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

The Cosmic Drama: Part One (of Five) Jesus Christ – an oriental who changed the West

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.

The teachings of Jesus were to force a reevaluation of the fundamental teachings of Judaism. St. Paul is generally credited with the intellectual horsepower that set the stage for these changes. What was to become the teaching of the Trinity – the triune nature of God – arose in Christianity primarily to help bring a broader understanding of the Jewish teaching of the oneness of God. In the Judaism there is only one God but the separation of God from man is absolute. His messengers might be angels or prophets but God’s appearance on earth was rare and never in human form. God “appeared” to Moses as a burning bush that did not consume the bush and out of which came a voice. In some form that is unknown, God gave to Moses upon Mt. Sinai the stone tablets upon which were written the Ten Commandments. But always God was “other” and all but inaccessible.

Jesus’ appearance on earth and his declaration that he was the “son of God” was naturally a shocking and blasphemous statement to the orthodox point of view. Moreover, as history and scholarship has repeatedly attested (and as the New Testament implies), the messiah was expected to be bring the Jews political freedom (from which would come the religious renaissance) in this world, a repetition of the role not unlike that of Moses who led the Israelites from bondage in Egypt to freedom in their new land and into a new covenant with God.

The assumption that God is wholly “other” and separate from creation is an easy and understandable one, for God’s presence in creation is well hidden, to say the least. The separateness of people, one from the other, plants and animals, night and day, male and female seems so obvious that why, too, wouldn’t God Himself be “other?” In Genesis, for example, we read that God simply says, effectively, “make it so” and it was. No one seems to have had much curiosity about exactly how He did it. A carpenter who makes a chair remains separate and apart from the chair. Isn’t that obvious? Why question it?

Obvious? Or, maybe not so obvious? Unlike the carpenter, God had place to go, no trees or hardware stores, from which to gather the materials of creation. Only now, in our age, with quantum physicists exploring the very nature of the creation of matter on its most element levels has the question (and the potential answer) been raised anew and piqued the interest of intelligent and thoughtful men and women everywhere. It is perhaps our newly acquired scientific consciousness that has provoked deeper inquiries into God’s methodology. Thus far, however, scientists seem to be stumped. They are standing before an abyss of emptiness devoid of discernible matter but latent with tremendous energy, out of which pops minute particles at seemingly random intervals only to vanish as quickly as they came. Like a scene out of the Trilogy, they stand as if before a door in a mountain unable to decipher the code that unlocks that door and leads to the inner sanctum of creation’s deepest mysteries.

A table and chairs may not reveal much about its maker but their very existence reveals the fact of a maker. A work of art, a new invention, a child conceived, and a new computer chip all appear from seemingly nowhere (the human mind and heart) but with great potential consequences, just as quarks and vibrating strings exist at the very edge of pure energy and no-thing-ness, out of which all things have come. While scientists tell us that energy is the underlying substrata of all matter, they have not nor probably ever will, discover the source and motive that underlies energy itself.

By contrast, rishis and masters, down through the ages, have suffered from no such limitation, for they have not merely tried to find the source of the atom but have become the atom using a kind of reverse engineering from the process by which God created the atom to begin with. The masters achieved Self-realization and oneness with the overarching Consciousness out of which all things in creation are born, live, and to which they are withdrawn. The teachings of metaphysicians aver that the creation is a manifestation of God’s consciousness “becoming” His creation. When the Jews intone daily their great mantra (“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is ONE!”) little do they know that the concept “God is One” means God is one with the entire cosmos as well and at the same time Being other, separate and apart from it. Oneness surely includes infinity and infinity is presumably inclusive of everything and therefore big enough to be “both-and” so that God can be both separate from creation and at the same time the very essence and sustainer of creation itself. But how? This question we will pursue in the series of four more articles to come. But it provokes more questions that need addressing, also, such as:

If God became the creation, does this mean we are but puppets and our so-called “free-will” is an illusion? What, if any, is our responsibility for our actions? From whence comes suffering and evil? Is God good, evil, indifferent or something else? Stay tuned…….for the next four articles.

Aum, shanti, amen,

Nayaswami Hriman

The Price of Greatness!

When you examine the lives of many whom the world upholds as noble and history-making, you soon find that they endured, indeed sought and accepted, their own need to remain apart from "the maddening crowd" of popular opinion. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed -- we think of the mountain top, the cave, the lone Bodhi tree! Gandhi, Martin Luther King -- all great men and women kept their distance, as it were.

