The Siri Singh Sahib Yogi Bhajan Lecture from June 7th, 1987 in Los Angeles, CA

Wahe Guru Ji Ka Khalsa.”

Student: “Wahe Guru Ji Ki Fateh.”

YB: The subject we are going to touch today prosperity and the Sikh way of life. I will try to reach into the mysteries which are very simple and I will try to relate to the concept. There is a very wrong thing to understand. I don’t mind if you are poor, you know, it’s fine with me but to feel poor and feel the pain being poor will create psychologically the trauma of your hatred and anger put together through the whole word and you shall deny the world, the creativity and the beauty and the decency of all God kingdom around you and therefore, being poor is not only being poor and miserable and not having any money and nothing doing but actually you are a psychological beast who just creates the dirt all around and creates pain to everybody, including you and you are made in God. I have not seen yet any factory in any country where men are produced or people are produced or females are produced. You are all made in God, you can deny it as Russians and you can accept it as Americans but both are bogus. Accepting and denying is not any benefit to the factory until you do not buy the product. Factory wants to produce. Why God is producing four and a half billion people and still producing more because nothing works and He keeps on producing.

You may be asking a question, why there is so much population, there is so much population because God is in a very bad turmoil, He sits back on His seat and thinks, oh my God, billion more. I am asking Him a question, ‘Lord, out of four and a half billion you didn’t get one, out of five billion what you are going to get?’ Then in desperation comes the world war. That is, let us start because God is very innocent, let us start all over again and that war and that destruction we create, not God, He created us and we do not thank Him. Any woman who is very beautiful, I mean, name anyone who is beautiful and doesn’t know how to appreciate the man or the environment or the circumstances that woman will be left to nothing but pain and indignity.

Any man who does not appreciate the mental control shall be destroyed and shall never be prosperous. There are certain rules you can’t change, do you believe that I give you a horse to ride and I say have a good ride and horse goes wild and start riding in its own way and you jump out of the ride, your foot get into the saddle foot and you are dragged down and by the time the end, the ride ends you are end up like a cucumber; beaten and roughed up by the earth, that same road on which you are going to suppose to ride. Exactly that is the story of the mind of the man. When your mind start controlling you, telling you to do things you don’t want to do, takes you away from your boundary and commitment, pull you out in the chill, buy baby, nobody is going to pay your bill, you are going to kill one who pays your bill and that is the divine, that is the pranaand there is no lie about it.

You think you come to a religion to do a favor, you don’t come to a religion to a Gurdwara to learn a favor, you learn a favor to yourself because you learn your own reality. There is a one place in the world a church, a synagogue, a Gurdwara or a temple where a person has the guts to tell you what to be. You don’t want to hear the truth, fine, don’t come there. You think by doing a hairdo and putting some spray and putting some smell and putting some scents and all that, you are going to look beautiful, no, your inner dirt is going to show up and outside and inside has to be one, it is that oneness of God we are talking out, that’s where Sikh dharma start, “Ek Ong Kaar.”

You are not going to be children of God, you are going to be adult of God and you are going to be mature God yourself. Less than that in Sikh dharma nobody accept anything. How can you represent God if you do not feel and experience God? You don’t even feel your human spirit, you do not talk to your own soul, you do not understand. You talk to everybody, you talk to mom, you talk to brother, you talk to sister, you talk to boss, you talk where your penny is, you do not care where your pound is. Word won’t go that way. Prosperity is not you can be measured in dollars, prosperity is you are measured in the deals. By action you have to be rich, prosperous, prepared and profoundly dependable, profoundly proud. Do you understand a man who does something and doesn’t feel good about it and does it because his mind makes him to do it, does it because his soul is not connected with him at that time, does it because he feels, he feels, he thinks? What we are talking about? What do you do?

If you get a riding horse, you keep on kissing the horse, licking his shoes, lying under, taking horse shed and cleaning it out, you never get to ride, what are you talking about? You have a lamp in the house, the light of God, that your soul and you go out in darkness and you try to find something which you will regret rest of your life here and hereafter and how unfortunate I will be if there is nobody to tell me to stop. How many accident you expect on this freeways and roads and everywhere if you pull all stop signs tomorrow? How many people can live if you takeaway all the brakes from all the cars. You think stopping is just a slavery, you American freedom fighters? You think commitment is just putting yourself down? You think having a character is having something overload on your body and physical self? You are wrong baby.

