Found a quiet place on Arunachala hill to sit and meditate. I was reading a little The Divine Life of Sri Aurobindo this morning. It reinforced the idea that reality is a composite of name, form, existence, consciousness, bliss. It is not that reality is an illusion, but that the way we see it is illusion. It is so because we fail to see the divine part of it. We are unable to see that because we separate ourselves from it in a subject-object relationship. The more we are able to see the other as existing without that separation from self, the closer we are to seeing reality. When we grasp the non-separation, there is a transformation of consciousness, so that the five components of reality come together and give birth to a different understanding with supersedes the component parts. Then, there is no longer a universe such as we know it.

But I think the way is to become aware of the unseen parts, of which we are normally oblivious. I think this is not a process, necessarily, of looking within, but of seeing the stranger as oneself. The indication is that this would more closely resemble karma yoga, or, karma yoga might be conducive to developing such a vision.

The discipline is to gradually remove the individual frame of reference rather than dwell upon it; to remove the feeling of identity with a particular religion or nation. Learning to feel comfortable in different countries and environments, without any sense of belonging to them.

If time itself is an illusion, what is the numeration of years? Illusion or not, it was jet lag that kept me awake last night thinking about life, and not a concern for new year’s resolutions. Yet I decided three things:

1. There must be progress towards embracing the underlying unity.
2. How to correct the fallacy in perception that causes us to see a world of objects with ourselves as subject… the fallacy that has plagued our civilization from the beginning and has now grown to be of critical importance with our destruction of the biosphere? It’s hard to go from our normal insensitive and self-centered everyday behaviour towards this rational realization. Probably the way goes through the practical means of reducing our exploitation of people, animals or the earth itself for our selfish wants. It involves living with the bare necessary to sustain our existence, care in sourcing the products we use, love for those around us and sensitivity in our interaction with the earth and the creatures and humans with which we share it. The Biblical injunction ואהבת לרעך כמוך (love your companion as yourself) sounds preachy only as long as we insist on the unnatural separation of self from other, forgetting the underlying unity.
3. Work must be done henceforth in a spirit of non-doing, without pressure or effort.
   I don’t know what will come, but from now on, I will work in this way. The hours spent may be long, and I don’t live for enjoyment, but the work will be achieved without pressure or sense of effort. This is the way I work best; or rather this is the best way that work is achieved through me.
4. Entertainment is of no more use
   We become so addicted to activity that when there is nothing to do, we feel a need to fill all available time with something else. The silence between activities is there to be enjoyed. Rather than “killing time”, or filling time, why not just enjoy it by simply being?

The way of thinking of our current era has given emphasis to self-involvement, self importance. For this reason we have given obeisance to religious and political leaders and credence to their human-based ideologies and causes. My inclination is to chuckle instead. It is not that the individual lacks value, but that the value is transcendent. The individual’s greatness is the greatness of the undying universe. Each human expresses that greatness in the range of his uniqueness and the breadth of humanity’s diversity. The essential is not mortal. We owe no allegiance to ideas, leaders, nations, causes, priests, religions or their gods. Yet we cannot do other than remain loyal to our essence, the consciousness expressed through us, so uniquely and diversely. In living, as well as in dying we give testimony to the unceasing unfoldment of the divine, like the endless back and forward movement of waves on the shore. It is due to the conviction of our own self-importance that we so easily fall under the spell of leaders and are willing to lay down our lives to fulfill their dreams. Let the foolish give credence to the foolish. We have better things to do with our time; to lay in the warm sun listening to grass hoppers, or watching ants carry grains of corn to their nests are more worthy pursuits than participating in building empires or defending them. If we are unable to serve our essential nature, in a generosity of spirit, what is the purpose of accruing time, money or goods? The fulfillment of such service (of the essential) is the dissolution of all consideration of I and mine. We take part in the manifestation, the upheaval, the outpouring of all life. We own this process; this greatness is our greatness. And whether the name and form by which we are known dies today or lives another hundred years is rather trivial. Life itself is trivial if we think only of ourselves, or serve surrogates for the true essential greatness at the heart of our lives.

maiyannahmaiyannah wrote the following post:

I won’t suffer very long
It feels like it’s almost time

As for the rest of us, we can only be grateful that some of the best minds and creative people have been willing to suffer for so long in order to make our world better or richer in some way. We don’t deserve it. It often comes at a terrible cost. I have to ask myself whether or how much I would be willing to suffer in order to bring some benefit.

My role model has never been the Buddha, who struggled for so many years to understand the cause of suffering, and then invested even more time in helping to provide the remedy for it, through what’s referred to as his “therapeutic paradigm”. Buddha did more than any other person past or present to present a way of understanding and alleviate suffering.

But my role model is more the deformed imperfectionists of Lao Tsu and Chuang Tsu, who evaded suffering and persecution by melting into the background scenery, avoiding contention and strife, being fiercely independent, honest through subterfuge; useless to the world, but true to the Tao. Ursula K. Le Guin thinks the Taoists were natural anarchists. The Tao te Ching is the most inspiring book I’ve read, and I first read it at the impressionable age of 16, alongside Omar Khayyam and the Hermann Hesse books.

