THERE IS NEVER NOTHING

What comes first, the chicken or the egg? They both come first. They arise mutually. You can't have one without the other.  In the same way, you can't have day without night, hot without cold, or life without death.

This mutual arising, or as it is known more fully in Zen, the mutual arising of opposites, has an unexpected implication.  There is this manifested world, the world of form, so there must also be an unmanifested world, the world of no form. 

This is, at first blush, an instance of presence versus absence.  But it's not presence versus absence.  It is the difference between something being present and its not being present, which is to say when I leave the room, it does not mean that I no longer exist.  It only means that I'm not in the room any longer.

When a person dies, it doesn't mean that he is gone without a trace, but just that he is not here anymore.  Even the Buddha who insisted that nothing survives after death, qualified this in his view of reincarnation.  Something does continue on, namely an impression, an inclination, a tendency to be a certain way, which then becomes the character of the reincarnated new person.  There is never nothing.

TAT TVAM ASI

Tat tvam asi in Sanskrit means "that art thou."  You are Brahman.  You are Brahman in that you carry with you the personal or subjective aspect of the Brahman called the Atman.

In the West, if a person declared himself to be Brahman, or God, he would be tossed in an asylum,or at the very least be shunned, avoided.  In the East, by contrast, and in India especially, an individual announcing that he is God would be met with, "Well, good for you.  At last you realized it."  He'd be celebrated.

But who is realizing at last that he is God?  It is the Atman who has discovered it and now declares it.  For the individual it is a "mystical experience," for lack of a better description, but when finally all has settled, he understands in his bones what has happened to him, that this is the so-called awakening.

It is interesting that the Atman for many years does not know it is the Brahman, encumbered as he is by the "maya" or illusion that comes with living in the physical world.  This maya has been likened to dust covering a compass. The compass cannot find what it is naturally drawn to, which in this case is the Brahman, hence the problem.

It is only when the dust is cleared away, when a person begins sadhana, or spiritual practice, that the Atman sees who he truly is and awakens into it.

POPULARIZED BUDDHISM

Originally, Buddhism was just for monks.  This was the Hinayana school, later known as the Theravada school, which centered around the Three Refuges, as they were called, the Buddha, the Dharma (i.e. the Buddha's teachings), and the Sangha (i.e. the brotherhood of monks).  

Monks would be away from their monasteries most of the year, living in the forest, in caves, and just generally in the out of doors.  During the rainy season, however, they returned to the monasteries, which of course would subsequently be crowded, sure to make the monks wish they were back outside again.

The ideal of the Hinayana monk was arahatship, or sainthood.  Everything for the monk had to do with his own liberation.  "Be a lamp unto yourself," the Buddha taught.

With the advent of Mahayana Buddhism, though, suddenly salvation was available to everyone, the Buddha's teachings now having a far broader audience.  The Mahayana Buddhist was to be a lamp to light the way for others, for the entire world if possible, the Buddha instructed.

In this popularized form, a follower of Buddhism need not renounce the world, family, and human affection in order to gain salvation.  What's more, salvation could come not only by way of knowledge, that is by way of the Buddha's teachings, but by way of faith and love as well.  This was a significant breakthrough, and arguably the reason Buddhism flourishes to this day.

MEET YOURSELF AGAIN

We are born of God and we die in God, and so God is where we meet ourselves again.

It is said that we are closest to God at birth and at death, that is before we become somebody, an egoic self, and then after we cease to be somebody, with the natural waning of the egoic self, and the return of innocence.

In Vedantic terms, the Atman is manifested in the physical world, in the world of form, during which it is, in effect, out of touch with its source the Brahman. It is covered by sheaths which constitutes a human being, and until those sheaths are surmounted, the Atman remains alienated from the Brahman.

But in the same way that a seed in the ground sends up a shoot that, inevitably, breaks through to the light of day, so, too, the Atman attaining once again, in time, its source.  Here, it is the Atman meeting itself once more in the Brahman.

THE HUMAN CONDITION

When we speak of the human condition, we are referring to such concerns as the meaning of life, the search for gratification, the sense of curiosity, the inevitability of isolation, or anxiety regarding the inescapability of death.

But these are all ideas, perceptions, psychological and emotional states.  Frames of mind.  They are experiences of the egoic, relative self. 

