Art and meditation  - The ‘last station’ and the train to oblivion: part 3 

Dear friends

In studying the lives of the artist Paul Cezanne and Sri Ramana Maharshi, we have seen how the lives of an artist and a man of wisdom have some great linkages. We saw how there was such an overlap in their journeys and we also saw how they were different too. We saw what directions their journeys took to the last station and beyond. Let’s now understand what exactly that journey is …

Sri Ramana Maharshi was called Maharshi or “great seer”. It was not just a ceremonious title; it aptly described his being, his stature. He attracted a lot of people from all around the world. People just got drawn to a direction and would wind their way to him. 

Even animals came to him regularly. Some came to him for solace, some for protection and some in disciple-hood. Yes, it might sound strange but it is true, he had animal disciples.

Where he lived in the then remote hill of Tiruvannamalai, once a war broke out between two tribes of monkeys and these fights between animals can be very brutal. Sometimes there is a genocide much like how it is between two tribes of human beings. So the elders of the two tribes came to him to resolve their dispute, as many had grown up with him and they considered him as one of their own. They trusted his sense of judgment  and he did bring about a truce between the tribes.

He spoke the language of silence and this is not a philosophical concept. This method of communication is called ‘para’, beyond the sensory realm that is how he talked to the monkeys. One of his disciples was a cow named Lakshmi .. 

In one of the monkey tribes, a lame monkey was familiar to all at Sri Ramana Maharshi’s ashram. He was called ‘the lame one’. As a baby and young adult he used to be constantly the victim of severe ill-treatment from the members of his tribe. He would seek out Sri Ramana Maharshi’s help. He would find solace in his company. Sri Ramana Maharshi once said of ‘the lame one’ that he went to the forest and did penance in solitude for a long period and once he was back those who bullied him could not stand in front of him. He evoked awe in all through his sheer presence and went on to become the leader of his group superseding all the alpha males.

What is this mystery of penance, the ancients called it ‘tapas’. Tapas is the removal of toxins, impurities, the excesses from the body and mind.

Today we will try and get a glimpse of what Sri Ramana Maharshi taught. How did he approach some of our deepest troubles and concerns. Because we are talking of truth without dogma, without the blindness that comes with belief.

Truth is also the highest goal of art. Cezanne said he was pursuing truth no less.  To him painting was a means and truth, the end. The enlightened quest of every human being. It’s a journey to the last station and beyond and if there is a process involved in it, it is called understanding.

Understanding ‘understanding’ ..

But what is the meaning of the word ‘understanding’? Is it that to understand something, it requires an aptitude and a specialisation in a subject? Or is a qualification of some sort an advantage? Perhaps, a level of mental skill or sharpness? We so often accept the authority of an expert, thinking he should know better.

While it is absolutely correct to accept a better qualified person’s understanding of a technical subject, is it valid to accept an expert’s opinion? In matters concerned with our very being, our lasting happiness, can there really be expertise in this? Can there be someone who can quench your thirst by himself drinking water?

Sri Ramana Maharishi used to often answer deep philosophical questions after consideration, with the words “keep quiet”. Not as an admonition, but as a method because the word ‘keep quiet’, it is colloquial compared to ‘be still’, but ‘keep quiet’ was given as the method to be practiced to come to clarity.

Michelangelo is said to have said about his method of arriving at a sculpture. That the form was there in the block of marble, he could see it, and his art was to see the sculpture in the block of stone, in all its clarity and detail. That ‘seeing’ was the art, the understanding .. If we look at the sculpture ‘pieta’, one of the most amazing works of art on stone, it makes you contemplate Michelangelo looking at a huge block of marble.

So Michelangelo said, all he did was to see it, completely, in all its detail. That was the work of the master sculptor because he was not just sculpting away and making a rectangle; all the skill with the hands would have amounted for nothing if he could not have ‘seen’ the form absolutely clearly. There were many skilled artisans around; why was it that it was only Michelangelo who created those masterpieces. Why is it that there is only one Michelangelo, one Rodin?

It looks like if there is any process at all in ‘understanding’,  if there is any action at all involved in coming to clarity, it is just understanding. To understand, in the end is to just ‘get it’. It is not like the process of building a house. It is more like how an idea occurs , how we have an insight, a breakthrough, a big idea. It is not something that you can put together skilfully, or create a formula for. It is a spark of wisdom.

For Michelangelo, all that needed to be done once the ‘seeing’ was complete, was the chipping away at all the extra marble that was in the block of stone, that was not the sculpture. He just removed the excess, the non essentials. He didn’t create anything, he just removed all the material that did not belong to Pieta. The same happens to us when we shed twenty kilos. An obese person does not need to do anything to look good other than shed the excess.

In this way, let’s understand the word ‘understand’ because as we will see that this process of getting rid of the excess, of all that is not essential, is a key to the method of Sri Ramana Maharshi.

‘Understand’, if we break it down into the components ‘under’ and ‘stand’, one of the roots of ’under’ is the Greek word ‘entera’ which means the intestines, but let us go deeper into the word ‘entera’ .. 

