Behind The Mask ~ THE FORCE
Many
of us are inclined to live overmuch in our heads,
giving intellect the supreme position—or the
only position—and ignoring or relegating the
feelings to a greatly inferior station. Somehow, we
must try to find a balance between these powerful
forces.
The intellect is generally considered to
be located in the brain; indeed, how could it be elsewhere?
The heart is—or was—considered to be the
base of the feelings, as the heart beats faster when
we are emotionally aroused; but with the advent of
heart-transplants this concept has been debunked,
as people who have had such operations have not acquired
the feelings of the person whose heart now beats in
their breast, but feel pretty much as they did before.
Therefore, we must conclude that the feelings are
also part of the mind, though in a different department
than the intellect.
But what do we mean by ‘feelings’?
Perhaps we had better try to define this term, insofar
as we are able to. We are obviously not referring
to physical feelings here—things like sensations
of pain, discomfort, heat and cold, and so on—nor
are we referring to things of the emotions, like grief,
anger, joy, sorrow, etc. We are talking more of the
intuition, whereby we feel that we know something
to be so, without being told or previously investigating
it; we sometimes say things like: "I have a feeling
that this is right/wrong"; "I feel that
something is going to happen". It has something
to do with insight or a direct seeing or knowing,
beyond the intellect. We feel convinced that something
is so.
There are many things in our minds that
we know little or nothing of: memories, tendencies,
abilities and so on; we actually know things that
we do not consciously know, that we are not consciously
aware of, having never learned them—not in this
life, at least. At times, things come up in our minds
that surprise us and cause us to think: "Now
where did that come from? I didn’t know that
I knew this!" The mind is like the lake of boiling
pitch in Trinidad which is constantly bringing things
to the surface and taking them down again: old cars,
tree-trunks, bones of prehistoric animals, and so
on, things that, in some cases, have been there for
so long that their existence was never even suspected.
There is a force working in us that we feel
at times, without knowing or understanding anything
about it. Let us look at the story of Prince Siddhartha
with this in mind before examining it in ourselves:
Undoubtedly, he must have been a very special
child, but was he aware of this, and of what did his
specialness consist? He was provided with luxury,
pleasure and entertainment befitting his station,
but was pensive by nature, and as he matured into
manhood, he was often observed sitting alone in the
garden, lost in thought. If asked why, or if anything
were wrong, he might have answered: "No, there’s
nothing wrong; I just want to be alone and quiet".
The real answer was that he didn’t know; it
was the force working within him, not allowing him
to be lost and swallowed by the pleasures of the palace;
he felt, rather than knew, that it was all hollow
and empty and had no real value, and that there had
to be something more to life than this.
I have written elsewhere that, since his
birth—and, according to the story, for many
lifetimes previous to this—he had been a Bodhisattva
(that is, an aspirant to Buddhahood or an ‘apprentice’
Buddha). While he was a Bodhisattva, however, he didn’t
know it; it was only after his attainment of Buddhahood,
at the age of 35, when he looked back on his life,
that He realized He had been a Bodhisattva for so
long before. Now, Siddhartha—or Gotama, to use
His family-name—is the only historical Bodhisattva
that Buddhists of all schools will accept, and it
is from His case that we may conclude that while a
person is a Bodhisattva, he—or she (let’s
not be sexist here)—does not know that he/she
is. This throws a much clearer light on the idea of
Bodhisattvahood, around which there is so much confusion
and even acrimony in Buddhist circles.
When, after seeing the four startling sights—an
old person, a sick person, a corpse and an ascetic,
which the story says he had never seen before—he
left the palace and went off into the forest to seek
for truth, did he really know what he was doing, or
was it again something that he felt he had to do?
He had not had any experience of this kind of thing,
nor did he, at that stage, remember his past lives,
so he must just have been following his feelings.
It must have been tremendously difficult
for him to do this, having led such a sheltered and
pampered life in the palace. Imagine what it must
have been like to change his fine clothes for the
filthy, stinking, lice-infested rags of a beggar!
If we do not have clean clothes every day—and
sometimes more than once a day—we do not feel
comfortable. Then, to beg for food at the hovels that
he came across in the forest must not have been an
easy thing for him to do, but he did it, and forced
himself to eat the scraps of coarse and unfamiliar
food that were offered to him, when he must have felt
like vomiting. Could we do such a thing? Why did he
do it? Why should he feel that only by leaving his
home and family might he discover the causes of why
we grow old, get sick, suffer, and finally die? Was
the sight of just one ascetic enough to convince him
that this was the way to go? Did he fully understand
then that the emotional entanglements of family-life
are not conducive to detachment and seeing things
clearly? Later on, he said that this is so, but did
he know it when he left the palace to go off into
the forest to search for truth?
