MOVING TARGET: A SHORT STORY

When asked whether he really believed all the things he wrote in his blog, he said, "Yes, except when I don't."  This was because spirituality, at least for him, was a moving target.

Whenever he lost his spiritual connection, he need only remind himself that "the kingdom of God is within you,” as Jesus put it.  It was right there in front of him.  His not seeing it was because other things, people, events, ideas, had gotten in the way.

St. Augustine said that if he could only remain permanently in the spiritual state, it would be something extraordinary.  He said unfortunately his “sad weight,” i.e. being human, made him “fall back again to where I am swallowed up by normality;” other things got in the way.

The elusiveness of spirituality was what the poem “Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross was about.  There were periods, at times lasting for years, when a person felt adrift spiritually.  The "dark night" of St. Paul of the Cross in the 18th century, for example, lasted 45 years, from which he ultimately recovered.  Mother Teresa of Calcutta was likely the most extensive such case on record, her crisis lasting from 1948 almost up until her death in 1997, with only brief interludes of relief between.

The problem, as this blogger knew, was being engaged in the world, his solution, to not be engaged in the world, called in Vedanta detachment, renunciation, purification.  And then turning within.  He was successful at this more than he was not successful at it, which was why what he wrote in his blog he believed more often than he didn’t.  But all of it was still a moving target.

MEISTER ECKHART QUOTES

"When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.”

“The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.”

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”

“There is something in the soul that is so akin to God that it is one with Him . . . .  It has nothing in common with anything created.”

NO CENTRAL PERSON

Vedanta did not originate with any one person or prophet and does not build itself around a central person.  At the same time, it has nothing against other philosophies that do.
 
Other philosophies and systems arose in India that were built around certain persons, such as Buddhism, and many of India’s present sects.  Each has a particular leader to whom they owe allegiance, just as the Christians and the Muslims have. 
 
Vedanta, though, as a very, very ancient philosophy, is in the background of all these various sects and embraces all of them.  Vedanta holds that many streams lead to the ocean; many paths lead to God.

SHORTCHANGED

To die a hollow death, is what we all dread.  This is a death where we feel incomplete, unsatisfied, a stranger to ourselves, despite living as ourselves for our entire lifetimes.  We feel robbed, shortchanged.

It brings to mind the song, “Is That All There Is?” sung, back in the day, by popular jazz singer Peggy Lee.  It is about being disappointed by everything in life.  The person portrayed in the song says, none the less, that she will never kill herself over it because she knows that death will be a disappointment as well.

Our feeling alienated, shortchanged, and disappointed in life is because we are not in touch with what does not feel alienated, shortchanged, and disappointed, the Atman.

“Is That All There Is?” was inspired, by the way, by a Thomas Mann story entitled “Disillusionment.”  The song and the story differ in that the narrator in Mann's story ceases being disillusioned when he sees the sea for the first time, which in Vedanta is what it is like seeing the Atman for the first time.

THAN I AM TO MYSELF

Meister Eckhart:  “I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God.  God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God.”

BUSY SIGNAL

We lament that we are not able to reach God, that when we pray to God we get a busy signal, seemingly.  But alas it is the other way around.  God is trying to get in touch with us, but so occupied are we in this manifested world that it is God getting the busy signal.

FISH AND ME

Watching an ornamental fish in a water garden, I was fascinated by how it would come near the surface and peer up at me peering down at it.  It was still submerged so its view of me would be distorted, but it was interested all the same in whatever it was that I was.

It occurred to me that I, here in this manifested world, am likewise peering “up” at some shadowy something standing there peering “down” at me.  No less curious am I.

CONDITIONED CONSCIOUSNESS

References have been made here to background versus foreground consciousness, to what philosopher Alan Watts called floodlight versus spotlight consciousness, and to what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has called pure versus conditioned consciousness. 

In an interview entitled Ripples on the Surface of Being, Tolle talks about pure consciousness, but then goes in to conditioned consciousness:  “. . . I call that stillness pure consciousness, whereas everything else is the conditioned consciousness.  The human mind is the conditioned consciousness that has taken form as thought.  The conditioned consciousness is the whole world that is created by the conditioned mind.  

