Remember You Are This Universe

Remember 

Remember the sky that you were born under,

know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Widayat, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

Joy Harjo 

Joy Harjo was appointed the new United States poet laureate in 2019. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise, which is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2019, and Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015). She is a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Who Was The Buddha?

Who am I? What is the Self? This is the most fundamental of questions.

Buddhism has the concept of anatta (no self) which is usually interpreted to mean that souls and selves do not exist. However, The Buddha may have meant that individual, discrete selves are an illusion, but there is a singular, undivided Self that can be realised by one who has awakened from the dream of separateness (ego). This interpretation makes The Buddha's teaching compatible with the Indian philosophy of Advaita (non-duality).

Buddhists believe in reincarnation, which suggests the existence of souls. It may be that The Buddha saw souls as merely subtler forms of the gross body, and not something one should identify with. Perhaps this is the intention of the anatta doctrine. Centuries later, the sage Shri Shankaracharya wrote his Tad Niskala, which states that who you are is not the body, or the sheaths of the subtle body (soul), but Shiva (the Self of all that exists). Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi has said that Shri Shankaracharya was a reincarnation of The Buddha. Shankara encouraged devotion for the Adi Shakti, the feminine aspect of Shiva, the Universal Self, who manifests in each of us as the Kundalini. This is because, without Kundalini awakening, Self-realisation is not possible.

One might ask why The Buddha bothered to try to liberate people if he did not believe in souls, or selves. What would be the point of mere matter trying to enlighten mere matter? It's a good question. According to tradition, The Buddha did initially consider that perhaps teaching people about enlightenment would be a futile task. The answer may be that the Self, like the sun, must shine, no matter that there are clouds of ignorance and illusion. Suffering is due to the illusion of separateness, and this illusion should be dispelled, even if there are ultimately no 'others' who suffer.

The Buddhist scholar Alexander Wynne considers this issue, and also questions the emphasis on therapy in the contemporary offshoot of Buddhism, Mindfulness Meditation, in contrast to the Buddha's emphasis on Self-realisation as the main aim. In his article Who Was The Buddha?, he also tries to separate the mythical and historical figure of Gotama Buddha.

Read the article. here

The Spirit Never Dies

That which you are
is eternal and all-pervading
This Being does not pass away
with the passing away of the body.
The Spirit never dies.

It can never die
because it was never born.
It has always existed
and it can never cease to exist.
The Unborn Spirit never dies.

It is indestructible and imperishable.
No fire can burn it
nor any weapon ever harm it.
It is absolute, innocent and free.
The Changeless Spirit never dies.

It is embodied in all
Do not mourn it in any form,
neither in the form of the dead
nor of the living.
The Universal Spirit, who you are, never dies.

- Adapted by Graham Brown from the Bhagavad Gita

Inner Being

Deborah Stevenson, Time out of Mind, paper collage.
Image used with kind permission of the artist.
See more of her work at deborahstevenson.com

Try to meditate. 

Meditate more, so that you reach that inner being. 

And this inner being is the vast ocean of bliss 

which exists inside every one of us.

-Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, 1983

According to several Indian teachings, including that of Guru Nanaka, the founder of the Sikh religion, the inner Self and the universe "outside" are one and the same. No part of the infinite cosmos, with all it's countless swirling galaxies, is outside the ambit of who you are.

One of the main obstacles to meditation is the mind's objection to being quietened - something it tends to see as a form of limitation. However, contrary to the mind's expectations, genuine states of meditation are characterised by a sense of expansiveness in consciousness; something Buddhists call the Vast Mind.

The poet and translator, Patricia Donegan, uses the composition and reading of the Japanese Haiku form as an awareness practice, a means of realising the Vast Mind. In her book, Haiku Mind, she writes: "to create and appreciate this tiny form of poetry, one needs a vast mind like the sky." 

Until you have loved

"Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself." 

-Emily Dickinson

Mural in Amherst, Massachusetts, home of the American Self-realised poet Emily Dickinson.

















Dickinson used 'slant rhyme' or half rhyme frequently in her works. In her poem "Hope is the thing with feathers" the slant rhyme is soul—all.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.

Staring at the Mountains

"Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born."

- Jack Kerouac

The Poetic Self

I think poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It will help you to form the things, but what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you. It’s who you are.

