PROBABILITIES

He acknowledged his spiritual family daily, the kindred spirits he called them, “both here in the world of form, and over there in the afterlife, in other dimensions, on other planes.”  He included the latter because his spiritual family had passed away long ago, most of them.  Two of them were especially helpful to him, not only for their own knowledge, but because they introduced him to so many other spiritual teachers and their knowledge, D.T. Suzuki, J. Krishnamurti, Swami Prabhavananda, and Ram Dass, to name just a few. 

It was a mystery how he came to meet the two, coming out of nowhere as they seemed to do.  The first one he encountered while high on a ladder painting a house.  As he often did while doing physical labor, he was listening to a local educational radio station.  All of a sudden who should come on but philosopher Alan Watts, delivering one of his “talks” on Buddhism. 

He met the other gentleman when a lady living in the apartment downstairs from him stopped him in the hall and offered to lend him a novel she had just read.  She knew he was a would-be novelist, and thought he would enjoy the one she had.  As it happened, the novel was by Christopher Isherwood, who, as it turned out, was a devotee of Vedanta.

There was one question that remained, however.  How did this happen, these two meetings?  There were those who would say that it was blind luck, and others who would hold that it was God’s grace, and still others who would say that he himself brought them to him; he was the one who attracted them.  It was all three, he had to conclude, to say nothing of the probabilities beyond them.

EVERYTHING IS A PLAYER

There is a lot going on backstage, behind the scenes, just out of sight.  This is the realm of ji ji muge, as it is called in Zen, which is the mutual interpenetration of all things and events.  A spider’s web is what it is likened to, where every dew drop on the web is reflected in every other dew drop on the web. 

Nothing happens in existence that is not reflected throughout all of existence, philosopher Alan Watts explained.  In this way, there is no such thing as a single event.  There are only multiple, concurrent events. When anything is born into this world, it is born everywhere in the world.  Whatever it does in its life, affects everything else in the world. 

The presence and doings of anything make the world what it is on any given day.  The world would not be what it is at any particular moment were it not for the presence and activities of any given thing.  Every snail is king, Alan Watts put it.  Everything is a player.

THE PRESENCE

He had regrets, do you?  Are yours well founded?  His were.  Has the thought of being someone else ever entered your mind?  It entered his mind all the time. He pictured himself a college professor more times than he could count.  He imagined himself a business leader, a corporate manager, an owner of his own company. 

He was an engineering genius, a best-selling author, a celebrity, in his mind.  There was nothing he could not do or be, he was convinced.  None of it was who he was, then or now, though, was the problem. 

The die was cast before he was born, genetics maybe, and then the social conditioning of his youth.  And circumstances.  Was it circumstances that explained the presence in him?   There was this undertow throughout his life.

Fast forward.  He was now the only thing he could ever be, the only thing he ever was, which he did not even have a name for.  He did not have a box to put it in.  There was just the presence.

LIFE TO LIFE

It started when landscapers planted a block-long garden of succulents in front of the building across the street from me.  Succulents are drought-tolerant plants, which is appropriate for California, given our history of droughts, and doubtless the reason the plants were now put in. The garden was spectacular as only succulent gardens could be.

So impressed was I by these plants that subsequently I gave them a thumbs up every time I passed by them, a life-to-life greeting I considered it, my single life to their multiple lives.

It occurred to me, then, that there are not single and multiple lives here, but all one life.  All life is Brahman.  With this I suddenly disappeared, the way it felt to me, for no longer was I separate from everything else, but everything else itself.

ADVANTAGE OF VEDANTA

Christopher Isherwood, novelist and devotee of Vedanta, noted in the introduction to Vedanta for Modern Man that Vedanta teaches the practice of mysticism.  It holds that a person may directly know and be united with “the eternal Nature,” the Atman, through meditation and spiritual discipline, without the aid of any church or delegated minister.  This was good news to me.

