11/20/18
MOTS Chapter 18: My Death in the Body and Resurrection in
Consciousness
The “I” is not dark; if it were dark we would be in a state
of blindness,
unable to know even “I, I”;
as we do know, the “I” is not darkness;
thus, for making this known, this should be told to anyone.
Free
translation:
The Self is not darkness. If it were darkness, we would not
have known and identified ourselves as ‘I’, ‘I’. As we do know, we should let
everyone realize that the Self can be known.
Narayana
Guru realized that wisdom instruction was not for everyone, especially as put
forth by evangelists, whose hidden subtext is the egotistical “I know and you
don’t.” One of his most famous mottos is “Ours is not to argue and win, but to
know and let know.” In other words, we can share as equals, but the main thrust
should be to come to understand for our own benefit. Every once in a while,
though, he would give permission to teach as he does here, implying that
certain ideas are important and universal enough you can pass them along to
anyone. Of course, you have to craft the presentation so it makes sense to and
is considerate of the recipient, and before you do that you have to really know
what it means. Quite a challenge, actually.
The
class didn’t directly address this idea, but I think it needs to be mentioned,
as most of the Guru’s teachings aren’t intended for the casual listener. In my
estimation of why this one is okay, the idea that the Self is remote or
nonexistent is very depressing to people, and may well lead them to despair.
That should be enough reason to share with them that we all know the state of
bliss in our core: it isn’t anything far away, and we definitely have access to
it.
Of
course it’s one thing to believe we
are made of happiness, that we already are the Self we are searching for, and
quite another to know it as a living truth. Narayana Guru palpably exemplified
the engulfing bliss we ardently hope to discover. The paradox is that if we go
looking for it, we are in a sense abandoning it. It means we have forgotten
that we already are the light. Narayana Guru’s philosophical arguments may well
have been too abstruse for most of the people he interacted with, but he
radiated a feeling that is integral with Self-awareness that spoke to everyone.
I’d say it’s even amplified by the restraint rishis of his caliber exercise.
Trying too hard to peddle the idea waters it down.
Jan
found the thought that we are already the Self even when we don’t recognize it
very reassuring—she felt comforted and encouraged. Feeling this way requires a
solid foundation, and doesn’t hold up for us if we are simply trying to imagine
we are something we are not. It felt real to her.
Deb
marveled that it wasn’t that hard to comprehend the Self intellectually, but to
experience the basis of consciousness without any sensory data is profound. She
also talked about a recent dream of a dear friend from the distant past, how
real it was to her and yet apparently fictional; certainly it all took place
independently of sensory input.
Chapter
18 is one more valiant attempt by the gurus to communicate the obvious, which
humans are uniquely incapable of grasping. Our eyes naturally look out, not in.
Nitya says:
The strangest paradox in the
world of awareness is that the very consciousness which has the power to
observe, probe, scrutinize, analyze, assert, recognize, memorize and recall,
can remain blind to its own identity. This is the case with most people.
What would the human species look like if we all reinforced
our wonderfulness, instead of denigrating everything outside our petty
(un)comfort zone? It has taken a determined effort—likely since the dawn of
sentience—to perpetuate the illusion of ignorance. To Nitya, this is another
quirk deserving of the adjective strange:
People spend years of penance and
search to realize their Self. It’s strange that they do not recognize the
seeking Self as the very Self that is sought after. It is not concealed or
veiled in darkness at all. It’s just there, where your thoughts are, where your
feelings are, and even in your state of deep sleep it looks on as an unblinking
witness.
This is reminiscent of neuroscientist David Eagleman’s
assertion in his book Incognito, that
“If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the busiest, brightest thing
on the planet.” I’ll tuck a couple more juicy quotes from him in the second
Part, because scientists are starting to catch on too.
Nitya
makes reference to the schism between Vedanta and Existentialism, which did not
have the benefit of neuroimaging when it was formulated. For that matter,
neither did Vedanta, but it read the brain more accurately somehow. In Nitya’s
words:
Jean Paul Sartre says, “existence
precedes essence,” but we say, “existence is established in awareness.”
Deb thought we should investigate this provocative
statement. To me, the rational version of existentialism is that consciousness
is an evolute of matter, while the Vedantic take is that consciousness is
primary. Nitya uses ‘awareness’ here in place of consciousness to distinguish
the ground of awareness from waking consciousness, which everyone agrees is a
tiny sliver of full consciousness.
