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Man's Destiny in the Universe
Man’s Destiny in the Universe by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Monday 3 February 2014 21:04
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I
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.
II
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 Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Aim of Human Existence – Part 3/3
The Aim of Human Existence – Part 2/3 by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Saturday 1 February 2014 18:22
*READ MORE \* The Aim of Human Existence – Part 2/3
(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 Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Aim of Human Existence – Part 2/3
The Aim of Human Existence – Part 2/3 by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Saturday 1 February 2014 18:22
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(Spoken at a Conference in Delhi on Sept. 21, 1980)
We are still human beings, and we cannot be regarded as anything more than that. Whatever be the form that we give to our impulsions from within which rush forth in the name of the ideals of life, religion, or spirituality, man cannot cease to be man. Whatever grows from man is also of the characteristics of man. The thoughts that arise from the mind of man cannot be other than what they are. A divine thought cannot arise from a human base.
Suffice it to say that we need not be too enthusiastic and be carried away with the idea that we are anywhere near God or spirituality or religion, in spite of the noises that people make in the name of God Himself – because God is not afraid of noises, and He may not be afraid of even our religions, much less of our spiritualities. He has managed to maintain His position secure and will not brook any shaking of His position by the thundering of our voices. This is the crux of the position I tried to pose before you so that it is perhaps wisdom on our part to realise our incapacities, if we are really incapacitated.
Wisdom is the acceptance of a position which is really there, and not the assumption of a different position altogether. Thus, if we plumb deeper into the positions that we found ourselves in as a conclusion of the analysis we conducted earlier, we seem to be nowhere near any satisfactory solution to our problems.
But I also sounded a note that there is something in us which would not accept a total defeat, in spite of the circumstances which will pour only rains of defeat and nothing else down on our heads. We have an enigmatic personality. Nothing can be more inexplicable than the personality of man. This is because both heaven and earth, paradise and hell, are blended together in this admixture called human personality. While the roars of hell are heard by us in the form of the lives that we live here, there is also, at the same time, the perfume of heaven which is wafting its glory in an unsuspected and imperceptible manner, coming before us as the idea of perfection and infinitude.
Philosophical disquisitions often have the tendency to hold the opinion that the idea of God is, after all, an idea, and an idea need not be a reality. This is a very critical point which one has to face in deeper analysis of human situation. Can an idea be identified with existence, or does an idea merely remain an idea isolated from what we can regard as true existence? There is a peculiar mystery behind the very idea of perfection arising in our minds. The mystery is this, which we have to analyse further with a little bit of caution and subtlety of thought. The idea that the idea of God may be an idea is also an idea. So, we are not sure as to where we are standing.
I will explain to you how humorous this situation is by giving you an example which will make you laugh. There were two mountaineers. It appears they climbed to the top of the range of Alps in Switzerland, and somehow they lost themselves. They were on the peaks of a mountain, but they did not know where they were standing. They looked around, and everywhere there was ice and mountainous peaks. One of the mountaineers wanted to know the location in which they were standing. “On which particular spot on the range of these mountains are standing?” His friend opened up a map, a geographical layout. He looked at the various points of space in the region of the Alps shown on the map. He looked at a point and said, “Friend, I have now found out where we are standing. Look at that mountain top over there. Do you see it? There we are standing.” How can a man be standing at a place at a distance, to which he is pointing? This seems to be a very funny answer that he gave, which might have satisfied his friend. But while there is the satisfaction of having received an answer, there is a query which arises out of the very answer itself due to the peculiarity of the answer and the mystery that is hidden behind it.
The notion of God will be accepted to be a simple notion and, therefore, we need not acquiesce in the attribution of any reality or existence to this idea or notion of the existence of God or perfection. Accepted. But the refusal to accept the presence of any reality or the element of existence in the idea or notion of God is an idea which will not again agree that it also should be identified with a mere idea minus existence. This is a very great subtle point that is hidden behind the workings of our minds.
A denial of a thing does not wish to be denied itself. If that denial is denied, its value goes, and it ceases to be a denial. So the idea that the idea of God cannot be equated with existence cannot be an idea merely, minus existence. It has to have some existence, some reality. Otherwise, we run into an infinite regress of arguments where we do not come to any conclusion at all. And this inconclusive way of arguing is called logical fallacy. It is not logic at all. It is not argument. It is not any acceptable statement. The insistence on the preceding idea, namely the idea of the refusal to accept the idea of God as identical with reality or existence, is a proof that the idea of God is identical with the existence of God.
Here we are in a very satisfactory position. We seem to have won a victory over this battle of philosophical controversies and theological disquisitions and religious warfare. Somehow we seem to have won the battle because, in the midst of this conglomeration of inconclusive arguments and positions assumed in religion, theology and philosophy, we seem to have a stand of our own, a status which cannot be rooted out from its position – namely, the impossibility of isolating thought from reality, idea from existence. And, therefore, an idea of perfection has somehow, perforce, to have a relation to the existence of this perfection. Therefore, such a perfection has to be.
Yesterday we were contemplating the implications of the answer to the questions as to the aim of human existence. We seem to be somewhere near the answer to this question when we go further around the line of approach we have taken today – namely, the idea of perfection – which is another way of putting the same thing when we say the idea of infinity. The conception of the infinite is the same as the idea of perfection. The recognition of the finitude of an individual or the limitation of any particular object in the world is, at the same time, an acceptance of the presence of a larger than the finite. In philosophical parlance, this is called the argument of the contingency of things. The contingency of what is mundane proves the non-contingency of what is not mundane.
The Buddha seems to have given his final message when he was departing from this world: “Ananda, how could there be a thing compounded, made of parts, and limited in its nature unless there is something which is uncompounded, unlimited in its nature, and not finite in its structure? How could there be contingency of the performances of nature and the movements of the world if a non-contingent explanation is not there? How could there be any movement unless there is a point towards which the movement is directed?” Every movement is perhaps a direction taken by things towards an unmoved Mover or a causeless Cause, a point where every directing motion has to find its conclusion.
So with the movement of the world in the form of the transiency and the contingency of things in the finitude of structure we, included in this performance of nature, seem to be moving towards this utter perfection. So we have the answer to the question of what is the aim of human existence. The aim of human existence is the aim of anything, for the matter of that. If man is supposed to be made in the image of God, the Perfect Being, everything else also seems to have been made in the very same image. The image of perfection can be discovered as the root and the heart of any little thing or particle of nature. As man speaks and no one else seems to speak, he speaks only about himself and he has little to say about anybody else.
All religion is manmade, and all the notions of spirituality and the pursuit of God, etc., are the productions of the workings of the human mind. Therefore, man always speaks about man only and to us the world is nothing but a world of mankind, humanity; there is nothing else for us. This is as it has to be, and there cannot be any other shape that our thoughts can take – because, as I began by saying, man can think only as man and he cannot think like a frog or any other thing that can be there in the world.
This shows that our ideas cannot be regarded as complete ideas because there are other aspects which are required to complete the ideas that are human – though in this incomplete idea that is human, there is the presence of an implication or a suggestiveness which takes it to a perfection beyond itself. Every individual finitude is a suggestion to the existence of that which is beyond itself. Therefore, we are only suggestions of what is beyond us and we are not complete in ourselves.
An indication, or a point, is present in every one of us. A pointer to a destination that is beyond us seems to be a light that we are enshrining within ourselves. We are vehicles carrying a meaning that escapes the notice of the eyes but persists and is recognised by an urge within ourselves. It is more than what the reports of the senses can give us. Far superior to the indications given by our mind and reason, it is present as a suggestion beyond reason itself. Man is more than man, though he cannot be anything else but man. This is the double indication, the significance of man’s personality which is earth and heaven at the same time.
That is why man has been a failure and is also a great success. He has been an utter defeat in his pursuits of the values of life, yet he is a great success as a masterpiece in the creation of God. This is because this utterly defeated puny brain of the frail individuality of man is carrying in its bosom the suggestion of the presence of a tremendous immortal infinitude. Whether God exists or not is a different matter; that man should be able to feel the necessity for the existence of such perfection as God is a great certificate that can be given to the capacity of the human mind. That man seems to be such a puny dust particle, as it were, in this tremendous fearsome astronomical universe is one aspect of the matter. But that this little dust of man should be able to conceive the magnitude of the fearsome expanse of the astronomical cosmos is the greatness of man. That which crushes, unconscious of the fact that it is crushing something, is not superior to that little thing which knows that it is being crushed. A man who may be pounded to dust by a huge mountain falling on his head is greater than the mountain, because the magnitude of the mountain is unconscious that it is falling on man but the man is aware that he is crushed under the weight of a huge mountain. The awareness of defeat is superior to the unawareness of success. So even a defeat carries within itself a superiority because of the presence of a light in the form of an awareness of the presence of defeat. There is no point in having success without having an awareness of it. An unconscious king is not in any way superior to a conscious beggar.
Here is again a point which raises itself as a luminosity in the mind of man. Again, to reiterate the point, man is a mystery, and he is not an equation of mathematics. With this mystery that man is, man can know his destination. Man is supposed to be superior to the animal merely because of this peculiar aptitude and endowment that he knows the purposiveness of his activities, while the automaton of an animal is divested of this principle of the awareness of a purpose.
A bulldozer moves and a man also moves, but there is a difference. The bulldozer does not know why it moves and where it moves, but the man knows why he moves. This is the difference between a helpless little man and a terrific bulldozer that can crush anything.
Thus, the might of the magnitude of the universe need not terrify man’s finitude, because the consciousness of finitude is more important than the unconsciousness of the expanse of the astronomical cosmos. Here is the crucial point we must contemplate and find time to meditate upon to suggest the nature of the final aim of our little activities.
I feel confident that these few words will stimulate your further imaginations and philosophical enquiries in the direction of this great problem of human existence. And it appears that in our little limited finitudes of our little personalities in this little audience, we carry within each one of us a cosmic meaning. These little nobodies that we are, these small insignificant nothings that we appear to be are moving about carrying within our bosoms an uplifted light and treasure in the form of a cosmic significance.
We do not seem to be the little mortals that we are. We are putting on a mask of finitude and mortality and bodily being, but we do not seem to be that. This is our hope and this is our satisfaction. This is our ultimate aim, if at all we can call it an aim or a purpose of life. We do not seem to be men sitting here; we are not women; we are not particularities. We are little bodies or caskets in which is treasured the value of the whole of creation. The might and the omnipresence of the Almighty Creator is speaking through every little individuality of ours. In this sense we may say that each one of us is made in the image of God; the Bible is right. Thus there is a great, glorious future before us. We have not been defeated, and nobody can defeat us. Our heritage and our future is a final success. The bell rings, and we shall succeed.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Aim of Human Existence – Part 1/3
The Aim of Human Existence – Part 1/3 by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Friday 31 January 2014 15:01
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(Spoken at a Conference in Delhi on Sept. 20, 1980)
We have been asked to express our ideas on today’s theme, the aim of human existence. It would appear that an impertinent world of mankind is seeking a pertinent answer to its questions when it asks for means of security and safety from imminent dangers that can threaten its existence from various corners of the world. Mankind seems to be asking for a gain for which it has not worked and does not intend to strive; yet it is not fully conscious of a gulf that seems to be there between what is sought, and the direction in which mankind is moving. We seem to be placing ourselves in a world of quandary.
Is there anything existent that you see with your eyes? We see only movements of things and a decomposition of bodies – a transformation of the structure of things – so that there is visible before our eyes a continuous incessant restless movement rather than a being or an existence of anything. To conceive of an aim of existence there should be a pith of reality, a kernel of significance beneath and behind the vicissitudes of transformation, movement, and the restlessness of life.
The principle of existence cannot be seen with our eyes. What we see, what is tangible to our senses, is a process which is the historical movement of nature, which again includes everything that mankind’s values are. What we are, what anything is, is a part of nature; and the purposes of nature are also our purposes. We cannot have an aim which is different from the aim of nature, because we are constituents of a vast setup called natural phenomenon.
We too are phenomena because we are born, we grow, we decay, and by a process of decomposition we seem to be annihilated totally. We do not hear of the being of anyone who has been physically decomposed and wiped out of existence. Where is being, and where is existence? Anything can be reduced to its ultimate constituents, which appear to demonstrate a character within themselves which is far from anything that can be designated as being. It is not for nothing that a genius like Buddha proclaimed that the world is a procession and not a being. It is transiency and not existence. It is death rather than life. This was a strange picture painted before us by stalwarts who experimented with these techniques of investigating phenomena and found nothing at their base.
The struggle for a meaning behind life, a search for values which are permanent in their nature, is no doubt ingrained in our being, which is essentially becoming. We have no idea in our minds to be annihilated at any time, though it appears that nothing can stand this ultimate requirement of utter transformation to the point of non-existence. What we see with our eyes does not seem to be capable of giving an answer to what our heart seeks. Our perception is sensory; and our arguments, which are intellectual, do not seem to collaborate with the demands of a point within our own selves which refuses to be reduced to a point of becoming or transiency, because the recognition of the transiency of things itself is an answer to the question of whether there is anything called existence at all. Transiency does not recognize transiency, a procession does not know there is a procession, and death cannot explain life. Thus it is that it appears to us. There is a point significant in our own lives which is qualitatively different from the quantitative expanse of the life that is perceptible as phenomenon before our eyes; and our dread of the world’s movements these days is a direct consequence of our identification of being with becoming.
The core of our existence has got somehow or other mixed up with the vicissitudes of perceptible phenomena; and as a lion can become a sheep by living in the midst of sheep, the principle that seeks an answer to the question of the aims of existence, getting identified with a process which cannot give this answer, is finding itself in a helpless position. And while we weep contemplating our woes, not finding an answer to the problems raised by life in its totality, we yet seek an answer to the problems.
We, therefore, seem to be living in a world which speaks in two languages. A world of phenomena, the life that we live as bodies, as individuals, as men and women, as human beings, as things, as stuff, as visible objects – all these, beyond which we are not able to see anything or recognize anything, appear to comprehend the whole of existence. No one on earth can ever imagine that there can be anything outside or beyond this vast conglomeration of nature which describes itself as a drama of tumult and tempestuous movement in a direction which is not visible to anyone’s eyes. Thus, we are lifted up by a cyclone which we call life, a hurricane that is driving us in a direction we know not what. Thus it is that we have lost our moorings and the very ground under our feet is shaking. It is being cut by the very forces of nature.
In this predicament, no sense can be there in asking a question what the aim of existence is – because there is no existence. There seems to be only the parading of the drama of non-existence. We are living non-existence, rather than existence; and in this enactment of life which is nothing but a series of pictures of the poses of non-existence, existence cannot be discovered. It is just not there. But we are not able to reconcile ourselves in spite of this unfortunate and hopeless state of affairs into which we have been thrown by causes unknown; and there is a voice speaking from within us from a realm which refuses to get identified with the picture of this drama of life we call phenomena, we call bodily existence, we call anything that we can regard as worthwhile in life. Nothing we regard as valuable or worthwhile in life can escape the clutches of these tempestuous movements of nature which is aiming at the destruction of everything; and it has no pity on anyone.
