Shackled

Given that the recent sequence on veils, words and values focused at some length on R. S. Thomas’s struggles to access God, reposting this poem that touches on a similar idea seemed worthwhile. My new poem posted last Monday was triggered by Thomas’s later poems.

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Book Review (3/3): Eknath Easwaran on Meditation

Given my reference to Easwaran’s work in a recent post, it seemed worth republishing this short sequence again, even after doing the same thing just over a year ago! 

So far, in revisiting Eknath Easwaran‘s excellent, down-to-earth and accessible book Meditation: common sense directions for an uncommon life, I’ve looked at what are in his view the foundations of meditation, and at the value of other related skills such as one-pointed attention. Now I’m going to deal with the next two chapters, which is as far as I have read up to now.

Training the Senses

The chapter on training the senses has much to recommend it, including guiding us how to develop the ability to choose what you eat rather than be controlled by our desire to eat, and it explains how this reinforces meditative practice and vice versa.

Right now I will only be focusing on what he has to say towards the end, as it made a strong impression on me for obvious reasons.

Many years ago, long before I ever read this book, I had a dream that I mentioned recently towards the end of a long sequence of posts on the ‘understanding heart.’ I wrote:

An account of a dream I had many years ago might help here.

“There is a lake in the mountains. By its shore a rabbit squats munching leaves or grass. Overhead a hawk flies. A slight breeze wrinkles the surface of the lake so the image of the sky and clouds is crumpled too. Only my eye is there to see this scene: I am not aware of my body at all.”

To simplify somewhat, as the dream has other implications as well, after some work on its content I came to see it as an image of my mind. The hawk is my anger, the rabbit my fear, the surface of the lake my superficial consciousness. Not only the sky but the hawk and rabbit are reflected in it.

If I see the surface of the lake as who I truly am I will live my whole life a prey to fear, anger and all the other changes in the mental weather – the clouds, winds, rain and so on of my inscape – that disturb and distress me. But in essence I am not these things. They are only the contents of my consciousness just as they are not the lake itself in the dream, only reflections in or perturbations of its surface.

My mind is the lake itself and the more deeply I allow myself to experience its full reality the closer I get to the ground of my being, where the essence of who I truly am is most closely in touch with the foundation of my existence. If I live my life from this level of awareness I will be authentic, I will be who I really am in essence rather than the person I seem to be in appearance: I will be in touch with my understanding heart. Heaven knows, if I persevere sincerely enough for long enough, one day I might even become capable, before I die, of being my understanding heart, at least for fleeting moments here and there.

It was slightly uncanny to read the following in Easwaran’s book (page 162):

Where there are many strong desires, the mind is in constant turmoil. Huge waves lash and roil the surface, and we cannot see the bottom of the lake of the mind: our true Self. When we learn to train our senses and master our desires, fewer and fewer of these waves rise up. Gradually the mind becomes still, so that we can discover our real identity.

For me this reinforces how powerful the language of symbol and metaphor is, and how it offers common ground upon which anyone can stand and learn more about the landscape of the mind. It also reinforces my belief in the wisdom of dreams, everyone’s innate storehouse of potent symbols.

Eknath Easwaran

Putting Others First

In the chapter on putting others first he tackles the problem of the ego. He describes (page 166) how his grandmother told him that ‘elephantiasis of the ego’ was a ‘dreadful disease that can afflict every one of us.’ He asked her if there was any cure (page 173):

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Love of God.’

This enables us to put others before ourselves. However, as he explains (pages 177-78):

This does not mean that if someone we love tries to do something foolish or injurious, we should ignore it or connive at it by saying, “What ever you want, dear.” Putting others first does not at all entail making ourselves into a doormat. In fact, if we really love someone, we will find it necessary to speak out for that person’s real and long-term interest – even to the point of loving, tender, but firm opposition.

Particularly striking is his emphasis upon patience (pages 178-79):

In my experience, love can be fairly well summed up in a single word: patience. Oh, I know it isn’t thought to be a glamorous quality. . . .

