Selected Masters

Introduction

Selecting Masters whose lives and teachings are relevant to the idea of jnani is not easy, and the list above and its ordering will not please everyone. The decision to start with Ramana Maharshi has been done on the grounds that his central teaching was to pursue the question 'who am I' which seem to go straight to the heart of what jnani is about. Maharshi is also the least controversial of the 20th century teachers. Ramakrishna was chosen for second place, despite the fact that he is one of the great bhaktis of all time. His universality make him uniquely valuable, and also his devotionality is a reminder that bhakti must never be made to appear as an inferior path. Douglas Harding, in his nineties and still alive at the time of writing, has been chosen for third place because his teachings are an entirely Western approach to demonstrating quickly and without recourse to ancient tradition the answer to the question 'who am ?'.

The remaining Masters all contribute a unique insight into the overall understanding of jnani, and are spread through history and geographical location. Two more bhakti Masters are included to round off the picture. All the Masters listed here are accessible through texts that are easily obtainable, and many have websites (there are links to Bibliography and Links sections on each Master). The last two on the list are living at the time of writing, and can speak for themselves (though Mother Meera does so in silence!).

Any one of the Masters chosen here would be enough for the dedicated seeker of truth to work with for a lifetime. Taken as a whole they represent a treasure-house of the spiritual flowering of the human race, even though there are many, many more that have been left out for now.

Only short overviews can be given here, but are done so in the hope that the reader might take one or more of the teachings and pursue them in depth. None are easy, but any of them will yield the 'solid prizes of the Universe' to those that persevere.

Ramana Marharshi

Life

Ramana Maharshi was born in 1889 to a middle-class Brahmin family in South India, showing no special aptitude for religion, but, at the age of seventeen underwent a spontaneous transformation. Ramana described the awakening in his own words.

It was about six weeks before I left Madura [Maharshi's home town] for good that the great change in my life took place. It was quite sudden. I was sitting alone in a room on the first floor of my uncle's house. I seldom had any sickness, and on that day there was nothing wrong with my health, but a sudden violent fear of death overtook me. There was nothing in my state of health to account for it, and I did not try to account for it or find out whether there was any reason for the fear. I just felt "I am going to die" and began thinking what to do about it. It did not occur to me to consult a doctor or my elders or friends; I felt that I had to solve the problem myself, there and then.

The shock of the fear of death drove my mind inwards and I said to myself mentally, without actually framing the words: "Now death has come; what does it mean? What is it that is dying? This body dies." And at once I dramatised the occurrence of death. I lay with my limbs stretched out stiff as though rigor mortis had set in and imitated a corpse so as to give greater reality to the enquiry. I held my breath and kept my lips tightly closed so that no sound could escape, so that neither the word "I" nor any other word could be uttered. "Well then," I said to myself, "this body is dead. It will be carried stiff to the burning ground and there burnt and reduced to ashes. But with the death of this body am I dead? Is the body I? It is silent and inert but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of the 'I' within me, apart from it. So I am Spirit transcending the body. The body dies but the Spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death. That means I am deathless Spirit." All this was not dull thought; it flashed through me vividly as living truth which I perceived directly, almost without thought-process. "I" was something very real, the only real thing about my present state, and all the conscious activity connected with my body was centred on that "I".

From that moment onwards the "I" or Self focused attention on itself by a powerful fascination. Fear of death had vanished once and for all. Absorption in the Self continued unbroken from that time on. Other thoughts might come and go like the various notes of music, but the "I" continued like the fundamental sruti note that underlies and blends with all the other notes. Whether the body was engaged in talking, reading, or anything else, I was still centred on "I". Previous to that crisis I had no clear perception of my Self and was not consciously attracted to it. I felt no perceptible or direct interest in it, much less any inclination to dwell permanently in it.

Ramana had entered into a state of pure consciousness. His description of it, generally uncluttered with technical terms, is useful for the understanding of jnani: he is describing an unbroken awareness of the centre of his being, capable of existing as the ground to all his sensations and not overwhelmed by them. Any aspirant on the path of awareness will know that attempts to maintain such awareness in the supposedly ideal circumstances of formal meditation practice, where distractions are at a minimum, is hard enough, but to do so while reading or talking is nothing short of miraculous. Ramana had a maturity at seventeen that was remarkable, for the onset of his experience would have been simply frightening even for most adults. Instead, he turned the experience into an enquiry into his nature, an approach that became the core of his pedagogy for the rest of his life. For some weeks after his transformation he attempted to continue the life of a schoolboy and son to his parents. It became obvious to them that he had changed, as he lost interest in boyish things and became indifferent to food. Legend has it that he stole the collection after worship at the local temple and used the money to make what was to be the last journey of his life — to Tiruvannamalai and the holy hill of Arunachala.

His flight from family and friends is a little reminiscent of the English mediaeval mystic Richard Rolle, who persuaded his sister to steal his father's cape and cloak in order to make a rough monk's habit out of it. Ramana abandoned himself to his revelation, to the point of neglecting his body and all external reality. He is supposed to have been infested with vermin by the time that locals began to look after him, in no doubt that he was a holy man. Ramana's change of orientation was so sudden and so complete that we see him becoming quite indifferent to the manifest world, to the point where he might have died of disease or starvation. This initial period, where he displayed no interest in disciples or teaching, gradually gave way to the more conventional life of a spiritual teacher and led to a fifty-year spell of teaching the path to self-realisation. A spiritual community grew around Ramana, and there remains some colour film footage of the ashram showing Ramana in his later years with his disciples, including a moving account of the death of the ashram cow. Ramana himself died of cancer in 1950.

Ramana was almost entirely unlearned in the Hindu scriptures at the time of his realisation (enlightenment), making him the mirror-image of the spiritual society so prevalent in India. Most people, including the general public and the Brahmins or priests, were at the time of Ramana's early life only too ready to quote the most profound elements of their spiritual heritage, such as 'Atman is Brahman', with very little direct experience of the truth behind the words. Ramana had discovered the truth but had very little scriptural knowledge. In time however this changed, not because he became more scholarly, but because his pupils wanted him to comment on and explain their favourite texts. Hence Ramana became associated with the Advaita or non-dualist school of illumination, as this was closest to his own experience, though he would provide an insightful commentary on any of the Indian spiritual treasures, including the more devotional. Ramana wrote little, usually in response to questions from his devotees, some of which is original verse and some of which is in the form of commentaries on key texts from the ancient traditions. Ramana's own writings add up to not more than about 80 pages, but are superb summary of the quintessential Hindu teachings of moksha (liberation), taken from personal experience but using an existing language and metaphor.Amongst Ramana's pupils was a man called Poonjaji or Papaji, who in turn was the pivotal teacher in Andrew Cohen's spiritual development. Poonjaji (1908 - 1997) was an Indian military officer burdened by visions of Krishna until awakened in the presence of Ramana Maharshi in the 1940's.

Teachings

Ramana's essential teaching was the question "who am I?" As we saw in his own account it was this question that he used to penetrate the mystery of his own experience. It has to be an active principle as he explains: 'It is not right to make an incantation of "Who am I?" Put the question only once and then concentrate on finding the source of the ego and preventing the occurrences of thoughts.' Ramana did not underestimate the difficulty of this task, saying that no answer provided by the ego such as 'I am Siva' was adequate. He used the traditional language of non-dualism when describing the state that was to be attained, including the ancient formulation 'Atman is Brahman'. His views were fairly conventional in that

he insisted that thoughts had to end, and that the way to do this was to disengage with the manifest world and to undermine the ego.

Ramana did not advocate renunciation for his devotees however, teaching that the challenges of everyday life were to be used as raw material for the quest for one's true identity. This was an original contribution to spiritual life in India, where it is usually expected that real spiritual progress comes only after an extended period of renunciation, asceticism, and even hardship. Ramana taught that his method could be used in every situation of daily life, asking 'who is experiencing success? who is experiencing failure?' and so on. As is inevitable for a spiritual teacher, many of those coming to him were not immediately interested in the question of identity, but in solving a problem in their lives. To such enquiries his response was always that the solution lay in seeing who it was that had the problem.

Although by temperament his teachings were not explicitly devotional, he exhorted his disciples to rest in the 'cave of the heart', an ancient expression that implies both love and silence. He also recognised that contact with genuine Masters could bring the disciple to self-realisation more effectively than any practice, thus acknowledging an aspect of the devotional referred to as satsang or darshan (being in the presence of the Master). Ramana prefers the more neutral term association:

1. Association with Sages who have realized the Truth removes material attachments; on these attachments being removed the attachments of the mind are also destroyed. Those whose attachments of mind are thus destroyed become one with That which is Motionless. They attain Liberation while yet alive. Cherish association with such Sages.

2. That Supreme State which is obtained here and now as a result of association with Sages, and realized through the deep meditation of Self-enquiry in contact with the Heart, cannot be gained with the aid of a Guru or through knowledge of the scriptures, or by spiritual merit, or by any other means.

3. If association with Sages is obtained, to what purpose are all the methods of self-discipline? Tell me, of what use is a fan when the cool, gentle, south wind is blowing?

Ramana was the cool wind and "who am I?" was his pedagogy. Note that in (2) above Ramana distinguishes between 'Sage' and 'Guru', meaning that a guru is lesser and incapable of spiritual instruction. His use of the word 'Guru' is not the same as used in this site, and it is not easy to enter the linguistic climate of his time and location or that of his translator to understand Ramana's precise point here, beyond the obvious one that there are true and false Masters (to use our terminology). We can do nothing more than press for the intellectual fluidity that can take words as temporary and contingent pointers to shared experience.

Commentary

Ramana Maharshi is one of the clearest cases of a jnani Master in recent history, whose life and teachings are well-documented, and therefore not susceptible to the mythologising tendencies of history. Ramana is jnani and via negativa. Any aspirant with the same instincts will find in the short texts by Ramana a clear and concise description of the path and goal that lies ahead of them, though couched in the ancient spiritual language of India. For those whom this language presents an obstacle there are teachers like Cohen, Harding and Krishnamurti whose teachings are close in spirit but don't use the archaic and Eastern concepts of Hinduism.

Although this site is mainly directed at a Western (or Westernised) audience, the reason for starting with Ramana is precisely because he does use an ancient and well-established language of jnani, one that never established a foothold in the West. Ramana was happy to use the ancient saying 'Atman is Brahman' as a shorthand to his condition and the goal of his teachings, a phrase that translates into Western terms as 'the soul is God' or even 'I am God'. 'Brahman' is not of course the same as the Western concept of a personal God, but it is close, and so for many Westerners the concept of 'Atman is Brahman' is problematic.

Another potential obstacle to Ramana's teachings is the shock that many feel on hearing about the neglect of his own well-being after the onset of the transformation. The idea that any positive inner transformation can lead to such loss of interest in life, to the point where rats are eating one's flesh, is almost unimaginable. The story is all the more poignant when we realise his age at the time, younger even than in the photo below.

We can understand the events in terms of via negativa, but also as a result of Ramana's unusual awakening, which came unannounced. The Buddha in contrast spent many years in active search for the same result, ironically only achieving it after renouncing the extreme asceticism he had been practising. Both men's teachings are via negativa, but we can only imagine that Ramana's awakening propelled him so rapidly into the bliss of eternal reality that it drove out any other considerations.

'Ramana's entry into self-realisation was unanticipated and sudden. His life and teachings represent the purest form of jnani via negativa transcendence, but the lack of any effort or interest on his part prior to enlightenment make his example problematic.'

Ramana's own transformation can be seen in terms of a radical shift of identity, from body to Spirit. As a body, one is ordinarily identified with a discrete, separate, and highly vulnerable fraction of the universe: one's energy is used in maintaining this fiction and in anxiously dealing with its needs, both physical and emotional, in a material and emotional world of limited resources. With the shift in identity from the body to the inner core of awareness the individual's investment of energy has shifted from the finite and temporal to the infinite and eternal. "I am not the body" sums up this shift, but as Ramana says so clearly, this is not a dull process of thought, but a living truth. This shift, for Ramana, seems to have taken place in the space of a few hours, and resulted in a permanent residence in the infinite and eternal. The lack of any peak experiences, visions, or manifest ecstasies, or any occult overtones whatever, makes Ramana's case more accessible to the secular mind than a man like Ramakrishna for example (who we will examine next).

Ramana's emphasis on association with Sages contains a paradox worth noting however : his own realisation was quite without any such association. This points to one of the universal problems of the spiritual life : that teachers often give advice that they never followed in the course of their own realisation. This should not be seen in a negative light however, but as a reminder that the idea of a 'path' is misleading, and is only a very rough metaphor at best. That is because one is 'travelling' to the place one never actually left, one's true nature.

Ramana's example leads one to speculate that there must be cases of self-realisation, where the individual becomes so wholly identified with the infinite and the eternal, that the desire to teach never asserted itself, so we never become aware of them.

Ramakrishna

Life

Sri Ramakrishna was born in 1836 in the Bengali village of Kamarpukur. He was an uneducated boy, with an early love for religious festivals and observances, and for acting in religious stories, often the woman's part. As a boy he watched a flock of swans fly up from a nearby lake, and lost consciousness in the first of many religious trances. He became a priest, and was offered a place at a Kali temple built by a rich devotee, but his parents were worried by his other-worldliness (even though both parents had a premonition before his birth of his spiritual stature), and arranged a marriage for him. The marriage had little effect, for they had to wait six years before consummation could be possible, and in any case they managed to choose as spiritual a girl as one could find for him, later to become revered in her own right as a teacher (Sarada Devi). By the time that they did come to live together both were so far on the spiritual path that consummation never in fact took place.

Romain Rolland gives an account of a formative stage in Ramakrishna's development, where his instinct for the devotional was challenged by an encounter with a formidable exponent of the path of non-dualism - a man known as Tota Puri from the Naga sect of Advaita Vedanta.

"The naked man, Tota Puri, taught me to detach my mind from all objects and to plunge it into the heart of the Atman. But despite all my efforts, I could not cross the realm of name and form and lead my spirit to the Unconditional state. I had no difficulty in detaching my mind from all objects with the one exception of the too familiar form of the radiant Mother [Kali], the essence of pure knowledge, who appeared before me as a living reality. She barred the way to the beyond. I tried on several occasions to concentrate my mind on

the precepts of the Advaita Vedanta; but each time the form of the Mother intervened. I said to Tota Puri in despair: 'It is no good, I shall never succeed in lifting my spirit to the "unconditioned" state and find myself face to face with the Atman.' He replied severely: 'What! you say you cannot? You must!' Looking about him, he found a piece of glass. He took it and stuck the point between my eyes, saying: 'Concentrate your mind on that point.' Then I began to meditate with all my might, and as soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared, I used my discrimination as a sword, and I clove Her in two. The last barrier fell and my spirit immediately precipitated itself beyond the place of the 'conditioned', and I lost myself in Samadhi." …

"The Universe was extinguished. Space itself was no more. At first the shadows of ideas floated in the obscure depths of the mind. Monotonously a feeble consciousness of the ego went on ticking. Then that stopped too. Nothing remained but Existence. The soul was lost in Self. Dualism was blotted out. Finite and Infinite space were as one. Beyond word, beyond thought, he attained Brahman."

The meeting between Ramakrishna and Tota Puri is unusual in the history of the spiritual life because there seems to have been a mutual transmission : Tota Puri then learned the devotional from Ramakrishna. Each in turn became master, and each in turn came to 'understand' the path of the other, though understand is too mild a word to capture what took place between them. Though each probably remained true to their basic impulse or orientation (one to what we call 'awareness' — but also variously known as non-dualism, jnani, yoga, knowledge and so on — and the other to devotion) their secondary realisation of the other path gave them an unusual basis from which to teach. Ramakrishna is typical of the Indian renunciate, though his story is unique as this brief introduction has shown. Despite his realisation of non-dualism he taught devotion to the divinity Kali, and his students were allowed to express this as devotion to him. He in return delighted in the young men that come and shared his worship. He warned them against 'women and gold', and advised them to keep away from women until they were sufficiently pure for a woman to be no danger, much as a young tree is fenced around to prevent elephants damaging it, but when fully grown needs no fence. His teachings were full of these simple metaphors, part of his culture, but brought to life by the intensity of his personality and realisation.

The Gospel of Ramakrishna documents life at Dakshineswar, on the banks of the Ganges in what is now Bengal, and is a diary written by one of his devotees, modestly calling himself only 'M'. Aldous Huxley provided a foreword, calling Ramakrishna a saint, with the lucky provision of a competent reporter on his life. This is probably the first well-documented Indian mystic, and probably only because of the influence of the British, and it is a remarkable glimpse into the Hindu tradition of guru and disciple, and into life in nineteenth century India. Ramakrishna urged his listeners to surrender to divine love, to God-intoxication, while renouncing the pleasures of the world. Ramakrishna was quite happy to take 'householders' as disciples, urging them only to restrain their sexual demands on their wives. Ramakrishna seems to be so genuinely beyond the sexual (he admitted somewhere that physically it simply didn't work any more), that his advice has the ring of a warm recommendation rather than of moralising. His renunciation had quite a different nature to that of Gandhi, for example : there was no sense of struggle with himself; but on the other hand his only interest in the manifest world seemed to lie with his disciples and their potential for self-realisation. An issue that crops up again and again in M's Gospel is whether Ramakrishna was a 'divine' or ordinary incarnation. Ramakrishna himself offered no definitive view, though both his parents had intimations of a divine incarnation (though whether of Shiva or Vishnu is unclear). His refusal to be dogmatic is typical of the fluidity of all his thought, and his respect for all paths, shown in this quote:

"Greeting to the feet of the Jnani [seeker on the path of awareness (knowledge)]! Greeting to the feet of the Bhakta [seeker on the path of devotion]! Greeting to the devout who believe in the formless God! Greeting to those who believe in God with form! Greeting to the men of old who knew Brahman! Greeting to the modern knowers of Truth. …"

Christopher Isherwood was more certain that Ramakrishna's incarnation was special, as we see from this extract from his biography of Ramakrishna at the time near his death:

On August 13th, Naren [Vivekananda, discussed below] was again in Ramakrishna's room, alone. The body on the bed seemed barely alive and quite preoccupied with its pain. Could this abjectly suffering creature be an incarnation of God? 'If he would declare his divinity now, in the presence of death,' Naren said to himself, 'I'd accept it.' He was instantly ashamed of the thought and put it from his mind. For some moments he stood watching the Master's face intently. Then, slowly, Ramakrishna's lips parted and he said in a distinct voice, 'Oh Naren — aren't you convinced yet? He who was once born as Rama, and again as

Krishna, is now living as Ramakrishna within this body — and not in your Vedantic sense.'