How is it that we are placed in this circumstance? Without knowing how we have landed ourselves in this hopeless predicament of a complete subjection to forces which have taken possession of us, we cannot know what the aim of human existence is.
So, like a diagnosis of a medical case, we may have to conduct an incisive analysis of this utterly hopeless state of affairs in which every one of us finds himself or herself, and perhaps we may have to be doctors of our own selves. Because of the peculiar enigmatic fact that we are subjects as well as objects, we are patients and physicians at the same time. Our malady is of such a nature that no other physician looking at us from outside can investigate into our problems. Our problems are inseparable from an apparent being of ours which is asking this question as to what the aim of human existence is.
A peculiar sort of existence appears to be affirming its own values in the midst of this din and bustle and the noise which nature is creating in this drama of her activities; and the noise and the clamour of nature is so bursting and breaking our ears that we have found it impossible to listen to the voice that speaks, in a different language altogether, saying that nature is not an explanation of herself. Life is unable to explain itself. Nature, if she has to be identified with this dance of the Kali which is before our eyes, is not an explanation of herself. Kali can be explained only by Siva, and not by herself. She dances and dances to the utter destruction and annihilation of all things. But why should there be annihilation? Who asked her to dance? Why should there be this movement of nature? Why should there be anything at all in the way in which it is moving or conducting itself? Why anything should be there at all is the final question before us. Why should we be existing here? “Why should there be existence itself?” is the final question. There cannot be another question beyond that. Every question drives itself forward to the nature of existence. And why should we exist? Why should we not not-exist? Why are we afraid of annihilation?
We were told by some of our speakers of the dread that is before us from the future world, the possibility of the utter annihilation of even the particles of sand. But who injects this fear into our bodies? The dread itself cannot be the answer to this question. The source of fear cannot be equated with the complexion of the sources of fear. We fear death because we are immortal. That is the final answer. It is the great proof of the immortality of what we essentially are. The fear of death demonstrates the immortality of the soul of things. Otherwise, we will not fear death. If death is our nature we cannot be afraid of death, because nature cannot be afraid of its own self. Death is not our nature; therefore, something else which has wrongly got identified with this peculiar phenomenon of destruction is shuddering at the bottom of itself under the impression that it is perhaps going to be annihilated by the processes of nature’s movements.
A question arises again of a peculiar nature within us: that which is not subject to destruction cannot fear death, and that which is death itself also cannot fear death. Who is afraid of death, then? Not the immortal soul, because we have already said it is immortal, and nothing that is in nature, because it is nothing but destruction. Here is a peculiar inexplicable, indescribable something which can be called only ‘something’ and not by any other designation. There is a mix-up of things that has taken place.
It is not true that the fear of death has arisen from the bottom of our immortal being, because it is a misnomer to say the immortal is afraid of death. It is also not true that this fear has arisen from our bodies, because the bodies are subject to destruction. They have to be annihilated into powder, into the final constituents of what nature is made of. So from where has this fear arisen? Can you answer this question?
Now, questions lead to further questions and we are not anywhere near the final answer, evidently. The incapacity of the resources of man to find an answer to the problems of life is the fear in us, fear in anybody; and what can be a greater fear than this? We have a great question before us, and we are unable to receive an answer. Not I, not you, not anyone in the world can give an answer to this question that the whole of the world has raised before itself, a large question of the nature of existence: Why should anything be what it is? Why should there be a tree, why should there be a mountain, why should there be a man, why should there be a river? Why should there be anything as it is? We cannot answer these questions unless we are in a position to transfer ourselves into the position of a circumstance or a situation which is not involved in this procession of phenomena – due to the workings of which, these questions have arisen.
The question cannot answer itself. The answer has to come from a source which is other than the source of the question or the nature of the question. If we are involved in the circumstances which have raised the question, we cannot answer the question. As I have been telling you oftentimes, a justice in the court cannot pass a judgment if he is one of the clients himself. We are the clients, and yet we want an answer from a judicial source – which is an utter impossibility under the existing circumstances. Mankind does not see any aim before itself. Which of you can say that you have an aim before you? We seem to be drifting from day to day like a leaf that is moving the way the wind blows, without knowing where. Only the wind knows where it is going; the leaf cannot know. And we are the leaves and not the wind that directs us. The wind is the purpose of nature, which is hidden from our view somehow or other suddenly by the tactics which nature is employing purposely – to deceive us, perhaps. Why she wants to deceive us, we do not know. She has a plan for us. Anyhow, we are not prepared to be deceived always. She can deceive everybody for some time and some people always, but not everybody always.
So we are now somehow awakened to a peculiar uncomfortable situation where we cannot rest in the place where we are. That’s why these questions have arisen, which are the agenda of this conference. Why should there be a question at all, or a pose as to the nature of the aim of human existence? Is there an aim at all? Let us put this question. Before considering the answer – the nature of the reply to the question as to the aim of human existence – may we find a few minutes to think over this other aspect of it: Is there an aim at all, or is there no aim? Who told you there is an aim? Which idea tells you? Who put this notion into your head that there is an aim? Did you read it in a book? Is it because somebody told you that there is an aim, or do you have some reason behind you to conclude that there is an aim? If you have a reason behind you to conclude that there is an aim, do you perceive that aim? Do you pursue it also in your life?
Our daily activities will show that there does not seem to be much relevance between the seeking of an answer to this question and the nature of our daily movements in life. We do not consciously do anything, it appears. We are driven by impulses. We are forced under certain circumstances to act in a particular manner; and if this is true, we cannot say that we have an aim before us. The aim is merely to be subjected to the mandate of that power which compels us to move in a particular direction. Well, this cannot be called an aim. This is slavery.
So we do not seem to be able to perceive any aim in our life by opening our eyes, or listening to any sound through our ears, or from any sensory operation. And intellectually, rationally, we do not seem to be much better off because our reason pr intellect is only a tool to confirm what the senses are saying; and if the judge is there only to confirm what the evidence is reporting, his presence is uncalled for.
Today our intellects are not superior, qualitative judges of the reports of the senses. They are only quantitative sieves which sift the evidences coming though the senses and give us qualitatively the same thing that the senses are giving. The judgment of the reason of man is not qualitatively superior in any way to the quality seen in the reports received through the senses. But a judgment is supposed to be qualitatively superior to the quantitative nature of the evidences or the reports received from the other sources. Unfortunately, it is not so – though it ought to be so.
Philosophers have stumbled upon this difficulty and have gone to the extent of finding out if there is any qualitative superiority in our reason, in our intellects, in our rationality, beyond what the senses give us as a quantity of information. We have failed utterly. We have found nothing; we see nothing. But there is a peculiar feature in our reason, or rationality; and our question that is refusing to be ignored finally, whatever be the difficulty in answering it. The process of human history is nothing but the insistence of this question to receive an answer and the failure of humanity to provide an answer. If humanity had provided an answer to this insistent question, the world would have vanished altogether by this time. But no one has been able to provide an answer to this question, and the question refuses to be ignored. It is persisting in wanting an answer. So there is a tug of war going on in the form of human history or natural history – namely, the conflict between an insistence for an answer to the question, and the inability of the world to answer it.
These sessions, The Divine Life Conference or whatever you may call it, are not leisure hours where you can listen to tales and stories from old men. Evidently, some serious questions in your minds have driven you here from different corners of the world, and I am sure you are seeking answers to these questions. You will not be able to receive these answers by merely moving about on the surface and hunting for gurus, reading books, and jumping from place to place. Nothing of the kind will be a solution. You will find that you are not yet ready to receive this answer. This is the reason why you are not able to find it, though the answer is pouring itself forth on your heads like a flood in the form of the meaning that is hidden behind the vicissitudes of nature. The transiency of things carries within it a meaning that is beyond the transiency of things. The ugly sight of nature’s activities secretly enshrines a beauty which can be visualized by an eye which is also your endowment, together with the physical eyes or fleshy eyes that you have, but which you have thrown aside and on which you have thrown dust and rubbish on account of a persistent habit of listening to the clamorous pressures of human society which has its own rules and regulations, falsely carrying the insignia of an answer to these questions.
And, we have religions before us. Religions tell us that they have an answer to these questions, but they have failed to give an answer. They have become mockeries. They have become only showpieces. They remain only as placards in conferences. Religions have become a part and parcel of this phenomenon of transiency. They have themselves got drowned in the flood, and instead of finding an answer, we have to give an answer to the question of why they drowned themselves at all. So pitiable is the state of affairs of man, of anything in this world.
It is difficult within a few minutes to go into even a minor detail of this major problem – to unlock the mysteries before you or inject a vision of intuition into your heads – inasmuch as it involves various factors which have to be considered and aspects which have to be solved. You have to spare a lot of time for going deep into this mystery without getting prejudiced or having a premeditated conception in your head, or being under the notion that you are already on the right path and that every other person is a fool. All these ideas may have to be shed. You may have to be Reborn, with a capital ‘r’, if you are to receive an answer to this tremendous question of what the aim of human existence is.
In an introductory remark to this main subject, I have used all the time, and I feel it is worthwhile. I postpone this theme for another day when it will be possible to continue the subject. Then we may be in a position to receive a brighter light in the midst of this tremendous darkness of oblivion and confusion which we call the world, which we call humanity, which we call anything worthwhile in this world. I conclude with these words, and I hope to see you again another day for the same purpose.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
An Analysis of Our Perception of Historical Personalities
An Analysis of Our Perception of Historical Personalities by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Thursday 30 January 2014 15:04
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(Discourse given on the occasion of Dakshinamurthy Jayanti in 1966)
In the evaluation of things, we human beings look from the standpoint of our mental functions, and are perforce obliged to ignore certain aspects that are not covered by the functions of our mind. We have, for example, the historical way of looking at things and examining whether such and such personality was a historical person. You might have heard and read about discussions on whether great seers and Avataras are historical personalities – whether they really existed or whether they are concoctions or imaginations of the devout mind. There are people even today who are certain that Christ was not a historical person, that Krishna was not a historical figure, and so on.
Whether or not we gain anything by knowing if they are historical or not, this attitude of the human mind gives us a clue to the manner in which it works. To the physician, the patient is only a case. He takes the patient as an occasion to study certain incidences of physical and psychological phenomena; and there is often the complaint that doctors do not treat their patients as human beings, but as cases. This is also the case with the lawyers.
Looking at human circumstances with a dispassionate attitude, the conditions under which the human mind looks upon things of the world as historical existences should give us an occasion to study the nature of the human situation itself. It is many a time imagined that the historical point of view is the correct one, and this is why we make such bifurcations between history, mythology, theology, Puranas, and so on. Taking for granted that our historical perspective is the complete perspective corresponding to facts, and the unknown personalities and incarnations did not exist, today I wish to make an investigation into this psychological situation which takes for granted the historical as the real and the other aspects as the figurative, or the unreal.
Whether a personality did exist, whether you exist or whether I exist or whether we are historical personalities, is a question to be answered; and when this question is answered properly to the satisfaction of logic and common sense, then, I believe, the general question as to the historicity of any person can be answered. If we can justifiably and intelligently answer this question whether you and I are historical persons at all, we can answer the question as to whether Christ was a historical personality, or whether Krishna or Buddha were historical personalities.
We have a very narrow view of things. Naturally, the imperfect existence cannot be the source of perfect consciousness. The imperfect perspective of the human mind cannot be expected to give a complete picture of things in their true state of affairs. It was during the last few discourses that I tried to point out the cosmic significance that things in the world have, in addition to the historical and the isolated significances that they seem to have in our social and national activities. There is a habit of the mind by which it looks at things in a linear fashion, in a line or a straight vision, as it were, as a series of objects, a line in space and time, and this is what may be succinctly called the three-dimensional perspective or the individualistic perception of the human mind – to look at things as bodies, as isolated existences, with the feeling that you and I are different, that things are isolated from one another in such a manner that there cannot be intrinsic or organic connections among them. This is perhaps the historical way of things. There is no organic connection between events in history. They are mathematically or causally related, so that one follows the other. Studies of history reveal that history is a procession of events, one following the other and one bearing a connection with the other, and history is not a chaotic happening, as many wrong minds would be apt to think.
History is a study from two angles of vision. One vision is like that of a student in college. How does a student study history? Somebody does something and somebody else does something else after some time, and the connection of all this is history. But there is a philosophical significance in history which materialistic minds are not able to discover. This is the philosophy of history, wherein the causal connection of the events which constitute history are discovered, and history is not seen as a combination of bifurcated events. History is not that something happened somewhere, and something else happened somewhere else, and somebody wrote about it in books. History has a wider meaning, a profounder significance.
Now, both these ways of studying history are defective, because they consider personalities to be individual existences. It is a study of personalities appearing in different times and disappearing after the performance of certain deeds. So history is the record of personalities and their actions. But what are these personalities? What is their importance, and how do we evaluate the nature of their existence? We will find we are hard pressed, cornered, and we cannot answer the question. All questions can be answered only superficially, and not in completeness. When we try to completely answer whether a person existed historically, we will find that we are cornered; and we will realise that we are cornered when our mind cannot go deeper than the historical level.
It is futile to study the nature of a person without knowing his health, his social status, his mental condition, his acumen, and so on. There are many factors involved in the existence of a person, and all these have to be taken into consideration in a study. And, a historical person is a citizen of existence as such. By ‘historical’ we mean really existent. That is the quarrel among learned ones: whether a person really existed or was merely imagined by devout minds in religion.
Now that we understand that history itself has a wider significance than the historical level would permit, we have also to study the historicity of a person from a different angle of vision. When we say that Christ did exist or Krishna did exist or Buddha was, what do we mean? Perhaps the child’s answer, as our answer also, would be that such and such a person was visible to the physical eyes of such and such persons during the time he is supposed to have lived. We do not deny the historicity of Gandhi, because we have seen him or believe that people saw him. But if we have a doubt as to the very nature of his existence: I have not seen him, nor do I know if any people saw him – we begin to doubt his very existence. We do not know whether Christ was seen by certain existent people. So, it may mean that perhaps nobody has seen him and, in that case, his very existence may be doubted. That is the case with many others, such as Krishna, Buddha, etc.
However, the wider history of things – the history of philosophy and also the philosophy of history – has no such difficulties because, to it, existence cannot be separated into the historical or the religious or the theological or the mythological. It was the philosopher Kant who said, “We look at things in three manners: we look out and say there is a world in front of us; we look about and conjecture that there should be a God who is the ruler of this world; we look within and remember that we have a soul.” We have no other way of looking at things. In other words, we have the theological, the cosmological and the psychological way of looking at things – or the stated points of God, world and individual.
