I struggled to come up with anything for this week; I did initiate writing something on a few occasions, but what I saw on paper I did not like. What I wrote and what I had to say, all of it and in all attempts, were so distasteful that I could not even look at them a second time. Whatever I have to say, spiritual or metaphysical or psychological, is so far removed from my heart these days. I have truly nothing to say. To be honest, I know absolutely nothing about life. What I have done is to hide in a dark room and write about what I imagined of life. And my person has heard nothing of what my mind has said; it has lived not. I am such a hypocrite.
And the question today is how much do I live up to what I broadcast? And my answer is “barely.” And as with all habits, I have become so comfortable with this dynamic, with completely separating matters of the intellect and the heart. That the intellect will drive, and the heart need not agree with where we go or what we do; in fact, the heart is better off napping under a dark blanket. And I admit to you all, that the intellect, being blind by birth, drives only to ruins. And I am in ruins when it comes to my person.
All this information about metaphysics, nonduality, transcendence, etc., all talk of spirituality! Everyone talks, everyone produces, makes podcasts, interviews, writes, etc., and I among them, thinking that I know better because of a certain experience, that life is this or that, that truth looks this way but not that way! And in all this, I see, as I have always seen but repeatedly denied, men and women that I deemed ignorant and content with lesser truths of faith and their little rituals, people whose simple faith I ridiculed and dismissed because it couldn’t be encompassed by my own flawed and ridiculous understanding, seeing that they lived and loved better, that what they did was more harmonious with what they believed. And I, sitting on this tower that I think has reached the highest, write and speak profound truths without even concerning myself with who truly I am and how I live and love, and if I love at all. That it was always more important for me to be profound than to be found; but now I look at myself and I see that I am profoundly shallow, and I am disgusted by what I see.
I’d go ahead and say that knowledge avails us nothing, but I cannot afford to make general statements like this anymore; I cannot pretend to know universal truths or the situation of all mankind, whether it is about knowledge or faith; I can say only that knowledge has availed me nothing, and not because anything is inherently wrong with knowledge but that I took it the wrong way and failed at living. I know nothing of the life of mankind, of truth, and least of all of myself; I know only that I have failed because I lived a double life, refused to look at myself and the way I walk and move my limbs, in the way I justified my fragmented soul and ignored the truth that between what I claim to know and how I actually live and carry my heart and my soul, there is an expanding gulf that didn’t seem to matter. The sick and pretentious man that I am, I admit to myself that I cannot save myself, but I shall try to stop pretending.
NOEMAYA 
You speak for a lot of spiritual people. A great confession. On the other hand, the intellect is also a path. Jnana yoga (via intellect) is the hardest path. For those with a strong intellectual bent, that may be the path most suited to come to understanding and peace. Like the cliche, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
I wrote a blog for several years. I can see that it was my own method of putting in writing what I was understanding. It felt great. Then suddenly I stopped writing. It was like I could not put down in words what I was knowing. In the end the heart and the intellect merge, which comes first doesn’t matter. Bernardo Kastrup is a good example of that. He came to his heart, his depth, via the intellect. All is not lost!
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“Profoundly shallow” is of course, an oxymoron, one that kind of makes me laugh! That is the essence of the problem right there, those are contradictory words going in two different directions. For some of us, taking the time to be shallow or superficial is actually a real blessing, a good thing that restores some harmony to our souls. I happen to spend entirely too much time being intense and profound and over thinking everything when I should in fact be out just smelling the roses.
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Thank you!
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That your heart/person has heard nothing of what you share with others – that I doubt.
Your confessions bring to mind a character from Franz Werfel’s novel “The Song of Bernadette.” Chapter forty-eight: “I Never Loved,” admitted Hyacinthe de Lafite (I strongly believe the character is based on Nietzsche). It’s worth the time if you have the opportunity.
Eric Weiner distinguishes between knowledge and wisdom at the outset of “The Socrates Express.” Among other lines, there’s “Knowledge is something you possess [or at least try to]. Wisdom is something you do [or participate in].” And, “Wisdom sees.”
There’s great knowledge in your posts, and loads of it too in your wonderful book “Nondual Perspectives on Quantum Mechanics.” Weiner sees the difference as “one of kind, not degree.” I refuse to believe that your entire body of work fails to cross the great divide here. I continue to see the wisdom you offer. Two of your posts – “World as Divine Symbol” and “The Symbolism of Solar System” – I refer back to again and again. The former, in particular, opened the door to a whole new way of thinking and seeing which I am exceedingly grateful for.
And your book, with its section on “Unity,” is simply beautiful. The mind/intellect alone cannot be responsible for such a creation, I assure you. In “Way to Wisdom” Karl Jaspers writes that “As man we suffer from fundamental weaknesses from which we cannot free ourselves.” “We can only do our best,” he concludes, “and hope that something within us – invisible to the world – will in some unfathomable way come to our aid and lift us out of our limitations.”
Despite how you may see yourself, the writings you share (and I hope continue to share, though free of any demand or schedule) demonstrate to me that this “something” is within you – it’s not invisible to the world. If there are times when you have truly nothing to say, then say nothing at those times.
