GOD'S NAME

Swami Satyananda Saraswati

This is not an alarm clock, it is my wake up clock. It is set to ring every morning at two a.m. It wakes me up and the first thing I listen to is God's name. It is programmed to chant the name of God for forty minutes at a time. So I get up from my bed and sit down to sing, Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram Patita Pavana Sitaram, Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram for forty minutes. Then I get up, wash myself and start my japa. Oh God, when I sleep You should be the last one whom I shall remember, and when I wake up Your name should be the first thing that I hear. So I inaugurate and close the day with God's name. Anything which is begun well, ends well.
However, when you open your eyes in the morning, the first thing you see is this idiotic world. What is there to look at? You look at the world the whole day because you have to. But you should forget it, at least for forty minutes, and listen to the Lord's name. Start your day with the Lord's name. Don't be fearful of God. God won't be unhappy if you don't repeat His name. Even if you denounce Him, He won't punish you. You pray, not for God, but for yourself. Why take the Lord's name if you are afraid of Him? Even if you abuse God, He will still shower His grace upon you. God does not get angry at anyone, He does not punish anyone. When you chant His name, you do it for yourself.
You can also remove yourself from this worldly business for at least forty minutes and just listen to the Lord's name. Sugar is always sweet whether you put it in halwa or cake. In the same way, God's name is always sweet whether you sing or chant it. It has its quality of madhuram. There is a song: Adharam Madhuram, Nayanam Madhuram. He is sweetness personified. When you get out of bed in the morning with your eyes closed, half asleep, half awake, sing God's name. That is how the day should begin, with God's name: Sri Ram Jai Ram. This is a good start in the morning, then you can take a bath and read the Bible, Ramayana, Srimad Bhagavatam, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Bhakti Vedanta or Swami Sivananda.

Long-term investment
When you rise in the morning, firstly sit down and sing God's name. Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram is one example. However, you need not sing this, you can make up your own. Go on singing the Lord's name for thirty to forty minutes. When you repeat God's name you don't spend time, you gain time. It is a long-term investment. Repeat this process again when you go to bed at night. Even if you return late at night from a discotheque or a night club and you are a little drunk, it doesn't matter - that's a part of life. You can still sing God's name.
Chanting of the Lord's name does not mean that you run away from the world. In the balance of life there are four scales: artha, kama, dharma and moksha. These scales balance each other. If only artha and kama persist, then man becomes agitated. Therefore, artha and kama should be counter-balanced by dharma and moksha. In what proportion? You do not mix one kilogram of sugar with one kilogram of milk. In one kilogram of milk, you only put a few spoonfuls of sugar. The same is true for the proportion of salt that you put in vegetable dishes. Similarly, dharma and moksha make the dish of life tasty. Therefore, chant God's name for some time, perhaps forty minutes in twenty-four hours. Forty minutes is hardly a fraction of one day, but it is enough to make the dish tasty, to make household life enjoyable.
You do not need to sing bhajans for eight to ten hours, just twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes at night. Then it doesn't matter what you eat. If you want to eat meat, eat it. If you want to drink wine, drink it. Whatever you want to do, you can. Even thieves and dacoits whose profession it is to plunder and loot should chant Sri Ram Jaya Ram for just ten minutes. This is the truth, because dacoits and criminals will always exist in the world. Even God cannot eliminate them, so what can the government do? No government can eliminate criminals; they have never succeeded in doing so. Crime is the oldest profession. Man first started to earn by thieving and looting, not by hard work. Crime is a reality. I am not asking you to commit crime. I am just saying that whatever you are, whether a prostitute, a dacoit or a saint, a female or a male, high caste or low caste, politician or executive, remember God's name.
When you get up in the morning, sit down and chant God’s name for forty minutes. Do it loudly. What is there to hide? There should be no shame in singing the Lord's name. I do my pooja openly and regularly - every evening. At half past five I worship Ganesha, Hanuman, Rama, Shiva and Tulsi. People advise me to take a shortcut in doing pooja. I say why take a shortcut? Why should people be ashamed of worshipping the Lord? If people see me worshipping, they will also go back home and worship.

