Maitreya: That is why God sends prophecies. God foretells how His teachings will come on earth. That's why Scriptures have been sent by God to predict and foretell how these things are going to happen.

Do they match the Scriptures? Is what they say exactly the same thing that the Bible says, the Koran says, the Bhagavad-Gita says, and the Upanishads say? Are they saying the same thing? Does it match? Because God never changes His Mind about His Laws.

As we said, God is not changeable. He doesn't change. Either you go to Him, or you miss Him. It is as simple as that. He doesn't change. He is right, very strongly, on His words. "These are the words that I said," and He doesn't change them.

As Christ said, "...Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." So God doesn't change His Mind. If someone is saying something that is not the same as God says, watch out. Your antenna always should go up and say, "Look, this thing is not according to the Scriptures. It is not according to God and I cannot accept it."

As we said, there should be a norm. Psychologists talk about abnormal people. But really there is no norm. They can't show us what is the normal compared to the abnormal.

But God didn't do that. God sent the norm. God said, "Here are My words, in the Scriptures. That is the way I want it." Now you have a standard, you can look at the chart. If it is according to the chart, according to the word of God, then you accept it. It is good. It is the truth.

But that doesn't also mean that this word is from God. You can pick up the Scripture and say the same thing that is in Scripture. That is what all the preachers do, but they interpret it in many different ways. What is the true interpretation?

That is when God prophesied that that is the way the Messiah, the teacher, "The one that I have chosen to bring out the word," will come. Then you have to ask such people, "What kind of prophecy have you fulfilled?" Have you fulfilled the prophecy?

The prophecy, for instance, of unifying all the religions of the world together, have they unified them? He prophesied that He will not call his name Christ. Do they have such a claim that the name Christ will be given to them, that they didn't call themselves Christ, or, he will come from the east of Jerusalem and the west of Tibet? Do they fulfill all those prophecies? These are some of the prophecies that we mentioned here. There are more.

Again that is another standard you can use to see if they are the true Messiah or not. If you find a Prophet and/or a Messiah, and he has a better teaching than what we present here, let me know. I'll follow him. But there are standards that God has given us so we can look at them and then decide what is true and what is not true. He has done it because He knows humans.

As we said, there are more teachers out there than students. Every person can tell you the truth of what they know about God. They can force their dogmas on you. But that is not from God. That is dogma. That is what they understand. So that is another thing we have to consider all the time when we encounter anyone who claims to be a teacher.

But, of course, if we believe that this is the teaching, that it is from God, that the prophecies are fulfilled, and that all religions are unified, etc, then our search is finished. We don't have to look around. If we are still looking around, we really don't believe this.

You have to feel you are home, your search is done. Your search is finished. You don't have anything to search for out there. There is nothing out there. The only thing out there is the teaching of some small realization, or a hoax.

Question: How to transcend the dualism, physical, spiritual, of the objective and subjective world, and also of "to be" and "to have" in the symbolism of the Tao, I-Ching?

To continue on the creation and the beginning, how do you explain the yin and yang forces? Are they gunas?
 

Maitreya: Well, if you look at the I-Ching you can see it has two colors, white and black (or blue in our case). But you can see at the same time, there is one spot of the other color, red, inside the I-Ching. Also if you cut the circle in half, you cannot have half blue and half white. There is always a part of the blue and white present there.

So the blue color in The Greatest Sign represents the tama guna. The tama guna, as we know, is the crudifying force in the universe. Crudifying means to make consciousness more into matter. As consciousness becomes crudified, the ethereal elements will be created, then aerial, then luminous or heat, then liquid like water, and then solid factors.

As these factors are created they take the form of the lower elements of the manifested world. For instance, ether doesn't have any shape, doesn't have any smell, sound is not carried in it, and it doesn't have any solidity.

When it becomes more crudified and it forms air, it has the property of transmitting the sound. It doesn't have any shape. It doesn't have any smell. It doesn't have any color. The only way you can know the air is there is you have to move something [waving his hand], you can feel it on your skin, "Yeah, it is there." But we usually don't even realize that it is there.

When it becomes more crudified it becomes luminous or fire, or flame. It has the property of visibility, and we can visualize it. We can see it now.

But it is so subtle that you can see it for only a second, and you can't see it a second later because it has completely transformed itself to the higher elements. Also fire has the conductivity. It conducts the heat.

When you come a little lower than fire, you come to liquid. The liquid has shape, has smell, conducts the heat, the sound travels in it, and it has solidity. It is more solid.

If you continue, consciousness under the influence of tama guna becomes the solid factor. The solid factor has all the properties of nature in it. It is visible. It conducts heat -- of course, some of them don't but most of them do. Sound travels in it. It is solid. It is visible. It has all the properties of the manifested world.

That is how the crudifying force does it. Without the crudifying force there wouldn't be any manifested world. So when we are talking about the tama guna crudifies the consciousness, at the same time the tama guna is a very useful element in the universe because if there wasn't the tama guna, there wouldn't be any manifestation. We wouldn't have these bodies. These bodies are here because the tama guna kept us crudified as flesh.

