Personality and Perfection

I once entertained the notion that those who are spiritually advanced must display a calm and pleasant personality. My early interest in Buddhism sustained this because Siddhartha Gautama, once He attained enlightenment, was in my understanding imperturbably calm in the face of all adversities and frustrations.

It was thanks to Meher Baba that I was disabused of this notion. As Baba explained:

In the evening some of the other mandali asked Baba whether the nature of a person changes after the divine experience of Realization. A long discussion ensued, and in the end the Master clarified the matter in relation to the personality of Hafiz:

Even after Realization, a man's nature is the same but in a different way. In the normal human state, his anger, his curses, his strong language and his mannerisms express themselves because of his ego. Where there is ego, there is no God; and where there is God, there is no ego. For this reason, the words and deeds of a Perfect One are egoless.

But his special nature and personality remain the same, even after Realization, and when expressed due to some mood, they are of the greatest benefit to others.

This is the meaning of Hafiz's couplet:

At one time I craved to see various things; 

But since I saw you, I no longer desire to see anything else!

This means that the nature to see is still there. Before, Hafiz craved to see a variety of different subjects; after the divine sight, he longed only to see God. It means: The desire of seeing remains the same but undergoes a change after becoming egoless.

Suppose a man is in the habit of getting angry and beating other people. His nature will remain the same even if he turns into a saint, but the change is beyond imagination. Behind his anger there is now no self-interest. It is simply an impulse with divinity behind it. It comes from the divine flow, and anyone who comes in contact with it is greatly benefited.

For us mere mortals however, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to bring the more ugly features of our personality under control. When we act out our anger, we disturb those around us and create more sanskaras for ourselves. At the same time, Baba is quick to point out that we shouldn't suppress or repress our anger but instead be quick to catch it before we act on it. If we can do this, we will see that the anger or other negative emotion is purely ego-driven and it will quickly dissipate.

If we try to repress our negative emotions and push them into our subconscious mind, they only gain more influence over us and strengthen what Jung called "The Shadow". Baba regarded hypocrisy as the worst of failings and emphasised that we must not pretend to be what we are not. This prohibition extends to the way we see ourselves. If we are troubled by anger, lust or jealousy, then we must acknowledge this and not pretend to be free of these negative emotions. The psychological tendency to suppression is encouraged if we have an idealised notion of what a spiritual person should be feeling. Suppression can lead to repression in which an individual genuinely believes that he or she is free of troubling emotions. This is no longer hypocrisy but delusion and this brings disaster in one form or another.

So neither suppression or repression is to be encouraged. Instead we should strive as far as possible not to act on our feelings of anger, lust, jealousy etc. Firstly the thought arises and then almost instantly an accompanying desire to give it expression arises. If we are quick enough, we can catch the thought, observe it and allow its energy to dissipate. Often we will not be quick enough and in that case the impulse to act can be suppressed while still holding the thought and its accompanying emotion in our consciousness. 

Baba would constantly goad his mandali into feeling angry or jealous by praising those who were undeserving of praise and criticising those who thought themselves deserving of praise. This served to grind down their egos. Situations in our own lives that arouse similar emotions can serve the same purpose. If someone insults us, our ego is quick to rise to our defence because that is its nature. When this happens, we simply need to observe this and recognise that the ego is simply doing its job. Human consciousness is capable of this objectivity whereas animal consciousness is not.

The following explanation by Baba in January of 1939 is instructive concerning the difference between a Perfect Master and a person of normal consciousness:

Dr. Deshmukh arrived from Nagpur to see Baba in Jabalpur. His mind was quite troubled and he told Baba that people were asking him why Baba was calling himself “God.” They were saying, “Isn’t this the expression of his ego? Isn’t he a supreme egotist?” Deshmukh did not know how to answer them. To pacify Deshmukh, Baba gave this explanation:

In all that a God-Realized soul or an ordinary man says or does, the “I” in him asserts itself. The difference between the two is that the “I” in the ordinary man is limited, whereas in the God-Realized being it is unlimited. If Deshmukh says, “I have written the book,” it is the limited “I” in Deshmukh asserting a certain job he has done. But when I say, “I am God,” it is the unlimited “I” asserting its universal aspect.

The limited “I” must go for the unlimited “I” to take its place. The limited “I” is like a seven-headed demon. The seven heads of lust, anger, greed, attachment, pride, jealousy and hatred must be killed so thoroughly that not even the slightest trace remains. When the false “I” is completely destroyed, another “I,” which is Real and Unlimited, takes its place.

Reincarnation

There are lots of misconceptions surrounding the concept of reincarnation. In this post, I'm just attempting some clarification based on what I've read over the years, not based on any personal revelation. Unless something about a past life reveals itself to you, there's little point in pursuing the matter. There's a reason you don't remember your past lives and it's simply that such an awareness would interfere mightily with the life you are currently living. If you don't remember your past lives or you don't even believe you have any past lives to remember, then that's fine. Just get on with your current life and do the best you can. There are plenty of people who will supposedly help you remember your past lives and many techniques that can be applied to this end but I'm not advocating any of that here. 

