WHAT IS GRACE?

 
True worship is an expression of devotion, not just saying prayers and making supplication. For you to worship me truly, it is necessary for you to have my grace. What is grace? No bargaining whatsoever is possible in the receiving of grace, and there is absolutely no specific condition for its bestowal. It may be given freely to anyone, whether saint or sinner, intellectual or illiterate, man or woman. Grace is just grace, nothing more and nothing less.

Although it is next to impossible, yet it is conceivable that one might become one hundred per cent prepared by one’s efforts, and thereupon realize God. In such an improbable event, God-realization is not through grace.

But if the worst sinner stood before me and I had the whim (lahar), I could make him realize God in less than the flash of a second. That would be grace. At the very instant my grace descends upon you, you also become me and we remain one.

It is easier for me to come as an Avatar than for you to receive my grace. The problem is that once you have been conditioned by duality there is no end to the conditions which restrict your ability to receive my grace. Therefore it is difficult for my grace to flow from me to you.

That is why it is not as easy as it sounds for me to get the whim to cause you to receive my grace. As a matter of fact it is flowing sufficiently all the time to fill one and all receptacles everywhere.

There is rarely a vessel which is not filled with other things. A vessel must first be emptied before it can be filled by the flow of my grace. It is also my grace which helps a vessel to become completely emptied in the first place.

The sun is now shining brilliantly outside this hall, but the sunlight does not reach you here under the roof. The sun is doing its duty of giving light. You have also to do your duty in removing whatever comes between you and the sun. Unless you break open the roof, how can you ask the sun to pour its light upon you? You have raised this roof of ‘ignorance’ over your own self. Demolish it and you will find that you yourself are the light and you yourself are the sun.

Through my grace, a sudden crack in the roof can let the sunlight in on you immediately, but one in a million roofs might thus attract my grace. I am the ocean of grace, but I am also hard as flint when you try to draw that grace from me.

The flow of my grace to you depends upon the intensity of your love, for it is love which attracts my grace to you.

Generally it is rightly said that the right time must arrive for grace to descend. Yet in a particular sense this is absurd. The contradiction arises because words are never enough to express spiritual truths accurately as they exist in the higher spheres, far above the intellect and understanding.

Suppose I happen to have the whim to make you realize God — simply because you happen to be near me physically at that moment — and you do realize God. That is grace, and it is also the right moment for you. In short, as long as you do not receive grace, the right moment has not come for you. And when you do receive grace the right moment has come for you.