12/17/13
Verse 44
The
many faiths have but one essence;
not
seeing this, in this world, like the blind men and the elephant,
many
kinds of reasoning are used by the unenlightened who become distressed;
having
seen this, without being disturbed, remain steadfast.
Free
translation:
The
normative essence of everyone's conviction is the same. Those who do not know
this secret become fanatical in establishing relativistic points of view,
arguing like the proverbial blind men who went to "see" an elephant
and couldn't agree between them in its description. Avoid all such disputes by
cultivating the all-embracing attitude of sameness.
Nataraja
Guru’s translation:
Not seeing that the various religions in the world
Are essentially the same, advancing various arguments
Like the blind men and the elephant, roam not like fools,
But stop wandering, and calmly settle down.
Verse
44, one of my favorites, also contains one of the key sentences in all of That Alone:
“Once you go from the
spiritual vision to religious belief, you have already strayed far from the
truth.” The adage applies to science as much as any other belief system,
because extrapolations tend to creep in and fill up the holes in our
philosophy, whatever it may be. The class explored in detail the drive humans
have for certainty, for taking the approximate understanding we glean from a
amalgam of our senses and conjectures and passing it off as unassailable truth.
Why can’t we accept that we are busily shaping reality, building it up from a
bare sketch and insisting it is a completed masterpiece? Knowing why we do such
things can help take the compulsion out of our posturing, so we can relax and
stand at ease. Tolerance and openness are impossible without letting go of our
desperate grip on a partial vision.
Bill
brought up another prime sentence of Nitya’s that goes far in explaining the
paradox involved: “Your position is rigid to precisely the extent that your
vision is limited.” Because we secretly know that we don’t know, we learn to
pretend that we do know, so as not to be shamed or punished for our
deficiencies. Since everyone else is pretending mightily, it seems as if we are
the only one who doesn’t know. Our life becomes a struggle to maintain an
illusion of certitude, impelled by the dread of exposure.
Somehow
we have to realize we are looking at a stage show in our mind, rather than the
world as it is, which is the primary magic trick of consciousness that fools us
over and over again. Probably this is the most important and practical lesson
we can take from the entire study. Nitya epitomizes it perfectly:
We
forget that in none of our mental functions are we in direct relationship with
the original, we are always only interpreting sensory images received in the
mind. When we intellectualize, our mind is giving its own version, its best
estimate, not a total picture of facts or data. The data is only what we
presume. ‘Fact’ is a fiction. There is no fact. There can be only a comparative
range of fictions which are more or less useful or reliable. We make an
approximation, even when we loudly swear our certitude.
The
paradox is we have to use our intellect to realize the limitations of the
intellect, because the default setting is that everything is just as we
perceive it. By disconnecting the intellect we don’t do away with its
limitations, we limit ourselves even more. The real mystery is why are we so
afraid to admit the very truth that permits us to turn away from partiality
and—intellectually at least—accept a total vision? That, you may recall, is the
function of the notion of the Absolute, a uniting principle that we can compare
our partial understanding to. The Absolute is the elephant we are too blind to
see, and so content ourselves with imagining the part we are in touch with is
the whole animal.
Speaking
of the famous story, a variety of versions from different traditions are
available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
. It is indeed an Indian story, but one that has “gone viral” and appears all
over the place. Some of the alternatives are especially nice.
Deb
summed up Narayana Guru’s point about the story by saying that we hold on so
tightly because we secretly suspect our position is limited, and we don’t
realize we are blind. But someone with a global vision doesn't need to defend
their position. Ideally they are not even taking a position, they remain open,
and so are continually expanding.
Deb
had a perfect example, too. When she was young and women’s liberation was a new
and socially destabilizing subject, she had an argument about it with her
brother. She got really upset for a number of reasons. She wasn’t sure of
herself yet, but she knew she should be treated as an equal. Plus, her brother
is really good at mockery and undercutting, which threw her off on tangents.
The whole argument was an unmitigated disaster. A couple of years later,
however, she had a similar argument and was able to keep her cool. Because she
was more confident, she didn’t feel she had to hold on to a rigid formula, and
the discussion was an enjoyable learning opportunity rather than a pitched
battle.
