As the death of people we know, including loved ones, becomes commonplace and we face more and more health issues in our own lives, the reality of our own mortality comes into focus. Faced with the difficult facts of mortality we are drawn toward the answers that religion offers.
Eknath Easwaran and Meditation
When I step back and take a look at my own religious impulses, I see that I am not just getting more religious but am moving toward Hinduism and Buddhism. I cannot be surprised at this discovery, given the fact that I have remained constant in my adherence to the practices of Eknath Easwaran, founder and guiding inspiration of the Blue Mountain Center for Meditation, and specifically to the practice of meditation since joining the Floyd County (Virginia) Satsong in September 2006.
The stated practices of the Blue Mountain Center are eclectic and unlimited, that is, open to everyone including everyone of all religious faiths. The fact is, however, that while he was very knowledgeable about the religions of the West, most notably Christianity, Eknath Easwaran came out of the Hindu tradition, and he was also steeped in the beliefs and practices of Buddhism, which itself grew out of Hinduism.
(Eknath Easwaran, 1910-1999, was born in Kerala in southern India, and first came to the U.S. in 1959 as a Fulbright Scholar, then subsequently settled in the San Francisco Bay Area permanently in 1965. The developer of Passage Meditation and the Eight Point Program, Sri Easwaran was the author of 27 books on meditation and mysticism during his lifetime. http://www.easwaran.org/Nilgiri.cfm.)
Mind Centered Morality
Another reason that my interest in Hinduism and Buddhism should come as no surprise has to do with my long interest in and dedication to the idea of the individual mind as the center of the universe and the source of our morality. This was the idea that I propounded in my first book of poetry I Will Mean, first published in 1975 and revised in 2005. (See the website: http://www.iwillmean poetry.com for more on this book.) Important aspects of Hinduism, the oldest continuously practiced religion, are mind centered, and Buddhism is entirely mind centered.
Moving toward religion in general and Hinduism and Buddhism specifically, yes, but then, I must ask myself, do I accept a key tenet of these religions? Do I accept the idea of reincarnation? No, I do not. And, for that matter, do I accept the major theological tenets of Christianity and Judaism? Do I accept the idea of a transcendent all-powerful God who intervenes in the affairs of mankind? Do I accept the existence of heaven and a life of the soul outside the body? Do I believe that the ideas of good and evil are the purview of this supreme transcendent being who judges each of us and exacts penalties on the transgressor? No to all of the above.
Agnostic on Theological Issues
However, when I say “no,” let me quickly assert that these are soft no’s. Ultimately I am an agnostic on all these questions. I am a doubter. I am a skeptic. All I can say with certainty on any of these issues ultimately is that I simply don’t know. I am too much an advocate for the importance of reason and the scientific method and too much a student of history to accept these specific ideas.
I am an agnostic on the theological issues, but as for morality I believe as I first made clear in I Will Mean that it is incumbent on each of us to be his own source of moral authority. We have the right to judge the behavior of others, and we all bear individual responsibility for our actions.
The Reality of God
Let’s bring this discussion back to where it began. I claim that I am becoming more religious. In what way? The common ground I can find with Hinduism and Buddhism is the idea that the divine, that is, the reality of God, can be alive in all of us. The fact that our minds can conceive of God and all the associated powerfully positive qualities associated with God is the best argument for the existence of God. We find God and the idea of perfect goodness in ourselves. We keep God alive in ourselves.
At the same time, we stray from God when we allow corruption inside ourselves to take hold—corruption in the form of selfishness, corruption in the form of addiction or extreme preoccupation with substances including food and drugs and destructive forms of behavior.
Evil of Hatred Obsession
Our ideas can also be a corruption, that is, can be in opposition to the possibility of God within us. We can become obsessed with hatreds for this group or that group. Instead of practicing the supreme manifestation of the God within, which is love, we indulge in the hatred of people. We become trapped in the tightening mental prison in which we hate the individual because he is the member of the hated group, and we hate the group because it is composed of hated individuals. The total unreasonableness of people trapped in such hate preoccupations does not dawn on them, or more accurately they will not let it dawn on them.
Meditation, which I do every day for at least one half hour in keeping with the practices of the Blue Mountain Center, is my way of finding and centering in consciousness the God within. My meditation now consists of seven memorized prayers from the Jewish, Christian, and Hindu traditions, which I recite to myself at least once and sometimes twice a day. These prayers are all found in the book God Makes The Rivers to Flow, a compilation of prayers selected by Eknath Easwaran and published by Nilgiri Press, the publishing wing of the Blue Mountain Center (website: www.nilgiri.org).
Let Nothing Upset You
The latest addition to my meditation repertoire is the shortest and comes from the Christian tradition. Entitled “Let Nothing Upset You” (page 206), it is by St. Teresa of Avila and is just seven lines long. I quote it here:
Let nothing upset you;
Let nothing frighten you.
Everything is changing;
God alone is changeless.
Patience attains the goal.
Who has God lacks nothing;
God alone fills every need.
I added this prayer to my meditation because of what it says to me as I proceed through multiple chemotherapy treatments and because it helps me address a central obsession in my life: what I perceive as the insufficient recognition of my creative work. For both of these issues, the word “patience” in the prayer is very meaningful as is every word of the piece, for that matter. But how can I, an agnostic who claims that he doubts the existence of a separate transcendent God, say such a thing? “God” is mentioned three times in a piece that is only 29 words in all.
Because God is the best in us. Let me end with a recent poem of mine that summarizes my thoughts on this crucial subject:
THE BEST IN US
No king of the good.
no emperor of ideas,
no president of order.
So how do we, all the single I’s,
make sense of the possible,
fill time with the semblance of a plan?
On radio Guillermo Dell Toro said
when confronted with atrocity
he learned no supreme separateness
offered any answers,
that if that is what he had to have
he’d have to make his own.
Struck with his profundity
you were suddenly in trouble.
Why all the study of the mystics?
Why say words from long past seers?
Then it dawned on you:
There is no contradiction.
The struggle toward enlightenment
coexists among the constancies.
As we seek a path for ourselves
our quest is tempered by the best in us,
a best as utmost as the mountains,
a best as always as the sea.
See my comprehensive website at http://www.sasaftwrites.com, also http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com.
Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft
1 comment:
Thank you for this post and for the evocative poem. I too practice this method of meditation and it's great to share this. Good luck with your practice, your writing and your health.
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