Darshan with Swami Krishnananda during 1997

by Swami Krishnananda

23. Religions Beliefs

(Darshan given on March 7th, 1997)

A visitor: Swamiji, I'm born as a Hindu. I'm a born Hindu. If anybody wants to become a Hindu, how can one do it?

Swamiji: You ask that person, “Why do you want to become a Hindu?” Why does that person want to become a Hindu? He must be belonging to some religion. He may be a Muslim, he may be a Christian, he may be a Buddhist, or anything. You ask him, “Do you feel that your religion is insufficient, due to which you are wanting to become a Hindu?” Who is that person? And you ask that question, “Why is it necessary to become a member of another religion unless one is dissatisfied with one's own religion? If that is the case, what is the cause of this dissatisfaction?” Will a Christian say that Christianity is insufficient? Will Buddhists say Buddhism is insufficient? Why should a person belong to a religion and then feel that it is insufficient? There is some psychological limitation in the way of thinking. If I see that person, I can speak to that person. You tell him there is some kind of mistake in thinking itself. If a person has no religion, then he can take up the methods of Hinduism; it is all right. But where is the necessity to change the religion unless the previous religion is defective? And I think no person will say that one's own religion is defective. Every religion is good if it is properly understood.

Visitor: One more question. I would be interested in knowing, why do we believe in rebirth?

Swamiji: You need not believe. I am not asking you to believe that.

Visitor: We Hindus believe in rebirth.

Swamiji: Hindus do not believe, because any scientific person will accept that. It is a scientific process. It is a process of evolution. Rebirth means the changing of the constitution of a particular thing, the shedding of the old condition and becoming another thing altogether. You have seen people telling you that the evolutionary process started with the transformation of matter into life, life into mind, mind into intellect. The mineral kingdom produced the plant kingdom. The plant kingdom manifested itself as animals. From the animal side some human being has come up. So the previous life has been shed. You have been reborn completely into human life. If you have not shed the animal's nature, and if you have not been transformed into a new characteristic of humanity – a plant continues to be plant only, the animal continues to be animal only, and man continues to be man only – then that is no evolution. The evolutionary process implies the shedding of the earlier condition and the coming in of a new, more prosperous condition, and rebirth is nothing but the shedding of the limitations of a physical individuality and becoming more purified in a new form that you assume. It is neither good nor bad; it is a scientific necessity. It is pure science.

Another visitor: When we say according to karma you have a rebirth, then…

Swamiji: Whatever you do, you will get back either in this birth or the next birth. Nature follows the law of gravitation. Gravitation is equal and opposite, as they say. Whatever be the intensity of what you do, in that intensity you will get back the fruit of it. If you do good action, people will do good to you. If you do bad action, bad things will come to you. This whole nature does that. That is called karma.

Visitor: What I mean is the soul, when it is coming out, the body is shedding here, then why the soul is taking these things into…

Swamiji: It is not the soul; it is the mind. The soul does not take birth, it is the mind. The mind it is that does good or bad.

Visitor: So the mind has done bad and so it will suffer again, so the mind will go to another body.

Swamiji: Yes, it is the mind that is reborn as the body.

Another visitor: Why is there suffering in the world?

Swamiji: Because people do wrong actions. It is the result of wrong actions – either individual wrong action or collective wrong action. There is no mutual respect among people. Each one dislikes the other, and each one is selfish; therefore, the law of nature penalises this selfishness and creates a catastrophe, which is called suffering in the world. It is selfishness of each individual and disregard for the welfare of other people.

Visitor: But children, infants sometimes suffer some terrible disease.

Swamiji: Children suffer for the actions they have done in the previous life. They are not children; they are persons born from a higher heaven. Just now I was telling that gentleman it is a question of birth and death. We are not suddenly coming out from the mother's womb like that. We are coming from a high level, where we are also existing. The cosmos is much bigger than we can think of on this Earth. There is no experience possible unless there is a cause behind it. Though a child may look like a child, it is a reborn form of a person who existed earlier in another form prior to the manifestation of this child. So any experience that is brought from previous life, that materialises itself as the experience in this life. There are no children and elderly people for nature. Nature does not believe in children, in old people, kings and beggars, etc. There are no such things for nature. They are all animate entities integrally connected to the whole cosmos.

So you should stop thinking like an ordinary individual. You must think of the whole nature as it is, and then you will find there is no child, no old man, no beggar, no king – nothing is there. They are all various manifestations of intensity of pressure exerted by actions performed in a previous life, either in this birth or in the previous birth. It is like transferring the individual from one place to another place, and if the population increases beyond the capacity of the Earth to sustain it, it will create a catastrophe, and it will destroy.

Another visitor: Can it be on another planet?

Swamiji: It can be another realm of being. There are many levels of being. And also, this population explosion cannot continue for a long time. If it goes too high, beyond the capacity of the Earth to bear, it will create a catastrophe and then destroy people, and then it maintains the balance.

Another visitor: What are the activities of this ashram?

