Being Truly Human September 2004 Newsletter

From the Editor

Few of you will know Tim but all of you will have been touched by him. He has worked diligently and creatively in assisting the Trust over a number of years with the production of the Newsletter and in the design and maintenance of the website. If you listen to a CD of one of Phiroz’s talks the chances are it was made by him and if not then the master copy certainly was. He left these shores in the summer for a year in New Zealand, but even all those miles away has still managed to assist us with the web-site. All of the Trustees, and I am sure all of our readers too, will wish him well in his new ventures and hope that he may continue to assist Phiroz’s work in his own very unique way.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at Dilkusha, Forest Hill, London on 27^th November 1976

At our previous group weekend we dealt with something of fundamental importance, something which marks the climax of the religious life or of any and every spiritual discipline which leads man to his supreme fulfilment as a human being. In a sense the last words were said, there is no more to say, there is only the living of what those words tried to suggest. The topic was the nature and also the significance and meaning of true meditation.

I am using the word meditation not in its ordinary dictionary meaning but in its supreme meaning of the state of communion, the state which is represented by the word samādhi in India, which is the fruition of the discipline of Yoga, of any and every type of Yoga, whether it be Hatha Yoga, Rāja Yoga, Jñana Yoga, Laya Yoga or any other Yoga. There are several such Yogas but they all culminate in this samādhi. In the West, especially in the mystical teachings, we have the term unio mystica, the union with God, with the Transcendent , and this union marks the complete fruition of our human nature and being. What is it that is distinctive of this state? Let me recall just some of the essential points we touched upon. We distinguished between the brain, its nature, activities and function, and the mind. Here again we are using the word mind not in its ordinary dictionary sense, where mind is a word which refers to the collection of mental processes, the thoughts and the feelings and so on, the non-material aspect of our lives, not using it in that sense but in the sense of that energy of Transcendence which is a creative energy, which is the creative energy, which brings things into manifestation, which produces a cosmos out of chaos, which is immeasurable, unlimited, not describable, it is non-descript. It is utterly pure, it can never be besmirched, it lives in us and functions through us so long as we do not obstruct it. In theistic systems it is referred to as the Divine Mind, the Mind of God. Generally speaking, in theistic systems the conception in the Mind of God is manifest in terms of the entire cosmos.

Therefore you see that, in the Western world too from the time of the Greeks onwards and in the Hellenistic expression of the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus and so on, this word Mind had its Transcendental meaning, and is not just a collection of thoughts and feelings which we human beings experience, but this creative energy which produces cosmos out of chaos. Chaos itself, remember, fundamentally is not disorder, it is order in a state of quiescence. Cosmos is harmony, is order in a state of movement. The common factor for both of them is vibration, there is nothing static about this. It is dynamic in the sense that it is vibrant, which means that it is alive, and its creative activity is manifest to us and in our experience as life throughout the universe. This Mind resides in us and functions through us insofar as we do not obstruct it. You may call it the Buddha Nature, the Buddha Mind, you may call it the Enlightened Mind, but if you call it the Enlightened Mind, do remember it is not your enlightened mind. There is only this one Mind, just as there is only one Space. The Absolute or Infinity cannot be two or more. Of necessity it is a Unitary Reality, not separate from multitudinous variety. Try to understand these words, letting your own brain be as quiet as possible which is of course extremely difficult. I know that when I am listening to somebody my brain is very active!

This Mind resides in us and utilizes one’s own brain insofar as oneself, the person does not obstruct this Mind, this universal energy, this creative power, from functioning through the individual brain. The fact is that the individual brain is the great obstruction to Mind, because the physical brain, just like the whole physical organism, is a psycho-physical organism which has had a very long history, a few million years. Each of us living now is the resultant of the sum total of forces that have acted upon human beings through these millions of years. The genes have been responsible for the transmission of this tremendous becoming process. So every influence which has played its part upon human beings through the millions of years, undergoing change according to the forces at play, has resulted in, at this moment, you and I and the 4,000 millions who occupy the globe. The brain therefore is a conditioned instrument. It is conditioned by our natural evolution, hence we have all our drives inherent in us. This natural evolution has conditioned every single cell of our bodies. Furthermore our socio-cultural heritage continuously conditions us. This Transcendent energy is something which is unknown to the psycho-physical organism functioning through the brain as the central controlling organ.

