Being Truly Human June 2014 Newsletter

From the Editor

Our annual Summer School will be held from Tuesday 22nd to Sunday 27th July 2014 at Claridge House, Dormans Road, Lingfield, Surrey.  The School is at present fully booked, but cancellations might occur, and if you would like to be put on the waiting list, please contact the Trust.

It is hoped that our regular Sunday afternoon group meetings will continue to be held throughout most of the summer, but please contact the Trust if you would like dates and details.

From the Editor

The Sisters of St. Andrew, who were so good to us when we held Summer Schools at Eden Hall, are now installed at Lewisham in southeast London.

We have received an e-mail from Sister Diane and she says that, although the Sisters are unable to welcome anyone residentially any more, they would be pleased to see any of us for a visit during the day.

Please contact Sister Diane if you would like to do this.

From the Editor

A one-day conference organized by One Spirit Alliance is taking place from 10:00am to 5:00pm on Saturday 28th June 2014 at Colet House, 151 Talgarth Road, London, W14 9DA.

The Phiroz Mehta Trust is helping to support this event, which is intended to bring together groups and organizations with similar aims, with a view to working together collaboratively. Speakers will include Anthony Russell, Colum Hayward and Dr. Serge Beddington-Behrens.

There is a suggested donation of £25 per person for the day; this will include tea and coffee, but please bring a packed lunch. For tickets please send a cheque, made payable to One Spirit Alliance, to Courtyard Lodge, Mellow Farm, Hawcross Lane, Redmarley D’Abitot, Gloucestershire, GL19 3JQ.

For further information please contact the One Spirit Alliance.

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta at Dilkusha, Forest Hill, London on 13^th February 1972

In our own present scientific age we talk in terms of the chemical elements as being the fundamental matter out of which the whole world is built. But whilst that is true for us purely intellectually, as a matter of cold intellectual knowledge, it is not true for us as far as our actual experience, as far as our actual sensitivities are concerned, because, constituted as we are, what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, etc., is a case of seeing, touching, smelling physical objects, solid objects, liquids, gasses. We experience temperatures, pressures and so forth. So that if for our own purposes we were to analyse the constituents of the world which is responsible for all our sense impressions, our living experience of the world, we are back again to Earth, meaning solids, Water, Air, Fire and something which we postulate, Ether. I am still using the old word, not taking into account that modern science has completely abolished what was imagined as a luminiferous ether, a medium through which light and forces like that travelled.

These words have come down to us from very ancient times, as you know, from India, China, Greece, to mention three of the important places where these words had significance and meaning. The Buddha refers to them as the Great Elements, the Mahābhūta. This is not original to him because it comes from the Saṁkhya philosophy and that is derived again from the old Upaniṣads, the whole idea of Earth, Water, etc. This Ether was postulated as something which was the One Only, the unitary source of all the others, and they built up an atomic theory which was an intellectual speculation actually, based upon this idea of a unitary Ether. What is so interesting here is that Man has this peculiar urge, this craving to find out a One Something which is the origin of all the multiplicity. But he has never succeeded in doing that, not even in terms of intellectual speculation. You may make it as an arbitrary postulate but there is only One which is the absolute source of everything. But if you try to develop that postulate into a philosophical system, you will always stop short at the Not-Two. That is to say that there are always two at least which the intellect has to accept and declare that they are in such complete interrelationship and interaction that they are a Not-Two but a Unity. What is interesting to us psychologically (as far as understanding some of the most deep-seated things in our own nature is concerned) is that there is this urge, this craving for a One.

Modern science also has experienced that in its own way. Towards the end of the last century we came to the chemical atoms and everybody said, “There we are, now we know the fundamental bricks out of which the Universe is built.” Then particularly from 1896 onwards we discovered that this fundamental brick, the chemical atom, was far from a single unitary fundamental. Then with the discovery of intra-atomic constituents we once again began to shout, “Now we are getting at something which is fundamental.” All electrons, whether they are in an iron atom or a gold atom or a hydrogen atom or a sodium atom, whatever atom they are in, they are all alike and completely indistinguishable. But they also have the counterpart of the electron, their proton, the positively charged nucleus, the electron being negatively charged. And they hoped that perhaps the time would come when something even more fundamental than that would take them to the Unity. On the contrary, the fundamental particles have risen to something like fifty-one now by further discovery. You see, science did precisely what religious philosophers did in past ages. It is a very interesting and fascinating thing. The intellect can never get beyond at least two and it can postulate an interrelationship and an interaction so complete that we can say legitimately that this is a Not-Two, a Unity.

