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THE PHILOSOPHY OF A GURU
CONTENTS
[The numbers shown within brackets along with certain
subtitles indicate the stanzas of the Atmopadesa Satakam
under reference.]
INTRODUCTION iii
1 STRUCTURAL KEY TO GURU-PHILOSOPHY 1
The two anterior positions 2
Guru-Philosophy reconciles the two rival positions 3
A Guru's philosophy is based on personal experience 4
Reason need not counter experience 5
The grand flux of psycho-cosmic becoming (50) 7
Cosmic absorption into the plus side (52) 9
Tree-structure evidence in verse 51 11
Other instances from Guru-literature suggesting
structure 12
Structural limits if speculation and experience 14
The common integrated import of all varieties of
wisdom 16
II THE ELEMENT OF WONDER 17
Indian Philosophy more scientific 17
The fuller scientific status if Sankara's Advaita 19
Each verse and topic fits into an overall plan 21
The homogeneous matrix into which the vision of
the Self us fitted 23
The nature of proofs 25
Proofs here as valid as science 26
Wonder has a place 27
Ascent implied in the Guru-philosophy 28
Bracketting of the wonder (35, 65) 29
III TRANSCENDING THE PARADOX 32
Facing the paradox frontally 33
The 'Oddness' or 'Mystery' of paradox in
mathematics and philosophy 36
The place of the paradox fully recognized in
Guru-philosophy (94, 33) 37
Subtler paradoxes examined (79, 80, 73) 40
Paradox is transcended by reconciling
opposites (96, 97) 43
IV HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL VALUE WORLDS 46
Psycho-physical ambivalent alternating process 47
Mathematical factors 48
A tensorial psychology and cosmology 52
A space within the heart of the Upanishads and
its structural implications 53
An alternative process in the Guru's verses (15, 51
68, 72, 81, 83, 89, 76, 67) 57
V THE SELF AND NON-SELF IN
SPIRITUAL PROGRESS 61
The Self placed in its axiological content 62
The Guru's method of laying bare the content
of the Self (10, 11, 12) 64
The Self as seen within the context of its
axiological counterparts (48) 67
The axiological field of interest analyzed (36-42) 70
VI THE UNIVERSE OF CONTEMPLATIVE DISCOURSE 75
One-many, part-whole, big-small are all extraneous 76
Percepts and concepts meet from opposite
poles in the universe of discourse 78
Dualities merge in the neutrality of
the Absolute Conciousness (89, 73, 36-42) 80
VII THE METHODOLOGY AND EPISTEMOLOGY
IN GURU-PHILOSOPHY 90
Usual logic falls short of paradox and does not
attain the Absolute 93
The compatability ot measurability of the Absolute
is summarily rejected (32) 96
Axiomatic and experimental certitude (90) 98
Apperception resides a the core (63, 20) 100
A scientifig epistemology is neutral to scepticism
and belief (30-33) 102
VIII PROTOLINGUISTIC IMAGERY 107
Crystalline or cryptic language of
profound philosophy 107
Hypostatic and hierophantic versions of Reality 109
Examples of verses with structural implications 110
(a) Transcending initial paradox (8) 110
(b) The double domain of concepts and
percepts (17) 112
(c) The apperceptive core of conscious
becoming (34) 113
(d) The spiritual progress of the Self (69) 114
(e) Three perspectives of the same
process (75-77) 115
A living picture of the contemplative process 116
IX ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND RELIGION IN
GURU-PHILOSOPHY 119
Obligatory injunctions different from free
ethical principles 120
A dialectically conceived ethics 121
How aesthetics is derived from philosophy 123
Kindness as the common basis of religion and
ethics (25) 124
The non-dual basis of all morality (20) 125
The ego as the epicentre for all conduct (23, 24) 126
The formation of closed static units in society
and their unethical status (21, 22) 126
The One Religion of the Guru 128
(a) All religions have the overall aim of
happiness (49) 129
(b) The deep mutual adaptation implied in
religious affiliation (48) 130
(c) Rival religions really plead for the
same value (47) 131
(d) The nature of the irony implicit in
religious rivalry (44-46) 131
X GURU-PHILOSOPHY SUMMARIZED 133
Appendix
One Hundred Verses of Self-Instruction
by Narayana Guru
Full text translated from the Malayalam 145
1.
THE STRUCTURAL KEY TO GURU-PHILOSOPHY
A Guru is a contemplative man of Wisdom. He
combines science and mysticism in the neutral value that
he represents in his person. He is understandable only in
the context of absolutism, his visible aspects being only
incidental.
We have hitherto spoken about Narayana Guru, but now
we shall be turning our attention to the understanding
of such a person more definitely in terms of a generalized
abstraction of the concrete universal necessarily belonging
to the notion of Guruhood. What is concrete and what is
abstract merge finally into a neutral notion of the Absolute
where duality is absorbed and abolished. Such are some
of the leading ideas we shall keep in mind in the pages
that follow.
We can insist on seeing before believing, or more
simply on believing before seeing. The former is the
a posteriori approach if the sceptic while the latter is
natural to a man willing to believe. The total knowledge-
situation in which both these possibilities lie, when fully
and philosophically understood, reconciles both the
approaches through simple unitive understanding where the
gap between mysticism and science tends to be abolished
by an approach of one or the other as it were, from
opposite poles.
2
The philosophy of a Guru corresponds or should
correspond to this unitive understanding which alone can
banish fear and doubt and help to bring about universal
brotherhood. Such truth makes one free and is a pearl of
price for humans.
THE TWO ANTERIOR POSITIONS
Scepticism and belief are two poles of the total
knowledge-situation, and the philosophy that can unite or
solve both these antinomies is that of a normal neutral
notion of the Absolute. Such a notion would be insipid
and seem contentless when not equated to the Self of man.
Guruhood is the notion that gives us meaning to the
Absolute. A correct appraisal of Guruhood gives us that
final certitude which alone is the significant value that
can make life purposeful.
By whatever name called or understood, in whichever
context, geographical or historical, a Guru marks the
meeting point, reconciling two opposing positions which
are those of science and scientifically revised mysticism.
Modern philosophers like Bertrand Russell stand for what
they themselves call a scientific or analytic philosophy
which leans on the side of scepticism rather than on the
side of belief. They have no use for wholesale solutions
to overall problems of life, but prefer to tackle problems
peicemeal by experimental or trial and error methods,
rather than relying on the a priori or synthetic approach.
They call themselves operationalists, pragmatists, positivists,
or logical mathematicians, forgetting that science is
linked intimately with mathematics which leans very much
on axiomatic thinking fully a priori in status.
3
The observables and calculables on which science thrives are
the counterparts dialectically understood, of the same visible
and intelligible aspects within which metaphysics also moves.
GURU-PHILOSOPHY RECONCILES THE TWO RIVAL POSITIONS
Two anterior positions have thus to be taken account
of by us in placing the Guru's philosophy, viz. where he
fits into the context of modern sceptical thinking and
where he starts to make his own contributions to Vedantic
and contemplative traditions, coloured by mysticism,
natural to the Wisdom of the East. We can grasp the
nature of Guru-Philosophy better and more easily if we
state here in advance, that we find in it a natural culmination
of both modern scientific scepticism and mystical
will-to-believe. His was an integral approach in which
scepticism and beleif cancelled each other out into a
neutral unitive notion which was fully human and within
the reach of all men.
His philosophy is a prolongation of Vedantic correction
and revision of its excesses and vague one-sided
accentuations, making of it a unitive and universal science
based on a normative notion of the Absolute. Such are
some of the claims we have to justify by examples from
the work we are directly concerned with here (1) and as also
seen in the Guru's philosophy revealed elsewhere.
Scientific scepticism and a revised form of mysticism were
the rival positions that he was able to revise and reconcile
unitively in the light of a full-fledged and normative
Science of the Absolute which his philosophy in fact
represents.
--------------------------------------------------------------
1, viz.Atmopadesa Satakam. See One Hundred Verses of
Self-Instruction, translation and commentary by the present author.
A Naravana Gurukula Publication
4
A GURU'S PHILOSOPHY IS BASED ON PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Experience and experiment are complementary dialectical
counterparts belonging to a totally or globally
understood knowledge-situation. Inner experience of
Truth tends to make a mystic, while factual experiments
make a scientific sceptic. Mysticism has been described
as the 'cultivation of the presence of God.' Outside
events support certitude in science whil the mystic's
certitude is derived from himself. Both are resultants of a
bipolar situation involving scepticism and belief. Where
a priorism leaves off, a posteriorism steps in to take over
the conduct of the process called human enquiry or under-
standing, which circulates between ambivalent aspects of
the total knowledge-situation.
Analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, the
general and the speciic, mark phases or points in the cal-
culatory course of reason that seeks certitude. All facts or
events emerge thus from the homogeneous transparent
fluid matrix of thought-stuff which a rich inner zone and
poor peripheral aspects, osmotically alternating in a grand
cosmo-psychological respiration in which subtle essences
from opposite poles are interchanged. A Guru is a man of
intuition, who is aware of such pure acts taking place
within the Self as the 'unmoved mover' or the 'thinking
substance.' Phenomenal and noumenal aspects of the
Self or the non-Self keep equalizing essences by such a
circulation.
Although such statements might sound strange, too
bold or untenable to modern ears, a Guru's philosophy
is able to fit all these versions or visions into one unified
and integrated organic scheme with a methodology,
epistemology and axiology hanging together by a central
normative notion in the Absolute Self.
5
It is experiment as well as inner experience that confirms the normal total
central Absolute Truth involved here. Without any implications
of vagueness associated with the term 'mysticism'
a Guru can be said to be such a contemplative whose inner
experience tallies or does not contradict what outer
experiment teaches any man through laboratories, observatories,
telescopes or microscopes.
Guru-philosophy is thus a science a precise a mathematics
and as experimental as physics or biology. The kind
of mystical visions that are natural to a Guru are indicated
in Narayana Guru's One Hundred Verses of Self~Instruction
(Atmopadesa Satakam) with which we are concerned in
presenting here as representing broadly the outlines of his
philosophy. Let us, therefore, linger a moment to examine
some verses whose mystical contnet is unmistakeable before
passing on to some other of the important distinguishing
features of a Guru's philosophy, as correcly representing
a natural culmination of Vedanta and a normalized scienti-
fic philosophy in a fully modern sense,
REASON NEED NOT COUNTER EXPERIENCE
One has only to read three of the most central of the
One Hundred Verses of Self-Instruction which we are treating
here as outlining the Guru-philosophy for our purposes, to
be convinced that the Guru is speaking his own inner
experience through them, and that they are of a fully
contemplative and mystical order. At the same time.
however, the critical student of philosophy on closer
scrutiny finds that the thoughts do not represent just
merely a passing mood, a state of emotion, agony, exaltation
or trance, often attributed to mystics who cultivate the
prescence of God in vague sentimental, unsystematic or
unscientific terms.
6
When the student has taken pains to examine the whole series
of verses in the light of reason, supplemented by the dialectical
approach where what is vaguely classed as intuition plays its part
with full play of the critical faculty natural to human reasoning
or understanding as employed from Locke to Hegel in the West, he
will be able to appreciate that the whole series of verses
is fully consequential and conform to the requirements of
valid speculation, with a method of orderly doubting like
the one introduced by Descartes,
Here we have to part company with those who claim
to be uncritical mystics, whether in the West or in the
East, and with those interpreters of mysticism who speak in
merely sentimental or emotional terms, looking upon
contemplative visions as passsing moods unconnected with
the normal reasoning faculty of man. Bertrand Russell is
one such representative modern thinker who writes:
"Belief in reality quite different from what appears
to the senses, arises with irresistible force in certain
moods which are sources of most mysticism, and of
most metaphysics. While such a mood is dominant
the need for logic is not felt and accordingly the most
thorough-going mystics do not employ logic but
appeal directly to the immediate deliverance of their
insight. But such fully developed mysticism is rare in
the West." (2)
We shall not stop to discuss here the merits of this
statement not the case of the 'thorough-going mystics'
alluded to here, especially as Russell himself admits that
'fully develped mysticism is rare in the West.'
-----------------------------------------------------------
2 Mysticism and Logic, by Bertrand Russell, Allen and Unwin
London, p. 19 1959.
7
Both in the East and the West there are those who think vaguely of
the closed domains of logic and mysticism, and hold
that one has to counter, compromise or contradict the
other. The Guru-philosophy as presented here, at least,
does not fall into such a category. Here criticism, experiment
and experience all co-exist integrally at the core of
the Absolute which can ontain so-called 'empricism' at
one pole and so-called 'idealism' at the other. Both
together give content to the central notion representing
Existence, Subsistence and Value. The closely-reasoned
verses which are prior to the central verses have a contemplative
metaphysics not far different from what Bergson
has explained in his Introduction to Metaphysics, which
differs from usual metaphysics in that it takes an inner
view of the total knowledge-situation, and is not satisfied
with putting together snaps or cliches statically understood
This distinction is a vital key to the understanding of the
Guru-philosophy.
THE GRAND FLUX OF PSCYHO-COSMIC BECOMING
The following is Verse 50 from the One Hundred
Verses of Self-Instruction:
"With earth and water, air and fire likewise,
Also the void, the ego, cognition and mind,
All worlds including the waves and ocean too,
Do all arise and into awareness change."
'All worlds do rise and into awareness change,' is, it
must be admitted, strange-sounding to modern ears
unfamiliar with Bergson, Kant, Hegel, and the Upanishadic
way, or with indeterministic nature of the physical world
that modern relativism has brought to the forefront of
thought in recent years. The mechanistic outlook has to
be discarded and the notion of a process included in our
vision of Truth or Reality.
8
Under the verse in question in the commentary we have tried to
touch upon some of theaccepted philosophical positions
supporting such an apparently bold statement that this verse
presents. We have also devoted many pages in The Search for A Norm
in Western Thought (3) to elaborate the same normative
philosophical viewpoint persistently kept in mind by
Western philosophers, ranging from sceptics or empiricists
like Hume and Locke, through rationlists like Descartes,
to Kant, Hegel and their modern followers. We have even
quoted philosophers of science like Eddingon to find just
those presuppositions that would lend 'justification' to the
apparently too mystical and sweeping statement implied
here. Yet, nothing incompatible with modern thought and
nothing inconsistent with Vedanta has been stated here.
To recognize this would be our first step in the direcion of
becoming more fully familiar with the philosophy of a
Guru, fully alive to all the modern currents of thought.
We have to take note firstly of the categories men-
tioned in the verse in graded and methodical order as well
as of the schematic or strucutral features respected by the
Guru in writing this verse, which should be quite patent
to one who is aware of such implications natural to
mystical language, as has been explained by us elsewhere.
The series of elementals first mentioned, beginning from
the most gross to the most subtle, pass beyond matter with
the fifth item in an ascending series of sets, groups or
ensembles that belong together to each level as phenome-
nological existential epoches with a unitive consistency of
monads within each, till the implication of both matter and
mind merge in the homogeneous transparency of pure
schematism in the reference to the waves and the ocean
bracketed together.
------------------------------------------------------------
3. A. Narayana Gurukula Publication (forthcoming).
9
Here the waves have the horizontal implications of plurality,
phenomenality or a practically manifested analytic aspect which can be called effects
rather than causes, or the cause, and the ocean understood
globally as a unit comprising the knowledge-situation as a
whole repreents the pure noumenal or vertical implications
of the same situation, both belonging together to
the same structural scheme.
In a universe that is subject to expansion and
contraction and under the sway of an alternative process
of a grand cosmic-psychic respiration within the homogeneous
matrix of transparent essences, osmotically
exchanged between the plus and the minus aspects, it is
not difficult to think of a dialectical ascent and an
alternating descent making up together a circulation, such
as that of a wheel that the Bhagavad Gita alludes to in
Chapter III, Verse 16. Other verses of the Guru also
help to confirm this living picture of what takes place at
the core of Absolute Self-consciousness. Many passages
in the Upanishads are also suggestive of the same
interesting content without which the notion of the
Absolute should have ever remained empty and insipid.
COSMIC ABSORPTION INTO THE PLUS SIDE
Without further aplogy for taking the above view,
seeing that we have specifically devoted space already to
clarify most of the implications brought together under
this one verse here, let us now pass on to the verse after
the next, skipping the 51st, to scrutinize for a moment its
presentation of the same living picture of the cosmic-cum-
psychic dynamic process viewed rather from the plus side
than from the minus side as in Verse 50. Verse 52 reads
as follows:
10
"Filled with word-content, that day the firmament shall radiant blaze,
And into it shall be absorbed to extinction all the visionary magic,
Then, too, that small voice completing tri-basic cognition
Shall cease, and, lo! Self~radiance prevails."
This verse may be said to touch the high-water mark
attainable to speculation when it manages just to remain
still within the scope of philosophy proper, although to
practical ears even these bare outlines might still sound
strange.
