C. TRUTH, NON-INJURY, PURITY
The foundation of all Godward movement—of making our earth-bound consciousness rise upwards towards its original source—is called dharma. And the greatest of all dharma is to make God your dharma.
Follow God. He has expressed Himself in His sacred scriptures and through the messages of His prophets. They may seemingly differ but their messages are non-different and one. The factor that helps us move towards God and attain experience is dharma.
And dharma is expressed as truthfulness in life. Truth and dharma are inseparable; they are two sides of one thing. And truthfulness requires inner strength which comes only from a pure heart that has nothing to fear.
Purity is the guarantee of inner strength. Purity comes by enthroning God in your heart, through feeling His presence within you. It comes by a living inner relationship with Him who you are certain is within you. Such a living relationship is to be cultivated and established through prayer.
Thus these factors are all interrelated. The channelising of our entire life towards the great purpose of existence, God-experience, is possible only through dharma. Truthfulness is the essence of dharma, and it is only a strong heart and mind that can adhere to truthfulness through all ups and downs and vicissitudes. Such strength comes only through purity, and purity comes through a living contact and relationship with God by knowing that He is ever established in your heart. And a heart devoid of anything that is contrary to dharma becomes the most perfect and suitable seat for God to come and dwell in: “I dwell where dharma dwells. I dwell where love for Me dwells.” Thus, let us all strive to make our heart, the inner spiritual heart, worthy of His presence.
25. THE TRUE BASIS OF MORALITY
Worshipful homage to the supreme Cosmic Being who is the one common factor indwelling and interconnecting all living beings and all members of the human family. We may be quite different and diverse in every other way, but there is one common factor and that is the indwelling Reality. “Within you is hidden God. Within you is Immortal Soul.” Eko devah sarvabhuteshu gudhah (God, who is one only is hidden in all beings). The same indwelling common factor—Existence-Consciousness-Bliss—makes us all one.
If this is pondered, recognised and gradually grasped as the basis of relating ourselves to seeming others, we discover that there are no others. From the innermost reality of our spiritual being, there are no others in the sense that they are something else other than us or something different with whom we have nothing in common. If we make this the basis of relating ourselves with all living beings and all of God’s creation, then we will live and move in this world as a unifying factor, a cementing force, a harmonising principle.
We are not what we see when we stand before a mirror. We are that which is not seen, that which we feel ourselves to be. And that is the same in all. That Being that makes us all one we call God, the antaratma (the Indweller), the One in the many.
This truth is the basis of the good life. It is the real basis of kindness and courtesy. Why should we give respect to others? Because the Being whom we worship and adore is the Being who is the indwelling common consciousness. When we worship Him in the temple or church, how can we show disrespect when He is before us as the living God? That which gives us happiness will also give happiness to others. That which is painful to us will also give pain to others. That which we desire from life around us is the same thing that others desire from life around them.
Therefore, the true basis of morality, goodness, kindness and compassion, being helpful to others, of politeness, courtesy and honesty towards others, is the ultimate spiritual experience which gives us the vision and reveals to us the truth that God is one and He is everywhere. He says: “I come to you in all directions through My own creation. I put before you My creation so that you may never forget Me, that I may never be far from you, I may never be something strange. I am the most familiar thing to you in your life, for you behold Me constantly in all your life, in the whole world. Every day you see Me.”
Gurudev came to open our eyes to this vision. He taught us to see the hidden God in all things and to make that truth the basis of our life and our living. Such a life will be full of reverence for life, of respect for all beings. Out of such a life will come sweet, desirable and beautiful human relationships.
This is the need of our times, the need of the world today. Many people do not know how to behave with each other either individually, collectively or internationally. Our behaviour is unspiritual; we fight and quarrel. For the spirit of religion has gone out of religion. We worship the outer form, and the awareness of the inner content is conspicuous by its absence. Therefore, the world is what it is today.
