Religion and Social Values - 1-3. Swami Krishnananda.

 

Monday, December 28, 2020. 08 : 04. AM.
Chapter 1: The Circumstances in Which We Have to Live in the World -3.

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There is a very peculiar attitude that we develop towards our own selves which can be very safely defined by a single word: duplicity. We do not maintain a true relationship with our own selves. At the very outset, we manage to be untrue to our own selves in order that we may live in an untrue relationship with people. It is sometimes felt that in order to justify one falsehood, another falsehood may have to be heaped over it. A single falsehood does not stand on its own legs. We are acutely aware of something peculiar in our own selves which cannot stand the logic of nature or, perhaps, the will of God; and with this circumstance, we have to live in this world.

We have been forced to accept that we somehow have to live in this world. We do not ask people, “Is it necessary for me to live in this world?” The question is already answered by our own selves: It is necessary. That it is necessary to live in this world is not learned by us from books. It is not a sermon that we have received from our Gurus or Masters. We have come to a conclusion definitely, by our own selves, for reasons we alone know: It is necessary to exist in this world. A hypothesis is already taken for granted. And this necessity to exist is—very, very unfortunately for us—involved in a network of complicated adjustments that we are required to make every moment of time, so that every minute that we pass seems to be an artificial existence. We are perpetually aware as to what is around us, as a field marshal may be looking around in the battlefield to see what is moving and operating in all ten directions. What rest can we have here? But rest we must have. We have already concluded that it must be there; and we have to move Earth and heaven to gain this acquisition.

The inward suspicion with regard to one’s own capabilities in the understanding of the nature of this world, and the powers that one can wield in this world, go hand in hand with the suspicion that we develop with everyone else in the world. We cannot trust anybody wholly, because we cannot trust ourselves wholly. This is because the trust, or the distrust, as the case may be, is only a description of an attitude that we generally develop in regard to anything—firstly, in regard to our own selves, and secondly, in regard to others. The distrust in regard to ourselves—in regard to the knowledge that we have and the powers that we wield—naturally has to condition the feelings that we have in regard to other people in the world, so that we cannot wholly trust our own brother. We have to be guarded even with him, for a secret reason which each one knows and no one can publicise. What a pitiable state of affairs that we have a secret attitude which conditions our public attitude in respect of the whole world—a secret which cannot be publicised, yet which conditions our public behaviour.

This very difficult-to-understand situation of our own mental operations is perhaps the background of very bitter analyses which were ruthlessly conducted by psychoanalysis about the nature of man in this world. Medical examination is not always a pleasant thing to undergo. Very unpleasant it is, for various reasons. And even to find time to go deep into our own mental makeup is not a happy thing. When we go into the corners of the citadel in which we are living, we will not scent fragrance, and perhaps we will not find even a clean floor to sit upon. Within ourselves is a world of dustbins, cobwebs, and undiscovered, uninhabited abysmal niches which refuse to come to the surface, or into the daylight of understanding. There are corners in our own selves which we do not want to see.

To be continued .....

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