Religion and Social Values

by Swami Krishnananda

At the close of the Sadhana Week, when your mind is gradually gravitating towards your homes, what are the thoughts, the ideas, the conclusions that you would be able to carry with you? What has happened to you after all, having come from a long distance, spending some money from your pocket, taking leave with some difficulty from your offices, staying here for some days, struggling in the small rooms of this Ashram? What has happened to you, finally, is a point on which you may bestow thought.

Most of us are accustomed to activities in the world. Everything that we do is only an activity. Whether we worship God, undertake a journey to Tirupati or visit the holy shrines of Badrinath and Kedarnath, all these programs come under the category of activity. Man knows nothing but activity. If we sit, it is an activity. If we stand, it is an activity. If we do something, it is an activity; if we do not do anything, it is also some sort of a negative activity. If we think of God, it is an activity; if we don’t think of God, it is also an activity.

Now, most of us, human beings as we are and capable of thinking only in human terms, cannot escape the difficulty of assessing everything in terms of human values. When we turn to religion, when we take to spirituality, mostly we have a business attitude. What will it bring to us? Commercial thinking is so impetuous and insatiable that we cannot exercise our mind except in terms of a give-and-take bargain.

Why should we go to God unless we are to gain something by this adventure? So, again, we are commercial. Why should we offer prayers to God, do japa, study scriptures? Why go to Mahatmas? Why do anything if something is not to come to us as a recompense, as a salary for the work we have done? Every action has to produce a result which is pleasant, conducive, beneficial, and to the growth of our satisfaction. If this is not assured, man will not budge an inch.

Are we going to conclude that this is the state of affairs, finally? When we grow old and our legs begin to totter, are we going to dispatch ourselves from this world with this prosaic way of thinking into which we have been shackled right from our childhood? And is our religion, our prayer and our holiness of attitude a commerce, after all? Have we only opened another shop in the name of religion and spirituality, where someone sells spirituality, and another purchases it at some cost of what he calls austerity and discipline? Is our austerity, discipline, and prayerful conduct in religion and spirituality the price we pay for a commodity that we purchase from the shop of spirituality? Or has it any other significance? 

Is it because of the fact that some security will accrue to us that we take to religion? Possibly so. We are insecure in this world. We are afraid of events that may devolve upon us as an avalanche of uncertain and uncomfortable experiences. We feel that God will protect us against all odds of life, bless us with a lengthy duration of existence in this world, and keep our family intact; and we shall be protected from adversities which tell upon our longings—again, longings which are calculated upon our material, social, personal existence. If these are our conclusions finally, it is unfortunate.

God is not a human being with whom we can speak as if we talk to a boss. And with all our maturity of age, white hair, grey beard and learning, a susceptible weakness in us will persist, irrespective of our studies and hearing that God is a father who is in heaven to take care of us, as a parent does, in our material living. This difficulty cannot escape us, whatever be our learning. When we pray to God, we are praying to a God of a creative capability that oversteps the limits of the Earth. There is a peculiar kink in the mind of the human being—a twist, a contortion, due to which the assigning of transcendence to God in our love of religion and practice of spirituality is not easily avoided.

We have heard it said again and again, and it has been dinned into our ears by adepts and scriptures, that God is only a name that we have given to the reality of things. The word ‘God’ unfortunately has an association which is anthropomorphic, though grammatically this need not be the meaning of the term ‘God’. By normal practice, a magnified human form gets associated with the concept of God; and our littleness, our incapacity and our mortality get counterbalanced by this magnitude of the Almighty, Whom we have placed as a counterpart of everything that we lack in this world. God is regarded by us as the place of fulfilment of everything that we lack here, so that perhaps we are running after God for the acquisition of all those things which we have not been given and are denied in this world. If death overtakes us here, we shall not be overtaken by death in God, so this is a joy. “Let me go to God. I shall not die there, because death is a fear. I am poverty-stricken, unwanted, and cowed down by society as a nobody here. This shall not be my fate in God; I shall be hallowed. The flag of my greatness will be hoisted up by the angels in heaven, and all my desires will be fulfilled.” There is again a totally human, physical, social, empirical, anthropomorphic reading of the meaning of God in our religious practice and spiritual outlook.

