Chapter III

"The Goal of All Experience"
CHICAGO

   

The last in the series of talks on Experience tolled the bell of attainment or realization, usually a most welcome sound.
   
   What are we aiming for? Where is all this experience leading us? To wisdom. It is wisdom which gives meaning to all our pursuits; it lies behind all that we love and is the only treasure we can carry with us from life to life. The old adage “You can't take it with you,” doesn't apply to accumulated wisdom. We shall have to leave behind our stored-up knowledge of the materials and affairs of this world, along with this distinctive personality. But wisdom—the mature state of our spiritual discrimination and comprehension—our character, in other words—we carry with us beyond death. It will be lost (if it can be called a loss) only when we surrender it to the Absolute Being in the very last stage of our journey. If you have not attained to perfection, to “perfect knowledge of the Divine Ground”, as Aldous Huxley used to put it, in this life, fear not. Other opportunities lie ahead.
   Next we need to understand how we arrive at the goal of experience, how that pursuit dawns upon us and how we recognize this wisdom. There are two main roads by which we move from ordinary experience, through higher, and on to the supreme. One may be called the negative way, the other the positive, it being largely a matter of temperament. Many of us spend some time in each.
   
Via negativa
   
   You are a traveler on the negative path if you feel, “No more experience for me, if I can help it. I've had enough. I don't care to explore in the darkness of this cavern any more; I don't want to be hurt, and I'm tired.” The attitude has been vividly portrayed by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan, in a long conversation with Alyosha, speaks of how he wishes to “cash in his ticket” to the world. He rejects life as he finds it, feels betrayed by it and sees no point in going further. Some years ago there was a play with the title “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” It is the kind of feeling you may have, as I do, when browsing through a great library and looking at the banks of books stacked up. Surfeited, one thinks “Enough of all this!” The worldwide web is relatively new, and all the fascination of novelty attends its technical expertise, but it may not be many years before the people of the negative way will be saying, “Enough of all this virtual reality; I want  the real!” Swami Vivekananda, in his poem “My Play is Done,” ends with this verse, eloquently expressing that hunger of the heart:
Let never more delusive dreams veil off Thy face from me.
My play is done, O Mother, break my chains and set me free![1]
   
   But things are not over so quickly: many a soul who might like to “renounce all” in this way still has miles to travel. Destiny, karma or whatever you may wish to call it, may push him or her into the land of mystical experience. Even unsought, visions, auditions and insights from the realms of the higher mind come to those who may even prefer not to have them. More often, this negative attitude conceals a hidden pining for the role of an aspirant, for mystical experience—something the rationalistic nature may attempt to deny. Generally the idealist is consciously intellectual: the person seeks wisdom, knowledge, freedom from every vestige of ego, high or low, “ripe” or “unripe.”
   
   Those who have seldom had feelings like this may think it an attitude toward the world adopted by the handicapped, under endowed, misfits unable to compete in the game and calling the grapes sour. In such cases it does not develop into a spiritual search. As mentioned before, apparent disadvantages can be turned to our advantage and serious trauma avoided.
   
A commoner path
   
   Let us move to the positive path. Here, experience is deliberately cultivated. But the traveler tries to refine the experience, seeking ever better, ever newer, ways to enrich it. Very soon you discover that the senses alone cannot provide the impetus needed. The physical body and the commonplace mind are simply incompetent and have, eventually, to be left behind. You discover at last that the sound you want to hear is that which never fades away, the light you look for is the one which does not dim, the joy your heart yearns for is that which never falls flat. You have learned that you must now explore the Great Unknown. Filled with energy, health and zest for life, the positive pilgrim plunges ahead, turning his or her energy to the search for cosmic consciousness, which will be true liberation from the ego. If today you cannot find the joy unmixed with sorrow, tomorrow or one day you will; it will come by virtue of your being ever so much more wise.
   
Entering the field of spiritual experience
   
   Both the negative and the positive seekers can enter the realm of spiritual experience. The saints and sages have told us about their own adventures. We have, for one, that amazing book, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, an encyclopedia for the spiritual seeker. We can only briefly indicate here some of the landmarks which it describes for us, on the road to Reality. There are the visions—sometimes of light, in its many forms, sometimes fire, a fire which does not consume its host; or a form of god or goddess; Jesus' disciples see him thoroughly transfigured; St. Francis has what is called an audition: i.e., God's voice indubitably commanding him at San Damiano to rebuild the church (or Church!). St. Teresa of Avila looks on as the beautiful form of Christ comes to make her his bride.
   Others have had different types of spiritual revelations, less involved with form and shape, e.g., the author of the Cloud of Unknowing has the veils of his mind lifted off. Sri Ramakrishna had all sorts of experiences, from the sight and sound of Mother Kali with her disheveled hair and her anklets jingling, through fearsome visions and on to scenes of joy and the nirvikalpa samadhi, about which he tries in vain to speak, becoming lost in it. The catalogue of such accounts is unending and as varied as there are individual seekers. Yet because all of us are part and parcel of the cosmic mind there are certain archetypal experiences, one after another, which most seekers undergo.
   
