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The Nature of the True Religious Life
by Swami Krishnananda


Chapter 12: The Simplicity Born of Utter Goodness

It would be good to bring your mind back once again to all I told you, in order that the significance of this instruction gets related to your practical day-to-day life. There is no use of listening to instructions and going through studies if the instruction or the study has not entered your blood and flows through your veins, and has become part and parcel of your physical and psychic personality.

It is our attempt to live life properly, not to study much. All study, whatever be its extent, is a gathering of knowledge, which has to be set into action in the environment of our life. In a large sense, this is the meaning of meditation. In a specific sense, it means the art of living. The way in which we have to successfully live in this world is itself meditation, though this name need not be associated with a perfect life.

The life that we are required to live in this world can be impersonally designated as a life of perfection, not a life of religion and spirituality or godliness, names which need not be associated with the task on hand, inasmuch as they are oftentimes associated with preconceived notions. Our minds are made in such a way that prejudices die hard. Whatever be our research in the line of religion, philosophy and psychology, after everything has been said, the mind will have something to say because of the feeble impact that the studies could make upon our personality. We remain the same persons with years of study and any amount of learning, like a rock into which water cannot penetrate even if it is inside the Ganga for years together. Hard-boiled is human individuality. Flint-like is the ego of man, and it cannot melt with any instruction and any amount of learning. All learning remains, finally, like water poured on granite; water flows over it, and yet not a drop enters. This happens because of a notion that we have about our own selves, and consequently a notion that we have about ourselves and others, and finally a notion that we have about life as a whole. We are born with a particular outlook of things, and we oftentimes die with the very same outlook. It does not change.

Hence, learning the art of living requires a deconditioning of the mind. This is the reason why we seek sequestered places, come to the Himalayas or to any ashram: to decondition the mind, which has been conditioned into a particular way of thinking and living under a given atmosphere. The deconditioning of the mind is not possible unless we are put into quarantine, into a camp which is away from that atmosphere which has been responsible for influencing us in that particular way. When you go home and live in the midst of your family, suddenly your mind changes its way of thinking. All your certificates of Oxford or Cambridge mean nothing in the family, where you are once again a small boy or girl. The same thought continues in the same old rut of thinking, and your certificate remains a piece of paper with no meaning.

You are here for a serious purpose, not to waste your time, because you have not plenty of time to squander. “Life is short, art is long,” is an old saying. There is no end for knowledge. Anekaśāstraṁ bahu veditavyam alpaśca kālo bahavaśca vighnāḥ, yat sārabhūtaṁ tadupāsitavyaṁ haṁso yathā kṣīramivāmbumadhyāt (Maha-subhashita-sangraha 1546) is an old Sanskrit saying. Anekaśāstraṁ: “The learning is so vast, like the sky.” We cannot comprehend it, even with all our might and main. Bahu veditavyam: “So much is there to learn that our life is not enough.” Alpaśca kāla: “The time at our disposal is very little.” Bahavaśca vighnāḥ: “Many obstacles come in the way even in this little period of time, the span of life that has been allotted to us.” Therefore, the second half of the verse gives the advice. Yat sārabhūtaṁ tadupāsitavyaṁ: “Abandoning the chaff, extract only the essence,” as we are told that a swan can distinguish between water and milk even if they are mixed together. The milk of life, the essence of knowledge, has to be extracted from the chaff of every type of information that is available in different places in the world.

The test of the progress that you make in the art of living is the amount of satisfaction and freedom from tension that you feel in your own life. There is no use saying, “I have learned so much. I have this degree and that title.” You have to set it aside as meaningless, finally. With yourself as a judge of your own personality, by silently contemplating your own self, you can gauge your own depths and measure the extent of the progress you have made by your own feelings about yourself, and also about other people around you. When you look around, what do you think in your mind? This will tell you what you are.

A type of diary may have to be maintained in order to undertake a psychological check-up of one's own self. You have to be very strict with yourself, though you may be lenient with others. You should not be lenient with yourself and hard upon others. A strict disciplinary checking up of one's own psyche and its functions is essential, and a specimen of this methodology of self-checking, going by the name of a spiritual diary, has been given in the prescription of Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj: “How many times did I get irritated? How many times did I resent something?” and many other questions of this kind are put to one's own self.

For how many minutes of the day were you able to entertain the idea of the goal of life? For how many minutes, I should say, because it is impossible to have this type of consciousness for hours. The hours of the day are spent in nonsensical thinking, which has absolutely no connection with our welfare. This is our fate because of the way in which our brains and minds are conditioned. We are the same old donkeys that we were when we were born, and we have not become horses in a moment's transformation. All great achievement in life, in any field of work—whether scientific, biological, chemical or philosophical—has been the effect of hard labour on the part of the seekers.

