Quest Magazine

VOLUME 91, NUMBER 4

Contents

The Urgency for a New Perspective
By Radha Burnier

The Radiant Mind
By John Cianciosi

The Extended Mind
By Rupert Sheldrake

Theosophy, Biosophy and Bioethics
By Michael V. Fox

By What Knowledge is the Spirit Known?
By Ravi Ravindra

Viewpoint: The Zen of Water Skiing
By Betty Bland

Originally printed in the July - August 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation:Ravindra, Ravi. "By What Knowledge is the Spirit Known?." Quest  91.4 (JULY - AUGUST 2003):142-145, 149.

By Ravi Ravindra

Two kinds of knowledge are to be known . . . the higher as well as the lower . .
And the higher is that by which the Undecaying is apprehended

— Mundaka Upanishad

WITH ALL THE PROGRESS in scientific and medical fields, have human beings morally or spiritually advanced? Is it reasonable to assume that future Nobel Prize winners in science will be more spiritually advanced than the past ones because more scientific knowledge will be available to them? What sort of scientific facts or spiritual information will or can lead to this transformation in the nature of human beings? Is a quantitative extension of our infor­mation about the universe likely to lead us to a more spiritual life?

All traditions assert that the spirit is higher than and prior to the body-mind, which is sometimes called the "body," for simplicity. One of the ideas which is common to all the great religious traditions of the world is the assertion that in general human beings do not live the way they should and furthermore, the way they could. The Christian perspective claims that we live in sin but we could live in the grace of God, and the Hindu-Buddhist way of saying this is that we live in sleep but we could wake up. All the traditions suggest ways by which human beings could move towards a life of grace or wakefulness, a shift which is a qualitative transformation of being. Here, I will focus largely on the Indian spiritual traditions, more particularly on the theory and practice of Yoga, the way of transformation.

Yoga begins from a recognition of the human situa­tion. Human beings are bound by the laws of process, and they suffer as a consequence of this bondage. Yoga proceeds by a focus on knowledge of the self. Self-knowledge may be said to be both the essential method and the essential goal of Yoga. However, self-knowledge is a relative matter. It depends not only on the depth and clarity of insight, but also on what is seen as the "self " to be known. The Chandogya Upanishad in­structs spiritual seekers in identifying the self with pro­gressively more and more spiritualized self.

A change from the identification of the self as the body (including the heart and the mind) to the identi­fication of the self as inhabiting the body is the most crucial development in Yoga and is considered a matter of great progress. Yoga identifies the person less with the body than with the embodied. Ancient and modern Indian languages reflect this perspective in the expres­sions they use to describe a person's death: in contrast to the usual English expression of giving up the ghost, one gives up the body. It is not the body that has the spirit, but the spirit that has the body.

The identification of the person in oneself with something other than the body-mind and the attendant freedom from the body-mind is possible only through a proper functioning and restructuring of the body and the mind. The Sanskrit word sharira is useful in order to steer clear of the modem Western philosophic dilemma called the "mind-body" problem. Although sharira is usually translated as "body," it means the whole psycho­somatic complex of body, mind, and heart. Sharira has the same import as flesh in the Gospel of Saint John, for example in John 1.14, where it is said, "The Word became flesh." The important point, both in the Indian context and in John, is that the spiritual element, called Purusha, Annan, or Logos ("Word"), is above the whole of the psychosomatic complex of a human being, and is not to be identified with mind, which is a part of sharira or the "flesh."

Sharira is both the instrument of transformation as well as the mirror reflecting it. The way a person sits, walks, feels, and thinks reveals the connection with the deeper self, and a stronger connection with the deeper self, will be reflected in the way a person sits, walks, feels, and thinks. Sharira, which is individual­ized prakriti (Nature), is the medium necessary for the completion and manifestation of purusha (the inner spiritual being), which itself can be understood as in­dividualized Brahman (literally, "the Vastness"), whose body is the whole of the cosmos, subtle as well as gross.

Sharira is the substance through which each one of us relates to the spirit, according to our ability to respond to the inner urge and initiative. The development of this relationship is the spiritual art. To view the sharira or the world, as a hindrance rather than an opportunity is akin to regarding the rough stone as an obstruction to the finished statue.

