Making Time for God (2)
by Brother Anilananda
Condensation of a talk given at the 1991 SRF Convocation, Los Angeles
Bring a cosmic perspective to your commonplace decisions
View Problems as Agents of Spiritual Progress
Recognize the Necessity of Work
Spiritualize the Motive With Which You Work
Be a Divine Warrior in Daily Life
Persevere in Meditation, and Cultivate Continuous Aspiration for God
Spiritualize the Motive With Which You Work
Since our duties generally take up a great portion of each day, our next method of “making time for God” also relates to work. It is this: Spiritualize the motive with which you work. On this subject the Bhagavad Gita truly shines. In its teachings we can identify five stages having to do with our motivation for working.
In the first stage, we work for ourselves; our consciousness is identified with the limited ego.
In the second, the consciousness starts to expand as we begin doing for others, for our family, our community, our country, for humanity as a whole.
And we begin to feel happy. “As you forget self in service to others,” our Guru tells us, “you will find that without seeking it your own cup of happiness will be full.”
Then comes the third stage—performing our actions as offerings to God. When we are performing actions for ourselves, or even for others, we are generally attached to the fruits of those actions, riding the alternating waves of hope and anxiety, satisfaction and disappointment. But when we perform actions to please God, we are at peace in just doing our best for Him—regardless of the outcome. In this stage, we seek constantly to bring our actions into harmony with the divine plan and guidance. By doing so, we cease accumulating new desires and new karma. At the same time, as we dutifully look after the health of the body, the welfare of our family and our business, we work out our past karma. So we accumulate no new karma and we get rid of the old. This is a beautiful—and liberating —way to live.
But there are still two more stages. Once in my early years in the ashram, I was part of a small group meeting with Sri Daya Mata, and she was talking about love for God. I remember thinking, “1 don’t have love for God, but I would like to please Him.” As if in answer, just then she remarked,
“The desire to please God ripens into love for God.”
This is the fourth stage. When we have been doing everything for God and thinking of Him and trying to please Him, gradually that conscientious effort changes into a great spontaneous flow of love for God. We become intoxicated with an upwelling of such sweet devotion for Him, which continues to grow greater and greater. We might not even know what started that wonderful outpouring of feeling for God; but it was all those actions we performed with the thought of pleasing Him.
Even this isn’t the end.
The Gita tells us there’s a final stage in which we realize that it is God Himself who is acting through us. We realize our oneness with God. That is a very, very high state; but it can come to each one of us. It starts with a simple change in the motive with which we work.
Be a Divine Warrior in Daily Life
Now, there is another point about working for God—we should work ambitiously. A common misconception is that to be a devotee means having a passive attitude toward outer accomplishments. But Master tells us: “Don’t think that you are too spiritual to wish for material success.” The business world is a battleground, and sometimes we have to fight. Listen to these words of Master from his commentary on the Gita:
When he enters the spiritual path [the businessman] must not become indolent, unpractical, or foolish in his ordinary worldly affairs.... A businessman who through foolhardiness and false spirituality declines to fight a righteous business battle will surely lose the glory and the success befitting his position. By his neglect of business laws, he invites the state or “sin” of uncalled-for losses and failures.... It is possible to be unselfish and nonattached to possessions, without supinely permitting others to trample on one’s rights. A spiritual businessman who allows unethical persons to crowd him out of existence is guilty of tolerating injustice and thus of permitting evil practices to spread in the business world. In short, nearly every good businessman must be, in modern competitive life, an embattled warrior!
This brings us to the next point in cultivating a greater awareness of God:
Never be submissive to a negative environment. When besieged by the soldiers of ignoble qualities so prevalent in the worldly environment, as divine warriors it is our duty to resist.
There’s a story from the Indian scriptures that bears on this point. Valmiki was the author of the famous Indian scriptural epic, the Ramayana. He had undergone a remarkable spiritual transformation, becoming a great sage; but in his early life he was a cutthroat who lived in the forest. One day, some sages happened past. Valmiki was about to strike them down and rob them when one of the sages stopped him. “I see that you are an intelligent man,” he said. “Surely you must realize the terrible sin you’re creating for yourself with all this murder and robbery.” “I know about the sin,” Valmiki replied, “but I have to feed my wife and children.” “Ahhh,” said the saint. “I understand. You are doing this for your wife and children. So I suppose your wife and children are willing to share in the sin you are creating?” Well, Valmiki didn’t know if they were or not, so he tied up the saints and went home to find out. When he arrived there he found his wife cooking some of the rice he had stolen. “I see you are cooking some of my stolen rice,” Valmiki said, “so I wonder if you are willing to share in the sin of having stolen it?” His wife was aghast. “I have no sin,” she said. “I have merely cooked the rice. I haven’t stolen it.” Then Valmiki went outside where he found his children, and he asked them, “Suppose it turned out that the food you are eating was stolen. Would you be willing to share the sin of the person who stole it?” And they said, “Sin? No way! It is your duty to feed us. How you do it is your business; we are not responsible!” So Valmiki went back and let the sages go.
