This blogspot is a repository for the many sayings and quotes that I have collected in my readings and studies on the path toward spiritual awakening and self-transcendence. May it happen to each of us in this precious human life which we are experiencing. . . .
"The ego is not personal," writes Eckhart Tolle. It has both an individual and a collective identity. And, as dangerous and all pervasive as it is on the individual level, it is on the collective level where it is most insidious. It is collective because it affects us all, and it is insidious because it continually slips under the radar of our consciousness. Unconsciously we go about our day-to-day activity, identified with our internalized thinking, yet tuned out to the madness around us.
"Greed, selfishness, exploitation, cruelty, and violence are still all-pervasive on our planet," Tolle observes. "When you don't recognize them as individual and collective manifestations of an underlying dysfunction or mental illness, you fall into the error of personalizing them."
Watching film footage of the Nuremburg rallies and of the resultant death camps of the Holocaust can we not say that this was an example of a world gone literally mad? Yet what about the greed and corruption that nearly brought down the world financial system in 2008? Was that not also an acute attack of madness? What about the daily traffic jams that clog cities around the globe as our carbon emissions melt the polar icecaps? Yet who amongst us is not sucked into the workaday madness that surrounds us? Is our identification as employees, as townsmen, as citizens, as "haves" or "have-nots" not an extremely potent motivator of our perspectives and behaviour? Are we not all too easily enabled to block out and disregard the harms we are causing to the planet as a whole, simply by the seeming drama of our day-to-day existence?
"You construct a conceptual identity for an individual or group," Tolle points out, "and you say: "This is who he is. This is who they are." When you confuse the ego that you perceive in others with their identity, it is the work of your own ego that uses this misperception to strengthen itself through being right and therefore superior, and through reacting with condemnation indignation, and often anger against the perceived perceived enemy."
"All this is enormously satisfying to the (personal) ego," he notes. "It strengthens the sense of separation between yourself and the other whose "otherness" has become magnified to such an extent that you can no longer feel your common humanity, nor the rootedness in the one Life that you share with each being, your common divinity."
"In the Kingdom of Heaven all is in all, all is one, and all is ours."
-- Meister Eckhart --
"The world inhabited by ordinary, nice, unregenerate people," observes Aldous Huxley, "is mainly dull (so dull that they have to distract their minds from being aware of it by all sorts of artificial "amusements"), some times briefly and intensely pleasurable, occasionally or quite often disagreeable and even agonizing." However, Huxley notes, "(F)or those who have deserved the world by making themselves fit to see God within it as well as within their own souls, it wears a very different aspect."
In one of the most significant passages in the New Testament, Jesus, who had been perpetually persecuted for his views by the Pharisees, and thus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven exclusively in parables, speaks unambiguously to his persecutors. When asked by the Pharisees where the Kingdom of Heaven might be found, he replies directly, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17: 20-21.) Then, in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, when asked by his disciples when the Kingdom of God would come, he replies: "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it." (Gospel of Thomas, Verse 113.)
Thus, it may be seen, as Huxley observed (above), that our being and our environment take on very different aspects depending upon whether we have a mundane or supermundane understanding of their nature. Alluding to these two very different ways of seeing the world, Jesus (again, from the Gospel of Thomas, at Verse 77) tells his disciples: "I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth, and to me all attained. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there."
"It is in the Indian and Far Eastern formulations of the Perennial Philosophy," notes Huxley, "that this subject is most systematically treated.What is prescribed is a process of conscious discrimination between the personal self and the Self that is identical with Brahman, between the individual ego and the Buddha-womb or Universal Mind."
"The result of this discrimination," Huxley points out, "is a more or less sudden and complete "revulsion" of consciousness, and the realization of a state of "no-mind," which may be described as the freeedom from perceptual and individual attachment to the ego-principle. This state of "no-mind" exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained overeagerness of the zealot for salvation. To achieve it one must walk delicately and, to maintain it, must learn to combine the most intense alertness with a tranquil and self-denying passivity, the most indomitable determination with a perfect submission to the leadings of the spirit."
"When no-mind is sought after by a mind," says Huang Po, "that is making it a particular object of thought. There is only testimony of silence; it goes beyond thinking."
"In other words," says Huxley, "we, as separate individuals, must not try to think it, but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it."
Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
-- Aristotle --
There are three basic causes of human suffering, according to Buddhist teachings: ignorance, desire, and anger. Of these, it would seem, anger is perhaps the most-readily identifiable as well as potentially the most damaging to one's self, to others and to the environment.
For most people, a certain degree of anger bubbles just under the surface of their persona, thus recognizing and learning to manage one's innate anger in a mindful manner is a readily achievable aim for each of us. Moreover, efforts in that direction forwards all of us on our common spiritual path.
"The true battlefield is the heart of man, as Dostoevsky said, not wars," Lama Surya Das points out in the attached two-part video. "Wars are not fought over borders. It's not weapons that kill people, it's people that kill people."
"So why," he asks rhetorically, "is this occurring? It is occurring from the greed, and meanness, and cupidity, and fear, and insecurity, and intolerance of people. And we see that all throughout history and all around the world today. So we live in a violent era, a volatile world, and we all see violence and hot wars - shooting wars - in (scores of countries) today. But also we have domestic violence in our homes, and in families, and children being beaten, and all kinds of violence being acted out."
"Also," he notes, there is "aggression, basic aggression that we act out almost every moment, which is aggressively trying to change things from as they are. We are always fighting with reality as it is. This is what Buddhists call 'the basic aggression' - insisting or wanting things to be different from as they are."
"I think it is important to remember that there is nothing in the Dharma that tells us never to be angry," writes Das in "Awakening the Buddha Within," his best selling-book on Buddhist practice. "Anger is a human emotion and it doesn't automatically disappear. Also it has its own logic, its own intelligence and function. If you bottle up and swallow your anger too often, you are going to make yourself ill."
"Meeting the challenge of ill will is not about denying, repressing, or suppressing anger. It's about staying up to date with anger and other emotions by experiencing and releasing their energy moment by moment rather than storing them up. It's about not carrying grudges, or blaming yourself, or turning your anger inward and becoming depressed and despondent. Ideally we should be able to be sensitive enough and aware enough not only to feel life fully but also to let it go."
". . . (D)o not be conformed to the world, rather be transformed by the renewal of your mind."
-- Romans 12:2 --
That there is an inherent conflict between the spiritual quest and the 'norms' of society is a reality that is as old, one assumes, as society itself. As Taoism was in many ways a rejection of Confucian conformity, Buddhism was a rejection of the ritualism of the Vedas, and Christianity was a rejection of a then-stagnant Judaism, so, too, in recent times the multifarious spiritual quest is in many ways a rejection of today's rampant consumerism. Be it the newfound Western interest in Zen, Yoga, Sufism or the Kaballah, or Eastern interest in Christianity, there is a sense it seems that in a post-modern world more and more people are looking for something deeper than scientific materialism and the strictly consumer society that it breeds.
Rather than seeking conformity in post-modern societies that are seen as being increasingly dysfunctional in the face of the existential challenges we face - be it global warming, increasingly severe famines, widespread poverty, massive species extinction, deforestation and desertification, etc. - many individuals now recognize that first and foremost there must be a "renewal of the mind" (individually and collectively) if we are to face and overcome these imminent threats to our very survival. However, there remains a profound inertia towards conformity that challenges even the most ardent spiritual seeker who wishes to remain "in the world" rather than sequestered from it.
The attached video of then radical spiritual philosopher Alan Watts (a video presumably made in the late 1950s or early 1960s before the 'beat' movement morphed into the wider counter-cultural revolution of the late 60s) critiques both the then (and now) status quo, and at once highlights the profound challenge that conformity poses to those spiritual aspirants who would reject conformity in favor of radical transformation.
"In the Christian scriptures," Watts notes, " it says that everyone is equal in the sight of God. That is a mystical utterance. That means that from the standpoint of God, all people are divine and are playing their true function. And that is something that is true on a certain plane of consciousness. But come down a step and try to apply the mystical insight in the practical affairs of every day life, and what do you get? You get a parody of mysticism, You get the idea not that everyone is equal in the sight of God, but that all people are equally inferior."
It takes a bold and independent spiritual seeker - a modern-day Thoreau, perhaps - to remain engaged in society and yet committed to his or her transformation. More importantly, it takes true commitment and independence to carrying the message, as Watts did in the 50s and 60s, that transformation is possible both for individuals and for society as a whole.
