Spiritual Sadhana—A Chiselling Process

Hidden in the mass of rock, and visible only to the transcending vision of the sculptor, is the graceful form of the sculptor’s creation. Only an artist can bring this hidden beauty out of a common piece of rock. He has the subtle intuition to see the glory and perfection of the form within. His attention is fixed upon this beauty, imperceptible to the ordinary eye, and he strips the rock of the gross portions that conceal the beauty within. At last, it is done. The finished product emerges in all its perfection. The artist has added nothing of his own to bring about or heighten the beauty. The beauty was always throbbing in the secret womb of the rock. The sculptor only released it from the encircling mass of formless rock.Man does not realise how gross he looks as he lives his worldly life, his eyes ever ready to overflow with tears from the smart of suffering. His brow is ploughed with discontent and perpetually sweating with exertions as he fights his own individual imperfections. And yet, the eternal Self, the beauty of beauties, God, the omnipotent and omniscient, lies deep within him, shrouded by layers of ignorance. To remove this veiling is to secure nearness to God, to ‘re-cognise’ his essential nature, the Godhood.The worldly life is led in agony and sorrow by a deluded jīva (the individualised ego) distorted by his ever-present dread of a continually threatening calamity – death. The divine life is experienced in joy and bliss, ever resplendent with life-giving wisdom, through which the jīva again finds his own essential Godhood. The divine life is the chiselling process by which Truth is brought out to fulfil itself. In living the divine life, one realises the Truth.No other sentient being in the universe has the equipment for hastening its own evolution as efficiently as we can. If we, with our wealth of available apparatus, do not learn to spend our life in striving for perfection, ours indeed is a life wasted.The Infinite is our nature. We have to realise this; and we would find ourselves at our journey’s end.