Carl Sagan: "Let Us Find a Worthy Goal"

"The trap door beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?"

"We long to be here for a purpose even though - despite much self-deception - none is evident. The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is better than ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring faith."

"Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Our commonsense intuitions can be mistaken, our preferences do not count. We do not live in a privileged reference frame. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find a worthy goal."

-- Carl Sagan --
(1934-1996)

Who Am I?

"Abba Poeman said to Abba Joseph: Tell me how can I become a monk. And he replied: If you want to find rest here or hereafter, say in every occasion, who am I? and do not judge anyone."

-- Greggory Mayers --
("Listen to the Desert," p. 9.)

One of the most insightful observations in the Bible is found in the Book of James, where it is plainly stated (at James 1:8) that, "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."  

In one pithy sentence, this profound observation diagnoses the basic human dilemma - the duality of the ego and 'who' we actually are - as well as the symptoms of our dilemma, i.e., the instability of our egoically-inspired thoughts, words and actions. A person identified with the ego is, of course, apt to think, say or do just about anything in any circumstance. Thus, Abba Joseph's sage advice is to ask oneself repeatedly, and in whatever circumstances one may find him or herself in, the question, "Who am I?" Are our thoughts, words and actions driven by the all-too-human separate "self" of the ego, or do they emanate from the authentic "Self," i.e., in strictly Christian terms, from "the Kingdom of God within" us? (See Luke 17:21.)

Almost as an afterthought, Abba Joseph also adds the advice: "and do not judge anyone," for he must have known that each of us is liable to find him or herself at any time within the throes and under the dictates of of our smaller "self." This is the heart of Jesus' admonishment: "Judge not, lest ye be judged." And, of course, it is the ego, itself, that renders the harshest judgment, and is metaphorically willing to serve as prosecutor, judge, jailer and executioner. Our greatest challenge is, thus, quite literally, to get over our "selves."

"Only he who has renounced the impassioned thoughts of his inner self, which is the intellect" observed St. Hesychios, "is a true monk. It is easy to be a monk in one's outer self if one wants to be," notes the father of' centering prayer, "but no struggle is required to be a monk in one's inner self."

[Palmer, et. al, "The Philokalia," Vol. 1, pp. 174-175.]

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.]

Burying the Spiritual Instincts of the Unconscious

"Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so . . . "

 -- William Shakespeare --
("Hamlet," Act 2, Scene II)

Conscious thought, that great ability of humanity, can be - as Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - "a prison." Lost in our cloying thoughts and judgments, we make a virtual prison out of this world's reality wholly through our thinking. A point recognized in all the world's great wisdom teachings and philosophies.

A more-or-less contemporary accounting of this universal truth was provided by Carl Jung in "The Undiscovered Self," his enlightening look at our conscious and unconscious thinking processes. In it, Jung discusses how the intellect endangers us by wholly obscuring the spiritual instinct that is buried within our very being.

"Nothing," Jung observes, "estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity, which turns out to be a genuine drive towards progressive transformations of human modes of behavior. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious."

"Separation from his instinctual nature," Jung continues, "inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side."

"There is," he notes, "an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably influences consciousness and its content. All this is known, but no practical conclusions have been drawn from it. . . . We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous, superficial and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious."

 "We are the origin of all coming evil," warns Jung, in the attached video. And, it is our "thinking without awareness" (as Eckhart Tolle expresses it), our reliance on conscious thought to the utter neglect of our unconscious and its spiritual instincts, which both imprisons and threatens us through a crisis in consciousness. "Nothing is either good or bad," as Hamlet notes, "but our thinking makes it so."

Inspiration from a Trio of Hungarian Exiles

In a hidden and inspiring gem of a lecture on TED.com (itself, one of the most inspiring sites on the Internet), Ben Dunlap, president of Wofford College, a small Methodist institution in South Carolina, relates how a trio of Hungarian-American luminaries (including renowned composer Béla Bartók) helped shape his worldview.

Primarily this must-see lecture tells the story of textile magnate, Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor who rebuilt his fortune in America after the Second World War, and who humbly but determinedly integrated South Carolina's textile mills in the 1950s. Yet Dunlap extends the spiritual lesson that he was taught by Teszler ("that humans beings are fundamentally good") to include the lessons he learned from Bartók and Francis Robicsek, a polymath Hungarian-American heart surgeon and art collector who cracked the secret of the Mayan's hieroglyphic code.

There is "an irrepressible and insatiable appetite to know," Dunlap observes, reflecting on the wisdom he received from this trio of Hungarian exiles who took up residence in the American South.  "Live each day as if it were your last," he exhorts his audience, quoting Mahatma Gandhi. "Learn as though you will live forever." 

Thomas Merton: Intellect, Possessions and Grace

How is it possible to find ultimate happiness and meaning in our Western consumer society? Clearly, it is not for sale, or there would be advertisements for it. In fact, all advertisements and media commercials are intended to create demand - or, in spiritual terms, desire - and without generating this 'needing' to have, the model of our Western consumer society collapses, for we are not really consumers but over-consumers, striving to get and have more in the hopes of being secure and satisfied.

