The Tao of "What Is Real"

A good man is not aware of his goodness, 
And is therefore good. 
A foolish man tries to be good, 
And is therefore not good. 
A truly good man does nothing, 
Yet leaves nothing undone. 
A foolish man is always doing, 
Yet much remains to be done. 

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone. 
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done. 
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds, 
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order. 

Therefore when the Dao is lost, there is goodness. 
When goodness is lost, there is kindness. 
When kindness is lost, there is justice. 
When justice is lost, there is ritual. 
Ritual is the dead shell of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion. 
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Dao. 
It is the beginning of folly. 

Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface, 
On the fruit and not the flower. 
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.

-- Lao Tzu, 'Tao Te Ching', Verse 38

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

More so than most of the world's great religious or wisdom traditions, Taoism (or Daoism) as expressed in Lao Tzu's classic "Tao Te Ching" is unrelentingly paradoxical. ("A truly good man does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone.") Like quantum mechanics, it's "methods" are expressible but an ultimate "understanding" or "meaning" are beyond the rational capacity of our ordinary consciousness and language. Famously, Lao Tzu starts the "Tao Te Ching" by declaring: "The Dao that can be told is not the essential Dao."

Even the greatest of enlightened teachers - the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, etc. - can only offer a flavorful "taste" of what the ultimate "essence" of "reality" is like. The essence of "what is" - the Universe, God or Allah, Buddha-nature or Nirvana, Brahma, the Dao, however one wishes to describe "It" - remains "ineffable" and beyond the power of pictures, poetry, or prose to fully describe.

The danger of such "ineffability" is that over time even the greatest religions and wisdom traditions, almost inevitably it seems, devolve and become to most of their adherents mere "dead shell(s) of faith and loyalty." The generation of religious belief, religious faith, religious knowledge, even religious adherence, are in most instances relatively good things for both individuals and society, but unless a religious or spiritual path generates transformational inner and holistic religious experiences it becomes "a dead shell" (above) in which "the salt loses its savour." (Matthew 5:13). This, Lao Tzu observes, "is the beginning of confusion."

The spiritual seeker who aspires to a truly transformational religious or spiritual experience will not be satisfied with the rote teachings and empty rituals offered in many a dormant religious community which seeks to promote merely outwardly-focused behaviour and moral conformity. He or she must, exercising great discrimination, first find and then dwell upon and in "what is real and not what is on the surface."

"Every object, every being," Rumi points out, "is a jar full of delight. Be a connoisseur," he advises, "and taste with caution."

"Any wine will get you high," the great Sufi poet notes. "Judge like a king and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with fear, or some urgency of 'what's needed.'"

Just as the pollinated flower of an apple tree turns into the fruit, so the seemingly outer rituals, teachings and practices of a true wisdom tradition, when seeded by true experiential insight, will effect an inner transformation and the attainment of a new state of consciousness and being.

Therefore, advises the great Daoist master, one should dwell "on the fruit and not the flower . . . accept(ing) the one and reject(ing) the other."

Buddha Nature . . . As It Is

"The real problem," states renowned Dzogchen master, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, "is the state of mind of the ordinary person, which is always changing from one thing to another. Sentient beings are totally unstable, but someone who has truly recognized mind essence . . . is completely free from suffering. Even in this lifetime one can be totally free of pain, and progress further and further on the path of happiness."

". . . It is never pleasant to maintain the state of mind of an ordinary person, which is always changing," he observes. "When unhappy, one is totally overcome by that feeling. Better to recognize the wide-awake empty cognizance and remain like that."

In describing Dzogchen's "pointing-out" instruction - i.e., that our inherent Buddha nature is an "unconfined empty cognizance" - and the accompanying spiritual discipline to effectively stabilize one's being in that state, the Rinpoche observes:

"Basically there is nothing to do in all this practice. Simply allowing our mind to be, without having to do anything, is entirely against our usual habits. Our normal tendency is to think, 'I want to do this. I want to do that.' Then we actually go do it. Finally, we feel happy and satisfied when it's all neat, all accomplished, accomplished by ourselves. But that type of attitude is totally wrong in this type of practice. There is nothing whatsoever to do. Anything we try to do becomes an imitation, something made up by our thoughts and concepts."

