BROADER CONSCIOUSNESS

Individual consciousness comes to see, over time, that it is a broader consciousness, not that it is a part of a broader consciousness, but that it is entirely a broader consciousness.

DISTRACTIONS

Distractions, such as sights, sounds, people, and ideas, are like waves on the surface of a pond.  They deny us a clear view of what is deep within, God.

Commentators on the yoga philosophy of Patanjali use a similar analogy.  They say that if the surface of a lake is covered with ripples, or its water is muddy, the bottom cannot be seen.  The lake is the chitta, the perceiving/thinking mind, while the bottom of the lake is the Atman.

Whenever the ripples of the lake are made tranquil, knowledge of the Atman is revealed.  Christ spoke of this in his beatitude:  “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

No one can avoid distractions altogether, but Vedanta, in its doctrine of non-attachment, teaches that they can be managed.   The old saying “in one ear and out the other” is the idea.  It is, generally speaking, to disregard, to give no real importance to, sights, sounds, persons, and ideas.

There is always the risk, however, of a distraction that utterly captures us, something that, for whatever reason, we are particularly vulnerable to, something that we are powerless to dismiss.

The solution, in such an instance, is to acknowledge to ourselves our susceptibility, and to understand that it is a state of mind only, and that we are not our mind.  We are not the chitta.

BUDDHIST VIEW OF KARMA

Buddhists and Vedantists agree that a person reaps what he sows, as set forth in the Law of Karma.  This is to say, a person of good character when life ends is reborn of good character, and a person of evil character at the moment of death is reborn of evil character.

The Law of Karma operates like a law of nature in that it is impersonal, predictable.

Gradually, however, the law took on a more terrible interpretation.  The implication now was that every individual act that a person did throughout his life had karmic consequences, as opposed to the cumulative effect of the acts by the end of a person’s life.
   
The Buddha gave the law more flexibility, however.  In his view, a person could experience so complete a change of heart or disposition (by following Buddhist teachings presumably) as to escape any negative karmic consequences from his current and previous life. 

Those who underwent so profound a change, who were no longer burdened by “the will-to-live-and-have,” by the longing for life, could be assured, the Buddha said, that their old karma was now exhausted and that no new karma was being produced, and that they, at death, would be extinguished like a lamp, never again to be reborn in this world of woe.   

REINCARNATION IN BUDDHISM

There is no permanent self that reincarnates from one life to the next, Buddhism teaches, as compared to Vedanta where there is such a self, the Atman.  

Buddhism acknowledges, however, that something must reincarnate, in light of the Law of Karma.  That something is, in fact, karma.

Only karma passes from one life to another, since a person is merely the five skandhas comprising him, body, consciousness, sensations, cognition, and mental constructions that initiate actions, which disperse when the person dies.
 
Reincarnation where there is no transfer of a self was likened by the Buddha to the flame of a candle passed from another candle.  It is the same flame but different candles.
  
There is, however, no psycho-mental element transmitted between lives, the reborn person having no memory of his previous life, or of any of his past lives.

Buddhism underscores, meanwhile, the extreme rarity of human birth, a slim coincidence, indeed, when it happens, and an even slimmer coincidence should it be a Tathagata, a Buddha.

A person ceases to be reincarnated when all his karma has been worked through, and he experiences Nirvana.

OBJECTS

Buddhists conceive an object, a rock for instance, as an event and not as a thing or substance.

AS IT IS

Buddhists accept the world as they find it, as it is.  They call this suchness, thusness, or tathata, the world without ideas superimposed upon it.

Above all, they do not place blame.  They believe that the individual determines what happens to him, not something “out there.”  The external world only reacts to what the individual does.

NO REHEARSAL, NO REPLAY

Our minds rehearse constantly what we will say to someone in the future, and replay constantly what we have already said to them in the past.

But there is no future, and there is no past.  Bring out the future and show it to me, the Buddha said.  Bring out the past and show it to me, he likewise said. 

Living in the present is the correct approach, treating each heartbeat, each breath, each meal, each laugh, as if it was our last, because one day it will be.

AHIMSA

Ahimsa is the principle of non-injury.  “All things breathing, all things existing, all things living, all beings whatsoever should not be slain or treated with violence, or insulted or tortured or driven away,” states the Acaranga Sutra of Jainism, the view of Buddhism and Vedanta as well. 

