Indian
Philosphy
by
Brahmasrii
Dr K C Varadachari
He
is the Acharya or the Guru. So much so, Kabir says that the name of God is
Kabir, or for the matter of that it can be the name of any great Acharya or
Guru in whom the Divine has manifested Himself in full knowledge. Thus the more
general theory of Kabir synthesizes the view-points of the infinite
Transcendent’s beneficence which is manifested by His central and full
immanence in the hearts of all creatures who have given themselves up to Him.
Man’s whole being must be offered up to God and man’s work lies in
concentration upon the task of weaving the name of Hari constantly. Kabir true
to his hereditary vocation as weaver says in his Bijak:
“Weave, weave the name of Hari
on which gods, men and Munis are meditating. He stretched the warp and took the
shuttle. The four Vedas are
the wheel.
One beam is Ram Narayan, fulfilling the purposed work.
He made the ocean of the world
a trough; therein he kneads the starch. The body of starch is stiffened: few
new it as starch.
Moon and Sun-the two are the
treadle: in mid-ocean (light) the warp is made. As the Lord of the three words
brushed on the starch Shyam joined the broken ends. He sets the pegs, and when
he took the reed, then Rama was bound. As the reed beat up the warp, the three
loks were bound. None he left free. The three loks were made one loom; the warp
worked up and down. The eternal Purusa bade me sit beside him. Kabir entered
into light”
(Sabad 64 trans. –Rev.
Ahmed Shah)
In
the above verse we can see the Agamas fourfold description of the Divine as the
transcendent, as creator-source, as avatar, as the inner companion of the soul
who watches over it and leads it by the path of light. Kabir wonderfully
represents by means of the metaphor of weaver and the weaving the process of
creation and liberation. Weaving is a wonderful
profession so said Valluvar, the great author of the
Kural, who also was a weaver by profession.
Kabir’s
vision of the Absolute was that of the absolute immanence of God in all forms
and yet no form exhausts Him. There is no doubt that God can be in all things
even like the whole sky could be contained in the pupil of the eye. Says Kabir,
“I saw a passage smaller than a needles eye. Therein I saw thousands of camels
and elephants passing on their way”. This path is the path of inner vision, the
vision of the Godhead in the heart is capable of being attained through the
apparently trifling act of surrender, by speech of surrender by wearing the
name of God always. Kabir entered a wider stream of consciousness when he began
to proclaim that he was the Absolute himself even like the Vamadeva of the
Upanishads. He was the seed of Brahma he said, the unbounded himself was he.
Kabir was a siddha.
The
knowledge of the transcendent nature of God alone is insufficient. The
knowledge of the immanent nature of God alone is also insufficient. The two are
not irreconcilable attributes of God. God is
mahato mahiyan, anoroniyan and pervades all things both inside and outside, antar
bahisca. Thus alone must God be contemplated upon. Else ignorance will
persist, if not result. The Upanishad states that this dual realization will
make one cross over death and attain the Immortal. Says Kabir. “The world will
die. But I shall not die. I have got one giver of life. Infidels will die;
saints will not die. They will fill and drink the immortal juice. If Hari dies,
then I will die: if He does not die then now why should I die. Kabir says I
fixed the mind in the mind: I became immortal and obtained the Ocean of Happiness”. The saints attain the
supreme abode. Saints do not die. They only become flowers of the Divine, are
gathered by the Divine for being worn eternally as ornament. The idea is not
new. Pattanathar, a siddha, became a heap of flowers on dying. So too did Kabir
become a heap of flowers when he passed away. The perfume of his realization
spread over the face of Northern India. A new
spirit was set afoot and steadily it became the most powerful influence towards
communal accord in religious History. For Kabir was the Guru of Guru Nanak the
founder of Sikhism. Both faiths claimed him. It is the nature of any
universal message to cut across the frontiers of
difference by penetrating down to the inner layer of individual being. “In
every abode the light doth shine: it is you who are blind that cannot see. When
by dint of looking and looking you at length can discern it, the veils of this
world will be torn asunder. “The temple
of God is a place at
which all persons without any difference can worship. A living temple God
is the teacher, the prophet and the seer. But he is not all. One should become
born again of the flower one had become. So were the alvars, some of them. The
world is a place of worship, a temple of the Lord. Says Kabir “By saying that
Supreme Reality only dwells in the inner realm of spirit, we shame the outer
world of matter and also when we say that he is only in the outside we do not
speak the truth”. The world is not contradictory to God. The world and souls
are organic to the Divine Lord.
