Philosophical Message – Page 4

No Pix from Day 6

Today, I am staying at my hotel. I don’t spend a lot of time with people any more. The Day 4 festivities, with the Baby Krishna reenactment, were followed, on Day 5, by four other neighbor kids dressing up as later versions of a Krishna as a youthful man, his wife Radha, and two other characters. It was again very joyful, lots of music and dancing, and crushing of crowds. So these images are all from yesterday, or earlier.

Scene from life of Krishna. Everyone has to see up close and take photos of everything!

Dharmendra and his sister dancing during a break from the storytelling associated with the Gita.

The rituals are powerful though. On the 4th day, or was it the 5th, after the morning puja, I went to personally greet the image of my mother. Suddenly, it appeared that she was there. Her face seemed three dimensional. She seemed to be watching me, smiling. I have had this experience before in India. When at the Swami Narayan Temple (BAPS) in Delhi, in 2009, the eyes of the 4th Guru, the main founder of today’s movement, seemed to follow me as I passed his bust. Skillful sculpting? I don’t know. Later, all of the photos of the deceased who were on the “altar” of holy cow dung covered bricks seemed to be alive to me, with the possible exception of the one photo that was really old and faded and off to the side. But some of the other photos were almost as badly faded. Maybe this uncle has already reincarnated, and his spirit is not available for this event.

The deceased honorees of this Bhagwat Ceremony. My mom to the left of the soldier. Dharmendra’s mother above the soldier, his sister to the left of his mother.

The power of the rituals must somehow be associated with the overall liveliness of the Indian people. A lot of effort goes into clothing. It’s so amazing to see people dressed in so many ways, from traditional to western to some mix of odd styles that constantly surprises me. But here is another beautiful sari, just because.

Many Indians are becoming obese. But not this woman, or Dharmendra’s father’s sisters, shown below.

The traditional generation. Bananas were passed out as “prasad,” or blessed food. The bags of fruit and other items, including rice, lentils, etc. to be used in cooking later, are left in front of the dias, under the images of the deceased honorees, to get the blessings along with the bricks and spirits of the departed.

I was told that the “main priest” would be reading from the Gita, and offering commentary. My Hindi is limited and my Sanskrit even more so, but as I read along in my English translation, the word husband occurs NOT ONCE. In fact, there is only one mention of family members, and it’s an exhortation from Krishna to Arjuna NOT to be attached to his wife or son. Yet the word that kept coming to me in the long Hindi passages was PATI. Which is husband. Eventually I became very suspicious that the speech of the priest had ANYTHING to do with the highest spiritual message of the Gita. Which is that our true essence is not the part of us that is carrying out our daily activities. Our true essence can do nothing at all but witness the universe. There is, as I noted in yesterday’s post, an exhortation to duty, repeated and repeated, but never one word about a wife’s duty to her husband.

My French friend later confirmed that they are actually not reading from the Gita at all.

The whole thing is a circus of storytelling. Of course. Because the Gita basically says clearly and repeatedly that the people who carry out the old Vedic rituals have much lower merit than those who devotedly love Krishna as they go about their daily duties maintaining society. No. That would never do for the priests to read the real Gita to the simple, religious people. It could destroy their livelihoods.

The message of the Gita is to renounce caring whether you experience pleasure or pain, and simply abide as the one witnessing the experience. By ending one’s identification with the body and the sensory pleasures and pains it attracts, one eventually merges with the eternal, all powerful Source. It’s an inward path. Has nothing to do with hiring a band of pandits to do rituals.

But Shush. The Catholic priests for many years prevented believers from reading the Bible on their own, and I argue with a Protestant friend whenever I have the strength that he would behoove himself to make his own interpretations from his studies, instead of repeating the supposed experts’. While the Israelites, the people of THE BOOK, were encouraged to become literate and read their holy texts for themselves, the mystical traditions that teach how to merge with God have also been kept hidden from all but men over 40 who are deemed worthy.

