The Nature of the True Religious Life - 2.2. - Swami Krishnananda.

Chinmaya Mission :

Celebrating the diverse intersections of Indian culture and Yoga 🧘🏾

Chinmaya International Foundation (CIF), CIF Shodha Sansthan (CIFSS), and Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram (KYM) jointly organized a 3-day Hybrid National Conference on Yoga as an Embodied Culture of Bharata. The conference aimed to showcase how Indian culture and ethos encompassed Yoga in all its facets, spanning religious and socio-cultural activities. Six esteemed speakers covered various topics related to Yoga, capturing the rapt attention of the participants.

The conference also featured guest lectures and 37 paper presentations, an impressive 65% of which were delivered by individuals below the age of 35. It was heartening to witness the youth of India upholding the culture of Bharata and carrying it forward.

The evening cultural performances encompassed diverse art forms, including Classical Carnatic music, folk dances, and even a self-defense demonstration.

The conference concluded with a Valedictory ceremony, graced by Chief Guest Dr. A. Radhakrishnan.

It proved to be a resounding success, bringing together participants from diverse fields who shared a common bond of yoga and culture.

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Tuesday, 18 Jul 2023. 05:30.

Chapter 2: The Religious Ideal of God-realisation - 2.2.

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In what condition do we exist in sleep? Perhaps we would be able to conclude that we did not exist there even as human beings. We never felt that we were men or women, that we were family individuals. We never knew that we belonged even to this Earth itself. It was a state of utter unawareness. “I knew nothing.” This is what everyone says when he wakes up from sleep. Now, this is not a very simple statement that a person makes. We are making a very significant statement when we say “I knew nothing”. We are saying this without knowing what we are saying, like a child blabbering a great truth without being able to probe into the intricacies of it. We merely blurt out that we knew nothing. But if we make a judicial enquiry into this statement, we will find that we have been caught by this very statement. If we knew nothing, how could we say we knew nothing? One who knows nothing cannot even make a statement that he knows nothing because it is a self-contradictory statement. An obliteration of awareness automatically precludes any statement regarding it, because no statement is possible unless there is an awareness precedent to the statement. We cannot make a statement about a condition of which we have no experience. We cannot say anything about what we have not experienced in some form or other, positively or negatively.

We had an experience of sleep; no one would deny that. “Yes, I did sleep.” This memory, or remembrance of the fact of having slept, is a great clue to a secret of our own existence. Here we have a key to opening the door of a great enigma. Let us argue logically, very leisurely, without any emotions and without any presuppositions. The memory of having slept is a result that follows from our experience of having slept, because memory is nothing but a recollection of a past experience. When we say that we remember something, we mean that we can recollect having passed through a condition of some sort or other. To have a memory of an experience, we must have had an experience. And what is “experience”? Experience is a conscious undergoing of a process, a state of affairs which becomes a content of our awareness. Where there is no awareness, there is no experience. We do not speak of experience when consciousness is completely absent. There is no experience when there is no consciousness. Therefore, if in sleep there is absolutely no consciousness, as we are likely to believe, there cannot be any experience of it; and if there is no experience of it, there cannot be any memory of it.

Now, the fact that there is memory of having slept indicates that there ought to have been some sort of an experience in which consciousness was hidden, latent or patent. We cannot observe the phenomenon of consciousness in sleep. We can only infer it. When we see muddy water in the Ganga, we infer that there must have been rain uphill. We have not seen the rain, but we conclude that it must have been raining; otherwise, the water would not be muddy.

There is a very interesting analogy which episte-mologists sometimes bring forward to substantiate the logical conclusions we arrive at by this sort of reasoning. There is a person who never eats during the day. We never see him eating even once, right from morning till the night, but we find him becoming bulkier and bulkier, stouter and stouter every day. He is putting on weight. How is it possible if he does not eat during the day? So we infer that he must be eating at night; otherwise, how could it be possible that a person becomes heavier, stouter and healthier by eating nothing? In epistemological circles, this argument is called arthapatti. Likewise, the memory of having slept soundly brings out the truth that this memory would be impossible if there had been no consciousness whatsoever. We would have not existed at all if there was nothing left. But we know that we existed. How could we know that we existed unless there was some sort of an awareness? Here is a very important point for us to probe into.

The study is not yet complete. This awareness that we existed in sleep is not conditioned by either the mind or the body, or by any sort of objective phenomenon. Neither the physical nor the psychological world were there to limit this awareness. It was, therefore, a pure principle of unlimited awareness. It was unlimited because it was not restricted by either mental phenomena or physical phenomena. Apart from this fact of its having been unrestricted by the mind and the body, the very nature of consciousness would reveal that it cannot be limited by any external presence.

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To be continued

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