These are not easy things to grasp. We may understand the words provided that they sufficiently clearly try to represent this, which is really very deep. So the brain contains all the forces of the past, every one of which, transformed, remember, because they do not remain static in the brain, is active now in the brain as such. They belong to the past, the known. But the known is that which is confined, which is limited. The main way in which this limitation is manifest in the lives of human beings throughout the millions of years is essentially in terms of an I-consciousness which separates us out from the rest of the universe. Note very carefully, self-consciousness, the consciousness of “I” and “I-am-I here” excludes the rest of the universe, because in saying “I-am-I here”, I am putting the rest of the universe outside the “I-am-I here.” It is very easy to read Vedanta philosophy and such things and to say, “The body is not I, this is not I, I am the All.” These are just words, they are just impotent, meaningless sounds made by our egoistic and vain self-identification with the Totality. Children in their innocence play the beautiful game of “I am the King of the Castle.” We have all played that game. This is exactly what we are trying to do in the spiritual sphere when we say, “This is not the real me, I am the All.” I am not the All. I am not the All in this sense, that in my inner consciousness, in my inner mental processes, I am this petty little thing separate from the rest of the universe.

Do you want evidence for that? Watch yourself throughout the day. Watch carefully and you will see, especially where the hidden processes of the mind are concerned. They are all really processes of the brain, of the psyche. Where all these hidden processes are concerned, we are completely self-centred and self-oriented. Because that is the case we are of necessity in some form or other in conflict with the Totality. The Totality does not die, I die, you die, because how can this speck less than the dust survive in a conflict against Totality? Do try and understand these things in depth, understand not just with the brain (the brain understanding also has to come). But try to let that Transcendent Reality embodied in each one of us sense this. If you allow that sense of Transcendence to wake up, you will find that the selfness within us is completely transformed into unselfness.

We have to tackle this conditioned brain. The brain is the hindrance to pure Mind. Pure Mind never compels. That which is Transcendent, which is beyond time and space, a becoming process and particular manifestation, is quite outside the realm of conflict and of sorrow. It is the brain with its limited nature which is the root of the trouble. But the brain is absolutely indispensable. The brain is the main root of what we call the psyche, what we usually call “my mind”, but which I would prefer to call “my psyche.” There is no such thing as my mind. Can you talk of “my space”? Can you label it, fence it round and say, “This is my space in the cosmos”? It is as absurd as the term “My God”, as if I possessed a little bit of God, or the term, if you were a Hindu, “My Atma.” There is no such thing as my Atma. The Transcendent, the Universal is unpossessable, it completely contains, is within, subsumes you, is over and above and transcendent to you. If the brain is on the one hand so limited and an obstruction to the real fruition of man as man, and yet also the root of the psyche (without the brain and in addition the ductless glands and their activity and so forth there would be no psyche), if the brain is all that, then it behoves us to let the brain reflect at its level the nature of this Transcendent Mind, this Christ consciousness, this Buddha nature, this Atma and so forth, to reflect it. Just as a mirror cannot reflect if it is an imperfect mirror or covered over with objects, tiny specks of dust or whatever it is, so as long as the brain is impure it cannot reflect Transcendent Mind, which means letting Transcendent Mind function freely through it.

But what is the meaning of the purification of the brain, what is the purified brain, how does it function? One might be tempted to say at once, “The brain which is completely free of all conditioning is the pure brain.” If the brain could be freed of every bit of conditioning, the organism would not remain alive. The routine of everyday life, the very ordinary, universal processes of bodily existence, eating, drinking, digesting, assimilating, eliminating, moving, using your muscles, etc., etc., all this is something which is the result of training, of conditioning. There are of course the natural processes which are not the result of conditioning. They take place because of our natural evolution. But our activities throughout the day, our relationships with human beings, our behaviour, our ideas, our beliefs and so on are all the result of conditioning. If that conditioning were removed, we could not even cross the street in safety. So you see the brain cannot be entirely deconditioned, and it should not be entirely deconditioned. Some sort of conditioning is always there. Those aspects of the conditioning which deal with the simple things of everyday life are more or less all right and we can alter them according to the result of our experience, further knowledge, science and so on and so on. But the conditioning from which we have to realize freedom is our psychological conditioning which springs up basically from within ourselves. It starts with the “I like” and “I do not like”, the two opposed psychological reactions, psychical reactions to physical pleasure and physical pain. Can we do this, can we become free of this conditioning? This is the great problem.