Today, I want to touch upon the spiritual significance of the teaching of the great divine incarnation Dakshinamurthy. In one of the prayers to him we are told that Dakshinamurthy, the great divine sage, was supposed to have three faces which signified or symbolised God or Ishwara, the Guru and the Atman. Or, we are told he had three aspects: the Godly aspect, the aspect of Guru or spiritual preceptor, and the aspect in which he revealed the Atman.
Dakshinamurthy was not merely an incarnation of the Divine Being, he was not merely a Guru or teacher, he was not merely an imparter of spiritual knowledge, but he was an all-pervading existence, an omnipresent Being, as it were, like space. These four revelations of Dakshinamurthy also give us a philosophical teaching, the manner in which we have to study things, and the way in which things really exist.
As I mentioned, the theological or the divine aspect of things is one which we are forced to accept because of our very acceptance of the existence of the world and the admission that we exist. We may not have seen God, but we believe in God. We are compelled to believe He exists because there are certain demands of our nature. We see water rising in the Ganges, and we have not seen the cause, but we can imagine that either snow melted or it rained, or perhaps both happened. The sun is very hot and the ice must be melting, and so the water is rising slowly; and perhaps it is due to a little rain. We have not seen the rain and we have not seen the ice melting, but we know such phenomena do occur, and we cannot explain the water rising in the Ganges in any other way.
Likewise, the demand of the inner consciousness of the human being requires that God must exist. If we exist, God must exist; and if God does not exist, we also have no right to exist. That we see a world outside us is itself enough proof that God must exist. Why? How do we interpret the existence of God by mere perception of the world outside? The man in the street also sees the world, just as we see the world, but he understands in a different manner. The child also sees the Ganges, but the child does not understand.
The very fact that we exist and the world is appearing before us as a tentative existence shows that there is also a connecting link, on account of which we are able to say that the world is. It also shows that there is a wider being than our own being. The world alone cannot be, and we alone cannot be. There is a third thing. What is that third thing, that thing by which we are able to see the world outside?
There is a table in front of me. I am not touching the table; there is no visible connection between me and the table, yet I am seeing the table. ‘Seeing’ is only a word, but it must have some meaning. What do we mean by seeing? What is the intention it conveys? What do we feel at that time when we make such a remark?
Unconsciously the feeling is that our knowledge is able to envelop the existence of objects outside of us and make it a part of our perception. Though the mountain is two furlongs away, our knowledge is able to envelop it in such a manner that we are able to take the object into our own being and make it a part and parcel of ourself. Where is our knowledge? It is in the brain, perhaps; and our brain is not able to travel to the mountain. There is a physical entity which is not space. This being aware of a thing outside of us is sufficient proof that our knowledge is able to go ahead and that it is not confined to our body. The knowledge that is contained within us, on account of which we are able to see the world, is not limited to our body. Due to it, we are able to know what is outside.
This shows that the element of knowledge in us is not identical with or a part of the body, but is something exceeding the body. This general consciousness, this general knowledge – knowledge in principle, which exceeds the body and objects – is the third element that is necessary in all human or animal perception. This third element is the existence of God. The seer and the seen are overcome, included and transcended by the existence of God.
If we fly in an aeroplane and look into space, we will not see the sunlight. But if there is an object suspended in space, we will see that the object is illuminated by sunlight. The light itself is not seen, but it is seen when it envelops an object. This element, the intrinsic consciousness in us, does not itself become a part and parcel of our perception, but through the knowledge we see an object. We are unable to see the element of the existence of God in things, but things are seen only on account of the light of God. The light that illumines things is not seen, but the objects are seen. We see the world, but the ‘unseen’ object is God, manifested as the world. It is the light seeing itself as the visible objects. Ishwara, Guru and objects are the three perspectives of the vision of one existence.
We may question whether Ishwara is a historical person, whether Christ or Buddha are historical persons. Is God a historical person? Is the world a historical entity? Are the contents in the world historical existences? We will find the question is inapt, and we will feel there is something funny about these questions; but equally so when it is about persons like Christ, Krishna or Buddha.
The existence of any particular object in the history of the cosmos is seen only when taken in its isolated aspect, and loses its historical meaning when taken in a general universal perspective. In other words, the very definition of existence is changeful. It is not a permanent viewpoint of the human mind, but a shifting viewpoint. We want Krishna and Buddha to be just like us, and only then we will say they were historical persons. If they had an existence that was slightly different from our own, we do not call them historical beings, and we want to deny even existence to them because we want existence to be the same as our own existence.
In Aesop’s Fables we are told of a fox that was caught by a hunter and his tail cut off by the hunter’s knife. The fox was very grieved. He thought, “How can I go and show my face to my friends with my tail cut off?” He thought of a way out. “I will somehow make the best of the bargain.” So he went to his friends and when they saw the fox without his tail, they said, “Oh, what has happened to your tail?” “It is a new fashion,” he answered. “Then we also must have our tails cut off.” They passed through some bushes and managed to tear off their tails in the bushes. “Now we are all up-to-date. We should not have long tails.” Likewise, there was a Frenchman who had only a small moustache, and today we find people with small moustaches. Thus, it becomes a fashion, just as in the case of the fox they thought that was the fashion so they followed suit and also cut off their tails.
It does not mean that this imitation corresponds to facts. That we, as human beings, want other existences to also correspond to our own existence does not show that we see things in the true perspective or that we see things really. The history of a thing is not what happens to that thing in a particular country or in a village, but what happens to it in creation. That is the history of a thing. If the answer to the question “Did Christ exist?” is “Yes, he did exist,” and we doubt whether this answer is correct, the doubt would have meaning only if the idea of Christ or Krishna or Buddha or some other person is from the point of view of his social or phenomenal existence.
We all exist in India, in Rishikesh, in this world, but we also exist in this cosmos. We do not only exist in this Bhajan Hall or in Muni-ki-Reti or Rishikesh, but we also exist elsewhere. Some of us are visitors, some are residents of this place, some are yatris on their way to Badri, and some have come from foreign countries. These are all descriptions of persons and are all true, but there is something more true. We belong to the creation of God. Now, what is our status from the point of view of creation? I think that is the real test of things, and that the study of a person can be complete and free from all doubts only when we study from this angle of vision and not any other way.
We criticise allopaths because they look at a person from the historical angle and take things bit by bit. However, the homeopath, the naturopath or even the vaidya of Ayurveda do not see the patient as some kind of machine that can be dismantled, but as an organism; and, therefore, they feel that they should not meddle with the patient’s soul, as the allopath would.
Studying one person as he is individually – whether Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Plato or Shankaracharya – and taking each person as associated with his given personal body alone, is called a biography. This is not the correct way to study people, because they have wider relations which we are not able see with our limited vision. They have a greater relationship, more intense than we can see, and until that relationship is studied, the biography is not properly written; the history is not properly written.
Ishwara, the Creator, God, the incarnations of God like Krishna, Buddha, Christ, etc., our own selves, individual jivas here, all exist from one point of view, but are non-existent from another point of view. We all have some existence. “Do we exist from the historical point of view?” is a question you may put to me. Now I will put a question to you: What is history? A student in high school has one conception of history, a professor in a university has a more profound conception, and a farmer in a field has some other conception of history. Therefore, one’s concept of history is, to some extent, responsible for the nature of the answer.
There is no such thing as a non-existent person, because a person must exist in order to have any value. If we deny value to a person, then of course there is nothing, or no meaning, to it. We know how many people worship Buddha or Christ. So much value is attached to them. If they are non-existent, all religion falls to the ground in one second. Then there is no Christianity, no Buddhism, no Islam, because we cut at the root the value which we attach to their seers or the incarnations by saying they are not historical.
The historicity of a thing is the attaching of value to a thing from one angle of vision. The mind of the human being sees things only in space and time; but religion emphasises that God is not in space and time. If we say that anything that is not in space and time cannot be, then we are denying God because He is not in space and time, even though we believe in the existence of God as trans-spatial or trans-temporal.
This especially applies to such divine beings like Dakshinamurthy. We do not know what these beings were. How can we say whether Dakshinamurthy really existed, whether he was a historical being? When we take the whole of creation in its total perspective, everything becomes historical. But if by history we understand only that which is localised in space and time, in this physical realm, then God and His incarnations in the other realms of being are not historical at all.
The world is not merely this Earth. We are told there are seven planes above and seven planes below. We are even told that we have worlds within us. The subconscious, the unconscious minds – do they really exist? They do not exist in space and time. We identify our existence with our experience, and anything we do not see or experience, we deny. This is a poor state of affairs, where we think that what we think is the complete truth and we deny everything else. We deny knowledge to our own perception.
The great Avataras, the incarnations of Ishwara, existed – some in the historical sense of our own present mind, and some in the historical sense of the cosmos. There is a difference between cosmic history and British or Indian history. The history of the cosmos is different altogether. Vyasa tried to take all things into consideration, and the Bhagavata is such an attempt of writing cosmic history where things are given significance from the spiritual perspective also.
A person exists not merely as a body, but as a spirit. We exist as historical beings. Now, what are we? Are we bodies? Maybe. When we write the biography of a person, we write about the activities of the body or the movements of the mind. When we write about Napoleon, we do not write about his spiritual existence, as if that is not important.
If the existence of the soul of the person is to be taken into consideration, as it must, then the history of a person, of a machine, of the Earth, would immediately assume a different significance. Our way of looking at things would change. We would not identify with what our eyes see, and we would know there are things our eyes are not able to see. We would not immediately make a remark. It is a hasty way of perceiving.
Before judging a thing we have to understand it completely, and before understanding a thing we have to take all factors into consideration – which is humanly impossible. And it is humanly impossible to say whether a person existed or not. We, as spiritual seekers, are expected to not have such a narrow way of looking at things, but to have more charitable views. There are more things than our philosophy dreams of. We should not think that our philosophy is complete and we can wind up things into our philosophy. Philosophy, after all, is a product of the brain. But there are more things than we dream of in our philosophy.
Existence is wider than we can see; and wisdom is deep only when it is associated with humility. The proud person is not a wise person. That is why in the Bhagavadgita, vidya and humility come together. The less we consider the personality shell as complete and the more we know there are things outside it, the more humble we become. It is the empty person that thinks he is complete. The profound person knows he has to be humble before the mighty universe.
We audaciously declare certain things – such as, that we can do this and that – because we do not know what is under our own skin. We are part of a wider existence, and our meaning is the meaning of that which is wider. To forget that is to forget the real meaning of human life. The existence of God, of His creation, of the Atman, are aspects of existence that we cannot see with our eyes. How much of the universe do we see? The cosmos is so deep! Even the physical existence of this universe is so vast that it far outranges our mental horizon. Though it is in us, we cannot see it.
Thus, the human situation is neither really psychological, because the deepest psychological existence of the Atman cannot be seen, nor is it even theological, because God cannot be seen. We are nowhere. We are empty balloons that float in the air, imagining that we are much. The value of any of us is in our association with the really existent, with God, and minus that relation we are nothing.
Dakshinamurthy was one of the incarnations of God. He was supposed to be the manifestation of Lord Siva, and his very body was supposed to be made up of the top of Knowledge. The word ‘dakshinamurthy’ is defined as Knowledge. Dakshina means south. Some say that he sat under a banyan tree, facing south, and taught wisdom by silence, and that he was the very incarnation, or embodiment, of Knowledge – the incarnation of spiritual Realisation, radiating wisdom all over. People had only to sit in front of him. Just as the light of the sun sustains us, the spiritual existence of Dakshinamurthy was a radiating presence of spiritual knowledge.
It is said that Dakshinamurthy especially came to initiate the Kumaras, the first-born sons of Brahma, into the mystery of Self-realisation, and that he taught in silence by a symbol. Gyana Mudra was the symbol with which he taught Knowledge to the Kumaras. The Guru taught in silence, and the disciples understood everything correctly and had no doubts. Dakshinamurthy did not deliver discourses to the Kumaras. He showed them the Gyana Mudra, and they understood.
What is this Gyana Mudra? There are various interpretations, but the common one is that it is that which is other than the three states: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. It is identical with the Supreme Being. There is something in us other than the three states, and that something is not seen by us. There is something in us other than what we experience in the three states. What do we see in the three states? We see persons, the world, problems, etc. In deep sleep we know nothing. There is something other than these three things, and that is the existence of the person. That is the real existent being. Other things are not really existent. That really existent thing in us is the fourth. It is the Supreme Being. This is what Dakshinamurthy taught the Kumaras, and they understood it. There was no need for further elaboration or expansion of the subject. In this way, the whole philosophy of our land is given: Ishwara, the God of the cosmos; Guru, the incarnation of Ishwara in the form of the spiritual teacher; and the Atman which receives this knowledge are the three aspects of this Being which is all–pervading.
But again we come back to where we began while discussing the historicity of things. Ishwara and His creation, which includes the jivas, are not two or three existences; they are one existence. When we take all these three together and study them from this point of view, we are living a spiritual life. But when we take these three things isolatedly, then come the various schools of philosophy and the different religions. Why are there different religions? Because we take these three existences as isolated values.
We do not know where God is; and each one has his own idea of God, and each person or groups of persons have their ideas. We do not connect God with our existence; and when we take only our own individual existence independently, we study only psychology. And when we see only the world, and see neither God nor the Atman, we are materialists. We see only the apparent things of the world. Hence, all these are only limited ways of studying things.
We should not consider God to be some distant person, nor should we think we are isolated beings, nor should we think that the world is existent by itself. All these are defective philosophies, and they have landed us in this condition of the twentieth century. From the phenomenal point of view, it is history; from the individual point of view, it is psychology; from the point of view of the Creator of the world, it is theology; and when we take all three together, it is called philosophy. But, unfortunately, the three are taken together in various manners, and so we have many schools of thought.
Spiritual mystics have the same experience, though philosophers may disagree. Spiritual realisation is One, because existence is One. We should not argue whether such and such a person existed or not. Whenever we attach value to things, to that extent we are historical. From the point of view of Ishwara, the Creator of the world, everything is real or everything is unreal. Everything is real to God, because this is His creation. All these many heads and legs are the heads and legs of Ishwara. So, in that sense, everything is real. But, in another sense, everything is unreal, because nothing exists outside of Him and, therefore, God’s existence is complete existence. If we say the world exists outside God, it is not correct. The world’s and the individual’s existences have a meaning only when they are taken in relation to God’s existence. There is no psychology, no theology, no history, for Ishwara. “I Am”: That is the feeling of Ishwara. He Is: That is the feeling of the bhakta. God alone is, and to serve Him is to serve the whole creation. To render service to God with prayer, meditation, is the real service. Without the consciousness of the omnipresence of God, all our social activities have no meaning. Our way of thinking is not correct because we isolate things. We bifurcate existence. That is not the Truth.
