GEMS FROM THE OCEAN OF HINDU THOUGHT
VISION AND PRACTICE
BEACH 11: LIVE HAPPILY, THE
(Other Beaches: 1 2 3 4 56
7 8 9 10 )
WAVE 1: THE GANG OF
THIRTEEN
[ OTHER WAVES ON THE SAME BEACH: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12]
Every one of us is essentially after happiness. Why do we seek
happiness? It is because we are unhappy, most of the time. Now and then we have tastes of what we assume
is happiness. We see others who we think are happy. But what is it that
prevents us from being happy? It is unhappiness, that seems to be possessing us.
There are several causes for unhappiness. First let us look at it from a global point of
view, in the sense, that it applies to the society, the world, in general.
Later we shall come to the individual point of view. From the global point of view we can
recognise there are different kinds of obstacles to our happiness. In fact
these obstacles can even be called evils of the world. Why am I calling them
evils? You will agree with me when I describe them.
I am going to classify these evils into five categories: economic;
social; sociological, political, and cultural. Each category contains five
specifically named evils or obstacles to happiness.
The five economic evils are :
Poverty, Luxury, Beggary, Slavery, Exploitation.
There is no necessity to explain the evil nature of any of these, except perhaps ‘Luxury’.
Luxury is an evil, because of its great potential to make us unhappy. Even if
you do not accept it now, please go along with me for a while into the project.
As we go deeper into the project, the negative side of luxury will present
itself.
Next there are the five social obstacles to happiness:
Robbery, Smoking, Suicide, Divorce, and Illiteracy.
Next there is an equal number of sociological
evils, which are actually diseases in society:
Drinking, Gambling, Murder, Rape and Drug Addiction.
We shall now come to more subtle ones. These may be termed to be the cancers in the
society. Each of
them can also be known as a political evil. These are:
Corruption, Nepotism, Turncoatism, Loose Values, and
Hypocrisy.
The last category of five is the most subtle of all. These are cancers
that can be traced back to the culture and tradition of the human species. They
are:
Dogmatism-cum-Bigotry,
Religious prejudice,
Race/Caste Prejudice, Superstition and Male Domination.
These five are most subtle in the sense that the person who is diseased
with this cancer would not accept the fact of his affliction!
Well. Thus there are 25 evils of society in this world. (Anything else that can be imagined can be
seen to fall under the generic heading of one of these). The total effect of
all these is general unhappiness. How to eradicate these evils,
is the major problem of mankind. Science and Technology are doing a lot to
fight these evils, but a proper analysis of the source of these evils will tell
us that no amount of scientific advances and technological breakthroughs by
themselves will solve the problem until the roots of all these evils are
eradicated from the individual mind. It is the
individual who is important. If the roots of evil are eradicated from
individual minds, the general problem of the society and the world would then
become amenable to correction. Secondly, when these evils of the world impact
on us the intensity of the impact depends upon how close we are to the
occurrence. And the root of the unhappiness is again the mind which receives
it. A mad man, for instance, would not be affected by any such impact.
So now let us turn our attention to the individual and look at the
problem of unhappiness from his end.
First every individual, in spite of himself, goes through six stages of
transformation, called vikAra in Sanskrit. We exist, We
are born, We grow, We mature, We decay and We disappear. None of us can deny ourselves any of these
six. These are also applicable to the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. If
our unhappiness arises from any of these, we cannot help it. So this
unhappiness appears to be incurable.
There are six other things, called Urmis (Waves), which make us unhappy. They come
in three pairs. Old Age and Death; Hunger and Thirst;
Infatuation and Suffering. Again, against the first two we are helpless.
Against the second two we have to fight a daily battle. Against the last two we
have to be continuously at war, because they affect us both mentally and
physically.
The unhappiness that arises by virtue of any of the things so far
discussed is all to be considered as external to us, since either we have no
control over some of them like old age, death, or we know exactly something
else outside of us which is the cause of it. Always there is something to which
we can shift the blame – either the society, or the tradition, or nature. Even
if it is a suffering because of a physical disease, we always find something on
which we can throw the blame – pollution, infection etc.