By adding 'not in your Vedantic sense' Ramakrishna was, of course, emphasising that he did not merely mean he was essentially the Atman, as is every being and object, according to Vedanta philosophy. Ramakrishna was explicitly declaring himself to be an avatar and an incarnation of former avatars. Isherwood was a devotee of Ramakrishna and may have been making too much of this conversation; Ramakrishna's statement here is not typical and may have been only said for the benefit of a particular disciple. For those seeking a justification of the perennial philosophy from a mystic, rather than from an academic, Ramakrishna is worth studying as he could see into the heart of all traditions and mystics and comment on their essential unity - from an experiential level. The initial encounter with Tota Puri, leading to his dissolving the boundaries of the devotional and the non-dual paths, became an active examination of all the traditions that he came across, including Christian and Moslem. Ramakrishna's embraciveness, present in its usual form of love and compassion for his students, was thus characterised by an additional and intense curiosity for any manifestation of the spiritual impulse in any culture or tradition.

Ramakrishna is also known for his disciple, Vivekananda, who, unlike his master who never travelled, went to the United States in 1983 and introduced Ramakrishna and Hindu thought to the West. His name previous to his departure for the States was Narendra (or Naren), and Ramakrishna had a presentiment of his arrival at Dakshineswar and the great role that lay ahead of him. The following passage describes this, but is also of interest as a description of Ramakrishna's inner world:

One day I found that my mind was soaring high in Samadhi along a luminous path. It soon transcended the stellar universe and entered the subtler region of ideas. As it ascended higher and higher, I found on both sides of the way ideal forms of gods and goddesses. The mind then reached the outer limits of that region, where a luminous barrier separated the sphere of relative existence from that of the Absolute. Crossing that barrier, the mind entered the transcendental realm, where no corporeal being was visible. Even the gods dared not peep into that sublime realm and were content to keep their seats far below.

But the next moment I saw seven venerable sages seated there in Samadhi. It occurred to me that these sages must have surpassed not only men but even the gods in knowledge and holiness, in renunciation and love. Lost in admiration, I was reflecting on their greatness, when I saw a portion of that undifferentiated luminous region condense into the form of a divine child. The child came to one of the sages, tenderly clasped his neck with his lovely arms, and addressing him in a sweet voice, tried to drag his mind down from the state of Samadhi. That magic touch aroused the sage from the superconscious state, and he fixed his half-open eyes on the wonderful child. His beaming countenance showed that the child must have been the treasure of his heart. In great joy the strange child spoke to him, 'I am going down. You too must go with me.' The sage remained mute but his tender look expressed his assent. As he kept gazing at the child, he was again immersed in Samadhi. I was surprised to find that a fragment of his body and mind was descending to earth in the form of a bright light. No sooner had I seen Narendra than I recognised him to be that sage.

The child in this passage is taken to be Ramakrishna himself. Narendra, like Arjuna, was of the warrior caste and physically and intellectually well-developed and of an acutely independent mind, but his first visit to Ramakrishna only persuaded him that the older man was eccentric, for Ramakrishna had recognised him from his vision and drawn him aside, to babble incoherently to him that at last he could 'pour out his spirit into the breast of somebody fitted to receive my inner experience!' Narendra returned however:

"I found him alone sitting on his small bed. He was glad to see me, and called me affectionately to sit near him on one side of the bed. But a moment later I saw him convulsed with some emotion. His eyes were fixed upon me, he muttered under his breath, and drew slowly nearer. I thought he was going to make some eccentric remark as on the previous occasion. But before I could stop him he had placed his right foot on my body. The contact was terrible. With my eyes open I saw the walls and everything in the room whirling and vanishing into nothingness.… The whole universe and my own individuality were at the same time almost lost in a nameless void, which swallowed up everything that is. I was terrified, and believed I was face to face with death. I could not stop myself from crying out, What are you doing? I have parents at home.…' Then he began to laugh, and passing his hand over my breast, he said, 'All right. Let us leave it at that for the moment! It will come, all in good time.' He had no sooner said these words than the strange phenomena disappeared. I came to myself again, and everything both outside and in, was as before."

Ramakrishna is Krishna to Vivekananda's Arjuna: also striking is the image of Ramakrishna placing his foot on him, as in so many images of the goddess Kali. Vivekananda's discipleship was troublesome but also 'nectar' for Ramakrishna, and later Vivekananda said of them both: "Outwardly he was all Bhakta, but inwardly all Jnani.… I am the exact opposite." The life of Ramakrishna helps us to understand the state of samadhi, an ecstatic state, which is considered to be either with or without content, and is described at length in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. We have many accounts of Ramakrishna's samadhi, one of which took place during a rare opportunity in front of a photographer, resulting in one of the best-known and best-loved photographs of the saint. In the photograph his hands are raised in a spontaneous gesture of bliss, and he has to be supported by one of his followers.

According to Rolland, Tota Puri himself was so awed by the body of Ramakrishna in samadhi 'rigid as a corpse for days on end', that this persuaded him to break his rule of only spending three days in any one place and resulted in him staying eleven months to learn from the man who had previously been his disciple. In the many accounts in M.'s biography, Ramakrishna said of his samadhi that they were empty of content: he lost consciousness of his surroundings and entered a state of pure consciousness. It is possible that Socrates' fits of abstraction were also of the same type, but (as will be outlined in the section 'jnani and the West') Socrates is clearly jnani in orientation. Ramakrishna's samadhis are those of a bhakti.

Ramakrishna died in 1886 of cancer of the throat. This affliction was often aggravated by Ramakrishna's love of singing, which played an integral part, along with dancing, in his devotions, and was much loved by his companions. His illness lasted nearly a year, during which Naren (Vivekananda) visited Bodhgaya, the site of the Bodhi-tree where the Buddha is said to have gained enlightenment. On his return they have an illuminating conversation about the Buddha, Ramakrishna repeating several times that the Buddha was not an atheist, while Naren shows increasing enthusiasm for his teachings, despite his interesting observation that the Buddha could not put into words what he had realised. Ramakrishna also commented that the Buddha or his path were to do with Pure Intelligence.

Ramakrishna's devotees often asked him, as his condition worsened, to pray to Kali to heal him, but he found that he could not. His state of surrender was so deep that, even for his disciples' sake, he found that his prayer simply could not contain any personal element, or request for intercession.

Teachings

Ramakrishna's teachings are devotional, and as such may not directly illuminate the jnani path, condition, goal and orientation. He is a wonderful example of the highly developed bhakti, coupled with a breadth of interest and vision as shown in his understanding of jnani and his interest in all religious paths. However, as we saw in his comments on the Buddha, his instinct is always devotional, so his transcendence is always in terms of a God. His particular object of devotion was the Hindu goddess Kali, usually associated in the Western mind with destruction.

His teachings always encouraged the renunciative celibate life, advising withdrawal from all contact with 'women and gold' (or 'men and gold' for woman devotees), although he was happy to instruct the householders as much as the renunciates. The via negativa of Ramakrishna is perhaps the one that is most easily recognised, the simple concept that to pursue transcendence one needs to turn away from an active engagement with the world. At the same time it was not a life-threatening neglect of the basic needs of the body, as was the case with the early experience of Ramana Maharshi.

His teaching always returned to the need to fill one's heart and mind with the deity, appealing to it as a child does to its mother. The attitude of surrender and helplessness, along with a purity of heart, is sufficient for the deity to respond and bring the devotee to the profundity of the spiritual life. Above all this path has passion and warmth, alongside which the jnani orientation looks cold and dry. Ramakrishna regularly passed into devotional ecstasies, known as the state of samadhi, which his devotees felt accorded them special blessings, and as such were an important part of his teaching.

If one finds Ramakrishna's ecstasies and tearful devotions quite foreign, or even to indicate a lesser kind of spirituality, then consider this quote:

I and mine — that alone is spiritual ignorance. It ignores Reality in favour of personal and collective ego. Right now, invoke your most penetrating insight! If only for a moment, you will realize what you call I-

consciousness to be fundamentally none other than limitless, timeless awareness. Look clearly! Are you really this body? Are you really this culturally conditioned mind? If you are uncompromising, you will inevitably recognize that you are none of these habitual structures. You will sense spontaneously that you have never been the originator or the performer of any action whatsoever. You are sheer awareness, free from routines, free from both faults and virtues. You cannot be essentially characterized as righteous or unrighteous, as liberated or bound.

This could easily be a passage from Ramana Maharshi, or for that matter, other great jnanis like the Buddha or Douglas Harding. Yet in fact it is a quote from Ramakrishna, cited in Great Swan, Meetings with Ramakrishna, by Lex Hixon. However powerful Ramakrishna's entire personal gestalt is for the devotional, his ability to articulate the case of the jnani is remarkable.

For the jnani however must remain the question, how much of Ramakrishna's experience of the reality of his chosen deity, Kali, is a matter of the imagination? Vivekananda often remonstrated with his Master that seeing God or Kali was all down to the imagination, reinforcing the idea for us that Ramakrishna must have had a profound intuition of Vivekanada's merit, as on the surface of it he seems a poor disciple. We also find in Ramakrishna's case elements that could be defined as occult (using the definition here), as in an extract quoted earlier where he enters various 'higher' or disembodied realms. We have noted before that the same question arises in connection with the entire occult, as Dion Fortune for example is ready to admit in her 'Mystical Qabalah'.

Ramakrishna is also a good example of a Master who's whole happiness depended on the quality of his devotees or aspirants, and his best-known disciple, Vivekananda, was very important to him.

Commentary

Ramakrishna represents a highly-evolved bhakti, showing that the path of devotion can lead to the most profound knowledge of self, or to the deepest spiritual experience. Having said that the cultural context and chosen deity of Ramakrishna are foreign to the average Westerner, even if his devotional emphasis is more readily understood in the West than the jnani spirituality. If one can enter his life and times however then such a study is very rewarding. As with Ramana Maharshi, he illuminates the scriptures of ancient India, rather than the other way round, though in Ramakrishna's case it is always with a devotional emphasis. The prejudices that one might have as a Westerner about guru-worship are tested here, in that Ramakrishna accepted and encouraged devotion to himself in the form of salutations, gifts, and homilies, all of which are foreign to us if not downright suspect. Reading how this is carried out on a daily basis in M's Gospel of Ramakrishna gradually brings home however that the Indian context ensures that this is a light-hearted and benign practice, particularly brought home in the way that Vivekananda seems to participate in the guru-worship at times, and at others disagree with the very tenets of Ramakrishna's spiritual life. It is the sheer breadth of Hindu spiritual tradition that makes this possible, and more than anything, the acceptance that the jnani individual approaches the divine in a valid but quite different way to the bhakti individual. It is mainly through Ramakrishna's testimony that one might accept that the samadhi of a bhakti is in essence the same as the samadhi of a jnani.

'Ramakrishna represents the highly-evolved bhakti or devotional spiritual Master. We are particularly indebted to Ramakrishna for his ability to illuminate the jnani-bhakti dichotomy for us, in his encounter with Tota Puri, with his relationship with Vivekananda, and in the many discourses that touched on the subject.'

While a study of Ramakrishna through the available texts undoubtedly deepens one's understanding of the spiritual life, there may be little chance to experience the blessings of such a Master at first hand. His 'classical' approach to via negativa is also mostly unsuited to the modern world. The rejection of 'women and gold' belongs to another era, one that is however common to both East and West.

We can sum up by saying that we are particularly indebted to Ramakrishna for his ability to illuminate the jnani-bhakti dichotomy for us, in his encounter with Tota Puri, with his relationship with Vivekananda, and in the many discourses that touched on the subject. He also shows us that devotion or prayer, while in its lowest form is not much more than a plea for intercession in the difficulties of one's life, becomes in its highest expression incapable of pleading even for one's very survival. It expresses a true oneness with the Universe.

 

Douglas Harding

Life

Douglas Harding, a retired English architect, was born in 1909 in Lowestoft. His family had belonged for generations to the Christian fundamentalist sect known as the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. Harding gives an account of his early life in the sect in a Postscript to his book The Trial of the Man Who Said He was God, a picture of puritanical rejection of the modern world, and rejection of any other religious outlook. At the age of 21 he composed a ten-page thesis outlining his opposition to the tenets of the sect, and found himself appearing before 'a kangaroo court of fanatics'. Needless to say he was found guilty of heresy and expelled from sect, family and lodgings. Harding spent the rest of his life pursuing and developing the ideas he had set out in his apostatic thesis.

Harding was posted to India in the second world war and tells us that his experiences there intensified his spiritual searching. He recalls that he was absolutely plagued in his early life with self-consciousness — a really 'virulent British sort' (as he calls it) — which was quite destroyed by his discovery of 'headlessness'. Although he spent some time much later in the ashram of the Indian guru Anandamayi Ma, it was not through the spiritual traditions of India that Harding came to his key insight. He was a thirty-three year old soldier on leave in the Himalayas when he made this discovery:

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough, and what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in - absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not a head. It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me", unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face - my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

This passage is found in two of Harding's books, and has been reproduced in Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's influential compilation The Mind's I. Harding's first book, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth, was sent in manuscript form to C.S.Lewis, who reviewed it favourably, and with which review it is now published. Harding's best-known work came later and is called On Having No Head, with a later subtitle Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious.

Harding has published a series of books since these early attempts to put his vision into writing, but it is probably through his workshops that most people 'get it'. If his insights rely on no tradition, yet can be understood in the light of many traditions, his techniques are truly unique. Harding has invented a series of exercises, some done singly, some in pairs, and some with larger groups, all with the single purpose of showing 'who one truly is'. He has led these workshops all around the world for at least fifty years, and at the age of over 90 continues an extraordinary itinerary as this programme for the year 2000 shows:

MAR 11-12 Belgium, Bruxelles.

MAR 25-26 Wales, Pembrokeshire. APR 1-2 France, St. Etienne. APR 8-9 France, Paris. APR 24 Belgium, Bruxelles. APR 29-30 Germany, Frankfurt. MAY 19-21 Switzerland, Geneva. MAY 27-28 Switzerland, Zug. JUN 17-18 France, Nice. JUN 24-25 France, Le Luc en Provence. JULY 23-28 France, Clermont-Ferrand. AUG 13-18 France, Ardeche. SEPT 17 England, London. OCT 5-26 USA, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, Los Angeles, NOV 4-5 France, Bordeaux. NOV 18 England, London. NOV 25-26 France, Morvan. DEC 2-3 France, Paris. DEC 9-10 England, Salisbury.

Harding pursued a career in architecture after the war, building his own home in Suffolk. He married but was eventually separated, perhaps because his vision had such a powerful hold on his life and not everyone can share in it. In the mid 1990's he met Katherine, whose background was mainly Buddhist, and they married not long after. They now present the workshops jointly.

Teachings

Harding's temperament and means of expression have an affinity with the 'sudden' enlightenment of Zen, and in the early days of his teaching he was promoted by Buddhist groups (the first edition of On Having No Head was published by the Buddhist Society in Eccleston Square). He was too radical for most of them however, provoking this comment (found in the introduction to Urgyen Sangarakshita's The Taste of Freedom): "The talks and study groups [at a Buddhist summer school] run from Therevada to Zen, through Zoroastrianism and Vedanta, to a sort of bizarre synthesis of ancient and modern teachings, whose pundit encourages his disciples to spend substantial periods of time with paper bags over their heads." This is an obvious reference to Harding's paper bag experiment, outlined below, and perhaps typical of how he is misunderstood. In fact all kinds of religious organisations invite Harding to give his unique workshops all over the world, including Ramana Maharshi groups. Harding's affinity with Maharshi lies in the emphasis on establishing or even merely 'noticing' one's true identity. He says of his experience in India quoted above that it had not been the result of any formal meditation or practice, but with a preoccupation with the question of his own identity. Harding cites both the Buddha and Maharshi in the following passage:

The Buddha's description of Nirvana, in the Pali Canon, as "visible in this life, inviting, attractive, accessible," is clearly true and makes perfect sense. So does Master Ummon's statement that the first step along the Zen Path is to see into our Void Nature: getting rid of our bad karma comes after - not before - that seeing. So does Ramana Maharshi's insistence that it is easier to see What and Who we really are than to see "a gooseberry in the palm of our hand" - as so often, this Hindu sage confirms Zen teaching. All of which means there are no preconditions for this essential in-seeing. To oneself one's Nature is forever clearly displayed, and it's amazing how one could ever pretend otherwise. It's available now, just as one is, and doesn't require the seer to be holy, or learned, or clever, or special in any way. Rather the reverse! What a superb advantage and opportunity this is!

