An
Intriguing Irony to Wrestle With
Humanity is now reaching -- reaching for that evolutionary,
communal, conscious AHA that we are
becoming the collectively conscious "brain" of the
planet, starting with the steps having to do with our personal
choices about that -- choices reflected, for instance, in the
ecological and social movements that have had a steadily
growing impact on the world in so many ways over the last
century, give or take. And these phenomena have grown in
tandem with the movement that is only now beginning to arise
in public awareness, regarding a fundamental consciousness
Shift expressed particularly in those who have had some form
of exceptional human experience. I suspect it goes well beyond what
most of us can even imagine. Whatever that may be, our natural evolutionary
unfolding of this awareness observed so clearly in these
Experiences 'knows that IT knows' ['IT'
meaning, we as a new expression of planetary consciousness] that we are capable and responsible stewards of
this sacred Being, the Earth. Remember, many
EHEers, particularly of the death-transcendent
variety talk about the ONENESS in which we all
naturally share, whether we realize it or not; they have
experienced this firsthand.
However .. together, we have a bit of Waking Up to do! I
believe it was Albert Einstein who said we cannot solve our
problems on the same level on which we created
them. We have to rise above outmoded ways of
thinking and acting to discover more holistic and powerful
means to accomplish this, starting with relating with each
other in order to discover a greater harmony and resonance,
such as we are realizing quite spontaneously through our
exceptional human experiences. They take us there in a
way that clears the decks of the old useless, caustic and
divisive patterns. Look at the Aftereffects,
and you can't help but feel what an indescribably delicious
and thrilling Collective Adventure is now presenting itself to
growing numbers of people every day!
But back to the learning curve, which can certainly be a major
part of the Joy we can have together, even if a little
daunting now and then. Where the irony comes into play
[cosmic humor must be in the main a product of irony] is when
we begin to glimpse what we have to let go of in the way of
taken-for-granted wisdoms. An abundance of guidance and
inspiration is available from Experiencers from everywhere on
Earth. Let me give you one remarkable example among even
the most remarkable examples -- Sri Aurobindo Ghose.
The
Bothersome, Grinding Mind
This extraordinarily brilliant man, by any standards, became a
stellar intellectual, graduating from Cambridge with highest
honors in 1892. He grew up in England, not his homeland,
India, because his father, a medical doctor trained in
England, did not want him to be exposed to anything having to
do with India's culture or religions or values. He
thought England, which then owned about 70% of the known
world, was the best place to provide a viable future for his
children. Reading Aurobindo's story is
mind-boggling. Many imagine he grew up a mystic,
etc. Not so!
In a nutshell, he eventually tired of the intellectual life
altogether. Satprem,
his disciple and eventual biographer, explains:
The day came... when Sri Aurobindo had had enough of these
intellectual exercises. He had probably realized that
one can go on amassing knowledge indefinitely, reading and
learning languages, even learning all the languages in the
world and reading all the books in the world, and yet not
progress an inch. For the mind does not seek truly to
know, even though it appears to -- it seeks to grind.
Its need of knowledge is primarily a need for something to
grind. If by chance the machine were to come to a stop
because knowledge had been obtained, it would soon rise up
in revolt and find something new to grind, just for the sake
of grinding and grinding. Such is its function.
That within us which seeks to know and to progress is not
the mind, but something behind it which uses it: The
capital period of my intellectual development, Sri
Aurobindo confided to a disciple, was when I could see
clearly that what the intellect said might be correct and
not correct, that what the intellect justified was true and
its opposite also was true. I never admitted a truth
in the mind without simultaneously keeping it open to the
contrary of it ... And the first result was that the
prestige of the intellect was gone.
Once he found that the pursuits of the intellect to be
meaningless, Aurobindo was totally at a loss for direction in life.
I'm
leaving out some eventful 'chapters' here -- but he was not a
religious man, not in a way that drew his interest to anything
India might have to offer. A friend suggested he try the
discipline of yoga. Satprem says, "Sri Aurobindo
refused: A yoga which requires me to give up the
world is not for me; he even added, a solitary
salvation leaving the world to its fate was felt as almost
distasteful."
Here is where the beginnings of the Shift happened for
Aurobindo. Satprem describes a kind of almost
everyday event in India. One of Aurobindo's brothers,
Barin, was very sick, racked with a high fever and covered
with layers of blankets -- visible just inside the door.
An Indian monk came by, probably begging for food, it was
thought. His body was coated in ashes, suggesting he was
of a particularly reverenced type of ascetic path.
"Without a word," says Satprem, "he asked for a glass
of water, drew a sign, chanted a mantra, and had Barin drink
the water. Five minutes later Barin was cured, and the
monk had disappeared." Aurobindo had heard of such
things but this was the first time he had witnessed anything
like this. On the order of a revelation, this
demonstrated to him that "yoga could serve other purposes
than escape. And he needed power to liberate
India."
This brings up another major facet of his life: soon
after moving back to his homeland at age 20, he discovered one
of his great passions was to do all he could to help free
India from the iron grip of foreign rule, and he very nearly
lost his life to this cause, pursuing this objective for
nearly 15 years. The experience with the Indian holy man
possibly saved him from what may have become a much shorter
life as he began turning within to examine the possibilities
of yoga with the same amazing single mindedness he had so
spectacularly pursued the life of an intellectual and then a
revolutionary for India.
Sri Aurobindo says he had long felt to be something on the
order of an agnostic, atheist, and skeptic, and even this did
not convince him of a God. However, what he witnessed in
the event with the wandering sadhu and his brother definitely
got his laser-like attention, and he "felt there must be
a mighty truth somewhere in this yoga." He
committed then and there to the task of practicing it to find
out if what he surmised was true. He did so with a
prayer that expressed his spiritual doubt and his personal
longing -- not for liberation, the ultimate desire for many
Indians, but "for strength to uplift this nation, I ask
only to be allowed to live and work for this people whom I
love ..."