[But] when you are patient . . . an unkind word or thoughtless act will not agitate you. You will not want to run away or retaliate. Your support will hold steady, based as it is on deep respect and the knowledge that the Lord lives in the other person. Pride will not keep you from making the first – and, if need be, the second or third – overture towards reconciliation.

This eventually leads naturally into discussing how to mend estrangements (page 183):

More awesome, more daring, we can learn to expand our love to include even those with whom we are in enmity. Estrangement, as all of us know, can drag on for months or years, sometimes between blood relatives.

This involves overcoming instinct, something I have dealt with at length recently, so I won’t go over that ground again here. What Easwaran emphasises is how (page 184) is when we are angry with someone we go over and over the rage in our minds:

What a paradox! Here is someone we cannot stand, someone we go out of our way to avoid, yet we carry him around with us constantly. Part of our mind conjures up his image – which may not correspond to reality at all – and another part of the mind, dwelling on the image, flies into a rage. . .

When we forgive, we wipe the slate clean. We choose to live not in remembrance of the past, but in the present. We choose to trust, rather than live in fear of the future.

We are close to the spirit of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s stricture here (Century of Light – page 9):

My meaning is that the beloved of the Lord must regard every ill-wisher as a well-wisher…. That is, they must associate with a foe as befitteth a friend, and deal with an oppressor as beseemeth a kind companion. They should not gaze upon the faults and transgressions of their foes, nor pay heed to their enmity, inequity or oppression.

Sometimes we don’t even know why we dislike someone. They just irritate us (page 86):

There just seems to be something – or everything – about the person we cannot take. We don’t like his pace, her gestures, his speech, her taste in clothes. We don’t want to see him, don’t even want to hear her mentioned favourably. In such cases, the real source of irritation is not the other person. We are tyrannised by our conditioning – our likes and dislikes.

His conclusion resonates strongly with the central tenet of the Bahá’í Faith, that all humanity is spiritually and socially one (page 187):

My plea is that none of us cease striving until we reach this unitary consciousness, when we live in the certitude that all life is one and the whatever we do has an effect, for good are ill, everywhere.

And that means upon ourselves as well. So, basically I’m very glad I went back to this book which has refreshed my determination to practice meditation more thoroughly and bring the spirit of meditation into more aspects of my life in general.

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Book Review (2/3): Eknath Easwaran on Meditation

Given my reference to Easwaran’s work in a recent post, it seemed worth republishing this short sequence again, even after doing the same thing just over a year ago! 

Picking up the threads of my review of Eknath Easwaran‘s excellent, down-to-earth and accessible book Meditation: common sense directions for an uncommon life from where we left it last time, having dealt with the basics, things for me get much more interesting.

When he started talking about Slowing Down and One-Pointed Attention was when I really began to wake up. So far he had been going over fairly familiar ground which my current meditation practice is successfully keeping alive, if not quite in perfect order.

But maintaining a slow and steady pace and reasonable focus – well, that was quite another matter. I am well aware that my journals, kept from 1975 till now, are full of my whinges about rushing around and trying to do too many things at once. Then, I record making resolutions to counteract this only to find that a few months later I’m back to whingeing again.

Was I missing something still? Clearly I was. I was even moved to start pulling some of his ideas, including slowing down, into my developing model of spiritual progress, as the cube above tries to illustrate. The top of the cube needs to be adapted to include the idea of one-pointedness more clearly.

I am well aware of what he points out (page 89): ‘a great deal of carelessness results from hurry.’ And from the consequent fatigue, I would add, as my own experience recorded in Marmalade and Meditation, testifies:

First, in spite of my lip-service to mindfulness, I became so ungrounded by the pace I was keeping up, that I spilt coffee on my lap top and destroyed it. That jolted me more than a little but I still did not fully wake up to my need to change something radically until, late at night a month later, in a haze of fatigue, with my whole close family in the car, convinced I was already on the dual carriageway which was in fact still half a mile down the road, I moved out to pass the slow moving car and trailer ahead of me. I was alerted to my mistake when I saw, with initial incredulity, the headlights of an oncoming car heading straight for me in the distance. I pulled back inside with time to spare more by good luck than good judgement. What shocked me most about this incident was that fatigue had warped my perception of reality so much that what I believed about where I was completely overrode the cues telling me otherwise that were plainly there for me to see and respond to.

