The Pilgrim Soul: A Path to the Sacred Transcending World Religions
140
The Pilgrim Soul: A Path to the Sacred Transcending World Religions
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780835631808 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 09/18/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 140 |
| Sales rank: | 891,027 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Pilgrim Soul
A Path to the Sacred Transcending World Religions
By Ravi Ravindra
Theosophical Publishing House
Copyright © 2014 Ravi RavindraAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8356-3180-8
CHAPTER 1
Have You a Pilgrim Soul?
Have you a pilgrim soul? Have you a soul that longs to glimpse the mystery, that keeps beckoning but which never wholly reveals itself? Are you a pilgrim in search of something—something not quite definable, though we may call it eternity?
Eternity—one can hardly utter the word without wonder, reflection, and inward silence. Whenever contemplation deepens and thought matures, what concerns serious people is eternity.
The closing pages of Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf include the following dialog:
"Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death."
"Nothing else?"
"Yes, eternity."
"You mean a name, and fame with posterity?"
"No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value?
And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?"
"No, of course not."
"Then it isn't fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the schoolmasters. No, it isn't fame.
It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too many could not continue to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth."
Eternity does not refer to an extension of time or to an everlasting continuation of time; it pertains to the timeless, to a dimension of being, of consciousness and perception, which is outside time. Everything that can be specified and defined belongs to the dimension of time and space. The laws of causality, which allow us to predict and control events, are all within the realm of time and do not apply to the eternal.
The eternal cannot be comprehended or possessed, though we may feel the need to seek it. It remains a mystery—not one that can be solved, but one that contains greater and greater depth, deeper and deeper truth, as in T. S. Eliot's poem, "The Dry Salvages," from Four Quartets:
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The major concern of wisdom, which is itself timeless, but which has been since ancient times, is the point of intersection of the timeless with time. It is not opposed to time or the things of time. As the Maitri Upanishad (6.15) succinctly says, "There are verily two forms of the Vastness and the Real [Brahman], time [kala] and timelessness [akala]." Wisdom is concerned with freedom from the hold of time, from the conditionings of the past and the imaginings of the future. In that state of being, one can act freely and freshly in time and see that nirvana is kala-vimukta. Nirvana is freedom from time, in time. Thus, wisdom, ancient or modern or future, acts in time to assist the transformation of anyone who wishes and is able and willing to pay the price, so that one can act in time while being anchored in eternity.
* * *
The blue god of the mysterious vastness, sometimes called Krishna, makes love to the pale Radha of time and fecundates her with multiplicity and decorates her with wondrous ornaments!
A long time ago, and now, Krishna and Radha are living by a riverbank as householders. One day they receive a message that the sage Durvasa, well-known for his austerities and short temper, is on the other bank with a thousand of his followers, demanding to be fed. As proper householders, Krishna and Radha undertake to do their part in the maintenance of order (dharma) by preparing food for the mendicants. When Radha is ready to carry the food across to the other shore, she sees the river in full spate and wonders how she can get across. Krishna says, "Go to the river and say, 'If Krishna is eternally celibate, O River, subside.'" Radha well knows the power of uttering the true word but is this the true word? Of all people, she ought to know! She smiles to herself, goes to the river, and asks it to subside if Krishna is eternally celibate. The river subsides. She goes across and takes the food to the sage Durvasa, who is well pleased and eats heartily along with his disciples. When it is time for Radha to return, she again sees the river in full spate and asks the sage for help. The sage says, "Go to the river and say, 'If Durvasa is eternally fasting, O River, subside.'" Radha had just seen the sage eat. She smiles to herself, goes to the river, and asks it to subside if Durvasa is eternally fasting. The river subsides and Radha returns home to Krishna—where time and the eternal intersect.
The World Is with Us, Always and Forever
We can see why the spiritual traditions, which are naturally concerned with wisdom, place so much emphasis on paying attention to the present moment, on being here and now. Now is the point of intersection of time and eternity. According to Wittgenstein, "If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present." In practice, one sees the difficulty of staying in the present, the eternal now, in the face of the strong momentum of time. The greatest weapon Mara (the deadly tempter and obstructer) has, in his war against anyone wishing to wake up from the hypnotic sleep of fear and craving in which we all live, is time and temporal power. The enchanting imaginings that transport us away from the now and the real consist of dreams of the future and revisions of the past.
