7/31/18
MOTS Chapter 4: Return
to the Source and Establish Reunion
Knowledge,
the object of interest,
and
one’s personal knowledge are nothing other than mahas;
merging
into that infinite, Supreme Knowledge,
become That alone.
The free translation:
Knowledge, the
object of knowledge, and one’s cognition of both are in fact only variations of
a beginningless Being. By merging in that knowledge of infinitude one should
become undifferentiated with it.
All
you lucky people don’t have to start your Wednesdays sitting before a piece of
virtual paper overwhelmed by the immense amount of material that needs to be
filtered and arranged from yet another amazing class session. As I imitate the
Wicked Witch of the West and gradually shrink away to nothing, the ambit of our
collective ponderings expands at a rapid rate. The contrast is surely daunting.
I’m
going to lighten the load slightly by inviting a contribution that some of you
might actually enjoy making. I may as well start off with it, though it is
based on Nitya’s last paragraph, which begins:
Regaining identity with the
Absolute is like going back home from a long and tedious pilgrimage through
several lives, and sitting on one’s own seat in calm repose, with the
recognition that there is nothing else to gain in the three worlds other than
the Self.
Bushra was struck by these lines, and we spent some time
talking about the wonderful feeling of being home after a long and engaging
journey. I’m sure everyone is quite familiar with the specialness of the
feeling, each in your own way. It’s not different from finding your True Nature
or your dharma, but more often it is a partial intimation of what those ideals
hold. Which is okay.
Bushra
noted there are times when you feel at home, and then you lose it. Those are
more superficial versions, but they are all touching something important. I
think it would be lovely for several of you to send in your experiences of
returning to a sense of belonging, of being home again, deep or shallow. How
did you get there, and what does it mean to you?
We
brought up several versions we experience regularly. Groups often have a sense
of familiarity that humans find enabling, maybe stemming from our
not-too-long-extinct tribal consciousness. Our class is one of those. Shared
events like concerts, movies, plays, where every mind in the room is attuned to
the same focal point surely generate that feeling. Nita, a retired high school
English teacher, talked about how each of her classes had a character of its
own, and if one member was absent for a time she could sense a subtle shift in
the “tone” of the class. So we are home in many ways and at various times and
places. A corollary to think or write about would be to note when you are not feeling at home. What’s missing?
Or
what’s present that takes you away from that reassuring sense of belonging to a
greater reality?
The
Bible refers to this subject in the parable of the prodigal son, a really
dissolute character who is welcomed home and celebrated by his father after
“spending his inheritance.” (Could this mean renouncing his vasanas and samskaras?)
From a social perspective it seems so unfair! He doesn’t deserve his father’s
welcome home! The good son who behaves and sticks around can’t believe it. The
implication at the very least is that being lost increases the joy of being
found, which must be because we discover so much by wandering off the beaten
track. We discover why being found is valuable. If it home merely taken for
granted, it doesn’t amount to anything. The message really flies in the face of
orthodoxy, which does not encourage kicking up your heels. Almost the whole
history of Christianity is pitted against it.
In
some ways, the return to the Self is more fantastic if you didn’t expect it and
weren’t trying for it. The more miserable you are, the better the rebound. Yet
intentionally making things miserable doesn’t work—it has to be natural
miserableness. The story I related last week about trip guide Zeff and the
photographs marks the moment of departure: we leave home when we surrender our
sovereignty to the social setup, most dramatically when we start school, though
some parents work hard to inculcate socialization as early as possible. I don’t
think we need to exacerbate the process, but you do have to lose yourself
before you can find yourself. You have to “become somebody before you become
nobody,” as Ram Dass has put it. Again, this is the opposite of social reality,
where it’s our “somebody-ness” that is the goal. In spirituality, we find
ourself by losing ourself: by relinquishing our stuff and becoming nobody we
discover who we really are under all the garbage and verbiage.
I
related how in the audio book Liberating Ourselves, I suggested the malaises
that would arise if the various chakras were not fully awakened. The first
chakra, muladhara, is where we feel
at home, it is the solid basis of our life. If it is closed down we will always
have a sense of not belonging, of not being where we are supposed to be.