Yet the glow of acquiring -  be it new clothes, a new car, a new house, or even a new relationship - fades all too quickly, and as the old saying goes: "the bloom is off the rose." Intellect, trained largely by the media tells us that the acquisition of material things will bring us happiness, but knowing this happiness fades, we suffer in any event; and implicit in this process is the stark if unfaced reality that possessions alone cannot bring ultimate happiness and, in fact, they may be a complete impediment to its attainment.

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)

Writing in his autobiography, "The Seven Story Mountain," the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton touched upon the role that our trained intellect has in generating not happiness, but suffering. He writes:

"I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, acutal practice. It is constantly and blindly being perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda."

"We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own infallibility. The desires of the flesh - and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even the ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgment, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed, register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire."

"And therefore, even when we are acting with the best of intentions, and imagine that we are doing great good, we may be actually doing tremendous material harm and contradicting all our good intentions. There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is the depths of hell."

[Thomas Merton, "The Seven Story Mountain," pp. 205-206

"The only answer to the problem," says Merton, "is grace, grace, (and) docility to grace."

But why this need for grace, this need to foster and develop a gratitude for who we are and what our life circumstances are, without regard to what we "should" have or "could" be in accordance with the standards of others? Perhaps, it is because we know, at a deep level, that all such standards are fallacies, and the opinion of others will not provide us with ultimate happiness any more than material possessions or wealth will.

"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy," Merton observes, "(on) the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions of other men! A weird life it is, indeed," he notes, "to be living in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real."

["The Seven Story Mountain," p. 303]

In these times, as blessed (or cursed) with material possessions as we may be, the ancient Sufi poet Rumi would undoubtedly agree with Merton: "(We) need more grace than (we) had thought."

Thomas Merton on 'The First Lesson About Man'

This surreal poem, "First Lesson About Man" (from "The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton") is an all-too accurate view of the world from which the late, great Catholic contemplative, Trappist monk and prolific writer, Thomas Merton, sought refuge in the late 1940's. Sadly, it seems no less applicable to our state now, some 40-odd years after Merton's death, than it did on publication.

To paraphrase the words of the great 12th-century Sufi poet, Rumi: "We may need more grace than I thought."

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

“First Lesson About Man” by Thomas Merton

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
Of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls,
He never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
A milk-drinker.
He fills his skin with coffee
And loses patience with the rest of his species.
He draws his sin on the wall,
On all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
Because he cannot find his joy,
Except in zoology.

Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
He gets the wrong number.
Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.
Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
But it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,
He drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
Who have learned the first lesson about man,
Answer your test:
“Man is the saddest animal.
He begins in zoology,
And gets lost
In his own bad news.”

What Is Our Essence?

"As a man thinketh . . . so he is."

What is the "essence" of a "human being?" It is a question that has haunted philosophers, metaphysicians and psychologists for millenia.

Etymologically, or looking at where our words come from, we can see certain similarities between the two concepts. "Essence" and "being" have similar roots in Latin, Greek and Old French (discussed below); whereas "human" is related to ancient words for both "man" and "ground."

The word "human" is related to both the Latin 'homo', meaning 'same,' and to 'humus' meaning 'ground.' Is this a reference to so many creation myths that have G_d forming the first man from clay, and then bringing the clay model to life; or is it a recognition that all humans are a part of the same "Ground of Being" that has been used to denote the Absolute throughout the history of the "perennial philosophy"? I prefer the latter, but it is probably an admixture of both meanings, and other factors that are not clear at first blush.

The origins of "essence" is much clearer. "Essence" means at once 'substance,' 'existence' and 'being.' It means "that by which a thing is what it is;" and its Latin root is 'esse,' its Greek root 'ousia' - both of which mean "to be."

Hamlet's immemorial self-scrutiny led him him to observe: "To be, or not to be? That is the question." And, like all good questions, the answer is implicit in it: a triumphant "to be!". The "essence" of a "human being" is simply "being," his or her "essence" within the "Ground of Being." And the sages and seers of all ages have spoken to this truth.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
(1920-1996)

The Buddhist master, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, remarked:

"Buddhas become awakened because of realizing their essence. Sentient beings become confused because of not realizing their essence. Thus there is one basis or ground, and two different paths."

[Tulku Urgyen Rinpoch,"As It Is," vol. 2, page 43.]

In the same vein, the great Sufi teacher and polymath, Idries Shah, observed:

Idries Shah (1924-1996)

'. . . (A)ll dervish teaching is based not on the concept of God, but on the concept of essence. . . "He who knows his essential self, knows God." Knowledge of the essential self is the first step, before which there is no real knowledge of religion.'

[Idries Shah, "The Sufis," page 309.]

 It is thus no mere cryptic abstraction that the words "Know thyself" were said to be carved over the doorway to the Temple of Delphi; for he who comes to know his higher "Self," beyond the lower "self" of the ego, comes to know much about his own "essence," the essence of G_d and how to "be" in the world.