God and Humanity
by Swami Krishnananda
I
A question which is purely technical, which
cannot be decided at once by the generality of mankind, arises in the mind
of a serious seeker after Truth, viz., his relation to society and to its
institutions. Judged dispassionately, the issue of the necessity or
otherwise of such a seeker to concern himself either with society or
institutions seems to arise due to a thoroughly misconceived notion of the
nature of the Truth – the existence of God. The need or the absence of need
for relations of any kind, much less obligations or duties, towards society
and institutions crops up only if God is an other-worldly being, as is the
conclusion of the usual theological concepts in all religions, and his
existence somehow falls outside the scope and operation of the world and
society. There have been controversies and heated arguments over the extent
of importance to be given either to meditation or service, for example, and
several schools of thought have risen out of this dichotomy in position.
This is, to put it prosaically, the controversy between the schools of
Jnana and Karma – knowledge and action – a subject which has been discussed
by many scholars ever since the Acharyas wrote commentaries on the cardinal
scriptures on which Indian culture is based.
All this is just mentioning in different ways
the same old problem of man's relation to God and to the world or society.
Unfortunately, people get emotionally warmed up in themselves whenever this
question is raised and it is rare that one finds time to consider the
subject in a scientific spirit by objective observation as a research man
in any field of learning would actually be expected to do. The factor of
emotion immediately rushes in whenever there is a talk of humanity, 'other
people', 'our brethren' or 'the sufferings of people', and the general mind
would even regard it as heretical to raise the question of the need or
otherwise of a person to concern himself with this complexity, which is
almost equated with the duty of man.
But, to come to the point again, our approach
has naturally to be scientific and not emotional and, really, this is one
of the precise conditions of conducting any successful research. Hence, the
problem has to be tackled in an unbiased manner, placing oneself in the
position of a mere witness and not a party in the game. Thus analysed, it
comes about that the question of man's relation to society and institutions
has much to do with the nature of God's existence and, unless this is first
settled, what follows from it is a consequence also cannot be properly
ascertained. Now, the existence of God, to define it impersonally, taking
God by himself in his own independent status, has been accepted to be free
from limitations of any kind, which means to say that he covers all states
of being, manifested or unmanifested, and there can really be nothing
unknown to him and hence outside the purview of his existence. This would
imply that there can be no reality worth its name outside the Being of God,
and the world and the individuals have to be summed under his Infinite
Being, so that the world and humanity fall within the scope of the
Existence of God.
Here, any doubt as to whether God exists or not
should be considered wholly irrelevant, since our definition of God is that
it is an appellation of the nature of Being in its absolute state, whose
significance cannot be set aside even by modern physical science, what to
speak of the more amenable sciences of biology and psychology. The theories
of electromagnetism, quantum, wave-mechanics and relativity, with many
things that follow in the wake of their discoveries, border on the
acceptance of the Absolute as the only reality. The more metaphysical and
spiritual approaches, both in the East and in the West, have held this
premise as the very rock-foundation of the edifices of philosophy.
But there have been a multitude of misconstrued
ideas which apparently seem to follow from this definition of God's Being,
viz., that mankind or humanity is God and, as a corollary of this position,
that service of man is service of God. But it is forgotten that the concept
of humanity is a concept of limitation, while it has already been agreed
that God has to be free from limitations. God is neither an individual
among many others nor a sum-total of individuals, which is precisely the
character of humanity. Hence the identification of humanity with God is an
unreasoned result of emotional enthusiasm in relation, which easily takes
hold of the mass-man, by dinning into the ears of people slogans,
shibboleths and stock sayings on the theme that humanity is God, its
worship is the worship of God, and the like. One's upbringing in family and
social conditions from one's very childhood in the circumstance of an
untiring repetition of such formulae and mass-propaganda carried on in such
religion, to whose steady effects no ordinary human find can be immune, is
responsible for the insinuation of the concept of a socialised God into the
minds of mankind. This doctrine, no doubt, carries one to some extent and
even appears to succeed for many years through history, as any repeatedly
propagated cult can. But propaganda is not and has never been a weapon of
final victory. For, it is a uniformly adopted medium of any theory or
ideal, real or unreal. The nature of reality, however, springs up
spontaneously, slowly blooming like a flower, in the hearts of gifted men
who begin to see an indivisible limitlessness extending through and beyond
the obvious and natural limitations of humanity and the world.
