Being Truly Human February 2002 Newsletter

From the Editor

The Phiroz Mehta Trust Summer School will take place this year in Berkshire from Monday 26th to Friday 31st May (four nights).

Our venue is set in 40 acres of landscaped gardens complete with rhododendron walk. It has accommodation for 22 people (18 singles and 2 twins). The bedrooms have been recently refurbished and are very comfortable, all with their own private facilities. The cost of accommodation will be £20 per person for the first day and £14 per person for each day thereafter. The cost of food will work out at approximately £6 per person per day. In addition one single payment of £12 will be made to the venue for the use of the kitchen, and this will be shared out between the participants. We will need to purchase and prepare our own food.

You may attend if you wish for only part of the Summer School or on a non-residential basis.

It is hoped that as many people as possible will he able to come — the Phiroz Mehta Trust Summer School is usually a very happy and enjoyable occasion. To make a booking or for further information, please contact the Trust. Do not leave it too late, as space is very limited.

From the Editor

The Trustees are considering the possibility of amending or altering the name of the Trust in order to reflect more nearly the scope of Phiroz’s Work. If you have any comments or suggestions to make, please contact the Trust.

By Phiroz Mehta

…There are those who say, “Show me God and the Devil in flesh and blood and I’ll believe in them.”

Quite easily done. Look at yourself in a mirror. If you have clear-seeing eyes and a sound brain to interpret what you see, you will see both God and the Devil — and remember: Truth is not facetious!

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at Dilkusha, Forest Hill, London on 6^th July 1974

The idea of the word of power, or the phrase of power, is extremely ancient. It goes right back to the original Qabalah and the original Veda, but, as far as I am aware, the first detailed statements about the use of the word of power come in the Upaniṣads. It comes right from the oldest Upaniṣads. The idea of the mantra in the first instance was that it was of the nature of a magic spell which could bring about even material results. It was always associated with religious rituals. There was also its degraded aspect, of which remnants have come through and still survive among people whom we sometimes regard as backward or primitive peoples, the use of the word of power for ill purposes or for purposes which do not do credit to man as a human being. That we need not consider at all.

But in the Upaniṣads we get very distinct teachings as to the use of the mantra, the repetition of a word or a phrase to produce psychical results upon oneself, and also, in the case of a congregation, upon those present who may be participating in some sort of religious ceremony. The repetition of the word is called japa, and we find it mentioned as one of the religious observances which formed part of the training of the Yogi. Yoga in all cases, whatever the name of the Yoga may be, whether it was Hatha Yoga, Laya Yoga, Mantra Yoga, or Raja, Karma or Bhakti, it made no difference, Yoga as such had eight special aspects. The first was that which dealt with the foundation, the indispensable foundation, of purity of the heart, morality in other words, yama it was called. The second, niyama, dealt with religious observances. The full list comes out in the Sāṇdilya Upaniṣad. Other Upaniṣads give shorter lists generally. The Sāṇdilya gives ten yamas, the moral precepts, and ten niyamas, religious observances. Of these religious observances, one is termed japa, the repetition of the holy word, the word or power, or the word which was entrusted to the disciple, specifically for the disciple alone by the guru, the teacher. It was distinctly stated that this mantra, this word, could be spoken aloud or it could be spoken silently in the mind. That which was spoken silently in the mind was regarded as far more efficacious in producing the desired result, the desired result particularly being the calming of the mind, producing that atmosphere, that peace and stability, that poise, which were essential for deep meditation. Through the centuries, particularly for instance in countries like India, people have indulged in this japa. The common people, who are not pupils of any teacher or a yogi or something like that, are quite accustomed to practising japa. They use usually the names of the Holy Ones, like Kṛṣṇa, or the saint-king Rāma. They go on for hours on end or all day long sometimes. Or it may be the name of any great saint or teacher of the past. That is one way. When you come to the deeper aspects of japa, it is done not automatically, not mechanically, but with concentrated attention. In all cases the meaning of the word or the phrase is known. It is only in very recent times, as far as I am aware, that the idea has been spread about that a word may be given by a teacher whose meaning you do not know. For example, people in Europe and America are given Sanskrit words whose meaning they do not know, and it is suggested that the very fact that they do not know the meaning means that the mind will not be distracted and the word will have a profounder effect. Be that as it may, the Upaniṣads have nothing to do with that, and I know that the genuine teachers in India do not have that sort of thing.

