3/19/13
Verse 13
Having
offered the flower of your mind to that Lord
smeared
with sacred ashes, the three gunas,
having
cooled down the senses, unwound everything, and become calm,
when
even the glory of aloneness has gone, become established in mahas.
Free
translation:
To become established in the Supreme Being, offer the
flowers of your mind to the Great Lord, whose body is smeared with the ashes of
the triple modalities of nature. Incline before Him in devotion. Turn your
senses away from all objects of desire. Feel freed of all bondage. Become cool,
and do not be excited even by the wonder of the Absolute.
Nataraja
Guru’s
Unto the Master who dons the ashes of the three modes,
Offering the flower of the inner self, inclining before him,
With all sense-interests effaced, divest of all and cool,
Even from the grandeur of loneliness bereft, into glory
sink!
We
have often found that our smallest attended classes are the deepest. Possibly
instead of waiting for others to say something, people are more forthcoming,
but there is usually a more intense focus too. That was certainly the case last
night, where we honed in on one of the most practical and transformative of all
the hundred verses. The intimacy of the smaller setting is especially excellent
for contemplation.
Our
task was to convert the religious imagery Narayana Guru employed into modern
psychological imagery. Nataraja Guru says that because the Guru’s image is so
familiar in South India, he avoided reams of boring explanation by using it.
That’s fine, but the key is, what exactly does it mean to make a flower bouquet
of our mental modalities and offer them to the Lord? The class first wrestled
with this in general terms, and by the end we were able to extract specific
examples.
Our
psychic life is like a flower garden, filled with a riot of plants in all
stages of growth and maturity. Weeds and prized specimens vie for their moment
in the sun. Ordinarily we shield our garden from view and for the most part let
it grow as it will, not realizing how important our influence is. Neglected,
the weeds will choke out the flowers that give us the most joy. Aggressive
plants will overwhelm the gentle ones we cherish the most. There is work to be
done here!
Making
a bouquet to offer means first of all that we have to care for our psychic
flowers and not just take them for granted. We need to stop and admire them
occasionally. When we do, we realize that our experience of the present is
colored by our history. We are not really seeing anything as it is, but through
a glass, darkly*, as a largely fictional creation of a brain struggling to make
sense of its surroundings. Our primary fault is to project our inner state onto
the outer world, and then become convinced that we are at the mercy of that
world. Because of the way our mind is structured, it looks very much like the
outside world is the basic fact and we are a provisional adjunct. But by now we
know for certain that it’s exactly the other way round.
Thomas
Merton, in Mystics and Zen Masters,
writes about an important moment in history when Christians lost touch with
their inner God and moved it outside, separate. They then believed that the
Muslims could steal it and they had to go conquer them and get it back. Almost
a thousand years of vicious conflict has ensued from that once instance of
projection alone. Merton writes:
Thus we see that in the course of time the peaceful and
defenseless pilgrimage, the humble and meek “return to the source” of all life
and grace, became the organized martial expedition to liberate the land
promised to Abraham and his sons. It is surely significant that in the Middle
Ages this conception of the Christian life became deeply embedded in European
man: the “center,” “the source,” the “holy place,” “the promised land,” the
“place of resurrection,” becomes something to be attained, conquered, and
preserved by politics and by force of arms. The whole Christian life and all
Christian virtue then takes on a certain martial and embattled character. The
true life of Christian virtue now becomes a struggle to death with pagan
adversaries who are wickedly standing in the way of one’s divinely appointed
goal and perversely preventing fulfillment of a “manifest destiny.”
Above all, the Crusades introduces a note of fatal ambiguity
into the concept of pilgrimage and penance. What was intended as a remedy for
sins and violence, particularly murder, now became a consecration of violence.
Nitya puts his finger on how this inversion trips us up. I
remember this as a particularly intense moment in the original class, realizing
how I was wedded to obtaining my sense of meaning from outside, and how that
had made me a kind of beggar:
The enjoying self in you has many
concepts of attraction, but when you turn to your inner reality all these seem
false. At that point you begin a return. It is a pilgrimage from unreality to
reality, from your sense orientation to the realization of your most divine
center. And when does this take place? Every day, all the time, whenever our
senses are drawn outward to get glued onto objects, and the great surge of
excitement comes. This is the time to hitch it to the central core of our own
divine being, rather than identifying the excitement with an objective,
external situation, as we invariably do. Each time a pretty thing is attracting
you, you become a beggar: haggard, poverty-stricken, wanting, desiring,
stretching your hand, crying for it. You become miserable. Once you get it, you
realize you have wasted a lot of time in pursuing this trifling thing. Now that
it’s yours, you just put it aside.
And I want to repeat the most essential idea in the
commentary, the crux of the whole matter, reprinted at length last week:
So, at the very height of the
excitement and joy of gaining something, you are asked instead to relate it to
the very core, to spiritualize that experience. You are not asked to kill the
joy, but only to look for its essence. You have to realize that it is not
produced by objects, but is an essential part of your own divine nature.