Some of us writers are solitary, introverted, interior people, monks essentially.  We are not joiners, not inclined to become members of religious organizations or institutions.  Congregations have no appeal to us.  I began practicing hatha (physical) yoga and raja (mental) yoga alone in my room when I was eighteen years old, and did so for many years.  Going to a temple to do so was the furthest thing from my mind.

Buddhist meditation was likewise an interest of mine, related as it was to raja yoga.  As much as I loved original Buddhism, the Threefold Refuge of the Buddha, the dharma (teachings), and the sangha (monastic order) repelled me, if only because the sangha meant I would have to be around other Buddhist monks.  I understood why the sangha was necessary, not the least of which was social interaction for the sake of sanity, but I still didn’t like it.  No, I was too solitary, what is called in Buddhism “a lone rhino on the plain.”

The matter was sorted out when I grew close to the Atman, when he and I were alone together. 

ART OF SURRENDER

“When you lose yourself, you find the key to Paradise,” the song goes.  Surrender is not defeat.  Surrender is victory.  Only by relinquishing our thinking mind and egoic self, who we are not but believe we are, can we advance spiritually. 

The trouble is, most of us do not know how to give ourselves up, assuming we have decided to do so.  We’ve never done it before, and therefore are baffled by it. 

The way to do it is by doing something else, by being something else.  This does not mean being someone else, which is trading apples for apples.  Rather is it trading apples for nothing. 

Buddhists do it by way of altruism, serving other people.  A good example is the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard who has been actively involved for years in the building and maintaining of clinics, schools, and orphanages in Nepal.  To him and his fellow monks, the smaller their identities, the larger their spirits.

FATE OF OBJECTS

The fate of objects is to become humans.  Take the example of a rock.  A rock is not a rock forever.  In the world of form nothing is anything forever.

Wind, rain, ocean waves, landslides, bulldozers, many things wear a rock down, break it down.  Where it ends up is in the ground or at the bottom of the sea, where life forms spring from it.  On land it becomes a plant.

A plant is eaten by animals, which in turn are eaten by larger animals, which wind up on the table of humans.  The minerals that comprised the rock are now a human, therefore.

But there is more to the story.  In a previous post I declared that nothing dies. You can see that the rock never died.  But there is another way in which the rock continues on.

Everything is Brahman, and Brahman is eternal.  What is eternal in Brahman is consciousness, transcendental consciousness.  All things possess this consciousness.

In objects this consciousness is rudimentary, whereas in higher life forms it is considerable.  Humans have the most advanced level of consciousness.  Transcendental consciousness never dies.

Vedantists make the point, always, that to be born human is rare, and a great privilege.  Only humans become enlightened.

HUMAN FOLLY, PART TWO

The word “folly” means lack of good sense.  It manifests as errors in judgement.  What causes a person to make such mistakes?  Misperception.  He sees something as one thing when it is really something else.

In Vedanta, a good example is a traveler on a road who sees up ahead what he perceives to be a coiled snake, when in fact it is a coiled rope. Errors in perception such as this are both individual and collective, and can include entire nations.  Countries have gone to war because of it.

In Buddhism the issue is, for example, why a person chooses to believe something even when he knows he is not seeing it correctly.  It is because he wants it to be true.  The reason he wants it to be true is because his ego has something to gain by it, such as the satisfaction of knowing he made the right call, when in fact he made the wrong call.

The point is that human folly is the doing of our thinking mind.  It certainly is not God’s doing.  It is our thinking mind that misjudges.

HUMAN FOLLY

Even if all the nations that currently have nuclear weapons got rid of them, the recipe for making them would still exist. 

And even if the recipe was destroyed, somebody would figure out how to make them again, simply by the fact that once upon a time they existed. 

The writing is on the wall, alas.  We won’t survive ourselves.

Have a nice day.

SPIRITUAL BLIND ALLEY

An alley or road closed at one end is called a blind alley.  Metaphorically, it is a course of action leading nowhere.

Spiritual quests are blind alleys, most of them, because despite great fervor and effort, aspirants have little or nothing to show for it.

