Sivananda's Personality-88

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29/11/2017
Sri N. Ananthanarayanan

The Master in turn adored all these saints. He loved them and served them as only he could. "Narayana, Narayana, Narayana" thus he would hasten to greet and embrace the visiting saints with the Name of the Lord on his lips, almost exactly as a child would run to embrace its mother. He was overjoyed when he saw them, when he spoke to them, when he offered them food.

The Master identified himself with all saints, with all Ashrams, with divine life activity everywhere on earth, no matter by whom it was carried on and under what label. He sang their glory as if they were his own. He wrote an entire booklet on the Ashrams and saints of India, in which he paid respectful adorations to all the Sadhus and Mahatmas in the country, praising the divine work they were doing. Not only that, in one of his earliest books, he gave an exhaustive list of dozens of contemporary saints, declaring that the very utterance of the names of these saints would purify the heart of the reader. He exhorted the reader to have the Darshan of as many of the saints as possible.

One so humble, the Master never discussed his own spiritual attainments. A Christian evangelist from America, Rev. Stanley Jones, visited the Ashram in 1956. At a small round-table discussion on the morning of March 14, the Master, Rev. Jones and others narrated their "experiences". When it came to the Master’s turn, he simply said, "Seek, find, enter and rest. I sing this formula. I live this formula. I try to be good. I try to live in God. I cultivate virtues. This is my experience."

To be continued ...
Swami Sivananda

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