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GOD IS CONSTANTLY WITH US AND READY
TO TAKE US UP AT THE SLIGHTEST SIGN ON OUR PART OF
ACCEPTING HIM
Dr. S.V.Raghavan
The topic of the seminar occurs in
Lecture 12 in the series of talks given by Rev. Dr.
KCV on the work of the Master Sriramchandraji
Maharaj, ‘Sahaj Marg Philosophy’.
We have once again gathered on this
august and auspicious occasion of Sri Krishna
Janmashtami to bask in the Sunshine of the grace of
the Eternally Present Supreme Personality, our
beloved Master Sriramchandraji of Shahjahanpur. We
are also gratefully aware that we will be drenched
to the core of our being by the sacred confluence of
the currents, Ganga- Jumni, on the occasion.
A perusal of the lecture referred to
will show that the topic resonates very well with
the thought of the day, ‘Lord Krishna had originally
introduced Bhakti in Raja Yoga in a way the yogis
know, because He knew the time was at hand when life
will be uncertain’. We will have occasion to address
this point, ‘Bhakti in a way as yogis know’ as we
progress in the discussion. The Master, while
discussing the system in the article Practical
Pursuit, (SS p 37) points out in the same vein when
He says, ‘Under the system, though the spiritual
training is imparted through transmission, still the
most important and indispensable thing remains for
the abhyasi to develop in himself. It is love and
devotion to supplement the abhyas. This feature was
introduced into Raja Yoga by Lord Krishna in order
to speed up the progress of abhyasis’. The Lord has
declared in the 9th Chapter of the Gita
that He is revealing therein the sovereign
knowledge, the sovereign secret which is of supreme
sanctity, directly realizable, in accordance with
the Law, easy to practice and imperishable. That is
nothing but the way of devotion. The Lord exhorts
Arjuna in the concluding verse of the Chapter and
through Arjuna all of us, to fix the mind on Him, be
devoted to Him alone, worship Him, revere Him and
gives the supreme assurance to such a devotee who
has thus disciplined the mind to dwell on Him as the
Ultimate goal and resting place that he shall
certainly attain to Him.
Our Master states while dealing with
the topic of devotion in Way to Realization (Role of
abhyasi) (WU p 58-9) that the abhyas becomes ‘a
luscious all absorbing engagement’ when the abhyasi
has developed an all consuming devotion to his
object of meditation.
The lecture from which the topic has
been extracted covers mainly the nature of
surrender, true love and devotion, the imperience
of devotion which an aspirant of the natural path
has at the knots associated in the pind pradesh,
miracles and their obstructive role in the smooth
progression towards the supreme goal and gurumatha
and manmatha disciples.
It is a philosophical and yogic
principle to state that God is both immanent and
transcendent. He is, rather He must be, constantly
with us being in us and certainly it is a
philosophical impossibility to get away from Him.
But the opaque layers we have accumulated through
our actions in innumerable lives performed driven by
the threefold attachment to property, progeny and
spouse and subject to the five fold distortions of
kama, krodha, moha, lobha and ahankara have so
settled on the inner core of Divinity preventing
even an inkling of His divine presence within. The
situation is further complicated by a sense of
separate ‘self’ responsible for the ‘I’ and ‘mine’
feelings which alienate us from all other forms of
Divine expression and the very Divine Source from
which all have come into being, by which all this is
interpenetrated and maintained and into which all
that is expressed will be involved. Ignorance of our
real nature and goal clarity are responsible for the
miseries, afflictions and suffering of embodied
existence. Man has to recognize first that he is in
serious trouble, really helpless to come out of it
based upon his own resourcefulness and come to
believe in God as a beneficent supreme power which
could be depended upon to deliver him out of his
miserable state. Master has stated in one of His
messages that soul is longing to feel its
characteristic which has gone out of sight namely
the balanced character which prevailed before
creation and the loss of this balanced state is
responsible for the intricacies created in our lives
paving the way for undergoing misery and sorrow. It
is the hidden dictum of Nature that all should lead
a peaceful and happy existence. But the intricacies
and complexities which are the spoilers of Nature’s
intentions have resulted through our own actions
issuing from the unbalanced state albeit done
seeking only lasting peace and happiness. Man has
resorted to prayer from time immemorial for the
resolution of his difficulties and protection from
danger to life, possessions and those dear to him.
Such a prayer was directed to a power
higher than him, which he believed to possess the
capacity and wisdom necessary for the fulfillment of
his expectations.
