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When the spiritual outlook of life assumes a practical shape, it becomes religion in one’s day-to-day life. The conducting of one’s personality in its entirety in the light of this vision, which is spirituality, is religious practice. We have to bear in mind that religion is the life that we live, and it is just that. All conduct in life is a manifestation of a vision that we have in our entire arrangement with the total atmosphere.

Knowledge of what we are actually seeking is at the back of what we have to do in life. Inasmuch as all activity in life is an endeavour towards the fulfilment of the basic aspirations of our total personality, and also because of the fact that all aspiration is, in the end, spiritual, life in its varied performances also becomes spiritual. All work, everything that we do, our professions and our undertakings, are various ramifications of the central aspiration to achieve the direct experience of the spiritual constitution of existence.

We are likely to miss the point that the life that we live in this world is a complete encounter with the world as a whole and never, in any of our undertakings or works, are we fractionally connected with anything in the world. The world is a whole in itself and we too are a whole in our own selves. Thus the way in which we come in contact with the world is also a whole in its operation. But the way in which we usually think, due to personal desires, prevents this placement of the entirety of our personality in its real encounter with the whole world.

We belong to the whole world in this sense. It is not that we belong to any little segment of existence. There are no fractions anywhere in creation. Even the minute organisms are not fractions, and the smallest atom is a whole in itself. Our expectations in life are not fragmented. We do not ask for a little of something—we expect the whole of anything. That we are unable to achieve this purpose, that nothing in a wholesome manner comes to us, that we seem to be getting little, small things, is the outcome of our distracted approach in respect of the constituents of the world.

To be a religious person is not an easy job because if religion is the way of living, it is a process of the transmutation of oneself as required in the light of one’s placement in the structure of the world. If this is religion, any activity that would not touch the core of ourselves would be a kind of movement taking place on the surface of our being, touching not our own selves, and any work, any activity that proceeds not from our own selves but from the surface of our being will not bring satisfaction to our being. We will get nothing out of this world, inasmuch as our work does not manifest from our own selves. A deed is supposed to be a manifestation of one’s intentions. The intention is not merely makeshift. It is not a political adjustment or maneuver—it is a rising to the occasion of the whole that we are.

All spirituality is wholesome in its nature, to repeat once again what we have been considering earlier. Spirituality is the nature of the spirit, and the spirit is the essence of anything and everything. Inasmuch as there is an essence, a core in all things, there is also a spiritual longing in everything. Basically all asking is a spiritual asking. But because this call of the spirit, this expectation of the soul, passes through the medium of the sense organs, mind, intellect and even the physical relations, it gets diversified and diluted into the form of external contacts, and it loses the vitality with which it rose. It also gets divested of its very intention—the purpose for which we undertake to do anything in the world gets lost in the diversified forms through which this intention of ours reveals itself outwardly.

Our longings are not an outward movement. Our desires are not actually a physical activity. It is not merely the skin of the body that is asking for final freedom and satisfaction. We have a deeper core that remains in a state of dissatisfaction, due to which it asks for that alone which can free it from this eternal longing, the cause of its dissatisfaction. Many a time we find it difficult to extricate the inner content of our basic longing or aspiration from the external forms it takes when it passes through the shells of the personality, the forms of our individuality, or the sheaths of the body, as we say—the koshas, etc. As the light of the sun may appear to assume different colours and project itself through various rays in convex and concave forms or in distorted shapes, so this real asking of ourselves inwardly, which is wholly spiritual, appears to be a physical asking, a social requirement, an outward comfort that we actually seem to be wanting.

The outwardness in which our basic longing gets involved is the difficulty that we are facing in our life. Nothing in us is really outward. We are ourselves. We do not become something external to our own selves at any time. Therefore anything that emanates from us also cannot be an external action. No action can be really called external. The great teaching of the Bhagavadgita is just this much, that work is not an externalised performance. It is only when we are able to envisage the non-externality of the performance we call work that it becomes a divine worship. The divinity in our daily performances arises on account of the divinity that is at the back of our aspirations. Basically, we are divine in our essence. The soul is the symbol of divinity in us. Its longing is the true longing. What it asks for is only what anyone wants. This aspiration is called spiritual longing, a search for truth, and therefore it cannot be an outward time-conditioned performance. But it appears as if we are conditioned by the time process. The body is in the midst of the movement of time, divided into past, present and future. The body is a space which is three-dimensional. Because this is so and because we mistake our body for what we really are, we condition our spiritual longing by the pressures of the dimensions of space and the segmentations of time. Not only that—our longings appear to be physical rather than spiritual.

Do we not ask for physical comforts, though it is sure, as everyone knows very well, that physical comforts are not the only things that we need in the world. Yet we crave for physical satisfaction only. All our longings in the activities of our daily life are just a call for physical comfort. Even what we expect from human society and the administrative set-up of the government is physical. It is very unfortunate that we seem to want only physical satisfaction, security which is physical in its nature, protection against the annihilation of our physical existence, freedom from the fear of death of the physical body. We seem to be asking only this much, while this is not actually the intention of the soul. Our soul is not placed in space, it is not in time, it is not inside the body—it is a very widespread operation taking place everywhere at all times, in every nook and corner of creation. Spirituality is a universal operation. A spiritual seeking is not one man’s work. It is not something that someone does, somewhere independently, unrelated to other factors that conditions life in the world.

