The Yoga of Self-Knowledge

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

The appended is taken from a series of lectures on the Yoga of Self-Knowledge by

A.M. Halliday.

 

Please enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

Members One of Another

 

The other day* the Duke of Edinburgh was installed as Chancellor of Edinburgh

University and on that occasion he had some wise things to say about peace and

war. He pointed out that the hundreds of millions of people caught up in war,

terrorism and other violence in the contemporary world can take little comfort

from talk of peace. It is not peace that needs to be studied, he said, but the

reasons for conflict. Church leaders of all denominations, statesmen and

humanitarians all raise their voices for peace, but that was rather like " being

against sin " . Nobody would publicly disagree with them, but it did not really

help. The men who ordered the fighting and killing pay not the slightest

attention. Even the so-called 'peace movement' had been exploited for 'partisan

advantage'. The violence in Northern Ireland, the war in the Lebanon and even

soccer hooliganism all had one thing in common, which he called the tribal

factor. And it is this tribal factor which he made the subject of his discourse.

We can see the same factor at work in the violence and intimidation of the

miners' picketing at the present time.

 

What he called the tribal factor manifested itself as the willingness of

individuals to form themselves into power groups and to become so emotionally

committed as to believe that reaching the group objective or defending their

position justifies any means, however unpleasant or violent. There are therefore

two essential elements to this problem, the feeling of belonging to a little

group whose interests one is identified with, the 'us' and 'them' feeling, and

the willingness to abrogate all moral scruples or conscience in furthering the

imagined interests of the group. The resulting attitude is one of 'those who are

not with us are against us' and therefore beyond the pale, and therefore can be

ridden over, disadvantaged, dispossessed or even eliminated, because they stand

in one's way.

 

Tribalism takes many forms, but it is one of the main hallmarks of what the

yogis call nescience or 'avidya', and it is a manifestation of the ignorant raw

and unspiritualised lower mind and its binding nature. The next thing to notice

about tribalism in the Duke of Edinburgh's sense of the word is that it is

intimately connected with the idea of self. As the great fourteenth century

yogic classic 'Panchadashi' says, the 'self' is the contrary of 'otherness'.

There is a universally recognised feeling current in the world which divides

things into contraries: 'this' and 'that', 'selfhood' and 'otherhood', 'I' and

'thou'. Not that the word 'self' is only applied to a person who uses the

pronoun 'I'. We can also speak of 'you yourself' or 'he himself', but in each

case the word self excludes specifically the idea of anyone else. Swami

Vidyaranya, who discussed this philosopical point in the sixth chapter of

'Panchadashi', points out that it relates to what we identify ourselves with,

and that the whole idea of selfhood and otherhood arises from the fact that we

identify ourselves with the mind and ego, with the empirical personality with

which we live our lives in the world. But this empirical personality is like a

garment which we wear, a coat of many colours. As the Bhagavad Gita says, just

as we don the body like a suit of clothes and discard it at the time of death,

so the mind too is only an undergarment of the self, a sheath, as it is called

in the holy classics. The real self is the light of consciousness within all the

sheaths, the real 'I' hidden within the outer coverings of the physical body,

the inner covering of the mind and intellect and the innermost sheath of what is

called in the Yoga classics the causal body. The self has become entangled and

confused about its real identity. Man is spirit, but he comes to identify

himself with the mind and the body, and this confusion leads to many problems.

Moreover he comes to identify himself beyond the confines of the body, with a

particular group or tribe, and hence the evils of tribalism come about. Just as

there is myself and the others, so there comes to be us and them, insiders and

outsiders.

