Philosophical Message – Page 4

Tarot Koans

THE MAJOR ARCANA

You may see the classical images for the Rider Waite deck at Wikipedia. Scroll down to Major Arcana. Arcana means secrets. The major arcana are meant to represent the entire human experience in an abbreviated, symbolic way.

Story Number 1: The Magician
After the thought, manifestation.

Story Number 2: The High Priestess
Before the thought, knowledge.

Story Number 3: The Empress
She glowed.
The fields flowered wherever she walked.
Bringing fruit out of season.

Story Number 4: The Emperor
His authority radiated from every pore.
He no longer required the uniform.

Story Number 5: The Heirophant
The attention rejuvenated his soul.
His sister had claimed it was his ego, but he knew better.
The eyes had followed his every move.
But now, he was tired of it all.
Performing the same rituals day after day.
Only the thoughtless cared.

Story Number 6: The Lovers
Loving lovers loved lengthily.
Do you remember?
Always remember.
Remember.

Story Number 7: The Chariot
Your chariot awaits.
The work you have done has its own reward.
Enjoy the ride.

Story Number 8: Strength
The Goddess radiated light.
The lion lay down in submission.
Truth and goodness flood the thought field.
Justice has become mercy.

Story Number 9: The Hermit
The old woman closed the door of her house behind her, and latched it.
Her cloak fastened at the neck, she headed up the mountain, holding nothing but a lantern.
She would go up as far as she could. She knew how to put one foot in front of the other. She knew how to struggle toward the heavens. She had done it all of her life.
There, she would breathe her last. Her knees would never let her return to lower earth, and that was just fine with her.

Story Number 10: The Wheel of Fortune
The monkey raced around the mulberry bush.
So did the weasel.
Which was chasing which?

Story Number 11: Justice
Jane bowed her head. Justice was slow in coming. Very slow.
A thousand times now, the sun had risen and set.
Jane lifted her head. Now she understood.

Story Number 12: The Hanged Man
Everything is upside down now.
The hummingbird has consumed the eagle. Ganesh rides a mouse.
Mist obscures the ground,
above the hard black bowl of the sky.

Story Number 13: Death
Ring around the rosie,
pocket full of posie.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Story Number 14: Temperance
Silver wings fluttering in the breeze,
the angel plodded on,
toward the approaching dawn.

Story Number 15: The Devil
The image stared back at him
from the depths of the blackness.
The sin looked out at the sinner.

Story Number 16: The Tower
Ground shaking, tower leaning.
Maybe this was not such a good idea.
We’d better jump now.

Story Number 17: The Star
She dipped her big right toe in
the river of time, while chewing
a blade of grass.

Story Number 18: The Moon
Over and over and over again, they had endured the
reign of terror.
Once, the wings of mercy had shielded them.
What goes around comes around.
The moon waxes and wanes.

Story Number 19: The Sun
Bright shining as the sun, the child’s smile.
Crickets start to chirp in the heat.

Story Number 20: Judgement
Dem bones gonna rise again, Ezekiel eventually proclaimed.
But is that really what you want?
The streets of heaven are paved with gold.
The alchemists’ stuff, not the end result of
two neutron stars colliding in
far away galaxies.

Story Number 21: The World
No longer at my fingertips.
Where are my fingertips?
Who am I?
What is I?
Boundaries dissolve.
The world is.
Is.
Isness.
Isness is.

A Story: The Master
I watch the lord comb the lady’s hair.
The rest is untold.

Story Number Zero: The Fool
Innocence and isness
make no claims.

I hope you liked these little poetic reflections. If you have an artistic bent, and would like to collaborate on illustrations, please let me know by the comment feature.

Osho and Patanjali

I have read Osho’s book about Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras probably around four times now. It’s called The Science of the Soul. A lot of real and metaphorical ink has been spilled over the Yoga Sutras. Osho says that Patanjali was the Einstein of the spiritual path. Yet today, scholars dispute the time of his life by plus of minus 500 years! (400 BCE to 600 CE). Patanjali, as I see him, lies squarely in the river of the thought of the sages of the Indian culture.

They were so logical. They did not have all of the different developed modern scientific tools of epistemological analysis, so they were limited in what they could achieve, and sometimes mistaken about what was natural law versus cultural habit, but many of the areas where they turned their gaze were revealed in a way that increased accessibility for whole new groups of people.

For example, our alphabet, based on the one supposedly developed by the Phoenicians, has a random order. The Devanagiri script, descendent of that used for Sanscrit, is completely logically ordered. The first letter is the one whose sound is furthest back in the throat, and it moves forward from there.

