Talks Excerpts 501 & 502 combined. Swamiji says: After realising God, if you are a selfless soul, you will come back to have God’s lilas and sevas.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

[Swamiji continues the exploration of Niyama].

Three: Mortification, austerity [tapasya]. When you place too much stress on physical things and do not think about God, then you become an atheist. When you mortify your body you get different powers. You do a lot of things – except know God. God does not want you to torture your body, He wants you to have intense devotion [bhakti], intense yearning for Him. It is not by cutting off all your hair, by putting on a mala, or standing on one leg, that you can get God. No. Moderation is the word, not mortification.

When you perform austerities you get stuck in virtues, in morals. You want everybody to behave like you do. You will say, ‘You must sit like this and you must do that.’ You will have a paw-paw [gloomy] face, no smile, nothing – as if God has got no sunshine in heaven. I do not believe in a God like that. I want a God that when I see Him I must laugh, I must joke, I must dance, I must sing – but with sense and mind control. Austerity means: do your sadhana regularly, to realise God.

Four: Study and devotion to God. You must study anything that gives you mind and sense control. Do not stop there. Side by side with this have increased devotion to the lotus feet of your Ishta Devata; and know that that Ishta Devata is Omnipresent, Omniscient and Omnipotent.

In addition to these niyamas you must do regular sadhana. You must do it regularly, do not miss a single day.

You must have humility. You must become more humble than the grass. How will you become humble? Will you go about prostrating to everybody? No. To become humble you must know that God has all the might and that we only have a minute part of that might. Become like a speck of dust in front of the huge mountain of God’s might, of God’s mercy, of God’s truthfulness. Think to yourself: ‘No matter how much truthfulness I have, I still have very little compared with God’s. No matter how honest I am, I still have very little honesty compared with God’s. No matter how much mercy and compassion I have, I still have very little compared to God’s.’ Like this I must humble myself.

You will find in all this that selfless service is the main thing; because that is what purifies you.

 502 [Swamiji continues on Niyama]:

Sri Ramakrishna said, ‘After realising God, if you are a selfless soul, you will come back to have God’s lilas and sevas.” That is what Sri Ramakrishna called ‘greater than samadhi‘.

After [God] realisation: worship. After realisation do not stay in a cave and only now and then come down. That was the old style. Swami Vivekananda followed the ancient Rishis as far as that was concerned. When Sri Ramakrishna asked Naren [his premonastic name] what he wanted, he answered, ‘I want to enjoy bliss and now and then come down to put a morsel of food in my mouth.’ Sri Ramakrishna said, ‘I thought that you would be like a banyan tree giving shelter to weary travellers.’ It is better to come back and worship God – the One who has become many.

After coming down, the same service is transformed into worship. For instance a man comes to you and asks for food. You give him food. Slowly he takes off his veil and you see who it is, and you say, ‘Oh, it’s Swamiji.’ What happens then? Are you still going to give him beggar’s food? No. He is the king himself. You will say, ‘Oh I am sorry. Please come inside and sit down and I will serve you.’ You are serving man, but when God is revealed, you are worshipping God. ‘O Lord, please come inside and take your seat.

The Bhagavad Gita says you cannot see God with these physical eyes. You can only see God with divine eyes, granted by God Himself. There is another kind of vision when you realise that I am everywhere. Not just that God is everywhere. He who sees the many in the One, and the One in the many, is the wise man. The sannyasi has that attitude.

After 1886 [following Sri Ramakrishna’s Mahasamadhi] all the people started saying, ‘All religions are one – all religions lead you to God.’ Before that they all said, ‘That religion is wrong, and that religion is right, that fellow is not good,’ and so on.

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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.