"As a matter of fact," he notes, "it may feel utterly dissatisfying, extremely disappointing, to allow our original nature to be as it naturally is. We might much rather do something, imagine something, create something, and really put ourselves through a lot of hardship. Maybe that is why the Buddha did not teach Dzogchen and Mahamudra openly - because this not-doing is in some ways contrary to human nature."

"Buddha nature is free of the three times of past, present, and future, while our mind is under the power of the three times. Wakeful knowing is free of the three times. The three times involve fixating, thinking. Wakeful knowing is free of fixation and thought."

"The Buddha," he says, "realized that different beings had various capacities, so out of great compassion and skillful means he gave teachings that were right for different individuals. Although the essence of all teachings of all enlightened ones is to simply let be in recognition of one's own nature, the Buddha taught a lot of complex instructions in order to satisfy people on all the different levels. . . . It seems to be human nature to love complications, to want to build up a lot of stuff. Later on, of course, they must allow it all to fall away."

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

As It Is, vol. 1, pp. 63-64

The Dysfunctional Human Ego

"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."

[Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth," pp. 73-74]

The Will to Percieve a New World

Wisdom is to know that all we perceive and conceive is not necessarily wholly true, that to a large extent our perceptions and conceptions are a result of what we wish to see and think about. It is clear, then, as Aldous Huxley points out below, that what we concentrate our intelligence upon is critical to our well-being, for our thoughts and perceptions shape our world.

"Some thoughts are practically unthinkable," Huxley notes, "except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present."

"For long periods of history and prehistory," he points out, "it would seem that men and women, though perfectly capable of doing so, did not wish to pay attention to problems which their descendants found absorbingly interesting. For example," he points out, "there is no reason to suppose that between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change, comparable to the change, let us say, in the physical structure of the horse's foot during an incomparably longer span of geological time. What happened," he observes, "was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to certain other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences."

"Our perceptions and understandings are directed, in large measure, by our will," Huxley notes. "We are aware of and we think about the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there's a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flamethrowers - that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained"

[Aldous Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 17]

Given the atrocities of war, famine and increasing environmental crises we have witnessed in the past hundred-odd years, one can only question why our perceptions and conceptions of the world we have created remain so static. While our scientific understanding of our world has increased a thousandfold and more, our understanding of the inner man, our motivations and collective consciousness seem to have changed but little. What one asks, will it take for us to reorient our collective perceptions and conceptions? We cannot, after all, as Einstein so plainly understood, solve our current existential challenges with the same level of thinking that created them.

What, therefore, do we will? A greater understanding of ourselves and our place in the evolutionary process of the universe, or the proliferation of ever greater consumption and domination over nature? Do we wish to come to "the unitive knowledge of the Godhead" or produce ever more efficient weapons to maintain the status quo bequeathed us by the horrors of the twentieth century? One knows where Huxley, Einstein and other great thinkers would weigh in on these questions. It seems clear that they would evince a will to an ever greater understanding of man and his place in both a new world and a newfound evolving cosmos.

Tolle and Ram Dass: Mastery of Life

"The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!"

-- Robert Burns --
("To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with a Plough")

"Mastery of life is not a question of control," observes spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, "but of finding a balance between human and Being."

Our humanity would have us incessantly casting our inner eye backwards and forwards in order to control and tame life, so that our fears and worries are averted and all remorse and bitterness over the past is overcome. Yet, in continual recurrence to this netherworld of past and future ( "I backward cast my e'e. On prospects drear! An' forward, tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!") we rob ourselves and others of the larger dimension of our Being. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Robert Burns seems wistful, even envious, of the mouse whose nest he has overturned with the plough. The mouse who lives in the Eternal Present knows a dimension of Being unknown to the ploughman who is merely stuck, held prisoner in his unconscious humanity, somewhere between his past and future.

"To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each of us is here to learn," Tolle points out. "You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity."

[Tolle, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," pp. 104, 106-107.] 

As Ram Dass observed in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: "Whatever karma it is that brought you to this point, it's now your dharma to work with it." To be present to that dharma is to move beyond time-limited humanity and towards eternal Being. It is to be as present as the mouse and not to be enslaved, like the ploughman, to the woeful past and and a fearful future.

[Ram Dass, "Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita," p. 52.]