- W.S. Merwin

William Stanley Merwin (born September 30, 1927) is an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands' rainforests. Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

-Wikipedia

Lao Tse's Description of the Self

It won’t be seen when you look
won’t be grasped when you reach
won’t be heard when you turn an ear
It’s not bright above nor dark below
seamless and un-namable
It is from and goes to no-thing
the no-form form-source
subtle and without image
preceding conception
passing beyond
trace It to Its no-beginning
track It to Its no-end
It can’t be known
only lived as ease in your own life
to understand where you’re from
is the nut of knowledge
.
Lao Tze,  Tao te Ching, V. 14

Image source: Freer Sackler Collection

The Interdependent Self

Like the young Asian students at Cornell, Jen’s father had been born into a culture whose parenting style explicitly intends the humbling of the individual self in favor of the needs of the broader collective. (Parents engage in short, selective conversation with their children, emphasizing “proper behavior, self-restraint and attunement to others.”) What this “low elaborative” parenting style aims at instead is the creation of an “interdependent self,” defined not by its sense of inner autonomy, but by its sensitivity to the social roles it must play depending on the context in which it finds itself. The scholars of cross-cultural cognition, who reject the universality of Western models of the mind, maintain that this emphasis on social context translates into a measurable divergence in how Easterners and Westerners literally see the physical world.

More here

The Strangeness of Self

"…if you think you know yourself, you haven’t looked far enough —- into that distance where your strangeness is. You hold more than you know, and that is how knowing opens."
-Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh, ia an American poet, translator, and educator

The Self can seem strange to the artist because the artist seeks originality, to say something that has never been said before. When the Self speaks through the poet, it is as if the poet is hearing his own language for the first time. j.

The Illusion of the Knower

The Self never undergoes change; the intellect never possesses consciousness. But when one sees all this world, he is deluded into thinking, “ I am the seer, I am the knower.”
Mistaking one’s Self for the individual entity, one is overcome with fear. If one knows oneself not as the individual but as the supreme Self, one becomes free from fear.

The entire universe is truly the Self. There exists nothing at all other than the Self. The enlightened person sees everything in the world as his own Self, just as one views earthenware jars and pots as nothing but clay.
~Shri Shankaracharya (probably 788 CE - 820 CE).

Swa

In Sanskrit, the ancient Indo-Euroean language of India, Swa means "self" or "own".

Swedish, like most European languages is descended from an ancient Indo-European tongue very similar to Sanskrit, and reading a brief history of Sweden recently, I was interested to discover that the "Swe" in Swede is thought to have come from an old Indo-European word meaning "us" or "our own" (people). It suggests that the ancient term for self could be used in a collective sense. Today the word 'self' refers to something entirely limited to the individual.

The Treasure of the Heart(h)

There once was a pious rabbi who had a dream in which a voice told him to go to far off Prague, where under the great bridge to the royal castle he would discover a hidden treasure. This same commanding dream was repeated twice. 

He finally decided to go, making the long journey by foot. On arriving in Prague he found the bridge; but as there were sentinels posted there day and night, he did not venture to dig. However, day after day he returned and loitered around, unostentatiously trying to study the situation. 

Finally, he attracted the attention of one of the guards. "Have you lost anything, my good man?"he asked. The rabbi told him of his dream. The officer laughed and exclaimed, "You poor man, to have worn out a pair of shoes travelling all this way only because of a dream! Why I had a foolish dream once. A voice commanded me to go to Kracow and search for the home of a rabbi Eisik, son of Jekel, where I would find a great treasure buried in a dirty corner behind the stove. Imagine believing is such a dream." and he laughed again. 

Rabbi Eisik bowing politely bid the officer farewell. He then hurried back to Kracow. There he dug under the neglected corner behind his stove and found the treasure, thus putting an end to his poverty. 

In commenting on this tale, Heinrich Zimmer in The Choice is Always Ours writes: 

Now the real treasure, to end our misery and trials, is never far away; it is not to be sought in any distant region, it lies buried in the innermost recesses of our own home, that is to say, our own being. And it lies behind the stove, the life-and-warmth-giving center of the structure of our existence, our heart of hearts - if we could only dig. But there is the odd and persistent fact that it is only after a faithful journey to a distant region, a foreign country, a strange land, that the meaning of the inner voice that is to guide our quest can be revealed to us. And together with this odd and persistent fact there goes another, namely, that the one who reveals to us the meaning of our cryptic message, must be a stranger, of another creed and a foreign race.

