Human Existence

How important are we?

This question is only answerable in connection with the cause and purpose of our existence.

So, first we have to verify what the purpose of our existence is. We need to have a clear understanding of the values of life.

Someone may be very knowledgeable; others may be very expert in music; others may have good memory, and some may be very skillful athletes. It is the same thing with beauty, wealth or any other attribute. Whatever we may have and whoever we may be, there is always somebody who has something more than us. So what is the actual value? How to determine, who has the best predisposition to find fulfillment in life?

Once I knew a boy, who had such a capacity of memory, that he had memorized entire telephone books of several cities. Of what value was that for him? I wouldn’t be able to tell. Of course, sometimes he would show off his incredible memory. Anybody could pick a book and ask him a name and a city. The boy would tell him the phone number. In cases like this, people can exhibit an extreme talent of one kind or the other.

But what is the value of this? From where does the concept of value arise? What is good? What is bad? How does a combination of sounds convey meanings? When and where are you supposed to take up responsibility and to behave according to a certain pattern of prescribed expectations? Where is the law? Who are you, to begin with, so that we can study this topic?

All this leads us to the greatest of all needs: Self-realization. Are we doing anything about this, or are we wasting our time buying pants, shirts, jewelry, entertaining ourselves with different things here in this world? We do not spend much time on self-realization. Thus our life is floating by fast, and we have not yet asked ourselves the most essential of all questions: Who am I and what makes my existence so valuable?

I must feel that my existence is very important. Otherwise, why would I work my entire life, only to sustain my existence? Of course sometimes, we are so lost and hopeless, that we are not able to see any value in our life. Then we may even sometimes conclude that the best choice of action would be to finish with our life. To finish with the many tasks, temptations, frustrations, which sometimes arrive at the point of seeming to be unbearable.

Then again our mood changes -- when we associate with positive minded people, and we again regain the previous appreciation towards our own life. This appreciation of your own life is the appreciation of the value of your existence. You cannot define it clearly; you don’t know what to do about it. You do not know how to develop it. And thus you do not have a strong standing. When we put all these questions to the transcendental tradition of Vedic wisdom, we find that we are positively surprised and we are freed from uncertainty at once.

In Vedic wisdom , existence is defined by desire. Because I exist, I desire. It is said, because I think, therefore I am. But the Vedas say, because you desire, it is proof, that you have a standing, a reality in this temporary existence and that you are unique -- an individual conscious unit. Individuality is to a certain extent characterized by independence. The capacity of considering options, moving ourselves about and making decisions, all these are characteristics of our individuality. As individuals we are independent to do whatever we want, but at the same time we have to take responsibility for whatever we do.

This is a simple fact about existence.

According to the Vedas, our existence is eternal, or Sad. But more than that, it is also Cid. Cid is the cognitive capacity. It means that we are conscious beings. What does that mean?

Consciousness

In the Vedic scriptures we can find the expression: Satyam Shivam Sundaram “There is nothing more beautiful or more auspicious, than the truth” or “the truth is auspicious and beautiful.” Through cid, through awareness, through consciousness, we can define where our path towards the truth is. In other words, my position as an individual unit is not lost; it is not shot into space without any purpose or direction. My feet are firmly on the ground of reality and they can carry me on my way to fulfillment.

But in which direction am I going? There are plenty of directions and one gets very confused about it.

The individual conscious unit is trying to define the meaning of truth. What is beautiful and auspicious? What is the truth? What is my participation in the truth? Can I contemplate it? Can I enjoy and consume it?

Our conscious unit has already explored so many areas of consciousness and knowledge and has never been able to gain any permanent satisfaction. For that reason we keep on studying more things, reading more books and doing further research. But this search has no end. We are always chewing the chewed, as long as we do not abandon the incorrect conception, that fulfillment of life can be achieved at the cost of others. We think that everyone and everything, all the living entities and nature exist to satisfy our needs and desires.

