Archive 1
Nisargadatta - 11/1/01 : This month's Missal takes a look at Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, an Indian guru of this century. His is an unusual case in that he had no spiritual training until he was in his thirties, when he was introduced to his future guru through a friend. This was the turning point in his life, as he progressed rapidly from Maruti, shop-keeper and cigarette seller, to the cigarette-smoking jnani [Self-realized individual], teacher and saint from Bombay, Nisargadatta Maharaj.
He ascribes this rapid transformation to his complete faith and trust in his guru - "through faith in my teacher and obedience to his words, I realized my true being...". He spent the last decades of his life making himself available to anyone who wished to find the Truth, passing on in 1981.
His teaching style pulled no punches. He continually turned the questioner back on himself, prodding him to go within and see for himself what IS. He advised focusing on the feeling 'I am', which brings one back to the start of consciousness, and from there to go beyond all thought.
In the modern spiritual classic, I AM THAT (Acorn Press), Nisargadatta is seen in the classic student/teacher format, patiently and forcefully leading the student to question his deepest beliefs, to go beyond the mind directly to the Self.
Questioner: I am not well. I feel rather weak. What am I to do?
Maharaj: Who is unwell, you or the body?
Q: My body, of course.
M: Yesterday you felt well. What felt well?
Q: The body.
M: You were glad when the body was well and you are sad when the body is unwell. Who is glad one day and sad the next?
Q: The mind.
M: And who knows the variable mind?
Q: The mind.
M: The mind is the knower. Who knows the knower?
Q: Does not the knower know itself?
M: The mind is discontinuous. Again and again it blanks out, like in sleep or swoon, or distraction. There must be something continuous to register discontinuity.
Q: The mind remembers. This stands for discontinuity.
M: Memory is always partial, unreliable and evanescent. It does not explain the strong sense of identity pervading consciousness, the sense of 'I am'. Find out what is at the root of it.
Q: However deeply I look, I find only the mind. Your words 'beyond the mind' give me no clue.
M: While looking with the mind, you cannot go beyond it. To go beyond, you must look away from the mind and its contents.
Q: In what direction am I to look?
M: All directions are within the mind! I am not asking you to look in any particular direction. Just look away from all that happens in your mind and bring it to the feeling 'I am'. The 'I am' is not a direction. It is the negation of all direction. Ultimately even the 'I am' will have to go, for you need not keep on asserting what is obvious. Bringing the mind to the feeling 'I am' merely helps in turning the mind away from everything else.
The real does not die, the unreal never lived.
Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded garment. The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death. The body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long.
Excerpts from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj's I AM THAT
compiled and edited by Miguel-Angel Carrasco
(a great site with quotes grouped in relevant categories)
Questioner: Kindly tell us how you realized.
Maharaj: I met my guruu when I was 34 and realized by 37.
Q: What happened? What was the change?
M: Pleasure and pain lost their sway over me. I was free from desire and fear. I found myself full, needing nothing. I saw that in the ocean of pure awareness, on the surface of the universal consciousness, the numberless waves of the phenomenal worlds arise and subside beginninglessly and endlessly. As consciousness, they are all me, as events they are all mine. There is a mysterious power that looks after them. That power is awareness, Self, Life, God, whatever name you give it. It is the foundation, the ultimate support of all that is, just like gold is the basis for all gold jewelry. And it is so intimately ours!
"All moulding oneself to a pattern is a grievous waste of time." - Nisargadatta
Commentary
Pride and Fear, the Curse of Alienation
When one begins the process of looking at oneself, many hitherto unknown facets of personality begin to appear. At first we may wish to think the meditative process itself has created these behavior patterns, but soon enough we come to see that our previous state of sleep was greater than we wished to admit. If we keep at our practice long enough, we will begin to see that certain states of mind are behind the newly discovered patterns, and may be shocked to discover our true motives in day-to-day-life. When these facts come to light, the first reaction may be to sort the behaviors into good and bad categories, and then set ourselves to the grim task of removing the negative while accenting the good. In other words, the ego will start a campaign of behavior-modification meant to bring us closer to 'perfection'. Actually this is nothing new, having been going on since birth, but the new found level of awareness gives the ego a new sense of cleverness. It's going to outwit itself this time, for sure.
