The Spiritual System of Thinking

by Swami Krishnananda

(Spoken on May 12, 1973)

In spiritual progress we seek for newer and newer experiences. Most seekers, while seeking such experiences, miss the point at issue, on account of which the type of experience that devolves upon them as a consequence of their practices misses their attention. What is to be borne in mind by a careful student of spiritual life is that a spiritual experience is not something dropping from the blue, a sudden birthing of an existing experience giving way to an absolutely new type of consciousness, but a newer interpretation and a newer reading of meaning in the existing experiences.

It is often said that truth is not created. Truth is not a future event that is yet to take place, but an eternity revealing itself with a new sense of value. Reality is an Eternal Being rather than a future event or experience, but we human beings are unable to get rid of the old, prejudiced notion that spiritual experience is a future event that is yet to come to us. We think that God-realisation is yet to take place in the futurity of events or experiences.

Now, this interpretation of events in terms of past, present and future through the calculation of the time process creates a new difficulty where really it is not. Spirituality is not a process in time. It is not a history of events that take place empirically. It is something quite different from what we are acquainted with in our ordinary life—quite different in kind, not merely in quantity, extent or magnitude, which is a very important aspect of it to remember. It is quite different in kind, like waking consciousness differs from sleep or even dream consciousness, to give an example. Dream consciousness differs from waking consciousness not merely in the extent of its comprehension or the magnitude of the values it includes within its gamut, but also in kind and in degree. The kind, degree or intensity of the evaluation of the waking experience is different from the dream or the sleeping experience, as we know. We cannot multiply a dream experience into a waking experience by any amount of calculating. A million dreams do not equal one waking experience. Likewise, any amount of arithmetical increase in the values of the world, or in the sense of values we entertain in the world, cannot be equated with a jot of what is usually known as the Eternity of values.

It is difficult to explain what Eternity means because such a thing has not been seen and cannot be comprehended or even imagined by the farthest stretch of the mind. We can only try to know Reality by comparisons, by analogies, by epic imageries and so on, but not by a logical equation or an arithmetical calculation. There is nothing in this world which can be equated with what can be called the Eternal meaning of things, just as there is nothing in the dream world which can be equated with the waking state of consciousness, because it is quite different in kind. That is the difficulty about understanding it.

Now, in spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation, and the like, we grow, or at least hope to grow, in the sense we call spiritual. While it is very difficult to comprehend the meaning of what spirituality is, it is very easy to misrepresent it, miscalculate it, and misjudge one's own experiences in respect of it. Spiritual seekers find themselves in a quandary and in a mess with all their years of practice of yoga because of an inability on their part to judge their experiences from the proper perspective. Spiritual experience, to underline what I already said, does not drop from the skies. It does not come from somewhere else.

I can try to explain what I mean by another analogy from the relationship between waking and dream. The waking consciousness is hidden in what is called the dream world, though it is quite different from dream experience. The dreamer, for instance, is not entirely severed from what we call the waking consciousness. If that had been the case, the dreamer would not have woken up into another consciousness. We may call it the immanency of the principle of waking in the realistic experience of dream. Though there is a possibility of the waking consciousness being immanently present in the dream world, for all practical purposes it is as if it is not there at all as long as the space-time of dream operates, the dream sense of values continues, and the dreamer regards the dream as real.

In such a way, as it were, the Eternal is hidden in the experience of the world. God is in the world in that very manner, perhaps. In what sense does God exist in the world? It is as the waking consciousness exists in the dream world, if we can safely give this analogy as a comparison for the state of affairs in connection with God and the world. God does not exist in the world like a king ruling the earth or a president or prime minister sitting somewhere, in some place. The existence of the Eternal in the relative, the Absolute in the phenomenal, God in the world, is impossible of comparison through ordinary language or through the ordinary methods of calculation and logical thinking.

It is on account of this difficulty that spiritual seekers miss the point of their meditation and fail to interpret their experiences. The spiritual seeker often asks for an experience which is completely different from the one that he is passing through or undergoing, as people want to see a God who is quite different from the world, who has no characteristics of the world, and who is perhaps far away from the world. But, unfortunate though it may appear for the struggling soul, the spiritual experience is already implied in our present state of experiences, and what we call the spiritual experience is only a manifestation of this implication.

