---

Here's our Chance

Hans Jayanti. November ninth has now become one of the most important dates on our calendar. Christmas, New Year's, Chanukah - all the holidays pass by, but when we flip the page and see the beginning days of November, a warm glow starts to grow inside us, and we know that festival time is near. Little by little we are shifting from a life that we once thought to be real to a new reality - and the way we see our year from beginning to end reflects this. Hans Jayanti is our New Year's Day.

Other people take New Year's with a certain disdain; revelling till dawn and making 'resolutions' about the year to come, yet ail the while not really being able to obliviate that gut-level feeling that there's nothing new under the sun; and there's not really much hope that everyone in the world will all at once and overnight take their common resolutions to heart. Their world will not change drastically with the purchase of a new calendar.

Living in Maharaj Ji's world is like moving from night to day. Each day that we attempt to fill our lives with meditation, we insure that the next morning will bring a new experience, a new perspective toward life that we've never had before.

Then, each year, Guru Maharaj Ji gives his premies a present and in November promises to sit with us and give us the opportunity to get an extra-special boost into the always new and unforseen territory of life with Knowledge.

Someone once said that premies were the only people to whom two months could seem like a year; and to whom a year could seem like an eternity. If we stop a moment and take a look over our shoulder at the year that has just passed, an infinity of changes is what we would most likely find. A year ago, did you think you would have grown this much? Did you ever think you would have gone down the path you've taken? Did you, a year ago, realize that your mind could one morning wake up and say "Jai Satchitanand!" to you and come back with more subtlety and force than ever to rationalize your way out of this path? Did you even consider last year that "next year" might arrive?

Well, the new year is here, or - if you haven't quite picked up on it yet- it's coming real soon. And with the new year comes two questions: "What have I learned" and "Where will I go from here?" What are the answers? Well, that's a matter of time … and effort … and meditation … and practice … and grace. But to some extent the answers to these questions will be drawn from our experience at this Hans Jayanti festival.

The most astounding feature of a human being is that at any moment in his existence he can take stock of the direction his life is presently taking - and completely change course. Just change direction; right there. Amid stream. For most of us our lives from here are not a matter of changing course, but correcting it; not a matter of changing direction, but of heeding the direction Guru Maharaj Ji's already given us.

Course correction. Somewhere inside us, within the deepest reaches of the oceans of our experience, there lies a magnetic needle that has an untiring affinity with the True North of our lives. If we can only make that small adjustment in our tack … just move two degrees to the right … then we'd have such an easier sail to our goal. We might even get a clear view of home.

But in order to make even that minor course correction, we need to put in port and get an expert's touch. We need the Harbor Master to tell us exactly how we're off, exactly how far we're off, in which direction, and exactly what we have to do to get completely back in that orientation that will give us that clear view of home. And the Harbor Master - to complete the analogy - is Guru Maharaj Ji.

Human beings are naturally loving creatures. Yet until Guru Maharaj Ji came and showed us to the experience of Knowledge, somewhere along the line we had forgotten how to be natural and loving. Given this opportunity, we began to meditate and open up to more and more of the love that is inside us. But sometimes that aggressiveness and tension that surrounds us in the world begins to rub off on us again. We need to get recharged. We need to come in contact with an experience that will lift us right out of our minds - that will once again lift us completely out of the stresses, tensions, aggrava- tions, concepts and limitations of this world; an experience that will put us in a place of fresh perspectives, where we can once again heed the direction Maharaj Ji is giving us every day.

The experience of this festival, the experience of the darshan of Guru Maharaj Ji, is not something we should take in stride with the rest of our lives. By organizing an event so Maharaj Ji's premies can come together, Guru Maharaj Ji is giving us all the opportunity to see exactly what we have. But the experience each of us has here is only a matter of how open we are to that opportunity. The value of Guru Maharaj Ji's presence to us isn't a conceptual thing; it's something to be experienced. And that requires some concentrated effort and an open heart. In the London satsang printed in this issue, Guru Maharaj Ji said about the festival that happened in Essen: "I don't know if the premies who were in Essen did experience it on that last night, but I sure did. It was different. it had happened before, but then again, it had never happened before. It was there, but it was impossible. Because such an experience could not be materialized, could not possibly happen. I mean, at least that's the way it was. It was very, very beautiful. The word 'beautiful' just sounds ridiculous to use to try to describe that function." If you can give yourself into that experience, if you really put out effort and try to meditate, Maharaj Ji will pull you up to a level you've never reached before.

So here's our chance: to accept Maharaj Ji's invitation and use this Hans Jayanti festival as a catapult, as a launching padfor a whole new cycle in our experience in this Knowledge. To take three days to really taste and savor living in that feeling of shelter of Guru Maharaj Ji, and then to take careful attention not to lose touch with that feeling when we all leave each other and go back to our homes.

"But one thing I do want to say," continued Maharaj Ji in London, "is that it is very possible for all of us premies to be in that experience we had, twenty-four hours a day. And it is my duty, it is my job to make sure that at one point all of us, all of this family, does get together, does experience and does merge into that most beautiful experience."