4. Individual and Universe: Stillness in action

Eight components constitute the individual and the universe in which we live. Of these eight components, four belong to the person and four are outside of the person. Any movement whether it is political, economic, educational or religious would benefit from considering the impact of its ideas and action on these eight components.

Individual: Body-Emotions-Intellect-Spirit/soul/wholeness

Body: Experiencing Body’s Wisdom

The body is the most neglected yet the most important component of human life. Nothing material or spiritual can be done, achieved or realized without a physical body. She is the base of all ideas, action and living; all progress, growth and evolution is possible because we have a physical body. But why then is the body neglected, ignored or even tortured? It is because the body can’t keep pace with our ideas, dreams, and grand visions. She is a slow moving, fragile and down to earth entity. She feels hungry, desires for sex, experiences pain, disease, old age, and death. She makes everyone equal – the king and the beggar; the ignorant and the wise; the powerful and the weak - all have the same basic body. The body is perceived as an obstacle in fulfilling mind’s search. While the mind seeks immortality, eternal life and the world of spirit, the body constantly affirms the existence of physical existence, real earth and death. That is why the mind despises and rejects the body. The mind tries to change the body in accordance with its ideas and theories which have an underlying obsession with never-ending life.


In integral awareness, action and living, the body is understood as a wise component, as powerful as any other component or faculty in the person, including the mind. The body is as sacred as spirit, as sensitive as the feelings and emotions. The body is fully aware and alive but because of her oppression by emotions and intellect she is not able to express herself fully. She remains dysfunctional and becomes the victim of many ills and diseases.

In Integral growth and evolution of the body, the first step is to become conscious of the distortions and pathologies that the body suffers due to the tyranny of the mind. This consciousness of the distortions and repression of the body will give us clear clues that the body’s basic functioning is not optimal. We recognize that the needs of the body, including hunger, thirst, sleep, sex and movement, are not being met.

After we become conscious of the body’s disturbed state, the second step is to correct the distortion and repression, which would help in discovering the body's intelligence or wisdom. Such discovery will enable her to find her own natural rhythms and regaining her status as equal partner with the mind in daily living. In such a state of intelligence, the body not the mind regulates sleep, appetite, sexual needs and physical movements.

The third and the last step in the body’s evolution is her communion with universal physical matter including earth. In this phase of the body’s evolution she finally communicates with her source, her mother and home, and she achieves a sense of immortality. This is Nirvana, Mukti (Freedom), or enlightenment of the body, where she, as a fully conscious entity, knows that there is no final death. Death is nothing else but the dissolution of form into its basic elements which are cosmic and universal. Basic elements never die. It is the form which changes.


Emotions: Experiencing Emotional Intelligence

Feelings and emotions constitute the second component in a person. Integral living is not possible without fully developed emotions and feelings. Within an optimal limit no emotion or feeling is good or bad. They all help in the survival and protection of the person. Peace, anger, kindness, jealousy, hatred, love or attachment are all part human nature and have their place and significance in daily living. They may become a problem if one of these feelings or emotions dominates the mind, goes out of control and disturbs daily living or the social environment. Emotions and feelings not only give us orientation in space and time but also help in making life decisions, give color to our world and are necessary for the intimate relationships. When emotions work with intellect, emotional intelligence is born.


Intellect: Experiencing Cognitive insights or Mindfulness

Rational intellect is the third component in a person. Intellect is the human ability to think with reason, analyze, organize and systematize the world. Without intellect, systems of governance, science and organizing our daily life wouldn't be possible. While emotions help in making the world colorful and in establishing intimate relationships, intellect helps in organizing our daily needs, including food, shelter, clothing, and communication, and also in maintaining the rules of law within society. A person without optimally functioning intellect lives in constant external chaos.


Spirit/Soul: Experience of Wholeness or Soulfulness

The last component embedded in an individual is the spirit. In most people spirit is a potential or a possibility because it is not being experienced constantly. Although it is ever present in a person, it is experienced only occasionally. Spirit is the result of complete integration of body-emotion-intellect. Normally there is a deep divide between the body and the mind (emotions and intellect). Generally the mind dominates. This results in a fragmented state which clouds the soulful moments or the experiences of the spirit. As the body's intelligence is awakened and the dominance of the mind recedes, a point comes when the body regains its optimal status in the person, resulting in complete integration of body and mind. Such integration, which contains two primary qualities of spiritual/Soul experience and wholeness, is experienced as inner joy, spontaneous witnessing and meditation.

