In The End Is the Word

I have expressed my discontent with the use and abuse of Karma  elsewhere, but it bears repeating, for I cannot “pick up” an on-line publication or hear a snippet of a conversation without nearly at least once hearing someone say something to the effect of “it was my bad karma that I got stuck in traffic” or “Tim Tebow must have good karma when he prays before a game” or the like, when speaking of why something did or did not happen. To re-iterate, then, karma, from the root Kr, simply means, “the thing done,” nothing more, nothing less. There is no value, no judgment, no good, no bad, no Quality to it. It simply means--an action done.

Karma causes an effect. Karma, the action is the cause. The result, whether it is judged later as good or bad, is independent of the karma, or action, with regards to Quality. It is the result of the action that ultimately bears the burden of Quality.

The Seventh Chapter of the Chãndogya Upanishad is a brilliant catechism of cause and effort. It simultaneously pre-dates the Buddhist concept of the eight-fold Middle Way with the precursor of the concept of “right speech,” while also being the virtual inversion, like a yoga headstand of St. John’s gospel concept of the logos, or the Word made Flesh. Logos from the Greek can mean simply word, but it also extends to the entire gamut of rational discourse, study, or rhetorical utterances. It is a very powerful word in itself.

However, for John, the Word comes first, it is the Creative Force, it is God. In the Chãndogya, the words come last, they are the least powerful in a long chain of karmic events, or actions, leading back to the source of all thought and expression.

Nãrada, an aspirant of learning, approaches (the verb upa-ni-shad means to approach, like a student to a teacher) Sanatkumãra, an esteemed guru, or teacher and wishes to learn what he knows. Sanatkumãra tells Nãrada to tell him what he knows, and Sanatkumãra will in turn un-learn him of what he has learned. Nãrada lists all of the studies and texts that he has learned, in this case, memorized, beginning with the Vedas down to texts on the natural history of serpents.

To this long list of apparent erudition, Sanatkumãra says that these are all merely “namani” or words, the etymology in fact of the Greek -nym, from which we get anto-nyms and syno-nyms and the like, not the mention the more transparent inheritance into our own English as the Names.

Sanatkumãra tells his questioning friend that there is nothing behind these mere words, or names, and that the truth lies much further back, down the chain of events of cause and effect.

The ensuing dialectic, predating even the Socratic Method by centuries and the Catholic Catechism by that many more centuries is quite simple and repetitive, almost like childish banter in its simplicity, but the consequences are quite profound, calling into question our notions of the childhood mantra of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Nothing could be further from the Truth for Sanatkumãra as we see, tracing back the origin of the word to its source.

Nãrada asks at each stage, “asti bhagavo nãmno bhuya iti nãmno vãvã bhuo’sti,” both a question and a plaintive query, “O venerable one, is there something greater than Name? Surely there is something greater than Name?!?” At each stage then, consequently, the teacher gives something that is bhuya, or greater, than the thing before, beginning with Name/Word.

From Name/word, he goes to Speech to Mind to Will to Intelligence to Meditation to Understanding to Strength (vitality to think) to Sustenance (to provide the vitality) to Water (to cause the food) to Fire to Space to Memory to Hope to the Vital Force, or Prãna, which is the source of everything. Prãna can be thought of as being kin to the pneuma of Greek, or the breath, the spirit or Life. Tracing back then, words or names are the final product of the initiation of the Vital Essence of Be-ing, the sacred breath of the Universe, pronounced by the udghita, by chanting the sacred syllable OM, or A-U-M. Though it is a chain of cause and effect, it is one and the same as you cannot have the cause without the effect, the two are not distinct, but part of the greater whole.

However, what is then interesting from this karmic chain is what Nãrada then learns is the consequence of incorrect speech, or harmful words. For, because speech and consequently words are the result of the Vital Force, expressed by the Will and through the Mind, to speak ill of one is as good as murder. Greater, or rather worse, is to speak ill of one than even to desecrate their ashes at the funeral pyre, because those are mere, mortal remains.

To speak improperly is simply spiritual murder. It does not attack the bones, like the sticks and stones, but rather the very Soul of another, the core of that person’s Vital Life Force. Speaking ill, then, of one, is not to bring on so-called “bad karma” to one’s Self, it is a much greater illness, it implicates one of pre-meditated murder.

Speak well, then, is the message from Sanatkumãra, and indeed, if you don’t have something kind to say, think about the real consequences, not the selfishness of whether you will get stuck in a traffic jam later in the day, or whether your favorite team will lose the game, but rather, what have you in fact done to that person’s Soul?