May we as individual sadhakas not commit the same mistake and land in the same predicament. For, although we can do little to change the world, yet we can change ourselves. We can bemoan the world but we cannot change it. However we can do everything to rise from unreality to Reality, from darkness to Light, from mortality to Immortality, from humanity to Divinity. That we can! That we must!
The foundation of all spiritual life is conduct and character, goodness of heart and the purity of one’s inner, hidden motivation for actions, speech and thought. No spiritual life or Yoga or Vedanta can stand upon a foundation of bad character, evil thoughts or wrong practices.
The path of wisdom leads one to peace and joy, to one’s renowned and good name, unto one’s divine perfection and liberation. To be unwise is to take the downward path, to court misfortune and to create one’s unhappiness, downfall and ultimate failure in this field of life where one was sent to make effort, to be wise and to succeed.
God’s plan for man is ascent unto divine perfection which is inherent, latent, in every human individual because of the fact that the inner, subtle, hidden, essential, true identity of the human being is the God-nature. For the individual soul is part and parcel of the Universal Soul. Therefore, God’s plan for man is not sorrow or failure, it is ascent unto perfection, a successful journey culminating in liberation, a transcendence of all sorrow, pain and suffering and an entering into a supernal state of eternal joy and peace.
The wise sadhaka always keeps this in his or her mind and proceeds to fulfil God’s will in their life by being wise and striving diligently to awaken and unfold the perfection of God that lies within their innermost centre, where one is not man but one is God, where one is not human but one is Divine.
The wise, therefore, pursue the path of virtue, for they know that wisdom lies in the practice of virtue. They know that God Himself coming as Lord Krishna has stated that divine virtues, spiritual graces, lead to liberation, and their contradiction, their opposite, lead to bondage and misery. And to bring this home in a still more forcible manner, He goes on to state that three of the vices—lust, anger and greed—are gateways to hell. They destroy the spiritual nature of man; therefore, they have to be given up.
When the Lord has given us both sides—what leads to a downfall and what leads to liberation—we have to be wise sadhakas and throw our weight fully on the side of that which leads to our own liberation. The path of virtue should never be given up. Even when one is assailed by the greatest temptations, even when one is assailed by the winds of carnal passion, greed, fear or even threat to one’s own life, even at the risk of this, the path of virtue should never be given up.
One should ruthlessly abandon all that is the opposite of virtue, all that threatens the path of virtue. No matter how attractive it may appear, no matter how pleasant it may seem, yet there is in it danger like poison. If it is sweet in taste, it does not become less dangerous. It is the same poison; it is lethal; it is fatal; it will kill; and, therefore, it has to be abandoned ruthlessly. Even so, wisdom lies in adhering to the path of virtue, and no cost is too great.
The practice of virtue, a life of virtue, is not just silly sentiment. It is not just a beautiful emotion, a sort of a theoretical, artistic, aesthetic urge in man. Far from it. It is in dead earnest; it is very serious. It is a science. From the point of view of Yoga and Vedanta, it is a science.
It is the adherence to virtue alone that burns up all unspiritual latent impressions in the mind. There is no other means of burning up wrong samskaras and vasanas except by the fire that is produced by strict adherence to the path of virtue.
Virtue is a purifying force; virtue is a divine power. Just as they say that all karmas are burnt by the fire of jnana, the fire of transcendental wisdom, even so all unspiritual samskaras or vasanas are burnt up in the powerful fire of virtue. Virtue is a blazing fiery power that has the possibility of burning up everything that stands in the way of full Divinity.
The practice of virtue is scientific because virtue creates sattva, and of the three gunas it is sattva that has an upward propulsion, a force that lifts one up, makes one take the ascending path. Vedantists insist upon virtue, because it is the one way of going deep within—to the subtlest depths of our being and burning up asuddha samskaras. Raja yoga prescribes virtue because virtue refines the mind stuff, makes it subtle; and, therefore, one is able to practise concentration which requires a refined and subtle mind. Also, spiritual instructions that are heard or imbibed from svadhyaya will only stay in a mind that is subtle, that is pure, that is sattvic.