The Truth is that everything exists where it is and where it ought to be, and is integrally related to God and comprehends history, cosmology, theology, etc., and in the one assertion ‘God Is’, we have said everything. No other assertion is necessary.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
Certain Problems of Philosophy
Certain Problems of Philosophy by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Wednesday 29 January 2014 14:43
*READ MORE \* Certain Problems of Philosophy
The following consists of replies to some difficulties raised by students of philosophy and religion.
What is Philosophy?
It has been argued that the system of philosophy which is known as Advaita, propounded by Acharya Sankara, is not a philosophical system, since it accepts the authority of the scripture, and philosophy does not accept scriptural testimony as a test of truth. To this point of view, several answers may perhaps be appropriate. Firstly, the term ‘AdvaitaEneed not necessarily be associated with Sankara, because it stands for a way of thinking or a doctrine which can be promulgated by a methodology of reason. Even if Sankara had not been born, this system of human thought would remain as a way of possible logical analysis and synthesis. Perhaps it would not be difficult to see that the conclusions which are associated with Advaita can be drawn even without reference to any scripture or theological background. That historical circumstances required Acharya Sankara to consider Scripture as the final authority would not preclude the great logical acumen which is demonstrated in his writings, which can stand independently as a supreme philosophical system, even without any reference to Scripture. Hence, a true student of philosophy need not have to mix up the theological atmosphere of Sankara’s times with the philosophical conclusions that he drew by pure reason alone.
Further, it is strange that philosophy should be interpreted as a position totally opposed to Scripture or irreconcilable with Scripture, if we are to consider Scripture as an accepted hypothesis which itself cannot be questioned, and not necessarily a book written by someone or even revealed to anyone. Which scientific method or philosophic situation can be said to be free from the necessity to be finally grounded on some hypothesis on which it bases itself and on whose pedestal it raises the edifice of its system? How would science or philosophy or any thinking process at all assume a sense or meaning if it is not to found itself on some irrefutable fact which is already accepted not as something deduced from a premise, since a premise itself cannot be deduced? Indian philosophers, whether they accept the authority of Scripture or not, had also amply revealed in their expositions the great power of reason which, while it was not necessary for it to refute Scripture, could also stand on its own legs.
The Nature of Reality
It is also argued that the Advaita position that Brahman is consciousness is a sort of self-contradiction, for consciousness is a quality. To this, it has to be said that consciousness is certainly not a quality, nor can it be a product of the conjunction of the subject and the object as some thinkers have tried to establish. If consciousness were a quality, it would have to be a quality of something other than consciousness, but what on earth can that be which is other than consciousness? That so-called something which is other than consciousness has necessarily to be also that which is not known to consciousness, in which case it cannot be related to consciousness, and consciousness cannot be related to it. Where then comes the question of consciousness being a quality of anything at all? Secondly, it is contended that the Advaita conclusion that Brahman (the Absolute) is consciousness is not tenable, for, it is argued, the statement “Brahman is consciousnessEis tautological. The point is that if Brahman is consciousness, it would be like saying that Brahman is Brahman, and to say that Brahman is consciousness would be like an analytic judgement, not a synthetic one, adding no new information to the subject Brahman, since Brahman is already said to be consciousness. This objection arises on account of introducing the defects of linguistic grammar into a philosophic proposition, for we cannot see any tautology in the statement that Brahman is consciousness, inasmuch as the statement is intended to describe the characteristic of Brahman, or, we may say, the constituent essence of Brahman, or, rather, more precisely, what Brahman is. Hence, the statement “Brahman is consciousnessEdoes not introduce the conjunction ‘andE so that there should be Brahman ‘andEconsciousness in order that Brahman may be consciousness. The grammatical copula ‘isEin the statement “Brahman is consciousnessEdoes not distinguish between Brahman and consciousness, but is only a verbal contrivance necessitated by the exigency of grammar. The spirit of the statement is the real philosophic position, and not the form of the linguistic structure of the sentence. It is well known that every sentence involves a subject and a predicate linked together by a verb. Only, in the present context, neither Brahman nor consciousness can be taken as a predicate, because one and the same thing is asserted even when two terms are used. Thus, it appears the objection is not philosophical. The statement “Brahman is consciousnessEcannot be considered as a truism, as if it is a well known fact, for it requires an elucidatory effort to come to the conclusion that the nature of Brahman is consciousness. If a father makes a statement, “Rama is my sonE it does not follow that the statement is tautological or a truism, for, while Rama and son mean one and the same person, the one term explains the intrinsic nature of that which is indicated by the other.
Is the World Unreal?
It has often been glibly and sarcastically opined by many a thinker that the Advaita doctrine propounds the unreality of the world, the illusoriness of all things, that nothing exists at all. While the process of an investigation into the validity of the question of the unreality of the world is a little intricate and need not be discussed here, it is not true that the Advaita crudely brushes aside the content of world-experience as a literal unreality. No content of an experience can be regarded as totally unreal as long as there is such a thing as experience, and no one with the least sense would dub an experience as unreal as long as it remains an experience. But, while it is certainly true that the very meaning of experience is that it ‘is thereE and no one will speak of it if it is not there, no experience can be considered as unreal as long as it ‘isEan experience, whether it is of the world or anything else. Yet, there is certainly something more to be said about this phenomenon. Would we call it an experience when it is contradicted by another experience subsequently following it? The famous analogy of the experience of a snake in the rope is before us. Is the snake real? No one would say that it is unreal, for it is a content of experience which is real. But, at the same time, there is a point which requires a more judicious consideration of the issue, since, in a different experience which is of the rope, the snake is realised to be unreal. Who would ever regard the snake as a reality on the perception of the rope as a real experience? It appears to us that the analogy of the snake and the rope, which is so well known, is not a puerile connivance of some psychological whim, but a most apt illustration of the position of the world as a whole and of man’s location in the world. It would thus be obvious how one and the same proposition can be unreal as well as real in two different contexts, while not being self-contradictory as a blending of totally opposite positions.
It may also be added here that it would not be wisdom to stretch even the weapon of logic to its breaking point, for logic is a function of reason operating on the dichotomy of the subject and the object, while at the same time feeling the necessity to bring together the two as an integral statement.
The Basis of Proof
If there are no proofs which can demonstrate Brahman’s reality, this need not be considered as a serious defect in the situation. Rather, it should be happily accepted as the glory of truth itself, which is also associated with eternity. How is one to prove the eternal through non-eternal means, and what eternal means are available to man in a world of temporal processes? What proof does one expect to establish the existence of Brahman, as Brahman is the basis of all proof, the indubitable existence as the very self of the one who argues and thinks in terms of proof? How would it be proved by some other proof, and where is the point in expecting a proof at all?
Evidence from Sleep
The illustration of experience in the state of deep sleep sometimes advanced in the Advaita system as an evidence of the existence of an absolute being, is not without substance. Reversing the Cartesian proposition, “I think, therefore I am,Ethe analogy cited is an adventure in the direction of the conclusion, “I am, therefore I think. Would there be a need to bring a proof that one’s own self exists? Obviously, it is not hard for one to realise that proofs proceed from the fundamental experience of there being such a thing as self, and if the self itself were to be an object of doubt, there would be no worth-the-while conclusion in life, which would be free from the defect of the same doubt. If there is anything at all which cannot be doubted, it has to have a base which itself cannot be doubted. All this would be commonplace to any sensible point of view.
Now comes the question, What happened in deep sleep? This is one of the great analyses made in the system of Advaita philosophy. While in the waking state the body seems to be the whole of the reality of oneself, in dream one’s existence is proved to be possible without association with the physical body. The point that comes to relief in deep sleep is that one can and one does exist there in a condition wherein even the mind does not operate, and one’s existence in the state of sleep is free from association of every kind, physical as well as psychological. It is no great feat of discovery to make much of the psychological difficulty involved in understanding the nature of the memory that remains subsequent to sleep, of one’s having existed in the state of sleep. That the physical and the psychological embodiments are not the reality of a person is the essence of the discovery which is made from one’s existence in sleep. Whether sleep is a biological condition, or is brought about by this factor or that, is irrelevant for the purpose. We need not go into the details here as to how and why one enters the state of deep sleep. The Upanishad has something to say about it, while the medical man or the psychologist and the scientist may have something else to say from their own points of view. These considerations, however, do not touch the essential point made out in the study of the self in sleep, that it is impossible to set aside the conclusion that the self is basically of the stuff of consciousness. While the experience of joy in sleep is attributed to different factors and can be explained in several ways, it is impossible to believe that there can be satisfaction in a state of unconsciousness. No doubt, sleep is a state of unconsciousness and it should be a contradiction for anyone to believe that such sleep should have any value. Is it not strange that the value of sleep seems to outweigh any other value, even if it is to be considered only as a reminder, though occasional, that man is evidently something other than what he appears to be in his much-adumbrated waking activity?
It is said that the condition of sleep cannot be regarded as an experience because this condition is an ‘eventE and all events are not experiences. To this it is to be pointed out that it is difficult to understand what an ‘eventEcan be if it is not existent, and what can existence mean if it is not something that is known to exist? Precisely, an experience is the knowledge of existence; it may be the existence of an event, a condition, a situation, a thing, or whatever it be. Then, why should not sleep be an experience, if it is an event? Further, the argument that in order to call an event an experience, it must be an event of which someone is the subject, does not in any way affect the issue on hand; for, how could sleep be an experience or an event if it is not an experience to someone or an event occurring in respect of someone or something? In fact, what exists, or, precisely, is, in the state of sleep is the pure subject alone. In sleep there is an indication of subjectivity, free from traces of all objectivity, if only we are not to consider the state of unconsciousness as an object counterposed before a subject. The definition of consciousness has also to be made a little clear. Consciousness cannot be considered as something happening to someone, whether it is noticed or not. Philosophically, the term ‘consciousnessE when it is applied to describe the pure metaphysical subject, is to be understood as denoting something more than even what is usually called self-consciousness. It is the basic presupposition of any meaning whatsoever. Hence, such a subliminal base of the very meaning of anything, the primary being or existence of whatever can be regarded as meaningful, has to be something not only not associated to any other primary being which may be its subject, but should be not even a state of self-consciousness in the sense of one being one’s own object of awareness. It is pure universality, consciousness as such, which cannot be distinguished from being as such. Thus, consciousness need not mean noticing, seeing or any kind of happening to anyone. This latter empirical characterisation of consciousness may have the utilitarian value of a grammatical subject, or sensorily conditioned individuality localised in space and time. But consciousness has to supersede space and time, since the former knows the latter as its content. The suggested pure subject indicated by the experience of sleep is not an ego, which latter is a self-conscious, localised, embodied something, but a general state of reality which encompasses all that can be anywhere or at any time. The subject indicated in sleep is not the enjoying or suffering subject, for it is prior to every psychological condition, since, here again, psychological experiences are its contents.
Experience is not ‘doing somethingE for the fact of doing anything would be the object of a consciousness prior to it. Thus, we find that consciousness cannot be associated with anything other than itself, neither an event nor a thing. The Advaita argument of the presence of bliss in the state of deep sleep, as evidenced by a subsequent memory thereof, cannot be just brushed as totally irrelevant. There is certainly a great point which the Advaita makes out here. It is logically impossible to conceive of memory or remembrance except as a conscious recollection of a previous experience. Since experience cannot be dissociated from a consciousness of it, the conclusion that consciousness is not absent in the state of sleep cannot also be ruled out. As regards the experience of happiness in sleep, it is up to anyone to prove it or disprove it. An intense subjectivity to which consciousness is driven in sleep should be considered as the explanation for the happiness mentioned. The nearer one moves to oneself, the truer one is, and, hence, freer; and, is not freedom a state of happiness? It is entanglement in objectivity that distracts the attention of consciousness by making it appear as something other than its own self, which may safely be called a sort of metaphysical schizophrenia. The utter subjectivity which everyone craves for as an emblem of total freedom is demonstrated by man in the process of history. No one would like to be other than oneself, or involved in what one is not. Such empirical involvements are not present in sleep, and though this not-being-present is a kind of negative freedom and an entry into pure subjectivity through the backdoor (this, incidentally, differentiates sleep from Samadhi, or universal consciousness), there is no doubt that this apparent negativity becomes at least a suggestion of the possibility of positive subjectivity, even as the reflection of an object, which may be said to be the negative presentation of the object, indicates the nature of that object itself. In studies of this type, one may have to be dispassionate and honest, as far as one’s own feelings and experiences are concerned, and not allow an empirical logic to interfere with its validity, for, as we have noted, logic is not a permanent friend of the very source of logicality. We need not identify this source entirely with the Transcendental Unity of apperception of Immanuel Kant, but here is certainly its elder brother, as it were, and the presence of it none can deny without denying the denier’s existence itself. In a way, the true self is reflected in spatio-temporal involvement in the state of waking and, evidently, philosophers are right when they opine that the world is a dream, if it is true that all spatial and temporal experience is a shadow cast through the screen of objectivity by that which is the archetype transcending the space-time network. Plato’s analogy of the cave is profound and pertinent, and it is a happy augury that in a more explicit manner this truth is coming to light through the discoveries of modern physics, into whose findings we need not enter here.
On the Question of Creation of the Universe
All descriptions concerning the origin or creation of the universe are intended to clarify philosophical and psychological situations which arise due to an inborn belief that the world must have an origin, and must have a creator. This is a hypothesis which cannot itself be explained by any rational process of investigation. Why should it be necessary for the world to have a creator outside itself? Why should anyone create a problem and then try to find a solution for it? Has anyone seen God creating the world? But how is it that people everywhere speak of the creation of the world as if they have witnessed God working at the beginning of things. The circumstance actually involves two facets, namely, (a) belief in the word of the Scripture, which narrates the story of creation by God; (b) a necessity felt by inductive logic and the natural manner of human thinking that everything that is visible must have come from somewhere and that all things must have been made by someone as a cause preceding an effect.
Taking the first issue, namely, the descriptions and explanations in the Scriptures, it is no doubt true that the Scripture of every religion, except those that do not bring in a God into the picture, speaks of God creating the world out of His own Will, not because He has a desire but it is His Nature automatically operating, as the sun shedding light without any desire to do the work of shining. Firstly, therefore, it has to be accepted that God creating the universe does not imply an action like some human being working, because God is timeless Being, and no action is conceivable where time is absent. Hence it is fallacious to take the creation theory literally, as if God is some large man thinking and working like man only. Creation is like the four-dimensional realm of modern physics appearing as a three-dimensional world of empirical experience. And no scientist will say that four-dimensional existence has ‘createdEthe three-dimensional world. The electrons or the atoms do not “createEthe stone of which they are the internal constituents. This would land us on the question: Is the world really there? For, if a stone is really there, it should be visible to the microscope which sees only a pressure of electromagnetic force commensurate with the entire structure of the universe. In this light, the world and God would be two names for one and the same thing, and any question regarding creation by God would fundamentally lack scientific basis.
