Nikolai1

Great because it was written by me Please feel free to like and to share! http://www.onreligion.co.uk/an-unlikely-saint-sri-ramana-maharshi/ Best wishes Nick

Interesting although you got the incisor thing the wrong way round!

I think a major distinction is those desires that are direct and authentic, and those that are learned. For example, we may imagine that we like something, like sports cars, but what we actually like is the thought of ourselves as the kind of person who drives a sports car. We may not love the sports car dirrectly and in itself, but we imagine that with the sports car we will get love and approval. One person will love weight-lifting because of the direct energetic impact inside their body. Another will love weight-lifting because it gives them a certain body, and this body willl attract a certain type of female, and with this female on our arm we will get the respect and the admiration of others. And the woman and the sports car as a combo will get me loads of this. So, yes, there is a kind of spectrum. As we develop we find that we shed more and more the inauthentic desires and are left with those that are closest to our essential nature. This process, by the way, is not easy. We come to see that our friends and our work may be based on desires that are inauthentic. Our motivation is withdrawn from all these structures that make up our lives and the changes that come about can be very scary. It is a real challenge to actually know what it is WE, as individuals, actually like to do. And it can come as a surprise when we realise just how inauthentic so many of our desires were. Many people are incapable of going through this process of individuation. They aren't ready yet, not in this lifetime. Their pleasures will be provided entirely be the cultural milieu they find themselves in. Whatever song is topping the charts will be the song they like the most. Whatever job their dad did will be a perfectly good job for them. Whatever beer his mates drink will be the perfect beer for him. This is the herd man, and he may pass his entire life without hearing the clarion call for Self. And he'll be entirely content, and his contentedness will be of the Tao. But he will not be aware of that, he will not be conscious, and he will not know the pleasure of ownership. The pleasure of being the author and the creator of his life.

You're kind of right! Pleasure is neither tangible nor intangible but a basic property of reality. It is reality, felt. Now the problem comes when we symbolise this fundamental pleasure in the form of, say, a sports car and then go seeking the symbol. If someone scrapes a key along our sports car we imagine that our pleasure has been spoiled. This is the illusion. Pleasure cannot be found nor lost, ultimately.

When it comes to the inner peace, it feels like we deliberately tune into it, and so the term 'seeking' is understandable and relevant. Other times, it feels like the peace imposes itself upon us and we are passive recipients of it.

I would say that seeking pleasure is natural and inevitable. The problem comes when we seek pleasure in the things that shall cease and pass away, which are also the same kinds of pleasures that can't be shared. Our pleasure seeking then becomes competitive, and our gain is another's loss. There is a higher form of pleasure to seek, and we must identify what this is within ourselves. To cultivate this pleasure is the highest benevolence, because the more we find it the more it becomes a force in life. It magnifies through us, and radiates out, and spreads to others.

I think this question becomes baffling when we imagine that the Tao is some sort of cosmic puppet-master. Then it seems that everyone and everything is already following the True Way and there can be no such thing as practice or realisation. In fact, it can alos make us think that the more unconscious we are, the more purely the Tao will be able to act through us. Therefore the Average American, with all the myriad desires can seem closer to the Way by virtue of their unconsciousness. The Tao however is not separate from us. It awakens and becomes elegant and efficient through us. But when we are unconscious, then so is the Tao, and a kind of chaos reigns. This is the human society that appals so many spirituallt sensitive people. Normal everday pleasures are an intimation of the cosmic bliss we eventually feel more and more. To begin with, this bliss is only felt in conjunction with some kind of outer symbol: the hot bubble bath, the good wine, the flashy car. Through these symbols we are able to feel the bliss of the Tao through a kind of ritual. Most Average Americans, Germans, Chinese Outer Mongolians gain their bliss in this way. As we grow in consciousness we no longer need these external symblic triggers to bliss. We discover that bliss is always there, in the background: a kind of subtly pulsing peace. Furthermore, we discover (and this is a hard discovery) that once we notice this constant bliss the old symbolic methods stop working so well. Even our favourite place in the forest starts to fail us. We must start to seek the bliss in the absence of the symbols if we are to enjoy it in its fullest. This is the start of practice, and leads to a true authentic asceticism. The attempt at asceticism while we are still unconscious of the constant bliss, i.e by emulation of the behaviour of the awakened always leads in catastrophe. A man must have his bliss! Nevertheless this unskilful practice forms to basis of, for example, the expectation that a cathlic priest must be celibate. If we are spirituallly nourished by inner bliss, celibacy will come naturally. So to answer this question, the Average American is already following the Tao and enacting the Tao through their behaviour. But there is a lot further for them to go!

