Develop the Vision Integral

Divine Life Society Publication: The Ascent of the Spirit by Sri Swami Krishnananda

There is really no solution to the problems, and humanity finds itself today in the same complex and quandary and insecurity as it was centuries back, all because the human approach to things has not changed in its quality and character, though the passage of history has traversed thousands of years during the course of time.

The ancient Masters have seen through this vexing situation of life in general and found out the only remedy for it, namely, to develop the Vision Integral, rather than confine oneself to mere perception empirical. This integral approach requires man to conceive life as one whole, inseparable in its parts, and the well-known classification of Human Values or Aims of Life into dharma, the pursuit of moral value; artha, the pursuit of economic value; kama, the pursuit of vital value; and moksha, the pursuit of infinite value, may be said to form the rock-foundation to base one’s right perspective of life.

All these four values have to be blended in a proper proportion to constitute a single compound and not merely a mixture of a set of separable ingredients. This means to say that every function one might perform, every thought, word and deed of a person, should manifest this singleness of purpose, namely, a focused blend of dharma, artha, kama and moksha, all at once. This is indeed a hard job for uninitiated and untrained minds. But spirituality is not a joke and calls for greater education and discipline than one would expect in an ordinary educational academy or institution of the world. It is this blend of the four Aims of Life in a single act that has necessitated the introduction of the cooperative social groups known usually under the name, varna; the classes wielding spiritual power, political power, economic power and man-power, which constitute a complete organisation of human aspiration and function. This view of life has also called for the recognition of four stages in one’s life known as ashrama; a life of continence and study, a life of restrained satisfaction and discharge of duties in accordance with one’s station in life, a life of non-attachment to all perishable, values, and, finally, a life of concentration on the only permanent value discoverable in the end, namely, the Ultimate Reality.

A life of yoga is the answer. And yoga is union with Reality, in the various stages of its graded intensity of manifestation, internally in one’s own personality and externally in one’s social relations and public life. The range of yoga is a little, complicated for the novice to understand. To obviate the difficulty of a sudden grasp of this truth, adepts in yoga have advised a more restrained approach to the Great Goal, by a recognition of the objective (adhibhuta), the subjective (adhyatma) and the supernormal Deity-aspect of Reality, superintending over both the objective and the subjective sides of experience (adhidaiva). This threefold resort to yoga would facilitate a still higher recourse to the larger realities, known in the language of the technical Vedanta, as Virat, Hiranyagarbha, Isvara and Brahman, connoting the fourfold aspect of the Absolute, conceived as helpful in one’s meditations.

Excerpts from

Develop the Vision Integral - The Ascent of the Spirit by Sri Swami Krishnananda