SPIRITUALIZING LIFE AND WORK

Notes from Swami Sarvapriyananda’s lecture entitled “Spiritualizing Life and Work.”

Background consciousness cannot become an object of knowledge.  You cannot know it.  It is your true self.  Nothing can touch you there.  It is  pure consciousness, a consciousness that illuminates everything outside of it.  It enables us to experience.

You cannot see your own eyes.  How are you able then to know that you have eyes?  Because you are seeing.  You cannot know background consciousness, so how do you know it is there?  Because you are experiencing yourself and the world by way of it.  By experiencing anything you will know that the background consciousness is there.

The background consciousness, Atman, in us is the same background consciousness that is in all sentient beings.  Background consciousness, that oneness, is what Vedanta considers to be God, the oneness shining through all of us and through all living things.

(Comment:  Sarvapriyananda says that background consciousness cannot be the object of knowledge, cannot be known.   Furthermore, pure consciousness has no content, is blank, hence there is nothing to be known.  This is not to say, however, that it cannot be experienced.  When the background consciousness, the Atman, “awakens,” a person knows it.  He experiences it.  Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher, terms this condition “presence,” which is to say that a person is aware now of something else in the room with him, so to speak.)

As for how a person spiritualizes his life and work, Sarvapriyananda begins by asking, why is there so much suffering in the world?  It is, he says, because people do not live the divinity within them.  The way to do so is by love and service to others.  See God in all things.  Serving is worshiping the God in all things.  Serving is manifesting the God that is within you.