Real children write actual letters to Santa Claus. They pay for real postage stamps and post them in real post boxes. Real, paid postal workers collect these letters and fly them to depots in Norway and Finland, This is real economic activity. When children stop believing in Santa Claus, they stop writing to him. They withdraw from the economic system they once participated in with full commitment. The mature, awakened adult faces a predicament. He no longer believes in the myths of his peers: the myths that are the foundation of nearly all adult industry. What is left for him to work for?

But the builder was already doing proper work in the first place. Most of the industry in the developed world is geared towards producing and providing goods and services that become immediately obsolete upon awakening. Do I need to go on holiday to Egypt? Do I need a travel agent to show me round? Do I need a plane to fly me there? Do I need a hotel to stay in while there? Do I need an insurance agent to insure me against the agent and the plane and the hotel? Home is my Luxor, I the Pharoah who dwells there... And the list goes on. The world is chock full of work geared towards making incomplete, unhappy and aimless people feel less this way. The awakened individual cannot particpate in this anymore. The need is gone, the passion gone. So how does he particpate? I teaching the only course open?

I do understand why you say this, and it reminds me of this very Zen dictum: 'Each moment is the Universe.' The trouble is, your words will strike most ears as an argument for a 'plurality of Absolutes' - a contradiction in terms. I think at the intellectual level the problem is resolved when we assume the Absolute to be a transcendent yet ontolgically empty category. Then all the moments are just instances of the Absolute, and only relatively true at their own level. The Absolute therefore both contains the relative and is in fact not separate from the relative (and it is this latter case which allows the word to be an absolute, as you argue).

In this thread the belief in Santa Claus was an example of illusion translating into real economic reality. 99% of human industry is based on the same kind of illusion. All the myriad goods and services are meaningless to the awakened person who has found their true wealth on the inside. When children stop believing in Santa they stop writing to him. What can the awakened adult do? Unless he participates he will perish. If he wishes not to perish he must presumably engage in that economic activity that is consistent with his wish. Must the awakened man become a farmer, a producer of food, and a builder of shelter?

It is the internal conceptual abstraction that differs across person and time, which is why the external perceptual concrete (the word) gets called 'relative'. A word without internal abstraction is just a vibration in the air, like the rustling of the leaves. It is the fact that it gives rise to mental concepts that defines this vibration as the word. If we are truly to absolutise the word, we must lose the duality of external and internal. Then the word can find its place in the stream of reality...a vibration in the air followed by an image and a feeling and perhaps a louder vibration. What we can't do is deny the relativism of the word and try to hold on to its function as an event that mist be internally decoded. Here we become irrational, as all philsophy since de Saussure has shown us.

Indeed, but the information communicated is not constrained by the words coffee table. For example, i say to my boss coffee table. He understands that I want to step out the office and discuss something more personal, more confidential. It is our 'code'. The person working for the company nexy door would miss all this richness. I say coffee table, he thinks I'm suggesting coffee! How vulgar! Now when it comes to the absolute realm of spirituality. It turns out that this notion cannot be shared or communicated at all. There are no gradations of subjectivity. There is no possibillity that we both agree at all Why is this? Because the attempted communication is itself more of the absolute. The signifier and the signified are both exactly and precisely the same thing. In fact not only this, but the speaker and the listener are both the absolute so there is not and cannot be any notion of communication because there are no separate locutors.

Your reference to bovine excrement seems somewhat out of context. How did we get from discussing the relative and the absolute to bovine excrement? I'm left wondering if you are speaking in metaphors?

The word has no final meaning. It can mean different thing to different people, and to the same person in different contexts. Meaning comes in the uniqueness of the moment, hence the truth of a word or statement is only ever relatively true.

Physicists can't conceive anything 'in fact', all they have is theory. The physicist cannot see this - they must imagine that their theories correspond to reality. They then get very confused when light seems to be both a wave and a particle. They cannot see that the wave is what we see when we look through the theoretical paradigm of context; the particle is what we see when we appraoch through the theoretical paradigm that is singularity divorced from context. There is no paradox there whatsover and they would see that if they understood that reality is not the same as their theory. It's basically the autistic mind. Physics is the science of the autistic, and a certain autism is a benefit to the pursuit of that science. The autistic person cannot get their head round alternative perspectives. To the autistic person things are as they appear to them, and the perspective they have taken. But of course they are not aware that they have taken a perspective. When the physicist realises that both the wave and the particle are what we see when we have taken a perspective, they could not continue to be physicists. They have transcended the science.

So phycicists don't believe that the universe commenced with a big bang and then proceeded from there?

The trouble is that we think the past is something that actually happened. Reality isn't like this. Your marriages are created afresh each time you think of them. It's more accurate to say that your marriages are still happening, than to say that they have happened and ended. Reality is much more fluid than our notions of time allow. Nothing was ever fixed in the history books. History is a project being undertaken in the present moment, and as Emerson said, We must taken ownershiop of time, and stop being its slave. If you wish to cancel your marriages you may, but perhaps the furthest you can go is to never think of them.

