Welcome to The Baba Times
Your Window to the World of Philosophy, Religion and Spirituality!
This website is devoted to Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality and Science. We bring in articles on teachings by Great Saints like Sri Shirdi Sai Baba, Adi Shankara, Swami Sivananda, Swami Krishnananda, Aurobindo, Mother of Auroville and others.
LATEST NEWS We are conducting 'Guided Meditation Session' every Saturday at 5.30 PM EST from New York.
This will include discussions on various topics like Upanishads, Philosophy, Spirituality & Meditation through Skype. Please send 'Add Request' to 'DLSNewYork' from your skype account so that you can participate in this Satsang. These sessions are part of Divine Life Society from Rishikesh
Hari Om. The Baba Times Team, Contact thebabatimes@gmail.com
Gita Jayanti Message
Gita Jayanti Message by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Friday 29 November 2013 19:58
*READ MORE \* Gita Jayanti
(Spoken during Gita Jayanti in 1972)
We can study a text as a historical document come to us from ancient times, forming a link in the development of human culture and civilisation, and we can also study a text as a piece of psychology of the author, a stage in the development of the human mind, so that the particular text to be studied gives us an idea of our present psychological relation to it, and vice versa. The scripture also can be studied as a piece of literature. For example, the Bible and Shakespeare’s writings are considered to be magnificent English literature available to us.
So from what angle of vision are we to study a book, especially when we take up a text like the Bhagavadgita, the Sermon on the Mount, or the Dharmapada? When we study these, we generally introduce into the context our own personality, viewpoints, and the nature of the interest we have at a given moment of time. The structure of the context also depends to a large extent on the mental constitution of the student. A grieved person who is sinking in sorrow due to the weight of samsara, buffeted from all sides with pains of every kind – if such a person reads the Bhagavadgita or the Sermon on the Mount, one particular meaning will come out of it. But a person who has been born with a silver spoon in the mouth and who has never seen pain and never known suffering has another interest altogether, and sees a different meaning in it.
This scripture, the Bhagavadgita – that which is the subject of our worship, prayer and study today – may be taken as a typical representation of religious literature among the many that we have in the world. It is studied, commented upon by countless people, scholars galore, and each one has spoken truths which are not whole truths and yet not untruths because, as I mentioned, the context in which we study the scripture, the circumstances which impel us or direct us to the study and, above all, the state of our mental evolution determine the extent of knowledge or the meaning that we can extract out of such literature as these.
There is a little difference between writings of scholars, poets, literatures, and writings of this kind such as the Bhagavadgita. Kalidasa has written Raghuvamsa and Kumarasambhava, and Vyasa has written the Bhagavadgita. We cannot say that they are on a par even from the point of view of literary merit because scriptures such as the Bhagavadgita contain words which are more than mere linguistic expressions. We are often told, perhaps the Christ himself mentioned it somewhere, that the words he spoke were not words, but spirit expressing itself. It was spirit that came out from the mouth of Christ. They were not words of language. If that was spirit which came out as the wondrous teaching in the New Testament, similar is the case with the words of the Bhagavadgita. It was spirit that was gushing forth, spirit coming in torrential forms and concretising itself through the stages of para, pashyanti, madhyama and vaikhari into visible audible form.
Thus, when spirit manifests itself as force of language and words of wisdom, it becomes a comprehensive manifestation. Spirit is comprehensive. It is not one-sided in any way. While we can speak one aspect of a matter without touching other aspects because of the incompetency of language and the limitations of words, when spirit speaks, it speaks all things at one stroke because spirit and life are identical. Life has no aspects. It is the one thing that we cannot define in our language. What is life? We cannot define it because it eludes the grasp of definitions through linguistic formulae. And if spirit manifests itself as these scriptures, it covers all ranges of thought.
Today when we were doing the sacred svadhyaya of the Bhagavadgita, the 700 verses, I was trying to glance through the meaning of every sloka, and it appeared to me that there is no subject which is not touched there. The only point is, we should have a little time to think over it deeply. Every aspect of human character, human aspiration and human context is touched on in one verse or the other. But if we read it in a hurry just because it is Gita Jayanti and we have to finish it in two hours, we will make little meaning out of it.
The more we study it in an impersonal fashion, the more meaning does it seem to convey to us. As days pass, the more is the depth into which we can enter. Every aspect of psychological question, every philosophical problem, everything that we can call scientific in its strict sense of the term, everything spiritual, social, political, economic, moral, all these subjects are touched on in some verse of the Gita so that, as Mahatma Gandhi used to say, some verse or the other would come up like a ray of light before his mind when he was drooping in a dark cloud covering the sun. There is no verse which will not throw light on some question of life. It may be my question, it may be your question, but it shall have an answer to every question because the Bhagavadgita is supposed to solve the question of mankind. It is not merely the question of Arjuna that was the point of discussion. The Arjuna was only a type of human nature which was taken as symbolic, representing mankind’s foibles as well as longings.
If Arjuna was taken as symbolic of human character in general, seeking its destination which it has lost in the oblivion of ignorance, Krishna would represent the cosmic answer to the individual problem of man. It is actually Iswara-jiva Samvada, Krishna-Arjuna Samvada, Narayana-Nara Samvada, the universe and the individual commingling with each other in a concourse which is deeper than physical sensory perception. What was actually the intention of the Bhagavadgita, we mortal intellects cannot easily explain because, as I tried to point out, if it was divinity that actually manifested itself as the force of the Gita gospel, it should have had intentions beyond the limitations of, and exceeding the borders of, mere human convenience and need.
Human nature, in its completeness and totality, was what was the object of address in the Gita. When we address human nature, we cannot speak merely to its nose or eyes or physiological organs. Human nature eludes the grasp of pure scientific understanding in its logical sense. Divine character, or divine perfection, was addressing human nature in its eternality. Human nature is a type that is eternal; it will not come to an end. Though Mr. so-and-so, Mrs. so-and-so may come to an end one day or another, their types of human nature will not end. There is a difference between logical types and physical patterns. The physical patterns of individuality have a beginning and an end. They die because they have a beginning; they have a birth. But the types of human nature are perpetually there. We have Duryodhanas, we have Krishnas, we have Arjunas, we have every blessed thing always in some part of the world. The psychological pattern of human nature, which cannot be said to have a beginning or an end, which is there as long as the universe lasts, that perpetual figure of human character and human nature was the recipient of this knowledge coming down from the supreme perfection of a blend of eternity and infinity. Thus viewed, the Bhagavadgita becomes a gospel of eternity.
While students of Indology, Sanskritists and grammarians see in the Gita a historical document of linguistic peculiarity, and political historians see in it a feature of the Indian nation in ancient times, people with a more comprehensive vision see in it an eternal gospel for man as such so that it is a gospel for me and for you, for one and all, at all periods of time and in every place or circumstance. The spiritual connotation of a scripture is, therefore, transcendent to the limitations of spatial, temporal and personal idiosyncrasies or peculiarities. It is not meant only for this place, for India only. It exceeds the limitations of space or place. It is not meant only for that particular age in the Mahabharata. That means to say, it exceeds the limitations of time. It was not meant only for Arjuna. It exceeds the limitations of personality. Space, time and individuality do not limit the significance of an eternal message. It is in this context that we are to look upon the Bhagavadgita, especially as sadhakas, seekers. We are not here as students of history or Indology, or politicians or social reformers who are concerned only with a particular given context at a given moment of time. As seekers of truth, we have to see the gospel of truth in the Bhagavadgita.
One of the remarkable features of the Gita is that while each of its verses can be taken as an independent gospel by itself, and even a single verse gives us enough knowledge to ponder over for months together, yet with all these variegated verses which apparently give us independent conclusive messages for humanity, they form a beautiful architectural pattern of beauty and wholeness. There is a pattern of development of the verses of the Gita, like the limbs of a human body. While each limb of the body can be studied independently – eye surgeons study only the eyes, ENT specialists are concerned with only certain parts of the body, there are heart specialists, brain specialists – we cannot forget the context of this part of the body in the setup of the whole organism. The brain is not somebody else’s; it is of the very same person who has also a heart, who has eyes, who has entrails, and so on. Likewise, each verse of the Gita can be taken independently as an object of study or a subject for our thesis, and an object of meditation, psychological analysis, moral self-discipline. For all these purposes we can take every sloka as a guiding light. Yet, all these slokas go together to perform a beautiful fabric of perfection so that we can take the Gita as a single gospel, or we may take it as a variegated gospel for every level of life.
How many rays has the Sun? They say he is sahastra girna or eka girna; we may say he has thousands of rays, or millions of rays, or only one ray. So is the Bhagavadgita. It is a masterpiece not merely of literature but a masterpiece of spiritual profundity and divine magnificence. If Sri Krishna in his cosmic form, or on the eve of his manifestation of the public, spoke the Gita, it was recorded for us by an equally great person, Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa. That is a wonder. The author of its present literary form is as great and as competent in every way as the speaker himself. So we have a beautiful blend of masters – the great master spirit of divinity Krishna speaking the Gita, and the mastermind of Vyasa writing it.
The comprehensiveness of the significance or meaning of the Gita gospel as a spiritual treatise for humanity can be gauged from an oft-quoted verse: krsno janati vai samyak, kincit kunti-sutah phalam vyaso va vyasa-putro va (Sri Vaisnaviya-tantra-sara, Gita Mahatmya 3): The meaning of the Gita is known wholly only to Krishna. Nobody else knows it. Arjuna knows a little bit, and Vyasa knows it, and perhaps his son Suka knows it. The others only hear.
We can make out only the word meaning of a scripture, but that is not the real meaning. It is not only one meaning that comes to the surface if we study a verse of the Gita. It has got many implications, connections and relations; thus, it differs from works such as the Raghuvamsa, the Kumarasambhava or even the Panchadasi. They have only a single meaning, because they are written for a special purpose. But scriptures such as the Gita, the Upanishads, the Veda Samhitas, the Ramayana of Valmiki or even the Mahabharata taken as a whole are not ordinary messages given by writers that we see in the world in plenty. They are not simply writers; they are ambassadors of the spirit who speak in the language of perpetual significance. And thus, we have force and energy induced into us when we study the Gita – much more when we actually contemplate its meaning, and if it is studied in the context in which it ought to be studied.
Sarva shastramayi gita is another oft-quoted saying: Every scriptural meaning we will find in the Gita. Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Sankhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, Vedanta, theism, acosmism, pantheism, transcendentalism, absolutism, devotion, knowledge, concentration, meditation, action, what not – everything we will find there. I don’t think that any one of us here had the patience or the time to read the Gita in such depth. Most people study the Gita as a routine of svadhyaya, parayana, or some people keep it only for worship. They keep it in the puja room and do not open it, keep a tulsi leaf on it and prostrate before it every day. That is also good, wonderful, but that is not enough. It has to be made a part of our life. The Gita is a gospel of life. It is a universal gospel given to Man, capital ‘m’, Man as such, human nature, the type of human character which Arjuna represented. It was not one person that spoke the Gita to another person, Krishna speaking to Arjuna. As I mentioned, the gospel of the Gita exceeds the limits of personality significance. That is why it is sometimes also known as Narayana-Nara Samvada and Brahma-vidya Yoga Shastra.
When we take the whole Gita as a complete gospel it becomes a systematic exposition of the sadhana which we have to perform as seekers of God – the various stages through which we have to pass right from the oblivion of the dark night of the soul, as the mystics generally call it, the condition in which Arjuna was as described in the first chapter of the Gita. The soul gropes in darkness, knowing not where it is and what is happening to it. Right from that condition of oblivion, we are taken systematically to the wondrous vision of the Supreme Being as described in the eleventh chapter of the Gita. From oblivion and ignorance, we go to omniscience and mastery in absoluteness. That is the eleventh chapter. Many things are said which we have to study in detail.
No single commentary on the Gita can be said to touch all the aspects which the Gita must have intended, so it is profitable to read at least half a dozen masters so that we may have an adequate knowledge of the various viewpoints with which the Gita can be studied. One of the most beautiful presentations of this spiritual message of the Gita is the work of Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita – most beautiful. He is one of those who have gone to the very depths of the Gita and given its spiritual message, not merely its historical or political or social message, but the spiritual message for all time. And among the ancient authors, we have the great commentaries of Acharya Sankara, Ramanuja, Madhava, and of later authors also who have written in modern languages. All these are wonderful expositions.
What is the message of the Gita? No one can answer this question in one sentence because we do not know how to express an answer to this moot question. It is like asking what Swami Atmananadaji is. We cannot say he is something in one sentence because there are so many aspects of a human being. Likewise, what is the message of the Gita? If you actually deeply think over the answer to this question, your mouth will be shut. Your silence is the message of the Gita, because you cannot say anything. It is everything and anything. When God speaks, you cannot say what He spoke. What He spoke, how can you say? He spoke everything because it was the Infinite that spoke.
However, beginners as we are on the path of the spirit, we would do well to choose a few verses for our daily contemplation such as ananyāś cintayanto māṁ ye janāḥ paryupāsate, teṣāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ yogakṣemaṁ vahāmy aham (Gita 9.22); manmanā bhava madbhakto madyājī māṁ namaskuru, mām evaiṣyasi yuktvaivam ātmānaṁ matparāyaṇaḥ (9.34); sarvadharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja, ahaṁ tvā sarvapāpebhyo mokṣyayiṣyāmi mā śucaḥ (18.66); karmaṇy evā ’dhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana, mā karmaphalahetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ‘stv akarmaṇi (2.47); ajo nityaḥ śāśvato ’yaṁ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre (2.20). Such verses can be taken as objects for contemplation, themes for meditation.
Or we may take the whole gospel as a single eternal message to us, God beckoning man: “Come to Me.” Sarvadharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja: Abandoning all relativistic modes of conduct which hang one on the other, not independent by themselves, come to the supremely independent root of all beings. Yadā bhūtapṛthagbhāvam ekastham anupaśyati, tata eva ca vistāraṁ brahma saṁpadyate tadā (13.30). When we recognise the rootedness of all variety in that single Being, we have attained to perfection: brahma saṁpadyate tadā.
But how could we contemplate this rootedness of all variety in that single Being? For that, various touches of sadhana are given to us in various slokas of the Gita. There is the moral or ethical side of it, there is the social aspect of it, there is also the political aspect of it, there is the psychological aspect. We cannot simply suddenly jump into it, ignoring these aspects. When we speak to a person, we consider the situation from all angles of vision; then only can we know how to speak, what to speak, and to what extent to speak.
Thus, when we contemplate the context of spiritual sadhana in relation to the gospel of the Bhagavadgita, we have to take all sides into the picture. Otherwise, we shall be one-sided, which is not the teaching of the Gita. Yuktāhāravihārasya yuktaceṣṭasya karmasu, yuktasvapnāvabodhasya yogo bhavati duḥkhahā (6.17). This is a very necessary caution given to us in the Gita as spiritual seekers: Don’t go to extremes. Extreme is not yoga. Extreme in any respect – extremely talkative or not saying anything at all, too much eating or not eating anything at all, always sleeping or not sleeping at all. Neither this nor that can be taken as a part of yoga. We must be normal. Normalcy is yoga. Abnormality is not yoga. We must be normal in every situation in which we are placed.
Bhagavan Sri Krishna himself is a concrete example as to how such a balanced life has to be lived. We cannot say how he lived and how he conducted himself and what attitudes he had in respect of things in general. It was all-sidedness, touching every aspect. There was nothing which he would ignore from his consideration. He was a master statesman, master yogin, master in knowledge, omniscient incarnate, and centre of attraction, love and affection, yet a relentless master who could terrorise even the terrific gods themselves. What God is, no one can say. God is all things combined – mātā dhātā pitāmahaḥ, vedyaṁ pavitram oṁkāra ṛk sāma yajur eva ca (9.17); gatir bhartā prabhuḥ sākṣī nivāsaḥ śaraṇaṁ suhṛt (9.18). What is He not? Everything He is.
So when such a being is the background of the message of the Gita, we could imagine what it has given to us. It has given to us everything. But the only thing is, we must be able to receive the message of the Gita as Arjuna received it. For that we have to place ourselves in the humble position of Arjuna himself. Neither should we be adamant and stick to our guns in saying “I will not fight,” nor should we imagine that we know things well. We have to put on, assume an attitude of humility in the way in which Arjuna himself did. Kārpaṇyadoṣopahatasvabhāvaḥ pṛcchāmi tvāṁ dharmasaṁmūḍhacetāḥ (2.7): I am confused. I don’t know what is truth. When we actually, in this spirit of self-abnegation, surrender ourselves to the eternal source of wisdom, it shall come to us as a Guru. The Guru will come to us.
