THE MEANDERING FLOW OF LIFE

The key to concentration is purity. Purity conserves the psycho-physical forces that build up concentration and lead to filtration of the nervous system for higher attainments in life and eventually the very conquest of life itself. Purity is, thus, considered a sine qua non for practising spirituality and is stressed in all major religions of the world as cardinal to living the spiritual life.

This is a prime point of difference between science and religion, for while the former does in no way stress on continence as a pre-requisite for the understanding of natural law, the latter holds chastity as fundamental to the spiritual process of investigation into truth. The reason for this is simple. Scientific investigation relies on sensory data analysis and delves into Nature external which may be apprehended with the help of the mind in its relatively grosser element whereas spirituality belongs entirely to the subtler realms of the mind where even access is denied unless the aspirant has the suitable apparatus to reach there, which is the purified mind freed of all material dross, unsullied, holy. The former analyses external Nature with objective tools while the latter probes into mind itself, the world within man, and has no means available to him for his investigation other than the analytical faculty in its reflexive mode. Both, however, require intense concentration of the mental forces, and why, the physical forces as well, for no great discovery is possible without the total elimination of all distraction.

Great scientists are known to have receded into their inner world of scientific contemplation oblivious of surroundings, and this comes from protracted training of the mind punctuated by rigorous abstinence of all carnal cravings or mundane, material pleasures which are the bane of all focused thought on pursuits transcending the ordinary, the routine rigmarole of life. Perhaps, such men of genius are unconscious of the role of prolonged periods of continence observed by them during their hour of absorption in the mysteries of the universe and, hence, some of them do not subscribe to the view that strict continence is a sine qua non for inner illumination in the world of the spirit or for the discovery of natural law. But all must admit after analysis of their life’s experience of prolonged concentration that physical and mental purity do help to focus the forces of the mind for investigative advances into the vast unknown.

These, perhaps, may be scientifically tested by devising suitable sample studies of brain scans of select continent and incontinent people during test periods in select circumstances. Some such research is going on at present in some major US universities. However, the proof of the pudding ever lies in the eating thereof and the best way to go about testing the veracity of the scriptural claims as to preservation of purity being the precondition for focusing the meditative mind is for scientists themselves to observe strict continence and to subjectively experience the whole process and its fruits. Therefore, whatever be the theories attending brahmacharya (continence) in scientific terms, it cannot be gainsaid that it is of singular significance in the successful execution of the business of life, especially, the conducting of the higher pursuits of knowledge and the experience of spirituality.

It stands to reason, therefore, to lay adequate emphasis on this aspect of a child’s training, especially, in his adolescent years when the turbulence of the senses so often sweeps many a youngster off course and maroons him in his desolate isle of ‘I’, a stricken soul tossed about by the cross-currents of his uncontrolled mind, a hapless desolate being who silently suffers the lashing of the billows which buffet him about aimlessly as he struggles to find his moorings in life. Students must be brought up in the care of men with sterling character, teachers possessed of the fire of renunciation, blazing souls full of nobility of bearing, a high morality and virtue that will set up their pupils with an ethical standard of life and a purpose transcending the morass of mundane living. When the mind is soft and pliable, when it is most receptive to influences, when it is as yet unsullied by carnal appetites consummated, it is most meet that the highest idealism be upheld before these fairest flowers of humanity as objectives of life, aspirations seeking fulfilment through tireless pursuit of Truth and a dispassionate desire for discovery of the laws governing the universe and the mind of man. The children are the future and we must set store on them. They are the resource that is most precious and requires careful nurturing for the future well-being of the human species.

Brahmacharya must be the basis of the new education as it conduces to one’s highest well-being. Information-culture may take a back-seat for the while as students are taught the rudiments of concentration before they attempt to master knowledge. The mind mastered, mastery of knowledge will be relatively easy. Thus, the thrust of education must be to build up the student’s power of higher concentration on concepts and ideas, ideals and abstractions, and to build up in the student an integrated personality with a world-vision and an aspiration for the well-being of the whole of humanity, nay, all of sentience so that an enlightened citizenry may, in time to come, inhabit the world and usher in peace and harmony which has ever been the elusive dream of mankind but never been the substance of reality of his terrestrial existence.