The Vedas give us a totally different approach. They say: We are here to learn how to love everybody. By having this purpose, our consciousness is put into a pleasant mood and set off in the direction of realizing Satyam Shivam Sundaram.

You have to go on, struggle and reach fulfillment during your existence. You cannot be satisfied with anything less than that. This is the living application of self-realization - working in a way that is loving and beneficial for everyone.

Relations with others

We are aware of so many circumstances of life, but it is very difficult to know how we can relate in a positive way to others. The reason for this is that we do not know who the others are. We do not even know who we are, and how all of us came into existence. Nevertheless, there is one thing we can understand or we can feel. We know that we have to establish relationships with others. And of course, the more these relationships are loving and sweet, that more we are likely to feel happy and fulfilled. On the contrary, everyone knows the suffering and problems that are a result of disturbed relationships.

In order to establish loving relationships, we have to find a common denominator. What is common and acceptable to all of us? There may be some group of relative interests and people may find themselves fully satisfied with these interests, but practically seen and understood by the Vedic wisdom, all these interests are temporary. They can change at any moment and we may find ourselves again in a problematic situation. So our common denominator, if we are ready or not to accept it, is the Creator of the whole existence. He is father and mother at the same time and by that fact we are all brothers and sisters in a very special way. It is really breathtaking to imagine that we are all brothers and sisters. This is the truth. We can even see it with our own eyes. Let us look at Mother Nature. Mother Nature is everybody’s mother and nobody can deny and say I came out of myself, I supplied my own ingredients and I do not have to say thank you to anybody. No. We are all standing in front of Mother Nature with reverence and have to submit to Her laws, whether we like it or not. So if we consider nature, the material nature, as our mother, then we have to understand that there must be a father also. The Vedas explain that Mother Nature, has been impregnated by the supreme power of all the powers. And that is the sweet will of God.

Our life comes from the Supreme

Why are we supposed to approach the origin of supreme power? Because it has given us life. So, He must be more alive than me, because He has given life not only to me, but to all of us. He is therefore the Supreme life-force. We all have life-force, because as soon we do not have life-force in our body, the body becomes useless. It can be burned or put into a grave. The life-force is really important. The life-force within us is the soul but now we are talking about the Supreme life-force. We are talking about the one who has given the life-force to each and everyone of us and who has impregnated us into the womb of material energy and supplied us with our respective bodies and subtle bodies as well. We are all individual spiritual units living a conditioned existence under certain physical, mental, and intellectual circumstances, which were produced by our previous activities.

We have the father, who impregnated the conscious units (meaning us) into matter. He is the same father for all of us. Not that each one of us has his own father. Physically we do, but spiritually we don’t have different fathers. We all have the same Supreme Father and therefore we are brothers and sisters and the proposal, that we are here to learn how to love each other, is a very good proposal. It is a very decent proposal.

Now, to have a positive relationship, each one of us patting the other on the back and saying, dear brother, dear sister... this is not enough. There is something more. Even by hugging each other we still do not get the pleasure our heart is longing for. Otherwise any happy married couple would say: we do not need anything more, we are happy, we are married, we love each other, and we have reached the perfection of our existence with our marriage. But no married couple ever reports such a thing. On the contrary, what they report is that it is very hard to sustain the relationship.
(see CD9-10)

Love is part of our Existence

Relationships are not solely about hugging. Here we are talking about something much more sublime. Something much more elevated. Something in the realm of spiritual love. The domain, where we have to enter is: Ananda. Ananda is the pleasure giving energy of the Lord.

Sac Cid Ananda. Ananda is born in the Lord’s love and out of the Lord’s love, the whole creation was manifested. What is the use of feeling, if you can’t feel love? You can feel fear; you can feel excitement; you can feel frustrations; but that’s not the primary reason why we have gotten this capacity for feeling. The feeling of love and the desire to give oneself in Divine love is something most valuable in our life. This is a very important and wonderful aspect of life and if during our life we go further in this direction, we will be increasingly happy and joyful. We will get rid of all the pains we usually experience. Real love is part of us since it is present in the very seed of our existence. A seed has many properties which manifest themselves slowly. Everybody has a hair color, but it is already encoded in the makeup of the seed that our hair color will start disappearing as we grow older.

