Page 14 - All India Magazine Jul-2020

Qualities Needed for Sadhana

Indispensable Qualities
It goes without saying that the qualities you speak of
are helpful in the approach to the spiritual path, while the
defects you enumerate are each a serious stumbling-block
in the way. Sincerity especially is indispensable to the spiri-
tual endeavour, and crookedness a constant obstacle. The
sattwic nature has always been held to be themost apt and
ready for the spiritual life, while the rajasic nature is encum-
bered by its desires and passions. At the same time, spiri-
tuality is something above the dualities, and what is most
needed for it is a true upward aspiration. This may come to
the rajasic man as well as to the sattwic. If it does, he can
rise by it above his failings and desires and passions, just as
the other can rise beyond his virtues, to the Divine Purity and
Light and Love. Necessarily this can only happen if he con-
quers his lower nature and throws it from him; for if he re-
lapses into it, he is likely to fall from the path or at least to
be, so long as the relapse lasts, held back by it from inner
progress. But for all that the conversion of great sinners into
great saints, of men of little or no virtue into spiritual seek-
ers and God-lovers has frequently happened in religious and
spiritual history — as in Europe St. Augustine, in India Chait-
anya’s Jagai and Madhai, Bilwamangal and many others. The
house of the Divine is not closed to any who knock sincerely
at its gates, whatever their past stumbles and errors. Human
virtues and human errors are bright and dark wrappings of a
divine element within which once it pierces the veil, can burn
through both towards the heights of the Spirit.
Humility before the Divine is also a sine qua non of the
spiritual life, and spiritual pride, arrogance, or vanity and sel-
fassurance press always downward. But confidence in the

All India Magazine, July 2020
14