Religious Consciousness

Swami Krishnananda coined a phrase called Religious Consciousness. Its quite a tricky set of words and so he thought of explaining it in his own unique way so: its that feeling of lack of completion that a human being feels knowingly or unknowingly. This is, to me, a factual picture of the entire life cycle of a person. Every being is searching for something missing. We do not know what that is. At each stage of life, that something seems different, something that we do not have, need badly and in extreme cases, so badly that we are willing to do anything and everything to achieve it. Having achieved it, we know it to be not what we were looking for and the missing factor to make us complete, remains!

This is not only for grown-ups alone, its also true for children. In fact, children are designed to use all the available resources around them to struggle for them and get them what they want. This is how God felt one's journey into life must start: craving for big and small things alike! Parents, relatives, etc. feel bad about what the child wants and they fulfill its desire. Having gotten used to such a fulfillment, the child grows up into this "being of wants". This is not entirely true though, since children who do not get their desires fulfilled are also seen to have a similar behavior later on. Whatever may be the reason for it, its clear that, "if only such and such thing happens to me, I'll be happy", is a lifelong experience of all. We fail to understand that this lack of something, *always*, cannot be fulfilled because its not outside us. Its like the camel that chews on the thorny shrubs in the desert and loves the taste of it thinking that the taste is from the shrub, not knowing that the blood oozing out from the thorns' pricking is what it likes; the taste being within.

If only we could understand that the true completion lies in one's stillness that Krishna explains of as stitha prajna, whether or not our desire is fulfilled, we would not go hankering till life's end and devote enough time to our journey within.