Sri Swami Sivananda and His Mission

by Swami Krishnananda

The import is that the world of matter, when it is fully controlled, is the solution for the problems of man. We have fast-moving vehicles and machines which can rapidly produce commodities which would take years for us to produce manually. And when the powers of electricity were discovered, people thought they were veritably in heaven. Even today, at this moment, we know the suzerainty of electrical power in the world. We cannot move an inch without the aid of an electric force. For everything, whatever be that operation of ours, there is the need for summoning what is called electric energy. A day may come when we may not even be able to swallow our food without some mechanism, and that may be the apotheosis and the goal of our achievements. Today we are far more advanced in the operation of physical matter than we were in the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the time when Newton ruled the world of science. He was the God of science. Even today Newton is a god in some way because of his study and research in the field of physical manipulation and the operation of matter.

‘Matter’ is a crucial word, and that became the deity which man began to worship. Everything that we have to control and anything that is necessary for our comfort as an appurtenance coming from outside is matter, a material value. All our joy is there, outside. It is in a machine; it is in an office; it is in some action which is to be performed in some place; it is somewhere outside us. The idea that all the values of human life are somewhere outside the human being is the thinking of materialists. Anything that is worthwhile in life is outside us. It is not inside us, because what is inside us is the mind, and the mind has to summon support from forces outside.

The dependence of the human individual on forces which are outside the human individual is called the philosophy of materialism. This was highlighted almost to the breaking point at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was considered very great to be educated along these lines and an educated person was a master of the knowledge of handling material power. The curriculum of studies in schools and colleges was designed in such a manner that it adapted itself very ably to this outlook of life which was framed in the light of material science; and we in India are well aware of this fact. When we compare the present system of education with the details of Macaulay’s system of education, written many years ago—a policy of training people—we will see how the very fundamentals of learning on the basis of a commercial interpretation of life, which is the child of material philosophy, were developed. A commercial outlook is begot by materialistic science. Hence, everyone who is wholly a commercial person is also a materialist.

Education which was framed under the aegis of this kind became the guideline for the normal behaviour of people in all fields of life. Man sold himself to the devil, as it were. Goethe, the great German poet, wrote the epic of Faust, which is the story of a person who sold himself to the devil. By reading that epic we can know the conditions under which man may be compelled to do these things. There is a time in the life of a man when he would not mind bargaining with the devil and saying, “Here I am; purchase me” in return for comfort and the dizzy feeling of satisfaction that comes from an atmosphere which is totally outside. It is Heaven selling itself to Hell, saying, “Hell, my dear, come and possess me.”

I am not telling a story of something that happened merely in the past; it is something that is happening even today. Today we are no longer under the lordship of Newton, the scientist. Macaulay is dead and the classical materialists of science are not as prominent as they were earlier. Though there are saints and sages, and spiritual institutions, the generality of the outlook of people has not changed. If we honestly view things from the bottom of our heart—view and interpret things dispassionately—we will see that the basic outlook of people in general has not changed. Though we may not call ourselves materialists and none of us may think that commercial life is the whole of life, though we are religious people who pray, study the scriptures and meditate every day, it is necessary to understand what it is to be a materialist in order to know whether we are free from its clutches.

A lack of confidence in powers that are not entirely outside and a wholesale confidence in powers that are entirely placed outwardly in life is a tendency to materialism. For instance, the love of money can make a person giddy; and a person can even collapse into coma and death if money in the form of gold and silver is lost. Anything associated with this kind of outlook is nothing but an apotheosis or deification of materialism. Each one has to be a judge for one’s own self because each person is ultimately a client before the Supreme Judge, the Almighty Creator. There is no proxy, no advocate here when we are placed face to face in the court of the Universal Judiciary. There is no use saying that everything shall be fine. There is a heart inside our heart, and that which is within the heart will be our lawyer who will argue dispassionately, properly, without any kind of twisting of the facts.

In this light, we will find that even though eighty years have passed, not much change has taken place in the general evaluation of things in life. We are in the eighty-fifth year of the twentieth century. But in human history, eighty-five years is very little, though some action has already been taken by the Time Spirit. I mentioned that sometime during the beginning of the twentieth century, or a few years earlier, it appeared that the world was headed towards the breaking point. The powers of health in our body give us a long rope, and they act only when we go to the breaking point. Many of us are not aware that we are tending towards illness, because illness is felt only when it is manifest outside as a headache or a stomach ache, etc. An inward tendency to a non-alignment of the psyche cannot be known unless it rises to the conscious level of our mind. Similarly, we may not know what is going on in the world. We should not merely say that so many years have passed. These years are only the beginning of the first step, as it were, of the working of the Time Spirit.

