The Tree of Life 1-6. Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, October 09, 2022. 06:30.
Discourse 1: The Twofold Character of Cosmic Life - 6.

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Chapter 15 – Purushothama yogam :
The Yogam of the Supreme Divine Personality : 
Lessons from the Analogy of a Banyan tree :

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Visualising this horror of life due to which we seem to have no voice in anything whatsoever in this world, thinkers such as Schopenhauer in the West pictured a dark form before us, and said life is nothing but hell: If you want to see hell, be born into this world. This is the utter despair that sometimes made these thinkers write poems such as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam which says everything is wind passing; everything is despair, sorrow, straw, sapless and essenceless; now it is, now it is not; there is nothing worthwhile in life.


But the picture of life is not complete merely by seeing the seamy side of things. The problem lies here. The difficulty in understanding life arises merely because of the comprehensiveness of the pattern of life. If it is just one thing before us, we can look at it; but it is so many things, and it is difficult for us to comprehend. Life is not only one side of the picture. It is tremendous sorrow, no doubt, from the aspect of emphasis that we lay on one side of experience; but if it had been only that, we would not be living here even for three days. Utter sorrow will not permit a person to live in this world even for a few minutes. He will immediately have a heart attack and collapse. But one lives in spite of darkness everywhere and sufferings galore because there is a positivity ruling over the sorrows of life.


This twofold character of cosmic life is presented in these verses of the Bhagavadgita. The first part tells us the problematic structure of the tree of life, and the second part tells us how we can free ourselves from the clutches of this cosmic urge for self-expression and entanglement in objects of sense.


The powers of prakriti are nothing but the powers of the whole of nature. We cannot know what nature is, what prakriti is, because we are a part of it. It is not outside us. This is another difficulty before us. A thing that is outside us can be seen and examined through a microscope or a powerful instrument in a laboratory, but how can we examine that in which we ourselves are involved? A study of nature automatically becomes a study of man. To know things is to know oneself.


This uncomfortable truth automatically follows from the fact of the involvement of human nature in cosmic nature. The world is not outside us, nor is it inside us because as a limb of the body hangs inseparably in its relation to the organism of the body, we hang inseparably in relation to nature as a whole. To understand anything will appear to be like understanding everything, just as to know the structural pattern of one cell in the body would be to know the whole body because of the interrelatedness of the various parts of the whole which it is. This tree of life which has its roots above and branches below is the evolutionary process of the cosmos. The whole of cosmology is here in two or three verses. The creative will of God is the sap of the tree of life, and if we can compare the will of the Supreme Being to the impulse for self-expression in the seed of a tree, we may naturally conclude that the whole of life is nothing but a tree with all its ramifications.

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To be continued ...


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