The necessity to think before we act arises on account of certain consequences that are
expected to follow from the act.
This is the logic of the mind which, by a process of internal argument known only to
itself, visualises what follows and what ought to follow from a given set of circumstances.
The capacity of the mind to reach out beyond itself is something worth considering.
Every conclusion that is drawn from known premises is actually a reaching
in respect of a realm that is not the venue that one is occupying at present.
One cannot reach out to the future, as everyone is living in the present.
But the presence of such a thing as a future, and even the nature of that future possibility,
becomes a content of the present consideration due to the present being hiddenly present
even in a future possibility, perhaps pointing out, at the same time, that there is no past,
present and future.
There is a continuity because in order that we may be aware that there is such a thing
called the past, it has to become a content of the present consciousness.
Even so is the case with the future.
That which is not yet, and is yet to be, can be known as such only when it has somehow
got accommodated into the present consciousness.
The idea of a particular prevalent condition, and the nature of the steps that we have to
take in the direction of a future possibility -- all these things take us
into the depths of our own mind.
There is a thing called mind, which is understood in many a way.
Philosophy or whatever it be, vision of life or anything that you can think of, deduction
or induction -- anything in any manner whatsoever, appears to be an activity of
the mind which is, which has been and which perhaps will ever be, a very
intriguing concept, a notion, a visualisation.
Unless we have some idea of the way in which our minds operate, it would be difficult for
us to come to any sensible and reliable conclusion in regard to what the mind
perceives or concludes as a verifiable fact. The justification of conclusions
drawn by mental cognitions can be there only on a verification
of the process of mental activity, the activity going on within our own selves.
Often people have felt that all our experiences are limited to the operations of our mind,
and even the whole world as an object of experience.
If all things in the world, whatever they be, are known to be there by a mind that acts,
and they are known to be there in the manner of the activity of the mind, there is some
point in the conclusion that all experience is subjective.
The objectivity of the fact of an experience, though it has to be granted for certain other
reasons, has also to get accommodated to the vision of the mind cast into the mould of
its own inner constitutions.
Our experiences are of the same shape and character as is the shape and character of
our mind. We have different kinds of mind, each one of us, as is well known,
and therefore we all have different kinds of experience of the world.
Not only different kinds of experience philosophically speaking, but even in our
daily life, we have different kinds of appreciation of values.
Each one lives in a totally independent world, as it were, to such an extent that the pleasures
and pains of others do not affect materially the existence of a particular person.
Even someone may die; that event of death does not materially affect or modify the life
of an individual in any manner whatsoever.
Such is the connection of the mind with the body.
The historical controversies over the nature of things, call it the point of view of the
doctrine of materialism or of socialism or any other point of view, has to be first of
all described in the pattern of the operation of the mind itself.
The vision of life is a mental vision, and a parallel consideration of this nature we
find in one of the chapters of the great work known as Panchadasi, written by the venerated
Sage Vidyaranya, in which he distinguishes between facts as they are or as they might
be and facts as they appear to the minds of people.
For certain reasons we have to accept that there is something like a world outside, but
the world that is really there outside is not the content of our daily experience.
Our duties, anxieties and activities daily are a sort of abstraction from the world that
perhaps really is there outside, abstraction enough to get accommodated into the working
of the mind in its own patterns.
Loves and hates, which dominate all experience, cannot be regarded as
present in the objects outside in themselves.
The land, the house, the material wealth which is supposed to evoke reactions in the mind
in the form of likes and dislikes, do not and cannot be expected to have these
qualities in themselves.
We do not know if land loves anybody, a house has an affection for any person, or material
possessions have any sense of value as we seem to be attributing to them.
A lovable object or an object that is despicable from any point of view is an adumbration of
that particular issue or the object from a unilateral appreciation by the mind of the
individual or groups of individuals, else it would be difficult for us to believe that
gold or silver, grains or land or wealth or house have in themselves any such quality
that can be regarded as happy or unhappy. These qualities which contribute to the
happiness or the unhappiness of people, these being life itself in its entirety, these
characteristics which are conditioning all human experience
are not to be found in the world.