The renowned philosopher, Acharya Sankara, says that theories of creation are not intended to describe an actual historical process of the world coming from God, as if God started manufacturing things in some ancient time, but that these stories of the procession of effects from God at the top are indicative of a higher truth that God alone is, inasmuch as the logical relationship between effect and cause negatives any difference between the two, thus merging the effect in the cause, that is to say, leaving God alone to Himself with no world whatsoever as a product externally created.
The infinity and the omnipresence of God, which is accepted by everyone, precludes the possibility of a world being there outside God. An appearance of a reality cannot be regarded as something created by reality. Hence all problems arising in respect of desire, playfulness, constraint and the like on the part of God, get ruled out and the question contradicts itself, since the necessity for the world to have a cause outside it is a hypothesis characteristic of the three-dimensional way of human thinking in which it is shackled.
On the Question of Pain and Suffering to Created Beings
The idea of pleasure and pain is a product of what may be called parochial thinking, without the consciousness of any reference which one may have with other factors that range beyond human perception. Pleasure and pain do not exist as if they are things hanging somewhere in space. These are names given to conditions of experience undergone by a particular degree of consciousness when the atmosphere which it regards as existing external to itself in space and time is either reconcilable or irreconcilable with its present condition. It is a pain for a human being to be dipped within the bowels of the cold waters of the Ganga, but a delight to the fish swimming within it pleasantly. Man never thinks the same thought throughout his life. Today’s pleasure is tomorrow’s sorrow. These facts are not unknown in human history. Apart from the psychological considerations, there is a scientific and a metaphysical error in thinking that pleasure and pain are existent in objects, as it were. A cool breeze in summer is pleasant, and the same thing is unpleasant in winter. A fourth or fifth cup of pleasant milk causes nausea. The rich people of the world know the sorrow caused by their wealth. People who crave for having children know the troubles of family life and social tension. Why go so far? Since pleasure and pain are conditions of particular circumstances of individualities in relation to reality outside, any excessive harping on the tune of life’s sufferings may require a more impartial adjudication.
The horror of the big fish swallowing the smaller ones and the apparent unjustifiability behind the survival of the strongest, or, we may say, the fittest, is inseparable from the basic psychological defect which Alfred North Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,Ewhich means to say that human judgements of what look like local events and occurrences do not take into consideration their vaster relationship to the universe as a whole, such that every event is a universal event, and it is not the big fish that swallows the smaller one but the evolutionary impulse of the cosmos adjusting itself in terms of its internal components for a purpose that transcends an existing situation. Evolution is not a pain, even as no one regards as pain the growth of a child into a mature genius. The whole difficulty arises because of the thought that God is outside the universe and handles things as a carpenter operates on his tools. This unfortunate weakness of human thought raises the frightful bogey of questions which have as much reality and meaning as its own intrinsic worth. Evolution is not for anybody’s pain or pleasure, because, there is no “anybody” outside the process of evolution. The Infinite seems to proceed from the Infinite, and return to the Infinite, all which can suggest nothing more than that the Infinite is just what it is.
The Process of Action and Reaction
If we insist on finding a reason behind the sufferings of life, whatever be their nature and detail, it has to be accepted that the justice of the universe which is a single organism cannot permit illogical and, therefore, unjust occurrences within its internal constitution. Life in the world is seen to be a little complicated by the operation of the law of action and reaction, called Karma. This is a principle according to which every action produces an effect with an equal force. Bondage is considered to be the reaction produced by actions which defy the fact of the unitary structure of the cosmos of which all individuals are inseparable parts. This principle of reaction to action arises only when this intrinsic inseparable connection of the individual with the cosmos is forgotten and the former indulges in attitudes or actions with the false notion that it is an independent actor or doer, consequently inviting the nemesis of reaction. The universe is the shadow cast by the wishes of its contents, and it is what these wishes are and what they sweep away from infinite existence with the winds of the forces moving towards their fulfilment. Since the acceptance of the fact of creation implies the fact of pleasure and pain in life and suggests a cause behind the effect, it would follow that there are endless causes behind endless effects moving in a cyclic fashion, which system operating in the time-bound world is called by different names by the religions of the world; and the Indian tradition calculates this cycle of an endless revolution by its concept of the Yugas or temporal ages known as Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali, in the descending order of knowledge and virtue. All this would explain why no man tied down to the present cycle alone can know why anyone has any particular experience, pleasurable or miserable, since the causes behind effects visible in the present cycle can originate from earlier cycles, and therefore it cannot be said that there is an undeserved pleasure or an undeserved suffering. Nothing can come from nothing, is indeed sound logic.
The Evolution of Life
There is no precise saying as to when a lower species evolves into the higher one. Since personal agency in action cannot be attributed to sub-human species, all evolution below the human level is supposed to be a spontaneous fulfilment of the vast purpose of Nature. The progress of the sub-human organism, or the rise from the lower condition of the soul to the higher, is considered automatic as a spontaneous action of the universal Nature in the case of all beings who are free from the egoism of personal agency in action. Personal effort comes into relief only at the human level wherein consciousness becomes self-consciousness, an individual affirmative urge, whereby this centre of affirmation is severed from the supporting hand of the universal Nature and self-effort on the part of one’s own individual self becomes the well-known drudgery of life. The animal nature when it rises to the human level will, in the natural course of things, take higher births, gradually, provided right thinking harmonious with the total universe motivates its thought and action. The sufferings of animals, as with sufferings of human beings, in whatever way they be called, are already touched upon in their essential causational circumstances, in what we have considered already above in a different context. There can be no devil engaged in inflicting sorrows on anyone, even as there cannot be a world external to the omnipresent reality. Human thought has to learn a little of the art of the vision of things by superhuman insight before whose glowing radiance the world will shed its cloak of all darkness and misfortune.
The Vedas, Epics and Puranas
The Epics and Puranas are there only to dilate upon the secret hints and hidden truths embedded in the body of the Vedas. The gospel of the Vedas does not contradict the Epics and the Puranas. People who speak of a difference herein are mostly those who have not made a thorough and entire study of either the Vedas or the Epics and Puranas in their true spirit. The hells and heavens of the Puranas are gradations or degrees of expression of reality, all which is corroborated in the Vedas in a more concise and pithy form. The meaning of the Vedas is too hard for the ordinary mind to grasp, and a mere grammatical or linguistic translation of them cannot be said to convey their real message. The Vedas are supposed to be interpreted from the subjective, the objective as well as the universal points of view and not merely as bodies of words which have just a dictionary meaning. The Epics and Puranas are elaborations of truths which are already embodied in the Vedas in a loftier form.
The Question of God and Satan
What is known as Satan may be regarded as the centrifugal urge of the cosmos, an impulse to move away from the centre to the periphery or the outer circumference as space, time and objects. God is the Centre of the Universe, and everything that is divine, the opposite of the so-called Satan, is the centripetal urge, an impulse that directs itself towards the Centre of the Universe. Neither God nor Satan can be viewed anthropomorphically. But man has an inveterate habit of converting God into a widespread man and visualise Satan as the quintessence of wickedness, again viewed as some person existing somewhere. Nothing of the kind is called for in the broad daylight of clearer thinking. Our earlier analyses above would be sufficient clarification of whatever one may think God is, Satan is, or their supposed relationship is. We are not puppets at the mercy of anyone, as we are integral parts of the universe; call this, if you would like, man’s relationship to God. With this awakening, the idea of the devil, or Satan, vanishes into thin air.
Man’s Duty
The duty of man, then, is an inward collaboration with the structure of all things, the law of the Universe; we may say the Universe is more a large area of a law operating than a thing, an object or substance. The terms Sattva, Rajas and Tamas imply the threefold condition of the constituents of the Universe, and the injunction to cultivate a tendency to Sattva is the highlighting of a requirement on the part of everyone to move towards larger dimensions of universality, that is to say, cosmical being. This naturally implies a rise from Tamas, or unconscious motivation and existence, and Rajas which is the impulse of consciousness to diversification and distraction of attention in a multitude of ways. Sattva is the integrated perspicacity of the total reality, or the wholeness of being, which is the final aim of all things and towards which it is that everyone, and everything, anywhere, seems to be eagerly moving inwardly as well as outwardly.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Concept of Maya According to Saiva Siddhanta
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The Concept of Maya According to Saiva Siddhanta by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Tuesday 28 January 2014 15:44
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Maya helps a great deal in the liberation of the jiva from transmigration. Anava, karma and maya are said to be the malas of the jiva. Of these, anava (darkness) is the cause of repeated births of the soul by fostering ignorance. But maya helps the soul to get freed from ignorance and thus be liberated from births. That which propels the jiva through the inducement of darkness, having maya for its (jiva’s) prop, is karma.
How maya helps the jiva is described by Siddhantic scriptures thus:
“Maya, according to the karmas of the souls, becomes the body, etc. of the souls. Till the souls obtain the necessary knowledge to attain the Grace of God, maya helps the souls like a lamp (which gives light to people till the dawn of the sun).”
When the Lord’s grace is attained, the darkness of anava will totally vanish. Till then, the lamp of maya helps the souls not to suffer in the darkness of anava. This is the meaning of the text.
Since maya thus helps the jivas, maya is called ‘a good relation’. To regard such a maya as the cause of births would not be right.
“When will the three eshanas inseparable from maya cease?” says Arunagiri. By this he means, the three eshanas which cause attachment to the perishable universe of maya regarding it (maya) as permanent.
Thus, though maya helps the jivas. But knowing its unreal nature, it has to be abandoned; only then can liberation be attained. That which does not allow it to be abandoned is ignorance; and this ignorance is caused by anava (darkness) and not maya. Wherever and whenever there is ignorance, it is to be understood as an effect of anava. Therefore, maya is faultless; the anava that holds to it is at fault.
- The soul has, of necessity, to pass through the 84 lakh yonis, and only after obtaining a human birth it can attain God.
A soul takes a body only on account of karmas. Whatever be the body, on the exhaustion of karmas, the soul will attain liberation. Therefore, the number of births is dependent on the karmas of the soul. Souls that have less karmas can attain liberation even in one or two births. But if the karmas are not exhausted even after taking births in 84 lakh yonis, the souls take births again and again in those same yonis. Therefore, to say that souls have to pass through the 84 lakh yonis to attain liberation is not correct.
- Rare is a human birth, because only through it the soul can attain God.
It is not necessary that the knowledge necessary to attain God can arise in the soul only on obtaining a human birth. It can arise in births like an ant, etc. There are a number of instances where souls in the bodies of an ant, elephant, snake, etc. have attained such knowledge. Did these attain salvation through the human body, which you call “the doorway to salvation”?
- Souls have to take births in the ascending order of plants, animals, humans and Devas.
A student in Class 3 can be promoted to Class 5 through Class 4, as also directly. He can also be demoted, all dependent upon his intelligence. Similarly, the soul that is born as a plant can obtain a Deva’s birth, and a Deva may be born as a dog or fox. All depends upon the good-bad deeds.
- The law of karma comes into operation only at the human level.
Without a body, the soul cannot exist. And there can be no body without karmas. That a soul gets a body that will correspond to its karmas. Therefore, there is no body (for the soul) without karmas.
It may be asked: If so, the soul from its subtle condition, when it takes its first body, on what does its body depend (as it is held by some that there being no body for the soul in its subtle condition, it has no karmas, too)? The answer is: That also is depending in its Karmas! When the soul is in its subtle condition, the anava (darkenss) griping it will induce desire in it. That desire becomes karma and, as a result, the soul obtains a body in its first birth.
Therefore, to say that karmas obtain only in the human level and not in the lower yonis does not stand to reason.
- There is freedom for the soul (to do virtuous or otherwise deeds) only in the human birth.
The souls have no freedom in any birth. The only person who has freedom is God. (This is one of the fundamental truths of Saiva Siddhanta). The peculiar characteristic of the soul is that it partakes of the nature of that to which it gets united. Accordingly, when the soul tries to unite itself with the Pati, it gets a little enlightenment and performs good deeds; when it joins Pasas, it will perform evil deeds. To so join (the Pati or Pasam) is also due to its past karmas_._ Therefore, the soul has no freedom.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Mind as a Quantum of Energy
The Mind as a Quantum of Energy by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Monday 27 January 2014 17:05
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(Spoken to the students in the Yoga Vedanta Forest Academy on Sept. 26, 1996)
Our subject is the yoga of meditation, which has direct connection with what we call the mind, or the mind-stuff. We may have a commonplace, lay-person’s idea that the mind is inside the body, and it is moving within us like a ball of mercury, shifting its position from one place to another place. The mind is neither inside the body, nor is it outside the body; it is just what we are.
The quantum of energy, capacity, and confidence that we have in our own selves is the mind operating. Our value is not in what we possess as an external commodity from the world, but is the manner we are thinking in our mind. This is not a difficult thing to understand. Whatever may be our quantity of material wealth in this world, if our mind does not agree to accommodate itself with this idea of possession, the possession becomes null and void. It is well said that we are what we think we are.
What do we think we are? What is the opinion that we have about our own selves? The answer would be a bundle of chaos. Our idea of our own selves is nothing but a confusion. It is so because every moment of time we change the idea about our own selves. Often, we think that we are well off; often, we think that we are miserable. Many a time we think that we have everything that we need; and often we think that we do not have what we actually want.
You must have noticed that even when a person is, for all practical purposes, confident that he or she has everything that one needs, still, there will be a persistent lingering thought that something more is there, beyond what one has already, and it is not under one’s possession. Sometimes we look like very adequate people: “I have everything; I am comfortable.” But, this is a paltry idea, which does not continue for a long time.
The mind is a quantum of energy that is operating in us. The mind is energy. It is not a thing; it is not an object. It is just what energy can be defined as. It is power, rather. Our power is in our mind. As strong as our mind is, so strong we ourselves also are. If, for any reason whatsoever, the mind is not strong, and it feels that it is incomplete in some way in comparison with somebody else, then the strength diminishes.
The wrong notion that the quantum of energy called the mind is only inside the body is the cause of our difficulty. We know very well that energy cannot be bottled up in any particular place. It is a pervasive reality, which gives meaning and value to everything in the world. This energy is present in everything in the world. Animate, inanimate, or whatever it is, everything is a concentrated form of energy. The word ‘concentrated’ is used because of the fact that a particular pressure point known as the individual thing, object or person feels finite and inadequate while comparing oneself with others who, too, are centers of energy and power.
