SWAMI SHIVANANDA SARASWATHI
(Swami Sivananda)
It would be easy to dismiss the question by saying: “Yes,
after a prolonged period of intense austerities and meditation, while I was
living at Swaragashram and when I had the Darshan and blessings of a number of
Maharishis, the Lord appeared before me in the form of Sri Krishna.
But that would not be the whole truth, nor a sufficient
answer to a question relating to God, who is infinite, unlimited and beyond the
reach of speech and mind.
Cosmic Consciousness is not an accident or chance. It is
the summit, accessible by a thorny path that has steps—slippery steps. I
ascended them step by step the hard way; but at every stage I experienced God
coming into my life and lifting me easily to the next stage.
My father was fond of ceremonial worship in which he was
very regular. To my child-mind the image he worshipped was God; and I delighted
in helping father in the worship by bringing him flowers and other articles of
worship. The deep inner satisfaction that he and I derived from such worship
implanted in my heart a strong conviction that God was in such images devoutly
worshipped by His devotees. Thus did God first come into my life and place my
foot on the first rung of the spiritual ladder.
As an adult I was fond of gymnastics and vigorous
exercises. I learnt fencing from a teacher who belonged to a low caste. He was
a Harijan. I could go to him only for a few days before I was made to
understand that it was unbecoming of a caste-Brahmin to play the student to an
untouchable. I thought deeply over the matter. One moment I felt that the God
whom we worshipped in the image in my father’s worship room had jumped over to
the heart of this untouchable. He was my Guru all right. So I immediately went
to him with flowers, sweets and clothes and garlanded him, placed flowers at
his feet and prostrated myself before him. Thus did God come into my life to
remove the veil of caste distinctions.
How very valuable this step was I could realise soon
after this, for I was to enter the medical profession and serve all, and the
persistence of caste distinctions would have made that service a mockery. With
this mist cleared by the light of God, it was easy and natural for me to serve
everyone. I took keen delight in every kind of service connected with the
healing and alleviation of human misery. If there was a good prescription for
malaria, I felt that the whole world should know it the next moment. Any
knowledge about the prevention of diseases, promotion of health and healing of
diseases I was eager to acquire and share with all.
Then in Malaya, God came to me in the form of the sick.
It is difficult for me now to single out any instance, and perhaps it is
unnecessary. Time and space are concepts of the mind and have no meaning in
God. I can look back now upon the whole period of my stay in Malaya as a single
event in which God came to me in the form of the sick and suffering. People are
sick physically and mentally. To some, life is lingering death; and to others,
death is more welcome than life; some invite death and commit suicide, unable
to face life.
The aspiration grew within me that if God had not made
this world merely as a hell where wicked people would be thrown to suffer, and
if there is (as I intuitively felt there should be) something other than this
misery and this helpless existence, it should be known well and experienced.
It was at this crucial point in my life that God came to
me as a religious mendicant who gave me the first lesson in Vedanta. The
positive aspects of life here and the real end and aim of human life were made
apparent. This drew me from Malaya to the Himalaya. God now came to me in the
form of an all-consuming aspiration to realise Him as the Self of all.
Meditation and service went apace; and then came various
spiritual experiences. The body, mind and intellect as the limiting adjuncts,
vanished, and the whole universe shone as His Light. God then came in the form
of this Light in which everything assumed a divine shape and the pain and
suffering that seem to haunt everybody appeared to be a mirage, the illusion
that ignorance creates on account of low sensual appetites that lurk in man.
One more milestone had to be passed in order to know that
“everything is Brahman.” Early in 1950—on the 8th of January—the Lord came to
me in the form of a half-demented assailant, who disturbed the night Satsang at
the Ashram. His attempt failed. I bowed to him, worshipped him and sent him
home. Evil exists in order to glorify the good. Evil is a superficial
appearance. Beneath its veil the one Self shines in all.
A noteworthy fact ought to be mentioned here. In this
evolution nothing gained previously was entirely discarded at any later stage.
One coalesced into the next, and the Yoga of Synthesis was the fruit.
Idol-worship, service of the sick, practice of meditation, the cultivation of
cosmic love that transcended the barriers of caste, creed and religion, with
the ultimate aim of attaining the state of Cosmic Consciousness, was revealed.
This knowledge had to be shared immediately. All this had to become an integral
part of my being.
The mission had been gathering strength and spreading. It
was in 1951 that I undertook the All-India Tour. Then God came to me in His
Virat-Swarupa—as multitudes of devotees—eager to listen to the tenets of divine
life. At every centre I felt that God spoke through me, and He Himself in His
cosmic form spread out before me as the multitude, listened to me. He sang with
me, He prayed with me; He spoke and He also listened. “Sarvam Khalvidam
Brahma—all indeed is Brahman.”
