71 - Future Spirituality

            In a large number of human activities the know-how must be continually updated. Meditation also needs to be updated. Armed with the information in the enormous pool of published material available in our day, we are now able to make a comprehensive study of the methods of meditation taught in the classical schools. By taking this opportunity to compare all these methods, we can gain a whole new grasp of the core issues facing our pioneering meditating predecessors. This in turn will help us to look ahead, and to brainstorm perspectives on the future of meditation at the scale of present-day thinking.            

            Since the challenges of our times are, in some ways, more demanding than those faced by our predecessors, our free-wheeling into the future must integrate a greater complexity. For example, we will need to take into consideration futuristic views in physics (some of which have not yet gained acceptance in the party-line of physics), or the latest developments in psychology. Meditation needs to give us the means to reduce stress, improve decision-making, overcome resentment and overcome poor self-image. We need in meditation to honor our concerns about the environment, the population explosion, crime, and political oppression. We need to gain insight into the disenchantment about institutionalization, particularly in the field of spirituality, and join the nascent trend to explore new expressions of our need for the sacred, emancipated from hackneyed forms of sanctimoniousness, prescriptions, dogmatism, and superstitions.

            Thanks to the momentous advances in communication (the media, technology, education, and the new paradigms), our way of considering the cosmos, and the planet Earth in particular, has taken a quantum leap. Instead of looking at the stars as viewed from planet Earth, we are now able to imagine how planet Earth looks as viewed from the stars. Looking at those photos of the Earth from outer space is almost like having been out there personally. This has surreptitiously revolutionized our way of considering our Planet, which in turn revolutionizes our way of seeing ourselves. We imagine outer space to be "out there", but has it ever occurred to you that actually planet Earth is in outer space? It all depends on how you look at it. This progressive vantage point is bound to open up new vistas in our meditation practices.

            Consequently, for example, instead of sitting still in meditation, simply observing the body or mind (which is tantamount to observing a mere cross-section of reality), we can see the whole forward march of the evolution of bodiness from our ancestors to the present state (which is like the prow), and even anticipate the future of the evolution of bodiness. Our development from our animal ancestry has not finished; it keeps advancing. The human race keeps on improving (albeit at the cost of decadence at the jagged ends).

            Instead of aiming at escaping the "here and now" to scan transcendental levels of reality (subliminal to the existential level) as did our ancestral meditators, we will endeavor to look at the "here and now" from an overview.

I ask for no less than the impossible possibility: infinity in a finite fact and eternity in a temporal act.

Prentice Milford

            Even this is too commonplace. It still evidences a static view of the existential state, whereas, as we have seen, existence is only a slice of reality in its dynamic state. Therefore, we will be learning how to see how the "everywhere and always" manifests in the forward march of becoming.

            Furthermore, instead of modulating consciousness from one vantage point to another, we will need to learn to extrapolate between several vantage points. The consciousness of future humanity may well be called stereoscopic consciousness. This applies equally to the mind, which will learn to extrapolate between thinking in terms of categories and grasping the wholeness of a situation. In addition, as a corollary, we will learn to avoid accounting for things merely in terms of a causal chain in time, of which they are the effect, but we will also include causal chains moving from the transcendent dimension into the transient. We may even grasp the concatenation of many causal chains coming together in our time and space. As a consequence of this forward step, we will be able to meditate in movement, even dancing, which will reinforce the dynamic mode of meditation, rather than the static.

            Quite understandably, the ancients, who had not yet acquired our knowledge of matter, witnessing the decay of the body after death, considered it to be like dust returning to the earth. Since we can now see our live cells in powerful microscopes, our whole perception of the fabric of our body has undergone a dramatic change. Instead of dismissing our bodies as other than ourselves, we are beginning to honor the involvement of our innate sense of meaningfulness with the very fabric of our bodiness. We are intrigued by the manner in which these two sides of the same coin interact and modify each other reciprocally. It is not just mind over body, but body over mind as well.

            This is different from psychosomatic, because with psychosomatic you say that mind affects matter as if they were two different substances ...  any change of meaning is a change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning.

Dr. David Bohm

            Consequently, we need to brainstorm a new method of meditation that incorporates the earlier methods and carries them into the future.

