Tattva

Need of the Hour
Today, as I ponder over the selective killings of Hindus, Jews, and foreigners in Mumbai (mainly Christians) on 26-28 November 2008, I cannot help revisiting Swami Ramakrishna’s message which I quote from the last month’s issue of Tattva:
The greatest contribution of Sri Ramakrishna to the modern world is his message of the harmony of religions. To Sri Ramakrishna all religions are the revelation of God in his diverse aspects to satisfy the manifold demands of human minds. Like different photographs of a building taken from different angles, different religions give us the pictures of one truth from different standpoints. They are not contradictory but complementary.

By no standards can any of the following verses from Quran (and there are dozens more like that) be said to give us a picture of ‘one truth.’
47.Muhammad (Muhammad)

[47:4]   If you encounter (in war) those who disbelieve, you may strike the necks. If you take them as captives you may set them free or ransom them, until the war ends. Had GOD willed, He could have granted you victory, without war.  But He thus tests you by one another. As for those who get killed in the cause of GOD, He will never put their sacrifice to waste. [47:5]   He will guide them, and bless them with contentment. [47:6]   He will admit them into Paradise that He described to them. [47:34]   Those who disbelieve and repel from the path of GOD, then die as disbelievers, GOD will never forgive them.                 50-    (Qaf)                                                                                                                                                 [50:24]   Throw into Gehenna every stubborn disbeliever.

Even our philosopher president Doctor Radhakrishnan proclaimed, “If you believe in absurdities, you commit atrocities”. My personal view is that such verses should be considered for deletion from Quran. It needs to be noted that a Government Minister of Netherlands, Geert Wilders, has said, “Send a signal … to Islamists that the Koran can never, ever be used in our country as an excuse or inspiration for violence.”

The need of the hour is to get the concept of God right. Aldous Huxley, the noted English spiritual writer, said that if we approach God with the preconceived idea that He is exclusively the personal transcendental, all-powerful ruler of the world, it improves our conduct but it does little, however, to alter character and nothing to modify consciousness. Things are a great deal better when the personal God is regarded as also a loving Father. The sincere worship of such a God changes character as well as conduct, and does something to modify consciousness. But the complete transformation of consciousness, which is “enlightenment,” “salvation,” comes only when God is thought of as the Gita affirms Him to be – immanent as well as transcendent, supra personal as well as personal – and when religious practices are adopted to this conception.

Those people who are not too stubborn in their ready-made beliefs, if they submit with docility to what happens to them in the process of worshipping, the God who is immanent and transcendent, personal and more than personal, may reveal Himself to them in his fullness. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is easier for us to reach our goal if we are not handicapped by a set of erroneous or inadequate beliefs about the right way to go there and the nature of what we are looking for. Swami Chinmayanand said it best when he said that the one Reality is the supreme cause from which the entire universe has emerged out.

Life of Swami Chinmayananda
Known as Balakrishnan, he was born at Ernakulam (Kerala) on the 8th of May, 1917. Right from young age he had an inquiring mind which critically questioned everything. He was brilliant in his studies and emerged out of the Lucknow University as a Master of Arts. Like many of the highly learned youths who find themselves in a dilemma as to what to do with life when they come out of the universities, Balakrishnan too was assailed by doubts with conflicting ideologies. But providence guided him properly; he studied the great works of Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo and others, and found his way to his Master, Swami Sivananda.
He was ordained into Sannyasa by Sri Gurudev on 25th February, 1949 to pursue further studies of scriptures under Swami Tapovanamji Maharaj, in Uttarakashi where he stayed with the great Master studying Vedanta Texts as well as Upanishads. Having mastered these texts, Swami Chinmayananda started his own Jnana Yajna Mission and moved from corner to corner of India conducting Gita Yajna classes, Upanishad classes and discourses on the scriptures (I had the privilege of hearing his discourses at Bangalore in 1958), which earned him great reputation as an extraordinary orator and a masterly exponent of India’s culture, its literary heritage and scriptural lore. Swami Chinmayananda also travelled to the West many a time. He established Centres at various places in India and abroad. He is one of the world-figures who have hoisted the flag of India’s spiritual heritage in several countries of the world.
Swami Chinmayananda merged with Supreme Consciousness on August 3, 1993.
Swami Chinmayananda’s Teachings on Supreme Consciousness

The supreme Consciousness, which created the entire universe, sustains it too. Consciousness in every living creature is the vital life in each, and since Consciousness is one everywhere in every creature, it is the sole Reality. It is the substratum at once for the whole universe.
To illustrate that this Reality is one and the same in all forms, Lord Krishna, in the Bhagwat Gita, states that It is the common factor in all forms in the universe: It holds all intact just as the string holds all the pearls in a necklace. The pearls are homogeneous, the thread, which is generally unseen  passes through the central core of every pearl, the large and the small, to hold them in a harmonious ornament of beauty.

