THIS MOMENT

If we concentrate on this moment and see that we are engaged in right and beneficial acts as we go through life, all our actions, hours, days and years are automatically watched and safeguarded against pitfalls. This moment-it is precious, it is sacred. It is our salvation or our doom. On the contrary, all our actions are geared to reach our goal which will be accomplished without anxiety or worry if we take care of the work right at hand. The secret of the freedom of the liberated soul is this: after a period of watching over ‘this moment’, perfection becomes a habit, a solid foundation. Sinning is deviating- just a traffic accident in the journey of life.

RESULTS OF ACTION

Results of actions can be broadly be classified as compensation, retribution, and reward and punishment. In nature’s schema, there is a compensation for every sacrifice made. A man remains a bachelor. He may miss the love and affection of a wife and children. But the compensation is that he is freed from the responsibilities that devolve on the head of a family. Similarly, a man who marries has some compensation by way of better care and comfort for the sacrifice he makes by sharing his resources with his wife and children. It can roughly be said that compensation is the dispensation of nature. Reward and punishment introduce an outside agency in the evolution of the results of a particular act.

TEACHINGS OF SAINTS AND PROPHETS

The scriptures and other religious and spiritual literature serve as teachers and guides of man. Besides showing the path to perfection, they unveil to us the real nature of ourselves, remove doubts about our weaknesses and give us confidence in our strength. Great books are really the teachings of saints, prophets and sages who speak to us through their pages. Man is a miserable creature and slave to his passions as long as he does not assert not only the liberty, but his mastery. It is not through wealth, progeny or anything, but through renunciation alone a few have attained to immortality.

EVALUATION OF THE RESULTS

Reward and punishment introduce an outside agency in the evolution of the results of a particular act. Therefore the authority to decide whether an act is good or bad also rests in that outside agency. That is the realm of justice and law. Every age, every country, every community or society has its own laws, canons of justice, jurisprudence. In olden days, so called heretics were burnt at the stake. In our present-day world there are what are known as traffic laws which were unheard of olden days. It is dangerous to place too great reliance on the correctness of the dictates of one’s conscience. The treatment of the subject of conscience here needs a little elaboration.

SILENCE

While becoming a zero mentally, you will feel as if you have no body-physically you become zero too. You are merely consciousness. Now drink deep the peace, this tranquility, this negation of body, mind and intellect and assertion of the soul. You will feel free, completely free. By daily practice, one must lift this state higher and higher and associate it with unconditioned, pure joy. This condition has been termed “the silence” because silence is the essential element in mediation.

It is stilling the body, mind and intellect. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves. There are three kinds of silence; the first is of words, the second of desires and the third of thoughts. The first he is perfect, the second more perfect and the third most perfect.

LIFE PRINCIPLE IS SAME IN EVERYONE

The ordinary conversation language of man has a mysterious capacity to unveil profound religious and philosophical truths. Great religious proclaim that we sin or err only when our acts are motivated by thoughts of ‘duality’ or ‘separateness’. Few doubt the existence of God, but it is not easy to see the same God in every one of us, even theoretically. Practice is still more difficult. Yet real knowledge consists of this realization. For those who have not reached this summit of knowledge, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of God without form, and still more difficult to describe a God without form.

Once you sent out to define or describe, you impose limitations whereas God is limitless, infinite. That is why oriental seers resorted to a method of negation instead of assertion, God is ‘not this’ ‘not that’. He is not like this, nor like that. It is existence absolute because it is the sub-stratum of all life. It is knowledge absolute because it is the entity in every being, the witness, the pure consciousness which knows that you do know or do not know. It is the bliss absolute because joy or bliss in whatever form any being experiences is only a glimpse or minute particle of that ocean of joy, that joy absolute. There is no birth, death or change for it.

THE BALANCE OF TOTAL GOODNESS

In worldly life, every one strives hard to build up material credit-excess of earning or revenue over expenditure. All religion exhort and lead every man to build up for himself a considerable credit balance of merit, not only acts of kindness but even materially, say by contributing the tithe. When each man, woman or child has a comfortable balance of merit and goes on adding to it, the total of goodness or merit in the family, locality, town, country and ultimately the world inherited by people piles up and reflects in the circumstances. This is not at all a preposterous when viewed in the light of and compared to the meaning of material or monetary credit.

Building up of merit is the duty of every one of us, both in the interest of oneself and those of others. Every kind or good act is an investment in kind as opposed to an investment in money. Most religion attribute the prosperity or otherwise of a people to the aggregate of the balance of merit being credit or debit. it was only one simple thing; that some hundreds of millions of men and women should set themselves to do good instead of evil and blessing instead of curses.

REMEMBERING GOD

It is necessary to remembering God constantly while going about our allotted daily tasks. This is made easy by our repeating God’s name. we can make God our constant companion; we can talk to him, consult him, demand his help and guidance, even force him if we but hold him bound to us through our love for him. Religious literature often finds worldly experience handy and useful to drive home great religious truths to the common man in an understandable language. Thus the incessant remembrance of God by the devotee is compared to the rapturous recollection by a woman, in illicit love, of her paramour.

The starting point in the higher life is faith; faith in God, faith in the higher life and faith in the existence of higher forms of joy. It is the duty of the enlightened to educate the masses gradually, and the religious gatherings referred to, serve as the media of such education. It is seldom that a direct or blunt reference is made to the so-called sinfulness of man. There is more remembrance and recollection of God and His greatness and in this process this sordid worldly existence is at least temporarily forgotten. The listener identifies himself with the trials and tribulations of a soul in its Godward ascent, inflicted by a misunderstanding society or king.

PRAYER-A NOBLE PETITION

Prayer is a logical adjunct of the practice of mediation. The great drawback of routine prayer is that it becomes an automatic mental or verbal repetitionery process which frees the mind to roam about in other fields. ‘words without thought’ is the mere verbal repetition of prayer in which the mind does not participate-just empty words. The subject of prayer has been discussed threadbare by a variety of writers, poets, preachers, teachers, philosophers and scientists. Prayer can be classified into four different categories: petition, intercession, adoration, contemplation. Petitionery prayer can be lofty and unselfish or childish and beggarly.

In intercession, the petition is on behalf of others and therefore it is on a definitely higher plane than petition on one’s own behalf. Intercessionery prayer can lead to a broadening of fellow-feeling as, it springs from real compassion for others. Adoration has been described as the use of intellect, feeling, will and imagination in making acts of devotion directed towards God in his personal aspect or as incarnated in human form. Prayer in the form of contemplation is, not quite different form mediation. Prayer in its purest form is simple. It is matter of concentrating one’s entire intellect on God, affirming a positive statement of truth.