   What about the pilgrim on the positive path? Here one sees, hears, thinks etc. in terms of form. Esthetic and poetic by nature, the positive pilgrim typically carries these expectations and preferences on the journey, up to the very last stage of spiritual maturity. This is the bhakta, the slower traveler who wants to explore the upper planes of the subtle world. He or she will perhaps wend a somewhat winding way through the visions, auditions, astral projections and all that gives the journey a mantle of the esoteric or mysterious. The great mystics warn us about this. “Do not get caught there,” they say. “Pass through these if you must, but go beyond.”
   
True wisdom
   
   Returning for a moment, to the pilgrim of the via negativa, one is more likely, here, to experience the Divine as Wisdom without the fancy dress. There will be much dwelling upon what the word wisdom implies: knowledge, surely, but not the academic or technical knowledge we acquire in the life of the world; rather, it is “functioning knowledge”—the kind that makes one better able to fathom human nature and relationships—what Sri Ramakrishna called vijnana, intimate knowledge. This is wisdom. It also implies learning, learning which ultimately means the ability to avoid making the same old mistakes, whether it is in laboratory animals, rats in mazes, or in the evolution of the spiritual aspirant. Wisdom implies judgment, intuition—a special way of knowing what is not apparent. True perception is the seeing beneath the surface of things. Intelligence now becomes the use of our intellect for higher purposes than classification and computation. It implies detachment too, because intellect without detachment is helplessness written in capital letters. Such are the ideas which this mountain-climber processes for his daily provisions.
   
The place of meditation
   
   Meditation has to be done in either case, at some point, either through inclination or in spite of it, regardless of the other practices followed. Meditation has its own fruits, in accordance with the seeker's temperament.
The bhakti-yogi, esthetically oriented, may be sitting there enthralled, thinking “How beautiful is Your face, Your nose; how tender Your feet, how sweet Your voice”. “Mother, how you are showing off in your Benares sari,“ said Sri Ramakrishna in the ecstasy of one of his visions. The bhakta will be in ecstasy, sailing through the seas of mystical phenomena.
   And this other “dry fellow”, who has wearied of experience? Let us see what is going in his mind. “Ah, what a relief it is to have emptied the mind,” (a Buddhist reaction); or, “How wonderful at last to be isolated from all disturbance!” (a Yogic expression). The jnani of Vedanta: “Here I am one—totally unified with the true Self, which is the Self of all.” We may wonder how the karma yogi will describe his meditation (if indeed he makes the opportunity to meditate). Perhaps he will say, “Aha! Having seen this, I can now plunge into all the work I wish without thought of self,” and to him that will be the most wonderful thing of all,
All of these are expressing ananda, bliss. Rather, it is not that they are expressing bliss, for bliss is our nature, it is what we are; it is bliss, as Vivekananda would say, which is coined into all these modes.
   Bliss, beauty, intelligence, freedom—all can be modes of wisdom, also to be found in some degree in our everyday behavior. There is that poem “If...”, by Rudyard Kipling, which the critics deplore, but which gives us many clues to wisdom in everyday life. I wish he had lightened the poem with a verse such as, “If you can laugh, not at but with, and turn that laughter, too, upon yourself...”
   
What is it our heart seeks?
   
   Both seekers, you see, are really saying the same thing. One is tired of experiencing—through the sense-organs and limited mind, the mind of our private dreaming. This one has had enough of being tossed by the pairs of opposites: pain-pleasure, depression-elation, praise-blame, and wants peace. The other wants to go on experiencing in a better way—through seeing, hearing, feeling and knowing That which never comes to an end, does not leave us, does not wear out, the boundaries of which can never be reached and which seems to be ever new. Both are after the transcendental, hungry for that which lies beyond and behind what we seem to see and seem to know here.
   Mystical experience is not so alien to us as we often suppose. We do not think about trying to have it when things are sailing along for us, as we said earlier, so filled we are with the enjoyment of the moment. And now constant entertainment is provided by our society, lest we fall into the ennui which might induce introspection. It is a great pity and prevents us from becoming mystics and discovering what true enjoyment is. There is a cartoon I like: snow is coming down and beginning to cover the ground. A large polar bear is seen going into its cave for hibernation. And the bear carries a portable TV set with him. Very funny, because so untrue. Bears must dream, I am sure, just as dogs do. They don't need TV. The bear remains happily holed up, apart from stimuli, for the long winter months. Yet you and I have trouble doing something of the sort for half-an-hour.
   