For instance, we feel small before an elephant. We have energy in ourselves, but the energy of the elephant seems to surpass our own. We feel puerile before it, and we dare not even go near it. This question of the circumstances of the operation of the mind of a human being is taken up in the psychology of yoga practice. The whole of yoga is nothing but a drama played by the mind-stuff. The idea that the mind is inside the body can easily be recognized as erroneous by the fact of the observation that a thing that is limited within the body cannot know that there is anything outside it. We take for granted, as we usually imagine, that the mind cannot be outside our body; either it is inside the body, or it is the body itself, but it is not outside. We cannot see the mind operating somewhere outside. It is not outside.
Since it is not supposed to be operating external to the body or individuality of a person, it becomes difficult to explain how one is conscious of the existence of other things at all. It is the mind that knows things. There is a mountain in front of us; there are trees; there are people sitting here. How do we come to know that they are there at all?
Accepting the fact that the mind is the knowing principle, and it is not outside the individuality of a person, it becomes difficult to explain how such a mind, which is so limited and is finite, can become conscious of the existence of anything else at all. If my mind is tied down to the location of my own individuality, I cannot know that you are sitting in front of me, because the mind cannot move outside the body. On a further analysis of the psychology behind the operation of the mind, we come to the conclusion that there is something seriously wrong with our notion that we are only in one place, and the mind is only within the campus of the individuality of a person. If this is regarded as something erroneous, then we would not be able to explain how we know that the world exists at all.
The mind knows everything, and there is no other faculty in us, except the mind, that knows things. The world is so big, and it is outside. The outsideness of a thing prevents the knowledge of that particular thing by that which is not outside, but only inside. That which is inside cannot be outside; and if anything is outside, then it is not inside. If we are only within ourselves, then we cannot know that the world exists. A mysterious operation takes place, due to which we are aware that the world exists, and there are many things around us. This is a subject, not merely of general psychology, but of what we may call philosophy.
In India, the most prominent philosophies that took up discussion of this subject are called the Samkhya and the Vedanta philosophies. In basic principles, the Samkhya and the Vedanta agree with each other; only in certain fundamental questions, they differ.
Now, let us concentrate ourselves on the Samkhya aspect of the practice of yoga, which studies mind and consciousness. The word ‘Samkhya’ arises on account of it being a categorization or computation of the various degrees of the evolution of reality.
How many things are there in this world? The categorization and numbering of these gradational degrees of evolution is the function of the Samkhya philosophy. The word ‘Samkhya’ comes from the word ‘sankhya’, which means numbering. The Samkhya philosophy numbers the categories of creation. It is a deductive philosophy, a little different from the inductive philosophies of Western thought – deductive in the sense that it accepts the existence of some fundamental being, and it does not require any proof that such a fundamental being exists. That thing which does not require any external demonstration is our own consciousness. We need not have to prove that we are conscious, because we never doubt that we are conscious. Always we are conscious of something.
Sometimes the mind and consciousness are considered as identical for certain practical purposes, though in fact the mind and consciousness are not identical with each other.
Briefly, we may say that the mind is the operational phenomenon projected by consciousness. Consciousness does not operate in any particular direction. The reason is that it cannot be confined to any particular place. We began by saying that the mind appears to be within the body, and it is located within our individuality. Not so is the case of consciousness, because consciousness is something by which everything is known. Without consciousness, knowledge is not possible – knowledge of even one’s own self, apart from the knowledge of any other thing in the world.
Now, the Samkhya raises a very great question as to where consciousness is. Is it in some place? If it is only in some place, where is it located? All right, for the sake of argument, let us accept that consciousness is in some place only. It may be in me, in you, or somewhere else. If consciousness is only in one place, it is not in another place. The consciousness of being in one particular spot precludes the consciousness of there being anything at all outside that particular spot.
Unless we are simultaneously conscious that there is something outside consciousness which consciousness does not know, we cannot imagine that consciousness is limited. The supposed limitation of consciousness to a particular location implies also the non-location of consciousness. A consciousness of finitude is not possible, unless there is a simultaneous inductive or consequential conclusion that there is something beyond the finite.
If we are not satisfied with something, it follows that there is something else which will satisfy us. “I do not want this.” If we make any statement like this, we imply that there is something else which we want. Therefore, every assertion of consciousness is involved in subjectivity and objectivity, as they are called. There is a subjective side of consciousness, which makes one feel that it is the knower of a particular individual or a thing. But there is an objective side of it, namely, that it cannot know that it is subjective, unless it is also objective. The subject and the object are not two different items, but complementary to each other. The knower has to know something. If the knower knows nothing and tries to imagine that it knows only the knower, there will be a psychological conflict arising as to what it is that the knower is knowing. We will come to a deep conclusion about this matter a little later, but suffice it to say, for the time being, that the consciousness of knowing implies the necessary counterpart of there being something which is to be known. That which is to be known by consciousness may wrongly be imagined to be outside consciousness. Or, it may not be so.
I shall relate one illustration to make this point a little more clear. When your waking mind goes into a state of dream, do you know what is happening to you? The waking mind, so called, is a composite inclusiveness of your total personality. What makes you feel that you are a whole by yourself is the waking consciousness; you may call it the waking mind. In that condition called dream, what happens is this so-called waking consciousness splits itself into the knower and the known aspect of the dream world. There is a vast world in dream – as vast as the one that there seems to be in the waking condition. Whatever you can see in the waking world, you can see in the dream world, also.
Now, who is seeing the dream? If you are the waking consciousness, which makes you feel that you are composed and safe, do you believe that the waking mind itself is dreaming, and entering into another condition? It cannot be so, because in the dream world, there is a dissection of the subjective side and the objective side. You are intelligent enough to understand that a peculiar split of the waking mind takes place in dreaming, due to which, a part of the waking mind looks like the observer of the dream, and another part looks like the observed world of space, time, cause, object, etc., in the dream. You cannot say that you are yourself dreaming as a waking mind, because if the waking mind is completely exhausted in the dream world, you would wake up. You would remain only in the dream world forever and ever. The transcendent aspect of the waking mind is retained intact, in spite of its apparent descent into a division of the dream subject and the dream object. You appear to have become somebody else in the dream, but really you are the same person that you were even before going into the dream. This is the reason why you wake up from the dream healthily, and without feeling that you have become somebody else.
The objectivity of the dream world, the externality of things that the dream subject observes, cannot be regarded as an ultimate reality, because if that world which you observe in the dream world really exists external to the consciousness of the observer, it will not allow you to wake up into the waking consciousness. You would be always dreaming. That you are able to wake up into the real waking consciousness, as you call it, shows that you have not become the dream object, nor have you become the dream subject. A kind of dramatic theatrical action takes place, as it were, in the dream, due to which operation the waking mind, which is otherwise hale and hearty – which is what you really are – appears to become somebody else.
It appears that King Janaka once dreamed that he was a butterfly, and this dream continued all whole night. When he woke up, people greeted him: “Janaka Maharaj, namaskar.” He asked the courtiers, “Am I Janaka, or a butterfly? Is it Janaka, the king, dreaming that he is a butterfly, or is the butterfly dreaming that he is a king?”
Imagine that there is a beggar who dreams for twelve hours every day that he is a king; and there is a real king who dreams for twelve hours every day that he is a beggar. Now, who is the king, and who is the beggar? You will be flabbergasted. For twelve hours a beggar is the king, and for another twelve hours the king is a beggar. Now, who is the king, and who is the beggar, because both are kings and beggars for twelve hours?
You may say, due to some difficulty you feel within yourself, that only what the waking mind thinks should be considered as real, not what is dreamt. The dream king is not a real king. The waking king only is the real king. Why do you say that? Because you have an indescribable, indemonstrable conviction that the waking mind is qualitatively superior to the dreaming mind. You cannot prove it, but you are convinced that you are qualitatively better in the waking world than in the dream world.
You have been an emperor in the dream world, but you are a poor fellow in the waking world. Would you like to wake up into the consciousness of a poor person, or would you like to continue dreaming that you are an emperor throughout the night? You would rather wish to be a poor fellow in waking condition than a king in dream. It is not the kingship or the beggarship that is important; it is the quality of consciousness that is important. Who told you that the waking consciousness is qualitatively superior? Nobody can demonstrate why it is so. It is a self-identical conviction: I am what I am.
The Samkhya philosophy takes us to this question from another angle of vision, and establishes that consciousness cannot be located in one place, though it looks like it is being located in the dream world, because the consciousness of limitation proves the existence of that which is not limited. You have to remember this one sentence. You cannot know that you are limited, unless there is a simultaneous conviction that there is something which is unlimited. A poor person cannot know that he or she is poor, unless there is a simultaneous consciousness that there is something called wealth or richness.
So, every affirmation is a complementary action, and pure isolated thinking is impossible. Samkhya, therefore, concludes that consciousness is unlimited. It is infinite in its nature, and as you yourself are the consciousness, you are, at the root of your being, an unlimited potentiality. Surprising, indeed, it is to hear this! There is an unlimited magazine of power and potentiality in every person. Due to the fact of there being such an unlimited capacity in every one of us, we feel miserable every day, and nothing in the world seems to be actually satisfying us.
Everything in the world is in one place. You cannot see any object in the world which is everywhere. There is location for everything in the world. That is to say, everything in the world is finite. Therefore, your infinite potentiality of inclusiveness cannot be satisfied even by the possession of the whole world. Even if you are a king of the Earth, you will be an unhappy person, because the Earth has not become you. The Earth remains outside the king always, though the foolish king imagines that he is the owner of the whole world.
No one can own anything that is totally outside. If that is the case, then you can own nothing in the world. What is the situation now? You can own only your own self. As people usually tell you, when you were born, you did not bring the world with you. The child who was born was not a king; and when he passes away, he ceases to be a king. In the middle of its little tenure of temporary existence, an illusion is created that there is a large possession, and the king feels, “I am the king.”
This is the reason why people say that the world is an illusion, and it is not a reality. If you consider the world as your possession and your property, and minus this possession of the world you cannot be happy, then you can never be happy under any circumstance, because you can never possess the world. The world was existing even before you were born, so how will you possess it now?
The Samkhya concludes that we have an infinitude of potentiality inside us, called consciousness, due to which we feel restless at all times. No finite accumulation of objectivity can satisfy any person. Even if the whole country is given to us as our property, we cannot say that we will be secure. There is a fear: “The whole country has been given to me, but how long will it continue? How long will I be existing here? It can all vanish.”
The possession of the whole Earth cannot satisfy us because, in fact, there is no such thing called possession, because one thing cannot become another thing. That which is not us cannot become us. If we imagine that the world is not us, then it cannot become us under any circumstance. Whatever be the effort that we put forth to possess it, it will elude our grasp. A beggar is born, and a beggar dies, and nothing remains in the middle.
The insight into which the Samkhya philosophy takes us is really fundamental. We are not the physical body; we are consciousness, and that consciousness is not in one place only, because if it is in one place, if it is a located point, it cannot know that it is located in one point. This is the very important conclusion that follows, as a logical deduction. We cannot know that there is nothing outside us, unless there is something outside us. It is very strange indeed.
Are we living in a real world? Are we really educated into the structure of this whole cosmos? Or, are we poorlings who do not know where we are actually living? Do we know how we are connected to this world? Here, again, another question arises from the point of view of the Samkhya: “How are you related to the world at all?”
The Samkhya calls the world prakriti. What is called prakriti in the Samkhya terminology is matter, in ordinary terms. The whole world is considered as a material ubiquitous pervasiveness. And consciousness is that which knows that there is prakriti, or matter.
The Samkhya concludes that there are only two realities ultimately – consciousness and matter. That which knows is consciousness, and that which is known is called matter. The known-ness of matter arises on account of the fact that matter cannot know itself. The materialist argument that only matter exists is defeated in one moment by the consequence that follows from this argument that matter cannot know itself. If matter only exists, according to the materialist doctrine, who will know that there is matter at all? Matter is that thing which is bereft of consciousness. Therefore, matter cannot know that it exists. Hence, who is saying that the matter exists at all? That one which is affirming that there is such a thing called matter cannot itself be matter. Hence, there must be two realities at least – namely, consciousness, and that which is known by consciousness.
The Sanskrit terminological description of these two principles is purusha and prakriti. Purusha is the conscious, living principle; prakriti is the matter that is what is called the whole universe. That which cannot know its own existence, and yet operates, is matter; and that which knows itself is consciousness.
Having established the fact that consciousness is everywhere, it cannot be considered as an active principle, because activity is a movement of something outside itself. The externality of a phenomenon is necessary in order that activity is possible. If there is nothing outside us, we cannot act. But having concluded that consciousness is everywhere, and it is infinite in its nature, the Samkhya has to conclude, at the same time, that consciousness is inactive, while prakriti is active. The inactivity of the illumination of consciousness, combined with the activity of matter, which does not know itself, is the whole drama of life. It is an admixture of the inactive infinite consciousness, and the active unconscious material principle.
A question arises: “How is it possible that consciousness can be associated with matter in any way whatsoever? How could consciousness know that there is matter, because they are two different things, qualitatively? If consciousness is infinite, it is everywhere. If it is everywhere, where does matter exist? Where is the place for matter to exist at all, because you have already filled the whole space with consciousness? Does matter exist at all?”
This question is taken up by the Vedanta philosophy, where it refutes the fundamental proposition of the Samkhya that consciousness and matter are two different things. This is a difficult subject, and we shall take it up another time.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Nature of the Individual
The Nature of the Individual by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Saturday 25 January 2014 12:55
*READ MORE \* The Nature and Location of Consciousness
When the universal presence of the Self is recognised in anything, that particular thing ceases to be a thing or an object because the Self cannot be an object. The impossibility to recognise one’s true Self in anything that appears to be outside is the reason why we regard all things as objects which cause either attraction or repulsion. There is a contradiction involved in this perception because the recognition of the presence of objects outside as solidly real goes against the other acceptance of the omnipresence of the Self, which is true Consciousness. The two aspects cannot go together. That which is universal, that which pervades all things, that which is itself and cannot become other than what it is will not permit the existence of an object external to it.
The question will arise before the student of yoga, “How does this contradiction arise?” Actually, this is the question of the basic principles of Sankhya philosophy, which posits consciousness universal on one side, known as purusha, and material ubiquitous existence known as prakriti in the Sanskrit language. It appears that the Sankhya is telling us something very valid indeed, and acceptable even to reason; but this acceptance is tentative. The higher reason will detect a flaw in this argument that consciousness and matter can join together and produce the phenomenon of perception. The objectivity so-called, the location of things external, is supposed to be an activity of the universal matter known as prakriti, which can never become a Self. It always remains as a non-Self; but the purusha, Pure Consciousness, which can never become an external object, contradicts the very process of perception of anything. For this purpose an analogous argument is projected by the Sankhya doctrine, which is finally very untenable. A person who has legs but cannot see can combine himself, join himself, with another person who can see but has no legs, and continue to move in any direction. The blind person with legs can walk, and the person with eyes but no legs can direct the way of movement. This analogy appears to be very humorous because purusha is not legless and prakriti is not as the Sankhya depicts it. Even then, that the two persons are entirely different is a point missed here. The two, one sitting on the shoulder of the other, do not merge into one able-legged, perceiving individual. Therefore the Sankhya, though it has paved the way for further philosophical, metaphysical speculations, has not bridged the gulf between consciousness and object.
