The well-known Greek aphorism ‘Know thyself’ is akin to the Upanishad precept atmanam viddhi, know the Self. By a process of abstraction we get behind the layers of body, mind and intellect and reach the Universal Self, “the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”. “To attain the Good, we must ascend to the highest state and fixing our gaze thereon.”
All our educational technology these days, as education is generally understood, concerns itself with objects of perception and intellectual understanding. The Atman is not a subject which can be perceived through the sense organs, nor can it be understood intellectually by any kind of logical acumen, the reason being that the Atman is yourself; it is not somebody else. In all courses of knowledge and procedures of study, you place yourself in the position or context of a student, and you consider the world of objects outside as subjects of observation and experiment and study. In your education you do not study yourself; you study something other than your own self. You go to a college or university, and you have themes like mathematics, physics, chemistry, sociology and what not. All these themes which are so well placed before you in great detail are external to yourself. Everything that you study, anywhere, is outside you. You don’t study yourself in any course of study that has been made available to you.
But the Upanishad is a study of yourself. Atmanam vidhi is the great oracle of the Upanishad. Know thyself and be free. It is something astounding to hear that we can be free by knowing our own selves. It is said because of the fact we have a feeling generally in the work-a-day life of the world, that we become free only when we know the world outside. We study sociology, history economics and what not, external studies and empirical observations, for the purpose of acquiring freedom in life. The more you are educated, the more you seem to be free in human society. But the Upanishad says this knowledge cannot make you free. It is only the knowledge of your own self that can assure you true freedom.
The reason for this opinion of the Upanishads is also very deep-rooted. How is it that freedom is embedded in you only and not anywhere else? I mentioned to you on the very first day that this particular something which the Upanishads call Atman is not a prerogative of any particular individual; it is not something that is in you only, it is the pure subjectivity of all things. The deepest essence of anything and everything in the universe is what is called the Atman. So the study of the Atman is not the study of the self of some person, Mr. So-and-so and all that; it is the study of the self of every Mr. So-and-so, so on and so forth. Everything, everyone, all things are a pure subjectivity in them. There is an l-ness or a feeling of self-identity even in a tree which grows according to its own predilection for the purpose of its own survival. The instinct of survival is present in each and every living entity, perhaps even in non-living elements like an atom. They maintain identity of themselves. Atman may be said to be the characteristic of self identity of everything. You cannot become other than what you are. You are something and you want to be that thing only and you cannot be something else. A is A, A cannot be B, this is the law of identity and logic. And everything is what it is; nothing can be other than what it is. This peculiar inherent tendency of the maintenance of self-identity in all things (you have to listen to me carefully every word that I speak), this inherent tendency in everything in respect of the maintenance of that vehement form of self identity consciousness is the Atman.
It is the Atman not merely as a force that causes this impulse of self-identity in things, it is also a consciousness of their being such a self-identity. You are what you are, but not only that, you are also aware that you are what you are. So it is existing and it is also conscious that it exists. So the Atman is existence; it is also consciousness. Now, what sort of existence? The existence of the fact that it cannot be identified with anything other than itself. This is the characteristic of pure subjectivity. For no reason can you become somebody else. Rama cannot become Krishna, Krishna cannot become Jesus, Jesus cannot become Thomas and so on and so forth. A particular thing is just that particular thing for the reason that it is constituted of characteristics that make that thing only that thing. This cohesive element which brings the parts of your personality into the centrality of apprehension, awareness, is the work of the Atman.
To repeat once again what I told you a few minutes before, this tendency is present in everything and everyone. Therefore the study of the Atman is not study of something somewhere it is the study of everything. I hope you catch what I’m saying. The study of the Atman is the study of the essence of everything anywhere because of the fact everything everywhere has this Atman. There is an Atman in all things in the sense that they maintain an identity-consciousness of themselves. So the Atman has a peculiar characteristic of being just what it is; that is to say, it cannot be an object of anyone. The self-identity aspect of consciousness, which is the Atman, cannot become Anatman, to put it in the Sanskrit language. The Atman cannot become Anatman. The Self cannot become not-Self. The subject cannot become the object. Consciousness cannot become matter. You cannot become somebody else.
This is something that will follow from a proper analysis of the nature of what is called the Atman, the great, grand, magnificent subject of the Upanishads. In as much as this is something which you have never heard in your life, something which nobody else taught you anywhere in any educational institutions, something that cannot be included in the curriculum of any kind of science, arts, or humanities in the ordinary sense of the term, this is an astounding thing that you are hearing. That is the reason why the Upanishads are insisting that it is a secret knowledge; it is not a subject for public oration. It is secret because it cannot be understood by any amount of scratching your head. The reason is, you are studying yourself as a basic principle, this “yourself” not being a person, this physical body- mind complex, but the principle that is the principle of all things.
So the study of the Atman is the study of first principles. The Atman philosophy is the fundamental philosophy. When that is known, you have known the secret of all things. It is the vital spot of every individual, of anything in the universe. This knowledge is not communicated by mere reading books in a library; it is possible to acquire it through hard discipline.