This is a defect which we are required to get over by our contact with mighty masters. As we are not human beings essentially, it is not necessary for us to transfer human characteristics to God. We have been convinced that we are only human beings and nothing more, nothing less. We are associating ourselves with a false definition. Why go to the extent of the problem of considering oneself as a human being? We cannot even forget that we are men or women. This idea of one’s being a male or a female persists to the grave, and it may perhaps pursue us beyond the grave. We are limited to a concept, which again is limited to a minor concept, which again is limited to further details, so that we are bundles of limitations, involvements, complexities, and a mess of everything.

The decentralisation of our personality, which has been locked up in these three knots of the heart referred to by the great masters as avidya-kama-karma—ignorance, desire and action—is the principle function of religion and spirituality.

It is not possible for us to discuss all these details within a few minutes, or even a few days. Discipline in spirituality and religion is a long-term process under a great master for years together— and, as our scriptures proclaim, sometimes it can extend even up to twelve years. Often it is a lifelong process of discipline because the limitations of our mind, which are physical, biological and social, are capable of entering our very blood and veins with such intensity that a little discourse or a few minutes of japa or instruction from a Guru for a few minutes may not suffice for us to free ourselves from this malady. We are involved in a problem which is not merely skin-deep, but it has gone into our marrow. We are totally a heap of limitations.

Since this is the last day of your participation in this course called Sadhana Week, there is neither the time nor the circumstance to go into a description of all the points involved in your spiritual practice. I shall place before you only a few important items which you can remember with benefit, setting aside the other difficulty that you have always—that you have no time to devote for deeper and higher thinking, as you have pressing calls of the life in which you are placed at present—which is a matter for each one of you to consider independently.

The way in which you pass your day is the way in which you can assess yourself, to some extent. The way in which you conduct yourself with other people, the opinion that you have in regard to the atmosphere around, the thoughts that persist in your mind repeatedly throughout the day, the agonies and the anguishes and the anxieties that keep you alert throughout the day are points to be perpetually recorded in your diary.

There is often an urgency felt by us the moment we wake up in the morning. We wake up with a sudden jerk and a shock of immediacy of action. The business of life is adjourned due to the pressures of bodily fatigue to get hours of sleep. If this pressure of fatigue were not to tell upon us, we would not sleep but would work even in the night. But the body has its own say. It does not permit us to work twenty-four hours of the day. And the moment we are awake, we are pursued forcefully by the ideas of commitments with which we have gone to sleep. We are, as it were, in the midst of an ocean where waves are dashing upon one another and we have no moment’s respite to take a dip or a bath in it. But we have to take a bath in the ocean even when the waves continue to move, because if we wait for the waves to subside, we will never take our bath.

So the pressures of existence, the commitments of our life, are not going to cease, even till death. It is a chronic disease that we have been born into. In the midst of these pressures of life, we have to take a few minutes off in the interest of our own future welfare. Don’t you, when you are in service, try to save a little money for your future, for the days after your retirement? Or do you spend everything that very day and become a pauper, waiting for your next salary due on the first of the month? Every wise person lays aside something for the future, as he knows that a day will come when he needs these amenities.

Don’t you think that this should be the logic that you have to apply to the whole of your life? When you retire from this life, what will sustain you? While you have some sort of an idea as to when you will retire from this official career of yours—after sixty-five, after completing thirty years of service, and so on—there is no such saying in the matter of your retirement from life itself. This is a greater difficulty before you than the difficulty that you have in your official career. You may be given an order of retirement from the Central Authorities without any previous notice.

