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Thought for the Day for January
by Swami Krishnananda

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Months

  1. The greatest sadhana, or practice, is the longing of the soul for God, the pressure which one feels from within one's self in the direction of the Supreme Attainment.
  2. Sadhana should not be any sudden assertive renunciation in the form of rejection of values, but it should be a growth of the personality into a wholeness which has overcome the lower, not rejected the lower.
  3. The whole effort of life is nothing but a progressive movement towards harmony of personality with the environment outside in various degrees and stages.
  4. Constant meditation on Om allows the individual consciousness to take the form of Om itself, which is unlimited in its nature. The meditator becomes ultimately the object of meditation itself.
  5. The greater is one's approximation to the universality of the Self, the more intense is one's freedom and intrinsic goodness of character and conduct.
  6. It is not man that practises yoga; it is that which is super-physical and super-individual in him which encounters this world.
  7. Restraint of the senses does not mean putting pressure on the desire of the senses, but an elimination of the desire itself.
  8. When God is, man ceases to be. This is a subtle result that would insinuate itself into the effort at meditation on the supremacy of All-Being. God is the Supreme Subject which contemplates Itself as the All.
  9. Love is spilt on ashes and not ennobled when it is directed to fleeting appearances. True love is self-integrating and not the medium of the interaction of the subject and the object.
  10. The Self neither dies, nor is born, nor has it any modification. If it has these changes, they have to be experienced by some other consciousness, which argument would lead to an infinite regress.
  11. The unconscious urge of the lower to realise the higher is evolution. When it is consciously manoeuvred, the process is called yoga. Unconscious movement towards the higher is evolution; conscious movement towards the higher is yoga.
  12. Our mind is only a pressure of consciousness, a concentrated form of awareness. It is not general consciousness but a consciousness particularly directed at a point in space and in time.
  13. An ardent student of yoga who is sincerely attempting to achieve perfection will be guarded by the rulers of the cosmos.
  14. Charity of things is of less consequence than possession of charitable feelings, and resorting to charitable speech, charitable demeanour, and charitable actions through a general charitable temperament.
  15. As you treat others, so others will treat you. As you treat me, so I treat you. This is a law of the world, the law of society, the law of nature, and the law of God.
  16. Purity is achieved by freedom from desire, and desire should be distinguished from necessity.
  17. Birth and death, transmigration, is nothing but the pressure exerted upon the individual by the forces of the cosmos in order that chances may be provided to the individual to attune himself, herself or itself with the laws that be.
  18. It is to be remembered that the value of meditation does not so much depend on the length of time that you take in sitting for it, but in the quality or the intensity of feeling operating at that moment.
  19. Freedom does not mean doing whatever one likes. Freedom is that state of consciousness that does things in the light of the harmony that it has to maintain between the subject and the object.
  20. Initiation is not mere utterance of words. It is a communication of an energy, a force. It is the will of the Guru, as it were, entering into the will of the disciple, where both have to be on the same level. Otherwise, there cannot be initiation.
  21. In moksha, the individuality ceases to be and one exists in all places and at all times, i.e., becomes infinite and eternal.
  22. Anything that is wholesome is God. God does not mean something far away from you. It is the characteristic of wholesome thinking, total thinking, and not partial or fragmented thinking.
  23. The sage is without hatred, and loves all. Firm in his resolution, he is yet possessed of the tenderest compassion. While wanting nothing for himself, he gives joy to all.
  24. Dissatisfaction is regarded as the mother of all philosophy. Philosophy is the child of a recognition of the inadequacies in life.
  25. When true knowledge arises, we are happy. When true knowledge arises, we give fearlessness to all; and when true knowledge arises, we, too, are fearless, and no one can frighten us.
  26. Religion is the language of the spirit in man. Religion is the reaction of the human mind to its notion of God.
  27. Often it is said that yoga is a matter of grace coming from God. It is not an effort of a single individual, because the effort towards overcoming individuality proceeds from the individuality itself.
  28. If we are careful enough to investigate into the rise and the action of our thought process, we would be perpetually in a state of meditation because meditation is union with things.
  29. The development of the religious consciousness in the human individual is the enhancement of dimension in experience achieved through the series of the degrees in which man adjusts himself with the universe.
  30. Knowledge and power go together where knowledge is identical with the being of what is known.
  31. The universe marches upward in an ascending spiral movement to find itself in itself, to know itself as itself, which is called the Self-realisation of the cosmos. We may call it God-realisation.