The experience of excellence
   
    All the saints of all the religions have told us that this Transcendental Being exists, and can be experienced. They have asked us to follow in their footsteps and to know it for ourselves. That is where we find our meaning and our fulfillment, they say. Is it beauty you want? There is a whole world of spiritual beauty this worldly eye never sees and the petty mind never dreams of. An Indian Christian devotee who came to Sri Ramakrishna had had a vision of Christ. “The beauty of the fairest woman in the world,” he told Ramakrishna, “is as nothing compared to the beauty of that face of Jesus.” Sri Ramakrishna himself described the loveliest of his visions. He saw the goddess Raja-rajesvari, a form of the Divine Mother. He said it looked as if her beauty had got melted, as it were, spread all around, and was illumining the universe! What can we make of language like this? Very little, unless we ourselves have had high spiritual experience.
   Is it love you want? Whatever expression of love you may think you have known, either as giver or receiver, pales before the opening of the floodgates of the heart, which takes place when the great Beloved is found and known. That love is never dimmed, never subtracted, never betrayed, never found inadequate, depends on none, no physical beauty: it just is , incontrovertible, inviolate, unconditioned. In the Master, in Holy Mother, in Swamiji—in everyone in that blessed spiritual family, people saw the living manifestation of this transcendental love.
    Is it truth you want? Do you call yourself a truth-seeker? And by that you explain all your adventures here? But what is meant by truth? What is the yardstick by which the world phenomena and the experiences of life—and death—are to be measured? Can any truth which is not forever be really true? Can the heart or mind ever rest satisfied in what is partial, not whole; temporary and not eternal; which is qualified by time or place, or sense qualities or mental reactions? Doesn't truth have to go beyond all that? And if there is such, can anything prevent us from getting it? Mosquitoes hover and buzz outside the tent far into the night, aware that what they want is just inside that membrane. Even in such a tiny creature is this manifestation of intelligence. Remember what the Master says about a thief, sleeping for a night in a room and knowing that the treasure he covets is in the next room: he will toss and turn all night conspiring to get to it.
   
An ideal life?
   
   Maybe you are in search of moral perfection. All your life you have been looking for someone in whom you would find only good and no bad; who could be trusted, through and through, perfectly honest, perfectly sincere, courageous, generous, sympathetic, yet dispassionate and self-contained. Perhaps in your own character you have attempted to develop all those moral virtues. Now life is passing and you have failed yourself time and time again, nor have you found that perfect character in anyone else. What is left? There is something called higher experience which by its sheer majesty and glory shames all the small pictures we cherish of these great ideals, but which brings us instead into the Living Presence of the Self of selves, the Truth of truths, the Light of lights. "Tameva bhantam anubhatii sarvam..." He shining, everything shines after Him; by His light all this is lighted.[2]
   
    After these talks some people came up to me and said, “Very good, but what should we do”? It was inevitable, it always happens. The books are full of things we can do, but that doesn't prevent the question.
    I think I understand: they suppose that the swamis know some secret, easy ways that no one else knows; sometimes they do not know our guru-tradition and imagine that any swami is able to give them one-on-one instruction; and sometimes they are just so hung up on the Western penchant for “doing” that any other way of looking at situations is difficult for them.
    It is for this reason that we put so much emphasis on knowledge. “There is no purifier on earth like knowledge,” Sri Krishna declares.[3] We make many mistakes and suffer from our ignorance, not because we do not know what to do, but because we do not know what to be. As Aldous Huxley stated it, “Knowledge is a function of being.” When we become what we truly are, then only we know what to do, and can do it ourselves. And sometimes we ask, “What shall I do?” only in the secret hope that the teacher will say “Very little,” or perhaps even “Nothing at all.”
   