This urge of reality, when it rises in one's
heart, becomes irresistible, for what is real can never be resisted. It is
in the light of this urge, which certain Western philosophers have called
the nisus for reality present in all Nature, which rare souls visualise the
existence of a transcendence of spiritual immanence in the universe and
recognise at once the impossibility of any identification of the finite
with the Infinite. No man can be God, not even all men put together can be
God – thus God transcends humanity – because humanity is the name of a
particular species of individuals whose mathematical total is regarded as a
unity only in the psychological sense of one individual thinking the other,
but never being the other, but God is Supreme Being. Here is the
unarticulated but ostensible difference between the nature of humanity and
the nature of God. But this truth can never become patent in an uninitiated
mind which is accustomed to think in terms of slogan and propaganda, cults
and creeds, and thinks, also, only through the emotion.
Nevertheless, the mass-mind cannot at once be
educated, because its main defects are dependence on sense-objects for the
assessment of any value and a rather too heavy emphasis on the economic and
biological existence of man than any deeper intrinsic worth or meaning in
his existence as once having a non-dependent status of its own. It may be
added here that much of the cult of humanity-worship and its deification is
a cumulative outcome of the urges of hunger, wealth, self-glorification and
power, which constitute the triple passion in an individual. When these
urges become so dominant as the be regarded as necessities of life, they
begin to rule mankind as its masters and what comes out of man begins to
subordinate him to the level of a mere tool or puppet that is operated by
strings. Psychology and psycho-analysis in modern times have done much
research in this line and the nature of the consequences of these human
urges, including the gregarious instinct, has been studied and analysed
into its components. That man is under an illusion of the spell cast before
him by the urges of wealth, sex and power is not something unknown to
well-informed minds and the present-day crisis of humanity cannot but be
traced to the working of a long rope that has been given by man to these
urges that are trying to destroy him from the very roots. A careful study
of advanced sociology, history and psychology will prove this fact to the
hilt.
The spiritual seekers, mention of whom has been
made above, are, however, an exception to the general mass thinking through
the gregarious urge and they keep themselves alive to the urge for God, the
Almighty, within themselves, as the nisus to perfection. When the urge for
God rises within the soul of the seeker, the whole universe would appear to
suck him into its bosom, from every atom and part of its extensive mass of
creation, and in the initial stages this divine urge would seem to be the
shooting of a luminous spark from within oneself and then gradually it
increases its proportion into the surge of a rushing star, then the flash
of a lightning, a flaming conflagration and, finally, an inundating flood
of oceanic force and grandeur. A seeker caught up in any one of these
divine manifestations would be able to see inwardly a super-mathematical
unit of indivisible existence whose minutest manifestation exceeds the
totality of mankind and the world, for the spirit is not magnitude,
measurable in terms of the space-time extension. Ushered in by this current
of the divine flood, the seeker can no more see meaning in the multitude of
finites, and individualities and even the whole of humanity and the world,
because all these which have so much significance to the mind that sees
through the senses present themselves before the seeking soul as parts
melting into the whole to which they organically belong and in which God
becomes their very Soul, their very existence. To those souls that seek God
in his essential Being, not merely as a transcendence but also as an
immanence and absoluteness, the question of their relation to society,
institutions and the world does not arise; it just does not exist. Truly,
this is the ideal and the goal of anything, anywhere and no man on earth
can hold an ideal superior or even equal to this grand consummation of
one's enthronement in Universal Being. And this does not call for any proof
or demonstration of its indubitably.
II
But it may be held that the question of one's
relation to the world and humanity shall remain valid as long as knowledge
comes through the senses and the world is visible before one's eyes. This
situation of the sensibility of the world includes the perception of others
outside oneself, especially other human beings. One's physical and
psychological limitations manifesting themselves generally as hunger,
thirst, heat, cold and fear of death and specially as the desire for
wealth, sex and power, compel a person to depend upon other persons for the
fulfilment or the mitigation of these instincts, and this results in the
concept of humanity as a corporate body, an indispensable necessity and
where utter selfishness of individuals or a group of individuals does not
attempt to ruin other individuals even at its own peril, mankind exercises
that understanding by which it recognises the need for a mutual
co-operation among people, naturally involving some sacrifice of personal
interest, and realises the impossibility of existing in the world without
such co-operation. While the majesty of the Absolute in its superabundance
and completeness referred to earlier in this section above is mainly the
central content of the Upanishads, a divinely related humanitarian concept
of mutual service is the preponderating doctrine of the Bhagavadgita. The
sage of the Upanishad merges into the Absolute and enters the very fibre of
all creation as its very soul and existence, and the Krishna of the
Bhagavadgita, while he draws into his personality the dignity of the
Universal God, at once becomes the paragon of humanity and exemplifies in
his life the integrality of behaviour, conduct and action which sweeps over
all mankind and unifies it as a social organism not only spiritually but
also ethically and politically. We are here speaking of the position of man
who is incapable of avoiding the sensing of a world outside him and
Krishna's teaching is to such a man. It is also with due consideration to
this situation of man in the world that the ancient seers ordained upon him
the daily performance of the five great sacrifices known as Pancha
Mahayajnas, viz., service to the celestial beings, service to the seers of
learning, service to the ancestors, service to man and service to the
sub-human creatures of the world. This is an all-comprehending system of
ritual to accentuate service of others which is obligatory on the part of
man as long as he enjoys personally the bounties of Nature and the
charitableness of other human beings. This is the position impossible of
avoidance so long as the universal flood of God-urge has not yet been
stirred within oneself and man perforce hangs on the world and the other
individuals for his subsistence in a variety of forms.
