Spiritual Awakening: You Cannot Reach the Moon with a Stepladder
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Spiritual Awakening: Must We Progress Step by Step?
You Cannot Reach the Moon with a Stepladder
Must we climb toward spiritual awakening step by step, measuring every bit of progress? In this satsang, Hans Yoganand ji turns the question around: since God is infinite, no ladder truly brings us closer to him. What can grow is our presence in the present moment, until the awareness of Grace, first lived like a dotted line, becomes continuous from waking to sleeping. An invitation to stop counting our progress and to live spiritual realization here and now, with every breath.
On The Spiritual Path, why should you follow a linear approach to realization? No one is forcing you to. Of course, every achievement, professional or material for example, goes through stages. So does spiritual awakening; its stages are very well described in various scholarly commentaries, spiritual teachings and ancient books.
There are certainly different states of consciousness. But why should you remain in a linear, time-bound unfolding of realization? These states are lived in the moment; they are not a change of paradigm, they are an intensification.
You already know that essential happiness is found in the moment. If you want to be in the moment, this rules out the principle of a linear, time-bound progression, without ruling out the notion of stages. It is not time that passes; it is we who drift away from the moment. Time is not a duration but a distance: the distance that separates us from the present.
So what does it mean to realize? If you set out to build a monument out of matchsticks, its realization is complete the moment you place the last matchstick. Then you can say: I have realized this monument. But what can be realized, what we live this sadhana for, this spiritual life we have chosen, is the awareness of Grace in the moment, endlessly renewed.
This is what you want, and it depends on you. But I cannot know your personal motivation. Why do you want to realize? What do you put into the word realization? I can tell you what I put into it: I put the word “reality”.
I tell you that to realize is to bring into the realm of facts what we perceive, what we receive, what comes to us from our innermost depths, from consciousness, through the Observance of the sadhana: the practice of meditation, service and satsang, and respect for the angas.
From the moment you see light within you and it gives you clear sight, when you hear sounds within you that give you love, when you feel the ineffable peace of the Holy-Name, the enchanting fragrance of the nectar, the love of God that you return to him like a mirror, all this influences your everyday life. You can make it your guide for living.
Everyday life can be, from waking to sleeping, like a painting, a blank canvas to which you give the colors you have found on your palette, within you: the color of peace, of love, of trust, of faith, of devotion. Then you do things, all things, with devotion, with love.
What does this give you? I would like to answer that it is up to you to give yourself. But it is natural to want to receive God’s love, especially when we need it so much. And besides, God does not need our love.
You need, we all need, so much of his love, of this inner peace, this serenity, this reassurance, this truth, of the meaning it gives our lives, that we are truly in a position to receive; and that is not a bad thing. Giving yourself to a sadhana does not, of course, exclude being open to Grace, quite the contrary!
Realization is not something that is built. It is not as if, after six months, you were at 2% Realization, after one year at 6%, after a year and a half at 10%, after two years at 15%, and so on. That is not how it works.
You realize in the moment. In the moment. And when this moment never stops being renewed, from waking to sleeping, then it is no longer merely realizing: it is Realization, sahaja-samadhi. It is not a more intense state than the others; it is awareness of the present that has become continuous.
It is not as if you could tell yourself: “I’ve done my part today, tomorrow I’ll realize other things,” and then, the next day, pick up where you left off to continue your linear progression.
Do not confuse what you have understood intellectually with what you have realized in practice.
You realize, you make God’s love real in your life. Your life is like a sponge overflowing with God’s love, and that is something you do not have to build; it does not belong to you.
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You know, God is not a person, let me remind you. I am not speaking of the God of religions or the God of human concepts; I am speaking of the source of everything, of the eternal. God is infinite in space and in time. He is infinite. And yet he is not the sum of physical forces without consciousness.
I know he is not a person, but I also know that he is love and that he regards every creature as a father regards his children. It is paradoxical, incomprehensible; but there are so many incomprehensible things, and that does not make them impossible. Our relationship with God belongs to lived experience, not to reflection.
