Illumination through Purity of Heart
Speech by H.D. Paramahamsa Omkarananda Saraswati
Austria, 29th July 1987

Purity of heart is obtained through devotion, through cultivation of universal Love, through selfless service, study of scriptures and reflection upon the timeless Being - by these activities, the purity of heart is obtained. When the heart is pure, automatically the mind finds itself illuminated. An illuminated intelligence perceives the Divine everywhere.

Purity of heart is essential. Even if the body is suffering from some disease, if you are occupied with the disease, worried about the disease, lost in the consciousness of the disease, it is impurity. Purity consists in keeping the consciousness, intelligence, attention upon something that is imperishable, infinite, absolute, all-powerful.

When your mind is on the Divine, automatically healing takes place because it is a condition of purity. The place where your mind is, determines whether or not you are pure. If the mind is occupied with sense-objects - body also is a sense-object - it is in a condition of limitation. Any limitation is called impurity, but when the mind is on the Divine, it becomes unlimited. At least, it becomes liberated from limitation. Constantly to dwell with the Divine, reflect upon the nature of the Divine, be with the Divine in thought and in feeling, in perception and in attention, that increases purity, and the Divine is not a person somewhere standing outside in the clouds or in some place, but a Reality that is the Heart of our heart, the Observer of the observer in us, the witnessing Principle in us, that which witnesses all our subjective states or objective states - all states are observed by the inner Witness.

This witness is also the Witness in the space. Therefore, you can't shake your head without literally, physically touching the Divine. When you are not conscious of it, such an act does not profit you. But when you are conscious of it, you derive immense strength, peace, happiness, knowledge.

This feeling of the presence of the Divine is called faith. This faith develops itself into experience. Afterwards it is no more faith as such but life itself. It is experience, it is direct perception. Faith has developed itself into experience.

When you experience this all-witnessing Principle inside you, outside you, in every person, in every thing, your pure heart becomes more pure. And with purity, automatically illuminations arise. Whatever you speak will be divine and in harmony with the scriptural statements, for the scriptural statements are nothing but revelations of God through pure hearts, through illuminated intelligences, through personalities who have become one with the heart of the Divine, and when you begin to speak it will be an expression of the Divine, portraying the nature of the Divine, and it does not mean that you have read the scriptures. You may never have read the scriptures, yet this wisdom flows through you, and those who know the scriptures, may think that your statements are from the scriptures, but in fact they are directly from the Heart of the Divine. The Divine begins to function through your illuminated intelligence. Even as thoughts constantly arise in a normal mind, illuminations constantly arise in you, unending illuminations, unending intuitions, a direct experience of the nature of the Divine. I have led your attention to the Divine within you yesterday and today, and pointed out to you how the Divine is at function in you all the 24 hours, as the Observer of observing intelligence in you. Intuition shows: This observing witness in you who is of the nature of peace and happiness as I portrayed yesterday, is also omniscient, is full of knowledge, self-knowledge, knowledge of Himself as boundless light, boundless perfection, boundless fulfillment, and at the same time conscious of everything that has happened in creation, since the creation came into existence.

The Observer in you, the Soul in you, or the Soul of the soul in you, this witnessing Being of even your own observing intelligence - this Being knows all about you: what you were ten million years ago, and it knows the future also, it knows the past of everyone, and the future of everyone, it knows the past of everything, and the future of everything. It is an unlimited ocean of knowledge. It is absolute knowledge, it is every kind of knowledge.

Does the presence of ideas in your intelligence burden you? They have no weight, unless they are personal thoughts, impure thoughts, thoughts of darkness and depression, otherwise your intelligence is capable of lodging endless ideas without there being any weight on the brain-cells. Million ideas, or rather countless ideas can be lodged there without any weight. Even so, the Divine carries in Itself every conceivable knowledge concerning everything, every type of knowledge: occult knowledge, psychological knowledge, material knowledge, spiritual knowledge - every type of knowledge, and above all real knowledge, that is Self-knowledge. God is perfect because He never loses hold on Self-knowledge.

