Between the years of 1970 and 1973 I, like many others of my generation, was on an unconscious search for something authentic, real, and lasting. I say "unconscious" because I was unable to articulate what I was looking for or even why. Several enormous waves had washed over America and I had been caught by one of them and was along for the ride. All I knew was that I couldn't blithely and blindly walk into the future as completely ignorant as I instinctively knew myself to be.
The search was intuitive. It was a felt-sense of reaching for something true. All antennae were out. Out of step with my peers, I quit a dalliance with smoking dope and began to meditate.
I wonder if there's ever been a time in human history when truth has been less in commerce than in this contemporary culture. No one seems to really know what it is yet everyone is avowing their own perspective to be true. At the top of their lungs. And you can agree or die. I think beneath this shrill stridency is the deep fear, the nervous uncertainty, the desperate insecurity of not really knowing what in the hell is going on. Everybody is lost and no one wants to admit to it.
Fifty years ago, I found an avenue. Lest you think it an easy answer, all I can say is that fifty years later, I'm still struggling to get my life aligned in some meaningful way with what I perceived. It's one thing to sight an opening; it's quite another to attempt to get your entire being turned around. Because many parts of your nature, as ancient as they are, don't want to turn around. And you can't bend your entire being by an act of will or fiat.
What do you do, then? You inch your way towards the truth. It may be a snail's pace but perhaps in a billion years or so, we may have made some headway.
I've been gradually re-reading the first book of Meher Baba's that I encountered, way back in the spring of 1973. Back then, 99% of it flew far over my head. But every so often, a sentence would float up off the page at me and I would have the feeling, much like recapturing a childhood memory that had been hidden for many years, and I felt, "I used to know this -- long, long ago." That happened several times throughout the latter half of the book, which was a sequential series of essays. By the end of the book, I had the feeling, "Okay, this feels true. Who, then, is the guy who wrote this? Who is Meher Baba?"
Much of my life was spent in attempting to answer this question for myself. I travelled the world, met elders who had spent time -- moments, years, or their entire lives -- with Meher Baba. That took me to San Francisco, South Carolina, Europe, India, Australia. But at the end of the day -- and, as I'm now 71, at the end of one's life -- the question is really an internal one. You can go looking for external clues but in the end, they all turn you back on yourself. There you sit, a null and numbing void, an inexplicable expanse, an unanswered question. And somewhere within, a journey to begin.
Here's an excerpt from a chapter of that book, entitled "Listen, Humanity." The chapter title is "The Ways to the Path." I'm quoting a section from page 155 to 158. And I don't quote this as someone who has "found." I quote it as someone who is still seeking, as a mere beginner. Fifty years is nothing, my friends.
"The path of divine knowledge has both beginning and end....the understanding of God which the average person attains through belief or reasoning is so far removed from true understanding that it cannot be called inner knowledge.
"Such true knowledge (gnosis) does not consist in the construction or perception of an ideology. It is the product of ripening experience that attains increasing degrees of clarity. It consists in man's consciousness becoming more real and participating increasingly in the truth, until there is nothing more to become, and nothing more to assimilate.
"The devotional rituals followed in religions do not lead the seeker to the true inner journey, for in greater part they are mechanical observances barren of the redeeming experience of divine love.
"Nevertheless, regardless of how rudimentary these types of belief and devotional observances may be, they do contain in latent form the future inner knowledge.
"As the aspirant struggles through the obscuring fog of mental and emotional tension his consciousness becomes more one-pointed, forming a spearhead that eventually pierces through the curtain to the inner path of divine knowledge. Even the early glimpses of this knowledge which the pilgrim gets are a great advance over understanding that rests solely upon faith or reason.
"As the aspirant advances towards the path he undergoes a significant change of direction that might be compared to a somersault. He is now more concerned with the inner realities of life than with their outward expression. As the emphasis shifts from the external to the internal aspects of life, the deepening of consciousness is greatly accelerated. Now consciousness is no longer committed primarily to external incidents or routines, but is directed towards the deeper and truer aspects of being that demand greater integrity of thought and feeling.
"Caught up within this deeper awareness of the self is a concurrent deepening of perception into the workings of the world. A refocusing of consciousness occurs which is far-reaching. All the avenues through which the individual conducts his search are radically transformed by the sincerity and concentrated purpose of his effort. The increasing depths of his internal understanding suffuse every aspect of life, giving it new form and meaning and causing him to hasten his exploration with the greatest exhilaration.
"Poise of mind born of the pilgrim's new understanding automatically and unwittingly brings about a readjustment of material surroundings, and he finds himself at peace with the world. Conservatism, intolerance, pride and selfishness are shed, and everything takes on new meaning and purpose.
"Sinner and saint appear to be waves on the surface of the same ocean, differing only in magnitude, each the natural outcome of forces in the universe rooted in time and causation. The saint is seen to have no pride of position and the sinner no stigma of eternal degradation. Nobody is utterly lost and nobody need despair.
"The 'internalizing' which is the real basis of entering upon the path should not be confused with the purely intellectual discovery that there can be an inner life. Nor should the gradual and natural shift from participation in external events to a focusing on inner development be confused with the limited intellectual detachment some persons achieve. Since such detachment is only intellectual, it brings freedom only in the realm of limited intellect and is usually characterized by a sort of dryness of being.
"The intellectually detached often try to shape the present in the light of knowledge of history, as well as through their insight into the possibilities of the unborn future. At best, such a purely intellectual perspective inevitably remains partial, sketchy, incomplete and in a sense even erroneous. Further, the intellectually detached are almost never in vital communication with the elements which so largely shape the course of the present. Therefore their beliefs, even if transformed into effort, rarely produce marked results. The limited intellect is not competent to grasp qualities which are beginningless and endless.
"Intellectual perspective is workable and even indispensable for planned action. Yet in the absence of the illuminating wisdom of heart and the clear intuition of spirit, intellectual perspective gives only relative truth bearing the ineradicable stamp of uncertainty.
"So-called intellectually planned action is really the product of weighty subconcious forces which have not yet risen to the threshold of consciousness of the planner. Thus, planning often leads to many results entirely unanticipated in the so-called planning....
"Although the unfurling realization of divine knowledge is often figuratively described as 'traversing the path', this analogy should not be taken too literally. There is no ready-made road in the spiritual realm. Spiritual progress is not a matter of moving along a line already laid down and unalterably defined. Rather, it is a creative process of spiritual involution of consciousness, and this process is better described as a 'spiritual journey' than as the traversing of a path.
"The journey is comparable in fact to a flight through the air, and not to a journey upon the earth, because it is truly a pathless journey. It is a dynamic movement within the consciousness of the aspirant that creates its own path and leaves no trace behind it.
"The metaphor of 'the path' is helpful to the aspirant in the early stages of his development because it gives him the sense of new phases of consciousness to be experienced. This anticipation is stimulated further by accounts of others who have completed the spiritual journey. This makes the pilgrim's ascent easier than if it depended solely upon his own unguided efforts to visualize the probably path."
I think I will stop there with the acknowledgement that although this is a real pursuit of a real experience, it is also immaterial in a certain sense. Although acted out upon the playing field of our lives, it is directed internally. Such is the basic reorientation of focus. And I should add the disclaimer that although I have wended this way for fifty years, it has been a perhaps unnecessarily convoluted and twisting journey. It is not so much external life that leads us astray as the constituent parts of our own nature pulling us in different directions. Hard to get your whole self turned in the same direction.
So there you have a snippet of what I'm thinking about as the New Year turns. May we "turn" with it.
