“I couldn’t believe in a God who wasn’t better than the
ordinary decent man. The monks told me that God had created the world for his
glorification. That didn’t seem to me a very worthy object. Did Beethoven
create his symphonies for his glorification? I don’t believe it. I believe he
created them because the music in his soul demanded expression & then all
he tried to do was to make them perfect as he knew how”.
“I used to listen to the monks repeating the Lord’s Prayer;
I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly
father to give them their daily bread. Do children beseech their earthly father
to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel nor need
to feel gratitude to him for doing it, & we have only to blame for a man
who brings children into the world that he can’t or won’t provide for. It seems
to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures
with the necessities of existence, material and spiritual, he’d have done better
not to create them”.
“It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a
man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought
the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights”
“But that wasn’t the chief thing that bothered me; I
couldn’t reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin which, so far as I
could tell, was never entirely absent from monks’ thoughts. For the most part,
I think, that generally the badness in people was due to heredity, which they
could not help, or their environment, which they didn’t choose; I’m not sure
that society wasn’t more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I‘d
been God I couldn’t have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the
worst, to eternal damnation. The reverend Father preaching in the church was
broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God’s presence, but
if that is such an intolerable punishment that can justly be called hell, can
one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all He created men; if He so
created them that it was possible for them to sin, it was because He willed it.
If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into my
backyard, it wouldn’t be fair to beat him when he did so”.
If an all-good & all-powerful God created the world, why
did he create evil? The monk said, so that the man by conquering the wickedness
in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain, sorrow & misfortune as
the trials sent by the God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to
receive His grace. It seemed to me like sending a fellow with a message to some
place & just to make it harder for him you construct a maze that he had to
go through, then dug a moat that he had to swim, and finally build a wall that
he had to scale. I wasn’t prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn’t
common sense. I didn’t see why you shouldn’t believe in a God who hadn’t
created the world, but had to make the best of the bad job he’d found, a being
enormously better, wise, and greater than man, who strove with the evil he
hadn’t made & who you hoped might in the end overcome it. But on the other
hand, I didn’t see why you should.
The good fathers & priests had no answers that satisfied
either my head or my heart to the question that perplexed me.
“I found that the Hindus believed not halfheartedly, not
with reservation or uneasy doubt, but with every fiber of their being. I never
got over the wonder of it. The Hindus believe that the Universe has no
beginning & no end, but passes everlastingly from growth to equilibrium,
from equilibrium to decline, from decline to dissolution, from dissolution to
growth, & so on to all eternity”!
And what does the Hindu think is the object of this
recurrence?
The Hindus believe that such is the nature of the Absolute.
They say that the purpose of creation is to serve as a stage for punishment or
reward of the deeds of the soul’s earlier existence. The soul passes from body
to body in an endless course of experience occasioned by merit or demerit of
previous works! This belief in transmigration of souls has a very practical
effect on the lives of those who believe it! After all that is the test.
What is the journey to ones goal? Liberation from the
bondage of rebirth. According to the Vedantists the self, which they call the
atman & we call the soul, is distinct from the body & its senses,
distinct from the mind & its intelligence; it is not part of Absolute, for
Absolute, being infinite, can have no part, but the Absolute itself. It is
uncreated; it has existed from eternity & when at last it has cast off the
seven veils of ignorance will return to the infinitude from which it came. It
is like a drop of water that has arisen from the sea & in a shower has
fallen into a puddle, then drifts into a brook, finds its way into stream,
after that into a river, passing through mountain gorges & wide plains,
winding this way & that, obstructed by rocks & fallen trees, till it
reaches the boundless sea from which it rose.
But poor little drop of water, when it has once more become
one with the sea, has surely lost its individuality.
“Yes! You want to taste sugar; you don’t want to become
sugar. What is individuality but the expression of our Egoism? Until the soul
has shed the last traces of that it cannot become one with the Absolute”.
What does Absolute actually signify?
