Hare Krishna Swami Loses Soul (DP)

Dissociated Press
January 17, 2009
Helsinki, Finland

In an unprecedented "Stay High Forever" temple music festival, Anatma Swami, a fired-up Hare Krishna preacher, lost grip of his wildly whirling monk partner and flew headlong into a larger-than-life copper

replica of the movement founder's lotus feet by an open window.

As the Swami failed to respond to conventional first aid, temple authorities alerted for resident witch doctor Shittiwawa Das, an Indian tantric adept and leading disciple of retired guru Bob Haripada, for help. At the conclusion of a fair fifteen minutes of exotic rattling, popping, muttering, whisking and bouncing, Das concluded the patient's soul had departed in the crash and required urgent re-insertion.

All resident devotees have patrolled downtown Helsinki since yesterday afternoon, the time of the incident, passing out pamphlets urging for the lost soul's founder to return the precious commodity to its rightful owner – in return for the Swami's abundant and perpetual blessings. Sources tell former guru Bob Haripada found his soul in the late 90's with the help of a female therapist.

The soul in question is described as bearing a strong resemblance to 1:10,000th fragment of a male Caucasian hair tip, following the verdict of an ancient Hindu philosophical text. One ten-thousandth part of an average Caucasian tip of hair measures at an average of 0,0075 µm. Temple authorities were not available for comment on distinguishing the Swami's soul from any number of other souls probably lost downtown Helsinki. (DP)

Metric Soul and Divided Minds & Divinities

"A one-hundredth part of a hair's tip, and again split into hundred,
this fragment is the living self or soul, also conceived of as endless."
(Svetasvatara Upanisad, 5.9)

The following text is drawn and expanded from my reply to a friend's query on the Upanisadic descriptions of the soul being the size of a ten-thousandth of the tip of the hair, and at the same time pervade the body; in general, the diverse depictions of the soul to be of a particular measure can come across as confusing. The second half of the post discusses the greater "divided spirit" issue of God and soul.

Oxymoron of Metric Soul

The soul, if we choose to believe in one that is, being an immaterial spirit-substance, cannot have a scale of comparison with matter. It is no more the size of a proton than it is the size of a hamburger or a Polish truck-driver. It is neither proportionate nor disproportionate to the object it appears to animate, for it has no proportion in common with inanimate matter.

Of course one might compare the soul to a lamp and the pervading of the body to its rays in a room, and that's a rather appropriate analogy as long as we forget about our attempts to pin it out on the metric scale. Both the lamp and the rays are finite objects, as are the individual jiva-soul and his field of awareness; hence the metaphor works in this application.

Technically speaking, the soul pervades and animates the body through the conscious mental functions (citta) filtered through the medium of ahankara conjointly with Antaryamin, the Inner Regulator or the so-called "super-soul" (paramatman). The antaryamin is variously identified as Ishvara (Supreme God) or Atman (Supreme Self) in differing schools of thought.

Atisayokti - Literary Exaggeration

Everything in the scriptures is a mixture of literal and metaphorical. There is svabhavokti or statement (ukti) reflecting or object's own (sva) nature (bhava), and there is atisayokti or excessive (atisaya) statement. All the four standard atisayoktis in the alankara-shastra (e.g. Alankara-kaustubha: 8.23), or the classical Indian corpus of books on  literary composition and criticism, feature departures from the literal or face-value meaning.

The third excessive metaphorical statement, where the impossible is being stated, is the one we are primarily after at the moment, for the soul has no material scale. Therefore, the statement of comparison is an impossibility. The two first atisayoktis are comparisons to other objects (and I suppose taking this as a hyperbolic diminutive would be every bit as valid), the other overt and the other covert, and the fourth features effect as simultaneous with or preceding the cause.

If we were to indeed indeed pursue this literally, as fundamentalists frequently do, we would have to first ask whether this proverbial hair is Afro-American, French or Vedic Indian — perhaps the sage in question split his own hair tip into 10,000 pieces and compared it to his soul, discovering it was an exact match under his microscope? Did he split it with a Vedic hair-splitter? Perhaps everyone's soul is 10,000 tip of their own hair? This again is problematic for men with thinning hair or baldness; their souls must be approaching limbo...

God and Souls - Divided Minds

A related field of paradox is in the supposed division that exists between the Jiva-Atman and the all-pervasive Brahman or ultimate God. From where I look at things, Advaita-vedanta is quite right in insisting that the atman (which is equated in the realization-stage with the brahman although brahman and brahman alone was the atman was all along) cannot be factually divided into individual soul-units, and that the individuality in question is only a temporary illusion rooted in Avidya or primal ignorance. This is naturally solved with the acquisition of Jnana or knowledge proper.

