The Struggle for the Infinite

Though the Bhagavadgita is regarded as a well-known text-book, it is really not intended for the ordinary man. Its teachings, its ethical principles, its ultimate aims, are all of such a nature that it is difficult to accommodate them into the normal thinking of the human being living in a world of desires, ambitions, prejudices and traditional routines of various types, all which are cut at the very root by the altogether different outlook of life which the Bhagavadgita presents. The more we begin to ponder over its message, the more would we find it difficult to make it a guideline for our day-to-day life, though its purpose is nothing but that. The arguments of Arjuna in the first chapter are our arguments. The logic of the human mind takes this body as a final reality and everything connected with it as equally real, and the reports of the senses as wholly valid. The senses, the understanding and the logical reason are the apparatus of our knowledge in this world. These are the things that we employ in the assessment of values, and though it appears that apart from the senses we have the understanding and the reasoning, truly the understanding and reason are the handmaids of the senses, which seem to confirm by their own logic what the senses gather as information through their perception, and they do not give us any new knowledge. Our understanding does not give us a knowledge superior in quality to what the senses provide us by sensations and perceptions. This is why it is said that we are in a phenomenal world and, unfortunately, even our reason, when it is not cautiously exercised with reference to the implications behind its functions, would suddenly join hands with this empirical understanding and it will amount to an acquiescence in what the senses say. And such were the arguments of Arjuna and these are the arguments we trot out when our sentiments and emotions are to be justified and are to be fulfilled by hook or crook. Setting aside for the time being the epic context and the story of the Mahabharata, and taking into consideration the principal spiritual message hidden behind the teaching of the Gita, we observe that the reluctance of Arjuna to take up arms on grounds of his own is the reluctance of the spiritual seeker to grapple with reality in its essentiality. We want a God suited to our senses, sentiments, feelings, traditions and social prejudices. Our reality and goal of life is conditioned by these feelings and we seem to be living for a purpose which is evaluated in the light of this understanding lit up by the senses. Each one of us has to be a judge for one's own self in these matters of profound significance. Our aspirations for spiritual ideals, or God-realisation, may not be so well-founded as they appear to be on the surface. The whole edifice of this so-called love of the spiritual ideal may crumble down when the acid test of the superior understanding and the reason is applied, and we would reveal ourselves as poor nothings who have founded our arguments of the spirit on the quicksand of personal desire and ambition. A love for bodily existence and an affirmation of the ego, a conformity to social relationships connected with the body and the ego, sum up our satisfactions in a nut-shell. We are mortal, living in a transitional world which pretends to satisfy our desires, but never does so. But this pretension is taken by us as a reality and we ground ourselves in the justification of this pretentious promise of the sense-world and somehow or the other persuade ourselves to be satisfied with whatever is in the world as presented to the senses, and whatever the emotions regard as what is ultimately required. Though we are not always emotional and sentimental in an obvious form, we are that basically; and our very root as individuals is unjustifiable finally in the light of the larger set-up of things. We have a subtle and secret longing to be independent and satisfied even at the cost of everything in the world. Consciously this does not come to the surface of our mind, but basically human beings are selfish; not merely in human beings, but perhaps in everything in the world, there is an urge to maintain oneself in a bodily complex, and the fear of death is the greatest of fears; the love of life is the greatest of loves. Between love of one's own life and fear of one's own death, the one implies the other, and each one confirms that we regard this body as our entire property, our belonging, nay, as we ourselves. The social relationships are practically physical relationships, accentuated by psychic contact and adjustable with the temporary features which the world of Nature manifests in the process of history. We, somehow, manage to live in this world, by a peculiar kind of daily adjustment with the unintelligible processes through which the world passes. We adjust ourselves not merely with the world of Nature every day, but, with a tremendous difficulty and strain on the mind, have to adjust ourselves with people around us. And this strain is a great toil indeed. We are so much accustomed to this strenuous life of adjustment with the outside atmosphere that we have mistaken this effort itself for a kind of joy and satisfaction. The condition of perpetual disease is mistaken for a normal state of health. Man is never said to be, but is always said to become. We do not remain in ourselves continuously even for a few minutes. As the Buddha said in his wondrous message, everything is transitory, everything is momentary, everything is like a link connecting itself with another link. There is a procession of events, and there is nothing existent. If we are part and parcel of this transitional universe, there can be nothing truly existent in us. This is perhaps the reason why the Buddhist philosophers denied that there is such a thing as the self, by which we have to understand the transitional self, the empirical self which we regard our selves to be in our poor understanding of the nature of things. We regard ourselves as a psycho-physical complex; body and mind combined in some manner. And this self, if it is to be regarded as our real self, certainly is not, because it moves with the laws of Nature, and, therefore, it has births and deaths. The process of evolution is a name that we give to the continuous series of births and deaths of all things. A succession of events is another name for the death of one event and the birth of another event; which indicates the finitude of every event and of every object. Anything that is finite materially or conceptually urges itself forward to overcome its finitude by an entry into another finitude, under the impression that when the finitudes join together they make the infinite. That is why we love objects with the notion that two objects coming together will abolish the finitude of objects. But that does not happen, because two finites do not make the infinite. Even a million finites cannot make the infinite, because the Infinite is a transcendent reality which cannot be described by characters that describe the finite, and it is not a quantity which can be measured by mathematical laws. But our senses work through the space-time mathematics. The argument of logic is mathematical ultimately and while we are sunk in this mire of phenomenality and this abyss of muddled understanding, we try to entertain a spiritual aspiration, a desire to overcome the world, which is conditioned by the world. Our longing to overcome the finitude of the world, the finitude of life, is directed by the finitude of the world itself. We are moving in a vicious circle, a merry-go-round, coming to the same point again and again, never getting out of the ruts of things. Arjuna's arguments were arguments in a vicious circle. We love God for a purpose which is connected with this world. The desire to transcend the world of sorrow and to overcome the finitude of bodily existence is at the back of love for the Infinite. We appear to be longing for the Infinite for the sake of the justification of the finite, a confirmation of our longings which the senses regard as real. And social values, psychic and bodily values, become the conditioning factors of even the idea of God-realisation. We seem to be loving God for the sake of people, for the sake of the world of Nature, for the sake of our egoistic satisfactions. Arjuna, in a wondrous manner, desisted from the battle of life, which is nothing but a battle with the world of every kind of relationship, personal or otherwise.

