Meditation and life by swami chinmayananda — Part 1

Notes & highlights ….

• A superficial review of modern man in his ‘brave new world’ would provide melancholy reading. The pleasing surface of his world is like the painted beauty of a prostitute in the shaded streets at dusk, which under closer observation reveals the abhorrence that often lies beneath it. What causes this painful illness in our life, which seems to be at best, an ugly paradox when viewed against the glorious achievements of our era and its civilisation?
• In our preoccupation with conquering nature and subduing her to serve us, we have ignored our own inner monstrosities. We have developed the faculties of seeing with fleshy eyes and engaging all our abilities in setting right the things we have seen. We have left our subtler perceptions undeveloped, and naturally, like a long neglected garden, our inner world has grown into a jungle. We live in the outer world but prompted from our own within. Our character and personality determine the experiences that we gain in the outer world. Unless we learn to master our inner life, the outer scheme of life, however efficient and perfect, cannot but bring sorrow and unhappiness.
• Unfortunately, this fundamental factor has been overlooked and as a result in spite of prosperity, education and scholarship and mastery over the outer world, the children of the modern age seem to make of their luxurious world a burial ground for all hope and joy. Their technological knowledge and efficient commerce provide them with a cross on which to hang their own individual peace.
• The present age has given us a long period of sorrow and we have become addicted to misery. Like an opium addict, the melancholy human being has come to believe that life without misery is putrefying death. He dreads bliss and peace.
• Misery and agitation have become natural to him and modern man, though he sadly mourns his plight dares not walk the path of self-mastery but makes a new Bible of sorrow, an Upaniṣad of sighs and a Koran of wretchedness.
• The edifice of life stands bereft of the cement of love, haunted by the ghosts of despair and the devils of misery. Inside the chambers of this edifice, to sing the song of God has become the greatest blasphemy that one can perpetuate.
• One can find little hope that a new generation of evolved human beings stable in their inward tranquillity, unshaken in their peace, divine in their noble perfections, can ever come to people of the world as the children of these desperate fathers and mothers.
• The suffering of the present age, if diagnosed properly, will be found to be the result of man’s own inward shattering. Each individual is a slave to his own passions.
• In his psychological weakness and intellectual impotence, he is incapacitated to control his passions and resist the suicidal temptations to strive to fulfil his sensuous impulses. Shattered between the wild forces of his uncontrolled personality, he becomes an inefficient instrument who cannot react to external challenges or intelligently digest his experiences in life.
• He finds no foothold for his personality. Like a dry leaf on a vast meadow, he becomes a victim of every passing breeze and gets tossed hither and thither aimlessly. This aimless tossing is the misery that characterises our age.
• Materialism is certainly acceptable and can be a blessing to us. The comforts of the scientific age, a life made easier by the use of machines, the profits gained by harnessing natural forces — all are ours by heritage. To decry them is to insult the intelligence of humanity, but when technology becomes our master and persecutes us, we must protest.
• Foolish indeed, is that scientist who creates a Frankenstein and in his intellectual vanity lets himself be haunted by the tyrant he created, refusing to destroy him. Unless the creator of Frankenstein can find a technique of developing himself to a greater strength than his creation, he has no right to protest against any member of society raising weapons to destroy this living threat. Individually, each person has the right to rear a tiger in his house but if it becomes wild and a threat to the community, the individual right is negated and the community justly demands the beast’s destruction.
• Similarly, if humanity does not grow strong enough to become master of the machines it has created, this present civilisation of slavery to iron wheels pounding to the rhythm of lust, shall stand condemned. But should we develop a self-mastery potent enough to rule the forces of nature we have released, then certainly we shall preserve our secular endowments and come to live, served by them, as sultans of our destiny.
• The instrument with which we live through our experiences is not, as we think, the body. When we observe an individual, we see that the experiencer in him is not his body, but is, in all instances, his mental make-up and intellectual peculiarities. No doubt, his mind and intellect do come into contact with situations through the instrument of his body.1 Thus in a given situation, the experience we gain is as much related to our body as a pair of glasses is related to the eyes.
• What the eyes see will be coloured by the hue of the glasses but the efficiency of vision depends entirely upon the efficacy of sight in the eyes. A blind person will see nothing through glasses. A colour-blind person will see differently through green or blue glasses than a person of normal vision would. Obviously, therefore, the condition of the eyes is the primary factor in determining the clarity of the vision enjoyed.
• Similarly, even though the experience of the world outside is gained through the body, the experiencer is in fact, our mind and intellect equipment. A better vision of the external world is possible only when the imperfections of vision are removed. The imperfections of our experiences in the world outside can be fundamentally improved if the mind and intellect are disciplined to behave better in the face of all circumstances. Therefore, all techniques of self-improvement must be directed toward the disciplining and strengthening of the psychological and intellectual entities in us.
• Knowledge of the world outside, constituted of things and beings perceived by our senses, forms the subject matter of science, while the inquiries pursued and the discoveries made in the world within, when codified into a systematic science of life, become philosophy.
