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In India the elephant is King of Beasts because of its intelligence. Although elephants are often used in forestry, they can be taught amazing skills. Only recently I reread Mooltiki and Other Stories by Rumer Godden. The last story was about Mooltiki, an elephant that showed amazing intelligence and had a very definite (sometimes difficult) personality.
Mooltiki was living in a hunting camp on the border of Bhutan. It was essential that a fire be kept burning all night to keep away the many tigers and leopards that lived in the area. Mooltiki was the fire tender. Three times a night she brought small tree trunks, made a pyramid shape of them on top of the low-burning fire, and got them to blaze up, even moving the hot coals around with her foot. In the day she gathered the fuel, but if it ran out she went into the jungle in the deep of night and got more.
She never ripped leafy branches off trees and waved them about the way other elephants do. Rather, when she saw a particularly beautiful flower she would delicately pick it and carry it in her trunk. When she crossed a river she loved to put her trunk under the water and blow bubbles–another thing elephants do not usually do. Though Mooltiki was cantankerous and often unkind to Rumer Godden, still she liked going for jungle walks with Mooltiki because she knew she was with a real person, not a “beast” at all.
The photo above is Andar, the temple elephant of the Sri Rangam Temple in Tamil Nadu in South India, together with his mahut. Monks from Atma Jyoti Ashram met Andar during their visit to the Sri Rangam temple in 2003. Andar especially enjoyed the gift of cookies which the mahut gave the remarkable elephant for our monks. See Andar eating their cookies in our video of Temple Elephants which they filmed during that trip.
This is a continuation of our extracts from Yogananda’s The Second Coming of Christ articles that originally appeared in East-West, Inner Culture, and Self-Realization magazines.
T
he joy in God is more tempting than all temptations. Just as when opium is suddenly denied to an opium addict, he becomes sick or dies, so, unless the laws of Satan, which have become second nature to man, are transcended, man dies the death of ignorance.
Moderation in married life, supplemented by tasting of the Infinite Bliss of deep meditation and the unconditioned divine love in the soul, is the way to freedom. The consciousness of God can tame temptation and God’s love can spiritualise conjugal love, for that divine love can exist under all conditions of life.
Since God’s love is more tempting than temptation, one can love God even though he loves his wife. One can love his wife with the love of God and not love of flesh. To love your wife in the material way only is to invite Satan to dwell with you and lead you to boredom, destruction of your most wonderful love, and to separation. To love your wife with the pure love of God and to live with her a life of self-control by mental development, and to create spiritual children is a noble way to live. To be drowned by material cares, weariness, overwork, greed for money, over-indulgence in amusements, buying more things, and slaving for more money and saving no time for God leads you to the misery kingdom of Satan. A happy, contented, simple, harmonious married life of self-control and meditation leads you to God.
The Opposites
God created forgiveness; Satan created revenge. Likewise, God created calmness, fearlessness, unselfishness, the spirit of brotherhood, peace, love, understanding, wisdom, and happiness. And for each of these Satan created its psychological opposite: restlessness, fear, greed, individual and material selfishness, war, anger, hate, murder, and jealousy. He created ignorance to replace wisdom, and sorrow to destroy happiness.
Sense slavery was created to defeat the happiness inherent in self-control. National selfishness, false sense of patriotism, industrial selfishness, and national pride were created by Satan to destroy the universal spirit of brotherhood, international understanding, and the law of equality created by God. Conscience, the voice of God, always beckons you to do right. Temptation, the voice of Satan, coaxes you to do wrong.
Remember that Satan has brought disease, cataclysms, famine, pain, death, strife, and imperfection in Nature so that man may desire to have a perfect earth and return again and again to earth life, where Satan reigns, and never go back to Spirit. Let us, by perfect living in a spiritual United States of the World, make God’s Heaven from Satan’s earth of imperfection. Let us help God’s pattern to take the place of the evil designs of Satan.