It is evident that here we have a mystic's vision
represented, but a closer scrutiny, as with Verse 50, reveals
the same process structurally understood as taking place
at the core of the significant Absolute in terms of Self-
consciousness. The process is one of circulation and
becoming, absorbed at unitive, more unitive, and universal
levels, whose meanings gain more and more absolute
significance or value till all truth, fact or value, gets
merged in the highest Value of all. This is like an 'echo
and a light unto eternity,' as some English poet has
described such a culminating experience. Reason is
here not abandoned, but in the ascent of thesis and antithesis
cancelling each other out into a syntheses at higher
and higher levels in Self-conciousness is a resultant
containing the thesis aspect, ever becoming purer or
brighter and more significant as a value.
Thus, Existence, Subsistence and Value aspects of
the Absolute remain without any taint of inner conflict
between any two pairs taken in the ascending scale. Light
here represents the visible and sound the intelligible,
which fuse together into one ineffable and ultimate Value,
11
TREE-STRUCTURE EVIDENCED IN VERSE 51
Lest the student should think that these structural and
other implications are read into the verses which are really just
ordinary mystical effusions as known in the East and also
familiar in the context of European mysticism, let us take
Verse 51, situated between the two we have cited already.
The subject matter of this verse might seem, at first, to
have nothing at all to do with the two verses with which
it is bounded before and after. The analogy of the
structure of a tree with two ambivalently complementary
reciprocal branches, one growing at the expense or a least
depending organically on the other, is clearly seen here:
"From awareness, the "I" sense first emerged,
Comes then with it "This-ness" as counterpart beside,
Like branches, these two do overcover
Hiding the whole of the Maya tree."
The tree in mystical language stands for all ramified
values, conceptual as well as perceptual, that claim
attention or interest in a given field of consciousness at a
given time. The stream of consciousness or flux of
becoming is like a tree growing and putting out fruits or
flowers peripherally and horizontally. The pure process
takes place, as it were, vertically in full transparence
between the perceptual and cpnceptual entities both
entering the matrix of consciousness. When correctly
focussed between the plus and minus, the tree tends
to cancel itself out but, when the least tinge of negativism
or quality is retained, as between the dual and the non-
dual Absolute, the ramified set-structure becomes evident
with two zones covering the plus (conceptual) and the
minus (perceptual ), both in terms of abstract and generalized
intuitions. This takes place alternately in the framework of
warp and woof of time and space categories.
12
The whole field is filled with relation-relate complexes of
infinite number, with a harmony pre-established in the overall
situation. The multiplicity of monads thus formed are
implied in the monas monadum which is the normative
notion of the Absolute. Bergsonian growth, division and
becoming within the core of the eternal flux of the élan
vital, phenomenological epoches, monadological schematic
and structural dualities, have all to be elaborated and fitted
together integrally and unitively as living like a tree or
flowing like a river of Maya, the relativist aspect of the
Absolute.
OTHER INSTANCES FROM GURU-LITERATURE
SUGGESTING STRUCTURE
The Guru has a large number of philosophical
compositions, mostly in verse, where the same structural
scheme is implicit and sometimes even explicitly used. As
an instance of explicit reference to structuralism in the
Absolute, one can readily use the fourth verse of the
common prayer composed in Malayalam by the Guru,
called Daiva Dasakam (A Prayer for Humanity):
"Like sea, wave, wind and depth
Let us within see
Ourselves, Maya (relativism), your glory and Thee."
The schematic implications here are unmistakable.
When we attempt to paraphrase the above line using the
language evolved by us, we can say that the dimension
of depth of the ocean, in the analogy consisting of four
quaternion factors by which the total situation is intended
to be comprised, is the vertical aspect of the Absolute
which is, by far, the most fundamental of all. We have
elsewhere shown that, in the general context of Vedantism
the material cause gains primacy over all other forms of
causes which can be used for speculation.
13
Upadana Karana which is its name in Vedanta, is fundamentally
basic andinclusive of its horizontalized counterparts. Formal cause,
as known in the context of Arisole, is an extreme
abstraction implied within the scope of this master cause
of all, which is the verticle principle itself. All pure
mathematical equations live within the core of this vertical
axis, here compared to the depth of the sea. The water
does not wet the depth nor the wind dry it. The Absolute
that is at the base of all phenomenalism is thus attained in
this root-principle which is no more or less than a
dimension in the total Absolutist situation where alone the
noion of the Absolute can properly be said to belong. In
the six verses following Verse 36 of the One Hundred
Verses of Self-Instruction which we treat here as presenting
us the broad outlines of a Guru-philosophy, the further
implications of this total knowledge-situation are seen to
be fully elaborated by he Guru himself. We shall have
more to say on theses aspects when the proper contexts
present themselves. Here what we just wish to underline
is that a normative and structurally understandable notion
of the Absolute is the key to Guru-philosophy. Verses 50,
51 and 52 of the One Hundred Verses are strikingly bold
and deserve full scrutinizing on the part of any student
who wishes to be introduced into the heart of Guru-
philosophy. The total knowledge-situation in which the
logical form of Aristotle, the dialectics of Parmenides and
Zeno, the antimonies or dichotomies that Kant or Bergson
alluded to, the bracketting as understood in phenomenology,
and the pre-established harmony of Leibnizian
Monadology, with Hegelian absorption of thesis and
antithesis into a higher synthesis, will all be seen to be
only particular aspects of the way of Guru-speculation
when fully and properly understood.
14
The recognition of abhava (non-actuality) as a padartha
(category) is one of the other important distinguishing
features of Guru-philosophy. Bergson's "flux" and his metaphysics
that give to becoming and process a fully open
and dynamic status, is another feature of a proper Guru-
philosophy. The three verses considered together here
reveal these broad features implicitly or explicitly, and we
shall have occasion to come back to each of the particular
aspect as we proceed.
STRUCTURAL LIMITS OF SPECULATION AND EXPERIENCE
.
Experience, inner or outer, meet in the Guru's person.
When speculation is based on inner experience, when no
laboratory experimental arrangements are needed, we tend
to have literature that resembles metaphysics. Otherwise,
it comes under the scope of physics. Physics and metaphysics,
broadly understood, belong to the same total
knowledge-situation in which inner and outer experience
confirm each other to give apodictic or dialectical
certitudes. Pure mathematics based on equations lives
and moves in this same vertical axis within the range of
possible human understanding.
We have, in one of our anterior studies of Vedantism (4)
given the instance of how in one of the Upanishads the
double value factor called ananda (Absolute Bliss) is
pictured structurally as having a head, a right side, a left
side and lower part, which last is treated as the most
important of all as representing the Absolute. A similar
verse (15) by the Guru in his composition entitled Advaita
Dipika ( The Lamp of Non-Duality) gives us a striking instance
----------------------------------------------------------
4 See page 122. Vedanta Revalued and Restated by the
present author.
15
where the unity of speculative factors belonging to inner
or outer experience are brought together, juxtaposed and
integrated to serve as a basis for correct scientific speculation
in respect of the Absolute. The verse under reference
reads as follows:
"Bliss exists, it looms (in consciousness), it is One alone;
If thought of disjunct from Self, it exists not,
And nothing then can attain consciousness at all;
Then mirage-water, sky-blue would become non-existent
and sky-flower and mirage-sky ultimate value attain."
The above is one of the most complex and complicated
verses ever written by the Guru, presenting in compact
form a methodological and epistemological problem set in
the context of bliss or value factor. To penetrate beyond
the reductio ad absurdum method used masterfully by the
Guru in his scientifically valid speculation will acquire the
knowledge of the same strucural secret that we have tried
to explain and elaborate all through our writings. Without
such a key hinted at here, most of the validity of the Guru's
writings are likely to remain a closed book to a majority of
students of philosophy.
Hence the importance of this first chapter, which when
grasped will open many doors in the many-apartmented
mansion which is Guru-philosophy. We can do no more
here, in passing, than to just indicate the nature of the
reductio ad absurdam method implicit in the above verse.
The two sets of examples are bracketed in a certain way
fully respecting structuralism so as to avoid giving to
merely nominal or concepual factors primacy over existential
and subsistential ones.
16
THE COMMON INTEGRATED IMPORT OF ALL
VARIETIES OF WISDOM
Concluding his composition called Anukampa Desakam
(Scriptures of Mercy) the Guru strikes an important note
himself with the following verse slightly retranslated here. (5)
"High scripture-meaning antique, rare,
Or meaning as by Guru taught,
And what the quiet recluse conveys,
Wisdom's varieties of every sort,
Together they are all of one kind,
One in essence, in substance same!"
