Still the Mind Page 3

  All of the vegetables understand this, and so from their point of view they are very highly evolved beings. Perhaps they don’t consider us inferior beings, and just regard us as something different, but we are very unfair to vegetables. When at last a human being approaches the end of life and lapses into a coma, we say, “Poor old so-and-so, he’s just a vegetable.” Or when somebody is lazy, we say, “They’re just vegetating.”

  Now that shows a lack of compassion toward vegetables. The word “compassion” means to feel with, or to have passion with. If you have compassion for vegetables, or for flies, or mushrooms, or viruses, what it means is that you have put yourself in their position. When you begin to really empathize, you discover that they think of themselves as people, and they have just as much right to think that they are civilized and cultured as you and I do.

  So what does that do to our perception of an ordered universe? Think about it for a moment in human terms. For one thing, most of the people we call primitive are far less violent and less diabolical than we are as a society. They live more peaceable lives, and even though the tools they use are not as developed or complex as ours, these are very dignified, civilized people. They certainly are not savage.

  Many primitive peoples look at us with grave concern. They don’t regard us as civilized at all. Instead they view us as a rather serious menace to the planet, because we are out of touch with the ecology of nature, and tend on the whole to be extraordinarily miserable. Some of the richest places I know of are full of wealthy people who are really amazingly miserable because, despite their tremendous resources, they are always worrying about their health, their taxes, politics, or losing their money. You can always worry about something if you are the worrying type, and it doesn’t matter how rich you are or how poor you are.

  A PLACE CALLED YOU

  As you carefully observe the cycles of life, a very strange kind of relativity begins to take root in your consciousness. Everywhere on a sphere is the same place, because there is as much east of you as there is west of you, and by the same logic, any point on the surface of the sphere is the center of the circle. Furthermore, if we live in a curved space-time continuum, any planet can be regarded as the center of the whole universe, and therefore any person on a planet stands in the situation of God — as that circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. So when you want to become something more than you are, different from what you are, or higher than where you think you are, all that means is that you haven’t discovered where you are, and you are under the illusion that there is somewhere else that you ought to be besides here.

  What we are engaging in here is a journey to the place where we are, and I would like to describe to you some of the peculiarities of this journey. It is a sort of Alice in Wonderland story, because it is full of paradoxes.

  If I say, “We are going on a journey to where we are, a journey to the center of the universe and to the middle of space and time, and it’s a place called you,” people will invariably begin to pass judgment about one’s progress along the way. They will say things like, “I think this person is more aware than somebody else. He’s more there than so-and-so is.”

  Then we begin to think about the stages one goes through in getting to be more where they are than they were before. You find this particularly in sophisticated circles, where people are concerned with spiritual and psychological development, and with religion. Some very curious games are played, and many of them are forms of spiritual one-upmanship. People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

  PASSING JUDGMENTS

  Suppose we see somebody who has a reputation, either deserved or undeserved, for being “spiritually evolved.” That is the sort of phrase that is usually used. But if they get influenza and feel very sick, people shake their heads and say, “If so-and-so were really spiritual, they wouldn’t be affected by sickness.”

  We have a funny notion in our heads that truly spiritual people are made of cast iron, that they are not sensitive, so that if you bang them about it won’t affect them. But as the great Sixth Patriarch of China pointed out, you must learn to distinguish between a living Buddha and a stone Buddha, because if a buddha was simply one who was not affected by anything, then lumps of wood and pieces of stone would be Buddhas. And perhaps they are in their own way, but that wasn’t the point he was making. His point was that if you think that the greatest ideal in life is to be invulnerable, then you are on your way to becoming geological rather than spiritual.

  This kind of spiritual geology is very prevalent if you know spiritual people as well as I do. I perpetually hear tales of people insisting that “my guru’s better than yours.” This goes on insufferably, whether it is my minister, my church, my society, or my own organization. I have heard all the reasons why, and I have heard people putting down other teachers and gurus, saying how dreadful it is that such and such a Zen master made them do so-and-so. Or we hear of the yogi who is a drunk, or sleeps with his students, or gambles, or drives cars too fast.

  A great many spiritual people in this country are actually crypto-Protestants and still believe strongly in the Protestant ethic. Therefore they pass all of these judgments, despite the fact that the founder of the Christian religion said, “Judge not that you be not judged.”