How is it that japa can have an effect upon the individual? Here the teaching is given out in full in some of the Upaniṣads, particularly in the one known as the Tārasāra Upaniṣad. It is a short one, and the teacher there is no other than that prince of yogis Yājñavalkya, practically the greatest name amongst the great host of Upaniṣadic Holy Ones and teachers. Bhāraḍvāja his pupil asks him to expound the use of the mantra and what is the finest mantra for enabling him to cross over this mundane existence. The idea of the mundane existence means this existence here in the state of ignorance, in our ambivalent condition with all the conflicts born of that ambivalence and all the dissatisfactions, the miseries and the sorrows of life which we go through. Mundane existence was equated with that. And so how was one to use the mantra, the great spell, which would take us outside this mundane existence or transform it into holy living and the holy state? It is rather interesting that the Prajñāpāramitā of Mahayana Buddhism ends with the statement by the Buddha about the spell, the great spell, which brings complete liberation. And it is just one sound A. In that sound is symbolised the entire teaching and the entire truth.

Now similarly in the entire Vedic tradition, the whole Brahmanical and modern Hindu tradition, the word Auṃ has paramount place. There are many meanings of the word Auṃ which we need not go into now. Let us examine this mantra which Yājñavalkya teaches Bhāraḍvāja. The mantra consists of three words, Auṃ-Nama-Nārāyaṇāya. Nama as an ordinary word in the language is just a salutation. We say namaste when we greet each other in India. Nama is a word which means “homage unto”. Auṃ is just the sound, the single syllable, but it is spelt AUM, the English Aum corresponding exactly to the Sanskrit first two vowels A, U and then the ṃ, the anusvāra, as it is called. Auṃ-Nama (homage unto) Nārāyaṇāya. Nārāyana is the name of the deity, and the concept of deity embodied in that particular name is about the nearest correspondent to the finest Christian God-conception. Nārāyaṇāya is the dative case of Nārāyana. So it means “Auṃ, homage unto Nārāyana” — that is its literal meaning. Now of course with the literal meaning one literally does not get further than our ordinary mundane experience. Why? The whole idea of crossing over the ocean of saṃsāra, crossing over mundane existence and realizing this spiritual condition and state here now, the whole idea is involved with the complete transformation of your consciousness in its innermost depth. If that transformation can be effected, then your entire psycho-physical nature and your entire psycho-mental-spiritual functioning undergo transformation. Therefore there must be something far more than the literal meaning, and this is what Yājñavalkya explains. He puts it in this form. Auṃ is of the nature of Ātma. Nama is of the nature of prakṛṭi. Nārāyaṇāya is of the nature of Parabrahman (that which is beyond Brahman). Conceptually, intellectually, it is a bit absurd to talk of that which is beyond Brahman, for Brahman is already postulated as the Absolute All, the Supreme, the Ultimate. You cannot have anything beyond the Ultimate, a Super-Ultimate. And yet we have got a very interesting example, the most interesting example of Dionysius the Areopagite. You will find him using terms like Super-essential, Super this, Super that, Super the Superlative itself, and it is not nonsensical. You have to study the work in order to understand it. So similarly this term Parabrahman, originates with the Sāṃkhya philosophy really, and is implied in the word Nārāyaṇāya.

What do we mean by Ātma? Of course he who has just studied the books will say, “That is the term for the Ultimate Reality in Hindu philosophy. It is the soul, the innermost soul of man, or the innermost consciousness of man.” Having said “soul” or “consciousness”, you are not a single step forrarder. You do not know what you are talking about. We all use the word “mind”, can anyone tell me what is mind? You try and look into it and see if you know what mind means. It is a convenient sound to express our awareness of the fact that there are processes which go on, because of the activity of our senses and brain and speech faculty, which we call psychical or mental processes. We say, “Therefore those are the activities and processes of our mind.” You can produce your liver, your nose, your bones, your heart, but you cannot put your mind on a silver salver and present it for examination. It is one of those elusive words, as elusive as the word God. So it is no good saying that the Ātma is this, that and the other. The Upaniṣads presented Ātma as the ultimate state of consciousness which you yourself can realize. That again is a pretty vague statement. I will give you a sentence which is the result of my lifetime’s work over this which will perhaps dispel certain misconceptions, but will still in certain aspects remain vague inevitably. When you yourself are completely purified in mind and heart, your mind empty of all its clutter of ideas, conceptions, beliefs, drives, all thought-forms whatsoever, empty of all that, utterly transparent therefore, when you are utterly still and silent, (the mind is silent, no flow of discursive thought), then you are the nexus, the focal point for the free inflow and outflow of Transcendent energy, or let me put it this way, the energy of Transcendence. When you are in that state, that is the meaning of the word Ātma. There is something more concrete there than saying it is absolute consciousness, because neither the word absolute nor the word consciousness is definable. But we all know from our experience the meaning of being pure in mind and heart to some degree or other. We know the meaning of beliefs, ideas, conceptions, and being free of all beliefs, ideas, conceptions, etc. We know the meaning of being still, of being silent. So at least we know something of what condition we ourselves are in, and it is that condition of utter purification, of a transfiguration of your whole being, in which Transcendence, the unknown, the unknowable functions through you unhindered, perfectly freely. That is the real meaning of the word Ātma.

