In modern thought we are caught in the trap of ceaselessly absolutizing the relative owing to our inability and difficulty in understanding unity or diversity, let alone of unity in the midst of diversity. This has given rise to shallow ethical relativism in all our relations to each other and our self-conception. In practice it leads to the appalling belief that anything goes, or, as put by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘If God is dead all is permitted.’ One cannot cultivate a sense a moral responsibility without freeing ourselves from the trap of ethical relativism. One must begin by refusing to regard anything conditional as final or sacrosanct before the bar of one’s own quiet self-contemplation. At the same time, in one’s own self-study — engaged in repeatedly as often as possible, daily, weekly, monthly — one should seize upon the highest and the noblest, wherever it be in Nature, mankind, oneself or in others, and make that hold the initiative. One must keep this as that which is inviolable, that which is beyond analysis and argument, that which is the testing-ground and the touchstone. Then with its help and strength, one must turn to everything else and look, with calm detachment and a sense of proportionality — sophrosyne — upon all that comes as the noise of the world, despite the vast clamor and seeming majority support, spelling no doubt the decay, downfall and doom of vast number of souls at a certain climacteric moment in the history of the human race.

 To do this requires the courage to individuate, and that is why to individuate and even to begin the dialectical quest, let alone to cross the barrier between being and becoming, is much more difficult than anything else. Too many people have flattered and distracted themselves by seemingly being preoccupied with the higher reaches, because of their terrible fear that they are in the grip of the very lowest forces. They have not even begun to stand up straight or to take a few steps. They must first learn to maintain a minimum continuity in the attempt to move from the realm of death to the realm of life and immortality, from the region of ignorance to the realm of wisdom. The authentic life of the dialectic is marked by degrees of progressive awakening and increasing insight into that which is essential, true and lasting, that which is universally applicable at all times, and that which must cancel all lesser truths.

 The pernicious tendency to absolutize the relative is in direct proportion to one’s degree of conditionality as a self-conscious participant in the pilgrimage of humanity towards universal enlightenment. Thus, the effort to become less conditional in one’s willingness to serve others is a direct help in moving toward a truer conception of the unconditional Absolute. This is the root reason for vow taking on the spiritual path of the dialectic. The unconditional is in all conditions. It is in the present moment. It is both a philosophical and a mathematical puzzle that the present moment cannot lapse because it must be divisible into infinitesimals and recurring decimals, and therefore no duration of time can have an end, even if it may seem to have a beginning. If that is so, there is that which is incommensurable, that which is actually and also potentially infinite within the finite, within each moment, within each and everything, and therefore, the unconditional is the ground on which we stand. To stand knowingly upon the ground of the unconditional is to raise one’s sights to the unconditional in the sky as a remote ideal, but also to apprehend it as that which touches upon our very breathing. To take one’s stand in the unconditioned is to learn to distinguish, in a world of conditionalities, that which opens the door, that which is freer, that which is less conditional, and that which is more open-minded. This is an exquisitely fine art and it is enormously enhanced by taking a stand in the conviction that certain things are inviolable and supremely sacred.

 That is what great souls have again and again shown, as for example Gandhi, when he was a boy, in regard to the vow he made to his mother about vegetarianism. It was shown by the vow of supreme resolve and renunciation taken by Buddha when he was a young man and he first saw the basic facts about human life. This is the archetypal vow taken by all souls, and it is the universal measure of true manhood. It is the hallmark of what it is to be truly human — to move towards the divine, and to divinize one’s life by making small beginnings. Instead of treating as sacred a false view of privacy, let alone the fleeting and deceptive boundaries of personal consciousness, one must revere the light in the eyes, the flame of love in the heart, the spark of decency and empathy which enables one to reach out in universal fellowship to all beings. It is this which must be made the basis of what is inexorable, inviolable and irreversible in oneself, if one is to become an apprentice in the fine art of becoming eventually like those who have crossed that ultimate threshold where any reversal or fall is inconceivable, those who have become achyuta, incapable of falling, like the Absolute.

 Far beyond the threshold that separates becoming from being in the Platonic dialectic lies the threshold that separates being from Non-being, which is real Being. To cross it means to become a perfected spirit, what to ordinary conception is a pure abstraction, a non-being that can have no gunas or attributes. Hence, the extreme difficulty in conceiving the true state of the highest perfected sages, those who alone realize in full the vision of the Eye of Dangma. Psychology has no conception of such a being or spirit, while metaphysics rejects entirely the possibility of the infinite having any conscious relation to the finite. Moreover, perfected spirit and the eternal principle are virtually synonyms. Hence, to speak of the existence of a perfected spirit as implying consciousness, or to speak of a non-entified presence implying unconsciousness, or absolute conscious, in the eternal principle, amount to much the same thing. The conception of a perfected spirit as a presence signifies the essential and co-extensive identity between the highest Sages and the entire plane of Akasha, the plane of Mahat or Universal Mind.

