Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda said:
We exhaust the known by knowledge and enjoyment of it, and then we turn to the exploration of the unknown because the known does not satisfy us permanently. If it did we would not have survived so long on this planet. Permanent satisfaction with the known, with no vision of the future, no effort to improve, no initiative to explore, no impulse to interpret would have meant stagnation of the human race and hence annihilation.
Talent is unknown quantity of personality born with the person. Training brings our talent that is already within. It cannot bring forth sprouts if seeds are not already there. Talent has various stages of expression, which can be observed in the development of personality to its consummate expression in that human being.
Every person who comes in the world carries within a general chart of his life, the details of which he fills in through out his lifetime. The highways and some byways are already in the chart when the person is born. These are the traits he brings with him from previous incarnations. He accepts them as his basic nature, and then connects them with alleys, and makes some additional byways. Sometimes he also extends the highways far beyond their original limits if he has real dynamic driving power. If he lacks this dynamism, he moves for the most part along with the limited maze of paths he had in his chart at birth and in the few pathways he has drawn in his present daily life. He does not push himself further. He is a common man.
But man cannot always remain uncommon. He will have to expand and move towards new vistas. The cosmic law of evolution will not let him rest. He may be idle for a while but the law of soul – progress is eternally active. God is always on the job. HE will through material working of his law, arrange circumstances that will at first coax the apathetic individual to turn in the right direction and move forward with positive action. If he does not heed, God will have to let him wander through the stinking open graveyard of his own follies until he wages his very life to get out of his abysmal condition and resolutely follows the proper road to progress and true happiness. Therefore, you have to recognize the tendencies that make you unique.
Be honest with yourself; do not do a thing that you inwardly feel to be wrong. Truly, to have a clean conscience, even if the whole world doubts you, is a joy and strength worth all the treasures of the universe.
Conscience is not the only companion of ourselves that we have to take care for. There are others too. A party of peeping desires, a group of half sleeping tendencies, a company of live-wire wishes, compose the crowd. In order to be true to ourselves, we cannot push aside these traveling companions with whom we started life. We have to be atleast attentive to them too, if we do not want to lose in life’s game. There may be some in the crowd that need shacking – the appetites, jealousies and others that are apt to choke our growth or hurt others. Some such as selfish desires, may need strong doses of advice and treatment. There are other that are safe enough to be relied on, or atleast tolerated such as the self preserving and social instincts. A special few need to be deliberately spurred on – sympathetic tendencies, spirit of reverence, service, love of truth. We have to attend to each propensity in a way that is most suitable. That is the proper education of the inner being. Every individual is a species unto himself.
There is no stereotyped way of promoting spiritual growth. Everyone has to work out his own salvation according to hints from his inner self after he has been started on the right road by stereotyped suggestions, standardized spiritual advice, be reverential, be patient , be contented, be self controlled, be meditative and so forth. The crowd of tendencies that one is born with, needs slightly different handling in different people. Some of the inclinations are to be curbed. Some tolerated, some developed, some sparingly fed, and some starved out. The tactics applied in the case of each individual will therefore necessarily vary according to the set of traits he possesses.
What is the origin of a tendency in a man? A conscious desire that he entertained in this life or a previous incarnation. A man with diplomatic ability ingrained in his nature will be a diplomat, no matter whether he is an ordinary laborer dealing with fellow workers or members of his family, or whether he is one of a board of a select men – a member of a legislature or a plenipotentiary in an international peace parley. Education or political training and opportunity will only sharpen his inborn diplomatic tool, and extend the scope of its use. The different in the capacity of talent in different people, even when increased by training is therefore due not only to the scope of the training but also to the inborn possession of that ability and its prior degree of development. Early training has much to do with stimulating or paralyzing the growth of this unknown part of our self. Our tendencies attract our companions and environments for the most part. The law of affinity is a matter of correspondence between what we are potentially and actually, on the one hand and the broad world on the other. The cue to our conduct is always supplied from the known and unknown with. What we are going to be is about seventy five percent foreordained by ourselves. That ‘horoscope’ of our tendencies from past incarnations attracts our present hereditary condition as well as the other circumstances we will draw to ourselves. The individual has free choice to change himself this way or that, free choice to decide between two courses of action. In most case, though the free will of man is nothing more than a slave – in the guise of freedom, but fettered to past tendencies.
Yet everyone knows there is such a thing as an unconditional decision that we make after rationally balancing the pros and cons of a certain matter. Having made such a decision, if we exercise our will, we can change many things in our lives that appeared unchangeable, or that may have been predicted to be inconvertible. This willing is freedom of will. Free will does exist. If it were not so, none could escape the vicious circle of his face once he was drawn to it. Growth would be circumscribed. Newer channels of activities would have little scope. The evolution of human beings would hardly emerge from the level of savagery. The conceptions of new social orders, progressive ideas in political government, advance methods of scientific explorations, new departments of research, literary activity – all prove the ability of man to exercise free choice in every line by the power of will.
You are born with about seventy-five percent of your life predetermined by your past. You will make up the remaining twenty-five percent. If you yourself, through your own free choice and effort of will, do not determine what that twenty-five percent will be, the seventy five percent will make the twenty five percent for you and you will become a puppet. That is, you will be ruled absolutely by your past tendencies. That is why spiritual training is vital. It takes into consideration not only the seventy five percent of our lives at we already are, but also designates the methods to mold the brand new twenty five percent that we ourselves are going to create by the exercise of our freedom.
All our impulsive and habitual acts, and motive-caused acts are the chariots that carry the will of the Lord, the Cosmic law, the Divine Final Cause, in other words, everything happens according to the will of God as expressed in his Cosmic Law. The first step towards understanding is to use your will to make those choice that are in harmony with the Eternal Good within the Cosmic law.
When you love life, not for God but for itself, every moment of it is incurring a debt to Him. Those debts pile up, day after day. Borrow from the commonly unknown bank of God, the Universal spirit and clear your debt to Him. You can get the loan only for the asking and you will not be hounded for payment of interest either. This is the only bank that makes loans and does not worry the recipients with the demand of interest because the Universal bank is always ready to invest in the betterment of its property, the world, and to look after the interest of its tenants. This is a form of banking that none but God allows. If you do not pay off the debts you have contracted by your life in matter, isolated from God, suffering will be your jail sentence.
What is the loan you should ask? the loan of spiritual wisdom, the eye to see every event of life as God sees it, to feel every details of life as He feels it, to live every moment of life as He lives it. When you ask God for his wisdom, the loan comes to you written off as gift.
Every event, fact, action or thought of a God-man such as Jesus or Krishna is the meeting point of the same wisdom coming from two sides – from God and from the God-man living in God. It is like a dot on the circle that you can approach from either side God fulfils His aim through the God-man and the God-man knowingly acts to fulfill God’s Will.
We do not know that He does the same thing through us, so we suffer and lament the bankruptcy of our so called freedom. This is not narrow determination. It is true idealism. We are absolutely free when we reach the Absolute. Until then we are relatively free, and it is a sin and source of suffering not to use wisely our relative free will. Working out way through relative freedom, we come to the Absolute freedom. Then the whole of the Unknown becomes Known, there is nothing more to know and knowing is all satisfying and ever-new.
Courtsey - 'The Divine Romance'