It is the mind that reacts to all these
obstacles to happiness. As we have already noted, the mad man has no reaction
to any of these obstacles. It is clear therefore that man’s unhappiness arises from within
himself. It happens in the
mind of the individual. It is the mind that turns out to be the
villain.. This is the bottomline of the problem of
unhappiness. When man is born he brings along with his birth certain tendencies
of the mind, certain attitudes, called vAsanAs, which become a second nature with him.
And that is what makes each one react to unhappiness in one’s own
indiv idual way.
sharIraM yad-avApnoti
yaccApy-utkrAmat-IshvaraH /
gRhItvaitAni
samyAti vAyur-gandhAn-iv-AshayAt // (XV-8)
Meaning, When the Lord takes up this body or
when he goes forth, he goes taking them (the mind and the senses) as the wind
takes the perfume from a vase.
In addition over the years of his growth in this life, his mind gets
tuned to certain ways and characteristics of behaviour by training and custom
and they also become part of his nature. The reactions born out of such nature
to the obstacles that present themeselves, determine the level of happiness or
unhappiness. These characteristics of
man’s behaviour have been analysed by our scriptures and they have identified a
set of sixteen basic
channels (vRttis)
of the mind. Of these there are thirteen channels in which the mind of
man usually runs amuck. These form actually a gang of thirteen, because all of
them are negative from the point of view of man’s attempts to become a better man. The first six
of these thirteen are:
Attachment; Hate; Desire and Lust; Anger;
Greed; Delusion.
(In Sanskrit: rAga, dveshha,
This is one set of six. All these may be traced to even the animal kingdom
which anyway is lower in the ladder of evolution.
There is another set of six, for all of which we have to blame man
himself, because he has developed them to perfection by his own genius! They
are:
Arrogance;
Jealousy; IrshyA, Malice, Show or Vanity, and Pride.
(In Sanskrit: mAtsarya, IrshhA, asUyA, dambha, garva)
What is ‘IrshhyA’? It is a
Sanskrit word for the bad feeling that “all miseries are happening only to me;
why does it not happen to the other man; Why Me?”. I
do not know of any single English word for this. Jealousy (mAtsarya) is the feeling
which would not brook the rise of another person. Malice (asUyA) is the feeling which takes
pleasure in playing down the good qualities of another person. ‘IrshyA’,
‘mAtsarya’
These twelve channels of the mind are the ones which take us downward
spiritually. In fact it would be a worthwhile exercise to analyse in our own
mind every action and thought of ours and try to pigeonhole it into one of
these twelve channels. If the thought
was not a noble one, it would certainly fall into one of these. Even when it is
apparently a noble one, if we are true to ourselves we may discover one or more
of these at the
bottom of our mind.
And the thirteenth is the most important; it is the captain of the
other twelve. It is the EGO of man. He
is the captain of the Gang of Thirteen. These are the thirteen tendencies or
vAsanAs which man has brought along, mostly from his previous lives, though
some of which he has accumulated due to his upbringing and the way he grew up
in this life.
It is the gang of thirteen which contribute to man’s internal
unhappiness. Our thesis in the whole of this series of lectures is going to be:
Man’s external unhappiness is not his basic unhappiness. It is his internal
unhappiness that is fundamental. If the latter is taken care of, the former
will bloom into insignificance. To fight
man’s unhappiness therefore, the main struggle for each person is to fight the source of all this
unhappiness, namely, this gang of
thirteen. And for this God has given Man what is called Free Will. This is the
fourteenth channel of the mind. But it is a neutral channel; neither good nor
bad.
Naturally the question arises: Does man bring only bad vAsanAs from his
previous lives? Does he not bring any good vAsanAs? Yes he does. These are just two in number:
ShraddhA (Faith) and Bhakti (Devotion and Dedication). These two, together with
the earlier fourteen, constitute sixteen channels in which the mind
flows.