Douglas helps one see one's own nature in a direct and repeatable way. His technique involves a series of 'experiments' with all the exhortations to scientific rigour that the word implies, though they are based on the consensus of the first person, unlike conventional science which is based on the consensus of the third person. In the conventional physical sciences the first person is the experimenter and the second person (or subject matter) is the object of one's experiment: it might involve lenses and light, electronic circuits and electromagnetism, or biological tissue and chemical substances. The third person, or third persons, is the rest of the scientific community who have an interest in the hypothesis that the experimenter is evaluating, and the possibility to repeat the experiments in order to verify or disprove the hypothesis. Out of this arrives the consensus of the third person and all scientific orthodoxies. In the social sciences, and in particular psychology, the second person in these experiments is just that: a

person, or a group of persons, and the route to scientific orthodoxies in these fields follow a similar path to the physical sciences though it is debatable how well the parallel holds. It is still, in its conceptual model at least, a consensus of the third person. Douglas's experiments follow a consensus of the first person in this sense: questions are established (all of which relate to "who am I?") and a group of people carry out a process involving observations on their own perceiving, resulting in answers to the questions. The second person or object of the experiment is the experimenter him or herself; a guide may be present in the form of Douglas, but the third person has no entry to the experiment (and an unprepared third party may even find the proceedings rather comical). The moment that the third person, acquainted with Douglas's hypotheses, wishes to verify them they become the first person in carrying out the experiment. Another way of saying this is that this form of spiritual enquiry is a science whose subject matter is you in the first person. Most of Douglas's experiments revolve around the sense of sight, and are designed to bring home to one an essential asymmetry between the observer and other human beings, an asymmetry that paradoxically brings one to a form of love — a simple openness to the existence of others.

An example of an experiment to show this involves four people, or more accurately, three people and the observer (first person). The observer stands facing one of the others, while the other two stand in such a way that their line of sight is at right angles to the observer's and across the observer's, i.e. in a little cross-shape. As one stands, looking at the face opposite, one is asked to notice that the 'first-person' type of looking between the observer and the person opposite is quite different to the 'third-person' type of looking that the other two are engaged in at right angles to one's line of sight. In one's own looking there is no face or head at the observer's end; the only face one possesses is the one opposite. Instead of a face of one's own one has space, space for all the world. For the other two, they are truly 'face to face' — closed at both ends of the gap between them by matter — matter that has shape, colour, and detail; prone to age, decay and death, quite unlike one's own which has no boundaries, which is colourless and featureless, and — thank God! is deathless. One could not read this page if one were not built open for it — built open for loving. In Douglas's workshops he arranges the participants into the necessary groupings to carry out the experiments (four in the above example) and then talks the group through them: he invites one to see what one really sees.

Probably the best known of Douglas's experiments involves the use of a paper bag open at each end, with a couple of unobtrusive holes in the middle for air. Two participants are invited to fit the bag over their faces so that they look at each other's face unencumbered by any surrounding other than the luminous white of the bag, mostly out of focus at that. It is a claustrophobic experience, and a threatening one : only in encounter groups is one asked to look this closely into another person's face, but of course, with Douglas there is no intention to engage emotionally with the situation. He invites one to notice again the difference between what is at one end of the bag and what is at the other end — a radical difference and, in normal life, almost always overlooked. (Harding has commented that at one end there is nothing material, and at the other end there is nothing spiritual.) The simplicity and ludicrousness of the bag situation are an affront to the intellect, and, with luck it retires hurt so that one can get on with noticing the pristine spotlessness and eternal nature of one's own end of the bag.

Harding does not recommend long periods in the paper bag, whatever others say, but what does he recommend as a general practice? He offers this:

Now the "hard" part begins, which is the repetition of this headless seeing-into Nothingness till the seeing becomes quite natural and nothing special at all; till, whatever one is doing, it's clear that nobody's here doing it. In other words, till one's whole life is structured round the double-barbed arrow of attention, simultaneously pointing in at the Void and out at what fills it. Such is the essential meditation of this Way. It is meditation for the market-pace, in fact for every circumstance and mood, but it may usefully be supplemented by regular periods of more formal meditation — for example, a daily sitting in a quiet place enjoying exactly the same seeing, either alone or (better) with friends. Here, in fact, is a meditation which doesn't threaten to divide our day into two incompatible parts — a time of withdrawal and quiet recollection, and a time of self-forgetful immersion in the world's turmoil. On the contrary, the whole day comes to have the same feel, a steady quality throughout. Whatever we have to do or take or suffer can thus be turned to our immediate advantage: it provides just the right opportunity to notice Who is involved. (To be precise, absolutely involved yet absolutely uninvolved.) In short, of all forms of meditation this is among the least contrived and obtrusive, and (given time to mature) the most natural and practical. And amusing too: it's as if one's featureless Original Face wore a smile like that of the disappearing Cheshire Cat!

Much later in life Harding seems to have a momentary doubt about the validity of 'headlessness'. In 'On Having A Head' published in a recent collection of essays, Harding reconsiders an obvious objection, one that must have been made many times to him over his years of teaching. He says:

And then, for no reason I know of, it suddenly occurred to me that a man born blind, fingering one of his hands and then his head, has as much reason for believing in the latter as in the former. Please check this for yourself right now. Go blind (that's to say, close your eyes), handle your left hand with your right, then your left arm and shoulder, your neck, and finally your head - back, sides, and front, all over. Isn't the present evidence for your head just as convincing as for your hand? for a head, moreover, which is as firmly attached to your trunk as your hand is to your arm. Now let's admit it, a fundamental truth that's untrue for a blind man isn't a fundamental truth at all. It doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. And certainly it's no foundation for building a life on. So I found myself asking myself some awkward questions. What if, all through those years of dedicated endeavour, I had been mistaken? Or worse, had more or less unconsciously suppressed vital evidence, cooking the books in favour of a cherished theory, not to say obsession? Could it be that - more hidden from me than from others - my stratagem for reversing my feelings of inferiority and getting noticed at any price, for hoisting myself head and shoulders above the masses, had been to pretend I lacked head and shoulders? How's that for irony?

The way in which he takes this objection and rescues 'headlessness' out of it is classic Harding, but also shows that, even in his eighties or nineties he continues to think deeply about his insights. It also contains a theme that emerged in his seventies, a Christ-centred aspect to his teachings. In the Postscript to The Trial of the Man Who said he was God, Harding tells us that he rediscovers aspects of the religion taught to him as a child, and rejected as a young man.

Commentary

Ramana Maharshi demonstrates a classical jnani case, and Sri Ramakrishna a classical bhakti case amongst the great Masters of transcendence. They both represented, in slightly different ways, the via negativa, and they both used the ancient spiritual language of their culture. Douglas Harding is a jnani of a very different type, using a language, instruction and metaphor that is entirely new, and entirely his own, though he is conversant with the world's spiritual traditions. He also demonstrates an exquisite balance between via negativa and via positiva. His teaching revolves around the question of one's identity, and therefore resonates with Ramana's 'who am I?' and it is often followers of Ramana who invite him to give his workshops.

Harding's interesting confession some fifty years after he started his teaching of headlessness, that it does not work for a blind person, prompted him to refine his earlier statements. But he cannot do it from any perspective involving closed eyes or non-functioning vision, he has to do it from the percepts of vision. All this means is that Harding's teachings are much more likely to work for a sighted person who happens to have a very strong visual sense. For headlessness to work one needs a strong perceptual sense of vision, a very active way of looking at the world, before its inversion can demonstrate that one really is space for the world. If one barely looks at anything in the first place, headlessness will not be an easy proposition or path to the divine. In this sense Harding may be right when he says that it works just as well for sighted as for unsighted people. As Harding quickly spotted, a child who is still in a state of wonder with the world has a very good chance of 'getting it', as did Thomas Traherne in his advocacy of the 'infant eye'. We can say then that Harding's teachings work for those of a jnani orientation, with a developed visual sense, and the child-like mind adept at spotting the 'Emperors new clothes' for what they are.

Above all Harding's work can show us like no other the nature of our being, in particular its nature in respect to the world. Ramana and Ramakrishna cannot illuminate our relationship with the manifest universe because they are renunciative, intensely via negativa, shown even in their personal lives. Harding's life is not renunciative in the slightest, and so the importance of his message is amplified for all those not in a position, whether from temperament or circumstance, to enter the renunciative life. If Harding's 'headlessness' corresponds to the Void, to nirvana (in the Pali sense), to the imperishable or unmanifest in Indian thought, then it cannot be apprehended without the manifest, bright, luminous World that fill it.

Harding does not wish us to wallow in our superb nothingness to the exclusion of the world. In Head Off Stress he advocates an identification with both the nothing and the everything as the cure for the modern affliction of stress:

Two escape routes lie open to you. The first is to become so small, so empty, so exclusive that there's nothing to you, nothing to be got at, nothing to act upon or react. The second is the opposite of this. It is to become so big, so full, so inclusive that there remains nothing outside you to get at you, nothing to pressurize you or to influence you at all, nothing left for you to react to. Let's put it differently. Particular things are stressed. If you were no thing you would be stress-free. Conversely, if you were all things you would, again, be stress-free. And if, by great good luck, you were both — if you were at once no thing and all things — why then you would be doubly stress-free, free beyond all doubt. This way, you would avoid being one of those unlucky intermediate things — things which are neither empty enough nor full enough to be free from stress. You would avoid falling between the two stools of total emptiness and total fullness, by sitting firmly on both stools at the same time. As nothing and everything you would be sitting pretty. You would be safe as well as comfortable. You would have arrived at our goal. You would already be established in the promised Land of No Stress, no matter how long it took you to feel at home and to get acclimatized. Well, I say you are sitting pretty, you are as lucky as that!

This passage clearly shows Harding's extraordinary balance between via negativa and via positiva, indicating even that one can pursue both at the same time.

This is a good point to examine the charge laid against Harding that his teachings are solipsistic, and to look at this issue in connection with the spiritual life. The Chambers 20th Century Dictionary gives this definition of solipsism: "the theory that self-existence is the only certainty, absolute egoism — the extreme form of subjective idealism; from the Latin roots solus, alone and ipse, self". Clearly, for many people the term would carry a negative connotation because of the 'absolute egoism' that it implies. The idea that one is the centre of the universe, the beginning and ending of all things, and that all other phenomenon, including other people, are part of a flux the only unchanging and permanent part of which is oneself, is at the heart of the mystics' sayings, and at the same time (at face value) both absurd and egoistic. Another common form of this is identity with God, as discussed earlier; also a statement that can arouses violent condemnation. Nambiar (one of Walt Whitman's Hindu commentators) quotes an appropriate passage from Rumi in which Rumi defends Mansur's 'I am God' against the very same charge of egoism:

This is what is signified by the words Ana'L Haqq, "I am God". People imagine that this is a presumptuous claim, whereas it is really a presumptuous claim to say "Ana'L Abd", " I am the slave of God"; and Ana'l Haqq, "I am God", is the expression of great humility. The man who says Ana'L Abd, "I am the slave of God" affirms two existences, his own and God's, but he who says Ana'L Haqq, "I am God", says "I am naught, He is all; there is nothing but God".

Rumi finds this "the extreme of humility and self-abasement". Solipsism is also a frightening idea because of the 'alone' part of its Latin root, present in the modern meaning of the word as an implied refusal to recognise others. In Harding's work this appears as an asymmetry: at the near end of the bag there is something (a nothing actually) quite different from what is seen at the far end of the bag — a reassuringly familiar face, even if it is of a stranger. Douglas finds that he is 'gone'; the universe is just 'built' this way, but also finds love in it. It is love of course that removes the sting of this uniqueness and loss of similarity with one's fellows: as one begins to identify with the 'space' for all things and see one's fellows as content of the space love restores to them their familiarity, or better makes them for the first time truly loveable. Edgar Cacey said that we meet only ourselves: how can one fail to love these manifestations of our true self? This world-view can lead to the fear of a callousness or indifference to the suffering of others, or to mild forms of megalomania, or in extreme cases to madness. It is vital not to underestimate that the jump from the 'normal' identification to the mystic identification with the cosmos implies a radical transformation of the individual — if this is occurs too fast or in an uneven way all kinds of problems can arise. Hence the emphasis in so many traditions on love and surrender, or, as exemplified in Buddhism, compassion. The Mahayana Buddhist teaching, that no individual should 'accept' enlightenment before ensuring that all others are enlightened first is firmly grounded in good pedagogy, but from Harding's perspective one's own enlightenment is the liberation of others. Love, surrender, compassion are emphasised by all mystical teachers, though it becomes hard to distinguish between these as pedagogical issues and as a natural outcome of the unitive state. Harding also counters the notion that identification with the Whole is special, euphoric or any kind of 'high', by calling it a valley experience — it is neither a peak nor a valley experience of course (something neutral in fact), but it is good to call it a valley experience to counter the sensation-seekers. .

Harding is explicitly against the guru-disciple relationship (as was Krishnamurti), and as an example of this dissects with great humour an imaginary relationship with an acolyte in The Trial of the Man Who Said He was God. His point, of course, is that the infinite and eternal (to use another terminology) that another lives in is of absolutely no use to the aspirant : it is their own apprehension of it that is vital, and guru-worship can so easily be used to postpone the moment of realising it oneself (and for Harding this has to be done now; no preparation is needed or is possible). We have pointed out however that in the appropriate context, such as that which Ramakrishna taught in, the guru, Sage or Master, can be of great benefit. It is probably that Harding's rejection of this possibility is rooted in unpleasant experiences, as we assume Krishnamurti's to be.

On a minor note we observe that Harding was thirty-three at the time of his major insight or revelation. It has been pointed out by many observers that the early-to-mid-thirties is the most common age in a person's life for a radical spiritual transformation. 

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Life

Krishnamurti's life is well-documented in Mary Lutyens' biography (see Bibliography). The Krishnamurti Foundation of America presents this brief history on its website:

The Person J. Krishnamurti (b. May 12, 1895, Madanapalle, Andhra Pradesh, India, d. February 17, 1986, Ojai, California) born of middle-class Brahmin parents, was recognized at age fourteen by the Theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater as the coming World Teacher and proclaimed to be the vehicle for the reincarnation of Christ in the West and of Buddha in the East. Mrs. Besant adopted the boy and took him to England, where he was educated and prepared for his coming role. He was made head of her newly formed worldwide religious organization, the Order of the Star in the East in 1911, but in 1929, after many years of questioning himself, he dissolved the Order, repudiated its claims and returned all the assets given to him for its purpose. Out of his own spiritual "process" experienced from 1922 onwards, he declared, "Truth is a pathless land and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. My only concern is to set humanity absolutely, unconditionally free."

Krishnamurti's mother may have had similar presentiment to those of Ramakrishna's mother about her future child, because she chose, against the explicit religious and caste instructions regarding birth, to deliver Krishnamurti in the puja room (shrine room) of her small house. As a child Krishnamurti was not considered unusual in any way, but was discovered in 1909 by Charles Leadbeater, a leading member of the Theosophical Society. His secretary had pointed him out, but was astonished at Leadbeater's prediction that Krishnamurti would one day be a great spiritual teacher, as he found the boy particularly stupid. Krishnamurti was in fact not academically gifted, and even after his private education and strict training failed to get into Cambridge University. This would come as a surprise to anyone who saw the incisive thinking in his written works, or demonstrated for example in the conversations between Krishnamurti and the eminent physicist David Bohm. The Theosophical Society had as its stated goal the preparation for a new World Leader, and before long it declared that it had found it in the person of Jiddu Krishnamurti. (This was to the disgust of the great esotericist Rudolf Steiner, who then left the Theosophical movement and founded the Anthroposophical movement.) Krishnamurti was prepared for his role through occult initiations at the hands of Leadbeater and Annie Besant, a process that involved communications with so-called disembodied 'Masters', and ultimately the excruciatingly painful preparation of his body to become the vessel for the (Buddha) Maitreya. Krishnamurti in later life had no recollection of most of these experiences, and vigorously denied that they contributed to his illumination. He gradually shook off the ministrations of the Theosophical Society, and in a dramatic gesture dissolved the Order of the Star, which was the organisation founded to support his work. He could no more shake of his destiny than any of us however, and entered a life of teaching that lasted fifty years. The teachings were his, however, and could be summed up in one phrase: choiceless awareness.

Krishnamurti could not be in greater contrast to Ramakrishna: he was educated (though mainly privately), sophisticated, an intellectual, and earnestly against the whole concept of devotion, either to a living person or to a deity. He simply jettisoned the whole of Indian religious history (as well as all other religious

apparatus) and talked for fifty years on the pristine state of a silent mind that lives with choiceless awareness. His emphasis on no-mind borrows nothing from the Zen Buddhists, and he seems to have taken no interest in any spiritual figure or teaching, however similar to his own. He was reputed to read detective novels or watch Clint Eastwood movies by way of relaxation. But his being was illuminated and silent; others made Christ-comparisons throughout his life - here are some comments from contemporary figures:

George Bernard Shaw called Krishnamurti "a religious figure of the greatest distinction," and added, "He is the most beautiful human being I have ever seen."Henry Miller wrote, "There is no man I would consider it a greater privilege to meet …"Aldous Huxley, after attending one of Krishnamurti's lectures, confided in a letter, "… the most impressive thing I have listened to. It was like listening to the discourse of the Buddha — such power, such intrinsic authority … "Kahlil Gibran wrote, "When he entered my room I said to myself, 'Surely the Lord of Love has come.'"

