8/19/14
Verse 70
One rati alone is expanding into the ego, the senses,
the mind, the body and all that
is;
where is an end to this?
Not until one knows that he is
different, none other than knowledge; remember!
Free
translation:
One pleasure principle (rati)
expands and transforms into the ego, the senses, the mind, the body, and all
that is, as if its proliferation has no end. It will go on operating till the
cognizing Self realizes it is not any of the pleasure-pursuits but Knowledge,
pure and simple.
Nataraja
Guru’s translation:
The one libido it is that as the ‘I’ sense, the senses,
The inner instruments, the body and all these becomes
Unravelled; where is the term to this? The knower remains
Distinct only till knowledge becomes known.
Earlier
this week Deb and I harvested some honey, spending time in close proximity with
our bees. They seem as if they are whirling, buzzing sparks of a single mind of
astounding intelligence. Last night as the class took on the complicated and
vague subject of rati (loosely translated as libido) I got the same sense of
independent parts joining forces to accomplish far more than they could
separately. Each class participant whirled around in their own orbit, yet the
sum total produced extensive insight: the honey of understanding.
The
way the complex interaction of the bees produces meaningful action seemingly by
transcendental accident reminds me of Nitya’s description of the intangibility
of mind:
When the ego becomes motivated by the
rati and you look for enjoyment within, the way it uses awareness—spread out in
a pattern—becomes the mind.
There
is nothing anywhere sitting by itself that is the mind. When I speak, mind
becomes words. When I visualize, it is various images. When I feel, it is
sensation. It has no definite form, texture, content or material. It assumes
anything the self wants for its inner satisfaction.
We
have already heard the key idea in several varied presentations in our study.
It is so counterintuitive that Narayana Guru has to try any number of
strategies to elicit even provisional conviction in us. It will probably remain
a mystery how and why anyone eventually realizes this, beyond an idealistic
supposition. The gist is this: we are—our true nature is—the source of our own
happiness. Yet we project it onto the world and into our inner world of hopes
and fears, where it continually lures us away from awareness of our self. This
endless pursuit continues until we discover that we are actually the source of
happiness, in a way that is fully satisfying. Then we project self-confidence
and compassion onto our individuality and our surroundings, in place of
mounting an enervating search for what we already possess.
The
cutting edge of science is beginning to think along these lines, and when it
finally joins the parade it may bring about the shift in focus the gurus have
been promulgating for millennia. Don’t expect them to give the rishis any
credit, however! A rishi wouldn’t expect any, anyway. I’ll include a statement
from physicist Max Tegmark that closely parallels this verse’s bold assertion,
and especially Nitya interpretation of it, in Part III.
Nitya
puts the central idea very clearly here himself:
Ultimately the
object of your pleasure is your own self. It is for the sake of the self you
desire everything. This identification of the libido with the aham, the self,
becomes the propelling force for the expansion into so many other aspects.
Those that Narayana Guru has listed here are the ego, senses, mind, body, and
all that is.
A twofold operation takes place
when the aham or the enjoyer-self is seeking enjoyment, one in the world of
objects and the other in the world of subjects. The idea is to release your
mind from these two attractions, remembering that there is nothing called mind
anywhere other than this.
In the ultimate analysis, he adds “It is impossible to
say
whether such forms of enjoyment are outside or inside you.”
Nitya
came to really appreciate Freud during this period, and he notes a number of
interesting parallels with our study. One key notion that I believe is worthy
of expansion is that Freud was a materialist who traced all motivations back to
the body, locating the root of interest in sexuality. Narayana Guru points to a
transcendent reality whose nature is ananda, that projects interest into every
aspect of creation. While similar, the Guru’s point-source is unlimited, while
Freud’s is limited, and limiting. Trying to force all attraction into the
narrow category of sex interest is an injustice, and some of Freud’s failings
can be located just here. At the same time, it is an example of how you can
take a narrow subject and expand it toward a total conception, refining and
sublimating it in the process. Done properly, each approach can throw light on
the other.
