Chapter II

"Experience"
CHICAGO and GANGES, MI.

   

The Center in Chicago was a bustling place when I became a resident there in 1975. The property in Ganges, Michigan, was about to undergo transformation from the farm and orchard it had been for decades, into a place for public gathering. In Chicago a Sunday School, was in full sway, as well as the devotional singing of “Ram Nam” and the usual weekly lectures and classes. Swami Bhashyananda was an extremely busy man, called upon to speak in many places in the country. He not only made regular visits to the satellite groups in other states, he was also called to the homes of devotees in many parts of the Chicago metropolitan area, for family rites or spiritual festivities.
Very shortly my speaking schedule was assigned. I was to drive on one Sunday a month from Ganges to Chicago, speak at the Center and return the same or the next day. At that time the Chicago congregation was large, almost filling the hall or, on occasion, overflowing it. Many of our listeners, regular and occasional, were of Indian origin, and this presented me with the same dilemma I have long had: how to speak to a mixed audience of those whose roots are so different. Born in India, and born in America — by no means do we have similar backgrounds, training, philosophical assumption and religious belief. It has always seemed to me presumptuous to expound what I knew of Vedanta to people who have (or should have) been brought up on it. "Do they not know all these things better than I?” was my thought. Consequently, the slight feeling of embarrassment and reluctance has long lingered. It was somewhat overcome when a few of the Indian college students would assure me that they were as lacking in previous acquaintance with these ideas, or comprehension of them, as any Westerner could be.
 Eventually I adopted Swami Bhashyananda's advice to "speak from experience," more than from books. I made my approach to this audience by way of my own experience, and also that of sages, saints and mystics and by an analysis of the idea of "experience" itself. I spoke to them in the following vein.

That magic word “Experience”

I surmise that this is the word the serpent used, to Eve, over that famous apple: “My dear,” he must have said, “try this fruit. It will be a new experience for you.”
With this word as lure, many persons have been beguiled into paths they wish they had never walked, and taken turns they would otherwise never have taken. It is a magic word. It comes to us in many forms: expectation (which is often more than half of the enjoyment of anything); anticipation — a deceiver, for when we finally come upon the desired object, we often feel disappointed. We conveniently eliminate, in our recall, the inconvenient and unpleasant aspects of the experiences we have already had; remembering only their glories, we go back to the scene, expectant and optimistic: "This time I'll do it right!" The psychological "set" we carry with us has much to do with what we experience in the end.

The pursuit of experience can become insistent for us. I knew a high-school girl whose mother did not want her to go to the Masquerade Prom, the graduation dance and party put on by the senior class. After other reasons for going failed, the girl fairly shouted, "But Mother, I have to go to the Prom!"
"Why do you have to go?" asked her mother.
"I have to have that experience!"
Adult warnings have little effect on the young, because they see through hypocrisy. As Emerson said, "What we call sin in others, in ourselves we call experiment." Call it what we will, life could not, of course, go on without experience; the question is, what kind, how much, how do we approach it and how do we handle it? Experience is the double-edged sword which gives us the advantages of learning and growth; it also brings penalties and dangers.

Every kind of experience?

The girl who found the Prom irresistible was making a mistake which many make: there is no must in experience. No doubt she thought she needed to "round out her life," but it is one of the grosser superstitions under which we operate, that everyone has to have every kind of experience the world offers. Years ago I read a book about reincarnation which declared that we have to have all the experiences life has to give, and if you were a woman in many past lives, you ought to be man in the next or another life, to round yourself out. For some time I thought this seemed reasonable. Later I knew that the spiritual aspirant will see this as just another ploy for postponing the inevitable, the struggle to be free from all birth and death.
One of our abbots used to explain that we are the possessors of three kinds of power: the power to do; the power to resist; and the power simply to be. The first we all know, and are busy with it. Spiritual aspiration requires the second. Look at the example of the luna-moths. They fly at night in wilderness, attracted by the moonlight. They fly on and on toward it until they drop. It is irresistible. We have the power to resist, and that is the engine that is going to drive us to the power of Pure Being.

 A case in point

There is the case of Swami Premananda. When he came as a boy to Sri Ramakrishna, the latter said of him, "He is all purity inside. He does not know what the sex experience is!" He was one of those rare children. Yet if you read his life and teachings you do not find any deficiency in Swami Premananda. You do not find any lack of human warmth, any remoteness from life and its problems, do not see in his teachings any inability to cope with the situations of the common man. Not at all. Well, you may say, he must have had all those experiences in a previous life. Perhaps. But the Master said he was an isvarakoti, an ever-perfect soul. Even if we assume he had obtained this wisdom in previous lives, how do we know we have not done likewise? What makes us think we have not been through this charade of human appetite and romance and "love" and disappointment and disillusionment, time and again? Nothing compels us to go out and have all kinds of worldly adventures which we glamorously call "new." You know that most of what is touted as new is not really so. Then again how long do most sense experiences last? As Sri Ramakrishna graphically put it, "What pleasure is there in the things of the world? One moment they are here and the next moment gone; like candy in the mouth: once you swallow it, it is gone."

