SITTING IN HIS science class, a junior high school student was listening as his teacher explained the biology of organisms. In the final analysis, the teacher observed, life—including that of mankind—was nothing but the process of oxidation and combustion. Some inner rebellion forced that student out of his chair. Springing to his feet, he burst out, "If that's so, then what kind of meaning does life have?"
That boy's cry can be seen as the cry of Everyman. At some point a time comes when we can no longer paper over the larger issues of human existence; is life, we ask, merely an intricate web of chemical processes? Has our life no more significance than a candle which slowly burns and sputters its way into oblivion? Is it "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"?
If there is one thing that we fear—and fear it more desperately than death itself—it is the dread of living a life without significance. A life smaller than the sum of its parts is intolerable to the human spirit.
Yet this dread has become more prevalent as we advance technologically, careening fast forward in a struggle to master the external world. We chase goals that evade us, disappoint us, turn to ashes in our hands. Our interior world—unexplored, uncultivated—is left barren. There's no doubt that we've enjoyed remarkable technological success. But the psychic cost has been great: in our search for comfort and prosperity, we've dangled ourselves over the edge of an existential cliff.
Mankind, in earlier, simpler years, was not inclined to believe that his existence was a haphazard event, an accident without a goal or purpose. There was security in the assumption that society was a microcosm of the harmonious universe it mirrored; God's well-ordered creation had an intimate niche for everyone and everything.
The security mankind once knew is now long gone. The faith that knit our lives together slowly unravelled with the intrusion of science. The universe we discovered, hummed along quite nicely by itself: God wasn't necessary to turn its wheels. The shift in the West’s world view over the past century rendered God, if not dead, at least coolly marginalized.
Faith in God shifted to a faith in various demigods, Marxism and Freudianism being that to most influential of the century. These quasi-religions offered their votaries a worldview that was satisfying in its rigidity, their respective dogmas being a jealous in their orthodoxy as any one of five creeds. According to Marx, a human being was nothing more than a socio--economic entity at the mercy of economic forces and ongoing class struggles. Man was defined by his or her place in the labour force.
Freud, by contrast, saw humanity as a mass of seething, repressed sexual desires. A person's life was dictated by his or her desire for pleasure. Later psychoanalytic schools expanded upon Freud's basic premise: Adler, for example, posited that man was motivated by the will for power.
But neither science nor any political, social, or psychological doctrine offer us the peace that we crave. None answer the larger questions that life presents. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl observed, "Some of the people who nowadays call on a psychiatrist would have seen a pastor, priest, or rabbi in former days. Now they often refuse to be handed over to a clergy man and instead confront the doctor with questions as, 'What is the meaning of my life?' "
This is the question that brought most of us to Vedanta's doorstep.
MANY OF US turn to spiritual life only when nothing else works. Being creatures of habit, we first try the techniques which have always patched things up for us before: we manipulate people and situations, pull a stitch here, move a stitch there, in the hopes that we can salvage a little happiness out of our lives. But it doesn't work. Things fall apart. Our solutions are jerry-rigged, bandaids over tectonic plates.
Why don't our solutions work? Because we are seeking external solutions to spiritual problems, Dr. Carl Jung—whose career spanned several decades and included patients from every corner of the globe— wrote:
There has not been one [patient] whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.
It is the "religious outlook" that gives meaning to life. Religious in this sense "has nothing to do with a particular creed or membership in a church" as Jung hastened to say. It is a spiritual approach to life which recognizes that our lives have meaning—a purpose and a goal.
The central fact of our existence is the divinity that lies at the core of our being. Divinity is our real nature, our birthright. Nothing can change it, nothing can take it away from us. True, for many of us that divinity is unmanifest; we are unaware, or only dimly aware, of its presence. But that doesn't make it any less real. If clouds hide the sun, we don't doubt the sun's existence. We know that the sun is there in all its glory, ready to shed its warmth and light. Similarly the Atman, the divinity within us all, is shadowed by clouds of ignorance. But these clouds do not affect the Atman: our real Self is pure, eternal, perfect, blissful. It is unaffected by our miseries, untouched by our failings. Within every one of us lies the source of all goodness and strength. Humanity, Swami Vivekananda said,
stands on the glory of his own soul, the infinite, the eternal, the deathless— that soul which no instruments can pierce, which no air can dry, no fire burn, no water melt, the infinite, the birthless, the deathless, without beginning and without end, before whose magnitude the suns and moons and all their systems appear like drops in the ocean, before whose glory it's away into nothingness and time vanishes into nonexistence. This glorious soul we must believe in. Out of that will come power. Whatever you think, that you will be.... All knowledge is in me, all power, all purity, and all freedom.
Unfolding our divinity, removing the clouds of ignorance, is the goal that gives meaning to life.
