The Tree of Life 2-2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Chinmaya International Foundation (CIF)  

Deepavali has always been a joyous celebration of light and love. The entire CIF campus was lit with beautiful lamps by devotees present in Adi Sankara Nilayam. Devotees from across the globe had made offerings of Dipam and Chuttuvillaku – lighting of lamps around the Ayyappa temple complex and everyone participated in kindling the lamps. At 6:30 pm IST, the Shodashopachara Mahalakshmi Puja was performed by the purohit Sri Sathish; many watched the Puja online on Chinfo Channel, YouTube. Everyone was immersed in devotion and gratitude to Maa Mahalakshmi invoking.

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Wednesday, October 26, 2022. 06:00.

Discourse 2: The Search For Wholeness-2.

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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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It is not true that we have gained everything that we require. Our needs are endless and as vast as the expansion of the tree of life. What we see with our eyes is far less in expanse than what we are unable to see with our eyes. The waters in the canal are very meagre in their extent compared to the expanse of the ocean which flows through the canal. Our happiness, whatever be the character of it in this world, is due to the sensation of having acquired what we need. But a simultaneous undercurrent of unhappiness at the back of it is due to a suspicion that there are many more things that we have yet to gain. So there is the dashing of the waters of this ocean of life against both the banks of this river of experience—on one side in the direction of a tentative happiness due to the feeling of having gained what we need, and on the other side in another direction, making us conscious that we have not yet obtained what we really need.

Our needs are incalculable and non-computable. No human being can say what he or she needs. Our ideas of our needs are foolish at the very core because of our mistaking appearances for realities. The knowledge of the world that is at the back of our activities in life has, again, a twofold character, which is perhaps the reason why the Bhagavadgita brings in the analogy of the chandas, or the Veda, which is knowledge temporal and knowledge spiritual at the same time. The wisdom in the Veda is not merely supernatural; it is also natural. Modern explorations into the regions of the Veda have revealed the fact that empirical sciences are also explained in the mantras of the Veda. The Vedas do not speak merely of God and His creation; they are said to explain even such mechanical devices as making an airplane. Mathematics, differential calculus, and such other scientific approaches are also the content of the Vedas, so that the knowledge which the Vedas contain and speak of and present before us is as vast as the tree of life which has its roots above in the eternal Absolute, but whose branches extend towards the lowest Earth and the deepest nether regions.

The Vedic knowledge, therefore, is rooted in the Supreme Brahman, the Absolute, but it expands itself also to the minutest details of relative experience, so when we touch any part of the tree of life we have touched everything conceivable, everything that exists, and we are part and parcel of the ramifications of this tree of life. We, everyone here seated in this hall, are expressions of this tree of life; it may be leaves, it may be flowers, it may be fruits, it may be anything belonging to this tree as its vital essence. To touch any part of this tree is to touch the whole of the tree, so every one of us is everything, and not merely something.

This is the mystery of our lives, which is the mystery of all life. We are all mysteries seated here. Every one of us is a tremendous mystery in one's own self. Neither can I know the mystery within me, nor can any one of you know the mystery within you. This inexplicable mystery that is in each one of us is explicable only by the recognition of the presence of the totality of the whole of the tree of life in each manifestation in the form of each one of us. Every leaf of the tree has the power of the whole tree within itself. Every little cell in every little leaf of a tree has a wireless communication with every other part of the whole tree. If we touch any cell of any leaf in the tree, we have touched the whole tree. The sensation will be carried through the entire manifestation of the tree, up to the very root.


So every one of us is a cosmic atom, and every thought, every idea and every impulse that arises in our mind has the power of the ocean of the Supreme Being, whose will works as the seed of the manifestation of this tree of life. We can appreciate to some extent how wondrous we all are, each one of us. We are not ordinary men, women, children, officers, subordinates, clerks—nothing of the kind. This is an illusion that is before our eyes. Unfortunately, we are content with being individuals in a family, citizens of a country, human beings on this Earth, masters and servants, wealthy and poor. All these are the delusions cast by the mind as a web before our eyes, succeeding to completely keep us out of touch with the realities of life, so that our sorrows are endless because our ignorance is abysmal. We are Masters of Arts in the field of ignorance, and this darkness of ignorance manifests itself in a worse form when we begin to perceive an external world. “While men of ignorance go to darkness, men of knowledge go to greater darkness,” says the Isavasya Upanishad. We will be surprised how it is possible that men of knowledge go to greater darkness. It is because the knowledge that we have in this world is an expression worse than the ignorance of reality. Not to know a thing is ignorance enough, and to know a thing which is not there is a worse form of ignorance.

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To be continued 

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