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Your Window to the World of Philosophy, Religion and Spirituality!

This website is devoted to Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality and Science. We bring in articles on teachings by Great Saints like Sri Shirdi Sai Baba, Adi Shankara, Swami Sivananda, Swami Krishnananda, Aurobindo, Mother of Auroville and others.

LATEST NEWS We are conducting 'Guided Meditation Session' every Saturday at 5.30 PM EST from New York.

This will include discussions on various topics like Upanishads, Philosophy, Spirituality & Meditation through Skype. Please send 'Add Request' to 'DLSNewYork' from your skype account so that you can participate in this Satsang. These sessions are part of Divine Life Society from Rishikesh

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Prayer – A Sure Source of Strength

‘Prayer – A Sure Source of Strength’ by Swami Krishnananda

(A compilation of various topics, prepared for Swamiji’s 75th birthday in 1997)

Created on Sunday 12 May 2013 14:11

Prayer – A Sure Source of Strength

We must be in a prayerful mood of humble submission to the Almighty every moment of time. Let no one be under the impression that he is a Raja Yogi, and therefore, not in need of God. That is a mistake. One cannot perform this feat of Yoga practice alone. God’s grace is necessary. The greatest Yogis were humble and submissive in their attitude. Prayer works miracles, wonders; and a humility of attitude on our side will be a great asset to us. Every day we have to offer our prayers to the great Master, our Guru, and to the great Almighty who is our great benefactor and friend. And, by the sincere prayers that we offer to God, we invoke His benedictions, and God’s actions are instantaneous. He will do the Sadhana for us; in fact He does the Sadhana. All our activities are God’s activities, finally speaking. We are like small children imagining that we are doing many things, while all these things are being done by somebody else for our sake.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Things We Carry With Us

‘The Things We Carry With Us’ by Swami Krishnananda

(Spoken at a Retreat on December 26, 1996)

Created on Saturday 11 May 2013 20:09

I take it that this is a spiritual group. Am I right? It is a spiritual group. Am I right or not? Here is the essential point. Nowadays, anything and everything goes by the name of spirituality, but it is a great secret, which always escapes the notice of even a careful attentive mind.

When you go anywhere, you carry your belongings, your luggage, and your property for the itinerary. These are the visible accompaniments of your travel, but there are certain things which follow you wherever you go, and they follow without you knowing that you are being pursued by them. These things which invariably are associated with you, day in and day out, right from your birth till the end of life, are those things about which you know nothing, and which you never think in your mind at any time. What are these?

When you move, you carry with you all those things which are vitally connected with you. That which does anything, or moves from place to place, is the person that moves. Now, the person is not the physical body that moves. Your mental structure is what you really are. You carry memories, for instance. Memories are not characteristics of the body. You have loves and hatreds, fears and anxieties, expectations, and many other characteristics which go with you wherever you go. You cannot throw your sorrow somewhere into the jungle, and then go on a travel. The sorrow will pursue you, and your joys also will come with you.

There is what is known as environment, very much emphasised these days by environmentalists. You carry with you, wherever you go, the environment in which you are placed. Like a shirt that you put on, the environment always comes with you, and you must know what that environment is.

As an individual, as a person that you are, you are a conglomeration of feelings, determinations, and decisions. Every person is a psychological entity. Sometimes we look like psychophysical individuals, inasmuch as the body cannot totally be dissociated from the operations of the mind. But, truly speaking, our fortune is not in the conditions of the body; it is in the conditions of our mind.

You not only belong to your own self, but you belong to a large area of human society. It is not possible for any individual to totally dissociate oneself from social associations or social conditions. You know very well how much dependent anyone is on the structure of human society. No individual is complete by one’s own self. There are things which you can give to others, which others lack and do not have; but there are things which you would like to take from others, which you lack but others have.

Farmers produce wheat, rice, and sugarcane, and shopkeepers move the commodity from place to place for distributing it in the proper manner. Some produce things; some consume things. There is a mutual agreement and understanding between the process of production and consumption, which is one of the characteristics of human society. You cannot yourself till the land, grow harvest, and carry wheat bags with you; and your own self must cook and eat. You require associations from outside.

Not only that, apart from these visible characteristics of social relation, there are unavoidable relations which we maintain; namely, we feel within ourselves that we cannot exist unless we belong to society. We form, generally, small societies for the sake of our security, like family. Family is also a society. It may be of two or three persons. The cooperative coming together of these three or four persons called the family gives security to this group. The family is secure. A single person, totally independent, sitting in the wilderness, cannot feel that one is secure, because the winds of society will blow over the head in any manner.

But even a family cannot be secure unless it has the sanction of protection from a wider atmosphere, which is a larger society. You may call it the nation, or the country. The whole country and the national law protects you, takes care of you. The family cannot be secure if the nation is in danger. Even a nation is not fully secure if the international setup is not well balanced. Nowadays, the world situation affects even little families. The whole world has become one family now, so social associations extend up to the farthest corner of the earth, though we do not think deeply along these lines. None of us feels the necessity to think that we are existing here comfortably because of stable international relations. Theoretically, we may accept this fact, but we do not think that it is essential for us to go on worrying about this. How is it that we take this for granted? A tumult in international relations, which may be of great consequence, will affect every individual in the whole world, and how it will affect us is up to anyone to think for oneself.

The whole world is with you, and you carry it with you wherever you go. Wherever you go, you are in human society. Wherever you go, you are conditioned by these unavoidable associations with the external setup of social relation, even up to the limit of the United Nations. You have a vital connection with the United Nations. You may say, “What connection have I got? I am a simple individual sitting here. Let them do what they like.” No, it is not like that. “Let them do what they like” is not correct, because if they do anything which is untoward, this may affect the whole ground of the earth, and as a wise person, you know what it is all about.

This is to say, you carry social relations wherever you go, up to the farthest limit of possibility, and you cannot ignore your obligation to society, inasmuch as the society is also giving you a helping hand in seeing to it that you are safe. Society supplies what your needs are. It gives security in the form of a government, and it produces commodities which you require. The foodstuffs, the clothing, and other facilities that you need come from sources which are outside the physical periphery of your personality.

You are a world individual in one sense. You are not a citizen of one place; you are a citizen of the whole world, if you think over this matter carefully. You belong to the whole world, and the world, in its gesture of goodwill and cooperation, has embraced you and taken you into its bosom. If that had not been the case, you would not have been here breathing the fresh air comfortably. You would be disturbed every moment about what is going to happen outside. You feel that everything is all right; nothing will happen, because of the stability of human society throughout the world. These associations which are inscrutable in their nature and not visible to the physical eye, always escaping the notice of even the greatest power of introspection, do exist.

So, the first thing to remember is that you are a social unit, apart from being a citizen of a particular country. Your belonging to the worldwide organisation of society is a more consequential relation than your belonging to a single country which gives you a passport or a visa. Human society is larger than a country and a particular nation, and that is with you wherever you go.

But, does anybody think like this? “I am a carefree individual. What does it matter? I go wherever I like.” You cannot go like that. You cannot go wherever you like. You can go only on the surface of the earth, in the midst of society. This is possible only if the air that is outside, the atmosphere external to you, is cooperative and friendly. You cannot even walk on the road unless the atmosphere of the road is cooperative. Suppose there is fear on the road; then, you cannot walk on the road. But you know that everything is all right. You can walk from here to Delhi without any kind of anxiety because society is so well knit together in a cooperative gesture of indivisibility. You are safe. Socially, you are safe because of the mutual cooperation.

So, in this context you will realise that selfishness is rooted out completely. No person can be selfish. “I mind my business, you mind your business.” This kind of thing will not work in this world. You have no business of your own, even as nobody else has a business of his or her own. It is a total business of a world family, to which we belong.

This is to tell you one aspect of that which you carry with you wherever you go. This is also a commodity that you carry – your social relations. But there is another thing which is deeper than this – namely, you carry your relationship with the whole of nature. Nature includes anything and everything that this physical world is. This very earth supports you. I mentioned society supports you. Now I am telling you the earth is supporting you. There are five constitutive elements in physical nature – earth, water, fire, air, and ether. Ether or space gives us accommodation. What we call accommodation is nothing but availability of space, and that space is everywhere. You do not like a narrow, congested little area of space for you to exist; you would like to have a wide area.

The physical body cannot continue to live unless it is fed with the elements produced by the earth which you call diet – food, for instance. The food that is necessary to maintain this body comes from the production of essences of the earth itself. The physical body is made up of earth principle, so it requires to be plastered every day by that which comes from the earth. The earth is supporting itself. The body is a part of the physical earth, and it cannot continue independently without a relationship with the vast earth.

We require water to drink. Suppose there is no water; what will happen? We do not manufacture water. Even food we cannot manufacture, as we think it is. The earth has to permit the growth of foodstuff. It simply can withdraw its essences and there can be drought and dryness everywhere. The sun can heat up the whole earth, and there would be no food to eat, and no water to drink. The elements are our friends.

We said human beings are our friends; all right, agreed. Now we come to another thing: the elements are our friends. The earth can shake, simply; but it does not shake. Why should it not? It can simply blow up the ground if it wants, and what happens at that time? We call it an earthquake. We are sure that the earth, the dear mother of ours, on whose bosom we are sitting and walking, will not do such a thing. We have a faith that the earth underground will not break today. This is a faith, without any reason behind it. Faith has no reason. Why should such a faith be there, that the earth will not break? But we have faith: “No, no. It will not take place. The sun will rise every day.” Why should the sun rise every day? Have we any control over that phenomenon? Let the sun not rise for a day and see what happens. All life will perish with cold.

You do not have to manufacture fresh air. Are you paying tax for the air that you get from outside? It is a gesture of God. Let there be no air. Can you manufacture air by any amount of money that you have? The earth gives you free food. Water is given to you freely; air is given you freely. Sunlight is free. What a wonder! All essentials are coming to you freely. What is man-made has to be purchased by a recompense of payment, but what God has made comes to you totally free. Suppose you have to pay a tax for the air that you breathe, or sunlight. What will happen? This is the bounty of nature.

In the same way as we have to be perpetually aligned to the requirement of the international social setup, we have also to be perpetually in harmony with natural conditions. We cannot violate the laws of nature. You must know, as educated persons, what the laws of nature are. You cannot insult nature in any way. You cannot spit at the sun and condemn air, or criticise water, or hate fire. No, you should not say like that. They are divinities. God operates not only in the form of an indivisible social setup for the sustenance of our life; He also operates as nature. Philosophers tell us that the world is the body of God. When God created the world, He did not create human beings first. He created the elements only. Read the bible, the Upanishads, or the Gita. Whatever you read, you will find that man and woman were not created first; they are latecomers. These latecomers are now becoming so proud that they think they are the masters of the whole creation. This is a very great tragedy.

The causes are more important than the effects. That which came first is more important than that which came later. We are perhaps the least important, because we came much later. Nature is more important. But, there is something more which you carry with you.

You carry yourself as a psychological unit; that is true. You carry human society’s relations; that is also true. Now, the third thing that you carry is the permission granted to you by nature to exist here. You know what permission nature has given to you. It gives you security. You want air to breathe: “Take,” says nature. You want water; it rains. Who can manufacture rain?

Such an arrangement has been made by the natural laws, by the cooperation of oceans surrounding the earth’s surface, and the sun in the sky, and the wind that blows. All these three cooperatively working create clouds, rain, showers, and we have rivers of water everywhere. Who can forget this wonderful operation in nature, to which we give scant respect?

In Indian traditional parlance, it is stated that when you wake up in the morning, you put your foot on the surface of the earth. This earth is a divine being. We generally offer a prayer in Sanskrit meaning “Oh, Consort to the Almighty, this Mother Earth, please excuse me. I am putting my foot on your chest helplessly. You are a divinity. “Would you doubt that the earth is a divinity? Would you doubt that the sun is a divinity? Would you doubt that the beautiful waters that flow in the rivers are divinities? Would you doubt that the fresh air, the oxygen, is a divinity? There is divinity everywhere. There is nothing but that.

So, I mentioned about your individuality, psychological setup, which is very important, and your social relations, and then your obligation to nature. “Prostrate yourself, bowing your head down every day to anything and everything that you see around you,” says a passage in the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana. “Prostrate yourself before a dog also, and a donkey. Do namaskar (a greeting with the palms of the hands placed together).” A donkey is not a wretched creature. It is as important as you are. A cow is very sacred. You must bow down and do namaskar. If you see a towering tree, “Oh, wonderful master, namaskar.” We prostrate ourselves before Ganga.

