So, when you build up your strength of individuality and self-reliance and character-strength from your young days, you are already catching that wind of Grace, and you are getting steadily stronger and purer to appreciate it and benefit from it.

And you become strongest when you surrender all your strength to that great breeze of Grace that blows all the time. For He alone is; we are only just a spark of that divine fire. We have not to run after, to pine after, Divine Grace; we have only to become grace-worthy. And that grace-worthiness is what one gets by achieving manliness through a life of self-reliance, hard work, and struggle to develop character -strength. This takes us closer and closer to that final spiritual revolution in total self-surrender—prapatti or saranagati.

When the mind is dominated by nature's powers of tamas and rajas, saranagati or self-surrender, if practised, will not be genuine. It is best then to practise purusakara, or self-reliance, accompanied by a general feeling of devotion and dedication to God. But, when the mind rises to the level of sattva, or even sattva-dominated rajas, it gets the capacity for self-surrender and the appreciation of Divine Grace. It is at this level that bhakti shines at its purest and best, and human life reaches the level of spontaneity: naturalness, and effort-lessness. The Srimad Bhagavatam gives a beautiful picture of such a life, in its exposition of the nature of a bhagavatottama, the best among the devotees, by the Nava Yogindras (XI. 2. 45-52):

'He is the best among the devotees of Hari (God), who sees the Blessed Lord as the Self in all beings, and all beings in the Blessed Lord as their Self.'

'He is a middling type of devotee, who practises love towards God, friendship towards His devotees, compassion towards childish or ignorant people, and indifference towards enemies.'

'He is an ordinary type of devotee, who seeks to worship God with faith only in an image or idol, but not in His devotees or others.'

"He is the best among the devotees of God, who sees this universe as the Maya of Visnu (the All-pervading Lord) even while experiencing its objects through his sense organs.'

'He is the pre-eminent devotee, who, through his constant remembrance of Hari, does not get deluded by the characteristics of the world such as birth, death, hunger-thirst, fear, cravings, and hardships affecting the body, sense organs, vital energies, mind, and intellect.'

‘He, verily, is the best a among the devotees, who, ever residing only in Vasudeva (Hari), does not experience the emergence of even the seeds of sense cravings and craving-satisfying actions in his mind.’

'He, indeed, is dear to Hi, who is no attached to the notions such as birth, action, caste, order of life etc., centred in this body.’

'He, indeed, is the best among the devotees, who does not entertain in his mind distinctions such as "this is one's own, this is an outsider or foreigner", and who is peaceful and looks upon all beings with equal-mindedness.'

Every devotee is inspired by this truth, when truly comprehended, that there is God's grace available to him or her. That is what will carry him or her onward in life thereafter, in a beautiful and natural and rewarding blending of self-effort and Divine Grace, until the flood of Divine Grace engulfs the devotee.

When people understand religion correctly as the science of total human unfoldment, they will realize that there is no gulf between man's external life and man's internal life, between man's secular life and man's spiritual life. External and internal are only formal expressions. Life or Reality knows no separation like this. What is external is also internal. 'Narayana, the Indwelling Divine', says the Narayana Upanisad, 'exists filling the inside and the outside of man and the universe’—

Antah bahisca tat sarvam, vyapya narayanah sthitah.

So, when you are working in the world, you are working in and through Narayana Himself. You are not really away from Him. Vedanta says that God is both transcendent and immanent. He is within as well as without. Sri Ramakrishna told Vivekananda: 'Learn to see God with eyes closed as well as with eyes open; with eyes closed in meditation andbha with eyes open during work and inter-human relations.'

So, in the early stages of one's life, when one is dealing with the world, one is actually in touch with the Divine as well. She or he doesn't know it yet, but that awareness will dawn depending upon how one handles one's life. And this truth will dawn fully on him or her, when that great strength gained by one's self-reliance and self-effort is able to go beyond itself to a still greater strength, the strength which is self-surrender to the Divine. This is the only occasion when surrender becomes supreme victory. The knowledge dawns that the breeze of Divine Grace has been gently carrying onward his or her little boat of individuality on the waters of life towards the ocean of total fulfillment. This also means that life and action continue even after self-surrender, but now, naturally and spontaneously and effortlessly, and as an instrument of the Divine and for the good of the world.

