Showing posts with label Shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shakespeare. Show all posts

Monday, February 17, 2020

Valentine's Day: How Important is Love on the Spiritual Path?

[I've been away for over a month from regular postings and yesterday's Sunday Service was focused primarily on my trip to India. The topics, expressed below, did not get the "full Monty" so I offer thoughts on the subject below.]

Each year around Valentine's Day the service reading at the Ananda centers worldwide has had the topic title of "The Law is Perfected in Love."

It would be easy to conclude that love, according to the reading ("Rays of the One Light," Week 7, by Swami Kriyananda), is all that is necessary to achieve perfection (happiness, bliss, nirvana or samadhi).

However, even the title of the reading isn't saying that. In fact, the title is simply reminding devotees and seekers that the "way" is not the "goal." Your faith, your religion, your yoga, your beliefs, and your righteous way of life are but steppingstones to perfection in God. (Be ye therefore perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. Matt 5:48) Do not mistake the path for the goal! 

But is the reading saying, never mind the "way?" Never mind the discipline; the self-offering; the effort? No, it isn't saying that.

No more is the reading saying that than is the emotion of love the only reality in human relationships. Effort, intention, and "work" is needed to achieve success in all worthy endeavours: health, relationships, career, art, and the spiritual path.  

Even Valentine's Day (which occurs each year around the time of this reading) isn't attempting to say romantic love is the definition of marriage. (It's simply acknowledging one aspect of marriage.)

Someone asked me the other day: "How can I love God more?" In responding I was fortunate to recall Swami Kriyananda's counsel on this: "pray to God that you feel devotion; that you feel God's love." I believe he went on to explain that it is difficult to love "someone" you haven't met yet. It is difficult to love an abstraction contained in a nondescript three-letter word ("God"). To feel God's love is the gift of grace, not merely effort.

When he, Swami Kriyananda, prayed to Yogananda that he could feel Yogananda's love for him, Yogananda (who intuitively "heard" Kriyananda's silent prayer) responded saying, "How can the little cup hold the whole ocean?" One must expand the cup of one's consciousness toward infinity if one is to know the infinite love of God. 

It is easier, however, to feel love itself: love without an object and without any conditions as to who, what, when, where or how. As God is the source of unconditional love, praying to feel love is to experience even a little bit of God: the Source of love. 

Swamiji also shared with us that Paramhansa Yogananda suggested that most of us approach God through joy, rather than as love. Why? Because most people's experience of love is tainted with the all too confusing (painful, pleasurable, attached, and mixed)  human love experience. How often have I seen a newcomer's heart open to divine love only find it difficult to remain on such a high plane and thus "fall" into attachment to the nearest soul clothed in the form of the opposite sex! (Reminds me of the delightful Shakespeare play, "A Midsummer's Night Dream.")

Even apart from romantic love, however, devotees who go more by emotions are sometimes far too personal (just as those who revel in ideas are sometimes insensitive to the feelings of others). And such devotees are inclined to "love" only those who "love" them. Beyond their "mutual admiration society," duality can throw a bucket of cold indifference towards outsiders.

We, humans, you see, are more likely to know what unconditioned joy is than unconditional love!

Think of an aspiring musician: unless born with it like Mozart, even the best musicians are likely to have spent years learning and practising. Their love for their art draws them through the "law of practising" into the inner experience of the joy and love of music. Without their love of music, their playing would presumably be colourless, lacking in feeling. But without the hard daily work of practice, they could not soar high on the wings of inspiration. As I often say in classes and talks, "truth is a BOTH-AND affair."

Love is higher than the law for the simple reason that the experience of satisfaction, success or oneness is the REASON behind the willingness to "pay your dues" through effort and self-discipline. To achieve the union, perfection, and joy of love which unites lover, loving and beloved is what propels the artist, devotee, the lover, or the humanitarian to sacrifice all for the "pearl of great price!" 

At the conclusion of the reading described above, Swami Kriyananda quotes Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita saying, in effect, "love God alone and let go of all else." Poetic, romantic, even, but be careful not to rely one-dimensionally upon a convenient interpretation. 

A story illustrates the point: Krishna once counselled the devotee, Draupadi, to practice yoga. Her response, however, was "How can I practice yoga when my mind is fixed upon you?" Krishna, it is said, only smiled. 

Until you, too, can be fixed upon God alone in every thought, feeling, and action, then you should not be so quick to dispense with the "rites and writ duties" of the "Way" of right action and right attitude.

Swami Kriyananda also offered this useful thought, drawn from his own experience of encountering those who, to say the least, didn't love him: "I choose to love because I am happier loving than hating."

When, through prayer, meditation, and self-giving we feel loving, it does not require a conscious act to love anyone: friend or self-styled critic alike. It is, rather, a natural extension of your own consciousness. When you are blessed to have this experience, distil from it the joy of loving so that the alternative of focusing on loving doesn't draw you into attachment to those to whom you express that loving feeling. Instead, feel the joy of that state of the soul.

Joy to you!

Swami Hrimananda

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The Cosmic Drama Continues: Part 2 (of 5): The Master Playwright!

