Being Truly Human June 2008 Newsletter

From the Editor

There are a few places still available for our Summer School in Kent. This will take place from Saturday 5th July to Thursday 10th July.

Our venue has several large meeting rooms, a chapel, a labyrinth and very attractive gardens. The food will be vegetarian.

The minimum cost, which will be considered as a donation, will be £40 to £45 per person per day for full board. Please telephone me on 020 8748 3218 if you would like more information or if you would like to book a place. Bookings should be accompanied by the non-refundable deposit of £30. Cheques should be made out to Rosemary Monk. There is a small fund available to help those who may have problems about meeting the full cost. Please contact me in confidence if you would like to hear more.

The theme for the Summer School will be “Awake Now!”, and we shall hear a number of relevant recorded talks by Phiroz. We shall also have discussions among ourselves, go for walks, meet friends old and new and enjoy quietness and peace.

If you would like any more information about the Summer School please contact the Editor.

By Rosemary Monk

The Trust has formed a link with the Foundation for Developing Compassion and Wisdom. The Foundation, whose Director is Alison Murdoch, has very much the same aims and objects as the Phiroz Mehta Trust, and it reaches out to many people in many parts of the world, including many young people. We believe that we shall be able to work together in the future in a number of ways.

We have also made a link with the Wrekin Forum, founded as the Wrekin Trust by Sir George Trevelyan. The Development Director is Janice Dolley, and in co-operation with the local representative Ann Hellyer we are hoping to hold Wrekin Forum meetings at 47 Lillian Road, in addition to our own group meetings. The Trust is very happy about these new links with organisations with similar aims to our own, and we look forward to many years of fruitful co-operation.

By Tim Surtell

The Trust is pleased to announce that, for the first time, all 857 talks recorded by Phiroz Mehta in the Trust’s archives are available from our website. The talks may be ‘streamed’ on-demand from our website, regardless of your connection speed, or you can download them for playback off-line on your PC or portable media player.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at the World Congress of Faiths, Cambridge on 25^th July 1953. This talk was not recorded

It is only fitting that one like myself who is not a distinguished scholar should pay tribute to the distinguished scholars who have delivered the previous addresses. They have given us the benefit of their study and scholarship, the fruit of their wisdom and realization. I am deeply grateful to them. I am also deeply grateful to all of you for giving me this opportunity to speak here tonight, Without you I am only a cipher. With you, there is the fullness of the boundless sphere. Let us create together, during this coming hour, and realize something of the eternal truth as embodied in India’s religions.

Uniquely characterizing India is the fact that, with the exception of Zarathushtrianism and Judaism, most of the great religions of the world have millions of followers living in the subcontinent. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism and Sikhism are amongst India’s own creations, whilst Judaism and Zarathushtrianism, Christianity and Islam are migrants into, or impacts upon that land. And this India, as if she were a spiritual mother of the world, enfolds them all in her ample embrace. There do these religions snuggle, like members of one great family, even if at times their intercourse with each other is boisterously affectionate. But in truth, they all stem from one parent, and only one parent — the One Single Reality which is called Brahman or Allah, Jah-weh or Ahura-Mazda, God or Father, Rāma or Kṛṣṇa, Viṣṇu or Śiva or Mahādeva or whatever you will. The different religions are the varying expressions of the realizations of the Supreme Reality by the unique Sons of God.

From the outset, let us stand unsullied by all false approaches to Religion, such as: this is superior, that is inferior; this is revelation by the incarnate Lord himself, that is heathenish doctrine; or that this is the final Word of God which displaces or supersedes all other words. Let us also be wholly clean of that lamentable inadequacy which makes some men think of this religion as pessimistic and world and life negating, and that religion as optimistic and world and life affirming. For religion, at its heart, is the way God lives His Life, the way in which the Brahmaputras, the great Sons of God, manifest in their own persons the living truth. Religion is of the Eternal. It is the expression of him who has realized the Immortal, here-now. And as such, Religion can never be approached in terms of the dualistic criteria of our temporal world, never be evaluated by the bemusing judgements which apply and belong to, and are entirely restricted within the circle of mortality. Can a rude mechanic pass judgement on the Ninth Symphony! Away, then, with these befuddling biases of pessimistic and optimistic, world and life negating and affirming. Realize the integration of the duals — an integration and not an ignoring — and you will be consciously centred in the eternal, and you will know, by yourself being it, the changeless perfection which is the essence of all Religion, a changeless perfection which manifests as continuous change, in terms of infinitely varied beauty in our sense-mind world of space and time. Here and now, in our sense-mind world, of course there is the pleasant and painful, the joyous and sorrowful, world and life affirming and negating. But here-now, immortally, there is only the absoluteness of “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”

