Talks Excerpt 547. Swamiji says, Do EVERYTHING as if you’re doing it for God.
From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.
[At the start of a Yoga Camp – spiritual retreat].
In a Yoga Camp you must try and learn how to join your mind permanently in God-thought. You do the very same things that people do elsewhere, but you do them with God, you do them for God. If you can take this Yoga Camp and carry it into your daily life, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, then the Yoga Camp does not end here. Then you are turning the whole world into the ‘mansion of mirth’ that Sri Ramakrishna wants it to be.
The practical aspect here must be applicable there, in your worldly life. If you take up a broom to sweep, think that you are sweeping because of God’s grace and that you are worshipping God through that act. If you are grooming yourself feel that you are grooming yourself for God and God must admire you.
Whether I have long hair or short hair does not matter. It is the head under it that matters. [laughter]. The things in the world do not matter; it is how you put those things to use that matters. If God thought that I should be born a bald man He would have made me bald, is that not so? I groom myself so that every morning when I prostrate to Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Ramakrishna will tell me, ‘You are looking neat and nice today. By looking at you, people will think of me.’ That is how I groom myself.
My father, Sri Ramakrishna, put on a smart green coat at a time when the sannyasins did not care for dark things [clothing]. Master put on a green coat because he thought: ‘Babus [gentlemen] will come today. They must look at me and feel that they want to live like me.’ He would dust himself and say to the Divine Mother, ‘Look Ma, I am looking nice.’ So Sri Ramakrishna has taught us this difference.
Be that kind of a child that you value everything in its rightful place. Transient [impermanent, temporary] beauty must be known to be transient; but keep it beautiful. Permanent [spiritual] beauty must be known to be permanently beautiful. Look after it.
If you are living simply like this, you are carrying yoga to the world, you are spiritualising the world.
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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.