How God Care Into My Life It would be easy to dismiss the question by saying: “Yes, after a prolonged period of intense austerities and meditation, while I was living at Swaragashram and when I had the Darshan and blessings of a number of Maharishis, the Lord appeared before me in the form of Sri Krishna. But that would not be the whole truth, nor a sufficient answer to a question relating to God, who is infinite, unlimited and beyond the reach of speech and mind. Cosmic Consciousness is not an accident or chance. It is the summit, accessible by a thorny path that has steps-slippery steps. I ascended them step by step the hard way; but at every stage I experienced God coming into my life and lifting me easily to the next stage. My father was fond of ceremonial worship in which he was very regular. To my child-mind the image he worshipped was God; and I delighted in helping father in the worship by bringing him flowers and other articles of worship. The deep inner satisfaction that he and I derived from such worship implanted in my heart a strong conviction that God was in such images devoutly worshipped by His devotees. Thus did God first come into my life and place my foot on the first rung of the spiritual ladder. As an adult I was fond of gymnastics and vigorous exercises. I learnt fencing from a teacher who belonged to a low caste. He was a Harijan. I could go to him only for a few days before I was made to understand that it was unbecoming of a caste-Brahmin to play the student to an untouchable. I thought deeply over the matter. One moment I felt that the God whom we worshipped in the image in my father’s worship room had jumped over to the heart of this untouchable. He was my Guru all right. So I immediately went to him with flowers, sweets and clothes and garlanded him, placed flowers at his feet and prostrated myself before him. Thus did God come into my life to remove the veil of caste distinctions. How very valuable this step was I could realise soon after this, for I was to enter the medical profession and serve all, and the persistence of caste distinctions would have made that service a mockery. With this mist cleared by the light of God, it was easy and natural for me to serve everyone. I took keen delight in every kind of service connected with the healing and alleviation of human misery. If there was a good prescription for malaria, I felt that the whole world should know it the next moment. Any knowledge about the prevention of diseases, promotion of health and healing of diseases I was eager to acquire and share with all. Then in Malaya, God came to me in the form of the sick. It is difficult for me now to single out any instance, and perhaps it is unnecessary. Time and space are concepts of the mind and have no meaning in God. I can look back now upon the whole period of my stay in Malaya as a single event in which God came to me in the form of the sick and suffering. People are sick physically and mentally. To some, life is lingering death; and to others, death is more welcome than life; some invite death and commit suicide, unable to face life. The aspiration grew within me that if God had not made this world merely as a hell where wicked people would be thrown to suffer, and if there is (as I intuitively felt there should be) something other than this misery and this helpless existence, it should be known well and experienced. It was at this crucial point in my life that God came to me as a religious mendicant who gave me the first lesson in Vedanta. The positive aspects of life here and the real end and aim of human life were made apparent. This drew me from Malaya to the Himalaya. God now came to me in the form of an all-consuming aspiration to realise Him as the Self of all. Meditation and service went apace; and then came various spiritual experiences. The body, mind and intellect as the limiting adjuncts, vanished, and the whole universe shone as His Light. God then came in the form of this Light in which everything assumed a divine shape and the pain and suffering that seem to haunt everybody appeared to be a mirage, the illusion that ignorance creates on account of low sensual appetites that lurk in man. One more milestone had to be passed in order to know that “everything is Brahman.” Early in 1950-on the 8th of January-the Lord came to me in the form of a half-demented assailant, who disturbed the night Satsang at the Ashram. His attempt failed. I bowed to him, worshipped him and sent him home. Evil exists in order to glorify the good. Evil is a superficial appearance. Beneath its veil the one Self shines in all. A noteworthy fact ought to be mentioned here. In this evolution nothing gained previously was entirely discarded at any later stage. One coalesced into the next, and the Yoga of Synthesis was the fruit. Idol-worship, service of the sick, practice of meditation, the cultivation of cosmic love that transcended the barriers of caste, creed and religion, with the ultimate aim of attaining the state of Cosmic Consciousness, was revealed. This knowledge had to be shared immediately. All this had to become an integral part of my being. The mission had been gathering strength and spreading. It was in 1951 that I undertook the All-India Tour. Then God came to me in His Virat-Swarupa-as multitudes of devotees-eager to listen to the tenets of divine life. At every centre I felt that God spoke through me, and He Himself in His cosmic form spread out