I remembered the story about a well-known Bahá’í, Dorothy Baker, who had a serious and almost fatal car-accident on a steep mountain road.

She mused aloud to a friend: ‘I wonder what God is trying to tell me.’

To which the reply came: ‘Dorothy, you drive too fast!’

The same kind of answer came to me in a flash, in the aftermath of this near collision: ‘Pete, you’re driving yourself too fast.’

Our hurry is also contagious, though hopefully calm is too, and has even spread to the way we read. It feeds on the competitive drive that underpins so much of our culture (page 97). I know this but am still in the grip of the Hurry Up driver, after all these years and so much meditation.

So how does he say I can learn to stop?

Learning to Slow Down

His key advice comes almost at the end of this chapter (page 112) and is deceptively simple and beguilingly concrete for the most part:

The first thing… is to rise early so you can set a relaxed pace for the day. Eat slowly at mealtime, sharing yourself generously with others. Arrive beforehand at your job and work on the essentials at a steady rate, not pushed by the clock or competition. Build friendly and loving relations with those at work and at home by practising patience at every opportunity. Put things in order when you leave your job, and learn to detach yourself from your work at will. Cultivate discrimination in recreation so that you choose what really revitalises and avoid what drains your time and energy.

The mantram is also particularly helpful in the case of hurry, because it gives the restless mind something to fasten on and gradually slows it down. [When a mistake triggers a mind bomb] [t]he best course to follow at that time is to repeat the mantram a few times and recollect yourself so you can proceed at a measured pace.

He also advises (page 114), as many others now do in self-help books, to make a list of everything we feel driven to do. It will be a long list. Then delete everything that is not essential. He concludes:

Putting aside my likes and dislikes, keeping my eye on what was necessary, using as much detachment as I could, I struck more and more from the list. Soon half of it was gone, and I found I had more time to give to what seems likely to be of permanent value.

This though is only half the story, and in fact would not in itself tackle all aspects of my problem in this area.

Learning to Focus

We now come to remedying my other weakness that compounds my problem with hurrying: distraction and lack of focus.

He reminds us what meditation does (page 118): it trains ‘the mind to be one-pointed by concentrating on a single subject – an inspirational passage.’ It turns the mind from being (page 119) ‘the master of the house into ‘a trusted, loyal servant whose capacities we respect.’

This reminded me of McGilchrist’s brilliant The Master & his Emissary. There the left-hemisphere language and logic based mode of operation has usurped the role of the holistic right-hemisphere processing, much to our detriment. There may be deeper parallels here but now is not the time to explore them. I’m distracting myself again!

Easwaran argues (page 121) that we should work at learning to focus even on tasks we find unpleasant. If we do we might find they become more satisfying. Focused attention also makes us more efficient (page 122):

When the mind is unified and fully employed with the task, we have abundant energy. The work, particularly if routine, is dispatched efficiently and easily, and we see it in the context of the whole into which it fits. We feel engaged; time does not press on us.

So it can alleviate the hurry up as well.

His core advice here is simple, if we are to learn this skill (page 127):

The first step is the systematic practice of meditation, which is the perfect way to learn the skill. There is another valuable aid too: to refrain from doing more than one thing at a time, to abandon totally the habit of trying to perform several operations simultaneously.

This last point should be applied to everything, from work through eating to recreation, and our meditation will benefit. It’s a two-way street. And we will have fewer accidents – that should keep me out of trouble.

His summarising phrase is (page 139) ‘Concentration is Consecration.’

Which seems a good point at which to pause before completing my survey of what I have read of his book so far.

