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Religion and Spirituality
Religion and Spirituality by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 9 June 2013 13:50
Religion and spirituality are the two defining factors in the determination of the higher values of life. These two functions of the inner call of a human being correspond to life in the world and life in God. The relationship between the world and God is also the relationship between religion and spirituality. It is said that God manifested Himself as the world. Then, equally, we may say that spirituality manifests itself as religion. Here we come face-to-face with the necessity to describe the characteristics of God. It is generally believed that God is all-pervading, all-knowing and all-powerful. But these three features usually associated with God are connected with space and objects in time; while space, time and objects are subsequent to God’s Original Being prior to creation. This would mean that no quality or attribute can be associated with God, even with the farthest stretch of one’s imagination. Nevertheless, it should be accepted that every conceivable quality or character should have its potential existence in God Himself. Or, else, from where did these qualities arise? Here we have a hint at the nature of religion and the nature of spirituality.
In India there is a discipline prescribed for the gradual evolution of the human individual by stages of (1) education, (2) adjustment of oneself with the demands of natural and social living and, (3) an austere detachment from the usual entanglements in life and (4) final rootedness of oneself in God. This last mentioned stage is known as Sannyasa and the first two stages are the religious disciplines preparing a person for the third and the fourth stages.
Religion has its various restrictions imposed on a person, keeping all human activity confined to specific areas of living with its several do’s and don’ts – ‘do this’ and ‘do not do that’. There cannot be any religion without these two mandates imposed on man. People in the first two stages of life mentioned above are placed under an obligation to follow these dos and don’ts of religion in social behaviour, in personal conduct and dealings with people in any manner whatsoever. Every religion has these ordinances defining the duties, which are religious, whether in the form of ritual, worship, or pilgrimage and even in diet daily ablution, and an exclusive literal devotion to the word of the scripture of the religion. These restrictions are lifted in the third stage where the life of a person is mainly an internal operation of thought, feeling and understanding and not connected with human society in any way.
Hindu codes of conduct called Smritis have often stuck vehemently to their promulgation of the superiority of the Brahmin (Brahmana) giving lesser importance to the Kshatriya, the Vaishya and the Shudra, a classification characteristic specially to the Hindu religion. As such, the Smritis and scriptures of that kind do not consider people who are not Brahmins as sacred and pure. Foreigners were called Yavanas and Mlecchas, which words mean infidels. Thus, travel to the land of these infidels was considered as contaminating the purity of the Brahmin, and one who took to such foreign travels, across the seas, was debarred from the community of Brahmins.
But, the Sannyasin is an Atyashramin, that is, transcending the caste system, because the Sannyasin transcends social law, and he was even considered to have undergone civil death. He is not anymore one of the four castes. He is rooted in God and he is a man of God and he has no restrictions even as God Himself has no restrictions.
The point is then that those who have a hesitation to feel that they are rooted in God have to follow these rules, but if the Sannyasin is sure that he is fixed in God-consciousness, no rules apply to him. He is free in every way. While the caste system was originally evolved for the necessary classification of human duty in order to preserve the organic stability of society, its original meaning and its philosophical foundation was forgotten through the passage of time, and bigotry and fanaticism took its place through the preponderance of egoism, greed and hatred, contrary to the practice of true religion as a social expression of inner spiritual aspiration for a gradual ascent, by stages, to God Almighty.
Vidura, famous in the Mahabharata, was born of a Shudra woman. But he had the power to summon the son of Brahma, from Brahmaloka, by mere thought. Which orthodox Brahmin can achieve this astounding feat?
It is, therefore, necessary for everyone to have consideration for the facts of world-unity and goodwill, Sarvabhuta-hita, as the great Lord mentions in the Bhagavadgita. Justice is more than law. No one’s body is by itself a Brahmin, because it is constituted of the five gross elements – earth, water, fire, air and ether. Else, it would be a sin on the part of a son to consign to flames the lifeless body of a Brahmin father.
It is therefore, not proper to victimise a colleague by an action plan of any religious community wedded to fundamentalist doctrines.
Through the process of evolution, the world has now become a global village. Sun, moon, stars and the galaxies operate in a cosmic co-operative spirit. The air that we breathe, moving everywhere freely, has no nationality, no ethnic distinction. We live by the free gift of Nature. Any assertion of isolated individuality is not in consonance with the way the Universe is operating. Events have cosmic connotations. Creation is one, even as God is One.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Purity
Purity by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Saturday 8 June 2013 20:44
Purity is achieved by freedom from desire, and desire should be distinguishedfrom necessity. When one is hungry, one should eat, when one is thirsty oneshould drink, when one is fatigued, one should sleep. These absolutenecessities cannot be called desires because without these necessities onecannot even survive.
Desire is a destructive form of longing which innervates the whole system,longing for things which are not necessary for the maintenance of the body.Every kind of luxury should be considered as desire. One has to judge foroneself whether this particular thing is absolutely necessary, or one can becomfortable even without that. Each one is one’s own judge. If one cancomfortably live happily without certain things, asking for those things onceagain is called desire. It will disturb the mind.
There are levels of desire, of a lower category and a higher category, etc. Youmay feel like having a cup of tea. It is a minor desire; have it. You may liketo go for a walk – go, go for a walk. Any object that brings about tumult inthe emotion, that is an object of desire by which you either want it intenselyor hate it intensely. Intense wanting and intense hating will affect theemotions. The test of good health is freedom from emotion, correctunderstanding without any kind of ebullition, burning desire of any kind. Thisis briefly the definition of desire.
There are two kinds of desires, anabolic and catabolic. Anabolic desires areconstructive, helpful and necessary for maintaining health and peace of mind.Catabolic desires are destructive in their nature. They throw the energy out.Any procedure by which we can conserve our energy is anabolic. Any process bywhich we deplete our energy and then become weak, that is catabolic. One mustbe able to very carefully distinguish between one and the other. Understandingis the judge, it is called Viveka-Shakti, capacity to distinguish between whatis absolutely essential for living a normal life and what is irrelevant. Thisis a preliminary definition to the question “What is purity?”
So purity is not like an apple that falls from a tree; it has shades of definition.You will not find any such clear description of this subject in any book. Eachone has to use one’s common sense.
It is necessary to save life. Suppose you find a snake is wriggling, encircledby forest fire. You would like to save it, but you do not go and catch hold ofits neck. So even a good desire like wanting to save the snake should not befulfilled in a reckless way. People generally take a long stick and throw itlike this, etc. etc.
There are desires of a different type – like sexual desire. It is neither goodnor bad, like fire. Do you consider fire as a good thing or a bad thing? Youcannot say anything about it. It can destroy or it can cook your food. So,likewise, sexual desire is a conservative process of maintaining a balance inthe system, it is not capable of definition in a cut-and-dried manner. It is,as any desire is, relative to circumstance. But if it is a passion, you maydistinguish between desire and passion. Passion is voluptuous, tumult-like, andmakes one sick afterwards. Great discrimination has to be exercised here.
There is a famous passage called Kama Gita in the Mahabharata. The desire says,”People try to conquer me, but they do not know that even the desire to conquerme is a desire, they don’t understand that, so I am behind all theirattempts.”
Desire for God sublimates all other mortal desires. The higher absorbs thelower, the lower should be transmuted to the higher by meditation.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Attainment of Liberation
The Attainment of Liberation by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Friday 7 June 2013 12:50
(This discourse appeared in the January 2002 issue of The Divine Life Magazine and is the first part of Chapter 6 of The Realisation of the Absolute.)
The Nature of Sadyo-Moksha
All endeavours aim at the common ideal of the perpetual abolition of sorrow and the experience of unending bliss. Bliss is only in the Infinite and sorrow is only in the finite. There is no bliss in the finite, and no sorrow in the Infinite. Therefore, the attainment of the Infinite Life is the supreme purpose of finite life. Knowledge and meditation have both their dear aim in the realisation of the Absolute. Moksha is the highest exaltation of the self in its pristine nature of supreme perfection. Emancipation is the Consciousness of the Reality not becoming something which previously did not exist not travelling to another world of greater joy. It is the knowledge of eternal existence, the awareness of the essential nature of Pure Being. It is the Freedom attained by knowing that we are always free. Knowledge is not merely the cause for freedom’ it is itself freedom. Moksha consists in Jnana (Knowledge) and is not the effect or product of Jnana. Jnana is Existence itself, and hence it cannot be a means to attain Jnana of Existence. which is Moksha, as a thing does not attain itself. Chit is the same as Sat. To be what is, is Moksha. It is to realise one’s Self, to be Oneself, and to be Oneself is to be the All.
“There is no consciousness after death (of individuality),” says Yajnavalkya. Since Consciousness alone is the entirety of being, there is no consciousness of anything objective in the highest state. It is the Fullness of Perfect Existence. It is, but is not anything; it sees, but sees not anything; it hears, but hears not anything; it knows, but knows not anything. It does not go to where it was not, it does not get what it did not have. Even the expression “It knew only itself” (Brih. Up., I. 4. 10) is an understatement of Truth, for it implies self-consciousness which is the characteristic of Ishvara and not Brahman. Brahman does not know, for it is knowledge; It does not enjoy, for it is enjoyment; It is not “existent” but “existence”. It is non-material, has no contact with any objective being. “It eats nothing; no one eats it”. It is the supreme “incorporeal which pain and pleasure do not touch.” The realisation of the Self is in a way like the shining of the sun when the clouds no more cover him. It is the regaining of originality in the absolute sense. It is “quenching the fire of death with the water of knowledge” (Brih. Up., III. 2. 11). It is deathless impersonality of conscious nature, not merely living as an eternal person. A person, even the absolute person (Ishvara), is non-eternal. No real change takes place in the realisation of Truth, but it appears to be all change! “Though the Full may be taken out from the Full, the Full alone remains without change”. Even the utter extinction of personality does not involve the least transformation in true existence. It is the simple knowing, the great knowing, so mysterious and complicated, the ever unsolved problem, the only problem of the whole universe. And yet, it is the only Truth to the Knower. The curious riddle, somehow, makes one feel that. truly, nothing happens in Infinity, though worlds may seem to roll in it. That which is so simply said as “Existence-Consciousness” and which is so easy to understand, is, after all, a hard nut to crack – never understood, never known, never realised by any individual, the supreme identity of the greatest positivity and the greatest negation in one. The Absolute is really supra-relative, supra-mental, supra-rational. Whatever is spoken or thought is not Truth as it is. Truth is the union of the cosmic thinker and the cosmic thinking. There is no separate object of this thinking, nothing that is thought of here, for thinking itself is the object of thinking, thought thinks itself, all objects are mere processes of cosmic thinking, nothing real in themselves. Thought and its object, knowledge and the known, seeing and the seen, relation and the object related to, mind and the universe, are identical with the Universal Essence. The conscious transcending of the successive double relation in the cosmos, of the thinker who is identical with the thinking, and of the thinking which is identical with that which is thought of, is Liberation. The universe has no reality independent of its Universal Knower. The original delusion of the difference between the thinker and the thinking is greater than and is the cause of the secondary delusion of the difference between the thinking and the thought of. There is the thinking because there is the thinker; there is the thought-of because there is the thinking. The thinking is the object of the thinker; the thought-of is the object of the thinking. Egoism or dualityconsciousness and the world or multiplicity-consciousness are the respective effects of the mistake that the object is independent of and different from the subject in both these cases. Samsara is the knower-knowledge-known-relationship. But it must however be remembered here that the distinction between the thinker and the thinking and that between the thinking and the thought-of is not valid to the Cosmic Consciousness of Ishvara. This distinction is superimposed by the individual on Ishvara when it perceives, as an individual knower, its own distinctness and the variety of world-manifestation. Relations are meaningful to the individual alone and not to the Universal Being. These distinctions are present even in the superhuman individuals, even in those who have reached Brahmaloka or the subtlest possible state which is within the jurisdiction of individualistic consciousness. That which is above all distinctions and relations is Brahman, the knowledge of which is neither thinking nor sleeping. This is that which is asserted through endless denials, impossible to describe, impossible to imagine, nothing, everything! The only definition of the nature of Reality is perhaps “That which is not anything, but not nothing, that which is everything, and knows nothing but itself”. That is Brahman! Therefore, bondage and liberation are only a matter of forgetfulness and awareness of fact, respectively, and not a change in being. The complete transcendence of one’s individuality is at once the realisation of the Absolute. The moment the Jiva is negated, the cosmic play is explained, and the cosmos and Ishvara sink into Brahman.
