The Stumbling Mystic

Dear Readers,

I think I’m going to have to abandon blogging more or less indefinitely. There are inner issues that need to be resolved and I have no idea how long it will take.

I trust that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are having fun guiding their instruments, even though we mostly seem to be making a mess of their spiritual guidance — at least I certainly am.

In Their Grace,
Ned.

I am a child of the Mother. All other external characteristics are but a temporary mutation — nationality, culture, ethnicity, biological sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, emotional biases, preferred political ideologies, and preferred intellectual opinions. For me, these things are all in the past: in each moment, she gives birth to me anew, and in each moment, I am a divine child reborn. The Mother has guided me, and brought me thus far. She will guide me the rest of the way as well.

I am her eternal child, seeking only to live in her Eternal Womb, willing to become whatever she will mold me into. I sincerely offer to her my pain, my sorrows, my attachments, and my fears, as well as my joys and pleasures.

Should she choose poverty, terror, estrangement, isolation, pain, disease, or death for me, I will accept it as her Will. Should she choose wealth, happiness, community, friendship, pleasure, health, or life for me, I will accept it as her Will. I know that everything is hers to transmute to the supreme felicity and protection of her mighty Embrace.

I aspire to be a true warrior against falsehood. I will fear nothing but my own hypocrisy, nothing but my own potential to create more karma for myself, nothing but my own ability to be misguided. For what is there to fear if the Divine Presence is with you?

I aspire to grow in faith, gratitude, patience, and self-awareness.

I’m late linking to this — I’m always late with linking, haven’t you noticed? — but here is an interesting talk by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor on her experience of having a stroke given by her at a TED conference. The TED website description reads: “Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.”

Although Taylor calls her experience “nirvana”, and draws what are in my opinion questionable conclusions from her experience (including an emphasis on a clear-cut right-brain/left-brain dichotomy which I frankly don’t really buy into), it does nevertheless sound like she had a genuine mystical experience that enabled her to detach while the stroke was happening, and watch it happen from the perspective of a witness consciousness. The result was that she was able to retain self-awareness and volition, and heal completely from her stroke. How’s that for mind over matter?

Because most scientists today do not have a benefit of a spiritual-occult framework within which to work and interpret spiritual experiences, my sense is that they don’t have enough discernment to know exactly what they are experiencing, so every experience is “nirvana”. Nevertheless, this was a remarkable talk, and you can also read Taylor’s book on the same subject, entitled My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

And while we’re on the subject of neuroplasticity and the power of the mind, let me also share an excellent quote from Sri Aurobindo, which I quoted in a comment on Ulrich Mohrhoff’s blog, and which he then quoted at length in a separate post. Here it is:

I have once before told you what I think of the ineffective peckings of certain well-intentioned scientific minds on the surface or apparent surface of the spiritual Reality behind things and I need not elaborate it. More important is the prognostic of a greater danger coming in the new attack by the adversary, the sceptics, against the validity of spiritual and supraphysical experience, their new strategy of destruction by admitting and explaining it in their own sense. There may well be a strong ground for the apprehension; but I doubt whether, if these things are once admitted to scrutiny, the mind of humanity will long remain satisfied with explanations so ineptly superficial and external, explanations that explain nothing.

If the defenders of religion take up an unsound position, easily capturable, when they affirm only the subjective validity of spiritual experience, the opponents also seem to me to be giving away, without knowing it, the gates of the materialistic stronghold by their consent at all to admit and examine spiritual and supraphysical experience. Their entrenchment in the physical field, their refusal to admit or even examine supraphysical things was their tower of strong safety; once it is abandoned, the human mind pressing towards something less negative, more helpfully positive will pass to it over the dead bodies of their theories and the broken debris of their annulling explanations and ingenious psychological labels.

Another danger may then arise, — not of a final denial of the Truth, but the repetition in old or new forms of a past mistake, on one side some revival of blind fanatical obscurantist sectarian religionism, on the other a stumbling into the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic occult and the pseudo-spiritual — mistakes that made the whole real strength of the materialistic attack on the past and its credos. But these are phantasms that meet us always on the border line or in the intervening country between the material darkness and the perfect Splendour. In spite of all, the victory of the supreme Light even in the darkened earth-consciousness stands as the one ultimate certitude.

Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, Part 1, Section IV (Reason, Science And Yoga), pp. 197–198

As usual, Sri Aurobindo is right on the money. Now that even scientists have started having and talking about spiritual experiences, it is only a matter of time, in my opinion, before people will have to face the paradoxes of subjectivity, even if initially they still opt for materialistic explanations. Apart from skeptical materialism and religious fanaticism, the other danger is of what he calls the “pseudo-spiritual” — that boundary between the material plane and the true spiritual planes which is often hazardously misinterpreted by the human imagination. It is this “Intermediate Zone” which gives rise to incorrect interpretations of spiritual experiences and to superstition.

I will again mention Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century as being probably the best compendium of scientific evidence around right now that deals with all these mind-body issues from a nonmaterialistic perspective. It includes a chapter showcasing large amounts of evidence from the field of psychoimmunology on the power of the mind to heal illnesses — data that is largely dismissed as the “placebo effect” by mainstream scientists.

Moreover, there are two other important books on neuroplasticity that need to be studied here as well. One is The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M. Schwartz (which I’m currently reading). Schwartz, a researcher at UCLA, uses meditation techniques to treat patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, and similar illnesses, and his research shows that meditation can literally rewire neural circuits in the brain and relieve these problems. The other relevant book is called The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge.

In short: the sky is the limit. “In absolute silence sleeps an Absolute power,” writes Sri Aurobindo. We must grow in faith and learn to trust this irresistible Absolute within us. It is not a question of if (for the irrevocable transformation will happen sooner or later) but simply a question of when. We may fail many times at first, but we can’t give up hope and succumb to darkness.

This is the true meaning of taking responsibility:

(The following is a dialogue I had with Bob last night. Essentially I’d been disturbed by reading the writings of an unnamed someone who, in my perception, was stringing together a host of prejudices and calling it “Truth” — and transcendent, capital-T Truth at that — and I was sharing my concerns with Bob. But the joke, eventually, was on me.)

Ned: The human capacity for self-deception seems to be so incredibly great. I mean, here I am, criticizing this writer because he seems to be orders of magnitude worse than me. But I know I’m deceiving myself all the time too, if to a lesser degree than him. So how to break out of it? It looks impossible at times.

Bob: Do I detect then a touch of “There, but for the grace of God, go I”?

Ned: (realizing own foolishness and moral grandiosity) LOL! If Sri Aurobindo was around, he would probably tell me: “If you were wiser, you would say, there, by the grace of God, go I.”*

Bob: Heheh. LOL. I do quite like that fellow.

Ned: He’s hilarious. This is why I love him so much.

* I was referring to this aphorism of Sri Aurobindo’s: ‘Sir Philip Sidney said of the criminal led out to be hanged, “There, but for the grace of God, goes Sir Philip Sidney.” Wiser, had he said, “There, by the grace of God, goes Sir Philip Sidney.”‘

Reality is nondual. We are one with all that is apparently anti-Divine.

I would much rather be a sincere atheist or agnostic than call myself “spiritual” and not live the path with integrity. Too many people today — both traditionalists and New Agers — are only interested in accumulating personal power from behind a facade of spirituality and faith. Too many people today turn spirituality into yet another ideology or religion, making it yet another extension of their egos, turning it into another mental fortress or construct of their minds, externalizing personal emotional issues and insecurities rather than courageously aspiring to live a life of self-sacrifice and become aligned with the universal forces of creation.

I can do no better than to quote the Mother here:

Break, break down the last resistances,
consume the last impurities, blast the being
if need be, but let it be transfigured!

May we never lock our souls up into mental or vital straitjackets. May we face each and every fear, and conquer each and every egoism within our being. May we stop resisting the Divine Grace and allow it to help us. May we manifest the things of God so that the divine life on earth can begin at last.

May I always fail and fall when motivated by the lust for personal power as opposed to being a transparent vessel through which the Divine Power can act.