Internal homelessness. Bushra was fond of a well-grounded youngster in one of
her film classes for homeless teens, who asserted “I’m roofless but I’m not
homeless.” His first chakra was alive and well.
Okay,
let’s get back to the beginning of the evening. You can write about home later.
Deb felt the chapter is reminding us to not be overly enamored of phenomena,
meaning to see how they are not nearly as solid and outside of us as they
appear to be. We are so identified with situations and other people that we
lose our own identity and think of ourselves more as reflections of our
surroundings than as embodying significant reality.
Nitya
does a fabulous job here in comparing the waking and dreaming states, showing
that they are much more similar than we realize. The wakeful state, like the
dream, is self-generated, though we presume there is some sort of outside
reality that impacts it. We have to give it more credence because our
well-being depends on a successful interaction with the wakeful world. This
always reminds me of something Nitya said in That Alone, verse 54:
We tend to imagine the
unconscious in terms of consciousness, timelessness in terms of time,
spacelessness in terms of space. This is an injustice, squeezing the
unconscious into the mold of the conscious in order to try to understand it. It
is also partisan: you are in favor of consciousness.
Waking consciousness is our “somebody,” and the rest is
relegated to the status of “nobody,” even by those of us who believe in the
value of the unconscious and the unknown. It takes directed effort to let go of
who we think we are.
Knowing
that the wakeful is manipulated by the mind, crafted, and presented as a
seamless story that we fully accept as real nudges us toward being co-creators
of our world. We are already participating unconsciously, so let’s work with it
consciously. Even if it’s a feeble force compared to our inner talents, we can
have some positive effects. Life would be a meaningless survival exercise if it
wasn’t possible to do anything. But it is, it is!
Deb
noted that in dreams, many things happen that are like a teaching. She gets
some of her best poems from dreams, or at least their inspiration. Bill told us
about working with Stanley Krippner in the Dream Lab on an article on dreams
and creativity. There are a number of scientific discoveries that were famously
revealed in dreams, and they well knew dreams are fertile soil for that kind of
imagining. It was the supposition of the article that most forms of creativity
make something new out of disparate but familiar elements. The creation of
something truly new is much more rare.
This
reminded Andy of a neurologist’s summation he once read, of the near identity
of the waking and dreaming states: waking life is constrained imagination. It’s perfect, though as Deb chimed
in, the
constraints are necessary in a transactional framework. I suggested that while
they are necessary, as adults we have the freedom to set them aside if we have
the fortitude. We all brought in tons of constraints as young children (making
us somebody), but now that we are stabilized in ourselves and presumably
capable of making adult choices, we can allow ourselves the creative freedom of
less constraint (temporarily making us nobody, however briefly). At least
everyone agrees that creativity is bubbling away beneath our willful
constraints. We could…. Ah, never mind.
So
even while dreaming we can have an effect on what takes place. Usually it means
working hard on a problem and/or going to sleep with affirmed intentions, and
this prompts the inner genius to respond within certain parameters. Based on
this week’s lesson, we could work with the wakeful state in a similar fashion.
That’s what we’re doing in these ridiculous Gurukula classes, too, by the way:
opening ourselves to vaguely intimated possibilities. Hopefully they have had
some transformative influence in your life; otherwise they don’t amount to much
as pure entertainment….
Bushra
feels that dream insights are a coalescence of something that has been building
inside of us. Dreams reveal what you have been thinking about, even if in
reality you don’t want to admit it. There are times when she wakes up scared by
what she has dreamt, but she knows if you stay with the dream you realize you
can’t deny it. It’s already in you. This shakes the foundations of your whole
being or reality. They are being questioned. You meet them in your dreams
because you cannot quite face them in waking life.
Bill
has been noticing more keenly that we really do craft our world—we make up what
we see. It’s an inviting revelation! All the realignment of our psyches
according to the high values of Vedanta that we have been working on is
actually beginning to bring about change. It’s kind of exciting.
