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Venerable
Ajahn Sumedho -
Devotion and Gnosis
This
year is the centenary of the first Parliament of Religions, held in
Chicago, 1893. In recognition of this, we will be printing articles
edited from talks on religious themes. Below, Venerable Ajahn Sumedho
points out a mode of practice that is common to, and transcends all,
religious forms.
The words 'spiritual', 'holy', 'pure', 'good' and 'true', are important
in any language because they remind us, of the aspiration of our human
hearts.
We aspire to be good, and to be pure, yet we easily forget the whole
purpose and opportunity of being human ... to realise the true, the
beautiful and the good. Sometimes we can become cynical and think that
these are naïve daydreams of people who don't know anything.
The purpose and importance of human life can get lost in the Western
world of middle class values and affluence. We can get what we want
these days, but even when we do get everything - or a lot - of what we
want, in the end we feel a sense of the meaninglessness or
purposelessness of our lives. Depression in a common experience in
affluent countries. Why is this, why do we think that if we get what we
want then we should be happy? At this point, our ability to reflect on
the way things are makes it possible to open our hearts to spiritual
enquiry.
You can see Religious Paths as being of two kinds. There's the
Devotional Path of religion and the Wisdom or Gnostic Path. In Hinduism,
Bhakti is the devotional path, Nana or Raja Yoga the path of knowledge,
profound insight or wisdom. Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Thailand,
Burma, Cambodia and Laos emphasises the Gnostic Path, and yet if you
went to a country like Thailand you would find most of the people
devotional. Modern Christianity has become very devotional and wisdom is
not highly developed in modern Christian institutions. Yet, ultimately,
devotion and knowledge meet. It's not that one cancels out the other;
and yet, like everything, if we choose one and reject the other then
something is lost. We can't just be wise without some level of devotion,
and to be truly devoted means that inevitably we will become wise.
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are generally
regarded as orthodox traditions, meaning they come from the revelations
of prophets or sages. They have given powerful direction to human beings
in realising and fulfilling their aspirations towards the immortal
Truth, the Divine, the Absolute, or whatever one chooses to call the
ineffable, Ultimate Reality. The definition of religion then is 'that
which binds an individual being to the Divine', and thereby engages the
whole life of that being. To be religious means that you engage your
whole being with that one aim of Ultimate Realisation. It's not just a
half-hearted, dilly-dallying with religious symbols, or ceremonies.
However, so much of what we call religion is a half-hearted adherence to
culture or tradition. When you ask English people about the Church of
England these days, they will usually say, 'It's part of being English.'
Whether you believe it or not doesn't make any difference; it's more a
matter of having a cultural identity to hold on to. But the aim of
religion is to transcend cultural identity of any sort.
Even though as a religious seeker, the individual human being aims and
aspires towards Ultimate Reality, that Ultimate Reality is not personal,
not individual; it doesn't belong to any religion. It's not something
that one religion has and another hasn't. This is where so much
misunderstanding amongst religions takes place because of the tendency
to think, 'Our Way is the only Way.'
This is our human blindness. However, we must have enough confidence in
the religious form we're using to engage our whole being with it; we
can't just think right now that it's a good idea, and make ourselves do
it. We have to act from a level of trust and confidence in the
convention itself. We need some trust or interest in it to start
engaging our whole being, to give up everything for that Ultimate Truth.
Then, when we have that measure of trust in what we're doing, we can
devote our whole lives to Realisation. Once we've set our aim, then
whatever happens on the worldly plane of conditions is part of the Path.
We have to use the good fortune, the misfortune, the successes and the
failures on this conditioned plane. We use those because we are no
longer identifying with or demanding that the conditioned realm be
anything; we recognise that whatever the condition is, it's part of our
experience. We look into it, we bear with it. One has to bear with how
things move and change. They may change in ways that we cannot control.
But we no longer try to exert control, or hold onto what we want, and
waste time trying to get rid of that which we don't want. We become
trusting and confident because our goal is no longer a worldly
conditioned goal. It's an Absolute Ultimate goal.
'Gnosis' is the Greek word: in Pali we use 'nyana', which means
'profound knowledge'. Any Gnostic religious form is a reflective,
contemplative practice. Devotional practice aims at total commitment and
engagement towards ultimate reality, and gnosis, nyana, is the ability
of the human heart and mind to contemplate existence and the way things
are. When we use gnosis, we are not starting with any a priori
assumptions. We're not taking a position that 'There is (something)' or
'There isn't', but we're watching and witnessing what we're experiencing
at this very moment. We're contemplating; we're thinking in a reflective
way about the meaning of life. 'What is its purpose?' 'Why was I born?'
'What happens when we die?'
These are reflective questions. We can't answer them in the usual way.
If we ask, 'Why was I born?' somebody might say, 'You were born to love
the Lord.' That's all right when you're a child, but when you grow up
you start questioning: 'Why does the Lord need to be loved?' 'Why would
He create so much misery?'
We develop a way of dismissing such reflective questions about existence
and Ultimate Reality; we tend to say, 'Don't bother with that, you have
to learn how to pass your examinations and become number one. You have
to become a success.' We hold up all these worldly goals. As a boy I was
given worldly things to aim at in life: Ultimate Reality and
Enlightenment were not even pointed to as anything worth bothering
about.