Because
the world is our appendage, and not the other way round, we are continually
supplied with a program of unfoldment. We fear that a niggardly life won’t give
us what we need, but as the Rolling Stones sang, we can’t always get what we
want, but we do get what we need. If people really believed that, they would be
much less anxious about life’s uncertainties. But as long as we remain
convinced the outside world is, well, outside, we will never be free from
worry.
When
we “make an offering” we spiritualize our experience. We move the center from
outside to inside. By doing so it is converted from ordinary, random,
meaningless activity to a cherished place in a meaningful evolution. The world
is reflecting our inner transformation, giving it every opportunity to be seen
and appreciated by us. Scientists are right: the world isn't intrinsically
meaningful. It's just a bunch of stuff. But what they leave out is that meaning
is imbued in the world by consciousness. And that's a good thing!
The
more we are fully present in the present, unaffected by previous
misunderstandings, the more “spiritual” or “real” our experience is. It’s not
that we discard the past, but we convert it from misunderstanding to
understanding. It has an important role to play, but we got it all wrong back
then, and we need to rectify that. A healthy relation with our past is the
solid ground we stand on, but our traumatic history has made the ground
unstable.
Spiritualizing
our experience means it is no longer demonic but divine, as Nitya puts it. The
world is no longer terrifying and threatening, it is our field of dreams, a
garden in which to actualize our potential. It’s hard to imagine any single
idea could have a greater impact on our lives than this. Let’s look at some
specific examples.
Several
people admitted that they were micromanagers of aspects of their lives. They
gave rather mundane examples of things that bothered them because they weren’t
done the way they wanted. It’s a common experience to like things done a
certain way, and get upset when someone else does it differently, or doesn’t do
it at all. So, in ordinary life we go along being irritated by a string of
disappointments in the outside world, both great and small.
Spiritualizing
this means putting a stop to the irritation by looking into our psyche to its
source. Why do we have such a strong reaction to trivial irritations? It is not
what we see in front of us, but we have heavy baggage from traumatic events in
our past. Something awful happened to us, and our response—perfectly
reasonably—was to obsess about what we might have done differently to prevent
the tragedy. The more we suffer, the more we scheme to avoid future suffering.
Unfortunately the footprint of those tragedies creeps into our petty pace
without our even realizing it. This is a common heritage of all humans, though
the traumas range from light to unbelievably heavy. We all have traumatic kinks
in our psyches that throw a long shadow on the world we encounter.
The
spiritual insight then, is that I am overreacting to the present based on my
fear of punishment or pain learned in the forgotten past. My offering to the
Lord is my resolve to let go of my guardedness, my self-fortification, because
it is no longer relevant. I very badly want to be present here and now, and my
fears are poisoning the possibility. I might resolve to stop micromanaging, for
instance, but I won’t be able to until I calm the fears that are driving me.
Another
person—I’m going to leave out names because they are a distraction—routinely
runs down his ego. Well don’t we all? But in our class we are trying to heal
our egos and help them become just the right size. They are valuable and
important, but they are a problem when they are deformed. Anyway, we stopped
our friend and wondered why he always runs himself down. We all think highly of
him. But he was raised in a fundamentalist Christianity that constantly
undermined him. Is it possible that his self-criticism was learned in
childhood, in a context where his wants were routinely suppressed? You can bet
on it. So we see where it comes from, and then we discard it. The spiritual
tack is to catch ourself running ourself down, make it into a bouquet and offer
it to the Lord smeared with ashes: the one who will crush it to powder and smear
it all over his body, wiping out its influence. The person in question is
merely an example of something we all do, of course. We don’t retell these
stories to cure him, but to cure ourselves.
Another
friend carries an even heavier level of self-loathing that harshly colors his
attitude. We could argue about it all day and get nowhere, or just leave it
alone and get nowhere. But we wondered if his upbringing in the Catholic
Church, where he, a sensitive and intelligent child, was taught he was a sinner,
and doomed to burn in hell for all eternity for being himself, had something to
do with it? Very likely. So his offering could be that instead of running
himself down he would think, “Oh, here is that Catholic legacy coming up again.
I’m not going to carry out those toxic dictates any more. I give them all up!”
This decision begins the healing process in earnest, where beating himself up
will never produce the peace he longs for. That's’ why the rishis tell us our
very nature is divine. We don’t have to make something new out of ourselves,
only scrape away the venom that has blinded and crippled us.
The
human race is basted in these perverse belief systems that convert sweet,
innocent children into angry, miserable adults. When are we going to get over
it?
We
also brought in science as a perverting influence. The very rationality that
should be our salvation secretly joins forces with fundamentalists in
sabotaging our souls. Einstein pointed out that you can look at the universe in
two ways: either everything is a miracle, or nothing is. Possibly in response
to the excesses of religion, modern science has a bias toward making everything
seem trivial, ordinary, boring and meaningless. As if the universe was a bad
accident, an imposition on our freedom to not exist! The closer you look at
anything, the more amazing it becomes, filled with layer upon layer of
incredible complexity, all working together in perfect harmony and brimming
with endless potentials. If that isn’t miraculous, what is? So science could easily
be our salvation, but it is all too often perverted by a presumption of
meaninglessness, coupled with the demeaning of our intrinsic value. Then we
carry that over into our daily life and wonder why there is no joy in it. Geez.