That is as far as the world as an external world is concerned. The intellect can play about with that. But how does any sort of intellectual playing about with such things, speculating about such things, help us or enable us to live the religious life, the good life, the holy life in the real sense, so that we as living human beings can come to the full fruition of what is implied in our humanity, so that we can emerge out of this state of sub-humanity in which we actually are? Our being concerned with the external world does not help us that way. This is one of the points which modern scholarship has considerably forgotten — that these very terms, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Ether, which were used by the ancients did not refer exclusively or even primarily to the physical universe around us. They referred to that which was earthy, watery, airy (very often airy-fairy!), fiery and Transcendent within our own inner nature, within the psyche itself. The primary practical concern of religion and religious teachers is not the external world, it is You, the living person, Myself, the living person. It is this that they were concerned with, and they understood and knew that within the living person there was a process which in its fulfilment would release a Transcendent awareness of existence which is quite different from this present stuck-in-the-mud consciousness of an earthy existence as such. A spiritual existence in the real sense, this is what they were concerned with. They were not interested in explaining the outer world, how suns and stars and galaxies and all the rest came into being, and trees and flowers and so forth. All that is the task of ordinary, everyday experience, investigation, observation and science. That is the sphere of science, the attempt to understand the Reality, whatever Reality may be, by approaching it through the understanding of matter, what science used to call matter. It is a perfectly valid approach to Reality. But that was not the concern of the religious philosophers, they were concerned with you and me, the earthiness in our nature, the fire in us in our nature and so forth. And it was convenient for them to present their findings in terms of correspondences between our earthiness, wateriness, airiness and so forth with the actual physical elements as they were.

The interesting point is this, that the Buddha’s teaching has at the back of it unquestionably, whatever the conventional, orthodox Buddhist may say, the Sāṁkhya philosophy which has at the back of it the Upaniṣadic teachings. The Upaniṣads gave rise to several slightly divergent systems of philosophy, but the Upaniṣads are the fountain source of all those philosophical systems. In the Sāṁkhya system they spoke about the origination and emergence of the world. Now remember, the world primarily means you, the living person, not the external world as such. In this process of the emergence of the world, one of the steps was postulated as what they called the tanmātras which are the invisible psychical counterparts, the immaterial counterparts, of the gross physical elements, that is to say, the gross physical element Earth has its tanmātra, which was the invisible, psychical counterpart of Earth.

You may remember that both the Hindus and the Buddhists postulated what they called the subtle senses. Here are gross senses of sight, touch, taste, hearing and so forth, and corresponding to them there are the subtle senses. This is what they arbitrarily postulated, and thus they showed the emergence of the world. If you look at it carefully, you will see that this world is just yourself obviously, because their final concern was what they called the puruṣa. Here again scholars have not done us good service in omitting to point out the meaning of the word puruṣa, which comes way back in one of the oldest of the Upaniṣads, namely: He in whom all evilmindedness has been burnt out. That is the puruṣa. He in whom all evilmindedness is burnt out is the real Alone, not the lonely one, but the Alone in the sense of the whole individual complete in himself, a harmony within himself and completely and rightly related to the Totality of existence. This is the real meaning of the individual, the whole being, the Alone. Such a being is the Alone because it is within his own consciousness that his own personal harmony and his harmonious relationship with Totality are experienced, felt, realized in his own consciousness. It is in that sense that he is the Alone. Therefore he is not the lonely, which is a very different thing. Most of the presentations of the Sāṁkhya philosophy fall down very badly when they come to discourse of this aspect of the puruṣa. The kevalin has realized Aloneness and they don’t know what it means. If your scholar has not been though the discipline successfully and realized at least something to some degree or other of that fruition, that culmination, he is not capable of giving a correct intellectual presentation of what the Sāṁkhya philosophy taught. These tanmātras, then, are responsible for the creation, as they put it, of the gross elements. All of them have as their starting point ākāśa, which we have translated, especially in the last century, as Ether. Again this craving for something which is One.

