In our ‘enlightened’ story of creation, we emerged from nothing with a Big Bang and all of this vast ~ but measurable ~ universe will one day dissolve back into … nothing. And here we are, between the bang and the dissolution, our lives serving nothing more than a ‘selfish gene’ that ~ the authors of this theory would have us believe ~ uses our individual existence to perpetuate itself.
So, we find ourselves, in this 21st century, with a sense of purposelessness that has been growing since we ‘killed God’. We read the headlines and listen to the news about the growing mental health crisis. Those of us in touch with people through our teaching have become aware that many are experiencing a deep existential crisis: questioning if there is any meaning to our existence
What can a simple Yoga class offer when faced with this crisis of our own making?
The Banyan Tree Seed
In his thought-provoking book God ~ A Human History2 the author writes,
“We are homo religious, not in our desire for creeds or institutions, nor in our commitments to specific gods and theologies, but in our existential striving towards transcendence: towards that which lies beyond the manifest world.”
Science is wonderful ~ it offers us so much: from technology to do the hard work, to inter-planetary travel. However, on ‘meaning of life’ issues, it is silent and in its silence all it can do is produce the host of medications developed to dull us to the problem that besets us: we have killed God ~ and in so doing, we have silenced a whole and deep part of ourselves.
It does seem we have always sought something beyond what we can see, hear, taste, touch …and measure.
The Vedas ~ the oldest sacred texts of Hinduism ~ are said to be the outpourings of those seers who had entered an altered and transcendent state of consciousness beyond ‘the manifest world’. The first creation stanzas of the Rig Veda ~ thought to be the oldest scripture in the human family ~ offer us light in our questioning of the mystery of life in verses known as the Nasadiya Suktam3. In the Nasadiya this world we live in is not a creation, rather it is a manifestation:
There was neither death nor life then; neither night nor day;
Only the One was ~ breathing breathless by Itself.
Darkness covered darkness; emptiness covered the life-force and the unlit
unfathomable depths;
And then finally from the power and the heat, the One emerged,
And love arose in It ~ that was the first seed born in the mind of the One…
..
And towards the end of this Nasadiya Suktam, we find:
…only the wise who know to seek in the heart find this bond between existence and non-existence. …and they stretch that bond across the void …
To ‘stretch that bond across the void’ requires an awareness trained in stillness to observe. It is looking through the product of the mind ~thought ~ to the unknown, in the silence that lies beyond it.
The final portion of the Vedas are the Upanishads, where we find people in retreat from cities and civilizations, seeking the solitude of the forest where they shifted their enquiry from the world outside of themselves, and began to explore that transcendent self within.
One of my favourite Upanishads is the Chandogya4, which is found in the Samaveda. In it a father, named Udalaka, is pointing out to his son, Svetaketu, that there is a mystery behind life. The son is failing to grasp his father’s teaching and responds, ‘I do not understand what you are saying, Father.’
Udalaka tells his son to fetch a fruit off a banyan tree that grows near to where they are sitting.
Banyan trees are mighty: as their branches spread, new roots grow from the branches, drop to the ground and burrow deep into it, creating a new root structure, allowing a vast spread of one tree into what appears to be many trees. Svetakeu runs off and returns with the fruit.
The father says, ‘Break if open, son, and tell me what you find?’
Puzzled, the boy responds, ‘Some fruit pulp and seeds.’
The father instructs him to break open a seed. The boy breaks it open.
‘What do you see?’ his father asks.
‘Well, nothing really, father.’
‘And yet, my son, from that nothing, this mighty tree came into being.’
Udalaka is pointing his son ~ and all of us ~ towards the mystery that life is.
His ‘nothing’ is not an emptiness, it is the incomprehensible centre of our being that the great Karnataka poet, Akkamahadevi, called, “ …the Being of our becoming5”: the Centre that waits for our attention to shift from the periphery. It is the mystery that all of Yoga reminds us of and invites us to turn our gaze inwards and seek ~ ‘to stretch that bond across the void’.
This search negates neither science nor the marketplace, it does, however, offer something beyond them equally worthy of our attention. We might name the mystery differently in our different traditions: Brahman, God, Atman, Jehovah, etc. Our tragedy is that we too often reduce the mystery to the name we have bestowed on it. The ancient sages of Yoga offered something along with this naming: ‘neti, neti’ ~ ‘not this alone, not this alone’. Our naming does not confine or define The Mystery.
The mystery behind life, behind the manifestation of each one of us, cannot be named or described: it is forever the immeasurable, indescribable. Einstein, surely one of the greatest scientists of the last century, put it beautifully in his autobiographical notes6 when he said, “… there is something deeply hidden behind everything.”
The seeking of this mystery is Yoga… and it offers an alternative ending from the one given in the Nietzsche story we began with. In that the madman bemoans the fate of temples and churches as ‘the tombs and sepulchres of a dead God’; in Yoga we realise ourselves and all else as the sacred living expressions of that Mystery ~ there for our exploration.
References :
[1]
https://allpoetry.com/Parable-Of-The-Madman
[2] God ~ A Human History by Reza Aslan, Bantam Press,
2017
[3] Nāsadiya Sūktam from Book 10, vs 4&5 of the
Rigveda
[4] Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.10 – 6.14
[5] Songs for Siva Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi, translated by Vinaya
Chaitanya, 2017
[6] Autobiographical Notes, Albert Einstein: A Centennial
Edition, 1991.
©Swami Ambikananda, September 2024