Well, I shall not proceed in the direction of Sankhya at present. I am mentioning it as an example of the irreconcilability that pervades all phenomena of life, the reason being the cause of our difficulties in life. We can never solve any problem, finally. Though we appear to be tackling every issue and looking for a result that is permanent, there is no permanent result following from any kind of effort in this world because there is a contradiction on the one hand between the Universal Self and the externalising force of prakriti; and on the other hand there is another conflict, subjectively, between mind and body. Even as we are unable to reconcile the relationship of the universal consciousness with the all-pervading material phenomena, we also cannot reconcile the mind and the body because we do not know whether the mind is produced by the body or the body is produced by the mind, or they run parallelly like two rails of a railway track, all which example does not seem to be satisfying. We are in a big muddle of psychological confusion, and this must be cleared before we take to any step in the direction of yoga.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali has many things to tell us in regard to this problem before us. He begins with a statement regarding the very basis of perception and decision. There are two kinds of perception: the general, acceptable, common to all, and the other, which is abnormal. The process of perception generally is, for instance, our looking at a tree and enjoying the beautiful nature in front, the sun, the moon and the stars, and anything in the world, as it is a general perception which has no particular connotation or meaning. We do not perceive a tree with any kind of meaning that we want to recognise behind it. It is there, and it has an impression upon the mind, and we see it. But there is another kind of perception, which is abnormal. The previous one, the process of general perception and inference, is the subject of what is known as general psychology. The other thing that I am going to tell you now is the subject of abnormal psychology.
A human being has a normal character and also an abnormal character simultaneously operating and creating the mischief of unhappiness wherever one goes. Let us not think of the general perceptions now. We are not bothered about the existence of objects outside like the sun, the moon and the stars, or the public in a railway train, bus stand and so on. This is not going to affect us, though later on we have to understand this also in the sense that we should be aware of how we come in contact with an object that is outside, such as a mountain, though it is not touching our eyes. This is a major problem that we have to tackle later on. How does the mountain sit inside our eyes and make us feel that it exists? Let us not touch that subject now.
The other is the abnormality of certain things. When we see a tree in a large forest, we just see it, and there is no reaction produced in our mind by this perception. But suppose we see a fruit tree in our own garden. We have another feeling towards that tree, not similar to the casual perception of a tree that is in the wild forest. We do not say it is our tree when we perceive a tree in the forest. The idea itself will not arise. But we feel, “It is in my garden, it is my property. I am vitally involved in this tree, and I would not like anyone to interfere with it.” Let somebody cut a tree in the forest; we are not bothered about it. But if somebody cuts or attempts to do this kind of thing with our tree in the garden, we will yell out. This is one example.
Emotional reaction, working simultaneously with the perception of an object, makes this perception abnormal. Merely looking at a thing impersonally without any kind of emotional reaction, like a judge in a court looking at the clients on both sides with no emotion in his mind, is one thing. As both these characteristics are operating in our mind, which one are we going to tackle – the general perception of the world as a whole or the abnormal difficulties that arise on account of emotional reactions? In medical science, general diseases do not receive preference when there is an acute disease. Suppose a person has an ache in the body which requires treatment, but at the same time the person has a high temperature. This second item, temperature, is an acute problem which has to be taken care of first, and the other difficulty of ache in the body is afterwards.
So our problem here is to see how we are suffering every moment of time. We have love and hatred, attraction and repulsion. The moment emotion ceases to agree with the convictions of reason, there is an internal conflict. No one, when perceiving a tree in one’s own garden, concludes that this is just one tree among many other trees in the forest. Is there not a difference between my son and somebody else’s son? Let somebody else’s son walk about; what does it matter? If my son is wandering, I will call him because there is a vital connection of oneself with something outside.
Patanjali makes out that emotions of this kind arise on account of a basic ignorance of the true nature of things. It is called avidya. Absence of true knowledge is called avidya. Vidya is knowledge, avidya means non-knowledge. What is this non-knowledge? It is the recognition of a particular thing as existent and operative, independent of the real fact behind it: This particular object that is so recognised is just a pressure point, as it were, of the universal prakriti, and the prakriti, the whole material matrix that is in front of us, is not made of one object only. Prakriti does not produce only my object. All the objects are manifestations of this all-pervading prakriti, just as all the waves in the ocean are the ocean only. We cannot hug one wave as ours and another wave as somebody else’s because of the vital interconnection between one thing and another thing in this world. The world is made up of interconnected forces.
Prakriti is actually not a substance. We are likely to think that it is a solid, brick-like material against which we can strike our head. No such thing exists. It is a force like electricity, to give an example, which may look like a very adamant, objective substance in front of us. In the same way as this body of ours, looking like a solid entity, is constituted of minute operative energy principles, it is an apparent solidity assumed by congealed forces, energy quantum, which constitutes the substance and the basis of everything else in the world.
The subject, which is the psychophysical individual, and the object, which is the so-called thing in front, are both constituted of a similar pressure in particular directions, as little bubbles and tiny waves in the ocean are certain differentiated pressures exerted by the operation of the bowels of the ocean. The impossibility to recognise this fact is avidya. You can never accept the fact that your existence is not in any way different in its potentiality and value from the existence of anything that you can see outside. If you know that the personality of yours is made up of sugar, that it is a sugar doll, and what you see outside is another sugar doll, you will know that one sugar doll need not get attracted to another because this one is as important, as valuable, as meaningful and significant as the other. But this does not happen. It is impossible to conceive that the things appearing outside are made up of the same substance as one’s own body and mind. The impossibility to recognise this truth is avidya.
Then, what happens afterwards? This avidya, this ignorance, causes further difficulties. If one evil or defect is allowed, many other troubles get piled up, one over the other. The consciousness that has got involved in the intricate difficulty of the impossibility of knowing the all-pervading existence of materiality within oneself as well as outside creates a mixed-up consciousness in oneself, namely, the affirmation of bodily individuality as one’s own self. “I am here,” says a person. Now, who is actually speaking when such assertions are made? Is it purusha, the universal consciousness, speaking? The universal consciousness will not say, “I am here in one place.” Is it prakriti, the all-pervading nature, that is asserting so? That also we cannot say so because it is not ‘here’ or ‘me’. There is no ‘me’ for the all-pervading matter, and there is no ‘me’ for the all-pervading consciousness.
Now, who is it that is saying, “I am here, I am coming”? This is a mix-up of a peculiar nature caused by the ignorance that was mentioned earlier, namely, the locality of the body getting mixed up with the universality of consciousness so that the consciousness itself looks localised. Finished! The tragedy has started. Then it goes on affirming itself again and again, again and again: “I am everything. Who are you? Don’t talk to me. What do you think of me?” and all sort of jargon starts because “I am here only. I cannot be anywhere else.” The body says “I am here. I cannot be anywhere else. I cannot be you or somebody else.” The body may be a concentrated appearance looking like it is existing here, but it cannot make any assertion unless it is attended with consciousness. Consciousness is not in one place, but it gets mixed up with the location of the body and imagines in a mysterious way that it is itself this body. The consciousness, which is Universality, is dead completely. The idea that there is a pervading potentiality in us is totally abrogated, wiped out, by the pressure exerted by bodily constituents.
This non-recognition of the Universal principle causes this assertion of individuality, known as asmita in Sanskrit – the feeling of ‘I am’. This assertion of ‘I am’ involves at the same time the recognition of ‘you are’ and ‘that is’, ‘it is there’ – the ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘that’ – and it begins to dance in the theatre of this ignorant assertion of a particular individual as all-in-all. Is there not a basic instinct in every person to rule over the whole world, if possible? “All others must be subjects. I must be emperor of the whole Earth.” How is it possible for one located individual to make an assertion that he or she is the owner of the entire structure of the universe which is constituted of other individuals of the same nature? So this boast of owning the property of the universe as an emperor is vitiated immediately by the icy hands of death, and the king perishes, and the universe continues.
Ahankara, as it is called – egoism, as it is commonly known – is not the pride of the ordinary person in the world; it is a subtle operative psychological principle of self-assertion itself. This is a deep secret which is to be studied by every person. Non-recognition of the universality of consciousness and matter engenders the foolish affirmation of one’s own self as ‘I am’.
Then what happens? Another difficulty starts, as a third principle. What is that difficulty? There is an agony felt by this individuality by a subtle feeling that it is actually limited in its nature. The so-called emperor who imagines that he is pervading the whole country knows basically he is subject to destruction and death. He is a weak individual. He requires bodyguards to protect himself. The whole country is himself; it cannot protect him. He keeps army, military, police, etc. behind him, which an artificial contrivance created by the frightened ego to guard itself by existent things totally external, so that the agony of location in one place is removed as much as possible by the accretion of other finitudes – large property, so much money, so many relations, and power, name, authority. These are external phenomena which are wrongly associated with one’s own self under the impression that the existence of these associated finites outside expand the finitude so that he becomes a temporary infinite.
But many finites do not make the infinite. Many fools joined together do not become one wise man. This is very important. But this is the tragedy of life. By accumulating many finitudes in any form whatsoever, a foolishness asserts itself again and again that the agonising feeling of limitedness of personality is abolished by the expansion of itself, as it were, through the expanded artificial arena created by considering certain finitudes as one’s own self.
It is not possible for a finite individual to expand to such an extent as to include all the finitudes in the world. Then there will be no perception of finitude itself. Only certain groups of individuals, one particular thing, is considered as necessary for filling the gap of the sorrow of the location of oneself, and it very vehemently rejects any other individual as unconnected with one’s own self. The attraction felt, the necessity to feel oneself in certain bodies of finitudes, causes love. You love only certain parts of the world. The entire world cannot be loved by you. You love only certain people. You cannot love the whole of humanity. And that which is not loved becomes the object of hatred because those things which are not loved may attack by way of a repercussion and a vengeance because of their non-recognition in the dimension of inclusiveness of finitudes. So there is a necessity to guard oneself from the possibility of attack from other finitudes, other people, and there is a distinction between ‘my people’ and ‘other people’.
But this solution is worse than the disease. The finitude thought that it is going to be very majestically happy because of the artificial accumulation of particulars around it, looking like a large expanded person. It has not expanded; it has only fooled itself by imagining that it has become big. But it has not become big. It is only perceptually recognised in the presence of other people by an emotional involvement which makes it appear that this also belongs to you. Nothing can belong to you. Each one is totally independent. There is no such thing as property, possession, etc. Everywhere there is bereavement.
So love and hatred – raga and dvesha, as it is called – follow one after the other from the original ignorance of the true fact of things, followed by self-assertion – asmita or ahankara – again following further into the difficulty of the clash between the wanted and the unwanted. This struggle continues throughout one’s life. This is the battlefield of life – the great Mahabharata in psychological existence, we may say.
Then what happens further? The trouble is not going to leave you so easily. There is a fear that all these things will perish one day. “I will go, and all those accumulated things also will go.” The phenomenal side in us warns us that we cannot perpetually exist in this world. It again wants that all those things you considered as yourself should also vanish along with yourself. The fear of death catches hold of a person. “Oh, one day I will go. One day I will lose all things.” But who can live with such a fear? Existence itself is impossible with a fright of this nature.
There is another attempt made to get out of this clutch of the fear of death by artificially trying to perpetuate oneself in some way or the other. How would you perpetuate yourself when you are going to be doomed by the icy hands of death? Some artificial methods are conceived by the cunning mind. “I shall physically go, but my name will continue.” It clings to a name of oneself, finally, because “I am identical with my own name. When I wish to continue, it is my name that is to be continued, not somebody else’s name associated with this body.” People struggle hard to perpetuate their names in various ways, as it is well known to everybody. They fix up a pillar and write their name: “Here such and such a person lived,” or put up a marble slab somewhere: “This is owned by so-and-so.” There is a feeling that even after the body goes, that name will continue.
How does this idea arise? Is there a memory in the afterlife of there being a name of the previous existence? Does any one of you know what you were in the previous life? The whole thing is wiped out from the person’s memory. Do you know that you were a very important person in the previous life? You had nameplates everywhere. Do you remember that? You were a wealthy man. All those artificial attempts at perpetuating yourself have been defeated totally by the operative forces of nature. In the same way as you do not know anything of your previous life, you will know nothing in the next life of what you are here. So the attempt of transferring yourself with the same glory to the next life is idle. It won’t work.
People try still another method, namely, “Let me have a son. That son will perpetuate my existence. He will be alive, and he will say my father existed.” This biological impulse of somehow or other perpetuating one’s psychophysical existence causes the pressure to have children, and one cannot be happy without them. Actually, nobody wants children. They are a botheration. But they look like great, pleasant surprises. Nature is so clever in implanting in the mind a false notion that children are also one’s own self. How much love you have when the child is born, and how much sorrow when the child dies! So you want a perpetual generation of yourself to continue. Though you have vanished completely from the surface of the earth, you imagine that you will continue existing through your children.
On one side there is the effect of time which defies the very possibility of continuance for all time, and on the other hand there is the individual’s attempt to defy time itself by wanting to perpetuate one’s name and body both. The body is perpetuated through the children. The name is perpetuated by announcements or any other method. Neither of them will work because this perpetuation – biological and psychological – is again individualistic. But that is not sufficient. What is the use of perpetuating an individual locality? There is a fear. “I want a perpetuation of my width also. I must die as a king and not like a beggar, as a wealthy man and not as a poor fellow.” So the limitation caused by space compels a person to see to it that this limitation is removed by the physical artificial expansion of oneself by gathering immense wealth, land, money, relations, etc. The individual sorrow of a possibility of destruction of oneself is attempted to be defeated by this technique of psychological perpetuation and biological perpetuation. These are all foolish dramas played by the individual, which is actually a meaningless child produced by utter ignorance of the true nature of things.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Nature and Location of Consciousness
The Nature and Location of Consciousness by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Friday 24 January 2014 13:59
*READ MORE \* The Nature and Location of Consciousness
The principle maintained in the philosophy of Yoga is that consciousness is unlimited. This is a very important point that we have to remember at the very beginning. Here, when we encounter the definition or meaning of consciousness, we are likely to face several difficulties: What is consciousness? Where is it situated? What is its origin? How is it related to us? And what is its final importance?