Spiritual journey of man
You should not relate spiritual life with daily life, nor should you have any. complex about your nature, such as "Oh, I am not a good man." Yes, you are not a good man, and I am also not a good man. You are a bad man eighty percent of the time and I am a bad man ten percent of the time, but a bad man I am. As long as you are in this human body, you can't be free from sins, from lapses, from the frailties of human life, because you are subject to the dharma of the body. You are subject to the gunas: sattwa, rajas and tamas. Without the integration and permutation of sattwa, rajas and tamas, there is no creation. The total composition of creation is the three gunas. When fusion takes place between the three gunas, then creation comes into being, otherwise existence enters into avyakta, the unmanifest dimension.
Therefore, you have to accept the reality as it is and yourself as you are. So where do you start? If you start with morality, you will have psychological problems. Ask any psychologist and he will verify that. Goodness cannot be imposed or cultivated. Goodness is your inner being which is completely hidden, and you can only break through the shell with God's name. Although man has been born with a body, he is controlled by nature, or Prakriti, which has threefold qualities, trigunatmika. The body and mind each have their own dharma. So, thinking that I am a bad person is a worthless thought. The spiritual journey of a man does not begin with satya, ahimsa and btahmacharya; these are the culmination of human life.
The journey of man begins with faults, because man has accumulated karmas from the past eighty-four lakh yonis through which he has evolved. Craving, sleep, fear, sexual instincts are what you have inherited from the animal level of evolution. The human journey begins with an incomplete nature. Do you complete your MA or MSc and then begin primary school? When you start school, what do you know? You know nothing. Similarly, life begins with weaknesses, mistakes, incompleteness, impurities, desires, anger, greed, animosity, attraction and repulsion. You can't fight with these things and you can't go against them. You can't say, "From today I won't tell a single lie. I will be truthful." You can't say, "From today 1 won't go to a single woman." It is all hypocrisy.

Satyam, shivam, sundaram
.Three things are your true form, your true nature: satyam, truth; shivam, auspiciousness; and sundaram, beauty. You don’t have to bring purity from outside, it is within you. You don't have to adopt any good quality from outside. You are already that. Therefore, the scriptures have said that these three-satyam, shivam, sundaram, represent your real nature, but are hidden. In order to manifest them, you have to break the outer shell. There is only one way to do this, no other method or way works. My model is 1923 and I have been trying all my life. I have tried every method and left it. I have tried to straighten the dog's tail so many times, but it always curls back again. Cut the tail and the stump is straight. I realized that I was trying to save the tail and also to make it straight. This is not possible. Either have a curled tail or cut it off. So, I cut off my tail.
Life begins with incompleteness. If you want to take your life towards completeness and perfection, then you should begin with the mantra of wholeness. The only mantra of wholeness and perfection is the Lord's name. So life starts with imperfection and this is natural. When you wish to move towards perfection, you don't have to take up a difficult method or path at the outset. You can try any method, but an important item in your life should be discipline. Just before you go to sleep and when you wake up, repeat God's name. You have seen my clock. It is not an alarm clock, I call it the Awakening Clock. This clock wakes you up with God’s name, not an ear-piercing, nerve-shattering screech or tone. Keep such a clock with you. Set the alarm for yourself and at the right time the clock will sing kirtan.

