Glorious Immortal Atman, on this very auspicious holy Sri Guru Purnima, I invoke upon you all the grace of the Almighty and the blessings of Gurudev Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj.
The divine blessings are always upon you, and the grace of God is intermittently flowing in and out, inundating you throughout your lives. It is up to you to awaken yourself to this fact and to see, through the bright, sunlit day of knowledge, the grace of God that is perpetually flooding all His creation.
It is in this state of awakening that you will also be simultaneously aware of what is before you and of how you have to conduct yourself in relation to this that is before you. When you are thus awakened, through the grace of God, to the fact of things as they are, you will realise, in this awakened mood of your mind, that you are face-to-face with the benign hands of God that move perpetually through all this variety of creation, which is nothing but His manifestation. It is only when you are awakened thus that you will be able to visualise what it is that you are confronting in your day-to-day life.
You are face-to-face with the Omni-faced Being of God Himself in the form of this vast manifestation. Your duty and your obligation towards this multi-formed Being that is before you is not a matter to be learned through your intellect or your understanding, but to be felt deeply from the bottom of your own heart. This Divine Being that you are confronting outside in the form of the world is also that which impels you to see it from within, so that you become only a kind of medium for the contact of the One Being that is behind from without and the very same Being that beholds Itself from within.
Furthermore, you cease even to be an instrument of this relationship between the within and the without. You get flooded with the force of this union, and you become part and parcel of this union itself. You become Self-conscious in a universal manner. This is the full moon of spirituality, the real Guru Purnima, if you would like to call it, where there is a complete blossoming of your mind into the fullness of perfection, which is identical with Being Itself.
Now, this awakening does not take place immediately, just as you do not get up from your sleep at once. There are small, intricate, and unintelligible passages through which you have to pass before you get awakened to the brightness of the noon, or the midday sun, of complete Realisation. You are in deep sleep, and before you actually wake up to this consciousness of the noonday sun, you pass through various intermediate processes of various kinds of dreams and hallucinations, imperfect perceptions, and misconceived notions of relationship within yourself and with others. These are the stages of what we call evolution. Now we are fast asleep, as it were, to the truth of things. We are gradually trying to wake up to the awareness of the real waking life, transcendent to the empirical waking life in which we are now.
While it is true that our duty is to be truly awakened in this manner, it is also our duty not to be too overenthusiastic about it, not knowing our own foibles and fortes. It is always wise to be fully equipped for the present state of affairs because all effort that is of a successful character is an outcome of a complete mastery over the present conditions. We are always living in the present state, and not in the past or in the future. Our difficulty is that we mix up the past and the future with the present so that we completely forget our present situations and imagine a glory of the past or an expected magnificence in the future. The glory of the past is not going to help us, nor is the expected magnificence going to be of any aid to us. What we are just now is what is of importance.
We always take pride in our ancient glory of the past culture of India, for instance. It is no use just imagining: “I was once upon a time related to a great Master,” “I am in the line of a great sage,” or “I am a descendant of an emperor.” What is the good of this imagination? There is also no use imagining: “After so many years, I will achieve some success.” All these are mere daydreams and what is called building castles in the air. But our mind is made in such a way that it is capable of building only castles, and nothing else. It imagines, concocts, and then contrives mechanisms which are of no utility at the present moment.
It is difficult to extricate the present from the past and the future. Again I reiterate, we always live in the present. There is no such thing as the past and the future for us because the past is dead and the future has not come. So how can we be happy by thinking of what is dead and what has not yet come? The present is like a hair’s breadth of a moment. Every moment time passes; what is past is dead, and what has not come is the future, so it is difficult to find out what the present is. It is a second, a flash of a second, as it were, and that flash of a second is the passage to Eternity. What we call the Eternal and the Infinite is this hair’s breadth of timeless consciousness through which we pass every moment of time, but which always gets mixed up with the past and the future so that we are supposed to be in time rather than in the timeless existence.
Our present state is, therefore, of importance. It is of momentous consequence, and the strength that we have at the present moment should be utilised to the fullest extent possible for the purpose at hand, the task for which we have girded up our loins. This purpose is not the achievement of anything objective, but a kind of disentanglement of our own internal subjectivity. We have always been taught to learn the art of achieving something external through the passage of history. There is no use trying to get anything or obtain anything in this world because what we actually want is not an external something but a proper relationship with that which is already there. We are not going to get anything new because nothing new can be created. All things that anyone requires are already existent, so they need not be manufactured or invented newly, but they require to be understood in the proper context. All awakening is nothing but an understanding and a readjustment of personality with the whole environment of objects.
We neither seek wealth, nor seek name and fame, nor food and clothing. These are not our objectives. They are only apparent needs that we feel on account of a basic difficulty in our psychological structure. The hunger that we feel, the thirst that we have, the glory that we seek in this world, the long life that we want, and many other umpteen things that we seem to require in this world are only an indication that we are sick at the core of our heart, and a sick person needs nothing but medicine. There is no use piling gold and silver on the head of a person who is ill. The only thing that one requires at that moment is health, and health is not anything objective or external. It is not something that is acquired from outside. It is a reshuffling of the constituents of our own biological personality. This is what is called health.
Likewise, there is a need for a readjustment of the constituents of our psychological personality, which is mental health. You may say, “I am mentally healthy. What is wrong with me?” You are not mentally healthy in the true sense of the term because if you were mentally healthy, you would not need anything. You would not ask for anything. You would not feel restlessness and unhappiness. Just as there is physical hunger, there is mental hunger, and your asking for things and your notion of having needs of various types are all indications of the mental appetite, comparable to the physical appetite which you try to appease by taking meals, etc., every day. Even hunger is not a normal condition. It is an abnormal condition arisen in the physical personality on account of a maladjustment of the personality with the outward nature. You should not think that you are eating breakfast every day as normal men. It has become normal because everybody needs the same thing, and it becomes a common pattern. Just because everybody feels the same thing, it does not mean it is normal.
