HAPPY DEEPAVALI TO YOU ALL. MAY GOD ENLIGHTEN YOUR HEART WITH JOY AND PEACE.
(A class-lecture
delivered in America by Swami Vivekananda)
First among the
qualifications required of the aspirant for Jnâna, or wisdom, come Shama and
Dama, which may be taken together. They mean the keeping of the organs in their
own centres without allowing them to stray out. I shall explain to you first
what the word "organ" means. Here are the eyes; the eyes are not the
organs of vision but only the instruments. Unless the organs also are present,
I cannot see, even if I have eyes. But, given both the organs and the
instruments, unless the mind attaches itself to these two, no vision takes
place. So, in each act of perception, three things are necessary — first, the
external instruments, then, the internal organs, and lastly, the mind. If any
one of them be absent, then there will be no perception. Thus the mind acts
through two agencies —one external, and the other internal. When I see things,
my mind goes out, becomes externalised; but suppose I close my eyes and begin to
think, the mind does not go out, it is internally active. But, in either case,
there is activity of the organs. When I look at you and speak to you, both the
organs and the instruments are active. When I close my eyes and begin to think,
the organs are active, but not the instruments. Without the activity of these
organs, there will be no thought. You will find that none of you can think
without some symbol. In the case of the blind man, he has also to think through
some figure. The organs of sight and hearing are generally very active. You
must bear in mind that by the word "organ" is meant the nerve centre
in the brain. The eyes and ears are only the instruments of seeing and hearing,
and the organs are inside. If the organs are destroyed by any means, even if
the eyes or the ears be there, we shall not see or hear. So in order to control
the mind, we must first be able to control these organs. To restrain the mind
from wandering outward or inward, and keep the organs in their respective
centres, is what is meant by the words Shama and Dama. Shama consists in not
allowing the mind to externalise, and Dama, in checking the external
instruments.
Now comes Uparati which
consists in not thinking of things of the senses. Most of our time is spent in
thinking about sense-objects, things which we have seen, or we have heard,
which we shall see or shall hear, things which we have eaten, or are eating, or
shall eat, places where we have lived, and so on. We think of them or talk of
them most of our time. One who wishes to be a Vedantin must give up this habit.
Then comes the next
preparation (it is a hard task to be a philosopher!), Titikshâ, the most
difficult of all. It is nothing less than the ideal forbearance — "Resist
not evil." This requires a little explanation. We may not resist an evil,
but at the same time we may feel very miserable. A man may say very harsh
things to me, and I may not outwardly hate him for it, may not answer him back,
and may restrain myself from apparently getting angry, but anger and hatred may
be in my mind, and I may feel very badly towards that man. That is not
non-resistance; I should be without any feeling of hatred or anger, without any
thought of resistance; my mind must then be as calm as if nothing had happened.
And only when I have got to that state, have I attained to non-resistance, and
not before. Forbearance of all misery, without even a thought of resisting or
driving it out, without even any painful feeling in the mind, or any remorse —
this is Titiksha. Suppose I do not resist, and some great evil comes thereby;
if I have Titiksha, I should no feel any remorse for not having resisted. When
the mind has attained to that state, it has become established in Titiksha.
People in India do extraordinary things in order to practice this Titiksha.
They bear tremendous heat and cold without caring, they do not even care for
snow, because they take no thought for the body; it is left to itself, as if it
were a foreign thing.
The next qualification
required is Shraddhâ, faith. One must have tremendous faith in religion and
God. Until one has it, one cannot aspire to be a Jnâni. A great sage once told
me that not one in twenty millions in this world believed in God. I asked him
why, and he told me, "Suppose there is a thief in this room, and he gets
to know that there is a mass of gold in the next room, and only a very thin
partition between the two rooms; what will be the condition of that
thief?" I answered, "He will not be able to sleep at all; his brain
will be actively thinking of some means of getting at the gold, and he will
think of nothing else." Then he replied, "Do you believe that a man
could believe in God and not go mad to get him? If a man sincerely believes
that there is that immense, infinite mine of Bliss, and that It can be reached,
would not that man go mad in his struggle to reach it ?" Strong faith in
God and the consequent eagerness to reach Him constitute Shraddha.
Then comes Samâdhâna,
or constant practice, to hold the mind in God. Nothing is done in a day. Religion
cannot be swallowed in the form of a pill. It requires hard and constant
practice. The mind can be conquered only by slow and steady practice.
Next is Mumukshutva,
the intense desire to be free. Those of you who have read Edwin Arnold's Light
of Asia remember his translation of the first sermon of Buddha, where Buddha
says,
Ye suffer from
yourselves. None else compels.