The little pinpricks of our day-to-day existence, and the mutual action and reaction psychologically created among ourselves in social life, form part and parcel of the observations we have to make in the leading of the life perfect. What we call the life spiritual is the life perfect. A complete life is called spiritual life. It is not a monastic life, or a life in a cathedral.

Again I come to the point of deconditioning your mind. You have been conditioned into a way of thinking the moment the words “God”, “religion”, “spirituality” are uttered. You cannot escape this predicament of getting compelled to think only in one way the moment you think of the words “religion”, “spirituality”, “divinity”. These words immediately create in your mind a sense of alienation from things in the world, and an artificiality of living, a complex of self-centeredness in the name of a religiosity or a Godward movement of yourself. You may hear sermons from saints and sages to any extent throughout your life, but they will not create any impact in your mind if an inward desire to lead this life is absent.

Most people are driven to a life of religion and spirituality by a defeat that they have suffered in life. This is unfortunate. It is not a coward that can go to God. Only a hero who has won victory in the battle of life can reach God. In this tremendous warfare of conflict with the forces of nature, and the ups and downs of social living, in this battle, in this tug of war, you are going to be the winner, and not be defeated. A person who is defeated here will be defeated hereafter also. It is not a question of changing the place and circumstance; it is the quality of attitude that matters. Each one of you will know whether you have been defeated in this world, whether things are too much for you and you cannot face them anymore; and then you turn to God, religion, monastery, church. If this is, and this has been, the cause behind your movement towards religion and spirituality, you will get nothing from them. Only a rich person can renounce. A poor person cannot renounce anything because the poor man has nothing. What will he renounce? A beggar cannot renounce, because he has nothing.

The spirit of renunciation becomes meaningful only when you have, and yet you do not want what you have. Renunciation is not the outcome of the feeling: “I do not have anything and, therefore, I am automatically a renunciate.” You have all things. Everything conceivable, glorious, beautiful, worthwhile, pleasant, is under your command. You can get it if you want, and perhaps it is already with you; yet, you have no interest in these things because of a higher light that has entered you.

That the Godward ascent is a positive movement, and not a negative defeatism, is symbolically given to us in an instruction of the Taittiriya Upanishad where the gradations of joy are described. “Only a king can become a sannyasin,” said Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. Unless you were a king in the previous birth, you cannot be a real sannyasin in this birth. The idea of renunciation arises in your mind because you have seen the world through and through and enjoyed it one hundred percent, not because you could not get it. Otherwise, you will be reborn as a wealthy man's son with all the material amenities.

The Taittiriya Upanishad tells us something very interesting, which should make our hair stand on end. Imagine that there is a ruler of the whole Earth, a king or an emperor. In the history of humanity there has never been an emperor of the whole Earth. Such a person never existed, and perhaps it is difficult to imagine such a person. But for the time being, imagine that such a person exists. The whole world is under his control. He is an emperor, the ruler of the whole Earth. Very young, highly educated, very healthy, learned to the core, and the whole world is under his control. What will be his happiness? None in the world can even imagine what it can be, because nobody has been in that condition. All these qualifications cannot be found in one person: very young, healthy, educated, cultured, without any form of disease, and the whole world under his control. Such a person never was, but if it were possible to have such a person, what would be his joy? He would burst with joy; that is all. That is the positivity of happiness which man can conceive in this world. But the Taittiriya Upanishad says that this great joy that you are imagining as the emperor of the whole world is a drop, a hundredth part, as it were, of the great joy that reigns supreme in the next higher realm, which is of the Gandharvas, the angels in the second realm, or the state of being that is just above this physical level.

To imagine what these levels are, we have to bring our mind to the point of concentration upon the layers of our own personality. There is the physical, the vital, the mental, the intellectual and the causal sheaths, one inside the other—one inside the other not in the sense of one being physically inside the other, but as gradations of the intensity of subtlety. So when we say there are higher realms, we mean the same thing as when we say there are layers inside our personality. They are realms inside the cosmos. They are not spatially high, even as the layers inside are not spatially inside but only logically inside. The Gandharvas are angels, divine beings, celestials who cannot be seen with the eyes, as electrons cannot be seen with the naked eyes but they exist inside the physical world. Their joy is one hundred times more than the joy of this great man about whom we have been speaking.

Only a person who has seen the light of this joy that is above can renounce this world; and the Upanishad tells us this great joy, which is a hundred times larger than the joy of the emperor of the world, is also a drop, as it were, compared to a still higher joy of the gods in heaven. The gods in heaven, therefore, have a joy a hundred multiplied by a hundred of this emperor of the Earth—whom we have not seen with our eyes, whom we are only imagining.