Here is another analogy. Before the birth of Albert Einstein, no one knew that there was a theory called the principle of relativity, but this principle was existent even before his birth. The principle of relativity was not created by Einstein. It was only a new meaning that flashed before his mind, a meaning which was already there in the world. It flashed through his mind, and perhaps the minds of a few people of his calibre. Before the birth of the scientist, the scientific principles did operate in the world. They are not an invention, but rather a discovery of a fact that was already there. A new meaning called the principle of relativity, a principle which has operated ever since the time of creation, irrespective of the existence of human beings in the world, flashed through the mind of Einstein. Similarly, the new meaning called the spiritual experience inhabits the whole world at every moment of time. The spiritual experience is never absent, just as the principle of relativity was never absent; it was always there, though it was known only much later in the process of time.

Spiritual experience, therefore, is not a new creation. It is not something that comes to us as a privilege or a prerogative of our own; it is a meaning that is already there which comes to our mind at a particular time due to the receptivity of the particular makeup of our individuality. The mind of Einstein was receptive to understanding the operation of the principle called relativity, while it was not known to other minds on account of their incapacity to be alive to the operation of these facts. The waves of light, the frequencies of energy, are not created powers. They exist always. As long as the universe exists, these forces, energies, principles do exist. Mathematical principles are not created by people, though they are discovered in the history of time. It is not that somebody has created a new principle of mathematics today. It flashed through his mind today, though he never knew it earlier.

Likewise, God is not created in our minds. The Eternal is not born at some point as an event in the historical process of time. It is a principle which eludes the grasp of a feeble mind, and spiritual practice or sadhana is nothing but the enabling of the feeble mind to be receptive to the operation of these Eternal principles we usually call God's laws.

How do we know that we have a spiritual experience through the practice of years of meditation? We have a peculiar way of relating Eternity with the relative, on account of which, we miss the recognition of the experience even when it comes. The Eternal is not beyond the world but is in the world; therefore, the experience of the Eternal or the spiritual does not come from a realm beyond the world, but comes through the world and, perhaps, as the world. Most often, the experience comes to us as the world itself, and not merely through the world, far from being beyond the world. The experiences through which we pass in our daily lives are the experiences of the Eternal. They are not something different from what we are seeking. The stones that hit us, the branch of a tree that falls on our heads, the words that people utter to us, the pleasures and pains through which we pass are the Eternal impinging upon our personality. They become spiritual experiences when their meaning is discovered through our minds. When the meaning is not discovered, they are called empirical experiences. The very same experience is called spiritual, and is also called relative, empirical, mortal, earthly on account of having two points of view upon which our minds operate at different times.

This is something which needs a careful training of the mind to think. Our present way of thinking, to which we are accustomed now, needs a reorientation. The kind of education we have received on account of the family circumstances under which we have been brought up, the myths, fables and traditions which have influenced our personality, tell upon our general attitude to life itself. This so-called tradition into which we have been born and through which we have been brought up has unfortunately created the appearance of a difference, which is not really there, between the Eternal and the relative. This is the reason why we can be very pious inside a holy temple, but very furious on the street. The same person can become different in a few minutes. He is very humble and prostrates himself at the feet of an idol in the temple, seeing God there, but is ready to fly at the throat of his own brother on the street a few minutes later because he does not see the Eternal in the relative. The relative seems completely different from the Eternal.

But the Eternal is not beyond the relative; it is not outside the phenomena, because an eternal which is beyond something is not an eternal. It ceases to be eternal. The Eternal is also the Universal. The Universal is, therefore, non-exclusive of whatever we may call the phenomenal or the relative. No one can have spiritual experience or seek to achieve success in the path of yoga or spirituality by a prejudiced way of thinking or an imagined sense of values which one has deliberately introduced into one's own life for one's own personal and private convenience. Laws are impartial. They have no friends or foes. The law of the Eternal has, therefore, no friend and no enemy. Unless we abide by the law of the Eternal, we are not going to have an inkling of its existence. If we refuse to abide by its laws while having our own ways of thinking, imagining that ours is the only right way of thinking, well, may God bless us.

