January 27, 2012

They cut another pre-cancerous mole out of me a couple of days ago.  I sit here about a month shy of 60 having been diagnosed the past couple of years with what my doctor calls "older" persons' complaints: melanoma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, sleep apnea, glaucoma--and with my history nobody has to tell me why.  I love the colorful way Ramakrishna puts it:

"Sin begets its own result.  This is God's law.  Won't you burn your tongue if you chew a chili?  In his youth Mathur [a dead friend] led a rather fast life; so he suffered from various diseases before his death.  One may not realize this in youth.  I have looked into the hearth in the Kali temple when logs are being burnt.  At first the wet wood burns very well.  It doesn't seem then that it contains much moisture.  But when the wood is sufficiently burnt, all the moisture runs back to one end.  At last water squirts from the fuel and puts out the fire."

Can you say "burning the candle at both ends?"  I'm about to squirt.  

January 26, 2012

Many consider Ramakrishna the Jesus of the 19th century.  Anyone who samples "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna" would soon see why.  He, too, was a salt-of-the-earth figure whose spiritual parables and metaphors resonate very deeply on multiple levels for a wide audience, which attracted the erudite and those less educated alike.  For example, because I am too well read in matters Advaitan, I can complicate the simplest instructions of Jnana yoga, which muddies something like self-inquiry meditation with all manner of misdirected conceptualization.  Ramakrishna puts it ever so simply in order to reach overheated people like me:

"...cultivate discrimination between the Real and the unreal.  God alone is the Real, that is to say, the Eternal Substance, and the world is unreal, that is to say, transitory.  As soon as a man finds his mind wandering away to the unreal, he should apply discrimination.  The moment an elephant stretches out its trunk to eat a plaintain-tree in a neighbor's garden, it gets a blow from the iron goad of the driver."

Is there a better way to instruct us on concentration?  If only Jesus had had somebody like the fortunate scribe, "M," who sat at Ramakrishna's feet by day and wrote it all down that very night for four successive years. The New Testament came in parts anywhere from 10-60 years after Jesus' death, depending on the gospel and which researchers you choose to believe (with some of Paul's letters a little closer in time).  "The Gospel of Ramakrishna" has not been handed down through centuries of translation and political and social prejudices extant in the Judeao-Christian bible.  It is still pure.  

January 17, 2012

Do I believe in reincarnation?  Put it this way: the day scientists are able to resurrect human beings from mug shots and fingerprints, you will find Sri Hippie Speedballs aplenty in Pennsylvania and Florida.

"...consciousness--does the body create it or does consciousness create the dream of body, the dream of somebody?" - Eckhart Tolle

This is the chicken or the egg conundrum of metaphysics, very ticklish.  Science and personal experience point to that chunk of meat between our ears as the creative source.  Advaita Vedanta would have it that all is consciousness, including the meat and everything it tunes into, or, in the vernacular, that Brahman (Existence-Knowledge-Bliss) alone is real and the world illusory.

January 15, 2012

"There are three classes of conditions that hinder one from advancing along the path of Enlightenment.  First, there are the allurements arising from the senses, from external conditions and from the discriminating mind.  Second, there are the internal conditions of the mind, its thoughts, desires and mood....In the third class of impediments are placed the individual's instinctive and fundamental (and therefore most insidious and persistent) urges--the will to live and enjoy, the will to cherish one's personality, the will to propagate, which give rise to greed and lust, fear and anger, infatuation, pride and egoism." - Ashvaghosha

One person may call these things impediments while another calls them reasons to live.  To most of us, you try to take away things like "the will to live and enjoy" or, god forbid, the will to propagate, and your cold, dead fingers won't get very far, no sirree. That's the stuffy stuff of monks, not me.  But they are only hindrances when they occur under the radar, subconsciously inducing our behavior and distorting our world-view.  Instincts will carry on of their own momentum regardless of our external efforts to suppress them--in fact they will likely metastasize into greed and lust and the rest of it because of that very suppression.  No, freedom lies in bringing everything into the light and recognizing that none of it, neither the least nor the most unsettling of our senses, thoughts, or instincts, need cut us off from spirit. Jnana and mindfulness illuminate the impediments as just so much flotsam in the brief existence of the body-mind, and the body-mind as just so much jetsam headed back into the sea of consciousness from which it came.   