The most authoritative text of Yoga is the Yoga Sutras, which consists of aphorisms of Yoga compiled by Pa­tailjali sometime between the second century BCE and the fourth century CE from material already familiar to the gurus (teachers, masters) of Indian spirituality. Patanjali teaches that clear seeing and knowing are functions of purusha (the inner person) and not of the mind.

The mind relies upon judgment, comparison, dis­cursive knowledge, association, imagination, dreaming, and memory through which it clings to the past and future dimensions of time. The mind is limited in scope and cannot know the objective truth about anything. The mind is not the true knower: it can calculate, make predictions in time, infer implications, quote authority, make hypotheses, or speculate about the nature of real­ity, but it cannot see objects directly, from the inside, as they really are in themselves.

In order to allow direct seeing to take place, the mind, which by its very nature attempts to mediate between the object and the subject, has to be quieted. When the mind is totally silent and totally alert, both the real subject (purusha) and the real object (prakriti) are simultaneously present to it. When the seer is there and what is to be seen is there, seeing takes place with­out distortion. Then there is no comparing or judging, no misunderstanding, no fantasizing about things dis­placed in space and time, no dozing off in heedlessness nor any clinging to past knowledge or experience; in short, there are no distortions introduced by the organs of perception, namely the mind, the feelings, and the senses. There is simply seeing in the present, the living moment in the eternal now. That is the state of perfect and free attention, kaivalya, which is the aloneness of seeing, and not of the seer separated from the seen, as it is often misunderstood by commentators on Yoga. In this state, the seer sees through the organs of perception rather than with them or as William Blake says, one sees "not with the mind but through the mind." Blake speaks about the transformation of perception that this re-ordering allows in "Auguries of Innocence":

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

It is of utmost importance from the point of view of Yoga to distinguish clearly between the mind (chitta) and the real Seer (purusha). Chitta pretends to know, but it can itself be known and seen, that is, it is an object, not a subject. However, it can be an instrument of knowledge. This misidentification of the seer and the seen, of the person with the organs of perception, is the fundamental error from which all other problems and sufferings arise (Yoga Sutras 2.3-17). It is from this fun­damental ignorance that asmita (I-am-this-ness, egoism) arises, creating a limitation by particularization. Purusha says, "I AM"; asmita says, "I am this" or "I am that." This is an expression of egoism and self-importance and leads to the strong desire to perpetuate the special­ization of oneself and to a separation from all else. The sort of "knowledge" that is based on this misidentifi­cation is always colored with pride and a tendency to control or to fear.

The means for freedom from the ignorance that is the cause of all sorrow is an unceasing vision of discern­ment; such vision alone can permit transcendental in­sight (prajna) to arise. Nothing can force the appearance of this insight; all one can do is to prepare the ground for it. The purpose of prakriti is to lead to such insight, as that of a seed is to produce fruit; what an aspirant needs to do in preparing the garden is to remove the weeds that choke the full development of the plant. The ground to be prepared is the entire psychosomatic organism, for it is through that organism that purusha sees and prajna arises, not through the mind alone, nor the emotions, nor the physical body by itself. A person with dulled senses has as little possibility of coming to prajna as the one with a stupid mind or hardened feel­ings. Agitation in any part of the entire organism caus­es fluctuations in attention and muddies the seeing. This is the reason that Yoga puts so much emphasis on the preparation of the body, as well as of feelings by right moral preparation and of the mind by immersing oneself in the views from the real world, for coming to true knowledge. It is by reversing the usual tendencies of the organism that its agitations can be quieted and the mind can know its right and proper place with respect to purusha: that of the known rather than the knower (Yoga Sutras 2.10, 4.18-20).