Why are you hungry? Why are you thirsty? Why do you feel sleepy? You do not know what the reason is. The reason is a maladjustment of the entire inner constitution with outward nature. It is the cutting off of the physical body from the five elements outside that has caused hunger and thirst, and sleep, etc., inwardly. Likewise, there is a cutting off of the mental realm of our individual personality from the cosmic mind, due to which we are miserable and unhappy to the core, and whatever we get cannot satisfy us. Even if we become the king of the world, we cannot be happy because what we require is a union with the cosmic mind, the cosmic nature, which is a thing that we cannot understand.
We are still children in the art of true learning. Our education is a useless husk that has grown like a mushroom around us, and we have been taught, wrongly, by our elders and teachers to be under the impression that we have learned something worthwhile in this world. What is the use of what we have learned if it is not going to save us in times of danger? We can go with an earthquake. How can our learning help us? If there is a catastrophic blow-up of the planets in the skies, what is the use of our learning, and what is the use of our social status in this world? Our own natural world is perishing; all the social name and fame that we earn, and the status and the position that we occupy, can be blown up in one second. Nobody will care for us. Nature does not have any pity for us if we have no concern for her.
We are concerned too much with our artificial relationship with human society. We are under the wrong notion that creation consists only of human beings. It is a very wrong notion. How can we think that the world consists only of human beings? Are there not many other things? Perhaps the more important things in this creation are non-human. This is something we cannot understand. The human aspect is the least aspect to be considered. As a matter of fact, no human being can help us in times of danger.
It is the human being that troubles you always. If you are in a restless condition, and if there is agony and anguish and insecurity today, it is due to the presence of mankind only. Are you afraid of tigers? Are you afraid of snakes? Nothing of the kind. You are afraid of human beings. There is international tension. It is not due to tigers and lions. It is not due to the fear that you have from planets. It is also not due to the fear of God. It is the fear that you have of your own brothers. You have got a contradiction in your being. You work for humanity, and yet you have fear of humanity. Is it not a contradiction? Ask any person: “Why are you working for the good of people? It is these people whom you are afraid of. It is these people that are going to trouble you one day or the other.” What can be a greater psychological contradiction than the fact that you seem to be working for the very same people who are your deadly enemies? Your friends can put you out of gear immediately, and they can become the opposite of friends. The so-called social relationship and friendship among humanity is due to a kind of adjustment that you are making every day, and if there is a lack of adjustment from your side, there is no such relationship at all. It breaks. Why do families break? Why do nations have internal insecurity? Why is there international war? All this is because of maladjustment. So it means in order to be happy in this social atmosphere, you have to put up an artificial adjustment every moment of time.
But this is not the truth. The truth is not merely an artificial adjustment, but a natural, spontaneous state of affairs. This spontaneity is what you seek. It is not food, it is not lunch, it is not breakfast, it is not sleep, it is not name, it is not wealth, it is not friendship. It is nothing of this kind that you want. All your fears are born of a segregation of your total personality from the totality of the universe.
Ultimately, what you seek is the knowledge of the art of becoming healthy in a universal sense. A sick person wants nothing but health. He doesn’t want breakfast, he doesn’t want lunch, he doesn’t want position, he doesn’t want anything. A person who is suffering from typhoid, or the high temperature and shivering due to malaria, cannot even open his eyes. You tell him, “I will give you money.” He says, “I want health.” So health is nothing but a coming to a normal condition of the constitution of one’s personality, and that becomes the source of such happiness to a person. You can imagine how happy you become merely because your temperature has come to normal. It was 105°F. What is the use of your position, what is the use of your wealth if your temperature is 105°F? You are on the borderland of this world and the next world. The moment your temperature becomes normal, you are very happy. Who has made you happy? It is your own self. You have become happy merely because of the fact that the components of your personality have become normal and properly adjusted. This is only an example to show you that your happiness does not depend upon anything that you can be provided with from outward nature. It depends entirely upon the harmony of the components of your being—physical, psychological, etc.
Likewise, there should be a spiritual harmony of the components of the whole creation, and then it is that you can be really happy. Happiness is God-realisation, as you have been told again and again. It is only a theory for you; you do not know what it means. It is a cosmic awakening to the harmony of your personality with the total Reality of the cosmos. Just as the humours in the body—bile, phlegm, wind, etc.—get out of order and then you are either bilious or phlegmatic, etc., and you become sick, likewise, you are sick in a spiritual sense. You have cut yourself off spiritually, from the bottom of your soul, from the Ultimate Soul. The moment it goes back to its source and the river enters the ocean, you wake up into the true reality of things and your illness goes, and you become happy in the same way as a sick person becomes happy when health comes.
This is a message which you will find, in its quintessence, in all the writings of Gurudev Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, in all the scriptures of the world, in all the religions of mankind, and this is the message that you have from the prophets of all religions, cults, creeds, and philosophies. This is the message of Guru Purnima for you. May it all be digested properly into your true nature. Absorb these ideas into yourself, and then contemplate these ideas so that you can be happy wherever you are. You can be happy whatever be the condition in which you are, so that you will not require a change of circumstance or condition, or place or time, to become happy.
I have given you the key to success in the achievement of happiness, which does not depend upon external conditions. It depends merely on your will to do what ought to be done by you, and what is expected of you. This is the message today. God bless you all. Om pūrṇamadaḥ, pūrṇamidam, pūrṇāt pūrṇam udacyate, pūrṇasya pūrṇam ādāya pūrṇam evāvaśiṣyate. Om śāntih, śāntih, śāntih.