To reincarnate literally means to incarnate or take flesh again, in other words you get a new body. But are you really reborn? As Barry Long said, you are not reborn. It is only your ignorance that is reborn. Your body, your memories and your personality, everything that you might consider as constituting you, does not return. It was this identification with these false elements of yourself that precipitated your return, according to Barry Long. You were ignorant of who you really were and so you have to return again in an attempt to dispel this ignorance. So who are you really? Well, you are certainly not your body, memories or personality and it doesn't help to have an intellectual conviction about what you think you are. You have to experience who you really are, as Gautama the Buddha did:

Seeking but not finding the house builder,
I hurried through the round of many births:
Painful is birth ever and again. 

O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too. 

My mind has now attained the unformed Nirvana
And reached the end of every sort of craving.

So, if you can find "the house builder" then you won't be coming back but of course, you - that is the false you - is the builder and while you might even realise that intellectually, you still identify with the builder because who else can you identify with. You still experience yourself as solid and permanent. Of course you are anything but. Solid? You are largely empty space. Permanent? You are have changed from baby, to youth, to adult and sooner or later you will die. You are hardly permanent. Tricky.

Your false you, and all the other false you's who came before you, are part of a vast chain of life leading up to that moment of enlightenment in which Siddhartha Gautama:

... remembered all his previous lives—infinite number of lives—female and male and every other race and every other being in the vast ocean of life forms. And he remembered all that viscerally so his awareness expanded until all the moments of the past were completely present to him. 

It might help to think of yourself as part of a team, a relay race if you will, and unwittingly you are passing the baton on to the next runner and any missteps on your part will affect the next runner's fortunes. This analogy conveys the operation of karma. Your actions in this life have repercussions in the next, for the next you. As an illustration, if you run a factory farm in this life that exploits and abuses animals, then you may find yourself drawn in the next life to caring for them and easing their suffering.

So what happens when you die? The following explanation about the purpose of life after death will clarify things further (source):

The purpose of this stage is to extract the essence of the life just lived. We do this by re-living our Earth life, with particular focus on the deeper meaning and finer feelings of each experience. During this process, countless psychic impressions are sifted and reviewed in great detail. Whatever material is no longer needed is cast aside, like chaff from the grain. At the same time, the true value of our life experience is gathered together into a concentrated spiritual essence.

When extracting gold from the earth, miners may collect 50 tons of raw ore to produce a single ounce of pure gold. Likewise, the huge volume of psychic impressions from a lifetime yields only a tiny germ of spiritual essence. The exact nature of this essence is a mystery. It could be called the deepest meaning, or the finest expression of a human life. From another perspective, it represents the accumulated truth, love and wisdom of the Earth experience. Once gathered, this essence ascends to the next plane where it becomes a permanent part of our spiritual body, or soul.

As we distill the psychic impressions, we're actually consuming our astral body, for really they are one and the same. By getting rid of what is no longer needed, we're becoming less. And at the same time we're becoming more, in the sense of more real, true, and eternal.

This process culminates in what could be called a "second death", at which point there are two possible outcomes. If the astral body has been sufficiently consumed through the process described above, then individual awareness makes a "quantum leap" to the spiritual plane where it merges with soul. However, if an astral body remains intact, then residual desires can pull awareness back to the Earth plane for another cycle of birth and death. These desires are like psychic seeds, or DNA, which become the template for a new birth, or so called, "reincarnation".

The term "reincarnation" usually refers to a soul incarnating a human form repeatedly, over many lifetimes. This is a misunderstanding. The soul always remains on the spiritual plane and can neither incarnate nor reincarnate a human form. Rather, the soul participates in recurring human births and the degree of participation, as well as the number and frequency of recurring births, can vary widely. Likewise, a recurring birth may take place soon after death or hundreds of years later. There are many variables which influence this process and the range of possibilities is enormous.

The astral body tends to just fade away rather than to die abruptly as the physical body does. For most of us, our "residual desires" draw us back to the Earth plane and the dance of life continues. Here is Meher Baba's comments on reincarnation (source):

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

"The worldly man completely identifies life with the manifestations and activities of the gross body. For him, therefore, the beginning and the end of bodily existence are also the beginning and end of the individualised soul.

"The overwhelming importance of death is derived from man's attachment to particular forms, but death loses much of its sting and importance, even for the worldly man, if he takes a broader view of the course of life. 

"In spite of their transitoriness, there is an unbroken continuity of life through these forms, old ones being discarded and new ones created for habitation and expression. 

“The recurring incident of death is matched by the recurring incident of birth.