The
materialist orientation springs from our fascination with the outside world,
positing that it is the source of our being. We mused about how stringently
society is focused on externalities. Paul noted that external and internal
factors should be commensurate, which is true, but the way our attention is
directed by those around us is anything but balanced. Susan gave the example of
Christianity. Despite Jesus’ assertion that “I and the Father are not two,” and
“The kingdom of heaven is within you,” most of the attention in her experience
is toward practical outward expressions. In the process, severe damage may be
done to the original message, transforming it into a mere mockery of itself. To
its detriment, science also relegates the inner world of the psyche to the
peripheral domain of psychology, though it is encouraging to see how physicists
and neurologists are becoming more influential. Because of the way our brain so
convincingly models reality for us, it will always be very hard to shed the
prejudice in favor of what we see over what we intuit.
Bill
surmised that most religions advocate moving from self interest to interest in
the common good. It’s a really good step, important in early development.
Infants start with only self-awareness and slowly enlarge it to include their
environment. Most of us stop the expansion way too soon, leaving out far more
than we allow in. Narayana Guru urges us to keep going until the whole universe
is included. That being said, Nitya often insisted that the entire subject was
dualistic, and the ideal was to not have barriers of arbitrary definitions at
all. He used to shock us by asserting that our focus shouldn’t be on serving
others, that that was an egotistical position. The absolutist orientation was
to meet every contingency with full attention. If we had a program of either
self-interest or other-interest it would equally interfere with our ability to
be fully present. Nitya himself was simultaneously having a wonderful time and
being of great help to those around him, without being dogmatic about it. He
was a major force for peace and accord in South India, but he never forced the
issues—he was simply available. Andy put it perfectly: the idea is to work for
one who was not an other.
As
Bill summarized, the unitive perspective is to realize we are knowledge. We are
knowledgeable entities having experiences in knowledge, and we incorporate
everything we can. In order to achieve this, though, we have to engineer a
break from our daily routines so we can take a close look at our condition. Otherwise
we will remain mesmerized by the play of events displayed for us by our mental
model.
The
intelligent way out of our fixations is beautifully expressed in the
commentary:
It is a most natural thing…. From a
very minute particle the whole thing is blown up into a whole universe of
interest. When it seeks, what is it after and what is its end?
In
the previous verse we were told that we run after many things, thinking they
will give us happiness. Doing this does bring happiness, but it also brings
unhappiness….
When
you realize this you withdraw from your chasing in order to have a better look
at yourself. There is a realization of the self that you are This, and there is
nothing to seek, nothing to find. Then the circular chase comes to a close.
Andy
and Bill reminisced about how Nitya carefully monitored his biorhythms so he
could achieve as much as he did, which was easily more than the rest of us put
together. He took his cues from his inner promptings, and didn’t force himself
to stay with a project beyond its natural measure of rati. He had many irons in
the fire at once, and as soon as his interest flagged in one he would turn to
the next, whichever beckoned him the strongest. That way he was always giving
it his best.
Andy
noted how Nitya wasn’t excessively goal-driven, it all seemed to flow of its
own volition. It shows us that rati doesn’t have to be about chasing something
extra we think we are missing, but that we bring our energies to bear on a
natural unfoldment. We are ineffective because we are so often chasing mirages
cooked up out of wishful thinking. Nitya demonstrated how being in tune with
your svadharma, your natural aptitudes, released vast amounts of libidinal
power in stupendously coherent directed endeavors. It’s like a laser, where the
light that normally radiates weakly in all directions is brought together in a
single focus, giving it the ability to perform delicate surgery or even cut
through steel.
It’s
very challenging to communicate the uplifting beauty of the class experience
thorough these summaries. I am no poet, but the experience is exquisitely
poetic. Nitya brought flights of fancy in at times to counterbalance to heavy
pondering we were all doing, as with his paraphrasing of Shankara’s Saundarya
Lahari (The Upsurging Billows of
Beauty):
When you think like this, everything
becomes rati alone. No wonder Sankaracharya said: “With a glance from your
eyes, Oh Mother, this Eros wins the whole world. He has no proper bow; his bow
is only a sugar cane. He has no proper string for his bow, only bees. He has no
proper arrows to shoot; he has only five flower buds with him. He has no
minister except the Spring season. His chariot is the southern wind. But that
is enough—he is victorious.”
