A forum for seekers of spiritual awakening through self-transcendence, irrespective of spiritual tradition, religious or non-religious background or affiliation.
.... Our goal is to walk with true spiritual seekers, and to provide encouragement along the path as these modern spiritual pilgrims quest for the holy modern grail --- a new state of consciousness and being ....
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James, one of the acknowledged "fathers" of modern psychology, distinguished between outer and inner religious faith. To him, "outer religion" was the province of rituals, sacraments, vestments and bells, while "inner religion" was a state of consciousness. In the true sense of the word, he viewed "inner religion" (from the Latin ligare, meaning to 'tie' or 'unite') as a state of natural, unitive and acceptive consciousness in which "religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands."
"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," he observes, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the folds and waterspouts of God."
"In this state of mind," he notes, "what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."
"This enchantment," he points out, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift or our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word or command."
"Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life," he concludes. "It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outward world disowns him it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste." "There are plenty of men," he adds parenthetically, "in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so."
"When a man surrenders all desires that come to the heart and by the grace of God finds the joy of God, then his soul has indeed found peace. He whose mind is untroubled by sorrows, and for pleasure has no longings, beyond passion and fear and anger, he is the sage of the unwavering mind."
"Spiritual experience," writes famed translator, Jose Mascaro, "is the only source of true spiritual faith, and this must never contradict reason, or as Shankara, c. AD 788-820, says in his commentary of the Bhagavad Gita: 'If a hundred scriptures should declare that fire is cold or that it is dark, we would suppose they intend quite a different meaning from the apparent one!'"
"What," he then asks, "is the indispensable condition for this spiritual experience? It is very simple, and it can be very difficult: it is the absence of desires."
[Mascaro, "Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics)," p. li.]
But, the question remains: How will we know when we have mastered desires?
In his treatise, "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," author, William Irvine observes that when we have mastered desire, "(w)e will experience what . . . has been the goal of most of those who have thought about desire - a feeling of tranquility."
"This should not be confused with the kind of tranquility brought on be ingestion of a tranquilizer," he cautions. Rather, he notes, "(i)t is instead marked by a sense that we are lucky to be living whatever life we happen to be living - that despite our circumstances no key ingredient of happiness is missing."
"With this sense," Irvine observes, "comes a diminished level of anxiety: we no longer need to obsess over the things - a new car, a bigger house, a firmer abdomen - that we mistakenly believe will bring lasting happiness if only we can obtain them. Most importantly," he points out, "if we master desire, to the extent possible to do so, we will no longer despise the life we are forced to live and will no longer daydream about living the life someone else is living; instead, we will embrace our own life and live it to the fullest."
[Irvine. "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," pp. 6-7.]
The "desireless realm" described by the Buddha, and so many others, is thus, a universal spiritual state of being described in all of the world's great wisdom traditions. In the New Testament, for example (at Matthew 6:27-34), Jesus addresses our overwhelming desires and worries, observing:
"And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!"
“Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
"(T)he time and effort we spend trying to master desire," Irvine suggests, "are probably considerably less than the time and effort we will expend if we instead capitulate to our desires and spend our days, as so many do, working incessantly to fulfill whatever desire floats into our head."
"Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires," says the Gita (at 2:48), be not moved in success or in failure. Yoga is evenness of mind - a peace that is ever the same."
According to the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung - the "Einstein of the mind" - the individual is born with an inherent disposition that becomes masked by the ego as he or she matures. And it is only by penetrating through the ego's mask that he or she discovers what and who she is. The danger, however, is that in doing so one will inevitably find a certain kind of madness.
In the lengthy video interview, attached, Jung observes that
"Man has a certain pattern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it."
"We are only deeply unconscious of these facts" Jung notes, "because we live all by our senses and outside of ourselves. If a man could look into himself, he could discover it. And when a man discovers it, in our days, he thinks he's crazy . . . and really crazy."
Jung's view was that without some real, inner religious experience, the madness of the human ego could and would drive the individual actor to the depths of madness, a view that is readily understandable given the collective insanity witnessed by Jung during the first half of the twentieth-century. In candid correspondence written in the last year of his life, Jung observed:
"I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouse so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible."*
The existential question for Jung, then, was: "Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving into the crowd?"