• ‘Life is a series of continuous and unbroken experiences of objects.’ Just as the physical scientists, having discovered that the fundamental unit of matter is the atom, did not declare that science had fulfilled itself, but continued observing and analysing the very atom, so also, the great Masters of old did not take to passive retirement after realising that the unit of life is an experience, but diligently pursued their investigations to discover the modes and factors governing and controlling individual experiences..
• ..These investigations brought the great subjective thinkers to the truth that an experience is possible only when three essential factors come to play simultaneously in a given field — the subject who is the experiencer, the object which is the experienced and the relationship between the subject and the object, which is the experiencing. They also discovered that an experience depends entirely upon the condition and the nature of these three factors.
• In the absence of the subject, no knowledge of the object is possible. The object may be present but if the subject is absent, the object cannot produce any knowledge or experience by itself. If somebody comes into your room while you are sleeping, the experience of having met the intruder is not yours because you, the subject, were absent from the field, although the intruder, the object, was in the room.
• Thus it becomes evident that an experience is the product of the experiencer, the experienced and the experiencing, when all three come to play in a given field of time and space. If these be the factors of an experience, a study of life as such, which is a series of experiences, cannot be complete unless we thoroughly investigate the nature of these three distinct factors.
• In the light of this reasoning it must become clear that physical science is insufficient for bringing about our total redemption from the thralldom of our suffering, for science deals mainly with only one of the factors, the experienced — that is, with the world of objects.
• The Masters of the scriptures came to the conclusion that a scientific analysis of the subject and a diligent attempt at understanding it, are the only methods sufficiently comprehensive in estimating life and planning the means and methods by which we may ultimately transform life’s discordant notes into harmonious and divine music.
• The composition of the Five sheaths is as follows :–
• Food Sheath – The physical body of which everyone is fully aware during the waking state of consciousness is called the food sheath. It is born of food assimilated by the parents, it exists because of the food regularly taken in and ultimately, after death, it must decompose to become food again. The physical structure which arises from food, exists in food and goes back to food, is most appropriately called the food sheath. The organs of knowledge (eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin) and the organs of action (hands, legs, organ of speech, genital organ and organ of evacuation) exist in this sheath.
• Vital Air Sheath — The air we breathe mixes with our blood and reaches every cell of our physical body. Oxygen forms an inner lining, as it were, for the outer physical sheath. The vital air sheath controls all the organs of action and it is five-fold, with five different functions: (1) the faculty of perception (prāṇa) which controls the perceptions of the five sense organs; (2) the faculty of excretion (apāna) which controls the throwing out by the body of various things, such as spit, seeds, faeces, urine or perspiration; (3) the faculty of digestion (samāna) which controls digestion of food; (4) the faculty of circulation (vyāna) which controls the distribution of digested food to all parts of the body and (5) the faculty of thinking (udāna) which makes it possible for people to entertain, absorb, and assimilate thoughts: The food and vital air sheaths together are called the gross body.
• Mental Sheath — None of us is unaware of the existence of the mind. The mind entertains our doubts, joys and a variety of emotions and constantly erupts with a non-stop flow of thought-lava. The mind can fly to things and places seen or heard, and because of its vast reaches, it is considered subtler than the food sheath and the vital air sheath.
• Intellectual Sheath — While the mind is the doubting element, the intellect is the determining factor in each of us. In literature of Vedānta, the two are considered one and the same. When our thoughts arrive at a determined decision or a willed judgement, they are called the intellect. The intellect is subtler than the mind.
• Bliss Sheath — This, the subtlest of the sheaths, is made up of the ignorance (non-apprehension) that exists during our deep sleep state of consciousness. It is considered blissful because, whatever be the condition of our waking consciousness, when once we fall asleep whether rich or poor, successful or disappointed, healthy or sick, young or old, we experience undisturbed peace and bliss. We experience a state of pure non-apprehension, that is, the absence of everything.
• Ᾱtman, the life center, the subtlest of all, is the core of this five-sheathed structure. All these together constitute the spirituo physical entity that plays as you and me. Consciousness exhibited by the organism depends upon the condition of its mental and intellectual sheaths. Stones have no awareness because the mind and intellect are absent in them.
• According to Vedānta, plants have a rudimentary mind and intellect and hence they live and grow and possess some awareness. The minds and intellects of animals are further developed and they are more aware than plants. The supreme development is reached in the human being. The purer the mind and intellect, the brighter are the beams of consciousness that radiate from the individual. The saint or prophet is he who has the maximum awareness manifest in him. ‘Brahmavit brahmaiva bhavati’ — the knower of Brahman is Brahman itself, i.e the knower of Brahman (brahmavit) is non different from brahman.
• The Masters of the Upaniṣads declared that their observations on our multiple personalities need not dishearten us. Instead, these facts should encourage us to venture forth into a closer and more diligent observation of life.
• The ṛṣis explained a method of self-effort by which we can dissociate ourselves from the false attachments and wrong identifications with the matter envelopments and rediscover ourselves to be in essence nothing but the eternally sweet spirit. The process by which this consummation can finally take place is meditation.

This lays the ground to introduce meditation and why it is required. I will release the rest of the posts in other parts.