Auṃ is of the nature of Ātma. Nama is of the nature of prakṛṭi. What is prakṛṭi? Prakṛṭi in the Sāṃkhya philosophy is primordial nature. We must not fall into the trap of thinking therefore that prakṛṭi is the origin of the material universe. Prakṛṭi is a word which we can best translate into English as primordial nature, but this primordial nature contains within it all that through the evolutionary process gets manifested not merely as the material universe, but also as life, consciousness. It would be better to regard this primordial nature as that out of which emanates the total becoming process, of the world and of man. (Man of course is part of the world). That is prakṛṭi. And another simple way of looking at prakṛṭi is essential nature. What is somebody’s essential nature? Is he by nature a saint, an organiser, a pioneer, what is he? Essential nature, that is one way of looking at prakṛṭi. But that is not implied here. It is primordial nature in its totality which is implied. Nārāyaṇāya is Parabrahman, that which is beyond the Totality, the Absolute. But let us leave it at that.

The sound Auṃ is one syllable, Nama is two syllables, Nārāyaṇāya is five syllables, making eight syllables in all. It is stated that the Yogi, who can utilize this with power, because he has developed the skill, the knowledge, and he has got the qualifications for it, with the pronouncing of the first syllable Auṃ, produces Brahmā, the Father-God, the Creator. Try and feel this out, do not try to intellectualize it, otherwise you will miss its import, its deep import. The Upaniṣad says that the sound Auṃ produces Brahmā, the Father-God. The Father-God is related to the body, as being the controller and residing at the base of the spine, in terms of Kundalini Yoga. Then the syllable Na, the first syllable of Nama, produces Viṣṇu, the second person of the Trinity, the Nurturer, the Preserver, he who represents mercy, love and so forth. And the location ascribed to him is in the region of the heart, anāhata of the Kundalini Yoga, tiphereth of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The second syllable of Nama, the syllable ma, produces Rudra who is located in the head, the third person of the Trinity. Rudra in the course of the centuries becomes Ṣiva, but the original name is of great importance, Rudra. Rudra means “the one who roars”. He is the roarer. Think of the lion roar of the Buddha, and of Sāriputta. What is the meaning of this? Why should the third person of the Trinity be located up there, given the highest place of honour, so to say, and why should he be the roarer? When a man at last wakes up to the vision of Transcendence, has a real flash of it which leaves a lifelong impression on him, his inner nature sets up a sort of battle cry against all evil. ”Enough of all this,” that inner consciousness says, and he makes the affirmation with the voice of thunder, Rudra, the roarer. But then, with this very element in us which starts as a warrior (the sign of Leo in the Zodiac), the climax comes as Ṣiva, the Benign One, the Auspicious One, the One who is the Lord of ascetics, the one who is in everlasting meditation. That is the climax of that. Auṃ-Nama therefore produces, Yājñavalkya teaches, Brahmā, Viṣṇu and the third person of the Trinity.

Now the five syllables of Nārāyaṇāya. Nā produces Īśvara. (Īśvara is another name for the Deity). Īśvara means “by virtue of self-strength”, his own absolute power from within himself, granted by nobody. Within yourself is the source of power, infinite power, spiritually speaking. So Nā produces Īśvara. Rā produces Virāt. Now Virāt is a difficult word. It refers to a type of consciousness which in the first instance is ascribed to the total universe. The Virāt consciousness is that aspect of the self-consciousness of the universe which gives rise to the self-sense in each of us individuals. That is how it functions in each of us, as a self-sense. ”I am I.” This is related to the Virāt consciousness as such. This is the old teaching; these are the forms in which they spoke about these things. Actually they need to be retranslated in our day and age into modern terms, and they will all bear the correct psychological correspondences. All this is the story of what you yourself are in your being and your total nature, and how that being and nature undergo the transformation which brings you to complete fulfilment, which means that the totality comes to full realization through you. That is what you have to realize, not I who achieve or attain anything whatsoever.

There is nothing whatsoever for me. For me there is only death, complete death, perfect death. Either that death can be the right sort of death, a sunset glory, or it can be just a miserable, grey ending. You have to realize that very clearly. If you do, you are religious, if you do not, you will everlastingly remain irreligious, because you will try to relate everything to self instead of being free from this bondage of the self which starts with the Virāt consciousness, the self-sense, the separated, isolative, limited self-sense.

