Religion and Social Values

by Swami Krishnananda

Spiritual life is a movement in the direction of God, which means a movement in every direction. It is not moving in any particular direction, such as east or west, because God’s comprehensiveness is a directionless existence. Therefore, in our search for God, we are searching for a way in all the directions of the world.

The spiritual movement towards God is not a linear movement. It is a multi-faced approach in respect of all things which may be considered as the faces of God. This is one aspect of spiritual life. The other aspect is that the movement towards God is, in some sense, like going from one country to another country.

What do we have to do when we leave one country and go to another country? We have to apply for a passport. But the passport will not be issued so easily, because our obligations to our country have to be cleared before the Passport Officer concedes to our request. He will ask us to produce the Tax Clearance Certificate, because the country would not wish that we skip over our dues to it in our aspiration to move to another country. We would also make some provisions and arrangements for our family and see that everything is stable in the environment of our house before we take a passport or a visa to the other country. Sometimes the Passport Officers even insist on what is called a Police Clearance; and any other dues which we owe to our nation are cleared first before we are free to go.

In a manifold manner are we connected to this country of ours; and anyone is so connected to his or her own country. At a moment’s thought we will not be able to make a list of all our relationships to our country, to our society. They will all come up one by one, as the occasion arises. Similarly, we cannot know how many desires we have in our mind. At the present moment here, seated in a hall, it may look like we have no desires at all; we are completely free. But this is not a fact, because this is not the occasion for the desires to manifest themselves. Just as a seed sprouts only under suitable conditions—when the earth is soft, and the rain falls, and the climate is favourable—in the same way desires, which are equally intelligent, will not manifest themselves when they know that their asking will not receive a response.

Likewise is our understanding of our relationships to things. Sometimes we may believe that we are totally free. People sometimes say, “I have no encumbrances. I am collecting my pension. I am a retired man, and I have no obligations.” This is a straightforward statement of an intelligible mind, because a clear insight has not been gained into the inward subconscious or even unconscious tentacles with which we are connected with the nether regions—not only of our psychic world, but also of the social and physical world outside.

The ancient masters, in India especially, have conducted a threadbare analysis of the conditions to be fulfilled by a seeker of Truth. It is not a sudden wrenching of ourselves from relations when we move towards God; rather, it is a fulfilment of relations. The idea of abandonment, which many a time obsesses our mind, is a partial truth of the matter. Often there is a dual urge that operates in us when we are fired up with a spirit of renunciation. A feeling of the reality of the sorrows and sufferings of life and a simultaneous feeling of the need to free ourselves from these sorrows and sufferings is a mistake we commit with these peculiar attitudes of ours. If the sorrows and sufferings are unreal and they have no substance—they are really not there—our anxiety to free ourselves from them is un-understandable. But if they are really there as meaningful connections which we have established with our atmosphere, a severing of our connections with them is, again, very unthinkable. The spirit of vairagya is a difficult atmosphere of the human psyche.

We have been told, right from our childhood, that the love of God is in some measure a dislike for the world. Though the word ‘dislike’ has a connotation of its own and people interpret the spirit of vairagya in a nobler environment, the dislike aspect does not completely leave us. Religious instruction, at least to the extent we have been able to understand it, has been a double-edged sword which operates in two ways: in the direction of the world, from which we have to free ourselves, and in the direction of God, in relation to which we have to connect ourselves.

It was mentioned earlier that a thread in a cloth is connected to the cloth in a very peculiar manner. This analogy was brought forth to explain our relationship to things. When a thread wishes to free itself from the cloth into which it has been woven, it is actually attempting a freedom from an all-round relationship that it has established with the entire fabric. Our connection to the world cannot be fully explained by this analogy. We are not merely like a thread in a cloth, because the connection of the thread to the cloth is purely mechanical; there is no living relationship of one thread with another thread. But there is a very forceful, soulful and living connection of ourselves to every soul of this cosmos. 

So when we free ourselves from the world in our attempt at the practice of renunciation, or vairagya, for the purpose of God-realisation, we are wrenching ourselves from the whole body of relations, which are a living connection wholly spread out through space and time, and we are not moving to God like a single individual. Many times we may be forced into the feeling that we individually move towards God, leaving all people here with whom we no longer have any connection: neither are we connected to our family, nor to the world; we are related to God in the heavens, so we move like a rocket—independently, individually, unrelated in any way to anyone and anything in the world at any time.

This idea is not true. Such a movement to God is not possible, because the world is woven into our personality and, vice versa, we are woven into the very structure of the world. When we lift ourselves from this world, the whole world will come with us, so that there is no such thing as individual salvation. This is a statement which has to be understood in its proper meaning. Neither is there anything called social salvation of all people together, nor is there anything called individual salvation. What we call moksha, or liberation, is neither social nor individual. It is a mystery by itself. Man is not given to understanding what it means.

Another analogy may give you a little insight into this difficulty. When you wake up from dream, what is it that comes with you into waking life? “I have woken up from dream. I have come out of the world of dream into waking existence.” What about your friends and relations, and the world, and your office work, and all your obligations and commitments in the dream world? You have brought them all together with you. It is not that you have left your office and your friends in the dream world and have individually come up to the waking life. You do not say, “My friends are still there inside, and I have got uncompleted and unattended work in the dream world.” When you have woken, the whole dream has woken. All your relationships, likes and dislikes, obligations, duties to be discharged, debts payable—all things are together with you, as your legs go wherever you go. You cannot leave your legs behind and go to some other place.