In August 1922 Krishnamurti underwent three days of a very intense and painful experience at Ojai Valley in California, during which one of his companions suggested that he sit under a young pepper tree in the garden, which proved to soothe him and under which he remained for a long time. As with many of the experiences he had in the period leading up to this time, Krishnamurti had no later recollection of the most intense parts, but he wrote afterwards of the period:

On the first day while I was in that state and more conscious of the things around me, I had the first most extraordinary experience. There was a man mending the road; that man was myself; the pickaxe he held was myself; the very stone which he was breaking up was a part of me; the tender blade of grass was my very being, and the tree beside the man was myself. I also could feel and think like the roadmender and I could feel the wind passing through the tree, and the little ant on the blade of grass I could feel. The birds, the dust, and the very noise were a part of me. Just then there was a car passing by at some distance; I was the driver, the engine, and the tyres; as the car went further away from me, I was going away from myself. I was in everything, or rather everything was in me, inanimate and animate, the mountain, the worm and all breathing things. All day long I remained in this happy condition.(later in the same account:)I was supremely happy, for I had seen. Nothing could ever be the same. I have drunk of the clear and pure waters at the source of the fountain of life and my thirst was appeased. Nevermore could I be thirsty. Never more could I be in darkness; I have seen the Light, I have touched compassion which heals all sorrow and suffering; it is not for myself, but for the world. I have stood on the mountain top and gazed at the mighty Beings. I have seen the glorious and healing Light. The fountain of Truth has been revealed to me and the darkness has been dispersed, Love in all its glory has intoxicated my heart; my heart can never be closed. I have drunk of the fountain of Joy and eternal Beauty. I am God-intoxicated.

This is one of the rare passages where Krishnamurti talked about himself, and is typical of how mystics describe their illumination, but it is in contrast to his later writings. The eternal and infinite are everywhere in his teachings and writings, perhaps with the greater emphasis on the ending of the passage of time, through the silence of the mind. Krishnamurti's embraciveness shows in his commitment to teaching, but also in a more relaxed attitude to the manifest world than shown by the previous two examples. Although he showed moderation in material things, he did like to dress smartly, and enjoyed sports-cars, his dogs, gardening, reading and films; his Indian instinct for renunciation only showing itself in a vague dismissal of human affairs such as war and politics, and a general distaste for the coarser sides of life. His embraciveness, though not of the type that is shown in full via positiva, showed another important aspect that we shall look at in the section on Nature Mysticism: a love of nature.

Teachings

It is a view held by some that Krishnamurti was enlightened, but a poor teacher, yet over the years of his teaching many thousands from all over the world attended his talks, attracted by his reputation and his words, and upon whom he had an enormous impact. One of these was Andrew Cohen, who claims that seeing Krishnamurti was one of the turning points in his spiritual development. The following passage, from The Only Revolution, gives the flavour of Krishnamurti's teachings:

Meditation is not the repetition of the word, nor the experiencing of a vision, nor the cultivating of silence. The bead and the word do quiet the chattering mind, but this is a form of self-hypnosis. You might as well take a pill.

Meditation is not wrapping yourself in a pattern of thought, in the enchantment of pleasure. Meditation has no beginning, and therefore it has no end.If you say: "I will begin today to control my thoughts, to sit quietly in the meditative posture, to breathe regularly" — then you are caught in the tricks with which one deceives oneself. Meditation is not a matter of being absorbed in some grandiose idea or image: that only quietens one for the moment, as a child absorbed by a toy is for the time being quiet. But as soon as the toy ceases to be of interest, the restlessness and the mischief begin again. Meditation is not the pursuit of an invisible path leading to some imagined bliss. The meditative mind is seeing — watching, listening, without the word, without comment, without opinion — attentive to the movement of life in all its relationships throughout the day. And at night, when the whole organism is at rest, the meditative mind has no dreams for it has been awake all day. It is only the indolent who have dreams; only the half-asleep who need the intimation of their own states. But as the mind watches, listens to the movement of life, the outer and the inner, to such a mind comes a silence that is not put together by thought.It is not a silence which the observer can experience. If he does experience it and recognise it, it is no longer silence. The silence of the meditative mind is not within borders of recognition, for this silence has no frontier. There is only silence — in which the space of division ceases.

(pages 19 - 20)

Like Ramana he does not recommend outward forms of self-discipline, but unlike him (and the others in this chapter) he is outspoken in his condemnation of all gurus, teachers, Masters and so on. His antipathy to the whole context of master and disciple may have been a result of his early training, but it placed him in a paradoxical position as a teacher, for he knew in his heart the same thing that Ramakrishna and Ramana Maharshi knew: association with him could change people. More than any of these masters he attempted to give the aspirant independence and self-reliance from the outset, but his own nature and background and the nature of seekers in general made this maddeningly difficult. In the following transcript of a conversation between Krishnamurti and the physicist (and friend) David Bohm Krishnamurti is the master and Bohm is the disciple, but the dialogue has the outward form of equality, or even an inversion of roles.

Bohm: You see, one of the things that often causes confusion is that, when you put it in terms of thought, its seems that you are presented with the fragments that are real, substantial reality. Then you have to see them, and nevertheless you say, as long as the fragments are there, there is no wholeness so that you can't see them. But that all comes back to the one thing, the one source.KRISHNAMURTI: I am sure, Sir, really serious people have asked this question. They have asked it and tried to find an answer through thought.Bohm: Yes, well it seems natural.KRISHNAMURTI: And they never saw that they were caught in thought.Bohm: That is always the trouble. Everybody gets into this trouble: that he seems to be looking at everything, at his problems, saying, "Those are my problems, I am looking." But that looking is only thinking, but it is confused with looking. This is one of the confusions that arises. If you say, don't think but look, that person feels he is already looking.KRISHNAMURTI: Quite. So you see, this question has arisen and they say, "All right, then I must control thought, I must subjugate thought and I must make my mind quiet so that it becomes whole, then I can see the parts, all the fragments, then I'll touch the source." But it is still the operation of thought all the time.Bohm: Yes, that means the operation of thought is unconscious for the most part and therefore one doesn't know it is going on. We may say consciously we have realised that all this has to be changed, it has to be different.

Bohm is certainly Krishnamurti's intellectual equal, and Krishnamurti directs the conversation in the detached scientific manner of the debating hall, but now picks up on Bohm's mention of the unconscious and moves the interaction into a different gestalt.

KRISHNAMURTI: But it is still going on unconsciously. So can you talk to my unconscious, knowing my conscious brain is going to resist you?

Krishnamurti puts Bohm in the position of the master, and himself in the position of the aspirant; at the same time he poses the question that all masters ask of themselves — how to reach the depth of their disciple. The disciple has come to the master, but they are going to resist him nevertheless: this is the ancient dilemma. The dialogue unfolds in a revealing way, Krishnamurti still speaking:

Because you are telling me something which is revolutionary, you are telling me something which shatters my whole house which I have built so carefully, and I won't listen to you — you follow? In my instinctive reactions I push you away. So you realise that and say, "Look, all right, talk to your unconscious. I am going to

talk to your unconscious and make that unconscious see that whatever movement it does is still within the field of time and so on." So your conscious mind is never in operation. When it operates it must inevitably either resist, or say, "I will accept"; therefore it creates a conflict in itself. So can you talk to my unconscious?Bohm: You can always ask how.KRISHNAMURTI: No, no. You can say to a friend, "Don't resist, don't think about it, but I am going to talk to you." "We two are communicating with each other without the conscious mind listening."Bohm: Yes.KRISHNAMURTI: I think this is what really takes place. When you were talking to me — I was noticing it — I was not listening to your words so much. I was listening to you. I was open to you, not your words, as you explained and so on. I said to myself, all right, leave all that, I am listening to you, not to the words which you use, but to the meaning, the inward quality of your feeling that you want to communicate to me.

Krishnamurti is not telling Bohm that he is ignoring him, the eminent physicist, but hinting at how Bohm should listen to Krishnamurti — not to the words but to the deeper meaning. They go on in this inverted fashion:

Bohm: I understand.KRISHNAMURTI: That changes me, not all this verbalisation. So can you talk to me about my idiocies, my illusions, my peculiar tendencies, without the conscious mind interfering and saying, "Please don't touch all this, leave me alone!" They have tried subliminal propaganda in advertising, so that whilst you don't really pay attention, your unconscious does, so you buy that particular soap! We are not doing that, it would be deadly. What I am saying is: don't listen to me with your conscious ears but listen to me with the ears that hear much deeper. That is how I listened to you this morning, because I am terribly interested in the source, as your are. You follow, Sir? I am really interested in that one thing. All this is the explicable, easily understood — but to come to that thing together, feel it together! You follow? I think that is the way to break a conditioning, a habit, an image which has been cultivated. You talk about it at a level where the conscious mind is not totally interested. It sounds silly but you understand what I mean?Say for instance I have a conditioning; you can point it out a dozen times, argue, show the fallacy of it, the stupidity — but I still go on. I resist, I say what it should be, what shall I do in this world otherwise, and all the rest of it. But you see the truth, that as long as the mind is conditioned there must be conflict. So you penetrate or push aside my resistance and get to that, get the unconscious to listen to you, because the unconscious is much more subtle, much quicker. It may be frightened, but it sees the danger of fear much quicker than the conscious mind does. As when I was walking in California high in the mountains: I was looking at birds and trees and watching, and I hear a rattle and I jumped. It was the unconscious that made the body jump; I saw the rattler when I jumped, it was two or three feet away, it could have struck me very easily. If the conscious brain had been operating it would have taken several seconds.Bohm: To reach the unconscious you have to have an action which doesn't directly appeal to the conscious.KRISHNAMURTI: Yes. That is affection, that is love. When you talk to my waking consciousness, it is hard, clever, subtle, brittle. And you penetrate that, penetrate it with your look, with your affection, with all the feeling you have. That operates, not anything else.

This is a rare admission by Krishnamurti (and his attempt to disguise it does not fool us) that he is the guru, teacher, master, or guide, and that the master operates through love regardless of whether he teaches awareness, self-enquiry, or devotion.

Commentary

Krishnamurti is one of the greatest Indian Masters to teach in the West. While Vivekananda in 1891 was the first to establish Indian teachings on American soil (Paramahansa Yogananda following some thirty years later in his footsteps) Krishnamurti disassociated himself with the spiritual heritage of his birth. He was a gentle iconoclast, in that he simply ignored Indian spiritual traditions rather then attempting to destroy them. He was however fiercely outspoken against the guru principle, and this message found a sympathetic hearing in the West. Ironically, as we have seen, his life's work and very mode of interaction with aspirants is that of the guru. We see a classical problem in the development of any sphere of human activity: once a process that requires trust and vulnerability is abused in a particular case the very process is denied in the general. Intellectually Krishnamurti may have found a way to circumvent the master/disciple relationship, but the ancient Indian self-confidence, as found in the life of the Buddha onwards, asserts itself time and again.

What Krishnamurti taught however is classical non-dualism. It is a simple and beautiful jnani teaching, made all the purer considering the occult overtones of his early training, which he jettisoned in their

entirety. In contrast to his approximate contemporary and temperamantal opposite, G.I.Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti emphasised that the deep moments come unasked for, without any method of preparation or programme of spiritual 'work'. For Krishnamurti, though he may have not used the word, it was a matter of grace. Krishnamurti was not a renunciate like Maharshi or Ramakrishna, but neither did he participate in ordinary life in the way that Douglas Harding did (involving military life, married life, and career as architect). Krishnamurti's life was always cocooned by the organisations surrounding him, so after his rather innocent childhood he had little contact with ordinary life. Hence we find in him a certain remoteness, perhaps contributed to by the tragic loss of his younger brother, a shock that affected him profoundly. What separates Krishnamurti from Ramana and Ramakrishna however is an unusual love for Nature. Krishnamurti was no optimist about the world, but his love of landscape, plants, and animals was highly developed, and found expression in some of the most beautiful descriptive prose to be found anywhere. Although Krishnamurti could not be described as a full Nature mystic, his Nature writings make a great contribution to its understanding (see section on Nature Mysticism).

'Krishnamurti taught a classical non-dualism, a simple and beautiful jnani teaching. The same aesthetic sensibility that gave Krishnamurti the eye and temperament to see the exquisite beauty in Nature, made him wince at the sometimes coarse and brutal nature of Man, a problem at the heart of via positiva.'

If it is clear the Krishnamurti is a great jnani, how are we to understand the balance of via positiva and via negativa in his life and teachings? He was not optimistic about the human condition, never married, and did not easily engage with the man in the street or in good-natured rustabout, yet in according to his own taste enjoyed many of the good things in life. In his teachings he did not advocate renunciation, so it would not be right to say that via negativa was directly part of his vision, but neither did he construct an elegant understanding of the nature of the manifest world, as Harding did, to balance the inner silence and space that he advocated. Where Krishnamurti does take a large stride on the via positiva is entirely in connection with Nature, and this aspect of his teaching is an essential but neglected part of his unique contribution. We also gain an insight into the basis of Nature Mysticism, that it partly derives from an aesthetic sensibility. One could say that it was the same aesthetic sensibility that gave Krishnamurti the eye and temperament to see the exquisite beauty in Nature (and we are lucky indeed that he combined this with no mean gift as a writer), as made him wince at the sometimes coarse and brutal nature of Man. This conundrum is at the heart of the problem of via positiva.

 

 Walt Whitman 

Life

Whitman was born in 1819 in Long Island, USA, making him historically the earliest of the spiritual Masters so far discussed in this 'Masters' section. His mother was a Quaker and his father a carpenter (a fact sometimes alluded to in Christ-comparisons). Whitman had only a simple education, but became a teacher, a printer's assistant, then editor of various newspapers, and writer of prose and poetry. His mother's Quaker influence, and the natural surroundings of Long Island were undoubted influences on him, but his evolution into the writer of the masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, is unchartable. In the 1984 preface to Gay Wilson Allen's critical biography Allen considers that the secret of this transformation during his early thirties has eluded all the biographers. Whitman's instinct for writing led him to publish numerous articles, and some early novels, all of which were so eclipsed by his Leaves that none remain in print today, and are universally considered mediocre. However for Whitman's friend, disciple, and biographer, Richard Maurice Bucke, the explanation of the transformation was simple : Whitman had entered 'cosmic consciousness'. This was Bucke's term for moksha, liberation or enlightenment.

Whitman's habit of mixing with the ordinary folk of Long Island, Manhattan, or wherever he was, gave him the subject matter and broad appeal that the more literary-circle types lacked. He mingled with workmen and took pleasure in doing their work with or for them, in a way that we would find very odd today, with our regimented and bureaucratic world of qualifications and identity passes. He liked to steer the vessels of friendly captains in Brooklyn harbour, but gave up eventually when he nearly caused an accident. He was particularly fond of the Broadway stage[coach] drivers, as he found them 'uncommonly talented' with their horses in the most difficult of thoroughways, and would join them up on the box — he spent the

whole of a winter in the 1850s driving a stage for a sick driver, so that the driver 'might lie without starving his family.' Towards the end of the 1850s he was a frequent visitor to the New York Hospital where he looked after disabled drivers. Leaves of Grass brought him notoriety and fame, and through its publication he later met some of the literary notables of his age: Emerson, Thoreau, and Oscar Wilde. In 1861, when Whitman was forty-two, the American Civil War broke out, and Whitman's brother George joined up; he was injured at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Walter travelled to be with him. He spent time with the wounded, comforting the injured and dying young soldiers, and also spent much of his spare income (which was small in the first place) on treats for them. At Fredericksburg the field hospitals consisted of shabby tents, where the wounded were lucky if the blankets they lay on had a layer of leaves or grass between them and the hard ground. He not only tended to the wounded but mixed with the soldiers in the camp in his usual informal way and commented that he found himself 'always well used'. A correspondent of the New York Herald wrote this about Whitman's ministrations:

I first heard of him among the sufferers on the Peninsula after a battle there. Subsequently I saw him, time and again, in the Washington hospitals, or wending his way there, with a basket or haversack on his arm, and the strength of beneficience suffusing his face. His devotion surpassed the devotion of woman. It would take a volume to tell of his kindness, tenderness, and thoughtfulness.

Never shall I forget one night when I accompanied him on his rounds through a hospital filled with those wounded young Americans whose heroisms he has been sung in deathless numbers. There were three rows of cots, and each cot bore its man. When he appeared, in passing along, there was a smile of affection and welcome on every face, however wan, and his presence seemed to light up the place as it might be lighted by the presence of the God of Love. From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous tones or whispers; they embraced him; they touched his hand; they gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of cheer; for another he wrote a letter home; to others he gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, a pipe and tobacco, a sheet of paper or a postage-stamp, all of which and many other things were in his capacious haversack. From another he would receive a dying message for mother, wife, or sweetheart; for another he would promise to go an errand; to another, some special friend very low, he would give a manly farewell kiss. He did the things for them no nurse or doctor could do, and he seemed to leave a benediction at every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for hours in the hospital that night before he left it, and, as he took his way toward the door, you could hear the voices of many a stricken hero calling, 'Walt, Walt, Walt! come again! come again!'

Whitman was greatly affected by these experiences, as the following comments in letters to his mother showed:

Mother, I have real pride in telling you that I have the consciousness of saving quite a number of lives by keeping the men from giving up, and being a good deal with them. The men say it is so, and the doctors say it is so; and I will candidly confess I can see it is true, though I say it myself. I know you will like to hear it, mother so I tell you.

In a later letter he says:

Nothing of ordinary misfortune seems as it used to, and death itself has lost all its terrors; I have seen so many cases in which it was so welcome and such a relief.

