|
Listen
to the audio of this discourse
Download
the MP3 audio
There is a subtle aspect in which our life is involved which keeps us pursuing
something or other day in and day out and, at the same time, keeps us restless
within ourselves. In the heart of our hearts, we seem to be doubly active—on
one side, with an endeavour to free ourselves from the different kinds of
restlessness in which we seem to be involved and, on the other side, we never
cease to pursue some ideal which we have chosen as the proper means to free
ourselves from the agony of restlessness.
There is not one in the world who is free from some sort of anxiety. This is
a great psychological study. This series of discourses have a simple and obvious
role to play: to examine, diagnose and direct our psychological personalities,
as a medical science would require a scientific mind to understand the problem
of a patient.
Our learning and our wisdom have not helped us very much. It is something we
learn too late in our lives. When we are small boys or girls, we are very enthusiastic
and bubbling with feelings of hope and positivity of achievement, all which
begin to show a tendency to turn into dust when our hair becomes gray and the
world begins to present a picture of disillusionment, as if we have lived for
no purpose. This psychological state through which all have passed, right from
prehistoric times, is very, very unfortunate; and it may appear that no one
has escaped this predicament.
Our life is not physical or social, though it appears to be such. Our life
is mainly psychological. We may be politically important persons, socially
very busy people, and individuals of importance and respectability, all which
are a camouflage of what we are inside. The outer activities and relationships,
whatever be the name that we give to them, are the efforts of what we really
are within ourselves.
Our search for whatever be the aim of our life, our joys and sorrows, are neither
physical features nor social or political phenomena. Our sorrows and joys are
not political and social; they are purely personal, inward, psychological.
They are projected outside, and they become problems and matters for consideration
politically, socially, and so on.
We have heard it said one thousand times, perhaps, that it is essential for
a person to know one’s own self. This has become a sort of shibboleth
which has lost all its meaning. Everyone knows this old, old saying, from the
Oracle of Delphi right down to the present day: One has to know oneself. The
number of times that we have heard it is such that, actually, this oracle has
no sense before us. A thing with which we are too familiar loses its significance
to some extent.
So, we seem to be aware as to what is our objective, but this awareness is
not adequate to the purpose. We are in a muddle of thinking and, oftentimes,
we find ourselves dashed by strong waves and currents of emotions, moods of
depression and elation, like a person sinking into the ocean and rising up
to show his head for a few moments only to sink down again in utter desperation.
There is something very peculiar about all of us, and this peculiarity is what
keeps us moving and getting on in life—and yet, we are terribly dislocated
within ourselves. Do we not think that we all have so little time to live by
our own selves that we are practically not our own selves, that we are somebody
else?
This is a peculiar trick the world is playing with us so that we may be defeated
in our aims; and, those who have left this world have been people who have
been completely thrown out of gear. History stands as a great demonstration
before us of human defeat and an inscrutable circumstance into which one feels
he is thrown at the last moment of time. Present-day life, especially, is an
utter travesty—psychologically, and in every blessed way—because
our mind is drawn outside and urged externally to things which pull us with
such vehemence that we live not in ourselves, but in something else.
We are terribly conscious of other things, and there is a total oblivion of
the fact that we also exist in this world. This is a difficult thing to understand,
notwithstanding the fact that we cannot forget our existence. It would be meaningless
to say that one can forget one’s own self. You are all here, and you
know that you are here; how can you forget that you are here? But, nevertheless,
the objectivity of the mind and the impulse of the psyche towards external
affairs is so uncontrollable, morbidly vehement and impetuous that we seem
to be ashamed to be conscious of our own selves and feel proud of being conscious
of other people and the affairs of life.
The more we are immersed in the affairs of life, the more important we appear
to be. The greatest men in the world are those who are conscious, totally,
of what is outside them, imbued in the affairs of political existence and social
problems. We have social workers and political geniuses trying to attack each
other with the weapons of warfare and making themselves very prominent. Our
prominence increases, like a rise in the thermometer, in proportion to the
extent we are immersed in what is totally outside us.
This is the reason why we say this is a world of death. ‘Mrityurloka’ is
a word that is common in India. This world is called Mrityurloka, the world
of death, and not a world of life. Nobody lives in oneself; and what can be
worse than not to be able to live with one’s own self? The fact that
we are forced by circumstances to live in that which is not our own selves
is the proof of this world being a world of death, and not of life. Here is
the foundation of our sorrows, the root of our difficulties, and the impossibility
to get out of the clutches of this condition which refuses to be understood
by anyone. The grip that the world has upon our minds is so strong, like the
crocodile’s grip, that we are not be permitted even to think. Even the
mind is caught.
