Category: Seminary

 It would be perfectly legitimate for two people to say that their tentative conceptions of the Absolute are similar to each other. But for them to agree that these cognitive conceptions are similar to the Absolute would be saying too much. And equally, for two people to find in a third statement something which they say is incompatible with the Absolute would also be saying too much, even if it were incompatible with what they recognize as the reasonable similarity of their recondite conceptions of the Absolute. Yet, while such intellectual identifications of similars and contrasts can only dimly contribute to our imperfect cognition of the Absolute, they can nonetheless enable the individual to transcend effectively the conceptual and imaginative horizons of the human mind and human heart. Thereby, they could release a deeper, a more assured and abiding, sense of unitary Being in the Self of All. Often we fall short of this profound possibility, because we are so conscious of how much more sensitive we are in feeling than someone else, or how much sharper we are in cognition than others. Hence, we do not push our own capacity for cognition or feeling to the limit, to the point where it empties itself and leaves us in a luminous state which transcends the mind and the heart.

 It is a state of sublime effortless silence, but powerful and potent. It is most sacred because it is our moment of silent awareness of the awesome Presence of the One Self, the unitary Being, within the fragmented selves and inmost sanctuaries, of all men, women and children. This is what is meant by the poetic saying that “deep calls unto the deep” — an expression truly meaningful to great mystics and great lovers who are, alas, rare to find in this loveless and prosaic world. The object and goal of love, its source and stimulus, must ever cancel and exceed all comparisons and contrasts. Such bhakti is incomprehensible to many and is indeed beyond the duality of division or the arena of comparison and conflict, or even the closeness and joy of communion.

 Thirdly, the contrasting terms, ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ cannot tell us anything about the Absolute, either directly through the term ‘absolute’ or indirectly through the term ‘relative’ — through the back door so to speak. Therefore, we need to go wholly beyond words like ‘within and without’, ‘above and below’, ‘before and behind’, in relation to the Absolute. However, in regard to our individual and collective cognition of the Absolute, all authentic approximations, all creditable attempts, may be compared to the six directions — North, South, East, West, Above and Below — so as to generate a conceptual tree of paradigmatic standpoints. Like the saddarshana, the six schools of philosophy in classical Indian thought, we may find room for idealism, both subjective and objective, on the one hand, and for materialism, on the other. If, in a Leibnizian sense, every windowless monad has a distinct, unique and original standpoint, our authentic approaches to the Absolute must embrace and enjoy multiple standpoints. This is as meaningful as holding an apple or an orange, seeing it and feeling it from every standpoint, and in every possible way. Even sense perceptions involve a degree of Buddhic synthesis, and if so it is vital that we make our minds more rounded and less angular in their apprehension of worlds, objects, subjects and selves. Whilst it is always meaningful to focus our concentration upon a single point — what is called ekagrata or one-pointedness — there is room for the rounded point of view. This is rare, especially in the realm of the mind or in the rhythm of the heart. There is also room for single-mindedness and singleheartedness. This is what is meant in mathematics by the topological similarity between the transfinite and the infinitesimal, or by Plato’s stress on the concordance between the two poles of his thought — creative mathematics and rapturous self-knowledge, the Eternal Forms and the immortal soul (as in Phaedo).

 Fourthly, as a pair of contrasting terms properly predictable of things ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ do seem to have an intelligible meaning. But we must always recognize that when we speak of that which is relative in some regard, it is only relatively relative and not absolutely relative. Similarly when we speak of that which is absolute in some respect, we must recognize that it is only relatively absolute. Even if it were shown and known to be absolute in relation to a specific world, we cannot rule out all possible worlds and therefore we have no basis for absolutizing what is absolutely true in our world. In language and in logic, as indeed in our progressive apprehension and changing cognition of the world and of ourselves, it is always meaningful to talk in terms of degrees of reality, or of what is relatively real and relatively absolute. This is relevant not only to levels of awareness corresponding to states of consciousness and planes of substance, but also to the way time, space and circumscribed causality enter into our perception and modes of cognition, as well as modify and affect the contents of our cognition.

 Furthermore, and at the highest level of what hardly three or four eminent yet exoteric minds in an entire century have even come to see, all statements and systems have temporal limits, that is, a beginning and an end. Even the most general statements or the most comprehensive closed, logical and axiomatic systems must contain inclusions as well as omissions, or have rules of relevance and reference as well as implicit, if not explicit, rules of exclusion. In contemporary mathematical logic, this is associated with the great work of Kurt Gödel in the 1930s. Given this truth, if Man is a unitary being, his finite awareness must have a fluidity and elasticity, a mobility and a resilience, which protects the future — both his own and, inseparably, the future of other beings. It must also acknowledge all past attempts of apprehension, which is why one has to do proper justice to all one’s predecessors known and unknown, as well as the integrity of all starting points and termini of apprehension. No one can be blamed for being where he or she is conceptually or empirically, or for being where she or he alone can start, or indeed, for being where he or he must end a certain process of enquiry.