“Everything is our conditioned consciousness; even objects are.  Conditioned consciousness has taken birth as form and then that becomes the world.  So to be lost in the conditioned seems to be necessary for humans.  It seems to be part of our path to be lost in the world, to be lost in the mind, which is the conditioned consciousness.

“. . . The purpose of the world is for you to be lost in it, ultimately.  The purpose of the world is for you to suffer, (for you) to create the suffering (apparently) needed for the awakening to happen.  And then once the awakening happens, with it comes the realization that suffering is unnecessary now.”

WHIRLPOOLS

Vivekananda:  “The whole universe is simply an ocean of matter, of which you and I are like little whirlpools.  Masses of matter are coming into each whirlpool, taking the whirlpool form, and coming out as matter again. 

“The matter that is my body may have been in yours a few years ago, or in the sun, or in a plant, and so on, in a continuous state of flux.

“So it is with thought.  It is an ocean of thought, one infinite mass, in which your mind and my mind are like whirlpools.”

ISHVARA

Brahman is described as the impersonal absolute Existence or Godhead, the all-pervading transcendental Reality; God without attributes, God beyond all description.  

 Ishvara is the name given to Brahman with attributes; the Personal God.  The three aspects of Ishvara which have been personified are Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer.  In the words of Vivekananda, Ishvara is “the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind.”

Vivekananda’s comment is telling.  For a religion to go from a religion of the few, of the priests and intellectuals, to a religion of the masses, it must translate such abstractions  as “absolute Existence or Godhead,” “all-pervading transcendental Reality,” “God without attributes,” to something more readily grasped by the person on the street. 
 
Hence Ishvara, who is a kind of being, who creates, maintains, and dissolves the world, and does so in the guises of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.” For the average person, it is easier to cultivate devotion to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva than to an abstract principle.

WHICH WAY IS IT?

Swami Prabhavananda maintained that the Brahman was only a witness to the manifested world and certainly did not participate in individual lives in any way, whereas Swami Vivekananda wrote that the Brahman “directs” our minds and bodies, and “guides and preserves” us.
 
Which is it?

Swami Tyagananda, the Head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston and the Hindu Chaplin at Harvard and MIT, suggested in an email that a reading of Vivekananda’s book Jnana Yoga would clarify this.

It turns out that there is both a Personal and an Impersonal Brahman.  Prabhavananda was referring to the latter, Vivekananda to the former.  As Vivekananda explains, “The difference between the Personal and Impersonal God is this:  The  Personal God is only a being (called Ishvara in Vedanta) whereas the Impersonal is everything in the universe, and infinitely more besides.

“The idea of the Personal God is that He is the omnipresent Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of everything, the eternal Father and Mother of the universe.

“Then there is the other idea of the Impersonal where all those adjectives are taken away as superfluous and illogical.”  This would be Prabhavanada’s position.

So, that is that.

Vivekananda’s Jnana Yoga is available, by the way, as a .pdf file on the Internet.

LIFE LIVES FOR ITSELF

Meister Eckhart wrote, “The person who for a thousand years asks the question of life, ‘Why do you live?’ could provide the answer, the only answer, ‘I live because I am alive.’  The reason for this is that life is lived for its own sake and emanates from its own sources; hence it is lived entirely without whys or wherefores, because it lives for itself.”

Our bodies live for themselves.  While, through our senses, we experience our bodies and all that our bodies do in their interaction with the environment, we none the less feel that they are not us.  They have a mind of their own seemingly and do their own thing despite us.  Yet we insist on identifying with them, saying, “Yes, this is me.”  Looking in the mirror, we declare, “Well, there I am.”

Our sense that we are not our bodies comes from our background consciousness, the witness, Atman/Brahman.

TWO OF YOU

A “doppelganger” is a paranormal double of a living person, an alter ego, or a look-alike.  A biological identical twin could be a doppelganger.

In classical as well as contemporary literature there is the tradition of “twins” and “doubles,” look-alikes, in mistaken identity stories.

In religion there is the soul, the immortal essence of a person, also a double.

