There is a floor level kitchen cupboard in the monk’s house where I stay — there is a never-ending flow of plastic, cloth, and jute bags into that small space. As bags continued to enter the cupboard during the last year, very few seemed to be coming out.
Opening the cupboard was an adventure and a game. Could I put the latest bag inside and hurriedly shut the door before all the resident bags escaped by spilling out? As fun as it was, it had become a chaotic tangle of overstuffed bags that had its own low level of energy.
Recently we were looking for our long-lost pressure cooker. We searched in vain in our house and the other monk’s houses.
The following day, the man who takes our recycled plastic, glass, and cardboard came for them. Someone had the brilliant idea to give him all the unneeded bags. True inspiration! When the bags disappeared, the long-lost pressure cooker suddenly appeared, bright and shiny, at the back of the cupboard! It had been hiding all along in that cupboard, which was right under the very stove where we were wanting to use it. And it appeared only one day after we had been ‘churning the ether’ for the pressure cooker!
Life gives us so many beautiful lessons when we look for them. This incident gave several. Two are most helpful.
Lesson One:
When any space in a home becomes a gathering place to stash items that are never used, or for hoarding hundreds of bags when only a few are needed, it generates a negative magnetism. Nayaswami Jyotish shares the following story in his book Lessons in Meditation:
Look around your living space. Is it uplifting? Is it beautiful? Is it even clean? Messy environments create low vibrations. Once a great yogi, Swami Chidananda, was visiting Ananda Village. As he walked through the garden, he spotted a rusty can lying on the ground.
“What is that used for?” he asked.
“It is a watering can,” replied one of the gardeners.
“Then,” Chidananda responded, “it should be painted and given its own place. Dirty objects attract lower astral entities.”
Who wants lower astral entities in their home or surroundings?
Lesson Two:
Similar to our pressure cooker, people ask, “Where is God? Why can’t I see Him? Why can’t I feel Him?” People roam and search everywhere for that One, without thinking too much about where He really resides.
Paramhansa Yogananda wrote:
Paramhansa Yogananda
“The increasing joy after meditation is the proof that God has answered through the devotion-tuned radio of your heart. The longer and more deeply you meditate and affirm, the more you will be conscious of the ever-increasing joy in your heart. Then you will know without doubt that there is a God, and that He is ever-existing, ever-conscious, omnipresent, ever-new Joy.
Then demand: “Father, now, today, all day, all tomorrows, every instant, in sleep, in wakefulness, all through life, in death, in the beyond, remain with me as the consciously responding joy of my heart.”
— From How to Awaken Your True Potential
That Divine joy is already there in our hearts! It is only covered, like our pressure cooker, by years — perhaps lifetimes — of hoarded debris, ideas, mental chaos, desires, hurts, and restless thoughts.
And just like the pressure cooker, that Divine heart is right under our nose. In fact, it’s less than twelve inches underneath our nose (I just measured!).
How do we uncover our Divine heart?
The whole of the path to God can be seen as a spiritual housecleaning that ends with purity of heart.
- Seva, selfless service, dissolves all thought of the little self in the expanding heart-awareness of helping others.
- Devotion lifts all our restless thoughts and selfish desires upward — carried along by the much more powerful Divine feeling-wave.
- Kriya Yoga, when practiced as Swami Kriyananda taught it — as an act of devotional self-offering — generates an even stronger current of energy that dissolves and carries away our littleness.
- Kindness, which is the active expression of God’s love to others, similarly removes the hoarded debris that covers the heart. Yogananda even said, “Humility and heartfelt kindness are liberating.”
- See God as the Doer, a practice that always keep God very, very close, and can change us more than any other power. As Yogananda declared, “The instrument is blessed by that which flows through it.”
There are many more such practices that will reveal the Divine heart within each of us.
Yogananda eloquently describes why these practices work in his Autobiography of a Yogi:
“The yogi offers his labyrinthine human longings to a monotheistic bonfire dedicated to the unparalleled God. This is indeed the true yogic fire ceremony, in which all past and present desires are fuel consumed by love divine.”
When that flame of bliss and love is awakened in the heart, then everything covering it will be consumed forever, even in a single moment.