Chapter 4

Chapter IV

Why We Are What We Are
CHICAGO AND BEYOND

This is the title which Swami Ashokananda gave to one of the first lectures I heard, years before, in San Francisco. As he continued his talk, that day, it soon became clear that the title might as well have been “Why we Are not What We Think We Are.” But are we not, in large measure, the result of what we think? Therefore I decided to keep the original wording when planning this discourse in 1978 for a Vedanta group in Falls Church, Virginia, near Washington D.C. As Swami Bhashyananda, Head of the Chicago Center, felt keenly for those who are not easily able to reach a Vedanta Center, he firmly believed in starting groups in less urban places, which he could visit from time to time. He also repeatedly remarked on the importance of having a center one day in the capital of the country. He and his assistants went to many places to give discourses on Vedanta. In this way we came to know fellow adherents and aspirants in Kansas, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Canada etc. Below is an edited version, expanded, of the talk which was subsequently given in the Chicago Center and again in Cleveland, Ohio.

“It seems my soul is like a filthy pond, wherein fish die soon and frogs live long,” said someone, who understandably preferred to remain anonymous. We are in this condition, first, because we do not hear the truth about ourselves; and second, even hearing it we do not comprehend it; so says the Katha Upanishad [1]. It goes on to tell us that it is adhikarita, spiritual preparedness, that brings us comprehension. Why do we not comprehend?
As with everything that takes place in us, too often we simply ask “how” instead of “why.” Suppose you trip and sprain your ankle; you are satisfied to discover how you did it—unevenness in the sidewalk—but do not inquire deeper, into why it happened. Was your mind wool-gathering at the time? Not attending to your feet? Then again much of our curiosity about things is idle; worse than idle, it leads us to open doors better passed by. I recall a noted holy man, a Westerner known as Gurudas Maharaj, who told me that when he first went to India he could hardly wait to learn the local language so that he could understand what all the monks around him were chatting about. But when he had learned some of it, he found to his chagrin that they were talking about things he didn’t think important at all.

Highest truth

Moreover, with Truth right in front of us (as Brahman is everywhere) we close our eyes and ears. Escapists, truly, as Eliot said, we cannot bear very much reality. Emerson and Thoreau have explained the need for solitude and its power to reveal truth to the quiet mind, in persuasive language, but do we read them now? Not much. As for silence, with all the chatter from radio, television and electronic gadgets going on around us, and our own voices, one wonders if there is any place left at all for silence. We turn these things on, pleading boredom; but what of the still small voice inside? Have you heard the “inner music?” Yes, we can now have constant music, plugged in our ears, worn on our arms or our belts, but that, plainly, is not what raises consciousness.
When it comes to paying attention to the crucial phenomenon of death or preparing for it, we are in a slightly better position. Some evidence of it can now be seen. AIDS and other tragedies have brought the topic into our very parlors. We are coming to acknowledge that there must be That in us which is the Watcher, the Witness, Observer, of the coming and going of the body. We are so busy getting experience, we hardly think of letting anything pass by, or of putting it aside.
“Many do not have the opportunity to hear this Truth; many, though hearing it, do not comprehend it, “the sruti says. Let us add: Even after comprehending it, we again forget it. And the forgetfulness is of two sorts: inadvertent and deliberate.

Fables

Let us take a good look at some of the fables we like to tell ourselves:
“The fault lies in my stars...” But they cannot talk back, and as Cassius reminds us, we must look rather to ourselves. We must stop the projection process. There is a Yiddish proverb which says that the girl who cannot dance complains the band doesn’t know how to play; it’s a poor carpenter that lays the blame on his tools. We react with elation to good fortune, and with depression to bad, not realizing that wherever there is a power outside to gladden us, a similar one to sadden us cannot be far off.
“If I don’t look at my predicament, it will probably go away.” There is the fable of the ostrich, who, frightened, hides its head in the sand. Nine-tenths of the bird remains exposed! Let us not do the same. Once a fox was caught and chained to a peg in the ground. After many attempts to break the chain by biting it, the fox gave up. But with his paw he scraped earth over his chain until it was hidden from view and then he lay down.
“I have a guardian angel with me, who makes me lucky.” Perhaps you do— many believe there are such beings, But if so, how is it that you don’t enter every lottery, and why does the lottery winner not win again? Our eyes are starry with a vision of holding the payoff ticket; we read in the paper only about those who win and never about those who do not.
“Something better is just around the corner.” That is what President Herbert Hoover assured us just before the Great Depression. I once went on a canoe trip on the Boundary Waters at the border of Minnesota and Canada during which the “explorer mentality” prevailed: all of us said, as we passed one campsite after another and the day wore on, “Just around the next bend we’ll surely find a better one.” Of course we had finally to settle, as night fell, on one inferior to those we had passed. We chase many kinds of wild geese. Our mind constantly wants change, which means that it is not going to any depth at all.
“It is for the sake of the children that children are born.” Many people think this, or pretend to. We bring ours into the world, and we feel happy again when the grandchildren are born, yet we spoil and exploit the world for our own comfort and enjoyment, leaving the mess and the shortages for them to deal with. We demand from them obedience. Every girl and boy knows that Almighty God has given mankind some commandments; but Emerson said that obedience alone gives the right to command. When the offspring see that their parents cannot or do not obey, will they be amenable to their commands?

