Quote ... Unquote

I very much enjoyed the responses to the "Golden Rules" post a few days ago. I think that what happened was that we stopped thinking about the problems as being about "them" and started to look at ourselves, with humour and humility. Maybe we could do more of that. The blog is useful to chivvy along the pace of change, I hope, but the real change is within me and you.

Another thing I would like to raise is the way we use quotations.

I often think of a wise quotation that I might use to contradict what someone else says, but I very rarely use it. It always feels like using a hammer to crack a nut ... and maybe the nut one is talking to is a human being, after all! ... click "Read more"

This blog is 99% made up of the words of its contributors. Why is this important? Because I believe that we in the School rely too much on the words of the wise, and need to learn to stand on our own two feet. The wise are constantly contradicting each other, anyway. The Bible is self-contradictory, if one is literal about it. Shantananda contradicts himself. So if we are going to rely on the wise, we need to place more emphasis on our own understanding. If we regurgitate partly-digested wisdom at each other, this is not communication.

There are blogs which are the exact opposite - a collection of wise quotations, with maybe 1% original content. I would not disparage that at all, but this blog has a different function.

Shantananda told the translator at the first meeting: "don't listen to my words; listen to my meaning, and translate that". On another occasion he said, "no-one needs to bind himself to a word". He also said that the quickest way to self-realization is to speak from the heart, and act on your words, without worrying too much about whether you've made a mistake or properly understood the teaching.

These principles of his have been honoured almost entirely in the breach.

There have been too many wise words from India and elsewhere, and too little understanding. We need to start to discover our own voices. Some (I know) will say that this is the route to egotism, but I can only respond that if that is what is in my heart, then "better out than in"! We cannot purify what is hidden, but only what is shown.

So I would propose this rule:

Never use a quotation to dismiss someone else's words, or when you have words of your own, however poor.

Responses?

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Bananas: His Holiness’ Words as a Tutors’ Capping Kit.

Have you noticed how His Holiness’ conversations can be used as a tool for making the world narrower, rather than what they were intended for, namely to break open our narrow vision to reveal the infinite spaces of the universal reality?

What do I mean? Let’s take a hypothetical example: bananas. In the conversations, His Holiness might have said something about bananas, perhaps as a diversion from the main thread of conversation, or to illustrate something else, or as part of a story, or whatever. It will rarely be a definition or an attempt to say the ultimate and last word on the subject.

Unfortunately, however, in the mind of the unimaginative tutor - unrefreshed by study of the conversations as a whole, or of the other works of the Vedic canon, or of the history of thought, or the lively global conversation of the early twenty-first century - this statement on bananas from then on becomes the entire truth about the subject ... click "Read More"

And so, if the student should say something about bananas that does not quite resonate with the context and content of His Holiness’ offhand remark, then the student’s comment will be ‘capped’ by the jubilant tutor: ‘You’ve got it wrong, lad. Let’s stick to the teaching. His Holiness says this, that, or the other.’

In this way the tutor retains the upper hand and the conversation is stymied. It may be that Shankara says the very opposite somewhere, or Plato, or Vasishtha, or Alasdair McIntyre. It is not well understood in the School that the Vedic tradition allows for many views and does not append the labels ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to ideas as we tend to do in the West, and as our founder was wont to do.

This crass illustration, of course, is just an imaginary example of a general trend. The remedy, however, is not obvious. It would involve widening the education and cultural outlook of the average tutor. It might involve the unthinkable decision to choose tutors who, rather than being ‘safe pairs of hands’, would be ‘loose canons’. It might involve having a rotating tutorship each week within each senior group.

It would certainly involve moving outside of the comfortable, endlessly-repeated habits of group practice and settled dogma, and letting into the School the fresh air and unlimited possibilities of the present.

Can you see this happening?

Posted on behalf of Son of Moses.

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Nothing

I had a strange dream just before waking this morning.

I was at a School function of some kind, and I met someone I know - let's call him M. (He is, I think, the happiest person I've ever met. He's always full of energy and enthusiasm; he's always delighted to meet you; I think his experience of the world is what my own might be one day, if the medicine works. He's not in School. It seems to be just the way he is.)

In my dream, however, I could hardly recognise him. He was wearing a conservative dark blue suit and tie, he looked frightened, and uncertain of what to do. What I knew, as I woke, was that M had forgotten himself because he had spent time in School.

Well, it was just a dream. Even so, I think it reflects something that I've felt for a long time. The School as it is raises some people up, because it's relatively better than what they know. There are others, however, who already know something better, and for them the School is relatively bad company. What we do is teach people about duty and obedience. This is helpful to many, but there are others for whom duty is the bedrock of their existence - but far from the whole of it. For them, "there is no time to attend a School, or to do duties" (Conversations, 1965).

