FROM THE BHAGAVAD-GITA

In the view of Vedanta, one's karma determines into what life a person will be born. The Bhagavad-Gita provides a description of two types of individuals, one born to divine tendencies, the other to demonic tendencies, so called.

"A man who is born with tendencies toward the Divine is fearless and pure of heart. He perseveres in that path to union with the Brahman which the scriptures and his teacher have taught him. He is charitable. He can control his passions. He studies the scriptures regularly, and obeys their directions. He practices spiritual disciplines. He is straightforward, truthful, and of an even temper. He harms no one. He renounce the things of this world. He has a tranquil and an unmalicious tongue. He is compassionate toward all. He is not greedy. He is gentle and modest. He abstains from useless activity. He has faith in the strength of his higher nature. He can forgive and endure. He is clean in thought and act. He is free from hatred and from pride. Such qualities are his birthright.

When a man is born with demonic tendencies, his birthright is hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, anger, cruelty and ignorance. Men of demonic nature know neither what they ought to do, nor what they should refrain from doing. There is no truth in them, or purity, or right conduct. They maintain that the scriptures are a lie, and that the universe is not based on moral law, but godless, conceived in lust and created in copulation, without any other cause. Because they believe this in the darkness of their little minds, these degraded creatures do horrible deeds, attempting to destroy the world. They are enemies of mankind. Their lust can never be appeased. They are arrogant and vain, and drunk with pride. They run blindly after what is evil. The ends they work for are unclean. They are sure that life has only one purpose: gratification of the senses. And so they are plagued by innumerable cares, from which death alone can release them. Anxiety binds them with a thousand chains, delivering them over to lust and wrath. They are ceaselessly busy piling up dishonest gains to satisfy their cravings."

We are not one or the other, Buddhists say by contrast, but both. Karma can create both in one person. There is not a saint who was not at first a sinner. Good cannot be known without evil, or at least the possibility of evil. Good and evil arise mutually. The saint and the sinner in a person arise mutually and exist for each other in a defining balance, until in the end the saint sheds what has become the dead skin of the sinner and steps free once and for all.

AT MINIMUM

Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, novelist Aldous Huxley had an extensive association with the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by Swami Prabhavananda. Together with Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and other followers he was initiated by the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices. From 1941 through 1960 Huxley contributed 48 articles to the periodical Vedanta and the West, published by the Society. He also served on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John van Druten from 1951 through 1962.

In his essay "The Minimum Working Hypothesis," Huxley states the fundamental beliefs of Vedanta. That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations. That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, to know, and, from virtually to actually, to become identical with the divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence. That there is a Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end. And finally, that the more there is of self, the less there is of the Godhead; and that the Tao is therefore a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living law of mortification and self-transcending awareness.

In THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, Huxley's book of the same period, 1945, he goes on to say that the Buddha, by contrast, declined to make any statement in regard to the ultimate divine Reality. All the Buddha spoke of was Nirvana, his term for the experience that comes to the totally selfless and one-pointed seeker. The Buddha talked only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, and also as it happened of later Buddhism, to be the object and at the same time the subject and substance of that experience, since in contemplation the knower, the known and the knowledge are all one.

DYING TO HIMSELF: A SHORT STORY

It could be argued that Alex was predisposed to spirituality in so far as his mother in her youth was deeply spiritual, a follower of the Christian Science of Mary Baker Eddy. And, one summer doing genealogical research, he found others in his family, including his grandfather on his father’s side, who had been Christian Scientists. It was a denomination that believed that human beings and the universe were spiritual as a whole rather than only material. His mother, however, after her marriage to his father, a chemical engineer who believed that everything, including God, could be explained by the laws of thermodynamics, retreated from her faith. This was not to say, though, that she did not feel that her two young sons shouldn’t be given a proper Christian education, and so she asked an older couple, friends of hers who lived up the hill, to give her children a ride each Sunday to the local First Baptist Church. There they would attended Sunday school followed by the main service in the church.

