Thus we avoid the dangers of life and its evils. Do not want anything. What makes us miserable? The cause of all miseries from which we suffer has been made by desire, want. You want something, and the want is not fulfilled; the result is distress. If there be no want there will be no more suffering. When we shall give up all our desires, what will be the result? The walls have no desires and they never suffer. No, and they never evolve. This chair has no desires; it never suffers, and it is a chair, too, all the time. There is a glory in happiness, there is a glory in suffering. If I may dare to say so, there is a utility in evil, too. The great lesson in misery we all know. Hundreds of things we have done in our lives which we wish we had never done, but which, at the same time, have been great teachers. As for me, I am glad that I have done good things, and glad I have done something bad; glad I have done something right, and glad I have committed many errors, because every one of them has been a great lesson.
I, as I am this minute, am the resultant of all I have done, all I have thought. Every action and every / thought has had its effect, and these effects are the i sum-total of my progress. The problem becomes diffi- cult. We all understand that desires are wrong, but what is meant by giving up desires? How can life go on? It would be the same suicidal advice, which GOD IN EVERYTHING 1 47 means killing the desire and the patient too. So the answer comes. Not that you should not have property, not that you should not have things which are neces- sary, and things which are even luxuries. Have all that you want, and everything that you do not want sometimes, only know the truth and realize the truth. This wealth does not belong to anybody. Have no idea of proprietorship, possessorship. You are nobody, nor am I, nor any one else. It all belongs to the Lord, because the opening verse told us to put the Lord in everything. God is in that wealth that you enjoy. He is in the desire that rises in your mind. He is in these things you buy because you desire them; He is in your beautiful attire, in your handsome ornaments. That is the line of thought. All will be metamor- phosed as soon as you begin to see things in that light. If you put God in your every movement, in your clothes, in your talk, in your body, in your mind, in everything, the whole scene changes, and the world, instead of appearing as woe and misery, will become a heaven.
•'The kingdom of heaven is within you," says Jesus; it is already there, says the Vedanta; so say others, so says every great teacher. "He that hath eyes to see, let him see," and "he that hath ears to hear, let him hear." It is already here. And that is one of the themes which the Vedanta undertakes to prove. It will prove also, that the truth for which we have been searching all this time is already present, it was all the time with us. In our ignorance, we thought we had lost it, and went about in the world crying and weeping, suffering misery, struggling to find the truth, and all 148 J NANA YOGA the time it was dwelling in our own hearts. There alone can we find it.
If giving up the world is true, and if it is taken in its crude, old sense, then it would come to mean this: that we must not work, that we must become idle, that we must sit like lumps of earth, and neither think nor do anything, but become fatalists, driven about by every circumstance, ordered about by the laws of nature, drifting from place to place. That would be the result. But that is not what is meant. We must work. Ordinary mankind, driven everywhere by false desires, what do they know of work? The man pro- pelled by his own feelings and his own senses, what does he know about work? He works who is not propelled by his own desires, or by any selfishness whatsoever. He works who has no ulterior motive in view. He works who has nothing to gain from work.
Who enjoys a picture, the seller of the picture or the seer? The seller is busy with his accounts, com- puting what his gain will be, how much profit he will realize on the picture. His brain is full of that. He is looking at the hammer, and watching the bids. He is intent on hearing how fast the bids are rising. That man is enjoying the picture who has gone there without any intention of buying or selling. He looks at the picture and enjoys it. So this whole universe is a picture, and when these desires have vanished, men will enjoy the world; and this buying and selling, and these foolish ideas of possession will be ended. The money-lender gone, the buyer gone, the seller gone, this world remains the picture, a beautiful painting. I never read of any more beautiful conception of God GOD IN EVERYTHING I49 than the following: "He is the great poet, the ancient poet: the whole universe is his poem, coming in verses and rhymes and rhythms, written in infinite bliss.'* When we have given up desires, then alone shall we be able to read and enjoy this universe of God. Then everything will become deified. Nooks and corners, by-ways and shady places, which we thought so unholy, spots on its surface which appeared so black, will be all deified. They will all reveal their true nature, and we shall smile at ourselves, and think that all this weeping and crying has been but child's play, and we were standing there watching.