So on this very blessed occasion of the Jayanti of the Bhagavadgita which, to speak from purely a historical point of view, was given to us perhaps some 5000 years ago at a place called Kurukshetra, that message is echoing in the ears and the minds and the hearts of all students of yoga and aspirants of truth for all time to come. The Bhagavadgita is, therefore, the central text of religious consciousness. It is not the text of the Hindu religion. It is not a text of this religion or that religion. It is a text of the religious consciousness, the spiritual attitude to things, the comprehensiveness of approach that we have to adopt in our conduct in life. Such is the gospel of the Bhagavadgita.
It is well said that the Bhagavadgita is the milk taken out of the cow of the Upanishads. Sarvopaniṣado gāvo dogdhā gopāla-nandanaḥ, pārtho vatsaḥ sudhīrbhoktā dugdhaṁ gītamṛtaṁ mahat (Gita Mahatmya 4). The science of being is given to us in the Upanishads, and the art of living is given to us in the Bhagavadgita. The art of living naturally depends on the science of being. How things are – that must be known first. This the Upanishads tell us: what things are in themselves. Then on the basis of this knowledge of what things really are, we know how to conduct ourselves in practical life. That is the science, the technique, the methodology of living in the world. So the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita form a group of complementary texts. Both are equally important for study and meditation. They are also known as the Sruti and the Smriti – the Upanishads is the Sruti, the Bhagavadgita is the Smriti.
The Bhagavadgita, located in the context of the Mahabharata, is also an epitome of the Mahabharata teachings. Just has we have 18 chapters of the Bhagavadgita, there are 18 Parvas or sections or books of the Mahabharata. There is some sort of a similarity of theme treated in these 18 Parvas of the Mahabharata and the 18 chapters of the Bhagavadgita – though not entirely, in some respects. It may be that we are not able to understand it properly. The soul’s incipient stage of ignorance and helplessness is described in the first chapter of the Gita and also the beginning Parva of the Mahabharata, the Adi Parva. In the Adi Parva the Pandavas are like children, knowing nothing, kicked from all sides, suffering all kinds of pains and woes, wandering hither and thither like unwanted children. What a pity! This is mankind in its incipient stage. Then there is a temporary rise into prosperity as in the second chapter of the Gita and the Sabha Parva of the Mahabharata. It is only a temporary rise; it is not a complete rise. When we take a series of vitamin pills, we suddenly feel energised, but afterwards will again droop when the pills are stopped. So such energy is suddenly infused in the Sabha Parva of the Mahabharata when Yudhishthira is crowned king after the Rajasuya sacrifice, but all for his woe and suffering later on. That prosperity of Yudhishthira after the Rajasuya was not real prosperity. It aroused the jealousy of Duryodhana and many others, and we know what happened then. In the Vana Parva he fell down once again. We go into the wilderness, suffer, search for light. The human soul is in samsara in this way.
Sadhakas are of this way. When we come to ashrams, we come in this very fashion. In the beginning there is all oblivion, confusion at home; nobody knows what it is. “We shall go to monasteries.” And suddenly there is an enthusiasm. “Oh, now I have entered a monastery, and now I shall take up the practice of yoga.” The second chapter has come. Yudhishthira has become the crowned king, but afterwards it is all gone. There is nothing. In the Vana Parva we are in the wilderness once again, in the jungle. “Oh, God, where it is nobody knows. I have lost everything – lost the kingdom, lost help from people.” But yet, well-wishers come and speak to us, “Don’t bother. It will be all right in the course of time.” In the Vana Parva Sri Krishna himself comes and speaks, “Don’t bother. The time will come, God willing, that justice will be reinstated.” And in the Virat Parva and the Udyoga Parva of the Mahabharata preparations are made for the coming battle with nature which has not yet started.
The actual battle of life has not yet started. When you enter the ashram, the battle has not yet started. There is only an enthusiastic emotional mood, which will bring you down after some time. But when you are ready, after the proper education that is given to you in ashrams – that education was given in the Vana Parva and the Virat Parva – then divinities come to your aid. All the masterminds came to the aid of Yudhishthira. They didn’t come before that. The battle starts from Bhishma Parva onwards. Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Salya – these Parvas are the Parvas of battle, and they are wonderful things. They are not simply descriptions of a Hitlerian war or any such thing. It is a battle of the spirit allegorically and metaphorically described in epic style – Bhishma representing one character, Drona one character, Karna another character, and Duryodhana a fourth character altogether. This is a battle of characters, types, natures, rather than persons.
Who was Bhishma? Who was Drona? What was their specialty? What was the specialty of Duryodhana? You will study this if you read these Parvas, and how difficult it was to face these people. Different techniques had to be adopted to face each one of them. The same technique could not be used with all people, because Bhishma was different from Drona, and Drona was different from Karna. They were not the same. Likewise, kama, krodha, loba, they are different things, and to deal with them you have to use different techniques. You cannot use a uniform method to deal with every situation. That will not work. You must be a very shrewd person, a very good psychologist, and also a very patient person in this respect. Then comes the real crowning glory of Yudhishthira installed as emperor and blessed with the wisdom of the Shanti Parva of the Mahabharata. Very interesting! All this is to be studied in great detail with a dispassionate mind.
In this wonderful garland of the 18 Parvas of the Mahabharata, the Bhagavadgita hangs like a beautiful pendant. The Bhagavadgita is the epitome of the whole Mahabharata, and we may say the Mahabharata as a whole is a vast commentary on the secret esoteric teachings of the Bhagavadgita. It is said that the Mahabharata is a Veda by itself – pañcamaṃ vedā. The four Vedas are Rig, Yajur, Sama, Artharva, and the Mahabharata is the fifth Veda, perhaps equal to them. Sometimes it is said the Mahabharata weighs heavier than the Vedas themselves. Such is the Kashna Veda, as they call it. Kashna Veda means the Veda written by Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa.
So we should use all our opportunities, the blessed field created by Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj here for us by his own compassion, in gaining this wondrous knowledge of our culture, this world gospel of the Bhagavadgita, and utilise every moment of our time in this only meaningful duty of aspiring for God-realisation. God bless you all.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Stages of Knowledge of the Yoga Vasishtha
The Stages of Knowledge of the Yoga Vasishtha by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Thursday 28 November 2013 21:02
*READ MORE \* The Stages of Knowledge of the Yoga Vasishtha
The general condition of human life, which may be said to be one of an acquiesced satisfaction with the world we see with our eyes, is a matter for deep consideration. That some sort of an investigation is called for into the nature in which we live in the world is a necessity not felt by many people. We do not feel the need to inquire into our lives because everything seems to be clear to us.
The longings of the heart and the general pressures of human desire are so very well taken for granted as the most normal things in the world that they do not require any special attention on our part. There is practically no event or occurrence in our life that we feel needs a particular investigative attention, so we have been content in living a life of utter abandon to the condition that has taken possession of us – possession to such an extent that, to any thinking mind, it may appear that we have lost our personalities. We have been sold to the conditions that have bargained to purchase us, and our subjection to these conditions of life is such an utter abolition of our independent way of thinking and willing that often it looks doubtful that we have any independence at all.
To be subject to the pressures of internal impulses is what we call the joys of life. The movement along the current of a river is a satisfaction since we have abandoned ourselves to the flow of the current. The upward movement is not a satisfaction or a joy because there is opposition to our contemplated movements. Whenever we oppose our impulses, the joys are cut off.
Thus, a continuous asking for unending joy in the world will automatically mean a total subjection to the will of the master, and that is the world. An utter subject as slave of a superintending authority has, in a way, no fear because there is no opposition. We have no fears of any kind, or so it looks, as long as we are content to move with any demand that is made by our body or by the conditions of our mind. Whatever is demanded is given, and therefore, the mouth of these impulses is shut by a provision of what is required, demanded, asked for from moment to moment.
But this has not been an easy affair. It would not be a simple matter to supply the demands of a source which changes its attitude and types of demand from moment to moment. If a single stereotyped asking is before us, we have enough time to think that this particular thing is what is expected of us.
The world does not seem to be expecting one particular thing from us. Our neighbours, our environment, the people who are part of human society in which we are living are, in a very important sense, hard taskmasters, so that to adjust ourselves to the requirements of these multifaceted atmospheres tells upon our system. To be compelled to adapt and adjust to conditions which change from moment to moment is a great strain on the mind and the body. The freedom that we speak of becomes a total chimera if it is impossible for us to live in the world without a moment-to-moment adjustment with the environment in which we are living. Whether it is hot or cold, we have no say in that matter. We have to adjust ourselves with it. Whether people are friendly with us or otherwise, we have no say in that matter and have to adjust ourselves with that also. There may be a hailstorm of painful conditions on our heads, and we erect an umbrella of protection against the fall of these hails.
There has been a continuous effort on the part of man to survive irrespective of this utter subjection to uncontrollable conditions and circumstances, and these joys, these satisfactions, these pleasures that are doled out to us as from a master to a servant are the immediate outcome of our willingness to subject ourselves to these conditions. As a dog is thrown a little piece of bread, the joys of life are thrown on us by these relentless powers of nature to which we willingly subject ourselves as helpless slaves. Thus is the joy of life.
But, who has time to think? A continuous subjection prevents even the movement of thinking. Time to think is not given. There is no permission given to us to think because to think would be to assert an independence of our own, and that is not allowed. We are perpetual slaves. Thus goes human satisfaction and human life, human misery.
A time comes, says the great scripture the Yoga Vasishtha, when man begins to contemplate the seeds and the very presuppositions of the conditions of subjection in which we are living. At least before going to bed for a few hours we begin to think: “Am I really living a worthwhile life?” This primitive stage of not being able even to think is not really worth any mention, really speaking. That our need for analytic thinking has not been felt is a great credit indeed to our ignorance and the extent of our subjection, because we are happy and we need nothing else. But why are we happy? Because we have sold ourselves. We have become slaves to such a degree that our life itself is in the hands of powers which we cannot understand, and over which we have no say. Such a kind of misery is the involvement of human life. But it is all a joy for the worm that travels in filth because there is an acquiesced adjustment of the biological condition of the worm with the constitution of its environment. We are ready to live with anything; that is enough for us, provided our impulses are gratified.
Thus, there seems to be a final quintessential conclusion of human enterprises, and it is this much: that human life is no independent, indivisible and standing value. It is a moment-to-moment self-adjusting structure which charges itself regularly day to day with the capacity for such adjustment and adaptation. Our body can adjust itself to any temperature and our mind can adjust itself to any environment. If this is not done, if this adjustment is not to be expressed as a gesture on our part, there would be a sudden eruption of a condition in life which would make our life impossible.
So a desire arises sometime in our lives, at least when we are old enough to think: “Have I lived a worthwhile life in the sense of having gained anything which is meaningful? Have I gained anything from this world? Have I lived for any purpose?” These questions cannot arise in early ages because the impulses of life are stronger in youth, impetuous and unrelenting in their behaviour. Continuously we are pressed down on our necks to the need of this subjection to whatever is expected of us by nature and the environment. But the impulses become weak when we become physically old. Neither we can eat well nor drink well. Neither can we sleep well nor can we have any interest in life with such pep and sauce that we discovered earlier in our youth. Then it is that the grey hair begins to speak in a language of investigation and begins to question itself: What have I done in these longish years of my life in the world?
This condition of an incipient need felt for self-investigation, says the Yoga Vasishtha, is called subecha, a desire for the good: “I must do something good. There is no use merely being a servant throughout my life because there is no saying when the life will end, and whatever has been bequeathed to me as a kind of remuneration for my subjection to life is not lasting. It may have its end any moment. What will happen to me, where will I go, who will look after me and where shall I be placed? Am I going to cease to exist after the body is shed?” It cannot be. The conscience does not permit the argument that we shall cease to be when the body is cast off. We think: “Oh, I am doing some good; I shall have my reward.”
Many a time the good deeds we perform do not receive any reward. They may even receive a condemnation. But man feels: “After all, I have done some good. Maybe man has not recognised it, but my conscience says I have done some good. Will I go unrewarded?” The conscience says, “No, I shall not go unrewarded. Where will I be rewarded, if not in this world? This world has given me nothing. It has recognised nothing worthwhile in me; it has exploited me, put me down, harnessed me, utilised me as an instrument, and given me nothing of value.”
The conscience of a human being says that life shall continue after the end of this body. But what kind of life are we going to enter? This is sometimes frightening, sometimes solacing. It is solacing to those who feel a sense of inner conviction that they have really done some good, and they have not done any harm or bad. “Some good I have done knowingly or unknowingly, whether it is publicised or not publicised.” To such a convinced mind there is a solace that life shall continue after the body is shed. “These good deeds, these charitable gestures, these attitudes of service which I have of my own accord demonstrated here which have not been even recognised by people shall receive attention in my next life.” That is a solace for those who are really convinced of having done something worthwhile and good.
But all are not of this type. We go with a suspicion; we go with a fear: “I have done nothing practically. I have perhaps earned a fat salary, but can this be called a good deed that I have performed, that I have had enough money to put in a bank? I have commuted my pension, I have educated my children, and my family is well fixed. Well, that may be. Is this going to protect me in my future life? What shall guard me, take care of me?” It is the law of the other world. What protects us is law, not man, not a human being, not any particular thing. It is a principle we call the law of sustenance of the world as a whole, which is obeyed implicitly, that will take care of us. “Have I obeyed the law, and what is that?” These types of questions arise some time or other in one’s life, and the Yoga Vasishtha says this is vicharana. We go on thinking: “It is now time for me to do something worthwhile. I may perhaps enter a realm after death where a different set of laws operate. It may be a condition, it may be a country, it may be a land of people who may not have any value for the laws of this world, and what I have done to people, to things here, may not have much value there.” Sometimes doubts of this kind may arise.
But there are universally accepted laws which, if obeyed, will stand by us as a large credit balance which shall be carried forward to our ledger books of the next world. These questions arise in us. Is there anything we can think of in our life today which can be really carried over to the other world? Or is whatever we have done in this world meaningful only here, and not in the other world? Is it a currency that is workable only here and it is non-current in the other world? Then this currency is of no value to us. But have we an international currency with us which we can take to the other world also? Have we anything of that? We shall be depressed, dispirited and agonised to receive answers from our own conscience that perhaps we are not yet ready to meet the contingencies of the other world.
This fear will grip us, and it is a purifying fear nevertheless. Such a fear is necessary. Often such fears purify us instantaneously. We rid ourselves of the memories of the past and decide once and for all not to commit an error in the future because of the fright that is immanent which may descend on us the next day, in a few days, in the next moment. An inviolable, ferocious predicament that may come upon us may purify us, cleanse us of our sins due to the repentance that we feel and the decision that we take to be right from this moment onwards. Often they say all sins, mountainous though they may be, can be washed out and discharged, destroyed, burned to ashes by a moment’s decision which is correctly taken: jñānāgniḥ sarvakarmāṇi bhasmasāt kurute tathā (Gita 4.37).
These investigations of the mind, vicharana conducted thus, compels us to set our foot on a right path. I have done many wrongs. I am very sorry indeed, and I shall rectify myself just now at this moment. I shall tune myself to that obedience to that eternal law of God, and thus I surrender myself.
Actually, these decisions of the spirit of the human being which can be even instantaneous, coming flash-like, can be so effective and purifying in their nature that saints, devotees tell us actions piled up in our minds as memories of several lives led earlier will be set at naught by the piercing flame of this repentance and surrender of oneself to God.
The mind, which is usually fat with its egoism of attention to the body continuously throughout its life, the ego which is rendered fat by pampering with the satisfactions of the world of senses, gets thinned out. The Yoga Vasishtha says the ego becomes stout; it puts on weight. It says how the ego becomes fat day by day. The more we are tied to affection to person and things, the stronger becomes our ego and assertive instinct. By acquiring wealth in the world, by becoming more and more rich materially, economically, by holding property, dissatisfaction fattens the ego. By the gaining of the objects of the lower impulses, the ego gets fattened. By these tantalising phenomenal presentations of the joys of life, mistaking the cool shadow under the hood of a serpent for a comfortable place for rest, with such mistaken views the ego becomes fat. The Yoga Vasishtha compares the coolness of Earthly satisfaction to the coolness under the hood of a cobra. Who will take rest under there? Even if we are parched in the hot sun, will we take rest under the hood of a cobra because there is cool shade there? This is the world, and so is the joy of life which will sting us one day or the other, to our own torment and discomfiture, and it is better to guard oneself before such a stage of utter helplessness takes possession of us.
