Scriptures tell us that the purpose of life is God-realisation or union with God or realising that we are That. But they also tell us that God is unknowable and indescribable, and Swamiji says that if you want to become God, you must become like God. But how can we become like something that is indescribable and unknowable?

Understanding our predicament the scriptures will describe God in language that we can comprehend and in some way relate to. So they will say that God is truth, beauty and goodness. These are qualities that we can relate to and try to develop in ourselves. God is also all-pervasive. He is everything that is. he is omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. These too are words that in some way we can relate to, but still they are very abstract. It is rather difficult for us to relate to being omnipresent or omniscient or omnipotent.

But they also tell us that God wants nothing. Because he has everything, He desires nothing. So perhaps here we have a quality of God that we can really relate to. Therefore, the scriptures and the teachers tell us to be desireless, to want nothing, that the problem within us can be identified as “I want.” So, if we want to discover what it is that is keeping us from a desireless state—from being like God, so that we can become God—perhaps we can just watch our mind and see it saying “I want—I want this for my body. I want that for my mind and I want something else for my Spirit.” This is an area that we can work on directly.

And then we begin to understand why it is said that the whole basis of the Vedic religion is the word sacrifice. And, the Christian religion is based upon the sacrifice of Jesus, his giving up His life on the cross. So, perhaps the whole of the spiritual life gets down to a sacrificing of “I want.”

And what do I want? I want all comforts I can get. And so perhaps we should examine these desires and sacrifice the comforts that are not necessary for the keeping of our body. And what else do I want? I want to study, I want to be recognised, I want to be liked, I want my ego puffed up. And so perhaps we sacrifice those things.

And, most of all, I want to do what I want to do. I want to sleep in the morning or I want to do my own routine. Therefore, I don’t want to sacrifice that and do something for the good of the whole or the ashram by attending morning meditation. I have my routine at night. I have what I want to do. I don’t want to sacrifice that. We’re missing the whole point.

The whole point of the spiritual life is to sacrifice what we want to do. And the place to start is right where we are. We sacrifice for something larger than ourselves. A mother instinctively does this for a child. A person working in a business, if they’re wise, will instinctively do this. They will sacrifice their personal convenience for the welfare of the business or the whole. The whole basis of being a good citizen of a country is to sacrifice your own selfishness for the good of the country. So here in an ashram we are given very practical opportunities to advance spiritually. Thanks be to God and Gurudev it doesn’t have to be something very abstract, but something as simple as sacrificing our personal convenience for the good of the ashram as a whole.