Now, the most difficult thing to understand is the significance of relation. We are accustomed to this word many a time, 'I am related to you, you are related to me, I am your brother, you are my brother.' This is a kind of relationship, indeed, but this is a way of talking and taking things for granted without knowing their true meaning. A relation is difficult to understand because it eludes its connection with the two terms which it relates. If I am related to you, it is difficult for me to explain the meaning of this relation. The relation that we speak of remains merely a word with a grammatical sense, but no philosophical justification. It does not mean that I am identical with you when I say that I am related to you. If A is related to B, even in a most intimate manner, it will not follow that A is identical with B, because the difference between A and B is to be confirmed if there is to be a relation between A and B. If A is not different from B, there cannot be relation, and the two will be one, and we would not be speaking of the two as if they are related. But if they are really different, there cannot, again, be relation. Whether with difference or without it, there cannot be relation. And so relation remains an enigma before us. The whole world is a mystery because of this fundamental something that is conditioning our life. This is what the great philosophers sometimes call 'Maya'. We glibly translate it as 'unreality' or 'illusion', while it is a mystery which cannot be understood, but which controls us to such an extent that we are helpless totally. So the arguments based on this kind of relationship will fail in the end. In the same way as there cannot be an ultimate justification for the principle of relationship between things, there cannot be a justification for the validity of any argument based on relationships. And all logic is nothing but a structure built on relationship between the subject and the predicate in an argument. The subject and the predicate cannot be connected, and if they are not connected there cannot be logic; if there is no logic there is no argument; if there is no argument there is no justification; if there is no justification there is nothing possible in this world. So the whole thing amounts to a chaos finally. But though we appear to be living in a terribly difficult atmosphere, impossible to understand, and more difficult to live in, there is something in us which compels us to get on in this world, not withstanding the environment that is around us which threatens us every moment of time with consequences dire. All this does not matter; we, somehow or the other, wish to live, even if it be in hell itself. We wish to live here. The desire to live in hell is to be explained. The explanation comes only from something mysterious within us, which does not belong to this phenomenal world, but which we cannot understand with the phenomenal mind, understanding, or reason. We are between the devil and deep sea, pulling us in different directions, something telling us something inside, and something describing another thing altogether in a different manner outside in the world of senses. The spiritual seeker girding up his loins for God realisation, for leading spiritual life, is faced with the complex of the world and the difficulties presented by the social relations. What about my father? What about my mother? What about my sister? What about my relations? What about my disciple? What about my Guru? What about this and what about that? Now, all these are nothing but items of relationship; and the Absolute is non-relational. It is not related to anything, and to aspire for the Absolute would be to aspire for a non-relational existence.

Chapter IV

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE INFINITE