This being a very basic topic some people may shrug their shoulders and click onto something more interesting. Yet, most of us are drawn into this so-called ping-pong game of rajas and tamas frequently so it may be worth reflecting on it.

 In the West, and increasingly in India, we live in a predominantly rajasic world, meaning the display of rajoguna is highly valued in modern societies.

 In Bhagavad Gita chapter 14, verse 12 it says

 „Greed, physical restlessness, undertaking of activities, mental restlessness, longing – these are born when rajas has increased.“[1]

 The wheel of time seems to turn faster and faster ever since man has begun to compete against the speed of machines. It is interesting that machines, which originally were designed to simplify life, have now started to make it more and more complex. Those machines including their flawless functioning are factored in when the time to meet the requirements of life is calculated (by oneself, by the company, in childcare, care for the elderly, etc.). On top, globalization opens up countless new opportunities every day. But none of this would be a problem if there was no possibility of greed in human nature, signifying rajoguna. As better options come constantly on offer, greed is constantly reinforced and so is rajoguna

 Hence an almost insatiable hunger for activities, entertainment, connectedness, pleasure, success, security, affection etc. has taken root in modern mans mind. In order to satisfy this hunger most people hurry through life, hunted by their agenda, by their mobile(s), their laptop as well as thousand and one other so called necessities. Those can spring up on every level: materially (gain more security), emotionally (gain more pleasure), intellectually (gain more knowledge) or ethically (gain more virtue). We live in Kali Yuga, the age of materialism and competition. Modern man, woman and even child are more and more turning into creatures driven by greed and ambition.

 So it is not surprising that in order to balance this strenuous and unhealthy lifestyle sometimes out of sheer exhaustion the individual has to fall back on tamoguna.

 In Bhagavad Gita chapter 14, verse 13 tamas is defined thus:

„Dullness, absence of activity, indifference, and indeed delusion – these are born, when tamas has increased.“[2]

 There are two types of people:

 There are those who alternate between rajas and tamas either in daily life or periodically. They jump out of bed, dash out of the house, race to work, zoom through their mails, rush through their chores, numb hunger and tiredness with coffee and cigarettes etc. and then come home in the night to collapse with beer and Pizza in front of the TV. Or they will frantically ride the rajasic wave for a while and then slump into a period of carelessness and avoid efforts as ever possible. Whatever the pattern – once tamas has set in, it will take the lead only just long enough to relax the overcharged physiological and mental system so as to start up the rajasic hunt again.

 The second type is not able to stop his/her rajasic compulsion at all. So he/she will go on and on, ignoring all warning signals of his/her physical and mental system until the body/mind will force him/her to stop by initiating whatever kind of breakdown will serve the purpose best – the purpose being to slow down or apply the brakes all-out. Disease, heart attack or even a stroke will stop activities; lethargy and apathy will prevail, it’s the time for tamas.

 To treat too much rajas, tamas has to be applied – but it is not the cure. Tamas means slipping down the ladder of evolution. Soon after recovery from the overly rajasic lifestyle, the same will be taken up again. Why? Because no learning has occurred: while rushing around there is no time, while recovering there is no energy for it. You only have three choices in life, going about it dull, active and/or contemplative. So if you have learned not to be habitually dull any more, you tend to be habitually active. Habit (vasana) will make sure that as soon as the slightest surplus of energy emerges, it will be spent in the well-trodden way of speeding along onto the next possible project. In that way the vicious circle goes on endlessly. To escape it you will have to learn a different approach – the contemplative one.

 It is our vasanas that underlie greed and excessive busy-ness. But what underlies those? Swami Dayananda points out that everyone basically feels deficient and tries in various manners and in various areas to become sufficient. The guna currently predominant in our body/mind will determine the manner in which one attempts to compensate for feeling deficient; whereas one’s goals in life will determine the area: to secure survival (artha), to make life more enjoyable (kama) or to change oneself and/or the world for the better (dharma).