            To extricate ourselves from the rut into which we may have inadvertently stranded ourselves by taking things for granted, or from the stalemate which we may well have maneuvered ourselves into owing to a faulty strategy in the game of life, we need to rethink our lives.

            To achieve this, we need to hoist our vantage point from the commonplace narrow range of the immediate environment and look at things in a wider context. This is where some of the skills of meditation can prove helpful. It is somewhat like witnessing how different a familiar landscape looks when flying over it in a helicopter or suspended from a hang-glider. Doing this, we realize that our assessments of our life-situations change with the altitude as it were, and furthermore that they are a function of our values which manifest the higher levels of our being- and monitor our motivations. Moreover we realize that our sense of personal inadequacy or our pessimistic judgement in our assessment of a situation were due to our mind's having gotten entrapped in a way of thinking from which we failed to see a way out. Yes, one can get trapped in one's thinking and ascribe the prison to one's fate. The bind is in the mind.

            To escape from this prison takes two things: a flash of insight and resolve. How do we trigger off the flash of insight? We need to first ask ourselves: what if my assessment of my life situations, (or of people around me), upon which I have relied all this time and which I have always taken for granted, is wrong? What is more, if this is true, any new assessment we might convince ourselves of at this point stands an equal chance of proving later to be erroneous. If we therefore forego not only previous assessments, but any attempt at a reassessment, then, faced with the collapse of our opinion, we find ourselves hopelessly groping our way in the dark night of understanding. Bereft of any crutches, a different mode of understanding dawns upon us. Imagine that, walking in pitch dark, suddenly you are able to see the auras of people and that the features of their real countenance are revealed to you in contrast with the features of their faces.

            It takes courage to let go of all that one has built up over the years without any guarantee that a new light will dawn upon one's horizon. But we find ourselves sometimes confronted with the choice between situations which progress gradually like a bud unfurls, or where things remain at a stand-still or run the chance of reversing into decay, or where nature proceeds by leaps and bounds. There are situations which one cannot change in their outer circumstances, but will change by one's changing oneself or by a new way of handling them. In exceptional cases - perhaps the most meaningful - there is no slow transition from one perspective to the other, the transit is sudden. Here lies the difference between the moment of time where there is an overlap between past and future and the instant where there is a sudden and irreversible break of continuity.

            These rare conditions called singularities in astro-physics occur in our lives and in our thinking. They may be illustrated by a sunrise or sunset, or solar or lunar eclipse, or the equinoxes or solstices where there is an alignment in space between two luminaries at a given time called a syzygy. Let us bear in mind that the coincidence is only meaningful from our vantage point, therefore relates the objective world to our subjective dimension.

            A particularly rare coincidence between two numbers, illustrated in mathematics by an algorithm, illustrates our mind's ability to grasp coherence of a sudden where two mental constructs seemed previously to be irreconcilable. More generally what we mean by our sense of meaningfulness is our mind's ability to click when it grasps a correspondence between two thoughts which had hitherto appeared unrelated. The grasp of congruence sparks our being with delight because it gives us a sense of thinking in sync with the thinking of the universe and feeling in resonance with the emotion of the cosmos, and hence makes us aware of our holistic connectiveness with the totality which we call God, not just at the physical level but at all levels.

            We are ourselves hybrids, born of the alchemical betrothal between heaven and earth.

At the moment of birth, two worlds meet: all that we have cumulated in our descent through the spheres and that which we have inherited from our ancestors.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Moreover we can rebirth ourselves by going through the steps that led us to our present state, altering them willfully and consciously. Here we witness in ourselves the very task we have investigated so far: conjugating in our very personality our celestial and ancestral inheritance so that they actually click.

            C. G. Jung spent much ponderous enquiry upon this paradoxical conjunction between our psyche and the physical world. In paradoxical cases, rather than it be a perception or an event that impacts our psyche and gets processed by our psyche, it is our psyche that triggers off the event. He called it synchronicity. Jung defines these rare and surprising cases that one would normally explain away as situations which cannot be causally determined as: The simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.

            Yet he still strived to grasp the mystery behind occurrences that could not be connected in a chronological sequence where one occurrence could have triggered off the other; rather they seemed to be causally connected in a network irrespective of the arrow of time. The connections of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal and requires another principle of explanation.

