The Vision of Life

by Swami Krishnananda

Chapter 3: Psychological and Psychoanalytical Vision

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 minds. There is a thing called mind, which is understood in many a way. Philosophy or whatever it be—a vision of life or anything that we 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 minds, and even the whole world as an object of experience should be regarded as entirely coloured by the spectacles that we put on in the form of mental operations. This consideration has lead people to such an extent that many have not hesitated to conclude that the world is merely a subjective form of appreciation. 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 minds.

We have different kinds of minds, each one of us, as is well known, and therefore we all have different kinds of experiences of the world. Not only different kinds of experiences, 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 materially affect 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 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 we find a parallel consideration of this nature in one of the chapters of the great work known as the 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 daily duties, anxieties and activities are a sort of abstraction from the world that perhaps really is there outside, abstraction enough to be accommodated into the working of the mind in its own patterns. Loves and hates, which dominate all experience, cannot be regarded as being present in the objects outside in themselves. The land, the house, the material wealth which are 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 the land loves anybody, the house has 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 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 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 the sage Vidyaranya there is a distinction between Ishvarasrishti and jivasrishti. Ishvarasrishti is the name that he gives to the world of actual objective perception, and jivasrishti is the reaction set up by the perceiving individuals in respect of the truly existent objective world. A human being is just the same as any other human being anatomically, physiologically and biologically, but a person is different to different persons by way of psychological relation. It is my relation, it is my friend, my enemy, someone related to me or someone unconnected with me, and so on and so forth; this 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 subhuman species, though they also are living beings and perhaps they have the same hunger and thirst and instinct of survival. The mind can create a heaven or an earth or a hell in one moment, at a single stroke of its internal action. Suddenly we will find ourselves in heaven if the mind works in one manner, or we will find ourselves in hell, though it would appear that the physical world we call Ishvara srishti 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 are 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? The history of psychology has attempted to locate the mind somewhere, and we people who have studied so many 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 that there is something moving inside the body, like a 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—childlike in respect of the 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 this is not the fact. We have never been able to come to a satisfactory conclusion, even today, as to where the mind is located and 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 that the mind certainly acts on the body, changing even physiological and chemical operations inside and vice versa—physiological 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 the mind and the body cannot be conceded due to the 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 psycho-physical, sometimes 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 is psychological and physical.

We are both mind and body at the same time. We are the mind-body complex. This is what we mean by saying 'psycho-physical'—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, rarified 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, koshas—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 gradated 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 relationship of the mind to the body. Psychology in its history, right from early times until 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 make-up. We are great mysteries and wonders in our own selves. We are not so simple individuals—going for a walk, having our meal and going to sleep—nothing of the kind is what we are. Very interesting, complicated and inaccessible 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 whole of what I am thinking. This is, again, a crude understanding of how the mind can act and react. There are immense possibilities in our minds 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 as all the forms of species that appear to be there in creation. Every species is embedded here in potential form in human nature, the lower as well as the higher. The divinised potentialities and the lower potencies are both present in human nature. The conscious activity of the mind is not actually the whole of activity.

Our life in the world is conditioned by pressures from outside to such an extent 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 minds 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. We 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 our own self. We 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, freedom seems to be a very peculiar thing as it implies the presence of a limitation together with what we consider to be the act of freedom.

Thus we do not seem to be entirely free in our conscious life. We are bound souls, even if we may seem to be free souls as we may appear to our own selves. I may walk on the street—who is to question me? But we cannot walk on the street as we would like. There are limitations set even to our walking on the street, we know very well. We cannot behave in the way we would like under the pressures of our 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 an 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 are not 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 as reaction, the consequences, results following from a mental action would have such impact upon itself that it would 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 such conscious agony would be a death blow to the very existence of the individual. So the inner sorrows arising from the fact of the limitations set on human freedom are 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 we may call it, which is at the back. These fields, which are kept as a stock of our griefs, lie there as ungerminated seeds waiting for the rainfall of conducive circumstances, at which time they can slowly germinate into action and surprise us, 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, koshas—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 always being brought 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, we have been unfriendly with them, because an unconscious friend is no real friend. These inner chambers of our minds have not yet become our consciously known friends. They clamour for this recognition. If one of us is not recognised, we would clamour for recognition by thrusting ourself in the crowd and making ourself felt somehow or other, so that recognition becomes a conscious operation and we are not there as a very unimportant person, unknown to people. So this desire to project oneself into conscious recognition is the element present in every fibre of the mental make-up. But inasmuch as this is not possible due to the pressure of society from outside, we remain always, in some percentage, grief-stricken individuals, though outwardly 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 prevailing from outer circumstances on every individual.

This continuous repression of factors that 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 observation—that no thought of ours on the conscious level can be regarded as a wholly free activity of the mind, and we are determined by the inner potentialities of the seeds of possible experience that 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 and psychoanalysis tell 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 are always forced to behave as double personalities—consciously something and subconsciously or unconsciously another thing. Our conscious behaviour is well known. We know very well how we conduct ourselves in daily life, in family affairs, in political circumstances, in our office, etc. But there is something which is private, which is known by each person individually, though even privately 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 has no time at all for himself or herself, being a very big gun in the 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 high relief of potential action when business ceases, office ends, or there is deviation or separation from family circumstances, when everything is lost and one stands alone to oneself. At that time the true personality comes up. Spiritual seekers do not expect such a kickback of a 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 one's own self.

