BRAHMO SAMAJ

Both Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were associated with Brahmo Samaj at one point in their lives.  Brahmo Samaj, or the Society of Brahma (Society of God) was a Bengali movement founded in 1829 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), a Bengali brahmin.  The movement was based upon a unitarian approach to God.

Roy, who was raised in Patna, then a center of Muslim learning, was influenced by Islamic teachings that rejected images, although, for him, some images for people who needed them were acceptable.  Later, in Calcutta, he was exposed to Christianity where, drawing upon certain aspects of the Gospels, he sought a purified way, free of superstition and idolatry. At the same time he did not want to abandon his own Hinduism.

A remarkable scholar, Roy not only knew Bengali, Sanskrit, and other Indian tongues, but also Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and, in his search for unifying doctrines, he read many of the world's scriptures in the original tongues. What he was looking for, though, he found in his own background, the eighth-century B.C. Upanishads, which contained many unitarian teachings. 

But he did not rely completely upon the past.  He advocated that Indians learn Western sciences, such as mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, and anatomy.

A few years after Roy’s death his work was taken over by the young Devandranath Tagore (1817-1905), a saintly man who reorganized the now dispirited Samaj.  Tagore did not accept the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other texts as infallible, and he rejected Christian doctrines as compromising the transcendence of God.  The Hindu books were guides, he felt, but the primary authorities should be reason and conscience.

A crisis came to the Samaj in 1865 when a young member, Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-84), objecting to certain conservative practices of Tagore's, led a schism of the majority of the members and founded Brahmo Samaj of India.  The original group now called itself Adi Samaj, or Original Society, and became increasingly conservative.  It was Keshab who "discovered" Ramakrishna.

Keshab introduced not only readings from other religions but also certain Hindu folk practices, such as devotional singing and dancing.  He also campaigned for the education of women and their emancipation, and against child marriages and for intercaste marriages.  However, to the dismay of his followers, his daughter, then thirteen, was married, with his blessing, to the prince Cooch Behar in an orthodox rite.  This led to still another schism, the founding of the Sadharan (universal) Brahmo Samaj, while Keshab's group was renamed the Church of the New Dispensation.

The Sadharan Brahmo Samaj was run not by a single figure but by an elected group of one hundred members, who chose their directors.  Since then, the entire movement has declined considerably in influence, with more schisms and offshoots in various parts of India.  It has almost always been confined to the upper castes and classes of Bengalis and rarely included the general population.

But its legacy has been a large number of educated, intelligent, progressive Bengalis who are open to new ideas and who generally eschew the barriers of caste and national group.  They often marry outside their community, and are active in their country.

THE RAMAKRISHNA MONASTERY IN TRABUCO CANYON

The Ramakrishna Monastery in Trabuco Canyon had its beginning in 1942 when Gerald Heard, a British writer and disciple of Swami Prabhavananda, founded the Trabuco College of Prayer.  It was on 300 acres in what was then a remote area of the Santa Ana mountains, about sixty miles south of Los Angeles.  The property was rugged, consisting mainly of rolling hills and ravines covered with native grasses, chaparral and live oak trees.  

Assisting Heard in the planning were Aldous Huxley and Eugene Exman, religious editor of Harper Brothers, along with other friends and students. Heard had the buildings beautifully designed in the style of an Italian monastery, complete with oversized bricks for the walls, tile roofs, bell tower and heavy beams. The purpose of the college was to provide a place for prayer and the study of Eastern and Western mysticism.  When Heard eventually realized that his experiment was impractical, he persuaded the college board members to deed the property over to the Vedanta Society.

The Trabuco College of Prayer was thus formally rededicated as the Ramakrishna Monastery in 1949.  A number of young postulants were then assigned by Swami Prabhavananda to reside at the new monastery.  Swami Aseshananda, who had come to assist Swami Prabhavananda in the transition, also lived there most of the time.  Besides doing the daily chores of the monastery, the young monks also conducted a noon ritualistic worship and an evening arati service in the chapel.  An arati service is a ceremonial waving of lights before a deity or holy person.

Swami Prabhavananda had admired the statue of Swami Vivekananda sculpted by Malvina Hoffman for the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center in New York.  He thus commissioned a copy of the statue to be made for the Trabuco monastery.  It was installed in the courtyard, with a lily pond in front of it, with a sweeping view of the valley and hills behind.  On July 4, 1951, the statue was dedicated with a special worship, attended by over three hundred people.  Since then, there has been a yearly tradition of a special ritualistic worship and open house on July 4.

Sunday lectures for the public were started in the early 1950s, drawing people from San Diego and various cities of Orange and Los Angeles counties.  The lectures were dropped during periods when there were not enough speakers, but were permanently resumed in 1977.

In the mid-sixties the monks built a cottage for the visits of Swami Prabhavananda and guest swamis.  In the 1970s, a shrine trail consisting of seven rustic, outdoor shrines to different religions was constructed by the monks in order to visually portray the Vedantic ideal of the harmony of religions.  In recent years a small bookstore was also opened. Additionally, the monastery has served as a place for men to go on retreat.  During their stays they often contribute their skills and energy by assisting the monks in the work of the monastery. 

As Orange and Los Angeles counties have become increasingly developed over the last few decades, more and more visitors are finding their way to the still rural and scenic monastery.  Indeed, it has become known as a refuge of peace and tranquility in the midst of the urban sprawl and hectic pace which characterize Southern California.

TIME’S WORK?

Let time do its work, I heard a man say today.  But what does this mean, exactly? What is time’s work?

Everything runs along it, and in one direction, so this must be its work.

The trouble is, time only exists in the moment.  It never leaves the station.

Its job, then, must be to be momentary.

