HSS: Thinning the Veil

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Dear Jagbir,

 

Would you please upload " Thinning the Veil " to Holy Spirit/Shekinah?

 

thanks,

 

violet

 

 

,

" Violet " <violetubb wrote:

>

> Dear All,

>

> This is a lecture that was given at Shanti Sadan on 5th December,

1986.

>

> violet

>

>

>

> Thinning The Veil

>

> SWAMI VIDYARANYA'S classic, Panchadashi, starts off, after a

preliminary salutation to his Teacher, with the encouraging words:

>

> This book is meant to teach the supreme truth in an easy way to

those whose hearts have been purified...

>

> One is reminded at once of the words of the Christian Gospel,

'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God', but one can

hardly imagine a Western spiritual classic promising to teach the

spiritual truth 'in an easy way'. Rather one expects to encounter the

forbidding sentiment:

>

> Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto

(everlasting) life, and few there be that find it. (Matthew 7.14)

>

> Strait here of course does not mean the opposite of crooked, it is

the old word which is still familiar to us in the term 'strait-

jacket' or the Straits of Gibraltar or when we hear of someone as 'in

dire straits'. It implies great difficulty and restriction binding us

down and a major struggle if we are to get free. This makes the claim

of Vidyaranya all the more remarkable when he offers to convey the

spiritual truth in an easy way. But there is no doubt at all that

this is the general claim of Vedanta as a whole, and it is one of the

particular characteristics of Yoga that it claims to bring within the

reach of the ordinary man, and each and every man at that, the means

whereby he can attain that knowledge of spiritual truth which has

been claimed for the saints and sages of all great spiritual

traditions.

>

> What then is the particular merit of Vedanta which allows it to

achieve this? It is no academic question, but a most important and

practical one with tremendous implications for each and every

individual. It is therefore worth examining more closely what it is

that the Teachers of this tradition themselves say on this topic.

>

> First of all Vedanta maintains that the spiritual aspirations of

man are not something exceptional or extraordinary. Religion, says

Swami Rama Tirtha, is as natural to man as eating. His hunger for

truth and beauty, his innate admiration for the wise and the good

when he comes across it, are as natural to him as his healthy

appetite for a good, appetising and nourishing meal. Of course, his

tastes may become jaded by indulgence in the wrong food, and his

spiritual sense can become blunted and perverted by the indulgence in

the wrong mental and spiritual fare, but the underlying hunger will

only achieve its full satisfaction in either sphere when it is

provided with a balanced and wholesome diet. In the case of the

spiritual quest, man will never be satisfied until he has known the

spiritual truth. This is not just the teaching of Yoga. It is the

teaching of all the great traditions. As St. Augustine says, the

human heart is restless until it finds rest in knowledge of God, of

the ultimate spiritual truth.

>

> It is a misconception to suppose that the spiritual view of the

world is incompatible with the scientific view. On the contrary, if

one looks at the great figures in science, like Max Planck, Einstein,

Eddington, Schroedinger and many others, you find the explicit

recognition in their writings of a mystical, transcendent dimension

to reality, lying behind the world of finite scientific concepts, and

implicit in the findings of science. Again this is not something

totally exceptional. As Eddington wrote:

>

> A point that must be insisted on is that religion or contact with

spiritual power, if it has any general importance at all, must be a

commonplace matter of ordinary life, and it should be treated as such

in any discussion. I hope that you have not interpreted my references

as referring to abnormal experiences and revelations... To suppose

that mystical religion is mainly concerned with these is like

supposing that Einstein's theory is mainly concerned with the

perihelion of mercury and a few other exceptional observations. For a

matter belonging to daily affairs, the tone of current discussions

often seems quite inappropriately pedantic. (The Nature of the

Physical World, pages 326-7)

>

> Eddington calls 'the insight of consciousness' the only avenue to

what he has called 'intimate knowledge of the reality behind the

symbols of science' (page 326). In other words it is only by turning

within to seek the spiritual truth within the depths of the

personality itself, that this dimension of life can be fully explored.

