Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita - 7. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Thursday 08, January 2025, 20:20.
Article
Scriptures
Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita - 7. 
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on February 24th, 1973)
Post-7.

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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.

Spirituality is different from all this. We cannot expect God to obey our command. We cannot and should not say, “God, do this.” Who are we to make God do certain things? We can only pray for the grace of God, whatever the form be in which it comes. We should not order God: “Let my business increase.” What is this sort of prayer, as if we know what ought to be good, what ought to be proper, as if we are omniscient?

This is the present type of interpretation of godliness in spirituality, which has become a trade these days, and a mockery, a joke, a humorous activity of people like any other form of business. It is good for nothing. It is worse than anything. We are not going to get anything from this God, from this kind of spirituality, but this tendency is in every one of us unconsciously. We may think that others are like this and we are not like this, but we are also like this. Go deep into your own subconscious and see that you expect something of a very comfortable type from God.

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Continues

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