Thus
Kabir was conformity with the Bhagavata doctrine. The point of departure of the
theory of Kabir from Ramanuja consists in the fact of refusal to recognize
idolatry or the Arca-form. In this respect he
shows his inclination to the Nirguna form, the truth of
the Islamic tradition which has been consistently opposed to image worship of
any kind. When reality is present why worship images? When we have the real
mother before us why play with dolls of the mother? so asked St. Nammalvar and
Tirumangai. This would be to take the representation for reality. This of
course is not the meaning of the Arca-form of the Southern and the Agama Schools.
But the refusal to recognize idol or icon worship was in tune with the spirit
of Islam and was the meeting ground between the Hindu and Mohammedan conceptions
of the deity. Thus Kabir reformed Hinduism and led the way for the emergence of
a new phase of Hinduism in the North. He established Bhakti through surrender
through repetition of Name as the means to realization. He showed the robust
way towards the realization of the Divine even here and even in this body
itself. He taught the four-fold truth of the nature of Godhead. He affirmed the
reality of the process of divinization of Man, God’s nearness and accessibility
and grace.
PSYCHOLOGY
AND RELIGION
Modern
Psychology has taken upon itself to analyse the complex sentiment of Religion.
Professor William James in his classical work on the Varieties of Religious
experience tried to establish psychological tests by which one could determine
what constitutes religious experience.
We
have to distinguish between religion as an institution and religious
experience. The religious experience has been shown to be a kind of sense of
the wonder and numinous and significant of the cosmic as against the individual
and the sense-universe and so on. Many have followed this Jimsian track.
The
Psycho-analysts headed by Freud have analyzed the religious experience and
declared that it is
i. a craving for protection and power. The infant’s
feeling of importance at the beginning gradually is given up and
thanks to this need to be helped and protected by the
environment and is sought to be regained by increasing one’s own power either
through the parents or some entity hypostatized.
ii. It is also seen to be an attempt to get control over
the sensory world directly but when this is impossible by alternative means
which are psychological.
iii. Religion itself is a great ‘Illusion’ as it posits
the existence of a spiritual being who loves all – a father-complex or image
erected into a higher reality. It is seen that God is a father surrogate’ and
the brotherhood among all is another imitational pattern.
This
Freudian analysis is really materialistic though nonetheless valuable. Religion
satisfies in one sense man’s desire for knowledge and competes with science. As
science advances perhaps we might give up the illusions of religion, as clothed
in the myths etc., which could be psycho-analytically explained.
According
to Jung who was much more concerned with the metaphysical analysis or meta-
psychology God is an archetype. All religions are
different methods of stating the same idea of God as a symbol of the psychic
energy which carries a tremendous load of libido. In fact this leads to the
concept of the omnipotence of God. Though this archetypal libido operates
through the unconscious almost everywhere yet it clear that it controls and
directs all conscious life and movements everywhere almost in an identical
manner. The universality of myths and dreams is an evidence of this singleness
of God-libido.
If
it is asked how far their studies helped clarification of religious experiences
all that we can say is with Sri Aurobindo – they have been walking in the
dim-lit worlds of the shadows.
Eric
Fromm and others interested in the study of human nature proceeded to consider
the religious aspect as part of human history. History has been the source of
factual data even as the myths have been the source of factual data for Carl
Jung. Fromm has transferred the ‘focal point from within the individual to the
external objective conditions. The behaviour of
individuals is shaped accordingly by their society and
the society is moulded by objective conditions. The environmental approach to
the study of human and individual problems may be acclaimed as a major step
forward for science (which objectifies and seeks objectification as the norm of
understanding).
That
we have not progressed very far in this methodology in respect of the proper
understanding of religion is self-evident. If we think that religion could be
understood in terms of the institutions of religion – the priest craft, the
fire-altar constructions, the incantations, the prescribing of taboos and the
adoption of totems, or even the formation of mystery cults, dances and music
and so on, then a study in detail of all the religious institutions from the
primitive to the higher religions would provide invaluable data. The Golden
Bough and the other studies do provide a much needed data. But that is not the
spirit of religion. These are exteriorizations or improvisations of the inward
welling up of certain sentiments and ideations, which are in fact inseparable.
