CHAPTER VI
A PERSPECTIVE
In the
year 1979 we are at a stage of world history in which not only the distance
has been annihilated but other
walls such as that of language, history, tradition, that separate peoples and
nations from each other have also been considerably lowered. Three modem scientific ideas have
shaken the complacency of the 19th century secular thought just as the 19th
century scientific thought had shaken the seemingly secure church-dogmatism of
religion and bigoted certitudes of certain world-religions. These three modern scientific ideas are that (1) the matter is bottled
up energical light waves; “That what is gross is the subtle” 1 (2)
the universe is an act of thought, “the entire phenomenon has been created by
God by an act of thought,” 2 and (3) Heisenberg’s ‘principle of
indeterminacy’ in nature. Thus the ‘matter’ has been shown to be as rich, if
not richer, in possibilities than the ‘spirit’; the energy it contains is
incalculable, and it can undergo an infinite number of transformations.’ The ‘materialist’
in its 19th century connotation has become meaningless and so has
the expression ‘rationalist’. The logic of ‘commonsense’ is
no longer valid since in the new physics, a fact can be both true and false at
the same time, unlike the Jaina syadvad, the May-be doctrine of
Jaina logic, which demonstrated that A may be A, at one point of time, ‘t-1’
and it may be not - A, at another point of time, ‘t-2’ or, that A may be A from
one perspective ‘p-1’ and A may be not-A from another perspective, ‘p-2’. Now,
as we understand the point, AB no longer equals BA, since an entity can be at
once continuous and discontinuous, a particle and a wave. Physics, the model
for all the natural sciences, can no longer be relied upon to determine what is
or, what is not possible. The concept of ‘strangeness’, the ‘quantum number’
has changed all these things and we now know that scientific hypotheses can
offer us no new knowledge; 3 they are like the Spanish inn where you
may only find what you bring yourself, and scientific speculation finally has
led us to ‘symbols’, airy, unknown, insubstantial and like a wisp of the wind,
incapable of affording a foothold to man’s unending restlessness for reaching
substance and certitude. Man cannot content like the boa-constrictor to have
good meal once a month and sleep the rest of the time. No promises of utopias
on earth or visions of socialist sumptuousness, communist felicity or other
political juggleries can give rest and sense of final self-fulfillment to man;
only a technology or teaching capable of ensuring direct comprehension of and a
direct contact with Reality may do so. Religion is a mode of actual living and
the only serious way of handling Reality. This is precisely what the ‘Epilogue’,
mundavani in the Sikh scripture says :
“In this revealed text, three topics are stated; the Reality,
contact with it and how to do so.
The immortal Name of God the All-Ground, is herein the major
premise.
Total self-fulfillment and the peace that knoweth no ending is
the reward for those who understand, accept and act upon it.
Man
cannot turn his back on it, permanently.” 4
The
different living religions, therefore; are now in a position to look at each
other with the eye of comparison and to find as to in what points they
fundamentally differ from their contemporaries, in the matter of doctrine and
religious experience. This task of comparison entails re-assessment of the ancestral
heritage of each religion and this process of re-assessment is by far the most
hopeful sign which promises the emergence of a world religion and a world
society.
Joachim Wach (1898-1955) of the Chicago School of the latest
theological speculations in Europe, emphasises three aspects of religion (1)
Theoretical is, religious ideas and images,
(2) the practical or behavioural and (3) the institutional, that is, how its
values tend to shape the institutions that express them. In the alternative religions may
be grouped (1) according to their conception of the Divine, (2) according to
the type of piety they foster, that is the human .type they produce and insert into society and the stream of
history.
To
distinguish Sikhism from the other higher and world religions, therefore, it is
necessary to point out the broad points of agreement between Sikhism and the
other religions, as well as the points of difference.
It is
a common postulate of all higher religions of mankind that there is a spiritual
Presence which mysteriously sustains the universe of phenomena and that it is
this spiritual Presence which is absolutely real. Indeed, it is the silent
premise of all human knowledge and awareness that all that is visible is
grounded in the invisible; all that is rational has its roots in the irrational
all that is felt and sensed sprouts from the mysterious, the incomprehensible.