>

> The method of exploration is also important. We often get asked the

question by casual acquaintances: 'Where do you live?' But we seldom

ask ourselves this question because we take it for granted that we

know the answer. But do we? Our physical surroundings may be a

trivial circumstance of our existence when compared with our mental

surroundings. All of us throughout our life use our minds as living

quarters, but regrettably few of us are tidy-minded and these

habitual surroundings of ours are often littered with all sorts of

rubbish and bric-a-brac which we have collected in the course of our

daily life. The yogic teachings remind us first that we cannot

improve the quality of our life unless we settle down to tidy and

reorganise the mental lumber room and introduce some system and

purpose into it. Furthermore this is impossible so long as it is so

cluttered up with mental 'jumble sale material' that we cannot move

freely without knocking into some obstruction. The lumber has to be

cleared if we are going to live well and wisely. The 'easy method' of

learning the supreme truth, Swami Vidyaranya reminds us, is for those

who have purified their hearts, and this is a qualification we cannot

ignore and have to take active steps to acquire.

>

> The yogis remind us that there are two sorts of knowledge. On the

one hand we spend most of our life stuffing the mind with an

unselected stream of impressions and ideas, many of them silly and

perverse, from the barrage of sense impressions which bombards us

from morning to night in modern Western civilisation. Even if we

select the material to be of the highest quality, the idea that

knowledge is to be gained by feeding in facts from the outside world

is the great fallacy of the scholar and the academic. We may end up

as knowledgeable as the Encyclopedia Britannica or contain within

ourselves the equivalent of a library of books, and still be ignorant

of the simplest things which experience can teach us. Wisdom, or even

common sense, comes from insight and the intuitive recognition of

truth.

>

> Swami Vidyaranya starts his teaching on the easy way to realisation

of the supreme truth by contrasting these two sorts of knowledge. The

knowledge which we go to science for, the knowledge of the external

world which reaches us through the senses, is all characterised by

detailed information about the finite peculiarities of particular

objects and events. In this sense, it is like the data bank which we

build up on our computers, or the knowledge which we accumulate in

our encyclopedias and reference libraries. It is a mass of detailed

descriptions of events, historical and contemporary, and of objects

and the relationships between them. And a characteristic of such

knowledge is that, however detailed it is and however much one adds

to it, it can never be complete. On the other hand there is the

knowledge of the underlying consciousness which perceives experience,

which is something apart from the experiences themselves. As one of

the opening verses of the classics puts it:

>

> The objects of sound, touch and so forth, which are perceived in

the waking state, differ from each other in their peculiarities, but

the perceiving consciousness, considered as something apart from

them, is one, undivided and the same. (Panchadashi, 1.3)

>

> But this does not only apply to the experiences which come to us

through the senses. It also applies to the mental experiences which

we enjoy in a dream or in imagination or memory. These may be

relatively fleeting when compared with the objects of the waking

state, says Vidyaranya, but the subjective or perceiving

consciousness is one and the same in both states. There is a unity of

consciousness in all the states of experience.

>

> This is a fairly easy point to appreciate, but perhaps more

difficult to accept at first sight is the contention of the yogis

that consciousness also persists in the state of dreamless sleep.

Certainly one knows that one is unconscious at that time, and the

provisional argument that Vidyaranya uses is that one must therefore

have a memory of that experience of lack of perception. This implies

that in dreamless sleep too, consciousness persists. We might take as

an analogy the physical world in which we can turn electricity on and

off to light our rooms or heat our houses, without altering the more

fundamental fact that the whole world of matter is created from the

electromagnetic forces within the atoms.

>

> But, whatever arguments are used to try and convince one of this

point, the case of the yogis really rests on the nature of experience

as revealed to them by their further investigations, and the

conclusion of this is that the true Self of man abides unchanged and

self-revealed within the personality, even in those states which

appear as states of unconsciousness or lack of perception. As

Vidyaranya puts it:

>

> Through the many months, years, ages, world cycles, past and

future, consciousness is the same and self-revealed. It persists and,

unlike the sun, neither rises nor sets.

> This ever abiding consciousness is the Self (Atman). It is the

highest bliss since it is the object of the greatest love. The love

of the Self is seen in the (universal) feeling 'May I not cease to

exist, may I continue to exist further'. (Panchadashi, 1.7-8)

>

> The 'easy teaching' of Yoga starts from the 'insight of

consciousness' which Eddington identifies as the only avenue to

'intimate knowledge of the reality behind the symbols of science'.

