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God and Humanity

God and Humanity by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Tuesday 9 April 2013 16:32

A question which is purely technical, which cannot be decided at once by the generality of mankind, arises in the mind of a serious seeker after Truth, viz., his relation to society and to its institutions. Judged dispassionately, the issue of the necessity or otherwise of such a seeker to concern himself either with society or institutions seems to arise due to a thoroughly misconceived notion of the nature of the Truth – the existence of God. The need or the absence of need for relations of any kind, much less obligations or duties, towards society and institutions crops up only if God is an other-worldly being, as is the conclusion of the usual theological concepts in all religions, and his existence somehow falls outside the scope and operation of the world and society. There have been controversies and heated arguments over the extent of importance to be given either to meditation or service, for example, and several schools of thought have risen out of this dichotomy in position. This is, to put it prosaically, the controversy between the schools of Jnana and Karma – knowledge and action – a subject which has been discussed by many scholars ever since the Acharyas wrote commentaries on the cardinal scriptures on which Indian culture is based.

All this is just mentioning in different ways the same old problem of man’s relation to God and to the world or society. Unfortunately, people get emotionally warmed up in themselves whenever this question is raised and it is rare that one finds time to consider the subject in a scientific spirit by objective observation as a research man in any field of learning would actually be expected to do. The factor of emotion immediately rushes in whenever there is a talk of humanity, ‘other people’, ‘our brethren’ or ‘the sufferings of people’, and the general mind would even regard it as heretical to raise the question of the need or otherwise of a person to concern himself with this complexity, which is almost equated with the duty of man.

But, to come to the point again, our approach has naturally to be scientific and not emotional and, really, this is one of the precise conditions of conducting any successful research. Hence, the problem has to be tackled in an unbiased manner, placing oneself in the position of a mere witness and not a party in the game. Thus analysed, it comes about that the question of man’s relation to society and institutions has much to do with the nature of God’s existence and, unless this is first settled, what follows from it is a consequence also cannot be properly ascertained. Now, the existence of God, to define it impersonally, taking God by himself in his own independent status, has been accepted to be free from limitations of any kind, which means to say that he covers all states of being, manifested or unmanifested, and there can really be nothing unknown to him and hence outside the purview of his existence. This would imply that there can be no reality worth its name outside the Being of God, and the world and the individuals have to be summed under his Infinite Being, so that the world and humanity fall within the scope of the Existence of God.

Here, any doubt as to whether God exists or not should be considered wholly irrelevant, since our definition of God is that it is an appellation of the nature of Being in its absolute state, whose significance cannot be set aside even by modern physical science, what to speak of the more amenable sciences of biology and psychology. The theories of electromagnetism, quantum, wave-mechanics and relativity, with many things that follow in the wake of their discoveries, border on the acceptance of the Absolute as the only reality. The more metaphysical and spiritual approaches, both in the East and in the West, have held this premise as the very rock-foundation of the edifices of philosophy.

But there have been a multitude of misconstrued ideas which apparently seem to follow from this definition of God’s Being, viz., that mankind or humanity is God and, as a corollary of this position, that service of man is service of God. But it is forgotten that the concept of humanity is a concept of limitation, while it has already been agreed that God has to be free from limitations. God is neither an individual among many others nor a sum-total of individuals, which is precisely the character of humanity. Hence the identification of humanity with God is an unreasoned result of emotional enthusiasm in relation, which easily takes hold of the mass-man, by dinning into the ears of people slogans, shibboleths and stock sayings on the theme that humanity is God, its worship is the worship of God, and the like. One’s upbringing in family and social conditions from one’s very childhood in the circumstance of an untiring repetition of such formulae and mass-propaganda carried on in such religion, to whose steady effects no ordinary human find can be immune, is responsible for the insinuation of the concept of a socialised God into the minds of mankind. This doctrine, no doubt, carries one to some extent and even appears to succeed for many years through history, as any repeatedly propagated cult can. But propaganda is not and has never been a weapon of final victory. For, it is a uniformly adopted medium of any theory or ideal, real or unreal. The nature of reality, however, springs up spontaneously, slowly blooming like a flower, in the hearts of gifted men who begin to see an indivisible limitlessness extending through and beyond the obvious and natural limitations of humanity and the world.

This urge of reality, when it rises in one’s heart, becomes irresistible, for what is real can never be resisted. It is in the light of this urge, which certain Western philosophers have called the nisus for reality present in all Nature, which rare souls visualise the existence of a transcendence of spiritual immanence in the universe and recognise at once the impossibility of any identification of the finite with the Infinite. No man can be God, not even all men put together can be God – thus God transcends humanity – because humanity is the name of a particular species of individuals whose mathematical total is regarded as a unity only in the psychological sense of one individual thinking the other, but never being the other, but God is Supreme Being. Here is the unarticulated but ostensible difference between the nature of humanity and the nature of God. But this truth can never become patent in an uninitiated mind which is accustomed to think in terms of slogan and propaganda, cults and creeds, and thinks, also, only through the emotion.

Nevertheless, the mass-mind cannot at once be educated, because its main defects are dependence on sense-objects for the assessment of any value and a rather too heavy emphasis on the economic and biological existence of man than any deeper intrinsic worth or meaning in his existence as once having a non-dependent status of its own. It may be added here that much of the cult of humanity-worship and its deification is a cumulative outcome of the urges of hunger, wealth, self-glorification and power, which constitute the triple passion in an individual. When these urges become so dominant as the be regarded as necessities of life, they begin to rule mankind as its masters and what comes out of man begins to subordinate him to the level of a mere tool or puppet that is operated by strings. Psychology and psycho-analysis in modern times have done much research in this line and the nature of the consequences of these human urges, including the gregarious instinct, has been studied and analysed into its components. That man is under an illusion of the spell cast before him by the urges of wealth, sex and power is not something unknown to well-informed minds and the present-day crisis of humanity cannot but be traced to the working of a long rope that has been given by man to these urges that are trying to destroy him from the very roots. A careful study of advanced sociology, history and psychology will prove this fact to the hilt.

The spiritual seekers, mention of whom has been made above, are, however, an exception to the general mass thinking through the gregarious urge and they keep themselves alive to the urge for God, the Almighty, within themselves, as the nisus to perfection. When the urge for God rises within the soul of the seeker, the whole universe would appear to suck him into its bosom, from every atom and part of its extensive mass of creation, and in the initial stages this divine urge would seem to be the shooting of a luminous spark from within oneself and then gradually it increases its proportion into the surge of a rushing star, then the flash of a lightning, a flaming conflagration and, finally, an inundating flood of oceanic force and grandeur. A seeker caught up in any one of these divine manifestations would be able to see inwardly a super-mathematical unit of indivisible existence whose minutest manifestation exceeds the totality of mankind and the world, for the spirit is not magnitude, measurable in terms of the space-time extension. Ushered in by this current of the divine flood, the seeker can no more see meaning in the multitude of finites, and individualities and even the whole of humanity and the world, because all these which have so much significance to the mind that sees through the senses present themselves before the seeking soul as parts melting into the whole to which they organically belong and in which God becomes their very Soul, their very existence. To those souls that seek God in his essential Being, not merely as a transcendence but also as an immanence and absoluteness, the question of their relation to society, institutions and the world does not arise; it just does not exist. Truly, this is the ideal and the goal of anything, anywhere and no man on earth can hold an ideal superior or even equal to this grand consummation of one’s enthronement in Universal Being. And this does not call for any proof or demonstration of its indubitably.

II

But it may be held that the question of one’s relation to the world and humanity shall remain valid as long as knowledge comes through the senses and the world is visible before one’s eyes. This situation of the sensibility of the world includes the perception of others outside oneself, especially other human beings. One’s physical and psychological limitations manifesting themselves generally as hunger, thirst, heat, cold and fear of death and specially as the desire for wealth, sex and power, compel a person to depend upon other persons for the fulfilment or the mitigation of these instincts, and this results in the concept of humanity as a corporate body, an indispensable necessity and where utter selfishness of individuals or a group of individuals does not attempt to ruin other individuals even at its own peril, mankind exercises that understanding by which it recognises the need for a mutual co-operation among people, naturally involving some sacrifice of personal interest, and realises the impossibility of existing in the world without such co-operation. While the majesty of the Absolute in its superabundance and completeness referred to earlier in this section above is mainly the central content of the Upanishads, a divinely related humanitarian concept of mutual service is the preponderating doctrine of the Bhagavadgita. The sage of the Upanishad merges into the Absolute and enters the very fibre of all creation as its very soul and existence, and the Krishna of the Bhagavadgita, while he draws into his personality the dignity of the Universal God, at once becomes the paragon of humanity and exemplifies in his life the integrality of behaviour, conduct and action which sweeps over all mankind and unifies it as a social organism not only spiritually but also ethically and politically. We are here speaking of the position of man who is incapable of avoiding the sensing of a world outside him and Krishna’s teaching is to such a man. It is also with due consideration to this situation of man in the world that the ancient seers ordained upon him the daily performance of the five great sacrifices known as Pancha Mahayajnas, viz., service to the celestial beings, service to the seers of learning, service to the ancestors, service to man and service to the sub-human creatures of the world. This is an all-comprehending system of ritual to accentuate service of others which is obligatory on the part of man as long as he enjoys personally the bounties of Nature and the charitableness of other human beings. This is the position impossible of avoidance so long as the universal flood of God-urge has not yet been stirred within oneself and man perforce hangs on the world and the other individuals for his subsistence in a variety of forms.

With this intention of the fulfilment of duty as mutual service and support, the organisation of people into the spiritual, political, economic and labour groups was formed in ancient times, particularly in India, under the Sanskrit names of Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra. These groups were especially classified as mutually inclusive powers and never exclusive elements as they later on got interpreted by habit, prejudice and selfishness of the part of the ego of man. Everywhere, it should be easy to see that fulfilment and complete success of the core cannot be achieved without the mutual collaboration of spiritual power, political power, economic power and man-power. This classification of human groups for the purpose of the constructive activity of society as a whole can never be gainsaid and substituted, much less avoided, by any other means of achieving human welfare. Spiritual idealism bereft of the other three brother forces in the world is likely to get degenerated into arm-chair philosophy and impractical suggestions for the improvement of man’s condition in the process of evolution. Here we have to carefully distinguish between this class of spiritual ministry as a part of the social set-up and those rarer, master-minds who seek to merge and absorb all these four values of life in the universal divine flood about which we have made sufficient observation above. These are the higher classes of an almost super-human type who are a little different from the kind of spiritual teachers and guides who are referred to here as forming a group to minister to the spiritual needs of people. Where the political aspect is emphasised to the detriment of the other three aspects, it may land in tyranny, despotism and dictatorship. The history of the world has seen both these over-emphases through the churches of the religions and the rulers of states. A tendency to emphasise the economic aspects leads to materialism, atheism and hedonism, which is the marked trend of the present day world, especially in the second half of the 20th century. This aspect is, however, linked up with the emphasis of the labour group also, so that, today, we find the third and the fourth groups getting mixed up promiscuously and attempting to rule human destiny. It need not be reiterated that such illogical over-accentuation of any particular group is not only harmful to the growth and function of the other three essential aspects of the life of man but also defeats its own purpose in the end, due to its false isolation of the other necessary aspects of the life complete.

There is also another aspect of this question which has originated in the rising of several institutions in the world whose founders honestly felt a need to serve humanity. But the intention of the founders is with difficulty carried through by their alleged followers not only on account of inadequate spiritual inspiration and understanding but also the intrusion of practical interest of a personal nature that dilutes the original wish of the founder. This deficiency has another awful side and it is the fact that where the spiritual ideal is ignored, the material aspects of life automatically get bolstered up, even as strong winds begin to blow when the sun is covered with clouds. This is natural law and it does not spare anyone from the impact of its operation. Thus, religious churches and institutions may degenerate into centres of mere economic force which may exclusively attract the attention of their heads who may not be aware that they have totally missed the aim for which the organisations were originally formed. But the difficulty does not end here. It goes further head-long into the political field and the institutions may not only engage themselves in their own internal political administration but also take part in the outward politics of the State, far, far from the original ideal of the founders. Now, nothing can be a greater travesty than this, that the intention to do service gets side-tracked along the lanes of wealth and power.

III

Spiritual seekers, to clarify whose position is the intention of this article, thus get bifurcated into the purely God-inspired, whole-timed Sadhakas and the probationers on the path who aspire to seek perfection but cannot escape the shackles of the world and human society. There is little difficulty before the higher class of seekers, but the troubles of the second group are galore. The reason for this is that they are unable to strike a balance between God and the world, the technique of which the Bhagavadgita has endeavoured to explain in great detail. A harmony between the inner and the outer is difficult enough to maintain always because of the strength of sensory forces influencing the mind through out the waking life of the individual. A counter-force from within has to be generated to keep the balance of consciousness so that the outer forces of sense-perception may not overwhelm it and make it merely an instrument of sense-gratification and the physical urges. This art is called Yoga, the union of the inner and the outer of the higher and the lower. If God is indivisible existence in his pure absoluteness, unrelated to externality of any kind, he appears as harmony in the universe of manifestation. Hence we can safely conclude that wherever is this balance and harmony of forces, there is the presence of God in some proportion. The harmony has to be worked out in the body, mind and spirit, as well as in society and the world. Physical harmony is health. Mental harmony is sanity. Spiritual harmony is intuition. Social harmony is the peace of the world.

The consciousness of indivisibility originally receives the touch of the relative in self-consciousness which immediately implies the existence of space outside oneself, though, in this primordial state, the consciousness of space may look inseparable from self-consciousness. Almost simultaneously with this, there is the consciousness of time as a process in which the consciousness find itself. The fourth step is the consciousness of objects outside, which primarily may appear to be organically related to consciousness. Up to this stage, it may be said, consciousness has not been ‘entangled’, in the sense in which this situation is generally understood, But the difficulty commences with the further movement of consciousness when it assumes the mark of an individuality of its own and isolates itself from other such centres of consciousness as well as objects by regarding everyone of them as external. There are, however, certain implications of the consciousness of separated individuality, which are mainly the sense of heat and cold, hunger and thirst and the fear of death of oneself as a bodily entity. The metabolic process is set up into action and sleep then becomes a necessity to cause repair to the wear and tear of the body thereby, as well as due to continued object-consciousness in the ‘wakeful’ condition, one which is obviously unnatural to pure consciousness. The functions of breathing, thinking, feeling and understanding, with their concomitants, follow at once. Up to this stage, the individual may be said to have been externalised into the biological and the psychological make-up of personality. In the case of man, this is pure humanity.

But certain other processes which should be regarded as the abnormal functions of the individual’s psychology now commence with the rise of the desire for material possessions – wealth and property – the desire for sexual contact and the sense of self-respect which materialises into the desire of self-glorification and the exercise of power over those outside oneself, which all come step by step, in succession. Here, the entanglement of consciousness is complete, and this is what is known as Samsara, or the painful earthly life. It is unfortunate that the mind of man does not rest even with this self-degeneration and, by process of time, getting itself accustomed to this condition, as if it is its natural state, forms its philosophy of ‘it is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven’. The result of this is the formulation of erroneous philosophies such as materialism, scepticism, agnosticism, pluralism, formalism, such as we find in the addiction to mere ritual, as well as the several arts and sciences which man regards as his highest achievements today but which are intended only to rationalise and perpetuate the condition of entanglement of consciousness with objects of various kinds, into which is has already descended. Even the so-called impersonal sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and empirical psychology appear to be valid only so long as Nature is regarded as external consciousness. A philosophy based on this bifurcation of experience cannot therefore save consciousness from the pains it suffers in entanglement.