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Book Review (1/3): Eknath Easwaran on Meditation

Given my reference to Easwaran’s work in a recent post, it seemed worth republishing this short sequence again, even after doing the same thing just over a year ago! 

In my recent Knowing your True Self (KYTS) sequence, written in the aftermath of the Three Brains Revisited exploration (see picture as a reminder), in the fourth post I mention Eknath Easwaran‘s excellent, down-to-earth and accessible book Meditation: common sense directions for an uncommon life.

Because I was triggered to go back to the KYTS sequence, I was moved to look again at Easwaran’s book, which had influenced that approach strongly. I noticed in the flyleaf that I had read it for the second time in May 2003. The penny then dropped, rather loudly and discomfortingly in fact, that much of my meditative experience has been shaped by this book, perhaps far more strongly than by the Buddhism or Psychosynthesis that I have trumpeted about since I started blogging in 2009.

It’s time then to begin to redress the balance.

I am now reading the book for the third time and having an ‘How did I forget that!’ experience. Almost every page hits me with an insight. Some of these are ones I consciously treasure but had forgotten where I found them. Others I recognised as deeply meaningful as soon as I saw them again but had no consciously active memory of them: heaven alone knows how much they have been influencing me subliminally.

The structure of the book is simple. The chapter headings say it all. It’s an Eight-Point Programme: Meditation, the Mantram, Slowing Down, One-Pointed Attention, Training the Senses, Putting Others First, Spiritual Companionship and Reading the Mystics, all of these to be practiced daily in the end. I’m about to re-read the last two. So far, nowhere have I come across my meditative bête noire – mindfully watching my thoughts.

I have no intention of quoting all the insights here – that would probably amount to half of his 219 pages. I’d rather you bought the book. I’m simply going to flag up a handful of the most useful from my point of view.

What is Meditation?

To begin with he places meditative practice firmly on the ground (pages 8- 9):

To begin with, meditation has nothing to do with the occult, the paranormal. . . . If you want to know how people have progressed on the spiritual path, just watch them in the little interactions of everyday life. . . . Can they work harmoniously with others? If so, they are evolving, though they may never have had a vision or psychic experience.

This is a great comfort to me, not because I believe I am a model of harmonious relating, but because I have never had any kind of dramatic mystical experience in all my years of meditating. He also makes clear that he does not see meditation as a kind of hypnosis nor any kind of navel gazing or rumination (page 9):

[Meditation] is, rather, a systematic technique for taking hold of and concentrating to the utmost degree our latent mental power. It consists in training the mind, especially attention and the will, so that we can set forth from the surface level of consciousness and journey into the very depths.

He moves on to analysing what for him are the three stages of meditation.

The first is recognising that we are not our bodies. Karen Wilson, whose book I reviewed last year, deals with that well so I won’t repeat it.

He then explains (page 20) his second stage that ‘we are not our minds either.’

I have also dealt at length in various places what my take is on this including in my review of Karen’s book. For me, I reserve the word ‘mind’ to refer to the accessible surface of consciousness, which reflects what the brain projects onto it like a captivating and convincing film. Once we begin, through meditation or some other means, to achieve a degree of ‘detachment’ (page 23) we can begin to recognise that even our surface consciousness is no more what is reflected in it or projected onto it than a lake is reducible to the clouds and birds we see reflected upon its surface. The surface of consciousness, as Easwaran of course recognises, becomes a gateway to its depths. I’ll stop nit-picking now!

His third stage is ‘the great discovery’ (page 24-25):

As long as we identify with the body and the mind we bob around on the surface level of consciousness, chasing after the fleeting attractions of life outside us.… now, in profound meditation, we drop below all that and become concentrated on one thing and one thing alone: our true identity. In this absorption, its great gathering within, we break through the surface of consciousness and plummet deep, deep into our real nature.

He points out that this leads to the realisation that (page 27) ‘All life is your family.’ We’ve been there many times on this blog, not least in discussing the Bahá’í concept of the oneness of humanity and my ideas about interconnectedness, so I’ll not rehash all that here again.