Everything in the world is worthy of respect. That is Bhagavan Sri Krishna’s admonition to his disciple; a parting advice he gives to a person called Uddhava. “We lose nothing by being humble. We lose everything by being proud and self-assertive, and wrongly imagining that we have all the power, while we have no power of any kind.” The power that we seem to be having, even to walk with our legs, comes from the cooperative structure of the whole of nature: the nervous system, the bloodstream, the brain, the heart, the lungs. How do they operate? We are not contributing anything to their operation. Nature is kindly setting itself in tune with our structural individuality. We have the grace of God, with which we are living in this world.

Now, I am mentioning the word “God”. It is the last, but not the least. You carry Him wherever you go. You carry yourself; you carry society, you carry nature, and you are carrying God Himself. This is the most difficult thing to conceive. To some extent, you may know what you are; to some extent you know what society is, and to some extent, what nature is. But what God is, is beyond; it passes understanding. You do not know what it is all about. People say anything about God. It is not possible to meditate so easily like that, because you do not know what it is that you want. An incomprehensible, indivisible, enveloping, total perfection, beyond space and time – how will you contemplate such a thing?

If this exercise could be practicable, if you can feel at one and the same moment that you belong to all these things, the quarters of the heaven will guide you, protect you, and take care of you. The Yoga Vasishtha says, “The guardians of the eight quarters in the horizon will protect you.” This is not imagery; this is not mythology; this is not religion. This is scientific fact. You are inseparably existing from nature outside and the divinity that is behind nature. You are perpetually under the protection and guardianship of these divinities.

We see with our eyes due to the operation of the divine solar principle that is giving energy to our eyes inside. We have five sense organs – seeing, hearing, etc. All these are superintended by certain celestial operations. If you read the Chhandogya Upanishad, or the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, you will have some idea how these divinities operate. The moment you are born, the divinities enter you, and the child opens the eyes and begins to see; it hears, and it feels.

When it is time to depart, the divinities take leave because the time of departure is like an emergency situation arising in the body. When there is an emergency in a particular country, the ambassadors coming from other countries flee that place immediately. All the embassies will be withdrawn to their respective countries when there is an emergency in a particular land. So, what can be a greater emergency than the event of death taking place? It is going to take place in a few minutes. The divinities, the ambassadors of God, withdraw themselves, and then we cannot see anything. The dying person cannot see, cannot hear, and he cannot think, also. This is a serious situation which is before us. We cannot escape.

The Upanishad tells us when the time of this order to quit comes to us, a little light emerges from our heart; a little flame, as it were, shoots up from the tip of the heart. It is the quantum of energy in our system. That little tip of flame – you may compare it to the soul that we are – is trying to extricate itself from the clutches of the bodily condition. It wants exit immediately. When it pulls itself out, what happens? It pulls the sense organs, and drives the divinities out. They are not necessary anymore. Then, the last thing that it pulls is the prana, or the vital force, and the body becomes cold. The fire element has been withdrawn; water element is withdrawn. The body becomes dry, chilled, and nothing is left except this physical substance, bereft of all the energies and the divine forces.

What will happen afterwards? This little flame will rush out like a rocket, with the speed of a rocket, we may say, or with a greater speed still, the speed of light. It is with incalculable speed. It will rush to the spot where you can fulfil those desires which you have been harbouring in your heart in this world, but which you could not fulfil in this world, due to various factors.

Therefore, be careful. The Upanishad says, “Oh human beings, be careful. Beware of what is going to happen to you.” Where are you going? You will go to that particular area, that atmosphere, that thing which you have been brooding over throughout your life. If you had chaotic thoughts, confused ideas, a muddled way of thinking, and distracted desires, the less said the better. You would like to be a wonderful, glorious luminous, happy angel, if possible. How can you deserve that wonderful state of a divine angelic existence if you have not aspired for it in this world? Is anyone wanting to be an angel? Is it possible? Then you have to live the life of an angel in this world. If a person lives like a pig in this world, how will that person become an angel in the next world?

What we become in the next world is only a carrying forward of the balance left in the previous life. It is a like a clear balance sheet. If there is a debit, a debit will be carried; if it is a credit, a credit will be carried, and you must know what it is that is going to be carried with you. Be very careful. Decide: “I want to be a shining angel in the high heaven. This is my desire. I want to be fit enough to visualise the Almighty Creator, God. I shall depart from this mortal coil and enter into the bosom of the Supreme Creator.”

Has such a desire arisen in the mind of any person? Even if that desire has arisen, has it taken a root in one’s heart? If it has taken a root in the heart, for how many minutes does this thought continue? Is it a waste of time to think like this, or is it the only proper thing that we have to do in our life? Is there time for us to waste in wool-gathering, and chit-chatting, talking nonsense and meaningless things, wasting hours and minutes? Is it going to be worthwhile? How long are we to live in this world? Nobody knows, but we think another fifty, sixty years is quite all right. Who told you this? Where is the guarantee? It may be fifty or sixty minutes, also, but you think it is years. This is another illusion that is catching hold of the person, so that the person will never be able to do any worthwhile fig.

If we are not in a position to do anything worthwhile for our own selves, what is the use of asking whether we can do some worthwhile thing for other people? People talk of service, social welfare, running about here and there, doing good to the whole world. What good have you done to your own self? You yourself are in a state of emergency end danger.

We started with the word “spirituality”. Here is spirituality. It is a comprehensive, total dedication to the cosmic structure that the Almighty God has created. That is spirituality. It is not chanting some mantra; it is not rolling a bead; it is not going to a temple, ringing the bell, or going to a church. It is not taking a bath in a river. Nothing of the kind can save us when the time for it comes. We have to gather ourselves up into a centre of absolute concentration on that great wonderful Totality, the Supreme Being.

People come to this ashram of Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj to find time to think like this; because they cannot think like this in a marketplace, in a railway station, or a club, they come here. But if even here you cannot find time, then who is to blame? Be happy. I have uttered these few words to you from the bottom of my heart. It is that which is important to me, and I consider it is important to you all.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Secular and the Spiritual

‘The Secular and the Spiritual’ by Swami Krishnananda

(Spoken at a Retreat on December 27, 1996)

Created on Thursday 9 May 2013 17:34

What I am going to tell you today may be considered as a kind of development of what I told you yesterday. You have to bring back to your memories the various aspects of spiritual life which I tried to highlight in as comprehensive a manner as possible yesterday. Now something more about it.

Throughout the ancient and medieval periods of European history there has been a cleavage between the state and the church. The state was the secular side, and the church was the spiritual side. There was no commerce between the two aspects of life. Catholic Christianity, headed by the Pope, had suzerainty over even the kings of the different states, and the secular ruler of a particular state could not completely go against the mandates of the Vatican. This state of affairs continued for a long time in European history. There had been no connection between the spiritual and the secular. The king was the man of the earth, and the Pope was the man of God; that was the difference.

It went on like this for a long time, through the medieval ages, until King Henry VIII of England felt a need to confront the Pope. He had his own peculiarities, and whoever has read British history will know what those peculiarities were. In order to obey the mandate of the Pope, he condescended to commit the most heinous crimes to human nature. Later, he could not get on with this condition. He severed his connection from the Pope and said he was the head of the English Church. He became the secular head, as well as the spiritual one. Added to this, the rise of Protestant Christianity made the power of the Pope a little weak, and the gulf between the secular and the spiritual slowly started getting narrowed down.

Now, as spiritual seekers, what do we understand from this dichotomy imagined between the secular and the spiritual? Is there such a thing called the secular? Is there anything called spiritual which is incompatible with the secular needs of people? Is a human being a composite of two departments? Have you noticed in your own personal life a secular side and a spiritual side, or do you feel that you are a whole, integrated person? It is not possible for you to distinguish between the demands of your relation to the world and the demands of your relation to God. They cannot stand as two watertight compartments.

It is a very interesting subject. Is there anything called the secular? Does it exist at all? If it exists, it is tantamount to an opposition to the requirements of divine living. Is the world opposing spiritual life? Has God created a world which is constituted of evil, with nothing good in this world? Can you say that God has created an evil world? You would not say that. Then, how has the secular idea arisen in the mind of people?

I mentioned yesterday your involvement in the total operation of the universe. I mentioned that you are a part of human society. Now, would you call this aspect of your life a secular aspect? Do you consider what usually goes by the name of the secular is something redundant, worth giving up as early as possible, and you would like to be spiritual minus association with human society? I mentioned yesterday that such a thing is not possible. Human society is not outside you. You yourself are a part of human society. People do not understand that they themselves constitute an element in the structure of human society.

So, you are involved in the vast sea of humanity. Humanity is the nature of a human being. It is not sitting outside somewhere. When we speak of society, we generally imagine that it is external to us, forgetting for the time being that we are vitally connected with this vast arena of human involvement we call society. Society is a total structure. It is an integrated operation taking place under the commands of human requirement. If such an integrated approach to the structure of human society were not necessary, we would not be living in human society. That it is inseparable from you shows that the secular is inseparable from yourself. If you are not satisfied with imagining that you are a secular individual, you will say, “No, it is not like that; I am not secular. I am a pure spirit inside, aspiring for God.”

Now, tell me what your status is actually. Being a part of human society, and being a part of the community of spiritual seekers – are these two aspects contradictory? Do you belong to two worlds at the same time? You will not accept that you are living in two worlds, with one leg here and another leg there, upstairs. You are everywhere; wherever human society is, there you are. And, I added yesterday, wherever nature is, there you also are.

Keep in mind the subtlety of thinking involved in this process. You are everywhere, as you are a unit of human society, which is everywhere. You are also everywhere because you are a part of nature, which has no distinctions of inward and outward, right and left, or up and down. It is a total integrated operation, and it is inseparable from you.

The whole of nature is working through you, through this bodily structure called an individuality. Earth, water, fire, air, and ether – these elements constitute your body. As long as the world of five elements continues to exist, you will be existing. You will be existing as a miniature universe, a miniature nature, appearing to be moving independently, as it were, though such an independence is not granted. Where is the independence?

Now, we come back to this question of the secular and the spiritual. Did you notice that the very idea of this disparity between the secular and the spiritual is ill-founded? It is based on wrong thinking, right from the beginning. It is the consequence of the child-like imagination that God is above and the earth is below. Do you believe that God is above and the earth is below? This is again a peculiar trait of the baby mind of humanity, which looks up in order to see God, and looks down in order to see the world, and looks sideways in order to see human society. Is human society spread out sideways? Is the earth down below, and is God above the skies?

If you apply your intelligence, you may not accept that it is so. But, in our daily life, we are still babies only. Spiritual bankruptcy is ingrained in the very nature of thinking. If you go deep into the nature of what true spirituality is, everybody is spiritually bankrupt. There is a vacuum inside.

That is why any amount of worship of God in temples, churches, and religious places has not quenched the thirst of anyone who is longing for a satisfaction which has not been found anywhere in this world. Whatever be your religion, you are an unhappy person. Is it so? You are a spiritual seeker, yet you are an unhappy person. What makes you unhappy and inadequate in your own self? There is no religious leader or spiritual seeker who does not have a sense of a secret inadequacy in one’s own self. That is because our concepts of God, society and nature are finite concepts. Our God who is above the sky becomes a finite God; because He is above, He is not below, so you have a finite God. And society is outside, so it is a finite conception of human society. And you consider nature as something outside, so that also is a finite conception of nature. We ourselves are finite individuals, so that we live in a tremendous chaotic assemblage of finitudes in thinking. How would you expect any satisfaction in this world?

I am introducing you to a subject that is very poignant. Spiritual life is not a joke; it is not an entertainment. It is not an experiment: “If it is there, let me see; if it is not there, let it go.” It is the fact of life that is vibrating through your heart and telling you, “I am here, as a complete perfection, and I am not outside you. I am not above; I am not below; I am not sideways. I am that which is everywhere.”

Every human being, looking like a tiny finitude, carries within its own bosom the potentialities of infinite existence. God is dancing through your heart, society is operating through your veins, and nature is throbbing through the entire system. Are you alone in this world? Then, what is the inadequacy that you feel in yourself? You are not alone in this world. Not only you are in society, but you are the society. Not only are you confronting nature outside, you are the nature. It is not necessary to look to the skies to perceive God; no.

