Man is Infinity's Heart.
Man is Eternity's Breath.Man is Immortality's Life.
```My History tells me that you have significantly learned the meaning of suffering.
My literature tells me that your culture is flooded with the soul's spontaneous sincerity.
My body tells me that your body is the perfect expression of nature's simplicity and candour. My mind tells me that your mind is looking pointedly into the golden Vision of the Future. My heart tells me that your heart is full of loving warmth and snow-white affection. Your heart's tearing efforts to transcend the ill-fated barriers of poverty will, before long, be crowned with success.
They came. They conquered. Perhaps they helped. But they could have made better use of their paternal concern.
They have come. They are helping. Momentous is their contribution. Yet you need more of their attention, sympathy and opportunity.
Let them come and let them go, if so is the Will of God. But you try to live dauntless, deep within. You try to listen to the dictates of your inner soul.
Yours is the mounting cry. Yours is the Golden Shore. Yours is the Promised Land. May God shower His choicest Blessings upon you, my Puerto Rico!
This short talk was given to a group of young students during Sri Chinmoy's summer visit to Puerto Rico. It was held under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian Association of Santurce, Puerto Rico, on 19 July 1966.↩
What is Yoga? Yoga is that which discloses God’s secret. If we wish to know God’s secret, we have to launch into the path of Yoga.
What is Yoga? Yoga is the Breath of God. If we wish to see through God's Eye and feel through His Heart, if we wish to live in God’s Dream and know God’s Reality, if we wish to possess the Breath of God, and finally if we wish to become God, Yoga will beckon us.
Yoga is union. It is the union of the individual soul with the Supreme Self. Yoga is the spiritual science that teaches us how the Ultimate Reality can be realised in life itself.
What we shall have to do is to accept life and fulfil the Divine in us here on earth. This can be effectuated only by transcending our human limitations.
Yoga tells us how far we have progressed in relation to God-realisation. It also tells us about our destined role in God's cosmic Drama. The final word of Yoga is that each human soul is a divine representative of God on earth.
Now let us focus our attention on the practical aspect of Yoga. There are various kinds of Yoga: Karma-Yoga (the path of action), Bhakti-Yoga (the path of love and devotion) and Jnana-Yoga (the path of knowledge). These three are considered to be the most important kinds of Yoga. There are other significant types of Yoga, but they are either branches of these three or closely related to them.
These three serve as three main gates of God's Palace. If we want to see and feel God as the sweetest and most intimate, then we have to practise Bhakti-Yoga; if we want to realise God in humanity through our selfless service, then we have to practise Karma-Yoga; if we want to realise the wisdom and glories of God's transcendental Self, then we have to practise Jnana-Yoga.
One thing is certain. These three paths lead us to self-Realisation in God-Realisation and God-Realisation in self-Realisation.
This talk was given on 20 July 1966, at the home of Sita (Mrs. Maria Teresa Gonzalez), Calle 1. SO 946, La Riviera, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico. (Sita is the Counsellor of the Aum Centre, Santurce, Puerto Rico.)↩
KARMA-YOGA, The Path of Action
JNANA-YOGA, The Path of KnowledgeThe first of these talks (Bhakti yoga) was given at the home of Sita on 20 July 1966, following the talk "What is Yoga?" The last two (Karma yoga, Jnana yoga) were given on 21 July 1966, at the home of Lakshmi and Narayan, Mr. and Mrs. Rafael Elvira, 708 San Jose Street, Santurce, Puerto Rico. (Lakshmi and Narayan are the Heads of Public Relations, Aum Centre, Santurce, Puerto Rico.)↩
A Bhakta's prayer is very simple: "O my Lord God, do enter into my life with Thy Eye of Protection and with Thy Heart of Compassion." This prayer is the quickest in knocking at God's Door and also the easiest in seeing God open the Door.
A Karma-yogin and a Jnana-yogin may suffer a moment of doubt about God's existence. But a Bhakta has no suffering of that type. To him, the existence of God is an axiomatic truth. More than that, it is his heart's spontaneous feeling. But, alas, he, too, has to undergo a kind of suffering. His is the suffering of separation from his Beloved. With the tears of his heart's devotion, he cries to re-establish his sweetest union with God.
