Question: Is it right to assume that the words of those we believe to be wise are true?
It might seem as if the answer is self-evident to any right-thinking philosopher. But something in me keeps saying "no". It seems to be an argument that I have been having for many years. I remember someone once saying to me with some annoyance, "your group doesn't seem to be able to accept that the Teaching is true". That man has long since left the School; practically all of my group are still around. There is something that we seem to have been hanging onto, no matter what people have tried to tell us. I woke up very early this morning, with the tail end of Hurricane Gordon battering rain onto the Velux windows, and it gradually came to me what it might be.
The problem I have is that I believe it contradicts the Upanishads to say that their words are true, and it contradicts His Holiness to say that his words are true. And although I can see that we need to treat these sources with reverence, in the end I do not believe that we should contradict the Upanishads or His Holiness, even if it seems to be in support of them. I will explain what I mean.
The word "Upanishad" means literally "to sit near", but in the Upanishads it is usually used with a different sense, that of "secret knowledge" or "hidden teaching". Another word used to say the same thing is rahasya. What is the secret knowledge? It is the knowledge of satyasya satyam, "the Truth of truth". Truth is prana, the life force; and the Truth of truth is that which cannot be defined: the consciousness of the Atman. It is wrong to say that the Upanishads are true, because they offer not truth, but the hidden knowledge of that which is true.
What is said about knowledge is that it is of two kinds, higher and lower. There seems to have been a view in the early Upanishads that lower knowledge was the ritual knowledge of the Brahman priests, which was intended to get a result. The Upanishads themselves were "higher knowledge" because they aimed at no result. Possibly later, or perhaps together with this, a second view emerged, which is if I may say a more refined concept, that the lower knowledge includes everything that can be expressed in words. The higher knowledge cannot be expressed: it is not in speech, but in that by which speech is known.
His Holiness says the same thing, when he says that knowledge of the Absolute and the Self is just ordinary information. It has to be transformed into understanding. This was why he told the translator of the Conversations, "don't listen to my words - listen to my meaning, and translate that". This might seem to represent a slippery slope. The Conversations are supposed to be "unalterable", and if we take that away, the reasoning goes, what do we have? What is the School?
The courageous answer to this, I would suggest, is that if the School is nothing without having a claim to "unalterable" texts, then it is indeed nothing. Only Fundamentalists have unalterable texts, and the reason for that is that they are too poorly educated and led to penetrate to the meaning. But the School is not and never has been about such a claim. A spurious claim on the truth cannot lead to truth.
People don't need the words: they need the meaning. And we come back again to the literal meaning of the word Upanishad: "to sit near". It presents an image of the teacher and the student, sitting together. In one of the Vedic invocations that opens an Upanishad we find the moving prayer, "may we not cavil at each other". Why? Because if we are to be united by truth, there is no room for petty emotions.
And that is what Shantananda meant when he spoke of higher knowledge (and here, he exceeded what is to be found elsewhere in the tradition) as the understanding that arises at the meeting of chittani ("hearts and minds") joined by love or common purpose. The same, he said, may not arise again away from such a meeting.
Those we love are those to whom we can tell the truth. All we need to do to benefit the world is to tell the truth.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Upanishad
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8 comments:
Right back on course, V. This is at the heart of the matter and much to reflect on. Thank-you.
Thank you for this.
I am surprised that you were asked to read a statement like that. I agree that that approach seems utterly at odds with what the School is (or should be) about.
If we start from the premise that the words on the page are true, what impetus is there for us to seek the Truth for ourselves? What role is left for discrimination, and the wisdom to understand what those words mean to us in practice? What will motivate us to engage with the words, to wrestle with them until we begin to sense the subtlety of their meaning?
I gather that His Holiness has spoken in the past about the four sources of knowledge available to us in order to assist us in the verification of Truth (I'm afraid I don't have the reference, but would be very grateful if someone could point me to this).
These are the shruti (i.e. revealed texts), the smriti (remembered texts), the maha purusha (the wise man) and the anubhuti (our own experience and understanding).
I think that in the School we may have focused too much on the first three of these, at the expense of the fourth.
But the real point to make is that His Holiness enjoins all four as an aid to the 'verification' of Truth. In other words, it is always up to us to engage deeply with these sources of knowledge and reach our own understanding of the Truth they seek to reveal. So we are engaged at every step of the process.
I don't think it is right, therefore, to suggest that we should start from the premise that the words on the page are true.
Yes, and there's a continuing confusion here between 'school' and 'religion'. No 'school' should require its students to accept anything as gospel without personal understanding and verification.
Your post has come to mind often in the last couple of days. James's 2nd paragraph puts it better but my own response is similar. Laziness would be the result of that acceptance. Or it could be the result.
The sources of knowledge are called "pramanas" in Indian philosophy (literally "measures"). They are the means by which accurate knowledge is received. Various branches of Indian philosophy set their store by different pramanas, but the main three (accepted by Vedanta) are (1) perception, (2) inference and (3) word.
