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Omkarananda AshramDiary 2004Sayings ofSwami Omkaranandafor Every Week of The YearThe sun is shining, but we can not experience it unless we come out of the darkness of our cells into the open. The Divine is present and visible everywhere, but we cannot experience it unless we come out of the darkness of our little thoughts, views, personality, ego, pride.
Comment: The decoration between each week leads back to the top of the diary. 1st week Sensitiveness to higher Realities is essential. Cultivation of spiritual susceptibility is demanded. A professor of chemistry in Berlin University says, the music of Beethoven is nonsense, a sound and fury. So you see, it requires special equipment to appreciate music. What does a primitive mind, which is equipped only to deal with knowledge in the field of chemistry know of the marvels of other fields?
Do not wait for God-experience to come somewhere in the future, but start experiencing Him now and here, express love, faith, wisdom; think of, reflect on, His nature,experience Him as thousands experienced, through the millennia.
Experience
God now and here by repetition of mystical syllables like
OM, which are the sound forms of God's Nature and Light and
Love.
2nd week Holding in inner experience the eternal Divine Truth, one has to live as a normal person, devoted to works of love, of service, of sacrifice, and of moral and spiritual perfection.
Most persons mentally live with the persons whom they love most. Even so, you can live mentally with God by developing intense love for Him; and He is the Father and Mother of all creation, the absolute Love.
How to develop love of God: Know , He is the listening Presence, a responding Power, a wonder-working Being, the sustaining Essence, - a Mother, a Father, everything and more. When you have Him, all the universe is subject to you, and does the Will of the Divine, which is in your favour. All creation loves you.
3rd week For daily life's peace, happiness, strength, success, use God's Presence and His boundless Resources.
God is my top-class Secretary. God is my top-class Mother. God is my top-class minute-by-minute Guide.
The field of life is the field of law, Dharmakshetra. Law is governing everywhere. Use it and understand it.
Divine love awakens into operation the inner powers of man, which are corresponding to the Reality, which apprehend and experience the Divine.
4th week You cannot live without consciousness; and if you do not live in the consciousness of the Infinite, you will live in body-consciousness. Therefore turn the body-consciousness into the consciousness of the Infinite. Make it the infinite Consciousness. Dwell in the infinite Consciousness. You cannot live without thinking. Therefore, make every thought a thought for and a thought in God. Make all thoughts God-thoughts. You cannot live without seeing things. Therefore, transform whatever you see into the form of God, of the consciousness of the infinite energy. You cannot live without hearing. Therefore, let everything you hear be heard as names of God, the music of God, the sound of God, God Himself. You cannot live without thinking of someone or the other. Let that person be God, God Himself. Transform that person into God. You cannot live without eating. Therefore, whatever you eat, let it be the Body and the Being and Substance of God - for God, in God. Eat it by offering it to God. 5th week You cannot live without 'I'. You always say I, I, I. Therefore, let this 'I' be God, for it is God. You cannot live without love. Therefore, know love to be God and increase it, expand it, infinitise it You cannot live without beauty. Beauty is God. Therefore, experience God in beauty, and beauty in God. God is Beauty. God is Peace. God is Music. God is Perfection. God is infinite Fullness. God is Wealth. This is the unique concept of the Vedic religion. Therefore, pursue supreme Beauty, Wealth and Knowledge. Therefore, become an artist, a musician, a dancer, writer and thinker. God is supreme Emotion, Rasa, Quintessence of ecstatic feeling and experience. Therefore be an aesthetician. 6th week Purify life through wisdom. Purify life through pursuit of art. Purify life through pursuit of beauty. God is the Light of lights. Attain Him through illumination. God is eternal Life: therefore never die, own now the infinite Life. God is infinite Consciousness: enjoy endless knowledge, endless wisdom, endless power, endless grace. God is Gracefulness infinite. Be graceful. Enrich all, expect nothing from anyone. Give, give to others, not take. Take only to give more. Anandam Brahma: God is bliss, joy. Seek Him. There is no true joy in the finite, only in the Infinite there is joy.