The reasoning mind does not charm the devotee. The hard facts of life fail to draw his attention, much less absorb him. He wants to live constantly in a God-intoxicated realm.
A devotee feels that when he walks toward God, God runs towards him. A devotee feels that when he thinks of God for a second, God cries for him for an hour. A devotee feels that when he goes to God with a drop of his love to quench the ceaseless thirst of God, God enfolds him in the sea of His ambrosial Love.
The relation between a devotee and God can only be felt and never described. Poor God thinks that no man on earth can ever capture Him, for He is priceless and invaluable. Alas, He has forgotten that He had already granted devotion to His bhakta. To His greatest surprise, to His deepest joy, His devotee's surrendered devotion is competent to capture Him.
There are people who mock at the Bhakta. They say that a Bhakta's God is nothing but a personal God, an infinite God with form, a glorified human being. To them I ask, "Why should a Bhakta not feel thus?" A Bhakta sincerely feels that he is a tiny drop and that God is the infinite Ocean; his body is an infinitesmal portion of God the boundless Whole. A devotee thinks of God and prays to a God of his own image. And he is absolutely right. Just enter into a cat's consciousness and you will see that its feeling of one more powerful than itself takes the form of a cat — only in a gigantic form. Just enter into the consciousness of a flower and you will feel that the flower thinks of something infinitely more beautiful than itself in the image of a flower. The Bhakta does the same.
He knows that he is a human being and he feels that his God should be human in every sense of the term. The only difference he feels is that he is a limited human being and God is a limitless human Being.
To a devotee, God is at once blissful and merciful. His heart's joy makes him feel that God is blissful and his heart's pangs make him feel that God is merciful.
A bird sings. A man sings. God too sings. He sings His sweetest songs of Infinity, Eternity and Immortality only through the heart of His bhakta.Karma-Yoga does not see eye to eye with those who hold that the activities of human life are of no importance. Karma-Yoga claims that life is a divine opportunity for serving God. This particular Yoga is not only the Yoga of the physical actions, but includes both the moral and inner life of the aspirant.
Those who follow this path pray for a strong and perfect body. They also pray for a long life. This long life is not a mere prolongation of life in terms of years. It is a life that longs for the descent of the divine Truth, Light and Power into the material plane. The Karma-Yogins are the real heroes on the earthly scene and theirs is the divinely triumphant victory.
A Karma-Yogin is a perfect stranger to the waves of disappointment and despair in human life. What he sees in life and its activities is a divine purpose. He feels himself to be the hyphen between earthly duties and heavenly responsibilities. He has many weapons to conquer the world. Of them, his detachment is the most powerful. His detachment defies both the crushing blows of failure and the ego-gratifying surges of success. His detachment is at once far beyond the snares of the world's excruciating pangs and the embrace of the world's throbbing joy.
Many sincere aspirants feel that the devotional feelings of a Bhakta and the penetrating eye of a Jnani have no place in Karma-Yoga. Here they are quite mistaken. A true Karma-Yogin is he whose heart has implicit faith in God, whose mind has a constant awareness of God and whose body has a genuine love for God in humanity. It is easy for a Bhakta to forget the world, and for a Jnani to ignore the world. But a Karma-Yogin's destiny is otherwise. God wants him to live in the world, live with the world, and live for the world.God has three sons. Their names are Jnana-Yoga, Karma-Yoga and Bhakti-Yoga. Jnana-Yoga wants to live in his Father's transcendental Truth. Karma-Yoga wants to live in his Father's all-pervading universal Truth. Bhakti-Yoga wants to live in his Father's most intimate Truth.
The man of action needs God’s guidance. The man of devotion needs God’s protection. The man of knowledge needs God’s instruction.
The Bhakta's faith in God and the Karma-Yogin's love for humanity do not interest a Jnana-Yogin, much less inspire him. He wants nothing but the mind. With his mental power he strives for the personal experience of the highest Truth. He thinks of God as the Fount of Knowledge. He feels that it is through his mind that he will attain to his Goal. At the beginning of his path, he feels that nothing is as important as the fulfilment of the mind. Eventually he comes to realise that he must transcend the mind if he wishes to live in the Supreme Knowledge.
