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.

The Passing of Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

H.H. Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, founder of the worldwide meditation movement called Sahaja Yoga, passed away peacefully on 23rd February, 2011 in Genoa, Italy, aged 87. 

Hers was a life unlike any other. Whether walking with kings or walking barefoot with Gandhi, it was a journey of extremes managed effortlessly, living as she did with grace, dignity and, always, loving guidance. 

Born of a royal dynasty, she conferred as a child with Mahatma Gandhi, living for a time in his ashram, was a medical student and a freedom fighter, was an adored mother, grandmother, great grandmother and the wife of a distinguished diplomat who himself was decorated by the kings and presidents of innumerable countries and knighted by the Queen of England. But incredibly, after all this, with her family grown and settled, she then embarked on an even more extraordinary mission. 

Shri Mataji was born to Christian parents in India. Spiritually enlightened, she knew from very early on that her unique spiritual gift must be made available to everyone. And so it was that in 1970 she founded Sahaja Yoga meditation, which she shared freely. Using simple techniques, she discovered a unique process of Self Realisation through which huge masses of people could easily achieve the peace of true meditation. She charged no money, and instead insisted this was a birthright which should be available to all who desired it, at no cost. She said “There can be no peace in the world until there is peace within”.

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Joseph Campbell Quotes

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

The Lake Questions Yudhishthira

A Midsummer Night's Dream

William Blake, an illustration of a scene from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A reading of Shakespeare gives the clear impression that he had realised the Self very deeply. Many of his works explore the theme of Selfhood, identity, and the ultimately tragic nature of ego. 

In A Midsummer Night's Dream he suggests that the true nature of selfhood lies in a collective self (not in a Stalinist, statist sense, but as a natural consequence of the unity of being - Advaita).

As a playwright working with a troupe of actors, Shakespeare would have experienced this collective selfhood in which each member has a unique role but depends on the others. The play is much more important than individual egos.

The play within a play is a device Shakespeare loved to use. The play within A Midsummer Night's Dream is performed by a group of labourers, called 'mechanicals' by the character Puck.

"Identities in the play are not so much lost as they are blended together to create a type of haze through which distinction becomes nearly impossible. It is driven by a desire for new and more practical ties between characters as a means of coping with the strange world within the forest."

"David Marshall, an aesthetics scholar and English Professor at the University of California – Santa Barbara, takes this theme to an even further conclusion, pointing out that the loss of identity is especially played out in the description of the mechanicals their assumption of other identities. In describing the occupations of the acting troupe, he writes 'Two construct or put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered'. In Marshall's opinion, this loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities found in community, which Marshall points out may lead to some understanding of Shakespeare's opinions on love and marriage. Further, the mechanicals understand this theme as they take on their individual parts for a corporate performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Marshall remarks that 'To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part'. He claims that the mechanicals understand this and that each character, particularly among the lovers, has a sense of laying down individual identity for the greater benefit of the group or pairing. It seems that a desire to lose one's individuality and find identity in the love of another is what quietly moves the events of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is the primary sense of motivation and is even reflected in the scenery and mood of the story."

-Wikipedia

It's a little past midsummer here in Australia, but feels hot enough to be.

Materialism

"Actually to be materialistic, in the real sense,
is that we understand the value of matter.
And the value of matter is aesthetics:
artistic things, real artistic things.
And beyond that, the value of matter
is that you can give love to others."

-Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, Wimbledon, UK, 1986

The Mantra for Overcoming Ego

"Just say 'I forgive, I forgive', and you can overcome your ego."


-Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi 

Sant Dynaneshwar

Whether It is the seer or the seen,
It doesn't matter;
There is only the Self
Vibrating everywhere.

From the Amritanubhava by Dnyāneshwar or Jñāneshwar (1275–1296), also known as Jñanadeva

Excerpt from the 1940 Marathi film Sant Dynaneshwar:

"I" is a dream

Shri Anantasayana Vishnu, Lord Vishnu sleeping on the cosmic serpent, Ananta (Endless), dreaming the world into existence.


I am not even dust. I am a dream
That weaves itself in sleep and wakefulness.
My brother and my father, Captain Cervantes,
Fought nobly on the waters of Lepanto,
Learned Latin and a little Arabic...
That I might be allowed to dream the other
Whose fertile memory will be a part
Of all the days of man, I humbly pray:
My God, my dreamer, keep on dreaming me.


- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 –1986)


Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of Borges: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."

The New World

The Italian film Nuovomondo (English title: The Golden Door) follows an impoverished Italian family as they migrate to the United States at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. An English woman, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, attaches herself to the family (unmarried women were not allowed to sail unaccompanied).

Despite the poverty and crowding, the film is beautiful to look at. Women from all parts of the Old World, move in files, in their best and most beautiful traditional attire. 

In one scene a sea of people, filling the entire frame, unexpectedly and breathtakingly parts, and we realise that half of the crowd are on the deck of the ship moving irrevocably away, and the other half are being left behind on the quay. It's an incredibly powerful piece of cinematography.

Later, on Ellis Island, the women contemplate the new life they are about to enter, and the the film pauses to a still image, inviting viewers to witness the present moment of their own lives in a rite of passage. 