Alex liked his pastor right away. Reverend Nielsen was a big man who looked even bigger in his robes, and whose right hand, like a catcher's mitt, enveloped his completely when they shook hands in the greeting line after the Sunday service. There was not a kinder, gentler man in town he was convinced.

Alex had been christened in the Episcopal Church when he was an infant but now he would be baptized in the Baptist church--well, not literally in the Baptist church as renovations had since begun there. Rather the nearby Methodist church would be used instead. Reverend Nielsen said that God would not mind. It was an experience that Alex would remember always, the dunking in the water in the alcove beside the altar. If he thought he would feel a surge spiritually from it, however, he was dearly disappointed. All he felt was wet. Even so, by the end of the year he was singing in the church choir, attending Vacation Bible School in the summertime, and reading grace before dinner at home every evening, much to his mother’s delight, and his father’s bemusement. He even made an altar in his bedroom at which he had a cross he bought during his sixth grade school trip to Washington, D.C., so that when he announced the next spring that he wanted to become a minister one day, it surprised no one.

Puberty and the beginning of junior high school changed things for him, though. His older brother had begun skipping Sunday school and church to be with a friend of his at a soda fountain down the street from the church, and so naturally Alex went with him. Mitchell couldn’t leave his brother by himself at the church, and besides, if Alex was with him he was not apt to betray him to their parents. But since Alex was older now too, the adventure with his big brother was fair enough.

Soon enough, though, Alex had friends of his own, having joined the junior high school marching band, and then by the ninth grade he even had a girlfriend. And then in his second year in high school, he became a member of the Hi-Yi club, a social club which included a church service each Sunday, a different denomination each time as an education for them. It reminded him how much he missed his spirituality. In fact, he soon began attending the Baptist Church adult education class to make up, in a way, for lost time. It was through this class, as it happened, that he was selected to conduct the church’s annual Youth Sunday service. Then he was invited to be a reader of the Scripture at the High School Senior Sermon the night before his graduation. Just why he was chosen for these roles he did not know, something that others saw in him it seemed, but which he did not see in himself exactly.

That adult education class at the Baptist Church proved more significant for him than he at first realized, for the man conducting the class took it upon himself to teach them about views other than only Christianity. He talked about pantheism, atheism, and agnosticism, and then eastern religions. This permitted Alex to ask a lot of questions and in so doing to enhance his spirituality. This was when he picked up a book on yoga, but not for the physical or Hatha Yoga so much as for the mental or Raja Yoga. There was something there that he needed to know he felt. It seemed to him an avenue to where he really needed to be. This was serious meditation. This was mysticism. There were techniques to be practiced and he did them daily.

Yet two months later he stopped them. Spotting a familiar face in a crowd when the odds of doing so were astronomical was interesting, but it unnerved him. And then when he found that he was able to bring it about at will, he didn't like it at all. “Siddhi” as such things were called, was the last thing he needed, even though they were common in Raja Yoga he later learned, as they were in Tibetan Buddhism where they were an entertainment. His feeling that he had control of them--he experienced several types along the way--let him do them in the beginning, but when they took on a life of their own, he dropped them. There was something here that he learned despite himself, however. There was more to existence than met the eye.

In his sophomore year in college he became increasingly interested in all things oriental, to the point of training in the martial arts, Shodokan Karate. By his junior year in college he was taking classes in eastern religions, recalling his first introduction to them in the Baptist church. Jainism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism put him closer to what he was seeking he felt.

Mr. Augustine, that teacher of the adult education class at the church, turned out to be a graduate student in the drama department at the local university and it was through him that Alex began taking drama classes himself. He was about to graduate in psychology and was interested in psychodrama, a therapeutic technique, so taking an acting class made sense to him. His fascination with psychodrama, however, yielded to an even greater one, the metaphor of theatre, or as the character Jaques says in Shakespeare's AS YOU LIKE IT, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts." Humans played roles that were not their true selves really, in other words. The existential theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre caught his attention next, as did the theatre of the absurd, so called, the plays of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. Here were the issues of "God is dead," and, again, how humans only played roles.

