Darshan of Swami Krishnananda in 1999

by Swami Krishnananda

19. Being and Becoming

(Darshan given in March 1999)

Swamiji: Being is indivisible, and it cannot undergo any kind of change. Anything that undergoes change is not being. That is why people like Buddha said there is no existence anywhere of anything. Everything moves, like the water in the Ganga, for instance. You are seeing the Ganga water, but you are not seeing the same water. Every second it changes, but the quickness of the movement of the water is not caught by the eyes of the human being.

There are two things: being and becoming. Only God can be called being. As it is called the highest being, we call it the Supreme Being. All other beings are only processions. Our body is also a procession. If it had not been like that, we would not have grown from childhood to adulthood. How did a little kid suddenly become so tall? Minute transformations were taking place all the time, even in the bone structure. A short child becomes a tall man. We don't realise that the bone also grows; otherwise, how the bone is so tall? A thing like bone, which is so hard, grows, and every cell of the body changes constantly. There is a mutation of the cells of the body taking place.

There is what they call anabolic action and catabolic action. There is a constructive activity of the cells, which makes us feel that we are very well. But there is a destructive activity also, called catabolic. That which nourishes the body is anabolic. That which diminishes the strength of the body, like sense indulgence, is catabolic. Any kind of sense indulgence depletes the energy of the body. The person becomes weaker and weaker. That kind of action is called catabolic. And that which energises the body, like correct thinking...

What is correct thinking? First of all, you must know what this world is made of. We talk of people and the world and all sorts of things, but what is the stuff of this world? What is it made of? That is the stuff of your personality also. When God created the world, He was first alone, the Supreme Being. When He willed that He become another, the otherness of God's face is the world that you see. Has God become the world then, or He has not become it?

The example is given. You place a little child in a room with hundreds of mirrors all around. It will go on seeing something. It will see itself only, everywhere itself only. So God created the multiplicity of creation, but He is seeing Himself only in everything – yourself, myself, everywhere. That is the Being looking like becoming, one looking like more than one. Actually, God has not become many, just as a child has not become many by looking at itself in a mirror.

To understand the meaning of this, we have to collect the forces of our prana and our mind into a centralised point, which is actually the secret of meditation. Just imagine: Sit like this. Close your eyes. Think: From where have I come? The cosmological doctrine of creation tells us that there is a series of descent from God to the ultimate earth. The Pure Being, which is Supreme Being, is God Almighty. You may call it Brahman, the Absolute, whatever it is. That Pure Being – all this is described in the Upanishads – comprehends everything. Everything means everybody, every atom, every particle of sand, sun, moon, stars, everything is included within this Great Being.

I am mentioning to you some technique of meditation. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath three times. Look around. Think: What am I seeing? The One Being, which we call the Supreme Being, alone was, alone is, and alone will be. Why do we perceive difference in spite of there being only one Almighty God? It is the sensory activity of the human being which casts the consciousness outside into space and time, and projects that which is everywhere as if it is only somewhere.

As everything has come from the indivisible Being, we cannot really be divisible. The feeling that we are divisible – that everyone is different from everyone else, everything is different from everything else – is a kind of illusion. To free ourselves from this uncalled-for and wrong perception of duality and multiplicity, while actually there is no such thing, we have to raise our mind. Feel intensely that you are not in this world. You have gone to the sun. Think: Oh, what a great thing! Oh, I am sitting on the sun now. I am sitting on the periphery of the sun and I'm looking down to the whole creation. But where is the sun? The sun is one star among the many, which are all in the Milky Way, as we call it.

The Milky Way is a cluster of stars. Sometimes in a clear night sky you can see it, some patch which looks like milk spread out in the sky. Thousands and thousands of suns are there, but they are not touching each other. Many, many, many light years of distance are there between one spark of that famous light which looks like suns everywhere. You cannot imagine the distance. You cannot even imagine the distance between us and the sun, and here is something greater than that. The whole sky is studded with millions of suns, and we are looking at one sun. There are suns which are mightier than this sun, more distant than the distance between us and the sun, hotter than the sun. There are some stars, they say, which are about eight hundred times hotter than the sun. We cannot understand all this. There are stars you can see. Look up to the sky. These stars are not little dots of emanations. They are sometimes larger than the sun himself, but the distance makes us feel that they are all little, little things. They control us. Our body, our mind, our perceptional capacity are all controlled by the operation of these huge divinities, devatas, called the stars, the sun, the moon, and everything.

Every cell of our body is dominated by a devata. The sun is the controlling principle of the eyes. There are many other devatas – even for the hand. You cannot lift the hand unless a devata works. You cannot move the fingers unless the central government of the universe gives the order. But the human egoism is so hard that it thinks, “I shall do this, I shall do that. I go there, I come here. I have done so much.” These are all vain boastings of an individual. The order comes from the highest centre, and because of the egoistic isolation of personality from this universal whole, it appears as we are individually acting and doing things.

There is an electric light here. Suppose the bulb asserts that it is shining. “See how I'm shining!” the bulb will say. The bulb is not shining. It is the electricity passing through it that is causing the light. So we cannot say that we are doing anything. Even our thinking is conditioned by the Central Thinking. The Central Thinking is the cosmic mind, of which our mind is a little, little, tiny tot.

Like that, you take a deep breath and raise your mind to the centre of the universe – beyond the sun, beyond the stars, beyond the moon. Take the mind to the level of this ultimate creative force. You will feel that you are protected. You will have no fear afterwards – guarded well.

We have got fear because we have unnecessarily, through our egoism, separated ourselves from the cosmos. We look at the world like this, with opening the eyes. You don't know you are identical with the universe. You have come from the universe, so you cannot look at it as if it is different. If you believe that the world is outside you, it will also think you are outside, and no benefit will come. If we think that we are separate from it, it is like a renegade speaking. Then no support will come. You must be a citizen of the nation, not a renegade. Then the nation will not protect you. So we are like renegades now, completely isolated from the whole and imagining wrongly that the world is outside us. You are not outside the world and the world is not outside you. It is an integral amalgam of total experience. It is something like God-consciousness.

Like this you must meditate every day. Then energy will flow from the stars, from the sun, from the moon, from every particle of the universe. Like rain they will inundate you, and you will feel energised by the very thought of it. Very difficult to think like that. Every day early morning get up, take a deep breath, chant Om mantra. [Swamiji chants Om.] The sound waves go on spreading themselves, whatever distance. If your force of chanting is intense, it will reach up to the skies, and you will feel you are as high as the whole sky: “I am the sky. I am the Time Force.” Kālo 'smi loka-kṣaya (B.G. 11.32). This is what Bhagavan Sri Krishna speaks: “I am the Time Force which destroys things and recreates things.” You must read the Eleventh Chapter of the Bhagavadgita. It is not enough if you merely worship it. You must make it your own daily art of thinking, art of living. To be in a state of harmony with the Ultimate Being is the art of living. You are in harmony with every level of existence.