The Power of Counterforces

Divine Life Society Publication: Living The Divine Life by Sri Swami Krishnananda

The belief in God with which we associate ourselves somehow or the other may make us feel that we are thoroughly religious people and spiritual stalwarts, but the world today requires a new weapon to launch forth the energy of divine living.

Unless we are fully equipped with the power of counterforces in this world, our efforts would not be of much avail. Your imagination that you are a student of the Bhagavadgita or that you are a devotee of God may be worth its while and genuine, no doubt, but your knowledge of the circumstances of the world may be very poor, due to which the strength that you have in yourself may not be up to the mark.

If you read the Ramayana of Valmiki or Tulsidas, or read the Mahabharata or epics of this type, you will find that the counterforces to divine aims were terrific. The epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are great examples before us to demonstrate that these opposing forces were not of a meagre nature. They were strong enough.

The strength of counterforces arises due to a conviction which goes deep into the soul of the person or the group of people concerned, and the force becomes inseparable from the soul of the person. The strength of the enemy or the strength of anything that is invincible lies in the conviction of that person, or the organisation of persons, that they remain inseparable from their source. The more your conviction becomes a part of your soul, the more is your strength to implement it, and that strength does not lie in the practice of any religion in an official sense. Your energies, your powers, your capacities are not in the length of time which you have spent in the study of the Gita or the rolling of the beads, but your strength depends upon the extent to which your concept or notion of divinity has been driven into the bottom of your soul.

Today the counterforce can be called materialism. The strong opponent of a divine power is called the material power. That which goads you to hold Divine Life conferences and sets your mind to thinking along these lines of conferences of religion and spirituality is stipulated by the presence of material powers. If it does not exist, these conferences would not be necessary.

Now, we may all be under the impression that we are religious people or spiritual seekers, and are not materialists, of course. But to come to a conclusion whether we are materialists or not is difficult because you have to know, first of all, what materialism means in order to come to a decision as to whether you are that, or you are something else.

We have been experiencing a perpetual harassment in our lives in spite of our religion and so-called spirituality. This harassment comes from material forces, as has been mentioned already. We are not wholly nonmaterial. We may not be paying tribute to Charvaka or the materialist philosophers of ancient Greece, etc., but we may be materialists in a different and more important sense.

Materialism is a belief that life is impossible without depending on something outside us; and if we have such a belief, we are certainly materialists. Who among us can have the guts to feel from the bottom of oneself that one can live totally independently without hanging on external powers, which are certainly material? You cannot hang on material powers as your support unless you believe in the reality of those powers, and the one who believes it is a materialist. Therefore, you can judge for yourself whether we are all materialists or something else.

You must be able to diagnose the inner structure of your own psychological life in a very honest and sincere manner, believing that you are doing this analysis in the face of God, in the presence of the Almighty, in the court of the Universal Judge of the cosmos, not having a subtle diffidence caused by a simultaneous unfortunate feeling that God may not be seen.

Friends, I tell you once again, it is not easy to be lovers of God, and we should not have any kind of foolhardy notion that we are already that. If we had been that, we would not be shedding tears. The problem is that we have not been able to convince ourselves as to the supremacy of God’s existence, what to speak of our learning, our philosophies and our religions. The religion of God has not been our way of living. We have a social and political religion, to put it properly, which we have been following in our outward life, but we have a secret materialist living in our own hearts because it is not true that we are always working through our souls. We work through the body and through the senses. We have a great affection for the friends of the senses and the body, and though it is true that the soul can take care of us if we entirely depend on it, we are not in a position to lay full trust in it.

The trust in God or the trust in soul cannot arise so easily because of the suspicion that our wishes may not be fulfilled by such a kind of total surrender to the Self, or what we call God. We have immediate requirements, and these immediate requirements are of such a pressing nature that we have a suspicion whether that wish, that requirement, can be fulfilled by a remote so-called Creator. This is the truth of things, and you will see if you touch your own hearts that this is a fact which you cannot deny.

Divine life is not something that you have to do and then forget it. As a matter of fact, it is not something that you have to do at all; it is something that has to be yourself. Divine living is living – underline the word living – and it is not merely an external expression or a social demonstration for the purpose of receiving encomiums or certificates from people.

To be conscious that you are in the presence of God perpetually would be a true divine living, and you can know very well what would be your feelings and attitudes if you are always to be conscious of your proximity to the great Creator of the universe.

The very conviction of your being a true Divine Lifer in the light in which I have tried to explain would create a wealth of satisfaction from inside you. You would be an unbounded source of happiness even if you are absolutely alone in a corner of this earth, and you would not be seeking a friend to speak to or an audience to address yourself to. You would be immensely feeling a flood of joy within you on account of an indescribable immanence and proximity of an invisible something.

God is the greatest giver, and He takes the least. Perhaps He takes nothing. And in my humble opinion, Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was a replica of this oceanic flood of giving.

The world, the creation that is before us is itself our support, and God is our support. God is never away from us, and if our connection with Him is spiritual, which means to say, indivisible, then the help that comes from Him is perpetual, and so it comes without asking. If this gospel can be planted in our hearts, even in the heart of a single person here, God will be immensely satisfied and the blessings of Sri Gurudev will be abundant.

I have spoken very much, and I beg your pardon for having spoken so strongly, but I have spoken with an intense feeling for the grand aim which Gurudev lived and the purpose for which, I believe, God has created this world itself.

The Power of Counterforces - Living The Divine Life by Sri Swami Krishnananda