The Latin ‘intera’ with an ‘I’ can be broken down into ‘in’ and ‘terra’. ‘In’ is a prefix used to signify ‘not’, ’ the opposite of’. When we want to signify ‘not that’, ‘not something’, we add ‘in’ like in the word ‘invisible’ - that which is not visible. ‘Terra’, signifies the earth and in this case ‘what is out there’. ‘Intera’ therefore means ‘not what is out there’ but if we examine further into ‘tar’, ‘tar’ implies that which sticks as in something that is inherent, which is part of you, so ‘intera’ implies that which is in here that is stuck with you, that is part of you, that is you.  

The other root of ‘under’ is traced through the Sanskrit word ‘antar’. It refers to ‘the in between’, the gap, the pause .. It is also used to say “that which is between any two”. It signifies the gap between the past and the present, between the outside and the inside, between two events, between two units of time. In this case, it signifies between two thoughts.

The ‘sta’ of stand is indicative of firmness across different languages and therefore ‘stan’ means a ‘place’ as in ‘Uzbekistan -the place of the Uzbeks’. ‘Nu’ means ‘now’ as well and ‘new’, but what ‘new’ implies here is similar to how we use the word ‘nava’ in Sanskrit, as in ‘fresh, which refers to what is ever fresh… the Now. 

So ‘understand’, as we can see has all these connotations, of firmness, of insight, of the now. It is neither this nor that, it is something that is firm and it is essentially a part of you, eternally part of you.

It is neither this nor that. It is essential, it is now, it is eternal, it is you…..an ta ra sta nu .. an ta an ta ra an ta ra sta nu ra an sta ra nu an .. 

If we just keep chanting these sounds we can get the full meaning of the word because in the end these are root sounds. Root sounds are also called ‘beej’ or seed sounds.  Root sounds of the ancient mother languages like Latin, Sanskrit, Tamil and Chinese evolved with the languages.

Alphabets are called ‘akshara’ in Sanskrit which means basic indestructible unit. So we cannot further analyse them. They are the starting points, so these sounds which are often the sounds of the alphabets themselves. They are the fundamentals and between the sound and the form of the alphabets, the sound came first, the form of the alphabets evolved around the sound. All Sanskrit alphabets are seed sounds when we contemplate their vibrations. In Tantra, we try to get to the point where we can ‘see’ the alphabets with the eye closed.

And where we are used to reading and writing in modern life, many of the ancients did not depend on writing at all, they memorized, because the memorisation itself creates its vibrations. It is a deep understanding .. that is why it is said “in the beginning there was a word”; ‘word’ here means the sound and that sound is the ultimate source. 

So these seed sounds which are pure vibrations have certain cadences, certain effects and based on these effects they acquire meaning; and from these sounds the languages evolved. So when we trace a word to its root, we try to go back to the particular root word and from there to the seed sound.

And yet, the understanding is not in this processing of the root words. The understanding is as we now know more of an experience, an insight, a vision, a spark of wisdom when the non essentials drop away.

So the sounds, they create a resonance, and the resonance and the silence that follows it is a direct method of imbibing the power of the word. This is the technique of chanting of the ancients.  And there are those who practice this art, where any word can be understood in this way, by tuning in to the seed sounds that it is composed of.

Understanding implies a direct insight into the essential, eternal, me. It implies the gap. It  implies neither this nor that, it implies freshness, it implies ‘now’, not a memory, not a concept, not an opinion, not an expectation, not a habit. It is clearly not about anything that we can cook up. It is not achieved by glueing pieces of stone. Michelangelo did not say that his masterpieces were conceived  in his mind, he did not say that he had a brilliant idea and he constructed it; no. He said he chipped away at the non essentials. Can you for a moment hear the sound chipping away an ta ra sta nu an ta an ta an ta sta sta nu nu ra ra an ra an ra an nu an sta sta ra nu ra nu ra ra an an an sta .. 

Its a complete immersion. Understanding is not just mental gymnastics, its a complete experience and so we can clearly see that ‘understanding’ is not an acquisition. It is not something that we can ‘go get’. It is not ‘out there’. We cannot seek it outside, nor is it a figment of the mind, a construct of the mind. It is that which is between, it is in neither the past moment nor the next moment, it is in between. It is neither this nor that, it is in between. It is not something that we can grasp at and capture. It can never be an achievement, because it is already here. It is already stuck within, it is the ‘entera’ .. ‘intera’, ‘antara’ and it is firm, permanent, eternal. 

And yet normally, where do we look for the permanent and the eternal, everywhere but in the entera. In all the elements of the entire discourse of our lives, we look for permanence and that permanence that we seek has the quality of happiness. We essentially look for happiness in all our external endeavors. It may not seem like that when we drive to work every day but if looked closely, we do everything for happiness. We want the best food, the best sleep, the best mobile phones, even the one who risks his life climbing Mt Everest seeks that high. The soldier is driven by his zeal for which he is ready to risk his life throughout his life. Even the fraudster believes that once he gets his million dollars, he can retire to that island and live happily ever after. 

