Satya, Dharma and Rta [Rita] - the Hidden Order

Rta

Rta is the cosmic order – consisting of the laws that govern the functioning of the manifested universe.  Rta is the order through which the universal intelligence unfolds in action – whether it be creation, sustenance or destruction. 

In a world where there are no human beings, there is neither Satya nor Dharma – only Rta – the unending symphony of the cosmic order.  Among all created beings on earth, it is only the human being who through his free will power – can realize what Rta is.  The human being has a deep yearning for the highest expression of free will.  And this free will expressed through thought, word and deed. 

Dharma

When the idea of an inherent order is applied to a particular material, then this applied order is called Dharma of that material.  Of course, its reach is wider and it applies to the worlds of human thought, word and deed. 

You may wonder where the necessity is to use a Sanskrit term.  Like karma, Dharma has also become an English word.  And yet the word Dharma continues to carry the potential for a wide and deep interpretation. 

Dharma is a characteristic quality, an attribute, a principle which we come to regard in life as necessary, beneficial and in the common interest of everyone concerned – and it permeates all three layers of our existence – body, mind and spirit.  The body has its own Dharma, the mind its own and the spirit – well, the spirit is free of Dharma!  And yet to reach this state of pure freedom, the body and mind have to be established in their Dharmas.  Thus Dharma can also be interpreted as the true and natural state of a manifested object – un-impacted by individual human ideas and ideologies.  More commonly, Dharma is the term that is used for a shared and common value of life which when upheld enables us to treat all fellow beings involved with a natural and warm degree of love and respect. 

Dharma is not religion as it is often translated as.  The idea of religion is only two millennia old, whereas Dharma is as old as the human being is on this planet.  It is just the human aspect of a sustainable cosmic order.  While all living beings follow largely predictable and natural behavioural patterns, the human being is different.  Over thousands of years, man has forgotten his natural state.  His mind is possessed by the force of collective ideas and other mental structures that are passed on as education or as social and communal conditions.  Some of these ideas may be beneficial and some may be harmful not only to the human being but to the viability of all life on planet earth.  Such negative ideas are unsustainable in the long run.  And yet they take root in the common psyche of man and drive the energies of the human being.

If we can use the term ‘positive’ to mean a field in which all human actions are sustainable, then this field of positivity can be called Dharma.  It is a field which is beneficial to the continuance of the human race on earth and for the co-existence of all life forms on this precious planet.  And yet an understanding of this field is elusive and subtle.

If you are living in the United States of America, you will find that whenever you interact with a representative of the government, the stationery carries the emblem of the United States.  And yet if you go from office to office looking for the United States of America, you cannot find it.  You can find numerous people representing the ideal called the United States.  You will find various laws that are enacted in the name of the nation called the United States.  And if you break a law, a police officer wearing a badge that carries the seal of the government of the United States of America will hand you a ticket.  And by noticing the seal, you can conclude that you are in the United States.  Actually you are standing on a small patch of soil on planet earth.  The earth does not know that we have divided the planet into several countries.  It is completely unaware of the fact that we have each appropriated a portion of its resource and are building and maintaining armies to sustain and defend these boundaries.  And yet when you are in the United States of America, it is prudent to follow the laws of the land.  This is what makes for a civilised society.

Dharma, similar to the concept of nationhood, is an abstract and often elusive concept.  It is the high ideal of a shared value of co-existence and harmony for the mutual well-being between man and nature, between man and man, and between man and the natural resources of planet earth.  The presence of dharma is felt in the laws that govern human behaviour and attitude, through the human attributes that subscribe to the fundamental idea of dharma – of sustainability. 

Within the living universe, the embedded laws that enable a form to be retained are called Dharma.  Because of this form-enabling property, the very word Dharma is built from its essential function - ‘dhaarayati iti dharmah’ – ‘that which sustains is Dharma’.  The essential effect of the embedded law is that it sustains the form.  Thus Dharma is the universal law of form which while being embedded within it, enables a form to be sustained.

Satya

The concept of Satya or truth is more easily understood.  In the world of human actions, Satya refers to the spoken truth and Dharma refers to the lived truth.  Thus the following may be said:

a)     Rta – cosmic order independent of human world.

b)     Dharma – Rta applied to the human field of thought and action.

c)     Satya – truth as applied to the human field of thought and word.

Both words and thoughts can be characterized as Satya based on whether they are in line with Rta.  What is expressed by a human voice or thought is called Satya if it is in line with the cosmic order as far as the manifest universe is concerned; and if it is in line with Dharma as far as the living universe is concerned.  Satya is therefore a statement of truth, of a pure fact.  Satya is unambiguous in its nature.  Satya is clarity of perception which is objective and human in its application. 

