Nitya Chaitanya Yati - Wit and Wisdom

Wit and Wisdom

Realization comes not by seeing everything as unreal but by making every moment real enough to love and adore it.

Science is to help us avoid the folly of putting our trust in nonsense.

If there is no desire, there is no life, no manifestation, no world.

If you are not affected by what you see, what you touch, what you feel, what you notice, what is the difference between you and a stone?

You don’t have to think of a Supreme God sitting somewhere in a far-off place and of one day reaching him so that bhakti can begin. No, bhakti is operating all the time. The very person next to you now is a symbol of the Unknown whom you are seeking. If you can see in this person the manifestations of truth, the manifestations of beauty, the manifestations of goodness—to that extent you are moving towards fulfillment. Your realization is at hand, not as a distant promise but as what is presented here and now.

Every possible value in the contemplative context is so rich with the presence of the Absolute that it is not necessary to idealize or idolize any one of them particularly

The seeker and the seer are on the same path. All the same they are not the same kind of beneficiaries of wisdom. The seer has solved age-old riddles in his or her heart. The seeker again and again gets lost on the slippery pathway to certitude. The quality of life is decided by how happy you are, how consistently you are happy, and how you are established in that happiness. Those who lack this excellence are always haunted by the questions: “What next? Where should I turn? Who can I approach? How can it be accomplished? How can I know that what I seek is truly what I need or what I want?” From the examples of those who have gone before us, we discover that in most cases those who have succeeded had someone to guide them, someone to hold their hand with compassion. The successful have been led to the sanctuary of satisfaction where there is no longer any remorse or sense of inadequacy. The masters who lead the seekers are called preceptors of wisdom.

Situations presenting themselves to us without any initiative on our part and as a result of our most natural and correct behavior, should be taken as the will of God. That very feeling will give us a sense of our togetherness with God. Even though a situation looks difficult and beyond us, this trust in the Highest will give us new hope and courage, and unsought aid coming from all directions will enhance our trust in God’s grace. When this trust and consequential fulfillment increases day by day, we know we are on the right track and we progress. In such a case no one will have any doubt in their mind of what is happening.

Although in principle Vedanta is supportive of the idea of the One without a second, in our daily life we always encounter the notion of the many. Therefore there has to be a continuous exercise of the mind to again and again find similitude between the seemingly diverse forms, names and functions. There is a central focal point to which all the pluralities are to be centripetally referred, to give full orientation to our understanding of brahman. This central focus is found in the heart. That is why prajapati is identified with the heart.

When the transparency of the mind is not affected by any kind of emotional crisis, intellectual conflict, or psychotic or other pathological affectation, it gives a spontaneous expression of its own truthful nature.

As we are used to accomplishing things and obtaining desirable ends by our actions, we entertain the false impression that for the self to become brahman there has to be some kind of process by which the part can evolve into the whole…. This is not so. We are always the whole. All that we need to do is forget the false notion that we are anything other than brahman. Realization is not accomplished by a forward march but by a regressive dissolution. Up to the last moment you have a choice to skip the whole process of samsara merely by accepting the fact that you are the Absolute.

For each one of us there is only one world. That is what we each call “my self.” That world is an actualization of the total creative energy of one’s manifestation, i.e. the prajapati. In that, one cluster of attitudes makes one divine, another set of attitudes makes one a human, and a third set of primitive urges makes one a demon. However ugly those urges are, out of them the most sublime aesthetic sensibility and spiritual wisdom are to be evolved. Looked upon this way, there is no hell outside, no heaven outside, no world outside. All pluralities organically belong to the unity of one’s being.

Now we can see how the false fabrication of heaven and its denizens, the earth with its sociopolitical histories, and hell with its wildest screams of fear causes millions of people everywhere to undergo excruciating pain, shame and misery. All these are manmade hypotheses which have become the most deplorable concepts of theology, religion, science, sociology, political economy, and every kind of belligerency. To clear the board of all such misconceptions we should make a valiant attempt to go through the entire maze of conceptualized beliefs.