ALAN WATTS AND SWAMI PRABHAVANANDA

Philosopher Alan Watts in his autobiography In My Own Way (1972) describes one of his meetings with Prabhavananda.  It occurred at a tea party gathered by Prabhavananda at his apartment at the Vedanta Temple in Hollywood, and reveals much about the relationship between the two men and their points of view.  Watts writes:

We were joined by Huxley, Isherwood, and many of the Swami's distinguished lay disciples.  Very soon it became apparent that I had been put on the path of the razor's edge.  On the one hand, the Swami wanted to demonstrate to the others the error of my views, while, for my part, I did not want to embarrass him in front of his disciples.

The trouble started when one of the sisters, nuns, who were serving the tea, said, rather too innocently, “Oh, Mr. Watts, I'd be so interested to know what you think about Krishnamurti.”  “Well,” I replied, “I must say that I find his work very fascinating, because I think that he is one of the few people who have come to grips with such basic problems of the spiritual life as trying to make oneself unselfish.”

“Yes, Krishnamurti is a very fine man,” the Swami chipped in.  “I don't think any of us can doubt the greatness of his character.  But his teaching is very misleading.  I mean, he seems to be saying that one can attain realization without any kind of yoga or spiritual method, and of course that is not true.”

“No, indeed,” I countered, “if in fact there is something to be attained.  Your Upanishads say very plainly, Tat tvam asi, You ARE That, so what is there to be attained?”

"Oh, no, no!” the Swami protested.  “There's all the difference in the world between being merely informed, in words, that this is so and realizing it truly, between understanding it intellectually and really knowing it.  It takes a great deal of work to go from one state to the other.”

“But so far as I can see,” I went on, “the more people consider themselves to have made progress in such work, the greater their spiritual pride.  They are putting legs on a snake--congratulating themselves for bringing about, by their own efforts, a state of affairs that already IS.”

“Well, I wonder,” mused Aldous, “isn't it rather curious that there has always been a school of thought in religion that attributes salvation or realization to an unmerited gift of divine grace rather than personal effort?”

“Of course,” said the Swami, “there are those exceptional cases of people who seem to be born--or suddenly endowed--with realization.  But we mustn't leave out of account the work that must have gone into it in their former lives.”

“But that virtually cuts out the principle of grace altogether,” I said.  “When Christians say that something comes about by the grace of God, Hindus and Buddhists say that it is so already and always has been.  The self, Atman, is the Godhead, Brahman.  It has always been so from the very beginning, so that your very TRYING to realize it is pushing it away, refusing the gift, ignoring the fact.”

“But this is ridiculous,” the Swami objected. “That amounts to saying that an ordinary ignorant and deluded person is just as good, or just as realized, as an advanced yogi.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “And what advanced yogi would deny it?  Doesn't he see the Brahman everywhere, and in all people, all beings?”

“You are saying,” said the Swami, “that you yourself, or just any other person, can realize that you are the Brahman just as you are, without any spiritual effort or discipline at all!”

“Just so.  After all, one's very not realizing is, in its turn, also the Brahman. According to your own doctrine, what else is there, what else is real other than the Brahman?”

“Oh!” the Swami exclaimed.  “There was someone who came to Sri Ramakrishna with such talk.  He said, ‘If that is your Brahman, I spit on it!’  Don't fool me.  If you were truly one with the Brahman and truly in samadhi, you would be beyond suffering.  You would not be able to feel a pinch.”

“You mean that the Brahman cannot feel a pinch?”

“Of course not!”

At that moment I had one of the great temptations of my life, and resisted it. Instead, I said something like, “I don't think your Brahman is very sensitive,” laughed and changed the subject.  Yet, in a way, I regret it.  I felt, in retrospect, that I should have honored the Swami by going the whole way, pinching him hard, and seeing what he would have done, for although he may be shrugged off by those who see him as representing the idle romanticism of Hollywood Swami-Land, he has nonetheless given thousands of people that startling and disquieting question: “Who, what, do you think you really are?  Absolutely, basically, deeply within?”

LISTENING: A MEDITATION

Listening to myself listening to myself.

SWAMI PRABHAVANANDA

Born in India, Prabhavananda joined the Ramakrishna Order after graduating from Calcutta University in 1914.  He was initiated into the Order by Swami Brahmananda, an original disciple of Sri Ramakrishna.

 In 1923, the Order sent him to the United States where he worked as an assistant minister of the Vedanta Society of San Francisco.  After two years in San Francisco, he established the Vedanta Society of Portland, Oregon.  In December 1929, he moved to Los Angeles where, in 1930, he founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California.

Under his administration the Vedanta Society in Los Angeles became the largest Vedanta Society in the West, with monasteries in Hollywood, in Trabuco Canyon south of Los Angeles, and in convents both in Hollywood and, up the coast, in Santa Barbara.

Swami Prabhavananda was a scholar who authored books on Hindu culture.  He was assisted by Frederick Manchester, and by Christopher Isherwood.  His comprehensive knowledge of philosophy and religion attracted such distinguished figures as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard.

In his book My Guru and His Disciple (1980) Christopher Isherwood describes his thirty years as a student and friend of Prabhavananda. He writes: "I first met the Hindu monk called Swami Prabhavananda in 1939, soon after I settled in Los Angeles.  I last saw him in 1976, only a short while before he died.  

"Throughout that period, as his often backsliding disciple, but always a devoted friend, I observed him lovingly but critically.  Thus I quickly became convinced that he was neither a charlatan nor a lunatic, and then, much more slowly, became aware of a Presence within him.

"This was altogether other than his usually charming, sometimes cantankerous, sometimes absurd Bengali self.  It was a Presence to which Gerald Heard, fastidiously avoiding the word 'God,' would refer to as 'This Thing.'"

BUSY SIGNAL

Your life has a life of its own.  It lives itself.  But when your thinking mind tries to live your life, it gets only a busy signal.

