Talks Excerpt 488. Swamiji asks householders to recall the five Maha Yajnas – the five great sacrifices.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
When you want to build a house you begin by digging the trenches for the foundations. After digging the trenches you put the concrete in and make it so solid that the building will not collapse, regardless of what calamities befall it. Similarly a sadhaka should build their spiritual life so that no matter what calamities, trials or tribulations befall them, they will tenaciously cling to that particular way of life.
Our religion actually starts with the karma kanda chapters on ritual worship. These rituals are nothing but exercises to build one’s moral strength. We must start from the householder’s [grihastha’s] point of view because 99.9% of those present are householders – not renunciates.
When we talk about sadhakas we do not only mean those people who have come to an ashram, or who are living somewhere in a cave, for we know that all stages of life in Hinduism are called ashramas. These are: the brahmacharya ashrama [celibate student stage], the grihastha ashrama [married householder stage], the vanaprastha ashrama [stage of retirement and contemplation] and the sannyasa ashrama [stage of renunciation].
Most of us mistakenly stress only on the brahmacharya ashrama and the sannyasa ashrama.
Who is a sadhaka? All of us are sadhakas. Some of us are consciously travelling towards God and others are unconsciously travelling towards God. Just as there are some children consciously going to school, others are going to school only because they have to go. In this way all of us are sadhakas.
I would like you, as householders, to recall the five Maha Yajnas, the five great sacrifices.
You must pay careful attention when words like ‘maha‘ are used. For instance Shivaratri occurs every month but Maha Shivaratri occurs only once a year. Or, you have Samadhi [communion with God] and then you have Maha Samadhi [final absorption in God].
The free-to-read or download, 396-page Flipbook version of Swamiji’s biography is available by clicking HERE. If you’d prefer the PDF version, please click HERE.
These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.