When the integrated knowledge-pattern implicit in
various kinds of wisdom literature is properly nderstood
it will be found that a simple human quality such as
kindliness or mercy emerging as a human value can be
fitted into a common context of Absolute value or significance.
The Koran, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads
not excluding the Vedas and the Bible, have all their secret
contributions to make to the totality of the heritage of human
wisdom. The integrative 'structural element' hiding at the core
of all such teachings is not different from the structuralism,
selectionism and subjectivism that modern philosophers of
science like Eddington and Einstein also share and wish to
communicate to humanity seeking science or wisdom.
Thus side by side with Guru's conforming to the
prototypes of Guruhood understood in the Vedantic context, it
would not be altogether absurd to think of Gurus or wise
men of the Western context where science holds the field.
The underlying integrative factor is what gives all of them
high wisdom content as Guru Narayana evidently wishes to
express in the above lines.
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5. For a commentary on this work see The World of the Guru
by the present author, pp. 355-372
II
THE ELEMENT OF WONDER
Having understood the structural key to Guru-
philosophy, as explained in the last section, we have also
to discover the over-all plan of the hundred-verse-
sequence, to be able to see clearly the scope, limits and
amplitude of speculation, within whose four walls,
together with the structural reference that we have pointed
out, Guru-philosophy is to be understood in living terms.
Then and only then will it give up its secrets and
become an open book to all, instead of remaining a
cryptically compact sequence of verses, succeeding each
other without any visible sub-sections, and seemingly
without a method or any critically understandable theory
of knowledge, respected by the author.
It is natural to expect that philosophy proper must be
capable of being critically examined according to
recognized norms and standards of resoning or thought
in general, which instrument of human understanding
should find full play in any philosophy worth the name. A
Guru-philosophy, however, tackles problems wholesale,
instead of piecemeal, but this should not detract from its
fully scientific status.
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY MORE SCIENTIFIC
How philosophy is to become scientific is a matter
about which there could be radically different opinions,
even among modern philosophers of the status of
Bertrand Russell and Max Mueller.
18
We are familiar with the views of Russell tending to discredit
a wholesale approach to philosophy altogether, and thus Indian
philosophy too. Max Mueller, however, thinks that Indian
philosophy is more strictly philosophical than modern
Western philosophies, with both of which he can be
credited as having sufficient familiarity. Comparing Indian
and Western philosophies, Max Müller writes:
"We know what an enormous amont of labour
had to be spent and is still being spent in order
to ascertain the exact views of Plato and Aristotle,
nay, even of Kant and Hegel, on some of the most
important questions of their systems of philosophy.
There are even living philosophers whose words often
leave us in doubt as to what they meant, whether
they are materialists or idealists, monists or nihilists,
theists or atheists. Hindu philosophers seldom leave
us in doubt on such important points, and they
certainly never shrink from the consequences of their
theories." (1)
While Hegel condemned Indian philosophy as
adolescent or immature thinking, here is a scholar and
a philosopher, originating from the same country not
many decades later, who has taken the trouble impartially
to examine both Eastern and Western philosophies. His
unstinted praise helps to counteract the aspersions cast
on Indian thought by some Westerners like Edward
Erdmann and others. Max Müller's further remarks in the
same context above are therefore worth quoting:
"What I admire in Indian philosophers is that they
never try to deceive us as to their principles and the
consequences of their theories.
-------------------------------------------------------------
1. Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, Calcutta 1952 p.x,
Intro. Vol. 1
19
"If they are idealists, even to the verge of nihilism they say so,
and if they hold that the objective world requires a real, though
not necessarily a visible or tangible substrratum they
are never afraid to speak out. They are bona fide
idealists or materialists, monists or dualists, theists
or atheists because their reverence for truth is
stronger than their reverence for anything else". (2)
A downright apodictic quality has characterized Indian
thought and the Six Systems do not err on the side of
vagueness or speculation. The definitions, though cryptic
in linguistic formulation, are precise and clearcut when
properly understood. No doubt Prof. Max Müller had in
mind these systems that have come down to us in clear-
cut aphoristic formulations, when he applauds as above
the merits of Indian philosophy as against Western philo-
sophical speculation in general.
THE FULLER SCIENTIFIC STATUS OF SANKARA'S ADVAITA
When we come to the Advaita Vedanta of Vyasa or
Badarayana, and especially as restated critically by Sankara,
the degree of certainty attains to a more fully scientific
status, The Absolute, treated wholesale and whole-heartedly,
in downright or frontally facing outright
terms of intellectual attack and emotional onslaught, then
becomes fully apodictic. The emotions naturally resemble
those of a mystic, while the intellectual approach would
correspond to the pure vision of a man of dialectical
wisdom.
Closely argued ways thus can co-exist in Guru-
philosophy without violating the codes of right speculation,
----------------------------------------------------------
2. Ibid. p.xi
20
although to minds conditioned by he divorce of speculation
and spirituality, as in modern Western thought, such
speculation, even when corect, might seem strange,
vague or sentimental. The mystical vision too, on the
other hand, would be too strong for them to gaze at,
compared to twilight worlds of easy or complacent speculation,
in which modern philosophy has had to thrive. To
the modern Western student, especially in academic life,
philosophy is only one of his many side-interests in life.
In the case of Guru-philosophy, as is only to be
expected in the present case, speculation not only becomes
red hot but attains to an incandescent white heat and
melting point at times, as we shall presently see. All we
want to point out in advance here is that this wholesale
and frontal character of the approach of Guru-philosophy
should not be considered by the modern reader as
detracting in any way from its true status of critical and
correct speculation. Its value is only enhanced when it
conforms to the requirements of a normalized absolutist
method, theory of knowledge, and an axiology which does
not exclude the over-all human problem of minimizing
suffering or bondage and of securing human happiness, indi-
vidual or collective, from its scope. Lukewarm, piecemeal,
trial-and-error, ratiocinative, eristic or sophistic approaches,
dabbling in mere opinions and counter-opinions,
do not serve the purpose of healthy, wholesale and correct
speculation that Guru-philosophy is meant to be.
No apology is therefore needed here for the bold
speculative flights found in the verses we are particularly
presenting here, which at first might confuse the modern
reader in resepct of their normality, sobriety or critical
validity, from the standpoint of the so-called man-in-the-
street.
21
EACH VERSE AND TOPIC FITS INTO AN OVER-ALL PLAN
Besides the key of structuralism which we have to
keep in mind in order to appreciate methodically and
critically the contents of this sequence of verses, there is
the equally important fact of the symetrically conceived
over-all plan within which the speculation lives and moves.
The first verse refers to the seeker for higher Wisdom
and the last verse marks the culmination of his search in
the realization of the Absolute as an Existent Subsistent
Value, as finally equal and non-different from the Self
within each man or in human consciousness treated generlly.
Between these extreme limits various topics, inclusive
of ethics, religion, logic, error aspects of the soul, cosmic-
pyschic correlation, states of consciousness, alternation
between poles, vertical and horizontal value-worlds, epistemological
and methodological laws or rules, dichotomy,
ambivalency ot polarity between aspects of the self or the
person, the principle of compensation in spiritual life or
in contemplative progress to wisdom, orthodoxy and
heterodoxy, adoption and disadoption, the place of the
a priori, the limits of logical reasoning, semantic analysis
of thought in the core of the Absolute, sublimation of
action, participation of mind and matter, are all brought
within the scope of the discussion contained in these
hundred verses, and there is an innate unity of subject-
matter and structure so compact as to constitute and come
within the amplitude of one sweeping vision of an
awakened Self.
22
The items are so compactly presented that they defy
analytical enumeration, and, as stated in the very first
verse, are meant more for meditative purposes, as in the
case of a sacred song, chant or scripture. The Vedas
and the Vedanta too, in India, are conceived on similar
cryptic, protolinguistic, schematic, unitively compact terms
of a vision that defies critical scrutiny and verification by
norms or human standards of thought and reasoning.
Each verse, or sometimes a sequence of two or three
verses, are seen to hang together, harping on the same or
a kindred theme. Sometimes the vision given to ascending
dialectics is balanced by the same vision stated soon after as
seen from the point of view of descending dialectics. There
is sometimes a sequence of four or five verses, whose
subject-matter is sometimes seen left off to be taken
up again in a subtler or improved form at a higher level of
speculation at a later stage. The change-over from topic
to topic takes place in such a gentle gradation that, unless
the reader or student is aware himself of the methodological
and epistemological unity kept in mind by the Guru,
he will see no reason why a certain thought should follow
rather than precede the previous one.