The human nervous system is uniquely endowed with the capacity of knowing truth in both its objective and subjective aspects. The human being, apparently, is juxtaposed between the two worlds, the outer and the inner realms of nature. His mind forms the interface of the physical and the spiritual reality, overlapping with both and drawing sustenance from each. Such is the human predicament then, his occupancy of this intermediate zone between spirit and matter where he must be party to the tug of each, his soul the field of tension between contra-disposed forces and his life the battle-field of mighty tendencies seeking expression in reverse modes which the enlightened call evolution. Through it all one thing remains pertinent, concentration. For the domain of human endeavour is of the mind and all his forays into the known and the unknown terrain of universal experience necessitate the focusing of force which in mental terms is concentration.

And what better a way to achieve it than to follow the line of the rishis (seers of Truth) en route to the pinnacle of perfection? The Vedic rishis found out the solution to the riddle of the universe. Abstaining totally from sensory contact, they zeroed in to Truth. These were scientific people who experimented with mental phenomena in much the same way as modern scientists do with physical phenomena. For centuries they carried on their research in the psychological and spiritual domain before they arrived at definite conclusions which they set to enunciating in the form of spiritual formulations. So, the Vedic mantras are not arbitrary assertions of primitive farmers who were gross Nature-worshippers but were enlightened formulations of the spiritual laws governing the universe discovered by ancient seers of Truth who carried out their research into phenomena with the same scientific rigour as their modern counterparts do today and, perhaps, with a far greater logical rigour than the moderns have ever attended their train of thought. These were ancient texts, scientific for certain, but lacking in mathematical exposition owing to the unavailability of such empirical knowledge at the time as well as the difficulty of translation of the spiritual experience, so entirely subjective in nature, to objective terms. Yet, the philosophy that emanated from the lips of these rishis, in its sheer pervasiveness and subtlety baffles the modern mind even as its rational rigour leaves modern European philosophers scurrying for cover when they have the civility to go through these ancient texts in the right spirit with a free and unbiased manner as ought to be the stance of any true man of learning.

And all these were the products of the superior concentration of the ancient Indian sages who led lives of the strictest continence in their bid to unravel the mysteries of Nature. Unbroken, uninterrupted brahmacharya they laid down as the bedrock of education and spirituality and, indeed, chastity as the very life of civilisation. The grand heights to which Indian civilisation rose may be traced to the grand discoveries of the Vedic rishis---and, here for the sake of convenience, I apologetically exclude the Indus Valley Civilisation which, however, was the crowning glory of Indian civilisation in yesteryears.

If India did rise to such supernal heights once, it stands to reason to state that, with advanced knowledge of the modern age, she will rise to greater heights of material and spiritual excellence and set before the world the ideal of the divinity of man and the spiritual integration of the whole cosmos whereby humanity the world over will find its spiritual moorings in this otherwise depraved age of selfishness and chaos when materialism has struck its nadir and man has been reduced to a beast of burden whose value is set in terms of his economic utility and oftentimes as mass garbage to be cast into war and decimated to fulfil the fanciful designs of malicious murderers masquerading as merciful messiahs of men. The scenario is grim today in a world heating up with material and mental pollution from which India alone may save it with her pristine philosophy of the fundamental divinity of all of sentience, a message so full of hope and light that even in the darkness enveloping human affairs this moment, a ray goes out beckoning humankind into the realm of peace and goodwill founded on fraternal feelings and the essential liberty of the Self within.

And this light is the light of India, the light of the Atman (the Self), the light of the Brahman (the Absolute Reality underlying phenomena) that will save mankind from the edge of the abyss where it finds itself right now, for this is the great mission which India has been preserved for through the ages to fulfil whenever the need arises and what greater need there be than the need of the hour now when mankind faces certain extinction from either an environmental disaster or a nuclear holocaust. A whole new philosophy of life must emerge from India, a new way of living, a fresh outlook, an entirely new perspective that will freshen up the withered, worn-out ways of the past and infuse life into the dead mass of things.

The Vedanta has powder enough to blow up the accreted superstitions of the past and replace them with life-giving principles of truth and it must be the religion and philosophy of thinking man in the future if the human species is to survive on planet Earth. All the systems of thought that abound in the world may be harmonised by the universal philosophy of the Vedanta which has plumbed the depths of existence and arrived at the centre of phenomena which transcends it and provides the basis for all its apparent divergences. Thus, fanatical faiths, exclusive and arbitrary in assumption, will find in the Vedanta their rationale and cease to be mutually antithetical. Ideologies founded on the outer personality of man, his gross material form and his economic and political necessities, will discover their basis in the spiritual integration of the Cosmos and understand the divergences in Nature as so many radial routes flowing out from the Mother-heart that binds all, nonetheless, with a common cord and, in the fullness of time, pulls them all in along the selfsame path to the centre whence they had sprung. The trajectory of ideas and principles known, their origin and terminus studied, exclusiveness will die its natural death and true liberalism will reign in human society allowing the harmonious co-existence of all forms of faiths and philosophies suited to different masses of men with divergent cultural affiliations and historical conditioning, separate in structure but integrated in spirit, and thus will come about the golden age of awakened humanity, the highest aspirations of humankind realised.

