Swami Chinmayananda

If peace and joy be the goal of every living being’s day-to-day struggles, it is natural that you have come to ask, “ What is peace?” Surely you must have realised that the question is not about any phenomenon in nature outside where laboratory experiments and visual or factual representations could facilitate understanding. The question is essentially a subjective enquiry into a state of satisfaction felt within and lived by the individual with or without reference to the external circumstances of the visible world outside. By peace, we mean a mental condition in the subject lived by him and recognized as such in the absolute sorrowless silence in his own within. Therefore, an enquiry into Peace can be conducted only by looking within and observing the happenings and occurrences therein during the various mental conditions.

In short, self-analysis and introspection are the very beginning of all philosophical enquiries into self-perfection. They are the perfect means of achieving a true vital blissful living. So long as the values respected in life are one of indulgence in feeding the sensual demands, attention gets diverted ‘outwards’ and the chaos within cannot be ended. We will therefore strive to understand the entire inner processes, even if it becomes tiringly long. These are no blind theories. They have been lived experiences of successful masers and are facts, tested and found to be solid truths by the very one behind this pen.

We can see that in everybody of us there are, at any given moment, a hundred desires struggling to seek their fulfilment. In those rare lucky ones among us, who gain in life at least a seeming fulfilment of some of their desires, we observe how each fulfilment is but the breeding ground for a dozen other complementary desires – each an attempt to complete the imperfections of the phantom joy achieved!

The desire for objects creates disturbances, which shatter our real nature of shanti, peace. The struggle and the urgency of the individual to get his desire fulfilled represent the urge of Truth to assert itself. The Spirit within is asserting to come back to its normal state of fullness. The tension of life and its pains are from the benign pull of the Truth upon untruth!

We have thus discovered that ‘desire’ breeds ‘thoughts’ and ‘thoughts’ propel us to ‘actions’, and when the ‘actions’ end in ‘successful fruition’ the result is the calming of the thoughts, which in its turn produces the feeling of joy and peace in the subject. Hence the conclusion is self-evident: the solution for all the sorrows of life now becomes an open secret. Renounce desire, thoughts will end. This experiencing of the all-full-satisfaction and contentment, which is independent of the external world and the day-to-day circumstances created around the subject by the world of objects and the living conditions, is the perfect, achievable and to be achieved goal of life.

Once having, fully and vitally, intensely and vividly lived (not merely heard or even intellectually come to appreciate), this desireless state of Perfect Bliss in one’s own experience, thereafter the world and its fleeting, illusory joys cannot evoke any response at all from the saint, the Jivanmukta, the liberated in life. Through all experiences be it joy or sorrow, honour or dishonour, peace or war, health or disease, heat or cold, ever will be poised equally in all pairs of opposites. He, the Mahatma, God like, lives on, as an immortal amongst mortals.

Such an individual, who always finds his own level in spite of the fact that he is living amidst the sense objects, is called a Man of perfection, a true saint. Lord Krishna, in the Gita, asserts that such an individual alone can truly discover peace and happiness in himself. Not satisfied with this negative assertion, the Lord, positively denies any true peace or joy to those who are ‘desirers of desires’.

He attains peace into whom all desires enter as water enter the ocean, which, filled from all sides, remains unmoved: but not the ‘desirer of desires’.

This idea is totally opposed to the modern belief in the material world. The materialists believe that by fanning up their desires and satisfying as many of them as possible, one is helped to live a life of joy and happiness. Modern civilisation, based upon industrialisation and large-scale production, is attempting to step up desires, and this attempt has now succeeded to such an extent that the average man has a million times more desires today than his forefathers ever had entertained a century ago. The financiers and the industrialists, with the aid of modern scientific knowledge struggle hard to discover and to satisfy new desires: and to the extent an individual comes to fulfil his newly created desires, he is taught by the day’s civilisation that he is happier than ever before.

On the other hand, the great thinkers of the past in India through their experience or through their careful and exhaustive thinking discovered that the joy created through satisfaction of desires could never be complete. They discovered that the joy or happiness, at any given time, is the (fraction) quotient obtained when the number of desires fulfilled is divided by the total number of desires entertained by the same individual at that time. This mathematical formula has been accepted by the modern preachers of secularism also: but in their practical application, the old Rishis and the modern politicians differ to a large extent.