NATURAL STATE OF NONEXISTENCE

Your natural state is to not exist.

When you come into existence, by whatever mechanism that is, you enter an unnatural state.

Throughout your existence, accordingly, nonexistence is dragging you back.

THEOSOPHY AND THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

In early adolescence, J. Krishnamurti had a chance encounter with prominent occultist and high-ranking Theosophist C.W. Leadbeater on the grounds of the Theosophical Society headquarters at Madras.  He was subsequently raised under the tutelage of Annie Besant and Mr. Leadbeater, the leaders of the Society at the time, who believed him to be the likely "vehicle" for an expected World Teacher whose coming the Theosophists had predicted.

But what is theosophy and the Theosophical Society?  To begin with, theosophy is an occultist, synthetic religion, drawing upon all faiths but originating in an esoteric form of Buddhism.  Its doctrines, however, are primarily a free adaptation of Hinduism.  Its aim is the establishment of a true brotherhood among all peoples dependent on an esoteric, ancient wisdom, expressed in Vedantism, and transmitted through "masters" or "Mahatmas" who appear from age to age.  

These "great souls" have occult powers which give them, for instance, unique control over their own bodies and over natural forces.  Under their guidance, humanity, bound to the ever-turning wheel of reincarnation by the Law of Karma, will someday gain happiness.  The world then will "drink as one from the one wonderful Fountain of Wisdom from which all religions have drawn their hitherto partial truths."

The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), a Russian-born spiritualist, in company with an American, Colonel H. S. Olcott (1832-1907), her partner in numerous occult and spiritualist activities.  With them as well, another American, W. Q. Judge (1851-1896), and thirteen other interested people.

Theosophy appealed to a Western elite disenchanted with Christianity and open to new ideas, especially from the East.  The Society was established on the thesis that there is an Ageless Wisdom, the thread of which can be traced through all cultures and mythologies, through religion, philosophy, and science.  The Society's headquarters were transferred from New York to Bombay in 1879, and were permanently established four years later in the town of Adyar, now a suburb of Madras.  The Society today has national centers in some sixty countries.

Colonel Olcott was named the first president of the Society, to be followed by Annie Besant (1847-1933), an Englishwoman and one-time freethinker who renounced her citizenship and became an Indian.  A dynamic and eloquent lecturer, Mrs. Besant joined the freedom movement against the British and was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1918.  She also founded the Hindu college in Benares which has grown into the present Benares Hindu University.

It was Mrs. Besant's close associate and fellow Theosophist, the Reverend Charles Leadbeater, a former Anglican clergyman, who, in 1909, personally "discovered" Krishnamurti.  Mrs. Besant firmly shared Leadbeater's belief that the fourteen-year-old boy from Madras was none other than this age's World Teacher. Krishnamurti renounced this eventually and set out on his own.

Madame Blavatsky was the Society's founder.  Alan Watts, skeptical of her, writes, "Her story was that, as a young woman, she had gone to Central Asia and Tibet to become the student of supreme gurus Koot Hoomi and Maurya, which are not Tibetan names, and whose alleged photographs look like versions of Jesus, who thereafter wrote her constant letters by psychokinetic precipitation or telepathic amanuensis in a distinctly Russian style of handwriting.  Madame Blavatsky's voluminous works reveal only the most fragmentary knowledge of, in this instance, Tibetan Buddhism, but she was a masterly creator of metaphysical and occult science fiction, and a delightful, uninhibited and outspoken old lady who spat and swore and rolled her own cigarettes."

"Perhaps she was a charlatan, but she did a beautiful job of it," Watts said, "and persuaded a goodly number of British aristocrats and literati to take to the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutra, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Buddhist Tripitaka.   Those persuaded found them much more interesting and profound than the Bible, especially the Bible as interpreted by the run-of-the-mill Catholic and Protestant clergy at the end of the nineteenth century." 

Despite regular growth, the Society has been marked by a number of schisms.  W. Q. Judge left in 1895 due to a difference of opinion with his colleagues and formed a separate theosophical organization.  At least three other schismatic groups may be counted.  There are separate theosophical societies in Pasadena, California, and in Unterlengenhardt, Germany, and the United Lodge of Theosophists in Los Angeles, with several foreign branches.  A major schism was led by Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Germany, who, after an argument with Annie Besant, formed what was called the Anthroposophical Society in 1912. Attempts at reunification have so far been unsuccessful. 

THE VEDANTIST: MUDRA CLUSTER

(Mudra) The awakened Atman.

(Mudra) The rudder of concentration that kept him on an even keel in the flow of the awakened Atman.

(Mudra) The Flow of the awakened Atman.

(Mudra) The background consciousness, the seed consciousness, the pure consciousness that was Atman/Brahman, the pure consciousness that illuminated the conditioned consciousness of humans, the pure consciousness that was in all of existence, the pure consciousness that was all of existence.  All of existence emanated from the pure consciousness like sparks from a fire.

(Mudra) This was his greeting to his spiritual family, the kindred spirits, both there in the world of form and over there in the afterlife, in other dimensions and on other planes, and he felt their greeting in return.  The Atman would not have awakened in him without their guidance, inspiration.  Of special mention among his spiritual family was Alan Watts, and Christopher Isherwood.  They led him to so many other spiritual teachers who were now in his spiritual family, too.

(Mudra) The oblique world, backstage, behind the scenes, just out of sight.  There was a lot going on there constantly.  This was the realm of ji ji muge, the mutual interpenetration of all things and events.  It was from there that meaningful coincidences arose, the one mind.

(Mudra) Moksha, liberation.  Everything other than the awakened Atman was off the table for him now.  There was no past, no remembering, no regretting, no thought to who he used to be or to what his circumstances once were, even five minutes earlier.  And there was no future now, which was to say that there was no anticipation, expectation, planning, worrying, no thought to who he was yet to be or to what his circumstances would one day be, even in the next five minutes.  There was only the present moment, one breath, one heartbeat at a time.