He knows Himself to be absolute, unmanifest, eternal, unchanging, all-full, of the nature of Peace and Happiness and Beauty, and yet He creates and maintains and observes numberless universes. It is with such a being that you become identical when you obtain spiritual perfection, when you progress on the path of the Divine. Compared to this achievement, no achievement on earth is worth even a handful of ashes. Every conceivable Art, Harmony, Science, Music, Knowledge, Experience, Life is there in the Divine, in the observing Observer within you. Though He is formless, He can take every form. He can present Himself to you in a limited form, without losing His Perfection. Every possibility the Divine carries in Himself. He is not limited even by His own infinite Perfection. He is an Infinity within an infinity, the Wonder within wonder, Power within power, Joy within joy, Beauty within beauty, Music within music. There is no lack of any kind. This Being is not only immanent but transcendent in everyone. He is not only the source of the love in your heart, the Light in your intelligence, but He is Himself that which transcends both, love and light, transcends everything that is manifest, transcends everything in which He dwells, even as your intelligence which creates the dream-phenomena and dwells in the dream-phenomena, dwells in all beings that are there in your dream phenomena and yet transcends these dream-phenomena, transcends the people which it has formed, in which it dwells in the dream-phenomena. You can know of your transcendence, self-transcendence by a little analysis. You have thoughts, you observe them. The Observer of the thoughts is different from the thoughts. You observe the observer of thoughts. This Observer of the observer of thoughts in you is always transcendent, is not made impure by impure thoughts, is not made pure by your pure thoughts, is not unhappy when you are unhappy, is not happy when you are happy. He transcends all your emotional experiences, psychological experiences, happiness and pain, purity and impurity. He observes these conditions and is not involved in these conditions. If you die, he observes your death and is himself not dead. He is touched by no condition, though he makes you experience every condition by His mere Presence. This is God, ever-pure, self-luminous. If you want to see the world, you have to open your eyes. If you want to see your thoughts, you have to see with your observing intelligence. The light for your eyes for seeing the world comes from the presence of this inner observer. Your intelligence sees thoughts and thought-pictures by the light that the presence of the inner observer gives. Everything in life in the world shines, because the presence of the Observer is everywhere, the Divine is everywhere. This Divine derives Its Light from Itself. It is Itself Light. Nothing and no one illuminates the Divine. The Divine illuminates everything. There is no experience possible without the Divine Presence, and those who are conscious of the Divine Presence become liberated from all experiences. All experiences are undesirable insofar as they are not experiences of that which is timeless and eternal. Only the experience of the Divine is perfect, problemless, full of happiness, full of wisdom, full of Light. "Narayana" is the name of this Light which is present everywhere, in all beings, in everything. We awaken ourselves to this presence of the Divine, touch this Presence, feel this Presence, experience this Presence, will be served by this Presence, enlightened by this Presence, purified by this Presence, if we repeat this mantra: "Narayana..." Let us repeat this mantra with other completing components: "OM namo Narayanaya!" That means, "OM" stands for the supreme Reality, "Narayana" stands for the same supreme Reality as present and operative in all forms of life here on earth - space and time.

"Namo" means adorations. "I am not here. Only You are here, oh Supreme Reality" - that is the meaning of "Namo". What happens to you when you say that? You become one with the Divine. When you fall asleep, you are in a condition of "namo". There you are not. You don't know of your body, nor the place where the body is lying, nor have you any awareness of time and space, nor is there an experience of pain and pleasure, love and hate. All these are absent because you are absent. To be absent is "namo". If you are absent always - where are you then in this sleep-state? You are in the Divine, in the Soul within you. You are absorbed in the Soul within you. That absorption in the Soul within you became possible for you by a condition of "namo". If you are present, then certainly sleep is destroyed. You become aware of your body, the place where you are, time and space, and your old thoughts and feelings arise. Thoughts and feelings dominate you, obsess you, trouble you, and so on.

So, with "namo" we efface ourselves, surrender ourselves to the Divine which is our real nature, which is the Soul of our soul. So, when you say "namo", you are in total surrender, perfect surrender. Surrender to the Divine is taught by all religions. It is one of the disciplines. The greater your surrender to the Divine, the more the Divine works through you.

Now, let us repeat this mantra and be in tune with the Infinite, the all-seeing, the self-luminous intelligence of God, consciousness of God. Let us be dead to the life there, and alive to the true Life here and now.