The
Hundred Verses of Self-Instruction are a collective cure for this universal
malaise. Unfortunately it’s a slow process—we can’t rewire our brains in an
instant. That’s why a momentary high wears off, because the underlying
neurology remains the same. The vision inspires us, but it recedes into the
distance. We have to battle it out in the trenches, recognizing our foibles and
surrendering them to “the Lord.” Cast them into the volcano. Scatter them to
the winds. They aren’t protecting us anymore, they are killing us. They are a
little like flypaper: you can’t shake them off, and they stick to whichever
hand you use to pull them off. We have to outsmart them, and they’re lodged so
deep as to be darn clever themselves.
Narayana
Guru, with the able assistance of Nitya and Nataraja Guru, is offering us a
helping hand to extricate ourselves from the quicksand of our social malaise.
Do we merely admire the hand, or reach out and take it?
This
would be a perfect opportunity for all the far-flung participants in the class
to say, hmmm, my case is different, but this is important stuff. Here’s how MY
past is impinging on the present. I’ll write it up and send it in, to see if it
can help others to break out of their cages. Maybe thinking more about it will
help ME to break out, too.
Just
a thought.
I
will start adding Nitya’s short version of commentary, from Neither This Nor That…
But Aum, along
with Nataraja Guru’s, as Part II. This one captures the intensity and
motivation of the verse even better than the long version. This study is not
for voyeurs or tagalongs. It appeals to those who have lost the taste for
ordinary reality, treating it like a well advertised amusement park that is in
reality a prison. The House of Mirrors can never fully satisfy them again. They
have to break free.
* Paul, in 1Corinthians, was trying to get at the same idea,
that our childish innocence is grounded in our true self, but our adult
orientation is outward, away from our self. The former is total while the
latter is partial. Here’s more of the context of my reference:
[9] For we know
in part, and we prophesy in part.
[10] But when that which is perfect
is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
[11] When I was a child, I spake as
a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a
man, I put away childish things.
[12] For now we see through a glass,
darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even
as also I am known.
Part II
From
Neither This Nor That… But Aum:
Having offered the flower of your mind to that Lord smeared
with sacred ashes of the three gunas, having cooled down the senses, unwound
everything, and become calm,
when even the glory of aloneness has gone, become established
in mahas.
We
live in a world of ideas, facts and fundamentals. These three fields
correspond, in a general way, to our thoughts, actions and feelings. Ideas are
vivid when they come, and they can be freely structured into patterns and
motives if we know how to handle their logical structuring. A fact is rigid, as
it is ruled by physical laws and social conventions, but one aspect of it can
always be turned against another so as to neutralize its potential or make it
aggressively real. The fundamentals imply the real challenge of life and are
wrapped in the mysteries of vagueness and uncertainty.
When
ideas become structured patterns of thoughts they sit on the surface of the
mind as semantic tools and they lose their potential to make a breakthrough
from the established concepts of our humdrum world. When a genuine idea blazes
forth as a leaping flame from the furnace of Absolute Truth, it causes such a
conflagration that all relativistic ideas are burned to ashes and the world can
no longer be the same for the person to whom this happens. In the transactional
world, where actions and reactions are governed by the conventional norms of
conformity, life becomes tedious and boredom sits heavily on everybody's
conscience as a taskmaster of duty.
When
the thrust for the soul's freedom erupts as a frenzied volcano, man-made walls
of prohibitions and the sceptre of commandments are brushed aside as of little
or no relevancy to the vertical unfoldment of the true meaning of life. When
the nonessentials, misunderstood and propagated by dull-headed fanatics, form
the morbid crust of social mores, there may come from the pen of a
grief-stricken poet of unbounded compassion or the tearful eyes of a great
lover of mankind a word or even a look that can abolish a whole world of
patterns and modes, so that humanity can begin again from scratch and return to
the innocence of its childhood with fresh hopes and dreams. This tri-basic
annihilation of morbid ideas, crude actions and outmoded values is symbolized
in this verse by the great God smeared with the ashes of the modalities of
nature: sattva, rajas and tamas.
To
understand this perennial source of creation (mahas), the boundless source of
subsistence and the imperishable value of the ever new theme of fulfillment,
one should reconsider one's own ideas, actions and preferences in the light of
the Absolute. This can be done only by consciously negating what is taken for
granted and by going for reassurance to the very fountainhead of truth. This
cannot be done with any sense of leisure: there are no holidays in the quest
for the Absolute. Although this might sound like a tall order, what issues from
such a discipline is the sundering of all fetters and the simultaneous
emergence of a freedom that was never known before.