When he discusses the nature of meditation he explains that we access (page 30) ‘the ground of existence,’ what Amit Goswami terms ‘the Ground of Being,’ and realise, ‘this supreme reality is not something outside us, something separate from us. It is within, at the core of our being – our real nature, nearer to us than our bodies…’

Bahá’u’lláh expresses this idea with both power and beauty in the Arabic Hidden Words (No. 13):

Turn thy sight unto thyself, that thou mayest find Me standing within thee, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting.

And also  in Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh (CLIII page 326):

This most great, this fathomless and surging Ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto you. Behold it is closer to you than your life-vein! Swift as the twinkling of an eye ye can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this imperishable favor, this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this most potent and unspeakably glorious bounty.

How Do We Start?

Easwaran advises using quotations as a core meditative means of training our minds: I’ve mentioned some of his thoughts on this before. Either of the ones above would be a good place to start for anyone who has not attempted this before.

He recommends the Mantram as something more portable, that need not be confined to the quietness of a room set aside for meditation. He explains the origin of the term (page 59): the word is linked to ‘the roots man, “the mind,” and tri, “to cross.” The mantram, repeated regularly for a long time, enables us to cross the sea of the mind. An apt image, for the mind very much resembles the sea. Ever-changing, it is placid one day, turbulent the next.’

For him, the mantram links us to (page 60) ‘the supreme Reality,’ whatever we choose to call it:

What matters greatly is that we discover – experientially, not intellectually – that this supreme Reality rests at the inmost centre of our being. . . . the mantram stands as a perpetual reminder that such perfection is within all of us, waiting to flow through our thoughts, words, and deeds.

He feels that (page 70) ‘the mantram works best when we repeat it silently in the mind with as much concentration as possible.’ He’s not in favour of counting with beads or linking it to the breath because it divides attention. These are things I tend to do most of the time. I’ll have to try sticking to his method for a sufficient length of time to test its effectiveness for me. He recommends we use the mantram at all moments of stress or simple waiting. It helps keep us calm and, for him, every repetition counts, taking us slightly deeper each time we repeat it with focused concentration. He strongly recommends we use it before we sleep.

Next time we turn to two topics that moved things up a gear for me, an unfortunate choice of metaphor in the context as you will see. My adaptation of the Three Brains diagram into an apparently upside-down Traffic Light design to place on my iPhone might give you a clue.

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Heart-to-Heart Resuscitation (3/4): Working on the Inscape

To be explained at the end of this post.

So, what do we do to at least begin the work of enhancing the power of our hearts.

A quote I use frequently in meditation is:[1]

Return, then, and cleave wholly unto God, and cleanse thine heart from the world and all its vanities, and suffer not the love of any stranger to enter and dwell therein. Not until thou dost purify thine heart from every trace of such love can the brightness of the light of God shed its radiance upon it, for to none hath God given more than one heart. This, verily, hath been decreed and written down in His ancient Book. And as the human heart, as fashioned by God, is one and undivided, it behoveth thee to take heed that its affections be, also, one and undivided. Cleave thou, therefore, with the whole affection of thine heart, unto His love, and withdraw it from the love of anyone besides Him, that He may aid thee to immerse thyself in the ocean of His unity, and enable thee to become a true upholder of His oneness. God is My witness.

The value of memorising quotations to use in this way is explained by Lasse Thoresen in his valuable book Unlocking the Gate of the Heart[2]: ‘Repeatedly reading a prayer or passage which you feel meaningful can increase your ability to experience it at a deeper level’ although we need to take care and avoid letting it ‘become a mechanical ritual of piety which we carry out without collecting ourselves or turning our hearts towards God.’ Done mindfully in a spirit of remembrance, it ‘will eventually give birth to new insights.’

I have explained before how Eknath Easwaran covers this same ground in his book on meditation so I won’t repeat it here.  What might be worth mentioning is the importance of a skill that meditation helps us learn: focus.