While walking in the forest, for instance, Jain monks carry long staffs which they tap on the ground in front of them to drive off small animals and insects so they do not accidentally get trampled. 

Ahimsa, in addition to physical non-injury, includes mental non-injury, as in the case of what Buddhism calls the destructive emotions, the mental afflictions.  Anger, ill will, hatred, jealousy, resentment are among these.

FORGIVENESS

Forgiving someone of something is the greatest gift a person can give another, as well as give himself. Forgiveness includes not trying to change someone who does not want to change or who cannot change. 

LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT

In Buddhism this is called dependent origination, meaning that what is, is dependent upon something else.  If this is, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises; if this is not, that does not come to be; from the stopping of this, that stops, the Majjhima-Nikaya II.32 puts it.

A skillful man asks, for example, “What are the consequences of my actions?  Will it lead to hurt of self, of others, or of both?  What will happen if I stop, or do nothing?”  Dependent origination is like a clock where if one wheel turns, all the wheels turn.   Everything changes with one change, or not.

Interdependence, called ji-ji muge in Buddhism, is a related principle. This is the mutual interpenetration of all things and events, likened to a spider’s web where every dew drop on the web reflects every other dew drop on it.  Existence is all one thing, and reacts as one thing.

To be aware of dependent origination and Ji-ji muge is called mindfulness.  Persons not aware of these principles are either ignorant, termed avidya, or they are ignore-ant; they ignore the  principles.  In either case, the result is suffering.

In the words of the author John B. Noss, “The cause of human misery and evil is ignorance.  Man in general is so darkly ignorant about his own nature that all of his actions have the wrong orientation.  Not moral transgression then, but mental error is the root of human misery and evil.”

The author Edward Rice adds, “The result of ignorance is an endless chain of false illusions in which each succeeding illusion is due to its preceding illusion.”

TRUTH OF IT

The truth is that we are on a rock hurtling blindly through space, a rock containing, by a fluke, life forms.  The biggest fluke is that one of these life forms is aware of itself, we humans.  

We are aware, for example, that we will die one day, which other life forms do not know about themselves.

Life on this rock has no purpose beyond perpetuating itself.  We are in denial about our life on this rock.  We understand it intellectually, but cannot grasp the reality of it, entirely.

When we look at the stars at night we do not know what truly it is we are looking at, otherwise we would be screaming in terror in the streets.  

We have, at the same time, a false sense of security about it, much as we have when we climb into a jet plane, believing that we are as safe in it as we are walking around outside it.  

The same with driving a plastic box, that we call a car, at 70 miles an hour.  It is insane. 

Buddhists see through the illusion, see past the smoke and mirrors.  They have awakened from the trance we are in, into reality.

PHANTOM SELF

It was Krishnamurti who 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, Alan Watts said, but that is all there is.  Moreover, there is no self separate from the rest of existence as our minds would have us believe.

Hormones contribute to the illusion of the self, the lie of hormones. For example, it is not until testosterone begins to recede in aging men that they see the extent to which they have been viewing the world through a veil.  Fluctuating hormones in women have the same effect.

There is the lie of symbolic thinking, thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates, plus the lie of language, words about words and problems that words create.  We do not know what we are looking at half the time and then go on to talk and write about it using symbols that are only approximations of what we mean.  

The semantics scholar Alfred Korzybski noted, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.”  Yet, we identify ourselves with our thoughts.  We think we are our thoughts.

There is the lie of feeling states.  When we are lonely we miss our family, friends, and God.  Loneliness, though, like all other feeling states, comes from thoughts, Krishnamurti explained, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable.  Feelings, likewise then, are impermanent, transient, and unreliable.  

Still, 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 and Vedanta, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound.  What we actually are is just consciousness.  We are a conscious body. 

All the individual is, Buddhism teaches, "is 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."

KILLING TIME

There is the art of properly killing time.  It is killing time before it kills us.  When the Dalai Lama is not teaching, he repairs clocks, a reminder to him that we are all “on the clock,” memento mori, remember death.  Repairing clocks, or whatever we choose, is diversion, which keeps the mind from itself.