The laws of God are the laws of the Eternal. That is what we call the law of the Absolute. We have heard it said umpteen times through the scriptures and through pravachanas, and so on, that God is the Absolute, purnam. Pūrṇam adaḥ, pūrṇam idam, pūrṇāt pūrṇam udacyate (B.U. 5.1.1), etc., is not unknown to us. But with all the teaching, listening, studying and thinking about it, we make a distinction between the Creator and the created. That is why we can be devoted to the Creator and hate the creation, which we do in everyday life. We do not deliberately do it, but we are unconsciously compelled to do it on account of the circumstances in which we have been born through this individuality. Hatred is not absent in our minds. But what do we hate? We hate an aspect of the Eternal itself. What we call dislike or hatred is an emotion towards a partial expression of the Eternal which we are unable to understand or appreciate through the present state of affairs of our minds. Love and hate are, therefore, regarded as defects of the human personality merely because of the fact they take aspects of the Eternal and cling to these aspects as if they are complete.

The spiritual experience, or the consciousness of the real, is not the discovery of something which was not already there, but is an awakening of our consciousness to a meaning which we could not discover earlier but which is present in the partial experience which we are now taking as a complete one. Therefore, life spiritual is a very hard job for all persons. It is not anyone and everyone who can achieve success in a trice on this path. We require a very strenuous training in the field of the mind, in the field of the operation of the understanding and the ratiocinating faculty. It is not that we need new knowledge. Perhaps we have enough knowledge, but we need a new technique of thinking because our present store of knowledge, our fund of wisdom of the world today, the library we are carrying in our heads, is based on that old interpretation of the mind into which we have been born and which we are not prepared to give up, even if our skin is to be peeled.

Our God is a God created by our own minds. It is not the God that is. The concept of the Eternal, the notion of moksha or liberation, salvation of the soul, etc., is that which is created by our own minds through the sense of values that we regard as valid and which we are not prepared to abandon for a more comprehensive setup of things.

The three angles of a triangle make two right angles, according to the Euclidean system of geometry. This is something accepted by all people. All mathematicians agree that the three angles of a triangle make two right angles. They cannot make more, or less. But while this is true universally—it was true, it is true and it will be true in the future—it is not the whole truth. The relation of a spiritual experience to an ordinary empirical experience is something like, to give another example, the relation between a non-Euclidean geometrical calculation to the geometrical calculation of Euclid. Non-Euclidean geometry does not follow the principle of Euclid. It refutes its principle, and according to non-Euclidean geometry the three angles of a triangle need not make two right angles. They can be more or less than two right angles for a different reason altogether, on account of a new envisagement of the structure of the universe. The structure of the universe has not changed merely because someone has said something different about it; it was discovered through a new enlightenment by certain people in the process of evolution.

As it is true that under certain circumstances the three angles of a triangle do make two right angles, under certain other circumstances they do not make that sum at all. We could have had a big meal before sleeping, but dreamt that we are hungry. How did we become hungry after having such a big meal? And the moment that we wake up from that dream of hunger, we are once again filled. We can as well have a reverse kind of dream. We may be hungry, starving for days together, but we may be enjoying a sumptuous meal in dream. We can be very happy in dream because of the adjustment of our consciousness in respect of a new sense of values.

The progress that we make in spirituality, therefore, is the progress in enlightenment. It is the progress in the intensity of our enlightenment, the progress in the extent of our understanding of the comprehensiveness of our perception or, we may say, the progress that we make in the magnitude of the degree in which we can recognise the immanency of the Eternal in the empirical, in the relative, in the visible.

To clinch the whole matter, what I mean to say is that the God Whom we seek through our meditations is before our eyes, but we are not able to recognise Him. We are seeing Him, but we do not want to recognise Him. We refuse to recognise His existence in the way in which He comes to us, and want to see Him in another way which we have already been enshrining in our minds as a predisposed condition. We can never give up the prejudice that the world is different from what we are seeking spiritually through yoga. May it be reiterated that what we seek from yoga is not beyond the world or outside the world; it is the world itself. What we seek through the practice of yoga is nothing but this world, the very world in which we are living.

You may be wondering, “Is it this world that we are seeking through yoga?” We are not seeking something else. We are seeking this very thing that we are seeing with our eyes, but we are trying to see a new meaning in it. We are going to discover in this very world a new sense, a new enlightenment, a new understanding, a new relationship, and a new treasure which is before us.

Many apples fell even before the discoverer of the principle of gravity saw the apple falling. Apples had been falling so many times, but nobody thought that they fall on account of the principle of gravity. The moment the principal was discovered by Newton, people began to say that all falling is due to the principle of gravity; otherwise, why do things fall? They could go up. Why come down? Why does the sun rise in the way it does? Why do the planets revolve around a central nucleus in the manner they do? Why do we conduct ourselves in the manner that we do? The discovery of the meaning behind this is the quest of yoga.

