When Swami Sivananda was initiated, he came to Rishikesh and lived alone in a cottage, performing his sadhanas and serving the sick and destitute, the travellers who would pass through Rishikesh on their pilgrimage to Yamunotri, Gangotri, Badrinath or Kedarnath. He had a beautiful routine. He combined sadhana and seva in perfect harmony and balance. Most of us who want to have spiritual awareness and experience indulge ourselves in sadhana only and shun seva, thinking ‘Oh, it is work, it is not necessary. I am practising my own sadhana for my enlightenment.’
Swami Sivananda blended seva and sadhana. The life he lived was austere, a Spartan life. One single room, sleep on the floor, two geru dhotis, and that was it. In the winter he would submerge himself in the freezing waters of Ganga and stay there for hours practising his austerities, sadhana, japa. In the summer, he would light fires and sit in front of the fire, practising his sadhana, his austerity, his japa.
He would also serve all the sick and needy. Eventually his name spread through the region. Like many moths are attracted to the flame, in the same manner many people were attracted to his luminosity and became his disciples. In the course of time, Swami Sivananda established the Divine Life Society. He was a swami, a sannyasi all his life, and not a yoga teacher. He taught people how to avoid the pitfalls of life, which are holes made by our own raga and dwesha. They are made by our own kama, krodha, lobha, moha, mada and matsarya. Everybody has those holes in their life and everybody invariably falls into those holes, practically every day. People are not able to extract themselves from these holes. They become jealous, fall into the pit of jealousy and cannot extract themselves. People get infatuated by comforts and luxuries and cannot extract themselves. They are willing to die for the sensorial pleasures of life and cannot extract themselves. This is our story.
Swami Sivanandaji gave lessons of how to avoid these pitfalls, how to become aware of these pitfalls, how to cultivate higher positive, constructive qualities in life. He says, ‘Avidity, cupidity, stupidity, audacity, irritability, eccentricity are all different obstacles to spiritual life. Duality, multiplicity, plurality, individuality, ahamkarity, raga-dweshity, abhiniveshity, sensuality, sensitivity, sentimentality, inactivity, rotundity are the obstacles of life.’ Which master can be so clear and say these are the obstacles and you have to avoid the obstacles and pitfalls? Everybody talks about ethics and morality, which they cannot follow nor understand. Swami Sivananda gave a clear guideline on how to avoid the pitfalls of life and what to cultivate to progress on the spiritual path.
Meditation is not the path to progress in spiritual life. Self-correction and self awareness become the path to progress in spiritual life. This was the lesson that Swami Sivanandaji gave to all. He lived a life of a sannyasin of the highest order. He was beyond Paramahamsa, he was beyond duality, he was one with the cosmic awareness. He was a trigunatita sannyasin, one who had transcended the three gunas, sattwa, rajas and tamas, and was established in the divine nature. There have been very few people like him. As disciples came to him, he taught them the way to live a spiritual life. He taught them how to become self aware, how to correct themselves and recognize the faults of nature, the mind and personality; how to discover harmony and peace inside, and experience luminosity inside. That was his sannyasa life. When people used to come to him knowing that he was a doctor, could understand their sickness and help them, Swami Sivanandaji used to dispense medicines, but not like an ordinary doctor.
My guru, Swami Satyanandaji tells us, ‘If a person came to Swami Sivananda for treatment, he would give him a medicine. After some time, if Swami Sivananda thought that the medicine given was improper and another medicine would be better for the sick person, he would give the new medicine to a disciple and say, “Go and find that sick person and give him this medicine.” Can you imagine a disciple going through the roads, looking for a person who had left the ashram three or four hours earlier, find him, give the medicine, come back and say, ‘Yes, I have given the medicine.’ That was the nature of Swami Sivananda. If he thought that something else would be beneficial, he would make sure that the person would be the recipient of that which was more beneficial to him.
He also knew that most of the illnesses and sicknesses are psycho-somatic and somato-psychic. Psycho-somatic begins in the mind and affects the body and in Sanskrit is known as adhyatmic. Somato-psychic begins outside and affects the mind, adibhautik and adidaivik. The adibhautik and adidaivik, the external factors causing suffering and illness, and adhyatmic, the inner stuff causing sickness, could not be helped only through medicine.
So he started training his disciples in yoga, and said yoga would become the means for people to attain, physical, mental, psychological, emotional and spiritual health. He told them that in the coming times they would have to spread out in the world and bring the teachings of yoga to human society across the nations. Many disciples asked Swami Sivanandaji, ‘Yoga is not our vocation. We are sannyasins. We follow the path of Vedanta.’ Swami Sivanandaji advised, ‘In your personal life you are sannyasins, but in your public life you are servants of humanity, and you have to give what humanity requires. If somebody is sick and ailing from respiratory problem and is having difficulty in breathing, what will you do? Will you teach him Vedanta and say, ‘You are not this body, you are not this mind?’ Will Vedanta help the person who is sick and suffering? No. You have to give the person who is sick and suffering the right tool by which he can overcome his sickness, his weakness and attain health. Vedanta will not give you health, yoga will.’
