Yoga for Health, Happiness and World Peace-17. - Swami Chidananda

22/10/2018

Secondly, a state of contentment is to be created in your mind. Rejoice in whatever God has given you. Be happy and be contented, and in that state of contentment, mind can become liberated to rise higher towards God. Where there is discontentment, dissatisfaction, mind is always grumbling, murmuring, and finding fault. It is in a negative state. It cannot be uplifted or made to move higher towards a higher reality, higher ideas of life. Some people say contentment will stop all progress. It is not like that. You are always at liberty to strive for improving your condition, bettering your state, but with contentment; not with discontentment in your present position, not with dissatisfaction, not in a negative state of grumbling, murmuring and complaining. No. Be contented, be happy with what you have. By all means strive to improve yourself.

Thirdly, you have to create a certain purifying fire inside by not allowing desires to dominate you, not allowing the sense appetites to enslave you. Confronting them and opposing them. This voluntary opposing of the inner desire nature and the outer gross sense of appetite of the body, creates a certain inner tension within you, which gives rise to a certain inner heat, a spiritual fire as it were that is called the inner Taapa, created by this determined opposing of your lesser nature which is called Tapasya. This inner Taapa, when it is created, purifies the entire human nature.

It is a purifying inner fire; a subtle psychic heat and a psychic fire which purifies your entire being by the higher opposing the lower, by the subtler opposing the grosser, by the spiritual reality within you opposing the lesser fleshy aspect of your present human nature, which is not your real nature, which is only an added factor, temporarily given to you to function upon this earth plane, but really, it does not constitute your essential nature, which is purely spiritual, being part of the cosmic reality. This Tapasya, liberates your being to move towards the higher reality, which is the source and origin of your being.

Fourthly, to counteract the influence of the outer world in which you have to move, function and live the greater part of your working hours—maybe eight, nine or even ten hours (if you have to commute one hour to and fro and eight hours you have to be in your post of work and duty)—and this mind is like a super camera. Whatever is seen, heard, tasted, touched, smelt, whatever is the outer environment, it constantly creates impressions. You should not allow these negative earthly gross impressions to go on accumulating within you. Then and there, you have to eliminate them. Each day there should be a cleansing process.

To be continued ...