Satsang December 30, 2006
 

‘Right View’: New Year’s Message 2007

Welcome everybody and Happy New Year. Another year has gone by and we didn’t even look around. We are coming up to the 11^th anniversary of being here in Mt Eliza; that will be in early January.

As I like to begin every talk by quoting my Guru, Baba Muktananda, who would begin every time by saying Subko bare sanmane ki sath premse hridik swagat, which means, ‘With great respect and love I welcome you all with all my heart’ (except one!). He would always affirm that to welcome another person is the essence of spirituality. Because it is a very interesting business, spirituality, you can get very complex, you can get very complicated. You can intellectualise a lot. You can get all kinds of maniacal theories. And I have held them all! But Baba would say, the essence of it is to be able to open-heartedly welcome other people with love, and also, he would say, welcome yourself with love, too. In that spirit, I welcome you.

It is a very auspicious occasion, as they say. The eve of New Year’s Eve. The past few years, I have given a New Year’s message. A couple of years ago – I think 2005 – I said that that would be the ‘year of decision’. And I lived to regret that! Last year was the ‘year of the act of greatness’. And the year of the act of greatness means that we rise above our pettiness and our limitation and we be the best we can. We go to the Self and we turn away from the ego. It was a very intense year that way. I am not promising that every New Year’s I am going to give a message. So don’t come here every New Year’s expecting a message! However, this year, as a lot of you know, there is going to be a group of us – about 60 – going to India. So, it could be the year of the pilgrimage couldn’t it?

Well, we won’t do that. But it would be good to make the pilgrimage to Mt Eliza. Every week, come down and make your pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a great thing even though Shaivism says that Shiva is everywhere, Consciousness is everywhere, there is not a place where the divine power does not exist, there is no place devoid of it. And, in a sense, no place is more special than any other place. Still, the place of holy beings and great beings is more special. So, can you hold those two things in your mind at once? If you can, you have been to India! If not, if you are very literal minded, you will not be able to do that.

What the year of the pilgrimage is about, and what the visit to Ganeshpuri is about, is to visit the seat – the foundation place – of our tradition. The place where Bhagawan Nityananda and Baba Muktananda both had their ashrams and are buried. What it is really about is getting in touch with an alternate reality, a higher reality, a higher truth. Hidden behind the mundane experience of this life, there is a higher life, a life of the spirit. And it is just as real, in fact, nay (as they say), more real than this mundane reality. So when we go on a pilgrimage, it is to affirm that hidden but palpable and real reality. We call that the spirit or the spiritual reality or the reality of the Self.

I have often talked about two narratives or two stories that each of us holds. These are stories that we tell ourselves about our life. One of them is what you could call the ego narrative, and that is our normal thing. It is filled with tearing thoughts: ‘Did I get enough? Am I appreciated enough? Those people don’t like me. I am getting a bad shake. Life is tough. Nothing works out right’ And occasionally a little flutter of success and so on. ‘Maybe I’m all right? Oh well, not really’. So this is the ego narrative. The spiritual masters say that this narrative, however compelling - and it is tremendously compelling because we focus on it every day, all day long, worrying about how we look to others and worrying about what we are getting and what we are not getting – but the great masters say that this narrative is essentially false.

They say that there is a more real narrative, the narrative of the Self. It exists within us but it is hidden and we have to discover it. We have to learn about it, we have to cultivate it. The word in our tradition of Kashmir Shaivism is recognise. It is to recognise something that is there, but hidden. And sometimes it takes a little effort to discover this essence, to find it hidden behind the mind, hidden behind the tearing thoughts and the negativity.

We are about to have our big summer retreat, and I hear it is overflowing, which is very good, and a few weeks later we are going off to India. I am going to talk about one of the greatest Hindu saints in the retreat: his name is Gautama the Buddha. The Buddha is a very interesting spiritual teacher, a great yogi. In the first talk that he gave after his enlightenment, he gave the whole of his teaching and particularly he talked about an eightfold path – a path to enlightenment. This is the inner path, the hidden path that I have been talking about. He discovered the way to it in his own way and he attained that place. He said that there is this path, and the suffering of our normal life can be overcome by pursuing this path, and he talked about the eight stages.