Why does everybody feel deficient? Because measured against one’s true nature, which is the one single reality of all, i.e. complete and sufficient, the individual body-mind-intellect IS deficient. So the only intelligent response to the feeling of deficiency is to search for one’s true, complete and sufficient nature – simple, even if not always easy to actualise. But if we learnt that the sense of deficiency is going to remain irrespective of how many ways and in how many areas we run after fulfilment (= sufficiency), then this very knowledge itself could point us to the door to what’s needed for us to undertake the search for our true nature. What we need for this is sattva. 

 Bhagavad Gita 14, 11 gives the following definition for sattva:

 “When through every sense organ in this body the light of knowledge shines, then know that sattva is predominant.”

 Knowledge is the key to sattva and vice versa: the more sattva shines through us the more capable our intellect will become. By deepening and refining the mind's capacity to understand, knowledge will grow. Yet, even the pursuit of knowledge can be approached in a rajasic way, i.e. be propelled by greed. We then want to gather more and more knowledge as fast as possible, either because it makes us feel secure or because we get pleasure from it or because we want to feel and be seen as virtuous. But, as mentioned it is a mutual process. Mere accumulation of information does not help the persons understanding and it is understanding what counts.

 So what is the practical conclusion of these reflections about the gunas?

 Once our minds have grown out of the predominance of tamas, rajas will become more prevalent. Naturally at some point in life/lifetimes the prevalence of rajas will also be left behind and sattva will have the chance to become the standard response to inner and outer events.

 Most readers of this site will be somewhere in between the last two gunas supremacies. It requires quite some watchfulness, to not join the rajasic game that people (especially those who are successful) play and that obviously pays off well in our society. The question now is what wins: hunger for more and more (of whatever) and allowing oneself to be driven to satisfy it. Or the single-pointed enquiry into one’s true nature.

 The first will mean dissipation of one’s energies into wherever one feels it may pay off fast. And more often than not it will pay off in terms of career, money, fame and name. The second requires concentrating one’s energies until there is just one goal left: moksha – freedom from identification with everything that is not the one true Self. Single pointedly directing one’s energies to moksha will more often than not give little pay-off in terms of career, money, fame and name. Yet, only this way we will have the chance to find the fullness that is inherent in us, discovering that actually nothing has ever, can ever and will ever be missing.

 The calm and quiet understanding of sattva, even in its beginning stages, can bless us with the insight into the value of leaving behind the bonds of rajas (obsessive activity), as it points to the only possible dissolution of the deep felt lack that every human being carries within.[3]

The word faith carries two meanings: trust and belief.

When I trust in something I meet it with confidence; even without knowing its exact nature, I assume that it will not harm me, rather that it will be beneficial to me when I expose myself to it.

When I believe in something I meet it with a conviction to be existent; I also may not know its exact nature but there is not necessarily an assumption involved that it will not harm me or will not be beneficial to me.

Trust invites devotion - devote what? Time, energy, other resources Devotion to what? To something assumed to be benevolent.

Belief demands submission - submit what? Any convictions, insights, reasoning or intuitions that contradict the belief. Submission to what? To something assumed to exist.

Shraddha is one of the nine virtues that should be cultivated by an aspirant to Advaita Vedanta, i.e. shraddha is considered to be one of the most essential traits someone should own when embarking on the journey to discover his/her own true Self. Usually shraddha is translated as “faith”.

Now, in the context of Advaita Vedanta it seems to be crucial that shraddha as faith is explained, understood and associated with trust and devotion, not with belief and submission of one’s own reasoning capacities. This is especially important when addressing Western seekers.

Why?

The idea of faith in the sense of belief has been dominating Western culture and its definition of religion since centuries. Abrahamic religions are belief systems, which are based on belief. Blind belief is considered to be a virtue and belief as such is all that is required of anyone following those religions. This has lead to the fact that using one’s own intellectual competence in spiritual matters has been viewed with suspicion by clerical authorities; the results of reasoning need to be kept within the limits set by the belief in question. This is how the Western shism between philosophy and religion and later between science and religion has come about. It had to come about: Belief is exclusive to the usage of one’s own intellect.

