The Aim of Human Existence – Part 1/3 : 1. Swami Krishnananda

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Monday, February 13,  2023. 06:00.

Philosophy :

(Spoken at a Conference in Delhi on Sept. 20, 1980)

Post-1.

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We have been asked to express our ideas on today's theme, the aim of human existence. It would appear that an impertinent world of mankind is seeking a pertinent answer to its questions when it asks for means of security and safety from immanent dangers that can threaten its existence from various corners of the world. Mankind seems to be asking for a gain for which it has not worked and does not intend to strive; yet it is not fully conscious of a gulf that seems to be there between what is sought, and the direction in which mankind is moving. We seem to be placing ourselves in a world of quandary.

Is there anything existent that you see with your eyes? We see only movements of things and a decomposition of bodies – a transformation of the structure of things – so that there is visible before our eyes a continuous incessant restless movement rather than a being or an existence of anything. To conceive of an aim of existence there should be a pith of reality, a kernel of significance beneath and behind the vicissitudes of transformation, movement, and the restlessness of life.

The principle of existence cannot be seen with our eyes. What we see, what is tangible to our senses, is a process which is the historical movement of nature, which again includes everything that mankind's values are. What we are, what anything is, is a part of nature; and the purposes of nature are also our purposes. We cannot have an aim which is different from the aims of nature, because we are constituents of a vast setup called natural phenomenon.

We too are phenomena because we are born, we grow, we decay, and by a process of decomposition we seem to be annihilated totally. We do not hear of the being of anyone who has been physically decomposed and wiped out of existence. Where is being, and where is existence? Anything can be reduced to its ultimate constituents, which appear to demonstrate a character within themselves which is far from anything that can be designated as being. It is not for nothing that a genius like Buddha proclaimed that the world is a procession and not a being. It is transiency and not existence. It is death rather than life. This was a strange picture painted before us by stalwarts who experimented with these techniques of investigating phenomena and found nothing at their base.

The struggle for a meaning behind life, a search for values which are permanent in their nature, is no doubt ingrained in our being, which is essentially becoming. We have no idea in our minds to be annihilated at any time, though it appears that nothing can stand this ultimate requirement of utter transformation to the point of non-existence. What we see with our eyes does not seem to be capable of giving an answer to what our heart seeks. Our perception is sensory; and our arguments, which are intellectual, do not seem to collaborate with the demands of a point in our own selves which refuses to be reduced to a point of becoming or transiency, because the recognition of the transiency of things itself is an answer to the question of whether there is anything called existence at all. Transiency does not recognise transiency, a procession does not know there is a procession, and death cannot explain life. Thus it is that it appears to us. There is a point significant in our own lives which is qualitatively different from the quantitative expanse of the life that is perceptible as phenomena before our eyes; and our dread of the world's movements these days is a direct consequence of our identification of being with becoming.

The core of our existence has got somehow or other mixed up with the vicissitudes of perceptible phenomena; and as a lion can become a sheep by living in the midst of sheep, the principle that seeks an answer to the question of the aims of existence, getting identified with a process which cannot give this answer, is finding itself in a helpless position. And while we weep contemplating our woes, not finding an answer to the problems raised by life in its totality, we yet seek an answer to the problems.

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To be continued

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