The Meaning of Life

The limited “I” (or separative ego) of ordinary human consciousness is a complex structure– with intellect and feeling as important constituents. Its impressional or sanskaric dispositions get involved with each other in numberless ways.

None of them, by itself, nor their natural and haphazard combinations, can yield any permanent glimpse into the meaning of life. On the contrary, the infinite impressionary tangle covers up the Truth, obscuring it and making it impossible to get at.
  To cut the tangled thread at loops and knots is to lose the whole game. And the straightening of the tangled impressionary thread can not be a mechanical process or an achievement through blunt application of unintelligent or loveless force.

The process of straightening up the impressions must, in its very nature, be both delicate and difficult, requiring the discriminative wisdom and infinite care, which the Master alone can bring for the task.

Bits of relative meaning locked up in each type of impressionary experience have to be carefully gleaned. These have to be carefully pooled, correlated and absorbed in the meaning of other types of impressional experiences to which consciousness has been subjected. The meaning has to be gleaned and retained before the impressional tangle can be straightened. But this is far from being simple or easy. Very often, the aspirant is unable to do this himself.

The working of the Master often infuses, into his impressional dispositions, their appropriate meaning and enables him to straighten them and annul their restrictive functioning.

The process of annulling the restrictive efforts of the impressions may be made clear by means of the analogy of the toy-balloon made of rubber. When there is no gas or air in the toy balloon, it shrinks into small size. And its entire surface is covered up with creases and wrinkles. If anyone tries to take away these creases or wrinkles on the surface of the toy balloon– by external pressure or adjustment, he is bound to fail. For,

• one wrinkle may be straightened up, there would be another one in its proximity.
• Or perhaps, for one previously existent wrinkle, there would be in its place a number of new wrinkles on its surface– either in the same portion or in some adjacent portion.

The wrinkles have no chance of disappearing as long as there is merely external manipulation of the wrinkled surface. The existing pattern of the wrinkles can, no doubt, be disturbed and radically changed by external manipulation; but the wrinkles cannot be effaced or annulled completely by this method.
  In the same way, the binding action of mental impressions cannot be annulled by the process of mere external or mechanical adjustments.

But if in the above analogy– the toy balloon of rubber is infused with gas or air, all the wrinkles will automatically get rounded up and annulled. There will be no creases distorting the surface of the balloon, if it is blown up to its full capacity. In the same way,

if the ‘mind-heart’ is infused with the ‘meaning of life’, all the wrinkles of ‘impressional dispositions’ get effaced. And being free from all distortions, the ‘mind-heart’ becomes sound.

But the binding action of impressions becomes defunct only after they are made to yield their inner meaning. Their becoming defunct– as ignorant resistance to Truth, releases the free functioning of consciousness.

To put the matter paradoxically, in the Truth-experience of unlimited consciousness, what has been rendered defunct is not the impressions but their binding action. In annulling this binding action, the impressions can perform their true function of yielding their real meaning to the liberated consciousness.
  Thus, from this point of view, the impressions have been so altered that they can contribute their quota to the plus-meaning of a free consciousness. The alteration of impressions is so drastic that it looks like annulment because– the readjustment ensures that the impressions will not be able to operate in their separateness in an exclusive or semi-mechanical manner, which inevitably leads to inertia or inner conflict.

Freeing the intelligence of the mind-heart-consciousness from IMPRESSIONAL MALADJUSTMENTS is an essential and indispensable requisite of releasing the dynamic harmony of the liberated consciousness.

Life is eternally scrawling its own meaning on the ego-mind-heart. But its script is not intelligible to the consciousness entangled with it because of the distorting sanskaric or impressional engravings left upon it by past experiences.

The ego-mind-heart cannot freely and intelligently function in the present with the necessary alertness and alacrity, owing to the inherent inertia and resistances created by these past engravings. The inevitable result is that it partly misses the import of the revelation of the Truth in the eternal present.

Thus, psychic distortions are due to inertia, and inertia is due to psychic distortions; and there is an unending vicious circle.

Suppose that, in the above example of the deflated balloon, the ‘wisest Truth’ had been written on its wrinkled surface; no one would be able to read the script. But if the same toy balloon is now infused with ‘air’ or ‘gas’, the wrinkles will all disappear, and the script on the finely rounded surface can be deciphered with utmost ease, making it possible for anyone to understand what the writer wanted to convey. In the same way,

the meaning of what life has written on consciousness can be easily and unmistakably grasped ONLY IF the sanskaric distortions are mended and taken away by an act of the Master’s grace, infusing it with a new life-force and receptivity to Truth.

The vicious circle that needs to be broken through is that the DISTORTED mind-heart of the limited ego cannot see the meaning of life, and therefore, it also cannot free itself from its own distortions and resistances.

The vicious circle can be broken only if the distorted ego-mind-heart of the aspirant becomes SUBMISSIVE to the Master, and allows itself to be illumined by the infusion of meaning imparted by the Master.

The infusion of meaning may, in the initial stages, appear to take upon itself the limitations to which the mind-heart is subject to, just as the air which goes into the toy balloon will seem to get conditioned as it occupies the diverse hollows of the inner surface. But this is only a temporary phase. It ultimately culminates in the disappearance of all creases and wrinkles on the balloon, after inflating it to the full size. But this is the only way in which all creases and wrinkles could be removed.
  In the same way, the Master cannot infuse the meaning of life in the psyche of the aspirant except on the lines engraved upon it by his own past.

• He has to enlighten the aspirant by making use of the ‘sanskaric’ or     impressional dispositions previously acquired by the aspirant.
• He makes explicit the meaning which lies implicitly and inscrutably stored in the dispositions of his own ill-understood experiences by taking away their muteness, as it were, and giving them a voice.