ANNAPURNA SARADA, Friday, August 21, 2015 10:29 am

Worldliness – Getting Noses Above Water

“The sense of smell doesn’t work under water.  So you have to get peoples’ noses above water first,

then send them the fragrance of the teachings.”

Babaji and I discussed one day how difficult it is to attract people to the Vedantic scriptures.  The people we see today who make the attempt to enter spiritual life are generally so mired in their lives, in their karmas – their pleasures and tragedies – that they are easily distracted and disheartened.  Babaji mentioned a particularly unfortunate case of someone who came to SRV and took initiation but did not continue to take the teachings, attend classes or retreats, seek guidance, or do the practices, even while remaining loosely connected, and despite life falling apart further with each passing year.  One feels helpless in these cases; it is like watching someone push flotation devices away as they drown.

Our conversation caused me to reflect on the devotees that came to Sri Ramakrishna in late 19th century India, most of whom were also householders.  They too had complex lives and relationships, financial difficulties, social obstacles – plenty of hardships to endure. One of Sri Ramakrishna’s oft-repeated teachings cites worldliness as the chronic disease of our age.  This has not changed in the last 150 years.  “But the devotees then and there seem different,” I said to Babaji.  “They had the context of devotion and faith in the scriptures (even if they themselves were lacking in one or both) as a background for what Thakur said to them.  Here, in the U.S., people just don’t have this.” “That’s true,” he said, “that is the canyon wall people in the West are lacking.”

By “canyon wall” Babaji referred to western culture’s collective lack of a samskara around nondual wisdom and devotion to Ishvara.  Instead, we have a faith in science, which only goes so far as material principles based on a one-lifetime scenario, that seeks to increase pleasure and avoid suffering.  The seers, incarnations, and saints of all traditions have been telling us for millennia that this is impossible.   Further, science rejects outright, or avoids entirely, the nature of Consciousness.  Thus, when we hear the eastern teachings from the wisdom approaches that tell us that only God is Real and the world is not; or when we hear from the devotional approaches that we must seek God above all else and offer body, life, and mind to Him/Her who is the blissful Source of everything, we have nothing to bounce it off of, no canyon wall of knowledge or devotion from this or prior lifetimes.  We cannot grasp it with our senses, make use of it for wealth or health, so how can we take these teachings on subtle Truth to be more real, more essential than what is happening in our daily life?

This becomes a serious issue for all authentic teachers in our society:  how to present the teachings in a way that penetrates an individual’s limited and false perceptions of reality and how to reach numbers of people without watering down the teachings and creating a “social club.”

Babaji quoted Sri Ramakrishna, “’When giving the teachings, remove the head and the tail.’” And another, “’When giving water to thirsty trees, don’t water the leaves and the trunk, pour the water right at the roots.’ You see, Sri Ramakrishna used these analogies to show us how to teach the essence to people of this day and age,” he concluded.

“But,” I gently argued, devil’s advocate style, “it could be said that teaching people about the fourteen spheres of existence (for example) is like teaching the head and the tail.”

“These kinds of teachings are the essence, that should be obvious,” he replied.  “People today and here in the West especially, do not even know what worldliness is, what it consists of.  It has to be taught to them.  If they cannot recognize it then they cannot overcome it.  Immersed in it, they will not be attracted to the revealed scriptures.  The sense of smell doesn’t work under water.  So you have to get peoples’ noses above water first; then send them the fragrance of the teachings.”

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I’ve been contemplating this conversation.  The essence is Brahman, Consciousness, according to Vedanta.  The example I offered is a teaching from the cosmology used by Tantra and Vedanta.  Cosmology falls in the sphere of “not the highest.”  So why did Babaji call this teaching and others like it “the essence?”

