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The moral or the ethical principle may be said to consist in the method or the art of determining the lower in terms of the higher. When one is totally exhausted in what is visible, this visible thing which is the object of our judgment, interpretation and encounter, cannot be evaluated in terms of that which reigns above the visible level.

As a matter of fact, there cannot be such a thing as virtue unless there is a standard of virtue. What you do, what you think, what you speak, becomes either permissible or not permissible in comparison with a standard that has been set, and this standard, whatever it be, may be considered to be the determining principle of human conduct. And divine life, at least in the sense in which perhaps Sri Gurudev Sri Swami Sivananda Maharaj envisaged it for the purpose of the welfare of mankind, should be regarded as the regulative principle of human life.

Though the word 'divine' has a very deep connotation which may take us far above the ken of human understanding and perception, the term 'divine' here, in the words 'divine life' are to be understood by us from a down to earth practical point of view, because divine life, which is the gospel and the message and the teaching and the precept of Sri Gurudev, is an art of practical living in this world. It may have some connection with larger, wider, higher realities, and it may even touch upon such transcendent mysteries as God and His creation, the relationship between the jiva and God, and such other deeply philosophical or metaphysical issues. But for our purposes, which is perhaps the real purpose on hand, divine life is the technique of so conducting ourselves in life, inwardly as well as outwardly, as not to be disharmonious with the principles that govern the world.

Swami Sadhanandaji Maharaj who was speaking, spoke one-half verse from the Mahabharata. Do not do unto others that which you would not wish to be done to you. Do unto others as you would be done by. Here is the crux and the essence and the quintessence of Dharma, which is the way of divine living. From another point of view I may say what are called the yamas in the system of yoga of Patanjali constitute the very rock foundation of divine living. Ahimsa, satya, asteya, brahmacharya, aparigraha yamaha; these sum up the whole ethical system. This is all morality, all goodness, and the system of perfect living.

From this angle of vision, in the light of this understanding, it may appear that self-control is indispensable in divine life, because to be a good person one has to be a self controlled person. A person who gives the longest possible rope to the operation or the activity of his senses and the mind is not a self-controlled person, and he cannot be regarded as a good person.

You know very well the word hammered into your ears again and again as the great teaching of the Master, "Be good and do good". You cannot know how it is possible for you to do good unless you know how it is possible for you to be good, because the doing of good is only and emanation of what you are made of. The whole personality of yours moves outwardly in human society when you do a good deed or perform what is righteous or virtuous.

There is a great dictum of ethics that the finality of good conduct consists in the acceptance of everybody else also in the world as an end in itself and not as a means to one's own end. This is perhaps the last word in ethical science and the moral principle. This is not an easy thing to understand, though the grammatical meaning of this sentence perhaps is clear to every one of you. You cannot treat anyone and anything in this world as a means to an end - everyone is an end in itself, everything is an end from its own point of view. This is the basis of a good living, a harmonious living, a happy living, a divine living.

The art of not injuring anybody else, the technique of not exploiting any other person or thing for one's own selfish purpose is a necessary ingredient of living a divine life. Let every one of us consider for a moment the extent to which we are likely to exploit the conditions and circumstances of other people. We cannot enjoy a flower unless we pluck it from the garden. We cannot have any relation to a person unless he is a liked one or a disliked one. We cannot independently assume an attitude of ends rather than as a means. A person is related to you in an extraneous manner, and the art of considering things or persons as ends in themselves rules out the question of relationship. Here we are entering into a concept of what they call the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom of heaven, in our own language it is Brahma-loka, is a system of living where one does not hang on another. One is not subservient to another. Each is what one is. And each is what one is that is complete existence. There is a self-sufficiency and self-completeness and self-perfection in each individual, in the Ram Rajya that people speak of, or in the golden age of Kritya Yuga, when we have been told that social compulsions in the form of social rules and political ordinances were not necessary. This is the final ideal of a divine living.

But we have to work towards this end. Every step in yoga is also yoga. Though yoga means union with the ultimate reality, it also means every step that you take in the direction of this union with reality, because, as I had occasion to mention earlier, reality manifests itself, perhaps at least from our point of view, in some degrees or levels of manifestation. Thus it is that you are in communion with the degree of reality when you are in a state of yoga.

