The Goal and the Way…Intro. by Satprakashananda (77)
The fundamental difference between man and what we call the lower orders of life is not in the physical form but in the psychical funtion. In human life the mind has reached a level at which it can think. Man not only sees, but reads and interprets things. He looks far beyond the senses. His knowledge is not confined within the domain of sense perception. The human mind has the capacity to probe the deepest secrets of nature and unravel the preofound mysteries of life. Not only that, man can also regulate his life by his knowledge. The practical application of man’s knowledge for the advancement of individual and social welfare is a characteristic feature of civilized life.
Much more important than sheer intellect is the moral sense of man. He is not a mere instrument of his instincts, as some psychologists hold. He can discriminate between right and wrong. true and false, noble and ignoble, good and pleasant. The instinctive urges are no doubt strong in man; but guided by reason, he can develop will power to control the natural impulses and pursue his chosen course. He has the choice of decision as well as the choice of action. He can dominate and direct the lower self by the higher self. This self-mastery constitutes the real nature of man. Man’s advancement is proportionate to the development of this virtue.
Sel-assertion and self-aggrandizement are the instinctive urges of animal life. Self-denial and self-sacrifice are the human attributes developed by moral culture. This distinguishes humanity from animality. Indeed, “humanity” is the distinctive mark of the human race as brutality is that of the beasts. In the animal kingdom life grows chiefly through rivalry and hostility in the struggle for existence. Those live who can subdue others. The fittest survive. On the human plane the scene changes. Mankind advances, as we see, through cooperation, self-abnegation, altruism. Man’s worthiness rests on the fulfillment of his duties and obligation. Whenver this truth is forgotten, human society faces dissension and disaster, with attendant misery.
In human human life there is an ideal, a regulative principle, a philosophy. Man’s outlook on life determines his way of life. To man the art of life is more important than mere living. A life devoid of meaning and purpose is regarded as of little value. He who has no aim in life is like a breathing machine in human form. Man alone considers it glorious to sacrifice his life for the sake of the ideal. Such martyrdom immortalizes him. There have been martyrs in religion, in philosophy, in science, in nationalism. We rever them as heroes.
In man self-consciousness is much more developed that in other living beings. He can distinguish the self from the not-self. He draws a distinction between the body and the mind, and knows that he has an outer as well as an inner life. He finds that his inner life is greater, deeper, and more glorious than the outer life. The physical body, however dominant and fascinating, forms but the exterior of his personality. The intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects of life are the expressions of his inner consciousness.
One special privilege of human life is the power of self-expression. It has been rightly observed that nature begets, but man creates. Man not only has the ingenuity to invent but also the creative genius of the artist. He can give aesthetic expression to his ideas, thoughts, feelings, and imagination in varied fine arts, such as architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music, and poetry. These woks of art, more marvelous than the achievements of science, are the cherished treasures of man on earth. How poor mankind would have been without them! The cultural life of man begins with the development of the artistic ability. As long as man is concerned only with the bare necessities of life he cannot develop art. The production of art becomes possible when man emerges from the animal-like struggle for food and learns to idealize life.
However, there are human beings no better than animals. In fact, human brutes are worse than beasts. The practice of such devilry as duplicity, hypocricy, treachery, conspiracy, and tyranny that so often marks man’s dealings with man is unknown to the animal world. The quadrupeds are incapable of such wickedness and meanness. Indeed, the poet has every reason to lament; “What man has made of man.” Nevertheless, in judging man we should take as our examples the true types of humanity and not the degenerate groups of individuals, just as an apple tree is to be judged not by the unripe, rotten, or worm-eaten fruits that the tree may bear but by those that are well-developed and typical. There have been among men such spiritual giants as Krishna, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Christ; philosophers like Kapila, Vyasa, Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Kant, Schopenhauer; poets like Valmiki, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Kalidas, Shakespeare, Goethe, Wordsworth; artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt; scientists like Archimedes, Aryabhatta, Galileo, Newton, Einstein; monarchs like Emperor Asoka, Harun Al Rasid, Alfred the Great, Akbar; seers and saints like Sukadeva, Sankaracarya, Saint Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart, Saint Rabia, Mirabai, and so forth— to mention just a few of the world’s great personages know and unknown to history.