As
our enslaved mind had never before known such freedom, it might become drunk
with excitement. A consistent follow-up of the discipline will result in the
experience of the same freedom, which will soon become an accomplished fact of
the fundamental that governs all ideas, actions and values. There is nothing
more to gain than to know that this is possible in this very life itself.
Nataraja Guru’s commentary:
VERSE 13
Unto the Master who dons the ashes of the three modes,
Offering the flower of the inner self, inclining before him,
With all sense-interests effaced, divest of all and cool,
Even from the grandeur of loneliness bereft, into glory
sink!
THIS verse follows an antique and somewhat idolatrous figure
of speech. The worship of Shiva, the great God of the Himalaya, who is at the
same time the Guru Dakshina-Murti (the divine manifestation of the South), as
pictured by Sankara himself, long before the Guru Narayana, is almost an
inevitable idiom on the spiritual soil of India.
The great God is pictured here as sitting in meditation, cut
off from all sense-interests, meditating on the Absolute and identical with it.
This language is familiar to all Indians and especially to the temple
worshippers of the South. The Guru invokes this ideogram to convey easily what
he could otherwise have said only in many a dry paragraph.
The principle implicit in idol-worship correctly understood,
is to treat of the two bodies involved - that of the worshipper and the
worshipped - as interchangeable terms in a dialectically contemplative manner.
The self of the seeker on one side and the personified Absolute on the other
form limbs of a reversible operation like an osmosis which takes place
spiritually between the two poles which in reality, belong to the same vertical
aspect of the Self as distinguished in verse 12 above. The Guru is merely
employing popular idiom here and no anthropomorphic god is necessarily
postulated, although the ruling-out of such a god is equally to be avoided.
Whatever anthropomorphism might persist will be cancelled out by trans-subjective
and intra-physical complementarity of counterparts.
The notion of the Absolute, which is neutral between the two
poles of the same unitive Self, can be conceived in pure or practical terms
and, as long as the limbs of the equation are properly conceived as dialectical
counterparts, no harm is done to the resulting doctrine touching reality that
results from the cancelling out of counterparts.
The subtle dialectics implied in the exchange of values that
can take place between the ‘Self’ and the ‘non-Self’, whether subjectively or
objectively treated according to the correct rules of dialectical
understanding, cannot be elaborated in the language of mechanistic or
syllogistic reasoning. Here the Guru therefore bypasses discussion of the truth
of God in the usual ontological or ideological discursive manner of modern
philosophers in the West. The logical manner employed by Voltaire, which can be
valid in its own way, is not resorted to either. Theology proper is avoided but
the same purpose is served here by the simpler dialectical approach. After
helping us to distinguish the Self from the non-Self in the previous verses,
the Guru passes over quickly to equate them so as to resolve them both in the
context of unitive Self-realization proper, without the usual logic-chopping or
laboured theology.
To extract the correct sense of this verse the reader has to
imagine himself as a Shiva-worshipper of South India who prayerfully offers
flowers at the temple of the God who represents the Absolute in the antique and
natural language of iconographic ritual and symbolism. The flowers are to be
thought of as fine value products of the mind of man. They belong to this or
the ‘self’ side; while the master or Shiva would represent the ‘Greater Self’
which is its own counterpart. The offering of flowers is a symbolic gesture by
means of which a bipolar relationship is to be established between the Absolute
as the ‘Self’ and the Absolute as the ‘self’. They further represent the
specific aspects of everyday value-factors or items corresponding to the
infinite small change which pays for the gold coin of the notion of the
Absolute, which is an all-inclusive and supreme value in life.
An osmotic interchange of values, representing a reversible
process or operation, takes place between the two counterparts envisaged here,
which leads to self-realization, after the manner of the ‘flight of the alone
to the Alone’, as Plotinus would describe the event or process.
The ‘glory’ in the last line refers to the principle
of the
Absolute, still within the limits of the phenomenal aspect of reality as
understood in verse 4. The Guru avoids referring at this stage to the pure
notion of the Absolute as meant by the term Brahman, but uses rather the word
‘mahas’ (the Great Principle) as used by the Samkhyas and as understood later
and used more unitively in Advaita Vedanta, as we have pointed out under verse
4 already. This is by way of respecting methodological strictness in developing
the subject matter stage after stage from the known or knowable to the more
unknowable or unpredicable.
‘THE ASHES OF THE THREE MODES’: The theory of the
three
gunas or modalities in nature, whether psychologically or cosmologically
understood, is developed in a whole chapter (XIV) in the Bhagavad Gita devoted
to their character and mechanism. The Bhagavad Gita itself presents a revised
picture of the modalities, which are given a psycho-physical rather than a
cosmic status; and the three stratifications within the limits of necessary
action, as understood in the dualistic Samkhya philosophy, are presented more
unitively as applicable to the unitive personality of man. The gunas or
modalities of nature are treated without the more pronounced body-mind duality
of the earlier Samkhya school.