Leaving all the purely philosophical aspects aside, because they are not of any special practical value to us as far as the actual attempt to live the holy life is concerned, leaving that aside, just let’s take a brief glance at what we know through modern science. I am not putting this out as final truth, “Science has said it.” In the old days they produced creation myths out of their experience, their realization and their intellectual speculations, and we call them creation myths, and quite rightly, they are myths. But myths are not dead things, remember, they are very potent living forces and powers. Today your second- and third- and fourth-rate scientist talks of scientific fact as if it were absolute truth. But scientific facts and especially all cosmologies presented by the scientist are the modern creation myths. They are mental constructs, pictures, appearances of that which is beyond all appearance, and which in its own mysterious way is the origin, the creative origin, of all appearance including ourselves. So they are the modern scientific myths of creation. We must bear that in mind very carefully.

Nevertheless the findings of science are of fundamental importance to us today. This is the scientific age. Mankind is going through this particular phase in its evolution and in its growth. It is part of the living process not to be despised, not to be overvalued, and certainly not to be underestimated.

This is how a certain section of science presents the story of the emergence of Man. The Sāṁkhya philosophy is all written about, you can read it if you like, and you can study the old Scriptures. You can study in much greater detail the modern scientific presentations because of course much more has been written in modern times than in those days. From our primordial ancestor (some say that he was a primate) there emerged two branches, one, our cousins (rather distant cousins), the gorillas and the orangoutangs and chimpanzees and so forth, charming chatterers in their way, just as we are charming and sometimes not so charming chatterers in our way! They are our cousins. But the line which became us ultimately started from a primordial ancestor who swung from tree to tree. We must try and picture his body. It is thought that this ancestor took to the grasslands more and more. One very great authority in this century said that he took to the grasslands and began to change in posture. It’s very interesting. This primordial ancestor was the first Yogi. He had one posture which belonged to his species and he began to change that posture by taking to the grasslands. If he took to the grasslands he began to use his legs more, to run about over the grasslands, to use his arms and his arm-strength much less, and gradually the spine became more and more erect (mind you, taking hundreds of thousands of years in the process), and the whole physical body underwent changes. Essentially the changes were increasing stereoscopic vision and, with more and more erect posture, much increased sensitivity of hearing, and an extraordinary development of the hand with its opposable thumb, which we alone have (the other animals don’t have it as we have), into a very delicate and sensitive instrument of action. With the erect structure the muscles of the neck began to relax because they did not have to hold up the weight of the head, which is quite heavy. You try going on all-fours for about an hour and see what happens to your neck and the neck muscles and how they will ache for so long! But try a few minutes, don’t try an hour or you might do yourself harm. And, very important, this head which was held up by neck muscles was now balanced on the top of the spine. The interlocking canines became freed, the lower jaw relaxed and with the relaxation of the lower jaw and the changes in the larynx, also helped by the fact that the neck muscles were no longer so rigid, the power of speech developed to an extraordinary extent. The shape of the muscle changed, the shape of his head changed and his brain grew. These changes increased stereoscopic vision, sensitive hearing, the development of the hand, the balancing of the head, the change in the mouth, the growth of the brain and the development of speech above all, and brought about extraordinary changes in the whole psycho-physical creature called Man. With the development of the brain and speech there was the development of memory which meant the retention of experience, the accumulation of knowledge, techniques, skills and the ability to hand them over to the next generation. With the animal we have only the instinct and conditioned reflexes, and all this is transmitted through the genetic structure, just transmitted like that, you can’t say no to it. From the animal source right in our very selves we have inherited certain difficulties, aggressiveness, fear, greed, anger and so on. We have also inherited the instinctive caring for the young, the instinctive movement away from danger, away from what hurts, because that would destroy the person, it would destroy the species ultimately. We have inherited all this and it is instinctive in us. The cultural aspect, developed primarily through memory and the accumulated of knowledge and skills and so forth, is not transmitted hereditarily but is handed over through the generations. Something like a hundred thousand generations may have passed since the days of our primordial ancestor.