Nancy
R. maintained that if your position is right, you don't have to defend it, you
go beyond the feeling of needing to defend that drives you to make excuses and
swear allegiances.
Susan
agreed, but pointed out that we have to be careful not to close down when we
are not propounding our position, but to stay open. She described a feeling we
all recognized immediately. The other night she was talking with her teenage
son, and he was telling her about an alternative method of generating nuclear
energy that was supposedly safer than the ones currently irradiating the
planet. Susan is adamantly against nuclear power, so powerful counterarguments
rose up in her, but this time she let them go and just listened. She quelled
her compulsion to be right and to dominate the exchange. Peter was excited
about what he had learned, and because he didn’t encounter resistance from his
mother, he felt free to express himself. If she had come on strong, he would
have shut down quickly and their sharing would have ended. But because she
stilled her negative reactions, the floor was open for an enjoyable exchange.
She felt really good about it, and after all it was only a discussion—Peter
wasn’t actually building a nuke in her kitchen.
Andy
was reminded of Suzuki Roshi teaching that if you are very quiet you can see
great virtue in everything. Several of us agreed that we go around judging
other people to be beneath our standards and therefore not virtuous, but if we
intellectually override that knee jerk response to whatever we disagree with,
we can begin to see value where we didn’t before. Ultimately when we extricate
ourself from the noise generated by our own opinions and begin to listen more
closely to the present circumstances, the miraculous beauty of existence shines
forth.
This
further reminded Andy of reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception many years ago. As Huxley began to get off on mescaline he was sitting at a table
with a bouquet of flowers. He was looking at the bouquet as ugly and poorly
composed, noting all its faults, and then suddenly it was spectacular: it was vibrating
with the full intensity of its being, and he was captivated. Huxley was astute
at using his intellect to open himself up (with or without psychedelic
assistance), and his ideas are a nice complement to the That Alone study. I’ll
clip in a couple of paragraphs in Part III, but The Doors of Perception can be read in an hour and is a very
enjoyable booklet. Highly recommended.
Since
Andy brought up psychedelics, I mentioned a thought I’d had this week, that in
practically the first instant of an LSD trip the seemingly solid reality around
you starts to melt and change, and you realize that what you’re seeing is a
product of your conscious structuring. The world is no longer a monolithic
solid reality “out there.” That sliver of separation makes a huge difference in
your life, because the mesmerizing conviction of the scene has been stripped
away. It’s like what people who have been in a strong earthquake say, that you
never again treat the ground as perfectly solid and dependable. In the case of
the ground, it’s too bad in a way, but if you can accept that the world as we
know it is a confection of seer and seen, you have instantly become a
philosopher, and a more tolerant one at that.
Honored
visitor Nancy Y. noted that children have a strong need to understand their
world; they are hungry for a satisfactory explanation of everything. In
response to their desire to know what’s going on, the popular position of the
day is reinforced in them by their education and social interactions. This is
well and good up to a point, but unfortunately the educational process seldom
goes beyond subscribing to the dominant paradigm. If we are taught to question
any assumptions, it is only within a very narrow range that actually reinforces
the imposed limits. We are only encouraged to question the things that fall
outside the acceptable range. Thus, as Bill said, our childish attachments stay
with us into adulthood, but by then they are cleverly disguised. Stepping back
into our true nature requires going outside our comfort zone. It is a mystery
why some people are compelled to do so. But unless we do, we remain trapped in
our limited world. Adding that justice requires us to break out of our
rigidities, even if doing so goes against our sense of security, Nancy Y.
quoted the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem:
Ring
the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
Children
have an innate sense of justice, and injustice animates their desire to make
changes and access new ideas. But since injustice is inevitably built into
socioeconomic systems, it tends to be disregarded by those who are
“well-adjusted.” Because of this, children, being weak, are unable to
successfully assert their perspective, and are forced to surrender it by the
perpetrators and supporters of injustice. They soon learn that it’s much easier
to go along than to challenge social illusions. But below the surface a desire
for justice still simmers, which is why leaders of all stripes pay lip service
to justice, even as they promulgate the opposite.
