Spiritual Life

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Spiritual Life

WHY not make a habit of using some of our spare time for turning inwards in

search of spiritual interests, adventures and experience ? This will be more

thrilling than any of other purely temporal interests.

Spiritual life has to be lived all day long ; otherwise, it will be many

years or even lives before we begin to unlock the deeper powers of the soul

and enter into the wider vision of life.

A suffering world is calling to us ; within us is the power to heal waiting

to be discovered and released. Great sages and saints like Sri Sai Baba, who

are out to serve the world, are eagerly watching to see who next is coming

to them to share their agelong and tireless labours. Shall we, then, not

find time to turn inwards and seek the God within so that we may reveal Him

to others and so that spiritual life may become a living reality to us and

to them ?

The spiritual realist must bring everything down to.the matter of fact in

everyday life. He must make his philosophy and his doctrines apply to the

problems of the world and bring all his faculties to the search for their

solution. Every aspirant for spiritual life should remember the following

nine points as the cardinal points of his spiritual compass to guide him in

the ocean of life, to reach the heaven of God realization : —

1. The aspirant must make frequent, impartial and dispassionate

self-examinations.

2. We must trace the errors and deficiencies, which examinations reveal to

their source in the inner nature and decide upon the best method of

eliminating them. A weakness is always found to be due to the absence of a

virtue, e. g., worry arising out of fear ; try to build up faith and

courage.

3. The aspirant should pay daily, hourly attention to conduct, speech,

feeling and thought, continually checking looseness, impurity, coarseness,

general lack of tone and any other particular error revealed by the regular

reviews.

He should deliberately mould his character nearer to the ideal, "Live

nobly", and refine life until its nature becomes truly spiritual.

4. The aspirant should continually repeat the act of self-dedication. Daily

and hourly, he should renew the consecra-tion of the whole] life to the

service of God and live in the light of his consecration.

5. The aspirant should perform regular meditation. He should rather

treat meditation as a great adventure in the inner worlds. We are bound to

win in the end, though we may seem to fail at first. Meditation, if

successful, produces a sense of actual union or of stepping into and

becoming one with the glorious light of the higher consciousness

and of being, identified with that light rather than with the

shadows cast upon the lower world.

The meditation should consist of four elements :

(a) Meditation directed towards gaining expansion of

consciousness and deepening the realisation of spiritual verities.

(b) The refinement of vehicles—emotion, mind, etc.

© The acquisition of virtues and the overcoming of every

weakness.

(d) The radiation of love over the whole world.

6. The aspirant should strive to win a living realiszation of the actual

existense of God, both as a divine and perfect conciousness within every man

and as the saviour of man

7. The aspirant should bear the presence and blessings of God everywhere and

live as though He were actually present all the time.

8. The aspirant should watch continually for wider fields of pouring the

blessings and the healing love of God upon the world.

9. The spiritual aspirant should build in, especially, the three

virtues which form the basis of the spiritual life. He should

strive in all things to be strong, humble and pure.

 

(Adopted from the Book Pearls of Wisdom by His Holiness Swami Kesavaiahji)