There is another extremely important point tied up with this, which relates the condition of the brain to the activity of Pure Mind. The brain always functions caught within the prison house of preferential choice, it is never free of preferential choice. When the senses function, you see something, you like it. You prefer this to that. Is it possible to learn the art of seeing without the exercise of preferential choice? If the brain is completely alert, completely awake, and it sees or hears or touches and remains choicelessly aware, fully aware, then you will see and hear and touch and so on in a manner totally different from the ordinary manner. There will be incidental consequences, for instance colour will be marvellous, you never saw such a red before or such a golden yellow before or something like that, and yet it is the same red and same yellow and so on. That is an incidental result. But there is another result. When the brain is choicelessly aware, choicelessly active, then it does not offer any resistance to Pure Mind functioning through that brain. Pure Mind directly utilizes your sense functions. In this utilization there is no conflict, there is no sorrow, that is the ending of all sorrow. There is an extraordinary stability, the stability of that which is not static but is vibrant, fully alive, fully active, wholly unresisting, infinitely resilient unrelated in terms of any binding relationship to anything whatsoever. There is a realization of freedom in the supreme spiritual sense. Now you are seeing and hearing and touching, thinking and feeling, living in terms of being that which you are seeing and hearing and touching, not merely by looking at it, listening to it, reaching out for it to touch it. It is something utterly different. This is the state of union, real unio mystica. Do remember that this Transcendence is the unknown and everlastingly unknowable by the brain in terms of its language, utterly unknowable, it is there, it just is the fact, the absolute fact. When the absolute fact is seen or heard or touched, you are that absolute fact, it is not outside you, it is not inside you. “The outside-inside.” The moment any descriptiveness comes into it, then the ordinary ego out of its vanity and ignorance and folly is playing tricks with you. Beware of the outburst of language particularly when that happens. It is so easy to be carried away by this, and if the organism is naturally gifted with the power of speech, if you are poetic, etc., you can easily burst into wonderful poetry. It has its place, it has its use, to inspire, to encourage, to sustain the energy of him who is tired or is faltering. It has its little place, but do not think that this is it, because if you do, there will be terrible suffering in consequence, things go wrong. We teach children not to play with fire, but a thousand times more seriously we must learn not to play with this creative fire of the Eternal. Otherwise awful consequences come, and they last through the centuries. Study the history of the religions of the world and see what has happened.

Let us come back to this brain. The brain has to be still and silent. If and when it is still and silent it is pure, although every cell of that brain, every single atom of that brain has impressed upon it all the impressions of the past, the conditioning. If you are awake to the fact that this brain, which is interpreting what comes to you through the senses, through memory, etc., if you are aware of the fact that it is interpreting for you, then you can know for certain that it is tying you to the past, to the realm of the dead. The impressions on the brain in themselves are more or less non-descript, but the peculiarity of our psyche and the brain is that it is a great storehouse of what we may call mental constructs, a mental card-index, so to say. We constantly refer to this card-index which is a lifeless thing, it is that much information, static. You see the point? It is no longer undergoing transformation, your mental construct does not undergo transformation, if you just let it remain as that fixed mental construct. This means that all your beliefs, your ideas, your conceptions, your thoughts, your feelings you do not allow to change. The most important aspect in this change is the complete dissolution of the old state, dissolution not in the sense of destruction but in the sense of purification, of transformation. If you have a handful of salt which has got sand or anything mixed up in it, you dissolve it in water, filter and recrystallize pure salt. It is a little bit like that — a little bit like that, all analogies fail really where the deeps are concerned. In order that the brain may be quiet and still, be intensely aware of the fact that it is not quiet and still. Stay with the disturbance, do not try to get rid of it. The disturbance in the brain is there because actually you are like that. Note particularly what happens when you wake up during the night. What thoughts, what feelings rush through the brain? What are you conscious of, what are you talking about silently with the brain? What is the brain chattering about? Do you approve of it and say “Ah, sublime, wonderful thought, now I must hold that thought,” or “Terrible thing, I had no idea I was such a wicked person or so awful or any such thing. Out, devil, out!” No, you cannot out that devil because that devil is me myself. Stay with it and be intensely aware of it, and in that intense awareness, that storm (whether a very pleasant, happy storm, a sublime thought, a wonderful feeling or emotion on the one hand, or something terrible, something awful on the other) will transform. It will not go away, it will not just subside. If it goes away it just goes away into your own insides and grows stronger and stronger and comes out with greater force later on. If you try to fight against it and destroy it, just the same thing will happen. Just be intensely aware of it.