Ya, the third syllable, stands for Puruṣa. Puruṣa literally means the person. Our idea of the person is of course John Brown, the person whom I see before me, a psycho-physical organism, and John Brown, like Phiroz Mehta or any other ordinary person, is in the ill state, full of difficulties, complexes, ignorance, greeds, violence and all the rest of it. No, it does not mean that person. The greatest of the Upaniṣads, and one of the oldest, gives the real meaning of person. We have gone into this in past meetings, I will just very briefly recapitulate. The word Puruṣa means he in whom all evilmindedness is completely burnt out. That is the meaning of the word Puruṣa. So the syllable Ya produces Puruṣa. Then the fourth syllable Nā produces Bhagavān. Bhagavān is the Lord God in the ordinary way. What aspect of the Lord God? It is not the Lord as power. To give the Qabalistic correspondence, it is El Shaddai, he who nourishes, he who is the giver of good things. The Hebrew root Shad is the origin of the words which imply the mother feeding the babe at her breast. El Shaddai - that is Bhagavān. In India the word Bhagavān essentially has this meaning. He is the giver of good things, he is the bringer of good fortune, he who pours blessings upon you. Please do not therefore start to say, “Bhagavān, Bhagavān, Bhagavān,” as a japa and think that your bank balance will go into ten figures! It won’t! It will probably go into the red unless you do hard work! No, the giver of good fortune. What good fortune? Everything in terms of pleasure, pain, difficulties, success, failure and all the rest of it, which will help you to awaken to Truth, to the Ultimate Reality, which will help you to become the completely emptied one, the purified one, the still and the silent one. And then in you yourself will be the embodied Lord moving amongst mortals. That is the significance of Bhagavān. Śrī Kṛṣṇa was called Bhagavān, and in our own day and age Ramana Maharshi is always refered to as Bhagavān. Of course the people of India are rather prone to confer degrees upon the good people amongst them!

And the last syllable Ya produces Paramātma, that is again Super-Ātma. Well, you cannot have Super-Ātma, Ātma is the Ultimate, Brahman is the Ultimate, strictly, intellectually speaking you cannot have Parabraham or Paramātma, but they have their own feel.

So, where are we? Auṃ-Nama-Nārāyaṇāya — the nature of the totality of the universe, material and spiritual, and it produces the totality of the universe, material and spiritual. Yājñavalkya does not go any further, he tells you that and he leaves it to you, if you have the patience, perseverance and the insight to understand what is the significance of this. And the significance in simple words is just this. Meditation consists essentially of three fundamental aspects. The first is mindfulness, which is a twenty-four hour activity, all day long and every day, you are mindful even in your sleep. The Buddha says that in his Great Discourse in connection with Mindfulness of Body, in just so many words, in sleep you are mindful. Then comes discursive meditation when we deliberately sit down to meditate. We assume a posture, we breathe and this, that and the other, and sort of quieten the body and let the turmoil of the psyche become placid, as far as we can let it get placid, and then we go through what? A verbal ritual, an imaginative process. We conjure up before the mind’s eye, but whatsoever you conjure up before the mind’s eye or the mind’s ear is something which you have originally obtained through the functioning of your senses. So it is confined to the sphere of mortality, it does not touch the sphere of immortality at all. Your whole consciousness is confined within the realm of mortality. But this discursive meditation is what the multitude of us, who are truly interested and try to practise the religious life, can go through. This is as far as we can go. As and when (and this is essentially due to the constant practice of mindfulness and developing insight, seeing the real nature of things) we are able to realize silence, the stillness of the body is easy enough.

But the stillness of the mind, the talking mind, is the crucial thing. It is the crucial portal of death, and when you go through that in your waking state then all this, the entire world of imagination, of all sense impressions, mental concepts and so on, all that is perfectly still, it is quiet. (You do pass through it when you are in dreamless slumber, but that is unconscious and you never know anything about it, and it is of no special use to you, apart from recharging and revitalising the body). When you go through that in your waking state, the whole circus is over, all the traffic has stopped. And now you can hear the stillness of the night speaking of the light of the day. In that state pure meditation begins. Don’t let us fool ourselves when we say, “Oh, I am practising meditation.” Don’t let us fool ourselves that it is the real thing. It is the kindergarten stage. It is inevitable, one has to go through all that, there is no other way. But when that discursive meditation comes to its stillness, then the pure meditation starts. In the pure meditation there are energies of mind in its transcendence at work. And the different modes in which that work finds expression when we come back to ordinary consciousness in our daily life, in our concepts and awareness of things and reality and so forth, these modes are expressed in terms of the Trinity and all the great archetypal concepts. That is why you must look into the meanings of the names of these archetypal concepts, especially as represented in the names of archangels and angels. The meanings of the names are the key to understanding something of the nature of these archetypal energies. Then they become realities. In that state of awareness, in that state of consciousness the mantra has power. And that is the meaning of saying that Auṃ-Nama-Nārāyaṇāya produces this whole world. But it produces it in perfection. It produces it in its aspect of the Immortal, the Transcendent altogether. And that is a power which, because of the fact that the body and mind are purified, transfigures the whole being altogether. The very cells of your brain change and your body. They do become different. You have never witnessed it. Nor have I. I have never witnessed it happening but I have seen three or four people, and that is enough. There is a difference.

