The life of a saint is a miniature world history. In the lives of most of these great leaders of mankind there is a turning point which suddenly makes them put on a power and an outlook which for all outward casual look may appear to prepare a new personality altogether as if the same person has been reborn. This is a new feature, a common interesting, sometimes intriguing feature, in the development of the process of the life of most of the greatest leaders of people. When I say leaders of people, I do not mean necessarily those whom you call saints. All astounding personalities, the vibhutis, those who strike a hallmark in the history of mankind in any field of operation-it may be a remarkable military leader, it may be a scientist who has shaken the world if discoveries and inventions, it may be a literary genius, it may be a religious or spiritual leader.

To appreciate this peculiar occurrence in supernormal personalities, we have to carefully study their own lives. It was the case with St. Augustine, who wrote his confessions in which we have a record of the transformation that took place in him in such a way that he was just the opposite of what he was earlier. For 18 years, we say Christ was not visible. He went away somewhere and his mission started after that apparent invisibility of his person. A period, as it were, of a preparation of a new personality of what you are going to consider as the great Christ. So was even our well-known scientist and physicist Alfred Einstein, a poor little nobody he was, as it were. He was rejected from every office as a poor mathematician and a not even mediocre scientist. So was the calibre of a mathematician like Srinavasa Ramanujan who was not detectable to the naked eye. No one appreciated Shakespeare when he was alive. His plays were never read; he was an attendant in a theatre, not a master that he is today, and many great personalities of this kind were born into families who are not normally recognised in human society. They may be born in the house of carpenters, shoe makers or farmers. We rarely hear of a master of this kind being born in the house of a business magnet, an industrialist or a millionaire. It has not happened for reasons which anyone can imagine.

In a similar manner we read of a sudden landmark in the great mission for which master Swami Sivananda was born. The little that we know of his earlier days, he is just the knowledge we have of a seedling or sapling which, when it is seen with the eyes, cannot be easily recognised as to what sapling it is. Is it going to grow into a banyan or a mango tree or some such thing because it is just budding forth. When any event is to take place, it is prepared in its seed form as a nebular condition of a future action, a precedent condition in which it is not properly formed into the pattern in which it has to work later on. This preparatory precedent condition, antecedent of the form in which it has to work, is the condition through which every event has to pass, even if it be an illness, a sickness of the body or a political revolution. A sudden windfall of fortune and bursting into the new outlook, and a discovery or an invention in the field of religion of science-all great things are outcomes of sudden intuitions. They are rarely preparations by experiment, observation and logical induction or deduction. It is a sudden burst and we cannot compare it to any occurrence in the normal ways of the world. An awakening from a sleep, a slumber of potentiality, though we may, for argument's sake, accept that the seed contains the whole tree in a latent form. That may be, but for all practical purposes, the great even which the life of a leader is, cannot be adequately picturised in the earlier days of unrecognised and unknown preparation. So is the case with a leader like Mahatma Gandhi. There were days when he was not known. I am just mentioning the names of a few well-known ones who appear to have a common procedure adopted for a common purpose to be achieved through totally differing channels of the modus operandi.

A genius in medical science and a genius in literature are not actually doing two different things, though it may appear that literary activity has very little to do with medical research or vice-versa. The world works for a single purpose. It may employ different personalities and instruments in different ways for the fulfilment of its intention. It does not mean that they are freaks suddenly erupting into the daylight of human recognition coming from nowhere and doing what one cannot understand. As I tried to mention earlier, there is a single operation going on in the whole world and this has to be borne in mind by every one of us in order to understand life in its proper perspective though it may be very difficult for people to entertain such an outlook of carefulness and vigilant observation of the very process of thinking. Many things are happening in the world. This is what we read in papers but only one thing is happening in the world really speaking: an inner adjustment of its components.