We
discussed how we synchronize with others around us without even trying, showing
there’s some interior connection beyond our awareness. Bushra noted how women
living together wind up with their monthly cycles at the same time; she didn’t
report (perhaps no one ever will) on what that does to the communal mood. I
shared a lovely account from Peter Matthiessen of a meeting of conflicted
hearts, that I’ll tuck in Part II. Also there you can find Baiju’s deep
meditation and Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebration of the spirit of our study.
If anyone sends homey thoughts, we’ll have a Part III later.
Susan
added how a room full of dancers feels like a single entity, when you’re a part
of it. She had also recently shared some insights on synchronicity from Ursula
LeGuin that I can’t find, pendulums synchronizing and so on, but while looking
for them I came across a gem that fits right in with our class:
The daily routine of most adults
is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have
to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get
us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world
opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are
cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around
young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world
out.
Moni
was overcome by the many ways we are touched by encounters to reveal our inner
self. She talked about how Guru Nitya always came to her in her dreams to teach
her, but she knows it is only her consciousness. As she put it, “in my dream
there is an independent state of mind, allowing the true knowledge to come out.
Only in my sleep I drift into that place where I need that help or answer. You
go to your source. That is the self. That is the Absolute within you.”
Dreams
are crafted by our brains—we know this—but they are presented in a similar
format to the wakeful presentation, which should strike us as odd. Of course we
don’t seem to register oddness in the dream very often—we can put up with just
about anything short of tyrannosaurus bites. Nitya muses about a dream he had
involving Nataraja Guru, and how strange it is that his consciousness can split
into a self-contained subject and object:
When I experienced seeing Guru in
my dream, I also saw myself as distinctly different from him. After putting questions
to him in the dream, I had to wait for answers, as if he was outside my
consciousness. When an answer came, it had the quality of novelty and
uniqueness which are characteristic of another person’s ideas, yet I know that
both the question and answer came from my own consciousness.
What we lose when we forget the projected nature of reality
is close contact with our essential beingness. Nitya was a vivid dreamer,
meaning he had a stronger awareness of himself while asleep than most of us do,
most of the time. I don’t think he was really surprised, but he shares a
surprising fact:
What surprises me is the
unaltering identity of the I-consciousness in the dream and the wakeful, and my
experience of this identity as an unbroken and ever-present core of my own
consciousness.
That mysterious and scientifically unsubstantiated
self-identity holds up through all our states of awareness. Meaning awareness
has a deeper foundation than anything we play around with in the wakeful and
dream states. Nitya notes the various changing roles that are played out as his
threefold experience of knower, doer and enjoyer (or sufferer), and how these
are governed by an inner agency in the same way our autonomic systems are
regulated.
I’m
sure we’re all familiar with the triputi,
or the tri-basic division of consciousness, but for review, knowledge, action
and enjoyment have a unitive basis, but in our ordinary state of
non-contemplative awareness we divvy each of them up into three parts. Take
enjoyment: we have our I-sense as the prospective enjoyer, an event or object
to be enjoyed, and the resultant sense of joy we crave to experience. It’s
termed as the enjoyer, the enjoyed, and enjoyment. Or knower, known and
knowledge; actor, acted upon and action. Nitya relates the crucial point: “There
is no hope of realizing the true and pure form of the Self unless one can
transcend this.”
I
meant to explain this to new visitor Nita, who had admitted to being “vague”
about triputi in an email. But she already had gotten the gist from the
reading, and referred to it as a delicate dance: for instance, when you’re
listening to a musical performance and you perceive it as being a magnificent
performance, the very act of recognizing this comes out of a consciousness that
somehow contradicts the existence of the experience. She clarified what she
meant: “I am creating the beauty of this performance because I’m hearing it. It
feels good to be hearing beauty. At same time, I my isolating and identifying
it stands between myself and the experience.” Turns out Nita was already
prepared to teach me something! And that’s what a teacher does, quite
naturally. Too bad she will be teaching in California (at Aaron Eden’s old
school) for the next year, but she plans to stay tuned via the notes.
In
our meditations, contemplations and reflections we should aim at unity, which
is the source from which manifold reality derives its existence, such as it is.
Nitya puts it this way:
If we can somehow manage to
return to the source, where knowledge, abstracted and held out as a notion in
our mind, is identified as non-differentiated from the knower and the known,
and by the same token know that the knower and the known are the same, we
achieve what is called unitive understanding (advaita darsana).
