Sessions with Ashram Residents

by Swami Krishnananda

Session 27: No Contradictions in the Brahma Sutra

Regarding the glorious theme of the soul's unity with God, all kinds of discussions arose, as detailed in the Brahma Sutra. Every aspect was taken into consideration. My personal opinion is, there are no contradictions as they may be appearing in the Brahma Sutra. They are all aspects of the pyramid of Truth. Those who cling to one brick and ignore another brick cannot know the whole of the structure.

There is nothing totally irrelevant in this universe. Even a hair of the body is not an irrelevant thing. Nothing either outside or inside the body can be regarded as totally useless. By comparing and contrasting with a personalistic outlook, we make the mistake of judging things from a specialised point of view, and see only difference everywhere.

The path to God is the path to nectar, but it passes through poison. In India we have a story called the Amrita Manthana, the churning the ocean for the sake of obtaining divine nectar. The gods and the demons joined together to churn the ocean to bring up the celestial nectar of the gods. The churning went on for endless time, practically. What first came up from the ocean was not nectar but a terrific poison which blinded their eyes, choked their throats and suffocated their existence, which no one could tolerate. I am not going into the story of the Amrita Manthana, but rather the implication of this story in our search for Truth.

We should not imagine that God will come merely because we want Him. The truth is, we do not wholly want Him. There is no mistake on the part of God. God is a whole being, but we are not whole beings. A fraction of a being, which is human nature, is asking the whole being, which is God, to come immediately. It is not anybody's mistake. It is an erroneous notion of one's own self by the seeker of God.

What is the poison that is coming up? It is the reaction of all the buried impulses that are in the deepest layers of our personality. If you want to have some indication of what these reactions are, you should go away from your home, live in an uninhabited place where nobody will speak to you, and you should not have any kind of facility, as if you are living in a desert with no one to speak to and no one to want you. Go on living there, doing austerity. At that time, the buried instincts will come up. You will see blackness everywhere, dirt everywhere.

Actually, there is no dirt anywhere; it is inside only. Accumulated impulses of actions performed for ages and ages of previous lives will come up. A satisfied enemy does not look like an enemy, so the impulses that are inside which are being satisfied by our sensory activities do not appear to be there at all. We say, “There is nothing wrong with me. I am a pure soul. I don't have any anger. I have no desire. I have fulfilled all my wishes. I am perfectly all right. I have renounced everything.” These are immature statements.

The waking life, the dreaming life, and our life in the state of sleep have to be examined carefully. What are we seeing in our waking life? We are seeing the world outside. How do we see the world outside through the consciousness which passes through the aperture of the eyes? What kind of consciousness have we got? It is an externalised form of the hidden instincts which are lying buried in the state of deep sleep. To give an example, it is like sunlight passing through scattered clouds in various patterns, and the light will also have various patterns— sometimes big, sometimes blurred, sometimes not visible at all. This is the kind of world we are seeing. We do not see the world; we interpret the world, or interpret something which we call the world.

Philosophers have spent their whole lives in telling us what is it that we are seeing. We are seeing our own selves in the world. Nobody will understand that this is happening. We are putting on some glasses which are made up of the fine potentials of our desires, which are in the deepest recesses of our heart. When we see the world, we are seeing our own desires, and they colour our perception. There are conflicts in the deepest recesses of our own instincts, and they colour our perception and make us feel that God has created a chaotic world, though God does not do such things. When we see sunlight reflected in water that is muddy or violently shaking, we will not see the sun. We will see a distorted appearance which is totally different from the real sun in the sky. The muddy aspect is the tamas, and the shaking of the water is the rajas.

These spectacles of instincts which form the medium through which we see anything, and through which we also see ourselves, are the reflection of the sun of the soul, the Atman, in the muddy water of the tamasic and rajasic qualities in us. When we say we see the world, we must also include ourselves because we are a part of the world. Who is seeing the world? We should not say: “I am seeing.” We are a part of the world. We cannot exist outside the world. Then who is seeing the world? The world of instincts is beholding itself in a dance of confusion similar to a bacchanalian dance, a drunken man dancing in a totally irrelevant, irregular manner. That is the reason why we are not having one minute of peace in this world. We are the creators of our sorrow. This is the poison that is coming up when we start meditating on God.

