(Mar 12,2014) Spiritual Message for the Day – From The Universal to The Universal by Swami Chidananda

From The Universal to The Universal

Divine Life Society Publication: - Seek The Beyond by Swami Chidananda

"The first jnana I want to give you is: This life is only a journey. You have come here; you don’t belong here. You are on a journey, and at the end of the journey you will have to leave and go. So nothing is really yours here. Nor do you belong here. This is the First truth.

"The second truth is that when a person is on a journey, they usually have a destination to reach. What destination have you set for yourself? Think of it! Your destination cannot be anything here for the simple reason that you do not belong here. If you reach any destination here, it will be here and you will go elsewhere. So you can reap no permanent benefit from whatever secular, temporal, worldly, earthly goal that you set for yourself—no matter how great it may be.

It may even be something as comprehensive as banning the use of nuclear weapons, something upon which the fate of all humanity on planet Earth hangs. It may be something as big as the United Nations or the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. All these things are trivial, for the simple reason that none of them can be your real goal; because no matter what you achieve here you will go empty-handed. You came empty-handed, you’ll go empty-handed. Therefore, think!

"Third truth: All these important things—that there is no proper provision in India today for the youth and that you must do something about it—is based on the egoistical feeling that there is a you and that you can do something.

"Look here, this world has been going on for hundreds and thousands of years before you and all people came. You come now and you will disappear like little insects coming in the rainy season having a 24-hour lifespan. Empires have come and gone. You have come and you will go. This drama of life will go on, the world will go on—another 1000 years, 2000 years, 10,000 years.

"You are nothing. There is some higher power that has been looking after this world for eons. Scientists say that the first sign of life came on planet Earth so many millions of years ago. What is your calendar of 365 days before millions of years? So don’t worry about it. There is some higher power who is quite capable of looking after this world that you are so concerned about. You better take care of yourself, so that during this precious little human life between an entry point and an exit point that you do something to improve yourself, bring out all the latent potential within yourself.

"And before you leave, try to do maximum benefit to God’s creation—into which He has put you. That is the only thing that makes life worth living. Life’s importance is not assessed in terms of how much you have amassed, what titles you have, how many audiences you have addressed or how many books you have written. All that is vain fancy. The value of life is in having come here, before you go how many people have been happier, how many have been benefited, how useful have you been to God’s creation. Not only human beings, the whole world."

"How many tears have you wiped from crying children, orphans, widows, helpless people, from poor, suffering people in the remotest villages where there is no drinking water, no sanitation, no education—they are disease bound? Try to do something. Go there and give them a proper road; they are cut off during the monsoon season. Go not to the posh cities, but help suffering humanity in the rural areas. Bring sanitation, hygiene, medical aid. Give eye camps for those who are blinded with cataracts. Then you have done something.

"Our culture, our country has as its highest ideal in life paropakara, benefiting others, being useful to others, doing something that is good for others, not only for yourself. Paropakara is the highest ideal. This body has been given only for this purpose. So bring about a change in the orientation of your vision.

"So this I am telling you personally. What then is the goal? Your goal is to go back from where you came. There is a great Universal Soul. You are not this body, this cage of flesh and bones. You are not the five karma indriyas or the five jnana indriyas. You are not this mind, emotion, sentiment, imagination and various moods such as anger, passion, greed, envy, jealousy. You are not even this little "I" that you are identifying yourself with when you look in a mirror. All these are not you. You are a center of radiant consciousness, shining consciousness—eternal, imperishable, unborn, beyond time, beyond space, infinite. Read the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita every day!"

This is not an individual addressing an individual. This is the Universal addressing the Universal. And I said that you belong to that dimension. This is a golden chance to lift yourself up from this confined consciousness to your real dimension of infinite consciousness, universal consciousness. That is why we are here.

"May the Universal Consciousness grace and fulfil whatever is there in your heart, whatever you are aspiring for, whatever you are ardently longing and wishing for. May it be fulfilled!"

Excerpts from:

From The Universal to The Universal - Seek The Beyond by Swami Chidananda

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(May 20,2013) Do the Best and Leave the Rest to God

Subtle Secrets of Sadhana - Do the Best and Leave the Rest to God

Divine Life Society Publication: Thus Awakens the Awakened One by Swami Krishnananda

·          “Do the best and leave the rest” is the key motto in Karma Yoga. The ‘doing of the best’, of course, does not mean being foolhardy or going headlong without thought on consequences, but the harnessing of one’s full resources to the execution of a noble ideal which is calculated to aid one in the attainment of God- realisation. To ‘leave the rest’ is to resign the results of the work to God, for, when even the best that one can do falls short of the effort needed to achieve a desired result, the mind is likely to get upset, which is not the spirit of Karma Yoga.

·         The more we try to depend on God, the more He seems to test us with the pleasures of sense and the delights of the ego. Finally, the last kick He gives is, indeed, unbearable. Those who bear it are themselves Gods.

·         Every moment of life should be regarded as the last moment, as there is no knowing when this moment will come. When it is said that the last thought of a person should be God’s thought, we are impliedly admonished to remember God every day and every moment.

