Being Truly Human November 1998 Newsletter

From the Editor

Another very happy Summer School was held in Beaumont Hall, Leicester, from 6th to 8th August. We are again grateful to Dick and Diana St. Ruth of the Buddhist Publishing Group for giving us the opportunity to hold the School at the beautiful location.

A lecture given by Phiroz Mehta before H. M. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands at Appeldoorn on 29^th January 1954

Continued from part 1

There is something which keeps God and the devil together in me, mixed up with each other in a fluctuating relationship. This something is the I-hood, the misconceived selfhood in me. This I-hood is the shadow of the eternal, divine I AM. It is real, as long as I struggle to perpetuate its reality. At death, the I AM sheds this shadow altogether. So too in profound slumber, or dreamless sleep. There is a third occasion which this shadow is cast out — but we shall come to this a little further on.

What do I do with myself? The devil I can transform; God in me I can bring up to full stature. So I assert. But can I do it? Yes, provided that where myself is concerned I will awaken and become Enlightened.

Now the devil, God and myself are not three sharply defined entities to be dealt with in three specific, separate ways. In the moment of obscurity, I myself am the devil, and in the state of enlightenment, I myself am the pure vessel of God. As I purify myself, I awaken. As I awaken, I transform the devil and make God in me grow. The process is a whole. It happens simultaneously.

At the beginning of this talk we touched upon the disharmony in the world situation, and the tribulations in our personal lives, so obvious to everyone. But we must look more deeply and see that even the joy of friends in converse, the ecstasy of lovers’ kisses, the delight of children at play, the pleasure of the senses and the elation of the mind, the satisfaction of achievement and success, are all clouded with the sorrow of their transience. They all pass away. All things arise and move and pass away. Death seems Lord of all. And we are aware of each and every event and experience, feeling and thought, as something which begins and proceeds and dies. Our very consciousness is subject to the Lord of Death. But the heart of man cries out for the joy that will never end, for the life that will never die. And until man can win this joy or ānanda, this deathlessness or amṛita, he is in anguish, and his whole world, both painful and pleasant, is only a vale of tears, a valley of the shadow of death. This blissful Peace, this living Im-mortality is the fulfilment of man here-now. This Eternal Life, man ascribes to God, to Brahman, to Ātman, whereas he himself, as he is, suffers the sorrow of his distance from God.

Let us hear what the sage Nārada said to his great master Sanatkumāra:

Sir, I know the Ṛg-veda, the Yajur-veda, the Sāma-veda, the Atharva-veda, Grammar, Propitiation of the Shades of the Departed, Mathematics, Augury, Chronology, Logic, Polity, the Science of the Gods, the Science of Sacred Knowledge, Demonology, the Science of Rulership, Astrology, the Science of Snake Charming and the Fine Arts. This, Sir, I know.

Such a one am I, knowing the sacred sayings, but not knowing the Ātman, the Spirit. It has been heard by me from those who are like you, Sir, that he who knows the Ātman knows the Spirit, crosses over sorrow. Such a sorrowing one am I, Sir. Do you, Sir, cause me, who am such a one, to cross over to the other side of sorrow.

Chāndogya Upaniṣad, VII.2. 2 & 3

The Buddha, with his sure touch with reality, declared the First Great Truth of Sorrow in these words:

O Bhikkhus! This is the Noble Truth as to the source of sorrow: worldly existence is sorrowful: old age… disease… death… union with the unpleasing… separation from the pleasing… the unfulfilled wish… each one of these is sorrowful. In brief, desirous transient individuality is sorrowful.

The Buddha refrained from calling the goal by the name of God. He called it Nirvana. But he unequivocally affirmed the Transcendent. Let us hear his assurance:

O Bhikkhus! There are those things, profound, difficult to realize, hard to understand, tranquillizing, sweet, not to be grasped by mere logic, subtle, comprehensible by the wise. These things the Tathāgata hath set forth, having himself realized them by his own super-knowing.

And a little later he adds:

When a Bhikkhu understands as they really are, the origin and end, the attraction, the danger, and the escape from the six realms of contact (viz. the five senses and the discursively thinking mind), then only he comes to know what is above and beyond them all.

Brahmajāla Sutta

At this stage we must try to understand clearly that the Great Teachers have always referred, fundamentally, to a state of consciousness rather than to an emotion or a thought, when they declared that worldly existence, both painful and pleasant, was sorrowful. The longing for God is an emotional stress and an intellectual outreaching in its early stages. But back of it there lies a deep-seated quiet urge in our inner consciousness itself. This urge becomes an irresistible dynamic power, in course of time sweeping our whole being to its ultimate destiny of God-realization. As long as our inner consciousness is not God-centred, then any and every experience is prevented from wholly being God in expression. Therefore, whether the experience be pleasant or painful from the standpoint of sensation or of any worldly, mortal values whatsoever, our inner consciousness, divorced from God, can only be characterized as sorrowful. Slowly, painfully, we mortals awaken to the awareness of our state of divorce from God. We have pious feelings about God; we raise up philosophies about God: we spin out theological systems. But we are not at home in God. Ours is a mortal awareness of a space-time world. And this is a sorrowful state.