7th week Conditions for experience of God: Throw away your 'psychological' an 'psychoanalytical' knowledge. Don't say: "Oh this is my sex-instinct expressing itself; oh this is my complex; oh, I have been neurotic." All such poison throw out. Recognise yourself not as a bearer of the racial unconscious, but as an embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven. Relate yourself not to things, persons, circumstances, but to God always, God asPower, God as Lover, God as Father, God as Light, God as Joy, God as your very Breath and Being, God as the Ground of the universe and all manifestation.
Though God is infinite Mystery, yet anyone can talk to Him, any person can establish every kind of relationship with Him and can talk to Him.
8th week When a mirror is placed against a huge red object, it reflects the object and appears red. When placed before a green object, it appears green. Even so, take the clean mirror of your mind to the various-coloured qualities of God, and make it reflect those qualities, and they will appear as what they are. This is thinking of God. God is boundless Love, and when you think of Him, something in your mind must mirror boundless Love, and must become, for the time being, boundless Love, - must be of the red colour of boundless Love. God is infinite divine creative Intelligence - spaceless, timeless, infinite Peace and Light - and when you think of God, your mind must reflect that infinite Peace. You must become what you are thinking of, you must absorb the nature of what you think of. Just soak your mind in a reflection upon the absolute Harmony, infinite Love, ineffable Beauty, the unlimited Power of God.
9th week What a tremendous transformation takes place in you, when your whole mind is absorbed in reflecting upon the grand nature of God! This is thinking of God. This is conscious recognising and understanding and experiencing God's Omnipresence and Omniscience and Omnipotence.
Mind is such a tender thing. It is influenced easily, by anything, - more quickly by the bad than by the good. Therefore, always determine to stand by the good; where it is not possible, transform the bad. Tell yourself, "I am superior to this demand for pleasure."
Mantra-exercises annul the negative, the selfish, the sinful elements in us, and create peace, bliss, well-being and success. They even lead to immortality.
10th week You become what you think of. Think of infinite Strength, you will acquire great strength. Think of love and your heart will be free of hatred, and love will drip from your heart. Mind is an extraordinarily sensitive principle. It becomes what it thinks of. It has hypnotised itself into the weak human nature, finitude, helplessness. It can de-hypnotise itself by thinking of Infinitude, Omnipresence, Omnipotence, -of the Nature of the Divine Consciousness in it; and thus, it can achieve Perfection and Immortality. Keep the sensitive needle upon the magnet of God's Presence and Being and Power, and it itself will be magnetised. Dust yourself, clean yourself and you will be attracted by the magnet and you'll be magnetised. As you think of God, you partake of the Divine Nature. Thoughts become things. Thoughts become experiences. Thoughts become the circumstances of life.
11th week Normal human beings dwell in human consciousness. Human Consciousness is full of bad thoughts, good thoughts, right thoughts, wrong thoughts, good emotions, bad emotions. It is caught up in sin and error, in ignorance and suffering. Cosmic Consciousness is consciousness of the Divine in all the universe, in all things, in all the world, in all nature. How do we attain this Cosmic Consciousness? By adoring the Divine in all possible ways, in all manner of ways, here, there, everywhere.
God is super-electronic Presence of infinite Wonder and Fullness, ready to pour upon you endless Light, Joy, Peace, Love. Every little feeling raised in relation to Him makes you greater in the stature of your soul.
12th week Love and knowledge illuminate life: The first and last aim of life on earth is the attainment of real Knowledge, Love, Peace, Happiness, higher Powers, Supermanhood, Deathlessness and Immortality. But this attainment can be achieved by one way only, there is no other way. It is the way of the unfoldment of the highest divine Consciousness within us, the way of God-experience. This divine Experience is possible by an increasing knowledge of the ultimate Ground of our Existence, God, and an increasing love for the absolute value that the Ground bears in Itself.
Therefore, it is the way of knowledge and love. Only on this way are we safe. Only by knowledge and love, we grow. The most wonderful persons in the world are wonderful because they have love and knowledge. You, too, are wonderful because of your love and knowledge.
13th week The knowledge in your mind is immeasurably greater than all that you learnt, in all manner of ways, since birth, as a child, at school, in life, in the world, in your profession. This immeasurable knowledge sometimes percolates into the dream experience, sometimes it comes as intuitive ideas into you, as creative feelings. Behind this is the Centre of infinite Knowledge in you.
