The Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi website - The Mountain Path - July 1964 Article - Beyond Psychology, by Prof. K. Subrahmanyam

Beyond Psychology

Prof. K. Subrahmanyam

In his 'Sad Vidya' or 'Forty Verses on Reality'^* Bhagavan indicates the Supreme Reality which can be approached only through the way of mysticism. Mystical experience can neither be gained nor explained by psychology, which is the study by the human intelligence of its own mental mechanism, its processes and products. This study is often held to postulate some urge behind the mechanism, but any such urge is very different from the Reality which is Knowledge free from thoughts. "There is, brethren, an unborn, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded. If there were not this unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded there could not be any escape from what is born, become, made and compounded." Nirvana, thus referred to by the Buddha, is the same as what Bhagavan means by Reality. But psychology can only concern itself with "the born, become, made and compounded."
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* See The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi, Rider & Co., London, and Sri Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai.

According to Hindu philosophy, Being is enveloped in progressively finer kosa or sheaths. The most gross of these is brute, inert matter. This is, of course, insentient and is ignored by psychology. It is known as annamaya kosa or 'the food sheath', being food for all organisms. Next comes the pranamaya kosa or 'breath sheath', in which intelligence acts only as the vital, biological instinct. This, still below the level of psychology, reacts mechanically to stimuli for the purposes of selfpreservation and procreative selfperpetuation. At the next higher level of manomaya or 'mind sheath', intelligence has created for itself a mental machine. Here is a more continuously purposive functioning, though the purposiveness is often unconscious. A 'computer' machine can perform some at least of the work of the mind at this level, but no machine can choose its own purpose, though it can function efficiently once its purpose has been chosen for it and 'the works' set accordingly by its owner. It is only at the vijnanamaya or 'intelligence' level that the human intelligence chooses its purposes, judges its own functioning with reference to them and begins asking the question 'what for?', which was never raised in the lower sheaths. Now it delights in its own working and loves to know for the joy of knowing. The vital, biological, instinctive urge has been transcended as sole motive power. The science of psychology, like all other sciences, has its birth at this level.

But the sciences falter as they approach its upper frontiers, where it touches the fifth or anandamaya kosa, that is 'the Sheath of Bliss'. The mind here begins to lose self-confidence. The instruments on which it has relied so far, the senses and reason, no longer seem authoritative in their reports and findings! Are space and time themselves, the framework within which reason operates, absolute entities? The concepts of 'duration' and 'extension' and the appearance of the 'spacetime continuum' are portents threatening the rule of vijnana. Browning's Abt Vogler declared that out of three sounds he framed, not a fourth (composite) sound, but a star. The rules of arithmetic were themselves in danger! Besides, the human intelligence began to recognise that reason was not the only power it could rely on. As Croce pointed out, we do not understand a sentence by sticking together the meanings of its words. At some early stage in the understanding of it - the more intelligent and seasoned the reader, the earlier the stage - the intelligence makes a leap and lands on the meaning of the whole sentence; and words, thereafter, have only a confirmatory function. This power, in use from day to day, is 'intuition', whether psychologists like it or not. Even the scientist can only heap up mounds of data and await the moment when he can leap to the top of them all with a victorious hypothesis! Inventors have made similar admissions of a saltatory power, but for which they would have been helpless. Studies such as Aesthetics, Ethics and Metaphysics are founded on urges over which reason and mechanistic modes of thinking have never really had any valid jurisdiction. But their usurpation has been of long standing; and nineteenth century science, overflowing into the twentieth, has conferred its own worthless validating charter on the forces of the fourth kosa aggressing across the frontiers into the fifth. Psychology must be confronted, at least at this late stage, with a quo warranto writ, when it presumes to operate in the region of Sad Vidya, which I would translate as the 'Urge to Pure Being'. It is an urge, at once allconquering and all-pervading; and reason, with all its presumption, has been only living, all along, on its leavings. Vidya, here, is not a 'science' or a 'lore'; it is the power of Sat (Being) bursting through the obscurations of the human mind. "How can the mindmoon measure the light of the Sun which is Reality? (Verse, 22)."

Spiritual life begins when the Sun of Reality sets the pace for the activities of mind and its retinue, reversing the usual process. President Radhakrishnan is fond of a story of a group of Hindu sages visiting ancient Athens and being proudly informed by the Athenian philosophers that they were seeking, with their investigations, to master all human phenomena. The Hindus asked; "But how can you master things human without first mastering the superhuman?" The Gita and Upanishads express this truth when they describe the Universe as an aswathatree with its roots above and branches below.

