Being Truly Human March 2006 Newsletter

From the Editor

This year our Summer School will be held in Sussex, from Friday 30th June to Wednesday 5th July (five nights). The cost will be £30 per person per night inclusive of vegetarian meals. (This year we shall not be doing our own catering and cooking.)

The rooms are not en suite, but all have wash basins, and other facilities are conveniently situated nearby. The venue is a lovely place and should be ideal for our Summer School.

For further information and details on the venue, please contact the Editor.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at Dilkusha, Forest Hill, London on 14^th December 1974

Music is the marriage of heaven and earth. Consider for a few moments the nature of music. It is a movement in sound, different voices moving together, and as these voices move they come to positions of discord and then they move on into positions of concord. The concord is the resolution of the discord. And this is how the movement of sound known as music takes place. But supposing we had all concords we would soon be bored with what we heard. That which we call the discord is an essential part of the music. And if the discords and concords move in the right way the overall effect is harmony. So harmony in the deep sense, the full sense, is not merely a pleasant state, a state of concord, it must also have discords in it, and the two have to play together, so to say, play with each other, sometimes complementarily, in co-operation, at other times apparently in opposition. The discord calls for, evokes, the concord. The concord in due time gives itself up to a situation of discord.

Now it is very helpful for those who are concerned with the living of the religious life to understand this matter very carefully, very deeply. If we do not understand this we shall always be stuck in this conflicting situation of taking sides with one thing against another. We shall either be always troublemakers disrupting things, or always, and often somewhat spineless, bringers of pleasantness according to our little lights. Now that is not the way life goes on. Life has this dualism of discord and concord which, when working together in the right way, become integrated into something Transcendent, and that Transcendent is beyond both concord and discord and is the true meaning of harmony. Harmony is not a mere opposite — it is true that in the language we have the word disharmony — but if we look deeply into our own minds we shall see that our tendency is to think of discord as an enemy of both concord and harmony. But in actual fact harmony is the inter-play of these two elements. Look again at the nature of discord. Life is something which flows along continuously. There come situations externally as well as in our own inner life in which this flow is hindered. It goes back on itself. It concretizes — it hardens and it becomes an obstacle to life in its totality, in its wholeness. And it becomes solid, hard earth. Now, if your composer has true genius he is not concerned merely with producing a concord according to the rules in order to resolve this discord. That discord is taken right into his inner being and it undergoes a process of transmutation, psycho-spiritually in his own being. Psycho-spiritually, remember. And then he produces his harmony out of the movement of both concord and discord. The discord is a challenge and the challenge is met, not in opposition but with that Transcendent power which does away with mere conflict and opposition and produces immortal beauty.

That is why I started off with the statement, “Music is the marriage of heaven and earth”. This thing, immortal beauty, or if you like transcendent love, or goodness, or truth, or virtue, or whatever word you like, in its transcendent sense is not a mere opposite of any one of the duals in which we find ourselves embroiled in our ordinary everyday life. There is something transcendent there, and in great art we have perhaps some of the finest expressions of this kind of realization, which is not merely a triumph of a musician, but it is Transcendence itself — the one total reality coming to fruition through this particular focus point, which is the right focus point because of genius, in the case of a composer. In the case of the religious person, the religious life, because of his utter purity and clear insight, has come to fruition; and therefore there shines forth the Transcendent in varied forms of expression, fundamentally One Total Reality, One Absolute, but its expressions have no end whatsoever. As Śrī Kṛṣṇa said to Arjuna, “There is no end to my glories, O Arjuna. With a fragment of myself I create the Universe, and remain”.

We glimpse something of the nature of the practical aspect of the living of the holy life, the living of the religious life. We all know that we constantly come up against discord in our everyday life, discords which when confined to the purely psycho-physical level of existence become fixations, as the psychologists say. They are tumours in the psyche, they are set ways physically, and if the situation goes very much out of hand, then there are diseases of the body also associated with the psychical ill-health. These are the discords. This obstructive, solidified earth prevents the free flow, the resilient expression of the harmonious movement of life in us as human beings. So our lives are sub-human, instead of being truly human. We meet these, and our task is really like the task of the creative genius. So we see why the living of the religious life really is a difficult thing, to use an under-stating word.