And obviously, Hindus, Christians and Jews are not the only ones who have two religions under the same name. One that is for the people who in my Knomo Choicius novel would really like the Free Thought Church, where one is freed from the burden of having to think. And the other, the hidden tradition, is for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, heart and feet to seek.

It is likely that my realization that the whole afternoon series of supposedly Gita inspired events is a facade for the opposite teachings was a factor in my need to stay in my hotel room today, and be an American on a spiritual path, taking a vacation from my “vacation”!

Lion’s Love or Alternative Valentine

The Buddhist nun Thubton Chodron says “Love is the wish for sentient beings to have happiness.”

I am very happy to have come across this definition of love. By this definition, I am very loving. I want all sentient beings to have happiness. The fact that I have given up on trying to help others have happiness no longer bothers me. I want it. Thubton Chodron seems to imply that’s what love is.

Of course Westerners think that wanting alone is not as effective as doing something to achieve the desire. We have that old saying: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. But Easterners have more wisdom that assures us that thoughts are things. In a way, we could consider that the entire core message of Jesus was just that. Jesus’ followers eventually got rid of much of the law, the requirements for doings. They emphasized the inner thoughts. Why, if not out of an understanding, not belief, understanding, that thoughts lay the groundwork for the quality of the deeds.

Another culturally Western Buddhist teacher instructs “Don’t just do something. Sit there!”

But, as long as I have been attracted to and studied the ideas of the East, a big part of me still feels like I need to do something to make my wishes into horses. Through the tension of East and West, I’m beginning to realize that every effort I have made to truly help someone out of what I perceived as a dire situation has gone wrong. People get into dire situations for large, complex and complicated constellations of reasons, most of which are incorrect subconscious beliefs about the nature of reality. Therefore, one person can’t ever have a high chance of truly helping someone for the longterm by adjusting their outside situation. The persons incorrect, unacknowledged beliefs will continue to sabotage them.

Therefore, while my spoken statement is that I have given up on doing anything to express my love, and am happy to wish for others’ happiness, my inner desire is to have the strength to continue to work in the ways that I am allowed to help others see a way to happiness.

Now, the intent, or content, of this string of sentences is all well and good. However, it pretty much applies only to humans. Thubton Chodron says that love is the wish for sentient beings to have happiness. The Buddhists have a prayer that is often translated into English as follows: May all sentient beings have happiness, and the causes of happiness.

Ok great. But, as Lynn Sparrow Christie, a motivational speaker notes, “There’s the problem of the food chain.” The Jains have truly tried to create a system of rules / laws / habits / deeds / way of life that addresses this. Not only are they vegetarian, they don’t eat seeds, because that cuts off a life. Eating the fleshy part of the peach is ok. Garlic cloves, definitely not. Wheat not. I’m not sure about potatoes. They can produce a new plant, but the plant will make seeds if allowed. So maybe they do eat potatoes. Of course, Jains might or might not have known about potatoes when their religion was started. The coffeeshop where I am writing is getting a new internet router, so I can’t check. This is good. Lets you the reader see my stream of consciousness, and you can go look to figure it out on your own! 🙂

Anyway, to get back to the Jains, not only do they have a restricted vegetarian diet, but they wear masks, so that they do not inadvertently inhale and kill by immersion in digestive juices, any gnats or other sentient beings. Not only do they wear masks to avoid unintentional inhalation of gnats, but they sweep their paths ahead of themselves as they walk, to avoid crushing ants and worms. Every moment of the Jains’ lives are taken up in avoiding harm. I now see this as an uninterrupted meditation on laying the foundations for other sentient beings having the causes of happiness, or at least avoiding the causes of pain and suffering at a basic physical level.