The crowning glory of human life is self-knowledge. Man can know himself as he really is. The body does not constitute his real self, nor the mind, nor the combination of the body and the mind. His real self, the very basis of his ego, is a self-intelligent principle. It is the knower of the body as well as of the mind. The mind cannot be self- intelligent, because the mind is known. There is something beyond that watches the mind. The mind falls into the category of the object. It should not be identified with the subject, the knower. Intelligence is the essence of the knower, and not of the known. The self-intelligent entity behind the mind, which watches all physical and mental events, is the only invariable factor in the human personality. It coordinates all physical and mental processes. It maintains the identity of man despite the incessant changefulness of the body and the mind. Unchanging, it witnesses all changes. Had it changed, it could not be the witness per se. We would have to posit another entity as the witness of this change. The witness cannot participate in the chage it witnesses. The witness must be aloof from what is witnessed. The real witness, the ultimate knower, must therefore be changless.
So the self of man is immutable. Being pure intelligence, it is self-evident. No one doubts his own existence. To him it is an axiomatic truth. “That he is” is an established fact for him. He may doubt or deny the existence of everything else, even of God, but not his own. Even in denying himself he has to affirm himself. Nothing can be affirmed or denied without presupposing the self-intelligent knower. The self must be the first thing real. The existence of nonexistence of everythng else rests on the reality of the self. It is therefore self-existent. It existed before this body originated, it will continue to exist after the body drops and disintegrates.
The self is eternal. Anything that changes is a compound, that is, made up of parts. As the self is changeless, it cannot be composite: it must be simple and formless. Contrary to matter, it is self-shining, self-existent, immutable, free, pure, and blissful. It is the spiritual basis of the phenomenal existence. The body cannot hold it, nor can the mind. It must be one with the Supreme Essence.
Such is the self of man. But through mysterious ignorance he gets identified with the body and the mind and ascribes to himself all that belong to them. Thus the unconditioned spirit becomes subject to to all physical and mental conditions. As soon as man can realize his distinctness from the psychophysical adjuncts and his oneness with the Supreme Essence, he becomes free from all bondages. The attainment of this Freedom is the highest goal of life. One can attain it even while living in the body. It is the ignorance of the true nature of the self which is the prime cause of bondage, and not the body nor the mind.
There have been great seers and saints in different climes and ages who have realized this Freedom and proclaimed it to be the Supreme End of life. So declare certain pronouncements, “I have realized this self-effulgent Supreme Being beyond darknes. By knowing Him alone one overcomes mortality. There is no other way out.” He who knows the Truth, becomes one with the Truth, because the Truth is his very self. You cannot objectify your own Self. You simply recognize the self. Why? Because “That thou art.”
Self-realization and God-realization are not two different experiences. In realizing the self we realize God. In realizing God we realize the self. The self and God are subjective and objective views of the same Reality, which is beyond relativity and is neither the subject nor the object. In the relative plane it is the Eternal Subject, the Soul of all souls. The direct approach to It is, therefore, through the self. This is why we seek God with closed eyes in the inmost depth of our being. In the words of Jesus Christ, “The Kingdom of God comes not with observation; neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.”
The same inner approach was taught by the great German mystic Meister Eckhart, who lived from 1260 to 1328 A.D.
To get at the core of God at His greatest, one must first get into the core of oneself at his least, for no one can know God who has not first known himself. Go to the depth of the soul, the secret place of the Most high, to the roots, to the heights, for all that God can do is focussed there.
