The Yoga of Meditation

by Swami Krishnananda

So, I may again iterate that the gospel of the Bhagavadgita, or you may say the gospel of meditation, or the gospel of life spiritual, is an all-comprehensive parental teaching, a mother's advice and a father's comfort, which gives you everything that you need, which provides you with the necessities of every stage of your life, every level of your personality and every aspect of your requirement. God, being all-comprehensive and present everywhere, offers to you every necessity, wherever you are, and whatever you feel like lacking in you, and what you consider from the bottom of your heart as the values of life. In God, everything is everywhere at every time, and God is All-Being.

 It was pointed out that for the seeker who is attempting to climb the ladder of Yoga, 'action' is the means; and for one who is established in Yoga, 'serenity' is the means: Arurukshor muner yogam karma karanam uchyate; Yogarudhasya tasyai'va samah karanam uchyate. This precise and pithy statement in a single verse has been interpreted almost by every expounder of the Bhagavadgita, as implying a difference, if not a contradiction, between one type of means and the other mentioned here 'action' is the means, and 'serenity' is the means.

Generally speaking, we cannot bring together action and serenity on one platform, because our way of thinking is such that action appears to be the opposite of serenity. There is a disturbance caused by a manifestation in the form of activity of any kind, and therefore, the term 'serenity', used in the Gita, has been regarded as a stage which is equivalent to withdrawal from action and not compatible with action in any manner. Also, there is another aspect of this interpretation. What is action which is supposed to be the means for the beginner and from which one is supposed to withdraw according to this interpretation in the application of the second means? We cannot think of activity except in terms of the physical body; and also, an activity is associated with movement of the physical body. So action has somehow come to mean, by tradition, a movement of the organism of the physical system, and inasmuch as every movement is caused by a motive, a sense of want or lack, a feeling for the realisation of an ideal that is yet remote, it has been taken for granted that the causative factor of every action is indicative of absence of serenity in the mind. This is the reason why the expounders of the Gita have thought that serenity is different from action, and samah (serenity) is not the same as karma (action). Also, it is an accepted feeling of the teachers of the gospel, as we have today, that serenity is higher in the quality of achievement than the state of action in which one is involved. So there is always a struggle on the part of the seeker to withdraw from activity, under the impression that every activity connotes a lower stage and the higher one is characterised by absence of activity, which is serenity.

If this is to be taken as the standard meaning of this verse, if on the basis of this interpretation, 'samah' or serenity is to be considered as absence of activity, Bhagavan Sri Krishna cannot be regarded as a Yogin. He would not be a 'Yoga-Arudha', because he was bristling with activity throughout his life; and we cannot say that he was lacking in movement of any kind. It was all movement and dynamism from top to bottom. So, considering the life of Sri Krishna himself, at least, who has been acclaimed as the 'Supreme Yogeshvara', or Master of Yoga, we have to bestow a second thought upon the meaning of this verse and try to find out if there is a hidden significance behind these terms, 'action' and 'serenity', which are held to be the means of the different stages of Yoga.

We, as normal human beings, living in society, have a particular notion of action into which we are born and through which we are bred up. We cannot conceive of activity or action except in terms of movement and, as I stated, we cannot think of movement except in terms of the physical body; and so, we are obliged to interpret action as a kind of succession of position of a particular event or an object. Every activity, according to our way of thinking, is a procession in time, a change of location, a transformation in condition, implying a sort of momentary application of concentration on the part of the one that is involved in this process.

We have been always told that the 'Yoga-Arudha', or one established in Yoga, is a personality who is identified with absolute fixity. This is a very subtle point which always misses our attention in our attempt to understand the meaning of fixity, serenity or composure; and the difficulty is in the understanding of the difference that exists between The character of sattva and tamas. In tamas there is fixity, stability, an absence of movement or activity of every kind; and in sattva which is the opposite of tamas there is another kind of fixity, a stability which can be mistaken for the same kind of fixity as characterised by tamas, but totally different from it in quality. To give you a homely example: if an electric fan moves in a slow speed, you can see its movement. The wings of the fan are seen moving, but if the rapidity of the movement increases to a high pitch and there is tremendous movement of the wings of the fan, you will not be able to see the motion at all. It will appear as if the fan is not moving. It is fixed. The appearance of a total absence of activity on the part of the fan may be really the highest type of activity in which it is engaged. If you want to know whether the fan is moving or not, you have only to thrust your finger through it (or beware, put a thin stick through), though you cannot see its movement because of the intensity of the rapidity of its movement. So, a visual perception of movement is not always the criterion of the judgment of the nature of action. There can be movement and yet it may not be perceived. As a matter of fact, perceived action is a low category of action. It is not heightened activity.