Here the mind is rejuvenated into a new orientation of thinking. Nothing of the world can satisfy us. There was a king called Yayati. The story comes in the Puranas and in the Mahabharata. He was very fond of sensual gratification. He was getting old, but the desire was not waning. He was in a state of grief. “I am old. My sense organs are not strong enough to receive the joys of life.” He went to his children. “Lend me your youth, my dear children. After my satisfactions, I will hand it back.” Nobody was prepared to give his youth. So he cursed them; he uttered some imprecations. One of them, they say, was agreeable to this request. In a mysterious way by tapas, austerity, by a vicarious suffering, as it were, vicarious transference, we may say, the youth of the poor boy was transferred to this old man. He became youthful again, and enjoyed all the pleasures of the senses. But again old age came. When he returned the youth, he was old again. It is said he went to the heavens due to the effect of his sacrifices, and he was not repentant. He was asked: “What have you seen?” “What have I seen? Nothing can satisfy me. There is no end. The pleasures of life have not satisfied me. All the rice and the wheat, all the gold that is on Earth may not be sufficient for the satisfaction of one man.” This is what he said. All the gold and the silver and the wheat and the rice and the sugar and what not, all the things of the world will not be sufficient to satisfy the cravings of even one person in the world. And what about many of us?
Thus one decides in the end, and girds up one’s loins to lead a life that is really recognisable in the higher realms of being into which we have to enter one day or the other. Sadhana is the stage into which we enter after this condition of vicharana. Subeccha, desire for the good, is the first stage. Vicharana, investigation, self-inquiry is the second stage, and the thinning out of the mind, the threadlike condition of the ego which was earlier very fat with these joys as if it is going to break, that tanumanasi condition is one of heightened spiritual practice or sadhana.
What is sadhana? What is spiritual practice? What is it that can save us from these turmoils of the life of sorrow by an inward communion that we establish with the law of God or, we may say, rita or satya, the law of the universe, which is another way of saying that we sacrifice ourselves at the altar of God’s creation. A yajna is performed by our Atman, a yajna which is jnanyajna, a knowledge sacrifice which is a knowledge of the fact that our very existence is inseparable from the creation of the Absolute impels us to surrender ourselves to this all-being. Towards this sense, sadhanas are practiced by japa, by kirtan, by swadhaya, by puruscharana, by dhyana, by tirth yatra, by study of scriptures, by charitable acts, gifts and the like, by holy baths and what not.
When the mind is thinned out, and the ego is famished almost, the light of the Atman reveals itself. The sun, though he is so fiercely brilliant, is clouded completely by thick layers of water particles as if an eclipse has covered the sun. In dark monsoon, even midday looks like night. Such a condition has befallen us. The light that is within us is beclouded by the layers of clouds of unfulfilled longings, desires which have been carried over into our present life from our earlier ones by non-fulfilment, lodged now in our koshas – anandamaya kosha, subtle body, the linga sarira. They are thick, but they have to scud. The clouds have to move by a fierce concentration directed towards this yajna purusha, the omnipresent reality which is the ultimate reason why we have even these apparent joys of life on Earth.
Light flashes when sadhana is intensified, the mind is purified, the intellect is stabilised. What happens? The clouds of desire disperse. Longings for contact with objects of sense break, and affections for things cease. In the light of the fact that our mind, our ego is only a network of longings for external objects, we may very well understand how they break when the desire ceases. As a cloth is made up of threads, the mind is made up of desires. It has no independent existence apart from the threads. So is the mind, so is the ego.
This beclouding mental awareness in terms of objects of satisfaction is not a real hard substantial something. It is a complex interrelated structure, like a fabric; it can be reduced to nothing when the threads of desire are pulled out one by one, and then the clouds disperse and the sun shines. Yoga Vasishtha considers this condition as sattvapatti. Sattvapatti means attainment of a flash of lightning of spiritual awakening. As we see lightning flashes in the sky, we will begin to see the flashes of the spirit before the vision of the mind. And they come and go. That is why they are called flashes. It is not a perpetual radiation like the midday sun, which of course we shall await. But it has not yet come. There are only indications we are moving in the right direction. When we move in the direction of the vast ocean, a cool breeze blows over our face. We are told we are nearing the ocean. When we near the Ganga we feel: “Yes, I am near the Ganga; I feel the coolness of the water.” So symbols will be presented before us in the form of musical intonations, fragrant smells, soft touches and brilliant flashes. This is what yoga scriptures tell us. These are indications that we are advancing in our sadhana. Superphysical satisfactions will present themselves before us, satisfactions which do not necessarily arise by contact of senses with objects, satisfactions which do not require any object at all. An automatic arising of the joy from the Self itself will come in the form of a flash of radiance, sattvapatti.
Then what happens? There is no necessity for the mind at any time whatsoever to long for contact with anything. The thing called the contact ceases because of the inner permeation of the spirit with the very substance of all things. The awakening that has come now educates us into the understanding that our joys are not the products of the contact of mind with objects. They arise from a spontaneous eternal bottom in our own being, and therefore, all longing for contacts ceases at one stroke. Asamsakti is this condition – no contact with anything. It is a condition of non-contact because the spirit has no contact. It is a non-contactual permeating principle, ethereal like the vast space or sky, and it is present in the hearts of all things; and that being the source of joy really, it needs no contact with anything outside for awakening this joy from inside us. Actually, contact of the senses with the objects will then be realised as a malady that has come upon us, a sickness, a sorrow. It is an illness.
What happens afterwards? Glorious descriptions are given to us in the Yoga Vasishtha which will transport us into ecstasy, which will make us dance in joy that such a thing is possible after all. These things which are told to us by these scriptures are unthinkable to our minds – unthinkable, unimaginable, and beyond the comprehension even by the farthest imagination. We shall not be able to live in this world due to the possibility of having such attainments. “What happens then?” says the Yoga Vasishtha. Padartha-bhavana\ is there. A pithy word is used. Matter vanishes; spirit reveals itself. Matter, the so-called hard world of rock, bricks and iron and steel, this world of such hard substances melts into the liquid of the omnipresent light. Matter becomes radiance. We have heard modern science saying that matter is convertible into energy and light. They are inter-convertible. They are inter-convertible because they are made up of the same substance.
The lodgement of the spirit in sleeping matter is awakened to its own self-independence, and it frees itself from these shackles into which it appeared to subject itself, and matter which appeared as a shroud for consciousness becomes an appendage and a glory, a shakti of the purusha, a light of the sun which is no more a shroud for the sun. So the whole world lifts the veil that it was putting on its face to delude us, to make us feel that it is something different from what really is. That veil which the world was putting on to deceive us, distract us and subdue us, that veil the world lifts, and the glory of eternity in this temporal world is revealed before the all-seeing eye of the spirit immanent. The world vanishes into the Supreme Being. Padartha-bhavana – no world, no object is there anymore, or rather, in another sense, it is the recognition of the true padartha, padartha-bhavana. The real substance is discovered by a direct entry and insight into its reality.
The culmination of this process is the melting down of our very existence in this vast sea of eternity. This is the state of moksha, turiya. Towards this great goal we are moving with our little foibles here, with our little deeds, with our ups and downs, with our little sadhanas and prayers. With our little humble efforts in life we are gradually trekking towards this Might of all mights, the Almighty, the glorious radiance of immortal nectar which is awake in us. The very thought of that glorious attainment is possible for us. After all, it is possible for us. If not today, then tomorrow it is possible. “I shall have it and it has to be had!” With this conviction that it must be had and it is possible and practicable, we shall attain it.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Integral Life of the Householder
The Integral Life of the Householder by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Wednesday 27 November 2013 18:50
*READ MORE \* The Integral Life of the Householder
(Spoken on May 17, 1997)
Everything is controlled by something else. ‘Something else’ means everything there is, so that you are appearing to be existing by the pressure effected by comic forces from all sides in a particular manner. Because of the particular manner of the impact of the forces, you look like one person. If the impact was different, you would look like another person. You may be anything. You may be a human being, a man or a woman, or even a tree. Anything can take place. Therefore, neither a tree exists nor a mountain exists nor stars exist; nothing exists. Everything is a shape given to a pressure of a particular kind, exerted from every nook and corner of creation, so even the existence of a little thing is the action of God. Nobody works. Nobody exists. That is why Buddha said there is no soul. When he said there is no soul, he meant there is no individuality. There are only relationships or pressures like magnetic influences from outside, and they make things appear as if they are standing because of the pressure from outside. But they are not standing. The river is not existing; it is flowing. The flame of a lamp is not existing; it is moving. We are also like that. We are a moving cosmic operation taking place, and really we do not exist by ourselves.
But there is a kind of ego, an assertion of the individuality of an otherwise mere floating bubble. The bubble is asserting its individuality, which makes it feel that it is existing as a person; but it is not existing. It is blown off by the operation of another force, and that blowing off is called death. The force can blow another way, and it is called rebirth. Every action, birth, death or experience is an operation of the centre of the cosmos. We do not exist here. The ego, or ahamkara, is the reason why we understand nothing. This great stigma on everyone will not allow us to think properly.
Therefore, you must seek deep meditation and expand your consciousness to the existence of everything in the universe so that when you think, you are thinking the whole universe at one stroke. You are not thinking any particular place – neither a place, nor a country, nor anything. The entire cosmic distance is yourself. In the Vaishvanara Vidya of the Upanishads it is said that you enter the cosmos, and the cosmos enters you, so that you do not exist at all. When you meditate, the cosmos meditates. The cosmos meditates on itself like a river entering the ocean, and there is no river afterwards. When the ocean thinks, it does not think like a river. The rivers are inside it. Though all the rivers are inside the ocean, the ocean does not think, “I am so many rivers.” It will not think like that. It thinks, “I am one mass of existence.”
Visitor: Swamiji, when a little understanding comes, why does it not go deep down and take charge of it?
Swamiji: I told you there is a thing called ego. Ego is a pressure inside us which retains the idea that this shallow, balloon-like existence is existing. It is called maya, avidya, and so forth. The ego is a kind of devilish influence which makes us feel that we are independently existing. Even the stars are controlling you. The sun and moon and space-time, everything is controlling you. So what is your importance? That false imagination of importance is the ego.
Visitor: How does it go?
Swamiji: By this kind of meditation.
Visitor: When one meditates, one has to be satisfied with oneself.
Swamiji: There is no ‘oneself’. You should not use all these words.
You must know that things are not moving according to our prejudices, according to our religion, according to our customs, according to our cult and the cultural background into which we are born. All these have no connection with the truths of life. We do not want to know these truths. We are men and women, we are from India and America, we are religious or not religious, we are socialists or Marxists, we are philosophers, we are businessmen, we are merchants. These things have no meaning if we look at things from the point of view of the whole world.
You must transfer your mind to the total world, as if the world is thinking. You should not think like a person belonging to any place. You should think as the whole world is thinking. The world has no men and women. It may not even know that they are existing. The world has no differences of any kind within itself. The world is a big organism, like our body. It has no caste, it has no religion, it has no philosophy. It is just what it is. Can you live a life like that – just being what it is?
I am telling you all this because there is a sutra in the Brahma Sutra which is very intriguing, which no commentator has explained properly. Kr̥tsnabḥāvāttu gr̥hiṇopasaṃhāraḥ (Brahma Sutra III.4.48). The meaning of this sutra is, the life of a householder is integral. Unfortunately, all the commentators of the Brahma Sutras are sannyasins. No sannyasin will accept that the householder is leading an integral life. They will say sannyasa is higher. Here also, there is some prejudice. We should never bring ideas of higher and lower in the scheme of things. All the commentators are sannyasins, and they abhor the word ‘householder’, so how will they write a commentary on this sutra? They are handicapped in saying anything. They cannot say that the life of a householder is wholesome. The general idea is the life of a householder is one of attachment to family, property, etc.
Then what does this mean? How is it integral? Neither can the sannyasin accept that the householder is integral, nor can they say that the Brahma Sutra is saying something wrong because everybody has high respect for the Sutra. It is like saying the Bible is wrong, the New Testament is wrong, Christ is wrong. One cannot say that. They are all holy words. One may disagree with it, but one cannot say it is wrong. So what these commentators do is, they glide over this. They write only two lines that, according to the Upanishad, the householder’s life is considered as integral. They won’t say anything more, and pass over it
You have prejudices. That is very important. Cultural prejudice, linguistic prejudice, ethnic prejudice, anthropological prejudice, man-woman prejudice – you cannot get over it. In this condition, you can never reach God. It is not possible. God is not a man or a woman. He is not a Brahmin or a Kshatriya. He is not an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Indian. In what capacity are you going to God? “Oh, I am Christian. My God, I have come.” God will not know what is the meaning of ‘Christian’. He is just ‘I am what I am’. If you think, “I am a Brahmin. I am coming to attain salvation,” it will not cut ice.
In what capacity will you go to God? Any idea you have got about yourself is wrong. It is not possible to free ourselves from this prejudice as long as we have got a pre-oriented individuality that we are born into a particular family, culture and morality. Morality also differs. It is not universally a unanimous thing. There is a village near Mussoorie where each lady has five husbands. There are many social workers in India. They said, “These villagers are fools; we must go and educate them.” The village is so far, beyond Mussoorie in a far-off place, and nobody wants to go there. Some ladies belonging to a cultural group of India went there, and were discussing with them. One lady said, “Listen. You should not have many husbands. I am also a lady. I have only one husband.” They all laughed. “Oh, poor lady! She has only one husband. What are you going to teach us? You are a very selfish person. You have only one husband. I don’t want to talk to you. Go.” The social welfare workers came back defeated.
Now, do you think these ladies are ethically right? Draupati had five husbands, and we adore her as a divinity. What is all this, finally? There is a free life in America. Everybody is free; unconditioned movement is allowed there, except for what is illegal. In India there are terrible restrictions; there is a restriction for eating, a restriction for washing, restrictions for moving, for standing, sitting, and even for looking. Everything is restricted here.
I am giving you an example of Western culture. It is a free culture. Because of the instinct of every person to be free and to not want to be shackled by anybody, everybody wants to follow the trend of Western culture. Even an orthodox Brahmin does not like his religion. He crops his hair, and wears a tie. Why should he wear a tie? He thinks that wearing a tie is high culture, that Western culture is higher. He dislikes speaking in his own tongue, and speaks in English only. What is it that attracts him? It is freedom, indeterminism, a kind of non-restriction of behaviour. Who does not like freedom? You want to bind me completely? The whole world is following Western culture. Everywhere, whatever country it is, all have the same Western dress, the same tie, the same way of thinking. Why?
There is something deep in us which is not in accordance with our adopted religions. We have two prejudices. One is, our religion is the best. Every Christian thinks Christianity is the best and that Hindus are pagans and Muslims are fools. That is why they are hell-bent to proselytise and convert people into Christianity by any means. Hindus think Hindus are the greatest people and that no religion is equal to Hinduism. Muslims think that Islam is the best and all others are foolish people.
What kind of people are we? Are we fit to attain God? A universal, omnipresent, indeterminable absoluteness which is God – can that fate be set in tune with our way of thinking?
What is liberation? Where do we go when we reach the state of perfect freedom and immortality? All sorts of answers are given. Some say we can only be near God, some say we can be in the vicinity of God, some say we can be only in the kingdom of God, some say we can just sit near God, and some say we can be God Himself. All these ideas arise on account of our way of thinking. As we think, so we will become. The kind of freedom we expect will be the freedom we will get. As the kind of freedom we are expecting is conditioned by our empirical way of thinking, we cannot answer the question of what liberation is. We have a logic which is pragmatic, empirical, and practical. We cannot go beyond it. Does God think in the same way? Has He a logic which is differential or deductive? Does God argue? Does He require an argument to establish His existence?
Now I am coming to the point of the householder. All this that I have said is an introduction to this intricate subject. A householder is not to be considered as a man of attachment. He has truly an integral level. He is a highly disciplined person. A married man need not necessarily be a man with attachment. Attachment is prohibited. A person should marry for reasons of a different nature, but he cannot be attached to his wife, to his property, or even to his son and daughter. That this is not practicable and parents are attached to their children is a great travesty.
The word ‘householder’ has a unique meaning in India. There are four gradational achievements, or attainments, for the development of the person, arranged in ancient times in India. The first is conservation of energy, and is called brahmacharya – studying holy scriptures, serving the Guru, and maintaining self-control. Ancient brahmacharis were great, powerful people. If they uttered a word, it would immediately take effect. Brahmacharis were feared. You did not dare irritate them.
There is a story of a brahmachari. Parikshit was a king. He went hunting, and on the way he felt thirsty and searched for a place where he could get water. He saw an ashram, and went there. He saw a sage sitting and meditating. He said, “I want water.” But the sage was in deep meditation, and did not hear anything. The ego of the king started working. “Oh, great man, meditating.” In anger, he lifted a dead snake lying nearby with the end of his bow, hung it on the neck of the sage, and went away. The students, who were all under the tutorship of this Guru, came and saw a snake around their Guru’s neck. They ran to the son of this sage. “Come here, and see what is happening to your father. A snake is on his neck.” The son wept and cried. “My dear boys, see my power today, the power of my words.” The boy took water three times. “Whoever has done this misdeed, he will be bitten by a cobra within seven days.” What power he had! I am not going into the details of this method.