"From the Ultimate to the proximate'' - this seems to be the law of progression in spiritual life. Bhagavan begins his teaching with the Being which is Knowing and then comes down to Mahesa, the personal God, and only then to ourselves and the world we cognise. No building up of Truth is possible with all our efforts, intellectual and moral. We can never earn Liberation. Love, whether from God or man, is a total act, without processes and constituents. It cannot be built out of parts; it cannot be led up to; reason, marshalling interconnected propositions, cannot scientifically construct or explain it. It is basic, primal to the universe; no otherwise can it exist. The Buddha speaks of Love that stands aloft, alone, looks out in all directions and radiates its power to all beings in the universe, seen and unseen, born and unborn! Love is so allsufficient to itself that it does not need even beneficiaries! The transition is abrupt from all our efforts, merits and attainments to that which is BeingKnowingLove. This abruptness is brought home to us by the Upanishad which even represents it as arbitrariness. "Brahman reveals Itself to him whom It chooses." At a more human level our teachers have emphasised the need for Grace and Love and framed the doctrine of prevenience. It is not our prayer that leads us to God. God first prays through us. "Thy cry, 'Allah, where art Thou?' was itself My answer 'here I am,'" says a Sufi. Unless the whole is known as the whole (and, therefore, the Alone), nothing is known. "The flight of the alone to the Alone" is not locomotion or a process. 'Science', which belongs to the fourth level, does not seem to have a place here.

Nevertheless, it is not at the Anandamaya Kosa level that the consummation takes place. The sages who called it a kosa made it evident that this ananda is less than the Anandaaspect of the Supreme, Sat-Chit-Ananda. Bhagavan is firm that even this kosa is only a constituent of the body. He says so, almost in passing, in verse 5. Most of us are stationed at the meeting point of the fourth and fifth levels. We have to look below and above. At the level below, we find that the mind has throughout been acquisitive and domineering. It has added to its possessions and power by gathering knowledge (which itself requires a certain mode of strenuous discipline) and by imposing, order on what it has come to know. This order, which the mind calls 'the laws of nature', which it professes to have only discovered, is shaped by the mind's shape, though the mind does not know it. At the level above, as the mind enters into it, it gains awareness of quite another kind. In place of the excitement of conquest, which it has experienced hitherto, it now knows the bliss of being conquered. We may call it a passive state if we please, because it is not induced by our desiring it and willing it. St. Gregory the Great distinguishes between the pleasures which we desire before we get them (and which are, after we have had them, productive of disgust) and the spiritual pleasures which we did not care for before we had them, but which we devotedly cherish when they have bestowed themselves on us. The ananda of the fifth level seems passive because it is of the latter kind. This is a creative passivity. Even as the mind is overwhelmed and subjugated, it delights in the mastering power holding it inescapably in its embrace and participates in its act, even to the point of abiding in energetic identification with this power. In such 'passive' moments the human intelligence grows in bliss and strength and gains the assurance that it is moving towards its own fulfilment. It has only to make itself receptive and Reality pours into it, exalting it. The seeming magnitude or triviality of the occasion (by any conventional, external standard) is irrelevant, because it is the welling up from the depth that matters, not the accidental opening of the surface soil by the pickaxe. Sri Ramakrishna mentions a recluse on a Himalayan slope who spent his life in front of a beautiful waterfall, ever murmuring "Thou hast done well, O Lord, Thou hast done very well indeed." A thing of beauty is a joy forever, not in the sense that the thing itself will endure for ever, but because the joy it provides is an emanation of the one source that endures. In this sense the 'thing' is an Epiphany. So are acts of genuine, pure ethical value, whether they be "little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love" or astounding acts of martyrdom. The 'science' of Ethics will never explain the ethical, urge.

It, is good to dwell for a while on the level of the anandamaya kosa, for beyond this there is neither guide nor signpost such as can he provided by our own experience! And yet there is a long way to go. This is the springboard from which one has to take the plunge like a diver who, with breath and speech controlled, seeks the treasure sunken in the stream (verse 28). Odungutal (the progressive subsidance of the self) and onrutal (one-ing) were favourite words with Bhagavan; the last kosa of all teaches us how in passivity of a certain kind is positive strength and how the intelligence must consent to be submerged in order that it may be exalted and fulfilled. Here is another mystery which is a challenge to reason the unreality of our individual selves, our physical bodies and the material world. Commonsense refuses to admit that these are unreal and yet their unreality has been repeatedly proclaimed by the seers. Bhagavan explains how they are real only within the Real (Verse 8). That one is real in the measure in which one responds to the 'Reality of That Which Is' is illumined by the mystery of artistic creation. The emotions are like brick and mortar; they belong to the sphere of the mason. The tranquillity is the presiding power which belongs to the architect. The emotions and the tranquillity do not cancel each other out because they belong to different levels and spheres altogether. It is in this light that Verses 17 and 18 on the reality of the physical body and the material world are to be understood.