January 11, 2012

"This state of no-mind exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation.  To achieve it, one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense awareness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit." - Aldous Huxley

Huxley discerns the central paradox of any path to enlightenment, which must employ striving without striving, but I get the feeling that he is a mechanic who has yet to drive the car.  It is much easier than all those nuts and bolts would suggest.  Like Nisargadatta, he recognizes earnestness ("indomitable determination") as the essential attitude and he emphasizes the ultimate wisdom as beyond thinking.  But then he goes off course with words like "achieve" and "maintain" balanced against "passivity" and "submission" in his attempt to convey a confluence of opposites, none of which exist in awakened sensibility because there is and never has been anyone to awaken.

Here is someone who drives the car:

"Pursue not the outer entanglements,
Dwell not in the inner void,
Be serene in the oneness of things,
And dualism vanishes of itself.
. . .
When the deep mystery of one Suchness is fathomed,
All of a sudden we forget the external entanglements;
When the ten thousand things are viewed in their oneness,
We return to the origin and remain where we have always been." - The Third Patriarch of Zen

No matter.  Huxley was terrific at pooling wisdom literature for posterity, just as Eckhart Tolle does today with damn good stuff like "Stillness Speaks."  They lead a modern horse to water.  From there, cultivation of abandonment, surrender and acceptance resolve into all-pervasive love, which ultimately evaporates into peace beyond understanding. 

January 8, 2012

"How does it feel
To be on your own
No direction known
A complete unknown?" - Dylan

How does it feel, this realization so sought after with bated spiritual breath?  It feels global, omnipresent and omnidirectional, without center and without limit.  It is sensing without objectivizing, it is void, vacant, yet vibrant, apprehended both empty and full at once (though ultimately neither, which can be understood intellectually as well as intuitively).  It begins in abandonment, surrender and acceptance, and it ends in complete equanimity, utter peace, regardless of the freak show thrown up on the screen by the body-mind.  It is a warm hearth midst the storming world.  I watch my personality roil with emotion and respond conditionally to situations, like a fire flaring up even as it consumes the last of its fuel, but I am not this personality.  I am the place in which a fire burns without consuming what I am.  I am not a part of something bigger because I am not apart. 

January 3, 2012

"...they (the awakened) are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is true relation to the universe and its spiritual Ground." - Aldous Huxley

They are "recollected."  They are prior to the explosion of senses and thoughts, always abiding just there even as the world emerges with all its sturm and drang.  It is effortless and undefiled abiding in our own true nature.

"What life can compare with this?  Sitting quietly by the window,
I watch the leaves fall and the flowers bloom, as the seasons come and go." - Seccho

Seccho expresses effortless and uncluttered recollection.  

December 31, 2011

We are our own worst enemies.  We grind ourselves into disease and dust with our constant resistance to "what-is," no matter what it is.  The grass is always greener and the mind a many-tentacled thing.  Nevertheless, I resolve again this New Year's to take notice of my ceaseless restlessness as it happens, to stop squandering this peaceful present moment, and to cultivate awareness of no-mind until it becomes the autonomic default undergirding nothing, no matter what.

"...it is the One before whom words recoil." - Shankara

"...human craving can never be satisfied except by the unitive knowledge of God..." - Aldous Huxley

December 30, 2011

"It's a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body, through identification with our psyche, on to an identification with our souls, then to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification." - Ram Dass

It's a ripening.  We identify with letters until we awaken to alphabet soup.  

December 25, 2011

"If it seemed to be possible should we not have done it long ago?" - Wei Wu Wei

And so in its place we are given Christmas, another in a long line of attempts by our limited minds to posit the possibility of enlightenment dawning here and now.

December 23, 2011

"Perceiving non-inferentially" is how WWW terms awakened sensibility: living in presence absent the tugging and pulling of past and future, of conditioned consciousness.  This is not a matter of attaining, but of attuning.    

December 22, 2011

"...ask yourself whether you are not still looking as from a phenomenal center that has only an imaginary existence.  If so, you will be misled.  If not--you will understand at once." - Wei Wu Wei

Thus, the effectiveness of protracted self-inquiry.  Holding "I am" in attention is like tossing styrofoam into sulfuric acid: it withers, melts, disappears into the solution.  So, too, does our fabricated self and all of its attendant mind-stuff.

December 21, 2011

"Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking?  Mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!" - The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare knew which questions to ask.  He also seems aware of his chief blind spot: himself.

"He that commends me to mine own content,
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop.
Who falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother, in quest of them, unhappy, lose myself."

Because Shakespeare intuits the deepest truths, he at times channels the Perennial Philosophy in the course of his writings.  I doubt he even knew it, as far as rational, conscious knowing, because he is intimating non-rational, unconscious wisdom here as intricate and profound as anything Wei Wu Wei might posit: "What we are looking for, trying to know, seeking to find, is what is looking, trying, seeking...but your conditioned objectivising bangs the door shut as soon as it opens."