Life is a mystery. So is death. A Jnana-Yogin wants to fathom these two apparently insoluble mysteries of God’s creation. He also wants to transcend both life and death and abide in the Heart of the Supreme Reality.
Man lives in the sense-world. He does not know whether this world is real or unreal. He is satisfied with his own existence. An ordinary man has neither the thinking capacity nor the sincere interest to enter into the deeper meaning of life. He wants to escape the problems of life and death. Unfortunately there is no escape. He has to swim in the sea of ignorance. A Jnana-Yogin alone can teach him how he can swim across the sea of ignorance and enter the Sea of Knowledge and Light.
A Jnana-Yogin declares: "Neti, neti." Not this, not this. What does he mean by that? He means that there is a higher world than this sense-world, a higher truth than this earth-bound truth. He says, in a sense, that there are two opposing parties. One party consists of falsehood, ignorance and death. The other party consists of Truth, Knowledge and Immortality. While uttering "Neti, neti" he asks man to reject falsehood and accept Truth, reject ignorance and accept Knowledge, reject death and accept Immortality.My ego needs.
My soul has.My ego tries.
My soul does.My ego knows the problem that is.
My soul becomes the answer that is.I am not alone.
Within my unlit selfMy ego, my naked death.
I am not alone.
Within my snow-white heartMy soul and my Spirit's Flame.
```I have worshipped God with love.
His Delight is my reward.I have worshipped God from fear.
His sorrow is my result.I have worshipped God to see Him.
He comes, but I see Him not.I have worshipped God.
I know not why.He is now won —
My self-revealing Sun. ```
Sri Chinmoy: First let me say that it is science that has contributed much to the feeling that Heaven is a place outside of oneself. Science has exercised its power on the conscious and sub-conscious planes of human thinking.
The Kingdom of Heaven is something that we can feel and not something that we can demonstrate. Science can demonstrate many things. But the Kingdom of Heaven is a matter of one's own inner achievement. If you have realised the Kingdom of Heaven within you, others will look at you and feel that you have something quite unusual, unearthly and supernal. And simply because you have seen and you have felt and you have possessed the Kingdom of Heaven within you, they will see and feel you as a totally transformed divine being.
Needless to say, it is your aspiration, your mounting inner cry that leads you to this Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is a plane full of Peace and Delight. We feel it when we reside deep within ourselves and when we transcend our ego-centric individual consciousness. The higher we go beyond our limited consciousness, the quicker we enter into our deepest, infinite consciousness, the more intimately we see, feel and possess the Kingdom of Heaven within us.
To be sure, the Kingdom of Heaven is more than a mere plane... it is a plane of divine consciousness. It is a state of Realisation. It embodies Sat-Chit-Ananda. Sat is Divine Existence, Chit is Divine Consciousness, Ananda is Divine Bliss. When we go deep within, we feel these three together, and when we acquire the inner vision to perceive them all at once, we live verily in the Kingdom of Heaven. Otherwise Existence is at one place, Consciousness is somewhere else and Bliss is nowhere near the other two. When we see and feel Existence-Consciousness-Bliss on the self-same plane, each complementing and fulfilling the others, we can say that we live in the Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Not only can we feel It, but without the least possible doubt, we can become It.How to be pure? We can be pure by self-control; we can control our senses. It is unbelievably difficult. But it is not impossible.
"I shall control my senses. I shall conquer my passions." This approach cannot bring you what you actually want. The hungry lion that lives in your senses and the hungry tiger that lives in your passions will not leave you by the mere repetition of the thought, "I shall control my senses and conquer my passions." This approach will be of no avail.
What you must do is to fix your mind on God. To your utter amazement, your lion and tiger, tamed, will leave you of their own accord when they see that you have become too poor to feed them. As a matter of fact, you don't become poor in the least. On the contrary, you become infinitely stronger and richer, for God’s Will energises your body, mind and heart. To fix your body, mind and heart on the Divine is the right approach. The closer you are to the Light, the farther you are from the Darkness.
Purity does not come all at once. It takes time. Dive deep. Lose yourself with implicit faith in God’s contemplation. You need not go to Purity. Purity has to come to you and it will. Purity does not come alone. It brings an everlasting Joy with it. This Divine Joy is the sole purpose of our life. God reveals Himself fully and manifests Himself unreservedly only when we have this inner Joy.