"To this question," he remarked, "there is a positive answer only when the individual is willing to fulfill the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If he follows through his intention, he will not only discover some important truths about himself, but will also have gained a psychological advantage: he will have succeeded in deeming himself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interest. He will have set his hand, as it were, to a declaration of his own human dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of his consciousness - that is, towards the unconscious, the only accessible source of religious experience."
"This is not to say," Jung cautions, "that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is the medium from which the religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such an experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem."
[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self, pp. 101-102]
* Letter from Carl Jung to Bill Wilson (co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), dated January 30, 1961. Jung died on June 6, 1961.
There are very, very few individuals who permanently change the worldviews of large portions of mankind. In ancient times there was Lao-Tze, Krishna, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed - all men who reconciled man with the world and the God or Being of their understanding. In modern times, perhaps only one man - Albert Einstein - has had such an effect, this time reconciling man with the universe itself.
And although Einstein was a scientist, and not an atheist but an agnostic at best, his spiritual life and views are a poignant reminder of how incomprehensible yet teasingly close is the evidence of some greater Being or entity, of which we may be a part. For Einstein a non-anthropomorphic God was evident in the profound simplicity and order of the universe itself, although he did not believe in life after death or a personal God that intervened in purely human affairs.
"I cannot," Einstein remarked, "believe in this concept of an anthropomorphic God who has the powers of interfering with these natural laws. As I said before, the most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical, and this mysticality is the power of all true science."
At a very deep level, as the above video demonstrates, Einstein held profound religious (in the sense of unitive) views, the most famous of which was that "God does not play dice with the universe." Yet, it was in his explanation of the illusory nature of our 'reality' itself, that Einstein was most prophetic - not just of the coming scientific understanding of reality, but of an awakening spirituality which questions the role of consciousness itself in forming and informing our world.
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe"," Einstein noted, "a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of consciousness."
"This delusion is a kind of prison for us," he observed, "restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
According to Einstein's own credo, "What I Believe," originally written in 1930, he explains that "(t)he most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is," he observes, "the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness."
"In this sense, and in this sense only," he concludes, "I am a devoutly religious man."
Unitarianism - the faith of Emerson and Thoreau, Dickens and Coleridge, Jefferson and Adams - was the essential faith of the American Transcendentalists, and its legacy can be traced through the New Thought movement to elements of the New Age movement today.
"Religion," writes James Freeman Clarke in 'The Manual of Unitarian Belief', "may be defined as the worship and service of God. It is necessary," he observes, "because man is feeble, and needs Divine power to give him strength; he is ignorant, and needs Divine light to guide him; he is sinful, and needs Divine mercy to give him peace; he is mortal, and needs faith in things unseen and eternal to give him the hope of continued existence."
"That religion is natural to man," Clarke observes, "appears from the fact that in a higher or lower form it has been found among all races and nations, among civilized and savage people, on ancient and modern times."
"Natural religion," he points out, "is that which is awakened by the sight of the order and beauty of nature, of its adaptations to the use of living beings, of its variety and unity; leading the mind up to the conception of a Supreme Being, perfect in power, wisdom and goodness."
"Revealed religion," he notes, "consists of the revelations of Divine truth made to the souls of inspired men, thus producing lawgivers, prophets, and spiritual leaders of the human race.
"Saint Augustine," Emerson writes, "described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere, We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms."
"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on midnoon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."
1. God's presence is made known in a myriad of ways. Religion should promote a free and responsible search for truth, meaning, communion and love.
2. Reason is a gift from God. Religion should embrace reason and its progeny, including the scientific enterprise which explores God's creation.
3. Free will is a gift from God. Religion should assist in the effort to find a path that exercises that gift in a responsible, constructive and ethical manner.
4. Conscious of the complexity of creation, of the limits of human understanding and of humanity's capacity for evil in the name of religion, we hold that humility, religious tolerance and freedom of conscience should be a central part of any religious experience.
5. Religious experience is most fulfilling in the context of a tradition. Our religious tradition is the Unitarian tradition, which emphasizes the importance of reason in religion, tolerance and the unity of God.
6. Revelation is ongoing. Religion should draw inspiration not only from its own tradition but from other religious traditions, philosophy and the arts. Although paying due regard for the hard lessons learned in the past and to the importance of religious tradition, religion should not be stagnant but should employ reason and religious experience to evolve in a constructive, enlightened and fulfilling way.