Such is the nature of Karma...and as such, we might think to speak unto others as you would have them speak to you.

Words can hurt. The good news is, they can heal too.

Tangled Up

I am in a bit of a tangle, to be perfectly honest. When do you tell someone that Santa Claus does not exist? Or, do you allow one to think incorrectly about something if that something is working well for them?

For example, there are a few Sanskrit phrases and terms that are used on a daily basis, quite often incorrectly with regards to the actual meaning. Sometimes I feel obliged to spell it out  because it is truly a misconception, whereas other times, does it really matter?

I went to an Iyengar yoga class this weekend and it was great to be back in such a class, having thoroughly enjoyed my hatha lessons in India and recent vinyasa ones, thoug, at heart, perhaps I am Iyengar, or at least inspired.

Regardless, at the beginning of the class, the so-called "Invocation to Patanjali" is chanted. It is very pleasant and a nice way to begin the class, something I had not done with my Iyengar teacher in Austin.

To make a long story short, the translation is widely and internationally accepted as correct, is well, to put it bluntly, wrong. I twisted my Sanskrit brain in many contortions this weekend thinking about the invocation and it just doesn't work. There is no way to translate it the way that all sites that I found on the website translate it. Further, I am not even sure that the Sanskrit is correct as I was not able to find the source text.

Does it matter? What if I produce a "correct" translation? Similar to the Christian tradition of translating the Greek parthenon as "Virgin," when it does not necessarily mean that, but...if it doesn't mean that. Or, does it matter if the wrong translation causes a great deal of good?

So, whereas I had originally planned to publish my "correct" translation here of the invocation, I am still puzzling through this hermeneutic tangle that I am caught up in. Suggestions are welcome...

Waking The Dream

I am sitting in one of my favorite cafes on the Dageraadsplaats in Zurenborg, Antwerp in Belgium. As, if in a dream.

Life goes on outside, kids are playing on the playground among the golden brown and ruddy, damp leaves that have fallen from the trees. Twilight approaches and there is calm all around. People are enjoying life: eating, drinking and talking. This life has gone on all the while that I was in India and will continue on after when I have died one day. Life goes on.

Life also goes on in India right now. The streets of Madurai are most likely anything but calm, filled with honking and bells of varous degrees, and music and song. People are going to the Meenakshi Temple, doing Pooja, wafting incense and preparing for bed with their final prayers of the evening.

Life goes on in America right now as well. The Sunday morning is just beginning, people going to Church or lazing around the house, getting ready for NFL on the television, hoping that today’s games are more exciting than the disappointing 9-6 victory of #1 LSU over  #2 Alabama, deflating any expectations of a game of the century scenario.

Each one of these lives I have been an integral part of, yet often each one of them seems to be as vague and fleeting as a passing dream that lingers in the backstreets of my mind, memories stretched across the corridors like laundry in Naples. Feeling at times like Descartes, wondering if indeed an evil demon merely whispers into my ear and causes the illusion of the world around me, the intangibility of these various worlds is unsettlingly tangible.

Less than 100 hours ago, I, Robert Fulton, was in India, yet at the moment, I am sitting in Antwerp, Belgium, recalling the memory of that, but in all honesty, am skeptical myself that it really happened at moments. Such are the tricks our mind and memory can play with us, playful at times, mercilessly mocking at others.

My entire life at times feels as if it were but a dream, full of the sound and the fury, signifying no-thing...and yet...

Shankara’s Aparokshãnubhuti, or Self-Realization, is a lesser-known text of his Advaita Vedanta writings that I picked up at Pilgrim’s Bookstore in Varanasi. I found the following passages rather poignant to the experience of these feelings.

Though this world is experienced, and suffice in its purpose, exists

Like a dream, of the non-existent, contradicting itself at every moment.

The dream is unreal upon waking, and waking eludes the dream.

Both, however, in deepest sleep are absent, likewise elusive.

Thus are all three states unreal as they are products of quality;

Yet the reality which binds them is beyond Quality, eternal and Consciousness itself.

Sanskrit Street

While visiting Sarnath, the original place of where the Buddha began teaching, there are a series of temples from various Buddhist sects and denominations and permutations, including a Jain one.

Though not Buddhist, the Jains are often compared to them, or wholesale lumped together with them as they share the most affinities of any of the religions on the surface. The Jains are a breed apart and are on the fringe of the Indian-based religions, though quite prominent in some sectors of society.

