Spirituality in Life : 3. Swami Krishnananda

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Saturday, June 27, 2020. 5:27.AM.
(A Message issued on the occasion of Swamiji's 54th Birthday in April, 1976.)

1.
Religion today appears to be shaking from its very roots, because the edifice of popular religion is built on a sandy basement and has no substantial support at the bottom. The so-called religious man does not really believe in God. The religious mind has taken advantage of its apparent belief in God or concept of God as an instrument in the personal fulfilment of its wishes and ambitions. To most of us, God is an instrument, not the aim or goal of life. Our asking for God is not because He is all-in-all, but because He is a tool for the fulfilment of our ulterior motives. We have desires and desires, in all the levels of our personalities. We are made up of desires: kamamayoyam purushah. We do not possess or have desires; we are made up of the desires. Every fibre of our being is constituted of desire alone. Therefore, this desireful personality contrives a tool in the form of the concept of a God in Paradise, in Brahmaloka, Vaikuntha or Kailasa, for its own fulfilment. God’s existence is travestied; it becomes a blasphemy of the very notion of God. We are told, again and again, that God is the goal of life and not a means to the satisfaction of the needs of the individual.


2.
We now have to be taught the primary lessons of life itself. We are still in need of the initial educational process, which has to set right the very thinking method of our mind. There is something wrong with us at the very root itself. We think in terms of the body, the personality and its external relationships. These relationships subtly interfere with every activity of our life, including the ‘activity’ of the ‘practice of religion’. It is very unfortunate that ‘religion’ has become a sort of ‘activity’, a kind of ‘work’ among the many other duties in life. The religious consciousness is not a work, it is not a function, it is not an action proceeding from our individual being, because the personality of the individual is an effect; it is of the nature of a process of becoming, tending towards something else transcending it. Therefore, any activity proceeding from this procession of individual existence cannot be identified with the religious consciousness which is the emblem of God’s Being.

To be continued ...


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