Mooji: On the Conquest of Thought

"If we think for a moment that there is such a thing as thought, consciousness itself will appear as thought. That itself will appear as the world, and jivas, and as the Supreme. There will be misery arising out of it. Therefore, beloved, conquer thought easily by the certitude that there is no such thing as thought and all is Consciousness, and like this attain bliss."

"Conquest of thought alone is the great success. Conquest of thought alone is the great achievement. Conquest of thought alone is the great yoga. Conquest of thought alone is the great knowledge. Conquest of thought alone is the great purification. Conquest of thought alone is the great liberation. Conquest of thought alone is the removal of sorrow. Conquest of thought alone is the greatest happiness. But conquest of thought is, itself, the renunciation of thought, (and) the renunciation of thought is Consciousness."

-- Ribhu Gita --

Anthony Paul ("Mooji") Moo-Young

Basing his short lecture (below) on a reading from the Ribbhu Gita, spiritual teacher, Mooji, points out that the basic problem of human existence, the individual ego, arises from the individual's identification with the body-mind complex rather than the pure Being innate in each of us. Mahamaya, the great illusion that we are the body-mind and nothing more, arises when we wholly identify with our egoic thinking, and are thus blinded to the pure consciousness and Being within us.

"Egoic thought can only molest you when you are the body-mind identity," Mooji notes. "Mahamaya, the great illusion, can only overwhelm you when you carry the modification 'I am the body-mind', 'I am just a person.' No person can defeat that Mahamaya. It is only because the Parabrahman is inside you, the Supreme Being is inside you, that you can transcend maya.""

"(It is) only by limiting yourself to being the body-mind only," Mooji points out, that illusions and (more) illusions can enter. But because the Supreme Being is your Being, because you are identical with that, and that alone can transcend the effects of maya, that is the evidence that you are the Supreme Being. Because human beings have transcended maya."

"Nothing is either good or bad," wrote Shakespeare, "But our thinking makes it so."

Thomas Merton: On Action and Acceptance

In his study of Eastern religious and wisdom traditions, a study cut short by his untimely death, the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, delved deeply into the heart of those traditions, finding the common ground that each shares with his own Christian faith  Not surprisingly, in his reflections on Hinduism (taken from his pithy book, "Thoughts On the East") he identifies the relentless pursuit of one's own self-will as the primary obstacle to spiritual growth and lasting happiness.

"The hazard of the spiritual quest is of course that its genuineness cannot be left to our own isolated subjective judgment alone," Merton points out. "We do not simply create our own lives on our own terms. Any attempt to do so is ultimately an affirmation of our individual self as ultimate and supreme. This is a self-idolatry which is diametrically opposed to Krishna consciousness or to any other authentic form of religious or metaphysical consciousness."

"The Gita," he notes, "sees that the basic problem of man is his endemic refusal to live by a will other than his own. For in striving to live entirely by his own individual will, instead of becoming free, man is enslaved by forces even more exterior and more delusory than his own transient fancies. He projects himself out of the present into the future. He tries to make for himself a future that accords with his own fantasy, and thereby escape from a present reality which he does not fully accept. And yet, when he moves into the future he wanted to create for himself, it becomes a present that is once again repugnant to him. And yet this is what he had "made" for himself - it is his karma."

"In accepting the present in all its reality as something to be dealt with precisely as it is," Merton writes, "man comes to grips at once with his karma and with a providential will which, ultimately, is more his own than what he currently experiences on a superficial level, as "his own will.""

"It is in surrendering a false and illusory liberty on the superficial level that man unites himself with the inner ground of reality and freedom in itself which is the will of God, of Krishna, of Providence, of Tao."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

An anonymous writer made the following observations about the challenges and hazards we create in refusing to accept life on life terms, and about the spiritual benefits that come to us when we do:

"(A)cceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. . . . (U)nless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."

"Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mere players." He forgot to mention that I was the chief critic. I was always able to see the flaw in every person, every situation. And I was always glad to point it out, be ause I knew you wanted perfection, just as I did. . . . (A)cceptance (has) taught me that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us; that we are all children of God and we each have a right to be here. When I complain about me or about your, I am complaining about God's handiwork. I am saying that I know better than God."

