PHILOSOPHY AND LIFE

[Guest guest]

PHILOSOPHY AND LIFE

 

The Philosophy of Life

by

Sri Swami Krishnananda

http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/phil/phil_21.html

 

The aim of philosophy is right living. Genuine, real philosophy,

worth its name, is expected to enable one to live the truest life

possible,-a life of wisdom, free from the imperfections by which

ordinary unphilosophical life is characterised. Philosophy is neither

an intellectual diversion nor an academic pedantry overlooking the

facts of experience in the world; neither a feat of empty scholarship

nor a mere hobby of the care-free mind; but the intelligent analysis

of the immediate facts of life as a whole, an examination of the

implications of experience, and a scientific theory evolved out from

such wise meditations for the purpose of regulating the functions

which are responsible for the various phenomena of the individual's

consciousness. Philosophy is, therefore, the great art of the perfect

life, a life where the common notion of it is transcended, and

the Supreme Being, which is identical with existence itself, is

realised.

 

In Swami Sivananda we find a powerful exponent of such a philosophy,

the grand philosophy of the Vedanta, and we also find in him an ideal

personage rooted in the experience of the Goal taught about by the

Vedanta. His life and teachings are aglow with the beautiful

synthesis of the different aspects which make up life in its

integrity. The Vedanta of Sivananda is neither a dreamy, subjective,

world-negating doctrine of illusion, nor a crude, sense-bound, world-

affirming theory of societarianism. His philosophy is the one of the

divinity of the universe, the immortality of the soul of man, which

is identical with the Absolute Self, the essential unity of

everything in the universe with this Reality. Towards this end, he

steered the course of the lives of people, bearing in mind the

various degrees of Reality in which human life is wound up from

beginning to end.

 

The most unique and impelling feature in his teaching, which he

always exemplified through his daily life, is that no part of life's

experience is neglected or turned a deaf ear to by his philosophy. A

philosophy which overlooks some aspect or aspects is subject to the

charge of being partial and incomplete and therefore not worthy of

being regarded as a science of life. Swami Sivananda exhorts the

aspirants after the highest end of life not to fight shy of the

objective realities which stare at the face of even the majestic

idealist. Every degree of Reality has to be paid its due; else it

would rebel against the proud aspirant who has trodden over it with

his eyes turned upwards. Swami Sivananda is the meeting point

of the Upanishad wisdom with the practical man of the workaday world.

The Vedanta does not shut its eyes to the heart-rending conditions

filling earthly life, nor does it pass uncircumspect about the body

and the mind with their downward pulls towards empirical life, though

the province of the Vedanta is supermundane. The Vedanta is

supermundane, not because it looks down in any way on the dreary

earth with a transcendental egoism, but because it transforms and

then embraces its fallen brother, the mundane life, in its bosom of

an all-inclusive knowledge and love. Only, it will not embrace the

brother unless he is transfigured by the magical touch of Divine

Life. The universe is included in Brahman, when it loses its limiting

characters of being a universe.

 

Swami Sivananda, with the stupendous experience of one who has dived

into the core of life, teaches that the one Brahman appears as the

universe in all the planes or degrees of its manifestation, and,

therefore, the Sadhaka has to pay his homage to the lower

manifestation before he steps into the higher. Sound health, clear

understanding, deep knowledge, powerful will and moral toughness,

are, all parts of the process of the realisation of the ideal

preached by the Vedanta. The importance of this picturesque

life is well brought out when the Swami insists on an all-round

discipline of the lower self. He has a song of "a little", whereby he

teaches that a simultaneous development of the diverse sides of human

nature is imperative. His Vedanta is not in conflict with Yoga,

Bhakti and Karma. All these are blended together in his philosophy,

as elements constituting a whole, in the several states of its

experience. "To adjust, adapt and accommodate", "to see good in

everything", and to bring to effective use all the principles of

Nature in the progress of the individual towards Self-realisation

along the path of an integrated fusion of the human powers, are some

of the main factors which go to build his philosophy of life. He was

one of the most practical of persons that could ever be found, though

he had his stand on the loftiest peak of absolutistic metaphysics. He

was an idealist-realist, a philosopher-humanitarian, a strange

mixture of contraries which seemed to find in him a loving mother who

brings together her quarrelsome children. To love all, and to see God

in all, to serve all, because God is all, to realise God as the

identity of all in one fullness of perfection, are his main canons.

His Vedanta is the culmination of wisdom, an expression of the

realisation of Brahman attained through philosophical analysis which

is made possible by the absence of the distractions of the mind,

consequent upon devout worship of Isvara. This devotion, again, is

hard to attain without self-purification effected through the

selfless performance of obligatory duties incumbent upon all persons

without exception. He prescribes methods for overcoming and mastering

the physical, vital, mental and intellectual planes of consciousness,

in order to enable the aspirant to proceed with his Sadhana, without

impediments, towards his great spiritual destination, the

realisation of the Absolute.

