Excerpt from
Meditation on the Imitation of Christ: A Vedantic Interpretation
by Swami Chidakarananda and Sister Jayanti
ON A GOOD RULE OF LIFE IN OUTWARD MATTERS, AND ON HAVING RECOURSE TO GOD IN DANGER
1. The Beloved: My son, you should take great care to see that
wherever you are and whatever you are doing – outwardly, I mean – you are
inwardly free and your own master. Be sure that you have the upper hand of
everything, and not the other way about; you must be the master and ruler of
all your actions, not their slave or mercenary. You must not be that, but
rather one of God’s chosen people, a true son of Abraham, sharing the destiny
and the freedom of the sons of God. These take their stand above what is now
passing, their gaze fixed on what is eternal; they see not only the passing
show of life, but heaven too. Such as these are not attracted by the things of
time, do not feel bound by them; on the contrary, they take these very things
to use in serving God, this being the purpose for which he ordained them and
set them in their places, for nothing in the whole of creation has been left
without its position in the scheme of things by the great Craftsman who made
all that is.
Whatever
we do, we should do it consciously. Our actions and thoughts ought not be the
result of a mere impulse but of reason and understanding, then they will not
bind us even if what we do is not the highest possible deed. All actions lead
ultimately to spiritual awareness if they are performed knowingly, because the
conscious performance of actions awakens in us the habit of recollection and self-consciousness. Then we will begin
to feel that we truly share “the destiny and freedom of the sons of God,” as
Kempis said.
Swami Vivekananda maintains that the
remembrance of our inner divinity is the only prayer we should have:
“This
is the only way to reach the goal, to tell ourselves, and to tell everybody
else, that we are divine. And as we go on repeating this, strength comes. He
who falters at first will get stronger and stronger, and the voice will
increase in volume until the truth takes possession of our hearts, and courses
through our veins, and permeates our bodies. Delusion will vanish as the light
becomes more and more effulgent, load after load of ignorance will vanish, and
then will come a time when all else has disappeared and the Sun alone shines.”[1]
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