God is One
Do not think of yourself as a devotee of Shiva, Rama, Krishna, Devi, Christ or Buddha. Sects are always different, but God is one. One father has ten sons and each son has a separate family and home. However, that does not make the father different in each family and home. In the same way, sects are many and different but God is the same. A variety of names does not mean that Rama, Vishnu, Krishna, Shiva or Shakti are different. By sect I am a Shaiva, but if I worship Rama in Raghunath Kutir, do I become a Vaishnava? If I worship the Mother, do I become a Shakta? If I worship Jesus or Mother Mary, do I then become a Christian? These are sects and traditions, but bhakti is not limited to a sect.
There is no harm if Shiva kirtan is sung in a Vaishnava house, if Christian hymns are sung in a Hindu house or if Rama or Krishna kirtan is sung in a Christian house. Five star hotels keep a Bible in every room. Nowadays they have also started to keep the Bhagavad Gita. I used to read the Bible, Koran and Gita. What difference has this made to my personality? Whether one is Christian, Muslim or Hindu, what difference does it make? These are sects, and sects are not the personalities of anyone. Essentially, we are not Christians, Muslims, or Hindus. We are human beings, we are all one. There is no special anger called Christian anger, no special passion called Christian passion.
These are the ways, the paths, but basically we are all one. Imperfections are almost the same in everyone. The qualities of anger, greed, lust and passion are the same in each one of us, throughout the world, whether we are from the East, West, North or South. Similarly, the quality of goodness is the same in everyone. Fundamentally we are one and the same. So it doesn't matter what name we repeat, Sri Rama, Om Namah Shivayah, Hail Mary, Hail Jesus. Suppose you have come from a Christian background and I give you this clock. You say, "No, I don't want it because I am a Christian." This is a foolish idea. Many Indians intermarry with men and women from foreign countries, and many foreigners marry Indian men and women. Yet we don't see any difference in that, we see the difference only in God's name.
When we repeat the name, it will remind us of God. Name is only a reminder. Sri Ram, Jaya Ram Jai Jai Ram is only a reminder. The idea which it invokes in us is that of divinity, and divinity has no form. Divinity is total, all comprehensive and universal. God's name reminds us of purity, divinity and greatness. We can take any name or read any scripture, whether it is the Gita by Prabhupad, the works of Shankaracharya, the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran, the Guru Granth Sahib, the couplets of Kabir, Meera or Raidas. They make no difference to our religious beliefs. I have found the taste of salt to be the same in Europe, India and China. I have found the same sweetness in the sugar of Russia, the UK and the USA. I have never found any difference in the taste anywhere. What I don't understand is how the difference in God's name cropped up in the first place. It must have been the work of mischief mongers.

Every form is God's form
Everybody says that God has no form, but the best way to depict Him is to say that every form is His Form. It is easy to say that God is without form, because no one has seen His form. You are the witness of the things which you have seen, and you cannot be the witness of the things that you have not seen. How can you say that God is without form? Have you seen Him? No. Whatever you have seen, you are the witness of that. You have seen this universe which is the manifestation of God. Places of pilgrimage or teerthasthanas are the manifestations of God. Ganga and Yamuna are the manifestations of God. I am also a manifest form of God.
There is a sloka which says:

The entire manifest universe, including time and space,
Inside and outside, everywhere, is pervaded by God.
In water, on land, on the mountain peak, in flaming fire,
God is universal, pervading the entire creation.

The entire universe is pervaded by one power. We call Him God, Hari, Rama, Allah, Khuda, Om or Amin. Just as it matters little whether we say soap or sabun, the name of God doesn't matter; it is the essence that is important.

Sing your way to Him
The scientists have said that there is energy within matter. We say that beyond energy there is consciousness, beyond consciousness there is the soul, and beyond the soul there is divinity. In the Bhagavad Gita it is also said that behind the body are the senses, behind the senses is the mind, behind the mind is the intellect, behind the intellect is the soul and behind the soul is divinity. By behind, I mean its essence. In the same way, God is the essence of everything. The essence of milk is butter. The essence of butter is ghee. The essence of ghee is fat. The essence of fat is calories and the essence of calories is energy and heat, which is the basis of life. When the heat diminishes, we die. Similarly, the ultimate essence of matter is God, and matter is the manifestation of divinity. We are all the manifestation of divinity. The panchatattwas, five elements, are manifestations of divinity.
Therefore, just as sugar becomes one with milk, let the mind melt in God. There is no use controlling the mind, because there is no mind as such. Just sing His name until you get out! Just sing and sing the name of God until your mind melts. This was the path of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and Meerabai. Narada continuously chanted Narayana, Narayana, twenty-four hours a day. If you sing the name of God with proper tune and pitch, rhythm and beat, you will enjoy it. Good food, sweets, tea, coffee, even brandy do not generate as much heat as the singing of God's name. There is a song:

Now I enjoy the life of a wandering ascetic.
The happiness I get from singing the Lord's name
I did not find in all the richness of the earth.
We are the monarchs, the crownless monarchs.

Bhagavat Katha

From 1st to 8th September 2009, Sivananda Janmotsav, the birth celebration of Swami Sivananda will be held at Rikhiapeeth. During this 8 day utsav, Bhagavat Katha will be conducted by Sri Swami Girishanandaji Maharaj of Akhandananda Ashram Vrindavan.

For information and registration you may contact Rikhiapeeth.

Rikhiapeeth, PO Rikhia, Dist Deoghar, 814113, Jharkhand, India
Tel: Rikhia 06432-290870/ 09304-488889/ 09304-799449.