. WHAT WILL BE YOUR CHOICE?

[Ms Tercy Lonan]

48. WHAT WILL BE YOUR CHOICE?
The humble prayer of this servant at this moment is that you may be enabled to grasp and
absorb the practical spiritual teachings of Gurudev and apply them in your own day-to-day life, that
you may adopt them as the very principle and pattern of your living, and thus, before you shed your
physical body and go forth from here, you may be able to realise the Absolute, you may be able to
enter into an experience of that great Reality and abide in that great Reality.
Whether this will be a fact or only a distant hope, whether this will be a dream or the reality,
depends entirely upon you. It depends entirely upon each and every one of you. It depends upon
your choice. It is a matter of choice. It depends upon your wisdom. It depends upon your right
understanding and clear perception. How do you understand your presence here on planet Earth?
How do you understand yourself as a part of human society?
Your presence here is primarily in human society, a society that is endowed with the power
of perceiving, observing, understanding, enquiring, discriminating, reasoning, selecting and
rejecting. All other forms of life are, by and large, body-bound in their consciousness and the living
of their life. They are not endowed with this unique faculty of reasoning and coming to right
conclusions or wrong conclusions depending upon whether their reasoning is right or wrong.
Reasoning can depend upon logic. Or, it can depend upon bias, prejudice or self-love. Then
the reasoning will lead you astray. But the real point is that whether this chance and opportunity of
being a human being will be rightly used or not depends not upon God, not upon faith, not upon
others. It depends upon each one of us. It is a question of choice.
This is made very clear by Yamadharmaraja when He was confronted by Nachiketas.
Yamadharmaraja, who had knowledge of this side as well as that side, who knew what becomes of
the soul after physical death, who knew the nature of the Reality dwelling within this unreal,
temporary body, tells Nachiketas: “It is a matter of the individual soul’s choice. Before each one of
them open up two paths.
“The first path is the one that is pleasant and satisfies the senses, a path fraught with the
danger of losing one’s freedom through attraction, through slavery. For the more one indulges the
more intense becomes the desire. The second path is apparently difficult and does not seem to be
pleasant but leads to one’s highest good, one’s supreme welfare. It is for the individual to choose
whether one will go towards that which is merely pleasant and attractive or one will go in the
direction of that which is difficult but glorious.”

And Yamadharmaraja goes further to say that the vast majority of human society is
short-sighted. They are shallow; they do not use their faculty of deep thinking and reasoning. So
whatever they perceive through the senses, they decide is the only reality. Seeing is believing. Thus
concluding, they run after temporary things believing that there is nothing beyond. Failing to
perceive the greater Reality, taking this temporary appearance to be reality, these small-thinking
people come again and again into the wide-spread net of death.
Nachiketas perceives immediately. He has right reasoning, clear perception, and he says:
“Then I only want the highest, the supreme, that which is permanent, unchanging and
imperishable.”
Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji wanted everyone to be like Nachiketas. He wanted us to be
wise, perceiving, and with clear thinking and right reasoning to make the heroic choice. He always
used to say: “You should have the Nachiketas spirit.”
Lord Krishna left to Arjuna the choice of the direction he will take. Even before the
Mahabharata war He put two alternatives before Arjuna and said, “You choose.” He did not help
Arjuna to choose. Arjuna chose Krishna instead of the Yadava army. Duryodhana thought Arjuna
to be a fool and rejoiced that the army was left for him. But Arjuna had wisely chosen the Divine.
The source of all human actions is the human mind, the thought that you allow to occupy
and dominate your mind. It requires vigilance, policing, alertness, wakefulness, jagriti. Thus
knowing, the wise yogi, the spiritual aspirant, is ever alert. This choice we are speaking of is not the
choice of some momentous point in your life. It is a choice which commences at every dawn and
continues throughout your waking hours until you retire at night.
This wakefulness and choice must be constantly exercised each moment, at every step, all of
your life. There is a bhajan which says: “O, keep your steps upon the highway of life, carefully
discriminating, reflecting well before each step about the direction you are stepping.” Thus a
constant awareness and a correct choice is what is indicated when the principle of self-choice is put
before us as the great fact of a successful spiritual life.
Similarly, departing from here, the great Buddha, the enlightened one, admonishes his
followers: “O Bhikshus, be a light unto yourselves and be a lamp unto the feet of others.” The light
is within; shine with that light. Let that light radiate, let it manifest in and through your life—your
thoughts, words and deeds. Shine with the light that you are, and so let your life be an ideal one that
illumines the path of others.
Now, it is left to you. Will you shine with that light that you are? Will you be a lamp unto the
feet of others? Will your very being be an awakening light, a constant process of illumining this
human society, this prapancha, wherever you go? Or, will you forfeit this great privilege, this great
blessing? Will you allow yourself to be entrapped in the grosser, lower self?
If you allow yourself to be enslaved by the lower self, then your life becomes a centre of
discord, disharmony, falsehood, unspirituality. All that is the very contradiction of your supreme

divinity begins to occupy the field of your relationships with others, vitiating the atmosphere and
creating asanti in yourself and others, spreading darkness instead of light.
Therefore, let us choose to shine as the light that we are. We make this choice now! We shall
never allow the lower self and its negativity to eclipse the full radiance of our divinity. We shall
never allow it! We shall be vigilant; we shall ward it off. No matter how many times we shall be
assailed, we shall emerge victorious. We shall shine with the great radiance of the light that we are.
This will be our life.
Thus we choose, and throughout the remaining days of our life, this choice will guide us.
We will abide by this choice, and at each step we will choose to move in the right direction. We will
choose to be what God has meant us to be, what we really are.
This is the great need. This is wisdom. In this lies your highest blessedness. Let this be your
wise choice, and let this choice guide you each day of your life at every step. May the grace of the
ever-present Divine Reality, the benedictions of the guru who dwells within you, enable you to
succeed in this great choice!
At every step each day make your choice and move towards the Light. In this lies your
assurance of transcending all pain and sorrow and entering a state of perennial bliss. Supreme bliss
does not come. We have to move towards it. We have to ask for it. We have to opt for it. We have to
work for it. Then it is ours. Thus, joy or sorrow, bondage or freedom, restlessness or peace is a
matter of individual choice. The way is before us and it is up to us to choose the direction.