The technique of Yoga as a method of striking a balance between consciousness and objects is the first part of the individual’s return to the universal. The second part of this attempt is the still higher stage of meditation by which the realisation comes that consciousness and its objects are not merely in a state of organised balance but form one unitary being. Philosophers like Kant, in the West, with all their acuteness of analysis, came to the conclusion that Reality cannot be known by consciousness, because of the difficulty in getting rid of the usual intellectual prejudice that the object of consciousness has always to be outside itself. This led Kant to the position of what he calls the paralogisms of conflict in philosophical position in regard to the truth of the mutual relation among God, the world and the individual. This difficulty is overcome in the philosophy of the Bhagavadgita and the Upanishads, a careful study of which every student of Yoga should make, going to the essential spirit of these teachings. It is outside the scope of this essay to go into details of the great gospels given by these scriptures to humanity, which constitute an independent subject by itself. It is hoped that seekers on the spiritual path will fare well if they take note of all these unavoidable aspects of their spiritual life, and where sincerity is the keynote, God is sure to shower his blessings.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Search for Truth

The Search for Truth by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Sunday 8 April 2013 16:53

The world we live in is mostly utilitarian, for to it utility has been the test of truth. If something is workable and useful, it is also meaningful and therefore real. This is sometimes identified with the pragmatic viewpoint, a purely working hypothesis on the basis of sensibility akin to animal perception. The subhuman instinct seen in animals functions upon the logic of pure utility – whatever satisfies hunger and sex and guards the instinct for life is real. But in man there is an additional factor: ego – whatever satisfies it also is real. Satisfaction of these urges is finally a factor of utility, and they have to be real in order that their satisfactions and their counterparts be real.

But, what is meant by being real? Tentatively speaking, for a thing to be real it has to persist in time and space as judged by a centre of experiencing consciousness. Now, this drags the factor of time and space also into the issue of reality. But what is the reason behind this judgment that to be real is to persist in space and time? We have to conclude that this is the only way in which the experiencing consciousness can decide the nature of reality. This position seems to land us in a question that we shall be discussing shortly.

It was realised by some that pure utility cannot always be the test of truth. Perception of mirage water under the notion that it is real water may bring to the mind of the thirsty man a sense of comfort. But, though the comfort may be real, the cause of it is unreal. A lunch served in dream may appease the hungry man in dream. A false news of having won a victory or earned a lottery may bring a satisfaction whose cause is unreal. An untrue news of the death of the only son of a mother may even kill her, and while her heart-break is real its cause is unreal. Occurrences of this kind and the usual commonsense view of life have made people hold that truths have to correspond to facts. Beyond utility is correspondence.

Now, the idea that correspondence to fact is the test of truth implies that we are capable of knowing fact, and hence truth. But what is fact? Again, we stumble upon our criterion of persistence in space and time. This sounds almost like a vicious circle from which we cannot escape. Even a phantom can persist in space and time, such as mirage water. There seems to be, in the end, no criterion of knowing truth if we are to rely merely on the utility theory or the correspondence theory of truth.

Thinkers have held that the test of truth, ultimately, is coherence. The parts should organically fit themselves into the whole. Utility and correspondence do not satisfy this test because while they seem to satisfy one part of the knowledge-process, they conflict with the other parts. The process of knowing is a self-related, organic whole in which the parts are mutually consistent with one another. There should be no contradiction within its constitution and it should not be transcended by any other experience. Else, it would not be truth but its opposite. Facts should not only be satisfying to the senses, mind, intellect and feeling, thus serving the purpose of utility, but also correspond to existent facts. But the existence of the fact should not be merely tentative; it should also have been existent in the past and should continue in the future. The mirage water, for example, does not exist in the future, for when one approaches it, it recedes from one’s contact and then vanishes at the particular point of difference in the circumstances that caused its appearance. It should also be self-consistent and consistent with the experience of which it forms a part. We say that waking experience is real because we see the same things throughout our life and the objects of waking life have been seen to be workable to our personality as also stand uncontradicted in the past, present and future of our span of life. They satisfy ‘me, you and everyone else’, at the same time. They are coherent to the practical system of our judgment of truth, viz., they are not self-discrepant and are true for all persons, at all times and in every way.

This analysis would amount to saying that there can be no other standard of judgment of truth than what is provided in waking life. We usually forget that there is a subtle snag even in this relative truth of coherence (Vyavaharika Satta). That objects are mutually consistent with others’ experience of them in terms of persistence in space and time is the conclusion of a particular observer to whom everything else stands in the position of the observed. How does one feel sure that others exist and that space and time do exist except by reference to oneself, to one’s bodily conditions, set-up of the sensory organs, mental state and emotional reactions? Often we hear of objective facts, objective reference, and extramental realities. This is a great prejudice of what is known as the scientific way of thinking, which is slowly getting blasted by serious thinkers in the field of science itself, who have latterly come to realise that no scientific observation or conclusion can be regarded as final, so long as they are the outcome of approaches made by the consciousness which works in terms of the sensory and mental conditions of the scientist’s personality which acts like a prism through which the consciousness gets deflected, diversified, mutilated and given a highly artificial structure and form. This would mean that truth as such cannot be known either by science or by philosophy, so long as the methodology employed by these techniques cannot be extricated from the terms and conditions of the psycho-physical organism which limits consciousness and prevents it from knowing truth as it is. Observation, and experiment, logic and argumentation are thus futile, in the end, in one’s search for truth.

But who comes to this decision is a moot question. It is nothing but an inwardly felt self-certainly which is inseparable from consciousness, which does not stand in need of any external proof or verification and splashes forth hints of its absolute independence even when it passes through the contortions of operation through the body and mind. There is no objective way, in the modern scientific sense of the term, of knowing truth, for all ‘objectivity’ is the result of consciousness operating through a medium whose structure would definitely condition it. This would again imply that truth is realised in pure subjectivity of consciousness, which is divested of all externality: in fact truth is consciousness. This selfhood of consciousness is inclusive of the whole of truth. Truth is, thus, non-objective, because consciousness is non-objective.

There is a great difference between solipsism and this position that naturally devolves from an analysis of experience, because consciousness here is not the subject of an obj ect but the pure subject, independent of objects and, so, universal: it is Absolute. Here philosophy and science meet together and experience stands undivided by the difference of subject and predicate or the knower and known. This pure experience free from the limitations of body, mind and its objects is naturally transcendent to all of them though it is present in every one of them. This is the God of religion, the Absolute of philosophy, truth which has been the goal of the quest of all thinkers through the ages. This is the supreme object of the meditation by the Yogis. Self-realisation is thus co-extensive and co-eternal with Godrealisation.

The culture of mankind has to take note of this basic principle, and the sciences and the arts have to be consistent in their pursuits with this ultimate aim of existence. The crass externality of approach adopted by materialism is as far from truth as the poles standing apart. The sciences of man and the technological enterprises based on them are bound to take man far away from truth and drown him in sorrow if these are to constitute merely a means to outer comfort and aggrandisement. It also follows that hatred of every kind, prejudice and war are the noises made by the passing clouds of untruth which try to darken the sun of consciousness that is divinity. For the same reason the modern mechanistic psychology of education is faulty, because it is soulless. The mind carries the dead weight of earthly learning and knowledge of objects, while its life is slowly being sapped from within by its dissociation from truth. The way to the discovery of ultimate Truth rises gradually from unselfish understanding to mutual cooperation, from cooperation to harmony of existence, and from harmony to the indivisible Absolute.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

Gems on the Way to the Absolute

Gems on the Way to the Absolute by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Sunday 7 April 2013 18:46

108 sentences selected and compiled from The Realisation of the Absolute on the occasion of Swami Krishnananda’s 72nd birthday in 1994.

Philosophy is the dear delight of the reason; the great joy of the understanding.
True philosophy is the solace of the heart, the peace of the mind, the refuge of the human individual.
Philosophy examines the entire gamut of possible experiences and lifts human thought to the Divine Consciousness.
Only a citizen of the Universe can be an enjoyer of peace – the peace that passeth understanding.
The Upanishads have always been acknowledged and acclaimed as veritable mines of Transcendental Wisdom.
It is a mistake to be interested in the different forms of perception. Nothing is worth considering except the realisation of Brahman.
This intellect is a very inadequate means of ascertaining Truth. But however much imperfect, it is the only human faculty of knowledge nearest to Reality.
To express what is complete is not within the capacity of the knowing process. All knowing is a process, and all process is imperfection.
Intellect is never free from subject-object relationship – and every such relation falls short of Reality.
Reason should always be aided by tolerance, and should not forget its own limitations.
The only condition, however, is that the aspiring intellect should be pure and unattached.
Even death occurs through wrong belief, and even life is saved through mere belief.
Perfection on Truth cannot be two, and there cannot be two Absolutes.
Existence is really the existence of Consciousness.
Nothing that is related to another is real. Relation always means interdependence and not Self-Existence.
Even the emperorship of the entire Universe cannot give perpetual satisfaction as long as it falls short of the Infinite.
The Upanishads are the ripe fruits of fine flowers blossomed out in the light of the Wisdom-Sun.
The quickness of the process of Attainment depends upon the intensity of the power of Meditation – both in its negative and assertive aspects.
The Bliss of unlimited Consciousness is the Zenith of Existence, and every thing other than this is condemned as untrue.
The delight of the Self is the delight of Being. It is the Bliss of Consciousness-Absolute.
Change is the quality of untruth and the Upanishads assert that Reality is self-satisfied, self-existent, non-dual, tranquil and utterly Perfect.
The Truth “Knowing which every thing becomes known” is the subject of enquiry and the object of quest in the Upanishads.
Blessed is he, and he has truly lived a purposed life, who attains to the height of undying joy in this very life; and he is a great loser and has lived his life in vain, who has failed to realise the Truth here. (Kena Up. 2-5)
All is well with him, whose heart is turned towards acting in accordance with the deathless law of Infinite Life. No disease, physical or mental, can ever assault him.
The welfare of society rests in its spirituality.
The ills caused by wrong methods of education, the social and political strife, the individual evils and the world-degeneration are all effected by the one terrible fact, that humanity turned against the law of the Spiritual Reality.
The Upanishads are our guidelights in the Supreme Pursuit. Let us understand and follow them with sincerity, faith, calmness, surety and persistence.
Change is the law of life; nothing is without changing itself.
Tranquility can well be said to be non-existent in the history of the space-time world.
Cognition is impossible without a pre-existence link between the subject and the object.
All contacts presuppose an immovable ground which supports all movements.
That objects exist also cannot be proved unless there are minds to cognise and know them. Each is explained only by the other and not by itself.
The test of Reality is non-dependence, completeness and imperishability.
One Reality appears as the knower as well as the known.
The Substance by itself does not change; only the mode of perception changes.
In order to have the experience of Reality we have to discard the forms as mere appearances.
To assert diversity is to deny Absoluteness.
To say that we are not yet the Reality, and we have yet to ‘become’ It, may be true with partiality to empirical Consciousness, but it is not the Highest Truth.
Realisation is not an actual ‘becoming’, but an unfolding of Consciousness, an Experience of Truth – Truth that already is, Truth that is eternal.
The Self is not really bound by space and time.
The Absolute of the Upanishads is the only Reality and all forms must, therefore, be nonexistent from the point of view of Its exact nature.
A faithfulness to diversity must necessarily end in a failure in the practical walk of life.
Truth is the undivided Absolute. Truth cannot be twofold.
The Absolute and the relative are not two different entities standing like father and son.
If Brahman has expressed Itself as the world, then the world cannot exist outside Brahman.
Even space is Brahman.
If we are not Brahman at present, we can never be That at any time in future. A Not-Brahman cannot be turned into Brahman.
Absolute-Existence does not admit of differentiation of any kind.
Nothing can be said about the Absolute, except that It ‘Is’.
Brahman which is the cause, and the world which is the effect are basically identical, and hence change and causation lose their meaning.
Absolutism satisfactorily solves all the problems of life.
Everyone is inside the prison of his own experience and knows nothing outside his consciousness.
A God, who changes Himself, is not a permanent Being.
The richness of the part is not equal to the magnificence of the Whole.
The world ‘All’ does not refer to the reality of the plurality of things.
Duality cannot survive and individuality cannot exist in the Truth of Brahman.
The infinite Bhuma alone hails Supreme. It is established in Its own Greatness. It is not dependent on anything else, for anything else is not.
All that appears to exist need not really exist as such.
Reaching the Real is not an action.
We seem to be doing many things, though actually we do nothing.
A perishable means cannot lead to an eternal End.
The world exists, because the mind functions on a dualistic basis. There is sound, because there is the ear and there is colour, because there is the eye. The human individual exists as such, because it thinks.
No form is self-existent.
The dance of ideas is the world of experience.
Though no thing exists, it is not true, that nothing exists – for Consciousness exists.
There is no duality. All modification is illusory.
The form of the world of plurality is an illusion, though the ultimate Essence of the world is real.
Truth persists even in the extreme of untruth. Untruth is a lesser truth and evil is a lesser degree of goodness.
The individual is the footprint of the Absolute.
The individual is a copy or miniature of the Cosmic.
Truth is inclusive of everything in the world.
Man begins from the physical body and ends in the imperishable Soul.
Life is a dramatic struggle for Self-Realisation, and Truth-Experience.
The state of perfection is neither an indivisibility nor a multiplicity, – but an indivisible Multiplicity.
The world is not an illusion, but a form of the Absolute.
Even materialism is a step in the path to Perfection.
Death is the beginning of a better life. Evil is the starting point of a state leading to good.
Every thing is only a part of the Infinite Completeness.
We cannot know any thing except in terms of what we are.
The knowledge of everything through the knowledge of One Thing implies that everything is made up of that One Thing.
Thought is objectified consciousness. The greater the objectification, the denser is the ignorance and the acuter are the pains suffered.
The aspiration of every living being is to find rest in the blissful possession of Eternal Life and nothing short of it.
The march of the soul is from the false to the true, from the apparent to the real, from the shadow to the light, from the perishable to the ever-enduring.
There is nothing greater than or equal to the knowledge of the Aatman : “Aatmalaabhaat Na Param Vidyate”.
When we turn our face away from this One Reality, we open the door to Self-imprisonment.
The love of life is based on the love of the Self.
The fervour of a Nachiketas or Dhruva, of a Prahlaada or Meera is expected in every spiritual aspirant.
Even Devarshi Narada’s knowledge is regarded by Sanatkumara as “mere names, mere words”.
Even death is not a bar in the process of the Realisation of Truth. Death is a reshuffling of Consciousness to adjust and adopt itself to a different order of life.
To know Him is to be saved. Not to know Him is death.
The ordinary man of the world has his mind and senses turned extrovert.
Some blessed one turns his gaze inward and beholds the glorious light of the Self.
The Self is imperishable.
Consciousness gets diffused through the distractive intellect and creates the perception of multiplicity.
Forms float in Truth, even as bubbles in the ocean. They cannot exist apart from the Ocean of Truth.
The deceived Soul fears death of its body, death of what it considers as dear. It loves objects, which do not promise real satisfaction.
The dream-objects have to vanish if waking experience is to be had.
Every true civilisation, if it is not meant to deceive itself, has to gird up its loins for Self-Realisation.
The value of a person is nothing if he does not aspire for the realisation of the Eternal Good, the Good not merely of this or that class of men, but of the entire Universe.
Perfection is Absolute-Experience, ‘Brahma-Anubhava’, the Consciousness of Reality.
Omnipresence, Omniscience and Omnipotence are said to be the characteristics of God.
Brahman is That, which is permanent in things that change.
The whole Universe is a spiritual Unity and is One with the essential Brahman.
The knowledge of the Self is the knowledge of Brahman.
When Brahman is known, all is known.
There is no seer but That, no hearer but That, no thinker but That, no knower but That.
According to the Rig Veda, even “immortality and death are It’s shadows”. What ever truly exists is the Real.
Brahman is Infinite, the Universe is Infinite; from the Infinite proceeds the Infinite, and after deducting the Infinite from the Infinite, what remains is but the Infinite.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

An Analysis of Experience

An Analysis of Experience by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Sunday 7 April 2013 18:41

In our attempt to know Truth, we cannot start with any fixed point in the universe, for every point, when carefully analysed, is found to refer to something beyond itself, until it carries the consciousness to infinity. Every so-called fixed entity is really a mirror in which the entire universe is reflected. To know any point in the universe perfectly would be to know the universe as a whole. Every point is a miniature universe, and so it is impossible for us to start with any fixed point or entity in our attempt to know Truth. The universe is not a thing, not a substance; it is not made up of several three-dimensional points or objects. Every object is a vortex of forces whirling in a particular direction and mode. These modes, however, cease to be such when they become the essential content of the Absolute Consciousness. The universe, therefore, is a form of Consciousness, in which is to be found the atmosphere or the environment which befits the potentialities of the experiencing stresses in it. There is, thus, an experience of objective form, and also an experience of subjective reactions; of the universe based on the Infinite Consciousness, and of the one based on the individual consciousness. The stuff of the universe is the Absolute.

