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The study of human experience is the study of life, in a very important sense.
Bring back to your memory all that you have been able to discuss along these
lines up to this time, and recollect where you stand in this arduous adventure
of the analysis of human experience. These processes of self-analysis are difficult
to remember, inasmuch as analysis and rational judgement with a due consideration
of the pros and cons of every act and thought is not the usual way in which
we operate in our lives. We are generally driven by instincts, impulses, sentiments
and habits of the past, and are not necessarily guided by reason and considered
judgement of values.
We are now here, not to be driven by instincts and to be pushed by old habits
of the social environment and social living, but to consider in a more logical
form the causative factors operating behind our experiences in all the aspects
of the dimension which they occupy in the scheme of things. We have come to
the point of confronting the universe before us as a large body of experience,
which has ever managed to place itself in the position of an object. Even just
now, at this very moment when we are speaking and listening to it, it remains
an object of our consciousness. People around us are our objects of sensory
perception and mental cognition. Things around us are of a similar nature.
The world as a whole refuses to be recognised in any other manner than as a
content of our awareness and an object of our experience. To resolve this mystery
of our relationship to things is a hard task that is before us.
We cannot understand the correct relationship that obtains even between ourselves
and our own near neighbour. How is this neighbour related to us? “Who
is my neighbour?” was a question put by an inquisitive person to Jesus
Christ. How do we know what sort of relation is there between us and the next
man? We are not in a position to easily probe into this difficulty. That there
is some sort of a connection of one thing with another, goes without saying.
No one will gainsay this fact that there is a relationship among people, a
sort of cause and effect relation among all things. But, what do we mean by
relation? I have already tried to touch upon the intriguing character of the
very concept of relation, and we cannot understand what it actually means,
where it stands. Does it belong to the subject, or to the object, or is it
independent of both? We found that it cannot belong to the subject; it cannot
belong to the object; and, also, it cannot stand independently.
Thus, the world is a world of relativity, inscrutability, indeterminability
and unintelligibility. Nothing can be understood to the core, inasmuch as relation
stands as a concept which cannot be explained and cannot be understood. How
am I related to you, and you to me? Nobody knows. Again there is a psychological
habit which takes for granted that there is such a thing called relation, whatever
that relation be.
This difficulty is the difficulty of all life—any kind of life, anywhere.
It boils down to other difficulties: our inability to understand what we ourselves
are, and what anything is—what the world is, what creation is, what life
itself means. Life stands before us as a mystery, because the mystery is hidden
within our own selves as an incapacity to understand anything whatsoever, within
or without. All this difficulty arises because our probing is shallow. It is
not an in-depth analysis. The senses are so powerful, our social instincts
are so rapacious in their demands, our hunger for name and fame, authority,
power and wealth is so intense that these pressures will not permit the mind
to go deep into its own self. It requires a Herculean energy on the part of
the seeker of Truth to resist the onslaught of these cyclones of sensory movements.
No one can stand them. When a tornado blows, we, too, will be blown out, together
with its movement. But, by abhyasa and vairagya, as the Bhagavadgita
and Patanjali put it—by persistent, tenacious practice and an attempt
to cut off the internal connection of the senses with the so-called externality
of things—we can, with intense hardship, no doubt, go deep into ourselves.
The going deep into ourselves is also, at the same time, a going deep into
anything in the world. To know ourselves is to know all people, all things—the
whole world. Researchers in biology have demonstrated that the whole man can
be seen in one cell of his body; the human body is a macrocosm to the cell
which is the microscopic mini-representation of the human organism. We are
told that in one drop of blood the whole history of a man can be read, right
from his birth to his death. And it is not for nothing that our scriptures
have told us that the whole history of man is written when he is in the womb
of the mother. The length of life for which he has to live, the experiences
through which he has to pass and the relationships in society which are to
decide his experiences—these are written in invisible characters by the
mystery of the cosmos even before the child comes out of the womb, because
every child is a child of the universe. It is not born to one person, one individual
called the father, and another called the mother. Every event is a cosmic event;
every baby is a child of the whole cosmos. It belongs to the universe. Everyone
belongs to the universe, everything—myself, yourself, all people. Neither
you belong to me, nor I belong to you. Nobody possesses anything here. One
cannot be the object of possession and enjoyment by another. Such a thing cannot
obtain in this world, where everything belongs to one single centrality of
operation, the government of the cosmos. Perhaps we cannot conceive of a greater
socialistic form of administration than the way in which the universe operates,
where each one is for everyone, and everyone for each.
This is an empirical difficulty, and also a philosophical problem. Where everything
is hanging on everything else, thinking is not possible. Yoga drives us to
this point where thinking is not possible. It is thinking that is our doom—thinking
in terms of perception, doubt, memory, sleep, and other things, which are the
psychic operations in man. The great aphorism of Patanjali puts it plainly
before us that every psychic activity is a hindrance to the impulse to the
practice of yoga. Yoga is not a psychic operation, not a mental activity. It
is not thinking. It is a tendency to being in a larger dimension.