I stress the aspect of the creative genius for this reason. A creative genius is wholly individual. He is unique. The uniqueness in him has come to full fruition. In the early stages, perhaps, in terms of resisting opposition, overcoming difficulties, conquest is still in the realm of duality, and then when that genius has fully flowered there is no more duality. Transcendence works freely through him, and it is only then when he is totally unselfed that he is the creative, the happy creative being. And it is precisely that which we have to do in living the religious life, and it can only come from within ourselves, because with us it is the within-ness in this particular creature called a man which nature, plus God, is trying to bring to fulfilment. The rest of the world, at least as far as I can see, lives in accord with the laws of its being inter-acting with its environment. There is no option possible to a stone or a tree. Option begins to be exercised with the animals, and in us option has reached its peak point. We can choose this way or that. We can choose to be in line, in tune with the great upsurge of life throwing out greater and greater beauty and marvel, or we can remain blind and ignorant, stuck in the mire, the mire of pleasantness, of comfort, of what we fondly, in the sense of foolishly, call security, the mire of success. These are our real enemies where our true fulfilment is concerned. If we are concerned with these things and achieve them, as we say, then we just remain of the earth, earthy. There is no heavenly element playing in our lives, no coming to fruition of Transcendence which is embodied in us. And remember that Transcendence never compels. Transcendence, God, Brahman, the Unborn, the Unmade, use any term you like, functions in eternity, not in time. Functioning in eternity and not in time it does not function in terms of the relative, therefore there is no comparison, no standard involved. Whatsoever emerges out of the true creative action of Transcendence is Absolute in itself. It has no motive, no purpose, it is Absolute and wonderful beyond imagination or conception in itself. And all this is trying to emerge out of us.

I used a bad word, “trying”, it doesn’t try, it just is. I have to wake up to this and cease to obstruct it. I have to cease to be a miserable block, a proper block-head, and wake up, clear away the cobwebs of my ideas and desires and fancies and pursuits and whims and all the stupidity with which I am plagued. And let this, the supremely marvellous thing, the Absolute thing, come to fruition. If I don’t do it I am just part of the flotsam and jetsam on the stream of life. I don’t matter at all. To start with in any case I am but just flotsam and jetsam, but when I see that, “Yes, this is what I am, nothing at all, just nothing at all,” then Transcendence brings about the transformation of me. And the me naturally gives up, just naturally disentangles itself from the miserable “dear me” attitude and conception which plagues humanity throughout its life. Then Heaven has played its part, and then life, as manifested through this very me, through this self which is nothing at all, now by virtue of having become unselfed is the instrument, the perfect instrument of the Divine Orchestra which makes the Divine Music always.

This unselfing must not be regarded as a goal to be pursued. As long as there is a pursuing there is a self, a separate self, pursuing. How shall I pursue Transcendence or God or Truth? It is here, all the time. To pursue, to grasp, to achieve, has no meaning whatsoever, in the context of of the Absolute, of Eternity, of Transcendent Reality — Reality is Transcendent. And remember Reality is not a mere concept. It is not a vapour of an imperfect mind. Reality, if you derive the word from its Latin origin res, is a thing. This is the one thing, the only thing. It is not a thought, it is not a concept, it is not a doctrine or a dogma, it is not a mysterious separate something which I as another separate something can pursue. It is a case really, as far as the real living of the religious life is concerned, of letting be. Let everything be. But let it be not through indifference, not through ignorance, not through fear or any such thing, but because you are wide awake to the fact that it is. Have we ever considered this extraordinary thing that there is no explanation really of why anything at all exists? We don’t know. At least I don’t know. How is it that there is the microphone? Of course you can give me a description of how it is manufactured, and so forth, and the parts which compose it — I can ask the same question. How is anything there at all? It is a mystery — a complete mystery. To the ratiocinative mind searching for an ultimate something which it can grasp, the ultimate something is myself, is yourself, is Totality, is Transcendence, is God, but none of these words mean anything in fact. I can’t grasp God or Transcendence, or myself. Have you ever tried to grasp yourself? Try and see what happens. I might seize hold of my ear or my nose, I might seize hold of some of my thoughts, and then what happens? It all comes to an end. I can’t seize those things.

So you see all the great teachers taught without exception to cease from grasping anything. They taught the end of greed, of envy, of ambition, of jealousy, of anger, to put it in another form — of all self—centredness, of all selfness, because when one wakes up to exactly how one does function, then one ceases to try to draw the world to oneself. This is the fundamental selfness, the selfishness, which functions all the time throughout our conscious and sub-conscious life. When we really see it and are wide awake, then quite naturally we don’t function in the self-ish way. I can’t fight against selfishness as such, that is an intellectually conceived thing — which sets up a battle. The Total Reality does not battle — it just is. Whittle down the Total Reality to my single body. If any one part of my body starts battling with the other part I’d be in a sorry state, wouldn’t I? So Transcendence or Totality or any one particular thing which is complete and whole and wonderful in itself does not battle. It is only I, a man, who has this capacity to look within, look without, and separate the two, who indulges in this foolish thing called battling. And so through the ages this has been embodied in these funny phrases, “fighting for truth, for honour, for justice, for regard”. But that is precisely what the Devil does all the time. And he has glorious victories in his efforts through each and every one of us not altogether human beings. We must laugh at ourselves a little bit over this.