7. Conscious of the spiritual and material needs of our fellow men and women, the evil they may be subjected to and the tragedies they may endure, works of mercy and compassion should be a part of any religious experience.
"There is a very, very dire importance to understand what is the essence of religion," Radhanath Swami points out, in the attached lecture delivered at the Unitarian Church of Dallas Texas.
"In a very broad sense," says Radhanath, a teacher in the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, "(the essence of religion) is to transform our consciousness - from arrogance to humility, from vengeance to forgiveness, from greed to generosity, and, most of all it is meant to connect us to the love within us so that we can be instruments of compassion in everything we do."
"This is the universal principle of religion," Radhanath explains, "to absorb ourselves in the love of God and to be genuinely compassionate to all living beings."
"Wherever we find love of God that is broad and deep," he points out (quoting his own spiritual guru), "it induces us to be truly compassionate and make sacrifices for the welfare of others. That is where the truth is. That is real religion."
"It is not about being a Hindu or a Muslim," he notes, "or a Christian, or a Jew, or a Sikh, or a Jain, or a Zoroastrian or a Buddhist, it is about loving God. It is about connecting to that higher experience of love within our heart and being an instrument of compassion within this world. That is the essence (of the world's wisdom traditions), and that is the greatest need."
An interesting and informative video introduction to quantum physics, cosmolgy, the "new physics" and their relationship to "God" has been put together by UNFFwildcard on YouTube ( "God and Cosmology I").
Very detailed, the video series (embedded below) is nonetheless a concise explanation of the "new physics" and the problems and possibilities that quantum theory presents for our understanding of the cosmos, consciousness and, perhaps, an omnipresent God that pervades and supports the universe.
Video for God and Cosmology - Part 4 is available for viewing on YouTube by following this link.
"Our faith comes in moments," writes Emerson, the great American Transcendentalist, "our vice is habitual." "Yet there is a depth in those brief moments," he observes, "which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences."
Continuing in his essay, "The Over-Soul," we read:
"We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related; the Eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle the subject and the object are one."
"We see the world piece by piece," Emerson observes, "as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul."
"All goes to show," writes Emerson, "that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and will; is the background of our being in which they lie - an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing but the light is all." (Emphasis added.)
"The soul circumscribes all things," he notes, "contradicts all experience. . . . (And) in like manner . . . abolishes space and time."
"The influence of the senses," he observes, "has in most instances overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of times and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the soul."
"We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age," he continues, "than that which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling it rather belongs to the ages than to mortal life."
In an insightful and encompassing lecture on the competing visions of our origins - metaphysical and physical, spiritual and scientific, Eastern and Western - Alan Wallace, a polymath Buddhist practitioner and trained physicist, traces how the origin of the scientific method has evolved to generally exclude anything that smacks of 'subjectivity' - and, most specifically, the phenomenon of consciousness.
The scientific stricture on limiting its studies to the strictly 'objective' became a very limiting bottleneck in the study of 'reality' with the rise of relativity and quantum theory at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, its historical preclusion of anything that that might be construed as 'subjectivity' became more and more untenable as one delved further into the role that the 'observer' (or consciousness) plays in the microcosmic world of atomic sub-particles
The brilliant Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, in his book, "Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science," highlights (and questions) the extent to which 'subjectivity' was precluded from 'classical physics,' a prejudice that was carried over, with mixed results, into the so-called 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum theory.
In "Physics and Philosophy," at page 29, Heisenberg writes:
"In classical physics science started from the belief - or should one say from the illusion? - that we could describe the world or at least parts of the world without any reference to ourselves. This is actually possible to a large extent. We know that the city of London exists whether we see it or not. It may be said that classical physics is just that idealization in which we speak about parts of the world without any reference to ourselves. Its success has led to the general idea of an objective description of the world. Objectivity has become the first criterion for the value of any scientific result. Does the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory still comply with this ideal? One may perhaps say that quantum theory corresponds to this ideal as far as possible."
"This division," between 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity,' Heisenberg observes, "is arbitrary and historically a direct consequence of our scientific method; the use of the classical concepts is finally a consequence of the general way of human thinking."
