Each Breath a New Year!

The New Year is a time for renewal and self-improvement: right diet, exercise, attitude, wholesome activities, or spiritual practices such as meditation. While it has been well said that each new breath is a new life, few of us are so intensely and inwardly aware that we can experience this level of reality except occasionally. The cycles of nature, based especially on our sun’s movements (diurnal, seasonal, annual) are easier for most people to attune to.

If yours, however, is an eagle’s heart that views with impatience these plodding prompts of nature, consider that Paramhansa Yogananda counseled that “the minutes are more important than the years.” Our soul possesses the power to span time and space in an instant! We can change habits RIGHT NOW!

Meditation is the premier science that peels back the layers of emotion, movement, and thoughts (responding to thought, memory, or sensory stimuli). Meditation reveals the underlying energy and consciousness which makes possible our participation and awareness of the drama of life. This level of “Being” or consciousness is not some “thing” that science can isolate in a test tube. Consciousness is the Self-hood with which we perceive the world around us. Its presence can be observed by its effects (in movements of thought, feeling, and action) in the body but only intuition reveals it as our own natural state and essence of our Being. Consciousness is not an object separate from self-awareness. It is complete in itself. Contact with it in its own state is as revitalizing to our Life Force and overall well-being as sleep is refreshing to our body and nervous system.

While science’s forays to the very edge of suprasensory reality offer intimations of a vast reality of a super Consciousness beyond the senses, science can never prove the existence or the nature of this reality. As an ancient Hindu scripture says, “God cannot be proved” (by the intellect or the senses). (Here we, and the scriptures, speak of “God” as something far greater than a mere anthropomorphic projection born of human imagination.)

Both science and religion point us in the direction of this same infinite reality in that both teach that subtler forces govern the more physical forces of matter. Illustrative of this point are such facts as the enormous power released by splitting the tiny atom, the power of the mind over the health of the body or upon the success or failure of human enterprises, the greater value mature humans place upon health or friendship over wealth or position, and the power of prayer and grace in the transformation and upliftment of consciousness.

Unfortunately the practical value of this realization is eclipsed in the public awareness by a lesser teaching that, while based on the material sciences, has assumed the proportions of an unexamined religious dogma! We speak here of Darwinism, or more precisely, the teaching that the biological imperative to survive and procreate is itself sufficient to have produced life in all its diversity and complexity, including, in humans, the appearance of consciousness and the underlying motive behind all human behavior and ideals. In articles on the human brain, researchers speak unselfconsciously as if certain parts of the brain (pre-frontal lobes, for example) are themselves the cause and the source of higher human functioning such as we find in the arts, in personal sacrifice, and in compassion. Writers speak without trace of irony or doubt that these higher functions have developed for the express value of their contribution to one’s survival and procreation! Almost laughable (except that no one seems to be laughing) is the absurd lengths to which reason is tortured in order to attribute great works of art to social conditioning whose laudable end is nothing greater than the perpetuation of one’s bloodline!

So confident have some leading scientists become in concluding that they’ve sewn up the whole question of life on the basis of Darwinism, that they have made a name for themselves proclaiming the inescapable “fact” (i.e. dogma) of atheism. Blinded by pride, they imagine they can throw the final, knockout blow to religion by mocking the (sometimes admittedly) foolish and blind beliefs of orthodox religionists. (Orthodoxy has certainly given religion a bad name and deserves some of the scorn it has received.) Such scientists (and others) have, however, over-reached their own boundaries (of logic and proof). “Pride goeth before a fall!” Science may offer us many useful facts but can never explain the motive or purpose of the creation and of life itself. Simply because facts cannot provide a motive doesn’t logically mean there isn’t one — any more than failure to prove the existence of God (by scientist or theologian) proves conclusively that God does not exist!

That some scientists and scientifically-minded religionists have fallen into this trap is understandable enough. Reasoning that humans (and the consciousness which appears) evolved from the mud of matter, it makes “sense” that consciousness is merely a by-product of biological evolution. Having already concluded that evolution has the sole purpose of survival and procreation, consciousness itself could have no grander purpose either. As Freud and others have gleefully announced, man puts on “airs” in imagining himself noble and self-sacrificing. Surely baser motives and functions are in reality being satisfied, they have decided? Our culture has pounced on this to “make hay while the sun shines” and has justified all manner of self-indulgent behavior and lifestyles.