What is happening in the sleep-state? You are dead to the life there, to the life of the senses, the life in society, in many things, amidst many people, in time and space, a life revealed by sense-experience - all this disappears when you fall asleep. You are dead to the outer life. A similar condition is created by surrender to the Divine, by saying "namo" - "I am not here!" That is the best way of adoring the object of adoration.

So long as you are there, you have egoistic feelings. Self-sense is operative. That is sin. That is limitation. That separates you from God. What separates you from sleep-state? Your egoism, your thought that you have a body, that this body is yours, that it is beautiful, or that it is ugly, or that it is young, or that it is old, or that it is hungry, or that it is suffering from indigestion, etc. All these limitations disappear with ego, and ego disappears when you tell the Infinite: "I am not here - you alone are here, inside me, outside me, above me, below me, as me. When you alone are - where is the place for me? I am you, you are I." This is the condition that has been reached through total ego-transcendence. So, with "namo", we disappear into infinite Beauty and Perfection. Our little heart becomes charged with boundless Joy.

Let us repeat the mantra now.
"OM Namo Narayanaya OM svaha"

We adore God now as Light. It is no sense in knowing from the holy scriptures that God is Light of lights, without experiencing it. The method of experiencing it consists in concentration on that Light. We begin the concentration with concentration on the physical light and disappear into the spiritual light.

Imagine before your forehead the rising sun. How brilliant it is. If you mentally put this sun before your forehead, for your mental experience, you will find the whole place is filled with and flooded with light. Don't leave this concentration on this orb of the sun, try to become identical with the sun by intense concentration, and suddenly find that your concentrating on the sun is also the sun. Sun becomes identical with the sun. In this condition you are pure. This is the basis from where you can explore the divine worlds. Here, all human nature gets transformed. This filling of the thought with Light and the inner consciousness with Light, with the will to awaken the Light that is resident in the consciousness, with a will to help the consciousness reveal itself as Light in our experience, we have to sustain the practice. From time to time during the day, you will always try to live in this consciousness and thus overcome the obsessive and hypnotic idea that you are a body.

We are greatly aided in concentrating on the light of God by the recitation of the Vedic hymns. This presence of God as light, light as God becomes part of our consciousness by continued meditation on its real nature. Its real nature is described in these hymns, so you have constantly to reflect upon the real nature of the Divine in a sustained way.

If you put a nail in the fire and immediately take it away again, there is nothing there, except a little warmth, and this warmth quickly disappears. But if you leave the nail in the fire for a sufficiently long time, it becomes identical with the fire. It is no more iron but an integral part of glowing fire. In the same way, if we leave our mind in this fire of God, light of God, an all-knowing light of God, an all-seeing light of God, an all-beautiful Light of God, our mind becomes an integral part of God.

Now, we recite the hymn, and at the end of every verse we adore the Light that the Divinity is, the Sun that the Divine is.

Narayana is the God in all of us - God in everything, including in space. We see we are a body, we see we are a mind, and now we turn our vision inward that is to say, we close our eyes, shut off all distractions, the sense-activities silenced, so that the thought can function freely, and the first thing the thought encounters, when the distractions are removed and the sense-activities silenced, is the Divine Presence, and this Presence is inward because through our method we have come out of the field of dual experience, experience of the outer world, of many forms and names, to an inner world, a world which is full of Light. This presence of the Divine is Narayana. If you adore this Presence of the Divine, you receive responses from the Divine. This is not a one-way-affair. The Divine is also responding to you with every spiritual attempt on your side, to every spiritual thought you entertain, to every word you utter. He is present amidst you more than anyone around you, with a greater consciousness, with an infinitely seeing eye, witnessing at the same time all that is in your physical environs as also in your mental world, as also in numberless invisible other worlds. He is a responding presence, and the experience of Him depends upon the spiritual sensitivity, responsiveness, receptiveness you have developed through constant thought of the Divine, through constant living in divine wisdom by governing all your daily activities by divine wisdom, by knowledge of the Omnipresence, Omniscience of God.

OM namo Narayanaya OM

Just now we have lighted the divine fire with our mantra-repetitions, with the special mantras for lighting the Divine Fire.

