(This article was written in 1946 and later on published as a booklet)

Publishers' Preface

The present booklet furnishes a systematic essay on the different facets of the philosophy and teachings of H.H. Sri Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj, with a metaphysical root, ethical stem and spiritual efflorescence. It has been the unique feature of the gospel of Sri Swamiji that he has included within its gamut the entire field of experience, and every system of thought finds in it an occasion for a final sublimation of itself. We have a firm hope that every seeking aspirant will find in this exposition of spiritual philosophy a veritable treat to his supreme satisfaction.

THE DIVINE LIFE SOCIETY
Shivanandanagar, U.P,
10th March, 1997

The Problem Stated

The world we live in is observed 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 only 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 universal machine that modern science envisages is explained away as only one of the many forms of the workings of the brute force of matter which is the ultimate stuff of all things. The natural consequence of such a theory as this is the astonishing conclusion that human life, like every other material substance in the world, is completely determined by blind causal laws and the so-called free-will of man is subservient to them, if not a mere chimera. When we protest that man is not merely matter but also mind, it is explained that mind is nothing but a subtle and ethereal exudation of forces of matter. Man is reduced to an insignificant speck in the gigantic machinery of the cosmos which works ruthlessly with its own laws, unconcerned with the weal and woe of man.

This naturalistic interpretation of life, that is fast threatening to become rampant in this modern scientific and atomic age, seems to be really the philosophy of the common credulous man, and even of the intelligent public who have neither the patience and the leisure nor the equipment of understanding to fathom the greater depths of human experience. Hand in hand with this theory of crass materialism there is a craze for more comfort and pleasure, by lessening effort and movement of every kind, and an inherent feeling that material progress conceived at its zenith should be the ultimate purpose of existence. Due to an irrational faith in the efficacy and correctness of this doctrine, the man of the world seems to have forgotten the corruption of moral values today, the fall in the mental life and the standard of present-day education, and a sense of monotony and restlessness of spirit, brought about by such a view of life, in spite of his riches and material possessions.

The fact that man is not merely a humble cogwheel in the deterministic machine of a relentless universe and that the essence of man is a spiritual principle co-extensive and co-eternal with the universal Spirit was easily felt by many as a reaction to the very unsatisfactory and humdrum propaganda carried on by the materialists. The balance swung from the extreme of materialism holding that man is merged in the physical Nature to the other extreme of the idealism which propounded that man is perforce dragged on by the impetus of a cosmic spiritual Substance. The difference between these materialistic and idealistic theories is found finally to be in the conception of the ultimate stuff and constitution of the universe; - the one advocating that it is matter, motion and force, and the other affirming that it is pure Mind or Spirit. But both agree in holding that man has no real choice and freedom of his own, he being inextricably involved, merged and lost in the ultimate reality of the universe; be it material, mental or spiritual. Unfortunate man discovered that it was hard for him, under such circumstances, to live a normal life of the enjoyment of the values - the aesthetic, the religious and the moral - and at the same time feel his feet well planted on mother earth, with her richness and grandeur, promises and mysteries, who manages in dexterous and wondrous ways to attract his attention and give him hint that life is reality, beauty and joy, in spite of the ostensible struggle, adventure and hazard to be faced constantly; and yet that life is not all, that there is some awe-inspiring and terrible truth continuously pointed out by the phenomena of suffering, pain and death, by the restlessness of the world and the vicissitudes of life, the endless desires of man and the moral aspirations surging from within. The man of the world required a loving and sympathetic, reasonable and satisfying teaching to enable him to live as an individual, fulfilling his daily duties in life, and yet aspiring for that marvelous and magnificent Beyond whichever seems to beckon him through the tantalising veils of Nature.