“Reality! You can’t say what it is; you can only say what it
isn’t. It’s inexpressible. The Indians call it Brahman. It’s nowhere &
everywhere. All things imply & depend upon it. It’s not a person, it’s not
a thing, and it’s not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence
and change; whole and part; finite and infinite. It is eternal because its
completeness & perfection are unrelated to time. It is truth &
freedom”.
But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to
the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they
can turn in distress for comfort & encouragement.
It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will
show them that they must look for comfort & encouragement in their own
souls. I think that the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old
remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that the God is
within me or nowhere. If that’s so whom or what am I to worship – myself? Men
are on different levels of development, & so the imagination of India has
evolved the manifestation of the Absolute that are known as Brahma, Vishnu,
& Mahesh & by hundred other names. The Absolute is Isvara, the creator,
& ruler of the world & it is in the humble fetish before which the
peasant in his sun-baked field places the offering of a flower. The
multitudinous gods of India are but expedients to lead to the realization that
the self is one with the supreme itself.
Is it not just austere faith?
“Not at all! I’ve always felt that there was something
pathetic in founders of other religions who made condition of salvation that
you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith
in themselves. They remind you of the old pagan gods who grew ineffective &
weak if they were not sustained by the burnt offerings of the devout”.
Advaita doesn’t ask you to take anything on trust; it asks
only that you should have a passionate craving to know Reality; it states that
you can experience God as surely as you can experience joy or pain.
“I found something wonderfully satisfying in the notion that
you can attain Reality by knowledge. They recognize that the true path to
salvation is won by the way of love & the way of works called the Karma.
But it is never denied that the noblest way, though the hardest, is the way of
knowledge, for its instrument is the most precious faculty of man, his reason.
According to Hindu religion they teach that man is greater
than they know & that wisdom is the means to freedom. India has taught that
it is not essential to retire from the world for achieving salvation, but to
only renounce the self. Work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind
& that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink the separate self
& become one with the universal self”.
“I went up to the forest retreat in the evening & got up
before dawn. I climbed to the spot from where you could see the sunrise &
the valley below. I waited. It was night still, but the stars were pale in the
sky, & day was at hand. I had a strange feeling of suspense. So gradually
that I was hardly aware of it, light began to filter through the darkness,
slowly, like a mysterious figure slinking between the trees. I felt my heart
beating as though at the approach of the danger. The sight that was displayed
before me was simply grand as the day broke in its splendour. The sun rose.
Those mountains with their deep jungle, the mist still entangled in the tree
tops, the bottomless lake far below me. The sun caught the lake through the
cleft in the heights & shone like burning steel. I was ravished with beauty
of the world. I’d never known such exaltation & such a transcendent joy. I
had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet & traveled up to
my head, & I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body & as
pure spirit partook of loveliness. I had never conceived. I had a sense that
knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that was confused
was clear & everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy
that it was pain & I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that
if it lasted a moment longer I should die; & yet it was such rapture that I
was ready to die rather that forgo it. No words can tell the ecstasy of my
bliss”.
What makes you think that it was anything more than a
hypnotic condition induced by your state of mind combined with solitude, the
mystery of dawn, and the burnished steel of your lake?
“Only my overwhelming sense of reality! An experience of the
mystics, it is impossible to deny the fact of its occurrence, the only
difficulty is to explain it. As if for a moment I was one with the Absolute.
Does the idea of Absolute forces you to believe that the
world & its beauty are merely an illusion --- the fabric of Maya.