  ALL THE DIFFERENT PERFORMANCES OF THE UNIVERSE

  If you look at all the religions and all the different kinds of practices that people are doing in the same way that you look at different kinds of vegetables and different kinds of flowers and insects and butterflies, you will see that while yogis are assuming one perspective and Baptists are assuming another, what they are all really doing is a different kind of dance — and you can accept this, and look at it with absolute amazement, and say, “Wow, look at all these different performances this universe is doing.”

  If you do this, you tend to stop griping and arguing about which one is the right one. Of course, you may not accept all of the performances entirely, you may not agree with their points of view. I must admit that I have some prejudices. I don’t like the flavor of some Bible Belt religions, because I find them exceedingly depressing. I also don’t like boiled onions; they’re distasteful as well.

  On the other hand, I can worship with the Roman Catholics, and the Episcopalians, and Theosophists, and Hindus, and Muslims, and feel perfectly at ease because I find that they are all doing the same thing in different and fascinating ways. Sometimes I draw the line, but I know when I do that it is nothing more than a personal prejudice, and I am entitled to some because I am human.

  After all, to be human you have to have within you a touch of rascality. When God created Adam, he put in him just a touch of the wayward spirit, in the same way that one adds a little salt to a stew. If this slight oddity, this bit of unpredictability, had not been there, nothing would ever have happened, because Adam would never have tasted the apple.

  A PINCH OF RASCALITY

  Once, Carl Jung felt that he had met a man with no human failings at all, and he was terribly disturbed, because it made him feel guilty. He thought that he should probably take a closer look at himself. Then a day or two later Jung met the man’s wife, and he ceased to worry about it. It wasn’t because she had said, “You should know my husband is very difficult to live with.” That wasn’t the story at all. Instead, the wife embodied all the things that were repressed in her husband, because when you live together that intimately you begin to share your psychic life. So if one becomes too much of a light, their partner may grow compensatory and become a shadow, and vice versa. So there has to be the element of rascality — but not too much, just a pinch of it.

  When I come across somebody who does not appear to have it, especially so-called spiritual people who are very pure and sincere, I always suspect they are unconscious of human nature. There is something about these solemn purists that makes me feel uncomfortable, because I like people I can let my hair down with.

  THE HIERARCHY OF L
IFE

  You may find this is disconcerting, however, because then you begin to wonder, “Is there no perfect human being? Isn’t there somebody up there, a great being who we can all look up to and respect, or are saints and saviors pretty much like anyone else?”

  When you look closely at the idea of the hierarchy of life, you realize that even someone as remarkable as Jesus Christ — who from a Buddhist point of view would be considered a great bodhisattva — can emerge at any level. According to the Buddhist idea of reincarnation, we have all occupied every position in the hierarchy, or on the Wheel of Becoming, as the Buddhists call it, since the image of time they use is a wheel. In this view, by moving around the wheel, you eventually realize that every position to which you can shift is the same position you were always in. While you are shifting you may feel there is a change going on, but once you have settled into your new position, it feels like any other settled position always felt. From the inside we know what it feels like to have a settled position because from time to time we can change — but, as the French say, the more it changes, the more it remains the same.

  We who live in a fidgety culture are apt to feel that this is an awfully boring philosophy, and that we are not going to get anywhere because there is no real progress. But, on the other hand, suppose there is a possibility of real advancement and improvement. Use your imagination to the best of your ability, and figure out exactly, and in detail, where you would rather be, and who you would rather be than who you are.

  If you work on this for a while, somebody who is ingenious enough will always be able to point out to you that you have left something out, and that there is something else you could improve upon. You can go on and on, and as you go about this imaginative creation of the perfect life you will eventually realize that what you are really doing is extending power.

  The process is very much like the people who are now working on gene manipulation so that man can direct the future of evolution and we can breed intellectual Einsteins, physical Elizabeth Taylors, and moral Sister Teresas. All of these people had extraordinary direction as human beings by virtue of their integrity and ingenuity, and so some people may look at this idea and think it would be just great. But look how we have extended our power now. We may think it would be good to be in charge of evolution, but along comes the old problem of the three wishes again. How do we know which way is really better?

  When human beings attempt to take charge of evolution, they do so using their minds and a kind of consciousness that scans the world and looks at everything serially — but the problem is that the world itself is not serial. The world is what we call multidimensional, which is to say that everything is happening all together everywhere at once, and going along much too fast for us to take adequate cognizance merely through a scanning procedure. Because scanning is confined to linear limits, it always leaves things out, and these things may be very important.

  That is why, as I pointed out before, turning the glass into gold may mean that your eyesight will fail or your hair will fall out. When we bring about change with our quite limited vision, and when we change people by altering their genes, we certainly will have a new situation, but it will not necessarily be any better, because we are unable to see in advance the fullness of the role that every individual will play.