Moksha is neither a mass of consciousness nor self-consciousness. It is the very life and order of the universe, ever present, unchanging. It transcends even the sense of immortality which, also, is conceptual. The Light of the Absolute puts an end to all relative existence, and the world does not exist even as a remembrance. There is no such thing as inert, inanimate, dead matter or blind force. It is all Supreme Force, Knowledge and Bliss without motion of mind. There are no planes of existence, no states of- consciousness, no degrees of reality. This is the most blessed and supreme state of absolute freedom and conscious eternal life, not merely a conviction but actual being. It is the awful grandeur of the utter negation of limitation and experience of Infinitude, not mere continued personal life. It is the complete dissolution of thought in simple existence, which is the mightiest nothing! It is an immediate here and now of spacelessness and timelessness, the inexpressible, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond knowledge and ignorance, beyond life and death, beyond all that is beyond! It is the fullest Reality, the completest Consciousness, the immensest Power, the intensest Bliss. Truth, knowledge, power, happiness and immortality are its shadows. Unseen, transcendent, uninferable, unthinkable, ununderstandable, indescribable, imperishable, the loftiest, the deepest, the Truth, the Great – That is the Absolute. The light of limitless number of suns is darkness in its presence. It oversteps the boundaries of being, and nullifies all ideas of existence. It is the Giant-Spirit which swallows up the mind and the ego and wipes out the individual consciousness to the very extreme. It is the Thunder that breaks the heart of the universe, the Lightning that fuses all senses of empirical reality. The bubble bursts into the ocean and the river enters the sea! The soul merges into the extremely Real.
The Grandeur of the Absolute is grander than all other grandeur. It is the crowning edifice of truth and glory. Nothing is beyond That. It is neither form, nor content, nor existent. The soul sinks into It by an experience of all-fullness – neither essence, nor kingdom, nor wisdom, neither equal nor unequal, neither static nor moving, neither sitting nor resting, neither one nor two, neither true nor false, neither this-ness nor that-ness, nothing known to us, nothing known to any existent being. It has no name, there is no definition of It! It is That which is. It is not love, not grace, not world, not soul, not god, not freedom, not light, for all these are relative conceptions. It is not Satchidananda, which is only an ideal ‘other’ of what we here experience. Satchidananda is only the logical highest, a mere intellectual prop. Reality is beyond Satchidananda, also. It is Itself, the eternal sun that shines in the infinite sky of the absolute world! It transcends cosmic consciousness. It is the supra-essential essence. Eternity and Infinity embrace one another to form Its Centre of Experience. It is an Ocean that sweeps away the earth and the heaven and the netherland. Sun, moon and stars are dissolved in It. Brahma, Vishnu and Siva vanish into It. It is the Life of life, Wisdom of wisdom, Joy of joy, Power of power, Real of real, Essence of essence. Birthlessness and deathlessness float in It like ripples. It is the supreme Death of all, and yet the highest peak of real Life. The totality of all the joys of the universe is merely a distorted fragment of That Supreme. It puts an end to the vicious circle of transmigratory life.
The Upanishads have left no stone unturned in attempting to give the best expression to the majestic Absolute-Experience:
“The knower of the Self crosses beyond sorrow.” “He who knows that Supreme Brahman becomes Brahman Itself.” “The knower of Brahman attains the Highest.” “One who is established in Brahman reaches Immortality.” “He returns not again, he returns not again.”
“By knowing Him alone one goes to That which is beyond death. By knowing the Supreme Being, the wise one casts off both joy and sorrow. They who see Him, the Self-Existent – they, and no others, have eternal peace. Of him, whose desires are completely satisfied, who is totally perfected, all desires dissolve themselves here itself. The liberated one becomes onefold, threefold, fivefold, sevenfold, ninefold, elevenfold, hundred-and-elevenfold, twentythousandfold! He goes to the other shore of darkness. That state is ever illumined, it is always day there. Time, age and death, sorrow, merit and demerit do not go there. Fearless is the state of the Bliss of Brahman. Even the gods fear him, even Indra and Prajapati cannot obstruct him – he becomes the Self-Emperor. The knot of the heart is broken, all doubts are rent asunder, and all actions perish, when That is seen. which is the Highest and the Deepest. His vital-spirits do not depart, they are gathered up, here itself. Being Brahman already, he becomes Brahman Itself. He is the maker of everything, he is the creator of all, the universe is his, he himself is the universe. This is the supreme treasure. The freed souls enter into the All, they enter into Brahman, they are liberated beyond mortal nature. The whole constitution of individuality becomes unified in the Supreme Imperishable. As rivers enter the ocean, leaving name and form, so the wise one, liberated from name and form, reaches the Transcendental Divine Being. Thus is Immortality.”
This is Immediate Liberation (Sadyomukti), the instantaneous experience of the Absolute through the sudden destruction of the fabric of personality built by Avidya, Kama and Karma. Karma is the child of Kama which is never fulfilled until its source, Avidya, is destroyed through the realisation of Brahman which is unsurpassed Perfection. How can, by knowing one thing, another thing be attained? The attainment and the knowledge here are the same, self-identical. The Supreme Brahman is the All.
Sadyomukti is the processless immediate experience of Brahman, spaceless and timeless, on account of one’s habituation to the non-dual knowledge of the Self. It is given to a very few to realise Brahman in this way, for most of the aspirants cannot proceed with their meditations without some kind of objective content in their consciousness. The quick and sudden illumination, which Sadyomukti is, is a very unique experience, and it puts an end to the relative notions of Ishvara, Jiva and Jagat. In this, there is neither the experience of the degrees of phenomena nor resting in the region of Ishvara or Brahmaloka after being freed. It is at once being Brahman.
Progressive Salvation
There are in the Upanishads intimations of Krama-Mukti or the progressive process of the liberation of the soul. The soul reaches the Karya-Brahman or Parameshwara who transcends even the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. This Great Lord of the universe is also called “Parama-Purusha,” “Uttama-Purusha” or “Purushottama”. He is the Absolute Individual, the Supreme Brahman manifested as the Cause of the origin, the sustenance and the dissolution of the universe. The Upanishads are emphatic in their statements that one who reaches through unselfish meditation and knowledge this Supreme Cause does not return to the mortal coil, but proceeds further to the Absolute Reality. The Mundaka Upanishad says that the sages in the world of Brahma are liberated beyond death in the end of time. Those who attain the world of the Karya-Brahman remain there until the end of the universe, enjoying the effects of their “Satyakamas” and “Satyasankalpas”, the fruits of their desires and willings based on Truth. Whatever they wish arises then and there instantaneously, for they are in harmony with the Universal Being. They enjoy the highest approximation to the bliss of the Lord of the universe. Their desires are not like those of the mortals of the Samsara, for, the latter’s desires are flames of morbid passions based on untruth and arising out of intense selfishness and egoism mostly set in opposition to the other individuals of the universe, whereas the former’s desires are absolute truth-willings which are attuned to the law of the God of the universe, in spite of the individualities maintained by them there. Practically the desire of the liberated soul is no desire at all in the general sense, for it is not the effect of Avidya (mixture of deluded passion and darkness) but of Maya (light of truth and knowledge). The desire of one liberated soul cannot be against that of another, for they all are co-existent with the one God; but the desires of one man are mostly against those of others, for they all are dissipated and cut off one from another by the separative egos rooted in the darkness of Avidya. The liberated souls think and work through the higher thought of the spiritual nature, not through the mind and sense-organs of the lower nature. They breathe the universal life and exist as partakers of the joy of the Master of the universe. They have the unceasing immediacy of the consciousness of everything, an awareness of the inmost objective essences of the complete universe. Their experiences are, no doubt, objective, they being not identical with the Absolute, but they can have an entire knowledge of the universe through self-identification with anything, at any time, though this is different from the simultaneous Cosmic Consciousness of God or Ishvara. But they are not opposed to the being of God, they work as God works, live as God lives, will as God wills, though all this happens spontaneously there. They are the sportive forms of the Absolute in itself. They want nothing; they are satisfied with themselves. They do not crave for an entity second to themselves, they desire only themselves, and even when they enjoy the objects of the universe, they do so with an all-engulfing unity-consciousness. They are like several circles with a common centre and radii of the same length, but comprehended within the Great Circle of the Infinite. The differences among these souls are not detrimental to the Infinite, since they are attuned to it. However, even truth-willings and enjoyments with consciousness of identity of things cannot be taken as the highest Liberation, which is Brahmanubhava.