With this glorious image we are
invited to let the best of our inner promptings conquer us. The secret is not
to become knights-errant, journeying to the Holy Land to take back our
supposedly stolen possessions, but to allow ourselves to expand into the joyful
possibilities we embody, each of them clamoring for an opportunity for
expression in this world of endless miracles.
The
somewhat disjunct section at the end of the commentary was prompted in part by
the many people from around the world who were writing to Nitya to complain
about the pressures they were laboring under. They felt oppressed by their
families and social structures, and Nitya was a beacon of openness that they
looked to, often in desperation. He presided over many mixed caste marriages,
and gave his blessing to many more. He encouraged everyone to find their true
calling beyond the dictates of their various pressure groups. He was acutely
aware of the lethal burdens many parents foisted on their children, and strove
to show how disastrous they were for all concerned. His message finds
harmonious support in this verse, and his unitive conclusion is eloquent:
We
should be able to speak this way of all whom we love: “I and my love are not
two.” What great freedom it brings! What great relief it brings! And what great
freedom and relief it gives to others, also. It takes away all the rivalry,
competition, jealousy, bickering, insecurity—all with this one recognition, “That
knowledge is me and everything is That.”
People can have any kind of idea
about their own happiness. It’s okay. You don’t possess anyone. I consider this
the great liberation. It is a liberation you can experience here and now.
Part II
Neither This Nor That But . . . Aum:
According to Greek legends, there are three fundamentals:
Earth, Chaos and Eros. In Indian legends, kama (Eros) is coupled with rati.
Rati is the libidinal enjoyment of erotics. A creation myth is given in the
fourth section of the first chapter of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. According
to it, the first person that came into being was unhappy being alone. This
being, longing for a mate, grew to the size of a man and a woman in embrace and
then split into two. Of the two, one half became the husband and the other the
wife. Fearing the guilt of incest, the woman disappeared and the entire space
became filled with the man's fascination for the woman. The woman changed into
the female form of every species on earth and the man mated with her by
becoming a male member of all corresponding species. Rati is the propelling
force which activates the ego into finding its gratification.
Sigmund
Freud borrowed from Moll (1898) the term “libido” to describe the dynamic
manifestation of sexuality. At first he thought there was a separation between
ego instincts and sexual instincts. In this libido theory he says:
What is described as the sexual
instinct turns out to be of a highly composite nature and is liable to
disintegrate once more into its component instincts. Each component instinct is
unalterably characterized by its source, that is, by the region or zone of the
body from which its excitation is derived. Each has furthermore as
distinguishable features an object and an aim. The aim is always discharge
accompanied by satisfaction, but it is capable of being changed from activity
to passivity. The object is less closely attached to the instinct than was at
first supposed; it is easily exchanged for another one, and moreover, an
instinct which had an external object can be turned round upon the subject's
own self. . . . The most important vicissitude which an instinct can undergo
seems to be sublimation; here both object and aim are changed so that what was
originally a sexual instinct finds satisfaction in some achievement which is no
longer sexual but has a higher social or ethical valuation.*
He further adds:
The ego is to be regarded as a
great reservoir of libido from which libido is sent out to objects and which is
always ready to absorb libido flowing back from objects. Thus the instincts of
self- preservation were also of a libidinal nature. . . . Clinical experience
had made us familiar with people who behaved in a striking fashion as though
they were in love with themselves and this perversion had been given the name
of narcissism.**
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, what Freud considers to be
a perversion is extolled as the only true love. No one loves anything more
dearly than one's own self. When the self is wrongly identified with the ego,
it projects the love for the self either on external objects of the senses or
on fantasies of the mind. Freud cannot see any end to this unquenchable zest of
the pleasure principle. Narayana Guru asks, “Where is an end to this?” He sees
one possible termination, and this happens when the knower knows that he is not
different from the one knowledge of which everything phenomenally apparent is
only a transient shadow.
*
Sigmund
Freud, Collected Papers, Vol. V, (London: Hogarth Press, 1952), pp. 132-33.
**
Ibid.
p. 133.