So we can see that he who is caught in the toils of sense-mind mortality will inevitably flounder about as he churns the ocean of words. He is the mere scholar and critic — to be distinguished from the true scholar — the argumentative man, the man who spins fascinating, spell-binding webs of words, which, wonderful and admiration-compelling as they may be, are nevertheless not the pure and simple truth. The word-spinner colours the truth fantastically.

Let us listen, then, to the wisdom of the Buddha when he says in the disciples:

Bhikkhus, there are those things, profound, difficult to realize, hard to understand, tranquillizing, sweet, not to be grasped by mere mortals, subtle, comprehensible by the wise. These things the Tathāgata hath set forth, having himself realized them by his own superknowing.

Brahmajala Sutta

And a little later he adds:

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

Let us relate to this a teaching from the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad:

A wise Brahman should not meditate upon many words, for that is a weariness of speech.

This weariness of speech is like a strange parti-coloured skin covering the body of Religion. And yet, it would be unwise, indeed untrue, to deny the skin is integral part and parcel of the living body. So let us not discard this skin, but let us look at it with a steady eye. Or to change the metaphor, let us dive into this ocean of words at the right point, and with skilled discernment, bring up the pearl of Truth.

Now the right diving point into this ocean is the word which exhorts men to live the good life. Moral development is the indispensable preliminary. All religions are at one here. All teach that man must abstain from evil in thought, word and deed, do good in thought, word and deed, and cultivate the virtues. Intimately bound up with this is the control of the senses, for, as the Bhagavad Gītā says:

The excited senses of even a wise man, though he be striving, impetuously carry away his mind.

The importance of the control of the senses is pointedly shown by the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad:

The whole of men’s thinking is interwoven with the senses; when that is purified, the Ātman shines forth.

As long as the senses are not under proper control, as long as they are not skilfully used, like perfect tools in the hands of a practised craftsman, so long will a man sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, so long will his mind be a seething sea of confusion.

What, then, shall a man do about it? Here are the words of Jesus:

If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish than that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

Jesus puts the teaching in a somewhat terrifying form! But five and a half centuries before him, the Buddha gave the same teaching in a different form. In his Third Noble Truth, he teaches us that:

The end of Ill is brought about by the utter cessation of craving, by putting away material things, the objects of sense, and, (where necessary) the use of the senses (pluck out thy right eye, etc. of Jesus), and by putting away thoughts, stimuli, feelings, perceptions, intentions, memories, preoccupations and deliberation arising out of the senses and the objects of sense.

Clearly, the discipline is strenuous. But rest assured that this discipline is not a rigid conditioning, but a true freeing of mind and faculty, of heart and spirit. This practice is not a formalized mode of behaviour. It culminates in the realized presence of God, in Brahman realization. This discipline is not a repudiation of this world, not a retreat into other-worldliness, not an escape or a cowardly flight from reality. For note a certain Buddhist teaching:

The eye is not a fetter to material forms, nor are material forms a fetter to the eye; but that excited desire which arises there in consequence of both, that is the fetter.

This discipline rejects, unequivocally rejects, all extremist self-indulgence or self-torturing. For this discipline is not other than the Perfect Way.

Now the Kaṭha Upaniṣad says:

He who has understanding, is mindful and ever pure, reaches the goal, from which he is born no more.

From which he is born no more! The end of rebirth, of saṃsāra, the miserable round of births and deaths! What is this doctrine of rebirth, so hopelessly misconceived everywhere? Recall the Buddhist teaching:

The eye is not a fetter to material forms, nor are material forms a fetter to the eye; but that excited desire which arises there in consequence of both, that is the fetter.

