When you talk about health, talk about physical, mental, and spiritual health. Spiritual health is most important, because it governs the body and mind. But how do you have a healthy spirit? The idea is to know that there is only one reality, one spirit, one universal spirit that includes you – you are that One. Universal spirit and you are nothing different from that. Period. You think yourself to be different and from there comes your struggle to come back to the right understanding of who you are that is not separate. Your struggle to obtain harmonious union. Union of the individual self and the cosmic self, between you and me, or union between the inner and outer. To realize that underlying consciousness that is truly ourselves and not identify with the different layers of ourselves that is only the instrument. In the same manner, when you drive a car, you do not say, “I am a Mustang. I am worth $10,000, and I am red, I am very powerful, I am sports.” So you don’t identify with the qualities of the instrument. So being spiritually healthy means that you identify with your immortal spirit. I am Atman. Atman means, I am the Self. Atman is indefinable, indivisible, unqualified, with no attributes, that means eternal, unconditioned by time.
Your existence is conditioned by time, constantly. Whatever you say is conditioned by time, your body is conditioned by time, but there is an experience or reality of yourself that is unconditioned by time and is unconditioned by space. It is neither here nor there. So when you live in the body, your experience is that there is always a here and there is always a there. Therefore you are always unhappy, going here and there. But you go here and there and you never find IT, because IT is neither here nor there. And also it is said that the experience of the self is an experience beyond causation. That means, in your normal experience something has to have a reason to be. This causing this, this causing that. This is the origin of this, this is the origin of that. But in the absolute experience of the self, then nothing exists from nothing. That means existence itself is self sufficient. So you can see already the problem. You are constantly conditioned by time/space causation. You think you are mortal, you think you are separate; you think you are doing something.
So to be healthy is understanding that you are everything – existence absolute, with no beginning and no end. You have to have a very expanded consciousness in order to think like that. To know that you are Satchitananda, existence absolute, knowledge absolute, you are the consciousness of all beings, you know everything from within. Therefore you don’t need to see anything from outside, because everything from outside comes from the consciousness within. So knowing that “I am that consciousness,” makes you become one and know everything there is to know from within because there is no external thing from your Self. Another way to describe this state of enlightenment is Ananda; bliss. Bliss absolute means to be in a state of complete satisfaction, of bliss that comes from no contradiction, no frustration, no feeling of separation, as in the eternal search for love.
Why are you constantly searching for love and never finding it? Because the love you are pursuing is always limited love. The nature of love itself is your nature, therefore you constantly search for yourself through continuous stories and dramas that would redeem you, and would make you completely blissful and give you the Ananda state. But the love that you have is not giving you that. It gives you glimpses, at the best moment, but then it stops, and ends in drama. All love stories end in drama.
To be spiritually healthy means that you are not afraid of death, because you know that you are not this body coming and going and getting old. You are going to lose if you think like that, because every single day you are approaching your death. You try not to think about it, think it only happens to other people, the old people, but very soon you see that you are the old people, even if you are young, your young friends also die. Death comes very quickly. It can happen to anybody. That’s the truth of it. If you don’t want to think about it you are not healthy. Because you are trying to deny an aspect of life. Facing your mortality, understanding your mortality is a good way to be spiritually healthy.
Living in unity and turning inward is another way to be healthy. Turning inward means to know once and for all that everything and anything that exists out there without your consciousness is illusion. It doesn’t have any value for your life. If you run after it, you just waste time and come back to the same place, because your life is consciousness, therefore you have to live in a way that is meaningful for you, your consciousness has to be in it. If you are in it then you are happy no matter what you do. You can wash dishes, or dig a trench. If you are completely aware of yourself, that consciousness gives you yourself, and you are absolutely very happy. But if you are a millionaire living in a five-star hotel, penthouse suite, with the best food brought to your mouth, you still not very happy, because you still think, “I need another kind of food, and this hotel is not the best hotel, and I must find another better hotel because someone looks wealthier than I.” You are never happy. One has to understand once and for all that your strategy to find fulfillment is inadequate, because you are not thinking right. And you would have to cease to think in that way.
The point of being healthy is that you cease to be that. You have to cease to run after illusion, you have to look at yourself, once and for all and do not look out, because there is nothing out there. It is always by looking in that you find the out, because the out and the in are one. So that’s the starting point of being healthy.
Swami Sitaramananda
12/03/06
Morning Satsang, Sivananda Yoga Farm, Grass Valley, CA
© Swami Sitaramananda 2014 No part of this article may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.
