The attainment of spiritual perfection is like a gradual ascent in the form of a pyramid. It has a base and it rises gradually, step by step, until the apex at the top is reached. This pyramidical structure of human life is constituted of four aspects of life, the fourfold requirements for the very existence of a person.

The material needs of the body are a very important concern indeed. Whatever be your spiritual aspiration, you cannot ignore that you have a body. As long as you feel that you have a body and cannot ignore its presence or forget that it is there, then you cannot also forget its requirements. Everyone, even an advanced spiritual seeker, has certain needs concerning the physical body, like protection against heat and cold, hunger and thirst, sun and rain, etc. If you ignore these essentials, the body may perish, even though you may have an innocent spiritual aspiration. There is what is known as a total of material requirement, material need. Its importance is well known, and is known as artha, the material unavoidable.

Then, there is another thing: the aesthetic longings of the human personality. One cannot be happy merely by eating, drinking, putting on clothes, and having a house in which to stay. Even such a person will not be a complete person; there are other requirements which are of a vital nature - the desire-filled nature of the individual. A desire is not merely the desire for food and clothing, though it is primary in some way. There are other insistent desires called kama, or vital wishes to be fulfilled, which are other pressures exerted by the biological personality, which, too, cannot be ignored, as they are part of oneself. Those who have lived a totally isolated life, unconnected with human society for a long period, will know the working of this kind of feeling in oneself. A disturbance of an unknown kind will take place inside the mind of the person, causing agitation of heart. Due to that difficulty in controlling this reason behind the agitation of such emotional feelings, a Yoga student also may be subject to intense anger, continuous irritation, intolerance of anything, and a bursting forth of one's own personality in an anguished manner. This is the negative aspect of the unfulfilled emotional desires. They cannot all be fulfilled, and they also cannot be totally ignored.

The nature of this kind of urge or impulse is something that cannot be imagined by an ordinary mind; just as one cannot know oneself fully, one cannot also know all the desires of one's own person. Here it is that you are in danger and you require the guidance of a master, a superior person. Whenever you are agitated, disturbed and cannot control yourself, almost feeling that you are going out of your track in your mental operations, at that time you have to approach a guide and place before that guide everything that you are passing through inwardly.

Then, together with all these, there is also the aspiration for moksha, attainment of God, which is a fulfilment, finally, of the whole complex of desires, physical as well as vital. That also is to be taken care of with great caution, as the one conditioning everything else. The method by which you can hook together these three types of impulse and the final aspiration harmoniously,that procedure of the cementing of all these sides of human nature is called dharma, or the law of harmonisation of the aspects of the whole of life, with all its relations in human society.

Dharma is sometimes translated as religion: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and others. Dharma is not denominational religion, necessarily. It is rather a law operating in the universe, by which everything is kept in a state of cohesion so that there is no dismemberment of the life of anyone or anything. You could be thrown into shreds of mental individuality, as if the mind has been broken and cast into the winds in different directions, with a feeling that you have lost yourself entirely, if dharma does not operate in you. Please forget the old definition of dharma as some religion. It is not any kind of ism. It is an ultimate law that keeps the universe in balance, keeps the body, the mind, your reasoning, society and everything in a state of perfect integration so that you feel that you are existing as a total individual and do not feel that you are a mix-up of several parts heaped together in a confused manner.

This definition of dharma is hard for an ordinary person to comprehend because we are always, right from the beginning, initiated into a wrong notion of dharma as going to a temple, worshipping a god, following a faith. I follow Christian dharma, Hindu dharma, Muslim dharma, is a common saying. This is a poor definition of dharma, which is something more than what one can easily think. It is the law prevailing eternally in the universe everywhere, in every aspect of creation, in every degree of manifestation, including your own individual existence.

All these four facets of life have to be brought together into a focus of attention at the same time. These are known as the purusharthas, or aims of existence, the final objectives of life known popularly as dharma, artha, kama and moksha, i.e., moral value, economic value, vital value and eternal value. None of these aspects can be ignored in our life. Mostly people emphasise moksha and ignore the other things and fall sick, and even become mentally a little aberrant. And, in the same way, you can emphasise wrongly one thing and forget the three other aspects by which you may turn into a shred rather than a total individual. All this is the foundation that you have to lay for your aspiration towards spiritual perfection, so that right from the beginning it is a rise from a wholeness of approach through gradations of wholeness of perception, until you reach the ultimate wholeness which is the Infinite.