In the language of Sage Vidyaranya there is a distinction between
Ishvara srishti and jiva srishti.
Ishvara srishti is the name that he gives to the world of actual objective perception,
and jiva srishti is the reaction set up by the perceiving individuals in respect of the
truly existent objective world -- Ishvara srishti.
A human being is just the same as any other human being anatomically, physiologically,
biologically; but a person is different to different persons by way of psychological
relation. It is my relation,
it my is my friend, it is my enemy, someone related to me or someone
unconnected with me, and so on and so forth, is also the case with material possessions.
The experiences of life have been considered to be psychological in their nature and it
is futile to wrangle over the true nature of things, going on arguing whether the world
is material in its nature, social in its nature, economic in its nature, or whatever it be.
These arguments seem to be out of point inasmuch as they hinge entirely, in the
end, on the manner in which human minds operate. There is no such thing as an
economic condition for animals in the forest, and many of the things that
human nature considers as ultimately meaningful do not seem to have meaning for
the subhuman species, though they also are living beings, they have the same hunger and
thirst and the instinct of survival perhaps.
The mind can create a heaven or a earth or a hell at one moment, in a single stroke of
its internal action.
Suddenly you will find yourself in heaven if the mind works in one manner, or you will
find yourself in hell in a second, though it would appear that the physical world we
call Ishvara srishthi has not changed whatsoever.
A shock of joy or a shock of sorrow, which is purely a mental appreciation of values,
can change the entire world of experience in an individual to such an extent that even
hunger, thirst and sleep will be affected.
Even life can end by excessive mental activity either in the form of inconceivable joy or
inconceivable grief. Such is the power of the mind. But where is this mind?
History of psychology has attempted to locate the mind somewhere, and we people who have
studied so much spiritual texts, scriptures, philosophies and psychological tomes have
our own idea of what the mind is, but mostly we are primitive in our concepts, whatever
be our education or study -- primitive in the sense that we cannot help the feeling
that the mind is some sort of thing inside our body. It is inside the body.
Though we cannot argue out this opinion in a satisfactory manner, instinctively we are
made to feel there is something moving inside the body, like the ball of mercury or some
sort of flexible and fluid element quickly adjusting its position from one part of the
body to another part of the body.
This is how we feel, child-like, in respect of mind's operations.
If the mind is all life, all our experiences are mental, our life and death seem to be
entirely conditioned by how the mind works, and if at the same time we begin to feel that
the mind is inside the body, it would appear that we ourselves are inside our own bodies.
But that is not the fact. We have never been able
to come to a satisfactory conclusion, even today, as to where the mind
is located -- what is its relation to the body -- because neither can we say that it
is the same as the body nor can we say that it is quite different from the body.
The entire distinction that is sometimes drawn between the mind and the body would lead to
a peculiar situation where the mind cannot act on the body at all, while we feel the
mind certainly acts on the body, changing even physiological and chemical operations
inside, and vice versa -- psychological conditions affect the mind also.
So, it is not entirely true that the mind is so very markedly set aside
in some part of the body.
It is vitally associated with the body, as if it is permeating every cell.
Inasmuch as a parallel existence of mind and body cannot be conceded due to action and
reaction appearing to take place daily between the mind and the body, as if they are one
and the same, as if they are two phases of one single element acting, many have held
that there is no such gap between the mind and the body.
It is one single act taking place which, for want of better words,
we may say is psychophysical, sometimes say psychosomatic.
'Psycho' and 'somatic' are not two different concepts; they are only two words used to
convey a single operation which is not just partly physical and partly mental but, at
the same time, psychological and physical.
We are both mind and body at the same time. We are mind-body complex.
This is what we mean by saying 'psychophysical'.
The human mind is also the human body and, vice-versa, the human body is the human
mind to such an extent that it appears that the body is nothing but a concrescence of
the mind. An ethereal, rarefied form of the body seems to be the mind,
and a more dense form of the mind is the body.
