The Call of The Higher Life – The Divine Life Society

Sri Swami Sivananda

The New Year heralds to you the advent of a time when you have to cast a retrospective look at your experiences and achievements of the past and use your higher reason to direct the course of your life towards better aims and ideals and better methods of endeavour. The past leaves its impressions on the present, and the present contains the future as a potentiality. Let the future, therefore, be the result of a natural opening of the bud of the present and let it blossom into the flower of nobler experiences yielding the fruit of the achievement of the goal. Offer your prayers to the Lord as the Supreme Measurer, and step into a newer mode of living. The grace of the Sovereign of the universe is upon you. It is flowing perennially and you have only to be ready to receive it and be ever blessed. Cleanse your feelings and invite the Divinity within.

Forget the past and its failures, and try to rectify errors. Memory of past misfortunes is a hindrance to furthering the great work on hand. Gain fresh strength and be a new person. Try to be reborn now in your consciousness. Breathe the spirit of higher aspiration and vivify yourself. Muster in hope and courage and utilise all your God-given powers to develop all the sides of your personality. Become whole. Let all the parts get harmonised. You have to enter the Infinite, and a mind with crumpled notions, religious perversities, and caste bigotry cannot gain access into It. To enter the Infinite is to comprehend It, which means to become the Infinite. To expand the mind to the Infinite is to cast aside the shell of cramped individuality.

It means to become a changed being altogether. To attain the fellowship with other beings, to think in terms of everything that is around, to share in the feelings of the different contents of the universe, in other words, to give freedom to your inner expressions and potentialities, to raise yourself from narrow thinking, and to surrender the physical and the mental consciousness to the still higher unifying substance, is indeed the precondition of the truly happy and perfect life.

It is wrong to act against the law of Nature, and it is this trespass on the part of man that is the cause of all his miseries. Let this New Year begin with a lesson to follow the course of the higher nature. Let not what ‘I think’, or ‘you think’, or ‘anyone thinks’ be the law; the law is what Nature is, not what one thinks of it. Remember that Nature’s law is freedom not bondage, knowledge not ignorance, universality not individuality, love and unity not hatred and separation. Love is the supreme rule of the virtuous life. Love is the heart of truth, goodness and beauty. Wisdom and justice melt in love of the Divine in all things.

The moral law is the command of God and it is based on the knowledge and love of God. Ethics is rooted in the science of Reality. The road is not known when the destination is not known. The means loses its meaning and value when the end is cut off from it. Virtue, which is the art of the life of freedom, has its foundation in the consciousness of Truth. There is no righteousness without virtue. Virtue has Divinity behind it, and wherever is Divinity, there is virtue. Open yourself to the God within and without. You shall be an embodiment of virtue.

Let not the vicissitudes of life move you out of the balance of your consciousness. Let not social and political dissatisfaction break down the city of God within you. The world shall be a haven of rejoicing when all men and women take interest in hearing the voice of the Silence which rings through all created things. Believe not in your earthly powers. They are vain and mortal. They may desert you any moment. They may leave you at sea. The only power that can sustain the nations of the world is a wholehearted recognition of the innate divinity in man, selfless service and prayer.

The message of the New Year is courage, hope, effort, cheerfulness, perseverance and nobility of aspirations. The message is of the profoundest world-and-life-affirmation in which one lives his life in the loftiest spiritual and ethical plane. It is a dynamic life of extreme usefulness, not an idealism. The highest fulfillment is the result of self-surrender to the Almighty Lord, a negation of the ego-sense, not complacence. If the retina of perception is cleansed, everything would reveal its infinite nature. Therefore, the New Year gives the message of opening the avenues of consciousness. It is the message of spiritual awareness, selflessness, restraint and illumination.

Individual life, family life, social life and national life are one in respect of obedience to the inner spiritual urge. Society and nation are made up of individuals as cloth is made of threads. The cultural regeneration of the individuals, particularly the younger generation, is the betterment of the whole nation. Each person will have to reform himself or herself and sweep the nation clean of its dirt and impediments, of narrow outlook, racial prejudice, and fanatic adherence to man-made, unhealthy conventions. If the threads are clean, the whole cloth shall be clean. Let each one recognise in himself a citizen of the world and act in allegiance to the order of the oneness of the spirit. It will facilitate a general, gradual advancement of the individual, in himself and in society, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.

The message of the New Year is the call of the higher life, the beckoning from the spiritual Presence. To respond to it, is your duty. To realise it, is your right. Sadhana is your duty. God-realisation is your right. Assert the right and plod on with your pursuits. Strive, and you shall triumph.

Maintain good health. Observe the rules of hygiene. Have a programme of life, a programme of the year, a programme of the day. Do not be complacent thinking that you do not know what would happen next. It is a fatalistic outlook. Develop a well-adjusted, balanced personality embodying all the higher ideals and faculties. Regenerate yourself. Take heart! You can do wonders. Always think and understand very carefully before you speak or act. Keep company with decent standard books on spiritual life and allied subjects. Make it a point to set apart an hour or more for contemplation, reflection and repetition of the Lord’s name or any sacred formula. Serve, love, give, purify. Bear insult, bear injury, but, do not invite them. Speak little, live an inner life, but, do not run away from responsibilities. Return more than you receive. Let not a single day pass without at least one good act, a kind word, a little service, a brief meditation and some physical exercise. Treat children kindly, lovingly and with utmost consideration; for, remember they are the future citizens. They first begin by loving their elders, then they scrutinise them in their adolescence, and finally they are hardly able to forgive and have any respect for nearly most of their former guardians. Therefore, do not neglect your responsibility to the future citizens.

May the Lord bless you with all-round success in your pursuit of righteousness and spiritual enlightenment.