Thinning The Veil
Self-realisation
SWAMI VIDYARANYA'S classic, Panchadashi, starts off, after a preliminary
salutation to his Teacher, with the encouraging words:
This book is meant to teach the supreme truth in an easy way to those whose
hearts have been purified...
One is reminded at once of the words of the Christian Gospel, 'Blessed are the
pure in heart, for they shall see God', but one can hardly imagine a Western
spiritual classic promising to teach the spiritual truth 'in an easy way'.
Rather one expects to encounter the forbidding sentiment:
Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto (everlasting) life,
and few there be that find it. (Matthew 7.14)
Strait here of course does not mean the opposite of crooked, it is the old word
which is still familiar to us in the term 'strait-jacket' or the Straits of
Gibraltar or when we hear of someone as 'in dire straits'. It implies great
difficulty and restriction binding us down and a major struggle if we are to get
free. This makes the claim of Vidyaranya all the more remarkable when he offers
to convey the spiritual truth in an easy way. But there is no doubt at all that
this is the general claim of Vedanta as a whole, and it is one of the particular
characteristics of Yoga that it claims to bring within the reach of the ordinary
man, and each and every man at that, the means whereby he can attain that
knowledge of spiritual truth which has been claimed for the saints and sages of
all great spiritual traditions.
What then is the particular merit of Vedanta which allows it to achieve this? It
is no academic question, but a most important and practical one with tremendous
implications for each and every individual. It is therefore worth examining more
closely what it is that the Teachers of this tradition themselves say on this
topic.
First of all Vedanta maintains that the spiritual aspirations of man are not
something exceptional or extraordinary. Religion, says Swami Rama Tirtha, is as
natural to man as eating. His hunger for truth and beauty, his innate admiration
for the wise and the good when he comes across it, are as natural to him as his
healthy appetite for a good, appetising and nourishing meal. Of course, his
tastes may become jaded by indulgence in the wrong food, and his spiritual sense
can become blunted and perverted by the indulgence in the wrong mental and
spiritual fare, but the underlying hunger will only achieve its full
satisfaction in either sphere when it is provided with a balanced and wholesome
diet. In the case of the spiritual quest, man will never be satisfied until he
has known the spiritual truth. This is not just the teaching of Yoga. It is the
teaching of all the great traditions. As St. Augustine says, the human heart is
restless until it finds rest in knowledge of God, of the ultimate spiritual
truth.
It is a misconception to suppose that the spiritual view of the world is
incompatible with the scientific view. On the contrary, if one looks at the
great figures in science, like Max Planck, Einstein, Eddington, Schroedinger and
many others, you find the explicit recognition in their writings of a mystical,
transcendent dimension to reality, lying behind the world of finite scientific
concepts, and implicit in the findings of science. Again this is not something
totally exceptional. As Eddington wrote:
A point that must be insisted on is that religion or contact with spiritual
power, if it has any general importance at all, must be a commonplace matter of
ordinary life, and it should be treated as such in any discussion. I hope that
you have not interpreted my references as referring to abnormal experiences and
revelations... To suppose that mystical religion is mainly concerned with these
is like supposing that Einstein's theory is mainly concerned with the perihelion
of mercury and a few other exceptional observations. For a matter belonging to
daily affairs, the tone of current discussions often seems quite inappropriately
pedantic. (The Nature of the Physical World, pages 326-7)
Eddington calls 'the insight of consciousness' the only avenue to what he has
called 'intimate knowledge of the reality behind the symbols of science' (page
326). In other words it is only by turning within to seek the spiritual truth
within the depths of the personality itself, that this dimension of life can be
fully explored.
The method of exploration is also important. We often get asked the question by
casual acquaintances: 'Where do you live?' But we seldom ask ourselves this
question because we take it for granted that we know the answer. But do we? Our
physical surroundings may be a trivial circumstance of our existence when
compared with our mental surroundings. All of us throughout our life use our
minds as living quarters, but regrettably few of us are tidy-minded and these
habitual surroundings of ours are often littered with all sorts of rubbish and
bric-a-brac which we have collected in the course of our daily life. The yogic
teachings remind us first that we cannot improve the quality of our life unless
we settle down to tidy and reorganise the mental lumber room and introduce some
system and purpose into it. Furthermore this is impossible so long as it is so
cluttered up with mental 'jumble sale material' that we cannot move freely
without knocking into some obstruction. The lumber has to be cleared if we are
going to live well and wisely. The 'easy method' of learning the supreme truth,
Swami Vidyaranya reminds us, is for those who have purified their hearts, and
this is a qualification we cannot ignore and have to take active steps to
acquire.