Evil and suffering are so real to the sufferer and are so poignant for one who witnesses them that it may be taken as sheer heartlessness for anyone to indulge in theorising about them. The theologies which offer glib solutions seem blasphemies. But the sense of exaltation which great tragedy produces (and which is among the highest human manifestations of ananda) provides an answer to the problem in the manner of experience, not explanation. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport" is a statement at Lear's level of agony. "On such sacrifices the gods themselves throw incense" is a statement at the King Lear level, the level of Shakespeare's imagination. The "tenth-man-fallacy" is frequently mentioned in our books of scriptural exegetics and there is no more necessary and useful pill in the kit of the spiritual traveller. We are constantly tempted to consider ourselves spectators and judges of the universe, standing, so to speak, outside it, leaving out of account the truth that we should always be reminding ourselves that we are the Universe. Said Sri Ramakrishna: "Evil is in the universe as poison in the cobra" the poison is not poisonous to him who secretes it. To grow into oneness with it (to be 'oned' as in Verse 8) is spiritual life.

Bhagavan mentions the tenthmanfallacy in verse 37 (counting the nine men and mourning the passing away of the tenth member of the band, who is in fact the mourner who has done the counting but forgotten to count himself), but the whole of the 'Forty Verses' is an exposure of this fallacy. The 'nine men' and the 'tenth' form only an illustration and one has to pass on to the truth, for the illustration has necessarily to stop short of the truth. This truth is that the tenth man emerges out of the nine, having been successively the first man, the second, and so on, now being simultaneously all the ten! The Taittiriya Upanishad, which dwells on the expository method of the five sheaths, mentions each successive stage as being more satisfying, but never denies the previous ones. Not only is the Truth all the five sheaths but it is also the power which passes on from one sheath to another. It is indeed the upward urge on which the five sheaths have been strung, like pearls on a thread. The upward urge, the tapas, that will give us no rest at any level, but will push us beyond the five and make us recognise itself as the Highest is Brahman. The anandamaya kosa is only the irradiated mist that swathes the peak of the hill. At the foot of the hill, it was the blanketing fog, darkness visible. At the top it is thinnest and appears as visible light. The nature of light is, in itself, to be invisible; the nature of mist is to obscure. The anandamaya kosa is the mist, the bright cloud, impregnated by the glory of the light that it has received into its bosom. Beyond this kosa is the invisible light. The proof of this? To touch the Reality, all that is needed is to project further the line that has followed its own straight 'compulsive course' so far. That which was insentient, then mere animal instinct, the vital urge, mechanical mentation, the selfregulative intelligence, intuition, inspiration and mysticism cannot be alien to us. "It is not the known, nor yet the unknown". The five sheaths have all of them to be transcended (Verse 5); the ultimate is beyond the jnana and the ajnana, the knowledge and the ignorance, of our intelligence. Faith is not uncritical credulity. It is to go further with one who has led us safely so very far, ourselves having suspiciously watched him all along.

Bhagavan and the Buddha are prophets for those who seek through pure intuitive understanding. Explaining the universe, its creation and dissolution, treating the relationships of a postulated 'soul' to a postulated 'God' is not their business. They begin with human awareness and lead up to pure Awareness.

That is the beginning and the end. The Buddha's eightfold path begins with 'right understanding' and culminates in 'right Awareness'. Bhagavan begins with our 'knowledge' that we are and ends with the Being that is Awareness. The individual entity finds itself, alas, involved in the whirling wheel of samsara. It can find its rest, not by moving out of the wheel, but only by moving to its centre; but it does not know this yet. Bhagavan sees samsara as the whole clutter of man's clumsy mental apparatuses with which he hopes to 'know' the wheel and even perhaps, to escape from it. The Buddha sees samsara as staying involved in a life of dukkha (suffering) constantly under the threat of disease, decrepitude and death, which only exemplify this dukkha. Both descriptions are fundamentally the same.

The Upanishad gives the answer to the question 11 what is dukkha (suffering)? By defining its antonym, sukha (bliss); "The Vast is bliss." It follows that the restricted is misery. Alas, it is not the privations of life that constitute misery for the illumined ones, but the nature of our satisfactions in life. It is our jnana, our petty, restricted 'knowledge' that Bhagavan would have us escape from. Is it not curious that Bhagavan never mentions rebirth in the whole of the Forty Verses? We keep on solemnly busying ourselves with the whole caboodle of the mind, rushing about inside the cocoon of our own weaving. Bhagavan asks us to wing our way out of it. For the Buddha it is pathetic that we live involved in alternations of satisfaction and desire, both what come to us and what we go on inducing in ourselves, only to end in the final frustration of old age and death. The life of most of us is a seesaw between aperitifs and emetics. It grieves the seers to see us, their fellow beings, as doddering imbeciles or as maudlin addicts. This is their 'compassion', as they appeal to us to be ourselves.