Teachings
Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths. ~ David Mitchell
All the mind can comprehend are concepts. Truth is beyond concepts.
Ĉonsciousness straddles the interface between the phenomenal and noumenal. As a witness in quietude, truth may seep into an individual’s consciousness.
The voluminous construals of Nature may have elements of veracity in them, like grains of sand taken from a beach. That is because all knowledge has a singular source.
Beyond the senses are the objects. Beyond the objects is the mind. Beyond the mind is the intellect. Beyond the intellect is the great Ātman (soul / true self). Beyond the Ātman is the Unmanifested. Beyond the Unmanifested is the Purusha (the cosmic soul / universal principle). Beyond the Purusha there is nothing. ~ Katha Upanishad 3.3.7
Knowledge of reality, and the path to realization, is archaic. The Upanishads (aka Vedānta) are ancient Vedic texts, the earliest of which date to the 7th century bce.
For those in ignorance, these texts are treated as allusions: mystical in import to those who cannot take them at face value. To one who is realized, they are instead merely florid statements of fact.
In essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms. ~ Eckhart Tolle
In relating the wisdom of ancient spiritual texts, distortions arose from lack of clarity in the interpreter, along with cultural orientations. Many preach who are not realized, and so their contributions are scattershot. These pretenders disguise reality as much as illuminate it.
Even among those who are realized there are canonical differences. One of the most glaring examples is the expressed belief in a God. Some gurus believe in God. Many don’t, for the simple reason that it is a fantasy of consequence: beggaring a false comfort from a capricious foreign source (one can never know what God may do).
God works in mysterious ways. ~ common religious expression, emanating from a 1779 poem by English poet William Cowper
The God issue is more than semantics. Combine the potential omniscience of Ĉonsciousness and the seeming omnipotence of coherence and you have the power of God. What you don’t have is a Supreme Being, as Ĉonsciousness and coherence are labels of convenience for natural processes. As object orientation is the mind’s rote ruse, confusing a process with a being is facilely made.
God is only an idea in your mind. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Is it that God-faring gurus have been careless philosophical analysts, and so off-base? Absolutely. Attaining a higher state of consciousness is not an injection of intellect. Most enlightened people are rather mundane outside their attained state of consciousness.
To err is human. ~ English poet Alexander Pope
Does this mean that the practicable teachings of certain gurus may be incomplete, ineffective for followers, or even incorrect? Yes. Misconception defines the human experience.
Individuals learn in their own way, taking in ideas which resonate at the time they are presented. Once satisfied, spiritual seeking stops, and acceptance sinks in, however perverse.
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As truth is ultimately beyond concepts, the only possible veracity check is through aporetic cross-validation of all that is known: a demanding intellectual task that takes decades of devotion, abetted by a sustained scientific skepticism that few possess the stamina for. By contrast, believing a smooth-talking authority figure, or buying into Collective convention, is a no-brainer.
(Spokes of the Wheel conveys salient information for all fields of knowledge. The intention behind Spokes is to allow the dedicated reader to connect the data dots into discernible patterns which validate, via inference, what empirical evidence can only suggest. Verifying the core of the ancient spiritual teachings requires the personal experience of unity consciousness. Whereas the force of coherence in Nature becomes obvious via cumulative scientific evidence, and the occasional feeling of “oneness” in Nature is somewhat common among those spiritually inclined who are not enlightened, Ĉonsciousness as a unified field can only be reliably felt when one is realized. That Ĉonsciousness localization corresponds with the quantum production of Nature via the Higgs mechanism, as theorized in physics, is strongly suggestive.)
Nisargadatta Maharaj is more extensively quoted in this book than Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was wildly successful thanks to his brief association with The Beatles and his easy instruction that all one needed to do to become enlightened was to meditate. Though he planted pointers, Maharishi never laid out a map to reach the ethereal territory known as reality.
By contrast, in recorded sessions, Maharaj addressed seekers directly, in dialogues pertinent to their specific concerns. The cumulative effect, provided through edited books of transcripts, was to convey a comprehensive worldview from a savvy guru.
For realization, understanding is essential. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
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The purchase of matterism, for instance, is an instance of pseudoscience by the simple-minded, notably neurobiologists. Have these clowns never bothered to consider how organisms without brains manage to possess awareness and exhibit intelligence?! If they had, they would have disabused themselves of the nonsense which they tout.
A common misdiagnosis is thinking that known facts are sufficient to encompass the world. Mistaking a peephole of atomic evidence for the whole picture is an egregiously erroneous projection when trying to comprehend reality merely from matter transformations, especially when implications are ignored. The illness of wrongheadedness is terminal when the worldview “answer” is arrived at before even looking at what is known.
What we know is a drop; what we don’t know is an ocean. ~ English natural philosopher Isaac Newton
It seems incredible that naïve realism and matterism are accepted in light of the basic physics fact that matter is composed of energy, which is nothing but a concept. That immaterial forces teleologically propel Nature is abundantly apparent from evolution.
Ignoring fundamental facts to propose fictions is pseudoscience. Incompetence among theoretical scientists is rampant, as matterism is ubiquitously espoused by those with the highest academic credentials: a conceptual convention from a confederacy of dunces.
Nowadays people are full of intellectual conceit. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
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The teachings of Ishi Nobu generally align with those of Nisargadatta Maharaj, yet their incidental content strikingly differs. (Not an author, Maharaj is remembered by transcribed recordings of his conversations with spiritual seekers. Maharaj’s teachings are not altogether consistent nor scientific, unlike Nobu, who presents a comprehensive system of knowledge from scientific facts accumulated for over 4 decades.) Whereas Maharaj spoke of the guņas and other Hindu constructs, Nobu writes of physics field theories, genetics, and other Western idealizations. Genes are no more real than guņas. A guru expounds in the milieu of his culture, and to his audience. (When Maharaj was asked about why he conveyed Hindu concepts, he replied: “it is my way of talking, the language I was taught to use.”) Expressions necessarily reside within a societal setting, reflecting the time of production.
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To be alive is to have one’s mind swim in an ocean of ideas, none of which are true. The best one may do is attain a level of understanding by gaining the constructs which enliven and enrich the enjoyment of life. Those theories which irrefutably outline Nature in all its intricacy are an invaluable aid. Their merit is not in the comfort they bring, but in their reliability as a guide. True spirituality is the epitome of practicality.
The essence of spirituality is to understand life properly, to find the truth and the untruth about who we are. All that can be found is the untruth. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
