A Statue and Two Temples

On a hilltop in the Indian state of Karnataka about 100 miles due west of Bangalore there stands a 57 foot high monolithic statue of a naked man in deep meditation. He stands upright in an almost military posture with half-closed eyes and a slight smile on his lips. Carved from a single white granite boulder, this colossal figure is one of the largest monolithic statues of the ancient world and represents Bahubali, son of the first tirthankara (enlightened sage) of Jainism who, theoretically, lived millions of years ago in a previous cosmic cycle. How this statue, thought to weigh over 80 tons, was transported to the top of a 480 feet high hill remains a mystery. But taken there it must have been because the type of white granite of which it is formed is not found locally. The statue appears to have suffered no erosion which is rather remarkable, given that its origins go back at least to the 10th century AD, and some speculate it may be even older.

 

Bahubali statue

The story goes that Bahubali meditated in a standing position and motionless for a full 12 years until finally reaching enlightenment. The parallels with the Buddha are obvious, and the peace and detachment that emanate from this figure are also Buddha-like. You can see the vine leaves that have grown up around him over the 12 year period. There is also an anthill by his feet which has not disturbed him, so profound is his state of contemplation. A snake slithers by his feet. There is a remarkable poise and self-possession about this figure as of a man who has fully mastered his physical and mental selves which are now simply vessels for the expression of spiritual realisation with no motivating power of their own. They have become the outward manifestation of a spiritual state, and, such is the sculptor’s skill, the power of this image can connect us to this state if we approach it in a suitably receptive frame of mind. Jain religion teaches renunciation of the world and the self if one is to reach the condition of inner peace and harmony with the universe. This statue is a perfect representation of that doctrine in stone. For us today it may seem a one-sided approach to spiritual reality because withdrawing into oneness leaves out love of God. Nevertheless, detachment, self-control, mental stillness and the relinquishment of material identification remain all-important elements of the spiritual path, and a true love of God must be spiritually coherent, meaning it must know what it purports to love which it can only do when it begins to acquire these virtues and so see beyond this world.

 

A flight of over 650 steps leads to the summit of the hill on which the statue stands as a symbol of spiritual completion as understood in the ancient East. Pilgrims would have ascended these steps to partake in the spiritual power of the site which, being remote, would have meant a journey much more arduous than the one I took when I visited it in the 1980s travelling in (relative) comfort by bus. It is salutary to put oneself in the mindset of these pilgrims of the past to whom the magnificence of temples, cathedrals and statues like this one would have been largely outside their everyday experience, and who would rarely have seen a representation of what they were coming to see before actually seeing it. The impact on them when they finally did arrive must have been tremendous.

 

From Shravanabelagola, the site of this statue, it’s a 2 hour bus trip to Belur and Halebid, two small towns today but once capitals of a royal dynasty. Here are found the Chennakeshava and Hoysaleshwara temples which are among the most splendidly decorated temples in all of India. They were built in the 12th century AD by the Hoysala kings, but there is something about them which speaks of an even earlier time. The mind that created them with its absorption in the mythological world of gods and goddesses derives from a period in the deep past when what is now myth was perceived as living reality. Our modern rational mind in which the ‘I’ has become fully separated from its environment finds it very different to conceive of the ancestral mind that is merged in the natural world and also extends into the supernatural, not yet fully differentiated from the natural. That is the mind on display here.

 

The Belur temple is dedicated to a form of Vishnu known as Kesava, and, according to Sanskrit inscriptions on the walls, took 103 years to complete. It contains a profusion of artwork in the form of sculptures, statues, friezes and reliefs depicting deities, musicians and dancers of 12^th century India, as well as scenes from the Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Puranas, that popular collection of stories telling tales of avatars, devas and kings from the past. The interior is a multi-pillared hall with dozens of columns, all individual and all carved in extravagant, geometrically complex shapes and styles that have then been polished to give them an almost metallic sheen. 