When we see these things, really see them, the intellectual grasping is just the superficial first step. Intellectual grasping will lead to argument inside the mind. Now if we go through that and say, “This is what that monkey, the intellect does, chatters away”, and then let that monkey settle down, and let the mind be quiet, then something else happens — we have to use the word “seeing” because we talk of the psyche in terms which are analogical with the body senses. This seeing takes place. When that seeing is really full and complete and it shines like a light, then that is the complete end of all inward struggles.

Do remember the functioning of the psyche is a curious sort of functioning. Where the body is concerned we have separate organs, the eyes which are indispensable for seeing, the ears, our sense of touch etc., they are all localised, they are all ordered in that way. They function separately on their own in relationship to the rest of the body and especially in so far as they connect up with the brain. Similarly the other organs like the kidneys, the liver, the heart, they are all special organs for special purposes, etc. But now, take the psyche, the mind, when one says that “I” am examining this which is inside me. Let us take this hard rock of hate against such and such a person, or such and such a institution, or whatever it is. Now, can I localise hate in the psyche as I can localise my liver or my teeth or something? Is not the whole psyche in the state of hate, when experiencing hate? You see, if something goes wrong with the body we can say, “Something is wrong with the blood there, or with the skin there.” Can we do that with the psyche? “It’s this bit of the psyche which is hate or hating.” It isn’t. In actual fact there is a phenomenon taking place in the living organism which, through the combination of our ignorance and for the sake of convenience, we denominate as a particular state of mind, a mood, a feeling, a thought or whatever it is. There is a mental process going on. There is a mental phenomenon taking place, and we name it like that and apparently localise it out of the inveterate habit we have of making analogies with our physical experience. It does not apply with the psyche. The whole psyche is in that state. And when I say in the process of self-examination that I am examining the state of hate or the state of overflowing kindness towards so-and-so, who is this “I” who is examining? Again is it not the whole psyche at play? The whole psyche is seeing the whole psyche. This is the peculiarity of our psychical or mortal life. The mind functions as a whole, and whatsoever happens, as we call it, mentally, happens as a whole. There are no separate organs, or compartments, in the mind. It is the entire thing. Such is the nature of the functioning which goes on, which we present as a psychical or a mental phenomenon or process.

Now, what is it in us which is our instrument of salvation, when we see the disharmony? I use the word disharmony. We see the earthiness that is so strong in us — the obstructive earthiness. Earth by itself is good earth — fertile, good stuff. But this hard earthiness, this desert-like stuff, is different, it is an obstruction to the free flow of life. Now what is our instrument of salvation? Is it not our power of attention? If we attend, that attention is directed towards the whole psycho-physical organism, pure attention, without prejudices, preconceptions, set standards, criteria interfering and spoiling the complete purity of the attention. This is very important and this is where we all fall down in religious discipline. And it is very easy to fall down. That attention has to be pure attention, pure attentiveness, and when that pure attentiveness is at play it is like a pure light which makes the entire organism transparent. The psyche is completely transparent then, made transparent with that pure attentiveness. And thereby the whole person now represents the harmony of life functioning in the full meaning and significance of the word human.

We have gone into the meaning of the word human several times, but as some of you are here for the first time just let me repeat the true meaning of this word human. Its Sanskrit root is man and there is the prefix hu. Hu means happy. Hu or su, ( h and s can be interchanged in the language) means that which is well gone, well done, perfect, come to fruition, etc. That is the meaning of that prefix. And man means the creative thought or thinking when we say “I think”. That simply means that I am talking silently, that is all, not talking aloud. Look at our thinking process, it is one long chatter. And notice how extraordinarily inconsequential and petty and foolish and sometimes malicious and devilish it is. And sometimes it aspires to the Supreme and at all times almost it is dreadfully egotistic. Even when it aspires to the Supreme it is not an unselfed aspiration, it is “I am going to be one with God.” This miserable “I”, as if God wants me at all! We have to bear all this in mind. Now the hu-man is the happy creator. But creation does not take place in time-space. Creation takes place in that immeasurable condition, which is beyond all description, there are no words at all. It is the mystery, the unknowable. But this is the description of God if you like. This is how we talk of God, the ever-blissful, God the Creator, or if you like to use a scientific word you can say energy. Creative action, creative energy are synonymous. There is no such thing as creative energy by itself divorced from creative action all the time. It has no meaning. It is not like electricity for instance, which we can store up, night storage for electricity in order to save expense, and then utilize later. It is not that kind of energy. This transcendent energy is perpetual creative action. It goes on endlessly. And a hu-man is the happy creator.