(Mudra) The bonus mudra was the mystical spot in him.  It was Brahman with attributes was how it felt to him, except that it was also Brahman without attributes.  In Vedanta it was “neti, neti,” not this, not that, which was to say that it was beyond description.

---------

But now what did he do now that he was done?  The purpose of life, according to Ramakrishna, was to find God.  Well, he had found God, the awakened Atman.  He had crossed the finish line.  Now that he was done, though, what did he do next?  When he was done, he should just be done, which meant no further striving, seeking, aspiring after God.  Striving, seeking, aspiring after anything was a burden, after all, a fetter, a chain that binds. 

There were fetters, however, that were essential, such as maintaining the awakened state of the Atman, as it could be lost to distraction quite easily.  He knew this well.  He looked away from the Atman at one point, for one week the previous month, and he felt awful, felt lost and alone and lonely.  Yet the moment he returned his attention to the Atman, he felt joyful again, blissful, as though the Atman was welcoming him back.

But there was one other requirement now that the Atman had awakened in him, and that was to notice, to pay attention, to focus on what was going on in and around him.  Revelations came to him to guide him--he had experienced many of them already--and then meaningful coincidences, synchronicity, as though a reminder to him that the Atman was still with him, and that he needed to be with the Atman, too.

THE VEDANTIST: MORNING MEDITATION

There was a lot going on in the outside world, in the world of the senses, in the forest, but it was peaceful and calm there in the center, in the clearing that was the Atman, who was Brahman.

This was the portal through which the Atman awakened in him eight years earlier and again that year.  He prayed to the Atman that it would grow ever more present in him, continue to unfold, to blossom, to deepen, to widen.  After all it was the Atman’s life not his.  The Atman’s many lifetimes, its many journeys, including the current 72 years and counting journey, had been that it would realize its destiny, which was to awaken.

He was proud to have been the Atman’s vehicle, and, as it happened, its final vehicle.  He, that biology, would die one day, but the Atman would not.  Nor would the Atman ever be born into that world of form again, not as the subtle body that had been him, and all of the other beings that that subtle body as him had been over the centuries.  The Atman’s task was complete now, its mission accomplished, the deed done.

At the same time, he was well aware that he was one of the rare ones to have actually experienced the awakening of the Atman.  It was said to take thousand, even millions of incarnations, as both insentient and sentient beings, that is as objects and then as living organisms, for the Atman to awaken in a person.  That it had occurred in his lifetime was humbling indeed.

But with that came a responsibility; he was responsible for maintaining the awakened state of the Atman in him, for all too easily it could be smothered over by the outside world, the world of the senses, the forest, and the thinking mind and egoic self, and the workings of his physical body.  Accordingly, he would not permit that to happen.  Accordingly, he would maintain the awakened state of the Atman in him, faithfully.

------

One thing remained now.  His life was for that one thing only, the awakened Atman.

The Atman was not up in the clouds somewhere apart from him.  Rather was it right there within him.  To be with it he need only go there.

The Atman was eternal, unchanging, constant, abiding, reliable, whereas the thinking mind, egoic self, and physical body were not eternal, were ever changing, were not constant, were transient, were non abiding, were unreliable, and would die one day. 

TIBETAN BUDDHISM

Buddhism was late in coming to Tibet.  Long after the countries to the south and east of it had yielded to Buddhist missionaries, Tibet remained unaffected.  At last about 630 A.D., a Tibetan prince, Srong Tsan Gam Po, sent emissaries to northern India, for the purpose, in part, of securing the introduction of Buddhism into his realm.  Likely his two wives, princesses from China and Nepal respectively, acquainted him with their own religion, Buddhism, and expressed their desire to practice it in Tibet.  

Yet Srong's introduction of Buddhism into Tibet was not successful.  The native demonolatry was too strong for it; and besides, the Tibetans found it hard to understand.  It would take another century before the true founder of Buddhism in Tibet came up from Bengal.  He was Padma-Sambhava, a vigorous teacher of the corrupt Buddhism of 8th century northern India.  This Buddhism, with it Tantric infusion of sex symbolism, took root, and ultimately, after various vicissitudes and "reforms," became the religion of Tibet.

The clergy of Tibet have had an interesting history.  They early acquired the name of "lamas," a term of respect meaning "one who is superior."  For a thousand years they lived in thick-walled monasteries.  These were originally of the unmilitary Indian model, but finally developed into fortresses of a distinctly Tibetan style, with massive walls rising firmly from the foundation rocks to overhanging roofs far above. The climate, with its extreme cold and its long winters, made necessary the building of walled structures with plenty of room in them for winter stores.  In the early days, the life that went on there was more that of princely magicians than of monks.  The Tantric Buddhism that was practiced encouraged the lamas to take spouses.  Celibacy, at least among the higher clergy, became a rarity.  The monasteries therefore often had hereditary heads, the abbots passing their offices on to their sons.

In the second half of the 14th century, the conditions were created for the final "reform" of Lamaism by the great Tibetan monk Tsong-kha-pa.  He organized the so-called Yellow Church, whose executive head is the Dalai Lama.  Its monks are popularly known as Yellow Hats, for their hats and girdles are yellow--an evidence of Tsong's attempt to purify Lamaism and take it back in theory and practice toward early Buddhism.  The monasteries that resisted reform continued the use of red and constitute the "Red" sects.

Tsong's reform was in part an imposition of a stricter monastic discipline.  There was to be less alcohol and more praying.  But what counted most and had the greatest future consequences was the reintroduction of celibacy.  The practice of celibacy had the obvious and immediate effect of ending hereditary rule in the Yellow Hat monasteries; the abbots had no sons.  But another result ultimately followed, about a century later, which gave the Yellow Church its world-famous theory of reincarnation of the head lamas in their successors.

