I have definitely gone through the different stages of spiritual life, there is no doubt about it. At the same time, I have not chosen a mission of my own. I have been given a duty by my guru who had a realization of his own, and he found that I was a very efficient channel for the fulfillment of his awareness and his knowledge. I exist as an instrument or a tool. I don't do very much of thinking or planning myself.
Things come and I participate. I have never led a life of ambition. As they come, I attend to them, because I myself have gone through the experiences in my childhood, and later when I lived with my guru for a long time and then when I moved throughout India and outside, just as a beggar, a mendicant, not as a preacher.
I moved right up to Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon and Pakistan, nothing doing, like an ordinary sadhu. But, in 1963, on 13th July, when I was staying in Munger, I received a very clear instruction, and since then I have been receiving instructions. It is as clear as I am talking to you; it is not a hallucination or a dream, a vision or a whispering. I don't know when it happens to me. I don't know how to get in touch with it, it just happens.
Then, after that I said, "Okay," and I stayed in Munger. I did not even know that the work would grow so much, that yoga awareness would become worldwide. So I found myself a very little and very inadequate place, because it was for me and not for a mission. But within a year or so, it was such a tremendous thing that people came from about seventy countries without invitation. I don't know. Someone said, "We received your instructions," or "We received your call," or "You called us in a dream." I was surprised because I did not know them. They came from different countries and they lived with me for nine months or a year.
Then they invited me all over the world, and to that I said, "I am not going anywhere, abroad or elsewhere. As a mendicant I can go with a jola, a shoulder bag." But when I went for the first time, there was no organization; there was no planning; there was no secretary. You understand, a man of very limited resources and with very limited goals. I went to Singapore, that is all. I went to Hong-Kong, Australia, America, South America and to different places. Everywhere it seemed those people had received the news already. I don't know how.
This confirmed me to think there is something which has to be done and I am only a participant, just a servant. And since then I have been doing things.
So, I have a mission of a servant, not the mission of a great man, you see. That mission belongs to saints.
27 February 1981, Delhi, India