you can perform maximally.
Where are you between two thoughts? If you identify yourself with certain actions, certain achievements and failures, those are thoughts. That’s you in the field of time and experience. Where are you otherwise?
If it weren’t difficult to get to that still point, there wouldn’t have to be so much talk about it and all this sitting in postures trying to get there. And then, when you get up from the posture, you are right back where you were. So, you go back to the posture to see if you can get there again. It’s not easy; yet, it’s very easy. It’s like riding a bicycle: you keep falling off until you know how to ride, and then you can’t fall off.
It’s a perspective problem. Running through the field of time is this energy which is the one energy that is putting itself into all these forms. By identifying with that one energy, you are at the same time indentified with the forms coming and going. If you see the two modes—involvement and the still point within you, samsara and nirvāṇa—as separate from each other, you are in a dualistic position. But when you realize that the two are one, you can hold to your still point while engaging. It’s the same world experienced in two different ways. You can experience both ways at once.
Sri Ramkrishna was devoted to the Goddess Kālī. Kālī, the word means “black” and also “time,” is that black abyss of mystery out of which all things come and back into which they go. That’s Kālī. Her principle image is that of dancing in the burning ground,the place where corpses are burned. This is dissolution. She is dancing on the body of her god, Śiva, her husband. Your god is the final obstacle to get past.
Any idea, any concept, any name, is a final obstacle. The one preached in the church in any religion is the final obstacle. The only Western teacher I have found who gets it is Meister Eckhart, who says, “The ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of God for God.” All of our religions hang onto the image. None has gone past its god. The still point is going past the god. Goethe says, “Everything temporal is but a symbol.”110 Nietzsche says, “Everything eternal is but a metaphor.” They are saying the same thing. “Everything” includes God, heaven, hell, the whole works. So as long as you are living to get to heaven, you won’t find that still place.
One has to go beyond
the pairs of opposites
to find the real source.
In Buddhism, those who attain nirvāṇa are said to have “achieved the yonder shore”; that is to say, they have crossed the river from the normal experience of life to the yonder shore of nirvāṇa, beyond all pairs of opposites, beyond twoness. Heinrich Zimmer gave this amusing anecdote to help us understand Buddhism:
Let’s say you’re living in San Francisco, and you are simply fed up with San Francisco. You have heard of Berkeley: the wonderful people there and these councils of sages. There are domes that suggest temples. You’ve never been to such a place, but you have heard of it. It seems that this Berkeley would be a great escape from San Francisco, and so—in the old days before the bridge—you go to the shore, you look across, and you think, “If I could only get away from this place—saṁsāra, the world of pain and effort—and go to Berkeley, I would be saved.”
Well, one fine day, you see a ferryboat set off from the yonder shore, and it comes right to where you are standing. There’s a man in the boat who says, “Anyone for Berkeley?” This is the Buddha in the Buddha boat. And you say, “I.” And he says, “Well, get aboard, but remember: this is a one-way trip. It takes great effort. There’s no coming back to San Francisco. You will give up everything: your career, your family, your ambitions. Everything.” You say, “I’m fed up with every-thing.” “Okay,” he says, “you are eligible.”
This ferryboat is known as the “lesser vehicle.” It’s for “Little Ferryboat” Buddhism, Monk Buddhism. To board it, you have to be ready to become a monk or a nun and give up the whole thing. In India, the saffron robes the monks wear are the color of the garment put on a corpse. These men are dead. Are you ready to put on the garment of a corpse? You are? Get on the boat.
Sri Ramakrishna says,
“Do not seek illumination
unless you seek it
as a man whose hair is on fire
seeks a pond.”
The ferryboat starts out, and it suddenly comes over you what you’re leaving, but you are already on the boat. You’re a monk or a nun. You’re a sailor. You love the sound of the waves slapping on the side of the boat, you learn how to lift sails and bring them down, and you use a different vocabulary: you call the right side, the “starboard” side, and the left side, the “port”; the front is “fore,” the back, “aft.” You don’t know any more about Berkeley than you did before you got on the boat, but people in San Francisco you’re now calling “fools.” You thought it would be a short trip, but
it may continue for three or four incarnations.
This is the monk’s life. This is the student’s life. This is obeying orders. Life is reduced to pushing beads here and there and chanting OM. You have reduced life to something that is a pretty simple affair. You would not want that to end. It’s like a situation I’ve seen in art studios: the student is working on a piece of sculpture, and the master looks at it and says, “Continue.” Of course, the disaster would be if he said, “You’ve got it, you’re finished.” “Oh no, I don’t want to leave school.” The last thing you want is not to be a monk or a nun.
