The Radiant Sameness (Satpurusa Maharajsri Mangatramji's Samatavilasa)

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Samatavilasa, The Radiant Sameness, shows the way of finding our fallen condition itself as redemptive. We are not merely to accept our pain and our mortal condition but to live these and become these. In becoming that pain lies our bliss, in living our mortality immortality. That alone is the highest bliss and absolute, that alone is salvation the final, this our becoming one with our mortal and absolutely tragic lot. That is what the state of samata, sameness, is. Only that man is a mukta, a liberated soul, who can look alike on Maya and Brahman, on reality and appearance, on bondage and liberation, on life and death, on misery and joy. Not that there is an actual state called the state of liberation, an actual bliss that is absolute and highest, for terms like 'absolute' and 'highest' turn out to be relative, and, therefore, misleading. Hypostatization of samata would not work, for all hypostatization is rooted in our narcissistic passion.

Yet Samtavilasa would not, in actual fact does not, encourage us to look alike on these opposites constitutive of our mortal being as long as we fight a desperate fight against our inevitable and destined fate, fate the mortal; a stern discipline we have to undergo before we can even think of samata, sameness, not to speak of living it. For, not before dying unto himself can a man look alike on these dualities, the stuff our mortal life and being are made of. Mere theoretical deconstruction of these opposites will not do; he must live the uncertainty that he is as a [no-] being placed between these opposites, between the given condition and the transcendental urge in us, between the past and the present, between oneself and one's other, between life and death. And to. accept and live this his unhappy condition, he has to have the humility to become mere passive witness of these ever recurring deadly tensions and conflicts within him, to stand apart from these as if these latter were mere events happening before him and not in him. He has to, in other words, cease to be the doer, accepting all the uncertainty that goes with his being as a mortal, as a creature uncertainly placed between the two poles of birth and death. But not before dying before his actual death can he have the patience, the patience all passive, to live his mortality and be his mortality, undoing thereby both birth and death and what lies between the two, his so called life.

SOM RAJ GUPTA, a direct disciple of the Master, is the author of the The Word Speaks to the Faustian Man (Wisdom of Sankara Series), a widely acclaimed modern interpretation of the Prasthanatrayi.

The reader interested in understanding the philosophical implications of the sayings collected in this book should consult the Translator's biography of the Master, To the Home that was Nowhere, An Encounter with the Life and Teachings of Sri Mangatram. Some of these implications have also been explained in the End-Notes appended to each chapter.

I would, however, add here that this work shows us the . path to find our fallen condition itself as redemptive. We are not merely to accept our pain and our mortal condition but to live these and become these. In becoming that pain lies our bliss, in living our mortality immortality. That alone is the highest bliss and the absolute, that alone is salvation the final, this our becoming one with our mortal and absolutely tragic lot. That is what the state of samata sameness, is. Only that man is a mukta, a liberated soul, who can look alike on Maya and Brahman, on reality and appearance, on bondage and liberation, on life and death, on misery and joy. Not that there is an actual state called the state of liberation, an actual bliss that is absolute and highest, for terms like' absolute' and 'highest' turn out to be relative, and, therefore, misleading. Hypostatization of samata would not work, for all hypostatization is rooted in our narcissistic passion.

Yet this work does not encourage us to look alike on these opposites constitutive of our mortal being as long as we remain mortals and fight a desperate fight against our inevitable and destined fate; a stern discipline we have to undergo before we can even think of samata not to speak of living it. For, not before dying unto himself can a man look alike on these dualities, the stuff our mortal life and being are made of. Mere theoretical deconstruction of these opposites will not do; he must live the uncertainty that he is as a [no-]being placed between these opposites, between the given condition and the transcendental urge in us, between the past and the present, between oneself and one's other, between life and death. He cannot but seek to escape from what he finds himself to be, cannot resist the transcendental thrust informing him, and cannot but engage in the fight between these two urges, namely, the urge to remain himself and the urge to transcend himself. He has to accept and live this his destiny, there is, there can be, no escape from this his role. And to accept and live this his unhappy condition, he has to have the humility to become a mere passive witness of these ever recurring deadly tensions and conflicts within him, to stand apart from these as if these latter were mere events happening before him and not in him. He has to, in other words, cease to be a doer, accepting all the uncertainty that goes with his being as a mortal, as a creature uncertainly placed between the two poles of birth and death. But not before dying before his actual death can he have the patience, the patience all passive, to live his mortality and be his mortality, undoing thereby both birth and death and what lies between the two, his so called life.

