The world ousts one who knows them as different from the Self
_ Brihadaranyaka Upsanishad
The earth is the size of a pencil’s eraser in a sea of black, photographed by the Voyager Space probe as it was aimed back for one last view before leaving the solar system. The photo brings home our ‘lost-pebble’ finiteness, perhaps as strikingly as did the Copernican revolution. Living here on this one small dot, what do we know of ourselves? What is our physical, and can one even ask, what is our spiritual position? On this dot, technology has created a greatly shrunk and almost instantaneous world. And yet, almost as a corollary, we live with vast and frightening psychological distances. Perhaps it is inevitable that alienation and meaninglessness have become the subjective crises of our ‘rational’ century.
Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, addressed these crises in speaking to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein. He said, “Many…greeted the 20th century as a century of elevated reason, in no way imagining the cannibalistic horrors that it would bring. …exterminations…were carried out on an unprecedented scale, culture fell sharply, the human spirit declined…and then there is environmental ruin… and the global population explosion…” He goes on, “If we do not learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria (emphasis added), we humankind will simply be torn apart, as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.” This one sentence underscores the need to examine, as one whole, the relationship of three areas: desire and material consumption, criteria of morality and the nature of being human.
We may start from morality. Einstein has written that if there is to be a rational morality, then it must be based on axioms of self-preservation. But what are the ground-rules of preservations? Are they self-centered, or culturally centered, or globally centered, or universal? We know, historically, the negative consequences of answering this question by developing an elitism of a limited self-group: the result is violence. Did we not foresee on entering this century, that technology, as a manifestation of the human mind, would not become a tool of both the self-serving mind and the mind serving others?
Morality must draw from very deep roots. It must admit this duality and yet reach beyond the ‘worst aspects of human nature.’ The Dalai Lama has said “If we look at the person from the moment of his or her birth until the moment of death, the very basis of our existence is linked to human affection, to gentleness”, and elsewhere, “What misery, what destruction [in this century], but the human mind can wake up and find some other alternative. That is the human capacity.”
How is this capacity known? How can it be pointed to in a practical way in our culture and time? The experience is within every individual; seeking the deepest experience of one’s self — so deeply that the universal aspect of the self can be felt, that a Unity is sensed which is more fundamental than the individual many. Nothing abstract is meant by this; rather that our strings to the universe become more and more clear within us.
The encouragement of this deep self-introspection could clearly be a role of religions today. Carl Jung wrote, “Religion is nothing if it is not obedience to one’s awareness.” Swami Ashokananda wrote, “Man [humankind] must become established in the consciousness of his own true Self. The more he does so, the more peace will come in the world, and the more he will find he has solved the problems of his life and the problems of his fellow men — if that is what you want. But if you don’t have that consciousness, you will make a mess of everything.”
This definition of religion highlights all self-awareness, and every breath we take, as essentially spiritual. We, perforce, express every moment of our lives as our relation to the universal. On a spiritual path we live in ever-deepening consciousness of this fact. The Benedictine monk Br. David Steindl-Rast, defines religion as a conscious engagement in the quest for ultimate meaning. He speaks of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom — wisdom that is in each of us. To live this way is the path of ahimsa, which removes, step-by-step, the attributes of separation — greed, jealousy and self-serving desire.
The nature and value of this experience must be made practical as we approach the end of our ‘rational’ century. It must become part of the dialogue addressing societal problems. Perhaps a model for this dialogue can be found in the ecological movement itself. Forty years ago, people who had an ecological awareness could not make clear ecological connections and values in terms that were meaningful within the mentality of American ‘can-do’ economics. Slowly, as the facts of ecological connections and consequences have become clear, the dialogue has grown, so that today ecological facts and values do begin to have a direct impact on sharing economic and national programs.
In parallel to this evolution of ecological awareness, three steps may be pointed to:
impact: which must be increasingly manifest. There is, in the mental and spiritual realms, as in the physical world, no less than an entire ‘globe’ laced by interconnected circle of needs, actions and values.
understandability: as in the early history of the ecology movement, spiritual consciousness does not now use language common to the social and technical languages of our industrial society. A basis for relating both language usages must be encouraged. Following on this point,
integrative awareness or ecological awareness, becomes an ‘expanded’ awareness.
At present, interconnectedness is taught as a multiplicity of connections, all still viewed piece-by-piece. But by becoming holistic, this fragmented awareness becomes an integrative identification of Oneness. Indeed, we may say our day-to-day awareness of our individual body is an ‘ecological awareness.’ We experience identity with its synergistic totality, and know its basic condition — not as a collective of cells, but as an imbued awareness. In extension, the ecology we explore here is that of our self-knowledge and individual action coupling to the present and future lives of others. The subjective can no longer be conceived as uncoupled from the objective. Currently, increasing discussions on Gaia, mysticism and human justice are all part of the search for a shared language and demonstrability of wholeness. The continued deepening of this ecological awareness becomes spiritual. It confirms a spiritual path as that of ever deepening and expanding awareness.
But in our time, simple pleas to ‘expand awareness’ mean little if, as is largely true in our culture, the subjective experience is not considered to be paid and personal enough to have direct objective impact. Truth cannot be contradictory, and here-in lies the objective basis. In our times, universality first is ‘proven’ through the rigors of science — that nature shows universal patterns or laws, including those called ‘chaotic’, that the elements of our bodies are born in stars, that organic molecules are born in space. Biology has shown the universal linkage between our DNA and that of ancient bacteria. The minds of animals are recognized to be less and less automatant — more and more having ‘human attributes.’ And human minds reach across the ‘paradox’ that math — pure intellect — holds the same patterns as nature. In all cultures, introspective spiritual practices have been the greatest long-term laboratory of this subjective/objective confluence.
Consciousness becomes sensed as an Impersonal Universal. In 1893, Swami Vivekananda said, “Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken sea of matter…and Advaita (Unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul.” The thrust of science toward demonstrating universality, the evolution of the ecological movement and the historically demonstrated response of humans to help the community at times of great stress, all provide reasons to approach a study of deepest subjective knowledge from a universal perspective. Will not such study nurture the deeper roots of spirituality? And in so doing will it not help us evolve a shared language and acknowledge subtle connections that will help us, all together, on this one Earth.