If God were not within us, in the inner parts of our inner being, how would love express itself from within us? From where would faith arise? What could produce the vision in us? Who of us would admire truth or pursue beauty? Reason and senses are not the only instruments of knowledge. There is intuition and revelation, direct knowledge. From where does it come, but from within ourselves?
14th week What is denied by thought, is affirmed by experience. What is intangible to the intellect, is tangible to the soul. The problems of the self-conscious human reason are not the problems of spiritual experience. What baffles critical intelligence, may remain a simple possibility with religious insight. While logic is always involved in contradictions, the mystic perception sees into the very core of the Truth in all things, the Ground of all being, the unifying and homogeneous spiritual Essence everywhere.
Try to retain the Grace. Let it not come to an end. It is a great tragedy if it comes to an end. Good things happen by karma, good karma; when the good karma is over, we are pushed down to the world. Such a tragedy should not happen to you!
15th week Mentally, put all creatures, birds, beasts in love. Mentally, pour out love on all creation, extend your heart to the dimensions of the visible universe. Mentally, penetrate all the invisible universes, and pour out unending and vast love and adoration. This I have done, this I am always doing, and this you can do also.
Man shares God's Nature, Qualities and Characteristics. God is Love, and that is why there is in man the demand for growth in love. God is Knowledge, and therefore God's Nature and Light causes in man the desire to grow in wisdom and knowledge, to extend the frontiers of knowledge. God is Light, and therefore there is in man an instinctive urge for seeking light, more light.
16th week There is no-one in this hall. A person enters; thinking that there is no-one, he begins to talk freely. An hour later, he is surprised to hear his talk played back. The microphone has quietly taken and registered everything he said. Even so, everywhere are the microphones of God, always registering everything we say, while we are alone, or amidst people. We think that no-one is seeing us. A man enters this hall and is surprised to find that after some time all that he did in this hall, all is registered by cameras of the video, the house-television apparatus in the next room, which is closed. Even so everything that one is doing in private or in public is being recorded and can be played back at any time anywhere by the all-registering Intelligence of God.
17th week If there were not God-Nature in a mother, how is it that she is so full of self-sacrificing love, a self-sacrificing love that can belong only to God, to a pure and perfect Being? How is it that she prefers the beautiful to the ugly? If there were not God-Nature in man, how is it that he is so full of creative, idealistic, poetic, philosophic an mystical intelligence? How is it that he is not altogether devoid of love, of a search for knowledge, a search for immortality? All these indicate the activity in man of God's Nature, God's Attributes, God's Qualities. Remember, wherever there is operative a large measure of love, kindness, spirit of service, sacrifice, goodness, love of beauty, creation of beauty - there you can find God at work, God in operation, God in self-manifestation.
18th week Let all the Perfection's of God slowly find their manifestation through our heart of divine Love. Before the body becomes weak, or has some accident, or the hand of time takes it away, and before the bad planetary cycle claims us, before our wonderful circumstances pass away, let us quickly pack into our life as much of progress as possible. Let us become so strong in moral and divine Nature that nothing of the outside world or any condition of life can ever more affect us in our progress towards the experience of the Kingdom of Heaven.
When the heart is filled with the emotion of love for God, automatically there is joy. From that joy, if you repeat the mantra, the effect is more marvellous. So when you say, "Om Om Om" let it come from the love of the heart. Let us do our things from the unending joy of the divine Emotions.
19th week Keep your feet on earth: The other person responds to us better, when we know the Presence of God in him. The business prospers more and more, when we are in tune with that which is infinite Wealth, God. The earth under our feet becomes stronger and unbreakable, incapable of a quake, when we know that God is with us, and in the earth. Everything about us is in our favour, when we are in the favour of that, which is in everything, some infinite Energy, Intelligence, Power, Presence, Existence, Consciousness - God.
20th week Signs of having obtained Cosmic Consciousness: A sense of oneness and fullness takes possession. The capacity to produce by mere willing or thinking, or wishing, anything that one needs, comes into operation. But, as there is no need or desire for anything, the capacity remains unused. The sense of fullness takes possession of us. Death is meaningless. When a wave rises on the sea and falls, do you say: "The sea in one part, rose as a wave, and dies"? No. It was, is, and remains the sea. It retained its condition as the sea. The rise and fall of one's conditioned being in the unconditioned Consciousness makes no meaning, no impression, it is immaterial, insignificant.