In one of the most moving scenes, the grandmother, who is denied entry for refusing to submit to an intelligence test, asks immigration officers: "Who are you to decide who enters the New World and who does not. Are you God?" She asks her sons and grandson to continue without her through the "Golden Door" into the land flowing with milk. The final scene, in which the immigrants literally swim through this milk, dissolves into magic realism.  

There is some nudity in this film, but it is not gratuitous since it shows the dehumanising effect of the physical and mental examinations immigrants were subjected to.
The film is a heart-felt testament to the pluck and initiative of all those torn from their homelands to join the great migrations throughout history. As the descendant of immigrants it struck a chord with me.

The Problem of Self

It is our ignorance which makes us think that our self, as self, is real, that it has its complete meaning in itself. When we take that wrong view of self then we try to live in such a manner as to make self the ultimate object of our life. Then we are doomed to disappointment like the man who tries to reach his destination by firmly clutching the dust of the road. Our self has no means of holding us, for its own nature is to pass on; and by clinging to this thread of self which is passing through the loom of life we cannot make it serve the purpose of the cloth into which it is being woven.

-Rabindranath Tagore, The Problem of Self. One of a series of lectures delivered at Caxton Hall, Westminster, 1913.


As Tagore points out, in the rest of his lecture, ridding ourselves of ego does not mean destruction of personality or uniqueness. Once the illusion of ego is removed the universal Self illuminates a person, and their true personality and uniqueness shines through.

A Peaceful Christmas

Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

-Gospel of Thomas

William Blake, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary.


The Kingdom is a symbol for the Self, which Jesus exhorts us to know. It is coextensive with the Universe, and therefore both inside and outside us.

Be Your Self

Be yourself. There is no one better qualified.

- Mary Dunbar

I want you to be everything that's you, deep at the center of your being.

- Confucius

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself. 

- Emerson

Square Painting

I've long been interested by paintings in a square format. This is a wonderful composition by Thomas Buechner.

The Spindle of Necessity

"After seven days in the meadow the souls and Er were required to travel further. After four days they reached a place where they could see a rainbow shaft of light brighter than any they had seen before. After another day's travel they reached it. This was the spindle of Necessity. Several women, including Lady Necessity, her daughters and the Sirens were present. The souls were then organized into rows and were each given a lottery token apart from Er."

From the Myth of Er, ascribed to Socrates by Plato.

This image of a rainbow spindle spinning out reincarnations, recalls the Kundalini, from Yoga tradition, a divine energy associated with the Goddess.

William Blake, illustration for the poem Jerusalem.

On the right a woman with the moon (feminine principle), spins a thread emerging from the crown of the head of a divine creator figure.

In yoga philosophy, the Kundalini shakti emerges through an aperture at the crown of the head, called the Brahmarandra (rent of Brahma).

Jerusalem is a symbol of the Sahasrara and the Eternal Self.

"Myths of weaving exist around the world as metaphors for creation."

"The spindle is often an axis mundi and its whirling whorls serve a cosmogonic function. Plato, for example, had a vision of the great goddess Ananke, "Necessity," spinning the universe; the sun, moon, and planets were her spindle's whorls; sirens sang through the webs of time and fate that she wove, and souls endlessly moved through the strands on their way to and from death and rebirth. Many goddesses are spinners and weavers: the Fates of ancient Greece; Athena, also of Greece; Neith of ancient Egypt; in Teutonic myth the Norns spin secret meanings into life."

The Norse goddess Frigg

Hypatia

Agora, a film by the Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar (The Sea Inside), revolves around the life of Hypatia, the greatest mathematician, scientist and philosopher of her time, played admirably by Rachel Weisz. In her native 4th century AD Alexandria she was much esteemed for her dignity, intellect and virtue. Many of her students, both pagan and Christian, rose to positions of political power, which meant that she was seen as a woman of great influence, putting her into the crosshairs of the power-hungry. Her death, to some historians, marks the end of the Classical Era, although Hellenistic philosophy did survive her for a few hundred years in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.

The villain of the piece is Cyril, patriarch/pope of Alexandria, a man described, even by Christians of his day as "a monster, born to destroy the church". He persecuted the Jews and other non-Christians of Alexandria, as well as Christians who disagreed with him, and probably incited the mob of zealots who brutally killed and mutilated Hypatia for her refusal to kneel to his power. Historians disagree over the extent of his responsibility for these events, but the Church's own resistance to his canonisation is telling.

Amenabar certainly has an agenda - firstly to warn against the overthrow of reason by ignorance, and secondly to show that so-called Christians have been, at certain times and places, no better than the Taliban. The second part of the message has infuriated certain reviewers allied to the Church. Agendas tend to distort historical accuracy, but the inaccuracies of the film are not as great as commentators, with their own ideological agenda, have made out. For example, some have deplored Agora for apparently blaming Christians for the destruction of the great Royal Library of Alexandria. There were several libraries in the city, and the film deals with the destruction of the library in the Serapeum temple, not the burning of the great library. The Serapeum was destroyed by either a Christian mob or by Roman soldiers, depending on which ancient account one reads. We will probably never know who was responsible for the tragic loss of the more famous library.
I saw the film with my librarian sister, which was quite appropriate.

Hypatia as imagined by Raphael