*
* *
Nataraja
Guru’s commentary is one of his best, revealing dialectical secrets of
self-realization:
WHEN the self is equated correctly with the non-self they
cancel themselves out in the Absolute. This is the epistemological law in the
light of which this verse will make meaning to the casual reader. When the
implied equation becomes an accomplished fact the process of unravelling of the
negative aspects of the personality goes on as a horizontalising process within
consciousness. The objective tension mounts up and then decreases when pure
thought reabsorbs it again into the domain of its own transparency. When
perfectly pure vertically, and when no element of objective opacity intervenes
between the self and the non-self, the process of unravelling of subjective
into objective elements comes to a stop and the equation succeeds in having the
full effect of making the subject and the object one. Before this term is
attained by contemplative self-realization in rare individuals capable of
verticalized and transparent unitive contemplation, the alternating process of
horizontalization and verticalisation goes on without any remission.
The continuity of the process includes as its natural
corollary the theory of
reincarnation taken for granted in Indian spiritual thought. Death is a forgetfulness of
the actual here and now aspects of life in favour of pure transparent thoughts
that are almost mathematical in content. When even the mathematical
implications of the vertical content of life are abolished there is breaking
from the process. This can take place within the relativistic frame of
reference or could be fully absolutist in its implication. In the latter case
the knower and the known merge into one unitive Absolute consciousness. Before
such a term is reached, relativistic processes of becoming, whether in the
gross outer sense or in the subtle inner sense must go on, now transparent in
content, now more and more opaque. Such is the ever-changeful alternating
process to which the ego-sense is subject, as analysed in the two previous
verses and further elaborated in the verses that follow, until the
subject-matter enters into the domain of pure thought by verse 84, where even
the earth is treated as a universal concrete.
The order in which this unravelling process is stated to go
on within consciousness warrants closer scrutiny. It is the ‘I’ sense that
first emerges. The unconscious rises into the conscious level of itself with
this first unravelling event. As indicated in the 68th verse, there is the
body-sense that keeps alternating with the ‘I’ sense in which physical factors
tend to be more fully
abolished. The libido thus gets raised and unfolded into the stage of ego-consciousness,
after which the specialized doors of perception come to be added to this global
ego-sense. This process of specialisation goes one step further and expresses
itself as instruments of inner perception by means of which the brute
actuality, which the senses gain directly from objects outside, gets more and more
meaningful in view of any action that the organism as a whole might want to
take.
Manas, which is both positive and negative according to
circumstances, is further specialized at a higher level into
buddhi, which reasons and discriminates between alternative
courses of action, selecting the advantageous as against the one that might be
disadvantageous. Cogitations involving the element of will that veils reality
when confused (‘vikalpa’), and reasons more clearly [when not confused] (‘samkalpa’),
alternate when the mind is in operation. At a still further state of positive
specialisation, ‘buddhi’ or the reasoning power becomes further transparent and
is able to enter into bipolar relations with objects of interest outside, or
with artistic or intellectual items of interest. This is the ‘chitta’ level in
the vertical series of specification of inner faculties. ‘Ahamkara’ (the ‘ego-sense’)
is imbued with a sense of one’s own individuation as a further specifying
factor.
Individuation pure and simple involves the objective
body-factor. This objective body-factor, thus socially individualised and fixed
in time and place, is not the same as the essential libido with which we
started, but is its more positive counterpart. Within the limits of the libido
and this objectified notion of the person, self-knowledge can live and move, and
such a process could go on unremittingly till full identity between subject and
object is established by contemplative self-realization marking the term to
this process of unravelling.
The Samkhya theory in respect of the factors that evolve
within consciousness has been worked out by various
philosophers of that school. (Cf. intro. pages 26-29 Samkhya-Karika of Isvara
Krishna, University of Madras, 1948). It is Prakriti (Nature) as opposed to
Purusha (Spirit) that evolves and unravels into the elements of Mahat,
Ahamkara and the three subdivisions and further ramifications of
tattvas (first principles) based on the three gunas (sattva, rajas
and tamas), culminating in the gross manifestations of the mahabhutas or the
five classical elements such as sky, air, fire, water and earth. The Saiva
Siddhanta and the Paramartha school of Samkhya all have their varied versions
of the process of unravelling of the elements of the self. Ranging from the
libido on one side to the object of attraction or interest is the picture presented by the
Guru here. The Guru’s version excels in that it conforms more to the findings
of the experimental psychology and analytical psychology of our times. A theory
of aesthetics and ethics is also implied therein. The revaluation implied here
is of great value to the student of comparative philosophy and psychology. The
duality between ‘Prakriti’ (Nature), horizontally conceived as subject to gross
evolution, and the pure ‘Purusha’ (Spirit), which has no participation with
nature, is abolished by bringing in the libido at one extreme and the object of
attraction as its positive counterpart. Scientific validity and metaphysical
correctness are combined here without duality. This kind of unravelling is to
be understood in the light of what is indicated below in verse 71.