So now when through the power of attentiveness this extraordinary transformation is effected, this inconceivable purity of the psycho-physical being is realized, then that creative activity goes on continuously, which is the harmony of human life. It is music — the marriage of heaven and earth. Now you see why this marriage is needed. The whole of the becoming process is manifestation through space and time. But manifestation is existence. Existence means a standing out of, the derivation of existence, ex sistere. But that which stands out of has stood out of, apparently, the One Total Reality. Where has it stood out of? In my consciousness — not in fact — not in universal fact. It is not a fact of the universe — it is in my consciousness. I am aware in that manner. In other words, I am conscious, I am aware in the manner which is rightly called sin, the state of dis-unity, the type of awareness which has sundered the unity — “God is there, the perfect is there, Nirvana is there, I am here.” And it is all in my consciousness. Buddhism likes to use the term mind rather than any other term. You may use any term you like, but the important thing is to understand, to try to understand what is the fact inside. So you see in my consciousness I have created this separation of self and not-self. But through attentiveness, pure attentiveness, the wholeness is realized. Realized means made real. The purity is there, the transparency is there, the self is no longer an obstructive rock shutting out the light of truth, the fact of reality. And this is a transformation, a complete transmutation, of awareness itself, your mode of awareness of the Totality has undergone this change.

That is why this pure attentiveness is our instrument of salvation. If at any time you have actually experienced the state of pure attentiveness, afterwards the brain will reconstruct that extraordinary experiencing of complete oneness. There was no “I” attending, there was no other object being attended to. This is the absolute harmony. This is perhaps the supreme purpose of our existence on this planet. It is through us as separate individuals, as selves, as earth, that the One Self, the Total Reality, the Infinite will function freely with the complete co-operation and the awakened state of the individual — otherwise the individual man obstructs Transcendence. It is a great game, it is the divine play. And it is a game of love in a peculiar manner. You know how it is when you play a game. One person makes the first move, the other person responds. Where Transcendence and I are concerned, I apparently always make the first move towards Transcendence, but it is the power of Transcendence actually which elicited this move, which I in my ignorance thought was the first move. Transcendence does not compel in any way whatsoever. It just is, and by virtue of its total and absolute isness this move gets elicited out of this earth, because this earth has gone through such stimuli, with pain and suffering and stupidity and sorrow and all the rest of it, that it suddenly makes this move, enquiring “God in Heaven, who the Devil are you?” You see? Right — so I make the first move and Transcendence does not make any move in response because then Transcendence would become an other than myself. Then there would be two and that would only be conflict — this is a game of love. Love means unification. Transcendence just looks on wrapped up in the silent folds of eternity. It just is, and that very isness produces a move which at first I think is the response of Transcendence to my original move. It is like a man, Prince Charming, wooing the beloved in just the way that the beloved wanted him to woo, in order that she may not be compelled to give a nay but give the inevitable yea, because the Prince has elicited that yea in the manner that she wanted it elicited. It sounds very complicated but then love is very complicated. It is like that, but you see some of the implications, in terms which we can easily understand. The infinite understanding, forbearance, patience, the resiliency, resiliency of mind and heart, the utter simplicity, all this is involved, isn’t it? And if all this were not involved you and I as ordinary people living in this world would find it almost impossible to enter that realm of Transcendence.

Now consider the great teachers of the world, all of them, the great spiritual teachers, who are the instruments through whom the bread and wine of life were given, and are being given continuously, to the human race. Is this not love, is it not one meaning at least of Christ’s saying, “This one Commandment I give unto you — love ye one another as I have loved you”? How did Jesus love? Was it merely Jesus, the son of his father and mother, who gave love? Is not the sinless Perfected Holy One no longer a separate self, but one through whom the Totality, the Absolute Transcendence flows freely? When you and I are like that, pure, simple, awakened, then you and I love anything, everything all the time, everywhere in that transcendent manner, “as I have loved you”. That is, through the individual the supreme thing possible for all human beings flows and goes out to everything and everyone around him. Then one realizes the simple fact, “I am nothing”. The Total Reality alone is, and in that realization all that the Total Reality is, is also in this mysterious way, with me, for me, and mine.

Now re-read when you go home St. John chapter 17, that famous prayer of Jesus when he is by himself, and you will see extraordinary meanings in it. Or if you like consider the words of the Buddha, to his disciples, “All that a teacher out of compassion can do for his disciples that I have done for you”. What is it that the Perfected Holy One, the Enlightened One, can do for his disciples? Have we any conception? Better than conception, have we any experience of it, any insight into it? Look into it and you will see that that was the correspondence five centuries earlier of Jesus’ words to his disciples on that fateful night, “Love ye one another as I have loved you”. And in this realization we are not cutting ourselves away from the world, earth. Think of the significance of that sentence, “He came down to earth from Heaven”, and of the Buddha, “He entered the womb of the Lady Mahāmāyā”. The great illusion is the meaning of the name Mahāmāyā. He entered the womb of the great illusion, coming down from his Tushita Heaven. You will see extraordinary things, and realize that we do not cut ourselves away from the world, but are most intimately, most inextricably involved personally with the entire world. But the way to serve the world, to help the world, is to realize our own humanity.

