Articles

As for those who depend upon God and have faith in Him, well, that itself is their spiritual practice, sadhana. God is one’s very own. It is an eternal relationship. One realizes Him in proportion to the intensity of one’s feeling for him. Don’t be afraid. Always remember that somebody is protecting you.

In recent years a great deal of interest has been aroused in this country concerning yoga. And, we may be sure, whenever there is a demand for anything, there will be people to meet that demand regardless of whether the article is genuine or spurious. As a result of this present demand, a large number of teachers as well as institutions of yoga have begun to flourish.

From all this it is clear that, while positively charged memories can and should be used for specific therapeutic purposes, there must be no indiscriminate indulgence in “natural piety”; for such indulgence may result in a condition akin to trance—a condition at the opposite pole from the wakefulness that is understanding. Those who live with unpleasant memories become neurotic and those who live with pleasant ones become somnambulistic. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and the good thereof.

“Wolf children,” adopted by animal mothers and brought up in animal surroundings, have the form of human beings, but are not human. The essence of humanity, it is evident, is not something we are born with; it is something we make or grow into. We learn to speak, we accumulate conceptualized knowledge and pseudo-knowledge, we imitate our elders, we build up fixed patterns of thought and feeling and behavior, and in the process we become human, we turn into persons.

Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence.

The first two Hebrew words in the Book of Psalms are: Ashre ha-ish—“Happy is the man;” then there follow the conditions to be fulfilled for a person to achieve true happiness. These two words set the tone of the entire book, for in effect they announce the two main characteristics that predominate in almost all the one-hundred and fifty psalms found in this book.

Another agent of transformation of ego-consciousness is the ideal. An ideal is a psychological phenomenon, which serves as a model of perfection and stimulates goal-oriented activity in the soul. Ideals are of two types, subjective and objective.

Abraham Maslow, a pioneer in humanistic psychology, has narrated a beautiful anecdote about a small American-Indian boy:

The removal of the distinction between the sacred and the secular does not at all mean the removal of the distinction between morality and immorality, between virtue and vice, between truth and falsehood. There is a universal moral law known as dharma governing both the sacred and secular aspects of human life. The compelling power of yajna itself is derived from this law, and any violation of it will destroy the sacrificial nature of life and will bring its own retribution sooner or later.

If we want to succeed in any enterprise we must give undivided attention to it. Undivided attention means an undivided life, the consecration of one’s whole life. The goal we aim at may be immediately attainable or it may take several years; in either case, as long as the goal remains unrealized we have to give our whole life to it.