We Must Lower Our Egos . . . For the Sake of the One

Each of the world's great religions and wisdom traditions has an esoteric and and exoteric component, notes Moslem cleric, Imam Faisul Abdul Rauf, "an inner and an outer path leading to the same Wholeness, the same Absolute, the same One."

"God, Baha, whatever name you want to call Him with," says Rauf, "Allah, Ram, Om (whatever the name might be to which you name or access the Presence of Divinity) is the locus of Absolute Being, Absolute Love and Mercy and Compassion, and Absolute Knowledge and Wisdom - what Hindus call Satchitananda. The language differs but the objective is the same."

Thus, Rumi, the great Sufi poet, writes (in part):

"What is to be done, O Moslems? for I do not recognize myself.  

I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Zoroastrian, nor Moslem.
I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea;
I am not of Nature's mint, nor of the circling' heaven.
I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire;
I am not of the empyrean, nor of the dust, nor of existence, nor of entity.
I am not of India, nor of China, nor of Bulgaria, nor of Saqsin
I am not of the kingdom of Iraq, nor of the country of Khorasan
I am not of the this world, nor of the next, nor of Paradise, nor of Hell
I am not of Adam, nor of Eve, nor of Eden and Rizwan.

My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless ;
'Tis neither body nor soul, for I belong to the soul of the Beloved.
I have put duality away, I have seen that the two worlds are one;
One I seek, One I know, One I see, One I call.
He is the first, He is the last, He is the outward, He is the inward;
I know none other except 'Ya Hu' and 'Ya man Hu.'
I am intoxicated with Love's cup, the two worlds have passed out of my ken . . ."

 

"There is only one Absolute Reality by definition," Rauf points out, "one Absolute Being by definition, because 'absolute' is by definition single, and absolute, and singular. There is this absolute concentration of being, this absolute concentration of consciousness and awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of Divinity. And that should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human."

"The human soul embodies a piece of the Divine Breath, a piece of the Divine Soul," Rauf notes. "This is also expressed in Biblical vocabulary wehn we are taught we are created in the Divine image," he points out.

"What is the imagery of God," he asks. "The imagery of God is Absolute Being, Absolute Awareness, and Knowledge, and Wisdom, and Absolute Compassion and Love. Therefore, for us to be human . . . in the greatest sense of what it means to be human . . . means that we, too, have to be proper stewards of the breath of Divinity within us, and to seek to perfect within ourselves the attributes of being - of being alive, of beingness -  the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, (and) of awareness, and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings."

"This," says Rauf, "is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform upon which we must all stand. And when we stand upon this platform, as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world. And I believe . . . that we are on the verge, and that with the presence and help of people like you . . .  we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah, when he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war, (or) make war, anymore."

"We have reached a stage in human history," he concludes, "where we have no option: We must lower our egos . . . control our egos . . . whether it is the individual ego, personal ego, family ego, or national ego. And let it all be for the glorification of the One."

Interdependence: An Eastern Perspective

"For a table to exist," writes renowned Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, "we need wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes in order to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast fresh air, and so on. And each of these things, in turn, has to be brought about by other conditions. If we continue to look in this way, we will see that nothing has been left out; everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table."

In explaining the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, Thich Nhat Hanh points out that there is no separation in reality, despite what our egos would tell us, and that in fact everything is in a state of perpetual interbeing.

"Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree and the clouds, we can see the table," he points out. "The one can be seen in the all, and the all can be seen in the one."

In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu writes:

As soon as one begins to divide things up,
      there are names;
Once there are names,
      one should also know when to stop;
Knowing when to stop,
      one thereby avoids peril.

In metaphorical terms,
      The relationship of all under heaven
         to the Way
            is like that of valley streams
               to the river and the sea.

"One cause is never enough to bring about an effect," Thich Nhat Hanh observes. "A cause must, at the same time, be an effect, and every effect must also be the cause of something else."

"Cause and effect interare," he notes. "They give rise to each other."