If you are a person who sometimes feels, "Oh I am homely, unattractive, I have a poor personality, no charisma, no one cares for me," (low self-image it's called, today) and you're tempted to go out in the garden and eat worms, don’t worry. Sophie Tucker once said that what a girl needs at eight is good parents; at eighteen, good looks, at thirty-eight, a good personality, and at fifty-eight, good hard cash. [1] Suppose you have none of these. Then will you commit suicide? Don't fret. You may have been saved many a damaging and devastating experience of another kind — a betrayal, a psychological maiming, a lifelong trauma. There is no proof whatsoever that those who have all the "desirable" physical or mental endowments are happier or better off in the long run.

The Hindus have a form of God specially designed for the Ugly Ducklings and Cinderellas of this world. That is the one known as Shiva. In addition to all his other functions, Shiva is especially available to those who have no one else. He is known for sheltering the freaks, the misfits, the ostracized. He says to them, "You have no one to go to? Come to me. Here I am, among the ashes. Come, sit by me, smear yourself with ashes and wear my shaggy skins and perform your austerities, for I too am homeless." In other words, if hard luck is your destiny, come have it in my company.

Early disillusionment

In India it is assumed that those who come to the monastic life while still young, without having acquired "worldly impressions”, will make the best monks; they are best prepared to strive for God-realization. Sri Ramakrishna continually spoke of the innocence and guilelessness of some of the young men around him and how well it boded for the making of their future. I have often debated this question, whether the external renunciation of monastic life should come after one knows the world and what one is giving up; or before the appetites of worldly life have caught us. One can argue for both, but evidence seems to favor the latter.
Everyone has to go through disillusionment. It begins early, when we eventually discover the truth about Santa Claus, and many other things. "When I first started my job," says the man in a famous cartoon, "I was fired with enthusiasm. And when I left it also, I was fired—with enthusiasm, by the boss." "If youth could know, and age could do," as an old saying goes.
How can that ever be? They are contradictory, and that is māyā. Swami Vivekananda, in his poem "My Play is Done," wrote this verse:

You sent me out in the dark to play and wore a frightful mask.
Then hope departed, terror came, and play became a task. [2]

Poet Kabir gives us two poems on the urgency of the task ahead:

O my heart! you have not known all the secrets of this city of love: in ignorance you came, in ignorance you return.
O my friend, what have you done with this life? You have taken on your head the burden heavy with stones, and who is to lighten it for you?
Your Friend stands on the other shore, but you never think in your mind how you may meet with Him...[3]

and:

O friend, hope for Him whilst you live, know whilst you live, understand whilst you live: for in life deliverance abides.
If your bonds be not broken whilst living, what hope of deliverance in death?
It is an empty dream, that the soul shall have union with Him because it has passed from the body;
If He is found now, He is found then.
If not, we do but go to dwell in the City of Death...[4]

When we are buffeted by the world, we very often forget the buffetings we have given to others. It happened to me not long ago. I had an unpleasant mishap for which I was bemoaning my fate; but in meditation that evening there came a memory, a sudden realization that I was not, after all, so innocently injured. What I had once done was not the same thing; therefore it was concealed from me at the moment; but now I realized that the way I had behaved must have had very much the same effect on the other person as this ugly incident had had on me.
 
Vedanta suggests that we venture into life taking care to avoid injury and making sure to get maximum benefit. Sri Ramakrishna used very often to counsel the clerks and business men who came to hear him, about working too hard in order to make more money than they actually needed. Once having achieved what is called a living, why not think about the fact that everyone of us inherits, by birthright, the Kingdom of God. Every one of us is a child of the Almighty, whose greatest happiness is to bestow upon us the knowledge of our immortality — the true "living." Even that language is not strictly correct, for it is no gift: it is our true nature. We have only to wake up, says Vedanta, and receive it. Why, then, all this frantic struggle for the almighty dollar and material goods of the world?

