SLOKA 55 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA
DOES GOD EVER PUNISH WRONGDOERS?
God is perfect goodness, love and truth. He is not wrathful or vengeful. He does not condemn or punish wrongdoers. Jealousy, vengefulness and vanity are qualities of man’s instinctive nature, not of God. Aum Namah Sivaya.
BHASHYA
There is no reason to ever fear God, whose right-hand gesture, abhaya mudra, indicates ”fear not,” and whose left hand invites approach. God is with us always, even when we are unaware of that holy presence. He is His creation. It is an extension of Himself; and God is never apart from it nor limited by it. When we act wrongly, we create negative karma for ourselves and must then live through experiences of suffering to fulfill the law of karma. Such karmas may be painful, but they were generated from our own thoughts and deeds. God never punishes us, even if we do not believe in Him. It is by means of worship of and meditation on God that our self-created sufferings are softened and assuaged. God is the God of all–of the believers within all religions, and of the nonbelievers, too. God does not destroy the wicked and redeem the righteous; but grants the precious gift of liberation to all souls. The Agamas state, ”When the soul gradually reduces and then stops altogether its participation in darkness and inauspicious powers, the Friend of the World, God, reveals to the soul the limitless character of its knowledge and activity.” Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 55 FROM LIVING WITH SIVA
PURIFYING THE INTELLECT
There are many things which have their claim on people’s minds. For many it is the physical body. The hypochondriac thinks about it all the time. Then there is the employer who has bought the intellect of the employee. The emotions consume the intellect with hurt feelings and the rhetorical questions that ensue, elated feelings and the continued praise that is expected. And then there is television, the modern vishvaguru that guides the intellect into confusion. As a dream leads only to waking up, television leads only to turning it off. Yes, there are many things that claim the intellect, many more than we have spoken about already.
The intellect is guided by the physical; the intellect is guided by the emotions, by other people, and by mechanical devices. And the intellect is guided by the intellect itself, like a computer processing and reprocessing knowledge without really understanding any of it. It is at the stage when anger has subsided, jealousy is unacceptable behavior and fear is a distant feeling, when memory is intact, the processes of reason are working well, the willpower is strong and the integrity is stable, when one is looking out from the anahata chakra window of consciousness, when instinctive-intellectual thought meets the superconscious of the purusha, the soul, that the inner person lays claim on the outer person.
There is a struggle, to be sure, as the ”I Am” struggles to take over the ”was then.” It’s simple. The last mala, the anava ”mala,” has to start losing its beads. The personal ego must go for universal cosmic identity, Satchidananda, to be maintained. This, then, is the platform of the throat chakra, the vishuddha chakra, of a true, all-pervasive, never-relenting spiritual identity. Here guru and shishya live in oneness in divine communication. Even if never a word is spoken, the understanding in the devotee begins to grow and grow and grow.
Some people think of the intellect as informing the superconscious or soul nature, instructing or educating it. Some people even think that they can command the Gods to do their bidding. These are the people that also think that their wife is a slave, that children are their servants, and who cleverly deceive their employers and governments through learned arts of deception.
These are the prototypes of the well-developed ignorant person, even though he might feign humility and proclaim religiousness. It is the religion that he professes, if he keeps doing so, that will pull him out of this darkness. When the first beam of light comes through the muladhara chakra, he will start instructing his own soul as to what it should do for him, yet he still habitually dominates his wife, inhibiting her own feelings as a woman, and his children, inhibiting their feelings in experiencing themselves being young.
But the soul responds in a curious way, unlike the wife and children, or the employer and government who have been deceived through his wrong dealings. The soul responds by creating a pin which pricks his conscience, and this gnawing, antagonistic force within him he seeks to get rid of. He hides himself in jealousy, in the sutala chakra, until this becomes unacceptable. The confusion of the talatala chakra is no longer his pleasure. He can’t hide there. So, he hides himself in anger and resentment–a cozy place within the vitala chakra–until this becomes unbearable. Then he hides himself in fear, in the atala chakra, fear of his own purusha, his own soul, his own psyche, his own seeing, until this becomes intolerable. Then he hides himself in memory and reason, and the being puts down its roots. The change in this individual can only be seen by the mellowness within his eyes and a new-born wisdom that is slowly developing in his conversations among those who knew him before.
SUTRA 55 OF THE NANDINATHA SUTRAS
INCANTATION AND SACRIFICE
All Siva’s devotees do japa daily, counting recitations on rudraksha beads. Embracing tapas through simple austerities, they sacrifice often, carry out penances as needed and perform sadhana regularly. Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 55 FROM MERGING WITH SIVA
TURNING TO THE INNER LIGHT
Thousands of young aspirants who have had bursts of inner light have evolved quickly. Assuredly, this has been their natural evolutionary flow. This over-sensitization of their entire mind structure, so suddenly intensified into transcendental realms, caused the materialistic states to decentralize attachments to their present life-pattern, school interests and plans for the future. A springboard is needed. A new balance must be attained in relating to the materialistic world, for the physical body still must be cared for to unfold further into the human destiny of nirvikalpa samadhi, the realization of the Self beyond the states of mind. Enlightened seers are turning inward to unravel solutions in building new models to bring forth new knowledge from inner realms to creatively meet man’s basic needs, and to bring through to the external spheres beauty and culture found only on inner planes–thus heralding the Golden Age of tomorrow and the illuminated beings of the future who, through the use of their disciplined third eye and other faculties, can remain ”within” the clear white light while working accurately and enthusiastically in the obvious dream world.
Should he come out too far into materialism in consciousness, the inner voice may be falsely identified as an unseen master or a God talking into his right inner ear, but when in the clarity of white light, he knows that it is his very self. Realizing he is the force that propels him onward, the aspirant will welcome discipline as an intricate part of his internal government, so necessary to being clear white light.
It is a great new world of the mind that is entered into when first the clear white light dawns, birthing a new actinic race, immediately causing him to become the parent to his parents and forefathers. When living in an expanded inner state of mind, he must not expect those living in materialistic consciousness to understand him. On this new path of ”the lonely one,” wisdom must be invoked to cause him to be able to look through the eyes of those who believe the world is real, and see and relate to that limited world in playing the game as if it were real, thus maintaining the harmony so necessary for future unfoldments. To try to convince those imbedded in materialism of the inner realities only causes a breach in relationship, as it represents a positive threat to the security they have worked so hard to attain.
First we had the instinctive age, of valuing physical strength and manly prowess, followed by the intellectual age, facts for the sake of facts, resulting in the progress of science. Now we are in an age of new values, new governing laws, an actinic age, with new understanding of the world, the mind, but most of all, the Self. Understanding is preparation for travel, for it is an age of the mind, and in the mind, much more intense than the speed of light, exist spheres which seers are only willing to speak of to those who have the inner ear with which to listen.
The mind of man tends either toward light or toward darkness, expanded awareness or materialistic values. Depending upon the self-created condition of the mind, man lives either within the clear white light of the higher consciousness, or in the external mind structure which reflects darkness to his inner vision.