It is said that these souls enjoy all powers except those of universal creation, preservation and destruction, which belong to God alone, and that conflict of actions may arise if all are endowed with the same power. This statement can be intelligible only when the relation between God and the liberated souls is not one of identity but of difference. If Liberation means the highest Knowledge of God, then, to live in the same world as God’s, to live near to God, and to have a form similar to God’s, and yet to be different from God, can only be lesser than Liberation, because God is not one of many individuals, not a Samsari, but the only existing Absolute Individual, and to have any relation with Him is to know Him, and to know Him is to be one with Him, and to be one with Him is not to perceive duality. The knowledge of God or Ishvara, which these souls in Brahmaloka on the path of Krama-Mukti have, is only an approximation to Ishvara-Consciousness, but is not the same as that. Hence these souls are neither omnipotent nor omniscient, though they have full freedom as far as their enjoyments within their circles are concerned. There does not arise the question of the conflict that may crop up among the liberated souls endowed with the power of creation, preservation and destruction, if all souls are one with Ishvara. To be endowed with the same power and knowledge as God is to be non-different beings forming a One-Whole which is God. And, since no two individuals can have identical knowledge without themselves destroying their different forms and becoming one being, we are led to suppose a difference in experience among these souls. Further, when it is said that the liberated souls attain Absolute-Experience only at the end of the universe, it is implied that they cannot experience Absoluteness as long as Ishvara exists as a Self-conscious being, which means that they have still an objective experience and are not identical with Ishvara. Otherwise, there is no reason why they should retain their individualities until the end of the universe. The correct view, however, seems to be that all those who meditate on the Absolute Individual (God) through positive qualitative conceptions, rest in Him, who, in the end of time, winding up the space-time-universe which is His own body, dissolves Himself in the Conscious Power of the Absolute, which is itself non-different from the Absolute. These relatively liberated ones have their individualities not destroyed here but exist in the world of Ishvara, i.e., Ishvara is experienced by them not directly but as an objective conscious universe, of which they are integral aspects. This Self-Dissolution of God is, in some respects, similar to the deep sleep of the worldly individual, who also, in the end of the day, ending his body-consciousness, dissolves himself in the unconscious power based on the Atman, which is superimposed on the Atman. But the difference between the two dissolutions is that in the case of God, there is no further forced coming back to universe-consciousness, no subsequent dreaming and waking state, and there is Absolute-Experience; whereas, in the case of the worldly individual, there is forced coming back to body-consciousness, there is subsequent dreaming and waking state, and there is no Self-Experience. There are Kama and Karma in the individual because of Avidya in him, but in God there is Vidya, Universal Consciousness or Absolute Self-Consciousness alone, and hence, there are no concomitant Kama and Karma which are the causes of objective multiplicity-consciousness and the activity therefor. Desire and action in the individual are the outcome of the darkness of ignorance, but they do not exist in Vidya which is the light of knowledge. The souls who are in the World of Ishvara, or the Absolute-Individual, experience it as an Intelligence-World of Shuddha-Sattva corresponding to their own personalities made of the same substance. The soul is said to reach God through the passage of the sun (Mund. Up., I. 2. 11), and, thus, pass on to the Absolute. Anywise, the imaginary problem of the possibility of the multiple lordship of the liberated souls does not arise, any more than the possibility of the existence of many Absolutes and Eternities. When there is individuality there is no omniscience or omnipotence, and when there are these there is no individuality. If we are to be alive to the sentences which declare that the liberated soul “goes around laughing, sporting, enjoying with women and chariots and friends, not remembering the appendage of the body” (Chh. Up., VIII. 12. 3), we can be so only by convincing ourselves that this state cannot be that of the Consciousness of the Absolute, or that this may be the condition of the Jivanmukta who does mysterious and ununderstandable actions, and who, though he has no consciousness of his body, is yet made to animate his body through a slight trace of the existent pure egoism unconnected with spiritual consciousness. This is the remainder of that part of his Prarabdha-Karma which is unobstructive to Knowledge. The state of Jivanmukti has no connection with the physical body; it is a state of consciousness; so it can be experienced even when the physical body is dropped, i.e., even in Brahmaloka. The Jivanmukta of this physical world, with his physical body, too, is really in Brahmaloka in his consciousness, though the body is in this world. Those who have not attained Jivanmukti here and are not ready for Sadyo-Mukti immediately after the Prana stops functioning in the present physical body, attain this through Krama-Mukti after the death of the physical body. This shows that a Videhamukta is not one who exists in Brahmaloka but who has merged in the Absolute. Or, we have to make a theoretical distinction between two definitions of a Videhamukta – he who has an individuality either in a lower superhuman experience, or in Brahmaloka, and is on the verge of Absolute-Experience on the exhaustion of his Prarabdha which is the cause of his superhuman experience and his experience in Brahmaloka ( the arising from which is called the waking up of Brahma or Hiranyagarbha), and he who has actually merged in Brahman. In Brahmaloka the soul is like a perfect Jivanmukta of this world, and all its actions are spontaneous promptings of the pure Satsankalpas, and not conscious willings born of a deliberately egoistic personality. If we are to be consistent with the demands of Jivanmukti, we have to hold that even the Satyakamas and Satyasankalpas or desires and willings based on Truth in the liberated soul of the Brahmaloka are really not conscious actions but spontaneous outpourings of the remaining momentum of actions done prior to the rise of Self-Knowledge, which were non-obstructive to the rise of Knowledge. If we are to think that the acts of the soul in Brahmaloka are deliberately directed conscious ones, it would follow that they are not as evolved as Jivanmuktas who have no consciousness of individuality. The Prarabdha in the Jivanmukta is not experienced by his consciousness; it is not a content of the Absolute-Consciousness; it is existent only to the other ignorant Jivas who perceive the existence or the movements of his body.
There is also a passage (Chh. Up., VIII. 14) which speaks about the soul’s entering into Prajapati’s abode and assembly hall. The joy which the soul experiences in the consciousness of God is expressed in glowing terms. The Taittiriyopanishad (II. 1) says that the knower of Brahman simultaneously enjoys with Brahman-Consciousness all that he desires for. The difficulty that often hampers our understanding of the exact nature of the different stages in the process of progressive salvation is increased by the fact that the Upanishads are rarely explicit about them, and find joy in giving intimations of immortality even in regard to a state which we must very much hesitate to take as the highest, if we are to use any reason in our understandings and judgments. Many a time, one is at a loss to know whether the Upanishads are giving a metaphorical exclamation of the Experience of the Absolute, or a real description of the state of one in Brahmaloka on the way to Krama-Mukti. The instantaneous enjoyment of everything with the Absolute-Consciousness has to be construed as an intimation of Ishvara Himself, for the one in Brahmaloka cannot have a simultaneous experience of the entire existence; or it has to be taken to indicate a joyous outburst of Brahmanubhava.
However, one thing is certain, that the criterion of salvation lies in that
“By knowing God, there is a falling off of all fetters, distresses are destroyed, there is cessation of birth and death, there is breaking up of individuality (or bodily nature), there accrues universal lordship, one becomes absolute, and all desires are satisfied.” – Svet. Up. I. 11.
We cannot, with our intellects, understand how there can be wish and enjoyment when all desires are satisfied. It is said that “it is simple Lila” or sport of the Divine, which is not an explanation of the mystery, but an admission that man cannot know God’s ways. For us, even the least wish or action, howevermuch universal it may be, means a state below the Supreme Being. It is clear that all the various statements regarding the different experiences which the liberated soul is said to have must refer to an objective experience introduced in one or the other of the three stages of Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishvara, or to the realisation of Brahman itself. The Upanishads, however, use the word “Brahman” to mean any of the four, and it is this that does not allow us to have an adequate knowledge of what they actually hold to be the definite stages of Truth-realisation. To us it somehow appears that the main stages must be only four: Attainment of (1) universal objective multiplicity-consciousness, (2) universal subjective multiplicity-consciousness, (3) universal Self-consciousness, (4) Transcendental Experience. The Mandukyopanishad testifies to the existence of these four states. But the first three experiences are relative and seem to be existent only so long as one remains an experiencer with a touch of the spatial concept in the Universal. There cannot be any logical proof for the existence of these three objective states beyond an individualistic demand. As a later Vedantin has said, “Those dull-witted persons who are unable to realise the unconditioned Supreme Brahman are shown compassion by a description of the Qualified Brahman. When their mind is controlled through meditation on the Qualified Brahman, the One Being, free from all limitations reveals Itself.”
Jivanmukti
It is very difficult, from the statements of the Upanishads, to distinguish between which actually is the state of liberation while living in body and which is that of Absoluteness attained after the transcendence of the body. Often, they give the same description with reference to both. This only shows that the distinction between Jivanmukti and Videhamukti is relative and does not have much meaning in itself. The Mukta has no difference of any kind in himself. Jivanmukti is the highest spiritual experience by the individual when the mortal body is still hanging on due to the remainder of a little of Sattvika-Ahamkara or Prarabdha. In this condition the usual empirical functions of the mind cease, even this remainder of Prarabdha is not felt, and the mind takes the form of Shuddha-Sattva, the original nature of universal knowledge freed from the relations of space, time and cause. The Jivanmukta experiences his being the lord of all, the knower of all, the enjoyer of everything. The whole existence belongs to him; the entire universe is his body. He neither commands anybody, nor is he commanded by anybody. He is the absolute witness of his own glory, without terms to express it. He seems to simultaneously sink deep into and float on the ocean of the essence of being, with the feeling ‘I alone am’, or ‘I am all’. He breaks the boundaries of consciousness and steps into the bosom of Infinity. At times he seems to have a consciousness of relativity as a faint remembrance brought about by unfinished individualistic experience. He exclaims in joyous words:
“O, wonderful! O, wonderful! O, wonderful! I am food! I am food! I am food! I am a food-eater! I am a food-eater! I am a food-eater!….I am the first-born!…. Earlier than gods, I am the root of immortality!….I, who am food, eat the eater of food! I have overcome the whole universe!” – Taitt. Up., III. 10. 6.
“He is the (real) Brahmana, who, having known this Imperishable, leaves this world” (Brih. Up., III. 8. 10).
“He enjoys as the Lord of the universe.” He is the “Seer who sees no death, nor sickness, nor any distress, the Seer who sees only the All, and obtains the All entirely” (Chh. Up., VII. 26. 2). His enjoyment is in the Self, he sports with the Self, he has company of the Self, he has bliss in the Self, he is autonomous, he has limitless freedom in all the worlds. Everything proceeds for him from the Self. He has crossed the ocean of darkness.
“As the slough of a snake lies dead and cast off on an ant-hill, even so lies this body (of a Jivanmukta). But this incorporeal, immortal Life-Principle is Brahman alone, the Light alone.” – Brih. Up., IV.4.7.
“He does not desire, he has no desire, he is freed from desire, his desire is satisfied, his desire is the Self” (Brih. Up., IV.4.6).
“He is the greatest among the knowers of Brahman” (Mund. Up., II.1.4).
“Him these two do not overpower – neither the thought ‘therefore I did wrong’, nor the thought ‘therefore I did right’. He overcomes them both. Neither what he has done, nor what he has not done does affect him.” “This eternal greatness of the Brahmana is not increased or decreased by actions.” “He sees the Self in the Self and sees everything as the Self. Evil does not overcome him; on the other hand he overcomes all evil. Evil does not burn him; on the other hand he burns all evil” (Brih. Up., IV. 4. 22, 23 ).
The wise sage is silent and indifferent towards the play of life. No force on earth or in heaven can touch him. Even the gods can do nothing to him, for he is the Self of even the gods. He is the supreme master, the overlord of all. If he breathes, others shall breathe; if he stops breathing, others shall die. By his mere wish mountains shall be shattered, and oceans dry up. He is the God, none is superior to him. His wish is God’s wish and his being is God’s being.
“He who sees all beings in his very Self, and the Self in all beings – he is not averse to any thing. In whom, the wise one, all beings are just the Self, then what delusion, what sorrow is there for him, who sees Oneness (everywhere) ?” – Isha. Up., 6, 7.
The Jivanmukta is in the extreme condition of Jnana, the state of Self-absorption, non-related and Self-Identical. There is practically no difference between the highest Jivanmukti and Videhamukti, though in the former state the body is unconsciously made to linger on for a short time on account of the last failing momentum of the desires arisen in him before the time of Self-Experience. For all matters concerning life we need not make any distinction between the two conditions. The highest Jivanmukta does not feel that he has any body. Hence he is not in any way inferior to, or lower than, the Videhamukta. The distinction is made, not by the Mukta, but by the other ignorant people, who perceive the appearance or the disappearance of his body.