The universe is a bundle of conditions, states or expressions of the Absolute. At any given moment or stage, the universe is one relative interconnected condition, a cosmic situation, and any part of it represents the whole background. The universe in which we live is not physical; it is Consciousness in disharmony and disturbance, trying to adjust and adapt itself, through its universally distributed parts, to regain its equilibrium. Physicality and psychicality are the stages of its expression and development, accidental to its essential being, only to be swept away by degrees in the progression of its evolutionary scheme tending to perfection. The universe is made, ultimately, not of particles, molecules, atoms, electrical charges, protoplasm or cells, but of a process of Consciousness which, when it extends itself into objectivity, goes by the name of space, time, movement, substance, energy, wave, particle, and the like. The universe is a single, continuous, connected, logical, systematic, purposive process with every part of it always mirroring the Absolute, to which it owes allegiance; a process of infinite varieties of qualitative and quantitative stresses, where each stress and aspect and part is pause and effect at the same time, where each determines and is the other, a magnificently worked-out plan of wholeness in every speck and quarter and cranny, a process in which every part is an expression of the whole, a unique and unitary finished act of completeness, the supreme example of matchless performance, and wondrous art, a process of the Self-realisation of the Absolute.

In this universe, nothing is by or in itself. Everything is everything else also, and everything is, because of the Whole which is. The individual and its environment are the same; one is not external to the other. No event is cut off from the others. Every pin-drop, whisper, thought or feeling gets recorded in all existence, setting it in vibration and affecting its equilibrium with an intensity which is in proportion to that of the cause thereof. The universe registers all events in an instant, and even a private act is at once judged in the court of the Universal Whole. Every part reflects the position of the Whole, and we can reach the Whole through a part, provided we know the innermost essence of the part. From the present, the past and the future can be known, for the present is the meeting point of the past and the future, and has in it the effects of the past and the potentialities of the future. The universe consists not of parts but of phases. There are no sharp divisions in it, and all experiences form a continuous process. Existence is an equilibrium, which persists and succeeds in maintaining itself. The cause of any event is not in any other thing or event, but in the Whole. Such is the grandeur of the universe, such the majesty of the Absolute.

The Transmutation of the Relative

The world of sense, therefore, has now been found to be a name given to confounded consciousness. It is a condition of experience. It can be compared to a shoreless, bottomless and surfaceless ocean of interrelated forces reacting upon one another, in order to enter into a transcendent and transfigured experience in which the lower is included and completely transformed and ennobled. Erroneous experience consists in the non-recognition of the fact that experience is always a whole, and never subject to partition of any kind within its indivisible constitution. The moment experience, which is in reality unbounded, appears to be discrete and, like a house divided against itself, begins to manifest phases which are self-contradictory, and objectifies itself into the distinction of subject and object, it becomes the mother of error or mistake. Error is anything that directly or indirectly engages the consciousness in what is other than itself. The degree or intensity of error depends upon the degree or intensity in which the consciousness is forced to engage itself in what is not itself. Consciousness can be said to be in a diseased condition when it is contemplating objects, i.e., when it gets fixed on what is not itself. All forms of error in this universe are derivable, by the process of conditioning, from this ultimate error which consists in the aberration of consciousness from itself, in the concentration of consciousness on what is not itself.

The internal processes of objectified consciousness may be grouped under what are called desires, and the external processes of this very consciousness may come under what are called actions. Desires and actions, which are the subtle and the gross manifestations of the forces of objectified consciousness, constitute the world of relative experience. An action which agitates the nervous system, and consequently excites the senses and gives them the strength to befool the consciousness into the false belief that external forms of perception are real and are instrumental to inner conscious satisfaction, is, in the true sense, the only wrong action. No doubt, all actions are propelled by internal desires, and so, ultimately, we should say that wrong actions are really wrong desires. A mere physical action is no action. It is mental action that is real action. Actions like lusting for sex, bibbing intoxicants, drinking, smoking, violence, stealing, robbing, etc., are the external modes of the internal error of consciousness that experience is individualised in nature, and that, the satisfaction of its urges being the aim of its life, all the objects of the universe are auxiliaries to the fulfilment of these urges. This fulfilment takes place through an interaction of forces extending beyond all individualities, and representing, in their essential characteristics, an index of the face of the Absolute. And this fact of the relative character of the individual and the objects of its desires is explained by the universal organic reactions produced among the constituent parts of the universe. The ultimate desire of every individual is experience of the Universal Whole, which is identical with the Universal Self. By error, which is the centring of consciousness in individuality, one unwisely attempts to comprehend this universal experience in individual consciousness and satisfaction. Every organic reaction produced among individuals is the proof of the incompleteness and the complementary nature of the parts. Nothing short of the Universal Whole, identified with Self-Consciousness, is the real aim of these organic; reactions manifested among individual natures.

This metaphysics of experience discloses the fact that there is no error in Experience-Whole. There is no evil, ugliness, nothing wrong in it. Wrong is in him who sees wrong. Ugliness is perceived by the ugly consciousness. Evil sees he who is evil. Error is a perception by the erroneous consciousness. Pieces of bent sticks may look awkward and crooked and not beautiful to perception; but if these bent sticks can be arranged to form the beautiful pattern of a perfect circle, their ugliness will vanish, and they will build this beautiful whole. In Experience-Whole, which is perfected consciousness, all error is transmuted and abolished. All imperfections, which are imperfections only for the individuals, are overcome and reduced to elements of perfection in the Absolute. Only when the consciousness is envisaged as a fragment separated from other forms of experience, it appears to be ugly, erroneous, immoral. Even beautiful forms, attractive features, virtuous deeds, goodness, etc., meet the same fate as error, etc., in the constitution of the Whole. For, even beauty, etc., are complementary phases of the separated parts of the Whole. There is no beauty, even as there is no ugliness in this universe. There is nothing good, even as there is nothing bad; nothing virtuous, even as there is nothing evil, in this magnificent Whole of the Absolute. Beauty is the name given to that feature of a perceptible objective form which fits into and evokes the complementary and correlated consciousness of the consciousness which perceives beauty. “Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing”, says George Santayana. In other words, beauty is “pleasure objectified”. The craving which is felt in the individual consciousness on account of the deep sense of imperfection inherent in it, and which corresponds to the mode and the degree of this imperfection, causes the consciousness to recognise beauty in forms and to get attracted towards the same, because it is this form that is necessary to rouse the counter-correlate of this consciousness-mode which perceives this beauty through this form of craving; and the degree of beauty beheld in objects is dependent on the degree in which it approximates to the ideal beauty, viz., the form of the object which is necessary to rouse the counter-correlate consciousness of the imperfect consciousness which perceives beauty.

Beauty is the vision of the Absolute through the senses and the understanding. It is symmetry, rhythm, harmony, equilibrium, unity, that is the main material of beauty. Whenever these properties are manifested in consciousness through (1) visual or auditory perception of objects, (2) intellectual appreciation of precision, exactness and logical arrangement, poetic presentation of knowledge and inspiration, etc., or (3) pure spiritual experience, there is said to be the experience of beauty. In these three stages of experience, harmony and perfection are expressed in varying degrees. The second is more enduring and inclusive than the first, and the third more than the second. The perception of harmony is the neutralisation of lack and onesidedness, the fulfilment of personality, the completion of being, and hence a manifestation of the Absolute, in some degree, in one’s consciousness.

Beauty is a property neither of the subject alone, nor the object alone, but of a special relation existing between the subject and the object. It is a complex situation in which consciousness finds itself as a result of a reaction between two complementary conditions. The aesthetic experience is a unique whole, and cannot be attributed to any part or parts of the subject or the object of this experience. Beauty is the soul of art, and art is the representation of beauty, visible, audible or intelligential. Architecture and sculpture, painting and drawing, music and literature, represent, in an ascending order, the greatest of the means of the manifestation of ‘objective’ beauty, apart from the beauty of a subjective-objective character perceived in objects which act as instruments in bringing about the private satisfaction of the unconscious emotional and instinctive urges in individuals. Architecture and sculpture should be considered to be the lowest of arts, for these are most encumbered with matter. Music and literature express the most rarefied of the beauties of the human world, for these, being least affected by matter, are the media of the greatest objectification of the Absolute in the realm of sense and understanding. Music is objectified through the most ethereal of media, and literature manifests the beauty of knowledge and inspiration which transcend mere sense-perception. The highest beauty open to man is the beauty of right thinking, pure feeling, virtue and philosophical knowledge.

Beauty appears to be objective, because men, in spite of the differences present in their psychological constitutions, have many psychological properties which are commonly shared by them all; and beauty appears to be subjective, because men, in spite of their having several common psychological properties, differ from one another in certain individual modes of their psychological constitutions. We should say, therefore, that there is, thus, an objective beauty, and, also, a subjective beauty. Though all men may agree with one another in regard to the perception of objective beauty, there will be difference in their perceptions of subjective beauty.

Even beauty which is commonly perceived by all men is the result of the interaction of the modes of the incompleteness of human experience and their corresponding counterparts, which brings about an experience of equilibrium, filledness, an all-possessing feeling and repose, which are the characteristics of the non-individual being, the Absolute. Hence, on ultimate analysis, beauty is a reflection of the system of the Absolute, in some degree. The greater the degree in which the Absolute thus manifests itself, the greater is the beauty perceived. This manifestation is dependent on the degree in which the complement of the percipient neutralises the sense of lack in the percipient, or on the degree in which the complement is a complement of the percipient. The more a complement approximates to its highest form in relation to the percipient, the greater is the degree in which it is able to neutralise the want of the percipient. The Supreme Beauty is the Absolute, and all other beauties are its partial appearances. Sensuous beauty is the lowest form of beauty; higher than this is the beauty of character, goodness, virtue and right understanding.

Ugliness is explained by the process which is the reverse of that of the perception of beauty.

Virtue is that quality of an act, mental or physical, which directly or indirectly leads the individual consciousness to the experience of the Universal Whole. Primary virtues are those which are directly concerned with the conscious movement of the individual to the Absolute. Secondary virtues are those which are only indirectly responsible. Every act which tends to raise the individual consciousness above and beyond itself, through the processes of self-abnegation, self-sacrifice and self-expansion, is virtuous or righteous. Every act which withdraws consciousness from the senses, pacifies the nervous system and tranquillises the mind is virtuous, because it brings the consciousness back to itself from its erroneous aberration in the delusive fields of belief in the reality of objective experience. In short, every process of the returning of consciousness from externality to rest in itself is a form of virtue or righteousness. The degree or the intensity of the virtue depends upon the degree or the intensity in which it approximates to the ideal virtue or good, which is the complete unification of all individual processes of the universe in one instantaneous Conscious Experience.

The nature of evil or vice is explained by what is other than or is opposite to this process of virtue, explained here.

The Transmutation of the Relative

Ugliness is explained by the process which is the reverse of that of the perception of beauty.

The nature of evil or vice is explained by what is other than or is opposite to this process of virtue, explained here.

The Individual Nature

Thus, all individual experience is a form of error in some degree, though all error becomes an element of perfection in the Absolute. The aim of the life of the individual is to overcome the urge for organic reactions in relation to external perceptible objects and to transcend itself in the all-comprehensive Absolute, which is the essential reality of all individuals. These reactions among individual natures are either unconscious or conscious. The unconscious urges are termed instincts and the conscious ones are those which constitute the rational processes in the individuals. Beyond these reactions of a twofold nature, there is the supreme integrating principle, viz., intuition and direct realisation of the highest essence of experience.

These instinctive urges are powerful, and, being ingrained in the very constitution of the individual, refuse to be easily subdued. The most powerful of these involuntary unconscious urges are those of self-preservation and self-reproduction. The instinct of self-preservation is sometimes wrongly called ‘food-seeking’ instinct. Food is not the end that is sought by the individual; food is only a means to the fulfilment of the will-to-live or the love of life which is inherent in everyone, and which is the end. One does not desire to eat food as an end in itself; the purpose of food and drink is living as an individual personality, possessed of a body. This urge is not withinthe control of the rational intellect, and overcomes the other urges by its intensity of expression. It manifests itself in various forms, and has several ramifications, primarily connected with, as well as secondarily related to it. It tethers the individual to bodily life and thwarts all ordinary attempts at turning a deaf ear to it. This instinct, this craving for life, this love of individual personality can be overcome only in a higher understanding and feeling relating to a wider experience transcending gross physicality and distorted psychic personality. But any unwise meddling with this urge, without properly understanding its deeper meaning, may make it run riot and ruin the individual attempting to control it. Intimately connected with the self-preservative urge is the self-reproductive urge, the nature of which has to be analysed before any method of overcoming instincts may be discovered.

The self-reproductive instinct is misnamed ‘sex-instinct’. This urge has, really, little to do with the sexual personality, as such; the sexual personality is only a means to the propagation of the species, and it is this urge for the production of a new individual of the species that makes use of sex as a cat’s paw. What becomes the object of craving is not sex, but the pleasure caused by the release of the tension brought about by the urge for being instrumental in bringing forth a new individual. Homosexual intercourse and fixation on objects which do not help actual reproductionare only cases of perversion or regression of this original urge, due either to a defect in the formation of the sex glands, or to frustration and non-fulfilment. The aim of the urge for reproduction is not to bring pleasure to the individual; its purpose is the continuation of the species.

Those characteristics of the sexual personality which become the source of attraction for the opposite sex are merely the external indications of the development of the gonad hormones which, through these indications, make known their maturity and readiness for the act of the production of a new individual. This attraction is not concerned with the pleasure of anyone, but is merely the process of the externalisation of cellular and nervous vibration seeking intercourse with the counterpart of the constitution of the attracted individual. It is not the external feature or the form of the opposite sex that is the source of attraction, but it is the meaning which is read in it by the individual that gives value to it and forces the individual to conform itself to that value. It is the suggestiveness and the expressiveness of the form that evokes the stimulation and vibration of the entire constitution in its counterpart. The more does something mean to one, the more is the value that one attaches to it, and the more is one concerned with it. The reading of meaning in the opposite sex is not a rational act of the individual, but it is the ‘general’ urge of the species that materialises itself in a specific individual as an involuntary instinct for physical action.

All stimuli set the organism in vibration, and this disturbs its equilibrium. In this process there is release of nervous energy, affecting not merely the body but, to a great extent, even the mind. The pleasure that is experienced at the time of being stimulated by an ‘intended’ external agency is really the warmth and affection felt in yielding to an inner command of the physical nature, when motor reactions take place in the organism, on account of the magnetic properties called forth in it. What ravishes the personality and makes it leap up in ecstasy at the time of a desirable objective reaction in the physical world is the total disintegration of the parts of this organism and the peace that follows as a consequence of the cessation of this disturbance, on the fulfilment of the purpose of this reaction. All instinctive pleasure is ultimately the recognition of harmony and equilibrium and joy in consciousness on account of the banishing of disturbance in it by the fulfilment of the meaning of the instinct through the possession and utilisation of the object which plays the role of an agent in loosening and removing the nervous and psychic tension created by the expression of the instinct.

Even the urge for self-reproduction may be explained in terms of the urge for self-preservation. It is really the will-to-live of the individual of the species to be manifested in the physical universe that asserts in what is termed the self-reproductive urge. The parent becomes the medium of the self-manifestation of a new individual, which is the intention of the physical nature. The lower nature of any ‘specific’ individual has no control over this instinct, because it is the intention of the ‘general’ nature or the species which exceeds the natural powers of the former. The will-to-reproduce is only the will-to-live of the would-be member of this physical universe. The fulfilment of this will-to-live is not really the good or the delight of any individual, but is only anexecution of the orders of the lower diversified nature, the fulfilment of the purpose of the species as a whole, which is wider than any individual in comprehensiveness. The will of the race or the species supersedes all individual wills, and subjects these latter to its own purposive rule. Sexual love or beauty has thus a reference to a need extending beyond the individual and so it is stronger than any other form of love known on earth. If anyone, however, is to know that the meaning of the self-reproductive urge is not the pleasure or the good of oneself, but is only a service done to a more powerful nature which makes use of everyone as its drudge, no one would indulge in the fulfilment of this urge. Hence nature covers the consciousness of the individual and steeps it in the delusion that the purpose of the urge is the pleasure of the individual, by preventing the discriminative understanding from functioning in it. This illusion is called the ‘instinct for sex’, and this is the pleasure derived thereby!