Just learn the law of God, there are seven rules to happiness. First is the commitment, second is the character, that gives you dignity, that gives you Divinity, that gives you grace, that gives you power to sacrifice and that gives you feeling of happiness, experience of happiness, that’s the way you enjoy. When the impossible become possible for you and for the good of all, that is called sarbat da bhala, good to all and that is the base of the Sikhs.

“Nanak naam cherdee kalaa.”

We very much profoundly say that we should meditate on God, we should repeat the name of God. The Siri Guru Granth to which we bow, it tells you that’s all you have to do in life but that does not end there. Doing that will give you the compassion for all, the good for all, the service for all, to give sacrifice to all. We don’t give sacrifice to God, we give sacrifice to everybody. It’s a great sacrifice when you wear a thousand dollars blouse, put it that way and twenty thousand dollars jewelry and you put three hundred dollars to decorate yourself and you wear shoes worth three hundred and eighty dollars from some special John and Pohn and Cohn store, whatever you want to call it and you look at the mirror and you say there is nothing more beautiful than me and you go on the road and you see a beggar, you give that beggar five dollar, shake a hand and give a kiss, let me see how many of you great Americans are out to do that and you talk about God and you talk (?) with fraud of religion and you talk all this, you are the most bogus people I have ever seen. What you know about God? Who created that beggar, who created the ugliness, me? That ugliness is there, my dear friend, to meet you head on to see whether you have the grace and the vastness and the Infinity and prosperousness and prosperity in your genes to recognize God is all and all is God and there is nothing else, that’s prosperity.

When I am bigger than the skies and smaller than the piece of sand, that’s yoga, that is pratyahar, synchronization to nothingness and vastness of the prana, that there is nothing which can measure me and match with me, that’s living life. Your priorities are, when this is going to happen. What I am going to do on Monday. What a crazy bum you are, you do not know what you are going to do Monday, God knows it all, just trust Him. But how can you trust God when you don’t trust yourself? What is God to you, a joke? Something you are hung up somewhere and you just pray to him when you want it and the guy is evergreen, keep on giving and listening to you? He keeps on listening to you and you don’t know His language either. God is everywhere, it is nowhere in your world. God is with you when you want it, when God wants you where are you babe? What a lifestyle.

Some people talk to you, you are rude, you are obnoxious, you are con, you under mean, you are mean, you make jokes of people. May I ask you who gave you the right to talk junk, eat junk and live junk? Have you ever understood, have you ever raised a baby? Do you understand why people love children, because they are innocent. Why people don’t love you that way because you are crook and you want to cover your crook ness with all that best clothing and best makeup and best scent, you stink babe. No scent can takeaway your stink, simple and plain, things are very simple, people know beneath you, simply they don’t talk because they think it is the hand of God which has created you, it is the hand of God should take you away. Nobody wants to kill anybody, it’s not the formula people believe in, but I want to tell you and I am asking you, you are digging your grave, you think somebody is going to lay in it? No my dear love, you are going to dig in the grave, you are going to lay on it and you are going to keep, lick the dirt.

When you listen to your mind, mannmath you totally absolve yourself of any responsibility to prosperity because prosperity without grace… What is a prosperity, let us go to the oldest religion of the world, the Hindu religion. They say God is the all, all, the great big God you know, parapar Brahm ba, ba, ba, whatever it is. I know you don’t know about it and you don’t want (?) to some people word God is very itchy, they think because the guilt comes through, thank God to Christianity you know. Judaism created it, Christianity practice it and Islam totally took it all the way. If you don’t believe in the win God, kill you. I mean, is that a religion? Oh, let us go to this old religion in its own innocent form, they say God is Para par Brahm, great and his wife is Lakshmi,Maya, money. Now have you, can you bring somebody’s wife to your house and insult her, that guy is going to come to you? I am asking a simple question. Isn’t that simple rule and if you want to please the man, you please his wife, you give her a present, say hello, welcome Mrs. John, so Mrs. John be happy, because John is hung up on his own insecurity about his wife. So is so the God, there is nothing above which is not below. Otherwise God have been so perfect according to you, what you believe in, why He created this world? He wanted to experience His perfection and that’s why He is creating and creating and there are four and a half billion people on the earth, He doesn’t know He is perfect or not. If He, the day He knows He is perfect, you are all will be gone. I have not to make a prophecy, I am telling you.