The Universe and the Liberated Self
Much has been said and written by speculative geniuses on the relation between the perfectly liberated soul and the universe. If liberation means the experience of the Infinite, the question of the liberated soul’s relation to the universe is a puerile one. It is like speculating over the relation of the sky to the sky. It is stated by some that the liberated condition need not annihilate the perception of plurality. If we say that the Absolute can perceive plurality, we go against all sense and reason. Or, can we hold that the liberated soul retains individuality? In that case, the liberated soul would become non-eternal, for all that is individual is a part of the process of the universe. Further, what do we mean by plurality? Plurality is the intervention of non-being or space between things. Then we have to say that the Absolute has internal differentiations and external relations, which would mar the indivisibleness and the secondlessness of the Absolute. No perception is possible without the intervention of non-being in undifferentiatedness. If the Self is the All, there cannot be non-Self in Self, and as long as there is perception of the non-Self, it cannot be the liberated state. Nor can we understand the argument that there can be any duty for the liberated soul. It is erroneous to believe that as long as all individuals are not liberated, no individual can have liberation. There is no intrinsic relation between the Karma of one individual and of another, except in the sense that there is a mutually determining cosmic relationship of all individuals so long as they live in particularised states of consciousness. When there is destruction of thought, there is annihilation of all forms. Forms cannot exist when there is no differentiation among them, and the differentiation of forms is the work of the cognizing consciousness. There cannot be objective cognition in the Absolute. It cannot be said that, because forms exist for others even though one individual may attain freedom, the freed soul can have objective dealings. There is no cogency in the statement that the liberated being can have any relation with any thing, for it transcends the cosmic relationship of created entities which flow into one another as reciprocally determining forces. As long as there is relation, there is some thing external to the Self, and as long as there is experience of something other than the self, there is no Absolute-Experience. The Absolute is not bound by the rules and regulations of the worlds and the thoughts of other individuals in any way. The fact that many others remain unliberated even when one soul is freed, does not compel the liberated one to have relations with others, for the simple reason that the liberated one is no other than the trans-cosmic Absolute. And, moreover, when the thinking process expires in the Absolute, there cannot be perception of other unredeemed individuals. We have no grounds to say that the form of the world exists after Self-realisation, for forms can exist only when existence is divided within itself. But this has no validity for the Absolute, which is Existence itself. Division creates individuality which is phenomenal.
So long as there is consciousness of the reality of an objective universe and the individuals, one cannot be said to be a liberated one, for he is, then, only another individual, however much superior he may be to others in the state of his consciousness. Liberation is experience of the highest Reality. He who perceives that there are others and they are unliberated, cannot be a liberated soul himself, for the liberated is one with the Absolute which is extra-relational. A liberated one does not think. He merely is. There can be no compromise with self-limitation in liberation, however slight it may be.
The liberated soul becomes the All. Experience of Pure Being is the criterion of liberation. The liberated soul itself becomes the One Self of all; how, then, can it have the consciousness of limitation or of the act of redeeming the unliberated? And, how, again, can an unredeemed soul redeem another unredeemed soul? The human mind is al ways obsessed by the delusion of the social bond that connects different individuals. It cannot think except in terms of society, family, relations, etc., connected with the separatist ego. He who is concerned with the world is only a magnified family man and is not free from the sense of separateness characterising mortal nature. Even several cultured thinkers have been limited by a humanitarian view of life. Their philosophies are consequently tainted by humanistic and social considerations. They are not dispassionate in their trying to understand the deeper truths, and are deceived by an inordinate love for the human being. The infection has led them even up to the dangerous point of attempting to argue that none can be liberated until social salvation is effected! This view is the outcome of the interference of materialism with spiritual absolutism. Man’s vision is so narrow that he is concerned merely with things that he sees. He fails to take an integral view of the essence of existence as a whole, because of his experience and reason being limited to empirical reality. To the Absolute, the world is not a historical process, but being. To the ignorant individual Samsara appears to be from eternity to eternity, an undivided super-rational appearance, though in the Absolute there is cessation of Samsara. Since different individuals are in different stages of evolution, and as also there can be nothing to prevent the entering of the soul into the Absolute on the rise of Knowledge, there cannot be any such thing as social salvation or ending of the historical process of the universe.
If the Absolute does not have any external or internal relation to itself, the liberated one cannot have any such relation to the universe, because the distinction of the individual and the universe is negated in the Absolute. It is illogical to say, at the same time, that “Liberation means Absolute-Experience” and that “the liberated soul is concerned with the work of redeeming others, and even on getting liberated, retains its individuality.” Relative activity and Absolute Being are not consistent with each other. If it is argued that both these are compatible, it is done at the expense of consistency. The Absolute has nothing second to it, and hence no desire and no action. Anything that falls short of the Absolute cannot be regarded as the state of Liberation. The Jiva remains a centre of universal activity in the states of Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishvara, but not in Brahman. If what the Sruti says – “He does not return” – is true, there can be no reverting to individuality after Absolute-Experience. There cannot be action without consciousness of plurality, and plurality-consciousness is not the nature of the Absolute. All attempts to reconcile Reality with appearance, taking them as two realities, are based on a faith in the ultimate validity of empirical experience. We want to know the beyond without stepping over to the beyond from binding phenomena. We wish to plant our two legs in two ships moving in opposite directions, and then cross the ocean. We desire to know something absolutely without ourselves being that thing, an impossibility! The tendency of some of the modern thinkers to struggle to give a reality to objective experience and multiplicity-consciousness even in the highest Reality is the effect of a failure to discriminate between the Real and the apparent and is due to an unwise attachment to phenomenal diversity. As long as philosophers are content to be mere dogmatic theorizers, they can never succeed in determining the nature of Reality, or of bondage and liberation. It is but intellectual perversion that causes some to twist even the metaphysical truths to answer to the empirical demands of man. The fact that we see things is not the proof for their existence.
It is said that, because the individual is inseparable from its environment, the liberated soul has to work for the redemption of the other unliberated souls, if its own salvation is to be complete. This argument is, again, limited to the souls that are still in the cosmos, that move in the realms of Virat, Hiranyagarbha and Ishvara, but is irrelevant to Brahmanubhava. It is wrong to think that the liberated soul has any external environment with which it may have relations. It is Infinitude itself. Further, each individual is restricted by its own Antahkarana, the mode of objectified thinking, and hence, its world of experience cannot be identical with the worlds of others. Man is cheated by the notion that each individual has the same psychological background and constitution as the other, and that the environment of one individual includes those of all other individuals, also. The environment of one is different from that of the other, and, therefore, the liberation of one individual does not have any relation to the states of other individuals. If everyone is to think alike, there would be no diversity of living beings and there would be a wholesale salvation of the universe. If individuals think differently, one cannot have an intrinsic relation to the other. No doubt, everything is comprehended in the Absolute, and so each individual, as long as it exists as such, influences the universe by its existence and active individualistic consciousness, and vice versa, since there is a real Unity behind all individuals. But this mutual interaction is secondary, and does not affect the primary factor of liberation. Moreover, we have no right to give independent realities to the subject and the object, for all plurality is like a dream in the Universal Consciousness, and to it there can be no question of the existence of unredeemed souls or an objective reality. Bondage is in each individual separately and not in the universal unity. In any case, the problem of the redemption of the unredeemed souls by the liberated one does not arise. There is no wrong to be set aright, no error to be converted, no ugliness to be banished from life, except with reference to one’s own self. When the self is purified, the Absolute Truth is revealed in it, and in its infinite knowledge it can set right the universe by its very existence, or consciousness of perfection. There is no ultimate relation amongst the imaginary environments of different individuals, even if they interpenetrate one another. They have a transcendental oneness, and an empirical phenomenality.
There is also an attempt made by some to argue that unworldliness is not the essence of any true philosophy, and that the Upanishads do not teach unworldliness. This view is the outcome of the failure of the arbitrary reason unaided by experience to determine the nature of Reality. There is a desire in the human being to maintain the same worldly relationship even in the state of final Liberation. Whatever we experience empirically seems to be a hard fact, the reality of which we do not want to deny. The individual’s attachment to the body and society is so intense that to break away from it does not seem to be desirable. If unworldliness means repudiation of the separative forms of experience and individual relationship, liberation is really unworldly. The Absolute is unworldly in the sense that it has not, as the world has, distinctions of space, time and individuality, or name, form and action. Liberation is the possession and experience of unlimited, undivided consciousness of the Bhuma, or the plenitude of existence.
There cannot also be any question in regard to the position of power, rulership, and the like, in the state of the highest liberation. These are all relative notions of individuals. The Ultimate Reality is the Absolute, which is non-dual and, therefore, there is no scope for the operation of an objective power in it. The Absolute itself is Power, not merely an exerciser of power. Power is a separative factor, a means to create duality, which is nullified in the Absolute. The truly liberated one does not feel that he is the lord of anyone else, which notion involves distinction in existence, but he has the Eternal Experience of the Essence of Infinity.
Absolute Liberation is Transcendent Experience, beyond conception and expression, free from the differentiations of knower, knowledge and known. It is the Conscious Experience of absolute “Be”-ness, which is the Great Reality.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Divine Life – Its Meaning and Method
Divine Life – Its Meaning and Method by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 2 June 2013 21:20
The moral or the ethical principle may be said to consist in the method or the art of determining the lower in terms of the higher. When one is totally exhausted in what is visible, this visible thing which is the object of our judgment, interpretation and encounter, cannot be evaluated in terms of that which reigns above the visible level.
As a matter of fact, there cannot be such a thing as virtue unless there is a standard of virtue. What you do, what you think, what you speak, becomes either permissible or not permissible in comparison with a standard that has been set, and this standard, whatever it be, may be considered to be the determining principle of human conduct. And divine life, at least in the sense in which perhaps Sri Gurudev Sri Swami Sivananda Maharaj envisaged it for the purpose of the welfare of mankind, should be regarded as the regulative principle of human life.
Though the word ‘divine’ has a very deep connotation which may take us far above the ken of human understanding and perception, the term ‘divine’ here, in the words ‘divine life’ are to be understood by us from a down to earth practical point of view, because divine life, which is the gospel and the message and the teaching and the precept of Sri Gurudev, is an art of practical living in this world. It may have some connection with larger, wider, higher realities, and it may even touch upon such transcendent mysteries as God and His creation, the relationship between the jiva and God, and such other deeply philosophical or metaphysical issues. But for our purposes, which is perhaps the real purpose on hand, divine life is the technique of so conducting ourselves in life, inwardly as well as outwardly, as not to be disharmonious with the principles that govern the world.
Swami Sadhanandaji Maharaj who was speaking, spoke one-half verse from the Mahabharata. Do not do unto others that which you would not wish to be done to you. Do unto others as you would be done by. Here is the crux and the essence and the quintessence of Dharma, which is the way of divine living. From another point of view I may say what are called the yamas in the system of yoga of Patanjali constitute the very rock foundation of divine living. Ahimsa, satya, asteya, brahmacharya, aparigraha yamaha; these sum up the whole ethical system. This is all morality, all goodness, and the system of perfect living.