Meditation

Easwaran reminds us what meditation does:[3] it trains ‘the mind to be one-pointed by concentrating on a single subject – an inspirational passage.’ It turns the mind from being[4] ‘the master of the house into ‘a trusted, loyal servant whose capacities we respect.’

This reminded me of McGilchrist’s brilliant The Master & his Emissary. There the left-hemisphere language and logic-based mode of operation has usurped the role of the holistic right-hemisphere processing, much to our detriment. There may be deeper parallels here but now is not the time to explore them. I’m distracting myself again!

Easwaran argues[5] that we should work at learning to focus even on tasks we find unpleasant. If we do we might find they become more satisfying. Focused attention also makes us more efficient:[6]

When the mind is unified and fully employed with the task, we have abundant energy. The work, particularly if routine, is dispatched efficiently and easily, and we see it in the context of the whole into which it fits. We feel engaged; time does not press on us.

So it can alleviate the hurry up as well.

His core advice here is simple, if we are to learn this skill:[7]

The first step is the systematic practice of meditation, which is the perfect way to learn the skill. There is another valuable aid too: to refrain from doing more than one thing at a time, to abandon totally the habit of trying to perform several operations simultaneously.

This last point should be applied to everything, from work through eating to recreation, and our meditation will benefit. It’s a two-way street. And we will have fewer accidents – that should keep me out of trouble.

His summarising phrase is[8] ‘Concentration is Consecration.’

The Heart Again!

Because I attach such importance to gardening my heart, many of the prayers and passages from the Bahá’í Writings I have memorised contain key quotations about the heart. For example, in the more mystical Writings of Bahá-u-lláh we find:[9]

O My Brother! A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of “Neither doth My earth nor My heaven contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.”

From the prayers I chose two that contained these supplications:[10]

Ignite, then, O my God, within my breast the fire of Thy love, that its flame may burn up all else except my remembrance of Thee, that every trace of corrupt desire may be entirely mortified within me, and that naught may remain except the glorification of Thy transcendent and all-glorious Being. This is my highest aspiration, mine ardent desire, O Thou Who rulest all things

And:[11]

O Thou the Compassionate God. Bestow upon me a heart which, like unto glass [lamp], may be illumined with the light of Thy love, and confer upon me thoughts which may change this world into a rose garden through the outpourings of heavenly grace.

They help remind me of where I am heading at least, as well as of the truth I first encountered in what I regard as one of Wordworth’s greatest poems, his Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, which contains these lines – words that I memorised in my teens and which survived my years of disbelief:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,          60

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,

          And cometh from afar:

        Not in entire forgetfulness,

        And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come             65

        From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

        Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,   70

        He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

    Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

      And by the vision splendid

      Is on his way attended;        75

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

Wordsworth’s own life sadly exemplified that trajectory.

Nature

Which brings me onto the importance of nature, a key theme for Wordsworth with his ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’ which dwells within the ‘light of setting suns,/And the round ocean and the living air,/And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.’ Part of the reason this resonates with me so strongly is the close link for me, reinforced in my Hearth dream, between the earth and my heart.

Lasse Thoresen makes clear[12] the importance of nature for Bahá-u-lláh, which is not just exemplified by his joy at being able to relish its greenery once more after years confined within the stone walls of the prison in Akká:

Bahá-u-lláh speaks of the country, as opposed to the city, as the home of the spirit. In His prayers and meditations He uses nature’s own sounds, colours, shapes and scents as symbols of spiritual realities and forces.[13]

‘Abdu’l-Bahá resonates to the same theme[14] and ‘even states . . . the Book of creation is the command of God and the repository of divine mysteries. In it there are great signs, universal images, perfect words, exalted symbols and secrets of all things, whether of the past or of the future.’

He goes on to state:

… When thou gazest at the Book of creation thou wilt observe signs, symbols, realities and reflections of the hidden mysteries of the bounties of His Holiness the Incomparable One.’