"Our difficulties," he points out, "arise when we forget this teaching and become attached to ideas and things, believing that they are independent and permanent. When we embrace the interdependent nature of all things, forsaking all extremes, we will be on the path of a more peaceful and joy-filled existence."

On Non-Duality, Karma and Consciousness

"All philosophies, all science, all religions, inform us that this world of shapes, forms and names 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 human reason, intuition or faith."

-- Yogi Ramachakara --
["Lessons in Gnani Yoga," Chap. 1.]

Mars Hill, Athens

One of my favourite passages from the New Testament is Paul's "Sermon on Mars Hill," in which he is asked by the Athenian Stoic and Epicurean philosophers to expound upon what was then a  new philosophy/religion.

"God that made the world and all the things therein," observed Paul, "seeing that he is the Lord of heaven and earth dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all things life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth . . . For in him we live and move and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring." (Acts 17:24-28)

It is among my favourites because (a) it speaks of the omnipresence of a higher order in which everything exists, (b) it brings the reality of this higher order out of religious places and frees it of ritual worship, and (c) it recognizes that all true philosophies, religions and wisdom traditions, alike, speak of the same higher order or Godhead, and that each of these is non-exclusive.

As the Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, observed: "Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."

[Marcus Aurelius,"Meditations," 4:40]

Physicists have demonstrated the conservation of mass and energy. With each inhalation of the cool morning air and each warm, moist exhalation of carbon dioxide, this is demonstrated. Indeed, every atom of our bodies, save hydrogen, was forged many billions of years ago in the implosion of some unnamed star, and our very bodies are thus a testament to the preservation of mass and energy.

Yet what about consciousness? How can it be that this seeming third aspect of the manifest universe, which along with mass and energy (themselves interchangeable) pervades and precipitates even the smallest sub-particular interaction, alone perishes?

"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."

"In God," Emerson wrote, "every end is converted into a new means." This, to me, seems inherently true; it has the "ring of truth" to it. It circumscribes the law of karma, in which each moment is seen as an effect produced by a chain of causation stretching back to the very first movement of the universe, and each such effect becoming a further link in this causal chain. Thus, everything that is reaped has been sown, over and over, many times.

If as has been said (and demonstrated, it seems, in science), "Nothing is wasted in God's economy," how can it be that the one perceptual sense underlying all others - that being consciousness itself - is the one and only thing in this 'Great Economy' that perishes? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; but where except back to the Universal consciousness - that which underlies and pervades the manifestation of all mass and energy in the universe's singular field - goes the consciousness, the soul of each being? For has not each individualized consciousness been at all times part and parcel of this Whole?

The Expansive Universe

Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941)

BRINK OF ETERNITY

In desperate hope I go and search for her
in all the corners of my room;
I find her not.

My house is small
and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my lord,
and seeking her I have to come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky
and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish
---no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.

Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean,
plunge it into the deepest fullness.
Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch
in the allness of the universe.

-- Rabindranath Tagore --

Who has not gazed in rapt attention at the night sky and not had a sense of his or her own smallness against the background of the stars? Throughout history sages and poets, alike, have wondered at the depths of the heavens, but only now do we know how deep and expansive the depths of the heavens truly are.

For the pantheist, the spiritual but not religious, the agnostic and the non-dualist, alike, the depths of the cosmos may testify to the breadth of the manifest and non-manifest aspects of Unity and Wholeness, or what might be a single, unitary G_d.

Light, one of the few constants in the universe, travels at a mind boggling 186,000 miles per second (or 300,000 kilometres per second). At that speed, it still takes three-quarters of a second for sunlight reflected off the moon to reach our eyes, and a full eight minutes for sunlight to travel the approximately 93,000,000 miles (149,000,000 km) from the Sun itself.

Every star we see when we look up into the sky lies within our galaxy, the Milky Way. And, yet, the closest star system to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.35 light years away - that's  25 trillion miles, or 40 trillion kilometers away. The Milky Way, itself is a more-or-less average sized galaxy containing approximately 200 billion stars, and stretching across 100,000 light years of space.