From this angle of vision, in the light of this understanding, it may appear that self-control is indispensable in divine life, because to be a good person one has to be a self controlled person. A person who gives the longest possible rope to the operation or the activity of his senses and the mind is not a self-controlled person, and he cannot be regarded as a good person.
You know very well the word hammered into your ears again and again as the great teaching of the Master, “Be good and do good”. You cannot know how it is possible for you to do good unless you know how it is possible for you to be good, because the doing of good is only and emanation of what you are made of. The whole personality of yours moves outwardly in human society when you do a good deed or perform what is righteous or virtuous.
There is a great dictum of ethics that the finality of good conduct consists in the acceptance of everybody else also in the world as an end in itself and not as a means to one’s own end. This is perhaps the last word in ethical science and the moral principle. This is not an easy thing to understand, though the grammatical meaning of this sentence perhaps is clear to every one of you. You cannot treat anyone and anything in this world as a means to an end – everyone is an end in itself, everything is an end from its own point of view. This is the basis of a good living, a harmonious living, a happy living, a divine living.
The art of not injuring anybody else, the technique of not exploiting any other person or thing for one’s own selfish purpose is a necessary ingredient of living a divine life. Let every one of us consider for a moment the extent to which we are likely to exploit the conditions and circumstances of other people. We cannot enjoy a flower unless we pluck it from the garden. We cannot have any relation to a person unless he is a liked one or a disliked one. We cannot independently assume an attitude of ends rather than as a means. A person is related to you in an extraneous manner, and the art of considering things or persons as ends in themselves rules out the question of relationship. Here we are entering into a concept of what they call the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of heaven, in our own language it is Brahma-loka, is a system of living where one does not hang on another. One is not subservient to another. Each is what one is. And each is what one is that is complete existence. There is a self-sufficiency and self-completeness and self-perfection in each individual, in the Ram Rajya that people speak of, or in the golden age of Kritya Yuga, when we have been told that social compulsions in the form of social rules and political ordinances were not necessary. This is the final ideal of a divine living.
But we have to work towards this end. Every step in yoga is also yoga. Though yoga means union with the ultimate reality, it also means every step that you take in the direction of this union with reality, because, as I had occasion to mention earlier, reality manifests itself, perhaps at least from our point of view, in some degrees or levels of manifestation. Thus it is that you are in communion with the degree of reality when you are in a state of yoga.
A state of harmony is established when you enter into the field of divine living. A divine living is an art of non-conflict, and, much more, non-injury to any person. You cannot hurt the feelings of any person, because it is the rule of the universe that what you mete out to others will also be meted out to you.
The world is sometimes, perhaps, like a mirror that is placed before you – it will reflect exactly what you are. The universe, the world, the whole of human society, if you would like to call it, is an impersonal atmosphere or an arrangement before you which reacts in the manner you react in respect of it. Whatever you think of other people will also be thought about you by other people. Whatever you speak to others will be spoken to you one day or the other. And whatever you think about other persons will be thought about you, and whatever you do to others will be done to you, if not in this life, in some other life at least.
Extreme good and extreme bad reaps its fruit in this life itself. But ordinary good actions, milder, may not produce their effect in this life itself. So you may appear that you are going scot-free; but you cannot go scot-free like that, because every thought, every attitude, every outlook, every reaction, every envisagement, every judgment is recorded in a document which is not visible to our eyes. The whole universe is a computer system, as it were, which works automatically and records every vibration that takes place in every corner of the universe. In this world of God’s creation, perhaps, there is no such thing as privacy. You cannot secretly mumble something into the ear of somebody without it being heard everywhere – it will be heard in Vaikuntha itself, not only here in your little room.
So, this world is made in a different way from the way in which it appears. Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was the great apostle of divine living; though the word ‘divine life’ existed even before Swami Sivananda’s advent in this world, he was the person who gave force and meaning to this great system of internal and external organization called divine living.
Generally we are carried away by the word ‘divine’, and are inclined to think that to divinely live would be to live like a god, like an angel, like a Mahapurusha or Siddha, and almost move like a god himself. Though that is a very virtuous and praiseworthy ideal – it would be good if we can walk like a god in this world – we know very well how impractical it is from the conditions in which you are at the present moment, because unless we know what God is, we cannot try to move like a god. We have various distracted, perhaps erroneous notions of God, Atman, Moksha, etc., and therefore we will have also a consequent erroneous conception of living a good life.
First and foremost, the meaning of divine living is the meaning of this sentence of Bhagavan Veda Vyasa that occurs in the Mahabharata recited to you already. Whenever you try to think something about other people, please consider for a moment – would it be all right for me if others also think like that about me? When you speak a word or do some deed, consider for a moment whether you would feel happy and satisfied if people speak about you also in the same way and do the same thing to you. “I would not like to be thought like that, I would not like to be spoken of also in this manner, and this thing should not be meted out to me.” If this is so, how would you say that you can mete out this treatment to other people?
The world is a kingdom of ends – this is the reason why you cannot mete out to people what cannot be meted out to you. The world is not made up of scattered particulars or isolated individuals with whom you have no connection whatsoever. It is not true. The people around you are not unrelated to you in this system of organic connectedness of God’s creation. We are inwardly involved in a great kingdom of fraternity and citizenship which is not visible to our eyes. The very same people which you see here, you will see in Brahma-loka also, but you will see them in a different light altogether. You will not see different people; it is not a different world that you are going to see. The kingdom of heaven is not outside, not far off, not external. It is a new degree of reality; it is a higher level of perception of the very same thing that you are seeing now in a grosser form in this physical world.
So we have to be very cautious when we deal with things – corruption, untruthfulness, incontinence, harming other people, exploitation, hoarding. These are the opposites of the Yamas. And, as I told you, the Yamas of Patanjali sum up the whole of ethical life. The whole of morality is here in these five little dicta of Patanjali – Ahimsa, Satya, Asteya, Brahmacharya, Aparigraha. I cannot think of any other ethical or moral principal which is not included here. What you call Panchasheela, from Buddhist parlance, also is practically one and the same.
Therefore divine life is an unavoidable way of living for every one of us if we want not to perish in this world. There is tension and insecurity and we have suspicion even about our own neighbors, because we are not endeavoring to think in terms of the requisites for living a divine life.
It is necessary that you have to accept the existence of God first if you are to live a divine life. If you have no fear of God, you cannot have fear of anybody else. This is an old Kannada saying I heard when I was a small child, written on a wall in a school: “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” If you cannot fear God and you deny God’s existence totally, then you have to be prepared for the worst of things that can happen to you in this world.
There was a humorous philosopher who said, “Well, if God does not exist really, well, so much the better for you, be free from all botheration. But suppose He exists – beware, be cautious. Incase He happens to exist, be cautious – anything can happen to you.” This is a very jolly, humorous, very uplifting, a fact.
Now, we are not here to discuss whether God exists or not. It has to be taken for granted by devotees and admirers and disciples of Gurudev Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj that God has to exist. And, as a thinker said, if God does not exist, we have to create one God. Just as if there is no President, we have to make one President, otherwise we cannot exist. Otherwise, people are not born as Presidents and Prime Ministers; they are like anyone else. But why do you create a President? Because without that person, we cannot exist. So he said that if God does not exist by any chance, we have to manufacture one – otherwise existence is not possible.
The idea is that the principle called God is the final controlling authority over not only the operations in the universe, but the behaviors of people and the conduct of anything else in this world. I am very fond of remembering again and again the oft-quoted saying of Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj that in every enterprise of yours, God has to come first. Sri Ganeshaya Namaha, Om Sri Sarasvati Namaha, Om Namah Sivaya, Om Namo Narayanaya. You do not suddenly start gulping food or drinking your tea, because even the art of consuming food is regarded as a Yajna to the great divine authority that is the digesting principle and the determining principle, perhaps the principle that we are. This is a wider subject.
So, it is absolutely essential for every divine lifer to believe, and to be convinced, and to be rooted in the great ideal that God does exist and that God perhaps only exists, inasmuch as He is All-in-All.
Now, God exists, and God has created this world, and we are seeing this world. Therefore it is an effect of God – it is also to be respected. The world comes after because it is an effect of God, and we were subsequent creations. If we read the Vishnu Purana or the Srimad Bhagavatam Mahapurana, or even the cosmological descriptions given in such scriptures as the Mahabharata, you will find that we are not the first created beings – we were created afterwards. We are not the crown of creation in the sense of antecedence in the chronological system of the coming down of things from the original creation. God comes first, the world has to come afterwards, and you are the last creation. Therefore the first consideration should go to the cause, and not to the effect.
Here is also a great gospel of unselfish living. The statement that God is first, the world is next and yourself is last is also a principle of good living. You have to pay respect to the cause first before you consider the welfare of the effect. You have to pay respect and obedience and obeisance to God first, and be prepared to obey His commands, His ordinances, “the righteousness of the Kingdom of Heaven”, as Christ put it. That is first and foremost – you cannot avoid it. If you rule out the possibility of the very existence of God, and violate the law, then anything can happen to you – you should not make complaints afterwards. It is like a renegade, or an anti-governmental or anti-social element.
The world is the next thing that should command your respect. You do not come first – your consideration should be for the Ultimate Reality first and foremost, then your consideration for the world afterwards. This is a Purendradasa saying, “The first duty is the service of God; the next duty is the service of man.” He does not say service of yourself – that is automatically involved and you need not too much bother about yourself. You shall be taken care of by the powers that be if the world receives your respect, honor, recognition, in the manner it is expected of you. You come afterwards.
But modern man, educated man, proud man, who, as Shakespeare puts it, plays such antic tricks, like an ape, as make the angels weep. Angels are weeping at our behavior. They are crying, “What sort of creation is this? How things are behaving!”
We need not be too eager to receive respect from people. It will automatically devolve upon us. This is not merely a spiritual gospel – it is also a sociological principle; it is also a method of ethical living; it is also an art of good conduct. Everything is implied in this great statement of Bhagavan Sri Krishna, “When you are united with the Ultimate Cause, It shall take care of you.” The higher determines the lower and guides the lower, decides upon the way and the conduct and the maintenance of the lower, and entirely is responsible for the lower, as the head of the family is concerned with all the members of the family and each one need not concern himself or herself as an independent person.
So, one of the principles of divine life, which is a large subject to dilate upon, is pinpointed in this pithy saying of Sri Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, “God first, world next, yourself last.” When there is a sweet dish, says Manusmriti, don’t eat it for yourself; you must share it with others. Sweet, delicious, nice things should not be eaten independently by closing the doors. I remember this very well, and I feel ashamed also, when anything is offered to me which I would like to offer to other people also. Very delicious, valuable, precious, delicious, tasty things should not be eaten alone – give it to your servant. You would not like to give it, because servant is nobody, he’s dirt. This is a very strange attitude of ours which has come upon us due to an overestimation that we have somehow or other imposed upon ourselves as the be-all and end-all of everything – the world has no concern with us.
We do not think of the world as much as we think of our own selves. We are putting the cart before the horse and doing just the opposite of what Sri Gurudev was expecting us to do when he said, “God first, world next, yourself last.” We are anxious that we may lose our property, welfare, and goodwill and all satisfaction if our concern goes to other people and we lose concern about out own selves. The world is not outside you. Therefore you are not justified in exhibiting a sentiment or conduct of neglect of this world as if it is an extraneous dirt that you would like to get rid of or get out of at the earliest opportunity. We are not educated enough to understand the intricacy that is involved in the relationship between man and the world. There is a large set of two volumes written by Royce, a great idealist of America, under the title “The World and the Individual”. Worth reading. What is the relationship between the world and the individual – he writes in 1,000 pages or 2,000 pages.