Kindof like Judaism, there are so many rules and regulations, you don’t have time to get into trouble. Of course I am sure that just as there are Orthodox Jews who manage to lead truly creative lives, there are Jains who do the same. I am convinced that God has led different peoples to adopt different religious systems, not only because it was natural and expedient based on differences of environment, both natural and as responses to cultural pressures, but because having a spectrum of beliefs and ideas and cultures makes watching the human drama a more interesting prospect.

That said, getting back to all sentient beings having the causes of happiness is going to require a lot of changes to the status quo. In order for all sentient beings to have the causes of happiness, many of Nature’s beings are going to have to undergo fundamental changes. The lion must be able to lie down with the lamb in perpetuity, not only for a few minutes, after it has gorged itself on three giraffes.

Dancing to an Unheard Melody

This is a past life regression I did in 1988. The title above is from my friend Mel, who heard me read the piece in the writing group…

To my surprise, I actually find myself embodied. My arms around my partner, I look into his eyes. He is black. He wears an army uniform. He is taller than I am. He leads me around the dancing floor. Bright spots of light move as the glitter ball rotates above us. The vision is a vision, and I don’t hear the music. I look down at my shoulder, and find I am white. I don’t think this is a surprise. The inner self I was channeling must have known this as soon as I noted the dark tones of my partner’s skin. The question of my gender was never articulated.

As the unheard tune ends, I step back to smile at my partner, and looking down, I see the upper line of my yellow sleeveless dress against my skin. I am pretty. I know this, even as I can’t see my face. They say that beauty is perceived in the face designed from the average of all common features in a population. I fill in my face with this subconscious information. I am slim. The pretty and the slim are different from my current incarnation.

The skirt of my dress is yellow, like the top, but covered with black polka dots, the size of quarters. I sense this is happening in the 1930’s. Maybe one of those dance contests they had with cash prizes to supposedly alleviate the misery of the depression. Like in the movie They Shoot Horses.

Now, thirty years after this past life regression experience, I wonder why an enlisted soldier, presumably with a paycheck, would subject himself to this. Hmmm. Maybe he was attracted to me? Still, this is hard for me to imagine, having been stuck in my current body for all of this lifetime.

The essence that I took from the extremely foggy vision of a past life, that felt extremely forced at the time, was that my unwillingness to conform to society’s expectations goes back to a time before my birth into this current heavy, plain looking carcass. But she must have died young, if she was in her twenties in the 1930’s or 40’s, and died in time to provide a soul to one born in the late 1950’s. I wonder what happened to my dancing partner. Was he a partner for an evening only? A weekend of a dance contest? Years?

Yesterday, I joined the Theosophical Society. They’d already been around for 100 years when I graduated from high school. Their purpose is to promote Universal Brotherhood. The founders believed in the benefits of reincarnation. If you know you have many lives, you don’t have to feel pressured to “get this life perfect.” All the major religions teach that we are more than our bodies. Most teach that we are more than our minds. Or that we are neither our bodies, nor our minds. Nor our feelings for that matter. I can intellectually grasp that there is evidence that we are more than our bodies and thoughts and feelings. The idea of reincarnation helps to explain a lot of things. It’s not the only possible explanation for the experiences of deja vu, or strong connections to other people. It’s not the only possible explanation for my wondering from the age of four why I was born.

To my mother’s credit, she never gave me a fake answer. For some reason, it never occurred to me to ask my dad. Perhaps this persistent question, which implies that I did have a choice in being born, or at least that I thought I did, is even better evidence for reincarnation. Or at least for the existence of the individual’s soul or spirit as an entity separate from the body.

When I took the past life regression workshop, I had little hope that I was actually going to be able to get any information about my past lives. I’m an intellectual, and that generally interferes with the ability to perform self-hypnosis. As noted at the top of the post, I was surprised to even get a glimpse of a past life.

