This article was revised on March 22, 2025 at 09:22 CET.
By Prabhakar Overland
When Prout founder Shrii Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar languished in jail in the 1970s, a visiting follower asked him: “How do I know if I am making progress in my efforts for liberation?” Shrii Sarkar replied: “If your love is increasing and expanding you are making progress.”
Modern human beings live in a highly complex world. Our increasingly demanding circumstances require renewed vision and steadfast existential endeavour for the goal of human glory to be accomplished.
The Job
The job of revolutionaries is most challenging. They have to deal with all three aspects of time in quick succession, more often than not under tremendous pressure.
Revolutions are processes of rapid change driven by pressing, irresistible forces. If revolutionaries cannot move swiftly from the past towards the future, they might end up as the proverbial children of the revolution, consumed by the very same uncompromising changes that they themselves initiated.
Two critical issues in particular rise with the onset of the fury of revolutionaries:
- How will they behave justly towards anyone perceived to stand in the way of their impatient ideals?
- How can they remain unattached to their firebrand ideals, ways and means that possibly become outdated with the passing of time?
How to not become irrelevant, useless and even harmful?
Action
Perhaps no one ever pondered the nature and science of action as deeply as the great Krsna did. The teachings of this world teacher are preserved in the Bhagavad Giita. In its concluding 18th chapter (verse 14) He states:
“The five essential factors of any action are its circumstances (body), the doer, the tools or instruments (senses), the styles or kinds of effort, and Divine Providence.”
(Adhiṣhṭhānaṁ tathā kartā karaṇaṁ cha pṛithak-vidham vividhāśh cha pṛithak cheṣhṭā daivaṁ chaivātra pañchamam.)
Here the great master of yoga states that there are innumerable individual and collective bodies; plants, animals, human beings and their various associations binding them in mutual associations. These assemblages and combinations—family, class, caste, community, nation, region, continent, etc.—constitute the circumstances of any political, socio-economic, cultural, and other actions. Individual and collective doers (kartā) execute those actions (karaṇaṁ) by various means (pṛithak-vidham),* and in various ways or styles (pṛithak cheṣhṭā).
Yoga
In Sanskrit, the word yoga means “unification”. The Bhagavad Giita merges worldly action and the practice of physical, psychic and spiritual yoga into a profound message and practical recipe of true humanity. According to Prout, society’s real leaders and revolutionaries should be “yogis”: leaders should seek integration and unification, and not fall-out and separation. Without directing spiritual light towards the nucleus of human endeavour and ambition, all actions will gradually and finally backfire as far as the welfare of living beings is concerned.
The Soul is our existential nucleus, the very basis of the authorative definition of yoga:
“When the unit consciousness merges itself fully and is finally identified with the Supreme Consciousness, it is called yoga.”
(Saḿyoga yoga ityukto jiivátmá Paramátmanah.)
Shrii Shrii Anandamurti ascribed the above verse to the great Sadashiva. It provides a philosophical basis for the concept of the rule of sadvipras. It explains that the ultimate unity—yoga—is the merger of our individual soul with the Supreme Soul. In this merger the individual rises above worldly relativities and beholds Supreme Reality beyond temporal and spatial relativities.
We can relate both the above verses to Prout’s principle of value-oriented leadership, to its idea of the paramount importance of morally and spiritually enlightened leaders—sadvipras. According to Prout, the only way is sadvipra samaj, the society of the morally and spiritually enlightened, whose minds (vipra) remain embedded in the Supreme (Sat). It is a wedding of souls in a socio-economic system where Divine Providence, the fifth factor of Lord Krsna’s formula of action, is properly fixed at the political centre of society:
“In the nucleus of the social cycle, spiritual revolutionaries (sadvipras) control the cycle in order to liberate all.” – Ananda Sutram 5:2
Will
Our world is constantly dominated by innumerable wills and their varying patterns of conduct and behaviour. In such a stupendous mesh of multifarious motivations and diverse ambitions, what is the way to secure non-exploitative, fair governance in a world where everybody may progress freely?
The merger of the individual and the ultimate will makes for a just society where no individual and group are discriminated against. The Universal Soul observes and knows that there are no shortcomings, there is only divine potentiality everywhere and in everyone. Individual wills may have it differently, looking towards their interests before those of others. A person or leadership wedded to ultimate truth will tend to act in the interests of all and not only against someone. Allround yoga, therefore, is the way and mode of fair policy.
Synthesis
Proper life style training and subtle self-analysis bring about synthesis in life.** Synthesis is just another name for subtle and sublime truths, and the path of yoga—unification—is the practical way for its actual realization. Yoga yields ultimate success and achievement, without which life remains unfulfilled, incoherent and ultimately tragic.
Analysis alone takes life apart; by itself it does not create new life and vigour. Only analysis in the perspective of synthesis brings about renewed energetic change and increasing meaningful purpose.
The processes of both evolution and revolution must be directed towards synthesis and not analysis alone. Analysis may be a means but synthesis should always remain the fundamental aim and reason for any action. Adolf Hitler stated that love is weak but hatred is strong. He opined that love cannot be used to unite people and propagated nationalist socialism based on racial hatred. The rest is history.
In order to bring about spiritual good in society, proper work has to be initiated in individual life. Yoga practised individually as well as collectively is the mighty foundation that can carry all of us forward towards the increasingly blessed state of a spiritual society.
Individual and collective lives devoted to the realisation of the subtle and sublime and the good of all are the only guarantee against corruption of power and all sorts of exploitation.
Notes
* Instruments, tools or senses.
** For the latest medical and other scientific findings on the benefits of yoga, please see medindia.net/yoga-lifestyle and other available sources of authoritative information.