What does this mean? Everything was part of that seed. You do not become 500 years old if it is not encoded in that seed. No one has got that type of seed, except the Galapagos turtles. We have to see that our seeds possess certain proportions, potentials and properties. Our propensity to love is definitely there, and it will always pop up asking for attention. In the same way that we have to give attention and care to a seed for it to grow well, we have to do the same for our love in order for it to manifest. This attention and care is provided by the process of hearing about the divine purpose of life and by putting what is heard into practice. It is our intention in OIDA-therapy to provide a possibility for discussion about Divinity and the Divine principles of life.

The three modes of the material nature – A Story

The following is a very nice little story that describes the three modes of material nature. Once there was a thief assisted by two friends who were also thieves. The three decided that they would rob a person. So they waited in the forest next to a path. Then, when one traveler was passing by, the three thieves jumped out, caught him and dragged him inside the forest.

One of the thieves said: “Let’s take everything he has and then let’s kill him, so that he cannot say anything about who robbed him.”

The other thief said: “You know I don’t think it is a good idea to kill him. We will unnecessarily bloody our hands. We should just tie him to a tree here. We will go away and he will die by himself.“

The others said, “Ok let’s do that.” So they tied him to a tree with ropes and took all his belongings and than they went away. After traveling for some time, the third robber changed his mind and went back. He untied the robbed man. Then he told him:

“Listen. You go this way. That way you can go back to the city and you will be safe. I did not want you to die here, tied to a tree.”

Then the man said: “Oh, you are such a nice fellow. You saved my life. Of course first you robbed me but now you are saving my life. So why don’t you come with me? I’ll get you a job in the city. I‘ll help you to get settled.”

The robber then said: “Sorry. I cannot go with you, because I am a thief. If I go to the city, they will catch me and put me in jail. So you go alone and get saved and I’ll stay here with my robber friends.”

The explanation of the story is that the robber who wanted to kill the person immediately was in ignorance. He did not care about anything. Just kill him; let’s just get it done.

The robber in passion was always calculating: “Oh, let’s do it this way; that way; but always in my interest.”

And the robber who was in the mode of goodness, he thought: “Let’s take his money, but let him go. Let’s not harm him.”

Another analogy can be made by comparing the three modes of material nature to chains. If you are chained up in the mode of goodness, your chain is made of gold. In the mode of passion your chain is made of copper. In the mode of ignorance your chain is made of iron. But actually it does not matter what the chain is made of. If you are chained, then you are not free. Even if you are chained by a chain of gold, you’re still chained and you are not free. Somebody may very proudly announce: “I am chained by gold! And you fools, you are chained by iron!”; but what does it change?

According to the Vedic tradition, the healing circle is synonymous with consciousness in the mode of goodness. The mode of goodness is part of the Vedic description of how everything in this world is divided into three modes of nature. The three modes of material nature control the living entities to a certain degree according to the activities in their past lives. These influences – ignorance, passion and goodness – are mentioned again and again. They produce all kinds of natures and behaviors in humankind. We can compare them to the three primary colors (red, blue and yellow), and when they are mixed together all other colors can be created. It is in the mode of goodness that living entities can get clarity about their position in this material world. And it is by mixing with activities and influences from the lower modes that we enter into diseased conditions. But the mode of goodness is also not perfect. That is why the evolution of consciousness goes far beyond of just being a good person in this world. The healing circle draws all the best qualities from everyone, who is progressing seriously on this mystical path.

Even when you are in the mode of ignorance and passion, still there are choices to be made. The principle choice is, whether you are willing to move towards the mode of goodness or not. In the graphics, these three modes of nature appear as three circles, but in the practical life, obviously they intermingle. (See CD35)

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