So you see, the mantra has meaning and significance in that way. So the senseless repetition of a word or a phrase will certainly produce psychical effects.

It will make you feel nice, it will make you feel happy, it will release a certain amount of psychical and mental power, it will help your aspirations and so forth. (I have done these things myself, remember, in my young days!) But let the circumstance become sufficiently provocative and (remember the game of snakes and ladders!) you don’t come down a peg, you come with a bump right onto the floor again. So just realize what is the place, the real value, of this practice of japa. It is only one of the ten adjuncts of religious observances as put out in the Sāṇdilya Upaniṣad. It is perhaps a ten thousandth part of the real work of the spiritual life. It can help of course.

We do know from our actual experience in everyday life the power of the word. Somebody says, “I love you.” And especially if you are at the right age and in the right condition all kinds of wonderful things happen, which can alter the entire course of your life. Or somebody says, “You are a rotter, you’re a silly little idiot,” and that too can blast your life for many years, especially if you are very sensitive in one’s young days and a parent or schoolteacher does that. It can incapacitate you in certain directions. You know the power of the word then. Henry II said a few words impatiently and Thomas à Becket was murdered.

If we study this question of mantras and translate its practical application into our everyday life, we shall have learnt a most valuable lesson. You remember how the Buddha first expounds the five moralities in the Brahmajāla Sutta. It takes twenty five lines of print in the volume of the Long Discourses of which sixteen are devoted to the precept regarding speech. The Buddha must have known something about the power and the importance of speech. And then when further expositions follow a few pages later, elaborations on the main exposition, you will see that all that he classes as frivolous talk is to be completely avoided by the one who is seriously concerned with living the religious life, and you will find that it would imply being absolutely silent almost all day long. Do you remember the words of Jesus? They are not exactly related to this but they are significant in their own context. ”Swear not at all… But let your communication be yea, yea; nay, nay.” Supposing we were to live by saying, “Yes, no, thank you”, and kept silent. Have you ever experimented with this and found out what a remarkable development of your power of mindfulness takes place? You really begin to attend. You know how at our social gatherings everyone is asking questions and answering and talking at the same time, so everyone hears all the sounds simultaneously and knows nothing at all of what the other fellow said. It is like the stone-deaf lady who went to hear a distinguished professor and said, “I couldn’t hear a word of what you said, I completely disagree with you!” But isn’t that how we carry on?

The word has power. Watch every word, because the word in our ordinary everyday sphere is a mantra. So if we have learnt that much it has been worthwhile considering this question of mantras.

By Sylvia Swain

All the world is in communion… The flower is in communion with the stalk from which it hangs; the falling leaf with the wind which makes it dance; the maiden with her lover and the mother with her babe… But just as there is the communion which is beauty and joy, there is also the communion of terror and pain and death: the lion’s jaw with the antelope’s neck… The executioner’s sword with the soft, full-blooded throat. And the redemptive communion of Socrates with his cup: and Jesus with his cross.

The Heart of Religion, p. 51

Such is communion in the full sense which is the religious sense, fully engaged with all aspects of the human psyche, its joy, its suffering and its redemptive quality, spanning conscious and unconscious and involving us all, believers or not. Each one’s life is involved in communion and all our communications with the world, whether by word, deed or mere presence, contribute to its collective well- or ill-being.

Mankind is daily threatened with the possibility of an Armageddon of its own making. Politics and religion have become confused, there is no single external authority for man to turn to. To paraphrase W. B. Yeats in his poem The Second Coming ‘…Things fall apart, can the centre hold?’

There is no overcoming of our suffering through the simple chopping and changing of our out-worn political or theological laws and customs, it shifts only the blame one to another, but cannot awaken the mind to a greater awareness of its own share of responsibility for the world’s anguish. Only a transformation of consciousness can regenerate the mind of man.

