Lessons in Truth Series: the Everlasting Gospel of the Kingdom of God (Spirit) Within. Timothy F. Gardner

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of life. The first is tranquility of the mind, interior calmness, and peace. Then comes sense—control, mastery over your passions. As long as we remain slaves to the senses and the mind, with its passions and its restlessness, so long we cannot really desire God. The third treasure is patience and forbearance. The next is burning faith in the ideal. The heart must move toward its ideal with pleasure—the pleasure is very important. When we move toward the objects of sense-attractions, we feel great pleasure in our hearts. We must find just as much pleasure in the search for God. It is no good merely saying: “Oh, yes, I believe in God.” That is not what is known as faith. But, if you really believe in God, then your heart will move toward the ideal of God—realization with great enthusiasm. We must cultivate that. It doesn’t come all at once . . .

      Then comes self-surrender. And finally, the desire for freedom from the bondage of life. That is the most important thing of all—that thirst, that longing for God, and that desire for freedom from the things that hinder our approach to Him (Prabhavananda as cited in Isherwood, 1971, pp.315-316).

      To continue Swami Prabhavananda states:

      Christ [Jesus], in His Sermon [on the Mount], as we shall see, speaks of these same conditions to be fulfilled in order that the purity of heart can be achieved and the truth of God revealed. But before we proceed on this subject, let me first try to explain the central note of the sermon. [Which is two-fold in nature.]

      “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God,” [and] “Be ye therefore perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect.” These two verses give the central note of the Sermon on the Mount. Whatever Scriptures one reads, one finds the same note, this same theme. See God! Be ye therefore perfect! Know God! Realize Him! This is the one purpose and idea of life . . . Theologians today may argue whether one can find God or whether perfection can be achieved or not, or what Christ [Jesus] meant by knowing the truth or seeing God: But this much I can say definitely—that when Christ [Jesus] spoke to his disciples, He meant literally that God could be seen in their present lives. And the disciples were hungering just for that truth, to know God, to be perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect. How can the spiritual aspirant who is hungering for truth be satisfied with theology, with philosophy, with doctrines and creeds? Christ [Jesus] was not teaching any creed, He was not teaching any doctrine but He was teaching how to know and realize God. The disciples who were sitting at His feet knew that the first thing in spiritual life is to know God while living in this world, not after the body is left behind, but here and now! That is what is meant by religion. That is the central note of the Sermon on the Mount. And the chief method of knowing God is told in the verse: “Blessed are the pure in heart.” The Beatitudes and the Sermon explain how that purity of heart is to be achieved. But we must remember that seeing God and attaining that perfection is not possible in what we call our normal life and consciousness. Nobody has seen God with these eyes. There is no perfection if we live in this life of the senses (Prabhavananda as cited in Isherwood, 1971, pp. 315-317).

      Prabhavananda further states that:

      CHRIST [Jesus] HAS TAUGHT US THAT, in order to see God, we must be pure in heart. What is meant by this purity? . . . Try to think of God now, this very moment. What do you find? The thought of God passes through your mind . . . like a flash; then all types of distractions begin. You find that you are thinking of everything else in the universe, but God. That is the test of true purity. As Christ [Jesus] understood the word: can a man, without any distractions whatever, keep his mind fixed upon love for God? Why are there these distractions? Because the mind remains impure from birth to birth—impure, because it has gathered so many impressions of so many kinds, good and bad.

      These impressions have to be removed completely: to remove them, we have to know their cause. Yoga psychology defines five root causes of all our impressions. First, is ignorance, in a universal sense: This is the chief of all causes of impurity of the mind. It is natural to all mankind: because of it, we do not see God. Ignorance is our normal state of consciousness. God is within us, and all around us: we are carrying Him with us all the time. But, instead of seeing God, we see the universe, and believe it to be the ultimate reality . . . Then there is the sense of ego, which makes me think of myself as an individual being, and say: I must possess, I must enjoy, and I must have this and that. This sense of ego separates us from one another, and from the reality of God. From the sense of the ego, we develop attachment, and aversion: I want one thing, I hate another. That desire, and that hatred, is both obstacles in the path to God (Prabhavananda as cited in Isherwood, 1971, pp. 318-319).

      Vedanta philosophy continues to elaborate on the ego: Ego . . . is the root—cause of our ignorance. What is Ego? But a belief in separation from God, a belief in a separate and individual existence—at best, a belief in duality, a duality of man and God, of matter and Spirit; at worst, a belief in finite and material existence as reality, and as the whole of reality ? . . .

      The belief, then in an existence apart from God, is the major sin; ultimately, the only sin, error or misconception (Van Druten as cited in Isherwood, 1971, pp. 350-351).

      In continuing with Swami Prabhavananda’s discourse, he states:

      The final cause of our mental impurity is our clinging to life, our fear of death—and this is natural to all, good and bad alike. Buddha calls it Tanha, the thirst for life, and Christ [Jesus] refers to it as the same, “He who loves his life shall lose it.” Only the illumined saint has no sense of ego, no attachment, no hatred, and no fear of death; they have all vanished.

      Even if we could have spiritual enlightenment instantly, this very moment, we shouldn’t like it, we should draw back at the borderline. Even if we have been seeking God, we draw back at the moment when we feel we are about to have the vision of Him: we are afraid, because we cling to this life and this consciousness. We are so afraid of losing this everyday consciousness, even though it means passing into that wider infinite consciousness—in comparison with which our normal perceptions are, as the Gita says, “like a thick night in a sleep.” . . . Before we are ready to realize God, we must purify our hearts [minds], we must prepare ourselves (Prabhavananda as cited in Isherwood, 1971, p. 319).

      In addition to the central theme of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus in his teachings gives us four cardinal attributes that we must develop in our search for God. They can be outlined as follows:

      Attribute No. One—the Right Desire:

      If we are to come into the conscious awareness of the inner-reality of God, we must possess that seemingly cold and inhuman desire, and love toward Him that Jesus taught—a desire so strong that one forsakes all material bonds willingly and joyously to gain entrance to the kingdom of God (Spirit) within.

      Vedanta philosophy states that:

      God becomes realized only by shutting our senses to the outward things and turning our minds toward the kingdom of heaven within. We must gather the scattered forces of the mind and direct it with a concentrated heart toward God, the abiding reality. The natural inclination of man is to seek and express life in the outside world, to find enjoyments outside. But religion tells us to overcome this natural desire and seek the true abiding happiness in God who is within.

      Man, as he knows himself is not the real man. The world is not as it appears to be. Behind this surface life, where we experience the play of life and death, there is a deeper life which knows no death; behind our apparent consciousness, which gives us the knowledge of objects and things and the experiences of pleasure and pain, there is the pure, infinite, blissful consciousness. This truth of God is experienced only by those blessed souls who turn their gaze inward. Somehow, man got caught in the net of ignorance. It is the nature of ignorance to accept the unreal, the shadow, for the real . . . We may accept the shadow as the reality; we may seek life, love, happiness in the fleeting objects, persons, and things, accepting them as abiding, as real. But Mother Nature gradually reveals the truth, “God alone is the unchangeable СКАЧАТЬ