The yogis remind us that there are two sorts of knowledge. On the one hand we
spend most of our life stuffing the mind with an unselected stream of
impressions and ideas, many of them silly and perverse, from the barrage of
sense impressions which bombards us from morning to night in modern Western
civilisation. Even if we select the material to be of the highest quality, the
idea that knowledge is to be gained by feeding in facts from the outside world
is the great fallacy of the scholar and the academic. We may end up as
knowledgeable as the Encyclopedia Britannica or contain within ourselves the
equivalent of a library of books, and still be ignorant of the simplest things
which experience can teach us. Wisdom, or even common sense, comes from insight
and the intuitive recognition of truth.
Swami Vidyaranya starts his teaching on the easy way to realisation of the
supreme truth by contrasting these two sorts of knowledge. The knowledge which
we go to science for, the knowledge of the external world which reaches us
through the senses, is all characterised by detailed information about the
finite peculiarities of particular objects and events. In this sense, it is like
the data bank which we build up on our computers, or the knowledge which we
accumulate in our encyclopedias and reference libraries. It is a mass of
detailed descriptions of events, historical and contemporary, and of objects and
the relationships between them. And a characteristic of such knowledge is that,
however detailed it is and however much one adds to it, it can never be
complete. On the other hand there is the knowledge of the underlying
consciousness which perceives experience, which is something apart from the
experiences themselves. As one of the opening verses of the classics puts it:
The objects of sound, touch and so forth, which are perceived in the waking
state, differ from each other in their peculiarities, but the perceiving
consciousness, considered as something apart from them, is one, undivided and
the same. (Panchadashi, 1.3)
But this does not only apply to the experiences which come to us through the
senses. It also applies to the mental experiences which we enjoy in a dream or
in imagination or memory. These may be relatively fleeting when compared with
the objects of the waking state, says Vidyaranya, but the subjective or
perceiving consciousness is one and the same in both states. There is a unity of
consciousness in all the states of experience.
This is a fairly easy point to appreciate, but perhaps more difficult to accept
at first sight is the contention of the yogis that consciousness also persists
in the state of dreamless sleep. Certainly one knows that one is unconscious at
that time, and the provisional argument that Vidyaranya uses is that one must
therefore have a memory of that experience of lack of perception. This implies
that in dreamless sleep too, consciousness persists. We might take as an analogy
the physical world in which we can turn electricity on and off to light our
rooms or heat our houses, without altering the more fundamental fact that the
whole world of matter is created from the electromagnetic forces within the
atoms.
But, whatever arguments are used to try and convince one of this point, the case
of the yogis really rests on the nature of experience as revealed to them by
their further investigations, and the conclusion of this is that the true Self
of man abides unchanged and self-revealed within the personality, even in those
states which appear as states of unconsciousness or lack of perception. As
Vidyaranya puts it:
Through the many months, years, ages, world cycles, past and future,
consciousness is the same and self-revealed. It persists and, unlike the sun,
neither rises nor sets.
This ever abiding consciousness is the Self (Atman). It is the highest bliss
since it is the object of the greatest love. The love of the Self is seen in the
(universal) feeling 'May I not cease to exist, may I continue to exist further'.
(Panchadashi, 1.7-8)
The 'easy teaching' of Yoga starts from the 'insight of consciousness' which
Eddington identifies as the only avenue to 'intimate knowledge of the reality
behind the symbols of science'.
If one compares this easy teaching with the teaching of other spiritual
traditions, it seems at first sight very different indeed, and it is only by
looking carefully at the testimony of some of the great saints of other
religions that one can begin to see how the teachings could, after all, be
fundamentally the same in so far as they are a clue to the riddle of our own
experience. One of the greatest figures in the Christian tradition is St.
