The Texts of the Convivium
SEARCHING FOR GOD
ALONG THE ROADS OF THE EAST
by Filippo Liverziani
C O N T E N T S
1. In addressing the spirituality of India and others deriving from it, ecumenism is openness and discernment.
2. The discovery of the Self in the Upanishads.
3. The discovery of the Self in the Vedanta.
4. Yoga aims to realize the Self also acting at a subliminal level.
5. Where the Self engulfs the living God: from ancient India to today’s “esotericism”.
6. How Hindu ascetic activism limits the experiencing of the living God.
7. The weak God of Hindu monism and the strong God of the Biblical transcendence.
8. The Hindu God: to what extent is He transcendent? To what extent is He a Creator? And how lovable is He?
9. From the Upanishads to Buddhism: how the obsession of pain prevents a real religious experience.
10. Far more than establishing real facts, Buddhist nihilism is the pragmatic assumption
of a really effective watchword.
11. Buddhism’s long and winding path towards God.
12. How Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga integrates in a genial synthesis the Self with the Divine’s other ways of being.
13. Following in the wake of Mahayana Buddhism, Zen too can help us discover a particular and different dimension of the Absolute
SEARCHING FOR GOD
ALONG THE ROADS OF THE EAST
1. In addressing the spirituality of India
and others deriving from it
ecumenism is openness and discernment
This essay does not in any way intend to be a study, and even less a treatise on Hinduism or Buddhism as such. Ecumenically inspired, it wishes to be a meditation on the search for God, a search that follows the spiritual paths of these two religions linked by obvious continuity
This is great tradition and it is useful to compare it to our own. With this I mean the school of thought that stems from Hebraism and achieves its maturity and greatest expression in Christianity, to then continue also in Islam itself.
The meditation starting here is proposed to all religious spirits and in particular to Christians. When addressing other traditions of religion and spirituality, especially such important ones, we Christians are faced with the problem of the attitude we should assume. One must be prepared to learn a great deal from the Hindu-Buddhist tradition without however allowing oneself to be engulfed by it.
Ecumenism means being open to others, assessing them fairly, learning what there is to learn while still remaining faithful to one’s own authentic values.
I would like to mention here a thought expressed by Frithjof Schuon: “One must admit without any hesitation at all that the Psalms and the Gospel are sublime; but to believe that they contain in their words, or their psychological aspects, all that is provided by the Upanishads or the Bhagavad-Gita, is a different problem”.
There is a certain missionary spirit, which we hope is no longer fashionable, that wishes to give, teach and civilise closing its mind to all that it could receive and learn from others, even from primitive humankind.
Certain missionaries take Christianity to the peoples of different religions, without bothering to also see if there are Christian values in those religions, or if one prefers, Christian dimensions or elements of Christianity called with different names and yet experienced all the more intensely and profoundly in a manner that is new and unknown to us.
In such cases these would be values, dimensions, elements to be emphasised, to be acknowledged, to learn, to assimilate, to be experienced also by us with the same commitment: why not? Would not an openness, in this case, to attend a school of Christianity held by these same non-Christians be better?
Christianity is devotion to God. There is in Hinduism a devotional fervour (the famous Bhakti)that cannot help moving us profoundly.
So, towards the end of the 19th Century, the cavalry officer Charles de Foucauld, an explorer of the north African desert, was so impressed by the fervour shown by Muslims that he was spurred to convert, if not to Islam, to his own religion, becoming a saint of Catholicism, which sooner or later will include him in the calendar of its saints.
Christianity is charity; it is a community of love. But let us think about the “lonely crowd”, the aggregation of solitudes crowding the large western cities. On the stairways and in the lifts in large buildings people meet without even a brief hello, without even noticing one another. And in the streets an injured person might easily lay there without receiving help among the many walking by without even stopping.
Let us compare the cross faces of drivers and pedestrians in our cities with the smiles, human interest, cordial welcome and spirit of hospitality shown by people in African and Asian villages. Is that not charity in action, experienced through the small gestures of daily life and nourished by a very lively sense of the sacredness of life?
Devotion and charity, love for God and for one’s neighbour are two indissoluble aspects of the Great Commandment. Let us stop here, addressing Christianity’s primary aspect without looking at the more analytical and subtle elements.
In concentrating attention on love for one’s neighbour and also on the correct love each person should have for himself, I would like to mention how, compared to the medieval Christian tradition, the modern West too has its merits.
