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"life force"
Page 82
In contrast with the vigorous, powerful, complicated, and often mischievous Gurdjieff, Pak Subuh seems al- most a shadow. This is probably what he would wish, for he believes that he himself has no power—it is the Divine Life Force which moves him and all his followers. Yet at Gurdjieff's death, some of his pupils turned to Subuh asa natural continuation of Gurdjieff’s teaching.
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real difference between Gurdjieff's teaching and Pak Subuh’s. For Gurdjieff believed that man must make the effort himself to realize his essence; whereas Subuh be- lieves that only God, or the Life-Force, can help man—he cannot do it alone. Pak Subuh has no exercises or methods except that of emptying oneself of thoughts and feelings as far as is possible so that the Life-Force can enter and purify one. This is done during latihan (spiritual training) by a transmission from one who is already opened to the Force.
Page 105
You must allow God to act within you through the working of the great Life Force, says Pak Subuh. The action is similar to allowing a friend to take you by the hand and guide you—whatever he wants to do, you sub- mit to it. This is the meaning of surrender to God, in Pak Subuh’s view.
Page 105
Subud is the abbreviation of three words—Susila, Budhi, Dharma. Susila means man’s true character when he acts in accordance with the will of God; Budhi is man’s divine life-force as man encounters it within himself; Dharma means man’s full surrender to the will of God.
Page 106
There are five life-forces, or levels, he believes, which dominate the ordinary human being, and of whose pres- ence he is usually unaware because he believes himself to be his own master. The three lower forces comprise the very nature of the physical world itself and at the same time each one—matter, plant, and animal—is a sphere on its own. Above them is the human, or fourth, level; and the fifth level is comprised of those expressions of the life-force that are superior to humans.
Page 108
enslaved by his stomach—the plant life-force of which he is partly composed is able to make contact with the plant world outside and this, says Bapak, “resembles a long- awaited meeting between husband and wife.” Because man can accomplish this plant reunion, his wisdom is worshiped by the lesser power, who has longed for his help.
Page 108
The way in which these three levels exist in man is by being eaten. Humans, however, do not eat each other so the human level of the life-force arises in a different way. Interaction on the human level comes about through sex- ual intercourse. Sexual union implies the act of creation and Bapak sees man becoming the creative field in which the world can develop—he likens the human body to that of a soil which varies in its fertility so that different people correspond to different soils, the highest being the “golden earth.”
Page 110
The way to receive the Power, says Bapak, is to become empty and still within the mind and heart, so quiet that all thoughts and emotions die down. The thinking mind, in particular, is the instrument of whatever powers are uppermost—man can never apprehend his spiritual inner feelings with his superficial thinking-mind. It must quiet down and be replaced by the powerful Life Force of God. This Life Force, the nature of which is entirely beyond his capacity to grasp, is the only true help man has. His thinking brain is an excellent tool and should be de- veloped to its full strength by ordinary methods; but its field of operation is the outer world and it cannot be used to understand the reality of God. One remembers, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”
Page 110
How can this submission come about? Bapak’s answer lies in the latihan, the spiritual training which is the core of Subud, and is also its great distinguishing feature. For the power of the Life Force is transmitted during the latihan, in the first instance only, by the people called “helpers,” who are appointed by Bapak to “open” their fellow men. This “opening” is not, however, anything personally to do with Bapak or the helpers. They are merely the channel through which the force is transmit- ted. Anyone may attend a latihan and be opened in this way. It is aclassless and race-free aid to religion in which few are refused, although it is occasionally felt advisable that a person should not receive the latihan until his
Page 113
Subud is not a separate religion. Its members come from all the established religions and find that, because of the latihan, their understanding of their own religion is greater (perhaps, as well, because they have learned to surrender their self-will). Bapak, himself, as the instigator of Subud and the original “transmitter” of the force, is regarded as a prophet by many of his “children,” al- though he refuses to think of himself as anything but the most ordinary of men. For it is not he but the Life Force which is the dynamic opener, he is merely a family man and lives in that way.
Page 113
Bapak’s complete confidence in the Life Force, rather than in man’s own efforts at self-transcendence, may seem deceptively submissive to those of us who have not been touched by it. For although man must, perhaps, ultimately see himself as nothing and the power of God as everything, although he should eventually surrender himself wholly—yet are not his struggling attempts to do so the very rungs of his ladder? To replace his own in- sights and affirmations which often arise from setbacks and doubts, by a force seemingly transmitted effortlessly
Page 248
Chokmah and Binah, then, represent essential maleness and femaleness in their creative aspects. They are not phallic images as such, but in them is the root of all life-force. We shall never understand the deeper aspects of esotericism unless we realise what phallicism really means. It most em- phatically does not mean the orgies in the temples of Aphro- dite that disgraced the decadence of the pagan faiths of the ancients and brought about their downfall; it means that everything rests upon the principle of the stimulation of the inert yet all-potential by the dynamic principle which de- rives its energy direct from the source of all energy. In this concept lie tremendous keys of knowledge; it is one of the most important points in the Mysteries. It is obvious that sex represents one aspect of this factor; it is equally obvious that there are many other applications of it which are not sexual. We must not allow any preconceived concept of what consti- tutes sex, or a conventional attitude towards this great and vital subject, to frighten us away from the great principle of the stimulation or fecundation of the inert all-potential by the active principle. Whosoever is thus inhibited is unfit for the Mysteries, over whose portal was written the words, “Know thyself.”
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experience
Page n8
“Whoever knows that he knows must be amazed,” says Alan Watts. And it is just this sense of existential wonder that forms the background to this book. “Who am I?” and “What is this world that I am in?” are the questions that arise from the awareness that I am. To find the answers, people feel a need to go beyond words and to experience the truth about themselves. It is this longing for real meaning that has led many to look for guidance from the mystics and sages who, consequently, have leaped into prominence.
Page n9
on the periphery of experience. There is a form of intellectual insight that moves many theologians to take up their pens, and which provides a background of discussion for all sorts of conferences and weekend schools. This pleasant skirmishing often produces good talk, but has little to do with real insight and has its rightful place in other books.
Page n9
Three criteria have governed the choice of subjects for this book. One criterion has been integrity of approach; another has been the international reputation of the sage; the third has been the originality of his teaching. Not all subjects have all three qualifications—some, for instance, are considerably bet- ter known than others. But all have a certain quality of inten- sity about them that makes them at least worth reading. There is not a great deal of difference between a mystic and a sage, but enough to call them by different names. A mystic seeks direct experience of, and communion with, the divine; his whole life centers around this purpose. He tends to be solitary and to communicate his understanding through books. A sage, on the other hand, is a wise man who is perceptive, discern- ing, and thoughtful about life in general. He, too, pivots him- self on the wish to experience the truth of existence and he, too, may write a lot of books. But he tends to be more outward-tumed than the mystic and more taken up with teaching and advising; he originates methods and attracts disciples.
Page n10
The mystery of man’s own internal identity—who and what he is when he apprehends himself as “I’”—has tumed out to be the central concern of most of the mystics and sages, and the biggest snag to placing all these highly different personal teachings and philosophies within the covers of one book has been the many interpretations of this central word “I.” They range from Ramana Maharshi’s, in which he points out that the feeling of “I,” when detached from body and mind, is itself the supreme Consciousness; to Alan Watts’s “I” which, he believes, cannot be found apart from experience (“you don’t think thoughts any more than you hear hearing or smell smelling’). Because the nature of “T’ is regarded in so many different ways, the subjects have been grouped. Cross- references can then be followed easily and the discoveries of one mystic can amplify another. Consequently, a short preface to each group precedes it (except for Mother Theresa, who needs no introduction), so that the reader can have some idea of the seas into which he is about to plunge.
Page n12
This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Alan Watts, John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., copyright U.S. and Canada by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.; Beyond Theol- ogy, Alan Watts, Hodder and Stoughton, copyright U.S., Canada, and the Open Market by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.; In My Own Way, Alan Watts, Jonathan Cape, copyright U.S., Canada, and the Open Market by Pantheon Books, a Division of
Page 1
The bridge builders come from sharply var- ied backgrounds, but the first three hold at least one thing in common—their understanding that aspects of the truth are found in both Eastern and Western religion. In the case of Aldous Huxley, the belief that there was any truth to find at all took some time to mature. All his later years were spent in a search for the mystical experience, and he remained, to the end of his life, preponderantly an intel- lectual man with moments of real insight rather than a true mystic. His brilliant command of language, however, makes him easy to understand, and his descriptions of his experiences are wonderfully direct and uncomplicated. Wherever he saw the truth expressed, he knew it. Thus his Perennial Philosophy, a book in which he links many spiritual writings and sayings from all of the religions, is not merely a collection of excellent quotations; it is a deeply spiritual book which has helped many people
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gain a clearer understanding of what they are looking for. This book, perhaps more than any of his others, is the firmest bridge for people to cross between their person- hood and the mystical experience.
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Alan Watts, also English in origin and also domiciled in California, became adept at comparing the central truths of Christianity (for some years he was an Episcopalian minister) with those of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism—religions which he deeply loved. He was very moved by his own experience of egolessness, and he evolved a personal philosophy from this experience which he linked with both Eastern and Western religion, thus becoming one of the most stimulating mystical philosophers of our time. His own beliefs centered around the crucial problem of human identity and his greatest attacks were on the common feeling of being an “IT” di- vorced from everything else, even from its own experi- ence. The “I” does not feel feelings or think thoughts, he said, any more than it smells smelling. He, too, is an easy writer to read and an entertaining builder of bridges, with a love of language and an especial fondness for puns.
Page 2
Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, gradu- ally moved away from a rather over intense in- Christianity to an illumined understanding of Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. His insights came through his own contemplative life and mystical realization, and, to some extent, he was able to isolate the contemplative experience and write about it clearly and freely. His overwhelming interest in every- | thing to do with contemplation made him entirely at home in Zen and Taoism, and his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, a great Japanese exponent of Zen, gave him such an insight into its practices that he seemed able, shortly before his untimely death, to reach right through the outer trappings of both Christianity and Buddhism to the
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ground of pure, direct experience from which they have both sprung.
Page 7
Separation, diversity—conditions of our existence. Condi- tions upon which we possess life and consciousness, know right from wrong and have the power to choose between them, recognize truth, have experience of beauty. But sep- aration is evil. Evil, then, is the condition of life, the condi- tion of being aware, of knowing what is good and beautiful ... even with the best will in the world, the separate, evil universe of a person or a physical pattern can never unite itself completely with other lives and beings, or the totality of life and being. Even for the highest goodness the struggle is
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of being. To experience it in the act of love and compassion.
Page 8
To experience it on another plane through meditation, in the
Page 8
Mescaline gave him the actual experience of a condi- tion in which duality was transcended (“no subject, no object,” he kept repeating happily), for which he had been searching so long. Religions had helped him to approach this state intellectually but had never taken him there, and, in fact, during the early part of his life, he had discarded dogmatic religion altogether and had de- veloped a cynical agnosticism, especially when he vis-
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It was while he was associated with Trabusco College that he wrote The Perennial Philosophy, his own “eter- nity-philosophy,” a book which has stimulated many people. It is a book about mystical experience and is based, he said, “on direct experience, as the arguments of the physical scientists are based on direct sense impres- sions.” Using quotations from Eastern and Western mys- tics, he writes about the great themes of existence —suffering, contemplation, charity, self-knowledge, grace, and others. It is a beautifully compiled book, but Huxley was still trapped in his intellect—the mystics themselves seem to glow with wisdom, and it is they who make the book memorable. Huxley, like a clever spider, weaves a finely worded web which holds his captured jewels together, but he himself is not one of them.
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sheep and goats: ... It is a fact, confirmed and re-confirmed during two or three thousand years of religious history, that the ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. This being so, it is hardly surprising that theology based upon the experience of nice, ordinary, unre- generate people should carry so little conviction. ... The self-validating certainty of direct awareness cannot in the very nature of things be achieved except by those equipped with the moral ‘astrolabe of God’s mysteries.®
Page 10
Huxley saw part of the truth but knew that he did not feel it. He lacked personal experience, barred from it by his own whirling intellect which could see all the view- points but commit itself to none, and by the exciting panorama of the world, which continually provided him with new food for thought. “Glimpses ... glimpses... sick or well, Aldous was always catching glimpses,” said his wife, Laura, “that ability of glimpsing, and expressing in part what he saw, made living fascinating. Aldous could experience immediate facts, moment by moment. Then—outside and inside the present facts—he could simultaneously perceive innumerable other, actual or po- tential, facts.’’6
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This first experience was, above all, radiant with light—and one remembers Huxley’s desperate lack of light during his boyhood blindness. Under mescaline,
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As well as light and color, this experience brought him a whiff of real nonduality. His “doors of perception were cleansed” and he found “the percept had swallowed up the concept”:
Page 13
There was absolutely no recall. Instead there was some- thing of incomparably greater importance; for what came through the opened door was the realisation—not the know]l- edge, for this wasn’t verbal or abstract—but the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains. . . I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been. The result was that I did not, as in the first experience, feel cut off from the human world. I was intensely aware of it, but from the standpoint of the living primordial cosmic fact of Love. And the things which had entirely filled my attention on that first occasion, I now per- ceived to be temptations—temptations to escape from the central reality into false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge."
Page 13
Because both mescaline and lysergic acid (LSD) had played such a remarkable part in Huxley’s “enlighten- ment,” he regarded them as entirely beneficial, a means of saving the human race. He argued that because most believers regard God as entirely spirit, only to be ap- proached by spiritual means, they would not believe that a divine experience could be brought about by chemical conditioning. But, he said, “In one way or another, all our
Page 14
But who knows, perhaps he was right. Even though the action of LSD does not always bring “gratuitous Grace,” a whole new generation of “aspiring mystics” has emerged who are demanding transcendental experience
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... 1 had been attempting to practice what Buddhists call ‘recollection’ (smriti) or constant awareness of the im- mediate present as distinct from the usual distracted ram- bling of reminiscence and anticipation. But, in discussing it one evening, someone said to me, “But why try to live in the present? Surely we are always completely in the present even when we re thinking about the past or the future?’ This, actually quite obvious, remark again brought on the sudden sensation of having no weight. At the same time, the present seemed to become a kind of moving stillness, an eternal stream from which neither I nor anything could deviate. I saw that everything, just as it is now, is Ir—is the whole point of there being life and a universe. I saw that when the Upanishads said, ‘That art thou!’ or “All this world is Brahman, they meant just exactly what they said. Each thing, each event, each experience in its inescapable nowness and in all its own particular individuality was precisely what it should be, and so much so that it acquired a divine authority and originality. It struck me with the fullest clarity that none of this depended on my seeing it to be so; that was the way things were, whether I understood it or not, and if I did not understand, that was IT too. Furthermore, I felt that I now understood what Christianity might mean by the love of
Page 23
He was convinced that the feeling of a separate “I” divorced from nature was the result and also, in a vicious circle, the cause of various fallacies and delusions by which people live. One such fallacy is the idea that the past and the future actually exist. He pointed out that our awareness of the past is now, in the present. We cannot compare what happened in the past with what is happen- ing now; we can only compare the memory of it with present experience, thus memory becomes a part of pres- ent experience. Likewise the future can only be supposi- tion felt in the present moment. When this is seen clearly, he said, it can also be seen that the “I” distinct from experience simply does not exist. There is only experi-
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You do not feel feelings, think thoughts, or sense sensa- tions any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling. “I feel fine’’ means that a fine feeling is present. It does not mean that there is one thing called “I” and another separate thing called a feeling, so that when you bring them together this “I’”’ feels the fine feeling. There are no feelings but present feelings and whatever feeling is present is “I”. No one ever found an “I” apart from some present experi- ence, or some experience apart from an “I’’—which is only to say that the two are the same thing.®
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Watts believes that the feeling of an “I” distinct from experience is brought about by memory and by the rapid- ity with which thoughts follow one another. If one falsely thinks that memory is a reliving of the past, then one has the impression of knowing the past and the present at the same time, both directly. This gives the feeling of a con- tinuous experiencer who knows both and can connect them. This in itself might not matter except that humans build such a life of misery for themselves based on this illusion:
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pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ‘I’ out of the experience... . While the notion that I am separate from my experience remains, there is confusion and turmoil. Because of this, there is neither awareness nor understanding of experience, and thus no real possibility of assimilating it. To understand this moment I must not try to be divided from it; I must be aware of it with my whole being. This, like refraining from holding my breath for ten minutes, is not something I should do. In reality, it is the only thing I can do. Everything else is the insanity of attempting the impossible.®
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and verbs obviously translate what is going on in the world into particular things (nouns) and events (verbs), and these in turn ‘have’ properties (adjectives and ad- verbs) more or less separable from them. All such lan- guages represent the world as if it were an assemblage of distinct bits and particles. The defect of such grids is that they screen out or ignore (or repress) interrelations.” 4 For the reality, which is the basis of everyday life, is never static or fixed in the way the word that represents it is. A fleeting, fluid, ever-changing field of experience, ungraspable because you can only be it, not have it, fright- ens many people very much indeed. But mind-con- structions such as thoughts and ideas, can be grasped and held and most people not only prefer an idea about the thing to the thing itself but have actually forgotten or never understood that the word only symbolizes reality, and an idea is only a pattern of thought.
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But words always fall so far short of experience that they are probably better not used, which is why the East- ern religions usually describe by negatives—“not this, not that, nor any thing which can be comprehended.” Watts was keenly aware of the misleading nature of words: “But the fact that 1r eludes every description must not, as happens so often, be mistaken for the description of IT as the airiest of abstractions, as a literal transparent
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Merton saw a good deal of both types and some of his books openly criticize the ways and moods of monks. He repudiated particularly the opinions of those who tried to define the experience of contemplation in psychological terms or with scientific definitions. In Christianity there is a distinction drawn between meditation and contem- plation. Meditation is a discussion in the mind, a silent working-out of a theme. Contemplation is a wordless nearness to God, an experience of being—unnecessary to the ways and natures of many monks, just as spiritual realities are often unnecessary to a busy religious life.
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This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he “thinks.” If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some “thing” alien to himself. And he proves that the “thing”’ exists. He convinces himself: “I am therefore some thing.” And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infi- nite, the transcendent, is also a “thing,” an “object,” like other finite and limited objects of our thought!
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As long as there is an “I” that is the definite subject of a contemplative experience, an “I” that is aware of itself and of its contemplation, an “IT” that can possess a certain “degree of spirituality’, then we have not yet passed over the Red Sea, we have not yet “gone out of Egypt’. We remain in the realm of multiplicity, activity, incompleteness, striving and desire. The true inner self, the true indestructible and immortal person, the true “I” who answers to a new and secret name known only to himself and God, does not “have” anything, even “contemplation.” This “I” is not the kind of subject that can amass experiences, reflect on them, reflect on himself, for this “I’’ is not the superficial and empirical self that we know in our everyday life.®
Page 52
There seem to be two ways in which religious people regard the world and time. One is Teilhard’s, in which some sort of perfection will be reached at an infinitely distant period. This way regards the present experience of life as incomplete in itself. It is merely a step towards a future goal. It often sees divine patterns revealing themselves—and events which do not fit in are ig- nored—as Teilhard was inclined to ignore suffering. This religious path demands concentration upon a goal which can never be realized now—it is in some vague and far off future. This attitude of mind is shared by all religions —there are many Hindus and Buddhists who believe that merging with the Self, or Nirvana, can only be reached after innumerable lifetimes.
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The feeling of “I’’ to Krishnamurti, is based on false beliefs. When this feeling is dropped, the awareness of what is here and now is complete and is no longer divided and altered by the choices of the I-ego. To say, for in- stance, “I am aware’ is to put an unnecessary division between the experiencing subject and the experience. The mind is conditioned to believe in “I,” says Krish- namurti, but when it can drop its conditioning (the way it has been taught to think) the feeling of “I” changes and becomes at one with existence, no longer separate from it. For many people, this argument is too difficult to under- stand and so Krishnamurti urges his hearers to become aware of life in a way which is choiceless, and to experi- ence this choiceless awareness now.
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Krishnamurti has perhaps uncovered—as did Alan Watts—a valuable light on the structure of the ego; on the sensation of isolated separateness within one’s skin which can lead not to humility but to power, not to love but to hatred and destruction. People in the oldest civili- zations and in present-day primitive ones seem to have less consciousness of separateness and less feeling of individual ego-centeredness than we do. The sensation of separateness seems closely linked to humanity’s in- creased ability to think in abstract terms, to separate life from the experience of it by the use of a word. Man lives
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by the symbol of the word rather than by real experience and this endangers his natural humanhood which be- comes abstract rather than actual. When he is not actual, not immediately real to himself, man is driven into re- moteness and isolation. His ego no longer derives its power from the moment, but from reactions to old storehouse memories which are taken out and dressed in the symbols of a new situation.
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It is only when the mind is tranquil but alert, Krish- namurti says, that it can really observe things properly. Occasionally we experience this without effort when faced with something awe-inspiring or great, such as a stormy sea, a magnificent sunset, or a superb building. Then the mind becomes completely quiet, if only for a split second. Krishnamurti points out that a child, when given a new toy, is completely absorbed by it. In the same way, he says, the greatness of the sea or the beauty
Page 74
A Zen way of purifying the mind is to exhort a pupil to “See, but don’t think!” In particular, Krishnamurti re- gards the conditioned memories of childhood as respon- sible for much of our thinking, and for many of our fears. If a fear, such as that for a wild animal, is based on the memory of something read or heard and not on actual experience of the animal, then there can only be the same old reaction of fear when the animal is actually encoun- tered. This sort of fear, which is not based on personal observation (the wild animal may, in fact, be quite friendly), has a paralyzing and destructive effect which would soon be sensed and acted on by the animal. But an action of the mind that makes one merely aware of the fear without identifying the mind with it is a complete action and will lead to the right response. So that if one encounters a tiger in the road, one should not feel an automatic fear of it, for this is conditioned fear, but only
Page 77
Is there a thinker, an observer, a watcher apart from thought, apart from thinking, apart from experience? Is there a thinker, a centre, without thought? If you remove thought, is there a centre? If you have no thoughtat all, no struggle, no urge to acquire, no effort to become something, is there a centre? Or is the centre created by thought, which feels itself to be insecure, impermanent, in a state of flux?
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Now, can the mind be aware of itself in action, in move- ment, without a centre? I think it can. It is possible when there is only an awareness of thinking, and not the thinker who is thinking. You know, it is quite an experience to realise that there is only thinking. And it is very difficult to experi- ence that, because the thinker is habitually there, evaluating, judging, condemning, comparing, identifying. If the thinker ceases to identify, evaluate, judge,.then there is only think- ing, without the centre."
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By motive, Krishnamurti means attachment to results. If we do the best we can for whatever situation tums up, without trying to influence or cling to the result, we will be motiveless in the sense that our motive is not centered on self-interest. Perhaps this sounds drearily austere —we are so used to connecting happiness with acquiring some experience for the self that we rarely step outside this circle. But to serve the situation for its own sake is strangely rewarding. To relate to things without attach- ment, just for their own sake, means that I am out of their way, allowing them to have their own existence, pure and unstained, no longer derived from the dead fringes of my projected thoughts and feelings:
Page 78
Being aware does not mean learning and accumulating lessons from life; on the contrary, to be aware is to be without the scars of accumulated experience. After all, when the mind merely gathers experience according to its own wishes, it remains very shallow, superficial. ... Awareness comes into being naturally, easily, spontaneously, when we under- stand the centre which is everlastingly seeking experience, sensation. A mind which seeks sensation through experience becomes insensitive, incapable of swift movement and therefore it is never free. But in understanding its own self- centered activities, the mind comes upon this state of aware- ness which is choiceless, and such a mind is then capable of
Page 79
Creative stillness is not the end-result of a calculating, disciplined and widely-informed mind. It comes into being only when we understand the falsity of the whole process of endlessly seeking sensation through experience. Without that inward stillness, all our speculations about reality, all the philosophies, the systems of ethics, the religions, have very little significance. It is only the still mind which can know infinity.!*
Page 92
What is man’s essence? It would be easy if one could say that Gurdjieff meant God by this term; for the sim- plest and most penetrating idea about man’s existence is that he gains the experience of the beingness of God as he drops his self-absorption, his identification with his small, created self.
Page 94
In his teaching Gurdjieff was highly aware of three psychological factors. One is that people generally do not take in what they are told; in order to know a thing they must experience it, be it. Another is that an intense ex- perience sharpens the mind and wakes it up. And thirdly, an experience itself, if repeated too often, results in a deadening of the mind so that people will revert to machine reactions—the mind is so caught up in concepts and dreams that they wander through the world without
Page 104
He was walking with some friends on a dark, moonless night, when, he says, a ball of light seeming to resemble the sun appeared above his head. It then seemed to enter him and he was filled with the feeling of vibrating forces. Believing that this would be his death, he went home and lay down, but as soon as he relaxed an unknown force impelled him to stand up and go through the Muslim ritual of prayer. He recounts that for the next three years he rarely slept but was visited every night by visions and by the same impelling force which moved his limbs with- out his volition. During this time, an understanding grew in him that the extraordinary force was cleansing and purifying his body and soul, and that the movements he made and the sounds which emerged from him were the expressions of inner purification. He became certain that his experience was alatihan, the Javanese word for train- ing, and that the force which manipulated him was di- vine. He believed that his own submission to this force and his surrender to it had allowed it to “open” him. He realized that surrender was the great key which unlocks the human heart to the will of God.
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Although it is constantly referred to as the power of God, Bapak takes care not to claim that the force actually does come from God for, he says, only God can know this. What is received, he says, comes from a stream of life beyond the reach of the lower forces and also beyond anything that could be termed magic. But he cannot ex- plain or categorize this stream. In fact it is useless to talk about it, he says, for explanations, however high- sounding, are only projections of the thinking mind and the imagination. The proper answer to those who want to know what it is, is that they must come and experience it for themselves. They will then know the facts, rather than words about them.
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A strange experience in his late teens sparked off his spiritual career. Until then he had been, apparently, a carefree, clever young man, uninterested in anything but his studies at the university and his social life. One eve- ning, cycling back from college, he drew close to the small hut of an old Muslim woman, Hazrat Babajan, who was said to be a fakir. To his surprise she appeared and beck- oned to him. He got off his bicycle and went up to her. They didn’t speak but she clasped his hands and then kissed his forehead.
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“God can always be captured by love,” said Baba. Cer- tainly it would be hard for many people if God had to be captured by intelligence or reason. Perhaps Baba spoke good sense, for the real abandoning of self occurs when you or I cease trying to better the “self” in any way, even the most spiritual way. When I drop, or gladly cast aside, my sense of separate selfhood, I do so because I want direct experience of being, of reality. I want to be actual and real, without barrier or guard, and my urge to do this is a‘revolution, felt completely and not only intellectu- ally. To call it love is true but it also transcends ordinary love as the sun pales a candle. “God is captured by love”
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need of them. “It is because of the five Perfect Masters that I appear here before you,” he said. “They fetch me down, and I experience myself as everything and tell you that I am everything.’?
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Below the Perfect Masters in the chart, who live as both God and man, are a “very, very few people” who experi- ence the Perfect Master state without actually putting it into daily practice; and below these again, are a very few who “‘pass away into God” and experience infinite power, knowledge and bliss. Below these are a number of planes of existence, Mental and Subtle for the few, and Gross for most of us. In the outer universe are planets which contain Seven Kingdoms of Evolution below our own.
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His aim became clearer as time went on. He wanted to teach direct spiritual experience without the usual for- malities of ritual and worship. He seems to have been like an early Quaker among the Hindus. He spoke strongly against the Indian love of metaphysical argument and philosophical debate describing these as time-wasting pastimes for the intellectual, as games that destroy the intuitive realization of Reality. He asked, rather, for lov- ing surrender to himself, the Guru, for no spiritual under- standing, he said, could be acquired without a teacher.
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Such oversimplifications do not matter to the Guru's followers, and perhaps they are right. What does a mere reinterpretation matter in comparison with divine bliss? And it is true that it is the experience of illumination that matters and not its description. In any case, soon we may all be able to decide for ourselves on the truth of his statements, for he has forecast that shortly the whole world will have the Knowledge.
Page 152
Stories of this strange sacred hill stirred the mind of a seventeen-year-old Brahmin schoolboy, Venkataraman, who later came to be called Ramana Maharshi (Maharshi meaning Great Sage). But it was not until an unusual preexperience of death came to him that he decided to forego the education that his parents had planned for him, and instead to journey as asadhu, an ascetic, to the Hill of Arunachala. The experience of death, which was his turn- ing point, came to him as he was sitting alone one day in his uncle’s house. He had rarely been ill and there was nothing at all wrong with his health on that day. But a sudden unmistakable fear of death swept over him. There was no apparent reason for this strong feeling and he did not try to explain it to himself. Nor did he panic, but instead began to wonder what he should do. It did not occur to him to consult anyone else; he felt it to be his own problem, and he said to himself, ““Now death has come. What does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies.”
Page 152
When Ramana Maharshi narrated this experience later on for the benefit of his devotees it looked as though this
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Ramana’'s experience of what he took to be death may seem to some people to be incomplete. After all, what do we know of death, and what could he know? To shut one’s eyes and hold one’s breath and then discover that the feeling of “I” continues is hardly evidence that it will still be there when one is unable to shut any eyes or hold a single breath.
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At this point and taken on its own, the experience does not seem sufficiently profound to have brought about a life of wisdom and deep understanding, any more than the fairly common psychic experience of being outside one’s body (usually suspended above it) seems to lead to any great spiritual profundity.
Page 153
But since Ramana Maharshi attached supreme impor- tance to this early experience of “death,” it is possible that it acted on him by giving him an illumined insight into “I,” the inner person—whom we so readily identify with our body.
Page 154
Hinduism teaches that the creative force which up- holds the world is neither name nor form but is con- sciousness itself. And the way for each one of us to experience this consciousness is to give up identifying ourself with all the objects of consciousness—with the body-centered world.
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After his “death” experience, Ramana left home and went to Tiruvannamalai, a town which lies at the foot of Arunachala, the Hill which he had imagined so often. He never left there again. At first there was no question of his being considered as a teacher. All he did was to sit absorbed in the consciousness of Being, indifferent as to whether his body lived or died. This was a state known and respected by Hindus, who have always treated their holy men with care and reverence; and a daily cup of food was brought to him. Gradually he left the condition of ineffable bliss and returned to the everyday life of those around him.
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“To live with the true consciousness of life centred in Another is to lose one’s self-important seriousness and thus to live life as ‘play’ in union with a Cosmic Player,” says Thomas Merton. “It is He alone that one takes seri- ously. But to take Him seriously is to find joy and spon- taneity in everything, for everything is gift and grace. In other words, to live selfishly is to bear life as an intolera- ble burden. To live selflessly is to live in joy, realising by experience that life itself is love and gift. To be a lover anda giver is to be achannel through which the Supreme Giver manifests His love in the world.’’}°
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“To be aware of reality, of the living present, is to discover that at each moment the experience is all,”’ says Alan Watts. “The art of living . . . consists in being com- pletely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as ut- terly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.”’!2
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He does not display Ramana Maharshi’s profound grasp of truth; the Maharishi’s teaching seems to be of a more conventional and superficial nature, but he does have a technique—and it is an admirable and valid one, particularly for Westerners. It may not have the mind- shattering effect of following to the very end Ramana Maharshi’s great query of “Who am I?” but it gives a quick and certain experience of tranquility to thousands of people who have never heard of Ramana Maharshi. The Maharishi’s technique is the use of a mantra, care- fully taught.
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superficial, conditioned mind becomes still, when it transcends the relative world of experience altogether and becomes empty, what is left is its essential nature, which is pure Being. In this experience of pure consciousness, the superficial mind becomes one with its Ground. After that, the mind will go back to relative thoughts in the world but it will feel the urge to return to pure Being and the constant journey from one state to another will deepen its familiarity with its own essential nature. It will then become capable of retaining that con- sciousness of Being while it is engaged in thought or speech or action. In this way, man serves the universe by becoming the bridge between unconditioned and con- ditioned life, and he also serves himself by fulfilling his own individual nature and purpose.
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This process, says the Maharishi, is not usually appar- ent to us because the thought bubbles come up ina rapid stream, each following the other indistinguishably. But the TM technique trains the mind to experience an on- coming thought at an earlier and earlier stage of its growth. In this way, the attention is taken down deeper and deeper until it reaches the source of thought, the source of creative energy.
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not part of the chain; and enlightenment is the experience of finding existence to be unconditioned and timeless.
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You should let the first impulse die down. Your first im- pulse towards spirituality might put you into some particular spiritual scene; but if you work with that impulse, then the impulse gradually dies down and at some stage becomes tedious, monotonous. This is a useful message. You see, it is essential to relate to yourself, to your own experience, really. If one does not relate to oneself, then the spiritual path becomes dangerous, becomes purely external entertain- ment, rather than an organic personal experience.5
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So the real experience, beyond the dream world, is the beauty and color and excitement of the real experience of now in everyday life. When we face things as they are, we give up the hope of something better. There will be no magic, because we cannot tell ourselves to get out of our depression.
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Depression and ignorance, the emotions, whatever we ex- perience, are all real and contain tremendous truth. If we really want to learn and see the experience of truth, we have to be where we are. The whole thing is just a matter of being a grain of sand.”
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A lot has been said in this book about the ego, most sages believing that it is the principal delusion of man, resulting in all his wars and divisions. To under- stand the real nature of the ego is the basic aim of Bud- dhism, and Trungpa explains how the ego develops from the primary openness of our real nature—a limitless clar- ity which we sometimes catch a glimpse of when our separate ego feeling is overwhelmed by beauty or strangeness, so that we no longer perceive in the usual analytical way, but drop perception for the simple act of seeing. But then, almost immediately, we try to attach a name to that experience so that we can freeze it into a form and store it in our memories as something belonging to us, a possessed knowledge, which, if it is labeled, can be brought out and looked at again. Clear space disap- pears then, and the world becomes solid with names.
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in, trying to possess it as his own fascinating experience, his own unique understanding—feeling desire for it; or he feels claustrophobic and frustrated and tries to batter his way out, feeling hatred for all that hems him in. Or he might even try to ignore or forget that he is in a prison and simply give up all feelings about it, becoming indifferent, slothful, and insensitive in a stupid way.
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The whole spirit of it (Vipassana meditation) lies in full attention or complete attention. This is very important. If we actually attend to what we do, what we see, what we come across, what we experience, then there is no waste of energy, no waste of time for seeing the truth, the living movement of life. In the Satipatthana Sutta (Sutra) you can see that the Buddha advises us to attend to all the things we do in our life; whether we are walking, eating, lying down, standing, talk- ing, looking forward, looking backward or keeping silent. All this must be done so that you do not miss the point, the target, of meditation practice and you do not live in the past or in the future, but fully in the present. The Buddhist teaching em- phasises the full living in the present.
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what it is. You have learnt to accept whatever arises and to practise acceptance in action, not in the idea. Beliefs, doubt and uncertainty are replaced by understanding and seeing. ... The way of meditation tells us to observe with awareness any situation we come across so that we can learn and remain flexible, flowing. When you feel fixated, you seem to get nowhere; you are uncomfortable and unable to function properly. Some people experience this state as aging, madness or boredom. Now, what can we do?
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Dhiravamsa speaks of being “alone.” By this he means being beyond dependence on other people or on second- hand experience.
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Perhaps there comes a moment for all of us when we realize the essential solitariness of personal experience. What happens to me can never be completely communi- cated to you. Beyond the level of communication I am alone. The awareness that I exist is also the awareness that I am isolated. All my feelings and thoughts are pri- vate and although I can tell you about them I cannot give you the experience of them.
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This awareness that in all circumstances we are by ourselves sometimes comes to people facing death. Then it can be seen that death is not the only solitary experi- ence we have but that, in fact, all of life is on just the same plane as death—it is an “I experience” state from begin- ning to end.
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Martin Buber is one of the hardest mystics to summarize, even briefly, because his use of “I”? seems, on the face of it, more complicated than anyone else’s. In fact it is not really very complicated, but it does demand a prepared ground in the form of some preknowledge of mystical experience—at least to the extent of knowing the difference between our usual ego-ridden way of look- ing at the world, and the way of seeing the world as it is in itself, in its numinous nature. When seen in the latter way, the relationship between the individual and the world is called I-Thou, and whereas the Buddhists find no need for the feeling of “I” at all, Buber insists that it is a necessary sensation because, he says, without the “I” feeling there could be no relationships at all.
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One is with It, which means with everything we can sense or think about or feel or remember. The other is with Thou (or, in Kaufman’s translation, You). People often think that Buber simply means God when he says You, and in one sense he does. But he does not mean the personal God of the Old Testament. He means the un- conditioned timeless ground of God, which is also the ground of all creatures, and which can be seen in every creature and object when all one’s conditioned ideas and feelings about it are dropped. I relate to You, the trans- cendent, when I find You in a person, animal, or object. When I do not find You, or do not know You when I see You, I relate to It, which means I relate to the person, animal, or object by seeing them as “things” for my own experience and use. I am then putting that person, ani- mal, or object into a familiar category in my mind, think- ing about it from my own store of concepts, and judging it accordingly, instead of seeing it afresh, as itself. Relating to You means relating to the person or scene in front of me at this moment entirely anew, as though it has never been seen before.
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Buber believed, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that evolv- ing man is heading towards a final identification and merging of himself with God. Historically, Buber saw the development of the feeling of “I as beginning in primi- tive man. An animal is not conscious of itself as being separate from its surroundings, he said. A catis its pounce on its victim, a dog is its love for its master—neither animal is capable of the reflective self-consciousness which says, “I am now going to.pounce” or “I love this man.” In the same way as animals, primitive man at first was identified with his actions—he did not think about the moon except as it affected him in the night. Fire was hot and bright and was nota word called fire but a process in which he took part. The experiencing subject had not detached itself from the experience and it was only when the force of self-preservation caused the beginning of language and knowledge, that the “I-acting-You” and “You-acting-I’’ were split and the “I” “emerged with the force of an element.’
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In our world of today, we mainly encounter other things as objects of experience and use, as did developing man. From our sensation of them, we create an It-world of known phenomena, of names and categories. We use this world for our own preservation and benefit. Our mastery over it reinforces the feeling of separation and the sepa- rate “I’’ becomes the ego, the demanding, insatiable oc- cupant of our feelings and thoughts. And so the It-world comes to consist of “It and It and It, of He and He and She and She and It.”* Even God, as long as he is He, is an object, a something to be experienced.
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What is the You relationship? I or you can have a You relationship with another person, or even with an animal or an object, when I withdraw from it all my projected ideas of it and my feelings about it, so that I see itnot as an object of experience and use, but as itself, supremely real in its own right, clearly shining from its own light. Posses- sively, we usually regard anything new to us as an object to be judged according to our habitual conditioned at- titudes. But when we observe that the world is not ours, that even the chair on which I am sitting and the paper spread out before me are, in their essence, unknowable by me, then we can become aware of the supreme and total mystery of existence, which is reality.
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—What, then, does one experience of the You? —Nothing at all. For one does not experience it. —What, then, does one know of the You?
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The question remains: if “one does not experience it’—why is the term I-You habitually used? “TI” surely must refer to an experiencer?
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The I of the basic word I-It appears as an ego and becomes conscious of itself as a subject [of experience and use]. The I of the basic word I-You appears as a person and be-
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The word “person” to Buber was all-important and he distinguished it from ego. Egos belong to the It world, and their desire is to survive, to possess, to experience, and to use. But none of these desires occur in the I-You relationship, because the I becomes unconditioned and unlimited through its participation in this relationship. The I, he said, becomes actualized, and this establishes
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Man can encounter You by transcending his under- standing that is formed by his intellect, and his feelings formed from his desires. In this transcendence he can have a relationship with that which is other than himself, with You. But if he clings to his thoughts and ideas and beliefs, he will not see You properly, You will be his creation and not Yourself; You will be reduced to It, an object of his experience and use.
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are developed, ordered, and controlled by rhythms and sym- bols which have become traditional because the experience of centuries has proved, though it cannot explain, their effi- cacy: and powers of apprehension which normally lie below the threshold may thus be liberated and enabled to report their discoveries.”
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Although these play an important role—and it is worth remembering that the ancient Hebrew prophets describe the process of creation as the unfolding of divine energy, divine light, and divine language—there need be no at- tempt to fit the Tree into a series of letters and numbers in order to understand and experience it. A real spiritual path goes beyond its starting point and Dion Fortune stressed that ifthe Tree is to be a valid method of Western yoga, it must be available to everybody, including those who don’t know Hebrew and who are bad at numerology. The Tree is a yogic way of using the mind, not a system of knowledge, she said.
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wanted to fire another of her staff and asked Fortune to back her up. After several more incidents, Fortune her- self got on the wrong side of the Warden. When, her case packed, she went to tell the Warden she was leaving (having decided on flight as the best course open to her) a terrible scene took place, one that was to have an effect on her for years afterwards. For four hours the Warden made her repeat two statements, one that she was incompetent and another that she had no self-confidence. Like a rabbit before a snake, Fortune tells us that she was incapable of leaving the room but was able to resist admitting the two accusations until at last she saw that her only hope of sanity lay in pretending to be beaten. When she reached her own room she went into a stupor for thirty hours. Eventually a colleague discovered her state and sent for her family, who took her away. But from this experience she suffered a breakdown in health that was only cured some years later by a combination of Freudian psycho- analysis and study of the Qabalah.
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we must experience the rush of the divine cosmic energy in its pure form; an energy so tremendous that mortal man is fused into disruption by it... . But although the sight of the Divine Father blasts mortals as with fire, the Divine Son comes familiarly among them and can be invoked by the appropriate rites—Bacchanalia in the case of the Son of Zeus and the Eucharist in the case of the Son of Jehovah. Thus we see that there is a lower form of manifestation, which “shows us the Father,” but that this rite owes its validity solely to the fact that it derives its Illuminating Intelligence, its Inner Robe of Glory, from the Father, Chokmah.4
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materialism, thus reinforcing faith; the after-effects are not considered, and experience shows that the after-effects are far-reaching, and though they may not necessarily involve moral deterioration in persons of naturally wholesome character—and we must acquit them of that charge so often brought—they do cause a marked deterioration in the quality of the mind, and especially of the capacity for logic and judgement. Any form of promiscuous psychic or supernormal dabbling is definitely undesirable, in my opinion, and unfits the person who indulges in it for serious work.?°
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actual experience. It is this activity that leads to freedom, he said, and it is the one activity that we fail to notice. We notice the idea that results from the action and we ap- propriate it as our own. Thus we seem to have our own “world of thoughts” and we fail to realize that thoughts are the products of an activity that precedes them. It is this activity that links the perception and the concept, and without it we would never see relationships between things. Steiner regards thinking as the road to freedom because it is the only objective instrument of knowledge we have. Before any ideas can be formed at all, the think- ing process must be there. If we start from any assump- tion, even one suchas “this is difficult to understand,” for instance, we have already gone past the thinking stage and reached its product, the thought. Thinking comes even before the distinction between subject and object, and this led Steiner to point out that thinking actually produces the ideas of inner and outer, I and you, just as it produces all other concepts.
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Perhaps Steiner’s universe-analysis can be better un- derstood if it is turned round. Instead of building up from the mineral body to spiritual outer-space Beings, as he always tends to do in his books, it may be easier to start from those Beings and work downward, because really the basis for all his thought was the Whole that becomes particularized. If we bear in mind that Steiner is inclined to attribute spiritual bodies to everything as he works out his hierarchy, we will begin to understand how it happens that his universe is so populated by Beings and Entities and Folk-Souls, etc., rather than by planes of experience.
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both sides of the Atlantic. For the condition is catching, he says; anyone who sees it can at once show others quite independently of Harding (who took twenty years about it) and his work. The appeal is to the enquirer’s own, direct, first-hand experience, for he is the sole authority on ‘how it is where he is.’ Accordingly, Harding has set up no sect or organization, and says he doesn’t regard him- self as any sort of guru. He and his friends claim that the in-seeing they enjoy and practice is, in any case, perfectly natural and nothing new. They say it is (though the lan- guage differs) central to all the great mystical traditions, where it has, however, been overlaid and often over- looked. But now, stripped bare of accumulated irrelevan- cies, they believe it has at last become so obvious and so accessible that it can be trusted to make its own way on its own merits, unburdened by personalities or mystifica- tion. Initiation into “headlessness” or “‘no-thingness”’ is free and immediate, and there are no strings attached to it.
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Such is Harding’s message. The two main states of hu- man experience, he believes, are what he terms lst- personhood and 3rd-personhood. In the Ist-person state, the person is not identified with the contents of his con- sciousness (his body and mind and the world around him) but with the source of it all—actual Consciousness itself. In the 3rd-person state (what for most people is ordinary existence) the person feels himself to be made up of parts (the contents of consciousness) such as shape, color, name, and place. The teaching about these two states and the ways to the first of them can be found in Vedanta (Advaita) Hinduism, particularly in Jnana Yoga, but where Harding’s originality lies is in his techniques for the actual discovery of Ist-personhood. For he believes that to grasp the truth intellectually, even to feel it deeply from time to time, is of very little value. You have actually to see the absence of everything that had been—or could ever be—imagined here, where the head is. Books and lectures, thinking and meditation, are at least as likely to divert you from the Spot you occupy as direct you to it, he says. For instance, these printed pages are about twelve inches from the Point—namely, the One who is now reading them. He urges the reader to turn his attention around 180 degrees and carry out a very few simple experiments—attending to the Attender—of which the following are a typical selection. Harding insists that there’s no alternative to doing these experiments, and thata minute of active discovery is worth years of reading: indeed, he says, it takes no time at all to see, beyond the possibility of doubt, Who you really are. All you have to do is answer the following questions on present evidence, on what you find given at this moment, instead of what people have been telling you:
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_ing, is not a mystical or even a religious experience, not euphoric, not a sudden expansion into universal love or cosmic consciousness, nor any kind of thought or feeling whatever. Quite the contrary, it is absolutely featureless, colorless, neutral. It is gazing into the pure, still cool,
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which—because it is outside—is no authority. On this subject, no one but this Subject—the Ist-person—is qual- ified to pronounce. Here, the scriptures are for testing by our experience, not our experience by the scriptures. In fact, they pass the test. At the heart of each of the great mystical traditions lies simple, direct Liberation or Awakening to who and what we really are.
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But reflections of this sort need not affect the straightforward benefit to be found in Harding’s tech- niques. Once the obvious but usually unnoticed fact becomes clear from direct perception that people see every- thing else but their heads, then the head need no longer be imagined as the place where “I” live. For if, when I look, I find the world about me has replaced me, then I have disappeared, become one with the world, and need no longer experience myself as apart from it.
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Don Juan introduced Castaneda to these other worlds in order to crack his rigid grip on “normality,” on Castaneda’s everyday “too real” world. Don Juan did not quite succeed but neither did he fail. Castaneda saw only fleetingly and not at will. But he did become pliant and open, and was able to experience moving moments of insight. On one such occasion he had been sent to the desert by don Juan and after some days, found himself
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Just as Gurdjieff would say that a man does not even exist in a human way at all until he begins to crystallize his essential nature by withdrawing his dependence on the world about him, so don Juan, too, spoke of unhooking one’s projected thoughts and feelings from all that lies outside of oneself. In fact, there is general agreement among the mystics and sages that man must look at both himself and the world afresh if he is to experience reality. Where they differ from each other is in their methods for helping man to accomplish this.
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There is a great truth about the idea of surrender, particu- larly the surrender of the latihan, where submission to the will of God begins to order one’s life. But one can’t help feeling that the act of surrender and its consequent re- ward should be earned; that without the experience of falling and picking himself up, man is not ready to walk. It all seems a bit too easy and slightly unreal. But Pak Subuh’s analysis of the structure of man is clear, and very much in accord with other mystics, particularly with Gurdjieff, for he shows man’s nature as wholly condi- tioned except for one thing—his ability to wish to submit to God.
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Neither of the Buddhists could be said to do that. They explore the central search for identity with full traditional knowledge behind them, and they assert that man’s feel- ing of himself as a separate entity is erroneous. There is no separation, they say. Form is emptiness and Empti- ness is form. Thus form, in all its Suchness, is the way in which we should experience the world. This is a difficult doctrine (although in the end perhaps the most satisfying
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Ramana Maharshi, 74, 149, 150, 167, 222, 307, 330, 331; ashram of 155; and the body, 154, 155, 160; darshan of, 157, death of, 166; the experience of death, 152, 153, 154, 307; feeling of “T,” ix, 90, 91, 149, 155, 156,
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Search inside (34 results)
mystic
Page n7
Douglas Harding 280 Castaneda’s “Don Juan” 295 Mystic and Mother 316 Mother Theresa 317
Page n9
Three criteria have governed the choice of subjects for this book. One criterion has been integrity of approach; another has been the international reputation of the sage; the third has been the originality of his teaching. Not all subjects have all three qualifications—some, for instance, are considerably bet- ter known than others. But all have a certain quality of inten- sity about them that makes them at least worth reading. There is not a great deal of difference between a mystic and a sage, but enough to call them by different names. A mystic seeks direct experience of, and communion with, the divine; his whole life centers around this purpose. He tends to be solitary and to communicate his understanding through books. A sage, on the other hand, is a wise man who is perceptive, discern- ing, and thoughtful about life in general. He, too, pivots him- self on the wish to experience the truth of existence and he, too, may write a lot of books. But he tends to be more outward-tumed than the mystic and more taken up with teaching and advising; he originates methods and attracts disciples.
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The mystery of man’s own internal identity—who and what he is when he apprehends himself as “I’”—has tumed out to be the central concern of most of the mystics and sages, and the biggest snag to placing all these highly different personal teachings and philosophies within the covers of one book has been the many interpretations of this central word “I.” They range from Ramana Maharshi’s, in which he points out that the feeling of “I,” when detached from body and mind, is itself the supreme Consciousness; to Alan Watts’s “I” which, he believes, cannot be found apart from experience (“you don’t think thoughts any more than you hear hearing or smell smelling’). Because the nature of “T’ is regarded in so many different ways, the subjects have been grouped. Cross- references can then be followed easily and the discoveries of one mystic can amplify another. Consequently, a short preface to each group precedes it (except for Mother Theresa, who needs no introduction), so that the reader can have some idea of the seas into which he is about to plunge.
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The bridge builders come from sharply var- ied backgrounds, but the first three hold at least one thing in common—their understanding that aspects of the truth are found in both Eastern and Western religion. In the case of Aldous Huxley, the belief that there was any truth to find at all took some time to mature. All his later years were spent in a search for the mystical experience, and he remained, to the end of his life, preponderantly an intel- lectual man with moments of real insight rather than a true mystic. His brilliant command of language, however, makes him easy to understand, and his descriptions of his experiences are wonderfully direct and uncomplicated. Wherever he saw the truth expressed, he knew it. Thus his Perennial Philosophy, a book in which he links many spiritual writings and sayings from all of the religions, is not merely a collection of excellent quotations; it is a deeply spiritual book which has helped many people
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Teilhard de Chardin’s bridges were built to span a different gulf. A French Jesuit priest, he was not in- terested in other religions at all, but only in going deeper and deeper into his own. To him, belief in Christ meant that mankind must and would evolve in certain direc- tions, evidence for this being shown by astudy of the past. So convinced was he that the human race was becoming more conscious, more sensitive, more communally minded, and nearer to the Parousia when all men would be merged in Christ, that he gave up his life to discover- ing scientific proof for this theory. He was trained as a paleontologist, and this discipline engendered in him a great reverence for the material world which, as a mystic, he saw as Christ-consciousness expressed in more and more diversified forms. God’s presence, he believed, is felt throughout the created world, and the whole of evolu- tion is a continuous movement towards him. In his own highly poetic language, he linked the spirit with matter, and for many people throughout the world this particular bridge is one of the most valuable.