A contemplation of this ‘unknown’ is the beginning of ‘the idea of the holy’
referred to as, bismadu, ‘a sense of awe and wonder’, in the Sikh
scripture 5 and an abiding empathy with it as the goal and fruit of
religion.6
In all
history of human thought, people have always divided, tacitly, the world into
the ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ and they have always understood that the visible
world accessible to their direct observation and examination represents but a
small fraction perhaps even something unreal, in comparison with the really
existent world. In all the human systems of thought, the scientific systems,
the philosophical systems and the religious systems, is recognised this division
between the ‘seen’ and the ‘unseen’, no matter under what names or definitions.
In the two thousand years old, the first Samskrit text of versified narration, Valamiki’s
Ramayan, two basic concepts occur,
again and again, in
narrating secular events divya, the ‘luminous subtle’, and adrista the
‘unseen invisible’.
In science the invisible world is the world of ‘small quantities’, and also the world of large quantities.
The visibility of the world is determined by its scale. The invisible world, on
the one hand is the world of micro-organisms, cells, the microcosmic and the
ultra-microscopic world; still further, it is the world of molecules, atoms,
electrons, vibrations, and, on the other hand, the world of invisible stars,
other solar systems, unknown universes. The microscope expands the limits of
our vision in one, telescope, in the other. But both enlarge visibility very
little in comparison
with what remains invisible. Physics and Chemistry show us the possibility of
investigating the phenomenon in such small quantities or in as distant worlds,
as will never be visible to us.
In philosophy there is the world of events and the world of
causes, the world of phenomenon and the world of numenon, the world of things
and the world of ideas.
In all religions, most developed and the most primitive, there
is a division of the world into the visible and invisible: in Christianity,
gods, angels, devils, demons, souls, of the living and the dead, heaven or hell; in paganism, gods
personifying forces of nature, thunder, sun, fire, spirits of mountains, lakes,
water-spirits, house-spirits, all this is the invisible world. The same is the
case with Islam, Hinduism and Mahayana.
Mathematics
goes even further. It conceives of and calculates such relations between
magnitudes and such relations between these relations as have nothing similar
in the visible world. Thus, we are forced to admit that the invisible world
differs from the visible world not only in size but in some other properties
which we can neither define nor understand, and further that, the laws
discovered by us for the visible world cannot refer or apply to the invisible
world.
In this manner, the invisible worlds, the scientific, the
philosophical and the religious worlds, are, after all, more closely related to
each other than they would, at first sight, appear to be and these invisible worlds of different categories
possess identical, common properties, (1) incomprehensibility and (2) being
the matrix of the ground and causes of the phenomenon of the visible world. “No
phenomenon can ‘become independently of the invisible Being, and the entire
visible world is strung on the single thread of this Being”.7
The
idea of ‘Causes’ is always bound up, associated with, the invisible world. In
the world of religious systems, invisible forces govern people and the visible
phenomenon. “All that becomes and all that passes away, all that is visible and
all that is invisible, the whole of creation and the entire cosmos, all that is
and exists, (here and there) is supported and governed by a single absolute
Power.” 8
“It is this invisible Power, that is causer of all causes”. 9
Man
has always understood that the ‘causes’ of the visible and observable
phenomenon lie beyond the sphere of his observation and they inhere in “the
Power unseen that is the matrix of all the invisible regions.” 10
In this postulate Sikhism agrees with the higher living
religions of the world such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.
Another postulate of these higher
religions is that man finds himself not only in need of arriving at an awareness
of this absolute Reality, but also to be in communion with it, in touch with
it. There is a basic urge in man which demands that unless this is done he
cannot feel himself at home in the world in which he finds himself born and
living. “Outside nearness to gracious God, where
else there is rest and peace for man”? 11
This
is an implicit postulate of all the aforementioned higher and living religions
and Sikhism is in agreement with them in accepting this postulate.