 

Swami Sivananda accepts the value of the different schools of

philosophy as stages leading to and representing partial aspects of

the philosophy of the non-dual Absolute.

His philosophy is, therefore, realism: The physical universe is

independent of individual minds; it appears material when viewed by

the individuals, but is ultimately a mode of the spiritual Reality.

It is idealism: The universe is an expression of the Cosmic Mind and

the values of life are expressions of the individual minds.

It is empiricism: The individuals receive sensations from the physical

universe outside, which is independent of their thinking; God is

above man and appears as the universe.

It is rationalism: The forms of individual knowledge are constituted

of the nature of the individual mind, and even the whole universe is

determined by the nature of the necessary and universal laws of the

Cosmic Mind.

It is voluntarism: The urges of the will dominate the individual

nature and subject it to suffering; the cravings of the will in man

restrict the functions of his intellect and make him rationalise the

wishes buried in the unconscious bottom of his psychological

consciousness, though the will can be overcome by the higher reason

and discrimination.

Itis dualism: There is, as far as human life in the world is

concerned, a difference between the sensible and the intelligible,

matter and mind, individual and God, the actual and the possible,

appearance and Reality, and one has therefore to follow the laws of

the Universal which is above phenomena. Only in Self-realisation is

this distinction abolished.

It is realistic idealism: Nothing that is existent can be essentially

other than Pure Consciousness. All existents are subordinate to it.

The universe is dependent on the Real. God is the dynamic cause of

the universe.

It is pragmatism: The true has also a practical value. The world of

sense is a practical reality (Vyavaharika-satta), because it leads to

successful action. The existence of Isvara or the Overlord of the

universe has to be admitted, and this hypothesis is indispensable to

account for life.

It is indeterminism: Man's essential nature is spiritual

consciousness which is free and is above all determinations in the

universe.

It is determinism: The relative individual is limited to mind and

body which are subject to the operation of universal laws.

It is evolutionism: All things are products of development and tend

to unfold themselves through several forward and backward movements

in their final ascent to the Absolute.

It is phenomenalism: The sense-universe is a realm of changing

appearances or phenomena of the Real, and human knowledge is limited

to these phenomena.

It is transcendentalism: The Absolute is above the categories of the

universe.

It is immanentism: Isvara is the indwelling and animating principle

of the universe.

It is agnosticism: Reality is inaccessible to mere human thinking.

It is mysticism: The Absolute is directly realised in spiritual

intuition and being.

It is pantheism: The stuff of the universe is not outside Isvara.

It is theism: Isvara is the cause of the manifestation of the

universe and rules it as its Lord.

It is Absolutism: The Absolute is the only reality, and its essence

is Consciousness: The universe and the individuals are its

manifestations or appearances.

It is mechanistic: Events follow the laws of space-time in the world

of sense-perception and understanding.

It is teleological: All motion and activity is directed by Isvara,

the final cause, who determines the universe by the law of His being

to which the universe with its contents is organically related.

 

The Vedanta of Swami Sivananda accepts all philosophical theories,

but with reservations, as different sides of truth, and not the whole

truth. His Vedanta is a synthesis of all philosophies as well as a

transcendence of them in a philosophy of the non-dual Consciousness

which sublimates all existences in its supreme essence. True religion

is the practice of this philosophy, and Sivananda's religion is a

religion of the universe, applicable to all human beings, relative to

their positions in the scale of the development of their

consciousness. Faith, reason and experience, theory and practice, art

and religion, service, love and charity, purification, reflection,

meditation and realisation, go hand in hand in the philosophy and

teachings of Swami Sivananda.

 

The Vedanta philosophy which the saint Sivananda propounds is a

practical, living one, and not simply a 'theory' of the universe. It

is not a theory, but the exposition of the nature of one's practical

life. We find this kind of spiritual life brought to its ideal

perfection in the life of Sri Krishna, and explained in the

Bhagavadgita. Swami Sivananda is an example of this type, a type of

exalted beings, to whom the Vedanta is a commentary on life, far from

those who think that philosophy is divorced from life, that the

Vedanta is unconnected with the concerns of existence in the world.

The Vedanta of Swami Sivananda is the science which opens up for

one the true meaning and value of human endeavour, the significance of

embodied existence in the realm of the experience, and enables one to

lead a worthy and glorious life here for the purpose of rising to the

blissful Absolute, in which the universe is realised as identical

with one's Self, to which nothing other than the Self does ever

exist, and as the result of which realisation the sage becomes the

saviour of all beings.