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He emphasized that the methods used by all religions, from yogic breathing to hymn singing, are really devised to create a chemical change in the body—extra carbon dioxide in the blood stream. One wonders if his defensive fervor is inclined to protest too much. Now that we have discovered the chemical conditions for self- transcendence, he said—and he writes persuasively on how LSD inhibits the dualistic action of the brain, so that there is no more sensation of separation between subject and object—it is pointless to go in for years of meditation or spiritual exercises when everything can be obtained in half an hour by the use of a drug. In what sounds rather like an advertisement for a businesslike enlightenment, he says: “Foran aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self- flagellation would be as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb’s Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a pig. Know- ing as he does (or at least as he can know, if he so desires) what are the chemical conditions of transcendental ex- perience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists—in pharmacology, in biochemis- try, in physiology and neurology, in psychology and psychiatry and parapsychology.’!3 Almost as much a labor for the aspiring mystic, one would think, as if he went in for years of meditation.
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Living in IT and by IT, altogether allowing IT to be himself, was the great theme of Alan Watts’s life. But he was certainly not a mystic in the traditional sense. He loved sensual life and lived with enormous gusto. He drank a good deal, took LSD many times, married three times, and had seven children. He died in 1973, at the age of fifty-eight. His vocation in life, he said, was to wonder about the nature of the universe, and this feeling of awe and fascination led him into philosophy, psychology, re- ligion, and mysticism—not just in ideas but also in ex- perience: He refused to talk about anything he had not actually discovered. He was not afraid to call himself a mystic but saw with amusement how the people who hoped he would be their guru, or spiritual guide, were shaken when they saw his “element of irreducible rascal- ity.” He knew what they wanted—an idealized incarna- tion of radiant tranquility, love, and compassion—but he was too honest to confess to anything but “a quaking and palpitating mess of anxiety which lusts and loathes, needs love and attention, and lives in terror of death putting an end to its misery’? when he looked inside himself. This insight led him to see that to try to control the “quaking mess, to deny it and despise it in favor of what a mystic was supposed to feel, was to miss reality altogether, for the very attempt to do so was simply one more desire of the quaking mess. The quaking mess itself was as much a part of the universe as the rain, or flies, or disease. To see it as divine did not abolish it but allowed one the peace of mind of acceptance and delivered one from schizo-
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Merton was a mystic, and to him contemplation was the opening up of an inner illumination. But Western religi- ous thought has always been verbal and intellectual rather than intuitive. Many Christians have echoed ap- provingly Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” To Merton, this statement and the attitude that went with it were anathemas:
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The other way is that of the mystic, such as Thomas Merton, to whom “nowness”’ is all-important. The true mystic is immensely at home in the world at this moment. He is as much at one with the smallest part as with the whole. He does not look for patterns or significant events or future wonders. He does not concentrate upon a goal because he feels no need for one—here and now contains all goals and all wonders. To him the idea of a future Pleroma is meaningless because every present momentis unique, unrepeatable, and timeless.
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The methods used for ascending the Tree are what are known in the East as yogic ones, for they include medita- tion, concentration and contemplation, mantra and vis- ualization. The way in which Dion Fortune translates what she terms the “Yoga of the Qabalah” into everyday language is her particular contribution to Western under- standing, for she was convinced that Eastern practices, emerging froma vastly different cultural milieu, were not right for Westerners. She points out that a “direct” mystic follows what she calls “the way of illumination,” the immediate path to the Unconditioned Ground or Godhead, and that those who follow this path often look askance at the occultist, seeing him as foolishly caught up in anumber of mental states, none of which seem to come near the sublime certainty of true union. But Fortune makes out aconvincing case for the occultist, and clarifies the issue for us:
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There are two paths to the Innermost: the way of the mystic, which is the way of devotion and meditation, a soli- tary and subjective path; and the way of the occultist, which
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is the way of the intellect, of concentration, and of the trained will; upon this path the co-operation of fellow workers is required, firstly for the exchange of knowledge, and secondly because ritual magic plays an important part in this work, and for this the assistance of several is needed for most of the greater operations. The mystic derives his knowledge through the direct communion of his higher self with the Higher Powers; to him the wisdom of the occultist is foolish- ness, for his mind does not work in that way; but on the other hand, to a more intellectual and extrovert type, the method of the mystic is impossible until long training has enabled him to transcend the planes of form. We must therefore recognise these two distinct types among those who seek the Way of Initiation, and remember that there is a path for each.
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... Real “magical initiation” is in essence a form of mental discipline, strengthening and focussing the will. This disci- pline, like that of the religious life, consists partly in physical austerities and a deliberate divorce from the world, partly in the cultivation of will-power: but largely in a yielding of the mind to the influence of suggestions which have been selected and accumulated in the course of ages because of their power over that imagination which Eliphas Levi calls “the eye of the soul.” There is nothing supernatural about it. Like the more arduous, more disinterested self-training of the mystic, it is character-building with an object, conducted upon an heroic scale. In magic the “will to know” is the centre round which the personality is rearranged. As in mys- ticism, unconscious factors are dragged from the hiddenness to form part of that personality. The uprushes of thought, the abrupt intuitions which reach us from the subliminal region,
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He [the mystic] has got to find God. Sometimes his temper- ament causes him to lay most stress on the length of the search; sometimes the abrupt rapture which brings it to a close makes him forget that preliminary pilgrimage in which the soul is “not outward bound, but rather on a journey to its centre.” The habitations of the Interior Castle through which St. Theresa leads us to that hidden chamber which is the sanctuary of the indwelling God: the hierarchies of Dionysius, ascending from the selfless service of the angels, past the seraphs’ burning love, to the God enthroned above time and space: the mystical paths of the Kabalistic Tree of Life, which lead from the material world of Malkuth through the universes of action and thought, by Mercy, Justice and Beauty, to the Supernal Crown; all these are different ways of describing this same pilgrimage.®
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It was through her understanding of the symbols of the sephiroth and her practice of meditation to bring about their realization, that Dion Fortune herself acquired bal- ance and sanity. She came to the Tree first of all by way of the deeply occult—the strata that seems most confusing of all to the real mystic—the spirit-world of mediums and astral planes. “Pickled in Spirit’? was how Alan Watts described it and Fortune, later on, might have agreed.
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Mrs. Mathers, rather surprisingly, agreed to this —secrecy had been considered essential up till then —and, in 1922, the Fraternity of the Inner Light was born; although for a time it bore the title of the “Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society,” which For- tune had joined early on.
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The word “‘symbol” is an emotive one, for the direct mystic is usually rather blind to symbolism and regards the whole subject as an unnecessary diversion from reality—this is particularly so in the Zen school of Bud- dhism. But to the followers of the Tantric way, symbols are the paths to reality. They stand for something of which the pupil is as yet unconscious, something that cannot be known in any other way but through itself. A symbol is a means of recognition and therefore of under-
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There are some psychologists who will tell us that the Angels of the Qabalists and the Gods and Manus of other systems are our own repressed complexes; there are others with less limited outlook who will tell us that these Divine beings are the latent capacities of our own higher selves. To the devotional mystic this is not a point of any great moment; he gets his results, and that is all he cares about; but the philosophical mystic, in other words the occultist, thinks the matter out and arrives at certain conclusions. These conclu- sions, however, can only be understood when we know what we mean by reality and have a clear line of demarcation between the subjective and the objective. Anyone who is trained in philosophical method knows that this is asking for a good deal.
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An intense inner life may develop in the country child. He may feel, more profoundly than he can ever describe, a sense of wonder and awe; of being in touch with the essence of things, which is infinitely greater than the objects which confront his eye. Oddly enough, this is not the high-road to fantasy and unreality—this particular way of awareness of things in their thingness usually leads to a good grasp of practical issues, for intuitive awareness develops the capacity to be at one with what exists. To sense things in their beingness (Buddhists call it Suchness) is the mark of the mystic.
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Steiner both was and was not such a mystic. On the one hand he was profoundly aware of and awed by the beauty around him: on the other, his intuitions assumed concrete form and he saw, with what he terms “clairvoyant percep- tion,’ the spiritual beings at work creating this beauty.
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But a direct mystic parts company with an occultist such as Rudolf Steiner. The Chinese speak ofthe world as “the ten thousand things.” Steiner has added at least another ten thousand when one takes into account all the gnome-spirits and fairy-spirits at work in and on the earth as well as the Beings in the universe. But to the mystic, it is really the unmanifest, that which has no entity and is beyond name and form which concerns him, and which, strangely, Steiner was silent about. Nevertheless, the human occupants of this world, mystics and all, owe a considerable debt of gratitude to a man who took so much trouble to promote the good of mankind and who cared so intensely about its spiritual welfare.
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“TI am aware of something in myself whose shine is my reason, said an unknown mystic. The something is what
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Mystic and Mother
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Mother Theresa is a practical mystic who needs no introduction, for her life illuminates both her insight and her teaching.
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320 MYSTIC AND MOTHER
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SVAN MYSTIC AND MOTHER
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324 MYSTIC AND MOTHER
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We must “taste God as the sole good,” says the 17th century mystic, Jean Pierre de Caussade, with whom Mother Theresa could be said to have many links. “We have to arrive at the point at which the whole created universe no longer exists for us, and God is every- thing.... Creatures by themselves are (then) without power or efficacy and the heart lacks any tendency or inclination towards them because the majesty of God fills all its capacity.’’®
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Without this surrender there is insufficient strength, and, as a practical mystic, Mother Theresa knows well the dangers attached to serving the poor—that a Sister might do it just for its own limited sake because she thinks it is
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326 MYSTIC AND MOTHER
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But, we may ask, does this mean that man must lose his personality, extinguish himself as a human being? Will he be negated, a person with no proper identity at all? Each mystic makes a different answer to this question but each seems to agree that a man finds himself rather than loses himself when he discovers his true nature and that of the world about him.
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The techniques of Hindu and Buddhist Yoga lend themselves to occult practice because they develop the heart and the mind. But the danger of the occult way is that the desire to know rather than to be, to conquer rather than to surrender the self, leads to strange malpractices and to highly inflated egos. The two occultists in this book, however, both had safeguards against the cruder and sillier extremes of magic and have not noticeably fallen into these traps. In fact, Dion Fortune’s study of the Qabalah and practice of its ways to mystical realization nearly takes her out of the category of occultism al- together, for the Qabalah itself is a genuinely religious path and any practitioner of it must eventually come to that point of surrender that is the fulcrum of the religious mystic. But she was an ardent believer in the stage-by- stage ascent of the occultist where every symbol can be
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verified by research and cross-reference, and every con- dition of the mind can be classified: thus her initial ap- proach was entirely different from that of the mystic.
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Rudolf Steiner’s safeguard was his love of humanity and his great desire to serve it through the cultivation of his own powers. The final transcendent union of the mystic was of less importance to him than establishing a right understanding of this world, which basically meant seeing its relationship to other, higher worlds. He foresaw a glorious ascension of man’s evolving thought and feeling in rather the same way as Teilhard de Chardin envisaged it, and the reader may notice a number of parallels between these two thinkers on the subject of evolution. Steiner, like Fortune, made use of Tantric methods, but his aim was to bring about realization of the many conditions through which the eternal soul of man progresses, rather than to attain union with the Source of all souls.
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mystical
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It is the purpose of this book to present a number of such modem spiritual leaders from all religions and from none —+representatives of new paths to religious truth. Those cho- sen are all full-time exponents of the spiritual life. They are not philosophers or poets who have a mystical streak, but are people who have devoted their lives to imparting inspired knowledge or to living a holy life. They have not always succeeded. Sometimes they have been given too much pub-
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The Esoteric Orders and Their Work, Dion Fortune, Aquarian Press, 1930; Psychic Self-Defense, Dion Fortune, Aquarian Press, 1930; The Mystical Qabalah, Dion Fortune, Emest Benn Ltd., 1935; Applied Magic, Dion Fortune, Aquarian Press, 1962.
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The bridge builders come from sharply var- ied backgrounds, but the first three hold at least one thing in common—their understanding that aspects of the truth are found in both Eastern and Western religion. In the case of Aldous Huxley, the belief that there was any truth to find at all took some time to mature. All his later years were spent in a search for the mystical experience, and he remained, to the end of his life, preponderantly an intel- lectual man with moments of real insight rather than a true mystic. His brilliant command of language, however, makes him easy to understand, and his descriptions of his experiences are wonderfully direct and uncomplicated. Wherever he saw the truth expressed, he knew it. Thus his Perennial Philosophy, a book in which he links many spiritual writings and sayings from all of the religions, is not merely a collection of excellent quotations; it is a deeply spiritual book which has helped many people
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gain a clearer understanding of what they are looking for. This book, perhaps more than any of his others, is the firmest bridge for people to cross between their person- hood and the mystical experience.
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Alan Watts, also English in origin and also domiciled in California, became adept at comparing the central truths of Christianity (for some years he was an Episcopalian minister) with those of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism—religions which he deeply loved. He was very moved by his own experience of egolessness, and he evolved a personal philosophy from this experience which he linked with both Eastern and Western religion, thus becoming one of the most stimulating mystical philosophers of our time. His own beliefs centered around the crucial problem of human identity and his greatest attacks were on the common feeling of being an “IT” di- vorced from everything else, even from its own experi- ence. The “I” does not feel feelings or think thoughts, he said, any more than it smells smelling. He, too, is an easy writer to read and an entertaining builder of bridges, with a love of language and an especial fondness for puns.
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Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, gradu- ally moved away from a rather over intense in- Christianity to an illumined understanding of Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. His insights came through his own contemplative life and mystical realization, and, to some extent, he was able to isolate the contemplative experience and write about it clearly and freely. His overwhelming interest in every- | thing to do with contemplation made him entirely at home in Zen and Taoism, and his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, a great Japanese exponent of Zen, gave him such an insight into its practices that he seemed able, shortly before his untimely death, to reach right through the outer trappings of both Christianity and Buddhism to the
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His attitude toward religion began to change—and eventually reversed itself completely—after 1937 when, because of a mixture of bad health and pacifist convic- tions, he went to live in California. He was accompanied by one of his closest friends, broadcaster Gerald Heard, a convinced Vedantist who was brilliant at making his philosophy comprehensible. When Heard founded Trabusco College in California, which was devoted to the study of mystical religion and Vedantism, Huxley took part in the project. He became an ardent advocate of Hinduism—although he later found that a more complete answer to his spiritual questions lay in Buddhism, par- ticularly the compassionate Mahayana of Tibet.
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It was while he was associated with Trabusco College that he wrote The Perennial Philosophy, his own “eter- nity-philosophy,” a book which has stimulated many people. It is a book about mystical experience and is based, he said, “on direct experience, as the arguments of the physical scientists are based on direct sense impres- sions.” Using quotations from Eastern and Western mys- tics, he writes about the great themes of existence —suffering, contemplation, charity, self-knowledge, grace, and others. It is a beautifully compiled book, but Huxley was still trapped in his intellect—the mystics themselves seem to glow with wisdom, and it is they who make the book memorable. Huxley, like a clever spider, weaves a finely worded web which holds his captured jewels together, but he himself is not one of them.
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Rejecting his own theory that to know the ultimate Reality one must be “poor in spirit” —empty of ideas —Huxley, like a grasshopper, leapt from one mystical path to another. Hypnosis and psychic phenomena took their turn with straight meditation, the Alexander method, and automatic writing. He was a positive collec- tor of ideas, but always retained a scientific attitude to this medley, and never gave way to any sort of woolly accep- tance. “ “The heart,’ he once quoted from Pascal, ‘has its reasons. Still more cogent and much harder to unravel
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Watts’s vigorous philosophical-spiritual life began in early youth when, while still in King’s School, Canter- bury, he started to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. By the age of seventeen he had already published a book- let on Zen. He failed to get a scholarship to Cambridge, left school at seventeen, and launched himself on the world. He decided to design his own “higher education” and was helped to do this by his very understanding father; by Christmas Humphreys, president of the then Buddhist Lodge; by Nigel Watkins, owner ofa “mystical” bookshop in the Charing Cross Road; by Dr. Eric Graham Howe, a psychiatrist; and by Mitrinovic, a “rascal-guru” Slav.
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At this time, he also began to write and to expound an unconventional and mystical approach to some of the aspects of Christianity which perplex many people. For instance, in what sense is Jesus Christ an answer to the problems of the world?
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Christian monasteries are often largely tenanted by two types of monks. On the one hand, there are pleasant, easy, talkative men, who simply prefer a monastic way of life, with its secure routine, to a worldly one, and who are practical and not particularly mystical; and on the other, there are men who are more withdrawn, self-absorbed, and concerned with their experiences, both religious and secular.
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Once we make up our minds to take the words of Revela- tion literally—and to do so is the idea of all true religion —then the whole mass of the Universe is gradually bathed in light. And just as science shows us, at the lower limits of matter, an ethereal fluid in which everything is immersed and from which everything emerges, so at the upper limits of Spirit a mystical ambience appears in which everything floats and everything converges.®
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Teilhard’s answers perhaps bear some of the shortcom- ings of a sheltered, academic life, but no one can deny his brilliant insights and fervent yet lucid language. Was he, perhaps, an overdedicated man? As a mystical theolo- gian, his whole interest seemed absorbed by the desire to prove scientifically the links between evolution and the Christian vision of the world. Apart from this overwhelm- ing passion, he seems to have taken little notice of other aspects of life. The arts passed him by. He was not in- terested in living people, or their conditions. He spent twenty years in China and took amazingly little notice of its culture and philosophies. He visited India and failed
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In his precise definitions of God’s plans for mankind —a more and more personalized existence in which all men would become one—one begins to sense in Teilhard a need for reassurance. He seems to insist too much on the Pleroma, on man’s convergence upon himself, his growingly intense and perfect unification as he travels further and further inward to Omega point—as though Teilhard himself was a little uncertain. He spent much of his life, such as the twenty years in China, isolated from contemporary thought and discovery and was further iso- lated (although not from his friends) by the Vatican’s decision to refuse to allow publication of his major works. Whatever the causes, his beliefs about the Pleroma when mankind finally reaches the ultimate convergence in per- fection on Omega and Christ is realized and reborn seem ideas hardly related to this world. Yet many people, par- ticularly Roman Catholics, have found in Teilhard a source of courage, and although a very different man from Merton, the two do share astrong spiritual inspiration and revelation; Teilhard’s more mystical writings in The Di- vine Milieu and The Hymn of the Universe among others, contain a great intensity of feeling which is lacking in the writing of many modern theologians and is perhaps needed in the rational West. He was able to express himself with true depth in poetic prose:
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For the mantra is essentially a crutch or device to help the mind release its grip on the thoughts which distract it. The Maharishi is honest about his mantra system and does not attribute any mystical or supematural power to the mantra itself. It is, he declares, an easy method of bringing the mind down from its usual superficial
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Martin Buber is one of the hardest mystics to summarize, even briefly, because his use of “I”? seems, on the face of it, more complicated than anyone else’s. In fact it is not really very complicated, but it does demand a prepared ground in the form of some preknowledge of mystical experience—at least to the extent of knowing the difference between our usual ego-ridden way of look- ing at the world, and the way of seeing the world as it is in itself, in its numinous nature. When seen in the latter way, the relationship between the individual and the world is called I-Thou, and whereas the Buddhists find no need for the feeling of “I” at all, Buber insists that it is a necessary sensation because, he says, without the “I” feeling there could be no relationships at all.
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The answer may lie in Buber’s religion of Judaism, which emphasizes the distance between man and God and is, perhaps, more dualistic than any other religion. Buber was a convinced Jew. His greatest inspirations came from the Hasidim, a mystical sect of Jews, some of whom lived near his father’s estate in Bukovina in North- ern Rumania, where, as a boy, he spent his summers. His father would sometimes take him to the nearby village of
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It is in this option of relationship that man has choice and free will, and Buber saw the continual exchange of It for You and You for It as constituting the nature of the world. He did not believe (as Teilhard de Chardin did) that the You world will eventually triumph over the It world, in a sort of mystical conglomeration, leaving no- thing of the old It behind. Rather, he saw that the You can not be sustained without It—that there must be alterna- tion:
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At the root of much of Martin Buber’s intui- tive thinking lay the great Hebrew outline of the cosmos—the Qabalah—the mystical Tree of Life. The Qabalah, an inner Hebrew teaching that has been passed down through the ages, often secretly, was the vigorous and powerful spiritual way that inspired the Hassidim; and their stories, which Buber translated, reflect his own penetrating understanding of the Tree. In his book Jewish Mysticism he describes how the Qabalah sud- denly rose up “purified and exalted” among the villages in Little Russia, and how it became the movement called Hassidism. “Mysticism became the possession of the people.”
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He [the mystic] has got to find God. Sometimes his temper- ament causes him to lay most stress on the length of the search; sometimes the abrupt rapture which brings it to a close makes him forget that preliminary pilgrimage in which the soul is “not outward bound, but rather on a journey to its centre.” The habitations of the Interior Castle through which St. Theresa leads us to that hidden chamber which is the sanctuary of the indwelling God: the hierarchies of Dionysius, ascending from the selfless service of the angels, past the seraphs’ burning love, to the God enthroned above time and space: the mystical paths of the Kabalistic Tree of Life, which lead from the material world of Malkuth through the universes of action and thought, by Mercy, Justice and Beauty, to the Supernal Crown; all these are different ways of describing this same pilgrimage.®
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The other sephiroth of the Tree are defined at length in Dion Fortune’s book, The Mystical Qabalah. But before leaving the Tree itself, undoubtedly Fortune would want mention made of the two strange and interesting stages in the middle pillar—Tiphareth and Daath. Perhaps this is the moment to follow Fortune’s advice and insert our- selves backward into the Tree so that the middle pillar becomes the spine. The two stages are then states of our own consciousness.
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The Tree of Life, astrology, and the Tarot are not three mystical systems, but three aspects of one and the same system, and each is unintelligible without the others. It is only when we study astrology on the basis of the Tree that we have a philosophical system; equally does this apply to the Tarot system of divination, and the Tarot itself, with its com- prehensive interpretations, gives the key to the Tree as ap-
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2 Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah (London: Emest Benn Ltd.), pp. 67-68.
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Muller Ltd.), p. 178. 8 Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, p. 73. 9 Ibid., pp. 14, 16. 10 Dion Fortune, Applied Magic (London: The Aquarian Press), pp. 52-53. 11 Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah, p. 73.
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both sides of the Atlantic. For the condition is catching, he says; anyone who sees it can at once show others quite independently of Harding (who took twenty years about it) and his work. The appeal is to the enquirer’s own, direct, first-hand experience, for he is the sole authority on ‘how it is where he is.’ Accordingly, Harding has set up no sect or organization, and says he doesn’t regard him- self as any sort of guru. He and his friends claim that the in-seeing they enjoy and practice is, in any case, perfectly natural and nothing new. They say it is (though the lan- guage differs) central to all the great mystical traditions, where it has, however, been overlaid and often over- looked. But now, stripped bare of accumulated irrelevan- cies, they believe it has at last become so obvious and so accessible that it can be trusted to make its own way on its own merits, unburdened by personalities or mystifica- tion. Initiation into “headlessness” or “‘no-thingness”’ is free and immediate, and there are no strings attached to it.
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_ing, is not a mystical or even a religious experience, not euphoric, not a sudden expansion into universal love or cosmic consciousness, nor any kind of thought or feeling whatever. Quite the contrary, it is absolutely featureless, colorless, neutral. It is gazing into the pure, still cool,
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which—because it is outside—is no authority. On this subject, no one but this Subject—the Ist-person—is qual- ified to pronounce. Here, the scriptures are for testing by our experience, not our experience by the scriptures. In fact, they pass the test. At the heart of each of the great mystical traditions lies simple, direct Liberation or Awakening to who and what we really are.
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The God-filled heart, he continues, is moved towards creatures when they are seen as part of God’s design. It is exactly this mystical understanding that the inner and the outer world are one that gives spiritual strength to Mother Theresa and the Sisters of Charity. Their strict rule of poverty applies to their egos as well as to their bodies. When they lack “any tendency or inclination” to comi- nate the world for their own purposes, then the world itself becomes nothing—without self-nature. It no longer holds power over them. This gives them the freedom and strength to serve and cherish it, for as the manifestation of God’s design it is infinitely marvelous and dear to them. The Designer and His design cannot be separated. The incoherent, filthy leper in the streets is as much Christ as He to whom they surrender their hearts.
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The techniques of Hindu and Buddhist Yoga lend themselves to occult practice because they develop the heart and the mind. But the danger of the occult way is that the desire to know rather than to be, to conquer rather than to surrender the self, leads to strange malpractices and to highly inflated egos. The two occultists in this book, however, both had safeguards against the cruder and sillier extremes of magic and have not noticeably fallen into these traps. In fact, Dion Fortune’s study of the Qabalah and practice of its ways to mystical realization nearly takes her out of the category of occultism al- together, for the Qabalah itself is a genuinely religious path and any practitioner of it must eventually come to that point of surrender that is the fulcrum of the religious mystic. But she was an ardent believer in the stage-by- stage ascent of the occultist where every symbol can be
Page 339
Fortune, Dion, 231, 232, 233, 236; background, 241, 242; books: Mystical Qabalah, 249, Psychic Self-Defense, 238; death of, 251; and the Golden Dawn, 236, 243, 244; and magic, 244, 255; marriage of, 244; psychi ill-health of, 242; psychic quackery, advice on, 253, 254; and the sephiroth, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250; symbolic sex, 248, 249; the Tarot, 254; the war and its effects on, 251
Page 340
Hasidim, the, 222, 223, 231 Hazrat Babajan, 123, 133 “Headlessness,” 278, 279, 282, 283, 287, 290 Heard, Gerald, 9 Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet of, 260 Hinduism (passing references) 2, 39, 52, 171, 204, 238, 262, 285 and avatars, 132 Bhakti and Advaita, 118, 119, 148 beliefs about Arunachala, 150 and Buddhism, difference between, 288, 289 and the feeling of “I,” 36, 153 and Huxley, 9 infinite Self, 158 mantra, 169 maya, 163, 262 and the nagual, 312 ultimate Reality, 122, 154, 160 self-surrender, 139, 163 Home for Dying Destitutes, 321 Howe, Eric Graham, 20 Hume, David, 159 Humphreys, Christmas, 20 Huxley, Aldous, 1, 4, 38, 122, 176; background, 6, 7; blindness of, 6, 7, 8; books: Eyeless in Gaza, 7, Perennial Philosophy, 1, 9, Shakespeare and Religion, 16, Those Barren Leaves, 4; in Califomia, 9; death of, 15, 16; and duality, 7, 8, 10; first marriage, 7; glimpses of truth, 10; humour of, 15; views on life, 15, 16; and mescaline, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14; mystical paths of, 10; nature of, 15; and religion, 8, 9; feeling of “I,” 13; universal love, 13; ultimate Reality, 10 Huxley, Laura, 10, 15, 16 Huxley, Maria, 7, 15 Huxley, Trevenan, 6
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divine
Page n9
Three criteria have governed the choice of subjects for this book. One criterion has been integrity of approach; another has been the international reputation of the sage; the third has been the originality of his teaching. Not all subjects have all three qualifications—some, for instance, are considerably bet- ter known than others. But all have a certain quality of inten- sity about them that makes them at least worth reading. There is not a great deal of difference between a mystic and a sage, but enough to call them by different names. A mystic seeks direct experience of, and communion with, the divine; his whole life centers around this purpose. He tends to be solitary and to communicate his understanding through books. A sage, on the other hand, is a wise man who is perceptive, discern- ing, and thoughtful about life in general. He, too, pivots him- self on the wish to experience the truth of existence and he, too, may write a lot of books. But he tends to be more outward-tumed than the mystic and more taken up with teaching and advising; he originates methods and attracts disciples.
Page n13
Writings in Time of War, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Teilhard de Chardin; A Biography, Robert Speaight, Collins Publishers; Human Energy, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc.; Let Me Explain, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Science and Christ, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Pub- lishers, Inc.; The Divine Milieu, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Pub-
Page n15
Satguru Has Come, Shri Hans Publications, by permission of the Divine Times; Farewell! Satsang of Shri Guru Maharaj Ji., 15th July 1973 Alexandra Palace; Divine Light Mission Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 4, Shri Hans Productions, by permission of the Divine Times.
Page n16
Maharaj Ji: The Divine Times, Shri Hans Productions
Page 13
Because both mescaline and lysergic acid (LSD) had played such a remarkable part in Huxley’s “enlighten- ment,” he regarded them as entirely beneficial, a means of saving the human race. He argued that because most believers regard God as entirely spirit, only to be ap- proached by spiritual means, they would not believe that a divine experience could be brought about by chemical conditioning. But, he said, “In one way or another, all our
Page 16
up to those lights, “to open herself to joy, peace, love and being, to permit herself to be irradiated by them and to become one with them. I urged her to become what in fact she had always been, what all of us have always been, a part of the divine substance, a manifestation of love, joy and peace, a being identical with the One Reality. And I kept on repeating this, urging her to go deeper and deeper into the light, ever deeper and deeper.’’!4
Page 17
... 1 had been attempting to practice what Buddhists call ‘recollection’ (smriti) or constant awareness of the im- mediate present as distinct from the usual distracted ram- bling of reminiscence and anticipation. But, in discussing it one evening, someone said to me, “But why try to live in the present? Surely we are always completely in the present even when we re thinking about the past or the future?’ This, actually quite obvious, remark again brought on the sudden sensation of having no weight. At the same time, the present seemed to become a kind of moving stillness, an eternal stream from which neither I nor anything could deviate. I saw that everything, just as it is now, is Ir—is the whole point of there being life and a universe. I saw that when the Upanishads said, ‘That art thou!’ or “All this world is Brahman, they meant just exactly what they said. Each thing, each event, each experience in its inescapable nowness and in all its own particular individuality was precisely what it should be, and so much so that it acquired a divine authority and originality. It struck me with the fullest clarity that none of this depended on my seeing it to be so; that was the way things were, whether I understood it or not, and if I did not understand, that was IT too. Furthermore, I felt that I now understood what Christianity might mean by the love of
Page 19
Living in IT and by IT, altogether allowing IT to be himself, was the great theme of Alan Watts’s life. But he was certainly not a mystic in the traditional sense. He loved sensual life and lived with enormous gusto. He drank a good deal, took LSD many times, married three times, and had seven children. He died in 1973, at the age of fifty-eight. His vocation in life, he said, was to wonder about the nature of the universe, and this feeling of awe and fascination led him into philosophy, psychology, re- ligion, and mysticism—not just in ideas but also in ex- perience: He refused to talk about anything he had not actually discovered. He was not afraid to call himself a mystic but saw with amusement how the people who hoped he would be their guru, or spiritual guide, were shaken when they saw his “element of irreducible rascal- ity.” He knew what they wanted—an idealized incarna- tion of radiant tranquility, love, and compassion—but he was too honest to confess to anything but “a quaking and palpitating mess of anxiety which lusts and loathes, needs love and attention, and lives in terror of death putting an end to its misery’? when he looked inside himself. This insight led him to see that to try to control the “quaking mess, to deny it and despise it in favor of what a mystic was supposed to feel, was to miss reality altogether, for the very attempt to do so was simply one more desire of the quaking mess. The quaking mess itself was as much a part of the universe as the rain, or flies, or disease. To see it as divine did not abolish it but allowed one the peace of mind of acceptance and delivered one from schizo-
Page 34
This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he “thinks.” If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some “thing” alien to himself. And he proves that the “thing”’ exists. He convinces himself: “I am therefore some thing.” And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infi- nite, the transcendent, is also a “thing,” an “object,” like other finite and limited objects of our thought!
Page 41
... We begin to divine that Zen is not only beyond the formulations of Buddhism but it is also in a certain way “beyond” (and even pointed to by) the revealed message of Christianity.1°
Page 50
Our worldly conditions, he thought, have been spiritual from the beginning—the divine atmosphere, or milieu, in which “God enfolds and penetrates us by cre- ating and preserving us.” Thus we have been created for God’s activity, which is for one purpose only—that we are to become “one and the same complex thing with him.’’6
Page 51
What is the supreme and complex reality for which the divine operation moulds us? It is revealed to us by St. Paul and St. John. It is the quantitative repletion and the qualitative consummation of all things: it is the mysterious Pleroma, in which the substantial one and the created many fuse without
Page 52
And now let us link the first and last terms of this long series of identities. We shall then see with a wave of joy that the divine omnipresence translates itself within our universe by the network of the organising forces of the total Christ. God exerts pressure, in us and upon us—through the inter- mediary of all the powers of heaven, earth and hell—only in the act of forming and consummating Christ who saves and sur-animates the world. And since, in the course of this oper- ation, Christ himself does not act as a dead or passive point of convergence, but as a centre of radiation for the energies which lead the universe back to God through his humanity, the layers of divine action finally come to us impregnated with his organic energies.®
Page 52
There seem to be two ways in which religious people regard the world and time. One is Teilhard’s, in which some sort of perfection will be reached at an infinitely distant period. This way regards the present experience of life as incomplete in itself. It is merely a step towards a future goal. It often sees divine patterns revealing themselves—and events which do not fit in are ig- nored—as Teilhard was inclined to ignore suffering. This religious path demands concentration upon a goal which can never be realized now—it is in some vague and far off future. This attitude of mind is shared by all religions —there are many Hindus and Buddhists who believe that merging with the Self, or Nirvana, can only be reached after innumerable lifetimes.
Page 56
At that moment, as anyone else will find who cares to make -this same interior experiment, I felt the distress characteris- tic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine successes, speaking to me from the depth of the night: ego sum, noli timere (It is I, be not afraid).
Page 56
O God, whose call precedes the very first of our move- ments, grant me the desire to desire being—that, by means of that divine thirst which is your gift, the access to the great waters may open wide within me. Do not deprive me of the sacred taste for being, that primordial energy, that very first point of our points of rest: Spiritu principali confirma me. And you whose loving wisdom forms me out of all the forces and all the hazards of the earth, grant that I may begin to
Page 60
Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (London: Collins; New York: Harper and Row), p. 122.
Page 60
Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p. 122.
Page 60
Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p. 76.
Page 82
In contrast with the vigorous, powerful, complicated, and often mischievous Gurdjieff, Pak Subuh seems al- most a shadow. This is probably what he would wish, for he believes that he himself has no power—it is the Divine Life Force which moves him and all his followers. Yet at Gurdjieff's death, some of his pupils turned to Subuh asa natural continuation of Gurdjieff’s teaching.
Page 105
At the end of his three years of illumination, Subuh received a revelation that it was to be his mission to transmit the divine force to others. Accordingly, he gave up his job—by that time he had five young children—and told his wife that they must trust that God would look after them. He felt intuitively that he must not even look for pupils or talk about his revelation unless asked to; but, at the same time, the transmission should be given to all who wanted it.
Page 105
Subud is the abbreviation of three words—Susila, Budhi, Dharma. Susila means man’s true character when he acts in accordance with the will of God; Budhi is man’s divine life-force as man encounters it within himself; Dharma means man’s full surrender to the will of God.
Page 109
This theme of emptying one’s mind of thoughts and imagination is one of Bapak’s most important teachings. To him, the separation of thinking and feeling from the reception of the Divine Power is essential. For thinking and feeling belong to the realm of the lower forces— everything that we do, which includes the actions of
Page 110
thinking and feeling, is conditioned by these forces. But they must be transcended if the Divine Power is to work unimpeded. How can this be done?
Page 119
Maharaj Ji is a very young man still and although he too asks for devotion, it does not contain the element of obedience demanded by Meher Baba. In contrast to Meher Baba, he has a definite set of awards to be won by those who make the effort to surrender themselves to him. One is the seeing of a light, the Divine Light, from which his movement takes its name.
Page 126
My Silence and the imminent breaking of my Silence is to save mankind from the monumental forces of ignorance, and to fulfil the divine Plan of universal unity. The breaking of my Silence will reveal to man the universal Oneness of God, which will bring about the universal brotherhood of man. My Silence had to be. The breaking of my Silence has to be—soon.®
Page 130
What, then, gave him a world audience of devotees? Foremost, undoubtedly there was a magnetic, charisma- tic quality about him which was genuinely felt as love radiating from him. People often wept when they first saw him. He laid himself open to everybody—not, perhaps, with the divine love which he attributed to him- self, but with a genuine if sometimes strangely expressed empathy with many ordinary people.
Page 132
There are many people for whom this state of openness is reached, as nearly as it can be reached, through a “messiah,” a personal Christ, one with whom a relation- ship can be established, on whom the weight of sorrows can be laid, to whom devotion is offered. Love must be experienced if it is to grow, and the cosmic image is sometimes easier to love than one’s neighbor. Hindus are well aware of this human need for an object of devotion and provide deities for every type of person, each image being the embodiment of a virtue rather than an actual god. Krishna, the mythical avatar of the Bhagavad Gita, sets many hearts afire. But the sort of avatar who gets into actual history, such as Jesus of Nazareth, tends, perhaps, to create complications, for his humanhood is not always at all easy to reconcile with his “divine” nature.
Page 136
Guru Maharaj Ji was born in 1958 and has been a Satguru, a revealer of the Divine Light, since the age of eight.
Page 139
Surrender to one’s guru is basic to Hindu tradition. Is it a genuinely religious path? At a certain stage in man’s growth he seems to need to lean on a divine figure, some- times an image, to whom he can attach feelings of love which otherwise could not be expressed. The very pour- ing out of reverence, joy, and intense love may carry
Page 141
And this is just what happens to those who think that Maharaj Ji will give it to them. Whether they get real knowledge of God or not, every day there are hundreds of young people who believe that they will, and who queue up to get it, longing for the moment when they will feel a vibration, see a bright light, smell nectar, hear a divine sound: these four experiences make up the Knowledge of God which Guru Maharaj proclaims.
Page 142
When there is consciousness of the vibration, the body moves with it and then a light can be seen that is said to be startlingly brilliant (the eyes are shut). This is the Divine Light of God and has given its name to Maharaj Ji’s movement, the Divine Light Mission. It is this light which seems particularly holy to those who see it, but not everybody does—it is not automatically seen after the vibration is felt, and it is said that those who are “‘intellec- tual,” such as school teachers, have great difficulty in seeing it at all. It is also referred to as the third eye.
Page 142
The divine sound is said to be music, faint and wonderful.
Page 145
The four experiences of “divine’”’ pleasure—the vibra- tion, the light, the smell, and the sound—are the goodies offered in exchange for devotion. Those who follow the plump young Maharaj are uncritical, even when they do not see white lights. They do not want philosophy or scholarship, which is fortunate. The Maharaj seems to base what doctrine he has on a few well-known sayings taken from Christianity as well as Hinduism, and he does not always interpret them properly. One such saying is: “Tn the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.” Guru Maharaj, who rests much of his advice on this saying, has taken it to mean literally that the first thing
Page 146
Such oversimplifications do not matter to the Guru's followers, and perhaps they are right. What does a mere reinterpretation matter in comparison with divine bliss? And it is true that it is the experience of illumination that matters and not its description. In any case, soon we may all be able to decide for ourselves on the truth of his statements, for he has forecast that shortly the whole world will have the Knowledge.
Page 146
Although so young, the Guru has recently married an American girl named Marlene, some eight years older than himself. As his message seems profoundly different from his father’s, it will be interesting to see if Maharaj Ji and the American sons yet to be born to him will found a dynasty of Hindu revivalism. This seems doubtful; the Guru’s image has slipped considerably since he was photographed passionately kissing an admirer—a divine action that did not please his supporters. Nevertheless, in 1988 he is still the revered head of this movement, but the movement itself has changed its name. It is now Elan
Page 147
4 Farewell! Satsang of Shri Guru Maharaj Ji, Divine Light Mission Magazine, 1973.
Page 147
Satgurudev, Shri Hans Ji Maharaj. Delhi: Divine Light Mission
Page 148
The second strand of Hindu guruship comes from the teachings of Advaita Vedanta, where the divine being is seen as impersonal, as pure Reality without attri- bute, limitation, or definition. At the same time, he is THAT from which all has emerged, and which sustains it etemally. THAT is the fundamental nature of all things, but only man has been given the power to find this out. The ways of discovering his true Self, which is the name given to man’s apprehension of the transcendent (it is called the Self because a man feels as though he has found his real self when he realizes the true ground of his nature) are not so much those of devotion to an object (human or inanimate) as in the preceding chapters, as of realizing the difference between the appearance of things and their reality.
Page 149
Nevertheless, this technique—which is the substitu- tion of a mantra (a word which supposedly has a divine origin and, as well, no intellectual connotations) for each and every thoughtas it arises—has helped many busy and self-identified people to approach a wordless peace of mind, which at least may be a step on the way to a greater wisdom.
Page 163
Because of the apparent indifference of Hindus to the value of life itself, which they display to shocked Western eyes in the rotting, death-laden streets of Calcutta and Bombay, the more energetic Westerners have concluded that a spuriously divine attitude ofacceptance is to blame. That may be partly true. But another factor enters into Hindu philosophy which is apt to confound Western thinking altogether—maya—the world thought of as illu- sion, not really there at all.
Page 170
In answer to the last question, the Maharishi says yes. He believes that the purpose of man is also the purpose of the entire universe, and that that purpose is the expres- sion of divinity. A divine, creative intelligence has caused the world to exist and man is “a bridge of abun- dance” between God and the whole of creation:
Page 170
To live a life of freedom is the purpose of life in the human species. If one is not able to live such a life, the very purpose of life is blurred. Man is born to live a perfect life holding within its range all values of the transcendental absolute divine of unlimited energy, intelligence, power, peace, and bliss, along with the unlimited values of the world of multi- plicity in relative existence. He is born to project the abun- dance of the absolute state of life into the world of relative existence.
Page 229
That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don’t you know also that God needs you—in the dullness of his eternity, you? How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—for that which is the meaning of your life. Teachings and poems try to say more, and say too much: how murky and presumptuous is the chatter of “the emerging God’’—but the emergence of the living God we know unswervingly in our hearts. The world is not divine play, it is divine fate. That there are world, man, the human person, you and I, has divine meaning.!9
Page 238
Although these play an important role—and it is worth remembering that the ancient Hebrew prophets describe the process of creation as the unfolding of divine energy, divine light, and divine language—there need be no at- tempt to fit the Tree into a series of letters and numbers in order to understand and experience it. A real spiritual path goes beyond its starting point and Dion Fortune stressed that ifthe Tree is to be a valid method of Western yoga, it must be available to everybody, including those who don’t know Hebrew and who are bad at numerology. The Tree is a yogic way of using the mind, not a system of knowledge, she said.
Page 239
But the importance of the Tree is not just its penetra- tion into the ways of the manifest Spirit (in which case it would be only asystem of knowledge) but the Tree is also one’s own self, for the sephiroth that mark the descent and particularization of God also form the rungs of the ladder up which man can ascend and become unified. Each sephirah symbolizes divine energy at a different
Page 240
Dion Fortune shows us the Tree as consisting of three pillars. The sephiroth of the left-hand pillar are negative and female; and of the right-hand pillar, positive and male. Two vital stages of realization are centered in the middle pillar, which is based on the earth and topped by the gateway to heaven. The sephiroth are connected by a zigzagging lightning flash—or flash of enlightenment —and the two central processes of realization are known as Tiphareth, or Beauty (in which Kether is first seen), and Daath, or Divine Knowledge (although Daath is a rare rather than a regular stage and is not regarded as a definite sephirah).
Page 247
we must experience the rush of the divine cosmic energy in its pure form; an energy so tremendous that mortal man is fused into disruption by it... . But although the sight of the Divine Father blasts mortals as with fire, the Divine Son comes familiarly among them and can be invoked by the appropriate rites—Bacchanalia in the case of the Son of Zeus and the Eucharist in the case of the Son of Jehovah. Thus we see that there is a lower form of manifestation, which “shows us the Father,” but that this rite owes its validity solely to the fact that it derives its Illuminating Intelligence, its Inner Robe of Glory, from the Father, Chokmah.4
Page 250
ality or lower self; the four Sephiroth above Tiphareth are the Individuality, or higher self, and Kether is the Divine Spark, or nucleus of manifestation.
Page 251
There are some psychologists who will tell us that the Angels of the Qabalists and the Gods and Manus of other systems are our own repressed complexes; there are others with less limited outlook who will tell us that these Divine beings are the latent capacities of our own higher selves. To the devotional mystic this is not a point of any great moment; he gets his results, and that is all he cares about; but the philosophical mystic, in other words the occultist, thinks the matter out and arrives at certain conclusions. These conclu- sions, however, can only be understood when we know what we mean by reality and have a clear line of demarcation between the subjective and the objective. Anyone who is trained in philosophical method knows that this is asking for a good deal.
Page 319
Her answer is quite clear. It is Jesus, eternally alive in the heart of man, whom she and her Sisters serve; and the keynote of her teaching and her work has always been: “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me.” Every person, to her, is Jesus. Every derelict or abandoned child or leper-rotted carcass is the Divine Presence—He to whom she has given herself:
Page 328
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence (London: Burns and Oates Ltd., Templegate), p. 58.
Page 338
Daath, 240, 249, 250 Dada Guru, 138 Death, attitudes toward: Ramana Maharshi, 152, 153, 154 Pak Subuh, 114, 115 Mother Theresa, 322, 323 Dhiravamsa, 102, 181, 198, 333, 334; awareness, 208, 209; being alone, 209, 210; background, 198, 200, 201, 202; complete at- tention, 203, 204; and en- lightenment, 207; feeling of “T,” 209; and holiness, 202; in- sight into duality, 206; levels of consciousness, 205, 206, 207; nonattachment, 204, 205; ob- jective thought, 207; relation- ship with the whole, 208, 209, 210; and Vipassana medita- tion, 201, 203, 205; watching the mind, 201 Distancing, 226, 227 Divine Light Mission, 136, 142, 145 Don Genaro, 303 Don Juan, 279, 295, 322, 330, 331; controlled folly, 301, 307, 308; the “doing” of the world, 309; losing his personal history, 300; man as a hunter, 303, 304; man as a warrior, 306, 307, 313; and Mescalito, 297; other worlds, 304, 305; and peyote, 297, 303, 304, 310; relationship with Castaneda, 395, 397; “seeing,” 278, 279, 299, 302, 307, 309; sorcery, 306, 310; space travel, 311, 312; thinking, 301; totality of the self, 310, 311; the world as a construct of the senses, 305
Page 341
Maharaj Ji, 119, 135, 293; discourses of, 143, 144, 145; Divine Light, 142, 145; Shri Hans, father of, 138, 139; the Knowledge, 140, 141, 144, 145, 146; nectar, 142, 145; sound, 142, 145; teachings of, 143; vibration, 142, 145
Page 343
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 3, 41, 44, 175, 224, 332; books: Divine Milieu, 55, Hymn of the Universe, 55; and Christ, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54; and energy, 53, 54; evolution of consciousness, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 218; his inmost self, 55, 56; the noosphere, 53, 54; Omega-point, 49, 54, 55; the Pleroma, 50, 51, 55; the soul, 34, 46, 47; synthesis of the personal and universal, 54
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god
Page 13
Because both mescaline and lysergic acid (LSD) had played such a remarkable part in Huxley’s “enlighten- ment,” he regarded them as entirely beneficial, a means of saving the human race. He argued that because most believers regard God as entirely spirit, only to be ap- proached by spiritual means, they would not believe that a divine experience could be brought about by chemical conditioning. But, he said, “In one way or another, all our
Page 15
Huxley died of cancer, as did his mother and his first wife. The nine or so years before his death brought him contentment and happiness, and many people remarked on his softer, mellower outlook. He grew out of the rather undergraduate, intellectual humor which, at a psychiatrist's conference, caused him to cross himself every time Freud was mentioned, and which made him think that it would be “amusing” to marry Laura in a drive-in wedding chapel. His astonishing fund of knowl- edge, observation, and real wit always provided him with many good friends from all walks of life. An astonish- ing picnic was once given by the Huxleys in the desert, to which were invited Krishnamurti, Greta Garbo, Anita Loos, Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell, Paulette God- dard, and Christopher Isherwood, as well as some Theosophists who came to cook Krishnamurti’s veg- etarian meal—the high point of the picnic occurring when a sheriff arrived to tell them that they were dese- crating the Los Angeles riverbed and demanded their names. When given, he refused to believe them, called them a lot of tramps and, pointing to a notice, asked if any of them could read!
Page 19
God—namely, that despite the commonsensical imperfec- tion of things, they were nonetheless loved by God just as they are, and that this loving of them was at the same time the godding of them....
Page 21
Does it help by guaranteeing that every word he said was the solemn, literal, and absolute truth, which we are there- fore bound to believe? That 1900-odd years ago, he somehow settled a mysterious debt for me which I don’t remember incurring? That everything he did was the perfect and finally authoritative example of conduct and morals—which we are expected to follow without the aforesaid advantage of being God the Son in person?
Page 21
He felt that on these sorts of points the Christian doc- trines were bewilderingly complex and unhelpful. They had developed into a sort of symbology which “fails ab- solutely to make any direct connection between the crucified and risen Son of God, on the one hand, and the daily life of a family in the suburbs of Los Angeles or London, on the other.’’4
Page 21
He saw the style of Christianity as artificial and inor- ganic because of the idea of God “as the maker of the world, and thus of the world itself as an artifact which has been constructed in accordance with a plan, and which has, therefore, a purpose and an explanation.”® He com- pared this idea with the Taoist wu-wei, which is the way
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of “nonstriving” and “nonmaking,” where things grow from within and are not made, shaping themselves from within outwards spontaneously. He felt that the Christian image of God was that of an architect or a mechanic, standing outside the world as a mechanic will stand out- side an assemblage of separate parts and that this belief had led to Western minds thinking of man himself as a separate bit, brought in from outside instead of emerging from within the universe as a leaf emerges from a tree. Thinking of God as outside creation had led to concep- tualizing him as a set of principles rather than the living reality and inwardness of all things.
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This struggle to extract the “I’’ from unpleasant ex- perience, particularly from death, is one reason, Watts thought, why people make an image of God and try to cling to it. But this clinging is in itself intense suffering, which is not to say that there is no God, but that to try and grasp God as a means of alleviating suffering or giving continuous everlasting life, is merely putting oneself in bondage. Death seen as sleep without waking, as the falling away of thoughts and memories and “I’’-ness, has something natural and refreshing about it, and should not be confused with “the fantasy of being shut up forever in darkness.” Death might also mean waking up as someone else, as one did when one was born, and Watts was con- vinced that what dies is not consciousness but memory, for “consciousness recurs in every newborn creature, and wherever it recurs it is ‘I’.””2°
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continuum or undifferentiated cosmic jello.”1% He points out that science has revealed to us a universe so mysteri- ous and so impressive that the Western image of IT as God the Father simply won’t fit and the images of a more impersonal or suprapersonal God “‘are hopelessly subhuman—jello, featureless light, homogenised space, or a whopping jolt of electricity.”!4 So how can we think of God?
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“T know,” says Watts, quoting St. Augustine, “but when you ask me I don’t. If you want me to show you God, I will point to the ash can in your back yard. But if you ask,
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‘Then you mean that this ash can is God?’ —you will have missed the point altogether. 5
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absorption was so great that he could genuinely believe that God, in order to convert him, had specially brought about the Hindu’s journey from India.
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Perhaps some of these “seeds” were growing into a different field of flowers than the one Merton thought he was in—a field where active religion is not so important as being still, and where conventional Christianity some- times seems at odds with the truth. Twelve years later he wrote New Seeds of Contemplation and became less popular as a Catholic writer for he seemed to query the Christian belief in the uniqueness of the individual self. While describing contemplation (an exercise of inner stillness and receptiveness to God), he said:
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and the superficial, external self which we commonly iden- tify with the first person singular. We must remember that this superficial “‘I’’ is not our real self. It is our “individual- ity” and our “empirical” self but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The “I” that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true “T” that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the vesture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and un- known “self” whom most of us never discover until we are dead. Our external, superficial self is not eternal, not spiritual. Far from it. This self is doomed to disappear as completely as smoke from a chimney. It is utterly frail and evanescent. Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this “I” is really “not I’ and the awakening of the unknown “T” that is beyond observation and reflection and is incapa- ble of commenting upon itself... .1
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Merton saw a good deal of both types and some of his books openly criticize the ways and moods of monks. He repudiated particularly the opinions of those who tried to define the experience of contemplation in psychological terms or with scientific definitions. In Christianity there is a distinction drawn between meditation and contem- plation. Meditation is a discussion in the mind, a silent working-out of a theme. Contemplation is a wordless nearness to God, an experience of being—unnecessary to the ways and natures of many monks, just as spiritual realities are often unnecessary to a busy religious life.
