Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals : 9-8.

Chapter 9. Gurudev Sivananda – Physician of the Soul-8.


Now, to ignore the existence and the operation of the soul in human conduct and activity would be to ignore yourself completely. What would happen to you, if you ignore yourself in the programme of life? The question is very strange. If everybody starts ignoring one's own self – I ignore myself totally, you ignore yourself totally, everybody ignores himself or herself totally in the meaning of life – then what remains in life? There would be no such thing as life itself.

So, to remove religion is to remove the soul. That is what I was trying to tell our friend who came to me from All India Radio the other day. Religion is the science of the soul. It is not Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc. These are not religions. These are only the shapes that religion has taken in social relationship. Religion is the character of the soul made manifest in outward conduct and activity. And if the soul is what you are, then religion is your conduct, and you cannot say that your conduct can be other than the religious. Your conduct and activity have to be religious because you are the soul, and religion is the conduct and activity and expression of the soul. So, to live a kind of life minus religion is to think the unthinkable and the impossible. There is no such thing as a life without religion. That would be like your living without a soul. That would be again to live without your own self. That is an absurdity of the first water.

This is a very difficult thing to conceive in the mind. People had a very wrong notion of spirituality, of religion, of God even, of creation, of social relationship, etc. To set right these errors of thought in mankind in general and to show a path to the whole of humanity, Masters like Swami Sivanandaji were born. The philosophy and the religion of Swami Sivanandaji is the philosophy and the religion of mankind. He did not come to preach Hinduism. He did not belong to any particular religion. He did not even act as a human being. He acted as a super-personality and as a representative of God, the Almighty, who cannot be regarded as a prerogative of any particular creed or cult. God is an impersonal existence, whose representation was this Master and Masters of his kind.

Chapter 9. Gurudev Sivananda – Physician of the Soul - ENDS.

Next : Chapter 10: The Esoteric Significance of the Devi Mahatmya

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  ...