It’s a mistake to think that the Indians look upon the world
as an illusion; they don’t; all they claim is that it’s not real in the same
sense as the Absolute. Maya is only a speculation devised by those ardent
thinkers to explain how the Infinite could produce the Finite. Samkara, the
wisest of them all, decided that it was an insoluble mystery. You see, the
difficulty is to explain why Brahman, which is Being, Bliss, and intelligence,
which is unalterable, which is ever and forever maintains itself in rest, which
lacks nothing and needs nothing and so knows neither change nor strife, which
is perfect, should create the world. Well, if you ask that question the answer
you’re generally given is that the Absolute created the world in sport without
reference to any purpose. But when you think of flood and famine, of earthquake
and hurricane and all the ills that flesh is heir to, your moral sense is
outraged at the idea that so much that is shocking can have been created in
play. Saints of Indian look upon the world as the expression of the Absolute
and as the overflow of its perfection. God cannot help creating and that the
world is the manifestation of his nature. When I asked how, if the world was a
manifestation of the nature of a perfect being, it should be so hateful that
the only reasonable aim man can set before him is to liberate himself from its
bondage, The saint answered that the satisfactions of the world are transitory
and that only the Infinite gives enduring happiness. But endless duration makes
good no better, nor white any whiter. If the rose at noon has lost the beauty
it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is
permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re
still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of
the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the
premises of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice,
but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing
too.
‘The Aryans when they first came down into India saw that
the world we know is but an appearance of the world we know not; but they
welcomed it as gracious and beautiful; it was only centuries later, when the
exhaustion of conquest, when the debilitating climate had sapped their vitality
so that they became a prey to invading hordes, that they saw only evil in life
and craved for liberation from its return. But why should we of the West be
daunted by decay and death, hunger and thirst, sickness, old age, grief, and
delusion? The spirit of life is strong in us. In old age it is not for the man
to leave the world and retire to a cloister, but to live in the world and love
the objects of the world, not indeed for themselves, but for the Infinite that
is in them. If in those moments of ecstasy I had indeed been one with the
Absolute, them, if what they said was true, nothing could touch me and when I
had worked out the Karma of my present life I should return no more. The
thought filled me with dismay. I wanted to live again and again. I was willing
to accept every sort of life, no matter what its pain and sorrow; I felt that
only life after life, life after life could satisfy my eagerness, my vigour,
and my curiosity’.
‘It may be that there is no solution or it may be that I’m
not clever enough to find it. Ramakrishna looked upon the world as the sport of
God. “It is like a game” he said. “In the game there are joy and sorrow, virtue
and vice, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil. The same cannot continue if
sin and suffering are altogether eliminated from the creation.”
The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested
itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never
have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror
of a convulsion of the earth’s curst. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in
what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it give
it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can’t make it anything but
fragile. If you drop it on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn’t
it possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only
exist in combination with evil?’
Living needs ‘calmness, forbearance, compassion,
selflessness, and continence.’
‘I should have thought that wisdom consisted in striking a balance
between the claims of the body and the claims of the spirit’.
‘That is just what the Indians maintain that we in the West
haven’t done. They think that we with our countless inventions, with our
factories and machines and all they produce, have sought happiness in material
things, but that happiness rests not in them, but in spiritual things. And they
think the way we have chose leads to destruction.
Money is nothing to us; it’s merely the symbol of success.
We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we’ve set
our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man
can set before himself is self-perfection. ‘Isn’t it worth while to try to live
up to?
‘But can you for a moment imagine that you, one man, can
have any effect on such a restless, busy, lawless, intensely individualistic
people as the people of America? You might as well try to hold back the waters
of the Mississippi with your bare hands.’
“I can try! It was one man who invented the wheel. It was
one man who discovered the law of gravitation. Nothing that happens is without
effect. If you throw a stone in a pond, the universe isn’t quite the same as it
was before. It’s a mistake to think that those holy men of India lead useless
lives. They are a shining light in the darkness. They represent an ideal that
is refreshment to their fellows; the common man may never attain it, but they
respect it and it affects their lives for good. When a man becomes pure and
perfect the influence of his character spreads so that they who seek truth are
naturally drawn to him. It may be that I lead the life I’ve planned for myself;
it may affect others; the effect may be no greater than the ripple caused by a
stone thrown in a pond, but one ripple causes another, and that one a third;
it’s just possible that a few people will see that my way of life offers
happiness and peace, and that they in their turn will teach what they have
learnt to others”.
Extracts from ‘The Razor’s Edge’ by Somerset Maugham
Collected by Shriratan Daga