But now consider one very difficult point. The animal lives naturally in tune with the rhythm of nature, he lives according to the laws of his being. The two main drives, as you know, are self-preservation and the perpetuation of the species. Self-preservation means of course obtaining food, drink, driving away a weaker enemy and running away from a stronger enemy. With the perpetuation of the species there is mating, procreation and the care of the young involved. With the animal, if you take the preservation of the species, everything happened according to due season, the process took place, the various psychical phenomena associated with that process, the wooing, the winning, the fighting another male for the possession of the female, and so forth, all took place at its due time and the species was preserved. And when that particular thing was over seasonally, that was the end. There are some animals which are everlastingly mating, yes, but we have no harmony with a rhythm of nature. No animals have sex problems of our sort. We are unique in that, in complication, in making difficulty and trouble and all the rest of it. Isn’t that so? So in that respect we are the losers through our evolutionary process. In another important respect again, we are losers as far as our socio-cultural heritage is concerned. This brain, this power of speech, this memory and all the rest of it, and the marvellous culture that Man has produced through the hundreds of thousands of years which we inherit, have been tainted. Tainted how? Why? This is the crux of the matter. In which way has Man been aware of the Elements, Earth, Water, Fire, Air? In which way has Man been aware of them? He has been aware of them possessively, lustfully, greedily, resentfully, fearfully. He has seen them as instruments for furthering his ambitions, his desires, his passion to dominate, his passion to indulge himself, to satisfy his stupid little vanities. Animals make their natural display when they are courting and so forth. But does an animal need cosmetics or ever think of them? He is incapable of thinking of them. We can.

So, we have been aware of the Elements in a tainted manner, tainted by these unhappy aspects. The greed, anger, fear and such qualities which have come to us by hereditary transmission from the animal, we have never properly faced or understood, and so they have tainted our consciousness all along the line. We never pay sufficient attention to this fact. We think in terms of getting rid of a vice, of acquiring a virtue. It is quite impossible either to get rid of a vice or acquire a virtue in that sense. It is not like an object which we can either put in our drawing room or throw into the dustbin. Greed, anger, etc., all are our self, our living self. We use those words to express the shape presented in the immediate situation of a living process which we ourselves the person are going through. It’s a living energy. That living energy is yourself, you can’t destroy it, nor can you acquire another shape of a living energy which you call a virtue. What you can do is to transform this energy. You transform the stuff of your psyche, if I may use such a phrase, just as, if the body is poisoned through and through with wrong food and drink and all the rest of it, you change your diet, you change your habits of daily living and so forth, so that the body is transformed by a living process into something healthy and good.

Now, let’s come back to this. The culture which we have produced is concerned with all the different Elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water and so forth. We take a great pride, perhaps not unjustifiably, in what Mankind has produced. Look at the marvellous buildings, the architecture, the sculpture, look at the poetry, the music and so forth. But at what a price, at the price of untold human misery and suffering. Who built the pyramids? How were some of the most wonderful monuments of the world built? Nostalgically we talk about Greek philosophy and civilisation and so forth and their city-states. But at the base of the city-states was slave labour, an inferior position of women, and so on. Those states which prided themselves upon their democratic system or whatever it was, were perpetually at war with one another. The same thing has disgraced human history everywhere in the world through all the ages. Why look back? Look at 1972. And we don’t need to look as far out as Vietnam or some such place. It is closer than the seas that separate us from that other little island west of us. Right here, what is our story? The oppression of Man by Man, the struggle between Man and Man because he is conscious of the Elements that compose his life in the destructive way, a destructive way because it is a sub-human way. It is the way of one animal in conflict with another animal in order to save its own life. But with Man it is not merely a question of saving his own life, it is question of fulfilling all his desires. And practically the entire bulk of his desires is not in rhythm, not in tune with the rhythm of nature, with the rhythm of life, and certainly out of step with that Transcendent urge which is non-compulsive, which is everlastingly patient, that Transcendent urge in him to bring to fruition a being whose awareness includes the Totality, and does not separate himself away from it.

