The Tree of Life: 2.6. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Tuesday 10, June 2025, 07:00.
Shrimad Bhagavad Gita
The Tree of Life: 2.5.
Discourse 2: The Search for Wholeness - 6.
Swami Krishnananda. 

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The whole secret of the success in life seems to be in the knowledge of the presence of something which is behind the varieties of the world experience, and not in the foolhardy pursuit of our intention to eat the fruits which the tree of life yields. The various experiences of pleasure, satisfaction, and grasping by the senses are the bondages of the individual. That is the bird. Every one of us is this bird.

Ishvara and jiva, God and the individual, are both seated on the same tree. This tree is this body, our family, our community, our nation; this tree is the whole of mankind, the whole universe. All these are but the same tree manifesting itself in various degrees of expression. There are not many trees; the tree is one, but the degree of its expression varies according to the stages of the development of experience. The whole is present in every degree, in every stage. I have been saying again and again that the whole human being is present in the baby, in the adolescent, in the adult, and in the mature person. In every stage there is a wholeness of the human being. Likewise, the whole tree is present in the seed, in the tendril, in the plant, and in its vast expanded maturity. The whole is present everywhere in every degree, only in different degrees of expression, so that the whole of God is present in us; but it is only in one degree, which is not sufficient or adequate.

Because of the inadequacy of the consciousness of the presence of this wholeness in us, we are pursuing the experience of this wholeness according to the knowledge with which we are endowed. Action is preceded by knowledge. Knowledge comes first; action comes afterwards. We have already an idea of what to do, and then only we start doing it merely as an outward implementation of this idea that is contained inside. We will never do anything without having an idea of it. First, we think, and then we act. So, the action is nothing but the form of the thought that is in our mind.

Hence, the search for wholeness, which can be equated with the search for happiness, is manifest in our lives as a search for an external object. The tree moves up in the direction of the sun in the high sky for this purpose alone. It seeks completeness of its life and imagines that this completeness can be experienced only by manifesting itself through an outward ramification in space and time.

What is it that we are seeking in life? Salary, high status, long life, soft beds, big buildings, large areas of land—are these the things that we are asking for? No. These are definitely not the things that we are asking for. When we are presented with a bundle of currency notes we feel happy, as if we are possessing something worthwhile, but we know very well we are not going to eat these currency notes. They cannot do anything except act as a means of getting something else which is our requirement. Nobody wants currency notes or coins. We need these as instruments for procuring something else. So our desire is not for money in the form of notes and coins, but for something else which we imagine can be acquired through this instrumentality. If we go further, we will find even that second thing is not our aim. That also is an instrument for a third thing which we are actually wanting. So on it goes, further and further, until we realise, to our horror, that we are asking for something which is beyond human comprehension through the instrumentalities of these little visible finite expressions of life.

What is it that we are asking for, if not all these things? We are asking for a relief of all tension, which is equivalent to happiness as we conceive it. Happiness is the release of all tensions—nervous, muscular and psychological—and our personality is in a state of tenseness because of some kind of pressure which is exerted upon our personality by something over which we evidently have no control, and of which we have no knowledge.

The pressure is something very interesting. From where does this pressure come? It comes from the ocean of life which seeks fullest expression through the limitation of our finite personality. The ocean wants to find itself in the river, in the pond. This little experience of ours through the senses and the mind is sought for as an instrument for the fullest expression of the whole power that is behind the tree of life. Any kind of completeness of experience is the same as happiness. When we search for objects in this world, we are trying to search for a type of conscious experience which will introduce into ourselves a wholeness of being. We are now partial expressions. When the object we need is outside us, that unity of feeling is absent. We are unhappy because a part of our life is outside us. It may be a visible object or merely a conception. A concept of an externalised situation or a visible object outside may be the cause of our unhappiness. Physical objects such as houses and land may keep us restless and unhappy because they have not become part of ourselves. Or merely conceptual notions such as status in human society can keep us unhappy. Status in human society is not a visible object. It is visible only to the mental eye, and when it is imagined to be a circumstance which is outside our mind, it becomes a psychological object that can keep us unhappy.

But when does this unhappiness leave us so that we become happy? It is when this object is united with us, when the percentage of ourselves which is apparently the object outside, whether physical or psychological, joins with us and becomes a part of us so that we become one hundred percent. When we become one hundred percent, we become happy. If there is even one percent outside us as a visible or conceptual object, we are in a state of unhappiness.

Now, this wholeness or hundred percent of being is a state of mind. It is an awareness, it is a thought, it is a consciousness. We must be convinced in our consciousness that we have obtained a hundred percent of all the values of life. A leaf in a tree should be aware that it is a part of the whole tree, and the whole tree is in it. A finger of the body is healthy and seems to be contented because the whole of the body is associated with it and it has a subtle experience within itself of its being sustained by the whole body and of its being a vital, inseparable part of the whole body. The health of a personality and the happiness of a person depend upon this consciousness of wholeness which is what we are seeking in life, and we are not seeking anything else—and 'not anything else' is to be underlined again and again.

So, when we are told that we have to be aware of the whole tree of life in order to be perfect in our lives, we are asked to go into the nature of the higher knowledge in which the tree of life is rooted. In the Upanishad especially, we are told that we should have the knowledge of the whole tree. The knowledge of this tree is liberation. But the Bhagavadgita says something quite different. 

Our salvation lies in our ability to cut at the very root of this tree by the axe of detachment: "asangaśastrena drdhena chittva" (B.G. 15.3). 

Both these terms of advice have a meaning in themselves.

As I endeavoured to point out, this tree of life has a twofold feature, namely, rootedness in the Absolute and manifestation in space and time. The aspect of its rootedness in God is what requires us to know the whole of this tree, and the aspect of its expression in space and time is that which is to be cut by the axe of detachment. The knowledge of this tree is our source attachment to God, and our detachment from the externalised form of this tree consists in our withdrawal of our external consciousness and the centring of it in our universality of being.

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Next

3. Severing the Root of this Tree of Life:

Continued

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