Essay on Life: Our life on earth is a mixture of joys and sorrows

Our life on earth is a mixture of joys and sorrows. There indeed many pleasures of life, and also many creatures who have a good share of them. But many more are the pains and sufferings of life and a living beings are more or less subject to them.

Even if it be possible for any individual being to shun all other pains and miseries, it is impossible for him to evade the clutches of decay and death.

Ordinarily, however, we are the victims of three kinds of pains, viz., the adhyatmika, adhibhautika and adgudauvuja. The first is due to intraorganic causes like bodily disorders and mental affections.

It includes both bodily and mental sufferings, such as fever and headache, the pangs of fear, anger, greed, etc. The second is produced by extra-organic natural causes like men, beasts, thorns, etc.

Instances of this kind are found in cases of murder, snake-bite, prick of thorns and so forth. The third kind of suffering is caused by extra-organic supernatural causes, e.g. the pains inflicted by ghosts, demons, etc.

Now all men earnestly desire to avoid every kind of pain. Nay more, they want, once for all, to put an end to all their sufferings, and have enjoyment at all times. But that is not to be. We cannot have pleasure only and exclude pain altogether.

So long as we are in this frail body with its imperfect organs, all pleasures are bound to be mixed up with pain or, at least, be temporary.

Hence we should give up the hedonistic ideal of pleasure and rest content with the less attractive but more rational end of freedom from pain.

In the Sahkhya system, liberation (mukti) is just the absolute and complete cessation of all pain without a possibility of return. It is the ultimate and or the summum bonum of our life (apavarga or purusartha).

How are we to attain liberation or absolute freedom from all pain and suffering? All the arts and erafts of the modern man and all the blessings of modern science give us but temporary relief from pain or short-lived pleasures.

These do not ensure a total and final release from all the ills to which our mind and body are subject. So the Indian philosopher wants some other is effective method of accomplishing the task, and this he as in the right knowledge of reality (tattvajnana).

It is a general 264 An Introduction to Indian Philosophy rule that our sufferings are due to our ignorance. In the different walks of life we find that the ignorant and uneducated man comes to grief on many occasions because he does not know the laws of life and nature.

The more knowledge we have about ourselves and the world we live in, the better fitted are we for the struggle for existence and the enjoyments of life. But the fact remains that we are not perfectly happy, nor even completely free from pain and misery.

The reason for this is that we have not the perfect knowledge about reality. When we have that knowledge, we shall attain freedom from all suffering. Reality is, according to the Sahkhya, a plurality of selves and the world of objects presented to them.

The self is an intelligent principle which does not possess any quality or activity but is a pure consciousness free from the limitations of space, time and causality.

It is the pure subject which transcends the whole world of objects including physical things and organic bodies, the mind and the senses, the ego and the intellect.

All changes and activities, all thoughts and feelings, all pleasures and pains, all joys and sorrows belong to what we call the mind-body system.

The self is quite distinct from the mind-body complex and is, therefore, beyond all the affections and afflictions of the psychical life. Pleasure and pain are mental facts which do not really colour the pure self.

It is the mind, and not self, that feels pleasure or pain, and is happy or unhappy. So also, virtue and vice, merit and demerit, in short, all moral properties belong to the ego (ahahkara) who is the striver and doer of all acts.

The self is different from the ego or the moral agent who strives for good or bad ends, attains them and enjoys or suffers accordingly. Thus we see that the self is the transcendent subject whose very essence is pure consciousness, freedom, eternity and immortality.

Its pure consciousness (jnanasvarupa) in the sense that the changing states and processes of the mind, which we call empire ciousness, do not belong to the self.

The self is the subject witness of mental changes as of bodily and physical changes, as much distinct from the former as from the latter.

It is but is freedom itself insofar as it is above the space-time and the cause- effect order of existence. It is eternal and immortal, because it s not produced by any cause and cannot be destroyed in any way.

Pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow really belong to buddhi or the intellect and the mind. The purusa or self is by its nature free from them all.

But on account of ignorance it fails to distinguish itself from the mind and the intellect, and owns them as parts of itself so much so that it identifies itself with the body, the senses, the mind and the intellect.

It becomes, so to say, somebody with a certain name, and a particular ‘combination of talent, temperament and character.’ As such, we speak of it as the ‘material self, the ‘social self, the ‘sensitive and appetitive self, the ‘imagining and desiring self, or the ‘willing and thinking self.

According to the Sankhya, all these are not-self which reflects the pure self and apparently imparts its affections and emotions to the latter.

The self considers itself to be happy or unhappy when the mind and the intellect, with which it identifies itself, become so, in the same way in which a father considers himself fortunate or unfortunate in view of his beloved son’s good or bad luck, or a master feels insulted by an insult to his own servant.

It is this want of discrimination or feeling of identity (aviveka) between the self and the mind-body that is the cause of our troubles.

We suffer pain and enjoy pleasure because the experiencing subject in us (drasta) wrongly identifies itself with experienced objects (drsya) including pleasure and pain.an account of the different kinds of selves vides James.

The cause of suffering being ignorance (ajnana) in the sense of non-discrimination (aviveka) between the self and the not-self freedom from suffering must come from knowledge of the distinction between the two (vivekajnana). But this saving knowledge is not merely an intelletual understanding of the truth.

It must be a direct knowledge or clear realization of the fact that the self is not the body and the senses, the mind and the intellect.

Once we realize or see that out self is the unborn and undying spirit in us, the eternal and immortal subject of experience, we become free from all misery and suffering.

A direct knowledge of the truth is necessary to remove the illusion of the body or the mind as my self. Now I have a direct and an undoubted perception that I am a particular psychophysical organism.

The knowledge that the self is distinct from all this must be an equally direct perception, if it is to contradict and cancel the previous one.

The illusory perception of snake in a rope is not to be substituted by any argument or instruction, but by another perception of the rope as such.

To realise the self we require a long course of spiritual training with devotion to and constant contemplation of, the truth that the spirit is not the body, the senses, the mind or the intellect. We shall consider the nature and methods of this training when we come to the Yoga philosophy.

When the self attains liberation, no change takes place in it and no new property or quality accrues to it. Liberation or freedom of the self does not mean the development from a less perfect to a more perfect condition.

So also immortality and eternal life are not to be regarded as future possibilities or events in time. If these were events and temporal acquisitions, they would be governed by the laws of time, space and causality, and. as such, the very opposite of freedom and immortality.

The attainment of liberation means just the clear recognition of the self as a reality which is beyond time and space, and above and the body, and, therefore, essentially free, eternal.

When there is such realisation, the self ceases to be affected by the vicissitudes of the body and the mind and rests in it self as the disinterested witness of physical and psychical changes.

‘Just as the dancing girl ceases to dance after having entertained the spectators, so prakrti ceases to act and evolve the world after manifesting her nature to the self.

It is possibe for every self to realise itself in this way and thereby attain liberation in life in this world. This kind of liberadon is known as jlvanmukti or emancipation of the soul while living in this body.

After the death of its body, the liberated self attains what is called videhamukti or emancipation of the spirit from all bodies, gross and subtle.

This ensures absolute and complete freedom. Vijnanabhiksu, however, thinks that the latter is the real kind of liberation, since the self cannot be completely free from the influence of bodily and mental changes so long as it is embodied.

But all Sahkhyas agree that liberation is only the complete destruction of the threefold misery (duhkhatraya-bhighata). It is not a state of joy as conceived in the Vedanta.

Where there is no pain, there can neither be any pleasure; because the two are relative and inseparable.