Being Truly Human April 1992 Newsletter

From the Editor

A few places are still available at the Summer School, which will take place at Cuddesdon House, near Oxford, from 18th to 22nd June. It looks as though we shall have a very interesting few days. John Moore, the author of a number of books and the publisher of two of Phiroz’s works, will be coming specially to give us a talk, and Cathie Jansen will be visiting us to give a Yoga class and demonstration and to do remedial work. Sylvia Swain will also be giving a talk, and Robert and Jehanne Mehta will be giving a concert. There will be an Ikebana class, as well as opportunities of course to hear tapes of Phiroz’s talks and to watch videos on related subjects.

Cuddesdon House is a friendly and beautifully-appointed centre run by Toc H, a Christian organisation which welcomes students from all religions. It was formerly the Palace of the Bishop of Oxford and has a small chapel adjoining. It is situated in a lovely garden on the outskirts of a village six miles from Oxford. It is quiet and peaceful and is an ideal setting for a Summer School. The cost will be £118 fully inclusive. Will anyone interested please contact the Editor.

An extract from Zarathushtra: The Transcendental Vision by Phiroz Mehta

Continued from part 1

Because of its ambivalence, the psyche injects both good and evil influences into the psychical atmosphere. The psyche also draws upon and is affected by the accumulated store of good and evil psychical energy enveloping the world, like the pure as well as the polluted air which encloses the earth and which we all breathe. Whereas we usually have little choice where the quality of the air we breathe is concerned, we do have considerable freedom of choice where the psychical atmosphere is concerned, for this depends upon what company we keep, upon our cultural and spiritual interests and upon being aware of our own psychological states.

Here we must consider an important teaching of Zarathushtra, namely, his doctrine of the twin mainyu — the twin spirits or twin powers, the one promoting and the other spoiling or destroying well-being and the purpose of existence.

In his very first sermon, Zarathushtra says to the assembled people:

Now to the eager ones I will speak of the Two created by Mazda — this is for the wise.

Ys. 30.1

Here the Two are not specified Zarathushtra continues:

(I shall sing) hymns unto Ahura and the praises of Vohu Manah; (and explain) the sacred lore of Asha also, so that you may attain perfection in realms of light.

In the next verse he exhorts the people:

Give ear to the highest (truths). Let each one, man by man, consider them with an illumined mind, before deciding for himself which of the two paths he decides to tread. Wake up each one of you and spread this (message) before the great ushering of the New Age (of the worship of the One God, Ahura Mazda).

Ys. 30.2

In the third verse he states the nature of the twin spirits. They are co-workers, but they are opposed in thought, word and deed. The “good” twin (as stated in the fourth verse) generates life and promotes spiritual growth, whilst the “bad” twin is the agent of dissolution.

One may wonder why Ahura Mazda should produce a good and also a bad spirit — two opposite energies. Any manifestation, material or biological or cultural, requires the stimulus, challenge and friction caused by contrasting energy; intellectual and aesthetic development, and moral and spiritual advancement is promoted thereby. If a person was deprived of the activity of the inferior, of the less good (the “bad”) and its consequences, he would remain lacking in true discernment. This does not mean that he himself must deliberately do evil. He himself needs to observe evil done around him by those who are immature enough to indulge in it, and thereby learn how to live in accord with asha. Therefore Zarathushtra categorically states: “Thus it is that Creation’s purpose is fulfilled.”

All Perfected Holy ones know that God is inconceivable and indescribable by us at our present level. God creates. This means that the primordial, undifferentiated Creative Energy is stirred out of its vibrant, quiescent state and the Cosmos comes into being — Manifestation in an infinite variety of forms. All Creation is an existence — a standing out of (ex + sistere, to stand) the one Source. Activity, movement, form, shape, change, life and death, always involve the constant interaction of the complementary opposites composing all duality. Without the operation of such duality there could be no existence, no manifestation of God.

Since all manifestation is a dynamic process of constant change, there is the perpetual interaction of what we call good and evil, construction and dissolution, positive and negative, male and female. All existence is of and in God, but God is not confined to existence. God is. Though God is unknown and unknowable, we can see and touch and know a small portion of Manifestation (the reflection of God projected out of God by God’s own magic play, maya), and grow in virtue (asha) and realize God’s and our own, perfect humanity, human godliness.

All existence tends this way, yearning towards its specific perfection — the gem, the flower, the thorn, the tree, the ant, the viper, the Holy One, the angel, the demon, ad infinitum. God that is remains, for us, the Mystery. Does God, seeing God’s divine signature throughout the pulsating immensity — all existence — ever know God? God knows. Or, maybe, God does not care to know. Mystery! Wondrous Mystery! Be reverent by letting the Mystery be. Such is the Way of Purity, and Wisdom and Love, of asha and vohu manah and armaiti. And by treading that Way, Creation’s purpose for man is fulfilled.