What happens through such intense awareness? This is the crux of the matter. You understand it. To understand means to see the true nature of the thing, you see the true nature of your own self and you see it without hate, without condemnation, without approval, egoism, vanity, without being puffed up. Therefore you see it not only with true wisdom but also with true love. (I suggested this when you wake up in the night because then the body at least has a chance to be quiet). You will find that the whole organism is perfectly quiet and still, naturally, spontaneously. You grow in insight, you grow in love, and this is love and wisdom at a Transcendental level, not what we commonly call love and wisdom. And that is the real meaning of understanding. Remember the words of Solomon, “Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes; and I shall keep it unto the end. Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart.” Can you and I keep the statutes of the Lord unto the very end, not meaning merely end in time, till the end of our lives in our little stumbling, muddling-through way, until the end, meaning until the complete fruition, until you have become the light of Transcendence itself, here and now as you live and in your world?

That is the meaning of the purification of the psyche, the stillness and quietness of the brain. You have not brought it about, it has come about because you have stayed with what the brain brings up in the immediate moment. If you work out the implications of all this, you will have to do a tremendous spring cleaning of all the old ideas about progress, about getting along, about evolving, about reaching the goal of human perfection and all the rest of it. All that will disappear. This is something quite different. We are so accustomed to taking a new broomstick or buying a new vacuum cleaner and getting down to the job of cleaning the house out. Where a material house is concerned, of course you have to sweep out the dirt. Where this living house is concerned, there is nothing you can sweep out, you attend to it and it transforms. The dust and the dirt, the dross in this house turn into pure gold, the ugliness, the distortion are transformed into pure beauty, and it is your beauty, your perfection, your humanity and at the same time it is not yours. It belongs to Transcendence which unobstructed fulfils itself in these terms through you.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at the Convent of the Cenacle, Grayshott, Hampshire on 24^th June 1982

Will you talk briefly about prayer and its relevance to the religious life?

When man begins to be aware of something which is the immensity, something much greater than him, something which fills him with awe and a feeling of reverence in addition, he tends to produce prayers. He recognises that power, or at least he imagines that power which he senses, as the power which gives him life and everything that is necessary for him, controls him, controls the world and the universe, and so on. So we have what we commonly call petitionary prayer, that is asking for something for oneself, something, not in the sense in which a child asks its parent to bring this, that or the other toy, but something which will fulfil his life, will certainly bring about the necessities of existence, take care of him, protect him and so on. That petitionary prayer probably extends later on to intercessionary prayer, prayer for the sake of his family, his friends, his tribe and so on. So to that degree petitionary and intercessionary prayer are related to the religious experience, the religious feeling and the religious life. There is then the other aspect, namely that prayer consists of hymns of praise, hymns of devotion, hymns of recognition, a deep inward recognition of that which is divine. Insofar as the person expresses his devotion, and that praise is an expression of his inward recognition that this power is something very real and so forth, it becomes prayer in a different sense from petitionary prayer. Also prayer is associated with bringing about a state of calm and peace within oneself. If one is in deep inward distress, not merely for material reasons or just superficially emotional reasons, when deep down within oneself there is questioning, there is confusion, there is fear, and so on, then the tendency is to pray for the solution of those problems and difficulties, to protect a loved one or something like that. Again when each person observes and considers the flow of thought and feeling in his daily life, he will see how often that flow of thought and feeling consists of fantasies which are evil running through the brain, fantasies of hate, destruction, revenge, and so on. It is very easy to feel that, even in so-called civilised, advanced people. Under such conditions the situation becomes so intolerable to oneself and hurtful to one’s good opinion of oneself, that one can take recourse to prayers and hymns and so on. They have a calming effect. But of course one must remember that the ultimate solution of such things lies right within oneself. People often say, “My prayers were answered, I do believe in a God which answers prayers.” The psychical atmosphere is filled with the formal religious feelings of one’s society, and that society may be a very large multitude, and the collective psychical atmosphere therefore has a certain amount of energy, like capital in a bank, which one can draw upon, so that prayer can bring about a response from that store of psychical energy in the atmosphere. That is why a good result is obtained when the person prays. Of course the person thinks that God, whatever his particular projection of God may be, has answered his prayer. As far as I am aware (which is not very much!), there is no individual God who answers prayers, he is so busy about his business that he does not bother about the noise of the earth! However the fact that results are obtained strengthens the religious feel, meaning thereby a sense of that which is the immensity, the source, the Transcendence itself, call it God, call it Brahman, call it anything you like. But there is that which is other than what our senses convey to us as sources of power, energy, healing and so on.