The modern era has proclaimed the rights of humankind and seen numerous attempts, more or less successful, to implement these in political, social and economic organisation. However imperfect these implementations and statements may be, one must acknowledge the undoubtedly Christian origin of the modern ideas of freedom and sociality.
Christianity has experienced a series of historical and different editions. Medieval Christianity proclaimed love for humankind, although ignoring this in many ways and at various levels. One could say that secular modern civilisation, even when this is implemented in the name of non-religiosity, or even atheism, has emphasised the many and important implications of Christianity that Medieval Christianity had excessively left in the shadows.
And yet the Catholic Church had challenged modern civilisation due to its basic non-religious approach. During the 29th century, with the Second Vatican Council the Church itself acknowledged the Christian roots of the implementations and implications that had come about in partibus infidelium, in contexts that were not precisely Christian (although Benedetto Croce believed that we children of modern western civilisation “cannot call ourselves non-Christians”). These acknowledgments too are exquisitely ecumenical acts.
We must put into effect a vast synthesis, welcoming the contributions each can provide, wherever they may be and may work, in a Christian environment or in others, even atheist. Modern scientific and technological civilisation can also help us greatly to achieve an integral humanism. All this must however be infused with a Christian soul.
I will repeat that certainly all that has Christian roots should be discovered, acknowledged and integrated within historical Christianity, that it may be implemented with the full richness of its potentiality. One should also bear in mind how the expression “Christian roots” can also come to assume an extremely high meaning. These are not only historical roots, that is elements that have already been proclaimed and accepted by historical Christianity in past eras. Before this, they are metaphysical roots.
Christ is the living God who becomes incarnated among us. If he is the living God. Christ is also all authentic values. Discovering a value means discovering something that belongs intimately to Christ. Closing one’s mind to a value, rejecting it and belittling it, it means rejecting Christ himself in that value.
It is through the most varied spiritual traditions that we can better learn the truth that the Jewish-Christian tradition had already discovered and emphasised in its own way. Thus the same reality is known, investigated and studied in depth according to different and yet complementary aspects. There are however dimensions of reality, dimensions of the Absolute too, that the Jewish-Christian tradition has left unexplored till now.
Let us first of all address what is known as the search for Self. One should consider that the search for the Self is integrally part of the search for God. It is addressed at exploring what appears to be God’s original dimension, His first metaphysical source. In the course of this essay mainly devoted to Hinduism we shall discuss this at length.
The Jewish-Christian tradition has for the moment left unexplored the dimension of the divine Self. Nonetheless this is also drawn on by Christian mystics in some way. The discovery of the Self, its exploration, the definition of spiritual techniques most suitable for pursuing it remains however India’s peculiar and fundamental contribution.
Hinduism, together with Buddhism that derives from it, and the East in general has truly a great deal to teach us. We could ask ourselves why so many people in search of spirituality today turn to the East, as if the West did not per se have a perfectly respectable spiritual tradition. A first valid answer one could perhaps provide is that the East proposes spirituality not as a dogma to be passively accepted, but as a direct experience.
Experience that is pursued as such. We can define this as the experience of the spirit. There is, in truth, a dimension of the spirit, and the East proposes to experience this personally. Such an experience appears complex and variedly structured.
Easterners come to ascertain the reality of the spirit. The spirit exists, and, even before this, it is. The spirit is an absolute reality. The Indians especially investigate it in its primordial and original way of being. The real, profound and original essence of the spirit is the Self.
It appears that within the Divinity itself there are various dimensions. Just as there is a human Self, God Himself has a first original dimension, from which other divine dimensions derive. Christians speak of a divine Trinity.
The mystery of the Trinity is unfathomable; however, according to the extremely imperfect and inadequate hint of an idea that we may have, it does not seem totally inappropriate to associate the first Person of the Trinity, the Father, to what the Hindus call the Brahman: in other words, to the divine Self.
The divine Self is like a sun shining in the immensity of the heavens, and yet with its rays it penetrates the personal room we each live in coming through the inner window we each have deep within us.
Thus the same pure Light of consciousness allows each of us to have a personal, imperfect, subjective and relative consciousness, but a progressing one, also allowing God to have His absolute, eternal and perfect consciousness of all things and all events.
The divine Self, the Divinity’s original Person and dimension, is one with the Self within each of us. Indians would say that Brahman is one with Atman. The fact remains that, while the Self of each human being incarnated within the personality is limited and imperfect, the divine Self is articulated in a plurality of absolute ways of being.