Thus, says the Vedanta, do you work. It first advises us how to work — by giving up — giving up the world, the apparent, illusive world. What is meant by that? Seeing God everywhere, as said already. Thus do you work. Desire to live a hundred years, have all the earthly desires, if you will, only deify them, convert them into heaven, and live a hundred years. Have the desire to live a long life of helpful- ness, of blissfulness and activity on this earth. Thus working, you will find the way. There is no other way. If a man plunges headlong into foolish luxuries of the world without knowing the truth, he has not reached the goal, he has missed his footing. And if a man curses the world, mortifies his flesh, goes into a forest, and kills himself bit by bit by starving himself, makes his heart a barren waste, a desert, kills out all his feeling, becomes stern, awful, dried-up, that man also has missed the way. These are the two extremes, the two mistakes at either end. Both have lost the way, both have missed the goal.
150 J NANA YOGA 150 J NANA YOGA Thus, says the Vedanta, thus work, putting God in everything, and knowing Him to be in everything, thus work incessantly, holding life as something deified, as God Himself, and knowing that this is all we have to do, this is all we have to ask for, because God is here in everything; where else shall we go to find Him? In every work, in every thought, in every feeling, He is already there. Thus knowing, we must work; this is the only way, there is no other. Thus the effects of work will not bind us down. We shall not be injured by the effects of work. We have seen how these false desires are the causes of all the misery and evil we suffer, but when they are thus deified, purified through God, when they come they bring no evil, they bring no misery. Those who have not learned this secret will have to live in a demoniacal world until they discover the secret. Many do not know what an infinite mine of bliss fulness and pleasure and happiness is here, in them, around them, everywhere; they have not yet discovered it. What is a demoniacal world? The Vedanta says a world of ignorance.
Says the Vedanta, we are dying of thirst sitting on the banks of the mightiest river. We are dying of hunger sitting near piles of food. Here is the blissful universe. We do not find it. We are in it; it is around us all the time, and we are always mistaking it. Religions propose to find this out for us. This blissful universe is the real search in all hearts. It has been the search of all nations, it is the one goal of religion, and this ideal is expressed in various lan- guages; all the petty differences between religions and religions are mere word struggles, nonsense. It i§ GOD IN EVERYTHING I5I only difference of language that makes all these apparent divergences; one expresses a thought in one way, another a little differently, yet perhaps each is saying exactly what the other is expressing in dif- ferent language. That is how struggles come in this life of ours.
More questions arise in connection with this. It is very easy to talk about. From my childhood I have heard of this putting God everywhere and everything will become deified, and then I can really enjoy every- thing, but as soon as I come into this world, and get a few blows from it, this idea vanishes. I am out in the street thinking that God is in every man, and a strong man comes and gives me a push and I fall flat on the footpath. Then I rise up quickly, the blood has rushed into my head, and my fist clinches and reflection goes. Immediately I become mad. Every- thing is forgotten, instead of encountering God I see the devil. We have been told since we were born to see God in all; every religion has taught that — see God in everything and everywhere. Do you not remember in the New Testament how Christ explicitly says so? We have all been taught this, but it is when we come to the practical side that the difficulty begins. You all remember how in "^sop's Fables" a fine big stag is looking at his picture reflected in a lake, and saying to his child, "How powerful I am, look at my splendid head, look at my limbs, how strong and muscular they are; how swiftly I can run," and in the meantime he hears the barking of dogs in the distance, and immediately takes to his heels, and after he has run several miles he comes back panting. The 152 JNANA YOGA child says, ''You just told me how strong you were, how was it that when the dogs barked you ran away?" "That is it, my son; when the dogs bark all my con- fidence vanishes. I forget my strength; my courage forsakes me and I flee for my life." So are we all our lives. We are all thinking highly of poor human- ity, we feel ourselves strong and valiant in the right; we make grand resolves, but when the "dogs" of trial and temptation bark, we are like the stag in the fable. We forget our power to overcome, we waver and for a time we are vanquished. Then if such is the case, what is the use of teaching all these things? There is the greatest use. The use is this, that perse- verance will finally conquer. Nothing is to be done in a day.