In what may be an archetypal developmental process, the great innovative teachers have arisen at times of need. Having matured beyond the limitations of the traditions of their day, they are able to offer their new and wider visions of the truth in keeping with the needs of their time. Our present-day needs are legion, but if we can tear our attention away from the constant fray which so fascinates, preoccupies and divides our world, there is always the new presentation for our modern age, taking its transcending direction and form of insight into the disoriented psyche of 2002. The next task for the next stage of the religious life.

The very word religion implies a return when we have gone off course; the religious life is not a ‘one way suits all’ direction or directive, not something set in stone in the ancient world, but a way of life live in the moment of mindful communion that will restore us, should we let it, to what we essentially are in heart and essence, a fundamental way of self discovery without which we can never develop beyond that immature I-centredness.

The problems of the world today are a reflection of the psyche of man distracted by deep conflict and with very little self-knowledge. C. G. Jung’s valedictory message was when he urged the need for much greater investigation into the psyche, which he had said was the last great adventure for man whom he saw as being too unconscious for his own good. It is true that until we can penetrate with honesty and humility those deep dark thickets of the unconscious we will continue to live at the mercy of our projected hopes, fears, deities and devils. The world case is getting ever more serious as we contemplate the epidemic proportions of violence alcoholism and drug taking.

It is remarkable that against its backdrop of perennial war, crime and inhumanity, the human race has produced its proudest creations, its arts, philosophies, sciences, technology and its religions. We are now at the peak of our scientific achievements and at the nadir of the destructiveness and terrorism which live in their wake. It is sad to have to refer to the religions as if they were simply products of the mind of man instead of inspirations from the heart of religion itself, but it is man’s predilection for projection, which, necessary in the primitive stages of religious development, has now become a dangerous hindrance and the source of animosity between the religions. It is the prime factor in any kind of warfare and the key to paranoid delusion. With his self/other psychological split man projects his craving and hatred, hopes and fears into his gods and demons, those elements over which he has developed no control, and from this unmindful helplessness in the face of fear and terror man has historically produced his pantheons of the gods and devils, evidence of his attempts to come to terms with the overwhelming archetypal forces which threaten his fragile ego consciousness. Even the greater religious concept of monotheism which was intended to heal could only be interpreted according to the shortcomings of split psychology, which tragically has resulted in many variations of crusades and jihads being called ‘holy’ — overlooking the fact that holy means holistic, that state in which no two opposing sides can exist.

Inevitably, primal man had to begin with looking upwards in projection but as Jung explained:

Great innovations never come from above — they come invariably from below, just as trees never grow from the sky downward but upward from the earth. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same… And it is just the people from the obscurer levels who follow the unconscious drive of the psyche. It is the much derided silent folk of the land who are less infected with academic prejudices than the shining celebrities are wont to be. Looked at from above, they often present a dreary or laughable spectacle yet they are as impressively simple as those Galileans who were once called blessed.

CW vol. 10 par. 177

Religious communion, dispassionate honesty is not really new, only rare, it is we, in the midst of the turmoil of our age who are new to it and so it will not come easily. Of it, Phiroz Mehta wrote:

Initially there will be tribulation, for you may at first not see beauty in the mirror of truth; but persevere living by your light and looking with that dispassionate love which the Buddhists call upekkha, equanimity.”

Holistic Consciousness, p. 143

The practice of it can be understood as the alpha and omega of religious living, from the the cradle to the grave. All are equal to start with as all have to start their lives as helpless infants. A baby cannot speak, it can only cry. It communes wordlessly with its hunger or pain and a primal sound comes out. This is not yet conscious communication but a response to need. It lies in the cot experiencing the overwhelming impact of the senses, they are all it knows, all it has. There are no words, none of the consolations of reason, such as the concept that ‘Mummy will have to be along soon’ to console it. The experience is one of communion, as is the pleasant one when Mummy does come along; both are direct sense experiences, long before words or concepts have conditioned our expectations, long even before expectations. It is relationship with the world at the level of the unknown, before ego development. Later, the baby is taught to speak, to communicate at the level of the known and in this new-found world of knowledge and intellectual communication, the primal state of communion, with the senses, is overlaid.

So, from the moment of birth, we commune with and learn from our environment; these early experiences are the foundation of the mind on the sensation and feeling levels. And so our psychological life unfolds in unquestioned conditioning from generation to generation.

There are, as we have remarked, so many areas of difficulty and restriction, both physical and psychological, of privation, illness, fear and neurosis, that it is inevitable that many parents will be so preoccupied with their own immediate problems that they will be unable to provide fully the ideally secure and loving environment their children need for happy development, and so for many children life begins and continues with little joy, and their communion is with sorrow.