Nancy
Y. was keen on the idea of justice and how we yearn for it. She honored Nelson
Mandela, who was imprisoned by truly heinous people and had every reason to
violently hate his oppressors, but who found that inner stillness and managed
to transcend his personal position to embrace the universal. When he finally
walked out of prison he recognized virtue in everyone, and so was able to
transform his society instead of energizing the opposition. It is a secret Narayana
Guru—who had a similar impact in his own region—also knew. Nancy observed that
Narayana Guru realized the oppression that the oppressors themselves suffered,
and so was able to have compassion for them too.
It
is very easy to be whirled around in vicious circles and become distressed when
we take our preferred slice of reality for the whole. We become steadfast and
undisturbed only when we are mature enough to acknowledge our limitations, to
admit our blind spots. Then we become eager to add to our knowledge base
instead of defending our turf. It’s a perfect ideal with which to welcome the
winter solstice of 2013 and enter the new year with an enlightening resolution,
one that is at the same time not too hard to keep.
Part
II
Neither This Nor That But . . . Aum:
If
we hide a pot behind a screen and ask someone to identify it, that person,
unaware of the hidden object, might make a number of conjectures. To qualify “this”
in the question “What is this?” Guru tells us in verse 41 that “this” is the
primal cause for fabricating the ideational world of the intellect. The
consciousness implied can, however, also function unitively and can easily
comprehend how a universal beingness always remains as the transcendent essence
of everything. To such a consciousness “this” is the unifying element of all.
The
original vision and inspiration associated with the founders of all great
religions can be traced to people who are fully realized masters, such as
Janaka and Yajnavalkya of the Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira of the Jains,
the Christ, Lao Tzu and the Prophet. What they have seen and experienced is
beyond words and certainly beyond the comprehension of a relativistically
oriented mind. When these great masters disseminated their wisdom, whatever
trickle came in the form of articulated words was half lost because of the
poverty of language, and misunderstood because the recipients' minds were not
as enlightened as those of their masters.
As
a result of this, feuds and conflicts arose among the congregates of all
masters. For the purposes of social security and political advantage, the
followers of all major religions got themselves organized. Several times the
world has been bathed in the blood of religious dissidents and even the word
religion is now looked upon with horror and suspicion by people who care for
the brotherhood of mankind.
Spiritual
experience is not arrived at as a logical conclusion of inductive or deductive
reasoning. It is a wholesome transformation of all the dissonance of nature in
one's personality into a harmonious resonance with the truth, beauty and
goodness in all. Although reason is an excellent tool for making a unitive
understanding beneficial to all concerned, it has no potential of its own to
make a person enlightened.
When
we are confronted by a raving fanatic it causes disquiet in our minds, and, as
if in a state of hypnosis, even the most liberally minded man is tempted to
take up a cudgel to defend himself. Only those who are well-established in the
universality of the all-embracing sameness can hold their peace and remain
unruffled on such provocative occasions. When the world around us goes mad with
religious factions and separatism, unitive wisdom is a panacea.
*
* *
Nataraja
Guru’s commentary:
THE blind men of the fable who examined an elephant could not
come to any agreement about it because none of them could have a clear enough
or total enough direct view of the animal, and generalized too readily on their
data which were partial and lacking in clarity.
There are many religious groups in the world which have
arisen to correct or wrong opinions or practices which might have prevailed in
disjunct regions and at distinct times. Formulated and codified with direct reference to the
actual situation
and the error they were meant to correct, they tend to stress one aspect of
spiritual life or to give primacy to one doctrine or commandment over others.
The total truth, which is independent of particular
circumstances, and which should not be limited even to correct particular
items, only tends thus to remain outside the scope of any particular
formulation or codification of religious life. The total or global truth tends to be even more than
the sum-total of individual points of view. Moreover, the
original founder of a religion
might have had a clarity of vision of the global truth which those who follow him
without the same degree of original insight cannot have in the natural course
of happenings in life.
Cults, creeds, codified and hidebound forms of faith or
doctrine tend thus to attach
more importance to the dead letter rather than to the living word. Direct
global insight into the nature of the absolute or total truth that is the basic
subject-matter of all religious faiths or patterns of behaviour tends thus to
be overlaid or examined piecemeal and partially, giving rise to endless
theological, doctrinal or other differences, around which much disturbance of
life takes place. The trees can hide the forest.