We cannot understand what is the way in which we are connected among ourselves. Most of us seem to be not connected at all among ourselves; each one has his own etiquette and each one can go secretly independently in any direction you like. What happens to others? It is not your business. This is a purely empirical, not even a good way of looking at things.
A divine living tries to raise your outlook of life into the vision of a prepondering principle that operates in the whole world, including your own self. A violation of this principle would be a violation of divine life. Today we are living in a world of mechanism and high industrialization and have a tendency therefore to feel that we are absolutely independent persons physically, biologically, socially, in every blessed way, so that we can independently work for our blessedness and salvation unconcerned with other people.
The concern with others, with the world and with God, is something unavoidably and inextricably related to you, and so Bhagavan Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj came to awaken us to this fact to shake up man from his slumber of ignorance. It does not appear he has come to chose one individual as his chief disciple so that he may push him up, up to the point of Moksha, though there were Gurus of that type, who had only one disciple and were concerned only with that person. But different masters and prophets had different types of vision. Buddha had one type of vision, Christ had another, and Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was a different type altogether. He has come to wake us up from sleep, and once you wake up you know what things are, and you need not be told that “this is the thing to be done, that thing to be done etc.” When you can see things properly, further instruction is not necessary. So Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj used to say, “I have woken you up – the rest us up to you. I have told you everything that has to be told. Now it is up to you to follow these principles that I have placed before you as your good.”
So the art of divine living is an art of ethical living, first and foremost. You may be wondering that ethical and moral living is only one aspect of life – it is not the whole of life – and sometimes you are inclined to feel these days that no truly ethical and moral man can succeed in this world; only a corrupt man can live. This is an erroneous error again; it is a mistake on your part. Truth always succeeds. If you can believe that truth triumphs, then corruption, black-marketing, exploitation cannot succeed. But you will say, “I’m seeing it’s succeeding.” It succeeds in the same way that Ravana succeeded. For ages he ruled with great pomp. Untruth triumphs as if it’s a god itself, and no other god exists except untruth. For the time being, it may be for years together, it will succeed, and with great authority it will rule the world. But later on what happens? The great Manu says the root itself will be struck off. The great Ravana whose pomp is described in the Valmiki’s Ramayana in more gorgeous verses than when he describes Rama, that Ravana had his root itself cut, and today we remember him not in the way he lived but in the way in which he ought not to have lived.
So, divine life is no doubt a divine, godly life. If possible we may live like gods, like angels in heaven, but for practical difficulties such an extreme step is not possible for us, we have our own weaknesses, little foibles. But these little foibles and difficulties have to be harnessed as appurtenances and not obstacles for living a good, serviceable, and virtuous and righteous life in this very world. Even the last person is going to be taken into consideration in the great system of organization which is God’s kingdom. “He also prays who merely stands and waits,” is what Milton said. They too pray who also stand and wait. So humbly, simply, without demonstrating too much our arrogance, whether intellectually, economically or physically, may we remember that this earth is not the last halting place for us. This is only one Dharmashala, one inn, one Chaultry, one hotel in which we are taking a little rest for the night, and tomorrow we have to pursue our own ways.
A divine life is not possible if you think that this world is the all and there is nothing else outside. There is a series of higher realms which we have to ascend, and this perhaps is the lowest of creation, the grossest manifestation – the earth plane. So, humbly recognizing the presence of higher realms, of greater realities to which we have to ascend, which is our goal, which is our ultimate aspiration, we have humbly to live as pedestrians, pilgrims, aspiring to reach that destination, and not taking for granted that this earth is the all and this is our property. This is not our property, even as the furniture of a hotel or an inn or a Chaultry does not belong to you though it has been given to you for utilization for that night. Nothing of that Chaultry or inn or hotel is your property. You have the authority – for the time being the permission given to you to use it – but you are not the owner of it.
So, we have the permission, a kind of blessing bestowed upon us, to utilize the facilities provided to us by this world, by this ashram, by the great ones, by every blessed thing, but we cannot possess anything. We are not owners of anything in this world – we are pilgrims. A pilgrim cannot own anything on the way. If this can be borne in mind, we shall be humble, humbler than what we conduct ourselves to be; and a humility, a humble nature, is not a put on appearance. This is also a thing that you have to remember. In the recognition of the might and the grandeur of the cosmos and the greatness of God, you automatically become humble. Before a huge elephant you are humble; before the ocean you are humble. You are not putting on humility there – you are automatically humble because you know the might and the grandeur and the terror that is there before you. Such is the mystery of God, such is mystery of creation, such is the glory of the great destination that we are aspiring for; and in the light of this, if we live and think and act and conduct ourselves, we would be living a divine life.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Alice in Wonderland
‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Saturday 1 June 2013 16:44
We have an inveterate obsession in our minds which prevents us almost entirely from conceiving the goal of life as a practical reality. For us, the goal mostly remains as a kind of concept and an idea, an ideal which is not easily reconcilable with the hard realities of the workaday world. The goal may be God Himself, and nevertheless, He is only an idea and an ideal, a concept, an imagination, a possibility, a may-be or a may-not-be.
This suspicious outlook is not absent even in the most advanced persons due to the strength of the senses, the power of the mind, and the habit of the intellect in understanding things in a given fashion. We are discussing in these lessons a subject called Comparative Philosophy, and in this context, we would be benefited by bestowing a little thought on the conclusions arrived at by certain other thinkers also, apart from Vedantic philosophers like Sankara, with whom we have a good acquaintance and about whose thinking we have spoken enough.
There was a great man called Plato in Greece. According to Paul Dawson, the whole world has produced only three philosophers – Plato, Kant and Sankara. There. is some truth in what he says. There cannot be a greater philosopher than these three persons – Plato, Kant and Sankara – says Paul Dawson. I was thinking about this statement. Why does he make this statement? Finally I felt that there is some truth in it, whatever it is.
The idea of the Ultimate Reality is the principal doctrine of Plato; and I started by saying that we are living in a world of ideas when we live a spiritual life, when we behave religiously, conduct worship and chant Mantras, do prayers, do Japa and even mediation; but there is a very uncomfortable consequence following the idea that, after all, the Reality is an idea.
Ideas are abstractions, notions which are supposed to correspond to realities, and as long as ideas correspond to realities, they are valid. I have an idea that there is a building in front of me. This idea is a valid idea, because it corresponds with the real existence of the building outside. So, the validity of my idea depends upon the reality of the object which is in front of it, but my idea itself has no reality. It is a borrowed reality. It hangs on the existence of something else outside, in this case, the building. So, if the idea of the Ultimate Reality or God is to hang on the existence of another thing, God is not a real being. This is a very subtle difficulty that may trouble the minds of even sincere seekers. Don’t you think that the world is real? It is not merely real, it is very, very real, hard to the core, flint-like and no one can gainsay that it is. Perhaps that alone is.
God is an idea that has been introduced in our minds by our ancestors, by our books, by our scriptures, by our professors and our teachers and parents, and somehow, we have been forced by the logic of this teaching to believe there should be such a thing as an ‘other-worldly existence’ and we have somehow reconciled ourselves to it – God must be there. But we are accepting the existence of God against our own will. We are hungry and thirsty and this hunger and thirst of the body is more real than the idea of God. No one can say that it is not so, whatever be our devotion to God. We are terribly angry, upset, very much attached to things, all which cannot be explained in the light of the supreme existence of God. This is so even in the case of advanced seekers, Sadhaks and sincere aspirants. This subject is the principal theme of Plato’s doctrine.
Ideas precede reality: this one sentence is the entire philosophy of Plato. The reality of the objective universe is subsequent to the idea of the universe. Here we have an echo of the great philosophy of Vedanta that the Hiranyagarbha is prior to the cosmos of physical appearance. The Panchadasi, the Upanishads and the other systems of Vedantic thinking tell us that in Hiranyagarbha the world does not exist in a concrete form as it appears, that it is only an idea cosmically manifested by Isvara who is even subtler than the idea. Isvara is only a possibility of the very idea that there should be such a thing called the universe. So, Isvara is subtler than the idea which is Hiranyagarbha, and Virat is supposed to be the animating consciousness behind the so-called physicality of creation. So, even in the Vedantic Philosophy, there is the same doctrine of idea preceding concrete existence. But we can never believe this.
My idea that there is a desk in front of me cannot be said to be harder in its concreteness than the desk itself. I have an idea that there is a little table in front of me. Is the table more real or the idea that the table is there more real? Any man with common sense will say that the idea is subsequent to the existence of the object called table and the idea is not preceding the object. Because there is a table, you think there is a table. You have an idea that there is an object. So, the idea that there is an object is the consequence of the existence of the object. So, the idea of God must be subsequent and not precedent.
These questions arose before Socrates. How can you say that idea is prior to the universe? How could there be an idea unless the universe exists? How can you have a thought about a thing unless the thing exists? How can you say that things are subsequent and ideas are precedent?
If God is supreme consciousness, how could consciousness be prior to existence? Consciousness is always of something. If the something is not there, there cannot be consciousness. What do you mean by merely saying consciousness, awareness, understanding, thinking, feeling? They cannot have any significance unless they are connected to a thing which is already there. This is the gross realistic doctrine of empirical philosophers which was highlighted by British thinkers like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, but already anticipated by people like Plato and Aristotle in a different fashion.
This is a very terrible problem before us. Notwithstanding the fact that we are devotees of God and honest religious thinkers, the concreteness of the world and the reality of the things we see with our eyes and contact with our senses cannot be abrogated merely by the notion that ideas are precedent. Ideas cannot be precedent as long as we are accustomed to thinking in the way we are thinking today. “Here is a man coming.” I am saying like this. This man is there; therefore I have an idea that he is coming. If the man was not there, the idea cannot be there. It is not that I think the man first and then the man comes. The man is there and the idea comes afterwards.
So, realism has a great fort before it. There cannot be an idea unless an object exists already. So God must be afterwards and the world first. Here is materialism, which has a very strong ground. Consciousness cannot be there, unless the object is there. So, what you call consciousness is only an exudation, a manifestation, a kind of effect of an already existing material stuff. Crude materialism, realism, is impossible to face easily. You cannot answer this question. You yourself will not be able to say anything in this matter; so you say that there is something in it.
This problem is an indication of the state in which we are placed. How far are we advanced spiritually? Where is our spirituality, where is our God, love and God-consciousness? Incidentally, it is not a joking matter or a humour. It is a very, very serious thing for us. Whatever be the study of the scriptures, we cannot get out of the idea that we are living in a very, very hard, flint-like, iron-like, steel-like world; and we can never accept that the idea of the world is in any way more real than the world. But Plato affirms that the ideas are more real than the world. The universals are precedent to the particulars. Horseness is prior to the horse. Tableness is prior to the table, buildingness is prior to the building. How can there be buildingness before the building came into being? How could there be horseness before there is a horse? We cannot answer these questions easily. We know very well that there cannot be horseness unless the horse were already there. But man’s mind is very poor. It is not wholly philosophical and we cannot understand how there could be an idea of a thing unless the thing were already there. How could God’s consciousness be there if God is only Consciousness?