So how do you expect to evolve toward the infinite? How do you expect to move toward the infinite? Imagine: you are on Earth, you look at the Moon and you say: “I am going to evolve toward the Moon.” So you take a stepladder, you sit on its top platform and you say: “I have come closer to the Moon.”
Then you take a double ladder, you climb to the top and you say: “I have come even closer to the Moon.” Then you take a fire ladder, you climb all the way up and you say: “I have come closer still to the Moon.”
Yes, you have come closer to the Moon, but so little that it is not even worth mentioning! What difference is there between being at the top of a fire ladder and standing on a stepladder?
God is infinite; you cannot progress toward him. The distance that separates you from him does not shrink. But the distance that separates you from the present can fall to zero, with every breath; and it is in the present that God becomes real. So you do not have to progress, you have to realize, to say to yourself: “Good heavens, of course! God exists and his love is within me! And I can receive it when I open myself to him.”
Opening yourself to him: that is all there is to realize, nothing else. And this is realized by mastering your mind. The more you master your mind, the more you realize that you are not your mind, and therefore that you are something else. This something else that you are, which is not your mind, is you, the real you: the soul. It is the pure soul that draws closer to God, not the mind.
The Observance of the sadhana is not there to bring the mind closer to God. It is there so that you can tell the difference between yourself and the mind, and so that you can turn toward God.
If it is your mind that you turn toward God, the mind being blind, you will not see him. It is you who must turn, not the mind; then you will have eyes to see and ears to hear, you will be able to see and hear God and go toward him. But you must truly take command of your mind. And how can you master it?
It is not the Holy-Name alone that will master your mind; it is you, and you have the tools to do it. These tools are given to you by Grace, but it is up to you to use them. It is your practice, moment after moment, that allows you to master your mind.
What does “mastering the mind” mean? It also means not giving in to all its whims, and giving priority in life to reason rather than passion, to need rather than desire.
Do not believe everything that is said in your head; do not analyze your progress. Do not analyze The Path. Plenty of books have been written for that; they can inspire you to practice, but that is all they can do. They cannot master your mind. Neither can this satsang, for that matter.
You know, a string of concepts, even coherent ones, does not make a line of reasoning. To realize, you simply have to integrate into your life the spiritual virtues that emerge through Observance, and this is not a matter of linear, time-bound progression. It is in every moment, with every breath, that you can be aware of Grace.
With each cycle, each inhalation, each exhalation, you have the choice to be in the truth or not, in the moment or not; to think or simply to meditate. When you use the moment, that is, the breath, to be in the breath and aware of what it contains, then you are fully realizing. And when you forget, because you got distracted, because you are thinking of something else, or because circumstances, your duties and your obligations prevent you, it does not matter: you will start again.
What matters is not to forget to come back, to come back, and to come back again. Every time you come back to the Holy-Name, you come back to the truth and you master the mind. Each return is whole; it does not add to the previous one, it does not accumulate.
In the beginning, awareness of the present alternates with the confusion of the mind. Then, over time, you are more and more often in the Holy-Name, and for longer and longer each time. Your day becomes less and less a dotted line and more and more a continuous one. When this continuity is no longer interrupted, from waking to sleeping, that is Realization.
Mastering the mind also means mastering your desires, your emotions, your melancholy. That does not mean you have to live the life of an anchorite, a hermit or a monk. You can perfectly well have wants and enjoy yourself! That is not the point. I am talking about constancy, regularity; but any steam locomotive engineer knew that you have to let off steam from time to time so as not to destroy the machine.
For an Observant of The Path, letting off steam means relaxing and enjoying yourself. And a pleasure lived with awareness can, in its own way, become an expression of Bhakti.
Spiritual life is not a life of sad, barren asceticism. Remember that the things that matter are lived in the moment, and that at every moment, with every breath, you have the possibility of being aware of them or not.
If you have any questions, please write here: madhyama.marga@gmail.com
Originally published at https://observance.over-blog.com on September 26, 2026.
