The outlook of one's life depends upon one's conception of reality. The
structure of the universe decides our relationship with things. What is known
as a vision of life is just the attitude which the individual is constrained to
develop in regard to the atmosphere of the universe. Such an exalted conception
of the totality of experience may be designated as the philosophy of life. It
is, thus, philosophy which determines human conduct and enterprises of every
kind in the social field as well as in one's own person. Not merely this; the
psychological pattern of the apparatus of perception and inference and the like
is also conditioned by the relationship that obtains between the universe and
the individual. As such, it can be safely said that psychology and ethics are
rooted in metaphysics.
It is often held that the programme of human life may be carried on with
an amount of success without straining one's consciousness to the distant
depths of the structure of the universe. People mostly prefer to live on the
surface and move with the current of the river, with the least effort involved
in the vocations of their personal and social existence. But, it is not
difficult to notice that a sort of merely getting on with life through the
vicissitudes of history is not only soul-less in its effect, by which the
spirit of existence gets converted into a lifeless skeleton, but life, in the
end, whether psychological, social or physical, would be impracticable if
action is not fixed upon its proper relation with the environment of the entire
pattern of life. Even as the working arrangement and the day-to-day performance
of administration is based on a Governmental Constitution, along the lines of
which contemplated programmes are carried on smoothly, life's enterprise would
not be a possibility if the same is not rooted in a standard picture of the
whole pattern of existence which directs and determines the nature as well as
the details of activity. Hence it is necessary to bestow a further thought on
the facile formula of the commonplace of mankind that one can go on with the
urges of life always in the direction in which the winds of the world blow,
because without a stable ideology and a lofty idealism, no movement is
conceivable. If this is the aim behind all enterprises and programmes, no worthwhile
action of any kind would be possible without it, even in contemplation.
It is not that the activities of life are to be psychological meditations
in an academic sense, or in the way in which people wrongly try to understand
philosophy. Often, the erroneous notion goes that philosophy is an abstract
thought process which idealises life into an ethereal and, perhaps, an unknown
something, while life is concrete and substantial. It is surprising that the
world of matter should be taken as a solid substance while the ideas are
regarded as airy nothings, even in the light of the astounding discoveries of
modern researches in the field of science, which have swept off matter from the
region of solidity, and matter appears to be evaporating into an undivided
continuum of what is sometimes called a space-time extension, transcending the
notions of a three-dimensional distance and a time process divided into the
partiteness of past, present and future. There is something more about this
interesting discovery. If the continuum mentioned is indivisible by the very
nature of its impartite and non-durational structure, naturally it would follow
that the individual observer of things cannot stand outside the continuum. The
consequences of this deduction are, again, startling, while being obvious. The
observing individual merges, as it were, into the vast indivisibility of the
continuum, and the events of the universe knowing itself and the individual
knowing himself, as well as the individual knowing the universe, cannot be
separated from one another. It would appear that the universe, in this
analysis, is itself a measureless conflagration of intelligence, knowing
itself, and nothing outside it can be noticed as an object of sensory
perception or psychological cognition. We find ourselves entering into the
bottom of an ocean of force and existence which is inseparable from
intelligence, and to know the universe would be the same as to know one's own
Self. In the act of Self-knowledge, the universe is known at once, and the
knowledge of the universe, on the other hand, is the knowledge of the Self.
In this circumstance of a new vision that we seem to be confronting before
us, our personal and social life should be, indeed, a mirror-like clarity,
which would include the type of relationship that we should adopt with other
people in our day-to-day existence. What we call the ethics or morality of
human relationships as well as of personal behaviour amounts, from the above
analysis, to a conscious participation in the pattern of things in general,
which is only the face of the brooding Spirit of the Cosmos as a whole. Love
becomes spontaneously unselfish. Love, then, cannot be directed exclusively to
any person or thing, or to an isolated ideal, but becomes a spring of joy
arising from the recognition of the fullness of existence. Hatred of any kind
gets abolished from the surface of life by the very fact of the unity of
procedure and purpose involved in the structure and programme of creation.
Human history can transfigure itself into a saga of the dramatic evolution of
the particulars to the Universal through the various levels and degrees of its
manifestation. What people have been dreaming of as the glorified ideal of Rama-Rajya, or the Golden Age of Satya-Yuga of divine and eternal perfection, would
not, indeed, be a far-off object to be realised. It was a perennial message
which Plato proclaimed with the conviction of a genius when he declared that no
peace on earth can ever prevail unless philosophy goes with administration, and
administration with philosophy. We have a glorious day ahead. Humanity! Be
prepared to extend it a warm welcome.
|