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This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he “thinks.” If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible. He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some “thing” alien to himself. And he proves that the “thing”’ exists. He convinces himself: “I am therefore some thing.” And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infi- nite, the transcendent, is also a “thing,” an “object,” like other finite and limited objects of our thought!
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own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God.? r
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torical existence of God-who-became-man Jesus. But Merton thought this assertion of individuality futile. Far better, he said, to realize humbly our own mysterious nature as persons within whom God exists than to believe that man exists because he thinks.
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Belief in the unknowable “I” that is beyond observa- tion and reflection is a constantly recurring theme in this book. Merton saw the unknowable “T’ as the true person, whom God had intended, implicit in all created things: “The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him. Ifit tried to be like something else which it was never in- tended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give Him less glory.’
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It does not mean that created things are imperfect, he said, because they are not exactly alike. On the contrary, real perfection does not lie in conforming to some abstract type; rather, it comes into existence when the individual’s identity is with himself—with his own en- tity, characteristics, and qualities. When he is at one with his own person, he gives glory to God by being precisely what he was always intended to be, just as that one par- ticular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots or lifting its branches in a way which no other tree has ever done or ever will do.
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the main task of Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Sufism and is the occupation of such sages as Krish- namurti and Ramana Maharshi. The ultimate discovery that God, or the Self, is the ground of one’s true nature is seen by Merton as a problem of identity, in much the same way as Ramana Maharshi saw it. Whereas Ramana Maharshi believed that one’s feeling of “I’’ was the key to the question of existence and that once this feeling had been identified with its Source, the Self, existence would reveal its true potential, so Merton, -in Christian terms, saw free will as the gift of God to man, to be used as active participation with God in the revelation of identity with him:
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Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied.
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With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it!
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Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. ... We do not know clearly beforehand what the result of this work will be. The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done. The way of doing it is a secret I can leam from no one else but Him.4
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His desire for “‘true identity” led Merton away from the close monasticism which influenced his early writing towards a more compassionate feeling for the suffering world—in contrast to his earlier glad detachment from it. He became aware of people and of the real problems of life. He began to find the distance was lessening between the innate sense of God that came to him in contempla- tion and ordinary life. He saw that the way to inner spiritual certainty was undramatic, even obscure, and that the monastic everyday routine of “work, poverty, hardship, and monotony” had supreme value.
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As his sense of realism grew, Merton began to take a harder look at the world outside. One of the current phenomena attacked by his pen was the Death-of-God movement which had more of a furor in America than in Europe, and was sparked off by Martin Buber’s book, The Eclipse of God. When Dr. John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich, wrote Honest to God, Merton reacted:
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To begin with, ‘the world’ has no need of Christian apologetics. .. . It explains itself to its own satisfaction. That is why I think it is absurd to approach the world with what seems to me to be merely a new tactic and a new plea for sincerity—a “religionless religion” which cheerfully agrees that God is dead. . . . Obvious answers from “the world”: “So
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Many Christians would and did disagree with him over this point. In every religion, but particularly in Christian- ity, two main groups of people seem to emerge. There are those who believe that God’s orders in the form of a vigorous Christian life are to be carried out, but who do not feel the need to contemplate God—who, in fact, are shy and wary of the admonition “Be still and know that I am God.” And there is another, perhaps smaller group, who see their own spiritual realization as of first impor- tance although, like Aldous Huxley, they are far from blind to the needs of the world.
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Merton was one of the latter type, and it might be fair to say they are more likely to be found in monasteries. But two themes of contemplation seem to have expanded his outlook and perhaps changed the direction of his life. One was the belief, stated earlier, that “each particular being... gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now.” The full awareness of the moment, which Merton called “‘nowness,” brings the knowledge of the “unknown I” into consciousness. The whole action of awakening is for now. Wherever one is, in lonely cell or crowded street, this moment contains all
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As long as there is an “I” that is the definite subject of a contemplative experience, an “I” that is aware of itself and of its contemplation, an “IT” that can possess a certain “degree of spirituality’, then we have not yet passed over the Red Sea, we have not yet “gone out of Egypt’. We remain in the realm of multiplicity, activity, incompleteness, striving and desire. The true inner self, the true indestructible and immortal person, the true “I” who answers to a new and secret name known only to himself and God, does not “have” anything, even “contemplation.” This “I” is not the kind of subject that can amass experiences, reflect on them, reflect on himself, for this “I’’ is not the superficial and empirical self that we know in our everyday life.®
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He came to believe that “the self is not its own centre and does not orbit around itself; it is centred on God, the one centre of all, which is ‘everywhere and nowhere,’ in whom all are encountered, from whom all proceed... .””8
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The Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, spent his life in pursuit of scientific evidence to show the pres- ence of God within the material universe. He was by nature a scientist, interested even in early childhood in all the phenomena surrounding him in the Auvergne region of France where he was born. He relates how, as a very young child, he would collect all objects which seemed to be imperishable. Even at six or seven years old, he longed to possess some finite thing which was unchangeable and absolute. He was dismayed to find that iron rusted, that wood could burn:
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In the course of time this overwheiming interest in discovering the eternal in the realms of matter brought Teilhard to attempt a synthesis in which he saw God manifest as consciousness throughout the whole of evolu- tion.
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The “soul of the world” or the “impressive residue” —how can it be recognized? It is manifested, said Teilhard, as consciousness. Throughout evolution, the directing energy of God has impelled organisms to evolve in consciousness, and their consciousness increases in direct ratio to their complexity. He believed that an atom, for instance, has an infinitesimal consciousness of its own existence. As atoms combine, as cells are formed, as or- ganisms develop, so their consciousness grows. The ul- timate state of consciousness will be the consciousness of God. Because this is its purpose and the cause of its
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At this point it is easy to lose the drift of Teilhard’s theory. What does he mean by a personalized universe? To Teilhard, a devout Christian, God was the ultimate Being, expressed in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. There- fore, he saw the whole of evolution as prearrangedly heading toward the ultrapersonal—toward a point in time when conscious, supremely personal mankind will be united, or oned, with Christ the Omega-point, the heart of the universe.
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Our worldly conditions, he thought, have been spiritual from the beginning—the divine atmosphere, or milieu, in which “God enfolds and penetrates us by cre- ating and preserving us.” Thus we have been created for God’s activity, which is for one purpose only—that we are to become “one and the same complex thing with him.’’6
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Teilhard here raises what is to me, and, I suspect, to many others, a baffling point—why has God bothered to create life if the end result will be the same as the begin- ning? The how of it all we can understand through the revelations of science, but the question of existence itself has not yet been satisfactorily answered by any religion or scientific discovery.
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confusion in a whole which, without adding anything essen- tial to God, will nevertheless be a sort of triumph and generalisation of being. ...
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And now let us link the first and last terms of this long series of identities. We shall then see with a wave of joy that the divine omnipresence translates itself within our universe by the network of the organising forces of the total Christ. God exerts pressure, in us and upon us—through the inter- mediary of all the powers of heaven, earth and hell—only in the act of forming and consummating Christ who saves and sur-animates the world. And since, in the course of this oper- ation, Christ himself does not act as a dead or passive point of convergence, but as a centre of radiation for the energies which lead the universe back to God through his humanity, the layers of divine action finally come to us impregnated with his organic energies.®
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Super-charity, he believed, is on its way, and is already felt in many places. “At this moment there are men, many men, who by making a conjunction of the two ideas of Incarnation and evolution a real element in their lives, are succeeding in effecting the synthesis of the personal and the universal. For the first time in history men have become capable not only of knowing and serving evolu- tion but of loving it; thus they are beginning to be able to say to God, explicitly, as a matter of habit and effortlessly, that they love him not only with their
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Yes, O God, I believe it: and I believe it all the more willingly because it is not only a question of my being con- soled, but of my being completed: it is you who are at the origin of the impulse, and at the end of that continuing pull which all my life long I can do no other than follow, or favour the first impulse and its developments. And it is you who vivify, for me, with your omnipresence (even more than my spirit vivifies the matter which it animates) the myriad influ- ences of which I am the constant object. In the life which wells up in me and in the matter which sustains me, I find much more than your gifts. It is you yourself whom I find, who makes me participate in your being, you who moulds Nich yoats
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O God, whose call precedes the very first of our move- ments, grant me the desire to desire being—that, by means of that divine thirst which is your gift, the access to the great waters may open wide within me. Do not deprive me of the sacred taste for being, that primordial energy, that very first point of our points of rest: Spiritu principali confirma me. And you whose loving wisdom forms me out of all the forces and all the hazards of the earth, grant that I may begin to
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ing for a World Teacher who would transform their lives and renew their understanding; but all it had amounted to was the substitution of a new god and a new religion for the old. They were still using the outer forms of religion as crutches and were still barred and limited by them. Their psychological state hadn’t changed at all and they depended for their spirituality on somebody else. When he asked them, Krishnamurti said, to put away all reli- gious practices and instead to look within themselves for enlightenment, glory, purification, and incorruptibility, they would not do it.
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real difference between Gurdjieff's teaching and Pak Subuh’s. For Gurdjieff believed that man must make the effort himself to realize his essence; whereas Subuh be- lieves that only God, or the Life-Force, can help man—he cannot do it alone. Pak Subuh has no exercises or methods except that of emptying oneself of thoughts and feelings as far as is possible so that the Life-Force can enter and purify one. This is done during latihan (spiritual training) by a transmission from one who is already opened to the Force.
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What is man’s essence? It would be easy if one could say that Gurdjieff meant God by this term; for the sim- plest and most penetrating idea about man’s existence is that he gains the experience of the beingness of God as he drops his self-absorption, his identification with his small, created self.
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But Gurdjieff’s ideas of both man and God were much more complicated than that, and followed the Sufi teach- ing of many veils between man and God and at least four stages of consciousness. Essence, which is a Sufi term, merely refers to all that we are born with, suchas the color of the skin and nature of the physique. Gurdjieff believed that character was innate and not acquired, that one was born a certain type of person. But this is arguable, and one cannot help remembering the reply of the Zen master,
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He was walking with some friends on a dark, moonless night, when, he says, a ball of light seeming to resemble the sun appeared above his head. It then seemed to enter him and he was filled with the feeling of vibrating forces. Believing that this would be his death, he went home and lay down, but as soon as he relaxed an unknown force impelled him to stand up and go through the Muslim ritual of prayer. He recounts that for the next three years he rarely slept but was visited every night by visions and by the same impelling force which moved his limbs with- out his volition. During this time, an understanding grew in him that the extraordinary force was cleansing and purifying his body and soul, and that the movements he made and the sounds which emerged from him were the expressions of inner purification. He became certain that his experience was alatihan, the Javanese word for train- ing, and that the force which manipulated him was di- vine. He believed that his own submission to this force and his surrender to it had allowed it to “open” him. He realized that surrender was the great key which unlocks the human heart to the will of God.
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“Tn truth the surrender you make when you have been opened or at the time of the opening is not the surrender to God that people ordinarily make, with their emotions only, with their thoughts, or with their desires. That which is required is not the surrender of your heart or mind; it is rather the power of God that is working and
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“In its essence you can come to the surrender . . . only when your heart is emptied and void of everything, such as your hopes, desires, and wishes, even your wish to surrender to God, for that part of you which wishes to do so in this way is nothing but your own heart.””!
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You must allow God to act within you through the working of the great Life Force, says Pak Subuh. The action is similar to allowing a friend to take you by the hand and guide you—whatever he wants to do, you sub- mit to it. This is the meaning of surrender to God, in Pak Subuh’s view.
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At the end of his three years of illumination, Subuh received a revelation that it was to be his mission to transmit the divine force to others. Accordingly, he gave up his job—by that time he had five young children—and told his wife that they must trust that God would look after them. He felt intuitively that he must not even look for pupils or talk about his revelation unless asked to; but, at the same time, the transmission should be given to all who wanted it.
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Subud is the abbreviation of three words—Susila, Budhi, Dharma. Susila means man’s true character when he acts in accordance with the will of God; Budhi is man’s divine life-force as man encounters it within himself; Dharma means man’s full surrender to the will of God.
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Thus Subud is a term which describes the whole con- tent of the action of the latihan: the total submission to God which results in the growth of man’s true nature.
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dominate him and he behaves as their slave, the world itself falls out of balance and everything suffers; for man’s destiny, as the most evolved of all the creatures, is to reconcile the forces within his own nature. To accom- plish this, he must rely on the creative power of God, which releases man’s human understanding and gives him compassionate but firm mastery over the lower forces.
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Within its own sphere, matter is capable of worshiping God, he says. Though without an intellect, it is spiritually aware, and it longs for mankind to allow it to enter his thought and thus raise it to his level. Man must under- stand this desire of matter to connect itself to him if he is to recognize the impulses of which he is composed.
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The way to receive the Power, says Bapak, is to become empty and still within the mind and heart, so quiet that all thoughts and emotions die down. The thinking mind, in particular, is the instrument of whatever powers are uppermost—man can never apprehend his spiritual inner feelings with his superficial thinking-mind. It must quiet down and be replaced by the powerful Life Force of God. This Life Force, the nature of which is entirely beyond his capacity to grasp, is the only true help man has. His thinking brain is an excellent tool and should be de- veloped to its full strength by ordinary methods; but its field of operation is the outer world and it cannot be used to understand the reality of God. One remembers, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”
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When man can abandon his thinking-mind, says Bapak, only submitting his will to God, he will become properly human, at one with himself and with the forces of which he is composed.
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present circumstances have altered. There is a three- month waiting period for every applicant before the latihan takes place, so that his sincerity can be tested and so that he can become properly informed about the nature of Subud and of the brotherhood he is joining. As there is no formal teaching in Subud, there is no required form of belief. At his “opening,” however, the applicant makes the simple affirmation that “he believes in Almighty God, and in his power.”
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What actually happens in the latihan? Twice a week for life, men and women go to separate rooms in their nearest Subud center, take off anything liable to be broken, and, standing relaxed with eyes shut, empty themselves as far as possible of all thoughts, perceptions, and desires. They then feel themselves urged to move about by a force which they believe to be the power of God. The latihan is said to be at one and the same time the worship of God, and a means of purification which clears out stage by stage the results of wrong actions, bad heredity, and so on. Members do not try to understand what is happening to them, but allow everything to proceed as it arises —whether it be slight movements, dancing, talking in foreign tongues, singing, weeping, and even shouting and screaming and making strange animal noises; or they may stand in complete stillness. At no time are they in any kind of trance, nor do they pay attention to what is going on around them. Every possible movement or sound may occur, because every person has his own combination of lower forces to master. But nobody is ever so possessed that he is out of his mind, and he is aware all the time as an observer. At the end of half an hour the helper declares the latihan is finished.
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Although it is constantly referred to as the power of God, Bapak takes care not to claim that the force actually does come from God for, he says, only God can know this. What is received, he says, comes from a stream of life beyond the reach of the lower forces and also beyond anything that could be termed magic. But he cannot ex- plain or categorize this stream. In fact it is useless to talk about it, he says, for explanations, however high- sounding, are only projections of the thinking mind and the imagination. The proper answer to those who want to know what it is, is that they must come and experience it for themselves. They will then know the facts, rather than words about them.
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He puts it this way: “Bapak is willed by God to be simply as Bapak is—to drink coffee, to eat butter, bread and cheese, also to smoke—because this is what people ordinarily do; and it will not close my way to God because He wills me to be so.”
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Bapak’s complete confidence in the Life Force, rather than in man’s own efforts at self-transcendence, may seem deceptively submissive to those of us who have not been touched by it. For although man must, perhaps, ultimately see himself as nothing and the power of God as everything, although he should eventually surrender himself wholly—yet are not his struggling attempts to do so the very rungs of his ladder? To replace his own in- sights and affirmations which often arise from setbacks and doubts, by a force seemingly transmitted effortlessly
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But perhaps Bapak has disposed of this criticism, for he is a firm believer in daily life in the world as the best arena for the force of God, and his teaching these days emphasizes the growth of enterprises. In the seventeen years since he brought Subud and the latihanto the West, he has gradually laid more and more emphasis on outer activities, and particularly on the enterprises which are now beginning to finance the social aims of Subud. He has given guidance in his talks to members about working for better social conditions, and he urges them to start Subud schools, hospitals, homes for the elderly, and so on. This is the only publicity for Subud that he is pre- pared to consider—“We should not make propaganda, but there should be evidence in ourselves for others. It is of the greatest importance,” he says, “to make use of our minds and hearts as long as we live on this earth, since our minds and hearts and our five senses are indeed given to us by God to serve the needs of life as long as we live on earth.’4
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And after this life? We not only need happiness in this life, but also happiness after death, says Bapak, for death is the continuation of life. It is absurd to think that we come to an end when we die. Certainly, he says, our minds and hearts stop working, but there is an inner feel- ing which continues to exist. If that inner feeling is not ready for the next life, if it is not yet purified and has not discovered the power of God, then it will be left rigid, in- flexible, and lifeless by the ending of the mind and heart.
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It is otherwise if the Power of God has been active within you in your exercise, for your inner feeling has begun to wake up and come to life; and coming to life means not owing to the influence of heart, mind and desires, but, on the contrary, owing to liberation from all these influences. Having come to
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There are two main strands in Hindu teaching—perhaps in all religious thought. One strand advocates complete love of God and surrender to him. All activities are not done for the self but are done for God. The other strand, although acknowledging the need for love and surrender, is not concerned with God as a recipient of devotion but more with the nature of his being, the ground of his existence.
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who embody all the personal aspects of God himself.
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Bhakti gurus abound in India, but some have greater depth or more charismatic qualities than others. These come to be reverenced by thousands and are then in- vested by public opinion with even more holy power, for they are thought of as avatars or messiahs, self-realized when born, direct incarnations of God, as uniquely God- become-man as Christians consider Jesus to be.
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The two such messiahs in this book are divided from each other by age and by teaching. Meher Baba, brought up a Parsee, offers little in the way of concrete methods; his advice is sometimes good but is generalized and not very original. His teaching was entirely concerned with devotion to himself—as an incarnation of God, of course.
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The key provided by Meher Baba does not quite fit the door. Somehow he is too frenetic, his demands and prom- ises too overwhelming and improbable. He insists that he is God, all-knowing and all-powerful, that he is the mes- siah of this age, as much God-man as Jesus:
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I am the Ancient One. When I say I am God it is not because I have thought about it and concluded that I am God—I know it to be so. Many consider it blasphemy for one to say he is God; but in truth it would be blasphemy for me to say I am not God.!
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India is a country where, if one says “I am God,” one does not provoke either laughter or scepticism. The goal of all Hindus is to realize that this transitory body is not the final ““me.” The body, mind, and senses die but my true nature is the Self, sublime and eternal, the one Real- ity which, because of illusion and ignorance, I see as a multitude of separate beings and things, including that which I think of as myself. Aldous Huxley once said that Western religion tries to “know” God, whereas Eastern religion tries to “be” God. The awareness of God, the Whole, as the undifferentiated ground of himself is the moment when the Hindu comes home to his true nature at last.
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Thus to say “Iam God” means “I have made the trip—I am there.” Meher Baba pointed out that only the man who is really there can say whether he is or not. An avatar, the nearest a human can come to God while still in a body (a list may include Krishna, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Mohammed) is the only one who can pronounce on his own status because nobody else has the qualifications to do so. Meher Baba said he was an avatar and many people believed him.
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This kiss affected Baba profoundly and he was drawn to her “as steel to a magnet.” He visited her every evening until one night, he relates, she “made me realise in a flash the infinite bliss of Self-realisation (God-realisation).” He went home to bed and lost consciousness of his body.
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The whole course of his life was now changed. The “veil” between himself and God had been rent by Babajan’s kiss. He had been in a state of ecstasy during the unconscious months, and had felt he was one with God in such a way that the whole universe, with all its levels of consciousness, became apparent to him. But coming down from this bliss to the earthly level was great agony, so painful that he would spend hours each day knocking his forehead against walls and windows, the physical pain relieving the spiritual torture. He said:
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His whole longing now was to spiritualize himself. He went to several masters, including the famous Sai Baba, a fierce guru who would demand money from any rich- looking visitor and then hand it to the waiting poor. Sai Baba looked at him and immediately called him the God-Sustainer. Meher went with Sai Baba to a temple where a guru called Upashni (Upasani) was living as Sai Baba’s disciple, in a state of fasting and nakedness.
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The blow had the effect of confirming him in his belief that he was the “Ancient One,” God incarnate, and he regarded Upashni as his master, staying near him for six months. Then Upashni announced: “Meher, you are the Avatar and I salute you.” He then became know as Meher Baba, Baba meaning Spiritual Master.
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At that time it was unheard of for a guru like Baba to have anything to do with the Untouchables. Such distinc- tions, however, meant nothing to Baba, who was not par- ticularly Hindu and who believed in the universality of God. He not only accepted the boys but personally cleaned their latrines and cut their hair and bathed them
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My Silence and the imminent breaking of my Silence is to save mankind from the monumental forces of ignorance, and to fulfil the divine Plan of universal unity. The breaking of my Silence will reveal to man the universal Oneness of God, which will bring about the universal brotherhood of man. My Silence had to be. The breaking of my Silence has to be—soon.®
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humble in intention. At Rahuri, near Ahmednagar, he founded the “mad ashram’’ for the treatment of the Indian insane, particularly those who were “God-intoxicated’”’ and who lived ina state of squalor and filth, their minds so removed from reality that they were unconscious of their surroundings. Various of the mandali were sent to search the district for both holy and ordinary madmen, and when they were brought back to the ashram Baba would per- sonally shave, bathe, feed, and clothe each one. He also scoured the latrines each day, and bathed the old before sitting in seclusion with them.
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This work of a servant to those in need was a spiritual task which Baba would not talk about. All he said was that he loved the God-men and they loved him. The ulti- mate purpose of this work was never known to anyone except Baba.
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In 1937, the mad ashram was moved to Meherabad, but shortly afterward, except for intermittent periods of en- thusiasm, Baba’s interest in it began to decline. A year later, most of the inmates were sent back to their homes and Baba began an extensive tour of India to find genuine masts, the word used for those God-intoxicated men whose ordinary minds have been driven into disintegra- tion by, supposedly, the revelation of Truth which they have received. Whenever one was found he was added to the party and consequently, when Baba eventually started back for Meherabad, he was accompanied by the mandali, twenty or so madmen, half a dozen masts, a gazelle, a peacock, a sheep, a rabbit, geese, dogs, mon- keys, and pet birds, all of whom had to travel by train. There was also a vast assortment of trunks, tables, chairs, and cooking equipment, which occupied the carriage with them.
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As well as being a Sufi teacher, Baba followed the traditional Hindu Bhakti path of devotion in which he, as a guru, expected a disciple to give up his life to serving him, thus enabling the disciple to approach God through him, who was God-man. A guru of this type does not think of himself in a personal way, and it is not to him as a person that the disciple submits.
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Secondly, his teaching, at its best, was designed to break down intellectual barriers and to reach the heart. It was nota philosophy so much as a way of cutting through philosophical reasoning to intuitive feeling, to where a deep response can be elicited—“The moment you try to understand God rather than love Him you begin to mis- understand Him, and your ignorance feeds your ego. Mind cannot reach that which is beyond it. God is infinite and beyond the reach of mind.’’6
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“God can always be captured by love,” said Baba. Cer- tainly it would be hard for many people if God had to be captured by intelligence or reason. Perhaps Baba spoke good sense, for the real abandoning of self occurs when you or I cease trying to better the “self” in any way, even the most spiritual way. When I drop, or gladly cast aside, my sense of separate selfhood, I do so because I want direct experience of being, of reality. I want to be actual and real, without barrier or guard, and my urge to do this is a‘revolution, felt completely and not only intellectu- ally. To call it love is true but it also transcends ordinary love as the sun pales a candle. “God is captured by love”
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is so, in the sense that all I have is given up and gladly forsaken; and it appears as though there is a reciprocal action of acceptance and immeasurable love by something—God, the heart, life, the real world. All is felt to be right, to be wholly good.
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There are many people for whom this state of openness is reached, as nearly as it can be reached, through a “messiah,” a personal Christ, one with whom a relation- ship can be established, on whom the weight of sorrows can be laid, to whom devotion is offered. Love must be experienced if it is to grow, and the cosmic image is sometimes easier to love than one’s neighbor. Hindus are well aware of this human need for an object of devotion and provide deities for every type of person, each image being the embodiment of a virtue rather than an actual god. Krishna, the mythical avatar of the Bhagavad Gita, sets many hearts afire. But the sort of avatar who gets into actual history, such as Jesus of Nazareth, tends, perhaps, to create complications, for his humanhood is not always at all easy to reconcile with his “divine” nature.
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One wonders how much of Baba’s teaching will sur- vive. His cosmology may, because a number of people of theosophical inclination are always fascinated by intri- cate charts, such as Sufis and Hindus produce. And Baba’s cosmology is quite specific. There are always, he says, five Perfect Masters on earth. God becomes man as an avatar, such as himself, and the five men become God as Perfect Masters who fetch the avatars when there is
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Three of the Perfect Masters we met earlier in this chapter—Babajan, Sai Baba, and Upashni. A fourth was Sadguru (Perfect Master) Narayan Maharaj, whom Baba visited once, without much impact on either side; and a fifth was Tajuddin Baba, an ex-soldier in the Indian Army who gave up his military career when he became God- realized. Constantly irritated by people who came seek- ing advice and blessings, he appeared naked one evening on a European tennis court and thus had himself sent to a lunatic asylum where he lived happily for seventeen years. Baba’s one visit to him seemed to be unimpressive.
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Below the Perfect Masters in the chart, who live as both God and man, are a “very, very few people” who experi- ence the Perfect Master state without actually putting it into daily practice; and below these again, are a very few who “‘pass away into God” and experience infinite power, knowledge and bliss. Below these are a number of planes of existence, Mental and Subtle for the few, and Gross for most of us. In the outer universe are planets which contain Seven Kingdoms of Evolution below our own.
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In spite of the difference between a keenly intelligent person and a very unintelligent person, each is equally capa- ble of experiencing love. The quality which determines one’s capacity for love is not one’s wit or wisdom, but one’s readiness to lay down life itself for the beloved, and yet remain alive. One must, so to speak, slough off body, energy, mind and all else, and become dust under the feet of the beloved. This dust of a lover who cannot remain alive with- out God—just as an ordinary man cannot live without breath—is then transformed into the beloved. Thus man becomes God.?°
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Truth is simple, but Illusion makes it infinitely intricate. The person is rare who possesses an insatiable longing for Truth; the rest allow Illusion to bind them ever more and more. God alone is Real and all else that you see and feel is nothing but a series of nothings.
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I am Infinite Knowledge, Power and Bliss. I can make anyone realise God ifI choose to do so. You may ask, why not make me realise God now? But why should it be you? Why not the person next to you or the man in the street, or that bird on the tree, or that stone—who are all but one in different forms? The more you love me the sooner you will discard the falsehood you have chosen to hide under that hoodwinks you into believing you are what you are not. I am all in all and love all equally. Your love for me will wear through your falseness and make you realise the Self that you truly are.
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Mere intellectual understanding does not bring God nearer to you. It is love, not questioning, that will bring God
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When your life presents an honest and sincere picture of your mind and heart just an embrace from a Perfect Master is enough to quicken the spirit. When I the Ancient One em- brace you I awaken something within you which gradually grows. It is the seed of Love that I have sown. There is a long period and great distance between the breaking open of the seed and its flowering and fruiting. Actually the Goal is neither far nor near and there is no distance to cross nor time to count. In Eternity, all is here and now. You have simply to become that which you are. You are God, the Infinite Existence.
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Like Meher Baba, his disciples believe him to be an avatar, an incarnation of God, and the most realized and holy among men. Unlike Meher Baba, he appears to have some quite concrete techniques to offer as aids to the transcendent, and it is the effects of these techniques that have brought him immense popularity among the young, as well as a vast American audience and a decidedly comfortable style of life.
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Maharaj Ji’s “divinity” comes in direct line from his father, Shri Hans Ji Maharaj, of Badrinath in North India. Shri Hans, who died in 1966, was the true Bhakti type of guru, not so much interested in philosophy as in teaching devotion to God and the realization of Him. He has his own place in this book as a sage for, like other sincere gurus, he attracted many devotees.
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He believed this episode to be a sign from God that he was doing the right thing. He went on to Dada Guru and was given the four krijas, truths, which constitute the Knowledge. At first he did not know what to do with it, but after reading the Bhagavad Gita the whole mystery of existence became, apparently, crystal clear to him. He surrendered totally to his Guru, and was known to be “austere and simple, his whole being bent upon truth.” After the death of his master, he began to disseminate the
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Knowledge in Sindh, Lahore, and Delhi, spending much time with laborers in the Delhi Cloth Mill, to whom he taught methods of meditation in action so that they could realize God at all times.
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He refused to accept differences in caste, fully believ- ing that all men are entitled to receive the word of God. On one occasion a sweeper in the household ofa Brahmin disciple asked to be initiated. Shri Hans accepted him and gave him Updesh, but when the Brahmin heard of this he was infuriated. It was unthinkable, he said, that both he and a sweeper could be disciples of the same Guru. Shri Hans replied that the blame must be laid on God, who places divinity in the heart of every man, Brahmin and sweeper alike, and there was nothing Shri Hans or the Brahmin could do to alter that.
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Westerners, hooked by their own insistence on a histor- ical Christ, have been caught for centuries in the dilemma of owning a supreme guru and yet not being able to carry out his teachings. Because he was an unrepeatable, once-and-for-all guru, no modern one can be acknowl- edged. And yet what Christ is reported to have taught, although it has a generally profound application, is moral rather than spiritual and does not seem to bring about self-transcendence and God-realization. Worship of a bearded and stern moralist or of a meek and forgiving Savior fails to satisfy many in the world today. But the image of Christ can not yet be dropped to make way for the living illumination.
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I am not scared to tell this point to everyone because it’s true, it’s a true point. The time is coming soon when the world is going to see a great, strange thing happening, a really far-out thing happening. The time is very near when the world will be able to realise who God is—not only believe in God but know that God exists.?
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To know that God exists would surely be, for many people, a reassurance so profound that all life would be transfigured by it. It is partly the lack of external, objec- tive evidence of God that causes such terrible existential doubt. If this doubt could be assuaged by some form of supreme knowledge, how many could resist it? Who would not want to go and obtain it as soon as possible?
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And this is just what happens to those who think that Maharaj Ji will give it to them. Whether they get real knowledge of God or not, every day there are hundreds of young people who believe that they will, and who queue up to get it, longing for the moment when they will feel a vibration, see a bright light, smell nectar, hear a divine sound: these four experiences make up the Knowledge of God which Guru Maharaj proclaims.
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The most important is the first of the four, the vibration. This is also known as the Word of God, and it is said to be the vibration of cosmic energy which activates the uni- verse. It is here within us already, says Maharaj Ji, but we are not conscious of it, we do not know how to realize it. The realization can only be gained by initiation from the Guru himself, or from one of his Mahatmas, chosen transmitters of the Knowledge.
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When there is consciousness of the vibration, the body moves with it and then a light can be seen that is said to be startlingly brilliant (the eyes are shut). This is the Divine Light of God and has given its name to Maharaj Ji’s movement, the Divine Light Mission. It is this light which seems particularly holy to those who see it, but not everybody does—it is not automatically seen after the vibration is felt, and it is said that those who are “‘intellec- tual,” such as school teachers, have great difficulty in seeing it at all. It is also referred to as the third eye.
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Those who have received the initiation are known as “premies,’ which literally means lovers of God and disciples of Maharaj Ji. Morning and evening, they prac- tice putting themselves into the vibration and seeing the Light.
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So this is the same thing. You live all your lifetime doing this, just thinking, “Should I realise God or not, should I realise God or not, should I realise God or not?” Then when the last moment of your life comes, you say, “All right, I'll realise Him.” But then this body has already got only fifteen seconds to live, and it is too late.4
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Again one senses the Fundamentalist attitude when one hears a discourse consisting of long lists of mankind’s sins; and a revivalist feeling in the whipping up of devo- tion. It does not seem surprising that after a continuous fortnight of this, those who take the Knowledge feel vi- brations and see white lights. The giving of the Knowledge takes six hours—two of which are spent in meditation. The basis on which the whole exercise rests is a mantra, the holy name of God, concentrated on at the tip of the nose. This is said to put one on a vibration wavelength.
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The four experiences of “divine’”’ pleasure—the vibra- tion, the light, the smell, and the sound—are the goodies offered in exchange for devotion. Those who follow the plump young Maharaj are uncritical, even when they do not see white lights. They do not want philosophy or scholarship, which is fortunate. The Maharaj seems to base what doctrine he has on a few well-known sayings taken from Christianity as well as Hinduism, and he does not always interpret them properly. One such saying is: “Tn the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.” Guru Maharaj, who rests much of his advice on this saying, has taken it to mean literally that the first thing
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Baba, Meher, God Speaks. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
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Purdom, C. B., The God-Man. Sheriar Press
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In the desolately rocky and sun-baked Tamil country of South India there is a twin-peaked hill called Arunachala, the Hill of Light. For many centuries this hill has been sacred to the Hindus. They believe that our world has been in existence for three complete eons, called yugas, and we are now in the fourth. Throughout all this time the hill has been there, but has changed its nature according to its age. In the first yuga, the purest, called the Age of Truth, the hill was a pillar of light. As the universe grad- ually declined and entered the Age of Trinity, when crea- tion, disintegration, and renewal were manifested, it became a heap of rubies. In the Age of Duality, when right and wrong came into existence, it was a pile of gold; and now, in Kali-Yuga, the present Age of Darkness, it is a mountain of stones. Throughout its history, it is be- lieved to have been the seat of Shiva, the god of sleep and death, who embodies the darkness which comes before the light and the ending which precedes a new beginning.
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The two ways that the Maharshi taught were (1) enquir- ing into who it is that undergoes this destiny and lives this life; then making the discovery that only the ego is bound by destiny and that the ego does not exist in the way we believe it to. And (2) surrendering the ego to God by way of realizing one’s own limitations and helplessness, and by substituting God’s will for one’s own; by accepting all that is to be done without ever claiming any action as one’s own, thus removing all sense of “me” and “mine.” (The Maharshi frequently used the term God for the Self.)
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eventually they are seen as empty of all the attributes of self, and upheld only by God or the Self—That which is beyond all human understanding.
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Some of his followers found the discriminatory path of Self-enquiry hard to follow, and Ramana Maharshi would then advise the way of surrender to God. Surrender, in his way, does not involve the intellect so muchas the will, for it is a continual giving up of identity; a longing for God’s will to be done rather than one’s own; a complete giving away of the feeling of oneself as the “doer” of one’s actions.
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And he said, “You now think that you are an individual; outside you there is the universe and beyond the uni- verse is God. So, there is the idea of separateness. This idea must go. For God is not separate from you or the cosmos. 14
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From time immemorial, mantras have been used to harness the mind and bring it back from its endless and erratic thought journeys. Focusing the mind on a mantra (the most famous is OM, which Hindus believe to be the word of God, the primordial sound) allows the mind to rest and, in that rest, supposedly to deepen. As thoughts arise they are replaced by the mantra and in this way the process by which they come to birth and fill the con- sciousness can be observed.
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In answer to the last question, the Maharishi says yes. He believes that the purpose of man is also the purpose of the entire universe, and that that purpose is the expres- sion of divinity. A divine, creative intelligence has caused the world to exist and man is “a bridge of abun- dance” between God and the whole of creation:
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For the realization of Being does not mean giving up everyday life, but enhancing it. The Maharishi is empha- tic that people throughout time have been mistaken in believing that God-realization is incompatible with ordi- nary existence; that in order to know absolute bliss con- sciousness you must deny the life of the senses—which the Maharishi calls the force of Karma, the continuous action of relative life seen in the cycle of birth, death, creation, evolution, and dissolution.
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Thai country peasants are not, asa rule, very spiritual people. They love their religion of Theravada Bud- dhism—the strict Buddhism of ascetic monks, meditating on imperfections and the hollow, transient world of the passions—and they take much contrasting pleasure in noisy, cheerful, colorful festivals and ceremonies during which large, ornate statues of the Buddha are decked with flowers and offerings. Many Thais feel such rever- ence for the Buddha that they have given him the status of a god, and frequently attach ancient superstitions and strange beliefs to him. They also have great respect for the Sangha, the order of yellow-robed monks, who carry their begging-bowls around the village once a day to be filled with food. And there is a complete belief in the Dhamma, the Buddha’s teaching—but not much under- standing of it.
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God, the One Being, the Supreme Being, but we can say that we have relationship with the wholeness; then the words “you” or “me” do not exist, the image of individuality does not exist. In that aloneness there is holiness in the ordinary and perfection in the doing.®
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When reading this chapter, it is perhaps important to bear in mind that he believes the sacred can be found here and now, at this moment. The only God worth know- ing is the one you cannot hold on to or talk about; God can’t be discussed but he can be spoken to and he can be listened to. This is the only real relationship we can have at all—to speak to God and to be spoken to by him.
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One is with It, which means with everything we can sense or think about or feel or remember. The other is with Thou (or, in Kaufman’s translation, You). People often think that Buber simply means God when he says You, and in one sense he does. But he does not mean the personal God of the Old Testament. He means the un- conditioned timeless ground of God, which is also the ground of all creatures, and which can be seen in every creature and object when all one’s conditioned ideas and feelings about it are dropped. I relate to You, the trans- cendent, when I find You in a person, animal, or object. When I do not find You, or do not know You when I see You, I relate to It, which means I relate to the person, animal, or object by seeing them as “things” for my own experience and use. I am then putting that person, ani- mal, or object into a familiar category in my mind, think- ing about it from my own store of concepts, and judging it accordingly, instead of seeing it afresh, as itself. Relating to You means relating to the person or scene in front of me at this moment entirely anew, as though it has never been seen before.
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Martin Buber saw, as did Alan Watts, Ramana Maharshi, and some other sages in this book, that man’s person- ality, what he thinks of as “I,” is not the isolated self- entity running by its own power, which he imagines it to be, but that the feeling of “I’’ exists as a “something” according to what it is identified with. When it is iden- tified with the body and bodily feelings then it seems to be mortal, fragile and changing. When it is identified with the unconditioned, with the absolute Void, Self, Such- ness, or God, it feels changeless and at one with all things.
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there—first with the outside world and then later, in ma- turity, with the inner essence of God.
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Buber believed, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that evolv- ing man is heading towards a final identification and merging of himself with God. Historically, Buber saw the development of the feeling of “I as beginning in primi- tive man. An animal is not conscious of itself as being separate from its surroundings, he said. A catis its pounce on its victim, a dog is its love for its master—neither animal is capable of the reflective self-consciousness which says, “I am now going to.pounce” or “I love this man.” In the same way as animals, primitive man at first was identified with his actions—he did not think about the moon except as it affected him in the night. Fire was hot and bright and was nota word called fire but a process in which he took part. The experiencing subject had not detached itself from the experience and it was only when the force of self-preservation caused the beginning of language and knowledge, that the “I-acting-You” and “You-acting-I’’ were split and the “I” “emerged with the force of an element.’
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In our world of today, we mainly encounter other things as objects of experience and use, as did developing man. From our sensation of them, we create an It-world of known phenomena, of names and categories. We use this world for our own preservation and benefit. Our mastery over it reinforces the feeling of separation and the sepa- rate “I’’ becomes the ego, the demanding, insatiable oc- cupant of our feelings and thoughts. And so the It-world comes to consist of “It and It and It, of He and He and She and She and It.”* Even God, as long as he is He, is an object, a something to be experienced.
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The answer may lie in Buber’s religion of Judaism, which emphasizes the distance between man and God and is, perhaps, more dualistic than any other religion. Buber was a convinced Jew. His greatest inspirations came from the Hasidim, a mystical sect of Jews, some of whom lived near his father’s estate in Bukovina in North- ern Rumania, where, as a boy, he spent his summers. His father would sometimes take him to the nearby village of
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Sadagora, the seat ofa dynasty of Hasidic rabbis, and here the boy would watch the “rebbe” striding through the rows of the waiting and “the Hasidim dance with the Torah.” Here he felt the strong relationship of commun- ity. It was the Hasidim to whom he came back in spirit as a young man, after a period of alienation from Judaism, and it was they he wrote about and their poems and legends he translated. He once summed up the teaching of the Hasidim, so much in accord with his own, as “God can be beheld in each thing and reached through each pure deed.”’8
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However much it may be inwardly felt, it would be hard for a Jew to outwardly agree that surrender to God means becoming of the same substance as Him. This is perhaps why Buber chose the term I-You for the man-God relationship, seeing it essentially as relationship and not as being.
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Buber’s insights have penetrated deeply into modern Christianity and greatly affected such theologians as Dr. John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, Bishop Pike of California, and many others. In particular, it is the mysterious unfathomable encounter between I and You which has fired the imagination of some Christians and has helped to bring about such movements as the Death of God, spurred on by one of Buber’s most famous books, The Eclipse of God.
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That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don’t you know also that God needs you—in the dullness of his eternity, you? How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—for that which is the meaning of your life. Teachings and poems try to say more, and say too much: how murky and presumptuous is the chatter of “the emerging God’’—but the emergence of the living God we know unswervingly in our hearts. The world is not divine play, it is divine fate. That there are world, man, the human person, you and I, has divine meaning.!9
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He [the mystic] has got to find God. Sometimes his temper- ament causes him to lay most stress on the length of the search; sometimes the abrupt rapture which brings it to a close makes him forget that preliminary pilgrimage in which the soul is “not outward bound, but rather on a journey to its centre.” The habitations of the Interior Castle through which St. Theresa leads us to that hidden chamber which is the sanctuary of the indwelling God: the hierarchies of Dionysius, ascending from the selfless service of the angels, past the seraphs’ burning love, to the God enthroned above time and space: the mystical paths of the Kabalistic Tree of Life, which lead from the material world of Malkuth through the universes of action and thought, by Mercy, Justice and Beauty, to the Supernal Crown; all these are different ways of describing this same pilgrimage.®
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Dion Fortune’s real name was Violet Mary Firth. When she was a young woman she joined the Golden Dawn —that turbulent group of spiritual searchers and practic- ing occultists that included such varied names as W. B. Yeats, MacGregor-Mathers, Alastair Crowley (who was thrown out), Evelyn Underhill, Charles Williams, and E. Nesbit. Violet Firth then took, as they all did, a Latin name and she chose Deo Non Fortuna (by God and not by luck). This title became shortened to Dion Fortune when she began to write novels.
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Through Ain Soph, which is one stage nearer to crea- tion and is apprehended as limitlessness—the timeless without which time could not exist and the emptiness without which forms could not be or move—the realm of Ain Soph Aur, Limitless Light, comes into being. Out of Ain Soph Aur, God emerges from the unknowable and ineffable region of his own Being to manifest himself as creation. God, the Beginning of the world, stands at the top of the Tree of Life as Kether, the Hollow Crown, through which the Uncreated flows and becomes man- ifest. Kether is the living dynamic force of life, the “I AM” of existence, the source of all the universes and of every creature.
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But the importance of the Tree is not just its penetra- tion into the ways of the manifest Spirit (in which case it would be only asystem of knowledge) but the Tree is also one’s own self, for the sephiroth that mark the descent and particularization of God also form the rungs of the ladder up which man can ascend and become unified. Each sephirah symbolizes divine energy at a different
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Although all the sephiroth make up the ladder that must be climbed by man, the bottom rungs are of no less value than the top. The earth of physical matter is also the Kingdom where God is manifested at his most dense and concrete. Thus one need not feel ashamed if one is at a low rung of the ladder rather than a high one. This free- dom from strain (a strain which, by contrast, is the hall- mark of some religions) is an essential feature of Tantric Yoga, which looks upon physical life as a holy arena, a uniquely equipped laboratory for the transmutation of matter into spirit; and the meditations and visualizations of the Qabalists are as much a Tantric path as are Tibetan mandalas and Hindu yantras.
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standing and knowledge. In Tibetan Tantrism for in- stance, the various gods who adorn the tankas are the approaches by which we are drawn towards the Empti- ness beyond form. Each god is a force, and his individual quality is expressed in gesture and color. One such as Ratnasambhava is golden-yellow in color because the golden light of the equality of all beings shines through him. He represents the principle of Feeling, which, through him, becomes love and compassion for all that lives; and he is seated on a horse for speed and energy. Meditation on him fills the mind with the quality of com- passionate love, because the symbol not only represents this state but is believed actually to call it forth into the meditators consciousness. In a yet more concrete exam- ple, Dion Fortune takes a coat of arms:
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In exactly this way, the sephiroth of the Tree symbolize the qualities of God. When they are taken all together, they reveal the Whole as it flows. For no one sephirah is a closed, complete state—all open into each other, each pouring its quality into the next in a continuous moving spiral.
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The human mind, knowing no other mode of existence than that of form and activity, has the greatest difficulty in obtaining any adequate concept of an entirely formless state of passivity which is nevertheless most distinctly not non- being. Yet this effort must be made if we are to understand cosmic philosophy in its fundamentals. We must not draw the veils of negative existence in frorit of Kether or we shall condemn ourselves to a perpetual unresolved duality; God and the Devil will for ever war in our cosmos, and there can be no finality to their conflict. We must train the mind to
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Tiphareth is Beauty—the extraordinary clarity and luminosity of the first sight of God. It is the reflected radiance of Enlightenment and it marks the turning point of one’s life. It is also the center of equilibrium of the whole Tree, as it is in the middle of the central pillar. According to the Qabalah it is the point where force is transmuted into form.
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There are a great many symbols which are used as objects of meditation; the Cross in Christendom; the God-forms in the Egyptian system; phallic symbols in other faiths. These symbols are used by the uninitiated as a means of concentrat- ing the mind and introducing into it certain thoughts, calling up certain associated ideas, and stimulating certain feelings. The initiate, however, uses a symbol-system differently; he uses it as an algebra by means of which he will read the secrets of unknown potencies; in other words, he uses the symbol as a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible.
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... Indiscriminate dabbling in seances, fortune-telling, psychism, and suchlike is classified as grey under our defini- tion, because it takes no account of anything save personal desires, and never asks itself what may be the spiritual qual- ity of what it is doing. No obvious evil being immediately forthcoming, and in fact a plentiful amount of specious pi- ousness being very much in evidence—a form of piousness wherein God is called upon to bless what is being done, but is never asked whether it is according to His will—it is taken for granted that what is afoot is a harmless entertainment, or even actively edifying as tending to raise the mind above
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grateful. After some youthful tribulations and waverings, the whole effort of his subsequent life has been to regain, at quite another level and in quite another way, the re- ligious certainty he lost when he lost the faith he had been brought up in. Though he qualified as an architect and practiced successfully in England and India (where he lived for eight years) he says that he never gave his mind to his profession. His concern instead has been to answer, without any reliance on outside authority —whether teachers or books or institutions—the great questions: ““What or Who am I?” “What am I up to here?” “What is my true relation to others, to the world, and to God?” His book, On Having No Head, describes how, at the age of thirty-four, he came to “see clearly into his own Nature,” thereby finding his own answer to all such ques- tions. Only gradually did he discover that his “seeing” had much in common with the mystics, and in particular, he thinks, with Zen and Sufi masters. Encouraged by their writings, he has spent the second half of his life working out the implications and applications of his orig- inal insight and presenting his discoveries in writing and speech and—recently—in group work, involving a grow- ing repertoire of nonverbal “games” or “workshop exer- cises.”
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Total charity—the giving up of one’s body, mind, and heart to God as He appears in the tramp muttering to himself on the park bench, or the drunken man retching on the street corner—is not always the practice of mystics and sages. Of all the mystics in this book, Mother Theresa, ignoring explanations completely, lives and acts by giving all of herself to God all of the time. What impels her to do this?
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A sense of vocation began in Mother Theresa when she was a very young girl. Her name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu and she was the daughter of an Albanian grocer in Skopje, Yugoslavia. The family atmosphere was warm and loving and she spent a happy childhood, but even in this carefree period an unusual awareness of God began to define itself, and by the time she was twelve she knew that somehow she must devote her life to God in the form of service to the poor. But she did not want to be a nun. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen she rebelled wholeheartedly against commitment to this particular re- ligious path. But when she was eighteen she decided that she must leave her beloved home and join an order of missionaries, the Loreto nuns. From then on she had no doubts.
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Even more than that, Mother Theresa wants them to know that they are close to God and that this is a joyous state. If the work of the Sisters is just useful but gives no happiness to people, she says, then these people would never be able to rise to the acceptance of God that she asks of them. They must see the contentment and happi- ness of the Sisters, they must feel that they are loved by the Sisters for themselves, and that this love comes from God. Then they may die with acceptance and dignity.
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In her own way, Mother Theresa understands that at- titude. She knows the closeness of God to man, and that the knowledge of God’s presence makes a man human so that he no longer thinks of himself as merely unwanted and destitute:
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I don’t know the future but to me, today, when a life comes into my hands, all my love and energy goes to support that life, to help that life to grow to its fullness, because this person has been created in the image of God. We have no right to destroy that life.4
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We must “taste God as the sole good,” says the 17th century mystic, Jean Pierre de Caussade, with whom Mother Theresa could be said to have many links. “We have to arrive at the point at which the whole created universe no longer exists for us, and God is every- thing.... Creatures by themselves are (then) without power or efficacy and the heart lacks any tendency or inclination towards them because the majesty of God fills all its capacity.’’®
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The God-filled heart, he continues, is moved towards creatures when they are seen as part of God’s design. It is exactly this mystical understanding that the inner and the outer world are one that gives spiritual strength to Mother Theresa and the Sisters of Charity. Their strict rule of poverty applies to their egos as well as to their bodies. When they lack “any tendency or inclination” to comi- nate the world for their own purposes, then the world itself becomes nothing—without self-nature. It no longer holds power over them. This gives them the freedom and strength to serve and cherish it, for as the manifestation of God’s design it is infinitely marvelous and dear to them. The Designer and His design cannot be separated. The incoherent, filthy leper in the streets is as much Christ as He to whom they surrender their hearts.
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Muggeridge, Malcolm, Something Beautiful for God. London: Collins.
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Ramana Maharshi, Buber, don Juan, Merton, and Hard- ing tackle the same problem of man’s conditioning from a different angle—that of man’s relationship to God (or the Self, or the nagual, or the Inmost). Here there is a general agreement that man errs in his estimate of himself—he thinks that he is autonomous and self-powered— whereas, they say, he must find out that he is really neither and that his Unconditioned nature is infinitely greater than his individual self.
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Merton, too, offers us more of mysticism than of practi- cal teaching, for his “contemplation” seems to depend on a monk’s routine. His great value for us lies in the clarity with which he sees the man-God relationship and the simple but powerful language in which he describes the fruits of contemplation (“the intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mys- tery of God’).
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There is a great truth about the idea of surrender, particu- larly the surrender of the latihan, where submission to the will of God begins to order one’s life. But one can’t help feeling that the act of surrender and its consequent re- ward should be earned; that without the experience of falling and picking himself up, man is not ready to walk. It all seems a bit too easy and slightly unreal. But Pak Subuh’s analysis of the structure of man is clear, and very much in accord with other mystics, particularly with Gurdjieff, for he shows man’s nature as wholly condi- tioned except for one thing—his ability to wish to submit to God.
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of all) for most of us to realize. For we are conditioned to the dualistic idea of God and man being separate, even if we don’t call him God anymore. But the Buddhists offer us help to understand their point of view in the form of a large number of methods and techniques.
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Mother Theresa, although profoundly Christian, perhaps comes close to Buddhism in her complete adora- tion of whatever she encounters. She has surrendered herself to God and sees God in all things. Theologically she is far apart from the Buddhists, for to Mother Theresa, God is in things whereas to Buddhists he (or Suchness) is things. But in practice they are close and the highest Christian and Bodhisattva ideals are very concordant.