"The uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature - not even sand, not even stone, not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be something. It burns and is wild. But the uncreated is no something. Waste, emptiness, total poverty of the creator. Yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible, infinite zero. Everything comes from this desert nothing. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return nowhere?"
"But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being - the incomparable point not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it, if you stop seeking it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost. For you are, at last, nowhere."
"The perfect act is empty. Who can see it? He who forgets form. Out of the formed, the unformed. The empty act proceeds with its own form. Perfect form is momentary, its perfection vanishes at once. Perfection and emptiness work together, for they are the same - the coincidence of momentary form and eternal nothingness. Form, the flash of nothingness. Forget form and it suddenly appears, ringed and reverberating with its own light, which is nothing."
"Well then, stop seeking, let it all happen, let it come and go. What? Everything - i.e., nothing."
"The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you. In this way, cleverness may be gained, but wisdom is lost, and so are joy, love, creativity, and aliveness. They are concealed in the still gap between perception and the interpretation. Of course we have to use words and thoughts. They have their own beauty - but do we need to be imprisoned by them."
The great existential battle is to rise above self-consciousness, and to rid our being of the constant, conditioned inner narrative of the ego. It is this undammed "stream of consciousness" that carries us through an entire lifetime unaware that our real being lies beyond words.
"Neti, neti, neti," goes the Sanskrit chant. "Not this, not this, not this." How, after all, can words possibly describe the ineffable? Spiritual teachers have always taught that the Ultimate is beyond description, and that the incessant voice of the ego is what separates us from the divine. Even when we voice the words in our mind that describe the Ultimate, our words pass like a net through barren waters - catching nothing. "Not this, not this, not this," we realize.
"Knowledge born of the intellect am I not. By nature Truth eternal am I. I am perpetual immutability. Neither formless nor with form, described by the Vedas as "Not this, not this," free from separation and unity, the true Self reigns supreme."
-- Avadhut Gita I:49-50 --
"When the ocean is searching for you," Rumi says, "don't walk to the language-river. Listen to the ocean, and bring your talky business to an end."
"There is a way between voice and presence
where information flows.
In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes."
"Unity in variety is the plan of the universe. As a man you are separate from an animal, but as living beings man, woman, animal and plant are all one; and as existence you are one with the whole universe. That universal essence is God, the ultimate Unity in the universe. In him we are all one. At the same time, in manifestation these differences must always remain."
-- Swami Vivikenanda --
"We find in all beings three sorts of instruments of knowledge," Vivikenanda writes. "The first is instinct which you find most highly developed in animals; this is the lowest instrument of knowledge. What is the second instrument of knowledge? Reasoning. You find that most highly developed in man."
"Now in the first place," Vivikenanda observes, "instinct is an inadequate instrument; to animals the sphere of action is very limited, and within that limit instinct acts. When you come to man, you see it is largely developed into reason. The sphere of action also has bere become enlarged. Yet even reason is still insufficient. Reason can go only a little way and then it stops, it cannot go any farther; and if you try to push it the result is helpess confusion; reason becomes unreasonable."
"Logic becomes argument in a circle," he notes. "Take for instance the very basis of our perception - matter and force. What is matter? That which is acted upon by force. And force? That which acts upon matter. You see the complication, what the logicians call a seesaw, one idea depending on the other, and this again depending on that."
"You find a mighty barrier before reason, beyond which reasoning cannot go," he points out. "Yet it always feels impatient to get into the region of the Infinite beyond. This world, this universe which our senses feel or our mind thinks, is but one atom, so to say, of the Infinite, projected on to the plane of consciousness. Within that narrow limit defined by the network of consciousness works our reason, and not beyond. Therefore there must be some other instrument to take us beyond, and that instrument is called inspiration."
"So instinct, reason, and inspiration are the three main instruments of knowledge," says Vivikenanda. "Instinct belongs to animals, reason to man, and inspiration to God-men. But in all human beings are to be found in more or less developed conditions the germs of all these three instruments of knowledge. To have these mental instruments evolved, the germs must be there. And this must also be remembered, that one instrument is a development of another and therefore does not contradict it."
