Talks and Lectures on the System of Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga

Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga: A Way of Life

Talk delivered at Vijayawada on 25-2-1968

I have been asked to speak to you on Sri Ramchandra's Raja Yoga. I have had a strenuous philosophic and academic life, running alongside my spiritual aspiration for realizing the Ultimate truth or reality. Therefore it has become very important for me to express myself very clearly on this new methodology by which the Divine can be known in the most easy and simple manner. The Lord Buddha, at one stage in the evolution of our country's religion, stated that his path was sweet at the beginning, sweet in the middle, and sweet in the end. Similarly the Sri Ramchandra's Raja Yoga is simple and sweet in the beginning, simple and sweet in the middle and simple and sweet at the end. For the realization that has been promised by this simple system, it does not ask you to break your head with metaphysical words or technical phraseologies so commonly used by our learned people and philosophers. This is particularly absent in this system. We hold that speech and talk have to be thoroughly disciplined and made to be appropriate to the great subject of God. God, in the English language at least, consists of only 3 letters and our "Omkar" again consists of 3 letters. They are very simple to utter, simple to remember. But such a god-head has been made complicated, and we are today witnessing the clash of philosophies and cults devoted to God in his manifold form or appearance. But suppose you spent all your lives in turning towards understanding the nature of God in his infinite multiplicity, you must certainly spend a crore of lives before you exhaust the inexhaustible. Therefore, that path of trying to get God in his manifoldness is fraught with great ignorance and even conflict. I will not enter into the important divergences which have happened in our own cultural patterns.

So, I shall now speak about Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga as a natural path of yoga. We have had, as I told you, these religions and these philosophies which are facets of culture. The adaptation of man to the cosmic processes of nature was by naming them, and by taking each one phenomenon of nature as being governed by an aspect of God. So, we have got as many gods as we could desire. Perhaps there are also many other gods in the making. Anyway, that has only led us to an artificial society of cultural nature. So Indian culture is rich with variety, and many people claim there is unity, or that there ought to be unity; but unity is not easily arrived at by that route of pursuing the diversity. Therefore, we have to return to what is called the original datum of experiencing God himself and to discover how, firstly, to go about connecting ourselves with God. Secondly, I will say that our present situation is such that many people ask me the simple question, "Why do we want a Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga when our great people have already given several margs?" For example they have stated that we have Karma Yoga, that we have Gnana Yoga, that we have Bhakti yoga; you may add even Hatha Yoga or Tantra Yoga and any other number of yogas. If each one of them could be multiplying then this is one more such thing which we are making today and the process is going on. Some people combine two yogas and speak about gnana-karma-samujya-yoga or gnana - bhakti - samujya - yoga. And then we have got the purna yoga which Sri Aurobindo has himself claimed as a unique integral yoga combining the best of all the yogas. This being so, why do you want a Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga?

Now this Raja Yoga is claimed by Sri Ram Chandraji, the founder of this particular Yoga, to be a purified version of the original version of Raja Yoga, and therefore he said the most natural thing to man is the Ultimate mind which is that of God. If we can use the Ultimate mind of God for the transformation of the nature of our little minds, or diversified minds, then it would be the simplest way by which we can transform our life of misery into a life of divine happiness and gratitude. Therefore all that is needed is somehow to secure the approach to the Ultimate mind or the mind of God, and connect it with our little mind which is resident in our hearts and expresses itself through our emotions and such other feelings, ideas and thoughts. This process by which we are trying to get the Ultimate mind to have a place in our mind and do the work of transformation of our consciousness and mind appears to be easy on the face of it. But it may be held that it is most difficult to get God's mind to come into us. So much so, the other yogas which I mentioned earlier have reversed the whole process and said that firstly let us do some duty or some karma which comprises, according to our ancients, yagas and yagnas and other tantras and yantras, worship or manipulating them. By that process they say you can connect yourself with God, and after the connection is made then you will get God to play in your consciousness and modify you.