This in its full profound religious meaning, in its transcendent meaning, is realizing the marriage of Heaven and Earth and making the music which is the music of the flowing of Eternal Life.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at the Convent of the Cenacle, Grayshott, Hampshire on 14^th April 1981

Could you please explain the meaning of Baptism by water and Baptism by fire in the Christian scriptures? Why did Jesus’s Baptism by John come before the Temptation and not after?

The Baptism by water refers to an earlier stage of development, namely when the psyche is well on the way to complete purification. The Baptism by fire comes towards the end of the process when, not only is the psyche made empty, but the whole of the mind is emptied as such.

The emptying of the psyche and purification of the psyche, when the conflict of the dualism of good and evil, of virtue and vice, is finished with, is the Baptism by water. The Baptism by fire comes when the person is able to enter into the very deep states of consciousness which have been denominated in the Upaniṣads as the third avasthā. This third avasthā corresponds in our ordinary everyday life to the deep dreamless slumber. When this happens the complete unification of Transcendent love and wisdom functioning through that person lays to rest for ever all the archetypal conceptions and ideas and beliefs which were animating forces for development before that. In the Buddhist presentation it is called the infinity of ākāśa and the infinity of viññāṇa, ākāśarepresenting the Void, or if you like to use the ordinary word “space”, which is pregnant with the plenitude to come. When one enters such deep states of consciousness one is already very sensitive to all the archetypal forms of expression of the One Primordial Creative Energy and the associated grades of consciousness with all that. All that is laid to rest, because all that is part of the whole existential process, and existential manifestation. One goes completely beyond that and these are laid to rest. But it is the fire of the spirit which brings about that laying to rest of all these conceptions and ideas which last through centuries, because those grades of being represent this Primordial Creative Energy in those forms which persist through time. When they are laid to rest, then time and the timeless state give place to Eternity in the real sense. Remember that both time and the timeless are confined within time limits. One enters a timeless state at a certain moment on a certain day and emerges out of that timeless state at another moment on another day, so to say. At the most it can last seven days and nights at a stretch, no more. So the limits of the timeless state are set in time, so timelessness must not be confused with Eternity. Eternity is something quite different, totally inconceivable, wholly non-descript. That is why I cannot say more about Eternity, apart from saying that the Primordial Creative Energy acting in Eternity produces all the grades of being which have been represented in the scriptures as angels, archangels, the demons, the destructive forces, the constructive forces, the suras, the asuras, and all the other names which are applied.

So the Baptism by fire leads to the ultimate realization possible to Man. Remember, ultimate realization possible to Man, because Man as he is constituted can go thus far towards the realization of Transcendence. Transcendence itself is not only the unknown but the unknowable and the unrealizable by Man as he is. Possibly as the human race progresses, if we as a race progress in the right way, a new kind of creature may come into being possessed of more senses than we have. It may possess six or seven or eight senses, I don’t know. That creature would naturally be able to function at profounder levels than anything that we can attain.

I have explained this more in terms of Hindu-Buddhist scriptures than the Christian scriptures as such, because in the Christian scriptures I do not know what has been said with respect to the Baptism by fire. The Baptism by water which takes place physically is only a symbolic Baptism. The actual Baptism is the purification of the psyche which takes place in the individual afterwards. The Waters of Life sweep through the psyche utterly cleansing it, Life in its purity and perfection. Hence it represents the moral development of the person which is the indispensable basis for the development in the higher spheres, so to say. You remember how it is said in the New Testament that Jesus after the Ascension when he shows himself to the disciples says, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” That has a tremendous significance. “All power” means that Transcendence itself functions utterly freely through that mind. There are no archetypal ideas, or concepts even, present any more. There is complete perfection, the Ultimate Peace of the Ultimate Origin. Why did Baptism by John come before the Temptation? Well, that is exactly how it happens. The symbolic Baptism precedes the Baptism by the pure Waters of Life because it is the sort of sign or signal for the individual to undergo that stage. These are all symbolic things. Of course the strange part of the story is that when Jesus goes to John to be baptized, Jesus already is the sinless one, the purified one. But he tells John to do this because it is the proper procedure.

Jesus said, “Resist not evil.” Why then in the Gītā did Śrī Kṛṣṇa urge Arjuna to fight?