One of the questions raised, perhaps, is the nature of the Infinite. If the Infinite is based on the Infinite only, where is the question of karma? Karma has no connection with the Infinite. It has a connection with the finite only. That which is located only in one place is called the finite. That which is everywhere is called the Infinite. Inasmuch as the Infinite is everywhere, it cannot perform any kind of individualised action; so karma cannot be attributed to the Infinite. Karma is a result of the reaction produced by individualised actions. The Infinite has no karma; therefore, our aspiration for the Infinite frees us from the bondage of action, also.

Purnamadah purnamidam purnat purnamudachyate, purnasya purnamadaya purnameva avasishyate: There was the whole in the beginning. From the whole, the whole universe manifested itself. Therefore, this universe in which we are living is not a conglomeration of little pieces of material objects or individual existences. Even now, it is a whole. The world works in a systematised, complete manner. From the whole which is the Infinite, the whole universe has come out in a whole manner - as a child is born as a whole entity, from its source which is also a whole. A little pin-pointed drop, as it were, which is the origin of the child, is not one drop among many other drops; it is a whole by itself, containing the wholeness of the child, as the little seed contains the wholeness of a large tree.

Thus, everything is "whole." You are whole, and you are living a whole life, and you detest any kind of partition in your way of living. You like everything in a completed form. That is the internal meaning of this great Upanishadic mantra: That is full, and this universe also is full; from the whole, the whole comes as this creation. How can it be possible? There cannot be two wholes, or two hundred-percents. There can be only one hundred-percent, not two. So, how can a hundred-percent origin produce another hundred-percent of this universe? This is a mystery, which should suggest that no activity has taken place in the process of creation. It is not that one day the Infinite thought, "Let me become something else," though such is the story we often read in scriptural narrations.

It is something like your whole mind becoming manifest as a whole dream. The dream is a whole thing; your whole being is transformed into a world of dream experience, and this whole experience of the dream world has emanated from the whole which was your waking mind. Then, does it mean that the whole waking mind has transformed itself into a whole that is the dream experience? If a transformation has taken place, then the original would cease to be in the process of transformation, just as when the whole milk becomes whole curd, the whole milk ceases to exist any more. If such a thing has taken place in the process of creation - the whole Infinite Absolute has become the whole universe, like the modification taking place in milk when it becomes yoghurt or curd - then, inasmuch as the milk ceases to be, God also would cease to be after creation. There would be no Infinite for you to attain afterwards. There would be only this curd of the universe. But that is not true. You have not really become the world of dream because if you had really transformed yourself into it, you would not wake up into the original consciousness of the total waking mind.

This whole coming from the whole is a kind of appearance, like the whole face seen in a mirror as a whole reflection. You are a whole person, and you can see yourself in a mirror as a whole person. There are two whole persons - one that is there seeing the reflection in the mirror; another is the whole person reflected in the mirror. Are they, then, two whole persons? Can you say that one whole person has become another whole person here? For all perceptional practical purposes, the whole has become another whole through the mirror of reflection; but really, only the one existed. The purna (full) only is there when it has become another purna (full). Nothing has happened, really, in the same way as when you are reflected as a whole person in a mirror, nothing has happened to you in fact. You are the same person, always.

  Thus, having taken the whole from the whole, the whole remains. Nothing has taken place, which would mean that there is no such thing as creation as described in mythological fashions, in a dramatic way, as is presented before us by stories of creation in the cosmological narrations. Such being the case, our life also should be moulded according to this vision of wholeness. As wholeness has not ceased to be, we have never become individual beings at any time. We never got distracted into personalities that we are appearing to be here. We are the same wholes and, therefore, all fulfilment is here at the same time. It is not connected with a past, present, or future.

This is the vision that you have to develop before yourself, so that even when you take the first step in spiritual practice, you feel that you are a totally contented person, having achieved everything, right from the beginning itself, because a series of wholes or perfections rise from the lower to the higher degrees. In sadhana, the rise from the lower to the higher level is not a fraction developing itself into a whole. A fraction can never become a whole; the part always remains a part, and the whole always remains separate from the part. But here, a mini-whole manifests itself into a larger whole.

Your ascent in spiritual sadhana is your whole personality rising into gradual expanded forms of wholeness of your own personality, so that when you reach the ultimate pinnacle of this wholeness, you realise yourself as a world figure, like the Viratsvarupa Itself. What is Virat? It is you, yourself, expanded to the ultimate pinnacle of the absolute universal.