Augustine, and he is particularly interesting in that, because he was writing
early in the tradition and was already a philosopher and a seeker before he
became a Christian, he has written down for us a very full account of his own
experiences on the spiritual path and his understanding of the spiritual truth.
His writings leave no doubt at all that he had himself confirmed what Vidyaranya
expresses in the first few verses of Panchadashi, that the Self or God is that
supreme consciousness which underlies even the ordinary experiences in the mind.
Consider, for instance, these words of St. Augustine himself:
Different (from the things intellectually seen) is that light itself whereby the
soul is so enlightened that it beholds all things truly the object of the
intellect. For that light is God himself.
It is worth adding that this was written in AD 415 when Augustine had been a
bishop already for twenty years and that there are many other passages which
could have been quoted which make the same point. He also speaks of having
verified this truth by his own experience. In the Confessions, for instance, he
says: 'I found by the eye of my soul, above the mind, the light unchangeable.'
And St. Augustine speaks of that supreme Light as the object of the greatest
love, addressing it as 'O Beauty, so ancient and so new!' In other words he
confirms the teaching of Vedanta that this supreme reality is not only the
unchangeable light of consciousness, but also Bliss Absolute.
But even if such towering figures as St. Augustine can be quoted in support of
the Vedantic teaching, the position of the ordinary man is entirely different.
His starting point is from experience as he knows it in everyday life. And, seen
from this point of view, not only are the teachings of the different spiritual
traditions very different, but the realisation of which the Vedanta speaks seems
very remote from his own grasp. And this is why the next point raised by
Vidyaranya is one that he should appreciate, for as he says:
If it is an established fact that the nature of the Self is supreme bliss, then,
we ask, is this bliss evident or not? If it is not evident, the absolute love
for the Self is inexplicable. On the other hand, if it is evident, why is one
attracted to worldly objects such as wife, wealth and power? The answer is that
the bliss of the Self is ever revealed but is not recognised owing to certain
obstructions. (Panchadashi, 1.11)
The present state of our mind, with its inability to see clearly and its
tendency to be distracted into irrelevancies, prevents us from seeing the
spiritual truth as it really is. There is, in other words, a veil of ignorance
or wrong thinking obscuring our inner eye and hiding the spiritual truth from
us, and it is only when we begin to concentrate on strengthening and cultivating
our inner vision and thinning the veil which hides the truth from us that we can
begin to verify that truth for ourselves.
When we do so, we shall find, according to Swami Rama Tirtha, that the apparent
differences between the teachings of the different spiritual traditions were
manifestations, not of differences in the light of the one eternal truth itself,
but of the thickness and quality of the mental or empirical veil through which
we were seeing it.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
(Shelley)
Swami Rama also says that, while each and every man has an inner spiritual
hunger, the way in which it is satisfied varies at different stages of his
spiritual evolution.
Imagine the loyal subject of a king. He is patriotic and willing to lay down his
life for his king and country if the call comes. He sees the monarch on state
occasions and he affirms his oath of loyalty to him in time of war or during his
service in the king's forces. His whole feeling of loyalty is expressed in the
conviction 'I am his subject', 'I am a true patriot'. The love of the king is
like the love of God felt by a devout but conventional member of the church,
mosque or temple. He feels that he is one of God's children, but he does not
presume to have any close personal relationship with God. This, says Swami Rama,
is characteristic of someone who lives under the light of the spirit, but sees
it only through the thickest of veils. His faith expresses itself in the
conviction 'I am one of His children'.
Very different is the attitude of one who becomes a close courtier and privy
councillor of the king's. His relationship is altogether more intimate and
personal, and his feeling of loyalty undergoes a subtle change accordingly. He
is in daily contact with the king and close to him as an adviser and loyal
confidant. His feeling of loyalty expresses itself in a much closer
identification with the king personally. He feels, not so much 'I am his', which
is still the feeling of one who stands at a distance from the object of his
love, but 'I am yours'. He feels a close personal bond with the king. In the
same way, says Swami Rama, those devotees of the spiritual truth who deepen
their relationship with God and draw near to Him in their spiritual practices,
see the light of Truth through a much thinner veil and they enjoy the feeling of
a close personal relationship with God. St. Teresa's love of the infant Jesus is
an example of such a loving relationship with God in his personal aspect. Many
sincere Christians achieve this stage of intimacy with the Lord in the course of
their communion with God.
