Words From Ken

Ten years ago I had the opportunity to attend a silent retreat led by Raimon Panikkar, who was then Professor of Comparative Religions at University of California, Santa Barbara. Just by chance, while going through some materials for the New Gaia, I came across my notes from that time. I was surprised and pleased to find them so relevant to this issue, so I will share them with you here.

May 31.  Last evening at 5 PM we met as a group with Fr. Panikkar. He briefly previewed our subject, “The Silence of Life”, and emphasized that our effort would have to be communal, even though that word is one that often just “fills our mouths”. He said that he was not to be our “spiritual cocktail butler” and that, consistent with the concept of silencing the mind, he did not know exactly what was going to happen. But as a general framework: 8 AM Breakfast in silence, and silence then until 10:30 AM meeting; 12 PM lunch in silence, then silence again until 4 PM meeting; 5:30 dinner, then quiet talk if necessary, private meetings with him if necessary, then 8 PM meeting and silence until next morning.

June 1 AM. Our first real meeting then was last night. Fr. Panikkar spoke more specifically about the silence of life, by which he meant the silencing of the intellect, of the planning, conniving, the plotting of our minds, even when we are trying to do good things. He spoke of the tragic over-emphasis on the masculine approach as opposed to the feminine one, which is willing to wait in patience and faith for fecundation by the Spirit.

“What are we doing here?” he asked. If by that we mean what do we hope to attain, what do we hope to accomplish, what are we striving for, we are already missing the point. We cannot have any “idea” of what we want, or the innocence is already lost. Even “he who sees God,” wrote Dionysius the Aropagite, “and knows what he sees, does not see God.” Fr. Panikkar told a funny story about a tightrope walker. When people asked, “How do you do it?” he replied, “It is very easy, you just walk. But don’t think.”

 

The moment you start thinking, worrying, plotting, even the most simple task becomes difficult if not impossible, not to mention sterile. He finished by wishing us a pleasant sleep, which has something to do with the life of silence. As I was falling asleep I thought of the four pillars of Brahman which are,

normal waking consciousness

dream-filled sleep

dreamless sleep

something beyond the sleeping and waking state.

Keeping busy I was.

May 31, 12:30 PM. This morning Fr. Panikkar began speaking  about self-confidence, which is different from the self-importance derived from the feeling, “I am rich, I am powerful, I am beautiful, I am Holy.” It is self-importance, according to the Buddhist texts we he cites, that will destroy us. But true self-confidence comes from an another source, one which is indeed silent, empty, and of an order altogether different from the many trappings of reality, good or bad.

He referred to a recent talk with Tom Berry. Berry’s thrust is that all traditional religions are inappropriate because they evolved at times when people were not destroying the planet as they are today. Therefore, the Bible, etc. should be “put on the shelf” while we are using every thought, every resource, every action to stem the tide of destruction and prevent our eventual doom, which of course would make all religious expression meaningless. Fr. Panikkar is in agreement with the general assessment of our situation. In fact he has recently made some mathematical calculations of a statistical nature, which show that within our lifetimes a nuclear disaster will occur which will destroy ¼  to 1/3 of all life on the planet. When he submitted this information to NASA they said they were aware of this but that his analysis was probably many times too optimistic!

But in spite of this devastating realization, one which does not allow us to stand idle in any way, there is also a more general realization. What if we do avoid nuclear catastrophe, reverse the tide of pollution and exploitation of the earth and even, just to be on the safe side, see every human being happy, peaceful and productive? Still, in 4 billion years the sun will go out. Some time before this the planet will no longer sustain life. “I am not satisfied with 4 billion years,” says Fr. Panikkar. My little ego is, of course, but life is more than that and life is not satisfied with any framework of time.

It is only by this awareness that life does transcend time, that there is an existential core of existence which does not need to obey the dictates of time, that true self-confidence can emerge. Otherwise it is just self-importance, and self-importance is ineffectual and ultimately destructive. In fact it is only without this self-importance that on can actually roll up the sleeves and take effective action in these very important though temporal matters.