Universe: Family-Community-Country-Earth/Nature


Family: Functional Family

Family is the first and most important component outside the person because it is immediate and intimate to the person. Usually, but not always, it consists of blood bonds. Family is the first concrete expansion of a person's consciousness where a person shares physical, financial, psychological and spiritual resources with others. In the family environment, a person not only receives but also learns how to give to others.

Whether the family is nuclear or joint, traditional or modern, natural (made up of blood relatives) or created (with non blood relatives) until children are born into a human society, family is a fundamental need. Not only is family necessary for the physical survival and growth of the child, but also for the emotional, intellectual and spiritual support of all family members, including the old, sick or disabled. There is no better place to mature spiritually than the family.

The child develops the skill of connecting to the world and social skills within the family. The capacity to receive and give love comes from a stable family experience. There is no institution in our world that can replace family, and thus we have to strengthen the family and make it optimally functional. In an optimally functional family, not only do its members share material and psychological resources, but they also give and receive freedom to explore their individuality. However, although the family is a beautiful institution, we must not confine ourselves within its boundary. Doing so is not healthy and will lead to neglect of society, country and the world.


Society/Culture: Integrated Society

Society is the place where a person gets cultural roots. Such rooting leads to further expansion of a person's consciousness beyond personal ego and family. The person develops the ability to share resources with a wide variety of people who are not of his or her class, religion, colour or status.

A person confined to the individual self will have narrow awareness. When a person is connected with the family, awareness expands and when the same person is connected with society and culture, there is further expansion of awareness which brings more depth and maturity to the personality. The connection with society should not be limited to theory or philosophy. It should inspire action based on love and compassion. Only when awareness is combined with action does integral living become a reality.

On one hand a healthy person creates a healthy family and a healthy family creates a healthy society and culture. In the same way, a healthy culture and society gives birth to a healthy family and a healthy family to a healthy person. They all complement each other. Complete confinement to one's own society and culture leads to oppression, fanaticism and narrow divisions in the world. This in turn leads to conflict with other societies and cultures.


Country: Dynamic Country

Outside the person, country is the third component in the human world. Country is the combination of various cultures and societies living together in a defined geographical area. It is also a political mechanism to ensure economic well being as well as protection of its people from unruly forces both inside and outside the country. Too much attachment with the concept of country may give rise to extreme nationalism which causes more problems then it solves, leading to war, destruction, occupation and enslavement of other countries and its people.



Earth/Nature: Blossoming Earth and Nature

The last and most important component outside the person is Earth or nature, on which the survival and well being of person, family, society or culture and country depends. Since all these components depend on earth or nature all else is going to be damaged or destroyed if the earth is deteriorating. Earth or nature is the ultimate mother and nurturer. Integral awareness, action and living are not possible without giving earth and nature its sacred place. To protect and enhance elements of nature is true worship and prayer and that has to come through global educational, and political, social and economic unity. Unity here means a single movement including all the diversity.

When these eight components of our world and universe exist in harmony, a dynamic state of Sat-Chit-Ananda expresses itself into life and the world.

But how can these eight components within and without human beings live in togetherness and dynamic intimacy?

Such togetherness, communication and intimacy are achieved by and governed by three connecting bridges.


Connecting bridges: Affection-Unity-Movement

1. Affection or Neh: Communication- Co-operation- Co-existence

Neha, or affection, is a state of being affected by whatever happens within and without. In a state of affection we don’t isolate and insulate ourselves from the world, earth and nature. It is state of dynamic connectedness physically, mentally and spiritually, with all things both living and non-living and is the first principle of living. Neha expresses itself in the world as a feeling of compassion, of Love towards all that is, both within and without. This leads to co-operation culminating in peaceful co-existence. Neha integrates body, emotions and intellect within a person allowing spirit to express itself in its wholeness. When family, society/culture, country and earth/nature are integrated and harmoniously co-exist with the spirit/soul, intellect, emotions and body, then Sat-Chit-Ananda manifests in life and in the world.

In the beginning, such integration is a conscious thought and an intentional effort in which we start contacting the components which we want to integrate. Contact leads to communication to understand the nature of the component which leads to co-operation and culminates in peaceful co-existence. Co-operation occurs when the four components within the person and the four components outside of the person are sharing, receiving and giving help in sorrows, joy, losses and gains. They remain ready to serve and to be served. After the conscious practicing of co-operation, a time may come when spontaneous affection emerges within us.


Unity: Ignorance-Awareness-Insight

Unity, or Ekatva, is the second principle in linking the eight components of existence. Ekatva, or unity, is a state of living where our actions and behavior match our words and thoughts. When the gap between thoughts, emotions and actions is minimal or nonexistent, then the state of Ekatva, or unity, is established. The person living in such a state becomes transparent and is a being of integrity. A gap between thoughts and actions is a corruption, which may lead to social, economic, political, moral or spiritual decay.