More fables

It is no less a fable to suppose that we can add finite quantities to the “good” in this world, at the expense of “evil.” We are like the woman Jesus spoke of, who tried to put a patch of new cloth on an old garment. She may know full well that the strains will make new holes nearby, but she persists for the sake of appearances. World bodies are meeting at this very hour to work out ways to raise the standard of living for have-nots. Such meetings have a way of breaking up when it is realized what sacrifices the have-nations must make, in order to implement the remedies. It only validates what Swami Vivekananda said about the balance of the pairs of opposites pertaining throughout our universe. There are others who wish to work vigorously for a selfless cause; somehow fanaticism and other biases infect the process and often two-thirds of the energy is wasted in these.
“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” It is not easy to die, you know. Vedanta makes clear to us that we have a tremendous thirst for life; it reaches right down into the depths of our being, and to think that physical death is anything but a door, opening to another opportunity, is to fail to use our reason. The venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes, at the age of eighty-five, out on a walk, saw an attractive young lady going by, and is said to have exclaimed to the friend who was with him, “Oh, to be seventy again! “ It is just this kind of drive, this recurrent desire, which runs the whole length of our life, and brings us back to it, again and again.
“I know when to stop.” Many who have thought they knew, did not; it is an art, knowing when to stop. A prince of ancient times, Yudhishthira by name, wise and virtuous in most respects, failed in this one: by gambling away his entire household, which led at last to the great war of the Mahabharata. If a single gambler always knew just when to stop, all the casinos in Las Vegas would eventually go broke! We need not dwell further here on the follies of all the addictions: we know we are an addicted generation.
At levels beyond the physical too, unwise indulgence can take place. “Love” which has not been freed from sensuality has its own pleasurable, attractive glow. We are all familiar with co-dependence—“she needs me,” “he can’t get along without me,”—in which affection degenerates into attachment, persisting even through exploitation, abuse and violence.

Anger and passion

The above are but samples of the ways in which we think ourselves to be other than what we truly are. Is it any wonder that we neither comprehend nor remember the truth? Even when we become a little aware of the Spirit, our ground and our true nature, in those rare moments of quiet insight, something pulls us right back into the maelstrom, “against our will”, we say. Arjuna asks the Lord, his teacher, what force it is that drives one to violate one’s values, even against one’s will, and the answer is not pleasant to hear: it is anger and passion, Sri Krishna replies. And Yudhishthira, a man of exemplary character, voices the ages-old complaint: Why is it that I know what I should do but my mind is not inclined to do it, and I know what I should not do and my mind inclines me toward it? Centuries later Sankara provides a double answer: it is maya, in general, and inadvertence in particular.
Are we, then, like the insects, which fly into flame, attracted to their own perishing? Or like the luna-moth which is said to be so drawn to the light of the moon that it flies up and up until it drops? As Swami Vivekananda said, we cover our eyes with our own hands and ask why it is so dark! There is a bird which, although its nest cradles the eggs, tears it apart little by little, in its attempts to clean it. Think how it is when we are asked to follow a rigid diet: we allow the ideal slowly to fade in our minds, we make a few hindrances into real obstacles, and soon our wandering eye is at the mercy of every advertisement and the diet down the drain.
Why do we find it so difficult to pull back, and leave aside these gross and subtle addictions? Habit. As someone said, life is maze in which we take the wrong turn even before we have learned to walk. We can be more clever, like the mouse who, catching the scent of the cheese, observes the trap and does not get caught in it. Our humanity is indeed our salvation—our ability to discern and to control our mind.
There is a word of wisdom which runs through the monasteries of our Order and it goes like this:

Sew a thought and reap an act;
Sew an act and reap a habit;
Sew a habit and reap a character,
Sew a character and reap a destiny.

It was the opinion of psychologist William James that the hell to be endured hereafter, (of which theology tells us), is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world, by habitually fashioning our character in the wrong way. We seem to choose, again and again, our disturbed and tempestuous moments for making decisions affecting the most vital aspects of life. Choices about marriage and divorce, housing, employment or career should never be made when we are in the heat of emotions; only after we have cooled down.

Such we are — or are we?