In Norse mythology, the doppelganger is called a "vardoger" and is a ghostly double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in advance of the living person.  In Finnish mythology, this is called an "etiainen," or “firstcomer.”

If we have a paranormal double, or look-alike, who precedes us, it would explain our experience of déjà vu, literal “already seen.”

OLD SOUL

We hear the term “old soul” every so often.  Old souls are persons who have learned from their past incarnations, or lives. They have acquired certain knowledge which they can apply to their present life, so that they, quite apparently, have more wisdom than the average person.

From the standpoint of Vedanta, “old soul” is a misnomer, as all souls are old.  In Vedanta the soul is called the Atman, which, like its source the Brahman, was never born and never dies.  Instead, it travels through time, lifetime after lifetime, on its mission to one day “awaken,” reunite with Brahman.

The Atman, by way of Brahman, is intrinsically wise.  It is absolute knowledge.  This knowledge appears in a person the moment the Atman in him awakens.

WHY A SOUL

In his Sermon VII, entitled “Outward and Inward Morality,” the medieval theologian, philosopher, and mystic Meister Eckhart said, “Towards this union with God for which it is created, the soul strives perpetually.” 

This answers the question of why we humans have a soul to begin with.  In Vedanta the soul is called the Atman.   A soul, Meister Eckhart is saying, is what enables a person to unite with God; without a soul, a person could not know God.  And the purpose of life is this union with God.

ATMAN MISTAKE

For a time, the Atman mistakenly identifies itself with the body of the person it is occupying.   

Vivekananda explains it this way:  “The human soul is like a piece of crystal, in that it takes the color of whatever is near it.  Whatever the soul touches, it takes its color, and that is the difficulty.  That is what constitutes the bondage.  The color is so strong, the crystal forgets itself and identifies itself with the color. 

“Suppose a red rose is near the crystal, and the crystal takes the color and forgets itself, thinking it is red.   In the same way, we have taken the color of our body, and as a result, we have forgotten what we truly are. 

“All the difficulties that follow come from our identification with the body.  All of our fears, worries, anxieties, troubles, mistakes, weaknesses, and evils are from this one great blunder--believing we are our bodies. 

“This is the lot of the ordinary person, even though we are no more our bodies than the crystal is the red flower.  It is through the practice of meditation that the crystal discovers what it truly is, that it realizes its own color.”

FROM THIS COMES THAT

In the view of Buddhists it is not possible to identify a beginning or origin of the world or universe.  Their position is that since all phenomena are dependent upon multiple causes and conditions, there cannot be a first cause or event that sparked the creation of the universe.  Accordingly, Buddhist philosophy refutes the concepts of either a creator god or an initial event such as the so-called “Big Bang.”

The term Buddhists use for cause and effect is pratitya samutpada, which means "dependent origination" or "dependent arising" or "interdependent co-arising."  It means that everything depends upon multiple causes and conditions to arise; nothing exists as an independent entity.  The traditional example in Buddhist texts is of three sticks standing upright and leaning against each other, supporting each other.  If one stick is removed, the other two fall to the ground.
  
Thich Nhat Hanh, the contemporary Buddhist monk and teacher, explains that pratitya samutpada is sometimes called the teaching simply of cause and effect, but that can be misleading.  This is because we usually think of cause and effect as separate entities, with cause always preceding effect, and one cause leading to one effect.  He goes on to say that according to the teaching of “interdependent co-arising,” cause and effect co-arise (samutpada) and everything is a result of multiple causes and conditions.

Buddhist sutras give the example of a table.  For a table to exist, there needs to be wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness, and many other causes.  And each of these causes needs other causes in order to be. The wood needs a forest, sunshine, and rain. The carpenter needs his parents, food, fresh air, etc.  And each of these things, in turn, is dependent upon other causes and conditions.

Everything in the universe has come together to create this table, to put it another way.  Looking closely at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, there appears the table.  The one can be seen in the all, and the all can be seen in the one.
  
Cause and effect “inter-are” this way.  The idea of first-and-only cause, something that does not itself need a cause, is implausible, in the view of Buddhists.

The universe had no beginning, therefore.