Finally, after several incarnations, the boat scrapes ashore, and you think, “This is it: rapture, nirvāṇa!” You go ashore. There are explosions: LSD and the whole goddamn thing—but it’s not the goal at all.
The Buddha, in the conversations known as the “Medium-length Dialogues,” says, “Oh, Monks, supposing a man, wishing to get to the yonder shore, should build himself a raft, and by virtue of that raft, achieve the yonder shore; then, out of gratitude for the raft, he picks it up and carries it about on his shoulder. Would that be an intelligent man?” The monks reply, “No, Master, that would not be an intelligent man.” “So,” says the Buddha, “the laws and experiences of the order of yoga have nothing to do with nirvāṇa. The vehicle of the doctrine is the way that you get to the yonder shore, and having attained it, you cast away the raft and forsake it.”
So, you are on the yonder shore, and you think, “I wonder how San Francisco looks from Berkeley?” You turn around and…there is no San Francisco, there is no bay, there is no boat, there is no Buddha.
You thought there was an opposition. You were still thinking in terms of pairs of opposites. The place you have left is exactly where you are. It’s simply your perspective that has been changed. This is the point of view of the so-called “Great Ferryboat,” or Mahāyāna tradition, where we realize that all things are Buddha things, we are on the Great Ferryboat, and the ferry-boat is already there. Furthermore, since the first doctrine of Buddhism is “no self,” there is nobody on the boat! The real self is that transcendent life and Buddha consciousness of which we are all just visionary moments. This is the Mahāyāna.
So we hear next, “Delight is yoga.” The life you are living is your yoga. As Ramakrishna put it, “The little nephew that you love is your God.” The irony of this wonderful discipline is that it teaches that you, who were bored, are in exactly the same place, but in rapture, simply because you’ve shifted your level of consciousness. You’ve given up thinking things should be the way they are not, and you realize, “This is it. This is it. This is it.” And you get to saying “This is it” by first saying, “This is not it.” That discrimination forces you into a different level of consciousness. What “isn’t it” is the way you’re looking at it.
The Buddha is the one whose eye
of full consciousness has opened.
This is the journey that comes through worship, because a deity represents a degree of power,a degree of consciousness of knowledge and love that is on a level not immediately apparent to the eyes. The Tantric saying “to worship a god, you must become a god” means y
ou must find in yourself the level of conscious-ness and love that the deity epitomizes and symbolizes. When you do, you are worshiping that deity.
It doesn’t matter what name you give the deity. People say, “Oh, we are Christians: Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and the Virgin Mary.” But if you can’t get into yourself on the level of the Christ within you, you are not a Christian. And depending on the level of awareness you have reached, your worship will be different from that of people in the same church who aren’t at the same level. Saying you are a member of this church, that church, or the other is a social notion, a sociological phenomenon that has nothing to do with religion.
What is your religion telling you?
How to be a Jew? A Catholic?
Or how to be a human being?
I had a friend, a marvelous young man named John, who became an editor of the Jesuit periodical America about the time that the Catholic church got interested in the ecumenical movement. Everybody was trying to correlate Catholicism with the other religions, but at the same time, they were denigrating them. So, John would always be telling them, for example, “No, you can’t do that with Hinduism. You can’t put it down by misrepresenting it. You’ve got to face up to it.”
Well, there was a big Roman Catholic conference of the meditation orders—Cistercians, Trappists, and so forth—in Bangkok, and John was there as an observer. By the way, it was while attending this conference that Thomas Merton died. He was electrocuted by a bad fixture in some absurd Thai hotel. John later said that the talk that Merton had given just before his death was one of the most magnificent he’d ever heard.
When John came back, he said the Christian monks and Buddhist monks had no problem communicating. As anyone who’s tried to be a poet knows, when you’ve had a spiritual experience, the words don’t render it. All they can do is give a clue. The experience goes beyond anything that can be said. The religious sense is implied in the metaphoric language of religion. “But,” he said, “the lay clergy who have never had the experience, but have only read the books, are in collision all the time.”
What is the Kingdom?
It lies in our realization of the ubiquity
of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.111
The big lesson in Buddhism, then, the sense of what we have been saying is, “Get away from your rational system and get into the wonderful experience that is moving through all things all the time.”
It is through living
that we experience and communicate
the spirit.
It is through life
that we learn to live in the spirit.
One in full quest of the spirit
knows that the goal of life is death.
I recall a wonderful talk I had with Alan Watts, who was a marvelous man. One of my problems was that Jean was always late. I’d make an appointment to meet her somewhere or other, and there I’d sit waiting for half an hour. I found it’s a normal thing for men to wait for women. They have so many things they have to do before they can walk out of the house that half an hour or more goes by quickly.