These self-expressing energies in individuals have a common source, an original, form, and their sum is constant at all times; it never decreases or increases; only it sometimes gets distributed in unequal proportions due to disturbance of equilibrium in consciousness. This sum-total of objectified energy is the matrix of all irrational and rational urges. These externalising urges or tendencies to organic reactions are not cut off even by the death of the physical body, for they are rooted in the very principle of the psychic individuality. They cease to exist only when they are absorbed into the Universal Consciousness, by the process of meditation on the essential Selfhood of all individuals in it.

There are certain minor instincts which are less powerful than those of self-preservation and self-reproduction, but which, nevertheless, exert a great influence on the personality and subject it to involuntary actions. The self-assertive instinct is one among these. This instinct is meant either to compensate for one’s sense of inferiority, or to preserve one’s thwarted power, importance and distinction (many times merely imagined), or to expand one’s ego by adding to it qualifications from outside (though this addition is purely artificial). It is the inherent tendency to preserve the complex of one’s psycho-physical organism. The gregarious instinct is another, which manifests itself in love of company of the group to which one ‘belongs’. This is the instinct of identification of the group with one’s self. Metaphysically, this appears to be an unconscious expression of one’s love for one’s larger social self or organism which comprises the individuals within it. But this love ceases to be a virtue when one is unconscious of the existence of such a larger self, and is merely goaded to love society independently of one’s understanding and will. The protective or the parental instinct expresses itself in the biological attraction of the physical organism (influencing the mind, of course) to its own ‘other self’. This attraction ceases when its purpose, viz., protection of the offspring, is fulfilled. Parental love is one of the manifestations of the biological nature of the individual, affiliated to the purpose of the propagation of the individuals of the species.

All urges, it is suggested, are ultimately a symptom of spirit calling spirit, under the cloak of outward bondage to forms, objects, notions and actions.

The desire to understand, or to know, is a rational urge. There are various forms of this urge, working through different channels, but aiming at the fulfilment of the desire to know. Sometimes, it is merely curiosity, and at other times, it is a necessity felt on account of problems that have arisen in life, that rouses in the individual the desire to know. At first, the knowledge that is desired is only a means to vaster and higher acquisitions, and later on, it becomes an end in itself. Except the desire for higher knowledge which is self-existent, and the instinct for self-preservation (the latter when not carried beyond the limit of real necessity), all these urges are outlets for the externalisation of energy towards objects other than what is indispensable to the individual for its self-evolution. Desire for knowledge, however, should be called a supernatural urge, though it becomes really supernatural only in the end, and involves some amount of effort and spending of energy in the beginning stages. The highest self-existent knowledge is not really an urge, but is the end of lower knowledge, and only this latter can be included among urges.

One special feature to be noted, however, in the functioning of the urge for knowledge is that it can be valid only on a dualistic basis, and so it involves, to some extent, a directing of energy to something which is external to consciousness. On account of this reason, it can be included among the several urges in the individual, though the higher knowledge, which is not a means to any other end, but is an end in itself, cannot be called an individual urge, for this latter is not directed to anything external, but is itself self-existence. What is meant by the rational urge is, therefore, not the self-existent independent absolute knowledge, but the aspiration to know, the desire to understand, the tendency to outgrow limited knowledge.

Except the longing for knowledge, all urges or instincts are to be subdued and transformed into the integrating energy of the higher consciousness, for these natural urges of the physical nature are inconsistent with the higher aspiration for the unity of consciousness in the Universal Being. The art of overcoming these instincts which are antagonistic to spiritual seeking consists, ultimately, in certain processes which are related to the essential nature of Consciousness itself. The end being the realisation of supreme oneness, the means to it has to bear an intimate relation to it.

Self-Transcendence

The transmutation of the individual constitution is necessary for the experience of the Absolute, and this can be achieved by recognising the true nature of the relation existing between the individual and the Absolute, as detailed in the foregoing pages. All forms of the externalisation of energy, which are called urges, instincts, etc., are ultimately movements of consciousness in the direction of the not-self. There can be no individual urge when consciousness ceases to function in this way. The way of self-control, therefore, is that of the recession of the modes of the objectified consciousness to their wider and deeper source, which functionally converge and merge in the Absolute. Only a conscious endeavour on the part of the individual to outgrow itself, to rise above particularity, can bring about this great achievement and realisation. For this, clear understanding, dispassionate feeling, longing for freedom, and perseverance are necessary.

Study, reflection and meditation are the processes of the method of self-transcendence. A careful study and analysis of the nature of experience, under the guidance of an able spiritual teacher, is indispensable for meditation on the spiritual Reality. The defects involved in relative experience, and the fact of its being finally centred in and reducible to the reality of the Absolute, are to be discovered, in order that attachment to external forms of experience may be withdrawn, and all energy be focussed on the supreme Self-consciousness. The nature of instinctive reactions and blind urges have to be clearly understood before any attempt to control them may be made. No practice can be of any lasting value, if it is not preceded by a correct knowledge of the inner anatomy and constitution of the meaning and method of that practice. One must act only after knowing how to act, why to act and what the act really is. Action must be based on a knowledge thereof. This knowledge, on which all spiritual practices are based, is the forerunner of dispassion for all externalisation towards things. True renunciation is not the abandonment of any ‘thing’, but the relinquishment of the thingness in things, the objectness in objects, the externality in experience, the projectedness in consciousness. This renunciation is the condition of the supreme fulfilment in the Absolute. There can be no hope of this ultimate realisation without the total surrender of personality and all its concomitants to this one goal. The moment this surrender is done, attachments cease, the mind becomes calm, the senses are abstracted from forms, passions subside, consciousness gets concentrated, joy ensues, and an immense strength is felt within. All these are the results of an attunement of the individual to Reality, the coalescence of all forces with it, the dissolution in it of all distinction and objectivity. By this act the individual draws sustenance from and becomes the Universal Centre. The actual experience is possible through intense meditation on it.

Every act of one’s life should become an expression of conscious contemplation on the Absolute. Unless all acts are based on this consciousness, there cannot be any ultimate value in these acts. The Absolute is the life-principle of all things, acts and thoughts, and so, without it, everything becomes lifeless and devoid of meaning. Spirituality is a state of consciousness; it is not merely certain forms of action. When consciousness is properly trained to exist in this harmony, all acts become universal processes, and cease to be individual efforts directed towards a phenomenal end. It is the duty of everyone in all one’s conscious states to attempt to unity oneself with the Absolute, and perform one’s duties with the consciousness of this unity. Such an individual is a sage, the supremely blessed one. The very presence of this hallowed being exerts a magnetic spiritual influence on the entire environment. “This universe is his; and, indeed, he is the universe,” says the Upanishad. This is the glorious consummation of life.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Coming and Going of All Things

The Coming and Going of All Things by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Friday, 5 April 2013 15:56

“In the beginning, there was knowledge, but there was no knowledge of another. Then came the knowledge of another, but not the knowledge of the many. Thereafter came the knowledge of the many, but not judgment of the one by the other. Then, finally, came judgment and evaluation of one by the other, and here we are, what we are.” Thus goes an ancient Master’s saying.

These gradations of experience may be regarded as the process of what we call creation. In these few sentences, creation is explained. Though it is stated so simply in a few lines, the implications of these processes are so variegated and involved that everything conceivable can be said to be included in every phase of it, in this gradational coming down of that which is, which was, and shall be, into what is seen now at the present moment.

The freedom of man, the salvation of the soul, is supposed to be a traversing of the very same path through which God may be said to have descended into the form of man, and all that the world consists of. The return of man to God is the movement in a reverse order, from the direction that creation took when the One deigned to appear as this vast involvement.

The word ‘Samsara’ is significant suggesting entanglement and an immense difficulty felt in disentangling oneself from the involvement. It is not an ordinary type of impasse that we are finding ourselves in these days. It is almost an unthinkable and ununderstandable abyss into which we have come down; and, here, in this condition of involvement in the way mentioned, there is not merely a physical or social involvement merely, but there is the worst of things that has happened, the involvement of what we consider ourselves to be in our essentiality, namely, our own consciousness, our own understanding, our intelligence, and the product of our educational career. In essence, anything that is worthwhile in us, meaningful and significant in our lives, is so involved.

There is a submerging of human individuality into this oceanic abyss of involvement and there takes place a tentative awakening of itself by coming to the surface of this ocean occasionally when we seem to know a little bit of the processes of the world. Our understanding of whatever is meaningful in life is conditioned by the dip that consciousness has taken in this ocean of involvement.

We have already sunk into a mysterious kind of the waters of Lethe, as they call it in Greek mythology, the waters of death, or the things into which we have dived, and got up into a consciousness of there being a kind of life in this world. Do you know that this world is called the world of death, Mrityuloka? It is never called the world of life. Though we are all alive, it is never called a life of any standing meaning at all. You will be wondering how this world is a world of death. Why do we call it Martyaloka or Mrityuloka? Because even the life we are living is a form of death only. It is not actually life that we are living. It is an unending preparation towards a catabolic activity in which the psycho-physical organism is engaged, and from moment to moment we are dying.

In this instance I may cite an occasion that arose many many years back, when emperor Aja lost his queen, and he beat his breast, hit his head on the ground, cried before his great Master, Guru Vasishtha, “I have lost the very meaning of my life; I have lost symphony, rhythm and meaning. I have nothing with me. I have lost everything.” This was the expression of king Aja before Vasishtha, the omniscient seer. And what was the reply of Vasishtha to this cry of the king, that he had lost his dear and near, his only value in life? Kalidasa, in his Raghuvamsa, in his own poetic style, tells us what this reply was: “Maranam prakritih saririnam vikritir jivitam uchyate budhaih.” This was the simple, open answer of Vasishtha to the king who was wailing over the joy he lost and the sorrow that had descended upon his head.

What is the meaning of this half-verse? Anything that is embodied is nothing but an embodiment of death only, because anything that is complex has to get decomposed into its original components. As a building is made up of its own ingredients known as building material, anything that is born, – it may be human or anything else, anything that is composed of elements which precede it in the process of creation, has to revert to that out of which it has been made. The building has to return to the condition of bricks one day or the other; it will be only the original that it was. It cannot be the Taj Mahal or anything that attracts your vision of grandeur, because this grandeur of human perception, the beauty of things and the value of life itself, is the tentative presentation before our blinded eyes of a shape or a form taken by causative factors which are precedent to things and to our coming into this world, whatever be our importance in life. Vasishtha held that death, thus, is what is natural to things; it is life that is unnatural!

The birth of an individual into this world is actually a birth into the waters of death. No one can escape this possibility. And the meaning behind this drama of coming and going is to be sought in the few sentences I uttered in the very beginning – that in a gradational coming down of the Ultimate Reality into the present condition of life in the world, there is a final involvement. No one can know how one is involved in this world. Whatever be your understanding and knowledge of things, you cannot know how you are involved. We have a poor, schoolboy’s understanding of our involvement here. A person may have debts to pay; he will say, “I have some involvement.” He has a family, and he is in an involvement. He has to work hard in an office; and he will say, “I have an involvement.” These are little involvements of a totally extraneous nature.

But there is a real involvement which is the source of our bondage, properly speaking. Working in an office, maintaining a family, or paying a debt, is not so serious an involvement, because you may discharge these obligations in some way. But there are certain obligations in our life with which we are born. “Sahayajnah prajah srishtva purovacha prajapatih, Anena Prasavishyadhvam esha vo’stvishtakamadhuk,” says the Lord in the Bhagavadgita. We are born ‘together with’ an obligation. ‘Sahayajna’ means “togetherness of birth with an obligation in the form of a sacrifice.” The ‘togetherness’ of coming into this world with a sacrifice or a necessity to sacrifice is called ‘Sahayajnatva’. Now, this becomes a necessity on our part, merely because of the fact of our involvement in an ununderstandable, mysterious impasse.

We can never be happy permanently in this world, whatever be our efforts to be happy, for the simple reason that we cannot diagnose our own illness. May be, there are means of this diagnosis. But one cannot be one’s own doctor; in a similar manner, we cannot know what our problems are, though we attribute our difficulties to events that take place outside. There is no ‘outside’ in this world, The meaning of involvement is the abolition of anything as external or internal. There is no thread in the cloth which can be called external to the other threads, because they are intertwined in such a way that everything is involved in everything else. So, one cannot be called the ‘other’; the ‘otherness’ that we perceive is an error, and the cause of this error in perception in the form of a conviction of there being something outside us is the reason also for the involvement.

It was said that there was the perception of the many. But we cannot have merely the knowledge of the many and remain quiet without any dealings with the many, because the very knowledge of the many implies a necessity felt at the same time to relate oneself to the many. I cannot simply know that you are sitting there, I have to feel a sense of relation to that which I see. This is the beginning of involvement. And, the freedom of the soul, our final salvation, we may say, consists in our disentangling ourselves gradually from the network of this involvement, which is a hard task, indeed. Sometimes Samsara is compared to a quagmire. A quagmire is a kind of marshy area where, if you keep your foot, you will go in. And if you try to lift your sunk foot with the help of the other foot planted on it, you will see the other foot goes in. And so both feet go in, and you can be sunk neck deep. And you do not know what will happen to you. This state of affairs is called the quagmire-involvement, and our life is something like that. Often, by ancient masters, life is compared to involvement in a quagmire. When you try to free your foot, you will see that the other foot has gone in; and when you lift the other, this one has gone still deeper, so that you do not know where you are. It is an unthinkable misery, unadulterated sorrow.

Where is the salvation, and where is the remedy? The remedy is not in further involvements. Often we try to cure one disease by introducing another disease into the body; this is not a real curative method. You cannot pay your debts by borrowing from some other person, though many a time we do this thing and feel that debts are paid. But we have paid the debt by creating another debt, paying perhaps compound interest and making matters worse. Our search for joy in life is at the same time an accumulation of sorrow from another side. This we forget in our involvements. So, at least from the point of view of man’s present way of involvement and thinking we can say that he cannot attain real freedom. But it is not true that the expectation is absolutely impossible. There is a necessity to go to facts as they are, and not merely opinionate about things and hold judgments on objects in any manner whatsoever, because every judgment is a characterisation of that which you see with your eyes, and, as I mentioned, this characterisation is always infected with a defect caused by your having sunk into the mire of an involvement which is called birth.

The withdrawal of conscious operation objectively in terms of what we see with our eyes, judging things from the point of view of the senses, would be the beginning of the development of wisdom in our lives. Then, to speak in the language of Buddhist psychology, we move from what they call Kama-loka to Rupa-loka. The world we are living in is called Kama-loka_,_ because it is the world of involvement by desires, positive as well as negative. A positive desire is the clinging to something, and a negative desire is aversion to something. And we have a twofold attitude towards things in the world. Whatever be that attitude, like or dislike, it is Kama only, and inasmuch as there is nothing visible in this world except these two types of involvement, they consider this world as Kama-loka_._ You cannot see a person as he or she is in himself or herself. A person, a thing, or an object, whatever it is, is to us what it means to us in terms of an involvement, and minus the involvement, we cannot know what it is. I cannot know what you are except in relation to me. This relation is the undoing of all things. Whenever we understand things or cogitate on any person or thing, we always do this cogitation work in terms of what sort of relation that thing has with us. Independently, we do not consider a person as a tree in the jungle. We do not bother what the tree is about; let it be there! It is not my son, it is not my brother. Whatever happens to it is not my concern. But it is a great concern of mine in relation to that with which I am related. This concern is the bondage of the soul.