Normally we attend a concert as an enjoyer, and the
entertainment is what we enjoy. We are led to think that our enjoyment is being
supplied by the entertainer, and is dependent on it. Thus there is a feeling of
loss when stimulations are not available. Is that the story of modern
civilization, or what?
It
is worthwhile to reframe it as the wonder we’re experiencing is the Absolute
context showing us how amazing we already are. If the joy was not present
within us, it could not be created by our experience. It must be there already.
On our daily walks Nitya would often stop to admire a flower or a sunset, take
a deep breath and say, “How beautiful I am!” It took me a while to figure out
what he meant, but he was implying that everything should be reminding us of
our divinity. A rose is nothing if not perceived, and more than that, loved.
Appreciated. If you really look, you are bound to see wonders. What are you
waiting for?
Vedanta
affirms that our very nature is joy, ananda. Events touch on our nature to remind
us of what it is, and once we open back up to it, everything resonates with our
joy, even, oddly enough, the terrible tragedies we know happen all the time.
They don’t make us joyous—we are joyous, encountering the whole range of
happenings. It isn’t something that can be destroyed by tragedy, and if it is,
we were not truly unified. It’s probably easier to distinguish our dualistic
and unitive states through tragedy than through benign events, though again,
it’s not something we need to intentionally cultivate. There’s plenty of
tragedy already. Sharing our joy in meaningful ways might diminish it for a
moment, but we’d be deluded to imagine we could erase one of the pillars of
existence, no matter what we did.
Nitya
concludes that the person endowed with the realization of unity can easily understand
the four great Upanishadic dictums, and this chapter is a perfect place to
return to refresh your memory of what they are. They amount to an affirmation
that we and everything are the Absolute through and through. Gurus of the past
found that humans tend to forget this truth, so sishyas (disciples) are expected to remind themselves of it until
it actually sinks in. Give yourself plenty of time.
Part II
Baiju’s
contribution:
In meditation #4 of the MOTS, Guru Nitya has lucidly
demonstrated with the example of his dream that consciousness is just one-the
cardinal principle of the Unitive Philosophy. To convince others of the
philosophic postulates and conclusions, the modern philosophers from the east
and the west have been struggling where Guru Nitya’s smooth elucidation of the
Advaita principle is like a gorgeous piece of art or a honey-sweet melody, at
once to our minds both soothing and enlightening.
Guru Nitya: “…easy for me to abstract the knowledge content
of my mind as a pure notion which is different from what I call ‘I’, and what I
recognize as the object of my knowledge.” In the dream, when analysed, it is
found that from the same knowledge came the questions of ‘I’ and the answers of
the ‘object of my knowledge’. If in dream the ‘great knowledge’ could make such
magical wonders, why can’t this phenomenal world be a similar creation, by the
same great knowledge, in the waking state? The Guru asserts that to be the
truth.
Narayana Guru has, in verse 4, proclaimed that triputi, the
tri-basic division of consciousness into the knower, the known, and the
knowledge is in reality nothing but the great unitive knowledge which is the
one and the same substratum of unbroken consciousness. And we should merge back
into the same great unitive knowledge.
In Vedantic terms, the veil of ignorance (Maya) that
causes the apparent perception of triputi everywhere is due to the
“great fall” from the original state. Instinctively yet unconsciously man
keeps striving hard to return to the place from where he has fallen. The
“master impulse” makes him do everything that is pleasure-seeking with the
misapprehension that the pleasure-giving objects will take him to his original
state of Ananda, the absolute bliss which is the nature of the Self. The
attempt thus to go back “home”, it’s clear, is not a conscious one and so he
seeks pleasure in all objects outside, which are only the magical show of the
ignorance-creating Maya dividing the pure consciousness into triputi.
Narayana Guru says one has to make conscious effort to
always bear in mind that the division as the knower, the known and the
knowledge is only a superimposed fallacious appearance over the pure
consciousness or otherwise referred to be the great unitive knowledge;
therefore continue to work towards merging back into the Self.