Buddhism would say that these things are important, though, because they are mindsets that can cause us much unhappiness.

Vedanta's view, by contrast, is that this is not what the human condition truly is.  The purpose of human life, the real human condition, is the Atman fulfilling its destiny of awakening into the Brahman.

Vedanta does not deny that we are psychological beings and that we are subject to both happiness and pain.  These, however, are secondary to what we are actually here in this life for.  Everything other than our true purpose is irrelevant.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Present consciousness (now), anticipation (future), and memory (past) create the illusion of a self. Krishnamurti said, “Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories?” There is this physical body, this happening, sure enough, but it is all that there is. There is, furthermore, no self separate from the rest of existence as our egos would have us believe. There is no little person sitting at a console in our head, "driving" our bodies. It is the difference between having a body and being a body.

Hormones contribute to the illusion of a self. This is the lie of hormones. It is not until testosterone recedes in men in their fifties, to give an example, that they realize the extent to which they have seen the world through a veil.

There is as well the lie of mental states. We are conditioned to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which may be false. This includes the lie of symbolic thinking (e.g. thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates), and the lie of language (e.g. words about words and problems that words create). We don’t know what we are looking at half the time and then we go on to communicate about it using symbols which are merely approximations of what we mean. Alfred Korzybski noted, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.” Compounding this, we identify ourselves with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts.

Also there is the lie of feeling states. We are conditioned emotionally to react to the world and ourselves in certain ways, which may be false. When one is lonely, he misses his family, friends, and God. Loneliness, though, like all other feelings, comes, as Krishnamurti explains, from thoughts, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. So, feelings likewise then are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Yet we identify ourselves with our feelings. We feel we are our feelings. We feel we are our moods.

Our lives are just these smoke and mirrors, called “maya” in Buddhism, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound. What we actually are is just consciousness, the watcher, so-called. We are a conscious body. In Vedanta the watcher, or consciousness, is called the Atman, which is the immanent form of the Brahman.

Buddhism holds that the individual is merely a temporary collection of momentary events that are constantly in flux in their causal relationship to each other, with a consciousness that expires when the individual expires.  In Vedanta, relative consciousness expires, but transcendental consciousness, the Atman, does not.

IS BUDDHISM FOR THE WEST?

Buddhism is for anyone who suffers, and that is everyone.

Suffering is a central fact of life. Birth entails pain, decay is painful, disease is painful, death is painful. Painful, too, union with what is unpleasant. Separation from the pleasant is painful. Any unsatisfied craving is painful.

This suffering is not exclusive to Asia. It is common to all humans everywhere, including especially in the West. Action and achievement are high priorities in the West, and with such pressing motives comes inevitable frustration.  Frustration equals suffering.

The origin of suffering is the drive to gratify the senses or the craving for material gains, which is particularly pronounced in the materialistic culture of the West.

The elimination of suffering is the objective of Buddhism, and this is to give up, to get rid of, to be emancipated from the desires that cause so much distress.

The one Path that leads to freedom from all misery is the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and everyone the world over can benefit from it.

IS VEDANTA FOR THE WEST?

T. M. P. Mahadevan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Madras in India stated that Vedanta does not distinguish between race, color, climate, or country.

While it came to be discovered first in India, Vedanta is not meant for India alone.

The qualifications that make one eligible for the study of Vedanta do not include any particular place of birth or genealogy.

Vedanta addresses the thirst for the eternal.  It is true that at any given time in the world only a few may become aware of this thirst.

Those who seek Brahman, or God, are as rare as the seeking is difficult. Those rare seekers, however, are not the exclusive products of any particular time or country.

They may be seen in the most unexpected places. They may turn up in the least expected times.

THE PROBLEM WITH ETERNITY

The destiny of the Atman is to awaken into its source the Brahman.  This may take many lifetimes, in the form of many different sentient beings, including humans.

Spirituality evolves, grows, matures, until finally it is ready to blossom.  After this blossoming, termed awakening, takes place, the Atman will never again be born into the physical world.  Its task is complete.

The human life that the Atman occupied in this process may live decades longer, but this has no bearing on what has already occurred.

Like a drop of spray falling back into the sea, the Atman is now, once again, one with the Brahman.  It is tempting to say that the Atman has returned to eternity, since the Brahman is said to be eternal. 

