The message of Bahagavan Das on the present significance of the Vedic Social Order

Experience. We are thinking about reality and we can indeed doubt the efficacy of our own thinking, mixed up as it is with perceptions and imagination, feelings and desires. We may doubt the reality of God, of Matter and even of I, but Experience we cannot doubt, since it is immediately experienced. This is the basic notion Chit, which we may call Awareness—not personalised consciousness, but awareness as the whole of reality. This may be compared with the apparently a-centric awareness of a small baby. As this awareness enters into the created world, we see in the baby’s experience the development of the primal duality, I and not-I. I is the subject of consciousness, not-I is all that I can treat as object, including my body and, as I grow more critical, my thoughts, feelings and desires.

In Vedanta the supreme reality is Awareness and this in our world is the Self, the I, about which nothing can be predicated because it is beyond all limitation. Everything about which anything can be said is not-I or not-Self. Now the Self—in the cosmic sense called Brahman and in the human sense called Atman—is the same Self in the world and in the single human being. It is the universal awareness, which in each of us created beings appears as the subject of consciousness and is contrasted with the objects of consciousness. From this primal duality come all the pairs of opposites from which the world is created, but there is also the relationship between the self and not-self, which is one of affirmation or negation, according to whether I identify myself with the created world or not.

So when Brahman comes into manifestation as a Universe, it appears as threefold and this triunity is called Sat Chit AnandaBeing, Consciousness, Bliss. Consciousness as I, Being or Existance as not-I and Bliss as the relationship between them. To this triunity corresponds the triunity of our single human selves, namely knowledge or thought as Consciousness, action or will as Being and desire or feeling as Bliss. Bhagavan Das works this out fully in the Science of Peace and even more fully in the Pranava Vada, but it is not possible in the short scope of this lecture to do more than indicate the way in which he founds his Science of Social Organisation on metaphysical first principles. We should only add briefly that creation appears and develops as an indefinitely large number of separate selves, each of whichJG@