Attaching our desires and hopes on the Spirit

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

In the article appended, it is said that 'People often associate suffering with

the spiritual path, but is it right to do so?' The article clarifies what a

yogi's view on this would be.

 

There is also an interesting quote in this article on the current subject of

'idolatry'. Very interestingly, it says that: " All your worldly attachments will

end in the breaking of the heart: nothing else...all worldly attachment brings

misery in its train, because all worldly attachment is idolatry. (In Woods of

God Realization, vol. iii, 152-3)

 

This article is saying that we should not attach our desires and hopes on any

sense objects, but on the Spirit, which is part of " Realizing the Self! "

 

i hope you enjoy this article and that it will help to shed some light on your

spiritual path.

 

kind regards,

 

violet

 

 

 

Seeing Through The Veil Of Tears

 

Joy and suffering are the proverbial accompaniments of human existence, and each

and everyone of us at times is visited by periods of gloom and negative

thoughts. But man is very inclined to give his current moods and passing

fantasies a cosmic significance they do not really possess. And it is therefore

necessary to ask whether the world at large really justifies these sentiments or

whether they are much more an expression of the current state of our mind. Is

King Lear right, for instance, when he says:

 

When we are born we cry

That we are come to this great stage of fools.

 

Or is Bertrand Russell right when he says:

 

The world is utterly bad, bad to the core.

 

Russell often expressed deep disillusionment with the world and man, but equally

at other times he could be optimistic and forward looking. He was a person, not

only of tremendous intellect and breadth of knowledge, but someone who felt

intensely for the future and the fate of mankind. One finds him, for instance,

writing in the introduction to the third volume of his autobiography:

 

This book is to be published while the great issues that now divide the world

remain undecided. As yet, and for some time to come, the world must be one of

doubt. It must as yet be suspended equally between hope and fear.

 

It is likely that I shall die before the issue is decided - I do not know

whether my last words should be:

 

The bright day is done

And we are for the dark,

 

or, as I sometimes allow myself to hope:

 

The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return...

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

 

I have done what I could to add my small weight in an attempt to tip the balance

on the side of hope, but it has been a puny effort against vast forces. May

others succeed where my generation failed!

 

Here you have it, gloominess and optimism fighting for the supremacy in one

mind.

 

There are many philosophers, like Schopenhauer or Oswald Spengler (whose major

work The Decline of the West had an important influence on comtemporary thought

in the first half of the twentieth century) who take Lear's view. But is

suffering inevitably man's lot? Is it necessary? And is it necessarily good for

one?

 

The problem of evil and suffering is a real one, but it is one concerning which

man is subject to a lot of misconceptions. People often associate suffering with

the spiritual path, for instance, but are they right to do so?

 

In his book Vedanta Light, our Teacher Dr. Shastri addresses this problem from

the point of view of Yoga. And what he says there is both forthright and to the

point, and will be unexpected to many:

 

It is commonly thought that to rise in spirituality we must suffer, we must

court suffering, and live as long as we can in suffering. The early Christian

saints were followers of this doctrine. It is said that Shakyamuni also taught

the doctrine of suffering. It must be made clear that this view is wrong and has

no foundation in the experience of the saints and sages. The nature of the soul

is bliss, and it lives in bliss. God is love, that is, bliss. To worship

suffering is to demonstrate bankruptcy of all spiritual experience. We are here

to banish suffering from our own mind and from the world of living beings.

Suffering is the result of duality and ignorance. How can it be a companion of

Truth, which is above duality?

 

Suffering will certainly come to man as long as he lives in ignorance and

darkness, but it is as a result of his own past action. Even more, the quality

of suffering itself depends, not on the experience, so much as on our response

to it. Man likes to blame anything rather than himself and (if he can't find a

more convenient scapegoat) rails against the powers that be.

 

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport!

 

But Shakespeare in King Lear, with his characteristic transcendent genius, also

expresses those profounder truths about suffering when he puts in the mouth of

his characters such sentiments as:

 

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us. (V. iii. 169-170)

 

Man loves to find something else to blame for his misfortunes, like the

superstitious Gloucester, who says to his bastard son Edmund:

 

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us...Love cools,

friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries,

discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father...We

have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all

ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. (I. ii. 106-117)

 

And the worldly but shrewd Edmund comments:

 

This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune,

often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the

sun, the moon and stars; as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly

compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards,

liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all

that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of

whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! (I. ii.

121-131)

 

What then is the right attitude for the yogi towards suffering? Is the world

inevitably a vale of tears, and should we embrace suffering as the means to

better things, or as man's destined lot? The answer is clear and simple:

 

You need not court suffering. As shadow follows substance, so does suffering

follow ignorance. The pleasures born of the contact of the senses with objects,

if taken as real, turn into suffering. If meeting a friend is pleasure, parting

with him will be pain. (Vedanta Light, p.15)

 

This is the first point. Suffering will result from becoming embroiled in the

lower life of the senses. What the senses provide is neither real nor

permanently satisfying. If we try and rely on their promises, we are courting

suffering. As the Bhagavad Gita says:

 

Whatever pleasures are born of the contacts of the senses with their objects are

only sources of pain; they have a beginning and an end, O son of Kunti, no wise

man delights in them. (5.22)

 

It may be said: 'That's a pretty pessimistic view of the world, isn't it? You

can't be much more negative than that, if what you say is that suffering is

inevitable following sense experience.'

