The Tree of Life -2.7: Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday, 21 Dec 2023 07:00.

Discourse 2: The Search For Wholeness - 7.

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The pressure is something very interesting. From where does this pressure come? It comes from the ocean of life which seeks fullest expression through the limitation of our finite personality. The ocean wants to find itself in the river, in the pond. This little experience of ours through the senses and the mind is sought for as an instrument for the fullest expression of the whole power that is behind the tree of life. Any kind of completeness of experience is the same as happiness. When we search for objects in this world, we are trying to search for a type of conscious experience which will introduce into ourselves a wholeness of being. We are now partial expressions. When the object we need is outside us, that unity of feeling is absent. We are unhappy because a part of our life is outside us. It may be a visible object or merely a conception. A concept of an externalised situation or a visible object outside may be the cause of our unhappiness. Physical objects such as houses and land may keep us restless and unhappy because they have not become part of ourselves. Or merely conceptual notions such as status in human society can keep us unhappy. Status in human society is not a visible object. It is visible only to the mental eye, and when it is imagined to be a circumstance which is outside our mind, it becomes a psychological object that can keep us unhappy.

But when does this unhappiness leave us so that we become happy? It is when this object is united with us, when the percentage of ourselves which is apparently the object outside, whether physical or psychological, joins with us and becomes a part of us so that we become one hundred percent. When we become one hundred percent, we become happy. If there is even one percent outside us as a visible or conceptual object, we are in a state of unhappiness.

Now, this wholeness or hundred percent of being is a state of mind. It is an awareness, it is a thought, it is a consciousness. We must be convinced in our consciousness that we have obtained a hundred percent of all the values of life. A leaf in a tree should be aware that it is a part of the whole tree, and the whole tree is in it. A finger of the body is healthy and seems to be contented because the whole of the body is associated with it and it has a subtle experience within itself of its being sustained by the whole body and of its being a vital, inseparable part of the whole body. The health of a personality and the happiness of a person depend upon this consciousness of wholeness which is what we are seeking in life, and we are not seeking anything else—and 'not anything else' is to be underlined again and again.

So when we are told that we have to be aware of the whole tree of life in order to be perfect in our lives, we are asked to go into the nature of the higher knowledge in which the tree of life is rooted. In the Upanishad especially, we are told that we should have the knowledge of the whole tree. The knowledge of this tree is liberation. But the Bhagavadgita says something quite different. Our salvation lies in our ability to cut at the very root of this tree by the axe of detachment: asaṅgaśastreṇa dṛḍhena chittvā (B.G. 15.3). Both these terms of advice have a meaning in themselves.

As I endeavoured to point out, this tree of life has a twofold feature, namely, rootedness in the Absolute and manifestation in space and time. The aspect of its rootedness in God is what requires us to know the whole of this tree, and the aspect of its expression in space and time is that which is to be cut by the axe of detachment. The knowledge of this tree is our source attachment to God, and our detachment from the externalised form of this tree consists in our withdrawal of our external consciousness and the centring of it in our universality of being.

Chapter ends here.

Next

Discourse 3: Severing the Root of this Tree of Life

To be continued

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