struggle

VIP免费
2024-12-20 1 0 148.29KB 27 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
THE STRUGGLE FOR
PERFECTION
By
SRI SWAMI KRISHNANANDA
Sri Swami Sivananda
Founder of
The Divine Life Society
6(59(/29(*,9(
385,)<0(',7$7(
5($/,=(
So Says
Sri Swami Sivananda
Sri Swami Krishnananda
A DIVINE LIFE SOCIETY PUBLICATION
Fifth Reprint : 1989
(3000 Copies)
World Wide Web (WWW) Reprint : 1998
WWW site: http://www.rsl.ukans.edu/~pkanagar/divine/
This WWW reprint is for free distribution
© The Divine Life Trust Society
Published By
THE DIVINE LIFE SOCIETY
P.O. SHIVANANDANAGAR—249 192
Distt. Tehri-Garhwal, Uttar Pradesh,
Himalayas, India.
PREFACE
Human life may be regarded as a process of successive achievements, and every movement
in this process is a step taken towards the actualisation of the ideal which beckons one to itself. All
beings, whatever be in the cosmos, are comprehended by this single law,—the law of a striving for
higher achievements. In this struggle to achieve the higher, one realises pleasure. It is well said that
man never is; he is always to be. We do not entirely live in the present. There is an element of the
future in what we do, and we never confine ourselves to the present merely. This means to say that
we identify ourselves, though in a covert manner, with an ideal to be achieved in the future, which,
we hope, will bring us a larger satisfaction. If the future is not ingrained in the present, how could
there be such a thing as hope? That we cannot keep quiet, that we always feel a duty before us, is
enough indication that we are wound up with a future. It is also not true that we wholly live in the
future, because the future cannot be contained in the consciousness of the present. Time cannot take
a jump beyond the present, which is its core. We might hope for the future, but we cannot live in the
future. Life is always a present.
If, then, it is impossible to have a ‘real’ satisfaction in the ‘future’, and if we cannot also live
without a future, there would appear to be a tension, or contradiction, in our life. Life is a battle
between the present and the future, between our affairs of today and our future hopes. The present
and future cannot join in time, and yet there seems to be a superhuman element, transcending
human understanding which somehow connects the two together. With all this, still, we know that
the present and the future never come together. All this may look like a logical untenability, but
logic is not all, and science is not everything. What, to us, seems a possibility, need not exhaust all
wisdom. We cannot understand how it is possible to reconcile our present difficulty with our
longings of the future. We seem to be wanting something which is not within our present
perception, and feel happy about what we know not. Are we not foolish in trying to achieve the
impossible? We seem to be fighting with time itself, which bifurcates the present from the future.
And what we want is not bifurcation but union of the present and future. Our souls cry for that
which cannot be given in time. There is something in us which time cannot explain, for it is not in
time. The one which ‘asks’ is not human, and so the human mind cannot understand the
significance of this epic war. Where does this asking for ‘more’ and ‘more’ end? It does not end in
time, because there is no end to time, just as there is no end to the horizon. As we proceed towards
the horizon, it recedes from us. Whatever be our effort to probe into the future, it cannot be
successful, even if we are to live for a thousand years. Are we then to conclude that we are bound
only to hope and struggle, but achieve nothing? Is this our fate,—to suffer for no reason? Or, is there
some meaning in life? Something in us voices that life has a significance, which makes us daily
work so hard. A marvel indeed is human life!
What are we hoping to achieve then? Logically argued, the effort would appear to be a vain
pursuit. If the life we have lived for so many years, so far, has not brought us anything worth the
while, what is the guarantee that it is going to bring something in the future? This would be the
result of an investigation of human life from the point of view of mind, psychology and logic.
Though all this may be correct as far as it goes, something seems to be announcing another truth
altogether, something which cannot reconcile itself with any of the above observations. A timeless
Spirit seems to speak from within us. It defies time and we seem to be living a timeless existence.
The difficulty in reconciling the present with the future is there only so long as we live in time. All
iii
that is in time is tantalising; it makes a promise which it never fulfils. The eternal seems to
masquerade in time and we seem to have something in us more than what we appear to be to
ourselves as well as to others. We are not mere humans, and our relations are not merely social. Our
connections with others, our name, age, height, weight, etc., are not a real description of ourselves,
because these have no relation to the eternal in us, which asks for what is not in time at all. We make
artificial adjustments in our life to bring about a false satisfaction that our wish has been fulfilled,
and that our future has been brought to the present. The realisation of a hope has a meaning when it
identifies itself with the present, which is the nature of consciousness. People generally complain:
“We have made so much sacrifice, but they have brought us no recompense. Then, what is the good
of all this?”
But, this is one side of the picture. That our outer circumstances often look unattractive is a
part of truth, and our wisdom does not consist in merely accepting this on its surface. The pains of
life are due to the wrong adjustments we make between our inner personality and outer
circumstances. We do make adjustments, but not always rightly. We may go wrong even in doing a
right thing. Many of us do right things wrongly. Sacrifices alone are not sufficient; they should be
done with wisdom. They should be performed not for any ulterior fruit but for that joy of the art of
