The Secular and the Spiritual (Continued)

by Swami Krishnananda

Imagine, for the time being, the state of the Creator of the universe. Transport your consciousness to the status of the Creator. Apply your will to some extent; rise up, immediately. Let the whole being of yours rise to the level of that creative omnipresence which contemplates the creation of the universe.

You see the world. Do you believe that God also sees the world? Does He see the world in the same way as you see it? Certainly not. How would God envisage the world of creation? Can you imagine what it is? God's envisaging of His creation would be something like a self-contemplation of God. He contemplates Himself as All-in-all.

If God were to see the world, He would not see it as an object that He has to encounter through the sense organs. God has no sense organs. He can grasp without hands; He can see without eyes; He can walk without legs; He can hear without ears; He can think without a brain. There is nothing which He cannot do by mere existence. His existence is His activity. In our case, existence is not activity. If we just exist, it does not mean that we are engaged in any activity. Activity for us is an externalised operation apart from our pure existence. This distinguishes us from God-Being.

The sun is very active. You know very well how active the sun is, but the sun has no eyes, ears, legs, hands, and no working medium. The very existence of the sun is the life of all creatures. There is a state where existence itself is activity. God's existence is God's work. As human beings, we cannot imagine such a thing at all. We cannot understand how existence itself is an operation.

Here we may draw a sideline in order that we may know what spiritual activity is. In traditional parlance, we call it karma yoga. It is not karma, as such. Karma is ordinary work, but karma yoga is a spiritual movement of your totality in the atmosphere of your involvement, about which I told you something just now. When your being expands beyond the limitations of body, and appears to be moving outside, when your little dimension of finitude of existence increases its dimension and moves outside, you are working as a spiritual seeker, as a spiritual leader, as a God-person.

Karma yoga does not bind, but karma binds. Action binds. Every action produces a reaction, but there is a kind of action which will not produce any reaction – that is divine action. When your actions and activities are nothing but emanations of your being, in the same way as all the operations going on in the world are emanations of the existence of the sun, then nothing affects you.

People read the Bhagavad Gita, but very rarely one can make out the sense of its teaching. It does not deny the value of work, but it should be work as God works, and not as a finite, localized individual works. Here in this concept of action, duty and spirituality, the distinction drawn wrongly between the holy and the unholy is abolished. The unholy things become holy when they are transmuted into the sanctity of the spirit which beholds these so-called unholy things.

God has not created unholy things. He has manifested Himself as this universe, and He has manifested as yourself, also. So, you have to behold yourself as God would behold you. True spirituality is the vision of God. It is a vision of God, not merely in the sense of an experience of God, but the vision which is necessary to behold the world correctly in its proper perspective.

When you think like this, in a total fashion, leaving nothing outside you, and embracing all reality that can be conceived in the mind, you feel a completed, filled satisfaction. A sea of delight will enter into you.

There is a word in the Yoga System known as samadhi, or communion. There, the celestial delight takes possession of you, it is said. What kind of delight is it? It is the delight of totality in experience, abolishing the cleavage between the object outside and the subject of perception. The thing which you consider as outside you, limiting your existence, enters into you, melting its local existence. Or, you may say, you melt down your perceiving individual existence and enter the object.

In deep meditation on any conceived spiritual object, you cannot know who is meditating on what. It may be that you are contemplating the object, or it may be that the other side, the object, is contemplating you. If you have eyes to see the object, the object also has eyes of a different nature to see you. Everything in the world sees you, knows you, understands you, and reacts to you. It is not that only you see the world; it sees you. A tree standing in front of you knows what you are thinking about it. Do not say they are foolish, unrecognized entities in the world.

"Everywhere there are eyes." What is the meaning of this statement? Every atom is a perceiving unit. Every atom is a solar system. There is a sun vibrating inside the atom as a nucleus. It is in the Bhagavad Gita that we hear that everywhere It has eyes. And, your eyes are its eyes only. This is the whole interesting point about it. These eyes with which you are seeing me, these eyes with which I am seeing you, do not belong to you, and do not belong to me, also. They belong to That which actually sees.

The eyeballs cannot see anything. There is an operation which is conscious that is responsible for the perception of things. That consciousness, which is actually the seer, is common to both the so-called seeing individual and the object apparently regarded as that which is seen. The commingling of the seer and the seen in a blend of inclusiveness, transcending both the subjective side and the objective side, which is the transcendent side, is Samadhi.