The Guru here sees the possibility of effecting further
unity in the same sense as in the Bhagavad Gita. The three levels or strata of
modalities in natural and necessary expression, when they attain the Absolute,
as represented by the Master who is Shiva, are nothing more than ashes,
generally worn as three horizontal lines on the forehead and body. Here they
have no effective living influence on him who has transcended the necessary or
negative level of life, where alone modalities could be operative. The gunas
may be described as the dark or dull (tamas) the passionate or the active
(rajas), and the pure or sublimated (sattva) expressions of psycho-physical
life. On the body of Shiva, in the ideogram here employed by the Guru, these
modes, which are sufficiently real from the side of the worshipper, have but
the status of mere ashes as attributed to the counterpart, the worshipped
symbol of the mystery of the Absolute.
‘THE FLOWER OF THE INNER SELF, ETC.’: In verse 9
the various
states of consciousness natural to man have already been referred to as bearing
blossoms. In relation to the plant itself the flower represents the most
specialized aspect. Such specific items represent horizontal multiplicity of
sense-values as against the vertical unity of the pure Self. The special
growths of a plant refer to luxury items in life, as suggested in the Bhagavad
Gita, which compares the leaf-buds of the great banyan tree of its famous
fifteenth chapter to the stanzas of the Vedas, which represent the hedonistic
values implicit in the Vedic religion. It is there recommended that the tree
with the buds be cut down mercilessly before one can follow the higher path of
the wisdom of the Absolute.
The flowers in the verse under examination here are also
petty utilitarian or sensuous luxury-items, even of the context of holiness,
which have to be sacrificed in the fire of absolute wisdom for progressing in
the path of self-realization envisaged in the present text. Moreover, the
Absolute is a wonder and is adorable, as the most supreme of human values.
Axiology, phenomenology and personalism represent attitudes or principles which
remain blended together in this reference to the subtle relationship that one
has to establish with the Absolute before merging into it could normally be
expected.
‘SENSE INTERESTS EFFACED, ETC.’: When a proper
bipolarity has been established in the manner indicated
above, the lower series of interests naturally give place to the higher
sublimated ones. The interests operative at the sense level of the personality
depend on objects of perception stimulated from outside. They are horizontal
interests which are of secondary importance only. When the full current is
switched on by the bipolarity established, as it were, vertically, between the
self and the Self representing the Absolute, these interests recede. The
absorbing nature of the latter bipolarity detracts from the intensity of the
sense-attractions to such an extent that, like stars that fade in daylight,
their appeal is countered and effectively nullified. They become faint and
enfeebled in proportion to the positive interest in the Absolute which becomes
progressively established.
‘DIVEST OF ALL AND COOL, ETC.’: The pure Self within
sits in
nakedness and simplicity, as opposed to the peripherally conditioned personality
that might have social dignity or status belonging to the outer world. Pilgrims
to Mecca have to divest themselves of all decorations and even tailored clothes
before entering the holy of holies. Likewise, the South Indian temple has to be
entered wearing as few clothes as possible. This is symbolic of the rejection
of all peripheral conditionings that might colour the pure self from the
extraneous and apparent phenomenal world. The utter nakedness of the soul may
perhaps trail clouds of glory, as the poet might say, in its spiritual journey
from God, but nothing of worldly decoration really belongs to it. Moreover, the
outer world is ‘of the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.’ Both these states of
affiliation to group-psychology or activity have first to be transcended before
the path of self-realization as envisaged here can be followed up. The cooling
therefore refers to the slowing down of the tempo of active outward socialized
life.
‘EVEN FROM THE GRANDEUR BEREFT, ETC.’: Zeus with
his
thunderbolt represents the great god on high as understood by the Greeks. Indra
of the Indian context is likewise a chief of the gods of heaven. There is
something quantitative still persisting in them in the attributes applied to
them which imply horizontal values.
The Absolute is not a quantity with any magnitude, but
rather a pure quality without magnitude. Even the hypostatic
glory that we attribute to God in praising Him is not
consistent with the image of the Absolute as understood in the purer
non-theological context of contemplative self-realization. Neither can we say,
however, that the Absolute is without greatness. The ‘greatness’ (as we have
translated the word mahas here) is to be understood as a glory that
participates more in the vertical aspect of value rather than in the
horizontal.
The distinction that we are trying to make is something like
the distinction between ‘natura naturans’ and ‘natura naturata’, as used by
Spinoza in his philosophy. The former has a vertical value while the latter is
horizontal in its content. We have a similar reference to two kinds of gunas
(modalities of nature) in the Bhagavad Gita (III. 28) which reads ‘the gunas
reside in the gunas’, meaning that modalities remain as principles with no
horizontalized expression. The grandeur of the subject is absorbed in the
greatness of the counterparts in the Absolute without getting horizontalized in
the process. Without this subtle philosophical distinction between the two
aspects, horizontal and vertical, the meaning of mahas and mahima, as used in
the original text, must remain mostly obscure. The ‘sinking into glory’
represents the ‘flight of the alone to the Alone’. The sinking further suggests
that the forward progression is itself a vestige suggestive of duality which
has to be counteracted by an inverse process which is sinking backwards rather
than going forwards or rising. This is more in keeping with the ‘negative way’
proper to contemplation. In pure becoming there is no movement at all in the
usual sense. The Absolute would correspond then to the ‘unmoved mover’ of
Aristotle.
