What Is Satsang?

You have some context to all of this? Yeah, good, good, good.

So just maybe I recap a little bit. I don't know what he told you, but I have some very absurd things that I tell everyone. The biggest probably absurd thing I tell everyone is that this world appearance is a Maya, is a Leela, you see? Which implies that it appears, but it doesn't have any substance. It doesn't have any tangibility, any reality. As opposed to that, there is the presence of God within ourselves, which we may call the Atma within, or the Satguru presence, or the Holy Spirit, or the Consciousness—the presence of Consciousness.

As we turn inwards towards that presence, as we learn to live in the love of that presence, in the light of that presence, that which is Avidya—which is ignorance, which is to take the false to be true and to take darkness to be light—that actually falls away. And you come to the presence of a greater reality than we could have ever imagined. And that is the reality of finding God. In the light of that discovery of the Holy Light within ourselves, the Atma within ourselves, we find our true reality, our true nature as the absolute Nirguna Brahman, which means the attributeless Self.

And what is important is that you don't have to agree with me. You don't have to believe me. None of this is true just because I say it. But it is important to either say that, 'Yes, I'm finding what you are saying; it seems to be true,' or to say that, 'No, you're just fooling everyone. He's just talking rubbish and just painting stories and just confusing everyone with his words.' So either prove me right or prove me wrong. Because if I told you—I don't know, let's presume that you like Mohanlal, huh? If I told you Mohanlal is in that kitchen there, you see, and I sound like a credible voice to you, you would at least say, 'Oh, let me go and check.' And then after checking you could say, 'No, no, he's not there, therefore you are lying,' or, 'Oh, thank you, he is there and I got to meet him. I always wanted to meet him.'

But I'm telling you about something which is much greater than any icon or film star or something like that. I'm telling you that God is real. He is not a conceptual construct. And His presence, His light can be found. And in the finding of that, we come to the end of the strife and suffering that we call human existence, you see? And our outer life, the play of life, may continue to go on, but our inner life gets transformed in a way that we could not previously imagine.

So that is the construct, that is the basic subtext to most things that you hear in satsang, you see? It is about this changeover from the way of the head to the way of the heart. Because why the heart? This is your spiritual center. Not the emotional heart, because many people say, 'Oh, I'm all heart, I'm not head at all,' you see? So they think they will fit in very well into satsang, but what they actually meant is that they just go with their emotions, whatever their emotions were telling them. But that is not the kind of heart that we are talking about. We are talking about the holy presence within ourselves, the Atma within, which seems to emanate—the core of it seems to emanate from our spiritual heart.

So to come to the company of this truth—Sat-sang is to come to the company of the truth—is literally the meaning of satsang. That's what we're mostly speaking of. It's good to do these recaps because you could be coming to satsang five years and then you hear the recap and say, 'Oh, that's what we're doing here!' It can happen. Because many still believe that it's about finding that spiritual aspect of our life and making our life more well-rounded. No, it's a complete overwriting of the previous operating system with a new one.