Sivananda Yoga, Talk-fourth In this Integral Yoga, is these a goal? Is there some way by which I can know, or I can reassure myself that I am on the right path, that I am progressing, that I have nearly reached the goal, that I have reached the goal, or I did reach the goal the day before yesterday! How does one know? How does one ever know whether one is on the right track or not? We never discussed this with Shri Gurudev himself, but on rare occasions he gave some kind of a hint that what is called Self-realisation or enlightenment is neither for the mind to describe nor for speech to describe, that one who has reached Self-realisation is touching Brahman. He didn’t suggest that this is the goal. He didn’t even suggest whether such a person would have special vision or other such phenomena. We started these talks by narrating an incident where Gurudev said, “One who is enlightened or who has Self-knowledge is ever in bliss, and in peace,” which again is not easy to understand. What does peace mean to us? Does peace mean a state of inertness, dullness, stupidity? What is the distinction between tamas and sattva? Once again you are at a loss. Such expressions as, “One must have peace, one must have bliss,” raise more questions than answers. When you forget all this and look at his life, what sort of clue do we get as to the state of a siddha, a perfected, being, one who had reached siddhi? It was obvious that in his case there was this cosmic vision-a vision in which there was no division. What does this mean? Does it mean that a sage does not know that this is a towel and this is a key? Would he try to open his door using a towel, and start wiping himself with a key? What does it mean? There is an expression in the Bhagavad Gita that has been grotesquely interpreted to mean that the sage wouldn’t know the difference between a stone and a nugget of gold. I’m not sure it means that. I’ve watched Shri Gurudev very carefully, and I have seen him pick up clips and pins from the roadside and put them into his bag, and I have at the same time seen that he took theft, cheating, calmly, as though nothing had happened. Great loss meant nothing, but one pin or a clip lying on the roadside had to be picked up. If someone cheated him of ten thousand rupees, that’s all right. So there again, did he walk with his eyes turned into his eyebrows as though he were not interested at all in life? No, he was deeply interested in life, and that again is the Bhagavad Gita’s definition. Saarva bhutahi divata. He would not even allow his own devoted disciples to kill the bugs that were keeping him awake at night. When we were using some insecticide Gurudev said, “No, no, don’t do that, take the can, put it in the forest. Let the bugs go away, but don’t kill them.” So once again we are where we started. What are the signs of enlightenment. Are there any signs at all? What are the signs of total egolessness? Are there any signs at all? If there are signs, they must manifest themselves, and not be produced by the sage. Is that right? ‘If this person is egoless, he is not going to produce signs and proofs for you to admire and give him a testimonial.’ He is not interested in all that. And so, whenever they who were very close to him were watching him, occasionally they would get glimpses of what egolessness may mean. But then before you tried to grasp and admire it, it changed. I don’t know if I must submit for your consideration that the surest sign of an enlightened person is unpredictability, which does not mean that all unpredictable characters are enlightened. There is a description in some scriptures of the sage. “The sage behaves like a child, or a madman or a goblin,” but that does not mean that all madmen are sages. In his case we found this unpredictability. That is, there was no ego-sense to determine or predetermine an action, and direct the action towards the attainment of a certain goal-the people’s admiration, more and more disciples, more and more name, more and more glory, and so on. When that goal is set up, it is easy for you to guide your life in such a way that that goal is reached. There was one swami who didn’t belong to Gurudev’s ashram but stayed there doing tremendous tapasya. What was the goal? He said, “I am going to have rajas and ranis as my disciples. That’s all I want.” He had rajas and ranis as his disciples. He did achieve that! So the goal-oriented practice of austerities, of yoga and meditation is easy. Then it is possible to know that this is the goal and this I have reached. I know also how far I am from that goal and when I have reached that goal. But in this practice of yoga that we have been discussing, whose aim is aimlessness and the total eradication of the ego-sense, what are the signs? Practically none at all. Now comes the crux. Since there are no goals, there is the continuing goal, which is to be vigilantly watchful for any sign of the resurrection of the ego. And here Gurudev used to insist upon this vigilance: be vigilant till the end that the ego does not come up. The ego-sense shouldn’t start to play again, whether that play is superficially diagnosed as worldly or otherworldly, sacred, secular or even spiritual. Spiritual vanity is as good or as bad as vanity of wealth or pedigree. It’s all the same. “I am so and so” is the devil, is the obstacle. Can that