The beguiled minds of the growing Indian youth educated under the artful scheme chalked out by the shrewd Lord Macaulay could be easily led astray, and, as it would be natural to expect, the sublimity and the wisdom of the lives of the ancient predecessors of these young men, come through posterity, were slowly lost, and people began to move along the ruts of a so-called modernism of thinking, a rationality of approach and a scientific attitude to life, so much spoken of in these days, and raised to an almost exaggerated height of apotheosis. There were many who delighted in doubting spiritual laws, in denying superphysical, and went even to the extent of decrying soul and God. The method employed by the alien rulers worked, indeed, like magic, and surprising was the way in which warm-blooded youth succumbed to the glamour of applied science and the utility of an industrial revolution placed before their unsuspecting eyes. People gradually shed the spiritual legacy of their forefathers and started to strut proudly under the unseen yoke of a civilisation wedded to a secret achievement of suzerainty over them; the simple sons of a hierarchy of an intensely religious and spiritual heroes who had the great privilege of having declared to their brethren the deepest truths of immortal life. Side by side, the world, as a whole, showed tendencies of a skeptical outlook, especially after the stress of the First World War, and the revolutions brought about by the discoveries of twentieth century physics and biology, hand in hand with an insisting demand for reason in everything, hinted that they would deal a fatal blow at all goodness, faith, morality, religion and spirituality, whatever be the conservative attitude to these time-honoured values. The situation called for a revaluation of all values and for the building of man's inner life upon a stronger foundation. There emerged, promptly and vigilantly, several powerful and authentic voices of the irresistible inner Justice, in the prominent fields of life's activity - politics, sociology, religion, Yoga and spirituality - to correct erring minds and give articulation to the requirements of truth, law and morality. Swami Sivananda figures prominently among such leaders that brought about a thorough inner transformation in modern India, and placed the grand spiritual values on a firmer footing and in a proper setting.

The Mission of the Philosopher-Saint

This significant want, this lacuna in the entire structure of life, this error in the aspiring spirit of man was carefully observed by the acute vision of Swami Sivananda who made it his mission to give to the world a comprehensive philosophical theory, striking a balance between and reconciling and blending together the demands of an obstinate empiricism and the principles and teachings of the lofty idealism that the eternal Spirit alone is real, and to design comprehensively a practice of certain synthesised techniques of inner and outer discipline to achieve perfection. While being fully convinced of and persuaded to accept the doctrines of the metaphysic of a spiritualistic non-dualism, that nought else than God can have any ultimate value, and having entered personally into the stupendous reality of its experience, Swami Sivananda felt the need to intelligently tackle the situations in which the human mind is involved, without disturbing or upsetting the beliefs of the ignorant, and taking, into consideration every aspect of man's life. We cannot teach that life in the sense-sphere is all, that the physical body and the external material world constitute the only reality; for the thoughtful nature raises the pertinent question that mind cannot be equated with matter, that love and joy refuse to be reduced to movements of electrons and protons; that the never-ending cry of the mystics and the religious men, from time immemorial, who professed to know and proclaimed the existence of an unknown region and an unexplored reality of spiritual values, and of the clear possibility of such a thing as immortality, cannot be set aside as mere distorted voices of morbid spirits or abnormal natures. Nor is pretentious man, being what he is, to be satisfied by the extraordinary teaching that the world is not at all there, that what he enjoys and suffers are mere phantasms, that life is a delirium of consciousness, that precious values which are so eagerly and anxiously treasured with zealous care are but the busy activities of a confused mind engaged in a long dream in the sorrow of life's disease; for the searching senses and the enquiring understanding vehemently complain that they see a world as hard, concrete and real as anything can be, that the body has its pains and pleasures; life has its duties, its burdens, its griefs, wonders and patent meanings, which cannot be brushed aside by any effort of logic, the experience is real and cannot be abrogated as worthless by any stretch of imagination, that the visible is real and is valued, as amply testified by everyday experience. We cannot say that God created the world, for God has no desire to prompt Him to create. We cannot say that the world is God's play, for a perfect Being needs no play. We cannot also say that the world has no ultimate basis at all, for the changing phases of the physical Nature and the moral urges of the inner spirit in man assert that God ought to be.