The personality of the world, the world spirit, the Time Spirit accommodates itself to the conditions necessary for the fulfilment of its purpose. So the latter part of the 20^th Century saw the sudden rising of luminaries in the firmament of science, political leadership, medicine, religion, philosophy and literature. You have to cast a glance over the world history procedure for the last 50 years or 60 years or even back for a hundred years. You will see what intense activity took place through the countries of the world in all the nations and developments galore-highlighted human history in many a feature. The origin of rivers and the origin of Rishis cannot be easily seen. Where the river starts you do not know, and where the Rishi or the sage or the saint started also we cannot know. Rishi mulam and nadi mulam cannot be known and it is not supposed to be known also. The great line of reformers of a totally different nature started practically with the birth of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa Deva in this century and there was a continuous flow of the stream of this kind of work with a many-sided touch given to it, and we will be able to understand the meaning of this kind of all round activity in which the world engages itself only if we can become students, careful students, of the cultural history of the world in the latter part of the century.

The mission of all saints may look like a single performance of awakening the spirits of people to a consciousness of a higher life, and that may be true, but different chimes and times require a variegated touch as given to this single performance, and so a person born in Mecca or one in Palestine or one in India may not necessarily adopt the same formation of procedure, though the procedure adopted may contain within its purposive activity the same force, because the mode of the application of this force of the rectification of any kind of irreconcilability within the earth as a whole should be so aligned that it fits into the particular preponderating physical conditions, political conditions, social conditions, and may even have something to do with the ethnic characteristics of people, for instance he has to speak in that particular language of the region in which he incarnates himself. Even language is a very important aspect to be considered in the activity of people, a language which they use as an instrument of their performance. The saints and the sages are also seen to be working in a very mysterious manner. For instance, we have cases where great masters led a single disciple forward, who became the torch-bearer of the Guru or the master. A single personality was prepared by this force that incarnated itself as a sage or a leader, for there are others who came for a general shake-up of the very structure of the world.

This kind of work is not concerned with personalities. An awakening of the entire slumbering humanity and not necessarily a work connected with groups of people or much less individuals may be said to characterise the saint and the sage we are considering now, Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. If you are shaken-up and made to see with your own eyes, what things are there in front of you, if you have been helped to wake up from sleep and enabled to see with your own eyes, you will know what is good for you. When you see what is in front of you with your own eyes it does not require much of an effort on your part to do what is proper, and so he came to rouse people from a kind of sleep. People were asleep, asleep to the Spirit that is within and totally unconscious of their own souls but intensely conscious of what is not soul. There can be a sleep of a different kind altogether.

Sleep is not necessarily a state of unawareness of things. It can be that but it can be a worse thing than a total unawareness. An awareness of what is really there is one thing, an unawareness of what is really there is another thing, but what you call that condition of an awareness of what is not there-that is the state into which mankind descends when it gets involved in the objects of the world. We may underline here that the world has no objects in itself. There are no objects in the world. There is the world but there are no objects. You have to bring to your memory a little bit of what I said yesterday and the day before. There are no things in this world. There is no such thing as something being in the world. There is the world and there is no in and out for the world. Hence to be conscious of an object would be to characterise the knower of that object as an individualised location which has managed to consider itself as the centre and the world as its satellite.

There was a time when people thought the earth was the centre of the whole of creation and the entire solar system was moving round. This is what they call the TeleVue astronomy which is now superseded by a latter discovery. "I am the centre." Every observer, every seer, every perceiver, every knower considers himself as the centre round which the whole world operates as a conglomeration of objects. The seeing has a status inferior to the status occupied by the seer. This is partly a concern of psychology whereby we can know how we place ourselves in a comfortable position, when we are observers and not the observed things. It is to be in a state of great discomfort to be observed. It is a great comfort to observe. We can appreciate this point of view. No one, none would like to be observed, seen, noticed or handled or made a thing of study. That would be to get converted into the status of an object, a thing, a satellite, something that is an associate without a status of its own.

An observer, a seer, one who conducts an operation and investigates, is always in a superior position compared to the position of that which is investigated. Now, are we observers of the world, are we seeing it or is the world seeing us? We can never imagine that the world sees us. It looks as if we are seeing the world, but there is another aspect to it. When we speak of the world as an object of our perception, we include all people except our own selves. All people around are the world, they are part of the world. The observer itself is not the world because to convert or place oneself in the position of an object would be to get deprived of the status of the observer. And people began to get involved gradually in this dependence on what they considered as the objects of the world to which I made reference yesterday as the outlook of materialism. A natural outlook which disbelieves it being possible at all to live in the world without being dependent on things outside.