EE7.5 - The Dialogues of Shiva and Párvatii

The Dialogues of Shiva and Párvatii – 5

Published in:
Ánanda Vacanámrtam Part 30

Notes:

Under the normal procedures of Ananda Marga Publications, this discourse would have been published together with the other 1967 “Dialogues of Shiva and Párvatii” in A’nanda Vacana’mrtam Part 23; but this dialogue had not been recovered at the time that that book was published. (Though this dialogue has been numbered “5”, since four had already been published and numbered, it was not actually the last of the series. It may have been third.)

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Párvatii asked Shiva, “Who has the right to attain salvation?” Sadáshiva replied,

Átmajiṋánamidaḿ Devi paraḿ mokśaeka sádhanam;
Sukrtaermánavo bhútvá jiṋániicenmokśamápnuyát.

[Self-knowledge is the greatest means to attain salvation. People are born as human beings due to their past good saḿskáras, but to attain non-qualified liberation, salvation, they will have to attain self-knowledge.]

Salvation is nothing but the realization of the self. What is self-realization? You know, for instance, a flower. This is your knowledge about it. Átmajiṋána [self-knowledge] is not this type of knowledge.⁽¹⁾

There are three [factors] in your effort to know a flower – the knower, the known, and the link connecting the subject and the object. But here [in the effort to know oneself] the knower, the known, and the knowledge are one. You know yourself, so knower and known are the same thing. And there does not arise any question of link, for the entity here is not dual. If the two banks of a river become one there will be no problem of connecting them.

Átmajiṋána is this unification where duality ceases to exist. Salvation, therefore, is ekarasátmaka [having the nature of a single flow]. This implies the vision of Brahma in every mundane or supramundane objectivity. Self-realization is mokśa [non-qualified liberation, salvation]. Only [a person who has performed] sukrti [good deeds] has got the right to achieve salvation. When one elevates oneself by sukrti, that person becomes fit to attain mokśa. Sukrtaermánavo bhútvá [“people are born as human beings due to their good saḿskáras (formed out of their past good deeds)”].

In laokik Sanskrit su means “good” and krta connotes “that which has been done”. But the term has a different connotation in Vedic Sanskrit. There su means sva, that is, “own”. When jiivas attain human status, [then] owing to their own actions they get the right to achieve salvation.

Who is a mánava [human being]? What is svakrta? What makes the difference between a human and an animal is a particular intellectual standard. [As for] beings below that standard, their spirit is personal and the medium impersonal. Animals and inanimate objects progress through the impersonal medium. They get their urges from the Cosmological order. They only progress and never retard. Animals and inanimate objects never degenerate; they always march ahead on the path of evolution.

But human beings have a particular intellectual standard. By properly utilizing it they can push themselves upward, and by misutilizing it they can throw themselves into the dark cave of degradation. Thus a human can progress by properly utilizing his or her intellect, and degrade by abusing it. That is why one should be very careful while applying one’s intellect. The created being through whose personal medium the impersonal entity manifests himself and actuates the entity [svakrta] is called the human being.

(1) Sentence that may have been poorly transcribed or translated in the original newspaper publication of this discourse omitted here. –Eds.