God is an all-knowing, all-witnessing Being instantly recording every feeling that arises in you.
21st week Omniscience is the essential Power and Function of the creative divine Intelligence in man. Omnipotence is the characteristic Power of the divine Being within us. Omnipresence is a matter of conscious experience and functioning of the Reality of the Godhead, which the highest Self and Consciousness in us are. Man as he is, in his outer personality and surface consciousness, is the infinite Being, infinitely delimited. Above our emotional and psychological possibilities, there are vast ranges of psychic, spiritual and other possibilities.
Always in the back of your mind is the reminder to be that state of consciousness where you can watch God live your life, without yourself interposing a wish, a will, or a desire of your own.
22nd week There is an omnipotent Being within each of us. If you seek to disprove it, the power with which you disprove it emerges from this omnipotent One. There is an omniscient Being in each of us. "I think, therefore, I am", says the French Philosopher Descartes. This philosopher does not seem to know that he thinks because he is. I'ness, existence is prior to knowledge. Consciousness infinite is prior to all knowing processes.
The Power of all powers is not outside, but within us. A prophet might emerge from us, given the circumstances and the needed effort to break our self-imposed limitations.
Everyone has a wisdom beyond their own, at times, for God is hidden in them.
23rd week This talk about the infinite Consciousness is not speculation, not dreaming, not fancy, not philosophisation: it is required by some pressure within each of us, by the logic of growing mind, by the pressure of a purified nature, a sensitive and expanding consciousness. Men have not only talked of the Infinite, but have lived in, and from it. We are not men, until we have arrived at this stage of evolution and development.
The incidents in the life of the Saint Sadasiva Brahmendra should convince everyone that there is a sublime divine Life independent of the object and the play of the mind and the senses. The sage was quite unconscious of the world. He did not feel a bit when his arm was cut off. He sought to be absorbed in the divine Consciousness and to become one with the Divine.
24th week Where it is possible for us to live in peace, it is a shame to live in restlessness. Where it is possible for us to use intuition as a means of knowledge, it is the conceit of the human blindness not even to consider its existence, or to deny its existence without prior investigation. Plato's genius is a possibility of human consciousness. Jesus Christ's heart is a possibility of the human heart. Kepler's and Copernicus' mind are a possibility of human intelligence. To mind are a possibility of human intelligence. To think like Plato, write like Racine, to paint like Raphael, to speak like the oracles of ancient Greece, is as natural to our inner Consciousness as flying is for the birds or swimming for the fishes.
All in us demands undying satisfaction which can come only from a Knowledge of the Infinite.
25th week Spiritual experience is more real than the physical experience. For physical experience is indirect, gained through the physical body, whereas spiritual experience is direct, gained by consciousness.
It is not only orthodox science, but also the voice of high spiritual experience that rejects the supernormal powers of parapsychology.
In our case, our occult experiences and observations have been the side-result of an integral spiritual experience we have sought.
Man is omniscience. His physical vision is a delimitation, a distortion, of the right view.
26th week Macrocosm and microcosm: It is not to a small petty little patch of land on a negligible little ball of earth that is wheeling its way in an unimaginably vast space, that you belong to; but I tell you on the authority of experience, in which Divine Grace is daily sustaining me, that you belong to all the worlds; and in fact, all the worlds are in you. It is to rule that you are born, - but if you wish to rule purely by political power, by the power of wealth, by the power of science and technology, by the power of social views, you will fail, as you have failed a hundred times. It is to rule the world in consciousness, by an almighty Power, that you are born. In truth, you are the lords of air, the lords of the sea, the lords of skies, and most wonderful of all, the lords of time, and space, and circumstances; the lords who rule the mind, matter, life and nature.
27th week All in you seeks for dominion, - dominion not over other people, dominion not over other people's properties, but dominion over ignorance, dominion over death, dominion over matter, dominion over earthly kingdom of time and space. Everything in you is seeking for, and demanding infinite Power, infinite Delight, infinite Peace. This is natural to you, this cannot be checked. We have to widen our vision, extend our horizons, cosmicise our feelings, universalise our views, exalt our love, elevate our wisdom, expand our being.