“Old generations are replaced by new ones; life is reborn in new forms, incessantly renewing and refreshing itself..." 

THE THREE FORMS OF NATURE 

“Immortality of the individualised soul is rendered possible by the fact that the individualised soul is not the same as the physical body. 

“The individualised soul continues to exist with all its sanskaras [impressions] in the inner worlds through the medium of its mental and subtle bodies, even after it has discarded its gross body at the time of death. 

"So, life through the medium of the gross body is only a section of the continuous life of the individualised soul; the other sections of its life have their expression in other worlds." 

“The whole of nature may therefore be conveniently divided into three parts – (i) the gross world, (ii) the subtle world and (iii) the mental world.

“When the individualised soul has incarnated itself in a physical body, it expresses its life in the gross world. 

"When it drops the outer sheath, the physical body, it continues to have its expression of life either in the subtle world through subtle body, or in the mental world through the mental body.” 

SANSKARAS 

“Ordinarily, life in the physical body is terminated only when the sanskaras released for expression in that incarnation are all worked out. 

"When the soul drops its physical body it is completely severed from all connections with the gross world, though the ego and the mind are retained with all the impressions accumulated in the earthly career. 

“...ordinary spirits try to reconcile themselves to severance from the gross world, and conform to the limitations of changed conditions and sink into a state of subjectivity in which a new process begins of mentally reviewing the experiences of the earthly career by reviving the sanskaras connected with them. 

“Thus death inaugurates a period of comparative rest consisting in a temporary withdrawal from the gross sphere of action. It is the beginning of an interval between the last incarnation and the next.” 

KARMA 

“In the successive incarnations of an individual soul, there is not only a thread of continuity and identity…but here is also an uninterrupted reign of the law of cause and effect through the persistence and operation of Karma. 

“The successive incarnations with all their particulars are closely and unfailingly determined by rational law... ” 

“The actions of past lives determine the conditions and circumstances of the present life, and the actions of the present life have their share in determining the conditions and circumstances of the future lives.” 

The Illusion of Time

Imagine a video file. The frames that comprise it constitute a linear sequence of events that can be viewed from start to finish. As we watch it at a frame rate of 60 frames per second or higher, the illusion is created of smooth motion along a time line. Once we've finished watching, the video remains on a storage device somewhere and can be watched again if desired. Until that time however, it simply exists and the illusion of time is created only when we open the file and traverse the frames contained within it.

I'm using this as an analogy to describe the human perception of time. Suppose the universe is a series of configurations, each configuration being a unique arrangement of elements that differ only slightly from the related configurations that precede it and follow it. As we move or are carried from one configuration to the next, the perception of time is created but in reality all the configurations already exist. They simply are. Eternity is experienced when not caught up in the configurations. If this is achieved, the perception of time vanishes and we see that the configurations were always there. There was no beginning and no end, just the totality of configurations.

This is not an original idea. I first read about it in Julian Barbour's 1999 book titled The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe and it came as quite a revelation. Here is a summary from Good Reads:

Time is an illusion. Although the laws of physics create a powerful impression that time is flowing, in fact there are only timeless `nows'. In The End of Time, the British theoretical physicist Julian Barbour describes the coming revolution in our understanding of the world: a quantum theory of the universe that brings together Einstein's general theory of relativity - which denies the existence of a unique time - and quantum mechanics - which demands one. Barbour believes that only the most radical of ideas can resolve the conflict between these two theories: that there is, quite literally, no time at all. The End of Time is the first full-length account of the crisis in our understanding that has enveloped quantum cosmology. Unifying thinking that has never been brought together before in a book for the general reader, Barbour reveals the true architecture of the universe and demonstrates how physics is coming up sharp against the extraordinary possibility that the sense of time passing emerges from a universe that is timeless. The heart of the book is the author's lucid description of how a world of stillness can appear to be teeming with motion: in this timeless world where all possible instants coexist, complex mathematical rules of quantum mechanics bind together a special selection of these instants in a coherent order that consciousness perceives as the flow of time. Finally, in a lucid and eloquent epilogue, the author speculates on the philosophical implications of his theory: Does free will exist? Is time travel possible? How did the universe begin? Where is heaven? Does the denial of time make life meaningless? Written with exceptional clarity and elegance, this profound and original work presents a dazzlingly powerful argument that all will be able to follow, but no-one with an interest in the workings of the universe will be able to ignore.

It's tempting for me at least to connect these configurations with the Akashic Records, described by this site as:

The Akashic Records, or "The Book of Life," can be equated to the universe's super-computer system. It is this system that acts as the central storehouse of all information for every individual who has ever lived upon the earth. More than just a reservoir of events, the Akashic Records contain every deed, word, feeling, thought, and intent that has ever occurred at any time in the history of the world. Much more than simply a memory storehouse, however, these Akashic Records are interactive in that they have a tremendous influence upon our everyday lives, our relationships, our feelings and belief systems, and the potential realities we draw toward us.

