A Unitive, Inclusive View of God and Man

God, Allah, Ahura Mazda - the Ground of Being, whatever its name - knows no differences. It is only those who profess their singular and exclusive view of religion that separate themselves off from the eternal. Those who are consciously possessed of this Divine Ground within and without themselves make no such distinctions and place no restrictions on their vision of God, as they know it is distinction itself that separates them from Wholeness.

Thus, "the Shakespeare of Mystics," Rumi can say:

"Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the oceans or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Ever or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

"The biographies of the saints," writes Aldous Huxley, "testify unequivocally to the fact that spiritual training leads to a transcendence of personality, not merely in the special circumstances of battle, but in all circumstances and in relation to all creatures, so that the saint "loves his enemies' or, if he is a Buddhist, does not even recognized the existence of enemies, but treats all sentient beings, sub-human as well as human, with the same compassion and disinterested good."

"Those who win through to the unitive knowledge of God set out upon their course from the most diverse starting points," Huxley notes. "One is a man, another a woman; one a born active, another a born comtemplative. No two of them inherit the same temperament and physical constitution, and their lives are passed in material, moral and intellectual environments that are profoundly dissimilar."

"Nevertheless," he observes, "as far as they are saints, insofar as they possess the unitive knowledge that makes them "perfect as their Father which is in heaven is perfect," they are all astonishingly alike. Their actions are uniformly selfless and they are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is their true relation to the universe and its spiritual ground."

Saints, mystics and sages, it seems, regardless of their formal path (or lack of a path), have an acceptive, unitive and inclusive view of God and man, for they have realized in the very essence of their Being that they are inseparably a part of the Ground of Being that encompasses all. It is the unsaintly, non-mystical, unsagacious common man who makes distinctions based on his or her God. And, in doing so, he or she falls short of realizing the essence of their Being.

Bliss, Peace and the 'Kingdom of God' Within You

"The undisturbed state of being is bliss; the disturbed state is what appears as the world. In non-duality there is bliss; in duality - experience. What comes and goes is experience with the duality of pain and pleasure. Bliss is not to be known. One is always bliss, but never blissful. Bliss is not an attitude."

-- Sri Nisargadatta --

Sri Nisargadatta
(1897-1981)

One cannot "think" blissfully. As the enlightened teacher Sir Nisargadatta observed: "Bliss is not an attitude." It is not a way of thinking. Bliss is the natural state of our being, devoid of ego or the sense of a small "self" as the identity of 'who' and 'what' we are.

When finally confronted directly by the Pharisees who demanded to be shown "where" the "kingdom of God" might be found, Jesus (who always couched his public teachings in parables) replied:

"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]

The state of enlightenment, thus seems to be an inner state of consciousness and being and not a system, attitude or way of thinking. "Peace," Kahlil Gibran observed, "is an oasis in the heart that can never be reached by the caravan of thinking." It is thus, incumbent upon the true spiritual seeker to go deeply within him or herself if the blissful state of pure Being is to be found. It is, as Nisargadatta observes, beyond the duality of the world which is created by the small "self" of the ego, and its egoic mode of thinking.

Interestingly, however, when this state of inner Bliss is achieved, it seems to change one's realization of what the world and its outer forms are. Thus, in the Gospel of Thomas (which has been continually used by the Coptic, Syriac and Nestorian, but not the Catholic or Orthodox churches) Jesus' confrontation with the Pharisees is echoed. This time, however, in response to an enquiry from his disciples asking, when the "the kingdom" will come, Jesus answers:

"It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'here it is' or 'there it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."

["The Nag Hammadi Library," Gospel of Thomas, verses 113-114.]

Similarly, at the beginning of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is reported to have said to Thomas, referred to as Didymos Judas Thomas, in the Nag Hammadi texts (a.k.a., the "Dead Sea scrolls"):

"If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

 It is only by coming to known one's true "Self," rather than the false, smaller "self" of the ego, that one realizes the bliss state of one's pure Being, and one realizes they are an inseparable component of the Ground of Being, or pure Bliss.

"There are no others to help," says Nisagardatta. "A rich man, when he hands over his entire fortune to his family, has not a coin left to give a beggar. So is the wise man (gnani) stripped of all his powers and possessions. Nothing, literally nothing, can be said about him. He cannot help anybody, for he is everybody. He is the poor and also his poverty, the thief and also his thievery. How can he be said to help, when he is not apart? Who thinks of himself as separate from the world, let him help the world."

"The only thing that can help," says Nisargadatta, " is to wake up from the dream."

"The beginningless begins forever," he notes. "In the same way, I give eternally, because I have nothing. To be nothing, to have nothing, to keep nothing for oneself is the greatest gift, the highest generosity."

"The self is all," Nisargadatta points out. "In practice it takes the shape of goodwill, unfailing and universal. You may call it love, all-pervading, all-redeeming. Such love is supremely active - (but) without the sense of doing." Such, it seems, is the state of Bliss.

