Saism Alone can Usher a Golden Era for the World

Arjun Kumar Sengupta has a Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he taught at the London School of Economics and Delhi University. He worked as an economic adviser to international agencies and was Special Adviser to the Managing Director of International Monetary Fund, Washington. He was an Ambassador of India to the European Community, Brussels. In 1993, he was appointed Member Secretary of the Planning Commission and Chairman of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector. From 2006 he was Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha until his death in 2010.

A person, who has overcome the trappings of his ego [and] is able to follow the precepts of selfless or universal love that Bhagavan teaches as a method of transforming one’s life can only be regarded as a devotee of Bhagavan. When I apply these criteria to myself, I do not think that I am competent to be regarded as a devotee. I have many miles to go before I reach that stage of liberation. I have gone through repeatedly the painful process of examining and re-examining the basis of my experience of Bhagavan Baba.

Still I am overwhelmed by Him. He is so real to me, so intensely alive, that I can never deny Him. I cannot comprehend His phenomenon. And what I do not comprehend, I cannot describe. So, I have never tried to explain Him, and have only suggested to anyone who has asked me about Him to go and meet Him and experience Him. I cannot verbalize or express that experience, because it is beyond my comprehension or reasoning. But I can still feel the impact of that experience.

I guess all these sentiments are quite common for anyone who has come to know Bhagavan. My experience is surely nothing uncommon. I would rather talk briefly about my reactions to a few teachings of Bhagavan. There is nothing extraordinary about those reactions either; but different people react differently to the same words or teachings, and it may be interesting to know the wide spectrum of views that can converge around very simple statements of Bhagavan. The variations only depend upon an individual’s background, understanding, and predilection.

The first thing that struck me, as I tried to go through the literature about Bhagavan, His teachings and His Discourses, was that they are addressed to all sorts of people with different beliefs and points of view and facing various kinds of problems and situations.

They are not and cannot be all applicable to every individual, and one has to look for and find the line that is applicable to oneself. That process of search itself is quite a difficult exercise, as it is also, essentially, a process of knowing oneself. There is no end to it, and one is never certain that one is on the right track. But, somehow, some day, one comes across some sentences, or paragraphs, or sayings or even some particular tunes of a bhajan, that suddenly strike one as if they were very specifically applicable to oneself, poignant with great significance and intimate allusions, with very special meanings.

On one such occasion, I was going through the exhilarating experience of discovering such a paragraph. Suddenly Bhagavan looked at me and said that if l could fix my antenna properly and tune in the right wavelength, I could listen to any program I wanted whether from the BBC or from Delhi, as all the radio waves of the world were passing through the place where I was sitting then. (It was at Brindavan in Whitefield).

A very simple point to tell me that it depended on me, my efforts, and my preparedness to be able to receive His grace that is flowing in abundance all around.

Time and again, Bhagavan reminds us of our own responsibility in shaping our life and destiny. There is enough scope for free will to change the course of our life within the bounds or parameters determined by our own karma or past activity. Every activity or karma done in the past, whether that past is yesterday, last month, or previous life, has its consequences. And at any point of time, the effects of all past activities constitute our initial endowments of assets, minus liabilities, or stock of capital. With that we start our life at every present moment to shape our future.

Bhagavan says, “The future is in your hands; tomorrow can be shaped by today, though today has already been shaped by yesterday.” This means that there can be a number of different tomorrows resulting from what we do today. It is this that gives the scope for free will, or the possibility of choice that would lead us to end up with an improved or deteriorated stock of capital compared to what we started with today. One’s past karma is one’s fate, and as Bhagavan says, it is, “The inescapable writing on the head and it has to work itself out. But people forget that it’s not written by some other hand. It is all written by one’s own hand. And the hand that wrote it can also wipe it off.”

This puts a tremendous responsibility on oneself. There is no scope for fatalism, despair, or pleading helplessness at the present state of being as the result of the past karma over which we have no say today. Man can still change his destiny, ameliorate the effects of the past karma by engaging in the right or appropriate karma at present. Working with the given stock of capital inherited from the past, we can, with appropriate effort, follow an optimum path ending up with an improved stock of capital for the future.