But we all know that nothing lasts forever.  It is an unbreakable law. No happiness seems to last. No high seems to last. Though when we have a good run at the stock market or three years of triple digit growth of the company, we wish, we believe, we hope against hope that the happiness we experience should last.

And on the positive side, no horror and no painful situation too lasts forever. Change seems to be the only constant.

Change is a cycle

But if we observe closely, change is not random. Things seem to go around in cycles. A bad phase follows a good one and a good phase follows a bad one. 

And if we have observed long enough, we begin to see a pattern of what we consider a good experience, a good trip, a positive phase.  It leads to or feeds into the bad experience, the bad trip, a negative phase and vice versa, the good and the bad, the positive and the negative. The high and the low seem to feed off each other, so we can say that in the positive exists the seed of the negative and in the negative exists the seed of the positive. 

And here is where once one notices this pattern, an opportunity exists.

Viveka - the dawn of understanding 

Whichever part of the world we may come from, or from whichever segment or class of society, and whatever our belief system, the texture of our experiences seem to be pretty much the same. The details may be different owing to culture and circumstance but our experience of life, if analyzed,  is in essence the same. 

We all go through the ups and downs of pain followed by pleasure and pleasure followed by pain. So the turning point comes to everyone when one notices this pattern, when it strikes you spontaneously that, “wait a minute, whatever the story of my life, the pattern is the same. It’s only in fairy tales that there is a “and they lived happily ever after”. What we seek in all our endeavors, be it career, romance or in the movies, the pattern that seems to pervade everything is that in pleasure is the seed of pain and in pain there is the seed of pleasure.  

If this becomes clear as daylight, an opportunity presents itself and that opportunity is called ‘viveka’. Discrimination or discernment which is the same as the real meaning of the word ‘understanding’. 

It is said in the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, “parinaama taapa samskaara dukhair gunavritti virodhacha dukhameva sarvam vivekinah”. It means that for the one who has ‘viveka’ or discrimination, all experience is in essence painful because change, acute suffering , impressions in the mind and the play of the ‘gunas’ or the components of all creation often contradict each other. All of them lead to suffering”.

The Yoga Sutra can be seen as no less than any equation of science. They are a string of very precise statements of the laws. You could call the Yoga sutra as a manual on “the way of consciousness”. It is about how consciousness plays out, it is also a manual that defines what can be the highest goal of a human being and how to get there. They come not as speculations but as confirmations of many many ancients who have all experimented, experienced and understood these statements.

Patanjali put the findings of the research of the ancients on the science of personal development in one manual called the Yoga Sutra because Patanjali belonged to the lineage of ancients who were all over the world spanned many eons, civilisations and cultures. The Yoga Sutra is a secular manual on the way to truth. 

So this sutra says that for the one who has developed discrimination or ‘viveka’, all is painful. Meaning both pleasure and pain are pain, because through observation one can see that pleasure has to lead to pain and the seed of the next pleasure is in the pain we experience now, the seed of the next pain is in the pleasure we experience now.

Once we are attentive to our experience of this cycle, the key word being attentive, the key is the attention we pay to our experience as it unfolds and this is what is meant by “one’s own experience”. If we begin to pay attention to all that is happening in us, we begin to see this pattern that we are all caught in this cycle of pleasure and pain and therefore, pleasure too is pain. 

When you know this first hand, as your personal experience when we are able to in this way assess the common thread in all our experience. When we are able to extract its essence, then this ability is called viveka or discernment and when this happens, we have this natural tendency where we look for a way out of the cycle. We want a way out and as Sri Ramana Maharshi liked to say, we may not be looking for it in the right places, we are not looking at what is essentially an understanding, something that is already stuck to our insides..

The most spectacular and touching example of looking for the right thing in the wrong place were the hippies. The hippies went some distance, the original hippies were influenced by the spiritual waves emanating from India, from Iran and from the bohemian movement of the artists of nineteenth century Europe. Around the time of the impressionists, it was only Cezanne who could have been an example but his life looked too disturbing from the outside, as we have seen, for anyone to follow. 

The hippies would rather follow the other bohemians who believed in a freewheeling life of excess. Cezanne was too intense for them, and Cezanne was himself a journeyman, figuring out what was going on with his life and so we look at Sri Ramana Maharshi. How he approached it, what did he teach, because his was a journey well completed and he remained to tell the story.

At the core, the hippies wanted peace and they wanted it ‘now’, and they were willing to give up everything for it,  family, social security, education… they lived for the day, by the hour, banishing all anxieties. 

In the sixties and early seventies, a whole generation of teenagers and young adults of America tried to break free of pain and they were open and their credo was love. They never resorted to violence, they were bold and experimental, willing to try everything. From commune living, to free sex, to drugs, because they had reached the point of realising that the whole experience was painful; but they didn’t know what to do about it.

More in the next episode...
Lots of love
Bharat Thakur