Spiritual asking, spiritual seeking, spiritual living, the religious conduct of existence is not a personal affair. It is not personal because spirituality is not limited to the physical personality of anyone. As I mentioned, we appear to be personally conditioned even in our religious practices. It looks as if someone is independently doing some spiritual practice somewhere because of a travesty of affairs that has taken place, because our inner spiritual longing passes through the lens of the covering of the soul, the bodily encasement. Inasmuch as it is so, it is assuming a form which is psychological sometimes, physical at other times. Very unfortunate that the unending joy that we expect from an eternal quest that is emanating from ourselves, has taken the form of a psychological security by means of name, fame, power, authority and a physical security by way of all available comforts and outward protection. The universal longing, which emanates from the universal centre which is our source, apparently assumes the form of the human desires and the social requirements of the personality. We should free ourselves from this predicament with a great effort of our will, intense reasoning along these lines, and a devoting of sufficient time in our daily life for this kind of meditation.

It is, first of all, essential for us to be convinced that we are more than what we appear to be. We always go with a satisfied feeling and take for granted that we are sons and daughters of people, socially connected with other persons, we are human to the core—we are nothing more, nothing less. If we are only individual units in human society and we are no more than that, our desires should be capable of fulfilment instantaneously by a human adjustment of values and a social adaptation of our life. But any kind of adjustment and adaptation does not give us freedom; we know that finally there is the icy hand of death that strikes on the head of everyone one day or the other in spite of any kind of adjustment that we make and all the protection that we expect, psychologically or physically.

There is a rule and a law, evidently, that defies the arguments of the physical body and human society. That law tells us that we shall be wrenched from this involvement which is physical and social by the operation of factors which are neither physical nor social. The asking for God is supposed to be the occupation of a religious person. Religion is spirituality in practise. Inasmuch as the spiritual vision of things, as we have noticed already, is a universal vision of all things—it cannot be anything else—the religious undertaking in our daily life also is a practise that is super-individualistic. It is not ever a social performance. It is not a creed to which we belong. It follows from this analysis that religion is not a character of a community; it is not conditioned by anything that we can associate with factors geographical, ethnic, linguistic, etc. It is a common requirement of anything that is alive, anything that is really human; all mankind basically has one longing only—to survive, and to survive at the highest possible reach of achievement.

But it appears that the forms of religion are multifold—there is no universal religion available in the world. This again is due to the fact that the otherwise universal upsurge of the human soul, which is the basic religious asking, gets conditioned by geographical factors, historical conditions and ethnic relations. All this merely highlights that we cannot easily get over the limitations of the physical body and our sense of belonging to a particular group of people called society, the idea of a nation or a country, sometimes going even lower into smaller circles of limitation, thus converting our so-called religion into a fanatic creed of a particular community, or perhaps even a little family.

This difficulty in first of all envisaging the true meaning of a spiritual vision and the difficulty of living a religious life is the reason why we have been told, again and again, that a special disciplinary process under a competent master has to be undergone by every seeking soul. A religious university is called for, evidently, for the training of religious seekers, which has to be carefully guarded from its spontaneous and automatic involvements in conditions which are other than spiritual and religious. A godly aspiration can get involved in ungodly conditions, which mostly happens, as we see through the passing of the history of religions of the world.

A disciplined approach to the fulfilment of our spiritual longing is usually known as the practice of yoga. Nowadays the word ‘yoga’ has become so very familiar in the countries of the world that it does not require much of an introduction. Everyone is a yoga student, of a yoga teacher, from one’s own vision of what yoga is. But in order that yoga may yield its desired fruit, it has to become the true implementation of the real religion which we are expected to live as a manifestation of a totally spiritual vision of life. We are told that yoga is a kind of union, a unitedness of ourselves with something in all the levels of our being and in all our relationships with people.

We have different kinds of yogas with which we are all familiar. These definitions of yoga relate to the many-sided approach that is possible in the practise of this discipline, in the light of the temperaments of people, varying one from the other, and conditions of life differing in different ways. Nevertheless, in spite of these differences that we concede on account of varying temperaments, basically yoga is an onward march of the deepest roots of whatever we are. This march is a systematic process of expansion on one side and ascent on the other side—it has a width as well as a height.

In our daily routines of yoga we become wider personalities, more than what we physically and individually are. That means to say, we become more considerate in our relationships with people—we become loving in our conduct, we become appreciative of the circumstances in which other people are placed, we are cooperative and sympathetic with others, we harm not any living being, we deceive not anyone in society, we grab not anyone’s property, we hoard not wealth more than what we require for our basic existence, and we live a life of utter truthfulness. This is how we can expand our personality into a cooperative existence so that society, not merely of human beings but even of all beings, gets transformed into a framework of association and cooperation with us. The world is at our back in a relationship of friendliness and sympathy and affection—the world shall love us. We become sarvabhutahite rataha, in the language of the Bhagavadgita. This is how we expand the dimension of our personality—socially, horizontally, as it were. The yamas and niyamas mentioned in the yoga system are this much—a consideration on our part in relation to the world in which we live, so that we do not live as strangers in our own world but become citizens of this universe.

But there is also, at the same time, an ascending factor in the practice of yoga, other than the expansion of a horizontal dimension by way of social cooperation and external consideration of values. This, as the ascending aspect of the practice of yoga, is the higher side of it. It is also said that yoga involves a twofold practice known as vairagya and abhyasa. Maybe from one point of view, at least, we may say that this horizontal dimension of ours, expanding beyond the limitations of the physical body, is a kind of practice involving detachment and freedom from attachment but for which our affection for the things of the world, our cooperation with things would be impossible—vairagya is this much.