But is this really a consequence of "the general way of human thinking," as Heisenberg posits? In the first part of a compelling, if lengthy, lecture, Wallace traces how the strictures against 'subjectivity' arose because the scientific method, ironically, arose out of traditional Christian theological and metaphysical assumptions and worldviews.
"From the time of Copernicus, right on through Kepler, Galileo, Newton and so forth," Wallace observes, "science as we have come to know it has been overwhelmingly extrospective in its orientation (and) its perspective. To understand the nature of reality scientists have looked outwards."
"There are very good reasons (that scientists look outwards), and a lot of them are based in Christian theology," Wallace observes. "It's very important to bear in mind that a great majority of the founders of the scientific revolution were themselves devout Christians. A number of them were theologians, such as Newton himself. And so there were very deep metaphysical underpinnings to the scientific revolution. It was not by any means a revolt against religion," Wallace declares, "but rather an expression of it for many of its participants."
"The scientific aspiration from the time certainly of Galileo on through Newton and for quite some time after that," says Wallace, "was to know the objective world from a God's eye perspective, free of the limitations of human subjectivity."
"Prior to the scientific revolution, prior to the Protestant Reformation," he notes, "there was Christian theology and there was together with that a fairly strong . . . contemplative ideal (and) discipline founded by people like Augustine and the earlier Desert Fathers - and later right on through the Medieval period - that was largely introspective in nature. . . . But with the Protestant Reformation there was this movement outwards, and so one finds no strong inward contemplative tradition, so to speak . . . in the new Protestant Reformation."
Wallace notes that "the Protestant Reformation . . . did have a contemplative mode to it, an active mode of inquiry into 'reality,' but (one) which stood instead of contemplative practice - sitting quietly, introspecting (and) going within one's own soul - (and) looked outwards."
"I think you can virtually regard scientific research, or scientific . . . methodology, as being like the contemplative counterpart for Christian Protestant theology," Wallace observes.
The methodology of third-person 'objectivity' (a cornerstone of the modern scientific method), Wallace notes, was thus developed as a method to check that personal subjective biases were not clouding the way in which a 'God's-eye view' would actually look upon the 'reality' of the physical world.
This has been "extremely successful for opening up that facet of reality that lends itself to third person investigation, namely the physical world" Wallace observes. "The disadvantage of that is that it ignores - simply because it refuses to attend to scientifically - those facts of reality that do not lend themselves to that type of third person public scrutiny. What leaps to mind," he notes, "is the whole range of subjective phenomena."
"What happens," Wallace asks, "if your authorities for knowledge very intelligently and for a sustained period and in multiple ways attend to one aspect of reality, and in a very concerted way, scientifically speaking, ignores another aspect . . . (or) domain of reality?"
Wallace cites the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher William James, who, in his classic work, "The Principles of Psychology," observes that:
"The subjects adhered to become real subjects, attributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence; whilst the subjects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneous attributes, and the existence disregarded an existence in no man’s land, in the limbo “where footless fancies dwell.” . . . Habitually and practically we do not count these disregarded things as existents at all . . . they are not even treated as appearances; they are treated as if they were mere waste, equivalent to nothing at all."
And so, this quirk of the Eurocentric evolution of the scientific method excludes the radical 'subjectivity' of millennia of Eastern philosophical and psychological insights, thereby erecting a largely artificial interpretive barrier to understanding consciousness and the subtler aspects of 'matter' that are increasingly less amenable to Western interpretations as quantum theory and our understanding of it develops. A point that is well made by Wallace in the first part of his lecture.
"I am by nature a traditional mystic," says author Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. "The new age spiritual teachings, so to speak, didn't mean much to me. My focus was on the inner experiences of the individual, the inner mystical experiences that really belong to classical Sufism."
"And then a strange thing happened in the spring of the year 2000," he notes, "suddenly my attention was shifted. It's like somebody turned my head from here to there, and then I saw what I call this 'emerging consciousness of 'Oneness,' that there is something awakening in the world that hasn't been here before."
"In a way," he notes, "you can trace it back to the mystical understanding of 'Oneness,' because 'Oneness' is a basic mystical experience. Many, many, many people have had experiences of 'Oneness.' They've woken up for a moment, like the poet William Blake said, "to see the world in a grain of sand." They've had those momentary experiences where they see everything as one; they see that the universe is one dynamic whole."
