Self Realization

The legend & the facts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a child, the Indian is raised in a physical surrounding that is wrapped around with stories of great saints, their deeds, the power of self awareness and the promise of the wisdom of the world. The peer pressure on this is quite unrelenting.

 

Even these days of satellite TV, internet and the sheer exuberance of the consumer society has not abated the pressure. At a dinner party, a wedding, a birthday or the occasional visit to the temple, the conversation inevitably veers to the issue of ' What matters in life ' or the much sought after, public reputation of ' A man of the world.'

 

As the children grow up, inevitably, the question of ' Who am I?,' or ' What is Hinduism?' stares at the father from innocent faces. To provide an answer that is succinct and steer the child in the right direction is a vocation every father views with responsibility but wishes he could have done more.

 

To balance a career with care for the family's needs and the individual realization of the heavens, is a role few fathers are trained to meet. Yet it is a role that many find, comes back to point at them, with all the expectations of integrity and virtue.

 

Perhaps the most irascible part of the experience is that it cannot be learnt. Ask any yogi or guru in an ashram and they'll tell you that all the literature can point at the direction but it is the individual that must take the physical effort for its realization. Although the scriptures point to it as an achievement of the householder, a father in the house, using the weekends for self-study, may still find the effort insufficient.

 

It is not until one gets ripe with age and the children have started their own families, does it become possible for the father to engage in the mystical individualization of the experience of the self. Grandma obviously engages in something similar as a natural extension of her life and experience.

 

In descriptions of the experience of self-realization, none comes close to being more bizarre than the hippie experience of the psychedelic nirvana. Indian expressions don't fare any better with its expressions of being  'god-like.' The experience is however, best expressed by the Sanskrit term, ' Jivanamsam ' interpreted as ' knowledge of the soul.'

 

The experience is not unlike that of a scientist who learns about wave particles, magnetism, chemical reactions and the biologically defined requirement of living units with the faculties to be alive, think, form relations and to survive. But where the scientist is limited by rules of objectivity, the Indian individual erases the instruments of his identity, merges with all discerned identities within and cultivates the realization of who he is, in time, from the day the stars were born, right up to his front door.

 

 

The difference? Indian literature summarizes the experience as the contrast between Sankhya and yoga. Where Sankhya represents knowledge of the experience and yoga is the living sensation of the being. The power of virtue, in the nature of the life force persuades the individual that the knowledge is tentative and untested. It is in the realization experience that one can truly claim to be and to know. Science, no doubt would agree.

 

The Greeks made references to the life of the gods as ' the power of enthos.' Certainly the quality of enthusiasm is very much the element embedded in the life force of entities, but it must have had an earlier quality, such as ' the power of inquiry.' And here is where the man of self realization points at, as the beginning of it all.

 

In the course of such an inquiry, one sometimes wonders why it is so powerful in its challenge. The classic inquiry, ' If god so loved the world, why did he permit the existence of evil?' can only be answered with the response, ' because he created it in perfect order.'

 

Man's task, as is his nature to inquire, is to find that perfect order. In the Indian experience of the Trinity, Siva as the god of destruction is the epitome of the first nature of man, to live the life with adulation for the created self, until we realize that we are killing the very thing that sustains our life. Thereafter we subscribe to the Vishnu principle of preservation.

 

This introduces a very special problem to the mind of the man who inquires. When you come to the end of your search, does it not also feel like the beginning? How will we tell it apart?

 

Sankhya, as an instrument of study, is a mind based activity. In a study of the forces of life, it revolves itself around the tenets of its findings, without the benefit of a beginning or end. Someone already familiar with Sankhya, through the experience of re-birth, comes to encounter a life of the passions with the instrument of the body. This suppresses from his experience, the knowledge of the earlier perfection.

 

Thereafter, he commences a new beginning in the nature of his inquiries. This begins with the passions and brings him back up to confront the nature of knowledge in his mind. The new perfection is compared with the old and the difference comes to define his own experiences as man.

 

To borrow an expression, the difference between the two, may be why the farmer went out and sold all that he owned. Where that may have occurred by a force of circumstances, the householder may wonder about the forces of creation and destruction that have come to  meet him at his front door.