Therefore, it is that they say that one should adhere to the path of virtue. And one should practise virtue as if it is the last chance that one has, as though tomorrow one may die. The pursuit of knowledge should be done with patience, as though one will live a hundred years. Because you cannot imbibe knowledge in a hurry; it is a slow process of evolutionary growth of the understanding and intellect. But the wise person practises virtue as though this is the one and only chance; it is not to be missed. It is to be practised immediately, never postponing it, never hesitating, never allowing any time to pass between a virtuous thought and a virtuous deed.
This is the great necessity. In virtue lies wisdom. In wisdom lies your success in life, your highest welfare. It is the guarantee and assurance of your peace, bliss, illumination, immortality and liberation. Therefore, virtue should never be abandoned, come what may.
The practice of virtue is not something that has to do with morality and ethics only. It has to do with human culture. It has very much to do with spirituality.
A human life, a human birth, is a call to rebirth. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” So said the great teacher of the Middle East, Jesus Christ, to Nicodemus, the respected ruler and spiritual aspirant, when he came to question Jesus secretly one night. “How can a man be born when he is old?” the confused Nicodemus asked. “Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”
Water is a universal cleansing and purifying agent. So it means getting rid of mala (impurity) and having chitta suddhi (purity of mind). You have to emerge as a purified being. That is also the symbol behind baptism—a cleansing of and getting rid of all sin and emerging sinless, spotless, pure.
Fire is also a universal purifying agent. When Sita returned from Lanka she proved her purity by stepping into a roaring fire and emerging unscathed. Not a hair of her head or even her garments were singed by the blaze as her spotless purity was proven.
Our fire ceremony also symbolises a thorough burning away of all dross, of all that is impure, of all that is contrary to Divinity, and an emergence as pure Spirit. This is why it is a symbol of the same rebirth Jesus referred to two thousand years ago.
It is a rebirth from passion to purity; and then from gross earth consciousness, physical consciousness, material consciousness, into a state of spiritual consciousness—a rebirth through the water and the Spirit to emerge as a new being, aware of oneself as connected with the supreme Universal Soul, as a spiritual being beyond time and space, without birth and death, name and form, blemish or impurity, ever pure, ever free, ever full, ever divine—to enter that knowledge, that consciousness, that awareness.
And, thus, it is a rebirth of your very identity, a renewal of your identity, a casting away, a dying to the old self and being born into a new identity where you know of yourself only as related to the Eternal Being, not to this non-eternal world—to the spiritual Reality, not to this gross material phenomenon, this passing phenomenon.
For a spiritual aspirant, there should be a daily rebirth, a daily reemerging into a new awareness, a new higher state of purity—a leaving behind of all that is dross, gross, unspiritual, undivine, not a part of authentic, genuine, one hundred per cent spiritual life, and emerging into a new state of shining purity, shining spirituality, total divinity.
Again and again there should be a rebirth until you become like the Being you wish to attain. You become like Brahman, like the pure divine Cosmic Being, as you were when you abided in Him eternally—being in that status of oneness of God, merging yourself into that Self, partaking of His total purity, partaking of His glorious divine nature.
Thus, each daybreak should constitute a call to rebirth for a discriminating and discerning soul. But what about nightfall? If pondered in depth, it is an even greater call to a rebirth because even as dawn and daybreak may be an emergence from darkness into light, from inactivity into creative, progressive, fruitful activity, even so, when night falls, it is a turning away from the many, the mere appearance, the carnival, and it is a reentry into the One, which is the substratum, which is deep within. When night falls, the world disappears. You turn away from your involvement and entanglement in this false appearance and you go into the silence of the One without a second.