When I say that the person is involved in the affairs of what he is not, I
do not mean that only our bodies are involved. Everything that we are is totally
caught hold of—our reason, our will, our feeling, our emotion, even our
values of life—so that we value life in terms of what we are conscious
of outwardly, and not in terms of what we are inwardly. A rich man is a valuable
man, a powerful person is a valuable person, and a name that appears in the
headlines of newspapers is very prominent. An unknown person living in a corner
of the world is not so worthwhile. So, the quantum of external involvement
has become the thermometer for the reading of the greatness and value of a
person, and of anything else in this world.
This is a serious subject in psychological studies. I began by saying that
we are minds more than bodies, and all our involvements are inwardly oriented,
though the involvement appears to be wholly external. It is essential for each
one of us to find a little time to discover the manner in which the mind is
operating. This is not an easy affair, because we are not separable from the
mind. A policeman who has become involved with a gang of dacoits becomes a
dacoit himself and, therefore, there is no question of discovering the dacoity
or the activities of these people.
How can we observe the method or the modus operandi of our minds when
we, ourselves, are the mind? Who is going to study the mind, as if we are standing
outside the mind and looking at it through a microscope? We can imagine where
we are standing. To some extent, we can know why it is that we are so very
grieved inwardly in a manner we ourselves cannot express outwardly in any language.
Our sorrows are our private property which nobody can look into, and which
we cannot explain, express or state in any adequate language. The privacy of
our sorrows and problems is so intense that it defies illustration, explanation
and description—logically, or in any language. Anything that is purely
personal defies description, and we are, therefore, in an indescribable predicament
of involvement. It is like an awfully sick person not knowing what sort of
sickness he is involved in.
Swami Sivananda, the great saint and sage who was the seed of The Divine Life
Society, was one of the many stalwarts in the world who became conscious of
this peculiar structure of the world. I do not say he was the only person;
there were many like him, but he was one among the many incomparable geniuses
who plumbed the depths of this problem of man: Who is man himself? The problem
of man is man; it is not somebody else. So, we are our own problem, not anybody
else.
This requires a tremendous patience, as would be required by a physician who
is treating a very complicated illness. It may require days and days of diagnosis.
Complicated diseases require an all-round consideration, and can’t just
suddenly become objects of prescription, of treatment. We are not involved
in a linear fashion. We are involved in a circular, zigzag and abysmal way,
so that a straight-line approach is not the way of studying the human mind.
It is not so clear, like a mirror shining before us.
There has not been one who could give a universal prescription for this difficulty
because, while the difficulty is common in its generality, it is personal and
has its own details of speciality. We all have a common problem as human beings
in this world; this, of course, is true. But, each one of us has, also, a peculiar
personal problem which is not common to all of us. So we have to be treated
from two different angles of vision, two standpoints altogether: the general
aspect of it, and also the special aspect of it. Our condition is really awful
because we are attacked from two sides: from the problems which are generally
common to all human beings, and from those which are privately inherited by
us through our race, through our species—one may say, by our karmas.
There is, according to modern psychoanalysts, a personal unconscious and, also,
a species unconscious. This is the reason why we think only as human beings;
we cannot think like snakes, scorpions, or in any other fashion than as human
beings. Is it is a great wisdom to be able to think only in terms of human
beings, and to evaluate things from a human point of view only, and to be overly
anxious about the welfare of human beings while bothering not at all about
anything else in the world, though we know very well that our life is decided
by factors mostly which are superhuman?
The breath that we breathe, for instance, to take a very gross example, is
not under our control. It is not a purely human affair. Even our heartbeat
is not under our control. These are things which are important enough, and
yet, of which we are totally ignorant and about which we wish to think nothing.
We will be terrified out of our wits if we begin to probe into the mystery
of even the heartbeat—which is our master, and not our servant. We take
for granted things which are most important, and busy ourselves with things
which are silly and secondary.
The outlook of life, with which we are at present concerned as human beings,
is the projection of our secondary character, whereas the primary characters
are deeply rooted within us and do not actually come to the surface. This is
to explain, in another language, what psychology has spoken of as the conscious
level—as distinguished from the very depths of humanity and human nature
which will not come to the surface, as it is not necessary for it to come to
the surface.
|
