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from The KW Forum 11/22/07:
This is a really great thread and strangely it intersects, for me, with some thoughts and feelings I was having about the waking state today. To wit, at one end of the waking spectrum I was having the "actual" experience of a broken furnace and the "actual" experience of fixing it. The reason I was fixing it was that I did not care to have the "actual" experience of freezing my "actual" ass off, not to mention the bursting of "actual" pipes.
At the other end of the waking spectrum I was visiting the bedside of my brother-in-law, a man I actually love, who is "actually" dying of "actual" cancer. This put me into a meditative place, relative to death of the "actual" body...in this case his body, but everybody in the house knew his death was their death as well: one by one, one after another. And something he said showed the nature of death: "I am trying to do some dying here." His smile and his humor were astonishing, in the face of the actual. Clearly his perception of this actuality was quite different than that of the man who screams hysterically on his deathbed (some do, you know), when confronted with the actuality of death.
The idea that we "reify" these experiences of the actual world, when in fact (according to self-anointed "nondualists") "they don't have that kind of ontological status, and giving them that kind of status distorts our whole perceptual and conceptual world, and the language we use to describe it" -- is just so funny I have to fall off my actual chair and sprain my actual ass. Ouch.
I don't take freezing or dying "for granted". The folks of Bangladesh don't take cyclones "for granted". (Or maybe they do, which is why they keep rebuilding their "actual" shacks in the same place, over and over.)
As a perceiver, I get different tastes of actuality, depending on where I live, and what the weather is in that region -- or, more to the point, whether or not a human body in my vicinity is dying or seriously being damaged. Other perceivers, all over the world, are having different experiences of the actuality that is the matrix of our waking state, in each and every moment. It is a very complex and highly diverse process, this immersion of the waking state in the actuality of the world. Ultimately, I think, it is a teaching, in which we are pressed up against God until we break out of the conceptual (and subjective) dissociation from God's Glory.
I sense that the "nondualist" wants to conquer and rule actuality with his subjectivity, which he raises to a God-like status in his own mind. Thus, to him, actuality becomes "illusion", and even death itself is an observed play of light and darkness on the movie screen.
Rather than go with this attempt to master suffering by pretending it is nothing-but, I like the example of Christ, who said the path to reality is found in actually suffering your actual death. You must pass through this initiation by the actual. It cannot be avoided by vain attempts to take refuge in conceptual escapism.
And if you can crack a great joke on your actual deathbed, you just might have passed the test your teacher (death) has given you.
namaste,
Elias
from Transition Notes January 2008:
an incidence of dying...
A few weeks ago I wrote about the death of my brother-in-law in these forums. At the time, I couldn't say everything about what took place, because I was waiting for confirmation from him that he had made it through. Last night he answered, and so I will write about one of the most extraordinary deaths I ever had the privilege to witness.
Tomorrow, I hope.
Elias
Watching the Ramana tape...
I'm watching the 73 minute Ramana tape that Jim sent me. It is extraordinary. Among the facts I learned was that there already existed a great complex of temples around Arunachala when Ramana arrived, as a boy. I learned that he spent most of his early years in these temples, immersed in divine absorption. The "caves" on Arunachala were actually little temples built onto the front of caves. Ramana was not the first to stay in these "caves".
As a boy, he seems to have been stunned into silence by his opening to God. I mean to say, his mind was permanently silenced. Nice work if you can get it, hey?
Ramana's mother came to take care of him after her other son had died. When she was dying, he spent days with one hand on her heart and the other hand on her head, so as to guide her through the "worlds" into realization. He continued to keep his hands in this position for quite a while after she died. When asked why, he said that he had made a mistake with an old swami whose dying he had assisted -- he had removed his hands just before the man died, and the "the swami left his body through the eyes" rather than via the heart/sahasrar connection. (Note: Ramanashram was built on the mahasamadhi site of R.'s mother.)
I was astonished to hear how R. laid hands on his mother -- when my brother-in-law was dying, I held him a long time with my right hand on his heart and my left hand on the top of his head. I had never heard or read of anyone doing that -- it just seemed the natural thing to do, to intensify my own connection to him and his connection to whatever I could bring him. He died the next day, in his wife's arms, and as I learned later, he found his way out of the body directly to God, bypassing "the worlds". I have seen quite a few people die, but this was the first time I witnessed a man go unimpeded to divine realization.
The confirmation of this fact is alluded to in the thread below this one. In a night vision a few weeks later, I found him unembodied, merged with God. Usually, when someone dies, you will find them embodied in an afterworld -- either a spiritual loka, or a replica of this world, or perhaps even a hell of some kind. But my friend apparently was "ripe" to bypass all of that.
"How do you like it?" I asked him. "IT'S GREAT!" he said, and his voice seemed to echo across the universe. In that moment I felt exactly what he was experiencing, and it was almost overwhelming, to the point where I started to die and leave my body. (I had to force myself not to follow him.)
