Swamiji’s Agenda

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Swamiji’s Agenda
Part 6

by Prof. P. N. Murthy

Once their mission is decided, it looks as though these avatars achieve their respective missions taking and through several births.  Some births are to prepare the ground. Some are to watch the progress.  Some are to show the path.  Viewed in this way all the Swami’s incarnations mentioned in the nadis acquire a new meaning and light.  Mostly his births have taken place on the Indian soil.  This can mean that one of Swamiji’s primary missions is to mold this Indian nation into a great spiritual community.  He took birth as a maharishi, a poet, a great bhakta [devotee], a king, a judge, and a common man.  These are a wide variety touching every nerve and center of the nation.

Some skeptics ask, “Why should an avatar or series of avatars worry about making a single nation into a Divine community?  Why this singling out?  What is this partiality of the Divine?”  In answer, one can say there should be a focal point for any action.  First let this focus be tuned, toned and refined.  Then the results can be propagated to others.  The Indian nation is a laboratory for spiritual research and action.  For millennia India as a human community invested its effort into spiritual inquiry, investigation and discovery, almost to the exclusion of every other aspect of life.  Many historians and social philosophers agree on this view.  They opine that every race acquires a distinctive character and consciousness over the ages and this turns into a kind of community sadhana.  This becomes its distinctive culture which unifies the community in a subtle manner.  Historians like Toynbee and Spengler and mahayogis like Sri Aurobindo have referred to this aspect in their writings.  Even we can observe this spiritual slant in Indian culture.  Indian arts, sculptures, music, literature, daily life, and festivals all constantly refer to and revolve around the Divine.  The life of an Indian looks like a constant tryst with the mystic.

Why, then, do we see in these days so much corruption, poverty and dissoluteness entrenched everywhere?  This is undeniably true.  However, if one scratches an Indian, one can always notice a fear of sin and a desire for spiritual life.  Once Vivekananda remarked, “In our country if a king and sannyasin appear together side by side, everyone will first do obeisance to the sannyasin and then to the king.  Even the king does the same.  There is a great respect in our country for learned people.  In your country the rich are respected more.  We may be poor in wealth but not poor in mind.”

It is easy to propagate spiritual doctrines in such a country.  If such a community acquires a spiritual mold, it is easy to influence the rest of the world through them.  Perhaps this is the reason why Swami took birth again and again in India.  In the incarnations as Sri Ramakrishna and Lahiri Mahasaya, it is well known that their disciples started spiritual journeys to the entire world during their lifetimes.  In this respect Sri Aurobindo’s explanation gives us a great clarity on this issue.

“The work for which the Avatar descends has, like his birth, a double form.  It has an outward side of the divine force acting upon the external world in order to maintain there and to reshape the divine law by which the God-ward effort of humanity is kept from decisive retrogression and instead decisively carried forward in spite of the rule of action and reaction, the rhythm of advance and relapse by which nature proceeds.  It has an inward side of the divine force of the God-ward Consciousness acting upon the soul of the individual and the soul of the race so that it may receive new forms of revelation of the Divine in man and may be sustained, renewed, enriched in its power of upward self unfolding.  The Avatar does not descend merely for a great outward action, as the pragmatic sense in the human is too often tempted to suppose.”

Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, p. 158

Some births of Swami may appear too common place and simple.  However their mission is essentially what Sri Aurobindo says above: to inspire silently the soul of the race.  Sometimes it may be to decide the paths of action by living close to the common man.  Once Swami told me, “It is to decide the future program, we live incognito on this earth.”

In the Kala Jnanam of Sri Veerabrahman it is written, “When this world is in unprecedented confusion and conflict, suffering greatly, Suka Maharishi will be born on the earth and will free the world of all this.”  Hearing this, Swami said, “Swami is Suka Maharishi.  Is it not so?”

 

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