I'm looking for the face I had before the world was made. WB Yeats
Although I’ve spent the past several years delving into
folk magic, Neopaganism, and the Western Mystery Tradition, my primary
spiritual orientation is Advaita Vedanta. Advaita Vedanta is a form of Hinduism
that I was introduced to nearly 40 years ago. It is a system that dates back to
about the 6th century CE and is primarily founded in the Upanishads.
The spiritual journey in Advaita Vedanta is a reclamation
of the atman, a philosophical term
that is translated from Sanskrit to English as “The Self.” Finding Self is
realizing who/what you really are. That Self is not your body or personality or
“baggage” or the drama of your life. It is also not what you want to become,
spiritually speaking. (See my blog entry on my Spiritual Ideal project for more
on that). The Self, in Vedantist philosophy, is the mechanism out of which all
these interdependently arising things express themselves like suds on the
surface of water or a movie against a movie screen or dream in the REM sleep of
a dreamer.
The question is: What is it to wake up from the idea of
yourself?
Becoming truly real, conscious, and capable
of free will begins by realizing the whimsical and fabricated nature of one’s
own being—the idea of self—and then detaching from the automaton (the robot) of
its personality, habits, and conditioning. Then the person who is the life
beneath the mask of selfhood opens her eyes and watches herself reveling
through the motions of daily life like a dreamer reveling in lucidity. The
dreamer is pristinely aware of what she and everyone and thing around her is and
has the ability to truly exercise free will within the field of consciousness
and experience. Spiritual types call this “enlightenment.”
This past summer, I became an
isolation-tank enthusiast. Yes, a few times a month, I enter a pitch black and virtually
soundless chamber and float on my back in buoyant saline for an hour or so.
In the tank, all there is to do is watch
the mind as it sinks into a theta state. Ontological thoughts emerge during
these sessions—thoughts about being and meaning. And I sometimes think, “What
is it to wake up from the idea of myself?” Who am I when I am not the
circumstantial preferences, habits, and conditioning the world made into me? In
the words of poet W. B. Yeats, what is “the face I had before the world was made”?
In working through how to express this in
my art work, I found, in a box of old photos, an elegantly brooding picture of
myself at age 3. Its background depicts Christmastide, and there I am standing
with a gift-box bow on my head, like a grumpy house cat on the head of which an
ornament has been unwantedly placed.
I excised, cleaned up, and colorized the
figure in the photo but then opted to use it in monochrome to better convey the
brooding composure. The child here is contemplating all those questions raised
in that Talking Heads song Once in a
Lifetime:
And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?...Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God!...What have I done?!
That image is juxtaposed with a stairway to heaven where
perhaps those answers reside ....
Favorite quotes on "Self-Realization":
“If you dissociate from the body and rest in consciousness, you will be
happy, serene, and free from bondage.”
--Ashtavakra Samhita 1:4
“He sees
the totality of objects appearing and disappearing in the space of
consciousness, like reflections in a mirror. Suddenly, all of his thought
constructs are destroyed through the recognition, after a thousand lives, of
his true, essential nature, which surpasses ordinary experience and is replete
in unprecedented bliss. He is struck with awe, mouth gaping. Upon attaining the
experience of spaciousness, his true essential nature comes forward. –Spandakarikas,
from section 1, verse 11 (from the advaitic Kashmir Shaivite tradition)
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