LUCK, GRACE & SUPER GRACE

The purpose with which we started out was to discover how we can create luck in our lives. We are all creating our lives all the time, but now we are doing it subconsciously. When we do it consciously, we can do it any way we want to. When we call Mother’s power, we can make our whole life luck. There is a phrase: ‘The time has come.’ Mother has another way of saying it: ‘We can make the time come.’ We can make this the time when all our lives become lucky. It does not depend on matter, fate, circumstance or any other person. We do not need a bank loan, we do not need an appreciative boss, we do not even need a cooperative spouse. If we want to do it, each of us without condition, has the power to do it in our own life. All we need to do is to fulfill the original conditions and rely on Mother.

We know that when we rely on Mother and ask Her to help us, the Grace comes down. We have all seen the power of that Grace to save us at different times. How to make that Grace permanent? When we rely on Mother to the extent of giving up our reliance on our own capacities, when we shift our reliance entirely to Her while fully exhausting our own efforts, Grace becomes Super Grace and comes without our asking. It comes in a measure far greater than our expectation. When Grace comes we get the result at the end of a labor. When Super Grace comes, we get the result in the beginning. All the results of a lucky life come to us in the beginning. Sometimes before we have even met any conditions, She comes to us. She does not bargain. She does not negotiate. She gives in advance and hopes we will respond.

Some men have good angels in their lives, benefactors who help them with their education or jobs. These people play the role of a good-will agent. If we have such a person like that in our lives, we say we are lucky. That person personifies luck for us because through that person good things keep happening to us. They give us a knowledge we need or a help we need, and what we could not achieve on our own, we achieve through their help. If we have the right attitude, we feel really grateful to them. Mother offers to be the good angel to everyone. She offers to bring everything that all of us need to accomplish beyond our dreams. The only appropriate response to that is gratitude. If we have faith and if we rely on Her, she keeps coming and giving more.

How to do this? We have to be positive, we have to think positively, feel positively, not just to Mother or about Mother when we are sitting in front of Her picture, but when we are meeting the spirit in life in everybody we interact with, whether it is the servant whom we are bossing around or a neighbor or a friend. We have to take every one of those moments as a divine moment and behave the way Mother would want us to behave in Her presence. Those are the real golden moments to make our lives lucky. You may ask, does how I treat servants have anything to do with making my life lucky? There are devotees who, by learning to relate to a servant with the attitude Mother wants, have seen luck pour into their lives. Every moment is an opportunity for us.

We exist at several levels and we are very complex beings. We have a surface and a depth, an ego, a vital and a mind. When we take a decision, we exist at many different levels. When we say we want Mother and we say it sincerely, certainly something really has faith in Mother. And when we say we have faith in Mother, it is true something in us has the faith. But that does not mean that every part of us has faith or is sincere. Mother is not asking and expecting us to become Supramental beings in a day or even in a lifetime. All She wants to do is deliver great prosperity, good fortune and happiness in our lives. That requires our decision and commitment to Mother must be at a certain level and intensity commensurate with what we want from Mother. We have to put ourselves in Mother’s hands at that level and be pure at that level so that She can enter into us. The index that we are doing that is happiness. The more and more we really relate to Mother in the depths, the happier and happier we feel in our lives. The deeper that happiness goes, the more luck, the more Grace comes.

The Life Divine offers us the knowledge that leads to unfailing success. Back in 1890 there was a railway stationmaster named Richard Sears in the mid-western USA. One day he received a parcel of watches from a company. The company requested him to deliver the watches to a shop in the town and collect the money for the parcel. It was like a VPP package. When Sears went to the shop, the shop owner told him that he did not have any money at that moment, so the watches had better be sent back to the manufacturer. Sears sent a cable to the company saying that the shop had refused the watches. The company sent back a cable suggesting that Sears try to sell the watches himself and pay for them after he sold them. He did not know anything about business, but he was quite strategically located. Up and down the railway line there were stationmasters at every town and he knew them all by name. He was communicating with them every day on the telegraph. So he sent a telegram to each of the stationmasters up and down the line telling them that he had some watches which he could sell to them at a good price. Within a month he was writing back to the watch company to order more watches. Within a year he left the railway and started a mail order company, one of the very first in the USA. By 1900, his company was worth about $5 million. By 1920 it was worth $20 million and was already the largest retail company in the world. By 1984 it was worth $45 billion dollars, about Rs. 200,000 crores. It all started with a consignment of watches that the shop owner did not want to buy. Now suppose that the stationmaster had become very angry with the shop owner and shouted at him, he may have spoiled everything with a wrong attitude. That is how unimaginable luck can come to us through the smallest of incidents, when we have the right attitude and meet the inner conditions Mother asks for.

What we are talking about is the Infinite. If we want to see Mother in life, we should be able to see the infinite. This man, who was not even a devotee, created an infinite company, which for more than six decades was the largest retail company in the world. He was not a devotee and yet Mother’s creative power was flowing through him a hundred years ago. There are people who have not even heard of Mother and who have risen to the top of their fields in music or sports or in the academic fields. Why not us?

What are the steps?

• In whatever we do, we should have knowledge of the whole. We should look at all points of view. Knowledge of the whole means the good and bad, the high and low, without judging, without reacting; objectively we should understand where we are. We should not distort things one way or another.
• In whatever we do, in any area where we want to achieve unfailing success, we should act from the highest values that are possible for us. Be truthful, honest, clean, punctual, well-organized, generous, thoughtful, kind, and humble. We all know the list. These are not impossible things; these are human values which society has cherished as ideals for thousands of years. At least in this one area where we want to unfailingly succeed, we should be capable of acting from the highest values.
• We should organize our time and energy, be systematic in our thought and action.
• We should release our energy, put the full weight of our personality behind what we want to accomplish. We should not sit around waiting for things to happen. We should exhaust our effort joyously. We should make unceasing effort.
• Finally, having put in that unceasing effort, we should do it while shifting our faith entirely to Mother and calling Her intensely.

Formula for Unfailing Success

In the next 30 days, take some time and prepare for an experiment. Decide what it is you want to accomplish. Set a goal that you would consider fortunate and lucky to realize. Decide that during this period with respect to this goal you will practice absolute truthfulness, become totally humble, thoughtful, and generous. Be willing at every moment to take a full effort to accomplish your goal in an organized way. And after preparing yourself for 30 days, when you really feel ready, take three days and shift your whole attention to Mother, your whole faith to Mother, your whole reliance on Her supramental power and call her non-stop for three days. Call Her not to give you anything, but call Her to come in and make your life a life of luck.