"This Self is first to be heard, then to be thought upon, and then meditated upon." Every one can see the sky, even the very worm crawling upon the earth, as soon as he looks up, sees the blue sky, but how very far away it is. The mind goes everywhere, but the poor body takes a long time to crawl on the surface of the earth. So it is with all our ideals. The ideal is far away, and we are here far below. At the same time we know that we must have an ideal. We must even have the highest ideal. And we know that unfortu- nately the vast majority of persons are groping through this dark life of ours without any ideal at all. If a man with an ideal makes a thousand mistakes, I am sure the man without an ideal makes fifty thousand. Therefore it is better to have an ideal. And this ideal we must hear as much as we can, hear till it enters into our hearts, enters into our brains, hear until GOD IN EVERYTHING 1 53 it enters into our very veins, until it tingles in every drop of our blood, until it fills every pore in our body. We must meditate upon it. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh," and out of the fulness of the heart the hand works, too.
It is thought which is the propelling force in us. i Fill the mind with the highest thoughts, hear them | day after day, think of them month after month. Never mind failures; they are quite natural, they are the beauty of life, these failures. What would life be without these failures? It would not be worth having if it were not for the struggle. Where would be the poetry of life? Never mind the struggles, the mis- takes. I never heard a cow tell a lie, but it is a cow — never a man. So never mind these failures, these little backslidings, hold the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times make the attempt once more. This is the ideal of man, to see God in everything. If you cannot see Him in everything, see Him in one, in that thing which you like best, and then see Him in another. So on you can go. There is infinite life before the soul. Take your time and you will achieve your desire.
"He, that One who vibrates more quickly than mind, who attains to more speed than mind can ever attain, to whom even the gods attain not, nor thought grasps, He moving, everything moves. In Him all exists. He is moving, He also is immovable. He is near and He is far. He is inside everything. He is the out- side of everything, interpenetrating everything. Who- ever sees in every human being that same Atman, and whoever sees everything in that Atman, he never goes 154 JNANA YOGA far from that Atmaii." When all life and the whole universe are seen in this Atman, then man has attained the secret. There is no more delusion for him. Where is any more misery for him who sees this one- ness in the universe?
This is another great theme of the Vedanta, this Oneness of life, Oneness of everything. We shall see how it demonstrates that all misery comes through ignorance, for this ignorance creates the idea of mani- foldness, of separation between man and man, between nation and nation, between earth and moon, between moon and sun. Out of this idea of separation between atom and atom arises all misery, but the Vedanta says this separation does not exist, that it is not real. It is merely apparent, on the surface. In the heart of things there is Unity still. If you go inside you find that Unity between man and man, between races and races, high and low, rich and poor, gods and men, and animals too. If you go deep enough all will be seen as only variations of the One, and he who has attained to this conception of Oneness has no more delusion. He has reached that Unity which we call God in theology. Where is there any more delusion for him? What can delude him? He knows the reality of everything, the secret of everything. Where is there any more misery for him? What does he desire? He has traced the reality of everything unto the Uord, that centre, that Unity of everything, and that is Eternal Existence, Eternal Knowledge, Eternal Bliss. Neither death nor disease, nor sorrow nor misery, nor discontent is there. All is Perfect Union and Perfect Bliss. For whom should he mourn then?