Man’s mind has four functions: one is to recall memories of stored
facts or impressions; another is to receive impressions or messages from
outside or inside; another is to discriminate; and finally the fourth is the
EGO which is therefore a part of the mind, but the most important part since,
whenever any thought happens in the mind, it is the EGO which claims authorship
or proprietorship for the thought. The discriminating part of the mind sifts
between good and bad and, between right and wrong, between pleasant and
unpleasant and takes decisions. When it takes decisions it is the Willpower of
the mind which engineers that decision. It is this Willpower which can
channelise the flow of the mind into any of the other fifteen channels – good
or bad. It is therefore this Willpower which has the responsibility of
disciplining the flow of the mind. The scriptures say: Have the will power to
channelise your mind into ShraddhA and Bhakti; then you will be happy. All your unhappiness is due to the fact that
this channelisation is not taking place continuously and consistently.
These two noble channels of thought, namely, SraddhA and bhakti, can go
a long way to prevent the mind in straying into the channels of the gang of
thirteen. In fact that is the only way to ward off the mind from flowing the
wrong way. But then why is Man very often erring into wrong ways? Why is he not
able to apply his mind to noble company and noble acts? What is it that
prevents him? This is where we have to accept the introduction of the villain
of the piece, Prakriti. Each individual has a store of vAsanAs (tendencies)
which have been accumulated over several lives. This store of vAsanAs is the
prakriti of the individual. It differs from person to person since the
accumulated store of vAsanAs is derived from past thoughts and actions of the
individual, in this life as well as in previous lives. It is the play of this
prakriti that makes the journey of life beyond our control. In every one
of our activities,
there is always an expectation, a result-oriented ambition. This clouds the
issue and slowly the members of the gang of thirteen, like, desire, attachment,
selfishness, pride, anger, etc. take over. And this makes the channelisation of
the mind into shraddhA and bhakti the more difficult.
Ultimately therefore it is the way mind reacts to external inputs
(obstacles) that matters for happiness. These reactions of course depends on the mental
make-up; the latter is the result of the vAsanAs imb edded in the mind. Thus it
is the reactions of the mind that determine one’s happiness. Following the
Gita, our whole thesis is going to be: Distance your mind from yourself. Say
with Shankara
“nAham deho nendreiyANy-antarango nAhamkAraH prANa-vargo na
buddhiH /
dArApatya-kshhetra-vittAdi
dUraH sAkshhI nityaH pratyagAtmA shivohaM” //
I am far from any marital, filial,
proprietory, or possessive relationships; I am neither the body, nor the mind
nor the intellect. I am the Witness; I am the Indweller; I am Shiva.”
PrakRti has a larger connotation in the sense of Cosmic PrakRti, which is dealt with
in the seventh chapter of the Gita. It is also called mAyA there, in the same
chapter. We will come to that later. But, now, what I am referring to as ‘our prakRti’ is the manifestation of that
mAyA individualised to each one of us.
Adi Sankaracharya in his commentary on the third chapter of the Gita (Shloka
33) makes this clear. He says that ‘our prakRti’ is nothing but ‘Impressions of
virtue, vice, knowledge, desires and so on, acquired in the past lives and
which become manifest at the commencement of the present life’.
“prakRtir-nAma pUrva-kRta dharma-adharmAdi samskArah
vartamAna-janmAdau abhivyaktih, sA prakRtih”.
In other words, whatever we have
done, we have thought or we have intended to do – in our past lives – all these
have implanted their footprints in our past minds in our past lives. A fraction
of these come to fruition in this life. That is our PrakRti for this life. It
is the store of vAsanas or tendencies with which we are born. In short, it is
the indelible imprint of our irrevocable past. These vAsanAs could be bad or
good; but our own experience says that mostly the negative vAsanAs have a
greater pull on us than the positive ones.The aggregate of these vAsanAs is
what Krishna calls our ‘svabhAva’ in the Gita. When Arjuna argues for laying
down arms and going to the forest to do a sannyasi-like tapas,
Go to WAVE
2
Copyright © V. Krishnamurthy Dec.19, 2003