There was a great French mathematician called Laplace; he wrote five volumes on the mechanics of the astronomical universe based on Newton’s theory. The book is called “Celestial Mechanics”. Napoleon’ saw that book and told Laplace: “Sir, in your scheme I am not seeing God anywhere.” Laplace’s reply was, “Your Highness, I have used the best of telescopes, and I have not seen God anywhere.” It is a very humorous conversation between two people.

So, with any amount of looking up you will not see God, because that which you expect to be above you is a fraction of truth. This is why we are not happy in this world. There is nothing that we do in our life that can fully satisfy us, because we have wrenched ourselves from our vital connection with the reality of life. What is the reality of life?

I introduced you to the concept of the truths of life yesterday, and I am telling you today that there is no such thing as the secular and the spiritual. They do not exist. Such distinctions are drawn due to a defect in the perceptional psychology of human nature. We make a distinction philosophically between the phenomena and the noumena, for instance. That distinction also does not exist. To say that the phenomenon is somewhere and the noumenon is somewhere else is another way of saying that spirituality is somewhere and secularity is somewhere else. You cannot think the existence of the noumenon because you have already accepted that you are involved in phenomena. How does a person who is totally phenomena, bound by space, time, and causal relations, have an idea of that which is above phenomena? How can you know that God exists if what you know is just the world external to you?

There is a suggestive inferential consequence following from even the fact of involvement in phenomena. You cannot know that you are a finite individual unless simultaneously you accept that there is something more than the finite. The limitation that you impose upon your finitude is like a fence that you have pitched around yourself, but there must be something outside the fence, also. Why do you want fencing if there is nothing outside the fence? The fencing implies that there is something beyond the fence.

The idea of limitation or finitude suggests, at the same time, the existence of that which is not finite. So God exists, because it is the necessary corollary following from the inviolable acceptance of your being a finite being. If you are finite, the Infinite has to exist; otherwise, you cannot even know that you are finite. You cannot say, “I am a poor person,” unless you have an idea of what it is to be not poor. The correlative always follows from the acceptance of a particular position. But we are too dull in our understanding; we only go a little bit, and then do not go sufficiently far.

What is the consequence of all this deliberation? You do not belong to this world only; then, that would be to say that you are only secular, and there is nothing else in you. We consider the secular as the unspiritual; there is no such thing.

Imagine, for the time being, the state of the Creator of the universe. Transport your consciousness to the status of the Creator. Apply your will to some extent; rise up, immediately. Let the whole being of yours rise to the level of that creative omnipresence which contemplates the creation of the universe.

You see the world. Do you believe that God also sees the world? Does He see the world in the same way as you see it? Certainly not. How would God envisage the world of creation? Can you imagine what it is? God’s envisaging of His creation would be something like a self-contemplation of God. He contemplates Himself as All-in-all.

If God were to see the world, He would not see it as an object that He has to encounter through the sense organs. God has no sense organs. He can grasp without hands; He can see without eyes; He can walk without legs; He can hear without ears; He can think without a brain. There is nothing which He cannot do by mere existence. His existence is His activity. In our case, existence is not activity. If we just exist, it does not mean that we are engaged in any activity. Activity for us is an externalised operation apart from our pure existence. This distinguishes us from God-Being.

The sun is very active. You know very well how active the sun is, but the sun has no eyes, ears, legs, hands, and no working medium. The very existence of the sun is the life of all creatures. There is a state where existence itself is activity. God’s existence is God’s work. As human beings, we cannot imagine such a thing at all. We cannot understand how existence itself is an operation.

Here we may draw a sideline in order that we may know what spiritual activity is. In traditional parlance, we call it karma yoga. It is not karma, as such. Karma is ordinary work, but karma yoga is a spiritual movement of your totality in the atmosphere of your involvement, about which I told you something just now. When your being expands beyond the limitations of body, and appears to be moving outside, when your little dimension of finitude of existence increases its dimension and moves outside, you are working as a spiritual seeker, as a spiritual leader, as a God-person.

Karma yoga does not bind, but karma binds. Action binds. Every action produces a reaction, but there is a kind of action which will not produce any reaction – that is divine action. When your actions and activities are nothing but emanations of your being, in the same way as all the operations going on in the world are emanations of the existence of the sun, then nothing affects you.

People read the Bhagavad Gita, but very rarely one can make out the sense of its teaching. It does not deny the value of work, but it should be work as God works, and not as a finite, localized individual works. Here in this concept of action, duty and spirituality, the distinction drawn wrongly between the holy and the unholy is abolished. The unholy things become holy when they are transmuted into the sanctity of the spirit which beholds these so-called unholy things.

God has not created unholy things. He has manifested Himself as this universe, and He has manifested as yourself, also. So, you have to behold yourself as God would behold you. True spirituality is the vision of God. It is a vision of God, not merely in the sense of an experience of God, but the vision which is necessary to behold the world correctly in its proper perspective.

When you think like this, in a total fashion, leaving nothing outside you, and embracing all reality that can be conceived in the mind, you feel a completed, filled satisfaction. A sea of delight will enter into you.

There is a word in the Yoga System known as samadhi, or communion. There, the celestial delight takes possession of you, it is said. What kind of delight is it? It is the delight of totality in experience, abolishing the cleavage between the object outside and the subject of perception. The thing which you consider as outside you, limiting your existence, enters into you, melting its local existence. Or, you may say, you melt down your perceiving individual existence and enter the object.

In deep meditation on any conceived spiritual object, you cannot know who is meditating on what. It may be that you are contemplating the object, or it may be that the other side, the object, is contemplating you. If you have eyes to see the object, the object also has eyes of a different nature to see you. Everything in the world sees you, knows you, understands you, and reacts to you. It is not that only you see the world; it sees you. A tree standing in front of you knows what you are thinking about it. Do not say they are foolish, unrecognized entities in the world.

“Everywhere there are eyes.” What is the meaning of this statement? Every atom is a perceiving unit. Every atom is a solar system. There is a sun vibrating inside the atom as a nucleus. It is in the Bhagavad Gita that we hear that everywhere It has eyes. And, your eyes are its eyes only. This is the whole interesting point about it. These eyes with which you are seeing me, these eyes with which I am seeing you, do not belong to you, and do not belong to me, also. They belong to That which actually sees.

The eyeballs cannot see anything. There is an operation which is conscious that is responsible for the perception of things. That consciousness, which is actually the seer, is common to both the so-called seeing individual and the object apparently regarded as that which is seen. The commingling of the seer and the seen in a blend of inclusiveness, transcending both the subjective side and the objective side, which is the transcendent side, is Samadhi.

What you experience there is impossible to imagine now, wedded as you are to this body consciousness. If the world of objects melts down into liquid and enters into you, what would you feel at that time? You would feel that molten steel has been injected into your personality. We cannot have any words to explain what it is. Molten steel, the essence of strength, has entered you, and you have become the embodiment of that impossible-to-conceive energy, strength, and power. That is all we can say. The more we think about it, the less it is that we will be able to express it in language, because language is used only to express the relationship between one thing and another thing. But when such a relationship is abolished completely in a transcendent operation of the melting down of both this side and that side, what language, which word, can explain that condition?

If you can contemplate this possibility in your own personal life, you will be moving like a little god walking on the road. Heavens will be there at your beck and call. The winds of the high heavens, blown by the angels above, will be wafting their fragrance around you, even when you are walking on the road outside. Do not feel that you are a deserted, unwanted, unrecognized individual. You are very much recognized. You are very valuable. You are dear to the gods; do not forget this. And they are with you now, at this moment.

I do not know if many of you know the Mahabharata story. It is the story of a war. The great spiritual ambassador who played an important role in this war was Sri Krishna, an incarnation of the Absolute, a ray of the complete Existence. When he was admonishing the opposite side, he raised a point: “You should not be under the impression that I am sitting alone here, as an isolated individual, and you can encounter me as a person sitting here. I am not a person. All the fourteen worlds are here just now. All the angels of all the realms of being are here just now. In one instant they will descend into action. Do you want to see it?” And he exhibited his cosmic form. The whole universe started vibrating in a little hall. All the fourteen realms of being, everything, was scintillating, like solar orbs. Wonderstruck people closed their eyes because it was impossible to see the brilliance of God.

This means to say that everything is here just now. You need not have to go to the temple to meditate. Here is the temple. You can create a temple wherever you are because the feelings that you entertain in your heart, the conviction that you have about true spirituality, and the love and regard that you evince in light of this concept of true spirituality, making no distinction between the outer and the inner, no distinction between the secular and the spiritual, will create a temple around you. Wherever you go, you move in a temple, in a chariot, in a glory that is not of this earth.

You must have confidence. You must not have doubt in your mind, because while time takes many days and many months to act, eternity does not take many months. Eternity is not constituted of days and months and years. It is just here and now. That is the divinity which transcends the secular side and the spiritual side. There are no sides at all for spiritual experience. Inasmuch as we have no words in language to describe that which transcends the concepts of spirituality and secularity, we are forced to use these words again and again, though they are not complete in themselves.

What would be the style of your speaking in regard to that transcendence where the secular and the spiritual, as conceived, join together, shake hands with each other, commingle, and become one experience? We have no words in the dictionary to explain that condition. Your true nature cannot be known by any kind of language. You are what you are. That is all.

Here is something worthwhile contemplating. You are not listening to some speech given by somebody; whatever I tell you is a kind of medicine for the illness of life, and it has to be made part and parcel of your daily experience. But the frailty of human nature often introduces itself as first priority, and will not allow you to think in this widened fashion.

That is why a little time has to be taken every day. You must have a little leisure, an hour or two hours, when you are totally alone to yourself. Do not be always with somebody else. Be alone at least sometime. It may be one hour, it may be two hours; or before you go to bed, you are alone. Contemplate this truth. The true aloneness, with which you came, the true aloneness with which you will depart from this world, is also the aloneness which you are experiencing now, even in the middle.

This alone that you are is seeking to fly to the Alone that is everywhere. Mystics call this process of divine ascent as the flight of the alone to the Alone. There is aloneness everywhere; multiplicity is unknown. Duality does not exist. The Alone created the world, and the alone that you are is a replica of that Supreme Aloneness. This photocopy, this replica, this reflection, this little particle, as it were, of that Supreme Aloneness is seeking to unite itself with that Ultimate Aloneness, so that the alone that you are even now, in an artificial socialized way, will reach the ultimate fundamental Aloneness, which you are unable to speak about in any language. We call it God. Again, the moment you utter the word ‘God’, you have an idea that He is above, far away, many kilometers away, not near you.

The habit of thinking in terms of sense perception and body consciousness prevents us from thinking truly in the light of God-vision. That is why I said you must have some leisure and be alone to yourself. Do not be talkative; do not go on chit-chatting and saying anything you like. What is the use of talking? You have talked enough. You are learned people; you have seen the world. Why do you talk again and again? What are you going to say? It is a waste of time. Now be satisfied with whatever God has given you, and be complete in yourself, which has to be felt in your daily life. You will find that in this little microcosmic individuality of yours, the whole macrocosm will rise to action. The son of man will become the son of God. Be happy.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

Spiritual Ideals and Humanitarian Values

Created on Wednesday 8 May 2013 20:01

The social man and the true man seem to be standing apart. There appears to be a schism within the structure of the human psyche itself – man seems to be a double personality. It is within man that we have to establish a relationship. The alignment we are required to establish is more within the structure and pattern of the human individual rather than with God and human society.

The perception of a difference between the Creator and the created universe is the reason behind the recognition of a distance between human values, call them social values, and spiritually oriented values and aspirations. It is in the habit of human thinking to find a peculiar irreconcilability between the present condition of social existence and the nature of a future fulfillment of human aspiration – the end result of all evolution, we may say, the very purpose of all existence and human endeavor.

We live in a world which is constituted in a particular manner. We live in a society which is of a specific character, and we ourselves are people of one particular kind. None of us is satisfied with himself or herself. No one says that present day human society is a desirable type of society. There is dissatisfaction with every kind of solution that has been found for bringing about a transvaluation of values and we have to think of a remedy for the ills of life. The ills are visible to our eyes, but the remedy is not so very clear before our eyes. Here we have automatically established a psychological distance between the present state of affairs, individually, socially, and universally, and the aspired goal which seems to be in our minds.

Why should any one of us be dissatisfied with this world, with our own selves, and the present day human society? Dissatisfaction is certainly, obviously, logically an indication of there being a state of affairs which is totally other than the prevailing conditions in the world. This unwittingly accepted proposition that the world can be other than what it is now and human society ought to be different from what it is at present indicates the transcendence, a kind of otherworldly character introduced into the goal of our aspirations.

