Vidya Vahini

The inescapable destiny of every living being is the attainment of fullness. By no means can it be avoided or denied. Our present condition of incompleteness is the consequence of our activities during previous lives. That is to say, the thoughts, feelings, passions, and acts of past lives have caused the condition in which we are at present. So too, our future condition is being built on the basis of our present deeds and desires, thoughts, and feelings. In other words, we ourselves are the cause of our fortunes and misfortunes. This does not mean that one should not seek and secure assistance from others for promoting one’s good fortune and avoiding misfortune. In fact, such assistance is very essential for all, except perhaps for a small minority. When one gets this help, one’s consciousness is purified and sublimated, and one’s spiritual progress is accelerated. In the end, one achieves perfection and fullness (poornatvam).

This vivifying inspiration cannot be got through the perusal of books. It can be gained only when one mind-element contacts another mind-element. Even when one’s entire life is spent in poring over books and thereby, one becomes intellectually very talented, one cannot advance to the slightest extent in the cultivation of the spirit. It would be unwarranted to claim that a person, who has reached the acme of intelligence, has thereby progressed and succeeded in reaching the acme of spiritual wisdom. Scholarship and culture are not related as cause and effect. However learned one is in worldly knowledge, unless one’s mind is cultured, the learning is mere junk. The system of education, which teaches culture and helps the culture to permeate and purify the learning that is gathered, is the best and most fruitful.

As a result of the study of books, or in other words, as a result of secular education, one’s intelligence may be sharpened and expanded. One can even deliver wonderful discourses on spiritual subjects. But, one’s spiritual life cannot be taken to have advanced in proportion. The teaching imparted to us by another person might not enter the heart and transform one’s nature. This is the reason why learning without intensive culture of the spirit proves barren.

The great one, who has the aatmic truth imprinted on the heart, is alone to be accepted as the guru. The individual who can welcome this truth and is eager to know it, he alone is to be accepted as the pupil. The seed must have the life principle latent in it. The field must be ploughed and made fit for the sowing. The spiritual harvest will be plentiful, if both these conditions are fulfilled. The listener has to possess a clear receptive intellect, or else the philosophical principles that form the basis of jnaana will not be comprehended. The guru and the pupil both have to be of this stature. Others, who have no such qualification or authority, can only dabble and play about purposelessly in the spiritual field.

There are gurus with far higher stature and far deeper capabilities than these learned and cultural masters. They are the avatars, the human incarnations of God. They confer, by mere willing, the blessing of spiritual strength. They command and by the very force of that command, the lowest of the low rises to the status of one who has attained the goal of spiritual saadhana (siddhapurusha). Such persons are the gurus of all gurus. They are the highest manifestations of God in the human form.

Man can visualise God in no other form, except the human. God appears in human form in answer to human prayer, since man can experience only that vision as real. When he tries to picture God and visualise God in any other form, he has to contemplate some crooked, ugly form and make great effort to believe that form, which is lower than the real one as He. One ignorant person agreed to mould an idol of Shiva and spent many days preparing it. As a result of his continuous labour, he produced at the end of the period the image of a monkey! So long as we are humans, we will be unable to picture, through imagination, any form of God beyond the human. So, one has to wait for the chance of perceiving the reality of the person, by oneself reaching a stage above and beyond the human level.

The petty investigation done by ordinary reason, not fed by wisdom, can help us to perceive only nothingness. When such persons deliver lectures condemning avatars, and you happen to be present and listening, ask the speaker, “Venerable Sir, have you understood the meaning of the words omnilocation, omnipotence, and omnipresence?” Man is confined to the objective nature, which he contacts through his senses. So, he is helpless in understanding these ideas. The speaker does not know about these concepts any more than the common, unlettered man. Though they are ignorant of these vast horizons of thought, speakers of this type create confusion and distress through their teachings.

Spiritual education is, in reality, experience of the truth, awareness of the truth. Pleasing oratory should not be mistaken as experiencing of the truth. That experience comes about only in the innermost tabernacle of the self.

As at present created, man is by nature encased and so, he can see God only as man. There is no escape. When buffaloes yearn to worship God, limited as they are by the buffalo nature, they can imagine God as a cosmic buffalo. So too, man imagines the divine principle as a cosmic purusha, with human limbs and human qualities.

Man, buffalo, fish - these can be compared to vessels or containers. Take it that these vessels proceed to the limitless ocean of divinity, to fill themselves with it. Each can have it only in its own shape and size, isn’t it? The man vessel will earn and accept God as having the form of man; the buffalo vessel, as having the form of buffalo; the fish vessel, as having the form of fish. All these vessel-forms contain the identical water of the ocean of divinity. When men visualise God, they see God as human. Each imposes on God its own form.