Page 41 - Microsoft Word - SPIRIT AND THE MIND.doc

24 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
swept away in one terrible moment of revelation. Such insights, occurring spontaneously, have left their mark on enough people that if the reader has no personal experience of the phenomenon, he may have encountered it in literature or biography. In Varieties of Religious Experience William James wrote of Aldous Huxley’s elderly father experiencing such a revelation, from which he never quite recovered.
How natural and understandable it is, then, that we avoid this kind of contemplation. Unless they spring out at us from the dark, catching us unawares, we keep our eyes averted from these Medusa- like insights. But the delusion of which they would tell us is real. It is, of course, the fundamental concept underlying virtually all the world’s religions. Or rather, it is the dark side whose other face is radiant with the promise our religions have always held out to mankind: immortality. It seems we can’t have one without the other.
And so the resistance. The two-fold fear of facing mortality and of risking ego disintegration perpetuates the delusion of duality. We hide from reality, becoming so absorbed in life’s fleeting superficialities that we are almost totally insensitive to the mind- boggling mystery of creation and the miracle of our own existence. We seem completely unable to properly gauge the relative importance of these aspects of life.
Scriptures from every religion cite this pervasive blindness to the great mystery of our brief moment of consciousness in an infinite universe. What is its meaning? What is our purpose? What is death? Where will we go beyond this life? When you stop to think for a moment, isn’t it strange how we almost totally erase such basic questions from our mind in favor of the insignificant pursuits which occupy us instead?
In the Mahabharata,1 there is a conversation which goes like this:
Q. What is the road to heaven?
A. Truthfulness.
Q. How does a man find happiness?
A. Through right conduct.
Q. What must he subdue in order to escape grief? A. His mind.