I think the wording of the question is in the wrong order. Kṛṣṇa in the Gītā precedes the birth of Jesus. The time, the circumstance, were quite different. The Gītā is understood, or rather misunderstood, I would say, as the urging by the incarnate Lord of the World to the disciple to engage in physical warfare. There may have been a battlefield known as Kurukṣetra, but consider carefully the presentation of the Gītā as such. Here were two mighty armies, embattled forces, fighting. Do you mean to say that they are just going to sit quietly whilst the Lord of the Universe gives profound religious teachings to his disciple? The situation is complely absurd. But the dramatic sense of the author of the Gītā was of just that nature that he chose to present the whole situation in an impossible manner. What is this fight actually? First of all, who is Kṛṣṇa, who is Arjuna actually? The author of the Gītā is himself Kṛṣṇa and himself Arjuna. In the 10th discourse verse 37 he gives out the secret. “Of the sons of Vṛṣṇi I am Kṛṣṇa.” (Vṛṣṇi was the clan to which Kṛṣṇa was supposed to belong. The name of the author of the Gītā was Kṛṣṇa - Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana Veda-Vyāsa). Then he goes on to say, “Of the sons of Pāṇḍu I am Arjuna.” (Pāṇḍu was the father of the five brothers, Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhima, Arjuna and the other two). Then he says, “Of all the great seers in silence I am Vyāsa”, (the great seers who can enter the silence, the deep silence, the silence of the chattering in the head and so forth, which in Buddhist terms would be the second jhāna ). He ends up by saying, “Of poets I am Uśanā.” (Uśanā was one of the poets of the Ṛg-veda who flourished long before the date ascribed to the Mahābhārata). So what does all this mean? It can only mean really just one thing. Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana Veda-Vyāsa, the author of the Gītā, was one who had realized Transcendence. He, in the state of that I AM consciousness, the ehyeh asher ehyeh of Moses, in that state he himself is Kṛṣṇa. He is the Supreme Teacher. In his ordinary state of consciousness functioning through the senses and discursive mind and so forth, he is every man, represented as Arjuna. So Kṛṣṇa the author of the Gītā finds the form of the divine dialogue a most useful and sensible form in which to present the teachings. After all, supposing any one of us is the Perfect Holy One, would we go about saying, “I am God”? We might get locked up, literally, not merely metaphorically! So you see, this form of the divine dialogue was a very convenient form in which to present the teachings realized by the Perfected Holy One who was a man or a woman, like you or I. We must remember this.

In all those cases in the Old Testament where it is said of the prophets that the spirit of the Lord moved them to pronounce this, that or the other, or the angel of the Lord came and inspired them to say this, all these are symbolic ways of saying that you yourself, having realized that state, fulfil the purpose of your existence in that particular circumstance in which you are placed, and are moved to say these things. If we realize that, then all the difficulty associated in modern times with accepting literally the old doctrines and dogmas, all that disappears. One sees it as a very sensible, rational fact. Also it is a fact which emphasizes the nature of our human destiny.

Can one have a healthy mind without a healthy body?

Yes. Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body, the old Latin statement. If the body is healthy it conduces towards a healthy mind, but the concept of healthy mind through the ages is a concept which is a worldly concept. It is not a religious concept, it is not a truly human concept. Remember, the human is the happy creator. What sort of a being is the happy creator? I do not mean creator in the sense in which a great musician or poet or scientist or a philosopher is a creator. I mean something other than all that, something which belongs to the context of Transcendence itself, not to the context of finititude, temporality and mortality. There have been Perfected Holy Ones who necessarily had healthy minds but they suffered physically, quite a lot. One of the outstanding examples of that in our own day has been Ramana Maharshi. That is one example, there have been other examples too. So you can have a healthy mind without a healthy body, but a healthy body is certainly conducive towards a healthy mind. It has its disadvantages too, if you have a very healthy body. You experience it yourself and see. There are certain difficulties which that tremendous vitality introduce. You become self-obtrusive very easily and self-assertive if you are very healthy. You become conceited. I have met such people.

Krishnaji has often said that if we see something in ourselves right down to the roots it is finished with completely. Now it seems that no-one I’ve known and certainly not myself has ever experienced this in any shape or form. This obviously is a very much deeper level of seeing than we know anything about.

Yes, this is the kind of thing I am referring to when I say you become the Truth. You become it in mind and consciousness, not in psyche and consciousness. When the psyche is purified it is an unresisting medium, it is a nexus for the free inflow of Transcendence and the free outflow. There is never a stoppage. That is why that sort of person is a benedication to the world in which he lives, all the time. He is like the sun shedding its light and heat and life and warmth everywhere. When you really see in that sense that is the real knowledge. The true knowledge is that sort of seeing, this sort of consciousness which emerges. What you are really conscious of, naturally and spontaneously expresses itself through all your thought and feeling, your word and your deed.

In his teaching Krishnamurti does not seem to think it at all important to know about other religions and often says that he does not read books on such matters. Could you comment.