 This was partly glimpsed by Kant when he stated that there are, in principle, as many points of view and systems of thought as there are states of awareness at different moments of time and in different spatial and conceptual, as well as empirical, contexts. What is true in principle can only become meaningful in practice if human monads or minds train themselves to become more multidimensional in thinking, more tentative in regard to limits and boundaries, and more hospitable to modes of apprehension which demand a higher level of synthesizing and a greater degree of inclusiveness than we normally need or use in our everyday encounters and our common discourse. In fact, this may be taken as the crucial yardstick of any advanced civilization, and therefore, it is vital to the emerging global civilization of the future — to its lifelong education, its new social institutions, its range and richness of discourse, and its quest for that which is greater and that which is beyond.

 Fifthly, the ready recognition that we can only speak of that which is relatively absolute is important to preserving a pristine sense of the non-dual immanence of the Absolute. However, the same problem is repeated when speaking of the transcendent and the immanent. What is transcendent to one person may be immanent to another, or what is transcendent at one time or place, or in one state of mind, maybe be immanent at another time or place, or in another state of mind. This is a simple truism, but it is crucial to the deliberate, disciplined attempt to meditate daily by dissolving distinctions and boundaries, by progressively removing all hindrances and limits. It is central to the attempt to contemplate continuously, however briefly, in a manner that alters our sense of what is real, or of what is really immanent and what is truly transcendent. At the same time, it is also necessary to recognize that the notion of degrees of apprehension, or levels of awareness, must be seen as preserving intact the difference in kind, not of degree, signified by our fundamental conception of the Absolute as indivisible, unitary, all-transcendent, as well as wholly and continuously immanent everywhere and always. This difference in kind of the Absolute from all else, including human conceptions of deity, makes the arcane conception of the Absolute distinct from that of everything else that exists, as well as from the Absolute of medieval theologies and modern philosophies.

Raghavan Iyer
The Gupta Vidya II

 What every human being perceives at any given time is deeply real, having a vital immediacy and relative importance that is essentially non-transferable, and cannot be effectively conveyed to another human being who does not independently have the same feeling at that moment of time. So, there is something incommunicably authentic about a ‘peak experience’, springing from a deep sense of self-transcendence in a human being. The danger lies in making that subjective experience the chief yardstick for all objective comparison, not only of actual but of past, present and future states, and even of all possible states of experience. Ethically the failure to recognize the transcendental and the immanent, the unique as well as the universal, as primary pairs of opposites in constant interaction, can consolidate moral backsliding, as well as become an obdurate obstruction to moral growth and refinement. Even worse, one may settle, as many do, for a convenient dualistic contrast between the ideal and the existent, the distant and the immediate, the ineffable and the tangible. This can only intensify rajasic restlessness and tamasic abdication, as well as notoriously aggravate sattvic self-righteousness, which in turn reacts upon tamas and rajas.

 Furthermore, any canonical dualism alienates a human being from the rich diversity and minute degrees of human striving, imperfection and attainment, from the highest possibilities as well as souls in distress. One is alienated from the highest possible beings who exist at any given time on earth or elsewhere, and also from human beings who are at the lowest levels of striving for subjective reasons that are all too difficult to ascertain. The tension of the subject-object dichotomy confines one’s perspective, perceptual range and capacity, as well as one’s circle of affinities and one’s degree of empathy. At the worst, it consolidates the absolutization of the relative. That is what conventional external religion does, and also popular, over-simplified science. All knowledge, in fact, which is packaged and pedantically transmitted through mass education, consolidates the absolutization of the relative, the limitations of human beings and the human condition, the narrowing of the horizon of human experience even in the sensory realm and certainly beyond it, and also hardens one’s judgments and reactions concerning other human beings, both as subjects and even as objects. Altogether, it narrows the base of one’s awareness and the capacity to extend and alter, enlarge and deepen, one’s sympathies, ideals and psychological states. It produces the smug boundedness as well as the false finality of one’s perceptions, concepts and perspectives. Above all, and this is extremely crucial, it limits the inherent focus of one’s motivation and the force of the inward stimulus in oneself to self-correction, to self-realization, to self-striving and to self-transcendence.