This is not to say we are all wasting our time: not at all; but it is time we made an honest, unsentimental assessment of how far we need to go. We're not going to improve things by magic; nor are we going to do it by effort. We need to start being intelligent. Not intellectual, just reasonable. We need to start giving something better, so that the best people are attracted. This isn't a marketing issue: we need them.

There's another man I know who has something of M's quality - again, not in the School, as it happens. He's been fairly successful in life. I heard a story about how he was accosted by a mean old lady, who spat at him, "I knew you when you were nothing!"

He paused for a moment, and said to her quite calmly, "And I knew you before you were nothing".

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Fundamentals

I feel the need to return to where I began with this blog. We have covered a lot of ground and opened up areas of enquiry that undoubtedly need attention (science, meditation, devotional work, School organization). My original conviction, however, was that all that is necessary is for the School to return to the words of His Holiness Sri Shantananda Sarasvati.

Even more fundamental, that we return to his meaning. We got some of that meaning first time around, but for whatever reason we missed a lot.

In order to understand his meaning, it is not enough to slavishly learn 'his' words (as we have them in translation). We must bring to the task our own intelligence, our spiritual intuitions, and our creativity. If we bring only our obedient loyalty, we bring only part of ourselves to the meeting. Since he brought all of himself, we should do the same.

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Nowhere Man

This was sparked off by Laura's story, which I quote here.

I heard a story today: 'A teacher was supervising her young pupils during class. As she walked round she noticed that one little girl was very intent on her drawing.

'What are you drawing?' asked the teacher.

'God,' said the child.

'But no one knows what God looks like,' said the teacher.

'They will soon,' said the child as she continued her drawing.

A few of us met with Mr Jaiswal at the weekend to talk about art - everyone there was either an artist of some kind or a writer - and he said "the artist is the soul of the school". He added that while the rationalist understands the past very well, he has no vision of the future; but the artist sees the future.

This phrase, "the future" is particularly odd. We are accustomed in our tradition to think of the present as the only reality, yet Mr Jaiswal in another talk spoke about "the absolute of the past", "the absolute of the present" and "the absolute of the future". Creativity is "the absolute of the future". What does this mean?

Maybe the key is the Sanskrit word sat, which means "real", "good" and "manifest". To connect with the present is to connect with sat. Then we have the word asat which has some negative connotations, but also carries the sense of "unmanifest". In one of the Upanishads (sorry, can't remember where) the asat is higher than the sat. This makes sense, of course, because the unmanifest is closer to the absolute.

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

- A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V Sc i.

So the artist, it seems, discovers the asat, that which will be, while the practical man connects only with the sat, that which is.

When we met the Indian tradition at the start of the 1960s, we brought with us a tradition that connected strongly with the sat of the present moment. Accordingly, there was a strong mistrust of anything that smacked of asat: imagination, dream, thinking are all words we learned to disparage. They were associated with delusion, sickness and psychosis - which, of course, has some truth. Shakespeare in the same passage says "The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact". If we tread in the unmanifest, we may stray into the unreal, that which has no possiblity of manifestation.

The Indian tradition is rather different. It does talk about the value of the present, but it gives it far less emphasis than one would think from second-hand accounts. There is much more to the tradition than sat. To give one example, there is meditation: a practice that is a retreat from the waking consciousness of sat. Which probably explains why we have never made much progress with meditation, and why even our leaders can tell us so little about it.

By the way, you know about meditation. You've just learned to despise that part of you that knows it.

How best to serve the School? Is it by stopping on the path, asserting that we have already arrived, and protecting its heritage? Or is it by continuing along the path, doing what we can to build upon and exceed what has already been done?

We are like tourists who have two maps. The first one is commercially produced by a roadside inn, showing how to get there, but nothing else. The other is a real map, which shows not only the inn but the terrain and the way ahead to a site of pilgrimage, which is the historical reason for the road's existence. Both maps are true, but unless we put away the first and start to follow the second, we will stay where we are. The inn is getting older and a bit run-down, because fewer people pass along that way.

The way to help the inn recover its health is not by fixing up the sign or replacing the tables or advertising it, but to make the pilgrimage. When people are reminded of that, then they will need the School to help them on the way. But they don't need the School in itself, any more than we need an inn on a road to nowhere.

Only the artist - the real philosopher - can see that 'nowhere' is really where it's at. The challenge is to make that obvious, even to someone as dense as a practical man.

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