When we begin to see the underlying motivation for a negative pattern of behavior is, say, pride, we can hardly resist wanting to counter it by creating a projection of humility or altruism. If we are honest, we may see through this, but be left wondering if there is another solution. Renewed effort in the form of continued self-observation may take us to the next step. The pride itself could be just an effect, a compensation for an underlying state of fear. As we continue with our observing, we may come to wonder if there is ever an end to all this, if the root cause of our aberrant behavior can be found. If we persevere, we eventually come to the root cause of the fear, a feeling of alienation, the battle of the self with the not-self, the mistaken belief that we are a separate thing. This thing, or body/mind, lives in constant opposition with what it sees as other separate things. The universal has become lost in the particular and forgotten itself. This unnatural situation brings about the sense of anxiety and fear underlying most of our lives.
What now? Here we find ourselves head to head with our very sense of survival, where no ego effort can help. By looking within long enough, we may come to the door of awareness, and with grace and luck, find ourselves beyond the mind. From this new awareness, we come to see the former belief in separateness to be, as John Wren-Lewis puts it, 'some kind of inflation or hyperactivity of the psychological survival-system'. We will also come to see the futility in putting new and improved patterns of behavior in compensation for any negative ones. The old Zen warning against putting a new head on top of the one we already have comes to mind.
All negative patterns of behavior can be traced back to the 'I am the body' idea, the feeling of alienation. Our natural state has no sense of separateness, for it contains all. Trying to fix an ego problem with an ego effort is doomed to failure, for as Wren-Lewis again states, 'the underlying universal consciousness, with its every-present-moment happiness, peace and wonder, gets shut out ''. True peace can only come from our true self, or universal awareness. The body/mind will then continue to function, but in a sane manner, without the inflated ego-sense as master.
The effort of self-observation is the revealing of the false. Our true nature will remain, and as such, needs no modification. All we can do is to follow the old adage for crossing a busy road: look and listen. If we can see something, anything, it's not us. In this manner we can come to see we do not exist, yet Are, and Life can become a wonderful thing.
Bob Fergeson
- Quotes of the Month -
" When the mind is kept away from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known; and yet you recognize it at once as your own nature. Once you have passed through this experience, you will never be the same man again.Sex is an acquired habit. Go beyond. As long as your focus is on the body, you will remain in the clutches of food and sex, fear and death. Find yourself and be free."- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
" Some things'll scare you so bad, you'll hurt yourself." - Boots Cooper, age 8
" I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.'' - Alfred North Whitehead
" The world is divided into people who think they are right.'' - Anonymous
" Do you know what listening is? I'm sure you don't know. People never listen. You only see through your own screen of concepts." - Dr. Vijai Shankar
" People do not live in the present always, at one with it. They live at all kinds of and manners of distance from it, as difficult to measure as the course of planets. Fears and traumas make their journeys slanted, peripheral, uneven, evasive.'' - Anais Nin
" The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from
some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends.
If they're okay, then it's you." -- Rita Mae Brown
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Colin Wilson - 02/03 : This month's Missal takes a look at Colin Wilson, a prolific writer and contemporary thinker. Wilson was born in England in 1931, and had his first and biggest success with the publication of The Outsider in 1956 when he was 24. After this initial success he was able to settle down to a life of research and writing that continues to the present day, having published over eighty books. He has remarked that he has simply written the same book eighty times, since the general theme remains the same: that of man's capacity to have "key experiences", and how to have this experience more often.
He " began to believe that peak experiences were brought about when reality is grasped by the mind rather than by the automatic responses which get us through everyday life."* This roughly corresponds to Gurdjieff's idea of the robot, that the robot was living our lives, turning them into nothing but habit, leading to frustration and boredom, as we could no longer experience life except through this robot 'self'.