This principle of unity begins by becoming conscious of a gap between our feelings, thoughts, speech and actions. Such gaps exist out of ignorance, or lack of consciousness. When the gap between word and action becomes minimal, insight or Prajna rises in the person. Ekatva, or unity, is movement within a person from Ignorance to Awareness and from Awareness to Insight. Once insight is firmly established, the person is saved from future corruption. Insight is the firm and stable bridge between words and actions which leads to a psychologically clear, clean and transparent individual.



Movement: Horizontal-Vertical-Integral

Movement, or Gatisheelta, is the third and last principle of existence. The cosmos is in permanent flux. Even when we perceive a thing as static, it is actually full of movement which our eyes can't detect. A stone seems to be a non-moving object but a physicist will tell us that its atoms are moving with lightning speed. All living and non-living things constantly move.

In human life this movement occurs in two directions, either horizontally or vertically. Horizontal movement helps us grow, an essential part of living that brings quantitative widening within a person and outside. Humans desire to accumulate more wealth and knowledge, which are part of horizontal movement. Although horizontal movement is an essential part of living, at a particular point such a movement becomes an obstacle unless we have a clear goal to use that extra growth to enhance our vertical evolution and use it for others. Most people don't use the excess horizontal growth for moving vertically or for the benefit of others. Why do people put themselves in such a prison, which costs them the possibility of rising to new planes of evolution and realizations?

One reason for such behavior is the fear of dying. Humans are self aware beings and they are conscious of the fact of their death. Fear of death pushes them to seek immortality and one of the ways to find this illusory immortality is to have more and more of the same - wealth, power etc. - which numbs their senses or mind to such an extent that they feel supremely powerful, protected and secure. This allows them to forget about their death. An excess of horizontal growth is a fear management device, but it results in the stagnation of personal growth. More often people take their horizontal movement and stagnation as the wholeness and the truth of the life. They may not be conscious of the fact that a prison of stagnation takes away the vibrancy of life. In the process of sheltering themselves from the fear of death, they are also walled in and cut off from the movement and vibration of life. In spite of their best efforts, death slowly creeps into the security of their prison.

As soon as an optimal point comes in horizontal movement and growth, one should move up in a vertical direction which is the direction of evolution. Transformation is a vertical movement which takes us to entirely new levels of consciousness and living until we reach Sat-Chit-Ananda. Sat-Chit-Ananda is the beginning of the endless Dharma. Vertical movement is a never ending journey. It is an endless pilgrimage into the boundless and infinite. Cosmic existence is limitless and no one can ever reach the end point of it, so no one can say that he or she has arrived at the last point of cosmos or consciousness. Mukti(Freedom), Moksha(Transcendence), Nirvana, Salvation or enlightenment is the ending of the known and limited living; it is the beginning of the endless, boundless and limitless. Enlightenment is the end of the one pilgrimage and beginning of another. There is no finality to it. To stop at any point that we may describe as Nirvana, Moksha or Salvation, is stagnation. If water stops moving and flowing it will stink and dry up. Flowing water will discover new levels and horizons of existence and life. When a glacier melts, a stream starts flowing. Streams form a river. Rivers merges into the ocean, the ocean evaporates into endless space to form rain or a glacier, and so the movement continues forever.

No religion, science, society, law or culture can be accepted as the final word and final form. They have to move and flow, finding new directions and energy. If a system or institution, no matter how grand, is taken as the final and ultimate, it will lead to stagnation, decay, conflict and violence. All forms have to evolve according to the time and place. For instance, a stagnant religion brings a stagnant vision and violence to its followers.

Violence in religion and politics is because of the lack of movement and this is also true with science. There is no final force or particle in the physical universe and nobody's god or God is the final god or God.

Relentless questioning of existing concepts, practices, theories, rituals and forms of religion, science, arts, ethics, morality and culture contains the energy to initiate and maintain movement. Questions will initiate dialogue, dialogue will reveal new possibilities, new possibilities will bring new realizations, and the movement will continue forever. Thus the process of movement involves questioning, dialogue, new possibilities and realizations. It is important to understand that these new realizations don't reject, out of hand, all that is old, but incorporate and integrate the useful, core and essential truth.

However, simply to have an awareness of the eight components and the three principles within and without the person is not sufficient. Concrete actions have to be taken to express and implement the integration of those components and to connect the principles within the person and in the outside world. Based on integral awareness, such integral actions will have the energy necessary to transform the person and the world at large, to establish integral living.