In the moment of uprising of excited desire, because the mind is in a state of confusion, an association is made between the self and the object of desire through the desiring. This self-association or self-identification with the object of desire in the moment of uprising of excited desire, is the meaning of the phrase “I am born”, the meaning of jāti (birth or rebirth) in the Buddha’s explanation of the origin and end of all Ill. This uprising desire runs through its existence cycle, either in fantasy alone, or in thought leading to action also. But, whatsoever is born, inevitably dies. When the desire-action cycle is over, “I am dead”, as it is said. This desire-action cycle is endlessly repeated in one’s lifetime. This is the series of births and deaths which one goes through, the self being associated, through being ignorant, sinful, with ephemeral desire and objects. This is the stream of saṃsāra, the cycle of existences from which release is sought. Now one can begin to understand what the Buddha meant by saying, Existence is Ill, is the suffering state”. For this cycle of existences in which all goes round and round during the lifetime of the individual, is the encircling cage of mortality from which “escape” is sought, from which freedom into immortality is longed for, and immortality here-now whilst we live on this earth, in this world.

The mind in turmoil is thus the domain of the Lord of Death. Whilst the mind is in this state, all discursive thinking is largely a distorter of the truth, a slayer of the Real. But for him who is mindful and ever pure, it is possible to begin to see the light, to have true understanding.

Now, moral purity and a clear intellect are necessary prerequisites but by themselves they are not enough. They do not take one to the supreme fulfilment. They may enable one to see the Promised Land from a distance, as Moses did, but not actually enter it. The Supreme Reality, as in the words of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, is:

That wherefrom words turn back, together with the mind, not having attained.

The Kena Upaniṣad says:

There the eye goes not, speech goes not, nor the mind.

In order words, the Supreme Reality cannot be structured by discursive thought. It is indescribable and un-analyzable.

Speech-thought is limited to the sphere of sense-consciousness, in which there is continuous uprising-processing-deceasing, continuous birth-life-death. Speech-thought is confined to the sphere of mortality. All our mental and spiritual life, even in its profound, exalted, near to God moments, is held within the sphere of mortality, subject to the Lord of Death.

And yet, the Supreme Reality can be fully experienced. Do you ever try to attain the Silence? And trying, how far do you get? Try, try and try again. You will experience feelings, or pictures will pass through your mind, or you will have thoughts or a single thought, words or a single word, or even, just God, as you might say, and yourself adoring God. But all these are caught in that mortal cage which is your own discursive thought, your own speech words, your own mental chatter, however exalted and reverential that chatter might be. But in that holy moment then, fully awake, in complete control of that manifested form which is called yourself, in full self-possession, all mental chatter completely ceases, all discursive thought is utterly stopped by you, then, in that holy moment you have realized, made real, the Silence. Now you are the Awakened One, the Enlightened One, the Anointed One. This is super-consciousness. This is the meaning of “And Enoch walked with God; and Enoch was not, for God took him”; the meaning of Elijah being transported to heaven in a chariot of fire; the meaning of “Be still, and know that I am God”. In the Mystery cults of ancient civilizations, this was the ultimate Mystery, imparted in absolute secrecy, to him who was fit, worthy to receive it. This is the meaning of that sentence in the Ṛg-veda, “We have drunk Soma and become immortal”; the meaning of that statement about the Vedic and Upaniṣadic seers that “Vāmadeva ascended aloft and became immortal”. For in this super-consciousness there is no uprising-processing-deceasing, no birth-death. Well might you triumphantly exclaim, “O Death, where is thy sting, O Grave, where is thy victory?”, for now you have transcended death, won victory over Satan, over Māra, and you experience immortality. This is the eternal world, the world of “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” This is Nirvana, this is the Kingdom of Heaven, here-now. This is union with God, this is Braham realization, this is the meaning of the Upaniṣadic phrase “knowing Brahman”. The stream of consciousness as we ordinarily experience it, the stream of saṃsāra, the round of births and deaths, has ceased to flow, and ordinary consciousness has flowed into super-consciousness. This is Eternal Life, the God-being, the “I am Brahman” of the Upani ṣ ads, which is the supreme fulfilment of man. This, as the Buddha said, is the utter end of Ill, this is the supreme Nirvana. Here, there is no question of whether “I am lost in Brahman” or whether “I retain my individuality in everlasting fellowship with God.” “Lost in Brahman” and “retaining my individuality” do not apply in this super-consciousness, in which “I and my Father in heaven are one” holds true — or in terms of the age-old Hindu teaching, Pratyagātman and Paramātman are eternally one. But if you stoop to attempt to construct a theological or philosophical framework for this, you will be unwise enough to try to trap God in the pit of Satan, for no speech-thought, everlastingly bound within the circle or mortality, can ever contain the immortal. The Eternal is the un-containable. Understand this and you will understand what Yājñavalkya meant in his great discourse on the Imperishable — one of the sublime passages in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad— when he used these words:

IT consumes nothing soever,
No one soever consumes IT.