In the modern world, the attempt is to increase the numerator which is represented by the ‘number of desires fulfilled’. The scriptural Masters of ancient India also were living in a world peopled by a society of men, and their philosophical contemplations were upon man as a social being, and their aim too was to bring more happiness into their society. But unlike the present prophets of profit, these Rishis of Religion did not conceive that an attempt to increase the numerator without a corresponding attention upon the rate of increase of the denominator could produce any palpable increase in joy. On the other hand, today, we are struggling hard to increase the ‘number of desires entertained.’ Such a state of affairs cannot produce any palpable increase in the quotient of happiness is the scriptural verdict, and this is an easily understandable scientific truth.

The desirer of desires can never come to perfect peace (shanti). Only he, who has in a spirit of detachment gained a complete control over his mind, so that the sense-objects of the outer world cannot create in him an infinite number of yearnings or desires, is the man of peace and joy. The objects of the outer world cannot themselves tease a man either by their existence, or by their non-existence. The outer world can borrow its capacity to illtreat man only when he expose himself unguardedly and gets wounded and crushed by his own attachments to a wrong valuation of the sense objects.

It is no doubt, that the world of objects remain, function and play their frolics according to a law over which we have absolutely no control. But objects must come in contact with our mind in order to produce the reaction, and that alone is the seed of our experience. So then, if we can control, train and culture our minds in a way that they can only react positively to any set of circumstances, then, our reaction would all be positive. Happiness and peace is his who has thus trained his mind to react ‘positively’ to the world outside.

The world which we experience is but a large assortment of different forms, sounds, tastes, smells and touches. These sense impulses are reported by the same organs to the mind and it, in consultation with the intellect, comes to certain ‘opinions’. These are arrived at generally by comparing the present with similar or dissimilar experiences that were lived by it previously, the impressions of which were carefully stored up by it, for purpose of ready reference, in our memory, each one labelled good or bad, joy or sorrow, pain or pleasure, love or hatred. In philosophy, these are called the pairs of opposites (dvandvas).

Being a victim of these dvandvas, not knowing himself to be under this tyrant, almost licking the very hand that whips, weeping and suffering, this worldy man, the sad, helpless, samsarin labours through a life of struggles and disappointment.

It is common knowledge that when the subject comes in contact with the objects, it reacts to the ‘challenges’ and produces its varied experiences – the dvandvas. Evidently the same objects can provide entirely different experiences when the ‘mood’ or condition of the subject is altered.

Thus even when your only son comes with his childish pranks to disturb you at an urgent and absorbing work, he is as a nuisance to you as the twentieth sweet set before you for your consumption! That which was a pleasure in winter becomes a torture in summer. What was a joy in youth is regret in old age. Thus, it is proved that the same set of objects and conditions provide varying types of experiences, each depending upon the fleeting hour’s immediate ‘mood’ of the subject.

The worldly man hunting after joy, among the confusions of an ever-changing subject and his ‘moods’ and hustling to equate it with the equally unpredictable changes in the objects and their conditions comes to grief. Not even the most skilled of acrobats can maintain his equilibrium unbroken at once over two wild horses! The endless attempt to solve the ever changing subject-object puzzle is the secret ulcer that condemns the samsarin to a life of agonizing pain.

The subject object puzzle can remain a real challenging conundrum only to the one who in his present ignorance to its ‘solution’ is dancing in vain to set himself in step with an ever changing set of factors such as the multiple sense objects, the fickle circumstances, the shooting desires, the endless thirsts of the outer life. In fact, the failures and sufferings of man are entirely due to the defects in the methods by which he tries to carry on the business of life.

The only method that can give a permanent solution to the problem is by fixing at least one side of the equation as a constant factor. This is exactly the message of Vedanta. The seeker, even during his early days of practice through correct discrimination is helped to come to the right understanding that the changing vicissitudes, is a false entity and that an equally false world of objects seems to keep dancing to a purposeless rhythm of change!