Brahmacharya is the initial stage of conservation of energy. In ancient days it was believed that a person would live for a hundred years, so the calculation was that for twenty-five years one must live like a brahmachari with great energy arising out of self-control, study of holy scriptures, and service of the Guru. After that, he would enter married life and fulfil the duties of a householder.
The duties of a householder are interesting to know. It is not attachment to family; that is far from the truth. In Indian culture, attachment is never allowed. Duty is necessary. The fulfilment of the needs of personal and social relations is the duty of a householder. In the early days of brahmacharya, he is concerned only with himself. But it is not possible to live only by oneself. There is also society outside. There are impulses of self-restraint, there are impulses of social relations, there are impulses of acquiring wealth, there are impulses of seeing beauty, and there are impulses of being charitable to people. This is why the sutra says the householder’s life is integral. The householder is a highly respected person not because he has a family, but because he is doing a duty without attachment. Such a person is difficult to find. Everybody is attached. But the principle is not at fault merely because it is not followed due to the insistence of the lower instincts.
Nobody has thought over these matters, as there is no one without a prejudice. One thinks “I am a pope”, another says “I am a Sankaracharya”, and third thinks “I am a saint”. Why do they think like that? There is no such thing as a pope, there is no Sankaracharya. There is nobody. There is only an individual associated with the whole cosmos. Everything else is nonsense. If they carry nonsense before God, they will achieve only nonsense. Nobody can attain God with a prejudice in the mind. Integral life is a life of non-attachment on one side, and freedom from hatred on another side. That is why it is called integral.
When the social relationships are well fed and taken care of, and the needs of the instinct of living a family life are also very well matured, then systematically, impartially, the householder retires from this duty of having relations with society, relations with anybody. Retirement means freedom from the necessity to be involved in social relations. Social relations are very important, and nobody can be free from that. But once one has passed through that stage and has graduated from it, then a super-individuality creeps in. Up to this level, people were individuals. A brahmachari is an individual of one kind. A grihasta, a householder, is an individual of a different kind. Now there is a concept of a super-individual who does not think in terms of personal self-restraint, study, seva, etc. Nor does he think of social relations, but engages himself in uniting his mind with universal relations. This is a higher stage.
It has nothing to do with the dress. Whether you put on white cloth, yellow cloth or sannyasi cloth, it has no meaning. God is not afraid of all these clothes. They are all useless. You must be very careful and impartial in your thinking, and highly dispassionate, true to your own conscience. There is an interest in universal relations. All that the brahmachari did in his individual capacity, and all that the householder did in his social capacity, are transcended in the mental operation in terms of universal relation. That is vanaprastha.
People do not understand what this is. It is highly scientific, mathematically correct. Then comes sannyasa. Sannyasa does not mean a person who is wearing an ochre cloth. This is again social restriction, social distinction, differentiation, etc. A person whose mind is centred in the indivisible Absolute is more than a super-individual. He is cosmic relation; he is God Himself. Sannysins are respected as God Himself, not because they have a shaven head and wear ochre cloth, but because their mind is centred in the Absolute.
This is the reason why the Brahma Sutra says the householder’s life is integral. But no sannysasin goes deep into it. They just bypass it. I was thinking I must touch this point. It is better to be a little impartial and free from prejudice. Do not be afraid of all these limitations set by religions and cultural distinctions and patterns, etc.
You must be a hundred percent honest before God. It is very difficult because we carry ourselves there. I am Mr. so and so, I am Mrs. so and so; I go to God. No Mr. and Mrs. can go there.
Such is the great commentary that one can write on this intriguing sutra, most difficult to understand. Even to understand these implications will purify your mind. You are not what you are thinking. You belong to another kingdom of values altogether. You will be thrilled to think like this. “I am living in the kingdom of God now itself. Why should I aspire for it? I am living in it. Oh, glory!” The Upanishad sages exclaimed, “Oh glory!” There is no other word for that. “Oh glory, oh wonder, oh wonder! How beautiful, how grand, how magnificent! Oh joy, oh joy, oh joy!” These are the words of the great masters of the Upanishads.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
On the Transition from the Empirical to the Absolute
On the Transition from the Empirical to the Absolute by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Tuesday 26 November 2013 20:47
*READ MORE \* On the Transition from the Empirical to the Absolute
(Dictated on October 31, 2001)
This has relevance to what happened to Dr. Faust when he sold his soul to the magician in the very beginning of my book Your Questions Answered. Only a person who has read that poem would be able to understand to some extent the agony of the soul. We have heard of agonies of various kinds, physical intellectual and financial, but the agony of the soul is incompatible and incomparable with anything else. The soul is quitting its own abode and where will it go? Now what is the agony about? Only a man who has passed through it would know. What does a jail look like? Your must go to the jail and know, with some chappati being served to you as big as a scooter wheel, with no bathroom passage, he lives there for a pretty long time and he gets an exit
The subject on hand is very special because it is purely personal. A person cannot go to the other world with another’s assistance. As Christ would say, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the goal.” Only one can enter, not more, at a time. This is the most frightening one can imagine. We never had an experience of living alone totally, always there are some with us called friends.
Some passages from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad again may be relevant here. Paul Deussen has made out a special reference in his book The System of the Vedanta what happens to the soul which has committed a mistake. Does it go to Yama Loka or descend? In his book on a passenger of the soul, he mentions two distinct allegations, namely, the gradual descent as well as a descending with certain conditions. These conditions may be with a regressive seed or otherwise.
Paul Deussen harps on a double punishment for the soul in one of the descents, i.e., if it comes with some conditioned remnant, how does it get released from the upper world? These souls are made mention of as those which come and die then and there, like leach, moth, and the like, having a very short life, of no special consequence. But the question is, why should it be like that? People who die but do not reach Moksha would not like to be harassed once again by a process of return in a double deal of punishment. For instance, in the Katha Upanishad, Yama the Lord of Death, is spoken of as having said, “People come under my control again and again.” These words “again and again” are frightening indeed. Why again and again? Nobody wants to come to this world again and again by committing the same mistake.
Here I am reminded of the great scheme of George Hegel who descends from the absolute bright light into the harder phenomena of Hiranyagarbha, Virat which includes the earth. Then the epistemology of perception, the cognition process, commences. But whose perception is it? It is the perception of the psychological functions which we highlight today as the apparatus of common knowledge. Linguistics, ethics, morality, sociality, chemistry, political science, end up in finally a kind of religion and philosophy again, falling upon the Absolute as an experience. That the Absolute is realised is not a vague idea. It is the Absolute about which no one has to say anything. It is just be-ness as a self-identity which we are all aspiring for finally.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Coming of a New Era
The Coming of a New Era by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Monday 25 November 2013 20:17
*READ MORE \* The Coming of a New Era
Human progress through the march of history has been recorded by centuries in the documents of the Nations, and this history has given us a hint to the trend of events through the ages and the direction to which the aspirations of mankind seem to point. It has always been a struggle for existence and fulfilment of an ambition that became the incentive to historical activity, and empires had risen and fallen in countless numbers in this process of man’s appetite and egoism. This striving for self-perpetuation and the fill of the ego has not resulted in any tangible success or satisfaction of the urges within him. Unfortunately the whole of history is observed to be a succession of ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ in human career and emotion, recording the intensity and the extent of the urges of man, but these have never ended in a conclusion of the play.
Millions of years have passed, as the astronomers and geologists say, since the earth has been created in this solar system, but all these years have been for man nothing but occasions for struggle and no achievement. We have been told that man gradually evolved from the Stone Age through the Copper Age, Bronze Age, etc., till he reached the present one which we are likely to regard as the pinnacle of human achievement. But, alas, we know too well today where we stand to be duped by any such encomiums as our being homo sapiens_,_ as masters of the forces of Nature, and the like; for we simultaneously know that men are today ready to fly at one another’s throats at the earliest opportunity offered and mind not even an extirpation of life on earth. We are again in the endless historical predicament of struggle, the satisfaction of immature egoistic ambitions and uncultured conduct, which we are likely to attribute only to the cave man, the primitive aboriginal, as we would like to call him. May it be reiterated here that cultural advancement or the mastery which one hopes for does not consist in any overweening patting on one’s back even when one is sunk in the quagmire of utter ignorance and stupidity, for culture is something finer and made of a better stuff.
Firstly, it has to be observed that if our aspiration is for any meaningful success or achievement in any walk of life or field of activity, we have to bring about a Copernican revolution in our ways of thinking. Instead of imagining that we are well off and up to the mark, on a surface evaluation of personal prejudice and social status merely, we have to turn our gaze in another direction altogether – the direction of real and not imagined peace. It is futile, on the very face of things, to work for any personal good and individual comfort alone, to the exclusion of the well-being of the environment in which we are placed. Selfishness can overcome bodily individuality and yet maintain its arrogance through the family, the community or even the nation. Family-selfishness leads to petty feuds in society, community-selfishness causes disturbance within the national set-up, and national-selfishness can bring about international wars. Since antagonism or battle is not the purpose of mankind’s existence – for this would lead to mutual destruction and annihilation of the very purpose of life-culture, naturally, implies a rising above selfishness in all the levels of social existence, so that there is a mutual recognition and appreciation of the values, needs and aspirations of those other than our own selves.
Now, this regenerated appreciation is impossible unless the regeneration is already present in man. The bringing about of this inner culture would indeed be the opening of a new era in the history of mankind, an era which had occasional opportunities in the passage of time to show its head as a possibility, but which never found full expression at any time. It does not mean that man had never been under circumstances of real culture since creation, for we hear of the glorious times of the rule of Sri Ramachandra, of the reign of Yudhishthira, and in later times, of Vikramaditya, and such righteous protectors of the prestige of man. But there were descents as there have been such ascents in the cultural history of humanity, and today, in this twentieth century; we find ourselves in a miserable situation when man is obliged to live in constant apprehension, anxiety, insecurity and fear of what may happen to him tomorrow. And why all this? Who is the cause of this fear and this feeling of insecurity? It is certain that everyone would announce, “Not I, but he is the cause.” A very interesting position indeed! And this is the culture to which we have attained in the sunlit midday of this century.
But is there any solution? Is there any remedy? The solution and remedy has to be sought in one’s own self, by each and everyone, for social and national existence is ultimately rooted in individual existence. As many drops make the ocean, many individuals make humanity. This boils down to the problem of the study of man. The peace of mankind is in man, and it will be evident how, as they say, man is the maker of his destiny.
“The proper study of mankind is man,” said the great poet Pope. “Know thyself,” said the Oracle of Delphi. “Atmanam viddhi,” says the sage of India. To investigate the constitution of man is a dire desideratum now. When the needs of the constitution of man are known, his disease is dug out from its depths, and the proper treatment administered to him.
But the study of the nature of man has to be made by man himself. And who is to bell the cat? For the study of one man cannot be done by another man. This is the crux of the matter, and when one studies oneself it is easy to come to the quick and pleasant conclusion that everything is all right with oneself and the wrong is with others. Now this is contrary to the true scientific spirit with which one has to work. No scientist can expect to have a correct discovery unless he sheds his prejudices and preconceived ideas; and this is all the more so in the case of a scientific analysis of the self. The structure of man is inextricably connected with the constitution of the universe, and ‘no man is an island’. It is therefore not given to anyone to study oneself as ultimately cut off from the rest of the Universe. The Purusha-Sukta of the Veda proclaims the organic unity of Creation. As it is not possible to study the life of a limb of the human body by severing it with a sword – for then it would lose its functional relation to the life of which it formed a part – so the constitution of man cannot be studied by isolating him from the universal set-up of which he is a part. And this assertion of a non-existent independence of the individual is called egoism. Imagine how pretentious the ego is!
Man’s peace, thus, rests on a community of feeling among everyone, which implies a mutual sacrifice among people. No man can reserve for himself all the pleasures of the earth that he craves for and yet except sympathy and help from others. The world rests on co-operative activity. “By mutual regard for one another, do ye attain blessedness,” says the Bhagavad Gita. It is surprising that people hope for an achievement that is impossible when they strive for their own supposed welfare while at the same time working to cut the ground from other’s feet. Let it be remembered that no selfish man can really be happy. The sufferings through history have been the sufferings by selfishness.
And this selfishness is grounded in the ignorance of one’s own good. It is a pity indeed when one cannot be aware even of one’s own good. And this is the condition of man today. There is no one to teach him, for he is not prepared to listen to anyone. Such is his audacity, because such is his egoism, and such his ignorance. Are we now ready to open our eyes and learn from our own experience that not to ride roughshod or dominate over others should be our aspiration but to subserve a common good through obedience to a universal law? Economic, political and religious fanaticism has first of all to be abandoned if mankind is to be in peace. There is no point in crying, ‘Peace, Peace,’ and working for a war secretly. This hypocrisy is another phase of the egoism of man, which, by hook or crook, wants to achieve the end it vainly covets in its meanderings through the darkness of erroneous thought. People who come to power cannot easily avoid the craving for self-advertisement and being to some extent callous to the good of the community or society of which they are supposed to be caretakers. Titular heads may be good gentlemen, for they have no real power, and one who is confident that he is vested with power cannot, when his personal interests are involved, resist the universal temptation to close his eyes to decency, etiquette and honesty and go headlong in working for a fill of his ambitions.
Constitutional heads, who are chosen guardians of the welfare of people, and are expected to exercise power only towards the protection and proper direction of the land and people, are likely to go off their tracks and pursue purely personal ends, to the defiance of the trust which people have reposed on them. Power-intoxication blinds the eye and it cannot see reality even with effort. To it reality is what it sees, and it sees only the realm of its personal self. Nero in the West and Vena in the East are classic examples of this behaviour. The power-mad person imagines that the property he is supposed to take care of is his personal possession, and he can do anything with it. To trample over the importance of others and exalt one’s own by announcement and advertisement of self, by rejection of the acts of others and substituting one’s quixotic opinion of veto over all these, by issuing perpetual directives and orders to subordinates even when such action is unnecessary and unwarranted, and by finding pleasure in hurting others’ feelings, is the characteristic of the power-maniac. He sees in himself an overlord of all things, and cringing instruments of his work in others. These are the dangerous consequences to which leaders, heads and chiefs get easily led, when they become sure of their position and power. And these are the real threats to social and world peace. These are the evils to be circumvented before any attempt is made to work for the good of mankind.
People who sincerely wish to work for the eradication of these illnesses of the human mind find themselves often resisted and thwarted in their attempts. One’s notion of perfection, either in work or in idealogy cannot be implemented in practical life successfully, since, unfortunately, one’s life is wound up with the idiosyncrasies and shortcomings of several others in the world. One may be a conscientious and efficient man of action, but one’s move may be hampered by a rusted part in the machinery of the execution of the ideal. One may fret and fume that the part is not co-operating, but it does no good, because the part is essential for the machinery to start and move; and it will not move. Nor can one dispense with this rusted rogue of an essential for the machine, for to abandon it and then try to go ahead with one’s enterprise is, for obvious reasons, impossible. You want to ‘do’, but you are not allowed. And there is a painful aspect of this situation which comes up when you are obliged to do a work while you are constantly being impeded and obstructed in your way by the non-cooperation or a morbid sluggishness of action on the part of certain other essentials for the fulfilment of the action, which, to you, is a bounden duty. Here you are likely to be at your wit’s ends, and lose all the God-given patience in you. But losing patience is not fulfilling the task, and you cannot also do anything with it. Man either becomes reckless or bungles when so hard hit. It demands of one an uncanny spirit of understanding and self-sacrifice to be able to appreciate the seriousness of this perspective of life and to rise to an adaptation of oneself to the higher requirement of a larger reality. Non-recognition of this fact has, many times, thrown out well-meaning and sacrificing souls into the limits, and occasionally they had even to perish without achieving anything beneficial. Life is a difficult battle, and no stereotyped ethics or beaten track of old routine can always be expected to come to one’s aid in the struggle. A vital reorientation with a new spirit at every juncture may have to be brought to action with renewed ingenuity and self-adjustment every time.