Andy
was put in mind of something he’s come across in his Patanjali study, that
awareness or knowledge is “the revelation of the luminosity of the Self.” That
particular item of knowledge was a revelation to him, and he spoke of it
reverentially.
There
was some inclination in the class to suppose consciousness and matter arose
together, as per the Bhana Darsana, but generally in Vedanta consciousness is
considered primary, though not in any exclusive way. The sense of a Self that
is independent of a body argues in its favor, though the body is necessary for
communication, so there is never going to be adequate proof for a dedicated skeptic.
The idea made Deb wonder how we can experience the Self in everyday life
without being a receptacle of stimuli that cause us to bounce around like a
rubber ball.
Moni
recalled a time when Nitya had a simple operation for a suspected cyst on his
back, by Dr. Pillai in Indiana, in fact. When his back was opened, the doctor
realized the problem was far more complicated than he’d anticipated, so they
rushed to the hospital for an emergency operation. There was no time to secure
anesthesiologists, so it was done without any painkillers. Nitya later told
Moni that he separated his self from his body before he went into the operating
theater, so he didn’t feel any pain. I then read a story about another
emergency of Nitya’s from Love and
Blessings, that you can find in Part II.
Another
concept I touched on in class is that we are born and live for a time in a
blissful state of openness, and this creates the memory bank where our
certitude of unity resides throughout our life. Neuro-imaging has shown that
the brains of young children and people on psychedelic journeys are very
similar: kids are tripping all the time, basically. Deb remembered asking Nitya
about this in terms of wise yogis (not hippies!), and he agreed there was a
likeness. The only difference was that the wise person knew they knew, while
the child did not. Which may explain why we are so vulnerable as children to
undermining of our self-confidence—we have no idea it could be lost.
It’s
easy to imagine what a torrent of disinformation—more like a Niagara—we’ve
experienced since emerging from the womb: an endless litany of reasons to
abandon our Self and become something other, from pretty much every side. All
“for our own good.” Virtually all instruction is to become disconnected with
our inner reality and play a profitable game according to the rules set down
hither and yon in the past. Perhaps this is even a necessary stage of
development. Regardless, it usually leads us into an emotional desert as a side
benefit. Narayana Guru was a compassionate fellow, who in this and other verses
gives permission for us to hand out maps to thirsty travelers directing them to
a nearby oasis, or at least to suggest to them that oases exist. Accurate maps
help make wandering in the desert purposeful, and possibly even exciting. It’s
much easier to get the idea across if you’ve actually visited an oasis than if
you’re simply passing along a secondhand account.
One
of Nitya’s visits to an oasis is recounted here as a source of his confidence
in handing out his own maps. Nitya wandered throughout India for many years as
a mendicant. Well, he was always a mendicant, but early on he was unknown and
not yet appreciated, so he endured stretches of extreme hunger and privation.
Here he gives an account of what may have been a kundalini event. After a
period of “hectic work and travel,” he lay down under a tree and was suddenly
unable to move. Good Samaritans got him to a hospital. The only clue we have of
the cause was a kind of electrical surge like those the kundalini force causes:
“Occasionally there came a spasm of pain, which moved like a wave from my feet
to my head, leaving me unconscious each time.”
Exhaustion
has been intentionally sought for millennia as a way to precipitate certain
religious experiences. Coupled with the intense fear from loss of functioning
along with whatever yogic practices Nitya would have been undertaking, it isn’t
surprising that he lost control of his body. The kundalini experience is a lot
like getting an electric shock, where all voluntary movements are overridden.
It happened to me once, and my body writhed rhythmically, the waves starting
from the feet and rising upwards. Like Nitya, I couldn’t speak either.
Prabu
has had a kundalini awakening, and it felt like a burning fire touching all his
chakras, up to the anahata, anyway. He talked about a vivid experience that
came from it of actually being made of light. He felt like he was a diamond
giving off light—he wasn’t just an inert stone being lit up by an external
substance like photons, he was the source itself. Since then he has been
pondering how to keep the light alive, because it seemingly subsides once you
come out of the experience. Even knowing it is still present, you want to
regain that vividness.
