The urge for self-transcendence

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One of the most basic elements in the life of each and every individual, no

matter where he is or what he is, empirically speaking, is the urge for

self-transcendence, to improve himself, to strive that tomorrow will see him

further than today. This deep-seated urge in the human heart takes many forms It

is an urge for happiness and also an urge for greater freedom, and it is equally

an urge for greater knowledge, an attempt to overcome the limitations which he

feels surrounding him. The physical limitations are not as important as the

mental ones. As Hamlet says:

 

....I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space,

were it not that I have had bad dreams.

 

It is the bad dreams of the ignorant and unspiritualised mind which hem man in.

 

It is only when he recognises the paramount importance of the psychological and

spiritual dimension of his being and turns his efforts to achieving liberation

and full self-realisation in this sphere that he can find an effective means of

permanent escape from 'the ills that flesh is heir to', as Shakespeare puts it.

This is the point of Rama Tirtha's simile. Man has to make his centre, not in

the concrete physical personality, which is his starting point in life, but

reaching out towards a more fundamental centre hidden within and behind his

personality. And it is the teaching of Yoga and of all the great spiritual

traditions that when he undertakes the inner quest for the real Self in his own

personality, he ultimately finds it to be beyond time and space and the mind, in

the realm of infinity. The great philosopher of Yoga, Shri Shankara, describes

the Yoga of Self-knowledge, 'Adhyatma Yoga', by saying that the Self is that

which appears to us at the outset as the limited individual associated with the

body, but turns out in the end to be one with the supreme being. It is spoken of

in the Gita as:

 

The Light even of lights, That is said to be beyond darkness. Knowledge, the

knowable, the goal of knowledge. It is implanted in the heart of everyone. (Gita

13.17)

 

And this 'adhyatma' (the science of the Self) is spoken of as the highest secret

in the first verse of the eleventh chapter, where Arjuna says to Krishna, after

receiving the teachings from him:

 

By that speech which has been delivered by thee for my benefit, that highest

secret which is called 'adhyatma', this, my delusion, is gone. (11.1)

 

Note that it is not said that this is something which is inaccessible.

Shankara makes this point very strongly when he says in his commentary to

Chapter Thirteen that the Lord speaks of this light of Atman, the real Self, as

knowable and the goal of knowledge with a view to cheer up Arjuna who seemed

dejected at the thought of the knowledge of Brahman (the Absolute) being very

difficult to attain. It is not so. It can be attained by any man, but there is a

necessary qualification. And that qualification is that one is willing to pay a

reasonable price for it. You cannot expect to get something for nothing. What is

a reasonable price? Does not Christ say: 'What shall it profit a man if he gain

the whole world but lose his own soul?' The price is quite simply stated. It is

that you shall give it the first place in your life. So long as you put anything

worldly on a par with this quest, you will not succeed, because, as the Old

Testament says, God is a jealous God. Even a beautiful girl, admired by many

suitors, is not going to give herself in marriage to someone who tells her that

she is his second best girl friend and that he wants her if he can't get his

first choice! It's really an insult to her and why should she have anything but

scorn for such a suitor? In the same way, unless we really want to achieve this

highest self-realisation of which the yogis speak, we will only be partially

successful. Swami Rama Tirtha makes this point repeatedly. 'To him alone the

spirit shall be given who wooeth it untiringly.'

 

One of the main implications of this vision is that it is universal. From the

point of view of this great Truth, there are no insiders and outsiders. In St.

Paul's words: 'We are all members one of another'. Why? Because 'it is implanted

in the heart of everyone'. (Gita 13.17) 'Without and wihin all beings, the

moving as also the unmoving.' (Gita 13.15) To return to Swami Rama Tirtha's

simile, so long as we are still dealing only with circles, with anything short

of this infinite Self this centre set at infinity, the boundary of what is mine,

of the insiders, is concave. Where the self-consciousness is narrow and the

circle small, there is only a small group of insiders contained within the small

circle of 'us', but even where the circle gets much bigger, there remain some

who are excluded from it by the fact of it being finite and concave. Those

within the circle are embraced within the arms of the self, so to speak, says

Swami Rama Tirtha, while those who are outside the circle are excluded. So it is

only when man recognises his true centre as the infinite Atman within the

personality that his sympathies become universal and there are no longer any

outsiders or foreigners to be rejected.

 

Let us therefore meditate for a few minutes on the verse from the Gita which

expresses this great truth and try to come nearer to realising it in our own

consciousness:

 

OM. The Light even of lights, That is said to be beyond darkness. Knowledge, the

knowable, the goal of knowledge, It is implanted in the heart of everyone. OM.