>

> If one compares this easy teaching with the teaching of other

spiritual traditions, it seems at first sight very different indeed,

and it is only by looking carefully at the testimony of some of the

great saints of other religions that one can begin to see how the

teachings could, after all, be fundamentally the same in so far as

they are a clue to the riddle of our own experience. One of the

greatest figures in the Christian tradition is St. Augustine, and he

is particularly interesting in that, because he was writing early in

the tradition and was already a philosopher and a seeker before he

became a Christian, he has written down for us a very full account of

his own experiences on the spiritual path and his understanding of

the spiritual truth. His writings leave no doubt at all that he had

himself confirmed what Vidyaranya expresses in the first few verses

of Panchadashi, that the Self or God is that supreme consciousness

which underlies even the ordinary experiences in the mind. Consider,

for instance, these words of St. Augustine himself:

>

> Different (from the things intellectually seen) is that light

itself whereby the soul is so enlightened that it beholds all things

truly the object of the intellect. For that light is God himself.

>

> It is worth adding that this was written in AD 415 when Augustine

had been a bishop already for twenty years and that there are many

other passages which could have been quoted which make the same

point. He also speaks of having verified this truth by his own

experience. In the Confessions, for instance, he says: 'I found by

the eye of my soul, above the mind, the light unchangeable.' And St.

Augustine speaks of that supreme Light as the object of the greatest

love, addressing it as 'O Beauty, so ancient and so new!' In other

words he confirms the teaching of Vedanta that this supreme reality

is not only the unchangeable light of consciousness, but also Bliss

Absolute.

>

> But even if such towering figures as St. Augustine can be quoted in

support of the Vedantic teaching, the position of the ordinary man is

entirely different. His starting point is from experience as he knows

it in everyday life. And, seen from this point of view, not only are

the teachings of the different spiritual traditions very different,

but the realisation of which the Vedanta speaks seems very remote

from his own grasp. And this is why the next point raised by

Vidyaranya is one that he should appreciate, for as he says:

>

> If it is an established fact that the nature of the Self is supreme

bliss, then, we ask, is this bliss evident or not? If it is not

evident, the absolute love for the Self is inexplicable. On the other

hand, if it is evident, why is one attracted to worldly objects such

as wife, wealth and power? The answer is that the bliss of the Self

is ever revealed but is not recognised owing to certain obstructions.

(Panchadashi, 1.11)

>

> The present state of our mind, with its inability to see clearly

and its tendency to be distracted into irrelevancies, prevents us

from seeing the spiritual truth as it really is. There is, in other

words, a veil of ignorance or wrong thinking obscuring our inner eye

and hiding the spiritual truth from us, and it is only when we begin

to concentrate on strengthening and cultivating our inner vision and

thinning the veil which hides the truth from us that we can begin to

verify that truth for ourselves.

>

> When we do so, we shall find, according to Swami Rama Tirtha, that

the apparent differences between the teachings of the different

spiritual traditions were manifestations, not of differences in the

light of the one eternal truth itself, but of the thickness and

quality of the mental or empirical veil through which we were seeing

it.

>

> Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

> Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

> (Shelley)

>

> Swami Rama also says that, while each and every man has an inner

spiritual hunger, the way in which it is satisfied varies at

different stages of his spiritual evolution.

>

> Imagine the loyal subject of a king. He is patriotic and willing to

lay down his life for his king and country if the call comes. He sees

the monarch on state occasions and he affirms his oath of loyalty to

him in time of war or during his service in the king's forces. His

whole feeling of loyalty is expressed in the conviction 'I am his

subject', 'I am a true patriot'. The love of the king is like the

love of God felt by a devout but conventional member of the church,

mosque or temple. He feels that he is one of God's children, but he

does not presume to have any close personal relationship with God.

This, says Swami Rama, is characteristic of someone who lives under

the light of the spirit, but sees it only through the thickest of

veils. His faith expresses itself in the conviction 'I am one of His

children'.