So today we are to do a very simple exercise. There has been so much emphasis in modern society on the masculine energy, the super achiever, the self-important person, and this exercise is an attempt to reveal the opposite element. Our retreat is “The Silence of Life”, and this exercise is specifically the silence of the body. We don’t have bodies, we are bodies, and yet so often we do not trust our bodies and thus ourselves. We prod and poke them, make them move and jump about often out of sheer nervousness.

So this exercise, the silence of the body, and also the self-confidence of the body, is just to let the body become immobile, static, quiet, still. Don’t make it be still, let it be still. Trust the body. And then take note of  “personal units of time”, which are not the same as hours, minutes or even natural rhythms, but are segments of time in which the body can remain still. And then notice that all of these personal units of time, whether of duration 1 minute, 5 minutes,  or even much longer, are yet connected and in a sense homogeneous.

The Silence of Life as experienced does not occur within our rational framework and within our rational concept of time. This is something different from life; it is the source of life. It cannot be destroyed today, tomorrow or even in 4 billion years, for it does not exist in time. In conclusion Fr. Panikkar made some hesitant remarks about sitting in a comfortable position, straight spine, etc. and also mentioned that he very rarely sees, in the West, yoga performed with the right motivation, i.e. to discover the Silence of the Body.

6 PM. Every traditional religion has pointed to the fact that there is a hope which lies not in the future but the present, within the very matrix of temporal reality. The fact that in cultures where many of these religions developed it was indeed very difficult if not impossible to have hope in any conceivable future made it perhaps easier for these people to maintain and communicate this understanding. 

In today’s world, where we have every comfort, every security, every promise for good things, workable solutions—the true sense of hope has atrophied. We hold hands and sing “We shall overcome, we shall overcome,” but we overcome nothing. Hope for the future will always be frustrated. Not that we do not work for a better future, but a better future can only be the result of better work in the present, and this can only come about when our hopes are pinned not on the future, but upon the Invisible Presence, or as the Upanisads says, the Inner Controller, the Atman.

This inscrutable, invisible, undefinable presence, this Atman, this Brahman, is our Self which is in all things. One of the most universal metaphors in all religious, poetic and philosophical language is that of the drop of water, falling through the air, splashing into the infinite sea and disappearing; not only in the sense of dying, losing its temporal individuality, but also in the sense that all finite reality bears this relationship to the Infinite. 

And if  we think of drops of water hitting the sea it is true enough that this represents death, the loss of that surface tension that holds the drop together, just as the “surface tension” of our small egos, our self-importance temporarily holds our individualistic lives together. In this sense, according to the metaphor, Atman is not Brahman—the drop (self) exists only until it hits the water and then— Splash! But if we think not of the drop of water but as the water of the drop, then water is just water, whether in the form of a drop or the infinite ocean, Atman-Brahman.

If we think we are like a drop of water then we hope, we hope, but we know we are falling and so we can only hope that Brahman (Heaven) is a nice place, and then…Splash. But if we realize the true Self, the water of the drop, which is not different from the water of any other drop or of the Infinite Sea, then our hope is centered on the present, on the inner reality, the only doer, the thinker and knower of all things.

          “This is the Lord of all, this is the all-knowing. This is the inner controller.

                This is the source of all, for this is the origin and the end of being”

June 1, AM. Last night the talk was much less formal, less challenging in a way, and at first I was a little let down. But this morning I see it differently, and I must admit that I feel very good right now. It has been somewhat up and down since I’ve been here. First this great longing and determination to accomplish this thing(?) whatever that is, and next frustration and regret at having more or less missed it, never getting quite there, coming up short, or long… And the “message” last night was just this: Life is not a challenge, life is not a burden or a series of obstacles to be conquered or overcome. Life is given. We cannot “do” anything. Atman, the real Self, simply is, and all we can do is let Atman be. Let life live. Trust life. And that is Self-confidence. 