Let us assume the presence of an individual "soul fragment", a separate conscious unit. Fragments by definition cannot have the same quality as an unbreakable whole, for they differ in the quality of being fragmentable. Again, if the great whole can be divided into fragments, a second is thereby posited next to the non-dual, leading to a number of questions on the unique nature of the supposed one and the greatest non-dual spirit proclaimed across the Upanishads.

The Theory of Simultaneous Difference-Nondifference

Gaudiya Vaishnavism proposes an inconceivable symbiotic difference-cum-non-difference solution to the issue under the heading of acintya-bheda-abheda. Aristoteles would insist things either are or are not, for they cannot be both. A follower of Jiva Goswami's would then employ the acintya-shakti defence: You need to believe that God has the power to not make sense to make headway with the dilemma.

All too often, the inconceivability card is a handy answer to each and every equation that doesn't exactly add up because a transcendent object is beyond logical derivation and accessible perception. This leaves me wondering whether this God does not become irrelevant altogether, stretching entirely out of our objective human grasp and contact as he does.

Of course we also have the standard explanation with the shakti-vada and the nonduality between the energy (shakti) and the energetic (shaktiman), the former of which would include all of us and the inanimate world. Not the least of the problems is the fact that shakti-vada has nothing to do with Vedanta and everything to do with the tantric tradition.

Setting aside doctrinal purism and strict Vedanta interpretation for a moment, the tradition of Kashmiri Saivism which is the root of the shakti theory also features an extensive existential grid, in many ways unique, and in many others parallel to the Vedic Sankhya and its model of causal derivation.

All of that notwithstanding, the problem of evidently divided consciousness between us and God remains. I for one do not possess all the knowledge of God, indicating we are clearly separate units of consciousness. There is little practicality to the proposal of the every-day experience of me being one with a personal and actively omniscient God.

Like Sun and Sunshine?

Omniscience indicates a flawless and all-pervading entity or state of being. This one, all-knowing and all-encompassing God is all that is. Shakti cannot be classified as a second separate unit, even as dependent and subordinate, for this would be introducing dualism, the existence of a second beside God; assuming the non-duality of God and creation, one would expect us souls to share of the same pristine strata of undivided and omniscient existence.

The simile of the sun and the sunshine should be understood for what it is: a simile. A simile does not constitute proof in and of itself, it is a manner of illustrating a more abstract principle. The problems we run into applying this to the case at hand are manifold.

The most obvious of all is the fact sun and sunshine do not feature a known conscious property, whether unified or divided; both are mechanical, passive factors incapable of decision-making, unlike soul and god. Independent decision-making and limited or unlimited fields of awareness, in turn, are the very factors begging the question to begin with.

If a simile is employed in illustrating simultaneously one and different consciousness(es), and especially in the capacity of proof, it should be a comparison of strict equals.

A Monistic Angle

There is a very vivid and distinct duality here, indicating we need to either admit to the non-reality of duality and divided consciousness, labeling them as a mere illusion (and moreover an illusion occuring in Brahman with no existence to its occurence), or do away with an undivided and omniscient, yet eeriely antropomorphic God.

Advaita-siddhanta considers Isvara (personal god) to be the most you can see of the nondual absolute through the veil of maya; as ajnana or individual ignorance is dispelled, the ignorance concerning duality is dispelled, and the one atman alone remains aglow. The doctrine of atman then becomes a de-facto doctrine of anatman, for there was no everlasting individual soul to begin with.

Neither duality nor nonduality are entirely satisfactory for a philosophical answer. I don't have an exact answer for the way all stuff works, though I do have some cool ideas I need to explore a bit further. The citta-matram doctrine of the Yogacara-school of Buddhism, the theory of an unified mind-field and repository consciousness or alaya-vijnana, comes across as rather fascinating to me, and also correlates with some of my experiences.

Summa Summarum

My preferred approach to the question, independent of any scriptures, is to conceive of a single mental field in which both the Ishvara and the jivas are fluctuation in greater or smaller degrees. The only factual omniscient potential is in the universal mind-field, an uninvolved, egoless all-containing entirety, where no catalyst (ahankara) for individuality exists; hence seeing without a seer is actualized. The concept appears to make seamless sense to me, independent of conformance to any ancient or contemporary theories.