It is only the dogmatic, authoritarian, institutional aspect of religion that speaks of man as a sinner. The revelatory, the intuitive, the spiritual content in religion always refers to the human individual as a child of God, as divine.
28th week Humanity constrains us to say with Newton that what we know is a handful of pebbles on the sea-shore and what remains to be known is an ocean, vast and illimitable. I am not pleading for an acceptance by all, of the border sciences, or of the vast areas of knowledge that have not yet become part of man's everyday knowledge. That task is far from me; it is alien to my taste. I am only trying to draw the attention to what is existent, but not yet mastered. The refusal to see that, which is not visible to the physical eye, or to accept for investigation, what is not evident to the existing physical senses, is a dogmatism unworthy of the dignity of human reason. We reject intuition because we are not yet able to see that intuition is an extension of intellect, a phenomenal heightening of the same powers of intellect to a degree where much that is dark is illuminated to human mind.
29th week We are not yet sufficiently courageous to accept realities beyond the realm of the mere physical and material, because such an acceptance involves labour, involves a spirit of painstaking and persistent effort for which our weak and lazy wills are not prepared. There is something wrong with us, we must admit, that is the cause of our inability to jump out of our cosy cloister of dogmatic and limited knowledge. What is required by the spirit of our times, is an adventurous spirit, governed by wisdom, guided by patience, ensouled by an alert and all-examining intelligence.
Reality of paranormal powers: In order to be true, a thing need not have to be common, or visible. Beauty, bacteria, life, mind, electricity are not visible - yet they are real.
30th week Parapsychology is a bold venture. But like all ventures it has its difficulties and its risks. It cannot be a great success, because the methods it employs for experiments cannot be valid, though they are a little fruitful here and there. The experiments here in this psychic and astral realm are to be purely subjective. And we cannot make a 'Science' as we understand science, with subjective methods and experimentations. It is difficult to say that parapsychologists would ever succeed in sanctioning scientific foundations for the phenomena uncovered afresh or noticed by the psychical researchers. For, even for us, the psychical phenomena are silly, childish, and unnatural - a little more unnatural than the operations of intelligence purely through the five physical senses.
31st week Like nuclear power in the hands of the various governments in the world, psychic powers are fraught with potential danger, for there can be no trusting of the human mind. It can and does all too often misuse those powers. Therein lies the danger. A possession of psychic powers can also pervert the human will, and raise the human ego to phenomenal proportions, most destructive in character. For this reason, the wisdom of the wise has always dissuaded men from pursuing those powers.
Millions of dollars are not valuable by themselves. Infinitely more valuable is a knowledge of yourself. If you have it, then the dollars will be valuable - not otherwise.
32nd week In this room, there are three persons. Here and now they experience three different worlds. One dreams that he is in hell, the second one dreams that he is in heaven, the third one dreams that he is swimming in the ocean. There is a fourth person, who here and now in this room experiences the wonders of the supreme Divine Consciousness, in the waking state.
Let us be great in all our being. We have not to be great scientists or philosophers, to know God, to experience the Divine.
God is the Cause, man is the effect. The effect has no peace, no strength, no joy, unless it is consciously related to the Cause.
33rd week All Nature is a garment of God, the firmament does show, as the Bible says, the Handiwork of God. The conscience in man is a Voice of God. The beauty of the moral life in others is a visible Expression of God. The great works of human genius are the visible Manifestation of God's Consciousness.
How to interprete man? We have to read the lower in him in the light of the higher. We have to measure the smaller and the corporeal in terms of the greater and the mental in him. We have to frame an image in harmony with the immense inner potentialities he bears.
34th week Occultism makes the mistake of conceiving man to be a mere occult phenomenon, a psychic entity, capable of only occult and psychic powers, capable of controlling material forces and mental powers, and influencing or using them for the fulfilment of personal aims, for knowing coming events and dematerialisation. But this is wrong. Man is more than all that, and if this awareness is lost, he is bound to be dangerous to himself and to others, and also to suffer much.