A state of harmony is established when you enter into the field of divine living. A divine living is an art of non-conflict, and, much more, non-injury to any person. You cannot hurt the feelings of any person, because it is the rule of the universe that what you mete out to others will also be meted out to you.

The world is sometimes, perhaps, like a mirror that is placed before you - it will reflect exactly what you are. The universe, the world, the whole of human society, if you would like to call it, is an impersonal atmosphere or an arrangement before you which reacts in the manner you react in respect of it. Whatever you think of other people will also be thought about you by other people. Whatever you speak to others will be spoken to you one day or the other. And whatever you think about other persons will be thought about you, and whatever you do to others will be done to you, if not in this life, in some other life at least.

Extreme good and extreme bad reaps its fruit in this life itself. But ordinary good actions, milder, may not produce their effect in this life itself. So you may appear that you are going scot-free; but you cannot go scot-free like that, because every thought, every attitude, every outlook, every reaction, every envisagement, every judgment is recorded in a document which is not visible to our eyes. The whole universe is a computer system, as it were, which works automatically and records every vibration that takes place in every corner of the universe. In this world of God's creation, perhaps, there is no such thing as privacy. You cannot secretly mumble something into the ear of somebody without it being heard everywhere - it will be heard in Vaikuntha itself, not only here in your little room.

So, this world is made in a different way from the way in which it appears. Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was the great apostle of divine living; though the word 'divine life' existed even before Swami Sivananda's advent in this world, he was the person who gave force and meaning to this great system of internal and external organization called divine living.

Generally we are carried away by the word 'divine', and are inclined to think that to divinely live would be to live like a god, like an angel, like a Mahapurusha or Siddha, and almost move like a god himself. Though that is a very virtuous and praiseworthy ideal - it would be good if we can walk like a god in this world - we know very well how impractical it is from the conditions in which you are at the present moment, because unless we know what God is, we cannot try to move like a god. We have various distracted, perhaps erroneous notions of God, Atman, Moksha, etc., and therefore we will have also a consequent erroneous conception of living a good life.

First and foremost, the meaning of divine living is the meaning of this sentence of Bhagavan Veda Vyasa that occurs in the Mahabharata recited to you already. Whenever you try to think something about other people, please consider for a moment - would it be all right for me if others also think like that about me? When you speak a word or do some deed, consider for a moment whether you would feel happy and satisfied if people speak about you also in the same way and do the same thing to you. "I would not like to be thought like that, I would not like to be spoken of also in this manner, and this thing should not be meted out to me." If this is so, how would you say that you can mete out this treatment to other people?

The world is a kingdom of ends - this is the reason why you cannot mete out to people what cannot be meted out to you. The world is not made up of scattered particulars or isolated individuals with whom you have no connection whatsoever. It is not true. The people around you are not unrelated to you in this system of organic connectedness of God's creation. We are inwardly involved in a great kingdom of fraternity and citizenship which is not visible to our eyes. The very same people which you see here, you will see in Brahma-loka also, but you will see them in a different light altogether. You will not see different people; it is not a different world that you are going to see. The kingdom of heaven is not outside, not far off, not external. It is a new degree of reality; it is a higher level of perception of the very same thing that you are seeing now in a grosser form in this physical world.

So we have to be very cautious when we deal with things - corruption, untruthfulness, incontinence, harming other people, exploitation, hoarding. These are the opposites of the Yamas. And, as I told you, the Yamas of Patanjali sum up the whole of ethical life. The whole of morality is here in these five little dicta of Patanjali - Ahimsa, Satya, Asteya, Brahmacharya, Aparigraha. I cannot think of any other ethical or moral principal which is not included here. What you call Panchasheela, from Buddhist parlance, also is practically one and the same.

Therefore divine life is an unavoidable way of living for every one of us if we want not to perish in this world. There is tension and insecurity and we have suspicion even about our own neighbors, because we are not endeavoring to think in terms of the requisites for living a divine life.