 

Much of the evil associated with the history of religion arises from this spirit

of exclusiveness creeping into the mixture, like garlic introduced into the

milk. When salvation is imagined to be a question of a membership card, then the

true spirit of living spirituality is contaminated and perverted. Instead of

living the teachings and following the path as a vital reality in one's everyday

life, the emphasis gets shifted onto being a card-carrying member. There are

insiders and outsiders, with identity cards for the former. In spite of the

teachings of Christ that not everyone that sayeth to Me, 'Lord, Lord', shall

enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in

heaven, the emphasis changes to one of 'there is no salvation outside the

Church', and a large notice is hung metaphorically on the door of heaven saying

'members only'. This spirit is not, of course, confined to Christianity. We can

see the same spirit at work in the fundamentalist militant Islam movement at the

present time. The Ayatollah Khomeini can persuade thousands of his followers to

swarm into Iraq and certain death, because he has imbued them with the belief in

'them' and 'us', in the mistaken view that paradise is assured for those who

lose their life in the struggle for 'us', while it matters not what violence or

terrorist atrocity is inflicted on 'them' in this so-called righteous cause. It

is an example of the grossest ignorance spiritually and the so-called religious

leaders who promulgate it are damned souls, whatever they may believe and

however grandiose their pretensions.

 

Christ put it all so simply. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart

and with all thy might and with all thy soul and thy neighbour as thyself. The

neighbour is the prototype of 'the other chap', 'them' as opposed to 'us', and

Jesus was giving the true spiritual teaching as to what the genuinely

enlightened attitude to them is when he answered the question 'Who then is our

neighbour?' with the parable of the good Samaritan. The true Christian, like the

true Moslem, Buddhist or Hindu, is the one who sees the same God in all

creatures and pierces the outer appearance to grasp the essential unity of all.

He is the one who loves his neighbour as himself, for whom (in a certain real

sense) there is no 'other', no foreigner, no-one beyond the pale.

 

China was civilised thousands of years before the rest of the world, and it has

been practically the first country to cultivate the fine arts and to establish a

literary and scholarly tradition of refinement and learning. but this

pre-eminence in time gave the Chinese a superiority complex. Even the Chinese

character for China is a circle with a line through the middle, representing the

belief that China is the centre of the world. To the Chinese everything beyond

their borders was the realm of the barbarians, and this attitude persisted even

at the height of the rise of the Western civilisations from the sixteenth to the

nineteenth century, when China wanted to learn from the West its new skills in

science and astronomy. As a result there is a streak of zenophobia, of dislike

of foreigners which still runs through the whole of Chinese culture, and is

equally apparent in the Communist regime. There are 'the Chinese' on the one

hand and 'the foreign devils' on the other, 'us' and 'them'. It has been a great

stumbling block to the further development and integration of China into the

modern world with its community of nations, and they are still suffering badly

from their self-imposed isolation. So that even on the national scale this

spirit of exclusiveness or xenophobia is a major psychological and cultural

set-back for those who are subject to it. If one considers the matter

objectively and carefully, many of the troubles of the modern world can be

traced back to this wrong-headed spirit of exclusivity, which is a denial of the

spiritual truth of universality and love.

 

But let us try and see this whole question in a much wider context. Why is it

that this spirit of narrowness arises in the mind at all, and how is it that we

can overcome it and follow the great principles of universality and the

brotherhood of men enunciated by all the great spiritual teachers? The great

modern yogi Swami Rama Tirtha provides us with the clue to the answer and it

concerns the way in which self-consciousness evolves both biologically and

psychologically. Life emerges out of the inorganic world through the

single-celled organisms, called protozoa. At first it is only found in its

simplest and most primitive form. Yet that first awakening of the potentialities

of life in the dead and lifeless world of minerals is at once characterised by

completely new qualities, of eating, reproducing, curiosity and self-generated

activity. The amoeba explores its surroundings, putting out its pseudopodia of

protoplasm to seek and investigate the objects around it. It surrounds and

engulfs that which it wishes to assimilate to itself as food and it extrudes the

waste products of its own metabolism. It is sensitive to light and heat and it

shows continuous spontaneous activity. It exhibits the biological instinct for

self-preservatiion and the urge to perpetuate itself and extend its sphere by

reproduction of its own kind.