His Holiness is not really following this approach, because the first three sources are all "word". "Anubhuti" seems to be part of "perception" - see this Encyclopedia Brittanica article:
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9061193
So much for the theory - I think there is some work to be done to understand how His Holiness' tradition fits with technical Advaita Vedanta philosophy.
In practice, I think His Holiness regards the knowledge gained from any source as much less important than whether one really gets understanding from that information. He even says that knowledge of the Absolute is just information and has no value if not realised.
So I think that we misrepresent him if we get too hung up on these technical points, failing to hear what he is really saying.
I liked the first version of your post better - I understood why you raised it in the way you did. This edited version? Someone reading this would have no idea what prompted you to bring it to our attention. The point of the original post was that you had been asked to read to your group a sentence that you believed to be untrue. You explained why you couldn't do this and you explained it well.
It is not only the question, 'Is it right to assume... etc', it is the context in which this was presented to you, and the response from others at the meeting, that was also pertinent.
Your original post was a challenge, it is true, but a justifiable challenge.
Well that may be the case, but it also included copyright material that I didn't have permission to quote, and it was possible to identify participants in the discussion, which is hardly fair.
The following is an excerpt from a talk that Gangaji did at a public meeting in the US in August 2005. I thought it might be of interest. Apologies for the length.
'I want to share with you something that happened the other day, because it exposes the obstacle to a true meeting. And it points to the necessity of a true meeting, to really receive what is being offered here. I was meeting with a small group of people, and I had never met this man before. As we spoke, he quoted Ramana and Papaji and Gangaji and another guru that he had followed, but it was clear that he had no satisfaction. I mean, he could quote Ramana much better than I could quote Ramana. He quoted me much better than I could, but what's the use if there is no satisfaction, and he was really frustrated. So I tried, unsuccessfully, to point out to him that it was not in the words. What Ramana was pointing to when he said, "be still" and what this man heard, were really different things. And he couldn't get that. He was looking at the words, "be still." And he was unaware that he was interpreting those words through his own understanding, and that his interpretation was an obstacle to receiving what Ramana was transmitting to him in the phrase "be still." So we went at it for a while, and we never met. It was an encounter but we didn't meet.
And that is often the way it is in our lives. We know when we have felt met, or recognized or seen or gotten, and we know when we haven't been met. And we know the frustration of our parents not meeting us, not seeing us, not getting us, or our lovers, or our friends, our government. We know that frustration and yet there is this place within each of us where we are stopping the meeting. The meeting is stopped when we believe that the words we hear (the way that we hear them), are what is being offered.
So I want to make it as clear as I can that what I am saying is not in the particular words I use. These words come from my vocabulary, from my life experience, from the way my brain is wired, from my interests. They somehow come together, metaphorically, to speak of what is true. But the transmission, which is alive and which your heart can resonate with, is really what this meeting is about. The words are not necessarily in the way of that unless you think you understand or if you think you know what it is about. What I am saying to you is: just forget all of that. What you think is irrelevant. Thought can be wondrous, beautiful, elevated, horrible, terrifying, true, a lie. But in this moment of actually meeting one another it is irrelevant. The transmission is heart to heart, and then mind to mind. The mind is a part of the transmission, but the mind has to follow the heart.
We have built our reality on thinking ourselves. And that is very powerful: I mean humans rule the earth. This is a huge part of our conditioning and it has to be recognized. This man I am referring to, refused to recognize it. He thought, he knew what "still" means: it means S-T-I-L-L. Period. End of conversation. And so that was the end of the conversation. The possibility we have here is for this to be the beginning of the conversation. What I want to say to you, very simply, is that the truth of you is already awake, is already free, is already pure, is already beautiful, whole, and in love with itself. And the only thing that keeps you from realizing this truth of yourself, really, fully, and completely — is the belief that what you think about yourself is real.
Regarding the truth of which you are, right now, thought will not help you. If you will give up searching for who you are in your thoughts; if you are willing to stop thinking yourself, stop planning yourself, stop remembering yourself, then in an instant, you meet yourself. Effortlessly. And the capacity for that meeting is what brings us together. We are all here to support one another in the deepest, truest meeting, so that each life here can be lived in the deepest, truest way: an unknown way, an unthought way, an unremembered way.' Gangaji, August 2005
Rebecca,
I think this is brilliant. I am sending you an invite so it can be posted up as a post on its own, if you can oblige.
This point about stillness is excellent. We think that we know what it's about - "S-T-I-L-L" - but it doesn't satisfy. In the School what we then do is say, "well, it must be my fault, ahankara doesn't want to know about stillness".
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We know all about stillness in the School. More than that, we have regular experience of it. But that's not enough - we are trying to "still the mind" and we persuade each other that this is the objective.
The stillness is in the heart - in other words, we can stop worrying about the mind.
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