Part III
Verse
70 has long been a favorite of Susan’s, and she shared some of her feelings
with us:
When rereading the verse, I realized that the ending part
(and particularly the following paragraphs) really gave me a lot of solace
several years ago when I was feeling sad and somewhat desperate about my kids
being away from me (summer camps or school trips). You actually told me to look
at this section:
"For all of us, the presence
of such a great love is always nurtured in the heart. It is only when we feel
an outer event has taken it away from us that we feel the vacuum. But if we
realize that our love was always an image in us—born of our own Self, our own
consciousness—then we know that nothing really happens at any time. The same
son is there where he was: in the same heart. There is really no separation.
If a mother knows
this, she can allow her son a lot of freedom. He doesn’t have to become a
framed portrait sitting on her table all the time. Does she really want to put
her son into a frame and keep him fixed there so she can always look at him? Of
course not. She can give him all the freedom he wants, since she can say “My
son continues to live in my heart, where he has always lived. I and my son are not
two.” Jesus also said, “I and my Father are not two.”
We should be able
to speak this way of all whom we love: “I and my love are not two.” What great
freedom it brings! What great relief it brings! And what great freedom and
relief it gives to others, also. It takes away all the rivalry, competition,
jealousy, bickering, insecurity—all with this one recognition, “That knowledge
is me and everything is That.” (p. 486)
Being reminded that my children are always right with me,
because of all the love we have shared and because we are all That, made so
much sense. It felt just right. Now that I am literally on the eve of taking my
son (second and last child) to college, this commentary is all the more
poignant for me. I tend to look at partings with trepidation and a
sinking feeling. These paragraphs (and the verse) remind me not to focus on
division. I am not just about me and I don’t stop with my skin. Our senses and
our culture make it seem that we are separate individuals, coming and going in our
own little spaces. How great to be reminded that that separation is a mirage
and that we are connected so much more than we know. When I allow that way of
thinking, my little universe expands and my anxiety decreases.
This understanding has helped me not only with my sadness
about separating from my children but also with the day to day conception of
myself in the world. It helps me to feel lighter and enables an inner flow that
is too hard to explain at the moment. I’ll put it in the mystery category.
Pretty great stuff.
Aum,
Susan
*
* *
Physicist
Max Tegmark comes to a similar conclusion to Narayana Guru that we are nothing
but knowledge. Here’s how he frames it:
Your
reality model includes a model of yourself—that’s why you’re not merely aware
but also self-aware. This means that when you feel that you’re looking at this
book, what’s really going on is that your brain’s reality model has its model
of you looking at its model of the book…. Which leads to the ultimate
consciousness question: who’s looking at your brain’s reality model, to give
rise to subjective consciousness? Here’s my guess: nobody! If there were another part of your brain that really looked
at the whole reality model and became aware of all the information in it, then
this brain region would need to physically transfer all that information into
its own local copy. This would be a huge waste of resources from an
evolutionary perspective, and there’s no evidence from neuroscience research of
such wasteful duplication. Moreover, it wouldn’t answer the question: if a
spectator is really needed, then this duplicate reality model would in turn
need a spectator to be subjectively perceived, leading to another infinite
regress problem.
