The Atma Jyoti Blog

An article written by Paramhansa Yogananda in 1929

India is the epitome of the world in everything–a land of all kinds of climates, religions, commerce, arts, peoples, sceneries, stages of civilizations, languages.

Her civilization dates back many thousands of years. Her great seers, prophets and rulers left records behind them that prove the great antiquity of the Aryan civilization in India.

Many European travelers visit India, see a few of the street magicians, sword-swallowers or snake-charmers, and they think that is the highest India has to offer them. They do not realize that these men do not represent India. The real life and secret of India’s vitality is her spiritual culture, which has made her the motherland of religions since time immemorial. Although the West can teach India much about sanitation, business methods and development of resources–although India needs business missionaries like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, yet the Western lands, too, are thirsty, consciously or unconsciously, for the practical spiritual lessons that India has specialized in for centuries.

In the Western cities, science has progressed so far that the physical man is usually well taken care of, fed and clothed and sheltered. Yet physical and material comfort without mental and spiritual peace and solace is not enough. India has been the unproclaimed reformer, the grand inspirer of human minds and souls. She has been the spiritual model of all religions. Her greatest and richest legacy to mankind has been the techniques discovered and handed down for centuries by her saints and seers for the scientific spiritual culture of man.

India is a land of mystery, but of mystery that reveals itself to the sympathetic inquirer and seeker. India has the grandest and highest mountains–the Himalayas–in the world. Darjeeling, in the north of India, is the Switzerland of that country. The unique ruins of ancient castles and vast palaces of princes in Delhi; the vast Ganges made sacred by the centuries of meditation near its banks by many God-realized saints; the sun-gilded teeth of the Himalaya mountain-ridges; the ancient places and caves of meditation where Yogis and Swamis saw the faggots of ignorance blaze with the wisdom of God; the Taj Mahal at Agra, the finest dream of architecture ever materialized in marble to symbolize the ideal of human love; the dark forests and jungles where the distant tigers roam, the blueness of the Indian skies and the bright sunshine, the innumerable varieties of Oriental fruits and vegetables; the many various types of people–all these tend to make India different, fascinating, romantic, never-to-be-forgotten.

A Land of Great Contrasts

India is a land of great contrasts–untold riches and utmost poverty, the highest mental purity and coarse, plain living, Rolls Royces and bullock carts, gaily-caparisoned elephants and quaint horse-wagons.

In the north, we find blue-eyed and blonde-haired Hindus, and in the hotter south, we find the dark sun-kissed skins of the tropics. From start to finish, India is a land of surprises, of contrasts and extremes. Life becomes prosaic with too much business, too many dull certainties; so in India one feels that life is a great adventure, a thing of mystery and surprise.

India may not have material skyscrapers and all the sometimes spiritually-enervating comforts of modern life–she has her faults, as all nations have–but India shelters many unassuming, Christ-like spiritual “skyscrapers” who could teach the Western brothers and sisters how to get the fullest spiritual joy out of any condition of life. Those scientific mystics and seers, who have known Truth by their own effort and experience, and not through ordinary, personally-unverified beliefs, can show others how to develop their own intuition and open the fountain of peace and satisfaction from beneath the soil of mysteries.

Though I have had the advantage of some Western education, yet I feel that in India alone I found the true solution to the mysteries of life. This feeling inspired the following poem to India, which I wrote recently:

My Mother India

Not where the musk of happiness blows,
Not in the land
Where darkness and fears never tread,
Not in the homes of perpetual smiles,
Not in the heaven or Land of Prosperity
Would I be born
If I have to put on a mortal garb again.

A thousand famines may prowl
And tear my flesh,
Yet would I love to be again
In my Hindustan.
A million thieves of disease
May try to steal the fleeting health of flesh,
Or the clouds of Fate
May shower scalding drops of searing sorrow,
Yet would I there
In India love to re-appear.

Is this, my love, a blind sentiment
Which beholds not the pathways of reason?
Ah no! I love India,
For I learned first to love God and all
beautiful things there.