I hope Maiyannah overcomes whatever it is that is causing her to suffer in this way. Etty Hillesum is another person I keep meaning to read more of. It seems to me that like the Buddha she understood that it’s mainly about perspective. Early in her book she speaks about a leftist professor who was so convinced that the Nazis would be around for a whole generation that he simply took his life rather than have to deal with that. She couldn’t have known he was wrong, but she herself found a way of seeing goodness and value in the world even on her train to the death camp. I keep thinking of the gap between these two perspectives. Sumud is the answer of the Palestinians. Somehow they retain their buoyancy, for the most part, even after 70 odd years of oppression.

Life is a kind of school but not one in which the syllabus is specifically tailored for the student, I think. Suffering (as well as pleasure) is there in abundance, and we can learn important lessons from suffering. We can acquire the capacity for empathy and compassion, for example. But I don’t think, as I used to, that the pain level is necessarily turned up in conformity with our capacity to learn from it. Many people suffer terribly all their lives without learning a thing from it.

Suffering is a kind of rich loam from which one can evolve spiritually, just as a lotus can only grow from mud. But the same soil can also nurture bad seeds. Life presents us with circumstances and lets us do what we want with them. It doesn’t necessarily give us the right circumstances to suit our disposition. But if we are sensitive not just to the circumstances, but to the lessons they potentially carry for us, there will be an evolution in our ability to understand life. And it will seem to us that we have been given exactly what we need; and in fact for one who is capable of such learning, this is always true.

Meaning is not inherent to reality (i.e. pain may come to us at random and does not target us specifically). And wisdom is not a matter of investing life with meaning (i.e. we do not need to adopt the superstition that we are being kindly mentored by our reality, and therefore the circumstances themselves are meaningful). The scale of meaning is a kind of human measure. Actually the universe is neither meaningful nor meaningless. If we can look back at the universe with the same dispassionate eye with which it seemingly regards us, our perception and frame of reference will begin to change. The view that we are victims or beneficiaries of an agency that is external to us begins to change too.

Lately I’ve been reading a translation of Sarmad by Paul Smith, who seems to have translated almost the whole body of Persian language Sufi poetry into English – tons of material. Paul Smith is a disciple of the 20th century spiritual teacher Meher Baba, whose center near Ahmednagar in Maharashtra I’ve visited. Interestingly the small town of Ahmednagar is also the place where emperor Aurangzeb (or Alamgir) died. Aurangzeb was responsible for Sarmad’s execution; a year or so after he had his elder brother and rival to the throne Darah Shikoh killed. Dara Shikoh, like Sarmad, was also a sufi and a composer of poems. He is also known for translating the Upanishads. A great man but a poor leader of men, unfortunately.

I don’t much care for Paul Smith’s translations, unfortunately, at least not his rubaiyat of Sarmad. He attempts to follow the traditional rubaiyat format of rhyming the first, second and fourth line, as Edward Fitzgerald did more successful with Omar Khayyam back in the 19th century. But whereas Fitzgerald employed blank verse, Smith’s translations are almost like prose, except for the rhyme at the end of the line. This convention doesn’t work very well, in my opinion.

This is what I occupy myself with instead of worrying about citizenship laws, impending wars and other troubles. Sarmad would feel right at home I think, or not at home:
“Until your last breath
This world won’t be your friend.”
I feel a need to write some sort of manual about how to spiritually survive the current dark age. It would be full of quotations from Lao Tzu, Ashtavakra, Sarmad… Lao Tzu was probably the most practical survivalist. His teachings provided the philosophical basis of Chinese martial arts, but he also showed people how to stay out of harm’s way. In T’ang dynasty China, many a disgraced courtier would find asylum by adopting a new life far from the emperor in the forests and mountains south of modern day Xian. Even today, folks who are disgruntled with modern day China and want to lead a simpler lifestyle are reportedly finding refuge in these same mountains. There have been a couple of films about these modern day hermits. However, the spiritual survival about which the sufis and vedantins (and Lao Tsu himself) speak is more important than merely living out one’s days.

O Sarmad!
Shorten your complaint.
Of two choices, take one.
Either surrender your body
To the will of your friend
Or offer
to sacrifice your soul.

At the time of his death, he was perfectly ready. He “looked straight into his executioner’s eyes, and spoke the following words:

Come
o come, I implore you!
In whatever guise you come
I know you well.

Aurangzeb, on the other hand, lived almost to the age of 90, but did not know peace. He had on his conscience the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men. From his deathbed he wrote:

I know not who I am, where I shall go, or what will happen to this sinner full of sins. . . . My years have gone by profitless. God has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognized his light. . . . There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is gone, but only the skin is left. … I have greatly sinned, and know not what torments await me. . . . May the peace of God be upon you.