by Sri Bimal Mohanty
VOL No. 33
November. 2003

ATTEMPTS TO DESCRIBE BRAMHAN - Part 7

"Based on the lectures by Sri Bimal Mohanty"

While we have to make efforts on our own, our philosophy also makes it absolutely clear, that the final success can only come by the grace of Bramhan - never without it.

Therefore what the jiva should do? The jiva has to pray for this grace. Pray to Bramhan to lift us out of imperfection to the level of perfection, from darkness of ignorance to the enlightened world of consciousness, from the world of hapless misery to the world of bliss eternal, from Tamas to Jyoti.

So, we deduce from this, that even if I am derived from pure Bramhan, I am as an individual self, subject to a conditional existence. To regain my purity requires my individual effort, my Yoga. I have no alternative but to remain engaged in Yoga all the time, non-stop, atandrita.

Now what we have seen so far is that our Srutis have worked out for us a concept of this Bramhan, which is all mental . Perfection, enlightenment, consciousness, bliss, these are all concepts of mind and higher mind. But the fickleness of human mind can not always hold on to pure concepts for very long. To love and adore and offer prayers to a nameless entity is difficult. A concept or an idea depends upon a word for its expression, for its outward propagation amongst each other. To be able to relate to each other, we all take the help of a name which we all have. This is necessary so that we can be focussed on a specific object of our contemplation. Hence the initial requirement is the need to give a name to this concept. We have to call this concept by an appropriate name.

One can argue that we already have names such as Bramhan, Paramatma, God, Allah, The Lord etc etc. But if one analyses these names, one finds that these fail to really describe the object in any manner or are only speak of only one attribute of the object, which happens to be of endless attributes. Could we conceive something to describe this concept in total? The mind now is seized with this idea.

But giving a specific name to something which is beyond any limitation, is in itself like forcing a unnatural limitation. But the idea is to have a word and sound, that when uttered or remembered would straightway focus the mind on that all pervasive concept of Bramhan, with as much accuracy as perhaps possible.