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Buber, Martin, 165, 213, 231, 300, 331; books: Eclipse of God, 37, I and Thou, 228, Jewish Mysticism, 231; development of a baby, 218; distancing, 226, 227; encounter, 220, 221, 226; faithful humanism, 225; feel- ing of “1,7.213215, 217,218; 222: influence of, 213, 226; I-It relationship, 215, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229; I- Thou relationship, 165, 213, 215, 220) 229) 993° 294; 225, 227, 228, 229; man’s develop- ing brain, 219; man’s merging with God, 228, 229; person as distinct from ego, 223, 224; transformation of “I,” 222, 224
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God: conceived as an avatar, 122, 132, 135 as Ultimate Being, 49, 217, 223, 238, 239, 335 plans, of, 21, 22, 55, 126 relationship with, 213, 229, 332
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Merton, Thomas, 2, 30, 53, 162, 331; background, 30, 32; books: Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 39, Elected Silence (Seven Storey Mountain), 32, Mystics and Zen Masters, 39, New Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Way of Chuang Tzu, 41; and the Buddha, 42, 43; and Chuang Tzu, 41, 42; and contemplation, 32, 33, 34, 37; death of, 42; and the Death of God movement, 37; and Descartes, 34; Eastern religions, 39; feeling of “I,” 39; and individuality, 34, 35, 36, 37; nowness, 38, 53; spiritual illumination of, 43; Taoism, 2, 41; Zen, 2; Zen and Christianity compared, 39, 40, 41
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165, 268, 330; and Gurdjieff, 90, 91; the Heart, 165; liberation, 77, 130, 156; maya, 163; ultimate Reality, 161, 162; self-inquiry, 74, 149, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 331; Self- realization, 36, 102, 158; the separate individual, 165, 217; surrender to God, 162; verses of, 166 Reality, ultimate: Harding, 284, 289, 290 and Hindu teachings, 122, 154, 160 = Huxley, 9 Maharishi, 170, 171, 174 Merton, 34, 43 Ramana Maharshi, 160, 161 Pak Subuh, 110 Trungpa, 196, 197 Watts, 17, 27, 28, 77, 222 Reincarnation, 264, 265 Robinson, Dr. John, 37, 226 Rofé, Husein, 106 Rosicrucian Brotherhood, 260 Rumi, 291
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Harding, 278, 282, 287, 288, 289 Mahargj Ji, 142 Steiner, 258, 268 Self, infinite, 36, 46,52, 161, 162, 164, 331 Hindu teachings about, 46, 158 Self-inquiry, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 165 Self-surrender: to God, 104, 105, 118, 119, 129,
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Theresa, Mother, ix, 316, 317; attitude to death, 321, 322; attitude to obedience, 324, 325; background, 320; the call to serve Jesus in the slums, 320; the closeness of God, 322; daily prayer of, 317; and Jesus Christ, 319, 323, 326; and leprosy, 323, 324; and love, 322, 323; meditation of, 326;
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Watts, Alan, vii, ix, 2, 17, 222, 241, 288, 330, 331; background, 19, 20; books: Spirit of Zen, 23, Way of Zen, 23; and Eastern religions, ix, 22; feeling of “I,” 2, 23, 24, 25, 70, 217; and God, 25, 28; hypocrisies of society, 28; the individual as a process of the world, 23, 155; and IT, 17, 19, 27, 28, 77; and Jesus Christ, 20, 21; and words, 25, 26, 70, 196, 331; the present moment, 23, 24, 25, 163; sound, 28, 29
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Search inside (36 results)
sages
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Twentieth Century Mystics and Sages
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MYSTICS AND SAGES ANNE BANCROFT
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The Hindu Sages 148 Ramana Maharshi 150 The Maharishi 167
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“Whoever knows that he knows must be amazed,” says Alan Watts. And it is just this sense of existential wonder that forms the background to this book. “Who am I?” and “What is this world that I am in?” are the questions that arise from the awareness that I am. To find the answers, people feel a need to go beyond words and to experience the truth about themselves. It is this longing for real meaning that has led many to look for guidance from the mystics and sages who, consequently, have leaped into prominence.
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licity and adulation and have succumbed to it, or sometimes they have set themselves too far apart from humanity. But what they have to say and how they have lived their lives is the concem of this book. It seeks to convey the teachings of some of the best-known mystics and sages, and it is less concemed with the groups of disciples who have formed themselves around those masters. Care has also been taken not to include the mini-mystics who like to scramble about
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The mystery of man’s own internal identity—who and what he is when he apprehends himself as “I’”—has tumed out to be the central concern of most of the mystics and sages, and the biggest snag to placing all these highly different personal teachings and philosophies within the covers of one book has been the many interpretations of this central word “I.” They range from Ramana Maharshi’s, in which he points out that the feeling of “I,” when detached from body and mind, is itself the supreme Consciousness; to Alan Watts’s “I” which, he believes, cannot be found apart from experience (“you don’t think thoughts any more than you hear hearing or smell smelling’). Because the nature of “T’ is regarded in so many different ways, the subjects have been grouped. Cross- references can then be followed easily and the discoveries of one mystic can amplify another. Consequently, a short preface to each group precedes it (except for Mother Theresa, who needs no introduction), so that the reader can have some idea of the seas into which he is about to plunge.
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Photographs are included of all the mystics and sages with the exception of two who prefer not to be photographed.
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the main task of Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Sufism and is the occupation of such sages as Krish- namurti and Ramana Maharshi. The ultimate discovery that God, or the Self, is the ground of one’s true nature is seen by Merton as a problem of identity, in much the same way as Ramana Maharshi saw it. Whereas Ramana Maharshi believed that one’s feeling of “I’’ was the key to the question of existence and that once this feeling had been identified with its Source, the Self, existence would reveal its true potential, so Merton, -in Christian terms, saw free will as the gift of God to man, to be used as active participation with God in the revelation of identity with him:
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This is the great belief of many sages in this book. It is the path to freedom, they say, when the self begins to realize its own powerlessness and limitations and begins to find a new happiness in the surrender of its entity, the giving up of its selfhood.
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Other sages in this book, notably Ramana Maharshi and Alan Watts, have made the discovery that thought does not need a thinker and that if the thinker, the ob- server, vanishes, there remains a marvelous sensation of release and joy. It is as though all the dualistic barriers of subject and object have melted and the world exists, as it really is, in its pristine wholeness.
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discriminating mind and for coming to such a response are described by other sages, such as Krishnamurti and Trungpa. Meher Baba’s way was to expect devotion from his followers to such an extent that their analytical, evaluating intellect would be replaced by a selfless love—selfless because Baba was put in the place of the self. When a decision had to be made the devotee was to summon his image of Baba into his mind and to ask it what to do. When there was a moment of leisure, Baba should be thought of. In this way, the ordinary ego was supposed to diminish. Baba made it clear that his disciples must not blindly copy him, but must always obey him:
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A lot has been said in this book about the ego, most sages believing that it is the principal delusion of man, resulting in all his wars and divisions. To under- stand the real nature of the ego is the basic aim of Bud- dhism, and Trungpa explains how the ego develops from the primary openness of our real nature—a limitless clar- ity which we sometimes catch a glimpse of when our separate ego feeling is overwhelmed by beauty or strangeness, so that we no longer perceive in the usual analytical way, but drop perception for the simple act of seeing. But then, almost immediately, we try to attach a name to that experience so that we can freeze it into a form and store it in our memories as something belonging to us, a possessed knowledge, which, if it is labeled, can be brought out and looked at again. Clear space disap- pears then, and the world becomes solid with names.
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Martin Buber saw, as did Alan Watts, Ramana Maharshi, and some other sages in this book, that man’s person- ality, what he thinks of as “I,” is not the isolated self- entity running by its own power, which he imagines it to be, but that the feeling of “I’’ exists as a “something” according to what it is identified with. When it is iden- tified with the body and bodily feelings then it seems to be mortal, fragile and changing. When it is identified with the unconditioned, with the absolute Void, Self, Such- ness, or God, it feels changeless and at one with all things.
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monizer of the three bodies, the essential “I” or “Ego.” In the pure feeling of “I,” Steiner sees the spirit and in his definitions he calls the astral body the Soul and the “I” the Spirit. Other sages in this book, particularly Ramana Maharshi, have believed in the great spiritual importance of attention to the feeling of “I.”
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One senses in Castaneda an oversuggestible credulity, perhaps a too-easy emotionalism (“You indulge too much,” said don Juan, when Castaneda, weeping on his shoulder, gave up his apprenticeship). Castaneda himself tells us that his nature is overdramatic and perhaps this accounts for his eager acceptance and then rejection of don Juan’s teaching, for nothing that don Juan says is really harder to accept than the teachings of some Zen masters, or the words of other sages in this book. At any rate, Castaneda had second thoughts. After an inter- val of three years he returned to don Juan, was warmly welcomed by him, and began a second term of appren- ticeship that was different in kind and turned out to be better. He no longer felt acute fear and don Juan was more relaxed, often clowning at crucial moments and helping Castaneda to accept more lightly and easily the knowl- edge he was being taught.
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Total charity—the giving up of one’s body, mind, and heart to God as He appears in the tramp muttering to himself on the park bench, or the drunken man retching on the street corner—is not always the practice of mystics and sages. Of all the mystics in this book, Mother Theresa, ignoring explanations completely, lives and acts by giving all of herself to God all of the time. What impels her to do this?
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The general message of this book is that we should wake up to the immediate here and now of the natural world in all its wonder. We should see things whole, washed clear of personal feelings. Man’s spirit thirsts, the sages say, for the clarity and luminosity of mind in which the feeling of ““me” and “‘mine”’ loses its importance; for the self-detachment in which the world is accepted without judgment, seen without shadow of need to grasp or possess it; for the stillness and silence of mind in which the numinous and transcendental nature of life is revealed.
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Just as Gurdjieff would say that a man does not even exist in a human way at all until he begins to crystallize his essential nature by withdrawing his dependence on the world about him, so don Juan, too, spoke of unhooking one’s projected thoughts and feelings from all that lies outside of oneself. In fact, there is general agreement among the mystics and sages that man must look at both himself and the world afresh if he is to experience reality. Where they differ from each other is in their methods for helping man to accomplish this.
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Within all the different messages of these sages and mystics lies the injunction to arouse ourselves, to dis- cover who we are, to look at the world around us as though for the first time, and to come into contact with reality. We must break the chains of our conditioned minds and step out into freedom—now. For these chains resemble spider’s webs that look as though made of shining steel but break ata touch. The more we hesitate, the thicker the web grows around us. The spider resembles the belief
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Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity Renée Weber
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This examination of nineteen of this century’ great mystics and sages offers as many different approaches to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’
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These modern sages and mystics suggest ways of living a more spiritual existence for those disenchanted with contemporary Western society; they also offer approaches towards the existential questions that we all seek to answer..
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Search inside (247 results)
life
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Anne Bancroft spent the early part of her life in the Quaker village of Jordans. While her four children were growing up she became a lecturer in comparative religion and at the same time began her own quest for spiritual understanding. Over the years she has found strength and inspiration in Buddhism and a deepening understanding of western mysticism. She is the author of several other books on religion and mysticism including Origins of the Sacred (Arkana 1987) and Weavers of Wisdom: Women Mystics of the Twentieth Century (Arkana 1989).
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It is the purpose of this book to present a number of such modem spiritual leaders from all religions and from none —+representatives of new paths to religious truth. Those cho- sen are all full-time exponents of the spiritual life. They are not philosophers or poets who have a mystical streak, but are people who have devoted their lives to imparting inspired knowledge or to living a holy life. They have not always succeeded. Sometimes they have been given too much pub-
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Three criteria have governed the choice of subjects for this book. One criterion has been integrity of approach; another has been the international reputation of the sage; the third has been the originality of his teaching. Not all subjects have all three qualifications—some, for instance, are considerably bet- ter known than others. But all have a certain quality of inten- sity about them that makes them at least worth reading. There is not a great deal of difference between a mystic and a sage, but enough to call them by different names. A mystic seeks direct experience of, and communion with, the divine; his whole life centers around this purpose. He tends to be solitary and to communicate his understanding through books. A sage, on the other hand, is a wise man who is perceptive, discern- ing, and thoughtful about life in general. He, too, pivots him- self on the wish to experience the truth of existence and he, too, may write a lot of books. But he tends to be more outward-tumed than the mystic and more taken up with teaching and advising; he originates methods and attracts disciples.
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The Real Way to Awakening, Dhiravamsa, Vipassana Centre; The Middle Path of Life, Dhiravamsa.
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The Course of My Life, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, Lon- don and New York, 1951; Theosophy. An Introduction to the Super- sensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, London and New York, 1973; Agriculture, Rudolf Steiner, Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Association, London, 1974; Fundamentals of Therapy. An Extension of the Art of Healing through Spiritual Knowledge, Rudolf Steiner and Ita Weg- man, Rudolf Steiner Press, London and New York, 1967.
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The bridge builders come from sharply var- ied backgrounds, but the first three hold at least one thing in common—their understanding that aspects of the truth are found in both Eastern and Western religion. In the case of Aldous Huxley, the belief that there was any truth to find at all took some time to mature. All his later years were spent in a search for the mystical experience, and he remained, to the end of his life, preponderantly an intel- lectual man with moments of real insight rather than a true mystic. His brilliant command of language, however, makes him easy to understand, and his descriptions of his experiences are wonderfully direct and uncomplicated. Wherever he saw the truth expressed, he knew it. Thus his Perennial Philosophy, a book in which he links many spiritual writings and sayings from all of the religions, is not merely a collection of excellent quotations; it is a deeply spiritual book which has helped many people
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Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, gradu- ally moved away from a rather over intense in- Christianity to an illumined understanding of Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. His insights came through his own contemplative life and mystical realization, and, to some extent, he was able to isolate the contemplative experience and write about it clearly and freely. His overwhelming interest in every- | thing to do with contemplation made him entirely at home in Zen and Taoism, and his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, a great Japanese exponent of Zen, gave him such an insight into its practices that he seemed able, shortly before his untimely death, to reach right through the outer trappings of both Christianity and Buddhism to the
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Teilhard de Chardin’s bridges were built to span a different gulf. A French Jesuit priest, he was not in- terested in other religions at all, but only in going deeper and deeper into his own. To him, belief in Christ meant that mankind must and would evolve in certain direc- tions, evidence for this being shown by astudy of the past. So convinced was he that the human race was becoming more conscious, more sensitive, more communally minded, and nearer to the Parousia when all men would be merged in Christ, that he gave up his life to discover- ing scientific proof for this theory. He was trained as a paleontologist, and this discipline engendered in him a great reverence for the material world which, as a mystic, he saw as Christ-consciousness expressed in more and more diversified forms. God’s presence, he believed, is felt throughout the created world, and the whole of evolu- tion is a continuous movement towards him. In his own highly poetic language, he linked the spirit with matter, and for many people throughout the world this particular bridge is one of the most valuable.
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But the greatest tragedy of the spirit is that sooner or later it succumbs to the flesh. Sooner or later every soul is stifled by the sick body; sooner or later there are no more thoughts, but only pain and vomiting and stupor. The tragedies of the spirit are mere struttings and posturings on the margin of life, and the spirit itself only an accidental exuberance, the product of spare vital energy, like the feathers on the head of a hoopoe or the innumerable populations of useless and foredoomed spermatozoa....
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The horror of ultimate meaninglessness, expressed in one of Huxley’s first novels, underlay most of his thoughts in the early part of his life. The seeming conflict between spirit and matter provided a constant whip which spurred him on toa search for further and yet further inner experi- ence. The apparently terrible injustice of life—the tor- tures people endured in concentration camps (of which the sensitive and socially concerned Huxley was pain- fully aware), the plight of the poverty-stricken, and the build-up of arms in the thirties for certain use in an appal- ling war—not only turned him into a convinced pacifist,
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His questing, roving, fact-finding intelligence became exceptionally keen. Leonard Woolf says of him, “... his mind was of the finest tempered steel, his arguments always had the sharpest cutting edge; his intellectual honesty was perfect; but what reconciled one to having these steely weapons turned against one, what made ex- asperation or irritation impossible, was Aldous’s charac- ter, his temperament, his essential gentleness and sweetness. 2 Yet pessimism underlined his novels for all the early years of his life. He was particularly aware of the feeling of separation from existence, of the uniquely human consciousness of being a lonely and isolated en- tity.
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Separation, diversity—conditions of our existence. Condi- tions upon which we possess life and consciousness, know right from wrong and have the power to choose between them, recognize truth, have experience of beauty. But sep- aration is evil. Evil, then, is the condition of life, the condi- tion of being aware, of knowing what is good and beautiful ... even with the best will in the world, the separate, evil universe of a person or a physical pattern can never unite itself completely with other lives and beings, or the totality of life and being. Even for the highest goodness the struggle is
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insight of direct intuition. Unity beyond the turmoils of sepa- rateness and divisions. Goodness beyond the possibility of evil. But always the fact of separation persists, always evil remains the very condition of life and being. There must be no relaxation of the opening pressure. But even for the best of us, the consummation is still immeasurahly remote.®
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Mescaline gave him the actual experience of a condi- tion in which duality was transcended (“no subject, no object,” he kept repeating happily), for which he had been searching so long. Religions had helped him to approach this state intellectually but had never taken him there, and, in fact, during the early part of his life, he had discarded dogmatic religion altogether and had de- veloped a cynical agnosticism, especially when he vis-
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... L became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and ex- panding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. . .. The books, for ex- ample, with which my study walls were lined ... glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colours, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate, of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose colour was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.’
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But still there was some separation. In the middle of bliss, Huxley found that he was deliberately avoiding the eyes of the two people in the room with him, that he did not want to be aware of them, for “both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescaline had deliv- ered me—the world of selves, of time, of moral judg- ments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of over- valued words, and idolatrously worshipped notions.’
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Huxley died of cancer, as did his mother and his first wife. The nine or so years before his death brought him contentment and happiness, and many people remarked on his softer, mellower outlook. He grew out of the rather undergraduate, intellectual humor which, at a psychiatrist's conference, caused him to cross himself every time Freud was mentioned, and which made him think that it would be “amusing” to marry Laura in a drive-in wedding chapel. His astonishing fund of knowl- edge, observation, and real wit always provided him with many good friends from all walks of life. An astonish- ing picnic was once given by the Huxleys in the desert, to which were invited Krishnamurti, Greta Garbo, Anita Loos, Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell, Paulette God- dard, and Christopher Isherwood, as well as some Theosophists who came to cook Krishnamurti’s veg- etarian meal—the high point of the picnic occurring when a sheriff arrived to tell them that they were dese- crating the Los Angeles riverbed and demanded their names. When given, he refused to believe them, called them a lot of tramps and, pointing to a notice, asked if any of them could read!
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Perhaps, with all his gifts, what attracted people most to Aldous was his gentleness, kindness, and sincerity. He was humble enough to say, near the end of his life, that the only real advice he could give was that people should be nicer to each other. His own nature was basically tender and compassionate and, as he became more able to detach himself from the power of his intellect, his com- passionate aspect was able to fulfill itself.
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An article on Shakespeare and Religion, written during his last weeks and published posthumously, contains perhaps his simplest and yet most profound statement about life:
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... 1 had been attempting to practice what Buddhists call ‘recollection’ (smriti) or constant awareness of the im- mediate present as distinct from the usual distracted ram- bling of reminiscence and anticipation. But, in discussing it one evening, someone said to me, “But why try to live in the present? Surely we are always completely in the present even when we re thinking about the past or the future?’ This, actually quite obvious, remark again brought on the sudden sensation of having no weight. At the same time, the present seemed to become a kind of moving stillness, an eternal stream from which neither I nor anything could deviate. I saw that everything, just as it is now, is Ir—is the whole point of there being life and a universe. I saw that when the Upanishads said, ‘That art thou!’ or “All this world is Brahman, they meant just exactly what they said. Each thing, each event, each experience in its inescapable nowness and in all its own particular individuality was precisely what it should be, and so much so that it acquired a divine authority and originality. It struck me with the fullest clarity that none of this depended on my seeing it to be so; that was the way things were, whether I understood it or not, and if I did not understand, that was IT too. Furthermore, I felt that I now understood what Christianity might mean by the love of
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Living in IT and by IT, altogether allowing IT to be himself, was the great theme of Alan Watts’s life. But he was certainly not a mystic in the traditional sense. He loved sensual life and lived with enormous gusto. He drank a good deal, took LSD many times, married three times, and had seven children. He died in 1973, at the age of fifty-eight. His vocation in life, he said, was to wonder about the nature of the universe, and this feeling of awe and fascination led him into philosophy, psychology, re- ligion, and mysticism—not just in ideas but also in ex- perience: He refused to talk about anything he had not actually discovered. He was not afraid to call himself a mystic but saw with amusement how the people who hoped he would be their guru, or spiritual guide, were shaken when they saw his “element of irreducible rascal- ity.” He knew what they wanted—an idealized incarna- tion of radiant tranquility, love, and compassion—but he was too honest to confess to anything but “a quaking and palpitating mess of anxiety which lusts and loathes, needs love and attention, and lives in terror of death putting an end to its misery’? when he looked inside himself. This insight led him to see that to try to control the “quaking mess, to deny it and despise it in favor of what a mystic was supposed to feel, was to miss reality altogether, for the very attempt to do so was simply one more desire of the quaking mess. The quaking mess itself was as much a part of the universe as the rain, or flies, or disease. To see it as divine did not abolish it but allowed one the peace of mind of acceptance and delivered one from schizo-
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Watts’s vigorous philosophical-spiritual life began in early youth when, while still in King’s School, Canter- bury, he started to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. By the age of seventeen he had already published a book- let on Zen. He failed to get a scholarship to Cambridge, left school at seventeen, and launched himself on the world. He decided to design his own “higher education” and was helped to do this by his very understanding father; by Christmas Humphreys, president of the then Buddhist Lodge; by Nigel Watkins, owner ofa “mystical” bookshop in the Charing Cross Road; by Dr. Eric Graham Howe, a psychiatrist; and by Mitrinovic, a “rascal-guru” Slav.
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Watts steadfastly refused a conventional career. He loathed the idea of being made to play any business or professional role and although he took jobs to keep him- self going, he was an original dropout, not letting any- thing get in the way of his intense living of life. However, after he had married Eleanor Fuller, daughter of Ruth Fuller Sasaki and stepdaughter of Zen roshi Sokei-an Sasaki, and had gone to America with her, he was forced to find a means to supporta family. The ideal way seemed to be to become a minister in the Episcopalian Church, and this he did, deciding that as a priest he would be sincere and natural, although not at all heavy. He felt that Protestantism lacked a light touch, with regard to both religion and sex, because ofa sense of guilt. He wanted to help people enjoy ritual for its own sake without looking for any wordy meaning in it.
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He felt that on these sorts of points the Christian doc- trines were bewilderingly complex and unhelpful. They had developed into a sort of symbology which “fails ab- solutely to make any direct connection between the crucified and risen Son of God, on the one hand, and the daily life of a family in the suburbs of Los Angeles or London, on the other.’’4
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To Watts, the answer to it all was to drop the image of Christ and thus to understand the Crucifixion and the Resurrection properly, “for we are spiritually paralysed by the fetish of Jesus. ... His literary image in the Gos- pels has, through centuries of homage, become far more of an idol than anything graven in wood or stone, so that today the most genuinely reverent act of worship is to destroy that image.’> He felt that the real meaning of the Crucifixion was that the imagined, conceptualized Jesus, the historical image, should be relinquished because while Jesus remained an object of possession, of knowl- edge, and of safety, there could be no spiritual growth or eternal life.
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For, he pointed out, what is truly inward can never become an object. Life itself and our living of it is truly inward and this was why, Watts felt, the atmosphere of Christianity seemed cut off from all that lay outside it:
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... When I leave the Church and the city behind and go out under the sky, when I am with the birds, for all their vora- ciousness, with the clouds, for all their thunders, and with the oceans, for all their tempests and submerged monsters—I cannot feel Christianly because I am in a world which grows from within. I am simply incapable of feeling its life as coming from above, from beyond the stars, even recognising this to be a figure of speech. More exactly, I cannot feel that its life comes from Another, from one who is qualitatively and spiritually external to all that lives and grows. On the con- trary, I feel this whole world to be moved from the inside, and from an inside so deep that it is my inside as well, more truly I than my surface consciousness.7
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After some years as chaplain to Northwestern Univer- sity, Watts formally resigned from both the post and the ministry. His old love of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism had never taken second place in his life. Meetings with Dr. D. T. Suzuki, the great translator of the Zen scrip-
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Watts believes that the feeling of an “I” distinct from experience is brought about by memory and by the rapid- ity with which thoughts follow one another. If one falsely thinks that memory is a reliving of the past, then one has the impression of knowing the past and the present at the same time, both directly. This gives the feeling of a con- tinuous experiencer who knows both and can connect them. This in itself might not matter except that humans build such a life of misery for themselves based on this illusion:
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The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperat- ing and frustrating is not because there are facts called death,
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This struggle to extract the “I’’ from unpleasant ex- perience, particularly from death, is one reason, Watts thought, why people make an image of God and try to cling to it. But this clinging is in itself intense suffering, which is not to say that there is no God, but that to try and grasp God as a means of alleviating suffering or giving continuous everlasting life, is merely putting oneself in bondage. Death seen as sleep without waking, as the falling away of thoughts and memories and “I’’-ness, has something natural and refreshing about it, and should not be confused with “the fantasy of being shut up forever in darkness.” Death might also mean waking up as someone else, as one did when one was born, and Watts was con- vinced that what dies is not consciousness but memory, for “consciousness recurs in every newborn creature, and wherever it recurs it is ‘I’.””2°
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and verbs obviously translate what is going on in the world into particular things (nouns) and events (verbs), and these in turn ‘have’ properties (adjectives and ad- verbs) more or less separable from them. All such lan- guages represent the world as if it were an assemblage of distinct bits and particles. The defect of such grids is that they screen out or ignore (or repress) interrelations.” 4 For the reality, which is the basis of everyday life, is never static or fixed in the way the word that represents it is. A fleeting, fluid, ever-changing field of experience, ungraspable because you can only be it, not have it, fright- ens many people very much indeed. But mind-con- structions such as thoughts and ideas, can be grasped and held and most people not only prefer an idea about the thing to the thing itself but have actually forgotten or never understood that the word only symbolizes reality, and an idea is only a pattern of thought.
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Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk and a gifted and popular Catholic writer on monastic life who had begun to explore new directions before he died in an accident in a Bangkok hotel, when he was electrocuted by a faulty fan-switch.
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His early life was nomadic and insecure. He was born in France of New Zealand and American parents, both of whom were artists. His mother died when he was a young child and from then on he wandered about with his father in France, spending occasional holidays with an aunt in England and with his mother’s restless American parents, who would descend on Europe, trailing along with them Thomas’s younger brother, John Paul. Eventually Thomas went to a public school in England and then on to Cam- bridge, where he took a degree in modern languages. But Cambridge was not a success. He was at odds with life and couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and he was given to depression. He had no religion, but was deeply im- pressed by the sincerity of a young Hindu who was able to convey to him some meaning in Christian mysticism. In those early days of his religious quest, Merton’s self-
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After the death of his father and the advent of war, Merton went to America and took some more courses at Columbia. Then he began to attend Mass and decided to become a Roman Catholic. He was greatly assailed by his own purposelessness. He could no longer bear to live only for himself. After some retreats at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he was received as a novice and was based there as a monk for the rest of his life.
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The Trappist life is simple and well-ordered. Merton found in it all the security and sense of purpose which had been so lacking in his rootless wanderings. Book after book flowed from his pen about the especial joys of monasticism and the terrible nature of the world outside the monastery. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (published as Elected Silence in Great Britain), was a best seller, and so too was a small book of devotional thoughts and themes called Seeds of Contemplation.
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Christian monasteries are often largely tenanted by two types of monks. On the one hand, there are pleasant, easy, talkative men, who simply prefer a monastic way of life, with its secure routine, to a worldly one, and who are practical and not particularly mystical; and on the other, there are men who are more withdrawn, self-absorbed, and concerned with their experiences, both religious and secular.
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Merton saw a good deal of both types and some of his books openly criticize the ways and moods of monks. He repudiated particularly the opinions of those who tried to define the experience of contemplation in psychological terms or with scientific definitions. In Christianity there is a distinction drawn between meditation and contem- plation. Meditation is a discussion in the mind, a silent working-out of a theme. Contemplation is a wordless nearness to God, an experience of being—unnecessary to the ways and natures of many monks, just as spiritual realities are often unnecessary to a busy religious life.
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This insight of Merton’s casts light on the general human habit of trying to conform to some currently fash- ionable attitude or life style. Instead of being me—here in this present moment and innocent of ideas about any role that would bring me benefit—I habitually think of myself as though there were another person six feet away from me all the time, judging my performance. We live by other people’s ideas instead of our own. We are self- conscious instead of conscious.
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Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. ... We do not know clearly beforehand what the result of this work will be. The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done. The way of doing it is a secret I can leam from no one else but Him.4
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His desire for “‘true identity” led Merton away from the close monasticism which influenced his early writing towards a more compassionate feeling for the suffering world—in contrast to his earlier glad detachment from it. He became aware of people and of the real problems of life. He began to find the distance was lessening between the innate sense of God that came to him in contempla- tion and ordinary life. He saw that the way to inner spiritual certainty was undramatic, even obscure, and that the monastic everyday routine of “work, poverty, hardship, and monotony” had supreme value.
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Many Christians would and did disagree with him over this point. In every religion, but particularly in Christian- ity, two main groups of people seem to emerge. There are those who believe that God’s orders in the form of a vigorous Christian life are to be carried out, but who do not feel the need to contemplate God—who, in fact, are shy and wary of the admonition “Be still and know that I am God.” And there is another, perhaps smaller group, who see their own spiritual realization as of first impor- tance although, like Aldous Huxley, they are far from blind to the needs of the world.
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Merton was one of the latter type, and it might be fair to say they are more likely to be found in monasteries. But two themes of contemplation seem to have expanded his outlook and perhaps changed the direction of his life. One was the belief, stated earlier, that “each particular being... gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now.” The full awareness of the moment, which Merton called “‘nowness,” brings the knowledge of the “unknown I” into consciousness. The whole action of awakening is for now. Wherever one is, in lonely cell or crowded street, this moment contains all
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As long as there is an “I” that is the definite subject of a contemplative experience, an “I” that is aware of itself and of its contemplation, an “IT” that can possess a certain “degree of spirituality’, then we have not yet passed over the Red Sea, we have not yet “gone out of Egypt’. We remain in the realm of multiplicity, activity, incompleteness, striving and desire. The true inner self, the true indestructible and immortal person, the true “I” who answers to a new and secret name known only to himself and God, does not “have” anything, even “contemplation.” This “I” is not the kind of subject that can amass experiences, reflect on them, reflect on himself, for this “I’’ is not the superficial and empirical self that we know in our everyday life.®
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His main bridge-building was in the field of Zen. He had illuminating talks with Dr. D. T. Suzuki, the greatest Japanese exponent of Zen in this century, and said after- ward that Buddhism (of which Zen is a school) had finally become comprehensible to him, that he had now seen through the rather bewildering cultural patterns of strange rituals, exotic images, and mysterious words to a clear and simple essence—‘‘the simplest and most baffling thing of all: direct confrontation with Absolute Being, Absolute Love, Absolute Mercy, or Absolute Void by an immediate and fully awakened engagement in the living of everyday life. In Christianity the confrontation is theo- logical and affective, through word and love. In Zen it is metaphysical and intellectual, through insight and emptiness.’7
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play in order to get along in society. This other is a “way” that prefers not to get anywhere in the world, or even in the field of some supposedly spiritual attainment. ... For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it. There is an affirma- tion of the world that is nothing but ruin and loss. There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves man in his own home, which is God’s world. In any event, the “way” of Chuang Tzu is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a “way out.” Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost.14
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Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more “imperative”’ than Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and-everything is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya (law and truth) . .. every- thing is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination.14
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The Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, spent his life in pursuit of scientific evidence to show the pres- ence of God within the material universe. He was by nature a scientist, interested even in early childhood in all the phenomena surrounding him in the Auvergne region of France where he was born. He relates how, as a very young child, he would collect all objects which seemed to be imperishable. Even at six or seven years old, he longed to possess some finite thing which was unchangeable and absolute. He was dismayed to find that iron rusted, that wood could burn:
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This is an important observation, for it certainly seems true that we spend most of our life naming and judging the world in relation to “me,” thus creating a false duality. We are distracted by appearances and take the appear- ance for the whole, so that we come to believe that the material universe we apprehend through our senses is all there is. In this way, always looking outward, we fail 'to
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Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortui- tously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can fol- low with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward. As far back as we can recognise a surface of the earth, that surface is inhabited. It is as if no planet can reach a certain stage in its sidereal evolution without breaking into life. But this is not all. The consciousness that we see filling the avenues of the past, does not flow simply like a river which carries an un- changing water past ever changing banks. It transforms itself in the course of its journey; it evolves; life has amovementof its own.4
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If we look at the very lowest forms of life—inert matter—we fall into the error of thinking that it has no consciousness at all, he said. But it may really be that its consciousness is so fragmented and diffused that we can only see it at all through the “laws of nature,” the laws of statistical organization which the study of science has revealed.
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For man is not only anew species, he said, he is also the beginning of a completely new era in the history of the earth. There is a much greater gap between man and simple organic life than there is between organic life and inorganic matter. Conscious intelligence has brought about, for the first time, a universe which is aware of itself, which is “personalized.”
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Teilhard here raises what is to me, and, I suspect, to many others, a baffling point—why has God bothered to create life if the end result will be the same as the begin- ning? The how of it all we can understand through the revelations of science, but the question of existence itself has not yet been satisfactorily answered by any religion or scientific discovery.
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Teilhard’s answers perhaps bear some of the shortcom- ings of a sheltered, academic life, but no one can deny his brilliant insights and fervent yet lucid language. Was he, perhaps, an overdedicated man? As a mystical theolo- gian, his whole interest seemed absorbed by the desire to prove scientifically the links between evolution and the Christian vision of the world. Apart from this overwhelm- ing passion, he seems to have taken little notice of other aspects of life. The arts passed him by. He was not in- terested in living people, or their conditions. He spent twenty years in China and took amazingly little notice of its culture and philosophies. He visited India and failed
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There seem to be two ways in which religious people regard the world and time. One is Teilhard’s, in which some sort of perfection will be reached at an infinitely distant period. This way regards the present experience of life as incomplete in itself. It is merely a step towards a future goal. It often sees divine patterns revealing themselves—and events which do not fit in are ig- nored—as Teilhard was inclined to ignore suffering. This religious path demands concentration upon a goal which can never be realized now—it is in some vague and far off future. This attitude of mind is shared by all religions —there are many Hindus and Buddhists who believe that merging with the Self, or Nirvana, can only be reached after innumerable lifetimes.
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It is in this last area of spiritualized energy that Teilhard laid himself most open to attack from other sci- entists. For he postulated three main spheres in the struc- ture of the universe—the geosphere, which is the sphere of matter; the biosphere, which is the sphere of animate life; and the noosphere, which is the sphere of the mind and is spiritualized energy. It is in the noosphere, he said,
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The being who is the object of his own reflection, in conse- quence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born. Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions, mathematics, art, calculation of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love—all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly-formed centre as it explodes onto itself.1°
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In his precise definitions of God’s plans for mankind —a more and more personalized existence in which all men would become one—one begins to sense in Teilhard a need for reassurance. He seems to insist too much on the Pleroma, on man’s convergence upon himself, his growingly intense and perfect unification as he travels further and further inward to Omega point—as though Teilhard himself was a little uncertain. He spent much of his life, such as the twenty years in China, isolated from contemporary thought and discovery and was further iso- lated (although not from his friends) by the Vatican’s decision to refuse to allow publication of his major works. Whatever the causes, his beliefs about the Pleroma when mankind finally reaches the ultimate convergence in per- fection on Omega and Christ is realized and reborn seem ideas hardly related to this world. Yet many people, par- ticularly Roman Catholics, have found in Teilhard a source of courage, and although a very different man from Merton, the two do share astrong spiritual inspiration and revelation; Teilhard’s more mystical writings in The Di- vine Milieu and The Hymn of the Universe among others, contain a great intensity of feeling which is lacking in the writing of many modern theologians and is perhaps needed in the rational West. He was able to express himself with true depth in poetic prose:
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... And so, for the first time in my life perhaps (although I am supposed to meditate every day!), I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relation- ships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further
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away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came —arising I know not from where—the current which I dare to call my life. ...
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Yes, O God, I believe it: and I believe it all the more willingly because it is not only a question of my being con- soled, but of my being completed: it is you who are at the origin of the impulse, and at the end of that continuing pull which all my life long I can do no other than follow, or favour the first impulse and its developments. And it is you who vivify, for me, with your omnipresence (even more than my spirit vivifies the matter which it animates) the myriad influ- ences of which I am the constant object. In the life which wells up in me and in the matter which sustains me, I find much more than your gifts. It is you yourself whom I find, who makes me participate in your being, you who moulds Nich yoats
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The feeling of “I’’ to Krishnamurti, is based on false beliefs. When this feeling is dropped, the awareness of what is here and now is complete and is no longer divided and altered by the choices of the I-ego. To say, for in- stance, “I am aware’ is to put an unnecessary division between the experiencing subject and the experience. The mind is conditioned to believe in “I,” says Krish- namurti, but when it can drop its conditioning (the way it has been taught to think) the feeling of “I” changes and becomes at one with existence, no longer separate from it. For many people, this argument is too difficult to under- stand and so Krishnamurti urges his hearers to become aware of life in a way which is choiceless, and to experi- ence this choiceless awareness now.
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I have long been in revolt from all things, from the author- ity of others, from the instruction of others, from the knowl- edge of others; I would not accept anything as Truth until I found the Truth myself. I never opposed the ideas of others but I would not accept their authority, their theory of life. Until I was in that state of revolt, until I became dissatisfied with everything, with every creed, with every dogma and belief, I was not able to find the Truth. ...
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But more powerful than any physical trouble was the whole atmosphere of reverence and adoration with which Krishnamurti was surrounded and which must have created abnormal demands on his personality. He had to be psychic. It was believed that he roamed about on the astral plane at night, that he could magnetize objects beneficially, that he had passed great occult initiations. Lady Emily tells us, “he accepted his position but never derived any personal satisfaction from it. He never wanted anything for himself—money, power or position. George [Arundale] was always urging him to try to re- member what had happened on other planes. “Please bring through,’ he would keep saying; but Krishna re- mained unmoved and only ‘brought through’ when he really did remember something. He was, I think, desper- ately unhappy. He hated publicity; he longed for a nor- mal home life. He often said to me “Why did they ever pick on me?’ 5
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It broke in 1929 when Krishnamurti finally dissolved the Order of the Star—the organization which had been built around his role as Messiah. With that action he deliberately renounced the estates and riches which de- votees had tried to thrust on him, the jasmine and rose- filled railway carriages, the camps where thousands listened with bated breath to his every word. Instead he chose an austere integrity, a hard and solitary path, which he outlined in the speech which ended his life as a pseudo-Messiah:
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Because I am free, unconditioned, whole, not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is eternal, I desire those who seek to understand me to be free, not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect. Rather they should be free from all fears—from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spiritual- ity, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself.®
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For that “I,” or ego, usually lives its everyday life in sucha way that it manipulates all circumstances to its own advantage, which means that instead of being generally aware it is constantly particularizing and judging each thing in relation to its own continuance and interests.
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Krishnamurti has perhaps uncovered—as did Alan Watts—a valuable light on the structure of the ego; on the sensation of isolated separateness within one’s skin which can lead not to humility but to power, not to love but to hatred and destruction. People in the oldest civili- zations and in present-day primitive ones seem to have less consciousness of separateness and less feeling of individual ego-centeredness than we do. The sensation of separateness seems closely linked to humanity’s in- creased ability to think in abstract terms, to separate life from the experience of it by the use of a word. Man lives
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not to entangle it with succeeding thoughts is an essential step on the way to self-realization. For to place a problem in its own niche and not to allow it to affect any other aspects of one’s life is to free oneself from the extraor- dinarily pervasive way in which problems seem to creep over one’s whole existence, using up psychological energy and assuming mountainous proportions. When this happens, the mind becomes stupefied and dull and can’t seem to get out of the habit of constantly going back to the problem, just as the tongue has to keep touching a bad tooth. But if one can see the present moment as completely different to the last one; if one can open one’s mind to all that is not the problem, the burden of self-pity and self-absorption drops away and one feels clear in- stead of muddled, integrated instead of in pieces.
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of truth, with its ecstasy, you must lay the foundations. The foundation is the understanding of thought, which breeds fear and sustains pleasure, and the understanding of order and therefore virtue; so that there is freedom from all conflict, aggression, brutality and violence. Once one has laid this foundation of freedom, there is a sensitivity which is su- preme intelligence, and the whole of the life one leads be- comes entirely different.®
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We certainly seem to cling to emotions quite des- perately at times and seem to confuse our psychological states with life itself, so that if we are not “involved” or not feelimg some specific emotion we doubt that we are really living. We can even cling to suffering as giving life some sort of meaning, perhaps because we are afraid to contemplate the Emptiness which might be seen if we ceased to cling. Essentially we cling to the known, which we call life, and are afraid of the unknown.
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happens,” teaches Zen. But can a person live everyday life in this way? “Can a person afford not to,” Zen would say. Krishnamurti believes that it is possible, but only when there is full awareness of life—“‘an awareness in which there is no motive or choice, but simple observation.’ !?
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Being aware does not mean learning and accumulating lessons from life; on the contrary, to be aware is to be without the scars of accumulated experience. After all, when the mind merely gathers experience according to its own wishes, it remains very shallow, superficial. ... Awareness comes into being naturally, easily, spontaneously, when we under- stand the centre which is everlastingly seeking experience, sensation. A mind which seeks sensation through experience becomes insensitive, incapable of swift movement and therefore it is never free. But in understanding its own self- centered activities, the mind comes upon this state of aware- ness which is choiceless, and such a mind is then capable of
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In contrast with the vigorous, powerful, complicated, and often mischievous Gurdjieff, Pak Subuh seems al- most a shadow. This is probably what he would wish, for he believes that he himself has no power—it is the Divine Life Force which moves him and all his followers. Yet at Gurdjieff's death, some of his pupils turned to Subuh asa natural continuation of Gurdjieff’s teaching.
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The reason for this was that Subuh’s understanding of man’s condition resembled Gurdjieff's, and his beliefs and observations also have a Sufi background. Pak Subuh sees man as composed of certain forces, about the nature of which he is mainly unconscious. These life-forces, or levels, number five. Three of them—matter, plants, and animals—are lower than man; one, the human, is on man’s own level; and the fifth is the level above man to which, however, he can aspire.
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real difference between Gurdjieff's teaching and Pak Subuh’s. For Gurdjieff believed that man must make the effort himself to realize his essence; whereas Subuh be- lieves that only God, or the Life-Force, can help man—he cannot do it alone. Pak Subuh has no exercises or methods except that of emptying oneself of thoughts and feelings as far as is possible so that the Life-Force can enter and purify one. This is done during latihan (spiritual training) by a transmission from one who is already opened to the Force.
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though he is out of time altogether, and then he experi- ences a state of consciousness which seems more real than his usual state. It carries a sense of freedom and clarity—what Krishnamurti refers to as “astonishingly alive and creative.” It is the feeling of being alive that is its characteristic, as though true life has not been experi- enced before. In this state, which Gurdjieff termed Ob- jective Consciousness, the outside world is no less real —in fact it shines forth as though never before seen—but a truly disinterested acceptance of it has taken the place of attachment and dependence, so that it is seen as it is, seen without the colored spectacles of the desiring self.
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So that his students could become aware of their machinelike minds, Gurdjieff wanted them all to report daily about each other—an infallible way of producing the friction he thought necessary to wake them up. As well, he would deliberately uphoid an irritating or un- harmonious personality. One of the boys at the Prieure, Fritz Peters, remembers how the children would all tease an elderly Russian, Rachmilevitch, “a mournful, dour type, full of prophecies of disaster, dissatisfied with everything. ’!° They did all they could to make his life unbearable and he was constantly flying into awful rages. One summer everyone, without exception, was put to remaking the lawns, goaded by Gurdjieff, who “would march up and down among all the workers, criticising them individually, goading them on, and helping to con- tribute a feeling of furious, senseless activity to the whole proceedings.’’11
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Looked at from the outside, the Prieuré must have been an unusual but trying place to live in, its community spellbound by their guru and always working self- consciously to please him. Yet Katherine Mansfield pre- ferred it to anywhere and spent the last weeks of her life there; and other writers and eminent people from all walks of life stayed there for months or years.
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Gurdjieff himself seems to have been a master show- man, arascal-guru of immense talent; an opportunist with a grasp of underlying truths which he could expound with such force that their impact was perhaps greater than their substance. He made a deep impression on the West and books are still being written about him to this day. To those who knew him he was vividly alive, open to the essence in every person he met. To those who have only read him, his teaching contains some of the great truths to be found in all religions, perhaps the most important being the belief that man as he is, is not perfectible. His personality is always that of a machine. Man himself cannot do. But by observing the operations of his person- ality he begins to abate it, and as it becomes passive so the big “Me” emerges. That is the true “doer,” the true life. Gurdjieff believed that the only way out of man’s di- lemma is to change his consciousness of who he is, and in this he agrees with other teachers such as Krishnamurti,
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initiate him or give him any training, saying that Subuh would receive all he needed from a nonhuman source. So Subuh gave up the search for spiritual knowledge and re-entered everyday life, training as a bookkeeper and getting married.
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In 1925, the year when he was supposed to have died, a strange thing happened to him which altered the course of his life.
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You must allow God to act within you through the working of the great Life Force, says Pak Subuh. The action is similar to allowing a friend to take you by the hand and guide you—whatever he wants to do, you sub- mit to it. This is the meaning of surrender to God, in Pak Subuh’s view.
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Subud is the abbreviation of three words—Susila, Budhi, Dharma. Susila means man’s true character when he acts in accordance with the will of God; Budhi is man’s divine life-force as man encounters it within himself; Dharma means man’s full surrender to the will of God.
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There are five life-forces, or levels, he believes, which dominate the ordinary human being, and of whose pres- ence he is usually unaware because he believes himself to be his own master. The three lower forces comprise the very nature of the physical world itself and at the same time each one—matter, plant, and animal—is a sphere on its own. Above them is the human, or fourth, level; and the fifth level is comprised of those expressions of the life-force that are superior to humans.
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enslaved by his stomach—the plant life-force of which he is partly composed is able to make contact with the plant world outside and this, says Bapak, “resembles a long- awaited meeting between husband and wife.” Because man can accomplish this plant reunion, his wisdom is worshiped by the lesser power, who has longed for his help.
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The way in which these three levels exist in man is by being eaten. Humans, however, do not eat each other so the human level of the life-force arises in a different way. Interaction on the human level comes about through sex- ual intercourse. Sexual union implies the act of creation and Bapak sees man becoming the creative field in which the world can develop—he likens the human body to that of a soil which varies in its fertility so that different people correspond to different soils, the highest being the “golden earth.”
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The way to receive the Power, says Bapak, is to become empty and still within the mind and heart, so quiet that all thoughts and emotions die down. The thinking mind, in particular, is the instrument of whatever powers are uppermost—man can never apprehend his spiritual inner feelings with his superficial thinking-mind. It must quiet down and be replaced by the powerful Life Force of God. This Life Force, the nature of which is entirely beyond his capacity to grasp, is the only true help man has. His thinking brain is an excellent tool and should be de- veloped to its full strength by ordinary methods; but its field of operation is the outer world and it cannot be used to understand the reality of God. One remembers, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”
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How can this submission come about? Bapak’s answer lies in the latihan, the spiritual training which is the core of Subud, and is also its great distinguishing feature. For the power of the Life Force is transmitted during the latihan, in the first instance only, by the people called “helpers,” who are appointed by Bapak to “open” their fellow men. This “opening” is not, however, anything personally to do with Bapak or the helpers. They are merely the channel through which the force is transmit- ted. Anyone may attend a latihan and be opened in this way. It is aclassless and race-free aid to religion in which few are refused, although it is occasionally felt advisable that a person should not receive the latihan until his
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What actually happens in the latihan? Twice a week for life, men and women go to separate rooms in their nearest Subud center, take off anything liable to be broken, and, standing relaxed with eyes shut, empty themselves as far as possible of all thoughts, perceptions, and desires. They then feel themselves urged to move about by a force which they believe to be the power of God. The latihan is said to be at one and the same time the worship of God, and a means of purification which clears out stage by stage the results of wrong actions, bad heredity, and so on. Members do not try to understand what is happening to them, but allow everything to proceed as it arises —whether it be slight movements, dancing, talking in foreign tongues, singing, weeping, and even shouting and screaming and making strange animal noises; or they may stand in complete stillness. At no time are they in any kind of trance, nor do they pay attention to what is going on around them. Every possible movement or sound may occur, because every person has his own combination of lower forces to master. But nobody is ever so possessed that he is out of his mind, and he is aware all the time as an observer. At the end of half an hour the helper declares the latihan is finished.
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Although it is constantly referred to as the power of God, Bapak takes care not to claim that the force actually does come from God for, he says, only God can know this. What is received, he says, comes from a stream of life beyond the reach of the lower forces and also beyond anything that could be termed magic. But he cannot ex- plain or categorize this stream. In fact it is useless to talk about it, he says, for explanations, however high- sounding, are only projections of the thinking mind and the imagination. The proper answer to those who want to know what it is, is that they must come and experience it for themselves. They will then know the facts, rather than words about them.
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who practice the latihan. Illnesses decrease, age is held back, the mind becomes clear and supple, and the emo- tions easy and open. In time, people should be able to receive the fifth power, the level of life which lies above the human. On this level are the saints and prophets, the rare men and women whose awareness and love em- braces all forms, although they themselves have evolved into a spiritual state which is formless, “comparable to the vastness of the ocean.”
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Subud is not a separate religion. Its members come from all the established religions and find that, because of the latihan, their understanding of their own religion is greater (perhaps, as well, because they have learned to surrender their self-will). Bapak, himself, as the instigator of Subud and the original “transmitter” of the force, is regarded as a prophet by many of his “children,” al- though he refuses to think of himself as anything but the most ordinary of men. For it is not he but the Life Force which is the dynamic opener, he is merely a family man and lives in that way.
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Bapak’s complete confidence in the Life Force, rather than in man’s own efforts at self-transcendence, may seem deceptively submissive to those of us who have not been touched by it. For although man must, perhaps, ultimately see himself as nothing and the power of God as everything, although he should eventually surrender himself wholly—yet are not his struggling attempts to do so the very rungs of his ladder? To replace his own in- sights and affirmations which often arise from setbacks and doubts, by a force seemingly transmitted effortlessly
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But perhaps Bapak has disposed of this criticism, for he is a firm believer in daily life in the world as the best arena for the force of God, and his teaching these days emphasizes the growth of enterprises. In the seventeen years since he brought Subud and the latihanto the West, he has gradually laid more and more emphasis on outer activities, and particularly on the enterprises which are now beginning to finance the social aims of Subud. He has given guidance in his talks to members about working for better social conditions, and he urges them to start Subud schools, hospitals, homes for the elderly, and so on. This is the only publicity for Subud that he is pre- pared to consider—“We should not make propaganda, but there should be evidence in ourselves for others. It is of the greatest importance,” he says, “to make use of our minds and hearts as long as we live on this earth, since our minds and hearts and our five senses are indeed given to us by God to serve the needs of life as long as we live on earth.’4
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And after this life? We not only need happiness in this life, but also happiness after death, says Bapak, for death is the continuation of life. It is absurd to think that we come to an end when we die. Certainly, he says, our minds and hearts stop working, but there is an inner feel- ing which continues to exist. If that inner feeling is not ready for the next life, if it is not yet purified and has not discovered the power of God, then it will be left rigid, in- flexible, and lifeless by the ending of the mind and heart.