Patanjali, like the modern scientists of the mind, used introspection as his main tool to create his science of liberation. Despite the work of Freud, Jung, Adler and their colleagues and professional descendants, Western culture has no communally shared answers to the big questions and problems of personal loss. Patanjali however, in the spirit of the Rishis of the earliest Vedic culture (1500 – 500 BCE) gave simple instruction on how to attain liberation from the feelings of loss and failure that accompany most thoughtful people who are subject to the human condition.

The instructions, Patanjali noted in his first sentence, are not for everyone. Osho says that Patanjali acknowledged that if you were not completely fed up with your mental state, completely devoid of hope that things would ever improve, you would not likely be interested in his method of liberation. I reached this state, or at least close enough to think that I know what it means, about a year ago. That’s why I keep rereading Osho’s book, and have also sought out other commentators on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

So, once you come to terms with the fact that you don’t have and never will have hope for peace of mind by any method based on logic, science, psychology, love, or money, open the Yoga Sutras. There you will read: Now, the discipline of yoga.

Grr. Discipline. I have never had any. People think I do, but I don’t. Or at least I never did. The arthritis attack forced me to get a little. I actually make my bed now, almost every day. Why not? I’m going to have to straighten the blankets before I lie down to sleep. Why not just do it in the morning? That’s discipline for it’s own sake. I live alone, so it’s very rare that anyone will see my messy bed. This, believe it or not, is a huge step forward in my personal practice of discipline.

Now, the discipline of yoga. Osho says that you have to have basic discipline in your life, eating and sleeping at regular times, or you will never get anywhere with your yoga practice. OK. Again, the arthritis forced me to change some of my ways.

I’m certainly not disciplined in any complete sense. If I were, my Failure Analysis book would be much further along than it is. Oh well. Maybe as I study and meditate more and more times on the second sutra, I will want more discipline so that I can proceed along the path to liberation from my own permanently troubled mind. The second sutra? Yoga is the cessation of mind.

This has always been problematic. The mind is kindof necessary, like the ego, to get through life. So what does this really mean? My current understanding is that it means that the mind, and ego for that matter, get demoted to servant, so that the true self can be the master.

The rest of Patanjali’s masterpiece is about how to make that happen. The bottom line is that we move our sense of who we are from our feelings, thoughts, and sensory input to the witness, the seer, the personal soul whose real existence is embedded in and inseparable from the consciousness of the eternal divine essence.

A Voice from The Grave

A voice from the grave. That’s the origin of all religion, according to Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the man credited with starting the modern science of anthropology. Specifically, Tylor speculated that religion, as distinct from totems and their associated specific dietary taboos, arose when peoples ran into major difficulties or obstacles, and became open to listening to advice from respected lost elders currently residing in spiritual domains. The disembodied voices of dead ancestors were the original gods.

Of course in Asia, many still worship their ancestors. That’s part of why the Ten Commandments conveyed to a small group in the Sinai Peninsula should still, today, be considered revolutionary. The Ten Commandments instructed “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”

We, the descendants, culturally if not from the specific haplo group, were told to HONOR, not to worship. It was intended to be a liberating commandment.

And, the reasoning was provided. Now, we may ask how honoring our PARENTS equates with long life for the ones doing the honoring, as opposed to the ones being honored. To answer this conundrum, we need only realize that as we live, we set an example. If we honor our parents, our offspring, or other people’s offspring, will see us doing so. If the entire community honors their parents, that will be the way life proceeds in that community. Then, the children will learn to honor their parents. They won’t even need the commandment.

Many people think that the reasoning is stating a different reality. A carrot and stick type approach. That God is sitting up in the sky counting the times we honor our parents, and adding days to our life in proportion. No. That’s not how it works.

The Fifth Commandment is a simple commandment followed by a statement of the consequences of the natural laws of human behavior. We learn by example.

That is the major reason why social change takes so long. That’s part of why the Pound Me Too movement is evoking a backlash, as innocent and thoughtless people alike are surprised that someone is trying to overturn the oldest rule of all, and not even in a single generation. In a single week, it seems, we’re seeing many question the millennia long truth that power and wealth are the ticket to doing whatever one likes. Within a week, it seems, the Pound Me Tooers claimed that every human has been cleared of all their subconscious conflicts that broadcast yes or maybe when the voice says no.

This is being followed in the national conversation by teenage girls claiming the right to go to school mostly naked, and claim it’s for their comfort, and that those who find their uncoverings sexually inviting need to ignore their bodily promptings. I really don’t see how this is going to end well. Unless the new generation has truly evolved to something other than Homo Sapiens.