A deep psychological analysis is to be made to understand the images we generate inside, the emotional energy source that generates imaginations that can foster sustaining faith in us, the energizing value which is fed into images, and the shifting values that intrinsically belong to the inner dynamism of personality formation.

There is an Indian myth that a certain demon came and challenged Balarama, the brother of Sri Krishna. Balarama accepted the challenge. He went, raising his fist to smash its head. Then the demon became twice the size of Balarama. Seeing this, Balarama, who had psychic powers, grew double the size of the demon. The demon doubled in size again, and started lifting hills to throw at him. Then Balarama realized he could not overpower the demon. He turned to Sri Krishna and asked for help. Krishna smiled and said, “Brother, leave him to me. I’ll deal with him.”

The demon turned to Krishna and found that in his hand there was no weapon. Krishna stood with his hands open and smiled. Then the demon became the size of an average human being. Krishna still stood there with his bewitching smile and said, “Come on friend.” He came close and became smaller than Krishna. Krishna patted him. He became very small. Then Krishna took him in his hand and stroked him. He became so tiny.

Then Balarama came and said, “Brother, I don’t understand this. How did he become so small? How did you tame him?” He replied, “Brother, don’t you know this demon’s name?” “No.” “This demon’s name is Krodha, anger. When you become angry, you are only feeding him. He thrives on somebody else’s anger. When you take away your anger, there is nothing to nourish him. He becomes less and less. So when I give him love, there is nothing on which he can feed himself and he becomes very small.”

This is also the central teaching of Buddha: with hatred you never appease hatred, but with love you win all.

Do not look into the social mirror and then think that is what you are. You should have an inner estimation of yourself and the value of what you are doing. Of course, it is possible to be self-deluded and make mistaken judgments. In order to avoid that, you need a confidante who is detached. If you learn to strike a root in the universal order, that gives you stability…. When you sit firm on your own truthfulness, your own trust, you can face any encounter.

Sannyasa is the giving up of the personal agency which can make the center of consciousness change from self to ego. When that tendency is given up, you find, instead of a personal agency, a cosmic order functioning, of which you are an integral part. When your program of life is identical with the general system to which it belongs, then you are a sannyasin. Sannyasa does not mean you should have a beard or a shaven head or a colored cloth or anything. Those are all superficial things.

Ultimately, what is renounced here? You renounce only your personal motivations and your personal sense of agency. You make yourself part of the whole. This is how the entire process is worked out.

In the Gita, Krishna wants Arjuna to know what his dharma is and how he should perform it. Implied in this is a revaluation of the value system to which man should conform, and of the proper functioning of those values in our life. For that, Krishna, as a teacher, is also doing what the psychologist is doing to his patient. The psychologist is not there to provide a plank for the patient to lean on which will always be held up by the therapist. Rather he should help him to stand on his own feet. That is possible only when the patient obtains an insight into his own problems, his own being. When he knows what he is and how he should function, he will be able to function by himself. The very basic attempt of a psychologist is to make the patient realize himself.

If self-realization is the motive of the psychologist, why do we stop half way? Why don’t we push it all the way until the patient is no longer a patient but a student, and further, not a seeker but a seer? Krishna functions here not merely as a therapist, he offers much more than therapy. He educates his patient. His patient becomes illuminated. He is no longer simply a patient in relation to a psychologist – the seeker has become the seer.

Letter to a disciple:

“Who am I? That is the great question. Go within. Find out.” So clamor all the masters. Take a break from being so serious. What is the point of knowing who you are? You are just you, a plain and simple you, like the plain and simple “I am” among a multitude of I’s and you’s and he’s and she’s. What’s more important is to watch the traffic and note the light signals at the crossroad and to understand the moods of the people and the markets you deal with. You will be a lot better off if you cultivate good taste for forms, shapes, designs and colors, a good ear for music, sound logic to think correctly, good ethical norms to conduct yourself amicably and cheerfully with others, and a sensibility to appreciate all the finer nuances of life’s music, which has a wide variety ranging from the Sama Veda to disco.