"It is reason that develops into inspiration," Vivikenanda concludes, "and therefore inspiration does not contradict reason, but fulfills it. Things which reason cannot get at are brought to light by inspiration, and they do not contradict reason. The old man does not contradict the child, but fufills the child."
One of the most insightful and informed ministers active today is the Reverend Theodore (Ted) Nottingham of Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church. In a video that directly addresses the human condition, Rev. Nottingham examines the duality and multiplicity of the human psyche in view of the world's great wisdom traditions.
"If you've had a bad dream," Nottingham explains, "if a thought goes through your head in the shower, your state changes. We are very fragile in that way. We are fractured. We are multiple. We are legion."
"The whole purpose of true teachings," he notes, "is to reunite us so that we can bring together the core of our true self, rise up out of that brokenness and enter the nobility of truly being creatures of free will, creatures in the image of their Creator. One of the blinders for us," he explains, "is that we have a strange psychological way of not seeing these contradictions."
"This is the condition of the human being," Nottingham observes. "This is everybody. It is a condition that many teachers have called 'asleep,' because we are so unaware, (because) our attention is so diverted and fragmented and there is nobody home to be present to our reality."
"There has to be a step back," he notes. "The mystics call it 'detachment,' a position of conscious presence that is not dragged around by what is going on, that does not have the rug pulled out from under it at any moment, and that is dependable both for God and for ourselves."
The ability to detach from outward phenomena is possible, Nottingham notes, but it "has to be created," through practice in mindfulness. "We don't come with that," he warns, "and life conspires to keep us from that place of centering. All the spiritual disciplines return to this. Meditation, prayer, all of these methods and habits and ways of life offered to us by the teachings lead us into a centeredness within, in a place of inner quiet, an inner sanctuary that is sealed off from the outside."
"In the world," Nottingham notes, "we are in exile. Spiritual beings lost in a world of materialism, disconnected from our source, no longer dependent as we should be on that which is greater than we are, thinking that we are independent, (we are) cut off."
Another great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, made the same observations and voiced the same warnings regarding the many split off 'selves' that can exist within the human psyche.
"We are many and not one," Krishamurti observes. "The one does not come into being till the many cease. The clamorous many are at war with each other day and night, and this war is the pain of life. We destroy one, but another rises in its place; and this seemingly endless process is our life. We try to impose the one on the many but the one soon becomes the many."
"Our problem," he observes, " is not how to hear the one voice but to understand the composition, the make-up, of the many which we are are." Yet, this is exceedingly difficult, he notes (as so many other teachers have), because the parts - each with its myriad of desires - cannot undertand the whole. Thus, like Nottingham, he concludes that it is in understanding desire itself, and detaching from one's desires, that one comes to wholeness.
"The voice of the many is the voice of the one," Krishnamurti writes, "and the one voice assumes authority; but it is still the chattering of a voice. We are voices of the many, and we try to catch the still voice of the one. The one is the many if the many are silent to hear the voice of the one. . . .
"To be aware of the whole, the conflict of the many, there must be an understanding of desire," he notes. "There is only one activity of desire; though there are varying and conflicting demands and pursuits, they are all the outcome of desire."
"Desire may not be sublimated or suppressed," Krishnamurti cryptically observes, "it must be understood without him who understands. If the entity who understands is there," he warns, "then it is still the entity of desire."
Complete detachment from desire through the experiential realization of one's wholeness, or centeredness, without any fractures, seems to be what is required. To see one's desire with one's very being, devoid of the raucous narrations of the many smaller 'selves' we each possess, is the way that leads us out of the mind trap we have created. For, "(t)o understand without the experiencer is to be free of the one and the many," Krishnamurti notes.
"In the awareness of this whole process," he writes, "there is a silence which is not of the experiencer. In this silence only does understanding come into being."
[Krishnamurti: Commentaries on Living: First Series," pp. 37-38.]
"
"The mystics," Nottingham notes, "tell us that you must be emptied, so that you may be filled . Meaning that it is possible, by eliminating the many false 'selves' of the psyche, for us to become "transparent to the divine," as the great 20th-century Christian mystic Karlfried Graf von Durckneim put it.
In his ground-breaking work, "The Power of Now," Eckhart Tolle, an enlightened spiritual teacher, takes the reader through the mechanism by which our conditioned thinking patterns and their concomitant emotional states rule our lives.
