Spiritual Knowledge

By Prof Eknath Easwaran

" Know God and all fetters will be loosed," declares the Svetasvatara Upanishad. "Ignorance will vanish. Birth, death and rebirth will be no more. Meditate upon Him and transcend physical consciousness. Thus will you reach union with the Lord of the universe. Thus will you become identified with Him who is One without a second. In Him all your desires will find fulfilment."

What are our desires, our real desires? On the surface level of consciousness they seem to be for personal pleasure, personal, profit and personal power; but the more we have of them, the more we crave for them, the more frustrated we become. This is because our driving need, in the depths of our consciousness, is not for what is finite but for what is infinite; and the only purpose that can be served by the finite is to make us know experimentally that it can never fulfil our real need, that "whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again."

Our real desire, our driving need, is for God, whether we know it or not; and we cannot have perfect peace until we find Him, until we realize Him in the depths of our consciousness. As Jesus said to the woman of Samaria, "But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life."

The Sacred Scriptures of ancient India declare that God is Sat-Chit-Ananda Infinite Existence, Infinite Consciousness, Infinite Bliss. It is through my spiritual teacher, that I have come to understand a little of the tremendous significance of this declaration.

"What did you learn today?" asked Granny when I returned home from college in the evening, many years ago.

"Logic," I answered airily, "Syllogism." I rolled the word round on my tongue like a real scholar.

"Show me one," she said with the disarming directness of those who are free from book-learning, or what Sri Ramakrishna calls rice and banana knowledge.

"All men are mortal," I reeled off the stock syllogism. "I am a man. Therefore I am mortal. That is logic."

"But it is not true," smiled Granny, her eyes bright with faith. "We shed our bodies, but we do not die. We are immortal."

"Who told you so?" I asked.

"You don't have to take anybody's word for that.. It is of little use. You must realize it for yourself through devotion to God."

That was many years ago. Today I would put the syllogism thus "All men are immortal. I am a man. Therefore I am immortal."

When you say I am mortal, you are referring not to me but to the house in which I am living at present. My body is, of course, changing, but I am changeless. As long as I identify myself with my body, senses and mind which are changing, I shall be subject to the great change that is called death. If only I can break through this obsessive identification, I shall then know experimentally that I am the Christ within, changeless, eternal. As Sri Ramana Maharshi would say, when we dis-identify ourselves with what is changing, that which remains is changeless Reality.

There is only one way in which I can succeed in dis-identifying myself with what is changing, and that is by being united with the Divine Ground of our existence. Listen to the song of Kabir, a great saint of mediaeval India:

"O Friend, hope for Him whilst you live, know whilst you live, understand whilst you live for in life deliverance abides.

If your bonds be not broken whilst living, what hope of deliverance in death?

It is but an empty dream that the soul shall have union with Him because it has passed from the body;

If He Is found now, He is found then:
If not, we do but go to dwell in the City of Death."

Kabir is driving home into our hearts that when we realize God in the depths of our consciousness we pass, here and now, from death to immortality. This is neither metaphorical nor metaphysical language, but a calm, clear statement of what happens to us in the tremendous experience called Samadhi (or Self-realization) when we realize God as Sat or Infinite Existence. "Seeing Him alone, one transcends death, there is no other way," says the Svetasvatara Upanishad.

"How can we see Him? What are the conditions we must fulfil to see Him in the depths of our consciousness?" Jesus answers the question in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God."

As long as we have the slightest taint of selfish craving in us, we cannot realize the Self. The Buddha calls this selfish craving by the expressive name of tanha or thirst and traces all human suffering to it.

"The thirst of a thoughtless man grows like a creeper; he runs from life to life like a monkey seeking fruit in the forest. Whomsoever this fierce poisonous thirst overcomes in this world, his sufferings increase like the abounding Birana grass.

"But for him who overcomes this fierce thirst, difficult to be conquered in this world, sufferings fall off like water drops from a lotus leaf."

The overcoming of this fierce thirst, the purification of the human heart, cannot be brought about through the senses or the intellect. These are no doubt very useful instruments in dealing with finite objects of the phenomenal world, but they can be of very little use in bringing about the transformation of character, conduct and consciousness so that we may become pure in heart. "All that the imagination can imagine and the reason conceive and understand," points out St. John of the Cross, "cannot be a proximate means of union with God."

