Sri Swami Sivananda and His Mission

by Swami Krishnananda

“The world is in a state of yoga,” says the Upanishad. This single statement may be regarded as the essence of all higher teachings. Yoga is the composure of oneself; and, a settling of oneself in oneself is what is attempted by the world as a whole. This perpetual activity on the part of all creation—namely, to maintain itself in a state of a healthy balance of its parts—is the yoga of God’s creation. We are told in the Veda as well as in the Upanishads that prior to the act of creation, God performed tapas and concentrated Himself in a fashion which, in its vast inclusive ambit, was clear about every detail of what was to be projected. The thought itself was the action, and the action was the same as the being of God. The world in which we are living is a part of creation, though it is not a part in the sense of something that can be isolated from the whole to which it belongs. It is only a conceptually separable entity but is essentially, integrally, related to creation.

Thus there is a point in the Upanishads telling us that the world is practising yoga. The sky meditates, as it were, and so does the earth. To conceive in our minds a state where the world can be contemplating creation, is a state of yoga. In order to be able to appreciate at one stroke the possibility of such a self-settledness on the part of the whole world, we might have to shed our human personality for a few seconds. If it is true, and it is certainly true, that the world is in a state of self-settled composure and inclusive compactness of its spirit, and if at the same time it is also true that we human beings are not capable of separation from the stuff of the world, then every one of us is in a state totally opposed to yoga—because we do not think with the world. We may think of the world, but not think with the world. Here is the crux of the matter, which has an import which is spiritual and temporal at the same time. We can think that there is a world, but that is different from aligning our thought with the composure that the world is said to be maintaining in itself.

To participate in the world is different from looking at the world and harnessing it for purposes that are human or individual. We cannot harness to any particularised purpose a thing with which we are moving and without which we cannot be said to have even an existence worth the name. We have, first of all, to convince ourselves that we are outside the world in order that we may exploit the world, use it for our purposes and deal with it, a term which implies a wealth of undesirable meaning. To deal with a thing is to totally cut oneself off from all vital relationship with that with which one is seeking to deal. Else, if that with which we try to deal is not so entirely vitally cut off from ourselves, our dealings with it would be equivalent to dealing with our own selves. We do not appreciate and understand the magnitude of the consequence that is involved in the errors of our thinking. This is the scientific base, the philosophical foundation, the core of the matter behind the difficulties of life, problems galore, and any blessed thing that we can think of in our minds.

The philosophy that I referred to yesterday as a materialistic outlook is this catastrophic thought, as it can be called, which persists in non-aligning itself with the way of the world and vainly attempts to align the process of the world with a temporarily significant process of one individual or even a group of individuals. Such an attempt is considered to be the task of life and the principal occupation—that is, putting the world to use and seeing that it moves parallel with the intentions of human behaviour and conduct. We have to subtly go into the depths of the difficulties of people in the world. Glib talking and a veneer of an outward interpretation of our difficulties will not do. There is a basic cause which refuses to come to the surface of analysis and persists in maintaining its isolation as a background of human thinking. Even our psychic endeavours and logical approaches are not adequate instruments to discover the basic difficulties of humanity, because these causes of our materialistic outlook are at the very back of even our psychic approach and are the conditions that are necessary for us to think in a particular manner—to think in a human fashion, so to say.

These conditions are prior—a priori, as it is called in philosophy—precedent to the action of every kind of human thinking, including rationality, scientific observation and philosophic probe. Man is conditioned in this sense. We know the meaning of the word ‘condition’. It has many meanings, psychological as well as social; but it has a deeper meaning than we are able to know. Psychologists may tell us that we are psychologically conditioned. Social conditioning is something well known. But there is a further conditioning which is the cause of all these exterior limitations of our psychophysical personality that determines our every endeavour, so that even the attempt to overcome our limitations seems to be varnished with a very thick coat of the very condition of this limitation—and so goes all learning of humanity. Once a long rope is given to this kind of thinking—when an instinct or impulsion or a natural proclivity is given unlimited freedom of action—it becomes the law of the day and the natural rule of ensuing thought and activity.

Aeons have passed since this circumstance of human creation seems to have taken place, and many an explanation is offered to describe the way in which this human outlook originated at a time which was perhaps even prior to the coming of time itself—and we can imagine what length of time has passed. We have been educated in this fashion of thinking, to which I referred to as being an unyogic way of thinking. This kind of thinking of man—of every one of us, of humanity as a whole—considers the world as an associate which has to be put to use and to be utilised for the sustenance of the human individuality, to make it secure for as long as possible within the duration of time on this Earth, and in every blessed manner. But, this is not to be. If this is not to be, man cannot be happy in this world when he persists in this inveterate way of thinking which he considers as his own thinking, and not the thinking of the world.

