Sachchidananda 'The Life Divine' Book I,Ch.9, 10, 11, 12 - Track 506

If this chapter did not exist, I may tell from my autobiographical level that at one time when I studied philosophy I had reached the conclusion that when I grow up and become adult, (I started studying philosophy at the age of fifteen by the age of eighteen I had read quite a lot of it and I came to the conclusion that when I become an adult about 25, 30, 40) I will tell the world do not teach philosophy to anybody. That was the conclusion to which I had reached because there is no conclusion. Intellectual speculation is so wide and there are so many alternative ways of thinking that you can never be sure that what is really and ultimately true and if you don’t have that conclusion then what are you to do with it. It’s all useless thinking. So, I had come to the conclusion that I will advise everybody to stop philosophy all together. It was at that time that I came to read The Life Divine, and when I read this chapter particularly, I was completely satisfied. I said, now if I have chance to tell anybody that if you want to read the most intricate intellectuality on the subject of existence, I will simply say please read these seven pages. You don’t need to read anything else, of course these seven pages contain a lot, which require lot of background, may be hundred pages or thousand pages as a background, quite possible, but even this can be summarized. What I am doing with you is a kind of an impossible task, to summarize the summaries of so many levels of thinking.

I have read this chapter in about two hours at that time. When I first studied this chapter, I was so satisfied and my experience was that I immediately attained to a complete stillness of thought, after reading it. My mind was completely quiet, I was convinced God exists and it was such a great relief. Shantam siddhati mannah, the mind sits silent; this is an expression which I expressed to myself at that time it was in 1950.

This is only a part of the answer to your question, not a full answer but let me continue, since it is a very important question. I don’t mind taking time on this. I would like to say first of all that considering the intellectual climate in which you are living, it would be a very good thing for most of the people of the world to understand what intellect is, what are the methods of intellectual thought and how intellect has millions of ways of thinking and how they can be summarized most quintessentially and arrive at a most convincing conclusion. If this can be done, it will be a great benefit to everybody and yet this is not indispensable. If you don’t do this, it is not as if you can’t achieve God; there are many other methods of attaining God. If Shri Ramakrishna could live in God consciousness being entirely illiterate or almost illiterate, surely you don’t need to study all this, at all. There is a way of knowing God but for that, first of all there is one great need and this I am expounding the method of devotion, which many people say that it is very easy method. It is true in a certain sense it is a easier method but to certain mentality and particularly the mentality the age in which we are living this is a very difficult method. This is perhaps an easier method than that method for most of us, who live in the world of intellectual age because first of all in the method of devotion the most important is faith. You should have an utter faith that God exists. Secondly, you should be really like a child, utterly like a child, like an infant, an infant who does not even think whether mother exists or not. In its consciousness mother is not even questionable, there is not even a thinking proposition, whether mother exist or not. It’s taken for granted to such an extent that the moment it cries, it knows there is an answer, so you have to be like a small child, absolutely like a child. As Christ has said that it is only if you become like a child that you can enter into the kingdom of God and that is entirely true. Even among children there are two types of children of which Sri Ramakrishna speaks – the cat’s child and the monkey’s child. And of these two you have to be really like the cat child. The monkey’s child has at least to make an effort to catch at the breast of his mother but the cat takes her child in its own mouth and carries it, so the child has to do nothing. It simply carries and it is true that God is really like that basically. Infact if you look at God really, if you ask the real experience of God, you will really find that God is really like a cat mother, we are all in the mouth of God, already. Only we don’t realize, therefore, we have problems, otherwise if you really know that we are in the mouth of God all the time, whether we know it or not, we are already there. In a certain sense you might even say, if you don’t do anything at all, you will be looked after. It is a fact just that the cat’s child has to do nothing, it will be looked after. But tell me, how easy is it to do nothing? It is one of the most difficult things to do nothing but the moment you start doing, remember you have deviated. You have really arrived at the point of really doing nothing, absolutely – don’t think, don’t act, don’t move.

It is said, one disciple went to Sai Baba of Shirdi and said, tell me, what am I to do? He wanted to do sadhana, so, he said tell me what am I to do?  His answer was: ‘nothing’. And that was an extremely difficult task, to do nothing. This is a real reality, God has a big mouth, in whose mouth we are all located and God is moving and we are being taken by him, wherever he wants to take us. We have to have faith, a living faith. We have to be like a child, we have to be like a cat’s child, which is absolutely sure that God is moving with us and we simply have to do nothing at all. Now if you can do it. You don’t need to read this at all.