 

Interior pillars

The Mohini pillar

 

The mandapa or pillared hall encloses the garbhagriha which means womb chamber and is the heart of the temple where the image of the god is enshrined. Here that image is a 6 foot high statue of Vijayanarayan meaning Victorious Vishnu which features a halo with carvings of his 10 incarnations from Matsya, a giant fish who saved the first man, Manu, from drowning in a Noah’s ark type deluge, to Kalki, the final avatar to come who will appear on a white horse at the end of the Kali Yuga. So maybe not long to wait. Vishnu temples don’t usually have the sense of dark mystery that some Siva temples have but to my mind there is still something slightly uncanny about them, and even though the worshippers would claim they are paying homage to God when they perform their rituals before the idol, the form and nature of that idol expresses a very different sort of God to that represented by the figure of Christ. Possibly that is cultural bias on my part, but these images are very old and may belong to a previous dispensation of human approach to the divine, one that should perhaps be outgrown.

 

The Vishnu shrine

Setting that thought aside for the moment, the outer walls of the temple are as resplendent as the interior. The temple stands on a platform, and there is a wide space around it to allow for circumambulation which is an intrinsic part of temple worship. As the devotee performed this clockwise pradakshina, as it is called, he would see images of the gods with stories of their exploits from the time when they appeared on Earth. The walls are arranged in bands with the bottom band consisting of elephants, all in different postures. Above them are scenes of dancers, musicians and artisans and other examples of secular life, and then more depictions of events from the Hindu epics. This brief run through gives the barest hint of the cornucopia of riches to be found on these walls. All human and divine life is here. When I visited I was with a young Italian I had met on the bus who, unusually, had come to India for sensual rather than spiritual reasons. He was fascinated by how this aspect of life was shown with such enthusiasm on a sacred building, but then Indians have always regarded all aspects of life as valid parts of the whole.

 

                                        

Bands of images on the outer walls

                                                             

A temple dancer

The Hoysaleswara Temple at Halebid is similar to the Belur temple except it is dedicated to Siva. This similarity only means that the style and conception behind it are the same for it has a different kind of quality to it. There is a dark element that exists in Siva worship due to the archaic nature of this god who seems to take one back to a primeval time or even a time before time when darkness was upon the face of the deep. This is why Siva is represented by the linga, the most basic of shapes that can be conceived of as the first form emerging from formlessness. Vishnu has an almost Apollonian quality about him and is more manageable. He is like a solar deity whereas Siva is associated with primal being and the state in which darkness and light are not yet fully separate. He undoubtedly harks back to a pre-Aryan India. In the Vedas he is known as Rudra who, according to Mircea Eliade, symbolises all that is chaotic, dangerous and unforeseeable. Things that are part of life and therefore must have a spiritual explanation.

 

Halebid means ruined city and refers to its sacking by Muslim invaders in the 14^th century. Many local temples were destroyed but this one survives. It houses over 20,000 carvings, a truly mind-boggling sum and the detail displayed on these carvings is equally stupendous, aided by the fact that it is made of soapstone which is soft when mined so can be relatively easily worked but then hardens over time when exposed to the air. Like Belur, the outer walls here are built up in bands with elephants symbolising a stable foundation at the base. This level is followed by one with royal lions and then a band of horses and horsemen before we reach the fourth band positioned at head height with scenes from the epics and the Puranas. Between these are thinner layers decorated with flowers and designs from nature. There are several more bands with animals, real and mythical, and scenes from court life, and then at the top we encounter the god and goddesses engaged in their legendary activities.

 

Outer wall at Hoysaleswara Temple

Hoysaleswara temple is unusual in that it contains two sanctuaries, one for the king and one for the queen, so masculine and feminine polarities with each sanctum connected by a corridor and having its own linga and mandapa, and each with an enormous Nandi bull positioned outside facing into the shrine. That to the north is polished to an extraordinary granite-like finish, and both are decorated with garlands and jewellery. The temple is raised on a star-shaped platform several feet high known as a jagati and, as at Belur, there is a wide span for walking round. Inside we again find the polished and lathe-turned pillars, all unique and with wheel and bell designs. It’s like a forest of stone with strange geometric-patterned trees supporting a ceiling covered in carvings of celestial beings. 

 

A Nandi Bull

Ceiling carvings

It’s hard to do justice to the astonishing level of artistry and craftsmanship of the Hoysala temples in a short post like this. I visited them over 40 years ago and can still remember a feeling of awe and mystery when I went round as though something more than human lay behind their construction, something that was at one time present and, though now departed, remained as a kind of echo. Both temples had this quality but it is the inner sanctum that is the source from whence it arose. The sanctum is like a connection point between this world and the next, and that is especially so in temples dedicated to Siva.

