Faith in God

Divine Life Society Publication: Sivananda’s Integral Yoga by Sri Swami Venkatesananda

The Master used to say very often, “You are talking about God’s grace. Do you know how to experience God’s grace? Not by paying lip service. If you want to enjoy God’s grace, depend on nothing else for some time. Without telling anybody, leave the ashram and walk away. When you feel hungry, somebody may give you food. When you feel tired, lie down. Live like this for a few days, you will then come to know what God’s grace is. You will find that an unknown person, someone whom you have never met in your life, might come and say, ‘Where are you coming from? Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea?’ You will look into his face and see God’s grace. You will feel, ‘Here is God’s grace. I don’t deserve it. I have done nothing for this man and he is probably very poor. He offers me a cup of tea.’ This is God’s grace. You are lying down somewhere, someone sees you shivering with cold and comes and throws a blanket over your body. You look at him and realise, ‘This is God’s grace.’ Somebody may even slap you–that too you enjoy as God’s grace.” God’s grace is not something which the brain can invent. It has to be experienced.

The Master himself did this in 1941 when there were still only a few people living with him. No one has been able to discover why he decided to leave the ashram. One afternoon the Master did not return to his office as usual and his room was empty. They found a note, “I am retiring. I have appointed Swami Paramananda to be the president after me and I would like the work to continue.” He had gone. It seems he kept walking towards Hardwar. One night he spent in a temple and the next morning he went on walking aimlessly. Aimlessly–that was the aim. When night fell, he looked around, there was a haystack so he got in there and fell asleep. The next morning he discovered it was a muslim’s house. This muslim looked after him for a day or two. Then Gurudev kept moving and was eventually picked up by a man who had a small sugar-cane farm. This man made him stay there for a few days and gave him sugar-cane juice. In the meantime everyone in Rishikesh, Hardwar and throughout the entire district knew that Swami Sivananda was missing. A swami had gone in search of the Master, and finding him, begged, “Oh, please come back to the ashram.” It was only then that this sugar-cane man realised that he had been host to a very great sage of the Himalayas. This man then became a great devotee of the Master’s and every year he used to bring two big drums of sugar-cane juice in commemoration of that wonderful event. And Gurudev also used to point out straight away, “I stayed at his house for two days.”

It is when you have such experiences that you begin to have faith in God. From belief, you have graduated to faith. It is still only faith, but it is strong enough to sustain us, in life until one day, by God’s grace again, we have a direct experience of God’s omnipresence and realise that God alone is, nothing else is. At this stage one realises that ‘I’ cannot realise God. God alone is real. When the ego dissolves, then God knows Himself. Self-realisation is the cancellation of the self. God-realisation is God realising Himself. ‘I’ does nothing at all, it is God who does all unto himself. This is the heart of bhakti yoga, the essence of God-realisation.

Though as the natural ‘fruit’ of Gurudev’s bhakti yoga practices he enjoyed the visions of divinities and sages, though his prayers for the sick healed them and his prayers for the afflicted removed their afflictions and even altered the destinies of devotees (many of these are recorded in the book “Miracles of Sivananda”), his utter egolessness was the supreme manifestation of bhakti. Such egolessness is indeed love that is God.

Excerpts from: Faith in God - Sivananda’s Integral Yoga by Sri Swami Venkatesananda