Belief in an objective Satan explains the origin of all evil, which cannot be explained by the individual or collective subjective ignorance of man. You are free, so when you are tempted, or angry, or jealous, or selfish, or greedy, or revengeful, or restless, member that Satan is asking you to come to his side. Remember that every time you are master of yourself: moderate, calm, understanding, unselfish, forgiving, and when you practice meditation, you are inviting God to help you. Remember, above all, that you are a free agent endowed with free will, and that Satan can only influence you when you command yourself to yield to his temptations.
You Must Choose
Remember, God can redeem you only when you act in accordance with His laws of right living in every way. Remember, also, that you are in the middle with Satan standing at your left with his kingdom of misery, and God remaining at your right with His kingdom of happiness. It rests with you whether you will allow Satan to pull you to his side, or whether you will ask God to draw you to His side of Eternal Freedom.
Remember, every time you are tempted to do wrong, it is not your subjective mind alone which is tempting you, but also objective Satan, and recognizing this, refuse to cooperate with him and thereby be destroyed.
Over the next few blog posts, we will be experimenting with a new mailing list service, Benchmark Email. We hope this will give us a better delivery rate, making sure more of you receive your emails of our blog posts if you have subscribed to them, and also enabling us to better format the emails which you receive.
You will receive duplicates of these emails for the next few posts, one from Benchmark, and one from FeedBurner, our older and somewhat problematic service provided by Google. This will enable us to check for any problems, and ensure a smooth transition to our new service before we discontinue FeedBurner.
We have also combined our Blog subscription list and our Ashram Newsletter list, to make it easier to manage and clear out duplicate and defunct subscriptions. If for any reason you wish to unsubsribe, you can do so at the bottom of the Benchmark email. Also, you can email us at the address provided there if you wish to give any feedback about the new service.
One side note: we are nearing the 1000 Like threshold at our Ashram Facebook page. If you use Facebook, visit the page, give it a “Like,” and follow the conversation on our wall for the latest news from the Ashram, our website and blog, and spiritual life in general.
This is a continuation of our extracts from Yogananda’s The Second Coming of Christ articles that originally appeared in East-West, Inner Culture, and Self-Realization magazines.
“If We Were God, We Would Create a Much Better World”
We think that if we were almighty we could create a much better world than this. We would banish from this earth cancer, accidents, weakness, revengefulness, anger, greed, murder, famine, leprosy, cannibalism, industrial greed resulting in depression, earthquakes, floods, bad weather, drought, death by pain, boredom, old age, despair, poisonous bacteria, tragedies of life, and so forth.
We would create a world with a joyous struggle and not painful struggle, and ever-new happy state of mind for all men, entirely different from mental idleness and boredom. We would make the body with the qualities of asbestos, diseaseless, changeable according to the commandments of our will. We would have our bodies tailored in the workshop of materialization and self-rejuvenation.
We would create a variety of occupations with a variety of actions, all leading to infinite, unending, ever-new happiness. Good citizens would be materialized by will from the ether, even as God created the first man and woman, and would dematerialize ourselves in Cosmic Consciousness after we had successfully finished our earthly entertainment.
The Dragon, Subjective Evil, and No Evil
Blind theologians and superstitious people made a dragon out of Satan, which had to be killed by the sword of the conquering knight. Modern intellectuals try to explain Satan away as a merely subjective idea born of ignorance. Some modern spiritual denominations, being unable to explain the existence of evil in the entirely good God, completely and blindly deny even the existence of evil.
We find that Jesus, Whose knowledge was born of intuition, distinctly spoke of a conscious Satan who lured Him to the wilderness and tempted Him with the wild beasts of evil patterns arrayed side by side with the good patterns of God. This conscious force comes in the form of little temptations to the ordinary man. The existence of such evils is the reason Jesus prayed: “Thy kingdom come,” in order that man might use his independence and act rightly, and that he might substitute the kingdom of God for the kingdom of evil.
Satan, like a fisherman, has cast a net of delusion around all mankind and is continually trying to drag man toward the slavery of delusion, death, and finitude. Satan tempts humanity by his baits of greed, and promises of pleasure, and leads people to destruction and continuous painful reincarnations. He keeps souls, like fish, in the pond of finitude and spawns them with desires for his own destructive uses.