This
brought to my mind the time when I had shed my ego identity through a
superlative, oft-mentioned LSD trip. One of the primary motivations that came
out of it was I needed to find a guru to teach me how to stay in that place
permanently. The drug ushered you into the home of light and love, but then you
came down, expelled so to speak, and I wanted to stay matriculated forever, so
I knew I needed something else in the mix. This led me “accidentally” to Nitya,
yet oddly I never did come quite down ever again. The vividness subsided into a
deeper residence, yet it always has felt present.
Nitya’s
point in relating his near death experience is that, despite an inert body, his
sense of Self never left him:
Although the body was absolutely
incapacitated and its very many stimulations pouring in through the senses
remained unrecognized, the identity of the Self was experienced as a whole,
complete being, not wanting in anything…. This was my first experience of the
self-luminosity of consciousness absolutely untainted by any sensual or
physical imagery.
Deb was also touched that he wasn’t coldly detached—he found
viewing his inert body “poignant.” I wonder if he felt that at the time, or if
it came up in retrospect. We’ll never know. Nitya reaffirms the core conviction
the experience gave him, and we can note that the “terrible state” is likely
also a later assessment, as there’s no indication he felt upset at the time:
Only the Self knows there is
light and darkness. All other things in this world have to be illuminated by
light in order to be seen. In one respect light itself is dark, because it does
not know itself. But even in that terrible state when I needed someone else to
lift my hand or leg, the existence of which I was oblivious to, I did not need
anybody’s help to know that “I” existed.
We also noticed there was a hint of the classic out-of-body
experience in Nitya’s account:
The surprising thing was that
even in that state my mind was calm and had the clarity to watch and judge with
lucidity and dispassion. The objective nature of the body became more distinct
and poignant than ever, while the subjective consciousness could feel itself to
be a separate entity which could pull itself out and look at the body as an
inert mass lying motionless on the bed.
It seems looking at your unconscious body from a distance is
a quite common experience, and everyone knew someone personally who had had it.
Researchers have documented cases where unconscious patients not only
accurately recalled conversations among the doctors and nurses in attendance,
but noted visual details from a perspective almost always looking down from the
ceiling. Both Prabu and Andy knew someone who as a child was buried alive and
survived. Both remembered details of what transpired their whole lives.
I
recounted my own similar experience, meditating with a friend on top of a stone
tower in Connecticut while tripping on a light dose of what was said to be
mescaline. Suddenly I was about a hundred feet up looking down on the two of
us, sitting in lotus pose. I was terrified I would fall, and panicked. Too bad,
because I missed a great chance to really fly high. I had never anticipated any
such thing, so I was afraid I might never get back in my body. The minute I
panicked, I zipped back down into it and stayed there. Oddly, on my biggest
excursion a couple of years later, the one mentioned above, spending endless
non-time in what I presumed was the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, I
retained body awareness all along, so that must have been a different sort of experience.
Back
when Meditations on the Self was
written, human gurus were a highly respected bunch. Now, not so much. Nitya
didn’t feel he needed to make a case for the value of being helped to overcome
our inability to spot the forest obscured by all those trees. Plus, people were
beginning to really seek him out, so he could say with full confidence:
As in the analogy of the cave of
Plato, somebody has to rouse us from our spiritual drowsiness so that we may
turn away from our own shadow to our real substance. In fact, this is the role
of the Guru. The Guru lifts the consciousness of the disciple to an awareness
of its identity with eternal consciousness that does not depend on any physical
crutch.
Nitya adds a nice touch of bringing his perspective to bear
in a Christian context:
Jesus says that every seeker has
to die and be reborn to enter the kingdom of God. Death in the body is the
death of the ‘I’ and ‘me’, and its resurrection is the identity with the
immutable all-filling Self.
Deb also contributed a quote relating the Guru ideal to the
art world, from author James Baldwin:
The role of the artist is to
illuminate that darkness (the wilderness of the self), blaze roads through that
vast forest; so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose,
which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.
We
closed with one of Deb’s all time favorite poems for the meditation:
Night
Rain at Kuang-k’ou
The river is clear and calm;
a
fast rain falls in the gorge
At midnight the cold, splashing
sound begins,
like thousands of pearls spilling
onto a glass plate,
each drop penetrating the bone.
in my dream I scratch my head and
get up to listen.