The history of philosophy has been a long record of varieties of definitions and answers to this great question. Endless definitions have been provided by various thinkers and philosophers throughout the history of thought. One of the insurmountable difficulties faced in this connection is the habituated feeling that consciousness is inside the body. We can never forget that this is the fact. Where is your consciousness? “It is inside me; it cannot be anywhere else.” Of course, we are prepared to concede that consciousness is inside everybody else also, but that does not help the matter. Though we do agree that consciousness is inside every person, that it is inside a person is very important to remember.
When we say it is inside, what do we actually mean? Water is inside a bucket; fruits are inside a basket; we are all inside a room. Do we mean that consciousness is inside us in this sense? That which is inside in the examples cited is totally different from that within which it is located. The fruits are not the basket; the people are not the room, and so on.
Going along this analogy, it would mean that consciousness is not the body, because we say it is inside the body. Or, are you prepared to say that it is the body itself? If you say that perhaps consciousness is not inside in the sense explained, that it is inseparable from the body, then inseparableness also involves a kind of relation. Two brothers in a family may be inseparables, as partners in a business. Husband and wife may be inseparables, socially. But, in spite of the fact that they are inseparables, they are not one person; they are not identical.
So, in view of this problem, you will find that you cannot easily decipher the location of consciousness. When you think, you will agree that it is consciousness that is responsible for thinking. Who is thinking? Is it your body that is thinking, or is there something else that you think is thinking? You, as an intelligent, educated person, may not agree that the body is thinking, because when you say a person is coming, you do not mean that a body is coming. You mean something else in the concept of a person coming, for instance.
“I shall speak to you.” When you make statements like this, who exactly is making this statement? Is this body speaking? Any application of common sense will not permit the idea that the body is speaking. Who is speaking when you speak? “I am speaking.” What do you mean by this “I am speaking”? Who are you? You may scratch your head one hundred times without coming to a definite conclusion.
It has been held by certain thinkers who are affiliated to a materialist doctrine that there is a certain unavoidable relationship between body and consciousness, because the body, also, is conscious. When you prick the body with a needle, you will know that the body is pricked. If the consciousness is not vitally related to the body, organically, so to speak, consciousness cannot feel the prick.
Here, one may feel that one cannot separate consciousness from the body. The doctrine known as epiphenomenalism, or the theory that consciousness is a function of the organism of a person, has led to the conclusion that consciousness is perhaps an emanation from the bodily individuality, as fire emanates from a matchstick. It is an exudation, an emanation, a kind of product arising as an effect of the physical organism, and this is the reason why no one can feel that oneself is a consciousness; there is always an insistent feeling that one is a body only. Any kind of theoretical argument against this assumption does not cut ice. There is an intense fondness for the body. It is taken care of as identical with one’s own self: It is me, and I cannot be different from what I appear to be.
If, on this assumption, we go back to our question of where consciousness is located, we would not be able to give a correct and final answer. If it is true that consciousness, for the purpose of our present argument, is accepted to be inside the body only, whatever be its relation to the body, then it cannot be outside the body.
It was pointed out last time that if the consciousness is only inside the body, there would be no means of knowing that there are things outside the body. It is this peculiar situation of it being necessary for consciousness to know that there are things outside it also, that takes us beyond the original concept of the inwardness of consciousness, as located in the body. There seems to be something very strange about this operation, not as it appears to be for all ordinary commonsense thinking.
How do we know that there is an object outside us? There have been various theories – realistic, and idealistic, and various other approaches – which tell us how we come to know that there is an object outside us. Often, it is said that the objects, as they really are, are never known by us. The objects are known by us only as they appear to our mind or consciousness. This is to say that we have a descriptive knowledge of the behaviour of objects, but we do not come directly in contact with the objects as they are in themselves.
A difference has been noticed between what people call the primary qualities of an object and its secondary qualities. The secondary qualities are the descriptive characteristics by which we apprehend the nature of an object. That is to say, the way in which an object reacts to the sense organs is the secondary quality. But the reaction of an object upon the senses cannot necessarily be considered as the nature of the object itself. Something may produce a reaction for reasons other than what the thing itself is. So, the nature of a reaction cannot be the definition of the object as it is.
The true nature of the object is supposed to be constituted of what are known as primary qualities. Here we have another problem which has been pointed out vigorously by idealistic thinkers. If only the secondary qualities are available for cognition to the sense organs, and the mind and the intellect only play second fiddle to the operations of the senses, how will we come to know that there are things called primary qualities? In other words, how do we know that things exist at all, except in the sense of a reaction produced by them in a representative manner, not as a direct contact with the object? There is no means, it is said, of really coming in contact with the essence of an object.
Here we come to the great prescription of a sutra in the system of Patanjali, who accepts this distinction of the primary qualities or essence of an object as it is, and the object as it appears to us. In deep meditation, which is the principal subject of Yoga, we seem to be coming in contact with the object of meditation in some way. But, in what way do we come in contact with the object of meditation? The sutra of Patanjali is very definite in its conclusion that what we know as an object is only a mixture of certain characteristics foisted upon the object by our perceptual or cognitional faculties.
What does this mean? We cannot decipher a particular object unless it has a nomenclature, a name. Only if an object is designated by a particular description called name, we can know what that object is. This is one point.
The second point is, apart from the name or the verbal description of an object that is necessary in order that we may locate the object, there is also, in our mind, an idea of what the object is. We cannot know the object, except in the manner in which we are able to entertain an idea about the object. We have an idea that a tree is tall. We cannot conceive the tree as flat, or as only a stub. In a similar manner, we have a particular idea of every other thing in the world.
The Yoga System points out that our idea of the object cannot be regarded as an ultimately correct description of the object, because it is already stated that the so-called object, of which we have an idea, is known only through descriptive characteristics according to the capacity of the sense organs to cognise or perceive the object.
There is, therefore, the mental quality foisted upon the object on one hand, and the name or verbal designation is also another aspect which is foisted upon the object. But, what is the object by itself?
Here, we go to the fundamental metaphysics of Yoga. For all practical purposes, we may take it for granted that the philosophy of the Samkhya, with much of which the Vedanta also agrees, is the basis of the Yoga doctrine. Yoga is the practical application of the deduction arrived at through the philosophical investigations of the Samkhya, which in basic principles does not differ much from the Vedanta. The Samkhya is a word which means, actually, a method of enumeration of the categories of reality. To understand what these categories are, we can use an illustration by common example.
There is an object called a hard stone or granite. We take for granted that this granite is exactly as it appears to the sense organs. But, by investigation we can know that this hard, impenetrable object called granite is constituted of little particles. We can break the stone into minute elements so small that we may not be able to visualise them with our naked eyes. Such invisible constituents we call the particles of matter seem to constitute the visible object we call the solid stone. Invisible constituents become visible objects. These particles can be divided further into more and more minute components until they become indistinguishable from the basic components of all things in the world. Material or non-material, things in general have basically a uniform characteristic of material constitution, and they tend to become ubiquitous in their nature at the end, so that the fundamental essence of these objects seems to be a uniformly distributed essence. This essence, being the basic reality of the so-called varieties of things, makes us conclude that there is a unity at the back of the apprehended duality and multiplicity of objects.
The stages by which we dissect an object and enter into its basic components are actually the categories of the Samkhya, which leads finally to a principle which is not capable of further dissection. We can dissect or reduce to basic components a thing that is distinguishable from another object. That which is indistinguishable cannot be so subjected to dissection or further analysis.
There is a point where all analyses cease. That point is the all-pervading nature of the fundamental essence of the objects. The Samkhya calls this fundamental ubiquitous material essence as Prakriti. The word ‘_Prakriti’_, though it appears very vigorously in the Samkhya philosophy, appears also in Vedantic scriptures like the Bhagavadgita, Mahabharata, Manusmritti, etc. They differ in certain matters which are not our concern at the present moment.
This all-pervading universal basic indistinguishable essence of material existence is Prakriti. It is the ultimate objectivity of all things. It is best described as objectivity, and not an object. Objectivity is a characteristic and an object is a thing, as we conceive it. Inasmuch as our body, which is material in its nature, also is subject to reduction to its fundamentals in the manner we do other objects, it may mean that we, as physical existences, so-called, are also inseparable in our basic material essence from this ubiquitous Prakriti, so that we cannot stand outside Prakriti as physical embodiments.
Now, inasmuch as this all-pervading physical essence, which is called Prakriti or the matrix of all things, includes even the individualising physical part of even the observer of all things, we may have to concede here that an observer of this material content is not so individualised as it appears in common sense perception of objects by our so-called individuality, because here in the reduction of all materials into this fundamental, material, all-pervading essence, our so-called individual bodily essence necessary for perception externally also gets melted down into this all-pervading material essence.
Then, who becomes conscious that there is a Prakriti? It is not possible that any individualised centre of consciousness can apprehend this all-pervasive material content. That which apprehends an all-pervading thing cannot be finitely located somewhere, because finitude contradicts the all-pervadingness of the object. Hence, the Samkhya concludes by the very force of logic that the knower of this ubiquitous material essence should also be ubiquitous. That is to say, the knowing consciousness cannot be located in any particular centre, because if that had been the case, there would be nobody to know that there is a universal material content.
Today in modern physics, for instance, we are told that everything is cosmic universal energy, space-time continuum, etc. How does anyone comprehend this all-pervading, ubiquitous space-time complex? That comprehending principle, which is the consciousness, cannot be located in one place only, and then conclude that the thing that is known is all-pervading. That would be a logical contradiction. So, the Samkhya is forced to accept a knower who is equal in its capacity to the nature of the object known as Prakriti. That is to say, the consciousness that knows this fundamental, material, all-pervading substance should also be all-pervading. This consciousness that apprehends this universal material essence is called Purusha, which should not be identified with man or a human essence. It is a metaphysical definition given to the consciousness which is supposed to know that there is a universally distributed material essence. Consciousness cannot be identified with matter because there is a total dissimilarity between consciousness and matter. Matter does not know itself. Consciousness knows itself. This is the distinction between objectivity and pure subjectivity. This subjectivity, so-called, is also, as we have to remember, a universally spread-out unlimited consciousness; so, according to the Samkhya, Purusha is infinite, all-pervading, and the Prakriti that is known by it also is all-pervading.
Though this position is very helpful to us in our practice of meditation, on a final logical analysis of the situation, we will observe a contradiction because two infinites cannot exist. We cannot have one infinite of consciousness knowing, and another infinite of material ubiquitousness. This is, as the Vedanta would point out, a defect of the Samkhya doctrine. If we are able to overlook this metaphysical defect of the basic deductions of the Samkhya as pointed out, and are not concerned with this problem metaphysically, we will have a practical guidance from this system of the categorisation of the evolution of this Prakriti into material form, which will be described gradually.
This all-pervading Purusha comes in contact with this ubiquitous material substance in some way, and we can only say “some way”, because exactly in what way it comes in contact, we cannot know. The usual example given by the Samkhya philosophy is that consciousness does not really come in contact with this material object, because they are dissimilar in nature. What happens is that the consciousness reflects within itself the presence of this ubiquitous material substance, as a crystal which is pure in itself, and has no colour by itself, can reflect the colour of an object such as a rose flower brought near it, and because of the proximity of this coloured object, the whole crystal may also look red.
In this manner, the Samkhya explains that consciousness – wrongly, we must say – begins to associate itself with the objects in the world and the basic Prakriti, universal matrix of things originally, and creates a wondrous universal situation. That objectified consciousness, which has arisen on account of this reflection of the ubiquitous material substance on the all-pervading consciousness, is the ultimate metaphysical reality of the Samkhya, called Cosmic Being, which knows Itself as all-pervading.
It knows Itself as all-pervading by coming in contact with this all-pervading ubiquitous substance of material essence, by getting reflected in Itself. Otherwise, the omnipotence or omnipresence or omniscience of this all-knowing consciousness cannot be explained, because in order that something may be omnipresent, there must be a field of ubiquitousness in which it operates as all-pervading. Or, to put it crudely, unless there is space, there cannot be the question of omnipresence. Presence everywhere – that is the meaning of omnipresence. The idea of everywhereness arises on account of the presence of space, because there is no such thing as everywhere, minus the idea of space. All-knowing means it is omniscient. Knowing all things means all things must exist in order that this omniscience may be possible. So is omnipotence, all power – all power means the capacity to exert its authority on things which are other than itself. It cannot exert authority on itself only.
This is a conceptual categorisation of the original manifestation of objectivity, according to the Samkhya philosophy. It calls this condition Mahatattva, the great knowing Logos, as religions would say. It is the original intelligence which knows all things. This idea of all things, omniscience, omnipotence arises on account of this so-called association of the otherwise infinitude of consciousness with this material ubiquitous substance.
The Samkhya goes down further, to the point where we are living now, by bringing into its operation another principle – namely, the self-assertive character of this omniscient, omnipotent Being. It is to be known clearly that there is a distinction between just that featureless all-pervadingness of the principle of omniscience, and the self-consciousness associated with this all-pervading essence. The omnipresent Being should know that it is omnipresent; otherwise, it would be just Being-as-such. This is a particular descent from the original stage of pure omnipresence or omniscience, wherein there is a universal self-consciousness of the fact of being omnipresent. “I am” is the feeling of this omnipresent Being. It is not the “I” of myself or yourself. It is a universal omnipotence and omnipresence asserting Itself, “I am”.
Religions tell us that God is the great “I am,” “I am what I am”, or “I am that I am”. God cannot be described by any other way than “He is”; and God can regard Himself as “I am”. There is no other possible definition available to this great “I”, which includes every other conceivable little dot of “I’s”, like ourselves.
This self-consciousness attributed to this otherwise all-pervading omnipresence suddenly manifests itself in a threefold form. That threefold form is known in Vedantic language as the objective reality called adhibhuta, the subjective reality called adhyatma, and the divine superintending connection between the subjective side and the objective side known as adhidaiva. Here we are coming into certain very important practical issues in our daily attempt to enter into Yoga meditation. The world appears to be external to the knowing consciousness, and the knowing consciousness places itself as a subjective knower of this world that is outside, and for reasons well known, as has already been explained, this connection between the subjective knower and the objective world cannot be established unless there is a link between the subjective side and the objective side.
This is the reason why you cannot know what is happening between you and the object when perception takes place. Some invisible operation which is consciousness by itself seems to be operating, because the link between the knowing subject and the object cannot but be conscious. We need not go further into this subject because I have already touched upon it the other day.
Now, something happens by way of a further evolution from the adhibhuta or the objective side, from the adhyatma or the subjective side, and the adhidaiva or this superintending conscious principle. This is a very important subject which requires a detailed explanation so that you may understand what it means and how it is relevant to your Yoga practice. This matter I shall take up another time.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]