" My first expression of my sense of revolt at the universal self-delusion was an essay on 'Superiority', written when I was twelve. I still have this essay. It argues that all men are completely enmeshed in self-delusion, and that the universal motive that underlies all human conduct is the need of the individual to feel himself 'superior', to deny the obvious fact that he is a mere insect among billions of other insects. "
- From Voyage to a Beginning: An Autobiography
After he had received some measure of entree into the scientific community, he began corresponding with Abraham Maslow, whose ideas were similar. Wilson saw that healthy, motivated people reported having peak experiences more often, that they had the capacity to see things with a sense of wonder.
"All of his research and literary work has had one primary goal: to test the limits and possibilities of human consciousness. As Wilson himself has said, everything he has done can be reduced to one simple mystery: when a child being reared in Christendom wakes up on Christmas morning, why does the world seem so much more vibrant and exciting, more "real," to the child than it usually does during the remaining 364 days of the year? And, even more to the point, why isn't this the way we feel all the time? "* quotes by John Morgan, The Colin Wilson Page
His idea that man can live in this state of peak experience more and more, possibly fulltime, permeates his books and novels, along with his ideas of why we are not in this peak state more often. His idea of the enemy to the evolved state of consciousness is cynicism, the giving in to hopelessness and despair. He offers no easy way out, and contends that each must find his own path to freedom, through exertion of the will. The individual must come to see, and escape from, the common hypnotic delusion of society, and find his own way to a clearer understanding of his place in life, and of his possibilities for personal evolution.
In many of his books, such as The Mind Parasites, and The Space Vampires, he casts this life-thwarting force in a sinister form, which lies within the mind of man. These forces are not seen as evil, but rather as entities which siphon off man's highest energies, the very energies that could transform him into a being capable of higher levels of intuition, understanding, and being.
It is not their intention to destroy, ... Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
- Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites
Among his many works is the classic reference on the world of mysticism, The Occult, plus biographies of such mystics as Ouspensky, Crowley, and Hesse. He continues to write to this day. While he may not have found "enlightenment", his struggles within himself and with society have born fruit, especially through his tireless efforts to communicate his understanding to others like himself.
Welcome to the Colin Wilson Page: by John Morgan "Colin Wilson is an English author who has written dozens of books and hundreds of articles on a variety of subjects, particularly (although not limited to) philosophy, crime, literary criticism, fiction, and the occult. What makes his work unique is that there is a single, driving idea behind all of his work in every field: namely, the concept of the "Outsider" and the place of such individuals within the context of these various fields." Best web site to date on Wilson.
The Biography Project: Colin Wilson. "An enormously prolific writer, having written to date over 80 major works on a wide variety of subjects: philosophy, religion, occult and supernatural phenomena, music, sex, crime and critical theory. His biographies include works regarding Bernard Shaw, Herman Hesse, Rudolph Steiner, Aleister Crowley, and P. D. Ouspensky. Major philosophical statements to be found in the Outsider Series consisting of: The Outsider, Religion & the Rebel, The Stature of Man, The Strength to Dream, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Beyond the Outsider and Essay On the New Existentialism. " Good bio, with links and quotes.
The High and the Low with Colin Wilson : an interview from Thinking Allowed, Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove. Contains a great self-description of Wilson's early suicide attempt and the revelation that halted it, and his philosophy in general.
Tricks and Traps
Trick: the ability to resist. When faced with the opportunity(temptation) to act in a manner against our own best interest, we can feel helpless in the crucial moment before the decision to resist or act. Asking ourselves "Why?" can give us the time we need to regain our wits while the force of the temptation passes.
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Trap:refusing to leave the nest, the fear of flying. To successfully engage in any true adventure, such as the quest for self-definition, we must be willing to take risks, to change. If we are not willing to trust our intuition through action, we may find ourselves rationalizing many traps as safe havens, when really we have just fooled ourselves as to our real intentions.
