The Evolution of Perception (EOP) is not based on Hindu theology, but there are some obvious parallels. For instance, both EOP and Hindu theology conclude that the world that we experience is an illusion. My objective here, though, is to talk about an important difference. And by association I’ll show how Hinduism differs from Meher Baba’s teaching on the subject.
When it comes to the relationship between God and the Universe, there are several views. One view called pantheism is that God and the Universe are one and the same. Another called panentheism is the view that God, as the supreme reality, is both immanent and transcendent. This means God is both in the things we see and beyond them.
My concept of an evolution of perception was originally inspired by my study of Meher Baba’s system of sanskaras, and was further shaped by consideration of the persisting problems of philosophy. Anyone can read about this system of sanskaras in Baba’s major books God Speaks, Discourses, and the Intelligence Notebooks, downloaded here.
The charts in EOP are helpful in that they give a quick way to conceive of what Meher Baba said, using commonly understood contemporary analogies such as lenses.
I propose that the writers of the ancient Vedas, upon which Hindu theology is based, may have actually meant to convey the same idea as Baba, but lacked certain analogies and concepts that we have today. So their intention was not understood as well as it could have been.
Analogies like lenses didn’t exist when the Vedic religious texts were written. They were written from about 1,500 BC to 500 BC. Cameras, projectors, and lenses were not invented until the 18th and 19th centuries. Clearly the Vedic writers wouldn’t have had them to convey certain concepts. Not only were these inventions not there to provide analogies, but additional concepts we have today had not been discovered, such as psychology and evolution. These ideas only developed in the late 19th century.
I propose that even if the Rishis who wrote the Vedas wanted to convey an idea similar to Meher Baba’s or that conveyed by EOP, they would have had no way to do so at the time. For they didn’t have the analogies and relevant concepts to get it across easily. Let’s look at what these modern analogies and concepts allow us to better conceptualize, and the kinds of analogies that were available to the ancients that did not convey such ideas nearly as clearly.
Consider the chart below. The closest thing to God in charts like this is the eye symbol on the left-hand side.
This eye symbol is meant to represent perception (or the single continuous creative witness). In my view this roughly symbolizes Brahman. The lenses in front of the eye represent sanskaras, or what I call perceptual schemas. They are formative of what they see.
The smaller eyes in the middle represent individual atmas or souls that emerge out of the process depicted as unfolding from left-to-right. The sense of individuality experienced by the atmas develops over time as they form individual consciousness as a result of the process. Yet the only real witness behind all apparently individual witnesses is the eye on the left. This corresponds nicely with words by Baba.
The only Real Existence is that of the One and only God, who is the Infinite Self in every finite self.
It is my understanding that in Hinduism, Brahman is not only the witness, as in EOP, but is the universe too. The seer and the seen. I copied the following paragraph from Google.
In Hinduism, Brahman is the ultimate reality and supreme being, the impersonal, all-encompassing essence of the universe. It is the source of all existence, eternal, and unchanging, both the universe itself and the divine consciousness within all things
This is a little different in the case of EOP, and I believe this difference reflects a difference in what Meher Baba teaches. I’ll explain.
In EOP the world of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and laws of nature is purely a perceptual illusion. It is perceptual only. It is appearance only. It has no actual substance or existence. You can liken such an illusion to a movie that is projected on a movie screen. In a way that is similar to how a movie projector works, what we perceive (thoughts and solid objects we call the phenomenal world) is nothing more than the experiential result of a projection through impressions, which in turn we can liken to movie frames.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, Meher Baba himself used all of these analogies, including the eye, movie frames, film projector, and even tinted eye-glasses in his Intelligence Notebooks. In other words, Baba used this perceptual approach to communicating his theme much like EOP.
Using this analogy of perceptual projection through stored imagination (lenses), it becomes understandable how the Universe is literally nothing, a zero as Baba repeatedly says.
Everything but God is zero. (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 2,327)
But compare this with the notion of panentheism, where God is beyond the universe and simultaneously is the universe. This assumes (or at least implies to a reader) that there is a universe that God can be — rather than it being an actual hallucination and nothing. A total zero.
This notion of the Universe being truly absolutely nothing is very hard to convey without psychology, evolution (the concept of processes), and the analogy of lenses which color a person’s experience. Without these, the ancient Rishis were forced to draw upon analogies available to them at the time. This included magicians. A magician creates the illusion of producing something out of thin air — like a rabbit out of a hat or a dove that flies from one’s hand. Maya literally means a magician’s illusion in Sanskrit, the language of the ancient Rishis.