 Given an initial grasp of the distinction between the term ‘absolute’ by itself and the term ‘absolute’ as contrasted to the ‘relative’ the various meanings and uses of these terms may be rightly understood.

 First of all, consider the Basic Proposition that the Absolute is out of all relation to conditioned existence and is, therefore, inconceivable and indescribable. This means that nothing can be logically predicated of it in words and signs, owing to the limits of logic and of language. The Basic Proposition concerns the meaningfulness and legitimacy of predication as well as the incommensurability and ineffability of the Absolute as an object of cognition or comprehension, apprehension or awareness. But, it does not rule out, either in principle or in practice, a consubstantiality between the core of one’s own being and the intrinsic self-existent nature of the Absolute. Not does it in the least vitiate the meaningfulness of meditation, the bliss of contemplation, or the potency of philosophical negation in the realm of particulars, wholes and worlds.

 Secondly, the terms ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’, as a pair of predicates, convey a vital sense of opposition or contrast. But, since nothing can be predicated of the Absolute, whatever the sense of the term ‘absolute’ as a predicate opposite to the sense of the term ‘relative’, this sense cannot properly be predicated of the Absolute. That is, the very contrast between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ cannot be turned back as a basis for attributing anything to the Absolute. Similarly, whatever sense the term ‘relative’ has as a predicate, this cannot properly be taken to establish or convey the idea of something related to the Absolute by opposition. That is why one cannot possibly maintain that the Absolute thinks or feels, in any sense that embodied beings can grasp. Any of the verbs we use in relation to our consciousness, in relation to ordinary human cognition, feeling or conduct, cannot be applied to the Absolute simply because all these everyday words have built-in limits and limitations that arise not only out of their customary use but even out of their conceivable use. Even the greatest conceivable thought or feeling cannot by itself limit or characterize the attributeless Absolute.

 The most primitive relational predicates, such as ‘the same as’ and ‘other than’, are inherently inapplicable to the Absolute. The Absolute is peerless and incomparable. There is nothing outside the Absolute which could in any respect resemble it. Nor can anyone truly say that anything or everything is other than the Absolute, or that, in relation to the Absolute, all else is unreal. To attempt to do so is to oppose everything else to the Absolute, which is actually to limit it and to overlook its omnipresence. We should discern the latter truth just as clearly as we can recognize the former. The intrinsic relativity of all attributions and predicates sharpens our meditative awareness of the supreme transcendence of the Absolute. It also deepens our mystical apprehension of the most pristine metaphors given by the sages, especially Absolute Space, dimensionless and unbounded, or Absolute Motion and Consciousness, or Absolute Duration. These pregnant analogies point to the all-inclusiveness of the Absolute, to the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of the Absolute, as mirrored in time, in space, and in all contexts. But all cognitive identifications of similars and contrasts, equivalences and opposites can apply only to our increasing if inevitably incomplete apprehension of the Absolute.

Raghavan Iyer
The Gupta Vidya II

Guarding the nest beneath through the life-breath, the Spirit of man rises immortal above the nest.
Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad

 In earlier eras death and regeneration were often no more than remote subjects of philosophical curiosity or idle speculation. In contemporary history, however, this is increasingly the burning issue in the daily lives of innumerable individuals. Many people are afraid to formulate the central concern, but somehow they sadly acknowledge to themselves that Hamlet’s question — “To be or not to be” — no longer has for them the literary flavour of a formal soliloquy. It is an anguished question so acutely pertinent at any moment that many people approaching the moment of death, as well as half-alive hosts of young men and women, are anxiously asking what is the meaning of modern life, and the possibilities of sustaining a clear, firm hope for the future. At a time of critical transition from obsolete formulae and shallow answers to a stark future without familiar guarantees, the very idea of survival takes on a strange and awesome meaning. In the early nineteenth century, when Prince Talleyrand was asked what he did during the French Revolution, he simply replied, “I survived.” This is poignantly true of millions of people today. The mere fact of existing through one day from morning to evening, one week, one month, seems like a singular achievement. Is this because, as some rashly assert, a malign historical fate in the form of some tyrannical and frightening monster or ever-resourceful and vindictive scapegoat is responsible? Or does the explanation lie hidden in a new intensity of psychological pain of vast numbers of people nurtured by an inexplicable convergence of individual insights? People sense something about each other because of what they partly know about themselves. They recognize that many of the illusions that made modern life a spectacular caravan of glittering progress have become insupportable. These illusions are seen to be either deliberately manufactured lies or pathetically ineffectual forms of perception.