Carl Jung: On Man's Existence

"The decisive question for a man is this: Is he related to something Infinite or not?"

-- Carl G. Jung --

"I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to. And, since I have reached my highest point and cannot transcend anymore, I am guarding my light and my treasure. It is most precious not only to me but, above all, to the darkness of the Creator who needs man to illuminate his creation. If God had foreseen his world it would be a mere senseless machine and man's existence a useless freak.  My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says "no" to it."

(Carl G. Jung, correspondence dated September 14, 1960)

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Says the mystic poet, Rumi:

"Consider the difference
in our actions and God's actions.

We often ask, "Why did you do that?"
or "Why did I act like that?"

We do act, and yet everything we do
is God's creative action.

We look back and analyze the events
of our lives, but there is another way
of seeing, a backward-and-forward-at-once
vision, that is not rationally understandable.

Only God can understand it."

[Coleman Barks, "The Essential Rumi," page 28.]

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Yoga and the Concentration of the Mind

Yoga is the method of uniting, or "yoking," the innate Godhead within one's being with the ultimate Ground of Being that pervades and upholds the universe. In the second of his Yoga aphorisms (or sutras), the great sage, Patanjali, notes that, "Yoga is the control of the thought-waves of the mind." This, of course, implies that it is only the uncontrolled thought-waves of the mind that separate us from the realization of the Godhead within us. Indeed, Swami Satchidananda, in his commentary on Patanjali's yoga sutras, points out that "for the keen student this one sutra would be enough because the rest of them only explain this one."

In his writings, Swami Vivikenanda (one of the first persons to bring the teachings of India to the West), asks:

"How has all the knowledge of the world been gained but by the concentration of the powers of the mind? The world," he observes, "is ready to give up its secrets if we only know how to knock, how to give it the necessary blow. The strength and the force of the blow come through concentration. There is no limit to the power of the human mind," he points out, "(t)he more concentrated it is, the more power is brought to bear on one point." (I. 130-131.)

"The flow of this continuous control of the mind becomes steady," Vivikenanda notes, "when practiced day after day, and the mind obtains the faculty of constant concentration." (I. 273.)

"Concentration is the essence of all knowledge," he points out, "nothing can be done without it. Ninety per cent of thought force is wasted by the ordinary human being, and therefore he is constantly committing blunders; the trained man or mind never makes a mistake." (VI. 123-124.)

In relation to this Swami Satchitananda cites the Sanskrit saying: Mana eva manushyanam karanam bandha mokshayoho. "As the mind, so the man; bondage or liberation are in your mind."

"If you feel bound," notes Satchidananda, "you feel bound. If you are liberated, you feel liberated. Things outside neither bind nor liberate you," he points out, "only your attitude towards them does that." (Satchidananda, "The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali," p. 5.)

As an 'attitude' is only a conditioned, habitual way of thinking, the practice of yoga is unlearning such conditioned habits of thought, and thereby concentrating the mind into a focused instrument with which to probe the inner depths of one's being. For it is only in doing so that we can become capable of perceiving the All-in-All.

Rev. Theodore Nottingham: Deep Prayer

"For most people ordinary life is characterized by the sense that God is absent," notes scholar and author, Rev. Theodore Nottingham. "But if God were not present at every moment we would not be here either."

"Creation is not a one-time event," Nottingham points out in a poignant presentation on "Deep Prayer" (below), it is God's ongoing gift on every level of our being, from the tiniest quark in the universe of the subatomic world to the highest stages of consciousness."

"Theresa of Avalon wrote in the 16th century," he points out, "that 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.'"

"The external senses perceive the immediacy of material reality," Nottingham observes, "(while) the spiritual senses perceive the immediacy of Divine reality in various forms by means of a gradual process in which the Word of God is assimilated, interiorized, and understood."

Says the 13th century Persian mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi:

"You and your intelligence
are like the beauty and precision
of an astrolabe.

Together, you calculate how near
existence is to the sun!

Your intelligence is marvelously intimate.
It's not in front of you or behind,
or to the left or the right.

Now try, my friend, to describe how near
is the creator to your intellect!

Intellectual searching will not find
the way to that king!

The movement of your finger
is not separate from your finger.

                      . . . . .
                     
