Baba says, ‘Every thought, word and action of souls who are embodiments of success will bring them success; they will not be wasteful.’

I come to Baba and listen to Him tell me how elevated a soul I am, about my elevated qualities and powers. I am intoxicated! I want nothing more than to become the person He is telling me I am. ‘You must renounce your weaknesses‘, He tells me and I couldn’t agree more. I don’t like the weaknesses either, I’ve had them long enough and I now want to let them go and be powerful, the way Baba wants me to be. I make plans to sacrifice a particular weakness- maybe anger, or jealousy or impatience or greed…whatever it is. ‘You mustn’t even keep the slightest trace of the weakness‘, He teaches, ‘otherwise, it will repeatedly pull you down like a magnet.’

‘Yes, Baba!’, I say. At Amritvela, I go to Baba and with a pure desire to change, I offer the weakness to Baba. ‘I am never going to be ….. anymore Baba’, I tell Him. I celebrate this loving meeting with Him; I am filled with hope for a new beginning, I have determination. I am happy about the change I am planning, my Father’s happy too, it’s great! ‘To celebrate‘, He teaches, ‘is to become; to speak about something is to do it practically.‘ When my thought takes on a practical shape, then, it is called success in the outside world; here, in Baba’s world, I am called an embodiment of success. When I am such a soul, even whatever words I speak take on a practical form- this is then called ‘sat vachan’, the true versions that become practical. To become true means for them to become worthwhile.

If I create thoughts but they don’t become practical or I speak all the right things but they don’t show up in my actions, then those thoughts and words became wasteful, not worthwhile. Many children, Baba says, have very good thoughts about what they want to do, they come up with great ideas, they even have very good enthusiasm for the self and for service; however, it only remains in their thoughts, doesn’t come into practical action. In a garden, if the seed sown is a very good one and yet the fruit that emerges from it isn’t good, then it would mean that either something is lacking in the earth or in the care of it. In the same way, here too, the thoughts offered to Baba are very good, they make BapDada happy but I don’t receive the fruit of those thoughts because I lack the earth of determination and the precaution of repeatedly paying attention, Baba explains.

Often I make the mistake of thinking that now that I have offered the weakness to Baba, it will no longer come back to me. That’s not the case, Baba teaches, it will come back. It is up to me to remind myself, when it does, that I mustn’t allow it back in. A gardener cultivates his garden; to cultivate is to care. He plants the seed, waters it at the right times, ensures the soil is healthy and constantly pays attention to take out the weeds. This is not a one time thing, it is something he has to do as long as he has the garden. Only then will the garden look pretty with the flower shrubs, fruit trees and other bushes he planted. If he doesn’t pay attention, then even though he planted seeds for the shrubs, trees and bushes, he may find his garden full of weeds, thorny plants, ant hills and poison ivy instead!

This is also what it means to be accurate; accuracy comes from caring about something enough that I automatically pay attention to it: I have to do this, it has to happen, I have to become this. The other aspect is the earth of determination. Baba teaches that the longer I wait to do something, the more scope there is for my determination to weaken. I have been struggling with something, then one day I have that moment of realization of what I need to change. That moment has the greatest power and so the wise thing to do, Baba teaches, is to harness that power and do what I need to do immediately. Instead, if I ‘plan’ to do something, note it down in my diary to do another day, then the power weakens and with that my determination. I give Maya room to give me 100 reasons why I should postpone it by another day and another day till when I no longer remember what I wanted to do. Baba says, ‘don’t say: I will do it at some time, I will see about it. Do it now!’

Let me also realize that despite the best gardener’s best efforts, there are bound to be a stray weed that shoots up here and there. Let me not be disheartened if the sanskar shows up in an unexpected way; Baba is helping me by showing me all the ways, all the triggers so that I can recognize and destroy the sanskar completely with all it’s progeny. What I already know to be a trigger, let me beware; what I don’t know yet, Baba will show me. Let me learn and beware. The thing I should never allow to happen is disheartenment. ‘If you give disheartenment a place for even a few seconds or a few minutes within yourself, it will not go away easily.‘, teaches Baba. So let me not become disheartened when there is that occasional trip over- let me look back at how much I have changed, how far Baba has brought me in this area. On the same token, let me also never become arrogant thinking that I have ‘arrived’- that’s usually when Maya pricks the gas balloon and brings me right down.

Let me be a good gardener and tend to my garden with a lot of love, tenderness and patience. Then, my garden will be full of beautiful fragrant flowers and fruits that will make me happy and the Master of the Garden, proud. He will then show it off to others as a sample: ‘Look at what is possible when you till the earth of determination and pay attention to the garden!‘ I become Lakshmi and Narayan, the world transformer now, the world sovereign in the future.