Sri Swami Sivananda and His Mission

by Swami Krishnananda

However, mistakes are made even by great men; and in the greatest pursuit of life, which is the religious pursuit, we can make a terrible blunder—just as we can make a mistake in a little calculation of arithmetic in school. The susceptibility to commit mistakes is what is important, and not the kind of mistake that we have made. There is an old saying that a person who steals a pencil is as great a thief as one who has stolen an elephant. So we cannot say he has stolen only a pencil and not an elephant, and therefore he is not a thief. The character of being a thief is important, and not the object that is associated with that act. Hence, the susceptibility of our inner constitution is to be taken notice of, and not the actual physical consequence that follows from it, because it is a weakness; and a weakness is a kind of illness. It is a weakness of a difficult type—namely, the impossibility and incapacity on our part to judge things correctly. Considering this impossibility on our part, we have been told: “Judge not lest you be judged.” Who are we to judge? We always make a mistake in judging things.

Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was a great religious leader and a veritable incarnation. He was a teacher of religion, spirituality and yoga. What sort of religion did he preach? What was the yoga that he taught, and what was his interpretation of the renunciation of the world—or rather, being a Sannyasin, which he himself was? Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj—Gurudev—was a Sannyasin par excellence. He renounced, and therefore we would also like to renounce as he did. He was a religious stalwart. We also would like to become religious stalwarts. He was a spiritual seeker and a spiritual seer, and we also would like to be like him. Now, what does all this imply? The great role that this unique master played in the field of religion and philosophy is the rectification of these blunderous involvements of the human mind in its asking for noble things like religious ideals. As I mentioned, we commit the same mistake in large things that we make in small things. The capacity to commit mistakes is what is to be considered; and we carry this susceptibility always. A reluctant worker is always reluctant, even in the face of God Himself, because reluctancy is a peculiar trait of the mind, and so are the traits and incompatibilities in which it is involved.

The philosophy and the teachings of Sri Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj are difficult to understand unless the entire compass of his writings is covered in a research mood and in the attitude of a sincere and earnest student. It is not possible to understand any scripture or the work of any great philosopher by reading only a few lines of what he wrote here and there, because their teachings comprise a compact presentation of the values of life. We cannot fully receive what such towering teachings hand down to us unless we are prepared and are capable of receiving the teachings. The teacher and what is taught are important, no doubt. We ask for big gurus and large teachings; but we have to be so made, burnt and burnished that this lofty instruction should pass through the medium of our personalities.

We never pay sufficient attention to this unavoidable and imperative condition that the preparation of the mind for the reception of knowledge is as important as the nature of the knowledge that is communicated. We have some idea as to what this knowledge is. It is something that is, on the one hand, totally different from the knowledge we acquire by means of empirical studies in the world; and, on the other hand, it includes every kind of learning, art and knowledge. The little I mentioned just now about the conditioning factors of the human mind will make it clear that it will not be easy for one to get out of this condition—which is necessary to do in order to absorb and imbibe the significance and meaning of this imparted knowledge, or even to understand the significance of the life of a saint. The completeness of the teaching also involves its many-sided variegatedness.

This also applies to the very life of the teacher himself. It is such a many-sided presentation that, for a casual onlooker, it may appear to be a bundle of contradictions. When looking casually, we sometimes see irreconcilable statements even in the Bhagavadgita. We do not know what it tells us, finally. The behaviour of these great masters, geniuses, religious heads is like God’s behaviour in this world. It is not a uniform, rounded ball that is presented to us. The multifacetedness of the very meaning of life is the explanation for the incongruence that we often see in the lives of these great masters—because we have a streamlined, blinkered perception. We cannot see all sides of any particular issue. This is due to the lodgement of our thinking faculty in certain crucibles into which it has been cast. It will take the shape only of those crucibles, and there is no other way of thinking. We have been cast in that mould. A human mind will think only like a human mind, and a human mind will think only that which a particular impulse pressing itself forward under a given moment would permit.

Therefore, it was laid down that a student that approaches a teacher should be prepared to undergo the required purificatory process—namely, the practice of the canons of what are known as the yamas and niyamas, and the well-known Sadhana Chatushtaya system—in order to prepare the mind to receive it. The light of the knowledge will then reflect itself as expected by the student. The teaching method in this field called religion or spirituality is not the method that is followed in schools and colleges. We do not sign an application form or an admission form and go and sit at a desk and listen to a lecture to get this knowledge. This is not a commodity that can be transported from one brain to another brain. There is no means of communicating this knowledge. Therefore, here the way of teaching is spiritual.