But such grand transformations are not brought about overnight for the human nervous system is highly conservative and resistant to change. Revolutionary changes in the past have been attended with bloodbath, that is, humanity had to be coerced into accepting new norms and ideals, such is the inertia that afflicts human percolation. Ideas are historically and culturally embedded in the psyche of a people and have to be supplanted slowly with higher ideals through education of children. But children are prone to environmental influences as well and doctrinaire creeds implanted in them by over-zealous clerics tend to undermine the enlightenment otherwise fostered in them by secular learning. Moreover, in theocratic countries and in the so-called Bible Belt of even a major democracy like the United States of America, the education system itself is vitiated by religious leanings of a vicious kind where sectarian, violent and irrational ideas, archaic and arbitrary, are taught to children in the name of truth and science, and the entire process of progress in intellectual enlightenment derailed.

All social changes have to be brought about within the parameters of existing social conditions and, until times are propitious when men become receptive to revolutionary transformations, all change must be slow and gradual along evolutionary channels, both biological and sociological. The right kind of education may hasten this process but, as has been mentioned above, such dissemination of knowledge is subject to social, cultural and religious constraints and a free and rational training of children the world over is still a far cry. Patience is now the only way out and this period of wait may best be utilised in laying the foundations for future development, creating public awareness about the pitfalls of blind and fanatical faith based on implicit obedience to authority, vicious and noxious, and allowing time for the age-old superstitions to run out, for attempts at revolutionary change, unsuited to mass psychology, is apt to be counter-productive and prone to perpetuating the myths that so beset human progress. Rather, a considerate approach to the entire phenomenon of mass ignorance about the fundamental divinity of man as a spiritual and, why? a scientific truth as well, for it is based on extensive research, experience and verification by countless seers of Truth, is by no means a conciliatory approach that demands condemnation by the sceptical radicals for, after all, the goal is the good of humankind and that leaves no room for the harbouring of any animosity towards any existing practice or any section of human society whatsoever, and all social change is a function of time. Social reformers must have absolute reverence for the human being as they go about preaching the gospel of truth and enlightenment in the name of modern science and the highest principles of spirituality, and in no way must they hurt the fundamental dignity of man or injure the feelings of the multitude who they wish to reform. Only on the basis of mutual reverence is great work possible and what greater work awaits man than his transformation from an external God-centric culture to an internal Man-centric one where the word ‘Man’ has a higher connotation than is generally understood? It is the innermost being within man, his spirit, free and immortal, unborn, undying, the omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent reality pervading and transcending the cosmos, in which universes arise, subsist and merge ad infinitum.

These are facile statements, perhaps, to the sceptics but experiential realities for the sages of India. Evolution is their prescription and never barbaric revolution and in this they are not being revisionists but, with unerring vision, are pointing out the right path for humanity on the march towards final fulfilment. Instead of a series of forward and backward movements that will leave mankind more or less stranded where it is, the rishis have advocated the steady advance towards the ideal of self-realisation which in Vedantic terms means the realisation of the Self, the inner essence of man and of the universe and whatever phenomenal realities there be. But the fundamental problem lies not in the analysis of things or providing theoretical solutions to the problems but in the execution of the change required in human society to overcome the maladies that afflict it. And this is a deeper psychological issue that needs addressing than has hitherto been recognised and needs a deeper understanding of the collective mind of mankind to be able to adopt the corrective measures that will set the balance straight. And herein we arrive at the subject of concentration as the remedy to the ills of the world.

                                                                                                                   

