Sunday, July 14, 2013

Enlightenment, Mystery and Perspective

The Mystery, still unseen, kills
The trick is getting your benefit
while leaving the beast to rest


Alright then, with respect to my own highest ideals regarding spiritual life, in particular, the one I refer to as Tantric, a yoga that at present is a meditation on affirming the power of affirmation through engagement (often recognized as postive reinforcement or acknowledgement and compliment).

And then again, not losing hold of the integral force of mind, but rather ... using it to vector our lives more precisely to our only purpose in this life which is as Swami Chinmayananda in Self-Unfoldment said "...Life principle supporting them all, the unchanging factor of all life. The enlightened being is one who has chosen this highest principle as his ideal and has dedicated all his activities to it."  So far so good, until he speaks of the state of enlightenment existing without emotionality, in some unsaid and subtlley implied logic, the Swami has stepped over a number of crucial points which together define the foundation of enlightenment for the human mind.

If one looks, emotionality is at the very heart and source of our attention. Quicker than any other functionality in man, most negative expressions of emotionality or simply false and old scripts and programming we clung to as children. The real truth to what he wants to say has to be a creative expression of how emotion actually allows us to perceive our lives as particularly human.

Without exasperating those listening, this quote by the Swami obviously leaves a bit to be desired. Mark S.G. Dyczkowski insightful remarks take on this task quite eloquently to the next level, keeping level and balanced with the mysteriousness of it all whether we're speaking of enlightenment or ignorance, but definitely corresponsponding who we are with that mysterious source yet providing an integral for this to evolve into a realtion to attention that allows us to be AUTHENTIC to whatever the truth is NOW.

Mark wrote, "Once we have overcome the negative forces that arise from our ignorance and prevent us from abiding in ourselves, we are liberated. To do this, we must penetrate through the pulsing fluctuations of objectively experienced states and perceptions at the surface level of consciousness and gain insight into the timeless rhythm of our own nature manifest in the universal arising and falling away of all things."

I give him kudos for his effort but not for anything significant in terms of a result. One could sum up all he has to say in the words The Enlightenment Gain. But wait, just when and how did the lower creep into this intellectual work? By being hidden behind a barney (if I am only admitting to yet being incorrect once again regarding a statement analysis by Regis which has to do with words being presented for their strength and specific flavor yet clearly having a signpost which is called the barney (?) in which such statements' truth is dependent on some degree of mystery which is rather an excuse to use those words instead of acknowledging that we no longer are empowered by them.

Before moving onto Sri Aurobindo, sit for a moment and contemplate Mark's continuing words as he writes, "To do this, we must penetrate through the pulsing fluctuations of objectively experienced states and perceptions at the surface level of consciousness and gain insight into the timeless rhythm of our own nature manifest in the universal arising and falling away of all things." Does the expression timeless rhythm really mean anything at all. If you check your dictionaries you'll find that it does not. It's like ascribing a certain attribute found and useful as a distinction in the world of fluid dynamics to solids. Feels close intuitively, and yet so far from our being able to articulate ourselves as such.

Sri is yet another evolution on this story which I will not include in this attack except to say that it ought to be clear on reading him how emotional he is and how important emotionality is to a man/woman'a ability to perceive. I think for my part at this juncture I will only submit this one correction to the overall perspective of enlightenment. I wrote of this recently in a poem titled The Mystery, and in the 2nd strophe wrote…

I have a destiny with a dragon
The Mystery, still unseen, kills
The trick is getting your benefit
while leaving the beast to rest.

 
Here in the west we want the ultimate reduction and a bank to deposit it in WITH INTEREST. We live constrained by our culture with so much ignorance and lack of perspective on life if only because we simply aren't even close to as smart as we would like to think we are.

I do think however, that I've reached a small jumping off point with respect to the prime ideal of life which we want to call enlightenment. We have to transcend culture, first by exposing ourselves to mankind's other cultures, and then by integrating and synthesizing the best of what we want. And succeeding in doing that brings us flat up against the wall. From here we can go no further, why? Because the process that got us this far in its neo-enlightened, integral, nonjudgmental, discerning, visionary, committed, philosophic thought represents the mind and the condition which is itself exclusionary to the truth.

Desire, the shroud and veil, prevents us from evolving ourselves timelessly. That leaves us only yoga as a viable hope towards fully realizing consciously Truth, Beauty, and Justice. Every desire exists out of the web of beliefs which make up our collective world views, except for those pertaining only to ourselves as individuals in the world. So there is that platitude in the process where one gives up or lets go of desire not because its right or intrinsic to attainment but because we have discovered how fundamentally it separates us from the Truth that ALL IS.  Funny though how this moment doesn't provide the level of breakthrough and enlightenment one would certainly consider possible given how fundamentally the condition of grasping, clinging, and needing prevents any nearness or taste of enlightenment whatsoever. Include the yogi platitude on the essential meaningless and emptiness of life as yet another major milestone however one that does not catapult one any further, but more or less just brings one to the point in which they stop believing in their own bullshit just as much as the rest. Life becomes peaceful and clear at this level of consciousness, and yet does this imply enlightenment?

I am called to return to the notion that one's desire to be enlightened ITSELF is enlightenment. In order to want this metaphysical liberty from illusionary egotism, is both the degree one might be said to be empowered to attain that state in the first place, and for a few who have come before me, there is clearly an artifact produced one might call the gift of the state of enlightenment, a teaching and a reaching out to humanity with a message for those who can hear to guide them on this path leading the soul out of the darkness of ignorance and into the purity of light which the truth shines infinitely.

a negate of a negated negation,
never gets the real truth, and yet
there's another energy transfer
labyrinths are key symbols for.

 
The next strophe I wrote was an attempt to acknowledge something of the heart of the desire which fulfills without fulfilling, that bath of paradoxical quagmire, wherein we are constantly challenged by our own mechanical responses entrained towards a dualistic structured society keeping our evolved engagement quite surreal until complete.

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