So here I was again last night, poised for struggle, ready to conquer, with intimations of victory, and once again it will slip from my grasp. Fr. Panikkar told a story two Chinese fellows who were walking along the street towards evening. The one said to the other, “Come on friend, let’s have a drink and enjoy the evening together.” The other was offended and said, “I do not have time for drinking and talking. I must be working for the revolution. Other things are a waste of time.” The first fellow replied, “What good is the revolution? What does it accomplish if two fellows cannot have a drink together and enjoy the evening?”

What is this “revolution” all about? What good are all these plans, strivings and vain hopes for some grand future if in the meantime (which is all there really is) we cannot experience and enjoy life? Again last night it happened that my disappointment,  my let-down, was my lesson. Someone asked Fr. Panikkar how much time should be spent in contemplation, or pure non-utilitarian past-time. How do we balance our lives so that we do not on one hand find ourselves too busy and on the other hand become so other worldly that we do not take care of things?

“Rule of thumb,” he replied, “50-50.”  “But you don’t mean half of every day should be non-goal oriented?” “Yes.”  “But I sleep 8 hours and eat and other things and then work 8 hrs…”  “You can count sleep, if you sleep well. Eating you should enjoy. Half the time should be just letting life live. Then you can also work, plan and all those things because you cannot totally escape the times. But it is important to establish a rhythm in order to not be drawn into a world of total busy-ness, so that the Atman, the third eye, should not become atrophied. Otherwise the cure will become much more painful.”

Wed., PM. Not much to say. There is an inner presence who (which) dwells in Silence and cannot be known by any sense faculty, but (like the water of the drop) is no different from the Infinite. There is no way to “get at” this inner presence, Atman, true Self, only stop creating obstacles. Let it Be. Give up the craving ego. Stop trying to be an “I”. There is only one “I”, and that is God, Atman-Brahman. “I am Brahman,” says the Upanisads. We are the Thou of God, “for in my inmost heart,” Romans 7, v. 22, “I agree with God’s law.”

1:00 PM. Final Gathering.  Whatever we do, all our important tasks and responsibilities, are ultimately futile and even destructive unless we have the sense of the inner presence, the Atman, the Christ. This exists neither outside ourselves (transcendent), nor deep within ourselves (again transcendent, though often a mistaken concept of immanence), but which is truly immanent, the very matrix of reality, about which nothing can be said or done—which simply is.

Unless we can stop making obstacles to Being, all our doing will be frustrated. This will take some faith. How do we know things will “get done” if we our not willing, with our great self-importance, to take the responsibility  and organize the show? What if we say, “All right God, or Atman,  or Spirit, I will trust you, do your thing,” and He or It doesn’t do it or does it not to our own personal liking? What if this Doing even involves personal change on our parts? Maybe even a little discomfort? Well, one cannot approach the Inner Presence just to seek consolation.

I remember that while saying goodbye Fr. Panikkar told us not to try to pack our experiences into memories to be regurgitated when necessary; and for this reason, I think, I have not often looked at these notes or considered sharing them. The value of what we did was measured strictly by the authenticity with which we experienced it, and this is true of any moment. But somehow coming upon them again I experienced an authenticity which I felt was worth trying to communicate.

As the 20th century draws to a close it is natural to be thinking about time, a subject which has both fascinated and perplexed thinkers since the beginning of—whatever it is. Augustine said that he knew what time was as long as no one asked him to explain. Charles Lamb wrote that “nothing puzzles me more than time…and nothing bothers me less, as I never think about [it].” Early Buddhist philosophers did not take the matter so lightly. For them, time as an independent objective entity cannot exist because “distinctions of space and time into past, present and future cannot be made without reference to objects in motion.” Zeno the Stoic, trying to track down time in the 3rd century BC, followed a similar argument to the startling conclusion that even motion cannot exist. Newton’s   great assumption which became the basis  for Western science is that of a uniform time through which all bodies “move”. This objective notion of time accompanies a subjective feeling of an ever rolling stream or universally trodden path, but this notion is itself far from universal; it is challenged by many voices, not only from the past but the present as well. Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner quotes an Australian Aborigine: “White man him go different. Him go road belong himself.” Philosopher and theologian Raimon Panikkar understands that the era of historical consciousness, ushered in by the invention of writing, (chron-icles), is not only preceded but underlain by a pre-historical consciousness in which time can be a more rhythmic, even circular, pattern than a linear one. Zen Master Dogen: “It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact it stays where it is.” “Ridiculous the waste sad time,” mused T.S. Eliot, “stretching before and after.”