In 1865 he was appointed as a clerk in the Department of the Interior, only to be dismissed shortly afterwards when it was discovered that he was the author of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's friend William Douglas O'Connor published his defence of Whitman and attacked the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, for dismissing him (the pamphlet may have been the first time that the epithet 'The Good Grey Poet' was associated with Whitman). Secretary Harman of the State Department had sacked Whitman from his recent appointment as a clerk for "being the author of an indecent book", and went so far as to say that even if the President had ordered it he would not reinstate him. Bucke reported that a friend had been with Abraham Lincoln when Whitman passed outside the window of the East Room at the White House and described Lincoln's assessment of Whitman as follows.

The President asked who he was, and was told that it was Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass. 'Whitman "went by quite slow, with his hands in the breast pockets of his overcoat, a sizeable felt hat on, and his head pretty well up."' The President, 'says nothing, but took a good look until Walt Whitman was quite by. Then he says — (I can't give you his way of saying it but it was quite emphatic and odd) — "Well, he looks like a man." He said it pretty loud, but in a sort of absent way, and with the emphasis on the

words I have underscored.'

Whitman in turn had great respect for the President and on his assassination in April 1865 wrote 'When Lilacs Last in the dooryard Bloom'd', a great elegy for the dead man, and included it amongst a series of poems in the section of Leaves called 'Memories of President Lincoln'.

In 1868 an edited version of Leaves was published in England by William Michael Rossetti. The was read by Anne Gilchrist, widow of Alexander Gilchrist (the biographer of William Blake), who then received the unexpurgated version and becomes one of its champions, leading her to visit Whitman in 1876. Meanwhile, in 1873, and at the age of only 54 Whitman suffered his first paralytic stroke, leaving him lame. His mother died in the same year, and Whitman was now far from the peak of health and good cheer that he described in 'Song of Myself'. He visited Emerson on his sickbed in 1881, a year before Emerson's death, and in 1882 met Oscar Wilde. In 1883, Richard Maurice Bucke, by now a close friend of Whitman's, published his biography, which included many letters and articles from both hostile and friendly press. In 1884 Whitman was finally able to buy his own house in Mickle Street in Camden, from profits made from Leaves. He lived there until his death in 1892, known to all as the 'Sage of Mickle Street'. It was four years before his death that a second stroke rendered him, at the age of 73, almost immobile, though he continued to receive a stream of visitors, many of them writers.

Teachings

It is an almost entirely novel proposition that Walt Whitman was a great spiritual teacher, and a more detailed argument is presented elsewhere. The interest in Whitman is usually for his masterful and daring poetry (considering the Victorian prudishness that prevailed in educated society of the time), as literary father to the Beat Generation writers and poets, and as possible homosexual. That he was a great spiritual teacher was seen by only a few of his contemporaries, and Richard Maurice Bucke's analysis of him as such was dismissed by the scholars of religion. Two Hindu scholars in the nineteen sixties and seventies, V.K.Chari and O.K.Nambiar, provided analyses of Whitman in a Vedantic context, but their work had little impact in the West.

It seems from a comment made by a British friend of Whitman, Edward Carpenter, that Whitman made a deliberate effort in his Leaves of Grass to hide his spiritual message. Edward Carpenter was an English social reformer and prolific writer who visited Whitman twice, once in 1877 and once in 1886. He recorded his first impressions in Days With Walt Whitman.

Meanwhile in that first ten minutes I was becoming conscious of an impression which subsequently grew even more marked — the impression, namely, of an immense vista or background to his personality. If I had thought before (and I do not know that I had) that Whitman was eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first interview produced quite a contrary effect. No one could be more considerate, I may almost say courteous; no one could have more simplicity of manner and freedom from egotistic wrigglings; and I never met anyone who gave me more the impression of knowing what he was doing than he did. Yet away and beyond all this I was aware of a certain radiant power in him, a large benign affluence and inclusiveness, as of the sun, which filled out the place where he was — yet with something of reserve and sadness in it too, and a sense of remoteness and inaccessibility.

Whitman gives us an insight into the spiritual message hidden in Leaves in this conversation with Edward Carpenter (Whitman is talking first).

"What lies behind Leaves of Grass is something that few, very few, only one here and there, perhaps oftenest women, are at all in a position to seize. It lies behind almost every line but concealed, studiedly concealed; some passages left purposely obscure. There is something in my nature furtive, like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing 'Leaves of Grass.' Sloane Kennedy calls me 'artful' — which about hits the mark. I think there are truths which it is necessary to envelop or wrap up." I [Carpenter] replied that all through history the old mysteries, or whatever they may have been called, had been held back; and added that probably we had something yet to learn from India in these matters. W.: "I do not myself think there is anything more to come from that source; we must rather look to modern science to open the way. Time alone can absolutely test my poems or any one's. Personally, I think that the 'something' is more present in some of my small later poems than in the 'Song of Myself'.

Where then is the clear evidence that Whitman had a spiritual teaching? This extract is perhaps the best clue yet:

For your life adhere to me, (I may have to be persuaded many times before I consent to give myself really to you, but what of that? Must not Nature be persuaded many times?)

No dainty dolce affettuoso I, Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived, To be wrestled with as I pass for the solid prizes of the universe, For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them. (Starting from Paumanok, v. 15)

Whitman presents himself as spiritual teacher here, reminiscent to us perhaps of a Zen Master, or even G.I.Gurdjieff, though Whitman would have had no knowledge of either. He is not just claiming the he possesses the 'solid prizes of the Universe' (which we translate as Self-Realisation, moksha, liberation or nirvana), but that he can 'afford it' to those that persevere. The reader may well find that such an interpretation of these lines no more than wishful thinking, but the evidence (which cannot be presented in full here) is overwhelming once one takes into account many similar hints in Leaves and the accounts from Whitman's contemporaries (mostly out of print now).

Richard Maurice Bucke for example writes, in the context of the world's religious books:

Leaves of Grass is such a book. What the Vedas were to Brahmanism, the Law and the Prophets to Judaism, the Avesta and Zend to Zoroastrianism, the Kings to Confucianism and Taoism, the Pitikas to Buddhism, the Gospels and Pauline writings to Christianity, the Quran to Mohameddanism, will Leaves of Grass be to the future of American civilisation. Those were all Gospels, they all brought good news to man, fitting his case at the period, each in its way and degree. They were all "hard sayings" and the rankest heresy at first, just as Leaves of Grass is now. By and by it too will be received, and in the course of a few hundred years, more or less, do its work and become commonplace like the rest. Then new Gospels will be written upon a still higher plane. In the mean time Leaves of Grass is the bible of Democracy, containing the highest exemplar of life yet furnished, and suited to the present age and America.

John Burroughs found that Whitman was "swayed by two or three great passions, and the chief of these was doubtless his religious passion." He then goes on to say, "Now there is no trace of this [traditional] religion in Whitman, and it does not seem to have left any shadow upon him. Ecclesiasticism is dead; he clears the ground for a new growth. To the priests he says: "Your day is done."" What does Burroughs think that Whitman puts in the place of Ecclesiasticism? He notes that for Whitman, "any glimpse of the farm, the shop, the household — any bit of real life, anything that carried the flavour and quality of concrete reality — was very welcome to him!" Whitman himself comments in 'Song of Myself':

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, For I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name, And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

Burroughs concluded that "In the past this ideal was found in the supernatural; for us and the future democratic ages, it must be found in the natural, in the now and here." On Whitman's deathbed Burroughs mused that "It is the face of an aged loving child. As I looked, it was with the reflection that, during an acquaintance of thirty-six years, I never heard from those lips a word of irritation, or depreciation of any being. I do not believe that Buddha, of whom he appeared an avatar, was more gentle to all men, women, children, and living things." There is not space here to present the full case for

Whitman as guru, but the testimony of those that knew him, comparisons to Christ and the Buddha, and the Hindu claim of Whitman as Vedantist should leave the reader with at least an open possibility.

Commentary

Whitman died just around the time that Vivekananda came to the USA, but they never met. How then did Whitman conclude that there was 'nothing more to come from that source [India]?' Perhaps his intuition told him that he personally had made one of the greatest contributions to the spiritual life of humanity, one that would really include all that India had to offer, but take it into a new, modern world, one that had to make more than just an accommodation with science and democracy, but celebrated it. Ramana Maharshi, Ramakrishna and Krishnamurti were all from India and as we have seen their contributions are profound, but in their different ways they were the fulfilment of their tradition rather than a departure.Whitman's teachings, once they are unearthed from its secular, poetical and old-fashioned text, Leaves of Grass, are extraordinary, and help us engage with all the issues central to this site. They are the most complete vision of a jnani via positiva path yet put forward. Perhaps their time is only now coming, and may prove to be the greatest contribution of America yet to the world.

'Whitman not only provides the source material for any serious study of via positiva, but also challenges us to redefine the boundaries between secular and spiritual. His is the greatest contribution to the spiritual life yet to come from America.'

There is not space here to comment on the Hindu interpretation of Whitman, which includes comparisons with Upanishadic and Vedantic themes, and with the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. What is of importance to us is a vision of an inclusiveness and an embraciveness that can only be achieved through a transcendence of the normal sense of self, in other words an epitome of via positiva. To find no fault in any manifest thing or in its adjuncts, to include women in every breath that talks of men, and to have come completely to terms with death, may not sound like the culmination of a spiritual path to everyone. Nor would everyone be convinced that Whitman had transcended 'ego', for the brashness of his poems, even the very title of 'Song of Myself' can ring false to those convinced that religion means renunciation. (Even as sensitive a thinker as D.H.Lawrence complained that Whitman's soul had 'leaked out into the universe', showing that he understood Whitman not one jot.) Most would find Whitman's claim to be Christ's equal, quietly made in a poem tucked away in Leaves, to be outrageous. But as one peruses his poems, and the testimonies of his contemporaries, one gradually finds a religiousness that is convincing and powerful — but simply lacking in 'Ecclesiasticism', that is any remnant of traditional religion.

Whitman not only provides the source material for any serious study of via positiva, but also challenges us to redefine the boundaries between secular and spiritual. His ministrations in the hospitals of Washington were not carried out as a Christian, but as a natural response from his expanded sense of self. His love of the ordinary men and women of America was not in order to proselytise, but because he saw the divine in them and could reflect that back to those that could see it. Whitman was not an ordinary man, but his love of the ordinary was the basis of his spiritual message, and brings a whole new dimension to our understanding of jnani.

Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)

Life

Osho was born in 1931 to a Jain family as Rajneesh Chandra Mohan in Kuchwara, a town in central India. He claims to have waited 800 years to find parents of sufficient purity for him to take human birth, having already sought enlightenment at the feet of many great Masters in previous lives. (Whatever the merits of this claim it is of interest to see that the parents of great Masters may be significant, for example both parents of Ramakrishna had a presentiment of his spiritual greatness, as did the mother of Krishnamurti, to say nothing of Mary mother of Jesus). As a child Osho was unruly and adventurous. His main early influence was his beloved grandfather, whose death was a terrible blow to the young child. Characteristic of the young Osho's temperament was his leadership of a gang of boys, inspiring them with daredevil acts such as diving from great heights into rivers and whirlpools, or from a bridge guarded by a

policeman to prevent suicides. Osho was self-confident and sometimes aggressive, particularly if he thought that his rights had been ignored.

Despite a rather basic early schooling Osho studied philosophy at Jabalpur University, where he received his BA degree in 1955, and where he later taught. He also attended the University of Saugar and obtained an MA in 1957. He taught until the force of his spiritual illuminations led him to the life of spiritual Master. Osho claims that every seven years he went through a spiritual crisis, the first being on the loss of his grandfather, and the second at the age of fourteen when he felt, somewhat like Ramana, that he was going to die. Taking leave from school for a few days he found an almost deserted temple in the mountains and laid down, as if to die, or to be reborn in some as yet unknown way. Eventually a snake made its way over his body, and Osho thought that this would be the turning point : life or death. The snake passed on its way and the youth felt that a new life had been given him. His interest in all things spiritual continued and in 1953 at the age of twenty-one after seven days of intensive spiritual search he was enlightened under a tree in a local park.

Osho began an intensive teaching itinerary, commenting once that he had been his own 'John the Baptist' to prepare India for his later teachings. This period of exhausting travel ended when he settled firstly in Bombay and then in Koragaon Park in Pune (Poona), where an ashram was founded around him, and he acquired the honorifics 'Bhagwan' and 'Shree'. As Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh he taught to ever-increasing crowds of followers, initiating those who chose it into 'neo-sannyas', which involved the wearing of orange robes and a 'mala' or necklace bearing his picture, and the taking of an Indian name. Despite his provocative teachings he had a significant number of Indian followers, but the bulk of his disciples were Westerners.

Before long he had an international following with 'Rajneesh Centres' in many major cities around the world, where books and tapes were sold and visitors could participate in a number of the meditations he had devised, many of which included dancing or chaotic movement and breathing. Osho had little interest or patience in convention and was under pressure from the Indian government for tax irregularities. In 1981 he moved his commune to a large ranch bought for the ashram in Oregon USA, and proceeded to create an alternative society partially based on the Israeli kibbutz system. They turned the unproductive ranch into fertile farmland, combining an intense spiritual practice with long hours of manual labour. As the project grew the community wanted to incorporate their settlement as a city, a move that alarmed local residents, and hostilities grew between the two communities. The ashram leader, a woman called Ma Anand Sheela, was eventually accused of plotting to poison local residents, interfering with the democratic process and even of plotting to kill the district attorney. Osho (as he had become known in this period) had spent some years in silence, so it is debatable as to his role in the events that led to the collapse of the commune, but he was arrested and charged with falsely arranging marriages. While in prison Osho claims that he was poisoned by the authorities with thallium, and on his eventual deportation and return to India his health deteriorated. He died in 1990, at the age of 59, and in intense pain. The ashram claim that his early death was due to thallium poisoning, citing similarities with the mysterious death of a anti-nuclear civil rights campaigner who had been imprisoned in the same jail in the US as Osho.

Teachings

Osho's teachings centred on awareness and a love of life. For many years he spoke for one and a half hours a day, and while he was in India he alternated on a monthly basis between the English and Hindi languages. The transcripts of his talks appear in almost five hundred volumes, which include book series on the great spiritual teachers of the world. His ten-volume translation and commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are typical of his early discourses, combining his own translation from the Sanskrit original with lengthy commentary, interspersed with jokes. The breadth of his reading was remarkable, perhaps only approached by Douglas Harding amongst the Masters presented here (as we saw Krishnamurti took no interest at all in the teachings of others, and is reputed to have read mainly detective novels). Osho's eclecticism gave him a universality of mind, but makes it hard to pin down his own teachings.

Awareness is a common theme however, in particular the 'double-edged arrow of awareness' that G.I.Gurdjieff taught (or 'double-barbed' as Douglas Harding called it, quite independently). Osho was greatly influenced by Gurdjieff in his approach to teaching, believing that the mind-feeling-body continuum benefited from 'shocks' that helped stimulate awareness and wake up the dormant spiritual side. These ideas were put into practice in a series of meditations that Osho devised, and in workshops or 'groups' that became the mainstay of practice for visitors to the ashram and centres round the world. Osho

adopted many psychotherapeutic techniques that were in vogue in the seventies, and, in keeping with the doctrines of sexual liberation of that time, encouraged sexual experimentation as part of spiritual practice. He drew heavily on Hindu and Buddhist Tantric sources for guidance on the use of sex in the pursuit of transcendence, and it is for this that he is mainly infamous now. Few seemed to have noticed how often he spoke of transcending sex, implicit for example in the title one of his early books From Sex to Superconsciousness. His approach was to go through sex rather than suppress it, but his goal was nevertheless its transcendence.

Osho also emphasised the master/disciple relationship, which he saw as a kind of love affair. He thought it unlikely that an aspirant could gain enlightenment from his discourses in printed form (however insightful they may have been), often stressing that it was his presence, or the 'silence between the words' where the real work took place. This was a quite traditional view of the role of guru, in the East at least, but for many of his Western followers it may have been their first exposure to the idea.His embrace of the breadth of life, in opposition to traditional views of renunciation, found a simple formula in his three 'M's --- Music, Mathematics, and Meditation, standing respectively for the arts, science/technology, and the spiritual. He felt that to neglect any one of these three areas was to become narrow or even one-dimensional, and in the modern era it was absurd to turn one's back on the delight and creativity of the arts, or the knowledge and living standards that science and technology could bring. Accordingly, life in the ashram involved the arts, the creation of beautiful buildings and gardens, and the use of modern technology where appropriate. For Osho, transcendence meant to embrace everything that life had to offer, rather than to shut down the senses and dull the mind.

Commentary

Osho was an iconoclast. While Krishnamurti ignored Indian spiritual traditions (and all other spiritual traditions for that matter), and spoke out against the guru principle, he did not otherwise set out to destroy tradition. In contrast Osho was convinced that the ancient spiritual traditions of India (in particular) were in themselves an obstacle to spiritual progress. His main target was the concept of renunciation, which he saw as responsible not only for the material poverty of India, but for the serious, if not rather grim, face of religion. His vision of the spiritual life was that it should be light, joyous and full of humour, rather than serious, sorrowful and moralising. Although he had immense respect for Ramana Maharshi and Sri Ramakrishna, he saw their renunciative stance as part of a past that should be overthrown, and his chosen method was to take the ancient symbol of renunciation, the ochre robe, and turn it into a symbol of the 'new man'. His followers, called 'neo-sannyasins', were to retain the inner spiritual life of the renunciate, but embrace and celebrate every aspect of the physical life, including sex. His target was conventional Hindu society, and the orange-robed Westerners flaunting their sexual and material wealth achieved his purpose of shocking conservative Hindus. His own symbolic revolt against renunciation included the wearing of expensive clothes and watches, and the gradual accumulation of 92 Rolls-Royces.