How much hatred and stupidity men succeed in packing up decorously and labelling ‘Religion’!
— Sri Aurobindo

My girlfriend Komal linked me to a five-part documentary entitled Baby Bible Bashers which you can watch on YouTube in its entirety. The documentary is about children who are turned into Christian evangelist preachers by fundamentalist and overzealous parents. We meet three children in this documentary, two boys and one girl, who are portrayed as having special powers and essentially used by their parents to push their agenda and/or make money. I am including the most distressing clip from the end of the documentary below. It shows one of the little boys, Samuel (about seven years old), from Mississippi, who is taken by his father to New York City, which is the city of sinners from the evangelical Christian perspective. (Heh … no wonder I live in New York. )

Samuel and his father were preaching outside bars and in public against everything they considered a sin, from alcoholism to homosexuality, and New Yorkers, as you know, tend to be uber-liberal — sometimes to an ideological extreme. Some of them reacted, but the upshot of the whole sad affair was that Samuel was scared out of his mind and started crying, clearly confused about what was going on and distressed by the barbs being exchanged between his father and the angry New Yorkers. Watch the clip below — but I have to warn you that it’s not for the faint of heart.

What a mess. I really felt for this boy. Not only were his parents filling his mind with hatred and neuroses about trivial things, not to mention abject fear of eternal hell (using corporeal punishment, if necessary, according to the parents’ own testimony in the documentary), but on top of that all the other people around the father and the boy turned it into a personal thing, not having the sensitivity to realize what a terrible position this little boy was in. It’s bad enough that the parents are conservative religious extremists, but what good did it do for the New Yorkers to take out their personal frustrations in this manner? Both Komal and I were horrified by this situation, and our hearts went out to the boy, above all else, whose life is being ruined by the collective stupidity of all the adults around him.

The documentary was one of the most disturbing ones I’ve watched. The children in it are clearly internalizing the grandiose visions of themselves that their parents are projecting onto them. They are being set up for tremendous disappointments later on in life.

Want the antidote to foolish parental authoritarianism? Let’s create a culture of child honoring.

Here’s a talk from December, 2006 by historian Tony Judt at New York University on the topic, “Disturbing the Peace: Intellectuals and Universities in an Illiberal Age”. While Judt is not coming from a spiritual perspective, he’s an impressive intellectual, known for his rigor and fearlessness in standing up for the right thing. His talk should be a wake-up call for “liberal” intellectuals all over the world, although he primarily addresses American intellectuals.

Judt rightly lambasts a lot of the wishy-washy postmodern writings of liberal intellectuals, and also points out the self-referencing nature of women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, African American studies, and so on, which seem to be preventing most liberals from an honest engagement with the Other. I personally also feel that there is too much of this self-involved work in academia these days and there’s something really pretentious about it. People who simply inherit liberalism through no thought or personal effort of their own turn it into a very narrow-minded ideology.

Meanwhile, Judt pulls no punches in criticizing the right-wing in America either, and in particular criticizes the Israeli lobby in the United States, as well as the apparent censorship one meets when trying to criticize this lobby (Judt is himself Jewish, by the way). He also criticizes the debate on the efficacy and “ethics” of torture in America, amazed, rightly so, that such a debate is being held at all.

I thoroughly enjoyed the mental energy that I sensed in this talk.

Out of not being seen for who we are in our early years, we develop a panoply of afflictions and addictions that make us behave the way we do. I’ve charted, over the last 20-30 years, a thin layer of self-loathing in the deep ecology movement, that I’m quite sensitive to — because I love the human species. And I love the universal human, who is the formative being in the young child. I am that child. We are all that child.
— Raffi Cavoukian, from a talk at AUM 2007, slightly paraphrased

(Yes, this is Raffi Cavoukian of Baby Beluga fame — he was at the AUM in 2007. I saw the videos, from which I took this quote. Even on screen, he gives off an amazingly warm vibe.)

Raffi Cavoukian, a friend of children the world over, has published a wonderful little anthology on what he calls “child honoring”. Raffi challenges us to ask ourselves: what might the world look like if it were organized around the needs of its youngest members? You can download his book for free here.

