Darshan with Swami Krishnananda – 1997

by Swami Krishnananda

7. Satisfaction of the Soul

(Darshan given on January 28th, 1997)

Swamiji [To a group of visitors]: Your intellectual curiosity may be satisfied, but the soul may be saying no, not okay. Do you believe you have a soul? Do you all have a soul? No?

Visitors: Yes.

Swamiji: Okay, but you ignore that. Nobody thinks of that. Little poor thing inside, it is neglected. And it is crying always. We are busy with eating and picnicking and travelling and sightseeing, and all sorts of things we do, but the soul cannot be satisfied by any kind of doing. The soul is a being. You must make a distinction between these two things. That which is being cannot be satisfied by any kind of doing. Even if you go to heaven, the soul will not be satisfied because, after all, that is also a process of becoming, transformation, change.

A very serious matter this is in spiritual life, and so serious that it is completely ignored by the pressure towards outer performance. We are very fond of outer performance, especially in the West. The West is fond of doing something. Always you must do something, manufacture something, improve your physical conditions, have more comforts physically. But it is up to you all to think over it: How can the Being be satisfied?

Being can be satisfied by Being only. It cannot be satisfied by any other thing. Your activities have no meaning for the soul. Soul does not do anything; it just is. And if your is-ness can widen its dimension and the soul becomes larger than what it appears to be as if located within the prison of your body, it exceeds the limit of your body. It is difficult to understand what it means. How can the soul exceed the limit of the body? You will be wondering: “How is it possible? It is inside my body, and how this swami is talking about exceeding the limit of the body?”

It has to exceed the limit of the body. It is now wool-gathering. It is dreaming. It is suffocated. It is stifled by the smoke of external activity. You can never be satisfied even if the whole earth is given to you as a charity. You will want the skies. You will ask, “All right, I have got the whole earth, but what about the skies? I want the sky also.” And if you get the skies, you will find out what is there beyond the skies. You will never be satisfied because the asking of the soul is endless. The dimension of the soul is not within the ambit of the physical body.

Suppose there is a little glass tumbler, and space is inside it. But is the space inside the tumbler really? What do you say? Space is everywhere. Suppose the space inside this glass tumbler is conscious that it is inside the glass. It is the soul of a human being, but it is as foolish as anything can be if it thinks that it is inside the glass. The space is not inside the tumbler; it is everywhere, but if by some hypnotic effect of identification with these little walls of the tumbler it begins to feel that it is inside, that is the soul of a human being. This is what has happened to us.

But you are not the soul of a human being. You are the soul of the cosmos, so it is dimensionless. Absolute Being is your nature. You are not Europeans and Americans, and all that. You are not even men and women. This is also a mistake. You are not even human beings. You are only certain pressure points in the cosmic force. It is doing its majestic work, and you think, “I am doing something.”

I am leading you to enlightenment by these words. What I told you is a very serious matter. If you ignore it, you will repent afterwards. Very serious matter. I have briefly told you a few sentences, but they can contain the whole world inside. You find out your status. What is your status at this moment? It is a kind of foolishness. You have ignored the whole thing. We have forgotten our own selves, and thinking something else outside, like this. There is no outside. It is Universal Being. It has no externality. The idea that you are the perceiver of the world, and the world is outside you, is the cause of trouble. The world is not outside you. It is organically connected with you and, vice versa, you are organically connected with the world.

So there is only the one Universal Being, and there is no man, no woman, no this person, no that person. If this can be contained in your thought, this thought is real meditation. This is the highest spiritual meditation, into which I am introducing your mind gradually, and if you can keep this in your consciousness for a long time, you will be the most blessed person in the world. The whole universe will serve you. Now you are serving the world; the other way around, it will serve you.

Right from Haridwar to Badrinath, the entire area, is called the land of the gods. In Sanskrit we call it Deva Bhumi. Deva Bhumi means 'the land of the gods'. We cannot know who is staying here, who was staying here, and all that. Great Masters are supposed to be living in this area. And many of them are invisible; you can't see them. They are in the higher frequency of existence, and the lower frequency cannot contact. But they can know that you are here, though you may not see them, just as God knows that you are here but you cannot know that God is seeing you.

There was a blind man – this is a humorous joke – who wanted to have darshan of holy Badrinath. The blind man was asked, “What are you going to see there? You have no eyes to see.”

“But He can see me at least,” he said. “So I am going there so that He may see me. That is sufficient for me.”

So don't bother if you are able to see Him or not, but be sure whether He is seeing you or not. If you are sure that He is seeing you, then you are blessed. But how will He see you unless you are His friend, and you are made up of the same stuff as His Being? Only God can see God. He will not see anything else. And to the extent you have risen to the level of godliness, to that extent He will see you. And if you have really become as vast as God Himself, you will just merge into it. This is called moksha, salvation, and nothing more can be said about it. All the words will be hushed, and you will not open your mouth afterwards in the bliss of Universal experience.

Thank you very much. God bless you. Hari Om!