Excerpts from Volume 13, No. 4 (Winter 2008)

 

Meditation on Great Souls

John Schlenck

 

. . . Meditation on great souls may be said to be of three kinds: meditation on the words spoken by them, meditation on their forms, and meditation on incidents in their lives. In practice, these three types of meditation tend to overlap. The words spoken by great souls are not uttered in a vacuum. They grow out of their life experiences and realizations. Indeed, meditating on the words in the context of the life can give more inspiration and generate deeper feeling.

 

Jesus' saying, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," is a great teaching in and of itself, when taken figuratively. But seen in the context of its occasion, where a group of men were ready to stone to death a woman convicted of adultery, the teaching highlights Jesus' compassion and generates love and devotion for him.

 

Or take Buddha's teaching that old age, disease and death are inevitable and painful, but that there is a way beyond them. Then place the teaching in the context of Kisa Gotami bringing her dead child to Buddha and asking him to bring it back to life. Buddha asks Kisa to bring a grain of mustard seed from a house where death has never entered. The story gives life to a teaching that may otherwise seem too general. One can envision the empathy and patience of Buddha, who knew that Kisa would have to find out for herself the inevitability of death in order to transcend it.

 

The teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita cover the whole of spirituality and are enough to build one's life on. And yet the setting on the battlefield, Arjuna's real-life situation, and the relationship between Krishna and Arjuna, give the teachings an immediacy that helps us to relate them to our own lives.

 

Much of the beauty of the Kathamrita lies in the setting which M. vividly describes, and even more for the portrait of Sri Ramakrishna's personality that emerges, over and above the teachings which are magnificent in their own right.

 

And if we meditate on the form (murta) of the avatara, incidents of the life are bound to come to mind. There is a very fine two-part article by Swami Atmajnanananda, "Meditation on Holy Mother," which appeared in American Vedantist, volume 10, nos. 3 and 4.  In this, Swami Abhedananda's "Meditation on Sri Sarada Devi" is taken as a starting point for meditating on the form of Holy Mother, in this case as seen in the photograph that is used for worship. Each part of her form is mentioned, but these descriptions are then used to meditate on different aspects of her life and character. So when we use this photograph for worship, we automatically think of incidents in her life.

 

Until the avatara becomes living in our meditation, we have the recorded words, the life story and the iconic form—statue, painting or photograph—to contemplate. These are the materials we start with. In the cases of Ramakrishna and Holy Mother, they are a very rich treasure trove indeed, which we are very lucky to have. Still, to the devotee who longs to come into the divine presence, they seem inadequate, and indeed their very inadequateness spurs one on to yearn more intensely for the living experience. Nevertheless, they are very precious, and one feels that it is by God's grace that we have this much to hold on to, to make easier our meditation on the divine, for those of us who find it difficult to develop love for a more abstract conception of God.

 

Glimpses of Swami Shraddhananda

 

[Students and friends of Swami Shraddhananda, led by Lalita Parvati Maly, celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth in the fall of last year by establishing a website in his honor. Many of those who had known him recorded and posted their reminiscences. These shared remembrances paint a varied and winsome portrait of a revered teacher who dedicated the last 40-odd years of his life to rendering spiritual service to the people of the United States. We are grateful to the contributors to the website for their permission to reproduce the following reminiscences. For those interested to join the website, the address is: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=42879/*http://groups.yahoo. com/group/ swami_shraddhananda.]

 

Cleo Satyamayee Andersen:

 

We were in the [Sacramento] temple, and Swami was speaking from the lectern. When I heard him say, "You are not this body, you are not this mind, you have never been born, you will never die," I knew I was hearing absolute truth for the first time in my life. After the lecture he shook my hand and asked me to wait for him in the library. When he came to the library he talked to me briefly and we made an appointment for . . . the following Saturday. When I came for the appointment I could not talk; endless tears began to flow. So an appointment was made for the following Saturday. Again, no words would come, only tears. Finally, I was able to say, "My mother died a month ago and I am still grieving for her." Swami said, "No, those tears are not for your mother, those tears are for God." I knew I was again hearing truth. From then on I was blessed to be able to have Swami as the polestar of my life. I had found my teacher.