People who speak, rather simplistically, of "the divine", or "God realization", or "non-dual realization", etc usually have no idea of the vast reality they hope to encompass in their meager words. It is simply indescribable and all-consuming. It wipes out this bodily reality and all the "needs" of this reality. And there are as many kinds of direct experience of God as there are snowflakes -- literally, "the ten billion names of God". No orthodoxy can hold it, or lay claim to it, or invent some version of discrimination to keep out the unclean and the non-priestly classes...
Thus, in watching the film of Ramana, I could see Ramana as one [i]kind[/i] of window into God -- not the final revelation of the Absolute, as some claim of him. His realization is genuine, and taking his darshan via this tape can floor you. You will feel the top of the brain going wild at the sight of him.
But then, afterwards, you are restored to your duty, to your own unraveling, and to your mission to get together a kick-ass blues band to save the orphanage for the Penguin... ;-)
later
Elias
The nothing-worth-doing syndrome...
I posted more about my friend's "transition" in the Ramana thread. I am going to jump back and forth between the two threads, but it is all one theme, as it turns out.
One of the effects that Jung noted about contacting the Self is that the conscious mind will lose its "tone", as attention is drawn deeply into inner reality. Energy stops being cathected outward, into objects and people. Projections are broken. Duality just collapses, at least for awhile, under the gravity of God's nearness.
I received a double-whammy in that regard, with the dying of my brother-in-law and then immersing myself in the Ramana film. If things come in three's, I am probably due for the triple-wham any day now...
What's it feel like? It's a mixture of sadness, dislocation, and loss of interest in just about everything. I've experienced it before, at different junctures, so I don't expect it to be permanent. On the other hand, if you have known first-hand the power of God, you know it can just sweep you away any old time. You could drop the body. People do, in fact, drop the body unexpectedly, on sighting God.
Meher Baba used to repeat a common Indian saying, that most people, after unmediated experience of God, will "drop the body within three days". I don't expect that, because I've been "there and back again" many many times, in different ways, and for different reasons. But God is God and each time the pull to vanish in That gets stronger, and there seems less reason to hang on to this passing scenery...
Ah, but there's hidden destiny as well, you know -- an arc of events yet to unfold, and plenty of reason to bring back what you can from "the other side", so as to act as a catalyst for changes in the mind, the dreaming, the feeling-relations, even the day-to-day round, of yourself and others.
Yet one wouldn't choose that course, say, as a "mission" for the ego. It can't be done, and those that try it have failed miserably. (Names withheld.)
Rather, "returning" is a path taken reluctantly, like being told you must forgo being with someone with whom you are deeply in love...
Yeah, it's the blues of separation...or the longing for home that soldiers feel in a war zone. (The world is a war zone, no doubt about that.)
But in the moment -- each moment considered -- it is simply that the "thrill is gone"...the excitement of engaging life to make a living, write books, take care of business, whatever... What a waste of precious time it all seems!
It is also an ongoing meditation, because you have been stunned (or stoned) by the Self. God has simply pulled back the veil and blasted you with perfect Joy. and now you are (consciously) in the dull world again, living out the rhythm of your friendships, your obligations, your aging, your thoughts, your entertainments, your new car, your household chores...etc etc.
It makes me laugh, this emptiness, because I have no doubt that emptiness is forever the true state of our busy lives. And the push-pull of juxtaposing it to the joyous "ground of being" is simply a bad joke...or like falling down and scraping you elbows on a sidewalk.
I've learned from long experience what happens next. I'll tell you about it if it happens. [Follow-up note: It did happen, but I can't talk about that just now.]
~E
the cow enlightenment...
One of the interesting things in the Ramana movie is the story of how he enlightened a cow.
They show the cow, a rather docile creature, white with sorrowful eyes. It was Ramana's favorite. He made quite a deal about how he raised it to Self Realization. After the cow died, Ramana built a shrine to it.
If you are a true believer, you can probably take this in without any salt. For myself, it had the effect of making me see Ramana as strangely flawed, in an innocent and primitive way.
In fact, the film offers a new dimension on the sage that you don't get from just reading the books. I understand now what Jung meant when he said Ramana was "a true son of the Indian earth."
I know a cow can't be enlightened. But in India, the most fantastic things are possible, and even the Jnanis embrace & believe the superstitions and the myths of the collective.
How is this possible? If you have taken a "night-sea journey" into the psyche, you know how it is possible -- the psyche, in all its symbolic and magical aspects is like a coat of many colors thrown over the nakedness of the Self. It is within the humor of the Self, as realized in the East, to accept and embrace the dream-like universe of the psyche.
In the West, largely because of the rise of rationalism and science, the Self will manifest (when it finally does) unadorned, brutally honest, and not so passive before the archetypes and the wishful fantasies of the masses... (Which is one reason Buddhism has caught on here, far more than Hinduism. And one reason Daism will never catch on.)
Wow, this is a big subject. More later, perhaps.
~E
The Bodhisattva Way vs the Yoga of Ascent
Those who call themselves bodhisattvas are motivated by the wish to benefit other "existences" and to lead them to enlightenment.