 That which is Akashic is also Fohatic, always capable of mediating between mind-spirit and matter. Ultimately, spirit and matter are one, and therefore Fohat is always capable of dynamizing, through the interaction of spirit — which is matter at a sufficiently homogeneous level that it is like pure spirit, matter which is at a sufficiently heterogeneous level that it is like mere matter. This is the engine, the bridge, the dynamizing capacity of Fohat itself in Akasha. Both Akasha and Fohat at the highest and deepest level have to do with constant, ceaseless, universal, unbounded ideation. Any human being who begins to move in this direction, regardless of the boundaries and limitations that are inescapable for him at any given time, begins to enter that plane on which he or she may become capable of communing, tapping and receiving help from much greater minds and hearts, much greater men and women of meditation and compassion, who on higher planes are engaged in eternal ideation. If this were not true, there would be something irredeemable about the human condition and there would be something totally false about almost everything that we take for granted and in terms of which we live. Therefore, there is something transcendental as well as something temporal in notions like r_. ta, universal harmony, and dharma, that which upholds, supports and maintains any and all living beings in this cosmos. There is also something supremely important in the endless points of Fohatic connection between the attributeless, transcendental Absolute and that which is immediately before our ordinary senses at any given time, and in any context.

 What the sage realizes continuously, and what the apprentice on the path struggles to glimpse intermittently, is that the Absolute, as the source of all manifestation, is therefore also the source of the plenitude we see around us. Dwelling on this idea reminds one of the inherent generosity in all being, however we tend to approach this generous plenty through the psychological medium of relativities, light and darkness, good and evil, like and dislike, and so forth. To use these dichotomies wisely requires a recognition of them in ourselves, and then a determination to treat them as stepping stones to rectification. Rectification is a sacred concept in the Buddhist Sangha and on the Buddhist path, as also in the teachings of Confucius, who spoke of the rectification of terms in the light of the Great Extreme. Indeed, the greatest need of our time is the rectification of anything and everything at the simplest level in relation to the ABC’s of human living. This is difficult, but the existence of perfected Sages tells us that it is possible. Were it not difficult enough, however, we add to it by being all too interested in the contradictions and workings of the pairs of opposites in others. In other words, we have become cowards and escapists, evading the task of confronting life directly and living autonomously, let alone individuating. So, we live vicariously through the lower perceptions of others, wandering in the twilight zone of shadows and zombies, of soulless beings and beings that have pledged themselves far back in the past to the finality of certain self-destruction and loss of soul. This is the basis of judgmentalism or fault finding. We are warned that this is the downward path, if only for the reason that it muddies karmic waters and does a lot more harm to ourselves and others besides.

 Authentic meditation on the Absolute can alone purify our perception of the relative. Meditation is the greatest purifier. Like the Spiritual Sun, the purifier of purifiers, the AUM is the supreme purifier. When we meditate on the AUM and the Spiritual Sun, and on the highest beings who are the living, dynamic, omnipotent embodiments of the highest current that flows from the sacred heart of the Spiritual Sun, reverberating as the eternal AUM throughout the ages, we have an infallible and ever-accessible means of cleansing our consciousness. We can cleanse our thoughts — even the very best, cleanse our feelings — even the noblest, because they are all polluted by the lie of separateness, by the false sense of self-hood, by the fearful self-protective concern for oneself separated from all others. If we were to avail ourselves of meditation as a purifier we would soon see the irrelevancy, let alone the profanation, of judging others, and begin, therefore, to be suffused with thoughts of generosity to all.

 In other words, we would begin to transform generosity and magnanimity from being fugitive and superogatory feelings in the heart, to being the firm basis in the mind of all our thoughts, word and deeds. We would learn to think generously about this world, about Nature, about all humanity, about human growth, and about all rays of the one light. We would also learn to think generously about all those individuals from whom we learned, and to whom we owe far more than we can repay in one life, and even learn to be generous to all those from whom we learned only by negative example. In time, we would become generous in the consciousness itself that we bring to waking each day and to going to rest each night, drawing from a deeper source of abundant generosity within the realm of Akasha, within the divine sphere around the human being, and within the immortal soul, making it flow with the dawning of light each morn, and with the diffusion of light through the day. Letting go all false sense of conditioned being, we could withdraw in meditation into the hidden darkness, the land of Silence and Non-being, wherein lies the Supernal Light that neither rises nor sets, which is the ultimate source of all that gives meaning and beauty, grace and generosity, to human life, and which is eternally witnessed by the opened Eye of Dangma.

Raghavan Iyer
The Gupta Vidya II