With
regard to the nature of this spiritual Presence which lies behind and sustains
the world of phenomena, it is agreed by all these higher living religions that
it is not contained in and is greater than either some of the phenomena or the
sum total of the phenomena, including the man himself. The Rigveda says
that only “one fourth of Him ·is the entire Creation, while the remaining three fourths of Him
is in the luminous invisible regions of immortality.” 12 Sikhism
agrees with this. “Greater than the sum-total of the entire cosmic phenomenon,
the created world is He.” 13
All
these great religions agree with each other in asserting that the nature of
this absolute Reality, which lies behind and sustains the phenomena, has an
aspect which is neutral and which is impersonal. The nirvana of Buddhism
and parbrahma of Hinduism, and the experience of the mystics of Islam
and Christianity affirm this aspect and characteristics of absolute Reality.
But they agree also that this absolute Reality has a personal aspect too. The
Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism,
Christianity and Islam are all agreed that the absolute Reality has a face
which is personal, in the sense in which a human being is a person, and that
human beings encounter this personal face of the absolute Reality in the same
sense in which one individual human being encounters another. What is a ‘person’? A ‘person’ must be distinguished from a ‘thing’
and ‘existence’ must
be distinguished from ‘being’.
‘Existence’ is that which manifests as ‘being’ in the consciousness of a ‘person’,
while ‘things’ and ‘persons’ both partake of the ‘being’.
‘Person’ as a substance is characterised by four attributes: (1) its ability to
think, feel, will etc., (2) its
unity as a present state of mind, (3) its historical unity, and (4) its being
aware of these two types of unity. The personal God of higher religions is
believed as having all these four attributes.
What
precisely this personal aspect is, whether it periodically
manifests itself only once-for-all and in a unique incarnation, is not universally agreed. But all these great living religions agree that the spiritual presence which
permeates and sustains the world of phenomena has a personal aspect. Mahayana
declares that this personal aspect of absolute Reality manifests itself in the
bodhisattavas and is plural. For Hinduism and for Christianity this
personal aspect is triune, i.e. it assumes the form of Brahma, Vishnu and
Shiva, or the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. In Islam this personal
aspect is deemed as Singular
in the form of one God, without a rival or co-partner, wahid-hu-, la-sharik. While in Hinduism and Christianity
this personal aspect communicates to man by assuming a human
form, in Judaism it directly speaks to man from behind an impenetrable veil of
a ‘burning bush’ and in Islam it does so indirectly through a supra human
messenger, Gabriel. In Sikhism, this communication is direct14, as
Sikhism repudiates the idea of divine incarnation. 15
Further, Sikhism,
while accepting that the personal aspect of the absolute Reality is singular;
declares this Person to be the Universal mind of which all other finite minds
are but emanations. “He is the light that incandesces all that shines”. 16
These finite minds are at each moment one with the
universal Mind, for, “He resides in every finite mind and every finite mind is
contained within Him”, 17 and the essence of their finitude being
eliminative and not productive. “Only such awareness a finite mind has, as God
enlightens him” 18 That what makes a mind finite and distinguished from the
universal Mind is what has been eliminated out of it and not what has been
produced by it. It is this universal Mind which Sikhism holds as the absolute
Reality and it is from this doctrine that the basic teaching of Sikhism declaring
ego-centricity, the self-centredness of infinite, individuated human mind, as the basic malaise
and alienation of the existential man 19, an annulment of which is
the main objective of religion. (1) To accept consciousness into altogether a
centric consciousness, characterised by utter dispassionate objectivity and
(3) to achieve
abiding communion with absolute Reality, the God, through the discipline of
Nam-yoga”. This
is all Sikhism. 20
Thus,
although Sikhism is largely in agreement with the basic postulates of the great
living religions of the world, it has its points of distinction which are not
less important and which when translated into action i.e. into the counsel
which it gives to mankind to attain its highest destiny, lead to practical
consequences which not only mark Sikhism from the other great religions but
also make it for peculiar interest to the modern man.
The ‘modern
man’, we, in this book, have equated
with ‘the layman’ to distinguish a
properly educated well-read man of to-day from a ‘specialist’, who, is trapped in his own self-imposed
limitations such as make him judge all human problems within the frame-work of
his own special domain.