Then there is the art of prayer. You will find in The Heart of Religion something written about that, page 263, how to pray in the deep sense. If you do that, you can get some very extraordinary results.

Would you say that the Old Testament can only be understood by knowledge and workings of the Qabalah?

Yes, I definitely do think that the really deep understanding of the Old Testament is helped by knowledge and workings of the Qabalah, because the Qabalah really gives the key to the way in which the Old Testament has been written. Even the Hebrew in which the Old Testament is written is not a wholly adequate translation of the original Qabalistic teachings. As far as we know historically, it was Abraham who, going westwards in obedience to the Divine call which he felt, took the Qabalistic teachings with him. He went westwards towards Canaan. The Qabalistic teachings have been written in the Hebrew language in terms of what is called the letter-number code. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet stands for a number, starting from 1 to 9. Aleph is 1, Bayt is 2, Ghimel is 3 and so on. Each of these letters and numbers is associated with, or rather I should say, represent profound metaphysical concepts which are the result of deep insight obtained through the practice of meditation in the deep sense, in the true sense, by the original founders of this system. The letter-number system is called the Gematria. If you read the Old Testament in the Hebrew characters, you will find that each letter has its particular number, and when you have got all the numbers together, almost in a sentence you get a whole philosophy, an extraordinary teaching,

It is an extraordinarily complex system, but it is not a complicated system. If it were complicated, it could be just a mess. It is a very complex system, complex in the sense that, say, a Bach fugue is a very complex composition. If one understands this and has the key to the significance of the letters and numbers, which stand for these deep metaphysical concepts, then the Old Testament becomes something quite extraordinary. The original Veda of India also had that kind of system attached to it. I have no special grounds for the belief, but I have the feeling that the original Veda and the Qabalah both originated somewhere in the Euphrates-Tigris region. The one went eastwards towards India, the other went westwards towards what is now Palestine. So if one knows these things and can get the genuine key to it all, then the Old Testament is certainly a wonderful source of spiritual wisdom and of course of psychological wisdom, because the Scriptures of the world purport, and they do, to tell you your own psychological purification and development, and they also relate that to the different states of consciousness you will go through in this psychological development. As the psyche becomes purified, the mode of awareness which you have undergoes changes until finally there is the supreme Enlightenment. You see, all words are troublesome. When you say Enlightenment, there is the idea of light, something astonishing, something shining. It is not like that. You become truly conscious in the profoundest sense of the word, that is, as far as human beings can become like that, because, by virtue of our psycho-physical constitution, there are limits to what the human can realize. Christs and Buddhas and Moseses and Zarathushtras and so on will be the ordinary people of humanity, provided we do not destroy ourselves before that happens. But it will be a very, very long time indeed.

What is the difference between mind and consciousness?