The world gives you desires. God gives you prayers. The world gives you bondage. God gives you freedom. Freedom from limitations, freedom from ignorance.
You are the player. You can play either football or cricket. You have a free choice. Similarly, it is you who can have either purity or impurity to play with. The player is the master of the game and not vice-versa.
The easiest and most effective way to have purity is to repeat a mantra. A mantra is a seed-sound. A mantra is a dynamic power in the form of a vibrant sound.
Now let us know what Japa is. Japa is the repetition of a mantra. You want purity, don't you? Today is Saturday. Right now, repeat the name of God five hundred times. This is our mantra. Let us all do it.
Thank you. We are all successful. Now every day please increase the number by one hundred. That is to say, tomorrow you will repeat the name of God six hundred times, and the day after seven hundred. On the coming Saturday, my calculation says that you will repeat the name of God twelve hundred times. From that Saturday to the following Saturday, please start decreasing the number daily by a hundred until you again reach five hundred. Please continue this exercise, week by week, just for a month. Whether you want to change your name or not, the world will change your name. It will give you a new name. It will call you by the name Purity. Your inner ear will make you hear it. It will surpass your fondest imagination.
Let nothing perturb you. Let your body's impurity remind you of your heart's spontaneous purity. Let your outer finite thoughts remind you of your inner Infinite Will. Let your mind's teeming imperfections remind you of your soul's limitless perfection.
The present-day world is full of impurity. It seems that purity is a currency from another world. It is hard to obtain this purity, but once you get it, peace is yours, success is yours.
Let us face the world. Let us take life as it comes. Our inner Pilot is constantly vigilant. The undercurrents of our inner and spiritual life will always flow on unnoticed, unobstructed, unafraid.
God may be Unknown but He is not Unknowable. Our prayers and meditations lead us to that Unknown. Freedom we cry for. But strangely enough, we are not aware of the fact that we already have within us immense freedom. Look! Without any difficulty, we can forget God. We can ignore Him and we can even deny Him. But the compassionate God says, "My children, no matter what you do or say, My heart shall never abandon you. I want you. I need you."
The mother holds the hand of the child. It is the child who has to walk and he does it. Neither the one who is dragged nor the one who drags can be happy. Likewise God says, "My divine children, in your inner life, I give you inspiration. It is you who have to aspire with the purest heart to reach the Golden Beyond."
This talk was given by Sri Chinmoy on 18 June 1966, at the home of Mrs. Mary Williams, 41 Fifth Avenue, New York City.↩
Looked at with human eyes, his appearance was so helpless — a storm-tossed raft seemed more dependable than the frail frame of this prophet. But going deep within, one could discover his true personality. To one's surprise, one could find in his teachings a colossal Will that could shake the world.
Here was a man whose authoritative voice declared that he had not only seen the Omnipotent, but could show Him to his beloved disciple, Naren (Vivekananda). He further claimed that he saw God more clearly than he saw the disciple standing before him.
As Ramakrishna’s life was replete with wonderful visions, his beloved Naren's life was surcharged with the power to fulfil those visions here on earth. Awakened India must ever remain beholden to Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, for it is they who were the most outstanding spiritual figures to appear on Indian soil during the last century. The Master and the disciple were hardly two distinct individuals. Each helped to shape the other. To our deeper vision, they formed an integral whole.
Sri Ramakrishna’s precepts were couched in the simplest language, in words that flew straight into the hearts of the people. The blessings that India, nay the world, received from him, his unique universal sympathy, stand matchless. "I do not care," he said, "I will give up a thousand such bodies to help one man. It is glorious to help even one man."
To live the truths that one has preached is often an impossibility. Glory to Sri Ramakrishna that he was a triumphant living example of the truths that he preached. To him, religion was nothing short of realisation. He synthesised most of the major world religions by his direct and immediate realisation of each of them. One by one, he pierced the core of each religion, extracted its essence and became the perfect embodiment of that path to the Supreme. Sri Ramakrishna firmly believed, too, that a time would come when an aspirant would be able to attain to God-realisation by three days' practice.