You see, there is no intercourse between man and God when you attain the Silence. Intercourse uprises and passes away, is born and dies as long as you are not one with the Father. And this lack of oneness is pain. This was the dukkha, the suffering, the Ill which the Buddha talked of, the great Ill which is manifest not only through the incidental ills such as the pain and sorrow of sickness and death and so on, but also as the ephemeral pleasures of spatio-temporal mortality. And this great Ill, this being divorced from Nirvana, is the fundamental meaning of sin, of being in a state of mortal sin, a state in which one is not permanently Brahman-aware, God-conscious.

The achieved Silence is the uttermost, realized meaning of Jesus’ praying to the Father in secret. The secrecy is absolute. In Gethsemane, before the striking of the fateful hour, Jesus enters the Silence of God-union. But some of his disciples, to whom he had taught these things, to whom he had shown the way to attain the ultimate samādhi, were unable to make the grade. They were unable to go beyond certain deep levels of consciousness, and so, as often happens in such cases, they fell asleep. The great yogi of Palestine stood alone in that stark eternity, victor over the Prince of Darkness. Now we can understand why it is said that the great yogis, the Brahman-become as they are called in India, the great Sons of God, never sleep.

With the achieved Silence, the Immortal is gained. Here are the first words of the Buddha in his very first sermon after the Enlightenment:

Hearken, the Immortal has been gained.

This gaining of the Immortal, this super-consciousness, is the profound meaning of resurrection. In this super-consciousness, this resurrection, there is realized the identity of the within-the-self-Infinite and God the Universal Transcendent. He who has realized Nirvana, realized God-union, knows that all the terms of description of God are merely tattered rags.

Let no one say, “This Indian teaching is all self-centred. It is a doctrine of one’s selfish salvation, unconcerned with one’s fellows”. Whoso says that has not even begun to understand.

Here let us repeat two points. The first is that moral perfection is indispensable. The second is that the final God-union is attained by completely stopping all mental chatter, all discursive thought. Without moral perfection, the Silence cannot be fully realized. And then, to bear the power and glory of Brahman-realization (and realization is quite other than learned knowing, than the process of discursive thinking), to be the fit, activated centre for radiating the divine energy, it is absolutely necessary to be the utterly purified one. Hence the discipline of the Perfect Way, as taught by Zarathushtra, Jesus, Kṛṣṇa, the Buddha, as laid down in the Upaniṣads, in Yoga and elsewhere. For if a man is not the utterly purified one, then in the ineluctable evil situation which will confront him, the stress of difficult circumstance will drive him to bestow the kiss of Judas. And the wages of sin, in every sense, is death.

Not unnaturally, some may feel perplexed, even repelled, by this teaching of the Silence. You may feel it is sheer vacuity, absurdity, annihilation or nothingness. No, it is not annihilation, not nothingness. But of course, there is no thing here. This, the eternal, the immortal, is not subject to time-space process, and cannot be invaded by all that belongs to the evil, painful circle of mortality. And so it renders futile all sciences and philosophies where Itself is concerned, although sciences and philosophies are indispensable where our manifestation here is concerned. Now we can understand why the great Brahmapuras — Prajāpati Parameṣṭhin, author of that remarkable Creation Hymn in the Ṛg-veda. Vāmadeva, Enoch, Elijah, Aruni, Yājñavalkya, Jesus, Kṛṣṇa, the Buddha, and others — why these great Sons of God cannot be analysed, examined and assessed by our methods, our tools, our standards and values. Which cock, even if owned by an Asclepios, could crow an eloquent discourse on Socrates?

Some may feel impatient and say, “Do come down to earth and let us have something concrete.” But it is one of the charming facts of our existence that we are fast bound to this delightful green earth, that we are embedded in the bone of the concrete, and it is our very business to rise up and realize that transcendental Reality of which this whole concrete is only a fragment.

I said earlier, that in the Silence there is realized the identity of the within-the-self-Infinite and God the Universal Transcendent. I am using words, hoping they may convey something of that ineffable experience. The attainment of the Silence unites the individual with God. God Immanent and God Transcendent are then a realized identity. What the Silence holds then becomes “known”. The Silence contains the Power, because of which the universe becomes. In words, it is as much true to say that God creates the universe out of no thing as to say that Brahman becomes this-All. Thus has come into being the teaching of the omnipotence of God. Without acting, without moving — as we would use those terms — the Divine Power manifests the universe. Because it is so other than everything that we ordinarily understand by power, God’s omnipotence never interferes with the universal process. There never is any intervention, however often we see manifest that which we interpret as dispensation through grace.

