OF SPIRITUAL CONSEQUENCE

What is of spiritual consequence?

You say your prayers as a child--Now I lay me down to sleep, etc., or, Our Father who art in heaven, etc.--but those are memorized "throwaways," mere recitations, robotics.  Then comes that occasion when you pray not because you have been told to do so, that it is good for you, but because you really want to, because you need to.  You speak to God directly, sincerely, as yourself.  This time, as it happens, you know you've actually been heard.

You establish a personal relationship with God, even though you are still a kid.  God becomes your special friend, just the two of you.  God is not a  parental figure but, as if He were your own age, your pal.  And it is not as though you are pretending or imagining God to be your own age, but God is your own age, you are startled to feel.  He is all ages, has been all ages for all of time.

Before long you no longer pray to God, though, or consider Him your personal friend.  This is because He has ceased to be other than you, someone or something outside yourself.  You know now, in fact, that He is your own consciousness, has been your own consciousness since before you were even you.  This is of spiritual consequence.

DETACHMENT

Detachment is defined by Patanjali as "self-mastery," and "freedom from desire for what is seen and heard."

Attached to God alone, the detached person does not crave sense objects and attractions, or the fruits of his actions.  He performs his work as karma yoga, which is the path of selfless work.  With karma yoga the individual offers his every action, and its results, to God as a sacrament.

Detachment does not mean indifference to one's work and other people.  It denotes, on the contrary, a profound regard for work and others, but without the sense of "me" and "mine."

The opposite of detachment is, naturally, attachment, termed upadana in Sanskrit and Pali.  Attachment is the desire to have this, to do that, or to be that, which is the source of much suffering and malcontent in the world.  Both Vedanta and Buddhism warn against this. 

Detachment is a central concept in Zen. One of the most important technical Chinese terms for detachment is "wu nian," which literally means "no thought."  Here is not meant the literal absence of thought, but rather the state of being "bu ran," or "unstained" by thought.  By separating oneself from one's thoughts and opinions, a person avoids being harmed by them.

SUPERCONSCIOUS STATE

Mysticism is the belief that direct knowledge of God can be attained, as it has been attained by the saints and mystics of all religions.

The end result of mystical experience is called nirvana or samadhi and is reached in the superconscious state.  This state, Buddhists and Vedantists believe, can be experienced on earth while living in a human body.

Nirvana is characterized in Vedanta as the extinction or absorption of the individual ephemeral ego in Brahman, which Buddhists call the "Uncaused" and the "Unconditioned."  Nirvana liberates a person from the cycle of birth, suffering, and death, and all other forms of bondage.  It is the supreme transcendental consciousness.

Samadhi is the identification of oneself with ultimate Reality.  It again is absorption.  Absorption is the eighth limb of raja yoga, in which the mind takes on the form of the object of meditation.  In this state, according to Patanjali, "the true nature of the object shines forth, not distorted by the mind of the perceiver."

A WALK THROUGH DEATH: A SHORT STORY

It reminded me of that July afternoon on a country road in Ontario, Canada.

I was striding along with only the sound of my pant legs shuffling when I stopped momentarily to catch my breath.  On doing so, though, I was startled by what I found.  I was amid a vast, deep silence, a stillness like nothing I'd ever experienced before.

"This surely is what death feels like," I thought to myself; I happened just then to be pondering the recent passing of my father and the great despair that this had left me with. 

This was when, suddenly, there on the side of that dusty road, with not another person in sight, and with a green pall of corn draped beside me as far as I could see, that I felt as though it were myself, not my father, who was now deceased.

Indeed, as the silence around me grew ever more silent, as though I were packed in a box of cotton, I felt myself standing somehow on the other side, no longer of this earth. 

It was only when a fly, or was it a gnat, large and noisy, buzzed by my nearside ear, a clap of thunder it may as well have been, that I snapped out of it, if I've ever snapped out of it.

SUSPENDING OUR DISBELIEF

When we go to see a play or a movie, we are no sooner in our seats and the show underway than we "buy in."  The story and the characters grab us, to the extent that we accept them as reality.  Not the reality but a reality. 

This is called in psychology "voluntarily suspending one's disbelief."  We know what we are seeing is not reality, but we accept it as real just for the sake of experiencing it. 