Satan Creates An Evil Pattern For Every Good Pattern Created by God
For all the patterns of good created by God, Satan created corresponding patterns of psychological evils. God created wisdom, Satan ignorance. God created all good, Satan all evil. God created the senses of sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch to be the servants of man, bringing happiness to him. Satan by temptation made man the slave of his senses and caused the resultant misery.
Misuse Of The Senses
The sense of hearing, smell, and sight can be over-taxed with very little ill effect. Very few people are foolish enough to strain their eyes so much that they become blind. No one can smell flowers or perfumes long enough to cause death. Very few people can make themselves deaf by continuously listening to good music. Of course, the sense of sight may be baited by physical beauty and result in a series of wrong judgments and misery. The sense of hearing may be misused and lost by too much practice of cannon shooting or other loud explosions. The sense of smell can be vitiated, but it is the most harmless of all of the five senses and can stand much abuse without retaliation.
Think what dreadful consequences follow when the sense of taste or touch is over-taxed. How easy it is to over-eat and hasten death by indigestion. How easy it is for most people to over-indulge in physical temptation and indiscretion and bring upon themselves ill health, boredom, social and matrimonial disaster, jealousy, murder, and so forth. God wanted man to procreate His species by materialization, but Satan, through misuse of his God-given power of free choice, created the physical urge and its infinite complications to keep man’s mind away from the joy of God. If God created infinite Bliss, Satan created the greatest of all the temptations–that of the flesh.
How Satan Created Temptations To Oppose God’s Pattern Of Soul Bliss
Is it wrong to have good children by the ordinary law of procreation? No, but remember that Satan’s law of procreation and its misuse can be overcome only by moderation in marriage and by self-control and by the joyous contact with God in meditation. When the joy of God, felt in meditation, remains continuously in the soul, then the physical temptation vanishes forever through contrast with this greater joy. Real freedom can be accomplished in no other way.
Q: What is the purpose or mission of Sanatana Dharma?
Let us consider the basics of growth as it takes place on this earth. The sun shines and warms the earth and the seeds in the earth. This stimulates the life principle in the seeds and they grow upward into the light. It is a very natural thing. Here, too, we would think someone crazy who would sit out in a field and yell at the plants to grow, promising rewards if they do and threatening punishments if they do not.
When we are dealing with human beings we are dealing with potentially infinite consciousnesses, with gods in embryo. We consider that we are dealing with a spark of God’s own life, because we do not believe God created the spirit. We believe that each individual spirit has existed eternally within God. So we consider that we are dealing with a potential god, and act accordingly. Gods should not be poked, pinched, and pulled.
Maria Montessori came to see that children should not be coerced to learn any subject. She proved that a subject need only be presented to them and when they are ready for it they will respond–until then they will not, and should not. Our present system of education fails because it assumes that chronological age determines readiness for learning. Maria Montessori, being a believer in reincarnation (though a Roman Catholic) understood that this was a matter of evolution, and that everything would come to pass in its own good and right time. This is why no child goes through the Montessori system and comes out having not learned. It is successful because it is based on the evolutionary nature of things.
We follow the same procedure. We present. The response is up to the individual. And any response, Yes, No, or Maybe, is fine. Certainly there are those who at their present stage of evolution need what we offer. But they have to recognize that themselves; it is not for us to tell them. It is definitely our duty to be there for those who need us, and we should let ourselves be visible. Beyond that it is their hands.
I learned something very early in my first visit to India. The fake teachers were more than volunteering their “wisdom,” they were cornering people and forcing it on them. But the real teachers had to be asked for instruction. Otherwise they just conversed affably on unimportant matters. Their insight was that only when the question arises in the mind of the seeker is he ready for the answer. Until then the teacher can do nothing worthwhile
Consider the material on our website: it is a matter of simple presentation, of visibility. If someone reads the material and says that they believe what is in them because they “convinced” them, we are not satisfied. That means they are simply spinning in the realm of the intellect and not in touch with their real inner self–something that has to be for conscious spiritual growth. Also, they should not be accepting our ideas. It should be a matter of their own conviction that arises from deep within. We cannot eat or digest for other people, and neither can we reveal wisdom to them. What we can do is present wisdom, and they can recognize it through their own inner response.
