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Spiritual awareness

CHENNAI: That there is a correspondence between a person’s spiritual nature and its manifestation in his deportment is a law of nature. The level of one’s spiritual evolution can be gauged from how one responds to nature. One can observe that the inspiration one gets from nature is proportional to one’s spiritual level.

When an individual is spiritually inclined even the sight of a fruit or a flower is enough for him to behold God’s hand in its existence while one who is not very evolved might require a spectacular sight like the Niagara Falls or the Mount Everest to derive the same inspiration. This is the reason why great mystics and poets are often moved by nature which the layman will dismiss as ordinary. For the sceptic who will be convinced by only what he can perceive, miracles are necessary to prove to him of the existence of a subtler spiritual realm.

In his introductory discourse on the Bhagavad Gita, Sri A. Parthasarathy said it was necessary to question why we needed tangible evidence for a supreme principle behind all the phenomena we saw. Can’t one see this in the functioning of one’s own body (over which one does not have any control)? Isn’t awareness of this not enough to become truly spiritual? This begs the question what devotion to God is. It is profound awareness of all things one enjoys, the bounties of nature and one’s body. It becomes apparent then that all one enjoys do not happen out of luck or accident, and that one is the architect of one’s fortune and misfortune—what you sow, so you reap. God is the witness of our actions (Karma).

How does God express Himself? He is within all of us. Beyond the human personality comprising the body, mind and the intellect is the essential “I”, the Self (Atman). The sense of “I” is there right from childhood to old age but the real “I” is missed because one does not pause to think and question. The average person has stopped thinking and so follows the herd mentality all his life and thereby acts mechanically. So it is essential to ask, “Who am I?” This will lead one beyond the body, mind and the intellect, which are constantly changing, to the “I”, which is constant, the Self within.

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