            Then it occurred to him that rare events (like a szyzgy or singularity) cannot be governed by the same laws that apply to statistics, for example. Indeed the conjunctions that take place in an instant of time are rare events as compared with the gradual transformations where at each moment, the past overlaps with the future.          

            Probability theory is able to predict with uncanny precision the overall outcome of processes made up out of a large number of individual happenings, each in itself is unpredictable.

Arthur Koestler

            Of course, granted that our minds can affect our body functions:

            You see that deep changes of meaning is a change in the deep material structure of the brain; we already know that certain meanings can greatly disturb the brain, but other meanings may organize it in a new way.

David Bohm

            But how does a grasp of meaning affect the outer physical world? (Incidentally this is what it meant by psycho-kinesis).

            After years of painstaking research in psycho-kinesis, Dr. J. B. Rhine arrived at conclusions that throw some light on the problem. For Rhine, space and time are dependent upon psychic conditions and therefore can be reduced to almost a vanishing point.

            A parallel with David Bohm is called for here:

            But there is still a mental pole at every level of matter...and eventually if you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something very close to what you reach in the depth of the mind.

David Bohm

            We are touching upon a most important point: space-time is only meaningful regarding physical reality. Indeed for the psyche, space is only meaningful where one is recalling physical occurrences or the functions of the mind creatively in the act of imagination. Yoga distinguishes where the mind adopts as it were the form of that which is perceived or reminisced (Nirvetarka), from the state where the mind absorbs the quintessence of the perceived irrespective of form (Nirvecara), and at some point the mind loses notions of space altogether (Asmita) and a further point at which the mind loses the sense of time (Asamprajnata Samadhi).

            For Speiser, at a certain level of our thinking, our psyche touches upon a level prior to causality.

            It is an initial state which is not governed by mechanistic law, but is the pre-conditioning of law, the chance substrate upon which law is built.

Andreas Speiser

            Compare with Bohm:

            The mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of operation. It may be able to operate directly in the depths of the implicate order where this timeless state is the primary actuality. Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a secondary structure.

            Indeed our commonplace understanding of causality is based upon our concept of time as being uni-dimensional: the event that we infer having been causated by another one, followed it in a sequential order. In our ordinary thinking, we also assume that an event causes another if they are related in space either by electro-magnetic forces that extend in space or gravity that also extends in space (including the strong and weak forces between sub-atomic particles) . But modern physics questions the mechanistic theories of their predecessors, replacing them with acausal, non-local laws.     If everything in the cosmos is connected with everything else as in the holistic paradigm, then location in space is irrelevant in the determination of events: it is simply easier for our minds to see the connection between the motion of a billiard ball and that of the one it has hit, then to see how the surge of a wave we think is in the Pacific could influence that of a wave which we think is in the English channel. Yet, as Dr. David Bohm points out, a wave in the ocean is not caused by the previous one, but each wave is introjected back into the whole ocean and it is the whole ocean that projects itself in the next wave.

            A form emerges or is creatively projected from the whole , then it influences the whole, or is injected back into it; in the implicate order, it resonates with similar forms and then is projected back into the explicate order.

            However, long before the holistic paradigm envisioned by General Smuts revolutionized science, the Sufis saw the insufficiency in reducing causality to the dimension of time which we call the process of becoming. One needs to account for at least another dimension of time moving from transcendence to transiency and vice-versa.

            The Sufi Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi felt that beyond the sidereal empyrean, other universes would be found in a hierarchical sequence of spheres of light of increasing subtlety. The higher ones precede the lower ones and enjoy a hierarchically higher value (precellence) and consequently sovereignty (prevalence); the lower ones proceed from the higher ones in a causal order in a different time order than the commonplace arrow of time - a kind of exponential order. This so called vertical hierarchy which he refers to as the 'world of mothers' then splits up in a lateral order where equality takes over from dominance. Here we find the prototypes of the species. It is at this level that our ordinary notions of the process of time take effect.