Again, in the Silence, there is attained the true all-knowing, the super-knowing which the Buddha talked of. The super-consciousness is the fount of inspiration leading to the emergence of all mental awakening and knowledge. This is the meaning of omniscience. It is therefore not encyclopædic knowledge in our worldly sense. The Buddhi, the enlightenment of omniscience is far other than the mortality-bound, discursive, speech-thought knowledge of the most learned man.

In the Silence there is realized God as infinite love, as creative whole-making activity, as an integrative principle operative throughout the universe. The Silence is the Peace that passes understanding, the Nirvana which is the ultimate happiness, non-sensational, never coming into birth and never dying, eternal, perfect.

Such, then, is the essence of India’s great religions, of all great religion, and of man’s fulfilment. This central, creative core of Religion is of the world of Eternal God, the Holy of Holies which everlastingly remains unsullied, though embodied in all the passing forms of our ever-changing universe. This creative core of Religion directly touches, awakens and inspires only the individual who has made himself fit — remember the story of the wise and the unwise virgins. Through his awakening, it is changed into forms of expression which affect and are affected by the world at large, the world of human society and human affairs. And it is these forms of expression which are the organized religions of the world, which become concerned with man’s activities in the world.

Each single man’s fulfilment is an individual responsibility. It calls for an individual effort, an effort which is the supreme peacemaking — the peacemaking between body and spirit; hence the teaching of Jesus: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be recognized as the children of God.” No man is a true individual until he has understood and discharged this responsibility. The true individual is the full human, the perfected man, the full-fledged Son of God. He is the Ṛṣi, the Muni. He is the Redeemer, the Saviour, the All-Enlightened One. He is one of the many mansions in my Father’s house.

You who are the children of the New Dawn are the heirs of the universe. You, and all the men, women and children living in the world, are the Chosen People, the Beloved of God, for you are the inheritors of Eternal God.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at the Convent of the Cenacle, Grayshott, Hampshire on 11^th April 1981

The first question here is: “You spoke of Truth taught in ages gone by and in far parts of the world as being different from the Truth of the here-now. Could you enlarge upon this?”

I should like to re-word the question in a slightly different form: “You spoke of the expression in concept and word of the Truth in ages gone by and in far parts of the world as being different from the expression in concept and word of the Truth of the here-now.”

You see, the Truth in the religious context is something which is the individual’s actual experience. This Truth is experienced in the profoundest meditative states, only in those conditions. This experiencing is not of the nature of our ordinary experience here in the world of things and affairs. When we go through an experience here, we know that this is an experience I am going through. When you experience Truth, the Ultimate Reality in the deepest meditative states, you do not know that you are experiencing anything. The point is that you are that thing in mind and consciousness. We use a phrase like the Unity of the Universe. Those are words and the top layer of our brain cells is responsible for saying those words. But whilst we may hold that as a thought, as a belief, it is not something of which we are truly and completely conscious. I spoke of consciousness this morning, but I omitted to explain that consciousness in the profoundest sense is a case of being that of which you are conscious in mind. You are it. You are not conscious of it as a separate object from yourself. In the same way you are not conscious of the conceptualized or the spoken truth as something separate from yourself. “I, the person, am conscious of that Truth.” This aspect of consciousness harks back to the nature of the ultimate origin of things, which is simultaneously the Primordial Creative Energy plus absolutely Pure Consciousness. Try and get the feel of it. They are an identity, they are not separate. This is something very difficult for the brain and the use of our senses to see. It is an identity. Therefore that consciousness is not a discriminative consciousness. You and it are not separate, the unity is absolute.

