Life -
A Process and Activity
Life – A Process and Activity (Part 1)
The psychology of the Vedanta
is a highly scientific methodology evolved out of the fundamental concept that
the supreme reality is Absolute Consciousness and anything that may seem to be
opposed to it can only be a phase of itself. The fivefold base of objective
perception, viz., sound, touch, form, taste and smell, is found to be
inseparable from the reciprocally related to the senses of knowledge working
under the direction of the mind. The theory of the Vedanta is that the mind,
constituting mainly the functions of understanding, thinking, feeling,
remembering and willing, is the resultant of the collective totality of the
purified forms of the essences of the five substrata of sensations enumerated
above. There is the presupposition of the greater truth that at the background
of the mind, the senses and their objects, there is the Absolute itself as
their very reality. The Vedanta psychology is a direct consequence of its basic
metaphysics which lays down that existence is non dual. It is on this
foundation of the ultimate inseparability of the knower and the known that we
have to envisage the law governing the universe and regulating individual and
social life.
The highest law is accordingly
conceived as Dharma based on Rita and Satya. Rita and Satya are two terms that
occur originally in the Vedas, signifying the eternal cosmic order and the same
as manifest in the diversified world. Dharma is nothing but one's duty as an
individual stationed in the cosmos, as its integral part. This at once explains
by implication one's duty towards family, society, the nation and the world at
large. Material welfare, the enjoyment of desires and relations to society are
given due consideration and are equally regulated by Dharma which, at the same
time, works with Moksha or the ultimate realisation of the infinite as its aim.
Dharma is the ethical value, Artha the material and the economic value, Kama
the vital value and Moksha the infinite value of life. As the infinite includes
all the finites, the aspiration for Moksha naturally implies the fulfilment of
the ends of all other desires and the execution of all other duties in life.
This sublime aspiration arises in the mind when it has an inherent feeling of
'enough' with the things of the world. This is the 'divine discontent' which
acts as a forerunner of the struggle of the spirit to grasp and know itself in
the Absolute. It is here that true knowledge dawns.
Ordinary psychological
experience is usually marked off from a life of spiritual insight. The path of
the pleasant is differentiated from the way of the good. What the senses report
to us need not necessarily be the true or the good. Often they give us false
intimations and involve us in tantalizing mirages which recede from us as we
try to approach them. It is because of this unfortunate predicament that we go
on experimenting with one object after another, seeking final satisfaction, but
do not find it anywhere. This fruitless pursuit continues until thinking of
benefit in terms of separateness discovers its own futility and gives way to a
search for peace in terms of more and more integrated realms of being. The
individual expands to the family, the family to the community, the community to
a wider society or the nation, the nation to the whole world, and the world to
the cosmos, wherein the process of expansion finds its limit and begins to turn
inward into the centre of experience which, in the end, is recognized to be
identical with the Supreme Being.
As we have already noticed,
nothing in this world can be considered to be merely a means to the
satisfaction of another, for in this mutually determined whole there are only
ends, not means. The Bhagavadgita states that all pleasures that are born of
the contact of the mind and the senses with the external are a womb of pain,
for outward contact is not the way of contacting reality. The dissatisfying
consequence of sense gratifications, the fear that usually attend upon them,
the chances of getting addicted to the habits and impressions produced by such
pleasures, and the inevitability of the rise of further desires and greater
distractions, in addition to the wearing out of the senses, should rouse in the
man of discrimination a consciousness of the higher life.
Excerpts from:
Life – A
Process and Activity by Sri Swami Krishnananda
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