We need to dwell somewhat on our
conception of God for the sake of developing the
present discussion, as we need to be clear which is
that God we are talking about as referred to in the
topic and the discussion here is only an attempt at
arriving at what it may be. As sadhakas on the
Natural Path we find it perhaps easier to imperience
Him directly in the core of our being than attempt
to describe Him!
We know that God is beyond the grasp
of the mind and intellect and is exceedingly
difficult to conceive of. The Upanishads have
declared He is (anirvachaniya), indescribable, mind
and speech returning from there acknowledging their
failure to comprehend and describe Him. In a sense
He exhausts and exceeds all names and notions of
man, the only rational creature in manifestation and
who is His parallel as our Master reveals,
possessing the power of thought, is capable of
fashioning. Master has also counseled us to get rid
of all conceptions relating to God or Self, however
much one may be enamoured of such conceptions or
viewpoints, for final success in the project of
Realization. He makes it abundantly clear in the
message ‘The subtlest method’, ‘Thought when purely
Divine reaches the Source without fail. If corrupted
with attribute and qualities, Realization also
becomes corrupted and degraded.’ (p 62 SDG)
We find him discussing the subject in
Lecture 3 on Sahaj Marg Philosophy (CW V1 p 172-5)
and I would like to place before you some relevant
observations therefrom attempting to stick to the
author’s words as much as possible. After
discussing various views such as those of saguna-
the personal and nirguna- the impersonal the
religious and philosophical ones, Rev. KCV puts
before us the most preferred one, namely, God as a
Principle rather than the person. The devotee who is
perforce in the sphere of duality, needs a personal
God, some one in talking terms, knowing terms and
loving terms, a person whom he can adore, worship
and love.
If God were to be taken as a
principle, can He be worshipped in that manner? Dr.
KCV poses here the amusing question, ‘do we worship
the principle of gravitation’. God as first cause is
also loved for it, being the First Cause. We worship
persons in whom the laws are exhibited such as Satya
in a Gandhi or dharma in Rama and so on. To
exemplify a certain principle a man comes along and
gets worshipped. So if God is the Supreme Person He
exhibits the principles continuously incessantly and
eternally. Both the person and principle he exhibits
are bound together. Taking up next the way we
approach God, Rev. KCV says that religion is an
aesthetic approach to Reality while philosophy is an
intellectual approach. Now Dr.KCV makes an
interesting departure when he says that God can be
approached through the ‘will’ aspect of man which
goes beyond both the above two approaches and that
is why Master wanted in each one of us a will to go
beyond the frontiers of philosophy and religion.
Will in purer form breaks through these two barriers
of intellect and aesthetic. The Master states, ‘A
perfect will made at the very first step and
maintained all through shall never fail to achieve
complete success.’ (DR 37) Dr KCV states that a
perfect will is needed, the will to go beyond the
frontiers of philosophy and religion, reason and
feeling. He further suggests that thought in its
purer form is not an idea. It is just an aspiration
a force or an urge, a concept which is basic for our
understanding the dynamics of the call of the
devotee’s heart. Rev. KCV refers to Master’s
concept of the Ultimate as ‘energy’ and says that
concept goes beyond the intellectual and the
aesthetic. That condition is what we are aiming at
and it is the Ultimate Reality.
If God has to assist us and take us
up as the topic says, the question arises as to how
this is may brought about. We have to somehow call
upon God whose assistance we seek and ensure that
our call reaches Him. Does the sincere call of the
seeker fall on deaf ears or there is a response? It
is the experience of all sincere seekers that their
earnest cry does surely elicit the gracious response
of God. We will see the dynamics of this process
through the eyes of the Master.