The events in Oregon leading to the expulsion of the movement and Osho's death are considered by many to undermine or negate anything of value in Osho's teachings. A neutral and critical appraisal of Osho's legacy is long overdue, as most commentators seem to have drawn on a single book for negative material, The God Who Failed, by Hugh Milne. Such an appraisal will have to wait, but what is of importance here is the implication of Osho's experiment for via positiva.

Osho attempted a revolution in spiritual thinking, to integrate the spirituality of a Ramana or Ramakrishna, with a love of life. He called his ideal composite 'Zorba the Buddha' after a novel about a Greek man with an exuberant lifestyle. As such it is worthy of consideration, all the more because Osho also recognised the importance of the jnani / bhakti distinction. While Whitman is the great guru of via positiva, he has been largely ignored, and even Osho was not aware of his significance. Harding's via positiva is neutral about the world, which is there mainly to demonstrate our 'original face' or true nature. Krishnamurti saw the beauty of the natural world, perhaps mainly in an aesthetic sense, but Osho went much further in advocating a love of life in all its ramifications. The fact that his experiment 'failed' in the eyes of most commentators has left the world community of spiritual seekers wary of such an approach and more likely to succumb again to scepticism about life itself. This can be seen in the teachings of Andrew Cohen for example, whose emphasis on purity and moral values is a reaction to many of the teachers of the 1970s, who, like Osho, were experimenting with sexual openness and counter-culture ideas.

'Given that many of Osho's followers seemed to have learned from him only the least attractive of his qualities, noticeably a contempt

for tradition and the democratic process, the disaster in Oregon was inevitable. The real loss is the devaluing of his teachings, which, as found in his books, audio tapes, or videos, are a treasure-trove of spiritual insight.'

Osho's via positiva is contradictory or paradoxical however. In Oregon he spent several years in complete silence, one of the marks of the renunciative life he so criticised. He also lived a very simple life, in a small room, ate a vegetarian diet, and had no legal title to any ashram property or possessions. Paradox was part of his teachings, and he did not encourage attempts to distil his often contradictory remarks spread over some 500 volumes into a coherent and concise system of thought. He liked to enter deeply into the teachings of whoever his discourses focused on, and said that his ability to become a conduit for their teachings inevitably meant that there would be contradictions. There were common themes however, one being that the inner transformation of the individual from a divided and fearful personality into an enlightened being grounded in awareness could be described as the transition from an experience of the world as a chaos to the vision of it as a cosmos. This is a valuable clue to the via positiva, that its hallmark is a perception of the manifest world as profoundly and beautifully ordered. In contrast most beginners on the spiritual path are drawn to explore religious teachings because they feel that life is a chaos.

There is no doubt however that Osho left chaos behind him. He was influenced by G.I.Gurdjieff in his teaching methods, which included techniques for deliberately creating confusion in the disciple's life and mind in order to allow a new and more spontaneous order to arise. What he failed to take from Gurdjieff however was an extreme selectivity of pupil, allowing instead individuals with a range of vulnerabilities and personal problems to be exposed to his methods, often through senior ashram members, who were not necessarily gifted teachers. The desire to reach a large number of people also permitted power-hungry individuals to take control of the community. Given that many of his followers only seemed to have learned from him the least attractive of his qualities, noticeably a contempt for tradition and the democratic process, the disaster in Oregon was inevitable. The real loss is the devaluing of his teachings, which, as found in his books, audio tapes, or videos, are a treasure-trove of spiritual insight.

Osho does not deserve to be dismissed. His discourses are instructive in the positive sense as his mistakes are in the negative sense. Any new spiritual community is capable of the errors of Oregon. This is closely related to the unfortunate instinct of seekers to latch onto the apocalyptic and paranoid components of a teaching, even when these comprise a very small part, as in Osho's case.

G.I.Gurdjieff

Life

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol in Russian Armenia in 1866, though there are doubts about the precise date. He died in Paris in 1949. The details of his early life are drawn mainly from his autobiographical sketches which are reputed to be a little 'impressionistic'. There is also a missing period of about twenty years from 1887 to 1907, which would include his early thirties, the age where the transformation of an individual to an enlightened Master is most common. Gurdjieff came to fame in Paris in the 1920s as a spiritual teacher, though this was after adventures and teachings in Moscow, Essentuki and Tbilisi. Although these adventures were real enough, Gurdjieff created a mythic personality for himself which led to the occasional charge of charlatanry. Apart from the controversial nature of his life and teachings, Gurdjieff's spiritual history is unusual for the way that it involved important figures in the spiritual life of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. These include P.D.Ouspensky (philosopher and author of 'Tertium Organum', J.G.Bennett (author and founder of many spiritual movements in Britain), Thomas de Hartmann (composer), A.R.Orage (editor of New Age in the 1920s) and many other writers, artists and thinkers of his time.

Gurdjieff travelled extensively in the first part of his life, and always claimed that his teachings derived from contact with Masters in remote and hidden parts of the middle and far East, including Iraq and Tibet. These sources have never been conclusively traced but show strong Sufi influences. His emergence as a spiritual teacher took place in Russia before the first world war, where he met some of his best known

pupils including Ouspensky and the de Hartmanns. He also worked on his first production, The Struggle of the Magicians, indicative of his life-long interest in dance and drama as a vehicle for spiritual teachings. When war broke out he undertook hazardous journeys with his first group of disciples, settling in Tbilisi (capital of Georgia), where the group immediately staged new productions of the Sacred Dances. This involved the contribution of dance teacher Madame de Salzmann, who continued the work long past Gurdjieff's death, and who can be seen instructing pupils in films of the Dances, including the motion picture 'Meetings with Remarkable Men.'

In Tbilisi Gurdjieff set up the first 'Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man', but the difficult political situation in Georgia prompted a move to Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1920. In 1921 he moved to Germany, and briefly visited London the following year, resulting in allegiance from many of Ouspensky's prominent pupils, including A.R.Orage. In 1922 he settled in Paris, and acquired the Prieuré at Fontainebleau-Avon. One of his early and most famous guests was the terminally ill Katherine Mansfield, whose death there in 1923 brought notoriety to Gurdjieff. The Prieuré became the powerhouse of Gurdjieff's mission for ten years, in which time he developed his teaching methods and wrote Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson, a monumental and deliberately obscure exposition of his teachings. An unsettled period followed the closure of the Prieuré in 1933, though Gurdjieff continued with trips he had been making to the USA, which had brought him many new pupils. During the second world war Gurdjieff stayed in Paris with a shifting constellation of pupils. He made one last trip to America after the war but despite various suggestions of new locales, he remained in Paris until his death in 1949.

Many groups continued his 'work' in different ways after his death, through Jeanne de Salzmann, P.D.Ouspensky, J.G.Bennet and many others.

Teachings

The essence of Gurdjieff's teachings were that man needed to work on himself to make spiritual progress. This work involved all levels of the human being, notably body, emotions and mind, to bring them into harmony with each other and the cosmic purpose of man. To emphasise the three-way split of the human entity he termed man a 'three-brained being', a phrase typical of his unusual nomenclature. He taught that there were three traditional spiritual methods, each corresponding to each 'brain'; the way of the fakir (body), the way of the monk (heart), and the way of the yogi (mind). By working on the harmonious development of all three components at the same time he was effectively introducing a 'fourth way'.

The main obstacle to progress, according to Gurdjieff, was the mechanical nature of contemporary man, and his inability to carry anything through. His dual aim then was to break through the habitual behaviour of his pupils and at the same time develop in them the will power to carry out their spiritual development. This meant a fearsome regime of work, both manual labour around the Prieuré, and artistic endeavour through the Sacred Dances. The situations thus created were all used by Gurdjieff to expose his pupils' mechanical behaviour and weaknesses, and it is only through his immense charisma and benevolence that such an intensity was sustained.

On a more theoretical level, Gurdjieff held that man had no soul as such, and was merely blown here and there by fate. For the few who were prepared to undertake the 'work' it was possible for a real inner being to crystallise, and for a genuine and capable will to form. He taught that reinicarnation was only possible to such advanced souls, and that those who failed to create within them a centre would become 'food for the moon'. Beyond these basics he also created an immensely complex cosmology and science of vibrations, some of which undoubtedly had come from esoteric traditions, and some of which were his own invention. In 'Beelzebub' these ideas are elaborated on in a kind of science fiction allegory, but few claim to have read the entire work, let alone understand it. The obscurity of the teachings in 'Beelzebub' are in marked contrast to the directness of his other writings, which are more autobiographical.

Gurdjieff's real teaching was at a personal level. He adapted his persona to the exact needs of each pupil, providing them with the encouragement or 'shocks' he felt they needed. This capacity to perceive and react to the qualities of the individual were so marked that it was claimed that he could have an expression on one side of his face for one person, and another on the other side of his face for another person. This quality of Gurdjieff's teaching is in contrast to other great Masters such as Krishnamurti or the Buddha (as far as we can tell) who taught from their enlightened perspective and not according to their immediate audience. There is no doubt as well that despite Gurdjieff's immense physical strength and courage he had been deeply affected by war and its horrific consequences. In 1904 hehad witnessed the massacre of Tibetans by the British colonel Younghusband and his army, and mourned in particular the death of an illuminated lama. The first and second world wars both impinged on him directly and

indirectly with the overall result that his teachings reflected some pessimism about the human condition. It was the observation that men would kill others out of unconscious mechanical responses to principles such as 'patriotism' and 'loyalty' that probably led to his desire for a more conscious life. He found it himself and taught it in any way that he could for nearly fifty years.

Commentary

While Gurdjieff had the breadth of vision to recognise and distinguish the paths of the 'fakir, the monk, and the yogi', his outlook and teachings were effectively jnani. The emphasis on work and will alone make it a jnani teaching, and to reinforce this view we find no encouragement in the teachings to devotional practices. Although Gurdjieff was very selective about his pupils, he worked with them at the stage of development that he found them in. His temperament inclined him to find even the best of his pupils utterly deficient, so he good-naturedly referred to them as 'idiots', and a kind of ritual humiliation was common in his entourage. From the outside this could be seen as the worst kind of abuse that seekers subject themselves to from exploitative so-called Masters, but on closer examination we find Gurdjieff serving his community with every ounce of his energy, symbolised by his frequent gesture of cooking for them. Once it was realised that he directed every resource at his disposal, including mockery and obscuration, to the development of his pupils, the only response was a deep love for him. Despite that love, it has to be said, many fled from his 'work', though many also returned again. There was nothing easy in this master-disciple relationship.

We have already commented that Gurdjieff's methods were directed to men and women as he found them, and were partly based on a response to the terrible suffering he encountered as a result of war. He was no remote mystic on a mountain-top but engaged directly with his pupils and the world with an energy that was almost superhuman. His outrageous behaviour at times and his lack of Olympean aloofness could raise questions as to his status as enlightened Master. What then was the common ground with the other Masters in this section? The only answer that can really be given is not based on common doctrines that we may be able to isolate in the teachings so far presented, but in the raw presence of Gurdjieff as a being, and the response he aroused in genuine seekers. This can only be discovered by a patient and open-minded reading of the Gurdjieff literature, in particular all the first-hand accounts of him.

Of all the teachers in this section it is probably true that the transcendent is least obvious in Gurdjieff. According to the distinctions here, there are strong social and occult elements in his work. Many were attracted to him because they thought his movement could change the world for the better, and undoubtedly key figures such as Ouspensky and Bennett were greatly concerned with such ideas. Many also sought occult knowledge, which Gurdjieff had undeniably pursued in the monasteries of the East, and esotericists have much material to occupy them within the Gurdjieff teachings. Despite all this it is clear that the transcendence of the ego was Gurdjieff's goal, and where he found occult interests coinciding with impure motives he was very direct in his criticism. After a brief visit to the Prieuré by Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff merely commented: 'Him dirty inside.'

'The common ground with other enlightened Masters --- is not based on common doctrines that we may be able to isolate, but in the raw presence of Gurdjieff as a being. This can be discovered by a patient and open-minded reading of the Gurdjieff literature, in particular all the first-hand accounts of him'

It is instructive to examine Gurdjieff's life and teachings from the via positiva / via negativa dichotomy. First of all, his path is outlined in great detail for the beginning of the journey, with little said about what it means to arrive at its goal. This is consistent with Gurdjieff's somewhat pessimistic view of humanity's condition. But on examination it is clear that this path wherever it is delineated has no element of withdrawal in it. The spiritual life is to be lived as a direct engagement with the world, and the body not merely worked with but celebrated. Food and wine, relationships and social gatherings, festivals and performances, were all situations for spiritual development and all took on a particular form under Gurdjieff's direction. He personally shied away from nothing, and one of his life-long preoccupations was healing, which he engaged with wherever needed, using medicinal techniques gathered on his extensive travels. Although he worked in a very direct way to break the ego-identification, withdrawal from the world was not his instinct. We have to conclude that his path was jnani, via positiva.

The Buddha

Life

Unlike the Masters so far discussed, the Buddha is a figure from antiquity. The details of his life are uncertain for this reason, and also because histories in India were not recorded in the more factual way found in the West. As the founder of what is now a world religion comprising many different strands, his life has been the subject of an inevitable mythologising. The essential features of his life as far as we can tell include his birth as prince Siddhartha Gautama to the Sakya clan in India in the sixth century BCE; his leaving home to search for enlightenment; his attainment and subsequent bearing of the title 'Buddha'; and a period of about forty years of teaching as a wandering mendicant. He attracted a large following which he organised into a 'sangha' or spiritual community, the rules for which guide such communities to the present day.

Details of the Buddha's life are recorded in a haphazard way in a collection of texts known as the Pali canon, so-called because they were first written in that language. This is a vast collection of writings which were originally handed down orally, and scholars to this day are working on the relative authenticity of the different texts. The Pali canon is the basis of the Therevada tradition of Buddhism which claims to be closest to the Buddha's teachings (known as the Dhamma, or Dharma). A later offshoot, called the Mahayana, disputes this claim and recasts the teachings with a greater emphasis on elements such as compassion and emptiness, also introducing a host of deities confusingly called 'buddhas' which symbolise aspects of the teaching. Accounts of the Buddha in the Mahayana tend to be more symbolic, so scholars agree that an attempt at an historical portrait of the Buddha are better constructed from the Pali canon.

One aspect of the Buddha's personality that stands out in the Pali canon is the impact that he had on all those who came across him. According to the texts, they all exclaim something like the following after their conversion:

"Magnificent, Master Gotama! Magnificent, Master Gotama! Master Gotama has made the Dhamma clear in many ways, as though he were turning upright what had been overthrown, revealing what was hidden, showing the way to one who was lost, or holding up a lamp in the dark for those with eyesight to see forms. I go to Master Gotama for refuge and to the Dhamma and to the Sangha of bikkhus."

It is implausible that each new convert would recite such a formula, as it is that the men and women of the Elders' verses would all remember their past lives at the same point in their awakening, but despite these formalisms that dominate the texts there are many convincing dialogues and personal accounts to be found. One is left in no doubt that the Buddha's presence, force of personality, and skill in debate and metaphor had an extraordinary effect on his audience, and that many were inspired by him to attain the same heights of spiritual awareness.

The Buddha's teachings would probably have remained obscure as many other great teachers, but for the fact that they were adopted by King Asoka as the religion of his expanding empire one or two hundred years after the Buddha's death. Much like for Constantine or the founder of the Russian empire, there were a number of competing sects, any one of which could have been chosen by Asoka as a way of binding together territories containing many races and traditions. Asoka was impressed by the pacifism of the Buddha's message however, and in promoting Buddhism he made sure that this element was honoured. He also made sure that Buddhism adapted to local religious traditions, which had the historical effect of making the religion a very broad church indeed.

Teachings

The Buddha's teachings are represented in slightly different ways in the different traditions, but are the epitome of a teaching of transcendence. Thoughts, feelings and perceptions are to be transcended by knowing them as they arise, as they are present, and as they disappear. It is not entirely clear whether one's ties to sense pleasures are first to be cut so that the necessary awareness can arise, or whether by practising the necessary awareness the ties to the sense pleasures are cut. Either way all attachments to the world are transcended and one eventually enters the state of nirvana, the cessation of all becoming. The key issue for the Buddha in his own search, and in his subsequent teachings, seems to have been

that of impermanence. By recognising that all suffering arises from the impermanence of the material condition one is motivated to seek out the deathless, the stainless. This idea became enshrined as the Buddha's first Noble Truth.

The teachings of the Buddha are often represented in a systematic form, for example the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, and the three Jewels (the submission to the Buddha, his teachings and his community). Obviously, such a method of organising ideas helps in an oral transmission, but it is clear from the early texts that the Buddha himself taught in a more spontaneous and inventive way, as one would expect from an enlightened Master. A few examples from the Pali canon can illustrate this.

The Buddha would often join his monks and ask them about the topic of their discussion (he encouraged them to either keep silence or to discuss the Dhamma or teachings). In one example the monk Ananda replied that they were discussing the wonderful and marvellous attributes of the Tathagata (a term for the Buddha), and then recited to him the wonderful and marvellous details of the Buddha's own miraculous birth, to which the Buddha listened without interruption. When Ananda finished the Buddha replied:

'That being so, Ananda, remember this too as a wonderful and marvellous quality of the Tathagata: Here, Ananda, for the Tathagata feelings are known as they arise, as they are present, as they disappear; perceptions are known as they arise, as they are present, as they disappear; thoughts are known as they arise, as they are present, as they disappear. Remember this too, Ananda, as a wonderful and marvellous quality of the Tathagata.'