It becomes universal Consciousness (second Person: divine Word or Logos). Finally it is implemented in its third Person or dimension that we Christians call the Holy Spirit and define as the creating God, the living God, and that Indians identify with the Divine Bride or Divine Mother, or with the yogis' Lord Ishvara, and however with the active, creative and provident Divinity.
This third way of being of God is His presence operating within all things and in each individual reality, in space and in time, in the evolution of the cosmos and the history of humankind as in the daily existence of each of us.
This outline can perhaps, with all its limitations, provide us with a first idea of how the search for the Self is complementary with the search for God: of how it appears as an extremely fundamental element of what could be a more structured, complex and rich search for God.
Of course Hinduism too has its own profound and lively devotional religiosity. A tendency for theism, for a relationship with a personal God, is already present in the Vedas and the Upanishads. It was then to find its highest expression in the Bhagavad-Gita and in the hymns of the mystic Bhaktis. All this however finds significant confirmation in the Jewish-Christian and Islamic traditions. Nothing is exclusive here.
An original, and even more I would say unique contribution is instead found in the Hindu spirituality that originates in the Upanishads and, passing above all through the non-dualist Vedanta, extends to Buddhism to then spread to many other countries.
The discovery of the Self as a pure Light of original spirituality, as the primordial Source of all spirituality, is the greatest gift India has given us. This is why ecumenism wishing to really be such cannot avoid assuming the Indian traditions concerning the discovery of the Self and also the results of this exploration of the Self they have performed through the millenniums.
What India can teach us, that is really important and specific, does not end here. It has discovered in the Self the first roots of all spirituality, identifying there the original essence of the spirit. If I may be allowed a rather schematic distinction, I would say that India has discovered the spirit at its first source, and also discovered that all that derives from it - every reality, matter itself - is spirit.
The idea that the profound essence of things is mental is familiar to almost all primitive-archaic populations, who tend to attribute a sort of psychicness to all beings, also to the forces of nature, which they respect and to whom they address cult and prayers. Indians have perceived this idea that all is mental in a very particular manner. They have elaborated extremely complex and refined mental techniques, structuring these in a way that can certainly be defined as scientific.
These techniques are addressed at achieving full power over the person’s physical nature and also over surrounding nature. Ancient magic has here been transformed into a rigorous psychic technique; ancient superstition has become science.
Using mental techniques, now applied in the most systematic manner, Indian ascetics look after the development of psychic powers for achieving self-domination of the personality as well as of what is physical. They aim at transforming the body, spiritualising it, changing the imperfect and painful human condition into a divine, perfect and blessed one.
Such elaborate mental techniques have in the course of centuries been applied increasingly intentionally to the unconscious. One attempts to affect the unconscious through meditation, through the definition of suggestive images that may work on it, expressing words and phrases to be repeated innumerable times to influence the unconscious in an analogous way. They are used to mould the unconscious, so that in turn it will mould the physique too, the functions of which are, precisely, regulated by subliminal psychic mechanisms.
Christian ascesis too can be helped by the better knowledge that Hindu ascesis - and, one should add Buddhist - has of the profound psyche and the techniques needed to dominate it, to render it a docile instrument of the highest spiritual life.
India, with its Upanishads, the Vedanta, the Samkhya and Yoga, with Buddhism in all its expressions (also those of the different countries it has spread to), provides us with what we could define as a real science of the spirit. It also provides us with what we could define as a science of humankind’s occult nature: the science of its subtle bodies and of how it is possible to act on them to transform them, cure them, perfect them and thereby transform and cure and perfect also the very physical nature of human beings.
Faced with so many passages from holy texts and so many old theological formulations that can cause us great problems, the East can teach us to interpret and provide a meaning to all this in terms of inner experience.
It is said for example that God punishes the sins of human beings. However it is actually the sin itself that acts in a negative sense. Even thoughts as such can be negative, since thought is already per se creative. Hence, even before becoming action, the negative thought itself produces negative effects. Hence a negative thought already contains its own punishment, its own salary of death.
And more, why is it said that God gives and imposes commandments to human beings? Those reading a holy text often interpret it literally feeling induced to believe that God legislates according to his will. In realty, every time, and to the extent that a divine commandment is confirmed as valid, should we wish to analyse in greater depth the reasons for this, we would discover that that divine law prescribes or forbids those thoughts, deeds and attitudes that allow us to progress, or on the contrary regress in spiritual terms.