The gnana yogin, on the other hand, says if you study the scriptures and know the relation, as stated in those scriptures, between you and God, or if you know the tattvas and if you merely can go on contemplating on, or reciting or repeating those sacred texts, you will get the connection with God, and after that everything will be easy. According to bhakti yoga, they say, if you can do the devotionals like - Sravanam, Keerthanam, Mananam and Nivedanam and so on, you will get connection with God however blind you are in respect of other matters. And once the connection with God is attained then I think our problems are solved. Some others say, like the Hatha yogis, that if only you can control your body, its postures, and perform pranayama and the other mudras, then you will get connection with God; of course it is a difficult path, but nothing great can be attained without some difficulty or effort. And so we have been accustomed to very effortful individual paths. So much so, by the time we ever think of attaining the goal, we are so tired that we think of leaving the whole thing and leave ourselves to fate and seek what is called Saranagati or surrender. So individual efforts, even when fully undertaken, had to be performed for quite a long time and perhaps for several generations and several lives. Bahunam Janmanam Ante Gnanavan mam Prapadyate". A man must take several lives before he becomes a Gnani and then alone he falls prostrate before God and surrenders unto Him. But if surrender can be taken at once, then most probably you can give up these karma yogas and gnana yogas and bhakti yogas because you would have got God almost by the time you surrender to Him.

So this path of Saranagati was discovered by the ancients as the simplest path, provided you are Gnani enough to realize, or intelligent enough to realize, that if you can surrender to God directly (at once) and if you can fall at his feet, then God is to be had without all these human egoistic efforts involving so much of trouble, money, expense, and even life. But you know again this Saranagati which was such an easy method did not follow it up. You did Saranagati but there are somethings required. God was willing to enter into you, but you did not receive God into your heart. You tried to escape from your misery but would not receive God in your heart. In fact you are satisfied if your fears are removed, depending on God's assurance in Srimad Ramayan. If only you surrender once

Sakrudeva Prapannaya Tavasmiti Yachate
Abhayam Sarvabhutebhyo Dadami Etat vratam Mama.

But then you did not follow it up. Saranagati became just an instrument, not a Yoga. But it is a Yoga, it connects you with God at once. Now, if we can use that technique in our Raja Yoga by which we can begin to have God's consciousness or mind to play into our heart, and if God consents to do that, consents to descend into our heart through his thought at first, and by his being later on, then our problem is solved. This is the crux of the matter. The artificial way by which we connect ourselves with God after arduous work and effort, in the process develops our ego to a very great extent. It is the most unnatural way by which you can connect yourself with God, it is artificial. It may be that all our culture only registers this process by which man is being more and more alienated from nature. Man thinks he is apart from nature, other than nature, and has to fight with nature, struggle against her. And then our modern scientists are making efforts, as I may put it, to make nature yield to our will for the sake of our comfort, for our pleasure, for our needs and so on and so forth. So we are in a sense pitted against nature, and equally we are pitted against God, because we do not want to reach God naturally but unnaturally, artificially. So, as against that, it was proposed that if we could somehow get that Supreme consciousness of God to enter into us and to shape us to become at one with nature, at peace with nature, in harmony with nature, it would be the most natural thing possible. For this a pure heart is needed, a heart that is anxious to realize that it is one with the Divine or God; that is aspiring finally to see God, to know God and to enter into God; that has as its final destination a harmony with the entire nature including all humanity and all life. That is a consummation, I believe, which every body would desire.

That is why some of our great modern prophets like Rousseau were saying that we are to cultivate a natural life. In America, Walt Whitman and Thoreau, and in Russia, Tolstoy, all of them pleaded for a natural life, not an artificial sophisticated life that has come into being, or was coming into being even in their times in America and in Europe. Today that phenomenon is occurring in India. The same sophistication, the same unnaturalness, the same rigidity of mechanized existence is with us. We are an unnatural people today, despite all the religions, which have already produced their quota of unnaturalness in our lives. So it is that Sri Ram Chandraji the elder, I will call him the elder, thought that it was an easy way which should be presented to our people, who are fitted to receive it, thanks to the great heritage of the past. So he said, "I can bring back that consciousness of the divine mind and connect it with your heart." Well, you might say it is a great claim, and from what our Rishis and other people have said, it must be considered to be a fantastic claim. I have no doubt, I myself thought so too. We could reason and argue with something one could do. But how to believe that God Himself will come and enter into our hearts just for the asking. It is impossible. Some people wanted lot of money so that they can bring God to you. Some people wanted properties to be given to them so that they can make the effort to bring God to them. Well what I think is that while people were bargaining as to how much they can pay to God, or pay to the person to bring God to them, God Himself came by the backdoor. And I think he cheated these great people who were trying to invest in God. So like that, Sri Ram Chandraji of Fatehgarh thought it was most easy to get God, and he showed that He can be got almost in silence and without fan-fare and trumpets and without garlands. And that was what I found when the present President of the Sri Ram Chandra Mission and its Founder, Sri Ram Chandraji by name, came to me and said "well, I will do the job!". Looking at him I never imagined that he was capable of that. That was my sophistication! I had the feeling that realized souls must be extraordinarily good looking like this or like that, enchanting people and so on, But here was a very silent, unobtrusive man, who I think, cannot be recognized in a public place as anybody different from anybody else. And yet such was the man who promised to deliver the most important secret of being to me; not only to me but to everybody afterwards. So I had merely to ask him to do the job.