So, in Vedanta it is said: 'Even to turn towards God, or towards striving for liberation, man needs His grace.' Only through grace of God do you get even this tendency towards spirituality, this thirst for the highest. Blaise Pascal, the mathematician mystic of the seventeenth century, felt Lord Jesus telling him (Pensess, Dutton paperback edition, pp.150-51):

Seeking is also finding, because what is sought for is also the highest truth within us. That is the way Grace operates in human life; but we fully recognize it only when we become spiritually mature with the strength of manliness leading to the strength of godliness or saintliness in total self-surrender. Then, from that height, one can say: ‘My play is done; Now I see the truth; everything was and is Divine Grace.’ Personal effort and self-surrender to the Divine are only the earlier and later phases of man’s spiritual life in Divine Grace.

[The Speaker:] “I wish all of you complete success in your spiritual training, growth, and fulfillment from manliness to godliness, from manliness to saintliness. That is a complete philosophy of life; and that is the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita.”

Source: Book 'Divine Grace', by Swami Ranganathananda, Published in 1980 by: Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai.

FAITH. WE COULD not live a day without it. We cross a street corner with the faith that the stopped cars will not run over us; we submit ourselves to the surgeon's knife with the faith that he will cure our disease; we rely on our friends with the faith that they will help us in our time of need. The examples of faith as a dynamic and constructive force in our lives are limitless and they demonstrate the truth of Tolstoy's statement, "Faith is the force of life."

Yet, ironically, when it comes to having faith in God, a multitude of doubts surface. We question the validity of having faith in the unseen and unknown. When the same faith that moves our everyday life is directed toward God, it is called "blind faith." But isn't all faith blind? "Has faith an eye?" asked Sri Ramakrishna. "Speak either of faith or of direct knowledge."

Nevertheless, the label of "blind faith" remains and carries with it all sorts of undesirable connotations. The classic example of blind faith is the individual who accepts, without question, every word in the scriptures as the literal truth, even though it may directly contradict scientifically proven facts. With the mind closed to doubt and reason, faith becomes rigid, unyielding, and easily demolished. Such faith is usually a product of laziness, ignorance, or fear. This faith is indeed "blind" and is worthy of the derision it often receives.

But to cover all faith in God under a blanket of irrationality and rigidity is unjust. The implication is that reason and faith in God do not and cannot coexist, when in fact one must first open the door to doubt and reason before genuine faith in God can be cultivated. We are fools to accept whatever we read or hear as the truth without first subjecting it to critical scrutiny in the light of reason. If it passes this test, if it satisfies reason, it should be accepted and held onto with unswerving faith. If not, it should be discarded as mere superstition. Swami Vivekananda once said, "Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything un-questioningly."

Although real faith is founded upon reason, it is not limited to reason. Faith often takes us where reason cannot penetrate, such as to the belief in the existence of God.

Intellectual conviction is essential, but this in itself is not faith. It is merely rational belief. When conviction in the mind is followed by a response in the heart, when our beliefs touch our hearts and change our lives, only then do we begin to have true faith.

How can we attempt to understand lofty spiritual truths with our limited intellect? The finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Reason can lead us only to a certain point after which faith must take over and carry us to the final realization of God.

Faith in God develops gradually. It often begins with a feeling of interest in an aspect of God or in a spiritual teaching we have heard or read. The idea intrigues us at first, and we inquire further into its meaning and import. After delving into it, reasoning upon it, and discovering that it satisfies reason, we reach the stage of intellectual acceptance. But this is not enough. We still feel unfulfilled and restless. When we begin to feel intuitively that the Lord is present within us, the seed of faith is beginning to mature.

Intuitive knowledge transcends intellectual knowledge. For example, someone has told you that your friend is in the next room. Upon entering the room, you find it completely dark and not a sound is heard. Since you were told your friend was there, you intellectually believe it. Yet doubt comes finding the room dark and silent. Then you begin to feel the presence of someone else in the room. The feeling is an intuitive one since you cannot see or hear anything. Yet it is strong enough to eliminate many of your doubts. Then at last, the light is turned on and you find yourself face to face with your friend. All doubts vanish with this direct perception.

Once we see the Lord, once we experience that ultimate Reality, nothing can shake our faith. If I see a table before me, nothing or no one can convince me that the table does not exist. My faith in the existence of t he table is unshakable because I directly perceive it. If my friend writes to me of a table she has bought, I accept her word, believing she now has such a table. But the table becomes truly real for me when I have seen it and touched it. This is the epitome of faith—belief based on direct perception. Complete faith in God comes only after one has directly perceived and experienced him.

