Spiritual Practice, Non-Attachment and Enlightenment

"Practice is the repeated effort to follow the disciplines which give permanent control of the thought-waves of the mind."

"Practice becomes firmly grounded when it has been cultivated for a long time, uninterruptedly, with earnest devotion."

"Non-attachment is self-mastery; it is freedom from desire for what is seen or heard."

-- Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: 13-15 --

"The waves of the mind can be made to flow in two opposite directions - either toward the objective world ("the will to desire") or toward true self-knowledge ("the will to liberation"). Therefore both practice and non-attachment are necessary. Indeed, it is useless and potentially even dangerous to attempt one without the other. If we attempt to practice spiritual disciplines without attempting to control the thought-waves of desire, our minds will become violently agitated and perhaps permanently unbalanced."

"If we attempt nothing more than a rigid negative control of the waves of desire, without raising waves of love, compassion and devotion to oppose them then the result may be even more tragic. This is why certain puritans suddenly and mysteriously commit suicide. They make a cold, stern effort to be "good" - that is, not to think "bad thoughts" - and when they fail, as human beings sometimes must, they cannot face this humiliation, which is really nothing but hurt pride, and the emptiness inside themselves. In the Taoist scriptures we read: "Heaven arms with compassion those whom it would not see destroyed."

. . .

"Perseverance is very important in this connection. No temporary failure, however disgraceful or humiliating, should ever be used as an excuse for giving up the struggle. . . . No failure is ever really a failure unless we stop trying altogether - indeed, it may be a blessing in disguise, a much needed lesson."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How to Know God," pp. 28-29.]

In the attached video, spiritual teacher Paramahamsa Nithyananda discusses the importance of practice in Patanjali's yoga sutras (above), highlighting the dangers that may arise when the spiritual aspirant employs spiritual techniques in practice without a true understanding of how and why such techniques are used.

In terms of practice being "cultivated for a long time, uninterruptedly," Nithyananda stresses that this is not in sole reference to linear time, but is rather a recognition that, like the Buddha, the aspirant must realize and determine that 'practice' is a life-long commitment that must be continuously cultivated. The dedication of the spiritual aspirant must, therefore, be to the practice of 'being enlightened' rather than to that of 'seeking enlightenment.' In the end, even the desire to 'become' enlightened - like all other desires - must be dropped, says Nithyananda.

Deepak Chopra: You Are the Universe

"When you know your true essence, you get in touch with that part of yourself that is beyond time and space and the source of both. You no longer identify with the changing behavior of the ocean of consciousness in all its different forms; you identify with the unchanging essence of consciousness itself. If you know that your essence is the unity of one spirit, then everything else becomes known to you."

"Are you ready to take a quantum leap of creativity? Beyond the illusion of a material world is a world of power, freedom, and grace. Understand your true essence, and you begin a journey towards enlightenment. By and by on this journey, you shed your habitual and conditioned responses. As you do so, you become a spiritual master and transcend all suffering, including the fear of death. You realize that the real you was never born, and therefore can never die. Only that which has a beginning has an ending. That which never began is eternal and always, and it is you."

-- Deepak Chopra --
("Power, Freedom, and Grace," p. 78.)

Deepak Chopra, M.D.
Author of "Power, Freedom and Grace"

It is difficult to describe Deepak Chopra's teachings, due in large part to the sheer volume and breadth of his work. Trained as a medical doctor, Chopra expresses a profoundly non-dualistic view of the universe and its beings. Perhaps, the best description of his positions on life, the universe, and our place in it, is that of a strictly non-dualistic "neo-Vedantist."

"In the deeper reality," says Chopra in the attached video, "there is no such thing as a person. There is only the universal manifesting as a person. What is a person? Your body is recycled dust. Your breath is recycled air. Your thoughts are recycled information, Your emotions are recycled energy. And what you call your personality is just the mirror of relationship, because in order to define yourself you need to define everyone around you and what they are doing."