Do you get the idea anyway? If you get the idea and let it work upon your mind, you will get the sense of it strongly, and you will be able to realize that consciousness in this sense is something which functions naturally and spontaneously. And the expression of that spontaneity and naturalness of consciousness expresses itself without your knowing it in your thought and feeling, your words and your actions. It is an unknown knowing. It is a curious paradox, but there it is. It is an unknowing knowing. Not analysable, it cannot be subjected to analysis, but it is there, and the proof of its being there is that one’s actual life, in thought and feeling, speech and action, will naturally and spontaneously express that consciousness. When we say consciousness, we always mean ordinary discriminative consciousness. The analytic as well as the mechanically synthesizing activity of the brain is at play, and that is what obstructs that transcendent consciousness in its true nature, in its ultimate nature. See what was said in the Upanis¸ads about this, it is very, very instructive. The question of how did these Teachers realize the unconditioned Transcendent and then affirm it may be considered. The Aḍhyaṭma Upaniṣad says:

That is called samadhi in which the attention, rising above (that is, becoming free of) the separative conception of the contemplator and the contemplated, merges gradually into the state of the contemplation.

The attention just becomes completely merged in it. This has been characterized by the word prajñenatman.

... merges gradually into the contemplated, like a light undisturbed by the wind. Even the mental states are not known at the time when one is in the embrace of the Atma.

You are the Atma then. It is not something which you seek or aspire to, it is not separate from you, you are it, in mind and consciousness.

The mental states are only inferred from the recollection which takes place after samadhi.

So, you see that any attempts at suggesting in concept and word what samadhi is like, the realized Ultimate Truth or Ultimate Reality, comes only by inference after the experiencing. After having entered the state of samadhi, after having plunged into Nirvana, so to say, then that actual experiencing leaves an impress upon the psycho-physical organism. If your intellectual nature and your intellectual development are of the right sort, then gradually concepts will arise which are like vague pictures, almost smudgy pictures of what actual samadhi is. Then you can convey those concepts and words to other people, and for your own brain perception you can use those. They will be not the Truth, obviously, they will be representations, re-presentations of that Ultimate Reality, the Truth, which is a living experience, it is a living experiencing. Through this samadhi, pure dharma is developed. That is very significant. It is because the Perfected Holy Ones are able to enter this state of samadhi that their religious teachings, the pure dharma, as it is called, emerges. Recollect the first words of the Buddha, “Hearken, bhikkhus, the Deathless has been found.” What a statement to make! It is absolutely tremendous. “The Deathless has been found.” By whom? By this man, Siddhattha Gotama. Supposing John Brown came along and said, “My friends, I have found God.” If you are very kind, you will be silent and say, “Oh, yes,” and that is about all. A statement of such tremendous importance is very difficult to fathom. So, pure dharma is developed. “Knowers of Yoga call this samadhi, dharma megha.” Note the term “dharma megha”. “Megha” means “cloud”, so “dharma megha” is “truth-cloud”. How wisely they used the right term, “truth-cloud”, not something which has absolutely clearly defined, rigid outlines. It is like a cloud, truth-cloud, or,to use the phrase used in Christian mysticism, the Cloud of Unknowing, that is what that is. “That in which speech was hidden till now appears no longer so and shines as Truth.” That means that the Teacher who can give out the Teaching concerning the realization of such Truth gives it out in words which shine as Truth. Although it is cloudy it is also shining, the cloud shines — mystery.

Bearing that in mind, let us consider the situation here. “You spoke of Truth taught in ages gone by.” Throughout the ages there is a development taking place in terms of the understanding of the nature of things and of the phenomenal world. This understanding is born of the use of our senses and the logical activity of the brain as such. According to the extent, the degree, to which we have discovered the nature of things in these terms, the brain will produce concepts and then words (concepts of course are clothed in words) which are dependent upon this discovery, in other words, the science and mathematics and so on of past ages determine the form in which the Ultimate Truth finds expression. You know how the conception of God has undergone extraordinary changes from far distant areas. First we had this idea of spirits everywhere, the spirit of a tree, the spirit of a river and so on, and the spirit was conceived anthropomorphically. Then, during the sixth and fifth centuries BC, atomic theories came into existence, in Greece with Democritus and Leucippus, in India with Kanada and others who founded the Nyaya philosophy and the Vaiseṣika philosophy. They talked in terms of atoms, and they defined the atom as invisible, because it was infinitely small, indivisible, it could not be divided any more, and indestructible.