Essentially consciousness is mind lighted up. We, as we are, receive impressions through our senses. We also receive impressions by the uprising of memory and so forth within ourselves. Those are the mental phenomena which we experience, but when any of that is truly lighted up and is absolutely clear, consciousness is that lighted up activity. We have clear sightedness, clear hearing, because we may translate our experience, not only in terms of seeing the truth of it, but of hearing the truth of it, depending upon our particular constitution and our particular leaning, our bias, in the right sense of the word, bias not as a prejudice, but that is our bent, as we say. The thing is fully understood, quite clear, no difficulty. Of course in European languages I think consciousness does not convey things very clearly, that word consciousness is so inadequately used. In Sanskrit we really have very clear distinctions between them. We have manas and citta. If one spoke those languages one could have sort of a better feel of the true meaning of the difference between them.

“In the midst of life we are in death.” This Bible quotation is often taken to mean that we know not the day or the hour when our life may suddenly end. Can it be that, by seeing life as a process of growth and development spiritually, we also see that we die daily to the old self, and is this real meaning of the Bible words?

My own inclination would be to take that meaning as presented already, that by seeing life as a process of growth and development spiritually, we also see that we die daily to the old self, because the whole process of manifestation, of procedure, of development, is a process of change. In order that this, which holds good at this instant, is to change, it means that this must die to its present state, its present condition, in order to become the new condition. That is the whole point. So we looking at changes see them as the continuity of life, and we say, “Oh, he is still alive, he is improving, getting on and growing and maturing” and so forth. It involves death from instant to instant. It is death which is the portal which opens in order that this may change into the new life, the new state. Death occurs both with regressive change and with progressive change, until there comes a final end, final, not the absolute sense, but in a relative sense. It is final for that particular species or that particular type of manifestation in the universal process. So that is a final end. I do not know whether the Bible quotation really means that we know not the day or the hour when our life may suddenly end. In actual fact, even if one dies very peacefully and happily in bed or wherever it is, the actual phenomenon of death is a sudden process. One moment a person is alive, he takes in his last breath, as we say, and then the whole thing is ended completely. That is sudden.

Yet in one of the prayers, I think it is a Catholic prayer, it says, “God save us from sudden death.”

There is a very good reason for that. “Preserve us from sudden death in case…” Whenever death is approaching in the normal way, one is fully aware that “I am going.” There is a feeling of resignation, not resignation of the wrong sort but the right sort of resignation. “Right, now, let this happen.” You will notice that, with so many people who have suffered great illness or something like that, when the final death comes, the whole face is transformed and there is a peace that spreads into one. That is essential in order that absolution can take place. One will die absolved. I think that lies at the root of the Catholic teaching. So one does not die without the priest being there, with the Last Sacrament and the Absolution. So man dies in peace, he feels that nothing terrible is going to happen to him after that.

If the Enlightenment of Jesus happened after the Temptation in the wilderness, what then is the deep meaning of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection?

There are two points here on which I am quite ignorant: Did the Enlightenment take place after the Temptation? I don’t know. There are those who say that Enlightenment takes place just like that, suddenly. Yes, the actual final bursting out into light is a sudden thing, but it has been preceded by a long process of development, of growth, until the critical point is reached, and then, that’s it! So people who emphasize that critical point say that Enlightenment is sudden. I myself do not feel at all sympathetic to that idea. It is the power of Transcendence itself which is quietly working all the time, and if I the individual, the ordinary person, am in line with that process and allow it to take place gradually, then after a considerable gradual growth there is this sudden lighting up. I should imagine that with Jesus too this process of Enlightenment started long before. There was the whole development, the purification, the deeper and deeper insight into reality and then that final stage when consciousness burst out fully enlightened, literally lighted up. These things are extremely difficult to describe, but one can get the feel of it if one has experienced something of that sort at least sometime in one’s life. The wilderness of course is very significant indeed. You know how for instance Moses is in Horeb, the waste land. This waste land, I should imagine, sort of typifies the process of the dissolution of all the impedimenta which clog the psyche. That is the waste land, and it is all going away. Then finally when that process has gone far enough, perhaps very far, then suddenly there is the burning bush present and the voice comes out of the burning bush and declares itself to be YHWH-Elohim. (That is in the case of Moses). Moses is enlightened then really, he is in what I have called in The Heart of Religion the I-am state (ehyeh asher ehyeh) , that is what we call in Christian terms the complete unio mystica. “What then is the deep meaning of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection?” I think we had a really fine exposition of the Crucifixion this morning. The Resurrection is the rising up. St. Paul says in the 15th Chapter of I Corinthians, “It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption.” Just after that there is the verse, “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” I have presented it as the Primordial Creative Energy, because the Ultimate Power, or God, or whatever you like to name it, is creative energy. Everyone ascribes creative power first and foremost to the Supreme, to the Absolute, to the Ultimate. This creative energy is the origin of it all and it belongs to a plane which knows no limitation whatsoever. If an analogy might help, consider it this way: All that we know here and experience from the beginning right up to the supreme state for human beings is just one octave of existence. When for instance the Yogi says that he is able to enable Śakti to rise up and become one with Sahasrāra here, Śiva-Śakti are united. All that is the limit of fulfilment and development possible to the human species. That makes one octave. Beyond that are several octaves, we don’t know how many, I certainly don’t! I use the term Primordial Creative Energy meaning the ultimate beginnings. Beginning is a bad word because space, time and matter all come into being with the Big Bang. Until then there is no space and time, there is no container before that, there is only the contained, and that is indescribable because of the absence of a container. Therefore the Big Bang produces the container for this Primordial Energy, the contained, in order to manifest one octave of universal existence. The Resurrection means the rising up of the embodied Transcendence, that is what it means to me, I don’t know whether conventional Catholicism or any other religion would accept that. These are very difficult questions.

