New-Age-Center

By: roystona
I would like to start this article by quoting and referring to

certain sage philosophers, to try and give some weight to

a universe of spirit, in contrast with certain atheists today

who seem only equipped to debunk the religions of the world

but who cannot engage with much deeper spiritual understandings.

Belief is one thing,said krishnamurti, reality quite another. one

leads to bondage and the other is possible only in freedom...

Belief can never lead to reality, it is the result of conditioning,

or the outcome of fear, or the result of an outer or inner authority

which gives comfort. Reality is none of these...The credulous are

always willing to believe, accept, obey, whether what is offered is

good or bad, mischievious or beneficial. The believing mind is not

an enquiring mind, it is preconceived and remains within the limits

of its formula or principle.

Again, he said, Through experience you hope to touch the truth

of your belief, to prove it to yourself, but this belief conditions

your experience.It is not that the experience comes to prove the

belief, but rather that the belief begets the experience. Your belief

in a God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will

always experience what you believe and nothing else. And this

invalidates your experience. The Christian may see virgins, angels

and Christ, the Hindu will see similar deities in an extravagant

plurality. The Muslim, the Buddhist, the Jew are all the same.

Belief conditions its own 'supposed ' proof.

The small in search of the large will only find what it is capable of

finding. Is devotion the worship of an image, of a person, of a symbol?

Can a symbol ever represent truth? Is not a symbol static, and can

a static thing ever represent that which is living? For those who believe

he said, your image is your intoxicant, and it is carved out of your own

memory; you are worshipping yourself through the image created by

your own thought. Your devotion is the love of yourself covered over

by the chant of your mind.

Krishnamurti is not soft on such matters and to some degree he would

expect atheists to pick up on some of them but he would be equally

scathing to them on a universe without meaning. - Unless human

beings find sacredness their life really has no meaning, it is an empty

shell. They may be very orderly, they may be relatively free, but unless

there is this thing that is totally sacred, untouched by thought, life has

no deep meaning.He goes on to say, there is a sacredness which is

not of thought, nor of a feeling resuscitated by thought. It is not

recognisable by thought. Thought cannot formulate it. But still, there is

a sacredness untouched by any symbol or word. It is not communicable

yet it is a fact. A fact is to be seen and the seeing is not through the

word.When a fact is interpreted it ceases to be a fact; it becomes

something entirely different. The seeing is of the highest importance.

The seeing is out of the stream of space-time. Its immediate,instantaneous,

and whats seen is never the same again. This sacredness has no

worshipper, no observer who meditates upon it. Like beauty. it cannot

be seen through its opposite for it has no opposite.

The atheistic verbal assault on the monotheistic religions is quite

understandable to a serious mind- after all, the truth does not need

defending and their various Gods that have no reality anyway are

the fabrication of human minds. However, if you have letters after your name

and a place on the faculty of Oxford university, as an atheist you should

be able to show how such spiritual sage philosophers are wrong in their

experiential, nondual vision of the world and universe-ie spiritual to the core!

Its like picking on the small guys but never meeting the big guys. I hasten

to add that such personages as Bishops,Imams, Rabbis are not and have

never been in this context, the big guys. I could not, for example, imagine

the Journalist Christopher Hichens, with his pseudo intellect. stand up

to the likes of Alan Watts or Ken Wilber much less Aurobindo or Maharshi.

Neither could I imagine these spiritual maestros engaging with such minds.

The philosopher Ken Wilber says, all individuals are touched by the divine

and all sentient entities intuit the divine.This is the only thing that holds the

cosmos together.Presumably Wilber is pointing to deeper levels of one's

consciousness, rather than the surface conventional self. This divine

intuition acts like a huge unconscious magnet, so to speak, drawing us

onward and upward towards that perfect release in the superconscious all.

But it also forces us, as a temporary and remedial measure. to fashion all

sorts of substitutes for the divine-substitute subjects, objects,gratifications,

sacrifices, immortality projects and cosmocentric designs and tokens of

transcendence. When these fail they are abandoned though created as

substitutes for the divine.

According to the philosopher Alan Watts, trust in the divine which one cannot

conceive in any way is a far higher form of faith than fervent clinging to a God

of whom you have definite conception. Even if that conception were right,

clinging to it as religions do, would be the wrong attitude. When you love

someone you dont cling to them.The Buddhist word nirvana actually means

to breathe out ; letting go is the fundamental attitude of real faith.he goes on

to say, the highest image of the divine is the unseen behind the eyes-the blank space, the unknown, the intangible and the invisible. That is the divine ! We have no craven image or biblical/scriptural idolatry of that. We do not know what that is, but we have to trust it. there's no alternative. you can't help trusting it. You've got to.He points out that the theological Mystica, was written in the sixth century by an Assyrian monk,Dionysius Exiguus. It is a very strange document, he says because he explains that the highest knowledge of the divine is through what he calls in Greek, Agnostos, which means unknowing. One knows the divine most profoundly, the most truly, in not knowing God. Just as our sight comes out of an unseen,so when we know that we dont know we really know. We know because we have reached a state of mind in which we have let go of our efforts to grasp life with our intellect. We cannot, try as we may, circumscribe that which is infinite.

Atheistic speakers such as Richard Dawkins and lesser Journalists such as

Christopher Hichens would do well to engage with such matters.They should

also realise that if their universe is not spirit and meaningless, then all within

it is also meaningless-including what they have to say about it it. For those

such as Wilber who maintain that the universe is 'spiritual to the core' , no

such problem exists.

What do we mean by God then ? if we intuit as Wilber allows and if we

are cautious on interpretation and if, as Krishnamurti advises, we meet

the ground of all on the conditions of the ground, namely absolutely in

stillness and without thought, no preconception whatsoever, then we

can at least be confident that we are trying to be a light to our own minds

and not reliant on minds that stretch back from now to the ancient past.

If the infinite and eternal appears as nothing then that is the object of

one's love. No more than that. That is Faith. The moment one subjects

this condition of the ground to even a thought, it is weakened and probably

lost.If such an experience is achieved the experience has its own certainty

and does not need interpretation. To say that man IS God is nothing

special if one comes to realise that everything IS God. Look at it another way

and it is possible to experience the reality that what we call God is nothing

less than the sacredness that Krishnamurti speaks of. All is what that

sacredness is doing. Getting rid of the ego or our sense of individual

identity is part of the realisation of achieving greater conscious awareness.

We do not exist as we think we do. When this is realised God can be said

to have been found.

More from : Mysticseed:Towards Atman : http://www.zalivanda.com/id3.html


roystona