Leo Tolstoy: The Kingdom of God is within you.

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" As soon as the Sahasrara was opened the whole atmosphere was filled

with tremendous Chaitanya. And there was tremendous Light in the

sky. And the whole thing came on the Earth — as if a torrential

rain or a waterfall — with such tremendous force, as if I was

unaware and got stupefied. The happening was so tremendous and so

unexpected that I was stunned and totally silent at the grandeur.

 

I saw the Primordial Kundalini rising like a big furnace, and the

furnace was very silent but a burning appearance it had, as if you

heat up metal, and it had many colors. In the same way, the

Kundalini showed up as a furnace, like a tunnel, as you see these

plants you have here for coal burning that create electricity. And

it stretched like a telescope and came out one after another, Shoo!

Shoo! Shoo! Just like that.

 

And the Deities came and sat on their seats, golden seats, and then

they lifted the whole of the head like a big dome and opened it, and

then this Torrential Rain complete drenched Me. I started seeing all

that and got lost in the Joy. It was like an artist seeing his own

creation, and I felt the Joy of great fulfillment.

 

After coming out of this beautiful experience I looked around and

saw human beings so blind and I became absolutely silent, and

desired that I should get the cups to fill the Nectar . . . "

 

Shri Niskala Devi

Opening Of The Primordial Sahasrara

Sahasrara Puja, Paris, France — May 5, 1982

 

(Niskala [140th]: Indivisible — Complete)

 

" Man is certainly not free if we imagine him stationary, and if we

forget that the life of a man and of humanity is nothing but a

continual movement from darkness into light, from a lower stage of

truth to a higher, from a truth more alloyed with errors to a

truth more purified from them.

 

Man would not be free if he knew no truth at all, and in the same

way he would not be free and would not even have any idea of

freedom if the whole truth which was to guide him in life had been

revealed once for all to him in all its purity without any

admixture of error.

 

But man is not stationary in regard to truth, but every individual

man as he passes through life, and humanity as a whole in the same

way, is continually learning to know a greater and greater degree

of truth, and growing more and more free from error.

 

And therefore men are in a threefold relation to truth. Some

truths have been so assimilated by them that they have become the

unconscious basis of action, others are only just on the point of

being revealed to him, and a third class, though not yet

assimilated by him, have been revealed to him with sufficient

clearness to force him to decide either to recognize them or to

refuse to recognize them.

 

These, then, are the truths which man is free to recognize or to

refuse to recognize.

 

The liberty of man does not consist in the power of acting

independently of the progress of life and the influences arising

from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the

truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful

participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of

the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the

truth, and so being a miserable and reluctant slave dragged

whither he has no desire to go.

 

Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to

move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And

therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way

of truth, some spontaneously accomplishing the task set them in

life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Man's

freedom lies in the power of this choice.

 

This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant to

men that they do not notice it. Some--the determinists--consider

this amount of freedom so trifling that they do not recognize it

at all. Others--the champions of complete free will--keep their

eyes fixed on their hypothetical free will and neglect this which

seemed to them such a trivial degree of freedom.

 

This freedom, confined between the limits of complete ignorance of

the truth and a recognition of a part of the truth, seems hardly

freedom at all, especially since, whether a man is willing or

unwilling to recognize the truth revealed to him, he will be

inevitably forced to carry it out in life.

 

A horse harnessed with others to a cart is not free to refrain

from moving the cart. If he does not move forward the cart will

knock him down and go on dragging him with it, whether he will or

not. But the horse is free to drag the cart himself or to be

dragged with it. And so it is with man.

 

Whether this is a great or small degree of freedom in comparison

with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only

freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness

attainable by man.

 

And more than that, this freedom is the sole means of

accomplishing the divine work of the life of the world.

 

According to Christ's doctrine, the man who sees the significance

of life in the domain in which it is not free, in the domain of

effects, that is, of acts, has not the true life. According to

the Christian doctrine, that man is living in the truth who has

transported his life to the domain in which it is free--the domain

of causes, that is, the knowledge and recognition, the profession

and realization in life of revealed truth.

 

Devoting his life to works of the flesh, a man busies himself with

actions depending on temporary causes outside himself. He himself

does nothing really, he merely seems to be doing something. In

reality all the acts which seem to be his are the work of a higher

power, and he is not the creator of his own life, but the slave of

it. Devoting his life to the recognition and fulfillment of the

truth revealed to him, he identifies himself with the source of

universal life and accomplishes acts not personal, and dependent

on conditions of space and time, but acts unconditioned by

previous causes, acts which constitute the causes of everything

else, and have an infinite, unlimited significance.

 

" The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it

by force. " (Matt. xi. 12.)

 

It is this violent effort to rise above external conditions to the

recognition and realization of truth by which the kingdom of

heaven is taken, and it is this effort of violence which must and

can be made in our times.

 

Men need only understand this, they need only cease to trouble

themselves about the general external conditions in which they are

not free, and devote one-hundredth part of the energy they waste

on those material things to that in which they are free, to the

recognition and realization of the truth which is before them, and

to the liberation of themselves and others from deception and

hypocrisy, and, without effort or conflict, there would be an end

at once of the false organization of life which makes men

miserable, and threatens them with worse calamities in the future.

And then the kingdom of God would be realized, or at least that

first stage of it for which men are ready now by the degree of

development of their conscience. "

 

Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is within you.