Rather,
my guess is that the answer is beautifully simple: no spectator is needed
because your consciousness basically is
your reality model. I think that
consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain
complex ways. Since the different parts of your brain interact with each
other, different parts of your reality model can interact with each other, so
the model of you can interact with your model of the outside world, giving rise
to the subjective sensation of the former perceiving the latter. When you’re
looking at a strawberry, your brain’s model of the color red feels subjectively
very real—and so does your brain’s model of your mind’s eye as an observing
vantage point. We already know that our brain is astonishingly creative in
interpreting the same basic types of electrical signals in a bundle of neurons
as qualia that subjectively feel completely different: we perceive them as
colors, sounds, smells, tastes or touches, depending on whether the neuron
bundle comes from our eyes, ears, nose, mouth or skin. The key difference lies
not in the neurons that carry this information, but in the patterns whereby
they’re connected. Although your perception of yourself and your perception of
the strawberry are extremely different, it’s therefore plausible that they’re
both fundamentally the same kind of thing: complex patterns in spacetime. In
other words, I’m arguing that your perceptions of having a self, that
subjective vantage point that you call “I,” are qualia just as your subjective
perceptions of “red” or “green” are. In short, redness and self-awareness are
both qualia. (289-90)
(Max Tegmark, Our
Mathematical Universe, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
*
* *
Andy
was musing about addiction and how it related to this verse, how projecting our
happiness onto outside substances creates bondage that is difficult or
impossible to overcome. My feeling is that we are all addicted to
externalities, but at least we have more options when they don’t involve
chemicals that produce irresistible physical dependency.
I’m
doing a final runthrough of my Chapter XIV Gita commentary, dealing with the
three gunas (sattva, rajas, tamas), and thought this paragraph worthy of
passing along:
Our
spiritual heart presses us to seek a higher state of mind in which its pains
will be eased. The sattvic approach is through yoga, meditation, clean living,
psychedelic exploration and the like. Rajas seeks dissolution through activity,
through throwing ourselves into the fray, and “giving it everything we’ve got.”
Quite a few spiritual, or at least religious, programs offer dissolution
through busyness, through works or service. Tamas makes the mistake of numbing
the brain for release. As the next verse points out, when we come back down we
are still tamasic, and our energy will be directed to renumbing ourselves with
yet another soporific medicine. Such a misdirected path quickly leads to
addiction, because each dose offers only temporary relief without resolving
anything.
*
* *
Jake’s
commentary:
In
verse 70 and Nitya’s commentary on it, several principles emerge that are flat
out heresy for both western atheists and religionists. Both share the assumption
that objects
external to ourselves stimulate our reactions to them. The sophomoric psychological
question
concerning the noise created by an unobserved falling tree (often posed by
undergraduate instructors) captures, I think, this idea. The prefabricated answer
is that no
sound could be created where no human agent existed. But the premise that the object’s action precedes perception
constitutes an even more fundamental assumption. Because the real
world is that of objects and forms, in this construction, our perceptions are
secondary, one could say derivative and dependent. As an anchor for social manipulation, few unstated premises
rival the power of this notion that the manifest world outside the Self is the
true and the real and that our Selves are vehicles through which we respond to
it. It is in charge by way of its
experts, priests, and propagandists who rely on this bedrock belief.
The
Vedantists, writes, Nitya, point out “there is only one reality, called Akahanda
Caitanya, unbroken
consciousness” (p. 482). Our
division of manifest self into the knower, doer, enjoyer are fragments of that
Absolute and when we focus attention on objects, both the objects and the
observer are, too, fragments in that totality united through sensory acts. Likewise,
writes Nitya, when the mind
turns inward seeking pleasure/happiness internally in the form of fantasies or
imagination, it cobbles together bits of memory in order to construct whatever
it decides to make. Works of art,
literature in all senses of the word, and so on, are common expressions of this
kind of work. As Nitya points out,
“whether you are seeking enjoyment in the field of your own fantasy or with
actual objects, it is always nothing more than the play of consciousness.”
Starting,
then, with a whole oneness of all the cosmos and our then splintering off onto
our manifest missions within that wholeness we are driven by what the Guru
calls rati in the first line of his
verse. Divided at our creation,
according to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad,
we enter manifestation driven to reconnect with that which completes us. This
drive, sometimes called libido in the West (but which indicates
much more than the sex drive only) works through our tripartite selves of
knower, doer, enjoyer. Doing and
knowing are driven by our peculiarities as an enjoying self. In other words,
knowledge for its own
sake is uninteresting to us and pointlessly pursuing it holds little
fascination. It is in the enjoyer
that the other two aspects find meaning, and meaning, value, determines the
course of any individual’s rati.