"Ramakrishna was God manifested in a human being... Vivekananda was a radiant glance from the eye of Siva", so said Sri Aurobindo, the founder of the Integral Yoga.
Vivekananda looked upon his Master as the embodiment of perfection. "In the presence of my Master, I found out that man could be perfect even in this body."
In the following lines produced from the penetrating pen of K. D. Sethna, we shall observe how in the march of evolution, one Avatar paves the way for the next one. "Ramakrishna, the illiterate man from the temple of conventional worship, was a veritable colossus of mystical experience; in him direct and immediate realisation of the Divine Being reached an intensity and variety which made him a marvellous summing-up of the whole spiritual history of India, with a face carrying the first gleam of a new age of the human soul — the age that will be known as the Aurobindonian."
And do we not remember the supremely prophetic utterance of Sri Aurobindo? "We do not belong to past dawns, but to the noons of the future."
"East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet." The famous statement by Kipling was proved false when Vivekananda, with his flood of Sri Ramakrishna's inspiration, gloriously united the East and the West with his unique message on religion.
India wants "to be". The West wants "to do". Is it not at once safe and advisable "to be" first and then to offer one's contribution to the wide world? "Atmanam Viddhi", Know Thyself, says the Upanishad. First know thyself and then do thou proclaim thyself. This was Ramakrishna's secret.
There are different paths leading to the Divine. But the shortest and most sunlit path is the Mother Cult. This Mother Cult was most powerfully shown to the Indians by Sri Ramakrishna. The never-ceasing injunction of his teachings was, "Approach the Divine as a child approaches his mother; with the same purity, sincerity, ardent love and faith, and the Mother will come to you! Call ‘Ma, Ma'; call again and again. The Mother is bound to come."
When the influence of Western culture had almost caused the real "self" of India to die, and the children of India were running amuck to imitate Western culture, Ramakrishna Paramhansa knew that the time was ripe for him to revive the lost tradition of India.
"Sri Ramakrishna," said Nolini Kanta Gupta, the celebrated Bengali author, "represents spirituality at its absolute, its pristine fount and power. In him we find the pure gold of spirituality at a time when duplicity, perplexity, deceit and falsehood on the one hand, and atheism, disbelief and irreverence on the other, reigned supreme... When spirituality had almost disappeared from the world and even in India, it existed, as it were, merely in name, there was the advent of Sri Ramakrishna bringing with him spirituality in its sheer plenitude and investing it with eternal certitude and infallibility."
It was Ramakrishna, too, who showed the greatest reverence for women that the world has known. He felt that women were the embodiments of the Divine Mother and he treated them as divinities. His own consort, Sarada Devi, he worshipped as the Divine Mother Herself.
Far and wide travelled the renown of Ramakrishna's spiritual teachings, influencing among others, the French savant, Romain Rolland. So deeply was he touched that in the evening of his life he wrote the memorable book, "The Life of Sri Ramakrishna". Two lines of significant insight I quote from that book.
> The man whose image I here invoke was the consummation of two thousand years of the spiritual life of three million people... His inner life embraced the whole multiplicity of men and God.
Professor Max Muller, another famous European, was also an ardent admirer of Ramakrishna. Max Muller had devoted the major portion of his life to the study of the Hindu scriptures, had translated the Rig Veda into English and was the author of "History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature" and "Sacred Books of the East." Among his later works was "Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings."
Once Swami Vivekananda went to Oxford to pay homage to Professor Max Muller, whom he looked upon as a sage and a "Vedantist of Vedantists and kindness itself." On Vivekananda's departure, the Professor, who had seen seventy winters, accompanied the Swami to the railway station, justifying his coming by saying, "It is not every day that one meets a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramhansa."
Sri Ramakrishna, to Thee we offer our deepest homage. Our hearts feel that what you possessed was the Infinite and the Infinite was your heart's Eternal Home.
(Reprinted from Sri Chinmoy's article in the "Amrita Bazaar Patrika" of North India, 18 Feb. 1962.)↩
From:Sri Chinmoy,AUM — Vol. 2, No. 7,8, Feb. — 27 Mar. 1967, Boro Park Printers -- Brooklyn, N. Y, 1967
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/aum_18