Way back my youngest son, age 5 at the moment, requested me, out of the blue: “Dad, do you exist?”
“Sure,” I responded, with out pondering.
The reply, I now suppose, was simply as attention-grabbing because the query popping out of the mouth of somewhat youngster.
What made it attention-grabbing was its immediacy.
After all, I exist! A thousand fleeting joys, a thousand heartaches, a thousand exhausting classes to be realized, and a lot extra of life’s abundance, have been making me keenly conscious of the truth that I exist. All these impressions have been perceived, and there will be no notion with out existence.
Once I write “perceived,” maybe I actually imply “felt.” Sri Yukteswar tells us that feeling makes existence acutely aware. By extension, the extra our emotions are attuned to the non secular abundance of the inside world, the extra our consciousness expands. This attunement of emotions is known as devotion.
The attunement of emotions is known as devotion
Emotional maturity is required. With out it, there will be no non secular progress. For the event of such maturity, music could be essentially the most environment friendly academic constructing block out there inside our colleges and our properties.
As soon as throughout a stroll, my oldest son, then fourteen years outdated, complained that he didn’t really feel he may take care of all of the assignments and the exams that the varsity demanded of him. I mentioned: “What if I offer you an inventory of musical items and ask you to hearken to them frequently, particularly in mattress, earlier than you go to sleep? You’ll see that if you’re extra in contact with the deeper emotions expressed within the music that I like to recommend, you’ll fear much less about what different folks consider you, and your thoughts shall be calmer and work higher for you.”
He preferred the thought and loved downloading on his cellular phone the musical items I gave him. The truth is, over the next months he turned noticeably calmer and his schoolwork improved. Years later, I nonetheless really feel that each one the music he was uncovered to throughout his childhood helped him on his method towards maturity as an grownup.
In my very own youthful years, it was my coronary heart, rather more than my thoughts, that started to understand the potential for a consciousness larger than the as soon as seemingly inextricable ego. Once I first began studying about Swami Sri Yukteswar, there was a heart-based consciousness, a sense, of historical recollections evoked by these tales concerning the nice Gyanavatar.
The identical feeling nonetheless arises when Swami Sri Yukteswar wraps his aura round me by means of that little booklet that he wrote and to which these blogs are devoted. Though I can on no account declare that I perceive each phrase of The Holy Science, I do really feel that his gentle of knowledge step by step spiritualizes the atoms in my coronary heart. I develop into enthused; I regular my enthusiasm by making efforts to comply with his directions; I domesticate a want to show inside. I develop devotion.
Devotion, Sri Yukteswar teaches us, is the guts’s want for reference to the inside realities of the soul, and particularly with the “north” or constructive pole of the sixth chakra, the ajna chakra – the non secular eye, also referred to as the “third eye,” on the level between the eyebrows. He additionally calls it Bhakti Yoga and describes it as follows:
By this (…) focus of self on the sensorium (the central backbone out of which the nerves result in the 5 senses) man turns into baptized or absorbed within the holy stream of the Divine Sound. This baptism is known as Bhakti Yoga. On this state man repents; that’s, turning from this gross materials creation of Darkness, Maya, he climbs again towards his Divinity, the Everlasting Father, whence he has fallen …[i]
Man climbs again towards his Divinity, the Everlasting Father
Our notion of existence then step by step expands past the recurring confines of the ego, and the pure love of the guts, because the Gyanavatar calls it, begins to manifest. Can there be any extra fulfilling course of in life?
Life might properly give us intense experiences of human love. But when these experiences are usually not coupled with the inside realities of the soul, they threaten to go away us empty or plagued with emotions of sorrow and nostalgia. We’d then be lacking the purpose: by not feeling what can actually fulfill our want for love, we develop into needy.
Perhaps that’s the reason why so many nice novels finish with the anticipated marriage of the hero and the heroine. Italy’s most well-known traditional, referred to as “The Betrothed” in English, finishes simply earlier than the marriage. After marriage, the on a regular basis realities of household life and the attempting confrontations with the fabric world demand depth and intense non secular effort – a much less interesting conclusion for a very good romance novel.
But it’s our love life that may educate us essentially the most about love, not merely as a fleeting romance or bodily union, however as a state of consciousness. Whether or not married or single, with youngsters or childless, that state of consciousness can develop into ours, with each effort we make to develop devotion.
Unique publish: Ananda Europe, February 12, 2023
