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

Emerson and Kipling: On Conformity and Self-Reliance

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion: it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of the solitude."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --
("Self-Reliance")

 "A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity," Emerson wrote in his great essay on Self-Reliance. And if this was so in Emerson's nineteenth century New England, circumscribed as it was by local conditions and custom, by distance and distinctiveness, how much greater the challenge today when we live in a mass society assailed on all sides by messages of conformity?

Today, unlike in Emerson's age, we are met each day with a barrage of advertising on just how we should live, on just what we should consume, and just what we should aspire to. Today, perhaps more so than in any time past, we rely not on ourselves but on others to define just who and what we are. But is this not its own form of madness? Is this not an injurious game of bluff and folly as Emerson observed?

"For non-conformity," he pointed out, "the world whips you with its displeasure." Yet, is it not the person who refuses to conform - a Ghandhi, a Churchill, a Mandela, an MLK Jr. - who ultimately shapes both our ideals and our destinies? In the end, are we not all forced to be self-reliant or perish under the weight of our circumstances, seemingly misunderstood by all?

Perhaps this message is best captured by another Victorian,  Rudyard Kipling, in his immortal poem on self-reliance:

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

 "A foolish consistency is the hobgobblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines," Emerson observed. "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words," he urged, "and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day."

"Is it so bad then," he asks, "to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

Vivikenanda: On Instinct, Reason and Inspiration

"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."

Science and Religion: Convergence, Synergy and the Clash of Cultures

For me, one of the most interesting synergies of the twenty-first century is the convergence of psychology, science and metaphysics or religion. Of course, this is nothing new, but is the inevitable process of millenial seeking after the 'truths' of what our 'realities' are. What is interesting is the extent to which the different approaches, Eastern and Western, introspective and extrospective, ancient and modern - science on one hand, metaphysics on the other, with psychology somewhere in the middle - are increasingly relevant to each other, and to ever broader swaths of an awakening humanity, irrespective of the often-time violent reactions to such abruptly morphing worldviews.

In 1962, Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum theory, observed:

"(I)rrespective of the location and cultural tradition of (the) group, the spirit of modern physics will penetrate into the minds of many people and will connect itself in different ways with the older traditions. What will be the outcome of this impact of a spectial branch of modern science on different powerful old traditions? In those parts of the world in which modern science has been developed the primary interest has been directed for a long time toward practical activity industry and engineering combined with a rational analysis of the outer and inner conditions for such activity. Such people will find it rather easy to cope with the new ideas since they have had time for a slow and gradual adjustment to the modern scientific methods of thinking."

"In other parts of the world these ideas would be confronted with the religious and philosophical foundations of the native culture. Since it is true that the results of modern physics do touch such fundamental concepts as reality space and time, the confrontation may lead to entirely new developments which cannot yet be foreseen. One characteristic feature of this meeting between modern science and the older methods of thinking will be its complete internationality. In this exchange of thoughts the one side, the old tradition, will be different in the different parts of the world, but the other side will be the same everywhere and therefore the results of this exchange will be spread over all areas in which the discussion takes place."

[Heisenberg, "Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science," pp. 1-2.]

Heisenberg's views, written just as the collision of Eastern wisdom traditions with Western science first impacted the wider worldviews of the many varied cultures involved, were prescient indeed. Fifty years later, the results of the impact -both positive and negative - are still shaking out.

Amongst the leading thinkers involved in the synthesis of ancient wisdom traditions with modern science is the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. In his intriguing book, "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality," he writes:

"When I speak with open-minded scientists and philosophers of science, it is clear that they have a deeply nuanced understanding and a recognition of the limits of scientific knowledge. At the same time, there are many people, both scientists and nonscientists, who appear to believe that all aspects of reality must and will fall within the scope of science."

"The assumption is sometimes made that, as society progresses, science will continually reveal the falsehoods of our beliefs - particularly religious beliefs - so that an enlightened secular society can eventually emerge."

"In this view," he observes, "science is viewed as having disproved many of the claims of religion, such as the existence of God, grace, and the eternal soul. And within this conceptual framework, anything that is not proven or affirmed by science is somehow either false or insignificant. Such views are effectively philosophical assumptions that reflect their holders' metaphysical prejudices."

"Just as we must avoid dogmatism in science," he cautions, "we must ensure that spirituality is free from the same limitations."

 "Clearly," the Dalai Lama concludes, "this (metaphysical) paradigm does not and cannot exhaust all aspects of reality, in particular the nature of human existence."

"In addition to the objective world of matter, which science is masterful at exploring," he points out, "there exists the subjective world of feelings, emotions, thoughts and the values and spiritual aspirations based on them. If we treat this realm as though it had no constitutive role in our understanding of reality, we lose the richness of our own existence and our understanding cannot be comprehensive. Reality, including our own existence, is so much more complex than objective scientific materialism allows." (Emphasis added.)

[Dalai Lama, "The Universe in a Single Atom," pp. 38-39.]

Much of the religious fundamentalism we now see - particularly in the Muslim World, as well as in the United States - appears to me to be an unfortunate fallout from the clash of modern scientific and traditional religious worldviews. Both worldviews can be dogmatic, and dogmatism (whether religious, political, and yes, religious) can and does breed violence.

Such reactions, with their inherent violence, are perhaps predictable and understandable, yet one hopes that as this synthesis of worldviews continues -as it inevitably will - the dogmatism of religious violence will come to be seen as an anachronism as poisonous to humanity's growth and development as is blind 'scientism.' World peace, and humanity's future is dependent on peace.

As the committed pacifist and most pre-eminent scientist of the modern age, Albert Einstein, once famously observed: "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

Thomas Merton: First Lesson About Man

FIRST LESSON ABOUT MAN

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
Of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls,
He never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
A milk-drinker.

