Meditation on Swami Muktananda’s Words
Siddha Yoga Satsang in Honor of Easter
by Eesha Sardesai
The Temple of God
In the story that Baba Muktananda tells in Play of Consciousness, the saint thanks everyone and everything around him—including his Guru, and the four directions and five elements—as he nears the time of his death. Lastly, Baba says, the saint “thanked and honored his body, the walking, moving, speaking temple of God.”1
This concept, that the body is the temple of God—that God’s presence can be found within one’s own person—appears in a number of religious and spiritual traditions. In the Christian Bible, for example, it is famously written, “Behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”2 The Qur’an describes Allah as creating human beings from clay and breathing his own spirit into them.3And in the scriptures of India, which Baba loved to draw upon in his talks and his conversations with devotees, we find versions of this teaching over and again. Consider the following verse from the Jnaneshvari, the commentary on the Bhagavad Gita by the great poet-saint Jnaneshvar Maharaj. Writing from the perspective of Lord Krishna, the poet-saint says, “There is no doubt that I exist in all forms and that everything abides in Me.”4
To some degree, then, this is a widely known truth. Our bodies house God. The question is: how do we square this truth with the day-to-day experience of living in these bodies? I remember being endlessly perplexed by this as a young child. It was before I had any real intellectual understanding of the Siddha Yoga teachings, before I even had the words to properly articulate the cause of my consternation. I would stare out the window, sometimes for hours on end, wondering why it was that people called me by my name. Why they thought that this name, and this face, and this body were me. There was a me inside of me—I was sure of it—and that felt more like the “real” me than any of these outer accoutrements that people seemed so fixated on.
I couldn’t make sense of it, not until I began to study Gurumayi’s and Baba’s teachings years later in earnest. I think this is why I find Baba’s classic teaching “God dwells within you as you” so revelatory—and especially the last two words, “as you.” It resolves the question I had as a child; it quiets that old anxiety. The “me” that I was so desperate for people to see did not exist apart from the “me” they could see. (For more on Baba’s teaching and what it means, I recommend reading Swami Ishwarananda’s wonderful talk on the subject.)
I find the image that Baba gives here, of the body as a temple, specifically, to be most illuminating. When I think of being in a temple, the experience I have—of being in the very palpable presence of divinity—begins as soon as my foot crosses the threshold. Sometimes it begins before that, when I see the temple architecture from the outside, its kalash rising toward the sky. Of course, the deeper I go into the temple’s chambers, the more I near the sanctum sanctorum, the more visceral my experience of God may be. But everything that precedes this is also part of the experience; it informs how I approach, understand, and appreciate the deity. In that sense, being in the temple cannot be separated from being with God.
On this note, I want to ask: What steps can (or do) you take to remind yourself that your body is an expression of God? Have you made time to breathe in the spirit of spring and let it cloak your vision with its promise and possibility?
- 1Swami Muktananda, Play of Consciousness: A Spiritual Autobiography, 3rd ed. (S. Fallsburg, NY: SYDA Foundation, 2000), p. 270.
- 2Luke 17:21.
- 3See, for example, Qur’an 15:28-29, Qur’an 32:9, and Qur’an 38:71-72.
- 4Jnaneshvari, chap. 6, verse 390; Swami Kripananda, Jnaneshwar’s Gita: A Rendering of the Jnaneshwari (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), p. 82.
Audio recording by Eesha Sardesai