Teams of such regenerated men are essential to muster in the forces necessary for achieving good. They can be made available through the smaller and bigger universities and institutes of right education, who have all to bear this in mind while planning the curriculum of training. If a feeling of mankind’s brotherhood is the prerequisite of international peace and prosperity, let it be remembered also that this brotherhood cannot be achieved without universal love, and no such love is practicable without the recognition of the sacredness of life and an eternal value in humanity as a whole. This Eternal Meaning in life has been, since time immemorial, acclaimed as an absolute Reality present also in everything and everywhere in the Universe, for the realisation of which man unconsciously struggles by the daily drama of his life, and the Universe evolves stage by stage, never resting perpetually in any of its conditions and pointing at every stage to a reality above it. Here is a deep mystery and an amazing truth revealed to the wondering eye of man, for the sake of which he cannot but strain every nerve, and forgetting which he is veritably losing his own life. Here is a truth which everyone has perforce to find time to think, and which everyone has to realise today or tomorrow.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Organism of Administration
The Organism of Administration by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Sunday 24 November 2013 19:19
*READ MORE \* The Organism of Administration
In the art of administration, the role of Yoga is significant. The chief principle of the system of Yoga can be summed up in a single word: ‘Organism’. The term, organism, has deep implications and it is this significant implication behind the principle of Yoga that makes it a novel feature in the conduct of human life.
You have witnessed just now a demonstration of the Yoga-Asanas. The intention behind this practice of the physical exercises in the system of Yoga is to maintain the organic character of the psycho-physical constitution. The body is not merely a machine, and here it differs from organisations of a mechanical character, though the body itself may be regarded as an organisation in a way. There are limbs in the body, just as there are parts in a machine. The physical body is constituted of minute cells. The anatomists and physiologists know very well the structural pattern of the physical body. It has many characteristics that can be compared with the structure of a machine – for instance, the parts make the whole. But, how does the human system differ from an inorganic machine, notwithstanding the fact that the body also is constituted of parts like a machine? The difference lies here: in a machine, which is inorganic, lifeless, a part can be removed and replaced without detriment to the structural pattern of the machine. But we cannot remove a limb of the body as we remove a part of the machine. We can remove one part of the machine and study it independently. It retains its originality, even if it is wrested out of the whole, which is the machine. But if we remove the heart of a person, take it out of the body and examine it, it will not retain its originality. A heart that is taken out of its relevance to the whole, which is the system of the body, and examined independently outside, will not be a human heart – it would be a physical substance. But, the physical body is not merely a physical substance. Here comes the role of what we mean by an organism.
There is something in the physical body which distinguishes it from organisations of a mechanical character. The vitality or the life-principle, the Prana as we usually call it, is the distinguishing feature. Why do you perform these Asanas? How does the system of physical exercises in Yoga differ from ordinary outdoor games, like cricket, foot-ball, tennis, etc? In the usual system of games of the western type, especially, there is a depletion of energy. You feel exhausted after you play the game. You wish to take rest. Prana is diverted spatio-temporally, outwardly: The energy flows out of the body. But in the practice of the Yoga-Asanas, there is an inwardisation of the Shakti, the power, the energy, the Prana. There is a tendency to the conservation of force and not a spending of energy in the practice of the Asanas.
You heard, just now, the script that was read in connection with the practice of the Yoga-Asanas. Mention was made of the endocrine glands. The endocrine glands are a subtle arrangement in our physical body, which controls the harmonious working of the whole system. The endocrine glands are not like the other glands with ducts. The secretion of these ductless glands is of a different type altogether. It is these glands that maintain us, keep us alive. Whenever there is an exhaustion of energy, a depletion of Prana, there is diminution of the activity of the endocrine glands, whereas in the practice of the Yoga-Asanas, the process is, quite a different one. There is, as mentioned, a total conservation of force. You not only do not exhaust energy, but increase the output of energy in the body. The endocrine glands begin to function more vigorously here, else they get stifled and there is sluggishness of the function due to a maladjustment of the various parts of this organism, called the body.
Now, I am coming to the point, again, of the organism. The purpose of the practice of the Yoga-Asanas is to keep the balance in the working of the system of the parts of the body. There should not be any kind of over-emphasis or neglect in respect of any part of the body. Suppose a person walks and walks for miles, every day, there is an extra work given to the legs and the other limbs of the body have to contribute their parts, also, for the purpose of the working of the legs, the blood stream moving more towards the legs. There is an unhealthy repercussion following this over-activity of the particular part of the system. There can also be neglect of the other parts of the body, similarly, the breathing system, the circulatory system, etc. The purpose of the Yoga-Asana practice, is to give the due to every part of the body, and in as much as the mind is intimately and inseparably connected with the body, it influences even the thinking process, the mind becomes perspicuous, there is clarity of thought, you feel buoyant and elastic, a kind of satisfaction automatically follows, a satisfaction that is not the outcome of the possession of material goods, but a spontaneous efflorescence of the vitality of your personality is the cause of the satisfaction that you feel within yourself. You feel happy, relaxed after this routine of practice, merely because of the release of tension in the system. By bringing into force of the principle of the organism in the body, you live a total life, instead of a partial life.
Satisfaction of any kind is nothing but the result of a totality of outlook, a completeness in living, whatever be the field of activity in which one may be engaged. Now, I would like to divert to the point with which I began at the very outset. I had occasion to mention that a very significant role is played by Yoga in the art of administration. It is for this purpose that I endeavoured to give this short introduction in regard to the meaning of Yoga. In as much as Yoga is the art of bringing about a sense of organism in life, it applies to social and political organisations also. An organism does not mean merely a physical body. The physical body is one organism, no doubt, but there are other organisms, also, which are larger in dimension. It is precisely the purpose of Yoga to introduce the system of organism to our outward life, too. You must all have heard of the term ‘Karma Yoga’, the technique of unselfish activity. This art of unselfishly working in human society is nothing but the implementation of the system of Yoga in human life. Just as we have to look to our own physical personality for the purpose of maintenance of health, the physical personality not being an independent unit completely outside human society, it becomes imperative on our part to live this very same kind of Yogic life in our outer social relationships, also.
There are various gradations of organisation. When we enter into the study of the secret of life, we may be said to enter into the region of philosophy. We do not believe, usually, that human society also is an organic structure, merely because of the fact that we are not able to understand the relationship that obtains among people in a social set-up. We have not been able to be secure in human society. We are insecure, as you very well know, and there is anxiety of various types in our social existence. You know, we have no anxiety about the way in which the limbs of the body work in relation to one another. You do not go to bed at night with a feeling of insecurity as to whether the legs will cooperate with the thinking of the brain tomorrow, whether the eyes or the ears may not set-up a strike in respect of the stomach which swallows all the food and gives nothing to the eyes or the ears! You have no fear that, perhaps, tomorrow there may be a battle between the right hand and the left hand. With great composure and satisfaction and security in respect of all the functions of the limbs of the body, you sleep well at night. But we cannot sleep in peace with respect of our attitude to human society. We do not know what will happen tomorrow, what our next door neighbour will do the next moment. We do not live a life of harmonious organic relationship in our outer life. Unfortunately, we seem to be living a mechanical life. Human society is taken to be a machine. Each part is independent and it has no organic connection with another part, and if each human being is to think that he is only a disconnected part and he has no real connection with the other parts, which seems to be the fate of people today, there cannot be any social organisation. There can only be a machine of human society. And if human society is going to be a machine, then we would be like parts of a machine, and I do not think that anyone would like to live in that fashion. There cannot be sympathy then, there would be no altruistic feeling, no love, no affection, no sense of service, no feeling for another, if we are to be only parts of a machine. What feeling does a part have in respect of the other parts of a machine? It works, apparently, in harmony with the other parts on account of their juxtaposition and their arrangement in a certain way by the mechanic.
Likewise, if we are to live in a state of an apparent co-ordination among ourselves, on account of an external pressure exerted upon us by the government, or a social mandate, or by some kind of mechanical rule which has been enforced upon us from outside, then when that force is lifted, we will fly in different directions with no connection among ourselves. Yoga is the recipe and the remedy for this difficulty that we are facing in life today. Yoga is not meant merely for the monastic. It is not a mystical doctrine. It is not a ‘spiritual’ science. It is, to put it precisely, the system of living in perfect consonance with the law of Nature. And I am coming to a new point now, ‘The law of Nature’.
If we are to be in harmony with the system that is operating in Nature as a whole, we can be regarded as healthy persons, physically, psychologically and socially. Scientists – many of you perhaps are – and psychologists, too, would be acquainted with the fact that Nature cannot be equated with a machine. It is not a machine but an organism. Only serious biologists, psychologists and philosophers would be able to appreciate this truth. The parts of Nature work in spontaneous harmony amongst themselves. The astronomical system which conditions the movements of planets round the Sun, the so-called rising and setting of the Sun, the changing of the seasons and the various types of phenomena which we observe in Nature, are all motivated by a central organising power which does not stand outside Nature, but works inside it as an inseparable vitality that is immanent.
An administrator, a chief in an organisation, in order to be successful in his vocation, has to behave in the same way as the motivating force behind Nature works in Nature, or that mysterious principle which keeps the body alive, in a relationship among the parts of the body. No one can say why it is that the heart is working so systematically right from the beginning to the end of one’s life. Who is controlling this system? We know that we do not have to play any part in the working of the heart, for instance. We can say nothing about it. There is a controlling system immanent in the physical body, in the psychological organism. The word immanent is very important, and has to be underlined. It is implicit and it is hidden, it cannot be detected by physical observations. You cannot know the presence of that integrating principle within the psychological organism, which keeps us alive, by any amount of microscopic observation. The principle which keeps the administration in order is inside the set-up of the administration, is a part of the administration itself. I will recite to you a small anecdote which is of a very instructive character and also may appear a little humorous.
It appears that during the reign of the king Raja Bhoja (in the early mediaeval times of India), who was a great patron of Sanskrit learning, a poet sought entry into his court. All learned men at that time were patronised by this king. One great Sanskrit poet wanted to get admission into the court of this king. He was standing at the gate outside and told the watchman, “May I have an interview with His Highness? I want to be one of the court – poets, if possible.” The person in charge went and conveyed the message to the king: “There is a learned man, evidently, he seeks admission to the court.” The king said nothing. He asked someone to bring one tumbler of milk filled to the brim, and told the assistant, “Take this cup full of milk, and give it to the poet standing there, and say nothing.” The tumbler full of milk was handed over. The poet said, “What is the order from the king?” The gentleman said, “There is no order, he has said nothing. He has only given you this milk – that’s all.” “Oh, I see, this is the reply. Please listen,” he said. The poet took a handful of sugar, poured the sugar very slowly, carefully, into the milk which was full to the brim, and told the assistant, “Please take this milk back to the king.” The milk was brought back. When the king asked, “What is this? How is it that the milk is returned,” it was told to the king that the poet said nothing, just as he himself said nothing, that the poet had only poured sugar gradually and slowly into the tumbler full of milk, and there it was. The king seems to have said: “Very good, here is the man. I want him.” The poet was admitted. No one knew the secret, what the mystery was of this milk, this sugar business.
The idea was this. The king wanted to convey the message that the court was full. There was no vacancy. That was the meaning of the milk filled to the brim in the tumbler. “I have no place.” But the poets’ answer was: “Even if there is no place, I can find a place, just as sugar can find a place in the milk, though full to the brim.” And not only that; the sugar has been so effective that it has sweetened the whole of the milk. “My presence in the court will sweeten your court in the same way as the sugar has sweetened the whole of the milk. Secondly, my presence in the court will not be felt and I will not be an unwanted man, or an extra person, even as one cannot see the presence of sugar in the milk.”
This is an anecdote which should give illustration to the ways of a good administrator. Every person who can be regarded as a real leader, a true administrator, is not to be outside the set-up of the administration. He is not just one individual among the many, rather he is a super-individual power. Are we not more than a physical system or disconnected parts? We have an impersonal significance in us, beyond the bodily limbs. This is something which the Yoga will tell you. We are not persons but vehicles of impersonality. The more you are able to develop this impersonal character in your personality, the more will you be a successful leader of people, because impersonality is nothing but the capacity to enter into the personality of other people. But, if you are also to be merely one of the personalities, you cannot enter into others’ hearts. Your dimension of outlook is to be wider than the dimension of the outlooks of other people. You are to be a power, rather than a person. You have significance as a force rather than as an individual, and when you become a true administrator, you become a super-individual element, unknowingly.
Yoga is not a difficult technique, though it appears a difficult one in the beginning. It is an art of expanding the area of your outlook and conduct, so that you learn to live a larger life in your own personal career and private aspirations, as well as be an incentive to others to whom you owe a responsibility, so that when you become the most efficient leader of people, you become a superman, almost.
The lesser the vehemence of your personality or individuality, the greater is the capacity in you for positive achievement. But when one’s individuality protrudes itself or becomes an ostensible feature in the organisation, it sets itself, at times, in opposition to other individuals. A true leader of people ceases to be one individual among other individuals and rises above the totality of individualities of others. That is the meaning of the impersonality that the leading individual develops. He may appear to be an individual from the point of view of his physical body, but from the standpoint of his inner outlook, he is not just that much. He is a vibration of an impersonal type, of a super-individual nature. Well, I cannot say that all of us can become supermen. It is a far-fetched ideal. But we have to try to approximate our lives one step at least, in the direction of the superhuman expectation. Nature is a vast infinite organisation, and we are tending towards the realisation of this infinitude in our lives. That is why endless things are what we seek economically, physically, temporally. Vast possessions are our desire. A very long life is our desire, and anything that we seek seems to have no end. We seek happiness. To what extent? You may say, “Well, there is no limit – as much as is possible.” This urge within us for an endless satisfaction, an infinitude of possession in our quest is an indication of what we are essentially. Nature seems to speak to us in the language of Dharma, and infinity, and to the extent we are able to rise to the expectations of this infinity in our working, to that extent we shall be perfect in our life. But if we assert our egoism, if we are too ostentatious in our behaviour, if our conduct in life, in society, is repugnant to the equal affirmations of other people, then we would be a failure in our vocations. We may be factory workers, office-goers, army men, whatever we are – we may be sweepers on the road, whatever work we do, the spirit behind this work should be of uniformity. When you look to the spirit behind the work, you will find there is no difference between the work of a Prime Minister or a low – paid labourer as far as their contributions to the well-being of the Nation are concerned. There is an organising spirit that is working behind every kind of activity, and when there is harmony among the various types of the manifestation of this central principle of working, we are said to have a national conduct. We should generally speak of a national character. It is the character of the consciousness developed in ourselves in respect of the total ideal of the entire Nation. Dharma is the ideal towards which the Nation is moving and working. If our daily conduct and the little work that we do even in the lowest capacity contributes, directly or indirectly, to the fulfilment of the ideal that is before the Nation, then we have a national character, whatever be the work that we do – that would make no difference. If we worked only for a parochial purpose, then we would lose the national character. Today we have come to a stage of life where it is not enough if we are merely national units. We are also international citizens. We all know it very well. We are not merely this. There is something more true. We are citizens of the Universe.
You are not merely members of a small family. You are not fathers or mothers, brothers or sisters. You are conscious, significant, responsible units which contribute and ought to contribute to the welfare of the whole country, to the fulfilment of the ideal of the whole Nation, which keep in view the ideal of the whole world towards which human society is moving.
I conclude with a word of caution, you may say, that even an international ideal is not the goal of life. Our ideal is a universal one, and we are not moving merely towards the fulfilment of a national ideal or an international purpose, but a universal realisation. The universe is beckoning us from inside, it is not outside us. The universe is in our hearts. That is the great principle finally, you call the universe, of which you are an integral part. When you are summoned by it, you become restless until you get it, until you attain it, until you become one with it. Organisations are degrees of the Universe. There is the physical organisation, the psychological organisation, the social organisation, the moral organisation, the intellectual organisation, all feelers of the Universal Organisation.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
A Conversation
A Conversation by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Saturday 23 November 2013 18:43
*READ MORE \* A Conversation
(Dr. P.C. Rao, Judge on the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, Sri J.S Verma, Retired Chief Justice, Supreme Court of India, Chief Justice of Andhra Pradesh, and Swami Krishnananda are present.)
Dr. P.C. Rao: Yesterday the definition you gave of a judge.
Swamiji: Judge is an impersonal existence.
Dr. P.C. Rao: It appealed to us greatly. Perhaps you mentioned that because the three of us happen to be judges. [The Chief Justice of India, J.S. Verma (Retd.) was also present.]
Swamiji: The Chief Justice of India is all the national principles of justice compressed at a single point. It is the whole nation speaking, it is not Mr. So-and-so; there is no Mr. So-and-so in the Chief Justice. He is not a human being at all. It is the whole nation speaking. Now, I go beyond the nation – the justice of the Cosmos. What would be the proper thing in the light of the justice of the Universe? Instead of seeing with two eyes, one sees with millions of eyes; then there will be no partiality or even duality.
