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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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