Giants in our midst

We’re all bigger than we realize. We usually think of our size in relation to the clothes that we require to cover ourselves. But the reverend minister at the church I attend is always reminding us that our spiritual auras extend far beyond our bodies.

This can be understood in many ways, at different levels. Even the most mundane aspects of our activities in the world involve interactions with others. If we displace a certain volume of air, and occupy a certain position on the face of the earth, nobody else can simultaneously occupy the same position and displace the same volume of air.

That, in any given situation, may or may not have obvious and immediate consequences.

Was our purchase of an orange from the Ionia Meijer what made the difference in the produce manager not getting fired? You never know. You just never know.

What size are we now? As big as the Meijer store?

Was the fact that we were trapped in position 12 in the traffic jam, which was what made the obstruction visible over the top of the hill, what gave the distracted father enough time to hit his brakes? You never know. You just never can know.

What size are we now? As big as the intersection that didn’t have an accident? As big as the area that contains all the lives of the people who helped to not allow the accident? As big as the lives of all the people who were able to carry on their activities because there was no accident at the intersection?

What size are we, NOW?

We sit at the coffee shop, writing away about Giants in our midst. We are the giants. We are the giants in our midst. Well, there is only one our, and just one giant. Just like the light that we see coming from Proxima Centauri, that took 4.244 years to get here, our size extends in both space and time, our actions, both intentional and unintentional by-products of our intentional actions, extend far beyond our specific knowledge.

What size are we now, that someone on the other side of the world has read our blog entry? Now, that we have seen the light of not only Proxima Centauri, but many other stars from far away galaxies.

No Pix from Day 6

Today, I am staying at my hotel. I don’t spend a lot of time with people any more. The Day 4 festivities, with the Baby Krishna reenactment, were followed, on Day 5, by four other neighbor kids dressing up as later versions of a Krishna as a youthful man, his wife Radha, and two other characters. It was again very joyful, lots of music and dancing, and crushing of crowds. So these images are all from yesterday, or earlier.

Scene from life of Krishna. Everyone has to see up close and take photos of everything!

Dharmendra and his sister dancing during a break from the storytelling associated with the Gita.

The rituals are powerful though. On the 4th day, or was it the 5th, after the morning puja, I went to personally greet the image of my mother. Suddenly, it appeared that she was there. Her face seemed three dimensional. She seemed to be watching me, smiling. I have had this experience before in India. When at the Swami Narayan Temple (BAPS) in Delhi, in 2009, the eyes of the 4th Guru, the main founder of today’s movement, seemed to follow me as I passed his bust. Skillful sculpting? I don’t know. Later, all of the photos of the deceased who were on the “altar” of holy cow dung covered bricks seemed to be alive to me, with the possible exception of the one photo that was really old and faded and off to the side. But some of the other photos were almost as badly faded. Maybe this uncle has already reincarnated, and his spirit is not available for this event.

The deceased honorees of this Bhagwat Ceremony. My mom to the left of the soldier. Dharmendra’s mother above the soldier, his sister to the left of his mother.

The power of the rituals must somehow be associated with the overall liveliness of the Indian people. A lot of effort goes into clothing. It’s so amazing to see people dressed in so many ways, from traditional to western to some mix of odd styles that constantly surprises me. But here is another beautiful sari, just because.

Many Indians are becoming obese. But not this woman, or Dharmendra’s father’s sisters, shown below.

The traditional generation. Bananas were passed out as “prasad,” or blessed food. The bags of fruit and other items, including rice, lentils, etc. to be used in cooking later, are left in front of the dias, under the images of the deceased honorees, to get the blessings along with the bricks and spirits of the departed.

I was told that the “main priest” would be reading from the Gita, and offering commentary. My Hindi is limited and my Sanskrit even more so, but as I read along in my English translation, the word husband occurs NOT ONCE. In fact, there is only one mention of family members, and it’s an exhortation from Krishna to Arjuna NOT to be attached to his wife or son. Yet the word that kept coming to me in the long Hindi passages was PATI. Which is husband. Eventually I became very suspicious that the speech of the priest had ANYTHING to do with the highest spiritual message of the Gita. Which is that our true essence is not the part of us that is carrying out our daily activities. Our true essence can do nothing at all but witness the universe. There is, as I noted in yesterday’s post, an exhortation to duty, repeated and repeated, but never one word about a wife’s duty to her husband.