Everyone is as important and unique as I am. So let me re-frame the question “Who am I?” as “Who are all these wonderful people including me?” Why go within? Why not be friends with this tangible world, this unending feast of colors and music in which the grand drama of life is always in full swing. Why should anyone dampen one’s spirit with a cynical philosophy of rumination on death and disease? That will be taken care of anyway.

Your self does not belong to any caste. You cannot be perceived by the senses. Unattached, formless and witness of all are you. Be happy. This suggests a drastic reduction of the solid person of flesh and bones into a rarefied abstraction. I do not have to write off the legitimate use of my senses and mind to be happy. I know caste is a barbarian prejudice, just as race is a regional scruple that can be dismissed as a pettiness of mind. We are mini systems intrinsically fabricated into the microcosmic system of the macrocosmic system. I can be genuinely happy by functioning as best I can within the frame of reference to which I legitimately belong without either exaggerating or obliterating my role and identity.

Another letter:

Depression by itself is not a disease. It only shows that there are some kinds of air pockets in your personality that are not fully plugged-in with life interests. For long you were running away from life and were seeking hideouts for your psyche. Now you’re coming out of the bush to face the challenge of the city and the burgermeister. It’s an education in itself. Even the most sublime song can be sung sitting on solid ground.

Annoyance is the immediate reaction to any advent of clumsiness where one seeks perfection. The world is in the slow process of becoming perfect with a norm that is not fully revealed to us. So our annoyance is not only caused by somebody else’s imperfections, but also because of our lack of understanding of the patterns of the other person’s self, designed by whimsical Chance, which lyrical people call Fate and religious people call God.

It is not with any word that we comprehend the Word, but with a total plunge into inexpressible wonder, to which we come with the canceling out of all the contradictions of this eternal paradox. After exhausting all possible complementarities and reciprocities, we come to grapple with the all-out contradictions. This gives us the secret of canceling out opposites to land in the neutral zero from which words recoil and the mind is melted away into oblivion.

There is an assumed superiority in the mind of all the aggressive races who have built up their fortune on the unwilling meekness of slaves. There is a concealed cruelty right in the heart of all their enthusiasm and kindness. As I see this ugly face sometimes very pronounced behind their sweetness and sincerity, I cannot help pointing my finger at it.

In the sixth chapter of the Gita Krishna says, “Be established in me. What makes a thing what it is, is its beingness. A thing becomes stable because of its beingness. Know me to be that beingness. Without me nothing can be, because I am the beingness. After having found it, feel devoted to it. Let your love flow toward it as the one beingness in all, as the one beingness which makes truth truthful, goodness good, beauty beautiful, love endearing.”

You cultivate this through constant meditation. I am not speaking of meditation as sitting cross-legged with eyes closed, or some such. Life itself is a meditation. Everything passing in our life is a theme of meditation. When you say “this exists” and “this does not exist,” what enables you to say it is that beingness. That is what we are asked to adore as the one God. It is up to your taste to call it God, or the Supreme Principle, or the one reality, or beingness, or what you poetically feel within you as the greatest empathy you can have, the sense of beauty you feel as an artist, the great love you feel as a lover. In all these there is a substantiality of beingness. You sense it from your heart.

Then the Gita says to see That as your own central reality. You are constantly saying “I am, I am, I am.” What assures you of that “I am” is the light within you. “I am That” is just like saying “I am that I am.” See it as the Absolute in you. Thus, having found beingness as the reality of everything, and as your own reality, it is easy to see that the real in you and the real in all other things are the same. This is how you gain the secret of sameness, samyam. It will bring you great serenity, great peace.

Nitya notes the similarities between adherents of science and religion in his Psychology of Darsanamala:

Both sides want truth to prevail; both want the mind to be systematically directed towards truth, so that whatever an individual does will be consistent with a truthful conviction; both hold that only truth will set man free from incorrect beliefs and wrongful conditioning; and both want their votaries to be happy. In addition, both spiritualists and materialists believe they should share happiness with others and work towards the perpetuation of peace, justice, love, and happiness for all through the achievement of the goals of their philosophies.