Born 6 July 1935, Lhamo Dondrub is the 14th Dalai Lama.  He was the fifth of seven children in a farming family in the village of Taktser.  His first language was, in his own words, "a broken Xining language which was a dialect of the Chinese language," for his family did not speak the regional Amdo dialect.  He was proclaimed the tulku or rebirth of the 13th Dalai Lama at the age of two.  In 1950 the army of the People's Republic of China invaded the region.  One month later, on 17 November 1950, he was enthroned formally as Dalai Lama: at the age of fifteen, he became the region's most important spiritual leader and political ruler.

In 1951 the Chinese military pressured the Dalai Lama to ratify a seventeen-point agreement which permitted the People's Republic of China to take control of Tibet.  He fled through the mountains to India soon after the failed 1959 uprising, the effective collapse of the Tibetan resistance movement.  In Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India, he established a government-in-exile.  The most influential member of the Gelugpa or Yellow Hat sect, he has considerable influence over the other sects of Tibetan Buddhism.

Today, Tibetan Buddhism is adhered to widely in the Tibetan Plateau, Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, Kalmykia, on the northwest shore of the Caspian, Siberia, central Russia, specifically Buryatia and Chita Oblast, and the Russian Far East, concentrated in Tuva.  The Indian regions of Sikkim and Ladakh, both formerly independent kingdoms, are also home to significant Tibetan Buddhist populations. In the wake of the Tibetan diaspora, Tibetan Buddhism has gained adherents in the West and throughout the world.  Celebrity practitioners include Brandon Boyd, Richard Gere, Adam Yauch, Jet Li, Sharon Stone, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Glass.

BEGINNER’S MIND

Zen masters say that they have nothing to teach.  This is true, but only partly.  The problem is that what they have to teach is not teachable.  Their task, rather, is the short-circuiting of a person's analytical mind.  If successfully undone, this mind will land where he was at the start of its life, at what is called beginner's mind.

The Ch'an school of Buddhism in China is called Zen in Japan, as this is how "ch'an" is pronounced in Japan.  There are three branches of Zen in Japan, which were established in the 12th, 13th, and 17th centuries.  The two sects that are now most active are derived from the two most durable Chinese sects: the Rinzai, so named from the Japanese pronunciation of Lin-Chi, and the Soto, from the Chinese Ts'ao-tung.

The former favors the koan method where there is an enigma or puzzle that forces a person's mind outside its normal processes, so as to gain instant insight.  The Soto school prefers the zazen approach, or sitting meditation.  This is for attaining gradual awakening.  In both instances the aim is beginner's mind.  When it occurs it is called satori.  Rinzai's most vigorous advocate is the world-famous professor Dr. D.T. Suzuki.  Alan Watts liked to recount Suzuki's informal description of his satori: "It is like everyday experience, only about two inches off the ground."

In beginner's mind a person sees the unitary character of reality.  "I" and "not-I" are one.  Deliberative reason will not succeed here.  One cannot THINK oneself into this realization.  This is to say, there are two ways of dealing with the world.  One is to distinguish, describe, analyze, and, in pursuit of practical ends, to manipulate the world from the outside.  The other approach is to contemplate the world, much as Taoists do, from a position of one who is indistinguishably the same as it. 

This feeling of oneness is the mystical component of Zen, but it is different from the oneness in, for instance, Vedanta, which speaks of the oneness of Brahman.  Dr. Suzuki points out that there is always what may be called a sense of the “beyond” to Zen's oneness.  The experience is indeed our own, he says, but we feel it to be rooted elsewhere.  However, a SENSE of the beyond is all that can be said about it.  To call this beyond, the Absolute, or God, is to go further than the experience allows.

DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI

D. T. Suzuki (18 October 1870 to 12 July 1966), the foremost exponent of Zen Buddhism in the West, was born Teitarō Suzuki, the son of Ryojun Suzuki, a physician, and his wife, Masu (full name unknown), in what is now the city of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan.  He was the youngest of five children.  Suzuki's grandfather and great-grandfather were also physicians.  The deaths of Suzuki's father, shortly after Suzuki's sixth birthday, and an older brother the following year, influenced Suzuki's gravitation toward religious and philosophical study.  

As a teenager he sought out both Zen monks and Christian missionaries and engaged them in philosophical discussions.  Suzuki's high school mathematics teacher, who had a strong interest in Zen and had studied with Kōsen Imagita, one of the great Zen masters of the time, intensified the youth's curiosity about Zen.

After leaving high school because of family financial difficulties, Suzuki continued to pursue his interest in Zen, working as a teacher of English.  In 1891, the year after his mother's death, one of Suzuki's brothers, a lawyer, sent him to Tokyo, where he enrolled in classes at what is now Waseda University, and also at Tokyo Imperial University.  

But soon after arriving in Tokyo, Suzuki began commuting to nearby Kamakura, the site of Engakuji, an important Zen temple, to study with Kōsen Imagita.  But Kōsen died in early 1892, leaving Suzuki to continue his studies at the temple--eventually taking up residence there--with Kōsen's successor, Sōen Shaku.  In 1893 Suzuki translated into English the address Sōen was to give at the World Parliament of Religions.  Sōseki Natsume, one of Japan's greatest modern novelists, checked Suzuki's translation.

Held in Chicago that year as part of the World's Columbian Exposition, the World Parliament of Religions was a milestone in the introduction of Buddhism to the United States.  At the conference, Sōen met Paul Carus, an author and editor with a strong interest in Eastern religions.

Carus was editor of Open Court, a journal focusing on ethical and religious issues, and was instrumental in the founding of an eclectic philosophical publishing company of the same name.  Sōen spent the week at the conference, visiting Carus at his home in LaSalle, Illinois.  As a result of this visit, Carus wrote The Gospel of Buddha, which Suzuki translated into Japanese at Engakuji while continuing to study Zen as a lay-disciple.

