Winning the Battle of Life with Joy

Watch this inspiring Sunday Service talk with Nayaswami Haridas, recorded at Ananda Village on June 8th 2025. Haridas emphasizes the importance of spiritual introspection, overcoming delusion, and striving for divine joy amidst life's challenges. He also highlights the need to recognize and resist the deceptive nature of the senses, urging listeners to seek lasting happiness in the soul rather than fleeting pleasures. A story about Yogananda's interaction with a young couple serves as a cautionary tale about how easily worldly concerns can overshadow spiritual aspirations. The core message revolves around the idea that falling on the spiritual path is inevitable, but the key is to quickly get back up, correct oneself, and maintain a vibrant connection with the spiritual community. Nayaswami Haridas encourages listeners to embrace the challenges as part of the journey towards enlightenment, emphasizing the importance of attunement, compassion for one's karmas, and the ultimate joy that awaits those who persevere. The talk concludes with a song about inner freedom and seeking divine guidance. The reading for this week from Swami Kriyananda's book Rays of the One Light is Why Do Devotees Fall? Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within. The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda. An endlessly fascinating question is, Why did Judas fall after receiving the extraordinary blessing of being accepted into the inner circle of Jesus Christ’s disciples? For Judas was one of the twelve apostles. Yet he be-trayed Jesus, and earned for himself the opprobrium of Christendom for all futurity for his sin. We find Judas reprimanding Jesus just days before that betrayal. Jesus, aware that his disciples would soon be facing, with his death, the supreme tragedy of their lives, allowed Mary to express her devotion by anointing his feet with costly ointment. This act of “wanton waste,” as Judas saw it, awakened indignation in that disciple. “Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?” This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and kept the purse, and bare what was put therein. Then said Jesus, “Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you: but me ye have not always.” Doubt not the power of delusion. Respect it – indeed, fear it, though not in the sense of cowering before it. For, as Yogananda said, “One is not safe until he attains nirbikalpa samadhi – the state of final union with God.” Judas, through attachment to money, opened his consciousness to subtle influences, which may be called satanic, that drew his thoughts toward other related attitudes: the importance of worldly power, for instance, and of worldly influence. The Bhagavad Gita gives a graphic explanation of how easily the mind can be drawn downward, once it begins to feed on wrong attitudes. In the second Chapter, Sri Krishna states: If one ponders on sense objects, there springs up attraction to them. From attraction grows desire. Desire, impatient for fulfillment, flames to anger. From anger there arises infatuation (the delusion that one object alone is worth clinging to, to the exclusion of all others). From infatuation ensues forgetfulness of the higher Self. From forgetfulness of the Self follows degeneration of the discriminative faculty. And when discrimination is lost, there follows the annihilation of one’s spiritual life. “At the first thought of delusion,” Paramhansa Yogananda said, “that is the time to stop it.” Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.