 

In fact, the meaning behind the Siva sanctum may go beyond even that. For an explanation we can turn to the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling whose Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom from 1809 provides a clue as to what Siva ultimately is. Schelling wanted to find out how human freedom, which includes potential for evil, is compatible with an all-powerful God. He came up with the idea, probably influenced by Jakob Boehme, that God emerges from the ‘Ungrund’ or Unground, a primal abyss of absolute freedom and infinite potential which exists beyond reason and order, and to which these are subsidiary. The Unground is pure potency containing with it both light/order and dark/chaos. Thus, God is light but there is an element of being or, as we might call it, pre-being, which, though not evil in itself, contains the potential for evil. God as Creator organises the Unground, but he cannot eliminate the dark/chaos element unless he eliminates freedom. It might even be that it is the interaction of dark/chaos with light/order that produces becoming and growth. Order should certainly dominate chaos if there is to be creativity, organisation and growth, but it also needs chaos to grow.

 

This is why Siva can seem unnerving and an ambiguous god at the best of times. If he represents the Unground then there is potential for good and evil within him, and in that respect he is a metaphysical principle rather than a being. In his Philosophical Investigations Schelling asked if creation had a final goal and concluded that it did because God was not merely Being but Life. In this sense, Siva is a god of Being but not, I would suggest, of Life. The spiritual task, however, is to grow from being into life so while we should acknowledge the former because it exists, we need to focus our spiritual attention on the latter, and the God of Life is Christ.

It is important to see the truths in ancient Eastern religion and not dismiss them for they are truths. But we should also recognise that Christ as a pattern and exemplar is the higher reality and greater truth.

Spiritual Loss and What To Do About It

 Anyone who starts looking around for some spiritual sustenance in the modern world is in a very peculiar position. On the one hand, the wisdom teachings of the ages are readily available. From Buddhism to Hermeticism and from Sufism to Christianity, it's all there. Then there are more modern spins, Theosophy, Anthroposophy and their ilk, various sorts of esotericism, the list is endless. Spiritual teachers abound too, and of every stripe. You are spoilt for choice.

And yet there is nothing of any real substance. Of course, the books have all the information required but it's just words. They may help to introduce people to spiritual ideas and concepts but these soon become familiar and you are not really any better off. Not in a deep sense. The teachers expound but they don't do anyone any good except on the introductory level. Once you are past this you see that they don't have anything further to offer and that for many of them being a teacher is just a substitute for living the life. If they truly knew what the spiritual was they would not be needing to set themselves up as teachers. They remain on the outside looking in.

Then there are the practices, meditation, yoga and all the rest. No practice is going to make you a spiritual person. Not on its own. It's not like sports training. You can do whatever it might be and it will bring some results, no doubt, but don't mistake these for spirituality.

What's going on? The nature of these times is that everything is being brought out, and when it is brought out, it is brought down. When a treasure is revealed, it loses its shine. When the sacred is brought into the light of day for all to see, it becomes profaned which is why such things were guarded and protected in the past. The democratisation of spirit means bringing it down to a lower level.

The remedy is for every individual to form his own relationship with God. You cannot rely on anything external now because it is all sullied. So, seek God within yourself. Not as yourself as some would say, but within yourself. There is a difference.

Love vs Compassion

 I've been thinking about the difference between love and compassion. Spiritually speaking, compassion is a Buddhist virtue while love is Christian. Some people would say these are the same thing, just differently viewed. I don't believe they are the same at all. Compassion is supposed to be rooted in a recognition of the unity of all life. You are me and I am you and so on. So, compassion is logical because in feeling for you I am feeling for myself in a certain sense. We are all one and compassion is the appropriate response to that spiritual realisation.