The wisdom of life, partially at least, consists in preparing oneself for retirement at any moment of time. To be unprepared is not wisdom. You should never say, “I was unprepared. I was taken unawares. I was scared by an event for which I was not ready.” There should be nothing for which you are not ready in this world. Every moment of time you have to be prepared for everything which you can think of or conceive in your mind. If the Earth gives way under your feet, you should not be under the impression that it is something unexpected. If the Sun drops on your head, you should not say “I never thought this could happen.” There is nothing which cannot happen in this world. Such a precarious relationship obtains between ourselves and the natural forces of things.

One of the aspects of wise living is to be ready for action at any moment of time for any eventuality that can overtake you without your knowledge. But how will you be prepared? What are the appurtenances with which you can equip yourself? Nothing will follow you. No pension will be given to you when you retire from life. But the pension that perhaps may follow you is your participation in the natural laws of the universe. The charitable feelings that you have expressed in your life, the goodness that has emanated from you and the unselfishness that has characterised your personality—or, in other words, what you have given— will follow you. What you have taken will not follow you, but will act as a great chain of bondage even in the future life.

It is absolutely essential—very, very essential for every one of us to keep in mind always—that we do not exploit society, exploit the world, exploit anyone, in the sense that we do not enjoy life at the expense of anybody else. In other words, your life should not show a debit side even by one inch of width when the day closes for you. Let alone life closing—even when the day closes, you must be able to retire with a satisfaction, and not with a grief: “After all, I have wasted my day today. I have done nothing.”

A few minutes of qualitative adjustment of your mind with the great reality of things is the asset that will follow you. Can you not find a few minutes when you wake up in the morning? Instead of rushing to your bathroom or to the table for tea, can you not cease from suddenly rising from your bed and opening the door to call out to your servants or engaging yourself in an urgent work? Wake up a few minutes earlier, if possible, and contemplate your position in this life. All that will accrue to you and follow you, all that you can expect in this world is dependent upon the relation that obtains between you and things outside—the people around, and the world in total.

Contemplate for a few minutes on the origin of all things—with which everyone is connected, and you are also connected. Contemplate for a few minutes that this world, this whole life, is like a vast tree, as the Bhagavadgita explains. We are all the leaves, the flowers, the fruits. One leaf does not touch another leaf. Each leaf is independent. One is ‘X’, another is ‘Y’, a third is ‘Z’. What connection have we among ourselves? We work for our own gain, our own welfare, our own good—everything our own, my own, for myself, and nothing else.

But in this tree of life, we are the leaves with the twigs and the flowers and the fruits—unrelated, as it were—yet, we are connected to the twigs and the branches, to the central root of this tree of the universe, which is again based on the seed from which it has sprouted. Contemplate the multitude of things as a widespread ramification of this vast tree of the cosmos of which you are also one. And you are not only a witness of this tree. You are not standing outside the tree and looking at it. You are one of the twigs, one of the leaves, one of the ramifications of this vast tree. When you look at the tree of which you are a part, you cannot see it. You cannot see a thing of which you are a part.

How do you see the world, then? What is it that you are looking at? This is a misconception. That you are able to open your eyes and look at the world as if it is an object of your senses shows the inadequacy of the education you have undergone and the knowledge that you possess. Once again, go deep into your own logical way of thinking. “How would I envisage this world, how would I look at people, how would I speak, how would I think, how would I feel, and how would I act when I am not a witness of this large tree of the universe but am one of these ramifications themselves?” You would find that thinking is not possible. How would a tree think about itself? That would be the way in which you would be thinking about life as a whole. You cannot imagine how a tree would think about itself, because you have always been looking at the tree as if you own it as a property in your garden. You have never had the time to imagine how one can think one’s own self as unrelated, because no such relation is possible, all relations getting involved in the very concept of relation itself. This is the stretch of imagination which you have to extend to yourself for a few minutes. You will find that the mind is thrilled. Your imaginations rise up from the mire in which they are clogged. When you are able to contemplate in this manner, you are in a true state of meditation.