"In the real deepest reality," he notes, "what we call a 'person' is a dynamic bundle of consciousness that is constantly transforming. Where is the person when you were fourteen years of age? Where is the person you were when you were five years of age? Actually, in every moment of existence the old person dies and a new one is born. So, the person you were yesterday is not the person you are now, in any way. Your thoughts are not the same, though they may appear to be the same. But your body is not the same, your emotions are transforming. So, if you really look at how the universe functions, the 'observer,' which we call the person, and the 'observed,' which we call the world, are recreated every moment of existence. The reason why you have this illusion of being the same person is 'continuity of memory' which gives you this false belief that you are the same person you were an hour ago, or ten years ago."

"The universe continues to evolve as observers and observed," Chopra points out. "In reality you are the Infinite Being with a localized perspective, and that localized perspective is impermanent and transient. You are the universe."

 "The essential you, your real essence," observes Chopra in his book, "Power, Freedom and Grace," is a field of awareness that interacts with its own self and then becomes both mind and body. In other words," he notes, "you are consciousness or spirit, which then conceives, constructs, governs and then becomes the mind and the body. The real you is inseparable from the patterns of intelligence that permeate every fiber of creation."

"At the deepest level of existence," he points out, "you are Being, and you are nowhere and everywhere at the same time. There is no other "you" than the entire cosmos. The cosmic mind creates the physical universe, and the personal mind experiences the physical universe."

[Chopra, "Power, Freedom, and Grace," p. 19.]

Tolerance, Love and the Essence of All Religions

In his study of the Sanatan Dharma - the wide and multi-branched body of teachings known as Hinduism in the West - Radhanath Swami (born Richard Slavin) "discovered the basic truths of all religions in a way that the oneness of God and religion is comprehensively understood." "The essence of Hinduism," Radhanath writes on The Huffington Post, "is the same essence of all true religions: Bhakti or pure love for God and genuine compassion for all beings."

"Why," he asks, "should we fight over which religion is better? It is pointless. True love for God devoid of selfishness or egoism is the best religion. Wherever true love, broad mindedness, integrity and compassion are present, there one will find real religion through whichever path it is realized."

"God reveals different visions of Himself according to the needs of time and place," Radhanath observes. "Throughout history, declaring one vision all in all has been a convenient pretext for aggression, as it is relatively simple to manipulate uneducated or insecure people with propaganda. It is unfortunate to see that God, whom all faiths exalt as great, is so often depicted as small, petty and partial to one group."

"My childhood conviction that the inherent beauty of God must lie at the essence of all true spiritual paths has only grown over the years," Radhanath notes. " Of course," he observes, "the accounts of tragedy in the name of God have endured as well."

"Whenever I hear such unfortunate news," he writes, "I can't help but think that perhaps a prudent addition to the premise of God's greatness would be that God is greater than our comprehension of Him -- greater even than the religions we dedicate in His honor. God is independent and not restricted by our expectations or demands. This is the premise of the Bhakti tradition and the starting point of the journey to reawakening our love of God: God is so much bigger than we imagine."

In the attached video lecture on "the essence of all religions," Radhanath notes that intolerance and indoctrination may be found amongst the adherents of all religions, but that at the heart of all such wisdom traditions there is a message of selflessness and unity.

"The supreme dharma or religion, is to love God," he observes. "That love must be to the degree it is unmotivated by any selfish egoism, and uninterrupted by any circumstances that may come upon us." Such a religion, he says, "actually satisfies the heart."

"We are all looking for happiness," Radhanath points out, "and that happiness is within us. To connect to that, and to be an instrument to share that with others, is true religion."

Double-Mindedness: Disciplining the Ego

"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways"

-- James 1:8 --

Double, triple or multiple-mindedness is the ordinary state of the vast, vast majority of people. Yet, only a relatively few people - although perhaps that number is growing - even question the state of their consciousness and being in the first place.

In his great book, "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," (written with Christopher Isherwood), the Vedantist monk, Swami Prabhavananda observes that if you were to look into the mind of most men or women it would look something like this: "Ink-bottle. That time I saw Roosevelt. In love with the night mysterious. Reds veto Pact. Jimmy's trying to get my job. Mary says I'm fat. big toe hurts. Soup good. . . . etc., etc."