My friends at the Spiritualist church assure me that I have had many past lives. Who knows? My “karmic astrology report” from Edgar Cayce’s Association for Research and Enlightenment says that my planets give a tendency to get carried away by my imagination. Yet some type of undiagnosed brain damage has left me with extremely poor visualization skills. I get lost really easily, even as I have developed skills to get to where I need to go in my daily life. Maybe this brain damage is what has kept me centered in the physical world. When I do have a clear inner vision, it always feels like a gift. I can never conjure it at will.

Glory of Ordinary People

The Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt was:

The Glory of the Ordinary People

Ordinary people or ornery people, Mel asked.

Either way, Cathy responded. Here’s my stream of consciousness….

Years ago, one of my clients, who I proposed coming to work for full time, responded with an affirmative to exploring the concept, despite my orneriness. Ornery. Hmm. I think it was the first time I heard that word. I more or less figured out that it meant all my personal characteristics that people complain about. But maybe I will look it up now, that I am sitting in my writing group meeting.

Well, I would have, but the internet is misbehaving. That forces me to continue with my writing. Am I out of luck exploring ornery? Or should I just continue to mull all my bad habits as known to me? Ornery, critical, a complainer, grouchy, won’t willingly suffer people who don’t treat me the way I want to be treated, self-righteous, according to my ex. I could go on, but you get the gist. Twenty one years ago I had a spiritual awakening, and all those characteristics vanished as I walked about the world. They didn’t totally vanish at home, where the bonds of habit are tighter, but suddenly I smiled my way through work and grocery shopping, and participating in my extra-curricular activities.

My vocabulary too, changed. Was my client’s part really cracked? I couldn’t tell for sure. What I actually saw looked like a shadow. Overwhelmed by a sea of beauty, who was I to pronounce their part cracked, defective, useless for the intended application?

The client, to his credit, a former school teacher, was unimpressed. “It’s cracked,” he said. “Call it a crack.” Well, who was I to pronounce their part cracked? Aaahhh, the specialist in cracks?

The next week, at breakfast after the morning prayer meeting, someone tried to sell me some real estate, and then, when I expressed strong disinterest, a small replica of the Calder Sculpture found in downtown Grand Rapids for $24.00, claiming it was enameled solid gold. It was obvious that the volume and weight of gold would far exceed $24.00 worth. Not to speak of the value of the labor of actually making the piece of jewelry. I told him I didn’t believe him. He agreed to let me test it. I told him it would destroy the piece. He said that was ok. I cut the part and mounted it in hard plastic, polished it to a mirror finish, and put it in a scanning electron microscope, then zapped it with an electron beam, which caused it to emit x-rays. The analytical instrument attached to the microscope informed me that the x-rays in a thin layer under the enamel, which covered a piece of steel, were emitted from gold. In other words, it wasn’t solid gold, but mostly iron and oxygen.

Did he thank me for preventing his further lies to potential buyers? No. When I showed him the data, he simply turned away. Of course he didn’t want this information, that now forced him to confront the fact that he had given false information to all of his previous buyers. I realize now that he was subject to the Belief Perseverance Syndrome. New facts be damned. New facts require work to reroute previously laid down neural routes. Entirely too much work for most of us. Most of us won’t even consciously acknowledge that we should do the work, if we want to act out of the truthfulness that most of us still claim to hold as our highest moral guide.

Truth, it turned out, was really more important to me than cheerfulness. Truth, it turned out, really was more important to me than politeness. Or at least that’s the way it used to feel to me.

There are parts of my life that now are reflected back to me as lies. But I guess that the fact that I allow myself to experience the waves of negative opinion washing over me might eventually lead me forward to a balance more in line with ordinary people, who know the truth that cheerfulness and politeness are more important than truth.

Why are some of us so obsessed with truth anyway? Because our parents beat it into us before we had developed logical analytical skills. Because of course our parents don’t want us holding secrets from them. Our parents are responsible for us. Our parents have millenia of cultural practice working in their favor when they invoke the highest spiritual forces to enforce their demands for truthfulness.

“Did you eat that cookie?”

“Did you brush your teeth?”

“Did you break that glass?”