My French friend later confirmed that they are actually not reading from the Gita at all.

The whole thing is a circus of storytelling. Of course. Because the Gita basically says clearly and repeatedly that the people who carry out the old Vedic rituals have much lower merit than those who devotedly love Krishna as they go about their daily duties maintaining society. No. That would never do for the priests to read the real Gita to the simple, religious people. It could destroy their livelihoods.

The message of the Gita is to renounce caring whether you experience pleasure or pain, and simply abide as the one witnessing the experience. By ending one’s identification with the body and the sensory pleasures and pains it attracts, one eventually merges with the eternal, all powerful Source. It’s an inward path. Has nothing to do with hiring a band of pandits to do rituals.

But Shush. The Catholic priests for many years prevented believers from reading the Bible on their own, and I argue with a Protestant friend whenever I have the strength that he would behoove himself to make his own interpretations from his studies, instead of repeating the supposed experts’. While the Israelites, the people of THE BOOK, were encouraged to become literate and read their holy texts for themselves, the mystical traditions that teach how to merge with God have also been kept hidden from all but men over 40 who are deemed worthy.

And obviously, Hindus, Christians and Jews are not the only ones who have two religions under the same name. One that is for the people who in my Knomo Choicius novel would really like the Free Thought Church, where one is freed from the burden of having to think. And the other, the hidden tradition, is for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, heart and feet to seek.

It is likely that my realization that the whole afternoon series of supposedly Gita inspired events is a facade for the opposite teachings was a factor in my need to stay in my hotel room today, and be an American on a spiritual path, taking a vacation from my “vacation”!

Lion’s Love or Alternative Valentine

The Buddhist nun Thubton Chodron says “Love is the wish for sentient beings to have happiness.”

I am very happy to have come across this definition of love. By this definition, I am very loving. I want all sentient beings to have happiness. The fact that I have given up on trying to help others have happiness no longer bothers me. I want it. Thubton Chodron seems to imply that’s what love is.

Of course Westerners think that wanting alone is not as effective as doing something to achieve the desire. We have that old saying: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. But Easterners have more wisdom that assures us that thoughts are things. In a way, we could consider that the entire core message of Jesus was just that. Jesus’ followers eventually got rid of much of the law, the requirements for doings. They emphasized the inner thoughts. Why, if not out of an understanding, not belief, understanding, that thoughts lay the groundwork for the quality of the deeds.

Another culturally Western Buddhist teacher instructs “Don’t just do something. Sit there!”

But, as long as I have been attracted to and studied the ideas of the East, a big part of me still feels like I need to do something to make my wishes into horses. Through the tension of East and West, I’m beginning to realize that every effort I have made to truly help someone out of what I perceived as a dire situation has gone wrong. People get into dire situations for large, complex and complicated constellations of reasons, most of which are incorrect subconscious beliefs about the nature of reality. Therefore, one person can’t ever have a high chance of truly helping someone for the longterm by adjusting their outside situation. The persons incorrect, unacknowledged beliefs will continue to sabotage them.

Therefore, while my spoken statement is that I have given up on doing anything to express my love, and am happy to wish for others’ happiness, my inner desire is to have the strength to continue to work in the ways that I am allowed to help others see a way to happiness.

Now, the intent, or content, of this string of sentences is all well and good. However, it pretty much applies only to humans. Thubton Chodron says that love is the wish for sentient beings to have happiness. The Buddhists have a prayer that is often translated into English as follows: May all sentient beings have happiness, and the causes of happiness.

Ok great. But, as Lynn Sparrow Christie, a motivational speaker notes, “There’s the problem of the food chain.” The Jains have truly tried to create a system of rules / laws / habits / deeds / way of life that addresses this. Not only are they vegetarian, they don’t eat seeds, because that cuts off a life. Eating the fleshy part of the peach is ok. Garlic cloves, definitely not. Wheat not. I’m not sure about potatoes. They can produce a new plant, but the plant will make seeds if allowed. So maybe they do eat potatoes. Of course, Jains might or might not have known about potatoes when their religion was started. The coffeeshop where I am writing is getting a new internet router, so I can’t check. This is good. Lets you the reader see my stream of consciousness, and you can go look to figure it out on your own!

Anyway, to get back to the Jains, not only do they have a restricted vegetarian diet, but they wear masks, so that they do not inadvertently inhale and kill by immersion in digestive juices, any gnats or other sentient beings. Not only do they wear masks to avoid unintentional inhalation of gnats, but they sweep their paths ahead of themselves as they walk, to avoid crushing ants and worms. Every moment of the Jains’ lives are taken up in avoiding harm. I now see this as an uninterrupted meditation on laying the foundations for other sentient beings having the causes of happiness, or at least avoiding the causes of pain and suffering at a basic physical level.