As I said, the materialist forces went to the breaking point. Anything carried to the extreme tends to tilt the balance to the other side, and suddenly there is catastrophe. A world war took place, and we can imagine what kind of catastrophe it was—the abolition, the annihilation of life, and the placing of people in utter insecurity. This is what one may feel when the temperature of the body rises to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Precarious—one does not know whether one will live or die. That kind of fever of action of the moving spirit of the world is what is called a cataclysm, a cyclone, a war, a battle, destruction and sorrow—which comes in a pronounced manner and in a most unexpected fashion, and which will almost break the heart of a person. We can imagine how it feels to be so ill that we do not know what will become of us. But, these are the rectifying forces of nature emerging forth at that time.

Great personalities—we may call them incarnations, avataras, purushas, the healing spirits of mankind—incarnated themselves in different parts of the world. When we speak of incarnations, generally we think of Jesus Christ, Lord Krishna, Rama, Buddha, Guru Nanak; these are the people who come to mind when we think of incarnations. But a divine interference need not necessarily be in the form of these well-known personalities. It can be any event which sets right the whole situation, and it can be any person who sees to it that things are all right. It may even be the head of a village. Why go so far to people who are well known in history? The chief of a village or a community may be a rectifying medium for the trouble there, and it is a divine interference.

Anything that contributes to the maintenance of a balance in society or in the personality of an individual is the coming into action of God Himself, because God is another name for the power of balance. Anything that sets a thing in a state of equilibrium is the work of God, though it may be so very insignificantly manifest as not to be noticed by even the person who is benefited. For instance, a person who did not feel well yesterday could be all right today for reasons which he does not know. He rested, and feels better. What has happened? Something has worked which was not known even to him. What is meant by resting and becoming better? It is a manner of speaking, another way of accepting that a healing power has worked. What we call rest is nothing but the working of that healing power introducing itself, even without announcing itself to us and even without our knowledge of its having done any work at all. In this sense, whenever there is peace of mind, whenever we are healthy, whenever we feel comfortable and satisfied, we may be sure that God has worked.

Such pronounced actions of God make themselves felt in human history. This was the theme with which I began. These pronounced manifestations in human history, from our point of view at least, are the descent of great personalities. It is my intention, during these days, to bestow a little thought to the role played by these masters who were felt in various parts of the world as if they were touching our skin. Only if we know history very well can we know who these persons were. They include even great generals of the army, and not only those whom we regard as holy people. Field marshals who won astounding victories are also to be taken into consideration in the assessment of the manner in which God works.

God’s action is both pleasant and unpleasant. As I mentioned, to have a high fever is not a pleasant phenomenon even though it is necessary, and that which is necessary need not necessarily be psychologically satisfying. Our psyche is attached to the bodily conditions of prejudice and a narrow-minded attitude to things in general, so that which is good for us is not always pleasant for us. The good and the necessary sometimes looks like unpleasant occurrences because of our inability to think impartially—being totally wedded, as we are, to a partial and individual outlook of things.

Thus came personalities of a lofty stature, from spiritual leaders like Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda and Swami Rama Tirtha, social resuscitating powers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and great political geniuses turned into great masters of the spirit, such as Sri Aurobindo Ghosh; and there are others such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, with whom we are all very familiar. These personalities come and go. They come in order to do something; they do it, and go. And, they go in the manner that is necessary for them to go—not as we prescribe. They may go in any way, and how they have to bear this exit is left to the discretion of the great Director of this drama of the cosmos. The wages are paid according to the performance, but everybody is paid.

In this great saga of the coming of masters, geniuses, there is one among us whom we have seen: the great master Gurudev Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, whose life some of us have witnessed physically, and many of you have heard and read about. His coming effected a transforming dramatic touch to the lives of people, and the entire procedure and methodology of spiritual action can be regarded as the story of the ascent of man to God. It is a story which Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj lived in his own personality, and a story through which we have to pass, each one of us individually—a story which is also the theme of every one of the works that he wrote, which, in miniature, may be said to be the story of the world in its aspiration for God.

These are the issues that shall receive our attention.