>

> Very different is the attitude of one who becomes a close courtier

and privy councillor of the king's. His relationship is altogether

more intimate and personal, and his feeling of loyalty undergoes a

subtle change accordingly. He is in daily contact with the king and

close to him as an adviser and loyal confidant. His feeling of

loyalty expresses itself in a much closer identification with the

king personally. He feels, not so much 'I am his', which is still the

feeling of one who stands at a distance from the object of his love,

but 'I am yours'. He feels a close personal bond with the king. In

the same way, says Swami Rama, those devotees of the spiritual truth

who deepen their relationship with God and draw near to Him in their

spiritual practices, see the light of Truth through a much thinner

veil and they enjoy the feeling of a close personal relationship with

God. St. Teresa's love of the infant Jesus is an example of such a

loving relationship with God in his personal aspect. Many sincere

Christians achieve this stage of intimacy with the Lord in the course

of their communion with God.

>

> But even in such a relationship there is a distinction between the

devotee and the Lord. The truth is still something other, experienced

at a distance, however closely; and the culmination of the spiritual

quest is the direct experience of truth as it is. To take what

inevitably is a weak analogy further, the loyal subject of the king

who is chosen by the king as his bride enjoys the closest affinity

with the king. She alone has the right to feel, as the culmination of

her love and loyalty to the king, 'he and I are one'. And so it is

that in the Christian tradition we find the mystics speaking of the

highest enlightenment conferred by God on the soul as 'the unitive

life', in which, it is said, Christ becomes the bridegroom of the

soul.

>

> Relationships are in the world of time, space and causation. The

three types of relationship represent three degrees in the clarity of

vision of the inner eye in its appreciation of the spiritual light

through the obscuring medium of the unenlightened mind. But in the

final experience, the enlightened seeker goes beyond the mind to

appreciate the light of truth itself.

>

> Swami Rama says that in the highest experience of the mystics the

veil is drawn aside, at least for the time being, and the soul

experiences the light of truth as it is. But the everyday mind soon

reasserts itself. Nonetheless, the light of truth transforms the

quality of life of the individual and, once seen, this experience

permanently changes the personality of the individual, conferring on

him that light of wisdom and inner peace which sees the unity in all

beings. The veil reasserts itself, so to speak, but the memory of

what has been experienced permanently alters his attitude to the

empirical suggestions which the mind brings. Here Swami Rama Tirtha

makes an important point. He says that it is the special role of

Vedanta and Yoga that it aims, not only to make available to each and

every man the ability to verify this state of enlightenment which

results from the drawing aside of the mental veil, but also to make

the veil so thin that one can (so to speak) see through it at all

times throughout everyday life. And it is for this reason that it

teaches the identity of the true Self of man with God.

>

> This truth is not known through sense experience, nor by any mental

experience, as the world and the ideas in the mind are known. The

spiritual truth is beyond the subject-object relationship. As St.

Augustine says:

>

> The human mind when judging a thing as visible is able to know that

it itself is better than all visible things. But when, by reason of

its failings and advances in wisdom, it confesses itself to be

changeable, it finds that above itself is the truth unchangeable.

>

> He says that:

>

> The truth unchangeable shines like a sun in the soul, and the soul

becomes partaker of the very truth... there is the Truth

unchangeable, containing all things that are unchangeably true, which

belong not to any particular man, but to all those who perceive

things unchangeable and true; (it is) as it were in wondrous ways a

secret and public light, it is present and offers itself in common

(to everyone). This is the light of true knowledge and that by which

empirical truths are recognised.

>

> As he says:

>

> Finally all truths are perceived in the unchangeable truth itself.

If you and I both see that what you say is true, and both see that

what I say is true: where do we see this? Not I in you, nor you in

me; but both of us in the unchangeable truth itself, which is above

our minds.

>

> Swami Rama Tirtha, that great modern yogi, says that the ultimate

reality remains unknowable so long as we rely on the local

consciousness and have not developed this cosmic consciousness. Only

when we develop the cosmic consciousness, spoken of by the mystics,

can we know the infinite truth. We may by reason infer its existence,

but this is not to know it. So long as we rely on the mind, says

Swami Rama Tirtha, even if we come to know the existence of the

absolute by inference and conviction, we are in the same position as

we are when someone comes up behind us and covers our eyes with their

hands, so that we cannot see who it is. We know it is a friend, says

Swami Rama, because no-one but a friend would take such liberties

with us, but who it is we cannot tell. It is the same with the

infinite, because, as the Upanishad says: 'It is beyond the reach of

speech and mind.' If it could be made an object of knowledge, it

would not be the infinite. One would at once have duality

established, the duality of the seer and the seen and the subject and

the object. But it is in the experience of cosmic consciousness that

universality and non-duality is established. (In Woods of God-

Realization VI. pages 147-148)