The concept of the five koshas, or sheaths, well known to us in Vedantic parlance seems
to justify this feeling. We have heard that there are sheaths --
annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya, anandamaya koshas --
described to us in such a way that we are made to feel that they are like five
shirts that the soul is putting on, like peels of an onion, one being there over the other.
But the sheaths are not so placed.
They are not coats or shirts or peels; they are densities of a particular activity, which
is called individuality, jivatva, and we cannot demarcate the presence of one sheath from
the presence and activity of another sheath. There is a gradual density, or
condensation of activity, we may say, appearing to take place from inward
to outward performance, and a rarefication from outward to inner conditions.
It is one single modification in a graduated system of concretisation of experience from
the centre of our personality inwardly to the outer periphery of our experience, ending
with the physical body.
In a similar manner seems to be the relation of the mind to the body.
Psychology in its history, right from early times till the present day, has been a very
interesting study, and its studies are not complete even today. Researches are
being conducted, to astonishing conclusions in respect of our own internal
makeup. We are great mysteries and wonders in our own selves.
We are not so simple individuals walking on the street, going for a walk, having our meal
and going to sleep. Nothing of the kind is what we are.
Very interesting, complicated, and unaccessible is our essential nature.
We are mostly in what they call the conscious level of activity.
We are just now conscious, and this state of a conscious mental activity is mostly
considered as the whole of activity.
Whatever I am thinking just now is the only thing I am capable of thinking.
This is, again, a crude understanding of how the mind can act and react.
There are immense possibilities in our mind which can shoot forth such forms of experience
that in a moment we can become different individuals, to our own surprise, and we
would not be a moment afterwards what we were a moment before.
There are capacities in us to behave in all the forms of the species that appears to be
there in creation. Every species is here, imbedded in a potential form in the human
nature, the lower as well as the higher.
The divinising potentialities and the lower potencies are both present in the human nature.
The conscious activity of the mind is not actually the whole of the activity.
Our life in the world is conditioned to such an extent by pressures from outside that we
cannot be wholly free in our conscious life.
This limitation to our mental freedom arises on account of the existence of other people
who also have similar mind and would expect a similar kind of freedom to act in society.
The conceding of freedom to others as one would like to have freedom to one's own self
is, at the same time, a limitation that one puts on the freedom of one's own self.
You cannot be entirely free if other people also are to be equally free, because the very
existence of another is a limitation on the existence of your own self.
You cannot be free, inasmuch as there are other things which are also clamouring to
be equally free. Inasmuch as everyone cannot be absolutely free
because absolute freedom granted to everyone
would be the abolition of freedom to anyone, so freedom seems to be
a very peculiar thing because it implies the presence of a limitation together with what
we consider as the act of freedom.
Thus, we do not seem to be entirely free in our conscious life.
We are bound souls, even if we are free souls as we may appear to our own selves.
I may walk on the street, who is to question me?
But you cannot walk on the street as you would like.
There are limitations set even on your walking on the street, you know very well.
You cannot behave in the way you would like under the pressures of your own inner calls
because every individual is a social unit, fortunately or unfortunately.
The social aspect of the existence of an individual is the limitation set on the
experience or freedom of the individual.
This limitation is not a happy thing, though we know very well that it is not possible
for us to live in the world with exercise of ultimate and final freedom because of the
presence of other people and other things in the world.
It would create a feeling of rancour in our own selves.
We feel unhappy that other people are, we would wish that they are not there because
if nobody else is there, one can be wholly free.
But this is only what they call building castles in the air.
It cannot be that others cannot be there.
Others have to be there, as anyone else has to be there.
So freedom has to be limited.
This consequence following from the limitation of the freedom that one exercises produces
such an effect and impact upon the mind that it very sorrowfully receives these consequences
and buries them inside. Every action produces a reaction, so while
thought can be regarded real action, the consequences,
results following from a mental action would be such impacts upon itself that it will receive
them back and keep them in a chamber created by itself, unknown to itself, on the conscious
level, deceiving itself as it were, as if these consequences have not followed at all.