Alex's life took a sharp turn three years later. After graduating with a B.A. degree in psychology and an M.A. degree in drama, he was drafted for the Vietnam War. Naturally, he filed for conscientious objector status, opposed as he was, on spiritual grounds, to all violence. His local draft board, however, would have nothing of it. Biased in favor of the war, their souls sold, they rejected his claim, which left him no choice but to formally refuse induction. This he did twice in person at the induction center. His arrest came next, followed by a trial. At the trial, the jury, it turned out, was only allowed to rule on whether he had or had not refused induction, which obviously he had. Convicted, prison was next for him. At the last minute, though, the judge permitted him to be free to be with his family at Christmas following which he would sentence him, three to five years. Still free? Alex was stunned. If this wasn't intervention of the divine kind he didn't know what was. He now had a decision to make. He knew that if he lost his trial, he sure as heck would get no justice in the sentencing, and he saw no benefit in becoming a martyr for the antiwar movement; when he was in prison he would be out of sight, out of mind.

When a pardon came from President Carter in 1977, Alex had the choice of returning to the States from Canada where he had lived in exile for six years now, or staying put. Again a hard decision for him. He was virtually a Canadian. His feeling at the end, however, was that if he had the courage to leave, he should have the courage to go back. Besides he had done nothing wrong by opposing the war, by taking the moral high ground, and his leaving the country after an unjust trial and facing unjust imprisonment was the only level-headed thing for him to do. Who wouldn't?

A doctorate was his achievement when he returned to the U.S., an effort that once again had him studying Beckett and the rest of them, whose philosophy he so greatly related to, knowing all the while this time that God was not dead, or SOMETHING was not dead, and that humans were not just a charade, a sad joke. There was more to it all than this.

During this latest stint in college he painted houses for his uncle part-time to make extra money to live on. One afternoon while hanging on the side of a house, his trusty radio at his side, he happened onto a program on public radio over in the city. It turned out to be a weekly lecture series by Alan Watts, an authority on eastern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zen especially. There was an old saying that when a person was ready for a guru, one would appear. Watts, who never professed to be a guru, even though he was to most people, proved most certainly to be for Alex.

And then there was the lady who lived in the apartment downstairs from him who gave him a novel to read by one Christopher Isherwood. As it happened he had a great deal in common with Isherwood whose biography on the back of the book revealed that he, Isherwood, was a pacifist, a conscientious objector to forced military service, an expatriate, and a devotee of eastern religions, of Vedanta particularly. Alan Watts listed Isherwood in that group of World War II immigrants to America whom he called the British Mystical Expatriates, to include Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Felix Greene. And with this, as Alex read still more about Isherwood, came the whole bunch, Swami Prabhavananda, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Swami Brahmananda, and J. Krishnamurti, to join the others he knew about already, theosophists Blavatsky, Besant, Olcott, Judge, Leadbeater, and Buddhist scholar-devotees Suzuki, Humphreys, Evans-Wentz, and David-Neel, individuals he henceforth referred to as his spiritual family. He was where he belonged in a huge way now.

Raja Yoga intrigued him again, and so he resumed all the techniques and meditation exercises as before but with a confidence and faith this time that it was important to his further development spiritually. His first experience with samadhi, a euphoria which he called “drunk on God,” came soon after. Saying it was God he was drunk on, though, was presumptuous of him. The fact was he didn’t know exactly what it was he was drunk on, except that it was spiritual. He was excited by it but at the same time uneasy, for this was someplace he had never been before. Underscoring this was what happened during a particularly intense meditation session later that month. Surrendering all that he was to whatever it was he was in contact with, the ground shook. Tibetan Buddhists, indeed the Buddha himself, experienced this all the time, he went on to learn, but it was of little consolation to his nerves.

