From "The Tree of Life" by Swami Krishnananda
The world experience is knowledge and action combined.
Our needs are endless and as vast as the expansion of the tree of life. Every
leaf of the tree has the power of the whole tree within itself. If we touch any
cell of any leaf in the tree, we have touched the whole tree. The sensation
will be carried through the entire manifestation of the tree, up to the very
root.
So every one of us is a cosmic atom, and every
thought, every idea and every impulse that arises in our mind has the power of
the ocean of the Supreme Being, whose will works as the seed of the
manifestation of this tree of life. While men of ignorance go to darkness, men
of knowledge go to greater darkness, says the Isavasya Upanishad. It is because
the knowledge that we have in this world is an expression worse than the
ignorance of reality.
The avarana, also known as ignorance, is a screen over the
reality which keeps us out of touch with it. We are not only screened away from
what is there but are presented with what is not there. Not only are we
ignorant of the presence of God, but we are conscious of the presence of a
world outside, so we are deceived in two ways.
In the totality of experience called the tree of life.
We observe that the sap of the tree of life grows in the form of the tree, and
the seed will not be content to remain as a seed. The baby grows into the
adult, etc. Why should there be growth and evolution and movement in any
direction? It is the intention of the Original Will to find itself as the one
in the many. The oneness is present, and the manyness is also there.
So is this variety of life. The division and the
difference, the gulf and the variety in the form of experience of objects, do
not deter us from asking for a unity behind them. We are urged towards working
for commonness of purpose.
The knowledge of this tree is supposed to be true
knowledge: yas taṁ veda sa vedavit (Gita 15.1).
If you know the whole of this tree, you are said to have true knowledge. But we
do not have knowledge of the whole of this tree. We see only one leaf or half a
leaf, just as we look at some object or a group of objects in front of us.
God is wholly present, not only partially, in spite of
the fact that we are partial expressions. We cannot understand how the
wholeness of the whole can be in a part. The whole of us is present in every
cell of our body, though biologically, physically,
physiologically, each cell is only a part of the whole of the body. So is the
completeness of perfection present in the partial limitedness of forms. That is
why we are hoping for God-realisation as a possibility, a practicability and a
surety.
This tree of life is, therefore, a beautiful analogy.
But the Bhagavadgita gives us a caution at the end of this analogy that we
should not be busy eating the fruits of this tree. It is said that in this vast
tree two birds are perched, perhaps on different branches. One bird is enjoying
the beautiful berries, the fruits of this forbidden tree, and is sorrow-ridden,
while the other bird is merely looking at the beauties of the various fruits of
this tree and eating not. The mantra of the Veda says the blessedness of this
indulgent fruit-eating bird lies in its turning its attention towards the other
bird—merely looking at it, gazing at the presence of the bird which eats not,
participates not, does nothing whatsoever, but merely is. It is just as, to
give another analogy, the success, greatness and power of Arjuna lay merely in
being conscious that Krishna was seated there in the chariot.
The whole secret of the success in life seems to be in
the knowledge of the presence of something which is behind the varieties of the
world experience, and not in the foolhardy pursuit of our intention to eat the
fruits of the tree of life.
Ishwara and jiva, God and the individual, are
both seated on the same tree. This tree is this body, our family, our
community, our nation; this tree is the whole mankind, the whole universe. The
whole is present everywhere in every degree, only in different degrees of
expression, so that the whole of God is present in us; but it is only in one
degree, which is not sufficient or adequate.
The search for wholeness, which can be equated with
the search for happiness, is manifest in our lives as a search for an external
object. The tree moves up in the direction of the sun in the high sky for this
purpose alone. It seeks completeness of its life and imagines that this
completeness can be experienced only by manifesting itself through an outward
ramification in space and time.
Any kind of completeness of experience is the same as
happiness. When we search for objects in this world, we are trying to search
for a type of conscious experience which will introduce into ourselves a
wholeness of being. Physical objects such as houses and land may keep us
restless and unhappy because they have not become part of ourselves. When we
become one hundred percent, we become happy. If there is even one percent
outside us as a visible or conceptual object, we are in a state of unhappiness.
Now, this wholeness or hundred percent of being is a state of mind. It is an
awareness, it is a thought, it is a consciousness. We must be convinced in our
consciousness that we have obtained a hundred percent of all the values of
life. A leaf in a tree should be aware that it is a part of the whole tree, and
the whole tree is in it. A finger of the body is healthy and seems to be
contented because the whole of the body is associated with it and it has a
subtle experience within itself of its being sustained by the whole body and of
its being a vital, inseparable part of the whole body.
So when we are told that we have to be aware of the
whole tree of life in order to be perfect in our lives, we are asked to go into
the nature of the higher knowledge in which the tree of life is rooted. In the
Upanishad especially, we are told that we should have the knowledge of the
whole tree. The knowledge of this tree is liberation. But the Bhagavadgita says
something quite different. Our salvation lies in our ability to cut at the very
root of this tree by the axe of detachment: asaṅgaśastreṇa
dṛḍhena chittvā (Gita 15.3). Both these terms of advice have a meaning
in themselves.
As I endeavoured to point out, this tree of life has a
twofold feature, namely, rootedness in the Absolute and manifestation in space
and time. The aspect of its rootedness in God is what requires us to know the
whole of this tree, and the aspect of its expression in space and time is that
which is to be cut by the axe of detachment. The knowledge of this tree is our
source attachment to God, and our detachment from the externalised form of this
tree consists in our withdrawal of our external consciousness and the centring
of it in our universality of being.
Continue reading:
The search
for wholeness by Swami Krishnananda
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