There are approximately 80 billion other such galaxies in "the observable universe" - some larger, some smaller than the Milky Way - in which there are anywhere from 30 sextillion to a septillion different star systems (i.e., 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000 to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 separate stars), and who knows how many countless worlds.

At the largest scale, as the video clips below illustrate, superclusters of galaxies (each stretching across hundreds of millions of light years) weave themselves into a fabric of knots and threads that can be billions of light years long, with the density of this fabric stretching matter uniformly out throughout the heavens.

And, yet, as incomprehensible as such distances and numbers are to us, it is indisputable that amidst all this "we live and move, and have our being," (Acts 17:28).

Non-Duality in Western Civilization

The West has always been influenced by the East. Even the West's principal religious tradition, Christianity, arose in Palestine, and has as its at root a fundamental non-dualistic perspective. See, for example, the following biblical passages: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD thy God is One." (Deut. 6:4); "I am in the Father, and the Father in me." (John 14:11); "I and the Father are one." (John 4:24).

This non-duality is no mere coincidence of wording, says philosopher and best-selling author, Peter Kingsley. The sense of 'One-ness' was already there at the birth of pre-Christian Western civilization and was then merged into the arising Eastern Christian tradition.

"Its fine what's going on in terms of coming together, and bringing different traditions, together, and this idea of a new global 'One-ness' (or) global harmony. But to me it's very important actually to be able to say, "Well that's been there since the beginning, and we here are looking towards bringing a greater reality or sense of 'One-ness' into these tatters of Western civilization."

"To me,"" Kingsley notes, it is very very important to say, "Yes, but that sense of 'One-ness,' not only did it happen to be there when Western civilization was born, but that it was out of that sense of 'One-ness' that Western civilization was very deliberately created."

While strains of the non-duality from the East permeates both the Old and New Testament, and indeed all of Greek thought, perhaps the great neo-Platonist Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, put it best in the second book of his famous "Meditations," when he observed:

"This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part."

Musings . . . . Poetic and Otherwise

       No matter what your body's appearance is on the outer level, beyond that outer form it is an intensively alive energy field.
       If you are not familiar with "inner body" awareness, close you eyes for a moment and find out if there is life inside your hands, your chest, your forehead.
       Body awareness not only anchors you in the present moment; it is the key that opens the doorway out of the prison that is the ego.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Each breath we take
is an exhalation of G_d.
And, from behind each face
and set of eyes,
G_d looks out unnoticed
on this world of our creation.

The rising and falling tide,
the blowing and listing wind,
the verdant or withered grass,
the songs of birds,
and the felt breath of angels,
are each an exhalation of G_d,
and an expansion of G_d's Being.

Everything rushes away from everything,
yet the expansiveness of G_d fills all.

There is no falling from Grace or Favour,
only the oblivion of unseeing
and the acceptance of a mundane world,
where life is taken for granted
and all else feared.

Surely the miraculous is frightening
and we pine for explanations.
Yet, this inexplicable Whole
falls short even of description,
let alone an explanation.

It is only when each exhalation
becomes an inspiration
that we might know.
Until then, we can only know in part
and intuit predictions.

Let them not be based on our fears.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

What a small place the world is,
       yet how large it seems
       as foreground to the stars!
Who amongst the ancients
       could fathom such immensities
       amid which we exist?
If the rishis had known,
       or could foretell, this
       star-vault's near infinitude,
       would they have not told us,
       and, this, explicitly?

Why would the Buddha speak
       of a mere ten-thousand worlds?
Thus, even the Tathagata could not sense,
       in neither time nor space,
       the Ocean's width once crossed.

How, then, will you or I
       plumb the depths of these star-fields
       from our too small perspective.
Is it not far better to forego
       contemplation of the heavens altogether
       then to hurry from our outward introspection
       with neither moment's wonder
       nor sense of humbled awe?

"I need more Grace
       than I thought," Rumi said.
Perhaps, however, we need more Grace
       than even Rumi could foresee.