This implies that the universe was created, albeit by some unknown trickery and is in some mysterious way only an illusion. But this analogy doesn’t communicate an ontology of true nonexistence — at least in any way we can understand. For the world appears to be present before us, just as the rabbit that the magician conjures is apparently there. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying the Rishis were confused. I believe they may have been trying to communicate what Baba is saying. But they lacked the analogies and concepts we have available today to convey it.
Again, today Hinduism is interpreted as holding the view that God is both transcendent and immanent, both beyond the world and the world itself.
In the supplement of God Speaks the author of the supplement actually reacts to this notion of transcendence and immanence by referring the writing of Ibn Arabi, the founder of Wahdat al-Wujud, the school of Sufi philosophy that Baba is said to have endorsed without equivocation.
Ibn Arabi denies transcendence and immanence, which imply duality. He maintains that God is one and it is He alone Who exists. All else that appear to exist are His manifestations or tajalliyat.
That comports with EOP, which is unsurprising considering that EOP was inspired by Baba’s writing. Now let me give some analogies that might help gain an intuitive understanding of this difference.
When a man is dreaming, his dream has no existence apart from him, away from him, separate from him. So we would say the dream is none other than him. But that does not make him and the dream the same thing, only non-different. To say the man having the dream is not only the dreamer of the dream, but is the dream, isn’t true.
It would not even be true that he is in the dream, even if he dreams of his own presence in the dream.
One way to say this is that the dream is him but he is not the dream.
Let me give another analogy, that of a movie projected on a movie screen.
The actor Gary Cooper was in the movie High Noon. Gary Cooper was in High Noon but he also lived his life outside of High Noon. While no one can deny that Gary Cooper is in High Noon, it hardly makes sense to say he is the movie High Noon or that he interpenetrates it. Without Gary Cooper there would be no such movie, but Gary Cooper could easily have existed without the movie. Gary Cooper was a substantive man. But the shadows in the movie theater that bear his image are substanceless. They are an illusion. because High Noon is just a move and doesn’t exist except in appearance when it is playing.
The point is that for Baba, the Universe is an illusion, as substanceless as a flickering movie show in a movie theater. And EOP conveys this point well.
The Nothing and the Everything
The following additional principle may make all this even more clear.
While Meher Baba taught a form of non-dualism, it may seem strange that his teaching also contains a form of dualism also. It is not a mind-body dualism like that of René Descartes, or a good-and-evil dualism like that of the Manichaeans. It is a dualism between what he called The Nothing and The Everything. See the chapter “Existence is Substance and Life is Shadow” in God Speaks.
In this duality, The Everything is Existence, Reality, Substance, God. The Nothing is the Universe, phenomena, life. He compares this duality to one between light and shadow. Shadow has no independent existence, but light is only discoverable in contrast to shadow. I suspect that it was this duality that Zoroaster originally meant when he taught of Asha and Druj. Asha represents truth, while its opposite, Druj, signifies falsehood and deception. Compare to Baba’s words contrasting life with Existence in God Speaks.
Next, compare this to a movie in a movie theater, where the image is literally shadow.
My point of my mentioning this duality Baba describes between the Everything and the Nothing is that Baba says that the Nothing has to be included in the Everything or the Everything could never be called Everything. Yet the Everything could never be included in the Nothing.
EVERYTHING by virtue of being everything embodies even "NOTHING," or else Everything can never mean everything. This Nothing is latent in the Everything. But Nothing, being literally nothing, the very being of being nothing is nothing at all.
Parvardigar is a Persian name for the sustainer aspect of God. Some may argue that in Baba’s Parvardigar Prayer, it names things that Parvardigar is “in” and also is “beyond,” implying immanence. Examples from the prayer are:
You are in the firmament and in the depths.
You are manifest and unmanifest on all planes and beyond all planes;
You are in the three worlds and also beyond the three worlds.
Some Baba lovers go so far as to say that Baba had to be a pantheist. However Baba literally denied this.
From all this, you should not take it that I am a pantheist.
The way I understand this apparent paradox is again with the analogy I gave of Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper was in High Noon, Sergeant York, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. But this does not make these shadow plays real. Gary Cooper is in these films, but they are not in Gary Cooper. And they are certainly not the same thing. For, as Baba said, Nothing, being literally nothing, the very being of being nothing is nothing at all.
In Conclusion, I suspect that the Rishis of the Vedas and Zoroaster who composed the Gathas may have meant the same as Baba, but being in the time in which they lived this was difficult to express, especially due to lacking the analogy of movies and concepts like evolution and psychology.
No comments:
Post a Comment