What exactly is this ignorance? It is the illusion that we are separate from God and from one another. Oneness is the great truth that Vedanta has to teach. We are all one—the universe and all its living beings are all manifestations of the one Brahman, unity is the sole reality or the universe. Brahman—eternal, infinite existence—cannot be divided. The nature of Brahman is bliss absolute: the law of unity is the law of love.
When we see ourselves as separate from the One, suffering is the inevitable result. "He who says he is different from others," Swami Vivekananda said, "even by a hair's breadth, immediately becomes miserable."
But wait a minute. There are not many people who walk around attuned to the divine unity which pervades all things. Does this mean that everyone is miserable? Everyone who thinks of himself or herself as a limited being certainly suffers. When ignorance blinds us to our divine nature, we feel alone and helpless, at the mercy of external and internal fear, loneliness, and insecurity. The more egocentric a person is, the more insecure and selfish he is. The more selfish and insecure, the more vulnerable and miserable that person is. He or she feels that he must compete to survive. Fearful that others are taking advantage of him, he is in fact his own worst enemy. Only when we rid ourselves of the ego, do we flow with the natural law of the universe: the law of unity and the law of love. We have to get ourselves, our prickly egos, out of the way. "When the ego dies”, Sri Ramakrishna said, "all t roubles cease.” The ego, the root of all ignorance, is the cloud which hides the sun of our true Self.
The goal, then, is to remove that ignorance so that we can attain the only goal worth having: realization of God, realization of the Self within.
Is it possible? Certainly. We've made our bed, and we can unmake it just as well. Just as our past actions have created the life that we are living now, so can our present actions create what we will be tomorrow. We are the masters of our own fate. There are no victims in the cosmos: whatever we see around us is the inevitable result of past actions.
Nothing happens to us by the whim of an outside agency. Our experience in the world is not haphazard. What may superficially appear to be absurd is in fact the effect of seeing the results of past actions in progress. We're seeing only one frame of a movie, without seeing what comes before or after the isolated freeze frame. For example: a child is struck by a car and is killed instantly. Is this the hand of fate, randomly selecting a victim here, a victim there, leaving grief in its wake? No, Vedanta says. We are only seeing the effect of an action that began long, long ago. Whatever actions a person has committed must take effect sometime or other. As we sow, so we reap. If we are reaping, there must have been some sowing somewhere along the line.
Does this make Vedanta a coldhearted, fatalistic religion? Isn't Vedanta saying that if a person suffers, he or she must have deserved it? Never.
Experience has shown that the more a person advances on the spiritual path, the more his heart broadens in love and sympathy for others. No one could love a Mary Magdalene more than a Jesus Christ; no one but a Ramakrishna could transform—through the sheer power of love—the debauched Girish Ghosh. Who but a Sarada Devi could say with utter conviction that the Muslim thief Amjad was as much her son as the monk Sarat, a beloved disciple of Ramakrishna? And who but a Buddha, overcome by pity, could offer his life for a goat? It is axiomatic that the more a person reflects the light of God, the less he condemns his fellow beings. Only an illumined soul can really love others with a full and open heart. The illumined soul, united with God, is freed from the bondage of egotism. With his or her ‘I’ out of the way, he can truly feel the sufferings of others. "May I be born again and again," Swami Vivekananda declared,
and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in, the sum total of all souls—and above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species, is the special object of my worship.
Hardly cold words of indifference. The illumined soul rejoices in others’ happiness and intensely feels for them in their sorrow. Yet, in the core of his being, the illumined soul is free—detached from both happiness and misery, pleasure and pain. And he knows that those who suffer can—and eventually will—be as free as he or she is.
Having rid himself of the ego, the illumined soul has found the mine of bliss within himself. Anger, hatred, lust, ambition, and pettiness of every variety, can never trouble him. Peace is his permanent treasure; peace is his abode.
"What kind of meaning does life have?" the junior high school student asked. Its meaning is found in how we live it. Our goal is to manifest our innate divinity through every deed we do, every word we speak, every thought we think.
It is not an easy task, but no worthwhile endeavor ever is. What is important to remember is that no effort is lost. There is no failure in spiritual life. Every step that we take in the right direction is a permanent gain. Every one of us, whether we know it or not, has greatness within; every human being's life is infinitely precious. A meaningful life begins when we add a spiritual base to life's equation. "If you put fifty zeros after a one, you have a large sum," Sri Ramakrishna said. "But erase the one and nothing remains. It is the one that makes the many."
Life without an awareness of our innate divinity is a stack of zeros. Add the "I" of the divine Self, and a meaningful life is ours.
Source: Article by Pravrajika Vrajaprana, Living Wisdom, Published by Sri Ramakrishna Math, Chennai, 1995.
