Vedanta

To some Indians, it may seem presumptuous that a Westerner should write to them about meditation and contemplation, even if it is only about the Christian contemplative tradition. After all, India is the Mother of Meditation. And historically, Christians have not been especially known for their capacity to meditate. The world may admire their teachings on brotherly love, their care for the poor, their schools and their hospitals—everything pertaining to active works of charity—but generally it would not look to Christians as masters of meditation or contemplation in the same way it would look to Hindus or Buddhists.

Our lives become meaningless when we lose the value of justice and ethics. We all have an equal right to pursue happiness; no one wants pain and suffering. And yet justice and equality are uniquely human principles. We should not sacrifice these principles in the pursuit of power or material wealth. Instead, we should employ them in serving others’ interests. But to do so, we need a firm foundation in ethics.

Spiritual progress depends to a considerable extent upon one's earnest personal endeavor. "Arise, awake! Approach the wise teachers and learn from them," the Katha Upanishad says. Throughout the Bhagavad Gita we find Sri Krishna exhorting his disciple Arjuna in a similar strain: "O mighty descendant of Bharata, arise; shake off all doubt and hesitation and hold fast to the practice of yoga."

After the Shvetashvataropanishad, descriptions of yogic practice continued to evolve, and finally Patanjali gathered together all that was known from the experience of the seers and yogins before him and systematized it as the eight-limbed yoga (ashtanga yoga). His Yogasutra is the classic manual on the technology of spiritual science, and the core of its teaching is the series of eight steps that Patanjali lays out for us to follow.

In the 1920s, when archeologists were excavating a ruined city near the Indus River, they discovered a huge chapter of Indian cultural history that had been long forgotten. Four and a half thousand years earlier, Mohenjo-daro had been one of the largest cities of the Bronze Age world, with broad avenues, marketplaces and residential districts, a municipal sanitation system, and impressive public buildings.

Every religious tradition offers the world a unique and particular gift, without which humankind would be infinitely poorer. The Hindu tradition's unique gift to the human family is the concept of the Atman, the ultimate Reality which lies at the core of our being. While the religious traditions of the West categorize human beings in terms of a body/mind dichotomy, the Hindu traditions see all living beings as trichotomous—that is, possessing three aspects—body, mind and Atman. The Atman, the ultimate divine Reality which lies within us, is one with Brahman, the infinite divine Reality which pervades the universe.

In the past three readings, three aspects of the personality of Sri Ramakrishna have been mentioned—namely, the ideal person, the world teacher and the deity—and it was pointed out that his status as the ideal person of the present age lay in his being the embodiment of the vijnani and rishi ideals. Before proceeding further, it is necessary to state the view of his chief apostle Swami Vivekananda on this matter.

Sri Ramakrishna was not a mere ideal man or a world teacher, but was a unique being endowed with the supra-human attributes of the Divine Person. Even during his lifetime he had become an object of worship, and several great scholars, spiritual adepts and religious leaders had considered him an avatar. Today he is being worshipped by millions of people belonging to all strata of society, casts, creeds and nationalities.

What are the marks of a fully illumined soul? According to Sri Ramakrishna these are three: renunciation, knowledge, and compassion. The relevance of the vijnani ideal in the present-day world can by appreciated only when we understand how important these three values are to the modern man’s life.

Greatness is of two types: contemporary and eternal. An ordinary person who has attained greatness in any field like social service, religion, art or science, can influence the lives of a few thousand people but only for a short period, for his influence does not usually survive his death. But world prophets like Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad influence the lives of millions of people for centuries. Their influence is not limited by time. Nay, it undergoes a process of time enlargement: with the passage of centuries the glory of these prophets, instead of decreasing goes on increasing.