One hundred times the joy of these celestials is the joy of the ruler of the gods, Indra. We cannot imagine what it is. Here, our mind will cease to think. One hundred times the joy of Indra is the joy of Brihaspati, the preceptor of the gods. One hundred times the joy of Brihaspati is the joy of the Virat, the Cosmic Being in its physical manifestation. One hundred times the joy of the Virat is the joy of Hiranyagarbha, still higher. We do not know what we are saying; these are only words for us. One hundred times the joy of Hiranyagarbha is the joy of Ishvara, and countless, incalculable, non-mathematical, super-logical—we cannot say a hundred times more, further—is the joy of the Absolute. This you are aspiring for. Now you can imagine what you are, and what it is that you are longing for. Your brain will cease to function, your mind can no longer think it, your mouth will speak no words, and you will not know where you are sitting if these ideas are to occur to your mind constantly, day in and day out.

What is the state in which you are living here, seated in this hall, compared to these tremendous envisagements ahead of you, which are actually what constitute the essence of your spiritual path? The great stages of meditation mentioned in the various systems of yoga are the rising of the consciousness to these levels of bliss. So when you check up your own mind every day and make an assessment of your own self, you will know where you stand. Have you gone to that level of inner satisfaction which can be associated with the king of the whole world? Or do you feel like a helpless nothing, a useless nobody?

I mentioned to you in the previous session that you cannot renounce the world unless you have become greater than the world. Does any one of you feel that you are greater than the world? If this confidence has arisen in your mind, if this confidence that you are greater than this world has come to you for any reason whatsoever, if you feel reasonably so, with some substantiality behind this feeling “For this important reason, I am superior to the world of contents”—if this conviction arises, true vairagya has arisen. I am repeating what I told you sometime back. If you feel that you are only a small boy in this large world of terrible people, then the world cannot be renounced, and even the next step cannot be taken. Then even the second step in spirituality, religion, Godward movement, is not possible, what to speak of the higher steps.

The second step, the immediately superior one, is that which transcends this physical Earth, which goes beyond the joy of the emperor of the whole world; and if you have seen through the joy of this type of person, you have passed through the world and known every bit of it, and can no longer be fazed by the logic of the world; and if you cannot be shaken by any word that anyone utters, then perhaps you have the strength to enter into the next realm.

The Godward movement, the movement towards perfection, freedom from thraldom, liberation of the spirit, is a positive movement from one degree of perfection to another degree of perfection. There is no loss in any stage of achievement. There is only gain in every stage. Spiritual asceticism, or religious renunciation, is not a giving up or a loss; it is a gaining of more and more substance. Thus, when you have renounced the world, you have not lost the world. You have got something which is bigger than the world. It is like gaining one million dollars by losing one dollar. Because the one is included in the one million, you have not lost anything. Everything has come back. All that you have apparently lost has been included in what you have gained.

The moodiness, dejection, melancholy, sense of defeatism, worry and tension in your mind in your religious life are unfortunate consequences which tell you that you are not leading a religious life, or even a good life. You have been thoroughly defeated by your own mind. Hence it is that anything puts you out of order and makes you become irate. The amount of calmness that is in your mind, the extent of positivity that reigns in your mind, the quantum of goodness that you can see in the world rather than the evil in things, are indications of your advance in the life spiritual.

There is no such thing as a spiritual life isolated from the life of the world. Again, this point has to be remembered. Many times we think like children and speak like children when we say that we are after this or after that. It is not the truth. We are not after any particular thing in the world. We are after a wholeness, which is the health of our being connected with the health of human society and the world as a whole.

No amount of repetition of this truth—that the word “spirituality” connotes an inclusiveness rather than an exclusiveness—would enable the mind to free itself from the old prejudice that, after all, the one is different from the other. The good life and the godly life are one and the same thing. To the extent we are godly, to that extent we are also good. We cannot be humanitarian, charitable, sympathetic, affectionate or good unless one modicum of godliness has entered us. Only God can be good. That is why the great philosopher Plato defined God as the Idea of the Good, because only God can be good and nobody else can be good. The Sun is the supreme source of light, and everything is sympathetically brilliant. Likewise, we are sympathetically or conditionally good to the extent we are able to participate in the Idea of the Good; all other ideas are subsequent and subsidiary.