The religious institutions such as the Temple
in India
stand for a certain idea-the house of God. The Church is a place where one
could pray alone and in company to that Highest Being who is everywhere. Here
there is no icon (pratima) to give a visual representation of the invisible and
omnipervasive being. The Mosque again resents the iconisation of God who is beyond
all our sense-grasps. But what are the lower religions otherwise? May be they
want a representation and idealization of the best and that which has helped
them – or contrariwise that which has injured them and the feelings of guilt
and fear and so on. The development of sacrifices – the most beastly and most
bloody – have their source not so much in the sadistic impulse or some such
libidinous impulse but in the need of give up oneself to the highest in all
one’s parts, property etc. – and the quantification of the ‘giving away or up’
has led to ferocious dimensions. Religion depraved in this manner had to
emphasize the quality rather than the quantity – the psychological as against
the objective or external offering. The external charity is to be measured only
by the internal charity – not vice versa. The pull towards externality however
has not
even today ceased to operate. The Religion is not so much
in grandeur of structures or rituals and sacrifices – festivals but in the
ability of each individual to arrive at that direct experience of the Ultimate.
The
religion of our temples has shown itself in the large formulation of the basic
external symbolic form of the structure – its rising towers. It is usually said
that the structure of the temple is based on the concept of correspondence
between the human body and the house of God: But this would be to over-simplify
the concept of the temple. The temple corresponds to the entire Universe – or
creation which has grown round the central force which has constructed it. The
central force of the temple is the innermost sanctum sanctorum – where
the deity is installed. The several enclosures are said to represent the
several sheaths – the ananda, vijnana, manas, prana and anna –
five: some have seven prakaras – the symbol includes the three – fire, water
and prithvi under anna. The towers (Gopuram) represent the ascending worlds – bhuh,
bhuvah, svah – or seven adding the mahah, janah, tapas and satyam.
So the symbolic nature of the temple seems to have been well-known to
the architects of the temples. There is bound to be large
amount of spiritual heritage in this symbolic temple architecture.
The
icons themselves are designed to represent the forces of the cosmic order which
one would like to worship or invoke. The attempt to objectify the inward powers
also held as cosmic powers has led to many speculations and innovations and
inventions. There are large differences between the Hindu and the Mahayana
myths and types of worship but when we penetrate behind them we have a
substantial unity of symbol. It is so as in the case of Jaina temple
psychology.
There
is a large amount of agreement in the matter of the goals of the three
religious movements, Hindu (Vaisnava, Saiva, Sakta), Buddhist and Jaina: the
goal is liberation - the means are also similar – the necessity of total
abnegation of world-values: the first emphasizes a life of disciplined
God-dedicated renunciation and enjoyment: the second emphasizes the
dharma-dedicated renounced life; the third emphasizes the total dedication to
purification of oneself till the least particle of karma-matter (pudgala)
is thrown out and one becomes a jina – a free spirit
without any bondage any longer.
Religion
means more the discipline of one’s life – a discipline that exalts the virtues
of dedication to the ultimate transcendental freedom and seeks within the
lifetime given to man to direct all energies to that goal.
This
is the psychology of religious transcendental idealism. It does not make
renunciation and end in itself but as a means to the attainment of that union
with the life of the Universe and beyond that. This does not mean any
pessimism, It on the contrary means a great deal of optimism. Pessimism is the
condition that develops when one feels that his goals or ideals cannot be
realized at all. That this world cannot be the world in which the highest can
be realized is for most a bare statement of fact. It is a law of nature itself.
To seek immortality in the mortal world would be an idle dream if mortality is
a law of this world. This might be denied and a philosophy of basic
transformation of the world would or may entail the abrogation of the law of
mortality. Some thinkers like
Sri Aurobindo hope for this. But this world would have
become some other world.
Again
it is not pessimism to affirm transcendence over this world alone will lead to
absolute Bliss. The attempt to establish a kingdom of God
on earth as it is in Heaven, would men the abolition of the earth itself. But
that notwithstanding, the social modifications of the earth society or
community so as to bring about a new set of codes of life or laws are not
beyond the earth consciousness at all. The aim of a godly world – a
religion-directed world had been attempted. The temple-centred cultures all
over the world have shown certain definite cultural developments. They have
greatly modified the minds of men, weaned them away from the pure
instinct-driven lives or ritual conditioned consciousness. But the new habits
of mind also tended to lose consciousness and conscience and this led to the
woodenness of ritual mortality, religious mortality and myth mortality and
symbolic mores.
The
psychology of self-transcendence is understandable – though perhaps it would be
meaningless if it means the giving up of oneself for the
sake of another – but this could be shown to be the newly
discovered self of one: The basic religious sentiments are not static but
dynamic revealing the great attractiveness of the ideals of Transcendence of
the self. These ideals or goals are not immanent and cannot be discovered
immanently. So much can be stated. The objective manifestations of religion are
means and are symbolic. These symbols are in a sense universal and stand for
objects of the spiritual mind not of the senses and even the ego-centered
desires and needs.
