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Pujya Dr. K.C. Varadachari - Volume -1
 

Discourses on "The Commentary on the Ten Commandments" of the system of Sri Ramchandra's Rajayoga - Commandment -5

  
Be truthful. Take miseries as Divine blessings for your own good and be thankful.
 

This is one of the most difficult commandments especially as we are not able to see the rightness or justness of our sufferings which are of all sorts. For no fault of ours we find ourselves humiliated and hurt and we begin to question whether there is any justice anywhere. The trouble seems to be that in a relative world, what is one man's joy is another man's misery, and the setting of one's rightness above another's seeks to be difficult. There are different criteria about what is just. It appears to be just to punish anyone who had the fortune or rather misfortune of having been born in a higher class or caste and to readjust the order of society so as to make the low class or the poorer class the higher class. The haves have to be made have-nots, and this is said to be restoration of justice. So also we find that with varying difficulties the concept of justice is so thoroughly ambiguous and relative that there is no (one) absolute principle by which one can say that this is just. Even in regard to our health where the restoration of it may be said to be our aim, we have different voices, which have no concept of health as the goal while real health is that which makes one really a thinking and intelligent and wise man, rather than one who some how is protecting the body for the body's sake.

Since this justice of the world's activities and the deserts that one gets seem to be inscrutable men are in despair. The only way to see our way through this maze of despair is to practice truth to oneself and in one's life without caring for the consequences of such life. Thus the practice and habit of truth-speaking, and truth perception will entail the change of attitude to the problems of justice. The reality then begins to appear as it is. Master Shri Ram Chandraji points out that the life of man should be in conformity with the highest state which alone will make us see truth as it is and make us arrive at the knowledge. 'It is as it is'. The Upanishad (Isa) speaks of the soul that sees things as they are in themselves (tathya) eternally or from beginningless time as a kavi, a Paribhuh, as Swayambhuh, poet, all becoming seer and self creative seer. Plato indeed speaks of this truth speaking as fundamental, but truth speaking cannot even take place unless one devotes oneself to the highest goal or aim of life. Justice will not appear to one who is all the time engaged in doing the unjust, thinking that he is doing the just. Unspiritual life usually breeds these inversions of value and truth, so much so that the truth begins to appear as falsehood or lie. Indeed Plato in the 'Republic' very apologetically and ironically says that he will tell a lie or a false story in order to illustrate his point, and the great scholars in the West seriously have argued that he told a lie and wished to use lie in order to preach truth or make one accept his conception of truth. Nothing can be more absurd than this for inverted men hardly can see reality as it is and truth to them appears to be false. Similarly Sri Yamunacharya in his Gita-commentary speaks of the extraordinary psychological difficulty of Arjuna as not so much lying in his view that 'the false appears to be true' but that it lay in his taking the right view to be false, for he considered his dharma to be adharma; and the entire Gita is undertaken to dispel this most serious error. Similarly we find we take our present miseries as unmixed evil, humiliation as evil, and so on, and we think in the converse that the joys and pleasures and wealths as unmixed blessings of God. This is about as mistaken a view as any that can be taken, for we are obviously suffering from Vivarta or inversion (which is the best translation of that original term, and not illusion, though the illusion arises from and can arise from this inversion). Thus what are God's blessings could be mistaken as punishments and what is intended to purify man as injuring him. Many a man and woman, child and widow, have complained, about injustice of God, the poor and the lowly have always cried to heaven against the death and disease that overtaken them as well as the deep indignity of life itself to them. Death seems to be a good friend, alas! Suicide is seen to be the only way out of this disaster or loss of faith in the world and men and nature and finally in God Himself.

Such being the case it almost appears than men come to spiritual organization for knowing the meaning of their misery and suffering, and getting rid of them, but if we say that it is God's blessing the whole explanations, to say the least, is disappointing and disquieting. So hopeless, is man's condition that it is obviously difficult to convince himself of goodness of evil or rather of what is misery and humiliation. This being one of the greatest difficulties of spiritual life one cannot get over this by any means except by the Grace of God and the Master Himself. If, of course, such a grace seems to be lacking, then it is that one turns against the whole spiritual way of life as meaningless. To be thankful for our miseries and trials obviously flows from the fact that all that occurs is owing to Divine Will. Master indeed writes (in a letter) that since God cannot but be good all that occurs is good and no one can think even that God gives the evil or the wrong, or that adharma even prevails. If this problem is stated in this manner then it becomes clear that one need to nothing but accept one's fate and suffer through all this, and to seek freedom from misery is to accept it as God's gift. Adharma and Dharma begin to have no opposition between one another. But perhaps it may be said that one pursues dharma because it shows your love of God rather than that it is dharma, and you would indeed do anything that you are instructed by Gurus as Dharma even when it goes contrary to your cherished traditions and conscience.

However, the commandment is unambiguous. One who accepts this path must accept all as God's gifts and be thankful. This demands more faith than reasoning and depends on it more fully than anything else.