These sets have to be distinguished by the careful
student after a first acquaintance with each of the verses
separately. Then, when the sets are seen to be interrelated,
he will be able finally to appreciate how the work
as a whole has been strung ogether with a sense of symmetrical
beauty when viewed megascopically as a whole.
The verses that have been translated and commented
upon (3) will be seen to be sufficiently self-explanatory.
Here in these remarks our purpose is limited to seeing
the connecting links and logical or critical implications
as between one section and another, and between one set of verses
----------------------------------------------------------
(3) See the One Hundred Verses of Self-Instruction by the
present author.
23
that belong together and another similar set elsewhere,
and to see also in each verse how the structural scheme
of each respects the over-all message that the verses
as a whole wish to convey. The verses are transparent
in content for each other and all together.
We shall travel from the apparently most mystical
verses to those which are more analytically and critically
conceived, as we come up against each set or counterpart
in later sections. The element of wonder characterizes the
former mystical verses, and the emphasis on reason or analysis
characterizes the critical group. Mythological imagery
belonging to the soil of South India is sometimes advantageously
employed by the Guru, as also an appeal made
directly to the Upanishads. These however are done in
such a way as not todetract or damage the fully critical
status that the verses are meant to have as a whole. It is the
exigency of language alone that makes the Guru resort to
such ideograms rooted in the popular mind of India. Besides
ideograms, protolinguistic devices too are seen to be
freely employed by the Guru. A strict scheme, semanti-
cally correct, is adhered to even here.
THE HOMOGENEOUS MATRIX INTO WHICH THE VISION OF THE SELF IS FITTED
Pyschostatics and psychodynamics are terms that are
sometimes used to make a distinction between living and
still pictures of the working of the Self. As in the case of
the thinking substance of Spinoza, there is a paradox
implied here as between natura naturans and natura naturata.
The very first verse puts its finger on a core (karu)
which is the source of all activities, whether thought of in
terms of an unmoved mover within, or, in more overt
terms, of a cosmological phenomenology. One of these
is a counterpart of the other.
24
When the first few and the last few verses are carefully examined
from this standpoint of psycho-phenomenal dynamism, one is able to see
how doctrinal items cling together and are set as stones in
a homogeneous matrix which is neither mental nor material.
Maya itself, which is the principle of error, illusion, or
false value, finds a place in the most central of the verses as
at the beginning and end. Maya has plus, minus and
neutral aspects, according to the over-all epistemology respected
and kept in mind throughout the composition, The
gems of doctrine have also to be fitted by us into the
matrix made up of pure consciousness so that they stand
out and do not stand out apart or differenly, in quality
at least, from the matrix. Advaita or non-duality implies
this rule of homogeneity (samanadhikaranarva) as its inevitable
corollary.
The vision of the Self is revealed as meeting at a
neutral point between two aspects of the Absolute,
a priori and a posteriori, which are represented in each
instance, as it were, by two limbs of an equation, one of
which is to be understood in terms of the other. The
proof of either statement is brought about naturally by the
cancellation of a thesis by an antithetical aspect of the
same. Analogies are thus equations in which the less
familiar is understood in terms of the more familiar. The
two limbs always cancel out into the synthetic unity of the
homogeneous matrix of the Self and its knowledge, which
are dialectical counterparts. A Hegelian methodology is
clearly implicit here, though in a more complete and perfected
form, perennial and not merely historical, and as
understood in the wisdom texts from the time of the
Upanishads, through the Buddha and down to our time.
25
The dialectical approach in our own time has become
more or less overlaid and forgotton, except in certain
schools such as that of Marx and Engels, who apply it
only to limited socio-economic fields, The full-fledged
dialectical approach, employed to the best advantage by
the Guru here, when discovered by the critical student,
will afford him one of the important keys by which he
can make the sstudy of these verses most fruitful. Their
critical validity will then become fully evident to him.
THE NATURE OF PROOFS
Critical speculation is best when the arguments are
cut and dry without giving room to ambiguity. The
experimental method of the physical sciences answers to
this purpose. When Newton says that, just as an apple
falls to the ground by the force of gravity, there is a law of
gravitation applicable to the whole of the physical universe
of all bodies, his reasoning is acceptable to the scientist
although it is the force rather of an analogy upon which
the demonstrable proof rests. Physicists might call it
induction, but scrutiny of instances shows the analogical
rather than the experimental logic at the basis of the
proof.
Here the experimental aspect on which the grand
generalization is based is so simple and negligible that it
can easily be admitted by men of commonsense from their
everyday experience that the proof is not different from an
analogical one. The relation between the experimental
aspect and the law is one only of comparison between
what is familiar, and what is unfamiliar, i.e. analogy. No
one can say, strictly speaking, if there are not exceptions
to this law, at the central, peripheral or stratospheric limits
of the universe. This law however, is today universally
respected as an over-all statement of something that is
basically and scientifically true.
26
If we think in terms of equations such as: "momentum
equals mass into velocity (M = m x v)", which we easily can prove
at any time by calculation and measurement in any
given case, the proof is all the same one of equating less
general actualities to more general concepts, and when the
letters Q.E.D. are put at the end of the calculation, the
physicist accepts it as proof. The Pythagorean Theorem
is provable both by the actual cutting out and
pasting of triangles or squares, or by a blackboard sequence
of propositions based on axioms of a graded order, whether
known as postulates, riders or lemmas. Whether the a priori
is more valid than the a posteriori is not certain. Both
together lend validity to the truth.
The nature of a proof has itself been called into
question by no less a philosopher of science than Eddington
who says, 'Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathe-
matician tortures himself.'(4) It is a form of idolatry or
superstition according to him. If the positive sciences are so
weak in their proofs how can we expect speculation to be
any better?
PROOFS HERE AS VALID AS IN SCIENCE
When we look at the present series of verses we find
that it consists of a number of definitions and instructions
given to the aspirant in contemplative wisdom of the Self.
If the proofs of the modern physicists can rest on such
flimsy grounds as analogy or interchangeability of the
terms of an equation, then in such a subject as contempla-
tion of the Self, where introspective experimentation of
commoner and rarer experiences are alone possible and
are the rule, the validity of the proofs for each of the items
of Self-instruction contained here should be less open to
question by a critical student, however highly developed
his critical faculty might be.
------------------------------------------------------------
3. The Nature of the Physical World, (London 1928) p.49
27
In fact, the more acutely it is developed in him the more he should
desist from asking for the more ordinary experimental demonstrations
here. Whether experiments prove axioms or vice versa is the
question. The best proof is what proves itself.
WONDER HAS A PLACE
There is no need for science to be cold-blooded.
Under what compulsion should it limit itself by excluding
the element of wonder, mystery or legitimate inspiration?
To be happy and be in a mood to sing a ditty is as natural
enough to the man in the street as it is to rare mystics
reputed to live in caves of the Himalyas.
If the proper study of mankind is man, and if man must
know his environment fully and globally to live in it
correctly, a complete philosophy of life which would help
him do so, must needs take into account all his subjective traits,
and match them with their counterparts inthe objective world.
Correlations, cosmic, physic or both, counterparts of the Self and
the non-elf, innate correspondences, have all to be matched through
analogies or equations implying one or the other aspect, or both
aspects at once, so as to reveal the full mechanics as well
as dynamics of life. The more fluid the resulting truth, the
better it would be.
It is such an inclusive way that the Guru-philosophy
is expressly meant to represent, and here it is only
following and keeping alive in revalued terms the Upanishadic
tradition. A healthy, wholesale and wholehearted
philosophy, in which dialectical counterparts are juxtaposed,
so as to yield a unitive vision of the Self in the light of the normative
Absolute, is the task which the series of verses boldly sets before itself.
28
How far it has accomplished this great task which the span of these
verses is the question we have to anser after detailed
and critical scrutiny of the verses themselves, sometimes
taken in recurring and non-recurring groups of two, three, four or
five, as we shall see.
ASCENT IMPLIED IN THE GURU-PHILOSOPHY
Contemplation implies a form of ascent through
intensity of thought, as it were, under high pressure.
Passive and lukewarm attitudes are not conducive to yielding
the results of true contemplation, where the inertia, the
aches and pains of the body, or even love of easy-chair
comfort are to be left behind by the aspirant. There is a
factor called tapas (burning up) which presupposes an agony
of some sort, and implies intensity in research, full alertness,
supported by clear memory, willingness to give full
attention to the subject or problem at hand, and power to
listen or will to believe on a basis of correct scepticism
which balances belief. Such are some of the known prerequisites here.
The very first verse in this series
of verses, stresses in its opening phrase just this prerequisite on the part of
one who wishes to grasp the Guru-philosophy. The same
requirements have been enumerated by Sankara and others.
