THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
(Sri Swami Krishnananda)
Let us look inside and see what is there. This is the subjective approach, quite the other side of the objective method of science. What do we see when we turn our gaze within? We see ourselves. Let us close our eyes and see what is there. We do not see anything outside; we see our personality and begin to wonder what it is made of. What am I? The search for an answer to this question is the subjective approach of psychology.
Now, let us see what comes out of this search. Are we going to be landed in the same unfortunate situation of the external approach, or does something else come out? We see the body when we look inside ourselves. We see the physiological and anatomical structure of the body, the skin and the bones, the flesh and the marrow, the blood and the various biological features of the physical body.
If I ask you, “Who are you?” you will say, “I am the son or daughter of so and so, the brother or sister,” and something like that would be your definition of yourself. By all these definitions you mean that you are a body; that is all. It means nothing else. Otherwise, how are you a son or daughter of somebody? It has no meaning except in the sense that you are a body. But let us see whether we are able to see only this much, and nothing further.
Are we living only as bodies and nothing else? Let us give everything to the body and see if we are satisfied. We have our breakfast and lunch and we have dinner, and we have a good sleep. What else do we want for the body? We will be given all these things, food and clothing and a house to live in. These are the things that the body requires, and the body is happy. But do we say that we are satisfied with this alone? No, these are not the things that people require merely. It is not just food and clothing and shelter that we need. They may be the requirements of our body. They may be necessities, no doubt, but these are not enough.
People with all these things are still searching for some other thing. There are people,—we call them well-to-do people,—who have got all these physical amenities. But they are still in search of some other relief. The reason is that their physical needs have not satisfied them, because they are not merely physical bodies. They have something else within them, which also needs a certain type of food, as the body requires material food.
What are we, then, other than the body? If we go deep into the body, we will find nothing there, except physical structure. By an amputation, or an operation on the physical body, one will see nothing inside the body, except the physical matter only in some layer. It is when we probe into a different state of our existence, through which we are almost daily passing, that we will be able to discover some other element of personality in us than the physical body, e.g., dream. In dreams, our physical bodies do not take part and yet we have an independent existence in dream, just as we have an independent existence in the waking condition. Now, did we exist in dream? Yes, we did exist. What was there? Not the physical body. What else? Well, very strange, we do find something else there. We had only the mind.
Thus we existed as a mind in dream is obvious. This does not require much explanation or commentary. We had joys and sorrows in dream, similar to those we experience in waking. We were exactly the same in dream as we were in waking, for all practical purposes of experience. We saw things, we encountered various phenomena, we were happy or unhappy, in the same way as we had such experience in the waking condition. So, it means that we can have, even independent of the body, the same kind of experiences we have with the body, through the body, in terms of the body. The bodily existence or non-existence is not going to make a difference to the experiences of another layer of our personality which can independently exist and with which we can identify ourselves.
The phenomenon of dream demonstrates that we are more than a body and we can exist without the body. In dream we existed without any connection with the body, and we passed through all the experiences of waking independent of the body. The body was used only as an instrument, but it was not our real personality.
What are we, really? What do we discover when we probe into our own selves? We realise that we are a mind rather than a body. This is the reason why we are not satisfied even if we have plenty of money, a lot of food and clothing, large gardens and palatial buildings. With all these physical comforts, we cannot be satisfied, because we are not merely a physical body,—a son, a daughter. We are a mind; that is why we are unhappy. It is not the body that is unhappy or is dissatisfied. It has everything,—it eats well, it sleeps well; what is the difficulty with the body? Why is it that we are still unhappy?
The unhappiness comes from the mind and not from the body. All our difficulties are mental, not so much physical. Such emphasis is laid on this mental life of man that, it appears, compared to it, physical comfort is almost nothing. If our mind is satisfied, we will not bother much about physical amenities. There are various avenues of mental satisfaction which can overwhelm the requirements of even the physical body and this, again, does not require much of an analysis or study, for everyone knows what it means. If we are immensely happy for some reason, which state has lifted us up from the physical level, we forget our breakfast, and lunch, and sleep, and everything else. Satisfaction is a mental condition.
(To be continued)
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The relationship between the Guru and the disciple is not physical, social or personal but spiritual and, so, eternal, till the salvation of the disciple.
Sadhana is not any kind of bodily action that is outwardly directed, but is rather a state of mind, a condition of thinking, a consciousness in which one lives.
—Swami Krishnananda
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