This illustration of the total world moving with you when you wake up from dream into this present consciousness will, to some extent, explain how you move towards God. It is not one Mr. so and so moving to God. Such a thing does not exist, because your relations are not artificial relations, but vital connections. Outwardly, empirically, from the spatio-temporal point of view, your relationships may look artificial, a make-believe. Therefore, it is called maya. But inwardly you are connected to things in a more significant manner.

There is a dual relationship of ours, again, with the world around us—a tentative relationship and a real relationship. Teachers of the art of yoga and adepts in spiritual life tell us that our relationship to things is twofold. A father has a relationship to his son, a husband has a relationship to his wife, etc. This is a very difficult thing to understand. A son is an independent individual by himself, yet he appears to be somehow connected to his father, and the father seems to be connected to his son by a bond of emotion and feeling. The father sees in the son something which he cannot see in other people—though other people are, for all practical purposes, physically speaking, exactly like his son. The wife cannot see in other people in the world what she can see in her own husband, though her husband is not in any way superior or inferior, or different in any manner from other people in the world.

Here we have a double relationship with things. In Sanskrit, this is called the distinction drawn between Jiva Srishti and Ishvara Srishti. The son as such or the father as such is Ishvara Srishti, God’s creation. The son has not created the father, and the individuality of the son is a status by itself which cannot be absorbed into the individuality of the father. The son is not a satellite of the father. He has an independent existence of his own. Yet there is a peculiar emotional bondage. This feeling in respect of things with which we seem to be emotionally connected or instinctively related is called Jiva Srishti, or the individual’s reaction to the structure of things in their social, instinctive connections.

But things are also as they are. Trees are trees, wherever we go. Wherever we go, whether to Kashmir or the United States, we see trees, but a tree in our own garden is different from a tree in the wilderness. A plant that we have tended with affection is different from the wild growth in the forest. Our relationship, too, is different. This relationship of ours to our own tree, our own plant, our own garden and our own property is Jiva Srishti—an individual, psychological connection—which can be regarded as an artificial connection because it will not stand always. When our mind undergoes a transformation, our feeling in respect of things will also change. But the plant is a plant, the tree is a tree, even if we have no connection with it. That is Ishvara Srishti.

God has created the world, and the world is called the kingdom of ends. A kingdom of ends is a kingdom of independent status maintained by each individual, each atom, each molecule in the world. Everyone is independent. Nobody is a servant of another. There is no subservience of any particular thing to any other thing in the world. Nobody can be exploited by another, because one does not belong to another as a property. So each one is a status by himself, herself, itself. This is the kingdom of ends. Each is a self by itself. Even an ant is a self by itself. An atom is a self by itself. It works as if it is an independent thing. A solar system is an independent structure. You are an independent structure. We assert ourselves, and we do not wish to abolish our individuality or our personality in the interest of another—because a self cannot become a not-self. 

This is the truth of things. That we really do not belong to another and anything cannot belong to us is the truth of the matter. But we somehow appear to be related to another, and things are possessed by us and connected with us in an artificial arrangement in society, emotionally required and instinctively demanded. This is the distinction that obtains between Ishvara Srishti and Jiva Srishti—God’s creation, or metaphysical existence, and psychological relation.

We have to understand both these things correctly in our approach to God—and, therefore, God’s being escapes the grasp of our understanding. Inasmuch as it eludes our grasp, we find it difficult to tread the spiritual path. We have often been very emotional, over-enthusiastic, fired up by instincts and sentiments; and often we are also unconsciously impelled to shirk our duties in the garb of a renunciation to attachments to the world, because renunciation is always applauded and attachment is condemned. So it is very easy for people to go with the garb of renunciation, though secretly it is a shirking of duty and a feeling of irresponsibility in regard to all those things which give pain in this world. Hence, our fear of pain may look like the spirit of renunciation.

Here we have to be judges of our own selves. The spirit of renunciation is not the spirit of the fear of sorrow. We do not renounce the world because it is giving sorrow and pain to us. That is not the reason. The reason is that we have fulfilled—not merely cut off—our connections with the world.

Spiritual life is a growth of our spiritual personality, and not an amputation of our spiritual limbs. And so, renunciation is not a cutting off of certain limbs of our psychic world, but a complete healthy growth of our connections—which have to be transmuted from the form which they have taken as Jiva Srishti into Ishvara Srishti. We have to be able to look at things as God sees, instead of as a father sees, mother sees, son sees, daughter sees, husband sees, or wife sees.

How would God see? You have not seen God, and you cannot even imagine how He could see things. But by an inference and a logical deduction of consequences which follow from a dispassionate study of things, you can place yourself in the context of an impartial visualisation of things. The vision of God, or God’s vision of things, is a totally dispassionate and impartial universal outlook where one thing does not hang on another thing, one thing does not depend on another thing, and one thing does not belong to another thing. Such a state of affairs is difficult to conceive for ordinary people. Therefore, spiritual life is so hard.