“Did you just feed that Brussel Sprout to the dog?”

Of course a lie, if discovered, would result in punishment, but even if undiscovered by the parental units, would still be known to the omniscient, omnipotent divine forces, who would eventually pay us back for the sin of lying, even if most of the above-mentioned acts do not usually carry felon status. It’s about the cover-up, the LIE.

Yes, it’s easy in retrospect to see why our ancestors found the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient GOD useful as a method of control for their offspring.

Why do some of us hear this verbal call to truth more clearly than we respond to the lived reverence for cheerfulness and politeness? A mystery. Past lives? Just a result of the variety of temperaments dished out by fate?

For now, orneriness is a blessing, a protection. Cheerfulness be damned.

Even the most intolerant hypocrites

“Reminders about tolerance are as old as the first pages of the Testaments, but the lack of attention to them makes them as new as though they were meant for tomorrow. What little effort is required in order to turn this tomorrow into a radiance of many achievements, which are possible in the case of hearty co-operation!

Even in our days of extreme intolerance, such unifying institutions as the World Postal Union and International Red Cross are possible. Even the most intolerant hypocrites do not protest against these institutions. Then, what slight expansion of consciousness is needed to reach co-operation and trust! And is this so difficult?”

The preceding quote from Nicolas Roerich, a famous Russian artist and philosopher, active as a public dialogue leader in the time between the first two world wars, could have been written yesterday. Even our American president is suddenly calling for unity, as a result of the simultaneous kicks to his perception of the structural integrity of his posterity, resulting from the killing of a Saudi journalist who worked for the Washington Post, and the package bombs mailed to his predecessor and former political opponent. I say resulting from the killing, rather than what the president says, which is related to the Saudi coverup of the killing.

How can we listen to the words of Nicolas Roerich? How can we truly listen and use the resonance of these words in our hearts to uplift our spirits in these troubling times? Maybe something symbolic, like mailing a paper letter to someone in a foreign country. Maybe making a donation to an international charity. Maybe posting this little piece of writing on the internet. Maybe sending the link to this little piece of writing to a friend.

The Saudis are not our friends, and they never have been, my esteemed father’s opinion to the contrary. His flawed single criteria method of determining that the Saudis are good guys is based on their support for Israel. Israel’s friendship with the Saudis is even more unintelligible than our own. Working for clarity and tolerance of our fellow humans does not mean that we endorse their sins. But working together on projects that we can all endorse, the World Postal Union, for example, lets us experience the fact that individual people on the opposite side of any particular political issue are probably just as likely to be otherwise suitable companions as those on “our side.”

Having this experience of being able to see the truth of the randomness of the sources of our political leanings will tend to soften even the most die-hard bigot. If you don’t understand the previous sentence, just try it out. Do SOMETHING for an organization where you will be brought into contact with someone from the other end of the political spectrum. Just do it. And then just think about it. We’re all humans, even if our political reality and the enforcing sword of justice have not yet caught up to the high minded rhetoric of the United States of American Declaration of Independence. Hey, we’ve only had 240 some years to clothe the words with flesh. As Americans, that seems like a long time, but the fresh start we all think we got when we or our ancestors came to the shores of the nation is not as fresh as we are led to believe. It takes work to excavate the layers of subconscious myths that keep us at each others’ throats.

Mycologist’s Lament

Born of the rain, this mushroom only exists after enough rain produces the right conditions for its parent mycelium to fruit!

I think these mushrooms are good for making some kind of medicinal beverage, but am not sure. But they are well socialized, not lonely!

