Sri Swami Sivananda and His Mission

by Swami Krishnananda

There is a general feeling that godmen and saints come to take people to the state of salvation, enabling humanity to attain moksha—liberation from the turmoils of earthly life—and instruct them in the art of renouncing the world. There is also a tradition which has entered the very blood of all religious thinkers and participants—that the apex of human achievement is the entry into the order of Sannyasa. All this has an associated aspect, which is the insinuation that this world is not so very meaningful, valuable, significant and requiring consideration as we are often made to feel in regard to it. There is a consequent conclusion that the world is not as real as God; or perhaps it is not real at all in any sense of the term, because we cannot abandon that which has even some reality. We cannot throw away even ten cents, though its value is less than a million dollars.

But why should it be necessary for us to be taught that the world has to be renounced, unless it has no significance at all? Even one cent has some value; no one would like to throw it away. The world is not worth even one penny—is it so?—but for which peculiar attitude of the mind, the tendency to the renunciation of the world is inexplicable. The world has no substance, no value—nothing we can call real. If this is not established, there would be difficulty in accounting for the deification of what people consider as the total renunciation of everything in the world. It will be found that the answer to this question will not easily come forth, because under conditions which engender feelings of a religious renunciation—a feeling for the life of a hermit and the like—we may be cornered into accepting that the aim of all life is the renunciation of all life. But, we do live in the world. This is something that cannot be gainsaid. We are not living elsewhere.

The renunciate is not outside the world. The renunciate has to plant his feet on the Earth and in the world in order that it may be possible to renounce the world. Segregation, isolation, renunciation, abandonment, tyaga are bywords in religious circles everywhere. Very rarely does it occur to anybody’s mind that there is a mix-up in this attitude—a kind of hotchpotch conclusion arrived at by a hasty analysis of the conditions of life, due to not being clear as to what it is that we are aiming at. The child’s philosophical outlook is also, many a time, a mature religious devotee’s outlook, as far as the final issues of life are concerned. We may be grown up intellectuals, educated geniuses in one way, but when crucial situations arrive and confront us, there is a difficulty in meeting the realities of life face to face and we will find that we are not much better than little children.

When a monkey screams and tries to attack, rarely do we see a difference in the reactions of people—mature or immature, grown up or otherwise. Confronted by a tiger in a jungle, the educated and the uneducated, the learned as well as the unlearned, may react in the same way. These are the realities. The structure of the human mind is partly responsible for difficulties of this kind. There were metaphysical philosophers, as we are sometimes prone to call them, who went into the very depths of these psychological backgrounds of the very art and the system of human thinking. It is impossible for the human mind, made as it is, not to imagine the goal of life as something above the Earth. Whatever that ‘above’ be, in that concept of the so-called above, we are little babies. We may look up without actually knowing the significance of this looking up. What are we gazing at or looking up to when we fold our hands and turn our gaze upwards?

The idea of God being above is a crude notion of the basic conditions of human thinking. What are these fundamentals of the psychic specialisation of everything, temporalisation of everything, localisation of everything, and externally connecting one thing with another thing? This is social life. This is also a philosophical way of thinking—but even if we are philosophers, we cannot actually jump out of our own skin. We stick to the skin of our psyche and then philosophise sociological ideas, personal feelings, instinctive promptings and conditions to which the whole humanity is subject. We cannot jump out of the conclusions that we draw from conditions which are basic to the very anatomy of our minds. Hence, we are willy-nilly compelled by a force of habitual thinking to feel that the Creator of this world is outside the world, because we have never seen the manufacturer of something being anywhere but outside the manufactured goods. The cause is always outside the effect from which it has come. We never see the carpenter inside the furniture that he has made. He is outside.

