Hinduism

Continued from part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4

If it is asked, “Is Brahman the same as God who is a Personal Being?”, the answer is that Brahman is the origin of God who is a Personal Being. If it is asked, “Is Brahman an Impersonal It, a creative force, a supra-Personal Being, Pure Consciousness, etc. ?”, the answer is that Brahman is the origin of all these. In other words, God as the Ultimate Reality is beyond logical understanding, beyond our power to express in words. Whatever we say about God, even if what we say is true, can express only a tiny fragment of God. The Hindus understood this very well, and so they taught that reverent silence is true worship of Brahman.

We may well ask, “How, then, did the Hindus arrive at the mystery, or even have a distant vision, of this supreme reality called Brahman?” This takes us to the inmost heart of Hinduism. The Hindus first asked, thousands of years ago, “What am I?” How easily and how constantly we use the word ‘I’ all through our speaking and thinking, and even in our sleep, in dreams! And how terribly and overwhelmingly does this ‘I’ absolutely dominate our lives! What is this ‘I’? Have you ever seriously tried to find out ? Is it the body? Feelings? Thoughts? Mind? Soul? Consciousness? Or some of these taken together, or all of these in combination? Attack the question another way: Is the ‘I’ mortal or immortal? Has it form, shape, substance, or is it formless and immaterial? Is it spirit or matter? What is it?

Now the Hindus discovered that you cannot arrive at an answer satisfactory to yourself if you try to answer “What is the ‘I’?” in your ordinary state of mind and with your present mental faculties. You must first develop an unusual faculty, namely, that of being able to hold the mind completely still, while you are fully awake. Try it. What is happening in your mind now? Is there not a continuous stream of impressions, feelings, pictures, and thoughts? A continuous stream of words? You say, “But that is quite natural, for I am awake and conscious, not unconscious”. Perfectly right. But now suppose you can really stop that continuous stream of words and tunes and pictures in your mind, make the mind perfectly still, and also remain wide awake and not fall asleep like the disciples of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. In what manner, then, will you be conscious?

Superconsciousness

Far from becoming vague or blank or unconscious, you will become superconscious. Then you will ‘know’ in quite a different way from the way in which you know with your ordinary consciousness in everyday life. Everything appears to be transformed. You become ‘transfigured’, as the great religions say of their great teachers. Thereupon the ‘I’, or ‘the Self’, is experienced in an utterly different way from the way in which you ordinarily think, or rather try to think, of the ‘I’. Now many of the great Hindu teachers, on becoming ordinarily conscious again after experiencing superconsciousness, taught their disciples that the ‘Real Self’ cannot be described in words. We cannot say it is good or bad, matter or spirit, formed or formless, living or lifeless, because whatever words we use would misrepresent it, or at best give an incomplete or blurred glimpse of the reality. Therefore, these teachers said: “Let us give this Real Self a name — Ātman — purely to enable us to talk about it when necessary, and let us say that the Ātman is ‘not this, not that’; in short, that no descriptive word can be applied to it. The best thing we may say about the Ātman is ‘It is’.”

The Ātman is known by being experienced superconsciously. It is quite a mistake to say it can be known by introspection, which, in its usual meaning, is carried out in ordinary consciousness. Now those Hindu teachers, by entering the superconscious state and realizing the Ātman, made the wonderful awe-inspiring discovery that in realizing the Ātman they had also realized Brahman. In other words, Brahman was not only Brahman, but was also man’s very essence, namely, the Ātman. Thus, the Ātman is the absolute foundation of man’s eternal hope. Our most real nature is God, a divine potential hidden within us. Remove the outer obstructions, and that hidden potential will blossom out as the visible, active Son of God. We must make the effort and aspire to the holy life, and the grace of God crowns the effort and aspiration by enabling us to cross over all sin and sorrow. This is resurrection and ascension after we have died to all sin. This is Nirvana. And such is the teaching of the Vedas and the Upaniṣads, the oldest and most sacred of the Hindu scriptures.

Immortality

When you enter the superconscious state, you are conscious in an immortal manner. In the ordinary state, you are conscious of an event or a mood or a thought as something which begins and then comes to an end, as if it were a birth and a death. Then you are conscious of the next thought or thing — the next birth and death. We may describe this as being conscious in the manner, or mode, of mortality. But to become superconscious, you have to succeed in stopping this succession of births and deaths, while still remaining wide awake, in full control of yourself. You now become conscious in a different mode, the mode of immortality, of not-mortality. Immortality thus really means experiencing existence superconsciously, here and now.

In the superconscious state, you are united with God. The great Hindu teachers said of their own experience of such union: “Pratyagātman (my Self, or I) and Paramātman (the Supreme Self, or God) are one.” Centuries later, Jesus said: “I and my Father are one.” As long as you stay in the superconscious state, you experience ‘eternal life’, ‘divine bliss’, and ‘the peace that passeth understanding’. The superconscious state is what we really mean by being in the presence of God, in heaven; it is also the real meaning of conquering death.

Rebirth and Karma

Just a little earlier, we talked of a succession of births and deaths in our own daily, mental life. This is a real, and probably the most sensible, meaning of the doctrine of rebirth, sometimes called reincarnation. Some scholars use other terms also — metampsychosis, transmigration, palingenesis, metensomatosis — in connection with that doctrine that you are born again and again in this world. Now, when we talk of the succession of births and deaths, most people do not mean the succession in our own minds, as taught in the Maitri and the Śaṇḍilya Upaniṣads. They mean that some time after your body is dead, your soul, or ego, or whatever it is that is supposed to survive as the real ‘you’, will reappear in this world in another body. After ‘you’ have lived that life, ‘you’ will be born again in a new body, and so on. This is the popular belief.

Why must this happen? The Hindus taught that God is perfectly just, besides being loving and merciful. Therefore justice must ultimately prevail throughout His creation. Perfect law governs universal process. The action of such and such a force brings such and such a result. Several forces will produce a net result. Again, if such and such be sown, that and that alone will be duly reaped. This law — that whatever happens is the correct result of all the forces, both material and spiritual, at work — is called the law of karma. The literal meaning of karma is action. Thought is mental action, speech is verbal action, and a deed is physical action. What we call the mercy or grace of God, or anything which we attribute to God, is spiritual or divine action. It is quite wrong to say that the law of karma is merely a law of retribution.

Continued in part 6

Comments

This article is a good one as it brings up some of the most important highlights of Hinduism — how it is not just a system to take one to heaven or some such wishes of the ego.

T. C. Gopalakrishnan, 9^th November 2011