The false subject is the conception of ‘I’ as ‘Mr so-and-so’. This self imposed arrogator, ‘I’, is a false entity, a mere thought-bundle – the mind. If once we accept that conclusion that the pains and mortality are all for the mind, ‘I’, and that the sense objects can inject their burning venom of greed and passions only when the mind is turned towards them, we have then discovered the specific for the cancer of life. Had the waking world and its enchantments been eternally true and their effects on the individual absolute and real, then, even during our deep sleep state we ought to have had at least an inkling of their presence. But, as it is, no man can complain that he had no joy or peace during his sleep, because his racehorse had gone lame the evening before! If he has really suffered in bed, surely it only means that he had no deep sleep that night, for no pain or regret has entrance into the hall of deep slumber.

The great thinkers of Indian philosophy have brought to beat upon this line of enquiry their extraordinary analytical acumen and their vivid intuitional experiences. They have come to observe that in deep sleep even the most intimate of emotions and the deepest of memories are entirely shut off from the sleeper’s cognitive experience; and as the individual enters the plane of the waking state, there is a sudden bursting forth of his entire past memories of sense-experience he had lived, which include things he had felt, seen, shared, touched, smelt and tasted.

What conclusion does logically proceed from the above observation? The knowledge of the jagat – which includes outer sense-objects and inner thoughts – and of the memories of such knowledge gained in the past, are indeed merely the tricky functions of the mind. Where the mind is, there the jagat, the waking state world is: where the mind is not, as in deep sleep, the jagat is not.

So then, to gain freedom from the tyrannical lifelong persecutions of the boneless phantom, the Lord of Tears, what man has to do is only to understand that his enemy is but an illusion of his own mind and then to train himself to calm down from the dreadful emotions which the mental mistake has caused!

Vedanta is never tired of repeating that the world in which men suffer and weep has only as much reality and capacity to give pain as the snake-bite which the wayfarer thought he experienced when he stepped on a harmless rope. The ‘snake’ was but a mental illusion of the individual born in his ignorance of the rope. The pains of the sufferer are indeed poignantly true for him: but the next pilgrim stepping on the same rope passes on his way carefree and happy, because his touch had lit the rope for him! Naturally, it is not the rope that gave the false pains to the ignorant; the pain was the result of his ignorance. Ignorance is removable by knowledge.

Just like the serpent-in-rope we have a world of pain, a mere illusory mental projection, daily to reckon with hot tears and sighs. The cause of pain in life is, therefore, in the false belief that the jagat is real and permanent. This false belief has risen from the womb of our own ignorance of the ‘jagat’ of ourselves and of God. Ignorance is removed by knowledge. Deep and steady enquiry into the nature of ‘jagat’, God and the subjective ‘I’, constitutes in all, the enduring and noble pursuit of self perfection. The life lived after the acquisition of the true knowledge about the inevitably poignant, but at the same time delusory, factors of life and thereby training oneself to an evidently cheerful, ever-in-peace existence through the rest of the days in the present embodiment, is divine life. And the perfection thus achieved in which the victor comes to live Eternal Bliss, is the Life Divine, a destination which if once reached, completely removes all the wrecking problems, ills and pains of life, and gives one complete, eternal and all perfect Bliss experience.

To the question “is this possible?” the answer is now unmistakably self-evident. There is a misunderstanding in us about the true nature of the world of experience, the jagat. We know not that the objects we crave to have and toil to acquire have no more any objective reality than the ‘snake’ of the rope. The objects and their capacities to give us joy or pain are all our own mental super-impositions. In deep sleep,, when the mind ceases to function, where are the objects of the world or their charms, or their plurality? What happens then to the pains of bereavements or the joys of successes? When the mind functions, the outer world flares up with its entire burden of imperfections, limitations, decay and death. When the mind is at rest, the world dissolves into nothingness.

The mind being the instrument of our cognising things that ate ‘not’ in both the waking and the dream states, remedy lies in the perfect control of the mind through a steady re-education of it. The mind is to be controlled in its freedom to roam about as it likes among the sense objects seeking after joy and satisfaction, and is to be re-educated to renounce its false fears, fantastic desires, illusory sorrows, and fancied joys. In short the mind is trained through diligent practice and correct thinking to recognise what he perceived as unreal as the twilight ghost ‘seen’ in a wayside lamp post. This then is the ‘solution’ for the stupendous conundrum of life, and this is achieved by living the Life Divine.

Tapovan Prasad June 1995.