It is, indeed, a refreshing rebirth into the Spirit, plunging once again into satchidananda. It is a turning away from the many towards the One. It is a turning away from the harsh, garish tumult and the demands of the senses and the mind into a silence where there is no longer the din of the demanding senses upon your psyche, much less upon yourself. You return back into your original state to emerge refreshed.
If physical death is a dying, entering into deep sleep is a temporary dying, for it is everything that death is except that biologically there may be respiration, circulation etc. Medically you may not be called dead, but psychically you have, at that time, entered into a temporary death. The only difference is that at the ultimate death when you wake up you wake up into another dimension, another plane of consciousness and being, whereas here in this recurring daily death in deep sleep we emerge back into the original setup.
In addition, when you wake up from this temporary death called deep sleep, you wake up into a new reality. If you stand by the bank of the Ganges, each moment you are seeing a new river. You may think you are seeing the same river, but the water you saw a minute ago is now downstream. You are now seeing a totally different river. Even so, every morning you are seeing a different universe, you are in a changed world.
When you wake up in the morning, you wake up in Uttarakhand, in holy Sivananda Ashram, in the pervading presence of Gurudev. You wake up into something very special. This emergence should constitute for you a rebirth into sadhana. If there has been slackness in your sadhana, in this new birth there should be no more slackness. If there is any pretence in your sadhana, there should be no more pretence. If there has been indifference, a sort of half-heartedness in your sadhana, there should be no more half-heartedness; you should be in dead earnest, truly serious.
Waking up should constitute a rebirth into divine life, which means a rebirth into total truthfulness. This is the unvarying, invariable condition for the realisation of Reality—to be true to oneself, true with the world, to be honest with oneself and honest with the world. It is a call to divine life in all its unalloyed purity. It is a call to each one of you to truthfulness, to absolute purity in conduct and character, to a continuous, almost godly compassion, and a reluctance to hurt or harm anything created by God.
Therefore, may we be reborn not once, not twice, but again and again until there is no longer any necessity or need for any such rebirth or reemergence. Then we are in a state of total Divinity. That is what Gurudev wants each and every one of his followers and devotees to be—total Divinities.
Keep this in your heart and may you become so. You are so! May you know that. You are so, and may you become so, and be so. May you shine with Divinity. May you shine as beings newly endowed with a blazing spiritual consciousness, a radiant spiritual consciousness. God bless you!
28. THE GLORY OF TRUTH, NON-INJURY AND PURITY
(a)Truth
You are seekers after truth and lovers of righteousness. They say dharma premi. Dharma is righteousness. Dharma premi is one who has love for righteousness. The foundation of all righteousness is truth or truthfulness. Character, integrity, truth all mean the same thing. Again and again it has been said: “He who destroys dharma is destroyed by dharma.” That means that when one destroys dharma and becomes unrighteous, his unrighteousness becomes his own undoing. No external force is necessary to give him his deserts. His unrighteousness itself is enough. He becomes the creator of his own perdition, his own suffering, which he has called down upon himself.
But dharma protects him who protects it. One who protects dharma, that being is protected by dharma. Where there is dharma, there is ultimate success in all things. This dharma is based upon truth. Truth is the supreme dharma because God is truth. And we are seekers after truth. It is the entry point to higher life. Truthfulness is the soul of righteousness. The basis of a righteous life, the basis of character is truthfulness. To be truthful, therefore, is the best foundation for supreme success in life. To be a worshipper of truth is the one thing needful.
Truth is the greatest sadhana. Truth is the greatest discipline. Truth is the greatest austerity. Truth is the greatest vow and truth is the greatest of all flowers that pleases the Lord Almighty. If He is worshipped with the flower of truth, He becomes extremely gracious, propitiated and showers grace. Truth is, therefore, the great desideratum or the one thing needful—that most desirable of all things. Therefore, ponder truth, meditate upon truth, reflect upon truth, become a worshipper of truth. In this lies your highest good.