The "ego" - our individualized and habitual way of problem-creating, thinking and problem-solving, or what the psychologist/philosopher William James identified as the "stream of consciousness" - is, Tolle teaches, always accompanied by what he calls "the pain-body." Thinking begets the pain-body, the pain-body begets yet more thinking, and so on, down the road of suffering.
Yet, like the Buddha some 2500+ years ago, Tolle also identifies a way out of suffering. End the addiction to, and the identification with, the human ego and the suffering of the pain-body will also abate. In his famous statement, "I think therefore I am," DesCartes was wholly wrong, Tolle says. "I think therfore I suffer," being much closer to the seeming truth.
"There is no ego apart from the thoughts," Tolle notes. "The thoughts, (and) identification with thoughts, is ego. But the thoughts that go through your mind, of course, are linked to the collective mind of the culture you live in (and) humanity as a whole. So they are not your thoughts as such, but you pick them up from the collective . . . most of them."
"So you identify with thinking," Tolle observes, "and the identification with thinking becomes ego; which means, simply, that you believe in every thought that arises, and you derive your sense of 'who you are' from what your mind is telling you (about) who you are."
And so our thoughts breed beliefs and motions, which in turn breed further reinforcing thoughts, beliefs and emotions, all in a psychological whirl which can quickly drive one 'mad' at any given point in time.
Stopping such thoughts is seemingly the only way in which we will break this vicious spiral. And, it is in the portal of what Tolle simply calls "Being" that we are afforded the silence that will break through into the raucous noise of the ego, bringing with it the clarity and sanity which fosters an emotional respite of peace, forbearance, compassion and well-being to a world of 'thought addicts' and 'emotional junkies.'
As the great 20th-century enlightened sage Ramana Maharshi taught:
"The mind is by nature restless. Begin liberating it from restlessness; give it peace; make it free from distractions; train it to look inward, and make all this a habit. This is done by ignoring the external world and removing the obstacles to peace of mind."
In a timely, yet timeless, message, aimed at those of us struggling with the reality of difficult times, Pastor Ted Nottingham of Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church, a prolific author and inspired teacher, asks: "(H)ow can we apply in a practical way the great teachings of spiritual masters throughout the ages to the here and now, to this 21st-century malaise, this troubled living that so many of us are in and (can) seem to find no way out of?"
Reverend Nottingham, one of the most informed and transformative voices in America's religious life, draws on the vast teachings of the Orthodox Church and its great spiritual teachers, as well as other esoteric wisdom traditions, to inform his brand of enlightened Christianity, a brand of faith based on the vast untapped, and perhaps unknown, potential of the individual.
"Self-awareness," says Nottingham "allows us to become conscious of who we are in the midst of our external circumstances. Because just by that separation of attention of yourself and the external world, you begin to pull back some of that energy and attention caught up in the struggles of the outer life."
"Through self-awareness," he says, "you are calling yourself home, you are coming back into yourself in a place that is, in some ways, beyond time." The timelessness of the Eternal or Spiritual, being, of course, at the heart of all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions, and it is the essential teaching of Christ's message that Nottingham continually brings home to his audience
"God or Spirit," doesn't just drop into our existence," he notes. Indeed, he points out, "we have to reach up to it metaphorically through consciousnsess, through expanded awareness."
"Most of us," he rightly observes, "are tunnel visioned, funnel-visioned, hypnotized by the outside world, and therefore full of fears (and) full of helplessness, really, in this global meltdown."
"The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kindgdom of God is within you."
-- Luke 17: 20-21 --
"My suggestion to you," he advises, "is to separate out, where you can find some peace within that is not completely flooded by the tsunami of the outside world. And from that first step into a place of peace, you can expand into (a) spiritual awareness which give us strength and courage that we knew not that we had; that gives us hope when there seems to be no hope around, (and) the courage to make it through another day."
"This teaching of detachment, he observes, "of recollection, of mindfulness, of remembering the deeper self, all place us in a new relationship to our circumstances."
"Let (these) be teachings for you now in this hard time," Nottingham urges. "Find that peace that you can't find any place else; find that strength that is your spiritual self and ability of your true identity; and, with God's help, may you find your way through these difficult times."
