The Tree of Life: 2.1- Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Thursday 15 October 2026, 05:00.
Books
Bhagavadgita & Hinduism
The Tree of Life: 1.4- 
Discourse 2: The Search For Wholeness -1
Swami Krishnananda

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Discourse 2: The Search For Wholeness-1.

The mystery of life is explained, as we noted yesterday, in the first five verses of the Fifteenth Chapter of the Bhagavadgita. The mystery lies primarily in the fact that the way in which this tree of life grows is a little different from the way in which human minds work. This is the reason why human comprehension cannot fathom the depths of the extendedness and the functioning of the movements of this cosmic tree. Just as the branching of the various limbs of the tree is conditioned by the power that is inherent in the seed which gives birth to the tree, all knowledge and work in this world is preordained and channelised in a given shape by the Original Will which is the seed of this cosmic tree.

The world experience is knowledge and action combined. The whole of life can be summed up in knowledge and activity, the understanding and the putting of it into practice in the daily vocations of people. The outlook of life is the knowledge that is behind the way in which people work. A very significant word is used: chandāṁsi yasya parṇāni (B.G. 15.2). The leaves of this cosmic tree are the Vedas, or to put it in a more general manner, all knowledge in its extendedness. Many a time the word chandas is understood to be the knowledge of the Veda, and a significant note is struck by this particular kind of analogy in this verse.

The knowledge that operates in this world has a twofold feature embedded in it. It is outwardly limited to the form in which it is expressed by way of perceptions, cognitions, etc., through the mind and the senses. Our knowledge is limited in the sense of the ocean waters getting limited when they are channelised through a river or a canal, etc. The vast oceanic expanse can be conditioned by a canal, through which it can be diverted in any given direction. The ocean gets conditioned because of the limitation of the banks of the canal through which the water, the ocean, flows. Likewise, the cosmic urge, which is present in the seed of the tree of life, gets channelised through the senses and the mental operations of individuals whether they are subhuman, human or superhuman.

But this water that flows through the canal is the ocean water, and not anything else. The conditioned character of the water of the ocean is due to the limitation of the bank of the canal through which it flows, but the force with which the water flows belongs to the ocean itself. The pressure of the water comes from the ocean, but the limited way in which this pressure moves is because of the limitation of the banks.

Some such thing can be taken as the analogy of human experience. We are on Earth and in heaven at the same time. This is the reason for the mystery of life. If we had been totally on Earth and stuck to the ground with our feet, with nothing of the heavenly in us, that would have been something to our satisfaction, at least empirically. But we can never be satisfied with anything in this world. Though we are conditioned entirely by whatever the world gives us, we are not wholly in this world. That particular aspect of our being, or that part of our personality which lifts us above the Earth, keeps us restless and unhappy. That which we have gained may make us happy, but that which we have yet to attain keeps us unhappy.

It is not true that we have gained everything that we require. Our needs are endless and as vast as the expansion of the tree of life. What we see with our eyes is far less in expanse than what we are unable to see with our eyes. The waters in the canal are very meagre in their extent compared to the expanse of the ocean which flows through the canal. Our happiness, whatever be the character of it in this world, is due to the sensation of having acquired what we need. But a simultaneous undercurrent of unhappiness at the back of it is due to a suspicion that there are many more things that we have yet to gain. So there is the dashing of the waters of this ocean of life against both the banks of this river of experience—on one side in the direction of a tentative happiness due to the feeling of having gained what we need, and on the other side in another direction, making us conscious that we have not yet obtained what we really need.

Our needs are incalculable and non-computable. No human being can say what he or she needs. Our ideas of our needs are foolish at the very core because of our mistaking appearances for realities. The knowledge of the world that is at the back of our activities in life has, again, a twofold character, which is perhaps the reason why the Bhagavadgita brings in the analogy of the chandas, or the Veda, which is knowledge temporal and knowledge spiritual at the same time. The wisdom in the Veda is not merely supernatural; it is also natural. Modern explorations into the regions of the Veda have revealed the fact that empirical sciences are also explained in the mantras of the Veda. The Vedas do not speak merely of God and His creation; they are said to explain even such mechanical devices as making an airplane. Mathematics, differential calculus, and such other scientific approaches are also the content of the Vedas, so that the knowledge which the Vedas contain and speak of and present before us is as vast as the tree of life which has its roots above in the eternal Absolute, but whose branches extend towards the lowest Earth and the deepest nether regions.

The Vedic knowledge, therefore, is rooted in the Supreme Brahman, the Absolute, but it expands itself also to the minutest details of relative experience, so when we touch any part of the tree of life we have touched everything conceivable, everything that exists, and we are part and parcel of the ramifications of this tree of life. We, everyone here seated in this hall, are expressions of this tree of life; it may be leaves, it may be flowers, it may be fruits, it may be anything belonging to this tree as its vital essence. To touch any part of this tree is to touch the whole of the tree, so every one of us is everything, and not merely something.

This is the mystery of our lives, which is the mystery of all life. We are all mysteries seated here. Every one of us is a tremendous mystery in one's own self. Neither can I know the mystery within me, nor can any one of you know the mystery within you. This inexplicable mystery that is in each one of us is explicable only by the recognition of the presence of the totality of the whole of the tree of life in each manifestation in the form of each one of us. Every leaf of the tree has the power of the whole tree within itself. Every little cell in every little leaf of a tree has a wireless communication with every other part of the whole tree. If we touch any cell of any leaf in the tree, we have touched the whole tree. The sensation will be carried through the entire manifestation of the tree, up to the very root.

So every one of us is a cosmic atom, and every thought, every idea and every impulse that arises in our mind has the power of the ocean of the Supreme Being, whose will works as the seed of the manifestation of this tree of life. We can appreciate to some extent how wondrous we all are, each one of us. We are not ordinary men, women, children, officers, subordinates, clerks—nothing of the kind. This is an illusion that is before our eyes. Unfortunately, we are content with being individuals in a family, citizens of a country, human beings on this Earth, masters and servants, wealthy and poor. All these are the delusions cast by the mind as a web before our eyes, succeeding to completely keep us out of touch with the realities of life, so that our sorrows are endless because our ignorance is abysmal. We are Masters of Arts in the field of ignorance, and this darkness of ignorance manifests itself in a worse form when we begin to perceive an external world. “While men of ignorance go to darkness, men of knowledge go to greater darkness,” says the Isavasya Upanishad. We will be surprised how it is possible that men of knowledge go to greater darkness. It is because the knowledge that we have in this world is an expression worse than the ignorance of reality. Not to know a thing is ignorance enough, and to know a thing which is not there is a worse form of ignorance.

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