We voluntarily suspend our disbelief elsewhere in our lives.  There are many examples.  We don't really believe, for instance, that we are sitting in a machine going 500 miles an hour at 35,000 feet.  It is not possible.  We would never put ourselves in such a situation, anymore than we would sit behind the wheel of another machine and speed 65 miles an hour down a trail of concrete.  Yet we do it.

We voluntarily suspend our disbelief when it come to war, as well.  The world wars of the last century, for instance, how could they be possible?  Slaughter of this kind, how could it happen?  Yet we are tricked by wars, to the degree that we believe they are not really real, only sort of real, and so we accept them.

And, finally, we voluntarily suspend our disbelief when it comes to ourselves.  We do not truly believe that we live on a rock flying around in space, out in the middle of nowhere, and that we, like the dinosaurs, will perish when the next asteroid of sufficient size slams into us.

The alternative to voluntarily suspending our disbelief is to not suspend it, thus seeing things as they actually are.  This is what Buddhists do.

WHEN IS LIFE HAPPENING?

When is life happening?  It can't be happening in the past, for the past does not exist.  The past is only memory.  It can't be happening in the future, for the future does not exist either.  The future is only anticipation, planning, expectation.  It must mean that life is happening now. 

Yet "now" is illusive.  When is now?  Now is too quickly the past, a memory, and, as the future, too quickly not here yet, only anticipation.  So when is now?

To find now, the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle recommends that one turn his attention inward, where he can feel life in his body, the surge of blood through his veins, the flow of air in and out of his lungs, the sensation of the surrounding temperature on his skin.  He should do this in a quiet room with his eyes closed, to block out the distractions that would force his attention to everything other than now.

He might then recall the words of Marcus Aurelius who said, “All we have is now,” remembering next the words of philosopher Alan Watts who observed, “There’s no place to be but here and now. There’s no way to be anywhere else.  Time is moving, yet there is only now.”

Once we find now, under our noses, the idea is to keep finding it.

DREAMING

Dreaming is remembering in your sleep.

SHADOWS

We are shadows cast by the Brahman.

AS TIME GOES BY

The Atman, our true self, is awareness, according to Sri Ramana Maharshi.  But what is this awareness aware of?  One thing that it is aware of is time.  It is aware of time, experiences time, but is itself timeless.

Shankara, in his Crest Jewel of Discrimination, teaches us to differentiate between that which is eternal, i.e. timeless, and that which is non-eternal, i.e. time bound.

The eternal is real because it is abiding, and therefore reliable, whereas the non-eternal is unreal because it is transient, fleeting, and therefore unreliable.  By unreal is not meant that the non-eternal does not exist, only that it is illusory, leaving the question, why would one put his store in something that only appears to be something?

AWARENESS

The issue of "I" or "I am" or "Who am I?" is called Self-Enquiry in Vedanta.  It was brought forth by Sri Ramana Maharshi.

The answer to Who am I? is found in the Sanskrit expression Tat Tvam Asi which is translated as That Art Thou.  In order to attain salvation (liberation), a human being must acquire precisely this self-knowledge, which is that the true self, who one really is, is the Atman, which in turn is identical with the transcendent self, Brahman.

But now what exactly is the Atman, what is the experience of it?  Ramana Maharshi said that the Atman is awareness, and to know this awareness is not to analyze it intellectually but to simply be it.  He said, "You are awareness.  Awareness is another name for you.  Since you are awareness there is no need to attain or to cultivate it."

There are many ways to focus on awareness, not the least of which is by way of these lines, presented earlier in this blog, from the Bhagavad Gita:

The illumined soul . . . knows always, "I am doing nothing."  No matter what he sees, hears, touches, smells, eats... this he knows always, "I am not seeing, I am not hearing.  It is the senses that see and hear and touch the things of the senses."

By setting aside however briefly all that the senses present to the mind, one is left with just plain awareness.  This is the true self, who one really is, the Atman.

TOTAL EXTINCTION?

There are those who hold that nothing survives death, that death is total extinction.

The one balking at this is the illusory, egoic self, who does not want to die ever.

But now if death is total extinction who will there be to be aware of it?  Who will be able to say, "Oh, I'm totally extinct now."