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.

Mystics, Awakening and the Divine: A Sufi View

 “… Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home. ”

 -- William Wordsworth --
("Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.")

"Mystics are lovers going home," writes Sufi teacher and author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, "living the passion and commitment that are needed to surrender and be taken, to become empty of oneself and filled with the Beloved."

"Little can be told," he suggests, "of the innermost mysteries of the heart, of how our own soul opens to God. And for each of us this jouney, our heart's pilgrimage, is unique, because each of us is unique. We are each a unique creation by the Great Artist, and each of us makes our own offering in the fire of love."

"We all come from God," he continues, "but when we are born into this world we forget. We forget from where we have come and that we are children of light. We take on the clothing of the world, leaving behind the "clouds of glory" of our true Home. The Sufi calls this the "journey from God," a journey of forgetfulness in which we leave Paradise behind."

But," Vaughn-Lee observes, "there are those who never quite forget, who keep a distant memory buried deep within them. As a result this world never seems like home; there is often a sense of not quite belonging, not fitting in."

"Mystics," he notes, "are strangers in this world, just because they remember their real home."

["Love is a Firre: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home," pp. 20-21.]

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

In the following six-part video lecture, Vaughan Lee examines spiritual awakening, who and what it is that awakens, and what they awaken to.

Emptiness and Dependent Origination: "Truth That Sets You Free"

"Emptiness," "insubstantiality" and "co-dependent origination" are fundamental concepts in Mahayana Buddhism, yet these concepts are also recognized realities in Daoist teachings, the teachings of many Indian philosophical and yoga schools, and - though not specifically referenced - most of the world's great wisdom traditions.

What we know of the origination and vast emptiness of the universe, as well as the mechanics and profound emptiness of the atom, makes these ancient philosophical realizations particularly relevant to all of us, although the Western worldview, to a large extent, still clings to its traditional materialist view of man, mind, the world and the cosmos.

In Chapter II of the Dao De Jing, we read:

"The thirty spokes converge at one hub,
But the utility of the cart is a function of the nothingness inside the hub.
We throw clay to shape a pot,
But the utility of the clay pot is a function of the nothingness inside it.
We bore out doors and windows to make a dwelling,
But the utility of the dwelling is a function of the nothingness inside it.
Thus, it might be something that provides the value,
But it is nothing that provides the utility."

[Ames and Hall, "Dao De Jin: A Philosophical Translation, page 91.]

"There is nothing," said Tzu-ch'i, "that is not a 'that' and nothing that is not a 'this.' One does not see from the standpoint of another knowing by oneself is knowing something. Therefore it is said: ''That' comes from 'this,' and 'this' is based on 'that.' This explains how 'that' and 'this' arise simultaneously."

"But when there is arising," he continued, "there is passing away; and when there is passing away, there is arising. When there is right, there is wrong; when there is wrong, there is right. By affirming we deny; by denying we affirm."

"Therefore," he notes, "sages do not go this way but perceive it in the context of nature. This is also based on an affirmation."

"A 'this' is also a 'that,' and a 'that' is also a 'this,' he concludes. "'That' is one judgment, and 'this' is also one judgment. Ultimately, are there in fact 'that' and 'this,' or are there no 'that' or 'this'? Nothing can be opposite to 'that and this' - we call this fact the pivot of the Way. When the pivot is centered in its hub, thereby responding infinitely, then affirmation is one infinity and negation is also one infinity."

[Clearey, "The Essential Tao," page 72.]

Vedantists, and other Indian philosophical and yoga schools, label this concept of "this and that,' or 'neither this nor that,' "sunyata" - a transcendental  state in which neither 'this' nor 'that' exists absolutely. In "The Spiritual Heritage of India," Vedantist scholar, Swami Prabhavananda, suggests that these concepts extend to all the world's great wisdom traditions, including Christianity, and that the transcendental reality in which this is experienced can be attained by all.

"The nirvana of Buddha," writes Prabhavananada, "is . . . not a state of annihilation but the attainment of the unchangeable reality, which can be positively described as the eternal peace. But what this peace really is, no words can define; all definition can be only symbol and can offer only a vague suggestion. Buddha employs negative terms for its description, such as freedom from misery and death, freedom from sensuality, from the ego, from delusion, from ignorance."

"This state of freedom is attainable by the 'noble kind of wisdom' - a phrase already quoted from the Buddhist scripture and signifying what the Vedanta calls transcendental knowledge. The wisdom meant is not a wisdom of the intellect, which implies a knower and an object, but rather a state, sunyata, in which no subject-object relation exists, and in which one transcends both intellect and mind - these two words representing, in Hindu psychology, separate entities."

"Christ refers directly to this transcendental wisdom when he says: 'And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.' It is identical with perfection, the same perfection that Christ has in mind when he says: 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' It is, in brief, the direct, immediate knowledge of that which is timeless unconditional existence."

