An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Yoga by Swami Krishnananda

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INTRODUCTION   

      

The outlook of one's life depends upon one's conception of reality. The

structure of the universe decides our relationship with things. What is

known as a vision of life is just the attitude which the individual is

constrained to develop in regard to the atmosphere of the universe.

Such an exalted conception of the totality of experience may be

designated as the philosophy of life. It is, thus, philosophy which

determines human conduct and enterprises of every kind in the social

field as well as in one's own person. Not merely this; the

psychological pattern of the apparatus of perception and inference and

the like is also conditioned by the relationship that obtains between

the universe and the individual. As such, it can be safely said that

psychology and ethics are rooted in metaphysics.   

      

It is often held that the programme of human life may be carried on

with an amount of success without straining one's consciousness to the

distant depths of the structure of the universe. People mostly prefer

to live on the surface and move with the current of the river, with the

least effort involved in the vocations of their personal and social

existence. But, it is not difficult to notice that a sort of merely

getting on with life through the vicissitudes of history is not only

soul-less in its effect, by which the spirit of existence gets

converted into a lifeless skeleton, but life, in the end, whether

psychological, social or physical, would be impracticable if action is

not fixed upon its proper relation with the environment of the entire

pattern of life. Even as the working arrangement and the day-to-day

performance of administration is based on a Governmental Constitution,

along the lines of which contemplated programmes are carried on

smoothly, life's enterprise would not be a possibility if the same is

not rooted in a standard picture of the whole pattern of existence

which directs and determines the nature as well as the details of

activity. Hence it is necessary to bestow a further thought on the

facile formula of the commonplace of mankind that one can go on with

the urges of life always in the direction in which the winds of the

world blow, because without a stable ideology and a lofty idealism, no

movement is conceivable. If this is the aim behind all enterprises and

programmes, no worthwhile action of any kind would be possible without

it, even in contemplation.   

      

It is not that the activities of life are to be psychological

meditations in an academic sense, or in the way in which people wrongly

try to understand philosophy. Often, the erroneous notion goes that

philosophy is an abstract thought process which idealises life into an

ethereal and, perhaps, an unknown something, while life is concrete and

substantial. It is surprising that the world of matter should be taken

as a solid substance while the ideas are regarded as airy nothings,

even in the light of the astounding discoveries of modern researches in

the field of science, which have swept off matter from the region of

solidity, and matter appears to be evaporating into an undivided

continuum of what is sometimes called a space-time extension,

transcending the notions of a three-dimensional distance and a time

process divided into the partiteness of past, present and future. There

is something more about this interesting discovery. If the continuum

mentioned is indivisible by the very nature of its impartite and

non-durational structure, naturally it would follow that the individual

observer of things cannot stand outside the continuum. The consequences

of this deduction are, again, startling, while being obvious. The

observing individual merges, as it were, into the vast indivisibility

of the continuum, and the events of the universe knowing itself and the

individual knowing himself, as well as the individual knowing the

universe, cannot be separated from one another. It would appear that

the universe, in this analysis, is itself a measureless conflagration

of intelligence, knowing itself, and nothing outside it can be noticed

as an object of sensory perception or psychological cognition. We find

ourselves entering into the bottom of an ocean of force and existence

which is inseparable from intelligence, and to know the universe would

be the same as to know one's own Self. In the act of Self-knowledge,

the universe is known at once, and the knowledge of the universe, on

the other hand, is the knowledge of the Self.   

      

In this circumstance of a new vision that we seem to be confronting

before us, our personal and social life should be, indeed, a

mirror-like clarity, which would include the type of relationship that

we should adopt with other people in our day-to-day existence. What we

call the ethics or morality of human relationships as well as of

personal behaviour amounts, from the above analysis, to a conscious

participation in the pattern of things in general, which is only the

face of the brooding Spirit of the Cosmos as a whole. Love becomes

spontaneously unselfish. Love, then, cannot be directed exclusively to

any person or thing, or to an isolated ideal, but becomes a spring of

joy arising from the recognition of the fullness of existence. Hatred

of any kind gets abolished from the surface of life by the very fact of

the unity of procedure and purpose involved in the structure and

programme of creation. Human history can transfigure itself into a saga

of the dramatic evolution of the particulars to the Universal through

the various levels and degrees of its manifestation. What people have

been dreaming of as the glorified ideal of Rama-Rajya, or the Golden Age of Satya-Yuga

of divine and eternal perfection, would not, indeed, be a far-off

object to be realised. It was a perennial message which Plato

proclaimed with the conviction of a genius when he declared that no

peace on earth can ever prevail unless philosophy goes with

administration, and administration with philosophy. We have a glorious

day ahead. Humanity! Be prepared to extend it a warm welcome.

  

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