Reflecting further on Wednesday's lecture, I think that it could be summed up in the statement, "What we are doing is not absolute, but relative".
Mr Jaiswal is, in my opinion, relatively the wisest person I've ever met, but I don't think what he says is absolute. I didn't think the discussion about whether language or art or music was the best medium was all that useful and, whether or not he was right, perhaps his own biography is the strongest reason why it came up. Neither did I think his statement about the present being the worst time in all history, because people are killing each other over religion, was reasonable. 400 years ago in this country one could be killed, or tortured, or have one's assets removed, because of religion. Before 1655 Jews were not even allowed to live here. Even if he was thinking of the Second World War (and I don't think he was), the crime of the Holocaust was just one aspect of the general slaughter of 55 million people, including 27 million Russians, and I don't think that historians regard this, the worst war in history, as being religiously motivated.
But to say that he can be mistaken like anyone else is only to say that he is human. I don't think this will be a surprise to anyone.
The problem that the School has is that we have an impulse to worship someone as superhuman, or something as supernatural, as absolute. Mr MacLaren was worshipped, though many will deny it. He was the King, and God, and he was not under the law: his word was law. If he said that evolution never happened, or that people had to dress in a certain way, we all tried desperately to believe it to be true.
But he wasn't the only one. His Holiness, the Friday Group, the Foundation Group, St James, the mantra, Sanskrit, the Teaching, the Word, the Scriptures, Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, Marsilio Ficino, Shankara, Jesus Christ, Henry George, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, music, law, Abhinaya, philosophy and economics.
Sacred cows all over the place, lowing gently. Aren't they lovely? It's a shame in a way that they hold up the traffic so much, but they are sacred after all. I am unaccountably reminded of the ad for Cravendale milk, "so delicious, the cows want it back".
Mooooooo.
I suppose this is why I think Mr Jaiswal shows us the way out. He shows us there is another way to understand the Shankaracharya who, as he mentioned the other night, said, "There is no tradition. There is no Shankaracharya".
Something else His Holiness said, a mere 39 years ago:
"The good and bad are relative states, for nothing is good or bad. To displace relatively bad, one needs discipline to take up something relatively good. When the pure light of wisdom dawns, then good and bad do not matter. Once this stage is reached, the influences ... have no effect at all, for the man is now free."
Sunday, July 02, 2006
A Teaching So Delicious, the Sacred Cows Want It Back
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Love it! Remember also that the cows are garlanded and paraded on feast days. At other times they have a tendency to sit down just where you want to walk.
You raise some interesting points, but it's still all talk about the world. From one perspective, things might look good, from another they may look bad. But in the end who cares? The 'world view' will always be relative because all we are seeing is the snake.
The real problem with the School is that they keep measuring progress by how efficient one becomes in the world - how shiny the snake can become. It has no real interest in 'moksha', being mainly concerned with social engineering. After all MacLaren was a lawyer and lawyers enjoy telling people how to live.
So the School's real agenda is about shaping people's way of life in the world. Look, even the founding sound is "to study and teach the laws governing the relations between men in society". What's that got to do with realisation? You cannot have 'relations' when there is only One! But I bet they will never change that founding statement. And, with a magician's wave of the hand, allow intellectually bankrupt school members to believe that it really is essentially a school of advaita.
In order for the lions to stay believing themselves to be sheep, they were deluded with the impression that they were growing in knowledge. Just look at the names the good student can spurt out at a dinner party: "...Sanskrit, the Teaching, the Word, the Scriptures, Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, Marsilio Ficino, Shankara, Jesus Christ, Henry George, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, music, law, Abhinaya, philosophy and economics." It is given pre-digested views on gender politics, art, education, music, language, medicine, government, race.... Happy little sheep.
(What with sacred cows and sheep, the farmyard is now getting crowded!!!)
Here's one effect of this 'rich' diet of sound-bite philosophy: 'students' (they're not really students, come on!) are given a thousand little unconnected details and told that they all link to form a unified theory. It keeps them busy working it all out, failing, and then, having being reminded about how stupid they really are, are told that their masters have the secret knowledge that will banish ignorance forever.
60 years later nobody has a clue. Not even Jaiswal.
Well, that's all very well. But having established your higher spiritual plane in paragraph one, you proceed to talk about "the REAL problem" and ... whoops! we are back on terra firma.
Now that we have established that the Skool is not perfect, it would be interesting to hear what kind of a school you might build, were we starting from a blank slate.
No zen remarks ... you only get away with that if you're self-realised.
A week after Mr Jaiswal's talk and what has floated to the top of memory is one phrase that he said, 'Tell the truth sweetly so that the heart may hear it.'
Perhaps it's just what I needed to hear.
It's also linked in mind with another saying: 'I may forget what you say but I will never forget the way you made me feel.'
Discussion anybody?
Wow - what a fantastic memory you have, to pick out those two gems!
There's an awful lot in there ... maybe should be a new post?
Confession time - I was scribbling notes during his talk but, even so, '...so that the heart may hear it' rang such a bell that it sang for me, inclined as I am to bang away sometimes.
As to the second quote, I can't remember who said it, but it's close cousins to the first. I know it's true.
Yes, it would be interesting to see what we remember - and to have a stab at identifying why. Whatever we remember will have a significance and maybe we'll be prepared to speak about it.
Post a Comment