Isn't this rather thin gruel? First of all, the logical nature of the thing is demeaning to true feeling. And secondly, if feeling for you is really a form of feeling for me then it's not really feeling for you at all. It isn't self-interested but nor is it seeing you in your own right as a real individual person

I know this is an over-simplification of what Buddhist compassion is but it does point to something real.  Compassion is calm, measured, dispassionate. It is kind and good. It is the cool light of the moon. But love is the blazing light of the sun. It bursts its bounds. It can dazzle and even burn. It is not kind or good or even loving in the usual sense of that word because it cannot be contained. It overflows. It is radiant, glorious, intolerant of whatever might limit it. There really is no connection between compassion and love. They are not the same or even similar because love comes from the sea of fire which is the hidden cause and substance of all the created worlds while compassion is the reflection of that fire in matter after it has descended from the throne of God to the worlds below. It is love at second hand. Compassion is the good man's response to the human condition but love is the direct spirit of God as it flows through the universe giving it its very life.

Don't take this to mean that compassion is not a good and worthy thing. But it is not love. Compassion lives for others. Love dies for them.

Ramana Maharishi

  Another instalment from my life in South India 1980-85

Yercaud is only 100 miles from Tiruvannamalai and it was inevitable that at one time we would visit the ashram of Ramana Maharishi who is generally regarded as the greatest Indian holy man or saint, or whatever he might be called as he really escapes categorisation, of the 20^th century. Michael respected him but was not especially interested in going to the ashram, having been to enough ashrams in the early ‘70s when he had spent some time in India. But I wanted to visit the place where the Maharishi had lived as he exemplified the ancient rishis of the Upanishads like no one else. He seems to represent a genuine conduit back to ancient India with a spirit uncontaminated by modernity or egotism. Just as one can see the falseness is some of the other religious figures I have mentioned, one can see the truth in him. 

I first came across him in the same way I imagine many people did, through Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India. When I read this book in 1978 it served as an excellent spiritual guide and travelogue and I’m sure it still does even though it is almost 100 years old. We may see further than Brunton in some respects now but that is because we stand on his shoulders and on the shoulders of people like him, those early writers who introduced the spiritual teachings of the East to the West. He combined a practical common sense with well-developed spiritual instincts and even today when so much more has been written and explored he remains a good bridge between Orient and Occident, cutting through the superstition of the one and the scepticism of the other. There is some minor controversy surrounding him but it only seems to come from one source and he has been dead for 40 years anyway, so we can overlook it. Meanwhile, his books, possibly outmoded in certain ways, remain a testament to his pioneering research and insights.

 

We wrote to the ashram asking if they could put us up for a few days, and they replied offering us a room for a date about a month away. There were regular buses from Salem to Tiruvannamalai which took about 3 hours and so, at the due date, we boarded one and off we went. The ashram was situated a short distance out of town at the foot of the famous Mount Arunachala where Ramana went when he was aged about 20 shortly after his ‘death experience’ at 16. This was when he became convinced he was going to die and lay down in preparation. While waiting for death he realised that it is only the body that dies, and his consciousness became absorbed in Brahman where it remained ever after. Put like that, it seems almost mundane but the transformation in him was profound for this was not just an intellectual realisation such as anyone might have but the actual experience of spiritual deathlessness and destruction of the idea of a separate self. I will have more to say about this later. Suffice it to say here that Ramana’s experience does seem rather different to that of many people who have mystical experiences in that his ego self did not lay claim to the experience afterwards as is often the case in such instances. I would suggest his experience was more profound and his level of spiritual maturity much greater than the norm. The self exists whether we accept that or not. The experience of self-transcendence can come to anyone at any stage of the mystical life but only one in whom the self has become almost transparent can process this experience in the complete sense, untarnished by ego. Ramana was one of the very rare examples of such a person. To use a Sufi expression, he was able to convert a state into a station meaning he truly became what he experienced.

 

After arriving at Arunachala Ramana lived in various caves in the foothills of the mountain eventually settling in Virupaksha Cave where he stayed for 17 years. When he had first arrived in Tiruvannamalai he had remained sunken in deep meditation oblivious to the outer world but gradually he returned to normal consciousness to the degree that he could interact with the world and the devotees that his advanced state inevitably attracted.  