"But the idea that this might become part of our collective human experience," he observes, "not just an individual mystical experience, which it has been traditionally in the past - the unio mystico of the mystics - that somehow the whole of humanity is taking a step to a different level of awareness, this really began to interest me."
"And, all I can do," says Vaughan-Lee, "is say that there seems to be a need to prepare the ground, so that if such a moment should happen, if there should be something that happens that awakens humanity, the whole of humanity . . . that one can begin to prepare the stepping stones."
"But how it is going to happen I don't know," he observes. "I thought it was going to be much simpler."
Preparing such a foundation, however, may be of the utmost importance. Without a preparatory foundation, Vaughan-Lee observes, the individual may be dangerously unprepared for such an awakening of consciousness.
In a related video, Vaughan Lee observes that "a human being is quite complex. We have a soul that longs for God, but we also have a personality, an ego that has developed, that has conditioning - (the) influence of parents and all of the dramas of being alive, of being part of humanity. And when you really seriously commit yourself to spiritual life, you have to start to clear out some of the clutter you have accumulated in your life."
"For this," he warns, " it is necessary to have some psychological system. Otherwise, what happens is that the bright light of the divine in you floods you, and you get unbalanced. You have to become grounded in yourself."
"Sadly," he notes, "there have been people who have become intoxicated by God but then became unbalanced because they haven't done the inner work that is needed for grounding the human being. You need a process to help you to prepare, to help your 'inner self' to prepare."
"If you haven't done that inner work, if you haven't explored yourself psychologically, then the spiritual energies that come into the human being will unbalance you and you will become ungrounded."
After the American Transcendentalists and the New Thought movements, with their various teachers and teachings, yet before the Hippies with their LSD, and before the New Agers with their crystals, there were the "Beats." And before the "Beats," as after the "Beats," there was the prolific writer and wanderer, Jack Kerouac - the singular "King of the Beats."
Kerouac, for all his hard-drinking and womanizing ways that were immortalized in "On the Road" and his many other novels, was nonetheless, and more than anything else an Arahat, a spiritual seeker. His most personal writings, the notebooks he kept that were published as "Some of the Dharma," reveal over and over the depth of the spiritual enlightenment he chased from his native Maine to New York City, and from San Francisco to the deserts of Mexico and the beaches of Florida.
In "Some of the Dharma," a masterpiece of existential poetry and prose, he writes:
MY PERSONALITY SELF is only like a river in its valley - the river is like Mind Essence, the shores Jack Kerouac - as soon as it gets "out to sea" there is no more river and my realization of essence of mind restored unshackled to shoreless void---but mind will continue to suffer down other rivers after my river runs out of its banks, so "I'll suffer again," because I'm mind, my realization of suffering is due not to my personality-shores but due and informed by the mind essence "waters" that stream through---So as long as ignorance exists I'll, as mind, suffer---consciously, too---The mistake of ignorance is in my own mind now.
["Some of the Dharma," page 183.]
Again and again, he would turn to the theme of ignorance, and the pursuit of his enlightenment with or without the help of the Buddha, the saints or God.
The world is what's in the mind.---
The reason why concentration is advised is because
sentient beings have a tendency to run wild in the
wrong direction and stampeded to Ignorance---
["Some of the Dharma," page 183.]
Kerouac died as he lived, and fittingly it was in 1969, before he would witness the demise of the love spread during that era. He died at the age of 47 from an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifetime of hard drinking.
Yet, in the end, it seems Kerouac may have obtained, in his own way, a peace that few of us come to know. On the final pages of "Some of the Dharma," he writes:
The Karma Emptiness Movement works automatically, evil is paid up prompt. . . . . .
ALSO It's worse than death not to know that "God" is the same thing as yourself----
and that's precisely the situation everywhere---and everywhere they're "dying"---
Kerouac concludes that his life was due to "a load of unpaid karmic debts," which his "automatic sentient suffering (would) make good."
These are the the fundamental existential questions which enlightened spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, examines in the attached video excerpt introducing his talk/teaching, "The Deepest Truth of Human Existence."