None other holds you
that ye live and die,
And whirl upon the
wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony,
Its tire of tears, its
nave of nothingness.
All the misery we have
is of our own choosing; such is our nature. The old Chinaman, who having been
kept in prison for sixty years was released on the coronation of a new emperor,
exclaimed, when he came out, that he could not live; he must go back to his
horrible dungeon among the rats and mice; he could not bear the light. So he
asked them to kill him or send him back to the prison, and he was sent back.
Exactly similar is the condition of all men. We run headlong after all sorts of
misery, and are unwilling to be freed from them. Every day we run after
pleasure, and before we reach it, we find it is gone, it has slipped through
our fingers. Still we do not cease from our mad pursuit, but on and on we go,
blinded fools that we are.
In some oil mills in
India, bullocks are used that go round and round to grind the oil-seed. There
is a yoke on the bullock's neck. They have a piece of wood protruding from the
yoke, and on that is fastened a wisp of straw. The bullock is blindfolded in
such a way that it can only look forward, and so it stretches its neck to get
at the straw; and in doing so, it pushes the piece of wood out a little
further; and it makes another attempt with the same result, and yet another,
and so on. It never catches the straw, but goes round and round in the hope of
getting it, and in so doing, grinds out the oil. In the same way you and I who
are born slaves to nature, money and wealth, wives and children, are always
chasing a wisp of straw, a mere chimera, and are going through an innumerable
round of lives without obtaining what we seek. The great dream is love; we are
all going to love and be loved, we are all going to be happy and never meet
with misery, but the more we go towards happiness, the more it goes away from
us. Thus the world is going on, society goes on, and we, blinded slaves, have
to pay for it without knowing. Study your own lives, and find how little of
happiness there is in them, and how little in truth you have gained in the course
of this wild-goose chase of the world.
Do you remember the
story of Solon and Croesus? The king said to the great sage that Asia Minor was
a very happy place. And the sage asked him, "Who is the happiest man? I
have not seen anyone very happy." "Nonsense," said Croesus,
"I am the happiest man in the world." "Wait, sir, till the end
of your life; don't be in a hurry," replied the sage and went away. In
course of time that king was conquered by the Persians, and they ordered him to
be burnt alive. The funeral pyre was prepared and when poor Croesus saw it, he
cried aloud "Solon! Solon!" On being asked to whom he referred, he
told his story, and the Persian emperor was touched, and saved his life.
Such is the life-story
of each one of us; such is the tremendous power of nature over us. It
repeatedly kicks us away, but still we pursue it with feverish excitement. We
are always hoping against hope; this hope, this chimera maddens us; we are
always hoping for happiness.
There was a great king
in ancient India who was once asked four questions, of which one was:
"What is the most wonderful thing in the world?" "Hope,"
was the answer. This is the most wonderful thing. Day and nights we see people
dying around us, and yet we think we shall not die; we never think that we
shall die, or that we shall suffer. Each man thinks that success will be his,
hoping against hope, against all odds, against all mathematical reasoning.
Nobody is ever really happy here. If a man be wealthy and have plenty to eat,
his digestion is: out of order, and he cannot eat. If a man's digestion be
good, and he have the digestive power of a cormorant, he has nothing to put
into his mouth. If he be rich, he has no children. If he be hungry and poor, he
has a whole regiment of children, and does not know what to do with them. Why
is it so? Because happiness and misery are the obverse and reverse of the same
coin; he who takes happiness, must take misery also. We all have this foolish
idea that we can have happiness without misery, and it has taken such
possession of us that we have no control over the senses.
When I was in Boston, a
young man came up to me, and gave me a scrap of paper on which he had written a
name and address, followed by these words: "All the wealth and all the
happiness of the world are yours, if you only know how to get them. If you come
to me, I will teach you how to get them. Charge, $ 5." He gave me this and
said, "What do you think of this?" I said, "Young man, why don't
you get the money to print this? You have not even enough money to get this
printed !" He did not understand this. He was infatuated with the idea
that he could get immense wealth and happiness without any trouble. There are
two extremes into which men are running; one is extreme optimism, when everything
is rosy and nice and good; the other, extreme pessimism, when everything seems
to be against them. The majority of men have more or less undeveloped brains.
One in a million we see with a well-developed brain; the rest either have
peculiar idiosyncrasies, or are monomaniacs.