If an individual were to vocalize this barrage of thinking which is the ordinary state of our human, egoic consciousness, we would call him or her mad. Yet this is the ordinary way that most people think. Caught up in the inner dialogue of the ego, they may be compelled to say or do virtually anything; although fear, or perhaps their conscience, usually prevents them from doing so. They are, quite literally, "double-minded" and, hence, "unstable in all their ways," because they are more or less unaware that beneath the raucous thought stream of the ego there is only the clear being of higher consciousness and awareness.

"The truth," says Prabhavananda, "is that we are all inclined to flatter ourselves - despite our daily experience to the contrary - that we spend our time thinking logical, consecutive thoughts. In fact, most of us do no such thing. Consecutive thought about any one problem occupies a very small portion of our waking hours. More usually we are in a state of reverie - a mental fog of disconnected sense-impressions, irrelevant memories, nonsensical scraps of sentences from books and newspapers, little darting fears and resentments, physical sensations of discomfort, excitement or ease."

[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How To Know God," pp. 58-59.]

The practice of yoga, like all esoteric religious or spiritual paths, is directed towards stilling the thought-waves of the egoic mind, and, by doing so, realizing the essence of one's being that lies beneath the ego's thought stream. "Who," asked Jesus, "ever added one cubit to his stature by taking thought?" (Matthew 6:27).

Prabhavananda and Isherwood, like other commentators on Patanjali's yoga aphorisms, use the metaphor of a lake to describe the effect of our egoic thinking. The lake is our mind, and when waves of thought muddy that lake, we can no longer see to the lake bottom which is the true essence of our Being. The job of the spiritual aspirant, then, is to still the thought waves in the mind so that he or she can realize their essence. For, at heart, we are all inseparable from the Ground of Being that permeates and sustains the universe, and we are only separate from that Ground of Being to the extent that we allow the reverie of thought to stir the waters.

When we discipline the mind through meditation, prayer and the frequent recurrence to the contemplation of our Being (or the Ground of Being) we become stable. When we don't, we again become "unstable in all our ways."

Advaita Vedanta and Non-Duality

In "A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga," (available at Gutenberg.org, here), author William Walker Atkinson, observes:

"All philosophies, all science, all religions, inform us that this world of shapes, forms and name is but a phenomenal or shadow-world - a show-world - back of which rests Reality, called by some name of the teacher. But remember this, all philosophy that counts is based upon some form of monism - Oneness - whether the concept be a known or unknown god; an unknown or unknowable principle; a substance; an Energy, or Spirit. There is but one - there can be but One - such is the inevitable conclusion of the highest known human reason, intuition or faith."

Sri Ramakrishna
(1836-1886)

All the world's great wisdom traditions ("Hear, O' Israel, the Lord, thy God, is One!"), as Atkinson notes, devolve back into an understanding of non-duality, an understanding that there is no separate existence apart from the Whole, the Ground of Being. But, perhaps, the concept of non-duality is nowhere more deeply examined than in the Advaita Vedantist tradition of India, particularly in the Shankarya school.

Explaining the non-dualistic philosophy of Shankara (a.k.a. Samkara), Vedantist teacher, Swami Prabhavananada (in "The Spiritual Heritage of India") observes:

"The world, according to Samkara, 'is and is not.' Its fundamental unreality can be understood only in relation to the ultimate mystical experience, the experience of an illumined soul. When the illumined soul passes into transcendental consciousness, he realizes the Self (the Atman) as pure bliss and pure intelligence, the one without the second. In this state of consciousness, all perception of multiplicity ceases, there is no longer any sense of 'mine' and 'thine', the world as we know it has vanished. Then the Self shines forth as the One, the Truth, the Brahman, the basis of the apparent world."

"The apparent world, as it is experienced in the waking state, may be likened, says Samkara, to an imagined snake which proves, on closer inspection, to be nothing but a coil of rope. When the truth is known, we are no longer deluded by the appearance  - the snake-appearance vanishes into the reality of the rope, the world vanishes into Brahman."

