Photo: Sri Swami Sivananda, founder of the Divine Life Society and Sivananda Ashram.
It would be easy to dismiss the question by saying: “Yes, after a prolonged period of intense austerities and meditation while I was living in Swarg Ashram, during which I had the darshan of a number of maharishis and their blessings, the Lord appeared before me in the form of Sri Krishna.”
But that would not be the whole truth, nor a sufficient answer to a question relating to God Who is Infinite, Unlimited, and beyond the reach of speech and mind. Cosmic Consciousness is not an accident or chance. It is the summit, accessible by a thorny path that has steep, slippery steps. I have ascended them step by step, the hard way; but at every step, I have experienced God coming into my life and lifting me easily to the next step.
My father was fond of ceremonial worship (puja) in which he was very regular. To my child-mind, the image he worshipped was God, and I delighted in helping father in the worship, by bringing him flowers and other articles of worship. The deep inner satisfaction that he and I derived from such worship implanted in my heart the deep conviction that God is in such images devoutly worshipped by His devotees. Thus did God come into my life and place my foot on the first rung of the ladder.
As an adult, I was fond of gymnastics and vigorous exercises. I learned fencing from a teacher who belonged to a low caste; he was a harijan. I could go to him only for a few days before I was made to understand that it was unbecoming of a caste-born Brahmin to play the student to an untouchable. I thought deeply over the matter. One moment I felt that the God whom we all worshipped in the image in my father’s puja-room had jumped over to the heart of this untouchable. He was my Guru, all right! So, I immediately went to him with flowers, sweets, and cloth, garlanded him, placed flowers at his feet, and prostrated myself before him. Thus did God come into my life to remove the veil of caste distinctions.
How very valuable this step was I could realize only later; for I was to enter the medical profession and serve all, and the persistence of caste distinction would have made that service a mockery. With this mist cleared by the light of God, it was very easy and natural for me to serve everyone. I took very keen delight in every kind of service connected with the healing and alleviation of human misery. If there was a good prescription for malaria, I felt that the whole world should know it the next moment. Any knowledge about the prevention of disease, promotion of health, and healing of diseases, I was eager to acquire and share with all.
Photo: Swami Sivananda offers medical care to a patient.
Then God came into my life in the form of the sick in Malaya [today, Malaysia]. It is difficult for me now to single out any instance; and perhaps it is unnecessary. Time and space are concepts of the mind and have no meaning in God. I can look back now upon the whole period of my stay in Malaya as a single event in which God came to me in the form of the sick and suffering. People are sick physically and mentally. To some, life is a lingering death; and to some, death is more welcome than life. Some lead a miserable life, unable to face death; some invite death and commit suicide, unable to face life. The aspiration grew within me, that if God had not made this world merely as a hell where wicked people would be thrown to suffer, and if there is, as I intuitively felt there should be, something other than this misery and this helpless existence, it should be known and experienced.
It was at this crucial point in my life that God came to me as a religious mendicant who gave me the first lessons in Vedanta. The positive aspects of life here and the real end and aim of human life were made apparent. This drew me from Malaya to the Himalayas. God came to me in the form of an all-consuming aspiration to realize Him as the Self of all.
Meditation and service went on apace, and with them came various spiritual experiences until body, mind, and intellect, as the limiting adjuncts, vanished and the whole universe shone in His Light. God then came in the form of this Light in which everything assumed a divine shape and the pain and suffering that seemed to haunt everybody appeared to be a mirage, the illusion that ignorance creates on account of low sensual appetites that lurk in man.
One more milestone had to be passed in order to know “Sarvam Khalvidam Brahman” (“All indeed is Brahman,” Chandogya Upanishad). Early in 1950 (on the 5th of January), God came to me in the form of a half-demented assailant who disturbed the night satsang at the ashram. His attempt failed. I bowed to him, worshipped him, and sent him home. Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is a superficial appearance; beneath its veil, the one Self shines in all.
A noteworthy fact ought to be mentioned here. In this evolution, nothing gained previously is entirely discarded at any later stage. One coalesced into the next, and the Yoga of Synthesis was the fruit. The effective and intelligent synthesis of murthi-puja (worship of a statue/image of the Divine), selfless service of the sick, meditation, the cultivation of cosmic love that transcended the barriers of caste, creed, and religion, with the ultimate aim of attaining Cosmic Consciousness, was revealed. This knowledge had immediately to be shared. All this had become an integral part of my being.
The mission had been gathering strength and spreading. It was in 1950 that I undertook the All-India Tour. Then God came to me in His virat-swarup — multitudes of devotees eager to listen to the tenets of divine life. At every center, I felt that God spoke through me and that He Himself, in His virat form spread out before me as the multitude, listened to it. He sang with me; He prayed with me; He spoke and He listened. Sarvam Khalvidam Brahman.
By H. H. Sri Swami Sivananda, from the book Sivananda: Biography of a Modern Sage