It is not only philosophers, artists and mystics who ponder the riddle of time. Some of the most startling discoveries of modern physics have to do with its mysterious and elusive nature. Einstein’s intuitions of a relative, flexible time have now been confirmed experimentally. Hawking and others have taken his theories still further. It appears that as one gets closer and closer to a complete mathematical description of physical reality, time simply drops out of the equations; in short, time does not exist. This assertion is shocking to our “everyday” experience of temporality and is not easily communicated with our language and thought structure which, following Panikkar, is precisely time-oriented and time-conditioned. The insights of artists are often expressed in metaphor and symbol, the intuitions of mystics by paradox and non-verbal communion, and now scientists find themselves struggling with common words, thought patterns and even the very nature of consciousness. If time does not exist in an absolute sense, then neither can causality. Without a well defined “before” and “after” it is impossible to conceive of a latter event being the result of a former one. Mind boggling experiments in quantum physics are in fact being done, in which operations performed at a certain time can “cause” changes in earlier states. “Before” and “after” precipitates, so to speak, only in conjunction with a certain type of awareness or mode of observation; and it is not merely that there is a subjective as well as an objective side to everything,  two sides to one coin. There is either no real coin at all or else it is spinning so fast that the two sides are transparent to one another. This reminds us of the Buddhist pratitya-samutpada, the radical relativity of all things including space, time and even a cognitive self. Science, which for centuries has striven to build a picture of objective reality—the world “out there”, has wandered into a world of appearances, permutations and timeless interdependence that is anything but objective. Quantum theory has shown us the universe as a game of chance, and we are both players and played. “We’re the bat swung by the children,” sang Rumi, “we’re the ball and we’re the game.”

Without causality every event becomes spontaneous and unique. Though shapes and forms appear to arise and dissolve in familiar patterns and we are tempted to make predictions on that basis, really we can only guess at probabilities. Furthermore, since this is a participatory universe to its very core, our predictions and guesses are themselves woven into the fabric of reality, affecting its texture, color and design. If the pattern appears sometimes frayed or incomplete, it is only so in a relative sense. If it looks beautiful or meaningful it is testimony to the creative genius of rational intellect, for example, or to a particular aesthetic sensibility but not to an absolute status. To be absolutely logical one would have to determine (as Descartes did not) what caused logic itself. It could be argued that rational thought appeared in Greece just as spontaneously as did spirituality in India. Ironies of history are rarely sweet but the course of Western thought, which set itself against the typical Eastern one, has taken it around the world, in a sense, to encounter ancient wisdom in a new way. Many physicists today believe that logical inquiry has sailed nearly its full course into the realm of relativity and quantum theory, and that exploration of this world of primal chaos, uncertainty and timelessness must include exploration of our own consciousness. Reality is a spontaneous collaboration involving ghost-like substance, shifting space and time frames, and an active participatory awareness.  Any purely objective analysis of this collaboration may lead us into what  Buddha called “the jungle of theorizing, the tangle of theorizing, the bondage of theorizing and the shackles of theorizing”. Life need not  always be felt as a series  of nagging questions,  it can also be experienced as lila, God’s play, or pure celebration. Historical consciousness is one of many unique improvisations on Reality, pre-historical consciousness yet another…

