Essays in Life and Eternity

by Swami Krishnananda

The experience of a reaction in respect of the environment around which one seeks the fulfilment of one's material needs may be called the basic economic need of the person. Whatever is essential far physical existence, without which one cannot live a healthy and sensible life in the world, becomes an object (Artha) of life's pursuit, and to the extent of the pressure of the need felt, one's life becomes inseparable from it. Food, clothing and shelter are some of the ostensible forms which this pressure of life takes. And this urge towards material security, is also to be transformed into a spiritual discipline, since this urge has its ultimate purpose in maintaining the individual secure for a purpose higher than the individuality itself. Here is the spirituality hidden behind even the material necessities of life. Matter itself is the first rung in the ladder of the development of the spirit towards perfection. Spirit condenses into matter and matter rarefies itself into spirit. The universe is the face of the Absolute Spirit. There can be nothing unspiritual in a world animated by the universal consciousness. The word 'secular,' if it means the 'unspiritual,' cannot exist in the dictionary of creation.

But no one can be satisfied merely with bread, clothing and a house to live in. There are other longings of the individual engendered by the fact that everyone is an intricate complex of different layers of involvement, each one knit into the other inextricably. There is the love for beauty, a desire for emotional satisfaction, and a longing for aesthetic enjoyment. The voice of this impulse is as vehement and pressing as the call for material comfort. The attraction for fine arts, music and literature, is an outer form which this inward impulse for aesthetic experience takes in every person. One loves and expects love. The tragedies of personal and social life may be mostly attributed to absence of affection that one seems to be expecting from others and one's own inability to love anything at all. Frustration is the outcome of defeated love. Man's vital satisfactions and fulfilment of emotional needs also form part of the spiritual life, since this impulse, again, is an indication of the orderliness, symmetry, rhythm and proportion present in everything that is a whole and a completeness. The aesthetic impulse, the desire for the beautiful (Kama) is suggestive of any kind of love or longing for recognition and a fulfilment in feeling. The romantic impulse, as it is sometimes called, is the apotheosis of the aesthetic sense. As there is a necessity felt to keep one's physical body secure by means of the requisite material needs, there is a simultaneous urge to perpetuate the physical individuality through an endless continuity in the process of time, which is the final explanation of the impetuosity behind the sexual hunger of the individual. Infinity and Eternity seem to be playing the fool in the individual acts of an endless material possession and insistent sexual longing.

The impulses have their visible expressions as well as hidden forms. There was, in India, no ban imposed on the natural fulfilment of desires, contrary to the dictates of certain over-austere religious attitudes which emphasise to a point of excess a mortification of the flesh, the starvation of desires, and a hibernation of one's normal impulses by forced repression. Though appearance is not reality and the bungling of consciousness in its material and aesthetic vehemences may be said to be far removed from the ultimate reality of life, all evolution has to be from the lower to the higher, from a lesser completion to a greater one, though we would prefer to designate the lesser ones as appearances of the higher reality. This is the beauty and the perfection, the spiritual significance, which the ancient masters envisaged in every individual attitude or movement, thus seeing and expecting everyone to see, the entire life in all its phases as a grand drama enacted by the Supreme Being in the Theatre of the Universe. This is the reason why even the ordinary daily occupations and instinctive impulses can become and should form raw materials for self-purification and an intelligent harnessing along the stages of the evolution of the spirit towards the Absolute. If God were not to call man, there would not have been desires in life. Every desire is some sort of a distorted shape of the response of man to God. A desire, while it is apparently directed towards the fulfilment of an objective satisfaction, actually arises from a need for universal experience. As everyone is placed in space and time, and the space-time complex manages to externalise even the universal, God Himself appears as an object of sense. What is everywhere looks as if it is in some place and only at some time.

However, the permission and concession given to desires to fulfil themselves, in the manner indicated, is to be conditioned by the great rule or law, called Dharma. If Dharma, the principle of the righteousness of the law, does not regulate the operation of desires, they cease to be aids in the movement of the spirit towards its perfection. Desires, which are like flowing rivers, get dammed up when they are bottled inside and not channelised in a systematic manner to irrigate life's wholesome involvements. Dharma is law, the regulative principle, which harmonises everything with everything else. The individual has to be a self-balanced purposiveness, integrated healthily, but not opposed to a similar need felt for self-completion and integration by the other levels of organisational procedure, namely, the family, the community, the society, the nation, and the world at large. Usually, there is an inherent urge in everyone to maintain one's own point of view even to the detriment of others, a form which desire takes when it is concentrated within the body and ignores the presence of other individuals or similar organisations. Dharma, or law, insists that desire can be fulfilled, and must be fulfilled, lest it should go amuck, but not to the disadvantage of others who also exist in the world and who too have a similar permission to fulfil their desires. There is no mutual contradiction involved in such a permission granted under the law, Rita, as the Veda would call such a universal sanction founded on perfect, impartial justice. "Do unto others as you would be done by others." "Do not do to others what you would not like to be done to yourself." For, if one wishes that everything should belong to oneself, everyone else also can entertain such a wish. Such a predicament would defeat the very purpose of the operation of any desire. Law is the principle of cooperation and sacrifice, as against competition and selfish arrogance. It is the concession which each one is expected to make in respect of everyone else, because creation, as could be seen from the above study, is a 'Kingdom of Ends,' and not a restless flow of 'means' only without any 'end' to be reached. The Veda uses the word Satya for the law of the Absolute, and Rita is the very same law operating in creation as a regulative principle, an imperative, immanent in all things. Every law is a facet of the cosmic law which is rooted in the integrality of the universe. There is a necessity to introduce a system of coherence among the visible particulars, so that they form a harmonious whole, a hierarchy of completeness, and not a mess of jarring notes without any relation among themselves. Law exists, because the Absolute is, God rules all things. Law is the manner in which the indivisibility of the Absolute manifests itself through space and time.