·         The energy that leaks through the senses by way of excitation and pleasure-seeking diminishes the psychic force that is necessary for meditation. Hence before any attempt at successful meditation this energy-leakage has to be blocked, and the direction of the flow of this energy turned inward.

·         We should not try to be more strict on others than we are on ourselves. Our task is not so much to change the world as to change ourselves.

·         The prarabdha karma is like an extortioner who will not let loose the victim until the last vestige of dues is cleared out. It cannot be exhausted without being worked out through experience, and the role of spiritual sadhana in relation to prarabdha is not one of negating or counteracting it, but of bringing about a transformation in the vision that evaluates and judges experience, pleasurable or miserable.

·         Mostly, the mind is where the eyes are. Look not at anything which may stimulate desire, or rouse egoistic ambition. The eyes have to be carefully guarded.

·         The importance of sadhana in spiritual life is great enough to compel the attention of anyone wishing to be freed from botherations. The vexations of life are due to entanglement in externalised forms, while freedom at once manifests itself when the universal nature of these forms is beheld. Sadhana is nothing but an attempt to withdraw from the particulars and sink into the Universal.

·         Doubts on the path of sadhana indicate that the spirit of sadhana has not been properly grasped. When there is enough conviction about the correctness of the method adopted, sadhana quickly bears fruit.

·         The highest fulfilment is the result of the highest renunciation. The less you want, the more you get. He who wants nothing from the world finds the world falling at his feet. Even the gods are afraid of him who wants nothing for himself.

·         Space, time and gravitation divide and pull the body by isolating it from other bodies. With this division and pull of the body, consciousness also appears to be affected due to its association with the body through the mind, Prana and the nervous system. The overcoming of this distracting effect of space, time and gravitation in one’s consciousness is yoga.

·         The establishment of oneself in a state of consciousness which stabilises one’s being in a non- externalised Universal Pure Subjectivity of Selfhood is the final panacea for the sorrow of mortal existence. This is the great meditation in which every soul has to engage itself throughout its career in life. This is the final duty inseparable from man’s aspiration, nay, the only duty in life.

·         There are three grades of Self: The real, secondary and false. The real is the Atman which is universal; the secondary is the person or thing which one likes or dislikes; the false is the aggregate of the five sheaths. Meditation disentangles the real from the secondary and the false.

·         Buddha and Sankaracharya represent two sides in the picture of life. The purely phenomenal approach of Buddha implies the so-called solid content of the appearance called the world, and the spiritual doctrine of Sankara fills this emptiness with Soul, and completes the picture.

·         It may be that we try to remember God when we are comfortably placed. But the test as to whether He has really entered our hearts is whether we remember Him in sickness, suffering, opposition and times of temptation.

·         The pain generally felt at death is due to the nature of the intensity of the desires with which one continued to live in the physical body. The more is the love for the Universal Being entertained in life, the less would be the pain and agony of departing from the body.

·         Who is a fool? He who thinks that the world has any regard for him and is really in need of him.

·         He it is that, as an old man, totters with a stick, thus deceiving the human eye, for He is all things.

·         Ishvara , jiva and jagat are not three entities standing apart like father, son and their house. They are three presentations of reality or view-points of the Absolute from the level of the jiva.

·         sadhana is a sort of constant remembering a thing against heavy odds, and pulling up oneself from sinking into deep mires. To retain the thought of God in a world of colours and sounds that dazzle the eyes and din the ears is hard enough. This is sadhana, a feat of will and understanding.

·         Avoid contact with such things as are likely to stimulate sense desire or excite the ego. This is necessary until strength is gained to withstand the forces of the world.

·         The test of spiritual advancement is a gradual attainment of freedom from doubts of all kinds and a conviction of having reached a settled understanding in regard to one’s true aim of life. It is this conviction that brings inner strength and power to face all opposition.

·         The strength to bear suffering comes not merely from a determination of the will, but the discovery that a vast treasure is awaiting one who practises such endurance. Students lose sleep and comfort, a lover undergoes untold pains, and an employee tolerates the unpleasantness of work, not because of a mere determination of will but due to the sure promise of an enjoyment which is known to exceed the pains which pave its way. So it is with spiritual sadhana.

·         Spiritual sadhana is ultimately an effort to cease from all effort. This is the highest effort, because no one normally can be without exerting oneself in some direction. All activity is a process of moving away from the Centre. The activity to cease from such activity is sadhana.

·         No saint has been able to maintain the spiritual balance throughout his life. There have been occasional reversals though these might not have left any impression on their minds any more than the mark left by a stick drawn on water. But the mark is there when it appears. Such is the difficulty of leading the spiritual life. The case of immature seekers is much more precarious, indeed.

·         Just as when we touch a live wire the electric force infuses itself into our body, when we deeply meditate on God the power of the whole universe seeks entry into our personality.

·         The sadhana that one does should speak through the actions and the words which manifest themselves through one’s personality. The personality is the vehicle of the aspiration that wells up within. And the face is the index of the mind.

·         The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are two great epics of the forces of lust and greed, respectively. The passion of Ravana and the greed of Duryodhana caused the wars of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These are the twin forces of the devil which can be faced only with Divine Help.

Continue to read:

Subtle Secrets of the Sadhana  - “Thus Awakens the Awakened One” by Swami Krishnananda

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