 

But this is not what the Gita is saying at all. Let us return again to the words

of Dr. Shastri in Vedanta Light. Referring back to the view that Shakyamuni

taught the doctrine of suffering, he comments:

 

The Buddha was neither a pessimist nor an advocate of suffering. He transcended

both and called this state Nirvana. Sacrifice of the false self must not be

confounded with suffering. Service becomes unspiritual when it is taken as

suffering. The only lesson that suffering teaches is that it passes and is

superficial. Emerson says: 'I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry

me one step into real nature.'

 

Let us not fear suffering. When it comes, as a consequence of the invitation

sent to it by us in the past (though often unconsciously) let us treat it with

indifference and with the hospitality of bliss. Through our knowledge of Truth

let us transform it into bliss.

 

Not enjoyment and not sorrow

Is our destined end or way,

But to act that each tomorrow

Finds us further than today

(Longfellow)

 

Dr. Shastri sums up the teaching of the Yoga on this point when he says:

 

The soul must not soil itself in the mud of sufferings or pleasures. It must

remain above the two, unaffected by either of them, rising in bliss, which is

the nature of the soul. Suffering neither necessarily purifies nor does it

elevate. It is indifference to suffering, while in the midst of it, that

purifies and edifies.

 

There is some wisdom in the saying of the cockney charlady: 'There aint no

'appiness in this world, so you've just got to learn to be 'appy without it'.

But this position is not nearly as negative as it looks at first sight, because

it isn't in this world that we should be looking for happiness in the first

place. If the yogis are to be believed, the real source of happiness is not in

the world at all, but in the nature of man's spiritual Self. It is only a

question of the individual discovering the way to this inner fountain of

happiness and bliss.

 

In fact, it is the real source of what he enjoys in the outer objects, but when

he tastes a few drops of the innate joy which is in him as a result of achieving

some desire or other, his mind is only temporarily at ease, and the

dissatisfaction, agitation and unrest, which are its usual everyday state when

deprived of happiness, reasserts its sway and he is little better off. Indeed he

is a good deal worse off, because he has again fallen into the error of

imagining that it is some outer object which gives him satisfaction. If it were

really so, then why is it that he gets tired of the loved object, and that it

gives him no further joy after he has been with it for a time? The thirsty man

may find great joy in water, but once his thirst is slaked he has no more use

for it. This shows that the satisfaction itself is the result of a temporary

state of mind produced by the achievement of the desire and not anything in the

nature of the desired object itself.

 

Dr. Shastri tells us in Vedanta Light that we should adopt exactly the same

principle towards pleasures as we do towards suffering, that we are wrong if we

allow the pleasures of the senses to touch our inner being. Both suffering and

pleasure are superficial incidents in our life, and the right attitude is to

live in equanimity and in the contemplation of that bliss which is independent

of our senses.

 

Bertrand Russell says some very wise things at times, although he also says some

very foolish ones as well. But one finds him saying in a letter to Lowes

Dickinson in 1902:

 

When I see people who desire money or fame or power, I find it hard to imagine

what must be the emotional emptiness of their lives that can leave room for such

trivial things. (Autobiography 1872-1914, p.184)

 

This is Russell at his wisest and greatest. As the Bhagavad Gita says:

 

He whose mind is untroubled in the midst of sorrows and is free from eager

desires amid pleasures, he from whom passion, fear and rage have passed away, he

is called a sage, established in wisdom. (2.56)

 

And Krishna's advice to Arjuna, given again and again in the early chapters of

the Gita is to treat alike pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat,

and to make himself equi-minded. The ideal, he is told, is to achieve the calm

of self-mastery, equally at peace in pleasure and pain, honour and dishonour.

(Gita 2.38; 6.7; 6.24-6)

 

That great modern yogi, Swami Rama Tirtha, puts the point even more bluntly when

he says:

 

All your worldy attachments will end in the breaking of the heart: nothing

else...all worldly attachment brings misery in its train, because all worldly

attachment is idolatry. (In Woods of God Realization, vol. iii, 152-3)

 

What does Swami Rama mean by this? What are the idols before which man worships

and demeans himself? What is the golden calf which leads him to value himself so

cheaply? The drug addict's craving for his fix, the miser's craving for gold,

the gourmandiser's passion for eating are all forms of idolatry. It is idolatry

because man wrongly attributes to the worldy object the ability to give him

permanent happiness and bliss, which is the prerogative of his own divine

nature, of God himself, who abides deep within his personality. There is nothing

wrong with using an image as an image of the deity, if we recognise it for what

it is, and use it simply as a reminder or a focus to direct the mind to the

reality which it represents. But man tends to take the object itself as the

reality and to attribute to it a pefection which it does not and cannot possess.

Swami Rama says it is like a man whose best friend gives him a picture of

himself. If he bestows all his affection on that picture and makes a fetish of

it, to such an extent that he forgets the friend himself and ignores him when he

comes to visit him, preferring to look at the picture, then he is misusing it.

The friend gave him the picture in order that he might remember him, not in

order that he should forget him.

 

We should love all lovable objects and persons in the world as reminders of the

Lord himself, appearing in this form. Does not Christ say: 'In as much as ye

have served the least of these my children, ye have done it unto Me'? If we use

the pictures which the senses present to us in experience in this way, simply as

a reminder of the inner reality which they represent, of the universal spirit of

which they are a partial manifestation, then we can safely consort with

so-called sinners and encounter sufferings and joys with impunity.

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 38-46