[Swami Prabhavananda, "The Spiritual Heritage of India," pp. 283-284.]

The following video serves as a brief introduction to the Advaita Vedanta, and introduces its many teachers, old and new, including Shankara as well as the late Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta.

Adyashanti: "Time Is Running Out"

In researching the convergence of spirituality and science, I was struck, firstly, by the enormous amount of material available on a sense of "oneness" - what Vedantists and other Eastern wisdom traditions have long viewed as "non-duality" - and, secondly, I could not help but be impressed by the sense of urgency that both scientists and spiritual teachers have as to whether collectively we will wake-up to the nature of our interconnectedness, our "oneness," in time to avert the many life-threatening problems which we face on a global scale.

"Nobody can avoid the truth forever," says spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. "If the human species doesn't survive - (and) as far as I've seen in the history of the world there is almost no species that survives forever - if we don't do the job, if our consciousness doesn't evolve, 'Life' or 'Existence will just go, " Well, that didn't work out so well . . . phht! . . . You're out!" Not that he means this to be as casual as it might sound. He notes that "there will be a lot of blood, of suffering and difficulty in that process."

"It just seems that we keep getting to these crises," Adyanshanti observes." Not that this is necessarily bad, it just seems in his view, as in the view of so many others, that with mass extinctions, global warming, an energy crisis and ever advancing technology we are now facing our inevitable existential challenge.



"Crises are often the catalysts for change," he observes, "(and) I hope we are starting to agree that we are coming to a place of crisis; that we are coming into a contact, not with our own personal mortality, but with our mortality as a species."

"Just like individual mortality can lead to a change of consciousness because we realize time's run out that, there is no more time," he notes, "in that 'no-more-time' sometimes consciousness can shift. And, as humanity, I think we are rapidly approaching that same kind of imperative. Time is running out."

"So quite naturally," he concludes, " there is tremendous pressure on humanity, on humanity's consciousness. We all feel  it, right? This tremendous pressure to evolve, to awaken, because somehow intuitively everyone knows that if there is not some rather dramatic shift of consciousness then this tremendous opportunity will be missed."

Sri Bhagavan on "What is Enlightenment?"

Sri Bhagavan, Co-founder (with
Sri Amma) of Oneness University

In the attached video, Sri Bhagavan, a modern teacher of non-dualistic enlightenment who follows in the living Vedantist tradition of Ramana Maharhi and Sri Nisagardatta, explores what enlightenment (or mukhti) is, and what the mental barriers to such enlightenment are. "The general definition which I give of mukhti (enlightenment)," says Sri Bhagavan, "is the liberation of the senses."

"When you see," this modern sage explains, "you do not see without the interference of the mind. If you can see without the mind interfering that is enlightenment. If you can hear without the mind interfering that is enlightenment. The same applies to smell, touch and even thought." 

"Thought (can) also be observed without your getting involved with the thought," Sri Bhagavan notes. "What happens is when you are thinking, you think you are thinking. But it is actually possible to see thoughts flow as though they are independent of you"

"This is a physical reality," he explains. "Actually you can see thoughts. Any kind of thought can be coming into you and flowing out of you, and you can watch them. This is the state of (enlightenment); that is, the complete liberation of the senses from the control of the mind."

"If you experience reality as it is," he notes, "then you will just experience bliss. You will see that this whole creation is perfect, that it is the most beautiful thing, that you are in heaven, (and that) you have made it into a hell."

Furthering his explanation of non-duality, liberation and enlightenment, Sri Bhagavan takes his audience through a practical explanation of how we attach to and identify with the contents of our mind - i.e., our thoughts. He then explains how we too often fall into the trap of seeking external relief from the angst or misery that our thoughts create, and what can happen when we let go of our unexamined attachment to our egoic, self-centered thinking.

"It is possible to liberate the senses from the clutches of thought," he notes. "Thought is necessary when required, otherwise why should thought interfere? There is no need for thought to come in and interfere with actual experience."

"Now when the senses become free of the thoughts of the mind," he explains, "we say that you have discovered unconditional joy, unconditional love. Such is this joy, that you will feel you are connected with everybody. You discover true love. . . . And this is an actual occurrence. That is what you are designed to be, that is what a human being is supposed to experience all of the time."