Please will you say a few words about Grace?

We all know the ordinary meaning of the word gracious, a gracious person, someone who is generous, giving, without being condescending, just naturally, spontaneously giving, the giver of good things. The giving of good things is Grace. I believe it is in that sense that the religions have talked of the Grace of God. In India, one of the Rg-Vedic Gods is Bhaga. Bhaga is the giver, the giver of good things. The Buddha is called Bhagava, and it is translated as the Fortunate One. He is the giver of good fortune, and the best fortune in Buddhist terms is the receiving through Grace of the dhamma, that is the greatest good fortune.

In your article on Death in The Middle Way you say, “When the five-khandā bundle dies, all the physical atoms composing the body return to the universal stock, all the psychical components likewise return to the aggregates, affecting and influencing the quality and properties of the stock.” Could you please tell us at what stage in manifestation the stock first appears?

To be quite truthful, I don’t know! I haven’t come across any calendar which tells me that! One may imagine that this stock, as far as it concerns human beings, appears when the psycho-physical organism comes into being, but when that came into being, the Lord knows! I don’t suppose he does even, because in these contexts what is time? We are here, we human beings are responsible for the psychical atmosphere that we have generated through the millennia. We are responsible for the changes which we introduce into the psychical atmosphere. The question goes on, “Is it what you call fundamental substance and does this stock become the building bricks of the next pulse or the next manifestation?” No. If by pulse you are referring to the phrase the pulse of creation in its supreme sense, that pulse is always new, it is non-repetitive. People regard the pulse of creation and the production of a new universe somewhat after the fashion of rearranging the furniture in the room, using the old stuff. No, primordial creative activity is totally new all the time. I have to use the word pulse because there is no word in the language which can express this without bringing in the feeling of time. The word pulse also brings in the feeling of time, but time as we know it just does not exists. This pulse of creation is Action in Eternity. The ultimate cosmos is something infinitely beyond the cosmos that we can examine, observe and talk about and so forth, and that ultimate Totality comes into being in Eternity where there is no time. Everything happens immediately, that is the extraordinary part of it. In fact it is reflected in what scientists have said about the Big Bang. From the initial moment of time, which they call the Singularity, (within 1 divided by 1 with 43 noughts after it of a second), suddenly most of the universe has come into being. That is reflected in material terms, but material which is not yet solid or liquid. It is entirely in terms of the sub-atomic particles and nuclei of the various chemical elements. So it is very difficult to say anything about questions of this sort really.

By Michael Lewin

Saint Francis of Assisi, at the close of each day, said to his companion Brother Leo, “Let’s begin again, for until now we have done nothing.” The spiritual life of Saint Francis was grounded in a questioning mind and an attentive heart, and this led him to discover new beginnings (again and again) in his desire to serve. There was never a sense of completeness or finality in his work. By staying fresh and open to unfolding events he brought both clarity and compassion into his life and the lives of others.