            But it is in the conjunction between a physical phenomenon and a spontaneous thought that was not triggered off by an actual occurrence that our delight reaches a degree of intensity such that it could spark our creative faculties - whether of a work of art or of our personality. One could define creativity as the act of exploring unchartered regions of the mind while grasping a correspondence between the mental constructs thus gleaned and a form or configurations or scenarios in the fabric of matter. Creativity is a congruent conjunction between the timeless and the transient, the heavenly and the earthly.

            We could say that our action toward the whole universe is a result of what it means to us. ..In the long run only those meanings that allow changes that tend to bring about accord between us and the rest of the universe will be possible.

David Bohm

            We shall sooner or later have to give up many of our old habits of thought and adopt new ones: habits that are better adapted to life in a world that is living in the presence of the past - and is also living in the presence of the future, and open to continuing creation.

 Rupert Sheldrake

PRACTICES

            What would be the kind of meditations embodying the progress in our thinking in our day and age and oriented towards the future? Having learnt how the mind works when it awakens beyond the existential realm, we need to learn to awaken in life - grasping our place, our role in the universe.

            Let us follow retrospectively the trails of the two evolutionary networks that have intermeshed into the formation of our being as it is at present: (i) the legacy of our celestial origination, (ii) our genetic inheritance. To do this we need to reverse in our mind the forward thrust of the arrow of time and carry our memory right back in time - into prehistorical aeons of time whose traces are stored (though recessively) in deep memory in the archives of the depths of the unconscious zones of our psyche.

            1)         Bear in mind that the fabric of your body originated in the big-bang explosion at the onset of the present aeon in the genesis of the universe - there were however previous universes! Ponder upon the fact that your body is made out of the fabric of the stars.

            2)         Try to imagine what it would feel like to be a vibration - more precisely a high-frequency vibration of pure energy.

            3)         Imagine that this pristine state in which you were gels into a crystal.

            4)         Can you visualize the marvelous symmetry of lattice-work of the molecules and within them the atoms of your crystalline primeval body jiggling and sparkling?

            5)         Can you envision the glee of the electrons within the atoms as they avail themselves of the energy of ambient light to free themselves, even if for a split second, from the rigor of the constraint of the order of the universe maintaining them in their orbitals, and dance with abandon. Imagine the outburst of joy at participating with some measure of freedom in the choreography of the cosmos!

            6)         Now imagine the sudden evolutionary leap of the molecules constituting your body from the mineral state to the plant - from the inorganic to the organic. Envision the intelligence of the universe self-organizing itself in an improved fashion through the awareness now emerging in the molecules, finding a way of grouping gregariously with their neighbors to cooperate by specializing in their mutual contributions to the living cell. To illustrate this: instead of the repetitive series of frescoes on a wall paper, we have a flurry of proliferating forms and radiant colors.

            7)         Can you see the way the crystal connects with light after being entombed in the earth? Now experience the plant's ability to power its cyclic unfoldment, and more so: its mutations by dint of light. Can you envision yourself as a flower at night fluttering in resonance with the trembling of a star? Can you feel the thrust of the evolutionary drive striving to free the plant of its roots that it may explore neighboring space as an animal whose instincts still conspire in us.

            8)         Or is it the impact of our heavenly legacy that seeks freedom from the strict conditioning in the more primitive developmental stages of our being and makes for ever more variable structures in the material underpinning of our being? Notice that simply thinking of the celestial spheres conveys to you a sense of freedom. Now you may feel somehow the connection between your body as it has evolved from its precursors and your heavenly legacy.

            9)         At this stage, we are ready to understand the implications of the alchemical betrothal. Recollecting the two main genealogical streams generating your being, the celestial and the genetic, try and see how they have been intermeshing in both your body and your personality. If you recall some of the practices we did, envisioning our celestial bodies, fashioning them in accord with our thoughts and attunements and creative imagination, and observing how this affected our countenance and even our demeanor, you will have established that connection. The same applies to our personality.

            10)       In meditative vein, envision yourself descending through the spheres. Now gage the need you felt through your descent to understand how the intention governing the software of the universe gets actuated on earth. Now realize that it was this very need to understand that you felt throughout that impelled the mutations in the very fabric of your body as it progressed though your precursors in the course of evolution that enable your present body to be better able to serve the intelligence of which it is the support system.

            11)       Now consider that, while you converge the universe and therefore incur a great measure of conditioning, you also act upon the universe. See how your incentive exercises an impact upon the legacy of the past in your body and personality which we have been recollecting.