The Guru highlights this important point in his other works
as well. For example, we see his reference to triputi in the first verse
of his Malayalam composition, Janani-Navaratna-Manjari (Nine stanzas to
the Absolute as Mother):
From that unitive mind-stuff, all encompassing,
A thousand tri-basic rays (of knowledge-knower-known) come
and,
Lo and anon, self-consciousness gone,
There awakened love of food and such;
Fallen thus into the ocean of need and lost altogether,
Say when, O Mother, shall my inner being regain that path of
hope
To be merged within the domain of pure word-import,
Bereft of all tri-basic prejudice
And, within the core of the radiance outspread of reason pure,
Reabsorbed in communion cool, ever
remain.
(Nataraja Guru’s translation)
No returning home unless we get rid of the tri-basic
prejudice (triputi) which obscures the way home.
Verse 4 of Atmopadesa Satakam ends: Ammahattam
arivilamarnnatu matramayitenam. Literally it means: push yourself and enter
into that Great Knowledge– the Self–, merge with it, and become that alone! Our
awareness that identifies ourselves to be individuated selves is the problem.
Now when the Guru clearly explains to us we realize that the dawn of the
awareness of each one of us as a separate individuated self, and the formation
of its concomitant I-my-mine nature are all because of the tri-basic division.
Man must be able to distinguish between his central goal and the peripheral
activities of his worldly life, and the central goal should never be out of
focus while performing the worldly functions. The ability to do so is defined
as viveka (discrimination). The Guru emphasizes (as implied) that
consciously ignoring the apparent experience of triputi and continuing
the effort to be the Self is the way forward to attain the central goal.
Here is an analogy from the Vedantic literature: it is about
the life of a professional stage actor; when he is on the stage acting a
particular role he is aware that he is participating in a drama and he is only
playing his part in it, and inside the stage costume he is just the actor who
plays the role he has assumed. In those moments on the stage, the actor
tries his best to live the part he plays and the spectators appreciate if he
performs well. It is but a performance. He has always been his original
self for sure whether or not he dons his stage costumes. In his peripheral role
as an actor, he is able to switch to the stage role, internally remaining
unchanged himself. Tomorrow the role he has to play may also change – only a
minor change in the periphery, having his regular life unaffected.
Worldly life is a drama to be played well according to the
dramatic rules, just wearing the worldly costume that is appropriate for each
individuated self. The professional actor on the stage is not attached to his
stage role. Every one of us should play his role, as an actor in this world,
with all the sincerity the role deserves, but with little attachment to the
role as such; because we now know that our individual role-play in the life in
this world is the display of the triputi the Guru has just described.
Our central goal is to win over the apparent tri-basic divisions and merge back
into the Self.
Aum tat sat.
* *
*
Author
Peter Matthiessen’s contribution to the book Zig Zag Zen, about the
intersection of psychedelics and Buddhism, has a lovely account of how we can
share our “awake” dreams sometimes. In writing about his transition from drugs
to unassisted spirituality, he comments on the 1960s: “What we needed was a
teacher and a discipline. In those days, instant gurus were turning up as thick
as bean sprouts, but true teachers were very hard to find.” Those of us
fortunate to land with Nitya are made even more grateful by this fact. Many
people only know the failed guru stories, which are legion. There were no
ratings in advance of taking a plunge, so disasters were easy to come by. One
of the moments of “coming home” that stands out in my life is the first class
with Nitya in 1970, realizing that here was an authentic knower of the Self,
one who knew what he was talking about. We had won the guru lottery! There is
no way to explain it; only gratitude for it.
Matthiessen
did lots of trips with his companion Deborah Love, referred to as D. The best
one is worth recounting. LSD made telepathy happen on occasion:
I remember an April afternoon in 1962, when we had taken
LSD together.