LIBERATION

“Survival is not the issue, because you are not going to survive,” Alan Watts said.  Liberation is it.  Everything other than liberation is irrelevant.

There is but one thing.  Our day must be for this one thing only.  We must make liberation our occupation.

All anyone wants is to feel happy.  We are naturally happy.  The reason we are not is because we are bound up with the irrelevant. 

WHY ARE WE UNHAPPY?

We are unhappy, Buddhism holds, because we are filled with wanting, with desire, to the point that eventually the desire becomes a thirst that cannot be satisfied, even when we achieve what we desire.  

How, then, can we be happy?  By ceasing to desire.  Just as a fire dies down when no fuel is added, so our unhappiness will end when the fuel of desire is removed.  

We must stop obsessively striving, grasping, clinging, clutching, wanting to do this or to be that, for even when we attain what we want, it is not enough.  The more we have the more we want.  

Attaining what we want is suffering just as much as not attaining it is, with suffering defined as chronic frustration.  What is gained by striving but wealth, power, and prestige, what society has taught us are the desirable things.  

But Krishnamurti said, “Think it through.  Do you really want what you think you want?”  Beware of what you want, you might get it, the old saying goes; hell is getting what you want.  

The reality of wealth, power, and prestige is that they are transient and therefore will end soon enough in suffering. The aim of Buddhism is to eliminate suffering.  The view that less is more, is the correct one.

By not having a lot and not wanting a lot we take the greatest pleasure in the smallest things and are happy.  He who knows he has enough is rich, Lao Tzu said.

DIRECT EXPERIENCE VS. SECONDARY EXPERIENCE

As it does not cause suffering, direct experience is superior to secondary experience. 

Direct experience is, for instance, classical music, which is abstract sound without literal meaning; physical labor, such as shoveling gravel, is the movement of muscles requiring minimal thinking; and color, as in a painting by Jackson Pollock, is a spectrum of light with no meaning in itself.  Direct experience is that of the five senses, in other words. 

Secondary experience is the symbolic world, thinking and language, life once removed.  While secondary experience is useful in ways, it generates a world unto itself and, ultimately, is false, or, more often than not, is only partly true.

OPPOSITES

Opposites only appear to be opposites.  In point of fact, they are one, called, in Buddhism, the unity of opposites.  Everything is the same energy.  Opposites are two sides of the same coin.  You cannot have light without dark, substance without space, life without death, self without other.  They go together. They arise mutually, called the coincidence of opposites, and continually create each other.

NONATTACHMENT

Buddhism, as well as Vedanta, teaches the principle of nonattachment.  We are to avoid all attachments, all fetters, all chains that bind.  This includes attachment to personal possessions, location, money, other people, and most of all ourselves.  

Attaching ourselves to things is folly because soon enough we are bored with them, wish we never had them, yet cannot get rid of them.  We become attached to people but because we do not like most of them all that much, it jeopardizes our happiness in the end. Have feelings for people, the Buddha said, but do not make them responsible for your happiness. 

And why should we attach ourselves to ourselves, to our physical selves especially, for our physical selves are dying, have been dying from the day we were born?  Why should we attach ourselves to our psychological selves when our psychological selves are an illusion?

EXISTENCE IS IMPERMANENT

When a prince asked his jeweler to make him something that would carry him through times of triumph as well as times of defeat, the jeweler made him a ring inscribed with the words, “It will pass.”  The Buddhist term for impermanence is annica  

Existence is in a state of flux.  Every day is different.  Every moment is different.  All is transient, hence unreliable, hence the cause of all suffering.  

We seek fulfillment in life but we never really feel fulfilled because what we seek fulfillment in, is time bound, transient.  When we try to grasp it, it just runs through our hands.  

We are not happy with what we achieve, own, and know because too quickly we are tired of it, are bored with it.  Time kills it.  We then go on to achieve, own, and know more, which again because of time is satisfying only briefly.

SUFFERING

The issue of suffering is found in Vedanta and Buddhism alike.  The term for it in Buddhism is dukkha.

According to Buddhist psychology, life is not all suffering, but largely it is.  Every moment of life when happiness and inner peace are absent is a moment of suffering.  