'Samatavilasa.' the title of this book, means 'Rejoicing in Samata, in Sameness'. There is another grantha, holy book, called Samata-prakasa, 'Revelation of Samata'. The 'Samatavilasa contains mostly Master's writings; some of them dictations. The Samata-prakasa, on the contrary, consists of revelations that descended upon him when the man in him had ceased to be to give place to the Word, to that alone. It was in samadhi that he uttered those words, knowing not what he uttered and when he uttered. His scribe was Banarasidas, or Bhagatji, 'The Noble Devotee', as he was affectionately called by other disciples of the Master. The reader must go to the Translator's biography of the Master to know how and in what manner and where the bani (vii1Jz), speech the revelatory, descended, replacing the man in the Master. The Samtiiviliisa, however, is, as already noted, a collection of his 'conscious? writings or dictations; it is his hermeneutic of what he found and became, not an interpretation of an interpretation, as we the ignorant are fated to formulate, but an interpretation of the uninterpreted and the uninterruptable. We mortals find ourselves in the already interpreted world, but he beheld the uninterrupted to become, in the state of samadhi, that very uninterpreted. But when he came out of the samadhi, he explained that state and the means of attaining to it for the benefit of mankind in general. Rejoicing in the state of samadhi, not becoming one with it, he spoke about it and the way to it. One can perceive the distance that is there between what is said and that about which it is said. The word does not coincide with the referent, does not become the latter's speech, does not become the word of the Word but is the word of a man about the No-man. The Master's diction and the peculiar syntax of his sentences that could, in our human writing, be a hindrance in. the way of conceptual or poetic communication became in this work its strength, their very inadequacy speaking of the truth of the transcendental reality they fail to express. He constantly harps on the ineffability of the real, harps on very many occasions and in almost the same language. And yet this failure of his language to capture what he has to say, this living dramatisation of the encounter between the sheer penury of language and the infinite abundance of the Real, succeeds in conveying the truth of what he speaks about. The unwearied dwelling on the ineffable, the frequent inconsistency of views regarding that truth, the use of appositions regarding the same subject term not always in consonance with each other, the turns of phrases frequently at discord with the rules of grammar and syntax, and certain lexical items defying their commonly accepted Connotations - all these go a long way in establishing the truth of the state of samata. In the very struggle of language to perform the impossible feat, in its very failure to map up the real, in the very intensity of this encounter and the frequent confession of the sheer inadequacy of language for the task it is called upon to perform, one can experience the truth of what refuses to be expressed and explained, experience its sheer ineffability, of that truth. One becomes aware of it without conceptualising it and without enframing it, without, that is, phenomenlising it. Where command of language will fail, where precision will fail and learning and the power to conceptualise, lack of education almost to the point of illiteracy succeeds. The text does not so much ask us to believe, it generates that belief, enacts the act of grace, that sole giver of faith. That is the paradox about his style, paradox benign and gracious; in its weakness lies its strength, in its simplicity its depth.

A reader with a scholarly bent of mind, he who would grasp the matter expressed in a book as a whole, would articulate it to himself in clear and communicative terms, will find this work monotonous and inconsistent, if not riddled with contradictions, those his red rags. The book is, undoubtedly, repetitive, is, to be more accurate, repetition itself. We humans rejoice in the new and the fresh, not in the old and the stale. How could this title be given it then, the title, 'Rejoicing in Samata' The same, as we understand it, is ever and always repetitive and, for this reason, is uninteresting for us. Add to this the exasperation of the reader that would try to know what the book has to say in toto. He has to shed this his passion for grasping the meaning of the book in totality, he must read it haltingly and leisurely, lingering on each and every paragraph, on each and every sentence, or on a few paragraphs dwelling on a particular thought, shedding his anxiety to reach a conclusion and assessment regarding the theme of the book. One is not to grasp the meaning, one is to let the meaning express itself. The preferred way would be to hear it read out by someone else, not more than a page or two at a time, and let the words sink into oneself. This would lead the reader or the hearer to think about what those words have conveyed to him, think about it in existential terms, think about it not for mere theoretical understanding but in anguished, existential terms. For, it is in these terms, terms of anguish, that this book will speak, speak about our existential condition and the tragedy of it. Once this understanding sinks in one's mind, once one feels with every intensity the sheer magnitude of that tragedy, one would not be put off by the repetition in the book. For the book will constantly recall only what is perpetual in one's life and being, its unhappiness and its misery unmitigated. And since this misery, this tragedy of our life, is a sheer recurrence, occur as it does each and every moment of our life, since we are born each moment and die each moment, we will find the book only reflecting that our state of being or no-being. Recurrence will no longer then appear monotonous to us, it will be our life and being, for born are we already stale and decaying and are destined to be and to get what is already stale and decaying.

But how can this misery of being the same, the same misery and the same mortality, this tragic repetition, be our rejoicing? The realization of the sheer magnitude of our pain, pain that the Samatavilisa is never tired of highlighting, would make us, if we have truly interiorised this its message, stand apart from our existential condition. This comes to be possible only when we distance ourselves from our eyes and ears, when we turn into seers of our sight and hearers of our hearing. When this comes to happen, we will find our concepts of things, concepts that enframe them in terms of relationships and contrasts, melting before us, blurring our sense of distinctions. No clear-cut distinctions will survive for us then, distinctions like those between one thing and another and between ourselves and the world and also between one word and another word. The world will turn into almost an undifferentiated presence then and language into a sound indivisible, a sound that will appear as our deepest interiority. Our text calls that sound nada, or sabda, word, or the atman, the self. It is a sound ready to swallow all one's thoughts, all that one perceives and hears.