Help on the Quest for Self-realization-Reminders-59

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Help on the Quest for Self-realization-Reminders-59

 

Austerity

 

By Arthur Osborne in "Be Still, It Is The Wind That Sings"

 

The introduction to "Who am I?" contains within it the germ of the

intellectual explanation of religious austerity. Everyone is

involved in the unending search for happiness. So long as the person

mistakes the body or individuality for the Self he seeks pleasure

from events and contacts, but in the measure that he approaches the

true Self he discovers that true happiness which, being his real

nature, requires no stimulus to provoke it.

 

If a man renounces the extraneous and fitful happiness given by

pleasure for the deep, abiding inner happiness, there is no

austerity—he is simply exchanging the lesser for the greater, the

spurious for the true. More usually, however, a man's pursuit of

pleasure (or his hankering after it even if he does not pursue it)

is itself what impedes his realisation of the Self, being due to his

false identification with the ego. Therefore he normally has to

renounce the pursuit of pleasure not after but before the attainment

of eternal, indestructible happiness, not because it has ceased to

be pleasure but because he realises, partly through faith and partly

through understanding and pre-vision, that indestructible happiness

does exist and is his goal and his true nature and that it is shut

off from him by his mistaken identity and by the indulgence of

desires and impulses that this entails. That is to say that he has

to renounce the false attraction before it has ceased to attract.

Therefore the renunciation hurts him and is austerity.

 

Religious austerity may bear fruit without understanding the

intellectual basis of it and there may be many who practise it

without this understanding; nevertheless, this is its basis. To some

extent every spiritual seeker must follow the two-fold method of

turning his energy away from the pursuit of pleasure and towards the

quest of happiness, away from the gratification of the ego and

towards the realisation of the Self. They are two complementary

phases of one activity. However, a method may concentrate more on

one phase or the other.

 

That taught by Bhagavan concentrated almost entirely on the positive

phase, the quest of the Self, and he spoke very little of the

negative, that is, of austerity or killing the ego. He spoke rather

of the enquiry that would reveal that there was no ego to kill and

never had been. This does not mean that Bhagavan condoned ego-

indulgence. He expected a high standard of rectitude and self-

control in his devotees but he did not dictate any actual programme

of austerity.

 

The basic forms of austerity are celibacy and poverty, further

heightened by silence and solitude. Let us see in more detail what

was the attitude of Bhagavan in such matters.

 

In speaking of celibacy one has to remember that the traditional

Hindu society with which Bhagavan was familiar has no place for the

worldly celibate; either a man is a householder or a mendicant. When

any householder asked Bhagavan whether he could renounce home and

property and turn mendicant, he always discouraged it. "The

obstacles are in the mind and have to be overcome there," he would

say. "Changing the environment will not help. You will only change

the thought `I am a householder' for the thought `I am a mendicant'.

What you have to do is to forget both and remember only `I am'." He

similarly deprecated vows of silence and solitude, pointing out that

the true silence and solitude are in the heart and independent of

outer conditions.

 

Yet Bhagavan showed a benevolent interest in the personal and family

affairs of his devotees—their marriages and jobs, the births and

sicknesses and education of their children, all the cares and

obligations that family life entails. His injunction was to engage

in it like an actor in a play, playing one's part carefully and

conscientiously but with the remembrance that it was not one's real

self.

 

Neither did he denounce the small indulgences common to the life of

a householder. Indeed, there was a time when he himself chewed betel

and drank tea and coffee. The only specific rule of conduct that he

advocated and that some might call austerity was vegetarianism. He

spoke of the benefit of restricting oneself to sattvic food, that is

to vegetarian food which nourishes without exciting or stimulating.

I have also known Bhagavan to say different things to different

kinds of people. But they should be taken to suit particular

occasions and not as a general rule.

 

The standard set by Bhagavan was uncompromisingly high but it did

not consist of disjointed commands and restrictions. It was a

question of seeking the true Self and denying the impostor ego, and

in doing this he approved rather of a healthy, normal, balanced life

than of extreme austerity. It is true that there was a time when he

himself sat day after day in silence, scarcely eating, seldom

moving, but that was not austerity; that was immersion in the

supreme Bliss after the Self had been realized and there was no

longer any ego to renounce, that is, when austerity was no longer

possible. His abandoning it was not indulgence of the ego but

compassion for the devotees who gathered around. He said that even

in the case of the jnani the ego may seem to rise up again but that

is only an appearance, like the ash of a burnt rope that looks like

a rope but is not good for tying anything with.