E4: Western Seekers of Eastern Enlightenment

Western Seekers of Eastern Enlightenment

Everyone is eventually confronted by the great mystery of their very own conscious existence, but the importance of our conscious existence is initially overshadowed by another priority that must be considered first. Our conscious existence is embedded in an elaborate combination of things including our own physical bodies that makeup the world of things around us. Establishing some measure of rapport with this physical world must be considered a first priority to simply engage in the basic aspects of survival. The extraordinary fact of conscious existence is not even immediately recognized by most as a specific matter requiring consideration. That consideration comes later.

Our preoccupation with the physical world is further complicated by the more superficial matters of being happy and content in the context of living in this external physical world. An elaborate array of feelings are generated in our conscious existence by physical sensations originating from contact with objects in this surrounding physical world. These sensations when properly chosen entice this intangible happiness and contentment out of the two sensation extremes of pleasure and pain. Initially, it seems that this surrounding physical world is the source of both our survival and our quest to be happy and content.

These two separate and distinct things, our conscious existence and the quest to be elaborate combination of things in the surrounding physical world, are the core components of the great human conundrum of life. No one is immune to the effects of this conundrum, and it is impossible to ignore. At a minimum, a sufficient understanding of our immediate surroundings is required to survive the many challenges that our very existence forces us to face, but ultimately beyond simple survival, our conscious existence’s nagging anticipation to be happy and content is what keeps forcing us to deal with this human conundrum.

A common approach to the most puzzling of these questions is to defer considering them in our initial rush to be blindly engaged in this great celebration of life. Such is the case with the whole matter of our conscious existence. Most don’t consider this for years. Some don’t consider it until they are near death. The key to really understanding the human conundrum is to recognize early on that there exists two different but interconnecting pieces of 1) a physical world with its pleasure and pain and 2) a conscious existence with its desire to be happy and content. These two things need to be considered together to be successful in life.

The choice to subsist on knowing only what is needed to just get by seems sufficient in one’s early years, but as time passes and the trials of life beset us, the answers to these more difficult questions become a greater priority. Eventually, everyone wants more than just the bare-bones survival this basic understanding of these immediate surroundings is able to support. They also want to be happy and content, and they eventually realize more knowledge enables this better quality of life.

The concepts of meditation and yoga are commonly understood in a casual way by pretty much everyone in Western culture today, but that was most certainly not the case prior to the arrival of Vivekananda at the Chicago 1893 Parliament of World Religions. Vivekananda was a charismatic Indian monk who ended up spending about three years in the West before returning to his native India. During that time he wrote four books that introduced Westerners to the classic yogic pathways and established a series of Vedanta Societies to promote the study and practice of one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy called Vedanta.

Vivekananda was the first, but he most certainly was not the last. In 1920, Yogananda arrived in Boston, and after making the West his home, established the world headquarters of his Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. Much later in 1959, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made the first of many trips to the West as part of a global effort to spread his Transcendental Meditation program. Initially he attracted only small numbers of grown-up middle-class seekers, but when TM caught on among students and the Beatles followed him to India, Maharishi became a counterculture icon.

These three spiritual leaders in particular and some other less well known ones brought this concept of enlightenment to very receptive Western audiences and left a lasting impression on Western culture. They each created a layer of trained intermediaries to support the seekers they had established, and these trained intermediaries actively solicited new seekers onto the path in lieu of direct access to the primary guru. In their wake, they left many new seekers looking for this Eastern vision of spiritual enlightenment.

There are three different Eastern spiritual traditions that describe this state of enlightenment, and in each of these traditions, there are many slightly different specific interpretations of approach to reach this common goal of enlightenment. But across all the three religious traditions and all the variations that exist in each of these traditions, there are only two recognized self-discovery paths to enlightenment. One path is the traditionally understood way of the ascetic, but the other path is structured around a typical householder who is simultaneously engaged in the pursuit of both spiritual and regular worldly activities.

Those who choose the path of the ascetic withdraw from the world to contemplate and meditate as they aspire for their one and only goal of attaining a state of enlightenment. The ascetic renounces all worldly things at the onset of their search. They live their lives withdrawn in seclusion denying all worldly things beyond the bare minimum required to survive. It is a hard and difficult path that is right only for the very select few who are so inclined to pursue it.

The other path of householders engaged in worldly activities is reputed to be the more noble of the two paths because the householder seeker is a productive member of society in additional to being a spiritual aspirant. In fact, the classic tale of enlightenment in the Bhagavad Gita describes the enlightenment of Arjuna who is a man actively engaged in the pursuit of war. The warrior Arjuna received his enlightenment from Krishna as he is surveying his impending enemy and the battlefield that he is about to engage. Instead of the ascetic who withdraws from the world, Arjuna actually received his enlightenment just prior to going to war.

On the path of action, the seeker does not withdraw from the world to pursue enlightenment. Seekers on the path of action create a balanced lifestyle that integrates a system of regular contemplation and meditation into their ongoing activities of living a life and contributing to society. Those on the path of action renounce worldly things by internally eliminating over time their tendencies to become attached to worldly things. As they progress, they can own worldly things without developing binding attachments to them.