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" I can resist everything except temptation."--- Oscar Wilde
This month's
Commentary
Working for Inspiration
To begin and end a life of spiritual seeking, there is much to be done. While at the end of our search we may realize that there was nothing being done and all is as it should be, while we are struggling in the morass of ego and illusion, we would do well to have a strategy. This plan should be based on the experience of those who have gone before us, as well as the hints from our own intuition, tempered by clear reasoning.
As Colin Wilson points out, there are things we can do to encourage our personal evolution, and things which hinder it. While the goal may be to become All, there are hidden assets in the many we can call into manifestation to improve our chances for becoming that All. There are also forces inside us that wish to maintain the status quo of ego and illusion, and will defend their daily portion of our valuable energy.
Let's take a look at how we can improve our odds at taking a step within, into the world of our mind and beyond. The journey within can be broken down into three steps, which are simultaneous and interdependent: intention, or aim; clearing the field; and the saving and transmutation of energy.
- Intention: We must have the proper desire: an unrelenting, conscious intention to know the truth. We cannot create or fake this, but can only discover it within us, and then help it to grow. Our main intentions may be ones we refuse to accept. This must be seen before any spiritual aspirations can be successful. A few months of regular group work in an ashram setting will show one which intentions are dominant. If the desire for self-definition is found, this aim will guide us in all we do, reminding us of what we truly want, and how to get it. An honest commitment to oneself must then be made, clearly and openly. Then we forget it, concentrating on the endeavors of the moment. The inner self will then be called to help, without undo interference from the ego.
- Clearing the Field : We can have only one main aim. Whatever is draining our energy without result must be cleared away. We need to know ourselves, to be watchful and wary. Many unconscious motivations, ambitions, fears and desires may be sidetracking our energy and time. These must be seen and admitted, so as to bring them into our awareness. The pitfalls of projection, transference, circumstance, heredity, and environment must be fully recognized and brought up into full consciousness, also. The machine must be cleaned, operating smoothly under our conscious control. As Wilson pointed out, when the robot is in charge, life loses its wonder and magic, and the inner resources are lost. We develop the intuition through the higher energy we save (as seen below), thus enabling us to discern what voices or habits are useful in our search, and which are against our best interests.
- The saving and transmuting of energy : In any project or large endeavor, much time and energy is needed. Given that our resources as individuals are limited, perhaps fixed, we must use this energy quantum to the best advantage. We can't have too many irons in the fire, too many ambitions or habits that require constant funding. The precious energy we have must be saved and redirected to the prime intention, of knowing our truth. The cleaning of the machine and our life's patterns, will give us this funding. Now that some of our energy is being freed from worldly pursuits, we can learn to direct it upward, through our aim. We hold our intention clearly in our mind, which is to learn to observe our self, and allow the attention to turn inward, and listen. This newly released energy will also help to develop the intuition, as we are forced to rely on it more and more, thus drawing the saved energy to its development. Then, we act on what insight we receive, thus becoming a vector. If we do not act on, and therefore acknowledge, our inspiration, it may not return. It is not there for mere intellectual pleasure, or to pump up some vain ego. The intuition must be transferred into action, even if that action is only to incorporate it into our thinking, to bring it into full consciousness. If we use it for profit or selfish motives, it may also vanish. It wishes to act through us, rather than for us. Allow it to manifest, and it will grow.
This may sound like a lot of work, and it is. To find the truth about oneself and the universe is not a small thing, though it's as close as the hair on your head. If you find you cannot live without knowing who is living, then get to work.
Bob Fergeson
- Quotes of the Month -
" All values are ultimately mystical."
" Everyday consciousness is a liar."