Helpful Steps    
   
   You will recognize that the position taken by the previous series of talks is in marked contrast to many attitudes we find around us. It puts the responsibility on us. We are not likely to find many today who resonate to this. Rather, we will be likely to encounter one of the following attitudes:
   
l. The clinical.
   Business-like and matter of fact, it looks upon natural disasters and the like as a part of life; suffering is involved in many surgical operations. Medical personnel often try to carry this attitude from the hospital into daily life, finding that it works pretty well on others, when giving advice etc., but not so well on themselves. Like those who minister to prisoners without ever having experienced life in prison, many physicians do not fathom a patient's pain until attacked, late in life, by some fell disease.
   
2. Sweep it under the rug.
   This is the try-to-ignore position, well expressed by the British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer. He shows clearly how death has become a taboo and how in the twentieth century it has replaced sex as the forbidden subject. “Formerly children were told,” he says, “that they were brought by the stork, but they were admitted to the great farewell scene about the bed of a dying person. Today they are initiated in their early years to the physiology of sex; but they no longer see their grandfather and express astonishment; they are told he is resting in a beautiful garden among the flowers. Such is the pornography of death.”
    If the fear of death is one of the commonest sources of suffering, consider how threatened we feel by the issues raised by pain and death. Jessica Mitford's book on the commercialization of death illustrates well what Swamiji called “covering the corpse with flowers.” How different are the customs of India, where mourners carry the body through the streets for anyone to see, all the while chanting “Ram nam satya hai!” (The name of God alone is truth.)
   
3. Positive denial (attempted) .
   Certain religious denominations and sects, spiritualists and healing cults often have the survival of the personality as the sole aim; these become the butt of jokes and criticism, much of which centers on the "untruth" of the teachings and the danger of following them. Swami Vivekananda firmly reminded one and all that the very fabric of this world is pairs of opposites and there can never be an immortality for the relative aspect of our being, that the liberty of the human being could never be in personality, but only in the divinity of the Soul.
   
4. Reveling in suffering.
   Perversely, suffering has been unduly glorified and even worshiped. Today it is not so much a school of thought as it is an individual attitude, a type of psyche. It steeps the sufferer in tamas and can lead to wrongdoing, as Dostoevsky has shown us in Crime and Punishment and Aldous Huxley in his Grey Eminence, and as played out in the “Thug” sect in India. Swami Vivekananda, writing about the nature of true love has said again and again, “In [it] there is no pain.”
   
5. It won't happen to ME.
   In the Mahābhārata we read that the hero Yudhishthira, when asked by that fabulous crane, what is the most marvelous thing in the world, replied, “That we see people dying all around us, yet fancy we will never die.” Why do we fancy we will never die? For two reasons, the first being that through attachment to life we unconsciously avoid or postpone consideration of our somatic death, and the other, that we have an equally unconscious intuition of That in us which never changes. The latter it is that provides a valid sense of our undyingness, and which pulls us, as it were, toward larger awareness of it.
   
   
How to help ourselves with suffering: steps we can take
   
     Attitude: Neither flippancy nor morbidity is truly helpful. “Grin and bear it” is usually said by those who do neither very well. On the other hand no one is fond of the masochist. Suffering has spiritual value only if there is constructive spiritual reaction to it; in that case character is built. Surely this is the intention of the author of the book of Job. In the Mahābhārata, Kunti, the exemplary mother of the Pandavas who used her pain as a means of remembering God, prayed to him not to remove it if that would cause her to forget him. Nehru as a political prisoner used his confinement for various kinds of spiritual practice. Our reaction should engender sympathy with others, firmness with ourselves. Let us realize, too, that people differ in their sensitivity to pain, both physical and mental.
   
     Not multiplying desires also helps, remembering that things which pamper come with a price. As the Gita tells us: “Feelings of heat and cold, pleasure and pain, are caused by the contact of the senses with their objects. Coming and going, they never last long. You must accept them.”[4] We recognize that seeking new ways to gratify greed, possession, comfort, prestige or image is bound in the end to be counterproductive. All of us know about resisting commercial pressures and we all undergo some asceticism. Just how much do we need? That is a good question to take to your spiritual teacher, who can best advise how stringent you should be with yourself. “Yoga is not for the one who overeats, or for one who fasts excessively. It is not for one who sleeps too much, or for the keeper of exaggerated vigils.”[5]
      Assuming that by luck we can “have it good” is foolhardy and many of us know this: we call it the law of compensation. Put positively, this is the practice of contentment. It leads to cheerfulness and helps to minimize suffering. Sri Krishna puts it succinctly:”
Water flows continually into the ocean
But the ocean is never disturbed.
Desire flows into the mind of the seer
But he is never disturbed
The seer knows peace:
The man who stirs up his own lusts
Can never know peace.[6]
   