We have been indoctrinated in this belief not merely in this birth, but throughout the births we have lived through in earlier incarnations. The difficulty arises on account of the impressions created in our minds by hanging on to objects of sense through the many births we have passed through.
The little spiritual aspiration that we have is a late development in the process of evolution. Let each one of us think, “Since when am I thinking of God, religion and spirituality? Since how many years back?” Compared to these few years of our ardent adventure in the spiritual field, what a long, long time we have passed in other types of thinking! The heavy weight of the errors in the thoughts of our previous lives hangs on us so vehemently and powerfully that our little aspiration is submerged. So, again and again we have suspicions in our minds. Doubts are galore. Very great difficulties are there. “Am I fit? Am I right? Is there any substance in it? Am I living in a foolish world, a fool’s paradise? Nothing is coming. I have been meditating for years, nothing is visible. I may be hoodwinked. Is there any point in it at all or is it all a waste?” These doubts can come even to sincere seekers.
The idea of the world is not dependent upon the world. The world is dependent on the idea. In a crude form, Berkeley said this. But, in a more philosophical fashion, Plato affirmed it. We can never stomach this idea that consciousness is precedent to matter, though we have attempted to convince ourselves, in our previous discussions, that consciousness is our essential reality by an analysis conducted of the three states – waking, dream and deep sleep. We have already understood this to some extent. We have gone to the depths of our condition in deep sleep where we appear to exist only as pure consciousness minus associations of body and mind. If we could exist as pure consciousness minus body and mind in the state of deep sleep, that must have been what our sleep, that must have been what our stuff is. This so-called body of ours, this hard substance of contactual experience, and the mind which thinks of it, are subsequent evolutes; and if they were the ultimate realities that we are, they would not have perished in deep sleep also. But we had no experience of body or mind there. We were bare, featureless, unobjectified being, consciousness only. This is what we learnt in our earlier analysis of the condition of sleep. What were you in deep sleep? Not man, not mind, not anything, not object. What were you then? A bare impersonal, indefinite, undivided awareness you were. So, this consciousness that you were is the same as consciousness of being, inseparable from being being inseparable from consciousness, consciousness inseparable from being.
This is the great conclusion of Vedanta philosophy – Being-Consciousness. Sat-Chit was your essential nature – not body, not mind, not anything that the senses perceive or conceive, not the world. Then, wherefrom this body came? What is this body? What is the world? What are these big buildings and stony mountains and the flowing rivers and the burning sun? What is all this? From where have they come?
They are also ideas. When Berkeley said that all the trees, the mountains, the heaven and the earth were only ideas, Samuel Johnson, it seems, later on kicked a brick and said, “I hereby refute Berkeley.” Kicking a brick does not refute Berkeley. It is a very prosaic way of confronting this poor bishop. There was some mistake in the thinking of Samuel Johnson. You cannot kick a brick and say, “I have refuted Berkeley”, because Berkeley includes Johnson himself, not merely the brick, in his doctrine of ideas.
Electric repulsions can produce a sensation of hardness, as many of you, or some of you at least, must have experienced when you had an electric shock. If you touch a live wire with a heavy voltage flowing through it, you will have a sensation of terrible weight and solidity, though there is nothing there. You will feel a mountain hanging on your hand. Any of you who ever had a shock would know what it is. How could this idea of a heavy weight of a hill hanging on your hand be a sensation when there was nothing whatsoever except the fact that you touched a live wire? Why go so far? Come to our modern scientists.
These solid objects – may be of steel or granite – are constituted of electric energy inside. Pure energy, electric energy – we may say, electricity itself. What is electricity? It cannot be seen, it has no weight, it has no dimensions, no length, breadth, or height. But it is the raw material of heavy substances which have length, breadth and height. This indescribable continuum of force and motion has become the atoms and the molecules, hard things like the mountains and the solar system.
Go further still. The doctrine of relativity lands us in a mere idea of the cosmos. The space-time stuff that they speak of as the ultimate substance is not a hard reality. Neither can space be called a hard reality like a table, nor time. But, researches into the substance of physics seem to conclude that the hardest realities like hills and rocks are constituted of configurations of the space-time continuum. We cannot understand what this space-time continuum is except that it is a mathematical heap of point-events in the brain of the scientist – and not a human scientist at that!
Here, Berkeley rectifies himself when he says that the world is an idea, not of Mr. Berkeley, but of a larger being in whom all the individual ideas are also included. We again come to the Hiranyagarbha of Vedanta philosophy, though such words were not used by Berkeley or Plato. Plato used the words, “Idea of the good”. A strange definition of his. You may say, “Idea of God” if you like. It is not an idea of God, but the idea which is God. Actually, God is only an idea; not your idea, but an Idea as such, which is the cause of all other ideas. The Yoga Vasistha goes into great detail in explaining this point that the whole universe is mind. Not my mind or your mind, but mind as such. Pure impersonal existence, of which our minds and thoughts and feelings and solutions are ripples.
Read the great book of Samuel Alexander, “Space, Time and Deity”, which is a great exposition of the structure of the universe which is so hard and real in space-time only. Space-time is not a substance. It is not something tangible. You cannot touch it, you cannot see it, you cannot sense it, you cannot taste it, you cannot smell it. And a thing which cannot be sensed is not reality at all. But, that is the reality!
It pinpoints, pressurises itself into a movement, a force. And space-time becomes motion, manifesting itself into the primary qualities of length, breadth and height. Remember: length, breadth and height do not mean length, breadth and height of a substance. They have never come into being. These are difficult things to understand. Only a purely impersonal thinker or mathematician will be able to appreciate or understand. How can there be a conception of length, breadth and height unless objects are there?
But space-time is itself without dimension. It has no dimensions. It is a four dimensional something – not a three dimensional substance. And we do not know what this four dimensional thing is. It is only an idea, a meaningless thing for us. It becomes primary qualities like length, breadth and height, etc. Geometrical patterns are called primary qualities which manifest themselves as secondary qualities of colour, sound, taste, smell, etc. The world has not come into being yet. They are only Tanmatras – Shabda, Sparsa, Rupa, Rasa, Gadha, says the Vedanta philosophy. These Tanmatras are not substances, but principles behind the objects which produce these sensations. They are not hard substances like earth, water, fire, air and ether; they are comparable to the secondary qualities of Aristotle and Plato and modern scientists.
Oh, what a wonder! We seem to be living in a dreamland like Alice in Wonderland. We are not living in a world as it appears. The primary qualities condensing themselves into secondary qualities of sensations, solidify themselves as it were into hard realities-like the heaviness that you feel when you get an electric shock.
So, under these conclusions, it appears that the solidity and the substantiality of this physical world is comparable to the solidity and the substantiality of the mountain that you felt weighing heavily in your hand when you had a heavy voltage shock. Does the world exist? No one knows.
Now, even your own body is of the same nature. This substantiality of the world which has been reduced practically into nothing but a sensation and an idea of a cosmic existence includes the very motion of our body also, so that we also go, the scientists also go into these conclusions. Sir Arthur Eddington said that no scientist can live in this world without going mad. Fortunately, he does not want to go mad, because, under these conclusions, no one can exists here for three minutes. Buddha said this. A really perceiving individual cannot exist in this world for three days. He will melt into nothing. But the fact that perception has not arisen is the reason why we are very happy here. So, ignorance is the cause of our very comfortable existence. Now, this comparative study of Eastern conclusions with Western discoveries seems to make us feel that all great men are thinking alike – whether Plato or Aristotle, Kant or Hegel, Acharya Sankara or Vidyaranya Swami.
Ideas are therefore not ideas of things which are earlier than the ideas; just as space and time are not subsequent to what we call the objective world, but precedent to the objective world. It is a final conclusion of Sir James Jean, for instance, that God must be a mathematician. It is not a man thinking a mathematical point, but mathematics itself. How can you only think mathematics, without a person thinking mathematics? He says it is a mathematical consciousness, highly abstract, purely impersonal, and the universe is nothing but conceptions of mathematical point-events.
Today we are in this world of modern physics. And what is Hiranyagarbha, what is Isvara, but these very things in the Sanskrit language? What is this Shabda, Sparsa, Rupa, Rasa and Gandha but conceptual precedents of the hard things called earth, water, fire, air and ether including our physical bodies? We can imagine why we have difficulties in meditation, why we cannot do Japa, why we cannot do prayer. We get angry for little things and we fly at the throat of another brother, because we are yet to be spiritual.
Religion has not yet entered us fully. We are playing jokes with God, at least for now. These deeper truths are not capable of easy entrance into our minds, because we are busybodies, very busy with bricks and mortar and vegetables and tea and coffee. These are greater realities to us than the supernal ideas that are the contents of our religious and spiritual consciousness.
I brought these ideas before you to bring about a comparison between the greatest thinkers of the East like Acharya Sankara, the Rishis of the Upanishads, and Sri Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita and Western thinkers like Plato, Aristotle and Kant. They seem to be thinking alike. Only they seem to be thinking in different languages and giving and different definitions.
So, we are now face to face with the great reality, the God of the cosmos. We have passed through the analysis. We have conducted a study of the essential nature of the human being by a study of the three stages of consciousness – waking, dream and deep sleep. We studied epistemological processes – the perception of the world, how we come in contact with things, and how we know that the world exists at all. This also we have concluded. Many of you may not remember it, but think over or see your diaries if you have noted anything down
Now we are facing the third principle of the ultimate reality of the cosmos, call it the Absolute, call it Satchidananda, God, Isvara, Hiranyagarbha, Virat – whatever it is. Here, true religion begins. Real religion is an awareness of the presence of the Supreme Being. Therefore, it is well said that religion begins where intellect ends, where reason fails. When religion begins controlling your life, you cease to be a mere intellectual or a scientist or a philosopher. You are no more a thinker, but a person who lives reality.
Religion is living reality and not merely thinking reality or academic analysing. All this is over already in our earlier lessons. We have thought enough philosophically, academically and hope we shall enter into true religion which is God-consciousness itself in some proportion, in some measure, in a modicum.
To face God and to encounter Him in our actual life is to live religion. So, religion is not ringing a bell, waving a light, or chanting a mantra. It is encountering God face to face. So, religion is superior to philosophy, if you understand religion in the true sense of the term. Religion is not Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism. It is the art of envisaging God-being.
Man melting, like ice vanishing before the blaze of the sun – that is religion. When the sun of God-consciousness rises, this substance called body-consciousness evaporates into an ethereal nothing. Gradually, we begin to approximate God-being. The life of religion is the way of gradual approximation to God-consciousness. Here, true love begins to preponderate in our lives. We do not merely think of God as philosophers or academicians or professors. We love God; and we cannot love a thing which is not really there. We cannot love a thing which is only an idea or a concept in our mind.
All love is an urge of the soul to contact that which it feels as a hard reality in front of itself. Every love is God-love finally and the final stuff of the universe may be said to be love.