 

Pravrajika Brahmaprana:

 

Walking with Swami Shraddhananda through the Vedanta Society retreat area gardens was always a joy. Every day at a certain bend in the path, he would look up at a large majestic tree and call out to it: "O Mother, shake your locks!" We would wait. And then, sure enough, a breeze would arise and the leaves would shimmer. This is how he daily made us feel that Consciousness was living, tangible, and all around us.

 

Amrita Salm:

 

 [On one occasion,] after conducting an evening class [at the Vedanta Temple] in Hollywood, rather than conclude it with a chant, as was customary, [Swami Shraddhananda] began to dance down the aisle of the temple. I think at that moment something clicked inside me, and I began to think what Thakur's disciples must have felt seeing him dance and be immersed in Samadhi. It was as if Thakur decided to visit us in the form of Swami Shraddhananda. That memory is still deeply impressed in my mind. I often recall that moment with awe and wonder and think to myself, was I really so fortunate as to have known a man of God, someone immersed in His joy? Someone who, by Thakur's grace, acted as an inspiration to my life.

 

Spiritual StabilityDepends On Its Ability To Alter With Time

Bhagirath Majmudar

 

. . . We are headed towards the crossroads of culture and civilization. Rapidly developing technology and its aftereffects will induce a new twist and turn in our so-far linear passage. This will be the period wherein a spiritual outlook will be most needed and, strangely, most rejected. The fractured limbs of religious faith can potentially be plastered together only by a higher plane of spirituality. I believe beyond doubt that Vedantic philosophy can achieve this. Vedanta can be our beacon, a lighthouse to guide us to our right path.

 

The changing times nevertheless will necessitate a change in our approach. In coming years, people may refuse to believe in God but they will believe in "goodness." They would have a developing sense of reverence for an integrative ecology. They may not believe in one God Incarnate but they will believe in the congregation of human beings propounding spirituality, perhaps without using that term. "Sanghe Shaktih Kalau Yuge" (Union of human beings will be the strength in Kali Yuga), is a well-known Sanskrit aphorism. Such congregations will include monks, musicians, scientists, philosophers, and many others, intent upon helping all biological beings, and they will restore our eco-spiritual balance in a broader sense. Their collective wisdom will draw them to Vedantic principles, but they may call them "New and Improved!" This should not bother our current generation of Vedantists because we have long believed that, "Truth is one; sages call it variously." Even our new twisted path will lead us from unreal to real, from darkness to light and from death to immortality. The neo-science when completely integrated with spirituality will be a new Avatara illustrating God Incarnate.

 

Krishnamurti's "Pathless Land"

A Personal Reflection on This Teacher's Role

Richard Simonelli

 

. . . Those who are inspired by Krishnamurti's teachings, or even those just curious to know what this spiritual revolutionary said, will very quickly learn that there are major themes and guidelines for a spiritual seeker all through Krishnamurti's work.  To me, they are his own interior discoveries, expressed through his own personality, temperament and background as a man of India, himself raised in a Brahmanic tradition until the age of 16. A spiritual aspirant may utilize them as powerful guidelines, keeping in mind that they are expressed through Krishnamurti's unique lens. But his statements and guidelines are not properly speaking, a path, nor did he ever intend them to be. A path is a trail, which, if followed, will lead to some particular place, pretty much guaranteed. There is no guarantee that a spiritual seeker will realize the spirit and intent of the Vedas or Upanishads, or what the Buddha, Krishnamurti or others have realized, by following a path in the sense of a formulaic pattern leading to Truth. Such a formulaic journey may help a person to clarify his or her difficulties and even cleanse harmful karma up to a point. But the actual phenomenon of realizing Truth is more like an act of grace, never a mechanical pathway.