Naturally we run into
extremes. When we are healthy and young, we think that all the wealth of the
world will be ours, and when later we get kicked about by society like
footballs and get older, we sit in a corner and croak and throw cold water on
the enthusiasm of others. Few men know that with pleasure there is pain, and
with pain, pleasure; and as pain is disgusting, so is pleasure, as it is the
twin brother of pain. It is derogatory to the glory of man that he should be
going after pain, and equally derogatory, that he should be going after
pleasure. Both should be turned aside by men whose reason is balanced. Why will
not men seek freedom from being played upon? This moment we are whipped, and
when we begin to weep, nature gives us a dollar; again we are whipped, and when
we weep, nature gives us a piece of ginger-bread, and we begin to laugh again.
The sage wants liberty;
he finds that sense-objects are all vain and that there is no end to pleasures
and pains. How many rich people in the world want to find fresh pleasures! All
pleasures are old, and they want new ones. Do you not see how many foolish
things they are inventing every day, just to titillate the nerves for a moment,
and that done, how there comes a reaction? The majority of people are just like
a flock of sheep. If the leading sheep falls into a ditch, all the rest follow
and break their necks. In the same way, what one leading member of a society
does, all the others do, without thinking what they are doing. When a man
begins to see the vanity of worldly things, he will feel he ought not to be
thus played upon or borne along by nature. That is slavery. If a man has a few
kind words said to him, he begins to smile, and when he hears a few harsh
words, he begins to weep. He is a slave to a bit of bread, to a breath of air;
a slave to dress, a slave to patriotism, to country, to name, and to fame. He
is thus in the midst of slavery and the real man has become buried within,
through his bondage. What you call man is a slave. When one realises all this
slavery, then comes the desire to be free; an intense desire comes. If a piece
of burning charcoal be placed on a man's head, see how he struggles to throw it
off. Similar will be the struggles for freedom of a man who really understands
that he is a slave of nature.
We have now seen what
Mumukshutva, or the desire to be free, is. The next training is also a very
difficult one. Nityânitya-Viveka — discriminating between that which is true
and that which is untrue, between the eternal and the transitory. God alone is
eternal, everything else is transitory. Everything dies; the angels die, men
die, animals die, earths die, sun, moon, and stars, all die; everything
undergoes constant change. The mountains of today were the oceans of yesterday
and will be oceans tomorrow. Everything is in a state of flux. The whole
universe is a mass of change. But there is One who never changes, and that is
God; and the nearer we get to Him, the less will be the change for us, the less
will nature be able to work on us; and when we reach Him, and stand with Him,
we shall conquer nature, we shall be masters of phenomena of nature, and they
will have no effect on us.
You see, if we really
have undergone the above discipline, we really do not require anything else in
this world. All knowledge is within us. All perfection is there already in the
soul. But this perfection has been covered up by nature; layer after layer of
nature is covering this purity of the soul. What have we to do? Really we do not
develop our souls at all. What can develop the perfect? We simply take the evil
off; and the soul manifests itself in its pristine purity, its natural, innate
freedom.
Now begins the inquiry:
Why is this discipline so necessary? Because religion is not attained through
the ears, nor through the eyes, nor yet through the brain. No scriptures can
make us religious. We may study all the books that are in the world, yet we may
not understand a word of religion or of God. We may talk all our lives and yet
may not be the better for it; we may be the most intellectual people the world
ever saw, and yet we may not come to God at all. On the other hand, have you
not seen what irreligious men have been produced from the most intellectual
training? It is one of the evils of your Western civilisation that you are
after intellectual education alone, and take no care of the heart. It only
makes men ten times more selfish, and that will be your destruction. When there
is conflict between the heart and the brain, let the heart be followed, because
intellect has only one state, reason, and within that, intellect works, and
cannot get beyond. It is the heart which takes one to the highest plane, which
intellect can never reach; it goes beyond intellect, and reaches to what is called
inspiration. Intellect can never become inspired; only the heart when it is
enlightened, becomes inspired. An intellectual, heartless man never becomes an
inspired man. It is always the heart that speaks in the man of love; it
discovers a greater instrument than intellect can give you, the instrument of
inspiration. Just as the intellect is the instrument of knowledge, so is the
heart the instrument of inspiration. In a lower state it is a much weaker
instrument than intellect. An ignorant man knows nothing, but he is a little
emotional by nature. Compare him with a great professor — what wonderful power
the latter possesses! But the professor is bound by his intellect, and he can
be a devil and an intellectual man at the same time; but the man of heart can
never be a devil; no man with emotion was ever a devil. Properly cultivated,
the heart can be changed, and will go beyond intellect; it will be changed into
inspiration. Man will have to go beyond intellect in the end. The knowledge of
man, his powers of perception, of reasoning and intellect and heart, all are
busy churning this milk of the world. Out of long churning comes butter, and
this butter is God. Men of heart get the "butter", and the
"buttermilk" is left for the intellectual.