‘Impersonal’ means that one does not belong to any side, nobody is your friend and nobody is your enemy. The universe has no friends and enemies, because the so-called enemies are inside it only and the friends are also inside; so, to whom does it belong? It is like electricity – is electricity a friend of anybody or an enemy of anybody? It can cook your food, heat your stove and move the railway train, but it can also destroy life. God is not merely creator Brahma and protector Vishnu but also destroyer Rudra. God can do anything. He creates this beautiful earth and maintains it in a gorgeous manner and destroys it also by flood, ravaging earthquake, tempest, high waves of the sea – thousands dying. Then, what is the work of God, what are his functions? We do not have to give any credit to Brahma who created the world, nor praise Vishnu for maintaining it, nor curse Rudra for destroying everything. If a case goes in favour of somebody, we cannot say that the Judge is a kind man because the person who won the case will think – “very kind Judge, very wonderful Judge”. Suppose the Judge passes a death sentence on someone – “horrible, horrible” will be the cry.
Now, what is the nature of this person who is giving acquittal to somebody and granting the wish of somebody and wanting to remove the life of somebody, also? What kind of person is he? Is he a good man or a bad man? He is not a man at all, the whole point is this; he is not a man. Is the sun a friendly being or an inimical one? Without the sun we cannot breathe, we cannot exist without the sun. But he can create sunstroke and kill someone, also. Now, why does the sun kill a man thus? The sun’s existence itself is a protective function, but he never asks anyone to walk in the hot sun and get sunstroke. Whose mistake is it? You curse the sun because you had sunstroke. The Judge is a symbolic embodiment of law. There is a policeman who puts on one kind of dress, a Judge puts on another kind of dress, there is a Collector who puts on one kind of dress – but they are not human beings but functionaries varieties in law. We have an inveterate habit of looking at things from a personal point of view. The policeman is the embodiment of a function. He is a function only, he is not a man, you should not call him a man, it is an operative force working through a particular individuality because the force cannot work without some medium, just as without a wire, electricity cannot work. It does not jump on our head directly, it wants a wire connection.
Swamiji: Is the country progressing?
Justice Verma:That is what I would like to ask you, Swamiji. What’s ultimately the future. This is a great country.
Swamiji: You have seen as a judiciary, everybody, all kinds of people, come to you seeking advice and judgment. What kind of people are coming to you?
Justice Verma: Very few of the right persons. That is what is very distressing. So, ultimately, since I believe that this is a great nation, and ultimately everything right should happen with men like you still being there to guide people. But the degeneration is so fast that it is not clear what is in store for the country as a whole.
Swamiji: I don’t think any trouble will come to the country; it has been existing since centuries, it will exist further, also. It has experienced travails of invasion right from the time of the Greek Alexander onwards; many invaders came here but they could not uproot the country and make it their own.
Justice Verma: Swamiji, personal aggression one can understand, but here the degeneration is from within. The falling of values, I think, in general, at every level and more so at the highest level – so-called highest level. That is what is more troubling.
Swamiji: The answer to this question you will find in a very interesting book written by Sri Aurobindo, Foundations of Indian Culture. Why India is continuing inspite of all these faults that you have pointed out, and why India is not succeeding as it ought to succeed in the comity of nations?
The reason for this, as he has pointed out, very wisely, is the dichotomy created by the human perception of values, between God and the world. No Hindu, no citizen of India can give an answer to the question: in what way is God connected to the world? It also means to say, in what way is an individual connected to the Creator? Let any religious man answer this question. “God is very far away”, people will look up as if God is sitting in the skies.
People there are who say that they have renounced the world. What is this ‘leaving’? What is the meaning? If you have property, you can abandon it, but do you think the world is your property? What kind of feeling, unnecessarily, ‘I have renounced everything’. This is the kind of religion that we are practising. Because duniya is a chhodne layak cheez hai, we have no interest in it, let invaders come and spoil it. We shall reach God, Moksha. What does it matter who tramples over the earth?
Right from the Vedas onwards, throughout the history of India, there was not even one person who could vanquish the Muslim invaders, or encounter the British forces. How did they become so strong? How did India become so poor and so weak? Because the invaders had a real God, whereas the Hindus clung to an unreal God – unreal God, because God is somewhere, far away, But the British God is here, just now. Allah, the very word, binds all Muslims. And the British see their aim in their action. The Hindu’s aim is an otherworldly God-realisation, while action is in this world, and there’s no connection between God and the world of action. Christians succeed better than Hindus in their enterprises. Christian colleges and Christian hospitals show a better performance than Hindu colleges or hospitals, because the Hindus have their God above in heaven, and He is not in the hospital or the college – “Why should He come here to serve people? This is all no good, one day we have to leave this, so we let the patient die, it doesn’t matter. The world is unreal, Maya.” But there it is not like that. What they think and see with their eyes is the God for them. They are doing ‘real’ work in a ‘real’ world. We are doing what is unreal, because the world is not real. The ‘unreal’ God of the ‘unreal’ world cannot face the ‘real’ God of the ‘real’ world. Feelings have been instilled into the minds of the Hindus that the world is unreal. Who told them that the world is unreal? That also nobody knows! Some bogey is sitting inside and telling them ‘the world is unreal’. So why should you take any interest in the events of the world?
The Hindu military system was not strong, because ‘why do you want a military system?’ We have our soul inside, it goes to God. This is why India is what it is. It has a soul within and a God above, and the soul continues and is surviving. But it fails in the world. Does it mean that in order to succeed in God we have to fail in the world? No; only a person who has conquered the world can reach God. A coward cannot reach God. People run away from the world saying that it is evil. This kind of philosophy will not work because you thereby cut off the connection between God and yourself and cut off the connection between God and the world, also.
Actually, today, the Hindus have no philosophy, and no religion. People cry “Hindu religion, Hindu religion”, really it doesn’t exist at all. It is a kind of chaos and a mess and a mass of superstition, ultimately. We might have heard people quarrelling – this caste, that caste, and go on blabbering; and afterwards somebody else comes and attacks. The third battle of Panipat took place and the Marathas joined together and were deliberating a day before. There were the Peshwa, Gaekwad, Holkar, and Bhonsle from Poona, Baroda, Indore and Gwalior. Inside they were quarrelling among themselves. And the next day Ahmed Shah Abdali made his attack, he was on the free field and they had to face him. There was internal schism “What do you think you are!” There was no unity among them even one day before the battle. The other side cried “Allah” – and everybody rose up into action. “Allah is in danger, oh!” But among Hindus, who is in danger? Nobody. And Ahmed Shah vanquished the Marathas, and the Maratha empire ceased to exist in its glory, the empire of Shivaji was split in different directions. Look at the unity of purpose and the system with which the disciplined army of the British and the Mohamedans could act like steel and fire, and no Rajah, prince or king of India could resist them. It was the British who achieved the impossible – integration of the whole country to a single unit of administration – India. Why did not the Hindu kings join and work this miracle, and why had they to wait for the coming of the British?
Tipu Sultan had his own powerful army, but a few soldiers from the British side ended him, because the latter force charged forth with concentrated action while the other side was not so disciplined. Two people among us cannot be friends, whereas they have Allah, who brings them together, or there is the British empire as the aim. Whether it is a Middle East man or American man or any mleccha to the Hindus, they had all a unity of purpose.
You must read this book of Sri Aurobindo. His language also is so energising. Even from a literary point of view it is an entertainment. His writings are mighty. Mighty writings, indeed. He was a great brain. And his understanding of Hinduism is surprisingly wonderful. He got to the very root of it. Hindus are clinging to their soul and losing the world as if the soul is somewhere else and the world is outside!
What is forgotten is that the omnipresent consciousness which is the soul is also in the world. When you protect the soul you have to protect the world also. A great Saint and Sage is also a soldier, as Lord Krishna was. No Sannyasin can equal Lord Krishna in renunciation. No soldier can stand before him. No householder can equal him. No Yogi can compete with him. He is a true Hindu. He brought together all the forces of India and gave us ‘Bharat’. The first great integrator of Indian forces was Krishna. Do you call him a householder? Do you call him a Sannyasin? Do you call him a warrior? What do you call him? The Almighty was working through Him. Is the Almighty a Sannyasin? Is God a householder? What do you call him? Such impersonal force incarnated itself through this personality of Krishna and won victory everywhere. His mere presence was a power, people would bow down to him everywhere. Beauty, grandeur, majesty, power, wisdom; everything was combined in Krishna. Can India produce one person like Krishna? Quarrelsome politicians there are; flimsy talks everywhere.
India is now in this condition – total dichotomy between God and man. There is nothing to cement the two together. One does not know which aim one is pursuing, which side. Are you to pursue your own self, or world, or God? Nobody knows – the whole structure collapses in utter ignorance. The entire thing is in shambles – this is Indian religion today. There is no education. The great Vedas and the Upanishads cried hoarse – the language of confidence. It is a surprise that such people lived in this country and today we are having shells of people. Why is it like that, such deterioration?
People say “Kali Yuga, Kali Yuga,” and all that – there is no use of talking these empty words. There is no use of saying anything. We require today collective action. India should stand together as one person, not as Tamil, Karnataka, Andhra and Punjab and so on. I should say Nehru made a mistake in creating linguistic States. Each one is now chauvinistic, each state has conflicting ideals. “My country, my, my, my, my,” people say. During the British regime there was no “my”, because there were Bombay Presidency, Madras Presidency, etc. There were no linguistic States. We require some power to make the country a single integrated force. The whole of India should stand up, not as Tamil Nadu standing, Karnataka standing, etc. No. “India is standing up as one power” – can anyone declare thus? Is there any person in India who can bring together the whole of India as a single force which can face the world?
Truth triumphs, and the truth is that God, world and individual are one Integrated Reality. There is no preference of the one to the other.
This is my little message. I do not know whether I am a warrior or a spiritual man or what kind of man I am. (Laughter)
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
Foundations for an Educational Career
Foundations for an Educational Career by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Friday 22 November 2013 19:08
*READ MORE \* Foundations for an Educational Career
Education is the process of the gradual and systematic summoning of the tendency in the human being to the realisation of perfection. As the concept of perfection is unclear in the initial stages, the approach to the mind of the public, in this direction, has to be initiated with immense patience and care. When we deal with persons, we are really concerned with minds, and hence all successful approach in life is psychological.
We have, first of all, to place ourselves in a position where we can appreciate sympathetic thoughts and feelings of people. For this purpose, we may classify society into three categories: (1) the student, who includes the child and the adolescent; (2) the man of the world or the active in society, including the youth and the middle-aged man; (3) the retired person, including all those who do not lead an active life but are in the evening of their age. Social regeneration has to keep in view all these stages of life and provide for their respective inner demands.
For the present we may confine ourselves to the minds of the budding generation, viz. the student population, for we have to begin the work of reformation and the regeneration of society at the stage of the student, when the mind is flexible and amenable to the educational process. Here we have to start from the standpoint of the taught and not merely of the teacher. Education is not a process of merely emptying out the mind of the teacher by pouring its knowledge into the minds of students, but a feeling of their needs and supplying them with the proper thing, at the proper time, in the proper manner. A teacher, thus, has to be a good psychologist and should not regard teaching as a kind of business with the students. The teacher should have the capacity to make himself liked by the minds which need teaching. This pleasant process of the imparting of knowledge is education.
In these days, neither the students nor the teachers are happy with the educational process, because it has been forgotten by the authorities concerned that education has to be physical, intellectual, emotional, moral, active and spiritual, all at once, in a way beautifully fitted to the conditions in which one is placed. The technique of education should take into consideration the average of the intelligence-quotient, health, social conditions, etc. of the students. It should also concentrate itself on methods for bringing about and effecting (1) the development of personality, (2) an adequate knowledge of the world, (3) an adjustment of self with society, and (4) a realisation of the permanent values of life.
By development of personality what is meant is the wholesome building up of the individual, not only with reference to the internal states of body, mind and intellect, but also in relation to the external world reaching up to the individual through the different levels of society. In this sense, true education is both a diving inward and a spreading outward. Knowledge of the world is not merely a collection of facts or gathering information regarding the contents of the physical world but forms a kind of insight into its inner workings as well, at least in so far as one’s inner and outer life is inextricably wound up with them. With this knowledge it becomes easy for one to discover the art of adjusting oneself with society. This adjustment is not possible in any appreciable degree for one who has not acquired some amount of knowledge of the spiritual implications of the structure of human society. The aim of the education of the individual in society is the realisation of life’s values-personal, social, civic and even universal; all mutually related and determined by a common goal to which these are directed.
Above all, we cannot start teaching students without our understanding the purpose of education. Many a Hindu, for example, has allowed himself or herself to be proselytised for different reasons. One such reason consists in the prospects of economic upliftment and raising of social status which the converters promise to these poor souls who have been unfortunately relegated to the unwanted section of Hindu society, by somehow depriving them of the facilities to improve themselves economically. The second reason is the baneful practice of untouchability and pollution by touch, which certain orthodox groups cultivated for a long time and which has not completely died out even today. Now the question arises: Why should have these things happened? Why should there be suppression and untouchability etc. in human circles? The answer is: lack of proper education.
But what is proper education? Bearing in mind the essentials of the process enumerated above, it should be added that though education should be an immensely practicable affair, we should not think that the practicability of a thing consists in what is called ‘succeeding’ in life in any political sense of the term, because one may manoeuvre to succeed for some time, as one does in business, for instance, but be extremely unhappy within, in spite of the so-called ‘practical’ success. This happens because here we have only a soulless practicality of affairs, bereft of the sap of life which sustains it. Though, when we occupy a house, we are not always conscious of its foundation, nor is the foundation visible to the eyes, it goes without saying that the whole edifice stands on the foundation. Likewise, human success in life may look beautiful like a decorated and furnished building, but it cannot stand if it is not firmly fixed on a strong base. Our purpose here would be to have some idea as to what could this foundation of life’s education be.
Education is for living life and not to suffer it. It is a wrong concept of the basis of life that has led to the defective structure of the present educational system. It is not necessary that religion in the orthodox sense or Dharma as the conservatives understand it should be proclaimed in the schools. The right type of education should have a very broad outlook and exceed the limits of parochial religions or the cult of any class of society and should be free from the prejudices of caste, creed and colour. The present-day system of education is thoroughly unsatisfactory, for, while it rejects all religion in the name of secularism, it rejects also the essentials of human aspiration and makes education a dead mechanism which has to be operated by a living being from outside. Education is not a machine to be driven by an external impulse but constitutes a vital process which has life in it and grows of its own accord when soul is poured into it. The bread-earning education has to become a life-earning education, for the latter, in addition to supplying bread, shall also supply man with a soul to live by.
The erroneous construction of the educational basis is, then, grounded on a mistaken concept of life’s values. The world we live in is believed to be a solid mass of matter. Even our own bodies are seen to be parts of the physical Nature governed by mechanistic laws, which alone appears to be all that is real. It has become a commonplace today, especially in the universe of science, that life is strictly determined by the law of causality which rules over the entire scheme of the world. We are told that distinctions that are supposed to obtain between such realms of being as matter, life and mind are superficial and are accounted for by the grades of subtlety in the manifestation and spreading of particles of matter. Even the organism of the human body which appears to defy the laws of the machine of the universe as envisaged by science is explained away as only one of the many forms of the workings of the forces of matter which is the ultimate stuff of all things. It is said that even mind is only a subtle, ethereal exudation of forces of matter. The human being is reduced to a speck in the gigantic structure of the cosmos. Behaviourist psychology with its materialistic implications gives a finishing touch to this doctrine of the mechanistic view of life.
The fact that man is not merely a humble cog in the deterministic machine of a relentless world and that the essence of man is a spiritual principle, co-extensive with the Universal Spirit, was easily discovered in the course of human evolution. Those in India, educated under the scheme of Macaulay, however, continued to move along the ruts of a so-called modernism of thinking, a rationality of approach and a scientific attitude of life, so much spoken of in these days. People began gradually to shed their spiritual legacy and started to strut proudly under the unseen yoke of a culture wedded to a secret achievement of suzerainty over them. It is this fatal tendency of thought that has to be counteracted by right means of education today.
A correct appreciation of human values is essential before introducing any suitable method of education. It is impossible to solve the problem of the educational method so long as the authorities feel satisfied that the body of man is the final word about him. The mistake seems to be not so much with the students as with those concerned with the act of teaching, for the students, under the current which flows before them, move with it from an early age. We have to observe with regret that one of the reasons why, for example, some Hindus are willing to change their religion is because they are dissatisfied with the promises of their own religion and the way in which their religion treats them. Apart from the pernicious practice of physical segregation in the form of untouchability and the intellectual assumption of superiority on the part of a few of the classes of society, a sort of false and inadequate values in religion have been responsible to a great extent in causing a schism between man and man in the country. There is the natural instinct to visualise the better in an unknown promise of the future and, like the calf which moves from one place to another in search of the distant greens which it sees with unclear eyes, one is tempted to undergo a conversion of faith. Essentially, what is needed in religion is its understanding by its followers. Often the cry ‘save us from our friends’, seems to have a meaning. The foolish friend is worse than a knowledgeable enemy. The Pundits of the Hindu religion and the scholars who do research in its fields have been both moving in blind alleys; the one clinging to rigid tradition and blind faith and the other to an arid rationality, though untenable. It is not true that we have nothing to learn from the West, as some conservative Hindus may hold, for we have to respect the change of times and the need for a revaluation of values. Indian culture has survived due to its flexibility, when other ancient cultures have died out due to their rigidity. It is also not true that Indian religion is mere superstition, myth and fable, as some modern scientific thinkers in oriental learning seem to think. The good is to be taken from wherever it is found, for knowledge is the aim of education, and not dogmatic clinging to unsound conservatism.