Plain talk about the drugs

Coming to an aspect of our life which is very much on our minds today, it is best that we be quite frank and open. The pressure to experiment with and abuse the mood-altering drugs, including alcohol, is very difficult for young people to resist today. In spite of (or because of?) the disapproval of parents and the law, children, even in the early grades, goaded by their peers and seniors to investigate drugs, have also been conditioned by the sight of their parents' medicine cupboards to believe that "pills" can solve life's problems, and if pills fail, bottles. Do you know what it is costing you and me, every year, in this country, to give various kinds of care to alcoholics? Incredibly, it is in the billions of dollars.[5] Human services have to be provided, hours are lost from work, welfare rolls are rising, and it all comes out of our pockets in the form of taxes. Is it not strange that such a hue and cry is raised about the spread of the newer drugs while large sections of society remain complacent about the older ones like alcohol and tobacco? The hard drugs are only the far end of a tendency to dependence and addiction running through the whole of our lives.

Rumi, in one of his poems, says "'Falsehood were nothing unless truth were there, to make it specious. 'Tis the love of right lures men to wrong. Let poison be mixed with sugar, they will cram it into their mouths."[6] This use of hard drugs is a Pandora's box which has been opened, and it is doubtful that the lid is going to be closed. We may deplore its ever having been opened, but we cannot deny that the drug experiences have had a powerful transforming effect on the life and thought of Western society, forcing us to reevaluate the nature and possibilities of the human mind. In view of the wide appeal to “experience” made by the drugs, what is needed today is a fresh, sane and sensible approach to the question of drug use and abuse.

Prohibition

I am old enough to remember Prohibition, and would not like to see it return, even if that were possible. Perhaps we can agree that those who would like to have all the narcotic and hypnotic substances banned and burned are dreaming an impossible dream. History shows that once here, they are likely to remain. On the other hand there is a good deal of evidence to show that the hallucinogenic drugs, whatever else they may have done, have served to open a doorway to spiritual insight for a generation. Materialist skeptics have amply verified Swami Vivekananda's observation: "It is better to have seen a ghost, than not to see anything at all beyond this world of the gross senses." And he was not at all, of course, an advocate of ghost-seeing. Preceding and accompanying the era of prohibition was the mentality which forbade alterations of consciousness of any kind, as evil, dangerous, the work of the devil. It is a mentality as old as humankind, leading to the burning of witches, and many sorts of malfeasance. This is not the place to dilate upon it, but simply to suggest to us that we need not have fear or guilt about alterations of our perception.
In other words the substances themselves are not the evil, but rather the mistakes we make in the use of them. Andrew Weil, now popular for his approach to daily medical problems, came to the fore first as a specialist in research on mind-transforming drugs. Weil says in his book, The Natural Mind, that the greatest mistake made is to suppose that a particular drug, say marijuana or LSD, is responsible for any particular ensuing experience.[7] He is one with Vedanta in saying that no physical material can be the cause of a spiritual experience. If, in other words, you have had your doors of perception widened, or your "third eye" opened by use of one of these substances, you may be sure that the drug merely served as a trigger for something which you yourself could have done without any drug at all if you had learned how to do it. The idea that a given drug has any consistent specific effect on the mind has been disproven.[8]

Yoga vs. drugs

This is the fact: our present state of consciousness can be altered, and altered for the better. Yoga is the process of learning to alter the state of consciousness consciously, deliberately. Certain substances introduced into the nervous system can predispose it to accept, for the time being, an altered phase of awareness, but it is gross error to suppose that we are dependent upon the drug for experiencing that expansion, or to think that we can get any lasting satisfaction of this sort without working for it in genuine yogic fashion. There are better ways than drug use to alter our state of consciousness. Moreover, we have been programmed into thinking of the waking state as the norm, the condition from which everything is to be judged.
There have been entire cultures which have used hallucinogens in constructive ways. Weil points out important provisos that have accompanied these cases: (1) the natural substances are not refined; (2) their use is heavily involved with ritual; (3) they are not used out of rebellion or in a negative context; and (4) they have constructive applications like the diagnosing of disease and warding off future dangers. With native tribes of the Amazons, for example, disease, family crises, tribal catastrophes—diagnostic insight into these has come to the shamans and elders of the tribe by the ritual use of peyote etc. Andrew Weil has spoken out clearly on what his experience has taught him, and his indictment is not of the drugs but of our society. This is what he says:
"We make a mistake in refining the drug so that it becomes ten times as potent as the natural substance the Indian tribes and others use in the native state. No wonder it has all kinds of outlandish side effects and exhausts the body."
     