Man’s life therefore is more impure than the life of any other kingdom on the earth. No animal, and certainly no plant, tree is as impure as Man is, because the twist, the dis-ease has taken place right within his psyche, almost at its ultimate root, almost only at its ultimate root. Because at its ultimate root in the psyche is Transcendence itself, the sahasrāra cakra if you like, which the Qabalists presented as a Trinity, the Trinity of Ain-Soph, the Infinite, the Absolute, Ḥokmah, the Incomprehensible Deity of Wisdom, associated with the right eye (this is symbolic of course, the association with the parts of the body), and Binah, Intelligence, associated with the left eye. The Transcendent Trinity is here.

Ours is a task of purification, and the task of purification essentially implies letting life be, letting things be. I am putting it in this form quite deliberately. If I let you, the person, be, I will not try to dominate you, I will not try to impose anything on you, I will not be so stupidly conceited as to try to convert you to my way of thinking. That takes a person nowhere. How does a gardener look after his plants, by making the plant grow into the likeness of the shape in his imagination, or by just serving the plant, letting it be, and it will grow into its own marvellous, unique beauty? If you constrain the plant to grow the way you want it, and if you achieve it, your egoism, your vanity, your absurdity will be satisfied. But what will be left in the psyche is dust and ashes, later on remorse and grief and a sense of utter emptiness and loneliness, of the inadequacy of one’s self.

So, if I learn to let be, I do not dominate, I do not grasp for myself. You see the relationship with the Buddha’s fundamental teaching, “Be free of all grasping.” What would happen, supposing we were free of grasping, where the natural urge, nature’s urge for the preservation of the species, is concerned? What would happen if there were no grasping? Do you think that there would be disharmony between the sexes, or do you think that it would just vanish away like an idle dream? If love is to be love, there can be no grasping, no possessing, no expecting, hoping, demanding, wanting or anything at all. All that is completely out of the picture. If fresh air is to be fresh air, there must be no chimneys belching forth smoke, sulphur dioxide, the oxides of nitrogen (I know a little bit about this, as this was my subject!), and so forth, none of the impurities that poison the atmosphere. How do you feel when you breathe pure fresh air? What happens to your living organism, well-being, health, beauty, peace, the delight that is not a fever of longing for pleasure, the pure delight of Reality, of Truth, Happiness?

So too where human beings are concerned, if one let them be. Let them be in the right way, not through indifference, but because you are aware of the being who is made up of the Elements, solid, liquid, gaseous, etc. You let that being just be there without any sort of possessiveness about him or her. Why is there this possessiveness? Why does one long for the sensational delights of the flesh or anything of that sort? Because one is empty, inadequate inside. It is the hunger of the dis-eased person, not of the healthy person. It is because one feels inadequate, one feels empty. “I am only half a person and the other will complement me and…”, what? All sorts of wonderful things will happen. Now this wrong functioning of the imagination is one of the curses of our socio-cultural heritage, this wrong romance, this false romance, imposed by thought, born out of my conditioning, out of my ignorance, my incapacity and all the destructive qualities in me. That is wrong romance. Life itself is one perpetual romance in reality, one perpetual delight, one perpetual unification, a perpetual conjugation. We give that up, shut ourselves away from the permanent unity, from the permanent active creative state of union, and because our minds and hearts are dis-eased, we behave and act and proceed in the way we do.

If you want the supreme proof of the truth of what I am saying, consider this lunatic phrase “falling in love.” To be in love constantly is the natural state. Not to be in love from moment to moment but to fall into love is the dis-eased state. Mind you, it has taken me sixty years and more to see that and to know the well-being and the happiness of it! What is the meaning of the state of love? It is this — when you are really awake you are awake to the complete and total relationship between yourself and whatsoever is around you, and you are fully aware that that relationship is not the relationship of a separate self called I, with another self called You. You have gone beyond the duality, and this is the charm and the marvel and the miracle of religious vision, living and realization, that two, who are obviously two limited, finite particulars, are so completely in relationship through the awakening from within, that the two-ness makes for the marvel, the wonder, the mystery, the delight of living together. This is a case of the right awareness of the Elements. (I am utilising that form of it because this question of the Elements arose a few meetings back.)

