Darshan with Swami Krishnananda during 1996

by Swami Krishnananda

50. Perfection

(Darshan given on November 29th, 1996.)

Swamiji: God is an all-inclusive Being, and love of God is an all-inclusive approach. It is an all-inclusive approach of the total person in the direction of the total Reality. Here is the essence of what you call religion, spirituality, yoga, and so on. If you are in it heart and soul, then you are the most blessed person on earth. So be happy.

A visitor: I want to be perfect, complete, unified, and I want to serve other people.

Swamiji: Even if a person has no illness, that person is to be considered as not perfect. A person need not be sick in order to be imperfect. Even a healthy person can be imperfect, for some other reason. It is not good to be sick. Therefore, the first step is to see that you do not have any inconveniencing sickness. If it is a minor thing, it does not matter. Everybody has some pain. But if it is a serious agony to you, you must take care of it first.

What do you want finally? What is your aim? Your aim cannot be to serve other people because that idea has not come to you if you are fully satisfied with life in this world. A person who is not satisfied with life in this world cannot satisfy other people, and nobody can say that one is fully satisfied with this world. There are insufficiencies everywhere. There is old age, and one day death will take place. A person will be annihilated completely. These are great problems for everybody, and the greatest imperfection is subjection to this kind of experience called old age and self-annihilation in death. If such a thing is ahead, any other thing you do is useless. You may do anything, but old age will pursue you, and one day it will finish you. So perfection does not mean living comfortably for some years. You must be always perfect. Do you believe in God?

Visitor: Yes.

Swamiji: Where is God?

Visitor: Within.

Swamiji: Do you believe God is the Creator of this world?

Visitor: Yes.

Swamiji: God does not sit inside your heart and then create the world, so before He created you, He was certainly not inside your heart. So where was He when He created the world? That is the real God. Can you imagine what God would have been before He created the world? Where was God before He created the world?

Visitor: Infinite.

Swamiji: You have rightly described God. So you need not say He is inside you. It is not a good definition. He is infinite. The attainment or experience of this Infinite is ultimate perfection. Nothing else can be considered as ultimate perfection.

There is a thing called yoga practice, which means the art of adjustment of one's consciousness to the requirement of the nature of the Infinite. You can understand what the Infinite is. It is an all-pervading, inclusive, infinite, eternal, immortal perfection. Can your mind think like this: God Almighty, infinite, everywhere, in everything, including myself? There is such a being who is your father and mother, brother and sister, caretaker and everything. He is your ultimate resort. You came from Him and you will go back to Him. Your duty is to work hard in whatever way to reach Him, back to that pristine, great, glorious existence where you were once upon a time, and from where you came as a created being.

We started by discussing perfection. Nothing can be perfect except this kind of thought in your mind. If you can adjust your consciousness to that infinite compass of the most majestic God Almighty and think Him continuously for at least fifteen, twenty minutes or half an hour, your whole body will vibrate with a sense of rejoicing and a blessedness and a feeling of health entering into you. You will feel natural forces are cooperating with you. The sky and the sun and the moon and the stars, space-time, everything will start vibrating in harmony with your personality because they are the embodied forms of God.

You are in the midst of this great wonder. You are not living in a wretched world, as people think. You are in the midst of a great wonder, which is called God's creation. Accept that. Be happy that this is the thing. Everything is all right, and everything shall be all right in the future also. In the middle only you are suffering because you have not properly understood this truth. Now you are awakening yourself to the great truth of the universal existence of God Almighty, who is the only thing worthwhile, and you have everything. In this manner if you go on meditating every day, you will be mentally happy, emotionally stable, and even physically healthy. This is sufficient for you. It will bless you. Do this practice.

In spite of the fact you have got hands and feet, nose, eyes, ears and so on, the difference between them does not in any way affect your conviction that you are one entity. You don't feel that you are a bundle of two eyes, ears, legs, a brain, and so on. You don't feel like that because of your self-identity with the very existence of these limbs. They have become you, and you don't consider them as parts of yourself. You say, “I am coming.” You do not say that your legs are coming or your head is coming, irrespective of the fact your personality is made up of limbs. Millions of cells, one different from the other, constitute this body. Each one is different from the other, yet you do not feel you are a bundle of many cells.

This is an example to show how the universe is constructed. It is exactly as your body is. It is a total, universal, absolute, organic perfection. This tree and other things mentioned are all limbs of this total organic substance, and you are also a part of that. So if you want to think the cosmic Reality, the Ultimate Being, you have to raise the status of your consciousness to that level of comprehensiveness that everything that you apparently see with your eyes as an external object becomes part and parcel of your total organism.

This is, in a way, God thinking. If you can imagine how God is thinking, it is like this. God will never say that there are many people and things. There are no many things for Him. It is just 'I am what I am'. That 'I am' includes everything, and if you want to be one with that perfection – which is the aim of life, the aim of spirituality, the aim of religion, the aim of everything – if you want to become immortal, deathless, if you don't want to be reborn, if you want to attain the Almighty Lord, this practice should continue. You become one with everything, as God is one with everything.

Everything is controlled by one mind, and therefore, it is sensible to say only one person is working. Even all the activities going on through an infinite number of personalities in dream are not done by any one of them. The string-puller is somewhere thinking, and all this dances here like a puppet show. Millions of puppets dance, and the string-puller pulls the strings. So it is perfectly correct that nobody does anything, and yet the foolish, outward-looking individual imagines that he is doing it.

A fly was sitting on the wheel of a moving cart, and so much dust was coming up. The fly was thinking, “See how much dust I am raising!” The dust was created by the wheel of the moving cart, but the fly who is sitting on the wheel thought that it was creating the dust.