The
upshot of the preceding set of circumstances leads to a conclusion both
materialists and moralizers find repellant: “ultimately, the object of your
pleasure is your own self. It is
for the sake of the self you desire everything” (p. 481). The Guru’s
first three lines, when
considered collectively, point directly to the consequences of our driven
search. Beginning at birth and
with our development of ego, the senses, the mind, and the body come to occupy
the stage on which this play is acted out, and for most there is no end. In our
frantic search to locate
ourselves “out there” we enter maya’s dualities of which our individual I
is now a part of. Both happiness and misery attach to
every thing.
In
his last two lines, the Guru gives his solution to this dilemma, a way out he
repeats throughout the verses generally.
Remembering that we are that
knowledge and that the world of becoming is an endless cycle of arising and
receding, we can step out of the illusion just enough not to be seduced by
it. Once we can arrive at such a
steady position, we may develop the wisdom to interact with others in constructive
ways that remove our own egos from the equation. Nitya illustrates this notion of how rati operates by narrating in general how he deals with people who
come to him “emotionally charged” and on the edge (p.484). Seeking
his counsel, they tearfully try
to put into words what is upsetting them, stumbling from one partial
explanation to the next.
Projecting their self-love onto external situations, they meander
between psychological breakdown and a letting go of the rati driving the whole enterprise. Nitya writes that he tries to remain sympathetic as the
person grapples with his or her misery but does not directly address the
misunderstanding at the heart of the matter. Nitya listens and offers words only at key points “but not
about them.”
In
his last two lines, the Guru reminds us to “remember” that we are “none other
than knowledge.” In his commentary
on those lines, Nitya concludes that in that re-collection we have an
opportunity to share the Guru’s advice with others, thereby locating in each of
us the power over our individual contemporary American lives. “You don’t
possess anyone,” concludes
Nitya, a philosophical position completely foreign to our political governors,
bureaucratic overlords, intellectual elites, cultural self-righteous
moralizers—and general population.
Part IV
It
occurred to me that one significant difference between Narayana Guru et al and
Freud is that Freud postulated pure self-interest as the central motivator in
humans, while the gurus proclaim Self-interest. The rishis have met face to
face with a benign—it could even be called it wise—force capable of incredible
acts of organization, resulting in the coherent world of endless complexity we
find ourselves astonished by. Both schools of thought discern a master impetus
behind the surface play of events, and both recognize the presence of
selfishness as a key factor, but the gurus add a more fundamental elan vital that
goes well beyond
immediate gratification to unobtrusively organize immense possibilities for us
to participate in. They insist this factor is objectively verifiable, that it
is not a postulate but a reality we can invite into our daily lives, and that
even when we remain ignorant of its presence it is sculpting our unfoldment.
Carl
Jung sensed something like this, a more universal guiding force he termed the
collective unconscious. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. As Nitya
will tell us in the next verse, “Do not try to give it a name.” Despite the
differences, all are united in being sure of what scientific observation has
recently confirmed: that the world we think we perceive is merely an appearance
we generate to make sense of unseen forces. It does make a difference whether
we conceive of these forces as benign or demonic, so that we either welcome
them or reject them. This crucial bit is the fulcrum on which our state of mind
pivots. So without necessarily naming it, we might hazard a frame of mind of
openness and eager anticipation.
*
* *
(Not
sent out):
Dear Scott,
Even though you feel miles and miles away, I just want to
say that your notes on verse 70 were truly lovely. I like the way you started
with the real bees, comparing them with class members all buzzing busily in
their own circles but together producing the best of honey. And then rounding
off with a touch of bees again, in the “Billows of Beauty” quote. An amazing
poetic balance taken as a whole.
Many are the apt metaphors you create. Recently there
was one about focusing less on the warp and woof of light and dark threads,
good and evil acts, and more on the tapestry of life as a whole.
“Like a good friend bringing gifts of sweets, the mind
will
always gratify us by bringing a few glittering metaphors gathered from its
contemplative intuitions. Such is the magical phenomena of the mind to
which the devas make their appeal.”
(BU, p. 71)
As always, thank you for all your dedicated and loving
writing and thought.
Jean