We behave as if we are wholly free, though we know that we are not wholly free.
This is a self-deceptive psychological attitude, which creates inward agony.
But this agony is not consciously felt, since conscious agony would be a deathblow
to the very existence of the individual.
So the inner sorrows arising from the fact of the limitation set on human freedom, is
kept inside in a dark chamber, inaccessible to the operations of the conscious mind, as
if there is another mind altogether which is different from the conscious mind.
Actually, it is a background of the very same mind, part of which acts as the conscious
level, part of which acts as the subconscious or the unconscious, whatever you may call,
which is at the back.
These feelings, which are kept as a stock of the griefs of our own person, lie there
as ungerminated seed waiting for the rainfall of conducive circumstances, at which time
they can slowly germinate into action and surprise our own selves because we would not
know that they have been there at all.
The surprise arises because they have been kept in an unconscious form, while we have
been limiting our life to the conscious level only, never knowing that we have
other chambers of mental activity which are at the back of the conscious level.
The layers mentioned -- annamaya, pranamaya, etc. -- are just the layers
or the chambers of the human mind.
It is the mind itself that appears as these various layers called the koshas.
So these internal layers, not being brought always to the surface of conscious activity,
lie inside, dissatisfied, sleeping with a sorrow of their own that they have not been
brought to the surface of active consciousness, which means to say, you have been unfriendly
with them because an unconscious friend is no real friend.
These inner chambers of our mind have not yet become our consciously known friends.
They clamour for this recognition.
If one of you is not recognised, you would clamour for recognition by thrusting yourself
in the crowd and making yourself felt somehow or other, so that recognition
becomes a conscious operation and you are not there as a very important
person, unknown to people. So this desire to project oneself into conscious
recognition is the element present in every fibre of the mental makeup.
But inasmuch as this is not always possible due to the pressure of society from outside,
we remain always, in some percentage, grief-stricken individuals, though outwardly
we smile as if everything is fine and milk and honey are flowing in the world.
No person can be really happy in this world, inasmuch as there is a restriction on every
individual from prevailing outer circumstances.
This continuous repression of factors which are not pleasant to the mind, later on becomes
a thick cloud, as it were, covering the light of understanding.
Here is the forte of all psychoanalytical observations, that no thought of ours in the
conscious level can be regarded as a wholly free activity of the mind.
We are determined by the inner potentialities of the seeds of possible experience but which
have not yet come to the surface of conscious experience.
Though psychology generally classifies human activity into the conscious, subconscious
and unconscious layers, there are many more layers than these, and the mentioned ones
are only the operative distinctions drawn, but not actually all the
potentialities included there.
Immense are the possibilities of the mind, infinite are the capacities, and we cannot
count how many things are there in our own minds.
Though it is true that this is the state of affairs in which the human individual lives,
the story does not end here.
Psychology, psychoanalysis tells us that we are self-deceiving persons.
There is no honesty in our efforts. This is so, and this has to be so,
because we always are forced to behave as double personalities -- consciously
something and subconsciously or unconsciously another thing.
The conscious behaviour of ours is well known.
You know how we conduct ourselves in daily life, in family affairs, in political circumstances,
in our office, etc. This is something well known.
But there is something which is private, which is known by each person individually.
But privately also it is not often known due to the flood of conscious engagements in our
daily life which occupy our attention to such an extent, especially when we are very busy
people, that we cannot believe that there are inner calls at all.
A very busy person who is having no time at all for himself or herself, being a very big
gun in office, in administration, in business, whatever it is, such a person does not know
that he or she has another personality altogether inside, which will come up to
the high relief of potential action when business ceases, office goes, or there is
deviation or separation from family circumstances -- everything is lost, one
stands alone for oneself. At that time, the true personality comes up.
Spiritual seekers do not expect such a kickback from psychological nature, though they know
that such a kickback can be the fate of anyone one day or the other, if proper attention
is not paid to the potentialities in ones own self.