            12)       Bearing in mind that the human condition is just a developmental stage in the evolutionary march, can you sense in yourself a longing to awaken beyond the human condition? Can you feel the evolutionary drive spurring you on? Can you see that if the initial spring-head behind the whole evolutionary drive is the very freedom that resonates with your pristine celestial nature, then the Cosmos envisioned as one being (which is what is meant by God) tends to converge in each being . This is incidentally the holistic model. If this is so , then the more we converge of the bounty of the universe, the more self-sufficient we become. Think of yourself as aiming at becoming gradually a spin-off in which the universe rethinks and reconstructs itself.

            13)       Instead of visualizing the stars as they may appear from Planet Earth, now reach out there and imagine them as supporting civilizations different from ours and how our civilization might look from the vantage point of their intelligence.

            14)       Now if you ponder upon how the mind of the crystal evolved into the mind of a plant, then of an animal, then reached the human stage, realize that you can stretch your mind beyond its limits. The clue to spurring our mind to surpass itself is by jettisoning a lot of pre-conceived ideas - which is precisely what we have learned in this course. There could be no limits to this, but if indeed our minds are holistically sub-wholes of the mind of the cosmos, and if indeed the smaller the fraction of the holograph, the less well it reflects the original object, then the more we stretch out minds, the more truly our thinking will prove isomorphic with the thinking of the cosmos! Think: we are decoding the code of the universe!

            15)       However we should not limit our thinking to its cosmic dimension (its ability to extrapolate between more and more factors); we could highlight transcendental dimension. As we shift our sense of identity from plane to plane we discover different levels of thinking. We normally ascribe the notions acquired by our thinking at higher levels to our sense of values. Values such as compassion, humor, authenticity actuate themselves increasingly as evolution marches on.           

            16)       Starting with your spontaneous thoughts however random, prompted by inspiring emotions, try to grasp the archetypes of which these thoughts are the exemplars. You will find yourself exploring a whole different dimension - the world of metaphor. Now if you turn your mind as it were downwards, you will find that these thoughts self-organize themselves as forms, or landscapes, or scenarios, as in your dreams.

            17)       Now we arrive at a kind of pinnacle of cosmic cognition: See yourself in the universe, your origination, your purpose, your destiny, your past and future, your ability to shift your focus through the spheres by adjusting your attunement.

            18)       At this point we grasp the antimony between thought and emotion as the two sides of the same coin, and permutate between them. Consequently we can trace our origination to the emotion behind the universe beyond the software. Just like the way that the emotion moving the cosmos, (the emotion behind the universe that manifested as the universe) passing though J. S. Bach's soul was crystalized into the notes of his music, you can feel the emotion spurring the universe at the cosmic scale configurating itself in the idiosyncrasies of your personality and the countenance of your face behind its external features.

            19)       You could willfully reinforce these emotions by indulging in the musings of your soul, by enjoying your sense of bewonderment at the marvel of yourself and the universe of which you are a part, and giving vent to your need for glorification. Lo and behold, what at first seemed to be your personal emotion - rapture - culminates into impersonal, cosmic emotion - divine ecstasy

            20)       Now honor your intuition that behind all manifestation there is great splendor and that you are born of the divine nostalgia to manifest that splendor in every possible way in and through your being at all levels. Accept the divinity of your being. Awaken to the divinity of your being. Accept the beauty of your being if you can reconcile it with a sense of modesty, as long as you do not confuse it with false humility. Priding oneself in one's self denigration avers itself to be a failure to recognize one's divine heritage, and proves self-defeating. The Sufis consider this to be an insult to the divine Artist.

            21)       We have been exploring methods of meditation whereby we may actuate the splendor of our divine investiture thanks to the ability of our intelligence to surpass its previous outreach, and by discovering in our high attunement, deeply rooted in the very spring-heads of our being, the divine nostalgia in search of beauty and love. Eventually we understand the enormous implications of a saying of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, my father, embodying the very quintessence of the metaphysical traditions of the Sufis and representing the spiritual paradigm for the future: awakening consists in seeing oneself as the fulfillment of the divine purpose and recognizing that purpose in the universe at large.