The mind of the human being is usually characterized by three defects and any kind of self-discipline implies the avoiding of these defects somehow or other, the stubbing out of the defect- ridden personality of the individual. In Sanskrit this three-fold defect of the human mind is called Mala, Vikshepa and Avarana.
Mala means dirt, something like a thick coating over a clean mirror, preventing reflection of light in it. Dirt is that which covers the essential nature of an object, like a thick coating of dust, etc. on a mirror. There is some such thing covering the mind of the human being also, on account of which correct knowledge is not reflected in the mind, as a mirror that is covered over with dust will not reflect sunlight. So some step has to be taken in order to see that this dirt of the mind is scrubbed off.
The other defect of the mind is known as Vikshepa, that is fickleness, inability to concentrate on anything for a long time, instability is the basic nature of the mind. It will think twenty things in one minute and will not be able to fix its attention on one thing even for a few seconds. These are the superficial aspects of the defects of the mind.
But there is a deeper defect known as Avarana. It is like a thick veil over the mind, a black curtain, as it were, which prohibits the entry of the rays of light into itself totally. The Atman being pure subjectivity, the impulsion of the mind to move outward in the direction of sense objects, is an anti-Atman activity taking place in the mind, a movement towards the not-Self. Any psychic operation, any modification of the mind in the direction of other than what the Self is, is to be considered as impelled by some dirt in the mind.
Sometimes the mind operates like a prism which deflects rays of light in various forms and in various hues. It is up to each person to consider for one’s own self what are the thoughts that generally arise in the mind from the morning to the evening. You may be doing anything, but what are you thinking in the mind? This is what is important. The thoughts which take you wholly in the direction of what you are not and engaging your psychic attention on things which are not the Self – these things should be considered as a serious infection in the mind itself.
When basically everybody is what one is, and even when you are operating in the direction of a sense-object so-called, through the perceptive activity of the senses, what is actually happening is that one location of this Universal Self (it is universal because it is present in all beings), one particular psycho-physical location of this Universal Self tries to impinge itself upon another such location in the form of an object outside. It considers another thing as an object wrongly because of the movement of the Atman- consciousness through the eyes, through the various sense- organs.
There is a tendency inherent in the human mind by which the pure subjectivity which is the consciousness of the Atman is pulled, as it were, in the direction of what it is not, and is compelled to be aware of what it is not in the form of sense- perception. Not only that, it cannot be conscious continuously of one particular object – now it is aware of this, now it is aware of another thing. It moves from object to object. The tendency to move in the direction of what the Atman is not, the impulsion towards externality of objects, is the dirt or Mala as it is called. The impossibility of fixing the mind on anything continuously is the distraction or the Vikshepa. The reason why such an impulse has arisen at all is the Avarana or the veil. These three defects have to be removed gradually by protracted selfdiscipline coupled with proper instruction. It takes its own time. Usually, you must have heard, there are techniques of yoga practice known as Karma, Bhakti and Jnana; or Karma, Upasana and Jnana. Karma is activity, work, performance of any kind, discharge of one’s duty, you may say. This impulsion of the mind to move always in the direction of objects outside is due to a desire that is present in the mind to grab something from outside and make good a particular lacunae that it feels in one’s own self. This tragic movement of the mind in the direction of objects for the purpose of fulfillment of selfish desires can be obviated only by a certain type of activity called Karma. Karma does not mean any kind of work, but a specific kind of work. Everybody is doing some work, everybody is busy in this world – but it does not mean that they are doing Yoga in the form of work. Work becomes Yoga only when it is free from the impulse of selfishness behind the performance of work.
When you do a work, you must put a question to yourself – what is the reason behind your engaging yourself in that work? Is it because some extraneous or ulterior motive is there behind that work? Or is it done for mere self-purification? You must distinguish between work done as a job and work done as a duty. A duty may not apparently bring you a material benefit at the very outset, but it will bring you an invisible benefit. That is why duty is adored so much everywhere and people say you must do your duty. If duty is not so very important, but only remunerative job is the only thing that is important, then insistence on duty would be out of point.
Everybody says duty must be done, but what is duty? Work done as duty can alone purify, no other work can purify the self. It is not any kind of labour that can be regarded as Karma yoga. Now, what is this duty that you are talking of which is going to chasten the personality of the individual, purify it? Briefly it can be called unselfish action. It is a work that you do for the benefit that may accrue to a larger dimension of reality and not merely to the localized entity called your own individual self.
When you serve people, you are to bear in mind always the reason why this service is done at all. Mostly, the reason is buried underneath. We have social reasons, political reasons, economic reasons, and family considerations when we do any work in the form of service of people. But service which is spiritually oriented is not a social work or a political activity, or it is not connected even with a family maintenance. It is actually a service done to your own self.
How is it? You may put a question. In what way is service of people, for instance, a little before – your essential being is also the essential being of everybody else. So the people that you see outside, the world of space-time even, is a wider dimension of the selfhood which is your own pure subjectivity. This is a subject which is a little difficult to understand, to be listened to with great caution and care. The service that you render to others, even to a dog let alone human beings, even manuring a tree for its sustenance, taking care of anything whatsoever, is not done with any kind of ulterior motive, much less even the consideration that it is something outside you.
(to be continued)