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Difficulties on the Spiritual Path and the Necessity for a Guru
Difficulties on the Spiritual Path and the Necessity for a Guru by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Saturday 20 April 2013 21:29
The well-known troubles of life are also the troubles of the spiritual seeker. A sadhaka on the path – one who treads the way of divine realisation, a seeker of God – is also in trouble in the same way as anyone else can be, as long as he is a part of this world. The various experiences, sometimes painful and at other times pleasant, are mysterious occurrences, and cannot be wholly attributed either to our own selves or to the structure of the world.
The question, “Why do we suffer?” is almost similar to the question, “How do we know that there is a world outside us?” Our experiences appear to be of suffering under the existing conditions of our physical body and the circumstances of our psychological operations. The conditions of life – we may call them conditions of the world – are not acceptable to the conditions of the body and mind of the person concerned, and so there is a coming together of two forces, asserting themselves in two different ways: the world in one way, and the body with its own mind in another way. The war between the world and the individual is the sorrow of life.
But why should this war take place? Here is the difference between the understanding of a sincere seeker and the opinion of the ordinary man of the world. The impact of the world on ourselves is what we call experience. It is up to us to understand it in any way we like and take it in any spirit. The world is certainly a substance which goes to the constitution of our own bodily individuality also. The gunas of prakriti – sattva, rajas and tamas – which are supposed to become concretised in denser and denser forms in the process of creation, become the various realms, the planes of existence; and our internal layers of personality are not in any way exempt from this law of the condensation of this threefold cause.
The layers of human individuality correspond to the realms of cosmic expression, the degrees of reality. The system of yoga that studies the internal structural patterns and layers of the psyche holds that there are whorls of power known as chakras, and these gradational arrangements of the whorls of force within us is a miniature presentation of a cosmical whorl in a gradational form, which we call the planes, the lokas or the realms of the universe. Thus, everyone is in the world, everyone is in this universe.
After passing through years of intense meditation and ardent conduct of discipline such as japa, anushthana, svadhyaya and self-control, there is likely to be a rebuff of a very painful nature, which all saints in the past also had to undergo. Though, in a very lofty sense, God’s creation is a veritable Kingdom of Heaven, the whole universe is the abode of the Almighty and, therefore, it is all eternal felicitation everywhere in His Kingdom. Uglinesss, pain and sorrow are unthinkable in this realm of perfection. Yet man sees nothing but imperfection, ugliness, dirt and the most undesirable ever conceivable.
These repercussions in the form of undesirable experience appear to become more and more intensified and more and more intolerable as the sadhaka treads the path further and further. Perhaps the normal troubles which people undergo in the world are somehow compensated by other joys and pleasures. They have their recreations and diversions, the pleasures of sense and the comforts of the body, but the spiritual seeker has none. He has no comfort. The compensating factors are absent in a seeker who treads the path of discipline because this restraint of self, called spiritual discipline, involves a percentage of indifference on the part of the seeker to any motivation inside in the direction of asking for any comfort or satisfaction in life. This motivation becomes totally absent in the end, and becomes at least diminished even in the earlier stages.
But there is an endless asking for comfort in the world, and the more the sorrow, the greater is the need felt to counteract the sorrow, which is what is called the desire for further comfort and satisfaction. Man struggles and struggles, and somehow succeeds. But such a struggle is absent in the spiritual seeker. A peculiar mood overtakes him, which prevents this gesture of the inner psyche in the form of asking. So there is a peculiar situation created, due to which the world may look insipid, bitter and totally unwanted. But the world is there, and it is not going to listen to our cries, and it cares not for our opinions.
So on the one side there is an inadequate provision of the means of physical comfort, and on the other side the world is as hard as ever; it is not going to bend before us. The tortures inwardly felt by the spiritual seeker may look more intense than the sufferings of even the poorest man in the world because there is already the submission of self to a kind of obligation to non-asking, non-expectation and non putting forth of direct effort in the direction of acquisition of comfort, because any effort that is diverted in that way may diminish the intensity of the effort in the right direction, for which purpose the discipline is practised. For fear of diversification of energy, for fear of depleting strength, the sadhaka contemplates intensely on an ideal which, in certain stages of the development and process of ascent, bitterly conflicts with the natural forces of life.
A list of these sorrows is enumerated by Patanjali in one of his sutras: vyādhi styāna saṁśaya pramāda ālasya avirati bhrāntidarśana alabdhabhūmikatva anavasthitatvāni cittavikśepaḥ te antarāyāḥ (Yoga Sutras 1.30). Physical illness is the first. Of all the troubles, the illness of the body is the first torture. The sadhaka will always be ill with something or the other because of the dual impact on the body: inner concentration, which causes pressure to be exerted on the prana, and, on the other side, the absence of the normal facilities of life. So, as if between the devil and the deep sea, the sadhaka plods on, and most of even the sincere seekers may feel a sense of ‘enough’ with this sort of living. Many have put a stop to this effort because one can bear suffering to some extent but it becomes unbearable beyond a certain limit, and so there is a tendency to put an end to all suffering by the putting an end to effort itself. And the higher we go, the greater is the thud with which we will drop. A drop from a few feet above is one thing, but a drop from thousands of feet or a few miles above is a different thing altogether.
The mind takes revenge under many circumstances – that is, the affirmative principle, or the assertive ego, which has been pushed aside with great effort by the power of discipline, takes the person to task and then starts the great drama of inward and outer conflict. Why does this happen, is a great question. Why should the path of God be strewn with hurdles, thorns and threats of every kind from fearsome elements? This is a question which can receive an answer only by deep contemplative analysis. How does it follow that the path to God is paved with suffering? Where is the relationship between these two extremes or contraries?
The answer is simple – namely, the stage in which we are at the present moment in the scheme of evolution. The consciousness in man has descended very low, and to say this is indeed to say very little because something worse has happened to man. He has not merely descended very low; something more atrocious has taken place, which is the entry of consciousness into a localised encasement called the body and the projection of it externally in space and time through the senses so that, like light rays passing through a prism and becoming deflected in various ways, the one consciousness appears as if it is a fivefold sensation. This is the reason why we have the sensations of a fivefold character – through the eyes, through the ears, through the tongue, through the skin, etc. It is not merely a simple entry of consciousness into the body and a coming out of it through the senses; it is a grasping of this projected consciousness in terms of that which it pounces upon, called objects. It is not a silent movement, a calm flow of consciousness in the sense of the movement of light rays through a prism; it is a vehement, intense rush of an eager spirit.
In the Puranas there is the story of Ganga descending with terrible power. Such was the force with which she descended that nobody could prevent her from entering into the nether regions, piercing through the bowels of the earth. The story goes that Bhagiratha had to perform such intense austerity to please the great god Mahadeva, Siva, that years and years passed in this effort of his. It is said that Ganga flowed from the kamandal of Brahma with a rapidity that only Lord Siva could bear. One can imagine what would be the force which would require a person like Siva to put a stop to it.
This great urge of consciousness to descend for the purpose of the fulfilment of the intentions of nature is strong enough to penetrate through the apertures of the body and lose no percentage of energy in that process. Like a wild animal which rapaciously moves with fury in a dark jungle searching for its prey, consciousness rushes through this physical body and makes it a petty instrument, a pawn that it pierces through in the direction of that for which it craves for its self-fulfilment.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad calls this grasping consciousness graha and calls the object atigraha. The vehement rush of consciousness in the direction of the objects of sense is comparable to a foolish person’s insatiable desire to catch hold of the mouth of an alligator or a crocodile, and the atighraha is the object or the crocodile itself. Its grasp on this person is stronger than the grasp of the one who has caught hold of it. So the foolish one, not knowing what he is catching,rushes into the crocodile’s mouth of gaping teeth and faces the terrible consequence of being caught between them, from which extrication is almost impossible. Vehement is the grasping, and more vehement is the regrasping of consciousness by the objects’ constitution itself. Vehement is the desire for enjoyment in terms of objects, but more vehement is the desire that follows as a consequence of that enjoyment.
A desire cannot be extinguished by its fulfilment because a conviction is driven into the mind that certainly joy is lodged in the object, else how could I be happy? My joy is incomparable when I come in contact with that which I love, which I consider as dear and near. This satisfaction that I have gained by union with that which I longed for is a confirmation of the fact that my own earlier opinion is correct. In this manner, opinions pile over opinions and there is a greater rush, intensifying itself more and more, like an avalanche falling into a deep cavern or the unthinkable velocity of the waters of a river which flow deep into the lower regions of the earth.
What has happened to man is not a happy predicament. We have a petty, childish understanding of the world. What is this world? It is a phantasmal externalisation in terms of an illusory screen called space and time, occasioned by this rapid movement of consciousness that has entered the body and moved out through the senses, interpreting the Universal as an object fit to be grasped through the senses.
We are often told in Vedanta philosophy and religious scriptures that the whole universe is the body of Virat. What does one mean by saying that the universe is the body of the Virat? Its meaning is unthinkable. No one can know what it actually means and what is its message, because if it is true that this universe is the body of God – the appearance of Hiranyagarbha or Virat – then everything that we think, all that we feel and do, becomes a meaningless chimerical acting in an arena which is clearly conceptual, having no reality or basis whatsoever.
The catastrophe that has befallen us can be appreciated only by investigative understanding which can compare its present condition with whatever could be the condition of that which we consider as ensouling the whole cosmos. When we call the universe as the body of the Virat, we mean that it is no more an object of anybody. It is not a thing that is to be seen with the eyes, and if God is the Reality, Hiranyagarbha, Virat is that which is finally real, and no other experience can be regarded as real.
Therefore, the desire for objects is an unthinkable, inconceivable malady of the mind of man. It is a disease whose description is really beyond the power of human language. Our longings, called desires, are the expressions of the very force of that descended Universal consciousness through this body, dissecting itself into a variety of forms through the apertures of the senses and then catching hold of the visible objects, whether they are physical or merely conceptual. I mentioned that the Upanishad has a very interesting terminology that it gives to the process of grasping and the reaction which this grasping produces – graha and atighraha. It is very difficult to understand what has happened to us. If we are strong in our adamant desire to grasp the objects of sense, the objects are even stronger than us. The objects are not going to leave us because they are configurations of world energy and, therefore, their strength is incalculable.
I gave the example of a crocodile. It is not fun to try to embrace an alligator, whatever be its beauty, as we know the consequence. Another example is given in a passage in the Yoga Vasishtha. There is no point in intensely longing to take rest under the cool shade of the cobra’s hood. No matter how hot the sun is, who will seek the shade of a cobra’s hood? This world is such. It is a peculiar presentation before these distracted forms of human consciousness, and the satisfactions are utter chimeras, illusory to the core. They are illusory because of the fact that the world outside consciousness is illusory. The world is not outside consciousness, and inasmuch as every satisfaction in life is a consequence of the externality of the world, there is no such thing as joy except in terms of objects. Objects are unthinkable except as things placed outside us, and inasmuch as outsideness is only an illusory spatio-temproal projection, all joys of life are utter illusions. One who is sunk in this condition cannot easily understand because the understanding that has to understand this condition is already immersed in this condition of involvement. Who is to understand the understander?
The Yoga System has scientific methods for a graduated wrenching of this projected consciousness from its vehement grasping in terms of objects, by what are called the yamas and the niyamas, asana, pranayama, etc. We all know these very well. Everyone has read these scriptures and knows the sutras of Patanjali. Even a child can repeat these aphorisms of Patanjali, and anyone can become a yoga instructor and teach these sutras; but the world is a crocodile nevertheless, and it can never be anything else.
These difficulties are the difficulties of a sincere spiritual seeker because once we have descended into this body through the prarabdha karma, the conditions prescribed by this prarabdha have to be our lot. There is the old analogy of the hunter who shot a poisonous arrow at an animal he saw moving in the thick forest at twilight, which he mistook for a prowling tiger; but as soon as the arrow was released, he realised that it was a grazing cow, not a tiger. His heart broke. “What a mistake I have committed! I have hit a poor cow grazing grass, and not a tiger. The knowledge of the fact that a mistake has been committed arises after the mistake has already been committed, as is the case with the hunter who realised that it was a cow only after he let off the arrow, and he had no control over the result. Controlling the arrow is possible only when it is in the hand of the hunter. Once he discharges it, it shall have its say, and it had its say, and it hit the cow and killed it.
In earlier incarnations, in the births through which we have passed, we thought that things are beautiful, the world is delightful, and the objects of sense are intensely satisfying, nectar-like. We prayed to God, “Give us a body through which we can enjoy these objects.” We craved for this joy of the union with the objects of sense, not knowing what the objects were really made of. We mistook the objects for delightful abodes as the hunter mistook the cow for the tiger, getting them mixed up in his consciousness. There are a few blessed ones who might have awakened themselves into the recognition of the fact that some mistake has been committed and the world is not what it may have appeared to be earlier. It is not an abode of joy. Now this body has come as a necessary instrument which was wanted earlier but is not wanted now, but once it was asked for and granted, its burden has to be borne, and we bear the burden – rather, consciousness bears the burden of this body. The physical body of an intensely contemplative spiritual seeker no more appears as a desirable instrument. It is a kind of curse which asks for food every day, clothing every day, rest every day, and facilities of every kind every day, but we cannot complain. We cannot speak one word, because the consciousness wanted to descend into this body.
In a humorous description of the process of creation, the Aitareya Upanishad tells us that the fallen angel wanted an abode from God. The centres of consciousness splashed off like sparks of fire from the universal conflagration of God’s majesty. These shootings, these shot-out sparks, are the angels in heaven that we speak of, and once they were shot out like satellites, they lost consciousness of their original union with the total whole, which was the Almighty Completeness. Hunger caught hold of each angel, says the Upanishad. Hunger is the most intense longing of any person or any living thing. The most intolerable and agonising longing of living beings is the desire to satisfy hunger; every other desire comes afterwards. “Give us food,” said these angels to the great Almighty. In a more specific way, the Panchadasi of Sage Vidyaranya tells us that God created this world as the food for the jiva. Sevenfold food is mentioned in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad – psychological food and psychical food. However, food is anything that is outside consciousness.
Anything that is external to consciousness should be considered as matter. ‘Matter’ is a term that we use to designate that which consciousness cannot consider as its own self, and so this world is material and our desires are not merely for these sensorily cognisable material objects, but we sometimes have even a greater longing for psychological conditions. Name and fame, for instance, are not visible objects. Respect is not a physical object, but one can end oneself for want of respect. In spite of having a multitude of physical objects for the purpose of sensory enjoyment, people have fallen into wells, hung themselves with ropes, and died miserably merely because of loss of self respect, not because they were poor from the point of view of material possessions. These incidents would show that psychological desires, or rather the longings of consciousness for conceptual objects, are more intense than the desire for physical objects. Name and fame, self-respect, are conceptual objects for which we long more than even food and clothing. Better to die than lose self-respect, is what people feel. Therefore, the invisible objects, such as the ones mentioned, have a more powerful force of grasping, the atigrahatva, than the physical objects.
Thus, we are caught by a twofold power – psychological longing on one side, and physical longing through the senses on the other side. When we are placed in this utter dilemma, in conditions of this type, we are likely to feel that we have no escape from being caught by the devil on one side or by the deep sea on the other side. Someone was asked, “Which is better, the devil or the deep sea? Which would you prefer?” The reply was, “The devil is better because once I enter the deep sea there is no hope of coming back, but I may somehow escape from the devil.” In a similar way, we sometimes feel that this wretched world is better than the tortures of spiritual life, and we revert to the world. “Let it be wretched. It is hell, but this hell is better than the greater hell of the pursuit of that which neither the mind can understand nor the body can tolerate.”
It is said that superhuman grace often descends upon the disciple from the Guru by a process called shakti-patha. A Guru is so knowledgeable of the conditions of the shishya, or the disciple, that he keeps a guard over him or her. He does not allow the disciple to wander independently, unprotected. It is believed that even the Buddha followed this practice. He was conscious of the movements and the conditions of life of his nearest disciples, and he would keep a watch over them. While he was kind and good enough to give a long rope to the mediocre idiosyncrasies and whims of human nature, he was a very able protector of his disciples.
The point is again before us that knowledge of the world is a kind of knowledge which is illusory. It is illusory because it is projected in terms of external objects. Any objectified knowledge cannot be really regarded finally as knowledge. Therefore, even the most learned person cannot be safe in this world. Any kind of professorial or academic achievement cannot be considered as adequate to the purpose because even the highest academician’s knowledge is a part of this illusory world. It is paroksha jnana, however intense it may be, however transparent it may look.
Thus, the possibility of slipping through the precipice of the erroneous conviction that the world is really outside is not ruled out even in the case of the most learned of individuals. Learning is one thing, and wisdom is another thing. Wisdom is the sprouting forth of that insight from within us which can be brought out to the surface of experience only by divine grace – call it Guru’s grace, call it God’s grace. Practical discipline is spiritual sadhana. It is not learning or reading books, which may have a value in its own realm, in its own measure, and serve its own purpose; that is another matter altogether. But when all is said and done, this is totally inadequate to the purpose of the one who sincerely longs to break through the fetters of life which are widespread before us, not merely in the form of little desires of the senses, but of a mighty screen before our mental eye in the form of space-time.
Who can break through this? This is the reason why yoga scriptures tell us that even in samadhi of a lower type, there is the danger of coming back. Processes, methods, techniques and ways of breaking through this fortress of the network of space-time-cause are all described, no doubt, but in enigmatic styles, difficult to understand. Even with commentaries on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, no one can understand what they mean. They are just sutras whose literal meanings may be known to us grammatically, but the spirit is a different thing altogether.
Thus comes the great age-old conclusion once again, to be repeated over and over, that the spiritual search is always an adventure that is undertaken under the guidance of a living teacher, in whose absence even the best of students may be in some danger one day or the other. Spiritual practice is compared to walking on a razor’s edge. ‘Razor’s edge’ has a double meaning. One meaning is that it is sharp and cutting like a razor, and the other meaning is that the path to God is invisible. The edge of the razor is so sharp, fine and subtle that it is not visible to eyes. So is the way to the Almighty; we cannot see it. It is not a beaten track. No one can know where the path to God is, or in which direction it is. This is the difficulty which one could feel in spite of vast learning and academic knowledge. Which is the way to God? The Upanishad which tells us that the path to God is like a razor’s edge also tells us that this mystery, this secret, can be known only with the guidance of one who is non-separate from God. Ananya-prokte gatir atra nᾱsty aṇīyᾱn hy atarkyam aṇupramᾱnᾱt (2.8), says the Katha Upanishad. No logic can break through this mystery. No amount of argument can bring you this knowledge because it is subtler than the subtlest conceivable thing. How do you know it then? You have to receive this knowledge only from one who exists in a state of identity with God. He is referred to in the Upanishads as Brahmanishtha, Brahmashrotriya, and perhaps it is the grace of God that brings a sincere seeker in contact with such a mighty soul in the world.
Thus, while spiritual practice, sadhana, is the only worthwhile thing in life, meaningful and significant for everyone, it is indeed a hard nut to crack. But the all-seeing eye of God, which is omniscient, is also the ever-protective power behind any sincere asking. This is again enunciated in the Bhagavadgita when we are told in that verse, ananyāś cintayanto māṁ ye janāḥ paryupāsate teṣāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ yogakṣemaṁ vahāmy aham (9.22). With all the difficulties, with all the hurdles, the grace is never denied to one who is ardently longing. Mokshatva is the prerequisite, and to such a one, God reveals Himself as the Guru. God is the Guru of all Gurus, and he will send one of his emissaries, suited to your purpose. Thus is the difficulty of the path, and thus is also the great glory of the way to God.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
New Year's Message – Becoming True Spiritual Seekers
New Year’s Message – Becoming True Spiritual Seekers by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 19 April 2013 18:10
Message given on New Year’s Eve, the 31st of December, 1973.
Want of proper attention to the aim of human life often limits our understanding of the world and the people around us. We are generally masters of mixing up issues and not giving the proper form of attention which is due to any person, any action or any relationship in our life. We often seem to be very enthusiastic, and this enthusiasm, when it fires up our nature, may outwardly appear to lead us to a kind of success in what we regard as our aim of life. But, enthusiasm is not always coupled with a proper appreciation of our position in life and an understanding of the true nature of things. Do we not suffer and feel unhappy sometime or the other every day of our life, in spite of our knowledge and learning and in spite of our age and experience in the world? Does the world not sometimes seem to give us a shock in a form we never expected? And, does it not appear that our learning and experience is not of much value to us when we are placed in a tight corner and when circumstances around us seem to be unfavourable to our chosen or pre-meditated notion of our good?
Man is man. Human nature cannot leave man, in spite of the fact that he is a genius in a particular line of education. Our knowledge does not come to our aid at all times because we do not have within us that amount of knowledge which will be able to face, interpret and implement every circumstance in our life into a means of transformation of that particular event for the sake of a higher achievement. Even elderly people weep when something unexpected happens. They start shedding tears like children when something very grieving, shocking and unfavourable to their emotions takes place. We seem to have friends around us. We put too much trust into personal relations among human beings, and when this trust gives way into an unforeseen encounter, we do not know where we actually stand. This inadequacy of understanding seriously affects not only our temporal life in human society but even our spiritual aspiration and our sadhana, the practice of our spiritual life.
After all, we cannot completely shed human nature merely because we have taken to an aspiration towards God and God-realisation. Our concept of sadhana is human. The equipments that we employ in our sadhana are also temporal and coloured with human sentiments. There is an instinct in the human being which makes him feel that he belongs to a fraternity of a particular species called humanity. We always talk about human beings. We have nothing else to think about. Even when we speak of universal love and brotherhood, we are likely to pinpoint human relations rather than anything outside the purview of this setup of things. Even a spiritual seeker, a sadhaka of a fairly advanced type, cannot free himself or herself totally from human sentiments and weaknesses.
We should not be under the impression that we are so advanced in sadhana as to be impervious to the action of sentiment and reaction. There is no person in the world, practically speaking, who can stand the onslaught of psychological rift and social encounter. We seem to be well off on account of the prevalence of certain conditions which are agreeable to our sentiments and personal satisfaction, but we are not really as all right as we imagine ourselves to be. We can become something quite different from what we appear to be, when conditions change. Our friendship is skin deep; it can break like a bubble at any moment of time. Even the friendship of brothers can break because it is based on very shaky foundations. For the matter of that, the relationship of human beings and the relationship of anything with any other thing is subject to separation and transformation without any previous notice.
When we dissociate ourselves from the ordinary relationships of family, society, etc., and take to a whole-souled, whole-timed and whole-hearted practice of sadhana, it should also be our endeavour, simultaneously, to see that we are rid of these tender bonds with earthly things that secretly lie embedded in our own hearts. Our affections are in our own hearts, in our own minds, feelings and emotions. That we have come several miles away from our home and family relations does not free us from subjection to these emotions of like and dislike, the seeds of which are buried in our hearst. Our difficulties and problems are inside us. We carry the seeds and roots of all our difficulties with us wherever we go, and they can sprout under suitable circumstances. We are wholly human – and even subhuman, many a time – in the manifestation of our sentiments and instincts, notwithstanding the fact that we are also spiritual seekers and aspirants on the path of God-realisation. Many years of hard toil, expectation and effort have passed, and yet it is difficult to believe that we have actually changed the quality of our thinking. Our thoughts may be different from the thoughts that occurred to us earlier, but the quality of thinking is the same as it was many years back, even before we seriously took to the path that is spiritual.
The danger of not being able to distinguish between what is actually expected of us in spiritual practice and the sentiments that are deeply buried within us, is hideous indeed. The love for comfort is ingrained in the mind of every person. And when comforts are provided in the degree that is necessary for the upkeep of our present state of emotion, it may appear that we are near to God and that we are rising from success to success, not knowing the fact that we can be shaken up from our very roots if the laws of the environment around us start to change. The study of human history, political as well as psychological, has not given us greater wisdom or greater knowledge than the usual reactionary knowledge that we have in respect of senses and their objects.
The advancement that one makes spiritually in the practice of spiritual sadhana can be tested by the emotions that pass over one’s mind every day. The attitudes that we project every day in respect of others and those feelings which we want to hide from others, the kind of thought that we entertain in ourselves and the kind of thought that we would not like to manifest before others, and also the several moments of joy and sorrow through which we pass through every day, will tell us the substance of our character. Man is a social animal, as is usually said. And this sociable instinct in human nature pursues the human mind wherever it goes, so that we feel insecure when we are alone. We have questions which the mind poses before us which we are unable to answer easily. We feel that we are lost, as it were, when we are not placed in such social circumstances as would promise us the needed physical protection and psychological satisfaction.
Spirituality is far superior to the social sentiment of man. It has nothing to do with one’s father and mother, brother and sister, friends, enemies, etc. These are sentimental notions with which we are born and brought up, and which we are unable to give up even if we are old people. We seem to take spirituality very lightly as if we can go scot free by merely uttering a few words of praise about it and making others believe that a spiritual regeneration is going again on in human society.
Spiritual life is not confined merely to the human circle. It is a power that has to take into consideration in its operations factors which are other than human also. Our life is not determined merely by human relations. We do not live merely because there are other people around us. As a matter of fact, the most important factors that control our existence and action are other than human. Sunlight and the sun’s heat, for example, are not human factors. We know how dependent we are to the light of the Sun, but do we pay any heed to its existence and action? The air that we breathe is not human. The water that we drink is not human. And the physical relationships which sustain even the planetary system and which governs our life is not human. Superhuman factors control our life, and these factors cannot be ignored when we contemplate the spiritual import of the conduct of our sadhana.