If unreconciled in consciousness, this form of suffering can be passed from generation to generation in an endless chain reaction of the deprivation of understanding. Unmindfulness is the real darkness, and it is with the pain of children of this kind of benighted family that concern is growing all over the world. They start with minds overshadowed by fear and with emotions stunted or overstretched by lack of understanding and good example. How, then, can they be taught to communicate adequately by those who themselves are unable to do so?

Thus, it is inevitable that some limitation is placed on the later development of the ego, on self-confidence, and on the capacity to trust and to form relationships. As a consequence, that energy which would normally flow outwards into the world of daylight and external affairs can be retained and concentrated in the inner sphere in conflict. This may result in an underdeveloped persona, often self-denigrating and unable either to cope with the demands of the world or to elicit much help from it. There is often depression too, which in itself is regarded by many as an indication of inadequacy and often, for this reason alone, no help is sought or offered.

We now confront the problem of justice in the lives of those who have choice and the lives of those who seemingly have none. How can religion reconcile seemingly irreconcilable things, the franchised, the disenfranchised, the light and the dark? We know that the religious message is the message of transformation and healing and so, however difficult the problem, we are unwise to assume that there is no solution. Worldly conundrums are created by dualistic thought but are not solved by it. As Phiroz Mehta once said in a talk on Buddhism, ‘To the worldly question, the Buddha always gave the transcendental answer’, an ‘answer’ which transcends light and dark, pleasure and pain and all other dualities.

If we are to relate that transcendental message to this problem, we need first to accept one universally held religious tenet, that of life’s mysteriously holy origin as a wholeness which preceded the later duality from which choice and conflict emerged.

With this as our basis, we can understand that psychological injury inflicted by the environment need not, as many people fear, inflict irreversible damage since nothing can touch that unitary primal essence, that still centre and origin of our being. By its nature, it is the pure, untouchable, indestructible, sacrosanct core of our being, be we children of the day or children of the shadows. The hope of Man lies not in any superior form of conditioning, but solely in that which is the unconditioned and not in any way subject to a conditioning process.

As we have seen, with a poor start in the conditioned stage of life, health and self-confidence can be inhibited, and those affected are often quite literally children of the ‘night’ in that they experience their most poignant moments lying wakeful in the dark, denied even the blessing of sufficient sleep, which is our unconscious communion with the source of healing, usually taken for granted so blithely by their happier brothers and sisters of the ‘daylight’ life.

Healing so often comes in sleep, but those who suffer and are denied this unconscious healing need to seek in a more conscious way their restoration by the spirit, and thus we discover the positive side of suffering when it can be a strong spur to seek conscious communion with the still inner centre of being.

So seeking healing in the only way open to them, in the inward direction whilst awake, rather than by escapism which is the real darkness of the spirit, they can learn deep communion with the inner world. Conscious communion with psychological and even physical pain through the religious methods of meditation and contemplation are recognition and acceptance of it in a positive way. It is a method of lightening up the darkness with understanding, meaning and compassion for others in like situations, and so those who seem so negative outwardly can be very positive underneath.

On the other hand, the maturity of the daylight person can often be retarded by the fact of their not having dipped deeply enough into the bitter-sweet well of inner experience. Such conscious seeking for the spirit may come only in later life, when the worldly orange has been sucked dry, and for them it may be the deepening and humbling discipline of silent communion when suffering; their own or another’s comes as an awakening and a challenge to be met by some form of sacrifice or service in a world in which they have been accustomed to being served. This is because, taking personal adequacy and capacity for communication in the external world for granted, he or she has not yet had occasion to learn what it is to forge lines of communication inwardly with the mysterious, unconscious, intuitive side of being. This chance may come at their ‘stroke of noon when the sun begins its descent’, as Jung described it.

The ‘shadow’ person has had much such experience, but the lack of open relationship contains their communion in a closed circuit until they are unable to partake in the totality of life. So we begin to realise that, until we experience psychological wholeness, we all remain immature, whatever our category or our age in years, each on a closed circuit, the one type gyrating in the external world and the other in their inner world.

We are now touching on that phenomenon the midlife crisis, which is a spiritual turning point like, for example, the crisis in a physical illness when the high fever begins to abate. The passing of the crisis heralds the turning point from which the healing process takes over. But the open sesame to the human psychological closed circuit is love, that love which by accepting ourselves and others as we are, with understanding but no blame, points the way from what we are to what we can become.

Love in its many forms is a constant need from cradle to deathbed and, if in the course of their lives the gyrating ones of the day or night meet with the teaching and example of those rare teachers who have the wisdom and the compassion to establish with them lines of communication at the deepest level, inspiring them to brave the new dimension of Transcendence, they then find the inspiration and the confidence to face up to that inner or that outer life, whichever they lack, and then they truly begin to grow. They are like seeds in the desert, seemingly static, and then the rains come and the desert blossoms like the rose.

