Religion and Social Values

by Swami Krishnananda

Moksha is the great goal of life. This is the ringing message of every genius in any field who has gone to the depths of things. This is to say, freedom is the birthright of man. There is a struggle in and out for liberation, freedom, and shaking off every kind of bondage. There is nothing anyone needs in this world except freedom to the largest extent possible, and for the longest duration conceivable—freedom in society, freedom in political relationships, freedom from illness, freedom from ignorance and unknowing of every kind, and freedom from the fear of death.

Some of us may be under the notion that we are enjoying some sort of a freedom in life, such as the freedom of a rich man, the freedom of a powerful man, and the freedom of a healthy man. They are freedoms, no doubt, in some way. But just as a beautiful, rotund fruit looking healthy and delicious from the outside may have a secret worm eating it from inside, an outwardly robust individual may have a vital illness within the core of his system eating him from within gradually, slowly, though outwardly its presence is not even felt.

So, this freedom of a millionaire or an autocrat that we are enjoying is an apparent illusion of freedom. No despot, dictator or tyrannical ruler can imagine that he is really free. He is in danger. No strong, physically built individual can be confirmed in his opinion that he will not fall ill. And we know the fate of the rich man. He is most insecure. Restlessly he passes his nights.

Let us set aside all these visible difficulties. There is an invisible, secret problem before us: the unaccountability of death, which can snatch and which must snatch everyone. What a pitiable state of affairs in which we are living in this world!

There are two great mysteries before us. No one can say when he will have to leave this world, and no one can say where he will go after he leaves this world. What can be worse for anyone than this ignorance in which a person is thrust into a concentration camp, as it were, in this world? Even a concentration camp is better than a world of this type, where we do not know what will happen to us the next moment or where we will be destined in the future.

This ignorance defeats all complacency that we may have in respect of our achievements of any freedom in this world. It is like the beautiful body of an emperor that has lost its soul no longer has any significance. It is no more a prince, it is no more a king or an emperor; it is nothing whatsoever because its appearance has been deprived of the essence of what it was constituted to be.

Likewise, our formal freedoms, which are what we are after in our elections, in our business and in our general attitude in society, all these attitudes of ours are infected by a secret anguish which gnaws into us—that is, death. Yama taught the great mystery of life to the aspiring student Nachiketas. Yama teaches the mysteries. Death is the best teacher. No one can tell us what the world is made of except the phenomenon of death, because it reveals the inner mystery behind the outward form of the physical and social world. Freedom from this untoward event—death, which goes together with birth, and birth, which goes with death—is alone real freedom. When a person is subjected to such harassment in the form of this imprisonment and punishment in the form of the cycle of transmigration, where comes freedom in this world?

But man aspires for freedom only. He does not bother about birth and death. The fact that we are after a positive attainment of ultimate freedom, infinite and eternal in its nature, irrespective of the impending difficulty of birth and death, demonstrates that we are finally destined for this freedom. We are bound in a way—perhaps bound in every way here; yet, this is not the final word in the history of man.

In the Mahabharata, towards the end, there is the narrative that Yudhishthira bodily went to the celestial realm, with a dog behind him. He was eager to see his brothers and his queen rejoicing in the glory of paradise. Narada and some other sentinels were with him, slowly directing him. He was eagerly awaiting the vision of this glory of paradise where his brothers and queen were all seated as emperors. He could not see anything. He was being led from darkness to darkness, from lesser darkness to greater darkness, from a comfortably expressible atmosphere of breathing even normal oxygen to a stinking, rotten abyss. After some time he had to close his nose because there was stink from all sides. There was no light. It was all darkness—stink and darkness.

“Where are you taking me?” asked Yudhishthira to the Great Ones.

“We are taking you to the place where your brethren and your queen are.”

“Is this the way to the place where they are staying?”

“This is the way.”

He could not understand. His brain did not function. He felt it was no more tolerable. He was suffocated with the stink of the place, and he was walking on slippery ground, knowing not what was around him. Then only he heard a faint cry.

“Save us! Save us! Wait here for a few minutes. Don’t go.” This was the voice of his brother. It was Bhima’s voice, Arjuna’s voice, Draupati crying.

“What is all this?” cried out Yudhishthira to Narada and the others.

“Well, you wanted to see your relatives. They are here. This is the paradise, this is the heaven in which your brethren are,” said the celestials. “This is what they deserve. But your destination is different. Turn away from this place. This is not your place. You are destined for heaven, and they are destined for this for their own deeds. Return! Why do you stand here? We shall take you to the paradise of Indra, which is and which shall be your glory.”

Yudhishthira said, “What do you mean by asking me to return to paradise when my brothers and my queen are here in this stink? I will stand here as long as they are here.”

There was a lot of argument. “This attitude of yours is not proper. Whatever one deserves, one gets. This is what they deserve, and you deserve another thing. Go from here,” said the celestials.

Yudhishthira would not budge from that place. “No, I am here, and I shall not move from this place. I shall be where my brothers are, where my queen is.”

Suddenly the curtain lifted. It was all blazing light. The resplendence and the fragrance and perfume of the paradise were instantaneously there. He was surprised. “Am I seeing things properly?”

He found his own brothers and his queen seated in the highest glory of paradise. Yudhishthira asked, “What is this? Are you making me mad? What am I seeing? What was I seeing, where was I standing, and where am I now?”

The angels said, “These are things which you are not supposed to understand. You are still in a mortal body. You have come bodily to the heavens, and your affections and your aversions, which are common to human beings, are still with you. You are not thinking like a celestial. You are thinking like a mortal. Take a dip in this river.”

