The Process of Yoga : 1.5. Swami Krishnananda.
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Friday, October 09, 2020. 07:19. AM.
Chapter 1: The Spirit of Life -5.
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1.
Why should this be so? Why should we be so poverty-stricken in the essentiality of our being? Why are we bankrupt in ourselves while we seem to be rich in the public eye? What is this mystery? Has anyone found time to question into this and find an answer to this question? Why should we be so grieved and agonised in our depths while we are looking beautiful outside? “The spirit of life has not been known,” is again the answer. “Life has not been understood,” is the answer. Why are we not interested in knowing it, entering into its spirit, and grasping it at its bottom? We have not been put in the proper direction. We have been misled right from our birth by social circumstances and public opinions, which is the ethics that we usually follow. Our ethics is social ethics. It is not metaphysical or spiritual ethics. If all people say, “It is all right,” we think it is good. Mostly, our moral standard is a social standard. We do not go into the scientific validity of the principle involved because the social standard seems to be the overwhelming majority, and we are afraid that going into the scientific depth may contradict public opinion.
2.
Inasmuch as we are living on the surface of social morality, social ethics, social etiquette, social setup, and a social goal of life, we live as social elements and not as spiritual beings or something worthwhile in our own selves. But, when we leave this world, which is the fate of everyone one day or the other, do we go as social beings? Do people come with us? Does social ethics or morality help us? Nothing should be regarded as our association at the time when we are to leave this world. That quintessence of life follows us. The essentiality or the substance of things that we have seen and observed, and the life we have lived, follows us.
3.
Thus, we are to be re-educated. We are still small children in the kindergarten level of education, small babies in the life process. We are unlettered, untutored from the point of view of life taken in its completeness. It is, therefore, pointless to imagine that we are well off in life. We will be taught a lesson to our bitter experience one day or the other if we are so complacent to think that we are well off in life. One day or the other we will be put to the necessity of eating the bitter fruit of life. No one has gone without tasting it, and we are not going to be an exception. Everyone has to pass through the same process of training and discipline in the school or the university of prakriti, nature in its completeness.
4.
We should first of all be humble. We have to realise that we have learned nothing. We have to forget what we have learned in order that we may know something new and more valuable in life. The egoism or the arrogance of our learning has to go. The pride of our wealth and our status has to be shed. We should stand like a child, as one to be admitted to the first level of education in the school of nature. Let this humility be our qualification for our entry into this university of life, having forgotten all the pride of our original learning that we got from the social atmosphere of life. Life is not social, ultimately. It is something more than social, but we are accustomed to living only socially. From our childhood, from our birth onwards, we are in society. We live with father, mother, brother, friend, and so on, so that we are taught to think in terms of society. Everything is judged from the point of view of multitude – from the public point of view, from the point of view of the quantity of things. We have never been taught to live life from the point of view of its quality and worth.
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