It was discussed in the morning whether the ideal of Indian society, human society, religion and spirituality, is in any way otherworldly. Swami Chidanandaji Maharaj said during his few words of conclusion that the goal is certainly otherworldly, but it is also not otherworldly for another reason altogether. His ideas are a little complicated, which require careful analysis and consideration. A study, an investigation into issues of this kind is like the solution of a mathematical proposition or the deduction of logical categories, not to be taken lightly as a type of after dinner novel which you may read this way or that way.

The otherworldly character of human aspiration or the goal of human aspiration becomes obvious from the fact that nothing in this world can satisfy us. If the goal of our aspiration is only in this world and not out of the world, if the kingdom of heaven is here and not elsewhere, there would be no sorrow, no pain, no suffering and no conception of evil throughout the process of human history.

It has been said that life is a veil of tears. We weep either covertly or overtly, within ourselves or in the public; but we always weep in the sense that our soul is in a state of distress. We stifle the consciousness of this distress of the soul many-a-time by drinking the liquor of sensory satisfactions, and causing titillations to the nerves by various gadgets of a material nature or a psychological nature, all which attempt on the part of the human being has, instead of bringing about a solution to the existing problems, seems to have made matters worse.

Today people are apprehensive of a possible descending of the world into lower and lower realms of involvement, rather than an expected evolution of it to a higher and higher aspiration and fulfillment, culturally or even intellectually.

The finitude that characterizes everything in this world, the fact of death that cannot free anyone from its clutches, the final eluding character of every kind of happiness in this world, the transitory nature of everything, the very evolutionary character of the universe itself, establishes what we may call the otherworldly character of the goal that our soul aspires for. It is otherworldly in a very, very specific, scientific, logical sense, and from these little words that I spoke just now, you would have been able to gather in what sense it is otherworldly. Why should Christ have taken so much trouble of preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of heaven, to come by self-discipline, austerity, self-control and service, if the kingdom of heaven is on this earth itself? All is well with this world, and there is no need to say anything further about it.

But the saints and sages and incarnations, and even human conscience in its varied manifestations, have been pointing out that the kingdom of perfection is not in this world, if by the term ‘world’ we are to understand the physical, material composition of an exterior presentation in the form of elements like earth, water, fire, air and ether, this astronomical universe and this human entity and this society constituted of these human entities.

Our aspiration, our longing, our desire, our hunger and our thirst is gross. Many a time we realize it in our own leisurely hours, and everyone has to realize it one day or the other, at least toward the end of one’s life. If nothing in the world is going to satisfy us finally, the goal of life is not in this world. In this sense the great spiritual ideal is otherworldly.

But it is not otherworldly in another sense altogether. If the perfection that we seek, the goals that we aspire for, the God who created this universe is outside this world in the sense of a totally otherworldly, disconnected existence, there would be no ladder to connect the world with the perfection aspired for or the God who might have created this world.

The attainment of God, the achievement of perfection, the goal of life would be a chimera, a sheer abstraction with no substantial or solid content, if it is impossible to attain it merely because of the fact of the otherworldliness of its character, there being no connection between the world and the otherworldly nature of its existence. But the possibility of the fulfillment of this ideal which is vouch shaped by the very fact of the arising of a desire for such a perfection, points out another aspect of this issue, namely, that the otherworldly character of the final goal of human aspiration is also somehow or other vitally connected with this earth, earthy, worldly life.

This physical tabernacle of the human personality, this gross, dirty earth, this material world, this lowest level of the descent of reality in the process of evolution, is in the worst of its involvements, yet, nevertheless, connected with the highest of possibilities, the Supreme Absolute itself. The cause, which is the original creative principle, say our scriptures, has gradually come down by a gradational descent of condensation of involvement into the lowest of categories we call matter.

The Upanishadic categorization of these stages of involvement go by the names of Anna, Prana, Manas, Vijana, and Ananda, corresponding to the well-known sheaths of the human personality, the Koshas, as they are called – Annamaya, Pranomaya, Manomaya, Vijnanamaya, Anandamaya. That means to say, the levels of physicality, mentality, intellectuality, and causality – these are the sheaths of human individuality, or, for the matter of that, any kind of individuality whatsoever.

That we are involved in the human body, in this physical vestment, is a well known fact. That we live in a physical world which is utterly material also is something well known to us. We are materially involved – personally, individually, as well as socially. All our acquisitions, all our needs in this world, have finally been clinched by the word ‘material’. There is nothing non-material anywhere in this world. Neither we, as physical bodies, have anything non-material, nor can the world, which is material, be anything other than what it is. We seem to be groping in a darkness of physical involvement; yet this lowest of involvements, which is entirely material, physical, dark, earthy, is also the footstool of the supremely transcendent Absolute.

In the description of the Viratsvarupa, as we have recorded in the Purusha Sukta of the Veda and also in the Epics like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Puranas like the Vishnu Purana, the Srimad Bhagavata, etc., we are told earth is the footstool; the material level constitutes the feet of development. The lowest manifestation is the lowest part of a humanely concealed picturization of the organizing principle. All things are included within the vast evolutionary process we call creation, arising from an unending principle, spatially as well as temporally, and finding its completion in the physical earth.

People like us, who live in the physical world, have to realize God. It is absolutely essential to achieve this perfection, and at least some of us who are here in this holy atmosphere would have been fully convinced of this necessity to work for God-realization, or Self-realization as it is sometimes called. But this longing of ours would be a futile attempt if there had been no connecting link or a possible relationship between our present involvement – which is of the worst possible involvements – if there is no link between this state of affairs with the highest potentialities and possibilities divinely conceived.

The relationship between spiritual ideals and social values would have been made a little clear by this little bit of analysis of the circumstances prevailing in this world as a last evolute in the process of evolution, the final aim that has come out from the supreme creative principle, yet having its connection with the ultimate cause.

The Ultimate Cause, according to the Vedanta, according to the Sankhya, is the supreme Purusha – the Universal Intelligence, Brahman, as the Vedanta or the Upanishad calls it. The terminology of these lofty doctrines has its own ways of describing the gradual manifestation of things. The Sankhya would tell us that the potential for the manifestation of the world, the pressure-point for the externalization of the Universal, is the Prakriti. Mula Prakriti is constituted of a threefold involvement – Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas – through which the supreme Purusha gets reflected, as it were, as the Sankhya would put it, in the manner of a reflection of an object brought before or to the proximity of a pure crystal.

The condensation of potentiality, the coming into a formation of greater and greater density of universality, takes place gradually, to put it in the language of the Vedanta philosophy – Brahman becomes Ishvara, Ishvara becomes Hiranyagarbha, Hiranyagarbha becomes Virat. In the language of the Sankhya, Prakriti becomes Mahat, Mahat becomes Ahankar – all which finally mean one and the same thing from two different angles of definition. These terms, Prakriti, Mahat, Ahankar or Ishvara, Hiranyagarbha and Virat actually mean a universal process of condensation of the ultimate universality which is Brahman or Purusha.

After the manifestation of the physical universality called Virat, there is a further creative action taking place through which we have a tripartite division of the contents of creation – Adhyatma or the individual, Adhibhuta or the objective universe. The objectivity of the universe arises only after the tripartite division takes place, consequent upon the manifestation of Virat, in which condition there is no such division. The Adhibhuta is the physical, objective universe, the Adhyatma is the subjective percipient – you, I and everyone that cognizes, perceives things, and a connecting link between the subjective and the objective sides – Adhidaiva, a superintending divinity. They are all highly technical things, but the mention of these principles becomes necessary to bring about some sort of understanding of what relationship exists between the spiritual and the material, the transcendent and the immanent – or rather, the principle of God and human society.

The individual man is, according to the doctrine of evolution, a kind of latecomer. Prior to him there were earlier creations. This doctrine is not merely a finding of Western culture, not of Darwin or Lamarck, but it is mentioned also in the Puranas and the Srimad Bhagavata, and as I mentioned today in the morning, we have a mention of it also in the Aitareya Aranyaka. That means to say, from the grossest of elements into which the Virat descended in the form of the five elements – earth, water, fire, air, and ether – arose the life principle. Vegetation in the beginning, and animals afterwards, and finally human beings. These human beings, which is human nature, constitute human society. Social values are human values, individual values, personal values, my value, your value – all are included in what you call social values. A society is nothing but an agreed arrangement of psychic operations among human individuals for the purpose of personal security and personal advancement in any manner whatsoever.

So, the evolution of the human individual, or rather the descent, we may say, of the human individual in the process of the creation as described in the manner mentioned in the terminology of the Vedanta philosophy would point out, would highlight the fact that there is a living connection between man and God; that means to say, a vital connection between human society and the Supreme Divine Principle. If this is the truth, any one of you will be able to immediately discover the fact of an eternal coordination subsisting, operating, permeating between the highest and the lowest.

In this context of our discussion, under the auspices of this Centenary, we are discussing a relationship between spiritual aspiration and social life, the connection between spiritual ideals and social values. The theme is intensely philosophical, highly analytical, requiring a sharp intellectual potentiality and leisure of mind to come to conclusions of this kind, which can be preferably and perhaps possibly achieved only through personal meditation. Intellectual discussions, scriptural studies and orations will not finally satisfy the surging longing of the human soul. The perfection that we seek is within our own selves. It is God speaking within the deepest possibility of the human being, the Atman, which is nothing but the Paramatman localized in human circumstance. A universal Paramatman engaged, as it were, within the locality of the human body is Atman. That is the obvious relationship between God and man, between the Creator and the universe, between spirituality and society, between the lowest and the highest, between the here and the hereafter.

This astounding conclusion was arrived at by the masterminds of the Vedas and the Upanishads in this country, a final word which is the only answer to the eternal query that torments human minds – what is life, what is its purpose, where it is moving, to what it is tending, what is it aspiring for, in what it can find its fulfillment. With these few words which attempted to bring about a little bit of coordination among the ocean – like contributions of the scholars who participated in this 3 day seminar, I request Sri Swami Madhavanandaji Maharaj to give his concluding blessings with which he will perform the Purnavati of this great Yajna of a three day seminar on spiritual ideals and humanitarian values.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

Annaprashana

The Relevance of Social Welfare Activity in Spiritual Practice

Guru Purnima Message by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Friday 26 April 2013 15:32

On this holy, most blessed Sri Guru Purnima, at this auspicious moment in the early morning, we place within our hearts the great Sri Nara-Narayan Bhagavan whose grace spreads through the whole earth as threads permeate a cloth, who is stationed in sacred Badrika Ashrama, as tradition goes, who is the original incarnation of Sriman Narayana – to these twin forces of Nara and Narayana we give our prostrations. Prostration to Bhagavan Sri Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa, after whom this day is also known as Vyasa Purnima, the great Guru of all Gurus. Uninterrupted by the time process, this Guru blesses all creation, the original Guru of all Gurus. Salutations and prostrations to Worshipful Gurudev Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj who is our immediate Guru, whose presence is not merely in this ashram but everywhere in this country and in the world.

The Gurus form a fraternity of their own, and all those who have reached the apex of experience are termed the Gurus of humanity. A leadership of a cosmic cosmopolitan society is vested with this great organisation of the Gurus. In this realm of divine ordinance, blessing and compassion that is bestowed upon all mankind, the Gurus shine as resplendent stars in the firmament of spirit. They are not human beings, though we may concede that once upon a time they assumed the form of human nature. Now they are disembodied, therefore capable of performing more effective action. Because of the disembodied nature of these Gurus, they permeate all existence. Because of their subtlety of existence they can manifest themselves at any moment and at any place. It is believed, in our tradition, that the moment we think of them they are here in front of us, because to materialise that which is not really material in form, it does not take time. So if our prayers at this time arise from the deepest recesses of our heart, these Gurus’ blessings will be upon us forever and ever.

They permeate us and do not stand above our heads and bless us. When divine beings want to protect us, they do not stand beside us with a stick like shepherds; they enter us and protect us. Standing near us with a stick and then guarding us is one thing, but entering us and permeating us and then guarding us is another thing altogether. This is a mystery in the operation of divine forces. They work internally, though they also can work externally. They can provide us with our daily bread externally; they also can give peace of mind internally. When Bhagavan Sri Krishna proclaimed the great ordinance of the constitution of the universe – ananyas cintayanto mam ye janah paryupasate tesham nityabhiyuktanam yoga-ksemam vahamy aham (B.G. 9.22): Those who are undividedly united with Me, I bring them succour, provide them with all their needs – when it was said in this manner, the meaning is external as well as internal protection. He will give us bags of rice and wheat, sugar and milk and honey externally, which He shall do instantaneously. He shall also live in our brains, which is a greater protection than rice and wheat.