" I'd make tremendous efforts to push myself up to a level of optimism. I'd do it in the evenings by reading poetry, thinking, writing in my journals, then I'd go back to the school the next day and blaaahhh, right down to the bottom again. This was the feeling of The Mind Parasites -- there's something that waits until you've got lots of energy and just sucks you dry like a vampire. "
" I realized suddenly that you can achieve states of control, provided that you put yourself in a crisis situation. And that's why throughout The Outsider I keep saying the outsider's salvation lies in extremes." - Colin Wilson
" The individual who wishes to embark on a truly conscious life must do so alone, and not fall victim to the endless parades of "knowers." The individual who has a sense of detachment from the norms of his or her society must not fall prey to cynicism or hero-worship, but instead use this sense of alienation as the starting point for values and myths of one's own invention, the true "outsider" of which Wilson speaks." - John Morgan
" Man is incredibly fatheaded. He believes he's in control, but the truth is he's just a robot in a dream -- a puppet whose strings are pulled by intelligences he can't see."- Richard Rose
" Heaven on Earth is a choice you must make, not a place we must find." --- Dr. Wayne Dyer
" Security is an illusion. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing at all." --- Helen Keller
" Stop talking and thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know. " - Seng Ts'an
Comic Philosophy
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then. --- Katharine Hepburn
I am not a vegetarian because I love animals. I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.
--- A. Whitney Brown
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Tibetan Book of the Dead: July 03 - The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Bardo Thodol, is the subject of this month's Missal. This ancient text, The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo, was composed by Padmasambhava in the eight century A.D., an Indian guru who was one of the first to bring the teaching of the Buddha to the land of Tibet. Padmasambhava buried the text, along with others, to safeguard them and insure their eventual recovery at the appropriate time. They were later recovered by Karma Ling-pa, and used continually since then as a means of reminding the deceased of their spiritual training, and to guide them through the realms of the bardo of afterlife to ensure liberation, rather than rebirth.
The main tenets of the Bardo Thodol are that once we are deceased, all the thoughts and actions of our previous life become objective to us as projections of our own mind. If we are not aware of the true nature of these karmic projections, and take them for being a true 'reality', we will be driven through the bardo's dimensions until we eventually come down to rebirth through entrance into the womb. By reading the text of the Book of the Dead to the recently deceased, the departed can be reminded of the true nature of the visions of the after-death bardos, and instead merge into the Light, or luminosity of Mind, and thus achieve Liberation.
The term bardo means gap, or in-between, thus the bardo is a realm between our life in this body and being born into the next. It can also mean any state of mind we are caught in, in this life as well. Our dreams can be thought of as a bardo realm, as can any complete environment of desire and fear, such as our work-place, or family life.
The Bardo Thodol is read beside the body of the deceased to help guide them through the realms of their own mind-projections as they wander through the now objectified thought-forms they created while living, in hopes of reminding them that all they see and experience is their own mind, and not an objective reality. The texts say that the after-death journey is one of ever-increasing chaos, and that the best hope for Liberation comes in the first stages, when the Luminosity of the Absolute is seen most readily. As one wanders through the visions of the thought-forms created by their actions here in this life, desire for and fear of these visions can lead the wanderer ever farther a field, until they are driven to seek refuge in a womb, and rebirth. The Bardo Thodol gives explicit instruction on avoiding being caught in any of the bardo's realms, of heavens or hells, and of how to avoid entering the womb and rebirth.
To profit from a text such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, one must take it to heart and put its teachings into action, now, in this life. The basic teaching of the Bardo Thodol is that what we call 'reality', and even our sense of 'I', is nothing more than the creation of our mind, with which we become completely identified. This created knot of identification, or ego, which we call 'us' or 'me', is convinced that it is a body, a thing, in a real world, surrounded by other things. The nature of our finite mind and its ability to be mesmerized by its own creations is the trap we fall into, in this life, and the bardo plane. While dreaming, we do not doubt the reality of the dream. The same applies to the waking moment, and whatever place we find ourselves later, after death. Transfixed by the images and moods we create and see before us, we forget our true Being as Awareness, undifferentiated Light, without subject or object.
