Every journey has to begin somewhere. It always begins with the basics. We are not hoping to teach every person yoga. We are hoping that you take another step in the coming years and deepen your own experience of yoga. This will connect you with the vision of the yogis of transcending the limitations of body, senses, mind, and establishing oneself in a spiritual personality or nature.
Somebody had once asked Swami Satyananda, ‘Is it possible to be self-realized?’ He said, ‘No.’ ‘Then all the scriptures and all the masters are wrong, when they say that you can be self-realized?’ He said, ‘No.’ ‘So, what do you mean?’ He said, ‘Self-realization is not possible, because our mind is not like that anymore. Self-realization was possible maybe centuries ago, when the mind was not subject to the dissipations, distractions and influences it is experiencing today. This fragments the human personality and nature. The maximum is what you can experience in meditation; beyond that you cannot go.’ The person asked, ‘Then if self-realization cannot be the focus, then what should be the focus in life?’ Sri Swamiji answered, ‘Cultivation of spiritual awareness should become the focus of life.’
That spiritual awareness is not God-intoxication. That is religious awareness. Spiritual awareness is the connection with the positive, benevolent, peaceful and the luminous in life. It is that awareness, which has to develop. If we are able to develop that awareness, either individually, as a group, society, a nation or as the world, the whole life will change. You will have heaven on earth, because of that spiritual awareness, there is connection with positivity and creativity, the expression of the faculties of head, heart and hands, there is harmony in life, peace in society, and prosperity and plenty for everyone.
The focus or purpose of life should be the cultivation of spiritual awareness. That is possible if we become practical in life and try to develop those channels which can connect us to luminosity. There are many channels like thought, feeling and sentiments. If we can connect with these channels, we can hold on to one channel, and develop the best of that, develop the beauty and quality of that channel, and live it. A super being does not have all the powers. They only have one power. It is not just one person with all the powers of all the super heroes, like as Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman. Why can’t you accept that you can only be one, why do you have to be everyone? Because we try to become everyone, we never find ourselves. We are too confused, thinking, ‘Who am I? Am I this? Am I that? Am I this? Am I that?’ We are comparing, ‘Am I this or that? This or that?’ Instead of realizing, ‘This is what I am.’
Spiritual awareness is realizing, ‘What I am. Who I am.’ That has to be the focus, and it starts in a simple manner. Of course, the same simplicity of the beginning can become a complex thing at the end. It changes the whole perception, view point and outlook. What you observe today as your strength and weakness, tomorrow you will be observing the same thing as atma and paramatma. The strength will become the highest consciousness; the weakness will become the lowest consciousness. The strength and weakness, in the course of time, will change themselves into the experience of individual consciousness and higher consciousness. The process remains the same; the perception changes.
Once a person had come to the ashram, and he had this funny obsession. He started cutting the trees of the ashram at a seven-foot height. People objected, ‘What are you doing? Who told you to cut the trees of the ashram at a seven-foot height?’ It was his problem, his mental illness. He used to say that all trees of one specific colour should be of the same height. He used to go around with an electric saw, just chopping off trees at a seven-foot height. It was a big problem. Then Paramahamsaji advised him, ‘Why don’t you do one thing? If you walk on the ground, you will see things which are bigger than seven feet. So, I suggest you sit in a helicopter and go up. Because from the top, when you look down, everything will be less than seven feet. So, change the perspective – what you see from here is one thing, and what you see from above, is something else.’ When you are seeing things from the ground level, and when you see the same thing from a higher, elevated platform, the vision, view, perception and the understanding, everything changes. A continuous transformation is happening and you are the witness of that change and transformation. And that, you can carry with you as spiritual awareness.
30 March 2024, Bihar Yoga Traditional Teachings, Ganga Darshan, Munger