"Since you do not experience that," he continues, "your lives have become miserable. And, to escape that misery, you have created various escape routes, through which all the time you are escaping from your misery; which misery is, itself, because you are not experiencing reality. That is why people take to alcohol or to drugs, or sex or to whatever it is," he notes. "Because otherwise what is there in your life? It becomes meaningless."

"So the whole attempt of (life) is to help you experience reality as it is," he observes. "When that happens you discover unconditional love, and unconditional joy. You feel connected with everything and everybody. You do not feel you are a separate individual; you do not live for yourself alone anymore, because your 'self 'has become everybody. You live for the sake of humanity.

"This is not a concept or some imagined thing," he tells his audience. "This is a day-to-day reality when you become enlightened, or a mukhti."

Vedanta: The Teaching of Yoga, or 'Yoking the Mind'

Perhaps the world's most powerful wisdom tradition - or, if not 'powerful,' certainly the most 'thorough' and 'ancient' - is that of Vedanta, also referred to as the 'Advaia Vedanta,' or 'vedAnta.'

With its foundations in the Vedas of ancient India, the world's oldest known spiritual teachings, and the Upanishads, the later but still ancient metaphysical interpretations of the four known Vedas (the Rigveda, Yagurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda), as systematized by the yoga aphorisms of Patanjali some 2,400 years ago, and as expounded by the great Indian philosopher of the 7th-century, Shankara, the Vedanta yields a complete teaching on the metaphysical (as well as physical) reality of 'non-dualism.'

In order to become an Advaitist, and fully grasp the Vedanta's teachings of radical non-duality, however, one needs to cultivate and nurture what Dr. Kuntimaddi Sadananda of the Advaita Academy calls 'the four-Ds' of Shankara, namely:

• 'Discrimination' between what is eternal and what is ephemeral;
• 'Dispassion' to reject that which is ephemeral in order to gain that which is eternal;
• 'Discipline' of the mind to divert it from trivial or ephemeral pursuits in life in order to conserve the energy to pursue that which is eternal; and, finally,
• 'Desire' strong enough to motivate one in that pursuit without getting discouraged by any type of obstacles that arise.

Acharya Sadananda

Dr. Sadananda notes - as excerpted in the on-line magazine, Non-Duality - that "if one does not have these four-fold qualifications, he has not prepared his mind for the knowledge of vedAnta." However, he further notes, "(t)he mind that has acquired these four-fold qualifications is a ‘pure’ mind that is ready to ‘take off’ when the vedAntic teaching is imparted by a competent teacher."

Dr. Sadananda also suggests that it is the third of these "four-Ds" - the "discipline of the mind" - that is most critical to the would-be Advaitist's progress in Vedanta. It consists, he notes, "of six (all-important) subsidiary disciplines for uncompromising commitment" to the study of Vedantic teachings.

These "six subsidiary disciplines" are, of course the six branches or "limbs" of yoga that Patanjali explores in his yoga aphorisms. ('Yoga,' which is derived from the same Sanskrit word as the English word 'yoke,' is synonymous with 'religion' in India, and consists of 'yoking' the Atman, or personal 'godhead' of the individual, with Brahma, the ultimate substrate which pervades and supports the entire manifest universe, as well as the unmanifest.)

"(O)ne has to listen to vedAnta from a competent teacher (shravaNam) and reflect on it until all doubts are fully resolved (mananam) and finally contemplate on this until the teaching has been fully assimilated (nidhidhyAsanam)," Sadananada observes. "Listening to the teacher is sufficient if one has all the pre-requisites. For those who do not have the prerequisites, the other two are required until conviction takes place in the mind - a conviction that what vedAnta says is indeed true to the letter."

This is, indeed, in line with the teaching of Sri Swami Satchidananda when he remarks, in his exposition of the second of Patanjali's one hundred-plus yoga sutras ("The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga."), that "(f)or a keen student this one sutra would be enough because the rest of them only explain this one."

