|
|
Feature Article (Archived) |
|
NO PROGRESSION WITHOUT CONTRARIES By Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan [ Most of us think of life as containing good and evil. Some things attract, and others repulse. They are opposites in our experience. We consider them incompatibles or irreconcilables. But according to William Blake, the English mystic and poet, "Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy [the creative or imaginative faculty], love and hate, are necessary to human existence."* Not only are they necessary, but there is no progression without them. As we transition from the dead of winter to the stirring of life with Spring, we can see that the Contraries are equally true. All are necessary. The Tiger completes the Lamb, and Being proceeds beyond both. Yin and Yang make up the Tao, the Way, the Godhead. Or, rather, the Godhead is perceived, manifested, made accessible through the Yin and Yang, through the Contraries. Being itself is beyond all Contraries. It is that which is. But is-ness is experienced through the play of the contraries, by passing through them, and then going beyond them in the light of Self-Realization.We crave Life, but Death is not only part of life, but necessary to it. Death is the Poetry of life: Life’s Glorifier. How poor Life would be were it not for the dead who have pre-deceased us, leaving us, in our memory of them, a page of life indispensable and blessed. The “noble dead,” Tennyson said. The sacred past. Life leads to Death, we know. But Death leads to more Life. Every death in Nature leads to a new Resurrection. Trees would perish if they did not shed their leaves every autumn. With every leaf that falls the way is made for the reappearance of new life in another spring. So among humanity. Suppose no one died, and humans even in their bodies achieved deathlessness. How quickly the earth would be over-populated, and life would be unbearable. Death redeems life … indeed, makes it possible. Dylan Thomas wrote: “Do not go gently into that Good-Night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” No, not rage. Acceptance. Socrates is the exemplar for humanity when he accepted the cup of hemlock, not Dylan Thomas. Thomas’ view of death reflected his limited vision of life. He died as an alcoholic at the age of 39 in New York City. From Life to Death—to Life again. And so on until the day of Attainment. Opposites breed each other, and if we move with the flow of their interplay and tidal recurrence we ascend on ever-higher rungs of growth, development, evolution, and Self-knowledge. If we are failing to achieve our spiritual goal, or failing even to understand why we are living, we should take that as the natural condition of man at a certain stage, accept that—the anxiety, the depression, the addiction, the cravings, the weakness, the bad temper, or whatever we are coping with—take that as the cross to be borne. Precisely that! It’s a process until the day of Realization of the Unity of Life when Perfection transcends the Process, having fulfilled it. As far down as we have gone, so far will we go up. All is purposeful in this world. Not only the planets, the stars, the seasons, the courses of Nature, but the courses of the soul’s development were also designed for maximum effectiveness. Satan is the potentiality in us for self-will carried to its ultimate end—that is all. Christ precisely the opposite. The effort to dislodge the satanic element in the personality will produce the Christ consciousness. If the effort is strong, sustained, determined and desperate enough, saintliness will result. The wildness and violence of the ego become, in this mysterious but fated process, converted into tremendous power of spiritual willing and discriminative knowledge, which make a person invincible, a hero.
No rose
without a thorn ... but no thorn without a rose.
* From "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
See also Words of Wisdom: Truth, Spiritual Life
THE PSYCHIC VERSUS the Spiritual By Paul Hourihan, edited by Anna Hourihan Why are people so interested in psychic phenomena? What is the psychic about, anyway? Is it part of the spiritual realm or is it, in fact, a hindrance to spiritual growth? In the past, if someone could command the mysteries of the psychic world we automatically thought he or she must be from God. Even to this day we tend to think that the person who can heal or read minds must have some kind of divine gift. It simply is not so. These individuals are accessing and utilizing a dimension of life that most of us, especially in the West, have not yet discovered or acknowledged. It is the psychic. Between spiritual reality and ordinary, mundane reality (including that of the every-day conscious mind) lies the world of the psychic. The psychic is merely an extension of our familiar world of sense and ego-experience, but an unfamiliar area of the mind—so unfamiliar that we assume it is Spirit itself! The psychic such as ESP, miraculous and healing powers, flows out of our natural constitution, and like the other five senses is given by Nature as part of our endowment as creatures. It’s simply a sixth sense. So we all have this ability in potential, except that only a few have reached the point, either by chance or karma, or work, or application, to develop it. The spiritual realm is also unfamiliar but is a reality and potentiality in us that is not given, as it were, by Nature. It has to be achieved by going beyond Nature, beyond the creatureliness in us. Soul and Spirit are beyond Nature, beyond Mind and beyond the senses. The Spiritual or Divine Life is that rare love, compassion, selflessness, nonattachment, and all-acceptance, which we find in Christ and Buddha—in their teachings and the way they embody them in their actions and relations to people. Many who possess the psychic gift are not prepared to live a spiritual life with its emphasis on discipline and purification of the mind. Why does the psychic appeal to us? Since it is part of the personality and mind, it is a more accessible experience. The desire for occult or esoteric knowledge and experience, which makes us feel superior to others, appeals to the creaturely, egoistic part of us. In spiritual life, however, we attempt to transcend, slowly and safely, the ordinary personality we have, including the personality that is fascinated with ESP, and try to achieve, through struggle, a new self that is there, hidden within. The greatest temptation on the spiritual path is said to be the desire to exercise occult powers. Lust and the desire to control the lives of others are two of the most powerful foes in spiritual life. Those who seek psychic powers, and gain them, usually cannot control them and are in danger of destroying themselves by those same powers. The use of these psychic powers by us is not only an expression of egoism but an enhancement of it. Of all the aptitudes or gifts we might possess, it is the most hazardous and burdensome for a spiritual aspirant since it so directly and subtly fosters the growth of the aspirant’s enemy—the self-serving ego itself. As we advance on the spiritual path, these powers may come to us. Patanjali in his Yoga Aphorisms states that giving up these psychic powers, even great miraculous ones, destroys the seed of evil. The evil he refers to in Vedantic terms is the ignorance—egotism resulting from our identification with the body and the mind—that makes us forget our true divine nature. Is it Psychic or Spiritual? When we have experiences of other worlds or other levels of mind and consciousness, how will we know if they’re spiritual or psychic? Psychic experiences leave us essentially the same; spiritual experiences transform us, our characters are changed for the better. When we have a psychic experience we wonder about its meaning, its genuineness, etc. With the spiritual experience, there is no doubt—Spirit is Truth! Truth speaks with a clear, compelling voice. Spiritual experience is not possible within the limits of the mind. We must transcend the mind to reach the spiritual realm. Thousands throughout the world have miraculous powers, but is there even one who can act like Christ or Buddha? We want to reach the point where we can forbear, have compassion, and love, like they did. That is the goal and what we should be striving for—not to read others' minds, but to evolve as spiritual beings. See also Words of Wisdom: Spiritual Life, Knowledge, Truth, Ramakrishna. For more on Vedanta - What is Vedanta?
|
|