"We make a mistake in using the drug out of rebellion against society's Puritanism and conventionality. If our American society would only take the charm of "forbiddenness" out of drug-taking, as is the case in India, for instance, a large part of our drug problem would evaporate."
These are controversial ideas and in our American freedom-loving society time will have to test them. I once had to conduct a seminar for teenagers and I asked this group of seventy-five boys and girls, most of whose parents were from India, what is the largest single factor, do you think, that makes you resist the peer pressure taking other kids "downhill"? They reported that the peer pressure from their classmates is not so great as adults sometimes think. For example, they said, when they took a clear and consistent stand, others would respect them and leave them alone. After some discussion there was general agreement that my question might be answered by the term "self-esteem." I liked the answer, but told them that in Vedanta we would like to spell it with a capital S. In-built in their genetic and cultural inheritance was the unconscious recognition of the sacred and inviolable Self at the core of their being. This was perhaps what guided them to a different judgment about what kind of experiences are worth having.

Making it rewarding

I have dwelt at length on some of the negative aspects of our experience. Growth and learning are the positive and necessary sides of experience. There are persons who are too tamasik, recluses and "clinging vines." whose egos are too passive; more experience may be just what they need. We speak rightly of the well-rounded person, if by this we mean one who has found the way to identify, approach and integrate the vagaries of life.
How then, can we assure ourselves an engagement with experience which will be fruitful, not wasteful, dramatic if you will, but not traumatic?

  • First, "Dream the impossible dream", really means to dream something which, however improbable, may not be altogether impossible. That may be a justifiable ambition. But to cherish outlandish desires, which are certain not to be fulfilled in this life, is both frustrating and debilitating. I once knew a young lady who aspired to be an opera singer. She spent years in practice and thousands in coaching fees, but unfortunately she was not endowed with the vocal equipment for an opera career and could not recognize that. Therefore we say, do not cherish outlandish, totally unrealistic ambitions.
         
  • Second, here are three ways to test any prospective experience:
a) Does it tend to dissipate my mind and energies? Does it "take me out of myself," as Thomas à Kempis used to say; we might say "keep me off base."
     
b) How does my behavior affect others? Is there injury involved? Will it put them on the spot or make it necessary for them to lie or practice deceit? Will it exploit, humiliate or demean them? Will it violate a promise made to someone, or make a liar of me?
     
c) Most importantly, where is the "locus" of the anticipated pleasure or satisfaction? Is it in the physical senses, in the mental field, or in both? I am reminded of a New Yorker cartoon in which a lady in her bizarre-looking apartment explains to a visitor, "We have gone from the Rococo to the Classic to the Modern, then the Postmodern; now there's nothing to do but move." Change, you see, is another deceiver. Our mind wants change, calling variety the spice of life. But Thoreau, beginning his retreat at Walden, and finding that attractive lake "lacking in variety" at last allowed his mind to settle down and was soon able to find infinite variety around him everywhere.
  • Third, it is good to remember that whatever we acquire in this life we shall also have to distribute, sooner or later. Whether it is the government's taxes or the moral suasion of envious friends or the Last Will and Testament—any wealth we acquire, financial or otherwise, is subject to the distributing forces of society and nature. Therefore let us try to acquire experience too, in a way which will be helpful to others, now or later.
         
  • Fourth, it is very helpful to live by a pattern, a schedule, keeping regularity in our routine. Contrary to what many suppose, this is not stultifying. It is not the death of spontaneity. We cannot prevent all surprise in our life, nor would we wish to. Surprise is an important and happy ingredient of spiritual life. But we Americans seem to pride ourselves on the rebellion of irregularity and indiscipline, which is supposed to demonstrate our "freedom." It only makes us smaller, and it hinders us from experiencing the joy of spiritual practice. We do not think about doing spiritual practice, such as japa, when things are sailing along for us. "Enjoying" eats up our awareness; and even if we become aware for a moment that we could or should be in spiritual pursuit, we don't, lest it should spoil our engrossment. That is a big mistake. We do not know what enjoyment really is, not having experienced it on a higher plane.

So far so good. These talks were eliciting a good bit of interest and were well attended. Certain persons came early and sat in the front rows—always an encouraging signal to a speaker!

   

  1. Quote by Sophie Tucker
  2. Poems, Advaita Ashrama, Almora, p. 30
  3. Poems of Kabir, trsl. by Tagore, Macmillan, 1917, p. 116
  4. Ibid. p. 46
  5. Substance Abuse: Alcoholism as an Example
  6. Rumi, Poet and Mystic, R. A. Nicholson, Geo. Allen & Unwin, p. 153
  7. The Natural Mind, Andrew Weil, Houghton Mifflin & Co. N.Y., 1972, 1998, p. 110
  8. Op cit., see Chapter Five

   

back TOC next


Aum | About | Calendar | Articles | Stories | On-line books
Bulletin board | Books & tapes | Links | Search | Contact