But these words eternity and eternal are misleading, insofar as they imply time.  Brahman is timeless, as is now, too, the Atman.

But wasn't the Atman always timeless, since it is the personal aspect, or experience, of the Brahman?  The answer is yes.  But while in the physical world, the relative world of form, it is time bound.  It is not until it awakens into the Brahman that it frees itself of time.

THE CULPRIT

The cerebral cortex in us humans is the most developed section of our brain and plays a critical role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language, and consciousness.

Our false perception that we are separate from everything else in the universe, rather than one with everything else, is the doing of the cerebral cortex.

The egoic self, a creation of the cerebral cortex, is the one seeing itself as apart from the rest of things.  The egoic self is an illusion, a psychologically and socially conditioned phenomenon, whose purpose is dubious at best.

The fall of man, so-called, in religion can be put in the lap of the cerebral cortex as well.  The fall came with the emergence in humans of the discriminating mind and its capacity for acquiring knowledge and making decisions.

Take away the cerebral cortex and what is left?  Adam and Eve before the fall, is what remains. The paradise of innocence as known to all other sentient beings, who do not have the trouble and suffering that we have, thanks to our higher mind.

CONSTANT CONSCIOUSNESS

Atman/Brahman is consciousness.  At no time, in all of existence, is there not consciousness. 

However, the word consciousness does not tell us much about it, indeed makes it sound like it is merely a blank slate.  A better word is awareness.  Unlike the word consciousness which is passive, the word awareness is active.  It suggests a paying attention, a noticing, as though that which is being observed is of importance. 

Ah, but there is the rub.  Vedantists purport that Atman/Brahman witnesses, watches, observes only, that it could not care less about what it is seeing, anymore than it gets involved in it in any way. 

Yet an argument could be made that why did Atman/Brahman create existence if it is of no significance?  The myth is that it created existence as sport, play, just to have something to do. 

The answer to this the Vedantists have provided themselves.  They say that the purpose of life is for the Atman to awaken into its source the Brahman, that is for the personal aspect of the Brahman to realize where it came from, what it actually is. 

This, then, is what consciousness, or better, awareness, is for.  The Atman could not fulfill its destiny without it.

ETHICS IN BUDDHISM

The fundamental ethical problem for the Buddha was how a person can live in such a way as to limit his pain and suffering, in light of the fact that so much of existence results in misery.

The first, and negative, principle in the Buddha's ethics is that, quite simply, one is to not indulge in any activities that he knows already, or even suspects, will cause him to suffer. 

As obvious as this seems, it is amazing how people so often ignore this and just keep doing what is bad for them, what, ultimately makes them unhappy.

But liberation from suffering cannot be attained by negative means only, by just not doing things.  Hence, the Buddha's second principle.  One is to indulge in those things which he knows from his past experience, or suspects from what he's seen, to be truly joy-producing.

It is by participating in these that one transcends and erases from his mind any of his inclinations to do what is bad for him.  Evidence of this is the Buddhist tradition and practice of altruism.

ONE STEP

If you take one step toward God, God takes a hundred steps toward you.

ETHICS IN VEDANTA

All ethics, according to Swami Prabhavananda, are merely a means to the end of finding God within ourselves.  Right action is action which brings us nearer to the knowledge of God, whereas wrong action leads us away from that knowledge.  Our ideas of good and evil are therefore only relative values.  They must not be used as an absolute standard by which we judge others.  Each of us has his own problems and his own path of development, but the goal is the same for all.

FIND GOD

Sri Ramakrishna said:  "Find God. That is the only purpose in life."

VEDANTA RESPECTS ALL RELIGIONS

To quote a Sanskrit hymn: 

As the different streams

Having their sources in different places

All mingle their water in the sea,

So, O Lord, the different ways which men take,

Through various tendencies,

Various though they appear

Crooked or straight, all lead to thee.

Thus Vedanta teaches respect for all religions.

NIRVANA VS. NIBBANA

Nirvana is a Sanskrit term in Hinduism referring to an individual's identification with and complete absorption into the Brahman. 

The prospective Brahman-knower sits meditating in profound stillness of mind, seeking to know, to know without question, not to have an opinion of or only a belief in,  but to be spiritually certain, that he and the world of sense about him are one and the same, that they share the same ground of being, Brahman. 

