Life - A Sadhana

Divine Life Society Publication: Swami Sivananda and The Divine Life Society by Sri Swami Krishnananda

Swami Sivananda addresses himself to the difficult but important task of taking man as he is—a growing organism of a psycho-physical character—neither wholly restricted naturalistically by the mechanism of the material world nor fully absorbed spiritualistically in the supermundane aim of divine existence.

Man is not merely a body, a mind or a spirit, but a curious mixture of all these in a manner not comprehensible to ordinary intelligence. The Katha Upanishad says that the true ‘enjoyer’ (or the empirical agent of knowledge and action) is a composite structure of the Atman, the mind and the senses, together. Life is not merely a process of swirling masses of matter, groups of molecules, aggregates of atoms or vortices of electrical forces; nor is it an occasion for the study of psychology (or even metaphysics); nor an idealistic soaring into the realms of logical thought, mental phenomena or mere psychic experience. Man is at once a physical embodiment, a mental phenomenon and a spiritual entity. He has to appease not only the hunger of the body and the thirst of his vital forces, but has to pay equal, if not greater, attention to the demands of his psychic nature, moral tendencies and spiritual aspirations.

Life is a synthesis of the forces manifesting in different orders and in a graduated scale of the evolutionary structure of nature. In this sense the whole of one’s life is a sadhana, an integral endeavour for fullness on the part of mysterious man whose constitution, attention and training ranges at once from the lowest matter to the highest Spirit. As a body he is a creature of natural forces, subjected to the suffering and the mortality attending upon all composite structures in the physical world. He is one with inanimate matter when taken purely as a material structure. But man’s tale does not end here. He grows like a plant, feels and reacts like an animal, and in-so-far as the craving for food, sleep and sex is concerned, he is indistinguishable from the inhabitants of the mute kingdom. But man struggles to reach above the realm of the brute, exercises a moral consciousness totally absent in animals, and displays a marvellous understanding power and reasoning capacity in distinguishing between true and false, right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. This makes it amply clear that while partaking of the natures of matter, life and mind (observable also in the inanimate world, the vegetable kingdom and the subhuman beings) he is also more than all these; and while including these in his individual make-up he also transcends them in an astonishing degree.

The life of man is thus very complex, embracing variegated elements, exhibiting diverse characteristics and manifesting different grades of reality. If life is a sadhana—a continuous journey and movement and a story of adjusting oneself to and adapting oneself with the vast universe—it is not enough if we merely look into one side of the picture. We have to consider every aspect of the revelation of reality in man. This is precisely the mission of Swami Sivananda, to whom all life is yoga, and whose writings are an elaborate dissertation on integral living.

Excerpts from: Life-A Sadhana - Swami Sivananda and The Divine Life Society by Sri Swami Krishnananda