II: 29

[Krishna Jaya]

Chapter 2, Verse 29

 

“Some experience the Self directly in all its wonder.

Others can only speak of it as wonderful

Beyond their understanding.

Others know of its wonder by hearsay.

And there are those who are told about it

And do not understand a word.”

 

Paramahansa Yogananda:

 

“With undeveloped intuition, the limited power of the intellect cannot truly comprehend matters of spirit even when truth is expounded.  Though colossal intellects and famous theologians may be well read about the soul, they may nevertheless understand little about it.  On the other hand, even illiterates given to deep meditation will be clearly able to intuit the essence of the soul from their own direct experience. 

 

In the life of every person, two forces of knowledge are operative from birth: (1) the power of human reason, along with its satellites of sensation, perception, and conception; (2) the power of intuition.  Reason is developed through social institutions and interactions.  Intuition usually remains undeveloped, because of want of proper guidance and methods of training in meditation.”

 

Father Bede Griffiths:

 

“God is light manifesting in creation and in all humanity, while the degree of manifestation depends upon the receptivity of the recipient.  In the person who has turned away from truth, the light is still there, but it is obscured.  In the holy person where the light is free from this obscurity, it comes through purely.  The aim is for each of us to be a pure filter of the one light.”

 

Baba Hari Dass: [a prayer]

 

“I take refuge in you, O Illuminator of all luminaries.

Please remove the darkness from my mind

By the light of your consciousness.”

 

 

[Krishna Jaya]

I have been studying a book for the past several months called "Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View," by Richard Tarnas. He writes:

“Perhaps the most concise way of defining the modern world view is to focus on that which distinguishes it from virtually all other world views. Speaking very generally, what sets the modern mind apart is its fundamental tendency to assert and experience a radical separation between subject and object, a distinct division between the human self and the encompassing world. This perspective can be contrasted with what has come to be called the primal world view, characteristic of traditional indigenous cultures. The primal mind not only does not maintain this decisive division, but it does not recognize it, whereas the modern mind not only maintains it but is essentially constituted by it.

The primal human being perceives the surrounding natural world as permeated with meaning, meaning whose significance is at once human and cosmic.

Meaning is recognized in the conjunction of two planets in the heavens, in the unfolding cycles of Sun and Moon.

The primal world communicates and has purposes. It is pregnant with signs and symbols, implications, and intentions. The world is animated by the same psychologically resonant realities that human beings experience within themselves. A continuity extends from the interior world of the human to the world outside.

Primal experience takes place within a world soul, an anima mundi, a living matrix. The workings of the anima mundi, in all its flux and diversity, are articulated through a language that is mythic and numinous. The particulars of the empirical world are all endowed with symbolic, archetypal significance, and that significance flows between inner and outer, between self and world. In this relatively undifferentiated state of consciousness, humans perceive themselves as directly participating in and communicating with the interior life of the natural world and the cosmos, emotionally and mystically. This participation mystique involves a complex sense of direct, inner participation of humans with divine powers by virtue of their immanent and transformative presence. The participation is multi-directional and multi-dimensional, pervasive and encompassing.

By contrast, the modern mind experiences a fundamental division between a subjective human self and an objective external world. Apart from the human being, the cosmos is seen as entirely impersonal and unconscious. Whatever beauty and value that human beings may perceive in the universe, that universe is in itself mere matter in motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity. It is altogether indifferent to human consciousness and values.

The world outside the human being lacks conscious intelligence, it lacks interiority, and it lacks intrinsic meaning and purpose. For these are human realities, and the modern mind believes that to project what is human onto the non-human is a basic epistemological fallacy. The world is devoid of any meaning that does not derive ultimately from human consciousness. From the modern perspective, the primal person conflates and confuses inner and outer and thus lives in a state of continuous magical delusion, in an anthropomorphically distorted world, a world speciously filled with the human psyche’s own subjective meaning. For the modern mind, the only source of meaning in the universe is human consciousness.

By contrast, the primal mind engages the world more as a subject embedded in a world of subjects, with no absolute boundaries between or among them. From the primal perspective, the world is full of subjects. The primal world is saturated with interiority, intrinsic meanings and purposes.” (pp. 16-18)

Krishna is talking in this verse of the Gita about the whole range of people that hear his teaching in their own ways. The India of five thousand years ago when Krishna walked upon the Earth was made up of a culture with this primal view that Tarnas describes. Yet even within that culture there were those who would not have understood a word of Krishna's message. Today, in the West, the predominant world view is secular, what is called "modern" in Tarnas' terminology. How much harder today it is to understand Krishna's message. And yet there are many who do. Tarnas argues that civilization, both Western and Eastern, are on the threshold of a new world view, one which incorporates the best of the old with an accommodation of the new. I don't know Tarnas personally and therefore have not had a chance to ask him, but if the opportunity did come up, my guess is that he would say that Krishna's message would be thoroughly consistent with this emerging world view.