That is what Zarathushtra teaches. Man is free to choose his path. The Creative Energy functions in terms of duality, giving rise to gaya on the one hand — life, growth and fulfilment — and to ajyaiti on the other — degeneration, decay and dissolution — which is a transformation process leading to a different kind of existence. Zarathushtra unequivocally extols and upholds Truth and exhorts man to live in accordance with it. He himself is its shining Exemplar. Whoso lives thus realises haurvatat, supreme well-being, and ameretat, immortality.

Continued in part 3, part 4 and part 5

By an anonymous artist

By Alan Thurley

Time is your name for the movement of Consciousness.

Richard Bach

Before 1915 when Albert Einstein published his famous General Theory of Relativity, time was accepted as simply a fact of existence. Mankind has always been aware of the passing of the seasons, and built monuments to record the movements of the Sun and Moon at least five thousand years ago. However it was not until the middle ages that mechanical clocks were made, capable of dividing the day reliably into shorter periods. In the present century this sub-division of the units of time has been extended to an incredible degree of precision and accuracy.

In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein shows there to be an intimate relationship between time and the dimensions of space, such that time itself must be viewed as a dimension.

Hence today we refer to time as the fourth dimension, but understand it only as we have always done. No-one seems to have looked into the properties of time as dimension. The conclusions expressed in this article should therefore be treated as tentative and subject to revision.

How can one visualise four dimensions?

A line (one dimension) can be considered to be made up of an infinite number of points (zero dimension) along its length. A plane is bounded by lines and can be viewed as having an infinite number of lines across its face. Likewise a volume can be viewed as an infinite number of planes (two dimensions) stacked together. Four dimensions therefore, will be equivalent to an infinite series o three dimensional spaces extending in the fourth dimension, and similarly for higher dimensions.

In this instance we are viewing the fourth dimension as the dimension of Time. As we shall see later, this generates limitations which can be resolved by resorting to a fourth dimension of space, thus making Time the fifth dimension in fact.

What then, are the characteristics of Time?

Time bestows Continuity and Duration on the Dimensions of Space, thus permitting the constructs of Space validity. For without durability how can it be said that anything can exist in the dimensions of Space?

Without Time the world could not be; and neither could we!

Let us try to visualise a four dimensional world; that is three dimensions of Space and one of Time.

This can best be done by thinking in terms of the duration of some object, of its ‘life’ so to say. Let us consider an ordinary kitchen knife. It is ‘born’ in two (or more) parts, a blade and a handle being the most evident. So the knife comes into being when the blade and handle are united. Its first experiences are sharpening, honing, and cleaning. It will be packaged in some way, and find itself eventually being bought and used for the first time.

Throughout its ‘life’ it will experience the cutting of many things; meats, vegetables, breads, perhaps even paper or plants. It may be misused as a lever or a screwdriver, or to do injury to some person. It will be washed and sharpened on many occasions, and the blade and handle will become marked and worn. Its shape will change as time progresses. Eventually, when it no longer functions as a ‘knife’, we may consider it to be ‘dead’.

In order to visualise Time as a fourth Dimension, it is first necessary to form a view of the many changes in the shape of the knife throughout its ‘life’. Next we must try to form a view of all these shapes extending in time. Somewhat like viewing a ‘sausage’ with a knife-shaped cross-section which varies along its length according to the physical state of the knife, gradually changing shape as it is blunted and re-sharpened, bent or chipped. Thus the ‘sausage’ represents the life of the knife, and every possible cross-section (slice) represents a moment in its ‘life’.

It is not too difficult to achieve this view, since we are all familiar with a sausage and slices of sausage. It’s just a matter of labelling one end ‘birth’ and the other end ‘death’, and visualising the ‘sausage’ in between as varying with the changes in shape of the knife throughout its ‘life’.

This still is a three-dimensional view however. The more difficult art is in coming to accept each infinitely thin slice of the ‘sausage’ as a solid three-dimensional moment in time. That is, to visualise the changing shape of the three-dimensional knife in the fourth dimension of Time. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t really. We do it unconsciously all the time:

“Do you remember when little Johnny had measles?”

This is taking a three-dimensional slice out of Time. A process very aptly called ‘re-member-ing’; putting back together. So when we look back on life, we re-view ourselves in the fourth dimension. We are just not used to thinking in those terms.

Having discovered that a life can be viewed in this way, it should not be too surprising to find that this ‘sausage’ of three-dimensionality in Time does not disappear when the object it represents ceases to exist in ‘our’ time. It remains unchanged.

This is much the same as driving along a country lane and passing a cottage. When it is passed it leaves our consciousness, but it does not cease to exist.

