|
|
"All truly or fully human
communication is art....and Paradox is the
essential content of human experience, all art" Hazrat Babajan of
Poona page 5 - Lord
Meher
Chogyam Trungpa,
The Collected Works Series, Vol Four p.
198
Beezone
Franklin
Jones (1971)
Lately I've been reading
some of the bulletin boards and web pages
on
the Internet that discuss Adi
Da. Many of these
discussions (if I can be so generous) center around
the questions of Adi Da's sanity and authenticity
of realization. There seems to be an inconsistence
in Adi Da's questionable ethical behaviors that
date back to 1974. In spiritual life,
particularly in the east, the problem of ethics and
questionalble behavior from a Guru have long been a
question of legitimacy. How can individuals who
'claim' enlightenment do so many hurtful and nasty
things under the name of truth? Why would Upasani
Maharaja throw a rock and hit Meher Baba
(Meher
Baba devotees say about his
abuses) in the head
and cause it to bleed? If Adi Da is enlightened the
how could he do all the bad things people obviously
experienced in his company? How does this 'square'
with truth and enlightenment? It simply does not square
with anything! It doesn't and it can never be
'reconciled' with our notions of enlightnement or
what is good. But yet it still exists and it is a
paradox. Even if one were to inquire
in real spiritual terms as to the condition of an
enlightened being which is suppose to be all about
Bliss and Love, how can "wackin" someone around or
performing strange sexual behaviors be in any way
'consistent' with Bliss, Love and Awakening?
As unenlightened beings we
are left in our own questions and logical
inconsistencies, our own wanting and needing things
to be 'good' and 'right'. We don't want to be duped
and 'had' by some mad man or woman! The only 'explanation' is
it's a paradox. The word paradox is used to
describe something that seems
to be a contradiction
but is in both cases true. Something is both
GOOD and BAD at the same time. Unfortunately our minds
think in a logical and sequential manner and we
can never fully come to terms with a paradox.
We can never come up with final answers that will
'solve' these questions. We can come up with
'relative' answers, based on the laws of nature but
not absolute answers. If we poist a question and
try and solve it by using our minds we will
ultimately come to an unresolved 'pair of
opposites'. So when we look at Adi Da
or any
other 'realized' being,
there is no way to ultimately resolve these
outrageous and inappropriate behaviors, which are
by all logical and common sense accounts 'hurtful'
and wrong. We have ideas that enlightened masters
should be like holy saints. "Saints would never have
contradictory natures." They'd always be on one
side; they'd always be good, morally and
spiritually. It is exactly this 'not
wanting to be duped' that continually keep us in
the contradictions and impossible dilemma's of our
own mind. Somewhere along the line, the line to
infinity, we must let go of ALL ideas and
expectations and every speck of what we think
ourselves to be. We must ultimately lose ourselves
and that means lose all sense of what we think is
RIGHT, GOOD and SANE! There is no other way to do
it. Nargarjuna, the famous Buddhist philosopher of
the 2nd century postulated his 'four corner
negation', pointing to the most ultimate answer he
could give to this question of logic. He said that
you can't ultimately say (1) Yes (2) No (3) Both
Yes and No (4) Neither Yes and No. All
possibilities of Eternalism or Nilism are
confounded in the 'infinite realm of contradictory
opposites'. Enlightenment does appear
to be a kind of madness. (see Crazy
Wisdom
article) (also see: Transcending
Madness, Chogyam Trungpa 'Crazy
Wisdom') To come up with a moral
certainty in this climate is .....forget it! It
can't be done. Reconciling Adi Da's behavior or
even the rationalizations of our own contractictory
nature is impossible. NO ONE can claim Absolute
Knowing. Adi Da, Meher Baba or whoever can claim
that the adept is That Which is Beyond All
Opposites and therefore WHATEVER that one does is
'purifying' and 'balancing' but the claim can't be
either proven or denied from 'this side of
infinity'. Our fears
(Fear and
revulsion account for most of the spiritual
adventure of mankind. Paradox p.
