Dharma Is Uniting, Adharma Is Dividing

All living beings — man, animals, birds, trees — they go on adding to themselves.

A child is born. It starts consuming food, water, air. They add to the body. They become tissues and make the body grow. By the time the child becomes an adult, it would have added 60 or 70 kg of mass to its body. Thereafter, the effort is to maintain it at that level. Cells keep on dying. They need to be replaced. The consumed items are used for this now.

The child keeps on acquiring knowledge and experience.

The case is the same with animals also — for both body and experience. There is no knowledge acquisition in animals like how we do from reading, listening, watching. They have intelligence — biological intelligence. They have cognition, memory, reactions, responses — but not the ability to gain, process, and retain knowledge like how we do and also act according to that knowledge.

It is due to this ability that we human beings stand out.

So animals throughout their life go on building up their separateness and individuality. But some men, at some point of time, get into a process which is just the reverse of this — losing the individuality, losing this separateness.

You can call this walking in the opposite direction. Going against the flow.

Building individuality is shrinking. Even though you think by acquiring degrees, gaining positions, power, recognition you are growing — as a matter of fact, you are shrinking more and more to your own centre.

Compared to this, losing separateness or individuality is expanding.

Considering the whole world as your family — vasudhaiva kutumbakam — such concepts make up this losing of separateness and individuality, the process of expansion.

You get less and less worried about your own gains, losses, comforts, assets, possessions. This is the real growth. This is the real expansion. The destination of which is realisation of great concepts like sarvam khalvidam brahma — all these are different manifestations of the same supreme stuff. Aham brahmasmi — I am that supreme stuff, I am that supreme truth.

To achieve this, you have to walk in the opposite direction. You have to walk on the other lane. When most people walk from north to south, you have to walk on the opposite lane of the road — south to north.

This is also called yoga. Yoga is merging together. Keep on cutting down dualities. In duality, you cannot decide between the two. You have to merge them into one.

In this path, anything that helps in merging, helps towards yogavastha, is right. Anything that causes separateness is wrong. This is right and wrong — dharma and adharma.

At an individual level, what makes you say that 'I am separate' is adharma — wrong. What would strengthen your state of oneness with the world is dharma — right.

When you can do anything to get that tasty meal into your mouth, you don’t even mind snatching it from another person — then it is adharma. Whereas you want to make sure that there is no one hungry near you before you eat — that is dharma.

In the first case, you are only concerned about your own separateness, you as a separate entity. In the second case, you have expanded yourself to a bigger area — you are growing. This is dharma.

This Vedantic concept is applied everywhere — to make it stronger and stronger within you, from every experience.

To the extent that — I have explained this before — the impurity associated with death is because there is separation. The impurity associated with childbirth is that there is separation of the child from the mother. The impurity associated with excretion is that there is separation of some material in the body.

So wherever you see separation, dividing — it means it is not good. Wherever you see unifying — then it is expansion, it is good.

There was a concept called sarvabhaumatwa — the whole world under one rulership. They used to do ashvamedha to achieve this. This was a meritorious yajna. Somebody who can unite the world can also get a high position in swarga.

Our own king Bharata, after whom we as a nation acquired the name Bharata, he did 133 ashvamedhas as an effort to unify the world.

It is obvious — the more the number of nations, the more the number of political entities — the more are fights among them.

This we are seeing every day. Countries divide, like North Korea and South Korea — they start fighting. Countries unite, like East and West Germany — there is less unrest.

The summary is that anything that divides — it is bad and adharma. Anything that unites — it is good and dharma.

You can take every single dharmic concept in Sanatana Dharma and you will see that this is the thread at its core.

Ramaswamy Sastry and Vighnesh Ghanapaathi