Similarly, the cottage was there before we came to it; it didn’t suddenly materialise. So also, if we could move at will through Time, we could pass and re-pass the cottage at all stages of its ‘life’.

Another way to look at this, is to liken a life to a page of text. The reading of the page sequentially from top to bottom represents the motion of consciousness throughout the life. When the age has been read, the life’s consciousness is ended; it is the end of that life. But the whole of the page, the life, is still there to be read again, perhaps incompletely this time. Perhaps a word, or the punctuation, is read incorrectly. It is still the same life, but the reading (consciousness) is different.

In reality, of course, things are much more complicated than this because each person inter-relates with other people, and the environment, throughout Time.

To return to the ‘sausage’ analogue, this would now look like a tangled mass of ‘sausages’, and the Time-slice would now intersect many of them. Because there are so many inter-relations throughout life, the true visualisation would probably be equivalent to a three-dimensional Hologram, varying in the dimension of Time.

A consequence of this view of time is that we do truly have Eternal Life; a short section in the holographic four dimensional space-time framework of the Universe. However, we should be very careful as to our ideas of who or what it is that experiences that life.

Now all this may seem difficult to understand and too complicated to cope with. How can we ever be expected to visualise our life as an entity in both Space and Time that remains unchanging in terms of the Universe?

Let us take another analogy. Let us assume that our life is a car travelling round the M25 motorway, and that the Dartford Tunnel is the limbo between lives. Let us join the car as it leaves the Tunnel on the Essex side. As it proceeds it passes various junctions, adjusts speed in relation to other traffic, passes through two short tunnels, changes lane, finds the road become wider for a while, and eventually, after many adventures, approaches the Dartford Tunnel from the Kent side, and enters ‘oblivion’ in the Tunnel itself.

This is equivalent to one lifetime. The experiences of the car are the ups and downs and changes of life. On this occasion there was little traffic, perhaps mid afternoon, with little reason to change lane or alter speed.

Rather like an ordinary uncomplicated life in the country perhaps.

The car leaves the Tunnel again and the journey is repeated. However, this time the traffic is much heavier and the journey seems longer and more difficult. Perhaps there are traffic jams, or an accident. Maybe the weather has changed or it has become dark. Perhaps the engine isn’t running smoothly or the windows keep misting up.

There are so many possibilities for change in this very simple analogy, that it suggests there may be more to our picture of life as a fixed invariant space-time entity.

Can the car leave the M25 for good? What allows the variation evident in the analogy?

One should be very careful about reading too much into analogies, however there is a parallel here with Indian teachings of transcending the “cycle of rebirth”. The choice lies with the driver, who may prefer the M25 as a ‘safe option’; even though he knows it does not lead to his destination!

In the analogy, the car experiences the ‘life’ of each individual circuit of the motorway differently. How is it that there can be a correspondence between the ‘lives’ of the car and the lives of ourselves?

Where is there the possibility for change to occur in our picture of a fixed lifetime in space-time? Surely we could only experience an exact repetition if our consciousness could rejoin our life at the beginning?

Perfectly true of course in a four-dimensional space-time, where life is predetermined rigidly and choicelessly by ‘Fate’.

But not in a space-time of five dimensions.

© 1992 Alan Thurley

By Michael Piggott

He sat by the window
And laughed with the sky
As lovers lay dreaming
And wild geese flew by

The water it rippled
And tossed its white head
It laughed with the living
It laughed with the dead

All around emptiness
Silent and deep
Caressing in waking
Caressing in sleep

See how it stretches
No end to its might
Slow creeper crawler
Majestic in flight

Forceful and gentle
Tearful and stern
All of her features
Changing in turn

Sweetly she whispers
Gently she speaks
All of our hearts
In her heart she keeps

All of our tears
From her eyes have flown
All of our laughter
From her heart has grown

Everything perfect
Everything right
The cat with its spring
The bird in its flight

The master of painters
Musicians and poets
Emperors and Pharaohs
Kings and Stoics

Lord of the night
Lord of the day
Lord of the scriptures
Lord of the way

Burning with beauty
Burning with life
Bringer of goodness
Bringer of strife

Never a murmur
Ne’er a complaint
Bless’d be the wicked
Bless’d be the saint

Ne’er to be followed
Ne’er to be found
In every sight
In every sound

Out of the darkness
Out of the light
Everywhere shining
Everywhere bright

Chief Seattle (an Anglicization of Si'ahl), leader of the Duwamish, Suquamish and other Puget Sound tribes, signed the Port Elliott treaty in 1855, ceding Indian land to the American government, and establishing a reservation for his people

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can we buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pure needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted out by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last Red Man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold it in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children and love it, as God loves us all.

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know: there is only one God. No man, be he Red Man or white Man can be apart. We are brothers after all.