To the eye of a person able to see the essential as distinct from
the merely superficial aspect of religions, there is a common basic substratum
of which the divergent expressions are only secondary and unimportant marginal
aspects. All religions in essence answer to one central human need for
spiritual consolation. They all seek happiness, and there is no religion in the
world which aims at suffering rather than happiness. This is stated in verse 49
that follows.
The one religion of mankind, to which the Guru Narayana
referred in his well-known motto of ‘One race, one religion and one ideal
or God for all mankind’, is to be visualized on the basis of the common end of happiness
that
all religions,
however varied and different superficially, have as the central value implied
in their teaching.
There is a tendency in the group-psychology of human beings
to get influenced by mob sentiments that might come to the surface of
collective life at any given moment. The excesses committed by fanatics in the
history of the world are such that they have drenched the soil with human blood
many times. The Guru is concerned in this verse to see that better sense or
wisdom should prevail. The contemplative view here recommended is to make the
man who tends to be moved by group emotions in such matters compose himself and
calmly go about his normal business without adding fuel to the fire of fanatic
agitations. Group contagion of horizontalized attitudes is to be guarded
against. The reference to settling down calmly is to the appreciation of
contemplative values in life. The whole of this discussion naturally stems out
of the common ground of philosophy and religion, which is the Self.
Part III
Some
quotes from The Doors of
Perception/Heaven and Hell, by Aldous Huxley:
“In
a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it
all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions.
There is always money for, there are always doctrines in, the learned foolery
of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced
whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are
honoured. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the
given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored.”
“We
can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by
means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the
brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as
well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words
effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify
our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque
medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar
likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.”
“Literary
or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal
and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of
transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the
natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of
experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know
nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.”
*
* *
Jake’s
commentary brings That Alone to bear on the American (and beyond) culture wars:
With
this verse, writes Nitya, the Guru concludes the project he has been working on
since verse 20, articulating the features of our individuated mind that receives
the light of our internal Karu. Up
to that twentieth verse, says Nitya, he focused on the nature of that Absolute
and the many forms it takes.
Conversely, with the next verse (45), and the four following that one,
he will deal with how we arrive at our possession of and become influenced by a
social mind, a development that can lead to all varieties of horror. These three
elements—the social mind,
the individual mind, and the “source from which your mind derives its light,”
constitute the three essentials that we need to understand and be able to
control if our life on earth is to be peaceful and constructive (p. 302).
The
Guru’s verse opens with a clear affirmation of the Perennial Tradition,
Plotinus’ observations concerning the One and the Many, and the all-pervading
sameness of the Absolute. In other
words, the mystical core at the center of universal spirituality is the same no
matter who experiences it or what names they might apply to it, a truth obvious
to those who have had that direct perception. It is when that truth is translated into words and concepts
that are subsequently passed on to those who have had no such direct connection
that all the trouble begins. The
“unenlightened” of the Guru’s verse are those on the second team, so to speak,
that follow someone who, for whatever reason, they infer has had access to the
Infinite which is beyond the capacity of the herd—or at least them.
It is the lot of the herd that is
the condition of most of us.
Training ourselves to survive the world of necessity, our minds and its
rational dimensions begin to learn what to learn and how to learn it as soon as
the equipment becomes available.
As Piaget chronicled as he observed his own children progress through
stages of development and as Dewey wrote of the education process generally,
the collateral effects of learning and education outweigh the nominal subjects
of study themselves, a point Nitya amplifies and personalizes on page 298: “All
too often, . . . having used this tool and found it efficient for solving some
of the riddles and problems of your personal life, you glorify it and make it
your sole crutch for ever and ever.” By so doing, we then put ourselves in a room with no
view or escape because of a companion awareness that manifests along with the
self-aware mind—“when you look in the mirror you might see your hair turning
white or new wrinkles on your face or colourations on your skin”; the whole
reasoned world will come to an un-reasoned end.