Raffi has also written a beautiful covenant for honoring children, which reads as follows:

We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving “village.” And to pursue a life of purpose.

We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.

We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come.

Read the rest here — it’s quite well-written.

I’m inspired by ideas about the liberation of children. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother also wanted an end to the patriarchal, authoritarian attitude toward children, in which children are treated as the property of the parents, primarily the father. In her Collected Works, the Mother actually gives a cut-off age of just fourteen at which parents need to start encouraging children to begin thinking about becoming independent and taking responsibility for themselves. The fact of the matter is that a loving family that guides and facilitates children to discover themselves, but doesn’t neurotically try to shape them or control them, is the only way to produce healthy adults capable of transforming this world. The detached, patient spiritual force of the soul has to replace fear-based, external authoritarianism. And I think if this were to be practiced, parents would be surprised at just how well their children turn out spontaneously — without any need on their part to exert personal power or authority. (The same principles extend, of course, to the schooling of children and integral education, which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother wrote about extensively.)

Parents need to realize that there is a far greater, vaster and more universalized Authority than their own egos. After all, the only true authority is the Divine’s, and we must learn the dual work of standing up to false authority, while surrendering instantaneously and spontaneously to all true Authority. Learning this discrimination and discernment — and teaching it to children — is a tall order! If you aren’t practicing what you preach on a moment-to-moment basis, children will see through your insincerity and hypocrisy in less than five seconds, and will rebel — and rightly so.

We know that most of the damage done to children happens with their parents within the first few years of their lives. Part of the problem is that human beings are born neurologically incomplete. We are born helpless and powerless in a hostile world, and are completely at the mercy of our parents for the first ten to fifteen years of our lives. During this time, if our needs aren’t met in a very integral way — and they never are — we are bound to come out of our childhood with severe emotional wounding. (This is partly why I’m too much of a coward to raise children. I know that I will just pass on my own pathologies and atavisms to them. If I did ever adopt children, it would only be after severe spiritual preparation and a deep commitment to be mindful and careful with them.)

The Sri Aurobindo Society published a little book called How to Bring Up a Child, a collection of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings on parenting. The book’s description reads, in part:

The child was in the ancient patriarchal idea the live property of the father; he was his creation, his production, his own reproduction of himself; the father, rather than God or the universal Life in place of god, stood as the author of the child’s being; and the creator has every right over his creation, the producer over his manufacture. He had the right to make of him what he willed, and not what the being of the child really was within, to train and not what the being of the child really was within, to train and shape and cut him according to the parental ideas and not rear him according to his own nature’s deepest needs, to bind him to the paternal career or the career chosen by the parent and not that to which his nature and capacity and inclination pointed, to fix for him all the critical turning-points of his life even after he had reached not as a soul meant to grow, but as brute psychological stuff to be shaped into a fixed mould by the teacher. We have travelled to another conception of the child as a soul with a being, a nature and capacities of his own who must be helped to find them, to find himself, to grow into their maturity, into a fullness of physical and vital energy and the utmost breadth, depth, and height of his emotional, his intellectual and his spiritual being.

I want to live in a world where children’s inner lives are respected, where adults treat them as potential equals from day one and do not put them down or patronize them, where children are encouraged to work hard and take responsibility but supported in doing so, where children are allowed to express their natural curiousity freely, and where their growth is never stifled or suppressed. It’s only in this sort of environment that the child’s soul can truly flower, and that we can nurture loving, peaceful, strong societies and raise future transformative leaders.

(The following exchange was narrated to me by fellow integral yoga practitioner Lynda Lester, who works at an atmospheric research think tank as a technical writer, where she strives to convince her materialist-atheist friends that Sri Aurobindo was onto something. )

Lynda: (in her typically sweet way) So in Vedanta, ultimate reality is described as Sat-Chit-Ananda. Sat means “Being” or “Existence”, Chit means “Conscious-Force”, and Ananda means “Bliss”. (goes into detailed explanation of each)

Tom: (incredulous) Eh, you’re full of Chit!