But until the faith of experience comes, we need a working faith, a faith in the unseen. In the Bible we read, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." This faith, this firm belief in the living presence of God, is the essence of spiritual life. Faith is something which on the surface appears so easy to obtain. Yet as we strive to acquire it, we realize how difficult and how rare it is to have real faith in God having never seen him. After years of conditioning in a society that measures intelligence by cynicism about belief in anything outside direct sense perception, acquiring simple, childlike faith in the unseen becomes arduous.

Sri Ramakrishna once said, "Unless a man is guileless, he cannot so easily have faith in God. God is far, far away from the mind steeped in worldliness. Worldly intelligence creates many doubts and many forms of pride—pride of learning, wealth, and the rest." We find ourselves faced with the task of getting rid of the intellectual jargon in our minds and the emotional turmoil in our hearts, which only serve as breeding grounds for doubts, and replacing them with guileless, childlike faith in God. The faith of a child is such that if his mother says there is a bogeyman or a ghost, there is one. And there is no doubt in his mind that such an entity does indeed exist.

Childlike faith is different from blind faith. The faith of the child is open, spontaneous, and receptive, without motive or thought of self. In contrast, the faith of a fanatic is closed, willed, and unsympathetic. Blind faith is usually motivated by fear, a need for security, or a desire for acceptance.

Firm faith and absolute trust in the Lord within is necessary before surrender to him is possible. Would you think of resigning yourself to the will of someone you did not trust wholeheartedly? Our faith in the Lord must be so great that we are ready and willing to entrust our body, mind, and soul to him. When we reach this lofty point in spiritual life, self-surrender will follow naturally.

To have faith when everything is going well is not too difficult. But the true test of genuine faith is to have complete trust in the Lord in the midst of trials, troubles, and temptations. In the words of Sri Ramakrishna, "The stone may remain in water for numberless years and yet the water will never penetrate it. But clay is soon softened into mud by coming in contact with water. So the strong heart of the faithful does not despair in the midst of trials and persecutions, but the man of weak faith is shaken, even by the most trifling cause."

From time to time, through prayer and spiritual discipline, we may get glimpses of the beauty and majesty of God, and every now and then we may feel a particle of his tremendous love for us. These glimpses serve to restore and build our faith in God.

Obstructions, disappointments, and dry periods are bound to come and with them doubts creep into the mind. But in the midst of these trials, we should try to recall the glimpses we have had and try to feel again that faith and love that accompanied them. By regaining our faith through recollection, we are able to overcome or at least endure the hard blows in Iife. By exercising patience and a healthy sense of perspective, we are able to ride out the turbulent tide of events without being capsized.

Most of us have assumed since childhood that God exists. Why then do we continually allow ourselves to be caught in the clutches of the world, to be consumed by our own petty little desires, to be ruled over by the materialism of our society? Because we lack faith. Our belief in the existence of God is only in the mind and has not yet reached the heart.

If we really had faith that the very source of all love, knowledge, and joy was within us and was attainable, we would go mad to get it. Our longing would be unbearable and would know no bounds. The story is told of a thief who knows there is gold in the next room and he stays up all night thinking of nothing else but how to get it. His entire mind is riveted to the gold. So it is with faith, having which our only desire would be to see God face to face, to experience and become one with that Reality.

Source: Article by Pravrajika Bhavaprana, Living Wisdom, Published by Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, 1995.

SITTING IN HIS science class, a junior high school student was listening as his teacher explained the biology of organisms. In the final analysis, the teacher observed, life—including that of mankind—was nothing but the process of oxidation and combustion. Some inner rebellion forced that student out of his chair. Springing to his feet, he burst out, "If that's so, then what kind of meaning does life have?"

That boy's cry can be seen as the cry of Everyman. At some point a time comes when we can no longer paper over the larger issues of human existence; is life, we ask, merely an intricate web of chemical processes? Has our life no more significance than a candle which slowly burns and sputters its way into oblivion? Is it "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?

If there is one thing that we fear—and fear it more desperately than death itself—it is the dread of living a life without significance. A life smaller than the sum of its parts is intolerable to the human spirit.