But even in such a relationship there is a distinction between the devotee and
the Lord. The truth is still something other, experienced at a distance, however
closely; and the culmination of the spiritual quest is the direct experience of
truth as it is. To take what inevitably is a weak analogy further, the loyal
subject of the king who is chosen by the king as his bride enjoys the closest
affinity with the king. She alone has the right to feel, as the culmination of
her love and loyalty to the king, 'he and I are one'. And so it is that in the
Christian tradition we find the mystics speaking of the highest enlightenment
conferred by God on the soul as 'the unitive life', in which, it is said, Christ
becomes the bridegroom of the soul.
Relationships are in the world of time, space and causation. The three types of
relationship represent three degrees in the clarity of vision of the inner eye
in its appreciation of the spiritual light through the obscuring medium of the
unenlightened mind. But in the final experience, the enlightened seeker goes
beyond the mind to appreciate the light of truth itself.
Swami Rama says that in the highest experience of the mystics the veil is drawn
aside, at least for the time being, and the soul experiences the light of truth
as it is. But the everyday mind soon reasserts itself. Nonetheless, the light of
truth transforms the quality of life of the individual and, once seen, this
experience permanently changes the personality of the individual, conferring on
him that light of wisdom and inner peace which sees the unity in all beings. The
veil reasserts itself, so to speak, but the memory of what has been experienced
permanently alters his attitude to the empirical suggestions which the mind
brings. Here Swami Rama Tirtha makes an important point. He says that it is the
special role of Vedanta and Yoga that it aims, not only to make available to
each and every man the ability to verify this state of enlightenment which
results from the drawing aside of the mental veil, but also to make the veil so
thin that one can (so to speak) see through it at all times throughout everyday
life. And it is for this reason that it teaches the identity of the true Self of
man with God.
This truth is not known through sense experience, nor by any mental experience,
as the world and the ideas in the mind are known. The spiritual truth is beyond
the subject-object relationship. As St. Augustine says:
The human mind when judging a thing as visible is able to know that it itself is
better than all visible things. But when, by reason of its failings and advances
in wisdom, it confesses itself to be changeable, it finds that above itself is
the truth unchangeable.
He says that:
The truth unchangeable shines like a sun in the soul, and the soul becomes
partaker of the very truth... there is the Truth unchangeable, containing all
things that are unchangeably true, which belong not to any particular man, but
to all those who perceive things unchangeable and true; (it is) as it were in
wondrous ways a secret and public light, it is present and offers itself in
common (to everyone). This is the light of true knowledge and that by which
empirical truths are recognised.
As he says:
Finally all truths are perceived in the unchangeable truth itself. If you and I
both see that what you say is true, and both see that what I say is true: where
do we see this? Not I in you, nor you in me; but both of us in the unchangeable
truth itself, which is above our minds.
Swami Rama Tirtha, that great modern yogi, says that the ultimate reality
remains unknowable so long as we rely on the local consciousness and have not
developed this cosmic consciousness. Only when we develop the cosmic
consciousness, spoken of by the mystics, can we know the infinite truth. We may
by reason infer its existence, but this is not to know it. So long as we rely on
the mind, says Swami Rama Tirtha, even if we come to know the existence of the
absolute by inference and conviction, we are in the same position as we are when
someone comes up behind us and covers our eyes with their hands, so that we
cannot see who it is. We know it is a friend, says Swami Rama, because no-one
but a friend would take such liberties with us, but who it is we cannot tell. It
is the same with the infinite, because, as the Upanishad says: 'It is beyond the
reach of speech and mind.' If it could be made an object of knowledge, it would
not be the infinite. One would at once have duality established, the duality of
the seer and the seen and the subject and the object. But it is in the
experience of cosmic consciousness that universality and non-duality is
established. (In Woods of God-Realization VI. pages 147-148)
St. Augustine speaks of the process leading to the awakening of the cosmic
consciousness:
If the tumult of the flesh were hushed; hushed the sense impressions of earth,
sea, sky; hushed also the heavens, yea the very soul be hushed to herself and by
not thinking on self, transcend self; hushed all dreams and revelations which
come by imagery; if every tongue and every symbol, and all things subject to