So now, let things be, let people be, let situations be. Don’t say, “I am twenty-five, I’ll soon be on the shelf if I don’t hurry up and hook onto somebody”, “I am thirty-six”, “I am forty-eight, oh my God, there is no hope now”, “I am sixty, I am done for!” How are we going to let be? Have you ever watched the process of yourself looking at another? Have you ever really understood it, not just this absurd, cold, ineffective, scientific sort of observation of an experiment going on? No, to be aware of it, livingly aware, have you ever watched it? I meet the tax collector. How do I behave? I meet one of you. How do I behave? “The girl is very pretty.” “The man is a most attractive person, he is so-and-so so-and-so, I must cultivate his friendship, I can get something.” Watch all this going on inside. “This will promote my cause.” “Beware of that person, he will be a trouble.” If I have got two clear eyes in my head, of course I will see the fact that this is a troublesome fellow, this is a helpful fellow, this is a strong fellow, this is a weak fellow, and all the rest of it. Yes, you will see the fact but the seeing of the fact will not be sullied by greed, by possessiveness, by my ambitions, by my envies, by my fears and so on. And when I see the fact as the fact, I remain in the state of complete and total love, because I am rightly related to the fact which I am seeing. This is the great point. It is very difficult to fulfil, but then to produce the perfect things of the world is very difficult, isn’t it? It is true that Handel produced The Messiah in twenty-four days but then that’s a freak. Beethoven took about ten years before the Ninth Symphony was completed. Don’t look for the end, don’t desire to achieve, let it emerge. Let be, let it emerge, because in that power of letting be is an extraordinary power for purification of the psyche. If I deliberately say, “I must cultivate patience, I must be forbearing, I must be forgiving”, I just can’t do anything of the sort. All these things, intellectually composed by thought, by a mere thought process are quite ineffective, they won’t do it. Just be quiet and grow. The life within will emerge and do all that if I don’t interfere with it. It is like the gardener, not to interfere with the process of life of the plant. Just give it the necessary nutriment and that is all there is to it.

So now, let’s look back at the way Man has been influenced by the two great conditioning forces, natural evolution from our primordial ancestor, because of which we have had hereditarily transmitted certain difficult energies, anger, fear and all the rest of it, and our socio-cultural heritage, which has been based upon the animal degraded to the beast. We are not good animals, we are bad animals, we are beasts. No animal can be a beast as a man can. Not a chance, the animal has not got the brain, the power to think, the power to nurse in his memory grievances, hate, angers. Look at the way nations nurse their hates through the centuries. Look at the way individuals nurse their hates through the years. “You do this, my boy, and I’ll disinherit you without the proverbial penny.” This is my own child and that is my behaviour towards him! Why? Because he has done something which I disapprove of. I am reacting against him. It may be perfectly true that he is doing something really evil. All right, I see the fact that this is evil. Do I therefore add to that evil by my hate, by my disapproval and cruelty and so forth? You see how it is? If we really appreciate all this, we can understand how and why all the Elements that compose life, physically and psychologically too, are all exploited. We exploit the Earth. Look how senselessly, thoughtlessly we exploit the Earth. We cannot be free after all these hundreds of thousands of years from this pathetic, this stupid, this evil phrase “the conquest of nature.” Nature is our Mother, isn’t she? What do we do but kick her continuously in the stomach? That is all we do. We are conquering Nature, subduing her. Filial duty? Love? How can we oppressors live in a state of human love and harmony if we treat Mother Nature that way? It is very easy to say that the modern world is like that, and it is perfectly true that we have no option in relation to this which goes on.