Kindof like Judaism, there are so many rules and regulations, you don’t have time to get into trouble. Of course I am sure that just as there are Orthodox Jews who manage to lead truly creative lives, there are Jains who do the same. I am convinced that God has led different peoples to adopt different religious systems, not only because it was natural and expedient based on differences of environment, both natural and as responses to cultural pressures, but because having a spectrum of beliefs and ideas and cultures makes watching the human drama a more interesting prospect.

That said, getting back to all sentient beings having the causes of happiness is going to require a lot of changes to the status quo. In order for all sentient beings to have the causes of happiness, many of Nature’s beings are going to have to undergo fundamental changes. The lion must be able to lie down with the lamb in perpetuity, not only for a few minutes, after it has gorged itself on three giraffes.

Dancing to an Unheard Melody

This is a past life regression I did in 1988. The title above is from my friend Mel, who heard me read the piece in the writing group…

To my surprise, I actually find myself embodied. My arms around my partner, I look into his eyes. He is black. He wears an army uniform. He is taller than I am. He leads me around the dancing floor. Bright spots of light move as the glitter ball rotates above us. The vision is a vision, and I don’t hear the music. I look down at my shoulder, and find I am white. I don’t think this is a surprise. The inner self I was channeling must have known this as soon as I noted the dark tones of my partner’s skin. The question of my gender was never articulated.

As the unheard tune ends, I step back to smile at my partner, and looking down, I see the upper line of my yellow sleeveless dress against my skin. I am pretty. I know this, even as I can’t see my face. They say that beauty is perceived in the face designed from the average of all common features in a population. I fill in my face with this subconscious information. I am slim. The pretty and the slim are different from my current incarnation.

The skirt of my dress is yellow, like the top, but covered with black polka dots, the size of quarters. I sense this is happening in the 1930’s. Maybe one of those dance contests they had with cash prizes to supposedly alleviate the misery of the depression. Like in the movie They Shoot Horses.

Now, thirty years after this past life regression experience, I wonder why an enlisted soldier, presumably with a paycheck, would subject himself to this. Hmmm. Maybe he was attracted to me? Still, this is hard for me to imagine, having been stuck in my current body for all of this lifetime.

The essence that I took from the extremely foggy vision of a past life, that felt extremely forced at the time, was that my unwillingness to conform to society’s expectations goes back to a time before my birth into this current heavy, plain looking carcass. But she must have died young, if she was in her twenties in the 1930’s or 40’s, and died in time to provide a soul to one born in the late 1950’s. I wonder what happened to my dancing partner. Was he a partner for an evening only? A weekend of a dance contest? Years?

Yesterday, I joined the Theosophical Society. They’d already been around for 100 years when I graduated from high school. Their purpose is to promote Universal Brotherhood. The founders believed in the benefits of reincarnation. If you know you have many lives, you don’t have to feel pressured to “get this life perfect.” All the major religions teach that we are more than our bodies. Most teach that we are more than our minds. Or that we are neither our bodies, nor our minds. Nor our feelings for that matter. I can intellectually grasp that there is evidence that we are more than our bodies and thoughts and feelings. The idea of reincarnation helps to explain a lot of things. It’s not the only possible explanation for the experiences of deja vu, or strong connections to other people. It’s not the only possible explanation for my wondering from the age of four why I was born.

To my mother’s credit, she never gave me a fake answer. For some reason, it never occurred to me to ask my dad. Perhaps this persistent question, which implies that I did have a choice in being born, or at least that I thought I did, is even better evidence for reincarnation. Or at least for the existence of the individual’s soul or spirit as an entity separate from the body.

When I took the past life regression workshop, I had little hope that I was actually going to be able to get any information about my past lives. I’m an intellectual, and that generally interferes with the ability to perform self-hypnosis. As noted at the top of the post, I was surprised to even get a glimpse of a past life.

My friends at the Spiritualist church assure me that I have had many past lives. Who knows? My “karmic astrology report” from Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment says that my planets give a tendency to get carried away by my imagination. Yet some type of undiagnosed brain damage has left me with extremely poor visualization skills. I get lost really easily, even as I have developed skills to get to where I need to go in my daily life. Maybe this brain damage is what has kept me centered in the physical world. When I do have a clear inner vision, it always feels like a gift. I can never conjure it at will.