Paramhansa Yogananda, famous for his life story, Autobiography of a Yogi, put it directly in saying that "Seclusion is the price of greatness." For those who are sincere in spiritual seeking, the tradition well established is to go on retreat at least once a year or a pilgrimage perhaps once in a lifetime (Jerusalem, Varanasi, Lourdes, etc.) Couples, too, should find time apart, in reflection and silence.

Writers do it; scientists do it; politicians do it. Why don't you?

When I managed the Expanding Light Retreat in northern California I recall meeting a retreatant who said that she'd never been apart from family all her life: from childhood right into marriage and children. She'd never been alone! Imagine! Well, don't.....because that's true for most everyone on this planet.

If you want to be good at what you do; if you want to be the best you can be; if you want to make contact with your, own higher Self; if you want to "find God;" if you are seeking soul freedom; all of these......Krishna  says in the Bhagavad Gita: "Get away from my ocean of suffering!" To have perspective of any sort, you need distance.

I just returned from my annual week of personal retreat which we call seclusion. It is a time alone: in prayer, meditation and mindfulness. There are periods of spiritual reading and journaling. During times of necessary tasks, such as meal preparation, one strives to remain in silence and in mindfulness of the eternal Present. Talk nor see anyone, if at all possible. Write notes, if you must.

I have been doing this for perhaps twenty five years: once a year for a week! It's not enough, really, but it's good enough. It's "hard work" but "good work!" I can't say it's life changing but it is a tune-up and a wake-up time to what's important.

I am 62 years old and came of age in the heady days of Haight Asbury, Monterey Pop Festival, and the Summer of Love. I was there, just like Forrest, Forrest Gump. I thought a lot of things were going to change. But you know, they didn't, really. I thought Vietnam was the "war to end all wars (of imperialism)." It didn't. I thought sexism was out the window and men and women were equals and friends. Not true. I thought peace and love was in; it isn't.

I can pass as pretty cynical but that's not really my point. My point is "the only way out, is in!" I do, in fact, think the world's consciousness is expanding toward a better place, but very, very slowly and with two steps forward; one step back.

We don't live very long nor do we know the "time or the place" of our departure. So, what's important? Is the love and family everyone talks about at holidays? Well, sure, why not? But most families are a bit nutty and usually more than a little broken. So, sure, if you're into that, fine. But it certainly isn't the reality for much of the planet. And if your family is really together, what about the one next door? See my point? You just never know, do you?

Our only "greatness" and success in life comes from the degree to which our selfishness expands into selflessness. That's it, really. Sure, I could say that this goes all the way into the Infinity of God's love, but if that doesn't mean much to you, maybe I said enough to begin with? But that expansion of consciousness cannot occur if the "trivial preoccupations of daily life" become the great mountains that you climb. "For wisdom, too, man has a hunger." (quotes from Yogananda's autobiography)

Yes, travel and education help give perspective, but these are more intellectual or in the moment. There's another aspect to perspective and it is the ages old dictum: "Know Thyself" or, as I prefer to put it: "Know Thy Self." "Whom am I?" "What is my importance, if any, in this life?" "My duty?"

Great sages of east and west say that to know thy Self is our only real duty because from this comes an understanding of right action. Are you your body? Personality? Social class? Race? Gender? Well, of course, not, but then "Who am I?"

Why, nothing, of course! That's the point. Nothing means everything and everyone. That's the point. Abstraction is the greatest gift to mankind for in it we see ourselves as our neighbor, not just our families, our nation.

A daily practice of meditation will help you make contact with the consciousness within you that precedes all the junk that you currently think is "you." Meditation can soften the heart, open the mind, and release your fixation on the body as your reality. Many powers of "mind over matter" have been demonstrated. Indeed, too numerous to bother to mention. There are people who have been documented to live without food or water for decades; to raise the dead; to be entombed for long periods and be revived; walk on water; fly; bi-locate and so on. You get my drift.

Science, too, tells us that reality is far from what it appears.

So, what's taking you so long? Get with it. Get out of it. Wish your loved one(s) "adieu" and take a retreat. Make sure you don't spend your whole time "chopping wood and carrying water" however. Make sure you are can be still for periods of time; and, alone. You'll find it's no picnic, at least if you are honest.

If you are not ready, and why should you be, then go to a real retreat facility where others are doing more or less the same. This is not only good in itself, taking some classes, doing some yoga or equivalent, but it is also a bridge to the real deal when you are alone and I mean really, really alone. That's why most people can't meditate: they are afraid of the dark though they'll never tell you that.

I dare you: once in your life face the abyss of unknowing, stripped of the comforts and preoccupations of daily life that assure you that you are alive and well. Buddha did it for real and for eternity. Can you do it for a short time? You don't need a mid-life crises you just need awakening to the Real.

Nayaswami Hriman