Harmonizing with the environment

A discourse by Guruji Sri Amritananda Natha
May 2006, at Devipuram

To live in these aggregates – to live in your environment – requires both cooperation and a competitive spirit. Competitiveness enhances our quality of life; so does cooperation – but they are still opposing forces. How much competitiveness is appropriate and how much cooperation is a balance that each society strikes in its own way: A capitalist society defines it in one way, a communist society in another; and a religious institution will define it in yet a third way. There are different degrees of balance required, depending upon each given setup or context. Moreover, what is right for one person at one point of time is wrong for another person at another point of time: In the U.S.A., it’s often wrong if you’re not dating; in India, it’s often wrong if you are.

So how do we harmonize our own personal values with those of the environment in which we must function? Must we sometimes forsake our personal values? Should we forsake them here and there, now and then, or should we not?

Let’s look at the example of an orchestral musical composition. There is harmony in the music because the conductor tells the individual musicians in the orchestra, “Okay, now you play the violin at this octave, and you play the cymbals at this frequency,” and so on. And in order to achieve harmony, the musicians follow the conductor’s orders. In other words, we might say, they suppress their individual freedom to some extent – because if they were all to simply do their own thing, it would spoil the harmony. Similarly, for the sake of maintaining harmony in the aggregate life of our society, we are expected to follow certain rules and regulations – though the dynamic of following them is necessarily a suppression of our individual freedom.

In the world of business, to be frank, profitable trade usually depends upon someone cheating somebody else: “Vyaparo dhroha chintanam.” You have to give something less than what you get in order to make a profit, and profit is the supreme goal of business. Thus, corruption – in the sense of illegitimate earning – is necessarily part of the corporate ethic. In the same way, at any given moment, there are certain cells within you that represent chaos and disease, and others that represent order and maintenance. There is a war constantly ongoing between these two. Sometimes the protective white cells die; sometimes the invaders die; it’s is a matter of life and death for the cells involved. Similarly, a company’s ethics represent the aggregate life of the corporate entity, whereas the personal ethics of an individual employee within that entity represent the life of the self. And these interests do diverge sometimes. They too can be at war.
Because it is a clash of values. An honest man in a corrupt society is a misfit: Either he becomes corrupt as well, or he perishes. That’s just the way things are. Say, for example, that you need to get a government official’s approval for some project and he lets you understand that a little money under the table will help make things happen. It’s called “expediting money.” Not corruption, of course.

What should you do? You’ve got to weigh the consequences – sometimes they’re in your favor and sometimes not. And then you make a decision.

Which decision? I’ll just say this: Peace of mind loses the battle when making money becomes the goal. People believe that money and the power are the means to achieving peace of mind. Then once they’ve accumulated these “means,” they reason that since they can get peace of mind eventually anyway, why worry about it today? So it doesn’t work – at the end of the day, you’ve got to ask yourself, “Look, do I want peace of mind? Or do I want power and money, which are the means to peace of mind?” If you choose the means, you forfeit the end: That’s the clash that exists.

You see, what’s wrong with the present paradigm is the equation that people make between possessions and happiness: The more you have, the happier you are, right? But that equation is valid only to certain extent: If you have a comfortable, air-conditioned house, what does it matter if that house has 60 rooms? You can only sleep in one of them. They say Bill Gates has a house with 120 rooms! But how many rooms can he live in?

What you enjoy is your wealth – what you don’t enjoy really isn’t yours at all. So this proportionality between possessions and peace flattens everything out. If I visit my friend’s home for the night and he gives me the master bedroom to sleep in, then it’s my house for the time I’m there. If you just let go of the concept of ownership, then all the houses in the world are yours. The concepts of “I” and “mine” are the problems.
The problem people have is failing to distinguish the point at which their wants and means are in proportion with one another. Because once you’ve crossed that equilibrium, it makes no difference whatsoever whether you have one million or 100 millions. Once you realize this truth, you’re free to say, “I’ve got enough. I don’t have to bend to anyone.”