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It is otherwise if the Power of God has been active within you in your exercise, for your inner feeling has begun to wake up and come to life; and coming to life means not owing to the influence of heart, mind and desires, but, on the contrary, owing to liberation from all these influences. Having come to
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life, the inner feeling is able to recognise and to be aware of life free from the influence of mind, heart and desires, which cannot possibly guide or accompany our inner life or our soul to the realm of life after death.
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As your inner feeling (or inner self) comes alive, freed from mind, desires, and heart, it becomes able to receive what you need and what is God’s will for you, so that you are able to receive within your inner self [a knowledge of] what life is like after death and “before I was born.”>
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The majority of Hindus find the first way the easiest, and their religion has developed a wonderful number of gods and goddesses, who are worshiped not for them- selves but for what they symbolize. Thus Kali, the Mother of the Earth, can be identified with and worshiped be- cause through her the devotee knows he is reverencing life itself. In her destructive aspect, he reverences the cleansing force of death. As well, there are cosmic gods such as Rama, Krishna, Vishnu, etc.—legendary figures
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A strange experience in his late teens sparked off his spiritual career. Until then he had been, apparently, a carefree, clever young man, uninterested in anything but his studies at the university and his social life. One eve- ning, cycling back from college, he drew close to the small hut of an old Muslim woman, Hazrat Babajan, who was said to be a fakir. To his surprise she appeared and beck- oned to him. He got off his bicycle and went up to her. They didn’t speak but she clasped his hands and then kissed his forehead.
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For the next few months he lived as a moving corpse, unconscious of life around him. He was able to walk but little more. He hardly ate, and tried to give away all his food to dogs and beggars. His parents thought his mind had gone and he was put under doctors, but to little avail. At last he began to regain consciousness and to live “as an automaton possessing intuition.’ Gradually, he is said to have recovered completely, although Paul Brunton, one of his critics, seriously doubts this.
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The whole course of his life was now changed. The “veil” between himself and God had been rent by Babajan’s kiss. He had been in a state of ecstasy during the unconscious months, and had felt he was one with God in such a way that the whole universe, with all its levels of consciousness, became apparent to him. But coming down from this bliss to the earthly level was great agony, so painful that he would spend hours each day knocking his forehead against walls and windows, the physical pain relieving the spiritual torture. He said:
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As well as being a Sufi teacher, Baba followed the traditional Hindu Bhakti path of devotion in which he, as a guru, expected a disciple to give up his life to serving him, thus enabling the disciple to approach God through him, who was God-man. A guru of this type does not think of himself in a personal way, and it is not to him as a person that the disciple submits.
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Perhaps it is true that the theorizing intellect is a hin- drance to spiritual response. Buddhism is quite clear that this is so. To a disciple who wanted to speculate on the afterlife, the Buddha replied emphatically that this sort of query is not profitable and has nothing to do with the fundamentals of religion. Zen says, “Don’t think—just look,” and the Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi, said, “You know that you know nothing. Find out that knowledge. That is liberation.” The mind, itself a marvelous tool for ordinary living, must be dropped when the nature of life is sought for. The observer in us who analyzes and makes value judgments, must give way to the total “I’? who wants to respond to what is. Methods for letting go of the
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What is meant by becoming footless and headless? It means implicitly obeying the Perfect Master: following His orders literally and not using your head to analyse their significance; doing only what He wants you to do—your feet moving at His command and your life being lived in the way of His love.®
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is so, in the sense that all I have is given up and gladly forsaken; and it appears as though there is a reciprocal action of acceptance and immeasurable love by something—God, the heart, life, the real world. All is felt to be right, to be wholly good.
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Apart from these categories of existence (all straightforward Sufi teaching) can one say that Baba said anything else which might have a life of its own?
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In spite of the difference between a keenly intelligent person and a very unintelligent person, each is equally capa- ble of experiencing love. The quality which determines one’s capacity for love is not one’s wit or wisdom, but one’s readiness to lay down life itself for the beloved, and yet remain alive. One must, so to speak, slough off body, energy, mind and all else, and become dust under the feet of the beloved. This dust of a lover who cannot remain alive with- out God—just as an ordinary man cannot live without breath—is then transformed into the beloved. Thus man becomes God.?°
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When your life presents an honest and sincere picture of your mind and heart just an embrace from a Perfect Master is enough to quicken the spirit. When I the Ancient One em- brace you I awaken something within you which gradually grows. It is the seed of Love that I have sown. There is a long period and great distance between the breaking open of the seed and its flowering and fruiting. Actually the Goal is neither far nor near and there is no distance to cross nor time to count. In Eternity, all is here and now. You have simply to become that which you are. You are God, the Infinite Existence.
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Like Meher Baba, his disciples believe him to be an avatar, an incarnation of God, and the most realized and holy among men. Unlike Meher Baba, he appears to have some quite concrete techniques to offer as aids to the transcendent, and it is the effects of these techniques that have brought him immense popularity among the young, as well as a vast American audience and a decidedly comfortable style of life.
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To know that God exists would surely be, for many people, a reassurance so profound that all life would be transfigured by it. It is partly the lack of external, objec- tive evidence of God that causes such terrible existential doubt. If this doubt could be assuaged by some form of supreme knowledge, how many could resist it? Who would not want to go and obtain it as soon as possible?
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So this is the same thing. You live all your lifetime doing this, just thinking, “Should I realise God or not, should I realise God or not, should I realise God or not?” Then when the last moment of your life comes, you say, “All right, I'll realise Him.” But then this body has already got only fifteen seconds to live, and it is too late.4
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family, it is impossible to spend every day for two weeks at Satsang) builds up a hysterical feeling that you must be chosen by a Mahatma. The premies, those who already have the Knowledge, conduct the Satsang and discourse endlessly on the corruptness of society, the futility of modern life, and the grossness of the body. One premie may intersperse his discourse with cracking, uncovered yawns, as though he has been dragged out of bed to speak. Another can be overcome by an emotional devotion to the young Maharaj and tell her audience that he is “love, just love—he actually created Jesus and the Buddha— if any of you have a guru, and he took one look at Guru Maharaj, he would fall down in front of him.”
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At this point and taken on its own, the experience does not seem sufficiently profound to have brought about a life of wisdom and deep understanding, any more than the fairly common psychic experience of being outside one’s body (usually suspended above it) seems to lead to any great spiritual profundity.
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After his “death” experience, Ramana left home and went to Tiruvannamalai, a town which lies at the foot of Arunachala, the Hill which he had imagined so often. He never left there again. At first there was no question of his being considered as a teacher. All he did was to sit absorbed in the consciousness of Being, indifferent as to whether his body lived or died. This was a state known and respected by Hindus, who have always treated their holy men with care and reverence; and a daily cup of food was brought to him. Gradually he left the condition of ineffable bliss and returned to the everyday life of those around him.
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The sense of “I” is natural to every being, he said —thinking along the same lines as Alan Watts, who pro- nounced that life is continually reborn in every “I.” Our feelings, said Ramana Maharshi, are always expressed in “T” terms—“I went,” “I am,” “I do.” Usually these feel- ings are connected with the body and its actions—‘I did some gardening,” “I read a book’—and so we come to think of the body itself as “I.” We identify ourselves with all its functions and activities and call them “mine.” But the sense of “I” is vaster, more profound than the vehicle of the body in which it arises. The body on its own is a mere collection of bones and tissue, alive for a time and then dead. If the body caused the consciousness of “I,” we would be bound to feel this consciousness all the time, but when we are deeply asleep there is no feeling of “rt”
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For all feelings pertain to the body; and they inevitably give rise to the verbalized mind-chatter which we call thoughts. When identification with the body is total, the thoughts which arise are primarily for body-survival, such as thoughts about food, housing and money. This is ignorance of the real nature of “I.” As realization begins to take place (which may not occur in this life, according to Hinduism) the sense of “I” becomes purified and ceases to be identified so strongly with the body. More
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What, then, is “‘I,’’ and what has caused us to feel it? This question, said Ramana Maharshi, is the basis of all the scriptures. How can one ignore such a question? How can one go through life without bothering to enquire what the nature of the “I” is? “I,” he says, shines within the heart, and the feeling of “I’’ is a continuous, unspoken, and spontaneous awareness which underlies all the flow of thoughts. If it is discovered and held to, the ignorance which mistakes it for its bodily attributes will disappear. This is liberation.
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The two ways that the Maharshi taught were (1) enquir- ing into who it is that undergoes this destiny and lives this life; then making the discovery that only the ego is bound by destiny and that the ego does not exist in the way we believe it to. And (2) surrendering the ego to God by way of realizing one’s own limitations and helplessness, and by substituting God’s will for one’s own; by accepting all that is to be done without ever claiming any action as one’s own, thus removing all sense of “me” and “mine.” (The Maharshi frequently used the term God for the Self.)
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“To live with the true consciousness of life centred in Another is to lose one’s self-important seriousness and thus to live life as ‘play’ in union with a Cosmic Player,” says Thomas Merton. “It is He alone that one takes seri- ously. But to take Him seriously is to find joy and spon- taneity in everything, for everything is gift and grace. In other words, to live selfishly is to bear life as an intolera- ble burden. To live selflessly is to live in joy, realising by experience that life itself is love and gift. To be a lover anda giver is to be achannel through which the Supreme Giver manifests His love in the world.’’}°
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that life is intrinsically good and right, and that what is provided for one right now is the proper and appropriate condition at this moment. To attempt to manipulate it one iota for one’s own benefit is to impose a stultifying and deadening concept onto a living reality.
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Complete acceptance of the moment does not mean, however, that one never does anything. Real surrender means a surrender to what needs to be done. This was once the basis of Christian life, and remains today an ideal in the mind of many Hindus who have not always seen, however, that surrender to a present situation re- quires a great effort of active awareness to help one to do as well as to be.
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Because of the apparent indifference of Hindus to the value of life itself, which they display to shocked Western eyes in the rotting, death-laden streets of Calcutta and Bombay, the more energetic Westerners have concluded that a spuriously divine attitude ofacceptance is to blame. That may be partly true. But another factor enters into Hindu philosophy which is apt to confound Western thinking altogether—maya—the world thought of as illu- sion, not really there at all.
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physical world is absolutely real, for the Self manifests in every creature and to disbelieve in the existence of the world is to deny the manifest Self. What gives falseness and unreality to the physical world, however, is to ascribe to any part of it a separate, self-subsistent life—which, in fact, is the error most of us fall into when we identify with the body and think of ourselves as mortal, think of the other as friend or enemy, think of all life as having its own separate powers over us. When we do this we create a conceptual illusory world, a dream world which re- places reality. Ramana Maharshi likened the process to a film or movie, where one sees characters and events that are not real in themselves, but are real in the imagination as a shadow show. And just as only the light of the lamp is visible when there is no film, so the Self alone shines when mental illusions are absent.
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Some of the Maharshi’s followers felt this to be a cold vision ofa mere force of energy, creating but not caring for its manifestations. But Ramana taught that if one could discover the Self existing always as the true nature and ground of one’s own being, one would find eternal life.
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To live a life of freedom is the purpose of life in the human species. If one is not able to live such a life, the very purpose of life is blurred. Man is born to live a perfect life holding within its range all values of the transcendental absolute divine of unlimited energy, intelligence, power, peace, and bliss, along with the unlimited values of the world of multi- plicity in relative existence. He is born to project the abun- dance of the absolute state of life into the world of relative existence.
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superficial, conditioned mind becomes still, when it transcends the relative world of experience altogether and becomes empty, what is left is its essential nature, which is pure Being. In this experience of pure consciousness, the superficial mind becomes one with its Ground. After that, the mind will go back to relative thoughts in the world but it will feel the urge to return to pure Being and the constant journey from one state to another will deepen its familiarity with its own essential nature. It will then become capable of retaining that con- sciousness of Being while it is engaged in thought or speech or action. In this way, man serves the universe by becoming the bridge between unconditioned and con- ditioned life, and he also serves himself by fulfilling his own individual nature and purpose.
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For the realization of Being does not mean giving up everyday life, but enhancing it. The Maharishi is empha- tic that people throughout time have been mistaken in believing that God-realization is incompatible with ordi- nary existence; that in order to know absolute bliss con- sciousness you must deny the life of the senses—which the Maharishi calls the force of Karma, the continuous action of relative life seen in the cycle of birth, death, creation, evolution, and dissolution.
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No, says the Maharishi (whose attitude to the nature, or Suchness, of life seems more Buddhist than Hindu), you must not split life into two opposing forces, Being and Karma. This leads directly to suffering. Instead, you must bring the glory of Being into the field of Karma and thus transform and harmonize all activities. This is the pur- pose of life, which hundreds of generations have missed. Because they have not understood how to realize Being and how to bring it into everyday life, the amount of misery and suffering, tension and negativity in the world has increased.
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The reason why this technique appears to be so suc- cessful is, according to the Maharishi, that it is the nature of the conscious mind to want to return to that level of transcendent Being where it is happy, creative, and free. He bases the whole theory of his system on the Rig Veda, one of the oldest Hindu scriptures. The central theme of the Rig Veda—the science of creative intelligence—is, he says, brought out in the Bhagavad Gita (part of the epic Mahabharata), when Krishna instructs Arjuna and says: “Open your awareness to the absolute field of life (the infinite value of creative intelligence), and, established in that awareness, perform action” (Maharishi’s transla- tion, verses 11, 45, 47).
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These patterns are brought forward to substantiate the Maharishi’s claim that during meditation the mind is opened to the awareness of Being as a state of timeless- ness and space, empty of attributes. The mind, he goes so far as to say, is enabled to unite with the origin of life before it reenters its relative and manifest state. He sees Absolute Being as resembling the center of a seed which, seemingly, is hollow. But in that hollowness, the “ab- stract area of the seed,” is contained the whole potential of the tree—‘‘the unexpressed source of all its expres- sions.
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Because it is the source of life, the nature of the unex- pressed and “hollow” potential is to create, and it stays eternally at the center of each one of its changing cre- ations. Thus a potential creativity is always latent within us, as it is within all living things, and the Maharishi regards this potentiality as pure creative intelligence, the basis of life.
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and source of happiness independent of the vagaries of life.
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What is the main cause of suffering, asks the Maharishi? It is the inability to adapt; it is the adoption of rigidly fixed ideas, beliefs, and routines that frustrate the very nature of life and its creative intelligence. Material prog- _ ress depends on routine, and once routine has become established there is very little opportunity for the flow of unbounded creative intelligence. Routine soon becomes
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rigidity—the unbounded is diminished and the full flow of life is lost. The supple, enduring mind becomes stiff and easily broken.
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This is the age-old problem of how to enter a new dimension of consciousness while still living an ordinary life; the problem of bringing together bliss and all the everyday things and events of which our life is made up; the problem of affirming one state while not denying another. Many people never reach the stage of seeing this problem at all. Others give up the attempt to solve it by retreating to monasteries, or living in drug-land, or devot- ing all their energy to making money. Some, like Aldous Huxley, carry the problem with them to the grave.
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Is the Maharishi’s answer too simple? All that is neces- sary is to establish another routine, he says. You can’t live without routine, it is natural to human life, so don’t at- tempt to. Break open your rigidity instead, by allowing your mind to become unbounded twice a day. Just a bit of extra routine.
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The impact of Western life on three newly arrived Tibetan abbots in 1963 was felt as a jarring shock. Each of them, Trungpa, Chime, and Akong, had spent his life until then almost entirely in study and meditation. They had come from the vast silence of mountain monasteries, from the radiantly clear air of Eastern Tibet, from the brilliance of flower-covered hills and ineffably blue sky, first to the hot steamy plains of India, and then to London—crowded, polluted, and shatteringly noisy.
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of great religious teachers. Trungpa was the eleventh reincarnated lama, and the supreme head of the Surmang group of monasteries. All his life he had been trained for his task of high-ranking abbot of the Karma-ka-gyu school. Quite literally all his life, for he had been found at the age of one year by monks who were searching for him, after the death of the tenth Trungpa Tulku in 1937.
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1) The rare privilege given to one to receive spiritual teach- ing in this life.
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2) The impermanence attaching to life and to everything else.
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He says that he was deeply affected by all this: “Living in this place, studying these teachings and constantly meditating, I began to develop greater depths of under- standing as a preparation for the way of life that lay ahead of me.”2
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During these years the Chinese army had begun to enter Tibet and to establish garrisons at many places. Their increasing economic and political hold on the coun- try threatened the life of the monasteries, which were
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But wisdom alone is not enough. There must also be transcendent compassion for all life. “One single self we shall tame, one single self we shall pacify, one single self we shall lead to Nirvana” is not the way of the Bodhi- sattva, the embodiment of Compassion. A Bodhisattva, said the Buddha, should train himself in this way: “My own self I will place into Suchness, and, so that all the world might be helped, I will also place all beings into Suchness, and I will lead to Nirvana the whole im- measurable world of beings.”
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So the real experience, beyond the dream world, is the beauty and color and excitement of the real experience of now in everyday life. When we face things as they are, we give up the hope of something better. There will be no magic, because we cannot tell ourselves to get out of our depression.
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Trungpa calls trust the open path—‘‘a matter of work- ing purely with what is, of giving up altogether the fear that something may not work, that something may end in failure. One has to give up the paranoia that one might not fit into situations, that one might be rejected. One purely deals with life as it is.’’®
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Dhiravamsa comes from Thailand, and was born the eldest of eleven children. His family owned the small piece of land from which they made their living, and they shared the local village life. When Dhiravamsa was thir- teen he attended a village temple festival—a common occurrence, but on this occasion an exceptional one. For he was singled out by the elderly temple monk, who then
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Dhiravamsa, until the monk singled him out, had not looked at life in an introspective way at all. But although their conversation was brief, it made a great impression on him. He found himself constantly thinking of it, and longing to know more about a matter he had never consid- ered before—the real nature of existence.
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The course of his life was beginning to shape itself. He
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In 1966, Dhiravamsa was appointed Chao Khun (chief incumbent monk) at the Buddhapadipa Temple in Lon- don. Here was another turning point in his life. Not only a new language but a totally foreign way of thought had to be learned if he was to communicate successfully with Westerners. But in less than a year he had mastered the language and was writing books in English. In the course of three years he had founded a meditation center at Hindhead in Surrey and became its meditation master. In 1969 he was asked to conduct a meditation workshop at Oberlin College in America, and has spent several months of every year in both the United States and Canada since then.
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In 1971, he gave up the robe and ceased to be a monk. This is less dramatic than it sounds for no life-vows are taken in Buddhism and there is no stigma attached to such a decision. Dhiravamsa still remains a meditation master, but now feels himself free to know people in their ordi- nary lives. He considers the monk’s robe to be a barrier to real communication—
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Robes are a symbol, a form, and when we put them on we are in a certain role where we try to conform to an ideal or to rules without looking into all aspects of life. It therefore fragments life, creating a division between the holy and the ordinary, and tends to prevent the individual from experienc- ing the wholeness of life. People think that the holy man should be dressed in a certain way, and they link holiness with form. This is contrary to reality, because in reality the holy is very ordinary, very simple. When we overlook sim- plicity we shall not find the holy, but instead just find the idea of holiness and worship this, in a religious way.?
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Dhiravamsa’s teaching on Vipassana meditation has grown more dynamic since his arrival in the West. A good many of the old traditional Buddhist observances have been pruned, and what is now emerging is a new form of teaching, one that is wholly in accord with modern life and therefore with “what is.” Its theme is insight, to be attained by simple awareness of what is here and now, a perfect alertness of attention to the present moment:
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The whole spirit of it (Vipassana meditation) lies in full attention or complete attention. This is very important. If we actually attend to what we do, what we see, what we come across, what we experience, then there is no waste of energy, no waste of time for seeing the truth, the living movement of life. In the Satipatthana Sutta (Sutra) you can see that the Buddha advises us to attend to all the things we do in our life; whether we are walking, eating, lying down, standing, talk- ing, looking forward, looking backward or keeping silent. All this must be done so that you do not miss the point, the target, of meditation practice and you do not live in the past or in the future, but fully in the present. The Buddhist teaching em- phasises the full living in the present.
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Now in life we should examine ourselves, whether we are attending to everything fully, and find out what is the obsta- cle to attending to everything fully, if we cannot do this. It may be because we have thoughts, fantasies, we have so many things going on in the mind that we are not really there; the body is there but the mind is somewhere else, wandering around seeking something, or entertaining some thoughts. So the mind is not attending to what is actually going on at that moment, and then there is no attention.
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anything else and then the whole process of attention is an inclusive process, which is the dynamic process of living, the dynamic process of life. Some people may call this a kind of movement in silence, or movement in the unknown. The unknown is that which cannot be givena name, aconcept... so meditation in your daily life is to be very attentive to everything. ... Then you can feel lively with your life, with your experiences, without being attached.?
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When Dhiravamsa talks of being lively with one’s life, he is referring to the extraordinary sense of freedom one sometimes gets when a scene—perhaps a moment when one looks out of the window, or turns a corner in the road—is experienced without any value judgment or any expectation. When it is just seen, without the inter- ference of one’s mind in any way, it then IS.
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When one attends to things in this way, for the first time, it can be very difficult. It seems so simple, just to attend, but one finds that hosts of impressions, ideas, feelings, and thoughts—all that the Hindus call mind chatter—rush in and one’s actual time of real attention is infinitesimal. One can then become aware that most of one’s life is spent in a state of semiconscious confusion, hardly ever noticing the moment as it is. The Buddhist way out of this dilemma is not, however, to reject the contents of the mind when they crowd out actuality, but to become aware ofall that is going on, mind as well, ina judgment-free way:
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... You are not attached, you do not grasp and hold on. You are also not detached in the sense of escaping from the reality of life. You will become realistic, looking at life, seeing it for
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Vipassana Meditation will say, look at this state of being fixed and see how you block yourself. What is happening right now? If you go into the present completely, you will see the facts and the truth of what is. Then you move on. You dissolve the problem into the light of clarity, the light of awareness. When you have the means to deal with yourself, you become your own psychotherapist. You need not say, “Oh, Iam a psychotherapist. I will look into myself.” No, the label is not important, but the ability to look is, for this looking will bring about insight. Insight will peer into a situation, penetrate, and break it. The barriers are cleared away and we can flow on with life. There is joy and happi- ness; there is sorrow and pain. We accept them all. When we are too happy, we can be lost in the happiness and gain no wisdom. We should regard unpleasant or unfortunate situa- tions in life as spiritual lessons for growth and maturity. They test us to see whether we are strong enough, whether we are free or not.4
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sensations, feeling, perception, consciousness, and ideas—are the reason for the two poles of life between which we are perpetually circling; the positive ways of wisdom, compassion, sanity, and health, and the negative ways of hatred, self-pity, and destructive self-will. Our journey between these extremes is not a pleasant one. It is full of conflicts and contradittions’ which cause us to lose balance, so that we feel uncertain and afraid.
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The step toward freedom from this sensation of being helplessly bound to the turning wheel of life is the sec- ond level of consciousness, says Dhiravamsa, insight into duality. We must see for ourselves and not only through books, the whole relationship of mind and body, and the way in which duality springs up between them. Then we can go on to a new area of insight which
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life.
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If we do not have relationship with human beings, we may have arelationship with the Buddha and Dhamma, his teach- ing. Some of those who meditate will have a relationship with meditation. We have relationships with one thing or another all the time. Perhaps when we come to the void, emptiness, we will have a relationship with that and to put it more precisely we may say that relationship is relationship with the whole, of the whole, so that there is no individual being to have relationship. Then we will say there is only relationship, the movement of life, the movement of being without becoming.®
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This awareness that in all circumstances we are by ourselves sometimes comes to people facing death. Then it can be seen that death is not the only solitary experi- ence we have but that, in fact, all of life is on just the same plane as death—it is an “I experience” state from begin- ning to end.
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We can say we have relationship with the whole, not with the details..In complete aloneness there is relationship with the wholeness. There is no relationship between you and something else in particular, but-there is completely objec- tive relationship, which is the movement of life. There is joy, there is wisdom, there is freedom in that movement of life. Perhaps in other religions they may call it relationship with
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2 Dhiravamsa, The Middle Path of Life, (No publisher), p. 92.
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But this is not the whole of man’s life, says Buber.
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Buber, however, does not seem to go as far as this in his vision. He remains sturdily dualistic in his use of the term I-You. He seems to have an authentic realization of the unconditoned isness of life, but his “I’’ remains obsti- nately durable. Where other mystics, such as Ramana Maharshi, use the term I-I to describe the realization of nonduality, because the small I is seen as merging into the great I, Buber keeps the two firmly apart.
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From this alternation, he believed, there can emerge a “faithful humanism,” the “faculty innate in man to enter into encounters with other beings.’ He believed that it was man’s duty to develop this faculty, and he himself certainly seemed to embody it. He welcomed encounter. He loved people. The passing stranger as well as the close friend could be sure of Buber’s full and warm atten- tion. His home in Jerusalem, where he spent the last twenty-seven years of his life, was a center of attraction for young people who came from all over the world to argue and discuss with him and to bring out their prob- lems.
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piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action cannot be handed on as a valid ought. . . . The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and in the uniqueness of his life. No prescription can lead us to the encounter and none leads from it.14
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it over and over again. Distancing is essential for self- survival and without distancing man would never have become the dominant species that he is. But the other side of the coin to domination is slavery, and man appears to have misused his unique gift enslaving himself to that which he dominates. He is enslaved by material objects and by power. His desires keep him bound to the material world of It, unable to recognize or respond to You. And yet he can wake up from enslavement at any mo- ment and turn toward the liberation of I-You. In all the world, he alone can distance himself from You, he alone can discover You in It, and can thus redeem It. Buber saw this act of redemption as man’s true response to the chal- lenge of life in this world. To him physical matter was never inert or dead as it seems to be to those who live exclusively in the It-world. Everything is always poten- tially You in all its concreteness. Not only do I find You, he said, in the ineffable wholeness, in the timeless You- ness of the It which I contemplate, but I must also look for You in all its particularities. I must never dismiss any aspect as unpleasant, distasteful, or irredeemable, thus consigning it to a frozen It-world. I must always be aware that You are never absent and that my whole purpose of living is to discover You in every It. Mere acceptance of You will not do, it must be an act of discovery and affirmation. ... Whatever has thus been changed into It and frozen into a thing among things is still endowed with the meaning and the destiny to change back ever again. Ever again—that was the intention in that hour of the spirit when it bestowed itself upon man and begot the response in him—the object shall catch fire and become present, returning to the element from which it issued, to be beheld and lived by men as present.'®
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That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don’t you know also that God needs you—in the dullness of his eternity, you? How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you—for that which is the meaning of your life. Teachings and poems try to say more, and say too much: how murky and presumptuous is the chatter of “the emerging God’’—but the emergence of the living God we know unswervingly in our hearts. The world is not divine play, it is divine fate. That there are world, man, the human person, you and I, has divine meaning.!9
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At the root of much of Martin Buber’s intui- tive thinking lay the great Hebrew outline of the cosmos—the Qabalah—the mystical Tree of Life. The Qabalah, an inner Hebrew teaching that has been passed down through the ages, often secretly, was the vigorous and powerful spiritual way that inspired the Hassidim; and their stories, which Buber translated, reflect his own penetrating understanding of the Tree. In his book Jewish Mysticism he describes how the Qabalah sud- denly rose up “purified and exalted” among the villages in Little Russia, and how it became the movement called Hassidism. “Mysticism became the possession of the people.”
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of atrophy and separation from life, he would describe the everyday state of resistance to suffering which, he said, prompted people to grow a protective shell around themselves—a shell that could grow into a barrier keep- ing out any contact with real life.
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With similar motives to Buber (although without his remarkable intellect and flair), the Englishwoman, Dion Fortune, spent much of her life teaching the Qabalah in practical form as “right-hand” or “white” magic. Perhaps because of its connections with fortune-telling through the misuse of its offspring, the Tarot, the Qabalah has suffered in Western eyes. But stripped of its false accre- tions, it is revealed as a giant among the religious ways; a great and superb outline of existence which, to be under- stood, must be experienced, level after level.
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... Real “magical initiation” is in essence a form of mental discipline, strengthening and focussing the will. This disci- pline, like that of the religious life, consists partly in physical austerities and a deliberate divorce from the world, partly in the cultivation of will-power: but largely in a yielding of the mind to the influence of suggestions which have been selected and accumulated in the course of ages because of their power over that imagination which Eliphas Levi calls “the eye of the soul.” There is nothing supernatural about it. Like the more arduous, more disinterested self-training of the mystic, it is character-building with an object, conducted upon an heroic scale. In magic the “will to know” is the centre round which the personality is rearranged. As in mys- ticism, unconscious factors are dragged from the hiddenness to form part of that personality. The uprushes of thought, the abrupt intuitions which reach us from the subliminal region,
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He [the mystic] has got to find God. Sometimes his temper- ament causes him to lay most stress on the length of the search; sometimes the abrupt rapture which brings it to a close makes him forget that preliminary pilgrimage in which the soul is “not outward bound, but rather on a journey to its centre.” The habitations of the Interior Castle through which St. Theresa leads us to that hidden chamber which is the sanctuary of the indwelling God: the hierarchies of Dionysius, ascending from the selfless service of the angels, past the seraphs’ burning love, to the God enthroned above time and space: the mystical paths of the Kabalistic Tree of Life, which lead from the material world of Malkuth through the universes of action and thought, by Mercy, Justice and Beauty, to the Supernal Crown; all these are different ways of describing this same pilgrimage.®
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disadvantage. Nevertheless, the movements in education and agriculture which he set in motion have proved to be of considerable value to modern life, and his general doctrines are very popular with the young, insofar as they are revealed in practice.
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and some of Underhill’s mysticism. This stream came from the unshakable Tree of Life, the Qabalah, and it is interesting to note that when Dion Fortune came to write about the Qabalah and interpret it for the West, the emotionalism of her novels and the rather strained inten- sity of Psychic Self-Defense and other books fell away, and she spoke simply and with clarity and understanding.
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Through Ain Soph, which is one stage nearer to crea- tion and is apprehended as limitlessness—the timeless without which time could not exist and the emptiness without which forms could not be or move—the realm of Ain Soph Aur, Limitless Light, comes into being. Out of Ain Soph Aur, God emerges from the unknowable and ineffable region of his own Being to manifest himself as creation. God, the Beginning of the world, stands at the top of the Tree of Life as Kether, the Hollow Crown, through which the Uncreated flows and becomes man- ifest. Kether is the living dynamic force of life, the “I AM” of existence, the source of all the universes and of every creature.
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Many readers will see a strong resemblance between the pillars of the Qabalah and the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang, the dual aspects of all life that show them- selves as darkness and light, female and male, etc. The Tao, the Way, is of the same nature as the Middle Way of Buddhism and the central pillar of the Qabalah.
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Although all the sephiroth make up the ladder that must be climbed by man, the bottom rungs are of no less value than the top. The earth of physical matter is also the Kingdom where God is manifested at his most dense and concrete. Thus one need not feel ashamed if one is at a low rung of the ladder rather than a high one. This free- dom from strain (a strain which, by contrast, is the hall- mark of some religions) is an essential feature of Tantric Yoga, which looks upon physical life as a holy arena, a uniquely equipped laboratory for the transmutation of matter into spirit; and the meditations and visualizations of the Qabalists are as much a Tantric path as are Tibetan mandalas and Hindu yantras.
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The Tree of Life, when it is properly aboetad asa ladder, seems to contain a flowing, creative force that impels one forward without risk. The symbols of the
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The bulk of her work was concerned with “magic,” the practical application of esoteric principles to daily life. One of the chief practices she taught was meditation on the various symbols of the sephiroth.
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The initiates of the Ancient Wisdom made no bones about their philosophy; they took each factor in Nature and per- sonified it, gave it a name, and built up a symbolic figure to represent it, just as British artists have by their collective efforts produced a standard Britannia, a female figure with shield charged with the Union Jack, a lion at her feet, a trident in her hand, a helmet on her head, and the sea in the background. Analysing this figure as we would a Qabalistic symbol, we realise that these individual symbols in the com- plex glyph [hieroglyph] have each a significance. The vari- ous crosses which make up the Union Jack refer to the four races united in the United Kingdom. The helmet is that of Minerva, the trident is that of Neptune; the lion would need a chapter to himself to elucidate his symbolism. In fact, an occult glyph is more akin to a coat of arms than anything else, and the person who builds up a glyph goes to work in the same way as a herald designing a coat of arms. For in heraldry every symbol has its exact meaning, and these are combined into the coat of arms that represent the family and affiliations of the man who bears it, and tells us his station in life. A magical figure is the coat of arms of the force it represents.”
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like Nature itself, is capable of both storm and tranquility, of death and life. She can be compared to Shakti, whose destructive side is Kali wearing a garland of severed heads about her neck, and who embodies the great truth that we must not cling to creation nor shrink from what seems to be destruction. Binah receives the force of Chokmah, while she herself is the creator of form.
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Chokmah and Binah, then, represent essential maleness and femaleness in their creative aspects. They are not phallic images as such, but in them is the root of all life-force. We shall never understand the deeper aspects of esotericism unless we realise what phallicism really means. It most em- phatically does not mean the orgies in the temples of Aphro- dite that disgraced the decadence of the pagan faiths of the ancients and brought about their downfall; it means that everything rests upon the principle of the stimulation of the inert yet all-potential by the dynamic principle which de- rives its energy direct from the source of all energy. In this concept lie tremendous keys of knowledge; it is one of the most important points in the Mysteries. It is obvious that sex represents one aspect of this factor; it is equally obvious that there are many other applications of it which are not sexual. We must not allow any preconceived concept of what consti- tutes sex, or a conventional attitude towards this great and vital subject, to frighten us away from the great principle of the stimulation or fecundation of the inert all-potential by the active principle. Whosoever is thus inhibited is unfit for the Mysteries, over whose portal was written the words, “Know thyself.”
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Tiphareth is Beauty—the extraordinary clarity and luminosity of the first sight of God. It is the reflected radiance of Enlightenment and it marks the turning point of one’s life. It is also the center of equilibrium of the whole Tree, as it is in the middle of the central pillar. According to the Qabalah it is the point where force is transmuted into form.
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As Dion Fortune grew older, her style of life showed some eccentricity. Her house in Bayswater contained a number of rooms dedicated to particular aspects of the esoteric Mysteries and her Fraternity had a Lodge in Glastonbury, a place that she regarded as a center of energy. She herself, according to Kenneth Grant,
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... wore rich jewels beneath a flowing cloak, and, on the rare occasions when she went out, a black broad brimmed hat from which her sun-glinting hair sometimes strayed and fluffed about her head like a golden nimbus. Her personality contained more than a streak of exhibitionism, strongly re- miniscent of Crowley, and towards the end of her life she collected about her an odd assortment of talismans and magi- cal impedimenta; she burned strange perfumes in curiously chased basins of glittering metals. Her afternoon stroll in Hyde Park was undertaken in the voluminous cloak which recalled the advertisement for Sandeman’s Port. She de- scribes the heroine of Moon Magic [one of her novels] as similarly dressed as she paces the misty Thames embank-
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And how does he do this? He does it by using a composite symbol; a symbol that is an unattached unit would not serve his purpose. In contemplating such a composite sym- bol as the Tree of Life he observes that there are definite relations between its parts. There are some parts of which he knows something; there are others of which he can intuit something, or, more crudely, make a guess, reasoning from first principles. The mind leaps from one known to another known and in so doing traverses certain distances, metaphor- ically speaking; it is like a traveller in the desert who knows the situation of two oases and makes a forced march between them. He would never have dared to push out into the desert from the first oasis if he had not known the location of the second; but at the end of his journey he not only knows much
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more about the characteristics of the second oasis, but he has also observed the country lying between them. Thus, making forced marches from oasis to oasis, backwards and forwards across the desert, he gradually explores it; nevertheless, the desert is incapable of supporting life.
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Fortune was very keen to impress on her students that every situation in life is a learning situation. If one thinks about this, it becomes apparent that life, seen in this way, is endlessly rewarding and invigorating. It gives back its own newness to the routine-stale mind, reminding one of the fact that we can only guess and can never actually know what the next minute will contain.
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The Tree of Life, astrology, and the Tarot are not three mystical systems, but three aspects of one and the same system, and each is unintelligible without the others. It is only when we study astrology on the basis of the Tree that we have a philosophical system; equally does this apply to the Tarot system of divination, and the Tarot itself, with its com- prehensive interpretations, gives the key to the Tree as ap-
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plied to human life.
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Fortune died convinced that the Qabalah would be- come the true Yoga of the West. She saw that a religion that is all theory and welfare and that lacks the essential practices of yoga and meditation is impoverished and limited. She constantly stressed the need for yoga in Christianity, correctly foreseeing that without its enrich- ing life, more and more people would take up Eastern methods.
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An intense inner life may develop in the country child. He may feel, more profoundly than he can ever describe, a sense of wonder and awe; of being in touch with the essence of things, which is infinitely greater than the objects which confront his eye. Oddly enough, this is not the high-road to fantasy and unreality—this particular way of awareness of things in their thingness usually leads to a good grasp of practical issues, for intuitive awareness develops the capacity to be at one with what exists. To sense things in their beingness (Buddhists call it Suchness) is the mark of the mystic.
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Like many of us, Steiner had to lead a double life. He found himself divided between the spiritual world of creation and harmony on the one hand, and the everyday world of hard work and deprivations on the other. He was the eldest child of a stationmaster employed by the South Austrian railway. The family was above the poverty line, but not much. As well as walking several miles to school every day, the young Rudolf was expected to help in all sorts of ways with the household. From the age of fifteen, he supported himself at school by giving lessons to other pupils. This left little time for imaginative fantasy to rule and Steiner would assert that it never did. He always averred that what he saw were facts about life that other people did not see, but that they could were they to develop the right organs of perception.
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life, Steiner was to see this statement as the basis of alchemy, and to link it with the work of other alchemical philosophers, such as Jacob Boehme.
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During the years of this inner search, Steiner’s outer life progressed, but only by dint of hard work and strug- gle. First he worked his way through the Technical Uni- versity in Vienna, always financially dependent on his own efforts at teaching. Then, when he had graduated in mathematics and science, a great opportunity came to him. He was asked to edit the scientific writings of Goethe for the new Kurschner edition. He had already seen in Goethe a mind that was deeply akin to his own, and now he was able to immerse himself in the two worlds that Goethe, too, had discovered. For Goethe had spent years in setting down very exact observations of natural phenomena, such as plants and birds, clouds and colors. From all this, Goethe also had drawn forth the Platonic vision already referred to, that behind every natural ob- ject is an archetype—an “Idea” of it—existing in a higher world.
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The second is the etheric body. It is here that we begin to pull back a bit, if we are honest. For nobody except a clairvoyant has actually seen an etheric body. What is it? Steiner says it is the force of life that keeps the organism together and on its feet, as it were. None of our organs or limbs have a life of their own. Yet they remain together as a compact body and perform actions. When the etheric force leaves the body, the body dies and disintegrates. The words etheric body are perhaps misleading but in a sense it can be thought of as something semiphysical, like gas or atmosphere that surrounds the physical body as a cloud.
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“To the investigator of spiritual life,” says Steiner,
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... this matter presents itself in the following manner. The ether-body is for him not merely a product of the materials and forces of the physical body, but a real independent entity which first calls forth these physical materials and forces into life... . In order to see this body, to perceive it in another being, one requires the awakened “spiritual eye.’ Without this, its existence can be accepted as a fact on logical grounds; but one can see it with the spiritual eye as one sees color with the physical eye.®
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But no activity of the ordinary senses can see the third of Steiner’s bodies or sheaths, which is man’s astral body. All members of living creation, including plants, have an etheric body or they would disintegrate, but only animals and man have an astral body, which is the inner life of consciousness, said Steiner. Thinking, feeling, and will- ing are the activities of the astral body and it is here that there is a qualitative difference from the other two. The physical and etheric bodies are essentially connected with matter. The etheric brings the physical body alive, Steiner thought, because it is drawn upwards and out- wards by spiritual influences working from the circum- ference of the universe. But when we get to the astral “thinking” plane of a person’s organism, those spiritual influences are revealed as Beings:
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It must not be thought that Steiner wanted to be consid- ered in any way unique because he was able to “see” what others couldn’t. All the accounts of his life bear witness to a genuine sincerity and a desire to help others discover what he had found out through occult powers. He devised a whole series of graded exercises for helping a clairvoyant eye to open and he was emphatic that before any esoteric work took place at all there should be a groundwork of moral preparation—three steps of moral progress for every step of spiritual progress.
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Occult waters can become very muddy indeed, but although one may look impatiently at some of Steiner’s more splashy plunges into occult “fact,” there is no doubt that within his own character he had plenty of integrity and independence. Too much of the latter, in fact, for some of the leaders of the Theosophical Society who were not very happy about the way the German branch was developing. In return, Steiner, who was deeply Christ-centered, did not think much of the adoption by Annie Besant of Krishnamurti as the new Christ. Various other differences occurred—one in particular was con- nected with Marie von Sivers, a Baltic Russian whom Steiner married and who had a very strong influence on his life. An impassioned actress, intensely involved with speech and drama, she encouraged Steiner to set forth his ideas in dramatic form, and in fact to translate his beliefs into art in all its expressions. Thus, when the more in- fluential members of the Theosophical Society arrived in Berlin one year for their annual congress, they were taken aback to find the lecture halls bedecked in vivid paintings and the subject matter containing poetry and drama
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Under his own flag of Anthroposophy Steiner was now free to put into practice everything that he believed in. He gave lecture courses and began to attract professionals from a number of fields—medicine, ecology, and physics, and also from the arts and education. By 1920, the need for a center for all his work had brought into being the Goetheanum at Domach in Switzerland, a remarkable building designed architecturally to embody the spiritual secrets of the universe and made of the same combination of woods as violins so that it would vibrate with all the arts. Steiner related each of the arts to man’s bodies— i.e., architecture reflects the physical body, sculpture the etheric body, painting the astral body, music the Ego or Spirit, poetry a further body, the Spirit-Self, and Eurhythmy (a particular art of movement developed by Marie von Sivers) yet a higher body, the Life-Spirit.
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young, against a tailoring of life to fit formal patterns, against domination by machines, and against the de- humanizing effects of living in large cities. Rudolf Steiner's work appeals strongly to those who want to live organically from within outward, and to live in harmony with the natural world.
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Fortune, Dion, Practical Occultism in Daily Life, London: The Aquarian Press.
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Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life (London and New York: Rudolf Steiner Press), p. 11.
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grateful. After some youthful tribulations and waverings, the whole effort of his subsequent life has been to regain, at quite another level and in quite another way, the re- ligious certainty he lost when he lost the faith he had been brought up in. Though he qualified as an architect and practiced successfully in England and India (where he lived for eight years) he says that he never gave his mind to his profession. His concern instead has been to answer, without any reliance on outside authority —whether teachers or books or institutions—the great questions: ““What or Who am I?” “What am I up to here?” “What is my true relation to others, to the world, and to God?” His book, On Having No Head, describes how, at the age of thirty-four, he came to “see clearly into his own Nature,” thereby finding his own answer to all such ques- tions. Only gradually did he discover that his “seeing” had much in common with the mystics, and in particular, he thinks, with Zen and Sufi masters. Encouraged by their writings, he has spent the second half of his life working out the implications and applications of his orig- inal insight and presenting his discoveries in writing and speech and—recently—in group work, involving a grow- ing repertoire of nonverbal “games” or “workshop exer- cises.”
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But it certainly isn’t a mere nothing. First, I am aware: this Emptiness here is fully awake to itself as empty: it enjoys itself as speckless Clarity. Second, and precisely because it is noth- ing, it is everything. It is Capacity, Room for the world to happen in. I am space, but filled space, in which are dis- played this trunk, these arms and legs, these people and cars and houses, and so on, with all the thoughts and feelings that they evoke. Empty of myself, I am filled with everything else. As 3rd person I am in the world; as 1st person it is in me. To see this, to live from this simple truth, is to be Who I am. And this is sufficient. It is the meaning of my life and the radical answer to my problems.
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are my identity, and what to do about it. Now I find I’m not even remotely like what people told me I was, I can hardly pretend it makes no difference, and go on living in the same old fashion—as if I were a small, local, perishable thing. Here, dishonesty is fatal. If, suppressing the most obvious and accessible of all facts—my No-thingness—I am so utterly wrong about what lies at the very Centre of my universe, am I likely to be at all right about the rest of it? Is a life-style built upon such a lie at all likely to make sense, to prove a natural and efficient design for living? If it’s important for me to know what tool I happen to be using (whether a hammer or a saw or a cut-throat razor) surely it’s still more important to know Who happens to be using it—for safety’s sake, let alone good work. Not to mention ordinary curiosity! Is it uninteresting to inquire Who one is? To have occurred, actu- ally to be, yet to look no further into the matter—how unen- terprising, how feeble: yes, how shameful!
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And all the more so because the difficulties are quite _ imaginary. According to Harding, it is the easiest and simplest thing in the world to see its missing nucleus —yourself. To continue to see it, on the other hand, stead- ily, throughout all the diversions and pressures of every- day life, isn’t at all easy. Practice is essential, ifthis seeing is to go on naturally and without interruption and bear its proper fruits.
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Does Harding place too much emphasis on cures, treatments, and first-aid to free one from the human con- dition (which certainly includes “greed, hate, fear, and all their brood” but also includes love, happiness and beauty)? In an earlier statement, he said “It [head- lessness] is the meaning of my life and the radical answer to my problems,” but in the long run he seems more concerned with problems than with meaning. This may be a drawback to his whole teaching, for a technique that is used only to serve the ends of men is likely to attract only those who wish to escape their problems. To exag- gerate man’s “pathological” condition in order to spotlight the benefits of “headlessness” is to turn that perfectly authentic insight into a magic panacea, an instant cure- all, on the level ofa course for improving the personality.
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but after five years of frequent visits Castaneda withdrew from the apprenticeship. His twentieth-century world, the world of Western intellectual man, was too threatened by don Juan’s teaching and he felt his person- ality was at stake, for the teachings were shaking the foundations of his confidence in normal, everyday life. He felt his sanity and understanding were being snapped and he became uncertain about everything.
Page 298
Even then it took Castaneda another five years to realize that all don Juan’s ministrations of psychotropic plants and all his detailed lessons in sorcery were not essential to understanding life at all, but were aids to help Castaneda let go his frantic grasp of the known world. After he appreciated the relative unimportance of the
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Castaneda was disturbed by the prospect of nothing being more important than anything else. He then felt that the whole of life must be unimportant and therefore worthless, but don Juan told him that this was because of his habit of thinking as he looked at things and also think- ing as he thought of them.
Page 301
“Thinking,” to don Juan, meant the constant flow of ideas that we form about everything. The habit of think- ing, instead of seeing, could be broken by the act of seeing. He pointed out that Castaneda should know by that time how a man of action lives—that he lives by act- ing and not by thinking about his acts, or by imagining what he would think when he stopped acting. A man who can act without thought is a man of knowledge, he said, and such a man will choose a path that has heart and follow it. He is aware that his life will not last forever; that there is nowhere for him or anyone else to go; and that nothing is more important than anything else. Such a man of knowledge can drop his feelings about honor, dignity, family name, and country, because he knows that the only point of being alive is to live. He simply laughs and rejoices in things as they are. He behaves outwardly as other men behave because he can control his “folly,” his life, and so he seems to be just like an ordinary man, struggling and sweating and puffing. He is so much in control that he can choose to do anything and seem to doit as though it really mattered to him, but he knows that it is
Page 302
Still dissatisfied, Castaneda recounted to don Juan the story of a wealthy, politically minded American lawyer, a conservative who fought against many innovations, such as the New Deal. He was defeated and, filled with bitter- ness and self-pity, retired. At last, at age eighty-four, he had told Castaneda that he realized he had wasted forty years of his life. What is the difference, asked Castaneda, between the emptiness of that old man and don Juan’s feeling that nothing really mattered? Would not don Juan end up in no better position than the lawyer?
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Don Juan replied that Castaneda’s friend was lonely because he would not see before he died. He must have felt that he had thrown away his life because he was determined on victories and found only defeats. He would never know that his victories and defeats were of equal importance. But the way in which nothing mattered to him any more was quite different to don Juan’s state. For don Juan, victories and defeats had no meaning, for his life was filled to the brim, everything in it was equal, and he felt that all his struggle had been worthwhile:
Page 303
The part that peyote played in don Juan’s life is not clear at all. This is not the fault of Castaneda, who has noted down all that seemed to take place and all that was said. But one cannot read between these lines to discover how much don Juan regarded peyote as a means and how much as an end. He instructed Castaneda to smoke the plants as much as possible as they were “an indispens- able prerequisite” to seeing. Only the smoke, he said, could give Castaneda the quickness and agility to catch a glimpse of that elusive world.
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But whether he felt they were indispensable to himself remains in doubt. He gave them to Castaneda avowedly to crack the young man’s two-dimensional (place and time) idea of the world. “You are too real to yourself,” he said. And he accused Castaneda of being too available and obvious, his life such a routine that he was predict- able. He advised Castaneda to be inaccessible, like a hunter.
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A hunter feels a protective tenderness towards all the things in the world and so he uses them carefully and sparingly. He feels intimately at home in the world, but it cannot get hold of him. He is not accessible because he does not have to cling to it with a life-destroying grip. He touches it lightly, leaves it when he is ready, and puts barely a mark on it.
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Did don Juan regard sorcery as indispensable to see- ing? He once told Castaneda that seeing was a process independent of sorcery, for sorcery served only to ma- nipulate other people whereas seeing had no effect on people at all. Why then did he involve Castaneda in so much sorcery? Throughout the three books one is aware that there are two don Juans. One is the master, simple, compassionate, serene, and detached from results. The other is the sorcerer, sewing together a lizard’s eyelids in order to make it reveal the answer to a question, powder- ing a devil’s root for vigor, attributing the power of life and death to a clay pipe, frightening Castaneda badly with tales of a witch flapping around as a blackbird. And there is even a third don Juan, a Gurdjieff who uses sorcery to place Castaneda in such circumstances that his own personality traits will bring him to the verge of de- feat; who doubles up with laughter at Castaneda’s reac- tions; who mesmerizes Castaneda, hoodwinks him, and plays startling jokes on him.
Page 311
In an extraordinary account of flying down ravines with the help of the nagual, Castaneda discovers that his in- trinsic nature is made up ofa cluster of “me’s” —feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. This Gurdjieff-like con- clusion is affirmed by don Juan, who says that all the multitude of possible feelings and “me’s” float peace- fully before birth in the nagual-like barges. Then, in the prebirth stage, some of them adhere together, bound by what he calls “the glue of life.” A being is created by this means, but as soon as he is born he loses his sense of the nagual and adopts the ideas and values of the tonal. When he dies, he disintegrates again, and all the parts of him sink back into the unchanging nagual.
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Mother Theresa is a practical mystic who needs no introduction, for her life illuminates both her insight and her teaching.
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Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to be understood; to love than to be loved; for it is by forgetting self that one finds; it is by forgiving that one is forgiven; it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.
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A sense of vocation began in Mother Theresa when she was a very young girl. Her name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu and she was the daughter of an Albanian grocer in Skopje, Yugoslavia. The family atmosphere was warm and loving and she spent a happy childhood, but even in this carefree period an unusual awareness of God began to define itself, and by the time she was twelve she knew that somehow she must devote her life to God in the form of service to the poor. But she did not want to be a nun. Between the ages of twelve and eighteen she rebelled wholeheartedly against commitment to this particular re- ligious path. But when she was eighteen she decided that she must leave her beloved home and join an order of missionaries, the Loreto nuns. From then on she had no doubts.
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But one day, no longer a young woman, she put it all behind her and left the school to take up a totally different life.
