The Flight Of The Subtle Body III

Swami Chinmayananda

oi-Staff

By Super

Monday, March 25, 2013, 9:14

Ignorant men, who regard sacrificial and charitable acts as most important, do not know any other way to bliss. Having enjoyed in the heights of heaven, the abode of pleasures, they again enter this world or even inferior worlds. (Mundaka Upanisad, Chapter I. Section ll: 10)

Never was the world without the controversy between the two principles of life, namely, laborious extrovert action (karma) and peaceful introvert seeking (jnana). Karma and jnana have ever been at a tug-of-war, unbroken at all times. This endless controversy itself, we may say, was the main motive force which gave Hinduism such a perfect and exact science of spirituality. In the history of the world we find periods of karma yielding place to periods of jnana. Which in their turn, give place to karma again after a period of retirement and renunciation.

Meritorious acts are divided into two groups by our ancient Rishis, as we have already seen. In the above verse, however, scripture refuses to define the heavens, which are obtained by doing these two types of noble actions, as positive places of happiness. She only says that it is a plane of existence where the soul-killing sorrows of life are not present. She wants us to understand that, though in heaven there are none of the pains of mortal life, it is only relative happiness. The denizens in heaven are only creatures in pain, when their state is compared with the absolute state of perfection, which is the theme of the Upanishads.

In the above verse we also have a positive declaration against the optimistic view held by some of our pundits as well as the most sympathetic of gurus. According to them, once the ego receives the form of a human being, one can never go down to any lower plane of existence, whatever his actions are in life. This idea is being blasted in this mantra. It is also interesting to observe that a person can go down on the ladder of evolution to the existence of even a worm if he engages in deliberate criminal activities.

About The Author

Swami Chinmayananda

Swami Chinmayananda's lectures were an outpour of wisdom. He introduced the Geetha Gnana Yagna. He wrote a lot of books on spirituality, commentaries to Vedantic texts, children books etc. He then started spreading His teachings globally.