Satya, Dharma and Rta

In order to guide the expression of free will, Satya and Dharma form the framework.  When man’s expression of his free will reflects Satya and Dharma, then it can be said to be in line with Rta.  An experience of the cosmic order, Rta, through the highest positioning of free will leads man to his native state of pure and unalloyed happiness. 

When human actions are in line with Rta, such actions form Dharma.  Within the personal body-mind field of a person, Dharma refers to the laws of nature that maintain the harmony between body, mind and spirit and sustain a form.  And within the body-mind field of a human society, it refers to natural laws that sustain the harmony between human beings and human communities. 

When you see something happening in the external world and refrain from reacting, your attention lodges in a deeper witness layer instead of dissipating in the external world of tumultuous happenings.  When it is your turn to act, natural forces will seek your participation.  Training your impulses to refrain from reacting to ordinarily arising situations, enables you to elevate yourself to witness the play of natural forces, and you will know when it is your turn.  Satya and Dharma form the framework for us to speak and to act, to play our part in this human world and to stay focused during our work.

While Satya is looking towards your center from your current position in this vast arena of human life, Dharma is a radial vector pointing to the center, along which you tread.  While we travel towards the center, our actions are dhaarmic.  While we take steps that move us away from our center, then our actions are non-dhaarmic or adhaarmic.

Let us remember that the choices we make are in our hands – to fix our will high or low using the base of knowledge and wisdom within us.  When one stations his will high, two higher levels will become visible.  When one positions his will low, two lower levels will become visible.  The tendency of the egoic mind is to choose the latter.  More often than not, the low choice is easier while the high choice seems difficult and beset with obstacles.

When you choose a lower level at which to fix your will, your freedom loses vigour while your ego gains mass.  Repeated ‘low’ choices lead your egoic mind to accumulate mass and acquire a pseudo personality leading to confusion between your authentic will and the will of this pseudo- personality.  The pseudo-personality having no roots in reality, starts taking decisions lower and lower, leading to addictions and obsessive disorders, and ultimately to the loss of the human form.

Let us strive therefore to be more aware.  Let us refrain from reacting.  May we be aware that we are positioning our will when we act.  May we get the wisdom to constantly look at our deepest center and when we walk, may we receive the wisdom to walk the path of Dharma.  Let us make our choices with wisdom and be an example for those around us.  May we be the divine light from whom others can light their own lamp of wisdom.

Refuse to Comment !

Just as you see something or read something, the first layer it impacts is your ego because the ego is the outermost shell.  The nature of the ego is to ‘react’ and hence immediately some reaction arises in your mind.  The egoic reaction usually stems from comparison and you compare your own views and expressions and feel a subtle need to say something either as a put down or as a standalone disagreement which defines your position as being different.  It is all right.  It is in the nature of the human construction itself.

 

When a baby first learns to talk, one of the first words it utters is ‘No!’.  This is the beginning of the expression of the infant ego that feels the need to oppose.   As a teenager, you feel like rebelling, you feel like doing exactly the opposite of what someone tells you to do.  This is the adolescence of the ego and most of us don’t really grow out of it.  Whenever you act from your egoic layer, you are not performing any useful action.  You are merely causing a reaction which in the end depletes human energy. 

  

Pass this phase.  Give the ego a go by.  Let the ego bus go past your stop.  And then you will reach the mind.  The natural mind reads something and if there is something uplifting likes to acknowledge and express disapproval if something deserves it.  However, as we grow, we rarely are in touch with the pure state of our natural mind.  The mind has become more of a repeat performer.  The basic property of the mind is to stick to what comes to it and keep repeating it like a broken gramophone.  It reads something and reads it again and again.   And this repetition will gradually lead to either an addiction or lower into an egoic reaction. 

Instead of plainly agreeing or disagreeing and going on with your life, if the sticky nature of the mind is allowed to take over, you may feel the necessity of coming back and reading again.  And if you like it, you’ll want to forward it to many friends and through this cycle, seek a repetition of the same.  Or an egoic reaction takes place and you feel that you must strongly express some disagreement.  When you react from the mind layer, you waste your energy in the game of influence.  In seeking to influence you move into the egoic layer and become the influenced.  Without knowing you have caught yourself in the web of reaction once again.

