The great Shankaracharya has said, ‘You may have a beautiful body, a nice wife or husband, fame all over the world, and immense wealth, but if your soul is not attached to the feet of the guru, there is absolutely no use of having all those things.’ Otherwise the mind keeps wavering, wandering and loafing about.
Today we are remembering this great person, who has been able to initiate a great culture around the world. He did not go anywhere outside his ashram in Rishikesh, but his spiritual realization and his great knowledge of higher consciousness has created fields of influence all over the world.
If you find people all over the globe talking about yoga, if you find institutions and teachers talking about jnana yoga, raja yoga, bhakti etc., if you find hundreds of pious swamis roaming all over the world with a very simple message, if you find anywhere in the world man trying to discover the reality behind this material world, then the founder of this great culture was Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh.
It is not because he was my guru, it is not because I have lived with him for some time, but I see that a man like me has changed completely. I never accepted to be changed, I have never accepted any kind of philosophy, I have no faith in any religion. You can say a very hard matter, a very deaf matter, I don’t criticize anyone openly, but there is none who I can appreciate and accept, because if a person cannot transform the very nature of my soul, I reject him. If you say you have lit the fire and you have put fuel in it, but the fuel wood does not burn, I doubt if you have lit the fire at all. Saints and swamis are not scholars; they are not the spokesmen of a social culture, they do not represent a political ideology, they belong to the masses and they belong to men. The only purpose, for which a swami or a saint or a rishi is born is to awaken the dormant light in everybody.
You live in your body, you live in the mind, you live through the senses and you depend on the materials of this world. But you do not know that there is someone else in you and that you can transform this consciousness and the whole quality of mind. And still you can function as a human being, and still you can live like a husband and wife, and brother and sister. The difference is just a simple difference. When you live in this limited area of life, you are conditioned by pain and pleasure. When you transform your awareness or live on a greater realm, you are not conditioned by pleasure and pain. You live and you witness the whole life. You enjoy and witness the whole enjoyment, you undergo calamities in life, difficulties in life but you witness the whole lot.
I am very happy that I have the pleasure to remember my guru on this day, on his 94th anniversary, that we are celebrating here. I am also very fortunate to remember the day I took sannyasa from him 35 years ago. You may be disciples of many, many gurus, it is alright, you may be following different paths of yoga, it is perfectly alright, but please remember one thing that at the other end there is only one man. That is Swami Sivananda, that is our guru parampara, the tradition of our gurus. Your guru may not be a direct disciple of Swami Sivananda, it does not matter. The guru disciple relationship continues through the tradition of spiritual discipline, and the spiritual discipline that we are talking about in this particular quarter of the century has never been seen by anybody else before Swami Sivananda came to teach us.
People mocked at mala and japa and he uprated the value. People used to make fun of the people standing on their heads, people used to make fun of this robe, people used to make fun of the people who used to live the spiritual life, but when Swamiji came out and started teaching discipline to everybody freely, the whole picture changed within three decades. The curses of two hundred years of industry and revolution were rectified. The historical mistake that man has made is being rectified now. Just imagine if he had not come!
12 September 1981, Zinal, Switzerland