A WORLD YOU CANNOT SEE

Your life comes and goes through you from a world you cannot see.

SELFLESSNESS

You say that you would be happier not being yourself, just being nothing.  But how would you do that, exactly?  Who is it that is trying to be nothing?  In Buddhism this is called striving to not strive. 
 
Zen says just stop.  Don’t make not being yourself a process.  Don’t give it to the brain to figure out.  Don’t give it to the egoic self, especially, as it will fight you tooth and nail, will fight you to the death, because it does not want to die.

Just stop, Zen says.  Do something else, be something else.  Don’t try to be nothing, though, because nothing is a something. 
 
Tibetan Buddhists practice altruism, as a solution.  Altruism is selflessness, which, in the view of the Buddhists, benefits them as much, if not more, than those they help.

This is why the renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher Matthieu Ricard, to name one, calls himself the happiest man in the world, and why the Dalai Lama is always smiling.

GETTING IT WRONG

Person 1:  It’s like the magician who pulled a rabbit out of his ass.

Person 2:  --out of his hat.

Person 1:  Pardon me?

Person 2:  The magician pulled a rabbit out of his hat.
.
Person 1:  Really?  How do you get a rabbit out of a hat?

Person 2:  Well, then, how do you get a rabbit out of--never mind.

We get things wrong a lot.  But there are different kinds of wrongs.  Sometimes a wrong can be a right, depending on your point of view.
 
For instance, there was an episode of a wildlife television program that showed a field mouse running from a hungry fox.  The mouse darted under a rock ledge and just sat there, relieved no doubt to have found safety.
 
The fox, though, waited there at the ledge watching the mouse watch him.  Hours passed.  The mouse then sensed all of a sudden that it was no longer in danger.  Out it darted.   

The mouse got it wrong.  The mouse’s wrong, however, was the fox’s right.  The fox was rewarded for his patience.

Wrongs make the world go round, as do rights, of course.

VEDIC MEDITATION

Technically speaking, meditation in Vedanta is the state of dhyana, which means prolonged concentration achieved through repeated practice.  It is the seventh of the eight limbs of raja yoga, defined by Patanjali as “an unbroken flow of thought toward an object of concentration.”   

The process is often compared to pouring oil from one vessel to another in a steady stream.  As generally used by Vedanta devotees, the word denotes efforts to achieve pratyahara and dharana.

Pratyahara is the withdrawal of the mind from sense-objects, and is the fifth of the eight limbs of raja yoga.  Dharana is the sixth of the eight limbs of raja yoga, defined by Patanjali as “holding the mind within the center of spiritual consciousness in the body or fixing it on the divine form, either within the body or outside it.” 

This differs from the Christian concept of meditation which is a more or less discursive, analytical operation of the mind around a central spiritual idea or scene.  What Christianity calls contemplative prayer or centering prayer is closer to what Vedanta means by meditation.

NO SATISFACTION

The song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones is, in the end, a statement of the human condition.  The reason why we are not satisfied is because the purpose of life, according to Vedanta, is to find God.  This is to say, the Atman in each of us seeks to unite with its source the Brahman, which, until this occurs, until we allow it to occur, makes being satisfied in any final way impossible.

FOUR THOUGHTS

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.--Anais Nin

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems in his way.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who looks outside, dreams.  Who looks inside, awakens.--Carl Jung.

For a mind to flower, it has to go beyond what it knows.--Mother Meera

GOD DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH

God does not speak English.  Yet we continually pray to him as if he understands what we are saying.  The reason we do this is because God appears to answer our prayers, at times, at least.
 
But, now, what if it is not God answering our prayers but someone else, an assistant maybe?  And what if that someone else turns out to not speak English either, or so we can only conclude because our prayers are answered even less often than with God?

Well, then, maybe God does not speak English well; it is a second language to him.  Still, God does not speak at all, we remind ourselves,  which is to say, he does not speak any languages, which is to say, he does not comprehend what anyone says.  He hears our words but does not know what they mean.

It is here that we get to the truth of it.  God does not speak English, or any other language, because he does not need to.  He knows what we are going to say, what is in our hearts, well before we say it.  This is because, as Vedanta teaches, he is us.

MENTAL COMMENTARY

Eckhart Tolle talks about the mental commentary, the voice in our heads, that comes from conditioned consciousness. 
 
I once knew a man who talked to himself openly.  I asked him why he did it, and he said it was because no one else would talk to him.  I said I admired his independence, and he said he’d talk to himself about it.
 
The beauty of talking to yourself is that more often than not you’ll get a reply.  This is as opposed to talking to God, for instance, in which case you will not get a reply, and if you do, you’ve got a problem.

HOW WILL IT TURN OUT?

