Commentary on the Isavasya Upanishad : 17. Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, October 04, 2022. 05:30. 
Part-3.
Post -17.

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Our concept of activity involves a result that has to follow from what we do. We become habituated to this vehement impulsion. It becomes part and parcel of our very life itself, and then we never feel that we are impelled to work. We begin to feel that ‘we'  work. ‘I' do the work. No one says, “I am forced to work. I am compelled.” Though originally it is a sort of compulsion consequent upon the empirical relationship between ourselves and the world of externality, our habituation to this continuous activity, day in and day out throughout our life, creates a peculiar psychological circumstance which makes us wrongly feel that we do the work, even though we are forced to work. And inasmuch as ‘we' do the work, we do it with a purpose. We expect a result to follow from the work that we do in this world.

This is the kind of attitude that we generally have towards life, and we have no other opinion about ourselves except that we work and some fruit is reaped out of this work. We start our day with work, and end our day with work. We are born with an impulse to work, and we die with work. If this is the only meaning that we can see in this world, then to darkness we go after death, because that is not the meaning of life. Merely because there is an impulsion to work and we are helplessly driven, as it were, in the direction of this work, and we do the work, it does not follow that there is a proper comprehension of the meaning of what this work is. Why should we be impelled so? Taking for granted that there is an impulsion to act, from where does this impulsion come? This question is rarely raised by anybody.

We have to work. We have this duty to perform. We have this family. We have these obligations. “I am involved in it. I am very busy. I am helpless. I do, and I must do.” This is all we hear from anyone in the world, as if this explains the whole mystery of life. It is an explanation of a particular phenomenon through which life presents itself as an aspect. But the impulsion to work is not the whole meaning of life. And, worse still, we feel that it is good to subject oneself to the pressure of some force that is impelling us to work, and then get on with this drudgery of action. To darkness we go after we leave this body, if we live a life of this kind, which is pure slavery, involvement without any kind of freedom attached to it. Avidya, ignorance is the name of this kind of living.

But if this kind of extreme attitude that we adopt, due to sheer subjection to outer activity, will take us to darkness after death, what else are we expected to do? There are people who withdraw themselves from all activity in a theoretical concept of the structure of things, and rational investigation is conducted into the motivation to work. They come to the conclusion that the life that we live in this world has a transcendent meaning. Reality is transcendent. The knowledge of the transcendent is to be the main occupation of our life, because the meaning of life cannot be discovered in empirical activity. Activity is an outer expression of another impulse that originates from a transcendent significance, so let us resort to the transcendent only and do nothing, because the transcendent does not compel us to work. Work is an arrangement between the human individuality and the outer world of space and time. The transcendent is not in space and time and, therefore, there is no question of work. These are people who try to contemplate an ethereal transcendence that is totally divested of any kind of connection with this world. For instance, to put it in a more concrete form, as it is bad to get attached to the body, we ignore the body totally and go on contemplating on a self that we imagine in our mind: “I am contemplating on my Atman; I am not interested in this stupid body.”

If one is totally ignorant of the existence of the Atman inside, and is wholly engaged in bodily comforts and works through the body for the sake of physical satisfaction, it is bad because the physical body is not the reality. So, one kind of extreme in the attitude of people makes them bend down to the needs and clamours of the bodily satisfactions and work for the body only, whether one's own body or family body. This is sheer ignorance, as we know very well. And contemplation on the Atman by imagining it to be a light transcendent to the physical world and this body would take another course, whereby we are likely to ignore the body completely. On the one hand, we ignore the Atman and cling to this world and the body for its own satisfaction; and on the other hand, we ignore the body and the world, and cling to a concept of the Atman as a transcendent element. To greater darkness we go if we think that the Atman is outside the body or inside the body, and we are totally oblivious – deliberately, as it were – to the existence of the body and its connections with the world, and we engage ourselves in a contemplation that is pure ethereal engagement and pure theory.

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To be continued ...

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