The Jains have a principal mantra of “Ahimsa parama Dharmah,” which means, “Non-violence is the supreme Duty.” A true Jain does not have much time left if he or she really lived up to the extremes of the religion for they believe that even breathing, eating, and drinking endangers other living creatures. But, for the most part, this is taken theoretically. However, it is a good mantra to have.

The Jains also stress something akin to the Buddhist doctrine of life. Your life is your responsibility, not God’s and not someone else’s. There is neither room for blame, nor praise, but rather action and consequence.

Living on the edge of religion, the Jains are not evangelical, nor do they have a large base, it is a choice, and the choice is yours. And, only a Soul that has vanquished its own demons can be considered liberated. Nobody can save your Soul, but by your own effort. 

When I Was King

The Upanishads, or the most well-known and circulated exegesis of the Vedic tradition, are the more philosophical answer to the religious-based Vedas. This was not only a philosophical movement, but it signaled a significant power shift in ancient Indian society.

Formerly, the ruling class, or caste was the Brahmin, or priestly caste. These were chiefly men from the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans who had descended upon the sub-continent from most likely the Russian Steppes, or former Persian empire in about the year 1500 BCE. In order to distinguish these taller, fairer skinned conquerors, the caste system, based upon varna, or color, was installed. Though this later becomes associated with civil status and occupation, originally the caste system was a way to discriminate between the conquering and the conquered.

For quite some time the Brahmins reigned supreme, espousing the holy scriptures as the Truth, but this was not to last. Within the second caste, the Kshatriya, there began to be murmurs of discontent. The Kshatriya class was the princely and warrior caste and the Upanishads belong primarily to their canon fodder of thought. Within this tradition, The Bhagavad Gita, whose hero is the princely warrior, Arjuna, is considered to be a discreet Upanishad within the larger epic, the Mahabharata.

Upanishad, or Upa-ni-shad, literally means to “approach and sit before.” These were teachings in which the student would approach the guru and sit before him, engaging intellectual debate, seeking clarification in the often vague and contradictory scriptures. These became the dialectic of the Kshatriya who eventually did wrestle the power from the Brahmins, and amongst whom Siddhartha Gautama, or, the Buddha , was counted. His questioning of the scriptures of old was quite in line with the Upanishadic tradition of the dialectic, quite like that of Socrates in his native Athens.

The Mandukya Upanishad chiefly deals with the breakdown of the sacred syllable of OM, which is famously used in yoga classes around the world as a mantra to be used for meditation.

However, the “true” nature of OM, when examined, is protracted to four movements, A, U, M, and Silence. When chanting the OM, it should begin from deep in the chest cavity, reaching back to the spine at the back of the throat with a bass “A” which then gradually moves up the esophagus as the “U” transiting towards the tongue with the “M” as it moves to the lips and finally clenched teeth and the nasal drone exiting from the nostrils trailing off into Slience, to be repeated again from the core of the abdomen.

In Upanishadic tradition, these tesseract of sound (and absence of sound), mimics the four stages of sleep, ranging from light, disturbed sleep of the “A” to a superbly profound, dreamless sleep of the silence, signaling the dissolution of the Self into the Atman, or Universal Soul. Before that, the Self enters the dream stage in which all things are possible. In the dream state, a pauper becomes king, a murderer a saint, and all barriers of Time and Space are broken. It is the great equalizer for it is the verisimilitude of Death, the true great equalizer.

In Advaita Vedanta, the concept then of the dreaming stage of sleep is likened to the quest for liberating the mind of discrimination between the Self and Other, between opposites, and any discretions at all. It is the moment before enlightenment in which the thinking and intellectualism can serve one no longer, it is the space between the calculus that cannot be measured, that illusive cantor dust, yet only transcended by the release of the ignorance of the “educated” mind, which deludes us with divisions, rather than seeking correspondences.

Shankara writes of this transitional phenomenon:

That which transcends caste and creed, family and heritage,

Devoid of name and form, praise and blame;

Transcending Time and Space and bass matter:

That Brahman, “Thou Art That.”

Contemplate this in your mind.

Words, Words, Words

Having visited the Theosophical Society's grounds  in Adyar, Chennai this weekend, I was moved to reflect upon  Krishnamurti's reluctancy with regards to “established religion.” What I believe that is often most misunderstood about his decision to leave any organization behind is that he was not saying that they were wrong in the message, but wrong in saying that Truth can be communicated by scripture alone. I am curious how many in the quest for spiritual fulfillment have indeed been fulfilled by words alone.