GOD IN EVERYTHING 1 55 In reality there is no death, there is no misery; in the centre, the Reality, there is no one to be mourned for, no one to be sorry for. He has penetrated everything, the Pure One, the Formless, the Bodiless, the Stainless, He the Knower, He the Great Poet, the Self-Existent, He who is giving to every one what he deserves. They are groping in darkness who are worshipping this ignorant world, the world that is produced out of ignorance. Those who are worshipping this world, thinking of it as Existence, are groping in darkness, and those who live their whole lives in this world, and never find anything better or higher, are groping in still greater darkness.
But he who knows the secret of beautiful nature, thinking of pure nature through the help of nature, he crosses death, and through the help of that which is pure nature, he enjoys Eternal Bliss. "Thou Sun, thou hast covered the truth with thy golden disk. Do thou open that for me so that I may see the truth which is inside thee. I have known the truth that is inside thee, I have known what is the real meaning of thy rays and thy glory, and have seen that which shines in thee; the truth in thee I see, and that which is within thee is within me also, and I in thee."
REALIZATION REALIZATION I WILL read to you from one of the simplest, but, I think, one of the most poetical of the Upanishads. It is called the Katha Upanishad. Some of you, per- haps, have read the translation by Sir Edwin Arnold, called "The Secret of Death." In our last lecture we saw how the inquiry which started with the origin of the world, and the creation of the universe, failed to obtain a satisfactory answer from without, and how it then turned inward. This book psychologically takes up that suggestion, questioning into the internal nature of man. It was first asked who created the external world, how it came into being, and now the question is, what is that in man which makes him live and move, and what becomes of it when the man dies. The first philosophers studied the material substance, and tried to reach the ultimate through that. At the best they found a personal Governor of the Universe, a human being immensely magnified, but yet to all intents and purposes a human being. But that cannot be the whole of truth; at best it can only be partial truth. We see this universe as human beings, and our God is our human explanation of the universe., Suppose a cow were philosophical and had religion, it would have a Cow Universe, and a cow solution of the REALIZATION 1 57 problem, and it would not be necessary that it should see our God. Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a Cat Universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, some Cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution. Neither does our conception cover the whole of the universe. It would be a great mistake to accept that tremendously selfish position which man is apt to take. Such a solution of the universal problem as we can get from the outside, labors under this difficulty, that in the first place the universe we see is our own particular universe, our own view of the Reality. That Reality we cannot see through the senses; we cannot comprehend it. We only know the universe from the point of view of beings with five senses. Suppose we obtain another sense, the whole universe must change for us. Sup- pose we had a magnetic sense; it is quite possible that we might find millions and millions of varieties of forces in existence which we do not yet know, for which we have no present sense or feeling. Our senses are limited, very limited indeed, and within those limitations exists what we call our universe, and our God is the solution of our universe, but that cannot be the solution of the whole problem. It cannot be; it is nothing, so to say. But man cannot stop. He is a thinking being, and he wants to find a solution which will comprehensively explain all universes. He wants to see a world which is at once the world of men and of God, and of all beings possible and impos- sible, and he wants to find one solution which will explain all phenomena.
158 JNANA YOGA We see we must first find the Universe where all universes are one; we must find something which, by itself, of a logical necessity must be the background, the material running through all these various planes of existence, whether we apprehend it through the senses or not. If we could possibly find something which we could know as the common property of the lower worlds, as also of the higher worlds, although we do not see them, but by the sheer force of logic could understand that this must be the basis of all existence, then our problem would approach to some sort of solution; but this solution certainly cannot be obtained from the world we see and know, because that is only one view of the whole.
The only hope then lies in penetrating deeply. The early thinkers discovered that the further they were from the centre, the more marked were the variation and differentiation, and the nearer they approached the centre the nearer they were to unity. The nearer we are to the centre of a circle the nearer we are to the common ground in which all the radii meet, and the farther we are from the centre, the more differentiated is our radical line from the others. The external world is farther and farther away from the centre, and so there is no common ground where all the phenomena of existence meet. At best the external world is but one part of the whole of phenomena. There are other parts, the mental phenomena, the moral phenomena, the intellectual phenomena, the various planes of existence, and to take up only one, and find a solution of the whole out of that one, would be simply impossible. We first, therefore, want REALIZATION 1 59 REALIZATION 1 59 to find somewhere a centre from which, as it were, all the other planes of existence start, and standing there,, we will try to find a solution. That is the proposition. And where is that centre? It is inside, internal man. Going deeper and deeper inside, the ancient sages found that there, in the innermost core of the human soul, is the centre of the whole universe. All the planes gravitate towards that one point; there is the common ground, and standing there alone can we find a common solution. So the question who made this world is not philosophical, nor does its solution amount to anything.
