Look at the life in a new Way

Look at the life in a new Way
[Vinod Anand]

Truth can be likened to a pyramid— its pinnacle gives the highest expression of truth, while its broad base gives strength and stability. I’ve been amazed by the number of people in India who tell me that they don’t believe in God, and then go onto demonstrate that they do.

They can’t get away from it— it’s part of their upbringing. They don’t necessarily define God in terms of somebody who is blue and plays the flute. The thought, however, of an infinite consciousness is so ingrained in them that it’s impossible for them to reject it.

Because the highest expression of spiritual teachings has, throughout the ages, usually been found only at the pinnacle, the result is that only a very few people reached it. Spiritual teachings were often very esoteric, and those few people who received them would go into the mountains or monasteries, or go into silence and solitude.

Paramhansa Yogananda gave people a simple, practical way to magnetize the inner spiritual spine so that they can bring their consciousness into alignment with a higher reality In Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda gave a lovely description Of God. He said, “The divine vision is centre everywhere, circumference nowhere.”

You are the centre of the universe. The universe is not some big thing imposing itself on some little thing. It’s created from within each little centre, radiating outwards. Deep inside, each of us wants love, joy and understanding. We think we’ll get these things by having more money, more possessions and more exciting experiences.

But at a deeper level of our awareness we are always dissatisfied with that kind of restlessness. The more you live at the surface, the less you can ever absorb and understand. The ego has only one direction to go — to contract inwards and think first of me, me, and me.

But this course makes us more and more a prisoner of littleness and limitation. There’s another direction we can go — that of the expansive• ego. This expression of ego feels other people’s sorrows and happiness; it doesn’t think in terms of happiness for itself alone, but delights in enjoying things through others.

The expanded ego finds that in helping and giving to others, it becomes free. But as you follow this line of direction, you ultimately realize that there’s a limit to how far even this little ego can reach out. Yogananda once told someone, “You have a sour taste in your mouth, don’t you?”

This person replied in amazement, “How did you know?” Yogananda answered, “Because I’m as much in your body as I am in this body” This, indeed, is the consciousness of a master. As you approach that state, you gradually become aware of the unlimited reality of God in everything. Yogananda’s purpose was to help us understand that if we will approach life with the practice of kriya yoga, we will find God.

The spine is our centre. When we can magnetize it and bring all of our energy into our inner self, everything falls in line for us. The more sensitively attuned you are to your inner Self, the more you can understand other people and perceive solutions to their difficulties. What you have to do is simply look at life in a new way — from your own centre outwards. Once you become centered within, from that centre, everything you do will go better, because it proceeds from your centre in attunement with the divine consciousness which is “centre everywhere, circumference nowhere”.