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She begged the municipality to give her a place where she could take the dying. She was offered an empty tem- ple that had been devoted to the Hindu goddess, Kali —who symbolizes the Mother of the Universe, the Giver of Life and Death. No sectarian scruples inhibited Mother Theresa from immediately and delightedly ac- cepting the Kali temple; in fact she was especially pleased that it had been used as a place of worship. Within twenty-four hours she had filled it with patients, all destitute and most of them dying. Of the many thousands of people picked up by the Sisters since that first day, about fifty percent have died.
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concerned with the conventional do-gooding that we connect with social welfare and that often stems from the belief that material well-being is more important than anything else. Indeed some enthusiastic welfare workers might be shocked by Mother Theresa’s attitude, for al- though the Sisters do what they can medically, Mother Theresa does not try to prolong life at any cost. She is not equipped to do so. Her only aim is to give loving comfort to the poor as they die so that they will know they are not forgotten but are wanted and cared for.
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I don’t know the future but to me, today, when a life comes into my hands, all my love and energy goes to support that life, to help that life to grow to its fullness, because this person has been created in the image of God. We have no right to destroy that life.4
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The isolated sensation of having to carve out of life ali that one can for oneself by oneself is replaced by a cer- tainty that this is not the purpose one was born for: that life itself is so incredible and so wonderful that to exploit
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it for one’s own ends is to lose the point of it entirely, and that the way to find the point is to obey life at the cost of all self-interest—to listen to what one is given to hear, to look at what one is shown, to understand what one is being taught, and to accept what one is presented with. To obey is to give oneself up to God’s will—to whatever occurs in life—without ego-judgment.
Page 329
The general message of this book is that we should wake up to the immediate here and now of the natural world in all its wonder. We should see things whole, washed clear of personal feelings. Man’s spirit thirsts, the sages say, for the clarity and luminosity of mind in which the feeling of ““me” and “‘mine”’ loses its importance; for the self-detachment in which the world is accepted without judgment, seen without shadow of need to grasp or possess it; for the stillness and silence of mind in which the numinous and transcendental nature of life is revealed.
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turn it into whatever suits them and this may have little relationship to what it really is. We describe to ourselves what is going on rather than really experiencing it, we know about instead of knowing, and so we come to live in a dreamworld of ideas and words rather than of reality. Both Alan Watts and Krishnamurti are very clear on this point, but neither give any real ways for breaking through the word barrier, although Alan Watts certainly practiced and advocated various traditional techniques, such as sitting in silent meditation, and chanting mantras. Krish- namurti advocates choiceless awareness so that we can see for ourselves that it is the monkeylike mind with its endless chatter and ideas that is responsible for our delusions—but he does not tell us what we should do when we do begin to realize this. Perhaps the best harvest to be gleaned from both is in the stimulation they give to our thoughts and feelings by the lively and lucidly clear understanding of life itself that they convey.
Page 333
There is a great truth about the idea of surrender, particu- larly the surrender of the latihan, where submission to the will of God begins to order one’s life. But one can’t help feeling that the act of surrender and its consequent re- ward should be earned; that without the experience of falling and picking himself up, man is not ready to walk. It all seems a bit too easy and slightly unreal. But Pak Subuh’s analysis of the structure of man is clear, and very much in accord with other mystics, particularly with Gurdjieff, for he shows man’s nature as wholly condi- tioned except for one thing—his ability to wish to submit to God.
Page 333
For many people the Maharishi’s mantra system de- mands just about the right amount of effort they can spare from a busy life. He does not set high spiritual targets and, perhaps because of this, there are thousands of people who use his mantra as a therapy. But the healing relaxa- tion may lead on to a deepening of understanding and in some ways the Maharishi may have a better quick answer to man’s spiritual problems and needs than many of the other mystics. For, as he points out, it is possible with his mantra to begin to see how thoughts arise and thus to explore the area of one’s own identity. His tech- nique is based on tradition but it does not carry the full traditional philosophy which the Buddhists expound. Therefore, it too, like Krishnamurti’s choiceless aware- ness, may leave one on a plateau.
Page 334
The two occultists, Dion Fortune and Rudolf Steiner, also make use of Buddhist as well as of Hindu techniques, but with very different ends in view. The aim of the great religions is to transcend the ego; to turn man’s conscious- ness towards That which is its Source; and to unite man with the world so sublimely that he sees all things in their wholeness, he is at one with what is, in a way that totally transcends yet also includes every aspect of the “ten thousand things.” The aim of occultism at its purest is to learn about and intellectually to understand the great unknown planes of existence beyond man’s ordinary consciousness—such as his life before and after death —in order that through this supersensible knowledge he can live an ideal life upon the earth.
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Hasidim, the, 222, 223, 231 Hazrat Babajan, 123, 133 “Headlessness,” 278, 279, 282, 283, 287, 290 Heard, Gerald, 9 Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet of, 260 Hinduism (passing references) 2, 39, 52, 171, 204, 238, 262, 285 and avatars, 132 Bhakti and Advaita, 118, 119, 148 beliefs about Arunachala, 150 and Buddhism, difference between, 288, 289 and the feeling of “I,” 36, 153 and Huxley, 9 infinite Self, 158 mantra, 169 maya, 163, 262 and the nagual, 312 ultimate Reality, 122, 154, 160 self-surrender, 139, 163 Home for Dying Destitutes, 321 Howe, Eric Graham, 20 Hume, David, 159 Humphreys, Christmas, 20 Huxley, Aldous, 1, 4, 38, 122, 176; background, 6, 7; blindness of, 6, 7, 8; books: Eyeless in Gaza, 7, Perennial Philosophy, 1, 9, Shakespeare and Religion, 16, Those Barren Leaves, 4; in Califomia, 9; death of, 15, 16; and duality, 7, 8, 10; first marriage, 7; glimpses of truth, 10; humour of, 15; views on life, 15, 16; and mescaline, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14; mystical paths of, 10; nature of, 15; and religion, 8, 9; feeling of “I,” 13; universal love, 13; ultimate Reality, 10 Huxley, Laura, 10, 15, 16 Huxley, Maria, 7, 15 Huxley, Trevenan, 6
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Subuh, Pak, 82, 83, 103, 333; background, 103, 104, 105; emptying the mind, 109; enterprises, 114; the forces which comprise man, 106, 107, 108, 109; illumination of, 104; the latihan, 104, 110, 111, 112; life after death, 114, 115; meaning of Subud, 105, 113; and surrender, 104, 105, 333
Page 349
In their own words, contemporary scientists and mystics — from the Dalai Lama to Stephen Hawking - share with us their richly diverse views on space, time, matter, energy, life, consciousness, creation and our place in the scheme of things. Through the immediacy of verbatim dialogue, we encounter scientists who endorse mysticism, and those who oppose it; mystics who dismiss science, and those who embrace it.
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All that we know of the early life of Gurdjieff — one of the great spiritual masters of this century — is contained within these colourful and profound tales of adventure. The men who influenced his formative years had no claim to fame in the conventional sense; what made them remarkable was the consuming desire they all shared to understand the deepest mysteries of life.
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This examination of nineteen of this century’ great mystics and sages offers as many different approaches to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’
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death
Page 2
Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, gradu- ally moved away from a rather over intense in- Christianity to an illumined understanding of Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. His insights came through his own contemplative life and mystical realization, and, to some extent, he was able to isolate the contemplative experience and write about it clearly and freely. His overwhelming interest in every- | thing to do with contemplation made him entirely at home in Zen and Taoism, and his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, a great Japanese exponent of Zen, gave him such an insight into its practices that he seemed able, shortly before his untimely death, to reach right through the outer trappings of both Christianity and Buddhism to the
Page 15
Huxley died of cancer, as did his mother and his first wife. The nine or so years before his death brought him contentment and happiness, and many people remarked on his softer, mellower outlook. He grew out of the rather undergraduate, intellectual humor which, at a psychiatrist's conference, caused him to cross himself every time Freud was mentioned, and which made him think that it would be “amusing” to marry Laura in a drive-in wedding chapel. His astonishing fund of knowl- edge, observation, and real wit always provided him with many good friends from all walks of life. An astonish- ing picnic was once given by the Huxleys in the desert, to which were invited Krishnamurti, Greta Garbo, Anita Loos, Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell, Paulette God- dard, and Christopher Isherwood, as well as some Theosophists who came to cook Krishnamurti’s veg- etarian meal—the high point of the picnic occurring when a sheriff arrived to tell them that they were dese- crating the Los Angeles riverbed and demanded their names. When given, he refused to believe them, called them a lot of tramps and, pointing to a notice, asked if any of them could read!
Page 19
Living in IT and by IT, altogether allowing IT to be himself, was the great theme of Alan Watts’s life. But he was certainly not a mystic in the traditional sense. He loved sensual life and lived with enormous gusto. He drank a good deal, took LSD many times, married three times, and had seven children. He died in 1973, at the age of fifty-eight. His vocation in life, he said, was to wonder about the nature of the universe, and this feeling of awe and fascination led him into philosophy, psychology, re- ligion, and mysticism—not just in ideas but also in ex- perience: He refused to talk about anything he had not actually discovered. He was not afraid to call himself a mystic but saw with amusement how the people who hoped he would be their guru, or spiritual guide, were shaken when they saw his “element of irreducible rascal- ity.” He knew what they wanted—an idealized incarna- tion of radiant tranquility, love, and compassion—but he was too honest to confess to anything but “a quaking and palpitating mess of anxiety which lusts and loathes, needs love and attention, and lives in terror of death putting an end to its misery’? when he looked inside himself. This insight led him to see that to try to control the “quaking mess, to deny it and despise it in favor of what a mystic was supposed to feel, was to miss reality altogether, for the very attempt to do so was simply one more desire of the quaking mess. The quaking mess itself was as much a part of the universe as the rain, or flies, or disease. To see it as divine did not abolish it but allowed one the peace of mind of acceptance and delivered one from schizo-
Page 24
The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperat- ing and frustrating is not because there are facts called death,
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This struggle to extract the “I’’ from unpleasant ex- perience, particularly from death, is one reason, Watts thought, why people make an image of God and try to cling to it. But this clinging is in itself intense suffering, which is not to say that there is no God, but that to try and grasp God as a means of alleviating suffering or giving continuous everlasting life, is merely putting oneself in bondage. Death seen as sleep without waking, as the falling away of thoughts and memories and “I’’-ness, has something natural and refreshing about it, and should not be confused with “the fantasy of being shut up forever in darkness.” Death might also mean waking up as someone else, as one did when one was born, and Watts was con- vinced that what dies is not consciousness but memory, for “consciousness recurs in every newborn creature, and wherever it recurs it is ‘I’.””2°
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Watts took a good many courageous and outrageous swipes at society’s hypocrisies and misunderstandings, from the concept of the “Cosmic Male Parent” to the way food is cooked and eaten. His teaching was mainly intel- lectual and he wrote some twenty books. But he also loved music, both for its own sake and as a way of medita- tion (which he also did for its own sake). He had a deep and powerfully resonart voice for chanting, and he had trained himself to maintain a sound for an amazingly long time. Ina record he made a year before his death, he uses sound as a means of realization by asking questions, such
Page 32
After the death of his father and the advent of war, Merton went to America and took some more courses at Columbia. Then he began to attend Mass and decided to become a Roman Catholic. He was greatly assailed by his own purposelessness. He could no longer bear to live only for himself. After some retreats at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he was received as a novice and was based there as a monk for the rest of his life.
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As his sense of realism grew, Merton began to take a harder look at the world outside. One of the current phenomena attacked by his pen was the Death-of-God movement which had more of a furor in America than in Europe, and was sparked off by Martin Buber’s book, The Eclipse of God. When Dr. John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich, wrote Honest to God, Merton reacted:
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Such themes inevitably led a person like Merton, with his wide reading and growingly open attitude to holiness, to the Eastern religions, particularly Zen where the awareness of ‘“nowness’”’ is regarded as essential. Accep- tance of non-Christian religions as a real source of the spirit may have entailed some inner struggles but his ability to grasp intuitively the essential teachings of Hin- duism and Buddhism were forming Merton into a strong builder of bridges between East and West before his untimely death. He was constantly irked by the unsym- pathetic attitudes of other Catholic writers who saw the Eastern religions as pessimistic and passive and unsatis- fying to the West, and he himself began writing a number of remarkable books, such as Mystics and Zen Masters and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, to point out the
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Prophetic words indeed—but Merton had no preknowl- edge that he was going to his death. Rather, he hoped for confirmation of the sense of kinship he already felt for the Eastern religions—and it came, in what seems to have been a deeply spiritual illumination.
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There can be no doubt that we are conscious of carrying within us something greater and more indispensable than ourselves: something that existed before we did and could have continued to exist without us: something in which we live, and that we cannot exhaust: something that serves us but of which we are not masters: something that will gather us up when, through death, we slip away from ourselves and our whole being seems to be evaporating.
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sketch the outline of a gesture whose full power will only be revealed to me in the presence of the forces of diminishment and death; grant that, after having desired, I may believe, and believe ardently and above all things, in your active presence.}5
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Because I am free, unconditioned, whole, not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is eternal, I desire those who seek to understand me to be free, not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect. Rather they should be free from all fears—from the fear of religion, from the fear of salvation, from the fear of spiritual- ity, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, from the fear of life itself.®
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“So the problem,” says Krishnamurti, “is to free the mind from the known, from all the things it has gathered, acquired, experienced, so that it is made innocent and can therefore understand that which is death, the un- knowable.’’?°
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In contrast with the vigorous, powerful, complicated, and often mischievous Gurdjieff, Pak Subuh seems al- most a shadow. This is probably what he would wish, for he believes that he himself has no power—it is the Divine Life Force which moves him and all his followers. Yet at Gurdjieff's death, some of his pupils turned to Subuh asa natural continuation of Gurdjieff’s teaching.
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Ouspensky himself had been an unsuccessful “seeker” of knowledge and had traveled all over India in search of it. He had returned to Moscow feeling himself frustrated and at a loss to know what to do next. In Gurdjieff he found a new beginning and, as his pupil, accompanied him to the Black Sea. Revolution forced them out of Rus- sia and it was then that Ouspensky and Gurdjieff sepa- rated, Ouspensky to continue the Work in London and Gurdjieff to take his pupils and a large number of his family and Russian hangers-on to the fourteenth-century Chateau du Prieuré at Fontainebleau, where they arrived in 1922. Here the Institute for the Harmonious Devel- opment of Man was established and continued until Gurdjieff's death in 1949. The many American and Euro- pean intellectuals who studied there became known as the “Forest Philosophers.”
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Ouspensky himselfhad been an unsuccessful “seeker” of knowledge and had traveled all over India in search of it. He had returned to Moscow feeling himself frustrated and at a loss to know what to do next. In Gurdjieff he found a new beginning and, as his pupil, accompanied him to the Black Sea. Revolution forced them out of Rus- sia and it was then that Ouspensky and Gurdjieff sepa- rated, Ouspensky to continue the Work in London and Gurdjieff to take his pupils and a large number of his family and Russian hangers-on to the fourteenth-century Chateau du Prieuré at Fontainebleau, where they arrived in 1922. Here the Institute for the Harmonious Devel- opment of Man was established and continued until Gurdjieff's death in 1949. The many American and Euro- pean intellectuals who studied there became known as the “Forest Philosophers.”
Page 103
Pak Subuh is a native of Java, a country which is watered by the religious streams of Hinduism, Buddhism, Chris- tianity, and Islam. The result is a theosophically fertile soil, exceptionally given to esoteric cults and the de- velopment of psychic faculties. When, for instance, Subuh was born, his first name was changed from Sukarno to Muhammad because a wandering beggar foretold that the delicate child would otherwise die. And his health improved from that moment on. Predictions of death, however, continued to shadow him, and when he was a young man he heard a firm prophecy that he would die at the age of twenty-four.
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He was walking with some friends on a dark, moonless night, when, he says, a ball of light seeming to resemble the sun appeared above his head. It then seemed to enter him and he was filled with the feeling of vibrating forces. Believing that this would be his death, he went home and lay down, but as soon as he relaxed an unknown force impelled him to stand up and go through the Muslim ritual of prayer. He recounts that for the next three years he rarely slept but was visited every night by visions and by the same impelling force which moved his limbs with- out his volition. During this time, an understanding grew in him that the extraordinary force was cleansing and purifying his body and soul, and that the movements he made and the sounds which emerged from him were the expressions of inner purification. He became certain that his experience was alatihan, the Javanese word for train- ing, and that the force which manipulated him was di- vine. He believed that his own submission to this force and his surrender to it had allowed it to “open” him. He realized that surrender was the great key which unlocks the human heart to the will of God.
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And after this life? We not only need happiness in this life, but also happiness after death, says Bapak, for death is the continuation of life. It is absurd to think that we come to an end when we die. Certainly, he says, our minds and hearts stop working, but there is an inner feel- ing which continues to exist. If that inner feeling is not ready for the next life, if it is not yet purified and has not discovered the power of God, then it will be left rigid, in- flexible, and lifeless by the ending of the mind and heart.
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life, the inner feeling is able to recognise and to be aware of life free from the influence of mind, heart and desires, which cannot possibly guide or accompany our inner life or our soul to the realm of life after death.
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As your inner feeling (or inner self) comes alive, freed from mind, desires, and heart, it becomes able to receive what you need and what is God’s will for you, so that you are able to receive within your inner self [a knowledge of] what life is like after death and “before I was born.”>
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The majority of Hindus find the first way the easiest, and their religion has developed a wonderful number of gods and goddesses, who are worshiped not for them- selves but for what they symbolize. Thus Kali, the Mother of the Earth, can be identified with and worshiped be- cause through her the devotee knows he is reverencing life itself. In her destructive aspect, he reverences the cleansing force of death. As well, there are cosmic gods such as Rama, Krishna, Vishnu, etc.—legendary figures
Page 120
He speaks of himself as having appeared in the past as Krishna and as Christ, and he promises that through his mediation the world, especially America, will change and become more spiritual. He forecast for himself a violent’ death at the hands of his countrymen, the Parsees, but he died peacefully in 1969.
Page 138
He believed this episode to be a sign from God that he was doing the right thing. He went on to Dada Guru and was given the four krijas, truths, which constitute the Knowledge. At first he did not know what to do with it, but after reading the Bhagavad Gita the whole mystery of existence became, apparently, crystal clear to him. He surrendered totally to his Guru, and was known to be “austere and simple, his whole being bent upon truth.” After the death of his master, he began to disseminate the
Page 149
The great theme of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching is Self-enquiry. When people asked him what would hap- pen to them after death, he would say: ““Why do you want to know what you will be when you die before you know what you are now? First find out what you are now.” Who am I? was the essence of his teaching, and some people found this hard to understand.
Page 150
In the desolately rocky and sun-baked Tamil country of South India there is a twin-peaked hill called Arunachala, the Hill of Light. For many centuries this hill has been sacred to the Hindus. They believe that our world has been in existence for three complete eons, called yugas, and we are now in the fourth. Throughout all this time the hill has been there, but has changed its nature according to its age. In the first yuga, the purest, called the Age of Truth, the hill was a pillar of light. As the universe grad- ually declined and entered the Age of Trinity, when crea- tion, disintegration, and renewal were manifested, it became a heap of rubies. In the Age of Duality, when right and wrong came into existence, it was a pile of gold; and now, in Kali-Yuga, the present Age of Darkness, it is a mountain of stones. Throughout its history, it is be- lieved to have been the seat of Shiva, the god of sleep and death, who embodies the darkness which comes before the light and the ending which precedes a new beginning.
Page 152
Stories of this strange sacred hill stirred the mind of a seventeen-year-old Brahmin schoolboy, Venkataraman, who later came to be called Ramana Maharshi (Maharshi meaning Great Sage). But it was not until an unusual preexperience of death came to him that he decided to forego the education that his parents had planned for him, and instead to journey as asadhu, an ascetic, to the Hill of Arunachala. The experience of death, which was his turn- ing point, came to him as he was sitting alone one day in his uncle’s house. He had rarely been ill and there was nothing at all wrong with his health on that day. But a sudden unmistakable fear of death swept over him. There was no apparent reason for this strong feeling and he did not try to explain it to himself. Nor did he panic, but instead began to wonder what he should do. It did not occur to him to consult anyone else; he felt it to be his own problem, and he said to himself, ““Now death has come. What does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies.”
Page 152
Well, this body is now dead. It will be carried to the burning ground and there burnt and reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body, am I dead? Is the body I? This body is silent and inert. But I feel the full force of my person- ality and even the voice of the “I” within me, apart from it. So I am the Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. That means I am the deathless Spirit.
Page 153
was a process of reasoning. But he took care to explain that this was not so. The realization came to him ina flash. He perceived the truth directly. “I”? was something very real, the only real thing. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. From then on, “I’’ continued like the funda- mental sruti note that underlies and blends with all the other notes.’! Absorption in the awareness of “I’’ con- tinued from then on.
Page 153
Ramana’'s experience of what he took to be death may seem to some people to be incomplete. After all, what do we know of death, and what could he know? To shut one’s eyes and hold one’s breath and then discover that the feeling of “I” continues is hardly evidence that it will still be there when one is unable to shut any eyes or hold a single breath.
Page 153
But since Ramana Maharshi attached supreme impor- tance to this early experience of “death,” it is possible that it acted on him by giving him an illumined insight into “I,” the inner person—whom we so readily identify with our body.
Page 154
After his “death” experience, Ramana left home and went to Tiruvannamalai, a town which lies at the foot of Arunachala, the Hill which he had imagined so often. He never left there again. At first there was no question of his being considered as a teacher. All he did was to sit absorbed in the consciousness of Being, indifferent as to whether his body lived or died. This was a state known and respected by Hindus, who have always treated their holy men with care and reverence; and a daily cup of food was brought to him. Gradually he left the condition of ineffable bliss and returned to the everyday life of those around him.
Page 160
Sometimes this realization occurs suddenly and uniquely without any preliminaries of training. It came to the young Ramana Maharshi in this way when he saw that the death of his body was inevitable but that That which created and upheld it does not die. It was then that he understood the great Hindu saying “Thou art That’ and realized that his feeling of “I,” in its purest form, was That, was pure Being without attribute.
Page 163
Because of the apparent indifference of Hindus to the value of life itself, which they display to shocked Western eyes in the rotting, death-laden streets of Calcutta and Bombay, the more energetic Westerners have concluded that a spuriously divine attitude ofacceptance is to blame. That may be partly true. But another factor enters into Hindu philosophy which is apt to confound Western thinking altogether—maya—the world thought of as illu- sion, not really there at all.
Page 166
The Maharshi died in 1950 of a long painful illness caused by an inoperable tumor. His own philosophy up- held him to the end, and he is remembered by many for words spoken within hours of his death: “They say that I am dying but I am not going away. Where could I go? lam here.’’16
Page 171
For the realization of Being does not mean giving up everyday life, but enhancing it. The Maharishi is empha- tic that people throughout time have been mistaken in believing that God-realization is incompatible with ordi- nary existence; that in order to know absolute bliss con- sciousness you must deny the life of the senses—which the Maharishi calls the force of Karma, the continuous action of relative life seen in the cycle of birth, death, creation, evolution, and dissolution.
Page 184
of great religious teachers. Trungpa was the eleventh reincarnated lama, and the supreme head of the Surmang group of monasteries. All his life he had been trained for his task of high-ranking abbot of the Karma-ka-gyu school. Quite literally all his life, for he had been found at the age of one year by monks who were searching for him, after the death of the tenth Trungpa Tulku in 1937.
Page 209
This awareness that in all circumstances we are by ourselves sometimes comes to people facing death. Then it can be seen that death is not the only solitary experi- ence we have but that, in fact, all of life is on just the same plane as death—it is an “I experience” state from begin- ning to end.
Page 226
Buber’s insights have penetrated deeply into modern Christianity and greatly affected such theologians as Dr. John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, Bishop Pike of California, and many others. In particular, it is the mysterious unfathomable encounter between I and You which has fired the imagination of some Christians and has helped to bring about such movements as the Death of God, spurred on by one of Buber’s most famous books, The Eclipse of God.
Page 248
like Nature itself, is capable of both storm and tranquility, of death and life. She can be compared to Shakti, whose destructive side is Kali wearing a garland of severed heads about her neck, and who embodies the great truth that we must not cling to creation nor shrink from what seems to be destruction. Binah receives the force of Chokmah, while she herself is the creator of form.
Page 251
But when the war came in 1939, Fortune’s personality altered and she threw herself into organizations of all sorts and seemed to relish contacts of the most humdrum kind with ordinary people. Her death in 1946 from a severe illness came when she was still a relatively young and vigorous woman.
Page 264
Thus man has arrived and is as he is because of an immensely long evolution. Traces of this remain within him—the fetus that passes through the stages of evolution in the womb, for instance—and the mind, which Steiner believes bears memory traces from other eons. For in his philosophy, each man is not newly minted on the day he was born. He has reincarnated as a spiritual entity in all the ages of evolution. Death is not the final end of man but a time for rest, just as a day ends in sleep.
Page 276
Fortune, Dion, Through the Gates of Death, London: The Aquarian Press.
Page 306
uneasy and depressed. He was sitting on a high plateau when a large black beetle came towards him, pushing a ball of dung. At the same time he became aware that a shadow had flickered somewhere to his left—tra- ditionally the vulnerable side. He thought it might be the shadow of death watching both him and the beetle. Suddenly he realized that he and the beetle were not different after all, and he had a great moment of elation, so overwhelmingly happy that he wept. He saw that don Juan had always been right and that he was indeed, as we all are, living in a strange and mysterious world. He saw that he himself was an unknowable being and yet of no more importance than a beetle.
Page 306
Did don Juan regard sorcery as indispensable to see- ing? He once told Castaneda that seeing was a process independent of sorcery, for sorcery served only to ma- nipulate other people whereas seeing had no effect on people at all. Why then did he involve Castaneda in so much sorcery? Throughout the three books one is aware that there are two don Juans. One is the master, simple, compassionate, serene, and detached from results. The other is the sorcerer, sewing together a lizard’s eyelids in order to make it reveal the answer to a question, powder- ing a devil’s root for vigor, attributing the power of life and death to a clay pipe, frightening Castaneda badly with tales of a witch flapping around as a blackbird. And there is even a third don Juan, a Gurdjieff who uses sorcery to place Castaneda in such circumstances that his own personality traits will bring him to the verge of de- feat; who doubles up with laughter at Castaneda’s reac- tions; who mesmerizes Castaneda, hoodwinks him, and plays startling jokes on him.
Page 307
A warrior, he said, knows that death is the only factor that can bar his way and he should always remember death when things became muddled or distorted. He should also learn to be free of the fear of death, so that the knowledge that it was always awaiting him would be a spur to his actions rather than a brake.
Page 307
In this way, he said, a man who wants to be a warrior must always be sharply conscious of the presence of death. But to keep thinking about death would focus all his attention on himselfand would immobilize him. So he must be keenly aware of it but also indifferent to it.
Page 307
... No man takes seriously the fact of death. He may see death around him, but he still does not believe that he will die. He believes, or rather, feels in some strange way, that death is not for him. Only when the body is threatened does he fall a victim to the fear of death. Every man believes himself to be eternal, and this is actually the truth... .°
Page 312
called a person, could seem a feasible explanation of birth and death; and undoubtedly it has features in common with Hinduism. But whereas the Hindu THAT is held to be beyond man’s comprehension altogether and yet intimately himself, the nagual seems a peculiar force because it can be used by sorcerers! It is certainly incom- prehensible, but not in the sublime way of the Uncreated and Unconditioned, or of Harding’s Emptiness. The nagual is anything but sublime. It can appear as a magic moth or as a fierce animal or as a terrifying sound. When used “properly,” it can carry a man through the air, up mountains and down ravines, and even to other worlds in outer space, according to don Juan.
Page 321
Calcutta is a city in which there is unbelievable pov- erty. Death from starvation and disease is widespread and the streets in the poorer parts contain many who are abandoned and dying and dead. The first woman Mother Theresa picked up, she recounts, had been eaten by rats and ants but was still alive. Mother Theresa took her to the hospital where they only accepted her because Mother Theresa refused to leave unless they did.
Page 321
She begged the municipality to give her a place where she could take the dying. She was offered an empty tem- ple that had been devoted to the Hindu goddess, Kali —who symbolizes the Mother of the Universe, the Giver of Life and Death. No sectarian scruples inhibited Mother Theresa from immediately and delightedly ac- cepting the Kali temple; in fact she was especially pleased that it had been used as a place of worship. Within twenty-four hours she had filled it with patients, all destitute and most of them dying. Of the many thousands of people picked up by the Sisters since that first day, about fifty percent have died.
Page 334
The two occultists, Dion Fortune and Rudolf Steiner, also make use of Buddhist as well as of Hindu techniques, but with very different ends in view. The aim of the great religions is to transcend the ego; to turn man’s conscious- ness towards That which is its Source; and to unite man with the world so sublimely that he sees all things in their wholeness, he is at one with what is, in a way that totally transcends yet also includes every aspect of the “ten thousand things.” The aim of occultism at its purest is to learn about and intellectually to understand the great unknown planes of existence beyond man’s ordinary consciousness—such as his life before and after death —in order that through this supersensible knowledge he can live an ideal life upon the earth.
Page 338
Daath, 240, 249, 250 Dada Guru, 138 Death, attitudes toward: Ramana Maharshi, 152, 153, 154 Pak Subuh, 114, 115 Mother Theresa, 322, 323 Dhiravamsa, 102, 181, 198, 333, 334; awareness, 208, 209; being alone, 209, 210; background, 198, 200, 201, 202; complete at- tention, 203, 204; and en- lightenment, 207; feeling of “T,” 209; and holiness, 202; in- sight into duality, 206; levels of consciousness, 205, 206, 207; nonattachment, 204, 205; ob- jective thought, 207; relation- ship with the whole, 208, 209, 210; and Vipassana medita- tion, 201, 203, 205; watching the mind, 201 Distancing, 226, 227 Divine Light Mission, 136, 142, 145 Don Genaro, 303 Don Juan, 279, 295, 322, 330, 331; controlled folly, 301, 307, 308; the “doing” of the world, 309; losing his personal history, 300; man as a hunter, 303, 304; man as a warrior, 306, 307, 313; and Mescalito, 297; other worlds, 304, 305; and peyote, 297, 303, 304, 310; relationship with Castaneda, 395, 397; “seeing,” 278, 279, 299, 302, 307, 309; sorcery, 306, 310; space travel, 311, 312; thinking, 301; totality of the self, 310, 311; the world as a construct of the senses, 305
Page 339
Fortune, Dion, 231, 232, 233, 236; background, 241, 242; books: Mystical Qabalah, 249, Psychic Self-Defense, 238; death of, 251; and the Golden Dawn, 236, 243, 244; and magic, 244, 255; marriage of, 244; psychi ill-health of, 242; psychic quackery, advice on, 253, 254; and the sephiroth, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250; symbolic sex, 248, 249; the Tarot, 254; the war and its effects on, 251
Page 340
Hasidim, the, 222, 223, 231 Hazrat Babajan, 123, 133 “Headlessness,” 278, 279, 282, 283, 287, 290 Heard, Gerald, 9 Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet of, 260 Hinduism (passing references) 2, 39, 52, 171, 204, 238, 262, 285 and avatars, 132 Bhakti and Advaita, 118, 119, 148 beliefs about Arunachala, 150 and Buddhism, difference between, 288, 289 and the feeling of “I,” 36, 153 and Huxley, 9 infinite Self, 158 mantra, 169 maya, 163, 262 and the nagual, 312 ultimate Reality, 122, 154, 160 self-surrender, 139, 163 Home for Dying Destitutes, 321 Howe, Eric Graham, 20 Hume, David, 159 Humphreys, Christmas, 20 Huxley, Aldous, 1, 4, 38, 122, 176; background, 6, 7; blindness of, 6, 7, 8; books: Eyeless in Gaza, 7, Perennial Philosophy, 1, 9, Shakespeare and Religion, 16, Those Barren Leaves, 4; in Califomia, 9; death of, 15, 16; and duality, 7, 8, 10; first marriage, 7; glimpses of truth, 10; humour of, 15; views on life, 15, 16; and mescaline, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14; mystical paths of, 10; nature of, 15; and religion, 8, 9; feeling of “I,” 13; universal love, 13; ultimate Reality, 10 Huxley, Laura, 10, 15, 16 Huxley, Maria, 7, 15 Huxley, Trevenan, 6
Page 341
Merton, Thomas, 2, 30, 53, 162, 331; background, 30, 32; books: Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 39, Elected Silence (Seven Storey Mountain), 32, Mystics and Zen Masters, 39, New Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Way of Chuang Tzu, 41; and the Buddha, 42, 43; and Chuang Tzu, 41, 42; and contemplation, 32, 33, 34, 37; death of, 42; and the Death of God movement, 37; and Descartes, 34; Eastern religions, 39; feeling of “I,” 39; and individuality, 34, 35, 36, 37; nowness, 38, 53; spiritual illumination of, 43; Taoism, 2, 41; Zen, 2; Zen and Christianity compared, 39, 40, 41
Page 342
Ramana Maharshi, 74, 149, 150, 167, 222, 307, 330, 331; ashram of 155; and the body, 154, 155, 160; darshan of, 157, death of, 166; the experience of death, 152, 153, 154, 307; feeling of “T,” ix, 90, 91, 149, 155, 156,
Page 343
Subuh, Pak, 82, 83, 103, 333; background, 103, 104, 105; emptying the mind, 109; enterprises, 114; the forces which comprise man, 106, 107, 108, 109; illumination of, 104; the latihan, 104, 110, 111, 112; life after death, 114, 115; meaning of Subud, 105, 113; and surrender, 104, 105, 333
Page 343
Theresa, Mother, ix, 316, 317; attitude to death, 321, 322; attitude to obedience, 324, 325; background, 320; the call to serve Jesus in the slums, 320; the closeness of God, 322; daily prayer of, 317; and Jesus Christ, 319, 323, 326; and leprosy, 323, 324; and love, 322, 323; meditation of, 326;
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Those Barren Leaves, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Aldous Huxley 1894-1963—A Memorial Tribute edited by Julian Hux- ley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; This Time- less Moment, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Inc.; Aldous Huxley: A Biographical Introduction, Philip Thody, Studio Vista Ltd., Van Nostrand Reinhold, Inc.
Page 1
The bridge builders come from sharply var- ied backgrounds, but the first three hold at least one thing in common—their understanding that aspects of the truth are found in both Eastern and Western religion. In the case of Aldous Huxley, the belief that there was any truth to find at all took some time to mature. All his later years were spent in a search for the mystical experience, and he remained, to the end of his life, preponderantly an intel- lectual man with moments of real insight rather than a true mystic. His brilliant command of language, however, makes him easy to understand, and his descriptions of his experiences are wonderfully direct and uncomplicated. Wherever he saw the truth expressed, he knew it. Thus his Perennial Philosophy, a book in which he links many spiritual writings and sayings from all of the religions, is not merely a collection of excellent quotations; it is a deeply spiritual book which has helped many people
Page 9
It was while he was associated with Trabusco College that he wrote The Perennial Philosophy, his own “eter- nity-philosophy,” a book which has stimulated many people. It is a book about mystical experience and is based, he said, “on direct experience, as the arguments of the physical scientists are based on direct sense impres- sions.” Using quotations from Eastern and Western mys- tics, he writes about the great themes of existence —suffering, contemplation, charity, self-knowledge, grace, and others. It is a beautifully compiled book, but Huxley was still trapped in his intellect—the mystics themselves seem to glow with wisdom, and it is they who make the book memorable. Huxley, like a clever spider, weaves a finely worded web which holds his captured jewels together, but he himself is not one of them.
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1 Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 334. Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley 1894-1963: A Memorial Tribute (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 35. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza p. 616. Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley (London: Studio Vista; New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold), p. 32. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 5. Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux), p. 197. 7 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 114. 8 Ibid., pp. 16-19. 9 Ibid. p. 31. 10 Ibid. p. 35. 11 Huxley, L., This Timeless Moment, p. 139. 12 Huxley, A., The Doors of Perception, p. 121. 13 Ibid., p. 122. 14 Huxley, L., This Timeless Moment, p. 23. 15 Huxley, J., Aldous Huxley 1894-1963, p. 174.
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Hasidim, the, 222, 223, 231 Hazrat Babajan, 123, 133 “Headlessness,” 278, 279, 282, 283, 287, 290 Heard, Gerald, 9 Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet of, 260 Hinduism (passing references) 2, 39, 52, 171, 204, 238, 262, 285 and avatars, 132 Bhakti and Advaita, 118, 119, 148 beliefs about Arunachala, 150 and Buddhism, difference between, 288, 289 and the feeling of “I,” 36, 153 and Huxley, 9 infinite Self, 158 mantra, 169 maya, 163, 262 and the nagual, 312 ultimate Reality, 122, 154, 160 self-surrender, 139, 163 Home for Dying Destitutes, 321 Howe, Eric Graham, 20 Hume, David, 159 Humphreys, Christmas, 20 Huxley, Aldous, 1, 4, 38, 122, 176; background, 6, 7; blindness of, 6, 7, 8; books: Eyeless in Gaza, 7, Perennial Philosophy, 1, 9, Shakespeare and Religion, 16, Those Barren Leaves, 4; in Califomia, 9; death of, 15, 16; and duality, 7, 8, 10; first marriage, 7; glimpses of truth, 10; humour of, 15; views on life, 15, 16; and mescaline, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14; mystical paths of, 10; nature of, 15; and religion, 8, 9; feeling of “I,” 13; universal love, 13; ultimate Reality, 10 Huxley, Laura, 10, 15, 16 Huxley, Maria, 7, 15 Huxley, Trevenan, 6
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The Bridge Builders 1 Aldous Huxley 4
Page n12
Those Barren Leaves, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Eyeless in Gaza, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Aldous Huxley 1894-1963—A Memorial Tribute edited by Julian Hux- ley, Chatto and Windus, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; This Time- less Moment, Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Inc.; Aldous Huxley: A Biographical Introduction, Philip Thody, Studio Vista Ltd., Van Nostrand Reinhold, Inc.
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Aldous Huxley: Chatto and Windus, London
Page 1
The bridge builders come from sharply var- ied backgrounds, but the first three hold at least one thing in common—their understanding that aspects of the truth are found in both Eastern and Western religion. In the case of Aldous Huxley, the belief that there was any truth to find at all took some time to mature. All his later years were spent in a search for the mystical experience, and he remained, to the end of his life, preponderantly an intel- lectual man with moments of real insight rather than a true mystic. His brilliant command of language, however, makes him easy to understand, and his descriptions of his experiences are wonderfully direct and uncomplicated. Wherever he saw the truth expressed, he knew it. Thus his Perennial Philosophy, a book in which he links many spiritual writings and sayings from all of the religions, is not merely a collection of excellent quotations; it is a deeply spiritual book which has helped many people
Page 4
Aldous Huxley 1894-1963
Page 4
The horror of ultimate meaninglessness, expressed in one of Huxley’s first novels, underlay most of his thoughts in the early part of his life. The seeming conflict between spirit and matter provided a constant whip which spurred him on toa search for further and yet further inner experi- ence. The apparently terrible injustice of life—the tor- tures people endured in concentration camps (of which the sensitive and socially concerned Huxley was pain- fully aware), the plight of the poverty-stricken, and the build-up of arms in the thirties for certain use in an appal- ling war—not only turned him into a convinced pacifist,
Page 6
He himself was not the victim of any modem horror for he was fortunate enough to be a descendant of two com- fortably secure and notable families. His grandfather was the scientist T. H. Huxley, and his mother’s grandfather was the famous Arnold, headmaster of Rugby. Matthew Arnold, the poet, was his great-uncle, and his mother’s elder sister Mary Augusta became Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist. As a child, Aldous was much attached to his Aunt Mary, and perhaps her influence turned him towards his own, very different, novel writing.
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Aldous Huxley t
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In Eyeless in Gaza, Huxley wrote:
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Aldous Huxley 9
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His attitude toward religion began to change—and eventually reversed itself completely—after 1937 when, because of a mixture of bad health and pacifist convic- tions, he went to live in California. He was accompanied by one of his closest friends, broadcaster Gerald Heard, a convinced Vedantist who was brilliant at making his philosophy comprehensible. When Heard founded Trabusco College in California, which was devoted to the study of mystical religion and Vedantism, Huxley took part in the project. He became an ardent advocate of Hinduism—although he later found that a more complete answer to his spiritual questions lay in Buddhism, par- ticularly the compassionate Mahayana of Tibet.
Page 9
It was while he was associated with Trabusco College that he wrote The Perennial Philosophy, his own “eter- nity-philosophy,” a book which has stimulated many people. It is a book about mystical experience and is based, he said, “on direct experience, as the arguments of the physical scientists are based on direct sense impres- sions.” Using quotations from Eastern and Western mys- tics, he writes about the great themes of existence —suffering, contemplation, charity, self-knowledge, grace, and others. It is a beautifully compiled book, but Huxley was still trapped in his intellect—the mystics themselves seem to glow with wisdom, and it is they who make the book memorable. Huxley, like a clever spider, weaves a finely worded web which holds his captured jewels together, but he himself is not one of them.
Page 10
Huxley saw part of the truth but knew that he did not feel it. He lacked personal experience, barred from it by his own whirling intellect which could see all the view- points but commit itself to none, and by the exciting panorama of the world, which continually provided him with new food for thought. “Glimpses ... glimpses... sick or well, Aldous was always catching glimpses,” said his wife, Laura, “that ability of glimpsing, and expressing in part what he saw, made living fascinating. Aldous could experience immediate facts, moment by moment. Then—outside and inside the present facts—he could simultaneously perceive innumerable other, actual or po- tential, facts.’’6
Page 10
Rejecting his own theory that to know the ultimate Reality one must be “poor in spirit” —empty of ideas —Huxley, like a grasshopper, leapt from one mystical path to another. Hypnosis and psychic phenomena took their turn with straight meditation, the Alexander method, and automatic writing. He was a positive collec- tor of ideas, but always retained a scientific attitude to this medley, and never gave way to any sort of woolly accep- tance. “ “The heart,’ he once quoted from Pascal, ‘has its reasons. Still more cogent and much harder to unravel
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Aldous Huxley Lh
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But still there was some separation. In the middle of bliss, Huxley found that he was deliberately avoiding the eyes of the two people in the room with him, that he did not want to be aware of them, for “both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescaline had deliv- ered me—the world of selves, of time, of moral judg- ments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of over- valued words, and idolatrously worshipped notions.’
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Aldous Huxley 13
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Aldous Huxley 15
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Huxley died of cancer, as did his mother and his first wife. The nine or so years before his death brought him contentment and happiness, and many people remarked on his softer, mellower outlook. He grew out of the rather undergraduate, intellectual humor which, at a psychiatrist's conference, caused him to cross himself every time Freud was mentioned, and which made him think that it would be “amusing” to marry Laura in a drive-in wedding chapel. His astonishing fund of knowl- edge, observation, and real wit always provided him with many good friends from all walks of life. An astonish- ing picnic was once given by the Huxleys in the desert, to which were invited Krishnamurti, Greta Garbo, Anita Loos, Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell, Paulette God- dard, and Christopher Isherwood, as well as some Theosophists who came to cook Krishnamurti’s veg- etarian meal—the high point of the picnic occurring when a sheriff arrived to tell them that they were dese- crating the Los Angeles riverbed and demanded their names. When given, he refused to believe them, called them a lot of tramps and, pointing to a notice, asked if any of them could read!
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Many Christians would and did disagree with him over this point. In every religion, but particularly in Christian- ity, two main groups of people seem to emerge. There are those who believe that God’s orders in the form of a vigorous Christian life are to be carried out, but who do not feel the need to contemplate God—who, in fact, are shy and wary of the admonition “Be still and know that I am God.” And there is another, perhaps smaller group, who see their own spiritual realization as of first impor- tance although, like Aldous Huxley, they are far from blind to the needs of the world.
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Aldous Huxley
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1 Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 334. Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley 1894-1963: A Memorial Tribute (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 35. Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza p. 616. Philip Thody, Aldous Huxley (London: Studio Vista; New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold), p. 32. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 5. Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux), p. 197. 7 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Chatto and Windus; New York: Harper and Row), p. 114. 8 Ibid., pp. 16-19. 9 Ibid. p. 31. 10 Ibid. p. 35. 11 Huxley, L., This Timeless Moment, p. 139. 12 Huxley, A., The Doors of Perception, p. 121. 13 Ibid., p. 122. 14 Huxley, L., This Timeless Moment, p. 23. 15 Huxley, J., Aldous Huxley 1894-1963, p. 174.
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India is a country where, if one says “I am God,” one does not provoke either laughter or scepticism. The goal of all Hindus is to realize that this transitory body is not the final ““me.” The body, mind, and senses die but my true nature is the Self, sublime and eternal, the one Real- ity which, because of illusion and ignorance, I see as a multitude of separate beings and things, including that which I think of as myself. Aldous Huxley once said that Western religion tries to “know” God, whereas Eastern religion tries to “be” God. The awareness of God, the Whole, as the undifferentiated ground of himself is the moment when the Hindu comes home to his true nature at last.
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This is the age-old problem of how to enter a new dimension of consciousness while still living an ordinary life; the problem of bringing together bliss and all the everyday things and events of which our life is made up; the problem of affirming one state while not denying another. Many people never reach the stage of seeing this problem at all. Others give up the attempt to solve it by retreating to monasteries, or living in drug-land, or devot- ing all their energy to making money. Some, like Aldous Huxley, carry the problem with them to the grave.
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Nor does Aldous Huxley really have any methods he can advise us to follow (unless we include mescaline and LSD). He, like most of us, was an explorer and it is just his failures as well as his discoveries which endear him to the reader and also help the fellow explorer to see his own mistakes.
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Hasidim, the, 222, 223, 231 Hazrat Babajan, 123, 133 “Headlessness,” 278, 279, 282, 283, 287, 290 Heard, Gerald, 9 Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet of, 260 Hinduism (passing references) 2, 39, 52, 171, 204, 238, 262, 285 and avatars, 132 Bhakti and Advaita, 118, 119, 148 beliefs about Arunachala, 150 and Buddhism, difference between, 288, 289 and the feeling of “I,” 36, 153 and Huxley, 9 infinite Self, 158 mantra, 169 maya, 163, 262 and the nagual, 312 ultimate Reality, 122, 154, 160 self-surrender, 139, 163 Home for Dying Destitutes, 321 Howe, Eric Graham, 20 Hume, David, 159 Humphreys, Christmas, 20 Huxley, Aldous, 1, 4, 38, 122, 176; background, 6, 7; blindness of, 6, 7, 8; books: Eyeless in Gaza, 7, Perennial Philosophy, 1, 9, Shakespeare and Religion, 16, Those Barren Leaves, 4; in Califomia, 9; death of, 15, 16; and duality, 7, 8, 10; first marriage, 7; glimpses of truth, 10; humour of, 15; views on life, 15, 16; and mescaline, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14; mystical paths of, 10; nature of, 15; and religion, 8, 9; feeling of “I,” 13; universal love, 13; ultimate Reality, 10 Huxley, Laura, 10, 15, 16 Huxley, Maria, 7, 15 Huxley, Trevenan, 6
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Huxley, 13
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165, 268, 330; and Gurdjieff, 90, 91; the Heart, 165; liberation, 77, 130, 156; maya, 163; ultimate Reality, 161, 162; self-inquiry, 74, 149, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 331; Self- realization, 36, 102, 158; the separate individual, 165, 217; surrender to God, 162; verses of, 166 Reality, ultimate: Harding, 284, 289, 290 and Hindu teachings, 122, 154, 160 = Huxley, 9 Maharishi, 170, 171, 174 Merton, 34, 43 Ramana Maharshi, 160, 161 Pak Subuh, 110 Trungpa, 196, 197 Watts, 17, 27, 28, 77, 222 Reincarnation, 264, 265 Robinson, Dr. John, 37, 226 Rofé, Husein, 106 Rosicrucian Brotherhood, 260 Rumi, 291
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139, 162, 325, 332, 333, 335 Hindu teachings about, 139, 140, 163 Ramana Maharshi, 162 Pak Subuh, 104, 105, 332, 333 Mother Theresa, 325, 326 Trungpa, 188, 189, 190, 197 Separate individual, the, 180, 181 Buber, 223, 224 Dhiravamsa, 206, 207 Harding, 291, 292 Huxley, 7, 8, 10 Krishnamurti, 74, 78 Merton, 34, 35, 36, 37 Ramana Maharshi, 165, 217 Teilhard de Chardin, 34, 46, 47, 54, 55 Watts, 23, 24, 25 Sephiroth, the, 239, 240, 241, 244, 2A7, 248, 249, 250 Sisters of Charity, 319, 321, 322, 323, 324, 326, 327 Sivers, Marie von, 269, 270 Sorcery, 306, 309, 310 Speaight, Robert, 51
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Those selected by Anne Bancroft come from all religions and, in some cases, no religion, but all have devoted their lives to spiritual enlightenment. All have become prominent because of the integrity and seriousness they have devoted to their teachings. From the intellectual ‘bridge builders’ such as Aldous Huxley to the visionaries like Castaneda’s ‘don Juan} Anne Bancroft has created individual profiles that forma
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merton
Page n6
Thomas Merton 30 Teilhard de Chardin 44
Page n13
Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton, Anthony Clarke Books, copyright 1961 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by per- mission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton, copyright 1965, 1966 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by permission of Doubleday and Com- pany, Inc.; Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton, copyright 1968 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, editors Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart, and James Laughlin, Sheldon Press; Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal, copyright 1973 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York; The Way of Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., copyright 1965 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
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Thomas Merton: Sheldon Press, London
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Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, gradu- ally moved away from a rather over intense in- Christianity to an illumined understanding of Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. His insights came through his own contemplative life and mystical realization, and, to some extent, he was able to isolate the contemplative experience and write about it clearly and freely. His overwhelming interest in every- | thing to do with contemplation made him entirely at home in Zen and Taoism, and his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, a great Japanese exponent of Zen, gave him such an insight into its practices that he seemed able, shortly before his untimely death, to reach right through the outer trappings of both Christianity and Buddhism to the
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Thomas Merton 1915-1969
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Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk and a gifted and popular Catholic writer on monastic life who had begun to explore new directions before he died in an accident in a Bangkok hotel, when he was electrocuted by a faulty fan-switch.
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After the death of his father and the advent of war, Merton went to America and took some more courses at Columbia. Then he began to attend Mass and decided to become a Roman Catholic. He was greatly assailed by his own purposelessness. He could no longer bear to live only for himself. After some retreats at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he was received as a novice and was based there as a monk for the rest of his life.
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The Trappist life is simple and well-ordered. Merton found in it all the security and sense of purpose which had been so lacking in his rootless wanderings. Book after book flowed from his pen about the especial joys of monasticism and the terrible nature of the world outside the monastery. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (published as Elected Silence in Great Britain), was a best seller, and so too was a small book of devotional thoughts and themes called Seeds of Contemplation.
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Perhaps some of these “seeds” were growing into a different field of flowers than the one Merton thought he was in—a field where active religion is not so important as being still, and where conventional Christianity some- times seems at odds with the truth. Twelve years later he wrote New Seeds of Contemplation and became less popular as a Catholic writer for he seemed to query the Christian belief in the uniqueness of the individual self. While describing contemplation (an exercise of inner stillness and receptiveness to God), he said:
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Thomas Merton 33
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Merton saw a good deal of both types and some of his books openly criticize the ways and moods of monks. He repudiated particularly the opinions of those who tried to define the experience of contemplation in psychological terms or with scientific definitions. In Christianity there is a distinction drawn between meditation and contem- plation. Meditation is a discussion in the mind, a silent working-out of a theme. Contemplation is a wordless nearness to God, an experience of being—unnecessary to the ways and natures of many monks, just as spiritual realities are often unnecessary to a busy religious life.
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Merton was a mystic, and to him contemplation was the opening up of an inner illumination. But Western religi- ous thought has always been verbal and intellectual rather than intuitive. Many Christians have echoed ap- provingly Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” To Merton, this statement and the attitude that went with it were anathemas:
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Thomas Merton 35
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torical existence of God-who-became-man Jesus. But Merton thought this assertion of individuality futile. Far better, he said, to realize humbly our own mysterious nature as persons within whom God exists than to believe that man exists because he thinks.