The masters, the supermen about whom we had occasion to consider certain aspects, are different from ordinary human beings in the sense that the super-humanity about them is the characteristic of the operation of their minds, which are set in tune with the thought of the world. To think as a yogi would think would be to think as the world would think. Hard is this statement, difficult is the import of this suggestion, because we cannot understand what the world is thinking and how we are expected to think if we are to be in tune with the thought of the world. Later we shall have occasion to consider what all this means.

Since a thought which is contrary to the way of the world is unhealthy and is a sickness of the world as a whole, it has to be remedied. The remedying feature when sicknesses of this kind erupt in the context of world history is that health forces begin to act. These forces of health and regeneration of the world—these forces that are unleashed for the purpose of remedying the illness of life—are the saviours of humanity. We may call them incarnations, great leaders of mankind, sages or saints. The world is perhaps incapable of thinking in terms of persons. It is doubtful if it is aware that we are existing as people. This is a matter which requires some consideration. The body, for instance, may not be aware that it has fingers; it may be aware that it is. Something like that may be the way in which the world thinks.

Personalities are of no value for the world, and human history has been a demonstration of this truth—of the manner in which people are treated by the world. They are treated as something which we, as humans, are not able to understand. Great geniuses have exited from the drama of life in one second. Great heroes of history in various fields, whom we would like to remain here in our presence for ages to come, are cast to the winds by the powers of life, the forces of the world. Does the world care for us? Our demands seem to be given scant recognition by the rule and the law of the world. The world does not bother if we are born; it does not bother if we die. It also does not seem to bother how we live, because it cannot consider us in the way in which we consider it. Here is the difference between a loving parent looking at a child and an ignorant child understanding its parent.

The considerations of world forces in respect of people like us are impersonal considerations, not personal affiliations of human friendship or social affiliation. The world is not a human society. We may think it is only that; but, it is not just that. This is the reason why humankind, right from creation onwards, has never been able to understand what this world is or why things are happening in the way they happen. Things are happening in the way they have to happen, but things are not happening in the way we would like them to happen from the point of view of the observation and interpretation of values which we have foisted upon the world—not the real world, but a world which we have created in our own minds, a world of an exterior association and affiliation in regard to ourselves, whereas the world is not an exterior appendage to our personal lives. Remember—the world is not an appendix to the book of our personal lives; it is a standard existence by itself. However much we may stretch our thoughts to concede an independent value to the world, especially when we speak of world peace, human welfare, etc., we may not fully understand what is happening to our minds when we think or speak in that fashion.

Even when our thoughts, so-called, extend or appear to extend to the whole area of the world, geographical as well as social, we remain there as persons. In fact, we have not melted into the humanity which we consider as the deity of our social activities. The social welfare worker is as yet a hard-boiled ego. He cannot cease to be, merely because the sea of humanity has engulfed him in this endeavour at social welfare or his thought of world good. It is not easy—rather, it is almost impossible—for us to get out of the clutches of the background of our very method of thinking, however much we may imagine that we are thinking altruistically and balancing ourselves with the way of things and the world outside. This is a psychological root. I do not want to use the word ‘unconscious’ which is used by psychologists, when we do not know the exact meaning that they have in their minds for this word. Apart from that, it is not a suitable discussion for what I am trying to convey as the background of our difficulty. It is unconscious in the sense that it is not capable of thought. That means to say, this background of our method of thinking cannot be converted into an object of thought, just as one cannot see one’s own back.

Hence, to be with the world, which is said to be the art of yoga, may require a type of effort and endeavour on our part that is not just a psychological effort. When we are students of yoga in the real sense of the term, it is not this mind that is working. This mind that is human—which is mortal and caught up in the body, which thinks from its own individual point of view and cannot consider the ways of the world as a whole—is not the mind that practises yoga. That is the reason why yoga teachers often make a distinction between the lower mind and the higher mind. We have heard these terms ‘lower’ and ‘higher’, but we cannot easily discover the difference between these two aspects of human thinking. As I pointed out a little earlier, the lower mind is that kind of thinking which is concerned only with the maintenance and the security of the bodily individuality and the psychic ego.