Part VI — Cleanliness

Question: Is it important to take a shower before coming to meditate at the Centre?

Sri Chinmoy: This Centre is a place of purity. This is a temple. Please try to come here as clean and pure as possible. Make it a point to bathe or take a shower and put on clean clothes before coming to the Centre. If you have to come directly from your office and you cannot go home to have a shower, please wash properly at least. Otherwise, you will disturb the meditation and pull down the consciousness of the persons sitting near you. In India, no matter how many times a day the disciples visit their spiritual Master, the first thing they will do is take a bath. Even if they finished bathing just an hour before, they will bathe again. They feel that physical cleanliness is important and they are basically right, since it adds to the mind’s purity.

A few years ago I was invited to see a hippie commune near San Francisco. Believe me, the life that they were leading was worse than an animal’s life. Their huts, God knows what you can call them, were infested by all kinds of insects and vermin. The vibrations were unbearable! It was sheer torture for me to go in there. In India, many spiritual aspirants also live in huts without any modern sanitary facilities. But they keep in their minds a sense of cleanliness. Three times a day they will enter into the village pond to take a bath. But here there are many so-called seekers, who do not take a bath even once a month. This is unthinkable.

We all know that on the spiritual path some people wish to lead an austere life. This is not at all necessary, but they feel that it will help them make progress. However, austerity does not mean torturing the body and ignoring society. Fighting against human progress and civilisation is not austerity; it is perverted self-indulgence. This kind of life is not spirituality at all. The people who live in communes, like the one I visited, speak about freedom to live in their own way. But the freedom that takes me back to the animal kingdom is not real freedom, but bondage and ignorance. The freedom that takes me to the infinite Peace, Light and Bliss is the real freedom.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness. I believe this. Every day, even when you do not come to the Centre, you should take a shower or bath. This does not mean that if you stay all the time in the water you will be pure. No, a fish is not purer than we are. A swimmer is not necessarily purer, even though he stays in the water a lot. The consciousness is the most important thing. But the purification of the body is absolutely necessary for purification of the consciousness. If there is no purity established in our nature, the divine Power cannot permanently remain in us. If purity is taken away from spirituality, there is nothing left. It is in the physical purity that the divine Power can act most powerfully and successfully, and last forever.

Some spiritual figures neglect the body. They do not care about physical cleanliness. But in my path, we feel that the outer life and the inner life have to go together. We care for the physical because we know that the fulfilment of the Divine Mission can only take place in this physical world. If we ignore the outer life, then we will remain imperfect. If we ignore the inner life, then we will have nothing to offer. The inner and the outer must go together.

If you take a shower and then wear a garment that is not fresh and washed, you will not feel clean. You will have an uneasy feeling and immediately your aspiration will decrease. If anybody thinks differently, I will say he is fooling himself. Similarly, if you put on brand new clothes but do not take a shower, again you will also not feel clean and comfortable.

Let us say that taking a shower represents outer purity. We see that the outer can help the inner, that wearing fresh clothes can help our inner being, our consciousness. In our life of aspiration, the inner and the outer must go together. If I can get a little help from the outer, if I am wise I will take it. If the inner can give me one thousand dollars and the outer can give me one dollar, then if I take help from both I will have one thousand and one dollars, while someone else will only have one thousand dollars.