From God within alone, a God-like being can arise. If there were not God in man, man could never attain communion with God, oneness with God. No human individuality can known and reach and experience oneness with God, as human individual.
35th week The God-like qualities in man are a fruit of the expression of God in man. If there were not potential saintliness, a saint, in the great sinner who persecuted the Christians, Paul would not have become so great an apostle. And because God is within man, there is the possibility of man attaining the Perfection of the Father in Heaven. But it also should be remembered that God is infinitely other and more than what He is in man. He is indescribably great: while all the time all of Himself is in man, yet there is His Transcendence, and His cosmic Being which is sustaining the universes. When man is fully awake, purified, illuminated, he gains in his conscious experience the dimension of the Transcendence of God, and the Oneness with God, as the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. If God were not in man, Henry Suso could not have said that "man is God in God".
36th week Attain cosmic Consciousness now, find inside, outside, nothing but the luminous, boundless, illimitable beautiful Light of God's Presence. I have the joy of helping you to attain this wondrous Cosmic Consciousness. There is no meanness in my heart, though meanness has belonged even to great minds and to great hearts. By the Grace of the Divine, my heart is not a human heart, therefore it is completely freed and liberated of all human qualities. It is purely a divine Heart, the Heart of the Divine Mother. I lose nothing even if I grant the Kingdom of Heaven to every man on earth.
You must cling to the Divine so completely that, even when the good Karma is over, God is forced to fill up the good Karma by his Grace, and protect you from falling off.
37th week Boundless, illimitable are the treasures of God in my life. I never ask my heart, "What do I gain by helping this person?" I never in my life expected anything from anyone. But I have always planned how much I can give to everyone. There is only one thing in my heart: not what I can take from others but only what I can give to others. I am a giver, not a taker; and if the world gives me anything out of gratitude for my services, I at once give it back to the world and see that the pleasures are multiplied for the welfare of the world.
There is only a give in our heart, not a take. Give of everything, not only of wealth, but of thoughts, and feelings, and energies. The whole life is surrendered for the welfare of mankind. We have no comforts, no pleasures, no holidays, no thoughts of the body. The pleasures of the senses are dead to our inner joy. The inner joys are independent of everything, therefore eternal, therefore permanent, therefore unlimited.
38th week All mankind, all nature is rooted in the infinite Value. We may not know it, even as we did not know of the gravitational force, that the earth is round, that there are no solid things but only events, and so on. Our ignorance of a thing does not cancel the existence of that thing. And that thing continues to influence us in many ways. "We live, move and have our being in God," as Saint Paul said. We are heirs of the Divine. This is the best and most valid view, which stands every test of reason, every examination of the scientific insight, every questioning of the logical acumen in man.
An apple tree cannot produce bananas. A sinner cannot produce a saint, unless the sinner is not in fact the sinner he seems to be.
39th week Our first view of ourselves as a body, worked by intelligence, feeling, will, is too crude to be real. Our aspirations reveal our other possibilities, dimensions, capacities. There are several self-exceeding capacities in us. Every bubble on the ocean can grow conscious of the unlimited waters of the ocean beneath, can claim the strength of the ocean as its own, can make the dimensions of the ocean its own dimensions, can be the ocean. So every bubble of a being upon the ocean of God's Being can claim the strength of the ocean of God's Being.
Parapsychology opens new doors on Man: We see more of man now than before. Our horizons are wider, our view is greater. A knowledge that such things are possible for us, breaks the human complacency, inspires effort, and the search for more perfection, more wide reaches of thinking and living and activity.
40th week God has formed man in His own Substance and Image, and man can have no peace or happiness worth the name unless he lives, moves, works as the Substance and Image of God. When Joseph goes about the world, and his work, and his life, as Mr. Joseph, he will have much trouble; but if the goes about the world, work, life, as the ambassador of the Indestructible in him, as the mouthpiece of the infinite Peace and Joy, as the embodiment of infinite Love and Goodness, as the manifestor of the all-conquering wisdom and inner knowledge, - then is he the master of the world, life and everything.
Nature has not meant man to be just a man but the Divine that he is in his essential nature. When man is man, nature punishes him until he seeks enlightenment and strives to be his own essential Being.