I wanted to mention tonight in this New Year’s about the first two – well, really the first one. The first one is called by the Buddha ‘Right View’, and the second one is ‘Right Intentionality’. So tonight, I want to talk about Right View and this is something I want to emphasise in the coming year. The year of Right View. What is Right View? Well, sometimes we call this in mundane terms, ‘your philosophy’. What is your philosophy? Do you have a philosophy? Some of us don’t admit to having a philosophy. But we all do have a philosophy whether we know it or not. And we live from that philosophy whether it is conscious or unconscious.

Right View means the correct view of things. A lot of people look at the world in strange ways, as you may have discovered. The Buddha said there is a right way, a correct way to view the world. Gurdjieff called it ‘thinking from the work’. What he meant by that was not taking an external point of view but thinking from the point of view of spirituality. In other words, spiritualising your point of view. Baba called the same thing, simply, ‘Right Understanding’.

When I was in Baba’s ashram in Ganeshpuri – as I have told you innumerable times, it was a rigorous and difficult and intense atmosphere. Every day there was a rigorous schedule that began early in the morning and went through the whole day unrelentingly. Baba was a great disciplinarian and cracked the whip. We cultivated an attitude that we called the attitude of sadhana while we were in the ashram. That attitude was ‘whatever happens to me is a teaching for me. Whatever happens to me is a divine thing that shows me something about myself’. This was the attitude we had in the ashram. If someone yelled at us, instead of the attitude of blame – ‘that person did this to me. It is their fault!’ – we tried to look and see what it meant for me. What did I do to produce this? What was I to learn from this? It is a tremendously good attitude. It doesn’t work only in ashrams, it works everywhere, because then your whole world becomes an arena of growth and of change and of self-study.

That is the same thing, that is ‘thinking from the work’ – that is Right View. I am going to quote a Western Buddhist teacher who said this about Right View, he said:

‘Our views might not be clearly formulated in our mind. We may only have a hazy conceptual grasp of our beliefs. But whether formulated or not, expressed or maintained in silence, these views have a far-reaching influence. They structure our perceptions, order our values, crystallise into our ideas – through which we interpret to ourselves the meaning of our being in the world.’

So fundamental is our point of view on life; we may not even be aware of it but it colours everything. He goes on, he says:

‘These views then condition action. They lie behind our choices and goals and our efforts to turn these goals from ideals into actuality. Right views correspond to what is real, wrong views deviate from the real and confirm the false in its place.’

Wrong View in this sense means that we have an understanding of life that will lead to suffering for us. Right View means that we have an understanding of life that will free us from suffering.

He continues:

‘The Buddha himself says he sees no single factor so responsible for the arising of unwholesome states of mind as Wrong View, and no factor so helpful for the arising of wholesome states of mind as Right View.’

What do we mean by ‘unwholesome states of mind’? Depression, anger, paranoia, jealousy, fear. According to the great sages, including the Buddha, when we are tormented by these negative emotions – and every one of us is – it comes from Wrong View, from wrong understanding. The Buddha was a completely serene being, he lived his life in perfect peace and perfect joy because he had cultivated Right View. And so, in this year I call on everybody to cultivate the higher point of view, the narrative of Shiva.

Cultivate the higher narrative. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have your personal narrative – you can have that – but always ask, ‘what is the higher thing here?’ When something happens in your life, and it is not the way you want it, don’t only lament and wail and gnash you teeth and say, ‘Oh it always happens to me’ Try to put it in a higher context, try to think outside the box of your ego. That is what it means to cultivate the Right View.