He fills his skin with coffee
And loses patience with the rest of his species.
He draws his sin on the wall,
On all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
Because he cannot find his joy,
Except in zoology.

Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
He gets the wrong number.
Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.
Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
But it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,

He drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
Who have learned the first lesson about man,
Answer your test:
“Man is the saddest animal.
He begins in zoology,
And gets lost
In his own bad news.

Carl Jung: The Conflict Between Faith, Experience and Knowledge

Over fifty years ago, one of the twentieth-century's greatest thinkers, the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung made the observation that both science and our modern religious views in the West lack the experiential force that would make them effective vehicles for shaping a sustainable and viable worldview. His comments now, as then, continue to cut to the heart of what is humanity's greatest existential question - how to find deep meaning in a seemingly superficial and surface life that is increasingly defined by a purely scientific worldview in conflict with fanatical and fundamentalist 'religiosity'.

Writing in his classic work, "The Undiscovered Self," Jung observes:

"The West has unfortunately not yet awakened to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere sound and fury. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us."

"We are faced," he observes, "not with a situation that can be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times, and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different and nonmaterialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defense against the danger of psychic infection."

"Unhappily," Jung notes, "the little word 'should,' which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same spiritual assumptions, the same arguments and aims."

In a durable commentary that is at least as applicable in the non-Christian East as it is in the West, Jung points out that churches (and one might add mosques, temples and synagogues) "stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief which notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it." Then, he notes, "(t)he content of belief . . . comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter."

"Belief," Jung notes, "is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously."

"People call faith the true religious experience," he observes, "but they do not stop to think that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled 'nous' into us - that is, trust and loyalty."

"This experience has a definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds," he points out. "But the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless."

"That is to say," he concludes, "the standpoints of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if taken literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge."

[Carl Jung, "The Undiscovered Self." pp. 46-48.]

What is apparent from Jung's analysis, it seems, is the need that both individuals and societies have for a meaningful and experiential belief system which is compatible, and not antithetical, to the collective knowledge that the world has garnered - both through science and through real religious insight. Such an insight, to be meaningful, must take into account what science has disclosed about the outer, material world and what experiential religious practice has disclosed about the inner, spiritual world of the individual and collective consciousness and psyche.

Nottingham and Krishnamurti: The Fractured Human Psyche

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."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895-1986)

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.

Thomas Merton: "Shining Like the Sun"

"I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

-- Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. --

The quotation, above, is but part of a description of an "epiphany" experienced by the famed Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, as described in his book, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander."

Thomas Merton (1915 -1968)

While Merton wrote in excess of seventy books (and has been the subject of many score more since his death by accidental electrocution in 1968), it is Merton's 'epiphany' moment, and his famous "shining like the sun" passage, that stand out from, and helps define, his larger body of work - much like Krishnamurti's famous "the Truth is a pathless land" quote.

(His "waking from a dream of separateness" and comments on "illusion" in the first paragraph of the "shining like the sun" passage are not uncoincidentally also reminiscent of Einstein's comments about our suffering from a "cosmic illusion of consciousness," which creates the seeming separation of the ego.)

Merton, in his "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander," writes:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you."

"Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous."

"This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking."

"It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake."

"I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

"This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!"

"Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift."

(Emphasis added.)

Merton was a staunch advocate for, and enthusiast of, interfaith conversation and understanding. A 'giant' himself, he pioneered dialogues with many Eastern spiritual 'giants', including the Dalai Lama, D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese Zen master and writer who was so influential in introducing the Zen Buddhist tradition to the United States, and the Vietnamese monk and anti-war activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, whom Martin Luther King Jr. nominated for the Nobel Peace prize.

Fittingly, the recent unveiling of an historical plaque, and the designation of Fourth Avenue and Walnut Street in Louisville as "Thomas Merton Square," was accompanied by an inter-faith reading of Merton's famous "Shining Like the Sun" quote at the site of his personal epiphany.

Human Existence Is "Trifarious" . . . Consisting of Body, Mind and Spirit

Writing in The Times of India - an excellent source for spiritual aspirants, as  one of India's top daily newspapers features reports on India's spiritual heritage - Shri Shri Anandamurti makes the following observations on humamankind's true nature:

Human existence is trifarious, a combination of three currents: physical, mental and spiritual. Most people may not transcend the limits of their physical existence: they get enmeshed in crude worldly pleasures, tormented by desire. Subtleties of life, expression and practice are perhaps beyond their reach. Their world is limited to their bodies and physical requirements.

There are others who are more concerned with their minds as they feel that it is the supremacy of mind that sets them apart. Their lives are guided by their desires for mental satisfaction. By virtue of their endeavours they create poetry, art, music and sculpture, for instance. They express the finer human feelings of mercy, sympathy, love, friendship and pity. They believe that the mind flows for the sole purpose of attaining the Infinite, and hence they focus their energies on the contemplation of the Transcendental Entity. They are spiritual aspirants. Drawn by the magnetic attraction of Cosmic Consciousness they speed forward and reach the stage which marks the end of mental existence and the beginning of spirituality. At that stage one is no longer a human being, one is a veritable god.

Clearly drawing from India's Vedantist heritage - perhaps the true source of most, if not all, of the spiritual traditions - at a deep level, Anandamurti's comprehensive comments encompass Christianity's "trinitarian" nature of God, and idealized Man.

The entire article is worthy of review for its observations of how cultures and societies in this phase of their evolution have lost their focus on mental and spiritual accomplishments - and, thus, their 'humanity' - in the pursuit of physical comforts and stimulation.