All seekers soon come to realize that no matter whether they have chosen the path of the ascetic or to actively be engaged in life, their actual pursuit of this enlightenment is a path that can only be tread alone. On the path of action, they might find themselves in the company of many other people. Some of the other people may actually be sympathetic to their spiritual journey, but none of them can can actually directly engage one’s solitary spiritual journey because it is a path of self-discovery that can only be traversed alone.

There are two possible outcomes from a lifelong commitment to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment via these Eastern technologies. The most common scenario is a life filled with the peace and fullness that comes from the regular practice of meditation and the slow but steady forward progress without actually reaching the goal of enlightenment in that lifetime. The individual’s unfinished journey will eventually through the process of transmigration of consciousness start a new life and continue the process until full spiritual enlightenment is finally attained.

Alternately, the one who aspires to know given the right conditions will forge ahead and complete the journey of discovery on their own to actually reach the state of enlightenment during the course of their lifetime. In these very rare cases, these pioneering seekers are largely left to their own devices without direct access to a guru. Their seeking experience becomes something of an improvised enlightenment experiment wherein they are left with the responsibility to address all the gaps in methodology and interpretation of results.

Understanding Religion

Historically, religion is the venerated source for answers to the great mystery of life questions that hauntingly preoccupy humanity and are considered too difficult to be answered otherwise.  The advantage religion has in answering these unanswerable questions is that it is not limited to what is known.  It has the advantage of being able to exploit the incredible human capacity to fill in the vague and missing pieces in what is known with things that have simply been accepted as belief.  

This heavy reliance on belief can ultimately become a problem.  This problem is compounded by the extreme diversity of religious perspectives that shapes their many beliefs.  The world is home to a multitude of religions, and each of these religions has multiple sects each with their somewhat different religious interpretations.  All these many groups think the things they hold as beliefs are correct, and everyone else is wrong.  

With all these different beliefs about so many things that matter, how does one choose the correct religion?  Reviewing the merit of all these individual religions and their many sects might seem like an impossible task, but at a high level, most of these religions and their many sects can be reduced down into either of the two very broad categories that have historically been designated as Western and Eastern.  

The terms Western and Eastern in this context simply refers to the general geographic points of origin of these various religious tradition which has made them historically, culturally, and theologically distinct.  After centuries of intermingling and sharing of ideas between cultures, both Western and Eastern religious traditions can be found in all parts of the world today, but the fundamental difference between the two different religious approaches is still very apparent.  

The fundamental difference between eastern and western religions is the clear distinction between how the religions in each category advocate spiritual progress.   

Western religions are based on faith. Followers are expected to believe on blind faith what they are told to believe by religious leaders who have assumed the responsibility for sorting out all the spiritual details to be spoon fed to the masses of followers.  On close examination however, many of these religious answers are filled with inconsistencies, missing big pieces of the story, and things that just don't ring true.    

Instead of faith, eastern religions are more focused on spiritual growth through introspection, practice, and study.  Eastern religion rituals and personal practices (e.g. meditation and asanas postures) promote personal spiritual growth on the path to spiritual enlightenment. In these eastern religions, the aspirant is more focused on seeking and finding salvation rather than simply holding some belief of faith and expecting salvation to find them.

These high level, specific ideological differences between western and eastern religions has a significant impact on each religion's ability to support the search for the Ultimate Truth. 
Those who are about discovering the truth will be drawn to the Eastern religions.  Those who want to believe what someone else has told them to believe is the truth will be drawn to Western religions.

In reality, life is a spiritual journey of self discovery that spans many lifetimes to complete.  As such, it must be lived actively questioning all things, rather than being slavishly bound to blind faith obedience and stale outdated dogma.  In the context of discovering the Ultimate Truth, the eastern religious approach is superior and will ultimately as one's spiritual journey advances become the approach of choice.

As it turns out though, you really don't need affiliation with any religion.  All you need is the correct and relevant knowledge that a religion might be able to offer because ultimately you alone are responsible for validating the things that you believe.  You alone are responsible for your own salvation.

 

The Power of Past Impressions

Many times we find ourselves faced with decisions that though difficult could be reasoned through to sensible solutions, but somehow, something inside us, compels us to make the wrong choice. Repeatedly in spite of a clear understanding of the consequences based on our personal experience, some mysterious force misguides our decisions. These miscues are the price we pay for not having a good understanding of who we are.

The real mystery here is to understand these internal forces that compel us to consistently move in the wrong direction. Some of these internal forces are coming from thoughts and feelings that we don’t even necessarily understand, perhaps do not even realize we are having. They just make us react in certain ways. These internal forces and the frequently confusing external circumstance we encounter make it critically important for us to understand who we are so that we can better deal with our lives. 

The reality is that these internal forces are largely (perhaps exclusively) driven by the impressions from past experiences. Our past experiences leave us cluttered inside with these impressions that range all the way from traumatic to comfort and peace, but by far, the most compelling are these impressions resulting from traumatic or painful past events. These trauma induced impressions are also most likely to result in decisions that lead to some sort of bondage related situation.

