(Feb 6,2014) Spiritual Message for the Day – Be Aware of Your All-Pervasive Nature by Swami Krishnananda

Be Aware of your All-Pervasive Nature
From particular to the Universal – This Brahman is What I Am

Divine Life Society Publication: Sandilya Vidya by Swami Krishnananda

Dādau brahmāhamasmītyanubhava udite khalvidah brahma pascat, is a passage from Acharya Sankara’s ‘Satasloki’ wherein he makes a reference to Sandilya vidya. He mentions how the consciousness rises gradually from the level of individual perspective to the universal one. It is not easy to understand because of the fact that we cannot distinguish between our personality or individuality and the Atman, to which reference is being made. We always mix up the two. The Atman is myself, and we know very well what we understand by the word ‘myself’. It is an inveterate habit of the mind to think in terms of the body. So, whatever be the thing that is associated with individuality is at once identified in meditation. The kernel that is within us, the essence that we are, is to be separated from the body that we appear to be in this technique of meditation. In the beginning, there is consciousness that one’s own self is all. Now, this is not merely a statement that is to be studied grammatically or linguistically, but is a matter of experience. One’s location in all things in addition to one’s own body becomes a revealed truth in the advanced stages of this meditation.

It is something like the space within a vessel realizing that it is everywhere. Just compare yourself to a little space that is contained in a small glass tumbler which has got obsessed with a notion that it is inside the glass tumbler only and that what is outside as space is not itself, but an object of itself – something external to itself. It has to elevate itself to the awareness of the non-distinguishability between itself and the external space. I am the all! The space within the vessel realizes that it is all-space. It does not mean that it has become all-space by any effort of its imagination or activity. It is just a rising to the awareness that the wall around it, namely, the tumbler or the glass, is not going to limit its all-pervasive nature.

Then the realization comes – khalvidah brahma pascat. It is not merely the ‘I’ that has become all, but every one is the same all. The Self that is in me is not in me only. The assertion, “aham brahmasmi – I am Brahman” can be made by each center of individuality in a similar manner. This is a larger realization, says Sankara. It is a rise from the limitation of one’s individuality upto the cosmic Reality of one’s essence, with a simultaneous awareness of the identity of every self, the so-called multiplicity of selves, with this single Self. So it is the total of all the selves in an indistinguishable mass rising to a single comprehension of the great Absolute Brahman. This is the actual inner import of the meditation which is called Sandilya Vidya.

Excerpts from:

Be Aware of your All-Pervasive Nature – Sandilya Vidya by Swami Krishnananda

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