Many of us, perhaps all of us, are not even on the first step of yoga. We are unnecessarily imagining that we are very great persons. We are very poor fellows, really speaking, though with a genuine feeling to be good and to do something good. Granted that this sincerity is already in us, still we are wriggling and writhing on the lowest pedestal of social living. What we see around us is a society of people, and not anything divine. That is not seen in this world. Where is divinity in this world? Can you show me in which place it is? We see only people, human beings. We do not even see the whole world with our eyes. We see only human beings like us.

Even in this conditioned form of involvement in the thought of the world as outside us, we are further conditioned by the thought that only human beings exist in this world. Our state is really a pitiable one. We are thinking only of human beings; we cannot think of anything else. People, friends and enemies, men and women—all thought is of humanity only. Even the thought of the world as a whole, as it is in itself, does not occur to our minds. We are utterly pitiable fellows. The idea of the world itself has not arisen in our minds when we think of only human and humanitarian values, and not of world values. The idea of a world value has not yet come to us because the world contains more than human beings, as everyone knows. Perhaps, things which are not human are more important than the human, as we will learn when we go deep into the matter. Things about which we are not thinking, and which are not human, condition even human life; and very foolishly we think that life is only humanity, people, and there is nothing else. So even in this world itself we are in a very low state, what to speak of the Gandharvas, angels, and Indra and Brihaspati. This is tall talk. We may take thousands of births to reach these stages.

Thus, humility is the hallmark of the spiritual seeker. Do not say, “I am seeing lights, I am shaking, and there is warmth in the spine.” Do not speak all this nonsense. There is nothing of the kind. This is only a kind of hypnotism that you are introducing into yourself. You are yet to learn the art of humility before the majesty of the universe and the greatness of God. The more you learn of the grandeur of creation, the less you feel the importance of your own self. Here begins religion, here begins spirituality. And, as I told you, the life spiritual, or the life religious, is a practical way of conducting oneself in this world, and all your learning and listening and studying is an aid in the implementing of this learning in your day-to-day living.

What is your reaction to human society? What is your reaction to the world as a whole? This is the thing that is to be assessed first and foremost. A hater of the world is not a religious man, nor is a person who is attached to the world. It is an impersonal outlook of a large friendliness, the great maitri which Buddhism speaks of, a friendliness which is equanimous and which does not see evil and ugliness in things.

The non-adjustable feature of your personality is the first thing that has to attract your attention. The great canons of ethics, known as the yamas in the system of Patanjali's yoga, are the prescriptions for bringing about a harmony between yourself and human society. When you cannot adjust yourself with anybody in this world, you are not even on the first step of yoga. You are a peculiar person. How is it that you cannot adapt and adjust yourself with anything and anybody? You quarrel with every person. There are people who are quarrelsome in their nature. In the office, in the family, in the shop, in the marketplace, in the railway station—everywhere they quarrel. Every word is a word of resentment, and not of acceptance. While many of us may not be so bad to this extent, this trait is present in every one of us in some percentage. We are not incapable of quarrelling. We are not incapable of going out of balance in our minds and becoming irascible.

The potential for retaliation in respect of the objects of the world is itself to be plucked out from the root. It is not enough if we are consciously good. Even subconsciously we have to be good. Many of us are consciously good. We are not quarrelling here, but we are capable of quarrelling under given circumstances. That capability itself should be removed. The disease has to go from the roots. Under no circumstances can we come in collision with others. It is just an impossible thing for us to collide. Such is the harmony that has to be established within in the deeper layers of our personality. This is real harmony, and a conscious effort to adjust oneself with great difficulty with other people is not enough.

Many of us adjust ourselves with great difficulty, as we cannot help it. But the adjustment has to be spontaneous. We are not putting forth hard effort at adjusting ourselves with people. It has become so natural that we are like children, adjustable with anything. As the great Acharya Sankara says in one of his verses: “With an old man, he is like an old man. With a child, he is like a child. With a sick man, he is like a sick man. With a young man, he is like a young man. With a wise man, he is a wise man, and with a foolish man, he is a foolish man.” We have no personality of our own. That is simplicity born of utter goodness, which again is a result of a total abolition of our egoism, by which we become one with things. Then the world is our friend. Then we have no fear.

Now we are afraid of even a wisp of the movement of the wind. A little straw that rustles can frighten us. The world is an enemy; people are opposed to us. Therefore, we are afraid. But when we are sincere, genuine well-wishers of all people, and bestow benediction on all creation inwardly, from the bottom of our hearts, the world will protect us. We will not require army and police. We will be protected by the forces which are around us, provided we are their friends. They are our friends even now, but we do not speak to them. We are very busy. Our minds are turned otherwise. Yoga is a movement in the direction of the natural forces, which take us by the hand higher and higher, to diviner realms.