It
is in this that lies the secret differentium between the human ideals and the
religions are transcendental ideals. In the modern world there is a tendency to
claim that transcendental aspirations are also human and are the human whereas
the immanental aspirations are lower than the human. This is due to the happy
shifting of the co-ordinates of reference. But not all agree to this shifting.
In a world of different levels of biological and moral development the psychic
claims and aims are bound to the variant.
In the modern world what are the most important needs
which could be called religious or spiritual?
1.
It is claimed that Santi or Peace is the real goal of all people.
Peace
or Santi is said to be granted by religious life. It comes about as a result of
a contact with God in contemplation. It may come about in devotional practices.
It is said to come about during the performance of good deeds.
The
peace that passeth understanding, which noting can disturb is the gift of God
or the Dharma.
What
is behind this need for peace which this god-union can grant? We have to
realize that Peace is the cessation of all activities – both the internal and
the external or the quelling down of the movements of the mind which either is
engaged with external objects or internal memory. This comes about through
strenuous practice.
From
having the peace of the individual we move towards peace outside in the world.
Peace in the outer
world is something very different – it is the harmonizing
of all diverse movements – bringing about the reign of law and order. The
external conditions of the world have quite an effect on man’s life. Indeed
most of man’s life is devoted to acting and reacting in the environment. Peace
is something that does not happen. We have a negative definition of peace:
peace is absence of war or conflict. It may mean absence of difference of
opinion or ideals. People go searching for peace to all places of religion:
they go from one sacred place to another; from one saint to another saint; this
continuous movements for the sake of inward peace may be considered to be a
phenomenon peculiarly Indian, for men do not go here for learning, for
sight-seeing or for any other purpose but for the purpose of getting peace –
santi. A certain quiet is got but it soon passes away. Is it the mind that is
the cause of this restlessness? The ancient statement – mana eva Manusyanam
karanam bandha moksayoh; the mind is the cause of both man’s bondage and
liberation; bondage when it moves outward to objects of sense, liberation, in
desisting from them. Mental peace is said to be arrived at by cultivating
thoughtlessness or non-
ideation of any kind. Thus impressions of objects and
their memories float constantly on the mind or rise and fall like waves in the
mind- the two analogies implicit are that it is a background and that it is a
sea or lake.
Peace
of this kind is the usual thing that one gets or at least is said to be felt
when one goes to sacred places or the sacredness of the place or person is
judged by this test.
This
linking up of man’s unhappiness or restlessness or non-peace with the mind is
one important discovery.
This
mind is said to operate through the sense – organs and the motor-organs and also
of the pleasure and pain and memory of these impressions. Taken altogether with
the eleven the mind is also engaged with the subtle sense-material (tanmatras)
and the gross material substances both composing the body and the outer world.
It is not necessary to make Mind an all creator but its activities are varied
and integrating. One’s experience (ex-outer perience: knowledge) including the
bodily ones are entirely governed or
assisted. No wonder the mind is over-worked and this
develops what we call the three states of consciousness. The gross state or
waking state or moving state consists of the total activities of the individual
observable through the senses both of one’s own body and of the outer world.
But the dream state has suspended all the outer motions – though it is clear
that internal or subjective movements are not made but appear to have been
made. Dreams seem to have all the activities which none observes but yet
subjectively done – so to speak – all this is imagination. No wonder the philosophers
who generalized on this dream consciousness have built up a universe of
imagination – of mental creation. That these creations could be fantasy,
hallucinatory and fairly described as psychotic constructions is well known. A
man may be known for his internal nature by seeing or hearing his creation –
mainly imaginative and artistic. Perhaps it would be necessary to see whether
there are not layers of this dream consciousness – and here we must be grateful
to the modern workers: Freud, Jung, Adler, Fromm and others, and even the great
artists Blake, Joyce, Lawrence, Elliot and others. Perhaps it is in the
creative mind that is imagination the free flow of
psychic energy expresses itself so to mould the given material of the waking
consciousness. A fruitful study has been available on the work of S.T.
Coleridge – The Road to Xanadu. There can be a great amount of psychic analysis
on these writers taking them to be operating on the mind at this second level.
The ancients called this level – taijasa-illuminating zone – not the dark zone
but the luminous one not unmindful of the light this can throw on man’s
personality. In one sense this zone of man reveals his astral personality, that
personality which is said to transmigrate to the other bodies at rebirth.