Driving the point still further, some physicists postulate that from the timeless, primal “quantum stew” not just one or two realities may emerge spontaneously, but an infinity of them. Some of these “worlds” may be very like our commonly accepted one with a certain kind of time and rational framework; some might be unimaginably different. The reality that each person, or culture, experiences is not independent of countless unknown or even unknowable realms. Today we may have chased the elves and fairies from the woodlands, locked angels in museums of mythology and even bound God with chains of reason. But what do we really know about viruses, global warming or psychological illness? We make definitive statements about life in outer space, but we are more than a little  nervous about the boundaries of our personal earthly existence. We dream of cloning ourselves to escape mortality, but how rational are we really? Cosmologists now agree with the Buddha and others that substance and time are quirky habits that may disappear just as inexplicably as they arose, and that absolute trust and dependence on such concepts is not warranted. It is entirely possible that the 21st century will see the end of time as we know it. In an historical sense this could well mean environmental disaster, nuclear holocaust or world-wide famine, plaque and depression, although we would rather hope for a kind of realized, perfected “future”. In an ahistorical sense it could mean simply transcending this world of flux and change, much as the Souix ghost dancers would have danced themselves into another world even as they were being shot down by soldiers. Again a more optimistic vision would see history ending in a spontaneous collaboration of all peoples including artists, philosophers and scientists that, being timeless, could not involve fear, greed or regret. But without time even apocalyptic visions, whether optimistic or pessimistic, would be out of place. 

Physicists are being led to the conclusion that every view of reality is relative and contingent, that there is no primary substance, absolute meaning, method or time frame to which we can refer. We are enmeshed in a four-dimensional space-time pattern in which everything that we feel as our past, present and future exists en bloc. Observation of this total reality, or any particular mode of perception, can occur only by slicing it so to speak into three-dimensional sections, each section representing an aspect of the Absolute. The “slicing procedure” developed by early Greek philosophers, modified by Arab and Jewish theologians, then refined by Newton, Descartes and others has given us our 3-dimensional material world and a subjective feeling of a linear, flowing time. Native Americans took a different cross-section, in which at least two of the four directions—East and West—did not come quite clean from time and in which the power of the world, like  the Sun moving across the sky is rhythmic  and circular.  Tatanka-Ptecila, a Souix medicine man, sings:

                “In this Circle O ye warriors, Lo I tell you each his future,

                  All shall be as I reveal it in this Circle.”

Don Juan taught Carlos Casteneda that the universe is an infinite agglomeration of energy fields and that rational perception is a particular choosing or grouping of these fields. “Time, space and causation,” wrote Vivekananda, “are only like a glass through which the Absolute is seen.” Infinite, unconditioned Reality, like the primal quantum state of modern physics, is original not just in a temporal sense but as a timeless basis for perception itself. Raimon Panikker hearkens a trans-historical consciousness, in which the past and future are integrated into a tempiternal present. Angelus Silesius wrote:

                   “Do not compute Eternity as year after year,

                     One step across time, Eternity is here.”

“History is now,” said Eliot, the sense of time being only a detail in the over-all pattern. “Time past and time future point to one end, which is eternally present.” From this standpoint then, how can we view and evaluate our personal past and, more importantly only in a historical sense, how can we envision the 21st century?

In our meditation on time we have glimpsed some radical new (and some very old) insights: That time is not absolute, uniform and changeless—it may curve and twist, revolve in circles, even break and disappear; that, time being relative and subjective, so too is the notion of causality and determinism—spontaneity is at the very source of things;  that there is an infinity of possibilities not only vying to become the future but claiming equal status with our past; and that these worlds of possibilities— what might have been and what  might be— exist perpetually and interdependently with what has been and what will be. As our rational perception cuts its unique slice in this infinite agglomeration of energies it indeed does so in linear time, but other cuts can be made in other modes and frequencies. Our historical consciousness sees the past as a finished product conditioning a future which is always waiting to happen, while the present is felt as an irresistible one-way motion. If we suffer chronically from a sort of motion sickness it is significant that we seek a cure in dreams of perfection or even immortality in the future, while Native Americans for example sought to “circle back” to a timeless world of their ancestors. In our modern world, the historical past comes alive only in a psychological sense, but as not only mystics have told us but also philosophers and artists and now even modern physicists, this is a narrow vision. As time looses its absolute status our meditation on time becomes a rather Zen-like piercing of the tempiternal moment in which past(s), present(s) and future(s) are all equally infused with vitality and consciousness. Our past, the 20th century, the whole history of mankind is not just like the beginning of a detective novel whose riddle will be solved in the future. The 2nd and 3rd millenniums, “time past and time future”, truly exist, or emerge spontaneously as you would have it, in an illuminated present. 