Such power these Gurus have; they bless us from within and without, in every way and every form, completely. But it is necessary for us to learn the art of invoking them. Sunlight is energising, but if we are sitting inside a cave under the earth, the forces of sunlight will not benefit us anymore. We have to keep ourselves open to the influx of the forces of the sun openly in order that this blessing may be upon us.

We have gone into the cave of this physically bound egoistic existence and shut ourselves up so that the influx of the rays of the benedictions of these masters may not enter us at all. Nature’s forces and God’s forces are shut off by the affirmation of egoism, but they are compassionate enough even to lift this egoism up into a divine personality and make it a resplendent ambassador of God’s performance.

How Worshipful Gurudev Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj’s presence is felt, and he is operating everywhere in this ashram and in this divine organisation through the hearts and the minds of his devotees and admirers on this earth, is something well known to everybody. You are all devotees of Sri Gurudev, and your life is secure today, even in the midst of difficulties – countless, everywhere in the world. Do you believe that you are living a very safe and comfortable life? If this blessing has been bestowed upon you, it is due to the grace of these masters who know your weaknesses and also your requirements. The gratitude that we have to pay for this protection that has been bestowed upon us by these masters is our prayer to them permanently. This prayer has to arise from us, and not merely from our lips in the form of words and chantings. Prayer arises from the feelings. Whatever you feel deeply, that is your prayer, and each one has to know what are the feelings operating within. The feeling is the root of our personality. Our brain, our understanding, our rationality, our intellect is not our true person. The feelings are the real person. What do you feel at this moment? That is your prayer. And even if you do not utter a word, these feelings of prayer will get communicated through the atmosphere of spiritual forces.

Occupied as we are in our humdrum activities of factory life, office life and family life, we may not be able to appreciate the operation of these great divinities. We cannot even see with our eyes if God is not working through the eyes. We cannot hear, we cannot speak, we cannot taste, we cannot sense anything unless some divinity is operating through these sensations. In this sense it appears that we do not exist at all, but are a conglomeration of divinities. Every cell of our body is the abode of one god or the other. Millions of gods are operating through us to give a shape to this personality as we appear to be. If one cell does not operate, we have to go to the doctor for an operation. One cell is sufficient; it can set at naught your whole security. Such is the power of a single divinity operating through every one of us. There are gods in the heavens, we say – but there are gods inside also. Every particle of our nature is filled with gods operating – otherwise, we would not be alive. The sense of being alive is due to the presence of these forces within us. In a way, we may say all individuals have a borrowed existence. It is given to us; it does not belong to us. Such is the mystery behind these wondrous forces operating irrespective of our inability to pursue them. As our eyes are projected outward, we cannot behold the inward operations taking place even within our own stomachs.

But faith is a miracle; it can work wonders. If you really have the faith that such forces are operating even just now – indomitably, unremittingly, keeping us alive and keeping us breathing – then this grace will get accentuated in our own selves. We shall be kept healthy, wealthy and also wise. But the difficulty is, it is hard to bring to our feelings the sense of these divinities. I can feel that I am here, but I cannot feel that you are inside me. It requires a special effort to make such feelings actually workable. Can you feel that I am in your heart? It is not possible, generally speaking, because the projection power of the sense organs keeps us outward at all times, and this is also in the case of our difficulty in feeling the presence of these divinities which are pure subjectivities. Gods are not objects, they are pure subjects – just as we ourselves are not objects, we are pure subjects. Such masterly organisation of pure subjectivities control this cosmos and then make it appear as if it is one single, integrated compactness. Otherwise the whole world will fall into shreds of little bits and there will be only dust particles everywhere and there will be no place for us to sit upon. The gods are very gracious to us.

Therefore, may we recollect to our memories, bring our will to action, feelings to operate and our understanding to stand in unison with these feelings is our collective prayer before the great masters who are actually not different, one from the other, as rays of the sun are not different. It is a mass of radiance that constitutes this world of the Gurus who are present here, at this moment, in our deepest hearts, in our feelings, in our prayers for our blessings, ever and ever.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

Annaprashana

Guru Purnima Message

Guru Purnima Message by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Friday 26 April 2013 15:32

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Spirit and the Letter

The Spirit and the Letter by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Thursday 25 April 2013 16:58

Human aspiration is a miracle by itself. It is not always easy to precisely discover and streamline towards action the implementation or the fulfilment of the longings of the human mind. In most cases, the very way of one’s thinking and feeling is moulded by the circumstances and the atmosphere of the family and the neighbourhood in which one is brought up from childhood onwards. This is particularly the case with the religious inclinations and community feelings which almost become inseparable from the general outlook and the very mode of life of a person. Do we not see in our daily life the parochial and segregating effect produced upon one’s personality and outlook by the very language one speaks? The impact of language upon one’s mind is so intense that it has successfully managed to determine the cultural pattern of people who begin to feel that they are a sort of chosen society entirely different from others, because of the hidden implications of the language which one speaks, affecting profoundly one’s life and cultural background. People become believers or non-believers according to the definition and the meaning attached to these terms by the impact of such circumstances as mentioned above. There is, perhaps, some point in certain classical thinkers, both ancient and modern, holding the opinion that man is a social product, a creature of circumstances, almost equivalent to an article manufactured by social, economic and political conditions.

On a broad view of the conditions in which man lives, it may certainly appear that the stuff of human nature is just this much. However, irrespective of a large number of people blown helplessly by the winds of external conditions, who may be under the pressure of concluding forever that they are results of what things are outside them on account of a feeling of utter dependence on circumstances, yet it would remain to be seen if man is nothing more than what is made by factors other than himself. By these external factors, people are likely to mean people other than themselves; else, what can these external factors be? Are they the sun, the moon and the stars, the mountains and the rivers? The complaints of man seem to be against men other than he, and his feeling of dependence, thus, is obviously the notion that the existence and behaviour of other people constitute the conditioning factors of his life. But who are these ‘others’ which one is thinking of in one’s mind, inasmuch one’s own self is also an ‘other’ to somebody else? There is, evidently, some hidden mix-up in the opinion generally held that man is conditioned by social, economic and political atmospheres, because there is no such atmosphere which can be considered as wholly alien, and everyone can become a conditioning factor for everyone else.

Is the human individual totally bereft of any stuff other than or different from conditions which may be regarded as external? A by-product of conditions, which man is many a time considered to be, can have no substantiality in itself, nothing that can be called real, apart from a relative phenomenon, a transitory situation, which is the only value that can be attached to a ‘produced’ something. But is man finally prepared to accept this judgement on himself? The definition of man alluded to turns him into a means, because of his being a ‘product’, but how could there be merely a means unless it is directed to an end; how could a product or an effect convey any meaning unless it is occasioned by causes other than itself? Here it may be argued that ‘society’ is the end, for whose satisfaction the human individual is converted into a means, and social, economic and political conditions are the causes behind the effect in the form of the human individual who is either a subservient satellite or a means or instrument to be utilised or put to use. The position that society is just a name for a group of people or an organisation of individuals has been rebutted by social and anthropological philosophers holding, as they do, that a society is more than the people which constitute it. If people are just the same as society, and vice-versa, there can be no complaint of man against society, and no man would be a product of society or social conditions. But, if society is something outside of, beyond and transcendent to people who seem to be its constituents, the fact that the conditions of human living are a consequence of the social set-up would take one to realities which are not human – we may say, superhuman. If the latter is the truth, man’s limitations are not to be equated to the irreconcilable positions of other people, but the irreconcilability which man feels in regard to something which is beyond the location of any human being. Society would then assume the shape of a super-individual impersonal force which is immanent in individuals, because they cannot stand outside it, but which, at the same time, transcends everyone because it cannot be identified with anyone, even with everyone. That man is conditioned by superhuman powers would be an acceptance that the life of people is not entirely dependent on how other people are or how other people behave. What else is religion if not the conclusive acceptance and belief that empirical life is a phenomenon determined by laws and regulations of a higher beyond?

But this religious impulse that reality is a beyond something, can easily be misinterpreted and misconstrued by the enthusiasm that characterises many seekers, which imagines a beyond this world, beyond human society, for the sake of which the world and people may be renounced. Religious injunctions have not infrequently been understood in this sense of a requisition for a literal abnegation or abandonment of the visible, for the sake of the invisible beyond, though the spirit of the religious requirement on this issue is a little difficult to decipher, especially when minds which take to religion are empirically bound to an unavoidable and irresistible feeling that the world and people are real things, while at the same time there is the urge towards a trans-empirical ideal which is notionally abstracted from the real visibles as a goal to be pursued. A sense of contradiction here cannot be avoided by anyone who pauses to think for a while.

The crux of religious living may be said to be in this knotty problem of the relation of the empirical to the transcendent, of the visible to the invisible, of concern with people to religious devotion, of the world to the ultimate reality of existence. Religious renunciation, which is the essence of what is known as spiritual life, is a hard nut to crack, since the mind which seeks the transcendent is, more often than not, sunk in the values seen in empirical life and it cannot escape the predicament of bifurcating the transcendent goal from empirical life, inasmuch as what the mind can sense and feel is only that which is seen with the eyes, heard with the ears or touched by the hand, tasted or smelt, and no one has ever seen or sensed a beyond the world. This unfortunate condition of mental operations makes God, spirituality and religion a concern wholly unrelated to the sensed and the visible facts of empirical life, something which has nothing to do with anyone or anything, here.

Hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and the natural biological and psychic impulses from which no one can be said to be entirely free, or ever free, affirm the values that go with the visible world, and the religious seeker has perforce to strike a harmony between what pulls him to the earth and that which ideologically spurs him to a transcendent beyond. Failure to achieve this purpose, and to fulfil the laws of this pressing necessity, may endanger the very intention behind it, the principles of religion and spirituality, and reduce these noble longings of the spirit of man to a sham enactment of an impossible adventure. The rigours associated with renunciation in the religious or spiritual sense have mostly bordered upon a condemnation of all earthly values and meanings in doing or having anything at all here, a condemnation which is mentally exercised in a theoretical fashion, while simultaneously feeling the pinch of the pressure to subject oneself to the material, biological and psychological needs of life in the world. People there are who think that religion has never succeeded finally. Yes; how could it succeed if it is just a name for this tension made to appear between the here and the hereafter?

The strength of religion is the power it wields by bringing about an inward communion of the particular with the general, the limited with the unlimited, the individual with the universal. In fact, there can be no value or meaning or strength conceivable except as a vital participation of the organic part with that living whole to which it is integrally related. Not only this; it would be difficult even to exist, except in terms of a participation in the structural pattern of the degree or reality immediately above the present condition of existence, or mode of living, the circumstances of life, as it to called. Nothing, thus, can be a greater solace to man than the pursuit of the religious ideal rightly understood in its spirit, since there would be no significance in existence itself if it is bereft of a relation to, or participation in, the reality which is the very soul and substance of that which so participates in an inward relation. The ‘generals’ and the ‘universals’ referred to range themselves one beyond the other until the final generality or universality, outside which nothing can be, is achieved in experience. This series of a range of the degrees of reality may be compared to the series of the stages of the development of a sapling into the mature and widespread banyan tree, or the stages by which a baby grows into a stalwart or genius. It is to be noted here, in this analogy, that the stages or degrees mentioned are vital, intrinsic and organic, and not layers of isolated things placed one over the other.

But the weakness of all religious seeking, which is so much spoken of, and even made much of, is the hypocrisy in which man may unconsciously and unwittingly find himself due to the distressing dichotomy which he may feel within himself between the real calls of empirical life and the ideal longings for what he considers as his goal beyond mortal life, transcending all earthly glory. A hint as to the nature of this difficulty has already been given in what is pointed out above. In most cases, this problem becomes poignant, and the religious life throughout may reduce itself to an unavoidable misery. The whole project may end in a travesty. It is this dark side of a failure in religious life that especially attracts the critics of religion, of anything that is considered as a way of holy living. To the sceptical outlook which doubts everything, the material values of physical existence appear to dictate terms even to the way one thinks, feels or understands, and man’s internal life becomes just an exudation of external nature.