So what do we want people to say about the web material? We want them to say the truth. It they think it is nonsense, that is perfectly all right. For them it IS nonsense. We do like someone to say: “I had never thought of it before, but when I read what you wrote I realized that it was the truth and that I had always believed it somewhere in the back of my mind.” In other words, we did not convince them of the truth, they recognized it as already being part of their inner intuition that had not heretofore been verbalized. The word “education” comes from the Latin, its literal meaning is “to lead out” That is, real education is the process of evoking the student’s innate knowledge, of bringing it out so he can consciously work with it. It is a reminding him of what he really already knows. Not many people are educated, then, nor are many people authentically religious or spiritual. And we cannot make them so. They have to grow into it. Then we can help further their growth by showing them how to pass from natural automatic evolution into intentional evolution.
From the lowest form of life up to and including a great deal of the human experience, evolution happens automatically with no intention or effort on our part. We just live and it happens. But a time must come–the real time of “conversion” or being “born again”–when the individual must take control of his own evolution and consciously direct and produce it. For at that point it will no longer come automatically. It is somewhat like a child who at a certain age must learn to dress himself and in time make his own living. He must finally do on his own, for himself, what others had heretofore done for him.
The earlier “child” evolution is natural or automatic. The “adult” evolution is completely in the purview of the individual. A religion that cannot show a person how to do this is not of much use to an awakening person. The wandering spirit has forgotten itself and its attendant realities. It does not need to be taught, it need only be reminded, profound as that experience is. That is the sole purpose of Sanatana Dharma.
This is a continuation of our extracts from Yogananda’s The Second Coming of Christ articles that originally appeared in East-West, Inner Culture, and Self-Realization magazines.
There are many causes which can be set forth as to the origin of evil. Some people say that it is due to man’s own fault and that neither God nor any evil power, such as that of a conscious Satan, is responsible for all the evil in the world.
Although evil is relative and is due to the lack of harmony with God’s laws, if you hit a stone wall with your knuckles the resulting undeniable evil of pain would not be created or willed by the wall, but would be due to your ignorance in trying to hurt a stone wall.
Likewise, it can be said, God is the eternal stone wall of goodness, and anyone who is foolish enough to misuse his intelligence and try to act against the good is bound to produce the evil of pain and suffering. God is good. We were made in His image, endowed with the gift of free choice to tune in with His Nature of Goodness, Peace, and Immortality, and those who get out of tune with Him by performing evil actions are bound to suffer.
A little boy endowed with reason may enjoy perfect health and protection under the strict discipline of his mother, but when he grows up and says: “Mother, I know I am safe under your care, but I wonder why you gave me the power of free choice if you are always to decide how I am to act? Mother dear, I want to choose for myself and find out in what lies my own good and what leads me to suffering.”
The mother replies: “Son, it is right for you to demand from me the right to use your free choice. When you were helpless and your reason had not yet budded forth into full expression, I helped you, and nurtured you through the maternal love which protects babies. Now, however, you are grown up, your reason has opened your eyes, and you must depend upon your own free choice and judgment to guide you to do what will produce your well-being.”
Thus the youth ventures into the world unguarded, with a semi-developed reason, and the first thing that he does is to get into a fight and secure the resulting evil of a broken leg and a black eye.
In exactly the same way the Divine Mother protects each baby through the instinctive love of parents until grown up, then the baby has to protect itself by the exercise of reason. If the baby uses reason rightly, it becomes happy, but if reason is misused, then evil is precipitated through the misuse of reason.
Subjective Origin of Evil
Many intellectualists claim that evil is more subjective than objective. This is not wholly true. It can be explained that most evil is due to the ignorance of man. For example, the habit of physical over-indulgence, and its consequent evils of indiscretion, ill health, and grip of temptation, does not arise until man, by an act of erroneous judgment, forgets himself and subjectively by repeated transgressions allows this consciousness to become a habit.