The practice of true spiritual sadhana is a terror to the human ego. It comes like a fierce lion or tiger, threatening it. Sadhana is not a comfortable process to the human ego which is involved in personal and physical relationships with people. Even spiritual seeking cannot be wholly free from a subtle longing for recognition, appreciation and a promise of security for its existence. It is on account of this weakness which subtly operates from within us, that we many a time feel uncomfortable in our lives. We have occasions to react sharply in respect of other people, due to this weakness that is present in us. Our dependence on external factors is too much, and that is the reason why we feel insecure and unhappy. There is no strength within us. The strength is external. This borrowed facility seems to be maintaining us, and it can be withdrawn when the relationships of people change on account of a change of circumstances. That we are sitting together here in a common hall, that we have a community of our own to which we seem to belong, that we have people who can be regarded as our friends, supporters and well-wishers, all this is a transitory bubble that has arisen before us on account of certain effects our previous deeds which we have performed in our previous lives. When the momentum of those deeds is exhausted, these relationships will also change. We will not be in the midst of the very same people with whom we are sitting and chatting today. The whole scene will be shifted, as in a drama. When a particular scene is enacted and is over the curtain will immediately fall, and we will be surprised as to what has happened. The curtain has fallen, and all the people have vanished into the background. Well, the curtain may be raised and it can fall again at any moment.
The present relationships of every kind, positive or negative, pleasurable or otherwise, are entirely the consequences of certain deeds that we did in our previous lives. The result of a particular karma is not permanent. It is only temporary. As every action has a beginning and an end, the product of that action also has a beginning and an end. The world is temporal, and it has a beginning and an end in the sense that it is a manifestation of the cumulative effect of the actions performed by all the contents of that particular realm.
There is what is called individual prarabdha and group prarabdha, individual karma and group karma. We are all human beings living in a common realm of experience on account of a similarity of actions, broadly speaking, which we did in our previous incarnations, on account of which we are here on a common platform. But, really speaking, we are not inwardly related in the manner in which we appear to be outwardly on the surface. That is why there can be separation of friends and war between father and son. We may wonder how this could be possible. Is it not unthinkable? It is really thinkable, and this is the only thing that we can expect in life. While our higher nature tells us that we are united among ourselves in a particular state of consciousness, we are completely different from one another in another state of consciousness. The unity among people is possible only on the basis of a common and similar structural pattern of our personalities. This unity is impossible merely on the physical or social levels.
That is why political peace, for example, is not wholly trustworthy. We do not have permanent peace. Though it may appear that the international setup is peaceful and amicable, and to our advantage, this cannot be wholly relied upon because it is brought about artificially. It is like the coming together of many logs of wood floating on the surface of water. They can be separated when the current changes or a strong wind blows over them. The scriptures tell us that our connections are similar to the connection of one log of wood to another log floating on the surface of a river. On account of the pressure of the water and the intensity and direction of the wind, two logs of wood come together. Likewise, by the force of a particular set of karma we have come together here in this world, on this Earth plane, in this country, in this town, in Rishikesh, in this hall. But the wind can blow in another direction at any moment. It can blow just now, and we will all be thrown helter-skelter, most unexpectedly. This is what we call a catastrophe; and such catastrophes can be physical, astronomical, political, social or personal.
But, are we prepared for it? This unpreparedness sits secretly in the heart of even a spiritual aspirant. We cannot wholly trust God or depend on His favour, due to the fact that we are still humanly limited and our notions of success or advancement are humanly conditioned. They have not taken a divine shape. A real spiritual seeker is a divine person. He is not an ordinary being. But we maintain human sentiments still, and then try to rouse in ourselves the spirit of aspiration for God. This is very unfortunate. The principle of this feature is stated by Manu in his Smriti, where he says in a half verse: sarvam paravasam dukham, sarvam atmavasam sukham – Wherever there is dependence there is sorrow, and joy is the result of independence.
Now, we do not know what real independence is. We are never independent. We are dependent on a hundred factors outside, due to which we seem to even exist and breathe in this world. Dependence on God is made up of a different stuff altogether. Though a spiritual aspirant may look at people, see the world outside even as anybody else does, he will not merely see things, but he will also start seeing through things. A spiritual seeker does not look upon another person as a son or a father, a brother or a sister, but as a symbol of a more significant reality. The Divine Truth, the Supreme Being, who is supposed to be present perpetually in each and every living or non-living thing in the world, appears as persons and things, a truth which we all know by reading scriptures, etc. But all this is brushed aside by our sentiments as a light affair. Our understanding never cooperates with our feelings, and our feelings do not go hand in hand with our understanding. We are something in our feelings, and something else in our understanding. We are very learned persons. We know that God is the only Reality, that He manifests Himself as all these things that we see – sahasra shirsha purushaha. All these things are known to us, and we repeat them a hundred times. But our feelings revolt against this kind of conviction intellectually arrived at. We cannot look upon another person as a manifestation of God, though we may go on repeating it like a parrot a hundred times. It is impossible because when a person or a thing is envisaged as a manifestation of God, that particular person or thing ceases to be individual in the sense our sentiments would like to take it to be.
A new value begins to be visualised in persons and things outside when the spirit begins to behold thing. The vision of a sadhaka is a spiritual vision. It is not a vision of the eyes merely. We are not looking at things with our eyes. We are looking through the eyes at the object from the standpoint of the spirit, which alone can be called spirituality. The standpoint of the spirit is spirituality, not the standpoint of a person. The idea of personality is outgrown when the spiritual attitude manifests itself in outward life. We do not smile at each other as friends in ordinary human relationship. Though we may contemplate this inner secret of the subtle bond that exists among human beings, we still stumble upon our own sentiments. We get angry, and we are emotionally attracted and repelled. We are still mortals to the very core.
Yet, it is essential to go on re-interpreting our relationship spiritually in our day-to-day practice of sadhana. There is no use doing sadhana with buried human sentiments inside one’s own self. These sentiments do not always come to the surface of consciousness; they come out only when it is necessary. As I have already mentioned, when we lose things that we regard as dear and when things happen which we have not expected, we are shocked. But why should we not expect it?
A sadhaka is one who expects anything and everything, and therefore he can stand on his own legs spiritually and independently. There is no use depending on outside factors for our happiness. As I have already pointed out, these outside factors are temporary relationships due to the operation of karmic forces, the prarabdha karma as we call it. All that we have today with us, all our possessions – our wealth, our prosperity, our security – is the effect of our past karmas. If we are rich today, it is because of some karma from our previous lives. But we should remember that we will not be rich always, and we will not be friendly with people always. These external relationships will change and transform themselves suddenly when the effect of those karmas is exhausted. Then another set of results of another set of karmas will manifest themselves, and then it is that a poor man becomes a rich man or a rich man becomes poor, friends become enemies and enemies become friends. Overnight a millionaire can become a pauper if the old karma’s momentum is exhausted. He is simply thrown somewhere else, into the limbo of another side of life altogether. Suddenly a poor beggar can become rich if his karma for poverty, which is the result of some previous action, has been exhausted.
Hence, we are living in a relative world of various conditions. These conditions can change, and therefore we must be prepared for these changes. If the very earth under our feet gives way, we should not be surprised. It is also expected. But, we are not prepared for such a fierce onslaught of natural forces because we are accustomed to physical comfort and egoistic satisfaction due to personal relationships with people
It is impossible for us to look upon the world as a manifestation of God, because though it is easy to say this, when we think about it and begin to feel it and manifest it in our life, our heart will quake. That would be something impossible for the mind to contain, and would mean another set of circumstances altogether around us. But, this is the psychological background which every sadhaka should prepare for, and this alone can keep us safe and secure and happy throughout the day and night. We stand on our own ground, and therefore we are happy and possessed of a sense of security and strength.
We should not be moody. Moodiness is caused when pent-up emotions of a human and even subhuman character start coming to the surface with vehemence, when spiritual understanding becomes feeble and sometimes even gets misdirected. Suffice it to say, it is hard to become a spiritual seeker. Merely smiling with your lips, shaking hands with friends, and sitting together in a gathering, is not spirituality.
Our real stuff is of a different nature, and that has to be remoulded and transformed. Our relationship with God is not an individual relationship. It is not a relationship of one person with another person. Spiritual relation is divine relation, the relation of the soul to the infinite background on which it is sustained. To love God is not easy, because God is not a person like a human being. And, therefore, it is also difficult to trust God. Our understanding of the nature of God is humanly conditioned, socially limited, personally interpreted, and so it falls to the ground when we are actually in need of its support. Even yogis and seekers of Truth cannot reach God so easily, unless there is that strength within them by which they can take to the spiritual point of view, the standpoint of the Spirit in the judgment of things outside and the understanding of life in general. The spiritual seeker is a God-man, and we stand alone in front of that Mighty Alone, the Great Creator of the Cosmos. When we face Him and stand before Him, we do not stand before a human being or a humanly interpreted personality. Divine values are transempirical. The God whom we are aspiring for is no doubt in the world, yet He is different in His character and substance.
Thus, to take to the spiritual path, to lead a spiritual life and to practice spiritual sadhana would be to die completely to the old prejudices of our life. “Die to live,” as Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj used to say. To take to spiritual life is a veritable death. Are we prepared for death? Nobody is prepared for it. We have our own small preferences, likings, weaknesses and sentiments which assume large proportions when they are given a long rope. We remain human beings till the end and die like human beings, repenting for not having utilised our life properly as it ought to have been. We are still the old, old persons with the same desires and the same weaknesses. May this be shed.
May we carry this message of the spiritual seeker on this eve of the New Year. May we carry this message of God in our own bosoms, enshrine it in ourselves and practise its principles as veritable God-men in this world. We are perpetually connected to God. He is not separated from us even by an inch; and yet, it appears as if He is totally dead to us, just as the waking world of experiences is regarded as totally absent in the dream world. How far is God from us? He is as far from us as the bed on which we sleep at night. Do we know what this means? In the state of dream, we cannot know that we are sleeping on a bed. We are in another world altogether, a different realm, and we do not know where we are and what has happened to us. But, we are really sleeping on a bed. How far is that bed from us? We are on it and are in contact with it. We are lying on it and yet it is not there, for all practical purposes. We are in a fairyland of dream. Similarly, God is as far from us as the very bed on which we are sleeping. We are touching Him, we are lying on Him, and yet how far He is! We are crying for Him in the same way as a dreaming person cries for the bed which he thinks he lost though he is lying on it. Such a state of affairs has taken place, unfortunately.
We have to reconstruct our consciousness from the point of view of the laws and regulations of spiritual life, and then we will realise God just as a dreaming person will realise that he is sleeping on the bed when he wakes up. He will know where he is. What happened to him was only a reshuffling of the constituents of his consciousness. He has not travelled somewhere to catch the bed. He has not moved an inch, he is just there, and yet what a difference it makes to him. He comes to a different world altogether merely because of the change in the constituents of consciousness. Similarly, we are on God even now. We are sitting on His chest, as it were. We are living and moving and having our being on Him, and yet we are crying for Him as if He is far away. What a pity!
We can imagine what sort of spiritual practice is expected of us to realise that, on the basis of which our very existence and activity are possible. What should we do to realise that on which we are seated? We are not to run about here and there, frantically in search of it. We are on it. Why are we searching for it? But our mind has wandered away in a dreamland, and therefore it looks as if we have lost it.
So, spiritual sadhana is not a hectic activity of the physical personality or the social individual; it is a spiritual retransformation of the very consciousness which we really are. It is difficult to conceive what spiritual sadhana is. Though we advertise it, print books on it, and talk about it to others, it has not really entered our spirit, and so we are still weeping. Our weeping has not stopped. It is necessary, therefore, to reinterpret ourselves, understand our situaiton once again in a proper form and perspective, and stand undaunted, confident and perspicuous in our understanding. Can any of us believe that we are in the very presence of God just now? But, this is the fact.
It is therefore imperative for us to reconsider our position in this world, to reconsider our relationships to other people and things, and reconsider the very meaning of sadhana. If the Truth is properly grasped, we should regard ourselves as thrice blessed. It is a hard thing to understand, and is very difficult to absorb into our feelings and emotions. Though our intellect may appreciate it and come to a sort of logical conviction, the feelings will not retain it for more than a few seconds because of the human and the temporal conditions into which our consciousness seems to have fallen, by which it is conditioned and in which it is involved. We have to raise ourselves from this mire of limiting sentiments and emotions, which are merely a state of human consciousness, and raise ourselves to a higher pedestal of appreciation, understanding and meditation. We have to truly become spiritual seekers. We must be capable of smiling always and never be melancholy and depressed. That would be the stuff of a spiritual sadhaka. May this message enter us. May God bless us.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Background of Thought (2)
The Background of Thought by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 18 April 2013 01:04
An element in a well-ordered life is to have a stable background of thought. Most of us suffer due to an absence of this stability in our inner life; we depend mostly on conditions prevailing outside, and we may be said to be living more an outward life than an inward one. The outer conditions of life seem to be determining our personality to such an extent that whatever happens outside seems to have a direct bearing on our personal life. Like the winds that blow in different directions according to the vicissitude of seasons, our personality seems to shift its scene of activity and experience on account of a precarious dependence on outer circumstances.
We are always in a state of mood, as we call it, either elated or depressed, on account of getting influenced by factors beyond our control. It is something like floating on the surface of the ocean and being tossed up and down, hither and thither by the violent waves, having nothing to say in the matter. This sort of life cannot be regarded as satisfying, because to be entirely in the hands of fate and chance occurrences would be a perpetual dying rather than a real living.
Most of us are in such a helpless condition, as it were, that we have to take into account everything that takes place outside without having any say in the matter. This is the life of slavery. A slave is one who has no personal say in anything. Whatever he is ordered to do, he has to do, and his life depends not on himself but on something else. Whatever changes may take place in that ‘something else’ will also be the corresponding change that takes place in one’s own self. This is not a life of freedom, and therefore, it cannot be a life of happiness and peace.
We are unhappy for one reason or the other. Though the cause of the unhappiness may vary from one person to another, the consequence is the same. People may die for various reasons, but the result is that all die. The consequence is uniform: no one is happy, whatever be the cause behind it and whatever be the ultimate reference we make as to the originating factor of it. We cannot be slavish in our conduct of life and at the same time expect to be happy. A slave cannot be happy because slavery is selling oneself out to something other than what one is. We have sold ourselves, as it were, entirely into the hands of factors which we regard as more real than what we are endowed with in our own selves. This is a life of dependence, not a life of independence.
Sarvam paravasam dukham: Whatever is dependent is a source of misery. Whatever be the extent of understanding of this situation of ours, it is not enough to solve the problem in which we have been involved. Our dependence is manifold. So complicated is this dependence that we have not found any time to bestow a thought upon it. People who have been born as slaves regard that slavish life itself as a kind of freedom. They have never enjoyed freedom in their life, never had good health, never heard a good word from people. That has become a normalcy for their life.
Some sort of situation of this character seems to be supervening in our personal lives – one and all, without distinction – so that we have mistaken this life of bondage for a life of freedom. Inasmuch as we have been born into bondage, we have never seen freedom, and do not know what it is. We mistake bondage itself for a sort of freedom and so we try to make the best of it, try to grab a jot of satisfaction or pleasure or happiness from this servitude in which we have been crushed by circumstance.
If we cannot be free, we regard our bondage itself as a kind of freedom. Submission is freedom. We go on submitting ourselves to any kind of thing that takes place, anything that is told and anything that happens, and that submission itself gives us a kind of vicarious satisfaction. This stupidity in which the human mind is involved, and out of which it tries to extract a little happiness, is what traditionally goes by the name of samsara, or earthly entanglement. We are somehow able to get on in life, though we are miserable. Notwithstanding the fact that we have not a ray of hope of achieving ultimate freedom in our life, we try to find some profit in this subjection to circumstance.
All this is because we have no background in our lives. We are drifting like a straw in a violent wind. A dry leaf that is tossed hither and thither by the gale of wind outside has nothing to say about itself. Wherever we are tossed, we move in that direction. Because we are in this condition, we do not know what will happen to us tomorrow – what change will take place in our own lives tomorrow, or even after a few hours. Because of this difficulty, we are in a perpetual state of anxiety. Anxiety gnaws into our hearts on account of not being certain as to what would be our fate the next moment of our life. I do not necessarily refer to death, which is our very fierce guest that may confront us at any moment; but even not taking into consideration this ultimate difficulty of death, there are other circumstances which are also wholly unpredictable.
We cannot say what tomorrow’s political condition will be. We cannot say what the attitude of our friend in regard to us will be tomorrow. We cannot say what would be the state of our health tomorrow. These are all smaller things than death, almost virtually equal to a destruction of our personal independence and freedom. Inasmuch as we are subconsciously in a state of insecurity, we are entirely unhappy in our personality. It is a disturbance that has taken place from within ourselves on account of an unconscious feeling of insecurity, unpredictability, and an unconscious yielding to whatever might happen. A word that is uttered, a behaviour that is confronted, a remark that is made, a little change in the weather – a small thing, a little occurrence or event can completely put us out of gear. Such is the independence that we enjoy in our life.
But the world is the world. The world cannot be anything other than what the world is. King Canute tried to stop the ocean waves. He ordered the waves to stop: “I am the king, the emperor. Stop, O waves.” But the waves said, “You mind your business. We are waves, and we have our own duty.” Canute’s orders were not obeyed by the waves of the ocean, though he was king. Thus, we cannot order the events of life, inasmuch as these events and occurrences seem to be beyond the operation of our capacity or power.
Then what is our fate? We know what has happened to us. As I said, we try to make the best out of the circumstances. There is an old proverb: If you go to a land where people eat snakes, you try to eat the centre of the snake. It means to say, you become better, even there. Don’t eat the tail of it. This is what we call somehow or other dragging through life, and it cannot be called living life. Inwardly we are in turmoil. Outwardly we seem to be trying to adjust ourselves to this turmoil, so we are perpetually in a mood of adjustment to conditions or circumstances that are not under our control. Thus, from birth to death it is a life of suffering and subjection to an unpredictable future.
But a yearning of the soul, a longing that is trying to speak in a language other than linguistic, tells us that we have a sort of future which cannot and need not be a total violation of freedom, or a negation of the fulfilment of the longing. This hope is an insignia that has been implanted in us by providence, pointing to our ultimate destiny. A comprehension of this ultimate possible destiny should be the centre of our life and the background of our thoughts, emotions and actions.
Generally, an example of a tortoise is given to tell us how we have to conduct ourselves under pressing conditions of life. The tortoise thrusts its head outside and moves forward in any direction it likes, but whenever there is a sensation of danger or even a slight movement of anything outside, it has a background of its own. It withdraws itself into its shell, and it seems to be safe there. The shell cannot be pierced or attacked. Whenever there is fear of any kind, the child runs back to its mother and sits on her lap. It is safe there because the ultimate protecting factor is taken as the refuge, which is the solution for all anxieties, for all fear, and for all unhappiness.
Have we in our life any such background of thought? If we are tormented because we cannot understand the processes of life outside, what are we supposed to do? Where are we to withdraw ourselves? We have not found such a centre of our life. We have lost our centre; we have been thrown out of the moorings of our life, and therefore, we drift from centre to centre in order to find solace and refuge. As the centre has been lost, we are still moving on the periphery, the circumference, searching for the centre alone.
Now, no man can be said to have fully discovered this centre of life because the proof is in the eating of the pudding, as they say. We have the demonstration of the futility of human effort in the unhappiness of mankind as a whole. You are not happy, I am not happy, and no one is happy, for a common cause – namely, that we have not yet been able to find a centre for our thoughts. If the thought of our mind could find a centre to rest which it can take as stable enough to protect it from all danger, then that would be a source of happiness for the mind and for the thought. But we are still searching. For ages we have been searching, but the centre has not yet been found. How is it that for centuries people search and cannot find it? It is because of a wrong methodology employed in this search, an erroneous procedure that has been adopted, and a misconception that has been entertained in our hearts from the beginning, right from childhood, in regard to the characteristic of this centre.
In India’s ancient culture there are two prominent terms which speak a word of wisdom on the entire range of human aspiration and enterprise. Satya and Dharma, truth and law – these two terms, which occur originally in the Vedas and in almost all the scriptures of India, tell us what our centre is about, and what also is the possible character or nature of our duty in regard to this Satya, or truth. The centre which we are searching for or seeking is what we call Satya, truth. The truth of things is the centre of things. Our centre is the truth behind us. Our personality is not our truth. We have, most of us, put on a personality which is a camouflage that we are masquerading with for the sake of getting on with the uncontrollable laws that operate outside us.
The centre of our own selves is our deepest resource, which can come to our aid when we are almost alone in the world, unbefriended and unsupported. That is our truth; that is our substance. Who will help us when we have no friends anywhere, when we have nothing to eat and nothing to clad ourselves with? When the winds of the world seem to be blowing everywhere, counter to our wishes, when we have lost the very ground under our feet, who will help us? Who will be our support? What will be the sheet anchor for our life at that moment? That is the truth of our nature, which we have not yet discovered because we have been searching for it elsewhere on account of its uncomfortable character.
The truth of our nature is not always very pleasant. The unpleasant nature of truth is unveiled before the senses and our mind; we dread its perception, and even its thought. Would we like to know what we really are? We would not like to know it because if we are opened threadbare and exposed to the world in our utter simplicity and substantiality, we would be quite a different person from what we appear in society.
There is an accretion of psychological growth which we have regarded as our personality and which we hug with great devotion and affection. The social personality, the egoistic personality, the desireful personality, the greed personality, the anger personality, the vindictive personality and many other personalities have grown over us, over the truth of our nature, like moss. When these personalities have grown for years, they become so hardened that the core over which they have grown gets completely submerged. We are only the moss that has grown over, and the inner core has been completely lost sight of.
We dread truth both outwardly and inwardly. Though we say truth triumphs, we are afraid of truth for the reason that the law of truth, the Dharma of Satya, is not always in conformity with the call of our senses and the desireful mind. Dharma and Satya go together like the light of the sun and the orb of the sun. If the orb of the sun is Satya, or truth, the radiance of the sun is Dharma, or law. Law is nothing but truth manifesting itself; and truth, if it manifests itself in life, becomes a restraining principle. Dharmaraja is also called Yamaraja. The king of righteousness or justice, who dispenses justice to people, is called Yama in Indian mythological parlance. Yama is one who restrains, controls, subjugates, and sees that people abide by the law. One who sees to it that the law is not violated is Dharmaraja. The principle behind Dharma is that truth should not be violated because Dharma and Satya, law and truth, are the obverse and the reverse of the same coin. We cannot be happy in life when we completely ignore the call of Dharma and Satya.
We have our own definition of Dharma and our own definition of Satya, no doubt. We have various degrees of righteousness and truth – the Vyavaharika and the Pratibasika. The apparent and the practical aspects are what mostly attract our attention. Utility is regarded by us as the test of truth. This is the pragmatic criterion that we generally employ in judging things by collecting evidence, weighing the evidence on a balance, and seeing how far it conforms to accepted major premises in the argument of justice and law. But people even today have never been able to find out to their fullest satisfaction what this ultimate law or ultimate righteousness is, because that which varies from person to person or from condition to condition cannot be called a perpetual source of Dharma.
We make a distinction between what are known as Samanya Dharma and Visesha Dharma, the general principle of righteousness and the modified form of it to suit particular instances. We are mostly concerned with particular instances, and have forgotten the principle of law behind it which will operate for all times. We call it the philosophy of law, and not merely the application of it. Its philosophy is a consonance with truth in general, and so long as our mind is in consonance with this ultimate regulative principle, naturally the mind draws sustenance and satisfaction from it.
Dharmo rakshati rakshitaha: When you protect Dharma, they say, Dharma protects you. When we abide by law, law protects us or takes care of us. This is because it is a call of the centre of life. The righteous conduct is an external demonstration of the inward call of truth with which our actions, thoughts and feelings have to be consonant. Whenever we are tossed by the winds of life, what are we supposed to do? We should withdraw ourselves to this ultimate background. The moment we withdraw ourselves to this background, as we go home after our office work, we are safe from the worries of day-to-day life.
If we are to be happy, we have to find the centre of our being and a background for our thought by detecting or discovering this centre in the place where it is, and not in the place where it would appear to be. Generally, we try to discover this centre in outward circumstances and objects of sense. That is the reason why we are very busy from morning to evening throughout the day and pass our lives in this manner by judging ourselves in terms of objects and outer conditions, thus not discovering a perpetual common denomination of happiness. Though by a difficult adjustment that we make in our conscious life we seem to be satisfied, inwardly we are shaken and feel very miserable. When the wind blows, the branches of the tree shake violently but the root is not shaken; but if an earthquake takes place and there is a complete shaking of the root itself, then the tree will not survive. The outer circumstances may be like shaking leaves, but the inward part of our life should be like a stable root. If we are to be satisfied with ourselves, we should have a centre in ourselves, and not seek it elsewhere under conditions which are not under our control.