Look at the way minerals are being dug out of the earth for instance. Of course they are useful in certain ways, but look at our whole approach and attitude in the matter. Our whole approach and attitude being inhuman, do we rightly use in all cases all that we dig out of the earth? We are incapable of right use. Take Art or take Religion. Do we not exploit Art and Religion? Art produces a wonder and a beauty that Man can well take delight in freely. And then what does he do with Beauty? He buys it and sells it, he prostitutes it in fact, so something that is wonderful in itself is tainted by his taints. That is what I do with Art. Look at the way pictures, antiques and so on sell at fantastic prices. What is being exploited? Men’s possessiveness, their vanity, their greed, their egoistic feeling of “I have got a million pound picture in my house.” Then there is all the anxiety associated with keeping it safe from robbers and so on.

Look at Religion. The great Teachers freely poured out the bread and the wine of life. The petty little sub-humans came along afterwards and organized it, all for your good and my good of course! They raised up rigid creeds, “Believe this, swear allegiance to it or else…” And look at the history of the world, the way men and women have been tortured and tormented. And if they have not been tortured and tormented physically, think of the torture and the torment in their minds through fear. “I have lived rather a bad life, my God, now I’ll go to hell for ever and ever, and suffer incredible torments, in hell where I cannot die as I can die on the earth and be free of my torment.” Think of the thousands of millions of people within the last twenty-five to thirty centuries who have been through this horror with the exploitation of rigid doctrines. Is this Religion? See how it has misled Man all along the line. Rigid doctrines and dogmas and so forth are Earthy. Ideas which are fluid are Watery. Principles which are based upon aspiration to the Highest and so forth and the inspiration which comes from them are Fiery, full of light if you like. But all of these things, good, bad and indifferent, are all binding fetters, the whole lot are binding fetters. We have to see that if we really want to live the human life, which is the holy life. No other life is human, it is sub-human. If we want to live the holy life, we must see that these are fetters and not grasp at them. Ideas, thoughts, forms of behaviour, actions and all the rest of it will just flow along through the becoming process. They will emerge and inevitably flow along, you can’t stop it, that is the nature of existence. But don’t grasp at it, don’t look for any gain from it, don’t flee away in fear because it might hurt you. Just be yourself and let be the becoming process. And be completely awake all the time, not shutting out your own actual sensitivity. Let the power to be hurt to the uttermost be present there, and be hurt to the uttermost. The psyche can never be killed, the body can. The psyche disappears with the death of the body, completely disappears, because the body is not just a body which has a psyche tacked on to it. There is the complete disappearance of the whole psycho-physical organism, the process is over. But whilst the process is there, let there be this complete living through the whole thing, very sensitively, very quietly, letting it be. This does not mean that one will not act. If one is inwardly poised, the attentiveness will invariably and inevitably call forth the right action in the situation. Don’t ask anybody else what you ought to do. “Such-and-such is my situation, what do you say I ought to do?” The person who tells you what you ought to do is doing you a terrible disservice. He could help you to see for yourself if he has wisdom enough and skill enough to do that. But to tell you what you ought to do is a profound error.

So, do not hold onto any of the Elements. As the Buddha said, they are all impermanent  and constantly changing, and all grasping, all attachment, all illusions and delusions tied up with the different Elements, with people, with things, with the process of life, are sources of misery. That does not mean that they are merely sources of pain to me, but they make me a producer of evil and pain in the world to everybody else also. This is the very important point to bear in mind.

So, let go, completely let go. Now, when that comes to its culmination and to its fruition, how are you aware of the Elements, the question with which we started earlier on? In what manner are we aware of the Elements? That awareness has no characteristics which can be formulated in words, which can be intellectually discussed or talked about. It never began, it never proceeds, it never ends. It is Infinite, it is Light itself and it is accessible everywhere. Wheresoever you are, this Transcendent Reality is there, and in the awakening, the complete opening out to that you are in the truly enlightened state, and there is no evil reaction of any sort, there is no bondage of your consciousness, of your awareness, to the things that limit, to the things that defile. You are the Purified One, the truly Holy One, the true Human.

By Guru Gampopa

Spiritual knowledge having dawned in oneself, neglect it not through slothfulness, but cultivate it with ceaseless vigilance.

By Phiroz Mehta

It is Man’s responsibility to bring the mind to maturity.