"The realization of Reality, according to the Bardo Thodol, is wholly dependent upon expurgating from the mind all error, all false belief, and arriving at a state in which Maya no longer controls. Once the mind becomes freed from all karmic obscuration, from the supreme heresy that phenomenal appearances - in heavens, hells, or worlds - are real, then there dawns Right Knowledge; all forms merge into that which is non-form, all phenomena into that which is beyond phenomena, all Ignorance is dissipated by the Light of Truth, personality ceases, individualized being and sorrow are at an end, mind and matter are known to be identical, the mundane consciousness becomes the supramundane, and, one with the Dharma Kaya, the pilgrim reaches the Goal. "
- W.Y. Evans-Wentz
Whatever thoughts and actions, moods and states of mind we create and live in, in this world, that is what we will find in the next, be it the after-death bardo, our dreams in sleep each night, or the imaginings brought on by desire and fear in the waking world of tomorrow. Tomorrow is the creation of what we do and believe in today. We cannot hope for someone or something else to judge us, and send us to our just reward, but must come to see our own true nature in this life, now.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead can be taken as a highly intuitive guide to our own psychological make-up, and a hint at what lies ahead if we do not turn within and begin to question our own mind.
"We are what we think. All that we are arises from our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." - Buddha
The edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead I would recommend is the one by W. Y. Evans Wentz, Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup, translator, published by Oxford Press. The Psychological Commentary by C. G. Jung, and the many footnotes and comments by Evans-Wentz are invaluable. An edition by Francesca Freemantle and Chogyam Trungpa is a simple introduction to the work with a more modernized rendering of the text to English.
- Related Sites -
Tricks and Traps
Trap: complete hypnotic identification with the current character in our life-drama. For every situation we encounter in life, we create a fitting character, and become identified with 'it', calling it "I". We do not see the change that occurs in our 'self' when the situation changes, as we switch our sense of "I" into the new character, or ego. The mind blurs or hides this change-over, creating a seemingly seamless flow through the many egos and their parts in our personal drama.
Trick: creation of an observing "I". To break the spell of the mind and its reaction-creations, an impartial point of reference is needed, an unattached observer. This "I" does not take sides, is not a judging or naming function, but simply an aware link between the many other "I's" which lead us around by our nose everyday, and night. The trick within this trick, is that we are already this pure "I", but have lost touch with our Selves through identification. Through the 'creation' of an observing "I", we get a glimpse of something greater, of possibility, a taste of our natural freedom.
Commentary
What Have We Lost?
" When Freud coined the phrase that the ego was 'the true seat of anxiety', he was giving voice to a very true and profound intuition. " - C. G. Jung, Psychological Commentary, Tibetan Book of the Dead
We come into this life complete unto Ourselves. Helpless in body and mind, and a bit forgetful perhaps, but still possessing faith in our Self-sufficiency. As we begin to look around us at the fascinating play of form and feeling, we slowly begin to lose our innocent Self-absorption, and begin to be seduced into the present dimension. We can't help it, being terribly naive, and still somewhat innocent (though carrying an unconscious package deep inside, the basis for our arrival here in the bardo of life). This regretfully changes, as we are soon permeated with an unseen fog-like state of mind we inherit from our newly chosen home environment. Constantly battered by moods and emotions we do not understand, and cannot question, we find ourselves facing a daily onslaught of conflict and stress, followed by relief and pleasure, all designed to hook our attention in the outer world. The unconscious tendencies we have waiting patiently inside, soon enough find their counterparts in the willing environment. Our mind is eventually set in concrete by the pattern of action-reaction with the world as we have encountered it, leaving little freedom of movement. We become hopelessly outer-oriented. With every passing year, the pattern becomes more fixed, and we ourselves more convinced that the solution lies in more of the same. More control, more action-reaction, more identification, until we finally conquer and become master of the very environment that made us, or so we think. As someone once pointed out, this a good working definition of insanity. But here we are.