Just understand that. Creativity of God is to understand His own projection and own prosperity.

“Jis nu bakhsay sifat saalaah. Naanak paatisaahee paatisaahu.”

God whom you give, sifat, the merit, the praise, saalaah, the wise wisdom, two words are very important, don’t goof up on that. Sift means a graceful appreciation is called sifat, saalaah mean wise advice, wise council. To whom you give graceful appreciation and wise council, that is the king of the kings.

“Jis nu bakhsay sifat saalaah.Naanak.”

Nanak seals it, Naanak paatisaahee paatisaahu.

And when a husband comes home, ‘What were you doing, how you’ve been, what do you want,’ that is not sifat, that is not saalaah. That is a police station, from one police station he has come to other investigation room, wife police station. I call it from work station to wife station. No, nobody wants to come home. That’s why I have seen these Americans, they come home, they put on a rock, they drink, they have a drink on the rock because they can’t stand this from one tragedy to another tragedy and you call yourself a wife and you have not yet lift a finger to get rid of why and if.

Marriage is not my dear a carriage of economic and environmental, sexual circumstances. Marriage is a test of unisonness of the sixth sense forever and sex is not what you know. What you know is acrobats done rhythmically and sometime non rhythmically to get your anger out and sometime your commotion and emotion out. Sex is the sixth sense, the creative sense and sex is such a sense which can get God divine into the spirit and produce it in human body. It’s not a small power, it’s the creative power and it’s symbolic or it’s practical or it’s spiritual, whatever you want to call it and how many postures you do it in, it doesn’t matter. Beauty of life is in the duty of life and to be prosperous is the duty of everybody because you must understand.

‘Deinda dey lenidey tak pah, juga, jugantar khaiyi raha.’

It is God’s will to give, ordinary man cannot give and you don’t have what you can give. If you want to test it out, just go out and the guy who parks your car, give him one dollar, see how he salutes you, give him five dollar how he salutes you, give him twenty bucks see the difference. Nineteen dollar can create a difference on the spot, nineteen thousand will create great difference, nineteen million will create a real difference and that should be your prosperity to give, give those who don’t deserve it, give those who don’t ask for it, give but first learn to get and that’s law of prosperity and law of vacuum is there is no vacuum. Those who give with a free heart God give them with the free hand and those who hustle, they never bustle, they stay poor, they stay restricted, they stay contained in their own misery.

You know what is the biggest punishment in the world is-to get contained in your own mental wrap because once you get wrapped in your mind you cannot see your soul. Mind is very powerful, mind is faster than time and space, remember this, it can take you anywhere and you cannot even measure it, the most dangerous thing but the most gifted thing. The gift of it is, it can take you to the very bosom of the divine and give you exaltedness, it can make you possible the impossible, that’s the power of the mind but also it can bore you.

Just understand, a ordinary woman who prostitutes herself and a ordinary God’s man who goes to that prostitute, if he sees God in her, can’t he just sit down and find out the real why and what made her to do what she is doing and uplift her but when a man goes to her, he goes for sexual and sensual satisfaction, both are people. Don’t look at the miserable people that they are wrong and you can use them, just think behind what made them to do wrong and learn from that that you don’t do it. That is Divinity and also help them that they can come out of that wrong, that is called dignity and grace is do it without asking anything in return and that means sacrifices of time and space, that will give you what you call is happiness.

The process of life in which we are is a gift of God. You all are made in the image of God, there is no doubt about it, but can the image be real or a non real, is it temporary, it is permanent, that’s all is the hassle about it. If you are in the made of the image God, then you continue to be real in the image of God, once you are the image of God, reality is not faraway from you, that’s as simple as that but if you try to be real. That’s why sometime you are very kind, very nice, very compassionate, very beautiful because the reality of God through your image starts showing up and sometime you are totally regretful you do not know where you are and what you are doing.