In this world, in Kali Yuga (the age of darkness), truth is discarded and therefore suffering comes upon individuals. But one who adheres to truth, practises truth, takes the vow of truth and performs the austerity of truth gets the power to overcome kali. The dire influence of darkness is overcome by the light of truth. Truth is the great tapasya of this age. It is a great purifier and uplifter, a force that helps the sadhaka at every step to overcome all things that stand in his way. Truth is, therefore, a great benefactor. It is the highest good.
Therefore the wise sadhaka makes truth his life’s companion. It is the entry point to all higher things. It is the soul of character as well. Therefore, beloved and worshipful Holy Master made it one of the triple principles that he laid down as being indispensably necessary in order to be accepted and to enter into his spiritual family of seekers and sadhakas. He said: “Adorned with truth, O seeker after God, come and I shall make you a member of my spiritual family.” We should, therefore, reflect upon the supreme value, the greatness and the need of truth in our spiritual and secular life. For if your secular life is to be ideal and a support to your spiritual life, then it must harmonise with it by taking into itself truth.
Spirituality is founded upon truth and ethics. A state of divine experience and perfection emerges out of the seed of a good life, out of a moral and ethical idealism in one’s life. It does not mean an irrational, illogical or fanatical puritanism. It means a sane and rational ethical idealism, a goodness that arises out of the appreciation of the auspicious, the beautiful and the holy; a goodness, a rectitude of conduct and character, a loftiness of behaviour, a nobility of attitude and approach towards life that comes out of true culture, true education, true understanding.
(b)Non-injury
Spirituality is similarly founded upon a goodness that arises from the understanding that even as I experience and feel so do others experience and feel: “What is distasteful, unfavourable, harmful or undesirable for me, I should not do unto others either by thought or word or action. Others are like me. They have sensitivities. Therefore, they should be given the same consideration which I am always only too ready to give to myself.” Thus equating oneself with others and others with oneself, one behaves with a sense of fairness, with a sense of justice, with a sense of consideration, with a sense of feelingfulness and compassion. Such a person never does anything that is likely to be harmful to others, that is likely to destroy the welfare of others, that is likely to go against the highest good of others. This is the essence of humanism.
Lower creatures, subhuman species, have not this feeling of “I am hurting others, I must not.” All lower forms of life are so constituted in nature that they feed upon other forms of life. This naturally entails destruction, it entails killing. So the most beautiful bird, with the sweetest voice, will be seemingly heartless. It will suddenly catch hold of an innocent butterfly flying in the air. If the insect is too big or if it flutters, it will hit it with its beak against some hard object and then swallow it. All forms of life other than human are thus constituted, although there are exceptions such as herbivorous animals like the elephant, camel and horse. But with rare exceptions, in nature most forms of life feed on other forms of life. There is no feeling that when I am preying, I am causing harm, giving pain, destroying life. That feeling is absent. In the human being, that feeling is present. That is the essence of the humaneness of the human status.
From the point of view of Vedantic philosophy and Yoga, this is because of spiritual evolution. The human being is an evolved being. Therefore he is capable of compassion, kindness, consideration for other people’s feelings and an urge and a desire not to hurt, not to harm, not to cause pain, not to injure, not to destroy life. This has to be developed further until one becomes godly. And the ideal of ahimsa (non-injury), the acme, the pinnacle of compassion, jiva-karunya was taught by Lord Jesus. He said: “There is no greater love in this human world than that of a person who is prepared to give up his life to save the life of his friend.”
It is, however, perfectly possible to be seemingly established in ahimsa, never hurting, harming, fighting or quarrelling, but at the same time one may hurt, harm, cause injury and make people suffer through subtle means. In Western society there is a term called “psychological torture.” Sometimes it is used in the law courts as the grounds for divorce: “In various subtle ways, upon the mental plane, my partner has tortured me, caused me untold psychological torture by taunting me, insulting me, making me feel unworthy etc.” In this way, causing anxiety, causing fear and distress, all in a subtle psychological way only, is also against the law of ahimsa.