Whether we accept this point or not the fact seems to be that crux of man’s
life is said to be discovered in his dreams or that illumined subjective
condition which is dynamically constructive imagination.
True
it is that the ancients held that one enjoys all his desires or their
contraries in this zone of his daily life. Whether they are made by himself or
by a higher than all – God – it is certain that there is an independence which
disproves autonomy in the dream construction by oneself. However artists try to
develop some amount of autonomy in their productions.
However this poetic movement of the mind in dream
conditions is sought to be transcended since all these productions or
objectifications of inner conflicts and hopes and the peace. Fulfillment of the
inner life is held by some to be the condition of peace – they call this the
positive peace and the other peace is said to be the peace of renunciation –
negative peace. This positive peace of fulfillment seems to be a great
attractive force and ideal. The great literatures are in fact attempts to gain
this peace through fulfillment: so too the great sculptures and paintings which
immortalise the mortal in stone and marble.
But
the means adopted for this purpose seems to be definitely not what the
Psycho-analytic schools call analysis of the Unconscious through dream or
association or myth or some other kind of complex arising from physical or
ability-defect. The annihilation of the mind-nirmamata – is also sought. In
fact in Buddhist psychology this condition is arrived at in jhana of the Void,
mindlessness, amanaska and so on.
Thus
the value of the modern psychological or psycho-analytic treatment lies not in
the ultimate
attainment of peace that religion aims at but at the
lesser adjustment or adaptation to the cultural situation or environmental
conditions etc. Perhaps it may be suggested that this mind-problem is
essentially a human problem – for such conflicts are not available in animals
etc. Whilst this might be the opinion of man it is held that they too in their
own way have this difficulty at least at the greatest moments of crisis – of
death through sudden conditions, like floods, typhoons, fires and so on. But
let us not enter into that field firstly because of its patent obscurity and
secondly because of its difficulty.
Man
and his mind seem to be in this difficult station – his mind seems to bring
about his distempers. The getting rid of mind seems to be the problem – its
solution may lie in ever so many directions, through sexual orgy, wine or
religion, which escapes from all the above, through penance and abstinence,
perfect self-control and dhyana – meditation that seeks to serve the
power of the mind over the self or man. These are powers used to check the
movements of the mind, the movements which might even be imaginative creation
and so on. Arts were looked down upon in religion at
the beginning: later arts subordinating themselves tried
to please religion by expounding religious motifs and themes; in the end arts
conquered religion; religion’s importance seemed to derive from art productions
rather than art derive its power from religious experience. But since religious
experience is the experience invisible or of the invisible etc., it had always
to go beyond art.
If
psychology considers that Art is not only a means of imaginative construction,
it has also to take note of the fact that it is a psychical behaviour revealing
the personality (or depersonality) or integration (or disintegration) of mind
at the back of the process or mind in activity. Whether art can itself help in
the overtification or externalization of the conflicts within the mind and
manifest the inner repressions without being aware of their being repressed or
without inhibition is a matter of great concern. Perhaps subtly most art is of
this order and it performs a spontaneous function in restoring the normalcy of
mental life – provided however it is not encouraged overmuch by neurotic
audience or fans, who find in such exhibition their own repressed sentiments or
complex getting an
expression. In this sense the neurotic art may well help
therapy. But this is a real field for investigation. We find in the religious
institution the festivals and other occasions the institutions and rituals as
well as the other paraphernalia do go a long way to satisfy this liberation of
the pent up psychic forces. All that religion does is to canalize the movements
and whilst appearing to permit or freely express the inward unconscious
cravings it subtly regulates the actual culmination. Thus it is that religious
houses have been considered to be houses that restore peace of mind that
permits a free expression of pent up grief’s, emotions the most urgent of
dependence, of love, of sensual participation in idea and image, of repentance
for sins so called, the lapses or possession by other spirits and so on. In
fact the religious institutions are clearing houses not only of all dirt and
disease of the mind but grant a sense of restoration of the balance that is the
necessity between the three levels of consciousness – the waking the dream and
the deep sleep. One finds oneself in a fourth state of liberated waking,
dreaming and sleep.
The institution of Surrender to God in works, in
knowledge and in devotion, called Bhara-Nyass or Prapatti, even like its
similar Confession in Christianity is a significant process of opening out
without any reservation. All that modern psychiatrists try to do is to create
an impression of scientific opening up of the inward life with perhaps success
in all those cases where religious impulses have lost grip. The truth is that
confessions have been abused and trustworthiness of the priest or confessor has
been questioned by the mind or else there is no real confessing possible.
Om Tat Sat
(Continued...)
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