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.
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