Cultural styles come and go; we accumulate more or less knowledge about this or that; we live for a little longer or a little shorter time. All this does not matter very much, for the depth is in an altogether different dimension. To be sure, there are cultural styles, institutional forms, or varieties of education that can be more conducive to certain depths, whereas others are less conducive. But the quality of this insight, the lack of comprehension of it, and the general societal conspiracy to evade it are not essentially different today than they were in the days of the Buddha or the Christ, nor are they any different in America than in China. This fact is intimately connected with the well-nigh universal human condition: our occupation with the superficial aspects of ourselves and of our surroundings. By confining ourselves to this limited aspect of the whole, we acquire the impression that we are in control. This results in the assumption that we are the central agents in our lives. This soon leads to self-occupation, which is really ego-occupation, the chief characteristic of the persistent dream about ourselves and about others. This is true for cultures as well as for individuals.
All social reforms seem essentially to be attempts to rearrange the contents of our dream by altering the social institutions that maintain a particular set of the conditions that shape larger or smaller cultural units. Different cultural units have different conditions, some more pleasant than others, but they remain at the same level. What is needed is a questioning of the notions that hold us, a questioning of the very state of dreaming, a questioning of ourselves in our entirety. We need to undertake a thorough investigation of ourselves, from the most superficial level, where each one of us is completely separate and distinct from the other, to the profoundest level, in which we participate in the mystery that "all there is is Krishna" (Bhagavad Gita 7:19).
Such questioning is too radical for us to bear for any length of time—radical in the literal meaning of the word, namely, what concerns the very roots: the roots of our existence, the roots of our being, and the roots of our possibilities. It is because we wish to escape the radical depths that we engage in arranging and rearranging the surfaces. Lest it should become clear to us how hollow we are, we undertake to reform others according to some ideology or to convert them to some belief system or a new paradigm. It is much easier to begin to teach others than to realize in our core that at a very fundamental level we do not know and cannot know, as long as we are what we are.
The primary question is one of being rather than of knowing, of transformation rather than information, of freedom from oneself—from that part of oneself that is a participant in the social dream and therefore lives basically by the operating principles of society, namely, reward and punishment, craving and fear.
The world and the times will sometimes be better and sometimes worse, but there is always change. Whether the time is short or long is not the important factor. What matters is how we are and from what depth we engage with the world. We live within the world of material objects and ideas, but we need to be constantly on guard that possessions and ideas do not imprison us. Wisdom consists, in part, in not building a psychological prison while building a physical house to live in. We need to remember that "every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God" (Hebrews 3:4). Real freedom and right internal order have to be continually regained, from now to now. They do not persist merely by a mechanical momentum from the past to the future, but they can be discovered again and again within the realm of time.
Those who seek the dimension not opposed to, but different from, that of time and achievement have a pilgrim soul. They seek to enter the dimension of eternity. Eternal life is not a life of endless duration, one that lasts forever in time; it is a state of being in time, accompanied by the qualities of clear perception and love. The everlasting is not timeless. Anything that is everlasting is still in the dimension of time, whereas timelessness transcends this, for the category of time does not apply to it.
To be a pilgrim is to be a searcher—a searcher for entry into the dimension of eternity. This cannot be known in the ways by which we usually know; it cannot be reached by the paths we have already understood. To set out on this journey, we must know that we do not know. This is not a celebration of ignorance, but a call for innocence, for an openness to what is and a freedom from all that is known. This freedom is also a freedom from fear, for the simple reason that what is truly unknown can never be a source of fear. Fear is created by an imagined or expected loss of what we know. The unknown is a source of mystery; the only feeling it can create is that of wonder. And fear and wonder cannot coexist.
But this state of wonder is less frequently available than we wish; innocence is far too often sullied by cleverness and by knowledge driven by our wish to control. It seems that we need to work at unknowing, to pay for owning nothing, and to make efforts to reach a state of effortlessness.