This was from two prompts in today’s writing group:

Pluviophile and Alone versus Lonely

In my early youth, I was no pluviophile. But in college, I bought a Totes brand umbrella that had a beautiful design of those 1920’s popular bathroom decor colors of coral and turquoise, with accents of lavender and grey. I loved the colors of that umbrella so much that I actually enjoyed walking in the rain, even if I won’t claim to have prayed for rain just for the chance of using it. Thanks to Totes lifetime warranty program, when a rib bent, I sent it back for repair. But those evil people didn’t repair it the second time. Nowadays MAYBE they would have sent me email asking my preference. Then, they trashed my beloved work of art, and sent me a smaller, new-fangled automatic opening black and boring replacement. I was crestfallen. Fortunately I kept the cover, so still have a tiny sliver of memory of the colors.

Still no true pluviophile, in early middle age, having moved to the country and acquired a small flock of geese, I tried to learn to merge my consciousness with theirs when it rained. Especially when it rained enough to turn the shallow depression outside the barn into a small pond. The geese were clearly pleased when this happened, and they provided one more step on the road to my achieving equanimity with regard to the state of the atmosphere.

In late middle age, at least according to the Hindu system of life segmentation, I was less bothered by rain, unless it seemed endless. Back in 2009, the first summer of The Great Recession, it never got warm and we saw the sun and blue skies only occasionally in Michigan. The two worst state economies were California and Michigan. Miraculously, my personal economy was saved by my being hired by a company in Tennessee which was managing an investigation in the Mojave Dessert. When we did the radiographic inspection of the steel component, everyone else sat in their air conditioned vehicles. I eschewed even the shelter of the canvas tarp the radiographers had brought along. I stood basking in the sun, trying to make up for the grey Michigan summer all in one day. That night, I had no appetite. Couldn’t even finish the salad I ordered at Denny’s. Even through the migraine, I never regretted my worship of the sun that day.

Now, in early old age, I am still no pluviophile. But my new hobby of mushroom foraging gives me a small push in that direction. These last few weeks however, have been a bit much. When at last a few hours of free time presented themselves in a time frame dried out enough for me to feel like venturing into the woods with my camera and net bag, I did find a lot of mushrooms. I MAY have even found some new edible varieties in quantity sufficient for a nice side dish. But many of the shrooms were well past their prime. Some even had fungi growing on them. Fungi on the fungi! Unfortunately, I did not find any lobster mushrooms, or aborted entolomas. If a new mycologist wannabee wants to be sure that it is an edible lobster, it is advised to only take it from a patch where both normal white and the red aborted lobster forms are found together. The red comes from another fungus that grows on the main mushroom, which changes its color, and somehow detoxifies or otherwise renders it edible. The mysteries of the mushroom are amazing.

The Green Quilted Russula’s that I think I found, Russula Viriscens, were the reason I went back in the woods last Sunday, after getting attacked through half a gallon of Deep Woods Off, by hordes of mosquitos on Saturday. I had seen the green capped mushrooms and thought “those can’t be edible.” Wrong, as David Arora, master mycologist says, there is no visible trait that distinguishes toxic, inedible and edible fungi. But I am still not sure, even after looking at the spores in my scanning electron microscope at up to 18,000x (see below), whether it is an R. Viriscens or an R. Crustosa, or something else. I am fairly confident it is one of those and all are supposedly edible, although only Viriscens is supposedly choice. But keeping to the advice of smart mushroom hunters that “There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but no old bold mushroom hunters,” I have promised only to eat those I am highly confident of the identity. Maybe next year I’ll be singing with Sam, that yes I do like Green Eggs and Ham, with good Green Mushrooms and a side of Spam.

Single spore with presumed attachment stem at arrow

And now, to the second prompt, the beauties of aloneness. Yes, I do enjoy my aloneness. Most people are more aggravating than enlightening, so I find it easier to enjoy my aloneness when I can find friendship in the pages of a book, even if the author is dead. Mushroom foraging is a challenging hobby that takes my mind off of the fact that I am alone. The fear of painful death by organ damage, usually not starting until 24 hours after ingestion, sharpens my powers of observation. As I learn, I add new experiences to the collective consciousness. Mushrooms, unlike people, minimize my loneliness, rather than magnifying it.