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Children of Immortal Bliss - Sample Excerpts |
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Excerpt from "The Swetasvatara Upanishad." Click here. This includes BRAHMAN: THE Absolute.
For Excerpts on Detachment,
click here.
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OM, HANDLE FOR
THE DIVINE OM, Handle FoR the DiviNe
When we try to think of God or the Divine Being, we have only the mind to think with. The mind is our instrument, our creature; before we can succeed, we have to find out what its nature is. Among other things, our mind lives for sense impressions, concrete realities. That is what makes it comfortable. If you give it a concept like Immortality, it grows restless and uneasy. Give it Love, and it is restless even there: It tries to think of love and immediately turns to a sense object, something specific. We tell it to think of Glory and it can’t—it again identifies with the familiar. So it’s clear that if you want to think of anything—not only these abstractions but anything at all—you need a name or a word to think with. That is the mind’s nature. We have to give it a word or a name before it can have a thought; it needs to know what to think to begin with, and to be able to think. Every thought in the world has a corresponding word or name that announces it to the mind. When we want to think of God, the mind wanders in a void. It thinks of the sky perhaps, but even that is something definite—blue, somewhat tangible. We need a name for God, or a word. We can’t think of the Absolute itself: we need something to give the mind some support to hold onto. As we have seen, if you tell the mind to think of Love, it gets restless, but if you think of some aspect of Love or some loving person—an image or symbol—immediately it feels more comfortable. Therefore we give it what it needs. There are many visual symbols for the Divine. Christ is one; he is a vehicle towards Brahman, a channel towards the Absolute. He did not point to himself, but beyond. Buddha, also, said, Don’t glorify me; tread the path that I have trodden, and you can experience what I have. With OM we’re concerned with another kind of symbol, the auditory…. OM is believed to be the sound of the creative power, of the Divine Will in action. OM is the sound of the Deity—at least, that which we can pronounce. Yogis are said to hear it in their meditation. Not only in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, but also in Christian traditions: Eastern Orthodoxy has had the sound HOM for centuries. “Whosoever knows OM, the Self, becomes the Self,”* says the seer of the Mandukya Upanishad. OM can be viewed as a handle by which we seize hold of the thought of the Deity; without a handle it is difficult to open the door. OM is a mantra, a sacred or inspired sound that is repeated to evoke to the mind a sense of that reality we are seeking to know directly. It stands for the Beyond, the Reality within, the Divine. There are many other mantras as well. We may prefer to repeat the name of Buddha, or of Jesus, or Krishna, or of some other name that represents the Divine. Whatever is congenial to us we should use. But in lieu of some special partiality, many find OM acceptable because it symbolizes the Godhead in the most impersonal and universal way. * The Upanishads, Breath of the Eternal, Trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester, (Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1975), 76.
Note: The image is the Sanskrit "\"symbol for OM.
INDIVIDUALITY AND
Mystical EXPERIENCE ... The individuality that we know now is separatist. That is what we cling to. It is egoism responding when we protest: What will happen to my individuality in mystical experience? However righteous it sounds, that is the ego speaking, loving divisions and differences; whereas, the spiritual element in us is trying to find unity and oneness. We want to develop and polish our individuality, but keep it intact, apart from other entities. We want to develop it, not lose it. In mystical experience, however, we lose the egotistic sense of individuality and gain a different consciousness entirely. It is like explaining to a boy of ten about the joys of married life. He doesn’t believe there are any other joys except the ones he knows. So we think our idea of individuality is the ultimate when it is only the beginning. There is something much beyond that.... We have to keep training our minds not to think that [mystical] experience has anything to do with annihilation, as we all tend to believe at first. It is simply the dissolution or extinction of the ego-power. Therefore, will mystical consciousness cause us to become nothings and lose our individuality? Quite the contrary: It will expand us to include the universe. The individuality we hug close is trapped in a kind of shell, like the caterpillar in a cocoon. Just as the caterpillar goes through metamorphosis to break free from its cocoon to achieve the next stage of development and become a butterfly, so we have to break the encasement of the ego-consciousness. After we do this, the Infinite will not be alien to us, although it is now. The feeling of exaltation and bliss that accompanies the experience, universally attested to, is the sign of coming into our true realm. We’re attracted to the Infinite, but we’re afraid of it, too. When we don’t have any direct experience of something, we are a little estranged from it even as it lures us on. This is what undergirds our fear that we are going to lose our individuality. But all the sages declare that the Infinite is our actual self. The discovery will be like suddenly coming home to ourselves in a flashpoint of awareness, consuming but a single moment. It will be like illuminating a dark room—after the light appears we don’t wonder where the darkness has gone, it seems never to have been. The moment the light is on, we don’t conceive of darkness any longer. This is how it is with the experience of the true self. The old self, so afraid to develop beyond its known limits, is magically wiped out, and we don’t think of it any longer—just as we don’t recall the darkness, which has not so much been changed as somehow fallen into nonbeing. Our true nature is Light. For more on mysticism: See also THE MYSTICAL STATE VS. THE DREAM STATE, IS MYSTICISM ESCAPISM? and Mysticism in our Words of Wisdom section. |
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