Darshan with Swami Krishnananda during 1997

by Swami Krishnananda

14. Retreating into Yourself

(Darshan given on February 19th, 1997.)

Swamiji: Retreat into yourself. Go back into yourself. Now you are outside you. Now go inside. You are thinking so many things outside. Therefore, you are not in yourself always. You are mostly outside you.

Visitors: Yes.

Swamiji: Is it meaningful to hear that a person can be outside one's own self? Do you make any sense when I say that a person can be outside one's own self? How can one person become something different from oneself? That is what we are doing actually, to the sorrow of everybody. To be something which is not oneself, that is the way of the world. That must be taken care of properly. You have to know yourself first before you know the world or anybody else.

This is virtually meditation: deep concentration of yourself in the ultimate fact of your own being. 'Ultimate fact of your being' is neither American nor European nor English nor anything. You must find out what it is. What is the ultimate fact of your being? Before you were born into a particular country in this world, you must have been existing somewhere; and that somewhere would not have been a country like this, and that has as much value as what you ascribe to your present situation.

There are endless realms of being, and the soul that one is ascends and descends through these infinite number of realms of being. When it ascends it becomes more and more rarefied, more and more expanded in its dimension, and when it descends it becomes more and more gross, and it becomes so material until it becomes this heavy physical body. That it has entered this physical body and virtually become the body itself is the worst thing that could happen to any person. You cannot go further down. When consciousness has become matter – consciousness cannot become matter, they are opposites, but yet when we feel that we are physically sitting here, consciousness has managed to deceive itself into the feeling that it is this material embodiment.

So this physical life of ours is a kind of transcendental deception, you can say. It is not an ordinary deception, but a transcendental misfortune that has befallen everybody. And so practice of yoga and meditation is not to be taken lightly. It is a serious matter. To disentangle yourself as a spiritual entity from the physical embodiment, and find yourself in the rarefied atmosphere of the higher realms of being, is the spiritual ascent spoken of. The whole life must be dedicated for this purpose, and there is no other duty I can think of for any human being: to free yourself from this prison-house of material embodiment and wrong perception. Let the soul speak.

This is my brief message to you.

Visitors: Thank you.