Enquirers after the Ultimate Reality
have attempted to find out the ‘Thing’ behind
everything or the First Cause and identified three
basic entities whose fundamental nature and mutual
relationships are to be understood viz.,
God, man and Nature. The Master
tracing such an enquiry in His message Dynamic path
of Rajayoga states, “When the thinking itself takes
further evolution it leads us to what is behind
everything. Our ancients when they peeped into it
went direct to find the ultimate cause of the world,
the relation between man and God, and static and
dynamic values representing Nature. --- They even
went beyond everything which has resulted in the
discovery of some movements being the cause of all
existence. When we go to this extent we find the
Centre and its region giving knowledge of their
existence. --- We see everything tending towards the
Centre and the Centre itself yawning towards the
circumference. After our adventure we initiated the
value of our existence and felt the cooperation of
the highest power that is around us”. (SDG p 55-6)
The Master gives an explanation of the mystery of
God in a scientific way as He puts it, ‘God is the
Centre wherefrom the energy starts. Energy becomes
frozen if its utility is not there. So in order to
maintain His existence, He sent out the power which
resulted in creation.’ (SDG p 26)
Thus God is the Central energy which
reaches or ‘yawns’ out to the circumference
embracing all creation and incessantly attracts
everything to itself. This is somewhat similar to
the force of gravitation which holds the physical
cosmos together and which is an attractive force all
the time irrespective of distance and the mass of
the object. The only problem with the analogy is
this physical force is proportional to the mass and
falls off as the inverse square of the separating
distance. However there can be no diminution or
variation in the Godly force under any circumstance
as He is samavarthi behaving equally with respect to
all. The difference felt is at our end only because
of the grossness accumulated over our spiritual
centres which attenuates greatly the effect, the
grace, power and piety of the higher centres or
realms of superconsciousness. The opacity is to such
a great extent in the vast majority of cases that
man does not feel the presence of God in him and
many go to the extent of denying His existence
altogether. All things observed could be explained
through the play of material forces and effects;
even mental and emotional phenomena are nothing but
the result of the collective and coordinated dance
of neurons in the brain. Some leading
neuro-psychologists claim that man’s brain is
‘wired’ for the God-experience.
The Master describes this fall and
also the process by which the sincere seeker gets a
real master in Method of Training (SDG 48), ‘Now our
life changed from spirituality to matter and this
went on and we became worse. Somehow either by the
effect of circumstances or by the company of pious
persons, we got a passing air of Divinity and began
to compare it with the present state and then we
came to know that there is something superior to
what we have. We now began to seek the method to
revive our original condition. We searched for a
proper man.
If the thought deeply touched the
core of the centre which is found ultimately in all
centres, in other words, if somehow we touched the
spirituality, the basic substance of all the
centres, it produced a kind of trembling and as
every action has some result, it had its own i.e.,
it would lead us to the proper man who is really
spiritual.’
When one makes up his mind or will
and cultivates a strong and sincere desire to reach
the state of Realization, he will surely get the
means for it. When the thought becomes stronger, the
activity for Realization develops. The burning
desire for Realization brings the goal nearer. (SDG
p 64) This burning desire for attaining the goal or
achieving oneness with God, the Ultimate is
aspiration. We have seen earlier that aspiration is
a force or an urge which enables us to move towards
God or His condition. This upward movement elicits
the response from the Highest which is felt as the
descending grace. There is an enlightening
discussion on the nature of aspiration in an article
of the same title (BP V3 p 119-128) and I would like
to cite a few important aspects here. Aspiration is
an earnest and strong desire or thirst for higher
values belonging to the ‘U’ realm of consciousness
whereas desires belong to the ‘L’ consciousness.
Contrasted with desire which burns like a wild fire
burning till it consumes us, aspiration is a glowing
flame that secretly sacredly uplifts our
consciousness and liberates us. Aspiration
involves persistent effort which itself is its own
reward, a source of joy and happiness whereas
desires are tinged by expectation and un- fulfilled
desires entail frustration and anger. The aspirant
is an ardent seeker who has restless impatience to
realize the Divine or his true nature. The real
seeker consciously aspires from all levels of his
being and dedicates through his physical, vital, and
mental planes of his existence to the noblest cause,
namely, securing indissoluble union with God, the
Ultimate.
Such an aspirant becomes acutely
conscious of the impurities, shortcomings and his
being yet a slave of his desires though he has
aspired to lift himself up from such a condition.
Realizing that his efforts are hopelessly inadequate
for the task, he prays to that supreme being Himself
to help him out of the miserable state and realize
the oneness with Him.
Rev. KCV opens his talk making a
reference to prayer which should be of the nature of
surrender to the supreme. Dr. KCV in his talk on the
2nd Commandment (CW V1 p 55-64) states
that ‘prayer finally is the expression of one’s
utter willingness and acceptance of the life of
surrender to the ultimate as the goal and means of
attainment. The prayer is an oral and mental act of
self-offering to the highest being’.
We say God and His power as it is His
power that is working out the subtle changes in us
transforming us so as to enable our knowing Him
seeing Him and then entering into Him with our Real
Being. Indeed God is God because He is the Power and
the only power which could take us to His supreme
abode; lesser powers can not do it. Desires centre
around the ego and reinforce it and therefore they
have to be seen as obstacles to ultimate realization
of God who is ultimate.
