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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 20th 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.
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