People think that they can bypass all these things and jump into God. There are many gates to the heaven of God, and we have to pass through every gate. Society is one gate, the physical body is one gate, the sense organs are one gate, the mind is one gate, the intellect is one gate, and then all that is there in the state of deep sleep is one gate. We have to pass through all this, and cannot bypass anything. The gatekeeper will stop us at every step. We have to pay our dues.

Desires cannot be crushed. Nothing can be destroyed. Anything that we have been hugging as a reality will always remain as a reality as long as we are alive, whether it is actually real or not. The real is that which our consciousness accepts to be really there. It may be a hallucination, but it is a reality for the type of consciousness which accepts that it is there. The world may be there or it may not be there; that is not the problem. The problem is that the consciousness is accepting that there is something outside. Why it is accepting it is a very deep subject. We enter into deep waters, as they say.

Hence, the moksha that we have been discussing all these days, the liberation of the soul, is not to be considered as a joke. Some complaint comes: “I have no time. I am a busy person. I go here, there, do all kinds of work the whole day. I am a family man. I have got responsibilities. Where is the time for me to sit and meditate like this?” Meditation is not one of the activities that you are performing. It is the background of all the activities. Meditation is a state of being, and not a state of doing something. You cannot say that you have no time to be. How can you say you have no time to be? You may have no time to do, but have you no time to be? Meditation is a state of being what you are, only in different stages of expansion of the dimension of being.

Expansion does not mean becoming wider and wider, which is measurable geometrically or mathematically. Being cannot be measured. Who can measure the width or the depth of your existence? It is not measurable; it is immeasurable. Your being is not the appearance of what you are now. We have discussed this several times, so I don't want to repeat that now. You are not the one you appear to be either in the waking state or in the dreaming state. You are that which seems to be hiddenly present, unperceived, in the state of deep sleep. Consciousness has no dimension. The word 'dimension' is used only figuratively. Consciousness has no dimension because it is not in space; it has no length and breadth. So the expansion of the dimension of being should be properly understood. You should not make another mistake, even if it be the right thing. We can do many right things in a wrong way. That does not work.

We cannot conceive the expansion of our being. Can you conceive who you are minus the body-mind complex? That thing which you really are even now, that has to expand in a non-measurable way. It is being rolled in itself in a non-externalised way. We have to put it in strange language because no language can suffice in explaining this situation. The path of meditation is inscrutable.

I have said something about the poison that comes up at the very beginning of our attempt to reach God. The poison does not come from outside. It is our unfulfilled longings which we have pushed inside due to the non-availability of the circumstances to fulfil them.

If, after years and years of meditation done sincerely, honestly, from the bottom of your heart, you succeed in obviating the tantrums that are created by these poisonous instincts in you, you should not think that the journey is over. The first stage is the opposition by all the unfulfilled longings inside. We have gradually evolved from the lowest mineral stage to the plant, to the animal, to the human stage. When we evolved, we brought a remnant of the earlier stages with us. We have the qualities of a stone, of a vegetable, of an animal, and of a selfish individual. Human nature is a selfish entity. There is nothing good in it, though it can be utilised for a higher purpose. We can sleep like a stone, be hungry like a plant, and be cruel like an animal. Nobody is free from these instincts. When the time comes, we manifest all these qualities. You should not say, “No, I am not like that.” The circumstances have not come wherein you can manifest this. Nobody is safe. You have to be guarded always.