The difference between the present and the past is one of attribution. It is a judgement imposed upon the mental imagery. The broken cup is on the floor; the intact counterpart is a mental image. But this mental image can be said to be from the future or the past, either works and both make perfect sense. To say that a mental image of the cup is from the past is exactly the same as saying that the coffee it contained was too strong. It is a judgement. To the individual with true perception, retrocausality is the same as causality. But to the physicist who assumes (totally on faith!) a cosmos that started at moment X, and has grown older ever since, retrocausality will be a blatant impossibility. But as I often point out: we aren't physicists here. We are sages and our wisdom goes higher than physics is capable of. Therefore live retrocausality; see the truth of it; feel how the present can and does shape the past.

As we look at the shards of cup on the floor, in the rawness of that moment, all we have alongside is a mental representation of the intact cup. A mental item exists out of time, There is no possible way of affirming whether the mental image of the intact cup is from the past or from the future. A memory and a prediction are of the same ontological nature. Therefore, any cause is also an effect - cause and effect are just two sides of the same coin. If we imagine that time's arrow flows in one direction, from intact cups --> borken cups we see only one side of the coin. We must also see that broken cups reform and regroup. In physics this second side of the coin is slowly gaining currency (pardon the pun) with the notion of retrocausality. Elsewhere the two sides are alienated into separate disciplines. Physics assumes entropy. Biology assumes increased organisation (negentropy and of course, evolution).

When we exercise our will power we are imagining a future reality. We want scenario x to happen, and we will use our will in order to shape events and make it happen. But there is another way of imagining future reality which doesn't involve what we think of as the will. This is when we predict something about the future, but the prediction is of an event that we imagine we have no control over. For example, I desire to start playing tennis in the evening but at the moment it is still too dark. In three weeks the hour will change and eveining tennis will become possible, exactly as I wish. In the tennis scenario I desire an outcome and confidently predict it will happen, and yet I do not suppose that I will the event because I imagine that it is out of my control. I propose that spiritual development unites these two kinds of desires into the same thing. In other words, what we will to happen is also what we predict will happen. Or to put it another way, we more and more find ourselves wanting those things that will certainly happen. This doesn't appear at first like personal creation of reality. It seems like nothing other than the realistic adjustment of our desires to the natural order of things, a philsophy not unlike ancient stoicism. But I propose that we can find ourselves both wanting and predicting certain events that may be completely at odds with what normally happens - i.e. the miracle. It is not exactly correct to say that we create the miracle; it is more correct to say that we become incapable of wanting something that won't happen. Therefore our will is also a prediction. Any dichotomy between our inner will and outer constraint has totally broken down and we are left with a mode of living that transcends both. This is how I understand wu wei. The miracle is therefore not a miracle to the wu wei mindset. It is only a miracle to the person who did not see it coming and sees only its deviance from normal events. The sage is hesitant to claim authorship of the miracle, and yet at the same time shall recognise that the event is beautiful, auspicious, totally unexpected and would have been impossible without his conscious involvement. Why then do miracles happen? The miracle is the sudden appearance in the everyday world of the harmony that is already above the world. The sage, who has been able to adjust his will to that of the world partakes of that harmony and is therefore able to introduce it into the world. He has become conscious of the harmony, and becoming conscious of it is the guarantee that it will happen. To be unconscious of the harmony it to have desires that you believe can't happen. In order to gain the harmony, either stop having the desires or stop disbelieving that your will is separate to the natural order of things.

Yes, and of course not just bringing the automatic inner into consciousness but also the automatic outer. The automatic outer is understanding the significance of the planets and the spheres; the processes of nature; the moral aspect of physical laws; the equivalence of physical laws like gravity and emotional laws such as love; the correspondence between the macro and the micro - the planet and the person The artists and the poets and the astrologers are ahead in the is respect very often, and the creative powers of this group are prototypes of the sage's wu wei.

And do you try to explain them? Because that to me is the key difference. Going back to the placebo. Medicine acknowledges what is happening but makes no attempt to explain it. Were they to try, everything would have to be rethought, from scratch. A massive, daunting project that the profession shirks. Easier to carry on as if they understand what is what. But when we come to understand how a miracle might work, or deja vu, or the placebo we start to get a conscious handle on it And when we have a handle on something it is able to be brought under the jurisdiction of the will. This is what I see the wu wei sage doing.

Marblehead, have you ever experienced the uncanny, the miraculous?

When I talk about emptiness I mean that experience of non-duality - where the sound of your own heartbeat is as 'out there' and as distant as rhythmic thunder; where the candle is known and understood so intimately that you feel the purpose of its movement...and where 'you' are nothing other than the locationless vision that sees all this. I think until we have experienced this, inner and outer, mind and matter, spiritual and worldly and all the other pairs of opposites will remain separate and unhealed.