The God conceptions which were presented from that time onwards bore the stamp of this belief. God similarly was invisible, indivisible and indestructible. So you will find that the expression of deep realizations is dependent upon the extent to which we are well acquainted with the knowledge of the nature of things. Concepts and words depend upon that. Since the knowledge of the nature of things undergoes change (and even at the same time in history different parts of the world have different ideas of the nature of things), people express their inner and profound realizations according to the concepts and words which are prevalent, in accordance with what we commonly call the climate of thought. So you see we are restricted by all that. The Truth of course is The Truth, whatever it is. But expressions of the Truth differ, so that it is not the Truth of the past which is different from the Truth of the here-now. The Truth of the here-now is the same Truth. Truth belongs in this religious context to Eternity and it is not subject to time and its changes. But the expressions of that and the way we communicate that change with our knowledge of the nature of things. I hope that gives some lines to utilize.

This is the next question: “You have told us many times that the birth of Christ represented the birth of the sense of Transcendence. Please could you explain a little more what this sense of Transcendence is, with particular reference to the symbolism in the Christmas story, and also the stages on the path that we all tread, again with reference to Jesus’s own journey, which culminate in this birth.”

Again a very, very difficult question to answer satisfactorily. But the first part we can deal with fairly well. “You have told us many times that the birth of Christ represents the birth of the sense of Transcendence.” The birth of Christ refers to the emergence of what in Christian terminology we may call the Christ-consciousness. The word Christ means the Anointed One, and the King was the One. When an individual has flowered out spiritually to a certain degree, he becomes a King spiritually amongst other individuals. He is the Anointed One now. Remember that consciousness in this context is not discriminative consciousness, it is an awakening from within oneself to the actuality of Transcendence as such, Transcendence which is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, all-knowing, all-knowing, not in the encyclopaedic sense, but in the all-knowing sense that, to whatsoever matter that person directs his attention, his buddhi, his nous, function with unerring accuracy. That is the omniscience. None of the great Teachers of the past are likely to do very successfully in an A-level examination! It is not that kind of omniscience; it is a totally different kind of phenomenon. That person being utterly purified, there are no mental fixations blocking the psyche so that the light of Transcendence cannot come through, or, to put it in other terms, nothing to prevent pure Mind, this archetypal energy, which releases cosmos out of chaos, from flowing into that person’s psycho-physical being, and his brain interpreting it with reasonable accuracy. So this is the emergence of the sense of Transcendence. The sense of Transcendence means, I think that we can put it this way, that you become really positively aware of Transcendence as the fact of existence. There is Transcendence embodied throughout existence. Existence is that aspect of part of Transcendence which is the perishable part, it undergoes change, it is impermanent, and in fact it belongs to the realm of mortality over which Death is lord. But when the sense of Transcendence awakens, there is in oneself that sort of vibration, if you like, or thrill, which realizes that the fact, the unchanging fact, the Eternal Truth, so to say, is Immortality not mortality. We are conscious of mortality simply because we have a discriminative consciousness, and in discriminative consciousness there can come a sharp break when the form changes in such a manner that it is no longer recognisable, re-cognisable, as the original form. And that is why Death troubles us so much. We have lost what we knew.

The awakening of the sense of Transcendence is of the utmost importance as far as the living of the religious life is concerned. When the sense of Transcendence awakens, it becomes easy to live the pure life, because that sense tells you unerringly what is the proper next thing to do. In other words, it enables the moral imperative in oneself to find the right expression in the particular situation, whatever it is. This moral imperative in us is inherent in us and in every single thing throughout the universe. It is the expression in various different forms of that principle of ṛtaas the Ṛg-veda put it, the Divine Law, as asha, as Zarathushtrian teaching put it, which animates and moves everything towards its fruition. We human beings, having the power of choice, can go against it. When we pluck the fruit of the Tree of Life, because we are unprepared for it, psycho-physically, this pure consciousness is spoilt, and the Tree of Life is scarred, and the scarring of the Tree of Life is the Tree of Good and Evil, because the consciousness which is released in us is not absolute consciousness, but it is discriminative consciousness. The moment you get discriminative consciousness you will exercise preferential choice, and that preferential choice always falls into the trap of “I like this, I want it, I don’t like this, I will not have it.” Who am I to say to the universe, “I will have you, I will not have you”? I have no power really to fulfil that. I do not know that I am powerless and so I strive against the reality, against Truth, against the world as such, against my neighbour, and so forth. So when this sense of Transcendence awakes, this principle of ṛtathe essential rightness of things, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” (wasn’t it Browning who said that?), then one does awaken to the truth of that, that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world. But that rightness and that heaven is misdefined and misconceived by us. That is why we poor mortals pay such a dreadful price.