 

The first awakening of conscious life (if it can be called conscious) Swami Rama

likens to a geometrical point. Its life is restricted to a single centre, but it

is the starting point for all living things. Each and every living being that we

know in the world starts from this point, both in the sense that all evolution

has progressed from its protozoan origins in the course of Darwinian evolution,

and also in the sense that each and every organism starts its own individual

life as a single cell, the fertilised ovum, and only from that point grows and

expands and reproduces itself to form the fully grown living creature that it

is. In the course of this evolution consciousness unfolds itself, awakening, so

to speak, from a long sleep. It is (to speak fancifully) sleeping in plants,

dreaming and beginning to awaken in the animals and only becomes fully

self-conscious in man. But man's consciousness is not the end of the matter.

Indeed, the expansion of consciousness in most men is still far from complete

and it not only varies from time to time throughout our life, but in relatively

few men has it reached anything like its full potential. If the yogis and the

mystics are to be believed, the aim and goal of this evolution is, in fact, the

attainment of what is called super-consciousness, the fully awakened state of

the pure consciousness absolute which lies behind the mind.

 

Swami Rama Tirtha likens this process to the gradual expansion of the circle of

self-consciousness from its starting point, where it is seen at its most

restricted, to infinity. As the centre of the circle of life gets further from

its starting point the circle expands and with that expansion covers a wider and

yet wider area within its orbit. At the same time its radius or range steadily

increases and when it reaches the limiting position of the circle whose centre

has reached infinity, the edge of the circle becomes a straight line and loses

all its curvature. Then there is nothing which is not contained within the

circle. As the circle gets large the curvature of its outer edge becomes less

and less conspicuous. It is like the curvature of the earth compared with that

of a football; because of its enormous radius it is not apparent to us in

ordinary life. To all intents and purposes the earth appears flat. It is only

when we ascend in a rocket or a satellite that we can see that the surface of

the globe is indeed a sphere and that its extent is, relatively to the size of

the cosmos, rounded, restricted and confined. In the same way, says Swami Rama,

the evolved self-consciousness of a man with wide sympathies, may appear

unrestricted, but nonetheless be less than universal in its scope.

 

And here comes the great point, which links this principle of the evolutionary

expansion of self-consciousness with the principle of tribalism spoken of by the

Duke of Edinburgh. For it is (says Swami Rama) the range of the emotional and

psychological sphere with which we identify our own self-interest that

determines the quality of our life. Some men, for instance, are interested only

in the interests of their own body. Even the interests of the family, their

wives or their children are regarded by them as impediments and obstacles if

they get in the way of their own imagined enjoyment. This, on the psychological

plane, is comparable to the restrictive narrow circle of the primitive organism

on the biological scale. Few people can come to love a praying mantis or an

alligator. Even other praying mantises or alligators can expect precious little

sympathy from them. And unfortunately, there are human beings with minds hardly

more advanced. But a little more evolved are those whose interest is confined to

the member of their own family. For them the dividing line between 'them' and

'us' is at the edge of this narrow circle bounding the interests of their own

immediate family. A wider expansion of self-consciousness is represented by the

man who feels identified with his own group or party. Wider still is the patriot

who feels at one with the interests of his own country. But all these circles

are still narrow in the sense that they exclude more than they include. Bernard

Shaw says: 'Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all

other countries because you were born in it.' We try and pretend to ourselves

that our judgements are objective, but the fact of the matter is that it boils

down to a question of self-consciousness and what one is identified with.

 

To put it simply, other people are divided into what we may call 'neighbours' or

'foreigners', and who it is we regard as neighbours depends on the width of our

sympathies or the narrowness of our self-interest. And what determines this

breadth or narrowness of vision is where we see our true centre. We all start

from a particular point in time and space, from a concrete situation as a finite

individual born in some particular family at a certain time and place in

history. But the human mind can reach out from its finite starting point towards

infinity. Man physically may be only an insignificant speck of matter

originating at a particular point-instant in time and space, but as a spiritual

being his mind is able to reach out, defying the limitations of time and space,

and through his aspirations for a better world, and a better life, can set its

sights on a centre somewhere on the way to infinity. And the further he gets in

that process, the higher his aim, the more spiritual he becomes, and the wider

the expansion of consciousness which he enjoys.

 

*This lecture was given at Shanti Sadan on 30th March 1984

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 1-8