Continued in part 3

By Sylvia Swain

Continued from part 1 and part 2

Ethics

Those who train themselves by day and night and are ever watchful will destroy their evil thoughts and approach Nirvana.

Dhammapada verse 226

So now we need to contemplate the psychological reality underlying those words with which we ended Part II. The message is all there if we look, not only into the meaning of the words, but to the conditioning within the minds of us who read the words, for it is through the conditioning of the mind that the true meaning becomes distorted. This is religion’s tragedy.

As the Bhikkhu Nanamoli so pertinently wrote in his notebook: “So much can be done by teachers for others — but what can others do for teachers? We might ask ourselves what would the teachers have us do?” Surely to uphold the integrity of the message. Another quotation from his is an indication of how distortion can arise: “If I insist on only having beauty before me, I know only horror will be behind me.”

To return to the Dhammapada and the problem of the destruction of evil, it is a psychological fact that “evil” repressed or evil evaded is not evil destroyed, but is in fact evil secreted and thus preserved. This is the horror behind us all, individually and collectively.

The most dangerous thing we can do is to live by a false ethic, which means to aspire to the beauty without addressing the horror. This insight, as many of us know, is also fundamental to the understanding of the psychology of C.G. Jung, which issued from his confrontation and penetration into the hidden reaches of the unconscious, both personal and collective, costing him much suffering, but producing much enlightenment in the process, and leading psychology into greater depths and fields of influence than had ever previously been conceived of by any other school. Jung penetrated to the religious wellsprings of the psyche from which our deepest ethics arise. The unconscious, he told us, is honest: it is the ego that colours and falsifies the facts. From an extensive and holistic view of the human psyche came the exposition of a new psychological landscape and ethic, a new truth of good and evil, not as independent absolutes but as relativities stemming from the discoveries of the mechanisms of repression and projection. The ego is our daytime companion, but by “day and night” unconscious procedures are at work, necessitating both honesty and watchfulness. Thus in their very different ways East and West have arrived at a common ethic.

In the beginning of religious practice, it is said, the more we look in, the more evil we find, but we need not despair or be too self-critical for this is everyone’s experience. Chapter 26, The Brahmin, verse 383 states:

Let the Brahmin struggle hard to stem the torrent of craving. Let him destroy the elements of being and realize Nirvana.

As we read this chapter we come to realize that “the torrent of craving” includes all the elements of the ego/shadow, that unit of “isolative self-consciousness” from which has issued our conviction of being someone, a someone whose craving, in addition to all the usual objects of human craving, includes the deceptively virtuous craving to be “good.” However this can only be a relative goodness, because to realize Nirvana involves the ending of all desire for being anything at all.

From verse 410 onwards the emphasis is put on all aspects of the emptying out of all selfness, as Phiroz sometimes put it. This means that we cannot free ourselves from evil whilst at the same time building up and harbouring ideas of being a “good” person for our own gratification. The good thing to do is to follow the Good Law, being no-thing in the ethos of competition between self and others.

In the early chapter of the Dhammapada, much is said about the righteous man and the evildoer (verses 16–17 onwards). Naturally we wish to identify with the righteous man and separate ourselves from that evildoer. This is as it should be. We need to respect dualistic values, since they were the opening by which humanity first evolved conscience and ethical identity. To discriminate between good and evil was a first indispensable step to the raising of standards of behaviour and to the passing of laws based on ethics. However, we cannot delegate responsibility for ethical behaviour to lawmakers, especially when laws are only imposed by stick and carrot.

So the lessons of selflessness and restraint, which are essential for the religious life, have to be learnt anew with each individual life. A baby needs to inherit instincts of greed and aggressiveness in order to survive to adulthood in the physical sense, of course, kindness and generosity have to come later from the heart in each case.

At the present time our animal instincts still counteract our spiritual aspirations very strongly, as we know, and yet we hear ourselves saying, “If only everybody could be honest and kind, what a difference this would make.” Indeed it would, but if we look closely at our own well-meaning lives, we see just how much we too are involved in collective activities, political, legal and economic necessities which advantage some and disadvantage others. However much we try, however carefully thought out the issues and choices in politics or business, we find that for sheer collective security we are a part of much that is less than fair or compassionate. So much for the evolution of social man.