I have my own experience; people who come to me with reverence they get grace and blessing, people who come to just jerk me out, they get continue jerked by the divine hand, I see it all the time and I laugh. I feel very personal about it. I see the blindness, in spite of these two eyes because they have never cared to open the third eye to see the unseen, they have not the sense of hearing, they want to hear with these ears, they heard nothing. They speak not, they are like ducks who create cluttering sound, quack, they speak not the word of God because they do not know how to speak with their heart, they use their head to manipulate and they exalt themselves of the grace because they are running for a race of earthly success but they do not know this earth is round no doubt but it has a dead end and you have to be beyond that.

There are two things which kill you, deadline and dead end but beyond that you can create your own line of destiny, prosperity, perpetual happiness and a pleasure that you can sit in the very lap of God and be on this earth, walk with the grace.

Side B

… People say you are in the image of God, then don’t shave your beard, God created it, keep it but you can’t keep it. I don’t want to blame you because you love to be a baby all the time. Look at the baby born and look at the eighty year old baby, self made baby. It is very difficult to be in the image of God and then when you want to be the mental image of God you have to have that vastness, you have to have that compassion of giving, you have to understand that way, you have to have that compassion always and forever and if you want to be the spiritual image of God, then you have raised the dead, the low, the depressed.

Somebody told me “I have to take my wife,” last night.

I said, “Where?”

“Oh she was extremely depressed.”

I said, “You should have touched her toe, she would have got up.”

“I don’t know how to.”

I said, “For God sake don’t be a Sikh, get out of it. If you do not know that your touch can give somebody the healing, what are you to pretending to be?”

“What should I have done?”

I said, “Now why you are calling me?”

“She is depressed again.”

I said, “Then take her to doctor again, that is the medical.”

“But what should I do?”

I said, “I know it is Sunday, take a glass of water and just sprinkle on her.”

“What that will do?”

I said, “She will get up.”

“How?”

I said, “You do it. I mean to say you can’t do a little thing, take a glass of water, take some water in hand, put on her, she will get up.”

Actually she got up and thank you very much, God’s worked miracles, it’s His grace and he asked me, “Why?”

I said, “She must have seen a one kind of special prayer by her husband and that was enough energy for her to get up.”

Kindness is the greatest medicine, compassion is the greatest vitamin B complex twelve, sweet words are the greatest uplifting gift you can give to somebody. Kindness is God in action.

‘Daya dharam ka poot hai.’

Kindness is the child of dharma where karma ends. To be kind and compassionate, to be sweet and uplifting, to be healing, to be soothing, to be peaceful, to be peacemaking, hey, make peace with your own self, be at peace with your own self, bless behold, blessed are the peacemakers but peace with who, who you are going to make peace with, your garbage? No.

I was telling somebody. I said, “Oh,” he said, “Sir, what is the word of the day.”

I said, “Don’t kill one who pays your bill, saying of the day.”

Student: (——-)

YB: That’s what I said. You want your bills to be paid, don’t go after the person who does it and who pays your bill-God, the unseen. Uncle Sam prints the money, you don’t get it, Uncle Sam keeps in the bank credit. You only know how to keep the earth credit all right. If you know how to keep the heavenly credit all right, you will be the best in the world. You care for this earthly credit. My credit rating I got to get this two thousand dollar, I got to have it, I have a deadline on it, what is the problem. My credit will go down and your credit with God not only go down, it doesn’t find where down is and you don’t even care. Your credit with your mind is absolutely zero, your mind is overruling you and you do not know how to escape it.

Your credit with your spirit is not there because you don’t have the kindness, compassion, which requires a infinite amount of warmth. The prosperity is not only measured by dollars and slavery is not having the collar around the neck. It is for those who see God where they cannot afford to see it that is your human intelligence. When you see…

‘Iss jiyo mey bedh na jano, sadh, chor, sabb brahm pehchano.’

Don’t make any difference between this soul and being, this jeeva atma, this being, this living being, sadh, the Sadhu, the saint and the thief. Recognize the God in it. See who made the thief and see the benefits of having a thief. All policemen are paid because of that. You pay the city taxes being afraid of a thief but try to recognize, if you have any Divinity in you, what made that human being to become a thief, what makes a, as a doctor you should see what made… What is a diagnose? You diagnose what makes the person sick and you are trained to have that patient. Surgeon sees what is the part which is to cut, so free the body of that gangrene. A businessman sees how he should represent himself to make a profit and why not to profit in Divinity also which is the totality and reality of your concept of prosperity.