The concept of time in this framework is a continuum that exists irrespective of the lives of individuals or societies. It is for our convenience that we slice it into units of hours, days, months, years, or a lifetime. We choose the units, relating them to some reference points in the case of the calendar time, to the solar system, and in the case of a lifetime, to an individual’s span of physical existence. Within a unit, however, time is limited and is a most precious scarce resource, as it allows the scope for changing and improving upon the initial stock of capital that one has been endowed with at the beginning of that unit of time. Bhagavan impresses upon us again and again the preciousness of time, and the severe cost of waste of this very scarce resource. This cost is measured in terms of opportunities of improvements that would be lost, within the span of a unit of, say, a lifetime.

For an economist like myself, accustomed to thinking in terms of choice subject to constraints, and of time as a scarce resource that can be converted into capital, this world view of karma or activity based on Bhagavan’s teaching is delightfully refreshing.

An individual in this scheme starts his life, or any day in his life, with a given stock of capital or endowment of net assets, inherited from the past. He has two resources that he can use according to his discretion: his own labor or efforts and his allotted time.

After leading a life of activities, he arrives at the end of his unit of time with a terminal stock of capital, which would determine the constraints of the course of life during the next unit of time.

The economist’s world is limited by the assumption about human behavior that it is supposed to be motivated by self-interest or personal gain. An individual in that world uses his scarce resources to maximize his personal gain, measured by material consumption. That is, by its very nature, a source of conflict, since at any time the amount of consumable materials cannot be infinite and a larger consumption of one individual must mean smaller consumption of another.

In conventional economics, there is hardly any other alternative view of human behavior or motivation. It is, of course, necessary to assume some model of behavior as otherwise we cannot explain what the individuals are supposed to do with their scarce resources, given their initial stocks or ‘endowments’. It is convenient to assume that they would try to maximize personal gains. That seems also to explain most of the actual empirical behavior of individuals today in the modern world. The socialist system that tried to impose an alternative behavior pattern did not seem to work. So long as the success of an activity is measured by the profits or its results, it is not possible to abstract from the question of who benefits from these results, and so long as the individuals are treated as separate from each other, benefits for one cannot be identified as a source of satisfaction or cause of motivation for another.

Indeed, the world consisting of such self-interested individuals maximizing personal gains, with no consideration for others except when it is conducive to serving the self-interest, is the world that we see around us today. It is a world of disharmony, jealousy, and inequity.

We are caught in a hopelessly divisive situation of conflicting interests. We cannot resolve those conflicts by changing policies or even by achieving a growth of material wealth. An individual would always try to get ahead of others, trying to have more of everything, maximizing his own possessions, leaving just that much quarter for others that is considered necessary to ensure his own security.

The karmic view of life that Bhagavan describes, as a model of human behavior, is clearly a way out of this situation. It also, in a sense, posits a maximizing behavior, where an individual operating with an initial stock of capital uses his scarce resources to maximize, so to speak, his terminal stock. He starts with a stock of karmic value and seeks to end with as much as possible an improvement of that value. Consumption of material goods and services during the period of life when such an improvement is realized is no longer an end in itself but becomes a means or input in the process of sustaining oneself during that period, to enable the individual to achieve such improvement.

In Bhagavan’s world, the karmic value an individual is seeking to maximize is his divine nature, which one secures if one’s activity or karma is motivated not by personal gain that separates him from others, but by disinterested efficiency and detachment. That divine nature is the antitheses of selfishness and divisiveness. It is the continuous discovery of unity and harmony between oneself and others and the universe around.

It is the direct product of the process of treading the path of ‘nishkama-karma—selfless or desireless action’. This is definitely no easy road, and most of us have many many miles to go before we can reach even the beginning of the road. But Bhagavan says, “There is more joy in the doing of karma than in the fruit it may give; the pilgrimage is often more pleasurable than the actual experience of the temple to which the pilgrim went.”

That is the path of sadhana, the pleasure of that is its reward. If only all of us could follow that path, we would have made a different world for ourselves. It is ‘Saism’ alone that can usher in a golden era for the world.

Source: Sai Vandana 1990 (65th Birthday Offering)