Some teach to seize the fickle dew-drop–Life–
Sliding down the lotus leaf of Time.
Some build stubborn hopes
Around the gilded brittle body-bubble.
But India taught me to love
The soul of deathless beauty
In the dew-drop or the bubble,
Not their fragile frame.
Her sages taught me to find my Self
Buried beneath the ash heaps
Of incarnations and ignorance.

Through many a land
Of power, plenty and science,
My soul, garbed as an oriental
Or an occidental, traveled far and wide
Seeking Itself–
At last in India to find Itself.
If mortal fires blaze all her homes
And golden paddy fields
Yet to sleep on her ashes and dream immortality,
O, India, I will be there!

The guns of science and matter
Have boomed on her shores,
Yet she is unconquered,
Her soul is free evermore.
Her soldier saints are away
To rout with Realization’s ray
The bandits of Hate, Prejudice,
Patriotic Selfishness,
And burn the walls of Separation dark
Which lie ’tween children of the One,
One Father.
The Western brothers by matter’s might
Have conquered my land;
Blow, blow aloud her conch-shells all!
India now invades with love
to conquer their souls.

Better than Heaven or Arcadia.
I love Thee, O my Mother India,
And thy love I shall give
To every brother nation that lives.
God made the earth,
And man made his confining countries,
And their fancy-frozen boundaries.
But with the new found love I behold
The borderland of my India
Expand into the world.

Hail, mother of religions, lotus,
Scenic beauty and Sages,
Thy wide doors are open
Welcoming God’s true songs
Through all the ages.
Where Ganges, woods,
Himalayan caves and men dream God,
I am hallowed; my body touched that sod.*

Visions of India’s Life-Giving Philosophy

From time immemorial, India’s greatest minds have specialized in discovering and understanding the philosophy and mystery of life. One of the oft-disputed questions in philosophy is whether the goal of human life is service or selfishness. Once I had a great controversy with a European who repeatedly and blindly affirmed that the goal of life was service, while I maintained that it was higher selfishness. I asked him again and again for his reasons in believing in “service”, but instead of satisfying my discrimination, he kept on reiterating, “Service is the goal of life. It is blasphemous to doubt that.” Finding him so dogmatic, I asked him, “Is service the goal of life because the Scriptures have declared it?” “Yes,” he vehemently replied. “Do you believe everything literally in Scripture?” I questioned him. “Do you think Jonah was swallowed by a whale and came out alive after a few days? How do you account for it?” “No. I do not understand how he could do that,” my friend said. That was just the point. In order to really know the truth contained in Scriptural stories, and in order to understand what is erroneous, or right, literal or metaphorical, in Scriptural writings, one must use his own reason, discrimination and power of intuitional verification developed thru meditation.

Scriptures Not Always Infallible

Many people think that what is printed in black and white is right. Above all, most people believe that anything wearing the robe of Scriptural authority is absolutely beyond question. But putting on an outward garb cannot make one infallible. Writers of Scriptures can also make mistakes. In order to know the truth of a doctrine, we must live it and find out if it works or not–give it the acid test of experience. Let us get out into the world and compare our religious beliefs with the religious experiences of true teachers. Let us be iconoclastic of our own errors that need to be destroyed within us. We must not harbor an undigested mass of theology and thus suffer from chronic theological indigestion.

Service a Form of Selfishness

The law of service to others is secondary to, and born out of the law of self-interest and self-preservation and selfishness. Man never in his sane mind does anything without a reason. All religious doctrines and instructions are based either on blind superstition or on real religious experience. The real reason behind the Scriptural injunctions to “Serve thy fellow-men”, and “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is that the law of service to others is to be obeyed by all devotees who would, thru others, expand the limits of their own self.

No action is performed without reference to a direct or indirect thought of selfishness. Giving service is indispensable to receiving service. To serve others by financial, mental, or moral help is to find self-satisfaction. Besides, if any one knew beyond doubt that by service to others, his own soul would be lost, would he serve? If Jesus knew that by sacrificing his life on the altar of ignorance, He would displease God or lose His favor, would He have acted as he did? No, He knew that though he had to lose the body, He was gaining His Father’s favor and His own Soul. Such immortal sons of God and all the martyrs and saints, make a good investment–they spend the little mortal body to gain immortal life.