He said that Transmission, or Pranahuti as he called it, is the most important thing that happens, and explained to me that this Pranahuti or giving of Prana to you is, in fact, the way by which the transcendental, or the Ultimate thought or consciousness, the sovereign principle in man, can be given to me in its purest state in the heart. All of us know according to our own sastras, that God is the breath of breath, "Pranasya Pranah.". If that Supreme being or Prana is given into our heart, that is what is called 'Ujjivanam,' upward movement of the soul, a new life is got. The spiritual life, this Ujjivanam, he said he would do. It is like a tonic administered into the system, or in the language of Homoeopathy, very highly potentised Divine force is introduced into the heart, which makes the thought within us of the same nature as itself, though poisonous now. It converts our mind into an efficient, wonderful, creative force or life-giving force.

All of us are said to be suffering from 'mind', now a days. Everybody wants that his thought should be controlled. And we have got all sorts of thoughts, the most material. I mean, even the most cruel thoughts are within us, hatred, cruelty, desire, avarice, delusion, fantastic notions. All these things are within us. Now these things could be immediately changed by the introduction of this highly potentised stuff of God's thoughts. The idea is that that Supreme thought has become grosser and grosser till it has become what it is, a poison. When it became centred in your mind and in mine and has become the instrument of our thinking itself, our thought has become vitiated, corrupted by our own perverse or inverse desires.

So the only cure is God, and it was realized by many people, saints, and the Bhaktas, who said God's name is the one thing that will make everything else go out. But, how to utter the name? Not by repeating it will you get that state. The name must mean something to you for transforming your inner consciousness or thought. For some time we thought in the hands of some great men the name did work, but later on, as you find it, even if you write a thousand or a crore of times the name Sri Ram nothing happens. The mystic charm with which it was working like a talisman in previous ages refused to work, even though it was told that, in Kaliyuga the name of God is quite enough. But what happened? Therefore our people said that the man who gives the Diksha or mantra must be of the highest calibre. And then what is more important is not the mantra but the force with which he introduces or gives it to you. But if that force has become gross and not highly potentised, as I put it, it is not the highest thought of God. Then what happens? It becomes useless, ineffective and then you complain like many people, "Sir, drug has not worked", because you have not been given the highly potentised one, and the potentised nature of the drug is what is necessary. You want the most subtle thing to come in. So the Master said, "Other people might have given less subtle things, but that has not changed us. Let me now try the Ultimate". Therefore, he must have done enough penance, I believe, or he must have got enough grace of the Divine to have permitted him to use His force. All that is what I can conjecture. Or else it is impossible for anybody.

So almost at the very first introduction of that consciousness into me, perhaps on the very first occasion I met him during the 3 days he stayed with me - thanks to his grace, perhaps, thanks also to my good luck, I was able to see something of the Ultimate, But I shall not exaggerate. This I knew, that it was capable of working. During the past 12 years I have been in this particular work of realizing God more and more, I found the efficacy of this transmission from above. Now this is so natural, I was not expected to leave anything of my own accord, by my own effort. Automatically everything seemed to change, slowly of course. No dramatic changes were there, but slow change as all natural processes are slow, but gradual and steady uninterrupted, unarrested; and the hand of God's activity or His thought within me was persistent through day and through night. It was not necessary even that the Master should be before me. Once it had begun to work, it began to work automatically also. This is what I call naturalness. I was made to become calm, not by any coercion or saying 'Be calm'. No orders please, but by quiet performance! Something happened which prevented me from being otherwise than calm. Slowly the Arishadvargas (six-fold enemies - kama, krodha, moha, lobha, mada, matsarya) began to yield. Slowly the controls of my consciousness became freedoms, rather than controls. So this natural process of transformation of the human being and nature, which is a prelude to the final and culminating transformation of man into Godliness or Suddha Satva - being or divinised nature, was achieved by the simplest process of introduction of what is called the divine consciousness into me and into so many of my associates during the last 10 years all over this country. So I said to myself, 'here is a method which is natural to man. Man is bound to become divine by the process of this spiritual evolution."