Why should you be concerned? That is the externalisation of your relationship. This is overcome by what you call detachment in its true spirit, not detachment in the ordinary ritualistic manner. Detachment does not mean moving from Kanyakumari to the Himalayas, or from one country to another. It is the disentanglement from the involvement of consciousness in this act of judging in terms of what it means to ‘me’ positively or negatively. Then you will reach the next world, called Rupa-loka_,_ where the world may be seen by us, as it is. The beauty of the painting will no more be there; you will see only a canvas and ink spread in a particular pattern. To give an example of how you move from Kama-loka to Rupa-loka_;_ from the beauty that is seen in a painting, you move to the substance out of which the painting is made. The arrangement of the ink on the canvas in terms of a spatio-temporal context, again involved in our way of looking at things at a particular distance also – all these factors considered – becomes the cause of our knowing things as beautiful, or otherwise. So, when this Kama is no more there, we begin to see Rupa_,_ or the forms of things as they are. Are you not something independently in yourself other than what you are to others? You know very well you are something to yourself. Whatever be the opinion others may hold about you, minus all these opinions, you are something, and that is the pure principle of existence, sometimes called Isvarasrishti, apart from Jivasrishti. The ideas of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, and the notions of ‘my belonging to somebody’ or ‘something belonging to me’ or ‘not belonging to me’, etc., are known as Jivasrishti, or the involvements mentioned – the abyss, Samsara_,_ this quagmire. But if I can know you as you know yourself, and I know me as I am to myself, and each one stands by himself or itself as a pure subject unrelated to the objects, relation is abolished, because, really, there is a basic unity of things where the pure subject which is the universe stands supreme in its integrated completeness, which is the universal perception we are waiting for finally, you may say, the vision of God. And when God knows Himself, not as an object of vision by somebody – That is the origin of things, That which is, the Almighty God Supreme, call Him Narayana, call Him the Father in Heaven, the Unimpeachable, Ununderstandable, Non-Externalisable, Pure Being, All-Being, the Bhuma, the Infinite, the Vaishvanara of the Upainshads, the Viratsvarupa of the Bhagavadgita. That is our Goal. And we can have an iota of satisfaction and joy in this world only to the extent of our approximation to this reverse movement of ours in the direction of Truth. But if you try to be happy here by adding more untruths to the already existing ones, purchasing more illnesses to the existing ones already in the body, and piling up sorrows over sorrows, over those which are already there, then the fate of man is booked, for what it is.

May this be a heralding moment to us to find time to brood over these truths of our real state of affairs in this world, what we really are, also what anyone is really in himself or herself, what any thing is in itself, in the eyes of that which alone can see things clearly without the spectacles of likes or dislikes. Such is the mighty Goal before us, into whose facts we are awakened by great masters like Gurudev Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. Their blessings we seek, and the Grace of the Almighty we invoke upon the whole of humanity at this auspicious hour of mutual communion. May we, then, sing the song of the ancient mystic in a slightly different strain: “In the beginning there was the One, and there was not the many; Then there was the many, but not the consciousness of the many; Then there was the consciousness of the many; but not judgment of ‘the other’; Then there was the judgment of ‘the other’, and, lo, mortal sorrow became the name of all life.”

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

Life – A Process and Activity

Life – A Process and Activity by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Thursday, 4 April 2013 20:15

The philosophy of the Vedanta makes a distinction between existence as such and the experience of any type of existence. We may say, if we would like, that a fact or an existence is absolute so far as it goes, and a subjective experience of it is relative. Human life is a psychological process, and not an immutable existence. A knowledge of the functions of the mind is essential to understand life in its fullness. In the observation of the mind we can have no instrument, such as the ones we use in observing, measuring, examining or cleaning outward things. The mind is the student as well as the object of study, when life as a whole is the theme that we wish to investigate and comprehend. In a famous image given in the Kathopanishad, the inner self of man is compared to a lord seated in a chariot, the body to the chariot, the intellect to the charioteer, the mind to the reins, the senses to the horses pulling the chariot, and the objects of the senses to the roads along which the chariot is driven. The Upanishad gives a caution that the supreme state can be reached only by him who has as his charioteer a powerfully discriminative intellect which directs the restive horses of the senses with the aid of the reins of the mind, and not by anyone else who may have a bad charioteer. The meaning of this analogy is that the human individuality and personality are outer forms and instruments to be properly used by the inner directive intelligence towards the great destination of life, and not to be taken as ends in themselves or mistaken for reality as such.

Not only the body and the senses but even the self conceived as a limited individual centre of consciousness is a process of intense activity, moving, changing and evolving incessantly. The individual self is the basis of knowledge as well as action. Due to confinement to a spatial existence, the individual self is dominated over and harassed by certain urges felt within itself, pointing to certain external objects and states. The desire for food, clothing and shelter, for name, fame, power, sleep and sex, often appears in the human individual as a violent force which cannot be easily subdued or even intelligently controlled. These deep-rooted urges are an immediate consequence of the self’s restriction to a dualistic perception of the world and an arrogation of ultimate selfhood to itself, while the truth is otherwise. The individual has a morbid habit of unconsciously asserting itself as the centre of experience and considering the other contents of the universe as adjectives or subsidiary elements meant to bring satisfaction to it in some way or the other. In this respect, we should say that all forms of human knowledge are different types of activity to achieve certain ends other than themselves. Man never is – he is always to be. This predicament is, as it would be clear, a corollary of the feeling that we are localised entities forming a mechanical whole, which we call the universe, of which it seems that we can never have a simultaneous knowledge. Our perceptions are always in a series; we know things one after another, and not at one stroke. We never see one and the same picture at two given moments in a cinematographic projection, but yet we seem to see a continuity of the existence of forms on account of a very quick succession and motion of the pictures. Strictly speaking, we never see one and the same thing in a particular act of perception, but the rapidity of the psychoses is so tremendous that there is an illusion of the perception of a static existence. And above all, there is that absolute Self behind all mental functions, from which these draw sustenance and borrow existence as well as light.

Every action, viewed in this light, becomes a symptom of the restlessness of the relative consciousness in any of the human sheaths in which it is enclosed. There is an unceasing attempt on its part to break boundaries, to overcome all limitations and to transcend itself at every step. The environment called life in which it finds itself is only an opportunity provided to it to seek and find what it wishes to have in order to exceed itself in experience in the different stages of evolution. The universe is a vast field of psychological experience of multitudinous centres of individuality for working out their deserts by way of objective experience. The universe is another name for experience by a cosmic mind, of which the relative minds are refractive aspects and parts. The desirable and the undesirable in life are nothing but certain consequences which logically follow the whimsical and unmethodical desires of the ignorant individuals who know not their own ultimate destination. What is desirable today need not be so tomorrow, and today’s painful experience may be a blessing for the future. It does not mean that all that we want is always the good. We often grope in darkness and find a cup of poison which we avidly drink, while we are really in search of some soothing food to appease our hunger. There is no error in the world or the objects; it is in the painful fact that we have no knowledge of what is really good for us. It is not enough if a physician knows merely that a particular drug has the power to suppress a particular ailment, he has also to know what other reactions the drug will produce in the living organism. In our life, the mind has to act as its own physician, and in this work it has to exercise great vigilance born of right perception. No thought, feeling or willing can be said to be healthy when it is not in consonance with the health and peace of the universe as a whole. That we are members of a single undivided family demands that we have to be mutually cooperative, and think and act in terms of mutual welfare, which, in the end, is the welfare of the whole. When this knowledge is not given to the mind, it acts blindly and errs with the idea that what appears to bring a temporary sensation of pleasure to it is the true and the good. When it does not learn the lesson of life by enlightened reason, it has to learn it by pain.

The mind, in the Vedanta philosophy, is conceived not as any independent entity opposed to matter, as is the case in several systems of Western philosophy, but is understood to be an aspect of the material principle itself appearing in a more rarefied form. The psychology of the Vedanta is a highly scientific methodology evolved out of the fundamental concept that the supreme reality is Absolute Consciousness and anything that may seem to be opposed to it can only be a phase of itself. The fivefold base of objective perception, viz., sound, touch, form, taste and smell, is found to be inseparable from the reciprocally related to the senses of knowledge working under the direction of the mind. The theory of the Vedanta is that the mind, constituting mainly the functions of understanding, thinking, feeling, remembering and willing, is the resultant of the collective totality of the purified forms of the essences of the five substrata of sensations enumerated above. The sympathy that is observed between sensations and their objects is thus explained by the fact that the causes of the appearances of the two are essentially the same. Not only this. There is the presupposition of the greater truth that at the background of the mind, the senses and their objects, there is the Absolute itself as their very reality. The Vedanta psychology is a direct consequence of its basic metaphysics which lays down that existence is non dual. It is on this foundation of the ultimate inseparability of the knower and the known that we have to envisage the law governing the universe and regulating individual and social life.

The highest law is accordingly conceived as Dharma based on Rita and Satya. Rita and Satya are two terms that occur originally in the Vedas, signifying the eternal cosmic order and the same as manifest in the diversified world. Dharma is nothing but one’s duty as an individual stationed in the cosmos, as its integral part. This at once explains by implication one’s duty towards family, society, the nation and the world at large. The fulfilment of this Dharma is expected to be achieved not in a slipshod way or by leaps and bounds, but in a gradual manner following closely the evolutionary process of the cosmos. Material welfare, the enjoyment of desires and relations to society are given due consideration and are equally regulated by Dharma which, at the same time, works with Moksha or the ultimate realisation of the infinite as its aim. Dharma is the ethical value, Artha the material and the economic value, Kama the vital value and Moksha the infinite value of life. As the infinite includes all the finites, the aspiration for Moksha naturally implies the fulfilment of the ends of all other desires and the execution of all other duties in life. This sublime aspiration arises in the mind when it has an inherent feeling of ‘enough’ with the things of the world. This is the ‘divine discontent’ which acts as a forerunner of the struggle of the spirit to grasp and know itself in the Absolute. It is here that true knowledge dawns.

Ordinary psychological experience is usually marked off from a life of spiritual insight. The path of the pleasant is differentiated from the way of the good. What the senses report to us need not necessarily be the true or the good. Often they give us false intimations and involve us in tantalizing mirages which recede from us as we try to approach them. It is because of this unfortunate predicament that we go on experimenting with one object after another, seeking final satisfaction, but do not find it anywhere. This fruitless pursuit continues until thinking of benefit in terms of separateness discovers its own futility and gives way to a search for peace in terms of more and more integrated realms of being. The individual expands to the family, the family to the community, the community to a wider society or the nation, the nation to the whole world, and the world to the cosmos, wherein the process of expansion finds its limit and begins to turn inward into the centre of experience which, in the end, is recognized to be identical with the Supreme Being. Bearing this in mind, the sage of the Upanishad warns us with the great rule that everything shall desert us if we consider it to be different from our own essential self. As we have already noticed, nothing in this world can be considered to be merely a means to the satisfaction of another, for in this mutually determined whole there are only ends, not means. The Bhagavadgita states that all pleasures that are born of the contact of the mind and the senses with the external are a womb of pain, for outward contact is not the way of contacting reality. The dissatisfying consequence of sense gratifications, the fear that usually attend upon them, the chances of getting addicted to the habits and impressions produced by such pleasures, and the inevitability of the rise of further desires and greater distractions, in addition to the wearing out of the senses, should rouse in the man of discrimination a consciousness of the higher life.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

On the Nature of Philosophy

On the Nature of Philosophy by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Wednesday, 3 April 2013 10:01

Philosophy is not a theory but a vision of life (Darsana). It is not merely ‘love of wisdom’ but signifies a real ‘possession’ of it. The philosophers are therefore not professors, academicians or doctrinaires, or even spectators, but true participants of life in its real meaning and relationship. To be a philosopher, thus, implies more substance than what is often taken to be its value in life. A philosopher is not concerned with human beings alone: his concern is with all creation, the universe in its completeness. His thought has to reflect the total import of existence in its togetherness.

A philosopher’s task calls for a great strength of will and clarity of understanding, side by side with an exalted moral consciousness. The usual prerequisites for a student of philosophy have been stated to be (1) Viveka or discrimination of reality as distinguished from appearance; (2) Vairagya or disinterest in those appearances which are divested of reality; (3) Sama or tranquillity of mind, (4) Dama or self-restraint, meaning control over the clamours of sense; (5) Uparati, or freedom from the distractions characteristic of selfish activity; (6) Titiksha or power of fortitude in the midst of the vicissitudes of life, (7) Sraddha or faith and conviction in the meaningfulness of the pursuit of philosophy; (8) Samadhana or ability to concentrate the mind on the subject of study; and (9) Mumukshutva or a sincere longing to attain the practical realisation of the Absolute. Without the equipment of these necessary qualifications, a student under the scheme of philosophy will be a failure and cannot get at either its method or its purpose. Though the discipline needed is arduous indeed and no one, ordinarily, can be expected to be full with it to perfection, it has to be accepted that it is an inviolable condition of the pursuit of philosophy, at least in an appreciable measure. Else, philosophy would only shed as much light to the student as the sun to the blind.

Philosophy has often been identified with a life of contemplation, without action. That this is a misrepresentation based on ignorance would become obvious from the nature of philosophic wisdom, as has been stated above. Though wisdom is a state of consciousness and implies concentration and meditation, it does so not in any exclusive sense, for philosophic wisdom is all-inclusive. It synthesises the different sides of the psychological nature, e.g., the knowing, willing, feeling and active. Any lopsided emphasis is contrary to the requirements of a wisdom of life. The teaching of the Bhagavadgita, a monumental embodiment of the gospel of the philosophic life, is a standing refutation of the notion that philosophical knowledge is tantamount to actionlessness. A philosopher, in his heightened understanding, has also the power of sublime feeling and action for a universal cause.

Philosophy is not also opposed to religion; on the other hand it is the lamp which illumines the corners of religion both within and without. Philosophy supplies the raison d’être of religious practices, even of ritual, image and symbol. If religion is the body, philosophy is the life in it. Philosophy ennobles religion, sublimates art and stabilises the sciences, such as sociology, ethics and politics. It was the hope of Plato that the philosopher and the ruler be found in the same person, if the world is to have peace. Philosophy is also the remedy for the illnesses which psychoanalysis has been immaturely attempting to trace back to a supposed irrationality of behaviour. Philosophy discovers the rationality behind the so-called irrational urges.

In India, philosophy as Darsana has always been associated with practice or Sadhana. What goes by the name of Yoga is the implementation of philosophy in practical life, with reference to the psychological functions predominating in an individual. Philosophy has therefore relation to one’s being more than to one’s intellectual grasping of outer situations. The philosophic truth is neither the inner nor the outer merely, for it is the whole. The cosmic gets mirrored in the consciousness of the philosopher who lives it more than anything else.

Philosophy is different from any kind of extreme, whether in thinking or living. The golden mean is its rule, which excludes nothing, but includes everything by way of transformation to suit the constitution of the whole which is its aim. To arrive at this finale of knowledge, it considers the cases of perception, inference and intuition; observation, implication and the testimony of experience. It neither denies nor affirms peremptorily. Philosophy is, thus, necessary for every stage and kind of life to make it a joy. There is no satisfaction where there is no meaning. Philosophy is the discovery of the meaning behind life.

Philosophy is impartial judgment without prejudice, underestimation or overestimation. It recognises the values accepted in the different fields of knowledge and iterated in the various viewpoints of observation and logic in order to construct an edifice of integral envisagement. From this it follows that philosophy does not take sides, has a place for every standpoint of thinking in its proper perspective, and its function is to so fit everything into its broad scheme that nothing is either ignored or made to strike a dissonant note in the harmony of its development. Its position is that of the chief judge in the government of the universe. It listens, understands, sifts, weighs and considers the status of any given circumstance not from the standpoint of the circumstance in its isolatedness but in its relation to the whole of existence. No one can, therefore, afford to turn away from the divine gift called ‘philosophy’.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Tuesday, 2 April 2013 21:07

These sessions, which go by the name of a conference, have been organised with a special purpose which to every one of you must be obvious – namely, to find a specific occasion when we all seated here may be enabled to collect ourselves into a focus of attention in the direction of what, perhaps, we are seeking in this life. This precisely seems to be the theme of this session today – what is it that we are seeking in this life; what is it that anyone is searching for through the vicissitudes, the works and enterprises in various walks of life. The turmoil and tumult of human endeavour is dinning such a clamour into our ears from moment to moment that we hear only the noise of human activity and desire, and a moment required for considering the motive behind human enterprise does not seem to be available.