Nirvana frees a person from the cycle of birth, suffering, and death, and all other forms of worldly bondage. 

A supreme transcendental consciousness, it is also called Brahma-nirvana in the Bhagavad Gita, turiya in the Upanishads, nirbija samadhi in Yoga, and nirvikalpa samadhi in Vedanta.

When speaking of nirvana in Buddhism, the Pali term nibbana is often used.  While some Buddhists interpret nibbana as "dying out" or "extinction," as of a fire, others take the word to mean "he who has cooled," i.e. cooled from the fever of greed, hatred, and delusion, the three primary evils in Buddhist thought. 

The interpretation of nibbana as total extinction, or annihilation, the Buddha explicitly rejected.  While nibbana does not mean complete annihilation, nor does it mean that following death a person continues to exist in some form or another. 

Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism denies the existence of a soul, whether before or after death, holding at the same time that there is no supreme being, no Brahman.  All the same, nibbana is a blissful state.

HOW IT WORKS

A caterpillar was shocked when one day it found itself as a butterfly.  It didn't even know what a butterfly was.  But as a butterfly, it then didn't know what a caterpillar was.

YOU AND YOUR OPPOSITE

The "pairs of opposites," as they are called, are endless.  Everything has its opposite, day/night, life/death, hot/cold, peace/war, and so on. 

What, though, is the opposite of a person, of you?  The opposite of you is "not-you."  Another way to look at it is in terms of presence/absence.  The opposite of the present you is the absent you.

 Brahman plays the game of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't, or, in this case, now-you-are-seen, now-you-are-not.  This is to say, Brahman manifests itself and unmanifests itself, and as you, manifests you and unmanifests you.

The unmanifested, in this pair of opposites, is not nothing, though.  It is still Brahman, only not manifested.  Anything in the world that vanishes, only appears to do so.  When it grows dark at night, it is only the absence of the sun, but the sun only appears to disappear, so to say.  It is always there.

Energy is neither created nor destroyed.  You are energy.  When a human dies, when you die, you only seem to end, when in fact you've only switched from the manifested state back to the unmanifested.  You've returned to what you were before you were born, which, again, is not nothing.

PRAYER

When you pray, God knows already what you are going to say.  This is because God is you.  God is everything.  There is nothing that is not God. 

Why should you pray, then, if God knows in advance what you have on your mind?  Isn't your prayer, in the end, only God talking to himself?

The answer is, while God is you, you are not God.  You have God in you in the form of the Atman, but there is a manifestation, an egoic, empirical self called you who in prayer surrenders to God.  Prayer is a defusing, a cancelling of this egoic self, if only briefly, which is essential for communing with God.

Purification, as it is called in Vedanta, is another term that applies here.  Prayer, relinquishing your egoic self, is purification of a kind in so far as it removes a barrier between you and God.

 Lastly, prayer, no matter the topic, creates an environment, a medium, in which God can grow in you.  Without this, there is no spiritual advancement.

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

"Dark Night of the Soul" is the title of a poem written by the 16th Century Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross.

The poem is about the painful experience that people endure as they seek to grow in spiritual maturity and union with God.  More specifically, it refers to the period of spiritual dearth that sometimes follows an episode of exaltation.  The Dark Night of the Soul can be brief or can last for many years.  Mother Teresa was said to suffer from it for 45 years.

In this state, a person feels abandoned by God, even though he has been steadfast in his spiritual practice.  He has done everything today that he did yesterday, when the glorious event occurred, but now there is nothing.  And it feels like there will be nothing for the rest of his life, leaving him in deep despair.

Several matters are at work here.  First, the person perceives God as separate from himself, rather than part of himself.  It is the difference between Christianity and Advaita Vedanta, between dualism and nondualism.  Vedanta teaches that never for one instant is God not with you, because the Atman in you is God.  Any feeling of abandonment one has is psychological only, not the fact of it.

The second consideration is time.  Atman/Brahman, or Atman/God, is eternal, whereas the person is time bound, is changing, ever changing.  While he may insist that conditions are identical today to the day before, when he experienced the exaltation, he is wrong.  All the ducks have to be in a row for a mystical event to happen, but by the next day one of the ducks may not have even shown up.

