preachers of Vedanta Philosophy since the time of Shankaracharya, die so young? Just
like Shankaracharya, Swami Vivekananda too did not live long and left his physical body
at the early age of 39. Now even though Swamiji, as he was called
suffered from many ailments such as diabetes and asthma, nevertheless on the day of his
passing he was actually in good health and in a jovial mood during breakfast.
So what caused him to die so young? Actually behind the passing of every evolved soul such
as Swami Vivekananda, there is a greater spiritual reality hidden which we ordinarily do not
grasp. But luckily for us Swamiji himself revealed the truth in great detail.
About 6 years before his passing, sometime in August of 1896, Vivekananda confided to
his brother disciple Swami Abhedananda that he was going to live only for 5 or 6 years
more at most. How accurate was this prediction, for Swami
Vivekananda passed away 6 years hence on July 4th 1902.
When Swami Abhedananda protested
saying a young man like him should not think of death, Vivekananda replied: You do not
understand. My soul is getting bigger and bigger every day; so much so that the body
can hardly contain it. Any day it may burst this cage of flesh and bone.
Now what did Swamiji mean when he said that his soul was getting bigger. Here is the explanation.
The soul is nothing but pure consciousness.
So what Swami Vivekananda meant was that his
consciousness was expanding so much beyond the realms of ordinary human consciousness,
to the domain of the super-conscious that the body was proving an inadequate container
and would soon have to be let go. To better understand this point let us delve
into Vedanta philosophy for just a few moments. According to Vedanta philosophy, consciousness
is a field which exists separate from the body. This field of consciousness is a continuum
which means that it goes on endlessly in all directions like an infinite ocean.
For the sake of simplicity I will draw it as follows the yellow bar representing
the infinite field of consciousness.
Now our individual souls can be thought of as a portion
of this continuous field of consciousness. Thus what we normally experience as human
consciousness is only a small subsection of the infinite range of consciousness. The vast
majority of which lies beyond the realm of ordinary human experience.
Here I would like to point out that many times what we call as paranormal or psychic phenomena
fall in this zone. This is similar to light, where we are able to see only a few frequencies
out of the full spectrum, but certain insects such as bees can pick out many more colours.
Now Vedanta tells us that different living beings experience different portions of this
one continuous spectrum of consciousness.
Take for example the ant. Compared to us it
has significantly lower amounts of consciousness. An ant is not aware of the traffic jam outside,
nor does it worry about picking the kids up from school. In other words the soul of the
ant is in a state of restricted consciousness, or limited awareness about the world.
Many
things exist beyond its ant world of which it is completely unaware. Now let us say that
the soul or consciousness of the ant expands so that it becomes aware of more things.
Then Vedanta tells us that the soul of the ant will find the small body and brain of
the ant as insufficient to express its greater consciousness. And therefore, it will manifest
for its purposes a better body, say that of a cat.
So according to Vedanta this is how evolution happens. Underneath the chain of physical
evolution of species, is the spiritual reality of an expanding consciousness.
This expansion
of consciousness is the real engine which propels the entire train of biological evolution.
Now in the evolutionary chain you do not jump directly from an ant to a cat, rather there
are many small evolutionary steps in the middle, but this is just an example to demonstrate
the idea. In fact in Hinduism, the soul is said to traverse through 8.4 Million life-forms
before it attains to a human birth. But human beings too are not the final step
in the evolutionary chain. In the case of human beings our consciousness or our soul
has gotten significantly bigger than that of animals but it is still restricted.
In fact still beyond the realms of ordinary human consciousness, lies a specific state
of super-consciousness, where our soul has become so enlarged that it has become infinite.
In other words from being a little portion of the ocean of consciousness, it has become
the whole.
This state, where the soul has become one
with the infinite ocean of consciousness - also known as Universal Consciousness or God; this
state of the soul is called by different names in different religions. In Hinduism it is
called Samadhi, in Buddhism, Enlightenment and in Christianity, Salvation.
The names may be different, but they all mean the same thing and that is freedom or
liberation from the evolutionary cycle of birth and death. For in this ultimate state
of super-conscious Samadhi the soul is finally free. Its infinite consciousness can no longer
be confined to the finite body and the body is let go.
This state of Samadhi was attained to by Swami Vivekananda, by his guru Sri Ramakrishna,
by Sri Aurobindo, by Ramana Maharishi and in our present times by my highest guru Shriram
Sharma Acharya.
This state of super-conscious enlightenment
was also attained to by Jesus and by Buddha; and this final state of freedom alone is the
goal for all of us, right down to the little ant.
This brings us to the end of our presentation. Thank you so much for watching. If you have
further questions in your heart surrounding God, soul, consciousness, life and death;
then be sure to visit my website The Spiritual Bee at www.Spiritualbee.Com..
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