Now, these two sentences that I have uttered will perhaps form a sort of introduction to the theme we are supposed to discuss. That we cannot find time to pay due attention to the purpose for which we are living and working will be an answer to the manner in which we are living in this world. A machine works very hard and works continuously in a very systematic, precise, mathematically operated manner, but the machine does not know that it is working in that way. So there can be a precise and scientific movement for the purpose of an output, as in a mill or a factory, without the movement being conscious as to the very nature of the output. Some sort of stuff is ejected out of the machine which is as unconscious of itself as is the operating mechanism behind it.

Today we – men and women, humanity in general – have become accustomed to believe the great ideology that a machine is an indispensable appurtenance of human life. We cannot do anything without the assistance of a machine. This shows the subsidiary character of man in comparison with the gigantic operative mechanisms that he has considered necessary for not only his satisfaction, but even his existence. He manufactures arms, not perhaps obviously for an immediate satisfaction, but for a security in regard to his own existence. Even his existence is controlled by a machine – he cannot even be sure that he will be here for a few minutes unless a machine operates around him; and a machine need not necessarily be a typewriter, or a printing machine, a motorcar or an airplane.

I am now trying to bring our minds to the very concept of mechanism, which is a way of thinking rather than an object that we visualise with our eyes. There is a philosophy which sometimes goes by the name of ‘mechanism’. We know very well that a philosophy cannot be a machine which we can obtain from a market. It is not a thing, it is not a substance, and it is not anything that is tangible. It is a conceptualisation and a certain outlook of the psyche of the human being – we may say the outlook as a whole of a particular set of people. This is called a mechanistic philosophy, and it has its roots in that which goes by the name of a scientific evaluation of things. In some way, classical science is mechanistic, though I do not say that every science is so. Today we are at the fag end of the discoveries of science, which has awakened the scientist himself to a novel presentation by nature – that it is perhaps not working on mechanistic lines, though ancient scientists like Lapis, Newton, etc. thought that there is nothing but mathematics working in the universe. Maybe mathematics is working even now, but it is working only at a certain level of human life. We need machines only under certain circumstances of life, and it is not true that we need mechanisms always, under every circumstance in our lives. That this is a truth may not occur to the minds of many of us, since we have not found time to think of conditions of living where machines may not be of any utility to us and we cannot save ourselves even with the help of machines. There is something in us which cannot be amenable to the operation of a machine. I do not wish to dilate upon this aspect, since during the few days of Sadhana Week we had occasion to discuss these aspects also.

None of us would believe that we are only machines, though from the point of view of a behaviourist psychologist, or a pure atomist, or a physiologist, we may be appearing to work like stereotyped machines, measurable by the rods of medical science and intelligible from the philosophy that is behind this approach.

Today we have been asked to speak on a very well-known but intriguing theme – man in relation to his soul. Here we are likely to commit an error at the very outset when we utter the words ‘man’ and ‘soul’. Though we may be well-educated persons, mature, and past sixty or seventy years of age, it may not be true that we have a correct understanding of what man is in relation to what we hear of as a soul. With all our age and experience and learning, we cannot escape the childish notion into which we have been born – that the soul is something that is residing in this body.

Now, does such a thing exist, or does it not exist? If we feel that there is such a thing called ‘soul’ independent of the body and yet existing within the body, illuminating, vitalising, energising this body which we sometimes mistake for what we really are – if this is our understanding of a so-called existence called a ‘soul’, and a mystery called ‘man’, then we would not be able to answer this great query that is raised by the very theme of the discussion today. What is happening to man today, and what he is today, is perhaps a necessary background on which we have to base our further considerations in the direction of a solution to this great question or pose – is man searching for a soul, or is he searching for anything at all?

A machine has not a soul, we know very well, and when we say that a machine has not a soul, we know what we mean. Everyone knows what is meant when a statement is made that a motorcar has not a soul, an airplane has not a soul, a robot has not a soul, any mechanism has not a soul. When we say this, what do we mean in our minds? We are making a statement without being clear as to what we are saying. We have a vague notion of the necessity of the presence of something which will permit our acceptance that there is a soul. Naturally when we say that the machine has no soul, we do not intend that something should be moving inside the machine like a light, in the sense that we understand a soul to be operating within ourselves. We speak of a soul and use that word oftentimes, on many occasions. “The whole activity has been without a soul.” “The entire enterprise lost its soul.” “The whole project has no soul in it.” Do we not make statements like this? “The whole performance was minus a soul.” When we say that an important theme that we expected in a large gathering or conference was absent, we say, “Oh, the soul was absent.” We expected a very powerful dignitary who would give a tremendous influential power to the whole organisation by his very presence, but he was not there. It might be a great genius of a scientist, or a great philosopher, or a great politician, or it might be anything – something surpassing in some way was absent and we say the soul was missing in spite of all the din and noise and activity there.

What do we mean by saying that the soul is missing? If one person in an audience is missing, how can we say that the soul is missing? Every person has a soul. If some important person whom we regard as very valuable, more worth the while than anybody else, and who has a pervasive influence over everyone else is missing and therefore the soul is missing, we do not mean that other people have no souls. Just imagine what ideas we are perforce entertaining in our minds when we are thinking of a soul. We are not thinking of some little thing inside the body of a person when we conceive of a soul – otherwise if one important person in an audience is missing we will not say that the soul is missing. It would mean to say that other people have no souls and only that person has a soul, which is not a fact; others also have souls. So what makes us say that the soul is missing? “The entire show was without a soul.” Why?

This is an occasion for us to dive into the mysteries of what a soul is, and then we can know whether we have missed the soul, or whether we are in search of a soul for modern man or ancient man or any man; particularly modern man – the word has been used for a specific reason. I’ll touch upon that theme shortly.

We have missed something in our lives, and if I use the word ‘soul’ it may be so enigmatic and intriguing and eluding to our understanding that I prefer not to use this word frequently, though it cannot be escaped. It has to come, one day or the other, in a new light altogether – into which I tried to introduce to our minds by bringing these illustrations of there being a soul which is not necessarily identical with the souls of all these people, though everyone has a soul.

What man misses in life seems to be something which keeps him in unison, harmony, and in a state of cohesion. A dismembered society, a dismembered political organisation, a dismembered bodily organism, a dismembered psyche of man is something like a machine without a soul. So a soul is that which prevents the dismembering of organisations, whatever be the nature of that organisation. It may be a little body – it may be the body of an ant. It may be my body, or your body, or the body of a family. There is a soul in a family. Though every member of the family has a soul, one may miss the soul of the family. If the chief organising, influencing, potent force in the family is missing, we will say that the soul of the family is gone. Yet the members of the family are there and they also have souls. Listen to me very carefully, because these are very subtle analyses.

Likewise, when we speak of any type of living arrangement or organisation, the word ‘organisation’ also has to be understood in its true spirit. An organisation is a coming together of various parts, and parts cannot come together unless there is something which brings the parts together. We do not see the wheels of a vehicle automatically joining together and making a motorcar; nothing happens automatically. No part of a machine will join with another part unless there is a cohesive, pervasive and immanent force which envisages the arrangement or the pattern that is to be projected in the form of a machine, and that may be considered as something independent of the machine, though it cannot be totally isolated from the machine.

‘Organisation’ is a very subtle, eluding word. This body also is an organisation. It is made up of various parts which work in collaboration – it is a machine. The body is a machine in the sense that it is made up of various parts, nuts and bolts, and there is a dynamo, and a pulley, and every blessed thing; but nothing will work unless there is a system introduced into this mechanically placed multifaceted arrangement which we call an organisation. There is no organisation without something which organises these parts which are called the organisation. We have to consider what that something is.

There may be a leader of a huge organisation, and his presence, his influence, his activity brings all the people together, though they may be millions in number. We may be wonderstruck as to how one person can bring together thousands of people, because thousands are larger in number than this one single person. Now again I am coming to a sort of answer to this query raised by the theme of today. If we can find out some answer within ourselves as to the circumstances under which one person can rule millions of people and command a huge battalion, and one single man called a field marshal can command a whole array, no part of which is inferior to him from the point of view of his body, or a mechanical structure, or even intelligence; if this is a possibility, there is also a possibility of lifting our minds to an area of consideration which is not necessarily mechanistic, physical, or purely visible to the eyes. There seems to be some invisible thing which seems to be an unavoidable and inviolable presence everywhere, without which the organisation cannot function.

Take this example of a huge army being commanded by one man. What strength has this man got over these millions of people? Mechanistically, physically, materially, economically considered, he has no strength whatsoever. Yet he has strength. That strength is that which pervades everyone in the whole army which is constituted of individuals like him. This is something very surprising – thousands, lakhs, (hundreds of thousands), millions of persons like him are organised into a single focus of consideration and attention and action by the presence of one individual who is also like them. We have to think deeply here, and this type of thinking is called philosophical thinking. This is not scientific thinking, because science cannot recognise what it cannot observe and experiment upon, and if we observe an army, experiment upon an army and see the army though a microscope or even a telescope, we will see nothing except a huge mass of people. But it is not a mass of people; there is something else in it, which is the reason why we do not call it a huge heap of people, but we call it an army.

Organisation and a unified force. What makes us feel that a large organisation – it may be a parliament, it may be a political system, or an army, or any such thing – what makes us believe that they form one single organisation, not withstanding the fact that we cannot see any organisation there? We see only different heads and different legs moving about in different ways. This eluding, mysterious yet impossible-to-avoid thing is the soul. We cannot say that it is inside the body, because the body of a person who organises a large gathering is like the body of anybody else, and if we say that his soul controls everybody, well, our consideration that the soul is inside the body rules out that argument. We cannot expect one man’s soul to jump on somebody else’s soul and then organise everybody. What is it that is intriguing us and stirring us and stimulating us, keeping us restless in spite of all our estimations, properties and social securities? We have missed something.

I was told that there was a doubt in the minds of some people whether there is a soul for which man is searching, or there is only the soul. This difficulty, this question also arises due to a misunderstanding of the very meaning of the soul itself. A mere academic bookworm cannot answer these questions, as one cannot find an answer to these questions in books. Though there are hints in the great scriptures as to what all this means, we do not have that intellectual caliber to go into the depths of the implications of these scriptures, much less the time to study all these.

What is man searching for? All of us seated here are well-educated, cultured persons with time enough to think deeply over this matter. We cannot say that we are searching for money and status merely, though it may be one of the things that we are searching for. We have seen learned people who are not happy. We have seen very rich people who can burn money but are unhappy in many, many ways. Potentates, politically powerful, ruling a large dominion, are terribly insecure day in and day out; they have no peace of mind. There is something that everyone is missing, whatever be the acquisition of a person – physically, materially, economically, politically. Do we know that something is missing which keeps us anxious all the while? A very rich man is always anxious about something – he is brooding, thinking and scratching his head. He’s not resting quietly, “Everything is fine, milk and honey, let me sleep.” No rich man will sleep like that – he is worse than a poor man as far as anxiety is concerned. Similarly, every person with any kind of acquisition is insecure for various reasons. A healthy man is insecure – he may fall sick and cannot be eternally healthy.

So, there is a lacunae, unintelligibly though, felt by each person, and one would like to search for an answer to this insecurity, this restlessness, and this elusive character of that which one is searching for in life. No one seems to have got what he wanted in this life. When the time comes for us to leave this world, it appears very few will go with the satisfaction that they have got what they wanted. There was always something receding, like the horizon, and not permitting the grasp of the human being – psychically, intellectually, mentally, much less physically. We cannot know so easily what we have lost. This is the reason why we are kept in this suspension. We may concede that there is some terrible lacunae in our life; we are a hollow, a vacuum, empty inside in some mysterious way in spite of our material possessions and social status.

Perhaps every one of us may be aware there is something lacking, but it is not easy for us to know what it is that we are lacking. We go on experimenting with various circumstances in life. “Perhaps I lack material wealth.” We struggle, experiment with it and get something, and find that it is not the thing that we wanted. We go on searching in various ways for various other things like power, authority and doership, and we find that we are not seeking for that, and it is not at all the thing that we expected. We have been experimenting with the location of something which we have lost in the various persons and things of the world, and to our consternation we have realised, and we are yet to realise, at least some of us, that these locations – call them persons, things, events, circumstances, situations – are not the spots in which we can discover that eluding something which we seem to have lost.

This mysterious, eluding something which cannot be confined to the body of an individual is what very, very glibly we define as the soul. Since it is an abused word whose meaning has never been understood clearly, even to this day, it is very difficult to project this word again and again as if it is very clear to the minds of people, because in all this explanation and analysis we will not forget that our soul is inside the body. “My soul, my conscience, my Atma speaks,” we go on touching the chest. This Atma, this little thing we are indicating within the location of this physical body, is not what we are seeking – though it is present there also – because it is an influence, it is a force, it is to some people something like an abstraction; and yet we will find that all life finally is an abstraction. Our life is an abstraction; it is not a concrete thing. We are not living a concrete life. For instance, when we touch money, we are not touching a substance but are touching a value, a conceptual evaluation which is in the head and not in the hands.

When we are friendly, when we are inimical, we are not encountering a person or a thing; we are encountering a circumstance which cannot be identified with the physical location of a person or a body. We are face to face with some situation which cannot be identified with a solid object. When we are happy or unhappy, we cannot attribute it to the presence or absence of some physical object. It is, again, a condition that has arisen, a condition that cannot be seen with the eyes, and we use this word again and again without knowing what it means. “I am in a very bad condition.” “I am in a prosperous state.” These are glib statements whose meaning cannot be clear so easily. This is the reason why we cannot easily be happy in this world; if it had been so easy we would have purchased it in one minute with all the dollars and pounds that we have. That cannot be done because the physical appurtenances and configurations in the form of people and things are not the thing that we have lost. When a person has lost his power – he has resigned or retired from a very powerful position – he has lost something. What has he lost? He is the same man that he was. The retired man is the same man that he was while in position. This thing that he has lost is that which he cannot see with his eyes, but it can make him utterly restless and put him out of gear. One can even go crazy if he is demoted and thrown down from a high pedestal. This pedestal is not a physical seat; it is a concept.

So are we living in a physical world, really speaking? Consider this for a while. Or are we living in a world of concepts, ideas, notions, evaluations and aspirations? Do we believe that this is a physical world? I am not going to the philosophical aspect of the doctrines propounded by Sankaracharaya and others that the world is Maya (illusion). We will slowly open our eyes and find there is some truth in what he has said. We are seeing a table, we are seeing trees, pandal (tent), this building and this beach, and the world is there so hard and solid – how do we call it Maya or an unreal thing? We will realise one day that we are really living in an unreal world.

The people that are around us are not our people. The things that we seem to possess, we have really not possessed, and we have not been searching for them. We have only been experimenting with them as tools for the discovery of that which we have lost. These friends of ours, these associations, these family members, this money, this status, this power, this authority, this land, this building – these are not the things we are asking for, though in a terrible state of ignorance we imagine that this is the soul that we wanted to grasp in life, and we will realise one day, “This is not what I wanted.” Otherwise, there could be no sorrow and bereavement. These are the tools that we have selfishly employed. We have been exploiting people and things in a very subtle manner to see whether they are the locations of that which we have lost in our lives.

We have not lost anything physical. The physical world is still there; we cannot lose it. We are sitting on it – how can we say that we have lost it? The whole earth is under us; we have not lost it. Do not say, “I’ve lost the physical earth.” What have we lost? What are we searching for? What is it that is keeping us restless and unhappy?

In the light of what I said a few minutes ago concerning the word ‘soul’, I will use the word ‘soul’ only in that light, of course, and that evaluation is to be before our mind’s eye when we utter the word ‘soul’. Man is in search of a soul or the soul – I will tell you why it is a and the both. We cannot think of the soul; we are not made in this way, because we do not see it. Who can believe there is one soul everywhere in this audience? We are all independent souls. When we search for a soul in our lives, we are searching for a meaning in our existence. We are not searching for a substance; we are not asking for a thing. When we have lost the meaning in our existence, we can say, “I have lost my soul.” People who are bereaved and who have lost their property and all their belongings sometimes feel that they have lost a soul. “I have lost all significance and meaning – everything.” They have not lost meaning, because they have never discovered the meaning in their lives even earlier when they were physically in possession of all the appurtenances of life.