It is not a weird, uncanny something that we call yoga. Yoga is the science of life. It is the underlying meaning behind the day-to-day experiences of our ordinary lives. It may be a lunch, it may be a breakfast; all this is included in the Eternal. Within the bosom of the Absolute we find all these, the silly little things that we see in the world. We will see that the broken piece of tin, the dustbin, the broomstick, the ugly, silly, nonsensical items of the world are inside the Absolute. Can you imagine this? They are in the Absolute. The silliest and the ugliest thing of the world is inside the Absolute, but there it assumes a new meaning altogether. It is no more a broomstick. It is not a dust particle. It is not something ugly, but something quite different from what we thought it to be. The things of the world are only a mask that the Absolute puts on, as it were, on account of which we mistake it for something other than what it is.

You must have heard of Buddha's experiences in spiritual meditation. We always imagine that spiritual experiences come to us only when we close our eyes, but that is not necessarily so. They can come to us even while we are walking on the street or shopping. And they do come, but we do not recognise them to be spiritual experiences. The temptations, the glories and the beauties, the pleasures and the sensations that attract us in the world are a part of our spiritual experience. The terrors and the fears, the miseries and the sorrows that we experience in our lives are a part of our encounter with the Eternal. The Eternal is not merely inside the puja room or the meditation room. It is everywhere. Even in the marketplace and the cinema hall, it is the Eternal that is playing, but it comes to us as something other than what we expect. We want to see the Eternal only in the church and the temple, and not in the cinema theatre and the marketplace. It is there, glaring at us and saying “I am here”, but it will not be recognised as the Eternal, which is why we can frown at a man on the street but bow before an image in a temple. This is our spirituality. This is why we do not progress.

Our spirituality has been a bookish trash of meaningless jargon which has only increased our pride and added to the worries of human life rather than enlighten us, because we have not been honest in the scientific spirit or in the true sense of the term. God will not come to us when we do not want Him, and God will come only as God is. He will not come to us as we want Him to come, in the way we want Him to manifest Himself. The laws of God will not change for our sake. They will come in the way they ought to come because the laws are eternal, sanatana. The sanatanatva, or the eternity of laws, is itself an explanation of the inexorability of the law. Anything that is eternal is also inexorable, so the eternal law is impossible of violation. We cannot bend it and make it apply to our private conveniences of our present individual lives.

The life spiritual is a sacrifice. It is not an enjoyment through the body or the personality. What do we sacrifice? In India especially, in Bharatavarsha, we regard yajna, or sacrifice, as a supreme principle of the spiritual. Even the highest of the hymns of the Veda, called the Purusha Sukta, regards the creation of the world as a yajna by God—a symbolic interpretation which means that the world is a sacrifice.

When we make a sacrifice, what do we actually do? We sacrifice the erroneous pleasures of our personality for the joys of the spirit, our hidden inner reality. The life spiritual is thus a sacrifice, not merely of our material wealth or so-called possessions, but a sacrifice of the very setup of the values in which we are living. The greatest sacrifice is a psychological adjustment in terms of Eternity. Na hi jñānena sadṛśaṃ pavitram iha vidyate (B.G. 4.38): The highest of sacrifices is the supreme knowledge by which we attune ourselves to the existing laws of the Eternal. Nothing can be a greater sacrifice than that. This is also called self-surrender. This is the yoga of Patanjali. This is jnana, wisdom.

An abidance of the law of our country ensures our protection by this same law, and a violation of it may come upon us as a penalty, punishment or pain which we never expected. Similarly, abiding by the law of the Eternal will produce a consequence of an unexpected result of satisfaction and protection from unknown sources, while a violation of the law of the Eternal will mean a world of sorrow. God has not created either pleasure or pain, just as the government has not created our pleasures and pains through its laws. The law is meant for the good of people, not to penalise us, but the good comes only when the law is obeyed. When the law is refuted, when it is set at naught, it naturally comes upon us as a nemesis.

The more we progress in our meditations, the more we try to tune ourselves with the laws of the Eternal by being honest about the presence of the Eternal in the world in which we are living. We must be honest. The greatest of virtues is honesty, honesty about the quest of our life. When we seek something and are dishonest about the very seeking, how can we hope to achieve success?