If the notion of the spiritual and the corresponding possibilities of enlightenment, freedom, or salvation are taken seriously, then what is spiritual is almost by defi­nition, as well as by universal consensus, higher than what is intellectual. The intellect is contained in being, as a part in the whole, and not the other way around. It is a universal insight and assertion of the mystics and other spiritual masters that spirit is above the mind. Of course, many other words have been used other than "Spirit" to indicate Higher Reality, such as God, Brahman, the One, Tao, the Buddha Mind, and the like. Furthermore, it has been universally said that in order to come to know this Higher Reality in truth, a trans­formation of the whole being of the seeker is needed to yoke and quiet the mind so that, without any distor­tions, it may reflect what is real.

Paraphrasing Saint Paul, it can be said that the things of the mind can be understood by the mind, but those of the spirit can be understood only by the spirit (1 Corinthians 2: 11-14). It is this spiritual part in a person that needs to be cultivated for the sake of spiri­tual knowledge. In some traditions, this spiritual part, which like a magnetic compass always tries to orient itself to the north pole of the spirit, is called "soul." This part alone, when properly cultivated, can comprehend and correspond to the suprapersonal and universal spir­it. Any other kind of knowledge can be about the spirit but cannot be called knowing the spirit.

Of course, to be against knowledge, scientific or oth­erwise, is hardly any guarantee of transcending the lim­itations of the mind. Ignorance is not to be commend­ed. For almost all the sages of India, the ultimate cause of all sorrow or bondage is ignorance. As the Buddha is quoted in the Dhammapada (243) to have said, "avilia paramam malam" (ignorance is the greatest impurity). To recognize that a certain kind of knowledge is lower, and that the Undecaying is apprehended by the higher knowledge of a radically different sort does not deny the necessary role of the lower knowledge. But does a quan­titative extension of such knowledge and information necessarily lead to wisdom or spiritual life?

In order to understand the sages and the scriptures spiritually, we need to undergo a change of being or a rebirth or a cleansing of our perceptions. How can progress in intellectual scientific knowledge lead to the sort of insight and transformation which takes one beyond the intellect? An intellectual and physical (that is, scientific) understanding neither requires any trans­formation of our being nor can it lead to such a trans­formation. Neither scientific knowledge about people who have spiritual knowledge nor theoretical knowl­edge about the spirit makes one a sage.

At the end I return to the importance of humility and wonder in the presence of the Great Mystery. In my long experience in academic life I have been struck by the difficulty of freedom from arrogance of knowledge, a major obstacle to spiritual life. I wonder if this dark­ness of intellectual conceit worse than ignorance is what a sage in Isha Upanishad (9) has in mind in saying, "Into blinding darkness enter those who worship ignorance and those who delight in knowledge enter into still greater darkness."

It seems to me that it is a matter of spiritual progress when one becomes free not only of the knowledge which is inevitably from the past, but also from the need to know which is so often permeated by a fear of the unknown and a desire to predict and control—an attempt to squeeze the Vastness into one's mental categories. In this freedom one can wonder and stand before the Mystery. In a way one then knows something, but it is not anything that can be expressed in a way that our ordinary mind can categorize and argue about, it is not anything that can be measured as progress in a quantitative sense. It is closer to an insight into the suchness of things, as in the following remark of Albert Einstein in his book Ideas and Opinions:

There is the cosmic religious feeling of rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, mani­festing itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.

Ravi Ravindra is Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. His most recent Quest Book is Science and the Sacred: Eternal Wisdom in a Changing World. Among his many other works is Heart without Measure: Work with Madame de Salzmann.

Originally printed in the July - August 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Sheldrake, Rupert. "The Extended Mind." Quest  91.4 (JULY - AUGUST 2003):130-135, 149.

By Rupert Sheldrake

MY IDEA OF THE EXISTENCE of the MIND beyond the physical brain is what I call the extended mind. I would like to suggest that the mind is much more extensive than the brain and stretches out through fields that I call morphic fields. Morphic fields, like the known fields of physics such as gravitational fields, are non-material regions of influence extending in space and continuing in time. They are localized within and around the systems they orga­nize. When any particular organized system ceases to exist , as when an atom splits, a snowflake melts, or animal dies, its organizing field disappears from that place. But in another sense, morphic fields do not disappear: they are potential organizing patterns of influence, and can appear again physically in other times and places, wherever and whenever the physical condi­tions are appropriate. When they do so, they contain within themselves a memory of their previous physical existences [The Presence of the Past, p. xviii]. Because the existence of these fields has intrigued me for a long time, I have developed experiments which do provide strong evidence for them as a scientific hypothesis.