 

In my own journey I followed prescribed spiritual paths and practices, which did indeed help clarify me up to a point. But after a certain point, religious formality for me became an obstacle to realizing the formless, luminous and free goal that the paths point to. I knew of Krishnamurti's powerful caution against following a particular path even as I spent 16 years in formal Japanese Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.  Those formal paths did help me find myself because I was so very lost, as a human being, as well as a spiritual seeker. I needed them and am grateful that they were available to me.  But as soon as the being began to break through to Truth in its own unique way, the formality of religion and its practices became an obstacle, just as Krishnamurti had taught. It was then that I realized for myself that Truth is indeed a pathless land.

 

Sri Ramakrishna, The Artist of Consummate Vision

Sreemati Mukherjee

 

Songs evoke the sense of the Ramakrishna Kathamrita (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna) almost as powerfully as the documentary realism of M's inimitable style. Indeed, song was one way through which Ramakrishna taught and expressed himself. It is commonplace to view Sri Ramakrishna as the visionary par excellence, the God-intoxicated man, whose reality was not the corporeal reality that circumscribes most of us, but another reality/consciousness that enabled him to derive ecstatic joy from all that he beheld. Sri Ramakrishna may be thought of as an example of the child visionary, richly celebrated in Romantic poetry, and also in Bibhuti Bhushan's immortal Pather Panchali. . . The poetic personality's tendency to continuously cross the threshold of the self and find it mirrored in the manifold beauties and sorrows of the world, offer for me a key to understanding Sri Ramakrishna's infinite capacity for empathy. Keats, with reference to Shakespeare, called this capacity "Negative Capability." This is how he describes the plastic[i] power that he felt allowed Shakespeare to create both an Iago (archetypal villain) and an Imogen (archetypal virtuous character).[ii] Keats tells his brothers George and Thomas in a letter:

 

"…at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean negative capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any  irritable reaching after fact and reason. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us not further than this, that with a great poet the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."

 

Keats's remark reminds me of the countless occasions in the Kathamrita when Thakur cautions against trying to understand everything. He says, "Why is it important to know how many mangoes are in the garden, when all you actually want to do is eat the mangoes." (127) He also exhorts a devotee at one point with the comment that it is futile for dolls made of salt (meaning us) to try to measure the ocean! When Keats tells  Richard Woodhouse that contrary to the "egotistical sublime" or emphasis on self which characterized Wordworth's poetry, he rather belonged to that group of poets (like Shakespeare) who delighted in both "foul or fair, I am struck by Thakur's protean sensibility that made him open to the existence of puzzling contraries in this universe. Thakur probably never reacted with "gusto" to "the dark side of things," but he too shied away from any uniform, unilateral, monochromatic view of existence. Thakur tells M (September 26, 1883):

 

"Hazra discriminates and ratiocinates too much! He's forever calculating, how much of God's energy is manifested in the world and how much is left! My head aches/whirls to hear him talk that way. I know that I don't know anything. Sometimes I think that He/She is Good and sometimes Evil. What do I know of Him/Her? (281) (Translation mine.) . . .

 

Notes:

i. William Wordsworth uses the word "plastic" to describe the fluid operations of the imagination in Book II of his long autobiographical poem The Prelude. In this poem, Wordsworth further describes this power: "An auxiliary light/ Came from my mind, which on the setting sun/ Bestowed new splendor; the melodious birds,/ The fluttering breezes, fountains that ran on,/ Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed." See Penguin Classics edition of Wordsworth's Selected Poems, pg. 334. In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge used the word 'esemplastic' to describe the poetic imagination, a term which he probably derived from Schelling's essay, "On The Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature," where Schelling argues that Nature and Art are intimately linked. In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge asserts that  the imagination is a divine faculty capable of "the reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities." (chapter XIV)

 

ii. John Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27^th October, 1818. English Critical Texts, D.J. Enright and Ernest de Chickera (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1962), 258.