Photo courtesy of Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cTat Twam Asi<\/strong>.\u201d (Thou Art That). \u00a0How many words, how many volumes, how many libraries, and how many religious cultures does it take to wrestle with that inspirational insight of Hinduism?\u00a0 None, if we have accessed the experience; millions if we merely try to understand it; and billions if we are foolhardy enough to try to explain it to others.\u00a0 Yet here is one more piece of writing attempting to speak of a personal encounter with it.\u00a0 Silly man that I am, enthusiastic man that I am, I can no more hold it back than a woman in labor can defer the birth.<\/p>\nI have seen that even compassion is a mistake.\u00a0 Compassion is a partial response to a partial comprehension of an infinite truth.\u00a0 Compassion is predicated on the idea of service-to-other.\u00a0 And therein lies the rub.\u00a0 There is no other<\/strong>!\u00a0 And so compassion ultimately is in the service of the illusion of separation.\u00a0 Only moksha (liberation) is Real.\u00a0 I say that with a capital \u201cR\u201d because Compassion, and Service, and Other are \u201creal\u201d, but only with a little \u201cr\u201d.\u00a0 The illusion is not that the physical world does not exist; the illusion is that the physical world is all <\/strong>that exists.\u00a0 How has this come about?\u00a0 The following may be the trail of its unfolding.<\/p>\nIn order to experience<\/strong> Herself \u2013 as distinct from merely knowing<\/strong> Herself \u2013 God created.\u00a0 And since God can only be ALL THAT IS<\/strong> (Brahman in the Hindu cosmology), from the ineffable void of Her cosmic womb She created a dream that led to the manifestation of the myriad aspects of Herself.\u00a0 Hence the arrival of Souls (Atman in the Hindu cosmology) \u2013 billions of them; more numerous than all of the stars of all of the galaxies of all of the universes.\u00a0 Yet they are as much a unity as are the 70 trillion cells of your body.<\/p>\nAnd then the dream got complicated.\u00a0 In order for these aspects to \u201ctalk\u201d to each other, gifts of communication became necessary \u2013 telepathy, clairvoyance etc. (the Causal Body in the Hindu cosmology).\u00a0 The slide into forgetting had begun.\u00a0 Little \u201cmind\u201d (the Mental Body in the Hindu cosmology), as distinct from universal \u201cMind\u201d, latched upon the notion of communication among parts as evidence that, in fact, each part is<\/strong> totally other. By now the \u201csouls\u201d were believed to be ontologically discrete entities.\u00a0 In short order, mind had invented a new cosmology, perceiving separateness as \u201cReality\u201d when, in fact, it was only \u201creality\u201d.\u00a0 Emotions (the Astral Body in the Hindu cosmology) were then invented so that we could feel<\/strong> the differences between us.\u00a0 And, finally, the senses (the Gross Body in the Hindu cosmology) were the ultimate proof: we could see<\/strong> that we are distinct; we could hear our differences; we could smell and taste and touch our differences.\u00a0 The veil, at last, was tightly drawn and fully opaque.<\/p>\nNow we could know what fear was \u2013 the feeling of utter isolation and total separation.\u00a0 This would lead to despair, despondency, depression and denial.\u00a0 To rescue ourselves from this pole of the nightmare, we would invent anger and violence, warfare and persecution, prejudice and chosen-ness.\u00a0 Henceforth, any newly discovered \u201cdifference\u201d quickly became a further proof of our separateness.\u00a0 And it became a midwife to the existential scream of our own cosmic abandonment.<\/p>\n
Who will help us retrace our steps?\u00a0 Mysticism, perhaps, which has drawn maps of the journey, some of which are 9,000 years old.\u00a0 Even modern science can help the process along.\u00a0 It is quite easy to demonstrate from the \u201chard\u201d sciences that all of the differences are superficial, since all are ultimately a collapse of the probability wave due to observation.\u00a0 Each kind of observer and each type of observing causes a different collapse, resulting in a different manifestation of the underlying field (the Subtle Body in the Hindu cosmology).<\/p>\n
The \u201csoft\u201d sciences demonstrate that emotions and ratiocination are produced by perceptions, expectations and inherited models of reality \u2013 thus allowing us back to the Astral and Mental Body stages of the devolution.\u00a0 Over 100 years of extraordinarily rigorous scientific studies by parapsychologists have shown the existence of the \u201cgifts\u201d of the Causal Body.\u00a0 We are most of the way back by now.<\/p>\n
Can science provide, for mysticism, modern metaphors for the last two laps back to Brahma?\u00a0 I think so.\u00a0 I believe that the journey is throwing up a new era, that of the Mysticists \u2013 a hybrid race of mystics and scientists \u2013 people trained in rigorous scientific methodologies, while being steeped in the utterly empirical practices of mystical, experiential Self-observation.\u00a0 These are the space travelers of the future \u2013 combining the inner and the outer explorations, until the veil is finally parted, the illusion dissolved and unity recaptured.<\/p>\n
The mysticists will be the next wave of bodhisattvas.\u00a0 Today, I met an old dog, with the saddest eyes on the planet.\u00a0 He is in renal failure and his owner is planning to put him to sleep tomorrow.\u00a0 She told me that she had adopted him last year from a man whose new wife didn\u2019t want a decrepit mongrel in her nice new home.\u00a0 I squatted in front of him and we gazed into each other\u2019s eyes.\u00a0 He had his tail between his legs but was attempting to wag it in that impossible position.\u00a0 I recognized him and he recognized me.\u00a0 He asked me, \u201cHow many sleepers does it take to undo the work of a single Buddha?\u00a0 How many Christ\u2019s does it take to wake up a single sleeper?\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>I sidestepped his questions and, instead, pleaded, \u201cYou\u2019re one of the lucky ones; you get to go home tomorrow.\u00a0 But please do not abandon us. So many of us cannot remember.\u00a0 So many of us are asleep.\u00a0 And each sleeper amplifies the illusion and thickens the veil. Please send us some more lovers, some more bodhisattvas.\u00a0 We are ready.\u00a0 Please send us the mysticists.\u00a0 Please!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nI think he will.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The illusion is not that the physical world does not exist; the illusion is that the physical world is all that exists. How has this come about? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2524,"featured_media":593,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,85,88,11,87,79,4,43,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atman","category-bodhisattva","category-brahman","category-compassion","category-moksha","category-mysticism","category-mysticists","category-soul","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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