Thursday, April 24, 2014

(Apr 24,2014) Spiritual Message for the Day – The Soul is the Ultimate Existence by Swami Krishnananda



 The Soul is the Ultimate Existence
Divine Life Society Publication:  -The Soul is the Ultimate Existence by Swami Krishnananda
Spoken on Swamiji’s 56th birthday on April 25,1978


The great truth

The more one has the opportunity to think, the less one feels the need to speak. The bestowal of greater and greater thought implies the drawing of oneself towards oneself more and more. That means to say, the more we become ourselves, the less we become the other. The ultimate purpose of all these means of communication, speech included, will amount to, finally, a coming back to one’s own self, if we deeply ponder over it. The human soul has found itself in a predicament where it sees through the senses, the bodily apparatus, and it moves under the impression that it is moving towards something other than itself for the purpose of completing its own need. It searches for values in things, and not merely the existence of things. 

The existence of things is the highest value of things

The search of the soul for perfection outside is due to the fact that it makes a distinction between the existence of things and the value of things. Otherwise, where would be the need for anyone to move towards things that exist if existence itself would be a satisfaction? We create a distinction between the value of the object and the existence of the object. We are never satisfied with the existence as such of anything. A flower may exist in the garden, but we are never satisfied unless it becomes ours. It must be plucked from the plant and brought home, and perhaps it should adorn our head, etc.

The bare minimum of existence does not satisfy us. We always want to enhance that existence by adjuncts from an apparent external source, under the impression that the adjunct is something which is other than existence. The values that we are trying to impose upon the existence of things are also existences by themselves, unfortunately. So there is no such thing as a value other than existence because a non-existent value cannot add to the quantity or the quality of the existence of the object which it is supposed to qualify. 

Never can we be happy in life until we are satisfied with things as they are. There is a great supreme manufacturer, the Reality of realities, which cannot be regarded as an external source of inspiration. All our scriptures – Ramayana, Mahabharata, Srimad Bhagavata, Bhagavadgita and all religions and scriptures of the world hammer upon the point of the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of God, which gets defeated the moment we begin to impose our personality on this superior operation of the Absolute.

It appears many a time that our practical life is a refutation of all that is studied in the scriptures because, on the one hand, there is an acceptance of the omnipresence of perfection everywhere. The omnipresence of perfection means that every point of space is filled with perfection. That is the outcome of what we learn from the great masters, the saints and the sages, the prophets, the avataras and the scriptures. 

Theory is nothing but a technique of practice 

There is nothing in theory but the methodology that has to be adopted in our day-to-day existence. What is the use of theoretical knowledge in engineering if it has no use in practical existence? The connection  between theory and practice is so vital that they are inseparable. They are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. What we know, we act; knowledge and action are identical. Perhaps this is the principle of karma yoga. When action becomes knowledge, it is karma yoga. Otherwise, it becomes binding karma which has a nemesis and a retribution which rebounds upon us like a boomerang.
The great principle of spirituality is the affirmation of the spirit, and nothing but that. The affirmation of the spirit is not merely a chanting of the mantra of the omnipresence of God, but the soul’s acceptance of the perfection of the Supreme Being. 

The reality of life is the soul of things

The great pity of human existence is that life and knowledge have become two different things. Religion fails when knowledge is isolated from life. The reality of life is the soul of things. Our reality is the soul, and it is the reality of everything. So when we speak, the soul has to speak; when we think, the soul has to think; when we act, the soul has to act; and when a need is fulfilled, the need of the soul has to be fulfilled. There is no use merely fulfilling the need of our tummy, or our sentiments, or our social circumstances, or our whim and fancy. This is not going to do anything for this world.

The soul is the ultimate existence, and when we are satisfied with the ultimate soul of all things, the existence as such of things, we begin to love all things as we love our own selves. ‘The love of all things as we love our own selves’ is another way of putting the love of soul for itself. The love of one’s own for another is nothing but soul of the individual soul for the Supreme Soul, which manifests itself in various gradations. 

Ultimately there is nothing but the Self in the universe

 Even what we call the world outside is a self that is empirically manifest in space and time. What we call the family or the society is also our outwardly projected self. The whole cosmic manifestation is nothing but the self which is apparently seen in space-time causal relations. So when the Self is affirmed in its true connotation, in its indivisibility of being as existence and not a value isolated outside, we are spiritual, we are religious, we are God-loving. 

To love God is not merely to go to a temple or a church or even to read a scripture. To love God is to love the higher Self of one’s own self. The self that is conquered is the self that is befitting union with the higher Self; otherwise, our own self becomes the source of our fear. We do not fear other people. We fear our own selves, really speaking. It is the devil that is working from within us that frightens us. 

Rama and Ravana both are inside. By inside, I do not mean within our physical individuality, but inside the whole creation, out of which we cannot keep our foot apart. There is only inside, ultimately; there is no outside anywhere. The whole cosmos is an inside, if we would like to put it that way, and we are that.

So there is a drama of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana going on always through the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which is the battle of life. The Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita tell us that the symbol of life is a battle. The Bhagavadgita was given in a battlefield, which means to say, struggle is the law of existence, and the struggle is nothing but the law of the higher self and the lower self – existence and value, perception and reality.

May we imbibe the true wisdom of the soul of all things, and not merely an empirical knowledge, and live a religious life, which is nothing but a spiritual life. May God bless you all!

 Excerpts from:

The Soul is the Ultimate Existence by Swami Krishnananda
 
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