Tag Archives: Ramana Maharshi

Weltschmerz (ii)

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Conflict, turbulence, uncertainty, violence, deprivation and upset are nothing new. During the time when Chan (early Zen) Buddhism was developing in China, when Linji was alive, during one decade, two-thirds of the population died from war, famine or plague. During the lifetime of the great nineteenth and twentieth century Advaita sage Ramana Maharshi, who spent most of his life in silence, doing nothing and simply being present, there were two world wars, the rise of Hitler, the holocaust, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Spanish Civil War, a global pandemic (the Spanish flu), the creation of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, the independence of India and the partition of that country into India and Pakistan, a division that also involved violence, conflict, mass displacement and death. The human world has always been filled with disagreements, power struggles, violence, persecution, plagues, famines, injustices and wars. Empires have come and gone, millions have died.

People have responded to this in many different ways. Nondual traditions such as Zen and Advaita are two of those responses. Social service work and political organizing are another. I think of Zen and Advaita as being akin to those musicians on the Titanic, and I see political and social service work as being more like those trying to save the ship or ready the lifeboats. All these actions have their place…

Joan Tollifson, Stormy Weather

It’s odd, perhaps, but after all these years I still sometimes worry whether I am doing the right thing as a slightly eremitical contemplative, or whether I should be out there on the streets as some kind of activist, or volunteering in some local social enterprise. You would think that by now I would be at peace with my own choice, if choice it is. (Actually I don’t think it ever was a choice; temperament and circumstance have given me the place I find myself in. I have merely to get on with it.)

Joan Tollifson goes on to quote from her own earlier book, Bare Bones Meditation,

As I see it, meditation is not merely a quest for personal peace of mind or self-improvement. In involves an exploration of the roots of our present global suffering and the discovery of an alternative way of living. Meditation is seeing the nature of thought, how thought constantly creates images about ourselves and others, how we impose a conceptual grid on reality and then mistake the map for the territory itself…

Meditation is listening. Listening to everything. To the world, to nature, to the body, the mind, the heart, the rain, the traffic, the wind, the thoughts, the silence before sound. It is about questioning our frantic efforts to do something and become somebody, and allowing ourselves to simply be…

Meditation is a powerful antidote to our purposeful, growth-oriented, war-mongering, speed-driven, ever-productive consumer civilization, which is rapidly devouring the earth. We retreat in meditation not from reality, but from our habitual escapes from reality. Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize. But meditation is much more (and much less) than all of this. Meditation is not knowing what meditation is.

I find this such a healing reminder amid the clatter and panic of the news media – not to mention the social ones – that I feel like printing it out and keeping it next to my heart. Of course we are intimately, intricately connected, one with another, and all that we do affects every one of us. To sit still in the storm is perhaps the single most powerful act we can contribute; it just doesn’t feel very powerful, because we are so used, so addicted, to purposeful action, discursive thought, polarised and polarising emotion. To the ego, meditation is doing nothing. The ego is right. Nothing, though, is what needs doing.

Sitting still like this, the webbed patterns that connect us all become clear, like bright wires against the dark; all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right, and our presence now is all that is needed. It is all that was ever needed; it is what we have been given, our work and our home, both of these.

No thing at all

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Over the last few months I have written little. If I am honest, I should have to say that this has not been because I have had nothing to say, so much as that I had run out of words.

Over the long years of my Christian contemplative practice – from the age of thirty, maybe – I was able to draw on the deep well of Christian iconography, theology, the Bible itself, for words and images to tell myself about the journey I was on; words which I could readily share. Since then it has been more difficult, much more difficult. I am not a Buddhist. Despite my great respect for Buddhism’s 2,500 years of spiritual and psychological research and development, and my love for many Buddhist writers classical and contemporary, their words do not on the whole “do it for me” in the way that the Christian tradition so often has.

Nonetheless, despite a couple of abortive attempts to return to formal, organised religion, and despite nearly a year of trying to live out a kind of “churchless Christianity”, I could not with any intellectual honesty understand myself as a member of a Christian church any longer. The faith that is indistinguishable from community, from the gathered people (ekklēsia) that is the church, simply no longer functioned as a descriptor for where I found myself.

Increasingly, despite (or because of) my subsequent unwavering practice of broadly vipassana-based meditation, or a version of centering prayer, I felt lost, my heart clogged with the dust of broken words, dry and hollowed out. I had no idea who I was any more.

It came to the point where all I could do was cry out (to whom?) in the cold hours before dawn, that I was lost, so lost. No maps I knew showed this desert place, wherever it was, and besides, my compass no longer worked. In this condition, tired out, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, light poured through the window across the bed. I was light myself, empty and crystal clear. No, I was not. I, was not; except that there was a gossamer memory that knew itself as me, someone who had, effectively, died in the night. “All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost.” (Andreas Müller)

That phrase, no thing, was all that was left of language that morning. (It is a phrase that has been with me, resonant and entirely resistant to explanation, for many years.) I cannot possibly describe the freedom, the irresistible joy that was left where I had been.

Since, the joy and the freedom have not dimmed. The gossamer memory of me still seems to function perfectly well as a way to get around in the phenomenal world, but it is no longer convincing. It is as transparent as glass. I so love all that is, even if it is no thing. Especially as it is no thing.

What happened? I don’t know. Of course I don’t. What happened is not the kind of thing “I” could know. This seems like a clever answer, a smarty-pants way to get one up on my readers, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I can say, though, that it is not “something” that “I” achieved. Müller again: “What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.”

So is this the fruit of meditation? The culmination of some kind of a process? Obviously not. And yet. Could it have happened without a couple of years’ steady practice of meditation, following nearly forty of Christian contemplation? Yes, obviously. People like Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi each had their illumination following moments of great stress or despair, not unlike, according to their own descriptions, the desert place where I had found myself that night. They do not seem to have spent long years meditating in preparation. Ramana hadn’t had time, anyway; he was only sixteen.

But perhaps, for me at least, practice made a place where it was possible. It just happened, that much is clear. For me, it seems to have happened while I was dreamlessly asleep. But maybe practice functioned like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. I don’t know. Something had to get me out there into that desert – something had to shear away the props that upheld the idea of a me who could get somewhere, even into a desert.

There is certainly nothing I could have done to force such a thing to happen (and from the point of view of “I” that would have felt not unlike some sort of suicide) and it doesn’t happen to or for “me” anyhow. It happens. What is beyond is no thing at all.