She came out onto the terrace of a country house and drifted toward me, down
across the lawn. D had black hair and beautiful wide eyes; in the spring breeze
and light of flowers, she looked bewitched. We had been quarreling in recent
days, and recriminations rose, tumbling all over one another in the rush to be
spoken, yet as we drew near, the arguments aired so often in the past rose one
by one and passed away in silence. There was no need to speak, the other knew
to the last word what would be said. Struck dumb by this telepathy, our mouths
snapped shut at the same instant, then burst into smiles at the precise timing
of this comic mime of our old fights; delighted, we embraced and laughed and
laughed. And still not one word had been spoken; only later did we discover
that all thoughts, laughter, and emotions had been not similar but just the
same, one mind, one Mind, even to this: that as we held each other, both
bodies turned into sapling trees that flowed into each other, grew together in
one strong trunk that pushed a taproot deeper and deeper into the ground. (87)
(Compiled by Allan Hunt Badiner and Alex Grey, San
Fransisco: Chronicle Books, 2002)
* *
*
Susan
wrote this morning, in relation to Nitya’s “Aren’t I beautiful!”:
I was trying to find the quote that Bushra mentioned from
Whitman [if I don’t send the sunset out of me, I will die] but even this
beginning is so relevant to class.
Wow.
1
I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs
to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of
summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the
shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and
like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I
shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste
of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become
undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzzed whispers, love-root, silk-
thread, crotch, vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my
heart, the passing of blood and air through
my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of
the shore and dark-colored sea-rocks, and of
hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice,
words loosed to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching
around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the
supple boughs wag,
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or
along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song
of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
Have you reckoned a thousand acres much?
have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of
poems?
Stop this day and night with me, and you shall
possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun —
there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third
hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor
take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from
yourself.
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the
talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is
now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there
is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Urge, and urge, and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance —
always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction,
always a breed of life.
Part III
We
got a few responses, mainly “in-house,” for tales of coming home, but I’ll take
whatever the traffic will bear. I thought maybe someone would mention the
so-called nesting instinct, when just before a baby is born the parents rush
around cleaning, neatening and preparing the home, constructing a welcoming
environment. There is plainly an inner controller at work, and the drive is
undeniable, exciting, and very likely sanitary. It may not strike us as coming
home, because right then we sense we’re diving into the unknown rather than
regaining the familiar. Only later does it feel like home. But it is, it is!
From Deborah:
Home can be so many different places or experiences and
those may change over our lives. But that immediate sense that “this is home”,
that is always recognizable. My first memory of that is from the age of four or
so, a time of only a few recollections. We lived in Dearborn, Michigan, a part
of Detroit, in a townhouse complex. In the front area were a trees and a grassy
lawn. Some part of this had a tree, either dead or partially so, with a section
of the trunk hollowed out, just the kind of place an animal would want to hide
or use for a home. There was a metal fencing around it, and I remember my
parents telling me to not go in there, that it could be dangerous. But the
memory of “home”, which wasn’t exactly what I felt, more like simply being
where I wanted to be, drew me there and I remember moving or crossing the wire
and going into the hole alone, sitting there quietly in the dark. It was not
premeditated, it wasn’t a thought, not even a rebellious act. Being in there
was simply what I wanted and needed and I went. I still have that sensation of
being in the tree, alone and silent. In a home.
Another important recognition of home began when I was 10
and my family went to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Montana—the
crystalline, clear lakes, the snow fields, the quicksilver creeks in the
valleys, the scattering of Indian paintbrush flowers, the fresh, high air. From
a lifetime in the Midwest this was all a revelation. And yet it felt in like a
return to something precious in me, a welcoming home. Which it has continued to
be.
In both these experiences of home, the home was both in me
and something I saw or felt outside of myself. It was a uniting of the two and
a realization of that.
* *
*
Jan:
I identified with your prompt about when you are not feeling
at home in yourself, and what is missing?
I had a self-realization earlier this week that I was in
that place. I saw myself stuck in obsessive thoughts about the other and
habitual negative modes of thinking. Some deeper awareness came forth and
helped me strive to shake it all loose….then I went to sleep and awoke truly
feeling liberated. I felt more connected to my deeper self and my sense
of belonging in my life. Symbolically,
I returned to my early childhood school days. I had a clear vision of
myself and some of my positive qualities going back in time. I felt the
excitement and vast potential that would come in the cool morning air of
approaching fall and school beginning (I loved school as a girl…) It felt
like a gift, a reminder that there was a world of possibility ahead of me, and
I was eager to meet it. I know I was still grounded in my individual self
but in a deeper way.