No physicist has ever seen an atom, much less a subatomic particle. But, like religious people who make icons, the physicist has also made conventional models of atoms and particles. Any person who has gone to school and studied the model of the atom cannot be dissuaded from that mental picture. In this way even scientific knowledge becomes a matter of belief. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad sweeps away all images born of mind. That is why a true Vedantin can never be a religious person.

Religion itself has become the greatest snare to stop a person from the vertical ascent of spiritual pursuit.

Yajnavalkya establishes that, as soon as it occurs, life correlates itself with tendencies which are detailed by religions as sins. With death, that tendency is overcome. This categorical recognition of sin as a phenomenon only pertaining to one life term dismisses a possible day of ultimate judgment and relegation of the individuated self to hell or heaven. This is the greatest contribution of Vedanta to humanity. We read “That very person, on being born or assuming a body, is conjoined with evils and on dying or leaving the body, discards those evils.” Even people outside the Semitic religions entertain the thought that sin is a phenomenon which is vicariously continued through generation after generation. It is this belief that the present mantra rules out.

Where there is no body, there are no sense organs. Where there is no sensation or sense data, there is no mind also. Anna (food), prana (vital breath) and manas (mind) all belong to nature and are governed and controlled by nature modalities. Extrapolating the mind into a non-physical, non-sensory world of abstraction is only a product of imagination. From wrong premises, most religions build up an imaginary world and threaten believers about the consequences of their actions as if they are deeply painted on the soul of a person. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the belief in a Day of Judgment is a cardinal article of faith. The votaries of these religions think that only such a belief will deter a person from indulging in evil. This is like adults trying to discipline innocent children by telling them stories of imaginary ghosts and goblins to tame them and make their minds submissive to the dictates of their elders. The havoc such a wrong faith does to a person, in principle as well as in practice, inflicts a deep mental injury on individuals which makes their bruised minds bleed with anxiety and pain all their lives.

Nobody wants to have factionalism, but even as you are attempting to bring unity, you become part of a faction. It is in the name of unity that you are creating all these factions in the first place….

So the true knower of this secret withholds from all disputes. Narayana Guru made this so central to his teaching because it is in the name of this one dispute that we have been killing each other since the dawn of human history. There has been more blood shed in the name of religion than there is water in the seven oceans put together. It is such an important question for all mankind. If the dignity of man is to be enhanced, we need to find a solution to this eternal riddle of man killing man in the name of an opinion.

The Christian notion of mysticism is an act of surrender to do service to others as an instrument of God. The favorite examples are Joan of Arc in the battlefield, St. Francis among the lepers, and St. Teresa organizing charitable institutions. This is what Bergson calls the “model of the throbbing machine.” The other variety is what is seen in the models of the meditating Buddha or Sri Ramakrishna or Ramana Maharshi in states of beatitude. In oriental mysticism, there is no idea of the “other.” The so-called other person is seen as one’s own Self, so there is no dualistic sense of duty to do service to oneself or to another. Instead, they only keep themselves true to their own inner rhythm that flows in harmony with the universal rhythm.

In a country where for centuries people have acted because of environmental forces, such as mineral deposits and consequent gold rushes, no realization makes much sense without relating it to action. Tales of yogis and seers attaining God-realization, brought to this country through books and by word of mouth, have fired the enthusiasm of many people to seek God-realization. This has somehow created in the mind of most people an idea of a far off realm to which one has to move for realization. There is no world other than this, and there is no experience that is removed from one’s earthly life. However, the idea of worldly responsibility should be changed to an understanding of the world in terms of the Divine.

Regarding ego:

Many people muse on the glory of realization, and dream of someday reaching there while, as if from behind, they are eaten up by the canker of ego and the darkness of ignorance. Every religion and every philosophy is trying its best to assure us that there is a bright tomorrow when we will be in the benevolent hands of the Supreme. This is a kind of panacea where the believer is held captive by self-hypnosis. But if we can shake ourselves out of this stupor and become more wakeful and conscious, we will see that we are in the hellfire of ignorance—-an ignorance that we ourselves have generated, if not during this very life, then in a previous one. It is all because we glorify the highest and neglect our existential life.