This visible universe has many weathers
and variations.
                       But uncle, O uncle,
the universe of the creation-word,

the divine command to Be, that universe
of qualities is beyond any pointing to.

More intelligent than intellect,
and more spiritual than spirit.

No being is unconnected
to that reality, and that connection
cannot be said. There, there's
no separation and no return.

                    . . . . .

"In the evolution of humanity's spiritual awareness," notes Nottingham, "we find that prayer becomes something very different. The great sages of all traditions reveal in their own lives that prayer is ultimately a uniting of human consciousness with a vaster life that they call divine. We can therefore trace the evolution of prayer from petition (or) asking, to intercession (praying for others), to contemplation - silence transforming prayer."

"We are then," he observes, "lifted out of the mundane consciousness which we mistakenly take for reality and experience the freedom and insight, and capacity to love, that transcends our ordinary way of being. The transforming power of prayer deals with a more attuned awareness, an exulted consciousness of the present moment, and a liberation from the psychological baggage that blocks our true identity. Consciousness is energy," he points out and with a little discernment of our inner lives, we can easily notice the difference in quality of our various states."

(Poem excerpts from Coleman Barks' "The Essential Rumi," pp. 151-152.)

Theodore Nottingham: On the Kindgdom of Heaven

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain
of mustard seed that a man took and
sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all
seeds,but when it has grown it is larger
than all the garden plants and becomes
a tree, so that the birds of the air come
and make nests in its branches.”

(Matthew 13:31-32)

The Kingdom of Heaven is not above, but is both within us and spread out upon the face of the earth. In a powerfully insightful sermon on the parables of Jesus, author and pastor, Rev. Theodore Nottingham, illustrates how a mustard seed of spiritual insight nourished by spiritual practice can blossom into a true flowering of the higher consciousness that is innate within each of us. It is this "Kingdom of Heaven" within us (Luke 17:21) that Nottingham rightly asserts is at the heart of all of Christ's teachings.

"I suggest to you," says Nottingham, "that the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing less than God's living presence known to you when you can enter that state of awareness, that state of consciousness, when you are not asleep to it. And so all of (Jesus') teachings are processes to get us there."

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." (Thomas, 113.)

"There is a method to this madness of spiritituality," Nottingham asserts. "Just that little bit of (spiritual) remembrance (and) application is so powerful that its ripple effect can change others and affect others, who (then) affect others, and (thus) have a powerful impact on your world today. . . . It is the power of God in action through you."

"He is," Nottingham points out, "giving us the clues (and) telling us in timeless imagery how to make these gifts of God manifest in your life, how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and become one with that love which then pours out to the world, how to forget 'self' and let something more profound come forth."

"When that yearning to help another takes you beyond your 'self' and causes you to do good in the world," says Nottingham, "the Kingdom of God is at hand because you have taken that seed seriously, you have cared for it and you have let it come through in such a way that transformation occurs. Then you unite with something greater than yourself (and) you become a conduit for the love of God in this world."

The Tao: Beyond Preconceptions and Thought Structures

"In order to recognize the reality of (the) experience of Greater Being, " writes modern mystic philosopher, Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim, "we need nothing more that the 'sacred sobriety' of common sense. This, in fact, is that transcendental realism which is neither clouded nor inhibited by preconceived concepts and rational thought structures."

Steeped in Eastern spiritual traditions, yet grounded in his own Christian faith, Durckheim (a one-time consular diplomat in Japan) was well aware that preconceptions and strictly rational thought structures more often than not obscure the 'realities' they try to illuminate.

In the Tao Te Ching, we read:

When the superior man hears the Way.

      he is scarcely able to put it into practice.

When the middling man hears the Way,

      he appears now to preserve it, now to lose it.

When the inferior man hears the Way,

      he laughs at it loudly.

If he did not laugh,

      it would not be fit to be the Way.

For this reason,

There is a set of epigrmas that says:
      "The bright Way seems dim.

      The forward Way seems backward.

      The level Way seems bumpy.

      Superior integrity seems like a valley.

      The greatest whiteness seems grimy.

      Ample integrity seems insufficient.

      Robust integrity seems apathetic.

      Plain truth seems sullied.

      The great square has no corners.

      The great vessel is never completed.

      The great note sounds muted.

      The great image has no form.

      The Way is concealed and has no name."