(Gita 13.17)

 

Whitehead says: 'The history of ideas is a history of mistakes. But through all

mistakes it is also the history of the gradual purification of conduct.'

(Adventure of Ideas, page 36). And he speaks of the creation of the world of

civilised order as the victory of persuasion over force. If one looks at the

older Western civilisations like those of the Assyrians or the Egyptians, you

find (says Whitehead) that they conceived of the universe in terms of despots

and slaves, of tyrants and their helpless subjects. But with the advent of Greek

and Christian thought, there is a new idea of brotherhood and equality among

citizens and peoples. This is a great expansion of the mental horizon on the

social level, corresponding to the movement of the centre of interest away from

the finite individual of the ruler to the more universal idea of the group to

which all citizens equally belong. But it is still a narrow ideal, since state

opposes state. Greece had the idea of democracy in its city states, but there

was a constant struggle between the states which erupted every now and then in

wars between Athens and Sparta. When Alexander united the Greeks, he gave them a

feeling of a common national bond, but they were still at war with the Persians

under Darius.

 

What is true of states is also true of creeds. As Whitehead wisely says:

'Wherever there is a creed, there is a heretic round the corner or in his

grave.' (page 68). And we find the Old Testament creed imbued with the idea of

exclusiveness, with the idea of 'a chosen people', 'the elect of God', which

reflects the narrowness of the circle of belief which it represents. Islam's

attitude to the infidel is much the same. Intolerance is the besetting sin of

such creeds and we see it manifest in the medieval Catholic church as much as in

the Old Testament prophets. It is only with the coming of the Enlightenment,

that the idea of the equality of all men before God, which is already present in

the teachings of Christ, both in the doctrine of the good Samaritan and in the

parable of the wheat and the tares, that the circle becomes less restricted. As

Whitehead says: 'The apostles of modern tolerance - in so far as it exists - are

Erasmus, the Quakers and John Locke. They should be commemorated in every

laboratory, in every church, and in every court of law.' (page 65) The ideas

were already present in the spiritual teachings, but they had been ignored by

society at large until the seventeenth century. Their worlds were narrow and all

who were not of their persuasion were heretics and heathens. Even such great

spiritual figures as Meister Eckhart and Bruno fell foul of the Church to which

they belonged because of the breadth and universality of their views which swept

aside the narrow blinkered exclusiveness of traditional theology, and they were

accused of heresy.

 

It is an advance that the different Christian churches were able to recognise

themselves as all children of one God the Father and united in worship of the

same Incarnation, but in the modern world this will not do. The circle, which

may have seemed to the narrow-minded in the Middle Ages too wide for comfort, is

now seen to be ludicrously restricted. Christianity is only one of many

spiritual traditions in the history of mankind and it has no monopoly of

spiritual truth and no pre-ordained right to the exclusive attention of the

Deity. It is, in any case, a ridiculously lop-sided idea. According to the

Christian doctrine, God created the whole world. Why should He only concern

himself, therefore, with one particular creed of so many, appearing relatively

late in the story of mankind? The fact is that all religions are paths to Truth

and the supreme truth (according to the saints and mystics) is to be found

hidden within the personality of each and every living being.

 

It can be found. Note this point. Swami Rama Tirtha is quite specific about

this. When man moves his centre beyond the finite to the infinite, he says, the

radius of the circle becomes infinite. And from the strict mathematical point of

view, when the centre of the circle moves to infinity (what mathematicians call

'the limiting case') then many of its properties change radically. Its

circumference becomes a straight line, all curvature vanishes. It is concave to

none and convex to none and it passes through the whole of space equally. Swami

Rama says specifically that he intends this as a simile of those individuals who

are fully God-realised, who have known the spiritual truth. For that circle the

centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. In other words it is

boundless and there are none excluded from it. Such a man is universal, because

there is no-one who does not appear to him as a reflection of his own Self. He

is a free man because, as his selfishness has been transcended, there is no

selfish little point centre rouond which his life revolves any longer. To quote

Swami Rama himself:

 

We began with the point circle, gross selfishness, and here is that little point

enlarged, increased and expanded until it has become a straight line. These are

God-men. These are people to whom the wide world is home, irrespective of caste,

colour, creed, community or country. Be you an Englishman, be you an American,

be you a Mohammedan, a Buddhist or a Hindu, or whatever you may be, you are

Rama's self. You are the Self of self to him. Here is selfishness marvellously

increased, here is a strange kind of selfishness. The wide world is my Self.

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 8-14