Not at Home in Adhyatma Teachings

A new disciple in a yoga group had some difficulties and she prayed for help. After a couple of weeks of no change, she put her case to a senior: “I pray and pray for help, but there’s no response, God never seems to be at home.”

The senior said: “This is something that happens in ordinary life too, there’s a small shop near here that sells electrical goods, and repairs them. They also send an engineer if there’s a problem in a house. Well, apparently there was a request for someone to go round on quite a simple job. So the boss sent a young apprentice of only fifteen who was very good with his hands. He gave him the address and a small pack of tools with the job sheet in it. But the boy came back after 20 minutes saying there had been no one at home. He had rung and rung but nothing had happened so he came back. The boss asked him whether he had looked at the job sheet, and he said, “Why no, I couldn’t get in to do it anyway. I told you there was noone at home. I rang the bell again and again and again.” The boss told him, “The job was to mend that electric bell, and the job-sheet told you to bang on the door.”

The senior went on: “It’s not that God is not at home but it’s our job to mend the connecting link. We have been given a worksheet to tell us how to get access to the link to make it work. And that may seem to be by an unnatural method, just like banging on the door for the boy electrician. It may seem to be unnatural to be told first to sit down in a quiet place and in a formal posture and then to breathe deeply and consciously twenty-one times. These methods of calming the mind by adjusting externals may be indirect but they are so to say the emergency methods. When the link has been repaired by consciously directed meditations they are not indispensable.”