The secret is that the closed circuit breaks and there is no longer any gyrating around the self centre; the will to communicate for the sake of others brings about a change in our orientation and we are weaned from our self preoccupation. It is in this way, by unselfish and loving communication, that miracles of development and healing, big and small, slow and sudden, can and do come about.

Throughout the recorded history of the human race, in myth and legend and in religious parable, the mysterious process of divine redemptive healing has been described in many ways and they are all variations on the archetypal myth of the wounded healer.

We do not need to go into too many complexities, the important point to establish is the fact that the divine healer was initially himself wounded in some way, and carries with him constant knowledge of the wound. The whole mystery of the healing process turns on this fact; it is the wounded one who heals, it is the eternal paradox at work again and again, because it is an archetypal situation.

One is reminded of Chiron who, wounded by a snake bite, developed powers of healing and went on to become the teacher of Asclepius who, in his turn, became a great healer. His symbol was a staff with a single snake entwined about it, representing transcendence and rebirth. Another outstanding example is, of course, Jesus, whose transformative redeeming communion on the cross is a clear archetypal illustration of wounded healing.

In Buddhism, the equivalent example is the Bodhisattva ideal, in which, as most of us have heard, the Bodhisattva or archetypal healing-teacher, often depicted in both male and female form, has arrived at the threshold to Nirvana, but, stopped short by the cries of the suffering world, makes a vow not to enter therein until the last suffering being is liberated. This vow is inevitable because, although enlightenment can be realised only by and through the individual by personal effort, it is no resting place for the individual, who is transformed by the very nature of the awakened state to taking upon him or herself the healing or the teaching role. Such is the religious life to all who open their hearts and minds to compassion.

Today this eternal myth of sacrifice signifies the value of the acceptance and mindfulness of our own suffering stemming from our own conditioning, no longer merely an unjust burden to be carried on one’s back. In the light of awareness, all experience, pleasant or painful, becomes that knowledge which is the raw material of compassion and healing. But without the example of the wounded healer, we would not see this.

Communion with the wound has shown him both sides of the coin and so he discovers the transformation of pain into knowledge and compassion. This is a healing which transcends the dualism of the wound and therefore bestows the power to heal both self and others.

Of course, improved efforts of a political and scientific nature will go on and take us who knows how many millennia to achieve maturity. However, any individual of sincere intent can take up the religious life at any time and by doing so come full circle from the original primal state, through all the suffering of the conditioning processes to holistic consciousness, of which P. D. Mehta wrote:

Holistic consciousness is not “attained” or “achieved” by a holy one. It supervenes when the organism, purified and well prepared to sustain the action of transcendent energies, is in a properly receptive state; that is, when it offers the right conditions for ordinary everyday consciousness to change into holistic consciousness. A bud does not “attain” or “achieve” anything when it flowers. It undergoes a natural transformation out of the bud-state into the flower state. So too holistic consciousness represents the full flowering of a human being. And just as the flowering of a bud happens, so too flowering of the person into fully fledged human-ness happens. To strive to attain, to try to storm the ramparts of heaven, would be quixotic. Simply be good, naturally and happily, and the best will make you its place of rest (Sabbath). In holistic consciousness you are at-oned within Transcendence. And since Transcendence is always blissfully creative — not merely pro-creative — you the fully-fledged human are a blissful creator.

Holistic Consciousness, p. 80

So our quest for justice has brought us full circle to the mystery of that Transcendent from which we will get no dualistic answers but only its own transformative responses. All religious answers end in paradoxical union because the secret of the divine wholeness is in its ambivalence. Our dualistic self-centredness limits us either to jumping from one pole to its opposite, or to trying to compromise with a reality which does not accept compromise. The divine wholeness, which alone can reconcile the duals, can be experienced by the individual only when he or she is willing and able to endure and to contain for a proper period of time the strain of those tearing energies in their personal lives, Phiroz Mehta would say, by ‘practising continence’, both in the inner life of the psyche and in the field of relationship.

Communion, then, is direct experience, where conditioning does not interpret and so divide us, and from this silent blending of essence comes wisdom.

Our lives need to be rounded out and those things we never thought to do can be revelation when we do them and prove to be the key to the ancient city of our wholeness. As we grow in self-knowledge and our conditioning loses its grip, fears and aversions abate and, increasingly, we each become the whole person we were originally born to be and in this we each attain to our true beauty and human dignity.

Being in communion — this is the heart of religion.

Phiroz Mehta, The Heart of Religion, p. 52