The principle of experience that we are seeking through the practice of yoga has its own laws, and they have to be accepted. Viveka, or understanding of the existence of certain laws and the nature of their operation, is said to be the preliminary qualification of a spiritual seeker. This is viveka, understanding the right meaning of things. Only then does the practice start. After viveka comes vairagya. Vairagya does not mean a change of clothes, a change of places, a change of Gurus, a change of books for study. That is not vairagya. Vairagya is an automatic readjustment of consciousness to the Eternal sense of values, just as when we wake up we are not anymore attached to the dream world because our consciousness has adjusted itself to a new set of values altogether. Thus, vairagya is not a force or an action against one's will, but it is a spontaneity of the expression of consciousness on account of the discovery of a new meaning in life.

The experiences that we are having every day, the encounters that we have from the morning till the evening in this very world on this particular day, are all our confrontation of the Eternal, our fight with God. This is the deva-asura-sangrama of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Esoterically, spiritually interpreted, all epics, all myths and fables, all analogies and comparisons are meant to give us in a homely language the meaning of the scientific principles which operate in life but which we cannot understand.

A small child cannot understand Pythagoras' theorem. How does a buffalo understand geometry? How do the epics help us? I will give a humorous example. The buffalo cannot understand that two sides of a triangle are longer than the third side. We know it as mathematicians, but the buffalo does not know all this. Still, I will show you that the buffalo knows it. Suppose we sit at the apex of a triangular field, holding some grass. The buffalo is at another apex of the triangle and we call it, offering the grass. Will the buffalo make a detour around the third apex or will it come straight? It will come straight, and will not come round to the third angle of the triangle. This is to explain the principle of geometry through myths and comparisons.

Likewise, the principles of the Eternal are explained to us in an impressive manner, in a homely style, through the epics and the Puranas. The whole world is an epic before us. It is an image of the Eternal. The Eternal speaks. The scientific principle itself speaks to us through the forms and the processes of the world. We can hear music from a radio without knowing how it happens. We can simply enjoy the music from the radio without knowing the principle involved or how it happens; we do not know how, and we do not want to know. We are satisfied if the enjoyment comes. Likewise, we want to enjoy the world without knowing what is actually happening behind it. We are happy due to certain experiences in the world because of a scientific law operating, and we are unhappy due to the very same scientific law operating. We do not want to know what that law is. We are satisfied if we are happy.

Spiritual seekers should not be so careless in their calculation of values, because nothing can be so harmful to a spiritual seeker as carelessness. Because we are well placed and happy, we should not think that all is well. Why are we well placed? Why do we seem to be happy? That reason is the scientific principle behind it. The very same principle hurls us down tomorrow into the pit. A particular principle, on account of a particular manner in which it works for a particular reason, has kept us in a position today in a particular way; and for a different reason, which is explicable only in terms of the Eternal, we will be down tomorrow. We are happy today, we smile, and tomorrow we will weep and cry merely because we take nature at face value, without trying to understand the meaning behind it.

The spiritual principle is nothing but the scientific principle existing and operating eternally, for all times, in respect of everyone and everything universally, without distinction. That law is to be discovered by a new adjustment of our way of thinking. The spiritual life is not a peculiar kind of life. It is not the sannyasin's life, the monk's life, the monastic life, or the yoga life; it is not any such thing as people would like to take it to be in their fashion. It is the only kind of life that is worthwhile and worth living because that is the way of life which is in consonance with the existing system of the government of the universe. How impersonal we have to be, how dispassionate our minds have to be, how carefully we have to conduct ourselves in these operations would be very clear from the nature of the situation.

Suffice it to say that spiritual experience is not an ethereal psychological birthing. It is a meaning that is to be discovered in the very experience that we are passing through now, and which we have been passing through for years. When we see an object spiritually it will look something different from what it appeared to be in our unspiritual vision, in the same way as a particular object may appear to be a lump of stone to the gross vision of the eyes, but to a powerful microscope it may appear to be a bundle of hovering forces, energies, and no longer a static object. When the power of vision intensifies, newer and newer realities are discovered in the very same objects at which we have been hitting every day for so many years because we are seeing things through a mask. Things are masquerading before us in a form which is not their essential reality.

The spiritual system of thinking is the highest scientific way of thinking. All other sciences follow from this science. People ask what the relation between spirituality and science is. There is no relation because spirituality is the highest science, and all other sciences are offshoots of this science. Spirituality is the most methodical way of thinking, the most systematic art of conducting one's consciousness in relation to facts as they are, and not in terms of things as they appear to be.

