The Spirit of Sadhana
Divine Life
Society Publication: Chapter 18 - The Ascent of
the Spirit by Swami Krishnananda
The nature of Truth does not
depend upon human thought and feeling. The human cannot become the divine
merely because human history has passed through many centuries of temporal
process. The divine is a qualitative transformation of the general attitude of
consciousness and not a quantitative calculation of syllogistic conclusions.
When Truth takes possession of us, we no more think it or judge it in our own
way, but participate in its being, which is a different thing altogether from
our definitions of truth, law and justice; goodness, virtue and rectitude.
It makes little difference
whether one is a student on the path of devotion or the path of knowledge. The spirit of sadhana in the Inner Path is more important than
the outward form with which most people usually busy themselves. One spends the
whole day in counting beads, and thinks that his sadhana
is over with that. Another attends the temple, rings the bell and does some
exercises, reads a few books, so that the hours of the day are all filled up,
which is all enough to make him think that he is busy with his sadhana. Now, all this is the
outward form which sadhana may take,
and a very necessary form. It loses its meaning only when it is deprived of the
spirit and the purpose with which it is expected to be done. It is to be
remembered that sadhana is not any kind of bodily
action that is outwardly demonstrated in the world, but a state of mind, a condition of
thinking, a consciousness in which one lives. Suppose one counts ten thousand
beads on a particular day, with a heart filled with rancor and an emotion in a
state of a ebullition caused by frustration, prejudice or jealousy, the beads
are not going to do one any good. All actions are symbols of an inward mood of
mind, and when the mood is absent, the action by itself has no significance.
The majority of sadhanas are lost in the wilderness of erratic thoughts and
confused ideologies. This is the precise reason why, very often, there is no
success in sadhana, despite years of routines
that are being followed, perhaps with great enthusiasm but bereft of the spirit
needed.
It is difficult to make one
understand that the spirit of sadhana is
determined by the extent to which one aspires for God-realization. We have
heard the words ‘God’ and ‘Realization’ so many times that they are likely to
lose their meaning, due to their being glibly used every now and then in life.
But gold does not become cheap just because we utter its name a thousand times
a day. Its value is intrinsic. Unless our routine of sadhana is charged with the ideal
of God-realization, it will turn out to be useless in the end, and mean nothing
in substance. Maya works in various ways. In one
it acts as a preventive against the very taking of the right step. It acts as a
tremendous obstacle even at the commencement of the proposed effort. This
happens when there is opposition from one’s relatives, from the state of one’s
bodily health, or from want of creature comforts that are the minimum which one
would need even to live on earth. But maya can also
oppose the Sadhaka by making him take the wrong step and imagine that he is
moving in the right direction. The latter predicament is worse than the former.
For, there, one cannot even know that one is being befooled. Most people cannot
avoid falling into this pit, which maya has dug for
everyone. But the worst form which it can take is when people mistake an
ethical dogma or a traditional routine of the socialized religion for the
spiritual meaning of one’s approach to the Absolute.
The ideal of God-realization
which is mentioned as the background of the spirit of sadhana is, it is to be reiterated,
incapable of being maintained throughout one’s life with equanimity. Even great
saints are said to have lost their patience and balance some time or the other
in their, lives, in their attempts to maintain this spirit perpetually. Students
who have honestly taken to the spiritual path in the beginning have been often
misled into the ruts of a desire for such things as tantrik
siddhis through mantras and
rituals on the one side and a longing to pursue grammar and literature, or
astronomy and palmistry, on the other side. It is not that there is anything intrinsically
wrong with these sadhakas, for
their trouble is that they have not found a suitable guru to guide them in these
confused conditions when they feel lost in a sea of hopelessness.
Unfortunately, that God-realization
is not going to offer us anything we want in the world is the feeling of many a
seeker, because, as pre-conditions of this realization we are asked to renounce
desires and want God alone. Now, how can one want God alone and nothing else
that is of glory and beauty and splendor and joy in the world? What do we gain
by reaching God and losing everything else which we would like to enjoy? Though
theoretically, by the argument of the intellect, we may conclude the God is the
sole objective to be aspired for, the heart with its feelings that are
accustomed to see and hear of the pleasures of this creation cannot reconcile
itself with the arid logic that sees no good in the tasty dishes which this
splendid universe with its glorious heavens is ready to offer it. These are
facts which everyone has to confront on the way to God-realization, and it is
not easy to get over the temptations as long as the heart is not united with
the understanding. In most cases the head and the heart are like a quarrelling
couple who make a hell of the family. There cannot be peace unless the two have
common aims and cooperate with each other in the fulfillment of a higher ideal.
The students of both the path
of devotion and the path of knowledge should remember one very important point,
for it is this point which decides whether their sadhana
is successful or not. To the bhakta or
devotee, God is everything, and he sees God in this manifestation as the world.
This does not mean that the devotee should have reached, in the very beginning
itself, the state of para-bhakti or
the devotion which sees the whole world as God shining in various forms. Even
in the initial stages of bhakti, when such
a vision of God is very far, when one is busy with the worship of an image in
the temple or in one’s own house, or when one is engaged in purascharana of a sacred mantra, or in svadhyaya or sacred study, the
important prerequisite is exclusive devotion to one’s sadhana and not with the affairs of the world outside.
This exclusiveness of devotion saves one from falling into mental states of
lust, anger, greed, jealousy, ambition, etc., for the sadhaka has no time to think such
things. This is so even when the sadhana is in its
beginning stages. What, then, should be the fortune of him who, in his rarefied
devotion, sees God everywhere, in the high and the low alike?
To the student of knowledge,
objects, as such, do not exist, for, to him, all objects or things are
transformed into the status of a Universal Seer or a Totality of
Subjectness, where the ‘worldness’ of the world vanishes, thus leaving no scope
for him to get caught in the passions and ambitions which flood what we called
the world. There is only a ‘Seer’ who is everywhere and nothing that is ‘seen’,
for the ‘seen’ is also the ‘Seer’ himself appearing, as dream-objects are
nothing but the thinking of the mind which is unified into a single whole in
waking. Where, then, is a chance for prejudice, anger, craving and egotistic
expressions?
This is the spirit of sadhana, whether in devotion (bhakti) or knowledge (jnana), which is to animate the
daily routine of the sadhaka. It is
this that gives meaning to sadhana. It is
this, again, that decides one’s success or failure in spiritual practice—to
what extent and in what proportion the God-element in sadhana preponderates over other
aims and objectives.
Excerpts from:
The Spirit of Sadhana - Chapter 18 - The Ascent of
the Spirit by Swami Krishnananda
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