Sivananda Yoga, Talk-THREE We have been considering the principal aspects of sadhana as expounded by Gurudev and illustrated in his life. I think we should remind ourselves once again that neither the teachings nor the illustrations in his life could be positively described as “this is it”. Then you miss it-it is neither/nor; it is the extremely subtle middle path. What is considered the middle path is imperceptible and, if we invent a new word, ‘inconceptable.’ Not only imperceptible but it is inconceptable. You cannot form a concept with it. Gurudev had supreme renunciation but not as a concept. Gurudev had the highest form of karma yoga, but not as a concept, not limited to it, not only this. Why do we slip into specialisation instead of following the subtle middle path, the path of neither/nor? Because in this neither/nor yoga, in pursuing this subtle middle path, one has to be constantly vigilant. One little wink or nod and you slip on one side or the other. Of course by God’s grace you wake up and go on, because the subtle middle path is neither this nor that, but something which partakes of both. That is what we have to bear in mind throughout our study of the life as well as teachings of Shri Gurudev. If we forget this, then we become fanatic, and that is almost contrary to what Gurudev was. So far we have gone over his teachings concerning what we call karma yoga and what we call bhakti. And it was pointed out that even the essential raja yoga sadhana of meditation was made to flow on from the bhakti practice of japa. ‘Flow on’ reminds me of a beautiful thought which I would like to share with you. These yogas – karma yoga, bhakti yoga, jnana yoga, and hatha yoga and what have you-these are not separate watertight compartments, but can be compared to the seasons. This is an example which is given in the Yoga Vasishtha. One season flows into the other, it is not as though one fine morning winter comes to an end and spring commences. One season flows, it is an unceasing flow; in the same way one yoga blends into another. Karma yoga blends with bhakti yoga etc. If it does not, there is something wrong somewhere. You are chewing the words, hoping that you might get enlightened or illumined. Gurudev’s as well as Krishna’s is an intelligent practice of yoga, not a bland ritual, not a superstitious, repetitive, mechanical set of practices, nor a set of dogmas to which we could give our intellectual assent-it is intelligence in operation, it is intelligence alive. Previously jnana yoga was isolated from the rest on the understanding that first we practise karma yoga, and once our heart becomes purified, then we go to the temple, and once we develop a little devotion, then we sit down and practise a little raja yoga. All this may take some two hundred years. Never mind, we come back again and again and pursue, and then we will go to the forest, go to a guru and learn the Upanishads from him. The sanyasins in Rishikesh sit and listen to the Upanishads at the feet of Swami Krishnanandaji Maharaj, because Shri Gurudev insisted that these too shall form part of our daily sadhana. This aspect of jnana yoga was introduced into our life as swadhyaya. I don’t know what this word swadhyaya literally means, but to me the first two syllables suggest something. ‘Swa’ means self, ‘dhya’-dhyana or meditation. Maybe it is swadhyaya – someone sitting alone and reading a scripture-I don’t know. It is also possible to see that while I am reading it, there is contemplation. It is not a mechanical reading of the scripture but an intelligent reading of the scripture. Gurudev often repeated, “Study daily a chapter of the Gita”. Why must I go on studying this? We ask this question only when it comes to the Bhagavad Gita or the Upanishads. You do not ask this question when it comes to a physics textbook or Shakespearean drama. We read these again and again; we even memorize them. Why? In order that the message may be inscribed on the tablet of one’s heart. These words are also Gurudev’s. This swadhyaya or daily reading (I’m deliberately avoiding the use of the word study) of the Gita, Ramayana, Upanishads or other scriptures, the Bible or the Koran, is like the continuous flow of a river. You have heard it said that you cannot take a bath in the same water twice. Every moment the water is flowing, as you dip and come up and dip again, it’s fresh water-not the water in which you had your previous dip. Something has happened. Here it’s the other way round. The scripture seems to be the same, but you who read the scripture-you are not the same. You are not the same as you were last year. Something has happened, and therefore keep on reading this and it is possible you will discover that newer and newer facets of meaning are revealed to you. That is the beauty of swadhyaya. That sounds mechanical, perhaps and therefore Gurudev said, swadhyaya is important, but not the mechanical type. Keep your heart open, keep your mind open, be alert and vigilant as you read this, whether you understand the meaning or not. Let your heart be open. How did he achieve that? I was particularly interested in this because as Vaishnava Brahmins of South India we had become accustomed to this routine, mechanical reading of at least Valmiki’s Ramayana. We didn’t read the Gita or the Upanishads. But we were asked to recite at least one chapter of Valmiki’s Ramayana before breakfast, otherwise we wouldn’t get our coffee. I still remember the delightfully jet-age speed with which we read the Ramayana! Why? The mind was on the coffee, not on the Ramayana. We weren’t interested in the Rama story