In Bahá-u-lláh’s book of meditations we find:[15]

. . . every time I lift up mine eyes unto Thy heaven, I call to mind that Thy highness and The loftiness, and Thine incomparable glory and greatness; and every time I turn my gaze to Thine earth, I am made to recognise the evidence of Thy power and the tokens as Thy bounty. And when behold the sea, I find that it speaketh to me of Thy majesty, and of the potency of Thy might, and of Thy sovereignty and Thy grandeur. And at whatever time I contemplate the mountains, I am led to discover the ensigns of Thy victory and the standards of Thine omnipotence.

Just as access to the potentially deep significance of nature demands of us the necessary effortful focus, the same is true for the metaphorical and symbolic references in the Writings. Thoresen flags up the importance of this as well:[16]

Many of the pictures drawn in the writings and metaphors. A metaphor replaces a concrete description with an image which has certain similarities. For example, when Bahá-u-lláh refers to ‘the Most Great Branch’ He means ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. Reading at a superficial level, we might content ourselves with just knowing that ‘the Most Great Branch’ refers to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. But if we wish to understand this metaphor at a deeper level, we have to ask ourselves: why does Bahá-u-lláh choose to use exactly this image?

He goes on to state:

Only by deeply experiencing the imagery and turning to God in intense prayer with the wish of gaining insight can we hope to acquire some understanding of the true spiritual realities behind these images.

He adds:

Many of the pictures used by Bahá-u-lláh are taken from nature. Each phenomenon of nature can be seen as a metaphor for one of the qualities of God.… The moment we can see the world around us as a metaphor, we transcend the concrete, material world and approach the spiritual world, a world not directly perceptible to the senses.

The Diagram

Now is time for a short explanation of the Heart-to-Heart Resus diagram which has headed all three posts so far.

Basically, as I explained long ago on this blog, I see a strong connection between the heart and the earth, held more easily in mind by the fact that in English those two words are anagrams of each other. On my side of the diagram there are symbols to indicate that psychology, spirituality and poetry are key sources of inspiration, deepening my heart’s connection with Reality. The heart with which I am interacting may hold other such sources that will complement mine if I am open-hearted enough, and further enhance my understanding. Each heart is drawing not only upon its interaction with the other heart but also on its developing access to the Star of Truth, enabled by experiences often based in science, spirituality and the arts. In this way we become increasingly capable of transcending our strong tendency to rely upon our primate-brained egocentric dystopian myopia.

I am not claiming that any of this is easy, either developing one’s own heart or interacting with the hearts of others, or that there are no other ways to move in this desired direction. What I am seeking to convey is that we all need to search for effective ways of dispelling the conflicted and all too often self-serving scripts and sub-personalities that haunt our inscape, so that we become at peace within, open to the hearts of others and possessed of a strong sense of our unbreakable connection with all forms of life. This will empower to make a real difference to the destination our culture is moving towards and speed up our collective journey to the tipping point where enough of us are on this same page to turn our destructive trajectory away from darkness and towards the light.

So, in my quieter moments nowadays, the first thing I do, rather than read a book, is read my own mind to catch valuable insights I would otherwise have missed, such as this one!

More on possible kinds of action next time.

References

[1]. The Summons to the Lord of Hosts – page 214.
[2]. Unlocking the Gate of the Heart – pages 110-11.
[3]. Meditation: Commonsense Directions for an Uncommon life – page 118.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 119.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 121.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 122.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 127.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 139.
[9]. Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys – pages 21-22.
[10]. Prayers & Meditations of Bahá-u-lláh – XCVI.
[11]. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Bahá’í Prayers.
[12] Unlocking the Gate of the Heart – pages 85-88.
[13] Hasan Balyuzi’s King of Glory – page 356.
[14] Bahíyyih Nakhjani’s Response – page 13.
[15] Bahá-u-lláh’s Prayers and Meditations – page 272: CLXXVI.
[16] Unlocking the Gate of the Heart – pages 119-121.

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Shackled

As the current sequence, in part at least, touches on how hard we find it to see further than the surface of our simulations, it seemed worth re-publishing the next three poems.

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