In the end, fiddling with lofty philosophical formulations amounts to little more than an entertaining mind-game fulfilling our intellectual urges. Otherwise, assumptions of mastery of a theory may help one to comfort himself and bring order into the surrounding chaos, or to command and conquer existence through comprehension.

Nirvana and God remain lurking in the fabric of the harmony, peace, clarity and joy of an independent nature we discover within ourselves through personal experience, introspection and natural immersion. Even if we all have our respective philosophies and mythologies with diverging particulars, it really doesn't matter a damn thing as long as you arrive at the conclusive non-dual One-Zero paradox at the end.


Related satire from Dissociated Press: Hare Krishna Swami Loses Soul - Downtown Helsinki (DP)

Buddha Blast: Conquering the Cosmic Winds

The following text originates in Maharatnakuta-sutra, an excerpt from the legend of Magician Bhadra's attainment of buddhahood. It holds interest in a number of ways, perhaps the most intriguing the highly superlative description of the Buddha's powers. The description is particularly fascinating in the light of the fact that neither the Buddha nor his followers ever declared him to be anything equivalent to a creator-god or other cosmic godheads or avatars, but rather depicted him as a man who worked his way up the cosmic ladder over eons and eons of time.

Extracted from Garma C.C. Chang's translation under the title "A Treasury of Mahayana Sutras", Motilal Banarsidass, 1991 (online). Subheadings mine. In contrast to the Pali scriptures, the Mahayana canon is decidedly more juicy and abundant in its descriptions of the Buddha, even if it causes the scene of the narratives to switch from a more history-flavored one into a world of magic and mysteries.

aṇor aṇīyān mahato mahīyān

ātmāsya jantor nihito guhāyām /
tama-kratuḥ paśyati vīta-śoko

dhātu-prasādān mahimānam ātman //

"Smaller than the smallest, greater than the greatest,
the self is hidden in the creature's heart.
Crosser of darkness, conqueror of pleasure and pain,
In elemental tranquility, he perceives the majesty of the self."

The anatman-doctrine (teaching of no permanent self) of the Buddhists notwithstanding, the narration that follows is almost a perfect commentary as if it were on this classic aphorism of Katha-upanishad (2.20), an early philosophical work seminal to the teachings of later Hindu philosophers. The exposition of ten cosmic wind wheels reflects the elemental principles of derivative causation found in both Buddhist and Taoist schools of metaphysical and analytical thought.

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Powers of the Tathagata

When the magician saw that the World-Honored One had accepted his invitation, he thought, "Gautama does not know my intention; he is definitely not an All-Knowing One." Then he bowed and took his leave.

The Venerable Maudgalyayana was in the asembly at that time and saw what had happened. He approached the Buddha and said to him, "Bhadra intends to deceive the Tathagata and the monks. May the World-Honored One decline his invitation!"

The Buddha told Maudgalyayana, "Do not think in this way. Only those who have desire, hatred, and ignorance can be deceived, but I eradicated those defilements long ago, for I realized that not a single dharma ever arises. I have been firmly abiding in right action for many kalpas. How can anyone deceive me?

"Now, you should know that the magician does not perform real magic, but the Tathagata does. Why? Because the Tathagata realizes here and now that all dharmas are illusory. Even if all the sentient beings were as skilled in magic as Bhadra, all their magical powers combined could not compare with those of the Tathagata, even if their powers were multiplied by a hundred, a thousand, or any amount, numerical or figurative."

Producing Billion-world Universes

The Buddha asked Maudgalyayana, "What do you think? Can the magician magically produce a billion-world universe and magnificently adorn all of it?"

Maudgalyayana answered, "No."

The Buddha said, "Maudgalyayana, you should know that I can magically produce magnificently adorned worlds, as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, inside a hair's tip, and even this does not exhaust the Tathagata's miraculous powers.

The Great Cosmic Wind Wheels

"Maudgalyayana, you should know that there is a great wind-wheel called Breaker that can break a billion-world universe to pieces.
   "There is another wind wheel called Great Hurricane that can ruin worlds and then rebuild them.
   "There is another wind wheel called Propeller that can revolve worlds.
   "There is another wind wheel called Secure Abiding that can blow as high as the Akanistha Heaven.
   "There is another wind wheel called Scatterer that can whirl away and scatter Mount Sumeru, the Black Mountain, and other mountains.
   "There is another wind wheel called Fierce Flame that can blow fierce flames up to the Brahma Heaven during the raging conflagration at the end of a kalpa.
   "There is another wind wheel called Quencher that can quench the raging conflagration at the end of a kalpa.
   "There is another wind wheel called Cool that can cause a cloud to cover a billion-world universe.
   "There is another wind wheel called Universal Downpour that can pour down heavy rains on the worlds during the raging conflagration at the end of a kalpa.
   "There is another wind wheel called Drying Up that can dry up the spreading flood at the end of a kalpa. There are so many wind wheels that I could not finish enumerating them even if I spoke until the end of this kalpa. All this, Maudgalyayana, you should know.