 

In 1922 following the death of his mother who, after initial disapproval, had joined him and become his disciple, he moved to her tomb at the base of the hill and the ashram began to form around him. One indication of the authenticity of his realisation is that as his fame increased and many more people came to see him, literally to sit at his feet in many cases, this had no effect on him whatsoever. He led a simple and spartan life with barely any possessions and there was no hint of scandal of any kind. He remained in service to his devotees and, such was his innate modesty, resisted any attempt to deify him which is something Indians love to do with their holy men. His purpose was to be accessible to anyone who wished to see him, and I cannot think of a better example of someone who taught by “silence and the rays you give out” (see Meeting the Masters, p. 255).

 

Ramana died in 1950 and his body was buried on site in accordance with tradition in India for a holy person. The ashram developed as a spiritual centre to perpetuate his memory and teachings, and now includes samadhi shrines, a meditation hall and a library amongst other facilities. I don’t recall the library being very large when I went in the early 1980s but there seems to be a big building there now so perhaps a new one has been built. When we went, we spoke to the librarian there, an Englishman slightly older than me who has written extensively about Ramana and some of his disciples. He was rather reserved in his manner but possibly that was because he saw us, as we were, as sympathetic observers rather than true devotees.

 

At that time the ashram still carried something of the peace of Ramana’s presence. It wasn’t crowded and when we walked up the hill to Skandashram, the cave where Ramana lived from 1915 to 1922, there was not a soul to be seen. I went back some 20 years later for a brief visit and it had become busier and more, one has to say, institutional in feeling, but that is inevitable as the further something gets from its source, the more the energy from that original inspiration will be diluted.

 

Ramana was an almost unique religious personage. But does he serve as an example of the way to follow, especially for Westerners? I would say definitely not. He left no lineage and those who came after him and claim to manifest his realisation are, at best, several rungs below him in attainment. It must be remembered how his realisation came to him. It did not come as the result of any spiritual practice. He equated his realisation with what was in the Hindu scriptures some time after his experience as they seemed to describe it, and so he adopted their terminology to explain it, but they were not what brought it about, at least not in this life. I am not questioning his spiritual achievement and status, but I would base that more on his personality and the obvious aura of saintliness about him than the state of consciousness he attained. For what reveals Ramana to be on the upper tiers of spiritual development is not his impersonal realisation but the quality of his personal response to it.

And yet, what exactly was the point of his spiritual realisation? For true believers he had reached the pinnacle of enlightenment but is that really all there is? To become one with the universe and have no self left? It seems a waste of effort. God's effort in creating, that is. Why go to all the trouble of creating if the end is the same as the beginning? Of course, for those who believe that the ground of reality is impersonal being or pure consciousness there is no problem. But if that really were the case then how did anything ever happen? 

I'll tell you how. It happened because God willed it so. There is no other possible answer unless you fall back on the complete fluke response but that is just question begging. God willed it and he had a purpose in doing so. That purpose was to make the universe a universe of many beings in loving communion rather than just one being by himself. It sounds naive perhaps, but why shouldn't the answer be simple? In fact, it should be simple.

Ramana had reached a high state by tracing consciousness back to its source but he had retracted his being into pure oneness. This might be the foundation of existence but it is not the building and it does not negate the reality and meaning and purpose of the building. The building is creation which is real. Your self and my self are real and God gave us these selves so that we might bring them to a state in which they could be divinised not discarded, though the separative element in them should be outgrown. Ramana was a saintly man, though not I repeat because of his realisation but because of his character. Even so, he does not indicate the way of Christ which is the greater way because it includes the whole of life not just part of it. Life is not just one. It is one and many, both together, and that gives it its unending richness and beauty.

Salvation and Enlightenment part 2

Eastern religion is the quest for enlightenment or liberation, the two words amounting to much the same thing. This entails the death of self-identification and a state of consciousness in which the outer world has little or no substantive reality. This is regarded as the zenith of spiritual achievement and at the same time the underlying eternal reality which has always been. Given it transcends time, that makes sense. But are time and the individual self really irrelevant to the spiritual quest or do they have a part to play in that there is a growing process involved and the end result is not just the realisation of something that has always been there? Christianity speaks of a new creation which the saved soul enters through Christ. This is radically different to absorption in eternity. One might call it eternity plus time, the two together making something completely new and more than either on its own.