Over the years, there has been a class of persons who have found fault with Babaji’s and SRV’s emphasis on cosmological and philosophical teachings, complaining, “Why do I need to know all this?  It just complicates my mind with concepts and I really don’t understand or want to understand these strange ideas.  Shouldn’t I be striving to have an empty mind free from thoughts and conceptualization?”  They read Sri Ramakrishna’s statements in the Gospel about giving up reasoning; or they read where he says that realization cannot come from scriptures, and conclude from these that the scriptures are not needed. As Babaji also stated in our conversation, these same people forget that Swamiji expounded the revealed scriptures and made sure that both his fellow disciples knew them thoroughly and that they were brought and taught to the westerners.  How is this reconciled?

Confusion over this actually proves our need to understand the contents of the scriptures, the essence of which is discrimination between the Real/Eternal and the unreal/noneternal.  As Babaji frequently states, “You will never know Who you are until you know what you are not.”  To think that a teaching like the Fourteen Spheres of Existence is simply an ancient and obsolete bit of cosmology is to miss a comprehensive explanation of the universe, both physical and mental, and one’s place in it according to individual, collective, and cosmic perspectives.  Further, by assimilating this teaching, one comes to understand what qualities are expressed in the lowest spheres and highest, thereby recognizing what is needed for higher states of consciousness and what needs to be rejected, purified, or transcended so as to remain free from the lower states.  All this is represented in that teaching as well as the fact that even the highest realms still fall short of Ultimate Reality.  The true Self is the Existence that contains all the realms and is their Witness – sarvadhi Sakshibhutam.

The Fourteen Realms of Existence is just one teaching of scores pertaining to cosmology, many of which have become part of Babaji’s and SRV’s arsenal for combating worldliness.  Elaborating on Swami Vivekananda’s statement that teachings come in good, better, and best, Babaji teaches, “knowing cosmology is good, philosophy is better, but spirituality (direct experience) is best.” He also explains that the sacred mythology of India leads into cosmology, which leads to philosophy, and culminates in spirituality.  Nothing needs or should be left out.  A rich understanding of the stories of our Tradition and its cosmology, along with one or more of its philosophical systems (Vedanta, Yoga, Tantra, Sankhya), equips the practitioner with a broad basis for integrating the four yogas, as well as understanding and practicing within the three stages of philosophy (dualism, qualified nondualism, and nondualism) as guided by one’s preceptor and one’s temperament and capacity – all without confusion or narrowness.

All this seems well beyond the stage of worldliness, and it is by this point.  But before it was reached, the aspirant had to have tools, ways of thinking – a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, as Babaji describes it – to make one’s way out of the darkened forest of worldliness that one had not even noticed before.  What is blocking all the sun’s light?  What is this worldliness?

Lex Hixon coined the expression, “mundane human convention” to explain Sri Ramakrishna’s terse definition of “kamini kanchan” sometimes translated as “woman and gold” or “man and gold” depending upon whether he was speaking to men or women.  Worldliness is the preoccupation with the physical realm without taking recourse to dharma, a spiritual perspective and practices. It is eating, drinking, procreation and gaining wealth merely to satisfy those pursuits as the goal of life.

Worldliness is not easily shaken. It persists well into one’s dharmic life and masquerades as duty, security, and social obligations that get in the way of deepening one’s spiritual life.  It manifests as procrastination, complacency, distraction, attachment and aversion, lack of decisiveness, and others. Eventually, the lack of a spiritual life results in depression, complicated karmas, and even mental disease. From mild to extreme, these all stand in the way of making daily spiritual practice and time in holy company the center pole of one’s life.  Cosmology, which includes teachings like the 24 Cosmic Principles, the Three Gunas, the Fourteen Spheres of Existence, the Five Akashas, the Three Bodies, the Four States of Consciousness, and many others, helps us identify the different aspects of our psycho-physical being and recognize their movements as compared with the unmoving, unaffected Self/Atman within – the Seer of all these changes. This knowledge leads to detachment and equanimity. Contemplating these systems over time – saturating our discriminative thinking process again and again – connects us with the entirety of our being at individual, collective, cosmic, and Absolute levels.  The inclination to practice is the turning point away from worldliness. This is getting our nose above water.  Next comes the fragrance of the scriptures.

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