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MYTH AND REALITY Swami Sivapremananda Saraswati
On this occasion, I wish you all the success and future progress in the great mission originally started by our Paramguru Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, with whom I had the good fortune to live froin 1945 until 1961. During that period, I lived with my gurubhai Paramahamsa Sri Swami Satyanandaji until 1957, the year he left Sivananda Ashram for a parivrajaka life.
I want to urge you, especially those of you who are teachers of yoga, not to confuse wishful thinking with reality. You must face reality. Be truthful to yourself and to each other. Do not make a myth out of what you are doing. There are two kinds of myth. One is spiritual myth which is created for spiritual progress, representing spiritual aspirations; the other is to promote self interest by deceiving yourself and others.
There is a saying which I was telling you about yesterday, that there is a greater reality behind the spiritual reality, that God created man in his own image. This is a biblical saying, not a vedantic saying because in Vedanta, the human being is potentially divine. But this biblical saying contains a great truth, the image of God is yet to be realized. The atman is there, shining within, but it is covered by the opacity of many veils of ignorance, by the veils of the panchakosha.
According to the transparency, the purity of our heart and mind, that light of pure atman shines through, but because of the opacity of our vehicles, what we say to be God, the image of God, is not able to shine through. The greater truth is that the human being made God in his own image rather than God making the human being in his own image. This should be understood in the sense that the deficiencies of human nature express themselves through this process of relating to God first of all for protection and self-preservation, then for a spiritual sense of belonging. The first need in human existence is to survive. The second need is to have a sense of spiritual belonging, which one does not obtain through human love or through spiritual love. One needs to belong to someone, to something,
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