Now, it’s a basic rule in New York that it takes a half-hour to get anywhere, but Jean always thought that the time when she was supposed to be somewhere was the time to leave. So, I had this long wait problem, and I said to Alan, “What can I do about this? I get aggravated, and when she arrives, I’m a little bit nasty.”
Alan said, “Well, your problem is that you want her to be there, and you’re wishing for a situation that is not the one you are in. Just realize that you are ruining the experience that you could be having there while waiting by thinking it should be otherwise.”
So then, waiting for Jean became a spiritual exercise. I said to myself, “You should not be thinking that Jean should be here. Look around you and see what is going on.” And, you know, the place where I was be-came so goddamn interesting that I wasn't bored at all. Oftentimes, I hoped that Jean would make me wait a little longer. That would have seemed impossible to me, until Alan suggested shutting out any thought that my situation should have been otherwise.
That’s an example of what fear and desire do. I de-sired the situation to be the one we planned, and that desire forbade me my immediate experience: “This is it! This is life! Look at it! Isn’t it bubbling?” But now that I could love the situation I was in, the waiting was no longer a bore. The psychological transformation would be that whatever was formerly endured is now known, loved, and served.
As long as you move
from a place of fear and desire,
you are self-excluded
from immortality.
The aim of all religious exercises is a psy-chological transformation. You can make up your own meditations and rites based on knowing, loving, and serving the deity in caring for your children, doctoring drunks, or writing books. Any work whatsoever can be a meditation if you have the sense that everything is brahman: the process, the doing, the thing that is being looked at, the one that is looking—everything.
The return
is seeing the radiance
everywhere.
The main problem is changing the location of your mind. The town you come back to is the one you left, otherwise the journey is not complete. You come back to whatever you regard as the place that is your life, to the same career, not necessarily to the same locale. The yoga disciplines are disciplines. They are not the place.
You give yourself to life
by leaving temporality behind.
Desire for mortal gains
and fear of loss
hold you back from giving
yourself to life.
Fear and desire do not give rise to social duty, society does. Do-gooders come and say, for example, “We have this picket line against nuclear armament. Please get on the line, give up your thinking, and do what we ask you to do.”
If you’re performing your social duty,
it is not your act at all.
Society has put it upon you
and it will keep you from life.
Dealing with such demands as compulsory social obligations means you are linked and locked to a given order of life in the phenomenal world. You can involve yourself voluntarily, but there is no compulsion upon you to participate in these actions. Nor are they necessarily the final good of mankind. That’s the whole didactic sphere.
People put social duty on you. Your neighbors say, “Why this apathetic sitting in meditation? Get up and do something for the world. You owe it to the world.” All that kind of thing. Duty doesn’t rise out of your fear. People put it on you. Duty is dharma; that is to say, dharma understood as social dharma.
Notice that little icon on the dollar bill, the static eye at the point where the pair of opposites come together. If you’re going to be in the world in action, you have to be down the pyramid on one side or the other. It doesn’t matter whether you are for Democracy or Communism or Fascism, you are still in the field of time, and the radiance shines through no matter which one you’re in. You can also get locked into compulsive participation in any position. It is a matter of relativity. All judgments are transformed as you move from one position to another. Good and evil are not absolute. They are relative to which side you are on.
The limitation comes
where your judgment comes.
A wonderful example is a story I was told about a Buddhist monk whom a friend was following. Now in Tibet, people go to a slaughter-house, buy a lamb that is about to be killed, then give the lamb its freedom, and that is a pious act. Accordingly, this monk, who had a cluster of beautiful girls around him, was going to perform a pious act by freeing five hundred fish.
And so, with his constellation of beauties, he went from one bait shop to another in Monterey trying to buy five hundred minnows. But bait was in short supply, and the shopkeepers said they were not going to sell him minnows for liberation. Finally, however, he found a shop that would, and he and his entourage, carr
ying buckets filled with fish, went down to the shore, where they had a ceremony of blessing the fish that were about to be given their freedom. Then they dumped one bucket after another into the ocean. Well, pelicans flocked from every point of the compass, and the little monk ran back and forth, waving his robe, trying to keep the pelicans away.
Now, what is good for pelicans is bad for fish, and this monk had taken sides. He was not in the middle place. This is to me a very important story. Every now and then, I wake up laughing at that monk and his banquet for the pelicans.
That is why the story of the lion lying down with the lamb is so silly. Read concretely, you realize that when the lion is eating the lamb, he is lying down with it. That’s how it was meant to be, and “shanti, shanti, shanti”: nothing is happening. That is the perspective of the sublime, which annihilates ego consciousness and its relationship. Without changing the world, there is escape from sorrow just by shifting the perspective.
Life will always be sorrowful.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 16