“Explain this sense of Transcendence with particular reference to the symbolism in the Christmas story.” The Christmas story is the symbolical representation of what happens to you yourself. Do remember that the scriptures of the world essentially teach you psychology, which means that they teach you what you actually are in the imperfect state and also what you can be in the perfect state. Recall that statement about the Buddha, that after the Enlightenment he stared at the roots of the tree under which he sat for seven days and nights. Now, even if he had botanical interests, do you think that he would just stand there staring at the roots of a tree, no experiments, no laboratory, no investigations? What did he stare at? Here is the root of the tree. The Asvattha tree which has, as put in the Gita, roots above and branches below, when completely purified (that is to say, the psyche is utterly pure), means that pure Mind now begins to function. And pure Mind is something which nobody knows about. How does it function? What is it like? This is what he looked into, and he did not look into it with a logical brain. He looked into it by being it, and by being it he became fully aware of it, and in that fullness of awareness he gave out his teaching and realized the meaning and significance of Deathlessness. If you were to make yourself well acquainted with the Buddhist teaching, the Resurrection and Ascension will find their proper meaning. So you see, scripture teaches you the psychology of the sick psyche as well as the psychology of the utterly purified psyche, the pure mind, the Divine Mind, if you like. Do remember that the Buddha himself used the phrase viññaṇaṃ¸ (discriminative consciousness) anidassanaṃ¸ (without characteristics) anantaṃ¸ (endless, which implies therefore also beginningless) sabbatopabhaṃ¸ (everywhere shining or everywhere accessible). You see the implications of that. Everywhere shining, everywhere accessible, meaning that the entire universe is full of this Truth, this Reality, and wheresoever one turns one can be in touch with Truth, with Reality. This is the deep, supreme meaning of Yoga and its fulfilment. The dhyaṇa , dharaṇa and samadhi, and particularly the samadhi, imply all that.

“…And also the stages of the path that we all tread.” As far as the Christian presentation is concerned, one need only look into the Sermon on the Mount. Take the statements in the Sermon on the Mount and sort of grow into the complete understanding, the complete comprehension of those statements. That will show you the stages on the path. “…Again with reference to Jesus’s own journey.” I do not quite know what you are referring to with the phrase “Jesus’s own journey, which culminate in this birth.”

There are two more questions. “I used to take pride in believing myself to be free of envy because of my lack of ambition. Now I know this to have been a camouflage for an envy of a very subtle kind. This envy expresses itself in my reactions causing great discomfort. I have observed this for quite some time, yet it still clings as a leech. Is it possible to let go of this and be free of it completely? Is it possible for the mind to free itself of all the accumulated burdens?” Yes, it is possible, because if it were not possible, the individual can never realize the wholly fulfilled human state. The key to it is attentiveness. Attend, attend, attend. When there is proper attention, full observation, complete observation, then the diagnosis is correct of what is the illness within the psyche, and the right knowledge of the diagnosis, as such, is also the medicine which heals it. With the body you have to go to another person who is a doctor and he does something for you. With the psyche you are your own doctor, no-one else really can be your doctor, and the healing agent is this attentiveness, complete, total observation, and that heals. We all have this sort of problem with various qualities, every one of us has this problem, and all these problems can be classed into three different categories, greed, hate and delusion. Understand the categories as such, understand the particular expression there. When you have fully understood, you will find that it has fallen off you.

“Do you agree that purity and innocence make a person extremely vulnerable, especially in youth, usually resulting in many painful experiences and damage to the psyche?” Yes, indeed. One is extremely vulnerable, especially when one is young, if one is innocent and quite pure, because when the world throws the opposite at you, it cannot but hurt, it cannot but upset and cause serious discomfort psychologically, illness psychologically, and so forth, and many painful experiences are bound to come out of it.

“Can you explain why this is so, particularly when it usually happens at a stage of life when Transcendence could not be explained or understood.” Transcendence in any case can never be explained. Transcendence can be realized in the deepest meditative states, but you cannot explain Transcendence, because then you make it an other something which you are explaining. This is one of the sad misfortunes to which all human beings are subject. We start innocent, we start simple, pure, and, as we grow up from babyhood onwards, we experience all these things. We are very vulnerable.

Here the talk breaks off

From the Editor

Weight Watchers will meet at 7pm at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

The Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7pm. Please use the back door.

From a Church bulletin

By Jiddu Krishnamurti

Of what significance is meditation when reality is there!