Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 25-4.Swami Krishnananda.

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Chinmaya Mission :

Chinmaya Ramdoot at Branchburg, New Jersey had the honor of welcoming Pujya Swami Swaroopananda to inaugurate and bless the centre.

Swamiji toured the new center, inaugurating the auspicious Hanuman Murti in the center’s foyer. Swamiji and also blessed the new donor brick wall, speaking of the importance of continued and selfless seva.

Following this, Swamiji unveiled the Chinmaya Ramdoot inauguration plaques and addressed the audience with an inspiring speech about You can and You Must. In his moving speech, Swamiji spoke of the power of surrendering to the Lord to reach our infinite potential and the importance of redefining what we deem impossible as no feat is possible when serving the Lord. Swamiji concluded his visit by enjoying a lunch bhiksha cooked by the Sevaks.

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Sunday, September 12 2022. 07:00.
Chapter 25: The Lower Self and the Higher Self-4.

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Here we should not bring personality into the picture. Unfortunately, we cannot think except in terms of persons. When we speak of management, we are not thinking of persons. The village is not a person; it is a system of organisation. A group of people does not make a village. When we speak of a village here from the point of view of management, we think of the unity of concept. So a management is an indivisibility conceptually introduced for the sake of secure existence. It has nothing to do with persons. This person may be there or that person may be there; that is immaterial. Thus, the district is not the District Collector. We should not make the mistake of identifying one with the other, though the principle called the collector is permeating the whole district. The collector is not a man. It is a principle permeating the entire area called the district, a force that makes itself felt – an energy itself, we may say. So a self is that which permeates everything. It is not sitting in one place. Even our own little self, this so-called self, is not in one place, in one part of the body. It is the total. The whole thing visible here is the self. It pervades. Nowhere is the self an individual. It is a pervasion, it is a control, it is a supervision, it is a management, it is an integrality, it is a concept, it is a consciousness, it is a principle; it is not a person, it is not a thing.

In this analogy that I am mentioning before you, there is a higher dimension of management which includes the lower without violating the existence of the lower. The district management is not in any way opposed to the village management, yet it is so much inclusive as to find within itself everything that is in the village. The higher is not a negation of the lower, but it is inclusive of the lower, so when we think of the district it is not necessary to think independently of the little villages.

Do we not feel that our bodies are made up of little cells, organically composed? Each little cell of our body is a self by itself. These days medical men say that we have got intriguing things called DNA and RNA and so on, hard things to comprehend, which suggest the existence of certain independent influences in each cell of the body. One doctor in Bombay told me, “Swamiji, these days medical science has done so much that we can know the past, present and future of a person by diving into a single cell of that person's body.” The whole life is reflected in that little cell. It is one mirror of the whole. The little cell of the body is a microcosm; the whole body is a macrocosm. As we say, the pindanda is the whole brahmanda in one sense; the whole cosmos is reflected in each individual. In one cell we find the whole man. Likewise, there is a larger dimension of control, supervision and administration which is the self.

We have to learn the art of thinking impersonally. We should not be always bogged down by this dogma of thinking in terms of persons – the prime minister is a person, the president is a person, the collector is a person, the minister is a person. We are habituated to think in this manner. None of these are persons. If we are true democratic thinkers or persons really having a love for the nation, we should not think of persons. There is no person anywhere in the country. They are forces operating; they are influences exerted for a non-individual motivation, which is national welfare. The illustration is that there are higher dimensions which include lower dimensions. There can be many selves. Each administration can be considered as one indivisibility. It is indivisible because it is self-contained, and it is indivisible because it is not one person sitting somewhere. It is a pervasive, integrated power.

There are higher selves. These are called generalities, or samyanas. Acharya Sankara makes reference to these in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras. There are samyanas and samyanas, generalities and generalities. He mentions this thing I mentioned to you just now. The village administration is a generality, the district administration is a generality, the provincial administration is a generality. By generality, he means an inclusiveness and compactness and totality. And the whole nation is one single person. Do we not say the whole world is one person? It is believed that in religious circles like the one propounded by Acharya Ramanuja, etc., the whole universe is the body of Narayana. There is only one person in the whole universe, and the whole nation is one person, not a multitude of many people. So when we carry the notion of singleness, unitary existence and indivisibility, we carry with us the notion of the self. Thus, we will be able to appreciate that the world contains only selves, and not persons and things. The self is not a thing and not a person. It is an indivisible consciousness. The village administration is a consciousness of indivisibility, and so on, in all the dimensions, until the world self or the universal Self is reached. So there are many selves.

Yet, we have to be conscious in admitting the possibility of many selves. It does not really mean that there are many selves, while it appears there are many selves for certain practical purposes of management. Yoga is the art of administering oneself. We have villages, we have provinces, we have countries, and we have international organisations inside our body. Every blessed thing politically conceived can be one way of thinking in our management of ourselves. As we manage a whole nation, we have to manage ourselves. Finally, we may have to conceive the whole universe as one single nation, one family, of which we may be the chief. And when we conceive ourselves as the chief of the administration of the whole creation, we should forget that we are persons.

Here, incidentally, we answer the question whether God is a person or an nonperson. Is the administrator of a country a person or a nonperson? When we say, “I want to see the head of the government” it looks as if we are going to see a person, somebody sitting on the chair. In that sense we may say, “Yes, the administration is a person; God is a person.” But the administrator is not a person from another angle of vision, into which I tried to throw a little insight. So we are seeing the whole nation reflected in that so-called person sitting on the chair. We have not seen the person. It is a concentrated, pinpointed presentation of the principle of the total administration of the whole country apparently sitting on the chair. So it is a person and a nonperson. God is a person, and yet is not a person. So the self can be conceived in an individual manner or it can be conceived in a non-individual, supremely universalised, general sense.

Now, in all the senses we have to encounter the notion of the self in order to understand how we can be a friend of the self, and how we can be an enemy of the self. The tehsildar can oppose the collector. Then what happens? Or he can be friendly with the collector. Here is a self becoming an enemy of the self, and if he is friendly, he is friendly with the self. The tehsildar friendly with the collector is the self friendly with the self, the self's friendship to the self. But if he opposes the administration of the district, he is in direct enmity, at loggerheads with the higher dimension. Sorrow descends upon the lower self when it opposes the higher self, and security is always automatically bestowed when the lower self is in communion with the law of the higher self. We shall have no problems if the little self is united with the higher self. Everywhere there is a problem, and nothing but problems can be there everywhere if the lower self is in opposition to the higher self. This is obedience to law, or opposition to law in another way.

Thus, we have a deep religious, philosophical and spiritual practical message concentratedly pressed into this little verse, into whose meaning we have to enter in order that we may be successful participants in the yoga discipline, which is the subject of this chapter.

End.
Next-Chapter 26: Being Spiritually Alone to Oneself
To be continued .....

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