Only after the West had started to question the authority of Abrahamic belief systems it started to be what it is now: a highly evolved industrial and scientific culture. Up to this day a deep mistrust to anything based on faith alone has remained within the Western mind.

So it is not surprising that Western seekers tend to feel that they have to exclude from their spiritual pursuit what they consider to be faith. This makes them the ideal aspirants for eastern spirituality, especially for Advaita Vedanta. It cannot be stressed enough that Advaita Vedanta will never ever ask the aspirant to surrender his/her own mental capacities to any kind of belief. In fact, Advaita Vedanta needs and relies on those very intellectual capacities, it puts a lot of effort into sharpening and refining the intellect (buddhi) as it is the very instrument used to discover who I truly am.

If Westerners are the ideal aspirants for Advaita Vedanta, how come so few are interested in it? I have addressed some of the obstacles in my last blog. There is one more which has to do with this blog’s topic “faith”. As for Western seekers faith and belief are inseparably linked, they tend to throw the baby with the bathwater: the bathwater being belief, the baby being trust. In other words: trust is the casualty of denying faith a place in their spiritual life.

I know almost nothing about Sanskrit but I do know something about the minds of Western seekers, especially of Europeans. That’s why I unreservedly advocate translating shraddha with trust, not with faith. In the Western mind faith becomes belief. Nobody studying Vedanta needs to believe anything, but trust is indispensable. If I cannot trust that it is possible to find what I am looking for and that there are means to help me finding it, I might as well give up the search altogether.

Although trust seems to be a less loaded word, it needs to be defined to be useful in Advaita Vedanta. It has to be cleaned of wrong connotations in two ways; two things should be made clear:

1. Trust includes usage of ones mental capacities, never excludes it.
2. Trust includes absolute openness with respect to the outcome, i.e. anything can be regarded as a working hypothesis that I place my trust in until it proves to be incorrect.

Interestingly both of these explanations perfectly accommodate Western people’s need to remain free while searching. For an Indian seeker they may be taken for granted. For Westerners they have to be pointed out, especially if they find themselves in front of a religious teacher who makes an ideal surface upon which one’s Western ideas can be projected.

When explaining shraddha Vedanta teachers usually mention that it involves faith/trust in the scriptures, in the teacher and in God. In an earlier blog[1] I defined shraddha as the “ability to trust that it is possible to discover what is searched for – with the help of Guru, scriptures and through the grace of the natural law and order (Ishvara)“.

The Western seeker will be able to handle his/her reservations towards Guru and scriptures when having the above two explanations in mind. Yet, a BIG obstacle arises when God comes into play. This is because - however much you call it “trust” – God is inseparably linked with “belief”, so as soon as God is involved “trust” inevitably becomes “belief” again.

With Westerners the question of God needs to be tackled in a very different way than with Indian seekers. Modern Western seekers usually have a “God-trauma”. Even those who grew up in secular families will carry age-old fear and shame patterns within their minds which can be traced back to Western religious belief systems

As Christianity is the dominant one and the one I know best, I will describe the ways in which it tends to strangle the Western seeker’s ability to embrace Shraddha.

The Christian God is male, has three different aspects (Father, Son, Holy Ghost), is forever different from man and has to be believed in; with him comes a whole set of doctrines, which also have to be believed in and a whole set of rules, which have to be followed.

Man being God’s creation was, initially, inherently good. Unfortunately something went wrong in the very beginning when the woman who was created as man’s companion decided to eat from the “Tree of Knowledge”. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat the fruits of every tree in paradise, except for this one! In Vedanta’s paradise those fruits would have been served to them by angels on a silver platter!

Anyway, because Eve went against God’s order she was expelled - along with her husband - from paradise forever. From then on humans (and for some reason all other life forms too) have to live on earth, which is considered a place of exile, a punishment, and not a blessing as per Advaita Vedanta. Since Eve’s transgression every human being is thought to be inherently evil and prone to end in hell.

But God is considered to be merciful so people have got the chance to earn God’s grace. How? By believing in him and in everything he says (all written down in the holy book) and following his orders. I have to point out here: believe means “do not think for yourself”. It also does not differentiate between people of high intellectual abilities and people who are yet unable to think for themselves. No, all of them have to become sheep, follow the good shepherd Jesus … that way you have the opportunity to be saved from your own evil nature and after death enter into something like paradise again.

