True Spiritual Living

by Swami Krishnananda

Thus vairagya, or dispassion, is a tendency of the mind to adjust itself with the natural order of things, and when this attitude is effected appreciably, there is also a simultaneous feeling of mental health, which is the proper attitude towards things. An improper attitude is mental illness. Love and hatred are illnesses of the mind. We are very fond of the word ‘love’. We think it is a great, gorgeous, divine blessing upon us, but it is not so. It is also an affection of the mind because where there is no object, there can be no love; and as we are again and again told that objects do not really exist as they appear to our senses, then love also cannot exist in the way in which it is manifest. Because what is love, if there is no object of love? All emotional movements, whether in the form of like or dislike, cease on account of a self-completion and self-sufficiency felt within by a manifestation of spiritual awareness. This is vitrishna which Patanjali speaks of. We have no desire for things because we have understood things in a better way now.

Why we do not have a desire for things is a very vast subject for one to contemplate. Why is it that there should be no desire for objects? Why are we so much condemning desire for objects? What is wrong if we desire things? What is the precise mistake that we are committing in loving things, hating things, or desiring things in this way or that way? What is wrong? What is the matter? The matter is simple. It is against the constitution of things. It is unscientific. Why is it unscientific? Because the order of things, the nature of the universe as it is, is such that everything is arranged in an organic connectedness. This system is called the Virat. An organic connectedness of things, when it becomes the content of consciousness, is the experience of Virat. What do we mean by this connectedness? It is a realisation that there cannot be objects and, therefore, there cannot be subjects. There cannot be causes and, therefore, there cannot be effects, and vice versa. In a mutual interrelation of things, we cannot say which is the cause and which is the effect, which is the object and which is the subject, who is the lover and who is the loved. We cannot say anything. The idea of externality, isolation, separatedness, is the cause of attachment, which is the principle of desire, passion etc.; and inasmuch as any desire for a thing is an affirmation of there being no such organic connectedness among things – while that is the fact – desire is contrary to Truth and, therefore, it is not desirable. Desire itself is not desirable.

We should develop an inward feeling of ‘enough’ with things. A sense of ‘enough’, of satiety, should arise in us, not because we do not have things, not because we cannot get things, not because there is a threat from outside, but because we ourselves do not feel a need for things; we have enough of things. Either we have enough of everything, or we have seen that desire itself is not a proper attitude or a correct form of understanding. In such works as the Panchadasi, the famous Vedanta text, we are told that a great sage, a man of wisdom, feels that he has no desire. An emperor who has the whole earth under his control also may have no desire. The emperor has no desire because there is nothing to desire. When everything is with him, the whole earth is his, what is he going to desire? “Whatever I want, it is under my control.” The sage, the jnanin, also has no desire, but for a different reason altogether. Both the emperor and the sage have satiety, surfeit, a feeling of ‘enough with things’, though for different reasons. The point made out in this analogy is that, rightly or wrongly, we cannot have freedom from desires as long as there are covetable objects in the world, whether we can actually possess them or not. The covetable objects should not be there at all.

But they are there, so what are we going to do with them? The objects should either be wholly possessed by us, as is the case with an emperor ruling the whole earth, or they have to become part of our own nature, as is the case with a sage of wisdom. Otherwise, we cannot be free from desires.

There is also a cause of dispassion which is characterised by investigation – scientifically, logically conducted into the nature of things as, for example, a physicist would do through a microscope. “This is a lump of gold. Very beautiful! I would like to have it. There is desire for it. Let me observe it properly. Bring a microscope.” He goes on observing, but he cannot see gold when he sees it through a microscope. He finds that whatever is inside the stone is also inside that gold. “Oh, I see. Whatever is inside the gold is also here. It appears to be gold because of a rearrangement of the very same constituents which form this object called stone.”

In the Panchadasi, we have very detailed expositions. Towards the end of the sixth chapter the great author says that various causes of vairagya are there, but whatever be the cause of the reason behind the rise of vairagya, it should be spiritually oriented – which means to say, there should not be a necessity to retrace our steps. Many honest and sincere seekers on the path of yoga fail in their attempts on account of a misjudgement of themselves. While we are very shrewd in judging others, we are not so clever in judging our own selves. We are very lenient towards ourselves, and very hard upon others – very unfortunate. The point is, we have to be hard on ourselves and a little lenient on others, and that we are not. The yogi is very severe upon himself, though he may be very kind towards others. He may be very charitable towards other people, but not so charitable towards himself. Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj was a great example of this. “Give, give, give, and it shall be given” was his philosophy, as was the case with Jesus Christ. In my life at least, I have seen only one person who was a follower of the philosophy of giving, and it was Swami Sivanandaji Maharaj. I have never seen a mahatma or a saint of this type, who would give things and feel that he loses nothing by giving. There is always a fear that by giving, we lose. “If I give five dollars, I have lost five dollars.” That is not so, my dear friend. We do not lose, we gain something. What we do not know is that when there is an apparent debit of five dollars here, there is a credit of five thousand dollars somewhere else – in another, superior bank altogether, in which we have a current account. Man, with his foolish, stupid brain, cannot understand this.

“Give, give, and give, and it shall be given unto you, pressed and overflowing.” What is the meaning of this? The meaning is that man’s understanding is inadequate to the task. It is born and brought up in a set of conditions which insist on selfishness of behaviour and comfort of the body, glory, name, fame, power, authority, and what not. All these are the doom of yoga. The greater we ascend in the ladder of yoga, the smaller we look in the eyes of people, and finally we may look like nobody at all when we are a master. But nobody wishes to be looked upon by people as a small fry.

Thus, the ethics of yoga, the psychology of yoga, is something super-natural, super-mundane; and the demands of yoga practice are, therefore, also very exacting. And when one steps into the ladder of yoga, one will be repelled by its requisitions – not because it is really hard or exacting, but because it is unintelligible to the uninitiated mind. Therefore, to live with a Guru for a sufficient length of time – until one is well-grounded in an understanding of what is one’s true aim in life – is called for.