I have been telling you sometimes that there is some secret meaning behind the last words in the Eleventh Chapter of the Gita when we are told that Bhakti is supreme. The Bhakti that Sri Krishna speaks of here is not ordinary obeisance to an idol. It is not a mass that you perform in the church. It is a melting of your being before the Absolute. Therefore Bhagavan Sri Krishna says, “Not charity, not philanthropy, not study, not austerity, is capable of bringing about this great vision that you had, Arjuna! Only by devotion can I be seen, contacted. Only by devotion am I capable of being known, seen and entered into.” These three words are used in the Bhagavad Gita at the end of the Eleventh Chapter – knowing, seeing and entering. Arjuna knew and saw, but never entered into It. Therefore, he was the same Arjuna after the Bhagavad Gita also. He never merged into the Supreme Being.
Now, religion is knowing, seeing and entering into. Knowing is considered by such thinkers like Ramanuja, the great propounder of the Visishtadvaita philosophy, as inferior to devotion. I am now digressing a little bit from the point, into another thing altogether, which is also interesting
Knowledge or Jnana is not equal to Bhakti, says Ramanuja, the great propounder of the doctrine and philosophy called Visishtadvaita. And Acharya Sankara says that Jnana is superior to Bhakti. It may appear that they are quarreling with each other. Really, they are not quarrelling. They have some emphasis laid on different aspects of the same question. Why does Bhagavan Sri Krishna say that nothing can make you fit to see the vision of God, to behold Him, except Bhakti? It would seem that He speaks like Ramanuja and not like Sankara. But they are only speaking in different languages….the same thing. There is no contradiction between them. “Knowing, seeing and entering into” signifies the process of contacting God by degrees. There is, in the parlance of Vedanta, two types of knowledge – Paroksha Jnana and Aparoksha Jnana. Paroksha Jnana is indirect knowledge. Aparoksha Jnana is direct knowledge. “God exists” is indirect knowledge. “I am inseparable from God-being” is direct knowledge. Now, we do not feel that we are inseparable from God’s being. That knowledge has not come to us. So we have not entered such a height of religious consciousness as to be convinced that we are inseparable from God’s existence. But we are convinced enough to feel that God exists.
At least the people seated here are perhaps convinced that God must be. He is. Circumstances compel us to feel confidently that God must be, that God is. But we have not gone to such an extent to feel that we are inseparable from Him. That is a little higher stage. We have known in an indirect way. Jnana has come, but Darshana or, vision of God has not come. We have not seen the Virat in front of us, notwithstanding the fact that we are seeing Virat. This whole cosmos is that, but somehow we have segregated our personality from Virat consciousness. A cell in the body is seeing the body as if it is outside it.
The way in which we are seeing the universe now is something like the possibility of a particular organism, called the cell in the body, separating itself in motion – not really of course – from the bodily organism and looking at the body. What would be the condition or the experience of a cell in our own body notionally isolating itself from the organism to which it belongs and considering the body as a world outside it? You can imagine the stupidity of it. This is exactly what we are doing. We think that the world is outside us. We can fly into space, drive in a motor car on a road, because a peculiar notion has become a reality in our mind, that the world is outside us though we are a part of the world. So, the idea that the Virat is an object of perception, that the world is external to us, is notional and not realistic. All our difficulties are notional in the end. They have no reality or substance in themselves. We are bound by our minds, our thoughts, our feelings and our willings. So when Acharya Sankara says that Jnana is superior and Ramanuja says that Bhakti is superior, they are saying the same thing.
By Bhakti Ramanuja means that love of God which supersedes intellectual activity or a mere knowing that God exists. And when Sankara says that Jnana or knowledge is superior, he means knowledge which is identical with being and which is the same as Para Bhakti or the love of God where the soul is in communion with the Being of God.
The highest devotion is the same as the highest knowledge. Jnana and Para Bhakti are the same. The Gauna Bhakti or secondary love of God, which is more ritualistic and more formal, is inferior. But Ramanuja’s Bhakti is the surging of the soul and the melting of personality in God-experience. It is to become mad with God-love as we hear in the case of Spinoza, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Mirabai and Tukaram. Their Bhakti was not simply love of God as that of churchmen or templemen. It is a kind of ecstasy in which the personality has lost itself in God-love and God-being. That is Jnana and that is Bhakti. So, there is no difference between Ramanuja and Sankara in the ultimate reaches. And Bhagavan Sri Krishna’s dictum is also of a similar character.
So now, when we are discussing the final point in our studies, we are gradually losing attachment to this obsessional notion that we are this little Mr. or Mrs. Body and that we are located in a part of the physical world called India or America, Japan or Russia. And we are slowly trying to become citizens of a larger dimension which is wider than this earth, perhaps larger than even the solar system and this physical cosmos.
When we enter into the true religious life, we become real children of God
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy
‘The Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy’ by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Friday 31 May 2013 15:48
We have started recently a small campus called the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy only to bring into our own memories and minds the divine message of Sri Gurudev. The intention is not to teach something technical, historical, academic or philosophical. The idea is very simple, very humble and very insignificant if you would like to call it. And its insignificance lies in the fact that it does not seek any kind of propaganda in the eyes of the social public, but it seeks the recognition in the great eye of God, the Almighty. And if you can succeed in rousing up even one individual to the status of God-consciousness, the Divine Life Society would have done a great service and the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy would have served its purpose. It is not quantity that we seek, it is quality. We may not be thousands in number, we may be very few, we may be two hundred, it does not matter. We do not require even two hundred. We require one and if that one has the inner soul-force which has the strength to declare that it can stand on its own legs and it can draw sustenance from the five elements, from the sun and the moon and the stars, Sri Gurudev would be immensely pleased. The world, that is, the creation that is before us, is itself our support and God is our support. And God is never dead, He is never away from us. And if our connection with Him be spiritual, which means to say indivisible, then the help that comes from Him is perpetual. And so it comes without asking. If this gospel can be planted in our hearts, even in the heart of a single person here, God will be immensely satisfied, and the blessings of Sri Gurudev will be abundant. I have spoken all this with an intense feeling for the grand aim for which Sri Gurudev lived and the purpose for which I believe God has created this world itself.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Grandeur of the Absolute
‘The Grandeur of the Absolute’ by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Thursday 30 May 2013 16:54
The grandeur of the Absolute is grander than all other grandeur. It is the crowning edifice of truth and glory. Nothing is beyond That. It is neither form, nor content, nor extent. The soul sinks into It by an experience of all-fullness – neither essence, nor kingdom, nor wisdom, neither equal nor unequal, neither static nor moving, neither sitting nor resting, neither one nor two, neither true nor false, neither this-ness nor that-ness, nothing known to us, nothing known to any existent being. It has no name, there is no definition of It! It is That which is. It is not love, not grace, not world, not soul, not God, not freedom, not light, for all these are relative conceptions. It is not Satchidananda, which is only an ideal ‘other’ of what we here experience. Satchidananda is only the logical highest, a mere intellectual prop. Reality is beyond Satchidananda, also. It is Itself, the eternal sun that shines in the infinite sky of the absolute world! It transcends cosmic consciousness. It is the supra-essential essence. Eternity and Infinity embrace one another to form Its Centre of Experience. It is an Ocean that sweeps away the earth and the heaven and the netherland. Sun, moon and stars are dissolved in It. Brahma, Vishnu and Siva vanish into It. It is the Life of life, Wisdom of wisdom, Joy of joy, Power of power, Real of real, Essence of essence. Birthlessness and deathlessness float in It like ripples. It is the supreme Death of all, and yet the highest peak of real Life. The totality of all the joys of the universe is merely a distorted fragment of That Supreme. It puts an end to the vicious circle of transmigratory life.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Do Not Shout, "I am a Yoga Student!"
‘Do Not Shout, “I am a Yoga Student!”’ by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Tuesday 28 May 2013 19:50
The desires of the mind, and the urges of the personality in general, are the activities of the outward nature that compel our attention in Yoga. We can flow with this current of the outward nature or we can oppose the current. Yoga tells us to be very cautious and adopt a via media. It tells us that neither have we to flow with the current of nature entirely, nor oppose it directly. Both these extremes are unwarranted, because they will immediately make us a cynosure in the eyes of Prakriti. It is better to live unnoticed than become an object of attraction to everybody; because an object of attraction always gets into some trouble. Whereas, an unnoticed person somehow gets on happily in life. Therefore, even in the practice of Yoga, the student should live in the midst of Prakriti’s activities in an unnoticed manner, and not make her suddenly conscious of his activities by shouting aloud, “I am a Yoga student!” Prakriti does not like shouts of this kind. The reactions of nature, if they are strong, may bring about a reversal of the practice. An internal desire may burn the senses. Desires, which the student tries to run away from in the name of Yoga, desires sensory as well as egoistic, violent urges, may press him forward in the reverse direction; and these reactionary urges may be stronger than the corresponding urges manifesting in a normal person in the usual course. Bottled-up energy is always stronger than the energy that is given a little bit of freedom. Let it be noted that Yoga is not bottling up of energy, but a wise utilisation of it. If water is allowed to build up in a dam without being released, the dam will burst. Dams are not built so that they may burst. They are built for optimum utilisation of the available water resources. But, if the waters are not so utilised, and are just allowed to build up inside the dam, the dam will burst, and the waters will ravage the land.
The activities of nature being external in space and time, and we being a part of nature, we are automatically involved in those activities, and we cannot easily curb our external urges. They have to be controlled only gradually. The stages of Yoga are, therefore, gradual ones in Patanjali’s system.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Essence of Service
‘The Essence of Service’ by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Monday 27 May 2013 17:12
A charitable disposition towards others is the essence of service. Charity of feeling is the greatest of charities. Giving donations of some dollars is not necessarily charity. That is only an outward expression of one’s internal recognition of the value of people outside. The discovery of great spiritual value in all things in the world is the essence of the serviceful outlook of life. We do not serve people because they are inferior to us, or because they are beggars and we are rich. That is not the reason why we do service. Service is the outcome of our feeling that the great aspiration that is throbbing in our heart is also present in other hearts. Social circumstances might have converted the other people into what they are, but that is not their essential being. The charitable feeling, which is the essence of service, arises on account of a recognition of divinity in all things, rather than on account of the discovery that others are poor fellows, beggars on the road, and unwanted units in society. There is no putting on of a superior attitude in unselfish service. We do not become important men, because we do service. It would be a blunder to think so. Perhaps, one who is capable of doing the highest service regards himself as the humblest of people. He is the last and the least, and not the first. These are again subtle points which one has to be able to appreciate in one’s own self, by careful examination of oneself daily.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Time and Space
‘Time and Space’ by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 26 May 2013 21:34
The nature of the experience of space and time depends upon the manner in which the consciousness happens to be objectively modalised. Persons who are in a depressed state of mind or who are in deep sorrow are apt to feel that, a moment of time is like a year, while those who revel in happiness would feel contrary. Space and time are ultimately conditions of consciousness and are not independent of it. In the dreaming state, experiences ranging over thousands of years can be undergone in a moment’s time, while at the same time, the mind in this state can also project a moment’s experience into a history of several years. In the state of intense spiritual contemplation and Samadhi, space and time are transcended, and only pure consciousness reveals itself. In this consciousness, the entire universal cycle is said to appear and disappear within the millionth part of a moment.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]