The Mahayana encourages everyone to become bodhisattvas and to take the bodhisattva vows. With these vows, one makes the promise to work for the complete enlightenment of all sentient beings. Indelibly entwined with the Bodhisattva Vow is parinamana (Sanskirt; which may be rendered in English as "merit transference").
According to the Theravada tradition however, being a bodhisattva and becoming a fully enlightened Buddha (Sanskrit: Samyaksambuddha) is not possible for the vast majority of beings, so their common path to follow is to strive for becoming an ordinary Arhat (liberated from the sufferings of the cycle of rebirths; the term is applied in Theravada Buddhism to Buddhas as well). [from Wikipedia]
The idea of the bodhisattva can't be understood, least of all by those who "take the bodhisattva vows".
I have known people who took such vows, and they did so in complete innocence of what process is involved in the work of a "bodhisattva". Indeed, they were (or are) neophytes in meditation and in self-understanding. But they were encouraged by their Tibetan Buddhist teachers to take this vow -- a vow for which they have idealistic feelings, but about which they are largely clueless.
You can't "vow" to be anything relative to God, Buddha, Reality, the Self...or whatever you choose to call It.
But you can discover your destiny in that regard, a path you are on before you even know about it. And when you do find that beneath your common life you are on this path, there is nothing the least bit idealistic about it. It is just damn hard work, born of a sentiment that is part of your primordial makeup, even before you are born into this world.
I realized I had this predisposition the first time I got "sent back" to the body, after my initial spiritual experiences in my late teens and early twenties. It was two-fold: it had to do with making conscious the structure of my own psyche, and it had to do with inserting that new way of seeing into my relationships, so as to undo the social contracts which tend to suppress and make unknown the reality of God in which we are all arising.
I was a "right brain" creative type, who loved music, poetry, art...and the mysteries that intuition can uncover in the worlds of dreaming, meditation, and prayer. Indeed, the development of my "right brain" self was rapid and pretty much unobstructed, to the point where I discovered I had a clear path out of here, if I wanted to take it, via the surrender to the ascending spirit. Leaving the body via the sahasrar was simply a return to a profoundly familiar state.
The experience of this ascent didn't even have to be engineered with meditation. It would happen spontaneously, unexpectedly, at particularly intense moments. Suddenly I would vault out of my body and find myself seeing everything from above, with a feeling of boundlessness and inviolable certainty. (I described some of these experiences in some bio material that was posted on this site back in the late 1990s.)
That was fine -- like knowing the secret door out of a haunted house, but also knowing it wouldn't be necessary to use it.
You see, there was a troubling aspect to being in the world: although God is accessible to the few who learn the yoga of surrender, God is also obscured by the mechanics of the left-brain by which the Western world has constructed itself. And, as a man of the West, I have carried that construct and all its (mistaken) assumptions in myself.
So what happened was that I discovered I had a built-in disposition to investigate the "unconscious" of the left-brain side of myself, to see how it was put together, and to learn how to penetrate it with the power that was my natural gift -- the right-brain spiritual intuition.
I thought this might take a few years at best. It turned out to take decades. And it is still ongoing. There were many tasks that arose in this "work" of mastering the left side of consciousness. One of them was the battle with false gurus -- misguided men who have threatened, by their machinations, to drag many many others down into archaic cults, further obliterating our real knowledge of God/Buddha/Self. Another task had to do with tackling the power complex in business: I found myself almost effortlessly being drawn into the play of several large corporations, including Lucasfilm, where a powerfully mayavic form of the complex is at work. In every case I was invited to capitulate to something to which I could not capitulate -- and the temptation to do so was sometimes very strong. But I had my feet planted in a reality that "the princes of this world" don't understand. Or rather, they do understand it, enough so that they are moved to offer a "price" if you will give it up. (more about his later, perhaps)
In any case, my own journey has been highly individual, and the various particulars have been fitted to me as a person -- they aren't summed up in some kind of collectivized ideal about "vowing to help all sentient beings". It just doesn't work that way, bodhis. That's why you need to honor you own life, your own journey, and the mundane happenstance of all your interactions, outward and inward, physical and subtle. Your bodhisattva path is there.
My brother-in-law took his own bodhisattva path, I see that now. But he was completely invisible to all the status-seekers of formal religion and all the elites of new age philosophy. He was just an ordinary guy, living a regular life in the world as he found it. Strange how he is remembered now, by those who knew him, as somebody who was always participating in the life around him with great energy and gusto. Always helping people, always living from natural compassion, without the word "compassion" even being part of his vocabulary.
So it is that he -- a non-churchgoer -- went directly and deeply into God when he died. I wish you could have seen his eyes on his deathbed. They communicated astonishing cohesiveness and wisdom. He had really pulled all the parts of himself together, in a most remarkable way.
I mentioned in an earlier post how he was joking and laughing the day before he died. According to his wife he was full of good humor right up until the end. He had already found his release...all that needed to be accomplished was the passion and ordeal of dying.
May it be the same for each of you.
Elias
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