Unfortunately, our existential life is one of functioning as a masochist and/or a sadist, taking pleasure in hurting ourselves, as well as feeling the vigor of life in the blood we or others profusely shed. Although we make many hypotheses painted in numerous colorful forms that fascinate our imagination, they do not help us to come out of the quagmire of illusion. The next course for us in our search for the Absolute or Self-realization is to give time to the factual situations of life. However, this does not mean one helpless person should hold another helpless person on their lap with the two sitting together bemoaning their fate. That will not help either. We have to see our egos clearly to know which aspects are malevolent and which aspects are benevolent. We have to rigorously clear away the agony-brewing aspects of ignorance or selfishness. The selfishness which we speak of here is the bias which in every walk of life leads us away from that central benevolence to which we should gravitate every moment.

In our own times, meditation and contemplation are used as synonyms: both the terms have lost their precise connotation and have become vague in meaning. So it has become necessary to revalue and restate the terms ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’. Sequentially, meditation comes as a prelude to contemplation. The way to know something, as Henri Bergson puts it, is not by going around it, but by first entering into it and then being it. Meditation is an active process of applying one’s mind to make a total ‘imploration’ of the depth of whatever is to be known. The state of actually being it is what is achieved by contemplation. It is a passive but steady state.

A flame that flickers has on one hand the flame itself, and on the other hand the wind which makes it flicker, as something extraneous. In a windless place, however, where the extraneous factors causing the flickering are absent, the flame just burns on. Establishment of unity is a similar state. It requires only the removal of what is extraneous to the situation.

Scriptures of most religions treat their votaries as if they are immature people with animal instincts and a discrimination that is no better than that of children. Moral norms are taught with the help of anecdotes and parables, which forcefully describe how wickedness is drastically punished and good is always rewarded. Believers' minds are fed with the lures of an enchanting heaven, a place where the most exaggerated hedonistic pleasures are lavished on those who are selected to enter paradise. In the same manner, hell is described as a terrible place of torture. Both the preachers and their congregations forget that when they die their brains and sensory systems transform into dead matter and thereafter the dead have no bodies to experience pain or pleasure. When the faithful are told that they might go to hell and be cast in the burning flames of brimstone, the fear of being scorched comes to them. Such outright stupidity is enshrined in the most adorable scriptures of all religions. Most people remain ethical in their outward life, fearing such punishments, and do good to others, coveting an honored place in heaven. Henri Bergson, in his Two Sources of Morality and Religion, exposed the dubiousness of static religion and closed morality. The alternatives are dynamic religion and open morality. (YS, 73-74)

In the eighteenth chapter, when Arjuna said, “Now my mind is clear. Please tell me what to do, I shall do it,” at that time Krishna says, “Thus has wisdom more secret than all that is secret been declared to you by Me; (critically) scrutinizing all, omitting nothing: you may do as you like.” Krishna is not asking Arjuna to obey him. A disciple is not supposed to obey his guru. The disciple should understand what the guru says. That is absolutely necessary. But you don’t have to be a slave of your guru. You are a free person exercising your own freedom of choice, but if you ask for the guru’s opinion through his wisdom teaching, then you are committing yourself to a serious responsibility. On your part you have to critically scrutinize all that he says. This is all that’s required. You may choose to touch the feet of your guru so that your ego won’t be tempted to jump up. This may look very crude and crass to the western world, but I am only speaking of an attitude. After humbling yourself, you should look for an opportunity where the guru is pleased to narrate. But beyond that the reverence stops. Thereafter, you put searching questions to the guru. You are not to just sit there like a dunce; you must ask searching questions. And when he or she speaks, you are not to lie down and accept it at face value, but you must critically examine every word. Scrutinize all that is said. Then afterwards you do what you like according to your best understanding, not what the guru likes.

Arjuna is given full freedom before the teaching of Krishna is closed.