As I mentioned, the appurtenances, the physical associations, social connections, etc. which were bringing us some sort of a satisfaction and making us feel that we discovered the meaning in life, they were not the meaning in life. They were very, very unfortunate instruments that we had been utilising for experimenting upon the thing which we have lost and which we consider as the meaning, and their disassociation appears to us as a disassociation from the meaning of life. The meaning of life is a pervasive influence, a power or authority, and everything in the world is only an ideological arrangement. A deep philosophical mind alone can probe into these mysteries. Therefore, it is true that we are searching for a meaning in life. We know very well how unfortunate it is to lose the meaning in life; we will go crazy in one second if the meaning is lost. And what is that meaning? That is the soul of life.

Each person has his own concept of the meaning of life – that is what we call a philosophy of life. Everyone has his own or her own philosophy. We have an outlook of life, we have an interpretation of things and we have evaluation of all things in the world – that is our philosophy, and that is the meaning that we want to discover in things. Anything that keeps us in a state of tension and isolatedness in any level of our being is the tendency to lose the soul. Even ill-health is a tendency to the loss of what we can call a meaning in a healthy body. A soul is a force; it is not a thing. It is a force which keeps in cohesion the parts of the being we call a person, an organisation, a world, a humanity, an everything. So the soul can be a force that is keeping in cohesion the limbs of our body, and in that sense we may call it a soul, because there are other people also having such a sense of need for feeling a meaning in their own lives. There is, similarly, a necessity to keep in cohesion the organisation we call a family circle or a community, or even a larger one like the whole nation or the entire humanity – otherwise there will be no humanity. ‘Humanity’ is a word that we use without understanding what it means. It is not a heap of people sitting together; it is a conceptual unity that we introduce into the presence of these isolated particulars called ‘people’. Humanity is one, though people are many. We can imagine that there can be one meaning in the midst of many people. That one meaning can be said to be the soul of humanity.

So it is large, and it is small. When it is large enough to comprehend the meaning discoverable in the whole of creation, we call it the soul – yes, it is true. But the process by which we discover the location of the soul or the meaning in life is by degrees. The soul may be one, that is a different matter, but it does not always reveal itself as one in our lives. There are degrees of the manifestation or descent of this concept of the soul. I do not say there are degrees of the descent of the soul itself, but the concept of the soul has a descending character and an ascending character. This is the reason why we feel that there are many souls, and each one is searching for one’s own soul, which perhaps is the reason why one is sometimes impelled to become selfish in spite of the fact that there are similar souls in other people. Yet we are occasionally altruistic, we think in terms of larger circles and the welfare of many other people, and we are serviceful, which tendency in us cannot be explained if the soul is only inside our body. So there is a larger soul than our own soul, yet we are searching for our own meaning.

In our individual lives we have our own predilections and we stick to our guns, oftentimes. “What I say must be done, let anything else go to the dogs.” When we speak like this and when we think like this, we are imagining that our meaning in life is conditioned by our own body, and our soul is only inside the body, whatever it be. But we are not always like that; we have a cultured attitude oftentimes to discover a similar meaning in other people’s existence also, which requires us to recognise the national soul – “I work for my nation.” When we work for the nation, for whose sake are we working? It is not the number of people considered as the citizens of a country that are called a nation. It is, again, an invisible thing. I am driving the point that the world is unreal, finally. It is only an idea in our heads – it does not exist physically, if we go deep into the matter. But this larger ideology of the national spirit, though invisible, is that which can shake the hearts of people; and people work day and night for the welfare of their nation, which is not merely a heap of people.

Likewise we can extend this dominion – this dimension of this concept of the meaning of life, the spirit of existence – into wider circles until it reaches the furthest limits of infinitude itself. That meaning that we discover, the one meaning that we discover in the whole creation, may be said to be the soul, because there can be many universes and many infinitudes.

There are gradations in an army arrangement, for instance. The lieutenant colonel is a soul of the group which he commands; the colonel is a soul of a wider group that he commands. Now, are there two souls – the lieutenant colonel is one soul, the colonel is one soul? And there is the brigadier, the lieutenant general, major general, and so on. Each one is a soul. I have already said that the soul is not a person, because one person cannot control so many other people. It is a pervasive influence, a larger immanence of an invisible something – call it meaning, call it authority, call it soul, call it intelligence, consciousness, whatever we like. That thing exists, pervading all. Perhaps the general’s soul pervades the souls of all the lower categories. There is the immanence of the soul of the general in the souls of the lieutenant generals, and the soul of the lieutenant general is present in the souls of all the major generals; the soul of the major general is present in all the souls of the brigadiers, etc. So are there many souls, or is there only one soul? We can answer this in any way because there are gradations of the concept of organisation, the concept of authority and the concept of pervasive influence, which is the soul that we are speaking of. So there is a soul, and there is also the soul – both are correct. When we reach a larger dimension, it appears as if it comprehends the lower levels, so it absorbs the existence of the lower categories of soul in the higher one; yet the lower ones exist in their own capacity, notwithstanding the fact they are subsumed by the operation of a higher soul.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnanda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

Man's Destiny in the Universe

Man’s Destiny in the Universe by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Monday, 1 April 2013 20:59

Human arrogance can take many forms. One of its manifestations in a pre-eminent way is man’s assumption that he is all-wise and his wisdom is incomparable, while its cruder forms take the shape of intolerance of the more respectable attitudes which the few enlightened ones entertain in life. Its subtler expressions go by the name of a scientific approach to things, which, it has to be confessed, is another name for a superior ignorance of anything which ranges beyond normal human understanding. This would make it obvious that a conceit of this kind is nothing short of a curse descended on humanity, and there has not been any other barrier to man’s prosperity in the history of evolution.

It may be emphasised that ‘not to know’ is bad enough, but to disrespect knowledge when it actually reveals itself to some is worse, and there cannot be a greater bane to true progress, whether outwardly in one’s vocations and pursuits of social life or inwardly in one’s psychological freedom and happiness.

The beginning of wisdom is a recognition of the need for one to be humble before the might of the cosmos. Puny man, lodged in his mortal frame, crawls on the surface of the globe of the earth, which floats like dust spinning round the gigantic machinery of the universe. The very size of creation and the complexity of its structure should be enough to strike a deafening blow of consternation to the presumptuous mind of man, whose knowledge of his environment is far inferior in quality to that the frog in the well possesses in regard to the ocean’s expanse. The light rays of the sun, which illumine the physical objects of the world and simultaneously shine upon the retina of the human eye, do not reveal a correct knowledge either of the objects or of man who sees things with their aid. What man beholds as the world outside him is more a play of the interaction of light rays than the substance of things or the structure of Nature. The causal relationship which man observes in Nature is a humorous conjecture of his mind, made in respect of what really happens in Nature as a whole.

Suppose a multitude of frogs residing in a reservoir near the huge building of a parliament house try to study the nature of this building. The frogs use an observatory and set up a telescope to see what happens in this house, and to it. It chances to be a Sunday, and no movement there is visible. The frog scientists immediately decide that this huge object is unfit for habitation for human beings as there is no trace of life there. Then, Monday follows, and the parliamentarians begin to enter the house, one by one. Now, the frog scientists would observe a strange phenomenon and conclude that the structure attracts human bodies on Mondays for a reason they cannot understand. But, to their surprise, the attraction seems to continue for some more days and suddenly it ceases on the evening of Saturday. The frog scientists conclude, again, that the building has in it a peculiar property of repelling human beings on Sundays and attracting them on other days, since this discovery of theirs seems to be confirmed by their observation for several weeks together. Now, a textbook on the essential structure of the building is ready and the frog scientists rejoice at their discovery. Then, suddenly, there occurs a three days’ holiday for the house due to a national festival, and the frog scientists are astounded that the house does not attract bodies on certain days, under certain given conditions, even if they are not Sundays. An exception to the rule has come and the conclusion is slightly amended, for there has been a new discovery. Bodies are attracted and repelled by the house not in a uniform manner but the system of the house seems to be a little complicated.

However, the wonder of the scientists is not over. On the anniversary of the nation’s day, human bodies were not only not attracted by the house in the usual manner, but the bodies began to circumambulate the house in a line of procession. The old discovery seemed to be incomplete and so a little defective. Under certain other given conditions, bodies can move round the house, but these conditions themselves are not known. The frog scientists draw up statistics of the days on which bodies are attracted to the house, the days on which they are repelled, and the days during which they move round the house. A year passes and the scientists hope to observe the same phenomena getting repeated the next year also.

But it so happens that the holidays and the festivals do not fall on the same dates as during the previous year. The phenomena changes, and all the discoveries of the earlier year fall flat. The frogs are surprised at the capricious nature of the house, and they decide that the house seems to be governed by a law of indeterminism and no instruments available in the observatory could conduct the operations satisfactorily.

And what do our human scientists tell us today of the internal structure of matter? That it is constituted of electrical particles, which may also be waves, and these wave-particles move erratically with a law of indeterminism, as the renowned physicist Heisenberg proclaimed many years ago.

What was wrong with our frog scientists? They could observe only the effects and not the causes. They could not know why human beings should enter the house on certain days, not enter it on certain other days and also move round it on some days. Unfortunately for them, all this was not at all the property of the house or the building, which had nothing to do with the activity of human beings in respect of it, a secret which the frog scientists were totally unaware. And so are we, wise men of this earth, patting ourselves on our backs and parading our ignorance before other ignoramuses whose satisfaction we regard and value as an achievement.

Unless the causes, nay, the ultimate causes behind phenomena are known, knowledge cannot be said to be complete or adequate. There is not merely a cause behind an effect but there is what may be called a causal chain in which there are many links, of which every succeeding link may be said to be an effect of the preceding one, so that the last link at the highest end of the chain would be the ultimate cause. But suppose the chain is circular, so that it has neither a beginning nor an end, and every link influences every other link. Which, in this situation, is to be considered as the cause, and which the effect? In a system of mutually determined relations, the causal explanation does not bring out the truth of things. Since the scientific approach is a special study in terms of cause-and-effect-relationship in a world of space-time, science cannot know the reality. To look at, see, observe or gaze at things is not the way of knowing their nature, even as the observations of our frog scientists, which were good enough, did not solve the riddle.

It is really a surprise that science, which hates all dogmatic approach to things, should cling to the dogma that the causal explanation is the only possible one, and is all that constitutes knowledge. There is a cause behind man’s faith in causation. To think in terms of space, time and causality is a habit of the mind and the only way in which it can visualise the world. Space, time and cause are the very preconditions of human thinking. Since the mind is so made that it cannot think except in terms of these presuppositions, we should really doubt if our knowledge of the world is real at all.

Space, time and cause cannot become the objects either of one’s perception or cognition, these being the constituents of the very ways of thinking. It is, therefore, impossible to know reality with the human mind, whatever be the methods it employs, whether inductive or deductive, sensory or rationalistic. Sense and reason are the faculties of human knowledge, and these are wound up in the laws of space, time and cause, which are the spectacles through which man sees creation and judges it with his reason. Even as the structure of the spectacles determines the nature and the form of the objects seen through them, man’s knowledge of reality is cast in the mould of the space-time-cause-relationship. It is with these glasses that man sees not only the world of external objects, but also his own self as a personality and as an individual, due to which he neither knows the world nor himself properly. Even one’s concept of the Supreme Being is spatio-temporal, and it is viewed more or less as an immensely large object of the senses, though in imagination it may be held to be universal. That reality cannot be an object should have become clear, since it also includes the subject which tries to know it. Thus the scientific methods of knowledge, which are observational and experimental, have little to do with its true nature.

The habit of relating causes and effects is not merely a philosophical prejudice but a more inveterate difficulty that has insinuated itself into man’s practical outlook of life. The causal notion in which the intellect of man is imbedded and soaked to its fibre appears in outward life as the seeking of perfection and achievement by the relating of one person, thing or circumstance with another, so that achievement of any kind is identified with doing something, in some manner, under some condition. But all ‘doings’, whatever be their nature, are infected with the impossibility of bringing about a real connection between the terms related, whose internal relation is prevented by the operation of space and time. Hence, every activity of man, in any field whatsoever, ends in an ultimate failure, though it may, in the beginning, assume a semblance of success. Finally, everything seems to be doomed to crumble down and be wiped out of existence, because the so-called existence of ‘relation’ is an appearance on the surface of the space-time structure and is not true inviolable being. Man’s professions and vocations, in short, all his business of life, is, thus, a perishable bubble floating on the tempestuous ocean of the space-time continuum. It appears futile, therefore, to hope for any substantial and permanent victory in such a precarious setup of things.

All this, and no more, seems to be the fate of man, because his body, senses, mind and intellect are all parts of the vicissitudes to which the space-time structure is subject, and the whole environment being thus transitory, not barring one’s own physical and psychological constitution, actions, as known to man, cannot bring him freedom. And all the activity of science, it need not be pointed out, is within the framework of these phenomena.

But, there have been exceptional geniuses who had rare visions of a secret that underlies phenomena. It is impossible that there should be appearance without reality. Change implies changelessness; that everything passes away shows that something does not pass away. The unending longing of man and his hope for a better future, in spite of the defeats he suffers in all his efforts, prove that there is an eternal ground of being behind temporal succession. Life is joy in its core, though pain on its surface. The problem which normally faces a person in entering into these depths is, again, the framework of space-time, from whose limitations the mind cannot free itself. Every thought and every sensation is restricted to the laws of space and time. What can man do, then, to gain access into reality? He cannot obviously make use of the commercial way of thinking, the doctrine of ‘give-and-take’, or even the methods of science, for all these are within the realm of space, time and causation.

That this should be the location of man in the universe and yet he should presume the wisdom of life and put on an air of completeness and real achievement is a wonder. Nothing can be a greater marvel than this ignorance which man mistakes for freedom and success.

However, there is a way out. And it has been called by various names, – spirituality, mysticism, religion, yoga. This is the true vision of life.

To have this proper vision of things, one has to set aside the old dogma, whether in the form of the belief that there can be real achievement through a business attitude to life which connects one thing with another, including some and excluding certain others, or the so-called approach of science, which is only a refined form of this very dogma of the senses and the mind which attempt to causally relate events in space and time. The correct perspective of life is what may be called the integral vision, which does not connect or disconnect, relate or associate, or outwardly manipulate things and conditions artificially through an apparent correlation of the impetuous tendency of the forces of the world not to yield to human effort at their subjugation. Man’s folly is that he wishes to stand outside Nature and then control it. This is the mistake which even the scientist commits, and, in this ignorance of truth, there is no difference between the mind of the scientist and the faith of the rustic. Nature refuses to be relegated to the position of an isolated object of observation by the human mind, for it asserts its sway even over the mind of man, who is really a part of the universe. This sublime understanding is the spiritual view of life and its conduct in practical affairs is what goes by the name of religion. Here, in this religion, man does not look at the world, but the world as a whole beholds itself and becomes an object as well as a subject of its own study. This is what is known as self-analysis, self-investigation and Self-knowledge. Until man reaches this consummation of wisdom, he cannot hope to be in peace in this world. This he may take both as a warning and a simple statement of his true position in the universe.

The Consciousness that universally envelops this wide range of Nature, in its completeness, is what we know as God. And this God who is the true God, naturally, cannot belong to Hinduism or Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, to this creed or that faith, but exists by His own right, as the indisputable explanation of all the meaning that may be seen in life, in the march of cosmic history. The knowers of this God are the saints and the sages, the masters and the adepts, the Yogis, and incarnations that the world hears of in the scriptures and chronicles, which it holds as dear even in moments of its intense distress.

This is the fundamental position and the grand goal. To attain this, the way is, in one word, self-restraint, which means the sublimation of the spatio-temporal urge in the form of sensory passion and mental distraction, on account of which man longs for physical pleasure and tosses about in life without the power of concentration on anything. Self-restraint is yoga, which is the practical outcome of this glorious spiritual vision of things. And this is the proper vision of life. With this knowledge one becomes, at once, master over the senses and the mind, good in character and conduct, charitable in disposition, affectionate to all beings, powerful in thought and will, and immensely sober in a heightened awareness, which may be called God-consciousness.

