TRUTH TOTAL AND TRUTH PARTIAL

TRUTH TOTAL AND TRUTH PARTIAL 

🕉 The total truth, if even accessible to all, will not be of interest to all, for limited is the need of an individual or even of a society or nation or of humanity as a whole at a given point of time to absorb the entire truth, such absorption and assimilation being dictated by the perceived requirements of evolution at that point of time, and, hence, truth in only segmented and fractured form becomes pertinent to its receiver.

To cite an instance that will make this clear. A large mansion has all its electrical circuits and its furniture and fittings in all its hundreds of rooms ready. But few are the occupants and limited their requirements. Hence, we see only a few of the rooms lit up and used while the rest of the mansion lies unused and in darkness. In the deep dark night of the new moon, from a distance it seems that it is small building but in reality it is a huge mansion. Truth in totality corresponds to the whole mansion while truth in temporary perspective is the lit up little building that is but a fraction of the entire mansion. This illustration has been inspired by a like citing by Romain Rolland in his classic work on Ramakrishna-Vivekananda.

Another illustration may be presented here from Swamiji's Complete Works but in an altered perspective. A long iron chain with millions of links lies in the dark. A person focuses a torch light on a few links which become visible while the links behind and the links ahead remain invisible. If the total truth corresponds to the entire chain, then the few visible links correspond to the perceived truth of the hour.

Thus, however much one may try to bring people's attention to the vast spectra of truth, the result will be a failure. Observers will prefer to view only a limited section of truth from their vantage point of perception  and from the requirements of the hour which they feel will facilitate their well-being, will cause them comfort and help them evolve, even if such responses are made unconsciously as per subliminal evolutionary drives. The effort to bring home truth in all its vastness to all will inevitably prove a failure which is what as a psychological problem of humanity faced Swami Vivekananda when he was on the threshold of his ministerial life. He brooded on this problem of effective communication -- how to drive home his message to man in as simple a language as possible which even a child could understand, and yet with all the divine depths of the imparted truths unimpaired by such linguistic simplicity such that even a university professor could find food for thought therein. Vivekananda's works, thus, on casual perusal sometimes seem over-simplistic but they carry hidden depths unseen.

However, the central point remains. Truth in all its totality is not apprehended by people whose requirements are generally limited. Hence, truth goes abegging in its vast significance and its lower derivatives find currency in popular conception. Which is why even in the world of religion the Semitic proselytising faiths, Christianity and Islam, which have hollow philosophical basis but propagate absolutist rewards and punishments post mortem in heaven and hell, find popular acceptance and the highly philosophical religion of the Vedas, the Sanatan Dharma, finds fewer followers. And even among the Hindus, what is actually followed by way of Hinduism are popular derivatives of the pristine philosophy of the Vedas and not its original essence. There the thesis of truth total and truth partial is proved again.

Swamiji is considered by Hindus as the Prophet of the Age. In his ministerial life he faced this predicament as to how he could present the whole system and spiritual tradition of the Hindus -- diverse as its multitudinous sects are -- before the West in a synthetic form where the local would meet the universal and the partial shoot out of the total while remaining integrated in its vast body. Facing the Chicago audience at the World Parliament of Religions on 19 September, 1893, Swami Vivekananda read out his 'Paper on Hinduism' where he outlined these various and varying features of all the dharma traditions of India as branches of the same tree of the Sanatan Dharma whose roots were the Upanishads. This was a monumental intellectual achievement by this young sage of thirty years which discovered Hinduism before the wide world and set up all its diverse elements on the firm foundation of the Upanishads. 

But has Swamiji been accepted in essence and in wholeness by any? Has for that matter any seminal sage through the ages been quite comprehended in whole and his mission found fulfilment as he had envisaged its ideal fruition to have been? Does practice ever fulfil precept, precept ever encompass the wholeness of vision? Is not the very concrete nature of external structure antithetical to the fullest fulfilment of fluid philosophy, and philosophy itself a poor rationalisation of the divine realisation attained within? There lies the essential problem of a layered distribution of truth in its external expression, the progressive outwardness diminishing in reverse order the wholeness and essence of truth. This is a structural problem that may never be overcome, the conception of the infinite truth by the finite senses, the finite nervous system and the finite mind. Thus, the Vedanta exhorts us to transcend the limitations of the senses to apprehend the truth divine in its bare reduced essence. But the multifarious world of phenomena will even then be forever beyond the conception of the finite mind, even that of the Self-realised sage, in all its complexity of detail. At best the sage may apprehend its essence and its bare outline but never the meat of matter in all its cellular, atomic, particulate detail. The Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg sort of corroborates Shankara's epic statement 'Anirvachaniya Maya'. 🕉 

Written by Sugata Bose