True Spiritual Living -4.1 -Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Friday 01,  May  2026, 18:45.
Books
Yoga & Meditation
True Spiritual Living
Chapter 4: Withdrawing from Objects of Sense - 1.
Post-18.

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Spiritual life is the intensive and systematic disentanglement of oneself from the clutches of unspiritual forces, all which arise from what we call the consciousness of externality. This is what is called Vritra, to whom I made reference yesterday from the Mahabharata. The consciousness of externality is the consciousness of space, time and objectivity. It is this that is harassing us every day—night and day, from birth to death. This is also called the trouble arising from sense perception, due to which we say the senses have to be controlled, and so on. The senses, their activity, the outward projection of the mind, the consciousness of space, time and objects—all these ultimately mean one and the same thing; and yoga, spiritual life, is only a consistent effort that we put forth to gain independence—freedom from these tangles in which we are caught.

We are caught not only in one way, but in every way—not from one side, but from all sides. We are in the midst of a very powerful net that has been spread before us: above us, below us, to the right and to the left, to the front and to the rear, and all around. Like a small fly that is caught in the spider's web unable to free itself, similarly we are caught up in the network of external relations, which also include the relation with this body, because this body is also an external object. Externality does not mean 'outside this body', as we are likely to take it to mean. The body is not so important a substance or a centre as we imagine it to be. It is as important as anything else in this world, but to give it an exclusive importance, to regard this body as of primary importance, greater importance than we attach to other bodies, is called selfishness. That is worse than being caught up in the network of externality. We have gone deep, deeper and deepest—far below a possibility of easy extrication. We have sunk ourselves into the heart of matter and become one with it.

Something worse than that has also happened. We have not merely got ourselves absorbed in matter and become the body, due to which we call 'I' this body; but we have done something more serious than this. Serious it is, no doubt, to get identified with this body; a great blunder it is to imagine ourselves to be this body, but we have committed an even greater blunder. What is it? We have come out of this body in an artificial manner, not in a natural way. This coming out of our consciousness from this body in an unnatural way is called sense perception.

Sense perception is not natural knowledge. It is unnatural, distorted, erroneous, binding, misleading; that is called samsara. Like a light ray passing through a prism and getting split up into different aspects of its constituents, consciousness appears to have passed through the prism of this bodily individuality and got spilt up into the rays of sensory activity. The indivisibility of consciousness has been split up into the divisibility of sensory activity and perception.

The great scriptures tell us that there has been a gradual descent of the supreme state of consciousness. Speaking the language of Indian Vedanta, there has been a concretisation of the Absolute into the will of Ishvara, then to Hiranyagarbha and to Virat, the cosmic animating consciousness of the physical universe. But up to this level, it is only a metaphysical descent. We may even call it a spiritual descent—a drama of the Absolute, a free play of consciousness with full consciousness of its independence and freedom. It is a joy up to this level.

But there has been a further descent into bondage. The great drama of the Virat in this form of the vast multiplicity of creation, which it is playing in its own self-immanence and transcendence, in its own majesty and glory and beauty and grandeur—this wonderful drama has become a pitiable plight by a peculiar feature that crept into the consciousness. This is a mystery for all, and perhaps it will remain a mystery forever.

The split-up rays of the universal   Virat Consciousness asserted themselves as individuals, isolated from other individuals. It is like a ray of the sun isolating itself from other rays of the sun, each ray asserting itself independently, with apparently no connection with the other rays. This is the beginning of what we call earthly bondage, samsara, the fall of Satan from the Garden of Eden into the hell of torture. This is the symbol of all religions representing the fall of man from the angelic condition of his proximity to God.

There has been a descent into the individual consciousness of this personality. Individuality does not mean merely the individuality of consciousness. Consciousness, which was originally universal, became split up. We may think that even a split-up part of it should be consciousness only, because even a spark of fire is fire. Well, it is naturally so. It had to be like that. But, a peculiar state of affairs compelled consciousness to imagine itself to be matter. It has never become matter, because one thing cannot become another thing. 'A' is 'A'. 'A' cannot become 'B'. But the intensified affirmation of consciousness as an isolated individual brought about the effect in the form of what we call the body—a concretisation of consciousness.

This is very unnatural, untrue to the right state of affairs. There was a struggle of consciousness to regain its lost independence. When something toxic or foreign enters the body, there is a war of the entire body to throw that matter out of the system. There is a struggle of every cell of the body to throw out that toxic matter. If a little particle of sand enters the eye, the entire eyeball starts struggling to throw it out by exuding liquid, etc.

The lost independence of consciousness cannot always be in that condition. In the Aitareya Upanishad, we have a description of this fall in cryptic language. Symbolically, the Upanishad tells us that the soul began to cry. It did not cry with a mouth. There was no mouth. It was only an agony that it felt: “Oh! What has happened!” The isolation of the part from the whole is the greatest agony conceivable. It is like death; it is veritable death, and death caught hold of consciousness. That is the beginning of mortality, and that is the beginning of hunger and thirst, and the writhing of oneself in a sorrow indescribable in any language. All this description is symbolic, very difficult to explain. The effect cannot explain the cause, and we are trying to understand the nature of the cause from where we have fallen.

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