The substance of the pearls is totally different from the material of the thread. Similarly, the world is constituted of an infinite variety of names and forms that are held together by the spiritual Reality into a perfect whole. Even within an individual, the body, the mind, and the intellect – each different from the other – can work together to give the melody of life because the same conscious principle works through all those different and varying matter envelopes.

In the following two verses, Lord Krishna explains how the supreme Reality can be thread upon which the pearls of the individual elements of plurality are strung together to become the necklace of the harmonious universe.

I am the sapidity in water; I am the light in the moon and sun; I am the syllable OM in all the Vedas, sound in ether, and virility in men; I am the sweet fragrance in earth and the brilliance in fire, the life in all beings, and I am austerity in the austere.
Ch VII: Verse 8, 9

All the above examples clearly indicate that the divine Self is that which gives each individual phenomenon its own existence. The Lord indicates the same truth through a set of more obvious examples.

Know Me as the eternal seed of all beings; I am the intelligence of the intelligent beings; the splendor of the splendid things am I    Ch VII Verse 10

Here Lord Krishna gives three beautiful examples by which we can get an insight into the relationship between the gross, perceivable matter and the subtle, imperceptible Spirit. The Supreme Reality is the one source from which all names and forms have emerged. The world of forms is inherent in the Self. Just as a giant banyan tree is present in unmanifest form in the banyan seed, the sprouting of the eternal seed constitutes the expression of different personalities.

Wherever one sees something of splendid beauty in any form of creation, he knows that the divine Self is there. In fact all objects have their splendor only because of the life force within them. As a comparison we could say that electricity is the “light in the bulb”, the “heat in the heater”, and the “music in the radio”.

The Self is one in all beings; the same conscious principle illumines the emotions in the bosoms of all living creatures. The same sun illumines all the different types of objects of the world. However, it is true that the quality and nature of the reflecting surface will determine the clarity and intensity of the light reflected. On a dull, rough stone there will be the least amount of light reflected, while on a bright polished facet of a jewel there will be maximum reflection. The sun cannot be accused of having special love for the jewel, or disgust for the rough stone.

The same analogy can be applied to the subjective life. It is only a natural phenomenon that the spiritual strength and beauty get reflected from the golden-hearts of the rare few and not at all from the iron hearts of the many and not because of any preference for any prejudice against anyone.

Kahlil Gibran
Almost identical philosophy is echoed in the poem Perfection by 20th Century Lebanese Poet and Philosopher Kahlil Gibran.

You ask me, my brother, when will man reach perfection.
Hear my answer:
Man approaches perfection when he feels that he is an infinite space
and a sea without a shore,
An everlasting fire, an unquenchable light,
A calm wind or a raging tempest,
A thundering sky or a rainy heaven,
A singing brook or a wailing rivulet,
A tree abloom in Spring, or a naked sapling in Autumn,
A rising mountain or a descending valley,
A fertile plain or a desert.

When a man feels all these, he has already reached halfway to perfection.
To attain his goal he must then perceive
that he is a child dependent upon his mother,
A father responsible for his family,
A youth lost in love,
An ancient wrestling against his past,
A worshipper in his temple,
A criminal in his prison,
A scholar amid his parchments,
An ignorant soul stumbling between the darkness of his night and obscurity of his day,
A nun suffering between the flowers of her faith and the thistles of her loneliness,
A prostitute caught between the fangs of her weakness and the claws of her needs,
A poor man trapped between his bitterness and his submission,
A rich man between his greed and conscience,
A poet between the mist of his twilight and the rays of his dawn.

Who can experience, see, and understand these things can reach perfection and become a shadow of God’s shadow.

Richard Wagner, in his prize essay, “On the Foundation of Morality”, wrote: This doctrine, that plurality is merely illusory, and that in all the individuals of the world – no matter how great their number, as they appear beside each other in space and after each other in time – there is made manifest only one, single, truly existent Being, present and ever the same in all, was known to the world, even ages before Kant. In fact it can be said to have been with us through all time. For, in the first place it is the chief and fundamental teaching of the oldest books in the world, the sacred Vedas, the dogmatic portion – or better, esoteric meaning – of which is preserved for us in the Upanishads, throughout which the same great teaching is to be found tirelessly restated in endless variation on practically every page, as well as allegorized in multitude of similies and figures. That it was basic, also, to the wisdom of Pythagoras, there can be no doubt. The Neoplatonists were literally soaked in it: ‘Through the unity of all’, they wrote, “all souls are one”. Spinoza’s name is identified with it. The same perception is restated in the eclectic philosophy of Schelling (1775-1854).

How wonderful this world would become if such words of Swami Chinmayananda, Aldous Huxley, Khalil Gibran and Richard Wagner are imbibed by all people in the world.

Colonel Mahendra Mathur prematurely retired from the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army in 1975 to build a highway in Tobago. Subsequently he was appointed Director of National Emergency Management Agency of Trinidad and Tobago before retiring in 1998. You can contact him at mmathur@tstt.net.tt>

 Email This Post

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 12:52 am and is filed under Biographies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.