So the blue part of The Greatest Sign we can see is the symbol of the tama guna. The white symbol is the satva guna. So in the I-Ching there is tama guna and satva guna.

Also if you realize that the I-Ching moves, if there wasn't another element to move it, it would have just stayed there. It wouldn't have moved. That is raja guna behind it. Raja guna is energy. Without energy, nothing would move in the universe. It would just stay there. It would become stuck.

Usually people only consider yin and yang. They don't consider the third element that is the movement, the energy in the I-Ching. Without energy, the I-Ching would just stay there and never move.

That's why we have a dot in the middle, a red dot which represents the energy. The red (or orange) part in The Greatest Sign represents energy. So energy makes the I-Ching move and become the third element.

The I-Ching really is the symbol of the three gunas, the three creative forces in the universe. The whole universe is created with three gunas. These three gunas crudify, or affect the consciousness, which is Father. It is through the three gunas (which are the creative force), (the Mother), that the Father and Mother create the universe. Both elements are necessary. The male and female energies are necessary to bring creation to fruition.

So the I-Ching is the symbol of the creative force in the universe and how the universe is created with the I-Ching.

For the second part of the question, everything in this universe, as we said, is not permanent. It has duality of male and female, duality of up and down, right and left. But if we go beyond this manifested world and realize that everything is created with God, everything is a part of God, and everything comes from that Essence, then what we look at is the consciousness behind everything.

Consciousness is that Essence that is in everything in the universe. So we can look at everything as a part of God which is united together because of Him. So there is no duality for a person who sees the Spirit of things instead of the manifestation.

When we get attached to the physical elements, the manifestation, then there is duality. But if we see the Spirit behind everything then we can understand why these things happen, and why these things have been created. So we always see the hand of God in everything, and God unifies. God brings us to the realization that everything at the end will result in goodness.

With this realization then, when we are down and in a bad mood, or don't understand what is happening in our lives, we realize that God is still there. When it is good and everything is going OK, we still know God is there. So there is no duality for us. We stay steady. We stay one-pointed.

Really, transforming the duality means to follow the middle path, the path of the stillness of the mind. That's why it says, "Be still and know that I am God." When we are still in mind, when we are still in purpose, when we are still in our realization, then nothing affects us because we are not pulled in different directions. When everything falls down, we are not going to be pulled down. When everything goes down, we are not going to get too excited about it. All the way we say, "Thanks God, it's going down, probably there is a reason. I have to learn something. I have to look at it in deeper levels. Maybe it is my problem, I have been doing something wrong, or there is a lesson for me to learn." So we meditate, we learn the lesson, we improve ourselves, and we continue our lives.

If it is going high, and everything great is happening, you say, "Thank you very much God, you are doing something good and eventually you are taking me from the downward." That's one duality, isn't it, the duality of going up or going down? You can bring that to every aspect of your life.

If there is duality, we stay steady in the middle path, based on God. So that's how you transform the duality, by being focused on the Spirit behind the universe instead of being caught in the manifested world. There is duality in the manifested world. There is stillness (non-duality) in the Spirit.

Question: Is it possible to meditate too much?
 

Maitreya: Yes, it sure is. We have to keep our lives balanced, the middle path again. Too much of anything is not good.

We are physical, mental, and spiritual beings. So we have to keep our physical bodies strong. The Reminder itself is an exercise. Actually it is mostly an innersize. It is almost like a yoga exercise. When we do it, it keeps our bodies very strong.

Also it affects the mucus (toxins) in our bodies. It pushes the mucus out of our bodies. As we know, mucus is a toxin in the body. That is why mucus is formed because our bodies become toxic. Toxins are the source of most of the diseases that people have, because they eat foods that are toxic, they don't fast, they don't meditate, and they don't keep their bodies in as good shape as they should. So the toxins build up and they acquire disease.

When you do The Reminder, it actually pushes the toxins out of our systems. That's a physical benefit. If you don't exercise, or don't do The Reminder, your body becomes very flabby and fat, and it will gain weight.

Why do you want to carry around a lot of weight? If you want to do that just hang some heavy weights around your neck, it's the same thing. If you are thirty pounds overweight, that means you are carrying thirty extra pounds around all the time. That's a pretty hard thing to do. It makes you tired, doesn't it?

Mentally you also have to be aware and exercise. Reading books, discussing things together, talking about God, etc, brings a mental alertness to you.

We can see that the physical exercise, the mental ability and also spiritual progress are all necessary. They go hand in hand. If you meditate too much, you become imbalanced in the spiritual path. You become too much the other way.

Even in meditation your physical body has to be strong to withstand the energy. That's why the yogis recommend to do yoga with meditation. It brings balance to your body. It tones your body.

The body is like an antenna. The better the antenna and the higher the antenna, the more in tune and the more you receive the waves (the consciousness). The less your body is tuned, the more you are out of shape, the less you receive. That's why the physical body and keeping it in good shape is very important.