So what spiritual seekers generally do is, they create an artificial atmosphere of
aloneness in themselves, not actually the aloneness that is thrust upon oneself by
loss of property or getting kicked out from office, etc.
They go to a sequestered place like Uttarkashi, Gangotri, etc., and live alone to themselves,
not having even correspondence with people, not reading anything, not seeing people, just
being one's own self.
For months and years, if you live like this in your own self, you will create an atmosphere
in you which is almost similar to the atmosphere that comes upon oneself
when everything is lost.
It is at this time, when conscious activity ceases from its intensive operations, that
the inner calls come out, the ungerminated seeds come up to the surface of action, and
you begin to feel what you really are.
You suddenly become unhappy.
After a few years of stay in Gangotri alone, you will feel that you are an unhappy person.
Don't be under the impression you will find yourself to be an angel after you do deep
meditation. Nothing of the kind is possible.
You will find that some trouble has suddenly emerged from within your own
self, from sources which are unknown to you.
People who live in such isolated places for a protracted period come down to the cities
in order that they may not go crazy because the pressure of the unfulfilled, frustrated
feelings oftentimes becomes so into intolerable that you have to palliate them by feeding
them with their requirements, that which you cannot do in a sequestered place like Gangotri
or top of Mount Everest.
But all the same, this is something worthwhile knowing -- what kind of persons we are.
The necessity to know all the inner potentialities of ours arises because we
are all these potentialities. Unknown things are not non-existent things.
Therefore, unknown potentialities in us are not something other than what we are;
they are just we. So it is necessary for us to be good psychologists
of our own selves, not just teachers of psychology
to the students in a college, but we should know how our own mind is working.
If we are happy just now, why are we happy? What has happened to us?
If suddenly a mood of depression takes possession of us, what is the matter?
Something is not all right. Something is wrong with me.
Many a time, the extent of conscious life in which we get involved is so intensive that
we cannot go deep into our own selves and discover what has happened to us when we are
in a state of moody depression or in a state of melancholy.
"I am not well. I don't eat. Let me be alone.
Let me go to sleep or go for a long walk, go for an excursion. Let me have a tour."
These ideas arise in the mind because of a sudden spurt of sorrow inside in being alone
to one's own self, for reasons which one cannot understand.
But it is necessary to understand what is happening to us.
Ignorance of law is no excuse.
If you are unhappy, you must know why you are unhappy.
You cannot say, "I don't know." This "I don't know" business
will not work in the world. Everyone has to know the law operating in nature,
in society, in one's own individuality also.
So psychoanalysis, particularly, has taken the trouble of going into the depths of these
mental operations and disillusioning us from the complacent view that all things are well
with us. We are not such angels as we appear to be or we pretend to be in human society.
We are crude matter inside our own selves, which comes to the surface
only when it is rubbed hard.
This rubbing hard of the inner potentialities takes place when either the conscious activity
ceases because of the exhaustion its own momentum or because conscious activity
becomes impossible due to conditioning factors operating from outside in human society.
So psychology, especially in the field of psychoanalysis, has its findings that we are
a big cloud of unknowing rather than an illuminated radiance of all knowledge.
To such an extent are we the cloud that even our intellection, ratiocination and education,
we may say, even the culture that we seem to be putting on, are just adumbrations of
a cloud that we essentially are. Ignorance conditions even our knowledge.
All our knowledge, all our education, our culture also seems to be a sort of projection
of a basic ignorance of the values of life, and this is the reason why, educated or not,
cultured or not, that you are, you are capable of being unhappy one day.
Neither have you the power that your expect to have, nor are you happy in the manner you
would to have, nor are you wealthy -- nothing of the kind is your prerogative.
This is one side of the picture of the human personality, which psychology brings to the
surface of our understanding that we are not just that thing which we appear to be in social
life. We are also something which we are in our individual life.