Krishnamurti does say that nowadays, perhaps he has forgotten all the books he has read! In the books which were produced in the 1920’s, if you go through them, you will find him distinctly conducting a class for the study of Paul Carus’s Gospel of Buddha, and also for the study of other religious texts. Don’t forget that he was brought up in the milieu of the Theosophical Society, where there were very brilliant pundits around who spoke to him and taught him what there was to teach about the Upaniṣadic and Buddhistic teachings. What happened with Krishnamurti was that, after the death of his brother, he went through a complete transformation. That particular event was so tremendous for him, it was as if the whole world haddied for him. When he came out of that death, so to say, all the conditioning to which he had been subjected was completely rejected and he saw very clearly one of the profoundest teachings which he gives out. The mind of the individual must be completely free of all beliefs, convictions, ideas, imaginations and so on, if that mind is to be touched by the Immeasurable and experience the supreme Truth as such. You see the implication there. The implication is that all our conditioning, every bit of it, every single belief, thought-form, idea, conception, all must be out. The mind must be completely open, completely empty, because then the mind in that state will receive directly the Transcendent Truth, and that Truth is of such a nature that, if this purified mind receives it, it will not degrade that Truth by making thought-forms about it. This is the important thing. So a person of that sort lives completely in tune with Transcendent Reality, all the time. It is said of quite a good few of these teachers in India that they are permanently in samādhi and in touch with the Transcendent and so forth. But if you look sufficiently deeply into it you will see that these are false claims. That is not the case, they are not permanently in samādhi, because they do and say certain things which betray just where they are actually. If you come across somebody who is a self-professed spiritual teacher, or if he touches worldly goods, and worldly wealth and comfort and all the rest of it, or if he also accepts the adulation of the foolish multitude, then you can use your blue pencil very effectively!

Nowadays I suppose Krishnaji does not read any religious books at all. He reads instead detective novels and scientific works. He keeps himself well acquainted with all that happens in the world and with all the progress made in the world in the realms of science and social developments and all that sort of thing.

“He does not think it important to know about other religions.” What happens when we study all the religions? With rare exceptions, we merely collect a heap of doctrines and dogmas from here and there and make a selection. We go through a syncretist activity which is not really helpful, which is not really creative, because we choose that which pleases us. It satisfies our intellectual curiosity and therefore we take it as such, and then make a nice Irish stew of the whole thing and present it as truth, and of course build up wonderful followings. People say, “What a marvellous man he is. He knows this and he knows that, “and all the rest of it. You can just set all that aside. Stand on your own feet absolutely. Listen to anybody and everybody you meet, yes, converse. But converse, that means exchange, not monologue. You will easily spot the monologist, he will always be talking of himself and what he has discovered and what he has achieved. The person who really has seen something of truth, and if the sense of Transcendence is beginning to awake, will never talk of himself. He will be self-less, not just unselfish. Any decent person can be unselfish and go through this conflict between selfishness and unselfishness, but it takes a true human to be self-less.

Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” Could you talk to us on the profound meaning of these words.

“Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” We have to go very deeply into this to understand it. You know how the first verse of Genesis is mistranslated: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The Hebrew is: Bereshyt Barah Elohim et Ha Shamaim Vay et Ha Eretz. The first three words, Bereshyt Barah Elohim are translated as “in the beginning Elohim”, and then Shamain Vay et Ha Eretz as “created heaven and earth.” This is a mistranslation of Bereshyt Barah Elohim. Barah is the past participle and Bereshyt means “out of the unknown origin” in this context. (If you study your Qabalah very carefully you will discover this). This is the proper presentation of the Transcendent Reality, the best possible presentation in terms of words. “Out of the unknown origin there emerged Elohim who separated out heaven and earth.” The word Elohim which is translated as God is compounded of Eleh, which is the Eternal What, and Mi, the Eternal Who. The Primordial Creative Energy, the Eternal What, and Absolute or Pure Consciousness, the Eternal Who, in interaction, in their first activity separate out what is called heaven and earth. Earth means the movement towards concretion, and heaven the movement which produces all those grades of being which are intermediate between the Transcendent itself and its concretest expression, between spirit and matter if you like to use simple words as such. Heaven and earth, then, essentially represent all that, the manifested universe, the physical universe, as such, together with all the grades of manifestation which come in the different stages between the concretest expression and the subtlest expression, which is the Absolute, the Supreme Spirit, if you like to use that phrase.