Thus, a spiritual seeker, a sadhaka, in order that he may be successful in his pursuits through meditation should be very cautious in the sense that he must know what he is actually seeking. Most people do not know what they are seeking. They just say, “I am practising yoga.” What yoga is, nobody knows. “I am staying in that ashram. I am doing yoga.” They think it is a great thing, but nothing comes of it because the aim itself is not clear. It is all a hazy, nebulous something. Someone has said something, something has been read in some book, and we take it in a mistaken sense and then imagine that we are doing yoga. It is nothing of the kind. The world is not going to yield so easily, because we are not its pet child or its friend. To the world, all are equal, in the same way as the law of electricity has no friend. It will kill even a king if he touches it. Electricity will not say, “He is an emperor, so I will not kill him.” It will say, “Even if you are an emperor, if you touch me, I will kill you.” So are the laws of God, the laws of the Eternal, which are also the laws of nature, the laws of life. All these things that we see and experience in our daily lives are the operations of these very laws, the meaning of which we have to discover, and this discovery is spirituality; otherwise, we are mortal beings. Mortality, death, suffering, etc., are a consequence of a misjudgement of values, a wrong interpretation of the setup of things, and a yielding to the prejudiced way of perception and understanding.

Spiritual science is the highest of sciences because it is the most comprehensive and the most impersonal. It excludes nothing; it includes everything. It has no nationality; it has no east and west, no south and north, no distinctions of any kind. It is for everyone, for all times, for all ages. Wonderful is that science, and it will be able to take care of us with greater affection than our mother can. Once the laws are understood and we are able to abide by these laws, the laws will protect us. Then we can be carefree. The law will take care of us. It will feed us, nurture us, protect us, and see that we are not in any kind of trouble because the law itself is God. Rita and satya are identical. The Ultimate Truth, which is the Supreme Reality, manifests itself as the inexorable law in the world of manifestation.

Thus, law and Reality are identical. If we want to contact Reality, we have to abide by the law. For that, we have to first understand what the law is. How can we abide by the law when we do not know what the law is? Ignorance of the law is no excuse. We cannot say, “I didn't know it.” If we did not know it, we suffer. If we go the wrong way on the road and tell the policeman, “I have never been here before,” he will say, “It's all right. You pay the fine, and hereafter you will know.” The law will work in the same way: “If you don't know me, well, hereafter you will know. But pay the penalty.” The highest penalty it inflicts upon us is birth and death. Metempsychosis is the consequence of misinterpreting the law of nature, of not understanding it, and of misjudging and miscalculating it.

No one can be a yogi. That is my conclusion. It is all tall talk, because it is so difficult. It is like peeling our skin. We cannot do it. Such sacrifice is necessary. With so many prejudices, such audacity, so much egoism, and so much good feeling about our own self, what kind of yoga can we practise?

But everything will be well. We need not be unhappy if we are honest. The mistakes of ages can be rectified in a second. This is the good point about it. Though I told you how difficult it is and how wretched our condition is, there is also a good point about it, which I will tell you now. Ages of darkness can be dispelled in a moment when the sun rises. The sun will not take hundreds of years to dispel the darkness, though the darkness was there for so many years. In a minute the darkness has gone. We do not know where it has gone. Likewise, ages of error and blunder can be rectified in a minute. This is the good point, apart from all the terrors and sufferings. Therefore, be happy. While we are miserable and pitiable from one point of view, we are also blessed from another point of view because we have got such a glorious opportunity before us. We have only to think correctly, and everything will immediately become heaven. Hell will become heaven, provided our thinking is set right.

When the mind adjusts itself in one manner, it is called dream; when it adjusts itself in another manner, it is called waking. Similarly, when the mind has adjusted itself in an erroneous manner, it is called the world, and when it adjusts itself in a new way altogether, it is called Eternity. It is here itself, just here. It is not far off. The God that we seek, the perfection we are asking for, the Eternity which is the object of our quest is seen by us every day. We are speaking to it every day; we are confronting it, but we are not able to recognise it. That is the mistake.

So be happy that God is with you, the Eternal is with you. It is here and now. It has no space, it has no time, and it is everybody's. It is everybody. Such is the glory of yoga, though that is also the difficulty of it. Wonderful is yoga. Be a yogi. God bless you.