There is nothing worth-while gained without paying a price. Thus even the most self-sacrificing act of service to others can be shown to be done not without any thought of self. It is logical, therefore, to say that the higher selfishness, or the good of the Higher Self, is the motive of life instead of service to others without thought of self.

Must be Given Because Received

In giving service to others, a man knows also that otherwise he cannot rightly receive service from them. If the farmers give up agricultural work, and the business men give up their business of transportation and distribution, then how could even the renunciate maintain himself? Nowadays, with increased population and wealth, even forests are divided off and owned by big landowners, who placard the trees with signs warning the trespasser that he will be prosecuted for coming into another man’s property. So the renunciate cannot logically say, “I will not work or earn my living–I will live on the wild fruits of the forest”. Hence, services given and received have reference to the goal of a lower or higher selfishness.

Three Kinds–Evil, Good and Sacred Selfishness

We must, however, clearly distinguish between the three kinds of evil, good and sacred selfishness. The evil kind is that which actuates a man to seek his own comfort by destroying the comforts of others. To be rich at the cost of others’ loss is sin, and against the interests of the higher individual self of the person who does it. To delight in hurting others’ feelings by carping criticism is evil selfishness. This malignant pleasure is not conducive to any lasting good. True and good selfishness is the kind which makes a man seek his own comfort, prosperity and happiness by also making others more prosperous and happy. Evil selfishness hides its many destructive teeth of suffering beneath the apparently innocent looks of comfort-assurances. Evil selfishness shuts one in a small circle and shuts all humanity out beyond it. Good selfishness takes everybody, including one’s own self, into the circle of brotherhood. Good selfishness brings many harvests–return services from others, self-expansion, divine sympathy, lasting happiness and self-realization.

Good selfishness should be followed by the business man, who, by sincere, honest, wholesome, constructive actions and labors, enables himself to look after his own and his family’s needs. Such a business man is far superior to the business man who thinks and acts only for himself, thinking neither of the ones he serves or of those dependent on him for support. He is then acting against his own best selfish interests, for he will suffer in time. Many misers die, leaving their wealth to relatives who often squander it on wrong self-indulgences. Such selfishness helps neither the giver nor the receiver, in the end.

To avoid the pitfalls of evil selfishness, one should first follow and establish himself in the good forms of selfishness, where one thinks of his family and those whom he serves, as part of himself. From that attainment, one can then advance to a practice of the sacred selfishness, (or unselfishness, as ordinary understanding would term it), where one sees all the universe as himself.

Being Sacredly Selfish

Feeling the sorrows of others in order to make them free from further suffering, seeking happiness in the joy of others, and constantly trying to remove the wants of bigger and bigger groups of people is being sacredly selfish. The man of sacred selfishness counts all his earthly losses as deliberately brought about by himself for others’ good, and for his own great and ultimate gain. He lives to love his brethren, for he knows they are all children of the one God. His entire selfishness is sacred, for whenever he thinks of himself, he thinks, not of the small body and mind of ordinary understanding, but of the needs of all bodies and minds (within the range of his acquaintance or influence). His “self” then becomes the Self of all. He becomes the mind and feeling of all creatures. So when he does anything for himself, he can only do that which is good for all. He who considers himself as the one whose body and limbs consists of all humanity and all creatures–certainly finds the Universal, All-Pervading Spirit as Himself.

Act Without Expectation

He does not act with expectation but, with his best judgment and intuition, goes on helping himself as the many, with health, food, work, success and spiritual emancipation.

Working with good selfishness and sacred selfishness brings one in touch with God, resting on the altar of all-expanding goodness. One who realizes this, works conscientiously only to please the ever-directing God-peace within.

* The final lines of this poem were the last words spoken by the Master, who immediately after their utterance consciously left his body on March 7, 1952.

More by Yogananda:

• How to Get Your Prayers Answered
• Ten Bits of Wisdom from Paramhansa Yogananda
• Finding Happiness in Difficult Times

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