One can almost imagine a faint smile on the face of the Buddha as he politely listened to the recitation from Ananda, and then gently reminding the assembled monks that the cornerstone of his teaching had nothing to do with miracles of any kind other than that of awareness itself. Here is another fragment, a dialogue with a man called Magandiya whose curiosity is piqued by the Buddha's refusal of the offer of his daughter as a wife:

The Buddha: I do not say one attains 'purification' by view, tradition, knowledge, virtue or ritual, nor is it attained without view, tradition, knowledge, virtue or ritual. It is only taking these factors as the means and not grasping them as ends in themselves that one so attains and consequently does not crave for rebecoming.

Magandiya: If you do not say that 'purification' is not attained by view, tradition, knowledge, virtue and ritual nor by absence of these — it seems to me that your lore is nonsense, because some deem 'purification' is from view.

The Buddha: Because of your view you are continuously asking these questions. It is because you are obsessed with your preconceived notions that you are holding fast. From this you have not perceived the least sense: that is why you see this as nonsense.

This dialogue shows how the Buddha presents Magandiya with a paradox, which Magandiya finds to be a nonsense. The Buddha turns this accusation back on Magandiya with lighting speed, telling him that because of his preconceived notions Magandiya has not perceived the least sense. In fact 'right views' represents the first of the qualities of the Noble Eightfold Path, which, if taken literally would mean adopting Buddhist dogma in place of any other. The entire sutta (verse) from which this extract is taken shows the Buddha working at a more subtle level where the holding of any view is shown to be the obstacle.

It is also clear from the early texts that the Buddha was very focused in his teaching, allowing neither belief in other teachings nor adoption of existing practices of meditation or worship, such as those used by the Brahmin, Jain, or other religions of his time. Using our terminology it is abundantly clear that bhakti played no part in his thinking, or in the methods he taught his followers. The Buddha taught the purity of transcendence with no compromise for the individual's understanding or development, despite his initial concern that no-one would understand him. The lack of compromise may be partly due to his personality and background, but also suggests that transcendence in itself is a very simple thing, as the work of Douglas Harding demonstrates. The large number of men and women that attained enlightenment through the Buddha, if we are to believe the texts, is testimony to his power as a teacher.

Once the Buddha was gone the teachings quite naturally were subject to adaptation, and the most striking of these, particularly in the Mahayana tradition, is the introduction of devotional or bhakti elements. If, as we suggest, roughly half the population responds more directly to a jnani teaching, and the other half to a bhakti teaching, why was the Buddha so successful, given the narrowness of his doctrine? We can only argue that his very presence was the real key to his teaching, and that his example represents a strong case for the idea of transmission, and by implication for the guru principle itself.

Commentary

The Buddha represents the jnani ideal at its highest and can be seen as one of the world's earliest and greatest exponents of it. However, the pure jnani form of the Buddha's life and teachings soon became adulterated with bhakti elements, notably after Buddhism was adopted as the state religion for the empire of King Asoka. As a state religion it had to be accessible to all the people, and so the extremely abstract and difficult concepts of the jnani teaching often became symbolised as deities for worship. Buddhism as a religion, in our terminology, takes on the social dimension of the spiritual, but what is remarkable about it is that the transcendent goal is still presented as attainable by the individual. Buddhism absorbed nature religions (particularly in Tibet), and also typical polytheistic and monotheistic strands, but retains the transcendent, much as Hinduism does. Both these religions contrast with Christianity which rejects the ancient nature religions along with polytheism, but provides no transcendent possibilities for the individual. The fluid nature of the religions of the East, which can provide a wide range of spiritual contexts for the individual, will be compared with the narrower monotheism of the religions of the West in later sections.

But what of the Buddha as a great jnani Master? Building a portrait of him as a spiritual teacher by using the Pali canon is a form of spiritual archaeology, though the premise of this site is that we can use contemporary templates to do so. In fact there are many cameos within the Pali canon that show him making a spontaneous response to a question or situation, and these indicate a personality of great force and sensibility. If we compare this portrait to those we have for Ramana Maharshi and Krishnamurti we can make some interesting observations. Firstly, the Buddha is highly proactive in engaging with aspirants, using a kind of Socratic dialogue to bring them under his sway and into his sangha (community). His very first act as a teacher is to set himself above his five former companions in the spiritual life, though once his position is established he could be exquisitely courteous. The combination of a warrior-like directness and courtly sensibilities are quite consistent with his caste status and upbringing; in the same way Krishnamurti's more remote and aesthetic nature is consistent with his own Brahmin background. Although the Buddha effectively ignored the caste system, the position he assumed as spiritual leader was hierarchical and in keeping with a feudal era. Krishnamurti was doubly hampered in this respect, firstly by his own distaste for the very concept of spiritual Master, and secondly by the democratic sensibilities of the age he lived in. Hence, where the Buddha is direct, forceful and authoritative, Krishnamurti is roundabout, inverted and fragile. What they both share is an iconoclasm, not a destructive kind, but a complete unwillingness to acknowledge other teachers or traditions. Maharshi is then quite remarkable in this context because having the most spontaneous and unsought-after kind of illumination, he was quite happy to equate his firsthand authority with the teachings found in the traditions of his culture, including the Advaita Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita. Maharshi is as clear as the Buddha concerning his status, but offered a method both ancient and yet in keeping with the emerging democratic sentiments; the method of self-enquiry. Although the Pali canon is a treasure-house of jnani spiritual insights, the nature of the true self is usually cast in the negative, and is a matter more of doctrine than enquiry.

'Where the Buddha is direct, forceful and authoritative, Krishnamurti is roundabout, inverted and fragile. What they both share is an iconoclasm, not a destructive kind, but a complete unwillingness to acknowledge other teachers or traditions.'

That the Buddha's teachings are jnani are hard to question, but what of the idea that they are primarily via negativa? The Buddha himself experimented with extremes of asceticism, and it is their rejection that led him to his self-realisation. However, his teachings readily imply a progressive disidentification with family, body and mind, rather than an expansive process, at least in the first instance. It is also true that in the Pali canon we find no accounts of the Buddha remarking on the beauty of the manifest world, as we find so widespread in Krishnamurti's writings. We could put this down to his warrior caste upbringing again, but the rejection of the manifest world seems to go deeper than that. Had he merely so satiated himself with sense-pleasures, for instance with the female musicians he mentions that fill his rainy-season palace,

or was there a deeper rejection of the manifest? In the Elder's verses, accounts by the earliest converts to the Buddha, both men and women seem after their enlightenment to be just waiting for death, often finding the world to be a disgusting place. To balance this we might consider the description of the Buddha by one who met him shortly after his enlightenment: 'Friend, your faculties are clear, the colour of your skin is pure and bright,' a description that would fit any of the great Masters discussed here, in other words fully and intensely alive.

There is not doubt that for Westerners the apparent negation implied in Buddhist doctrines can be a difficulty, and led C.G.Jung for example to remark that nirvana for him was an 'amputation'. Had he come across a fully enlightened one he would have been presented with the paradox of a man or woman intensely alive and vibrantly responsive to the world, yet seemingly committed to a doctrine of self-negation. Paradox was of course at the heart of the Buddha's teachings, and became the cornerstone of the Zen tradition.

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi

Life

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi was born on 30 September 1207 in Balkh (in present day Afghanistan). He died on 17 December 1273 in Konya, Turkey, where his tomb and a monastery of the whirling dervishes are to be found to this day. Both Rumi's places of birth and death are significant in the spiritual history of the region; Balkh for being where Zoroaster is reputed to have died, and Konya the place where Ibn Arabi, another great Sufi, taught for a while. In 1219 Rumi's father took the family on a long journey away from the threat of the Mongol hordes of Genghis Kahn, settling in Anatolia, firstly in the city of Karaman. On the journey the young Rumi is supposed to have been introduced to the great Sufi poet Attar, who presented him with a copy of his Book of Mysteries and said of the young Jelal: "This child is destined to set the hearts of many aflame". Rumi's father, a theologian and mystic, was called to a post in Konya in 1228, and after his death Rumi took over as religious teacher there to a small community.

Some sixteen years later, having studied the writings of other Sufi masters, particularly Sana'i and Attar, and by all accounts leading a religious life within the conventions of his time and place, Rumi's life was to be transformed by the encounter with a God-intoxicated wanderer called Shamsi Tabriz. Rumi says of him "The God which I have worshipped all my life appeared to me today in human form." Rumi was thirty-seven at that time, and devoted himself completely to his new friend, to the ire of his family and community. Shams left after a while and was murdered on his return (the story is not entirely clear) after which Rumi embarked on his Herculean poetic masterpiece, the 30,000 verses of the Divan-i Shamsi Tabriz, his song for his lost friend. Rumi appears to have been transformed (at the age so typical in the lives of many great Masters) into a Master in his own right. The later poetry of the Mathnawi is dedicated to his closest disciples.

Rumi's fame spread and Sufis came from all over the region to meet him. After his death in 1273 his pupils organised the Mevlana or Mevlevi Order of The Whirling Dervishes, which has as its head a direct descendent of Rumi to this day. Dr. Celaleddin Bakir Celebi, the 21st generation successor and 32nd family member to hold the post of head of the order died only recently.

Teachings

Rumi's teachings need to be set against the background of Sufism, often described as the mystical heart of Islam. Sufism appeared as a movement in the 10th century and is said to have drawn on pre-Islamic traditions including Neoplatonism and Buddhism. For us this would imply a jnani strand in what presents itself in the first instance as a fiercely devotional spiritual path. In fact we find this in Rumi's verses hidden amongst the outpourings of love; indeed even the great structural jnani Douglas Harding often quotes him in support of his entirely unsentimental understanding of Self. Sufism has a history predating the 10th century however and it has an early martyr in the Sufi Master, Mansur al-Hallaj. Already established as a spiritual teacher al-Hallaj travelled to Northern India in 905 where he would have been exposed to Vedantic traditions, and possibly Buddhist ideas. He returned to Baghdad but in 912 was arrested and executed for the heresy of proclaiming identity with God. This calamity was the background to the relationship between Sufi spirituality and the Islam of the mullahs, and many Sufis were subsequently persecuted, as were Christian mystics under the Catholic Church.

In India the pronouncement 'Atman is Brahman' means that the individual has found their identity with the Absolute, or God, and the statement and all variations upon it were never considered heretical in Hindu, Jain or Buddhist traditions. What marks out the Sufi tradition is that its goal was no less than 'Atman is Brahman' (expressed by al-Hallaj as 'an'l Haqq' or 'I am He'), despite the persecution that it brought. The Christian mystics who expressed the same idea were persecuted to the same degree or more, but their common revelation never was allowed sufficient expression to became a tradition. Hence the very idea is quite foreign to Western thinking today.

In this context it is easier to see why Rumi wrote in allegorical style, allowing him to express his identity with the Beloved without incurring the wrath of the authorities. Like many devotional Masters he used the metaphor of the lover to describe his relationship with the Absolute or God. To the secular mind the mingling in his poems of the relationship he had with Shams and the relationship he had with God is a matter of confusion, and even in Turkey and Iran today many assume that Rumi's poetry alludes not to a spiritual but to a homosexual love. While spiritual friendships between male Masters and their disciples may be a fascinating topic, it is not the point of Rumi's poetry.

To extract a doctrine out of Rumi's vast outpourings is also to miss the point however. To read them over a period of time is to let them do their work on one's heart, for any that can feel him. An immersion in his poetry does bring out common themes however, but the one overarching one is love, love, love. To quote just one of his poems is to ignore 130,000 others but this quite chance selection may just illustrate Rumi's special power:

Oh lovers, lovers, it is timeto set out from the world.The drum of celestial distancessounds in my soul's ear.The camel driver is at workand has prepared the caravan.He asks that we forgive himfor the disturbance he has caused us,but why are we travellers asleep?Everywhere the murmur of departure,and the stars, like candlesthrust at us from behind blue veils.and as if to make the invisible more plain,a wondrous people have come forth.

Beneath this water-wheel of starsyour sleep has been heavy.Observe that heaviness and beware...for life is fragile and quick.Heart, aim yourself at Love!Friend, discover the Friend!Watchman, wake-up!You weren't put here to sleep!Noise and alarm on every side,candles and torches, tonightthis pregnant world gives birth to eternity.Lifeless clay is living heart.The inept become aware.What draws you nowwill lead you further,and as it draws you to itself,what pleasure your suffering becomes.Its fires are like water,do not tense your face.To be present in the soul is its work,and to break your vows.By its complex art these atomsare trembling in their hearts.

Oh vain puppet proclaimingyour importance from a hole,how long will you leap?Humble yourself, or they will break you!You have tended seeds of deceitand practised contempt.Oh pimp, the eternal truthwas cheapened in your hands!Oh ass, you deserve only straw,and were better black like the pot.

There is another within meby whom these eyes sparkle.If water scalds it is by fire,let this be understood. I have no stone in my hand,no quarrel with anyone.I rebuke no man, but possessthe sweetness of the rose-garden.My eye is from that sourceand from another universe.One world on this side, another on that,as I sit on the threshold.On the threshold are they alonewhose language is silence.Enough has been uttered,say no more, hold back the tongue.

(Translated by Edmund Helminski)

This poem contains many images resonant of the Middle East, and also many symbolic elements of Sufism and Islam. The poem starts by telling us that we are lovers, and that it is time to set out from the world; the camel driver is at work. Most likely the 'camel driver' is Shamsi Tabriz, but it could equally well by Rumi himself or any spiritual Master telling us to turn inwards. We note that the 'camel driver' is polite, and the imagery of 'murmurs of departure' is likewise gentle (though evocative for anyone on the spiritual path). He goes on to remind us that we are asleep (spiritually) and that it is time to wake up, and that 'this pregnant world gives birth to eternity'. Our suffering is a fire that does its work in the soul, a sentiment that Richard Rolle, the great medieval English bhakti would have agreed with. Rumi then chastens us, comparing our base nature to that of a pimp or ass. He finishes however with an exquisite description of what it is like to find God within one. Firstly it is by Him that one's eyes sparkle, and to emphasise the transmutation of man into God he uses the metaphor of water which does not scald through itself but through the agent of fire. He tells us that he possesses the sweetness of the rose-garden (a common Sufi metaphor) and then returns to the theme of his eyes. By saying that 'my eye is from that source and another universe' he is effectively pointing to the Witness that perceives through all our senses, and then finishes with the metaphor of a threshold. Quite simply this threshold is the interface between the manifest and the unmanifest, and Rumi, as with all enlightened beings, finds himself sitting at that interface. In one poem then, Rumi encompasses love, suffering, the departure from 'this' world, our 'sleep' to the divine reality, our baseness, and finally to the relationship with God. The last sentiment, that of sitting at the threshold, stripped of the emotion of love, is simply what Douglas Harding has taught for fifty years, and where the great bhakti and the great jnani are one and the same.

But Rumi ends the poem with a plea for silence. How can such a magnificent poet plead for the death of his art? Simple. He was foremost a Master, and only secondly a poet. This is shown in the reputed exchange between Rumi and one of his disciples, who asked for more poems. The great Master replied that his poetry was only tripe, but if that is what his guests demanded, then he could only bow to them and provide it.

Commentary

In the introduction to Edmund Helminski's short collection of Rumi's verse he says that the West has no convenient category for Rumi. In the terminology of this site we do however, and describe him as a fully

realised bhakti. So far we have presented Ramakrishna as the only example of the fully enlightened bhakti Master, but Rumi in fact has a greater presence and following round the world. Unlike Ramakrishna who was an uneducated village boy, Rumi was a theologian and scholar, though transformed by his encounter with Shams. He was also a brilliant poet. The resulting verse is extraordinary because it combines the direct experience of the bhakti with a highly educated mind and literary gifts. While Ramakrishna could express the relationship between jnani and bhakti through his tradition and homespun metaphor, Rumi interpenetrates the divine longings of his heart with the intellectual sophistication of the Buddha. But, for the Buddha the term 'sober' would be synonymous with Enlightenment, while for Rumi it would be 'drunk' — a difference of metaphor that goes to the root of the jnani / bhakti divide. In the Sufi tradition intoxication and sobriety are terms of great importance and refer to two types of love for God. The true Sufi rejects any artificial intoxicant, Rumi for example saying this:

They place upon themselves the shameof hashish and opium.To escape for an instantthe shackles of existence.

To be God-intoxicated however is not to escape existence but to reach its very heart.

'While Ramakrishna could express the relationship between jnani and bhakti through his tradition and homespun metaphor, Rumi interpenetrates the divine longings of his heart with the intellectual sophistication of the Buddha.

It is interesting to compare Rumi with Whitman. Both were great poets with substantial oeuvre, and both (we contend) were great spiritual Masters, one bhakti, the other jnani. Both have an overtly celebratory element to their poetry, both have acquired the 'solid prizes of the Universe'. Both men hid their meanings within the language of poetry (though Rumi less so), and both had disciples. The great difference was that Rumi hid his meaning because of the intense interest in the spiritual in his time, whereas Whitman hid his meaning because of the indifference of his age. The nineteenth century American context was one where the modern spirits of that age stood for secularism and democracy, though they may have had a private religion; the thirteenth century middle-Eastern context was one of feudalism and open piety. Rumi was also part of a tradition, and already served as cleric before his transformation, but Whitman, despite his Quaker background, pursued a spiritual life so democratic and secular that his spiritual genius is now unrecognised.