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Belief in the unknowable “I” that is beyond observa- tion and reflection is a constantly recurring theme in this book. Merton saw the unknowable “T’ as the true person, whom God had intended, implicit in all created things: “The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him. Ifit tried to be like something else which it was never in- tended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give Him less glory.’
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the main task of Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Sufism and is the occupation of such sages as Krish- namurti and Ramana Maharshi. The ultimate discovery that God, or the Self, is the ground of one’s true nature is seen by Merton as a problem of identity, in much the same way as Ramana Maharshi saw it. Whereas Ramana Maharshi believed that one’s feeling of “I’’ was the key to the question of existence and that once this feeling had been identified with its Source, the Self, existence would reveal its true potential, so Merton, -in Christian terms, saw free will as the gift of God to man, to be used as active participation with God in the revelation of identity with him:
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Thomas Merton 37
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His desire for “‘true identity” led Merton away from the close monasticism which influenced his early writing towards a more compassionate feeling for the suffering world—in contrast to his earlier glad detachment from it. He became aware of people and of the real problems of life. He began to find the distance was lessening between the innate sense of God that came to him in contempla- tion and ordinary life. He saw that the way to inner spiritual certainty was undramatic, even obscure, and that the monastic everyday routine of “work, poverty, hardship, and monotony” had supreme value.
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For a time, he went even further than this and an- nounced that “‘the surest asceticism is the bitter insecu- rity and labour and nonentity of the really poor.” Many will find this hard to accept. From the security of a monas- tery it may seem “ascetic” to suffer as the really poor suffer, but no pinched and disheartened parent of hungry children is going to feel his condition as an enviable asceticism. With more insight, Merton added: “Misery as such, destitution as such, is not the way to contemplative union.”
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As his sense of realism grew, Merton began to take a harder look at the world outside. One of the current phenomena attacked by his pen was the Death-of-God movement which had more of a furor in America than in Europe, and was sparked off by Martin Buber’s book, The Eclipse of God. When Dr. John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich, wrote Honest to God, Merton reacted:
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Merton pointed out that what man needs is not a Chris- tianity that is involved in every worldly issue, but a religion that is “not of this world.” Man wants to be freed from the fashionable “myths, idolatries, and confu- sions” of the world. He can never, of course, be free from the natural created world as such, nor from human soci- ety, but a Christian should be free from the obsessions ofa society which is governed by love of money and the use of power— What is important is to show those who want to be free where their freedom really lies!”
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Merton was one of the latter type, and it might be fair to say they are more likely to be found in monasteries. But two themes of contemplation seem to have expanded his outlook and perhaps changed the direction of his life. One was the belief, stated earlier, that “each particular being... gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now.” The full awareness of the moment, which Merton called “‘nowness,” brings the knowledge of the “unknown I” into consciousness. The whole action of awakening is for now. Wherever one is, in lonely cell or crowded street, this moment contains all
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Thomas Merton 39
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Such themes inevitably led a person like Merton, with his wide reading and growingly open attitude to holiness, to the Eastern religions, particularly Zen where the awareness of ‘“nowness’”’ is regarded as essential. Accep- tance of non-Christian religions as a real source of the spirit may have entailed some inner struggles but his ability to grasp intuitively the essential teachings of Hin- duism and Buddhism were forming Merton into a strong builder of bridges between East and West before his untimely death. He was constantly irked by the unsym- pathetic attitudes of other Catholic writers who saw the Eastern religions as pessimistic and passive and unsatis- fying to the West, and he himself began writing a number of remarkable books, such as Mystics and Zen Masters and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, to point out the
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Merton saw that what replaces the self, the feeling of the small and individual “I,” is “an intuition of a ground of openness ... an infinite generosity which communi- cates itself to everything that is.’’®
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This sort of statement made many conventional Catholics view Merton with some suspicion and mistrust, although there was never any Vatican opposition to his views. (I was told by a young English Dominican monk that Merton is not to be read in his monastery and is
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Thomas Merton 4]
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Taoism, which formed a large part of the spiritual back- ground to Zen in its early days, also attracted Merton deeply and, after five years of study, he published The Way of Chuang Tzu, his own interpretation of the writings of the Chinese sage, in which he was helped by a friend, Dr. John Wu. In an affectionate preface about Chuang Tzu, which has the feeling that it is also about Thomas Merton, he says:
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Thomas Merton died in Bangkok, where he had been invited to address a conference of Asian monastic orders. His journey through India and Ceylon to Thailand was the fulfillment of a long-awaited dream and as the plane left San Francisco airport for the East, Merton wrote, “We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around.’ !2
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Prophetic words indeed—but Merton had no preknowl- edge that he was going to his death. Rather, he hoped for confirmation of the sense of kinship he already felt for the Eastern religions—and it came, in what seems to have been a deeply spiritual illumination.
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Thomas Merton 43
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The other way is that of the mystic, such as Thomas Merton, to whom “nowness”’ is all-important. The true mystic is immensely at home in the world at this moment. He is as much at one with the smallest part as with the whole. He does not look for patterns or significant events or future wonders. He does not concentrate upon a goal because he feels no need for one—here and now contains all goals and all wonders. To him the idea of a future Pleroma is meaningless because every present momentis unique, unrepeatable, and timeless.
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In his precise definitions of God’s plans for mankind —a more and more personalized existence in which all men would become one—one begins to sense in Teilhard a need for reassurance. He seems to insist too much on the Pleroma, on man’s convergence upon himself, his growingly intense and perfect unification as he travels further and further inward to Omega point—as though Teilhard himself was a little uncertain. He spent much of his life, such as the twenty years in China, isolated from contemporary thought and discovery and was further iso- lated (although not from his friends) by the Vatican’s decision to refuse to allow publication of his major works. Whatever the causes, his beliefs about the Pleroma when mankind finally reaches the ultimate convergence in per- fection on Omega and Christ is realized and reborn seem ideas hardly related to this world. Yet many people, par- ticularly Roman Catholics, have found in Teilhard a source of courage, and although a very different man from Merton, the two do share astrong spiritual inspiration and revelation; Teilhard’s more mystical writings in The Di- vine Milieu and The Hymn of the Universe among others, contain a great intensity of feeling which is lacking in the writing of many modern theologians and is perhaps needed in the rational West. He was able to express himself with true depth in poetic prose:
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Thomas Merton
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1 Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (London: Anthony Clarke Books; New York: New Directions), p. 5.
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Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.), pp. 296-297.
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6 Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, p. 217.
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7 Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York:
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Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.; New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation), pp. 10-11.
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12 Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon Press; New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation), p. 233.
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“To live with the true consciousness of life centred in Another is to lose one’s self-important seriousness and thus to live life as ‘play’ in union with a Cosmic Player,” says Thomas Merton. “It is He alone that one takes seri- ously. But to take Him seriously is to find joy and spon- taneity in everything, for everything is gift and grace. In other words, to live selfishly is to bear life as an intolera- ble burden. To live selflessly is to live in joy, realising by experience that life itself is love and gift. To be a lover anda giver is to be achannel through which the Supreme Giver manifests His love in the world.’’}°
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Ramana Maharshi, Buber, don Juan, Merton, and Hard- ing tackle the same problem of man’s conditioning from a different angle—that of man’s relationship to God (or the Self, or the nagual, or the Inmost). Here there is a general agreement that man errs in his estimate of himself—he thinks that he is autonomous and self-powered— whereas, they say, he must find out that he is really neither and that his Unconditioned nature is infinitely greater than his individual self.
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Merton, too, offers us more of mysticism than of practi- cal teaching, for his “contemplation” seems to depend on a monk’s routine. His great value for us lies in the clarity with which he sees the man-God relationship and the simple but powerful language in which he describes the fruits of contemplation (“the intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mys- tery of God’).
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Buddha, the (passing references), 122, 136, 200, 208; and de- pendence on a guru, 140; the feeling of “I,” 180, 186; and Merton, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43; and religious speculation, 47, 130, 225; and Steiner, 268
Page 338
Buddhism (passing references), 2, 29, 52, 169, 192, 205, 207, 213, 238, 240, 258, 334, 335; and don Juan, 298, 312; and Hard- ing, 282, 288, 291; Hinduism, difference between, 288; and the Maharishi, 171; Mahayana, 9, 181, 187, 288; and Merton, 2, 39, 40, 41; Theravada, 181, 200; Tibetan, 9, 185, 186; and Vipassana, 201; and Watts, 22, 23; Zen, 29, 74, 78, 93, 156, 159
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Ego, the: Buber, 223, 224 Krishnamurti, 70 Steiner, 268 Trungpa, 188, 189, 192, 193 Emptiness: Fortune, 246 Harding, 284, 285, 288, 289, 291, 293, 310, 311, 312, 332 Krishnamurti, 73, 74, 79 Maharishi, 174 Merton, 43 Pak Subuh, 109, 110 (See also Reality, ultimate) Enlightenment, 207 (See also Reality, ultimate)
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Merton, 39
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Merton, 33
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Merton, Thomas, 2, 30, 53, 162, 331; background, 30, 32; books: Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 39, Elected Silence (Seven Storey Mountain), 32, Mystics and Zen Masters, 39, New Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Way of Chuang Tzu, 41; and the Buddha, 42, 43; and Chuang Tzu, 41, 42; and contemplation, 32, 33, 34, 37; death of, 42; and the Death of God movement, 37; and Descartes, 34; Eastern religions, 39; feeling of “I,” 39; and individuality, 34, 35, 36, 37; nowness, 38, 53; spiritual illumination of, 43; Taoism, 2, 41; Zen, 2; Zen and Christianity compared, 39, 40, 41
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Merton, 38, 53
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165, 268, 330; and Gurdjieff, 90, 91; the Heart, 165; liberation, 77, 130, 156; maya, 163; ultimate Reality, 161, 162; self-inquiry, 74, 149, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 331; Self- realization, 36, 102, 158; the separate individual, 165, 217; surrender to God, 162; verses of, 166 Reality, ultimate: Harding, 284, 289, 290 and Hindu teachings, 122, 154, 160 = Huxley, 9 Maharishi, 170, 171, 174 Merton, 34, 43 Ramana Maharshi, 160, 161 Pak Subuh, 110 Trungpa, 196, 197 Watts, 17, 27, 28, 77, 222 Reincarnation, 264, 265 Robinson, Dr. John, 37, 226 Rofé, Husein, 106 Rosicrucian Brotherhood, 260 Rumi, 291
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139, 162, 325, 332, 333, 335 Hindu teachings about, 139, 140, 163 Ramana Maharshi, 162 Pak Subuh, 104, 105, 332, 333 Mother Theresa, 325, 326 Trungpa, 188, 189, 190, 197 Separate individual, the, 180, 181 Buber, 223, 224 Dhiravamsa, 206, 207 Harding, 291, 292 Huxley, 7, 8, 10 Krishnamurti, 74, 78 Merton, 34, 35, 36, 37 Ramana Maharshi, 165, 217 Teilhard de Chardin, 34, 46, 47, 54, 55 Watts, 23, 24, 25 Sephiroth, the, 239, 240, 241, 244, 2A7, 248, 249, 250 Sisters of Charity, 319, 321, 322, 323, 324, 326, 327 Sivers, Marie von, 269, 270 Sorcery, 306, 309, 310 Speaight, Robert, 51
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Teilhard
Page n6
Thomas Merton 30 Teilhard de Chardin 44
Page n13
Writings in Time of War, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Teilhard de Chardin; A Biography, Robert Speaight, Collins Publishers; Human Energy, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc.; Let Me Explain, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Science and Christ, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Pub- lishers, Inc.; The Divine Milieu, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Pub-
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Teilhard de Chardin: Editions du Seuil, Paris
Page 3
Teilhard de Chardin’s bridges were built to span a different gulf. A French Jesuit priest, he was not in- terested in other religions at all, but only in going deeper and deeper into his own. To him, belief in Christ meant that mankind must and would evolve in certain direc- tions, evidence for this being shown by astudy of the past. So convinced was he that the human race was becoming more conscious, more sensitive, more communally minded, and nearer to the Parousia when all men would be merged in Christ, that he gave up his life to discover- ing scientific proof for this theory. He was trained as a paleontologist, and this discipline engendered in him a great reverence for the material world which, as a mystic, he saw as Christ-consciousness expressed in more and more diversified forms. God’s presence, he believed, is felt throughout the created world, and the whole of evolu- tion is a continuous movement towards him. In his own highly poetic language, he linked the spirit with matter, and for many people throughout the world this particular bridge is one of the most valuable.
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Teilhard de Chardin regarded the individuality of a person as ultimately real, and many Christians have also always believed this, basing their convictions on the his-
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I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me. If St. Augustine could read Plotinus, if St. Thomas could read Aristotle and Averroés (both of them certainly a long way further from Christianity than Chuang Tzu ever was!), and if Teilhard de Chardin could make copious use of Marx and Engels in his synthesis, I think I may be pardoned for con- sorting with a Chinese recluse who shares the climate and peace of my own kind of solitude, and who is my own kind of person....
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Teilhard de Chardin 1881-1955
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The Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, spent his life in pursuit of scientific evidence to show the pres- ence of God within the material universe. He was by nature a scientist, interested even in early childhood in all the phenomena surrounding him in the Auvergne region of France where he was born. He relates how, as a very young child, he would collect all objects which seemed to be imperishable. Even at six or seven years old, he longed to possess some finite thing which was unchangeable and absolute. He was dismayed to find that iron rusted, that wood could burn:
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In the course of time this overwheiming interest in discovering the eternal in the realms of matter brought Teilhard to attempt a synthesis in which he saw God manifest as consciousness throughout the whole of evolu- tion.
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Teilhard de Chardin 47
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It is this uniting factor that Teilhard was most con- cerned with. If you were to add up the differences be- tween individuals, he said, you would have no more than a phantom world because differences are so few and ephemeral. But by adding up all human qualities and then subtracting the small number which differ from the rest, you are left with a “most impressive residue which belongs to no particular soul but to all souls together.”
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What is the nature of this residue? Teilhard believed that it was a directing energy which impelled people on to higher and higher states of consciousness and unity. But, like the Buddha, he did not speculate greatly upon its nature. The important thing to him was the fact of its existence which, he felt, must be accepted. All living beings, he said, “are grafted upon one and the same Reality as tangible as our own substance... .” Whether we concentrate on fulfilling our own personality to its ulti- mate degree, or whether we surrender our personality to God's will, as soon as we withdraw our attention from the outer world of day-to-day relationships we must find “immediately behind us, as though it were an extension of ourselves, a soul of the world.”
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The “soul of the world” or the “impressive residue” —how can it be recognized? It is manifested, said Teilhard, as consciousness. Throughout evolution, the directing energy of God has impelled organisms to evolve in consciousness, and their consciousness increases in direct ratio to their complexity. He believed that an atom, for instance, has an infinitesimal consciousness of its own existence. As atoms combine, as cells are formed, as or- ganisms develop, so their consciousness grows. The ul- timate state of consciousness will be the consciousness of God. Because this is its purpose and the cause of its
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Finally, in what Teilhard thought of as the ultimate development, thought appears. Because the preparation for this phase has extended over such aeons, “nothing quivers when it appears in nature,” and because there is no apparent break in the evolutionary chain which binds us to other animals, natural scientists have not, until re- cently, given a proper importance to the emergence of thinking man. This was Teilhard’s contention and un-
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Teilhard de Chardin 49
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At this point it is easy to lose the drift of Teilhard’s theory. What does he mean by a personalized universe? To Teilhard, a devout Christian, God was the ultimate Being, expressed in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. There- fore, he saw the whole of evolution as prearrangedly heading toward the ultrapersonal—toward a point in time when conscious, supremely personal mankind will be united, or oned, with Christ the Omega-point, the heart of the universe.
Page 49
Catholic Christianity has always believed that in some way unfathomable to man, the person of Jesus Christ contains the whole explanation of existence—not so much in his historical concreteness but as the “cosmic Christ,” a spirit of the universe. “The answer to the uni- verse is: Jesus Christ” says Father Corbishley, Superior of Farm Street Church in London; and Teilhard himself says:
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With this beliefin mind, it was an easy step for Teilhard to conclude that the direction of conscious intelligence must be toward one personality—the personality of Jesus. Individual differences he thought very little of, as we observed earlier. But ultimate personality, to him, was the expression of divinity—unselfish, creative, and pure. The combined personalities of all men, he thought, would become one, drawn like a magnet towards the end of evolution, towards the Pleroma of complete con- vergence on Christ.
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Teilhard here raises what is to me, and, I suspect, to many others, a baffling point—why has God bothered to create life if the end result will be the same as the begin- ning? The how of it all we can understand through the revelations of science, but the question of existence itself has not yet been satisfactorily answered by any religion or scientific discovery.
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Teilhard de Chardin Syl
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Robert Speaight, a leading authority on Teilhard, says of him: “Now that he was quite fixed in his belief that mankind was carried along by an advancing wave of consciousness, ‘does anything,’ he asked, ‘remain to be disclosed in what has been left behind us?’ It was an extraordinarly cavalier view of history. Teilhard was so sure that progress was inevitable that he made little al- lowance for disaster or decline. It rarely occurred to him that, from his own optimistic point of view, the past might be superior to the present and had much to teach it. For all our conquestofthe atom we are still trying tocatch up with Socrates. Teilhard envisaged progress in a strictly linear development; he did not seem to realize how it could play ducks and drakes with time.”
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There seem to be two ways in which religious people regard the world and time. One is Teilhard’s, in which some sort of perfection will be reached at an infinitely distant period. This way regards the present experience of life as incomplete in itself. It is merely a step towards a future goal. It often sees divine patterns revealing themselves—and events which do not fit in are ig- nored—as Teilhard was inclined to ignore suffering. This religious path demands concentration upon a goal which can never be realized now—it is in some vague and far off future. This attitude of mind is shared by all religions —there are many Hindus and Buddhists who believe that merging with the Self, or Nirvana, can only be reached after innumerable lifetimes.
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Teilhard de Chardin 53
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Because Jesus was a man, Teilhard believed that the cosmic energy of the universe is constantly increasing in man and he saw this “hominized energy” appearing in three ways: incorporated energy, controlled energy, and spiritualized energy.
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It is in this last area of spiritualized energy that Teilhard laid himself most open to attack from other sci- entists. For he postulated three main spheres in the struc- ture of the universe—the geosphere, which is the sphere of matter; the biosphere, which is the sphere of animate life; and the noosphere, which is the sphere of the mind and is spiritualized energy. It is in the noosphere, he said,
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Many scientists could not accept such utterances, par- ticularly when Teilhard envisaged the noosphere as a sort of psychic layer surrounding the globe, a network of communication and thought. But scientific scepticism did not cause Teilhard any hesitation and he went on to predict that from the noosphere would evolve “love, the higher, universal, and synthesised form of spiritual energy, in which all the other energies of the soul are transformed and sublimated once they fall within ‘the field of Omega.’ ”’!1
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Teilhard de Chardin 55
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In his precise definitions of God’s plans for mankind —a more and more personalized existence in which all men would become one—one begins to sense in Teilhard a need for reassurance. He seems to insist too much on the Pleroma, on man’s convergence upon himself, his growingly intense and perfect unification as he travels further and further inward to Omega point—as though Teilhard himself was a little uncertain. He spent much of his life, such as the twenty years in China, isolated from contemporary thought and discovery and was further iso- lated (although not from his friends) by the Vatican’s decision to refuse to allow publication of his major works. Whatever the causes, his beliefs about the Pleroma when mankind finally reaches the ultimate convergence in per- fection on Omega and Christ is realized and reborn seem ideas hardly related to this world. Yet many people, par- ticularly Roman Catholics, have found in Teilhard a source of courage, and although a very different man from Merton, the two do share astrong spiritual inspiration and revelation; Teilhard’s more mystical writings in The Di- vine Milieu and The Hymn of the Universe among others, contain a great intensity of feeling which is lacking in the writing of many modern theologians and is perhaps needed in the rational West. He was able to express himself with true depth in poetic prose:
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y Teilhard de Chardin 57
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Teilhard de Chardin
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Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War (London: Collins; New York: Harper and Row), p. 181.
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Robert Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography (London: Collins), p. 25.
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Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, p. 182.
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Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (London: Collins; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc.), p. 96.
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Teilhard de Chardin, Let Me Explain (London: Collins; New York: Harper and Row: p. 129.
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Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (London: Collins; New York: Harper and Row), p. 122.
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Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography, p. 213.
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Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p. 122.
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Teilhard \de Chardin, Human Energy, p. 115.
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Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins; New York: Harper and Row), p. 165.
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Teilhard de Chardin, Science and Christ (London:
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Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, p. 76.
Page 175
The Maharishi seems to have become enraptured by the methods of science and, like Teilhard de Chardin, uses scientific discoveries to confirm his own under- standing. He quotes the third law of thermodynamics—as activity decreases, order increases—to affirm the trans- forming effects of Transcendental Meditation—known as TM. As the stresses dissolve, he says, physical and mental order increases, and the conscious mind expands into creativity. He explains the process by likening a thought toa bubble. A thought is formed at the deepest level of the subconscious mind—the part of our mind that is most out of reach as it is composed of innumerable old memories, feelings, and reactions which we have stored from ear- liest childhood. In the same way as a bubble starts from the mud at the bottom of a pond, so the thought emerges from the subconscious waters of the mind. As a bubble, or a thought, comes up, it becomes bigger. When it reaches the surface it becomes big enough to be perceived.
Page 218
Buber believed, as did Teilhard de Chardin, that evolv- ing man is heading towards a final identification and merging of himself with God. Historically, Buber saw the development of the feeling of “I as beginning in primi- tive man. An animal is not conscious of itself as being separate from its surroundings, he said. A catis its pounce on its victim, a dog is its love for its master—neither animal is capable of the reflective self-consciousness which says, “I am now going to.pounce” or “I love this man.” In the same way as animals, primitive man at first was identified with his actions—he did not think about the moon except as it affected him in the night. Fire was hot and bright and was nota word called fire but a process in which he took part. The experiencing subject had not detached itself from the experience and it was only when the force of self-preservation caused the beginning of language and knowledge, that the “I-acting-You” and “You-acting-I’’ were split and the “I” “emerged with the force of an element.’
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It is in this option of relationship that man has choice and free will, and Buber saw the continual exchange of It for You and You for It as constituting the nature of the world. He did not believe (as Teilhard de Chardin did) that the You world will eventually triumph over the It world, in a sort of mystical conglomeration, leaving no- thing of the old It behind. Rather, he saw that the You can not be sustained without It—that there must be alterna- tion:
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Teilhard de Chardin is less concerned with individual man and his attempts to discover his true identity than with humanity’s overall development and future. He does not go in for methods of self-realization. But his observations on man’s condition are of great general in- terest.
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Rudolf Steiner’s safeguard was his love of humanity and his great desire to serve it through the cultivation of his own powers. The final transcendent union of the mystic was of less importance to him than establishing a right understanding of this world, which basically meant seeing its relationship to other, higher worlds. He foresaw a glorious ascension of man’s evolving thought and feeling in rather the same way as Teilhard de Chardin envisaged it, and the reader may notice a number of parallels between these two thinkers on the subject of evolution. Steiner, like Fortune, made use of Tantric methods, but his aim was to bring about realization of the many conditions through which the eternal soul of man progresses, rather than to attain union with the Source of all souls.
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Dhiravamsa, 205, 206, 207 Teilhard de Chardin, 47, 48, 53, 218 Consciousness, objective: Dhiravamsa, 207
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Jesus Christ, 65, 119, 122, 132, 140, 291 and Chokmah, 247 and Maharaj Ji, 136 and Roman Catholicism, 49 and Teilhard de Chardin, 3, 49, 50. ole o3eDo and Mother Theresa, 319, 323, 326 and Watts, 20, 21 Judaism, 222, 223, 225, 231, 238
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139, 162, 325, 332, 333, 335 Hindu teachings about, 139, 140, 163 Ramana Maharshi, 162 Pak Subuh, 104, 105, 332, 333 Mother Theresa, 325, 326 Trungpa, 188, 189, 190, 197 Separate individual, the, 180, 181 Buber, 223, 224 Dhiravamsa, 206, 207 Harding, 291, 292 Huxley, 7, 8, 10 Krishnamurti, 74, 78 Merton, 34, 35, 36, 37 Ramana Maharshi, 165, 217 Teilhard de Chardin, 34, 46, 47, 54, 55 Watts, 23, 24, 25 Sephiroth, the, 239, 240, 241, 244, 2A7, 248, 249, 250 Sisters of Charity, 319, 321, 322, 323, 324, 326, 327 Sivers, Marie von, 269, 270 Sorcery, 306, 309, 310 Speaight, Robert, 51
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Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 3, 41, 44, 175, 224, 332; books: Divine Milieu, 55, Hymn of the Universe, 55; and Christ, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54; and energy, 53, 54; evolution of consciousness, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 218; his inmost self, 55, 56; the noosphere, 53, 54; Omega-point, 49, 54, 55; the Pleroma, 50, 51, 55; the soul, 34, 46, 47; synthesis of the personal and universal, 54
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zen
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This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Alan Watts, John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., copyright U.S. and Canada by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.; Beyond Theol- ogy, Alan Watts, Hodder and Stoughton, copyright U.S., Canada, and the Open Market by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.; In My Own Way, Alan Watts, Jonathan Cape, copyright U.S., Canada, and the Open Market by Pantheon Books, a Division of
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Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton, Anthony Clarke Books, copyright 1961 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by per- mission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton, copyright 1965, 1966 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by permission of Doubleday and Com- pany, Inc.; Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton, copyright 1968 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation; The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, editors Naomi Burton, Brother Patrick Hart, and James Laughlin, Sheldon Press; Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal, copyright 1973 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York; The Way of Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., copyright 1965 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
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Zen Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews, Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, Doubleday and Company, Inc.
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Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, gradu- ally moved away from a rather over intense in- Christianity to an illumined understanding of Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. His insights came through his own contemplative life and mystical realization, and, to some extent, he was able to isolate the contemplative experience and write about it clearly and freely. His overwhelming interest in every- | thing to do with contemplation made him entirely at home in Zen and Taoism, and his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, a great Japanese exponent of Zen, gave him such an insight into its practices that he seemed able, shortly before his untimely death, to reach right through the outer trappings of both Christianity and Buddhism to the
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Watts’s vigorous philosophical-spiritual life began in early youth when, while still in King’s School, Canter- bury, he started to read Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. By the age of seventeen he had already published a book- let on Zen. He failed to get a scholarship to Cambridge, left school at seventeen, and launched himself on the world. He decided to design his own “higher education” and was helped to do this by his very understanding father; by Christmas Humphreys, president of the then Buddhist Lodge; by Nigel Watkins, owner ofa “mystical” bookshop in the Charing Cross Road; by Dr. Eric Graham Howe, a psychiatrist; and by Mitrinovic, a “rascal-guru” Slav.
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Watts steadfastly refused a conventional career. He loathed the idea of being made to play any business or professional role and although he took jobs to keep him- self going, he was an original dropout, not letting any- thing get in the way of his intense living of life. However, after he had married Eleanor Fuller, daughter of Ruth Fuller Sasaki and stepdaughter of Zen roshi Sokei-an Sasaki, and had gone to America with her, he was forced to find a means to supporta family. The ideal way seemed to be to become a minister in the Episcopalian Church, and this he did, deciding that as a priest he would be sincere and natural, although not at all heavy. He felt that Protestantism lacked a light touch, with regard to both religion and sex, because ofa sense of guilt. He wanted to help people enjoy ritual for its own sake without looking for any wordy meaning in it.
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After some years as chaplain to Northwestern Univer- sity, Watts formally resigned from both the post and the ministry. His old love of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism had never taken second place in his life. Meetings with Dr. D. T. Suzuki, the great translator of the Zen scrip-
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tures, gave Watts an illuminated understanding of Zen and he became one of the first popularizers of Zen in America, with such books as The Way of Zen and The Spirit of Zen. He moved to San Francisco and became a lecturer at the newly founded Academy of Asian Studies as well as giving many broadcasts and public lectures. He became increasingly famous but still retained his down to earth humor, particularly at himself. At that time, he thought of himself as a teacher-philosopher and also as a bit of a shaman, doing his own “weird.”
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any self that is listening. This can be done with all the senses, but most easily with the ears. Simply listen, then, to the rain. Listen to what Buddhists call its “suchness’—its tathata or da-da-da. Like all classical music, it means nothing except itself, for only inferior music mimics other sounds or is about anything other than music. There is no “message” in a Bach fugue. So, too, when an ancient Zen master was asked about the meaning of Buddhism he replied, “If there is any mean- ing in it, I myselfam not liberated.” For when you have really heard the sound of rain you can hear, and see and feel, everything else in the same way—as needing no translation, as being just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what.16
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Such themes inevitably led a person like Merton, with his wide reading and growingly open attitude to holiness, to the Eastern religions, particularly Zen where the awareness of ‘“nowness’”’ is regarded as essential. Accep- tance of non-Christian religions as a real source of the spirit may have entailed some inner struggles but his ability to grasp intuitively the essential teachings of Hin- duism and Buddhism were forming Merton into a strong builder of bridges between East and West before his untimely death. He was constantly irked by the unsym- pathetic attitudes of other Catholic writers who saw the Eastern religions as pessimistic and passive and unsatis- fying to the West, and he himself began writing a number of remarkable books, such as Mystics and Zen Masters and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, to point out the
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His main bridge-building was in the field of Zen. He had illuminating talks with Dr. D. T. Suzuki, the greatest Japanese exponent of Zen in this century, and said after- ward that Buddhism (of which Zen is a school) had finally become comprehensible to him, that he had now seen through the rather bewildering cultural patterns of strange rituals, exotic images, and mysterious words to a clear and simple essence—‘‘the simplest and most baffling thing of all: direct confrontation with Absolute Being, Absolute Love, Absolute Mercy, or Absolute Void by an immediate and fully awakened engagement in the living of everyday life. In Christianity the confrontation is theo- logical and affective, through word and love. In Zen it is metaphysical and intellectual, through insight and emptiness.’7
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... We begin to divine that Zen is not only beyond the formulations of Buddhism but it is also in a certain way “beyond” (and even pointed to by) the revealed message of Christianity.1°
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Taoism, which formed a large part of the spiritual back- ground to Zen in its early days, also attracted Merton deeply and, after five years of study, he published The Way of Chuang Tzu, his own interpretation of the writings of the Chinese sage, in which he was helped by a friend, Dr. John Wu. In an affectionate preface about Chuang Tzu, which has the feeling that it is also about Thomas Merton, he says:
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7 Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York:
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A Zen way of purifying the mind is to exhort a pupil to “See, but don’t think!” In particular, Krishnamurti re- gards the conditioned memories of childhood as respon- sible for much of our thinking, and for many of our fears. If a fear, such as that for a wild animal, is based on the memory of something read or heard and not on actual experience of the animal, then there can only be the same old reaction of fear when the animal is actually encoun- tered. This sort of fear, which is not based on personal observation (the wild animal may, in fact, be quite friendly), has a paralyzing and destructive effect which would soon be sensed and acted on by the animal. But an action of the mind that makes one merely aware of the fear without identifying the mind with it is a complete action and will lead to the right response. So that if one encounters a tiger in the road, one should not feel an automatic fear of it, for this is conditioned fear, but only
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happens,” teaches Zen. But can a person live everyday life in this way? “Can a person afford not to,” Zen would say. Krishnamurti believes that it is possible, but only when there is full awareness of life—“‘an awareness in which there is no motive or choice, but simple observation.’ !?
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But Gurdjieff’s ideas of both man and God were much more complicated than that, and followed the Sufi teach- ing of many veils between man and God and at least four stages of consciousness. Essence, which is a Sufi term, merely refers to all that we are born with, suchas the color of the skin and nature of the physique. Gurdjieff believed that character was innate and not acquired, that one was born a certain type of person. But this is arguable, and one cannot help remembering the reply of the Zen master,
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5 Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, Zen Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.), p. 81.
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Perhaps it is true that the theorizing intellect is a hin- drance to spiritual response. Buddhism is quite clear that this is so. To a disciple who wanted to speculate on the afterlife, the Buddha replied emphatically that this sort of query is not profitable and has nothing to do with the fundamentals of religion. Zen says, “Don’t think—just look,” and the Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi, said, “You know that you know nothing. Find out that knowledge. That is liberation.” The mind, itself a marvelous tool for ordinary living, must be dropped when the nature of life is sought for. The observer in us who analyzes and makes value judgments, must give way to the total “I’? who wants to respond to what is. Methods for letting go of the
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It is not the “I” sense itself which is the cause of suffering. A Zen master, Bankei, once asked his pupils why they “sold” their marvelous and deathless sense of “T” for the passing transformation into a greedy mind ora selfish mind. Instead of dwelling in the whole and acting from it, we become involved with the part and bind our- selves to its limitations.
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And far farther East, Zen Buddhism teaches its follow- ers not to project the feeling of “I’’ onto thoughts, feel- ings, or the outside world. As thoughts begin to be clearly seen as arising and dying in the same way that the body is born and dies, the sensation of “I”? becomes more pro- found and less personal. It transcends me and yet itis me. This sensation can no longer be called a thought or a feeling—it is an awareness of a changeless state of being, about which there can be no doubt. It does not seem to be, it is. No words can ever capture the immense marvel of this certainty.
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The process can be seen equally well without a man- tra. Buddhist meditation (Vipassana, or Zen) in which internal thoughts, images, and daydreams, as well as ex- ternal sounds and interruptions, are merely noted with- out involvement in them, is as quieting to the nervous system andas revealing of the nature of thought as is man- tra repetition. But it is harder.
Page 244
The word “‘symbol” is an emotive one, for the direct mystic is usually rather blind to symbolism and regards the whole subject as an unnecessary diversion from reality—this is particularly so in the Zen school of Bud- dhism. But to the followers of the Tantric way, symbols are the paths to reality. They stand for something of which the pupil is as yet unconscious, something that cannot be known in any other way but through itself. A symbol is a means of recognition and therefore of under-
Page 282
grateful. After some youthful tribulations and waverings, the whole effort of his subsequent life has been to regain, at quite another level and in quite another way, the re- ligious certainty he lost when he lost the faith he had been brought up in. Though he qualified as an architect and practiced successfully in England and India (where he lived for eight years) he says that he never gave his mind to his profession. His concern instead has been to answer, without any reliance on outside authority —whether teachers or books or institutions—the great questions: ““What or Who am I?” “What am I up to here?” “What is my true relation to others, to the world, and to God?” His book, On Having No Head, describes how, at the age of thirty-four, he came to “see clearly into his own Nature,” thereby finding his own answer to all such ques- tions. Only gradually did he discover that his “seeing” had much in common with the mystics, and in particular, he thinks, with Zen and Sufi masters. Encouraged by their writings, he has spent the second half of his life working out the implications and applications of his orig- inal insight and presenting his discoveries in writing and speech and—recently—in group work, involving a grow- ing repertoire of nonverbal “games” or “workshop exer- cises.”
Page 288
Oddly enough, this particular point lights up the essen- tial difference between the Hindu and the Buddhist, par- ticularly Mahayana, positions. Harding takes the part of the Hindu—he believes in a total distinction between Subject and object, Self and self, lst- and 3rd-person, No-face and face. But when Consciousness and its con- tents are seen as distinct from each other in this way, it is very easy to fill Consciousness, or Emptiness, with imag- inary qualities, such as Inmost. Buddhists, on the other hand, and Zen Buddhists most of all, believe that No-face and face exist as one. There are no distinctions. The
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Harding quotes many scriptures to support his case. According to the Advaita of Hinduism, he says, there is one See-er—one Consciousness, one Being—in all things, as their Essence or Reality, and It is empty of all attributes: Liberation is seeing that you are neither the body nor the mind, but This alone. Enlightenment for Hui Neng, one of the founders of Zen, was seeing his “Original Face” —which, interprets Harding, is your No- face. And, he adds, many of the koans or puzzles used in Zen are for getting us to see our Original Face. Jesus taught that we shall find the Kingdom within (not blood and brains and bones, adds Harding). And, says Harding, Rumi, the great Sufi poet, celebrates “headlessness” in much of his poetry. ~ None of this proves anything, he says, but it does pro- vide so many more reasons—if any were needed—for examining the Place the masters are pointing to.
Page 298
One senses in Castaneda an oversuggestible credulity, perhaps a too-easy emotionalism (“You indulge too much,” said don Juan, when Castaneda, weeping on his shoulder, gave up his apprenticeship). Castaneda himself tells us that his nature is overdramatic and perhaps this accounts for his eager acceptance and then rejection of don Juan’s teaching, for nothing that don Juan says is really harder to accept than the teachings of some Zen masters, or the words of other sages in this book. At any rate, Castaneda had second thoughts. After an inter- val of three years he returned to don Juan, was warmly welcomed by him, and began a second term of appren- ticeship that was different in kind and turned out to be better. He no longer felt acute fear and don Juan was more relaxed, often clowning at crucial moments and helping Castaneda to accept more lightly and easily the knowl- edge he was being taught.
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In fact, space travel seems its greatest accomplishment, and this final confirmation that don Juan is a sorcerer rather than a sage may disappoint many people. It will at least disappoint those to whom the perfection of man’s outward powers is of less importance than the discovery of his real inner meaning. For, as Zen Buddhism says, why bother to cross the water miraculously if you can get to the other side by boat? If one ofthe major discoveries of four books and a great deal of teaching is to see the floor of a ravine by flying rather than by climbing down, it seems a great amount of effort for very little.
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Douglas Harding, On Having No Head: A Contribution to Zen in the West. London: The Buddhist Society, New York: Harper and Row.
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Buddhism (passing references), 2, 29, 52, 169, 192, 205, 207, 213, 238, 240, 258, 334, 335; and don Juan, 298, 312; and Hard- ing, 282, 288, 291; Hinduism, difference between, 288; and the Maharishi, 171; Mahayana, 9, 181, 187, 288; and Merton, 2, 39, 40, 41; Theravada, 181, 200; Tibetan, 9, 185, 186; and Vipassana, 201; and Watts, 22, 23; Zen, 29, 74, 78, 93, 156, 159
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Merton, Thomas, 2, 30, 53, 162, 331; background, 30, 32; books: Zen and the Birds of Appetite, 39, Elected Silence (Seven Storey Mountain), 32, Mystics and Zen Masters, 39, New Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Seeds of Contemplation, 32, Way of Chuang Tzu, 41; and the Buddha, 42, 43; and Chuang Tzu, 41, 42; and contemplation, 32, 33, 34, 37; death of, 42; and the Death of God movement, 37; and Descartes, 34; Eastern religions, 39; feeling of “I,” 39; and individuality, 34, 35, 36, 37; nowness, 38, 53; spiritual illumination of, 43; Taoism, 2, 41; Zen, 2; Zen and Christianity compared, 39, 40, 41
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Watts, Alan, vii, ix, 2, 17, 222, 241, 288, 330, 331; background, 19, 20; books: Spirit of Zen, 23, Way of Zen, 23; and Eastern religions, ix, 22; feeling of “I,” 2, 23, 24, 25, 70, 217; and God, 25, 28; hypocrisies of society, 28; the individual as a process of the world, 23, 155; and IT, 17, 19, 27, 28, 77; and Jesus Christ, 20, 21; and words, 25, 26, 70, 196, 331; the present moment, 23, 24, 25, 163; sound, 28, 29
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Zen and the Art of Calligraphy Om6ri Sdgen and Terayama Katsujo
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Exploring every element of the relationship between Zen thought and the artistic expression of calligraphy, two long-time practitioners of Zen, calligraphy and swordsmanship show how Zen training provides a proper balance of body and mind, enabling the calligrapher to write more profoundly, freed from distraction or hesitation
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Search inside (61 results)
meditation
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Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The New American Library, Inc., The Everything and the Nothing, Meher Baba, copyright 1963 by Meher House Publications, 12 Kalianna Crescent, Beacon Hill, N.S.W., Australia, and by permission of the Beguine Library, California; Listen Humanity, Meher Baba, Harper
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The Maharishi: Transcendental Meditation, London
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To experience it on another plane through meditation, in the
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Rejecting his own theory that to know the ultimate Reality one must be “poor in spirit” —empty of ideas —Huxley, like a grasshopper, leapt from one mystical path to another. Hypnosis and psychic phenomena took their turn with straight meditation, the Alexander method, and automatic writing. He was a positive collec- tor of ideas, but always retained a scientific attitude to this medley, and never gave way to any sort of woolly accep- tance. “ “The heart,’ he once quoted from Pascal, ‘has its reasons. Still more cogent and much harder to unravel
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He emphasized that the methods used by all religions, from yogic breathing to hymn singing, are really devised to create a chemical change in the body—extra carbon dioxide in the blood stream. One wonders if his defensive fervor is inclined to protest too much. Now that we have discovered the chemical conditions for self- transcendence, he said—and he writes persuasively on how LSD inhibits the dualistic action of the brain, so that there is no more sensation of separation between subject and object—it is pointless to go in for years of meditation or spiritual exercises when everything can be obtained in half an hour by the use of a drug. In what sounds rather like an advertisement for a businesslike enlightenment, he says: “Foran aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self- flagellation would be as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb’s Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a pig. Know- ing as he does (or at least as he can know, if he so desires) what are the chemical conditions of transcendental ex- perience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists—in pharmacology, in biochemis- try, in physiology and neurology, in psychology and psychiatry and parapsychology.’!3 Almost as much a labor for the aspiring mystic, one would think, as if he went in for years of meditation.
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Merton saw a good deal of both types and some of his books openly criticize the ways and moods of monks. He repudiated particularly the opinions of those who tried to define the experience of contemplation in psychological terms or with scientific definitions. In Christianity there is a distinction drawn between meditation and contem- plation. Meditation is a discussion in the mind, a silent working-out of a theme. Contemplation is a wordless nearness to God, an experience of being—unnecessary to the ways and natures of many monks, just as spiritual realities are often unnecessary to a busy religious life.
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The innocent mind implies that whole in which are the body, the heart, the brain and the mind. This innocent mind which is never touched by thought, can see what truth is, what reality is, can see ifthere is something beyond measure. That is meditation. To come upon this extraordinary beauty
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Please, this requires a great deal of insight, meditation, and penetration, because most of us assume that there is a thinker apart from thinking. But if you go into it a little more closely, you will see that thought has created the thinker. The thinker who is directing, who is the centre, the judge, is the outcome of our thoughts. This is a fact, as you will see if you are really looking at it. Most people are conditioned to believe that the thinker is separate from thought, and they give to the thinker the quality of eternality; but that which is beyond time comes into being only when we understand the whole process of thinking.
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Knowledge in Sindh, Lahore, and Delhi, spending much time with laborers in the Delhi Cloth Mill, to whom he taught methods of meditation in action so that they could realize God at all times.
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And I must tell you that you don’t meditate for me, you meditate for yourselves. You should get high. I am high. Iam high enough. But you should get high. You need to do this meditation because you want to get high. Not me. I am high. J am in the infinite state. You must get high, you must get to this point where you can also go to the infinite state. I have given you this Knowledge, therefore your duty is to meditate on it.3
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Again one senses the Fundamentalist attitude when one hears a discourse consisting of long lists of mankind’s sins; and a revivalist feeling in the whipping up of devo- tion. It does not seem surprising that after a continuous fortnight of this, those who take the Knowledge feel vi- brations and see white lights. The giving of the Knowledge takes six hours—two of which are spent in meditation. The basis on which the whole exercise rests is a mantra, the holy name of God, concentrated on at the tip of the nose. This is said to put one on a vibration wavelength.
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The process can be seen equally well without a man- tra. Buddhist meditation (Vipassana, or Zen) in which internal thoughts, images, and daydreams, as well as ex- ternal sounds and interruptions, are merely noted with- out involvement in them, is as quieting to the nervous system andas revealing of the nature of thought as is man- tra repetition. But it is harder.
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Having now bought his mantra, the customer then learns how to use it, and must return daily for four days for constant teaching, checking, and advice. The way to use it is to sit in a relaxed position, thinking of nothing in par- ticular, until the mantra comes into the mind. If it has not come of itself after half a minute, then the meditator must silently say it. After this he lets it go and ceases to cling to it or to worry about what is happening to it. Ifit is replaced by a thought, it doesn’t matter, this is still meditation. If, at the end of twenty minutes, the mantra has been ob- scured by thoughts all the time, this stil] doesn’t matter.
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The alternation of activity and deep rest (even though it is only forty minutes a day) brings, says the Maharishi, the true fulfillment of a person’s natural creative intelligence. Sleep alone cannot provide the depth of real rest which comes with meditation. This is not an idle claim, for a great deal of research has been going on into the effects of Transcendental Meditation, the Maharishi’s technique, and it now seems well established that there are physiological changes in the body and the brain, which
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These patterns are brought forward to substantiate the Maharishi’s claim that during meditation the mind is opened to the awareness of Being as a state of timeless- ness and space, empty of attributes. The mind, he goes so far as to say, is enabled to unite with the origin of life before it reenters its relative and manifest state. He sees Absolute Being as resembling the center of a seed which, seemingly, is hollow. But in that hollowness, the “ab- stract area of the seed,” is contained the whole potential of the tree—‘‘the unexpressed source of all its expres- sions.
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The Maharishi seems to have become enraptured by the methods of science and, like Teilhard de Chardin, uses scientific discoveries to confirm his own under- standing. He quotes the third law of thermodynamics—as activity decreases, order increases—to affirm the trans- forming effects of Transcendental Meditation—known as TM. As the stresses dissolve, he says, physical and mental order increases, and the conscious mind expands into creativity. He explains the process by likening a thought toa bubble. A thought is formed at the deepest level of the subconscious mind—the part of our mind that is most out of reach as it is composed of innumerable old memories, feelings, and reactions which we have stored from ear- liest childhood. In the same way as a bubble starts from the mud at the bottom of a pond, so the thought emerges from the subconscious waters of the mind. As a bubble, or a thought, comes up, it becomes bigger. When it reaches the surface it becomes big enough to be perceived.
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1 Transcendental Meditation (original title: The Science of Being and Art of Living), (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: New American Library, Inc.), p. 65.
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Forem, Jack, Transcendental Meditation. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. Inc.
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His teaching was the basis of two distinct schools in Buddhism. One, the Theravada school from which Dhi- ravamsa comes, believed in a strict segregation of monks from laymen, and thought that withdrawal from the world through meditation was the way to enlightenment.
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The two ideals of Wisdom and Compassion dominate Buddhism, and the two Buddhists here, although they have both moved a long way from the strictly traditional teaching, reflect its ideals in their practices. Dhiravamsa’s ways are the quietly serene ones of a meditation master. Trungpa’s are the more colorful and dynamic statements of a Tibetan sage. Both emphasize the importance of insight into the nature of “I’’ and both frequently use the word ego for the feelings and demands of “I.”
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The impact of Western life on three newly arrived Tibetan abbots in 1963 was felt as a jarring shock. Each of them, Trungpa, Chime, and Akong, had spent his life until then almost entirely in study and meditation. They had come from the vast silence of mountain monasteries, from the radiantly clear air of Eastern Tibet, from the brilliance of flower-covered hills and ineffably blue sky, first to the hot steamy plains of India, and then to London—crowded, polluted, and shatteringly noisy.
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It was once prophesied in Tibet that its religion would travel to the West and become that of the pink-faced people. Certainly Tibetan Buddhism has begun to attract many Westerners who are eager for a positive religious teaching based on meditation practices and on the inten- sified use of the senses.
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When Trungpa arrived in England in 1963 he was a young but full-fledged meditation master. He studied at Oxford and combined this with setting up one of the first Western Tibetan meditation centers, Samye-ling, in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Here he was joined by the tul- kus who had come to England with him, Chime Rinpoche and Akong Rinpoche.
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But Trungpa resembles in every way the solid doll whose center of balance always brings it to an upright position. With the permission of the Dalai Lama, he mar- ried a young English girl and took her to America in 1970, where he founded the Tail of the Tiger Meditation
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Center in Vermont and Karma Dzong Meditation Center in Colorado. He also founded the Naropa Institute in Colorado, a unique college where Eastern and Western intellectual traditions can interact.
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continued to spend some months every year at the tem- ple until he was old enough to go to Mahachulalongkorn Buddhist University in Bangkok, where he started to study the historical Buddhist texts. As well, he began to learn more and more about meditation. Every day he cleaned the room of his Abbot and sometimes came across unusual books describing methods of meditation. One such outlined a way called the tranquility meditation and Dhiravamsa immediately started to practice it on his own. First, the head and shoulders of the Buddha had to be visualized in every detail—no small undertaking. Then the Buddha had to be visualized seated on the head of Dhiravamsa. From there, the stages of visualization took the Buddha to the throat, to the heart, and down the body to the solar plexus. Dhiravamsa accomplished all this. But his interest began to turn away from absorption and vis- ualization states to another, more active, form of medita- tion called Vipassana, “insight into things as they really are.” It was Vipassana which attracted Dhiravamsa most and he still sees this as the best means for realizing the truth. Vipassana is the meditation of awareness and atten- tion.
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Watch any state of mind, whether it be worry, anxiety, wandering, thinking, talking—any condition of mind—watch carefully, closely, without thinking about it, without trying to control it and without interpreting any thought; because this is very important when you come to the deeper level of meditation. Naming is the main obstacle to coming to the deeper level because the moment you give identity to what you are watching, ideas come into being. Then you have to work with ideas again and you come back to the superficial level. You fail to remain deep down in the reality of what you are watching. In the deep state, all concepts and all names or words must be given up completely so that the mind can remain silently watchful and because of that, creative energy comes into being. All impurities can be cut off
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In 1966, Dhiravamsa was appointed Chao Khun (chief incumbent monk) at the Buddhapadipa Temple in Lon- don. Here was another turning point in his life. Not only a new language but a totally foreign way of thought had to be learned if he was to communicate successfully with Westerners. But in less than a year he had mastered the language and was writing books in English. In the course of three years he had founded a meditation center at Hindhead in Surrey and became its meditation master. In 1969 he was asked to conduct a meditation workshop at Oberlin College in America, and has spent several months of every year in both the United States and Canada since then.
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In 1971, he gave up the robe and ceased to be a monk. This is less dramatic than it sounds for no life-vows are taken in Buddhism and there is no stigma attached to such a decision. Dhiravamsa still remains a meditation master, but now feels himself free to know people in their ordi- nary lives. He considers the monk’s robe to be a barrier to real communication—
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Dhiravamsa’s teaching on Vipassana meditation has grown more dynamic since his arrival in the West. A good many of the old traditional Buddhist observances have been pruned, and what is now emerging is a new form of teaching, one that is wholly in accord with modern life and therefore with “what is.” Its theme is insight, to be attained by simple awareness of what is here and now, a perfect alertness of attention to the present moment:
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The whole spirit of it (Vipassana meditation) lies in full attention or complete attention. This is very important. If we actually attend to what we do, what we see, what we come across, what we experience, then there is no waste of energy, no waste of time for seeing the truth, the living movement of life. In the Satipatthana Sutta (Sutra) you can see that the Buddha advises us to attend to all the things we do in our life; whether we are walking, eating, lying down, standing, talk- ing, looking forward, looking backward or keeping silent. All this must be done so that you do not miss the point, the target, of meditation practice and you do not live in the past or in the future, but fully in the present. The Buddhist teaching em- phasises the full living in the present.
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anything else and then the whole process of attention is an inclusive process, which is the dynamic process of living, the dynamic process of life. Some people may call this a kind of movement in silence, or movement in the unknown. The unknown is that which cannot be givena name, aconcept... so meditation in your daily life is to be very attentive to everything. ... Then you can feel lively with your life, with your experiences, without being attached.?
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what it is. You have learnt to accept whatever arises and to practise acceptance in action, not in the idea. Beliefs, doubt and uncertainty are replaced by understanding and seeing. ... The way of meditation tells us to observe with awareness any situation we come across so that we can learn and remain flexible, flowing. When you feel fixated, you seem to get nowhere; you are uncomfortable and unable to function properly. Some people experience this state as aging, madness or boredom. Now, what can we do?