transiency were wholly hushed: since, if any could hear, all these say: 'We made
not ourselves, but He made us who abideth for ever.' If then, having uttered
this, they too should be hushed, having roused only our ears to Him who made
them; He alone speak, not by them but by Himself, so that we may hear His word,
not through any similitude, but His voice whom we love in these His creatures -
may hear His Very Self without intermediary at all - as now we reached forth and
with one flash of thought touched the Eternal Wisdom that abides over all:
suppose that experience were prolonged and all other visions of far inferior
order were taken away, and this one vision were to ravish the beholder, and
absorb him and plunge him in these inward joys, so that eternal life were like
this moment of insight for which we sighed - were not this to 'enter into the
joy of thy Lord!' (Confessions IX. 25)
And he makes clear that he himself had experienced this state:
Step by step I was led upwards, from bodies to the soul (mind) which perceives
by means of the bodily senses; and thence to the soul's inward faculty, to which
the bodily senses report external things, which is the limit of the intelligence
of animals; and thence again to the reasoning faculty, to whose judgment is
referred the knowledge received by the bodily senses. And when this power also
within me found itself changeable, it lifted itself up to its own intelligence,
and withdrew its thoughts from experience, abstracting itself from the
contradictory throng of sense images, that it might find what that light was
wherein it was bathed when it cried out that beyond all doubt the unchangeable
is to be preferred to the changeable; when also it knows That Unchangeable: and
thus with the flash of one trembling glance it arrived at THAT WHICH IS. And
then at last I saw Thy 'invisible things understood by the things that are
made'; but I could not sustain my glance; and my weakness being struck back, I
was relegated to my ordinary experience, bearing with me but a loving memory and
a longing for what i had, as it were, perceived the odour of, but was not yet
able to feed upon. (Confessions VII. 23).
The experience of that drawing back of the veil or cosmic consciousness is not
one where we are distanced from Truth. It is an experience of identity. This may
be misunderstood. As Swami Rama says, when I say 'I am God' I do not mean that
this little personality is God. Nor that this mind is God. Nor is it some new
state which has been conferred on me, like being created a king or a baronet.
The realisation is that at the innermost core of this personality, man is
identical with the reality behind the universe, and that all the empirical world
of time, space and causation, including the personality and the body, are in a
certain real sense transient and phenomenal. They are not abiding realities,
which can in any sense be called unchangeable.
If you read the Christian mystics and many of the Sufis, you will find them
talking of such experiences, but hedging round their statements with
qualifications. They speak of the soul becoming one with God by participation in
the experience of cosmic consciousness, but carefully add that this is only like
the iron becoming red hot when it enters the fire. It appears while it is in the
fire to be of the nature of the fire, but it is really of a different nature.
This represents exactly what is meant by Swami Rama Tirtha in the simile of the
thicker veils. These faiths still speak of the individual in its relationship
with God in terms of the subject-object relationship, in terms of the feeling 'i
Am His' of the loyal subject of the king and, at a higher level, the 'I am
Thine' of the courtier and the close confidant. But they do not, at least in
their philosophy and theology, envisage the thinnest of the veils exemplified by
the Vedanta philosophy, in which the intrinsic identity of the soul with God is
recognised at all times. The glory of Vedanta is that it comes closest to
expressing the real Truth insofar as it can be expressed in words or thoughts.
Freedom through Self-Realisation
A.M. Halliday
A Shanti Sadan Publication - London
ISBN 0-85424-040-3
Pgs. 209-223
NOTE: If this page was accessed during a web search you may wish to browse the sites listed below where this topic or related issues are discussed in detail to promote global peace, religious harmony, and spiritual development of humanity:
www.adishakti.org/www.al-qiyamah.org/
www.adi-shakti.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Hinduism)
www.holyspirit-shekinah.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Christianity)
www.ruach-elohim.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Judaism)
www.ruh-allah.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Islam)
www.tao-mother.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Taoism)
www.prajnaaparamita.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Buddhism)
www.aykaa-mayee.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Sikhism)
www.great-spirit-mother.org/ ' Divine Feminine (Native Traditions)