During his four years at Engakuji, Suzuki struggled fruitlessly with the kōan he had been given by Sōen.  In 1897 he traveled to the United States to assist Carus with his translation of the Taoist classic Tao te ching. The winter before his departure, Suzuki finally achieved enlightenment and became able to answer the monk's questions about the kōan.  At this time Sōen gave him the name Daisetsu, meaning "Great Simplicity."  Suzuki is known as Suzuki Daisetsu in Japan; Daisetsu is often spelled Daisetz in English.

After assisting Carus with the Tao translation, Suzuki remained at Open Court, studying Chinese and Sanskrit and working on a variety of projects.  This included translations of important early Buddhist texts.  In 1905 he served as Sōen's interpreter during the latter's tour of the United States.  His increasingly strong belief that Westerners needed assistance in their understanding of Buddhism led Suzuki to publish his first original book in English, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, in 1907.

In 1908 Suzuki left LaSalle, traveling to New York and Europe before returning to Japan in April of the following year.  In Paris he spent time at the Bibliothèque Nationale, copying, photographing, and studying ancient Chinese manuscript copies of sutras, and in London he translated into Japanese Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell for the Swedenborg Society.  In 1912 the Society invited him back to London to translate several other works by Swedenborg.

On his return to Japan in 1909, Suzuki became a lecturer at Gakushūin University and Tokyo Imperial University. The following year he was appointed professor at Gakushūin.  Suzuki married Beatrice Lane, a Radcliffe graduate and Theosophist, in Japan in 1911.  The Suzukis lived at Engakuji until the death of Sōen in 1919. They then moved to Kyoto, where Suzuki became a lecturer, and later a professor, at Ōtani University.

In 1921 the couple began publishing The Eastern Buddhist, an English-language quarterly largely intended for Westerners.  The first series of Essays in Zen Buddhism, published in London in 1927, and the succeeding two series, published in 1933 and 1934, firmly established Suzuki's reputation in England.  In April 1936, Suzuki was invited to London to speak at the World Congress of Faiths.  His encounter there with the twenty-year-old Alan Watts resulted in the publication, later the same year, of Watts's first book, The Spirit of Zen.

After the death in 1939 of his wife, who was his close collaborator throughout their marriage, Suzuki went into seclusion in Kamakura, remaining there for the duration of World War II.  He emerged in 1949 to travel to Honolulu to attend the Second East-West Philosopher's Conference and taught at the University of Hawaii the following year.  

After spending the next year in California, he moved to New York in 1951, where he began teaching a series of seminars on Zen at Columbia University.  Among his students at that time were the psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and Karen Horney and the composer John Cage.  Cage, who went on to attend Suzuki's seminars for two years, was profoundly influenced by them.

Although Horney died shortly after a Suzuki-led tour of Zen monasteries in Japan in 1952, her final writings bear evidence of her association with him.  Fromm in 1957 organized a groundbreaking workshop on Zen and psychoanalysis at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at which Suzuki was the featured speaker.  The long list of other Western intellectuals and artists on whom Suzuki is known to have had an influence included Carl Jung, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and potter Bernard Leach.

In 1953 Mihoko Okamura, a second-generation Japanese American student in his class at Columbia, became Suzuki's personal secretary and editor.  At this time Suzuki took up residence at the home of Okamura, where her parents, and her sister also lived on West Ninety-fourth Street in Manhattan.  Okamura remained his secretary, and he continued to live with her family, when not traveling, for the rest of Suzuki’s life.

After his retirement from Columbia in June 1957 Suzuki traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lectured and helped found the Cambridge Buddhist Society.  Until his death in Tokyo at age ninety-five, Suzuki continued to travel widely, lecturing, attending conferences, and receiving a variety of honors.

In addition to playing a key role in the popularization of Buddhism in the Western world, Suzuki, who never formally graduated from any of the schools he attended, also made significant contributions to Buddhist scholarship, particularly to the modern understanding of the Gandavyūha and Lankāvatāra sutras.  In addition, his work resulted in a reawakening of interest in Buddhism in Japan after a period during which the study of Shinto had dominated Japanese religious scholarship. 

Suzuki's collected complete works in Japanese occupy thirty-two volumes.  The more than thirty titles he published in English include An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, first published in 1934, and Zen and Japanese Culture in 1959.

ALAN WATTS

When speaking about Zen Buddhism and its introduction to the West, the first name that comes to mind is, of course, D. T. Suzuki.  The second name, however, is Alan Watts.  Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker.  He wrote more than 25 books and numerous articles on a wide range of subjects, mostly in the areas of philosophy, religion, and psychology.

Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent, England in the year 1915, living at 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane.  His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tire Company, his mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary.  With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up playing in the fields, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies.

By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative.  He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training) in his early years.  During holidays in his teen years, Francis Croshaw, a wealthy epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and the exotic little-known aspects of European culture, took Watts on a trip through France.  It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to growing up, and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s.  He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge, which had been established by Theosophists, and was now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys.  Watts became the organization’s secretary at age 16 (1931).  The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Watts went on to attend King's School next door to Canterbury Cathedral.  Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically, and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was considered presumptuous and capricious.

Hence, when he graduated from secondary school, Watts was thrust into the world of employment, working in a printing house and later a bank.  He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović.  (Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.)  Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom.

London afforded him a considerable number of other opportunities for personal growth.  Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors, such as Nicholas Roerich, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey.  In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D.T. Suzuki, read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism.  Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, he absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.  Also in 1936, Watts' first book was published, The Spirit of Zen, which he later acknowledged was mainly digested from the writings of Suzuki.

