Evolution of Love 2

I AM EVER WITH YOU

When a spiritual aspirant starts worshiping a form of his Beloved, he will in the course of his practice attain to a condition in which the form of his Beloved is beheld wherever his eyes may fall. Next he comes to realize: "All other deities are contained in my Beloved." He sees that everyone's Lord, in fact all things, are contained in his own Ishta (chosen form of God) and that his Ishta also dwells in all deities, as indeed, in everything. The aspirant comes to feel: "As my Lord resides within me, so He, who is present within everyone else, is truly the same Lord. In water and on land, in trees, shrubs and creepers - everywhere in the whole universe abides my Beloved. Further, all the various forms and modes of being that we behold, are they not expressions of my Beloved? For there is none save Him. He is smaller than the smallest, and greater than the greatest.

Actuated by your various inborn tendencies, you each worship a different deity. The true progress in one's spiritual experience depends on the sincerity and intensity of one's aspiration. The measure of a person's spiritual advance will be reflected in the manifestations that are vouchsafed to him of his Ishta, who will by no means remain inaccessible or separate from His devotee but let Himself be contacted in an infinite variety of ways.

The multifarious kinds of beasts, birds, men and so forth, what are they all? What are these varieties of shapes, of modes of being, what is the essence within them? What really are these everchanging forms? Gradually, slowly, because you are rapt in the contemplation of your Beloved, He becomes revealed to you in every one of them; not even a grain of sand is excluded. You realize that water, earth, plants, animals, birds, human beings are nothing but forms of your beloved. Some experience it in this manner. Realization does not come to everyone in the same way. There are infinite possibilities. Consequently, the specific path along which - for any particular person - the Universal will reveal itself in its boundlessness, remains concealed from the average individual.

The Universal Body of the Lord comprises all things - trees, flowers, leaves, hills, mountains, rivers, oceans, and so forth. A time will come, must come when one actually perceives this all pervading Universal Form of the One. The variety of His shapes and guises is infinite, uncountable, without end. When a sadhaka enters this state, he becomes conscious of the perpetual transformation of all forms and moods. When the current of one's thinking that was directed towards worldly matters, is reversed and turned inwards, the One Himself becomes revealed as the 'secret skill'. It is a Kingdom without end, in which even what is discerned as non-existence is equally an expression of the One. In Chinmaya, the purely spiritual (and completely non-material) world, all forms - whatever they may be - are ever eternal. Therefore, simultaneously and in the same place there is non-existence as well as existence, and also neither non-existence nor existence - and more of the kind if you can proceed further!

Just as ice is nothing but water, so the Beloved is without form, without quality, and the question of manifestation does not arise. When this is realized, one has realized one's Self. For, to find the Beloved is to find my Self, to discover that God is my very own, wholly identical with myself, my innermost Self, the Self of my Self. Then according to the exigence of time and circumstances, various possibilities may take effect - as for example, the revelation of mantras and even of the entire Vedas by the ancient Rishis who were seers of mantras. All this will occur in consonance with the individual karma and inner disposition of the person concerned.

Form is really void; one sees that freedom from form means the realization that form itself is the void. In this way the world reveals itself as void, before emerging into the Great Void.

It is the perception of the world, based upon the identification of yourself with body and mind, that has all along been the source of your bondage. A time will come when this kind of perception will give way before the awakening of universal consciousness, which will reveal itself as an aspect of Supreme Knowledge.

On transcending the level where form, diversity, manifestation exist, one enters into a state of formlessness. What can this be called? Godhood, the Paramatma Himself. As the individual self becomes gradually freed from all fetters, which are nothing but the veil of ignorance, it realizes its oneness with the Supreme Spirit (Paramatma) and becomes established in its one Essential Being.