 This "sense of reality" that is uninhibited by preconceptions and rational thought structures "permits the unique, unclassifiable quality of the experience to be as it is," notes Durckheim. "(It) accepts and savours it, and because of its very incomprehensibility, is intuitively convinced of its truth."

"We need practice in order to acquire the possibility of recognizing the quality of this reality," Durckheim points out. "By remaining alert and constantly prepared, we can learn to hear and feel the call of Divine Being in everything that happens to us. For this," he observes, "we need to work diligently in order to become vessels capable of receiving all that is poured into them."

[Karlfreid Graf Von Durckheim, "The Way of Transformation," p. 31.]

Within the Kingdom of God & the Kingdom of God Within

"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."

[Aldous Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 75.]

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."

[Aldous Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," pp. 72-73.]

"Be Transformed By the Renewal of Your Mind"

". . . (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.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Contemplative Practice and Disciplining the Mind

"You tell me nothing new; you are not the only one that is troubled with wandering thoughts. Our mind is extremely roving; but, as the will is mistress of all our faculties, she must recall them, and carry them to GOD as their last end."

"When the mind, for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contracted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome, and commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth."

"I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before GOD. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer: many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before GOD, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the LORD. If it sometimes wander and withdraw itself from Him, do not much disquiet yourself for that: trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, GOD will have pity on you."

"One way to re-collect the mind easily in the time of prayer, and preserve it more in tranquility, is not to let it wander too far at other times: you should keep it strictly in the presence of GOD; and being accustomed to think of Him often, you will find it easy to keep your mind calm in the time of prayer, or at least to recall it from its wanderings."

-- Brother Lawrence --
("The Practice of the Presence of God," VIII Letter)

That the undisciplined mind is restless, and goes where it will, is recognized in all religions. Indeed, disciplining the mind may be the central purpose of religion, as through disciplining the mind we attain to a higher and deeper consciousness in which we attain to the divine. "The mind is indeed restless, Arjuna," says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, "it is indeed hard to train. But by constant practice and by freedom from passions the mind in truth can be trained. When the mind is not in harmony, this divine communion is hard to attain; but the man whose mind is in harmony attains it, if he knows and strives for it."

"(E)very mind, no matter its present nature, can ultimately be disciplined and transformed" observes Swami Prabhavananda in his commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, "(and) can be, in Patanjali's phrase 'one-pointed' and fit to attain to the state of perfect yoga." However, as he later notes, disciplining the mind requires both practice and effort.

"(T)he thought-waves cannot all be controlled at once," Prabhavananda observes. "First we have to overcome the "painful" thought-waves by raising waves which are "not painful." To our thoughts of anger, desire and delusion we must oppose thoughts of love, generosity and truth. Only much later, when the "painful" thought-waves have been completely stilled, can we proceed to the second stage of discipline; the stilling of the "not painful" waves which we have deliberately created."

"The idea that we should ultimately have to overcome even those thought-waves which are "good," "pure" and "truthful" may at first seem shocking to a student who has been trained in the Western approach to morality," notes Prabhavananda, "but a little reflection will show him that this must be so."

"The external world, even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient," he notes. "It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it not at it to see the Atman."

"Certainly," he concedes, "it is better to love than to hate, better to share than to hoard, better to tell the truth than to lie. But the thought-waves which motivate the practice of these virtues are nonetheless disturbances in the mind. We all know instances of admirable, earnest men who become so deeply involved in the cares of a great reform movement or social relief project that they cannot think of anything beyond the practical problems of their daily work. Their minds are not calm." 

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda concludes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

 [Prabhavananda and Isherwood, " How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," pp. 23-24.]

Thomas Merton: Contemplation and the Contemplative Life

The aspiration for enlightenment - "direct awareness," as Trappist monk, Thomas Merton describes it, below - is, if anything, far stronger today, than it was in the early 1960s when Merton wrote his classic work of comparative contemplative traditions,"Mystics and Zen Masters." Merton's observations about the difficulty of attaining what Christianity would generally describe as "mystic union," and Zen Buddhists would describe as ""satori," points out the helpfulness of grounding one's practice on, if not in, one or another of the many varied religious or contemplative traditions. It also requires, Merton posits, a deep understanding of the world's anguish, a state that has manifestly increased in the past fifty years.