Make no mistake about this, if there is anyone among you who fancies himself wise—wise, I mean, by the standards of the passing age—he must become a fool to gain true wisdom. For the wisdom of this world is folly in God's sight. (I Corinthians 3:18–19)
Pilgrimage—Journey of the Soul
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
—T. S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quartets
We must start precisely from where we are, in the midst of our life, in the world, in this place, at this time. Our life is a symphony of which we are the conductors. The later notes and phrases are not going to be any more authentic or sacred than the ones we are now playing—unless we ourselves are transformed. Their quality will depend largely on what we now try and on what intention and awareness we now bring. Our ordinary daily life is the very arena of our spiritual effort.
Spiritual practice involves the transformation of the whole of ourselves—body, mind, and heart. For this an impartial self-knowledge is necessary, with an awareness of all of our contradictions, fears, and wishes. Daily life is the material for a true self-knowledge. It is precisely where we live. Our life is a hologram: any part of it contains the whole and can reveal the whole. So our gestures, posture, or tone of voice, our behavior toward animals, or the way we interact with our neighbors—any of these is a fit subject for investigation and can reveal a great deal about our inner selves.
Pilgrimage is the journey of our soul. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna emphasizes the importance of nishkama karma, "desireless (or selfless) action." However, our usual life is largely full of desires without purposive action (nishkarma kama). The whole process of daily life as a spiritual practice consists in the continuing transformation from the inattentive state of nishkarma kama to a mindful state of nishkama karma, the state in which "the sage does nothing, but nothing is left undone" (Tao te Ching 38). Thus ordinary daily life itself is transformed, because the person who is living it is different. We continue cooking, washing dishes, putting the garbage out, lecturing, meeting friends, caring for our children, but all of these acts then are fresh in each enactment. But mindfulness is not achieved or finished once and for all time; such a state needs to be renewed again and again in each moment.
A Hasidic pupil was asked whether he visited his master to hear his words of wisdom. "No," came the answer, "I want to see how he ties his shoelaces." And when Krishna speaks to Arjuna about a person of steady wisdom (sthitaprajña), Arjuna asks not what sort of wonderful ideas such a person has or what his theology or philosophy is, but, "What is the sign of a person with steady insight, one who is in samadhi? How does a sage of stable understanding speak, how does he sit, how does he walk?" (Bhagavad Gita 2.54).
Our daily life consists of walking, talking, sitting, tying our shoelaces. The quality of these activities and of all our relationships reveals and reflects our selves. It is an expression of our search for and our connection with mindfulness and steady wisdom. We cannot disregard where we now are and what we are now doing; we need to search for the real in this very place and in these activities. As Krishnamurti said, "The infinite is not beyond the finite, but it is in the finite. The eternal is not beyond the transient, but it is in the transient. The immortal is not beyond the mortal, but it is the mortal. The immortal, the eternal and the infinite is thyself."
The eternal is to be found in time, right here, right now, not over there, not later. There is nothing ordinary about the events in our daily life, but an intensity of engagement with those events is usually lacking. The three well-known sights that Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, saw—namely, an old person, a diseased person, and a dead body—are not so strange to most of us. There is hardly an adult who has not seen all of these three sights. But for us it does not create the sort of psychological revolution it did for the Buddha. For him these sights prompted a response of total renunciation of life as he had lived it until then. He set out in search of that which is not bound in the domain of time, where everything is, in principle, subject to change, death, and decay. He discovered that the way of freedom from the tyranny of time is steadiness of attention, quiet mindfulness, and constant vigilance.
Vigilance is the abode of eternal life;
inattention is the abode of death.
Those who are vigilant do not die;
the heedless are as if dead already.
—Dhammapada 21
The search in time for a state that is free of time is a mystery. This is not a who-done-it kind of mystery that can be solved by the discovery of additional data or a missing clue by smart sleuthing. This is a mystery not because something is missing, but because something is overfull. It cannot be solved, but we can contact subtler levels of being—of body, mind, and heart—where it is dissolved. This mystery is like a Zen koan. The solution is not a matter of having a published solution to the koan; what is needed is a breakthrough of consciousness that is naturally reflected in the way we talk, stand, or walk.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Pilgrim Soul by Ravi Ravindra. Copyright © 2014 Ravi Ravindra. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Editorial Note,
Preface,
1. Have You a Pilgrim Soul?,
2. Spiritual Quest,
3. Divergence of Religions,
4. Pilgrim on the Path,
Notes,
Bibliography,
About the Author,