We are all familiar with fields that extend from ma­terial objects; the most obvious example is a magnet. The magnet is a physical, material object you can hold your hand, but it has a region of influence stretching all around it—the magnetic field—that is invisible and in have effects over a distance.

Another, more modern example is the cellular phone. The material object you hold in your hand has a mate­rial composition which you can weigh and analyze, but its function depends on much more that its material constituents. It depends on invisible fields that stretch out far beyond the limits of the cell phone itself and whole function depends upon those extended fields. Likewise, the fields of our mind are rooted in the brain, but they extend out far beyond it in accordance with our attentions and intentions.

The idea that the mind is more extensive than the main is not a new idea, but is found in the ancient philosophies of Greece and India and in Buddhist tradi­tions. It is something Theosophists have been talking about for a long time as well. 

The conventional scientific view is that the mind is the brain or mental activity is only activity in the physi­cal brain—in other words, that it is all inside the head. This is what many of my scientific colleagues take for granted. (At least when they are at work.) It is also the view on which billions of dollars are spent every year in medical and brain research, and it is what is taught in schools and universities. It is the mainstream assumption of our culture. However, it is just an as­sumption. It is a theory that hasn't been properly tested because it has not been questioned. We can actually test this theory and refute this assumption by means of fair­ly simple experiments.

As soon as we accept the theory that the mind is more extensive than the brain, a whole range of unex­plained phenomena begin to make sense. These include the sense of being stared at, telepathy, and a whole range of even more mysterious phenomena like premo­nitions. All of these things are normal: normal in the sense that they are common, many have experienced them, they actually happen, and they are part of nature. Yet they are all considered taboo from the point of view of conventional institutionalized science because they do not fit in with the materialistic view of the mind being inside the head. Most scientists prefer not to dis­cuss these phenomena and consider their existence im­possible. In fact, some skeptics get extremely angry at the mere mention of things like telepathy, and there are organized groups of skeptics who serve as vigilantes, policing the frontiers of science and trying to suppress discussion and research on these topics. As I am one of their primary targets, it has caused me to reflect on why people get so angry about this. I think it is because these phenomena are anomalies that threaten the prevailing material worldview. Many people accept the material worldview and have made it something of a religion. Evangelical materialists are terrified that if any of these theories are accepted, science and reason will crumble into dust and that civilization will be overrun by what Freud called "the black mud of superstition." These things are so frightful to some that they feel these theories must be kept at bay at all cost.

Rather than dogmatically denying them outright, testing these phenomena open-mindedly would be in the true spirit of scientific inquiry. All science is based on critically examining evidence to see if there could be alternative explanations. This is how organized sci­ence works.

VISION

To get a sense of the extended mind, we can use the nature of vision as an example. Vision is absolutely funda­mental to the experience of humans and most animals. The usual view of vision is that light travels through the electromagnetic field after reflecting off an object and enters your eyes, inverted images appear on your retina, changes occur in the cone cells, electrical impulses go through the optic nerve, and then complex electrical and chemical patterns of activity occur in the brain. All this has been studied using neuro-physiological meth­ods. But then something very mysterious happens that science cannot explain: you become conscious of what you are seeing.

Consciousness itself is the biggest mystery of science. There is nothing about consciousness in physics, chem­istry, or biology textbooks. Yet it is the basis of all our experience in science itself. The fact that you have be­come conscious of your experience is still a mystery.

An even greater mystery is that the experience you have happening before you is meant to be happening in­side your brain, but you don't experience it as being in­side your brain. You experience the image you see before you as being in front of you! I propose that the image you have of an object is located right in front of you. It is not inside your brain. Vision involves a two-way process: inward movement of light and an outward pro­jection of images. So everything you see around you is where it seems to be. These images are projected out by the mind. They are in the mind because they are inter­preted by your mind, produced by the mind, but they are not inside the brain.