The response of the Divine to the cry
from the sincere seeker is to guide him to the feet
of a worthy Master, ‘the proper man who is really
spiritual’ as referred to above. Such a Master is in
tune with God in the fullest sense and is securely
connected to Him. His mind and faculties are
thoroughly regulated and disciplined and in a state
of thorough moderation and balance. Above all he is
endowed with the capacity for yogic transmission.
Master has stated that God in His highest
transcendent state does not have a mind. Hence we
may wonder as to how He hears our prayer and
responds to it. In the passage quoted earlier from
the Master’s message we find, ‘If somehow (our
thought) touched the spirituality, the basic
substance of all the centres it produced a kind of
trembling and as every action has some result it had
its own.’ God has no mind of His own in the ordinary
sense as that would make Him also form samskars as
Master states. But He uses the transformed and
divinized minds of the Masters whose motto is to
help the struggling seeker who has rightly resolved
to realize his true nature and achieve oneness with
God. We find our Master saying that He is always at
the service of sincere seekers. When the seeker has
played his part of praying to God in a supplicant
mood surrendering himself to Him, God plays His part
by bringing the Master to his door as if it were.
This is divine justice. Master assures all sincere
seekers in the following words, “But Divine help
happens to fall to the lot of human being of right
sort of courage alone. As such adopt the purpose of
life and path of its realization; and move on until
the purpose be fulfilled holding on to the promise
that whoever moves one step towards it the goal
advances ten steps towards that one. The experience
of all this is a matter of fact but only for the one
who may have faith in that divine assurance and
keeping steadfast to it may continue marching on.”
(SDG p 174)
We find Rev. KCV advocating in
unequivocal terms in all his writings, the need to
surrender directly and at once to God Himself and no
less for securing the connection to Him (yoga) and
attaining finally His condition. He would say that
if only the seeker would read the Bhagavad Gita from
back to the front all his troubles will be over.
Surrender to the Lord first and He would show the
path. Dr.KCV gives an important advice as to how one
should approach God.
He says, ‘We do not care whether God
is and how and what He is. We want to know God only
as a Master. If you approach God as God, or a Divine
Being, He runs away from you, but if you approach
Him as a Guru, then He runs after you.’ (CW V1 p
484)
Discussing the various approaches
adopted such as Karma, Bhakti, Jnana, Hatha yogas
for securing connection with God in ‘Sriramchandra’s
Rajayoga, a way of life’, (CW V1 496-8), he says,
‘We have been accustomed to very effortful
individual paths – individual efforts, even when
fully undertaken had to be performed for quite a
long time and perhaps for several generations and
several lives. A man must take several lives before
he becomes a gnani (bahunam janmanamante ) 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.’ Saranagati though thus discovered as the
simplest path, was not followed up; it became just
an instrument and not a yoga. Dr. KCV says further,
‘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’.
Such a surrender has to be integral
not merely verbal, ‘I surrender’; all the parts of
our being, physical (prostration), vital (giving up
all desires other than the supreme desire or
aspiration to realize our oneness with Him), mental
(be of His mind) and spiritual (the greatest and
noblest value being a life in Him and through Him)
are to be offered to Him in the spirit of utter
dedication. Dr.KCV says again, ‘This total or
integral surrender (prapadana or prapatti) alone
makes for the evolution of the individual and gives
meaning and power to the practices of karma, bhakti
and jnana.’ (CW V1 p 320) Our Master has also
emphasized (SDG p140) that the easiest and surest
means to shatter off the layers of grossness and
opacity (our tiny creation) one by one and assume
the absolute state we had at the time of creation is
to surrender to the Great Master in the true sense
and become living dead ourselves.
Dr.KCV says when the seeker makes
total surrender as said above, God/Master would take
him up and complete the surrender. That is, the
seeker is enabled to surrender more and more
willingly to the Master’s treatment and training
without any protest, without resistance and without
egoistic assertions that he has done the surrender.
