The Tree of Life -2.4: Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, 06 Dec 2023 07:10.

Discourse 2: The Search For Wholeness - 4.

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Now we are entering into a new section of analysis of this totality of experience called the tree of life. Yesterday we had occasion to observe that the sap of the tree of life grows in the form of the tree, and the seed will not be content to remain as a seed. The baby grows into the adult, etc. We were wondering why this expression should be there at all. Why should there be growth and evolution and movement in any direction? It is the intention of the Original Will to find itself as the one in the many. The oneness is present, and the manyness is also there. The presence of the oneness of the Original Will of the seed of life keeps these varieties of forms in unison, in collaboration with one another, just as the comprehensiveness of the tree keeps all the branches and the leaves, etc., in collaboration one with the other.

The variety and the multitudinousness of the leaves of a tree, for instance, is no bar to the relatedness among themselves in the form of this tree. So is this variety of life. The division and the difference, the gulf and the variety in the form of experience of objects, do not deter us from asking for a unity behind them. That is the reason why we ask for collaboration, unity, solidarity of people. We are urged towards working for a commonness of purpose. We do service, we have a feeling of affection, we feel for other people, we extend ourselves into another, all which can be explained only by the fact of the presence of an inexplicable oneness that is at the back of this apparent multiplicity of personality, objects and things. In the same way as a wholeness called the tree is present in the variety we call leaves, etc., God is present in the world. “He became the many, and He entered into every part of it,” says the Upanishad.

But we have to pursue this nature of the mystery of life still further so that the purpose that is behind the expression of this mystery may be clear to our minds. The knowledge of this tree is supposed to be true knowledge: yastaṁ veda sa vedavit (B.G. 15.1). If you know the whole of this tree, you are said to have true knowledge. But we do not have knowledge of the whole of this tree. We see only one leaf, or half a leaf, just as we look at some object or a group of objects in front of us.

Who can know the whole of this Earth, what to speak of other things beyond the Earth? No one can imagine what is in the skies and above. We are very much conditioned to this little place, Muni-ki-reti or Rishikesh; or the farthest expansion of our mind may be to India or the Earth. This is not to look at the whole of the tree but to see only a little of it—and that, too, wrongly, as an externalised form. Even this little knowledge that we seem to have is erroneous knowledge and wrongly directed. But the mystery creeps into this horrid picture of life because of the presence of the great unifying absolute power of God. This unifying presence keeps us somehow or other hoping for the best, happy under every condition, and seeking to save ourselves even in the midst of the ocean in which we are being drowned. We try to catch a little straw in the flooded river, hoping that we can be saved. That hopefulness of continued existence and the seeking of significance in existence is due to the presence of God in us, the presence of the vitality of the seed in every part of the tree of life.

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To be continued

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