If one does not believe in the theory of evolution, man has to return to God's nature and that is his destination, sooner or later. It is true a few people hold that if you do not turn towards God but turn away from Him, you might become an Asura or go to hell. But many others realize, even those persons will have to turn to God when they meet with the ultimate crisis of their lives. Therefore even to such men it is possible that the grace of God can be sent in. So this Pranahuti or the introduction or offering of the divine Prana into each individual man, so as to effect his individual transformation, and ultimately the transformation of the society or the family in which he is, is the most natural way and the simple. In the other systems, as I may put it, the problem of renunciation of life arises. If you want God you must renounce nature. If you want the spirit, you must deny matter. If you want God you must deny yourself also. Unless you merge into non-existence and into God, there is no realization. That type of renunciation is a turning away from nature and therefore it is, in a sense, unnatural.

Now what does this system do? This marga says, if a real consciousness of the divine can come here, the very environment will also begin to change and you become reconciled to nature, and in fact you become the principle by which nature and God are once again restored to their unity. Nature is said to be the mother, God is said to be the father, and you are said to be the son. The son cannot go about separating father and mother as some persons try to do. I believe, if there are differences between the father and the mother, it is the child that brings them together. Is it not then the business of the child to make his father and mother live together and grow together, and be proud of the children that they have? This view is there in our ancients, I may tell you. But we have, as I said, tried to divide what is united, or keep things divided that tend to get united even. If two persons are willing to join together there are some people anxious to divide them, and we have got enough stories going about for that purpose. So here that unnatural way of human relationships has to be resolved only by an appeal to the Divine who unites what is separated. Therefore this Pranahuti, the Ultimate principle by which everything lives and moves and has its being, has to be practised by everybody. It is now possible, thanks to Sri Ram Chandraji. He has been able to train many men to do this job of Pranahuti to anybody who comes and offers himself for spiritual upliftment and divine evolution. This again is an important thing. Previously only one man perhaps was able to give Mantra Diksha or Tantra Diksha or Yantra Diksha, and though there had been many people who have been reciters of the Veda, they themselves never got the permission to transmit this force of the divine consciousness or the Pranava or the Pranahuti. Or if it was ever available it was restricted to a few people of a particular caste or a particular religion. Or else it became esoteric or Rahasya.

Now this path of naturalness has not even the esotericism, which is said to be very necessary for getting God or God's consciousness into you. Here we do not have mantra because that has failed. There is no tantra I am sure, there is no yantra even. But what is here? A direct spiritual offering of the highest consciousness into your heart, which begins to set in motion your whole spiritual journey or Ujjivana till you reach the ultimate stature of God-head or the nature of God. You receive as a blessing in this, Sayujya; you receive as a blessing in this particular path Sarupyata also; and you have the vision, which is Salokyata with the Divine. As I said, the last hurdle of getting God himself to do the job has been crossed in this system. It has been made easy. God is simple, therefore he must be only achieved by simple means. God is sweet, he cannot be tasted by bitter things. God is omnipotent, omnipervasive, he cannot be won by impotence and privateness. This being so, I consider, after due deliberation and practice that this is what can be accepted by one and all, high or low, rich or poor, for, all of us are subject to our own individual private minds which are struggling against their privateness, and against their own irremediable fatigue.

We are all tired people, and to get zest for life, zest for being, zest for higher and higher realization, a divine union is one thing that this transmission of Pranahuti from God does. But it is a practical path, very practical. As I said there are no dogmas, there is only the acceptance that there is such a thing as a divine thought, and that it can come and enter into your heart; and then it asks you to observe yourself day by day and see whether your tensions are not removed, whether your life is not made easier, and harmony with the world is not more secure, and whether all the obstacles before you do not fade away like the mist in the morning sun.

This is the message of my Master, so easy to practise, so easy to get. There is nothing here with strings attached to it but love for the Ultimate life and aspiration for spiritual evolution and growth. In my humble opinion this is a message for the whole Universe; but I should say, in the words of my Master, unless India is made to accept this fine Yoga of harmony, it would be difficult for the World ever to rise far beyond. Our present cataclysmic age, atomic age or super-nuclear age has only posed before us the threat of Nature which is now rebelling against man, or against man's misuse of her. So before nature finally annihilates her children, let us awake and make use of this Divine weapon for security of ourselves, and peace and prosperity for all mankind and for the glory of nature herself.