Part III
Paul’s
link about the meeting of a poet and a scientist:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-tagore/
Above is the link you requested. It also exists in short form on Speaking Tree but this link
is more complete. There is also a
whole book dedicated to that same meeting that is on my wish list.
*
* *
Scott:
There
are so many important corollaries to Verse 13 that I want to cover at least one
more before we move on. As noted, the class discussed the micromanagement of
our lives that feels like a solution to pressing problems but in fact does not
get to their roots. By dealing with surface issues, such an attitude is
inadequate to affect the underlying causes of our discomfort, so it leaves us
frustrated and anxious and feeling incompetent.
Pretty
much everyone in the modern world either micromanages, over manages, or simply
manages their lives. This is in contradistinction with the model of the
liberated one who lives by instinct and is open to happenstance. The hidden
problem is that these are two distinct frames of reference that need to be
clearly differentiated.
Linear,
rational management is the proper way to deal with the horizontal world, but it
is inadequate to cope with the complexity of the unfolding evolution of the
psyche: what we call the vertical or spiritual realm. For that, a dialectical
or yogic approach—the pairing of opposites to achieve a heightened
perspective—is ideal.
It
is very important to distinguish the different types of ideation and their
proper fields. Nataraja Guru cautions us that “Dialectics is conducive to
unitive understanding only, and spoils the case when applied to ordinary
situations in life where usual ratiocinative methods or logic would be the
proper instrument to employ.” (Gita, p. 112.) He expands on this at length in Unitive
Philosophy, concluding on page
378:
Existential, subsistential and
value aspects of the Absolute have three different methodological approaches,
one proper to and compatible with each.
A
normal methodology applicable to integrated knowledge whether philosophical or
scientific has to accommodate within its scope these three kinds of approaches
to certitude, each in its proper domain. The experimental method suits
existential aspects of the Absolute, the logical suits the subsistential and
the dialectical suits the value aspects of the Absolute. Interest in the
physical world gives place in the second stage of ascent to logical psychology
or phenomenology, where ratiocination plays its part. Finally we ascend higher
into the third aspect of the Absolute where value relations hold good and the
instrument or methodology used is that of dialectics.
Management,
then, is necessary and appropriate for coping with horizontal actualities, but
when it is carried over into spiritual life, it undermines our progress rather
than furthering it. The fact that linear concepts are easy to manage explains
why people love to have a neat, well-defined program for their spiritual
practice. The unknown can be unnerving. But as Joseph Campbell so eloquently
stated, “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the
life that is waiting for us.”
Since
over-management blocks rather than promotes the inner flow of the psyche, a
vague sense of dissatisfaction creeps in. We then cast about for a new solution
or redouble our efforts with the present one, but seldom look into our own
makeup to identify the real impediments and give them up. That’s the solution
recommended by the present verse: we should take a close look at these
flowering propensities (including their roots), make a bouquet out of them, and
offer them to the Divine, in other words, give them away. We don’t reject them
outright, we cherish them first, since they are very much us, a part of our
history. But they no longer serve us well, if they ever did. It is time for
them to be let go of. Donate them to the Void.
*
* *
Jake’s
contribution:
In
the conclusion to this verse’s commentary, Nitya sums up his point in a gentle
admonition that we assume a posture or point of view as we go through our daily
lives. Our procedure, he notes, is
that we follow one world of interest after another without realizing what we
are doing and, in doing so, mistaking that series of mentally manufactured
worlds as real. The consequences
of this “mindless” skipping from one event to the next are a series of
disappointments and regret.
Implicit in the attention we pay to this mistake of projecting ultimate
value on that which always perishes is a compulsion to discover the
transcendent in its immanent forms only, without noticing the finite nature of
that metaphoric wave on the water.
The experience becomes one of identifying with the manifest wholly and
in a consecutive manner. The Guru,
concludes Nitya, asks us to back up just a bit as we go through our days and assume a broader and more
stable point of view—as the mind reels on in its compulsive process. If
we can maintain that point of view
which allows us to perceive all this activity as a continuous rising and
falling of the phenomenal and do so while we are in the thick of it, we have an
opportunity to live in the transcendent in every moment of time we create and
not get caught in the snares of regret, fear, and depression.
In
his opening paragraphs, Nitya points out that all the major religious
traditions make this point of view part of their teachings and generally
present it as a pattern of one’s first succumbing to temptation, followed by a
falling away from the divine center, repentance, and then a re-merging with the
divine. Nitya gives the example of
Christ and the series of temptations Satan offers if only he (Christ) will
renounce God. When Christ does
not, his redemption becomes his lived experience in the transactional world,
every part of which is a play of the Absolute creating, dissolving, creating. The
Guru, adds Nitya, is not proposing
we dismiss the work-a-day world as an illusion to be avoided but rather that we
participate in it, enjoy it, but not be seduced by it. When we attach absolute
value to the ephemeral we end up in a spiral of regret and fear. Appreciating
the phenomenal is not the same
as attaching to it as if it alone contained eternal truth.