This is a fallen world. Most religions accept that. The Buddha called it a world of suffering and the Hindu search is for moksha meaning liberation from the need to incarnate in the material world which is an endless process as long as the jiva or individual soul makes new karma which it will do if attached to the outcome of its actions. It may be that the spiritual path before Christ did entail the escape from material bondage through fully transcending identification with the phenomenal part of one's being up to and including the individual self. Hence, enlightenment, nirvana and so on. But Christ brought something new. He defeated the devil, the prince of this world, and thereby redeemed matter. He made a new creation, heaven, and from that moment on there was a higher destiny for the soul than absorption into the all. It could become spiritualised or sanctified which would mean the good in it, love, beauty and goodness itself, all of which are superfluous in strict non-duality where form has no function, would not just be preserved but enhanced. Spirit could transform matter by entering into it instead of matter needing to be left behind for spirit to be known. Christ ascended into heaven with his body which means heaven is not just spirit but spiritualised matter too. It is not a divorce but a marriage.

This does not mean that the Nirvikalpa Samadhi state of Indian mysticism in which subject and object differences cease to exist is not fully real. That does represent contact with the ground of our being. But it is still part of the old creation even if it is the most fundamental, the most primal, part. It is the deepest level of reality but it still exists in nature by which I mean a human being can experience this state through its own efforts unlike salvation which takes us beyond our present spiritual state to a new existence, and which is dependent on grace bestowed by the Creator.

Salvation in contradistinction to Enlightenment does not open our eyes to what already and always is but transforms us into a being which combines the divine and the transfigured individual. The Heaven promised by Christ is very different to the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of heaven which would be better called paradise. The Buddhist and Hindu heavens are transient and below the Nirvana level whereas Heaven is eternal. And, as stated, it cannot be gained by the unsupported efforts of the creature. Entry depends on the grace of God though one must be fully open to this grace which means fully open to him.

Enlightenment is not Heaven. Heaven is a new creation whereas the non-dualistic consciousness called enlightenment is the ground of awareness which is always there albeit overlaid by form. When God saw creation he pronounced it good and, though original creation was spoilt which is why early mystics sought liberation from it, since Christ there is a new creation in which goodness and beauty and love all exist in perfect form, fully transparent to spirit. 

We must understand the difference between the beatific vision which is union with God after death (the degree of union being proportionate to the spiritual condition of the soul at death), and mystical states that can be experienced while on earth. The beatific vision is qualitatively different to the experience of being one with pure consciousness because that is not God but the imprint or image of God within us. The divine image is a living reality but the image is not the actual Person. We can be totally identified with the image within us but that is not oneness with God who is the source of the image. For that we need to go beyond the impersonal which is the spirit of God spread throughout creation to the personal or God in himself.

The identification of the individual self with universal spirit can lead to the erroneous idea that the subject is one with God. In fact, he is one with the root of his own being or God in him not God in himself. This spiritual error can lead to moral and ethical confusion if the subject is not sufficiently aware of the distinction between Creator and created, and many Indian gurus have succumbed to this form of spiritual narcissism though the renowned Ramana Maharishi is not among them. His case was exceptional. He was an ordinary boy who at 16 had a death experience which dramatically altered his consciousness for evermore. He found parallels for his new state in the Hindu tradition, notably that of advaita Vedanta, but he did not come to it through that tradition or any spiritual discipline. He claimed never to have practised sadhana of any kind. The question is what caused his experience? Was it spiritual, psychological or even physical as in a chemical change in his brain? It is not to denigrate his spiritual status to ask this because that was demonstrated in his life afterwards. His personal reaction is a better guide to his high status than his impersonal realisation.

 

Whatever the answer to that question what can definitely be stated is that no experience attainable by mystics in this world necessarily leads to or guarantees salvation and the post-mortem seeing of God face to face which is a spiritual vision that includes and transcends both dualistic and non-dualistic modes of being. No mystic is spiritually saved by his experiences but only by the love of God and faith in Christ, however they may see him because members of non-Christian religions can respond to the spirit of Christ if that appears in their religion which it may do under a form congenial to that religion. Christ appears as he is only in Christianity but his spirit did influence other spiritual approaches after his death to the extent that they were able to respond to it.