I saw somebody very rich. He said, “How yogi you feel to be a rich?”

I said, “Not like you.”

He said, “Why not?”

I said, “You are like that, you have make a big rich.” I said, “I tell you what you are. How you feel like to going to George Washington memorial and sit on the top of it.”

He said, “I don’t like that too.”

I said, “That’s what you are doing, you are making all this money and making like a George Washington top memorial, how many stories it is and you are sitting on the top of it.” I said, “You are not making any use of it, money is no use to you, it’s just a satisfaction of your insecurity.” I said, “I have no insecurity, I run around free. I came here with nothing, I don’t want to take anything from here because if I put anything on me, I am not going to go where I come from.”

In my father’s domain, I in my light only exist. This body is a shelter and is a can to pass on in the weathers of the earth. There is a coziness and comfort of eternal light to which my merger is just me and me alone, not all the decorations and not all the gears. This all paraphernalia is only for to passing the time in the earth and its journey. Those who have started in the journey of the life must understand that they have decided to walk together and together means when everything is together, together not is, you are together in the bed and bad in the living room. You are together in the living room and terrible in the kitchen and take the knife which is supposed to cut the vegetables, to cut each other neck and the biggest knife you have is your tongue; it can cut the wounds can never heal. Those who use the tongue to create and chant the name of God are blessed and sit on the right side of it and those who use this tongue to cut the hearts and feeling of others, they do not know where to sit because God even doesn’t know what to do with these guys.

So try to understand life is a longing to merge with the Infinity in the reality of prosperity. Prosperity is a projection and Sikh dharma tells you that you should be so prosperous that you can share vand chako, don’t eat without sharing, it’s, this is the law. Don’t earn and keep it, share; not sharing is not caring, not caring is denying the creative image of God. Two third of the world is hungry and we have stores of food. All the leftover of United State can feed one third of the universe, hungry world, do we care.

No, we pay for storage of the cheese and the dry milk. There are thousands of children are dying of malnutrition. You think this karma we are not going to pay one day? But it’s not aconsciousness, it’s a consciousness haves and have not. When a woman stands before the mirror she thinks she is for a kill. Guru, Lord be with you, go and kill and come back with a dead body but baby, dead body you have to drag home. Do you have that many muscles? You all prepare yourself for a kill. Your day doesn’t start to go and heal, you don’t come out of the house, I am going to go, bless. I am going to go heal, I am going to go and smile, I am going to lift and cheer up the lift and spirit of everybody, that’s how the Sikh thinks. No, as a people, as human and especially as American you prepare yourself best to go and make a kill. Well, make it, make lot of kills and take all the trophies and put on you and come home bleeding dirty, ugly, stinking, smelling. That’s what those trappers used to look like, smell like, right, go ahead with your mental maneuvers and your mental games and play these games and come back with all the dirt together. You know how many lifetime you will take to clean that out? Have you ever thought of it? If you start something, you got to finish it.

And don’t start something which you cannot even finish before your life finishes, don’t start on that journey if you don’t have a gas in the car, you may end up in the middle of the desert of nowhere, that’s what the Guru says.

“Guru Teg Bahadur boliya Guru shabad hia mann hodi bahe jinna di pakadiye sirr dijiye bahe na chodiey.”

With Guru’s word stop the game of your mind and when you hold the hand of someone let your head roll but not the hand go.

I hope you understand. Those who can do it are real prosperous, they know the law of prosperity. Those who fall short of it should join the school of the dharma to learn it and those who cannot do it are very beautiful because useless things only are there in many a number to let us compare what usefulness is. People who are shallow, small, negative, tragic are many because they are just a comparative study to make us understand for those who are gracious, prosperous and pure in heart and peacemakers for all.

“Wahe Guru Ji Ka Khalsa, Wahe Guru Ji Ki Fateh”

(Punjab Language)

“Wahe Guru Ji Ka Khalsa, Wahe Guru Ji Ki Fateh”

Student: (——–)

“Wahe Guru Ji Ka Khalsa, Wahe Guru Ji

Lecture ©1987 – Courtesy of The Yogi Bhajan Library of Teachings®

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