In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America.  He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York.  A few years later, following their divorce, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki, who served as a sort of model and mentor to Alan, though Watts chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki.  He did, however, take Zen training.

Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of teaching did not suit him.  He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a professional outlet for his philosophical inclinations.  He entered an Anglican, Episcopalian, school, Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and Church history.  He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy.  Watts was awarded a Master's degree in theology, in response to his thesis, which he went on to publish under the title Behold the Spirit.  The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for formal religious outlooks, which he saw as dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing, no matter where they may be, in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as, ironically, an Episcopalian priest.  This began in 1945 when he was 30 years old, until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled.  It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry in 1950.  In the new year he met mythologist Joseph Campbell, Campbell's wife Jean Erdman, a dancer and choreographer of modern dance, and John Cage, a composer, music theorist, and a leading figure of the post-war avant-guarde.

In the spring of 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco.  There he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa, Frederick Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors.  Hasegawa, an abstract calligrapher, was a major influence on Watts, in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature.

Watts also studied written Chinese with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the Academy.  While Watts was noted for his interest in Zen Buddhism, with its origins in China, but his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta as well, along with cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid 1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973.  Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area.  These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death.  The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles, and at the Electronic University archive founded by his son, Mark Watts (alanwatts.org).

In 1957, Watts published one of his best known books, The Way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history.  Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics, gleaned from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published. Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life.  The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.

Around this time, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung.  In relation to modern psychology, Watts's instincts were closer to Jung's or Abraham Maslow's than to those of Freud.

When he returned to the United States, he began to dabble in psychedelic drug experiences, initially with mescaline given to him by Dr. Oscar Janiger.  He tried LSD several times with various research teams led by Drs. Keith Ditman, Sterling Bunnell, and Michael Agron.  He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down.  Watts’ books of the ‘60s reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook to life.  He would later comment about psychedelic drug use, "When you get the message, hang up the phone."

For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology.  His book Psychotherapy East and West is a good example, finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe as proposed by 20th-century physicists.  He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Watts's explorations and teaching brought him into contact with many noted intellectuals, artists, and American teachers in the human potential movement. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support.  He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his “Lights along the Way” in Wilson’s book Cosmic Trigger.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, Watts did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University.  He also lectured to many college and university students generally.  His lectures and books gave Watts far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia of the 1950s-1970s, but Watts was often seen as an outsider in academia.  When questioned sharply by students during his talk at U.C. Santa Cruz in 1970, Watts responded that he was not an academic philosopher, but rather "a philosophical entertainer."

He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.

In several of his later publications, especially in Beyond Theology and in The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview drawing on Vedanta, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science.  He maintained that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek from itself by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is.  The upshot was that we are all this cosmic self in disguise.  In this view, Watts asserted that our conception of ourselves as egos in a bag of skin is a myth, and that separate "things" so-called, are merely processes of the whole.  Everything is one thing.

BRITISH MYSTICAL EXPATRIATES OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

It was through novelist Aldous Huxley that Alan Watts became aware of a group he went on to call the "British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California."  It included Huxley, Gerald Heard, Felix Greene, and Christopher Isherwood, all of whom were associated at various times with Swami Prabhavananda and the Vedanta Society.  Gerald Heard's ashram at Trabuco Canyon (Trabuco College) in the Santa Ana mountains below Los Angeles they were also interested in.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was one of the 20th Century's foremost novelists whose works included most notably Crome [sic] Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1928), and Point Counter Point (1928).  His Brave New World (1932) and Eyeless in Gaza (1936) became classics.  His essay "The Perennial Philosophy" (1946) evidenced his interest in mysticism.  In 1947 he moved to Southern California where he lived most of the rest of his life.  It was there that, through Gerald Heard, he first met Swami Prabhavananda.  Prabhavananda initiated him into the Ramakrishna Mission in Hollywood, home of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.  Among Huxley’s later works were The Devils of Loudon (1952), and The Doors of Perception (1954) written following his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, and Island (1962).

Gerald Heard (1889-1971) was an historian, science writer, educator, and philosopher.  He wrote many articles, and over 35 books.  He was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans including Clare Boothe Luce, and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.  His work was a forerunner of, and an influence on, the consciousness-development movement that spread in the Western world in the 1960s.  In 1937 he emigrated to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, Huxley's wife Maria, and their son Matthew Huxley.  He had been invited to lecture at Duke University.  However, he subsequently turned down the offer at Duke, settling instead in California.  In 1942 he founded Trabuco College as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued.  

But the Trabuco College project was short lived and in 1949 Heard donated the campus to Swami Prabhavananda and his Vedanta Society.  Actually, Heard was the first among a group of literati friends to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta.  Like Huxley, Heard became an initiate.  As with Huxley, the essence of Heard’s mature outlook was that a human being can "effectively pursue intentional evolution of consciousness,"as he put it.  He himself maintained a regular discipline of meditation, along the lines of yoga, for many years.  In the 1950s he tried LSD and felt that, used properly, it had strong potential to "enlarge Man's mind."  It allowed a person to see beyond his ego, he said.  Heard had a radio program on the BBC when he was a young man which may have inspired Alan Watts, twenty years later, to do the same on KPFA in San Francisco.

Felix Greene (1909—1985) was a British-American journalist and a cousin of both the well-known British author Graham Greene, and novelist/playwright Christopher Isherwood.  At one point he had an executive job with the Friends Service Committee (Quakers) in Philadelphia.  Later, however, he joined Gerald Heard in California where he was hands-on in the preparation of Heard's Trabuco College.  He is best known for chronicling several Communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s.  He first visited China for the BBC in 1957.  He later produced documentary films, including One Man's China, and Inside North Viet Nam.  But these films give a rosy and one-sided view of the communist society.  It is best to view him as a “Fellow Traveler” so-called, a person sympathetic to a particular philosophy but not a card-carrying member of a representative institution.  He was one of the first Western reporters to visit North Vietnam when he traveled there for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960's.  He lived in the San Francisco area for twenty years.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was an English-born novelist and playwright who settled in the U.S. in 1939.  His best-known novels are Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), set in the decaying Germany of the 1930's.  These were later adapted into plays and films (I Am a Camera, and Cabaret).  He collaborated with poet W. H. Auden on three plays, the best-known being The Ascent of F-6 (1936).  Greatly influenced by Aldous Huxley, Isherwood turned to Eastern religions.  