 

 Over the past several decades thousands of Westerners have sought mystical transcendence through Eastern religion. The reality is that most people who have followed the gurus and holy men of India and elsewhere in the quest for enlightenment have not got much real benefit from the exercise, and many have even become more spiritually self-absorbed because they have pursued heaven instead of God.

 

It is precisely to correct this that the disciple after mystical transports, which are often given as early encouragement to tread the path, may (if he is lucky) suffer periods or even a whole lifetime of aridity. He must learn to do the right thing for the right reason. He must learn to love God for God's sake not his own. This is the only way to salvation.

Salvation and Enlightenment part 1

 The most distinctive feature of advanced mystical experience is the dissolution of self in which the sense of "I" is subsumed in the totality of what is. To be strictly accurate, this cannot really be categorised as an experience because there is, or seems to be, no self remaining to experience anything. There is simply a pure, universalised consciousness of bliss that shines in the mind and breaks down the barrier between outer and inner so that the duality of self and not-self disappears. It is a state beyond time, space, thought and any divisions of form when everything is taken up into illimitable being. But we do call it an experience because the experiencer always returns. For note this. These experiences are extraordinary but they do not make you a better person when they pass and you reenter the everyday world. And if you think about it, how could they since they have no relevance to life in the normal world with its characteristics of light and dark, good and bad, better and worse. They are above all that, relating as they do to being not becoming.

Two questions arise. If these experiences bear no relation to the world of becoming do they render that world meaningless? Or does the fact that they bear no relation mean they do not represent the ultimate goal of human endeavour as some would claim, but are simply expressions of one side of it and, in that respect, might even be seen as deceptive? That is to say, is life the absolute alone or the absolute and the relative together? The second would surely be more than the first even if the concept of more has no meaning in the light of the first taken on its own terms.

 

When the individual who experiences these transpersonal states tries to interpret them afterwards it is by no means certain he will arrive at the correct understanding. An experience and its interpretation are very different things. In this case, the ineffability of the experience might lead the person to draw the conclusion he has cracked the cosmic code of life. After all, what could be more than something that goes beyond the very idea of more or less, something that is whole and complete and unarguable in its completeness? But if the point of spiritual life was to enter into this supernal state what reason would there be ever to have been born in a world of duality? What need was there for a self in the first place if the goal was just to discard it? To think of life in those terms is to ignore a good part of reality which is obviously more than just pure being or we would not be able to ask the question.

 

Mystic states of oneness, sometimes regarded as pointers to enlightenment if they become permanent, are real. They may be rare for most people and they may not last long even when they are attained, but they certainly exist.  The question is what causes them? Are they a purely spiritual phenomenon or might they be the result of chemical changes in the brain and therefore linked to the physical body which would mean that the death of the body would probably bring them to an end and they would have no bearing on the post-mortem state and fate of the soul.

Mystical states can arise spontaneously or they can come about through spiritual or mental disciplines in the same way as body-building, diet, exercise, training etc, can develop powerful muscles. In India techniques have existed for centuries to manipulate these states into existence and we know they can also be brought about through psychedelic drugs which does rather suggest that chemical changes in the brain might be responsible for changes in consciousness. If we accept that we are spirits in corporeal bodies which are designed to experience the material world then we can see that these bodies might act as filters which block out higher consciousness so we can function in this world. It may well be possible that these filters can be removed under certain extreme circumstances causing mystical experiences to occur, either arising spontaneously through brain changes or else being engineered by technique and discipline.

 

But does this mean the subject is a more spiritual person? His I may have been removed for a spell but in itself it remains what it was. It has not been rendered pure and holy which I would submit is the whole point of the spiritual exercise and which, moreover, is something that can only happen through grace. God gives us a self for us to grow and develop until the point is reached at which we give it back to him and then he restores it, filled with his presence. This is a process not a sudden transformation of being which can take place at any time, and it is not restoring our original nature but creating something totally new which is the divine self, the God-infused self as opposed to re-absorption in the pool of original consciousness from whence we were drawn out at our creation.