In other words, our minds reach out to touch what we are looking at. The images we project out coincide with what we are seeing. If they didn't, we would be bumping into things all the time. (This would obviously be a dis­advantage from the survival point of view.) The fact that everything goes along smoothly and we are not crashing into things is something we take for granted. This two-way vision is much more in accordance with our experience. It is what Hindus, Buddhists, sages, and Tibetan Masters believe and also what children, usually under the age of ten, believe.

According to the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's studies on children's intellectual develop­ment before the age of ten, the average child believes that vision involves the outward movement of influ­ences from the eyes. After the ages of ten or eleven, Piaget remarks, that the average child learns the "cor­rect view," which is that thoughts and images are invis­ible things located inside the head. 

Most of us have been brought up with this idea. It is part of the standard assumptions of our culture. Most people, when they assimilate this idea, are too young to challenge what is actually a philosophical theory that has become an integral part of our culture. The idea that all thoughts exist solely in the brain started as an ec­centric philosophical theory in the seventeenth century and has now become a predominant theory throughout the Western world. It has never been the dominant theory in other cultures. 

If our minds do reach out to touch what we are look­ing at, this has rather amazing implications. It means we can affect what we look at just by looking at it, and the way we look at it may affect it also. This also means our minds can reach out over enormous distances. For ex­ample, if we are looking at an enormous mountain quite a distance away, our minds reach out that distance. If we look at a star, many light years away, our minds literally reach out over astronomical distances into the universe. 

If I am not just playing with words, then our minds reaching out and touching things should have a mea­surable effect on what we look at. When I first thought of this, I thought that it must be pretty implausible be­cause otherwise it would have already been noticed and documented. Then I realized that people do notice it. Most of us have had the experience of turning around and finding that someone has been looking at us; we have the sense of being stared at. Most of us have also had the experience of looking at others and making them turn around. Ninety percent of the people I sur­veyed had experienced this phenomenon. Surveys com­pleted by Gerald Winer and his colleagues from the University of Ohio have given even higher figures of about 95%. There is a difference in the results between men and women, however. More women than men have experienced the sense of being looked at while more men than women have done the looking, making others turn around.

These are very common experiences. What does sci­ence have to tell us about them? Practically nothing. The total number of papers published on this phe­nomenon between 1890 and 1990 amounted to four. Oddly enough, even parapsychologists have ignored this phenomenon, while most scientists will try to dismiss the results, stating it is coincidence or a matter of chance. But what is the evidence that this is so? In order to examine what the evidence is, we need to do statistical experiments. I have developed an extremely simple experimental method for testing this phenom­enon. It is so simple that thousands of school children have done ft. I conduct these experiments in schools because children tend to be more sensitive than adults, and I found school teachers are interested in them because most school teachers use the power of the gaze as their stock in trade for controlling unruly children!

The experiment includes two people and a blindfold worn by one of them. The person with the blindfold—the subject—sits in front of the other person. A signal, such as a bell, is used to let each person know the ex­periment is beginning. The subject must guess whether they are being looked at or not. The subject says "look­ing" or "not looking" and he or she is right or wrong. If the subject is guessing, they would be right 50% of the time, but the actual score of this experiment is over 50%. When the experiment is done over and over again, the percentage increases significantly. In the "looking" trials the results are 60% correct and 40% wrong. In the "not looking" trials, the results are about 50-50.

Interestingly, when the data is plotted subject-wise, there is a significant change in the results between "looking" and "not looking." When someone is looking at them, there are more people who are right than wrong. This makes perfect sense. In the "looking" trials, people have a sense of being looked at, which is when you would expect the experiment to work. In the "not looking" trial people are being asked to do something that is totally unnatural. We don't have a sense of not being stared at and under those conditions people are just guessing. (The only people who might be conscious of not being stared at are people who are exceptionally vain. But for most people, not being stared at is not something nature has equipped us to sense.) We also know that it is not a matter of subtle clues which allows these results to happen. We have found that the same effect takes place when using a one-way mirror or by having someone stare through a window. Skeptics have repeated these experiments and to their surprise got the same results. [These results can be found in Dr. Sheldrake's book, The Sense of Being Stared At, or on his website at www.sheldrake.org.] 