41st week Nature abhors artificialities, and discloses the persona of man, his superficial personality, individuality and ego. In fact, the human problem is constituted of the manhood of man. The Godhood of man is the solution to the problem of the manhood of man. And, the Godhood of man is nothing but love, light, joy, wisdom, peace of man in their infinite dimensions. Be a man however great, in whatever direction, - you have trouble, difficulties, trials, limitations. Live in your essential Being, your inner Heart of Knowledge, Love, Wisdom - and all will be well.
God is the Vine, man is the branch. The branch has no strength, no life, unless it is related to the Vine.
42nd week People think, God is an enemy of all pleasures, and therefore they are afraid of Him. The moment someone speaks of God, they call the person superstitious, or idiotic, or run away from him, and say there is no God. They don't know that by approaching God, their pleasures increase, and their joy becomes perfect, lasting, their life fulfilled infinitely, their existence successful, their mind omniscient, their will omnipotent. It is ignorance of God, His Nature and His inseparable Relations with our consciousness, that is the cause of the people's fear of the word 'God'. When they are troubled and sorrowful, they run to God. From this itself it is clear that God is a destroyer of sorrows, disease, unhappiness. If He is so, why not seek Him consciously and now, so that the whole life is fully enriched? They do not know they get infinitely more by a little turn to God, than they get by endless struggle on earth.
43rd week No sense is made in saying that man is God. Man as he is, is not God. Man in his inmost Being, divested of all psychological qualities, sensuous forms, material expressions and conditions, is God. The seed is not the plant, nor is the plant the seed. But, under certain conditions the seed is the plant, becomes the plant. - There is nothing really wrong in saying that the seed is the plant.
Man is not God, yet under certain conditions, man is God. Man divested of his human limitations, broken in his shell of the ego, the little self, the imperfections, is God. We say, "A thousand hands came for work today". By "thousand hands" we mean a thousand men. It is not hands that came for work, it is men. Even so, when we say, "the thousand men came for work," we mean in fact that the one God in thousand forms has come for work.
44th week The idea of God the Infinite, the Absolute, the Timeless, the Imperishable, is not something externally presented to us, but is resident in us. As fragrance is immanent in the petals of the rose, so is the idea of the Infinite immanent in our inner Being. It is natural to us. It will express itself, whether we want it or not, in due time.
Man is the Infinite become the finite, the Godhead become the human individual of limitations. Therefore, the finitude in man is capable of infinite expansion. The love in the heart of man can become cosmic, - for the love in the heart of man is the Energy of the unlimited Love of God in man. The little love can attain its absoluteness. The knowledge in man can attain its absoluteness.
45th week If there were not God in us, there would be no love in our hearts, nor would there be any striving to be good, nor yet any insatiable hunger for Joy, Peace, Truth, Beauty.
To measure man, measure him with the Image of the Divine. No other measure holds good.
The image of man is the Image of God. The Divine formed itself into man while being transcendent. No other image can define man: no other image of man is comprehensive, all-inclusive, to be acceptable and valid. The possibilities of man are the Possibilities of God, and vice versa. Man is the only means we have for an empirical knowledge of the transcendental Reality.
46th week Don't think nature is insensitive, or that men and women are insensitive: most of them are sensitive. They can feel the emotions in your heart. If you are full love inside, automatically it touches them, affects them, whether they want it or not. If they do not feel it today, they will feel it tomorrow; but they will certainly feel it. Therefore, exert an attractive influence on all by the overwhelming love you can lodge for all, in your heart.
Love God with love that is more intense than the one that subsists between two young lovers. Love God with an intimacy and strength of affection that subsists between the young mother and her only little baby. Let Him be more real to you than the breath you can take.
47th week Be you a philosopher or spiritual aspirant, a religious individual or a devotee, there is no God-experience possible in any case expect by development of love. The phenomena of love is implicitly present even in the most intellectual among the knowers of Reality. Love alone is light and liberation. It enables the individual to transcend matter and recognize its identity with the Heart of infinite Perfection. Therefore one should pass the currents of love through every nerve and cell of one's being. Love purifies and baptizes and illuminates. It is everything, it is life, it is attainment. It is immortality, it is genius.