30) tell us that this
kind of stuff is 'crazy' and that kind of logic can
be used by manipulators to do evil and perform self
justifying actions. And that IS true. We have to be
aware of 'deception' and protect ourselves from
falling into the spell of someone's evil
intentions. But paradoxically the higher up one
goes up the scale of things the less and less the
things of this world can be brought with it, and
that includes logic and the concepts of good and
bad.
Our
Unfortunate Dilemma in the
The Paradox
of Instruction, 1977
"The use of Paradox
does not spring from a desire to mystify the
hearers or oneself.
It arises from the inablilty of language to say two
things at once.
Paradoxes are the bright banners of the liberty of
the mind...reasons grips life with a stangle-hold,
but life says, 'to win is to lose' and as in Judo,
uses the power of the enemy to escape from it"
R.H. Blyth
"But I awakened and
would not serve madness. I turned back and joined
the ranks of those who have corrected Thy
work....to-morrow....(we) will hasten to heap up
the hot cinders about the pile...(and) burn thee
for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever
deserved our fires, it is Thou.
The Grand
Inquisitor
Fyodor M. Dostoevsky 1879 - The Brothers Karamazov,
Chap 36
- Pontius Pilate speaking to Jesus
"It is I who have
created all! I am the source of everything in
creation." Upon hearing these ecstatic
declarations, an angry mob of fanatic Baluchi
soldiers buried the old woman alive. Over ten years
later, when some of these same soldiers happened to
be in Poona, to their utter amazement they saw the
same old woman, Hazrat Babajan, giving her blessing
to a group of devotees. Realizing their terrible
mistake, the soldiers approached Babajan and begged
for her forgiveness, placing their heads at her
feet in reverence.
The (Guru) analogy is
that of a snake in a bamboo tube. When you put a
snake in a bamboo tube, the snake has to face
either up or down. Relating with the guru is very
powerful, too powerful.
In fact, the knowing of the common and ordinary
order of life in Truth is a greater form of
realization or liberation than the knowing of the
extraordinary states of the higher or subtler
levels of the psyche, because we are conventionally
bound at that ordinary level. We are truly
experiencing this great fear, this conventional
limitation, in the midst of ordinary states, so to
be realized, to be happy in the midst of functional
life, not to escape it, is the great release. The
ordinary is the condition that we fear, the place
where we are threatened.
Garbage
and the Goddess
..paradoxically,
and most unfortunately, the higher up one goes up
the scale of things the less and less the things of
this world can be brought with it, and that
includes logic and the concepts of good and
bad.
The Man
of understanding is a wild man, and one who
approaches him should be ready for anything. Even
so, all those who approach (him) will be turned by
numberless subetlities and tricks for which they
have no armour....No man is prepared for the
encounter with a man of understanding, and all who
meet such people must suffer kinds of craziness and
offense until they understand.
The confusion of
negative thoughts is naturally purified in space.
Ordinary mind, free from accepting and rejecting,
loss and gain - May we realize the truth of
(simplicity)
Realization of Ignorance
Life or the Cosmos is itself a modification of the
Great Divine. What heresy to assume that the Lord's
Power of modification is false or to be gotten rid
of! It is all God's work, God's happiness. It is to
be known and lived in Truth. It is not modification
that is to be undone, but the strategy by which you
direct yourself through these conditions that are
arising in God. And the fundamental strategy is the
assumption of this limited self existence rather
than the perfect intuition of the Divine as one's
Nature and Condition. All that arises is to be
realized consciously as the Conscious Theatre of
God.
Garbage
and the Goddess
Life of Understanding, Week 11 (unpublished)
See:
"The
perfect among the sages is identical with Me. There is
absolutely no difference between us"
Tripura
Rahasya,
Chap
XX, 128-133
All copyright materials are used under authority of
the Fair Use statute.