Can mere words bring us to a state of spiritual liberation, or is there rather a divine spark, much like Plato said is the only true transference of knowledge from a master to a student?

The paradox, of course, is that such ideas are inevitably written down, and some become the so-called “gospel truth.” Cecil, whom I met this past week, and who is a believing Christian, said that he “hated all religions” but is a follower of Christ. Paraphrasing St. Francis, he said he believes in “preaching the Gospels, but also using words every now and then” to communicate his belief. I found this to be an intriguing take on Christianity as Cecil is very well versed in many religions as was apparent in our two and a half hour conversation coming back to Madurai from Tirunelveli last week.

Krishnamurti, like others before him, was against the idea of “followers” for his words, but rather exhorted one to search for him or herself if something was Truth and not to take it for granted upon the pronouncement of an expert. And, like many such requests, there have been Krishnamurti Institutions set up to do just the opposite of what he asked.

In a similar vein, Shankara’s treatise on Advaita Vedanta, the Vivekashudamani ultimately declares that the path to liberation is not via the Vedas, but through the individual’s personal reconciliation and recognition of his or her communion with the Universal Soul, or Atman.

Reminiscent of the “Nameless Name” of Taoist thought, Shankara dismisses the Vedas and other scriptures as the path to enlightenment, though, yet again, he does so in words, words that have themselves become the scriptures for Advaita Vedanta. And, the vicious paradox continues...

Like a shower of mere sound, vulgar words, adeptness in reciting the scriptures and such knowledge is good merely for the enjoyment of scholars, but is not for liberation.

The study of the scriptures is useless so long as the ultimate Truth is unknown, and likewise as useless when the ultimate Truth is known.

Hold Your Horses

In addition to the concepts of self-discipline linked to the five aspects of Yama in the Astangayoga philosophy of Patañjali, there are likewise five precepts of Niyama, which further prepare the sadhaka, or aspiring student for the path of Yoga. The pairing of Yama and Niyama is the dual aspect of restraint and action. This involves the development of discernment between what one should not do and what one ought to do in order to attain a level of physical, mental, and spiritual equilibrium that is necessary to obtain so that one may proceed with your practice with clarity of body and mind.

In my life, I have always strove for a symbiotic relationship between my mind and body, and when one is out of synch the other seems to also follow suit, and conversely, when one is in good condition, the other is likely to be so as well. Ultimately, I have come to realize that it is a quasi-chicken and the egg koan that is not likely to be resolved with mere cogitation, so I have likewise stopped asking that question as such as to which drives the other, and instead have been focusing on bringing the two into balance.

Yoga is the past participle, verbal noun of the Sanskrit verb YUJ, which means to join, or, like the English that comes from it, to yoke as in a pair of oxen, or perhaps horses. In the Phaedrus of Plato, there is a well-known allegory of the soul as a charioteer with a team of yoked horses, one light, one dark, which pull in opposite directions, causing the chariot to careen off course if the charioteer cannot bring them into harmony. The lightness of the soul is countered by the weight of the body, the former seeking non-material sustenance, the latter material. Though made up of three apparently discreet entities, when working in harmony, they become one.

Likewise, when the aspirant of Yoga has been able to bring the forces of the mind in harmony with the body’s physical needs, the resulting process then is the successful action of yoking them together to work as one. Yama and Niyama are the preparatory measures that need to be taken in order to bring this harmony into focus.

Speaking from experience, I know how crucial it is to keep the body and mind in balance, and for me, Yoga has been an excellent avenue for me to pursue this equanimity and poise to bring back that balance at times when I have otherwise lost it. Though I have neglected to act upon this at times in my life, it has once again become an integral part of living my life in balance. However, it has also been a continuous struggle and ongoing effort to keep the allegorical horses in check. We are constantly being met with the obstacles of uncertainty and inertia and the resulting lethargy thus can be our own worst enemy. As such, the two sides of yama and niyama are required for us to be vigilant against complacency, both about ourselves and how we further operate in society as a conscientious, considerate, and compassionate participant.

shauca-santosha-tapah-svãdhyãya-Ishvarapranidhãnãni niyamãh

vitarkabãdhane pratipakshabhãvanam

Cleanliness (shauca), contentment (santosha), austerity in praxis (tapah), self-analysis (svãdhyãya), and surrender to divinity are the active precepts of discipline (niyamãh).

Obstacles of uncertainty are countered by the creative process (by the union of yama and niyama).