Life - A Sadhana

Swami Sivananda addresses himself to the difficult but important task of taking man as he is, a growing organism of a psycho-physical character, neither wholly restricted naturalistically by the mechanism of the material world; nor fully absorbed spiritualistically in the supermundane aim of divine existence. Man is not merely a body, a mind or a spirit, but a curious mixture of all these in a manner not comprehensible to ordinary intelligence. The Katha-Upanishad says that the true 'enjoyer' or the empirical agent of knowledge and action is a composite structure of the Atman, the mind and the senses, together. Life is not merely a process of swirling masses of matter, groups of molecules, aggregates of atoms or vortices of electrical forces, occasions for the study of psychology of even metaphysics, and an idealistic soaring into the empyrean of logical thought, mental phenomena or mere psychic experience. Not even an exclusively spiritualistic consideration or an occultist interpretation can explain the mystery of life which proves to be a superhuman work of the combination of certain characteristic elements of all these stages and strata of being at one and the same time. Man is at once a physical embodiment, a mental phenomenon and a spiritual entity. He has to appease not only the hunger of the body and the thirst of his vital forces, but has to pay equal, if not greater, attention to the demands of his psychic nature, his moral tendencies and spiritual aspirations. Life is a synthesis of the forces manifesting in different orders and in a graduated scale the evolutionary structure of Nature. In this sense the whole of one's life is a Sadhana, an integral endeavour for fullness on the part of mysterious man whose constitution compelling attention and training ranges at once from the lowest matter to the highest Spirit. As a body he is a creature of natural forces, subjected to the suffering and the mortality attending upon all composite structures in the physical world. He is one with inanimate matter when taken purely as a material structure. But man's tale does not end here. He grows like a plant, feels and reacts like an animal, and insofar as the craving for food, sleep and sex is concerned he is indistinguishable from the inhabitants of the mute kingdom. But conspicuously enough, man struggles to reach above the realm of the brute, exercises a moral consciousness totally absent in animals and displays a marvellous understanding power and reasoning capacity in distinguishing between the true and the false, the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, thus making it amply clear that while partaking of the natures of matter, life and mind observable also in the inanimate world, the vegetable kingdom and the subhuman beings, he is also more than all these, and while including these in his individual make-up he also transcends them in an astonishing degree. The life of man is thus very complex, embracing variegated elements, exhibiting diverse characteristics and manifesting different grades of reality. If like is a Sadhana, a continuous journey and movement and a story of adjusting oneself to and adapting oneself with the vast universe of a similar nature, it is not enough if we merely look into one side of the picture, but have to consider every aspect of the revelation of reality in man. This is precisely the mission of Swami Sivananda, to whom all life is Yoga, and whose writings are an elaborate dissertation on integral living.

The Education of Man

The human self is constituted of a consciousness which is not pure existence but a dynamic process, being interfused, as it were, with the nature of the circumstances in which it finds itself in the world, with an environment of social elements, political restraints, moral commands, physical needs, vital urges, intellectual situations, and the like. In other words, man discovers, in his activities and in, the problems he has to encounter everyday, that his life is related to others' lives and undergoes growth and change as the world appears to change. We have to remember that human life is involved in the time-process and hence bound by temporal laws. The human self is in the world, though not of the world. Thus a study of man is nothing but a reflection on the totality of situations that are comprised within the range of human knowledge, whether explicit as in the usual everyday experiences and in the themes of the physical and the psychological sciences, or implied as in philosophy, or revealed as in religion. Such a study has to include in its gamut the whole of life's problems, insofar as they affect the human self which is the aspiring individual. Man thinks, feels and wills, and does not merely exist. Hence his approach to the religious value of God, the ethical value of duty and the logical value of truth should proceed from and contain elements in the structure of his own central reality as far as he experiences them in his daily life.

Human life is conceived by Swami Sivananda as a school of education for the Jiva or empirical self caught up in the meshes of ignorance, desire and activity. This 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 actual technique of this education differs in its details in different individuals, in accordance with their age, health, avocation, stage of evolution, social relations, etc., all which call the attention of the soul in a variegated world. Essentially, any scheme of education should consist of methods for bringing about and effecting (1) the development of personality, (2) a knowledge of the world, (3) an adjustment of self with society and (4) a realisation of the permanent values. 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 consciousness, but also in relation to the external world reaching up to it 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 specific insight into its inner workings as well, at least insofar as man's inner and outer life is inextricably bound up with them. When this knowledge of one's own individuality and personality as it is involved in a world of picturesque colours and varying depths is acquired through intensive training by study, reflection and service of one's preceptor, it becomes easy for one to discover the art of adjusting oneself with society. Truly speaking, this adjustment is not possible for one who has no knowledge of the deeper spiritual nature of humanity, which it is that constitutes society in man's practical affairs. The aim of the individual as well as the society is the realisation of the values; personal, social, political and even universal - all mutually related and determined by a common goal to which all these are directed, consciously or unconsciously. Ignorant man may not be fully aware that the eternal values of life are summed up in the all-comprehensive terms: God, Freedom, Immortality, and that all his daily struggles are nothing but gropings of his mind in the darkness of his ignorance to recognise these and participate in these, by way of all that he sees, hears or understands. To awaken the human spirit to this tremendous fact is the primary mission of Swami Sivananda, and his voluminous works cater variegatedly to the hungry souls who are in search of food but cannot find it for want of knowledge.