  In terms of projecting power, you will see that the geneticists’ power is limited because they have a limited view. If we decide to give them all the computers they need to add it all up so that they will have a complete view of life, we are then placing ourselves in a position to control life on the planet. This is to be the final creation, and we are trying to carefully arrange it with our seemingly vast intellect and omnipotent consciousness. We are to be the master magicians; we are to have complete control over ourselves, and nothing is to happen that is not in accordance with our will.

  Yet suppose we do all this, and suppose we have even managed to will our will so that it is always a good will. I am not quite sure how we would know it was a good will unless there was a possibility for bad will, but suppose we have managed. Ultimately, you must ask, “Do I want to be in that kind of situation?” In other words, think of where those directions we speak of as progressive are really going, and extrapolate on them.

  Perhaps you will say, “Of course I wouldn’t do that, because I realize I’m never going to get there.” But even so, why are you even heading in that direction? Are you sure it’s a better direction to go in? After all, we kill more people with cars than we do with wars, and you have to think about things like that. I am not arguing that we should not have technological developments, but perhaps it is shortsighted to conclude automatically that they are improvements. They may not be improvements at all in the long run — and so it is very important to consider whether you want to control the direction in which you are heading.

  FULL OF SURPRISES

  Inwardly, do you really and truly want to have power over everything that occurs within the sphere of your consciousness? Perhaps, speaking as a man, I would like to cast a spell over a woman so that she would become exactly as beautiful as I could conceive beauty to be, and so that every inflection of her voice and gesture would obey me like a violin under the hand of a perfect master. I would entirely direct her actions, and although in her every action she would be my dream, I would quickly begin to worry about this Frankenstein woman. I would think that perhaps there was nobody home, and that all I had done was to create a machine. When I think about it, what I really want is for her to do something that I don’t expect.

  That is one of the reasons why it is so nice when we have an occasion to give gifts. We love surprises, because a surprise means there was someone else there, someone who made it fun by doing something that we could not have predicted.

  I’ve heard people who think that in the future, due to our psychic development, we are all going to be able to read each other’s minds. Through direct transference from one mind to another we will have access to everybody’s thoughts, and there will be no privacy left. Of course, since everybody will be completely transparent to everyone else, we won’t be able to surprise each other. Personally I am not looking forward to that kind of world, because I am afraid it will be quite devoid of spontaneity. We may lose that little element we call vitality.

  Now this may sound as if I am saying the best sort of thing is not a universe where we realize that there is a profound underlying unity through all things, but rather a universe that is pluralistic, that is not one at all. Certainly it may be said that one of the best parts of life is having lots of separate things all surprising each other, but I see still a different scheme.

  The world I see is what we might call unity in diversity. What we call self and what we call other are like something and nothing. They are fundamental polarities, which — just because they contrast with each other — have something in common. We cannot say what it is, though, and therefore our world will always be full of surprises.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MEET YOUR REAL SELF

  WE HAVE STARTED out on a journey together to the place where we are. It’s good to reflect, at some point along the way, on the futility of a certain kind of power game we play with our energy.

  THE FUTILITY OF POWER GAMES

  There are two kinds of games — the game you play to win and the game you play to play. There is a difference between the two, in the same sense as there is a difference between traveling to get some-w h e re and traveling just to travel, which we might call wandering.

  There is a difference between motion with the objective of changing place and motion with the objective of dancing. All those forms of energy that are moving to dance, or traveling to wander, are joyous manifestations of energy. On the other hand, all those forms of energy that have us moving to get somewhere tend to become frantic, and have a quality of urgency that moves us faster and faster until we simply can’t go fast enough to accomplish the object. Even when it comes to practicing meditation, people
keep asking about the fastest way, and they want to know how long it is going to take.

  Nishkarma means action or doing (karma) without attachment, especially without attachment to the result s of action. Nishkarma is the whole point and message of the Bhagavad Gita, or “Song of the Lord,” which consists of the instructions of the charioteer Krishna to the warrior Arjuna about his conduct on the field of battle. With this principle we can view not only our ordinary activities of everyday life, but also our religious activity in an entire l y new way — not as something done to achieve a result.

  WHY DO IT?

  Of course, people then ask, “Why do it?”

  People are always asking why, but one must realize that why is a barren question. You expect an answer addressed in terms of motivation: you want to know the cause of what somebody is doing, and the goal it leads to. If you are acting without a goal in mind, however, you can’t say why you’re doing it, except to do it.