Other times, I feel the rejuvenation that comes from meditation
and contemplations, where returning to a vast self-less place happens and less
thinking or identification happens. I think the verse is talking about
that more, but often we cannot just go there and take steps toward it, which is
probably what the above example shows.
* *
*
Scott:
From a vey early age I have felt that I didn’t belong to the
human race. I just didn’t get it! Everybody else seemed to know what was going
on, what to do and how to do it, which to my mind meant they knew something I didn’t.
But I had no idea of why anything was necessary, or how to go about it. My
questions about this were mostly answered with platitudes that boiled down to
the circular adult argument “It’s so because I said so,” or the tautological
one: “That’s what we do.”
I
grudgingly went along with all that was expected of me—school, sports, chores,
friendships, schedules—but always in the back of my mind was a nagging doubt.
Being a kid, I of course assumed it was just my own lack, and I was a flawed
person. But it made me eager to figure out what was going on, and why things
were the way they were.
I’m
a natural outsider, obviously, and got along decently with the ‘out crowd’ in
high school, yet I remained an outsider even to that. Occasional warm
friendships were heartening, but were mostly about goofing around, making fun
of everyone without being aware of any alternative. Being a cynical wanderer
was interesting in that very rich period of history, but it didn’t satisfy me
all the way to the core.
To
make this short, two major restorative moments occurred. The first was an early
LSD trip, maybe my second or third. (The first trip was at a Cream concert in
New Haven, so there was amazing music but no room for reflection.) When I
finally tripped alone my first flash was, “Oh my God, I’m home! I was right—all
that stuff doesn’t make sense! This
is where I belong, where I exist.” And so on. It was a tremendous relief. It
launched a long period of sarcasm about what others take for granted, but that
gradually faded away as I gained comfort with my new state of mind.
That
supportive condition remained as a background until the rare trip I have
alluded to before, which met all the criteria (put together later) of an
optimal mystical experience, the tip of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid.
True Self-actualization. I visualized it as I had been rushing away from
myself, trying to escape my inadequacies, but my beeline to elsewhere was
slightly curved, so my trajectory actually described a huge circle. By going
forward I had mysteriously arrived back at my self, and the realization blew my
mind. I had come home to my true being.
In
addition to the core realization of universal oneness and love, I knew I now
needed a guru to guide me back to that place without medicinal assistance.
Though I may never have come all the way back down to social reality, there was
definitely an improving ability to interact with the world and maintain my
equipoise, a.k.a the integration of horizontal elements with the newly
discovered vertical impulse.
Some
six months later, in September of 1970, Deb and I attended the first class of
then-Swami Nitya on the Bhagavad Gita, in Portland. The Matthiessen quote above
is true: “In those days, instant gurus
were turning up as thick as bean sprouts, but true teachers were very hard to
find.” By some beneficence of fate we had hit the guru jackpot. It felt like a
true arrival at a place that mattered immensely. I was no longer alone,
floating in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, I was in the company of
fellow Earthlings not so different from me. Deb and I agreed as we left the
room after the initial class that here was the first person we’d ever
encountered who actually knew what he was talking about. It was another coming
home moment, one that felt like it had roots in many lifetimes, and that has
persisted through all the intervening zooms and crashes. Even now it recalls to
mind the lovely quote from Nitya in Love and Blessings, about a talk he gave to
his acolytes in an Australian National Park:
I concluded with a conviction
that had been growing within me as my teaching role had expanded. “This
learning situation is eternal. We gathered in Egypt and we gathered in Sumeria.
We gathered in Babylon and on the shores of Galilee. And we gather here today
in this prehistoric wilderness, children of a New Age, to give praise and
thanks to the Absolute.
* *
*
Dipika is studying at her own pace, and sent this a few
weeks after the rest:
somehow talks on spirituality were always like a ‘coming home’
for me too.
As kids in a Convent school, we non Catholic children had a ‘Moral
Science’ class.
I remember being wide awake and present and all ears.....
later in life as my meditation has got stronger...whenever I
sit....and get deeper into the vast empty space that opens up....it settles my
soul.
So we all seem to have this thread in common....yes !!