Therefore, pass this phase too.  Let the mind bus also go past your stop.  You will then be able to reach your intelligence.  Unless you have given up the mental talk and the egoic reaction, the pure intelligence cannot be reached.  In the grip of the mind or the ego, a pseudo intelligence, a sort of cleverness, uses up your energy and poses as your intelligence.   It is only when you consider what you have read in the light of a deeper pure intelligence, that you understand the real import of what you have read.  You reflect on your wisdom, weigh the input, accept what can be accepted, acknowledge and reject what ought to be rejected.  This is a sign of discretion.  You are interested in living an intelligent life.   Not just in accumulating ideas.  And you quickly absorb the wisdom into your life and grow in wisdom.

Any rise in consciousness can happen only through a giving up of something, only through a denial of acting on options that become available.  As you give up the choice to react from your ego, you rise to your mind.  As you give up the addictive nature of the mind, you rise into intelligence.  As you learn to act on discretion and give up that which does not suit you, you rise in wisdom. 

Isn’t it a wonderful thing to rise in wisdom and have our relationships free of egoic reactions and words?  Isn’t it a wonderful life where our energies are not sapped by a mind that repeatedly says the same things, so that we can use our energies to savour that which is bright and sunny and enjoy the external world to the fullest?  Let us therefore give up something that is worth less even though we are tempted by it.  Let us therefore, refuse to be drawn to comment and thereby, rise into something that is valuable and lead a life of enthusiasm, abundance and quiet wisdom.     

A Gentle Soul !

I met a Gentle Soul once and told it all the things I liked about it!

I said, "You know what I like about you?  I just realized that you are good, noble, graceful, loving and wise. 

In your goodness, you seek nothing in return.  It is just your nature.  And you know not how to be evil.  You trust people and whenever you find something good in them, you praise it.  Whenever you find something that makes you uncomfortable, you ignore it and pray that such things do not take root.  When you read about some evil in society you empathise with the wrong doers and sympathise with those who enforce the law.  You do not curse nor utter bad words, because you are far wiser than that.  Your goodness does not interfere.  You are ever ready to forgive, ever ready to patch up, because you are aware deep within, all anyone wants is to be loved. 

You are noble and in your nobility, you are elegance personified.  You are like a great and noble monarch.  You are patient, kind and considerate.  You speak softly and when something is said that jars the atmosphere, you quieten it down with a soft glance and a silent smile.  You lend dignity to every proceeding and every interaction.  You bear with patience every pretence and falsehood, every expression of vanity and arrogance.  You have seen the highs and lows of life, and you know better than to let yourself be carried away by these waves.

You are graceful in your movements and perfect in poise.  Your walk is majestic and nothing flusters you.  There is nothing loud about you and you seek no attention.  And yet you are the center of the world.  When you move, the world moves with you.  The past and present are your servants and when you sit, it is as if your presence is occupying a throne. 

I find that you are wonderful, loving and affectionate.   You care about people and respect their position and relationship.  Every person in the world belongs to someone.  A child to her parents, a wife to her husband, a husband to his wife, an employee to his employer and a friend to a friend and so on.  And yet every person is also alone to some subtle degree and at this very personal level, each one belongs to the One that resides deep within the cave of our hearts, who is ultimately the source and substratum of all creation.  You understand this and respect these relationships and never do anything to tear the fabric of another relationship.  You wish to leave it the way you found it.

Your love is impartial and you prefer to see the role of qualities than blame people, personalities and creeds for actions that seem to hurt.  You know it is the work of ignorance.  You know that deep within every heart, each one is innocent.  You know that each one will one day reach his perfection and if you are asked for advice, you give it most reluctantly and yet in a manner so gentle and soft, that neither the reluctance nor the passing of wisdom is detected.

Your voice has a tone to it, that tone of compassion and caring, that tone of a genuine sharing. You revere those that are wise, respect the elderly, and love equally all animals and plants.  A tiny bloom hiding below a flimsy leaf beckons your attention as does a stray dog seeking a pat.  In the gentle eyes of a cow, your eyes melt and in the strong structure of an erect and old tree your person expands. 

You love music, dance and all forms of majestic and unifying art and lose yourself in it.   You love the beauty in nature and the stillness within all movement.  You love to find the thing that is common to people and situations and that which brings them together. You realise that everything is covered with a halo, a halo of perfection and luminosity.  And those that come in touch with you, touch this sacredness.  You wish neither good nor evil, and accept everything without comment.  You know very well that happiness is your true state.  Everything else is alien to you.    

You walk tall, elegant and noble

While life and events flow into you

Like pouring the nectar of sweet grace

Into the ocean of time. " 

Break the Coconut !