The French writer Montaigne somewhere makes the observation that we are ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out if those things are really so! How ironic. We really have no proof that we are small, limited and finite, ignorant, selfish and mortal; yet we take great pains to inquire about how it is that we have become so. May we not, then, be sighted persons dreaming that we are blind?
Aristotle, you may recall, insisted that the definition of any species is made, not by the sum total of its run-of-the-mill products, but by the best example of it which can be found: it is that alone which defines the species. By this measure, we are all Christs, or as the Buddhists say, we all have the Buddha-nature. Who can look at the image of Siva, or the face of Buddha, and not feel that they have something of this in their own makeup?
Are you overburdened with the suffering of life? Look again at Buddha’s face, or the Trimurti, that noble carving in stone of the three faces of Shiva. Behind each one of us is that amused, slightly distant, visage—the Spectator of life and death. “Ye are gods,” cries Vivekananda, “stand up and know it.” Sri Ramakrishna told us that he saw with his eyes that it is God who has assumed the form of this universe and all its beings. Why not discover this for ourselves?
Do you say it is too difficult to believe? But the Hindus are not the only ones who say it. Let us revisit our friend Emerson. “Tragedy,” he says, "is in the eye of the observer, not in the heart of the sufferer. If a man says, ‘Lo, I suffer!’ it is apparent that he suffers not, for grief is dumb.”[2] We must think well upon this, for it is profound. “There are people,” he observed, “who have an appetite for grief. Pleasure is not strong enough for them and they crave pain.” And in his essay called History, he has this quatrain:

I am the owner of the sphere,
Of the seven seas and the solar year,
Of Caesar’s hand and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart and Shakespeare’s strain.[3]

“Well, now, if I am acting in ignorance,” you may say, “how can I be held accountable for my thoughts and deeds?” It is the unconscious liar who is the greatest liar, some say. Ignorance of the law, we know, is no excuse; why then excuse our spiritual ignorance? We do not need to be ignorant, nor have we any right to be so.

Western popular opinion

It is an odd thing that if you read much of what is known as Western literature, you will find there, in what has been said about the nature of man, a great deal of what is negative. “Man is a mere insect,” “a fading flower,” “a prisoner,” “a social animal,” “one born into trouble,” “...is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records,”—these are some of the choice phrases used by prominent writers, and is, after all, an echo of the feelings of the public at large. And here, on the other hand, is Swami Vivekananda calling us divinities on earth and asking why we are like babies in mud puddles playing with marbles,. To believe that what we don’t want to happen always happens, and vice versa, the condition of a person out of touch with himself or herself. Is it possible for us to be cheated by anyone but ourselves?
We have no need to accept this “majority opinion” which we hang around our necks: the majority, as we know, is very often mistaken.

Being what we are

It is naive to think that we are merely the perceivers of a ”given” world. We make our world, at least in the sense that we color what is perceived through our own dark glasses, or smoked glasses, or rose-colored glasses; always superimposing on the here/now our accumulated left-overs from earlier impressions and biases. Thus it is that we fail to recognize the rope as a rope and continue to see it as a snake. What would we think of someone who smears over his viands the left-overs of yesterday’s meal? That is how it is when we sloppily allow the memories of past impressions to conceal what is right before our eyes. Pascal in his Pensées has this amusing remark: “If a common laborer were to dream every night that he was a king, he would probably be almost as happy as a king who dreamed every night that he was a common laborer.”[4]
Swami Vivekananda called us infinite dreamers, dreaming finite dreams.
Life sometimes forces us to turn away from the commonplace and go inward, and great can be the results there from. Imprisoned, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Jean Genêt, Gandhi and Nehru, each turning inward, found there the gestation of his creative power.
Of course there are some who think that in view of all the frustration life throws in our face we should not bother to aspire for anything at all. “Be agnostic, and enjoy whatever you can.” It is impossible, because it ignores the fact of higher aspiration in human nature. Spirit is what we are, and the truth of our nature must assert itself one day; satyam eva jayate says the Veda: Truth will always triumph. Struggle we must, by means of purity, patience and perseverance and it is that struggle which is the zest of life.
Today we need not so much the passivity of “harmony with nature”—a popular cry, which cites, misleadingly, the Tao-te-ching—as the rousing enterprise of the Bhagavad Gita urging us to renounce our complacence and take up sadhana, spiritual discipline, and with earnest application to challenge what we suppose to be true. And this is perfectly in keeping with the mood of modern man. Samuel Butler once posed the question, ‘Is life worth living?’ It is a question for an embryo, not for a man.[5]

Katha Upanishad, I.2.7
The Natural History of Intellect, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., N.Y., 1904, p. 410
"The Informing Spirit," Poems of Emerson, Thos. Crowell, N.Y. 1965, p. 50
Sayings, (Pensées), Penguin Books, 1966, p.803
The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, Jonathan Cape, London, 1930, p.17

Chapter IV Why We Are What We Are CHICAGO AND BEYOND

Chapter IV

Why We Are What We Are
CHICAGO AND BEYOND