To seek this centre, to find this centre, to enter into this centre, has been our perennial effort throughout the day and night, and when it is discovered, it comes like a startling revelation. It rises before us like the bright sun coming from the horizon; and like the mist vanishing before the rising sun, our difficulties vanish before the revelation of this truth. To find the centre in ourselves would be to seek the truth of our nature, which would be ultimately the truth of the nature of all people; and to be in consonance with the nature of this centre in our self is the Dharma of our life. Our duty is our Dharma, and our duty is in consonance with our real nature.
We have been defining Dharma, or duty, by transferring the character of this centre of ourselves to other aspects of our life which are workable and necessary and yet do not exhaust the nature of truth. We have various kinds of duty such as social duty, duty to others, duty to Nature, duty to the Creator, and so on, which are extensions of the application of this law of our centre in terms of the nature of our perceptions, cognitions and appreciations in the world, while really it is a consonance of our conduct with our own nature.
We will realise on a careful analysis that the truth or the centre of our life is an indivisible unit, and not a ramified or distracted conglomeration or a composite. We are not divided in our own being. You know very well that you are an undivided centre in yourself. You cannot be divided or cut into parts because even if you are to be divided, your awareness of the division is undivided. You cannot be divided because it is the basic fundamental. If that can be divided, it cannot be the fundamental; there must be something behind it yet. To be in harmony with an indivisible centre or a unit of being would be also to conduct oneself in such a manner that it is not in any way dissonant with the centres of a similar nature discoverable in other persons and other things. This is a very difficult concept to swallow because the relationship between two centres, two substantialities of two persons between or among themselves, is difficult for the mind to understand inasmuch as the centre of another person or another thing is mistakenly regarded as an object of perception.
Well, it is not so. Just as the centre of your being is not an object of your perception – it is an intuitionally accepted fact in your own nature – so also the centre or the ultimate substance of any person and anything in the world is such an intuited non-objective something which has to be appreciated by everyone in a manner suitable to its nature.
We find it hard to observe the law of Dharma and to proclaim the nature of truth in the world because we cannot appreciate the truth or the centre of other things and other persons, except in an objective manner. When we do not objectify our centre and our substantiality – we regard it as a pure subject which has an intrinsic worth of its own – how is it that we externalise that very same centre and substance in other persons and things? This is the error of thought, a mistake in our thinking. A centre is that particular something which cannot be externalised. The moment it is externalised, it ceases to be a centre. It becomes a radius, a circumference, a periphery, a boundary, an object, and so on.
What we are speaking of now is to find a centre, and appreciate and recognise that centre as it is. That would be the Dharma of that centre – the Dharma of Satya, the righteousness of the law, as they call it. We find this hard because we have been taught to think in terms of sensory operations, activities of the senses, and not intuitively. Truth is intuitive; it is not sensory, it is not psychological, it is not cognitive, it is not perceptional.
It is very difficult to understand what intuitive comprehension is. We cannot describe adequately what intuitional comprehension of the centre is because all that is described is of the nature of an object or an externality. The only example of an intuitively comprehended object is our own centre, our own truth, ourselves. We know the substance, the worth, the meaning and the intrinsic value of ourselves intuitively by a supernormal, super-sensory grasp. We never externalise ourselves and judge ourselves as we would judge another person. We do not like to punish ourselves as an object of infliction. We are something indescribable for ourselves, so certain and so sure, so indubitable, the centre of all proof and argument, from which all arguments and proofs proceed, so that it is an accepted fact. Accepted by what? Not by perception, not by logical deduction. It is by a means which is not sensory, not psychological, not intellectual. We do not know our existence by intellectual argument, logical deductions, sensory perceptions, or memory, etc. We know it by another means altogether, which can best be described as an intuitive grasp.
Now, this is the nature of our centre, and this is the nature of the centre of anything – any object, any person anywhere. If we can appreciate the centre of other persons and things in a similar manner in an intuitive grasp, that would be to abide by the truth of the law, and the law as it is in itself. But this has become an impracticability for us in our life, inasmuch as we never have an intuitive grasp of people, of objects. We have only a sensory perception of things. To us, other people are only sensory objects because they are seen with our eyes, they can be touched, they can be sensed by one of our senses, and they are ‘others’. We define what is not ourselves as ‘others’, and this ‘otherness’ is what spoils our whole effort in the comprehension of the centre of people.
The centre, may it be remembered again, can never be grasped by observation, experiment or perception. We cannot know or see the truth of another person or thing by opening our eyes, gazing at things, or by logical deductions of any kind, which is why they always remain an outside stranger to our nature; therefore, we have a tug of war with every person and every object in the world. We are at war with things because they are outside. Who invades our realm? Only an outsider, a stranger. People in the world, things outside, have become strangers because we have been treating them as sensory objects right from the beginning. What a pity! We regard a human being as a sense object. We regard an object outside as a content of our senses and our mental operation, quite different from the manner in which we try to appreciate our own self. Do we regard ourselves as an object of perception and a sensory content? Nothing of the kind. And do we accept that other people are like us? Yes. But why do we regard them as sense objects? Helpless – we are helpless, and this helplessness has put us into a helpless condition of dependency in factors beyond our control.
The law of the world is the law of the intuitive comprehension of Reality. It is not the law of sensory perception that operates. The law of Nature is quite different from what we see as operating through our senses. The fundamental law of Nature is unknown to us because just as we are a centre intuitively comprehended, Nature in its totality is also an object of intuitive grasp.
This bifurcation of Nature outside, an object outside, and ourselves as subjects has created this difficulty of samsaric existence. This is the war between the Deva and the Asura which we read about in the Devi Mahatmya every day – the battle between the virtuous and the vicious, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. This is the fight between the subject and the object, consciousness and matter, Purusha and Prakriti, yin and yang – whatever we may call it. So many terms are used, but they are all one and the same thing finally: the battle perpetually waged between the inward and the outward, the spiritual and the material, the intuitive and the sensory, the Devi and the Asura, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. All these are the perpetual occurrences in the day-to-day existence of things, all on account of a single dichotomy that has been created in our nature by sensory life and intuitive life.
As long as we are drifting in the world of sensory existence, we cannot be happy, as the Kauravas were not happy despite all their mighty army. We have a large expanse of the world, like the huge army of Duryodhana, but it is only a quantitative expansion without a qualitative vitality. That vitality has been lost because the substance, the value in things, is the intuitive centre in things, which is completely lost sight of on account of our weddedness to sensory perception.
Spiritual life commences when we accept the necessity for this intuitive recognition of the centre of things. Though we may not be able to recognise it, we have to at least be able to accept the necessity to accept it. When we aspire at least for this supreme recognition of the centre of all life, we are said to be mumukshu, or aspirants after Truth. At least we feel the necessity for it, though we have not been able to find a methodology to discover it. With this acceptance of the existence of a supernormal reality beyond our sensory comprehension, we become open to the operation of forces which will sustain us. The greatest sadhana that we can perform is to move Earth and heaven and leave no stone unturned in the recognition of this centre.
This is spiritual meditation proper. This is the contemplation into which we have to make the mind enter in its spiritual practices. It cannot enter into this truth of things directly from the outward sensory life by a single blow or hit of meditation. This has to be done very slowly, gradually, by a systematised unfolding of the outward involvement of the mind in material conditions by abhyasa and vairagya, as the Bhagavadgita tells us. By practice of the character of truth and by withdrawal of our interest in things which are purely sensory, we keep ourselves open to the inflow of the nature of truth in our own selves. When we begin to appreciate the principle of intuitive substantiality in all persons and things, we become inwardly connected with their deeper realities. Outwardly we may be separated; inwardly we become one.
The moment this art of recognition of the centre of things is learned, this is the art of Yoga. It is the union of the substance within us with the substance in the cosmos outside. This is the Yoga we are striving for. It is not the union of two objects, two persons, two things or two factors isolated from each other. It is a bare awareness of the fact of there being no such dichotomy at all. While we are outwardly and in sensory life separated and seem to have a battling element in us, inwardly we are at the bottom connected by this centre which cannot be externalised. This non-externalised centre can only be one. This is the wonder of it.
I began by saying that we have a centre in ourselves which cannot be objectified or externalised, which we grasp intuitively. And I also said that this centre is in every person and every thing. Now, inasmuch as we have various persons and various things in the world, we are likely to make a mistake in thinking that centres are many, like the many Purushas of the Sankhya. They are not many really; they are many only apparently. Because of an inability to comprehend the character of this centre, we are still subconsciously externalising it and regarding centres as manifold.
There is a famous statement of Neo-Platonist origin: “This is a centre which is everywhere.” We cannot think of a centre that is everywhere. Such a thing is never seen anywhere in the world. The centre of a circle is only in one place; it cannot be everywhere in the circle. But this is a centre which is everywhere in the sense that it has a uniform characteristic. However much we may scratch our head, we cannot understand what all this means because we have never seen such a thing in our life. With effort of thought we have to subdue the old habit of thinking, cultivate a new habit altogether in a reoriented form, and strive to learn this art of Yoga proper, which is the system introduced for the appreciation and recognition of the centre that is everywhere. Because the centre is everywhere, the circumference can be nowhere. We have heard this said many times, and we dismiss it as a joke and a humorous gesture made by an old philosopher, but he has said the ultimate truth of things. We call it the Atman in Sanskrit, and the great Neo-Platonist said it is a centre that is everywhere – the Atman which is everywhere.
We are always likely to think the Atman is within us. How can it be everywhere? When it is within us, naturally it is very clear. It is within you, and within that person, and within this object, and so on. So there are many ‘withins’. Naturally we are led, due to a sensory interpretation of this centre, to regard it as manifold, or a multitude of intuitively grasped subjects, or Purushas. This is absolutely far from the truth. The Atman, which is the centre of our being, is also the centre of other beings, organic or inorganic. Inasmuch as they are uniformly spread, they can only be one ultimately, and yet we have to comprehend this uniformity of centre or Atman without bringing the idea of circumference or externality.
The moment we think of a centre, we cannot help thinking of a radius or a circumference, but this is a centre without a radius and circumference. This is an inwardness without an outwardness. When we say it is the Atman within, well, it is all right, wonderful; but it is not such a kind of within as to isolate itself from the without. That is the meaning of saying the centre is everywhere with circumference nowhere. If we can comprehend such a situation where there can be an inwardness without a corresponding outwardness, that would be the Atman, but we cannot think such a thing. That is why we are unable to meditate. Meditation has become a problem because the mind is unable to grasp what it is that is before it. It has become a hard job stretching and scratching, but nowhere ending. It begins nowhere and ends nowhere.
The spiritual effort is a psychological novelty in our life, and it is not something that we have been accustomed to or which we have been habituated to see with our eyes. By the effort of logical analysis, when we come to this conclusion of the true nature of the Being of all beings, we need not be told as to what righteousness is or what Dharma is. When we know what truth is, we will also know what law is. When we know what Satya is, we will automatically know what Dharma is. We need not be taught about it. We will not put a question about what Dharma, what law, what righteousness is. First of all know the centre; find your Being, and when you find your Being, you have found the Being of others also.
Our problem in meditation and in spiritual practice in general is that we cannot escape this old grandmother’s habit of externalising the centre and interpreting it in a sensory fashion. Though we may say that God is everywhere, for us He is a sense object only. However much we may think otherwise, it would be impossible to comprehend in any other manner. This is the influence of sensory perception on our life – so deep and so hard to overcome that whatever be our effort at the recognition of truth, we give it a colour of untruth. The character of an object is foisted on the universal subject, and that is why the mind hankers after pleasure in spite of trying to seek the centre in meditation. We have not been able to overcome our weaknesses yet because of the fact that the senses have not left us fully; we are still under their clutches. The readings that we make of life are only sensory readings, empirical appreciations which disturb our meditation and our effort at spiritual practice.
So we have to learn again. Every day we have to humiliate ourselves and come to the simple conclusion that we have not yet reached even the boundary or the fringe of the recognition of what the truth is. God and the soul are supposed to be one ultimately. The universal is in all the particulars. The ocean is in every drop of it, as we know very well. In every drop there is the ocean. Likewise, the supreme Brahman is in every Atman – so much in the Atman that we cannot know which is the Atman and which is Brahman, just as when we touch the waters of the ocean we cannot say whether we are touching the drop or the ocean. They are indistinguishable. They are different only from the point of view of interpretation and envisionment; they are really one and the same thing.
This uniformity of intuitive recognition is what abolishes the externality of things and persons and makes us appreciate the central character of objects and persons, so that when we look at the world, we do not look at the world really. It is something like looking at a drop and seeing the ocean there. When we look at the drop in the ocean, we are seeing the ocean only, though psychologically we can estrange ourselves into the conception of a drop, which we have done already in our samsaric life. We are seeing the same thing and not two different things, and yet thinking in different ways. From one side it looks as Purusha, from the other side it looks as Prakriti. From this side it is the Atman, from the other side it is Brahman. Here it is subject, there it is object. But it is one and the same thing that looks as this here, and that there.
The spatial and temporal limitations have made us think in this manner. Space divides, time bifurcates, and when these two factors have introduced themselves into our experience, we cannot help dividing objects into one and the other, and ultimately make a fundamental distinction between the subject and the object of perception. These are only outward interpretations; they are not fundamental differences. The distinctions that we make in our life as subject and object, etc., are all various ways of interpreting and envisaging, and not a real distinction that is drawn in truth.
Truth is a centre; let us remember it again for the purpose of our meditation. Satya or truth is a centre which is in us, which is in others, which is in other objects, and it is non-externalisable; it cannot be externalised. Therefore, it is not possible to see this centre through the senses. We cannot see the centre of another person, because the moment we begin to see it, it has become an object. Just as we cannot see our own centre as an object, we cannot see the other centre as an object. But when we begin to see the centre of other things in the same way as we comprehend our centre, that would be to really appreciate other people and things. Then the war ceases. There will be no Mahabharata or Ramayana afterwards. A new revelation will supervene; a flood of light will be thrown on our existence in such a way that existence itself would become consciousness. Sat becomes Chit. Our centre is our existence ultimate, and this ultimate existence and centre is that which is the existence and centre of others also, indivisibly connected with us – indivisibly connected, not externally related. This is the Satta or the Pure Existence of things, the knowledge of which, or illumination of which, is the Realisation of God.
When we realise, or come to a comprehension of, or become aware of this centre which is everywhere – the Existence and the Atman of all things – we realise God, or we realise the Absolute. So God-realisation, which is the goal of life, is the realisation of Sat-chit-ananda, the Pure Existence which is at once the illumination of the fact of life. This is the background of our thought, to be entertained always, and to which we have to revert whenever we have problems.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Background of Thought
The Background of Thought by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 18 April 2013 01:04
An element in a well-ordered life is to have a stable background of thought. Most of us suffer due to an absence of this stability in our inner life; we depend mostly on conditions prevailing outside, and we may be said to be living more an outward life than an inward one. The outer conditions of life seem to be determining our personality to such an extent that whatever happens outside seems to have a direct bearing on our personal life. Like the winds that blow in different directions according to the vicissitude of seasons, our personality seems to shift its scene of activity and experience on account of a precarious dependence on outer circumstances.
We are always in a state of mood, as we call it, either elated or depressed, on account of getting influenced by factors beyond our control. It is something like floating on the surface of the ocean and being tossed up and down, hither and thither by the violent waves, having nothing to say in the matter. This sort of life cannot be regarded as satisfying, because to be entirely in the hands of fate and chance occurrences would be a perpetual dying rather than a real living.
Most of us are in such a helpless condition, as it were, that we have to take into account everything that takes place outside without having any say in the matter. This is the life of slavery. A slave is one who has no personal say in anything. Whatever he is ordered to do, he has to do, and his life depends not on himself but on something else. Whatever changes may take place in that ‘something else’ will also be the corresponding change that takes place in one’s own self. This is not a life of freedom, and therefore, it cannot be a life of happiness and peace.
We are unhappy for one reason or the other. Though the cause of the unhappiness may vary from one person to another, the consequence is the same. People may die for various reasons, but the result is that all die. The consequence is uniform: no one is happy, whatever be the cause behind it and whatever be the ultimate reference we make as to the originating factor of it. We cannot be slavish in our conduct of life and at the same time expect to be happy. A slave cannot be happy because slavery is selling oneself out to something other than what one is. We have sold ourselves, as it were, entirely into the hands of factors which we regard as more real than what we are endowed with in our own selves. This is a life of dependence, not a life of independence.
Sarvam paravasam dukham: Whatever is dependent is a source of misery. Whatever be the extent of understanding of this situation of ours, it is not enough to solve the problem in which we have been involved. Our dependence is manifold. So complicated is this dependence that we have not found any time to bestow a thought upon it. People who have been born as slaves regard that slavish life itself as a kind of freedom. They have never enjoyed freedom in their life, never had good health, never heard a good word from people. That has become a normalcy for their life.
Some sort of situation of this character seems to be supervening in our personal lives – one and all, without distinction – so that we have mistaken this life of bondage for a life of freedom. Inasmuch as we have been born into bondage, we have never seen freedom, and do not know what it is. We mistake bondage itself for a sort of freedom and so we try to make the best of it, try to grab a jot of satisfaction or pleasure or happiness from this servitude in which we have been crushed by circumstance.
If we cannot be free, we regard our bondage itself as a kind of freedom. Submission is freedom. We go on submitting ourselves to any kind of thing that takes place, anything that is told and anything that happens, and that submission itself gives us a kind of vicarious satisfaction. This stupidity in which the human mind is involved, and out of which it tries to extract a little happiness, is what traditionally goes by the name of samsara, or earthly entanglement. We are somehow able to get on in life, though we are miserable. Notwithstanding the fact that we have not a ray of hope of achieving ultimate freedom in our life, we try to find some profit in this subjection to circumstance.
All this is because we have no background in our lives. We are drifting like a straw in a violent wind. A dry leaf that is tossed hither and thither by the gale of wind outside has nothing to say about itself. Wherever we are tossed, we move in that direction. Because we are in this condition, we do not know what will happen to us tomorrow – what change will take place in our own lives tomorrow, or even after a few hours. Because of this difficulty, we are in a perpetual state of anxiety. Anxiety gnaws into our hearts on account of not being certain as to what would be our fate the next moment of our life. I do not necessarily refer to death, which is our very fierce guest that may confront us at any moment; but even not taking into consideration this ultimate difficulty of death, there are other circumstances which are also wholly unpredictable.
We cannot say what tomorrow’s political condition will be. We cannot say what the attitude of our friend in regard to us will be tomorrow. We cannot say what would be the state of our health tomorrow. These are all smaller things than death, almost virtually equal to a destruction of our personal independence and freedom. Inasmuch as we are subconsciously in a state of insecurity, we are entirely unhappy in our personality. It is a disturbance that has taken place from within ourselves on account of an unconscious feeling of insecurity, unpredictability, and an unconscious yielding to whatever might happen. A word that is uttered, a behaviour that is confronted, a remark that is made, a little change in the weather – a small thing, a little occurrence or event can completely put us out of gear. Such is the independence that we enjoy in our life.
But the world is the world. The world cannot be anything other than what the world is. King Canute tried to stop the ocean waves. He ordered the waves to stop: “I am the king, the emperor. Stop, O waves.” But the waves said, “You mind your business. We are waves, and we have our own duty.” Canute’s orders were not obeyed by the waves of the ocean, though he was king. Thus, we cannot order the events of life, inasmuch as these events and occurrences seem to be beyond the operation of our capacity or power.
Then what is our fate? We know what has happened to us. As I said, we try to make the best out of the circumstances. There is an old proverb: If you go to a land where people eat snakes, you try to eat the centre of the snake. It means to say, you become better, even there. Don’t eat the tail of it. This is what we call somehow or other dragging through life, and it cannot be called living life. Inwardly we are in turmoil. Outwardly we seem to be trying to adjust ourselves to this turmoil, so we are perpetually in a mood of adjustment to conditions or circumstances that are not under our control. Thus, from birth to death it is a life of suffering and subjection to an unpredictable future.
But a yearning of the soul, a longing that is trying to speak in a language other than linguistic, tells us that we have a sort of future which cannot and need not be a total violation of freedom, or a negation of the fulfilment of the longing. This hope is an insignia that has been implanted in us by providence, pointing to our ultimate destiny. A comprehension of this ultimate possible destiny should be the centre of our life and the background of our thoughts, emotions and actions.
Generally, an example of a tortoise is given to tell us how we have to conduct ourselves under pressing conditions of life. The tortoise thrusts its head outside and moves forward in any direction it likes, but whenever there is a sensation of danger or even a slight movement of anything outside, it has a background of its own. It withdraws itself into its shell, and it seems to be safe there. The shell cannot be pierced or attacked. Whenever there is fear of any kind, the child runs back to its mother and sits on her lap. It is safe there because the ultimate protecting factor is taken as the refuge, which is the solution for all anxieties, for all fear, and for all unhappiness.
Have we in our life any such background of thought? If we are tormented because we cannot understand the processes of life outside, what are we supposed to do? Where are we to withdraw ourselves? We have not found such a centre of our life. We have lost our centre; we have been thrown out of the moorings of our life, and therefore, we drift from centre to centre in order to find solace and refuge. As the centre has been lost, we are still moving on the periphery, the circumference, searching for the centre alone.
Now, no man can be said to have fully discovered this centre of life because the proof is in the eating of the pudding, as they say. We have the demonstration of the futility of human effort in the unhappiness of mankind as a whole. You are not happy, I am not happy, and no one is happy, for a common cause – namely, that we have not yet been able to find a centre for our thoughts. If the thought of our mind could find a centre to rest which it can take as stable enough to protect it from all danger, then that would be a source of happiness for the mind and for the thought. But we are still searching. For ages we have been searching, but the centre has not yet been found. How is it that for centuries people search and cannot find it? It is because of a wrong methodology employed in this search, an erroneous procedure that has been adopted, and a misconception that has been entertained in our hearts from the beginning, right from childhood, in regard to the characteristic of this centre.
In India’s ancient culture there are two prominent terms which speak a word of wisdom on the entire range of human aspiration and enterprise. Satya and Dharma, truth and law – these two terms, which occur originally in the Vedas and in almost all the scriptures of India, tell us what our centre is about, and what also is the possible character or nature of our duty in regard to this Satya, or truth. The centre which we are searching for or seeking is what we call Satya, truth. The truth of things is the centre of things. Our centre is the truth behind us. Our personality is not our truth. We have, most of us, put on a personality which is a camouflage that we are masquerading with for the sake of getting on with the uncontrollable laws that operate outside us.
The centre of our own selves is our deepest resource, which can come to our aid when we are almost alone in the world, unbefriended and unsupported. That is our truth; that is our substance. Who will help us when we have no friends anywhere, when we have nothing to eat and nothing to clad ourselves with? When the winds of the world seem to be blowing everywhere, counter to our wishes, when we have lost the very ground under our feet, who will help us? Who will be our support? What will be the sheet anchor for our life at that moment? That is the truth of our nature, which we have not yet discovered because we have been searching for it elsewhere on account of its uncomfortable character.
The truth of our nature is not always very pleasant. The unpleasant nature of truth is unveiled before the senses and our mind; we dread its perception, and even its thought. Would we like to know what we really are? We would not like to know it because if we are opened threadbare and exposed to the world in our utter simplicity and substantiality, we would be quite a different person from what we appear in society.
There is an accretion of psychological growth which we have regarded as our personality and which we hug with great devotion and affection. The social personality, the egoistic personality, the desireful personality, the greed personality, the anger personality, the vindictive personality and many other personalities have grown over us, over the truth of our nature, like moss. When these personalities have grown for years, they become so hardened that the core over which they have grown gets completely submerged. We are only the moss that has grown over, and the inner core has been completely lost sight of.
We dread truth both outwardly and inwardly. Though we say truth triumphs, we are afraid of truth for the reason that the law of truth, the Dharma of Satya, is not always in conformity with the call of our senses and the desireful mind. Dharma and Satya go together like the light of the sun and the orb of the sun. If the orb of the sun is Satya, or truth, the radiance of the sun is Dharma, or law. Law is nothing but truth manifesting itself; and truth, if it manifests itself in life, becomes a restraining principle. Dharmaraja is also called Yamaraja. The king of righteousness or justice, who dispenses justice to people, is called Yama in Indian mythological parlance. Yama is one who restrains, controls, subjugates, and sees that people abide by the law. One who sees to it that the law is not violated is Dharmaraja. The principle behind Dharma is that truth should not be violated because Dharma and Satya, law and truth, are the obverse and the reverse of the same coin. We cannot be happy in life when we completely ignore the call of Dharma and Satya.
We have our own definition of Dharma and our own definition of Satya, no doubt. We have various degrees of righteousness and truth – the Vyavaharika and the Pratibasika. The apparent and the practical aspects are what mostly attract our attention. Utility is regarded by us as the test of truth. This is the pragmatic criterion that we generally employ in judging things by collecting evidence, weighing the evidence on a balance, and seeing how far it conforms to accepted major premises in the argument of justice and law. But people even today have never been able to find out to their fullest satisfaction what this ultimate law or ultimate righteousness is, because that which varies from person to person or from condition to condition cannot be called a perpetual source of Dharma.
We make a distinction between what are known as Samanya Dharma and Visesha Dharma, the general principle of righteousness and the modified form of it to suit particular instances. We are mostly concerned with particular instances, and have forgotten the principle of law behind it which will operate for all times. We call it the philosophy of law, and not merely the application of it. Its philosophy is a consonance with truth in general, and so long as our mind is in consonance with this ultimate regulative principle, naturally the mind draws sustenance and satisfaction from it.