"(D)irect awareness," writes  Merton, "is a gift, but it also presupposes the knowledge and practice of certain traditional disciples. Thus, we can say that contemplation is both a "gift" (a "grace") and an "art." Unfortunately, we must also admit that it can almost be said to be a "lost art." And for this lost art there is certainly in the world today a definite nostalgia, not unmixed with vague hopes for the recovery of this awareness. But the nostalgia and the desire do not of themselves suffice to make the nostalgic one a contemplative."

"Needless to say, the contemplative" Merton points out, "is not simply a person who, by vocation, is juridically isolated and cloistered. The mere fact of breaking off communication with the world and of losing interest in it certainly does not make one ipso facto a "contemplative." On the contrary, it would seem that today a certain openness to the world and a genuine participation in its anguish would normally help to safeguard the sincerity of a commitment to contemplation."

[Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 203-204.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * 

In the attached video, highlighting Merton's writings, this most contemplative of writers has the following to say about contemplation, its source, and its importance to man's psyche:

"Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is the vivid realization that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond both reason and beyond simple faith.  For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete."

"Yet contemplation is not vision, because it sees without seeing, and knows without knowing. It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images and words, or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows, the contemplative mind takes back what it has said and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by unknowing, or, better, we know beyond all knowing or unknowing."

The Universe, Relativity and the Present Moment: Ancient and Modern Perspectives

"Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul; and observe how all things are submitted to the single perceptivity of this one whole, all are moved by its single impulse, and all play their part in the causation of every event that happens. Remark the intimacy of the skein, the complexity of the web."

-- Marcus Aurelius --
("Meditations," IV:41)

Written nearly two thousand years ago, these comments on the non-dualistic nature of the universe by Marcus Aurelius - a Roman Emperor more famous for his book of "Meditations," than all his victories on the battlefield - seem remarkably modern.  Consider the following quote by Albert Einstein:

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Do not the comments of the Roman Empire's great "philosopher-king' and the father of the "New Physics" talk of the same reality, reminding us that we are separated from a holistic, non-dual universe only by our consciousness?

Einstein once wryly described relativity as being the same process by which holding one's hand on a hot stove for a few moments seems like hours, while hours spent talking to a  beautiful woman seems like minutes. For his part, Marcus Aurelius noted the following:

"Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man's equal possession, but what has once gone is not ours. Our loss therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come - for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? So two things should be borne in mind. First, that all the cycles of creation from the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or forever. Secondly, that when the longest and shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his."

What Will Be When Ages Cease?

What will be when the moon
no longer pulls the tides,
when the sun rises in the north,
when ages cease?


What will be when man is no more,
when the land is sere,
when the air is foul, the sea inert,
when ages cease?


What will be when knowledge is lost,
when information loses all form,
when history ends,
when ages cease?


What will be when consciousness itself wanes,
when the night sky is stripped bare
by the motion of time's inexorable passage,
when ages cease?

What will be when suns cease birthing,
when galaxies dissipate,
when the universe goes dim,
when ages cease?


What will be when everything goes absolutely cold,
when light itself is snuffed out,
when even change becomes unchanging,
when ages cease?

The Evolutionary Clock Is Running Down

"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up recreating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

In an interview shortly before his death in 1961, the great psychologist, Carl Jung, made the prescient observation that "we are the origin of all coming evil." Fifty years later, with the Earth's atmosphere warming and amidst widespread hunger, poverty, continuous wars and a massive species extinction event caused by our impact on the planet's ecosystem, we are coming face-to-face with that evil. Can we survive the multiple crises we have brought down upon ourselves? Perhaps. But, perhaps not.

"Crises are often the catalyst for change," observes spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. In the attached video, the enlightened neo-Buddhist points out that the evolutionary clock is running down for mankind as a species, and that there is a spiritual imperative for us to evolve in consciousness before time runs out.

"There is tremendous pressure on humanity - on humanity's consciousness - right now, he observes. "We all feel it. . . . There is tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everybody knows that if there is not some rather dramatic shift in consciousness this opportunity will be missed."

Neti, Neti: Language from Beyond the Self

"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."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

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."

-- "The Essential Rumi" --
(Translations by Coleman Barks)