The spiritual way of the communication of knowledge is by living the knowledge—living it. The knowledge of a saint is the same as the life that he lives. It is not a book that he has written. What he thinks, how he lives and what he does is the exact counterpart of the knowledge with which he is blessed. The student is prepared in the same way as an embodiment that lives that knowledge. It is not thinking some thoughts that is knowledge. It is not memorising some texts that is knowledge. It is an infusing of a mode of living and a transfiguration of the psychophysical personality in us—which we are—so that, just as we feel a kind of energising bolt entering into us when we are given a vitamin injection, so do we feel an energising atmosphere within us when knowledge enters us. We have to repeat, again, that knowledge is being of knowledge; it is not an acquiring of something that is from outside.

Hence, it was difficult for many people to live with Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. Thousands must have come here as dedicated ones and with a determination to live here till they attained salvation—but it was not to be. Among the many that came here, even a handful did not find it convenient to stay, because it is not merely staying in a geographical place. It is not listening to what is told; it is not doing some work. It is a transforming of oneself into a higher person, a lofty individual, a stronger embodiment of the very thing that one knows. To live the life spiritual is to make knowledge one’s torch in the movement of the career of our lives.

In the present condition of our minds it would be difficult for us to understand what it means to live the knowledge. It is something that we hear, the meaning of which cannot be very clear. How can we live our knowledge when we make this inveterate conclusion, again and again, that knowledge is an abstract acquisition by way of information gathered by the mind, which also looks like an ethereal something while the body is a solid object? We conclude that the solidity and the substantiality of the beingness of a thing are to be equated with a physical condition of the thingness of anything. Whenever we think of realities, substances, we compare them with bodies—stones, trees, mud, or this physical body of ours—and in that sense, the mind does not look real. We have never seen the mind, and we have never seen knowledge. It is something that is conceived.

Thus, our knowledge seems to be a conceptualisation, an idealisation of certain features of the human psyche, and we are unable to attribute to it as much reality and substantiality as we give to our physical bodies. Even the most learned person in the world will not be able to credit his knowledge with as much reality as he gives to his physical body. This is a tragedy. But, knowledge is not an ethereal abstraction; it is a solid thing. The body is not as solid and substantial as knowledge is, nor is it as hard or concrete as being is. It is not the body that is important; it is the being of the body that is important. Here, again, we are in a difficulty. We cannot conceive being except as some thought process, while being is not a process of thought. It is at the back of even the very way of thinking itself. Just as knowledge is not a concept, being is not an idea.

We who are used to thinking in a totally topsy-turvy fashion will be able to agree that we are not fully prepared for the reception of this kind of knowledge, where knowing is not a property that we own as an outside something. It is something that has entered us and become what we ourselves are. The more we know, the stronger we are. The more we know, the more righteous we are. The more we know, the happier we are. This is a little touchstone, a graph by which we can judge ourselves. To what extent are we powerful and strong in ourselves? To what extent are we men of virtue and righteousness and goodness? To what percentage are we happy in life? In that percentage, to that extent, we are learned people—educated, cultured, men of wisdom. If this is not there, there is something awfully wrong with our very approach to things; and if we are awfully wrong everywhere, we are wrong in our religious practices also.

Spirituality has to be remodelled to suit not the current mindset of the people living in the present-day world, but it has to be modelled according to the requirement of its own basic composition. If we wish to scale the peak of Mount Everest, we have to be competent to reach its top. We cannot bring down the height of the mountain to our level because we are puny creatures. Similarly, the magnitude of this great life we call spiritual life cannot be brought down to our little level, the puny condition of our distorted thinking. We have to lift ourselves to that status.

It is just to bring about a total transformation in the religious outlook of people in general that the incarnation of the great master Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj had to be effected by God Almighty; and he gave what I may call a transforming magical touch to every issue of life. There was a spirit, or the spirit of spirituality we may say, hidden behind every writing of his. Even a line that he wrote on a medical subject—on ayurveda, allopathy, naturopathy, or on such simple commonsense subjects like how to become rich, how to be successful in life, and so on—even these very, very realistic and down-to-earth teachings had the thrust of a spiritual connotation. And he would not forget to implant in these little commonsense teachings for the work-a-day man that God-realisation is the goal of life. But in what sense is the goal of life to be conceived by mortal man? For that Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj lived, for that he worked, and for that he dedicated his life.