These are all
preparations for the heart, for that love, for that intense sympathy
appertaining to the heart. It is not at all necessary to be educated or learned
to get to God. A sage once told me, "To kill others one must be equipped
with swords and shields, but to commit suicide a needle is sufficient; so to
teach others, much intellect and learning are necessary, but not so for your
own self-illumination." Are on pure? If you are pure, you will reach God.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." If you are
not pure, and you know all the sciences in the world, that will not help you at
all; you may be buried in all the books you read, but that will not be of much
use. It is the heart that reaches the goal. Follow the heart. A pure heart sees
beyond the intellect; it gets inspired; it knows things that reason can never
know, and whenever there is conflict between the pure heart and the intellect,
always side with the pure heart, even if you think what your heart is doing is
unreasonable. When it is desirous of doing good to others, your brain may tell
you that it is not politic to do so, but follow your heart, and you will find
that you make less mistakes than by following your intellect. The pure heart is
the best mirror for the reflection of truth, so all these disciplines are for
the purification of the heart. And as soon as it is pure, all truths flash upon
it in a minute; all truth in the universe will manifest in your heart, if you
are sufficiently pure.
The great truths about
atoms, and the finer elements, and the fine perceptions of men, were discovered
ages ago by men who never saw a telescope, or a microscope, or a laboratory.
How did they know all these things? It was through the heart; they purified the
heart. It is open to us to do the same today; it is the culture of the heart,
really, and not that of the intellect that will lessen the misery of the world.
Intellect has been
cultured with the result that hundreds of sciences have been discovered, and
their effect has been that the few have made slaves of the many — that is all
the good that has been done. Artificial wants have been created; and every poor
man, whether he has money or not, desires to have those wants satisfied, and
when he cannot, he struggles, and dies in the struggle. This is the result.
Through the intellect is not the way to solve the problem of misery, but
through the heart. If all this vast amount of effort had been spent in making
men purer, gentler, more forbearing, this world would have a thousandfold more
happiness than it has today. Always cultivate the heart; through the heart the
Lord speaks, and through the intellect you yourself speak.
You remember in the Old
Testament where Moses was told, "Take off thy shoes from off thy feet, for
the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." We must always approach
the study of religion with that reverent attitude. He who comes with a pure
heart and a reverent attitude, his heart will be opened; the doors will open
for him, and he will see the truth.
If you come with
intellect only, you can have a little intellectual gymnastics, intellectual
theories, but not truth. Truth has such a face that any one who sees that face
becomes convinced. The sun does not require any torch to show it; the sun is
self-effulgent. If truth requires evidence, what will evidence that evidence?
If something is necessary as witness for truth, where is the witness for that witness?
We must approach religion with reverence and with love, and our heart will
stand up and say, this is truth, and this is untruth.
The field of religion
is beyond our senses, beyond even our consciousness. We cannot sense God.
Nobody has seen God with his eyes or ever will see; nobody has God in his
consciousness. I am not conscious of God, nor you, nor anybody. Where is God?
Where is the field of religion? It is beyond the senses, beyond consciousness.
Consciousness is only one of the many planes in which we work; you will have to
transcend the field of consciousness, to go beyond the senses, approach nearer
and nearer to your own centre, and as you do that, you will approach nearer and
nearer to God. What is the proof of God? Direct perception, Pratyaksha. The
proof of this wall is that I perceive it. God has been perceived that way by
thousands before, and will be perceived by all who want to perceive Him. But
this perception is no sense-perception at all; it is supersensuous,
superconscious, and all this training is needed to take us beyond the senses.
By means of all sorts of past work and bondages we are being dragged downwards;
these preparations will make us pure and light. Bondages will fall off by
themselves, and we shall be buoyed up beyond this plane of sense-perception to
which we are tied down, and then we shall see, and hear, and feel things which
men in the three ordinary states (viz waking, dream, and sleep) neither feel,
nor see, nor hear. Then we shall speak a strange language, as it were, and the
world will not understand us, because it does not know anything but the senses.
True religion is entirely transcendental. Every being that is in the universe
has the potentiality of transcending the senses; even the little worm will one
day transcend the senses and reach God. No life will be a failure; there is no
such thing as failure in the universe. A hundred times man will hurt himself, a
thousand times he will tumble, but in the end he will realise that he is God.
We know there is no progress in a straight line. Every soul moves, as it were,
in a circle, and will have to complete it, and no soul can go so low but there
will come a time when it will have to go upwards. No one will be lost. We are
all projected from one common centre, which is God. The highest as well as the
lowest life God ever projected, will come back to the Father of all lives.
"From whom all beings are projected, in whom all live, and unto whom they
all return; that is God."
SOURCE:The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda;
Volume-1; Lectures and Discourses
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