So spiritual seekers generally create an artificial atmosphere of aloneness in themselves, which is not actually the aloneness that is thrust upon oneself by the loss of property or getting kicked out from the office, etc. They go to a sequestered place like Uttarkashi, Gangotri, etc. and live alone to themselves, not even having correspondence with people, not reading anything, not seeing people, just being to one's own self. If we live like this in our own self for months and years, we will create an atmosphere within us 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 we begin to feel what we really are. We suddenly become unhappy. After a few years of staying alone in Gangotri, we will feel that we are a unhappy person. Do not be under the impression we will find ourself to be an angel after we do deep meditation. Nothing of the kind is possible; we will find that some trouble has suddenly emerged from within our own self, from sources that are unknown to us. 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 they have to palliate them by feeding them with their requirements, which they cannot do in a sequestered place like Gangotri or on top of Mount Everest.

But all the same, it is worthwhile knowing what kind of persons we are. The necessity to know all our inner potentialities arises because we are all these potentialities. Unknown things are not non-existent things. Therefore the unknown potentialities in us are not something other than what we are—they are just us. So it is necessary for us to be good psychologists of our own self. We should not just be teachers of psychology to students in a college—we should also know how our own mind is working. If we are happy right 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 us. Many a time the extent of conscious life in which we get involved is so intense that when we are in a state of moody depression or in a state of melancholy, we cannot go deep into our own self and discover what has happened to us. “I am not well. I do not 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 inner spurt of sorrow 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 the law is no excuse. If we are unhappy, we must know why we are unhappy. We 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, and also in one's own individuality. 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 self, 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 of 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 found that we are a big cloud of unknowing rather than an illuminated radiance of all knowledge. To such an extent are we clouded that even our intellection, ratiocination and education, we may say, even the culture that we seem to be putting on, are just adumbrations of the cloud that we essentially are, and ignorance conditions even our knowledge.

All our knowledge, all our education, all 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, we are capable of being unhappy one day. Neither have we the power that we expect to have, nor are we happy in the manner we would to like be, nor are we wealthy—nothing of the kind is our prerogative. This is one side of the picture of the human personality, which psychology brings to the surface of our understanding. We are not just that 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 Eastern philosophical parlance called the anandmaya kosha, the deepest recesses of our own self. This anandmaya kosha, or the unconscious level of our personality, is not just something created only in this life. It is not that we are suddenly born into this world from nowhere and all our experiences, pleasurable or otherwise, are created by actions and reactions of only this life. 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 self 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 the anandamaya kosha, or the unconscious, do not all germinate suddenly, but gradually, little by little, as it may happen if rain falls only in some part of the world and in some other parts 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 due to scarcity of rainfall. They will germinate only where conditions are good, atmospherically. Likewise, all the potentialities in us do not manifest into action in our life, and only certain portions of the existing stock act in conscious life. These percentages, or certain aspects or certain packages of the existing stock coming into action in conscious life are called prarabdha karma. The prarabdha is only a retail commodity that is kept by the shopkeeper outside for daily use, but he has more commodities inside, in the storeroom that is the reservoir of his resources. What we experience is said to be prarabdha karma, which simply means we are not the whole of what we are even throughout our life. We cannot be that due to the fact that the whole storage of the unconscious, or the anandamaya, cannot come into action because conditions in the world do not permit 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 —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 future births that we are likely to take, certain other unused packages of potentialities will be brought to the surface of action and we will be different things altogether. Next birth may not be the same thing as now, nor will our experiences of this birth be the same in the next birth—we may even change our sex. A man today need not be a man in the next birth. A woman today need not be a woman in the next birth. One can be anything and everything, pleasant or unpleasant, higher or lower, as there are so many things in a particular individual.

So to restrict our view of life only to what is available to us today on the conscious surface is not wisdom, says Indian psychology; and in a similar way Western psychology also tells us, of course not going to such depths, that the vision of things manifested by the human mind on the conscious level is an artificially conditioned projection and it is not even the whole possibility. There is therefore a chance of the individual reverting to the baser instincts when the 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 all the instincts lie sleeping in the child and it has practically no conscious desires. It has mostly a biological existence and very little of what we call a 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 a biological content earlier, in the womb of the mother, and the question of a psyche operating in it does not arise at all in those rudimentary stages. It gradually manifests its potentialities as it grows into the awareness of society and also the awareness of what was lying dormant in its own self.

Basically, hunger and thirst are the primary instincts in the human individual. Everything else comes afterwards. When all things go, only these remain. We would like to eat, we would like to drink and keep breathing—that is all that we want, and nothing else would be asked. Conditions which are atrocious in life may drive us to that acceptance of our minimum requirements—only food and drink and breathing. This vegetable existence, biological existence, 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 and 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 mental and rational understanding, we are basically biological, animalistic, full of instincts that are subhuman, and the so-called cultures of mankind and the education 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 we are indistinguishable from animals.

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, in a marketplace, in a railway train, in a bus—wherever we are, we are with somebody. We are never alone. We cannot be our own self, and therefore we cannot know even our own self.

The problems that are besetting humanity today are considered by these systems of findings as the outcomes of the hidden potentialities of unhappiness which cannot be brought to the surface of consciousness due to their being conditioned by social life and it not always being possible for the individual to be wholly free to act as one would like to act. Though it is true that we have inner potentialities in the anandamaya kosha, in the unconscious levels, and sometimes some of these are experienced by us translucently though not very transparently in the dreaming condition, yet Indian psychology goes deeper than Western psychoanalysis and says that there is something eternally operating in us, and not merely psychologically as we are often told.

Hence the vision of psychology 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. Earlier 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 our entire life is 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 the essence, we are not constituted only of sorrow. Human nature is not a bundle of grief. It is basically a preparation for eternal happiness, which cannot be had under conditions of pressure exerted by any kind of wrong manoeuvring of the mind by a maladjustment of itself with 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 and more and more, an endless more, and an asking for further and further possibilities, the end of which one cannot reach. Infinity seems to be the 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 oneself, though apparently complete 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, office 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.