This Katha Upanishad speaks in very figurative language. There was in ancient times, a very rich man, who made a certain sacrifice which required that he who made it should give away everything that he had. Now this man was not sincere. He wanted to get the fame and glory of having made the sacrifice, which required the giving away of everything, but at the same time he was only giving things which were of no further use to him — old cows, half dead, barren, with one eye, and lame. Now he had a boy called Nachiketas. This boy saw that his father was not doing what was right, that he was breaking his vow, and he did not know what to say. In India the father and mother are living gods; a child dare not do any- thing before them, or speak before them, but simply stands. And so the boy appreached the father, and because he could not make a direct inquiry he asked him, "Father, to whom are you going to give me? Your sacrifice requires that everything shall be given away." The father became very much vexed. "What l60 J NANA YOGA l60 J NANA YOGA do you mean, boy? A father giving away his own son?" The boy asked the question a second and a third time, and then the angry father answered, "Thee I give unto Death" ( Yama). And the story goes on to say that the boy went unto Death. There is a god called Yama, the first man who died. He went to heaven and became the governor of all the Pitris; all the good people who die, go and live with him for a long time. He is a very pure and holy person (i.e., yama), chaste and good and pure is this Yama. The boy went to Yama's world. Even gods are sometimes not at home, and so three days this boy had to wait there. After the third day Yama returned.
"O, learned one," says Yama, "you have been wait- ing here for three days without food, and you are a guest worthy of respect. Salutation to thee, O Brah- man, and welfare to me. I am very sorry I was not at home. But for that I will make amends. Ask three boons, one for each day." And the boy asked. "My first boon is that my father's anger against me may pass away, that he be kind to me and recognize me when you allow me to depart." Yama granted this fully. The next boon was that he wanted to know about a certain sacrifice which took people to heaven. Now we have seen that the oldest idea which we got in the Samhita portion of the Vedas was only about heaven, where they had bright bodies, and lived with the fathers. Gradually other ideas came, but they were not sufficient; there was need for something higher yet. Living in heaven would not be very dif- ferent from life in this world. At best it would only be a verjr healthy rich man's life, plenty of enjoyment REALIZATION l6l REALIZATION l6l of the senses, plenty of things to enjoy, a sound body which knows no disease. It would be this material world a little more refined, and just as we have seen, there is this difficulty, that this external material world can never solve the problem. So it would be there; no heaven can solve the problem. If this world can- not solve the problem no multiplication of this world can do so, because we must always remember that matter is only an infinitesimal part of the phenomena of nature. The vast part of phenomena which we actually see is not matter.
For instance, in every moment of our life how much is our own feeling, how much is thought phenomena, and how much is actual phenomena outside? How much do we feel and touch and see? How vast is the external world with its tremendous activity! And the sense phenomena are very small compared with the mental phenomena. The heaven solution commits this mistake; it insists that the whole of phenomena is only in touch, taste, sight, etc., so this idea of heaven where we are to live with very bright bodies, did not give full satisfaction to all. Yet Nachiketas asks as the second boon for some sacrifice through which people might attain to this heaven. There was an idea in the Vedas that these sacrifices pleased the gods and took human beings to heaven. Now, in studying all religions you will find the inevitable fact that whatever is old becomes holy. For instance, our forefathers in India used to write on birch bark, but in time they learned how to make paper. Yet the birch bark is still looked upon as very holy. When the utensils in which they used to cook in the most 1 62 J NANA YOGA