The great regulative system of the administration of life, known as Varna-Ashrama Dharma, sums up the way of a perfect life. While what we may call the horizontal integration of life by means of a blend of spiritual power, political power, economic power and man power in life is ensured by the intelligent mechanism of Varna Dharma, which is not a distinction of colour, but a mutually involved differentiation of each one's capacity to participate in the fulfilment of life, the vertical ascent in the qualitative wholeness of each person is patterned in the rule of the Ashrama Dharma, representing the stages of study, discipline, conservation of energy and continence; the ordained fulfilment of the material, social and emotional requirements of life; a gradual freedom from every kind of externally oriented involvement; and the final pursuit of absolute universality. The horizontal stratification was designed by the participating phases of cooperation known as Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra; the vertical discipline and gradual perfection of the person was laid down in the well-known stages of the Brahmacharin, Grihastha, Vanaprastha and Sannyasin. Neither is the Varna system a caste-oriented gradation of the superior and the inferior, nor the Ashrama pattern a social enactment. Both represent a spiritual necessity and the only way in which human society can exist and thrive in harmony, and the individual progress upward towards a gradual realisation of universality. There is no comparison in this system of stratification, but a necessary and just participation and healthy integration of social and personal life. India's culture never held that negation is the law of life; for it fulfilment is a state that has to be reached by working through the media of every disciplinary process, all which is equally important. The stages of evolution do not brook comparison. Each stage becomes as important as any other, when one finds oneself in it. Life is an inward attainment of oneself with a cosmic conditioning. The inwardness, being constituted of the different layers of personality, has to be taken into consideration in all its degrees when one attempts to live a life of perfection. The inwardness is of a graded form. There is no sudden contact of one level with the rest of reality, except through the necessary stages. The human individual is formed of several psychic vestures, each of which is to be treated well by paying its due, which is accomplished in the fourfold stratification of cooperation and the stages of life. Time is a movement towards Eternity.

The perfection that is wholeness, which characterises every stage of evolution, is also to be equally active in the administrative, political and judicial field of human management. The question of management arises practically from the very level of the individual. Management does not necessarily mean a handling of relationship with other people. It is also a matter which concerns oneself. Self-management, or the proper handling of one's own self, will be found to be of primary importance even when considering one's relationship with other persons. The individual, as was observed, is also an organisation that needs to be managed. Any non-alignment of factors involved in personal management may land the person in a state of mental restlessness, whimsical behaviour, erratic conduct, and a bungling in the handling of any matter whatsoever. While human society is a group of human beings, it cannot be forgotten that it is human beings as individuals that constitute the society. There cannot be a factual qualitative superiority of a society whose constituent members do not possess in their own person the expected quality. But the very necessity felt to form a society, an administrative system, a government, or a judiciary should naturally be suggestive of an imperative involved in the outlook of anyone to exceed the narrow limits of a purely personal or individual concern and entertain an outlook which would not exclude from its purview the welfare or interest of any other person in the society. This is a specific requirement on the part of anyone who is placed at the helm of affairs in any organisation – social, political or judicial. The head of such an organisation, whether he is a king or a monarch, president, minister or judge, naturally requires a specialised form of education in being able to understand his relationship to the organisation of which he is the chief, a relationship which is not a particularised connection with individual members merely, but a superior relation to the spirit of the organisation, a welfare state, as one may designate it, which is not a person but a principle. From this it would also be clear that the head of such an organisation cannot look upon himself as a person, but the representation of a universalised principle which is the integrated welfare of the entire jurisdiction over which he has authority and responsibility. It would require some specific educational calibre and a stretch of some genius to realise that the head of a managemental system, social, political or judicial, is not a person, but a super-personal general principle. A judge in a court, for instance, does not only transcend the limitations of the clients of the cases, but transcends even himself as a person. The judge is neither anyone of the clients or advocates, nor the visible person seated on the chair. The judge is an embodied representation of law, which by itself is impersonal. Hence, the true judiciary is not visible to the eyes but can only be appreciated through reason which has a wider jurisdiction than any person or even all persons. It is in this sense that a ruler is often considered as a representation of divinity, a deity in himself. It is so because the ruler is a principle of wholeness which, in every one of its levels, enshrines perfection which is godliness, which is a name for the soul or the self-integrating principle in anything.