"The 'noble kind of wisdom' is attainable by 'the noble conduct of life' and 'the noble earnestness of meditation.'"

[Swami Prabhavananda, "The Spiritual Heritage of India," page 186.]

In Memoriam: "To One Shortly to Die"

What words do you say to the dying? I had watched my friend decline and knew that this was, perhaps, the last time we would meet together, the last time I would be able to comfort, perhaps, the man who had brought and opened up a new vista of consciousness and being to my awareness.

How to reassure a man who really needed no assurance save what each of us might want when a companion on the spiritual path meets with us one last time on what we know will be our death bed?

Socrates, before the poison took hold, told his friends: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows." What was I to say?

We had walked a long way together on paths that had too briefly merged, and together we had explored what other wayfarers had said. And as he was no fabulist, but a realist, I chose the following poem by Walt Whitman, a spiritual kinsman, to reassure him and to ease him on his way:

TO ONE SHORTLY TO DIE

From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
You are to die - let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate.
I am exact and merciless, but I love you - there is no escape for you.

Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you feel it,
I do not argue, bend my head close and half envelop it,
I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
I am with you, I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

"Apart from the physical pain," I asked him, "is there any fear or suffering?" (For I'd asked this of an enlightened man upon his death bed, and he had laughed heartily at the proposition.)

"No, just confusion," he replied.

"What confuses you?," I asked.

"Why," he asked me, looking up, "do I struggle to hold on?"

I told him that there was no longer any reason for him to hold on, that he had learned all that he had come here to learn, and that he had taught scores of others (including me) what he had learned.

"I'll have to consider that," he said. And then he asked me to help him lay back down.

I laid him down, and he slipped off his oxygen mask. I told him that I loved him, kissed his cheek and took my leave. I am told that shortly thereafter he slipped into a coma, where he lingered for a day or so before departing.

The next evening, as I sat with my father waiting for a chorale to be performed, my thoughts turned back to my friend, for he had been a musician. "How much he would like this," I thought. And just at that time, I'm told, he revived for a moment, surrounded by others who loved him, and to whom he'd taught peace.

He lingered for a moment in silence, closed his eyes, and then breathed his last. It was in a silent and smiling acceptance, I'm told, that he slipped into his final deathless sleep. He had evolved.

Enlightenment: The Tao of Now

"(A)wakening to our original enlightened nature," suggests Robert Holden in the Huffington Post, "involves interrupting the ordinary flow of linear, language-based, thinking so that we can rediscover "the mind within the mind"."

"Focusing on external circumstances or teachings is not what triggers the moment of enlightenment," writes Holden, an author with a decidedly Taoist bent, "(r)ather, it is focusing on the absence of internal commentary. Because it is impossible to "think" without words," he notes, "this practice of stopping the flow of running commentary on our lives involves cultivating a mindset of no-thought (wu-nien) in an attempt to experience each moment as it is without silently talking to ourselves about it."

Holden puts forward the following recollections of nature as doorways into "a wordless space of wonder at the profound transparency of nature," in which, "overwhelmed by awe in the face of creation, the boundaries between self and world dissolve in a mystical union transcending conscious thought."

•  "A white pelican sails south across the darkening sky, heading deeper into the high desert marshlands."
  
• "The first warning drops splash dust on the washboard road as a flock of ibis flap madly against the north wind."
  
• "A yellow-headed blackbird throws its head back over its shoulder, singing ecstatically from its perch on a swaying cattail."
  
• "The sun blinks through thinning clouds, throwing off a triple rainbow like a casual afterthought."

Each haiku-like observation of the pervasive, yet largely unobserved, face of the world around us, Holden suggests, "offers the perfect opportunity for a higher integration of one's original nature with the eternal Way (Tao) that gives rise to everything from within."

Thoreau's Walden Pond

In "On Man & Nature," the great Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau observed: "I want to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me, and I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me."

"Between Heaven and Earth," says the Tao-Te-Ching, "there seems to be a bellows: It is empty, and yet it is inexhaustible; the more it works, the more comes out of it. No amount of words can fathom it; better look for it within you."

"Paradoxically," writes Holden, "awakening to the perennial truth leads experiencers to see absolute truth and conventional truth as one, not two. This is part of the experience of swallowing the whole of the river in one gulp, wherein all dualities are united within the individual. This grasp of the non-duality of reality and appearance is expressed in the analogy of the statue of a golden lion: its form is that of a lion but its substance is of gold. Because its nature is that of a golden lion, its lion-form cannot be separated from its gold-substance. This analogy hints at the experience of non-duality that lies at the heart of enlightenment, in which the boundaries between self and other, inner and outer, collapse."

"In eternity," observes Thoreau, "there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are here and now. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us."

"Man follows the ways of the Earth," says the Tao-Te-Ching. "The Earth follows the ways of Heaven. Heaven follows the ways of the Tao. Tao follows its own ways."