adjustment. Science may be a means to some end, but not art. Art is an end in itself. Self-adjustment
is an art, and when carried to its perfection, it is called Yoga. Even in its initial stages, an all-round
adjustment becomes Yoga. Even the very first step points to an eternal perfection, and so it
transcends all learning,—it is Yoga, says the Bhagavadgita.
We have to make this adjustment from the point of view of the timeless element in us. The
wrong we do in life’s adjustments is in not taking into consideration the superhuman element in us
and thinking in terms only of the personality. It is not the body, the personality, that makes the
sacrifice as this adjustment; but the ‘I’, which needs to be trained more than anything else in the
conscious, subconscious and unconscious levels, in a sense deeper than what the psychologists
generally understand. The timeless reality cannot be grasped through the apparatus of ordinary
psychology, because all these instruments are temporal, while that being within is spiritual. The
spiritual reality which is the ‘I’ is indistinguishable in its ultimate essence from other entities or
beings. Though we differ from one another in bodies and in social circumstances, we have a kinship
of feeling from the standpoint of our essential nature. The adjustment that we have to make, which
is the art of the Yoga of the Bhagavadgita, so difficult to understand even with all our trained
understanding, is nothing but the simple act of attunement of oneself to the universal environment,
not from the standpoint of time, but the inner reality. It is an organic adjustment, not a mechanical
dovetailing. While mechanical adjustment is what we generally do in the hope of obtaining
pleasure, organic adjustment is Yoga. We often think that certain aspects of our personality can be
hidden from people and only certain others can be projected outside and related to others, according
to our desire. This is a mistake, and this is mechanical adjustment. There is a secret law which we
forget,—the law which connects our inner personalities with the inner personalities of others, even
without our consciously knowing it. This inner act of spontaneous recognition is called
‘prehension’. Prehension is a process by which we automatically relate ourselves to everything else
in the cosmos. While apprehension is an outer act on the conscious level, prehension is deeper than
even the subconscious function. There is no such thing as hiding things from other persons, because
we are always related to others. When the prehensive activity within contradicts the apprehensive
activity outside, there is a psychological tension.
iv
We have an inner personality and also an outer one. We usually exhibit the outer and hide
the inner. We make sacrifices by the outer personality. We may appear unselfish in our outer
conduct, while there is selfishness in the inner attitude. We are thus at war within ourselves. The
malady of human life is not only of outer society but also of each one of us, individually. We are
mostly busy in studying others, but not ourselves. Our present-day system of education pertains to
the study of outer phenomena but not the inner truth of things. We never become the subject of
study; the subject always remains an ‘object’! Unless right education of the integral type is
provided, humanity’s suffering will not end. There must be a sympathy between ourselves and the
outer world, and between our inner and outer personalities.
This is Yoga,—to establish peace in our relations with others as well as in our own selves.
The system of Yoga is meant to effect this inner attunement by a graduated process of
self-transcendence. There seems to be no other wrong with us than an ignorance which has led us to
a maladjustment of values. We have to learn the art of seeking the proper thing in the proper
manner. Life is a process of education in the art of this proper seeking, morally, psychologically,
socially and spiritually. To be at peace with ourselves, with society and the universe, for ever, is to
realise the eternal value which vitalises all existence. Towards this knowledge, may we proceed
with diligence.
v
CONTENTS
PREFACE iii
INTRODUCTION
Character of Human Struggle—The Primary Problems of Life—Implications of Effort and
Aspiration
THE STRUCTURE OF EXISTENCE
The Nature of Yoga as an Inner Practice—A Study of Consciousness—The Movement of
Consciousness towards Integration through the Fields of Politics, Sociology, Learning,
Instinctive Need, Psychology, Vital Urge, Philosophical Analysis and Spiritual Experience
THE PROGRESS TOWARDS THE ABSOLUTE
The Bhagavadgita as a Science of the Rise of Consciousness to the Stages of
Perfection—‘The Dark Night of the Soul’—The Illuminating Understanding—The Battle
of Life—The World and the Individual—Incarnation of God—The State of
Non-attachment—Self-gathering and Meditation—The Gamut of the Universe—The
Transcendent Spirit—God, the Friend and Saviour—The Immanence of God—God as the
Universal Reality
PERSONAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS
The Way of Practice—Spirituality and Social Life—Consciousness and Matter—The
Absolute—Matter as Force—Purushottama or the Superman—Above Duality—The Right
Attitude to Life—Three Duties of Man—Proportion in Understanding, Judgment,
Volition, Feeling and Action
THE BEARING OF KNOWLEDGE ON SOCIAL LIFE
Human Relations Characterised by Ultimate Forces Constituting Individuals—The Social
Structure—Spiritual Power, Political Power, Economic Power and Man-Power the
Building Bricks of Society—Continence, Fulfilment of Desire, Austerity and Spiritual
Realisation the Stages of Personal Evolution to the Supreme Being—Duty and Its
Consummation
1
2
10
15
19
CONCLUSION 20
vi
摘要：

THESTRUGGLEFORPERFECTIONBySRISWAMIKRISHNANANDASriSwamiSivanandaFounderofTheDivineLifeSociety6(59(/29(*,9(385,)

展开>> 收起<<
struggle.pdf

共27页,预览6页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：27 页 大小：148.29KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-20

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 27
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注