In the video, Tolle asks the listener to acknowledge and focus on his or her "realm of stillness underneath the stream of mental noise," underneath what the philosopher/psychologist William James termed the "stream of consciousness," underneath the mental phenomena of the human ego which Tolle rightly observes most people are mistakenly identified with as "themselves," or 'who' and 'what' they are in their essence.
"We are here to explore the deepest truth of who you are," Tolle observes, "because you are human existence. We are here to explore the deepest truth within yourself. Knowing yourself at the deepest level, (is) a level so deep that knowing yourself and knowing God become one and the same."
"That which acknowledges that dimension in you," says Tolle, that "which is able to listen to that dimension - (to) listen not to something but to nothing, (to) listen to 'no' thing - that in you which is able to acknowledge that dimension and to be attentive to that dimension, is a realm of existence underneath the stream of mental noise."
It is because of "this stream of mental noise," because of the misidentification of our egoic 'selves' with our real essence, that nearly all of us struggle with our thoughts and the existential questions of 'what' we are, 'who' we are, and 'why' we are here.
"Through thought you cannot pay attention to silence," Tolle notes, "because thought is noise." And, it is because of this conditioned way of constant thinking we have learned, that most everyone in this age struggles to experience the consciousness of God, and experientially witness the 'state of grace.'
Thus, as the psalmist urged millennia ago, it is now - as ever - necessary for the spiritual aspirant to "(be) still and know that I am God."
Perhaps one of the most unheralded American 'Zen masters' was the late William Samuel - a 'Zen master' whose life was a temple, who glimpsed enlightenment fighting with the Chinese Nationalists in World War II, who found enlightenment on an embattled hilltop in the Korean War, and a 'Zen master' who sat 'Zaizen' for the remainder of his life in the hill country of Alabama.
Samuel's largely unheralded teachings, although he wrote two inspiring and informative books on the matter, are emblematic somehow of an enlightened man of the 20th century who found peace in war, and surrendered to the Godhead in the midst of battle. The following passage from his essay, "A Soldier's Story" is at once enchanting and inspiring. Here is a man that "glimpsed" and then "grasped" the Absolute amid the Hell's of the last century's worst conflicts.
"Let me write a Glimpse or two from those days," he writes. "First, harking back to China, Mr. Shieh and I, with five American teammates, were being pursued by a Japanese combat patrol. We were "retrograding," bringing up the rear of our little patrol, trying to get back to the safety of friendly lines. We were close to being captured. In those days, neither the Japanese nor Chinese "gave quarter." That is we took no prisoners. I knew that if I were taken by the pursuing Japanese, it meant certain death. On the other hand, Mr. Shieh might successfully pass himself off as a Chinese peasant. Oh, I cannot write this story! At this minute it is enough to remember Mr. Shieh seeing and pointing out the beauty of those purple blooms on the distant mountain we had yet to climb. I marveled at a man who could see beauty under such oppressive circumstances. I marvel more that he helped me learn to do it"
From the peace of his post-war home in rural Alabama, Samuel taught a distinctly American brand of non-duality; a brand of non-duality informed by his immerision into an ancient Eastern culture during the worst of times and situations of modern conflict. Samuel's unique experiences paint an intriguing picture of what must have been both "the best of times and the worst of times," to steal a line from Dickens.
Here, in a recollection of his post-World War II travels set out in his most personal and eclectic book, "The Child Within Us Lives," Samuel invokes the wonder of a young Western exposed at once to the contradictory worlds of an ancient and too-modern China, between ancient teachings and modern cynicism and disbelief:
In Kwangse the group sat talking. "With all my travel and study I've never heard of the equation," the soldier groused. "I haven't either," said the minister. Neither had Lee nor Mary. Han said, "One who doen't live the Divine Equation simply doesn't know it. To know it without living it is to be dead. To know it is to live it. personally, I do not see how one can know he knows it without living it, but I don't know everything." "But friend Han," shouted the soldier, "you just told us that the real Identity of each of us is Omniscience itself! How can one be that and still now know everything?" Han said, "God knows everything, but I don't. I am merely the knowing of God, so I certainly don't know everything." "That doesn't make a damn bit of sense," the soldier said. "I call that circular reasoning," he added, leaving the room.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The "Equation," of course is the fundamental truth of all the world's great wisdom traditions: 'All is One.' And Han, Samuel writes, "is not God and does not claim to be. . . . Han is as close as one comes to his real Identity before consciously being that One."
