Spirituality in Life : 4. Swami Krishnananda

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Saturday, August 29, 2020. 5:48.AM.
(A Message issued on the occasion of Swamiji's 54th Birthday in April, 1976.)
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1.
God is Being. We call Him the Supreme Being. The human mind cannot conceive the meaning of true being. We have a very wrong notion of even what ‘being’ is. When we say that something exists, something is, we associate ‘being’ as a kind of adjective of the object that is said to exist. The chair exists. When we say that a chair exists, the chair is the subject and its existence is the predicate. We have conceived existence as a predicate of the chair which is the subject. But existence cannot be a predicate of anything. It is always the subject. It is presupposed by the notion of every other individual thing in the world. Existence precedes even the notion of chair; it cannot be a predicate of it. On the other hand, when we understand the situation metaphysically, philosophically or spiritually, the chairhood of the so-called object is known to be the predicate of the existence which precedes it. And because of a peculiar twist of character in human thinking, we also conceive God as a predicate to our temporal life. God is an appendage to all our needs, necessities and desires. Therefore, God does not seem to be helping us, at least openly. We have misused our relationship with God. We have conceived Him as a kind of attribute to our individuality, a very sorry state of affairs. God cannot be an attribute. He is the Supreme Substantive. He is the Reality. The Supreme Being that God is, is the presupposition of even our thought, of ‘being’. That is why we say that God cannot be thought through the mind.


2.
If such an unthinkable presupposition of all human understanding is the nature of God’s existence, what should be the character of religion, which is the way to God? It should be characterised by all the attributes which ‘being’ can have, though in varying, lesser degrees. These sublime characteristics of true religion are inclusiveness—not rejection—and the capacity to transmute every lower phase in the higher, by way of understanding and appreciation.


3.
Thus, the practice of religion is the practice of God-consciousness in some degree or the other. It is to flood our personality with something super-mundane, super-personal and super-individualistic. When we become religious seekers, we are touched by the non-temporal not only in our personal life but also in our social existence. To be a seeker of God is not easy. You cannot just receive initiation into a mantra from a Guru and think that you are at once a religious adept. When you receive initiation, you are led into a new way of living and being. Your life is to get transformed, and there has to be a complete transvaluation of values. Unless that essential condition is fulfilled by the disciple, the initiation will not reveal the needed light.


4.
The law of evolution from matter to life, from life to mind and from mind to intellect, whether in its individual or social form, is initially a law permitting a diversity of being in an apparently multitudinous variety, which gradually rises upwards into lesser and lesser intensities of diversity and objectivity of character, until there is only a universalised consciousness confronting a universal object as the vast creation. But this consciousness has to become its object; a unity of knowing with being, the oneness of self with all existence is the goal of the evolutionary processes. The cosmic consciousness realises that the cosmos is itself.


5.
This is the message of Bharatavarsha, the message of India’s culture, the message of true spirituality, the message of Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, and the message of all the mystics, saints and sages of the world. God bless you all! Peace be to the whole world!

The End.

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