In
the pages between his opening and closing comments, Nitya offers an overview of
the Indian mythology, a great metaphor, designed to explain the process through
which we create our daily worlds of interest (which can last from a few seconds
to years) and become attached to them while, at the same time, those very same
worlds come and go without our noticing that feature. The Lord of preservation (Vishnu) represents the work of our
mind which is monotonously busy supplying us with an endless variety of
distractions that the “Supreme or Infinite . . . the Great Lord . . . crushes
in his palm, turning them into ashes.
He smears his body with them.
What we see as a great reality . . . is not even skin deep.” (p.97)
Giving
imaginary form to our human impulses, behaviors, and ordinary ways of behaving
is bound to become an exercise heavily influenced by cultural peculiarities,
especially when they are given graphic form to boot. However, drawings of the various Hindu deities, I think,
offer what amounts to characterizations of our common psychology as it operates
in and through material manifestation, frantically determined to keep our
attention riveted on the movies it manufactures and screens minute by minute.
It was this narrow obsessive compulsive behavior that sociologist Jules Henry
identified in the 1960s as a fundamental element of an American consumer
culture then only a fraction as influential as it is today. He noted that becoming
a more
discerning or sophisticated or eco-friendly or broad-minded consumer will not
change the prime directive of the larger enterprise, one that by definition
excludes anything not reduced to a quantity that can be commodified—and the
infinite just doesn’t qualify as a quantity no matter how hard one tries to
make it fit. But Americans
continue to try, an effort Henry was less than charitable in characterizing
when he quipped, “In order to exist economically as we are we must try by might
and main to remain stupid.” (p48)
Part IV
Scott’s Apology
I
have received some undoubtedly well-deserved criticism lately, and it is best
for it to be publicly aired, I think. Although it makes a catchy title, apology
is really not the right word; rebalancing is more like it. Therefore I’m not
going to list the complaints against me, but simply address the core issue and
admit my mediocrity. I am not looking for vindication or expiation of my sins,
so it would be better for everyone just to ponder the matter and not worry too
much about my part in it.
The
question is, should there be intensity and possible unpleasantness in a
spiritual quest, or is that a de facto indication of the unfitness of the
teacher? Some think it is, and a few accept that it might prove valuable. It’s
actually a very important question, particularly since many people judge
spirituality primarily on the basis of pleasantness. The trick is, when there
are obstacles to overcome, extra intensity is necessary. For those who are
already sufficiently realized, it may not be necessary. Of course, it is a
guru’s or therapist’s role to push, and that’s different than a teacher. It
gets a little tricky when you’re teaching about a guru, however.
To
me, the point of having a class on the wisdom of the gurus is for the benefit
of those who wish to overcome their personal impediments, and is not so
worthwhile for those who have already accomplished this. I have been editing a
paper for the Spring Gurukulam magazine about one disciple’s relationship with
Nataraja Guru that puts this quite nicely:
All of us who hung around Nataraja Guru for any length of time were
there because we had problems in our lives that we were looking to him to help
us solve. As he used to say, “If you have questions about where this world came
from and what is the meaning of your life, then wisdom can be of use to you. If
you have no such problems, you don’t need wisdom.” Also, “If your typewriter is
OK, leave it alone, but if it isn’t working properly, take it to the repair shop.
This is what Gurus are for.”
For
those who think I’m a prideful false guru, I would answer that I’m trying to
use my reasonably extensive knowledge to direct people to some real gurus,
namely Narayana Guru, Nataraja Guru and Nitya. My attitude is that I am “pinch
hitting for Babe Ruth” whenever I open my mouth in the wisdom context. That
means I’m a poor substitute from off the bench, standing in for the most iconic
baseball player of all time only because he can’t be present. It is probably
inevitable that I will misrepresent the real gurus, but there is some chance I
won’t strike out totally. I like to think it's better than nothing.
That Alone presents the dichotomy
expressed so clearly in verses 8 and 9, of on one hand a hunter shooting down
distractions with deadly intent and on the other hand an alert contemplative
sitting quietly. There is a place for both aspects in a spiritual quest. The
Bhagavad Gita also encourages a serious attitude and an ability to persevere
against obstacles, epitomized in XVIII,
36-39:
And now hear from Me of the three
kinds of happiness, in which one by practice rejoices, and in which he reaches
the end of pain;
that happiness which is like gall
at first, ambrosial at the end, born of lucid self-understanding, is called
sattvic;
that happiness arising out of
contact of the senses with objects, at first like ambrosia, at the end like
gall, is called rajasic;
that happiness which at first and
in after-effects is self-confounding, arising from sleep, lassitude and
listlessness, is called tamasic.