Much of Isherwood's subsequent writing was devoted to popularizing aspects of Vedanta.  He wrote a biography of Ramakrishna entitled Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1959) and with Swami Prabhavananda translated the Bhagavad-Gita and other Hindu scriptures.  In 1969 he published Essentials of Vedanta, and in 1979, My Guru and His Disciple. Vedanta and the West was the official publication of the Vedanta Society of which Isherwood was managing editor from 1943 until 1945.  Together with Huxley and Heard, he was on the Editorial Advisory Board from 1951 until 1962. Many of the essays in this publication are found in the book Vedanta for the Western World (1960) edited by Isherwood.

Alan Watts did not really consider himself one of the “British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California” despite similarities he had with them.  To start with, he was younger than the others, which is to say, in 1955, when his career as a freelance writer and speaker was taking root, he was a mere 40 years old.  Huxley was 61, Heard 66, Greene 46, and Isherwood 51.  On the other hand, he, like the others, was a transplant from England, setting up shop, like Greene, in the San Francisco area, and he had the same interests as the others.  He certainly knew the rest of them, some of them, like Huxley, quite well.  He was not, however, connected with the Vedanta Society, even though on many occasions he had discussions with Swami Prabhavananda. There were ideas in Vedanta that he quite liked, though.

KARMA AND REINCARNATION

Both Vedanta and Buddhism ascribe to the principle of karma which says that for every deed we do in this existence there is, for better or ill, a consequence, baggage which we then carry from one lifetime to the next.  But what exactly is karma?

Karma means action, work, a deed, which can be physical action, conscious or reflex, but also mental action, conscious or subconscious.  Karma is everything that we think or do.  Karma also means the Law of Causation, i.e. from this follows that.

When we do something or think a thought, this action or thought, even though apparently over and done with, will inevitably, sooner or later, produce an effect. This effect may be pleasant, unpleasant, or a mixture of both for us.  It may be long delayed.  We may never notice it.  Still, it will be produced.

Moreover, every action and every thought makes an impression upon our minds. This impression may be slight at first, but if the same action or thought is repeated, it will deepen into a groove of sorts, down which our future behavior will easily tend to run.

These mental grooves are then our tendencies, which make it possible to predict just how each of us will behave in a given situation in the future.  The sum of our karmas represents our character.  As new karmas are added and previous ones exhausted, or neutralized, our character changes.

While agreeing on the phenomenon of karma, Vedanta and Buddhism have different views of reincarnation.  With the former, a person who dies does not, except in the case where he has identified with the Atman, pass into a permanent state in heaven or hell, or in a condition elsewhere, but is reborn into another existence.

This next existence will terminate in due time and necessitate yet another birth.  Rebirth follows rebirth in an endless chain, and may occur in any of a series of planes.  On earth it could be in any of the forms of life, vegetable, animal, or human.

Since Buddhism does not accept the existence of a soul, it has a decidedly different take on reincarnation.  In Buddhism the karma-laden ego passes from one life to the next but in the manner of a seal that is pressed upon wax. What passes from the former to the latter is the elements engraved on the seal and then retained by the wax.  Nothing substantial is involved.  Another analogy is the passing of a flame from one candle to another.

In both Buddhism and Vedanta this process is quite impersonal, which is to say that unlike Christianity, there is no man in a white beard sitting on a celestial throne passing judgement on one's fate.  And, again, one's fate does not include an endless heaven or hell as in Christianity.

Vedanta holds that the individual can escape from karma and reincarnation at any time, as soon as he realizes that he is, in fact, the Atman, really realizes it.  The person escapes from karma and reincarnation because the Atman does not reincarnate. 

In Buddhism, getting free of karma and reincarnation comes only with the attainment of enlightenment, when the individual ego ceases to call itself "I" and dissolves in the featureless purity of Nirvana, as a drop of spray is merged in the sea.

UNITIVE EXPERIENCE

Philosopher Alan Watts said that when he looked up at the stars he didn't relate to any of it, all the billions of galaxies out there.  They weren't him. But, for that matter, neither did he relate to all the “wiggly stuff,” all the biological things that were the inner workings of his body, that were, in personal terms, him.

He said that he did not achieve a unitive sense until it dawned on him that "Alan Watts" shared a boundary with the outside world, that the outline of his body was the border he shared with everything else that existed.  It was this border that was the unifying factor for him, to where he now felt that he belonged.

This was an intellectual determination, of course, which in as much as Watts was a trained philosopher, and scholar, should be expected.  But the unitive experience can be realized free of the analytical mind. For instance the Mandukya Upanishad describes three states of consciousness: waking, sleeping, and dreamless sleep.  But there is a fourth state called turiya, the transcendental state.  It is there that the unitive experience, free of the intellect, can be known.

Turiya is not in one's immediate control, however.  Rather is it a sudden flash of insight where you realize in an instant, out of the blue, by direct intuition, that you are the whole works.  This happens to a person who is not aware that he is aware, so to speak. 

There is spotlight consciousness where an individual's attention is on the task at hand, and there is floodlight consciousness where his focus, whether he knows it immediately or not, is on the big picture, on all of existence.  It is when floodlight consciousness breaks through suddenly into spotlight consciousness that there is the abrupt insight.