Now there is the divine fire before us. We offer our prayer into this fire. This fire takes these prayers and makes them a part of the heart of the Divine. There is nothing more pure in the world than fire. In the fire there is no disease, no impurity, no darkness, everything is reduced to ashes. Into this fire, we offer also all limitations of the human condition. We are no more there, our ego is burnt, individuality is burnt, self-sense is burnt, body-consciousness is burnt, with the result: in daily life, if our body is actually destroyed, while we are still conscious, we do not feel unhappy or painful. This destruction of the body does not in any way touch us, so completely detached we would be from matter - not merely body as such - from time and space. Then we are said to be true devotees of God. Such a condition has to be obtained; it can be obtained. Among the many spiritual practices of Omkarananda-Upanishad, this is one of the practices: to sit before the divine fire, lighted by our consciousness, according to the prescriptions of the divine truth, and offer in that fire and through that fire our devotion to the Divine, meditation on the Divine, prayers to the Divine. All that is most beautiful, most valuable, most precious that we wish to offer to the Divine, we offer it through this fire. Fire is the agency which carries our gifts to God, our hearts to God, our soul to God. Fire does not burn the inner spirit in us. It burns all impurities, all matter, but not our spirit. Our spirit finds itself in the fire as if it is a wonderful cool comfortable place. Nothing can touch the inner spirit, neither fire nor weapons of destruction. We are indestructible the moment we establish ourselves in the inner spirit. The establishment of ourselves in the inner spirit is not different from the way you establish yourself in deep-sleep state. It happens when obstacles are removed. For such a sleep you prepare conditions, you prepare a bed, a comfortable bed, you put off the lights, you lie down, you close your eyes, and you relax totally, and sleep happens. All spiritual discipline is something like that. It is elimination of all obstacles, hindrances to this oneness with the Divine. We now begin to offer our prayers to the Divine through the fire that we have lighted with the Vedic mantras. This fire is no physical fire, it is a divine fire, it is divine consciousness.

More real than the body and things around you are the thoughts in your mind. More real than the thoughts in your mind is the consciousness that causes these thoughts. This consciousness is the Reality of realities. Every action from there is the most real action, the mental fire that we light is more real than the physical fire. Thus we intensively concentrate on the Divine, and offer all that we want to offer to the Divine, inclusive our meditation, through this agency of fire. OM

Every lover of God wants instant God-experience and complains sometimes that "I have been praying for 20 years, meditating for ten years, nothing has happened, I did not progress, I don't see the development" and so on. The fact is: spiritual development, achievement of God-experience follows laws of growth, laws of development. Growth means: Time factor is operative. This time-factor and its operations can be controlled and reduced by the intensity of our aspiration and by the many-sided development of our inner nature.

Thomas comes from New York and says, "You are a Mystic, you are a great Master, illuminate me immediately." Now, supposing that the Master gives him something, it will be of no use to Thomas, unless he has prepared himself.

I give you another example: There is Julius. He is uneducated, he is a peasant, and he goes to the University and asks for a degree. It is easy for the University Management to produce a certificate for him and stamp the University's authority on it, and call him a Doctor, Doctor of Medicine, or Doctor of Philosophy. It is easy to get such a certificate. But can the peasant overnight become a medical Doctor, or Doctor of literature? Certainly not. The possession of the certificate itself does not mean anything. What is important is the actual growth, discipline. 20 years he has to study intensively before he can present himself to the world as a Doctor of medicine, or philosophy, or literature, etc. Education is a question of time, discipline, concentration, development of intelligence, constant exercise of reason, constant application, exercise of thought, constant development of skills. The basis has to be prepared.

So, one has not only to ask for the end-result, but cover all stages of growth through intensive exercises, through following faithfully the methods given, prescribed.

If you want experience of Truth, if you want to be illuminated like great Sages, be divine like Saints, experience God like Mystics - you have also to develop the Heart of them. That is the pre-requisite, precondition. If you are as good as them, as noble as them, as self-sacrificing as them, you can get God-experience in this second.

Those who have worked very hard in this life for highest spiritual experience, and yet may have not achieved it, will certainly achieve it in the next life. All the progress they have made - all this progress is invisible, because it is not a physical progress. Physical progress is subject to death, to decay, degeneration, as you see with your own body. Every birthday means a year you have come closer to the grave. Body ages, body becomes diseased, body degenerates, body perishes. This law of growth, in relation to the body, has no relation to the law of growth of the spirit within you.

