More thoughts on the blog and Baba
If I followed this outline of a path, trying to produce some reasonable reflection on the subject of my life in Baba, I could hope that it would at least not impede Baba’s work, but also and simultaneously advance the conventional wisdom about modern “spiritual” life. This could be a valuable contribution.
I came to Baba from a place of fairly extreme dissociation. Believing in the neurological underpinning of existential experience, transformed, admittedly by a teleological social reconstruction. There were reasons and stories that shaped the bare sensory bones of human life, and those linguistically, socially generated stories were the only palpable glue that created human life as we know it. Miraculously, but dangerously, these narratives permitted a degree of self-referential inspection, resulting in an “Aha!” moment for Western thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was now possible to doubt the ground of our being more thoroughly than ever before. At moments the cold wind of isolation seemed to cut through many of our warmest social institutions: family, country, and religion.
For me, then, (this time) the pursuit of Meher Baba began with the serious consideration that the world was an optical illusion. That Maya, or the heart of our embeddedness in this world, was itself held together with our desires and with our related activities. So, seen from one perspective, the world, or framework, was one of individual neurological perpective framed by social/linguistic constructs. Seen from a 180 degree different angle, Maya was glued with personal karmic sanskaras and resulting personal actions.
Having written this paragraph, I admit that I have no knowledge of how to say this in a clear and logically consistent way. It is as if I have a yin and a yang symbol: one referring to a view of life that crudely corresponds to a modern, scientific reductionism: the other referring to a view with long roots in Easter mysticism, equally reductionistic.
But here is the starting spot. The path consists of reconciling these two views as long as is needed. As a “modern,” I can simply embrace the narrative of Meher Baba. My greatest risk is that some part of it will outrage some socially transmitted ethic of intellectual life. As a devotee, I can readily “underweight” these “modernistic” qualms, bearing with them until Baba chooses to shatter them with some direct experience of truth or love.
Another problem is that this "philosophizing" may be too dry and deadly. All of the Baba lovers I've known are happy folk. Focused, but far less trapped in their minds than me. In the mean time, I am not enlightened. Baba is, but I am not. And I accept (at least within the narrative) that “i” never will be. Jai Baba.
I came to Baba from a place of fairly extreme dissociation. Believing in the neurological underpinning of existential experience, transformed, admittedly by a teleological social reconstruction. There were reasons and stories that shaped the bare sensory bones of human life, and those linguistically, socially generated stories were the only palpable glue that created human life as we know it. Miraculously, but dangerously, these narratives permitted a degree of self-referential inspection, resulting in an “Aha!” moment for Western thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was now possible to doubt the ground of our being more thoroughly than ever before. At moments the cold wind of isolation seemed to cut through many of our warmest social institutions: family, country, and religion.
For me, then, (this time) the pursuit of Meher Baba began with the serious consideration that the world was an optical illusion. That Maya, or the heart of our embeddedness in this world, was itself held together with our desires and with our related activities. So, seen from one perspective, the world, or framework, was one of individual neurological perpective framed by social/linguistic constructs. Seen from a 180 degree different angle, Maya was glued with personal karmic sanskaras and resulting personal actions.
Having written this paragraph, I admit that I have no knowledge of how to say this in a clear and logically consistent way. It is as if I have a yin and a yang symbol: one referring to a view of life that crudely corresponds to a modern, scientific reductionism: the other referring to a view with long roots in Easter mysticism, equally reductionistic.
But here is the starting spot. The path consists of reconciling these two views as long as is needed. As a “modern,” I can simply embrace the narrative of Meher Baba. My greatest risk is that some part of it will outrage some socially transmitted ethic of intellectual life. As a devotee, I can readily “underweight” these “modernistic” qualms, bearing with them until Baba chooses to shatter them with some direct experience of truth or love.
Another problem is that this "philosophizing" may be too dry and deadly. All of the Baba lovers I've known are happy folk. Focused, but far less trapped in their minds than me. In the mean time, I am not enlightened. Baba is, but I am not. And I accept (at least within the narrative) that “i” never will be. Jai Baba.
posted by David | 9:29 PM
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