The Most Excellent Advice
Over many years of my own spiritual studies, the one advice that has always remained very valuable to me is, “When one hand of yours is at work, hold God with the other; as soon as your work is over, hold Him with both your hands.” Said by Shri Rãmakrishna, these words have a beauty beyond compare and a practical importance that none can afford to ignore.
God is satyam, shivam, sundaram – true, good and beautiful. What can be wiser for us to do than to hold Him tightly all the time? Sweet remembrance of Him through His name, form or qualities (nãma, roopa or guna) is at once such a purifying act that we can then ill afford to do anything wrong in our daily life. What is more, our mind will prompt us to do truly virtuous deeds when it is held in the pure state through an emotional bond with God. As we know well, our life has become unnecessarily complicated. We keep a lot of extra stuff with us, physically and mentally.
On top of it, we want more and more. A lot of our fights with other people are actually ‘much ado about nothing’. Our mind is utterly confused about what we actually want in life. As Swami Vivekananda quotes in one of his talks, “The mind is like a monkey, restless by nature. It drinks the wine of desire and, to add to its troubles, is bitten by the scorpion of jealousy. On top of it all, the ghost of ego enters into it. Imagine the mind’s state.” False prestige, unnecessary sentiments and useless comparisons make our psychological field a veritable fish market of the small town with unbearable noise. In such an unenviable situation, loving remembrance of god anchors us in inner stability and helps us view the worldly matters with much objectivity and the least selfishness.
Selfishness is itself the basic ailment with the human mind. True remembrance of God cures us of this ailment. On a Sunday morning, in a small village, a man requested his wife to go to the neighbor’s house and borrow their hammer. The lady went but returned saying the neighbor’s house did not have any hammer. The man asked her to go the neighbor on the other side and she returned from there too, saying they were using it and therefore could not lend it. Then she went to a couple of other houses nearby and could not get a single hammer from anywhere. After all this, the man said with much anger and disappointment, “Look how selfish all these people are. Nobody is ready to part with their hammer for even a couple of hours. All right, let us then use our own hammer today.”
Often we do not realize how selfish we are and we very cleverly identify how everybody around is self-centered. It pays to slow down and introspect. Taking the name of God can help us get a handle on our mind which tends to deceive us. If anybody somehow does not have much idea or feeling about God, she or he could substitute Truth (Existence – Awareness – sat – chit) for God. Truth, justice or order is to be thought of as lying behind and beneath all the apparent chaos and disorder in this world. Hold truth tightly always.
The practical importance of this advice is that it relates to our daily life where we have work to do, duty to discharge. Even the sannyãsis (monks) in the Himãlayas have a few things to do on a daily basis. Householders in villages, towns and cities of course have long lists of things to do. Even with a hundred jobs on hand, it should be possible to put a part of our mind on God (Truth). When we have tooth ache, a part of our attention is on the paining tooth, no matter what we are doing. When a little love of God has risen in us, we would have no difficulty in thinking of Him during all our exertions. Shri Rãmakrishna thus is giving us an advice that is quite doable. Actually there is no other way. Unless we follow his advice, we can have no peace. This is an open secret. Alas, the extrovert tendencies in us make us postpone such divine practices and suffer, unnecessarily.
This advice of the Sage of Dakshineshwar is an echo of Geetã (8:7) where Lord Krishna urges Arjuna, “Therefore, at all times, keep Me in your thoughts and do your duty.” The Geetãchãrya defines a new yoga as though by coining a word here – abhyãsa yoga. To translate it literally, it is the spiritual discipline (yoga) of constant practice (abhyãsa). Normally when we work, our mind is partly in work and it partly runs towards a hundred other things that could be unrelated to the work on hand. The practice here involves withdrawal from those countless irrelevant topics and dwelling on the loving remembrance of God. A certain saint explained this with an agricultural analogy. He said we need to remove weeds and sow seeds as per the crop of our desire. Thoughts of work and thoughts of God can go together. Upon completion of work, let there be just thoughts of God.
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi, Monday, June 18, 2007