With this intention of the fulfilment of duty as
mutual service and support, the organisation of people into the spiritual,
political, economic and labour groups was formed in ancient times,
particularly in India, under the Sanskrit names of Brahmana, Kshatriya,
Vaisya and Sudra. These groups were especially classified as mutually
inclusive powers and never exclusive elements as they later on got
interpreted by habit, prejudice and selfishness of the part of the ego of
man. Everywhere, it should be easy to see that fulfilment and complete
success of the core cannot be achieved without the mutual collaboration of
spiritual power, political power, economic power and man-power. This
classification of human groups for the purpose of the constructive activity
of society as a whole can never be gainsaid and substituted, much less
avoided, by any other means of achieving human welfare. Spiritual idealism
bereft of the other three brother forces in the world is likely to get
degenerated into arm-chair philosophy and impractical suggestions for the
improvement of man's condition in the process of evolution. Here we have to
carefully distinguish between this class of spiritual ministry as a part of
the social set-up and those rarer, master-minds who seek to merge and
absorb all these four values of life in the universal divine flood about
which we have made sufficient observation above. These are the higher
classes of an almost super-human type who are a little different from the
kind of spiritual teachers and guides who are referred to here as forming a
group to minister to the spiritual needs of people. Where the political
aspect is emphasised to the detriment of the other three aspects, it may
land in tyranny, despotism and dictatorship. The history of the world has
seen both these over-emphases through the churches of the religions and the
rulers of states. A tendency to emphasise the economic aspects leads to
materialism, atheism and hedonism, which is the marked trend of the present
day world, especially in the second half of the 20th century. This aspect
is, however, linked up with the emphasis of the labour group also, so that,
today, we find the third and the fourth groups getting mixed up
promiscuously and attempting to rule human destiny. It need not be
reiterated that such illogical over-accentuation of any particular group is
not only harmful to the growth and function of the other three essential
aspects of the life of man but also defeats its own purpose in the end, due
to its false isolation of the other necessary aspects of the life complete.
There is also another aspect of this question
which has originated in the rising of several institutions in the world
whose founders honestly felt a need to serve humanity. But the intention of
the founders is with difficulty carried through by their alleged followers
not only on account of inadequate spiritual inspiration and understanding
but also the intrusion of practical interest of a personal nature that
dilutes the original wish of the founder. This deficiency has another awful
side and it is the fact that where the spiritual ideal is ignored, the
material aspects of life automatically get bolstered up, even as strong
winds begin to blow when the sun is covered with clouds. This is natural
law and it does not spare anyone from the impact of its operation. Thus,
religious churches and institutions may degenerate into centres of mere
economic force which may exclusively attract the attention of their heads
who may not be aware that they have totally missed the aim for which the
organisations were originally formed. But the difficulty does not end here.
It goes further head-long into the political field and the institutions may
not only engage themselves in their own internal political administration
but also take part in the outward politics of the State, far, far from the
original ideal of the founders. Now, nothing can be a greater travesty than
this, that the intention to do service gets side-tracked along the lanes of
wealth and power.
