Peace and harmony in daily living

Mar 23, 2010, 12.00am IST
RAMESH S BALSEKAR.


There have been moments in almost everyone’s day-to-day living when one has experienced the true joy of living, with calm, peace and tranquility.

What has usually disturbed these moments are memories of guilt and shame, carried by the ego and which resurfaces every now and then, causing discomfort. These feelings could be because of one’s own (mis) deeds or another’s.

What if you can be totally convinced that no action is anyone’s doing, that all action was merely a happening that simply had to happen?

This is what spiritual seeking is all about. Masters may talk about enlightenment or Self-realisation, but what it means is to be able to experience the peace and tranquility that the sage enjoys in his day-to-day life.

A sage is considered a sage because he seems to be anchored in peace and tranquility while facing the pains and pleasures of day-to-day living in his chosen field of activity, like any other ordinary person.

'Self-realisation’, to the sage, simply means the realisation – the absolute, total conviction – that ‘events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof,” as Buddha put it. Both the sage and the ordinary person respond to their respective names being called. In both cases, therefore, there is identification with body and name as an individual entity separate from all others. The difference is that whereas the sage knows that “events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof,” the ordinary person has the conviction that each individual performs his action and is responsible for it.

Every action is happening according to a Cosmic Law and not because of something ‘done’ by an individual human being. If this is accepted, it also has to be accepted that no one can blame anyone for whatever happens through any body-mind organism. Therefore, he need not blame himself for any action, need not feel guilt or shame for any action; he need not also hate anyone for whatever might hurt him in life. The result is that anyone who is able to have this acceptance in his day-to-day living would carry no burden of guilt or shame, nor any burden of hatred and malice, jealousy and envy. In other words, the result is that he is anchored in peace and harmony: he is continuously comfortable with himself and also comfortable with others.


Perceiving in phenomenology is an impersonal, nominal function of the manifestation of the phenomenal universe. Such perceiving is pure perceiving because there is nothing seen, and there is nothing that perceives. We are nothing but illusory dream-figures. All phenomenal existence itself is merely an appearance in Consciousness, and all the characteristics of sentient beings – the form, the perceiving, the knowing, and the feeling – are also nothing but movements in Consciousness as in the dream.

The dream that is the phenomenal manifestation occurs in Consciousness. It is perceived and cognised in Consciousness and is interpreted by Consciousness through the duality that is the basis for all phenomenal manifestation: the subject-object relationship. This duality of subject-object relationship is merely the mechanism or the instrumentation (like space-time itself) through which the manifestation occurs – and is, of course, a concept – with the result that the perceived can be nothing other than the perceiver. Consciousness is all there is: the subject and the object, inseparably united when unconceived and unmanifested, only appear as dual and separate when conceived in the phenomenal manifestation.

Excerpt from Ramesh S Baklsekar’s ‘Peace and Harmony in Daily Living’.