Carlos Casteneda tells of Calixto Muni, the popular hero of the Yaqui Indians, who was executed by Spanish conquerors. “What would you say,” don Juan asked him, “to a story of Calixto Muni the victorious rebel who succeeds in liberating his people?” Carlos replied that that might be an acceptable way of  “releasing psychological stress”, but don Juan came back, “The story teller who changes the end of a “factual” account does so at the direction and under the auspices of the spirit. Because his pure understanding is an advance runner probing that immensity out there, [he] knows without a shadow of a doubt that somewhere, somehow, in that infinity, at this very moment the spirit has descended. Calixto Muni is victorious. His goal has transcended his person.” Before our historical consciousness can recoil too much against such re-telling of historical fact, it might be appropriate to remember another story. If a particular son of a simple Jewish carpenter and his devout wife had only been a very great teacher, spiritual leader or political revolutionary; even if, like Calixto Muni, he had died a martyr’s death, that might have been a very great thing historically; but it is doubtful if, on that basis alone, we would now be contemplating the 3rd  millennium Anno Domini. It was not historical consciousness that “changed the story” of Jesus from that of a great man to an Eternal Presence. It was not historical consciousness that revealed his “victory” on the cross, that moment of the spirit descending when “his goal transcended his person”. And it could not have been with historical consciousness that Christ himself might have experienced the splitting of the shell of temporality, the breaking of the chains of causality and determinism, revealing his identity with all things, and all beings, past, present and future. We do not need to accept this story either, but as we approach the year 2000 AD it is only fair and rational that we keep it in mind.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary

 for one people to transcend political boundaries and assume

 among the powers of Earth the true status of co-creators,

 conscious enlightened aspects of Gaia, a decent respect

 for the Dharma of human experience requires that they

 describe the basis for this new awareness.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Beings

are equally creative, that they endow and are endowed

with certain inalienable rights and responsibilities,

that among these are Life, Freedom and Love 

for all Creation; that to express these sublime traits

they bond together as self-governing entities with

compassion, wisdom and joy, that any other bonds

or institutions which are not conducive to these ends

may, and should be, firmly and finally renounced.

Prudence indeed will dictate that laws and governments

are not always wrong and evil, but when a long train of

corruption, insensitivity and greed, all pointing to one end,

evinces a design to reduce human life to mere mechanical

response at best, to threaten all life with extinction at worst, 

it is the right, it is the duty, to throw off such a government.

Such has been the patient suffering of humans, of Gaia herself.

We therefore, Representatives of the Living Universe,

appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World 

for the rectitude of our intentions, and by the Authority

of our Love for one another and for all conscious life

solemnly declare and publish and celebrate that we are

free though interdependent beings, that we are absolved

from any allegiance to obsolete cultural, racial or ethnic bias,

and that all such prejudices are dissolved; that as enlightened,

free and interdependent beings we have the responsibilty

and full power to express our mutual love and gratitude

and to do all other things that true participants in Creation

should do. And for the support of this Declaration

and with the firm reliance on the strength of Truth

we mutually pledge to each other and to all Creation

our bodies, out minds and our inherent divinity.

I’ve been hangin’ out, right near the center of town.

I’m gettin’ all burned out, I’ve been shoppin’ around.

Right now I need some way to get my feet back on the ground. 

I need some homemade love,

Y’know somethin’ fresh and warm.

I need some homemade love,

Just like they make back on the farm.

Lord, I think some homemade love wouldn’t do me no harm.

-Ken King, Homemade Love (excerpt)