Not enough with this, the most tricky thing is that every human being is granted only one life. If he fails in this one no other chance is given to him ever. Moreover, failure means that he is going to be condemned for eternity, lost forever in hell.

No wonder that Christian countries are almost obsessed with trying to be (or at least pretend to be) do-gooders. Anyone growing up in a society impregnated with such kind of beliefs cannot but carry within him a deep sense of shame, guilt and fear which has to be constantly kept in check. It is the fear of an almighty God who sets up non-understandable rules (do not eat from the tree of knowledge), unattainable goals (keep your insights within the realms of your believes) and merciless punishments (eternal hell).

Being aware of this, one cannot but expect every intelligent Western seeker to dismiss any idea of God. That’s why, when speaking to Westerners, it is unwise to call Ishvara God. Westerners will necessarily understand God as something fitting the above description. But such a God does not exist in Advaita Vedanta; as far as I know he does not even exist in all of Hinduism.

Yet Westerners do not know that. When they learn that Advaita Vedanta is associated with Hinduism they cannot but feel apprehensive. In their culture there is only one God. But in Hinduism there many, some looking suspiciously sweet, but others seem to be even worse than the God of their culture that they are so happy to leave behind. Who would be interested in something that has links to a religion with millions of them?!

Western seekers want to escape their own religious heritage and because of their God-trauma prefer religions and spiritual directions, which do not take God into account, such as Buddhism and Western Advaita.

In Advaita Vedanta we have the concept of Ishvara; it has to be introduced to Western seekers with great sensitivity; many Vedantins have no problem to personify Ishvara, whereas Western seekers will have lots of problems with a personified God.

Luckily, understanding what Ishvara is, those problems will dissolve: Ishvara is the totality of all natural laws and orders and their seamless interlocking. When they manifest, the universe with its multitude of shapes and colors appears. In that sense the universe is Ishvara manifest. This is God in Vedantic terms. No Western seeker will have problems accepting such a God. He, who actually is a He as much as a She, places no threat. After all, who is to blame for the law of gravity? If someone jumps from the third floor of a building he either intends to die or he is not in his senses. But in no way he would be able to say “God punished me by breaking all my bones after I had jumped down that building.” Breaking his bones was the result of his action that, given the natural law and order, had to be expected (being optimistic that is).

After having written about faith and God I came to realize how translating Sanskrit terms this way or that way can make a whole lot of difference in respect as to whether Westerners become interested in or repulsed by Advaita Vedanta. In the wonderful translation of the Bhagavad Gita by Swami Dayananada I discovered one other example. In chapter 2 we find the word “sin” twice. After everything I said above I probably do not have to explain that just like “faith” or “God” it is one of those words prone to cause misunderstandings. Actually Christian terminology should be avoided when translating Vedantic texts (especially negative words) – at least if you intend to reach a modern Western audience. Should such words appear somewhere they always have to be explained in their Vedantic context.

The term that Swami Dayanandaji translated as “sin” is the Sanskrit word papa. I wonder whether it is necessary to translate it as “sin” and would be thankful to receive feedback from other readers. In order to give Westerners a more suitable understanding I suggest - in spite of my extremely limited understanding of the language - the translation of “bad karma” with a footnote briefly explaining what this entails. So papam avapsyasi (II,33) would become “You will gain only bad karma” (instead of “you will gain only sin”). In fact it seems that the way the word “sin” is used here, already shows a different understanding of sin than one would have in a Western context. In the West “sin” can be committed but as far as I know, it cannot be gained.

Of course, this is in no way meant to criticize Swamiji or his translation – how could I, knowing not even a iota of what he knows. I only mean to point out that Non-Western translations, which innocently use certain loaded words are likely to have a counterproductive effect on Western readers/listeners. It can put Western seekers off from exploring the most precious Advaita scriptures we have in the world and thus can come in the way of the teaching itself.