When we do the Shiva Process work, we have a part of it that is called the G-Statement. We take in statements from all the great traditions, all the great scriptures. They all try to elevate our point of view. Sometimes the views that these great teachers give seem contradictory. The Buddhists say there is no Self, while the Hindu masters say, ‘Everything is the Self’. But each thing within its own terms is meaningful. I think of them as parallel lines that meet in heaven. They seem to clash here, but if you look up there, they meet, they make sense together.

Vedanta says, ‘All this is an illusion’. This is Right View from the point of view of Vedanta – whatever happens to you is an illusion. But a Shaivite says, ‘Everything is real, everything is the play of Consciousness’. Christianity says, ‘Jesus is the Way’ and followers of the Guru say, ‘The Guru is the Way’. What has to happen here is that we have to find our true view, our higher view and nurture this view and bring it into play. In Gurdjieff’s terms, it means to ‘think from the work’. What are our real deepest spiritual values? Don’t just leave them only for Saturday night at the ashram, bring them into your life. Think from the work all the time. Have your mundane mind, but don’t only have your mundane mind. Think higher thoughts. Put your life in a divine context.

So, let’s do that. This is the year of ‘thinking from the work’. This is the year of cultivating the Right View. Buddha said have the Right View. Gurdjieff said ‘think from the work’ and Baba used to say, ‘Put on the Guru’s glasses’. And what are the Guru’s glasses? It means seeing everything as the ‘play of Consciousness’. It is not all about your personal triumphs and your personal tragedies. Believe me, the way the universe is stacked, you will have more tragedies than you will have triumphs. It is just that one little person against the whole universe who is getting – as the Buddha says – old and diseased and dying. It is not a good percentage! So it is important that we cultivate a higher view and bring the Right View in on a daily basis, and make it part and parcel of our life. Think about it all the time. Think about your life in the highest context, in the divine context, from the point of view of the Self.

Where does Wrong View come from? Wrong View comes from the false ‘I’, the ego self, the persona. The investment we have in the ego’s point of view distorts our vision. And how will we know the Right View, the right understanding when we find it? This is very important , so listen carefully! Your Right View, your right understanding gives you peace. Baba used to quote a story from the Yoga Vashishta, which said as a refrain, ‘Peace follows renunciation’. That says the same thing. Renunciation of what? Renunciation of the false view of the ego. Therefore, peace follows finding the Right View.

So that is my message for this year! The year of the higher wisdom, of Right View, of ‘thinking from the work’. So if you come complain to me, I am also going to ask, ‘what does it mean in a higher context?’. It is really self-serving! (laughs).

It has been a very great year, it has been full of intensity and acts of greatness. More and more people have been coming and no wonder because there are few places where you can go where the Self, the higher wisdom, the soul, is primary. You can go to a lot of places where there are gatherings for other kinds of purposes, but for the essential purpose, for the purpose that is really at the core of the meaning of life, it is rare to find that place. For the next year, I hope you all continue to come and join to gather and celebrate the essence – the inner Self – that which exists in every person.

No matter how badly you think your life is going, no matter how little self-esteem you manage to squeak out and how desperate you seem, the spiritual masters say (with one voice) that this is not the truth about you. In fact, it is a very minor truth. They say, ‘Within every person is a divine possibility, a divine essence’. If we take a little trouble, if we meditate and practise Self-inquiry and gather like this in satsang, we can start to uncover a beauty that we didn’t even imagine was there. A power that we didn’t imagine was there. And a strength that we didn’t imagine was there. A love that we didn’t imagine was there, more beautiful than the love that anyone else can give you. And a luminous wisdom – you don’t need PhDs, you don’t need to read lots of books, you can find this wisdom within yourself. That is the promise of spirituality. So in that spirit, we will be doing that this year! I hope to see you all the time.

This is the year of the Right View – don’t sell yourself short, don’t only think from a mundane, ego-ridden perspective.

With great love and respect and looking forward to 2007, I welcome you all with all my heart.