When we are rushing, impatient, irritated, frustrated, anxious, angry, fearful, bored, sad, or jealous, when we are filled with desire for something we want that we do not have, or feel aversion for something we do have but that we do not want, we are suffering. 

When we are reliving a painful experience from our past or imagining a future one, we are suffering. Nothing on this planet is free of it. Even long-time Buddhists who endeavor to not suffer still do so, because no one can eliminate all of his sources of suffering.

BUDDHIST BEGINNINGS

I wrote only about Buddhism at first, starting with a personal confession: 

I felt from an early age that I was being lied to, was being betrayed.  But by whom?  By what?  At the same time, I felt myself a lie.  When I opened my mouth I did not know who it was that was speaking.  I spent years in the academy which I argued to myself was worth the effort.  It was stimulating intellectually, and entertaining even, but of what use was it in the end?  What I really wanted was salvation.

Seek out your own salvation with diligence, Buddhism teaches.  Try it, see for yourself.

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, the Buddha said.  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.

VEDANTA AND THE BEATITUDES

Swami Prabhavananda regarded Christ with the same reverence as India’s greatest teachers, and in his lectures he often used Christ’s teachings to illustrate spiritual truths.  

In his book The Sermon on the Mount According to Vedanta, Prabhvananda discussed The Beatitudes, beginning with blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

What exactly does “poor in spirit” mean?  In Vedanta, it means transcending pride.  It means being humble, which is to say, a person must not be so distracted by himself as to be unreceptive to higher teachings.

Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted, concerns spiritual loss, spiritual loneliness.  It is crying for God, spiritual longing.  It is when we are haunted by loneliness for God.  Shedding even one tear for him invites God into our lives.

Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.  What is meekness?  Prabhavananda says that it is to live in self-surrender to God, free from the sense of “me” and “mine.”  

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.  What is the righteousness for which Christ wants us to hunger and thirst?  It is the righteousness of God himself. 

Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy, means that we should forgive those who wrong us. In the words of Patanjali, “Undisturbed calmness of the mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, mercy and compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference towards the wicked.”

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.  What is this purity that we must have before God reveals himself to us?  Our habit is thinking of everything other than God, so purity is ridding ourselves of this habit.

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.  Vedanta teaches that when our hearts are uplifted by God’s presence, we no longer have any desire to quarrel.

And lastly, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  There are those in the world who will mock us, revile us even, and try to do us harm.  But we, the religious, must not react to this, keeping our minds solely on God.

GOD

Hidden in plain view.

WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?

When a student asked him what she should do with her life, Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, writer and lecturer, told her “follow your bliss.”  

He borrowed the expression, he said, from Vedanta’s sat-chit-ananda, where sat is full being, chit is full consciousness, and ananda is full bliss, rapture.

Campbell confessed that he did not know what full being and full consciousness were exactly, but he definitely knew what full bliss was.  So by “follow your bliss” Campbell meant follow your passion, follow what inspires you the most.

But now where does this passion come from?

Campbell said simply that it is with you, like tracks guiding you.  Bill Moyers, in one of his interviews with Campbell for The Power of Myth television series used the expression “invisible hands.”

Did Campbell feel such unseen guidance?   Yes, indeed, Campbell replied, he felt it his entire life.  This was the bliss he followed.

SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

All you did was say my name.

MIND AND ATMAN

We have a mind but are not the mind.  The mind is like our onboard computer.  Philosopher Alan Watts said that the mind is a useful tool but did not say that it was who he was.

The mind creates the illusion of self, the person, the ego, the “I,” which operates in maya, the illusion of the world of form.
 
A person’s true self, the Atman, is covered by five kosha, or sheaths, which include the mind and intellect.  But the Atman is separate from these sheaths and is unaffected by them.  The Atman experiences them, witnesses them, but that is all.

The mind is not the Atman or any conception it has of the Atman.

The Atman, like its source Brahman, is absolute consciousness, which remains constant throughout a person’s life, and throughout all of the lives that it occupies for as many years, centuries, millennia that it takes for it to become liberated.

The mind does not liberate the Atman.  The liberation of the Atman is likened to a bubble of air drifting up from the bottom of a pond.  When the bubble, Atman, reaches the surface, Brahman, it merges with it and is liberated.