The great Chinese sage Lao Tzu, in the sixth century B.C. spoke in a similar strain:
Without going outside one’s door, one understands (all that takes place) under the sky; without looking out from one’s sindow, one sees the Tao of heaven. The farther one goes out (from oneself), the less one knows. Therefore the sages got their knowledge without traveling; gave the (right) names to things without seeing them and accomplished their ends without any purpose of doing so.
Man’s intrinsic divine nature and his relationship with God is the keystone of all theistic faiths. “Religion,” as defined by Vivekananda, “is the manifestation of the Divinity already in man.” In other words, it is the unfoldment of man’s innate perfection. That the human soul is essentially pure and perfect is not only a fact of supraensuous experience but also the basic principle of the process of evolution. If a human being can evolve into such a divine personality as Buddha or Christ, it necessarily follows that Buddhahood of Christhood must be involved in man. If, according to the theory of evolution an amoeba is progressing towards perfection then perfection must be latent in the amoeba.
A tiny seed grows into a giant oak tree because the tree exists in the seed in potential form. The growth of a living organism means the unfoldment of its latent potency. An oak tree never emerges from an apple seed. To hold that man evolves into a godlike being and at the same time deny that Godhood is involved in man is illogical. It is but a one-sided view of the evolutionay process. Evolution presupposes involution. If perfection of Divinty be man’s goal, Divinity must be the origin of man. According to science man is a risen animal; according to religion, man is fallen spirit. The acknowledgment of involution as antecedent to evolution harmonizes the seeming conflict between scientific and religious views.
To evaluate man we should take into account not merely his physical and mental stature but his spiritual nature as well. Those who think the body and the mind to be the principal factors of human personality naturally fail to see any truth in the conception of man’s divine relationship. They argue: “Imagine the immeasurable vastness of the universe as first revealed by Copernicus. Compared to that what is this puny man! Even this terrestrial globe appears to be something like a geometrical point. What relationship can man have with the omnipotent, omniscient Ruler of the universe if any such Being exists? It is an extrme case of human conceit to trace man’s descent from God or to claim relationship with Him.” But, in fact, man is ever united with God in spirit, though he fails to recognize this, being under a spell of amnesia, as it were.
In one of the monthly magazines of America is the following interesting comment on the rude shock that man’s pretensions to divine relationship have received from scientific disovveries:
Three men have reduced us to our proper insignificance and put an end to the primitive dream that we are godlike or that there is any God for us to resemble. They are Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Copernicus began the revelation of the vastness of the universe and the consequent triviality of our poor molecule of a planet. Darwin showed man’s ancestry reaching not up to the stars and their glory, but down to the mud and its fermentation. And Freud pushed our humiliation into the last pit by the knowledge that what we thought was the light of spirit is only the sickly gleams of funguses growing rank in the cellars of physiology.
It is needless to point out that these are only limited and distorted views of the human personality. If the very rudiments of human life be carnal, bestial, unholy, by no possible method of culture, by no alchemy, can they be transmuted into moral and spiritual virtues. But the truth is that there arise among men and women certain individuals who do relize their divine nature and whose life and conduct testify to their inner experience.
The same Supreme One is the indwelling spirit in all living creatures. “I am the Self existing in the hearts of all beings,” says one source. Another philosophy, does not deny the soul, the spititual self, to any sentient being, but acknowledges infinite variations in its manifestation according to the development of each individual mind. In the human life alone the realization of the self becomes possible. It is self-knowledge of God-vision that makes man free.
Devoid of supreme devotion to the Highest, one cannot attain this Freedom by meritorious deed alone. Moral virtues, too, cannot take us beyond the relative existence. An individual may go to higher or lower planes of existence according to merits or demerits predominating in his nature. But he will come back to this human life after the effects of those deeds are exhausted. The human life alone is the sphere of action. Here you can underake fresh actions, good or bad, and also cultivate self-knowledge. It is because of this blessed privilege that human life is considered to be the highest. The human life is short and frail, no doubt; but righty lived it can serve even as the springboard to enter the Life Supreme.
