Swami Shivapadananda on seeing God in people
SWAMI SHIVAPADANANDA
DAILY READINGS
From Mother Radha's recordings of Swamiji
Day 515
Swamiji reads from: The Teachings of Swami Vivekananda
Reads: You may build a temple through which to worship God and it may be good, but a better one, a much higher one already exists – the human body. The living God is within you and yet you are building churches and temples and believing all sorts of imaginary nonsense. The only God to worship is a human, and in the human body, because all animals are temples too. But man is the highest, the Taj Mahal of temples. If I cannot worship in that, no other temple will be of any advantage. The moment I have realised God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him, that moment I am free from bondage. Everything that binds me vanishes and I am free. When a man has no more self in him, no possessions, nothing to call 'me' or 'mine', has given himself up entirely, destroying himself as it were – in that man is God Himself. For in him self-will is gone, crushed out, annihilated. That is the ideal man. The growth of a man can only be gauged by his power of living in the higher atmosphere where the senses are left behind, and by the amount of the pure thought-oxygen his lungs can breathe, and by the amount of time he has spent on that height.
Swamiji: 'On that height,' he is talking about God or the Self. First let us be gods and then let us help others to be gods.
Reads: Let this be our motto: Say not that man is a sinner. Nay, tell him that he is a god. Even if there were a devil it would be our duty to remember God always and not the devil.
Swamiji: This means that although you know that the other man is bad you do not have to tell him so. Your duty is to remember God, to be subjective. He must have some good qualities in him, so praise those rather than picking on his negative qualities. When Girish [Chandra Ghosh] Babu went to Sri Ramakrishna everybody knew that he was a sinner, but what did Sri Ramakrishna say to him? 'Nay, you are not a sinner. You are a god, you are a mahatma [great soul].' And later he became one.
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