Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 5. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Thursday 25, June 2026, 19:35.
Article
Scriptures 
Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 5.
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on February 24th, 1973).
Post - 5.

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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.

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.

Impersonal love for God is unthinkable, but that is spirituality: “Heaven or hell, good or bad, pain or pleasure, God is my goal.” If this attitude is implanted in our hearts, we can be said to be real spiritual heroes. God does not come to us always in the form of satisfaction and pleasure of the senses and the body. It is not that God will always make us a prime minister. God may make us a beggar, because there is no connection whatsoever between divine justice and the human concept of good and satisfaction.

To be spiritual is to be impersonal to some extent, and this understanding is superior to the calculative understanding of human nature. Any give-and-take policy is a commercial policy, and if this policy is to be applied even to divine existence and God-being, heaven help us.

Today, the unfortunate condition of spiritual life, the humorous forms which yoga has taken these days in all parts of the world – as I mentioned, the form of a trade, as it were – this type of living is worse than having no yoga, no spirituality. Misapplication, abuse and misunderstanding are worse than not having any knowledge at all, and deliberate misuse is still worse. So we have to be guarded from all sides.

If we really want God, if we really want to be yogins, if it is true that we honestly ask for yogic perfection, this hypocrisy in our minds should go. We should not ask for consequences, results and commercial values to devolve upon us in our social and personal life. All this should be shed first; otherwise, what is vairagya, what is self-control? We keep cosily in our hearts the treasure of our personal prejudices of fulfilment of our own desires and do not want to give them up, and yet we seek God. Therefore it is that we do not find Him because, really speaking, we do not want Him.

So the scriptures give us a warning always that it is hard to find God because it is harder still to understand what God is, and more difficult to practise yoga. So let us be honest seekers of Truth, not hypocrites who put on the guise of yoga and practise the trade of spirituality. Nothing of the kind; this will not work. Do not put up an 'International Yoga House' advertisement or label in your house. No such thing will work. God is not interested in all these things. You may be an international yoga teacher, but the spiritual awareness has nothing to do with these advertisements, propagandas, labels and notice boards. Nothing of the kind. You should not have a notice board even in your mind, let alone outside. To love God and to be loved by God is difficult even to understand. Read the lives of saints, how they lived. They did not have international houses. They did not have palaces. They possessed nothing; they lived in rags, but they were the masters whom we worship today.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.” 'The poor in spirit' is important to remember. When the world does not want us, God will want us, and when we are big in the eyes of the world, remember, we are small in the eyes of God. Difficult is spiritual life, difficult is religion, difficult is purity and goodness, harder is yoga, and God alone should come to our help. Therefore, daily prayer to God in this connection is essential.

End.

Next
The Philosophy of the Karma Yoga of the Bhagavadgita:
Swami Krishnananda.

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