This is harsh, admittedly, since some will come away with a considerable intellectual knowledge of the philosophy, religion that has inspired them, which is worth something.  But, honestly, is this what they were after?

The trouble with spirituality is that nothing is guaranteed.  Success comes to few, and can be suspect.  The difference is that a seeker knows when he has succeeded.  He knows what he’s got.

BUDDHISM: POINTS TO REMEMBER

Buddhism is a way of life not a philosophy, although philosophy underlies it.

The central issue in Buddhism is suffering.  Suffering is caused.

The Buddha taught that the greatest single source of suffering is impermanence, what he called the non-substantiality of all things.

Whatever is, is dependent upon something else.  What creates was also created.

WALDEINSAMKEIT

The German word waldeinsamkeit means, roughly, the loneliness of the forest.  It is so specific that it is difficult to find a single-word equivalent in English.

Forests are magical, mysterious, special places, certainly.  It is easy to feel alone in them.  Yet, somewhere else has the same effect on us.

Below the choppy chatter of our minds is a place where we feel adrift, lost, fearful even.  We do not know which direction to turn, except that there is no direction to turn.  All the directions are the same direction.  We are left with only ourselves, out in the middle of nowhere.  The feeling is waldeinsamkeit.

MYSTICAL MYSTERY

Nothing is what it appears to be.  Everything is something else.  Our senses give us only their view of things. 

We can go our entire lifetimes without ever knowing what it is we are actually living.  Yet, it is imperative that we discover what that is.  It is why we keep turning up here.

I HAVE BEEN A MONK

I have been a monk for centuries.

NOTHING DIES

Everything is Brahman, and Brahman is eternal.

I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE

“Here” is multiple here’s, in the same way that I am multiple me’s, not one person only, not one thing only. 

So when I say that I have been here before, what I am actually saying is that one of me has been in one of the here’s before.

VEDANTA AND REINCARNATION

Reincarnation is the succession of birth, death, and rebirth resulting from a person’s ignorance of his divinity.  A person’s true identity is the Atman, which is the personal aspect of Brahman, God, and the way in which a person is divine. 

This is the famous Vedanta teaching tat tvam asi, that art thou, referring to the oneness of the Atman with Brahman. 

The ignorance that is referred to is the Atman’s mistaken identification with the so-called sheaths: body, mind, intellect, ego, etc., that make up a person. 

Reincarnation continues to occur until the person awakens spiritually and realizes, in the superconscious state as it is called, his divinity. 

Reincarnation gives a person repeated opportunities, in as many lives as necessary, to manifest this divinity, or spiritual perfection, and thus to achieve immortality. 

In Vedanta, immortality is a state of being beyond time, space, and causation.  It is the superconscious state in which the Atman unites with Brahman.

As for who actually reincarnates, it is not John Jones or Mary Smith but their subtle body.  The subtle body is the vehicle with which one passes from life to life.  It does not disintegrate at death but forms the basis of a new physical body.

MAINTAINING AWAKENING

It takes thousands, even millions of incarnations for a person to awaken spiritually.  When it does occur, however, he must maintain it, for losing it will subject him to thousands, even millions more incarnations.

CENTERING PRAYER REVISITED

Centering prayer is apophatic in that it is a wordless union, a state of being in direct contact with God, who dwells within us.  “God who dwells within us” in Vedanta is the Atman. 

It is about intention, about being totally open to God, “not my will, but Your will,” as we consent to the presence and action of God within us.  “Action of God within us” is unlike Vedanta as the Atman does not act in the world. 

Centering prayer is an exercise in letting go.  It is laying aside every thought, even that of looking for spiritual consolations.  Both the presence and the absence of God are experienced. 

Advocates of centering prayer say it does not replace other forms of prayer, but simply encourages silence and deeper connection to God.  They say, moreover, that it is not an exercise in concentration, of focusing the attention on a mantra for instance, as in Vedanta.