Being Truly Human November 1994 Newsletter

From the Editor

The Phiroz Mehta Trust Summer School was held at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, from 28th to 31st August, by kind invitation of the Buddhist Society, who were holding their own Summer School there at the same time. A successful School was held at the College, set in its beautiful surroundings, and a number of Phiroz’s recorded talks were played. Participants all enjoyed meeting members of the Buddhist Society, many of whom remembered Phiroz from the days when he gave talks at the Buddhist Society Summer School. Sylvia Swain gave a very interesting talk “Radicals of the ways”, which a number of members of the Buddhist Society also attended.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta on an unknown date

Continued from part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4

Then we come to Anāhata, the heart centre, where true egohood is realized — true egohood, which is devoid of egoism. True egohood means that one is rightly self-conscious; self-responsibly self-conscious, free of the tyranny of desire. Such true egohood contains within itself the energy for its own Transcendence. Now the Transcending will take place very consciously, and only from within yourself. Nature cannot go any further, without our deliberate co-operation. We have the power to say ‘Yea’. We have the power to say ‘Nay’. You must care, and if you really care, Man comes to fulfilment and fruition, through each and every one of you, otherwise there is no such thing as fruition or fulfilment for any man. So now — in Anāhata there takes place the pacification of sense consciousness, and in Anāhata one enters the first deep state of meditation, real meditation begins there. And here, as I said, the pacification of the sense consciousness takes place. If you examine the process that goes on in your mind throughout the day you will find that all the sense impressions and sense images keep rising up all the time, after they have sunk into the sub-conscious, they keep rising up and clamour for attention. We may have our drawing room spick and span and like a shop window for tidyness and order, and what-not. But look at what happens inside one’s own brain. It’s a wonderful wilderness, a jungle, a confusion. Complete confusion. The labyrinth through which you have to find your way, and arrive safely at the other end. Watch it. Follow it. Don’t fight against it, don’t give way to it. Don’t indulge it. That is your task — a tricky one, a difficult one, but when you do it, the clamour of the sense-consciousnesses will subside, and for the first time you will know the meaning of peace. It is not the mere opposite of turmoil and strain, but that which transcends the conflict of the dualities, of quiet and turmoil.

The next is the Viśuddhi cakra. Here one goes quite beyond the word, which means beyond finitude and mortality. I won’t say anything about this tonight, because I spoke quite a lot about it last April. Here is the realm of Prophetic Speech. It is the second deep stage of meditation where all discursive thinking as such comes to an end. Thoughts will rise up still; they will flow along; but all self-association with those thoughts has ceased, and the origination of those thoughts out of one’s own self through one’s own desire, and frustrations, and unfulfilments and so on — all that has ceased. This is the great significance of the Viśuddhi cakra as such. Here Unified Mind — unified, made One, Whole, for the first time, functions at its own level and in its own rights, the Receptive-Responsive Sensitivity that I spoke of earlier, is at its peak and there is the release from isolative self-consciousness. At the Ajñā cakra — concerned with the medulla — one goes beyond all ideation. There is direct perception of the great archetypes.

And in Sahasrāra there is complete pacification of all sense consciousnesses, freedom from isolative self-consciousness and self-obtrusion upon the Totality. We as we are obtrude upon the world, but that obtrusion, that obtrusiveness, completely ceases, and there is no conflict between self and not self — between Being and Non-Being, in fact all those barriers are out, and you realize the Wholeness of existence. There is no such thing in that state which one may call ‘my’ mind, because one has become empty, transparent, and so that mind which is commonly spoken of as the Divine Mind, or the Cosmic Mind, functions freely through you. In this state power can be handled safely, otherwise in the ordinary worldly state we always mishandle power, for now Love and Wisdom are in perfect harmony.

So — in the ascent from Mūlādhāra, Kuṇḍalinī Śaktī works in and through finitude, constraint and mortality, and ascends right up to Śiva — the abode of Śiva — peaceful, auspicious, non-moving, universally active, infinite, immeasurable. And there Śaktī enjoys bliss with her Lord; the bliss of union with Śiva — Father and Mother are One. It is in this state that one realizes, I believe, the meaning of the words of Jesus, after he had ascended — “All Power is given unto Me in Heaven and Earth”. The united ŚivaŚaktī returns to Mūlādhāra, as they say in the books. But I say it not only returns to Mūlādhāra, the united Śiva Śaktī rise up again and make their final abode, during the lifetime of the yogi, of Anāhata, because it is at this level that one is in tune with all mankind. What happens? The united Śiva Śaktī, coming right down to Mūlādhāra, completely purified, refined, and sensitized the whole being, so that every vestige of impurity is out, you are the Perfected Holy One, but if you just remain there you are isolated. But when the united Śiva Śaktī ascends again to Anāhata it transcendentalizes all the worldly functions represented by Mūlādhāra, Svadhiṣṭhāna and Maṇipura, and the work which falls to our lot in ordinary, everyday life. This, as far as I am aware, is not stated in the books. But that is what happens. Śiva Śaktī resides there in the Perfected Holy One, and at the time of death rises right up to Sahasrāra again, and the end of the body takes place. So from Mūlādhāra to Sahasrāra is from Earth to Heaven. The Maitreya and the Skanda Upaniṣads say — “The Body (of the Purified One, of course) is the Temple of the Lord”. The dweller in that Temple is Śiva himself.