As human beings, we are multi-dimensional creatures.  We have a mind, the ego and the soul.   Of these, the soul is your pure identity and the ego is the outermost shell. And the fundamental property of the ego is to 'react'.  And the nature of reaction is that it is sharp and hurts more.  The Egoic layer is a hard and brittle layer.  It also makes egoic relationships fragile and broken egos are hard to mend.  Unless the identification with the ego is broken nothing meaningful can be achieved in life.    


This is the esoteric meaning behind breaking of the coconut when you go into a temple or when you begin a new project.  The coconut is a perfect example.  The outermost shell is hard and represents the ego.  It must first be broken.  The shell is made up of a hard substance which contains a great deal of heat.  A single lit coconut shell can heat up 2 or 3 gallons of water.  It contains that much heat.  It can be used to create a fire and when thrown into an existing fire, burns blazingly.  The softer edible portion within the shell is the natural human self.  It is soft, white and nourishing to the body.  It also contains fire, but in a different form.  When dried, it can be pressed to obtain an oil.  And this oil can be utilised to light a lamp.  This is the oil of human life.  The tender coconut water represents the soul.  It gives vital nutrients for the human body and is a water form – the universal solvent.  When you break the coconut shell, you break your ego; you surrender the white insides - your natural human self; and allow the water to flow out – allow your individual soul to merge with the universe.    


Thus the ego must be broken all the time.  Or else it forms a thicker and harder shell and it will be painful when it will have to be forced open at a later stage.  Sometimes we recognise that the so-called law of karma works in this layer and feel that we have gained some great insight.  It is no insight at all.  It is no knowledge at all.  It is merely an acknowledgement that within the egoic layer, Newtonian laws apply.  And its sphere of operation is limited.  And this law cannot be used by human beings.  You cannot use it to wish someone ill and to wish yourself well.  There is no place for a wish in the middle of enforcement of this law.  When you wish something, you are trying to interfere with the laws in operation – you are trying to speed up or slow down a reaction.  And this will also create another reaction.  Therefore the wise never wish – either for good or for bad; either for themselves or for others.  They go on working.  Eventually the fruits will show up. 


The egoic shell is also flammable as mentioned earlier.  This is why all fights, wars, curses and violent struggles are products of Egoic actions.  All these violent flames arise from the egoic shell.  When it takes over, it destroys – not only the ones that it fights, but also the host.  Many are driven to suicide by it.  How foolish it is to commit suicide, isn’t it?  How foolish to fancy that your soul can be destroyed.  Suicide and murder are just the same.  Both bodies are not you.  Whether you kill yours or another’s, it makes no difference.  It is all the same.  The Ego makes some believe that by killing themselves other people are learning some lesson through suffering.  While in fact, he is only killing his own options of learning from life.  It is quite unbelievable how the reactive Ego makes a person quite stupid and foolish.


No doubt the Ego must be broken but it is also that the outer protective shell cannot be broken everywhere.  When we meet a stranger, we do not divulge everything that we know or feel.  We give some limited information and protect our identity.  We retain our shell, a bit of our ego, for the purposes of a limited interaction with strangers.  When we meet family, friends and well wishers, there is no need to pretend much about who we are.  They already know a lot about us and our egoic identity is not of much use.  We must fall back to our natural human identity, leaving aside the identities imposed by our possessions and worldly qualifications.  We interact as human beings.  When we meet the Lord, we have to shift to a further layer of internal truth, to our divine layer.  In this identity we are just a part of the same divine self that is the source and substratum of all creation.  With God, we cannot retain our Ego, we cannot hang on to any limited idea of our selves.  We must let go carefully so that we can savour His embrace, his unconditional love for us.  We must break the coconut.  We must break the Ego, let go of our worldly identities and let our inner self merge with Him.


We must not retain the egoic shell when we go to a temple to meet the Lord.  And even in many worldly situations, we must not let the Ego dictate our actions.  We can use the egoic external identity to shield ourselves, to protect those whom we love, to protect the principles of truth.  But we should not use it to hurt others or to accumulate hurt within ourselves by inviting an internal reaction that creates dark spots in our subtle body.  When you are in two minds about what to do, resist the temptation of the ego to react.  Break the coconut and be patient.  And wisdom will show you in time the course of action that is best suited to all parties concerned. 

                               ..........shree gurubhyo namah.........

¹Conversation between Sriranga Mahaaguru and his disciple

Sri Varada Deshikachar that occurred some 50 years ago and

are published in a book called 'Vichara Sumanomaala'.   

Sri Varada Desikachar is now known as Sri Sri Rangapriya Swamiji