It is necessary to write a small text-book on the constitution of man in the Universe in such a simple way that it could be understood even by children of a primary school. It may begin with simple questions and answers, stories and even small plays which can be enacted on the stage. The book should contain information on the structure of the human personality in relation to outer Creation in a readable and intelligible manner. It should also deal with the fundamentals of human conduct on the basis of this relation of man to Creation. Not only this; some knowledge should be provided of the aim of such conduct on the part of human beings. These things should be said without saying things like philosophy, ethics, teleology and such phrases which are the jargons of the schools of thought. No stereotyped phrases or technical terms should ever be used in such a book. In fact, these should be avoided, because now one is concerned with the primary standard of education where technicality of any kind is to be carefully set aside. The lessons may abound in apt stories and simple plays intelligible to beginners. This may form the background of a preliminary booklet on the fundamentals of life.
There should be three or four text-books in a graded series of this nature, suitable to the primary, elementary, high school and college standard of education. The books should be written in such a way that students should be able to take interest in the subjects and cherish a faith that they are going to be benefited by the study. The high school and college levels should gradually introduce advanced learning.
In the text-books for higher classes, which will outgrow the elementary teachings, stories, etc. of the early stages, the student may be introduced to the great heritage of India in the form of its deep culture. The spiritual-cum-temporal import of the hymns of the Vedas, such as the Purusha-Sukta, the Mandukya Upanishad, the conversation between Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the suggestiveness of the Creation theories of revelations like the Aitereya Upanishad, the epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the basic gospel of the Bhagavad Gita should find a proper place in the higher stages of education. An acquaintance of the student with the immortal heroes of India, like Rama and Krishna; sages like Nara-Narayana, Vasishtha, Vyasa, Suka, Dattatreya, Jadabharata, Vamadeva, Uddalaka, Yajnavalkya, Parasara, etc.; India’s great rulers like Prithu, Marutta, Ambarisha, Mandhata, Sibi, Harischandra, Dilipa, Bhagiratha, Raghu, Aja, Dasaratha, Janaka, Rama, Yayati, Bharata, Yudhishthira, Vikramaditya, Asoka and the like, is essential at a particular stage. Short life-sketches of teachers like Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva, and saints like Gauranga, Nanak, Tukaram, Jnanesvar, Mirabai, Surdas, Tulasidas, Kabirdas, Purandaradas, etc., should be provided in suitable places. The contributions to India’s cultural revival by Swami Vivekananda, Swami Ramatirtha, Swami Dayananda, Swami Sivananda, Annie Besant, Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo and S. Radhakrishnan should be brought home to the minds of students, particularly in the college level. To give a broader vision of culture in general and to point out the unity underlying human aspirations, a separate section may be devoted to the lives and teachings of Buddha, Mahavira, Christ, Mohammed, the Sufi saints and the Sikh Gurus.
Teachers should, at the background of their minds, keep behind education the fourfold aim of human existence; Righteousness in all its stages and forms (Dharma), economic independence (Artha), emotional satisfaction (Kama) and spiritual realisation (Moksha), as the principal incentive to all human activity. This viewpoint should be constantly maintained at the teaching level, so that the purpose of education may not be missed on the way to the achievement of tangible results. It is also necessary to remember that without some standard of self control (Yama-Niyama); which has to be properly defined at any given situation, the curriculum of studies is not going to be flawless. This is a rule to be observed both by the teacher and the taught. The educational career is a holy pursuit. Its sacredness should never be profaned by indulgences of the subhuman urges. The intellectual, volitional, emotional and active sides of human nature should all receive adequate attention. No one side should be stressed at the expense of the others. Else, there is likely to be a revolt of the neglected aspects at some later stage. The relation between the inner and the outer realities, the psychic nature of man and the physical and social nature of the world, should be harmoniously maintained at every stage of teaching. Let not the teacher think that the student is an instrument that can be operated merely by external pressure. This would be a gross blunder. For the student is a living being, a human individual, with outer desires and inner aspirations not yet properly articulated. Ignorance of this fact has led to the grievous condition of the present-day educational institutions. The individual (Vyashti) and the universal (Samashti) are organically related and not mechanically dovetailed.
The mechanistic view of education held by Western educationists and imitated almost everywhere nowadays forgets the lifeelement present in the bodily structure of man and his environment. Education has concern with life, mind and intellect and the theory that these are exudations from the bodily mechanism is the erroneous knowledge imported from Western psychologists. The individual, family, community, nation and the world at large are quantitative extensions of the set-up of the individual’s bodily existence, but it is to be remembered that these outer forms have their inner being hidden from the physical eye but asserting themselves perennially as a universal spirit which speaks out in various languages of mind and intellect the same message of the integral value of the entire existence. The law of action and reaction, called Karma, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and sociology of the moral urge and of political history, are all different affirmations of this eternal truth. Holding this in view, the ancient teachers in India instituted the order of the four classes of society (Varnas), to harness wisdom, power, material and labour into a single force of progressive human society. This institution had also the advantage of preventing class rivalry and competition, and substituting it with cooperation and mutual respect of values. The institution of the stages (Ashramas) of life revealed the ultimate purpose of all existence pressing itself forward in every stage of life, of the student, the man of the world, the mature philosopher and the one who has attained insight into universal life. The last stage is the culmination of human endeavour and its needs have to be reflected in everyone of the preceding steps. This is India’s grand vision of perfection.
The Western yoke on India has left an impact which always insists that whatever modern science says alone is right. Unfortunately, this is not true, for the field of science is sensory, on which are founded experiment and logic, and today the boasts of science are slowly getting exploded as false and vainglorious. One is told that man comes from the ape, that one’s ancestors were untutored tribes, that the past history of one’s land is the story of animal-men roaming wildly in jungles, that life began with fungi which grew on earth millions of years ago, and that hunger and sex exhaust the psychic urges of humanity. Contrast with this the sublime wisdom of the masters who proclaimed that the world was originally involved in the universal being of God, that life, mind and reason are evolutes which spring back to God in a gradual self-realisation, that history also records the lives of mighty sovereigns and great sages whose personalities manifested the cosmic order of justice, truth and knowledge, that our life is a faint pointer to the latent potentialities for a vaster life in eternity and infinity and that our aspirations are indicators of what we are in ourselves essentially. There is no reason why spiritual intuitions should be mere fancies and only scientific findings be correct. We are already in an age where the very foundations on which science is based are being doubted and are regarded as questionable hypotheses. Sense, reason and intuition are three stages of knowledge, the succeeding one being more inclusive and nearer to reality than the preceding.
Care has, however, to be taken in ensuring that in our enthusiasm, the relative merits of the Eastern and Western cultures are not missed but duly recognised. Neither should a total abrogation of the foreign nor a lowering of the dignity of the indigenous culture be resorted to even by mistake. Cultures stand or fall in accordance with their ability to meet the needs of human nature in the changes of time. Physical education and instruction in the sciences is a necessity, especially in this century, and this knowledge should be imparted in the regular modern manner of educational discipline in the institution, coupled with a touch of the personal element in teaching. This latter aspect is more important in the educational process than the way in which it is likely to be appreciated by many.
Teaching is a more difficult task than learning, for the student has mostly to imitate the teacher and do what he says, while the teacher has to take the original initiative and the trouble of understanding the mind of the student. But we should not imagine that the role of the student is one of mere submission, for the faculty of judgment is present in everyone, though it is incipient in the student. Teaching is a process in psychology and calls forth not only superhuman patience but also infinite understanding on the part of the teacher.
Apart from the curriculum of teaching in the arts and sciences, there should be provision for recreation, excursion, pleasant exercise and open-air living. Contact with Nature is as important as lessons in the classroom. A student should not, if possible, be allowed to mingle with persons who are likely to disturb the educational career. A screening away of the student from communal or political movements is essential. Hostel arrangements in the schools would help much in isolating students from undesirable contacts. A distinction may be drawn, if necessary, between residential scholars and day scholars, as it is done even now in certain Christian colleges. Residential education would come near the system of Gurukulavasa, where students are not allowed to contact even their parents and relatives during the period of education. All these things may be a little difficult where poverty is rampant and facilities for living are scanty, particularly in our country. It is here that the well-to-do should come forward and help the implementation of true education. The premises and the atmosphere of the school should be clean and attractive so that the mind receives a subtle impact of an elevated mood while one is in it. The dignity of the behaviour of the teachers, the restriction of their conduct purely to educational work, and their unselfishness of motive, add much to the perfection of the course of education. As far as possible, the school should be away from cities and not in the thick of the crowd, which may have an undesirable effect on the minds of students. They must have pure air to breathe, both physically and psychologically.
It is difficult to control the emotions of the younger generation. Regimen and discipline should be mollified by adequate entertainment. Educational and cultural film shows may form a part of occasional programmes. Music and dance of an elevated nature, as also familiarity with the arts of sculpture and painting exert a good influence on the emotion and give it a mild satisfaction. It is to be seen that the emotions are not allowed to grow wild either by too much restriction or by too much enjoyment. Emotions have to be channelised towards the culture of the spirit which seeks its manifestation in the form of life in the world. A satisfactory training in noble living cannot be given in a few years alone. The basement has to be laid at the first standard of education and the work of construction should continue at least up to the Higher Secondary School level, which would ensure training for about twelve years, the minimum period fixed in the tradition of Gurukulavasa. Charging of high fees from students may deter large sections of people from availing themselves of such benefit. Poverty is a great hindrance to progress everywhere. The richer classes should come forward and help the working of this system, for the country is not going to be freed from mental slavery and ignorance of culture by educating merely the sons and daughters of a few aristocrats in its different corners. To enable this method of education reach at least the majority, funds are obviously necessary, for the teachers have to be paid well to prevent them from falling into indifference and corruption. More important still is to find proper teachers. Much spadework has to be done in the beginning, and adequate funds invested for the purpose. It is a question of the blending of the intellectual, economic, moral and spiritual powers. All these have to be combined into a single force, as it was done in ancient India by a loving co-operation between the sages and rulers.
Summing up, certain features may be reiterated, which go to make for success in the educational process. Firstly, the building of the school or the college should be architecturally attractive and stately, catching one’s spirits and elevating them spontaneously. Unclean, slovenly and ill-maintained sheds have a depressing effect on the mind, even without one’s knowing it consciously. Secondly, the premises of the institution should be perfectly clean and one should be able to breathe an air of health when one steps into it. Thirdly, the institution should be away from the atmosphere of the city and be in natural surroundings, untouched by the busy, community life and also the communal and political atmosphere of urban areas. Fourthly, the authorities should manage to enshrine an atmosphere of seriousness, solemnity and sublimity in the premises of the institution. Fifthly, there should be a neatness of conduct between teachers or professors and students and a mutual sense of affection and trust between them has to be established, so that the whole institution becomes a fraternity dedicated to a common purpose. Sixthly, there should be a comprehensive and methodical layout of the curriculum of studies in different classes. Seventhly, suitable text-books have to be prepared embodying the subjects of the curriculum. Eighthly, as obedience to the principal of the institution is compulsory in every case, it should be seen that he sets a practical example to others by his ideal personal demeanour, impartiality of treatment and devotion to the ideal of the institution. Ninthly it should be a rule that trainees cannot go out of the premises of the institution during the ‘spread-out’ of the school or college hours, without permission of the concerned authority. Tenthly, attempt should be made to run as many residential schools as possible, so that the ancient system of Gurukulavasa may once again be revived, and students are not allowed to contact outsiders during the whole period of their educational career. Finally, the authorities of the institution should succeed in infusing confidence in the students as to the genuineness of the interest which they have in the welfare of the latter.
All this work is a difficult aim, but it can be achieved with effort.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Principles of Education
The Principles of Education by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Wednesday 20 November 2013 19:45
*READ MORE \* The Principles of Education
(A talk broadcast from the Ahmedabad Radio Station on August 27, 1980)
The principles of education are based on the concept of life and the aim of existence directed by the nature of its structure and the prevailing conditions of the environment in which we live. It is taken for granted, usually, on the basis of observation and experiment conducted through the methods of empirical science, that the universe is formed of physical, biological and psychological units, called things, entities and persons, in which, when selected and studied in their isolated capacity are known as individuals, and, when taken in groups with kindred characters, go by the name of society. The educational process has normally been a series of techniques in studying and gathering information on the objects of sensory perception and mental cognition, which are supposed to constitute the environment of man.
On the supposition that the units forming the human environment are outside the subject of perception and cognition, educational institutions have been including in the curriculum of studies such subjects as mathematics, astronomy and physics; chemistry, biology and psychology; sociology, civics and economics; geography, history, and politics. To these primary subjects of study were dovetailed certain accepted doctrines of ethics, philosophy, religion and aesthetics, founded on the assumption that persons and things are independent units contained in the cup of the universe, almost like pebbles filled in a bottle, heaped together in mechanical contacts with one another but individually enjoying absolute independence, each for itself. This vision of the universe is practically the basis of modern educational philosophy and psychology and its implementation in the teaching field of institutions. We, thus, hear students being asked to choose a group of subjects among the several enumerated above, and they obtain a pass or a degree after a course of learning how to add, subtract, multiply or divide factors of computation in arithmetic, algebra and geometry, how things behave on observation of their bodies, how they act and react among one another—in short, what is the result on an empirical investigation of the visible structure and behaviour of perceived objects.
The whole system of present day education may be called mechanistic in the sense that it takes the relationship of things among themselves as one of physical contact or of permutation and combination of essentially dissimilar characters brought together into action by changing movements of things or by a pressure exerted by factors which are wholly external to their individual wake of constitution. All this naturally implies that we do not live in a world of any inner bond of friendly relationships but are basically formed of elements, characters and aims foreign to one another, which cannot ultimately be united into a real, vital fraternity of mutual relationship. We seem to be living in a billiard-ball universe where things are scattered at random in space and they appear to be working in reciprocal contact, collaboration or cooperation either by mere accident or due to sheer selfishness which needs a certain kind of assistance from others for the fulfilment of their objectives. Whether the world is ruled by chance or by the selfishness of its essential nature, it does not, on this supposition, appear to be anything more than a medley of soulless activities of ultimately purposeless motions of mindless forces with an unintelligible intention that seems to be lurking and struggling behind the deepest core of each individual unit, whether inorganic or organic, physical, biological or psychological.
This would naturally be the picture of the universe with which modern science provides us, and an educational system rooted in the perspective of such a scientific analysis and deduction would obviously be mechanistic, soulless, non-purposive, and an altruistic camouflage of a basically selfish intention of every individual. To put it more plainly, this form of educational career can carry with it no other purpose in the end than to perpetuate a physically and egoistically comfortable existence—to wit, the acquisition of food, clothing and shelter, physically; of sex-satisfaction, vitally; the gain of name, fame and power, psychologically. These being the manifest pattern of the psychophysical organism, and where the purpose of education has been recognised to cover such fields as the welfare and protection of other persons than one’s own self, it could be easily discovered that it is only a tactful extension of these aims of the psychophysical individual, for an interest in others is seen to be conducive to an intensification of the satisfaction of these urges as well as to furnish better chances of their fulfilment, as they cannot be fulfilled adequately if there is no cooperation from others and from external factors of various kinds, which fact the personal ego knows well by a subtle insight deeper than sensory or intellectual apprehension.
This is really the unpleasant secret that comes to the surface of one’s observation behind the so-called noble efforts of man, based on this educational wisdom, born of this view of the universe. This should also explain why man has always been feeling insecure in an unfriendly environment, irrespective of a love for others and a sense of brotherhood which he has been demonstrating and apparently working for externally, for these otherwise noble virtues are based on false values and cannot hold water for long. An outward form of cooperation and friendly relationship founded on an essentially self-assertive and unfriendly attitude cannot be regarded as having any meaning, ultimately. The truth, when it is bluntly put, would appear to be that we live in a world of love and cooperation which arise from an internal dislike for and irreconcilability with others! Such is the world, such is life, and such is man’s fate, when such is the structure and aim of our general attitude and our education, that one cannot expect students and teachers to behave in a way which is not demanded by the essential nature of things. This is modern education in its plain colour.