 Some Indian gurus teach that enlightenment can be attained through awakening the kundalini energy. To be sure, they will say this is dangerous and should only be undertaken under the supervision of a qualified instructor but what they don't make clear is that kundalini has its roots in the physical body and so the consciousness changes its arousal can instigate are down to material changes not spiritual ones. As a Master in the book Towards the Mysteries in a talk given to Pandit Gopinath Kaviraj, an eminent Hindu scholar of the mid-twentieth century, says "Kundalini is not ‘spiritual’. It is ‘material’". The proper procedure is that it will arise naturally concomitantly with proper spiritual development but it can be forced artificially which is what these renegade gurus (let's call them what they are) teach. They may get results but these are unholy results because not in line with the correct way which is growth within character. Furthermore, being bodily instigated, they will cease with death leaving the subject back where he was or even worse off because he has sought to steal divine fire from God. This may well be the state of many supposedly realised yogis and the like after death. Their occult manipulations will have no bearing on the eventual salvation or otherwise of their soul. They may indeed jeopardise it.

To be continued.

The Recovery and Renewal of Tradition

Christianity can seem soft and feeble to many men today, a sentimental palliative that answers none of the deeper questions of life. It has become something of a nursery religion that looks to make people behave nicely to each other rather than something that addresses absolutes and can overcome death and darkness. The fire has gone out of it, and managers and consultants are raking over the ashes making the Christian religion just another form of liberal humanism.  What we need is a return to Tradition using the capital to make clear that it is the spirit behind Tradition we must rediscover rather than any particular form it might have adopted in the past.

Tradition isn't a theory or ideology and to think of it in those terms is to see it through the eyes of secular modernity. It isn't a system or a codification of some intellectual analysis or argument. Though it may have those elements within it, they are secondary and used to express the ideas behind it. They are not the source of them. The real source of Tradition is insight into the reality behind outer appearance, and this may either come from revelation or mystical experience which is to say it derives from the spiritual world which is primary. For Christianity and the West in general, the revelation was obviously Christ, the descent of the Logos into human form. Therefore, to restore the Christian vision we should go back to him as the source.

 

However, tradition in the Western world was based on Christ but not just Christ. Greek philosophy and thought, Roman law and military strength and the Northern European sense of the individual all determined the form it took. These coalesced into a spiritual ethos that shaped the world until it lost touch with the transcendent and collapsed into modernity which in turn collapsed into whatever we have now when not only the spiritual but more recently the rational too have been rejected.

 The rediscovery of Tradition does not mean going back to the past as it was because we are not the same people we were, and the experiences of the last few centuries have marked us indelibly. What it requires is the recognition of the transcendent and the divine principles rooted in that. At the same time, the forms Tradition took in the past were highly effective means of communicating those principles and until we have anything better we would be well advised to understand and appreciate them because they still have power when understood as receptacles for spiritual truth. We should not limit spiritual truth to the forms it took but nor should we neglect those forms since few of us are able to fully intuit spiritual reality directly. We usually need an outer vessel to convey its essence for us and there is still much to be learnt from the vessels that were built up by wise and inspired men over many centuries.

That having been said, our main goal should be to become aware of God ourselves, and the best way to do this remains through the figure of Jesus Christ. But which Christ? The unfortunate reality is that we have built our own images of Christ which reflect our own prejudices so how can we circumvent these false Christs and discover the true one? Obviously, there are the Gospels, especially that of St John, but there is also Western art and I would suggest that the image on the Turin Shroud is of particular relevance in this respect. It really does seem authentic not just in the sense that scientific analysis has, so I believe, confirmed that the cloth is of the right time and place, but also the image itself, the method of creation of which we still cannot explain. If I were told this was how Jesus looked I would not be disappointed. The face has such nobility and power and inner strength that it exceeds any artist's representation of what the Son of God might look like.

These are outer approaches to Jesus and we cannot do without them. But there is also the inner approach. This is the quest to find Christ within our own heart. I am not referring here to any concept of our own Christ nature or an abstract or Cosmic Christ. There is no inner, no abstract, no Cosmic Christ without the real person of Jesus Christ. That is the reality and the others merely borrow from that reality. But I do believe we can meet Christ within ourselves through prayer and meditation on his holy self, and that by this means we can start to know something of God and eventually unite our being to his. Then we are in touch with the true source of the Christian Tradition.

This is how we rediscover Tradition today. We go back to the source but we also look for it within ourselves. Each is required for the whole approach. Tradition is made up of both body and soul, the body to preserve it and the soul to renew it.