 A person who really does believe that “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”, may either have had an inexplicable stroke of good fortune or some apparent reason for smug satisfaction in personal or professional life measured in terms of status or achievement. Even if such a person senses the grandeur of the world, he can no longer expect other men and women to concur with him. If they are tolerant and good-humoured in the way so many young people were for a golden moment in 1967, they might concede, “If it makes you feel good, go ahead.” But such indulgence is now a luxury that few people apparently can afford. A person dare not admit to himself that he is enjoying himself. To do so seems somehow to hurl a blasphemous curse upon the social scene. Is this really because the sufferings of men are visible tokens of physical torment, or rather because there is a profound and pervasive soul-frustration? Behind the restlessness of vast ill-directed energy are haunting questions. Human beings do not find time for thought or contemplation. They do not sit down and calmly question where they are going, who they are, why they are doing what they are doing, why they share with many other human beings a seeming paralysis of will. Those who have been fortunate, owing to their early upbringing in easier times, to build up an infrastructure of habits which enable them to get up early and to greet the dawn, or to smile after breakfast and to have a sense that they had planned the day, at least have a sense of being able to cope at some level with life. But their sense of coping with it is wholly parasitic upon the acceptance of an excessive valuation placed upon something which is sacred only so long as no one questions it. The same people, late in the evening or around the time of twilight, or over the dulling effect of mixed drinks, suddenly only too readily admit the emptiness of their day. They willingly plunge in the opposite direction into a malaise which they dare not acknowledge during the day.

 The rare opportunity at this moment lies in an increasing recognition by many that the time is past for diagnosis, patter and endless stating of the obvious. It is time to find out what one can do to make a difference in one’s own life. The difference is, at heart, between the living and the dead. One might deliberately assume a critical distance from the contemporary scene and ask why the original impulse behind the technological culture with its staggering vitality — unprecedented in recorded history — seems to have run down. One might ask even more fundamental questions in terms of essential categories of apprehension that transcend history as a chronicle of events. That history is a tedious catalogue of sins, crimes and misfortunes is no new discovery. Gibbon came to this conclusion when examining the Roman Empire. Hegel held that the only lesson learnt from history is that nothing is learnt. Far more is needed than a feeble explanation of the contemporary hiatus with its anomie in terms of any rationalist philosophy of history. The relationship between propositions about collectivities and their fate and the individual’s inability to give credible meaning to his own life is difficult to establish. Psychologically, the problem manifests as the apparent need for constant reinforcement. This has taken such an acute psychophysiological form that most human beings today manage to cope with the enormous flux of sensory stimuli only by attenuating or toning down the impact of external stimuli. If they attempted the opposite, magnifying auditory and visual responses, intensifying sense-perceptions in general, they would be utterly lost. They would be smoked out amidst the blazing chaos of the surrounding world. So they take the opposite path — though seldom choosing it consciously — and it consolidates into a habitual pattern. They tone down, turn off, maintain a seemingly safe standpoint of passivity in relation to the world. They purchase magazines they do not read, see pictures they cannot grasp, greet people they do not truly notice. They deal with seemingly diverse objects of interest with minimal involvement. In a short time, this inevitably becomes self-defeating.

 The more one reduces the impact of external stimuli upon one’s sensorium, the more one needs more intense inputs of the same kind to sustain any residual capacity for assimilation. Therefore, it is not just metaphorically true that the U.S.A. is now a nation in which vast numbers of people suffer from spiritual hypoglycemia, an inability to distil the essence of experience into a form that could meaningfully channel energy, nurture creativity and sustain commitments. It is deeply threatening to many on the Pacific Coast that the sun shines, suspended like a blazing jewel over the ocean. Nature’s abundant intimations may remind some of Athens, Alexandria and Knossos, of places far apart in historical time but where seminal impulses from a tempestuous intellectual and psychic ferment led in time to a tidal wave of creative energy, a renaissance of the human spirit. Though many may have a dim awareness that something like this seems to be imminent, they cannot in any meaningful manner connect themselves with what they see around them. The sense of the emptiness of all, the voidness of one’s life, the meaninglessness of everything into which one is tempted to throw oneself with a false intensity, is intensifying so rapidly that all words seem irrelevant mutterings. Promises of golden citadels in the future resemble the unsecured promissory notes of a defunct company. Vision has no point of contact with anything in daily experience which all can use, to feel that they are truly affecting the world. It provides no basis for growth, no stimulus to the acceptance of pain, denial and death. The physical body, owing to its homeostatic metabolism and the involuntary processes of Nature, functions as a system which can continually restore equilibrium. This is hard to achieve on the psychological plane in relation to the arbitrary fabrication of namarupa, name and form.