Nataraja
Guru summed up a lot of territory by saying, “If it makes you happy and kind,
it is the truth; if it does not make you happy and kind, it is not the truth.”
He meant in the long run. Nitya’s autobiography Love and Blessings is full of the travails he went through at the
hands of his most excellent guru. Of course, he had asked for it by requesting
instruction. If he hadn’t he might have remained a soap manufacturer.
For
an ordinary teacher—or an usher in a theater, as in my case—there is a fine
line to walk between making ideas lively and valuable while not offending
anyone’s sensibilities. How much do you bring out the implications that aren’t
obvious, and how much do you let them go by the board? It’s a perennial
challenge, and in a subject charged with such intensity there are bound to be
mistakes. That’s why I take criticism to heart: true or false, it’s an antidote
to egotism. It may taste like gall at first, but after awhile the taste
improves.
Part V
Brenda
characterized what she has written as “making a bouquet of my reflections and
tossing it into the fire!” She shares with us a perfect example of what the
Guru meant by Verse 13, to wit: Having offered the flower of your mind to that
Lord smeared with sacred ashes, the three gunas,
having cooled down the senses, unwound everything, and become calm, when even
the glory of aloneness has gone, become established in mahas.
Over Spring break, I was with my family in Klamath Falls,
the portion of my family that are evangelical and steeped in Christian
fundamental jargon.
When I was a child, I too was dipped in this myopic tea of
religious arrogance and superiority. I was told that because Christ died for my
sins that I was one of God's chosen ones, in fact I was above others!
Well, over the years, after I had walked the aisle and
'accepted Christ' and then proceeded to be baptized, I realized that all of my
family, and all the people in the Church were hung up on words and not by
actions. They were in fact disconnected from a Christ-filled life through their
actions.
I saw a mean, hypocritical, adversarial church body, who, to
my mind were schizophrenic. One face, sickly sweet, the other, mean as a snake,
and completely justified in their interpretation of Christ's teachings and how
they judged others. They used their judgments as a way to not communicate with
others different from themselves.
I had only walked the aisle because I was told that in order
to sing in the church, I had to jump through the hoops of the order. I had been
singing solos with piano accompaniment, only to shock the congregation when it
came out that I hadn't yet publically accepted Christ as my personal savior.
Well I got on that task right away! The worship for me was
the music, so I found my way by their rules, without taking the dogma to heart.
Over the years, I have seen the devastation of this mean
spirited view of God. My family is split apart by their own personal religious
views, they have judged one another, condemned one another, so that we can now
never be in the same room together, ever. But I renounced the dogma and the
church when I was 14. I also left my family to begin my heroine’s journey. I
called the pastor and told him that he was embellishing his sermons with his
own prejudice and hate, and that is not what Christ would teach. I told him
that I will not participate in such evil, unconscious behavior.
Presently, I am the only family member who visits all these
divided factions of the family. Yes, I live set apart from our own version of
the Mahabarata War! I see the war on both sides of the chariot, and I am the
mystic skimming like a flat stone upon the waters of unconscious minds, who are
drowning in the waters of dogma that they have never questioned.
The rift in my family goes so deep and is justified by the
small religious minds in arrogant opposition, but I am not needing to air my
beliefs, I act, not preach.
For example, I brought my niece back to Portland from
Klamath Falls, she hadn’t seen her grandmother for six years because the
grandmother had a rift with her son, the father of my niece. I didn't tell the
grandmother that I was bringing her granddaughter, I just called to say, I look
forward to seeing you, and I have a surprise...!
When we walked through the door, the grandmother burst into
tears and the granddaughter embraced her now frail grandmother with
all-encompassing healing unconditional love. The heart was open, no time to
prepare a defense, we were able to have a joyous visit and reclaim what is
essential for everyone, belonging, and that elusive value: familial piety!
I move within my family as a free agent without being a
member of a specific church body, without qualifying my existence by
fundamental Christian values.
Sure, there are aspects of my being that were deeply
affected by this early indoctrination, but I questioned it then and I question
it now. But in my renouncing this interpretation of religion, I am not devoid
of the goodness of the church, I see the positive values, the minds might be
wrong, but sometimes their hearts are right. I will remain imprinted by my
Baptist beginning, yet I know that my very being is not wrong, and that like
Walt Whitman in Song of Myself, my very being is a great poem! The shame of
being small has fallen away and I am able to share the light of love and
acceptance with my family even in their restricted frustrated consciousness. I
can even see their beauty in ways that are hidden from themselves.
I went to hear our own local NY Times reporter, Nicholas
Kristof last night at Reed College, he said, ‘you must create the opportunity
to have an education beyond your country, find some way of traveling, get out
of your comfort zone. There are so many places you can travel out of your
comfort zone in your own town!’ He mentioned tutoring in prison, neighborhoods
in need, mentoring a child to read, grassroots organizations in need. He said,
'Do this, and it will shape you for the rest of your life!'
GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE!
Well, that resonated with me indeed!