III
Spiritual seekers, to clarify whose position is
the intention of this article, thus get bifurcated into the purely
God-inspired, whole-timed Sadhakas and the probationers on the path who aspire
to seek perfection but cannot escape the shackles of the world and human
society. There is little difficulty before the higher class of seekers, but
the troubles of the second group are galore. The reason for this is that
they are unable to strike a balance between God and the world, the
technique of which the Bhagavadgita has endeavoured to explain in great
detail. A harmony between the inner and the outer is difficult enough to
maintain always because of the strength of sensory forces influencing the
mind through out the waking life of the individual. A counter-force from
within has to be generated to keep the balance of consciousness so that the
outer forces of sense-perception may not overwhelm it and make it merely an
instrument of sense-gratification and the physical urges. This art is
called Yoga, the union of the inner and the outer of the higher and the
lower. If God is indivisible existence in his pure absoluteness, unrelated
to externality of any kind, he appears as harmony in the universe of
manifestation. Hence we can safely conclude that wherever is this balance
and harmony of forces, there is the presence of God in some proportion. The
harmony has to be worked out in the body, mind and spirit, as well as in
society and the world. Physical harmony is health. Mental harmony is
sanity. Spiritual harmony is intuition. Social harmony is the peace of the
world.
The consciousness of indivisibility originally
receives the touch of the relative in self-consciousness which immediately
implies the existence of space outside oneself, though, in this primordial
state, the consciousness of space may look inseparable from
self-consciousness. Almost simultaneously with this, there is the
consciousness of time as a process in which the consciousness find itself.
The fourth step is the consciousness of objects outside, which primarily
may appear to be organically related to consciousness. Up to this stage, it
may be said, consciousness has not been 'entangled', in the sense in which
this situation is generally understood, But the difficulty commences with
the further movement of consciousness when it assumes the mark of an
individuality of its own and isolates itself from other such centres of
consciousness as well as objects by regarding everyone of them as external.
There are, however, certain implications of the consciousness of separated
individuality, which are mainly the sense of heat and cold, hunger and
thirst and the fear of death of oneself as a bodily entity. The metabolic
process is set up into action and sleep then becomes a necessity to cause
repair to the wear and tear of the body thereby, as well as due to
continued object-consciousness in the 'wakeful' condition, one which is
obviously unnatural to pure consciousness. The functions of breathing,
thinking, feeling and understanding, with their concomitants, follow at
once. Up to this stage, the individual may be said to have been
externalised into the biological and the psychological make-up of
personality. In the case of man, this is pure humanity.
But certain other processes which should be
regarded as the abnormal functions of the individual's psychology now
commence with the rise of the desire for material possessions – wealth and
property – the desire for sexual contact and the sense of self-respect
which materialises into the desire of self-glorification and the exercise
of power over those outside oneself, which all come step by step, in
succession. Here, the entanglement of consciousness is complete, and this
is what is known as Samsara, or the painful earthly life. It is unfortunate
that the mind of man does not rest even with this self-degeneration and, by
process of time, getting itself accustomed to this condition, as if it is
its natural state, forms its philosophy of 'it is better to rule in hell
than serve in heaven'. The result of this is the formulation of erroneous
philosophies such as materialism, scepticism, agnosticism, pluralism,
formalism, such as we find in the addiction to mere ritual, as well as the
several arts and sciences which man regards as his highest achievements
today but which are intended only to rationalise and perpetuate the
condition of entanglement of consciousness with objects of various kinds,
into which is has already descended. Even the so-called impersonal sciences
of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and empirical psychology appear
to be valid only so long as Nature is regarded as external consciousness. A
philosophy based on this bifurcation of experience cannot therefore save
consciousness from the pains it suffers in entanglement.
The technique of Yoga as a method of striking a
balance between consciousness and objects is the first part of the
individual's return to the universal. The second part of this attempt is
the still higher stage of meditation by which the realisation comes that
consciousness and its objects are not merely in a state of organised
balance but form one unitary being. Philosophers like Kant, in the West,
with all their acuteness of analysis, came to the conclusion that Reality
cannot be known by consciousness, because of the difficulty in getting rid
of the usual intellectual prejudice that the object of consciousness has
always to be outside itself. This led Kant to the position of what he calls
the paralogisms of conflict in philosophical position in regard to the
truth of the mutual relation among God, the world and the individual. This
difficulty is overcome in the philosophy of the Bhagavadgita and the
Upanishads, a careful study of which every student of Yoga should make,
going to the essential spirit of these teachings. It is outside the scope
of this essay to go into details of the great gospels given by these
scriptures to humanity, which constitute an independent subject by itself.
It is hoped that seekers on the spiritual path will fare well if they take
note of all these unavoidable aspects of their spiritual life, and where
sincerity is the keynote, God is sure to shower his blessings.
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