 Brahma Vach speaks directly to any human being willing to get to the root of his own self-questioning. One has to ask fundamental questions. Is one willing to grant that this vast universe is a macrocosm, a single system, beyond comprehension and cataloguing, dateless yet with a future history which is unknown? If Nature exhibits processes that seem to move in opposing directions — expansion and contraction, withdrawal and involvement, separation and integration, aggregation and disintegration — can these be seen as the warp and woof of a single texture, interdependent aspects of an intelligent life-force? If this is true, why is it that human life has become so detached from the ordering principle in the cosmos? Why is the hazy conception of organic growth in Nature, man-made conceptions, human lives and plans and notions of success and failure, satisfaction and misery, so inadequate to resolve fundamental questions about wholeness and disease? Is the individual prepared to concede that the physical body is fighting a constant and futile battle against inevitable disintegration, without which the organism could not even maintain itself? It surely seems like a losing battle. One is dying every moment. But is a person psychologically prepared to welcome this inescapable truth? Is one prepared to create for oneself, at least as an abstraction, a viable sense of identity that has no relationship to heredity and environment, to past events and future hopes, anticipations and regrets, fears, muddles and neuroses? Is one willing to see oneself not as a static sum of psycho-social conditions but as a dynamic series of states of mind over which one has little control, especially over their unavoidable shadows?

 Could a person place his or her sense of selfhood beyond the proscenium of the theatre in which there are disordered scenes, a chaotic flux of deranged events with no inner connection? Is it perhaps meaningful for a person to say that to be a human being lies in the very act of seeking connections? If so, in discovering connections between events, past, present and future, between different elements in oneself, between elements in oneself and in others, why is it that one is such a cocksure coward? Why is one so willing to edit perceptions and memories to a degree that shuts out intermediary facts? Why is it that one will refuse to face what is readily confirmable by statistics concerning the untoward consequences of certain lines of activity? Human beings have become clever at avoiding the cancelling of their illusions to a point where they could not live. They have become adroit in avoiding those extreme conclusions that in concentration camps, in arenas of acute suffering, individuals in our own time have been forced to consider. The stark language of existentialism can be purchased so easily that anyone may quote Sartre or discourse in romantic terms about the promethean agony and the burden of living. It is too easy to entertain the deceptive feeling of sharing in the poignant experience of Camus’ The Stranger or of some piteous character in Sartre’s No Exit.

 In a deep sense human beings are afraid that neither the past nor the present contains clues to the future, collectively, historically or individually. The recognition that the restless intensity of men and women in pursuit of so-called progress was achieved only by making a Faustian deal with the devil, with some illicit external authority, is sufficient to show that the deal can no longer be made. Human beings cannot go back in the same direction; least of all can they do this if they inherit more opportunities for choice and greater psychological and social mobility than has ever been available to so many. All the games are over. Suddenly people are discovering the full implications of what it is to live in a society without moorings, charts or maps. Many are not even concerned to destroy the pathetic delusions of others because they feel that merely by ignoring them, these illusions are shown to be the more brittle. If a person consults the wisdom of the ancients, he will come to recognize that there is something true of nature as a whole which is also fundamentally significant to the human psyche.

 Two contraries are simultaneously true of every person. First of all, at all times and in all contexts, any person can only live by making some unchallenged assumptions — that he is the centre of the world, that the world exists for his benefit, that his parents lived to bring him into the world, his teachers laboured to help him to get on in the world, his friends exist to support him in the world, that the vast panorama of visible nature exists for his enjoyment. Evil exists for his own moral education; he can recognize his assured detachment from evil by readily condemning it. The whole world for every man is seemingly a spectacle of which he is the central actor, the hero in a drama which, though private, can extend in every direction and become coterminous with as much of the social scene, of contemporary history and of the cosmos as he chooses to make it. At the same time, however, the contrary proposition is also true: the universe is indifferent to him. He is a very small affair in relation not only to the whole universe, to humanity or his nation, but even in relation to his immediate neighbourhood. For a man to feel fully conscious of both propositions at the same time is extraordinarily difficult — like telling a man who pleads, “To be or not to be, that is the question”, that the unavoidable answer is “To be and not to be”. This has little meaning unless one begins to ask what it means to say that one is or one is not. What is the very basis, the cash value, the logical foundation, the raison d’être, the psychological significance of existing in a world unless one can understand what it is to exist in a world, to be anything at all? Why do men and women assume that because their categories, utterances and theories limit human consciousness, any difference is made to the vast energy-fields in the universe?

Raghavan Iyer
The Gupta Vidya II