5) Devakāryasamudyatā
Poised for doing the work of God.
What is the work of God? To express his infinite possibilities in better and better ways. To evolve life towards higher and better forms. To reduce misery and increase happiness of all life forms, which are his expressions. To create a higher harmony, love and bliss, using the least coercive means.
God cannot, will not denounce Himself, no matter how lowly a form He decides to take on. God will not praise Himself, no matter how exalted a form He decides to take on. His view of Himself is totally balanced. His work is to generate this balanced view in all.
What are the obstacles to such a balanced view? The root cause of all such obstacles is the illusion of separateness between the observer and the observed. We think that we are different from the world that we see. Flowing as consequences from this illusion are the obstacles to happiness such as: lust, anger, greed, obsession, ownership, envy, etc. Let us examine each of these in turn.
When we see a desirable object, we wish to possess it intensely, sadly, so that no one else should have that object; when we do possess that object, we enjoy the fruits of possession to the point even of pain to the object concerned. This happens especially in human relationships. This is lust. The origin is obvious. The idea that the object is separate from me is at the root of my desire for it. If there was no desire in the first instance, there could be no lust either. And there would be no pain of being possessed felt by the object of our lust. Here one sight ask: “Can there be no desire for an object when I know it is mine already?” The answer is, obviously yes, there can be desire. But note this; the desire I have to enjoy my husband or my wife is met on the same level of lust as my desire to enjoy a paramour; it’s not lust at all; the fact of ownership reduces the intensity of desire from lust to love; from inflicting pain on others through our lust to the cooperative enhancement of mutual pleasure. When we know that the world we see is ourselves, lust for "objects" of the world gets changed into love. The difference between lust and love is that while both of them are based on desire, lust hurts the object of lust, while love enhances the object of love. In lust possession is not a reality; in love, possession is a reality.
Anger results when a lustily desired object or an end is prevented free being realized. It is a direct consequence of frustrated action. The amount of anger one experiences is in proportion to the intensity of the desire for the object or the end. A frustrated date with a girl might not cause much anger; but withholding the pay packet might arouse one to strike work. While lust tends to hurt the object of lust, anger turns back and hurts the very person who is angry; this occurs because whatever action is performed in anger cannot be a well-considered action; because anger is an emotion much stronger than reasoning, its energy subtracts from the energy to do clear thinking. Frustrated love causes no anger but patience, which neither hurts the lover nor the object of his love.
Greed is obviously an emotion related to the idea that I do not have something. This goes away when I have everything in this world. Obsessive pursuit also results from the notions of separateness, ownership and the pride thereof, are again illusions based on limitations. Ownership means: I only own this house, this property, these servants, these pastures and nothing else; so, instead of being the absolute owner of all that I see, I have restricted my ownership to such and such. Before I bought a car, all cars in the universe were mine; after I bought a car, only that one car has become mine while I lost the ownership of all the other cars in the world.
The last thing we have to consider is envy, or jealousy. This is an emotion capable of doing very much harm to happiness because it hurts a person not for what the person has or does not have, but for what another person has! Since there are many, many persons about whom one can be jealous about, the potential danger from this source is very great indeed. The concept of ownership for example, can wreck a happy carried life simply because the wife or husband succumbed temporarily to sensual attractions of a third party. All that has happened in reality is that there has been a little extra happiness for one of the carried partners. Instead of this being a source for joy for the partner, greed, possession and jealousy have combined together to form a destructive force leading to a divorce (from happiness).
It is quite clear from the little analysis above that the root cause behind all the forces working for misery and against happiness is the idea of separateness from what is seen. If one can settle down to the idea that the whole world he or she sees is himself or herself, the root cause behind these divisive, destructive forces can lose its strength and eventually drop off. But this is a very bold idea that seems contrary to experience. How can this world that I see be me? If my finger is pinched, I feel the pain. If your finger is pinched, I don't feel the pain. On the contrary, I can feel pleasure! Or, to put it another way, if I have a million dollars, I can buy many things with it. You, a pauper, can't get these things. You must be out of your senses to say that all this world, which is outside of me, is me. Well, this is the average man's view. Looking at the fearful "sequences such an egotistic and self-centered view forces on the world, it is worth considering whether there could be something after all in the crazy idea that “The world I see is myself”.
How do I know that there is in fact a world other there, outside or me? Because I see it out there. Let me say then, that everything that I see or can see is not myself, and see where exactly such a position will take me to.
I see this scenery, so this scenery is not me.
I see this house in which I live, so this house is not me.
I see my hands, legs, body; my hands, legs, and body are not me. When I close my eyes and sit down, I see my thoughts. So, my thoughts are not me. (This is getting to be a little dangerous argument! But let is continue.)
When I am not thinking, what am I seeing? There are two cases to consider.
In sleep, I am not thinking anything.
In dreams, of course, I am seeing the dreams. So I am not my dreams either.