The Cosmic Drama
Part Two (of Five)
God: the Master Playwright

This is part one of a series of articles. It has its origins in a prior blog article entitled, "Who is Jesus Christ?" You may wish to read that first, though not absolutely necessary. This series attempts to describe the Trinity, or, how God can be omniscient, omnipresent, infinite, and immanent in creation at the same time. And, what significance this has for the reality we face as individuals. As the prior article on Jesus Christ noted, "Who Jesus is says a great deal about who we are." So, too, who God is addresses who we are.

As Shakespeare the playwright who writes the script for the villain isn’t therefore himself an evil person, so too the cosmic playwright knows that the play, in order to be performed and enjoyed, must have both protagonist and antagonist. If the villain plays his role well on the stage he will be convincing and all the audience will hiss and boo at him. The hero, too, played correctly and well, will invite the sympathy and support of the audience. Thus we are drawn to the virtues of the hero and away from the evil of the villain.

As the players aren’t really killed in the battles that take place on stage,  so too are we, the players in this divine drama of life, not really killed when we shed our bodies in “death.” Like waves rising from the surface of the sea, the elements and individuals in the drama of creation appear on the lake of the cosmic mind, appearing to be separate, but then, after their time is finished, falling back into the bosom of the sea. (Reincarnation is suggested in the scientific principle that matter cannot be destroyed; it only changes form. Its corollary, the law of karma, also spawns a scientific principle: for every action, there is an equal or opposite reaction.)

Thus the playwright writes a script but it takes the creativity and talent of the actors to bring it to life, to make it credible, and to engage the audience emotionally and convincingly. Thus the playwright, the actors (and even the supportive stage crew from behind the curtain, as it were) and even the audience all have roles to play. No one stands completely apart from the others but the playwright gives birth to the drama and invites others to “play,” which they must do voluntarily: some with excellence, and others poorly following the script.

The essential reality of the drama and of the persona of the actors springs from the mind of the playwright. This “dream” magnetically draws to itself the necessary participants, both actors and audience. Shakespeare, already in his time well known, a famous and successful playwright, no doubt attracted both actors and audience, springing, as it were, from the unseen realm of his mind.

But this metaphor stops short of giving satisfaction because all participants are recognizably separate entities. To deny this is to give up the game for naught, saying that “nothing is real” and we might as well go home and go to bed or make merry. How can we be separate and at the same time One? How can we be held accountable for our actions when we are but creations of the dream-nature of God? This is the essential “mystery” of creation and the source of the teaching of the triune nature of God.

Let us return to the metaphor of the artist, craftsman or inventor. The “signature” of great artists is often recognizable in the style of their work even if the subject matter may vary widely. This is as true for Monet as for a cabinet maker, at least potentially. Thus every invention or work of art might be said to reflect some aspect of its maker, even while, at the same time, hiding much, indeed most, of the maker’s persona. As God “becomes” the creation, the creation hints at the existence of its creator even while it hides Him.

While the wood a carpenter buys to make a table is inert, all God has to work with is His own consciousness! Thus, no matter what He makes, He makes it with His own essence and cannot wholly be other nor yet wholly be hidden. Whereas a saint reveals more of the divine Presence than a criminal, it is only a matter of degree, not essentially a different species or kind.

Like hiring actors to play the roles in the script, God cannot help but endow his creation with His own intelligence and intention. As He has created, therefore, so we, his children, and all of creation, is endowed with both the intelligence to play the drama and the desire to do so. As the son of a father may look like the father and may have many of his parent’s attributes in appearance and personality, and yet, at the same time, walk his own path of life, so too might the creation reflect the Creator without either limiting the Creator or limiting the creation!

Parents do their best to raise their children with good habits but at some point the child becomes an adult and must choose to put into practice, or to reject, what he has been taught. But he can never alter his DNA, his essential bloodline. If he errs, he can still repent and come back to the truths taught to him by his parents.

The difference between the literal application of this metaphor and God and each soul is that our souls are forever and from eternity individuated expressions of the Cosmic Light of God. We might postpone this awakening or recognition for untold lifetimes but we can never kill it or separate ourselves from it. For it is gives us life, for it is life itself. God is like the hidden germ or life spring of intelligence and life force that animates us. His very intelligence, clothed with a specific outer form, takes on its own life and identity, losing touch (though never entirely) with its divine essence as it identifies with its outer form and as it interacts with other forms similarly clothed and cloaked, some benign, others threatening.

A B-grade actor becomes typecast because he and his audience begin to identify the actor himself with the role he plays. He ends up having to play the same basic roles again and again until, like the lesson of reincarnation itself, he “gets it” (by severing his true self from his repeated roles). A great actress, by contrast, plays parts tragic and comic, heroine and villainess, with equal gusto and talent, delighting and entertaining her audiences like a great artist but never becoming identified with any of the specific roles.

Let us now, turn, in the next article, to analyzing the triune nature of God!

May the Light of the Universal Christ Consciousness be born in you this and every day, a Christmas!

Nayaswami Hriman