Therefore, he instructed his disciples to teach yoga and no other philosophy of life. All his disciples became front line teachers of yoga at a time when nobody in the world knew what yoga was. This was the instruction he gave to Swami Satyananda, our master, ‘You go out and spread the message of yoga from door to door and shore to shore.’ At that time Swami Satyanandaji said, ‘I don’t know yoga. How do you expect me to teach yoga?’ Swami Sivanandaji said, ‘I will teach you yoga. Come with me.’ He took him to a room, taught him kriya yoga and transferred all his knowledge to Swami Satyananda. You may wonder, ‘How can knowledge be transmitted by one person to another person in a few minutes?’
When you eat food, you use your fingers or spoons. The spoon becomes the medium to bring food to the mouth. The food goes down and it fills your stomach. The fingers become the medium to pick up the food, bring it to the mouth, then the food goes down and fills your stomach. Just as a metallic spoon or four fingers and thumb become the medium to eat food and satisfy your hunger, kriya yoga became the medium for shaktipat, for transference of knowledge from Swami Sivananda to Swami Satyananda. Endowed with this knowledge, Sri Swamiji left Sivananda Ashram to fulfil the mandate of his guru. Swami Sivananda, the guru, said about his disciple, “There goes my true successor, who will bring the light of Siva into the world.” This he did not say about anyone else. “There goes my true successor, who will bring the light of Siva to the world.”
This happened because Swami Satyananda had become Swami Sivananda. Swami Sivananda had merged himself into Swami Satyananda. The example is the hard drive of a computer. When the hard drive of a computer is full and you want to make a copy of that hard drive into another empty hard drive, when you transfer the information from this full hard drive to the empty hard drive, it becomes an exact replica of the original. Nobody will be able to tell the difference which is the original and which is the copy except the person who has done the transfer. Otherwise everything is the same, every byte is the same. There is no difference. This happened to Swami Satyananda because he was able to empty himself and allow Guru’s grace to fill his being.
This is not possible for everyone. There are people who make gurus, who become disciples and they want to sit with the guru for hours talking about their problems, difficulties, sufferings and pains. They talk for hours and days just about themselves to the guru, thinking, ‘Guru doesn’t know me. I have to tell him everything.’ If that is the attitude, then you have misunderstood the whole concept of guru and disciple relationship. There is no need for you to sit and describe as in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia every little ache and pain you are having in the body, in the mind, every little suffering you have faced in your life. People tell the guru, ‘You don’t know what I have suffered in my life.’ That is only a misconception that they live.
Swami Satyananda and other disciples of Swami Sivananda were not like that. They never sat down with their master to tell him of their problems and difficulties or ask for consultation. They believed that their master would always help them overcome their limitations. Sri Swamiji says, ‘If one can die for the sake of the pleasures of the world, let me die for the sake of my master.’ That was the awareness and attitude that sannyasins had. The sannyasins of Swami Sivanandaji did not practise meditation for eight hours, six hours, three hours, four hours, no. They did not practise japa, repeating so many thousands of mantras, no. Swami Sivanandaji guided them on the path of sannyasa which, for Swami Sivanandaji, was commitment to seva. That was his sannyasa.
He laid down an eightfold path for sannyasins, in which the first step is seva, serving; second step, prem, loving; third step, daan, giving; fourth step, shuddhi, self-purification; fifth step, do good all the time, acchha karo; sixth step, be good, acchha bano; seventh step, meditate, dhyan karo; eighth step, realize, atmasakshatkar. Nowhere in this teaching for sannyasins does the word sadhana appear. Sadhana is a selfish thing. You only do it for your on pleasure, not for your transcendence. What kind of sadhana do you do anyway, when you are not even able to manage the fluctuations of your mind? When you are not able to manage your kama, krodha, lobha, moha, mada, matsarya, ghrina, raga, dwesha? What kind of sadhana, what kind of meditation is going to be beneficial to you? Like an ostrich, you can put your head down in the sand and think nobody in the world is looking at you, but remember, the big bum is sticking up. That is what we are. In the guise of sadhana we hide our head in the sand, yet all the negatives of life always shine brightly in our life. Therefore, if you understand what I am saying, you will know the secret of success. Swami Sivanandaji lived this life and he taught this life to his disciples.
Many of you may not agree with what I am saying, but what I am saying is the truth, and people don’t understand truth. Swami Sivanandaji was not a yoga teacher. He inspired people to teach yoga to benefit humankind, yet he lived the life of a sannyasi. He inspired others to live the life of a sannyasi, to develop the awareness of the higher qualities leading them to live the divine life. In the same vein, Swami Satyanandaji was not a yoga master like the world thinks. In the span of his eighty years of life, he taught yoga for only twenty; the rest was his sannyasa life. When only one-fourth of life is yoga, how can you say he is a yoga master? He was a sannyasin who lived his life for sixty years and served yoga for twenty years.
In these twenty years, the contribution of Sri Swamiji for the development of yoga is unchallenged. He was the master and he could give the lessons of yoga in a manner that no sage of the past had done. It was Swami Satyanandaji who brought all the aspects of yoga to life and made them practical, scientific, experimental and experiential. Therefore, his contribution is unparalleled in the history of yoga, past, present and future. He stands unique as the master of yoga vidya, the total science and subject of yoga. However he was a sannyasi foremost, first and last. Yoga was his contribution as per the mandate of his master. It was the inspiration of Swami Sivanandaji that flowed through Swami Satyanandaji. They are our inspirations. These two are our masters, whose life and teaching is an example for us to emulate, follow and realize.
12 July 2022, Ganga Darshan, Munger