The inner growth is imperishable, does not degenerate, is not subject to death, does not disappear, even when the body perishes. It survives the death of the physical body, and all the spiritual progress you made in this life will be carried into the next life, and when you are born and when you are still a child, any Master may touch you and you are at once illuminated. That is because you have already covered all stages of development in the previous life. Because this has happened to this child, all the children in the world have no right to tell the Master: "You have touched this child and made it the greatest Mystic of the world - touch us and also make us Mystics!"

It is like getting a false certificate - false in the sense, as it is not in correspondence with your growth, your effort, your goodness, your achievements, your developed skills. So, everyone has to prepare oneself to grow, evolve, expand the heart, achieve moral purity, discipline the thoughts, examine oneself, examine one's thoughts, analyse one's feelings, eliminate thoughts and feelings which are negative, not in harmony with Truth, with God, with Wisdom, with Goodness, with the requirements of progress and evolution.
You have to become universal, cosmic, divine, you have to extend your goodness to all creatures, to all creation. You have to find the Divine in all beings. You have to begin all kinds of spiritual exercises, so that your soul grows rapidly. Thereafter illumination becomes easy and constantly brightest ideas, intuitions, perceptions, illuminations spring up from your own consciousness and heart, and prepare you further for highest experience of the Truth, for life in the Truth, in the Divine, as the Divine.

Now, every day, every hour you have to cause in yourself universal feelings, include all creatures in your adoration, adore them as bearers of the Kingdom of Heaven, adore them as lights of God, wish them peace, happiness, progress, prosperity, everything positive, every kind of blessing, freedom from suffering and immortality, indestructibility. And how do they get indestructibility? They will get it because they have wished it through their progress. They will be compelled to make progress because you have wished them immortality, they are compelled to follow every method, every practice that leads to the experience of immortality. - Let us now wish all that we have just said to all creatures, all beings, friends and enemies, all mankind, all living beings, visible and invisible. Dead persons are not visible - that is, the spirits of them are not visible, and there are beings in other invisible worlds, they, too, are not visible. But they all belong to the great Creation of God. To all of them wish every kind of blessing. These mantras which we repeat now, help you in such a wishing.

So, all sincere aspirants, all real lovers of God must prepare themselves intensively. Not a single minute of life should be lost, neither in idle talk nor in distractions, whether these be social distractions or other distractions. Every kind of distraction we have to avoid, concentrate on essentials and our development. The more you are developed, the more a blessing you will be to the environment, to the people around you, to all beings. Concentrate on development, growth, every minute gain something, every minute produce something positive, something valuable, something that serves the Truth, serves God, sustains life on earth, and is development, is growth, is progress into immortality.
There is no use of blaming God. You cannot say to God, "You have appeared to Saints, but you are not appearing to me, you are partial, you are unkind, you are discriminating." All these are false charges. The differences between great Saints and you is: Many of them had 40 years of prayer, meditation, suffering, hard-work, high discipline, one-pointed devotion to God behind them, for forty years! Have you behind you the same 40 years of discipline, devotion, suffering, concentration, one-pointed love for the Divine? If you have, you will get immediately God-experience. In thousands and millions of ways He can appear to you. It is wrong to say, "We love you, oh God, yet you have not transformed us, as you have transformed Saints." We have to gather the experience, express the devotion as great Saints have done, live by wisdom, as they have done, if not in this life, at least in their past lives, and thus qualify ourselves for God-experience. Such a qualification alone makes your divine experience natural, permanent, supremely valuable. Any other experience, induced by any other method, or an apparently divine experience caused by drugs, or hypnotism, or any other means, or by some supernatural agency will not benefit you, no matter whatever sensation it will create of having made you overnight a superman. It is unnatural and will disappear, and before it disappears it may harm you, and harm others, and it may take millions of years before your soul can again find its roots in the Divine.

So, always aim at development, growth. Before you ask for God-experience, develop a divine heart. Express divine wisdom in daily life. Constantly be humble, be full of reverence for all life, for all beings. The more you do all this, the nearer you are at permanent illumination.

- Swami Omkarananda