This was so obviously another one of Swamiji's jokes.

You wanted to be The Quiet Girl in the Back of the Temple? Well, guess what...

But this is what always happens at the Ashram. You make some big grandiose decision about what you need to do, or who you need to be, and then circumstances arise that immediately reveal to you how little you understood about yourself. I don't know how many times Swamiji said it during his lifetime, and I don't know how many more times my Guru has repeated it since his death, but it seems I have not quite yet absorbed the truth of their most insistent statement:

"God dwells within you, as you."

AS you.

If there is one holy truth of this Yoga, that line encapsulates it. God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn't interested in watching you enact some per-formance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our in-dividuality. This is a classic example of what they call in the East "wrong-thinking." Swamiji used to say that every day renunciants find something new to renounce, but it is usually de-pression, not peace, that they attain. Constantly he was teaching that austerity and renunci-ation—just for their own sake—are not what you need. To know God, you need only to re-nounce one thing—your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.