As genuine interest, love and cooperation are characteristics of the soul, these qualities cannot be expected from any soulless system of education based merely on the mechanics of a physical observation and study of inorganic matter, even if it be the study of the solar and stellar system and the electromagnetic core of atoms, which, science tells us, are the building bricks of the cosmos. If science is right in its proclamation of such results as the ultimate fact of creation, man can never hope for peace, or gain freedom worth the name.
But is this true? The untiring hopes and aspirations of man are a standing refutation of these deductions devolving from a reliance on materialistic science and behaviourist psychology. Human longing has always been for the achievement of absolute freedom and perpetual peace, with a consciousness of this achievement which implies that consciousness must be capable of reaching a state of absoluteness, which must at once be one of immortality and non-exclusive universality. Minus these profounder implications of the aims of life, which are amply manifested by every man in his everyday life, human endeavour would be a blatant futility, at best a perpetual self-deception, heading towards one’s own doom. That a unitive, non-mechanistic, universal purpose is at work behind the mechanised urges and relations of men and things is proved by the very existence and irrepressibility of aspiration. And, that the educational process has to be reoriented and transformed into a process of the vital evolution of a soulful subjective aim of every individual comes naturally to high relief. There is in life a divine core of a basically spiritual reality, hiddenly present in all things.
That the universe is primarily a ‘kingdom of ends’, wherein every individual or unit is an essence of selfhood rather than a means of exploitation by other individuals; that this aim of a collective organisation of ‘ends’ and ‘selves’ is the basic ideal of all pursuit of knowledge; that education is a systematised process of unfolding gradually this eternal fact of all life; that it calls for a parallel advancement along the lines of greater and greater unselfishness and inclusive consciousness of existence tending towards the realisation of a universal Selfhood; that the material amenities and economic needs (artha) and the satisfaction of one’s emotional side (kama) are permissible only so long as this law (dharma) of this eternal truth of the liberation of the self in universality of being (moksha) regulates its fulfilment, and that, thus, the whole of the life of an individual is one of studentship and learning in the light of broader and broader outlooks of life which lie ahead of oneself at every stage, are to constitute the vitality and meaning of the educational process. Education is the creative evolution of the total man towards the realisation of his cosmic significance, passing through his personality, the society and the world.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]
The Gospel of the Bhagavadgita
The Philosophy of Education
The Philosophy of Education by Swami Krishnananda
Created on Tuesday 19 November 2013 20:56
*READ MORE \* The Philosophy of Education
The theme that has been designated for discussion at the present moment is “The Philosophy of Education”. It goes without saying that it is human nature that requires to be educated. We are not going to educate the angels in heaven, or the sub-human species. What we call the progressive evolutionary process of education is directly pertinent to human nature and human constitution. Therefore, it is not easy to know what kind of method has to be adopted in imparting education to human beings, unless we have an in-depth knowledge of the human being himself.
The great pathfinders along these lines these days have been the psychologists, and more properly, the psychoanalysts. The study of the human being has to precede doing anything in regard to the development and improvement of human nature. What is a human being? What is it made of? For all practical purposes, it looks that the way in which we think determines our very empirical existence, and our life is nothing but the life of our mind. As we think, so we are; but what do we think? What are the thoughts that occur to our minds? There is a clear-cut answer on the surface, based on the operations of the conscious level of the mind.
Now, in this waking condition, we are supposed to be conscious at a particular level of the operation of the psyche. But the psychologists have gone deeper into the nature of these operations and discovered that human nature is not just conscious thinking. There is something deeper, buried potentially and invisibly in the very substance of human nature, which determines the operations of the mind in the waking condition.
This observation of the psychologists denies freedom of choice. There is always determinism – that is to say, even the so-called free will that the mind is supposed to be exercising in the waking condition is a determined pressure exerted from a deeper level of the personality. By discovery, they have found out that there are at least two subliminal layers beneath the conscious level. If these levels are ignored, we would be forgetting the essential nature of a human being, and just pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp.
The disturbances, the anxieties, and the fears that we are facing in our life are to be taken into consideration, whatever be the degree and the quality of the educational depth of a human being. A most learned person, a professor and a PhD degree holder cannot be free from fears and anxieties which arise not from the learning that he has acquired, but from that which is buried inside himself. There is something which tells him that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”.
The instincts are impulses arising from the potentials of nature, of which the human being also is constituted. Nature is, to some extent, irrational; or if we do not want to dub it with that word, we may call it super-rational, but it is not rational in the sense of the logic of the human mind. We have to take into consideration these realities of life and not go by the intellectual arguments of a determined psyche, which is under the pressure of forces which are beyond its control. The unconscious depths of our personality are the final authorities passing judgements on what we are and what we are expected to do.
The psychologists tell us that many of the reasoned arguments that we produce for justifying any action or thought are only rationalisations of instincts which are accepted blindly, without any reason behind them. We reason and argue and establish and substantiate what we already believe by instinct. This is an astonishing discovery by the psychoanalysts, making out that if these deeper apparatus of human nature are not taken into consideration, all learning is a waste. We will be only whitewashing the walls of a dilapidated building, and it cannot stand merely because of the beauty that is foisted upon it by external operations.
Now, today’s subject is the philosophy of education. Philosophy has been defined as the art of finding the causes of effects, or rather, the ultimate causes of any phenomenon. The phenomenon of man, the phenomenon of human nature, the phenomenon of human activity, is the effect produced by certain causes whose operations and nature have to be studied deeply. An in-depth study of the ultimate causes of any kind of event is generally considered to be the philosophy thereof.
“Where comes philosophy here?” may be a question. We are concerned with the methodology of teaching, the psychology of imparting knowledge. Where is the philosophy behind it? It is philosophy in the sense that the deepest roots of human nature have to be taken as the guiding factors in preparing a syllabus for studies and the nature of the curriculum, whether in schools or in colleges.
The total individual is the subject of study in the educational process. The total individual is the word that we have to underline. It is not the intellect that we are trying to train in education, though mostly these days, education has become an intellectual exercise. That is why it does not provide enough strength in a person to face the world after the education is over. We come out of college and are faced with the realities of life and find that the world is before us, red in tooth and claw, and our education has not helped us. That is, life has not been transformed; it has not been touched. This substance of human nature has been ignored in the eagerness to impart knowledge of a descriptive nature.
In this connection, I am reminded of an ancient story which occurs in the Chhandogya Upanishad. The great sage Narada approaches the divine Master Sanatkumara and implores, “Bhagavan, teach me.”
The Master says, “What do you already know?”
Narada is a master of all the arts and sciences. “I am master of every art, every science, known or unknown, in earth and heaven, but Bhagavan, I do not know myself. Teach me.”
The great Master said, “All this learning is only descriptive, informative, a veneer, a name – just a word only. You have not touched the substance of things. Informative knowledge of a thing is not equal to possession of that thing.”
We may know the structure of the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens, and space and time, but we cannot be masters of space and time. They are far away, removed from us, as if nothing has been done at all.
To know informatively the spatio-temporal characteristics, through sensory knowledge of anything, is to go blindfolded into the nature of things. We cannot know anything if the thing is distant, and unconnected, and unrelated to the student of knowledge. Knowledge is a process of imbibing the substantiality of the thing that is to be known. We become larger in our being, by being educated. We do not collect a load of information like a bundle carried by an ass, and say we are educated. The essentiality of the object of knowledge enters into the essentiality of our own soul, so that we become richer in our being; the dimension of our existence expands.
The thing that is before us, the object of study, the world as a whole, stands outside us deliberately and refuses to come into the grip of our mind and our understanding. It has been so, and it is so now, and it shall be ever in that condition.
Knowledge, truly speaking, which is real education, is the art of entering into the very substance of the object of knowledge. This is to say, the soul of the thing has to be en rapport with the soul of the student. I have to be that which I want to know; then, the enrichment in knowledge takes place. The existence of the object of knowledge has to be included and it has to coalesce with the substance and the soul of the learner. Only when two souls meet, there is a real education. There is enhancement of personality. There is refinement of conduct. All this takes place automatically. If knowledge stands outside the learner, it will be like a shirt that we put on, but the shirt is not the person. The person is different from the drapings with which one covers oneself.
“Suffice it to say that, Narada, all that you have learned is good enough, as an information, but you have not touched the core of things.”
“What is the core? Tell me, Bhagavan,” said Narada.
The great psychologist that he was, Sanatkumara took the mind of Narada gradually, like a very good professor, a psychologist, and a wonderful teacher, stage by stage from the lowest experience possible to the higher and higher levels, from the stage of pure nomenclature of things, or descriptive knowledge as we call it, to the physical nature of the objects of knowledge, the society in which these things are involved, the natural conditions by which they are determined, and the cosmical substance of which these are actually part and parcel. All these are taken into consideration.
Finally, what the great Master said was, “Unless you know everything, you can know nothing. The universe is made in such a way that everything is inter-related, vitally connected. There is an organismic relationship of parts in the structure of the whole cosmos. Though the universe appears to be too large for us to comprehend, the largeness, the wholeness, the integration mentioned has its own degrees.
“We are whole beings – yourself, myself, and everybody, though we are finite individuals by ourselves. The finitude that seems to be limiting our personality does not preclude our being conscious of ourselves as a totality by itself. We feel we are complete; nobody feels that he or she is a fraction of something. The limitations imposed by the factor of finitude only add to the further difficulty of there being other finite centres which limit the freedom of the one single finite. This is the reason why the finite individual tries to expand itself into the false infinite, as they call it, by accumulating more and more particulars, coming in contact with a larger and larger number of finitudes, making friends, becoming a king or a minister, or a president, or a ruler, by which process one is falsely made to imagine that the finitude has been expanded into an infinitude.
“The total of finites is not the Infinite. Many foolish people sitting together do not constitute one wise person; therefore, this idea that the co-relating of oneself with large multitudes and becoming an emperor of the earth is the way to increase the dimension of finitude in the direction of infinitude is pretentious, and an exercise in futility.
“Therefore, Narada, the plenum of existence is the only satisfying principle. The plenum is that which is complete. That which is complete is that outside which nothing can operate, because the very existence or the presence of something external to oneself is a limiting factor, and the plenum would stand defeated.”
Wonderfully, in an astonishing manner, the great Master says, “In this state of completeness of experience, one has not got to open the eyes to see anything. There is no need to hear anything through the ears. There is no necessity to exercise the intellect to understand anything, because that which is to be seen, that which is to be heard, and that which is to be understood through reason has entered into the very being of the person who is endeavouring to know. The being has become a larger being.” Finite is the knowledge and experience of that person who depends upon things which are seen with the eyes, heard with the ears, or understood by the mind. The mind, or the intellect, is a limiting adjunct; therefore, it cannot provide us with intuitive knowledge of completeness.
An educational philosopher should bear in mind all these factors of the substance of human personality. The teacher teaches the student in his or her completeness. The total student is taken up for consideration and teaching by the good teacher; also, the teacher should be so elevated in knowledge that he should be able to come down to the level of the student while teaching. There must be a common platform between the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind. That is to say, nothing that cannot be absorbed into the mind of the student should be imparted.
For that purpose, the higher being of the teacher may have to stoop down temporarily, for the purpose of enlightening the student, to the level of the student; and when rising above the lower to the higher, the teacher takes the student’s mind together with him or her, so that when education is completed, the teacher and the taught become one.
The judge is not a frightening imposer of punishment on the client. He is a distributor of impartial justice, wherein is a higher integration of the judge, the client, and the parties. So is the teacher. The teacher sometimes looks like a judge in a court, sometimes like a father or a mother, and a friend of all. The teacher is a friend and benefactor, and a parent, and a loving guide and mentor to the student. The student feels happy by looking at the face of the teacher. Obedience automatically follows. The teacher need not impose obedience on the student by threat. Anything that is high will attract the lower, automatically. We need not have to put exertion on our mind to know that the sun is rising. The sun does not speak, but he speaks in a different way altogether, calling the attention of everybody. So, even though the psychologists have gone, to some extent, deep into the nature of the educational process, they stopped with the unconscious level. They have not gone deeper into it.
Psychoanalysts wrongly define religion as an illusory comfort-giving process invented by the fears of the human individual, but they forget how an invented illusion can give comfort, because comfort that is so provided by the illusion of religious processes would also be an illusion, and the word ‘comfort’ should not be used. “The concept of God is the concept of a rectifying medium to the anxieties and the frightening limitations of human nature,” is what the psychoanalysts say, but they forget how this happens. Why does the idea of God satisfy a person? If the idea is an illusion born of the fears of human nature, then the concept of God, which is itself an illusion, cannot bring any satisfaction. So, there is a flaw in the arguments of the psychoanalysts. They have not gone deep into their own arguments.
Religion does not mean worship of a Transcendental Being, necessarily. It is a worship of that which is above you. All longing is actually an aspiration for that which is above us. Whatever that be which is above us, that is our divinity; that is our deity; that is our object of affection. We love only that which seems to be above us, which completes our finite nature. That is our god. We cannot say that the concept of God is far removed from the existence of God. It is not true, because the concept satisfies the aspirant in a manner which establishes an inward relationship between thought process and reality. There has been a lot of argument in the field of philosophy whether thought can, or cannot, touch reality. It is understood that thought cannot contact reality, because reality is not a psychological being. Its existence is ontological; yet, the existence of that which is above oneself cannot be outside oneself.
That which is above us is our own nature, which is lifted above the lower level of ourselves. The Bhagavad Gita tells us, uddhared atmanatmanam: “You have to lift your self by your self,” which is to say, we have a higher dimension of our own selves which has to lift the lower self that we are, and imbibe the whole being of the lower self into itself, so that when we reach that which is above us, we become more complete.
Finally, it is the realisation of the Infinite that is the search for knowledge. It is highly spiritual. The educational process is a spiritual process; it is spiritual, but not in the sense of a fundamentalist religion. It is not an “ism” that we are meaning. This art of teaching, this educational process, is purely scientific. It is logically acceptable. But, if we consider knowledge as merely an accumulation of information, we will be in the same condition as Narada who was dubbed “a master of words”.
We can see our learned men in the world. Socrates has said, “Knowledge is virtue; knowledge is power; knowledge is happiness.” Let each learned person touch his or her heart and decide how much virtue has arisen in one’s own self by the knowledge. How much power is there? How much happiness? Is the learned person a happy person? Is the learned person endowed with some kind of authority or power, or is the learned person a righteous person? If none of these is possible, then we can know to what extent the knowledge has gone.
Remember always that knowledge is virtue; knowledge is righteousness; knowledge is goodness; knowledge is beautiful; knowledge is power. You will wonder: “What power have we got? We are professors in the university, but we have no power.” No, because you are not professors at all. Being a mere professor is no good; you must be a possessor of knowledge. Why do you call yourself a professor? Say you are a possessor of knowledge. See if this is possible.
Thus, a lofty theme is placed before us for further consideration in all educational circles, and I would confidently say that the educational department of an administration should receive the highest regard and respect and consideration by the administrators. It should not be considered as a number two, or a redundant department, because it is the man-making department. It is here that the person is made. It is the art of the preparation of the future individual of the nation, of the community, of the world, so the educational department is the most important of all departments; but it is unfortunate to note that this has not been considered as an important issue, and all the teachers are grieving. The professors are unhappy; Vice Chancellors run away. They do not want to sit on their seat because of the turmoil, in the midst of which they are placed. They say, “We do not want to continue this service because there is a total misrepresentation of the very art of education.” It has become mercenary to the core, a give-and-take policy, a business, rather than an educational career. It has come down to the most earthly materialistic level of utter selfishness, and is far removed from the noble cause that is to decide the process of learning.
The Guru-sishya relationship is the most well-conceived relation that we have, right from the beginning of time. Today, the teacher is not a Guru, and the student is not a sishya, so they are torn apart. This gulf should be bridged by great effort of understanding on both sides. Who is responsible, finally? Everyone is responsible. You and I – all are responsible for the welfare of the nation and the world, because these layers of inclusiveness are not standing apart from one another. World events determine even the family life of an individual. We cannot live cozily in our little house under the impression that “anything can happen in the world – what does it matter?” It is not so. An earthquake can disturb everybody.
The operations in human history throughout the world determine even the smallest experiences of an individual, because the world is a whole. This aspect of wholeness in the approach to anything should be taken into consideration. All effort is a wholesome effort. It is the rising of the soul to the surface of consciousness, and it is only when the soul rises to action that it becomes successful action. If it is only the upper part of the mind, the intellect so called, and the psychic instincts that are responsible for working, they will not succeed. When the soul acts, it must succeed, because in every act of the soul it touches the bottom of the Soul of the universe, and it shall succeed.
This is a great truth before us which we have forgotten. This truth has to be revived and brought into the forefront of our experience and learning. It has to become our real treasure. That is the comfort that we can truly expect.
[Extracted from Swami Krishnananda Maharaj’s discourses Divine Life Society]