We have become hypnotized by the world. Our mind, and the minds of those who taught us from birth, have convinced us that we are an individual, a separate 'thing' in a world of separated things. This sooner or later creates the unquestioned, complete identification with this illusory 'thing', this knot between the sentient Self and the world. This knot is called ego, nebulous at best, though it calls itself "I". Because we have transferred our very sense of being into something unreal, that must be continually created and enforced, we feel an underlying anxiety, a longing for something, something stable and inherently self-sufficient. We, as ego, mistakenly transform this anxiety into a hope and belief in fear and desire, and turn again and again to the world for the solution to our own mind-made problem. The Tibetan Book of the Dead gives us a hint at how serious this transference of meaning from the real to the unreal can be. Death of the body may not break the spell. Even in our dreams and fantasies, we are continually wandering, looking for safety and fulfillment in ego-building and unquestioned belief in our desires and fears. We have lost our Selves, and can only react to the creations of our own now desperate minds.
As we continue through life, becoming more and more engrossed, our thoughts and actions reinforce themselves and the driving forces behind them, leaving less and less chance for any meaningful change. Just as in the world of the after-death Bardos, where at every step of the way the mind becomes more and more sensually oriented, more and more emotionally strident and confused, where in desperation, the wanderer eventually returns to life and the world of bodies and things in order to manifest its unconscious fears and desires, so is it also in this life. We wander from one game of desire to another, encouraged by success and pleasure, and driven by fear and our growing anxiety: the carrot and the stick that deny us any rest. We become obsessed with our health and possessions, and when faced with death, will do anything for even one more week of existence. We continue to turn towards life, bodies, and emotional highs and lows, making the same mistakes over and over, never guessing that the solution lies within, not in the manic, repetitious attempt to control the outer environment.
The world is change. Any hiding place or fortification we crawl into, or pleasure palace we build, will fail us, someday. All form is subject to this never-ceasing change. Only in the Formless can we find the road Home. This wandering from bardo to bardo, dream to dream, gives no peace or true understanding. The true cure for our anxiety and longing is the death of the ego, not the body. We have lost our connection to our Inner Self, not some thing, or some needed control over things. Instead, with non-attachment and great attention, look at the world, at the little life you think you love and hate so much, and at your anxious fear of it, at your coming death. Question everything, especially your self. Then, hopefully this dream of existence will be seen for what it is; a never-ending play of form upon emotion, a wandering through desire and fear that never ceases. Turn your attention back to your Source, to the Love within, and find peace for the wanderer, the lost traveler in the endless bardos of life, death, and dreams.
Bob Fergeson
Do you know, brother, that you are a prince? A son of Adam.
And that the witch of Kabul, who holds you with her color and her perfume, is the world?
Say the words, I take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak.
Avoid the hot breathing that keeps you tied to her. She breathes on knots
and no one can unknot them.
That's why the prophets came.
Look for those whose breath is cool. When they breathe on knots, they loosen.
You must marry your soul.That wedding is the way. Union with the world is sickness. - Rumi
- Quotes of the Month -
" There is no death - because there is nothing to die. But we don't accept this because we want this identity to live - to be real. Accepting that there is nothing to die is acknowledging that the "we" we take as us is not - and the reality of that, we perceive as death! " - Bob Cergol
" God does not redeem the personal man by death. He redeems Himself by freeing Himself from the personality of man." - Franz Hartmann
" Man is the Frankenstein of God. " - Richard Rose
" If I lived a billion years more, in my body or yours, there's not a single experience on earth that could ever be as good as being dead. Nothing." - Dr. Dianne Morrissey
" After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world." - Oscar Wilde on the effects of absinthe.
" Spending time alone is a very spiritual thing for me. Sometimes I compare it to going to church. " - Aron Ralston
Comic Philosophy
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
"They say such nice things about people at funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days." - Garrison Keillor
7/02/03
Copyright 2002 - 2003 Robert Fergeson. All Rights Reserved.