Conquering the Great Wind Wheels

"What do you think? Can the magician dwell securely in any of these wind wheels for a moment?"

Maudgalyayana answered, "No."

The Buddha told Maudgalyayana: "The Tathagata can walk, stand, sit, and lie undisturbed in the wind wheels.  The Tathagata can also put those wind wheels into a mustard seed and display their motions without the mustard seed either expanding or contracting, and without the wind wheels in the seed obstructing each other. Maudgalyayana, you should know that the feats of magic accomplished by the Tathagata have no limit."

When the Venerable Maudgalyayana and the assembly heard the Tathagata's words, they were all overwhelmed by wonder and awe. They all bowed down before the Buddha and exclaimed in unison, "Because we have now met the great Teacher who has these awe-inspiring miraculous powers, we are greatly blessed. One who has the opportunity to hear of the wonderful miraculous powers of the Tathagata, the World-Honored One, and generates profound faith and understanding will certainly gain great blessings adn bring forth a vow to attain supreme enlightenment."

Anatman – Exploring the Non-self

Posted 21st of May, 2008 @ Vraja Journal.

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The doctrine of anatman (Pali: anatta), a central concept in Buddhist philosophy, is sometimes juxtaposed with the Hindu belief in atman. The fundamentals on both sides of the debate deserve a good, careful look.

In an evident parallel with the Bhagavata – among countless other Hindu texts – in observing the illusory "I" and "mine", janasya moho 'yam aham mameti, the suttas (e.g. MN 8) assert three wrong views:

1. Etam mama – "This is mine." – arising from craving.
2. Eso aham asmi – "This I am." – arising from pride and conceit.
3. Eso me atta – "This is my self." – arising from fundamental misconception.

Thereby craving, pride and wrong view lead one to establish diverse self-related conceptions in relation to the five khandas, the five base categories of formation (sankhara). These are, for obvious reasons, states of delusion, for anicca vata sankhara -- all formations, aggregates, conglomerations, are temporary by their nature, unfit for being labeled either a lasting, enduring self or its accessories.

The non-selfness of the five khandas is noted, among other sources, in the Culasaccakasutta (MN 35):

"Material shape, monks, is not self, feeling is not self, perception is not self, the habitual tendencies are not self, consciousness is not self; all conditioned things are impermanent (sabbe sankhara anitya), all things are not self (sabbe dhamma anatta).”

The five-fold khandas are conditioned dhammas, or sankharas. Nibbana (nirvana) is an unconditioned dhamma (thing, principle). While nibbana is often described as deathless (amrita), steady (dhruva), unfalling (acyuta) and so forth, adjectives familiar to many from Hindu descriptions of atman, it is not admitted to as atman, for the concept of a self by its very nature implies the presence of context and condition. That is, for as long as we take it in referring to an individual self – which really is the only meaningful usage of the word – in indicating an identifiable unit as separate from other units, whether purushas, jivas or other such atman-candidates.

A person with a rudimentary understanding of Advaita-vedanta will know moksha or liberation to be the state where the atman is realized as non-different from the Brahman, leading to the dissolution of the individual self-conception in favor of an unconditioned, homogeneous state. The individual self turns out to be nothing but a temporary fabrication rooted in avidya, the perennial ignorance serving as the foundation of conditioned existence in Advaita and Buddhism both alike. The doctrine of anatman understood as the absence of a lasting individual self, do both systems in fact not subscribe to the same concept?

The Upanishads describe Brahman – not atman – as the ultimate reality: sarvam khalv idam brahma. The attainment of, or realization of this Brahman is the objective. The term “brahma” finds, interestingly, countless references in the Pali Suttas. The monks are often referred to as brahma-faring (brahma cariyam), the vimoksha or final liberation bringing about the state of brahma-bhuta, the brahma-attainment.

A more detailed study of this subject, along with the obvious extended theme of analyzing the concepts of Brahman and nirvana, is outside the scope of this text, and only possible with more time and library access. In the meantime, may we occupy ourselves with pursuit for the attainment of an unconditioned reality by means of wisdom (prajna), moral conduct (sila) and meditative absorption (samadhi).