The Atman, on the other hand, does survive death and will be able to say, "Oh, I'm not totally extinct now," never having been, for that matter, even slightly extinct.

NO CHOICE

Through much of life, the Atman has no choice but to identify with its manifested coverings, the body, the intellect, the emotions, etc.  This is because the body's hormones are intense during this time, as is social conditioning.  There is much distraction. 

There are four stages of life, according to Vedanta, the student, the householder (worker, family person), the retiree, and the monk.  It is in the second half of life, after the hormones and social conditioning have waned,  that the Atman awakens from its forced, false identification with the coverings and sees itself for what it truly is, the Brahman.

NOT READY YET

There are people who are not yet ready for spiritual awakening.

These are people who, when a spiritual teacher speaks to them, simply stare at him.  They think he is deluded, "just another spiritual fruitcake." 

What these persons don't know is that the spiritual teacher's speaking to them is not a coincidence.  They don't realize that despite themselves and thanks to the teacher their own awakening is now assured.

EMANATION

In his discussion of the Upanishads, Swami Prabhavananda notes that rarely does Vedanta use the word "creation."  The better word is "emanation."

Emanation means that all things "flow" from an underlying principle or reality, usually called the Absolute or Godhead.  In Vedanta it is called Brahman.  Emanation is in opposition to "creation ex nihilo," for example. Emanation means that everything has always existed and has not been "created" from nothing.

Furthermore, with emanation all things are derived from God by steps of degradation.  All things are lesser degrees of God, and at every step the emanating beings are less pure, less perfect, less divine. As Webster's Collegiate Dictionary puts it, "emanation is the origin of the world by a series of hierarchically descending radiations from the Godhead through intermediate stages, to matter."

In Vedanta, to sum up, Brahman does not create the universe.  The universe flows or radiates from Brahman, as it always has done.  And then, from greater to lesser degrees, all things contain Brahman.

We are reminded, moreover, that Brahman is not one thing, as our language suggests, but is everything.  There is nothing that is not Brahman.  It is from this everything, therefore, that everything emanates.

INDRA'S NET

The analogy of Indra's net is used to describe the interconnectedness of everything in the universe.  As put by the author Francis Harold Cook:

"Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions.  In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each 'eye' of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.  There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.  If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.  Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring."

Author Timothy Brook provides a similar description:

"When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl.  Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net.  Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net.  Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists."

JI JI MUGE

The Buddhist term ji ji muge is defined as the mutual interpenetration of all things and events, which is to say that all things and events affect all other things and events.  It is like three-dimensional chess where one move is actually three moves. 

Ji ji muge, though, occurs on a far grander scale.  One analogy is that of a spider's web, where every dew drop on the web reflects every other dew drop on it.   Similar to this is Indra's net, as it is called, where there is a jewel tied in every "eye" of the net, and in every one of these jewels can be seen the reflection of all the other jewels.

The lesson of ji ji muge is that we must be vigilant, called "mindfulness" in Buddhism.  We must act responsibly.  Everything we think, do, and say affects, either directly or in subtle and unseen ways, all the rest of existence and over great spans of time. 

According to Vedanta, this is possible because everything is one thing, Brahman.  Everything happens within Brahman.

It is interesting that while Vedanta speaks of ji ji muge in spiritual terms, Buddhism refers to it as though a phenomenon of nature, like polarity, or gravity.

THE TWO VIEWS

The first view is that life has no purpose.  Life has no purpose beyond, that is, perpetuating itself.  But this perpetuation is meaningless because it is perpetuation just for the sake of perpetuation.  What is left is death, and death is extinction, utter extinction. 

This is the view of Buddhism.  Whether this perspective is the truth of it, how things really are, is not Buddhism's point.  The point is that it may as well be the way things are, given what we know and are capable of knowing with our limited senses and intellect.  According to Buddhism, there is only one thing that we can truly know and are capable of knowing and that is ourselves and why we are not happy.

The second view is that of Vedanta.  Here, life has a purpose and that is the awakening of individual consciousness.  The universe perpetuating itself is not meaningless but instead is necessary for the evolution of this consciousness. 

There are those who argue that awakening is merely an idea, a concept, a wish even, until, that is, the person actually experiences it himself.  When this happens, and it does happen to everyone eventually, there is no doubt what it is.  And it is not, above all, only a notion.