Ram Dass: Krishna on Brahman ॐ ♥ राम राम ♥ ॐ In chapter 8 of the Gita, Arjuna asks, “Who is Brahman?” and Krishna proceeds to tell him, and to describe how to get there. Were the Gita to stop at that point, I think that its Buddhist tone would be dominant: leave form behind and merge with the One. But the Gita is about to point us toward a whole new level of wisdom. See, here is the predicament: We talked about there being those two different aspects of Brahman—the formless, and the creator of form. The question is, are they mutually exclusive, like purusha and prakriti? Does the formless one rule out the creation? We’re actually a little scared of Brahman. We figure that were we to go back into the One, were we to merge totally with it, there wouldn’t be anything more happening after that. It’s a good question. Would there? Would there be any more manifestation? Or would nothing ever happen again? Krishna addresses that one for Arjuna by pushing him into deeper practice. He says that until Arjuna has quieted down, until his mind is completely cooled out, until his purification exercises are all done—in other words, until he is residing in Brahman—he won’t even begin to recognize Krishna. You have to be in Brahman before you begin to recognize that something lies beyond it. Krishna is suggesting that beyond both that which is form and that which is without form, behind both purusha and prakriti, behind the Brahman and the shakti, there is still some other . . . what? Something. But what is it? It seems there is still the dharma, there is still law, there is still some kind of directionality to things. Whatever Brahman is, we know that it is the ultimate paradox, the simultaneous presence of all paradoxes. In Brahman, there is no space: everywhere is here. In Brahman, time has stopped: past, present, future, all are right now. So there is freedom from both space and time. Now we can begin to talk about true freedom, the real freedom that is possible on this journey. It’s the freedom from limited view, the freedom from limited sensation, the freedom from standing anywhere, the freedom from holding on to any models. Beings like Maharajji are operating from that perspective all the time. They are in the world, but they are not subordinate to the world. They have transcended the gunas, the forces of nature, the strands of rope that create the world. “I have passed through the market. I am not a purchaser.” If absolutely nothing entices us anymore, we are equanimous, imperturbable. We can let go of the separate self and just be with everything. There are those of us who have gone in and touched that place, but have come right back because we still have more karma to unfold. Our attachments bring us back—and yet we did touch the possibility, and that changed us. I suspect that many of you who are reading this book have done that. Then there are others. In India, there are beings who go into what’s called nirvakalp samadhi—samadhi without form—and just stay there. After some period of time (Maharajji said forty-three days, although I’ve also heard twenty-one) the being totally merges into that state of nirvakalp samadhi, and the body disintegrates. It just falls apart, because there’s nobody in there keeping it together anymore. It’s an interesting way to leave an incarnation. And then there are others still, who go into that state and reside in it, and yet their manifestation continues—only now it’s different. Now it is the manifestation of Brahman coming through a human form. It’s like nobody came back, and yet there is something there. For such a being, there are no more rules in the game, because the compassion has become all embracing. Any of our models of “You must do this because it’s good” or “You shouldn’t do that because it’s bad!” come out of our limited perspective. Their compassion, on the other hand, comes out of their total consciousness of the whole of it all. Trungpa Rinpoche talked about that—it was what he termed “crazy wisdom.” Crazy wisdom, he said, is “outrageous wisdom, devoid of self and of the ‘common sense’ of literal thinking. Crazy wisdom is wild—in fact, it is the first attempt to express the dynamics of the final spiritual stage of a Bodhisattva, to step out with nakedness of mind, unconditioned, beyond conceptualization.” Hakuin’s Zen poem—the beautiful Zen poem we used to recite at four every morning in the temple in Kyoto—says, “If we turn inward and prove our True Nature, the true self is no self, our own self is no self, we go beyond ego and past clever words. Then the gate to the oneness of cause and effect is thrown open. Not two and not three, straight ahead runs the way. . . . Now our thought is no thought, so our dancing and songs are the voice of the Dharma.” So our dancing and songs are the voice of the dharma . . . so our dancing and songs are the voice of Krishna . . . so our dancing and songs are a true harmonizing with the divine law that incorporates form and formlessness, life and death, creation and destruction, the law that incorporates all conceptual polarities and possibilities. Operating from that space of Brahman, we come to a new understanding of karma yoga, a wider understanding. Before, karma yoga meant doing something from within our karmic predicament that we hoped would bring us to the One. Our actions were our path, our practice. Now, residing in the One, we come into a relationship with the Tao, with the way of things, with the law, such that all our actions henceforth are simply a pure statement of the dharma. Nothing else. We have transcended the gunas; we are nirguna, beyond the attachment to the strands of nature that bind us. A being residing in the Brahman is qualitatively an entirely different entity from everybody else, because there is literally nobody there. There’s nobody home! That’s one of the awesome and exasperating qualities, when you’re around a being like that. Take my guru, for example: from November 1967, when I first met him, right up until this very moment, in all the years I have hung out with him, thought about him, studied him, reflected about him, analyzed him—I have never been able to find anybody there! I keep projecting onto him, because there was, of course, a flesh-and-blood body there. And it walked and it talked and it smiled and it laughed and it did all its stuff. But when I go toward that guru, when I look into those eyes or I reside in that heart, when I quiet down and meditate on what lies behind that form, it’s like I’m entering into nothing other than vast emptiness and vast fullness at the same time. I am entering into the state of Brahman, and that is the state where a being like Maharajji makes his home. Brahman encompasses a panoramic view of all form: It’s the physical plane, the astral plane, the causal plane—all the conceptual levels of form, all the way back to pure idea. All of it folds back in on itself, back into that which is unknowable, immeasurable, indefinable—and yet is . . . and yet is. We give that state a name; we call it Brahman - from Ram Dass, “Paths to God: Living with the Bhagavad Gita,” eBook pp. 105-109.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 23:38:37 +0000
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