"How to Know God,"
by Swami Prabhavanada
and Chirstopher Isherwood

For his part, Swami Prabhavananda (author, with Christopher Isherwood, of "How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali") compares the mind to a clear lake that has become muddied with relentless waves of barely conscious thought. It is in learning to still the mind, so that the sediment raised by the actions of the barely conscious mind settles out, Prabhavananda saysthat one learns to practice yoga, or "yoking."

But in order to realize and effect this, it is clearly evident that one must learn and practice a 'discipline' of mind in order to "divert it from trivial or ephemeral pursuits in life," as Sadananda says "in order to conserve the energy to pursue that which is eternal."

Ramana Maharshi: "Surrender, "Self-Enquiry" and One's "Source"

Questioner: "How are we to treat others?"

Ramana Maharshi: "There are no others."

R

Sri Ramana Maharhi (1879-1950)

Mother India - sometimes called "the birthplace of all religions" - has always had a succession of sages, a lineage of rishis and gurus stretching back to the mists of time.

It was the opening up of India at the turn of the 19th-century, and the exposure of the Western mind to the treasures of India's  spiritual literature that helped birth American Transcendentalism; and it was, perhaps, the appearance of Swami Vivekenanda at the Parliament of World Religions at the 1893 world's fair in Chicago that sparked the interest of yet another generation in the Advaita Vedanta - India's brand of essential 'non-dualism.'

Unlike in the West, where the great teachers and saints are, for the most part, essentially phenomena of the past - half mythic, and half historic - India has been blessed with great teachers in all ages, including in the Modern Age.

Perhaps the first great teacher to have his image captured by photograph was Sri Ramakrishna, Vivikenanda's teacher; and, perhaps the first great enlightened sage to be captured on film was the late Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, "the Saint of Arunachala."

Mount Arunachala
Located in Tamil Nadu, India.

To Advaitan Vedantists world-wide, Ramana Maharshi is renowned as an avatar of "direct non-dual experience," and as a reluctant enlightened teacher "who not only revived the ancient Indian teaching of 'self-enquiry,' but as one who made it simple and direct bringing it within the ken of one and all."

Maharshi maintained that "the purest form of his teachings was the powerful silence which radiated from his presence and quieted the minds of those attuned to it." Fortunately, however, he did give numerous oral teachings for the benefit of the many uninitiated visitors and bevy of Western spiritual seekers who flocked to his ashram on the slopes of his beloved Mount Arunachala, and many of these were recorded for posterity.

His verbal teachings were said to flow from his direct experience of Atman (the 'godhead' within each being and form) as the only existing reality. When pressed for advice on how to make progress on the spiritual path, he would almost invariably recommend radical 'self-enquiry' as the fastest path to moksha - i.e., permanent liberation from the ego, or enlightenment

"Self-surrender," said Ramani Maharshi, "is the same as self-knowledge, and either of them implies self-control. Surrender can take effect only when it is done with full knowledge as to what real surrender means. Such knowledge comes after inquiry and reflection, and ends invariably in self-surrender. Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one's being. Do not delude yourself by imagining such a source to be some God outside of you. One's source is within one's self. Give yourself up to it. That means you should seek the source and merge in it."

Radical self-inquiry - or, 'watching the thinker,' as the enlightened spiritual author and teacher, Eckhart Tolle, calls it - not only disrupts our conditioned pattern of continual and interminable thinking, it offers up a portal to true religious or spiritual experience, after which the spiritual seeker no longer needs to take on faith the existence of a higher state of consciousness (what I have called "acceptive consciousness," elsewhere) within his or her being

"Investigate what the mind is and it will disappear," says Ramana Maharshi. "There is no such thing as 'mind' apart from 'thought.' There is no use removing doubts. If we clear one doubt another arises, and there will be no end of doubts. All doubts will cease only when the doubter and his source have been found. Seek for the source of the doubter, and you will find that he is really non-existent. Doubter ceasing, doubts will cease."

The following film, "Abide as the Self: The Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi," produced by Inner Directions and narrated by Ram Dass, opens a wonderful window into Maharshi's timeless teachings of essential non-duality.

