Surge 90
Regaining Balance
“No matter in what state you are – impure, disorganized, disturbed or depressed – you return to purity and poise by remembering the Lord,” says a popular verse1 recited by priests at the beginning of many a ritual. Regaining balance is the need felt by increasingly large number of people everywhere in the world these days. Men and women in developed and developing countries find they are going through life in mechanical ways with no meaning or depth in their daily activities. They feel alienated in some strange way from their own homes. “What is wrong with me?” they ask, and wonder if they could “reset” the machine of their life and start all over again.
Remembering the Lord, we can return to poise. The “Lord” here is not necessarily the God that organized religions have talked about, in their loudest voices. The Lord is our own true nature, our own “original face”. Don’t we, in our heart of hearts, wish to love all and don’t we, deep within us, wish to be loved by all? This inmost calling is declared by the Vedanta as the nature of our real Self. To hate or distrust is as much a departure from our true being as it is to be lazy or laid back. Our own mind plays a thousand games, which successfully take us away from our home of peace. We are victims of our own thought patterns, which for example fill us with such self-importance that any small incident where somebody did not treat us well causes a lot of hurt to us. To return to a state of openness, utterly free of any self-importance, is the true meaning of “remembering the Lord”.
We generally attach importance to the conditions of our body and mind. The spiritual insight of the Upanishads lifts us above the physical and mental levels. The body and mind keep us in the realm of space and time. Spirituality helps us gain a glimpse of that which is not touched by either space or time. Big, small, far and near are ideas related to space. Slow, fast, yesterday and tomorrow are concepts of time. When we shift from ‘thought’ to ‘insight’, we operate through a different consciousness. Therefore such wisdom is called transcendental – it goes beyond the periphery of the usual parameters.
So how do we ‘remember the Lord’? Mantra or tantra can taxi for some distance but the “take off” is a mystery. Techniques and their practices, very popular in this world, have their limitations. The key to the miraculous leap to the higher consciousness is better described through a number of negations than by any assertion. When we understand clearly that saying (reciting) something, doing (repeating) something or visualizing (imagining) something could sustain, if not strengthen, the self (the ego), then alone the new phenomenon may begin. We may ‘let go’. We may relax. We are otherwise disturbing our own rest, all the time. Consider an analogy. After we swing the cradle for sometime, we find the baby is asleep and let him sleep peacefully. Similarly, after some effort at study or meditation, we recognize that our mind is inclined to explore the unknown. In that state, we just let the mind take off.
The road of effort leads to the zone of no effort. Grace takes over at this point. Effort paves the way but grace makes the real thing happen. Effort is in the realm of the ego and illusion. Grace is the wonderland of spirituality.
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi, Saturday, June 30, 2012
End Notes:
1 apavitrah pavitro va, sarva-avastham gato’pi va
yah smaret pundareekaksham, sa bahya-abhyantarah shuchih.