All problems arise from the apparent fracturing of consciousness resulting in the perception of the mind with its analytic and synthetic modes. Consciousness is absolute and never disintegrates really but relativity arising from cosmic nescience (Maya) makes it appear as having been transformed from its transcendental unitary state to its phenomenal pluralistic state. The mind, then, is the derivative of consciousness and operates along a graded plane from the lowest tamas (inertial state) to the highest sattva (tranquil state) via the intermediary rajas (active state), the trinity of gunas (qualities/states/energy levels) being permutated and combined in various proportions to produce an infinite variety of moods and vibrational phases. Universal consciousness, transcendental, integrated and unvibrating, thus, apparently transforms into the myriad-faceted cosmic mind whose individual facets are our minds, fragile and changeable, fragmenting and coalescing, never at rest, in perpetual motion. The individual mind is a portion of the universal mind and gains cognition of itself by means of the ego which itself is a derivation of the transcendental Self. This percolation of the Absolute Self into the realm of relativity is inexplicable for the Self is immovable, immutable and transcendental, bearing no contact point with hypothetical phenomena which is based on an endless series of suppositions while the Self reigns in Reality. Thus, the term ‘Maya’, to denote this contradiction in terms which phenomenal existence is, a term, much misinterpreted through linguistic aberration that inevitably affects the usage of terms over the course of centuries and has thus got mixed up with illusion, magic and mystery when all that it truly is, is a statement of phenomenal fact as it appears to be when viewed through the prism of the mind and its allies, the senses. Brahman lies beyond the purview of the mind and the senses, the transcendent Reality without attributes or form but forming the existential base of all of phenomena, the consciousness-basis of all thought and being the fount of all bliss, a repulsive field of Pure Spirit, free of all contact with material element or aggregation, surpassing space, transcending time and eluding causality or chance, the spiritual essence of life and non-life and all that lies betwixt.

Now, problems arise with their solutions embedded in them. If our fractured vision causes problematic perception of things, then integrated vision will resolve such flawed perception. And, herein lies the power of concentration to set things right. When the rays of the mind are focused, they illumine. It is a complex mechanism, for the mind, as such being material, is inert. It is the Self that truly illumines, it being ever the luminous base of all of phenomena, dark and desolate as it is in this dreary universe bereft of light or understanding, a solitary case unsolved, a puzzle-perplex that knows no meaning till effulgence is, and then, the panoramic existence stands revealed in its essence as the mirage of Maya melts. Man is released from bondage unto the bliss of perennial freedom, a freedom that had never been lost save in this cosmic delusion that had inexplicably arisen from nothingness and now has dissolved into its mysterious source.

The river meanders endlessly enroute to the sea whence it rises again to shower as rain and thus, the saga of life goes on from aeon to aeon, fulfilling the text of the divine drama enacted. As page after page of this play unfolds, one fondly hopes that humankind will awake to its truest dreams of a fulfilling civilization that will hasten human evolution and reduce human misery heaped on man by man’s own arrogance, ignorance and a stupendous theological certitude based on archaic articulations of faith unfounded in reason or realization by protagonists of a dubiously partisan God dispensing grace on individuals capriciously to conduct the business of the Spirit in a violent and malevolent manner that betrays a fundamental paucity of human culture in these sacrosanct votaries of truth. But their day is done as the masses awake to the music of the divine within and the changing rhythms of life are evident everywhere as rejection of popular myths that had seemingly settled into inertial stability. What is now needed is to fill up the void created by this mass rejection of unreason and untruth masquerading as age-old wisdom with the pristine philosophy of the Upanishads which in trumpet voice bespeaks the glory of man and his imperishable Self, a system of thought uniquely universal and addressing the whole of humanity and beyond in the most catholic terms, a precursor to all liberal and modern humanistic and spiritual systems of thought, ever inclusive and never exclusive, perhaps the faith of the future man. These are dangerous times when major transitions in culture are taking place, when shifts in the sand-dunes of civilization are sending shock-waves through the desert of dead habit crystallized as coerced culture, when liberal ideas and ideologies are threatening to sweep away all that is pernicious and peremptory and when the stifled conscience of the common man is finally seeking liberation in its first articulation and activation of the Rights of Man in the myriad political adjustments that have donned human history in the past two centuries. Democracy and socialism, though apparently contra-disposed in terms of ideology, functioning and objectives, are, nonetheless, the manifestations of the revolt of the human spirit against subjection to feudal power or the power of capital. While capitalistic democracy allows unmitigated exploitation of the masses by the factory-owners with full sanction by a complicit government that owes its origin and life to the people, socialism plays into the hands of an oligarchy and, more often not, a malevolent dictator who turns the tide of the people’s revolution into a personal absolutism that represses the soul of man.

Thus, all movements of the freeing spirit of man are tortuous and fraught with terrible dangers that threaten to carry civilization off-course as has so often been its fate in the past. The onward march of man continues despite these terrible travails as a new civilization is being born out of the womb of the past, a new culture emerging, that of the awakened man in his pristine glory as the resplendent Self, a new wave of light spreading with the common man as its prophet and God. May we all give in our ploughshare in this grand endeavour and usher in the future man who needs no prophet to obey nor master to serve, who is a god unto himself, is his own highest ideal and his own final fulfilment!