Happy New Year - 2008 from Australia!

[Guest guest]

Dear Folks,

 

Happy New Year, 2008 to all! May this year bring many spiritual

blessings, the main one being to Realise the Self!

 

To that, i would like to proffer the appended, titled 'Food For Thought'.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

 

Food For Thought

 

But from the point of view of the philosophy of Yoga, of Vedanta, the mind is no

more real than matter, nor is matter more real than mind. Both are phenomenal,

empirical creations of energy, that creative energy of nature called 'prakriti'

in the classics. The reality is ultimately something other than both matter and

mind: it is the spiritual consciousness in which both live, move and have their

being. This spiritual reality, called theologically 'Brahman or God', is not

something apart from the world, neither is it the same as the world. It is the

substratum of the appearances of the world. The world has an empirical,

phenomenal existence, but the reality behind that appearance is Brahman, the

Absolute.

 

Just as the world of energy transcends the world of matter and yet encompasses

it; just as the evolution of science, from Newton's view to Einstein's, the

world of material atoms was found to be contained and evolved within a subtler

world made up of electro-magnetic energy (because, as you know, in the

Einsteinian universe the ultimate reality is not matter existing in a solid

framework of absolute time, space and causation, as it was in Newton's picture

of the universe, but electro-magnetic energy, which we know as light, existing

as waves in a relative world in which the time-space continuum has only a

relative validity, and a framework whose appearance is not fixed for everyone,

but depends entirely upon the position of the observer); so this world too, this

world of energy, the Einsteinian universe of relativity, is transcended by the

world of forms and ideas, which are the appearances of structure seen in sense

experience and in the mental images to which sense experience gives rise.

 

The eighth century Vedantin, Sureshvara, points out that if you see smoke rising

from a fire, it does not have to push apart the empty space in the sky in order

to make its way upwards through it, because the space in the sky is untouched

and unaffected whether the smoke rises through it or not; space is subtler, it

is a more refined principle. It may seem otherwise: if they were on the same

level of reality, then it would be either smoke or space, you could not have

both, and the space would have to get out of the way in order to allow the smoke

to ascend; but it is not like that. The space is something subtler than the

things which it contains, and so it exists on another level of reality. In the

same way as the space is subtler than the universe of matter, or smoke, so the

mental reality - the universe of thoughts and ideas and sensations and

experiences - is a subtler reality than the physical reality; but it is still

only a relative reality. Transcending the mind, transcending the physical

universe and transcending also this subtler universe of the mind (the mental

consciousness), is absolute reality. And the clue to this reality is man's real

self, the Self hidden in the mind.

 

Our being functions on all these planes, and on all these planes it requires

food. The food of the body is physical food. The food of vitality - of life - is

energy. The food of the emotions is love and the feeling of unity (and a man is

starved indeed if he does not satisfy the feeling for love or unity). The food

for the intellect is knowledge, and the food for the spirit is illumination; it

is wisdom, or spiritual enlightenment.

 

But as well as starving, or being malnourished, we can also eat the wrong food.

If we eat the wrong physical food, as we all know, we grow physically unhealthy

and suffer from the many diseases which arise from errors of diet. If we eat the

wrong emotional food, seeking satisfaction in sensuality or sensationalism, or

sentimental nonsense of one kind or another, then we will grow emotionally

unhealthy. The human heart needs the right kind of affection and friendly

relationship, as much as it needs food and water. Only an enlightened man, say

the yogis, only a jnani, can live independently of others, because only he has a

true feeling of oneness with others, whatever their behaviour towards him may

be. But we need the right kind of love; we need love of the highest, and the

best thing is to offer our love either to the Lord or to a saint or to a perfect

man or to a spiritual guide.

 

As the Lord says in the Bhagavad Gita:

 

He is supremely dear to Me whose devotion to Me is single-minded. I am supremely

dear to him and he is dear to Me. (7.17)

 

The wise worship Me, endowed with meditation. (10.8)

 

Their thoughts are fixed on Me, their lives are wholly given up to Me. They are

contented and rejoicing in Me. To those who are in constant union with Me and

worship Me with love, I grant the power of understanding by which they come to

Me. (10.9-10)

 

This, then, is the greatest and the best emotional food for man's emotional

being.

 

Much of what we are offered today as food is 'ersatz' - and this is just as true

of the spiritual food as it is of physical food. It has the right name but it is

not the real thing, and it does not nourish properly. Chicken in my youth was

one thing: chicken as it is today is a very different thing. It is still called

chicken, but it is only a label; in fact one might legitimately call it a libel.

The official legal definition some time ago, of processed green peas was 'yellow

dried peas, reconstituted by soaking and dyed green'! 'Full fruit standard' used

to be the legal name for something containing fifteen per cent of the fruit

named, and the rest made up from pulped turnip, or whatnot. What's in a name? It

is no different with the contemporary mental and spiritual foods which are

offered to man. The so-called 'Zen Buddhism' offered by the beat poets, or the

'Yoga' peddled by hippies, has the name of something genuine but none of the

power of nourishment for the soul which the genuine article contains. Man,

awakening to wisdom, has to discover the real food which will nourish his soul,

and that food is the spiritual teachings which lead the soul to a knowledge of

the non-dual principle within his own being and within the universe as a whole.

When he has realised this oneness with all on the highest plane, then his

realisation is expressed in the ecstatic utterance which Swami Rama Tirtha

quotes in his essay on worship, Upasana:

 

Whatever grain is eaten, is eaten by Me;

Whosoever sees and breathes, does so by Me;

Whatever is heard or said, it is by Me.

Those who do not know Me as abiding in all, as the inner controller,

They perish in the world for want of knowledge of Me.

O lightning! I proclaim Brahman, who is achieved by faith and endeavour.

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 58-61