Yet this dread has become more prevalent as we advance technologi­cally, careening fast forward in a struggle to master the external world. We chase goals that evade us, disappoint us, turn to ashes in our hands. Our interior world—unexplored, uncultivated—is left barren. There's no doubt that we've enjoyed remarkable technological success. But the psychic cost has been great: in our search for comfort and prosperity, we've dangled ourselves over the edge of an existential cliff.

Mankind, in earlier, simpler years, was not inclined to believe that his existence was a haphazard event, an accident without a goal or purpose. There was security in the assumption that society was a microcosm of the harmonious universe it mirrored; God's well-ordered creation had an intimate niche for everyone and everything.

The security mankind once knew is now long gone. The faith that knit our lives together slowly unravelled with the intrusion of science. The universe we discovered, hummed along quite nicely by itself: God wasn't necessary to turn its wheels. The shift in the West’s world view over the past century rendered God, if not dead, at least coolly marginalized.

Faith in God shifted to a faith in various demigods, Marxism and Freudianism being that to most influential of the century. These quasi-religions offered their votaries a worldview that was satisfying in its rigidity, their respective dogmas being a jealous in their orthodoxy as any one of five creeds. According to Marx, a human being was nothing more than a socio--economic entity at the mercy of economic forces and ongoing class struggles. Man was defined by his or her place in the labour force.

Freud, by contrast, saw humanity as a mass of seething, repressed sexual desires. A person's life was dictated by his or her desire for pleasure. Later psychoanalytic schools expanded upon Freud's basic premise: Adler, for example, posited that man was motivated by the will for power.

But neither science nor any political, social, or psychological doctrine offer us the peace that we crave. None answer the larger questions that life presents. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed, "Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest, or rabbi in former days. Now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergy man and instead confront the doctor with questions as, 'What is the meaning of my life?' "

This is the question that brought most of us to Vedanta's doorstep.

MANY OF US turn to spiritual life only when nothing else works. Being creatures of habit, we first try the techniques which have always patched things up for us before: we manipulate people and situations, pull a stitch here, move a stitch there, in the hopes that we can salvage a little happiness out of our lives. But it doesn't work. Things fall apart. Our solutions are jerry-rigged, bandaids over tectonic plates.

Why don't our solutions work? Because we are seeking external solutions to spiritual problems, Dr. Carl Jung—whose career spanned several decades and included patients from every corner of the globe— wrote:

There has not been one [patient] whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

It is the "religious outlook" that gives meaning to life. Religious in this sense "has nothing to do with a particular creed or membership in a church" as Jung hastened to say. It is a spiritual approach to life which recognizes that our lives have meaning—a purpose and a goal.

The central fact of our existence is the divinity that lies at the core of our being. Divinity is our real nature, our birthright. Nothing can change it, nothing can take it away from us. True, for many of us that divinity is unmanifest; we are unaware, or only dimly aware, of its presence. But that doesn't make it any less real. If clouds hide the sun, we don't doubt the sun's existence. We know that the sun is there in all its glory, ready to shed its warmth and light. Similarly the Atman, the divinity within us all, is shadowed by clouds of ignorance. But these clouds do not affect the Atman: our real Self is pure, eternal, perfect, blissful. It is unaffected by our miseries, untouched by our failings. Within every one of us lies the source of all goodness and strength. Humanity, Swami Vivekananda said,

stands on the glory of his own soul, the infinite, the eternal, the deathless— that soul which no instruments can pierce, which no air can dry, no fire burn, no water melt, the infinite, the birthless, the deathless, without beginning and without end, before whose magnitude the suns and moons and all their systems appear like drops in the ocean, before whose glory it's away into nothingness and time vanishes into nonexistence. This glorious soul we must believe in. Out of that will come power. Whatever you think, that you will be.... All knowledge is in me, all power, all purity, and all freedom.

Unfolding our divinity, removing the clouds of ignorance, is the goal that gives meaning to life.

What exactly is this ignorance? It is the illusion that we are separate from God and from one another. Oneness is the great truth that Vedanta has to teach. We are all one—the universe and all its living beings are all manifestations of the one Brahman, unity is the sole reality or the universe. Brahman—eternal, infinite existence—cannot be divided. The nature of Brahman is bliss absolute: the law of unity is the law of love.