What you experience there is impossible to imagine now, wedded as you are to this body consciousness. If the world of objects melts down into liquid and enters into you, what would you feel at that time? You would feel that molten steel has been injected into your personality. We cannot have any words to explain what it is. Molten steel, the essence of strength, has entered you, and you have become the embodiment of that impossible-to-conceive energy, strength, and power. That is all we can say. The more we think about it, the less it is that we will be able to express it in language, because language is used only to express the relationship between one thing and another thing. But when such a relationship is abolished completely in a transcendent operation of the melting down of both this side and that side, what language, which word, can explain that condition?

If you can contemplate this possibility in your own personal life, you will be moving like a little god walking on the road. Heavens will be there at your beck and call. The winds of the high heavens, blown by the angels above, will be wafting their fragrance around you, even when you are walking on the road outside. Do not feel that you are a deserted, unwanted, unrecognized individual. You are very much recognized. You are very valuable. You are dear to the gods; do not forget this. And they are with you now, at this moment.

I do not know if many of you know the Mahabharata story. It is the story of a war. The great spiritual ambassador who played an important role in this war was Sri Krishna, an incarnation of the Absolute, a ray of the complete Existence. When he was admonishing the opposite side, he raised a point: "You should not be under the impression that I am sitting alone here, as an isolated individual, and you can encounter me as a person sitting here. I am not a person. All the fourteen worlds are here just now. All the angels of all the realms of being are here just now. In one instant they will descend into action. Do you want to see it?" And he exhibited his cosmic form. The whole universe started vibrating in a little hall. All the fourteen realms of being, everything, was scintillating, like solar orbs. Wonderstruck people closed their eyes because it was impossible to see the brilliance of God.

This means to say that everything is here just now. You need not have to go to the temple to meditate. Here is the temple. You can create a temple wherever you are because the feelings that you entertain in your heart, the conviction that you have about true spirituality, and the love and regard that you evince in light of this concept of true spirituality, making no distinction between the outer and the inner, no distinction between the secular and the spiritual, will create a temple around you. Wherever you go, you move in a temple, in a chariot, in a glory that is not of this earth.

You must have confidence. You must not have doubt in your mind, because while time takes many days and many months to act, eternity does not take many months. Eternity is not constituted of days and months and years. It is just here and now. That is the divinity which transcends the secular side and the spiritual side. There are no sides at all for spiritual experience. Inasmuch as we have no words in language to describe that which transcends the concepts of spirituality and secularity, we are forced to use these words again and again, though they are not complete in themselves.

What would be the style of your speaking in regard to that transcendence where the secular and the spiritual, as conceived, join together, shake hands with each other, commingle, and become one experience? We have no words in the dictionary to explain that condition. Your true nature cannot be known by any kind of language. You are what you are. That is all.

Here is something worthwhile contemplating. You are not listening to some speech given by somebody; whatever I tell you is a kind of medicine for the illness of life, and it has to be made part and parcel of your daily experience. But the frailty of human nature often introduces itself as first priority, and will not allow you to think in this widened fashion.

That is why a little time has to be taken every day. You must have a little leisure, an hour or two hours, when you are totally alone to yourself. Do not be always with somebody else. Be alone at least sometime. It may be one hour, it may be two hours; or before you go to bed, you are alone. Contemplate this truth. The true aloneness, with which you came, the true aloneness with which you will depart from this world, is also the aloneness which you are experiencing now, even in the middle.

This alone that you are is seeking to fly to the Alone that is everywhere. Mystics call this process of divine ascent as the flight of the alone to the Alone. There is aloneness everywhere; multiplicity is unknown. Duality does not exist. The Alone created the world, and the alone that you are is a replica of that Supreme Aloneness. This photocopy, this replica, this reflection, this little particle, as it were, of that Supreme Aloneness is seeking to unite itself with that Ultimate Aloneness, so that the alone that you are even now, in an artificial socialized way, will reach the ultimate fundamental Aloneness, which you are unable to speak about in any language. We call it God. Again, the moment you utter the word 'God', you have an idea that He is above, far away, many kilometers away, not near you.

The habit of thinking in terms of sense perception and body consciousness prevents us from thinking truly in the light of God-vision. That is why I said you must have some leisure and be alone to yourself. Do not be talkative; do not go on chit-chatting and saying anything you like. What is the use of talking? You have talked enough. You are learned people; you have seen the world. Why do you talk again and again? What are you going to say? It is a waste of time. Now be satisfied with whatever God has given you, and be complete in yourself, which has to be felt in your daily life. You will find that in this little microcosmic individuality of yours, the whole macrocosm will rise to action. The son of man will become the son of God. Be happy.