The German Indologist, Heinrich Zimmer was one of Carl Jung's few male friends. After Zimmer's death in 1943, the well-known anthropologist Joseph Campbell (another great friend) edited his writings for publication. 

Zimmer felt that Western civilisation was at a crossroads; a turning point that had been reached in India around 700 BC: an encounter with the Self of the Universe.

Rembrandt, The Philosopher in Meditation.
A wonderful interpretation of the symbolism behind this painting here.

Love over Ego

An early Chola Bronze Figure of Siva Nataraja. Tamil Nadu, South India. Circa 950-1000 A.D

This exquisite South Indian bronze represents Lord Shiva, the embodiment of Universal Self or Love.

He is shown with one foot subduing a dwarf demon, representing the ego and ignorance (the small self). One of the left hands gestures towards the other foot, signifying that the way to Self-realisation is through devotion (in Indian culture, the feet of divine beings are a particular focus of worship). Poet saints have often referred to the Feet of the Lord or the Goddess as a place of refuge from the devastating illusions of the world.

The upper right hand holds a damaru (small drum), a symbol of creation; while the far left hand holds the fire of cosmic dissolution. 

For the Self there is no Creation and end of the world. Self and World are one and the same. The world is brought into being, and annihilated, from moment to moment. There is no such thing as a time of creation in the distant past, nor a future doomsday to dread.
The fourth hand is held in the abhaya mudra (gesture of reassurance), telling the viewer not to have fear.

image source: Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch Antiquities, Indian and Islamic Art

Anatta

A parable is given in the Pali Stanzas of the Sister Elders. There was a mother, we read, who had lost six children: one remained, a daughter. But eventually this child too died, and the mother was disconsolate. The Buddha came to her; and he said: "Many hundreds of children have we buried, you and I, hosts of kindred, in the times that are gone. Do not lament for this dear little daughter; four and eighty thousand with the same name have been burned on the funeral pyre by you before. Which among them is the one whom you mourn?".

- Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India.

It seems highly improbable that any one individual could have had scores of thousands of children with the same name, even if they had lived thousands of lives. And regressing only a few hundred lifetimes, one would reach a prehistoric period in which the name did not even exist. So the sense received from the Buddha's words is that "you and I" - the woman, himself, all beings that are and ever were - are the immortal, universal Self who has lived all lives, borne and lost all children. 

One of the central teachings of Buddhism is the concept of anatta (non-existence of self); which is often interpreted to mean not only that individual egos are an illusion, but that there is no universal Self either - all is void of being (sunyata). However, this story suggests that the Buddha did believe in the universal Self  described in the Upanishads. Though believe is the wrong word - He knew.

(painting by Waldmuller)

That is Self

"He through Whom we see, taste, smell, feel, enjoy, know everything, He is that Self.

Knowing that by which one perceives both dream and waking states, the great omnipresent Self, the wise man goes beyond sorrow.

Knowing that the individual self, eater of the fruit of action, is the universal Self, maker of past and future, he knows he has nothing to fear.

Born in the beginning from meditation, born from the waters, having entered the secret place of the heart, He looks forth through beings. That is Self.

- Katha Upanishad

The Indian actor Sabu, in a scene from the 1947 film Black Narcissus.

"There was no self"

One night in 1977, at the age of 29, after having suffered from long periods of suicidal depression, Eckhart Tolle experienced an inner transformation. That night he awakened from his sleep, suffering from feelings of depression that were "almost unbearable," but then experienced a life-changing epiphany. Recounting the experience, Tolle says:

I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.

Tolle recalls going out for a walk in London the next morning, and finding that “everything was miraculous, deeply peaceful. Even the traffic." The feeling continued, and he began to feel a strong underlying sense of peace in any situation. For a period of about two years after this, he spent much of his time sitting, “in a state of deep bliss," on park benches in Russell Square, Central London, "watching the world go by.” He stayed with friends, in a Buddhist monastery, or otherwise slept rough on Hampstead Heath. His family thought him “irresponsible, even insane." Tolle changed his first name from Ulrich to Eckhart, reportedly in homage to the German philosopher and mystic, Meister Eckhart. Tolle's books on spirituality have become best-sellers.