Anything that is made, is made by someone or something which is not in the thing that is made. This is common knowledge, simple common sense. Philosophy cannot be wiser than this, as we have never seen two things becoming one. We cannot see a collusion of ‘A’ and ‘B’. In logic this is called the law of contradiction. ‘A’ cannot be ‘B’; ‘A’ is ‘A’, and ‘B’ is ‘B’. I cannot be you, and you cannot be me under any condition—whatever be our friendship and family relationship. We may be the closest of friends; nevertheless, I am I, and you are you. We have seen that one thing is one thing; one thing cannot be another thing. The exclusiveness of the items of the world, human or otherwise, conditions everyone and everything in this fashion, and we cannot but place ourselves outside the purview of God’s jurisdiction.

We can never feel that somehow or the other we are involved in God. Such an involution is not possible, even by intense exercise of thought. Though God is the Creator, we are the created and we are the thinkers of God. We conceive of God. We pray to God and we practise meditation on God, so that God is an exclusive object—in the same way as a tree is different from a stone. These are psychological conditionings of the human mind. And if one object cannot be another object, man cannot be God. This is so much so that there is an excluded remoteness required to place God as far as possible from the horizon of the Earth, partly because of the extent of the visible creation which appears to cover the entire space; therefore, God should be above space. Are we not told that God is above space and above time? One thousand times we have been told this. How wide is space and how long is time? If that is the case, how far is God? Far! Far, as far as the reach of the sky or the end of time. As time’s end is inconceivable and the height of the sky cannot be thought by our minds, we do not know how far God is. He is far, unthinkably far, and it is difficult to reach Him.

The difficulty in reaching God arises out of the extensive distance that obtains between us and God. This is a frightening feature in the conception of God: the immense distance. And there are other difficulties in wholly devoting oneself to God—namely, the impossibility to exclude the attention being paid to things which are also existent. The world is not non-existent to our eyes. It is as real as our own selves. To the extent that I am real, what I see is also real. There is a compressence of the subjective side and the objective side: the world is as much real as we are, and it is as much unreal as we are unreal.

Now here, incidentally, we may say that to consider the world as less real than ourselves would be a false attitude, because we are involved in the world as part of the world. At least that much we have to concede. The renunciation of the world as an unreal phantom by a person who is not unreal is an irreligious mix-up of emotions, sentiments and unrelieved problems. Many times we make this mistake of not conceding as much reality to the things of the world as we give to ourselves. The food that we eat is as much real as the reality of our hunger. We cannot satisfy real hunger with unreal food. That is to say, the seer and the seen are on par. This is one issue of the matter.

Hence, it is to be accepted that the renunciation of the world by any particular person is not so easy an affair because in the renunciation of the world, simultaneously oneself is also renounced. It is beyond one’s capacity to imagine how oneself also can be renounced. Who has done that? It is not possible to throw oneself out of oneself in the manner we try to throw the world and the relations with things outside in a fit of renunciation. So here also it must be logically accepted that the world cannot be renounced as long as we do not renounce ourselves in equal proportion. To what extent it is possible to renounce one’s own self is for anyone to imagine; and to that extent, one can renounce the world. But this is beyond ordinary possibility because it is not easy even to think what it all means, let alone actually do it. What on earth does it mean that we should, in percentage, renounce ourselves along with that with which we are connected and which we renounce in the spirit of religious renunciation? The things of the world insist on being recognised as some sort of reality. Their insistence is so vehement that no person with a little sense can deny that. The body is intensely real to us. If that is the case, anything that is connected with the body also becomes equally real.

The world is, therefore, an interconnected arrangement of relationships which are partly physical, partly social and partly psychological. The psychological aspect of human relation is not less real than the physical or social family relations. We cannot say that what we are related to in our minds is comparatively less in the degree of reality than our physical, economic and social relations, because we had an occasion to observe that our minds are stronger and more real, and what the mind affirms should be regarded as a higher reality and of greater consequence than the so-called physical contacts. Physical contacts will amount to nothing if the mind revolts against associating any meaning to them. All this is to say that the world is not as simple a thing as it appears, or it is made to appear, before us.