When we enter into the field of yoga, we expand the ambit of our existence.
We do not merely start thinking of something as an object outside us. We think ‘being’ as
such in the various degrees of its expression. We are individuals, and in that
sense we are also a sort of being. I am. This consciousness of I am-ness is
an affirmation of the being of the isolated individuality. The rise of the
yoga consciousness is from this level of being to the next higher state of
being, where it includes the environment of the individual’s perception
and experience—not in the sense of a contact with the environment outside,
as it happens in ordinary sense perception, but in an inclusion of this atmosphere
in the ambit of one’s experience. This is called yoga samadhi, samyama—the
art of uniting one’s being with the being of that which tentatively appears
as an atmosphere around oneself.
The environment around us is a being in itself; it exists. This existence of
the environment around us is inseparable from the being of our own selves,
as we appear to ourselves. Unfortunately, this environment stands outside us,
so we struggle with the environment. We are in conflict with the environmental
atmosphere. We struggle to exist because of the fear of the unknown motives
behind the way in which the environment operates. This fear vanishes when the
environment becomes a part of our existence.
Yoga is the art of union with every content of consciousness. That which the
consciousness apprehends as an existent something is its content, and may also
be called its environment. When I am conscious that I am placed in an environment
of people around me, of air blowing, sun shining and earth under me, all these
ideas that occur to me are ideas of an environment which is physical, social,
political, and every blessed thing. This complicated environment of the perceiving
consciousness, which stands outside in space and time as an object thereof,
has to get absorbed into the being of the perceiving consciousness in deep
meditation.
This is a difficult art. Meditation is a difficult job because the mind insists
on affirming that the environment is outside, that people are external, and
things are unconnected. The obsession that things around us are unconnected
to us will not leave us until the end of our life. The child born of our egoism
affirms the isolatedness of our being. The ego is hard, like flint. It will
not melt, even by the application of the heat of meditation.
Yet, it has to be effected. The day has to come when we shall have to achieve
this purpose. All our desire, all our ambition, all our conflict, all our love
and all our hatred in life is a multi-formed expression of our attempt to seek
a union and harmony with the environment around us. But we bungle in this attempt.
We fumble and fall, and get defeated and receive a kick in our attempt to establish
this union between ourselves and the environment around us. Thus, we feel frustrated
and come back. But, nevertheless, our activities in life are a blind groping
in the darkness of ignorance in the direction of a communion that we wish to
establish with the universe outside—which we never achieve because of
the difficulty in controlling the senses, which insist on saying again and
again that the environment is outside us and we can never have union with it.
Our desire is nothing but a desire for union with things. When we love an object,
we wish to enter into that object and absorb that object into ourselves, as
a part of ourselves. We wish to get absorbed into that object, as a part of
that object. All fulfilment of affection and love is the fulfilment of union
with the object of affection. Where there is hatred, animosity and conflict,
it is only the negative side of this affection which operates like the obverse
of the same coin of the human attempt to encounter the world, its environment.
This is the outcome of our study of the internal relation that obtains between
us and the world outside. We have, to some extent, conducted an analysis of
our own selves. Then, we studied, in a measure, the process of knowledge—what
we call the epistemological predicament. We encountered the universe. I tried
to explain in some detail the internal structure of the cosmos in its various
planes of expression. Now we are coming to a crucial point in our spiritual
adventure—namely, the character of the Ultimate Reality of the universe,
which is a more difficult problem for us to understand, encounter and analyse
than anything that we have been discussing up to this time.
What is Truth, finally? What exists finally, ultimately? Everything passes,
everything is transient, everything moves; everybody who is born also dies.
We have never seen Truth in this world. That which perishes, demonstrates its
unreality. “I am not true. I go.” That which goes, goes with a
proclamation of the inadequacy of its own being. Everything moves, everything
is a flow of energy, a force. We cannot touch the same water in a flowing river
the next moment; nor can we touch the same fire in a moving flame. Perhaps,
we may not be able to touch the same object the next moment. It transforms
itself in an impulse of movement which carries it onward, forward, towards
a destination which no one knows.
Such being the case of things in this world, such being the character of the
whole world which perishes every moment like a bubble that bursts, what can
be Truth? We live in a world of untruths, transitory right to the core. Mortality
is gripping everything relentlessly. Mrityuloka is this; everything dies. Why
one dies, no one knows. Why should one be reborn? No one knows. What is birth;
what is death; what is transition; what is all this drama of the universe;
what is anything at all? This is a question which will point to the possibility
of our solving this mystery of the Ultimate Reality of the universe. If nothing
is possible, if everything is transitory, no question will arise because the
question, also, will be transitory.
There is something which speaks within us in the language of eternity, not
merely in the language of transitoriness. The consciousness of the transitoriness
of things is an indication of the presence of a non-transitory eternity. This
is a subtle voice that speaks within us, but it gets stifled, smothered by
the mud that is thrown over it and the dust that is kicked up by the activity
of the senses which blinds our eyes until we cannot see what is hidden behind
this profundity within our own selves.
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