And lastly is the issue of grace.  It is by God's grace and not by human will that mystical contact occurs.  There is no point in worrying or becoming depressed over something that is beyond one's control.

IT IS WHAT IT IS

Suffering is what it is.  This is a central issue in Vedanta, but even more so in Buddhism.  The Buddha built his entire career around it, you could say. 

Vedanta says that suffering results from attachment to the empirical, egoic self, including the body, and that this blocks the way to God.  Buddhism's position is simply that suffering is painful, and if something can be done to end it, then it must be done.

The Buddha comes down hard here, though.  He included in his sources of suffering, aged parents, wives, children, and friends.  He said that if one loves his wife, children, aged parents, and friends, then death, that is separation from them, is painful.  Moreover, the very intensity of love itself is painful, he said. 

"Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil.  Those who have a hundred dear ones have a hundred woes; those who have ninety dear ones have ninety woes; . . . those who have one dear one have one woe; those who hold nothing dear have no woe.  Those who love nothing and hate nothing have no fetters."

Like Vedanta, the Buddha argued that all attachment to the empirical self must be overcome entirely, not because, as in Vedanta, the empirical self is not the true self, the Atman, but because it leads, inevitably, to misery.

KNOT OF IGNORANCE

Vedanta seeks to untie the knot of ignorance in us.  Ignorance is when we believe that the empirical self is our true self.  It is our identifying with all things non-Atman.  Our doing this is a mental error not a moral failing, as we might worry.

Ignorance, termed avidya in Vedanta, leads to attachment.  We become attached to our bodies, minds, emotions, and sensations, which in turn leads to craving, wanting to have this, to do that, to be that.

Craving, in turn, leads to frustration, because everything we want to have, want to do, want to be, is time bound, impermanent, ever changing, even the want to want itself.

But then after we've gained everything we want, our satisfaction, we find, is short lived.  We get bored with what we've acquired, or find that it is not what we thought it would be.

The goal of Vedanta is to eliminate all craving, and this comes when we correct the mental mistake of seeing ourselves as our bodies, and the rest of it.  When we've done so, a yearning for God suddenly appears, which carries us down the right path to identification with the Atman and spiritual awakening.  

FAITH VS. BELIEF

"Faith," wrote Rabindranath Tagore, "is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark."

But there is a difference between faith and belief.  Faith implies a hoping that something is, a hoping that God really exists, for example, while not knowing for sure.

Belief, on the other hand, connotes an intellectual acceptance, an assention by reason that God exists.  The odds are that God exists, or a personal spiritual experience has convinced us of the presence of God.

Tagore's bird, then, may more correctly be a case of belief rather than faith.  The bird in not hoping that the sun will soon appear, but it knows from its past experience that it's only a matter of time before the sun shows up again.

In fairness to Mr.Tagore, though, there is a mystical overtone to this bird he calls faith sitting in the dark before dawn, feeling the sun even though there is no sign of it yet.  We are all sitting in the dark before dawn, feeling the presence of something quite other than ourselves, not knowing what it is, not seeing it, but counting on it.

NEVER LOOK BACK

"Never look back.  Something might be gaining on you," the old saying goes.  What might be gaining on you is who you have been.  The trouble is, who you have been is not who you are now or who you will be in the future.

Yet, it is difficult for us to see ourselves in the present moment, because Now is, well, when is it?  It's so fleeting, it's hard to pin down, hence hard to pin ourselves down to that one moment in time.

Seeing ourselves as a collage is much easier, as a blend of who we have been and who we imagine ourselves to be in the years ahead.  This is for the simple reason that for most of us there is more to work with when we draw on the past and on the future.

Unfortunately, this collage, while satisfying, is false.  It's a contrived self.  It's like a writer who pens a novel and sends it off to a publisher, only to have it land back at his doorstep with the words "too contrived" on it.  This means that the story was not convincing.  It didn't ring true.  Likewise our collage self doesn't work either.  It's not believable, even if we like it.

The answer is to just be present, as basic as that sounds.  Just stop and look where you are.  Use a candle as an aid.  Focus on the flame.  The flame is happening now, not yesterday, not tomorrow, but now.

Next, turn your attention from the candle inward.  The person you find there is plain consciousness, pure consciousness, which is who you are, truly, the eternal you, the present moment itself.