Nature of the Ego: "Lions All Around Us"

In one of the best lectures I have had the pleasure of attending, Dr. Bruce Perry (a devlopmental neurobiologist) spoke of humankind's evolutionary context as hunter gatherers in an environment where stressor events were intense but far between. Someone would shout, "Lion!." and the 'wary' lived to pass their genes on to the next generation. The 'slow' were an evolutionary dead-end . . . i.e., lunch.

His point, however, was that our bodies and brains have not evolved significantly since then (except, perhaps, for the weeding out of the slow and tasty). As a result, we go through our modern life with a huge volume of stimuli that we "need" to pay attention to - co-workers, cell phones, traffic, bill statements etc., and our psyches are screaming, "Lion! . . , Lion! . . . Lion!," on a more or less continual basis. As it turns out, we are not really built for the way that we now live.

Modern humankind therefore tends to be in an almost continual "fight or flight" modality, with little time in the "rest and digest" mode where we formerly spent the vast majority of our time, evolutionally speaking. (Indeed, studies of modern hunter-gatherers show they spend very little time foraging and a great deal of time sleeping.) The result of all this? It appears to be a mind in a perpetual state of alert motion, ever searching for (or manufacturing) "something" that requires our further attention and further thought. This "mind" is, of course, the human "ego" (or small "self") that we mistake for our only identity, and an 'individuality' that is separate and apart from everything and everyone in the outer world.

And, of course, "the ego" is always restless, looking for lurking "dangers" and for opportunities to gratify its instincts. (As such, it is small wonder that virtually all the "news" we consume is bad news, and "sex" still "sells," no matter who is doing the peddling or what is being peddled.)

In a now classic translation and commentary of Patangali's 'Yoga Aphorisms,' Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda (of the Ramakrishna Order, now the Vedanta Society) discuss the operation of the unawakened mind of modern man, noting:

"The truth is that we are all inclined to flatter ourselves - despite our daily experience to the contrary - that we spend our time thinking logical, consecutive thoughts. In fact, if at any given moment, we could take twenty human minds and inspect their workings, we should probably find one, or at most two which were functioning rationally. Most of us do no such thing. Consecutive thought about any one problem occupies a small portion of our waking hours. More usually, we are in a state of reverie - a mental fog of disconnected sense impressions, irrelevant memories, nonsensical scraps of sentences from books and newspapers, little darting fears and resentments, physical sensations of discomfort or ease. The remaining eighteen or nineteen minds would look something like this: "Ink-bottle. That time I saw Roosevelt. In love with the night mysterious. Reds veto Pact. Jimmy's trying to get my job. Mary says I'm fat. Big toe hurts. Soup good. . . ." etc., etc. Because we do nothing to control this reverie, it is largely conditioned by external circumstances."

This was written in 1953, long before the true beginning of the Information Age, with its multiple demands - human and electronic - for our attention playing through our psyches, turning the gentler "reverie" that Isherwood and Prabhavananda describe into a mental landscape of, "Lions, lions . . . everywhere, and never a moment of peace."

There seem to be two conclusions, and one synthesis of conclusions, that one can draw from this. Either the human mindscape (and thus the "reality" we create for ourselves) is getting much worse; or, because of an increasing (and, not uncoincidentally, interconnected)  awareness of the inner mental disharmony our global culture creates, things are getting much better.

The synthesis, paradoxically, is that things appear to be getting both much better and much worse simultaneously. And, as Eckhart Tolle observes in an audio interview (below) which he gave on the afternoon of 9/11/2001, "Even the Sun Will Die," things have to get worse in order for them to get better.



Tolle and other spiritual teaches, both now and in ages past, all say that there is a tipping point, a 'critical mass' of consciousness, so to speak. Hopefully, as they predict, we are nearing a point where the collective consciousness of individuals who are "awake" and not in a state of "reverie" will trigger a global awakening. Certainly, with the interconnectedness that virtually all of humankind now has at least some access to, when (not if) this occurs, it will be very rapid and, one suspects, astonishing spiritual awakening.