In terms of our distinctions Rumi is clearly a transcendent bhakti, and shows again that the fully realised bhakti is no less or more than the fully realised jnani. But what of our via positiva / via negativa distinction? Rumi in fact brings a whole new dimension to this discussion because his verse often explicitly deals with another Sufi idea, that of expansion and contraction. Expansion is a state of grace and takes place when God turns to the supplicant; contraction is when He departs. Essential to the bhakti way is dependence on grace, and when it is denied the bhakti is in a state of longing or contraction. Even when the Beloved is present there is the dread of loss, but this depends a great deal on personality. The Sufis have an extraordinary story about Jesus and John the Baptist, that Jesus never wept and John never smiled. When they met John said to Jesus: "O Jesus, have you become secure from being cut off from God?" Jesus replied "O John, have you despaired of God's mercy? Your weeping will not change the eternal decree, nor will my laughter alter His foreordainment." (Nowhere in Western Christianity is Jesus found laughing!)

Rumi taught that expansion and contraction were a natural rhythm like the seasons. In expansion energy is expended, and in contraction it is again regenerated, much like a garden that needed winter because without it the summer sun would burn up its beds to the very roots. This gives us another way of looking at via positiva and via negativa, that they too can intertwine in one's spiritual life like the seasons.

Mother Meera

Life

Out of deference to the fact that Mother Meera is still alive and sensitive to the way that she is publicly portrayed, the biography presented below is quoted verbatim from the web site devoted to her:

"Mother Meera was born on December 26, 1960 in the village of Chandepalle in southern India. She soon showed herself to be an unusual child: by the age of three She would report "going to various lights." Her parents treated Her as an exceptional child and loved Her very much. Her family was not especially religious and She was not brought up in any tradition. Her real parents were the spiritual guides that She met in vision; it was from these that She received the love and help She needed. The state of samadhi was constant for Her. Under the auspices of Her uncle, Mr.Reddy, She lived for some time in Pondicherry where Her extraordinary presence attracted considerable attention. She married a German in 1982 and he stays with the Mother. She presently lives in Thalheim [since moved to Balduinstein], a quiet village in Germany. Although She has not sought publicity, thousands of people from all over the world come to receive Her darshan, her silent bestowal of grace and light through Her gaze and touch. Mother Meera is worshipped as the Divine Mother in India."

The other main source of information about her is found in Andrew Harvey's Hidden Journey. Harvey was a something of a prodigy in the field of poetry and held a professorship at Oxford at a young age. His experience of Mother Meera caused him to give up the life of academic and devote his energies to the spiritual life. After a disagreement over his desire to marry his male partner, he seems to have become disillusioned with her. There is no doubt however that the glowing terms with which he originally wrote about her was partly responsible for her coming to world attention, with the British television screening a documentary on him and his transformation through her teachings.

Harvey tells how he met Mother Meera in Pondicherry in 1978, where she blessed him in the fashion that she retains to this day, that is by first holding his head in her hands, and then looking into his eyes. Mother Meera was only eighteen at the time, and it seems that her parents had sent her to the Aurobindo Ashram some time before, in the company of her uncle Mr. Reddy. The actual connection with the Ashram seems unclear, at any rate Sri Aurobindo died in 1950 and the Mother (Aurobindo's spiritual partner) in 1973. In 1979 Mother Meera was in Montreal giving darshan to up to 300 people, so it is clear that her reputation was already established at this stage. Nevertheless Harvey joined her in Germany in 1987 and made repeated visits after that, leading to the publication of Hidden Journey in 1991, which brought her to wider public still.

The pattern of Mother Meera's life has hardly changed in that she gives darshan today in the same way as she gave it to Harvey in 1978. A gathering of perhaps 200 people from all over the world are seated in silence. She enters the room without looking at anything, sits down, and waits for the first visitor, who kneels in front of her. She takes the person's head in her hands for about ten seconds, and on releasing the head the visitor looks up into her eyes for another ten seconds. This is repeated until the last person, after which she pauses briefly. It may be that the pause simply tells her that darshan is at an end, for she still does not look up. As she rises the gathering stand in salutation and she leaves the room, all in complete silence. Harvey describes his experience of the Mother's darshan in flowery terms, and can be contrasted to the more measured description given by the scholar Georg Feuerstein (published in What is Enlightenment, and also on the web, see links). Most visitors find that it brings them an inner peace and sense of love.

Her entourage has recently moved a short distance to larger premises in another village in Germany, where it is said that perhaps more locals attend than they did in Thalheim. It was the illness of her uncle Mr.Reddy that brought Mother Meera to Germany, and his death in 1985 affected her deeply and led to a series of paintings, published in a book called ' Bringing Down the Light'. As the example above shows, her work is reminiscent of Blake or Rudolf Steiner and his pupils.

Teachings

Mother Meera's teachings are summed up in a book of questions and answers called Answers. She speaks of herself as an avatar (a term with a range of interpretations) and as bringing down the divine light, known as Paramatman. 'Avatar' can mean saviour, or incarnation of a deity, or sometimes the incarnation of a divine principle with no previous lives. Mother Meera discusses at length what she means by avatar, making clear for example that an avatar cannot be realised because that is something a human being has to attain. She points out that avatars come from the Divine whereas self-realized persons go

the to Divine. Mother Meera claims to have known her work before incarnating, and to have known even as a child who she was.

Answers is a book worth studying, but it would be fair to say that Mother Meera's teaching is really done in the silence of darshan.

Commentary

Mother Meera happens to be the only female Master in this selection, and one of only two living Masters in this selection. Because she teaches in silence, much the best way to gain a flavour of her teachings is to arrange to take darshan with her. Nevertheless we can point out some features of her work in connection with our concepts. On balance her teaching has a bhakti orientation though when asked on this topic she says that both jnani and bhakti seekers can be helped on their path through her. The way that darshan is arranged makes it somewhat devotional, though without the traditional Hindu elements of singing, music, and dance.

'When asked about the feminine energy that the Mother in general represents, and her path in particular, and whether it represented more of a transformation than a transcendence, Mother Meera replied no, transcendence is the primary aim of the human being'.

We do find a number of occult elements in her teaching, and there is a strong emphasis on change in the world, which we would locate within the social dimension of the spiritual. Can we be sure then that the transcendent is central to her teaching? When asked about the feminine energy that the Mother in general represents, and her path in particular, and whether it represented more a transformation than a transcendence, she replied no, transcendence is the primary aim of the human being. When pressed what transformations she brought about she replied: "when humans on Earth are afflicted with difficulties, it is the Divine Mother who relieves suffering and lifts them up". Many of her visitors do come for help of some kind, and seem to receive it through darshan. Of the other Masters examined in this section, it is perhaps only Gurdjieff who was so concerned about the transformation of Man. The compassion of the Buddha in contrast seems more remote.

Andrew Cohen

Life

Andrew Cohen was born in 1955 in New York. The details of his life are set out in his Autobiography of an Awakening, and further information is provided in a book by his mother called Mother of God. Cohen tells us of a relatively unhappy, though relatively privileged childhood, marked at the age of sixteen by a profound spiritual experience. He describes this experience in terms not dissimilar to Maharshi's description of the moment of enlightenment, coincidentally at a similar age. Cohen's transformation was not a permanent one however, and his growth into the enlightened condition took place later and after exposure to India and its spiritual teachings. Cohen pursued the ambition of becoming a jazz drummer for a while, but became convinced that even if he was to be highly successful in this field it would not bring him the happiness that he sought. He had recognised at an early age that the secular life was insufficient for him.

At the age of twenty two he began a search for teachers who could afford him 'self-realization', a search that led to a range of teachers including a direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda. The Kriya Yoga that Cohen learned took him deeply into meditation, but even at this stage he was aware that the teachers he came across seemed flawed. Cohen heard Krishnamurti speak in Switzerland, and although his initial response was cool, the long-term impact seems to have been profound. There followed an exposure to Buddhist thought and practice, and after a somewhat confusing period he decided to travel to India to the site of the Buddha's awakening at Bodhgaya.

India had a powerful effect on Cohen, where he met both his future wife Alka, and his future guru, H.W.L.Poonja, also known as Poonjaji. This spiritual teacher was a direct disciple of Ramana Maharshi, and is considered by many to be fully self-realised. Cohen had found a teacher of sufficient stature to

match his enquiry, and in turn Poonjaji found a student of unusual capacity, claiming that he had only seen the emptiness of self-realisation in the eyes of three people in his lifetime, Maharshi, himself in the mirror, and Cohen. Poonjaji was soon talking of Cohen as his spiritual 'son' a statement that is very significant in the spiritual life. If enlightenment took place at a particular time then it was during this period, in about 1986, when Cohen would have been thirty one. A highly charged and ecstatic state propelled Cohen into a career as a teacher of enlightenment, in the first instance at least as spiritual 'son' of Poonjaji, and by implication in the lineage of Maharshi.

Cohen found his own way of teaching however, one that corresponded to his own experience, and after a time was less reliant on Poonjaji. In 1990 Cohen's relationship with his Master cooled, and he began to see him in a more critical light. It seems that throughout his extensive spiritual journey Cohen was able to find fault with all the teachers he came across, and in the case of Poonjaji this centred about accusations of sexual misconduct. When Cohen attempted to present about 150 of his students to Poonjaji as their spiritual 'grandfather' it backfired, and left him disillusioned. A rift took place which meant that students had to choose between Cohen and Poonjaji, at which point Cohen decided that he had surpassed his teacher.

Cohen now teaches under his own authority, and his claim to be controversial is probably justified. Contributing to this is the account by his mother of her experience as one of his disciples and her eventual rejection of him as teacher. The account is painful but probably typifies a feature of the spiritual life and context of Andrew Cohen, a lack of mutual understanding. Cohen puts this down to his insistence on the 'truth' however uncomfortable for others.

Teachings

Cohen's teachings, despite the rejection of his guru, are a form of non-dualism that sits well with the Advaita Vedanta that Ramana Maharshi found himself to be a luminous illustration of. However Cohen's insights and methods are original, bold and direct. In the first instance it seems that it was the sheer fire of Cohen's inner experience and conviction that brought him so many students, in particular his insistence that liberation came from a profound honesty. In time he developed a number of coherent and focused themes to his teachings that are found in his five tenets. These tenets (reproduced verbatim below) grew out of Cohen's point of departure from his teacher, considering that instead of the sole spiritual enquiry 'Who am I?' there existed a second question of equal importance 'How shall I live?' This has a radical implication for Cohen's teachings, and reflect his lifelong concern that the liberated individual should live according to the highest moral standards. In the spiritual communities that have grown around Cohen's teaching both these questions are pursued with equal weight. The five tenets of the teachings are presented here (taken without editing from the Andrew Cohen website).

"Once again, the first tenet is Clarity of Intention. It states that if one sincerely aspires to achieve Liberation and Enlightenment in this life, then the desire for that Liberation must be cultivated in such a way that it will always be stronger than our desire for anything else.

The second tenet is The Law of Volitionality. It states that there is only one doer and that that doer is us. It says that the unconditional acceptance of that fact makes it possible to take complete responsibility for the consequences of everything that has ever happened to us. It tells us that only then does Liberation become possible.

The third tenet is Face Everything and Avoid Nothing. It states simply that if we want to be free, we have to be willing to face everything and avoid nothing in every moment. It says that if we are not willing to face everything and avoid nothing, then it is inevitable that others will suffer the consequences of our own unwillingness to be awake. It tells us that facing everything and avoiding nothing is the ultimate spiritual practice, and that if we want to be free our Liberation depends upon it.

The fourth tenet is The Truth of Impersonality. It states that every aspect of our personal experience, when scrutinized closely enough, will be revealed to be completely impersonal. It says that the discovery of the ultimately impersonal nature of our personal experience is the door to direct perception of the universal nature of all human experience. It tells us that it is through the direct perception of the universal nature of our own experience that the truth can be known.

The fifth and final tenet is For the Sake of the Whole. It states that to be truly free we must finally be willing to renounce a relationship to life that is based on wanting to have everything,

including spiritual experience, for ourselves alone. It says that the whole point of spiritual experience is evolution. And it tells us that that evolution occurs, and the true significance of human life is found, when we cease to live for ourselves but live only for the sake of the whole.

Through the sincere contemplation of these five tenets, the way to actually live the enlightened vision–the vision of nonduality–is revealed."

With a living Master it is of course impossible to separate the teachings from the teacher. Cohen has a presence and impact in his discourses and question-and-answer sessions that can only be assessed by being present. His teaching and his manner seem to polarise his audience however, some in favour, some against, but few remain indifferent.

Commentary

Andrew Cohen is the only living Master, apart from Mother Meera, presented in this section. There is no doubt that he represents a pure jnani path of transcendence, and for anyone who identifies with the goal of that path it would be absurd not to seek him out and hear him firsthand. What we can do here is locate him amongst the teachers and teachings so far presented, perhaps quite simply by saying that he he comes closest to Ramana Maharshi in his teachings and to the Buddha in his personality. He clearly does not represent the bhakti temperament found in Ramakrishna or Rumi, nor the divine Mother principle found in Mother Meera, nor has he the analytical power of Harding's teaching. Neither is he a 'rascal Guru' like Osho or Gurdjieff, nor possessed of that immense acceptance and expansivity of Whitman. Many have suggested that he is a 'younger Krishnamurti', but the difference in temperament is too profound: Cohen has not the refinement which made teaching such a delicate ordeal and Nature so aesthetically present for Krishnamurti.

The mark of a great teacher of course is that they are like no other, but the comparisons with Maharshi and the Buddha are instructive. The similarity with Maharshi lies in the emphasis on 'who am I?', while the point of departure is Cohen's insistence on also pursuing 'how shall I live?' This makes the appeal of his teachings much wider than Maharshi's, because many more people are interested in the second question than the first, simply because their lives are unhappy. In fact, if one were to come to the question 'how shall I live?' because of one's concerns for others, then the question is already answered. Few are prepared to really ask the question 'who am I?' because it seems in the first instance to offer no solution to one's own suffering. (The paradox is that it provides the only solution to everyone's suffering.) It is the 'how shall I live' that brings Cohen closer to the Buddha, in that both set up spiritual communities or sanghas, and both were interested in rules of conduct and moral standards. Cohen shares with the Buddha another trait, that of the warrior personality. The boldness of their teaching and interaction and the unwillingness to consider any other teacher or teaching as valid are common to both men, though Cohen may well be the more abrasive of the two.

'It is the 'how shall I live' that brings Cohen closer to the Buddha, in that both set up spiritual communities or sanghas, and both were interested in rules of conduct and moral standards. Cohen shares with the Buddha another trait, that of the warrior personality'.

Cohen's teachings on enlightenment are profound, and for those who have experienced him first hand there is no doubt of his impact on them. The issue of moral values in the spiritual life is a thorny one however. One of the very reasons that individuals reject the religion of their birth, by definition usually geared to the social dimension of the spiritual life and not the transcendent, is because of prescriptive morality. Cohen's willingness to make moral judgements on the spiritual teachers of our time is no doubt based on his convictions, but has the effect of encouraging this attitude amongst those in his sangha. This can lead to taking too much interest in the behaviour of others, always an easier route than to bring the light of awareness to one's own behaviour. The other effect of Cohen's preoccupation with standards of behaviour in the spiritual life is that he has set himself up as a target or this kind of scrutiny and created a climate where people want to believe the worst. His mother has provided the very fuel for this speculation.

The Buddha in The Sutta-Nipata seems clear that liberation means relinquishing all views, telling Magandiya that because he held fast to his views that he could not perceive the least sense. To make moral judgements on other is not just to hold a view, but to set the other person as separate, an act that contradicts the heart of Cohen's teaching, the loss of the separate sense of self.

Conclusions

It would be a rare person inded who could resonate with all the teachers and teachings presented in this section, and not everyone might agree that they all are directly concerned with the transcendent. However if each Master has also been studied through the additional material found in the Bibliography and Links section it should be much clearer by now what the meaning of jnani and bhakti are as presented in this site.

An individual with a strong bhakti orientation would find that apart from Ramakrishna, Rumi, and possibly Mother Meera, the teachers and teachings in this selection would have a remote quality, and however impressive at other levels would remain a somewhat academic study. When properly encountering Ramakrishna or Rumi however a wave of recognition would overcome the bhakti individual, and the spiritual love in their hearts rekindled.

In contrast an individual with a strong jnani orientation would find themselves spiritually elevated by any empathetic contact with the jnani Masters presented here, but at a loss with Ramakrishna, Rumi and Mother Meera. Even the idea of kneeling in front of Mother Meera in the dignified surroundings of her German residence can be anathema to the purist jnani, and the descriptions of the more ecstatic devotional practices of Ramakrishna and his disciples simply foreign.

To pursuade the strongly polarised jnani or bhakti individual that the fully-realised state for both orientations is equivalent, and that it represents the same state of transcendence, is difficult. However, a careful and sympathetic reading of this section should help identify the arguments in favour of that view. A study of Rumi in particular might help.

The distinction between via positiva and via negativa should also have received some illumination through the Masters presented here. A study of Whitman, particularly through the longer analysis available via Links, is the best way to grasp this radical form of spirituality, though Osho's and Gurdjieff's work also point to some of its characteristics. To see the Buddha's path as via negativa is not to see it as necessarily nihilistic either, so it becomes clear that a longer contemplation of the issue can be valuable. Douglas Harding's work, while purely jnani, place these paths in a precise theoretical and perceptual framework. The next section, on Nature Mysticism, pursues another slant on via positiva.

Ultimately, the goal is to know who and what one is, and live from that, as it is suggested that all the Masters in this section have done. As Whitman says, one has to abandon all the theories of oneself before the simplicity and grandeur of what one truly is becomes apparent. As Harding and Jesus said, children know it, even a child of seven days.