Substance abuse is one such example of internal bondage: Substance abuse is the result of a person’s belief that ingestion of a particular substance is necessary for their happiness. Typically, the root cause is physical or psychological pain relief. Perhaps, the origin of this addiction was real pain, but over time, it becomes a convoluted tangle of cause and effect in one’s personal truth that is not easy to understand and thus is very difficult to overcome.

Another internal bondage example is the existence of unresolved childhood traumas. Children are very impressionable, and certain issues that happen in early life can have a long lasting effect on one’s person truth creating learned responses that extend way into adult life. 

Traumatic past experience live on into our present in the form of these impressions created in the endless cycle of desire, action, and impression (illustrated in figure below). In this cycle, we desire something and act to that end. The result is an impression that takes root inside us shaping our next desire to act. 

 
There are two level of understanding the endless cycle of action. At the simplest level, it can be understood intellectually. Understanding the existence of the mechanism that drive us to action is helpful in developing strategy to remediate the possible negative impacts, but there is a deeper understanding that actually helps us rise above this cycle of action.

Coming to know this cycle from the direct experience of consciousness can actually create a situation where our in present actions are not dictated by past impressions because over time the practice of direct experience of consciousness actually minimizes the significance all these past impressions.

Overcoming without the advantage of these regular direct experiences of consciousness will inevitably take a long time with any one of these internal bondage experiences could easily span a single lifetime. With the regular direct experiences of consciousness, all past impression will be neutralized and the capacity to create new impressions will be suppressed.

Our Carefully Crafted Cages

In this world of diverse pleasures and pains, we strive to string together a series of life events in an attempt to optimize the occurrence of pleasure experiences over those that bring pain, but this seemingly simple life mission proves to be extremely difficult for most.  Of course, there is the problem that circumstance limits the options from which we can choose, but these issues of circumstance are largely beyond our control.  There is another big problem with making these correct choices that can be addressed by the individual.

Making good choices between the opportunities that are at hand should be a simple matter of deciding and doing what makes us happy, but frequently, the biggest problem in this simple pursuit of happiness is not having the freedom required to make and pursue the best choices.  There are two possible sources of obstacles to our freedom of choice.  One is the threat posed by persons external to us who want to obstruct the realization of our desires, but by the far, the greatest obstacle to our personal freedom is in the form of the carefully crafted cages that we create for ourselves.

Everyone longs to be free to pursue their own personal happiness. They just want to be the person they really are without fear of ridicule or worse yet persecution, but these simple desires like so many other things get tangled in the individual’s intricate web of illusions and are never realized.  Freedom seems like a simple enough concept, but most don’t even have a good understanding of what freedom is much less how to attain it. 

On superficial consideration, freedom appears to be a simple matter of being able to do what you want or not, but like everything else, the devil for freedom is in the details.  A popular catch phrase “Freedom isn’t free’ leads many to believe they can be free by virtue of someone else’s sacrifice, but true freedom is a much more complicated matter than just that.  It is further complicated by our own involvement in the decision process. To really understanding freedom, the entire process of action needs to be considered.

Every action begins with a desire, a gentle intent or a strong urge, and from that desire, we spring into the process of taking action.  There are no constraints on what we want at this desire level. Everyone has the ability to think that they want.  In fact most, don't have the self-control required to not think what they want.  Perhaps we are too afraid to acknowledge some thoughts to anyone else, but they are there nonetheless tantalizing us with the possibility of their realization pretty much all the time.   

The obstacles are encountered when we choose to act or not on an actionable desire (I.e. one favored by circumstance).  This personal evaluation to determine whether to act or not is where our personal truth enters the freedom equation and potentially make us our own worst enemies. 

Everyone’s unique and individual Personal Truth creates a unique personal reality constructed from all the things that known and that have been accepted as beliefs by the personal.  These realities become that individual’s rules of engagement which specify the circumstances and limitations under which that person will engage and interact with the various affairs of life.  In effect, this personal truth decision matrix makes us the gate keeper for our own desires.

This decision matrix is an important part of the action process where the immediate and long-term effects of the action for us and everything else are assessed.   We all understand our actions have consequences, and some actions have adverse outcomes for us and/or those around us.  These consideration is critically important to correct action, but we are all susceptible to things that can cloud the analysis and lead to the wrong decision. 

The great imprisoner of mankind is simple ignorance in all the common forms of its manifestation such as lack of understanding, fear, and self-doubt.  Ignorance makes us vulnerable, and the less we are aware of this ignorance, the greater is our vulnerability risk. Ignorance keeps us from the happiness that we all long to have, and we are foolishly by virtue of this ignorance the instrument that enforces that imprisonment by causing us to make wrong life choices.

It is only by the complete understanding of our Self that true freedom can be attained.  This process of liberation begins from the moment we deliberately start on the path of knowledge to discover the Self.  This liberation continues incrementally as long as we continue to be steady on this path until complete liberation is realized with a complete understanding of the Self in our personal truth.

The process of believing is both a blessing and a curse.  It is a blessing in the context that it is an opportunity to look forward on the path of discovery, but it is a curse if it is used to remain stagnant or worse yet look back. 

Be careful what you accept as a belief.  The consequences could be catastrophic.