And if you are “such a hypocrite,” you are in good company. “St. Paul [for example] showed that we cannot be truly good” (Jaspers). The transcendent found ways to work within him – should you expect to be any different? “Seneca, Boethius, Bruno were men with their weaknesses, their failures, men such as ourselves. They had to conquer themselves [Schrodinger put it, “For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time – it is a true continued ‘self-conquering.’”] And this is why they can point the way for us.”
Something prompted you to share this writing. At bottom there’s no possession, only participation. Please do not cease from participating/sharing if/when the mood strikes again (as I believe it certainly will).
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Thanks for kind words about my writings; truly means a lot to hear that. I think over the last year or so, I have become more concerned with how my day-to-day runs itself and if I live by, at least to some extent, the truths I write about. If I believe in the truths of nonduality, do I still choose to live in fear, resentment, anger, etc., beyond their moderate presence in our lives! And opening up and writing about it has been a useful channel to breakthrough some of the ego-structures that have created a divide between my knowing aspect and my living aspect. Not to seek perfection but rather be more self-aware that one needs to take care of one’s soul, and that often comes about in terms of what we do than what we know.
I always enjoy your comments. Thank you for taking the time to write.
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“…opening up and writing about it has been a useful channel…” I can relate, and I know the courage it takes to ask yourself tough questions in a public forum. “There was no new element in [Lafite’s] consciousness. But he knew that the emptiness, the critical emptying of the soul’s content…” was paramount, “For faith [“If I believe in the truths of nonduality…”] is not a function of the soul. It is the soul itself in its last nakedness.”
“For man the knowledge of truth is always a matter of return to that knowledge…” you write. That is wisdom. That no one can own or possess the knowledge of truth – I have come to recognize this as invaluable wisdom. Werfel put it this way:
“Even less than our body does our mind belong to us. The knowledge, for example, that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals 180 degrees, that light travels at a velocity of 186,000 miles per second, that a seventh chord must consist of four separate tones, is not at all my personal knowledge but I am only permitted to partake of it. We are all sitting, in a manner of speaking, at the mind’s table which was set long ago, and we dip into the common bowl with more or less appetite. Thus the mind transcends us.”
“Something that may sound strange to commonsense but is true from a scientific standpoint is that light by which all things become visible is itself something invisible. Photons cannot be seen…” I recall being blown away when I first learned this from Edward R. Close. I had a similar response while reading these lines: “A black-hole does not signify lack of light; on the contrary it is the locus of infinite amount of light. The black appearnance…”
I have no idea how you arrived at this brilliant knowledge. Somehow, we might say, you returned to it. Now I must confess: there are other lines you wrote which affected me in quite another fashion:
“After giving a short account of Yin-Yang and Golden Ratio I proceed to prove their equivalence. Since after a year of research I have found no one else who has discovered this equivalence I stick a copyright notice at the end of the article just for the publication purposes in case the finding turns out to be of significance.” Copyright © Tomaj Javidtash and NOEMAYA, 12/30/2014 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Tomaj Javidtash and NOEMAYA with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.”
I copied and pasted the above in an email which I sent to myself, titled “Reminder to ‘self’ about credit and ownership.” If these words influenced me so profoundly it’s only because for years my dream has been to find and/or publish something “of significance.” I still need that reminder.
“Wheeler [of course credited with coining “black hole”] was distraught. For years, for pages, he obsessed. ‘I am not proud. I will confess all errors. I will try anything to crack the mystery.’ After all, he wrote, ‘I owe it to the community to give my very best.’ Any reality in which a thought, perception, or measurement outcome was someone’s private property was not a reality he could live in.” So writes Amanda Gefter in an article about how “John Wheeler Saw The Tear in Reality.”
The tear… Jaspers mentioned St. Paul. Jung concludes his “Answer to Job” with this bit of wisdom:
“In these circumstances it is well to remind ourselves of St. Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other side, a sinful man who could not pluck out the ‘thorn in the flesh’ and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him. That is to say, even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells in him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”
Wheeler had this to say in a lecture on black holes: “And here, such a strange object, epitomizes, acts a kind of summary of all the mysteries that confront us about the universe itself…This black hole gives us hope that we, someday, will understand this paradox of collapse of the universe, and with it the glittering central mechanism of the universe. The greatest prize of all, the insight that we’ll gain surely will give us a far deeper understanding of the whole place of man in the scheme of things.”
“…and hence a black-hole can be viewed as the symbol representing the reintegration of the manifestation in the principle which itself marks the beginning of a new cosmic manifestation.” Denying the mechanistic nature of the universe, S. Radhakrishnan offers, “If mechanism were true, the writer of Ecclesiastes, who laments that ‘the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun, would be faithful to facts, but the truth is nearer what the Book of Revelation declares: ‘Behold, I make all things new.’” “All things pass but the passing.”
Thank you for the opportunity to write/share.
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This post has stirred a lot. Narayana doest it in many many ways
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Thank you!
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Thanks for this
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