As such, Han is an inspiration for us all.
Samuel's work is elliptic, hinting at the Absolute and then drawing back in order to draw the spiritual aspirant in. Perhaps his most direct statement of the Absolute and our spiritual quest here is in his introduction to his other great work, "A Guide to Awareness and Tranquility." In it, he writes:
"The world is not as it appears to the busy, troubled mortal. A beautiful and magnificent harmony is spread over the entire face of the land; perfection permeates everything. This perfect Harmony is readily discernible and immediately available to anyone willing to acknowledge its presence and pay the small price demanded of it.
What is the price? Surrender of the personality! Only the personality, the prideful, intellectual ego, denies the totality of Reality and the presence of a perfect experience."
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
"The world is not as it appears . . . ."
I pause with Han and rest.
Breathing in, I become the fragrance of the purple blossoms on the side of the mountain we are climbing.
Richard Dawkins, the noted biologist and critic of all things 'religious,' gave what has become a bit of a 'stump speech' (entitled "Queerer than We Can Suppose: The Strangeness of Science") on Ted.org several years ago. Dawkins - whom I would describe, having been one, as an "evangelical atheist" - along with Christopher Hitchins, is in the forefront of an all-too ideological battle against what comedian Bill Maher has called "religiousity."
While many "religious critics" have found Dawkins' pitch antithetical to their ideas and beliefs about God and the universe, I don't share that view. Dawkins is both an eminent scientist and influential social critic, but while many found Dawkins evolutionary critique of fundamentalist religious teaching challenging, I found it profoundly inspiring.
Perhaps the fundamental conflict that Dawkins and others have with "religion" or "God," per se, (Dawkins' formal religious critique is, after all, called "The God Delusion") consists of a definition of terms. Dawkins and Hitchins rail against an "anthropomorphic God" - i.e., a man-like God behind the universe somewhere, 'pulling the levers,' so-to-speak, like an eternal 'Wizard of Oz.'
While this anthropomorphic view may be a popular conception of what "God" is, or may be, it is an old and disavowed view which, nonetheless, continues to hold some capital with those who have not given much thought to what such metaphysical terms might mean. I suspect it is still informed somewhat by the iconic images on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel. Nonetheless, it has been disavowed by most authorities, including the Vatican and the Pope, himself.
If one examines experiential religion - what the founding father of introspective psychology, William James, called "inner religion", as opposed to the "outer religion" of dogma, creeds, temples, vestries and incense - there is no inherent conflict with the evolutionary scientific perspective of Dawkins and Hitchins. Their choosing to oppose fundamentalist, outer and anthropomorphic theism with science is just that, a choice. Yet even the Vatican's chief astronomer has said that the 'Big Bang' is the most likely version of the Creation. And the current head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, besides lifting the ex-communication of Galileo, has said that the debate between evolution and creationism is "an absurdity," pointing out that the two can co-exist.
A more informed debate would occur if there were agreement as to the terms and concepts being discussed. More's the pity since this does not appear to be likely even though such a debate would likely prove to be beneficial to both science and metaphysics. (A point made by Alan Wallace, an accomplished scientist and Buddhist practitioner, in a fascinating, if lengthy, "Google TechTalk.")
Rather than engaging in a debate with 'fundamentalist' religious types (and stereotypes) over the 'usefulness' or 'social harm' caused by organized religion, a more utilitarian debate informed by the works of modern theologists, philosophers and scientist, like the Jesuit paleontologist, Teihard de Chardin (that's right, a Jesuit paleontologist) or progressive spiritual leaders like Andrew Cohen, who teaches what he calls "Evolutionary Enlightenment," would add much good to both the public discourse and to science.
While we wait for such a debate, as an inwardly-focused yet not "outwardly religious" spiritual aspirant, I find Dawkins' lecture to be both immensely informative and profoundly inspiring. I suspect that many, if not most, seekers after authentic, inner religious experience who are at all informed about the wonders of evolution, relativity theory and the uncomprehendable (not 'incomprehensible') wonders of quantum mechanics, may find that Dawkin's "polemic" is both profound and, dare I say, spiritually uplifting.