Dharmo rakshati rakshitaha: When you protect Dharma, they say, Dharma protects you. When we abide by law, law protects us or takes care of us. This is because it is a call of the centre of life. The righteous conduct is an external demonstration of the inward call of truth with which our actions, thoughts and feelings have to be consonant. Whenever we are tossed by the winds of life, what are we supposed to do? We should withdraw ourselves to this ultimate background. The moment we withdraw ourselves to this background, as we go home after our office work, we are safe from the worries of day-to-day life.
If we are to be happy, we have to find the centre of our being and a background for our thought by detecting or discovering this centre in the place where it is, and not in the place where it would appear to be. Generally, we try to discover this centre in outward circumstances and objects of sense. That is the reason why we are very busy from morning to evening throughout the day and pass our lives in this manner by judging ourselves in terms of objects and outer conditions, thus not discovering a perpetual common denomination of happiness. Though by a difficult adjustment that we make in our conscious life we seem to be satisfied, inwardly we are shaken and feel very miserable. When the wind blows, the branches of the tree shake violently but the root is not shaken; but if an earthquake takes place and there is a complete shaking of the root itself, then the tree will not survive. The outer circumstances may be like shaking leaves, but the inward part of our life should be like a stable root. If we are to be satisfied with ourselves, we should have a centre in ourselves, and not seek it elsewhere under conditions which are not under our control.
To seek this centre, to find this centre, to enter into this centre, has been our perennial effort throughout the day and night, and when it is discovered, it comes like a startling revelation. It rises before us like the bright sun coming from the horizon; and like the mist vanishing before the rising sun, our difficulties vanish before the revelation of this truth. To find the centre in ourselves would be to seek the truth of our nature, which would be ultimately the truth of the nature of all people; and to be in consonance with the nature of this centre in our self is the Dharma of our life. Our duty is our Dharma, and our duty is in consonance with our real nature.
We have been defining Dharma, or duty, by transferring the character of this centre of ourselves to other aspects of our life which are workable and necessary and yet do not exhaust the nature of truth. We have various kinds of duty such as social duty, duty to others, duty to Nature, duty to the Creator, and so on, which are extensions of the application of this law of our centre in terms of the nature of our perceptions, cognitions and appreciations in the world, while really it is a consonance of our conduct with our own nature.
We will realise on a careful analysis that the truth or the centre of our life is an indivisible unit, and not a ramified or distracted conglomeration or a composite. We are not divided in our own being. You know very well that you are an undivided centre in yourself. You cannot be divided or cut into parts because even if you are to be divided, your awareness of the division is undivided. You cannot be divided because it is the basic fundamental. If that can be divided, it cannot be the fundamental; there must be something behind it yet. To be in harmony with an indivisible centre or a unit of being would be also to conduct oneself in such a manner that it is not in any way dissonant with the centres of a similar nature discoverable in other persons and other things. This is a very difficult concept to swallow because the relationship between two centres, two substantialities of two persons between or among themselves, is difficult for the mind to understand inasmuch as the centre of another person or another thing is mistakenly regarded as an object of perception.
Well, it is not so. Just as the centre of your being is not an object of your perception – it is an intuitionally accepted fact in your own nature – so also the centre or the ultimate substance of any person and anything in the world is such an intuited non-objective something which has to be appreciated by everyone in a manner suitable to its nature.
We find it hard to observe the law of Dharma and to proclaim the nature of truth in the world because we cannot appreciate the truth or the centre of other things and other persons, except in an objective manner. When we do not objectify our centre and our substantiality – we regard it as a pure subject which has an intrinsic worth of its own – how is it that we externalise that very same centre and substance in other persons and things? This is the error of thought, a mistake in our thinking. A centre is that particular something which cannot be externalised. The moment it is externalised, it ceases to be a centre. It becomes a radius, a circumference, a periphery, a boundary, an object, and so on.
What we are speaking of now is to find a centre, and appreciate and recognise that centre as it is. That would be the Dharma of that centre – the Dharma of Satya, the righteousness of the law, as they call it. We find this hard because we have been taught to think in terms of sensory operations, activities of the senses, and not intuitively. Truth is intuitive; it is not sensory, it is not psychological, it is not cognitive, it is not perceptional.
It is very difficult to understand what intuitive comprehension is. We cannot describe adequately what intuitional comprehension of the centre is because all that is described is of the nature of an object or an externality. The only example of an intuitively comprehended object is our own centre, our own truth, ourselves. We know the substance, the worth, the meaning and the intrinsic value of ourselves intuitively by a supernormal, super-sensory grasp. We never externalise ourselves and judge ourselves as we would judge another person. We do not like to punish ourselves as an object of infliction. We are something indescribable for ourselves, so certain and so sure, so indubitable, the centre of all proof and argument, from which all arguments and proofs proceed, so that it is an accepted fact. Accepted by what? Not by perception, not by logical deduction. It is by a means which is not sensory, not psychological, not intellectual. We do not know our existence by intellectual argument, logical deductions, sensory perceptions, or memory, etc. We know it by another means altogether, which can best be described as an intuitive grasp.
Now, this is the nature of our centre, and this is the nature of the centre of anything – any object, any person anywhere. If we can appreciate the centre of other persons and things in a similar manner in an intuitive grasp, that would be to abide by the truth of the law, and the law as it is in itself. But this has become an impracticability for us in our life, inasmuch as we never have an intuitive grasp of people, of objects. We have only a sensory perception of things. To us, other people are only sensory objects because they are seen with our eyes, they can be touched, they can be sensed by one of our senses, and they are ‘others’. We define what is not ourselves as ‘others’, and this ‘otherness’ is what spoils our whole effort in the comprehension of the centre of people.
The centre, may it be remembered again, can never be grasped by observation, experiment or perception. We cannot know or see the truth of another person or thing by opening our eyes, gazing at things, or by logical deductions of any kind, which is why they always remain an outside stranger to our nature; therefore, we have a tug of war with every person and every object in the world. We are at war with things because they are outside. Who invades our realm? Only an outsider, a stranger. People in the world, things outside, have become strangers because we have been treating them as sensory objects right from the beginning. What a pity! We regard a human being as a sense object. We regard an object outside as a content of our senses and our mental operation, quite different from the manner in which we try to appreciate our own self. Do we regard ourselves as an object of perception and a sensory content? Nothing of the kind. And do we accept that other people are like us? Yes. But why do we regard them as sense objects? Helpless – we are helpless, and this helplessness has put us into a helpless condition of dependency in factors beyond our control.
The law of the world is the law of the intuitive comprehension of Reality. It is not the law of sensory perception that operates. The law of Nature is quite different from what we see as operating through our senses. The fundamental law of Nature is unknown to us because just as we are a centre intuitively comprehended, Nature in its totality is also an object of intuitive grasp.
This bifurcation of Nature outside, an object outside, and ourselves as subjects has created this difficulty of samsaric existence. This is the war between the Deva and the Asura which we read about in the Devi Mahatmya every day – the battle between the virtuous and the vicious, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. This is the fight between the subject and the object, consciousness and matter, Purusha and Prakriti, yin and yang – whatever we may call it. So many terms are used, but they are all one and the same thing finally: the battle perpetually waged between the inward and the outward, the spiritual and the material, the intuitive and the sensory, the Devi and the Asura, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. All these are the perpetual occurrences in the day-to-day existence of things, all on account of a single dichotomy that has been created in our nature by sensory life and intuitive life.
As long as we are drifting in the world of sensory existence, we cannot be happy, as the Kauravas were not happy despite all their mighty army. We have a large expanse of the world, like the huge army of Duryodhana, but it is only a quantitative expansion without a qualitative vitality. That vitality has been lost because the substance, the value in things, is the intuitive centre in things, which is completely lost sight of on account of our weddedness to sensory perception.
Spiritual life commences when we accept the necessity for this intuitive recognition of the centre of things. Though we may not be able to recognise it, we have to at least be able to accept the necessity to accept it. When we aspire at least for this supreme recognition of the centre of all life, we are said to be mumukshu, or aspirants after Truth. At least we feel the necessity for it, though we have not been able to find a methodology to discover it. With this acceptance of the existence of a supernormal reality beyond our sensory comprehension, we become open to the operation of forces which will sustain us. The greatest sadhana that we can perform is to move Earth and heaven and leave no stone unturned in the recognition of this centre.
This is spiritual meditation proper. This is the contemplation into which we have to make the mind enter in its spiritual practices. It cannot enter into this truth of things directly from the outward sensory life by a single blow or hit of meditation. This has to be done very slowly, gradually, by a systematised unfolding of the outward involvement of the mind in material conditions by abhyasa and vairagya, as the Bhagavadgita tells us. By practice of the character of truth and by withdrawal of our interest in things which are purely sensory, we keep ourselves open to the inflow of the nature of truth in our own selves. When we begin to appreciate the principle of intuitive substantiality in all persons and things, we become inwardly connected with their deeper realities. Outwardly we may be separated; inwardly we become one.
The moment this art of recognition of the centre of things is learned, this is the art of Yoga. It is the union of the substance within us with the substance in the cosmos outside. This is the Yoga we are striving for. It is not the union of two objects, two persons, two things or two factors isolated from each other. It is a bare awareness of the fact of there being no such dichotomy at all. While we are outwardly and in sensory life separated and seem to have a battling element in us, inwardly we are at the bottom connected by this centre which cannot be externalised. This non-externalised centre can only be one. This is the wonder of it.
I began by saying that we have a centre in ourselves which cannot be objectified or externalised, which we grasp intuitively. And I also said that this centre is in every person and every thing. Now, inasmuch as we have various persons and various things in the world, we are likely to make a mistake in thinking that centres are many, like the many Purushas of the Sankhya. They are not many really; they are many only apparently. Because of an inability to comprehend the character of this centre, we are still subconsciously externalising it and regarding centres as manifold.
There is a famous statement of Neo-Platonist origin: “This is a centre which is everywhere.” We cannot think of a centre that is everywhere. Such a thing is never seen anywhere in the world. The centre of a circle is only in one place; it cannot be everywhere in the circle. But this is a centre which is everywhere in the sense that it has a uniform characteristic. However much we may scratch our head, we cannot understand what all this means because we have never seen such a thing in our life. With effort of thought we have to subdue the old habit of thinking, cultivate a new habit altogether in a reoriented form, and strive to learn this art of Yoga proper, which is the system introduced for the appreciation and recognition of the centre that is everywhere. Because the centre is everywhere, the circumference can be nowhere. We have heard this said many times, and we dismiss it as a joke and a humorous gesture made by an old philosopher, but he has said the ultimate truth of things. We call it the Atman in Sanskrit, and the great Neo-Platonist said it is a centre that is everywhere – the Atman which is everywhere.
We are always likely to think the Atman is within us. How can it be everywhere? When it is within us, naturally it is very clear. It is within you, and within that person, and within this object, and so on. So there are many ‘withins’. Naturally we are led, due to a sensory interpretation of this centre, to regard it as manifold, or a multitude of intuitively grasped subjects, or Purushas. This is absolutely far from the truth. The Atman, which is the centre of our being, is also the centre of other beings, organic or inorganic. Inasmuch as they are uniformly spread, they can only be one ultimately, and yet we have to comprehend this uniformity of centre or Atman without bringing the idea of circumference or externality.
The moment we think of a centre, we cannot help thinking of a radius or a circumference, but this is a centre without a radius and circumference. This is an inwardness without an outwardness. When we say it is the Atman within, well, it is all right, wonderful; but it is not such a kind of within as to isolate itself from the without. That is the meaning of saying the centre is everywhere with circumference nowhere. If we can comprehend such a situation where there can be an inwardness without a corresponding outwardness, that would be the Atman, but we cannot think such a thing. That is why we are unable to meditate. Meditation has become a problem because the mind is unable to grasp what it is that is before it. It has become a hard job stretching and scratching, but nowhere ending. It begins nowhere and ends nowhere.
The spiritual effort is a psychological novelty in our life, and it is not something that we have been accustomed to or which we have been habituated to see with our eyes. By the effort of logical analysis, when we come to this conclusion of the true nature of the Being of all beings, we need not be told as to what righteousness is or what Dharma is. When we know what truth is, we will also know what law is. When we know what Satya is, we will automatically know what Dharma is. We need not be taught about it. We will not put a question about what Dharma, what law, what righteousness is. First of all know the centre; find your Being, and when you find your Being, you have found the Being of others also.
Our problem in meditation and in spiritual practice in general is that we cannot escape this old grandmother’s habit of externalising the centre and interpreting it in a sensory fashion. Though we may say that God is everywhere, for us He is a sense object only. However much we may think otherwise, it would be impossible to comprehend in any other manner. This is the influence of sensory perception on our life – so deep and so hard to overcome that whatever be our effort at the recognition of truth, we give it a colour of untruth. The character of an object is foisted on the universal subject, and that is why the mind hankers after pleasure in spite of trying to seek the centre in meditation. We have not been able to overcome our weaknesses yet because of the fact that the senses have not left us fully; we are still under their clutches. The readings that we make of life are only sensory readings, empirical appreciations which disturb our meditation and our effort at spiritual practice.
So we have to learn again. Every day we have to humiliate ourselves and come to the simple conclusion that we have not yet reached even the boundary or the fringe of the recognition of what the truth is. God and the soul are supposed to be one ultimately. The universal is in all the particulars. The ocean is in every drop of it, as we know very well. In every drop there is the ocean. Likewise, the supreme Brahman is in every Atman – so much in the Atman that we cannot know which is the Atman and which is Brahman, just as when we touch the waters of the ocean we cannot say whether we are touching the drop or the ocean. They are indistinguishable. They are different only from the point of view of interpretation and envisionment; they are really one and the same thing.
This uniformity of intuitive recognition is what abolishes the externality of things and persons and makes us appreciate the central character of objects and persons, so that when we look at the world, we do not look at the world really. It is something like looking at a drop and seeing the ocean there. When we look at the drop in the ocean, we are seeing the ocean only, though psychologically we can estrange ourselves into the conception of a drop, which we have done already in our samsaric life. We are seeing the same thing and not two different things, and yet thinking in different ways. From one side it looks as Purusha, from the other side it looks as Prakriti. From this side it is the Atman, from the other side it is Brahman. Here it is subject, there it is object. But it is one and the same thing that looks as this here, and that there.
The spatial and temporal limitations have made us think in this manner. Space divides, time bifurcates, and when these two factors have introduced themselves into our experience, we cannot help dividing objects into one and the other, and ultimately make a fundamental distinction between the subject and the object of perception. These are only outward interpretations; they are not fundamental differences. The distinctions that we make in our life as subject and object, etc., are all various ways of interpreting and envisaging, and not a real distinction that is drawn in truth.
Truth is a centre; let us remember it again for the purpose of our meditation. Satya or truth is a centre which is in us, which is in others, which is in other objects, and it is non-externalisable; it cannot be externalised. Therefore, it is not possible to see this centre through the senses. We cannot see the centre of another person, because the moment we begin to see it, it has become an object. Just as we cannot see our own centre as an object, we cannot see the other centre as an object. But when we begin to see the centre of other things in the same way as we comprehend our centre, that would be to really appreciate other people and things. Then the war ceases. There will be no Mahabharata or Ramayana afterwards. A new revelation will supervene; a flood of light will be thrown on our existence in such a way that existence itself would become consciousness. Sat becomes Chit. Our centre is our existence ultimate, and this ultimate existence and centre is that which is the existence and centre of others also, indivisibly connected with us – indivisibly connected, not externally related. This is the Satta or the Pure Existence of things, the knowledge of which, or illumination of which, is the Realisation of God.
When we realise, or come to a comprehension of, or become aware of this centre which is everywhere – the Existence and the Atman of all things – we realise God, or we realise the Absolute. So God-realisation, which is the goal of life, is the realisation of Sat-chit-ananda, the Pure Existence which is at once the illumination of the fact of life. This is the background of our thought, to be entertained always, and to which we have to revert whenever we have problems.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Regaining Paradise Lost
Regaining Paradise Lost by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 16 April 2013 21:04
(Spoken during Sunday night Satsang of Jan 17, 1982)
The presumptuousness of human nature strives to insist that it is all-in-all, and is the sole agent of its ideas and actions. Here is the seed of human bondage, which shoots forth trunks and branches, leaves and fruits and flowers in the form of experiences, of which the world consists. What we call the world is a fabric of experience. Whatever we feel within ourselves is the world for us. Whatever we sense is the world for us inasmuch as whatever we feel, think and do is mostly a reproduction of what the senses report to us. Our world is a world of sense. It is not an intellectual world or even, more moderately, a psychological world, a world of feelings and emotions, though it appears as if the world is psychological, emotional, volitional and intellectual.
The secret is that it is sensory at the root because our understanding, our willing, our feeling, our emotion and our deeds are all effectuations of sensory contacts, sensory experience. What do the senses tell us? That we are independent human beings. This humanity of ours is a body, an indivisible entity that each one of us appears to be. The purpose of the senses is to harden the ego by plastering it with the concrete and cement of contractual experience. The ego may feel frightened if the senses are not to support it perpetually from moment to moment. Every day is a day of sensory experience which only confirms to our ego, and everything that is associated with it, that the world is nothing more than or less than sensory experience. We believe what we see with our eyes, and we cannot believe what we do not see with our eyes. We believe what we hear with our ears and what any other sense organ tells us.
This is a reflex action taking place within ourselves on the foundation of sensory experience. We have to understand what it is that we mean by sense experience. It is a total impact produced upon us by every type of communication we receive through the avenues of our personality. The eyes, the ears, the senses of taste, touch and smell all act together in one group as a single body of information, as if five evidences in a court speak in one language, with one word.
So we have no choice. We have to choose what is given to us by the senses because we have no other source of information except what is received by them. A judge in a court has to believe what evidence comes. He calls for reports, but cannot go beyond the evidences available. There are only five witnesses to the world – the five senses of knowledge – and there are no more evidences available. Finally, it has to be decided that what is communicated as valid by the five senses is to be the judgment of the ego and anything that is the structure of what we appear to be.
We have founded our life on this report, the judgment passed by our own centre, which is the ego which struggles to maintain itself as the only competent judiciary in this world. Each individual, each person, each man, woman and child is conditioned by this assumption and presumption that each one is a final judge for one’s own self. Here is the beginning as well as the end of the fate of the human being. The world is not really made in the way in which it is reported by the senses and judged by the ego. The world escapes the notice of the instruments of sensory perception. The constitution of the world is totally different from the way it is understood and reported by the senses or judged by the ego of man.
It is not possible for any human being to understand what the world is made of. One can know the world only as it is reflected through the media of the senses. This means to say that the world is what each one understands it to be for one’s own self by the information so gathered, as mentioned earlier. World is world, man is man. That the world is constituted differently from the way it is understood by the human being is the folly of human nature and the sorrow of humanity.
The world is incapable of being judged by any man inasmuch as the relationship of the human being to nature or to the world as a whole is not purely sensory. It is super-sensible in a very important way. The way in which we are connected to the world is not sensory or even psychological, intellectual, volitional or emotional. There is a more central relationship that seems to be between us and the world outside. This relationship is the conditioning factor of human pleasure and pain, and the whole destiny of mankind. The history of humanity, of wars, of kings and queens and comings and goings is not a making of human beings wholly. The history that we study in our universities and colleges is a political history, a cultural history, a literary history, a social and economic history, but the causes behind the movement of human beings creating this sort of history are beyond the operation of the human movement.
Who causes history? Man creates history, is what man may say. This is not true. History is not made by man. On the other hand, the historical process utilises man as an instrument of its purpose. There is a difference between history as we read in books and the historical process, which is a different thing altogether. World history is not what we read from the book of H.G. Wells or Edward Gibbon. These are chronicles that have been subject to the perception of human understanding and senses. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is not a chronicle of actual facts. It is a report of what is evidenced by the senses to man and judged by human understanding on the basis of these reports.
Human history is a part of world history, and world history is always understood by us as meaning only human history; for us, world history is man’s movements and the political and other circumstances of human life. Man thinks that he alone exists in this world and that God has not made anybody else except man. So presumptuous is man! So goes man, as if he alone has been created and the world is for his sake: he is to enjoy it, condition it, use it, harness it and appropriate it, and do anything that he likes with it. This is not true.
There is another judiciary above the human judiciary, which is the principle which issues mandates for the movements of nature. One of the persons who has tried to understand the inner motivating factors behind human history was the great writer Arnold Toynbee, who wrote twelve volumes called ‘A Study of History’. This study of history by Arnold Toynbee is not what is read in colleges. It is something different. It is a philosophy of history. Why should history take place at all in the way in which it takes place? Why should events occur in the world in the way they occur? Why does man behave in the way he behaves? Why should there be kings and queens and emperors and comings and goings and enthronings and dethronings and wars, victories and defeats? Why should these be there at all? We may say it is man’s foolishness, man’s wisdom, man’s needs. Nothing of the kind is the truth. It is cosmic history.
We have in the Srimad Bhagavata Purana perhaps the first attempt ever made to write what is called cosmic history – the processes of the universe or the circumstances of creation as a whole, energised by a will which is the maker of history. This will is the central authority to issue any kind of order, just as a Chief Justice in a Supreme Court issues a judicial order which is supposed to be the guideline for the whole country of which he is the judge. No man, no individual, no citizen, no subordinate, no official can refute, contradict or bypass this mandate of the central authority, and any event that takes place in the country under the pressure of the indications given by this central judicial authority cannot be regarded as an individual action. Though they are all conditioned from various sides by certain secondary factors such as the human body and the instruments of activity, the authority is central; therefore, it is finally motivated, instrumentalised and fulfilled according to the purpose indicated by the central judgment.
Thus, the history of the cosmos, the story of the universe and the processes of mankind’s coming ever since man came to this Earth are all centrally ordained by one single will, of which man has no knowledge. Neither I do anything, nor you do anything, nor even can we do anything. It is not merely that one does not do anything; the other way around is that no one can do anything because of the great restraint that is exercised on every part of nature by a central governing purpose which is the original will of the Creator.
The Rigveda, towards its concluding portion, makes mention of a cosmological principle wherein it is indicated that the incidents that are to take place in the whole creation are already visualised at the time of creation, just as a central constitution, when it is laid before the parliament in a particular country or a nation, indicates the guidelines for the further movements of every type of official purpose or action. Dhata, or the Supreme Creator, Ishwara, God the Almighty, is the seed out of which the whole tree of the universe has arisen, and there can be nothing in this tree which is not in the seed. Whatever be the largeness or the expanse of the banyan, after all, it can contain nothing which was not in that tiny seed of the banyan tree. We may say, “How beautiful, how grand, how mighty, how strong, how shady!” and so forth, but whatever be our grandiose description of the expanse of the banyan tree, all that grandiose beauty, whatever the secret or mystery of it is, was contained in that little tiny seed in a minute latent potential form. So is this world.
Events in this world are not man’s creations. They are the will of nature, the volition of God operating, and when there are transmutations, transformations, historical processes, as we call it, taking place in various forms – kings ascending and descending from thrones, and so on – these are not caused by people. They are caused by the will or the purpose of the nature that is the mother of everything, and of which we are all parts.
Human wisdom consists in the realisation of the fact that man is not an independent universe by himself. There is no independent man in this world, nor is there even any independent atom and molecule. The rotation of electrons, the movement of molecules, planets and the solar system, the actions of every human being or even of an ant, and even the shaking of a leaf in a tree is mysteriously, ununderstandably, conditioned by the original seed of the cosmos, which is the will of Ishwara, the creative, purposive volition of God the Almighty, or the central substance of the cosmos. This is a thing which is totally obliterated from the human vision due to the affirmation of the human ego which sees only in a blinded fashion the repercussions created upon its own self in the form of the ego by the wrong information conveyed in a diversified manner by the different sense organs.
The sense organs are not our friends; they are our enemies. They are enemies who have entered the camp of our own habitat and given us information which is not intended for our welfare. And we, as credible beings, listen to the words of these enemies in the garb of our friends; we act upon their advice, and we reap sorrow. The day that we pass is full of tensions and agonising pressures from every side. This is the reason why we have no time to think in a poised, calm, leisurely and dispassionate manner.
We never know what dispassionate thinking is because all thinking is a ray projected by the ego. It is an I that is speaking. Unfortunately, this I is the lord of this body, fed by this body, sustained by it, and pampered by it in every way so that we do not know which is the body and which is the ego. The ego seems to be a kind of bodily self-consciousness. This is the utter ruin of what we call the spiritual ideal and the aim which man is supposed to be pursuing. The progressions and retrogressions in human history and the rise and fall of empires, the births and deaths of human individuals, the coming and going of all things in nature are purposively motivated by a central authority of which no individual can have any consciousness or alliance.
How is it that we have been thrown into this despairing condition of a total oblivion in regard to what is taking place in the very environment in which we are living? We may call it by any name – avidya, maya, ignorance – but the words do not matter; the facts are there. We have been given a blow on the head, as it were, by an event which we call the fall of man from the originality of his pristine affiliation with the purpose of nature, God the Almighty.
We are living in an ashram. We are living in an atmosphere of culture, education and understanding. At least, we hope we are in that atmosphere. We expect to be in such an environment which is the blessed incentive provided to us for finding a few minutes every day to awaken ourselves to this fact of the cosmic purpose that is behind even the winking of our eyes and the breathing of our breaths.