When these obstacles gradually disappear, temptations arise. Instead of poison, smoke and irritation, you will see beauties everywhere. The beauties attract. The story of the churning of the ocean for nectar also tells us the stages of the ascent. In the beginning it was smoke and poison. Then one by one the jewels, the beauties, start rising up from the ocean. In the earlier stages they are small beauties, small attractions, then gradually they are more and more gorgeous beauties, and then they are magnificent attractions unimaginable by the human mind. The beauty of heaven itself can attract a person in such a way that the mind can be completely distracted from the path that is being trodden. Patanjali Maharishi, in one of his sutras, says that when the denizens of the higher stages of life invite you, be careful. In a very picturesque and humorous way, it is said that you will have the vision of the heaven of the gods. What happens? They will all invite you: “Your asceticism has fructified. Come! Here is a river of nectar. Here is a pond of milk you can bathe in. Here is a cosy sofa; be seated here. These are all the beauties who are going to serve you. Be happy. You have come here by the power of your meditations.” Patanjali says, “Don't be tempted.” Sthānyupanimantraṇe saṅgasmayākaraṇaṁ punaraniṣṭa prasaṅgāt (Y.S. 3.52). This is the sutra of Patanjali. When the denizens in the higher levels of life invite you, do not accept the invitation. Do not accept an invitation from anybody. Do not receive gifts. You do not want gifts from others; otherwise, you will fall from that place.

Christ also had to pass through these stages. A voice was heard by Christ when he was doing austerity on the top of a mountain. “Why are you sitting here and torturing your body? See the beauty,” said the voice. He saw a field of gold, all richness and beauty. “Here it is. This is the result of your austerity. Come on. Why are you wasting your time?” said the voice. But Christ was made of a different stuff. He said, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

Buddha had the same experience. He went on meditating for days and days. He saw things before him. What did he see? He saw his own wife with a little child. “You have left me and gone,” that lady said. There was no lady there, and no child. It was his own mind. Some guilt due to the desertion of his wife and child rose up inside him and came in the form of a presentation. The wife was sitting in front saying, “My dear Lord, you have left me and gone. Here is your child.” Buddha opened his eyes and thought, “How has this lady come here?” He closed his eyes. “No, it is not my wife, it is not my son. Mara is talking. No. Go, go, go!”

We also see all the grand beauties. You must read the sixth chapter of Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, which is the life of Buddha. He described what Buddha saw. The whole chapter is that only. You will be wonderstruck at what kind of life we are living. When those entities could not tempt him any more, they threatened him. “Hey, I will break your head. Get up from this place. Who are you?” There was thunder and lightning and rainfall, and he was fearstruck. He thought he would die just now, but he bore it.

We are not in a beautiful world, we are not in a world of nectar; we are in a world of opposition. Every inch of the world will oppose us. All the gatekeepers will say, “Get away from here because you have not paid the taxes that you owe.” Bypassing the body is not possible, bypassing the instincts is not possible, bypassing the law is not possible. Nothing can be bypassed. You owe a debt to everything. You have to clear the debts at every stage and not say, “What is there in the world? What is there in the family? I don't want anything. I am going to God.” This kind of talk has no meaning. You have to pay the tax. What is the tax? Those who have physically come far away from their family and their property, their mind will say, “No! What have you done?” In the Bhagavadgita we are told the objects of sense may be far away, but the taste for them will remain inside. You have rejected all the value of the world, but if they are brought before you in a concentrated form, will you receive them again or not? Ah, be careful! Nobody can renounce like that.

In the story of the Amrita Manthana, they continued churning the ocean until the grandest beauty arose. There was Lakshmi, the consort of Narayana, Vishnu. No human being could believe what kind of thing it was. Finally, nectar came.

The Brahma Sutra, therefore, does not create confusion. It only tells us the various stages and the different bricks in the structure of the ascent of the soul to God. There are no contradictions. Every school of thought is correct from one point of view. We have Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Sankhya, Yoga, Mimamsa, Vedanta, even Charvaka, Materialism, and every one of them has a meaning. Meaningless things do not exist. We have to fortify ourselves by being friendly with the structural pattern of the whole universe. We have to become the universe itself. How is it possible? By deep meditation.

I have written some essays on the cosmical type of meditation called the Vaishvanara Vidya. It is a part of the Chhandogya Upanishad. Read it again and again, again and again; go on reading it three times, four times, ten times. In the beginning, the meaning may not be clear, but then you will be able to think only in that way, and there is no other way of thinking. You will feel wonder. “O wonderful! O wonderful! O wonderful!” exclaimed the Upanishadic sage.