I said a little while ago that with the Baptism by fire all these grades disappear, the whole lot disappear. “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” What is the word of Jesus? The spoken word, an idea, a thought? Not at all. The word referred to here is a symbolic term, it is the same as the Creative Word, the Creative Vibration. If you study the Hellenistic presentation of the teaching of Hermes Trismegistos, which of course is the Greek expression of the original Egyptian teachings, you will find this phrase coming in, “The thought in the Mind of God,” and God is referred to as All-Father Mind. It is very interesting, it is so akin to the Buddhistic concept of Mind as the Supreme. I think it is Huang-po who identifies pure Mind with the Buddha, with the Absolute. Those three are an identity. So this Mind, as I have often said, is that archetypal aspect of the Creative Energy which releases Cosmos out of Chaos, Chaos being understood as the state of vibrant quiescence. If we take the Trismegistic phrase “the thought in the Mind of God”, and if then God is presented as something Transcendent and therefore belonging to the context of the Infinite, the Eternal and the Immortal, what sort of a Mind does God have? For us the word Mind is immediately associated with the brain and with our gross mental processes of thoughts and feelings. It is just the psyche as such, the psyche in its earliest manifestations. But surely God cannot be thought of as possessing that sort of Mind. The word which is used is “thought” in the Hellenistic presentation. Our thought is just a string of words. When we think, we are talking silently, that is all, that is our thinking, or we are having a series of pictures passed through our consciousness, or of sounds, whether of man-made music or whether of the sounds of Nature, or whatever it be, or of smells or tastes, in other words all the manifestations which are sensuous, belonging to the senses. That is our thinking, and that thinking has no creative power. Any aspect of our thinking along those lines will not bring some-thing out of no-thing, it will not produce a plenitude out of a chaos, out of a void. So you see, the thought in the Mind of God is something quite different.

Consider again the Mind as this creative energy, this creative power. Thought is the particularisation of this creative power which releases an actual form or shape, whatever the grade of being may be, through all the different grades of being. So if in Genesis it is said, “And God minded let there be light, and there was light”, it is a literal fact. There is this creative energy actually at work. You will find this sort of thing through many of the religions. Zarathushtrianism has similar things in the Gāthās. This thought in the mind of God is the symbolic way of talking of the Word.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Notice carefully, “The Word was God.” That means this Promordial Creative Power itself, the Absolute Pure Consciousness itself, that is, the Word. This is the thing which has this creative power, and that of course cannot pass away, because that is the actual context of the Transcendent, the context of the Infinite, the Immortal, and the Eternal. It has no beginning, it has no end, it has nothing like a developmental process in its own rights, in its own sphere. If you study the Zohar you will find what is called the theosophic doctrine of the Zohar, and that is the original theosophy long before the days of Madame Blavatsky! Moses de Leon who produced the Zohar flourished in the 14th century, and it is between 1380 and 1386 that he produced that work. It is a tremendous work, but one has to have some awakened sense of Transcendence oneself in order to be able to interpret what is put in human words in these things. So you see, “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.” And when Jesus said, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth”, after the Ascension, it is simply an affirmation of the complete unity of Jesus, not as the entity Jesus, but as the embodied Transcendence which functioned through Jesus back in its own context of the Infinite, the Eternal and the Immortal. That is how I see it.

So in a way, without making a verbal thing out of it or getting depressed or whatever, one has got to see that one is existing on the periphery of things.

Yes, absolutely.

By Ron Martin

Those who followed, on television, Jonathan Miller’s series about the history of atheism may have had difficulty countering some of the points he made, supported, as they were, by many eminent people throughout the ages. But there is one issue where atheism (as well as the science of psychology) comes up against a buffer — this is to do with consciousness. We know that consciousness exists, because we all have it, but if the sequence of events in the theory of Evolution are true then, at some stage, life and consciousness must have come to something that had previously been inanimate.

This is where the difficulty arises, because there is a fundamental difference between conscious behaviour and reactions by inanimate objects, such as the chemical reaction when one chemical reacts with another to produce a completely different substance. It is not just a matter of complexity either. As mentioned in my book on Zen Meditation, computers are now at the stage where they can beat the best chess players in the world, but they are no more conscious of what they do than is a chemical reaction. It is no good arguing, as Miller does, that Evolution did not start from the top (i.e. a supreme creative intelligence) but from a very low level and then increased by evolutionary means to the situation we have now, because this does not overcome the basic problem as to how consciousness actually began.

This is not to say, as the Creationists do, that the complexity of life came entirely from intelligent design, even though to some extent this is true. For instance, the giraffe does not have a long neck purely by chance; it was developed by evolutionary means over millions of years because the giraffe’s forebears strove to eat leaves high up in trees in order to survive, which clearly gave an advantage, by natural selection, to those with the longer necks to predominate and, eventually, to the extinction of the others. By developing longer necks , but not long enough, the latter could neither eat the leaves higher up nor could they then graze at ground level. It does not amount to ‘intelligent design’ but it does point to consciousness playing an important part in the evolutionary process.

Creative existence is not something given to the world by some benign Creator but by the harsh realities of Evolution, and this has given rise to the crocodile, the bird eating spider, the malarial mosquito, the super bug, cancer and all the other afflictions of the living world, as well as all its benefits.

In effect the arguments of both the theists and atheists cancel each other out. The reason why this is so is because they are both dealing with concepts, which involve the idea that we can think our way to Absolute Reality, and this inevitably comes up against the buffer referred to earlier. The Taoists and, later, the Zen sages, knew of this problem and, however imperfect the translations may be, we can become aware of the solution through reading their thoughts in the published books and then putting into practice Zen meditation.