It has been pointed out time and again that the internal life of thought and consciousness cannot exude from material causes, unless the former, which is considered to be an effect, is potentially hidden and is latent in the latter which is the cause. The necessity to recognise the latent presence of consciousness in its supposed cause, which is said to be matter is some form, obliges one to locate consciousness everywhere in the very structure of matter, which position would turn matter into a veritable embodiment of consciousness, such that there would be nothing to distinguish between matter and consciousness, or, to go a little further, between cause and its effect. This little consequence that would follow from the theory that consciousness is an offshoot of matter would defeat the very purpose of the materialist supposition. There would be no matter left if consciousness is to be immanent in it. So much about the net result of the highly adumbrated doctrine that matter is the only reality and consciousness is its baby. Can we see here some sort of an answer to the insistence that man is a product of natural forces? This is apart from the obvious need felt to presuppose consciousness even to know that matter, or any object outside, exists at all, whether independent of the principle of consciousness, or otherwise.

The religious life, like the science of mathematics, is an inviolable and inexorable operation of law, and the validity of the science itself has no relevance to any error that may be committed in the mode of calculation or the assessment of hypotheses. There is, no doubt, every chance of the ideal and the principle getting missed due to the means getting converted into an end in itself, either due to an excessive zeal in putting on an appearance before the public mind, or by a subtle expectation of some gain in the empirical field, or the presence of a desire to achieve a personal end even through means which may, in its outward form, seem wholly altruistic. With this difficulty which is very basic to the foibles and weaknesses to which the biological man particularly is subject, already considered by us above, there is the temptation to reduce religious life or convert it into the machinery of a spatio-temporal institution, an organisation which can cleverly manage to keep half the hen for cooking and half for laying eggs. This outcome of even the religious zeal is not something unknown to human history, and the very charge against religion that it is an internal illusion occasioned by natural pressures may find itself crowned once again to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven. While the religious spirit is essentially a movement towards enhancement of the dimension of being, it can get deadened into the mechanical structure of the fulfilment of social and even political needs. The soul, which is the subliminal root of man, asking for freedom in the realisation of its own infinite comprehensiveness, can get yoked to the plough of institutional and organisational requirements, thus getting transformed into a tool harnessed for work or a mere part of the gadget of an institutional make-up. Here the soul exists for someone else, for an other-than-oneself, by a natural loss of its own status and its very being, in its enslavement to the machine of which it is a part. Work done in this way is tiring, exhausting vitality and distressing to the core, for a mechanised part, which has no soul of its own, cannot but get worn out by the drudgery of labour to which it is subject perforce. This can eventually be the tragic fate of even an otherwise well-intentioned and honest religious seeker, a condition in which the spirit is killed in order to keep the letter alive. This undesirable result of such a life cannot be avoided, unless, of course, one voluntarily sells the soul in order to pamper and parade its psychophysical cravings through the instrumentality of the empirical show which, for this purpose, is intelligently manoeuvred, whereby the night of the shadow glories beyond the radiance of reality.

A false abstraction of the hereafter from the here, the eternal from the temporal, by forgetting the immanence of the real, through an overestimated concern for the notionally entertained transcendent, is the principal snag in a carelessly led religious behaviour and religious life in general. Since advancement, progress or growth is always organic, the system of ethics, laws and rules cannot but be a living principle by which one achieves a graduated self-transcendence and not a sanction to negation of the lower levels of life. This transcendence is, however, of the nature of a fulfilment in a wider ambit of inclusiveness and is not a resort to rejection for achieving something entirely different or alien. The grown-up tree is not different from the plant that it was, but a self-transcendence in a larger comprehensiveness and maturity of being. Renunciation is not a loss of what one has or a giving up of one’s needs, but a positive gain of that which exceeds all possession, an attainment which is the fructification of the total longing of the infinite root of all things. Progress in the religious pursuit is a process of evolution, by which the bud of potential perfection opens systematically into the flower of the realisation of that something which can brook no existence outside its limitless being.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

True Religion

True Religion by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Wednesday 24 April 2013 21:09

(Spoken in 1991 to the organizer of a religious conference for world peace.)

Namaskar! …sometimes occupies the mind of even so-called religious people. Even religious people work hard for material expansion of their institutions, and they want a lot of money, and name, fame comes in. This name, fame, greed are great obstacles, and they are part and parcel of human nature—like the very skin of man. Name, fame, greed are the very skin of the person, and to peel the skin is very difficult. It requires a perfection of spirit in one’s own self. He should not merely be a teacher or a preacher of religion, he must be a religious person himself. You know very well—I need not tell you—what is to be a religious person. It is the planting of the consciousness of God in one’s own heart.

For that, we have to bring before the minds of people what actually they mean by ‘God’. What is it—a theoretical concept? Or is it a “may be or may not be” question? And is it a necessity, or has it any significance in our life? Ask religious people, all religious people: What is the significance of the presence of God in human life? Let answers come. Is it a question of tomorrow, or after death? Do we reach God after death, and not in this life?

Most of the religions, or I should say all the religions, have a peculiar notion of the otherworldly character of God. It is a defect in human thinking. There is no otherworldly isolation of existence, because existence is a complete, organismic structure wherein we cannot distinguish between past, present and future; and if we accept God is eternal, He is not tomorrow. He is just now, and not somewhere in heaven. God is not in heaven, and He is not tomorrow. Now, if we can give up or free ourselves from this wrong notion of tomorrow and somewhere…

Look at the mind of man. “Where is God,” you ask. Where is God? At this moment, where is God? Just now when we are speaking, where is God sitting? It is difficult for the mind to accommodate itself to this question. It will shatter the whole body. The very thought will shake the whole personality. You are asking this question: Where is God just now? The whole ego of man will tremble, because the ego cannot stand this question. It can answer any question, but the ego cannot answer this question because if it starts answering this question, it will cease to exist at that very moment.

It requires purification of the heart. All religious studies, any kind of religious way of living, is preceded by a moral and ethical purificatory process. It is not easy to be religious. Going to a temple, going to a church, fasting on Sundays, sleeping late in the night, rolling the beads—this is not religion. Religion is the consciousness of God, and to the extent one is conscious of the presence of God, to that extent one is religious. It has nothing to with political activity, social welfare work and so on. Though there is no objection to it, it cannot be identified with religion. Religion is not one way of living, it is the only way of living, and it must inundate the whole personality of the person.

We must be bathed in religion, so that we are the embodiment of religious consciousness itself. We are not flesh and bone. We are not physical personalities. We are forms taken by aspiration for the Almighty. We may be regarded as representatives of God in this phenomenal world, so when we walk, we walk like ambassadors of God. The ambassador is the government represented. The entire force of the government is working through him; and if the force of God can work through us, we are incarnations, we are Krishna or Christ, we are Godmen. Such persons alone can work some benefit in this world.

Political leaders whose names are appearing in the newspapers, and who are only bookish, fundamentalist and tradition-bound—this kind of thing will not work before God. When we go to God, we do not go as Hindus and Christians; we do not go as men and women. In what sense do we go there? Let us accept that we are going to attain God. When we go there, how do we go—as Christians, as Muslims? “I am a Muslim.” Will we say that before God Almighty?

It is necessary to convince ourselves that we are just now in the presence of God—just now. In the presence of God, what will we do? Here is ethics and morality. Whatever we do in the presence of God, that is goodness, that is ethics, that is morality. Let anyone for a few minutes close the eyes and contemplate: “I am in the presence of the Almighty, the Creator of the universe. He is seeing me.” Now, what will we do at that time? We will melt completely. We will become liquid, and we will cease to be. What we will be at that time, only the experience can say. We cannot describe it in words.

If there is such a person who can understand these significant factors in religious living, I think that person can work wonders in the world. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was a person like this. We cannot call him a religious man. He was a Godman. God was dancing in his heart, and so if he thought something, it reverberated through the whole world. So was Ramana Maharishi, and so were great saints and sages who lived in this world, whether of the East or the West.

Therefore, it is necessary to free ourselves from the need to be presented before the public eye, but have a desire to convince ourselves that we are in the vicinity, in the presence of God Almighty. It not a theory, it is not a scripture speaking. It is a hundred percent fact. That God is just here and looking at us, is not a theoretical doctrine. It is not an imagination. It is a highly perfect scientific fact, and no science can be more perfect than this feeling and conviction that we are being seen by millions of eyes. Every atom is the eye of God, and He sees us from all directions.

There is a great poem in the AtharvaVeda, a prayer offered to the Almighty. It is something very touching indeed. It was translated into English by a great German orientalist, a scholar called John Muir. The translation was done beautifully, in a poetic manner. He was a great Sanskrit scholar who wrote five volumes, which are deep research on all the original Sanskrit texts. There is no Sanskrit book that he had not read and mastered. I will read to you the English translation of that prayer from Atharva Veda. This is from Atharva Veda:

The mighty Lord on high,
our deeds as if at hand espies;
The gods know all men do,
though men would feign their deeds disguise.

Whoever stands, whoever moves
or steals from place to place;
Or hides him in his secret cell,
the gods his movement trace.

This is addressed to Varuna, which was the name of the Absolute in the Atharva Veda

Wherever two together plot,
and deem they are alone;
King Varuna is there, a third,
and all their schemes are known.

When we are talking now, there is somebody in the middle. Neither you can see it nor I can see it, but there is a third element which is making it possible for us to converse with each other.

This earth is His,
to Him belong those vast and boundless skies;
Both seas within Him rest,
and yet in that small pool He lies in the heart.

Wherever, whoever far beyond the sky
should think his way to wink;
He could not there elude
the grasp of Varuna the King.

His spies descending from the skies
glide all this world around;
Their thousand eyes all-scanning,
sweep to earth’s remotest corner, remotest bound.

Whatever exists in heaven and earth,
whatever beyond the skies;
Before the eyes of Varuna the King
unfolded lies.

The ceaseless winking all He counts,
of every mortal’s eyes;
He wields this universal frame,
as gamester throws his dice.

He plays with us. I am reminded here of a line from Shakespeare which says that gods play with men as children play with flies. This is how the gods treat us.

I feel it is not easy to be truly religious, because it is not easy to truly love God. That, again, is because it is not easy to understand what God is; and if one clearly has a concept of what God is, he will shrink into a non-entity in one minute, and he will be filled with God. “Empty thyself, and I shall fill thee.” This is the whole of religion: Empty thyself; I shall fill thee. But we are like dustbins, already filled with some rubbish. How will we have fragrance put into it?

We may talk of God but, really speaking, we have no faith in God. Sometimes there is doubt also: “Will He give something to me, or will He ignore me. Is it possible to reach Him or not? Suppose He does not respond to my request; what will happen to me? I must have my own strengths, a little bit. What is the guarantee that He will actually bless me? And He may be far away; I may not be able to reach Him in several births.” If time consciousness vanishes from us, eternity descends into our heart, and God is just now here. If there is such a person in this world, he is the protector and the savior of humanity.

If God is eternity, non-spatial, non-temporal existence, the world is not outside us. Do you catch my point? If ultimate reality is timeless eternity, the world cannot be external. If it is not external, it is identical with our personality. There is no spatial distinction between ourselves and the world. The world is a total whole, which includes me and you. So we cannot look at the world, we cannot see it, because to see it is to externalise it, to make it an alien to ourselves, which is not the fact. We are a part of the world, organically connected, inextricably related to it. How will we see the world? When we say we are seeing the world, it is a mistake. We have isolated ourselves from the total whole to which we already belong. So to think the world would be to think as the world would think itself. Do you understand me? Here is, according to me, the spirit of religion or spirituality—which is not dead. It is still alive in this world, fortunately. It may be somewhere from the point of view of quantum, but it is still alive. God is not dead, as Nietzsche said. God is not dead, He is very alive and well, and if God has created the world, as we believe, He knows also how to take care of it. And we are instruments in His hand, because we are part and parcel of this universal organism of Being.

What I am telling you just now is a kind of meditation. It is not a lecture I am speaking to you. I am just concentrating my mind on the ultimate meaning of life, which is nothing but the consciousness of the omnipresence of the Almighty, omnipotence of the Almighty, and omniscience of the Almighty, from which we cannot extricate ourselves. We are just in it and, therefore, we are well guarded. “He who is united with Me in spirit, I shall take care of that person in every way.” This is a verse from the Bhagavadgita—God speaking to man.

