The Secret of the Katha Upanishad : 3.7. Swami Krishnananda.

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CHINMAYA INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION- (CIF)

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Twenty two students from the Chinmaya Sagar zone, Mumbai, completed CIF’s Advanced Vedanta Course facilitated by Sevak Smt. Jasmine Asher, under the guidance of Swami Swatmananda (Chinmaya Shivam). 

On 30th October, Swami Swatmanandaji graced the graduation ceremony and handed out the Course Completion Certificates to the students. 

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Friday, November 25, 2022. 07:00.

Discourse -3.7 

Post -18.

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Here we come to a halt, as it were, because of exhaustion of all our available resources. Beyond the intellect you know nothing. The intellect is known as vijnanadhara in Buddhist psychology. Buddhism has a tremendous analysis of the nature of understanding. We regard understanding or intellectual comprehension not as a static act of consciousness from within but a process of momentary links which come one after another, like the pictures in a cinematographic projection. In a cinema, you do not see only a single picture. You see many pictures coming one after another. Yet it looks as if there is a stream flowing continuously, without a break. 

There is a jump or a break between every picture. You can see a film and see the distinction between one picture and the other, but the velocity of the film is such that it gives us the illusive perception of a continuity or flow, like the flow of the Ganga, we have before us. The psychology of Buddhism tells us that vijnana is a dhara, a successive flow of momentary discrete links which are really not connected with one another but which have the appearance of a continuity. Thus, the world is not made up of any continuity of objects. It is made up of a momentary linkage of forces. The world is momentary, kshanika, says Buddha. 

We say that the tree, for instance, is a solid or static object, a stone is static, a building is static. Not so, says the psychology. They appear to be static on account of a temporary conjunction or union of the condition of our knowing with the condition of the momentariness of objects. The temporary or momentary character of things is not known by the mind, and the mind mistakes momentariness for solidity and perpetuality due to a peculiar activity that takes place within us in correspondence with the momentary objects outside us. We do not really know what is happening within us. 

The velocity or the speed of the movement of the mind sometimes comes in conjunction with, coincides with, is co-extensive with the condition of the momentariness of objects. And, because of this uniformity temporarily established, for the time being, between a type of momentariness of mental functions and a corresponding type of momentariness of the movement of objects outside, there appears before us a solid object, as it were, while the solid object does not really exist. Thus, intellectual knowledge cannot be regarded as real knowledge. It is an illusive information conveyed to us by the trick played by a joint action or connivance between the object and the senses. Yama says, this is not sufficient. There is something beyond the intellect.

There is a higher knowledge than the human understanding. That higher intelligence superior to human understanding is called Mahat-tattva, also called Mahat. Sometimes, in Vedantic parlance, you call it Hiranyagarbha. This Cosmic Intelligence is regarded as the totality of individual intelligences. This is the usual description of Cosmic Intelligence; but it is not a correct statement of fact. The Universal is not merely a totality of particulars. Many fools do not make one wise man. You know that even a thousand fools put together do not make one person of wisdom. Even all the individualities put together cannot make the Cosmic Mind. The Mahat-tattva or the Cosmic Intelligence is qualitatively different from the totality or the mathematical union of individual understandings. God's knowledge is not merely a total of human knowledge. It does not mean that if everybody sneezes, God will have a big sneeze! He does not sneeze, though we all may. Quality marks the difference between cosmic existence and individual process. 

You cannot call individuality as existence at all. You can only call it a process, a becoming, and not being. Being is only the supreme state. The Mahat or Cosmic Intelligence is as much different from individual understanding in quality as waking knowledge is from the dreamer's perception. You cannot say that your knowledge in the waking life is only a totality of what is there in dream. It is qualitatively different and therefore you are happy even to be a beggar in the waking condition than a king in dream. The cosmic knowledge is qualitatively different from, that is, superior to, the human understanding. Yama says, Mahat-atman or Hiranyagarbha is a higher reality than human understanding, to which human nature points. Evolution is not over with human experience. Mankind is only a link in the process of a longer evolution. You have to move further, still, to the Mahat. But Mahat itself is not complete. The Avyakta is, yet, higher.

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To be continued

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