I think I will stay about another week here in Tiruvannamalai. I arrived on May 13 to stay with an octogenarian friend in his home close to the ashram. I spend about four hours a day there, in a self-imposed schedule of meditation. The ashram imposes no strict rules upon visitors, or even guests who stay there. But there is a faithful community of devotees, Indian and foreign, who spend a good part of their day in its halls and grounds. Hebrew readers can see Tomer Persico’s article about it, or look at the pictures.

It’s my fifth visit to Tiru, but I know less about the town than most others where I’ve spent this amount of time. I’ve visited the grand old temple of course (once), climbed up Arunachala as far as the caves, and circumambulated around the hill (13 km) a couple of times, though not barefoot like a true believer.

D. in the evening pointed out the peacefulness of the place where he lives and said that “this moment would not return again.” He seems to be wishing me to enjoy the moment and make the most of it, and there is something in what he says, since my responses to it are for the most part fairly dull. Also, Dorit, in our phone call, asked me if I found this a place of inspiration. I was unable to give an unequivocal answer. I guess, for the most part, I do not feel anything special, and the annoyances are as great as the advantages. So it is hard to say. I feel for the most part peaceful in the ahsram halls, but not exactly inspired.

In addition, I have begun to develop some criticism for Ramana’s approach. I think it is an incomplete realization, that requires a follow up in real life. It starts with the self and does not seem to end in any broad vision of unity or kinship with others / the other. There is no other. and yet there is.

From an ecological viewpoint, it is true that a person possessed of self-realization will have few wants, will live on the bare minimum, which is what is required on our ravaged planet. But if one wants to live as a responsible world citizen and bring about change to a world confronting ecological disaster, something more is needed.

There was a sudden change in the weather this afternoon; blustery winds that brought the temperature down suddenly be several degrees, and a little rain. Quite refreshing.

Did a little work for the office in the afternoon. Quite a hot day today. I’m thinking how to create an autonomous personal space in the cosmos, and am partially succeeding at this here in South India. My sitting mat defines this personal space. My bag has all the few things that I need: sitting mat, filter water bottle, phone – which does just about everything. Perhaps I should use it for keeping this journal. And, back in the house, a few more things. I think this may be the trend in the coming difficult age of enforced austerity, as the world becomes harder to inhabit. South India is certainly a good testing ground for global warming.

Sannyasa has meaning only in the context of adwaita vedanta, but it stems from a much older tradition of parivajak and hermit ascetics These too were masters at managing with the bare minimum of possessions, while living in a totally independent way with the cosmos. Because there is of course no true ability to live in any self-contained way: one takes as one’s garb the earth, its waters, the sky. We are simply seeking a modern paradigm for this.

Found myself growing really exasperated with D. tonight. The dissonance between his assertions of nondualism and his constant disparagements of everyone around him is the salient feature of his discussion. As if there are two themes: Bhagavan (God) and the others (devils). I wonder if he is suffering from some form of paranoia (though his fears are actually well founded)? This does not go at all well with his philosophy. It would be better to acknowledge a failure to realize his understanding than to travel with this, pretending all the while that the universe is a figment. It’s obviously very real to him.

Slept poorly, with this and other thoughts. The “Good Night” anti-mosquito stuff gave me a headache. Read part of a Toma Persico article that Dorit sent, about his stay in Tiruvannamalai. It’s true, on first sight, what he says about the over-seriousness of many of the Western disciples, who look like gnarled pieces of wood. Persico quotes Alan Watts: Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

If the matter of liberation is not a personal thing, I wonder if it is actually important for there to be a mystical supramental realization of the truth, as long as one is acting according to the principle of interbeing, acting in a selfless, non-egoistic way?

From the perspective of the universe, this would seem to be more important than a half-baked, occasional semi-realization of the truth, or worse, a misguided vision. Because, from the point of view of universal well-being, it is not true that “nothing matters”. The universal does matter. Where this line of thinking falls down is that it is quite likely that one will make mistakes if the vision is not complete. But if one makes a sincere attempt to understand holism, and the interplay of forces, this is still likely to be more useful than, again, a half-baked mystical vision. Actually, holism is not “rocket science”. There is not a lot to understand, on a basic level. It is more true when it relates to the nitty-gritty of, say, our personal choices as consumers. But it is less true with regard to our interactions with people and nature at a direct level.

In Buddhism, this universal vision, or the acting according to the good of the whole, or the aligning of action with cosmic principles, is the wheel of dharma, the noble eightfold path. In Hinduism, it is similarly the duty of the individual to live life according to the principles of swa-dharma. But acting for the good of the whole is common to all the religions, with differing interpretation of what this actually means. Religions usually only need to take a wider view, beyond speciesism, to consider the good of the earth, in an age in which we are destroying it. It is this element of urgency which makes me think that we cannot afford to wait for mystical experience, but must rely upon our intelligence and act now.

The individual observer sees other individuals and neither are real, in the sense that neither are complete. The web that unites them, the substratum, is not seen or intuited. The substratum is interbeing. When the element of interbeing is there, the differences dissolve. The completion works like a cancellation, because what remains is consciousness without object. The danger is that it then appears that the universe is illusion. This is not so, because it actually does exist, though not in the incomplete way in which we observe it. So the state of apprehension of the interbeing actually carries the same danger of wrong perception as the normal perception of the world of differences. Both visions are flawed. One must not allow the world to disappear, as it were. It would be better to maintain even an intellectual or rational understanding of holism, because it would permit positive action, which is necessary in order to change our damaging influence upon the world caused by our wrong action. At the very least, spiritual practice must be based on thes understanding throughout, becasue the pitfalls, in this very subjective field, are great.

The question is whether the matrix of consciousness should be presented as a kind of forest, in which the trees have a common root system, each growing up, individually, from this unitary base, or rather like a system of objects within a common universal web. The latter is closest to representations of the universe; the cosmos of galaxies and star systems, each affected by forces such as gravity, magnetism, etc., so probably should be approved. No one cosmic body is acting independently; all are locked in a cosmic dance. This is the way in which we interact with each other, with nature, though there is the illusion of independence. The wrong vision is just this. And there is the tendency not to see the whole due to the infatuation with the individual components – or to see the whole and then not to see the individual. We fail to see the forest for the trees, or the trees for the forest. Either way, we should not search for an agent that is independent of the universe that is acted upon from within, though within and without are part of our illusion.