Quote of the Week #144 - God is Simple. Everything else
is Complex.
God is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek
absolute values in the relative world of nature.
Good and evil is the challenging riddle which life places
sphinxlike before every intelligence. Attempting no solution, most men pay
forfeit with their lives, penalty now even as in the days of Thebes. Here and
there, a towering lonely figure never cries defeat. From the maya of duality he
plucks the cleaveless truth of unity.
I have long exercised an honest introspection, the
exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of
one’s thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the
stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers.
The way of ‘self-expression,’ individual acknowledgments, results in egotists,
sure of the right to their private interpretations of God and the universe.
Man can understand no eternal verity until he has freed
himself from pretensions. The human mind, bared to a centuried slime, is
teeming with repulsive life of countless world-delusions. Struggles of the
battlefields pale into insignificance here, when man first contends with inward
enemies! No mortal foes these, to be overcome by harrowing array of might!
Ominipresent, unresting, pursuing man even in sleep, subtly equipped with a
miasmic weapon, these soldiers of ignorant lusts seek to slay us all. Thoughtless
is the man who buries his ideals, surrendering to the common fate. Can he seem
other than impotent, wooden ignominious?
To love both the invisible God, Repository of All Virtues,
and visible man, apparently possessed of none, is often baffling! But ingenuity
is equal to the maze. Inner research soon exposes a unity in all human minds –
the stalwart kinship of selfish motive. In one sense at least, the brotherhood
of man stands revealed. An aghast humility follows this leveling discovery. It
ripens into compassion for one’s fellows who are blind to the healing potencies
of the soul awaiting exploration.
Only the shallow man loses responsiveness to the woes of
others’ lives, as he sinks into narrow suffering of his own. The one who
practices a scalpel self-dissection will know an expansion of universal pity.
Release is given him from the deafening demands of his ego. The love of God
flowers on such soil. The creature finally turns to his Creator, if for no
other reason than to ask in anguish: “Why, Lord, why?” By ignoble whips of
pain, man is driven at last into the Infinite Presence, whose beauty alone
should lure him.
--an unnamed wandering sadhu, as quoted by Paramhansa
Yogananda in Autobiography of a Yogi