How easy it is to abandon divine principles under the sway of worldly environment and values. Others may be willing to encourage or benefit from our wrong actions, but they aren’t the ones who have to pay the price.
As our Guru says,
“The world influences you to sow the seeds of useless bad habits, material desires, and God-forgetting activities; but the world does not have to answer for your poisonous harvest. You alone are held accountable for the effects of your actions.”
It takes courage—moral courage—to fight degrading environmental influences by actively upholding godly principles and qualities. This is vital in making a place for God in our lives.
Practice the Presence of God
How to remove ourselves altogether from the power of a negative outer environment? This is the next point: Create a strong, positive inner environment by practicing the presence of God.
To get back to Valmiki, now he was very concerned about all the bad karma he had created for himself, and he wanted to make a change in his life. So when he got back to the forest, he asked one of the sages what he could do about it. The sage told him to repeat constantly the name of Rama, a great incarnation of God, because this is very purifying. But Valmiki had already accumulated so much evil karma that the Divine Name wouldn’t even come out of his mouth. The best he could do was to turn the syllables around and say “Mara, mara, mara”—which in Sanskrit is a word for evil or Satan! However, his desire was sincere, and as he kept on repeating, “Maramaramara,” he found it turned into “Ramaramarama.” He persevered in meditating on the holy name, each repetition cleansing his consciousness more and more, and eventually he went into ecstasy!
Keep a devotional thought rolling in the background of your mind. No matter how unworthy you think you may be, or how worldly your environment, it will transform you.
Sometimes we feel that concentration on work prevents us from being with God. This need not be. Perhaps you have seen these new personal computers that are capable of what is called “multi-tasking.” If they have a powerful enough computer chip in them, you can set them doing one task in the background, and while you are using the computer to do another task, they will be crunching away doing the original one you gave them. Computers became more and more powerful as new chips were developed—the 386, then the 486, and the Pentium chip. Well, our minds have better capabilities than any of these, because as God’s children we are “a chip off the Divine Block”!
Though our intellect or reason may be fully occupied with the task at hand, we have a higher faculty—intuitive feeling—which can register an awareness of God in the background of our consciousness regardless of what the intellect is attending to. That faculty is awakened by meditation. And the effort to hold on to the aftereffects of meditation—practicing the presence of God—gradually endows us with the ability to keep Him in our consciousness no matter what else we are doing.
Here is another helpful analogy: Think of your life as a stone wall. The stones are the tasks or duties on which you have to concentrate. But there are always spaces between those duties, just as between the stones of the wall. Why not fill those little spaces in your life with the thought of God? Take just a moment and inwardly say, “I love You, Lord. I love You.” Then pause and listen and feel. It does not require much time. It can happen in seconds. The Lord will then become the “mortar” in the wall of your life, supporting it and giving it strength as nothing else can.
Persevere in Meditation, and
Cultivate Continuous Aspiration for God
The last “method” of bringing God into daily life really underlies and supports all the others: Persevere in your daily practice of meditation. Meditation enriches and enlivens the other practices we have mentioned, and they in turn make it easier to go deep in meditation. Keep on, and someday you will reap the reward.
Once I heard about an interview with the sister of the Wright Brothers, those two inventors who led humanity into the era of flight. The sister had no doubt been skeptical; for years, she said, these two simple bicycle mechanics just kept playing around in the garage with engines and oil and machine parts and smoke and gasoline. But she said, “Then one day it flew.”
The same will happen in our spiritual lives. If we refuse to give up, one day we will look back on our effort and say, “Ah, it was so worthwhile!” By persevering in the practice of even some of these methods of bringing God into daily life, along with meditation, we will find Him filling our hearts and minds with such divine love, strength, and joy that we will no longer wonder how to “make time for God”—for we will know that He is with us always. In closing, let us absorb this beautiful prayer of our Guru’s:
O Spirit, teach me to aspire each day to the best in everything.... Teach me to perform all my duties to please only Thee. Teach me to think of Thee until Thou dost become my only thought. Teach me to call Thee until Thou breakest Thy vow of silence. Teach me to seek Thee until I find Thy hiding place. Teach me to beat the drum of my craving until Thou dost come into the temple of my heart... .Teach me to dig with the pickax of my peace, deeper and deeper into the soil of silence, until the water of Thy presence gushes forth and I am bathed in Thy bliss.. ..Aum. Peace. Amen.