But no man can change man. “What a pity,” says the poet, “what man has made of man.” Freedom has been given to man, as Milton says in his great poem ‘Paradise Lost’. Freedom has been given to man, but what kind of freedom? Either to stand or to fall. But man has chosen the freedom to fall because it is easier to fall than to stand. We know it is difficult to stand up but easy to lie down, and easy to swim with the current of the Ganga and difficult to swim against the current. Why do we always like to lie down? Because it is easier than to stand. Effort is needed to stand on two legs, but no effort is necessary to lie down. It becomes a natural, comfortable posture.
Thus it is that man has chosen the freedom to fall, and not exercised the other freedom to stand in unison with God. The freedom to stand in union with God is an unpleasant thing to that incentive or pressure in man’s egoism which seeks to assert itself. Anyone in a body, a congregation or a meeting who wishes to assert his own opinion will feel great agonising pain when the law of the body impinges upon that person contrary to his or her own opinion because the larger law is painful to the selfish law. Any law is painful, any discipline is unwelcome because discipline, law, regulation, rule, is a name that we give to that procedure which restrains the operation of an individual ego; therefore, it is always painful to the ego. It is resented by every man, every woman, every child, which means to say we resent every discipline, every law, every rule, every regulation, which again means we resent the way in which nature operates. Consequently, we resent God Himself. Man is the enemy of God, so what would God do to man? He would unleash the forces of nature, which He does in the form of wars and battles and revolts and many other catastrophes and cataclysms that He visits upon the whole world as He applies the surgeon’s knife under given conditions.
Man’s blessedness is not in the affirmation of his ego, but in the reaffirmation of his allegiance to the One from where he came. Man does not know from where he came. He thinks he comes from his father and mother, from the Punjab, or from Madras. To whom are you related? Who is your nearest relative? My brother, my sister, my father, my mother. We have no other relative except these people. We are limited to this relationship geographically, nationally and even socially.
The other operations that are superintending over our little actions, and even our thoughts and sense activities, are unknown to us. Do we know that divinities operate upon our senses? No one knows that. People may sit for a few minutes and hear that the sun operates upon the eye, the divinities are superintending over the senses, and then we close the book and come back and we ourselves are the operators of everything. The operation of divinity is only in the classroom. Afterwards, we are the masters of even the gods themselves. Let the gods mind their business. The ego is stronger than any instruction that can be given to it. It is violent, rebellious, unyielding and stronger than flint.
The blessedness of man is not in losing the paradise, but in gaining it. When Milton wrote his great poem ‘Paradise Lost’ which thrilled the literary audience of England, people came to him: “Friend, you have written about loss. But what about gain?” He never wrote about gain. Then under the advice of many friends he wrote another poem called ‘Paradise Regained’. Maybe he was not very eager to write that poem, and so it is not as forceful and charged with such feeling and power of literary beauty as is ‘Paradise Lost’, because tragedies are more touching than comedies. We feel torn to pieces when we are witnessing a tragic drama. We are shred into pieces, broken, as it were, into glass pieces, when we see a tragic occurrence. We are not so much elated by a comedy.
This again is an indication of the way in which man is made, a study in psychoanalysis. Tragedies seem to be more near to the way in which man’s mind operates than comedies. Man himself is a great tragedy of creation. It is mentioned in a scripture, perhaps in the Old Testament of the Bible, that God thought, “I will never create man again. I will destroy man forever. I will root him out completely,” and so on, in spite of the fact that man has been regarded as the final touch of God’s wisdom. So there is this position today in human history which demonstrates that the paradise has been lost and it has not been regained, and we are struggling to regain it. But it cannot be regained unless the law is obeyed.
All these things of the world follow us when the law of the righteousness of God is obeyed because the blessedness of man consists in obedience to law, and not breaking law. If man takes law into his own hands, the cudgels of God descend upon him, and God’s mills grind very slowly, but very finely. God is a very leisurely person, as it were, highly majestic, very profound, dignified. He will not open his mouth and perhaps will say nothing, knowing everything at the same time. He does not act like a dog barking, but is like a lion that takes action when it is necessary.
This is demonstrated in the Mahabharata in the history of Bhagavan Sri Krishna. He was not a person to take action in one second. He did nothing at all. Everything is silence, as if nothing is taking place. It is all watching, understanding, knowing, omniscience because God has given man some kind of freedom, and the long rope has to be exhausted. The cow that is tethered to a rope has the freedom to move to the extent of the rope. and no one will interfere with it. No restraint is exercised upon the cow to the extent of the length of that rope with which it is tethered to a peg. But the restraint is felt when it tries to go beyond the length of that rope.
So man never feels much sorrow or grief. He thinks he is very happy in this world of milk and honey, as long as he is within the ambit of the length of the rope that is given to him in the form of individual freedom. But there is a limit to this freedom, and when he tries to overstep this limit and break this boundary set by this rope of restraint exercised upon him by the law of nature, he is pulled back. This pulling back is the history of man. Very few of us have leisure; we are all very busy people for nothing, but those who have real leisure will benefit by the study of these great classics such as the Mahabharata, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost and Regained’, Gibbon’s ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire’, Arnold Toynbee’s ‘A Study of History’, and epics of this nature which tell the whole story of man right from the beginning till the end, right from the beginning of creation itself and ending with the great blessedness that is awaiting us, the salvation of the soul.
Our salvation or freedom does not consist in what we are trying to do with our hands and feet. Human action is not necessarily a fulfilment of the law of God, though it can be in harmony with the law of God. Karma yoga is an instance on the point. The Bhagavadgita is very difficult to understand. No one can understand it unless one thinks like Lord Krishna himself because it is an ordainment or an ordinance issued by God from the point of view of his vision of creation, and we can understand what it says only when we are able to raise ourselves to that status of vision where we see things in the way in which the whole universe sees, as the body sees every limb to which it is connected, or of which it is the organ. Every limb of the body is known to the body, and the body has an outlook, a vision or an understanding of every cell, every part, every limb, every finger. That vision is a total vision without any partiality of friend and foe. The bodily organism has no friendship or animosity in regard to any of its limbs, though it may separate some part if it becomes diseased, without being angry with that part. Another limb may be very strong, but it does not mean that the body has any friendship towards it. It is a totally impartial organic outlook of the whole system in regard to the limbs which belong to it.
Such is the way in which God operates, nature operates, the history of the cosmos works, and our blessedness consists only in contemplating this great truth of the universe. Meditation is the duty of man, not action. Action can become meditation when knowledge arises in us that action is not anything that we do, but something happens on account of the rise in this understanding. When action becomes a movement of consciousness, it becomes karma yoga. When the universe begins to work and throb within us and through us as instruments of it, all our actions become karma yoga.
Karma yoga is not an action that I do or you do; it is an action that the world does, nature does, God does. When the universe works through us as instruments, all that we do produces no reaction in respect of us, as a message conveyed by an ambassador is not his message and no reaction from that message will have an impact upon him because he represents another body which has deputed him to convey this message or execute a particular deed. We are like ambassadors, trustees, instruments. Nimittamātraṁ bhava, mayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvam eva (Gita 11.33), says the great Lord in the Bhagavadgita: Everything has been done by Me, and I do all things. We are only an instrument, a fountain pen. We do not say the pen has written the dramas of Shakespeare, of Kalidasa or any history, but it is true that it has written them; we cannot deny that. So it is true that we are doing many things, yet we are not doing anything. But if we are so presumptuous as to feel that we are doing anything, we have to reap the harvest of this seed of ignorance which we have sown. It will redound upon us like a boomerang and compel us to pass through the process of transmigration, metempsychosis, birth and death.
We are not here in the Sivananda Ashram to work for our rebirth. That is not the purpose for which we are here. We could have taken rebirth even without coming here. The purpose is to stop this cycle of unending sorrow, the pratitya-samutpada as Buddha calls it, the chain of coming and going, relentlessly, endlessly moving like a wheel without stopping. Such a movement has to be put an end to. The law of cause and effect has to break, which cannot break as long as we live in space and time and cause and relationship. To live in space and in time is to be involved in cause and effect relationship because cause and effect relationship is nothing but the way in which space-time operates, and we are all in space and time. And so the law of action and reaction, which we call cause and effect, has its effect upon us. This will bring about rebirth. We cannot avoid it. So no one who is conditioned by space, time and cause can avoid rebirth.
Here comes a great crucial point before us. Is there a hope of salvation? Can we attain moksha? Can we contact God the Almighty? “Yes,” is the answer. We can. The paradise lost can be regained. For that, the Son of man has to sacrifice himself on the cross, which means to say, the individual has to be sacrificed on the cross of this utter sacrifice of individuality in jnana yajna, the meditation on the Absolute, wherein the nexus of cause and relation is broken through and the fortress of ignorance is pierced by overcoming the limitations caused by our location in space and time.
In meditation we do not think space and time. In meditation we do not think that we are persons. In meditation we do not think that there are people around us. We do not think that there is anything at all. When the consciousness of objectivity ceases, the consciousness of space-time cause and relation also simultaneously ceases, which puts an end to the consciousness of our bodily individuality and egoism, etc. In one stroke of asanga shastra, as the Bhagavadgita puts it, the axe of detachment, we take one step in the direction of liberation, the final moksha.
Thus, in these few words I have placed before you a few ideas concerning the great duty of every one of us in this universe of God’s creation, which is meditation and nothing else, so that every duty that we perform, every little work that we do is also a meditation, and it means nothing else. We are not working for ten hours and meditating for one hour. We are meditating throughout the day and the night. All our operations in the world are meditations on God, and every little work such as washing vessels or sweeping the floor is a meditation on God. We are not the doers of anything. We want nothing in this world. We want nothing in this world because we cannot get anything in this world. This is so because nothing belongs to us. Even this body does not belong to us. Neither I belong to you, nor you belong to me. Every one of us belongs to that Central Authority, the seed of the universe from where everything has emanated as this vast banyan tree of samsara.
Thus, meditation is our duty. Meditation is nothing but a perpetual attempt on our part to gather our consciousness into this centrality of our relations to the whole universal setup wherein we step over the conditioning factors of space-time and causal relation, and we cease to be what we appear to be. There is neither the consciousness of our own self as meditating nor the awareness of any environment outside; we are just before the audience of God. Here is the final word, practically, about meditation, which is described in such large detail in the scriptures of yoga such as the Patanjali Sutras and the Bhagavadgita, the Upanishads, etc., which have to become the theme of our daily prayers, our sessions, our satsangas, our vocations and our meditations.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Humanity as Yajna or Sacrifice for Perfection
Humanity as Yajna or Sacrifice for Perfection by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 15 April 2013 22:28
I am supposed to be here to introduce to you, under the auspices of ‘The Yoga Society’ of this Academy, a way of the assessment of values, which we may regard as a little removed from the usual manner of the human outlook of life, a system of living whose physical expression is the Yoga-Asanas.
We are here to bestow a little thought upon the impact that Yoga can have on human life as a whole and the relevance it has to the objectives of human existence. There is a need for a reorientation of the assessment of values, at least from the point of view of Yoga, and this necessity for re-orientation arises on account of the very nature of Yoga itself. Literally, or grammatically, Yoga means ‘Union’. The definition or the explanation of the word does not go beyond this simple implication, ‘Union is Yoga’. But union with what? And who is to be united, with what? This is not easily explained, and it is left to us to go into the depth of the suggestiveness of this term, ‘Yoga’.
The objectives of life are also the purposes of life. Our culture regards the central aims of existence as the Arthas, or the Purusharthas, to be pursued by every human being. We live in the world for a purpose, and the activities of life are nothing but implementations of various methods for the fulfilment of the objectives of human life. We are after the fructification of our ideas and the fulfilment of our desires. The object is counterposed with the subject. The object, in its general perspective, is the whole world before us. We are facing the world, in front of us, every day, as an object of our consciousness. Matter is there staring at Spirit, and the Spirit within us envisages the movement and the structure of Matter, which is the world in front of us. Human activity or endeavour, in all its phases, may be said to be an act of Consciousness, struggling to establish an adjustment of itself with the structural patterns of Matter. We are daily trying to adapt ourselves to circumstances, physically, socially, politically and in all the fields or vocations of life. The adjustment of Consciousness is the principal motive, the guiding factor behind the various vocations of life in general. This is the Artha which we speak of in philosophical language – the purpose of existence. We pursue the objective of life and try to make it a part and parcel of our experience. And experience is nothing but the union of the object with the subject. The desire of the Spirit or Consciousness gets fulfilled, when it is united with its object, and a desire is nothing but the movement of Consciousness in the direction of the object. The impulsion of Consciousness towards the object that it has set before itself is the aspiration, the longing, the desire; the craving, whatever you may call it. The intention behind this desire is the cessation of the desire itself, and we are supposed to be happy, when the desire is fulfilled. We are in a state of anguish when the desire is not fulfilled. The unhappiness that follows from the propulsion of a desire from our Consciousness can be explained psychologically as a result of a self-aberration of Consciousness itself. We go out of ourselves in the act of desiring an object. I move away from myself, as it were, in the direction of something other than myself, and this is what we mean by desiring anything. The subject alienates itself into the object. The Seer moves towards the Seen. I try to behold myself in something other than my own self, with the basic intention or aspiration to come in union with that which is the so-called object of desire.
There is something interesting about all this movement of Consciousness in the direction of the object. It is not easy to understand why this movement takes place at all. Why should we desire anything, is a simple question that we can pose for ourselves. Why is it that we should be perpetually asking for one thing or the other? How is it that we never remain contented with what we have or what we are? This is a question which takes us beyond the empirical structure or feature of human society. A mere perception of the existent conditions of life will not enable us to give an answer to this question. The phenomena of ordinary human life cannot provide an answer. This question arises from a realm of values which transcends the perceptional ken of our sense-organs. The world that we perceive is the object of our senses. Whatever the senses can cognise or perceive, is the world around us. But the senses are only the external instruments of this propelling force, the desire of Consciousness. There is something deeper and more implicit behind the activities of the senses, which is the reason behind these activities themselves. This basic or fundamental urge, being precedent to the activities of the senses, cannot be explained by the senses themselves. Why we should ask for anything, is a question that the senses cannot answer: well, our mind or the reason may be able to answer. Not so, is the position. Even our reason is incapable of delving into the depths of this mystery. Because, unfortunately, our mind, and even the so-called reason, seems to be working like a handmaid of the senses and doing merely the function of collecting the evidences given by the senses sifting them into a pattern and arranging them in some sort of an order, passing a judgment on the nature of the various reports received through the senses. Though there is a coordinating and synthesising activity exercised by the reason subsequent to the reports given by the senses, the quality of the judgment does not much differ. It does not mean that our reason gives a superior judgment in respect of the world of perception, quite different in every way from what the senses themselves are able to perceive. The mind and the reason seem merely to agree with the basic structure of the evaluation of values envisaged by the senses.
We cannot, therefore, understand what is happening to us by the exercise of the phenomenal reason. We are conditioned by the factors which are at the back of the operation of the reason itself. I had occasion, sometimes back, when I had visited this Academy in this very context, to speak on the other aspects of the subject: how the mind is conditioned by the structure of the universe itself. The universe that is perceived by the mind, the reason and the senses, seems to be weighing heavy upon the mind and the reason in such a manner that the mind cannot think independently of the way in which the world is made. The phenomenal character of the world impinges upon the mind in such a manner that the mind can think only phenomenally. The so-called noumenal implications behind the phenomenal perceptions remain untouched by the exercise of the phenomenal reason. We think in terms of the laws that operate in the physical universe so that we are compelled to be satisfied with being physical entities. But you know very well, physical satisfactions are not real satisfactions. People who are physically comfortable are not necessarily happy people in the world. Which person can say that he is really happy in spite of material possessions that he may have, the social status which he may occupy? Why is it that we are always kept on tenterhooks and we always go on hoping for a better future even when not knowing what that future would be like? How is it that we are always impelled by an urge whose nature is not clear even to our own minds? Is it not true that we are perhaps beckoned by some transcendental meaning in our own selves? Transcendental, because we seem to have no access to that realm. Well, it comes to this, that we do not know our own selves, a very uncomfortable conclusion though. If that is the case, how can I understand anybody else? If the very instrument of action, which is my own personality, is beyond my own self, how could I use this instrument as a tool in the understanding of the world-structure outside? We are unhappy today, as intensely, as people were two thousand years ago. It is a futile patting ourselves on our backs to imagine that we are advancing in civilisation. Where are we advancing, we do not know. Well, it is true, that we are moving, but it is uncertain, in what direction it is. If we are sincere and honest in the investigation of the world situation today, and the psychological condition of people anywhere in the world, we would be in a state of discomfiture, and we should be really sorry to learn that, basically, we have not advanced a whit culturally, beyond what people had to experience and pass through in the ages that are gone by. We are as insecure and unhappy today as the people in the past were. The reason is something that appears to be beyond the investigating capacity of the psychological apparatus with which we are endowed today; and our education has not helped us. Our certificates, our degrees from colleges and universities have not taken us far. We have doubts, the very same misgivings that people had centuries back, and we do not sleep with a satisfied heart. We go to bed with a doubt, get up with a doubt and live our day with a doubt, and at the back of it there is a sense of insecurity gnawing into our vitals. The reason is not far to seek. We have been moving in the wrong direction, under the impression that we are advancing in civilisation, technology etc. We are fond of technological development and industrial revolution and scientific advancement. Very good, all this is well. But where does it take us? What is the objective? What is the Artha? What is it that we are pursuing, and for what aim or end, is a question that we have not posed before ourselves and we have not been able to answer.
We have in one grand hymn of the Vedas, a point given to us, enabling us to contemplate in the right direction. The ancient seers of the Vedas, in their grand contemplation of the cosmos as a unitary structure, visualised the human being as an inseparable part of the cosmos. They viewed the individual as inextricably involved in the purposes of the cosmos. The involvement of the individual in the structural pattern and the purpose of the cosmos implies a sort of obligation on the part of the individual in respect of the cosmos. We have a duty towards the world, towards the universe, in its entirety. This obligation that we are expected to perform in respect of the world outside, is what goes by the name of Dharma. We may translate this term, for the time being, as the law that operates in the world. Any kind of law is Dharma. The essential nature, intrinsic to the substance of a particular thing or object is the Dharma of that object. It is the Dharma of the fire to burn, to give an example; it is the Dharma of the wind to move in a direction, to blow; it is the Dharma of the body, to evolve, to grow, decay and to move towards its cause. The intrinsic nature of anything is the Dharma of that particular thing. The ancient seers emphasised this obligation on the part of every individual, which they designated as Dharma. Now, I must, at the very outset, tell you that Dharma does not mean religion in the commonsense meaning of the term. It is not a belief in God; it is not a worship that you perform in the temple; it is the necessary obedience which you owe to the very nature of things. It has nothing to do with religion in the sense of piety as a super-phenomenal or extra-cosmic attitude in life. It is a scientific truth or principle which has to be accepted on the part of the individual. There is a ‘Dharma’ of the body, for example. The legs have to walk and the brain has to think. The various limbs of the body have to perform their coordinating functions. Every limb of the body has a Dharma in respect of every other limb of the body. There is a cooperating Yajna, or a sacrifice, being performed by every limb of the body.
This term ‘Yajna’ comes into high relief in this context of the great hymn to the Vedas, I made reference to. The central culture of Bharatavarsha, India, may be summed up in one term, ‘Yajna’. You have heard this word uttered many a time. People perform Yajna. They perform Havan; they offer sacrifice, pour sacred ghee in the fire. But, this is only an outward expression, a symbol of the intention behind what is known as Yajna. The performance of a ritual is a spatio-temporal shape given to the inner idea expectation which is the Yajna. I am coming to the point, again. Your obligation to the world, as a whole, is the Yajna. You may ask me, why do you call it a Yajna? Why do you call it a sacrifice? Why do you say that my duty towards my nation is a Yajna? It is a Yajna because of an important factor involved in this process of the fulfilment of duty. In the discharge of duty, whatever be the nature of that duty, we diminish ourselves in one way and enlarge ourselves in another way. The diminution of the assertive or the individuating factor in ourselves is the Yajna or the sacrifice that we perform for the sake of the enhancement of the larger dimension of our personality.
Human society, in the Vedic hymn I mentioned, is envisaged as one single organism. We owe an obligation mutually among ourselves, merely on account of the fact that we live a single life of immanent relationships which obliges us to manifest this inner communion in outward activity, conduct, behaviour etc. Our conduct or behaviour, externally, in human society, is an outward manifestation of the internal bond that is perpetually maintained among ourselves, even without our knowing the very existence of this relationship. We are called phenomenal beings merely because of this fact – phenomenal, because we do not know the ‘noumenal’ implication of our existence. Yoga is the technique, the art, the science of bringing you into union with the noumenal implication of your own self. The phenomenal individuality of yours is brought into coordination with the noumenal universality of your existence. This is something very profound for us to contemplate. Phenomenally, we are cut off from the world. On an outward observation through the perceptional faculties of the senses, we may regard ourselves as men and women, people belonging to different nationalities, age groups, different levels in economic existence, etc. This is not our real nature. Our unhappiness, to reiterate, is our inability to recognise the fact that we belong to a different order of existence altogether, raised above the one in which we seem to be involved today in this world of diversities. Yoga tells you of the great implication of the Vedic hymn which proclaims that, ultimately, finally, basically, we are neither men nor women. We are not even human beings as we understand ourselves to be. We are bits of universal force. We are eddies, waves as it were, in the ocean of Cosmic Power and it is this deeper reality of ours that keeps us ever restless. That is why we cannot sleep a single night with composure in our hearts, because we have lost our mother, our parent as it were. We have been cut off from our own very source. We are sundered completely from our own self. This is ‘Atmaghata’, that has taken place, as the Isavasya Upanishad puts it. These people who have lost the consciousness of the Self, are the killers of the Self, and they go to regions which are Sun-less, dark and torturous, says the Upanishad. This is a way of putting the condition that awaits a person who takes appearance for reality and completely misconstrues the relation of himself empirically with this basic Reality of all things. We have a reality in our own selves which is commensurate with the Reality of everyone else. The Artha that we are pursuing, the objective of our life, the Kama, or the desire that we are evincing in respect of objects of sense, are nothing but the phenomenal expressions of the beckoning of the noumenal Reality within us. It is calling us. The mother is calling the child, “You come”. The universal call is the pull that is exerted upon us in the form of a desire for things in the world. This is the metaphysical meaning, the philosophical explanation behind even ordinary desires or any kind of impulsion from within us to do anything whatsoever, personally or socially, or in any other capacity.
So, Yoga gives us a great message: the message not of any scripture, not of any religion, but the message of the Cosmos, the message that comes from the distant stars, like the cosmic rays, as the modern scientists tell you, which come and impinge on us without our knowing that they are on our heads. The Universe is speaking to us in the language of desire and it tells us that our destination, our central goal of life, is a graduated attunement of our personality with the various degrees of manifestation of this ultimate Reality. The necessity to tune ourselves with the requirements of political administration, the needs of human society, the requirements of even a family or the demands of our own physical personality – all these are the various degrees of the expression of the law of the one Universal Existence. The various duties that we are called upon to perform in the different vocations of life are the obligations that we owe to this one Reality in its various facets. So, Dharma is Universal. It is not a religious term. It is a scientific expression. It is the Law that binds you to the Whole. It is the principle by which the part is coordinated to the completeness of the structure of the universe. Here is the message of Yoga for you, and difficult as it is to contemplate the further implications of this wonderful message, it is imperative at the same time to bear this in our mind every moment of our life, if we are to breathe a breath of satisfaction, if we are not merely to go on cursing our fate, finding fault with things and becoming disssatisfied with anything and everything in life. If it is given us to be happy at least for a moment in our life, if this is a practicable proposition at all, I would tell you that this cannot be, if you are not to be in union with Reality.
Satyameva jayate, is a great motto with which you are all familiar. And what is this Satyam, the Truth? Satyatvam badha rahityam said a great master. That which is ‘uncontradictable’, is the Truth, and if ‘Truth alone triumphs’, it is another way of saying that the ‘Uncontradictable’ alone triumphs. My dear friends, can I put you a question? Have you seen anything in this world which is uncontradictable? Everything is contradicted by everything else. There is supersession of values. Everything is transcended by something else. There is nothing in this world which cannot be negated by a subsequent occurrence or historical procession. It is because of this fact that it is said that there is no Reality in the appearance of this world. The appearance carries Reality, no doubt, the appearance of the world is a vehicle of Reality, but the structure itself is not Reality. We may make a distinction between Nama-Rupa-Prapancha (the world of names and forms) and Vastu-Tattva (essential Reality). The vehicle is the outer, phenomenal, transient expression of a particular degree of Reality and not the whole of Reality, so that at no occasion in the process of human history can you discover the whole of Reality. By a study of human history the entirety of Reality cannot be known because at every moment of human history there is only a partial expression of it and the reason behind the procession of human history can only be said to be the universal impulse within everything to effloresce into the realisation of the destiny of history. The rivers will not be quiet until they reach the ocean. There is roaring and rushing and moving and meandering of the rivers and rivulets. All this noise continues until they reach the sea. So is human history supposed to cease moving when the destiny of the cosmos is reached. This destiny is known as Moksha, a term with which, I believe, you are familiar, again. Moksha is the ‘Infinite Value’ or the ultimate determining factor of the principles that govern the fulfilment of all objectives – of Artha or material gain, and the achievement of Kama or desire both conditioned by a tremendously restrictive discipline, the rule of Dharma. Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha – these four aims are so comprehensive that they mean the total Integral Life of all.