God would be unjust and lack love, if by any destruction in the scheme of creation, any form of life were really destroyed. God is Love, therefore nothing is really destroyed, everything is resurrected.
48th week Love is the possession of a heart, from which all animal and human impulses and instincts and motives are absent. Love is the possession of a heart, from which hatred, jealousy, anger, are absent. Love is the bearing of a heart of unlimited goodwill, unquestioning benevolence and beneficence. Love is not sentimentality, nor is real love mere human affection. It is something more. This loving Heart of the Infinite sustains all the universe. Why then does it not sustain man? Man is given by that Love, unlimited freedom, which man uses for destroying himself and others, for perverting natural things, for artificial existence, for hatred, ugliness - and then blames the all-merciful, all-loving Godhead for it. This is double wickedness on the part of man. But, even in spite of this double wickedness, God is never angry with man. He still gives him unlimited freedom to come to Him; and he is accepted by God unconditionally, unquestioningly, by His all-loving Heart.
49th week He is blessed, who has his eternal Mother and eternal Father always with him, inseparable from him wherever he is; and all their wealth, wisdom, joy, peace, perfection, blessedness, are his. This I say from my experience and as a fact of my daily life in all circumstances and conditions, and places, and at all times. It seems there is no-one in the world who is not an orphan. None has the experience and the joy of being with, and by, and for, God, consciously, in minute-by-minute life, on earth.
Man is spirit, and lives by spiritual things, even while living in the body. The challenges of the body are met by the resources of the Spirit. Faith, devotion, love, wisdom, - these are sustainers and treasures eternal. 50th week Tragedy is that when one is damaged in some manner. When one is not damaged in any manner, there is no tragedy. Our wealth and our power, our joy and our treasures, are indestructible and cannot be touched by anyone, they are with us always, and so nothing has happened. And if the circumstance is testing terrible some seekers after Truth, it is because the seekers have to be tested, and only the best of them that survive the challenges, will be selected for eternal Treasures.
It is an insult to human intelligence to declare, as science does, that it does not know what space is, what electricity, life, mind, are. Let us not be intellectual cowards, trying to explain to away what is difficult to understand, trying to eschew what is a real challenge. Let us face the realities of the higher life. 51st week It requires a rare logical argument, high development of reason and intellectual abilities, to understand the Reality of God. Some great scientists and intellects of our age have thought of faith in God, as if such a faith is either cheap, or could be had easily. It presupposes almost a supreme development of reason in order to understand the operative Presence of the Divine in the Universe. It takes greater powers of perception, greater powers of reason and intellectual development, greater devotion to truth and knowledge, greater love for factual knowledge, greater sacrifices for the pursuit of such a knowledge, than it takes to make a scientist. It is easier to make a scientist than a saint. It takes millions of years for evolutionary nature to produce out of man, a saint. 52nd week We are not sheep to be governed by sense-impressions. We cannot accept life uncritically. We have to examine the data, we are expected to be more critical than the scientists, more critical and rational than the logicians. Gone are those days when we could look upon the religious person as a pious soul full of blind faith. The spiritual individual is essentially a bold thinker a heroic spirit, fearless, master of his senses, master of his mind, and integrated personality, to whom life is not a challenge but an opportunity for growth.
Scientists are not devils and demons, and saints are not angels and gods. God's all-discerning Consciousness and Powers of Knowledge, are as much in the scientist as in the saint. In the former they are directed outward, in the latter they are turned inward - one is for facts and the other for values. 53rd week In any true concept of man, we have to take into consideration the dual nature: man as he is in the evolutionary and historical world, and man as he is in himself, in that transcendent order which permeates everything while remaining uninvolved in anything. Mere an empirical view of man can be misleading and merely a metaphysical idea of man can be unhelpful. Man transcends the empirical realm, only when he has arrived at inner perfection, and is wholly established in the Divine and the Absolute.
Be a critic who is resolutely intent on discountenancing every strand of thought that fails to stand the test of disciplined reason. Yet be like a soul sensible to the highest ideals and values by which the creative minds have, down through the centuries, nourished the cultural urges and expressions of humanity.
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Printed and published by Omkarananda Ashram Switzerland and Himalayas World Wide Web Edition (WWW) 2004 |
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