Ananyas cintayanto mam ye janah paryupasate tesham nityabhiyuktanam yogaksemam vahamy aham (Gita 9.22) is a verse in the middle of the Bhagavadgita, which is the Absolute speaking to the relative, Eternity speaking to time, God speaking to man, as we may say. “Whoever is undividedly conscious of Me, it is My responsibility to take care of that individual in every way.” If we want a spoon of sugar for our tea, God will give it. We may not think it a silly matter. There is no silly matter for God. He is Himself operating everywhere. Even in a cup of tea, He is operating. If we want a spoon of sugar, it will topple down. It has to come, if it is God that is wanting it. When we want, it is God wanting. Let us be sure. We should not distrust or have a lack of faith. “Oh! It cannot be. It cannot be. When I want something, it is not God wanting.” We should not say that. Then, immediately we cut ourselves apart from God. A person who is centered in God, when that person thinks, God thinks, and therefore it has to act and take effect immediately, materially. Such a person is a saint, such a person is a representative of God in this world, and these persons should form a conference as a target of religion. Bring them together; but be careful that they are really great people. You do not want twenty-five or a hundred.

Daniel: There is no number really, but it will be a small number.

SWAMIJI: Persons like Sri Aurobindo, Swami Sivananda, Ramana Maharishi, Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi—let them all sit at one table. What will they think? They will not talk much. They will not say anything. Just imagine a conference where these people are all sitting. Aurobindo, Swami Sivananda, Ramana Maharishi are sitting, and Krishna and Christ are also there. What will they speak? That is a real conference.

Daniel: Here is a question about this, because you have been speaking the very highest Vedanta.

SWAMIJI: I don’t think it is Vedanta. It is the science of life. Why use such words as ‘Vedanta’, ‘Bhakti’, and so on. Let us not use any jargon. It is the principle of life; and it has no language, no tenet, and does not belong to any clan or cult or religion. It is nothing of that kind. It is the science of Being. Science is not partial; it is an inexorable law. An inexorable law cannot be diluted by any kind of human expectations. You have to raise yourself to that level, and not bring that down to your level.

Daniel: I won’t put a label on it. What I am thinking of is the example of Vivekananda, who struggled to find ways to talk to the millions of people he spoke to, to rouse them to higher levels.

SWAMIJI: Because he was speaking through his spirit, it was thunder from the wisdom of God that he was enshrining in himself. He was not an ordinary lecturer.

Daniel: No, I understand, but I am thinking he was finding words because he was concerned that they’d be able to understand what he had to say, and rouse themselves. In America, he spoke one way; when he came to India, he spoke a different way.

SWAMIJI: Of course he would have noticed the attitude of the audience. You cannot speak same way everywhere. In the railway station you will speak in one way, in the market place in another way, in the church in another way, and to intellectuals in Oxford University in another way. It is of course expected.

Daniel: So, I’m thinking there must be good ways of teaching. In the world today, a world that is saturated and preoccupied with…

SWAMIJI: The teacher should come to the level of the audience. He should neither be below them nor above them. The person who receives and the person who imparts the knowledge should be en rapport. A good teacher will not go above, nor will he go below; he will be on a par. He will be a friend of people. He will shake hands with the audience. Then good communication will take place between himself and the audience. Even if you know much more than the audience, you can speak only in that manner which can be received by the audience. You can galvanise it or sugarcoat it in whatever way you like.

You can teach philosophy even to a child; it is not impossible. Yes, it is not impossible. It all depends upon how you speak. Once I had an occasion in Delhi to speak to little kids, and afterwards I had to speak to some intellectuals. The intellectuals who heard my lecture said, “Swamiji, what you spoke to the children is much better than what you talked to us.”

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Importance of Our Last Thought

The Importance of Our Last Thought by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Tuesday 23 April 2013 17:08

Philosophy and Life

A study of the principles of living is philosophy. When consciousness is able to set itself in harmony with these principles, it becomes a philosophical life. While man is accustomed to regard religion and its practice as a holy act of the spirit or a concentrated effort of the mind which is in no way related to the practical life of the world, the truth of the matter seems far from this popular belief. Man is not a child of God for a few days alone, or only for a few hours of the day. His participation in the nature of reality is not a work that he performs like an employee in a corporation, but it is an affirmation of what is his essential status and very being. The intrinsic significance of the person does not change with vocations or the calls of social engagement.

The Theory of Karma

How does it happen that the human individual, nevertheless, looks only a partial abstraction from reality? The answer to some extent can be had if the doctrine of karma is analysed carefully. The conclusion of the systems of thought in India, except the Charvaka, or the thoroughgoing materialist, is that human individuality is a form assumed by the effects of karmas done in the past. The personality is itself a bundle of these forces. Karma is a concentrated point of the force of desire-impulsions grouping themselves into a body or an organism. There is a parallel to this thought in the philosophy of Leibnitz, who regarded every individual as a monad, i.e., a centre of force, and not a hard substance closed within itself.

Karma is a term whose meaning has been much misunderstood, and it has been associated with every event or occurrence. The dictionary meaning of it would be ‘action’, or ‘that which is done’, or ‘what one does’. But, this is not a sufficient coverage of the definition. Karma amounts to an interference with the harmony of Nature, somewhat like one’s coming in contact with a high voltage electrical field. The moment one touches it, it gives one a kick, and a jolt follows. Self-contained energies do not brook interference, for the field maintains an equilibrium, a balance of its own.

The universe may be compared to an ocean of force. When individuals are considered as points of force, it would follow that the whole of creation also has to be a mass of this force, a large sea of energy. It is constituted in the nature of an organism so that it successfully struggles to maintain its identity. Physiologists and biologists say that even when one feels a little prick from a thorn in the sole of one’s foot, there is an entire disturbance of the whole organism. The forces of the body are at war with this occurrence. There is an effort of the cumulative organism to throw out the enemy that has entered the system. Any interference with the system is not tolerated. The human body is a miniature cosmos. A study of the human system can suggest ways leading to the knowledge of what the universe is made of, and conversely, if the universe is known, one also knows one’s self. Man is a microcosm, while the universe is the macrocosm. This balance, which is the universe, is a perfect equilibrium of being.

What is called action, karma, activity, movement, doing, is a kind of interference with this balance, which is the reason why it sets up a reaction, comparable to the reaction caused by one’s own body when a thorn pricks the foot. The thorn coming in contact with the foot is the extraneous action, the activity, or anything that one does or anything that anyone does anywhere. The reaction of the organism to this event is the karma, the nemesis of retribution. The nature of the reaction, its quantity as well as quality, will depend upon the nature and intensity of the interference – even as when an enemy attacks a country, the reaction will depend upon the extent of the invasion. Thus, karma has a cosmic connotation, and it is not merely a little bit of sweeping or washing that one does in daily life. It is a metaphysical reality and not merely a movement of bodily limbs, with which karma, or activity, is generally identified, perfunctorily.

The so-called individuality is known to be ultimately a myth in the light of the structure of the universe which is a self-sufficient whole. Inasmuch as the universe is a completeness, it includes within its existence everything that is substantial in the individual. If anything exists as a reality in the individual, it has to be a part of the universe. There cannot be an individuality outside the universe. The universe is the name given to the totality of being and, therefore, it should include within its comprehension, everything that anything can be, including all humanity and all things.

The assertion of the individuality of a person, or even the notion of the presence of something isolated, is repugnant to the constitution of the universe. There cannot be something redundant hanging on in the human body. Such a thing is resented. We call this foreign matter. A thing that does not actually belong to the body is foreign to it; it is a toxin that has to be rejected, and cannot be tolerated even for a second. Likewise, egoistic individuality stands in the position of an irreconcilable element to the universe; it is foreign matter, and the powers do not tolerate its presence. The ego is an anathema to the cosmos. It is almost like a citizen in the country asserting total independence and defying all laws of the government, as if he does not belong to the nation at all. He becomes a toxin to the administration and he has to be expelled, because he has not become a part of the organism which is the governmental structure. He is not a citizen, and he cannot be tolerated. A moment’s existence of his is a pain to the organism. So does this organism of the administration of the universe not tolerate the presence of such a thing as individuality, which is a myth before it. It is a hobgoblin, and it cannot be there. But this goblin of the individual struggles to maintain its character of an apparition, and interferes with the healthy assertion of the universe.

From this study it would appear that even personal action is a myth; it cannot exist on its own right. If the individual, finally, is a chimera, action also goes with it. It looks that man is in a world of illusions. Do we live in a real world? Man is not permitted to affirm himself in the way he is doing every day, for it is contrary to the law of things. His existence as an isolated individual is against the operating law. Thus it is that nature kicks him back, and this repercussion is the law of karma operating inexorably, and one has to pay for it, indeed, through one’s nose.

The situation would reveal that the individual is an abstraction from the whole, in a very special sense. Some of the features of reality are taken into consideration at the time of the formation of individuality, and every other aspect is ignored, just as, when one has an attraction for an object, one sees in its presence only those forms which are conducive to one’s relationship with it, and every other characteristic of it is rejected. Anything that belongs to oneself is beautiful, and what one hates is ugly, because those contours which are suitable to the particular mood, or the mode of the mind accepted at that particular moment, are imposed upon the object under the pressure of a psychological exigency. Karma is this reaction of the universe to pay back to any kind of interference with its harmony – which is, thus, a cosmic occurrence and not just an individual affair. From this point of view, the individual would have to be defined as an effect that has been projected by the character of a reaction from reality. The individual can exist only so long as the momentum of his reaction persists (prarabdha-karma). When the reaction ceases, when the pressure of it is lifted, individuality evaporates, and it attains liberation from the bondage of isolation.

This little bit of an abstraction of force that is extracted from the total of the universe for the formation of the individuality, is called prarabdha-karma. And one can exist as a bodily individual so long as this selective operation continues; and when it is over, one is also no more. What is called physical death is the cessation of the momentum of a given form of the force which created this physical individuality, and then the form ceases, its purpose being fulfilled. But, since its other forms do not always get worked out in one life, there can be rebirth into a newly conceived form. The chain can be an endless one if karma accumulates repeatedly due to freshly formed desires in the subsequent incarnation. If this does not happen due to the rise of knowledge, salvation is attained in eternal life.

The Last Thought is Said to Determine the Future

It has been said that man’s future life depends on the path he follows in the course of his present life, and it is also held that the last thought determines the trans-empirical future of the individual. No one can say exactly when this last thought would occur, as no one knows the time when the last moment will come. It is so because the future is severed by the present attachment to the local body and its relations. There would, then, be no point in postponing the spiritual ideal of the meditation of consciousness to a future moment, the point of dying, since the future is unknown. The undecided future would be enough caution instilled into our minds to be prepared for the last moment, as if it is every moment of the day. For a sensible person, every moment is the last moment. It is only the foolhardy go-lucky that can entertain the notion that the last moment is going to be a future occurrence after several years. If it is true that the last thought will decide what man shall be in the future, he should be careful enough to see what would be the nature of the last thought.

This is, however, one aspect of the matter. The other side of it is that the last thought is not one isolated link in a chain of different kinds of thoughts. The last thought is not a single thought. The object of meditation, as already seen, is not one among the many objects. It is a supreme object which includes the concepts of every other object in the world. Similarly, the last thought is not one among the many thoughts. It is the wholeness which the mind assumes by including within itself all the earlier processes through which it has passed in the sojourn of life. As when a man grows up into a mature adult, he has included in this maturity of his personality all the earlier stages and the mature adult condition is not merely one stage among the many earlier ones – it is all the stages – so is the last thought of all the thoughts. The conduct of man, the way in which he has lived through his life here, will decide the nature of the last thought. As the fruit of a tree is the culminating maturity of the growth of the tree, one’s last thought can be said to be the fruit that has ripened through the maturity of the tree of one’s life.

The Last Moment is like Standing Before the Supreme Judge

At the time of passing, the last moment, man gets gathered up into a total force, even without his knowing what is happening to him. When one is drowning in the waters and there seems to be no hope of survival, when one has lost everything in this world and life itself is at stake, when one is at the moment of leaving the world, one gets gathered up into a concentrated jet of indivisible focussing of motion. This gathering up of whatever man has been, at the time he leaves this world, would look like his preparation to present himself before the Supreme Judge of creation. One stands alone at that moment, and one stands alone in a literal sense, stripped of every association – a condition which may be frightening even to imagine. One gets disillusioned at that moment, and one would not know what to think. Many times one becomes unconscious at the time of passing, but it is not always the case. The last thought is that idea which preponderates at the last conscious moment before entering into a state of oblivion. The fear of the severance of all relationship at this moment strikes like a thunderbolt, which is the reason why one becomes unconscious mostly. The snapping of the links of relation is stupefying, for it was the only sustenance of the individual in its life of attachment and revelry.