29
Bergson also says:
"But the truth is tht the intelligence can follow
the opposite method. It can place itself within the
mobile reality and adopt its ceaselessly changing
direction; in short, can grasp it by means of that
Intellectual sympathy which we call intuition. This is
extremely difficult. The mind has to do violence to
itself, has to reverse the direction of the operation by
which it habitually thinks, has perpetually to revise
or rather to recast all its categories. But in this way
it will attain to fluid concepts capable of following
reality in all its sinuosities and of adopting the very
movement of the inward life of things." (4)
Contemplative metaphysics therefore has to be
approached with a revised attitude about what is to be
expected. Bergsonian philosophy comes nearest to it.
There are many other features of the Guru-philosophy
which we can only touch upon when occasions arise.
Here we shall focus our attention in concluding this
section, on the element of wonder as admitted into correct
metaphysical speculation by the Guru in his philosphy.
BRACKETTING OF THE WONDER
The Absolute Self is an enigma and a wonder. It has
been called a mysterium tremendum (a tremdous
mystery), and the Gita (II. 29) states this unequivocally:
"A certain person sees this as a wonder, likewise
another speaks about this wonder. Another hears
of it even as a wonder, but even hearing no one
understands this at all".
We have in the previous section examined three of the
most central verses of the series before us. The rise and
circulation of elements of thought at the core of the
Absolute were pictured there.
-------------------------------------------------------------
4. An Introduction to Metaphysics, (Liberal Arts Press, New
York.) p. 51
30
How the visible world itself can be effaced in the full wonder of the
Absolute in terms of meaning or sound, was also boldly touched upon
in Verse 52. We shall now select two other verses where
again the element of mystery or wonder is pronounced.
Verses 35 and 65 are turned in opposite directions like the
outer brackets in an algebraic sum. First let us scrutinize
Verse 35:
"Like the dawning altogether of ten thousand suns
Wisdom.s function comes, Such verily is what
Can tear asunder the knowledge-hiding impermanent darkness of Maya here,
And, as the primordial Sun on high, prevails."
The overwhelming and total nature of Wisdom treated
as a wonder here is unmistakeable. By its position in the
total series (as Verse 35) we have to take note that this
wonder reaches out from the negative to the positive side
of the total knowledge-situation. The arrow points upwards
to the glorious vision possible to the contemplative. If
this verse is taken as the opening of the brackets enclosing
the content of general wonder of the Absolute vision of
the Self, which is the subject-matter of the series here,
we can see that Verse 65 suggests the closure of the same
pair of brackets. The arrow is reversed here. Instead of
suggesting endless possiblity for the contemplative vision,
there is here to be imposed a limitation lest too much
positiveness of the vision should disperse the unity of the
Self that is to be located in its middle neutral ground.
31
Verse 65 reads:
"There is nothing here that we have not already once known.
Hidden by form, knowledge fails us, wakefully
To know all this there is none at all, limitless as it is,
Oh, who can there be at all to know this wonder dear!
Here the limitlessness of the wonder is stressed to
show that the contemplative can have only such visions
as his own self can contain. The Absolute Self is enclosed,
as it were, between two opposite tendencies, one that is
of limitless expansion to the plus side and another that
points its arrow to the core of the neutral zero point of the
total knowledge-situation. The position of the verse in
the second half of the series, well towards the end, is
what alone can justify this seeming contradiction when Self-knowledge
and its wonder are understood as the content of the work
as a whole, with its plus and minus limiting factors.
Besides these limiting verses there are others in the
body of the work which the student would do well to find,
and analytically and critically scrutinize himself, according
to the contexct of each.
III
TRANSCENDING THE PARADOX
A philosopher does not merely dabble in information,
opinions or rival theories arrived at through trial-and-
error methods.
He is interested in findind reality behind appearances,
distinguishing truth from falsehood and facts from mere
superstitions. He employs experimental reasoning, logic
and valid general ideas, for determining what is existent,
subsistent or of value in life. The general and wholesale
approach is more natural to him than any piecemeal one,
and mere possibilities and probabilities cannot satisfy that
fully human curiosity or thirst for knowing which distinguishes
him as belonging to Homo sapiens.
It is thus that speculative literature differentiates man
from the anthropoid apes. He seeks the 'Truth that shall
make him free' and that 'pearl of great price' or 'the little
leaven that leaveneth the whole lump.' The Bhagavad
Gita states the same verity, 'the slightest measure of a
way of wisdom alone can save man from great fear.' (**)
The 'master-knot has to be cut' and 'doubts sundered in
his heart' to liberate or emancipate him.
Unlike the halting methods of inductive scientific
disciplines, which are less ambitious in this aspect, the
central problem of all philosophising anywhere or at any
time by humans has had the same problem or enigma to
solve. As the Guru puts it, they can be said to be
contained in the primary questions of all philosophy such
as, 'Who am I?' and 'How does this phenomenal world
come about?'
33
A wholehearted and wholesale approach to
such problems can alone make philosophy worthy.
From most ancient times the world over speculation
has gone on to unravel this mystery, solve this
enigma, or save man from the dilemma in which he is
caught. His spirit of research cannot rest satisfied till he
correctly locates the problem at the core of life. How
does matter interact with spirit? How are body and mind
articulated? How is the mind inserted into matter? How
can there be participation of the inner and the outer
factors of life?
All these refer to the same central problem of solving
paradoxes. Variously labelled by philosophical schools under
couples of terms such as the phenomenal and the nouemnal,
the visible and the intelligible, the experimental (or
observable) and the calculable, form and matter, in
endless variety, whether brought under the Self or the
non-Self, the subjective or the objective, or under spatial
or temporal dimensions in which life has its being or
becoming, all the dual aspects have an implied paradox
between each of the pair of terms. Mathematically they
can be comprised under the vertical (pure) and the
horizontal (practical).
FACING THE PARADOX FRONTALLY
The primary task of a philosopher is to face this
problem frontally. Modern philosophers like Russell tend
to bypass the central problem in the name of a scientific
approach. At the same time there are to their credit such
doctrines as that of 'neutral monism' which reflects a
total or wholesale doctrine or approach. Instead of a total
annexation of Truth in terms of an absolutist approach,
34
The so-called analytic philosophers prefer, in the name
of science, to annex bits of a territory at a time, by methods
resembling those of experimental science. The hollowness
of such a claim has been discussed by us elsewhere more
than once. In speculation, relativism and absolutism are
terms ill-defined by modern philosophers.
Neither of these terms can have a meaning apart from its
dialectical counterpart, for one of them must presuppose the
other for them to have any meaning at all. How even the Relativism
of Einstein has some Absolute notion at its core is
brought out clearly in the following lines which we
quote from a recent authority without entering into the
discussion here at any length:
After explaining (on page 292),
"The consequences of the Einstein theory are that distance
and time are relative, and hence measurements of them by another
observer need not agree with ours,'
and deriving further implications of the Lorentz Transformation, the writer
continues;
'This means that although time and space are relative, a certain
mixture of them is absolute. It is an error to think that because
Einstein's theory is called Relativity, all measurements are relative.
The mathematician Whitehead chose the name 'seperation' for the
absolute invariant t2 - x2 ."(1)
Further light on the status of the velocity of light
as an absolute normative notion at the centre of the
theory of Einsteinian so-called Relativity is afforded by
another atatement:
'.......no material body can have a velocity equal to or
greater than the speed of light.' (2)
------------------------------------------------------------
1. The Main stream if Mathematics by Edna E. Kramer Ph.D
(Fawcett Publication, New York,) 1961 p. 295
2. Ibid. p. 292
35
Thus there is a paradox hiding even at the core of the
meanings of the two terms "relative" and "absolute". If
what is absolute is real the relative must be called false
because there cannot be two truths. If there are two
truths one should either contradict the other or be merely
a tautology of the other. In Vedantic parlance the
former is an asambhava (impossibility as a contradiction
in terms) and the latter is vitiated by the evil of atmasraya
(begging the question).
Between accepting tautology or contradiction there
hides, at the core of even the most recent of speculation,
supported by the strict rules of mathematics used in
modern science, a master enigma, dilemma or problem,
like a Gordian knot, intricate and difficult to resolve, which
has taken all the intelligence of wise men of all times and
climes to resolve once and for all.