Moksha is the Infinite Value. It is not the last value, or one of the four ends of life. It is the Infinite itself. You cannot say that the Infinite is the last end in the long chain of development. It is Infinitude and, therefore, it subsumes within itself all other values. The temporal values, the objects of the world, the desires of life, the various vocations which we pursue, are all subsidiary to our allegiance to this ultimate call of life in its totality which we designate as Moksha, or liberation of the Spirit. The activities in life, in the various fields, and the various aspirations of mankind, whatever be its movements, whatever be the directions they take, all these are the gradual growth of the human personality towards this attainment.
This is the message of Yoga. It is, thus, impossible for a person not to be a Yogi. Tasmat Yogi Bhava, (therefore, become a Yogi), says the Bhagavad Gita_._ This is the message of the Eternal to the temporal. It is not Krishna speaking to Arjuna; it is the Absolute admonishing the relative. Tasmat – therefore, because of the fact that it is impossible even to exist maintaining one’s integrity without relationship with Reality. Just as, without life-breath, we cannot live, without contact with Reality we cannot exist. The values that we seem to be admiring in life, are assertions of this Universal Spirit, and it is the battle between the Spirit within and the material universe without that we call history. It ceases, it fulfils itself, it finds its consummation, when Matter emerges into Spirit, and Spirit unites itself with Matter, so that the subject and the object cease to be two contending parties. They stand as one integrated Principle – the Absolute.
This is the goal of life towards which everyone is moving. ‘You’ and ‘I’, and everyone else, not merely human but even the other levels of existence are all tending towards this mysterious culmination of the values of all life, and what can be a greater call, what can be a more solacing message than this wondrous word that we hear from the adepts who have trodden this path, seen through the vicissitudes of life, and plumbed the depths of existence.
At this auspicious moment, I invoke the blessings of the Almighty upon you all, that, in the words of the great Mantra called the Gayatri, we have our understandings properly directed. We have no other prayer except this, that our understandings move in the direction of Reality. We need understanding and nothing else. Understanding itself is satisfaction. Chit (Consciousness) is Ananda (Bliss). The more you understand, the more do you become happy. It is wisdom that gives you satisfaction and not material possessions. The more you know, the more do you commingle with Reality. The goal of life is wisdom of existence, the knowledge of Reality, union with the cosmos, and this is the ultimate aim of Yoga. It is not merely the ultimate aim, it is also the immediate aim. It is that which is under our very nose, just new, and the step that we have to take now is the step in the direction of Yoga. Life is Yoga.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
On the Concept of Righteousness and Justice
On the Concept of Righteousness and Justice by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 14 April 2013 21:50
The Universe, as the word itself suggests, is an inclusiveness of operation, in which everything, whether living or non-living, is included. The inclusiveness, which is an inviolable character of the universe, raises a question which cannot easily be answered by any attitude of life which is empirically oriented, sensorily conditioned or even psychologically delimited in any manner. The perceptional procedure of human beings, to take an example, invokes, spontaneously, a principle of exclusiveness by which it becomes necessary for the universe of observation or perception to stand outside the location of the observing intelligence, or the perceiving individual. This would imply that the universe, in order that it may become an object of perception by the mind and the senses, should shed its inclusiveness, that is, its intrinsic nature. What would follow from this predicament is that whatever is observed by the individual is, then, not a universe but an abstraction of certain features from the original nature of the universe. But there is something which is interesting about all this. The attempt of the individual to look at the universe and then make any meaning or sense out of it would be like the attempt of one to study a part of a living organism, such as a human body, by segmenting it and wrenching it out from the organism of the body of which it is an integral and vitally involved part. That is to say, a part of an organism ceases to have any character of the organism, it is no more living, when it is placed out of the context of its vital involvement in the organism. All this would be tantamount to reducing the attempts of classical scientific projects and psychological systems based thereon to studies of a corpse in the endeavour to study a human being.
By way of a slight digression from the point at issue, it would be pertinent to mention here that, in fact, a human being cannot be studied objectively, since no living being can be considered as an object of externalised perception. It is possible to observe the body of a person or even, perhaps gather indications of the prevailing mental operations of the person concerned, but it would not be difficult to accept that the status or the value of a person is not exhausted by the anatomical or physiological structure of the person, or even the mental condition in any given situation. There is a sort of uniqueness, unity and indivisibility about living entities, and thus, it would be clear that a person is certainly more than what the body is or the present condition of the mind is. Then what is a person? What do we call a human being, if neither the physical body nor the transitions of mental process suggest anything at all about the true person? It would appear, then, that a person is more an outlook of consciousness, a centralisation of attitude, a force, an energy, than anything that could be perceived or conceived in an objectivised manner.
The above analysis of the human personality also suggests a wholeness about the person, a wholeness that precludes any attempt at a study of it by means which would convert it into an external object, that is, external to the mind, senses or the consciousness that studies it or even knows it. This non-exclusive and non-objective nature of the basic essence of a human being would, further, reject any effort to convert it into a means leading to some other end, inasmuch as the whole that it is would cease to be such, the moment it becomes an instrument to something else, for an instrument is a tendency moving and rising beyond itself, that is to say, it cannot be a whole. Whatever is an integrality or a wholeness cannot, then, be a means to any thing else.
The above study of the essential nature of things in general would bring out two important truths of life as a whole: One, the universe as an inclusiveness and a wholeness in itself cannot be encountered as an external object; two, a living being also, having the essential characteristic of wholeness, cannot be looked upon as an external object for purpose of study, experiment and observation. If all well-known processes of life in the world, whether scientific, psychological, social or political, require that the world and people in the world are invariably externally perceived and objectively conceived things, then, the natural conclusion is obvious: The entire life process is an erroneous operation of consciousness, and no one can know anything as it is in itself. The world of perception is an appearance, not a reality.
There is a necessary and insistent urge within everyone towards what is usually known as righteousness and justice. It would be hard to find any person in the world who would regard righteousness or justice as a mere appearance: This great requirement of life is always held to be a necessity and a reality. It is known to everyone that life would annihilate itself if it is bereft of the nobility that is attached to and the imperativeness involved in the ideal of righteousness and justice. But how could this be, if the available means of human knowledge and the conditions to which the human mind is subject reduce all life as it is lived to an appearance not related to reality.
It would be impossible to be righteous or just, under the above analysis, unless and until the personal outlook and the empirical approach of the common life of the world rises above itself to a super-personal outlook and metempirical attitude which grasps life as a whole and a totality and ceases to look upon the world or the people in the world as objects of external perception. That is, in entertaining the spirit of righteousness and justice, neither the world nor people remain as outwardly located objects of perception, but integrally involved totalities, and no judgment of any kind would be righteous or justifiable unless the source of judgment stands above both itself and that which is judged. Judgment is a transcendent operation and not something pronounced by someone on someone else or something outside. Law is an operation which is inclusive and not merely a thought or a whim that is exclusive. Law is not a person; it is a field of operation in which are included both the person that dispenses law and the one in regard to whom it is so dispensed. This also applies to scientific observation, which, in order to be correct, should include and at once transcend the location and predicament of both the observer and the observed, the seer and the seen, the judge and what is judged.
In ancient India, great masters who conceived everything in a holistic attitude, regarded human life as a whole within the universe which is the largest dimension of wholeness. Every application or duty in life was envisaged as a movement of a lesser whole towards a larger whole, and not the movement of a fraction, since not even an isolated part, for all practical purposes, is without a self-identity in itself, a personal status it maintains, forming thereby a complete entity by itself. Not only this. Even the so-called individualised operations or activities are not fractions, but emanations of a wholesome character, and every thought, feeling or attitude is a whole by itself, since it is an emanation from the individual which is a whole. In this connection it would also be necessary to state that every organisation that a ‘holistic’ individual forms is also a whole, invested with a soul, keeping it intact, the soul meaning what acts as the cohesive force that keeps the organisation as an integrated entity, whether social, legal, national or international. While the human being as an individual is certainly a whole, a fact which needs no further explanation, a family of individuals is also a whole, without which feature the members of the family would get dismembered and the unit called the family would cease to exist. A community is an organisation of several families, a district an organisation of several communities, a province an organisation of several districts, the national state an organisation of several provinces, and the world set-up an organisation of the entire comity of nations. In each of these levels of the organisational procedure, right from the individual to the concept of a world state, a unity is maintained by each concerned level, each level has a soul of its own, each one forming a self-identical integrated individuality by itself and yet simultaneously forming a facet of the larger self of the next higher level of organisation, until a general universality of what we may call the cosmic organisation is attained as the state of utter perfection.
If we could carefully bear in mind the several implications of the above analysis of human situation in general, we would also realise that even the smallest of individual units, we may call them living or non-living, from the point of view of our observational capacity, and every movement, effort and attitude of such units, have in them potentially and implicitly the resources and powers, the facts and purposes, of the largest and highest organisation – the universe. If this is so, every individual is a whole, every organisation is a whole, and every impulse of every organisation, including the individual, is a wholesome endeavour to reach out to a wholesome experience in every way. This will explain why no one would tolerate oneself being regarded as an unimportant person, even second to someone, and every desire of everyone and everything is actually an asking for everything, inasmuch as what emanates from a whole cannot but be whole.
This vital fact was borne in mind by the ancient adepts in India, who brought about such a transformation in their outlook of life that they felt a necessity to introduce a system of living according to which the whole of life becomes a religious movement, a spiritual aspiration: Religion becomes all life. This system is embodied in the concept of what is known as the Purusharthas, namely, the aims of human existence. The fourfold concept, which includes the four facets of human longing, i.e., human desire, human aspiration, human enterprise, is an attempt to bring together into a single focus of attention the aspirations of the individual towards the totality of being. Life may be defined as a kind of reaction of the individual to the whole atmosphere and environment – an environment which is at once personal, physical, social and supernatural. All the aspects of life, which are the concerns of man, would then be regarded as logical needs to be transformed into the spiritual endeavour. Whatever be one’s occupation in life, that becomes a spiritual movement, it gets transformed into a worship of the universal reality. This is so because religion, spirituality, is the encounter of the total individual in regard to the total cosmos. The whole of life gets thus harnessed into the spiritual enterprise. The Purusharthas, the aims of human life, are broadly classified in terms of a fourfold asking of the individual for a fourfold fulfilment of being: These are Artha (material need), Kama (emotional and aesthetic need), Dharma (the impulse for righteousness), and Moksha (the ultimate spiritual requirement of all things).
The experience of a reaction in respect of the environment around which one seeks the fulfilment of one’s material needs may be called the basic economic need of the person. Whatever is essential far physical existence, without which one cannot live a healthy and sensible life in the world, becomes an object (Artha) of life’s pursuit, and to the extent of the pressure of the need felt, one’s life becomes inseparable from it. Food, clothing and shelter are some of the ostensible forms which this pressure of life takes. And this urge towards material security, is also to be transformed into a spiritual discipline, since this urge has its ultimate purpose in maintaining the individual secure for a purpose higher than the individuality itself. Here is the spirituality hidden behind even the material necessities of life. Matter itself is the first rung in the ladder of the development of the spirit towards perfection. Spirit condenses into matter and matter rarefies itself into spirit. The universe is the face of the Absolute Spirit. There can be nothing unspiritual in a world animated by the universal consciousness. The word ‘secular’, if it means the ‘unspiritual’ cannot exist in the dictionary of creation.
But no one can be satisfied merely with bread, clothing and a house to live in. There are other longings of the individual engendered by the fact that everyone is an intricate complex of different layers of involvement, each one knit into the other inextricably. There is the love for beauty, a desire for emotional satisfaction, and a longing for aesthetic enjoyment. The voice of this impulse is as vehement and pressing as the call for material comfort. The attraction for fine arts, music and literature, is an outer form which this inward impulse for aesthetic experience takes in every person. One loves and expects love. The tragedies of personal and social life may be mostly attributed to absence of affection that one seems to be expecting from others and one’s own inability to love anything at all. Frustration is the outcome of defeated love. Man’s vital satisfactions and fulfilment of emotional needs also form part of the spiritual life, since this impulse, again, is an indication of the orderliness, symmetry, rhythm and proportion present in everything that is a whole and a completeness. The aesthetic impulse, the desire for the beautiful (Kama) is suggestive of any kind of love or longing for recognition and a fulfilment in feeling. The romantic impulse, as it is sometimes called, is the apotheosis of the aesthetic sense. As there is a necessity felt to keep one’s physical body secure by means of the requisite material needs, there is a simultaneous urge to perpetuate the physical individuality through an endless continuity in the process of time, which is the final explanation of the impetuosity behind the sexual hunger of the individual. Infinity and eternity seem to be playing the fool in the individual acts of an endless material possession and insistent sexual longing.
The impulses have their visible expressions as well as hidden forms. There was, in India, no ban imposed on the natural fulfilment of desires, contrary to the dictates of certain over-austere religious attitudes which emphasise to a point of excess a mortification of the flesh, the starvation of desires, and a hibernation of one’s normal impulses by forced repression. Though appearance is not reality and the bungling of consciousness in its material and aesthetic vehemences may be said to be far removed from the ultimate reality of life, all evolution has to be from the lower to the higher, from a lesser completion to a greater one, though we would prefer to designate the lesser ones as appearances of the higher reality. This is the beauty and the perfection, the spiritual significance, which the ancient masters envisaged in every individual attitude or movement, thus seeing and expecting everyone to see, the entire life in all its phases as a grand drama enacted by the Supreme Being in the Theatre of the Universe. This is the reason why even the ordinary daily occupations and instinctive impulses can become and should form raw materials for self-purification and an intelligent harnessing along the stages of the evolution of the spirit towards the Absolute. If God were not to call man, there would not have been desires in life. Every desire is some sort of a distorted shape of the response of man to God. A desire, while it is apparently directed towards the fulfilment of an objective satisfaction, actually arises from a need for universal experience. As everyone is placed in space and time, and the space-time complex manages to externalise even the universal, God Himself appears as an object of sense. What is everywhere looks as if it is in some place and only at some time.
However, the permission and concession given to desires to fulfil themselves, in the manner indicated, is to be conditioned by the great rule or law, called Dharma. If Dharma, the principle of the righteousness of the law, does not regulate the operation of desires, they cease to be aids in the movement of the spirit towards its perfection. Desires, which are like flowing rivers, get dammed up when they are bottled inside and not channelised in a systematic manner to irrigate life’s wholesome involvements. Dharma is law, the regulative principle, which harmonises everything with everything else. The individual has to be a self-balanced purposiveness, integrated healthily, but not opposed to a similar need felt for self-completion and integration by the other levels of organisational procedure, namely, the family, the community, the society, the nation, and the world at large. Usually, there is an inherent urge in everyone to maintain one’s own point of view even to the detriment of others, a form which desire takes when it is concentrated within the body and ignores the presence of other individuals or similar organisations. Dharma, or law, insists that desire can be fulfilled, and must be fulfilled, lest it should go amuck, but not to the disadvantage of others who also exist in the world and who too have a similar permission to fulfil their desires. There is no mutual contradiction involved in such a permission granted under the law, Rita, as the Veda would call such a universal sanction founded on perfect, impartial justice. “Do unto others as you would be done by others.” “Do not do to others what you would not like to be done to yourself.” For, if one wishes that everything should belong to oneself, everyone else also can entertain such a wish. Such a predicament would defeat the very purpose of the operation of any desire. Law is the principle of cooperation and sacrifice, as against competition and selfish arrogance. It is the concession which each one is expected to make in respect of everyone else, because creation, as could be seen from the above study, is a ‘Kingdom of Ends’, and not a restless flow of ‘means’ only without any ‘end’ to be reached. The Veda uses the word Satya for the law of the Absolute, and Rita is the very same law operating in creation as a regulative principle, an imperative, immanent in all things. Every law is a facet of the cosmic law which is rooted in the integrality of the universe. There is a necessity to introduce a system of coherence among the visible particulars, so that they form a harmonious whole, a hierarchy of completeness, and not a mess of jarring notes without any relation among themselves. Law exists, because the Absolute is, God rules all things. Law is the manner in which the indivisibility of the Absolute manifests itself through space and time.
The great regulative system of the administration of life, known as Varna Ashrama Dharma, sums up the way of a perfect life. While what we may call the horizontal integration of life by means of a blend of spiritual power, political power, economic power and man power in life is ensured by the intelligent mechanism of Varna Dharma, which is not a distinction of colour, but a mutually involved differentiation of each one’s capacity to participate in the fulfilment of life, the vertical ascent in the qualitative wholeness of each person is patterned in the rule of the Ashrama Dharma, representing the stages of study, discipline, conservation of energy and continence; the ordained fulfilment of the material, social and emotional requirements of life; a gradual freedom from every kind of externally oriented involvement; and the final pursuit of absolute universality. The horizontal stratification was designed by the participating phases of cooperation known as Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra; the vertical discipline and gradual perfection of the person was laid down in the well-known stages of the Brahmacharin, Grihastha, Vanaprastha and Sannyasin. Neither is the Varna system a caste-oriented gradation of the superior and the inferior, nor the Ashrama pattern a social enactment. Both represent a spiritual necessity and the only way in which human society can exist and thrive in harmony, and the individual progress upward towards a gradual realisation of universality. There is no comparison in this system of stratification, but a necessary and just participation and healthy integration of social and personal life. India’s culture never held that negation is the law of life; for it fulfilment is a state that has to be reached by working through the media of every disciplinary process, all which is equally important. The stages of evolution do not brook comparison. Each stage becomes as important as any other, when one finds oneself in it. Life is an inward attainment of oneself with a cosmic conditioning. The inwardness, being constituted of the different layers of personality, has to be taken into consideration in all its degrees when one attempts to live a life of perfection. The inwardness is of a graded form. There is no sudden contact of one level with the rest of reality, except through the necessary stages. The human individual is formed of several psychic vestures, each of which is to be treated well by paying its due, which is accomplished in the fourfold stratification of cooperation and the stages of life. Time is a movement towards eternity.
The perfection that is wholeness, which characterises every stage of evolution, is also to be equally active in the administrative, political and judicial field of human management. The question of management arises practically from the very level of the individual. Management does not necessarily mean a handling of relationship with other people. It is also a matter which concerns oneself. Self-management, or the proper handling of one’s own self, will be found to be of primary importance even when considering one’s relationship with other persons. The individual, as was observed, is also an organisation that needs to be managed. Any non-alignment of factors involved in personal management may land the person in a state of mental restlessness, whimsical behaviour, erratic conduct, and a bungling in the handling of any matter whatsoever. While human society is a group of human beings, it cannot be forgotten that it is human beings as individuals that constitute the society. There cannot be a factual qualitative superiority of a society whose constituent members do not possess in their own person the expected quality. But the very necessity felt to form a society, an administrative system, a government, or a judiciary should naturally be suggestive of an imperative involved in the outlook of anyone to exceed the narrow limits of a purely personal or individual concern and entertain an outlook which would not exclude from its purview the welfare or interest of any other person in the society. This is a specific requirement on the part of anyone who is placed at the helm of affairs in any organisation – social, political or judicial. The head of such an organisation, whether he is a king or a monarch, president, minister or judge, naturally requires a specialised form of education in being able to understand his relationship to the organisation of which he is the chief, a relationship which is not a particularised connection with individual members merely, but a superior relation to the spirit of the organisation, a welfare state, as one may designate it, which is not a person but a principle. From this it would also be clear that the head of such an organisation cannot look upon himself as a person, but the representation of a universalised principle which is the integrated welfare of the entire jurisdiction over which he has authority and responsibility. It would require some specific educational calibre and a stretch of some genius to realise that the head of a managemental system, social, political or judicial, is not a person, but a super-personal general principle. A judge in a court, for instance, does not only transcend the limitations of the clients of the cases, but transcends even himself as a person. The judge is neither anyone of the clients or advocates, nor the visible person seated on the chair. The judge is an embodied representation of law, which by itself is impersonal. Hence, the true judiciary is not visible to the eyes but can only be appreciated through reason which has a wider jurisdiction than any person or even all persons. It is in this sense that a ruler is often considered as a representation of divinity, a deity in himself. It is so because the ruler is a principle of wholeness which, in every one of its levels, enshrines perfection which is godliness, which is a name for the soul or the self-integrating principle in anything.
The above consideration would also in a way enable one to answer the question as to whether the individual is for the State or the State is for the individual. The controversy seems to be finally unfounded, arisen due to a misconception of the relationship between the individual and the State. To bring the instance of the judiciary once again, the client, the lawyer and the judge form a single cooperative network in the act of bringing about legal and social balance in the jurisdiction of the people concerned, and the unit constitutes a whole, each member forming a necessary contributory part of the whole, and the whole in turn deciding the status of each of such participating parts. The individual exists for the State, because the individual, as a lesser whole, is a constitutive element in the larger whole which is the State. But the State exists for the individual, since the integral wholeness which is the State cannot afford to interfere with the progressive welfare of any of the lesser wholes, insofar as the lesser wholes do not contradict or clash with one another’s welfare. So, both the views stand the test of tenability, for they are actually not two viewpoints but two phases of a single point of view, which is the consideration of the entire State as a final whole which is at once inclusive of all the lesser wholes within it forming its inner constituents. This also answers the other question sometimes raised, that both the State and the individual are equally important. The point, however, is that the two are not distinct entities at all.
The administrative and legal issues of life, while they essentially constitute an operation of positive and constructive remedying and equitable healing forces in the organisation, also involve a sometimes unavoidable factor known as punitive justice. Criminal laws engage themselves in this latter aspect of the management of human affairs and in the act known as punishment inflicted by law, the social welfare of the organism is supposed to be ensured. The positive side of legal justice mainly concerns itself with the distribution of property and the question of its ownership in society: the civil rights of the people. Though, even in an act of civil dispensation of justice, an element of punishment may be said to be involved, where, for example, a landed property wrongly appropriated by a person is wrenched out from him and handed over to its rightful owner, based on the principle of equity and welfare of the entire organism of administration; yet, in what is known specially criminal procedure, the punitive aspect puts on an accentuated form as a special kind of pain inflicted on the wrong-doer. It has been held even in a free state or a democracy, where private property is conceded, that all ownership is more a kind of trusteeship and the State can have the right, and has actually the right, to own the entire property under given conditions. In fact, private ownership cannot defy or contravene public welfare or the well-being of the State as a whole. All this means that no one exists for himself alone, but everyone exists for everyone else, also. Here comes into high relief the great spiritual significance of life operating powerfully even in political and judicial administration.
While the manner in which people are entrusted with civil rights or ownership of property has been seen to vary from country to country and from nation to nation, occasioned by local conditions of people and their mentality in the regions concerned, what strikes one’s eye ostensibly is the peculiarity in the administration of criminal justice as understood and enacted by the different nations. What kind of punishment is to be meted out to what offence? Can the hand of a person who steals a pencil be amputated as a punishment equitable with the act of offence? Can a nation which forbids smoking, execute a person for committing that act under its jurisdiction? These are extreme cases which kick up basic questions of human justice, but there are others which are involved in the prejudices of the human mind. The steel frames within which are locked up, in India, the characteristics attributed to the classes of people called castes, Varnas, and the functions associated with the Ashramas in the personal life of an individual, as if they are water-tight compartments, iron cages, and not flowing streams joining the river of life, are also examples of the inveterate habit of human prejudice, ignorance and self-esteem, which raise similar questions of a thing called justice behind the rule of social law. In a region monogamy is holy and inviolable, in another polyandry is not only necessary but an act of sacred cooperation and sacrifice. One leader of the people exhorts the nation on the necessity for unconditional non-violence, but another concedes a proviso that violence is justifiable where self-defence is involved, or where one feels a need to protect the lives of people or guard the security of the nation. It needs no mention that the principle of unconditional non-violence considers that even death should be welcome if it follows as a consequence of adherence to non-violence. It follows also from this that one who does not hesitate to embrace death as an inevitable something, whatever be its causative factors, believes perhaps in a deathless immortality of a soul in man, and the welfare hereafter is a greater concern than a welfare in this world. This strange conclusion, though it is likely automatically to follow from a strict observance of unconditional non-violence, cannot be said to be the intention of the leader of a people, who would not deny the possibility of their earthly welfare, all which would only mean that there is a difficulty in reconciling the need for the welfare of people in the world and the necessity, to be adherents of unconditional non-violence.
The processes of the study of the principles of life considered in the above paragraphs should enable one to accept that justice is neither an affirmation nor a negation of life, but a harmony of conditions that should contribute towards the manifestation of circumstances which would enable lower organisations of reality to expand their dimensions and reach up to higher levels which are the souls of the lower ones. Nature does not go to extremes, nor are law and justice extremes of act and behaviour. The meaning of principles that transcend personalities is generally hard for the mind to grasp. As action and reaction are equal and opposite, because they are based on a unitary law of a balance maintained by the forces of Nature, the rights and privileges of people as may be conceded to them, or even the punishments that are supposed to be necessary, cannot, even in a state of enthusiasm, ignore the fundamental principles of righteousness and justice which demand that the spiritual expansion of the individual and the society has to be the criterion behind all judgments, whether rights and properties, privileges and concessions, or punishments and deprivations. It is not for nothing that great thinkers have often felt that only philosophers can be kings, and kings should be philosophers. It was Plata who proclaimed that until this condition of administration is fulfilled, the world is not going to have peace. There must be justice in conceding privileges to a person and justice in meting out punishment. The justice consists not only in the security and welfare ensured to people in general by that dispensation, but it also should, at the same time, ensure the betterment, welfare and progress of the particular individual concerned. Certainly, none but a god can be a just ruler (Navishnuh Prithivipatih). It has to be borne in mind, again, that the ruler is a principle of integration involving an element of universality in it, and not just a person among many others.