>

> St. Augustine speaks of the process leading to the awakening of the

cosmic consciousness:

>

> If the tumult of the flesh were hushed; hushed the sense

impressions of earth, sea, sky; hushed also the heavens, yea the very

soul be hushed to herself and by not thinking on self, transcend

self; hushed all dreams and revelations which come by imagery; if

every tongue and every symbol, and all things subject to transiency

were wholly hushed: since, if any could hear, all these say: 'We made

not ourselves, but He made us who abideth for ever.' If then, having

uttered this, they too should be hushed, having roused only our ears

to Him who made them; He alone speak, not by them but by Himself, so

that we may hear His word, not through any similitude, but His voice

whom we love in these His creatures - may hear His Very Self without

intermediary at all - as now we reached forth and with one flash of

thought touched the Eternal Wisdom that abides over all: suppose that

experience were prolonged and all other visions of far inferior order

were taken away, and this one vision were to ravish the beholder, and

absorb him and plunge him in these inward joys, so that eternal life

were like this moment of insight for which we sighed - were not this

to 'enter into the joy of thy Lord!' (Confessions IX. 25)

>

> And he makes clear that he himself had experienced this state:

>

> Step by step I was led upwards, from bodies to the soul (mind)

which perceives by means of the bodily senses; and thence to the

soul's inward faculty, to which the bodily senses report external

things, which is the limit of the intelligence of animals; and thence

again to the reasoning faculty, to whose judgment is referred the

knowledge received by the bodily senses. And when this power also

within me found itself changeable, it lifted itself up to its own

intelligence, and withdrew its thoughts from experience, abstracting

itself from the contradictory throng of sense images, that it might

find what that light was wherein it was bathed when it cried out that

beyond all doubt the unchangeable is to be preferred to the

changeable; when also it knows That Unchangeable: and thus with the

flash of one trembling glance it arrived at THAT WHICH IS. And then

at last I saw Thy 'invisible things understood by the things that are

made'; but I could not sustain my glance; and my weakness being

struck back, I was relegated to my ordinary experience, bearing with

me but a loving memory and a longing for what i had, as it were,

perceived the odour of, but was not yet able to feed upon.

(Confessions VII. 23).

>

> The experience of that drawing back of the veil or cosmic

consciousness is not one where we are distanced from Truth. It is an

experience of identity. This may be misunderstood. As Swami Rama

says, when I say 'I am God' I do not mean that this little

personality is God. Nor that this mind is God. Nor is it some new

state which has been conferred on me, like being created a king or a

baronet. The realisation is that at the innermost core of this

personality, man is identical with the reality behind the universe,

and that all the empirical world of time, space and causation,

including the personality and the body, are in a certain real sense

transient and phenomenal. They are not abiding realities, which can

in any sense be called unchangeable.

>

> If you read the Christian mystics and many of the Sufis, you will

find them talking of such experiences, but hedging round their

statements with qualifications. They speak of the soul becoming one

with God by participation in the experience of cosmic consciousness,

but carefully add that this is only like the iron becoming red hot

when it enters the fire. It appears while it is in the fire to be of

the nature of the fire, but it is really of a different nature. This

represents exactly what is meant by Swami Rama Tirtha in the simile

of the thicker veils. These faiths still speak of the individual in

its relationship with God in terms of the subject-object

relationship, in terms of the feeling 'i Am His' of the loyal subject

of the king and, at a higher level, the 'I am Thine' of the courtier

and the close confidant. But they do not, at least in their

philosophy and theology, envisage the thinnest of the veils

exemplified by the Vedanta philosophy, in which the intrinsic

identity of the soul with God is recognised at all times. The glory

of Vedanta is that it comes closest to expressing the real Truth

insofar as it can be expressed in words or thoughts.

>

> Freedom through Self-Realisation

> A.M. Halliday

> A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

> ISBN 0-85424-040-3

> Pgs. 209-223

>