All habits, good or bad, control and enslave the mind only after the will has allowed itself to be overcome by repeated good or evil actions born of good or evil judgment, as the case may be. Thus it may be said, man’s good judgment, and his will, acting under its influence, produce all good, and man’s ignorant or evil judgment, and his will acting repeatedly under its influence, is responsible for all evil. From this viewpoint good and evil are mostly subjective instead of originating in some objective power.
It may be asked why some children are born with special tendencies of self-control and some with tendencies of weakness. Some intellectuals may point out that heredity is responsible for good or bad traits in a child. Then the question comes: Why would an impartial God start one child with a good heredity and a good brain inclined only to good tendencies, and another child with a bad heredity and the brain of a moron inclined only to do evil under the compelling influence of evil physiological instincts?
According to the law of reincarnation and the law of karma, or the law of cause and effect, which governs the actions of all persons, it is explained that the soul attracts to itself a good or bad heredity, and a good or bad brain, according to pre-natal habits formed during the periods of its prior incarnations. Therefore, it may be said that the good or bad judgment of all incarnations, working through the law of cause and effect, which governs all human actions, creates good or bad habits, and that good or bad habits create good or bad hereditary tendencies, and that thus all evil arises from wrong judgment.
All this is very well said, namely, that evil is subjective, but it does not explain why millions of bacteria and virulent invisible armies of germs move silently about the earth seeking, like devouring locusts, to destroy the crop of human lives.
Why is it easy for the majority of people to be tempted materially? Why are they spiritually idle, and why do they do the very things that will hurt them? Why is there death by floods and cataclysms? Why do men murder each other in war?
Why is there cannibalism in Nature? Why does the baby salmon live on the flesh of its mother? Why does the big fish eat the little fish? Why does even the thoughts of wrong judgment and emotions of jealousy, revenge, greed, and selfishness arise at all in the human mind which was made in the image of God?
If man is the image of God, and God is good, then the logical deduction is that man could become nothing else but good. The [First] World War may have resulted from industrial selfishness, from nations fuming with national selfishness and greed for possessions, by why were they not avoided by parliamentary discussions? Why was it that the slaying of the Austrian Duke threw the world into furious conflagration? Think of Tamarlane, emperor of India, slaying one million Hindus after his victory.
Think of the joy in fishing. You deceive the fish by hooked food, and the more the fish struggles for life, the more you enjoy it and say: “My, it is a game fish.” Would you like to change places with the fish? Think of the Aztecs, who used to cut the hearts out of their prisoners of war, six or seven hundred at a time, in front of their idol gods. Think of all the burning of witches and martyrs under the zeal of the “Christian” faith.
Think of the war of the Crusades, fought for the Biblical teachings, which preach only love for your enemies. Think of the numberless diseases which infest plants and animals who have no free choice and who consequently could not attract pre-natal evils due to bad karma.
The eternal warfare of animals preying on one another, and the battle of opposites in Nature, distinctly show that there is an evil force which is employing germs, wrong judgment of men, and cannibalistic instincts, which are wrong vibrations resulting from the wrong actions of man, and breed temptation to do wrong in infinite ways by trying to destroy the efforts of the Infinite Good Who is trying to express Himself in infinite good ways.
"Come here every now and then. A brass pot must be polished every day: otherwise it gets stained. One should constantly live in the company of holiness."
—Sri Ramakrishna
In India the elephant is King of Beasts because of its intelligence. Although elephants are often used in forestry, they can be taught amazing skills. Only recently I reread Mooltiki and Other Stories by Rumer Godden. The last story was about Mooltiki, an elephant that showed amazing intelligence and had a very definite (sometimes difficult) personality.
articles that originally appeared in East-West, Inner Culture, and Self-Realization magazines.
This is a continuation of our extracts from Yogananda’s 
This is a continuation of our extracts from Yogananda’s 
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