For this we need a higher mode of knowing, developed through meditation, which will enable us to dive deep below the surface level of consciousness so that we can transform selfish craving into selflessness, ill-will into goodwill, hatred into love. It is impossible to do this as long as our senses are rebellious, as long as our mind is restless. "When all the senses are stilled, when the mind is at rest, when the intellect wavers not, then, say the wise, is reached the highest state." Katha Upanishad.

In other words, when we still our senses, when we still our mind, we pass then and there into a higher state of consciousness in which we are no longer separate fragments but are at one with all creation. "The rout and destruction of the passions, while it is good, is not the ultimate good; the discovery of Wisdom is the surpassing good. When this is found, all the people will sing," says Philo.

This rout and destruction of the passions, as Philo calls it, this extinction of all selfish craving, as the Buddha terms it, is the travail of labour for a man to be born again of the Spirit. As Jesus reveals to Nicodemus, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God."

Meditation may rightfully be described as the most dynamic, most creative, most significant function of which man is capable because it can lead him, by bringing about the death of all that is selfish in him, to the selfless state of Christ-Consciousness, called Chit by the Hindu sages.

God is Ananda or Infinite Bliss, and He has made us in His image for infinite bliss. How then can we ever be content with the fleeting satisfactions brought by money, or pleasure, or power, or fame? As I understand it, these have served their purpose when they have helped us to know experimentally that nothing fleeting or finite can ever satisfy our driving, deepest need. As Ruysbroeck puts it with deep insight, "Knowledge of ourselves teaches us whence we come, where we are and whither we are going. We come from God and we are in exile; and it is because our potency of affection tends towards God that we are aware of this state of exile."

When we become aware of this state of exile, we long more and more, day by day, for God who is our home. It is this intense longing for the Lord of Love that leads to the integration of our character, to the unification of our consciousness, to the complete purification of our heart. "The Self is not to be known through study of the Scriptures, nor through the subtlety of the intellect, nor through much learning. But by him who longs for him is he known. Verily unto him does the Self reveal his true being." - Katha Upanishad.

We do not long for him intensely because of our selfish attachment to the passing pleasures of the world. Our modern civilisation is essentially a sensate one, in which we are being conditioned, by the vast network of mass communication media around us, to believe that we get more and more satisfaction out of life as our senses are stimulated more and more. For a person who is enmeshed by the senses, it is impossible to suspect that he is being drawn by them towards increasing frustration disguised skilfully as increasing fulfilment. He is a prisoner who is clinging to the bars of his prison. As the Bhagavad Gita warns us:

"Thinking about sense-objects
Will attach you to sense-objects
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse your mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss Life's only purpose."

This raging thirst for sensory satisfaction, for selfish satisfaction, is rooted in the age-old, race-old fallacy that I am the body, senses and mind. This primeval ignorance can be dispelled only by loving God with "all our heart and all our soul, and with all our strength and with all our mind."

"How do we come to love God?" some of my Western friends ask: "It is much easier said than done." We can do so through the practice of meditation on divine attributes using appropriate passages from the Scriptures and the repetition of the Holy Name.

With our gradual progress in meditation we begin to develop the freedom to withdraw our desires from channels which can lead only to increasing frustration, and to redirect them to the Supreme Goal, which can lead us only to increasing fulfilment. And Jesus said unto them: "I am the bread of life; he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and he that believeth on me shall never thirst."

During the first half of our pilgrimage towards the Supreme Goal of life, we have to sail under our own steam; but during the latter half we feel the irresistible pull from the Lord of Love and begin to realize that it is through His infinite grace that we are able to move closer and closer towards the One Light that gives light to all. "Thus spake Jesus again unto them, saying, 'I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life'."

To conclude with the perfect words of St. Anselm, "Lord, teach me to seek Thee and reveal Thyself to me when I seek Thee. For I cannot seek Thee except Thou teach me, nor find Thee except Thou reveal Thyself. Let me seek Thee in longing, let me long for Thee in seeking; let me find Thee in love and love Thee in finding."

May we seek Him in longing; may we long for Him in seeking; may we find Him in love; and love Him in finding.