And then there was that friend of his, a casualty of the Vietnam War. While researching a book he was writing about his own resistance to the war, he read letters of this former friend at the West Virginia and Regional Historical Archives at West Virginia University. So deeply engrossed in his words was he, to the point where he felt actually in touch with him somehow, suddenly a thunderstorm came roaring down the valley, shaking all the windows and blinds and blinking the lights. Concluding that it was just a coincidence, just any summer thunderstorm, he left it at that. The next morning, however, he found a full article about his friend, with his picture, on the front page of the local newspaper. What were the odds of it all these years later?

It all came to a head soon after. He had settled on the strict Buddhist position that he was living on a rock huddling blindly through space, a rock on which, by a fluke, there were life forms. Neither the rock nor anything on it was significant, though. The purpose of this view, stark as it was, he understood perfectly well. It was to discourage the grasping onto the lifeline of the supernatural, something that took the responsibility for human behavior and fate out of the hands of the individual and put it squarely into the hands of a God. Buddhists held, in other words, that what happened to them was their own doing and not the doing of something "out there." "Seek out your own salvation with diligence," the Buddha said. If a person was suffering he could and should fix it himself. Alex appreciated this. Over time, though, he found that it wore him down, made him feel old and dying on the vine, so to speak. Finally one evening during his walking meditation, he came crashing down.

Nature hated a vacuum, it was said, and Alex was a vacuum now. Into him then something suddenly flooded. The last time he felt it was years earlier when he regularly visited the local arboretum. On a long stretch of the main trail, there were two ancient coastal oak trees side by side, and always he would stop beside them and meditate. What the energy was that they radiated, he did not know, anymore than he knew how he was able to feel it. It felt as if it were the energy of the universe itself. In this moment of his collapse then, it was this power of the whole universe that rushed into him.

The next morning he set about putting up his Christmas tree, being the beginning of the holiday season. Up went all the glowing lights, the ornaments colorful and shiny, and tinsel even, twinkling cheerfully. It was all up in two hours except that he turned around and took it all down again. It so happened that his crisis of the evening before triggered in him a shift of consciousness so that his usual self, the one who put up Christmas trees every year, was now gone. In religion it was called dying to oneself. What was left, the energy of all that existed, was what he now identified with. He was a changed man.

PROPER BALANCE

By the time of Gautama Siddhartha, Hindu philosophers had taught that the way to salvation was as narrow as the edge of a razor. Gautama, however, went on to develop a way of his own, one that was more universal and readily achievable. Yet,in his teaching he never strayed that far from his Hindu tradition; Buddhism was an offshoot of Hinduism. There are some people and some books that suggest that Gautama was out to start a new religion, or that he disagreed completely with other religious teachers of his time, but this was not so.

The Buddha's way is based upon his realization that the extremes of over-indulgence and of self-denial do not work. A good analogy is a stringed instrument where if the strings are too loose, representing over-indulgence, the instrument does not play well. Conversely, if the strings are too tight, as in self-denial, the instrument does not play well either. It is the same with the wheel of a cart. If it is too loose it will wobble and fall off, and if it is too tight it will not turn. It is this lack of proper balance that Gautama considered the source of human troubles.

The doctrine of the Four Noble Truths is the Buddha's remedy. It is set up like a prescription one would get from a physician. First there is the initial diagnosis, which is yes, there is a problem. Next, the cause of the problem is stated. Thirdly, the judgement is made that there is a cure. And finally, the cure is set forth. This structure and his subsequent Noble Eight-fold Path were so his followers could memorize them easily. Today we have books and computers for ready reference, but not so back then. Information about most things was passed along by word of mouth.

Briefly then, the First Noble Truth says that there is suffering. This suffering, the Buddha then said, is caused by a grasping, a clinging to life, a wanting to do this, to have that, to be that. The modern term for this is hang-up, to be hung-up, obsessed with something. This, however, can be overcome, the Buddha said, although saying that one should just cease behaviors leading to his or her unhappiness he knew was not sufficient. This would have left everyone without significant help. Accordingly, he presented eight specific steps to aid the effort.