Yudhishthira took a bath, and suddenly he shone with a fire-like body, and he no more thought like Yudhishthira. It was a new outlook altogether, a new vision, a new understanding, freed from the loves and hatreds which are inseparable from mortal existence.

This is a story which, to some extent, also explains our condition. We are in hell. We may say that we are not in a stinking place. Yudhishthira was not able to breathe. He was in darkness; and it was an awful atmosphere in which he was. But we are not in that condition. We are happy. Here is the blazing sunlight. We have oxygen to breath. We have food to eat. What is wrong with us?

That we are totally ignorant of what has happened to us and what is happening to us, and we are not able to know that we are in this state of ignorance, can be said to be a worse state than the one in which Yudhishthira was. Yudhishthira was in a better state because he knew what was happening and where he was standing. He knew that it was a very undesirable, awful atmosphere. But we think this is paradise.

This is the bondage of man. Man’s bondage does not necessarily consist in absence of currency notes or any physical amenities, but in his incapacity to know where he is standing. Ignorance is bondage; knowledge is freedom. It is not gold and silver that can make us free, not authority over people that can make us free, and no accumulation of the different particulars of the world can make us free—because they are, in a way, comparable to a dreamland where we may rule like Ashoka, Alexander the Great or his grandfather, but it amounts to nothing finally. All the glory of the dream world is a dream indeed as long as the dream continues. It is worse than a bubble, because even a bubble has its own reality. We are here in the space-time and material complex of dream, completely under the control of a magic which deludes the whole personality, root and branch. And even our thinking is deluded. Reason operates in dream. And what reason? The dream reason operates. Such is our intellect, our scientific achievement, our rationality, our genius; it is a dream genius, dream poetry, dream art, dream achievement, dream wealth, and dream emperorship. All is wonderful. How wonderful it is to be an emperor in dream! But we know the substance out of which this experience is made.

Such is the experience out of which our world is made. “The world is made of such stuff as dreams are made of,” said Shakespeare. A great eternal truth: the world is made of such stuff as dreams are made of. What is the stuff that the world is made of in dream? Can you tell me it is made of wood or brick, iron, gold or silver? What is the substance out of which the world of dream is made? You have to think very deeply to give an answer to this question. Vainglorious, mirage-like, unsubstantial, hollow experience is the substantiality, solidity and permanency of the dream world. What a contradiction! It appears to be a permanent experience. We can rejoice. We have the great joys of life even in dream. We can rule Earth and heaven there. But there is no substance in that experience.

So we can have a substanceless experience also. We can be very comfortable in a world which has no substantiality behind it and, therefore, our comfort may be an unsubstantial comfort. It is like living in a fairyland where, like Aladdin with his magic lamp, we seem to be rubbing a lamp of the wonder of magic with the power of our empirical intellect and associations, and are glorying in the heaven of this world that we ourselves have created in our own minds. This is real bondage; and freedom from subjection to a compulsion to think in this manner is real freedom.

Great masters and adepts who have plumbed the depths of experience have compared this world to a dream world. It is difficult to believe that this world is a dream because it is substantial, tangible, visible, audible, and we can taste it and experience it in a concrete manner. But we can have a concrete, substantial, solid experience even without a concrete atmosphere being around us. The world of psychological experiences under hypnotic conditions, pressures of strain and mental agony, demonstrate that we are capable of living in a hard reality which has no internal substance.

Thus, freedom which is ultimate, which is called moksha or the liberation of the spirit of man, is considered as the goal of life. How do we know that this is the goal of life? We ourselves can know this. We need not go to a scripture to understand this or to any adept to be taught. Our own internal content will reveal what we are aspiring for.

We are, no doubt, in a miserable world and an unfortunate condition, yet we have a great strength within us. This strength is the power embedded in our mind to comprehend that the world is not final; there is a ‘beyond’ to this world. The finitude of our experiences and the limitations which cramp our movement in any direction point to the presence of an illimitable, boundless possibility beyond ourselves. The asking of man for freedom is actually an asking for infinite possession. It is not the freedom of the servant who serves a master; who too has some sort of freedom to receive his salary every month, a month’s leave once in a year, and a few hours of respite for his lunch or dinner or to have a little rest in his house. This is the freedom of a slave, of a servant.

This is not the freedom that we are expecting in this world. The freedom we want is not only to be totally free from every kind of shackle imposed upon us. We want to be free not merely from the presence of other people around, but even from the presence of anything around us. The very presence of anything outside us is a limitation upon us. There is always a need felt by us to adjust ourselves to the presence of something outside us. Thus, we are not entirely and wholly natural in our thinking, in our speech and in our behaviour when we are in the presence of other people. To some extent, we have to make an adjustment and concession, and live a sort of artificial life in the presence of others. While in the presence of others, we cannot think whatever we want to think, say whatever we want to say and behave in any way we like. This is a limitation.

Beyond this, there is the limitation of space and time which constricts our existence to this little body which is only six foot long and two and a half feet wide, and we cannot go outside this. Such little freedom is given to us. To move within the little ambit of our body is our freedom, and we have no liberty to touch anything outside us. The moment we attempt to interfere with anything that is outside this body, we require a government to control us; and social relationships and rules and regulations of every type begin to be felt as necessities in life on account of the artificiality in which one is compelled to live, in an atmosphere over which man has no control, which does not belong to him, and with which he is not really related.

Hence, while political bondage is bad, social and communal bondage is equally bad, and the compulsions of the instincts and the urges of the body and the mind are also very undesirable, the greatest bondage is the limitation to space and time. It is due to this that we are born and we die. Birth and death are not caused by the presence of other people around us. We are not born and we do not die because of our possession or non-possession of things. The final stroke of a physical annihilation of our personality is not brought about by our connections with our family members or the society of people, but with our connection to space and time.