By just meditating, after awhile, because your body is not going to be strong, you will receive messages that might not be from God. They might be from your ego. So you become completely imbalanced.

One of the examples is like in India where they have meditated for the last 2,500 years. They never economically progressed. They never progressed too much in the physical world. And what has happened? Around 700 million people are there in that country and economically there is not much to offer. There is disease, there is poverty, etc. So if you meditate too much, you fall too far from mental and physical abilities.

As I heard, someone was in the Philippines, in one of those countries, and a child fell into the water. No one rescued him. Then he asked why no one rescued him and they said, "Well, that was his destiny to fall into the water and die."

See, their mental ability is completely lost. Their spiritual progress came so far that everything was based on karma and dharma. So you don't have to rescue the child. He should die because, "That is his destiny to fall into the water." You see the imbalance there? They fell the other way.

God has given us mental ability. Why? If He wanted us to just completely trust in Him blindly and not use our senses, why did He give us mental ability, senses, and all those things?

So too much meditation can also make you imbalanced. That's true.

Question: Is it possible that we could have found the way to God before the present life? Do we have to find and travel along the path each time we come on earth in a body of flesh?

Maitreya: Not only that, He is even going to teach you that He is not only transcendental but He is also everything and everywhere. All the time He is present with you. Not only is everything in God, but everything is God. And not only is God everything, but God is also beyond everything. So He is transcendental and also creative.

See God is not like us that if He wants something He just goes to the store on the corner and buys whatever He wants. The only material He had was Himself and the creative forces. So He had to create everything from Himself. He actually used Himself to create the universe.

If we can see that everything is God, then we can see He is not only transcendental, He is beyond our minds and brains. Wherever you look is God. There is nothing which is not God. If you reach that point then again, that unity that you were asking about, about how can we become unified, comes in doesn't it?

We can look at everything and see, well, God is there. That is a part of God. Whatever is manifested in this universe is a part of God. So if everything is God, He is not only transcendental but He is everything.

With that an even greater realization comes to us because whatever we do also is done by God. When we take care of our child, God is doing it through us. When we have a patient, or have a friend, or teach someone, or anything we do to others, or talk about the Mission or this revelation, all those things are done by God. We are just the observer.

Actually, as long as we think that we are the doer, God sits up there and enjoys it. He says, "Look at this child, he thinks he is the doer." We do all these things, we get tired, yell, and say, "What is this life that I have to do all of these things?" It is so difficult, we have to run and do, and all those things.

But the moment you realize that God is the doer, you sit back and say, "Hey, I am not the doer, God is the doer." Then you become the enjoyer because God is doing everything and you have become the observer. Then you can sit back (sit back in the sense of becoming an observer of what you do) and say, "Great, look at these great things that are happening, and I am not doing anything at all. I am just the observer." Who can do things better, you or God? Of course, God can.

As long as our ego says, "I am the doer," our ego is doing things. We are trying to figure everything out. But the moment we sit back and say, "God is doing it through me," then God is going to do through us. He is going to do, and He is a better doer than we are. So things are going to get done in an even greater degree, in even better ways then we would do them ourselves.

Of course, we have to purify ourselves more and more. All these things the Mission has given and all these words of God that have come to us, are to purify us. The more we are purified, the more God manifests through us. And God is perfect, so we become perfect.

As Christ said, "Be ye perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect." How can we become perfect as the Father is perfect? By purifying ourselves. Through purification, eventually His Spirit will manifest through us and we will become perfect as He is, because He is the doer. He is the Spirit behind us.

With that you completely transcend your work and consciousness. You realize God, not only as transcendental but that He is here and now. Of course, it is probably very easy right now in this environment and this energy to look at it and say, "Yes, it makes sense."

But probably two weeks from now, when you are out in the world, it will all be forgotten. You will be running around and all these teachings will be forgotten. This makes us remember that these teachings can best be practiced in the Communities of Light. So we go back to the Communities of Light.

If we create more Communities of Light with this kind of mentality and understanding, more and more we can be in this energy and this way of looking at the world. Eventually in the Communities of Light no one will be working, in the sense that they are doing anything, but God will be working through them.

For instance, someone cooks something for me and I say, "That's delicious." They say, "I didn't cook it. God did it." That's great. So whenever we do something good and perfect, it is God. When we do something that is not perfect, it is our doing.

One more question and then we will wrap it up tonight.

Question: Is Maitreya healing people, and is it possible for some people to ask Maitreya to be healed as Esa was doing? Do you have any kind of ritual or spiritual service for the healing of people, and does Maitreya teach his disciples how to heal?
 

Maitreya: This topic has come up many times in the Mission and we have a lot of literature about healing. Probably the person who had this question can read that literature. You can ask the Mission to send you all the literature about healing.

But there is one question here, "Does the Mission do techniques or are there ways that you can learn how to heal yourself?" Yes, we do.