What do we have now here in modern Britain? The goal is to try to create
the perfect society. On a grander scale this includes a harmony between
all human beings, a United Nations built on ideas of justice, mercy,
ecology and conservation, sharing and goodness; all aimed at life on
planet Earth. Once we get everything right on this Earth then we will
somehow be happy. Yet even then, taking our earth-bound ideals to a
complete and totally successful manifestation, it would still be
unsatisfying to the human heart. It would not be enough for us; we would
still find something to complain about because discontent of the human
heart comes from the basic misunderstanding of the human being, when the
Ultimate Truth is not recognised or realised. Nowadays, modern material
values tend to be more attractive to masses of people: yet underlying
all that, there is still a recognition of that aspiration of the human
heart; and that aspiration goes for all humanity.
The Ultimately True and Beautiful; these are words that point to that in
each of us that aspires to something beyond the changing conditions of
the sensory world. The sensory world is this way - it changes; and
changing doesn't mean it gets better and better. Sometimes it gets
better and then it can get worse and then it can get better again. But
things just don't get better and better, and they just don't stay the
same; they may change in ways that we cannot control, or in ways that we
don't like.
The human body changes, doesn't it? It doesn't change in the way we want
it to; it changes into the way we don't want it to - until we have
perspective on the Ultimate Reality. Then, the changing-ness of the
sensory realm can be perfect for us, rather than changing in a way that
we don't like. We begin to open up to life in its totality, its pain and
its beauty. We are quite willing to endure the pain, the misfortunes,
the blame, the rudeness and the meanness of human existence when we
realise it as change rather than as some personal threat or terrible
disillusionment with God because 'God shouldn't have created the world
like this. He should have created it perfect according to the way I
think, where things don't change but they remain in a permanent or
static state of beauty and pleasure'. But sensual pleasure - one moment
after the next, to eternity - sounds horrible doesn't it ... because
pleasure is unsatisfying. Imagine just being praised for eternity ... or
being able to live for five hundred years - that's eternal enough - with
a crowd of obsequious sycophants saying, 'You're wonderful ...' 'I love
you ...' 'You're the best.' Five hundred years of that!
With gnosis or insight knowledge, we remember that the human experience
is the experience of knowing. Consciousness is a way of knowing things;
when we are conscious of something, we know it. Just like seeing an
object with my eye; I know what it is. It's conscious where the eye
contacts the object; that's a kind of knowledge, one of many levels of
knowledge. But gnosis takes the ability to know to an Ultimate position
beyond interpretation.
For example, from the basic assumption that 'I am this body', and 'I am
a person', whatever I know about my experience is interpreted from a
very personal position: how it affects me; whether it pleases or doesn't
please me. My ability to see and to know individual people on a personal
level is tinged with infatuation or aversion, prejudice, opinion. All
these come in and distort my knowing. Even though the eye sees, if
there's 'me' and 'mine' and the assumption of 'me' and 'mine'
accompanying that visual consciousness, then I interpret everything in a
very personal way; various biases or prejudices influence that
knowledge.
Gnosis, in Buddhism, is realised only through mindfulness. We can't
study it in a book; it's not conceptual. We can't read a Gnostic text
and suddenly become enlightened. The Buddhist teachings, as Gnostic
teachings, are to encourage a total engagement with the Dhamma or the
Ultimate Reality through reflecting on the way things are.
For example, we can reflect on the way things are within the limits and
conditions of having a human body. What are the limitations of being
human? The Buddha encouraged us to reflect upon old age, sickness and
death, because this is what happens to every human being. Through a
lifetime, from birth to death there is always a certain amount of pain
and sickness along with the inevitable death of this body. From the
personal position, we try to hold onto youth - because society adores
the youthful, those who can do things and get things done. But if we
reflect on the way things are, we see age as restraining. And anything
that restrains and limits is helpful as a reflection. We can use age as
Dhamma, rather than create suffering around it as a personal failure or
problem.
Then on the emotional plane, what can I expect in this life as an
individual being? Things are going to be good and bad; there's going to
be praise, and I will be criticised. I will experience happiness,
suffering, and the loss of loved ones. These are common experiences of
all human beings whatever their cultural context.
So we can reflect, with wisdom using the limitations of our human
experience; the limitation of masculinity, or femininity; the
limitations of age. In monastic life, we use voluntary limitation as a
form for restraint and relinquishment. We use it to reflect, to develop
more and more of this profound insight into the Ultimate Truth, the
Ultimate Reality, the Saccadhamma. The Saccadhamma is that which is
ultimately true and real, Ultimate Reality. The sense of devotion is
fuel to keep us going with loyalty and commitment and love. These come
from the heart, so it is not just intellectual idealism. We feel it in
our hearts; we long for and aspire towards realisation; we offer our
lives to realise and be free from all delusions. We are willing to
endure the inevitable changing process of this sensory realm in order to
learn from it, from whatever happens: because whatever happens, is the
Path for a Gnostic and a devotee of the Dhamma.
Forest Sangha Newsletter: July 1993 2536 Number 25
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