In one of his morning talks here, Swamiji quoted Gurudev as frequently saying: “Examine always your hidden motives.” And surely this is very good advice to us. We should be constantly examining our hidden motives for what we say and what we do. And one of the motives that we should be very sure of is why we are here.

If we examine our motives and discover that basically we came here because we felt that this would be a better type of life to live than we were previously living, or that we came here so that we would have a better opportunity to worship god, and we find that indeed we are getting that opportunity—that our life is better than it was back home—then we can be quite content and carry on. But if we protest that “No, no, I came here not just to worship god, but to find God, to realise God,” then perhaps we have to ask ourselves the question whether or not we are doing those things that are necessary to accomplish our purpose.

We love to quote the story of Gurudev standing in the cold Ganga hour by hour doing japa or how Mira and the other saints had to suffer. But somehow we don’t think that that applies to us. We feel that we have come to an ashram and somehow that we can continue to lead a worldly type of comfortable life here and still realise God. As Swamiji says, “Perhaps for one in a million this is possible”; but he adds: “You should not think that you are that one in a million.”

When I first came to the ashram, Swamiji used to sit in a chair. Then one day I noticed he was sitting on the floor and the chair was gone. Another thing I noticed was that he always seemed to go to Europe during the cold winter and be in India in the hot summer. Now, any person looking after their comfort would do just the opposite. They would go to the West in the pleasant summer and be in India in the pleasant winter. And one day he ordered that the comfortable cushion where was to be taken away and replaced with a hard board with just a towel over it.

Constantly, even at his age, he does things that are a discipline, that make life more difficult for him rather than easier. He is basically a night person, but then he took on the discipline of being here every morning when he is in the ashram. He is constantly pushing against himself.

We have got to recognise that the ego only wants comfort. Gurudev said: “Man is a comfort-loving animal.” And the ego will never want anything except comfort, and the ego does not want God-realisation. What has been called to the spiritual life in us is the Spirit. It is the Spirit that wants to be free. It wants to be free of this comfort loving ego, this ego that only wants what it wants.

But unless we recognise that, that it is we the Spirit that wants to be free of the ego, we will continue to identify with the ego and we will continue to think that our comfort and convenience is more important than anything else. We will even think that it is the ego that wants to be free, whereas it our actual bondage.

So Gurudev has called us to examine always our hidden motives. The very least we can do is to recognise what our position is. Once we have done that then we can make a decision as to how we want to live our spiritual life.