Thus, coming to the point once again, before we withdraw ourselves into an inward contemplation or a meditative policy, we have to be socially good, and harmonised and aligned in our personality. We should not go inward to meditation with an inimical feeling towards others. “Make friendship with your neighbour first,” said Christ, “before you turn to God.” You should not have an inimical neighbour. Make peace with the world first, and only then can you make peace with God. If the world is our enemy, God cannot be our friend. This is a hard thing for us. The world is still an enemy. We have many things which we do not like, and not liking is another name for an inimical attitude to things.

Is there anything which you do not like? Make a note of it in your diary. Make a list of all the things that you do not like, and give reasons as to why you do not like them. If you are unable to find an answer to these queries, go to your Guru and tell him that these are the things you do not like. Why is it you do not like a thing which others may like? A thing which you do not like may be the object of liking for another. How is it that the same thing is liked by one and disliked by another?

Hence, a policy of an inward subconscious, deeper than the conscious, acceptance of true friendliness is the beginning of yoga. Yoga is not a religion. Yoga is the way in which we have to live in this world. It is union with the smallest atom of creation, union with the most insignificant things in the world. With those things we have to set ourselves in union. That is yoga. It is not necessarily union with the Absolute; it is union with a cup of tea, it is union with a banana that we eat, it is union with the most insignificant, silly things of the world—meaningless things, as it were, which no one considers. With those little insignificant nothings, we are in harmony. Thus, every cell and every atom of the world is in unison with us. We become world personalities—citizens not of India or of any particular nationality. We are citizens of God's creation. Nature is our friend.

This is the first step that we take in our onward movement, or we may call it an inward movement, or a movement in all directions. The steps in yoga that we take are at once outward, inward, and multi-dimensioned. From the universal we have come down to this particular personality of ours in the process of creation, evolution, and from this individuality of ours we have moved outward into an externalised form of relationship, called society. Now, the yoga practice is a reverse process of movement—inwardly, in a very technical sense. It is not a physical inwardness that we are attempting. It is an inwardness of consciousness, which is not a spatial or temporal inwardness. As, in the downward movement of creation, we have come down from the all-pervading Universal to the particular, and from the particular we have gone outward into human society in space and time, in the same way, in the upward movement we retrace our steps from the outward involvements in the particular things of the world to the inward contemplation which usually goes by the name of meditation.

Thus, in the meditational technique, in the art of the inwardisation of the mind and consciousness, we withdraw consciousness from its attachment to particulars. We do not physically withdraw from spatial contact with things. A meditational technique is a consciousness technique. It is a work of consciousness, and is not physical or spatial in any sense. It has nothing to do with our physical location. It is an inward transvaluation and transfiguration of our conscious attitude. The whole world is consciousness finally, ultimately, as the end result. The objects so-called, the people we see around, are configurations of consciousness. They are gold shining as dross. A condensed form of light becomes matter. Modern physics says the same thing: Light can condense, become hard, solidified into the substances that we see as the things of the world. Energy can become matter, and matter can become energy; light can become substance, and substance can be converted into light. Consciousness has become the whole world. These people seated here, and these walls and buildings, are Consciousness condensed, particularised, localised, pinpointed in space and in time. Therefore, in the process of meditation, they have to be decomposed into their generality. The ice has to melt into the generalised water of the cosmos. The hard-boiled individualities of things outside, the objects in the world, and our own selves, all have to melt in the menstruum of the originality of Consciousness.

Here we come to the inner depths of religious practice and yoga. All yoga is meditation, finally. Religion and spirituality are meditation. Any successful endeavour in life is a meditation. The whole of life is meditation. “The Earth itself is meditating, as it were,” says the Chhandogya Upanishad. The entire enterprise of life is summed up in one word: meditation.

Meditation is the art of success—success in any field. In your profession, in your line of teaching, in your professorship, in your business, in your family life, in your dealing with anything and anyone in the world in any manner whatsoever, there will be success. “Success is sure,” says the last verse of the Bhagavadgita. Success is certain. Where is it certain? It is certain where the two join together. In the language of this verse of the Bhagavadgita, it is “where Krishna and Arjuna are seated in one chariot”. The individual and the universe melt into each other as rivers enter the ocean. We are able to think as Nature thinks, not as X, Y, Z thinks or A, B, C thinks. Meditation is the way in which we think in consonance with the way in which Nature thinks, or God Himself is thinking.

The gradational ascent of consciousness in its attempt to think in alignment with the way in which Nature thinks, or God thinks, is the series of steps in the practice of yoga. These are the meditations, about which I shall tell you something in the coming few days.