Right Viewpoint. The first thing is to see one's problem for what it is and then to take responsibility for it. Typically the issue is ignorance, so called, that is identifying oneself with the ego, which is an illusion. The ego believes, through the social conditioning that created it, that certain things, such as possessions, will make one happy when in fact they won't, don't.

Right Aspiration. Everyone aspires after something, but when they are centered around "I," "me," and "mine," they result in unhappiness. The Buddha pointed to kindness and love of others as more worthwhile objectives because they resulted in feelings of well-being in both the receiver and the giver. These first two steps on the Path are for getting one's attitude changed for the better. The next three steps deal with the types of conduct that stem from the right attitude.

Right Speech. Gossip, slander, and abusive or idle talk is a waste of everyone's time. Controlled, considerate, and thoughtful speech has an outcome that is far more worth the effort, positive.

Right Behavior. Gautama did not describe fully the range of this step, even though later followers did so, singling out killing, stealing, and lying, among others that must be avoided. Rather than list all the things that one should not do, he instead encouraged people to do the right things. To Gautama, right behavior meant love. He taught, for instance, that "hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love." Another time he said, "Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good."

Right Livelihood. There are certain occupations that a person should not engage in lest he damage himself spiritually, businesses, for example, that involve injury to life in any form. Slaughterhouse owners, drug dealers, manufacturers of liquors, are not good. One should not be a soldier.

Right Effort. The sixth step moves beyond the level of conduct and refers to the staying speed, so called, the proper rate of speed one should maintain on the Eightfold Path so not to become discouraged. Going at it too quickly or too slowly, depending upon the individual, is not good. Trying to keep pace with someone else is not good.

Right Mindfulness. Gautama argued that it was the mind that led a person into most of his disharmonious troubles. It is not the wish to have something, a new pair of shoes for instance, that is the problem he said, but the insistence on having the shoes to the point that even when the shoes are had, they are not enough.

Right Contemplation. Because people varied greatly in temperament, Gautama suggested several dozen modes of training the mind for right concentration. He had considerable appreciation for some of the prevailing Yoga practices of his day, techniques that permitted a calming and focusing of the attention. This attention might be plain meditation with no objective in mind, or it might be a serious delving into the depths of the mind, leading to Nirvana. Nirvana was not a place but a condition of mind.

Finally, just as the Buddha did not speak of a soul or the Atman, so he was reluctant to talk about Brahman or the Ground of Being. Such matters, he felt, could not be determined with any certainty, and anyway they were beside the point. Solving the problem of suffering here and now was the point.

POINT OF DEPARTURE

We feel from an early age that we are being lied to, are being betrayed. But by whom? By what? At the same time, we feel ourselves a lie. When we open our mouths we do not know who is speaking. We spend years in formal education, which we argue to ourselves is worth the effort. It is stimulating, and entertaining even, but of what use is it in the end? It leaves us with the real question, what is worthwhile doing? What we really want is salvation.

“Seek out your own salvation with diligence,” the Buddha said. “Try it, see for yourself.”

The Buddha said, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of salvation than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere.”

When we are suffering, we are as much in need of our compassion as is any other being, and we are equally deserving of it.

In the end, only the individual can attain his own salvation. The Buddha can merely teach that there is a Way. It is the individual’s responsibility to follow it. “Abide with oneself as an island, with oneself as a refuge. Seek no external refuge.”

Be assured that the Buddha's teachings "conduce to dispassion and not to passions, to detachment and not to bondage, to decrease of worldly gains and not to their increase, to frugality and not to covetousness, to content and not to discontent, to solitude and not to company, to energy and not to sluggishness, to delight in good and not to delight in evil. Of such teachings you may with certainty affirm that this is the Norm, this is the discipline, this is the Master’s message."