Dr. KCV makes an interesting point
here when he asserts that true devotion develops in
the surrendered seeker when he observes that not
only his physical body is prostrated every day or
every hour before the Master, but the vital body
full of desires gets controlled followed by ‘sama’
and ‘dama’. The mind ceases to wander and constant
remembrance and spiritual faculties begin to
develop. In other words, the seeker finds that he is
more and more absorbed even without being conscious
that he is in God or the Master. That is devotion
and when it develops the seeker recognizes that
God’s grace has begun to flow through him. Dr.KCV
goes one step further and states that the moment one
surrenders either mentally or physically or vitally
God’s grace starts flowing through him which shows
that God is constantly with us and ready to take us
up at the slightest sign of our accepting Him. Such
a response from God/Nature appears to be automatic
just as the echo to a voiced sound. Master states,
‘When a person wants his evolution, Nature helps
him—God wants to see His creation quite befitting,
pious and clean. So it is the Law of Nature that He
does everything necessary to open the door of
Evolution.’ (SDG 105)
We had remarked earlier that God is
best taken to be a Principle and such a principle is
manifested in the lives of truly great and noble men
such as our Master. We know that He has voided
Himself entirely so that the Divine can express
Itself without any obstruction or diminution through
Him. The auspicious qualities such as Prema (all
inclusive and unalloyed universal love), Karuna
(complete compassion), Daya (mercy), Krupa
(graciousness or blessing splendour), Kshama
(patience and forgiveness), Samavarthi (behaving
equally towards all), Samadarsi (equal vision),
Saulabhya (easy of access) and Sausilya (coming down
to our level making us feel at home) which we
normally attribute to God are the ones which
characterize Sriramchandra Consciousness. As the
saying goes, brahma vid brahmaiva bhavati meaning
the person who knows God (through the yogic process
of mergence) becomes verily God. God is unknown to
us and we get an idea or a glimpse of Him only
through the Master who has totally extinguished
Himself in God. Thus wherever the word God has been
used in the foregoing we should take it to mean a
worthy spiritual Master of caliber who acts as a
true representative of God sent by God in response
to the helpless cry of a sincere seeker who has
willed (not a mere inclination as Dr.KCV puts it) to
achieve God through God.
Now a comment is in order regarding
Rev. KCV’s statement that devotion develops as a
result of surrender. We are aware that in the
journey on the natural path one goes through the
state of devotion, knot 3 before he achieves the
condition of surrender. Master has stated dependency
and devotion lead to surrender.
However we need to note that the
devotion developed in the pind Pradesh is of a far
lower order compared to the state of devotion
described by Dr.KCV. Our guide writing on Devotion
states, ‘Here we at a point in pinddesh where it is
all emotional as it is related to the elements of
earth and water and it is the wood which is being
fired, we have not come to the stage of phosphorous
being burnt (which burns without leaving any
residue)’ (BP V3 p 75) Devotion is not obviously
confined to the third knot rather it is there from
the top to the bottom. ‘The realization that we are
devotees of the Divine will continue till the end
even when you reach the central region.-At various
levels we express, at whatever level we are, as an
integral part of the divine we express. As we gain
more and more depth in consciousness still we
continue to serve Him. Service to the Divine
continues and devotedness to the Divine continues’.
(BP V3 p 89)
Writing on the subject Master says
that the fire of love and devotion alone burns down
trivial trash and wins the gold from the dross.
‘Real devotion has no tinge of affection in it and
goes hand in hand with enlightenment. In the initial
stages the devotee may be conscious of his feeling
towards the object of his love; but at higher stages
the foam and fury is dimmed to the extent of an
almost total loss of its awareness at the ultimate
stage. The superfine level of devotion may be spoken
as total self surrender, from which the awareness of
surrender has entirely withdrawn by the grace of the
Supreme Master Himself.’ (WU p59) The above
statement of Master is in total conformity with what
Rev. KCV has stated on the subject as mentioned in
the preceding paragraphs. Our guide has said in his
talk on Samadarsi on the occasion of Sri Krishna
Janmashtami 2005, ‘It is neither flattery nor
worship in crude form that can be considered as
Bhakti. Bhakti in yoga is not different from
surrender to Master and the message of the Lord in
verse 66 of the Chapter 18 sums up the final stage
of Bhakti that an aspirant should cultivate.’ (BP V5
p 40)
I would like to end this discussion
with Rev. Master’s saying, ‘Human perfection lies in
realizing the Master in true sense, and oneself as
His slave devoted entirely to His service. By doing
so one creates in Himself the state of Negation
which attracts His direct attention and establishes
a link with Him. Now it becomes incumbent upon one
to discharge his duties in like manner, keeping the
link intact so that the Master’s greatness be
embossed upon His heart and he may be in His direct
view.’ (IB p 57)
Pranam. |