Modernism mistrustingly looks upon such a solution
as resembling the search for a philosopher's stone, or the
search for a panacea for all ills. In spite of this modern
prejudice in the name of the experimental approach of
science, we can see from the above citations that even at
the very core of the theory of relativity, there is hiding a
paradoxical absolute element. The Guru-philosophy that
we are attempting to present in these introductory chapters
attempts to approach this very problem that Einsteinian
theorems or theories involve. A fresh and bold approach
is warranted by our times and this is exactly what Guru-
philosophy as we wish to present in the pages that follow,
claims to bring into view, as representing the central
problem of all philosophy which cannot be bypassed
without detracting from the full dignity and purpose of
philosophy itself.
36
THE 'ODDNESS' OR 'MYSTERY' OF PARADOX IN
MATHEMATICS AND PHILOSOPHY
We have just seen how paradox hides at the core of
the Relativity Theory. There are certain unresolved para-
doxes which are known in mathematics. Leibniz prefers
to call them contradictions while Bertrand Russell would
dismiss them as mere "oddities." What anyone
prefers to call such a paradox is a question of personal temperament.
The sum of the odd numbers in a series must give
rise to a different total than the sum of the even numbers,
thus giving rise to two paradoxical values of infinity.
Whether merely 'oddness' or 'copntradiction' is recognized
here, the paradoxical dilemma remains to be solved. On
their solution, Runes in his Dictionary of Philosophy says:
"Russell's solution of paradox is embodied in what is now
known as the ramified theory of types....Because of its
complication this has now been largely abandoned in
favour of other solutions."(3)
No proper solution has been made acceptable, either
by logicians or by mathematicians. The dialectical approach
of Bradley to logic brings him up to this very problem
of the difficulty of transcending paradox when he states:
"And we seem unable to clear ourselves from the old
dilemma. If you predicate what is different, you ascribe to
the subject what it is not, and if you predicate what is
not different, you say nothing at all." (4)
Philosophically, scientifically, logically, and mathematically
we are thus finding it still very difficult to transcend paradox.
-----------------------------------------------------------
3. Cf. under 'Paradoxes, Logical,' p.224.
4. Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed. p.17
37
Between full paradoxes, dilemmas and enigmas, ranging
from mild implied paradoxes to open contradictions
There can be endless grades in the type of paradox we
might have to solve, but in order to transcend paradox an
absolutist philosophy like neutral monism, which is neither
one nor the other but unites both aspects of being or
becoming, is inevitable. The Bhagavad Gita states this
problem of all philosophy in the following words:
"What is unreal cannot have being and non-being cannot be real,
the conclusion in regard to both these has been known to philosophers. (II, 16).
In the light of the last part of this verse, any philosopher
who does not face this problem with its paradoxes
squarely cannot be ranged by the side of philosphers
who are fully alive to their problem. As we shall see, it is just
because the Guru-philosophy faces this paradox at the heart
of all serious speculation, that it might appear unusual to moderns
who wish to bypass this central question by taking refuge in
verbosities or in piecemeal approaches such as Russell seems to
recommend. The modern notion of a space-time continuum is an
attempt to transcend an implied paradox between space-like
and time-like elements.
THE PLACE OF THE PARADOX FULLY RECOGNISED IN
GURU-PHILOSOPHY
The subject-matter and the object-matter of philosophy
constitute together in Guru-philosphy a master enigma
or wonder in which each is to be understood unitively in the light
of the other, and even thus only in its broad outlines
and in its most generalized categories, as a totality and
as unity in terms of the Absolute.
We have already seen: first how the secret of structure
holds the key to the understanding of Guru-philosphy, and how
secondly, the Absolute which underlies it is of the nature of a wonder.
38
The reasoning man is not going to rest with the thought that Truth
or Reality is merely a wonder. He wishes to critically analyze it
further and break it up, if possible, into its components,
subtle or gross, to see how the various aspects
hang together to give unity to Truth, without which it
would be meaningless in life. Logic, ratiocination,
induction, deduction and the application of the various
measures of validity to arrive at conclusions - all of these are ways
that have been open to speculation as ordinarily employed
by philosophers. The negative method of first determining
what aspects of reality are not valid is a more scientific
approach than the inductive-hypothetical empirical method
of piecemeal experimentation based on experience. The
a posteriori approach by itself cannot penetrate into the
mystery presented by life. This is evident from the fact that
the hand of God or of Nature is still hidden in science. Even
such simple questions as sex determination in nature
eludes scientific clarification. The nature of the self and
its destiny is not within the reach of usual commonsense
reasoning. Intuition or dialectical methods, when perfected
as instruments of thought, as we can hope they may be in the\
future, are alone adequate to penetrate behind the
mystery that life presents in its totality of the subjective
and the objective treated together. In such a wholesale
and wholehearted philosophical approach as that of
the Guru here, the confrontation of the most central of the
problems of all philosophy - which is that of the paradox at
the centre of life - is all important. The Guru questions its
nature in the work before us, in the following pointed
manner:
39
"As a mixture of what is the world and what is the real
That which presents itself before us is a great iniquity indeed!
This is what is indeterminate beyond grasp of word or mind;
How can the course of right reason move within its domain? (5)
This verse as we notice, occurs at the end part of the
series of one hundred verses. This might give room to
the question whether the paradox is still valid after all the
speculation of Guru-philosophy. Such a conclusion
would be both true and false at once, because as we see
finally the paradox is transcended. All the preceding
verses are meant only to lay the foundations for the final
conclusion in fully unitive terms. The method, the theory
of knowledge and the value notions, each proper to the
finalized position, are clearly indicated in the last verses.
Almost all the verses contain elements of the duality
at the base of the paradox, and almost all the verses or
groups of them indicate too, how the paradox is to be
transcended by the unitive vision given to the philosophy
of the Guru. Both the a priori and the a posteriori go
hand in hand in Guru-philosphy. Axioms and everyday
experience come together to coalesce and give certitude
or conviction, as far as is possible in such a domain of
pure wisdom. Let us take another verse which suggests
more clearly how the paradox is resolved in terms of a
dynamic circulation of existence and essences at the core
of Absolute Self-consciousness:
"Knowledge, in order to know itself, the Earth and other manifestations became.
In inverted manner thus, now mounting, now changing over
Like a circulating fire-faggot, it keeps turning round. (6)
-------------------------------------------------------------
5. Atmopadesa Satakam, Verse 94.
6. Ibid. Verse 33.
40
The dynamism at the core of the unitive vision of the
Absolute is thus sufficiently indicated quite early in the
series, and after referring to the implications of the
same vision stage by stage in a certain methodic
order, the Guru refers to the same paradox again at a
later stage, to confirm that a form of higher intuitive
and dialectically perfected reasoning is needed to get
behind appearances to the core of the reality that they
hide. There are various contemplative, ethical, aesthetical,
logical and commonsense findings or conclusions incorporated
in the body of the work, each of which has to be
studied in its own context. Here we are concerned with
the over-all paradox involved in Guru-philosophy in order
to see how, in each of life's problems, the way he
unitively resolves paradox is applied by him to arrive
at the main guiding conclusions within the scope of
contemplative Self-knowledge. It is the Self as the
Absolute and as the Highest of human values that should
act as the normaive reference or regulative principle in
all matters of import in life. Such a vision lies beyond the
duality of paradox. Between tautology and full contradiction,
elements of paradox can hide the truth as a mere dilemma,
enigma, doubt or incertitude. All these dual elements,
referred to under the head of maya in Vedanta, tend to
indeterminism and confusion of right values. Transcending
such an 'either-or' or 'neither-nor' situation in favour of
both at once is the task that Guru-philosophy boldly sets
before itself.
SUBTLER PARADOXES EXAMINED
The Paradoxes of Zeno and Parmenides (revalued in
Plato's Socratic dialogues) have occupied a central place
in western philosphical speculation from pre-Socratic days.
41
The one and the many, the big and the small, the
part and the whole, the Self and the non-Self, have all been
subjected to dialectical treatment, and various attempts have
been made to resolve them unitively, sometimes statically,
sometimes dynamically, whether in the context of being
or becoming. Cosmic or General Self-Consciousness is
the unified field or ground on which dialectical revaluations
themselves have to live and move. Hegel's thesis, antithesis
and synthesis refer to a process of dialectical revaluation
on the basis of the Absolute on which they depend.
In Bergson's philosophy of the flux to which the élan vital is
subject, we have the same pure dynamism which had been
previously discussed in the paradoxes of Zeno and which was
given by him a new lease of life after it was nearly forgotton by
rationlist speculators in Europe after Descartes. The two verses
of the Guru that we quote below are highly reminiscent of the
fluid reality that Bergson, based on Zeno's paradoxes, had postulated:
"At birth-time being there is none,
And the one born at another instant cannot be;
How ever does this exist? Death too is even likewise.
All is but a flux and becoming of the mindstuff pure.