On this same website, there is an excerpt from one of Edgar Cayce's readings (Reading 294-19) in which he vividly describes accessing these records:

I see myself as a tiny dot out of my physical body, which lies inert before me. I find myself oppressed by darkness and there is a feeling of terrific loneliness. Suddenly, I am conscious of a white beam of light. As this tiny dot, I move upward following the light, knowing that I must follow it or be lost. As I move along this path of light I gradually become conscious of various levels upon which there is movement. Upon the first levels there are vague, horrible shapes, grotesque forms such as one sees in nightmares. Passing on, there begin to appear on either side misshapen forms of human beings with some part of the body magnified. Again there is change and I become conscious of grey-hooded forms moving downward. Gradually, these become lighter in colour. Then the direction changes and these forms move upward and the colour of the robes grows rapidly lighter. Next, there begin to appear on either side vague outlines of houses, walls, trees, etc., but everything is motionless. As I pass on, there is more light and movement in what appear to be normal cities and towns. With the growth of movement I become conscious of sounds, at first indistinct rumblings, then music, laughter, and singing of birds. There is more and more light, the colours become very beautiful, and there is the sound of wonderful music. The houses are left behind, ahead there is only a blending of sound and colour. Quite suddenly I come upon a hall of records. It is a hall without walls, without ceiling, but I am conscious of seeing an old man who hands me a large book, a record of the individual for whom I seek information.

Of course, the author of The End of Time, as a reputable scientist, would probably be outraged at any connection being drawn between his concept of timeless "configurations" of the physical universe and the Akashic Records. However, it seems to me that everyone has her or his own configuration file or Book of Life. The contents of this book are hidden from us and of course we are still writing in our books as we live our little lives. The Avatar, Meher Baba, could read this book for any individual who entered his circle and thus he knew exactly what was needed for that individual's spiritual advancement. With enlightenment comes full access to the book of oneself and of others:

Nowadays scientists deal with physical matter as well as so-called dark matter. They have only the vaguest notions about what dark matter might be composed of but they happily accept its existence on the basis of its observed effects on physical matter. In my previous post, I proposed a connection between dark matter and either the astral plane or more likely the subtler states of physical matter comprising the etheric planes. I propose that the configurations have a gross physical (solid, liquid, gas), a finer physical (etheric) and an astral dimension. Each configuration has, is and always will be because of the illusory nature of time. Each action produces an impression. On the gross physical level, my footsteps in the sand are always there, they always were, they always will be. Just as my feet leave an impression in the sand, likewise my thoughts and feelings impress themselves on the substance of the etheric and astral planes.

As a physical being I am constantly disturbing the equilibrium of the physical world that I live and move about in. Even sitting in meditation, my weight is upon the surface of the Earth, I am radiating heat and chemically interacting with the atmosphere as I breathe in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide. The disturbances I am creating in such a situation are very slight and quite unavoidable. Travelling to and fro however, produces far greater disturbances as, unawares, I trample ants to death underfoot as I walk about. It's for this reason that Jain priests don't travel very much. They are sensitive to the damage that they will necessarily cause as they do so. Similarly, thinking and feeling disturb the equilibrium of these non-physical realms. A positive thought and a negative emotion both leave an impression in the same way that my foot leaves an impression in the sand. Looking at an individual's Book of Life, all the recorded impressions can be read, including the footprint in the sand, the positive thought, the negative emotion.  

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

 

"All we really yearn for is our own absence, after all, we yearn for what happens at death. Ahhh ... I don't have to worry about that anymore."

Nice quote from Jim Carrey in the film "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond" watched on Netflix. We put so much energy into building ourselves, being ourselves, a lifetime of input to build our egos and associated empires. As the Buddha purportedly said according to Vipassana meditation:

In this flow of the world I have taken so many times birth ... birth after birth for so many lives, countless lives. And every time I have taken birth I kept running incessantly. And some wise people in some lives told me that I can get out of this cycle of misery provided I can witness the Creator. Many lives I kept searching for the Creator, the Creator of This House. In search of the Creator of the House, again and again I kept getting birthed full of misery. Oh builder of the house, now I have seen you. You can't build any house for me anymore. Now, I have destroyed everything. I have destroyed all the building materials. You can't make a building for me. My mind is now free of all sankhara [wandering thought-forms] and the craving is rooted out. 

Hollywood is saying of course that Jim Carrey has lost it but what he's saying is no different from what I've been thinking about these past couple of years ... that I'm just a figment of my imagination. Figment meaning "something made up, invented, or fabricated". It's similar to playing the part of a character in a play. However, I have a physical body, This House as the Buddha put it, and it is in that body that the drama is played out.