At the beginning of the voluntary, individual path, we must respect simple collective “right and wrong” ethics, because they are our introduction to truth and compassion. Phiroz always emphasized the importance of observing the moralities as a foundation of the religious life, but said that for clarity it is necessary to review teachings for each generation to keep pace with new understanding and changing terminology, or perhaps; as Addison wrote, “Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

As a current example of this we can take the western sacred right to free speech, our proudest value etched in stone as an indispensable guarantee of all the other forms of freedom. Over the years, particularly in America, it has come to be interpreted ever more loosely, and because it was an open-ended , unconditional “ideal”, no one could find any justification for curtailing its increasingly wide interpretations and expressions. So, when the recent scandal in the White House in all its sorry detail exploded from the airways across the world, seeing that freedom had indeed become incontinence, I wondered what the effect would be on the numberless millions whose tastes and moral laws were more restrained. I heard myself saying, “The Americans are corrupting the world with their free speech!” A very contradictory thing to say, until I realized that it actually illustrated a dilemma faced by many teachers of morality who are often accused of contradictoriness. The Bible is full of such “contradictions”, as is Buddhism if one looks for them; Jung also came in for such criticism.

Wherever the transcendent heart of morality is approached, we are confronted by the paradox, it is inevitable, we get it here in the Dhammapada verse 412: “He is a Brahmin who is beyond good and evil... ”, except that here is a rider to the effect that the Brahmin is “free from longing and suffering.” In other words, he has no axe to grind and thus will never claim that freedom from good and evil is an excuse to do anything he fancies and not be held to account for it. He is the one who has faced up his meditation to the ways in which the mind can become intoxicated with desire and aversion, and who understands how in extremis the psyche can swing without warning to its opposite polarity. This is why he renounces both good and evil, in order to reach that third transcending view. Until this is achieved there is always the possibility of instability and suffering for individual and community alike, which is why we cannot withstand modern pressures by depending on faith and will-power alone. It takes well rounded and stable people to benefit fully from a holistic teaching.

He is a Brahmin who is free from craving and understands the Law, is free from doubt and knows Nirvana.

Dhammapada verse 411

What a difference there is between knowing the law of the land when one is motivated by craving and liable to manipulate the law for one’s own ends, and understanding the Law of the Dhamma free from craving and doubt, but enjoying freedom from choice. Such is the new ethic. Until freedom such as this is gained, our whole lives are involved with the anguish of choosing good from ill, without being confident just what is the best course of action in any particular situation. What the conditioned dualistic mind sees as good is not necessarily harmless or free from potential to cause suffering.

In conclusion, it remains to draw together the common points in the life of the householder and the life of the Brahmin, which is of course the example of the religious life given as the ideal. We, the householders, are far from achieving that ideal, but the attempt does offer to modern people psychological possibilities for future development.

All manner of experiences and situations constantly enter our lives and then, in due time, pass away if we do not cling to them. At least the situations pass away, but the crucial question is, has the mind let go of their emotional detritus?

The Brahmin observes with detachment, what Krishnamurti calls “choiceless awareness.” Is our awareness as free? “That Brahmin the Buddha” taught the methods of awareness, patience, endurance, detachment and harmlessness. Such are the procedures through which the mind is liberated and purified. Such is the message of this book, small in size but great in wisdom. Many regard it as the teacher in their pocket. The teaching is rounded, open-handed; it is ahiṃsa, harmless, that renowned ethic of Buddhists everywhere, having no secret doctrines, pitfalls or penalties. It is up to the individual how far on its path they travel. It is described as “lovely in the beginning, lovely in the middle and lovely in the ending.” Majjhima Nikāya 27, 179.

By William Grice

Oh yes, indeed there is, just waiting for someone to make the first move in breaking the ice of isolative self-consciousness. It was just a matter of time before one of the innumerable members of the group of us, whose lives have been touched and awakened by Phiroz, signalled that the period of reflection and adjustment to the situation since his death is now over.

When I, the person named William Grice, read the article by Eileen Benson, under the heading of the rhetorical question, I was very happy that the initiative had been taken by someone else. Phiroz Mehta is not merely a “hard act to follow”, but my use of the vernacular is an attempt to clear from my mind the absurdity of such a notion.

During an informal discussion with Phiroz at Dilkusha in 1987, I asked how he thought I might best approach some difficult business meetings. His reply after due deliberation was, “Be yourself.” Had this apparently simplistic advice not come from Phiroz, I would probably have dismissed it politely. After much puzzling, the real import eventually sunk in. To be myself necessitated knowing myself. Quote a different proposition which was far from simple. A quotation from Shakespeare came to mind and put it into perspective:

This above all — to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

This thread runs through Carl Jung’s “individuation”, but is given its true power and meaning by the “becoming process”, which runs through most of Phiroz Mehta’s talks. Jung’s very terminology lays stress on the development of the individual; Phiroz mindfully exposes the isolation of self-consciousness.

It seems to me that “all of us out here” will be drawn together again, perhaps in the form of meetings similar to those at Lillian Road, or possibly for convenience of travel, at other locations. This is what Phiroz foresaw.

Why have meetings at all? Another rhetorical question to end on.

Wherever two or three are gathered together…