At
Last, At Last, Here Art Thou, O Irony! [Where have
you been??]
Our planetary survival is no laughing matter, but back to the
original observation about our growing into what might be
called an inwardly orchestrated collective "brain"
as caretakers of the Earth, considered by many to be itself a
living organism. So put that together with what you are
about to learn from Sri Aurobindo and others below.
The Aurobindo most people are familiar with today is the one
who became an incalculable spiritual influence as a result of
this decision. Knowing a bit about his story will help
you to appreciate the following anecdote about knowledge he
gained through his life from that point forward in a yogic
discipline. One of the personal discoveries he
made, as have numerous EHEers before and since, is that our
thoughts, what we think of as our personal thoughts, are not 'our own'
at all!!
Satprem
elaborates on this while introducing the story of how Aurobindo
eventually witnessed it directly:
[As
we become more proficient at silencing the mind,] we soon
make out [a] discovery of capital importance in its
implications. We find that not only do the thoughts of
others come to us from outside, but our own thoughts, too, come
from outside. Once we are sufficiently transparent
we can feel, in the immobile silence of the mind, little
swirling eddies coming in contact with our atmosphere, like
faint little vibrations drawing our attention; if we get a
bit closer to "see what they are," that is, if we
let one of those little swirls enter us, we find ourselves
suddenly thinking of something: what we had felt at the
periphery of our being was a thought in its pure form, or
rather a mental vibration before it is able to enter
us, unnoticed, and come to the surface of our being clad in
a personal form, enabling us to triumphantly claim:
"This is my thought."
Thought
Forms, Take Notice!
Similarly,
PMH Atwater, who had three traumatic and also profound
near-death experiences within a year, was impelled to learn
all she could about this type of experience. In the
process she gained so much insight, both from the outside and
the inside that, with the urging and support of Kenneth Ring
and Rick Bradshaw, co-founders of the International
Association of Near Death Studies, she soon began what became
her first book, Coming Back to Life:
The After-Effects of the Near-Death Experience, chronicling her Experiences and also what she
was learning from and about them. She is speaking here
of her early efforts, during which physically, she was still
basically a wreck, post-NDEs, which also made it very
challenging to stay with the tasks required of her. PMH
says,
Writing
such a book .. proved difficult. My mind was still too
scattered, my ability to concentrate limited. I tried
so hard to maintain a focus that thought forms spun out all
over the room, looking like the blobs I had encountered in
dying. [She also had expanded sensory abilities, one
of the frequent by-products from such Experiences.]
The air was so thick with them I kept a fly swatter next to
the typewriter so I could bat them away when it was time to
type. Sensible intelligence left me when I spied one
over three feet tall.
Unfortunately I don't have the book handy to quote, but Jill
Bolte Taylor, who wrote My Stroke of Insight,
provides a fascinating AHA! along these lines as well.
As a neuroanatomist whose left brain was essentially
incapacitated by a major stroke -- her right brain pretty much
intact, she details the marvel of beginning to slowly recover
her faculties. She said living out of her right-brain
consciousness was fluidic, profoundly peaceful, "nirvanic"
-- without the left brain, which is home of speech and
language centers, for instance] to nag and drive her and
talk-talk-talk. Out of her right-brain
orientation, she lived with a sense of multi-sensory
spaciousness and silence and flow.
As she began to heal and the left-hemispheric centers began to
bring her back into the more frenetic world most of us think
of as "normal," she also began to remember her past
and, comparatively, how she found herself to be then, which
was with emotional baggage and habits of personality she was
not happy with and also as they generated all those little
dramas we all love to hate in our dealings with others. Perceiving this
from the removed, and therefore objective space of the
life-is-sooooo-AAahhhhhh!, right-of-center in her head, she
had the clear presentiment and opportunity to be able to
choose not to pick up all that again.
Speaking of whadda
thought! Perhaps in terms of the realizations mentioned
above, of Sri Aurobindo and PMH Atwater, Taylor is providing
us with yet another holographic facet of objective awareness
of, we could say, thought forms and patterns, in which she could discriminate and choose which
ones she wanted to take on again and
which ones she did not. In fact, with an apparent ease,
us more two-healthy-hemispheric types could well envy, Dr.
Taylor was able to deliberately leave behind many behaviors
and habits that no longer meshed within a life that
exemplified that of an almost prototypic EHEer, given all
her newly dominant, almost exclusively right-brain
predilections. As I recall, she particularly emphasized
the love and spontaneity and openness she now enjoyed in clear
contrast to how she felt when looking into those old
emotionalisms and dramas that were so ... how's YUKKY?, by
comparison.
Again, think EHE
aftereffects!
The point is, we as the Self-conscious "collective
I" certainly can't operate as ONE and from within a
quality or type of consciousness that is capable of
experiencing this context of unitive Being, from within our
vulnerable little-i consciousnesses that for the most part
live [unconsciously] at the mercy of thoughts and feelings
in the usual way (... and now that they mention it, where do
those little buggers come from, anyway,
don'tcha wonder??) It's safe to say, most of us have not a clue about thought forms,
certainly not in the way Sri Aurobindo, Atwater, Taylor and others
describe them from a more objective perspective.
So what are we to do?
Well, I have a, ahhh ...
. .
.
|
(whispering:)
A THOUGHT .. |
A
muttering Pooh Bear: You can't
live without them ..
And
a sighing Christopher Robin: And
you can't live with them.
Tigger:
So now
what?
A
passing compassionate being responds with a twinkle
...