Swamiji: Oh, many things. We have got a large kitchen in which a large amount of food is cooked, and it is served to some five hundred people every day in this ashram, including poor people, beggars, and whoever comes as visitors, etc. We have got a hospital. We have got a printing press which prints religious, philosophical and scientific literature. And we have got some system of social welfare work like educating students and helping poor people. If they are very poor we finance them, if they are hungry we feed them, if they have got no clothes we clothe them. Sometimes people have no house to stay in; we build a little hut for them. And whatever need is felt by people who are in a very unfortunate condition, we try to help them to remove their ignorance through education, to make them healthy through medical attendance, and giving food when they are having nothing to eat. There are varieties of social welfare activities we are carrying on. But our principal aim is to spiritualise people and to lead them to the path of God-consciousness. Together with that we are doing social welfare work also – both of this world and of the other world.

Another visitor: By what process do you begin to determine that a man is a reincarnation of God?

Swamiji: Man is not a reincarnation of God. Man is a reincarnation of man only. Maybe, once upon a time, at the time of creation, he may be a part of God Himself because you cannot come from anywhere else. As God is everywhere, naturally you must have been included in that God-consciousness. From where else will you come? Originally God alone existed, and therefore everything like us must have been existing in a potential form there only because every effect must be in the cause, and the ultimate cause being God Himself, nothing else can be outside Him, so you have to feel that we must have also been there only; otherwise, from where we come? We have come from the ultimate cause; therefore, everything comes from God ultimately. It is perfectly correct.

Visitor: A lot of people do not like the word 'religion' because it connotes a section, a belief in organised…

Swamiji: That is what I am trying to remove from your mind. Religion does not mean a section. It is a comprehensive thinking in terms of God-consciousness.

Visitor: Right. But we like the term 'spirituality' rather than 'religion', which is divisive.

Swamiji: Religion is the outer manifestation of spirituality. It can take any form, like Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, this ism, that ism, but originally it is a total inclusive concept. Anyone can be religious, but a Hindu cannot become a Sikh, a Sikh cannot become a Buddhist, because they have got limited concepts. So you must trace all these isms to their original source of pure religious awareness, which you call spirituality. Correct. You are right.

Another visitor: But Swamiji, dharma is not religion, it is not a…

Swamiji: Then what is dharma?

Visitor: Dharma is your duties.

Swamiji: What is duty?

Visitor: How you should behave in your life.

Swamiji: You have to behave as God ordains you to do. You should not do any bad thing. You should not use Sanskrit words – dharma and all that. They get confused by that. Use only English words. Why are you using Hindu words?

Visitor: But religion is not the meaning of dharma.

Swamiji: Again you are using that word 'dharma'. I said to avoid that word completely. It creates confusion in the mind.

Another visitor: Do you have any words for someone like me who feels that they have no beliefs at all?

Swamiji: A person who has no belief believes in something else. What is that something else?

Visitor: I believe in the cycle of nature.

Swamiji: Okay. So you are a believer?

Visitor: Yes.

Swamiji: You said you don't believe in anything.

Visitor: But I don't believe that there is a God, I don't believe in…

Swamiji: Let it go. You don't believe in God, but you are believing in something else. What is that something else?

Visitor: Nature.

Swamiji: Where is nature?

Visitor: We are born, we need to procreate, we need to eat, sleep, and then we die.

Swamiji: After you die, what happens to you?

Visitor: We become grass, roses, plants. We become one with the earth.

Swamiji: Do you believe you will become a vegetable and somebody will eat you? If you become a vegetable, someone will eat you?

Visitor: Yes. That's fine. To me that's the cycle of life.

Swamiji: Whoever has created this kind of cycle that somebody should be eaten by somebody else must be a very cruel nature – very cruel, not very compassionate.

Visitor: No, I don't think it's compassionate. I don't think of it as having any…

Swamiji: Otherwise, why should anyone eat another person? It is a very hopeless thing to imagine. Nature does not do that. It is a confusion in thinking. There is no such thing called nature. It doesn't exist. What you are thinking of as nature is these plants, trees, water, mountain, wind, and all that. They are only the outer manifestation of a basic nature which is the cause of it. You are thinking of an effect, which is the nature, but it modifies itself. Nature evolves, and therefore there is something behind the evolving nature which is the cause of it, into which you must go. Then you will know how things are working.

It is better to be happy under any circumstance. Under any circumstance, be happy. One should not be unhappy under any circumstance, and you must find out the way how you can be happy completely, for all time to come, as far as it is possible. If it is nature, okay. Nature is another name for God. Perfectly okay.

Another visitor: You've spoken of meditation. I don't have a good answer for you on the religion question. I think for us religion is basically seeking an ethical life and trying to live it. But…

Swamiji: But there is something more than an ethical life.

Visitor: Well, maybe. Perhaps. My next question sort of touches on that too, and you have spoken of meditation, and most of the meditation has different levels of seeking God and spirituality. What have you to say about meditation on Self-knowledge?

Swamiji: That is the highest kind of meditation. Meditation on the Self is the highest kind of meditation, and I did not mention it because it is too difficult to understand. It is too difficult to understand, so I did not touch that subject, but it is the highest kind of meditation. Everybody tries for Self-knowledge, or Self-realisation, as they call it. There is nothing equal to that. If you know your own deepest Self, you have understood the whole creation because you are a cross-section, a specimen of the structure of the whole creation, so knowing oneself is equal to knowing the whole universe. So Self-realisation, and any method towards that achievement, is the highest meditation that one can think of. You are right.

Visitor: Thank you.

Swamiji: Thank you all.