DEIVATHIN KURAL # 115 (Vol #4) Dated 13 Dec 2010

DEIVATHIN KURAL # 115 (Vol #4) Dated 13 Dec 2010

(These e-mails are translations of talks given by Periyaval of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam, over a period of some 60 years while he was the pontiff in the earlier part of the last century. These have been published by Vanadi Padippagam, Chennai, in seven volumes of a thousand pages each as Deivathin Kural. Today we are proceeding from the middle of page number 639 of Vol 4 of the Tamil original. The readers may note that herein 'man/he' includes 'woman/she' too mostly. These e-mails are all available at http://Advaitham.blogspot.com updated constantly)
169. State of Being and Action. When the mind is blank without any thought and the body is still without any action, in sleep or swoon or Samadhi, I said that this Jeevan is the same as Aatma. That is the state of Being. The moment the mind and body are active, this state of Being is hidden and the state of action is apparent. Was there any action on the part of the Aatma for this change of state? No! Simply, it is there. This state of Being is known as ‘Kevalam’. It does not mean some demeaning state. Somehow such a connotation has come to be in Tamil as a meaning. Actually to be actionless in the pure state of Being is ‘Kaivalyam’, ‘Kaivalya Status or Kaivalya Moksham’, sans body, action or thought, without any relation or reference to the world!
170. Moksham is given different meanings and names by different Siddhaantis, that is, philosophers of varying conceptual points of view. Adwaitis call it, ‘Brhma or Aatma Saaktchaatkaaram; Saivites call it Siva Saayujyam; Vaishnavites say VishNu Saayujyam; Buddhists name it NirvaaNam; Nyaaya and Vaiseshika Siddhantis call it Apavargam and in Jaina and Yoga it is known as ‘Kevala Stiti or Kaivalyam’! Instead of this state of just being, the moment there is mind, thoughts and action; the whole lot of millions and zillions of inconsequential traditions burst out with all the varieties beyond our imagination!
171. The Outcome of the Hunger of Desires. Once there is the mind, it has thousands of hungry desires in satisfying which, come out a whole army of anger, greed, lies, jealousy, and hate battalions. After all that, is there any abating of desires? No! Just looking for happiness all these avenues of creation of unhappiness get going, clamouring for our attention, effort and time. There is not a single mode of pure happiness! They all come hand in hand with a plethora of problems causing sorrow and embarrassment. If you eat snacks of odds and sorts, there is some thrill along with the problem of stomach ache, obesity and unwholesome eating habits! This is so not only in the case of hunger of the stomach! In the case of eyes, ears, thoughts, money and so on too, the satisfying of the hunger is also coupled with arrival of problems. When you look at the child playing, you feel happy. You suffer four times that when the baby is running fever! There is happiness in getting money, even if it is only say, arrears of pay or recurring deposit saved over the years. At once there is the fear and apprehension of taxes, people asking for donation and theft! Our earning a living, getting married, begetting children, accumulation of wealth, going to cinema and club, visiting places; is all for the sake of obtaining happiness, is it not so? With the happiness, we tend to get plenty of sadness, worry, fear, anger, embarrassment, jealousy, hate and so on. Amongst all such, are we able to keep any of those thrills and satisfactions forever? Answer is an emphatic ‘No’!
172. The moment we have a desire for something, we have a worry as to how to obtain that or reach there. If someone else is also trying for the same then there is an irritation and anger with the other competing with us. If the other gets it we have jealousy and if we attain it we have pride and wish to show the other down! Thus as a result of the original desire many other desires or demerits accrue. Having got what we have aspired for there is some flimsy satisfaction followed by further planning and or scheming. That something which we desired for, causes us to take many actions restlessly. Then if we sleep, the instant we are awake, our mind is again on the prowl, without knowing any peace or contentment, making us do so many things. In between there are some small victories, celebrations followed by further ambition like a flow or even a flood of continuous dissatisfaction in which we are carried away, very far away!
173. There are problems galore in the process of obtaining, retaining, avoiding and discarding any of these things in life! These problems come together. If obtaining had certain amount of problems, doing without or getting rid of the habit has more quanta of problems. If you eat well you have to digest it also well. Good staff is to be recruited and bad material has to be got rid of. Enemies have to be sorted out and friends to be nurtured and cultivated. Whatever are the obstacles in one’s effort, have to be solved or sidelined. For every desire of ours there are such concomitant matters to be pulled in or pushed out of the way. By both these actions there are problems. You eat good food. Either it is creating digestion problems or creates the urge for more of it or we want the same cook. Indigestion causes diseases and the doctor charges exorbitantly. The worker we dismissed is out to take revenge and the one whom we employed is asking for increase of pay! Then when we find that he is too avaricious, we may have to get rid of him and employ the first one! What we eat today is after all, the next day’s excreta! Life is too full of such compulsions! As though fearing enemies is not enough, one has to be afraid of over familiarity with existing friends. They may also feel so exactly similarly! That is how, Shakespeare is supposed to have said, “Marry in haste and repent at leisure!” The more we analyse in this line, more one is convinced that, “To do any action is simply madness”!
174. When the Aatma is without any work and involvement, see how wonderful that state of Being is. We do not know about Samadhi and Swoon. We do know and are very happy with the state of sleep, evidently as seen by its popularity. Young and old, rich and poor, man, animal and all sorts of living things are so universally fond of sleep. Even the insomniac is fond of sleep and only not able to sleep, for some reason. That is because, when we are purely as the Aatma, there is no urge to possess or discard. We cannot possess our selves. If we are yet to possess ourselves, are we something else, now? Can we be something other than us? The answer to both these questions is a, “No”! Similarly we cannot get rid of ourselves, as who has to do the discarding and who is to be there in balance? We can neither take ourselves nor leave ourselves. As we are forever us only, we cannot create ourselves.
175. AmbaaL is thus described as the Aatma Roopam (form of self), in Lalita Sahasranama, as “heyopaadeya varjitaa”. ‘Heyam’ is what is to be got rid of and ‘upaadeyam’ is what is to be obtained. She is complete in Herself without a need or requirement; She is also not having any blemish to be erased or got rid of! So She is “heyopaadeya varjitaa”. Since we feel the needs and requirements, we are trying to obtain them. Then we feel that there is something to be got rid of or discarded, we are trying to erase or do without or drop those habits! So we are all the time doing something due to our mistaken notions about ourselves or being ignorant of our real self! That is why in sleep, there is so much peace. No pull of desires and no irritation of intolerance. The only time the Deva – Asura battle is not happening in us, is when we are asleep. That is God’s Grace being experienced by all of us every day and night! Even if we are full of such demerits that we do not deserve His Grace, still we are enabled possibly to sleep so that, at least for those seven to eight hours, we may not trouble others!
176. “What do you mean Swamiji? So, what are you telling us to do or not to do? Without the inner conflict between the Asuric (evil) and Divine forces and without the mind with its desires and concomitant pulls and pressures; all the people of the world should be sleeping all of the time? Should we all be having a stock of sleeping tablets and keep going back to sleep whenever we wake up?” “No! That is not what is being said or intended.”
(To be continued.)
Sambhomahadeva.