Sivananda Yoga, Talk-TWO Gurudev’s Integral Yoga rests on two fundamentally vital factors: one, to see God in every face, and two, to ensure that the body-mind complex, which has somehow been considered an individual personality, becomes a free-flowing channel for the divine will, grace, or power. Therefore the whole thing appears to be one of selfless service, nishkarma seva, and it has to partake of the vital elements of what we usually consider other yogas. In Gurudev’s mind there was no ‘other yoga.’ There was only one yoga, Integral Yoga-yoga means ‘integration,’ so “Integral Yoga” is already a redundant expression. Gurudev often used to liken the best devotee and the best yogi to Krishna’s flute. The emptier it is, the more divine the music. So, the first part involves what we have come to regard as bhakti yoga, and the second part involves what we leave come to regard as raja yoga – dhyana yoga – jnana yoga. Therefore he included in his sadhana vital elements of the bhakti sadhana. Why do I say vital elements and not just bhakti? When we think (“think” is the most important word in the sentence) of bhakti, we have an image, and the image is made up of largely showy emotionalism. One must wear some kind of a tilak and some kind of a cloth around one’s shoulders; whether the man repeats “Om Namah Sivaya” once or twice a day or not, he has a whole shirt and shawl made of Om Namah Sivaya. Or he must sing and shout and do all kinds of things. All these practices may have their own benefits, but these according to Gurudev’s life and teachings are of secondary importance. There were some vital practices in his sadhana. First and foremost of these was Murthi Puja. Amongst Gurudev’s initial devotees were great Arya Samajis who don’t like Murthi Puja at all. As a matter of fact Gurudev even attended the wedding in the house of one such devotee. He mixed freely with them and even sang the maha mantra. Gurudev himself has said somewhere that when he presided over sankirtan conferences, even Arya Samajis who came to criticise and disrupt the proceedings, later joined in and started dancing! When he performed murthi puja, it was not as many of us do it, regarding the statue as a statue as a stone, but as a living presence. There was this deep-seated realisation, not conviction but realisation, that it is God l am worshipping-not a stone. He did not even use the expression, ‘through this I am worshipping God. Through this stone image, which somehow represents Lord Krishna, I am worshipping God.’ No. I am worshipping Krishna here. This is Krishna. I used to be pujari in the temple for quite a number of years, and Gurudev used to come three times a day, and every time with some flowers or bael leaves he entered the temple, it was an unforgettable and indescribable sight. I used to stand with my back towards the window and watch Gurudev’s face. He used to look up, and in that look there was definitely the unmistakable look of greeting a friend. During Shivratri particularly there used to be puja in the evening, and after the arati some people used to be given bael leaves. It was customary to drop some leaves on the Nandi, the bull, as a token of seeking the bull’s permission for worshipping Siva. Then they used to offer a few bael leaves or flowers on the Siva lingam. I have never seen Gurudev throw a flower or a leaf-he placed it so softly. Why? Because it is a living thing, it is a living divine presence. If I throw flowers at your face, I don’t think you will appreciate it very much. When he looked at Krishna, it was friendship, supreme intimate friendship. “Hello, how do you do?” You could almost read it in his eyes. “Ah, how are you, alright today?” Just as he used to ask me and you and everybody, “What would you like to have, some tea or some coffee?” – that same blissful look of intimate friendship. In the office where he used to sit, a few pictures hung in front of him from the ceiling, and those pictures had to be there in that order. They were not pictures at all. They were living beings, the divine presence. As soon as he walked into the office he tossed a glance at them. If somebody meddled with them, “hmm, what has happened to that!” Because, he thought, my friends have gone, they are my friends and assistants here in my work, and they have been disrupted. In all this there was absolute and total naturalness, there was no showiness at all. We greet each other, laugh at each other, make fun of each other – “Narayana!” He would never do that. And sometimes we shout while stretching or when we hurt ourselves, “Hare Ram, Hare Ram”. All that showiness was completely absent, but deep within him he believed, he taught and his life was a continual demonstration of the fact that this bhakti is a totally intimate love affair between your soul and God. No one need know, you don’t have to parade it; you don’t have to exhibit it to anyone else. I mentioned a minute ago that he used to look at those pictures. Even that was done in a very subtle almost imperceptible way. Unless you were very carefully watching, you couldn’t have noticed it. Sometimes he would close his eyes, and just with one eye, lift it up and take a look and close the eyes again. In those five seconds some magic thread was re-established. Very often we think that we are so highly advanced that worship is unnecessary. He never forgot his worship. Only when he could not come to the temple did he confine himself to the worship in his own room. He was very fond