The philosophy and the rationale behind law, justice and jurisprudence would, then, raise the pertinent question: Is man prior to law or is law prior to man? This crucial difference of viewpoint in ultimate matters concerning life is virtually the point of distinction between the Contract Theory of State propounded by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and the Logical Theory of State advocated by philosophers like G.W.F. Hegel, in the West. The Contract Theory holds that man was originally in a state of nature and was ruled by the law of the fish (the larger swallows the smaller) and the law of the jungle (might is right), and this could be naturally the height of any conceivable insecure condition of things. To obviate this sort of perpetual fear endangering the lives of everyone, people are said to have made an agreement among themselves and framed a system of laws and of governance, vesting the power of rule in a single person (monarchy) or a body of persons (oligarchy or bureaucracy) or an assembly of chosen ones by periodical election (democracy). Here the law of the society and of political government is considered as something created by man by mutual consent or agreement to suit the circumstances or conditions under which he lives at any given time. When the circumstances of life change, the laws also can be and have to be changed by mutual understanding and agreement. This would make it appear that there is no such thing as law unless man wills, individually or in a group, that it should be there. It is the creation of human needs and the environment of life. Law does not exist by itself. Man can do or undo it by a majority of votes (since it is unlikely that everyone would always consent to everything unanimously), and sometimes by the exercise of physical force even by a quantitative minority (as it has happened rarely in the history of the world, though unfortunately for the many in the majority) – a situation which implies that man makes laws either by understanding which would be to the satisfaction of many, or by physical force which can be to the sorrow of many. Anyway, according to this point of view of the origin of social law and political government, man is the law-maker, and this is the essence of the Theory of Contract in the science of Politics. From this it would also follow that even the sense of justice can turn out to be a whim oftentimes in the minds of the ruling powers, because it is hard for the dispensation of justice to stand isolated from the operation of law. On a close examination of the subject, the implications of the Contract Theory would seem to be inseparable from the psychological background of society presented by psychoanalysis. Man can be no better because he can make laws, for he can also unmake the very same laws by the same principles of contract which made them, and rational justice would be a word without any substantial meaning.
Though it may be conceded that the Contract Theory is perhaps the truth of the historical origin of human law and government, even this manner of the origin of law must have itself originated from a principle which ought to have a logical priority over the historical accident of the origin of law as propounded by the Contract Theory. Here we come to a subtle philosophical point which would not ordinarily occur to the mind of the common man. Why does there come about a necessity for man to frame a law at all by mutual consent? The answer to this question is the logical ground which explains the meaning of law and the necessity for law. The principle which is prior to the human effort of mutual agreement in respect of the framing of the law is itself the central law conditioning and regulating all the laws that man makes subsequently by agreement, election, etc. This is the point which Hegel endeavours to win over Hobbes. It cannot be that man is the sole maker of law; if that had been the case, it would be difficult to understand why at all man felt a need to make law. This need felt by him is the conditioning factor behind man-made laws, and is the main law, the universal law, which regulates temporal laws of the terrestrial State. If law arrests a person and inflicts on him punishment, it is not because of the operation of a man-made law merely (else, man could suddenly change his law and abolish such a thing as legal punishment), but the reaction set up by a wider law which is superior even to the totality of the individuals in society and the members in the State. And what is this law?
Here we turn to the metaphysical background of law which also purports to be its logical explanation and justification. The relationship between man and man is not the outcome of some quixotic agreement but a rational necessity dictated by the structure of the universe. Human relationship cannot be made or unmade according to fancy, for it is rooted in a fixed pattern of structural behaviour which is harmonious with the nature of the universe as a whole as manifest in the various degrees or realms of its expression. The necessity for law arises on account of a need felt to rise and grow into a higher degree of reality than the one in which one finds oneself at a given moment. The growth into a higher order of reality is both quantitative and qualitative in a measure in which the two aspects cannot be distinguished one from the other. The higher degree of reality connotes and implies not only a wider inclusiveness of quantitative measure but also a deeper profundity of knowledge and wisdom and an insight into the nature of things. To give an example: Is not man more than a mere total or an assemblage of the different limbs of his body? All the parts of the body of a man, even when viewed together, cannot be regarded as the man himself, for what we mean by man is a. significant meaning or a transcendent essence vitalising and animating the body and the personality, rather than the body or the personality by itself. Man is a significance, a c_onnotation_, a suggestiveness, the state of an integrated consciousness, and not merely a physical body, a psychological unit or a social personality.
Even so is the concept of a nation, which is more a spirit than a sum or an assemblage of people and things. The meaning of this position can be appreciated if we consider for a while such phenomena as, for instance, large number of persons recruiting themselves as soldiers and even dying in a war waged in what is regarded as the interest or the welfare of the nation. Obviously, no one would ever believe that the nation for whose sake people are ready to sacrifice themselves is just the ground of the earth, mountains and rivers, for these do not require protection and they stand by themselves unconcerned with man’s predicament. What seems to be in the mind of people, evidently, when they entertain the notion of the nation, is the group of people arranged into a conceptual network or pattern of wholeness governed by a uniform ideology, cultural aim or ultimate purpose. On this ground, the nation is inclusive of everyone, even the soldiers going for a battle. Even supposing that a large percentage of people as soldiers die in a battle waged in the interest of the nation, no one feels that a part of the nation is dead or that the nation is now alive only as seventy-five per cent or fifty per cent. The nation does not perish even if the majority of people cease to be for some reason, and this is so because the nation is not the person or the physical assembly of individual bodies. Even if fifty per cent of the limbs of the body of a person is to be amputated for medical reasons, the man remains still a whole and never feels that half of him has gone and that only half is alive. That the spirit is not the same as the letter, that the invisible is a greater reality than the visible, can easily be seen on a little in-depth examination of anything.
The ethical or what are known as moral laws, also, stand by this test of spirit ruling the letter, intention standing above routine or outer form. Else, how would one explain the universally acceptable law that no one can injure or harm another on any account and yet feel justified in maintaining defence forces to avert self-annihilation? Here is a subtlety which accepts human behaviour and conduct to be regulated not by the instinct of love and hate, but by obedience to the law of the spirit transcending the isolated instincts of individuals or even a group of individuals. Here is the principle of Ahimsa, or non-injury, thrown into the crucible of a test which can be broadly categorised as utility, coherence, or self-realisation. Though the meanings hidden behind these nomenclatures of behavioural and ethical operation seem to be outwardly different one from the other, there is an undercurrent of a common significance and a uniformity of meaning in all this operational attitudes. Though, sometimes, it appears that truth cannot go counter to its utility in life, the sense of utility cannot but maintain a coherence within its structure, inasmuch as the utility has to be a feature of the common welfare of everyone and cannot be just the favourable utility of someone to the detriment of others. Here, even the idea of utility has to be governed by the principle of coherence, which latter ensures security to people in general and does not convert utility into a picture of selfishness. But what is coherence, and what is its intention, what is the purpose? Here we are face to face with the question behind all questions.
There can be a justification in the necessity felt for the introduction of coherence among values of human utility for another reason altogether, which is neither just empirical utility nor mere logical coherence. And that is the demand for the self-realisation of Spirit. There is an inherent, unbending, unrelenting and eternally operative requirement in everyone to be in a state of self-realisation, which, in the purely physical personality, takes the form of an undividedness of feeling that one is what one is, and one cannot be other than what one is. This is the law of identity, namely, A is A, and A cannot be B. This strange persistent urge to maintain a conscious self-identity is the principle of self-realisation manifest in the lowest degree of reality, that is, the physical organism which lives and works with an intention and purpose. But, as observed above, the individual self-hood can maintain itself only precariously in the absence of its adjustment, adaptation, harmony and coherence with other people in the world, call them families, communities, or nations. These latter are the wider forms of the very same impulse for self-realisation as revealed in the world of space and time, but demanding self-identity at their own levels, and brooking no interference from anything outside that particular unit of selfhood, whatever be its degree of inclusiveness or expansiveness. There would be no necessity to dilate on this issue any further, since this appreciation of the way of things in general would automatically land itself in the recognition that a Universal Selfhood alone can explain and account for the very meaning of the life of anything, and it is its affirmation in graded forms of inclusiveness that goes by the name of law, righteousness or justice.
The above also explains why Nature and history never care for individuals, and even the strongest of empires and the greatest of men have been reduced to the dust of the earth. Not even the best of actors is allowed a continuous and unending performance in the drama of creation. There is a coming and going of things, as required by the change of scenes which constitute the beauty of the enactment. It is not the individual, whether in the form of a person, family, community or an empire, that is of any value to the universal justice, for, what is of value is the universal intention, the universal purpose – the largest universality of selfhood with no external interference or conditioning by way of limitation. Moral virtues and ethical codes relating to the norms of non-violence, truthfulness, continence, appropriation of property and permissiveness to enjoy security, do all finally hang on this final justification to be found in every one of their normative shapes in personal and social behaviour, namely, a healthy balancing of every order of reality, right from the level of the lowest individuality, as required by the necessity to grow by a gradual ascent through degrees, to the general selfhood of the universe.
The need for norms of any kind in one’s behaviour arises due to the necessity to grant the same permission as given to oneself to other people also in the world. While everyone is to be granted the highest freedom, it loses its sense when such a freedom cannot be granted, at the same time, equally, to others also in the world. Unrestricted individual freedom granted to all would be another name for a tendency to the annihilation of all life – strange, that freedom can lead to destruction. But this is so because freedom is a universal principle and not an individual prerogative. The higher always justifies and can justify the lower, and the lower is not supposed to stand independently by itself. The aim of an action has to be justified. The reason behind the choosing of this aim has also to be justified. The means adopted to fulfil the aim is, again, to be justifiable. Finally, the consequence that may follow from the action should also be justifiable. And justice consists in the integral security of any order of reality.
Our duties, as well as character and conduct, are determined by the nature of the meaning that we are able to see in life, or, rather, the aim of life which is the ultimate objective towards the achievement of which every activity is directed. This would mean that the way in which one thinks, lives and acts, the manner of one’s behaviour towards others, and ones relationship with the general atmosphere around, are all fixed by the pattern of the meaning discoverable in life – the final aim of life. Though it may appear that the ultimate goal towards which one is directing one’s life is far remote somewhere in the future, it goes without saying that even the minimal step that one takes in any direction at the present moment is entirely governed by the law which is the stuff and substance of the ultimate purpose of all life. Law is, thus, an operation of the system of the Absolute in different evolutionary degrees of comprehensiveness and perfection, right from the revolution of an atom or the vibration of an electron to the ultimate causality of the universe. Personal needs, social laws and political systems of administration cannot, therefore, be separated from the requisitions necessitated by the very nature of the final unity of all things. It is this Universal Transcendent Principle that creates, sustains, rewards or punishes individual systems and organisations by its gradational actions and reactions. Here is also the explanation as to why individual systems strive for mutual love and cooperation, and at the same time, keep themselves ready with a knife hidden in their armpits. Life is a perpetual battle between the empirical and the transcendent, the external and the universal, time and eternity.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Cosmic Mystery
The Cosmic Mystery by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Thursday 12 April 2013 21:36
Is there a world? We know it is, by means of sensations from outside, which are converted later into perceptions and concepts. But is it really a world that we perceive? We receive sensations and have ideas formulated according to what we think is a logical way of dealing with things. And when we have a visual, auditory or tactile sensation, we feel we are in contact with an object. But have we any contact with what is not a sensation? We have every right to assert that we have real sensations and real experience. But of what? Of sensible qualities. Science has taught us today that the sensed properties point to a something of an indeterminable nature, observable as radiant energy, force, etc. We are told that the mass of a body is variable. It appears to be fixed in low rates of motion, but it cannot be perceived in states of high velocity. Objects are fields of force, which appear as substances due to our channelising the consciousness through sensory moulds. Pure force cannot be confined to space or time, and the shape, position and time of location of an object have different significations in different perspectives or frameworks of perception. We see a world, because we do not see ourselves properly as essential elements in all experience. The student who studies the world goes with the world, and in vain does he attempt to know it, because he himself is involved in it. He merely sees the laws and limitations which no one can overstep. The universe turns out to be a body of a collective interpretation by its individual contents, and that all men see the same world does not mean that it is independent of the observational perspective. The world is an interrelated process envisaged by an all-inclusive consciousness. There are no bodies visible or tangible, but there is a tremendous mystery that ever recedes from our world which has been reduced to mere frames of reference to a witnessing consciousness. Where is the world of experience? It has shrivelled into conditions of feeling and sensation, modes of the observation of a universal ‘Observer of Himself’. Our dear world is at stake. Reality is something different.
The way in which reality presents itself as appearance is, to the mind of man, inexplicable. Those who witness a legerdemain conjured up by a magician cannot but take it for reality, as long as they see it. But the magician himself is fully aware that it is an illusion created by him. No amount of intellectual analysis and understanding to the effect that the juggleries are unreal will prevent one from taking those phenomena as real, instinctively, and without thought. The world passes for reality to those to whom it becomes a content of experience. Only the magician behind these appearances can know what their essential nature is. We cannot say that our experiences are unreal as long as our consciousness is associated with them and gets identified with their formulations. Our trouble is that we are never conscious of what is altogether non-existent. We glibly talk of a real universe, even as we get excited when we see silver in nacre. Our reflective consciousness may resent acquiescing in the ultimate validity of the reports of our senses, but we cannot help being immured in them and delighting in their deceitful music. We understand that the world can only be an appearance, but we are forced to feel that it is real. We accept it with submission. We seem to be bound; we do not know why. There seems to be a world; we do not know how. We are in the realm of Maya.
The principle of appearance is not an entity second to the Absolute, designated by us as Brahman, but constitutes the great wonder of the One becoming the many. It is not real, for it is contradicted in Brahmanubhava or Truth-Experience. It is not unreal, for we perceive and feel the diversity of life. It cannot be said to be both real and unreal, because such a proposition is unintelligible to us. It is not also neither real nor unreal – such a thing cannot even be imagined. The term ‘Maya’ is used in different senses, it denotes (1) the inadequacy and the incompetency of the world to explain itself without reference to Reality; (2) the inexplicability of the relation of appearance to Reality; (3) the dependence of the world on Reality or Brahman; (4) the energy that is inseparable from Isvara, from which, as the material cause, the manifestation of the world becomes possible; (5) and the dreamlike character of the world when compared with the transcendent Brahman. It is a term suggesting a mystery, which cannot be taken for reality, and yet cannot be denied altogether. We have to admit it as some Power that somehow brings about these strange phenomena of a world-existence in which we find ourselves. It is real to those who are in it, indescribable to those who try to understand it, and non-existent to those who have gone beyond it. Those who are not endowed with spiritual intuition speculate over it, but cannot solve the riddle, for the mechanism of individualistic knowledge is the psychological organ, a modification of Maya itself. As darkness cannot destroy darkness, the mind cannot know Maya.
Two powers are said to be ever busy: the Avarana-Sakti or the veiling power, and the Vikshepa-Sakti or the projecting power. The latter becomes the cause of the creation of the universe from the subtle elements of the gross cosmos. It is this power that, in its cosmic and individual aspects, becomes the medium for the manifestation of Isvara (God) and Jiva (individual), respectively. The Avarana-Sakti veils the difference between the seer and the seen inside, and the difference between Brahman and the universe outside. It is this Sakti that is the cause of Samsara. Empirically, consciousness and its object are different from each other, and the non-perception of this difference is the seed of pain. Metaphysically, the two are one, and the non-perception of this essential identity, is, again, Samsara. The empirical self appears due to a false superimposition arisen in the Witness-Self. This is the work of the projecting power. When the difference between the perceiver and the perceived becomes vivid, as soon as the veiling power is overcome, Jivahood also vanishes along with it. And likewise, as in the case of the witness and the object, Brahman appears as a modification, as it were, on account of the veiling power Of Maya that hides the distinction between the real nature of Brahman and the phenomenal universe. When this veiling power disappears through Brahmabhyasa (continuous meditation on Brahman), the nature of Brahman and the world becomes clear.
There are different degrees in the manifestation of Maya in the world. Its workings correspond to and are felt in its further miniatures in the planes of greater ignorance, where they get more and more separated from one another, until on the earth-plane entities are completely cut off as independent bodies. The power of disfiguring reality is not of the same intensity everywhere. Maya is more manifest and works more vehemently in inanimate beings than animate, more in brute natures than in refined, more in Tamas and Rajas than in Sattva, more in man than in the celestial, more in an aspirant than in a saint, more in the sleeping and the dreaming states of the Jiva than in the waking, more in gross forms than in subtle ones. Maya is manifest on a progressive evolutionary basis on the one hand and as a steady concealing of reality on the other. It pervades every quarter and cranny; there is nothing on earth or heaven that is not under its sway. The impetuosity of universal change drags with it the entire brood of creatures, and every individual is compelled to modify and adjust itself accordingly. Maya is another name for the energy of the cosmos, animated by Isvara, the vehemance with which the formed individuality asserts its independence over the universe.
Maya is supreme Isvara-Sakti. “Maya is not-That. It is not Brahman, the solid reality that is at the back of this seeming universe.” “Maya is the material cause of the world, and the possessor of Maya is the great Lord.” “Maya has two Avasthas or states viz. Guna-Samya-Avastka and Vaishamya-Avastha. The first one is a state wherein the three Gunas-Sattva, Rajas and Tamas-exist in a state of equilibrium. This occurs in cosmic dissolution (Pralaya). The innumerable Jivas remain in a subtle state with their Samskaras and Adrishta (unseen power of Karma or the fruit-giving power of Karma that is hidden in Karma). When the period of Pralaya is over, Spanda or vibration takes place in this equilibrium, because the hidden Jivas want to enjoy the fruits of their actions. This is Vaishamya-Avastha,” “Vidya, Para-Sakti, Prakriti, Mula-Prakriti, Avyakta, Adi-Sakti, Adi-Maya are all names synonymous with Maya. Vishnu-Sakti (Lakshmi), Siva-Sakti (Parvati) and Brahma-Sakti (Sarasvati) are all manifestations of the One Supreme Sakti.” “Chaitanya associated with Sattva-predominating Maya is Vishnu, the preservative aspect of Brahman, Chaitanya associated with Rajas-predominating Maya is Brahma, the creative aspect of Brahman. Chaitanya associated with Tamas-predominating Maya is Siva, the destructive aspect of Brahman” Swami Sivananda: (Philosophy and Teachings, pp. 58-60).
The mystery of Maya has to be accepted as superlogical. “The why of Maya can be understood only when one attains knowledge of Brahman.” “The ‘why’ itself is a logical absurdity. We can have a ‘why’ only for worldly matters where the Buddhi (intellect) functions. There can be no ‘why’ for questions of the transcendental plane where the gross and finite intellect conditioned by time and space cannot reach. Everyone who endeavoured to account for the empirical world has been confronted by ignorance at every step, and has been obliged to confess that human wit could go only so far and no further” (Ibid. p. 60). “The world somehow exists, and its relation to Brahman is indescribable. The illusion vanishes by attainment of knowledge of Brahman. It is in this sense, in the sense that it vanishes when Atma-Jnana (Self-knowledge) arises that this phenomenal universe is said to be unreal.” “If we know the nature of Brahman, all names and forms and limits will melt away.” “A man whose clothes are caught by fire will immediately run towards water. He will never enquire at that moment, when he is in acute distress, how the fire came, or how his clothes were burnt up” (Ibid., p. 62). When the play of the mind is stopped by conscious effort in Yoga, when the seed of thought is burnt by spiritual wisdom, the tree of Samsara ceases to exist.
Does Maya really exist or not? This inscrutable, indescribable Maya cannot be said either to exist or not to exist. It is a strange phenomenon which cannot be accounted for by law of Nature. Maya is Anirvachaniya (inexpressible). It is neither real like Brahman nor unreal like a barren woman’s son, or the horn of a hare, or a lotus-flower in the sky. The phenomena produced by a magician do not really exist…. But we cannot say that they do not exist, because we are conscious of the phenomena, though only for a short time. We are never conscious of a thing which, although it is non-existent, is like a lotus-flower in the sky. Similar is the phenomenon called the universe, which is imagined to be distinct from Brahman. It is like the silver for which the mother-of-pearl is mistaken.” “We call it Maya or illusion” (Ibid., p. 61). “Maya is that illusive power of Brahman which makes the Anitya (impermanent) appear as Nitya (permanent), Asuchi (impure) as Suchi (pure), Duhkha (pain) as Sukha (pleasure) and Anatman (not-self) as Atman (Self).” “The world of names and forms vanishes entirely from the vision of a sage. It is an illusion that can be removed only by true knowledge. It is the illusory notion of the serpent that is removed when the rope which is mistaken for the serpent is recognised. Therefore, it must be clearly admitted that the universe which is removed by knowledge of the Self is also an illusion” (Ibid., pp. 62-63). The illusion, however, is no illusion to those who directly experience it. We have to recall here our investigations of the nature of truth in dream and in waking, and add that the world is relatively real and transcendentally ideal. It has Vyavaharika-Satta or practical reality, while Brahman is Paramarthika-Satta or absolute reality.
It is necessary to dispel certain misconceptions regarding the nature of Maya, for it is held by many that the principle, instead of establishing the oneness of Brahman, creates a dichotomy in existence by its presence. As it was observed before, the term is used in different senses, to suggest the absoluteness of Brahman and the inscrutability of phenomena. Maya is not altogether non-existent (Sunya), for a void, cannot become an object of consciousness; but Maya has a capacity to appear in manifold forms. It does not also signify a self-contradictory assumption like that of a barren woman’s son or a round square, for such fancied things as these cannot even be conceived. But the effects of Maya not only present themselves before the individual but exert a control over it. The Jiva is a part of the world of Maya, and is not the cause of it. The acceptance of Maya does not annul the existence of a world external to consciousness. The theory is not analogous to the Vijnanavada school of Buddhism, as it is generally understood, according to which the world is an objectification of subjective cognitions or a perception of the externalisation of the series of the flow of individual consciousness which is of a momentary nature. It is not to be supposed that the introduction of the principle of Maya to account for the world can in anyway lead to the untenable position of subjective idealism. The theory of knowledge, proposed by Mayavada, accepts Anirvachaniyakhyati (indescribability), and not Asatkhyati (non-existence) or Atmakhyati (subjectivity). The object of knowledge is neither a nihil nor a projection of the internal cognitions. The object is held to be an indescribable appearance, as it cannot be considered either as object or as unreal. There cannot even be an appearance of externality if there were no substratum for such an appearance. When we perceive a table or a cloth, we do not regard it as forms of our own thoughts or feelings but as things independent of us as perceivers. Though, the objects cannot claim to have an ontological status of their own, they have an empirical existence and psychological independence which points to a real though unperceived basis behind them. When we regard the world as Maya, what we mean is that it has no validity of its own as absolute truth and not that it never appears to us, or that it is real enough to vitiate the Infinite.
It has been regarded that the theory of Maya creates an unnecessary difference between Saguna-Brahman and Nirguna-Brahman, while, in fact the two have to be brought together and reconciled. The criticism is really without a basis, for the alleged dualism is never intended. Brahman is either Nirguna, or Saguna, or both, or neither. If it is Nirguna essentially, its Saguna aspect must be accidental, brought about by causes extraneous to it. This would mean that Brahman is not really Saguna but Nirguna. But if Brahman is really Saguna, its Nirguna aspect should be alien to its essential nature. To suppose, then, that Brahman is also Nirguna would be to imagine it in a state not its own. And whatever does not belong to it cannot be considered to be eternal. Thus the Nirguna aspect would be non-eternal. If, on the other hand, Brahman is to be regarded as both Nirguna and Saguna, we would be speaking what we are not able to defend for one thing cannot be two things at one and the same time. If, again, it is said that Brahman, on account of its infinite power, can assume both forms, though unintelligible to us, it means that the real nature of Brahman is neither Nirguna nor Saguna, but beyond both. Thus, again, we are led to the non-dualist position, where the question of the reconciliation of the Saguna and the Nirguna aspects of Brahman does not arise. And if it is neither of these, it must be something different, which, again, would mean that it is one without a second.
It is argued that the world is a real Self-manifestation of Brahman, a creation of its consciousness-force, and that it is not unreal in any sense. If Brahman has really become the world, it has undergone a modification in its essence, and thus has ceased to be what it is. We are driven here to the difficult position of the doctrine of Parinamavada (real transformation). There would be no Brahman left to be realised by souls if it has already become the world by self-transformation. But if it has not really modified itself into the world, the world is other than Brahman, and thereby loses its being – it becomes an appearance. That which does not belong to Brahman, but yet seems to exist, is what is designated by the term Maya. It cannot be said that the world, as we know it, is in Brahman, or belongs to Brahman, for the mortal nature of the former can in no way be extended to the immortal. The world is not also something existing unrelated to Brahman, for, then, it would limit Brahman, and consequently deny it. Even supposing that Brahman has become the world in a manner transcending our logic, we have to admit that Brahman alone is, for the reason that consciousness does not admit of divisions in it. The consciousness of division has to be divisionless.