The Indian counterpart of Western psychology has a theory of its own which explains, perhaps
in greater detail, the inner contents of the deeper potentialities, in Western language
called the unconscious, but in the Eastern philosophical parlance called the
anandamaya kosha, the deepest recesses of our own selves.
This anandamaya kosha, or the unconscious level of our personality, is not just something
created in this life only. It is not that you are suddenly
born into this world from nowhere and all your experiences,
pleasurable or otherwise, are created by actions and reactions of this life only.
Western psychology does not have the leisure to accept that a previous life of the individual
also could be possible, but for which, present experiences can not be entirely accounted for.
The anandamaya kosha, or the deepest unconscious, is the reservoir of potentialities
stored up within our own selves of all frustrated feelings come from various
incarnations through which we have passed in earlier types of creation and ages.
The stored-up potentialities in anandamaya kosha, or the unconscious, germinate not all
suddenly, but gradually, little by little, as it may happen if rain falls only in some
part of the world, in some other part of the world it does not rain at all.
So while seeds can be thrown on the soil throughout the earth, all the seeds may
not germinate at the same time. Because of scarcity of rainfall,
it will germinate only where conditions are good, atmospherically.
Likewise, all the potentialities in us do not manifest into action in our life, and
certain portions of the stock existing only act as conscious life.
These percentages, or certain aspects, or certain packages of the existing stock coming
into action in conscious life, are called prarabhda karma.
The prarabhda is only a retail commodity that is kept by the shopkeeper outside for daily
use, but he has more commodity inside, in the godown,
which is the reservoir of his resources.
We are said to be experiencing prarabhda karma, as we know, as it is said well,
which simply means we are not the whole of what we are even throughout our life.
We cannot be that because of the fact the whole storage of the unconscious, or the
anandamaya, cannot come into action because conditions in the world are not
permitting the manifestation of all these potentialities.
We have to be cosmic individuals, suddenly enlarging our dimension to the entire cosmos
in order that all the potentialities stored up within can come into action suddenly --
which we are not, and therefore which we cannot do.
Individuals that we are, we have a limited capacity to manifest all the potentialities,
and so we are just some little things in our individualities, and not all things. In the
potentialities will be brought into surface of action, and you would be different
things altogether. Next birth may not be the same thing as now.
Neither our experiences of this birth are to be the same in the next birth --
we may even change our sexes.
A man today need not be a man next birth. A woman today need not be a woman.
One can be anything and everything, pleasant or unpleasant, higher or lower, and so many
things is a particular individual.
So to restrict our view of life only to what is available to us today on the conscious
surface is not part of wisdom, says Indian psychology and, a similar way, Western
psychology also tells us, not going of course to such depths, that the vision of things
manifested by the human mind in the conscious level is an artificially conditioned projection,
and it is not even the whole of the possibility.
There is therefore a chance of the reverting of the individual into the baser instincts
when occasion arises, though a human being does not always behave
like an instinctive animal.
The child that is born does not seem to have all these complications in its mind because
of all the instincts lying sleeping in the child, and it has
practically no conscious desires.
It has only a biological existence -- very little of what we call psychological existence.
It lives, it breathes, but it cannot think as a developed conscious mind can think.
It gradually grows into the capacity to manifest what was lying latent in itself.
It was not merely a biological unit; it was something like a material content earlier,
in the womb of the mother. It was material stuff only, not even having a life.
It assumed life a little later on, and the question of psyche operating in it does not
arise at all in those rudimentary stages.
It gradually manifests its potentialities as it grows into awareness of society and
also awareness of what was lying dormant in one's own self.
Basically hunger and thirst are the primary instincts in the human individual.
Everything else comes afterwards. When all things go, these only remain.
You would like to eat, you would like to drink and then be breathing; that is all that we
want, and nothing else would be asked.
Conditions which are atrocious in life may drive us into that acceptance of our minimum
requirement -- only food and drink and breathing. This is vegetable existence,
biological existence, which is seen manifest in a newborn child,
but it becomes more and more artificially construed and constructed when externalising
impulses manifest themselves, by way of intensive activity for self-protection,
self-preservation. It moves earth and heaven to see that it survives,
and in any manner it has to survive.