He went to study under the most famous spiritual
teachers of his time—noble-minded men who lived
what they taught—and quickly mastered all they
had to teach but felt it was not enough and that it
would not lead him to enlightenment. No-one told him
this because no-one knew, and he had no previous experience
of it. So why should he even think that there must
be something more? What the teachers had taught him
was already a high stage—much higher, in fact,
than anything he had known before in the palace—so
why should he think there was anything higher? He
didn’t know there was, but felt that there must
be, that there had to be, and so he left those teachers
and went off on his own, and we learn that later on
he did, indeed, find what he was seeking and became
a Buddha, an Awakened One. Thereafter, He began to
teach and explain to others about what He had found,
but now it was a matter of knowledge, of conviction
and certainty, rather than of feeling. It was his
feelings, however, that led to His knowledge. Feelings
came first; knowledge afterwards.
The Buddha came and He went; He is no longer
with us to guide us and clarify our doubts. His Teachings
are still with us, but we cannot be 100% sure that
they are exactly what He taught, as things change
with time, and His Teachings cannot be an exception;
in fact, we can be 100% sure that what we have today
in the books is not exactly what He taught, but this
doesn’t really matter as long as we perceive
the essence, which is still there. There is much,
so much, that we can learn from His Teachings, and
I am in no way underestimating them here or implying
that they are unimportant; certainly not. What I am
saying is that they must be used as far as they can
take us, and that we must experience reality for ourselves;
books cannot do this for us; there is no substitute
for direct personal experience, and we cannot regard
a thing as true unless we have directly experienced
it for ourselves; until that time, it will be just
a matter of hearsay or conjecture.
Now to ourselves: It is imperative for us
to feel the Force operating in our lives. Just because
we might not have noticed it or even thought about
it doesn’t mean it’s not there or that
we’ve not felt it; it’s there alright,
and we have felt it. What is it, for example, that
caused us to learn how to walk? We were not taught,
and we did not learn by imitating others, because
even babies born blind somehow learn to walk. We—or
at least, I (and I presume this about others, too)—do
not remember learning how to walk, but we can all
see babies doing it and it doesn’t look easy;
we can see them trying and failing, falling down,
bumping their heads, crying, but getting up and going
on, until finally they succeed and don’t fall
down anymore. Why don’t they give up in despair,
as adults often do when they don’t succeed after
trying to do something a few times? Is it because
they have no choice about it but must just follow
the Force? And does the Force cease to operate in
us when we have mastered the ability to walk? Surely
not; it is there, although we are unaware of it; we
have never been told of it and so, in most of us,
it remains unknown, undiscovered, usually all our
lives. What a pity! What a tragedy that so much is
available to us that we know nothing of! In The Voice
of the Silence, a mystical work of the Theosophists,
it is written: "Alas, alas that all souls should
possess Alaya, but that, possessing it, Alaya should
avail them so little!" (‘Alaya’ is
a Mahayana Buddhist term that is usually translated
as ‘Storehouse Consciousness’—that
is, an aspect of consciousness that we all share;
this is the real meaning of the term ‘common
sense’—that is, a sense that we have in
common, rather than something ordinary or commonplace;
in fact, it is far from being common).
I can see now, looking back, how the force
was operating in my life, although I still cannot
explain it, and do not know, until the present moment,
whether I was pulled out or pushed out of England,
or both; all I know is that I couldn’t stay
but had to set off on my wanderings, which eventually
led me to India, where, in 1970, I stumbled upon Buddhism,
and what I learned of it made sense to me, although
I had not been looking for it—consciously, at
least. What I had been looking for, I did not know;
in fact, I didn’t even know that I was looking
at all! Only when I found it (or it found me!) did
I realize that I had been looking for something, because
it filled a vacuum in me that had been there a long
time.
Ah, but it didn’t begin there, if
it—or anything—can be said to have a beginning.
Where—if anywhere—it began, I have no
idea, but I can trace it as far as my childhood, where
two things of significance stand out as I now look
back: (1), in a family of meat-eaters, I was the only
one who didn’t like to eat meat. In itself,
this might not be anything special as lots of kids
don’t like to eat meat; but together with the
second factor, it seems meaningful: (2), I always
felt drawn to India. None of my family had been to
India, and none of them had the slightest interest
in it, but India called me, and even the word ‘India’
did something to me, conjuring up images in my mind.
And it was there, many years later, that I found ‘it’.
And India, by the way, is a land where vegetarianism
has been a way of life for centuries.
I can account for these things in no other
way but by The Force.
Sometimes, when giving a talk, I ask the
audience: "Why are you here like this?"
Before anyone can offer an answer, I say: "Don’t
even try to answer, because I can tell you, you don’t
now, which is how it should be. If you can explain,
it will not be right, as there are just so many things
involved, and we can see only a few of them. But although
you don’t know, how does it feel? Does it feel
right to you?
Carlos Castañeda, who wrote several
books about the teachings of an American-Indian medicine-man
by the name of Don Juan, some years ago quoted his
teacher thus:
"Any path is only a path, and there
is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping
it if that is what your heart tells you .... Look
at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as
many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself—and
yourself alone—one question: Does this path
have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it
doesn’t, it is of no use".
No-one can ask, or answer, this question
for us; we must decide for ourselves. |