John Constable
Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow

Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi once described Hampstead Heath, in London, as the "trigger" of the Heart Chakra of the World. It is a wild place miraculously preserved in one of the biggest cities on Earth, where William Blake would often walk.

Haruki Murakami

Many years ago a friend lent me a copy of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. It was unlike any other novel I'd read previously, not necessarily one I'ld recommend, but certainly unique. Below is his take on ego and the Self in relation to the Tokyo Sarin attacks by the pseudo-Buddhist sect Aum Supreme Truth.

A much debated point is whether the Tibetan Government-In-Exile leader the Dalai Lama XIV has met, endorsed or supported Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo. He did meet Asahara; he doesn't deny this, and there are photos to prove it. His inner circle members supported Aum Shinrikyo during the time when the group struggled to obtain the legal religious organization status. The Dalai Lama at least admitted that this error offered proof that he was not a “living Buddha” but it's a shame he neglected to tell us all that before making the error.

In Eastern spirituality, guru and Self are said to be one and the same. Surrendering the ego to the guru is surrendering it to one's own true Self. But the guru has to be a Satguru (true master) like the Buddha himself. To surrender to a false guru is disastrous. 

Of course, the individual is free to try to overcome desires and attachments and so on, but from an objective point of view it seems extremely dangerous to allow another, a guru, to take control of your own ego. Are there still many believers or ex-believers who don't recognize this?

   I don't think many have thought about it properly. Gautama Buddha said: "The Self is the true master of the Self" and "Keep the Self an island, approaching nothing." In other words, Buddhist disciples practice asceticism in order to find the true Self. They find impurities and attachments, and attempt to extinguish these. But what Mr. Matsumoto (Asahara) did was equate "Self" and "attachments." He said that in order to get rid of the ego, the Self must be disposed of as well. Humans love the "Self," so they suffer, and if the "Self" can be discarded then a shining true Self will emerge. But this is a complete reversal of Buddhist teachings. The Self is what should be discovered, not discarded. Terrorist crimes like the gas attack result from the process of easily giving up on the Self. If the Self is lost, then people will become completely insensitive to murder and terrorism.

   In the final analysis, Aum created people who had discarded their Selves and just followed orders. Therefore enlightened practitioners in Aum, those most steeped in Aum doctrine, are not truly enlightened people who have mastered the truth. It's a perversion for believers who supposedly have renounced the world to run around collecting donations in the name of "salvation."

Haruki Murakami

The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche  (interview with members of Aum Shinrikyo)

The Self as Infinite Beauty

Estranged from Beauty - none can be -
For Beauty is Infinity -
And power to be finite ceased
Before Identity was leased.

-Emily Dickinson

The Immortality of Self

When Arjuna is reluctant to go to battle, because some of the princes on the enemy side are his relations, Shri Krishna explains to him that the Self cannot be slain:

I have always existed, you too have always existed, and those princes have always existed. The time shall never come when we shall all cease to exist. Just as the Self within the body goes through childhood, manhood and old age, so also it passes to other bodies; a wise man is not puzzled by this.

What is not there cannot exist; what is there cannot be anything but existent. The distinction between these states has been recognized by those who study truth. That which pervades this universe is imperishable; no one can destroy that changeless being. It is these bodies that house the everlasting, imperishable, incomprehensible self that have an end. Therefore fight. 

He who thinks the Self can be a slayer, and he who thinks the Self is slain, are both mistaken. The Self does not kill, nor is it killed. For the Self is never born and never dies, nor may it ever become non-existent. This unborn, everlasting, abiding Self is not slain when the body is slain. Knowing the Self to be unborn, imperishable, everlasting, changeless, Arjuna, how can a man slay anyone or be slain?

As a man gets rid of worn out clothes and put on new ones, so the Self puts away outworn bodies and puts on others that are new. Weapons do not cut the Self, fire does not burn it, waters do not wet it, the wind does not dry it. Not capable of being cut, burned, wetted, or dried, the Self is everlasting, present in all things, unchangeable, unmoveable, for ever the same.

Knowing that the soul is immaterial and unalterable, you should not grieve, Arjuna.