The psychological aspect of this situation is that, at least from the point of view of
Western psychoanalysis, the mind that the human individual uses in a developed state
of individuality is just a kind of instrument that biological instincts use, so that from
this point of view at least, even today at the height of our understanding mentally and
rationally, we are basically biological, animalistic, full of instincts that are
subhuman, and the so-called cultures of mankind and the educations of humanity
are outer circumstances created by biological conditions for their own survival.
All social life is selfish life. This would be the final conclusion of psychoanalysis: Basically
everybody is selfish to such an extent that one is indistinguishable from an animal.
This vision of life, which is briefly stated for the further consideration of its implications,
is to highlight what we can be, other than what we are socially, culturally and
educationally from our present-day understanding of what education is,
culture is or social life is. That there is some truth in these findings of
psychology and psychoanalysis can be appreciated
by every one of us who lives a private life, if at all anyone has a private life in this
modern world. We are never private at any time. We are busy people.
We are always with somebody, in a family, in an office, here, there, in a market place,
in a railway train, in a bus -- wherever you are, you are with somebody.
You are never alone. Wonderful that we cannot be our own selves.
Therefore, we cannot know even our own selves.
The problems of humanity that are besetting it today, are considered by these systems
of findings that as outcomes of the hidden potentialities of unhappiness which cannot
be brought to the surface of consciousness due to it being conditioned by social life
and it being not always possible for the individual to be wholly free to act
as one would like to act.
Though dreaming condition... Yet Indian psychology goes deeper than Western
psychoanalysis and says that there is something eternally operating in us,
not merely psychologically acting, as it is often told us.
Hence, the vision of psychology, it is entirely true, of course, from the angle from which
it is operating and acting and telling us; it is true, and yet it is individualistic
in its approach and does not take into consideration the non-individualistic
associations of the human individual.
On the earlier two days, we had occasion to consider certain aspects of human nature which
are not just individualistic.
For psychology and psychoanalysis, we are only individuals.
We are like animals, and all our life is just mentally constructed from the point of view
of those unseen forces buried in us, so that our conscious life seems to be an arena of
utter sorrow appearing to be a life of happiness. But this is not the whole truth of the matter.
We have an eternity inside our temporal occupations and experiences.
All the problems and sorrows of life are misconceived adjustments, or rather,
maladjustments, we may say, of the human individual.
Basically, at essence, we are not constituted of sorrow only.
Human nature is not a bundle of griefs.
It is basically a preparation for eternal happiness, which cannot be had under
conditions of pressure exerted by any kind of maneuvering of the mind wrongly by
maladjustment of itself in the circumstances in which it is placed.
So the considerations of these doctrines -- materialistic, humanistic, psychological,
whatever they be -- do not seem to exhaust all the possibilities of human nature.
There is still an asking beyond us.
Granting all freedom from problems in human existence, making one happy in social life,
giving all the wealth that the earth can bequeath, with all these things, there
would be an asking further. A more is there beyond the more that is given to us.
Life is a more potentiality of the individual, and not merely a limited possibility of socially
restricted individualistic operations.
Thus, our considerations of the different visions of life, appearing to be interesting,
very incisive in their probes, very valid also in certain fields of life, are not exhaustive.
Whatever description one may give about yourself, though complete apparently in
itself, is not really complete. No one can describe what a human being is.
Though we can give some sort of a description from the point of view of the physical body,
social relations, offices that one holds, wealth that one possess, and so on and so
forth, all these definitions, the bio-data of the human individual, would not be
an exhaustive consideration of the individual.
There is something more about us than we can think of in our own selves.
There is an infinity masquerading in the form of individuality, an eternity crying for recognition
even in the midst of temporal vicissitudes. Hari Om Tat Sat.
Om purnamadah purnamidam purnat purnamudachyate, purnasya purnamadaya
purnamevavashisyate. Om shanti shanti shanti.