Sunday, April 21, 2013

(Apr 21, 2013) Regaining Paradise Lost by Swami Krishnananda

From Divine Life Society Publication: Spoken during Sunday night Satsang of Jan 17,1982 by Swami Krishnananda

Freedom has been given to man, as Milton says in his great poem ‘Paradise Lost’, but what kind of freedom? Either to stand or to fall. But man has chosen the freedom to fall because it is easier to fall than to stand. Effort is needed to stand on two legs, but no effort is necessary to lie down. It becomes a natural, comfortable posture. Thus it is that man has chosen the freedom to fall, and not exercised the other freedom to stand in unison with God due to man’s egoism which seeks to assert itself.

Man’s blessedness is not in the affirmation of his ego, but in the reaffirmation of his allegiance to the One from where he came. The blessedness of man is not in losing the paradise, but in gaining it. But it cannot be regained unless the law of righteousness of God is obeyed.

God has given man some kind of freedom, and the long rope has to be exhausted. The cow that is tethered to a rope has the freedom to move to the extent of the rope. No restraint is exercised upon the cow to the extent of the length of that rope with which it is tethered to a peg. But the restraint is felt when it tries to go beyond the length of that rope.

Action can become meditation when knowledge arises in us that action is not anything that we do, but something happens on account of the rise in this understanding. When action becomes a movement of consciousness, it becomes karma yoga. When the universe works through us as instruments, all that we do produces no reaction in respect of us. Nimittamātraṁ bhava, mayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvam eva (Gita 11.33), says the great Lord in the Bhagavadgita:  Everything has been done by Me, and I do all things. We are only an instrument, a fountain pen. We do not say the pen has written the dramas of Shakespeare, of Kalidasa or any history, but it is true that it has written them; we cannot deny that. So it is true that we are doing many things, yet we are not doing anything.

The purpose for which we are here is to stop this cycle of unending sorrow, the pratitya-samutpada as Buddha calls it, the chain of coming and going. The law of cause and effect has to break, which cannot break as long as we live in space-time and cause-effect relationship. The law of action and reaction, which we call cause and effect, has its effect upon us and this brings about rebirth. So no one who is conditioned by space, time and cause can avoid rebirth.

Is there a hope of salvation? Can we attain moksha? ‘Yes’ we can. The paradise lost can be regained. For that, the individual has to sacrifice individuality in jnana yajna, the meditation on the Absolute, by overcoming the limitations caused by our location in space and time.

In meditation we do not think space and time. When the consciousness of objectivity ceases, the consciousness of space-time cause and effect relation also simultaneously ceases, which puts an end to the consciousness of our bodily individuality and egoism, etc. In one stroke of asanga shastra, as the Bhagavadgita puts it, the axe of detachment, we take one step in the direction of liberation, the final moksha.

All our operations in the world are meditations on God, and every little work such as washing vessels or sweeping the floor is a meditation on God. We are not the doers of anything. We want nothing in this world and nothing belongs to us. Even this body does not belong to us. Every one of us belongs to that Central Authority, the seed of the universe from where everything has emanated as this vast banyan tree of samsara.

Thus, meditation is our duty. Meditation is nothing but a perpetual attempt on our part to gather our consciousness into this centrality of our relations to the whole universal setup wherein we step over the conditioning factors of space-time and causal relation, and we cease to be what we appear to be. There is neither the consciousness of our own self as meditating nor the awareness of any environment outside; we are just before the audience of God.

Continue to read:

Regaining Paradise Lost” by Swami Krishnananda
The Meaning and Method of Meditation” by Swami Krishnananda
Thought Power” by Swami Sivananda
The Purpose of Life” by Swami Sivananda

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