   
 How to ride the waves
   
   Exultation is out of place. Self-congratulation is as deadly as self-pity, for depression is sure to follow. Speaking of pleasure and pain, The Prophet puts it poetically: “When one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”[7] And this plangent piece of advice comes from Swami Vivekananda: “When you are on the crest—be generous; when in the trough—hold on!” The crest will return. The saints were aware that everything they held, they held in trust. “Through His grace” is in the mouth of nearly every one of them. It was God from whom all blessings flowed. “In reality, I alone am the giver,”[8] says Sri Krishna; ...”I shall supply all [your] needs and protect [your] possessions from loss.”[9]
   
   If we learn to discriminate the suffering of the body from that of the mind, and to distinguish the death of the body from the death of the mind, we are true Vedantists. We compound our pain through dread, anxiety and worry. Sri Ramakrishna had to suffer a dislocated elbow, then cancer of the throat, and we hear him saying again and again, “O my mind, remain in your natural bliss; let the body take care of itself.”
Vedanta describes our nature as made up of three bodies: the gross or outer shell, the inner, mental shell and the inmost, the causal body. Mind is a Janus: it can choose to look down and be distressed or to look up and be blessed.
   
   Keep the mind high! All is prana in different rates of vibration. Yoga means adaptability—the capacity to raise our vibratory level by avoiding low, mean thoughts and any unsavory company which fosters them. In our society it is easy to be skeptical, but this is a fact: those who are able to live “cleanly” really do transcend suffering, avoid injury and disease, and can face death serenely. Some diseases seem literally to be gross manifestations of their mental counterparts, e.g. blindness and deafness when of hysterical origin, and the neurasthenia which comes from anxiety neurosis. We have to step carefully if we don't wish to tempt fate.
   
What role for God?
   
Those of devotional nature can draw close to God and seek his/her protection. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. Then the question comes, does God always protect? On one hand Jesus promises protection, with the other, hands us a cross: “If any one would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me.” Swamiji's poem to the Divine Mother ends with: “She who, since birth, has ever led me on/through paths of trouble to perfection's goal....” Devotees do suffer, you say. Yes, but when we look at the cross, and see how Jesus bore it to Golgotha, we understand that in some way the quality of that suffering is different, and even the quantity, when the heart is willing.
It is said of a Countess in Europe of the last century that her nephew, attending her at her deathbed, asked, “Madame, how is it you can remain so calm in the face of death?”
“Do you think,” the lady replied, “that one who has learned to live gracefully for eighty years will not know how to die gracefully for fifteen minutes?” Swami Vivekananda once said that we cannot prove anything is evil until we see it from the background of eternity. And in The Imitation of Christ : “If to die be accounted dreadful, to live long may prove more dangerous.”[10]
   
Fearlessness: the best medicine
   
   Know who you are: this is the source of fearlessness, for all the Vedanta texts say, there is no remedy for suffering so useful as that of knowledge. Who are you? In reality the Atman, with three kinds of clothing, as it were. Are the clothes torn? Are they in tatters? Or have they stuck to us in our helpless attachment? Many of us suppose that to identify with the intellect, mind and senses is a normal thing. It is not. The fact that we often say, “my nose,” “my leg,” “my body” shows our duplicity about it and at night we divest ourselves of the outer layer in dream and sometimes two layers, in deep sleep; look well at the current crop of near-death experiences (at least some of which must be genuine); and hear the words of the sages who have lost their false identifications. They can bear misery much better when they are firmly assured that in the core of their being, they are untouched by it.
   As embodied beings you and I have died many times and been born in other, self-forgetting forms. Like those fleeing the raging forest, you've packed up and moved so often! Why not strive now for the freedom of disembodiment? Caesar had some intuition of it when he remarked that cowards die many times before their death, the valiant only once.
Today there is much talk in some quarters about making the mind blank or annihilating it. But the mind and intellect can never be annihilated on their own level, by their own devices. We have to go above mind to transcend it.
   As in life, so in death. To face life daily, remembering death, this is the secret. If we face it in these ways we discover that suffering and death have taken care of themselves..

   

  1. Op. cit., p. 32
  2. Katha Upaniṣad, II. 2. 15
  3. Bhagavad Gitā, IV. 38
  4. Op. cit., II. 14
  5. Ibid., VI. 16
  6. Ibid., II. 70, 71
  7. The Prophet, Khalil Gibran, Knopf, N.Y. 1943, p. 36
  8. Bhagavad Gitā, VII. 22
  9. Ibid., IX. 22
  10. Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis, Collins, London, 1957, p. 70

   

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