It is said, again, that just as there is continuity in the perceptions of the imagined snake and the rope, a real relation between the world and Brahman cannot be denied. It is evident that the supposed continuity between the states of the snake and the rope is not in the perceptions, but in a substratum common to both. The Adhishthana or the support of the snake and the rope is one, and it is on account of this fact that one is able to perceive the two in one and the same locus, at different times. There is no continuity between the forms of the perception of the snake and the rope, for the former are negatived in the latter, and the suggested relation is only due to the consciousness present as the substrate of both the forms of perception. The world and Brahman, therefore, are one in the sense that the essence of both is consciousness, but it does not mean that the perception of the world by itself has any relation to the realisation of Brahman.
It is asked: How can Maya have a beginningless appearance if it stands eternally cancelled in Brahman? We see that the snake seen in a rope stands eternally cancelled, for a rope never becomes a snake nor is a snake ever transformed into a rope. Yet the perception of a snake in the rope becomes possible, as testified by common experience, and there is no beginning for the possibility of such an appearance. Suresvara describes Maya as Sarva-nyaya virodhini, the contradiction of every type of reasoning or logic.
The absolute cannot become what it is not; if it does not there is no world. But there is one seen. It must not be, therefore, different from the Absolute. This, again, means that there is no world but only the Absolute. But we do not see the Absolute; we see only the world!
The doctrine of Maya is not a theory of reality, but a symbolic representation of a phenomenon to be transcended, like an ‘x’ in a mathematical equation. When we take a symbol for truth, difficulties are bound to arise, for we assume here the reality of what was declared in the beginning itself to be something meant to be abandoned latter on, as a means of explanation and not anything real. And it is not true that the useful should always be real, ultimately. Maya is not a truth eternal but the baffling mystery of the descent of the One into the many. Maya cannot be known, for the one who aspires to know it is the Jiva whose very fibre is soaked in Maya. And the knowledge of Maya would mean a transcendence of individuality. Darkness cannot be seen with the help of a light.
The critics of the doctrine of Maya commit the initial error of taking it for granted that Maya is something real, and then complain that the introduction of this principle in an explanation of the world in relation to Brahman brings about a duality between the two. It should be reiterated that Maya does not mean any existence or being that would limit the infinitude of Brahman but denotes the inscrutable character of Brahman, by which a multifarious world becomes somehow possible in its unattached plenitude. The sages declare that Brahman alone is real, that the world is not different from Brahman in essence and that Brahman is verily the Atman. Other than this knowledge there is no way of overcoming the influence which Maya seems to have over us. Knowledge is the means to Moksha – in fact, it is Moksha, liberation.
It is objected that even if an appearance is not ultimately real in the sense of Brahman, it cannot but create a duality, for even appearance is, as long as it is experienced. In as much as appearances are facts felt and known, they have to be accredited with a certain amount of reality. And it will be clear that in the perception of a snake in a rope, the snake that is observed is real to its observer, and the rope-snake is not absolutely non-existent. It is experienced, and so has some amount of reality. But does this snake that is perceived cause any duality in the real? The supposed duality would be the one that might subsist between the snake that is seen and the rope which is its substratum. But we all know that what kind of duality there exists between this percept and its substratum. There is no duality at all, for there is only the rope. Even granting a kind of reality to the appearance of the snake, we find no duality that divides the snake from the rope. The being of the snake is at once the being of the rope. The world is a superimposition on Brahman, and the reality of the world is Brahman itself. Thus the principle of Maya does not introduce any duality between the world and Brahman. If the world were absolutely real, a real creation or manifestation of Brahman, it would have been impossible for anyone to escape from limitation, pain and death. That freedom eternal is somehow possible shows that bondage is in the end, unreal, and the changing universe has no reality of its own. This is why it is said that the universe is relative; it cannot contradict The Absolute, which alone is, and can be.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
Philosophical Deliberations
Philosophical Deliberations by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Thursday 11 April 2013 16:20
The consideration of the nature of the Supreme Absolute is known as Ontology.
Contemplation on the nature of the Creative God is known as Theology.
The study of the nature of the world is Astronomy, Geology, Geography and History.
The study of the individual is Psychology, including Psychoanalysis.
The study of the relationship between God and the world is Cosmology.
A probe into the relationship between the world and the individual is Epistemology.
The study of the relationship between individual and God is Religion.
The study of the relationship between one individual and another individual is Sociology, which includes Economics, Ethics and Politics.
Meditation is just Total Thinking. Now, what does this mean?
Generally when a person commences meditation, there is the initial attempt to concentrate the mind on one thought or a few thoughts as one would like to entertain, and at the same time there is a simultaneous attempt of the mind to reject certain other thoughts which one considers as irrelevant, obstructive or distracting. But here, in this process, one peculiarity hidden behind is mostly forgotten. And that is the impossibility of rejecting certain thoughts and entertaining only certain other thoughts which are regarded as conducive. The question here is: how would the mind entertain some thought and reject some other thought without being simultaneously aware that the rejected thought also is existing somewhere. In order to be able to reject one particular thought the mind, which rejects the thought, should also be present in the rejected thought. Hence no thought has been rejected, for the simple reason that the consciousness of rejection is also a thought. What is the remedy now?
It is necessary here to exercise great attention and bring about a reconciliation between the chosen thought and the rejected thought. How would this be possible since it is only the mind once again that has to effect this reconciliation. This would mean that the mind has to be present in the selected thought and the rejected thought as a third thought altogether, which is something astounding even to imagine. This third thought is not the thought of the chosen object and not also the thought of the rejected object. It is what they call a tertium quid which is for all practical purposes a miracle which ordinary thought cannot comprehend. This third thought is the total thought referred to above because it is present both in the chosen thought and the rejected thought and remains as an umpire between the chosen thought and the rejected thought.
Thus it would mean that the meditator is not the mind that is choosing a particular thought nor the one that is rejecting the thought. But to repeat once again, the total thought here rises a surprising impersonality of observation and the common complaint that the mind gets distracted on meditation vanished automatically. The so-called distraction that people complain about is attachment for one thought and hatred for another thought. Meditation is not on either the chosen thought or the rejected thought but the transcendent thought which rises above both the thoughts and yet is immanent in both.
Now, another trouble may arise inspite of all this effort mentioned above. This so-called transcendent thought is also a thought. But whose thought is it? It is necessary for every aspirant to recognise the tricky character of the mind. No one can be a great trickster than the mind of one’s own self. It is clever in deceiving itself. This transcendent thought, being also a thought, is to be contained in the mind, no doubt, but, beware, in a wider mind than the mind which brought about a division between the chosen thought and the rejected thought. The universe is wider than whatever the mind can think. It is therefore necessary to extend the boundary of this transcended thought further on by making it once again a chosen thought different from what any other thing that there may be in the universe. This process should go on almost indefinitely until the absolute reconciliation is achieved whereby what we call the world does not stand outside as a object to be rejected by gets reconciled with the great subjectivity achieved by the earlier processes. Philosophically this process is designated as position, opposition and reconciliation of thought which exercise the mind rises to the concept of God Almighty in which it absorbs itself in a state of perfect union and there would be no complaint hence forth about distraction and flitting of the mind from one place to another place. A meditator should also be a good psychologist, not to teach psychology to someone else but to understand one’s own mind. The greatest problem arises from one’s own self and not from anyone else.
All this is to say that a spiritual thought should be a total thought, virtually a universal thought.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Ontological Argument in Philosophy and Meditation Techniques
The Ontological Argument in Philosophy and Meditation Techniques by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Wednesday 10 April 2013 16:23
It is a well-known fact that the process of meditation in the field of spiritual life is centralised in the attempt of consciousness to concentrate itself on Ultimate Reality. Here, in this connection, philosophical circles have been conducting deep researches into the possibility of Thought contacting Reality, and whether it is a possibility at all on account of the limitations to which psychological processes are naturally subject.
The seed of the controversy arose from the affirmation of the Greek philosopher, Plato, that Ideas are the Archetypes of things; that is, the forms of the objects visualised in sense perception and the objects which are the field of phenomena, are like shadows or copies of the Ideas which Plato affirmed as being universals. It was the insistence of Plato that the universal is prior to the particular, more real than the multiplicity of things, and that the Ideas are eternal while the objects of sense are perishable. Aristotle, his disciple, erroneously thought that Plato made a mistake in creating a division between eternity and time-process since the two realms fall apart from each other and eternity cannot invade the realm of phenomena. If this is the case, thought cannot contact reality, or as a consequence thereof, we may say that there is nothing in the world which can touch God by any means whatsoever. However, here Aristotle should be considered as gone wrong in the appreciation of Plato’s foundational doctrine, because nowhere do we find Plato asserting that there is no connection between the eternal Ideas and the phenomenal objects of sense. The very fact of the objects being considered as shadows of the Ideas should give us a clue to the relationship between the Ideas and objects. There cannot be a shadow unless there is an original and the relationship between the two is obvious. This means to say that the faculties which are otherwise considered as phenomenal are not entirely distinct from the characteristic of the eternity of the Ideas, and are not organically dissociated from Reality, and the very aspiration for God arising from the heart of the human being should be proof enough to demonstrate that there is a vital relation between the phenomenal and the noumenal, the world and God.
In the medieval ages, Saint Anselm propounded the argument known as the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, making out thereby that the thought of God cannot arise in the mind of a human being unless the potentiality for God’s Presence is already embedded in the human mind. Else, how does such an idea arise at all? As another great thinker has humorously said, the wonder is not whether God exists or God does not exist, but the wonder is that the tiny mind of the human being can conceive such a tremendous comprehensiveness called the Infinite. Saint Anselm’s argument is that the concept of God is itself proof for the existence of God; otherwise there should be no reason why such an idea should arise at all in the mind of the human being. It is well-known that nothing can arise from nothing and hence the thought of God cannot arise from a vacuum or a totally dissimilar cause.
Rene Descartes, the famous French Philosopher, modified this argument of St. Anselm and followed a mathematically deductive process of reasoning in proving the existence of God. Descartes concluded that a finite mind cannot be expected to generate within itself an Infinite Thought. The Infinite cannot arise either from a finite source or from vacuum. The Infinite can arise from the Infinite only. Descartes concludes that God Himself must have planted the idea of the Infinite in the mind of the human being; else, there is no explanation as to how such a profound thought can arise in a mortal brain, limited to sensory perceptions. His well-argued confirmation of the existence of an eternal Self is something well-known in the history of philosophy. He carried on a process of doubting everything that the mind can think and could doubt even the existence of his own self, but the fact that there is doubting, cannot itself be doubted. Unless the doubter exists, the doubt by itself will have no meaning. We may doubt everything, God, world, individual and everything, but cannot doubt the validity of there being such a thing as doubt. The doubter cannot be doubted. Further it follows from this argument that the doubter must be a conscious being, since there is no such thing as unconscious doubting. The doubter is conscious existence, one feature inseparable from the other. The Self is Existence-Consciousness. It is from this potential certitude of Self and the mind that thinks on the basis of this Self, that we can deduce further on the concept of the Infinite. The eternal is in the heart of man. God exists, because the thought of God exists.
However, the most formidable refutation of the Ontological Argument comes from the German Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who analyses this Argument threadbare and concludes that the Ontological Argument has no philosophical value. Kant’s proposition is that the human mind can work only within phenomena and it cannot think noumena which transcend the boundaries of its capacity of knowledge. Hence, there is no such thing as Thinking God. Kant’s contention is that the ideas of God, world and soul are just regulative features, which suffice to give a synthetic unity of apperception to the perceptual process through space and time and the conceptual process through the categories of understanding, namely, the obligation on the part of the mind of the human being to think only in terms of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Since God is not a quantity, quality, relation or modality, the mind cannot think God. The Ontological Argument is hereby refuted. But, here, one can observe, Kant deeply errs in his conclusion.
The error of Kant consists in this: That the noumenon cannot be known, cannot be asserted by anything which is within phenomena. It is futile therefore to say that the noumenon cannot be known. If that were so, even such a statement cannot be made. The argument that noumenon cannot be known is self-defeating. The idea of the noumenon cannot arise if it has no connection with the idea at all, which, according to Kant, is within phenomena.
Hegel tries to rectify the deficiency in the argument of Kant that thought cannot contact reality. We have already noticed that Kant makes a mistake in confining all thought to phenomena and simultaneously asserting that the phenomenal thought cannot contact noumena. How does the idea of noumena arise in the phenomenal mind if the phenomenal mind cannot have even the idea of there being such a thing as the noumenon. Hegel turns the tables round by asserting that Kant’s insistence on making a distinction between phenomenon and noumenon defeats his own philosophy. There cannot be a knowledge that two things are separated from each other unless there is a third thing which knows that they are different from each other. The categories, which Kant feels are restrictive, are not actually the categories of the human mind as Kant seems to think. On the one hand Kant says that understanding creates nature, on the other hand he says that understanding cannot contact the real. Now, whose understanding creates nature. Can any human being’s mind achieve this feat? Is there anyone who with his mind can project a whole universe outside? Hegel argues that the understanding that Kant speaks of should be interpreted as cosmic understanding, the TOTAL MIND. This Total Mind is virtually the Mind of God. Thus, God alone can create nature. When the Ontological Argument asserts that thought is reality, it only means that Infinite Thought can contact Infinite Being. Hegel has brought God into the centrality of the thinking process. The Thought of God cannot be separated from God Himself. Universal Thought is the same as Universal Being. Indian philosophers explained this with the nomenclature that Sat is Chit, that is to say, Existence is Consciousness and Consciousness is Existence. Thus the ontological argument is reinstated by Hegel in the West and Acharya Shankara in the East.
Here is the highest technique of the greatest meditation which merges God, world and the individual in one breathless moment of ecstasy.
Comments by Laurence Browne on Swami Krishnananda’s “Ontological Argument in Philosophy”
The main thrust of Krishnananda’s article is, in his words, “St Anselm’s argument is that the concept of God is itself proof for the existence of God.” He says that this must be true because “nothing can arise from nothing”. This is very easily refuted because a) it cannot be proven to be correct, and is therefore simply a statement of faith or belief, and b) it does not necessarily follow, in logic or in practice, that the existence of an idea means that that to which the idea refers has objective existence, e.g. I can have an idea of dragon or a phoenix, but neither of these exist objectively, though they may exist in the realm of ideas, as does say, Tolkein’s Middle Earth or the various Buddhist worlds as described in some of the more grandiose sutras.
In the next paragraph Krishnananda uses Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” to support the existence of a self which can doubt anything except the existence of the doubting. From this he infers the existence of a ‘self’. Then he makes a big jump, again based on faith or belief rather than logic, to say that “The Self is Existence-Consciousness”. In other words he brings in a fundamental Indian concept to bolster his argument without first establishing the premises for that concept beyond saying that Descartes’ analysis of the self is proof that the ‘Self’ exists. He jumps from the small ‘s’ self to the big ‘S’ self with the sort of pseudo quantum leap that is not permissible in philosophical reasoning. In any event, Descartes’ analysis can easily be undermined by the ‘neti-neti’ or ‘vichira’ of jnana yoga, or an application of the Madyamika ialectic. And he ends this paragraph with a restatemant of the ontological proof: “God exists, because the thought of God exists.”
He then moves to Kant, who in his “formidable refutation” of the ontological proof stated that we can can only know phenomena and that the noumenon cannot be known. Krishnananda refutes Kant by restating the ontological argument as if he has already ‘re-proved’ it: “The error of Kant consists in this: That the noumenon cannot be known, cannot be asserted by anything which is within phenomena. It is futile therefore to say that the noumenon cannot be known. If that were so, even such a statement cannot be made.” This is circular logic, based on the notion that his analysis of Descartes has ‘proved’ the ontological argument.
Krishnananda also appears to misquote Kant when he says that “Kant says that understanding creates nature.” He then goes on to say, “Now, whose understanding creates nature? Can any human being’s mind achieve this feat?” But Kant never said that. He said (quoted in Flew’s Dictionary of Philosophy), “The order and regularity in objects, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. The understanding is itself the lawgiver of nature.” There is considerable difference between ‘creator’ (God) and ‘lawgiver’ (interpreter)!
Krishnananda also introduces in his defense of the ontological proof Hegel’s concept of the “absolute mind” and equates it with the “Mind of God”, stating that “Hegel has brought God into the centrality of the thinking process. The Thought of God cannot be separated from God Himself. Universal Thought is the same as Universal Being… Thus the ontological argument is reinstated by Hegel in the West…” Krishnananda makes several logical leaps, not the least being that of equating Hegel’s idea of the absolute (the theoretical summation of dialectical reasoning) with the unconditioned Absolute (Brahman) of Indian thought. Even if it was, the thought of Brahman (a concept, however vast) is clearly not the ‘Thought’ of Brahman (the Sanscrit ‘chit’), and we are left where we started with the ontological argument neither proven nor somehow ‘reinstated’ in Western philosophy; for Hegel’s concept of the absolute remains just that: a concept. The finger pointing at the moon is not and can never be the moon itself. As for the ontological proof it may be worth quoting Frithjof Schuon on the subject:
“To be able to accept the ontological proof of God, which deduces from the existence of an innate concept the existence of the objective reality corresponding thereto, one must begin by realising that the truth does not depend on reasoning – obviously it is not reason that has created it… In every act of assent by the intellect there is an element which escapes the thinking process, rather as light and colour elude the grasp of geometry, which can, none the less, symbolise them indirectly and remotely. There is no such thing as “pure proof”; every proof presupposes the knowledge of certain data. The ontological proof, formulated by Saint Augustine and Saint Anselm, carries weight for the person who already has at his disposal some initial certainties, but it has no effect upon the willfully and systematically superficial mind… Some of the Scholastic philosophers were too Aristotelian to be able to accept the usefulness of the ontological proof; reason was considered by them as leading to a certainty that was in some way new, rather than to Platonic “reminiscence.” (Logic and Transcendence, 1984, p.59)
Concerning the Ontological Argument
I have received a critique offered on my essay, The Ontological Argument, by Laurence Browne, for which I am grateful.
The History of Philosophy, whether in the East or in the West, has been a search for a relevance which remains to be discovered between Appearance and Reality. My purpose has always been not to enter into futile polemic but to arrive at a conviction that a thing called God must exist, without which certitude life would lose meaning. The technical description of the process of arriving at this certitude attempted by Philosophy is what is generally known as the Ontological Argument, meaning thereby Proof of Being. The part of my essay which the critique has not touched is the beginning paragraph pointing to Plato’s doctrine of Ideas or The Idea which acts as the Archetype of everything phenomenal. We need not go here into the further development of this thought of Plato as there being archetypes for everything in the world, something which looks like there being an ‘eternal object’ for every ‘actual occasion’ in the language of A.N. Whitehead. The critique mentions here that the idea of a thing does not mean that the thing indicated by the idea does really exist; that is to say, there need not be an objective existence corresponding to the idea of a thing. Without going further into this subject, I would elicit an answer from the learned critic to Plato’s doctrine of the Idea, which I believe Whitehead deeply appreciates, holding the opinion that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. I would be edified if some light is thrown on this issue.
It was Acharya Sankara in India who formulated the argument for an Ontological Being in his statement that no one can deny one’s own self or one’s own existence. This existence has also to be a conscious existence, because unconscious existence cannot be conceived. In Sankara’s words, this point is expressed as Satta eva cha bodho, bodha eva cha satta – existence is consciousness and consciousness is existence. From the certitude of the existence of one’s own self, the certitude of the existence of anything else also follows, as is corroborated by Immanual Kant in his chapter on the ‘Refutation of Idealism’.
As far as my reference to Rene Descartes is concerned, it is just to say that his point is not much different from Sankara’s dictum that the ‘I’ exists, and it cannot be denied, because to deny the ‘I’, another ‘I’ would be required, a process which may lead to infinite regress. I do not know if there is any jump, as the critique points out, when it is discovered that the self is existence which is conscious. I do not also know if there is any objection to finding a common ground between Sankara’s position as regards self and Kant’s asseveration of a Transcendental Apperception, whatever meaning one would like to associate with Kant’s presuppositions. The finitude of one’s own self cannot rest quiet without finding comfort in a ‘more than itself’. The finite has necessarily to make an automatic reference to a non-finite, which is generally designated as the Infinite. Human aspiration is never complete in its fulfilment without absolute fulfilment.That the existence of an idea does not necessarily indicate the existence of the thing to which the idea seems to refer, is a point to consider. Well, let us go further.
We may cite one sutra from the great Yoga Text, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, from its third chapter, which reads as ‘Bahir akalpita vrittih mahavideha, tatah prakasavaranakshayah’. The suggested meaning of this Sutra is that the empirical thought, which we may consider as a psychological function that artificially relates itself to an object outside is one thing, and the thought precedent to this empirical thought which may be regarded as the way in which Cosmic Thought is inseparably related to the psychological thought, is another thing. The point is that an individualised psychological thought cannot even function as it is distanced from its object by the intervention of space and time, unless at the back of it, integrally related, there is a Thought which does not require an object outside it, as this Thought is inseparable from its object. Here Thought is Being. The sutra makes out that this Metaphysical Thought, when deeply meditated upon, leads to the liberation of the finite thought from getting entangled in space and time and absorbs it into the Overself, which we may consider as the Transcendental Thought, or what we may say in the language of religious devotion, God-Thought – not God’s thought but God Himself as the Thought. This marvellous discovery, I believe, is what Aristotle intends when he makes out that God is Thought thinking Itself, the Prime mover of the world. Thinkers like Sir James Jeans have dared to say that God is just thought, may be a mathematical thought. To Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘The stuff of the world is consciousness.’
This is to say that it need not always be true that the idea does not have any relation to the thing of which it is the idea. Else, Acharya Sankara and Plato would be misled in their doctrines, and even Kant would be wrong if he does not set aside his critical phenomenal shackles with no reference to the noumenon; because a thing that is considered phenomenal cannot intelligibly exist without reference to something which is not phenomenal.
Laurence Browne’s Reply to Swami Krishnananda’s Reply
Thank you very much for your response to my critique. As you say, the purpose is not to get into debate, so I’ll just make one or two points.
Firstly, concerning Plato. Within Western philosophy Plato was the first real metaphysician. So powerful and influential was his system through the ages that Whitehead said – and no-one disagreed with him – that European philosphy had been a series of footnotes to Plato. As a result of creating his realm of Ideas and Forms, Plato became the first philosopher to systematically conceptualise the direct experience of both goodness and truth. After Plato goodness became an ethical ideal and truth the correctness of an intellectual judgment. Here we have the beginnings of the profound difference in the understanding of the nature of truth between the East (direct experience of Satchitanand) and the West (the correctness of an intellectual judgment). The same difference can be seen in Shankara’s understanding of ‘I’ and Descartes’ understanding of ‘I’: chalk and cheese as we say!
Whitehead himself tried to get away from the conceptualisation of experience – and from Plato’s overwhelming influence – and so developed his system of ‘process philosophy’ which is worth looking into. For example, Whitehead regarded space time and matter as abstractions, and in his view to consider them to be real would be to fall into the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ since the conceptualisations of space, time and matter are mental constructs and are not the result of direct perception.
Because truth, in the West, became the correctness of an intellectual judgment, and later, with the scientific method, something for which we must have physical evidence, the traditional proofs of God, such as the Ontological and Cosmological Proofs, are not taken seriously in the West as proof that God exists. The proofs, however, can be used to assist those who already have a sense that there is a Supreme Being and want to become firm in their understanding. I myself found the Cosmological Proof (the idea of a First Cause) a great help to me when I was younger. Perhaps the most beautiful thing I have read on the Ontological Proof comes from Simone Weil: “The Ontological Proof is mysterious because it does not address itself to intelligence, but to love.”
Perhaps the greatest Ontological Proof is our own experience of the inner self, which is the fount of bliss and warmth in our hearts. Ontology means being, and where else but in our own being can we experience its reality and depth? Also, the very existence of the saints and sages, who were and are filled with Sat, Chit and Anand, is a tremendous Ontological Proof, and one that must go hand in hand with our own inner experience. Only hints and indications can come from philosophy and reason, never proof in the modern sense.
A little more on Kant. In the early 19th Century the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher took Kant’s morally independent self (the phenomenonal self, cut off from noumenon) and asserted that it was able to experience its own transcendence through a “feeling of absolute dependence.” Schleiermacher thus shifted the defense of religion from reason (the Proofs etc) to direct experiece. According to Louis Dupre (in ‘Transcendent Selfhood’), “Scleiermacher’s feeling of dependence is more than a merely subjective experience which would fall under the objections of Kant’s critique. It is a total consciousness which is both objective and subjective. Indeed it is man’s most profound awareness of his own nature… The feeling of absolute dependence… reveals the transcendent ground of consciousness, the point in which consciousness is both itself and more than itself.”
So Schleiermacher, both theologically and philosophically, established the connection between the phenomenon and the noumenon, which Kant had denied. He made the shift from thought to feeling, from the head to the heart, and that is the shift that has to be made by each person who wants proof that God exists. As Simone Weil said, “The Ontological Proof is mysterious because it does not address itself to intelligence, but to love.” And love springs from the heart, not the head. (The Simone weil quote is taken from Iris Murdoch’s “Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals” which has a very comprehensive chapter on the Ontological Proof.)
There is a very nice quote from the science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, which you might enjoy: “Logic is an organised way of going wrong with confidence.” I really like that one!
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]