When we see ourselves as separate from the One, suffering is the inevitable result. "He who says he is different from others," Swami Vivekananda said, "even by a hair's breadth, immediately becomes miserable."

But wait a minute. There are not many people who walk around attuned to the divine unity which pervades all things. Does this mean that everyone is miserable? Everyone who thinks of himself or herself as a limited being certainly suffers. When ignorance blinds us to our divine nature, we feel alone and helpless, at the mercy of external and internal fear, loneliness, and insecurity. The more egocentric a person is, the more insecure and selfish he is. The more selfish and insecure, the more vulnerable and miserable that person is. He or she feels that he must compete to survive. Fearful that others are taking advantage of him, he is in fact his own worst enemy. Only when we rid ourselves of the ego, do we flow with the natural law of the universe: the law of unity and the law of love. We have to get ourselves, our prickly egos, out of the way. "When the ego dies”, Sri Ramakrishna said, "all t roubles cease.” The ego, the root of all ignorance, is the cloud which hides the sun of our true Self.

The goal, then, is to remove that ignorance so that we can attain the only goal worth having: realization of God, realization of the Self within.

Is it possible? Certainly. We've made our bed, and we can unmake it just as well. Just as our past actions have created the life that we are living now, so can our present actions create what we will be tomorrow. We are the masters of our own fate. There are no victims in the cosmos: whatever we see around us is the inevitable result of past actions.

Nothing happens to us by the whim of an outside agency. Our experience in the world is not haphazard. What may superficially appear to be absurd is in fact the effect of seeing the results of past actions in progress. We're seeing only one frame of a movie, without seeing what comes before or after the isolated freeze frame. For example: a child is struck by a car and is killed instantly. Is this the hand of fate, randomly selecting a victim here, a victim there, leaving grief in its wake? No, Vedanta says. We are only seeing the effect of an action that began long, long ago. Whatever actions a person has committed must take effect sometime or other. As we sow, so we reap. If we are reaping, there must have been some sowing somewhere along the line.

Does this make Vedanta a coldhearted, fatalistic religion? Isn't Vedanta saying that if a person suffers, he or she must have deserved it? Never.

Experience has shown that the more a person advances on the spiritual path, the more his heart broadens in love and sympathy for others. No one could love a Mary Magdalene more than a Jesus Christ; no one but a Ramakrishna could transform—through the sheer power of love—the debauched Girish Ghosh. Who but a Sarada Devi could say with utter conviction that the Muslim thief Amjad was as much her son as the monk Sarat, a beloved disciple of Ramakrishna? And who but a Buddha, overcome by pity, could offer his life for a goat? It is axiomatic that the more a person reflects the light of God, the less he condemns his fellow beings. Only an illumined soul can really love others with a full and open heart. The illumined soul, united with God, is freed from the bondage of egotism. With his or her ‘I’ out of the way, he can truly feel the sufferings of others. "May I be born again and again," Swami Vivekananda declared,

and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in, the sum total of all souls—and above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species, is the special object of my worship.

Hardly cold words of indifference. The illumined soul rejoices in others’ happiness and intensely feels for them in their sorrow. Yet, in the core of his being, the illumined soul is free—detached from both happiness and misery, pleasure and pain. And he knows that those who suffer can—and eventually will—be as free as he or she is.

Having rid himself of the ego, the illumined soul has found the mine of bliss within himself. Anger, hatred, lust, ambition, and pettiness of every variety, can never trouble him. Peace is his permanent treasure; peace is his abode.

"What kind of meaning does life have?" the junior high school student asked. Its meaning is found in how we live it. Our goal is to manifest our innate divinity through every deed we do, every word we speak, every thought we think.

It is not an easy task, but no worthwhile endeavor ever is. What is important to remember is that no effort is lost. There is no failure in spiritual life. Every step that we take in the right direction is a permanent gain. Every one of us, whether we know it or not, has greatness within; every human being's life is infinitely precious. A meaningful life begins when we add a spiritual base to life's equation. "If you put fifty zeros after a one, you have a large sum," Sri Ramakrishna said. "But erase the one and nothing remains. It is the one that makes the many."

Life without an awareness of our innate divinity is a stack of zeros. Add the "I" of the divine Self, and a meaningful life is ours.

Source: Article by Pravrajika Vrajaprana, Living Wisdom, Published by Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, 1995.

Source: Meditation and Spiritual Life by Swami Yatiswarananda