Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 6. Swami Krishnananda

 

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Wednesday 28, May 2025, 11:00.
Article 
Scriptures
Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 6. 
Sami Krishnananda
(Spoken on February 24th, 1973)

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We are a positive personality when we grow, not merely a transcendence of lower values. Merely giving up something wrong, bad or evil is not enough. We want to achieve something positive which is good, which is proper, and which is just. How can we rest merely in a negative personality of having avoided something? As health is not merely absence of disease, spirituality is not merely control of the senses, but the positive achievement of a superior state of existence and perception and knowledge. Therefore, it is a state of freedom and bliss. We cannot have freedom and bliss merely by having avoided something or got out of some clutches. Positive is spirituality, positive is yoga, and in the earlier stages it is combined with a negative withdrawal from the limitations of sense and the pure rational approach.

This is the sum and substance of the fundamentals of yoga practice – their philosophy and methodology. This has to be applied in our life daily, because every day is a link in the chain of the development of our personality into spiritual life. Every day, every minute, every moment of our life is a link in the chain of our development, and every link has to be strong enough. If one link breaks, the whole chain will be broken, so every moment, every second, every minute of our life is a very strong link in this long chain of development which we call spiritual evolution.

Therefore, it is necessary to build up strong seconds, strong moments and strong minutes of our life. It should be positivity proper. This can be achieved by satsanga, the company of the wise, and meditation, which has a very wide meaning. Meditation means fixing our attention on all those necessary characteristics of a higher form of life, which includes svadhyaya, which includes japa, which includes self-control, which includes seclusion, which includes purity, which includes truthfulness, and so on – all characteristics of that which is higher.

The higher we go, the more we are freed from the clutches of sense and body. The lower we are in the evolutionary process; the more is the control of the senses over us. Senses become very uncontrollable when we live merely a bodily existence. We have a very strong appetite of the senses when we live a bodily existence only. The hunger of the senses becomes uncontrollable when the consciousness is dependent on the bodily processes. The more does consciousness get freedom from the clutches of bodily processes, the more does it also gain freedom from the activity of the senses.

Desire and anger, greed, malice, jealousy, etc., are psychological consequences of the limitation of consciousness by bodily processes. When we have these traits and inclinations in our mind, we may take it for granted that we are still living an animal life, though we look like a human being. Higher than the body and the sensory is the intellectual and literary. A purely scientific, philosophical and rational living is higher than the animal form of sensory living, but spiritual life is more than rationality, more than scientific existence and more than intellectual appreciation. We cannot understand in the present state of our life as to what spirituality really is because we are tethered to bodily consciousness, at best to the human way of perception. Therefore, when we try to understand spirituality and the nature of God, we are unconsciously trying to bring down the dignity of God's being to the human level. We try to make a social God and interpret God from a social viewpoint. If God is useful to us, then we can approach Him; otherwise, we do not bother about Him. God has to be useful to us. This is the social interpretation of God.

A child of a big business magnate died. He had been praying and had done a lot of yajnas, but still the child died, so he wrote me a letter: “My child is dead. This only confirms my belief that God does not exist. If God did exist, the child ought to have lived.” This is the interpretation of God that we make. It is a commercial interpretation of God: “If I succeed in business, God exists. If I fail in business, He does not exist. If I make a profit, God exists; otherwise, He does not exist.” So this is our understanding, unfortunately. We are very educated people, very learned scholars, but look at our view of things: “If I am comfortable, God exists. If I am suffering and am tortured by the forces of the world, God does not exist. He cannot see me.” This is not true spirituality, it is comfortable spirituality. If it is conducive to our social and personal happiness, we go for it.

There was a lady who had a case in the court. Every day she was perambulating the temple for the whole day. I have seen it myself. The case failed and she stopped going to temple afterwards because her faith in God had gone.

This idea of God is very unfortunate. It is calculative, business-like, commercial, social, and personalistic. We have concocted a God like a robot, an engine or a machine to be useful to us for our practical convenience in our daily life. Such a God is no God, and He cannot help us.

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Continued

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