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#2328 - Wednesday, November 30,
2005 - Editor: Jerry Katz
This issue features a typed-out excerpt about the teaching of Ramana Maharshi from Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions, by Lex Hixon. Foreward by Ken Wilber.
The book was published in 1989 and while reading the passage below you might sense that since that time there has been a leveling of our regard toward enlightenment (it's not capitalized anymore), spiritual practices and experiences, and self-realized people. It's all kinda become, "Yeah, okay, whatever." It's just not a big magilla for us anymore. In other words, the timeless truths that Hixon sets forth below are placed in a setting that is now more or less out of fashion. What does that say for today's settings for expressions of truth? They too are only fashion. And with the internet, ways of setting forth truth are burned up and rendered quaint literally seconds after they appear. Tony Parsons and Sailor Bob Adamson and that whole gang of extreme nondualists are making fashion statements. They are supermodels. The Highlights is Fashion TV. Silk is the fundamental substance and great designers and models do with the silk what seems right at any moment in time.
The book is out of print, but several used copies are available through Amazon.com: http://snipurl.com/ke3e
Lex Hixon has appeared in about a dozen past Highlights, which you'll find by entering "hixon" into the nonduality.com search engine: http://nonduality.com/search.htm or http://nonduality.com/hlhome.htm.
Ramana once
remarked: "Realization consists only in getting rid of the
false idea that one is not realized." When liberated from
this false notion by Ramana's illumined affirmation, we recognize
Consciousness itself to be the ultimate fulfillment that human
beings have endlessly sought. Our daily consciousness is
intrinsically Ultimate Consciousness. This insight, which is the
dawning of Enlightenment, need not change any appearing
structures. One need not be transformed from a lawyer working in
the city to a monk or nun meditating in the mountains. No form of
creativity is inhibited by the realization that the goal of all
life has always been attained as primal awareness. Life is now no
longer regarded primarily as evolution but as play.
But even after
Enlightenment, there remains our karmic destiny, our particular
energy pattern, our grain. Each being has its own special
momentum or motivation. This is why the relative universe
continues to manifest. Our karmic momentum may lead us, for
instance, to reshape society. But we should realize that although
there is no ultimate society, this very Consciousness that we use
to design social institutions is intrinsically ultimate.
When Ramana
spoke, he either instructed seekers in the practice of "Who
am I?" or evoked his deepest realization: the natural
Enlightenment of all beings. When he remained silent, absorbed in
primal awareness, his presence both instructed seekers in vichara
and fully expressed the fact of natural Enlightenment, which
exists prior to any spiritual practice. Ramana teaches: "You
speak of various paths as if you were somewhere and the Self were
somewhere else and you had to go and attain it. But in fact the
Self is here and now and you are it always. It is like being here
at the ashram and asking people the way to Ramana Ashram and then
complaining that each one shows a different path and asking which
one to follow." This remark enables us to understand more
deeply Ramakrishna's conviction that all spiritual paths lead to
the same goal. The paths are illusory, and this, ironically, is
why they are fundamentally in harmony. There are no separate
paths. There is only Consciousness itself, which is always
present and thus cannot be described as a goal. What we thought
were paths to a goal are just the playfulness of Ultimate
Consciousness. Any spiritual path is an illusion, because, as a
path, it purports to lead us away from where we are, whereas
Consciousness is always here. But we can travel spiritual paths,
joyfully knowing them to be illusory, or provisional, as Ramana
often venerated the holy mountain Arunachala by circumambulation,
a path of worship that is, appropriately, circular in form.
Various
spiritual practices impart their own flavor to Self-realization
or Enlightenment. Goddess Kali, as a Divine Form assumed by
Ultimate Consciousness, imparted Her lasting fragrance to the
illumined being of Ramakrishna, who repeated Her mantra with his
last breath. Similarly, circumambulation and praise of the holy
mountain remained a form of veneration for the illumined Ramana
until his death. The presence of Kali, or Arunachala, can persist
for these Enlightened beings precisely because such Divine Forms
are not intrinsically separate from primal awareness. Their
nature is dreamlike, but their reality is more archetypal than
the dream of space and time. They are comparable to the
transcendental Forms of Plato's philosophy, living principles
whose mode of being is indestructible because it is not
substantial in any physical sense. We cannot dissolve a
geometrical theorem. And countless systems of geometry, each with
contrasting axioms, can subsist simultaneously. They do not
impede each other. This is the nature of the various spiritual
paths. They are intrinsically transparent to the Ultimate
Consciousness at their Source.
Let us consider
Ramana Maharshi's death. At seventy, he developed a tumor on his
arm which was operated on several times without anesthetic.
Ramana tried to clarify the meaning, or lack of meaning, of pain
and illness for the totally illuminated person: "They take
this body for Ramana and attribute suffering to him. What a pity!
Where is pain if there is no mind?" The approach of Ramana
was not that of the healer who removes pain but that of the sage
who perceives all phenomena, including pain, as Ultimate
Consciousness. Years before, Ramana had elucidated this point:
"If the hand of the jnani, or knower of Truth, were cut with
a knife, there would be pain as with anyone else, but because his
mind is in bliss, he does not feel the pain as acutely as others
do." Thus ordinary bodily experience does exist for the
illumined sage, although greatly muted.
When begged by
some devotees to cure himself with yogic powers, Raman replied in
the spirit of vichara: "Who is there to have such a thought?
Who is there to will this?" When near death, Ramakrishna
received this same request from his devotees. Rather than
responding immediately, as Ramana did, from the standpoint of
unitary insight, Ramakrishna agreed to ask his Divine Mother
Kali. He went to the temple and humbly requested,
"Mother, please let me eat a little in order to keep the
body together." Goddess Kali replied, "You are eating
through all mouths. Why do you have to eat through this
mouth?" The same truth is being expressed through both these
revelatory media: the Source Consciousness of Ramana and the
Divine Mother of Ramakrishna. The Source and the Mother are the
same primal awareness.
During his final
illness, various devotees of Ramana continued to plead that they
needed his physical presence to help them in their spiritual
practice. Ramana replied, "You attach too much importance to
the body. They say that I am dying, but I am not going away:
where would I go? I am here." Ramana, like any illumined
being, is everywhere. He is with us now as we think about him.
Ramana is the Ultimate Consciousness that we are. And we are
Ramana. His life is an expression of our own deepest Life. His
story is essentially our own awakening.
The physical
death occurred on
Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions, by Lex Hixon. http://snipurl.com/ke3e