One Should be Always Prepared for the Last Moment

Anyone could imagine from this circumstance that man mostly leads an unnatural life throughout his social career. The present state of earthly consciousness may safely be regarded as a passing phenomenon, an appearance. The truth comes out when one is about to leave this world. It is sometimes easy to live in a fool’s paradise, but that everyone has been living such a life will be shown when one is compelled to stand alone before the aloneness of reality. To live in this world is really a terrible thing. It is not always milk and honey, and it is not such a joy and a satisfaction as the unwise may think. Instead of forcibly getting huddled up into this corner of an unpleasant isolation where one is deprived of every help from outside, anyone endowed with a little discrimination of this true predicament here would do well to prepare oneself for this ordeal, the time of the great trial that one has to face, one day or the other. This preparation of the individual for standing on his own legs one day, to root himself in his own private status without being arrested by a court’s order but honourably by education and knowledge, is one of the requirements for a peaceful ascent to higher realms.

Sleep, death, and coma have some resemblance among themselves. In death man is drawn into himself wholly, though not voluntarily. In sleep also this happens for another reason. In coma the same circumstance supervenes under different causes. They differ from one another in other respects, though there is a feature of similarity in them in the sense that the individual gets withdrawn into himself in these states. In a sense, deep meditation is a state of conscious death, or a conscious sleep, and a conscious dissociation of oneself from every relationship with externals. But no one would be happy to be forced into this circumstance. It would be an honour on one’s part to enter into this state deliberately by a consciously operated will and aspiration. In the meditations of yoga, one enters into this state of conscious aloneness which is in consonance with the nature of reality.

It has been noticed that it is doubtful if man is living a natural life today. Inasmuch as he is going to be thrown to the winds, blown off from his feet one day with no connection with anything, one should conclude that the realities man regards as worth-the-while in his present ways of living are only semblances. The Bhagavadgita admonishes one to be perpetually in a state of yoga. While an establishment of oneself in yoga at the last moment will bestow the fruit of Yoga, one cannot always know when the last moment will come. Further, the last moment is not one moment among many others; it is the fruit of what man has done, felt, thought, experienced, or passed through during the course of his entire life. The last thought is the quintessence, the juice, the honey, as it were, squeezed out of what one has lived through in life. Hence, a continual establishment of oneself in yoga is advised. Else, one would be taken by surprise. It is known that wars do not take place always; but everyone is ready for it any moment. One does not start manufacturing weapons when the enemy unleashes attacks. Though there be no apparent danger of that kind, one is prepared for the eventuality as if it is to pounce on oneself now. While death may take place after many years, it can occur the next moment, also. Man is not omniscient; he cannot know his future. Hence, he has to consider the present as if it is the last moment and, like a good child, be ready by making necessary preparations, lest he should be surprised by unexpected summons.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Message of India's Culture

The Message of India’s Culture by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Monday 22 April 2013 21:26

(Spoken on Guru Purnima in July 1975)

Blessed immortal Atman. This is holy Sri Guru Purnima, the full moon day when the glorious rays of the spiritual moon shed themselves upon the inner lives of all people. May we know the grace of the Almighty on this holy Sri Guru Purnima day. This is also the sacred commencement of the Chaturmasya, the four months during which spiritual seekers observe intense austerity and practice inward discipline.

To us humble followers of Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, seekers of God, devotees of the Almighty, this is an occasion which is thrice blessed. To us humble seekers, this is not merely an occasion of the commencement of any temporal succession of personal efforts or activities, but an eternal remembrancer of the fact of the awakening of the human soul to its universal destination.

These few words that I have uttered before you should be significant enough of the purpose of human life, of beauty of man in general. In these few words, I have tried to sum up the esoteric truth, the secret fact that human duty is inseparable from divine realisation – the fact that the creation of God cannot be separated from the being of God. The great truth that our activities in life are coextensive and commensurate with our spiritual aspiration is to me, at least, the message of holy Sri Guru Purnima from Master Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj.

The great Guru that was Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj comes to us as an ambassador of the Absolute. He has not come to us as a bodily encasement, as a personality, as a Guru in the ordinary sense. People cry when the Guru passes away, but he is one of those rare specimens who came to tell us that the Guru never passes away because we daily repeat in our prayers that Guru is Brahma, Vishnu and Siva – which, again, has a double meaning and significance.

The Guru is the same as Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, or it may mean Brahma, Vishnu and Siva are the Guru. Both meanings apply to this famous verse: Gurur-Brahma Gurur-Vishnu Gurur-Devo Maheswara Guru-sakshat Param-Brahma tasmai Shri Gurave namah. It is Parameswara, the Supreme Lord, in His various and glorious manifestations who comes as teacher – not only to mankind but to every created being – to accelerate the process of its evolution towards Himself.

Life is a process of evolution. Towards what? Towards that from which everything has come. Ānandādd hy eva khalv imāni bhūtani jāyante, ānandena jātāni jīvanti, ānandaṁ prayanty abhisaṁviśanti (Taitt. Up. 3.6.1): From bliss Absolute we have come, in bliss Absolute are we rooted, and to bliss Absolute are we destined, so that the philosophy and culture of our land is a philosophy and culture of ananda, or bliss. It is not a message of pain, agony and distress. Pessimism is unknown to our culture. It is a culture of exuberant positivity of approach to God, who is the greatest of positivities.

It is a movement from joy to joy that we call the evolutionary process of the soul. It is a movement from lesser truth to higher truth, which is a better way of putting things than to repeat the old opinion that we move from error to truth. In the glorious Kingdom of Heaven, which is within everyone, there cannot be error. Error is only misplacement of values. It cannot ultimately exist, and it cannot have an absolute value. Absolute error is unthinkable, and therefore it cannot be. Absolute falsehood cannot exist. Everything exists as a relative representation of God’s perfection, and therefore everywhere – even in the so-called erroneous movements of material, psychological and social forces – there is an element of God present, urging all these processes towards His Supreme Perfection.

To our culture, which is the culture of God, the culture of Perfection, all the duties of life become manifestations of happiness. The glorious gospel of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, which may be regarded as the tripod of India’s message to mankind, provides us with the hopeful exhortation that we can never be helpless at any moment of our life. Our culture is the blossoming full moon, the real ‘Purnima’ of hope after hope, aspiration after aspiration. May we recall to our minds, once again, the message of the saints and sages of all times and climes who had plumbed into the depths of the Great Reality of the universe, that we exist in God, live in God, breathe in God, move in God, and perform the functions of our life in the Kingdom of God.

The great message of Christ that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” should be a miraculous and revolutionary teaching to all those who think in terms of the temporal and always evaluate things from the historical point of view. A kingdom cannot be inside anyone. Can you imagine a kingdom being situated within anyone? And, yet, a great incarnation spoke this truth to mankind: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Either it is a contradiction in terms or it is a super-mundane fact which the human understanding cannot fathom. That which is external is also the internal, is also a message of the Chhandogya Upanishad (Section VIII), which is echoed in the statement of Christ that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us.

The whole cosmos is vibrating within every cell of our personalities. Everything that is everywhere is also within us and is inseparable from us. This was the foundation of the doctrine of God’s supreme perfection also given to us by Acharya Sankara on the basis of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavadgita and the Brahma Sutras. Everything we need is in us. Everything required by us for our existence, every movement in evolution towards perfection, is implanted in our being. When we were born we brought with us everything that is necessary for us, and we carry all these necessities with us wherever we move in this world. We cannot be separated from these needs or standing necessities; they are inseparable from our vital existence.

This is the spirit of true spirituality. There is the letter of the teachings of spiritual life, and also the spirit of these teachings. The letter of the teaching is what is generally practised by the masses in the world, but the spirit is missed. The letter is easy to understand, but the spirit is difficult to follow. What is the letter of the teaching of spiritual life? What does the letter of religion say? It says: you must love God, you must believe in the existence of God, you must speak the truth, you should be honest in your dealings with your brethren, and you should be living a life of purity, goodness and truthfulness. But the letter of the teaching has been so construed, on account of the very constitution of the human mind, that the life of the spirit, or the life of God, or the life of spiritual aspiration has been covertly, without one’s knowing what is happening, separated from the day-to-day activities of life, so that we are one thing in the street or the shop and another thing in the church or the temple. Thus, we have two ideals before us, the ideal for the marketplace and the ideal for the church or the temple. This is the traditional and organised creed of what we may call the church, which does not necessarily mean the Christian holy of holies, but the concept of the religious atmosphere in any so-called religious mind.

Religion today appears to be shaking from its very roots because the edifice of religion is built on a sandy basement; it has no substantial support at the bottom. The so-called religious man does not really believe in God. The religious mind has taken advantage of its apparent belief in God or concept of God as an instrument in the personal fulfilment of its wishes and ambitions. To most of us, God is an instrument, not the aim or goal of life. Our asking for God is not because He is all-in-all, but because He is a tool for the fulfilment of our ulterior motives. We have desires and desires, in all the levels of our personalities. We are made up of desires: kamamayoyam purushah. We do not possess or have desires: We are made up of the desires. Every fibre of our being is constituted of desire alone. Therefore, this desireful personality contrives a tool in the form of the concept of a God in Brahmaloka, Vaikuntha or Kailasa, for its own fulfilment. God’s existence is travestied; it becomes a blasphemy of the very religious concept and the idea of God. We are told, again and again, that God is the goal of life and not a means to the satisfaction of the needs of the individual.

We now have to be taught the primary lessons of life itself. We are still in need of the initial educational process, which has to set right the very thinking method of our mind. There is something wrong with us at the very root itself. We think in terms of the body, the personality and its relationships external. These relationships subtly interfere with every activity of our life, including the ‘activity’ of the ‘practice of religion’. It is unfortunate that ‘religion’ has become a sort of ‘activity’, a kind of ‘duty’ among the many other duties in life.

The religious consciousness is not a work, it is not a function, it is not an action proceeding from our individual being, because the personality of the individual is an effect; it is of the nature of a process of becoming, tending towards something else transcending it. And, therefore, any activity proceeding from this procession of individual existence cannot be identified with the religious consciousness which is the emblem of God’s Being.

God is Being. We call Him the Supreme Being. The human mind cannot conceive the meaning of true being. We have a very wrong notion of even what ‘being’ is. When we say that something exists, something is, we associate ‘being’ as a kind of adjective with the object that is supposed to exist. A chair exists. When we say that a chair exists, the chair is the subject and its existence the predicate. We have conceived existence as a predicate of the chair which is the subject. But existence cannot be a predicate of anything. It is the subject. It is presupposed by the notion of every other individual object in the world. Existence precedes even the notion of chair; it cannot be a predicate of it. On the other hand, when we understand the situation metaphysically, philosophically or spiritually, the chairhood of the so-called object is the predicate of the existence which precedes it. And because of a peculiar twist of character in human thinking, we also conceive God as a predicate to our temporal life. God is an appendage to all our needs, necessities and desires!

Therefore, God does not seem to be helping us, at least openly. We have misused our relationship with God. We have conceived Him as a kind of attribute to our individuality, which is a very sorry state of affairs. God cannot be an attribute. He is the Supreme Substantive. He is the Reality. The Supreme Being that God is, is the presupposition of even our thought, of ‘being’. That is why we say that God cannot be thought through the mind. And if such an unthinkable presupposition even of all human understanding is the nature of God’s existence, what should be the character of religion, which is the way to God? It should be characterised by all the attributes which ‘being’ can have, though to a lesser degree.

So, the practice of religion is the practice of God-consciousness, in some degree or the other. It is to flood our personality with something super-mundane, super-personal and super-individualistic. When we become religious seekers, we become non-temporal not only in our personal life but also in our social existence. To be a seeker of God is not easy. You cannot just receive initiation into a mantra from a Guru and think that you are a religious seeker. When you receive initiation, you are led into a new way of living and being. Your life gets transformed, and there is a complete transvaluation of values.

This is the message of Bharatavarsha, the message of India’s culture, the message of true spirituality, the message of Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, the message of all the mystics, saints and sages of the world, and the message of holy Guru Purnima. God bless you all! Peace be to the whole world!

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

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