Once again, the words of Isaiah, and I’ll give you the full quotation this time — “The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what manner of house will ye build unto me? And what place shall be my rest?”

By Sylvia Swain

Continued from part 1

The Scapegoat Complex

An example of the part played by choice and motivation in the progress of the ego to either pathology or to a higher consciousness is that of the formation of the Scapegoat Complex.

Historically it originated as a religious method to purge guilt but later degenerated into pathology i.e. a negative complex in the collective shadow. Having developed our separate, what Phiroz described as ‘isolative self-consciousness,’ humanity could only conceive of God indirectly, in projection, and whilst this is the case that closer union which is the eventual goal is not possible. So we either live in our isolation, or we undertake that dark and hazardous pathway through the unknown before we can discover who we really are.

It has ever been the case; ‘Those things I would do, I do not; but those things I would not do, those things I do.’ Under the old black and white authoritarian religious systems, not only was evil in projection but so was good. With God in projection, and a great area of instinctive life in repression, the ways of good and evil were largely inexplicable and uncontrollable. Man felt himself to be the recipient of fate meted out by the gods, until the time of the coming of Christianity when, whilst still in the midst of a primitive polytheism, we were forced to adopt sophisticated doctrines of Christian grace and love. This produced, not a sudden conversion, as was hoped, but a dissociation between conscious and unconscious, something Jung described as “a peculiar twist”. The reason for this was that, although intellectually and philosophically we can absorb and agree with ethically higher doctrine, until we have developed to a sufficiently higher standard of psychological maturity, our emotions, feelings and desires will remain what they were, because we cannot transform the heart as easily as we can change the mind. This is because, whereas the thinking, reasoning mind is within the conscious domain, the emotions and passions originate in the unconscious. Even the rationality which over the years has served to distance us from faith in spirituality and in the existence of higher beings, cannot solve our ethical problems. As Jung explained:

This split between conscious and unconscious, meant that the conscious personality could become highly disciplined, organised and rational on the one side but the other side remains suppressed, cut off from education and civilisation, which explains our many lapses into the most appalling barbarity. And the more we climb the mountain of scientific and technical achievement the more dangerous and diabolical becomes the misuse of our inventions.

But he continued:

If the white man does not succeed in destroying his own race with his brilliant inventions he will eventually have to settle down to a desperately serious course of self-education.

Collected Works volume 10 paragraph 1010

So let us look at this general problem as it affects the inner problem of the individual, because it is only with the individual that real change can come about. For example, the popular press with its nose for scandal makes public scapegoats every day, but the real scandal is that many people read it in order to enjoy a vicarious participation in this unconscious, pagan ritual, because somehow it helps them to feel better about themselves. Jung observed that when we thus project our guilt onto others and exchange it for what he called an “infantile innocence,” we get caught up in an inescapable “causal nexus”, that is a group linked by a common cause of scapegoating, and without noticing it we lose our moral freedom, that is our individual conscience. He said:

Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself, ‘Who am I that all this should happen to me?’ To find the answer to this question he will look into his own heart.

Collected Works volume 12 paragraph 152

Let us look at the basic pattern of the complex, which can be understood as producing three types of participants:

1. The scapegoater who is a self-righteous perfectionist, a nit-picker, or a bully, punishing and condemning everyone else, the Inquisition type.
2. The victim with a negative self-image who feels personal inadequacy, and who accepts blame and punishment either from outside, or from inside as self-hatred.
3. One who develops both an inner accuser and an inner victim. It is the nature of the ego structure, with its twisted dissociation from natural reality, that it can, and frequently does, set unnaturally high goals for itself. Simultaneously it projects unreasonably black guilt not only onto others but onto itself. Through a lack of understanding and capacity the scapegoat, originally a religious archetype, has turned negative and has become no longer an archetype of atonement, but one of punishment and sickness disguised as an ethic.

As a consequence of this unrecognised, unaddressed problem, unlike the Indian gods based on the instincts, all the gods of modern man have become diseases. In his book Alchemical Studies Jung said:

We are just as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms.

Paragraph 54

Though we may feel ourselves to be helpless victims of our history, of our society, of our parentage or whatever, and that we have in our turn to pass the whole thing on as reaction or revenge or just as our sickness, it is not so. Mankind, even in a psychological epidemic, does have a choice, but a choice that can be made only on an individual basis. Even during the Nazi epidemic, the classic example, there were some who did not succumb, yet those previously normal decent people who did succumb, did so through their shadow. Mass horrors always happen unconsciously through the shadow, through greed, people can be bribed: through fear, people can be coerced. Envy, spite or self-pity can turn people into informers and monsters, because these are virtually automatic reactions, whereas considered ethical choice involves conscious restraint, deliberation and ethical decisions.

Continued in part 3, part 4 and part 5

By Jehanne Mehta for Phiroz Mehta

Crossing the boundary
between the garden and the wild
suddenly there was a freedom
a widening release
suddenly I could breathe
with the spirits

At the moment of threshold
breath turned on itself
became light for you
the root of your being wound
upwards and grasped
the light as soil

Now you put out wings
bicotyledons
expanding into the ethers
from this pale seed case…
the last whisp of prana
lifting
in a being borne spiral
a cadence of exquisite delicacy
such as you might have played
once in a neighbouring room
with your long beautiful fingers