RAMA - THE APOTHEOSIS OF HUMAN PERFECTION -6. Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, December 11, 2022. 06:00.

Post-6. 

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So the epic of Ramayana is a long meditation on the superior manifestation of God in the form of Sri Ramachandra. Terror was Rama, thunderbolt was Rama—says Valmiki. But butter was Rama, a rose petal was Rama, all compassion was Rama—says the same Sage Valmiki. In anger, Rama was fierce like fire—fire comparable only with the fire during the dissolution of the cosmos, and at the same time nobody could be so compassionate, goodhearted and simple as Rama himself was. This is the dramatic contradiction of personality which Valmiki introduces into his epic, to bring out the greatness of the divine personality. What are the characteristics of great men? They are harder than a diamond but softer than a lotus petal. The great Masters are harder than a diamond and, therefore, you cannot do anything to them and they will never budge from their principles. You cannot shake them by your powerful logic and argumentation. This is only one side of these great Masters. The other side is that no person can be so good, merciful and tenderhearted as them, which characteristics are revealed in proper time. Such is the mysterious combination, a terrific manifestation of divinity combined with most perfect humane characteristics and features that we see in Sri Rama.

I had occasions to go through the beautiful descriptions in the Valmiki Ramayana in Sanskrit, but I had less opportunity to go through the Tulasidas Ramayana. I believe that the comparisons and descriptions are almost similar. Without telling you what they actually want to tell you—this is the peculiarity of poets in general—they imply their meaning in words which, without your knowing, influence your emotions and the total personality. Slowly, without your knowing what is happening, the whole personality is shaken up from beginning to end when you read the Ramayana. You come out burnt and burnished, beautified and purified, because of a very graduated purification process which you undergo in your emotions and your understanding, when you pass from Kanda to Kanda in the Ramayana, until you reach the Pattabhisheka Kanda, the crowning glory of the Ramayana epic.

I shall conclude with a prayer and a request. We are humble seekers; we are not Masters. We are small people trying to follow the footsteps of great Masters like Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, in our own humble, faltering way, trying to raise our minds to true devotion to God. In this attempt, let us be honest to ourselves. This is my prayer to my own self and to all. Honesty of conscience is the watchword of a sadhaka. Honesty of conscience has a very important significance which we have to make note of. Many times we may look honest, but we are not really honest in the deepest core of our feelings. Then it upsets the whole structure of our endeavour in the life spiritual, because spiritual life is nothing but the life that we lead in the bottom of our being, and not the life that we live in our rooms or in our offices or colleges or factories. What our conscience speaks is our spiritual voice. And if our conscience is not honest and pure, well, you will see the sure outcome of it—an utter failure in the spiritual path. It is difficult to be true to one's conscience, because of the circumstances under which people generally live. The pressure of society, the needs of the body and the weaknesses of flesh are such that it is difficult to be true to one's conscience. It only means that it is difficult to live the spiritual life, to have divine characteristics imbibed into our personality, and to be a devotee of God. In short, it is difficult to realise God.

For this purpose—the purpose of overcoming these unavoidable limitations of our personality—the remedy is to contemplate on the lives of saints. What a difficult but ideal life Saint Tulasidas lived! What a hard and painful life all our saints lived, in spite of the great obstacles placed on their path by the vast majority of the public! How difficult it is to be a man of God can be known only when we study the lives of saints. To be a man of God is to be a fool in the eyes of the public. This seems to be a necessary outcome of turning one's face towards God. Yasyaham anugrihnami tasya vittam haramyaham. “When I want to shed My grace on any person, I deprive him of all his pleasure-­centres,” is a famous statement reported to have been made by Lord Narayana Himself as recorded in the Srimad Bhagavata. What are our pleasure-centres? We know them very well. The greatest fortress of our pleasure is our own personality-consciousness, our egoism. We have many other pleasure-centres, no doubt, but the greatest among all of them is what we call, in common parlance: izzat—dignity of personality, self-respect. This self-respect was unknown to great masters and saints. They respected God and so they were humiliated in the eyes of people, put down as ‘no-ones' in the eyes of the world. What torture and what suffering they underwent—it is something terrifying, if you think over it. We have only to read the lives of a few saints of the past. We can read even the life of such a recent personality as Swami Sivanandaji. 

While it is easy to think that we believe in God, it is really difficult to be true to the salt. Hence, may we take these auspicious occasions as occasions for honest sadhana of our own conscience and spirit also, and not the sadhana of the hands, the limbs and the feet alone. We have the sadhana of the limbs of the body, in the form of ritualistic worship with waving the lights in the temple, opening a scripture and reading it loudly through the vocal organ, and paying obeisance physically by sashtanga namaskara through the body. All these are beautiful, wonderful and very necessary. But they become null and void if the conscience is set at naught and is opposed in its spirit to all our outer performances of rituals and religious observances. God is within us, in the deepest root of our being, and to turn to Him would be to turn to ourselves, in our essence, finally. This should be the spirit of sadhana and devotion to God—and nothing can be more difficult, because it is the death of the individual personality. “Die to live,” as Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj used to say. If you want to live in the Eternity, you have to die to the temporal, which means to say that you should die to all that you regard as beautiful, meaningful and valuable in this world. 

Who can do this? No ordinary man is prepared for this. No ordinary mortal can have the courage, the power and the strength to face the weaknesses of flesh, the foibles of human nature and the impetuosity of the human ego. Who can face these powerful demons? Who can face Ravana? No one, not all the gods, not even Indra could face him. And who are we? It is not a joke to face and overcome these great negative forces. They are awful—this is the only word we can use here. They are so terrifying that even a mere thought of them is enough to make one run away. Such is the terror that one has to meet with before one becomes fit for God-realisation. “The fear of the Absolute,” said Plotinus, a great saint of the West. Entering the Absolute is like entering a lion's den, from which you cannot come back. Fierce is the ocean, fierce is the lion, fierce is the conflagration of fire, fierce is the love of God. No one can love God, unless one is prepared to die, wholly and totally, to the so-called good, beautiful and pleasant in this world, to this body and to the ego. Hard is the job! Difficult is the task! God's grace is the only saving factor. So, may we pray to Him, the Almighty, that He may bless us with this uncanny courage, knowledge and strength, that we may realise Him in all His Glory in this very birth.

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To be continued 

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