A weatherman on television last fall was sporting a day’s growth of whiskers, explaining that he was growing a “November beard” to mark the beginning of winter.  But as he’d never grown a beard before, he said he didn’t know how it would turn out.
 
Our lives are the same way.  We have never lived our lives before so we do not know how they will turn out.  The weatherman has the advantage because if he doesn’t like what he’s done he can always shave it off.

OCCUPYING

Are you doing something to occupy your mind, like reading a book, or is you mind doing something to occupy you, like being your identity?

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

An acquaintance of his told him that he had been confusing him with someone else, which was why he had been calling him “Gary.”  He told his acquaintance that he had the same problem, that he confused himself with someone else, too, only he did not know the name of that someone else.  He thanked his acquaintance.  Now he did.

THE CLIFF APPEARS

It occurs to you that this is the longest you’ve ever lived.  Then, again, you’ve always lived the longest you’ve ever lived.  This, though, is the closest you’ve ever been to the cliff.  You can see it, now, in fact.  You feel apprehensive about it.  You say your anxiety is because you’ve never died before.  You’ve never died before as Joe Blow, at least.  Joe Blow has never been over the cliff.

Eckhart Tolle says that death is not the end of life but merely the opposite of birth.  Deepak Chopra says that birth and death are like parentheses in the constant flow of life.  Life is eternal, indestructible, everlasting.  Like a wheel, it has no beginning and no end.  You are life itself, all you have ever been, and therefore you are not going anywhere at death.  Joe Blow is going over the cliff, you are not.

TAKE YOUR TIME

Vivekananda, in the book Pathways to Joy, said:  “I am walking in the street thinking that God is in everyone, and a strong man comes along and gives me a push and I fall flat on the footpath.  Then I rise up quickly with clenched fist; the blood has rushed to my head, and my discrimination goes.  Immediately I have become mad.  Everything is forgotten; instead of encountering God, I see the devil.

“We have been taught to see God in everything and everywhere, but it is when we come to the practical side that the difficulty begins.  But then, if such is the case, what is the use of teaching all these things?  There is the greatest use.  The use is this:  that perseverance will finally conquer.  Nothing can be done in a day.

“It is thought that is the propelling force in us.  Fill the mind with the highest thoughts; hear them day after day, and think them month after month.  Never mind failures; they are quite natural.  Hold to the ideal a thousand times, and if you fail a thousand times, make the attempt once more.
 
“The ideal is to see God in everything.  But if you cannot see him in everything, see him in one thing, in that thing that you like best, and then see him in another.  And on you will go.  There is infinite life before the soul.  Take your time and you will achieve your end.”   

WHAT IS IT?

We live in a perpetual state of puzzlement.  But note that this puzzlement is in our minds.  The universe is not puzzled.

So we set about clarifying things to lessen our confusion about them.  We develop language which permits us to name and describe things, so we can put them in order.  We create science which lets us name and describe things in still greater detail, and we invent computers which store ever more information about things.

These efforts, unfortunately, collapse under their own weight, for what is the truth of something really, what the something actually is?
 
When, for instance, we put a thing under a microscope so we can see down to its molecular level, we discover right away that the microscope is not powerful enough to tell us all we seek to know.

As a consequence, we devise an even more powerful microscope, except that it doesn’t tell us what we want to know either.  All it reveals is that the object appears to have no end to it.

It is only when we devise an ultimate microscope that we see that what we are looking at is the universe looking back at us, endlessly.

VAISHNAVITE HINDUISM

In the previous posting, it was noted that Ronald Nixon, later known as Krishna Prem, was an initiate of Vaishnavite Hinduism, or Vaishnavism.  Vaishnavism is one of the major branches of Hinduism, along with Shaivism, Smartism, and Shaktism.  It is oriented to the veneration of Vishnu.  A devotee of Vishnu is called a Vaishnava or Vaishnavite.

Vaishnavites promote monotheism, and worship Vishnu, the Supreme Lord, along with his ten avatars, the most popular of which are Rama and Krishna.  The adherents of this sect are non-ascetic, monastic, and are devoted to meditative practice and ecstatic chanting.  Deeply devotional, their religion is rich in saints, temples, and scriptures.

Its beliefs and practices, especially the concepts of Bhakti and Bhakti Yoga, are based essentially on the Upanishads, and are associated with the Vedas and Puranic texts, including the Bhagavad Gita and the Padma Purana, Vishnu Purana, and Bhagavata Purana.

Since the mid-1900s, the Gaudiya (Bengal/Bangladesh) Vaishnava branch has raised awareness of Vaishnavism internationally, mainly due to the Hare Krishna movement founded by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. 
 
Krishna Prem was a strict Gaudiya Vaishnavite, and remained so throughout his life.  Highly regarded, he had many Indian disciples.