In dreamless sleep, I am seeing nothing. So. I am not nothing either. In sleeping I may be seeing my unconscious thoughts. So, I am not my unconscious thoughts either. But here, since I am not sure whether or not I am seeing am subconscious thoughts, let me say I am not sure whether or not I am my subconscious.
So it seems our postulate "What I see in not me" demands that in order to be me, I should be something that I cannot see or know. But since there are times when I see nothing and I am awake, at those times, I cannot be nothing. It is this unknowable part of me that is real to me, if we accept our initial postulate. Since this me is unknowable, it can't be hurt if my body is pinched. These arguments can obviously be extended to states before my birth when I knew nothing about this or any world, and to states after my death, if we can assume reasonably that the states if any, before and after death are similar or identical.
So we have to accept that the real me is not known, cannot be known by me. So even if it were to feel the pinch when someone else is hurt, that fact would not be felt by me. The real me does not feel anything, not even my own body, thoughts, or pains. It is truly actionless, mere witness. But there is something truly disturbing about it, this me. It seems to be nothing, but it is not nothing also. It is nothing and something also, capable of switching between these two states. What is this? It is actionless and all action. Now, both cannot be true unless action itself is actionless, that is, action is a myth, or an illusion, an illusory reality. We are thus led to the conclusion that since there are times when I see the world, and there are times when I do not, when I am seeing the world, I am nothing; and when I am not seeing the world I am that which I am not seeing, I am the world. Is it not logical then to conclude that I am the world which includes me? On the other hand, if we started with the assumption that “I am what I see”, then we are straight away led to the conclusion that “I am the world I see”, without any intermediate steps.
THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM THE FACT: YOU ARE THE WORLD YOU SEE. This is true whichever assumption you start with. You have every right to say, I am not convinced.
Let us try another approach. I come to know this world through my thoughts alone, there is no other way for me to know. When I am seeing something it is the thought of my seeing that something which is the primary reality. When I hear, it is the thought of my hearing that is the first reality through which I infer that there was something that could have produced the sound. The same situation holds in the case of every sensory or motor channel; it is only thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. The world outside is only an inferred world; its reality is on the same level or a level even lower than thoughts. Since the substance of thoughts is imaginary, the substance about which thoughts occur are even more imaginary than thoughts. As proof of these statements consider the following. Where was this world of space, time and objects, when I was asleep? Where was it for me before I was born, or where will it be after I am gone? There is one world which I see when I am awake, and many others when I am dreaming. Why should I ascribe a higher reality to one of these more than the others? If I say that the world I see with my open eyes has a higher reality than the worlds of my dreams, because
I see it more clearly,
The world is not changing so fast as my dreams, a little reflection shows that none of these arguments has any truth in it.
Should clarity of personal vision be the criterion through which reality is to be tested? What about the existence of a visible world for a person born blind? If he argues that there can be no visible world because he has never seen it, nor does he recognize that anyone can see for that matter, do we, who can see, accept his argument as true? So the dream worlds have the same degree of reality as the real worlds even if they did not have enough clarity or consistency.
Next, the time scale for which dream world lasts: it is quite clear that if our life span was a million years instead of the hundred years, the very cities of the civilizations will look like so many dream worlds to us, so short is their life compared with our lifetime. So the changeableness of this world or that world cannot be a criterion for deciding its reality. Even the fact that many people agree that there is a common waking world outside cannot constitute an invariant yardstick for measuring the reality of the common world. Because such a yardstick will have to be acceptable to an ant, a seal, a tiger and a thousand-eyed life form. Who can care to say that even two human beings see exactly the same world? Have exactly the same experiences? Where is the commonality of experiences? There is no escape really from the fact the world is really only a world of thoughts and has no substance in it. The reality of experience is always subjective.
Subjective reality implies that the reality we see is created in our minds by ourselves and none else. This implies that since the world is a figment of my rich imagination, it is a part of me, it is me, in the same sense as my thoughts are me, as my body is as my car is mine.
If we accept the truth that the “world I see is me”, then as explained earlier, the root cause working against happiness in this world falls off, and with it, the support systems of thought for the egoistic, self-centered forces of lust, anger, greed, obsession, ownership, jealousy, etc. fall off.
The advances of civilization have always been accompanied by movements away from man-centeredness.
First, there was the idea that the whole world revolved around the earth. This has given place to the sun as a center. Science has pushed the center even further away, to the galactic center, may even further than that, far away in space and time, to the original big bang which created this cosmos. And the surprising thing is that since the big bang can be seen even today and for all time in the cosmic microwave background everywhere, the center is no more a point, but has spread out everywhere and to all times. Thus, science has done its job of spreading the center, exploding the center to the whole universe.
The last bastion of center concept resides deep within the mind, and it has to be exploded if there is to be progress in the real sense of the term if there is to be happiness in unbounded measure. This then is the work of God; of self-improvement of every life form; towards a higher harmony based on egolessness. Lalitā is poised to accomplish just that.
Source: Śrī Amṛtānandanātha Saraswatī "Sudhā Syandinī Bhāṣyaṃ" Typed Manuscript
(an incomplete commentary on Lalitā Sahasranāma)