At
this point, Nitya presents a marvelously succinct assessment of the
faith/reason dichotomy endlessly debated in the West, especially the US, and
demonstrates the essential pointlessness at the heart of it. More often than
not, the skirmishes in
the American culture wars erupt where the two scrape up against one another and
have done so publicly since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. The fact that they
continue and that
those on either side of the squabble appear to have not learned much suggests
that perhaps there is not much to learn when quarreling substitutes for
understanding and the premise on which the hostilities rests doesn’t exist.
Once the terror of death penetrates
awareness, the mind seeks an answer and easily locates one in a promise that
the body may drop away but the soul remains eternal—the siren’s song of any
number of exoteric religious organizations. Because the soul (or spirit or whatever) is beyond reason or
the mind’s capacity to locate, that same mind shifts “our bodily feeling to
this so-called soul or spirit, which is only conjectural” (p. 298). As
Nitya points out, it is the
intellect that makes this decision, a choice it is supremely unqualified to
make, but given the responsibility the ego has assigned it and the success it
has demonstrated in the transactional domain, such a demand appears both
reasonable and achievable, given the givens—given all the sacred books making
the claim.
At
this juncture, Narayana Guru, says Nitya, makes a startling but accurate
observation, that such faith as this process produces is “born of your
intellect” and is founded on conjecture (because it must be in order for the
mind to work with it at all).
Furthermore, this construction is the very stuff of religion, commonly understood (including Marxist atheism,
and so on). It is a second-hand
conviction founded on someone else’s vision, an interpretation of what one
never experienced firsthand. This sequence moves the “believer” further and
further away from truth. As Nitya
comments, when two people experiencing a spiritual vision encounter each other,
there is no disagreement. Only
when the junior varsity gets involved do “religious” disputes arise, battles
that require a dogmatic belief developed by a mind engineered to handle events
manifesting in the transactional domain only. It, too, dies with the body.
As Nitya concludes, continuing on
this “reasonable” course will lead us into circles of redundancy, and the
history of the quarrel in the American experience underscores the claim. By continuing
to face outward and to
experience experience secondhand, we continually privilege our
perceptions/interpretations and thereby accept our mind’s best efforts in
evaluating what is going on. The
“facts” we think we deal with are always partial and the best guesses our mind
can manufacture. As a consequence,
all minds deal with comparative estimates that are assumed to be whole truths
containing accuracy they cannot represent.
This faith borne of intellect
controlled by the ego is the battlefield of the American culture wars. Once an
original spiritual vision is
translated into religious belief it goes public, so to speak, and requires
dogma and conformity in order to stand on its own. Once that process has begun, religion has replaced clear vision and defenders of the true faith—familiar
with secondhand information only—monitor the frontiers. The Liberal/Conservative
tensions in
our public discourse make up the heart of our contemporary political
entertainment and have over the last several decades become the very point of
the exercise. In fact, the most
rigid and doctrinaire reflect their severely constrained perspective because
the position held becomes as rigid as the vision is limited as does reason
which is the sole weapon in defending the indefensible. Characteristic of the
True Believer are
doctrinaire denial, projection, and all the other features of an ego engaged in
its fierce confrontation with the inevitability of its eventual annihilation.
The solution, writes Nitya, is in
re-directing the mind inward rather than accepting its normal outward-directed
posture. Focused on the external,
the mind naturally dichotomizes things and concepts in order to isolate,
identify, and name them. From this
point of view, the mind’s opinions assume the same contours: my opinion is not
yours and vice versa. Nitya points
out that this approach is like continuously viewing the world through the wrong
end of a telescope; distortion, isolation, and frustration rule when the
“facts” we work with are mental constructions of partial distortions the mind
cobbles together as best it can in its mission to survive in manifestation as
long as possible. The universe, I
think, does not really care and is unconcerned as to whether or not “we accept”
death, aging, or any of the other of the natural certainties. Using our defective
telescope as a
guide, we can never move beyond the limits imposed by the instrument
anyway. The best we can hope for
is to “learn to accept” the necessity of a mental stoicism in order to face a
cyclical condition offering us endlessly the same choices. As the Guru and Nitya
have outlined in
previous verses, beyond dispute is the mind’s power to construct great magic.