I listen and listen, until the
dawn.
All my life I have heard rain,
and
I am an old man;
but now for the first time I
understand
the
sound of spring rain
on
the river at night.
Yang Wan-li (12th century) from Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow
Part II
Nitya
had several medical emergencies during his lifetime. One he recounts in Love and Blessings, in the chapter Heart
Pangs. He was attempting to bring peace between the Gurukula and SNDP Mission
in Singapore, when Nataraja Guru arrived on the scene:
Just at that time Guru came. Our
behavior patterns differ very much. My policy is to wait, giving a lot of
opportunities for people to present themselves as they think they are, and only
after establishing ties with them do I start correcting them. But Guru never
wanted to waste any time. He never minced words, and in less than a minute he
would cause a confrontation. Whenever he saw even the slightest exaggeration,
he would tell the person right to his face that he was mad. Those with latent
abnormalities would come out of their hideouts immediately with all the
frenzies of really mad people. And after such an outburst they would either
calm down or leave in a fury, never to return. This is exactly what happened to
the Singapore crowd. After two weeks Guru returned to India with all the peace
talks in shambles. I felt deeply wounded in my conscience, and decided to leave
as well.
Parenthetically speaking, I met Nitya at a time when he was
trying out Nataraja Guru’s techniques, which were strong medicine indeed. Too
strong for some of us! I was a recipient of the “you are mad!” technique, and I
can attest to its shock value, coming from a highly respected wisdom preceptor.
After
a sojourn to Delhi, where he was the director of Nehru’s Psychic and Spiritual
Research Institute—which Nataraja Guru was highly critical of—he found his efforts
undermined there as well. Nitya was becoming desperate:
Guru had driven a wedge between
the Institute and me, and I was ready to walk away. So I went back to Singapore
with the intention of bringing a rapprochement between the Gurukula and the
Mission. This time I succeeded, but the emotional strain of mediating between
different groups with intractable vested interests caused me to lose my
stamina, and I fainted while giving a talk. I was rushed to the hospital, where
the doctor surmised I had had a heart attack. There was no foundation for the
diagnosis; even so, I was initiated into the mystery of myocardial ischemia by
being given all the worst drugs that are administered to heart patients.
After
sixty-five days in the hospital, the doctors gave up on me. It was a remarkable
night. Several nurses spent the entire night in my room, kneeling by my bed and
praying to the Good Lord Jesus to save my life. I think God must have listened
to their prayers. Next day, I was flown to Kuala Lumpur where a doctor consoled
me, saying that there was a good chance I would live for at least six more
months. I just wanted to hold out ten more days so that I could get back to
Varkala and pay my last respects to Guru.
My
sister was a pathologist and her husband was a cardiologist. They met me at the
Trivandrum airport with a stretcher, a wheel chair and bags full of medicine,
and took me up to the Gurukula, where Nataraja Guru insisted that I be
accommodated in his room. After the doctors had left, Guru came in and looked
disdainfully at all the pills and capsules and tonics. He insisted that I throw
them all away as part of my therapy. In the morning he expected me to get up at
half-past four and take down notes as I had always done. He thought that lying
in bed would only worsen an ailing heart. Later he took me by the hand and made
me walk around the hill a bit.
Under
Guru’s care I slowly started improving. Little by little he gave me small
assignments to do, and in the morning and evening he took me out for short
walks. His theory was that we die when the plus side of our life is robbed of
its vital interests. A good remedy for seemingly fatal diseases is to cultivate
enormous interest in accomplishing something worthwhile.
* *
*
Pater M. sent this timely excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s Book
of Bokonon. The subtext might be “gratitude for atheists”:
The Last Rites of the Bokononist Faith
(excerpt)
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the
sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't
have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think
of all the mud
that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ~
(Cat's
Cradle)
* *
*
From
David Eagleman, Incognito,
(Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011):
There are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter
of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. [Roughly 100
billion] (2)
If you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you’re the
busiest, brightest thing on the planet. (2)
The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is
a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our
conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The
conscious you—the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning—is
the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent
on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Most
of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.
Your
consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking
credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.
(4)
You’re
not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells
you. (33)