Now there is a third aspect of this point apart from the two already mentioned. Activity does not necessarily mean movement of the physical body, though this is the way in which we usually understand the meaning of activity. From the point of view of the gospel of the Bhagavadgita, from the standpoint of the ideal of spiritual life, the meaning of action is something different from what we associate with ordinary activity. There can be intense activity even if the physical body is stable. A stabilised physical body can engage itself in a different kind of activity by which it can move even mountains. This is a strange kind of action altogether, different from what you know and what you can imagine. The great events of the world are caused and motivated by forces which are not necessarily physical. It is not the physical activity of any individual or any particular physical object or body that is the cause behind great transformations that take place through history. There are other meanings hidden behind visual activity and these are generally called the forces of the world which control the destiny of mankind as a whole. The forces behind the visible activity of physical nature and human society are not physical, necessarily. They are something different from physical bodies and physical actions, because they cannot be contacted by physical means. A high frequency of motion can transcend the realm of physicality, and may be impervious to the entry of physical instruments, incapable of perception by physical organs and yet more powerful than any physical instrument that you can think of. A stage may be arrived where physicality may completely drop out altogether and the forces may assume a new shape absolutely, in which condition it is difficult to call them physical. Even the discoveries of modern science have almost led themselves to this conclusion. The so-called physical matter of materialism, of crass material perception, the physical objects of nature which are tangible to the senses, have gradually evaporated into a substance which is really substanceless, which is absolutely incapable of physical contact, which cannot be observed even by the subtlest of instruments through a laboratory, and far subtler than even atoms as they can be conceived.

Matter has been de-materialised for reasons difficult for the mind to comprehend, and matter has become something quite different from what it is and what it has been taken to be. It has ceased to be an object in the sense of any perceivable content; and it appears to have withdrawn itself into a different realm of being which is inseparable from subjectivity rather than the realm of objects. This is just to cite an instance of modern discovery. The physical particles of nature, the objects that we see with our eyes and contact through our senses are associated with activity, generally speaking; and we cannot think of action except in terms of these physical objects. But, what could be the character of an action, or an activity, or a movement in a condition where physicality appears to have disappeared altogether and objects seem to enter into the structure of one another, mutually, where we cannot make a sharp distinction between one thing and another thing, as in the case of the waves in an ocean, for instance. One wave enters into the bosom and the structure and the bowels of the other. You do not know where one ends and the other begins. If forces of the world are to act in this manner and put on this shape in their activity, if one is not capable of existing without reference to the other, what would be your definition of action?

Now, I would draw your attention back to the illustration I gave of the movement of an electric fan where intense activity can appear to be absence of activity, rather the highest activity may look like no activity at all. The difficulty in understanding this point, which does not occur before our eyes and is not a phenomenon usually observed in human society, makes it also difficult to understand the meaning of the verse which mentions two different means in the practice of Yoga, action on the one hand, and serenity on the other. It may be safely said that this verse of the Bhagavadgita which speaks of 'karma' and 'samah', action and serenity, does not speak of a contradiction between two types of means, but rather a difference between a lower state and the higher state, the higher state always being inclusive of the lower, as we had occasion to note earlier. The higher cannot be said to be different, from the lower in any manner, whatsoever, inasmuch as the vitality and the values of the lower are always contained in the higher, just as we cannot say that an adult who has grown out of babyhood is in any way different from the baby merely because adult-stage is different from the child-stage; for the values that are associated with childhood are transcended in the adult's state and not lost. So the higher means applied in Yoga is not a contradiction of the lower means but an absorption of the lower in the higher, an inclusion of the lower in the higher, a sublimation of the lower in the higher, so that instead of there being a contrast or a difference between one means and the other, there is a continuous growth and persistence of uniformity between what we usually call the lower and the higher. Here we come to the vital point of issue that is brought out as a significance in this verse as we are studying.

The difference that is struck here between 'karma' and 'samah' is, therefore, something quite other than what we understand to be a difference between one thing and another thing. There is no question of inferiority or superiority here. It is an absorption of a lower means in a higher means, again to reiterate, the lower being included in every respect in the higher. Also the higher, when it is said to include the lower, cannot exclude the meaning of action, that which is signified by action, because action or 'karma', which is supposed to be a lower stage of means, if it is to be included in the higher, naturally, cannot lose its sense when it becomes the higher. So, the higher stage which is regarded as serenity or 'samah' is not absence of activity but a heightened form of activity, something quite superior to the ordinary type of action which is of low frequency, just as we cannot see with our physical eyes the high frequency light-waves, alpha, beta, gamma, cosmic rays, etc. about which we hear of these days. There are high frequency waves of light whose very existence is not known to us because of their being not capable of perception through the eyes or sensation by the senses. What we call sunlight, the most brilliant form of light we can think of, is a low frequency light which is capable of being caught by the retina of the eyes because of the frequency of the light-waves of the sun being commensurate with the capacity of the retina of the eyes. If it had risen to a higher state of frequency, we would see darkness everywhere. The whole of the world, then, would be as pitch, not because there is no light but because the light has become so intense that it is blinding, and the eyes cannot know that the light exists at all.