The above is the principle and the policy which devolves out of the knowledge (Jnana) of Truth, which transmutes all activity and process of becoming into eternal being. But life is action (Karma). The relation of knowledge to action has been a subject of long discussion and varied judgment ever since the time of the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita. These two scriptures of mankind may be regarded as the statements, respectively, of the vision of Reality as it is, and this vision translated into the processes of the world as life and action, in every stage of human relationship. While the world may be regarded as appearance, and to live in appearance a bondage, freedom consists in the experience of Reality attained by degrees of self-transcendence. While Reality has no degrees, the stages by which it is reached in consciousness have gradations of varying intensity. These steps of ascent are the stages of one’s rising through the degrees in which Reality is manifest in the world-process. Everything in the world is action, outwardly in Nature as well as inwardly in the individual. The world hurries forward to its destiny of self-completion, dragging with it the individuals which constitute its organic parts. The bondage of action, to which reference is usually made by teachers of the way of knowledge, is in one’s falsely imagining that individual initiative and effort is independent of the universal activity of Nature, which goes on everywhere, perpetually. The source of the sense of ‘I’-ness and ‘mine’-ness in regard to oneself and others in the world is this erroneous notion of one’s being independent of Nature, while really Nature includes everything. It is this untenable position maintained by the individual that is called ignorance (Ajnana). All suffering in the world may be finally attributed to this inexplicable stupidity in which everyone seems to be sunk, and freedom and happiness would spontaneously follow if this ignorance is to be dispelled by the knowledge of the fact that all action is a phase of universal evolution, and the role that the individual plays in the system of Nature is that an organic part would in respect of the whole which it subserves. This is the methodology of enlightened action (Karma Yoga), enunciated in the Bhagavadgita, which is the great gospel of life that has been bequeathed to humanity. To live wisely is neither to assert nor to deny action in the world, but to appreciate and evaluate it in its true relation to Nature’s cosmic processes, to which individual thought and action are no more than aspects of its own ways of working. To know this, and to act on the basis of this knowledge, is the whole wisdom of life, in whose light individual and social activity becomes a self-movement of the universe, entirely free from the reactions called pleasure and pain. The universe is God in eternal action.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnanda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

The Aim of Human Existence – Part 3/3)

The Aim of Human Existence – Part 3/3 by Swami Krishnananda

Created on Sunday, 31 March 2013 19:54

(Spoken at a Conference in Delhi on Sept. 22, 1980)

No success in any field of life can be achieved without tapas. Tapas is the guarantee for success in any walk of life, in any direction of any activity. We have been told that creation originated with the tapas of the Creator. The Nasadiya Sukta of the Veda tells us that the Supreme Creator performed a tapas when He willed this vast creation, and the whole of His creation is vibrant with the various degrees and manifestations of this supreme tapas. In this sense, we may say that the whole creation is only tapas, and the activities of nature in its generality and of people in its particularity are all engendered by a force which can be best described as tapas. I for one cannot believe that there is anything worthwhile in this world except tapas. But what is tapas? It is a well-known term which has been interpreted, explained and understood in perhaps as many ways as there are people in the world.

First of all, let us try to fix our attention on that supreme circumstance when the Creator Himself appeared to have been performing a tapas. What was the kind of tapas that the Father of the universe did at the time of willing this creation? It is a concentratedness of Universal thought. We can only say that it must have been something like a gathering up of the energies of the whole creation into a particular point of tapas: every particle of the whole of being was gathered up into a mighty energy intended for the performance of a function which had a cosmic purpose before itself. Such must have been the tapas of the Almighty – a universe concentrating on itself, as it were, for the actualisation of its future purposes in the form of this vast manifestation through the multitudinous degrees of its expression.

We cannot think what God did not think. We cannot be what God Himself is not. We cannot possess what is not God’s possession, and we cannot have a satisfaction which is not God’s, because this mighty Originator of this cosmos has somehow planted Himself in the heart of everything that He has created, so that He is the pumping house of even the littlest energy that is the cause of the movement of even an ant crawling. In this sense we may say that this great energy of the cosmic tapas of the Almighty is motivating even the movement of the littlest atom and the crawling of an insect – what to speak of the activities of ours?

Here I see a little light which may explain the significance behind Karma Yoga, a great teaching that we have in the Bhagavadgita. The meaning of Karma Yoga seems to be apparent before our eyes when we delve a little deep into the mystery of the way in which the original tapas of the Almighty is motivating every action in the universe. Thus it appears – it follows from this theorem, this thesis, this position – that our activities, our movements, even our thoughts, intentions and feelings are remote and perhaps rarefied reverberations of this original intention of the Creator when He willed this cosmos. So what is this Karma Yoga, and what does it amount to?

It appears to me that the whole of the gospel of the Bhagavadgita, which is the Karma Yoga that we hear of always, is our conscious participation in the intention of this supreme tapas of the Creator. So Karma Yoga is also a kind of tapas. And, any type of life which can be regarded as having an element of divinity in it has to be a form of tapas because wherever divinity is present, even in the least modicum of expression, God is present and, therefore, tapas is present.

This is one aspect of the meaning of the great word tapas. The other aspect is its practical implementation in our workaday life in this empirical world. Tapas is the force we generate in ourselves by which we approximate our personalities to the requirements of the divine ordination. Any movement, any activity, any thought, any feeling, any intention or purpose in our minds that may deviate from the intention of the supreme will of the Almighty is contrary to tapas, is the opposite of divinity, is not spirituality, not religion.

There is no object before God – a very important thing we have to remember always. God has nothing external to see with His eyes. And, therefore, whenever we see something outside us, we have to that extent dropped down from that status which can be regarded as in consonance with the existence of God. The consciousness of a world outside – even seeing an object or, much worse, getting attracted towards it by either love or hatred – is an utter fall from the status of divinity. And an extrication of oneself from this impulsion towards the objects of the senses, primarily psychologically, would be the performance of a tapas on our part.

Tapas has been mostly regarded in a very prosaic and gross manner as putting on tattered clothes, sleeping little, eating less, talking not, becoming frail in the body, and so on. This is the least that can be said about the spiritual significance of tapas. The concentration of consciousness in its direction towards this supreme tapas of the Almighty is the tapas that we can perform. It involves withdrawal of the senses, of course. The restraint of the senses from the operation in terms of the objects outside is, no doubt, tapas;but here we may go wrong in a little bit of enthusiasm, misinterpreting and misconstruing the meaning of this process of self-withdrawal.

The restraint of the senses, or the withdrawal of the senses from contact with objects, does not mean closing the eyes or plugging the ears. It is an adjustment of consciousness. Ultimately, what we call sense activity is a movement of consciousness. It is not merely an operation of the eyeballs or an activity of the eardrums. There is an inward apparatus, an inner structure of our personality, which urges itself forward, outside itself, to come in contact with those other than its own self. I told you there is no other than Itself for God. So whenever there is an urge towards an ‘other than one’s own self’, there is an undivine activity. And so tapas as a divine procedure that we have to adopt in our divine lives would amount to a re-turning of the consciousness in a manner which cannot easily be described in words or language. It is a circus feat, to some extent. It is very difficult to understand, very difficult to explain what it actually means to turn the consciousness away from its objectification of movement and centralise it in that status which can be in consonance with that mighty will of the Creator, the supreme tapas that He performed.

If we can perform tapas and be examples of tapas, then we will succeed in every one of our pious activities and our endeavours. But if there is even a subtle desire lurking inside to have a little bit of name, fame, recognition, authority, power and money, or even a word of thanks, then that would not be the quality of tapas that we require.

To describe Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj as a founder or a president of the Divine Life Society is to describe him in the poorest manner possible because he was not just a founder of the Divine Life Society; he was himself something, even if the Divine Life Society were not to be there. He was a man of God who lived a life of utter divine vision, a descent of a power which originated this universe. And he was himself a completeness and a comprehensiveness which can be best described as integration. So to lead the divine life would certainly be to emulate the great example of this great master. To emulate him is not to found a Divine Life Society or to open a branch. That is a secondary matter. To emulate him would be to live as he lived, to think as he thought and to be as he was, to have the same purpose in our minds that was his main intention in his very descent into this world. I do not believe that he had a world outside him, though it looked as if he was a man of hectic activity and had association with every blessed thing in the world.

As the Yoga Vasishtha puts it, men of God are maha-kartas, maha-bhogtas and maha-tyagis. This is a very interesting description of great masters given in the Yoga Vasishtha. They are great doers, great enjoyers and great renouncers. There is nothing that they cannot do, there is nothing that they cannot enjoy, and there is nothing that they cannot renounce. This is to be a maha-karta, maha-bhogta and maha-tyagi, and such was the characteristic of the personality of the great master Swami Sivananda.

So to be a disciple of this great saint and sage, to be a follower of his ideals, would be first and foremost to live in that centrality of awareness and purpose for which he came to this world and which he demonstrated in his personal life. And, to repeat his own words, it would be to consider God as first, the world as the next and one’s own self as the last. This pithy maxim of his is a total gospel, a complete message and a whole instruction to every one of us.

We are today at the closing session of this conference which has been organised to create a wave of spirituality in the world. It has no other intention, and it should not have any other intention. And this wave of spirituality, this God-consciousness, can be spread in the world only if it can be generated within ourselves, first and foremost. Unless we are powerhouses in ourselves, we cannot conduct electricity to others. It is essential, therefore, for every one of us seated here or everyone who is associated with this organisation and conference to gird up one’s loins to be honestly and sincerely fixed in one’s attention towards the achievement of this purpose of, first of all, creating a force of the spirit in oneself – which cannot be achieved unless one is a tapasvin, to come to the point again. We have to be great tapasvins, and to be a tapasvin is not to tie the hair on the head or to drop the cloth and walk with bare feet. These are not the points. The important thing is what we are thinking throughout the day in our minds. You have been thinking something from morning to night since many days. Take stock of all these thoughts. “Before – yesterday, today, many days before – many thoughts, many feelings passed through me. What were they? Have they anything to do with the purpose for which I am supposed to be in this world, and for which I have come here? Or are they erratic thoughts, aberrant ideas with no relationship whatsoever with the intended ideals or the adumbrated purpose of the conference?”

There is no possibility of any kind of demonstration before God. It is an utter impossibility because any kind of show, any kind of external appearance is not called for in a world which has been generated by the tapas of the Supreme Almighty and which is presently working even in the least of creations, as I mentioned to you. So you cannot forget this fact. Therefore, to be a tapasvin or a Divine Lifer, or to be a devotee and a follower of Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj or a Divine Life Conference member means being a great example in one’s own self of a life divine which may be appreciated in the eyes of God.

I have the habit of creating an internal atmosphere in my own self by placing myself in the presence of the Almighty. It is difficult to imagine what it is. But one can, with some effort, place oneself in the presence of this Mighty Omnipresence. “Before this vision of this multi-faced Being, what is my value? What is the certificate that I can receive from this all-visioned Being?” God must be seeing us even now and He must be thinking about us just now. And your conscience just now can tell you what God is thinking about you. Don’t say, “I do not know what God is thinking about me.” Your deepest secret recesses of the heart, the conscience as we call it, will tell you what God is thinking about you. And that you really are, and not what other people say – not your document, not your paper, not your certificate, not anything that anyone thinks about you is what you are. But what is lurking in your deepest conscience and secretly speaks is the voice of God; and that, perhaps, is what God thinks about you. Place yourself in this position in meditation, and beware of the future.

Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was never tired of saying that death is a great teacher. In the Katha Upanishad Yama, the Lord of Death, teaches the great message of the spirit to Nachiketas. Naturally, nothing can be a better teacher than death, because death is the leveller of all beings. “Sceptre and crown will tumble down,” as the poet says, and the king and the beggar will sleep the same sleep. Such is the activity of the Supreme Annihilator of all things. Who can be a better instructor for you into the mysteries of things than He? Death is a great teacher whose orders may be received at any moment. You must pursue learning and accumulate the worthwhile treasures of life as if you are immortals here. Don’t say, “I am dying tomorrow; why should I study anything?” You must imagine that you are immortal and going to live forever. So pursue your studies and increase your wisdom, knowledge and learning. But pursue the path of righteousness as if death has caught hold of the crest of your hair and is strangling your throat just now. If death were to come just now and hold your neck, what would be your thought at that moment? Let that thought be the perpetual thought throughout the day, because death can catch hold of one’s throat at any moment of time. And it is futile to imagine that this warrant will be received by us after fifty or sixty years, etc. History is a lesson to us. So the great master’s teaching is that we should be vigilant and finally we are here alone in this world. This is a great saying of mighty wisdom.

Spirituality arises in our heart and springs forth from within us when we recognise our aloneness in this world. Many of our artificial activities and the so-called movements and appearances are due to the existence of other people around us. We cannot be natural persons before other people. We are natural only in the bathroom or when we are alone in the bedroom. Otherwise, we are always artificial. We cannot think what we want to think, we cannot speak what we want to speak, and we cannot be what we want to be. It is very difficult to live in the world. But we are absolutely alone, really speaking. That we have friends and associations is an illusion before us. “Adavante cha yannasti vartamane ani tat tatha” is an old saying. That which was not in the beginning and will not be in the end is not in the middle either. If we had no friends and we brought nothing when we came to this world, and if we can have no friends and we shall not take anything when we go from this world, we have no friends and possessions even now. We are wholly deluded to imagine that we have friends and associations and supporters in this world. A day will come when we will be knocked down from under our feet and we will be utterly helpless in this flood of the movements of the world; so instead of expecting this kick from nature which can come any day in our life, it is better to be honourably prepared to live a life of loneliness.

Again I come to this point of being alone – a word which was emphasised by great mystics like Plotinus when he said that it is a flight of the alone to the Alone, while describing the nature of spiritual life. The alone flies to the Alone. When I say ‘the alone’, you must be able to understand the meaning of it. It does not mean that you can be inside your room and lock the door and then you become alone. Not so. Here again, it is the aloneness of the spirit. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” We must understand what it is to be poor in spirit. Our aloneness can be achieved even here, just now, in the conference. It may look that we are in the midst of many people and, therefore, this is not aloneness. To be alone, we have to go to the forest behind Vishwanath Mandir or we must be in our meditation rooms. Here, how can we be alone? Even when we are in the forest, we may not be alone. Even in our single meditation room with closed doors, we may not be alone. And we can be alone even in the thick of a city because aloneness is, again, an attitude of consciousness. It is a recognition within oneself of one’s spiritual placement in the context of creation, where external relationships are uncalled for.

To again come to the point where I began, there is no external object before God’s eyes. Therefore, this great aloneness, which God was and God is, is reflected in every aloneness of each individual particularity. God is reflected everywhere and in everything, and His characteristics are present everywhere. So while His tapas is also reverberating through every one of us in every form of activity and purposive movement, His aloneness is also reflected in every one of us. Therefore, when a time for it comes, we feel disgusted with everything. A day comes in one’s life when one begins to with feel, “I am fed up with everything. I had enough of everything. I had a surfeit. Let me be alone.”

This idea to be alone is a reflection of the aloneness of the Absolute, and it is not capable of achievement merely by moving geographically, physically, from one place to another place, because this aloneness is a characteristic of consciousness. It is a status of our being, where we are able to coordinate our existence, our being with the Almighty Aloneness – Aloneness with a capital A – in the presence of which outside persons do not exist and nothing can be. In this context of our inner communion or association with this mighty Aloneness of God, we are alone even now in the apparent multitude of the audience or conference here. So one can be a great tapasvin in one minute, just now, without having to wash one’s face or take a bath and sit in the meditation room, because tapas is an immediate action of consciousness and it is a decision taken by it, a determination to place itself in a particular context of this vast creation of God. We must first of all realise the context of our being in the world, our placement in society, our relationship with anything and, finally, the relevance of our present individual existence to the vast creation of God. This is to achieve suddenly a status of inward tapas and to be alone in a mood of worship of God.

This inward attunement, about which I spoke to you in these few words, perhaps is the inner core of spirituality, the essence of religion, and, in my humble opinion, this is the great intended message of Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. God bless you all.

[Extracted from Swami Krishnanda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]

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