Few have considered an equally reasonable proposition and indeed a more likely alternative, considering both humankind’s own testimony of its motives, and for the fact that here we are asking these questions! Rather than saying matter (and all that evolves from it) is unconscious, why not posit that everything is conscious! Surely the grandeur, beauty, and complexity of the universe are more suggestive of intelligence and intention than blind, unconscious forces?  The simple fact that consciousness (and higher aspirations) must await the development of organs adequate to their expression (such as the human body, and advanced brain and nervous system) is as much a potential motive for that development as not. Just because a person cannot speak doesn’t mean he isn’t aware. Why would we expect a rock to manifest a humanly recognizable level of intelligence without organs of brain and speech? Yet, is not its innate intelligence at least hinted at in its crystalline structure, its enduring form, perhaps its beauty, and other properties? Might not the evolution of plants and animals toward the human level (with its power of reason and abstraction) be as much an impulse from above as a push from below? Or, rephrased, why might not the “push from below” have its origins in a higher awareness and purpose? Doesn’t this make more logical sense than to posit that a state of UNconsciousness “miraculously” endows an organism with a “desire” to survive, and even more unlikely, a “desire” to endure the perpetuation of its own genes? Doesn’t even the biological imperative beg the question (of the purpose and source of the intention)?

In this context then, the biological imperative for survival and procreation takes its rightful, necessary, and intelligent place. Alone, it is insufficient, however, to account for more than the most elemental level of evolutionary adaptation. In determining human behavior (where sheer survival has little to do with humankind’s highest achievements in art, science, literature, society, and spirituality) it is all but irrelevant.

Why then not consider the alternative: that the creation and the grand drama of evolution manifests a cosmic, rather than merely a biological, imperative! Let’s be both honest AND objective: the concerns, interests, and values that are the focus of human life go far beyond mere biology, survival, and procreation! And what might that cosmic imperative be? Why it’s simple: the birth of life, and with life’s birth the dawn of self-awareness! Just as a human requires years to learn to communicate and to grow to become a responsible adult, so is the entire cosmos is a child. The cosmos is also a backdrop and stage for the great drama of this cosmic imperative.

Admittedly, this view can no more be proved (by logic and reason) than the existence of God. But from the human perspective (which is the only one we can objectively admit to), is it not more reasonable in light of our human experience of life? Why, on the basis of supposed objectivity, must we deny humankind’s experience of life and the existence of our own, conscious intentions?   

Everyone, scientist or poet, with any degree of sensitive awareness, views with awe and inspiration the grand intelligence behind the beauty and vast complexity and interrelatedness of all creation. The saints of all religions teach us that God’s purpose for creation is that we, His children, discover His secret: that He exists! In so doing, we are invited to know and love Him and in this realization discover the truth that shall make us free. Creation is a game of hide and seek between the Creator and His Creation. To those asleep in subconsciousness, the creation hides the Creator. To those who are awakening to higher consciousness, the creation begins to reveal His presence. Through those, the saints, who have awakened in God, He speaks and teaches us. The vistas of time and space over which this “lila” (or drama) takes place are unimaginably vast, compared to the span of one human life. But for God, infinite and infinitesimal, and who is beyond time and space and yet present in every atom of space, these vistas exist in the eternal present.  Those great ones, the saints, who have demonstrated power of over life and death surely deserve a hearing at least equal to the high priests of science? Might we, too, like our Father, have existed from eternity and return life after life to fulfill the cosmic play? Is this not more “reasonable” than the stark view that we are but upright animals, mere creatures of the mud? Does not creation teach us that life persists, multiplies, diversifies even in the face of death and destruction, thus hinting at a higher purpose?

Our apologies to those who find the length of this article exceeding our normal allotment, but a clearer and more complete exposition can be found, and indeed is our inspiration, in Swami Kriyananda’s landmark book, Out of the Labyrinth. Far more is at stake in these precepts than may appear at first: ironically, the survival of the human race requires a new basis for idealism and cooperation. Orthodox religion is inadequate; legislation is powerless; warfare is self-destructive; economic power tends to exploit. The present model of competition based on precepts of the survival of the fittest are ill equipped for the health of a planet whose diverse nations, races, life forms, and cultures must learn to live together in harmony in order to survive.

So at this time of New Year reflections, let us survey the grand scheme of life that we might re-commit to life’s highest and most noble purpose! Resurrect the soul from its tomb of indifference, rote habits, and attachment to bodily comforts.”The time for knowing God has come” Paramhansa Yogananda declared. Our own culture is all too steeped in materialism on the one hand and blind dogmatic beliefs on the other. God needs soldiers of light to live creatively, unselfishly, simply, and with devotion to God, and love for God in all. Meditation has come into increasingly popular use to show humankind the nonsectarian pathway to inspiration, fellowship, and to the presence of God, our one Father-Mother, Beloved, and Friend. Kriya Yoga, the highest and most advanced technique of meditation for this age, has come for those eagle hearts who wish to soar in Spirit’s own land. In the temple of silence, learn to part the veil of maya (delusion) that hides us from the face of God.

Blessings,

Hriman and Padma