Contraries like being and becoming, how can they
Like creation, endurance and dissolution, in one place co-exist?
For these three to pass into, there is nothing either
Thus viewed, the earth and other things are mere words alone." (7)
-----------------------------------------------------------
7. Atmopadesa Satakam, Verses 79, 80.
42
From the time of Heraclitus, whose famous saying
was that one cannot enter into the same river twice,
this doctrine of the flux has been central to many and varied
schools of speculation both modern and ancient, Eastern
or Western. The difference with Guru-philosophy here is
that the Guru is not limited to perceptualism, nominalism,
conceptualism or even empiricism schematically understood,
but gives due place to them all in a unified manner and
even in a methodic order, based on a strict spistemology
and axiology. Later chapters will perhaps amplify this and
justify this claim further, as we proceed.
While we are on the subject of transcending paradox
let us refer to another verse in which the transcending of
paradox is accomplished in as delicate a way as in the
dialectics of the One and the Many in Plato, who refers to
Zeno in his Parmenides where the contention of Zeno is:
"Being cannot be many, because if it were, it would be
like and unlike at the same time, which is impossible." (8)
Here the paradox is not transcended but only a sort of
reductio ad absurdum or ad impossibile is arrived at. The
Guru, as seen tackling the same problem in the verse below,
merges the impossibility into the neutrality or unity of Absolute
Consciousness, which is the rare 'secret' clarified in his philosophy elsewhere:
"Of one thing there could be many, as in many objects
One single meaning could reside: by such knowledge we can know
Consciousness as comprising all, diferencelessly without any remainder;
This ultimate secret, however, is not given for all to know. (9)
-------------------------------------------------------------
8. Plato's Dialogues translated by B. Jowett, (Random House,New York.) p.88
9. Atmopadesa Satakam, Verse 73
43
Cubic crystals of common salt or an orchard of apple
trees of the same variety and of the same age, when taken
as examples, will easily be seen to justify the seeming
puzzle of the above verse. What tends to give specificity
overtly combines in meaning innately, and what tends to
be generic in meaning, tends to be overtly distinguishable
as separate entities. Word and meaning belong to the
matrix of pure mind-stuff, where both the mechanistic and
the vitalistic aspects co-exist without conflict or contradiction.
This is one of the ways in which the paradox
that life presents is seen to be capable of being
transcended in the philosphy of the Guru. This kind of
approach which is most subtle, as the Guru himself warns,
need not be the only way of transcending the contradiction
in life. At different levels of the total knowledge-
situation, different appraoches, some factual, some
demonstrable, some logical, intuitive or dialectical, may
be seen to be employed, even with the limited range of
the hundred verses before us.
PARADOX IS TRANSCENDED BY RECONCILING OPPOSITES
If the Unified Field Theory of Einstein, where gravitational,
electromagnetic, and geometrically understood space or
world-ground, with a common unified schematic basis, in
which micro- and macro-cosmos participate, as it were,
from opposite poles of the same homogeneous totality of a
time-space continuum, has become familiar and acceptable
to modern ears; then the heights of Guru-speculation here in
the verses before us, need not necessarily have a strange,
outlandish or antique ring in our ears either. Its full
implications have been explored and scrutinized in our
An Integrated Science of the Absolute.
44
Without going into the merits of these verses, we
quote below two more verses from the Guru in order to
show how his speculation at the beginning of the century
echoes and complements those very generalizations to
which human minds, more in touch with the physical
world than the mental, have been able to attain.
The daily newspaper before me today (22nd March, 1965)
has, on its front page, a photograph of how two
Russians have accomplished the feat of stepping out into
space 300 miles from the earth. These conquests might
change the complexion of the war situation from one pole,
but from the other pole too human speculation has to
catch up with such outer victories with equally significant
victories of the spirit of man that can attain equal depths
more significant for peace. The sublime synthesis of opposites
in transcending the paradox of life, even in the domain
of concrete universals, and not merely in the world of
semantics, is reflected in these verses which we quote by
way of conclusion, without comment. The serious student
will himself scrutinize them and derive from them all their
implications, when he comes to them in more orderly fashion
in the text as developed by the Guru.
"The atom and the infinite, thus as being and non-being,
Loom from either side; this experience too
Of being as well as non-being, shall thereafter extinction gain,
And devoid of any basis, shall forever cease to be!
45
Within the glory of pure knowing the atom bereft of all parts, shall extinct become,
And the infinite too, shall thereafter its own plenitude attain.
Direct experience alone can reveal this boundless
Stuff of Intelligence Pure, this silence-filled ocean of Immortal Bliss. (10)
--------------------------------------------------------------------
10. Atmopadesa Satakam, Verse 96, 97.
IV
HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL VALUE-WORLDS
This term "Absolute" would be a mere word without any
content significant to human life if we did not look at it
from the side of the phenomenal world known to us through
the senses, supported by our powers of inference, deductive or inductive.
Abstraction and generalization lead us, step by step, to
categories of facts, truths or realities of value in life. The
lesser values are inclusively covered by the more general
and the more abstract. This is the way of speculation known
as the via negationis or neti neti of the Upanishads. When
the limit of such a negative way is reached, there is a residue
still left in the thinking mind which, when understood
globally and schematically, gives us the first key to the
understanding of Guru-philosophy, as we have tried to
explain in the first of these essays.
Beyond this limit of the negative approach from the
phenomenal to the noumenal, the Absolute cannot be
appraised by the human understanding except as a vague
wonder. The wonder or the mystery that the notion of
the Absolute thus presents has been dealt with by us in
the second section of this series. We have further
explained that when critically scrutinized at closer quarters,
a paradox lurks at the very core of philosophical speculation
in general. We have indicated how Guru-
philosophy faces frontally this problem of transcending
paradox.
47
So now the stage is set for us to consider another
aspect, which will afford us further ease in
following the broad outlines which speculation as under-
stood in Guru-philosphy adopts.
A strict methodology and epistemology are implied
in Guru-philosophy which is for the keen student to
follow up further when examining the text of the hundred
verses. He can also reasonably expect further clarification
from our final work on the "Science of the Absolute"
based on the Guru's Darsana Mala (Garland of Visions
of the Absolute) which attempts a more scientifically
systematic treatment. (1)
PYSCHO-PHYSICAL AMBIVALENT ALTERNATING PROCESS
Like the heartbeat, psycho-physical life presents
an alternating ambivalent process between two poles.
Guru-philosophy as we are able to understand it gives
full recognition to this process. We have travelled far
and wide in our other expositions to lay bare the structure
and dynamism of this process, and found that this same
structural dynamism is seen implicitly or explicitly referred
to in the efforts made by great minds from most ancient
times world over. Pairs of dialectically reciprocal
counterparts are referred to wherever a subtle intuitive
understanding is called for in solving the problems of
life. In our section devoted to the problems of trans-
cending paradoxes, we have made it amply clear that there
is always a dual aspect present in the basic field on
which paradoxes can thrive. This ground whether cosmlogical,
psychological or axiological, or all three of these
combined, is lodged at the core of the Absolute.
The very fact that all words representing percepts or
concepts can be arranged in two columns of synonyms or
----------------------------------------------------------
1. See An Integrated Science of the Absolute, by the author.
48
antonyms shows that there is an antinomain principle, a
dichotomy or polarity, which enters into a kind of subtle
mathematical intersection in which two elements participate,
as when time and distance participate in the notion of
velocity. All phenomena are capable of graphical
representation as correlated elements into which two
antinomian factors enter. Matter and energy are so
related that both cannot be measured together without
indeterminism getting involved. The Self and the non-
Self are also to be looked upon either as proper or
improper elements, relation or relata, cause or effect,
in respect of each other. Life is a process of such
alternating ambivalent factors.
MATHEMATICAL FACTORS
Modern algebra and geometry have many common
axioms on the basis of which sums and products of
mathematical elements with the laws of commutation,
association and distribution obey or answer fundamantal
axioms accepted by mathematicians. There is a modern
branch of the 'algebra of geometry' wherein what are
called proper and improper elements enter and reveal
the nature of pure space or number.
Such a new mathematical treatment of algebra and
geometry together is a branch of the science which has
not yet been fully explored. Its promise is, however,
great, we have to remember here too, that mathematics
becomes real only to the extent that its possible applications
become significant in the context of human
experience or solve problems in life. New conventions
based on old axioms and laws of mathematics, such as
referred to above, are permissable in respect of both
algebra and geometry.
49
These two branches can be made to come together
to interpret for us the nature of pure space or pure number.
Complex numbers as well as pure
space, subjected to strict though arbitrary t | 