Yoga and the spiritual life demand that violence in all its aspects, harming or injuring in all its forms, be it gross or subtle, manifest or unmanifest, expressed or unexpressed, should be eschewed, should be given up. And Holy Master Swami Sivanandaji went one step further and said: “It is not enough to merely abjure violence, injuring and harming others, whether grossly or subtly, by action or psychologically; on the contrary, one must actively and positively exercise compassion, feelingfulness, mercy, kindness, daya, karuna.”
For that is our concept of God. He is all-compassion, an ocean of mercy. And all spirituality, all yoga, all sadhana, ultimately is an earnest attempt to approach God, to return to God, to contact God, to experience God and become established in God. It is a continuous effort to draw nearer to the great, divine, cosmic Universal Being, to enter and experience that Being and make ourselves one with that Supreme Reality. It is an inner mystical process whereby the seeker grows into the God-nature or progressively approaches the ideal of godliness, wishing to become a channel of God’s divinity, to become an expression of all that he conceives God to be, all that he looks for from God.
They call it spiritual alchemy, a slow but sure process of transformation of one’s very being from one’s lesser nature into a sublime higher state of godliness, of the God-nature. It is a slow but steady inner transformation of the being, progressively into the likeness of the Being whom we are trying to attain, whom we are trying to realise. And the more this transformation takes place, the more this inner change towards godliness goes on progressively within, the more one begins to draw closer and nearer to that supreme experience. This is the inner dimension of yoga. This ascent towards godliness is the hidden inner form of yoga. It is the true yoga. It is the very life breath and inner heart of yoga. This inner transformation is the subtle unseen content of the life spiritual, yoga and the practice of yoga.
And this, therefore, requires that we cast out, shed away and remove from ourselves all that is contrary to our concept of the God-nature, all that is other than the God-nature. Everything that does not harmonise with the God-nature can have no place in the spiritual ascent to divine perfection. Anything that does not harmonise with the supreme ideal—the God-nature—logically, rationally, cannot have a place in the life spiritual. To see this clearly does not require any great erudition, philosophy or metaphysical knowledge. You cannot approach light taking darkness with you. When you approach light, darkness has no place.
Truthfulness, compassion and kindness go hand in hand. Because when you are kind and compassionate, you manifest your true nature which is the God-nature, you being part of God. It becomes your authentic life, not contrary to your reality. It becomes your true life. Anything that goes against the God-nature in you—either mentally, verbally or physically—is contrary to your true nature; you are contradicting your truth. Therefore your life becomes based upon falsehood. It is not expressing the truth of your being, your real identity. This is the inner contradiction, dichotomy, that comes about if you do not grow in the spirit of divine compassion and kindness. This is to be understood and grasped. It is to be seen with clarity and practised with determination.
(c)Purity
Similarly also, the Atman or Brahman is nitya, niranjana, nirmala, suddha sattva, all that stands for sanctity, spotless purity and holiness. Therefore, at the very outset of raja yoga as part of the practice of niyama, Maharshi Patanjali wants the spiritual aspirant to strive after a state of inner and outer cleanliness, inner and outer purity. And the classical Vedantic tradition also draws our attention to the three hurdles that stand in the way of illumination or enlightenment, supreme knowledge. They speak of mala, vikshepa and avarana. Mala is impurity. Vikshepa is the constant restless nature of the mind and avarana is a curtain or veil that hides. So they say: “These three obstacles that stand as barriers between the jivatma and the paramatma, the seeking soul and the Supreme Being, have to be gradually eliminated or eradicated. They have to be removed.” They say that sadhana is removing everything that stands in the way of your realisation of the ever-present Reality.
Gurudev used to put it in a very simple manner: “Purify, concentrate, meditate, realise.” Purify signifies the overcoming of mala. Concentrate signifies the overcoming of vi