Scientists
lay claim to the entire field of knowledge about the universe, including the human problems and
yet they themselves limit their claim by defining the universe in terms of the
observable phenomenon, observable by the human organs of sense and with their
tool-extensions, and including such things as sub-atomic particles whose
presence can be inferred only from their observable effects. This field of observation,
that is of sensory perception, is an
abstract from the totality of human experience and both are not the same. This
stupidity of the scientist has confused and befuddled the human intellect for
the past two hundreds years giving birth to anti-religion ideological monsters
and demons luring man into the Bermuda Triangle of socialism, communism and
secularism, that social transformations aimed at setting up utopias on this
earth through political upheavals and revolutions is the only and final
solution of the basic human problems.
The
human problems are a state of the psyche while the problems of material
well-being and affluence are only relatable to the problems of nerves, and that by tackling and solving the latter, one does not necessarily solve the
former, is being slowly and dimly realised by the lay-man today, thus focusing his attention on religion as a matter of top-priority
for the serious minded person. He
who does not understand the situation thus, about him Dr. A.N. Whitehead remarks:
“There
is no hope for a person who cannot distinguish between a state of nerves and
the state of the psyche”.
The layman of today, the modern
man, is under the assaultive
impact of two urgencies. One,
he must re-arrange his entire sum-total of ‘scientific thought’ so as to provide his judgemental
capacities with a new and all-comprehensive frame work,
and two, he must discover and adopt a religious way of life to come to terms with the absolute
Reality.
The
older world religions tend to persuade and tempt man to the ideal of ‘static perfection’, an idea associated with the
ancient Greek thinker, Parmenides, and subsequently embodied in Plato’s theory
of Ideas. These religions, therefore, great and profound as they are, appear to be somewhat inapplicable
to the human affairs as viewed by our ‘lay man’. Man needs for his fulfillment
not only the achievement of this or that ‘highest good’, the summum bonum, but hope and
enterprise and change, an
ever-alluring yet constantly receding numenous Vision. As Hobbes says : ‘felicity consisteth in prospering, not in having prospered’. Among
modern philosophers, therefore,
the idea of an unending, static,
unchanging bliss is replaced by an orderly and evolutionary progress towards a
goal which is never quite attained. This altered outlook comes from substitution
of dynamics for statics that began with Galileo and has increasingly affected
all modern thinking, scientific or political, secular or religious.
Such an ever-beckoning, constantly receding numenous Ideal is promised, par excellence, by Sikhism, its
teachings and technology, its
dogmatics and its basic Vision : “My Lord is ever new, new every
specious moment, and for ever and for ever more, the All-Bestower”. 21
1. Nanak so sukham soi asthul. — Sukhmani
2. hari simrani kio sagal akara. — Sukhmani
3. baba horu mati horu hore,
je sau ver kamaie,
kude kuda joru — Guru Granth Sahib
4. thal vic tin vastu paio sat santokh vicaro, amrit nam thakur ka
paio jiska sabhs adharo,
je ko khavaie je koo bhuncai tiska
hoe udharo; iha vastu taji na jai nit nil rakh urdharo — Guru Granth Sahib.
5. adi ka bicaru bismad kathiale.
6. dekh adrist rahau bismadi dukhu binsai sukhu ai jio.
7. tum te bhinn nahi.kicchu hoe, apan suti sabhu jagatu proe. — Sukhmani
8. avanu javan dristi andristi,
agiakari dhari sabh sristi.— Sukhmani
9. ki koran kunind hain. — Japu, Dasamgranth.
10. ki ghaibul ghaib hain. — ibid.
11. hari nahna miliai sajanai kol pale bisram. — Baramaha
12. Padah asya vishva bhutani triyapada asya amrtam divi. (X 90. 3)
13. vaduh vada vada medni. —Asa, paudi.
14. bhagat-sang prabhu gost karat — Guru Granth
15. so mukhu jalau jitu kahai thakur joni — ibid
16. Tisdai canani sabh mahi cananu hoe. — Dhanasri
17. man mahi api man apune mahi. — Sukhmani
18. jaisi mati dei taisa pargasu. — ibid.
19. haumai diragh rog hai. — Sikh Scripture
20. bhana manna,
hanta tiagan, satanamu simiran liv lagan.— As
explained to Bhai mani Singh, the martyr by the last Sikh Prophet, Guru Gobind
Singh.
21. sahib mera nit navan sada sada
datar. — Dhansari 
No comments:
Post a Comment