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Vipassana Meditation will say, look at this state of being fixed and see how you block yourself. What is happening right now? If you go into the present completely, you will see the facts and the truth of what is. Then you move on. You dissolve the problem into the light of clarity, the light of awareness. When you have the means to deal with yourself, you become your own psychotherapist. You need not say, “Oh, Iam a psychotherapist. I will look into myself.” No, the label is not important, but the ability to look is, for this looking will bring about insight. Insight will peer into a situation, penetrate, and break it. The barriers are cleared away and we can flow on with life. There is joy and happi- ness; there is sorrow and pain. We accept them all. When we are too happy, we can be lost in the happiness and gain no wisdom. We should regard unpleasant or unfortunate situa- tions in life as spiritual lessons for growth and maturity. They test us to see whether we are strong enough, whether we are free or not.4
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meditation. Then we can get into the creative aspect of living where we find energy, wakefulness and the treasures of our
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If we do not have relationship with human beings, we may have arelationship with the Buddha and Dhamma, his teach- ing. Some of those who meditate will have a relationship with meditation. We have relationships with one thing or another all the time. Perhaps when we come to the void, emptiness, we will have a relationship with that and to put it more precisely we may say that relationship is relationship with the whole, of the whole, so that there is no individual being to have relationship. Then we will say there is only relationship, the movement of life, the movement of being without becoming.®
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Meditation in Action, Shambala Publications Inc. Mudra, Shambala Publications Inc.
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Insight Meditation, Hindhead, England: Vipassana Centre
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Beneficial Factors for Meditation. Hindhead, England: Vipassana Center
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There are two paths to the Innermost: the way of the mystic, which is the way of devotion and meditation, a soli- tary and subjective path; and the way of the occultist, which
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It was through her understanding of the symbols of the sephiroth and her practice of meditation to bring about their realization, that Dion Fortune herself acquired bal- ance and sanity. She came to the Tree first of all by way of the deeply occult—the strata that seems most confusing of all to the real mystic—the spirit-world of mediums and astral planes. “Pickled in Spirit’? was how Alan Watts described it and Fortune, later on, might have agreed.
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The bulk of her work was concerned with “magic,” the practical application of esoteric principles to daily life. One of the chief practices she taught was meditation on the various symbols of the sephiroth.
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standing and knowledge. In Tibetan Tantrism for in- stance, the various gods who adorn the tankas are the approaches by which we are drawn towards the Empti- ness beyond form. Each god is a force, and his individual quality is expressed in gesture and color. One such as Ratnasambhava is golden-yellow in color because the golden light of the equality of all beings shines through him. He represents the principle of Feeling, which, through him, becomes love and compassion for all that lives; and he is seated on a horse for speed and energy. Meditation on him fills the mind with the quality of com- passionate love, because the symbol not only represents this state but is believed actually to call it forth into the meditators consciousness. In a yet more concrete exam- ple, Dion Fortune takes a coat of arms:
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When she came to teach meditation on the Qabalah, Fortune stressed the great importance of beginning with the very top—Kether. Students are usually taught, she said, that the three top sephiroth belong to the realm of Pure Spirit and cannot be realized while we are still in bodily form. But to start elsewhere would not be in har- mony with cosmic law.
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There are a great many symbols which are used as objects of meditation; the Cross in Christendom; the God-forms in the Egyptian system; phallic symbols in other faiths. These symbols are used by the uninitiated as a means of concentrat- ing the mind and introducing into it certain thoughts, calling up certain associated ideas, and stimulating certain feelings. The initiate, however, uses a symbol-system differently; he uses it as an algebra by means of which he will read the secrets of unknown potencies; in other words, he uses the symbol as a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible.
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Fortune died convinced that the Qabalah would be- come the true Yoga of the West. She saw that a religion that is all theory and welfare and that lacks the essential practices of yoga and meditation is impoverished and limited. She constantly stressed the need for yoga in Christianity, correctly foreseeing that without its enrich- ing life, more and more people would take up Eastern methods.
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Such is Harding’s message. The two main states of hu- man experience, he believes, are what he terms lst- personhood and 3rd-personhood. In the Ist-person state, the person is not identified with the contents of his con- sciousness (his body and mind and the world around him) but with the source of it all—actual Consciousness itself. In the 3rd-person state (what for most people is ordinary existence) the person feels himself to be made up of parts (the contents of consciousness) such as shape, color, name, and place. The teaching about these two states and the ways to the first of them can be found in Vedanta (Advaita) Hinduism, particularly in Jnana Yoga, but where Harding’s originality lies is in his techniques for the actual discovery of Ist-personhood. For he believes that to grasp the truth intellectually, even to feel it deeply from time to time, is of very little value. You have actually to see the absence of everything that had been—or could ever be—imagined here, where the head is. Books and lectures, thinking and meditation, are at least as likely to divert you from the Spot you occupy as direct you to it, he says. For instance, these printed pages are about twelve inches from the Point—namely, the One who is now reading them. He urges the reader to turn his attention around 180 degrees and carry out a very few simple experiments—attending to the Attender—of which the following are a typical selection. Harding insists that there’s no alternative to doing these experiments, and thata minute of active discovery is worth years of reading: indeed, he says, it takes no time at all to see, beyond the possibility of doubt, Who you really are. All you have to do is answer the following questions on present evidence, on what you find given at this moment, instead of what people have been telling you:
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This practice is the conscious enjoyment of lst-per- sonhood. It is also, says Harding, meditation—of a most radical sort, and different in many respects from medita- tion as usually taught. Harding describes it thus:
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First, and above all, it is a two-way attending, a simulta- neous looking in and out, which loses itself neither in the Emptiness nor in what fills it, but holds both together in one glance. [Outside the paper bag, (see exercise c) as inside, you see the total distinction between that face and this no-face, thus overcoming all the feeling of separation caused by be- lieving that there are two different faces]. Accordingly, it works at least as well in the marketplace as in the meditation hall, when you are talking or walking or driving no less than when you are sitting still with closed eyes. So far from requir- ing or inducing a somewhat trancelike state and temporary retirement from the busy world, it sharpens your apprecia- tion of what’s going on. You are more alive. It’s not when you look at, but when you overlook, the See-er that the seen grows dim and distorted. Not only the “outer” world, but also your “inner” world of psychological states, is obscured when you ignore the Inmost which covers and underlies them all.
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Not everybody would agree that meditation necessar- ily leads to a trancelike state. Also, Harding’s “Inmost”’ may seem to some an unnecessarily complicated image, sounding rather like what Watts might call Cosmic Jello. For surely, to find oneself gloriously empty is the aim of most mystics, and enough, and it seems a pity to start qualifying that Emptiness with descriptions, such as In- most.
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Once seen, says Harding, the Absence here can be reseen, any time, at will. Unlike ideas and feelings, you can have it when you need it most, as when you are agitated or worried. In fact, he believes that there are no occasions when this meditation is inappropriate, no times when you may safely wander from the lIst-person posi- tion. In the end, he says, you stay at Home where it goes on unbroken, though at times very unobtrusively, like the bass accompaniment in music.
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This does not mean that there is any improvement—or deterioration—in the actual seeing. While it lasts, says Harding, this is an all-or-nothing meditation which can’t be done badly. You can’t see half your Absence, nor can you half-see it. Either you are looking at what is central to you, or you are overlooking it. One welcome conse- quence is, he says, that among those who consistently prac- tice this meditation there can be no hierarchy or pecking order, no gurus or chelas, no spiritual one-upmanship or intimidation. Nothing is achieved, but only discovered. And What’s discovered is totally humbling: your Noth- ingness when actually seen can’t be doubted. This alone carries conviction. Here is the one Spot where you are real and have no appearance, the one Spot that is plainly free from egotism and everything else—in a word, free.
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It is free from all content. This meditation, says Hard-
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Because of its featurelessness, says Harding, there is nothing special about the meditation he is describing. It is secular, simple, natural, he believes. There’s nothing to be learned and therefore no expert guidance is needed, no meditation manuals and masters, no agonizing choice between their conflicting systems, no hunting for the infallible teacher—seeing that He lives within. This meditation is safe because it can’t be bungled, he says; because it avoids dependence on others, and because it is uncontrived. There’s nothing arbitrary or fanciful about it, nothing to strain credulity, nothing to go wrong, noth- ing to set us apart from ordinary people. It is safe be- cause it is finding out how matters stand, not trying to manipulate them. What could be less dangerous than being honest about the Place we are always at, or more dangerous than being dishonest about it?
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How inconsistent and hard to please we are! We would like, says Harding, a meditation that detaches us from all creatures yet unites us with them, that reduces us abso- lutely yet exalts us absolutely, that leaves us wholly pres- ent and self-aware yet wholly absent and self-forgetful, that gives peace yet inspires action, that calms yet ener- gizes, that is aimless yet purposeful, that leaves us noth- ing to do seeing that we are already at the Goal yet everything to do seeing that we are still at the beginning. What’s wanted, in short, is a meditation that reconciles all our built-in contradictions.
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turn it into whatever suits them and this may have little relationship to what it really is. We describe to ourselves what is going on rather than really experiencing it, we know about instead of knowing, and so we come to live in a dreamworld of ideas and words rather than of reality. Both Alan Watts and Krishnamurti are very clear on this point, but neither give any real ways for breaking through the word barrier, although Alan Watts certainly practiced and advocated various traditional techniques, such as sitting in silent meditation, and chanting mantras. Krish- namurti advocates choiceless awareness so that we can see for ourselves that it is the monkeylike mind with its endless chatter and ideas that is responsible for our delusions—but he does not tell us what we should do when we do begin to realize this. Perhaps the best harvest to be gleaned from both is in the stimulation they give to our thoughts and feelings by the lively and lucidly clear understanding of life itself that they convey.
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Maharishi, the, 148, 166, 333; and the Buddha, 171; pure consciousness, 170, 171, 174, 175; creative intelligence, 173, 174; feeling of “I,” 149; Karma, 171; mantra techniques of, 149, 168, 169, 172, 173; nature of man, 170, 174; physiological effects of TM, 173, 174; Transcendental Meditation, 172, 173, 174, 175
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Meditation: Dhiravamsa, 201, 203, 205, 208 Harding, 287, 289, 290 Fortune, 246 Krishnamurti, 71, 73, 77
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Theresa, Mother, ix, 316, 317; attitude to death, 321, 322; attitude to obedience, 324, 325; background, 320; the call to serve Jesus in the slums, 320; the closeness of God, 322; daily prayer of, 317; and Jesus Christ, 319, 323, 326; and leprosy, 323, 324; and love, 322, 323; meditation of, 326;
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Transcendental Meditation (TM), 172, 173, 174, 175
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Vedanta, Advaita (see Advaita) Vipassana meditation, 201
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buddhism
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Anne Bancroft spent the early part of her life in the Quaker village of Jordans. While her four children were growing up she became a lecturer in comparative religion and at the same time began her own quest for spiritual understanding. Over the years she has found strength and inspiration in Buddhism and a deepening understanding of western mysticism. She is the author of several other books on religion and mysticism including Origins of the Sacred (Arkana 1987) and Weavers of Wisdom: Women Mystics of the Twentieth Century (Arkana 1989).
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The Middle Way of Buddhism 180 Chogyam Trungpa 182 Dhiravamsa 198
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Alan Watts, also English in origin and also domiciled in California, became adept at comparing the central truths of Christianity (for some years he was an Episcopalian minister) with those of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism—religions which he deeply loved. He was very moved by his own experience of egolessness, and he evolved a personal philosophy from this experience which he linked with both Eastern and Western religion, thus becoming one of the most stimulating mystical philosophers of our time. His own beliefs centered around the crucial problem of human identity and his greatest attacks were on the common feeling of being an “IT” di- vorced from everything else, even from its own experi- ence. The “I” does not feel feelings or think thoughts, he said, any more than it smells smelling. He, too, is an easy writer to read and an entertaining builder of bridges, with a love of language and an especial fondness for puns.
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Thomas Merton, an American Cistercian monk, gradu- ally moved away from a rather over intense in- Christianity to an illumined understanding of Eastern religions, particularly Zen Buddhism and Taoism. His insights came through his own contemplative life and mystical realization, and, to some extent, he was able to isolate the contemplative experience and write about it clearly and freely. His overwhelming interest in every- | thing to do with contemplation made him entirely at home in Zen and Taoism, and his friendship with D. T. Suzuki, a great Japanese exponent of Zen, gave him such an insight into its practices that he seemed able, shortly before his untimely death, to reach right through the outer trappings of both Christianity and Buddhism to the
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His attitude toward religion began to change—and eventually reversed itself completely—after 1937 when, because of a mixture of bad health and pacifist convic- tions, he went to live in California. He was accompanied by one of his closest friends, broadcaster Gerald Heard, a convinced Vedantist who was brilliant at making his philosophy comprehensible. When Heard founded Trabusco College in California, which was devoted to the study of mystical religion and Vedantism, Huxley took part in the project. He became an ardent advocate of Hinduism—although he later found that a more complete answer to his spiritual questions lay in Buddhism, par- ticularly the compassionate Mahayana of Tibet.
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After some years as chaplain to Northwestern Univer- sity, Watts formally resigned from both the post and the ministry. His old love of Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism had never taken second place in his life. Meetings with Dr. D. T. Suzuki, the great translator of the Zen scrip-
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any self that is listening. This can be done with all the senses, but most easily with the ears. Simply listen, then, to the rain. Listen to what Buddhists call its “suchness’—its tathata or da-da-da. Like all classical music, it means nothing except itself, for only inferior music mimics other sounds or is about anything other than music. There is no “message” in a Bach fugue. So, too, when an ancient Zen master was asked about the meaning of Buddhism he replied, “If there is any mean- ing in it, I myselfam not liberated.” For when you have really heard the sound of rain you can hear, and see and feel, everything else in the same way—as needing no translation, as being just that which it is, though it may be impossible to say what.16
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Such themes inevitably led a person like Merton, with his wide reading and growingly open attitude to holiness, to the Eastern religions, particularly Zen where the awareness of ‘“nowness’”’ is regarded as essential. Accep- tance of non-Christian religions as a real source of the spirit may have entailed some inner struggles but his ability to grasp intuitively the essential teachings of Hin- duism and Buddhism were forming Merton into a strong builder of bridges between East and West before his untimely death. He was constantly irked by the unsym- pathetic attitudes of other Catholic writers who saw the Eastern religions as pessimistic and passive and unsatis- fying to the West, and he himself began writing a number of remarkable books, such as Mystics and Zen Masters and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, to point out the
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His main bridge-building was in the field of Zen. He had illuminating talks with Dr. D. T. Suzuki, the greatest Japanese exponent of Zen in this century, and said after- ward that Buddhism (of which Zen is a school) had finally become comprehensible to him, that he had now seen through the rather bewildering cultural patterns of strange rituals, exotic images, and mysterious words to a clear and simple essence—‘‘the simplest and most baffling thing of all: direct confrontation with Absolute Being, Absolute Love, Absolute Mercy, or Absolute Void by an immediate and fully awakened engagement in the living of everyday life. In Christianity the confrontation is theo- logical and affective, through word and love. In Zen it is metaphysical and intellectual, through insight and emptiness.’7
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... We begin to divine that Zen is not only beyond the formulations of Buddhism but it is also in a certain way “beyond” (and even pointed to by) the revealed message of Christianity.1°
Page 103
Pak Subuh is a native of Java, a country which is watered by the religious streams of Hinduism, Buddhism, Chris- tianity, and Islam. The result is a theosophically fertile soil, exceptionally given to esoteric cults and the de- velopment of psychic faculties. When, for instance, Subuh was born, his first name was changed from Sukarno to Muhammad because a wandering beggar foretold that the delicate child would otherwise die. And his health improved from that moment on. Predictions of death, however, continued to shadow him, and when he was a young man he heard a firm prophecy that he would die at the age of twenty-four.
Page 130
Perhaps it is true that the theorizing intellect is a hin- drance to spiritual response. Buddhism is quite clear that this is so. To a disciple who wanted to speculate on the afterlife, the Buddha replied emphatically that this sort of query is not profitable and has nothing to do with the fundamentals of religion. Zen says, “Don’t think—just look,” and the Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi, said, “You know that you know nothing. Find out that knowledge. That is liberation.” The mind, itself a marvelous tool for ordinary living, must be dropped when the nature of life is sought for. The observer in us who analyzes and makes value judgments, must give way to the total “I’? who wants to respond to what is. Methods for letting go of the
Page 159
And far farther East, Zen Buddhism teaches its follow- ers not to project the feeling of “I’’ onto thoughts, feel- ings, or the outside world. As thoughts begin to be clearly seen as arising and dying in the same way that the body is born and dies, the sensation of “I”? becomes more pro- found and less personal. It transcends me and yet itis me. This sensation can no longer be called a thought or a feeling—it is an awareness of a changeless state of being, about which there can be no doubt. It does not seem to be, it is. No words can ever capture the immense marvel of this certainty.
Page 180
The Middle Way of Buddhism
Page 180
The two Buddhist masters in this book are from different countries and different traditions, but both are concerned with techniques and ways for finding out the true nature of the self. Buddhism is the most practical of all the religions. It does not ask its followers to believe in anything at all, it simply says: follow the teachings and see what happens.
Page 181
The Middle Way of Buddhism 181
Page 181
His teaching was the basis of two distinct schools in Buddhism. One, the Theravada school from which Dhi- ravamsa comes, believed in a strict segregation of monks from laymen, and thought that withdrawal from the world through meditation was the way to enlightenment.
Page 181
The two ideals of Wisdom and Compassion dominate Buddhism, and the two Buddhists here, although they have both moved a long way from the strictly traditional teaching, reflect its ideals in their practices. Dhiravamsa’s ways are the quietly serene ones of a meditation master. Trungpa’s are the more colorful and dynamic statements of a Tibetan sage. Both emphasize the importance of insight into the nature of “I’’ and both frequently use the word ego for the feelings and demands of “I.”
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It was once prophesied in Tibet that its religion would travel to the West and become that of the pink-faced people. Certainly Tibetan Buddhism has begun to attract many Westerners who are eager for a positive religious teaching based on meditation practices and on the inten- sified use of the senses.
Page 186
The whole unique and very practical teaching of Tibet- an Buddhism revolves around the understanding that each one of us lives in an illusory world of self- projection, isolated from reality by our grasping at ideas and beliefs, which includes the belief that “Tl” exists as a separate, autonomous entity. This description of personal existence is, the Buddha said, the cause of all suffering, and the way out of suffering is to realize that “I’’ does not derive its power from itself, is not self-subsisting, but is, in truth, Buddha-mind, the natureless nature of all things, empty of self-nature altogether. The complete realization of this emptiness is known as Nirvana. It is transcendent wisdom.
Page 187
The ways for reaching Nirvana and for placing the self in Suchness belong to the whole field of Buddhism, but the practices of compassion for placing all beings in Such- ness belong only to Mahayana Buddhism, the teaching that spread north from India and found its greatest expo-
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spoke to him about some of the profound truths that are the basis of Buddhism.
Page 200
Thai country peasants are not, asa rule, very spiritual people. They love their religion of Theravada Bud- dhism—the strict Buddhism of ascetic monks, meditating on imperfections and the hollow, transient world of the passions—and they take much contrasting pleasure in noisy, cheerful, colorful festivals and ceremonies during which large, ornate statues of the Buddha are decked with flowers and offerings. Many Thais feel such rever- ence for the Buddha that they have given him the status of a god, and frequently attach ancient superstitions and strange beliefs to him. They also have great respect for the Sangha, the order of yellow-robed monks, who carry their begging-bowls around the village once a day to be filled with food. And there is a complete belief in the Dhamma, the Buddha’s teaching—but not much under- standing of it.
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In 1971, he gave up the robe and ceased to be a monk. This is less dramatic than it sounds for no life-vows are taken in Buddhism and there is no stigma attached to such a decision. Dhiravamsa still remains a meditation master, but now feels himself free to know people in their ordi- nary lives. He considers the monk’s robe to be a barrier to real communication—
Page 204
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... where there is illumination, clarity and alertness—perfect alertness with nonverbal insight. This awakened conscious- ness gives a freedom that is not connected to any form of emotion or with like and dislike. Freedom is just being free. If you sit, you are free to sit; if you walk, you are free to walk. There is no uneasiness, no anxiety, no disturbance. When you wake up fully, you see everything clearly. You are not distracted because you see everything as it is. You are not concerned with any elements or images of what you see. Buddhism regards this true, luminous consciousness as in- trinsic to every human being. The sense impressions that intrude upon us becloud it. If we do not establish awareness at the doors of the senses, we are left without a keeper, when destructive elements enter our consciousness making it im- pure and defiled. Our task is to cleanse it away through
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el lets THE MIDDLE WAY OF BUDDHISM
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A New Approach to Buddhism. The Dawn Horse Press
Page 240
Many readers will see a strong resemblance between the pillars of the Qabalah and the Taoist philosophy of Yin and Yang, the dual aspects of all life that show them- selves as darkness and light, female and male, etc. The Tao, the Way, is of the same nature as the Middle Way of Buddhism and the central pillar of the Qabalah.
Page 312
In fact, space travel seems its greatest accomplishment, and this final confirmation that don Juan is a sorcerer rather than a sage may disappoint many people. It will at least disappoint those to whom the perfection of man’s outward powers is of less importance than the discovery of his real inner meaning. For, as Zen Buddhism says, why bother to cross the water miraculously if you can get to the other side by boat? If one ofthe major discoveries of four books and a great deal of teaching is to see the floor of a ravine by flying rather than by climbing down, it seems a great amount of effort for very little.
Page 335
Mother Theresa, although profoundly Christian, perhaps comes close to Buddhism in her complete adora- tion of whatever she encounters. She has surrendered herself to God and sees God in all things. Theologically she is far apart from the Buddhists, for to Mother Theresa, God is in things whereas to Buddhists he (or Suchness) is things. But in practice they are close and the highest Christian and Bodhisattva ideals are very concordant.
Page 338
Buddhism (passing references), 2, 29, 52, 169, 192, 205, 207, 213, 238, 240, 258, 334, 335; and don Juan, 298, 312; and Hard- ing, 282, 288, 291; Hinduism, difference between, 288; and the Maharishi, 171; Mahayana, 9, 181, 187, 288; and Merton, 2, 39, 40, 41; Theravada, 181, 200; Tibetan, 9, 185, 186; and Vipassana, 201; and Watts, 22, 23; Zen, 29, 74, 78, 93, 156, 159
Page 340
Hasidim, the, 222, 223, 231 Hazrat Babajan, 123, 133 “Headlessness,” 278, 279, 282, 283, 287, 290 Heard, Gerald, 9 Hermes Trismegistus, Emerald Tablet of, 260 Hinduism (passing references) 2, 39, 52, 171, 204, 238, 262, 285 and avatars, 132 Bhakti and Advaita, 118, 119, 148 beliefs about Arunachala, 150 and Buddhism, difference between, 288, 289 and the feeling of “I,” 36, 153 and Huxley, 9 infinite Self, 158 mantra, 169 maya, 163, 262 and the nagual, 312 ultimate Reality, 122, 154, 160 self-surrender, 139, 163 Home for Dying Destitutes, 321 Howe, Eric Graham, 20 Hume, David, 159 Humphreys, Christmas, 20 Huxley, Aldous, 1, 4, 38, 122, 176; background, 6, 7; blindness of, 6, 7, 8; books: Eyeless in Gaza, 7, Perennial Philosophy, 1, 9, Shakespeare and Religion, 16, Those Barren Leaves, 4; in Califomia, 9; death of, 15, 16; and duality, 7, 8, 10; first marriage, 7; glimpses of truth, 10; humour of, 15; views on life, 15, 16; and mescaline, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14; mystical paths of, 10; nature of, 15; and religion, 8, 9; feeling of “I,” 13; universal love, 13; ultimate Reality, 10 Huxley, Laura, 10, 15, 16 Huxley, Maria, 7, 15 Huxley, Trevenan, 6
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Page 21
He felt that on these sorts of points the Christian doc- trines were bewilderingly complex and unhelpful. They had developed into a sort of symbology which “fails ab- solutely to make any direct connection between the crucified and risen Son of God, on the one hand, and the daily life of a family in the suburbs of Los Angeles or London, on the other.’’4
Page 22
of “nonstriving” and “nonmaking,” where things grow from within and are not made, shaping themselves from within outwards spontaneously. He felt that the Christian image of God was that of an architect or a mechanic, standing outside the world as a mechanic will stand out- side an assemblage of separate parts and that this belief had led to Western minds thinking of man himself as a separate bit, brought in from outside instead of emerging from within the universe as a leaf emerges from a tree. Thinking of God as outside creation had led to concep- tualizing him as a set of principles rather than the living reality and inwardness of all things.
Page 30
His early life was nomadic and insecure. He was born in France of New Zealand and American parents, both of whom were artists. His mother died when he was a young child and from then on he wandered about with his father in France, spending occasional holidays with an aunt in England and with his mother’s restless American parents, who would descend on Europe, trailing along with them Thomas’s younger brother, John Paul. Eventually Thomas went to a public school in England and then on to Cam- bridge, where he took a degree in modern languages. But Cambridge was not a success. He was at odds with life and couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and he was given to depression. He had no religion, but was deeply im- pressed by the sincerity of a young Hindu who was able to convey to him some meaning in Christian mysticism. In those early days of his religious quest, Merton’s self-
Page 32
Perhaps some of these “seeds” were growing into a different field of flowers than the one Merton thought he was in—a field where active religion is not so important as being still, and where conventional Christianity some- times seems at odds with the truth. Twelve years later he wrote New Seeds of Contemplation and became less popular as a Catholic writer for he seemed to query the Christian belief in the uniqueness of the individual self. While describing contemplation (an exercise of inner stillness and receptiveness to God), he said:
Page 33
Christian monasteries are often largely tenanted by two types of monks. On the one hand, there are pleasant, easy, talkative men, who simply prefer a monastic way of life, with its secure routine, to a worldly one, and who are practical and not particularly mystical; and on the other, there are men who are more withdrawn, self-absorbed, and concerned with their experiences, both religious and secular.
Page 36
the main task of Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Sufism and is the occupation of such sages as Krish- namurti and Ramana Maharshi. The ultimate discovery that God, or the Self, is the ground of one’s true nature is seen by Merton as a problem of identity, in much the same way as Ramana Maharshi saw it. Whereas Ramana Maharshi believed that one’s feeling of “I’’ was the key to the question of existence and that once this feeling had been identified with its Source, the Self, existence would reveal its true potential, so Merton, -in Christian terms, saw free will as the gift of God to man, to be used as active participation with God in the revelation of identity with him:
Page 37
To begin with, ‘the world’ has no need of Christian apologetics. .. . It explains itself to its own satisfaction. That is why I think it is absurd to approach the world with what seems to me to be merely a new tactic and a new plea for sincerity—a “religionless religion” which cheerfully agrees that God is dead. . . . Obvious answers from “the world”: “So
Page 38
Merton pointed out that what man needs is not a Chris- tianity that is involved in every worldly issue, but a religion that is “not of this world.” Man wants to be freed from the fashionable “myths, idolatries, and confu- sions” of the world. He can never, of course, be free from the natural created world as such, nor from human soci- ety, but a Christian should be free from the obsessions ofa society which is governed by love of money and the use of power— What is important is to show those who want to be free where their freedom really lies!”
Page 38
Many Christians would and did disagree with him over this point. In every religion, but particularly in Christian- ity, two main groups of people seem to emerge. There are those who believe that God’s orders in the form of a vigorous Christian life are to be carried out, but who do not feel the need to contemplate God—who, in fact, are shy and wary of the admonition “Be still and know that I am God.” And there is another, perhaps smaller group, who see their own spiritual realization as of first impor- tance although, like Aldous Huxley, they are far from blind to the needs of the world.
Page 39
Such themes inevitably led a person like Merton, with his wide reading and growingly open attitude to holiness, to the Eastern religions, particularly Zen where the awareness of ‘“nowness’”’ is regarded as essential. Accep- tance of non-Christian religions as a real source of the spirit may have entailed some inner struggles but his ability to grasp intuitively the essential teachings of Hin- duism and Buddhism were forming Merton into a strong builder of bridges between East and West before his untimely death. He was constantly irked by the unsym- pathetic attitudes of other Catholic writers who saw the Eastern religions as pessimistic and passive and unsatis- fying to the West, and he himself began writing a number of remarkable books, such as Mystics and Zen Masters and Zen and the Birds of Appetite, to point out the
Page 42
Thomas Merton died in Bangkok, where he had been invited to address a conference of Asian monastic orders. His journey through India and Ceylon to Thailand was the fulfillment of a long-awaited dream and as the plane left San Francisco airport for the East, Merton wrote, “We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around.’ !2
Page 49
At this point it is easy to lose the drift of Teilhard’s theory. What does he mean by a personalized universe? To Teilhard, a devout Christian, God was the ultimate Being, expressed in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. There- fore, he saw the whole of evolution as prearrangedly heading toward the ultrapersonal—toward a point in time when conscious, supremely personal mankind will be united, or oned, with Christ the Omega-point, the heart of the universe.
Page 50
Teilhard’s answers perhaps bear some of the shortcom- ings of a sheltered, academic life, but no one can deny his brilliant insights and fervent yet lucid language. Was he, perhaps, an overdedicated man? As a mystical theolo- gian, his whole interest seemed absorbed by the desire to prove scientifically the links between evolution and the Christian vision of the world. Apart from this overwhelm- ing passion, he seems to have taken little notice of other aspects of life. The arts passed him by. He was not in- terested in living people, or their conditions. He spent twenty years in China and took amazingly little notice of its culture and philosophies. He visited India and failed
Page 140
The young Maharaj Ji, who has taken on Shri Hans’ guruship, has a reply to this Christian dilemma. The knowledge that he imparts is universal, he says, and is the pure essence of all religions. It is not specifically Hindu, and so his messiahship is not limited to any one religion.
Page 163
Complete acceptance of the moment does not mean, however, that one never does anything. Real surrender means a surrender to what needs to be done. This was once the basis of Christian life, and remains today an ideal in the mind of many Hindus who have not always seen, however, that surrender to a present situation re- quires a great effort of active awareness to help one to do as well as to be.
Page 188
Relating to oneself is a form of surrender. The word surrender has, for some people, an emotional content slightly tinged with hysteria and perhaps connected with the ecstatic writings of Christian or Sufi saints. But sur-
Page 241
She was an orphan, related to the “Stainless Steel” Firth family and brought up in Yorkshire in a household where Christian Science was rigorously practiced. She did not fit in and was often so unhappy that she retreated from the world into prolonged bouts of daydreaming, which became intensified into perception of auras and development of mediumistic powers. This alarmed her guardians and caused some stir in her small home town.
Page 243
Mrs. Mathers, rather surprisingly, agreed to this —secrecy had been considered essential up till then —and, in 1922, the Fraternity of the Inner Light was born; although for a time it bore the title of the “Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society,” which For- tune had joined early on.
Page 280
Douglas Harding was born at Lowestoft in Suffolk, En- gland, of parents who belonged to the Exclusive sect of the Plymouth Brethren—an ultrafundamentalist Christian body that, puritan and intolerant and scrupulous to a degree, forbids all unnecessary contact with the “world.” Gradually he came to doubt, to question and explore, until, at twenty-one, while studying architecture at Uni- versity College, London, he finally broke away from the Brethren. Disowned by his parents and relatives, he found himself alone, penniless, and jobless in the Lon- don of the slump.
Page 335
Mother Theresa, although profoundly Christian, perhaps comes close to Buddhism in her complete adora- tion of whatever she encounters. She has surrendered herself to God and sees God in all things. Theologically she is far apart from the Buddhists, for to Mother Theresa, God is in things whereas to Buddhists he (or Suchness) is things. But in practice they are close and the highest Christian and Bodhisattva ideals are very concordant.
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Page n13
Writings in Time of War, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Teilhard de Chardin; A Biography, Robert Speaight, Collins Publishers; Human Energy, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, Inc.; Let Me Explain, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Science and Christ, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc.; Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Publishers, Harper and Row, Pub- lishers, Inc.; The Divine Milieu, Teilhard de Chardin, Collins Pub-
Page 3
Teilhard de Chardin’s bridges were built to span a different gulf. A French Jesuit priest, he was not in- terested in other religions at all, but only in going deeper and deeper into his own. To him, belief in Christ meant that mankind must and would evolve in certain direc- tions, evidence for this being shown by astudy of the past. So convinced was he that the human race was becoming more conscious, more sensitive, more communally minded, and nearer to the Parousia when all men would be merged in Christ, that he gave up his life to discover- ing scientific proof for this theory. He was trained as a paleontologist, and this discipline engendered in him a great reverence for the material world which, as a mystic, he saw as Christ-consciousness expressed in more and more diversified forms. God’s presence, he believed, is felt throughout the created world, and the whole of evolu- tion is a continuous movement towards him. In his own highly poetic language, he linked the spirit with matter, and for many people throughout the world this particular bridge is one of the most valuable.
Page 20
At this time, he also began to write and to expound an unconventional and mystical approach to some of the aspects of Christianity which perplex many people. For instance, in what sense is Jesus Christ an answer to the problems of the world?
Page 21
To Watts, the answer to it all was to drop the image of Christ and thus to understand the Crucifixion and the Resurrection properly, “for we are spiritually paralysed by the fetish of Jesus. ... His literary image in the Gos- pels has, through centuries of homage, become far more of an idol than anything graven in wood or stone, so that today the most genuinely reverent act of worship is to destroy that image.’> He felt that the real meaning of the Crucifixion was that the imagined, conceptualized Jesus, the historical image, should be relinquished because while Jesus remained an object of possession, of knowl- edge, and of safety, there could be no spiritual growth or eternal life.
Page 33
and the superficial, external self which we commonly iden- tify with the first person singular. We must remember that this superficial “‘I’’ is not our real self. It is our “individual- ity” and our “empirical” self but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The “I” that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true “T” that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the vesture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and un- known “self” whom most of us never discover until we are dead. Our external, superficial self is not eternal, not spiritual. Far from it. This self is doomed to disappear as completely as smoke from a chimney. It is utterly frail and evanescent. Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this “I” is really “not I’ and the awakening of the unknown “T” that is beyond observation and reflection and is incapa- ble of commenting upon itself... .1
Page 49
At this point it is easy to lose the drift of Teilhard’s theory. What does he mean by a personalized universe? To Teilhard, a devout Christian, God was the ultimate Being, expressed in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. There- fore, he saw the whole of evolution as prearrangedly heading toward the ultrapersonal—toward a point in time when conscious, supremely personal mankind will be united, or oned, with Christ the Omega-point, the heart of the universe.
Page 49
Catholic Christianity has always believed that in some way unfathomable to man, the person of Jesus Christ contains the whole explanation of existence—not so much in his historical concreteness but as the “cosmic Christ,” a spirit of the universe. “The answer to the uni- verse is: Jesus Christ” says Father Corbishley, Superior of Farm Street Church in London; and Teilhard himself says:
Page 50
With this beliefin mind, it was an easy step for Teilhard to conclude that the direction of conscious intelligence must be toward one personality—the personality of Jesus. Individual differences he thought very little of, as we observed earlier. But ultimate personality, to him, was the expression of divinity—unselfish, creative, and pure. The combined personalities of all men, he thought, would become one, drawn like a magnet towards the end of evolution, towards the Pleroma of complete con- vergence on Christ.
Page 51
Teilhard’s belief in the inevitability of progress was arrived at through his faith in the magnetic power of Christ at the center of the universe. Having once positioned Christ there, and proved that position to his own satisfaction by what he had observed of evolution, he could then only allow himself to see progress. The future must be better than the present. If it were not, his belief would be wrong. For if mankind is to end up in a great smelting fire of glory, it can not, in the meantime, blow itself out in a furnace of radiation.
Page 52
At last we are nearing our goal. What is the active centre, the living link, the organising soul of the Pleroma? St. Paul, again, proclaims it with his resounding voice: it is he in whom everything is reunited, and in whom all things are consummated—through whom the whole created edifice re- ceives its consistency—Christ dead and risen... .
Page 52
And now let us link the first and last terms of this long series of identities. We shall then see with a wave of joy that the divine omnipresence translates itself within our universe by the network of the organising forces of the total Christ. God exerts pressure, in us and upon us—through the inter- mediary of all the powers of heaven, earth and hell—only in the act of forming and consummating Christ who saves and sur-animates the world. And since, in the course of this oper- ation, Christ himself does not act as a dead or passive point of convergence, but as a centre of radiation for the energies which lead the universe back to God through his humanity, the layers of divine action finally come to us impregnated with his organic energies.®
Page 54
“A Super-mankind calls for a Super-Christ.
Page 54
“A Super-Christ calls for a Super-charity.’’2
Page 55
In his precise definitions of God’s plans for mankind —a more and more personalized existence in which all men would become one—one begins to sense in Teilhard a need for reassurance. He seems to insist too much on the Pleroma, on man’s convergence upon himself, his growingly intense and perfect unification as he travels further and further inward to Omega point—as though Teilhard himself was a little uncertain. He spent much of his life, such as the twenty years in China, isolated from contemporary thought and discovery and was further iso- lated (although not from his friends) by the Vatican’s decision to refuse to allow publication of his major works. Whatever the causes, his beliefs about the Pleroma when mankind finally reaches the ultimate convergence in per- fection on Omega and Christ is realized and reborn seem ideas hardly related to this world. Yet many people, par- ticularly Roman Catholics, have found in Teilhard a source of courage, and although a very different man from Merton, the two do share astrong spiritual inspiration and revelation; Teilhard’s more mystical writings in The Di- vine Milieu and The Hymn of the Universe among others, contain a great intensity of feeling which is lacking in the writing of many modern theologians and is perhaps needed in the rational West. He was able to express himself with true depth in poetic prose:
Page 60
Teilhard de Chardin, Science and Christ (London:
Page 120
He speaks of himself as having appeared in the past as Krishna and as Christ, and he promises that through his mediation the world, especially America, will change and become more spiritual. He forecast for himself a violent’ death at the hands of his countrymen, the Parsees, but he died peacefully in 1969.
Page 132
There are many people for whom this state of openness is reached, as nearly as it can be reached, through a “messiah,” a personal Christ, one with whom a relation- ship can be established, on whom the weight of sorrows can be laid, to whom devotion is offered. Love must be experienced if it is to grow, and the cosmic image is sometimes easier to love than one’s neighbor. Hindus are well aware of this human need for an object of devotion and provide deities for every type of person, each image being the embodiment of a virtue rather than an actual god. Krishna, the mythical avatar of the Bhagavad Gita, sets many hearts afire. But the sort of avatar who gets into actual history, such as Jesus of Nazareth, tends, perhaps, to create complications, for his humanhood is not always at all easy to reconcile with his “divine” nature.
Page 140
Westerners, hooked by their own insistence on a histor- ical Christ, have been caught for centuries in the dilemma of owning a supreme guru and yet not being able to carry out his teachings. Because he was an unrepeatable, once-and-for-all guru, no modern one can be acknowl- edged. And yet what Christ is reported to have taught, although it has a generally profound application, is moral rather than spiritual and does not seem to bring about self-transcendence and God-realization. Worship of a bearded and stern moralist or of a meek and forgiving Savior fails to satisfy many in the world today. But the image of Christ can not yet be dropped to make way for the living illumination.
Page 269
Occult waters can become very muddy indeed, but although one may look impatiently at some of Steiner’s more splashy plunges into occult “fact,” there is no doubt that within his own character he had plenty of integrity and independence. Too much of the latter, in fact, for some of the leaders of the Theosophical Society who were not very happy about the way the German branch was developing. In return, Steiner, who was deeply Christ-centered, did not think much of the adoption by Annie Besant of Krishnamurti as the new Christ. Various other differences occurred—one in particular was con- nected with Marie von Sivers, a Baltic Russian whom Steiner married and who had a very strong influence on his life. An impassioned actress, intensely involved with speech and drama, she encouraged Steiner to set forth his ideas in dramatic form, and in fact to translate his beliefs into art in all its expressions. Thus, when the more in- fluential members of the Theosophical Society arrived in Berlin one year for their annual congress, they were taken aback to find the lecture halls bedecked in vivid paintings and the subject matter containing poetry and drama
Page 319
Actually we are touching His body. It is the hungry Christ that we are feeding, it is the naked Christ that we are cloth- ing, it is the homeless Christ that we are giving shelter and it is not just hunger for bread, and nakedness for clothes and homelessness for a house made of bricks but Christ today is hungry in our poor people, and even in the rich, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.
Page 323
Being unwanted, says Mother Theresa, is the worst state of all. For most diseases there are medicines nowa- days. But only love can cure the terrible illness of being unwanted and abandoned. In Calcutta, Mother Theresa saves the discarded babies, as well as the dying. Some the Sisters bring from hospitals, some from jails, some are brought by the police. So far they have never refused a child. Each one is beloved to them. Each one is the embodiment of Christ, from the children swollen with malnutrition to the tiny, premature semicorpses found on
Page 325
The God-filled heart, he continues, is moved towards creatures when they are seen as part of God’s design. It is exactly this mystical understanding that the inner and the outer world are one that gives spiritual strength to Mother Theresa and the Sisters of Charity. Their strict rule of poverty applies to their egos as well as to their bodies. When they lack “any tendency or inclination” to comi- nate the world for their own purposes, then the world itself becomes nothing—without self-nature. It no longer holds power over them. This gives them the freedom and strength to serve and cherish it, for as the manifestation of God’s design it is infinitely marvelous and dear to them. The Designer and His design cannot be separated. The incoherent, filthy leper in the streets is as much Christ as He to whom they surrender their hearts.
Page 326
The real safeguard against wrong motive, she says, is to remember to love. To remember that not only is the work done for Christ but also that it is done by him—that in herself a Sister is nothing. When a Sister understands this, she sees that the perfection of “self” is meaningless.
Page 326
Mother Theresa meditates for several hours early every morning. She then attends Mass, profoundly empty of herself. Without the morning Mass, she says, and the strength that comes from it, the whole work would be too difficult. But when she and the Sisters go out into the streets they are happy and buoyant, stripped of self- interest, and finding genuine delight in all the tasks they ~ do. For where the ordinary self-motivated person would see only degradation facing him in the streets and would shrink from it in horror, the Sisters know that they are meeting Christ and that the most embittered, ugly, or horrific face will seem to them singularly beautiful and lovable.
Page 340
Jesus Christ, 65, 119, 122, 132, 140, 291 and Chokmah, 247 and Maharaj Ji, 136 and Roman Catholicism, 49 and Teilhard de Chardin, 3, 49, 50. ole o3eDo and Mother Theresa, 319, 323, 326 and Watts, 20, 21 Judaism, 222, 223, 225, 231, 238
Page 343
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 3, 41, 44, 175, 224, 332; books: Divine Milieu, 55, Hymn of the Universe, 55; and Christ, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54; and energy, 53, 54; evolution of consciousness, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 218; his inmost self, 55, 56; the noosphere, 53, 54; Omega-point, 49, 54, 55; the Pleroma, 50, 51, 55; the soul, 34, 46, 47; synthesis of the personal and universal, 54
Page 343
Theresa, Mother, ix, 316, 317; attitude to death, 321, 322; attitude to obedience, 324, 325; background, 320; the call to serve Jesus in the slums, 320; the closeness of God, 322; daily prayer of, 317; and Jesus Christ, 319, 323, 326; and leprosy, 323, 324; and love, 322, 323; meditation of, 326;
Page 344
Watts, Alan, vii, ix, 2, 17, 222, 241, 288, 330, 331; background, 19, 20; books: Spirit of Zen, 23, Way of Zen, 23; and Eastern religions, ix, 22; feeling of “I,” 2, 23, 24, 25, 70, 217; and God, 25, 28; hypocrisies of society, 28; the individual as a process of the world, 23, 155; and IT, 17, 19, 27, 28, 77; and Jesus Christ, 20, 21; and words, 25, 26, 70, 196, 331; the present moment, 23, 24, 25, 163; sound, 28, 29
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Search inside (22 results)
jesus
Page 20
At this time, he also began to write and to expound an unconventional and mystical approach to some of the aspects of Christianity which perplex many people. For instance, in what sense is Jesus Christ an answer to the problems of the world?
Page 21
To Watts, the answer to it all was to drop the image of Christ and thus to understand the Crucifixion and the Resurrection properly, “for we are spiritually paralysed by the fetish of Jesus. ... His literary image in the Gos- pels has, through centuries of homage, become far more of an idol than anything graven in wood or stone, so that today the most genuinely reverent act of worship is to destroy that image.’> He felt that the real meaning of the Crucifixion was that the imagined, conceptualized Jesus, the historical image, should be relinquished because while Jesus remained an object of possession, of knowl- edge, and of safety, there could be no spiritual growth or eternal life.
Page 35
torical existence of God-who-became-man Jesus. But Merton thought this assertion of individuality futile. Far better, he said, to realize humbly our own mysterious nature as persons within whom God exists than to believe that man exists because he thinks.
Page 49
At this point it is easy to lose the drift of Teilhard’s theory. What does he mean by a personalized universe? To Teilhard, a devout Christian, God was the ultimate Being, expressed in the perfect man, Jesus Christ. There- fore, he saw the whole of evolution as prearrangedly heading toward the ultrapersonal—toward a point in time when conscious, supremely personal mankind will be united, or oned, with Christ the Omega-point, the heart of the universe.
Page 49
Catholic Christianity has always believed that in some way unfathomable to man, the person of Jesus Christ contains the whole explanation of existence—not so much in his historical concreteness but as the “cosmic Christ,” a spirit of the universe. “The answer to the uni- verse is: Jesus Christ” says Father Corbishley, Superior of Farm Street Church in London; and Teilhard himself says:
Page 50
With this beliefin mind, it was an easy step for Teilhard to conclude that the direction of conscious intelligence must be toward one personality—the personality of Jesus. Individual differences he thought very little of, as we observed earlier. But ultimate personality, to him, was the expression of divinity—unselfish, creative, and pure. The combined personalities of all men, he thought, would become one, drawn like a magnet towards the end of evolution, towards the Pleroma of complete con- vergence on Christ.
Page 53
Because Jesus was a man, Teilhard believed that the cosmic energy of the universe is constantly increasing in man and he saw this “hominized energy” appearing in three ways: incorporated energy, controlled energy, and spiritualized energy.
Page 65
bring out the particular aspect of the Truth needed for that age. Jesus was the last acknowledged incarnation (Theosophists do not count Mohammed), and in 1909 they decided that the time had come when an incarnation was necessary, and they were sure that it was about to happen.
Page 119
Bhakti gurus abound in India, but some have greater depth or more charismatic qualities than others. These come to be reverenced by thousands and are then in- vested by public opinion with even more holy power, for they are thought of as avatars or messiahs, self-realized when born, direct incarnations of God, as uniquely God- become-man as Christians consider Jesus to be.
Page 120
The key provided by Meher Baba does not quite fit the door. Somehow he is too frenetic, his demands and prom- ises too overwhelming and improbable. He insists that he is God, all-knowing and all-powerful, that he is the mes- siah of this age, as much God-man as Jesus:
Page 122
Thus to say “Iam God” means “I have made the trip—I am there.” Meher Baba pointed out that only the man who is really there can say whether he is or not. An avatar, the nearest a human can come to God while still in a body (a list may include Krishna, the Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Mohammed) is the only one who can pronounce on his own status because nobody else has the qualifications to do so. Meher Baba said he was an avatar and many people believed him.
Page 132
There are many people for whom this state of openness is reached, as nearly as it can be reached, through a “messiah,” a personal Christ, one with whom a relation- ship can be established, on whom the weight of sorrows can be laid, to whom devotion is offered. Love must be experienced if it is to grow, and the cosmic image is sometimes easier to love than one’s neighbor. Hindus are well aware of this human need for an object of devotion and provide deities for every type of person, each image being the embodiment of a virtue rather than an actual god. Krishna, the mythical avatar of the Bhagavad Gita, sets many hearts afire. But the sort of avatar who gets into actual history, such as Jesus of Nazareth, tends, perhaps, to create complications, for his humanhood is not always at all easy to reconcile with his “divine” nature.
Page 132
Meher Baba rather fell into this historical trap. He frequently seemed to try too hard to live up to an avatar image and perhaps as many people were turned off by him as. were tumed on. But now that he is dead, young devotees who never met him are thrilled with their image of him in the same way that some Christians respond to the Jesus of their imagination.
Page 136
Older and more reticent Europeans and Americans are repelled by a form of religion which seems to resemble show business more than spirituality, which promotes a star—the young Satguru—and loudly proclaims him as he travels about in his Rolls Royce to be an avatar, on the level of Jesus, the Buddha, and others.
Page 145
family, it is impossible to spend every day for two weeks at Satsang) builds up a hysterical feeling that you must be chosen by a Mahatma. The premies, those who already have the Knowledge, conduct the Satsang and discourse endlessly on the corruptness of society, the futility of modern life, and the grossness of the body. One premie may intersperse his discourse with cracking, uncovered yawns, as though he has been dragged out of bed to speak. Another can be overcome by an emotional devotion to the young Maharaj and tell her audience that he is “love, just love—he actually created Jesus and the Buddha— if any of you have a guru, and he took one look at Guru Maharaj, he would fall down in front of him.”
Page 291
Harding quotes many scriptures to support his case. According to the Advaita of Hinduism, he says, there is one See-er—one Consciousness, one Being—in all things, as their Essence or Reality, and It is empty of all attributes: Liberation is seeing that you are neither the body nor the mind, but This alone. Enlightenment for Hui Neng, one of the founders of Zen, was seeing his “Original Face” —which, interprets Harding, is your No- face. And, he adds, many of the koans or puzzles used in Zen are for getting us to see our Original Face. Jesus taught that we shall find the Kingdom within (not blood and brains and bones, adds Harding). And, says Harding, Rumi, the great Sufi poet, celebrates “headlessness” in much of his poetry. ~ None of this proves anything, he says, but it does pro- vide so many more reasons—if any were needed—for examining the Place the masters are pointing to.
Page 319
Her answer is quite clear. It is Jesus, eternally alive in the heart of man, whom she and her Sisters serve; and the keynote of her teaching and her work has always been: “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it unto me.” Every person, to her, is Jesus. Every derelict or abandoned child or leper-rotted carcass is the Divine Presence—He to whom she has given herself:
Page 319
Today, like before, when Jesus comes among his own, his own don’t know him. He comes in the rotten bodies of our poor, he comes even in the rich, who are being suffocated by their riches, in the loneliness of their hearts, and there is no one to love them. And here Jesus comes to you and me. And often, very, very often, we pass Him by.
Page 320
While on her way to Darjeeling for her annual retreat she had received, in the train, a “‘call’”’ to give up her work and her position at the school and to follow Jesus into the slums, to serve him through the poorest of the poor. This “call” came with utter clarity and certainty and she had no second thoughts about obeying it.
Page 340
Jesus Christ, 65, 119, 122, 132, 140, 291 and Chokmah, 247 and Maharaj Ji, 136 and Roman Catholicism, 49 and Teilhard de Chardin, 3, 49, 50. ole o3eDo and Mother Theresa, 319, 323, 326 and Watts, 20, 21 Judaism, 222, 223, 225, 231, 238
Page 343
Theresa, Mother, ix, 316, 317; attitude to death, 321, 322; attitude to obedience, 324, 325; background, 320; the call to serve Jesus in the slums, 320; the closeness of God, 322; daily prayer of, 317; and Jesus Christ, 319, 323, 326; and leprosy, 323, 324; and love, 322, 323; meditation of, 326;
Page 344
Watts, Alan, vii, ix, 2, 17, 222, 241, 288, 330, 331; background, 19, 20; books: Spirit of Zen, 23, Way of Zen, 23; and Eastern religions, ix, 22; feeling of “I,” 2, 23, 24, 25, 70, 217; and God, 25, 28; hypocrisies of society, 28; the individual as a process of the world, 23, 155; and IT, 17, 19, 27, 28, 77; and Jesus Christ, 20, 21; and words, 25, 26, 70, 196, 331; the present moment, 23, 24, 25, 163; sound, 28, 29
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