Similar experiments have been done in a number of universities and institutes using closed circuit television (CCT). For example, Marilyn Schlitz from the Institute of Noetic Sciences has shown that people can sense when they are being looked at even when it is through CCT. In her experiments people are not asked to guess whether they are being looked at or not, but instead electrodes are placed on their fingers and their skin re­sistance is measured. This is much like a lie detector test. When a person is emotionally aroused, a certain amount of adrenaline is secreted into the bloodstream making a person sweat and changing the skin resistance. Schlitz had subjects sit in a room with a video camera on them while the monitor was in another room, some­times a great distance away. When the subject's images on the television screen were looked at, their skin resis­tance changed.

The reality of the CCT experiment led me to look into the experience of those who watch people for a living. I interviewed dozens of security guards, private detectives, the drug squad at Heathrow Airport, and store detectives at Harrods and other shops in London, all of whom look at people through CCT monitors. Most people who work in those fields are convinced that people can tell when they are being looked at even through CCT.

 Many people have found that animals can sense when they are being stared at. Pet owners have found that they can wake their dog or cats by staring at them and that they can tell when their pet is watching them. This shows that the feeling of being watched crosses species boundaries. In fact, when you reflect on this you will see it could have enormous implications in the animal kingdom.

I would like to suggest that all animal vision involves the art of projection of images and the contact of what is being looked at. If prey can tell when predators are looking at them, they can get out of the way. This would be of value to survival behavior of natural selection. This basic ability could have an evolutionary history. What looks like a quirky phenomenon on the margins of human psychology may be an everyday occurrence in the animal kingdom.

Many people have found that animals can sense when they are being stared at. Pet owners have found that they can wake their dog or cats by staring at them and that they can tell when their pet is watching them. This shows that the feeling of being watched crosses species boundaries. In fact, when you reflect on this you will see it could have enormous implications in the animal kingdom.

I would like to suggest that all animal vision involves the art of projection of images and the contact of what is being looked at. If prey can tell when predators are looking at them, they can get out of the way. This would be of value to survival behavior of natural selection. This basic ability could have an evolutionary history. What looks like a quirky phenomenon on the margins of human psychology may be an everyday occurrence in the animal kingdom. 

In this light, it is interesting to reflect on the popular folklore behind the power of the gaze. In India, for exam­ple, it is believed that if you are looked at by a holy per­son, the look is a great blessing; however, there is a nega­tive effect if one looks at another in anger or envy. People believe in the "evil eye" in Southern Europe, the Arab world, Turkey, Greece, India, and many other parts of the world. Many people try to protect themselves against such looks with amulets or special prayers. 

These beliefs also were common in England until the seventeenth century, when skepticism suppressed such thoughts, but in Greece, as mentioned before, this belief is still very common. A research assistant of mine in Athens, appropriately named Socrates, surveyed people in Greece about the evil eye and found that this belief is almost uni­versal. Most modem Greeks who had an education, espe­cially in science or engineering, felt that they shouldn't believe such a thing is true and have a veneer of rational thought, but not very far beneath it is the traditional be­lief in the evil eye. I have no experimental evidence to show that envy does in fact bring about harm, but I think that a belief in the power of the gaze shows that people im­plicitly believe in the mind reaching out to affect what is looked at. When one thinks of this in the context of the predator-prey relationship, then the evil eye makes a lot of sense. It is frightening to be looked at by someone who is envious because it involves a kind of predatory attitude. 

CONCLUSION

There is a huge amount that we don't understand about the mind, but I do think we can tackle each phenomenon scientifically with relative ease. Some people ask me why I waste my time trying to prove things that everyone knows exist. In a sense this is true. All of us have experi­enced these things and know they exist. On the other hand, we have an official system of knowledge in institu­tional science that has been denying these things for a very long time because of the materialistic paradigm. I think as we move beyond the materialistic belief to the belief of the extended mind, we will simply expand the scope of science. This won't involve abandoning science and reason, but it will be good news for science and reason because people will no longer have to go on irrationally denying phenomena that do not fit into their worldview. I think this will be quite liberating even for materialists. None of this comes as a surprise to Theosophists who have studied these concepts for more than one hundred years, but it will make a big difference when these ideas are accepted by institutionalized science for both our un­derstanding of the mind and the implications this under­standing will have in fields like alternative medicine (the impact of mental intentionality on healing), psychology (the impact we have on other people and they on us), and our relationship to the animal kingdom.

Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society and was a scholar of Clare College, Cambridge, and a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University. He is author of several books including The Sense of Being Stared At, The Presence of the Past, and Seven Experiments That Could Change the World. This article is transcribed from the Second Kern Lecture, delivered at the Bederman Auditorium, Chicago, Illinois, on March 13, 2003.

Originally printed in the July - August 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "The Zen of Water Sking." Quest  91.4 (JULY - AUGUST 2003):122-123.

By Betty Bland

WATER SKIING is a sport that requires a good sense of balance that does not rely on any external prop. The constant motion of the water gives no reliable foundation, and although the rope is pulling the skier, the skier cannot pull on the rope. Novice skiers can have plenty of frustration until they learn to rely on the central balance point. As any good skier knows, one must maintain an interior balance somewhere just below the solar plexus, somewhat like the balance of a gyroscope. From this balance point, the shock of the waves can be absorbed by flexing one's knees and the pull of the rope can be equalized.

One's relationship to life in many ways resembles the skier's relationship to rope and water. In life, we are buffeted by troubled waters--emotional and circumstan­tial. We are catapulted forward by time and pushed back by our own limitations. Dealing with these difficulties gracefully would seem an impossible task, were it not for the knowledge that there is a reliable center that is un­affected by the turbulence. Somewhere deep inside each one of us is the divine spark, the inner self, which par­takes of the divine universals: power of presence, reliable awareness, and eternal bliss (Sat, Chit, and Ananda). We may not consciously recognize these attributes of our center of being, but life's ups and downs can teach us that this interior self is ultimately the only true point of refer­ence. As we seek to expand our contact with that center, its realities become clearer. 

In her foreword to The Doctrine of the Heart, Annie Besant speaks of the need to balance opposites in a spir­itually attuned life. On the one hand, we as aspirants are told to be without desire, without passion, unmoved by the vicissitudes of life. Yet on the other hand, we are constantly exhorted to feel the anguish of every suffering creature as if it were our own. One should be uninvolved, and at the same time deeply involved. In other words, it is necessary to operate from that balance point which can only be found in the eternal unitive Self.

A similar dilemma appears in the little spiritual guide­book written by Krishnamurti as a young boy, At the Feet of the Master. In it four qualifications are given for the spiritual life: discrimination, desirelessness, right conduct, and love. In the discussion of the second—desirelessness ­the aspirant is told to have no care for comforts, powers, cleverness, or even approbations and to stay out of other people's business. Yet, the discussion culminates with an exhortation to come to the rescue of the weak and down­trodden. The book ends with the fourth qualification—love. By the second qualification, the aspirant is encour­aged to care less; by the fourth, to care more. Here again we see the importance of finding that calm balance point called equanimity.

In Buddhism, the "Four Immeasurables" for the spiritu­al life are the wish for all beings to be happy, the wish for the suffering of all beings to cease, delight in the good fortune of others, and equanimity. Once more we are ex­horted to be immersed in the world while at the same time remaining balanced and away from the fray of the mad­ding crowd. 

The only way we can achieve such balance is to strength­en our awareness of the center point of peace within our­selves through meditation and self-study, identifying with the One Reality—the ground of being. If we truly touch that center, then we can maintain our equilibrium even in the face of death, pain, and loss. We can trust that physi­cal life, although it is maya or illusory existence, yet has a reality and purpose that is far deeper and more profound than appears on the surface. When we finally learn this lesson, we will be able to ride life's waves without falling into the sea; we will be able to endure the pulls and tugs while yet remaining centered in peace. We will know how to live.

Before the eyes can see,
   They must be incapable of tears
Before the ear can hear,
   It must have lost its sensitiveness.
Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters,
   It  must have lost the power to wound.
Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters,
   Its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.

—Light on the Path