WAITING FOR THE MESSIAH

I prophesy unto you that are of a fearful heart--be strong, fear not; for mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, thus spoke prophet Isaiah, of the coming of the Messiah. The Jews have been waiting since then for the Messiah who will take them to the Promised Land. If the Jews have been missing out on him since the time he came to them as Jesus of Nazareth, the Christadelphians---Christian denominations such as Adventists, Apocalypticists, Chiliasts, Minnelialists--- have also been by-passing him, waiting for the Second Coming. This is the predicament of focusing on the past or the future: we miss out on the present.

When Jesus returned to his own folks at the age of thirty, after a blacked out period of 18 years, he was greeted with jeers, stones, and slammed doors: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the son of man hath not where to lay his head . And within three years of his come-back his countrymen conspired to nail him to the cross. The story of Jesus Christ, as told in the Bible, consists virtually of the travails and tribulations of those three years.

Isn't it intriguing that nobody from the Church, down the two millennia, has evinced any interest in trying to work out a schedule of his life's events during that long period of obscurity ? The Bible is silent on this aspect; but the Nath Namavali of India's Nath yogis asserts that Jesus, or Ishai Nath, which is the name used in the text, came to India at the age of fourteen, and that, after sixteen long years of concentration, became enlightened, and returned to his country to begin his teachings. A Russian journalist Nicolai Notovich in his book The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (1895) talks about similar stories of Jesus the Nazerene. Recently a German theologian, Holger Kersten, in his book Jesus Lived In India (1986) gives seminal evidence of Jesus' 18 year long stay in India.

However, his return was beset with two fold difficulties. Firstly, there was a congenital contempt for all prophets in the minds of the rulers, the priests, and the Haves. The prophets were self-appointed ambassadors of God, consumed with a passion for justice and endowed with certain powers of prognostication. Since they were, unexceptionably, a thorn in the flesh of the perpetrators of injustice, they were threatened or done away with. Isaiah was sawed down, Moses threatened with death ( he is said to have escaped to India), and John the Baptist, beheaded.

Secondly, he was speaking a language which none of his predecessors had used. The kingdom of God is within you, did not make any sense to a people who were focused on the Promised Land of Moses, or the Messiah of Isaiah, or the God ruled kingdom of John the Baptist, on a part of this earth. To look for a kingdom within was totally an alien concept for them. They were so accustomed to brute force, to hard power, they knew nothing of the soft power within.

Further Jesus said: Resist not evil: but whosoever smites you on the right cheek, turn to him the other side also. This is totally out of sync with the God of the Jews. Their God is wrathful, vengeful, judgmental, who can arbitrarily order the destruction of the towns of Jericho, Sodom, and Gomorrah in which innocent lives, even by his own reckoning, are laid to waste. They were familiar with the fight or flight responses to a crisis but accepting it and living through it nonchalantly... well, this was unheard of. So for these desert tribes, attuned to a totally different weltanschauung#, words of Jesus were nothing short of blesphemy.

Jesus belonged to the tribe of Essene, an ancient Jewish sect of ascetics which, as expected, had been living on the margin. In the great tradition of his tribe, he had now become a fully blooming mystic. Mystics were as much misunderstood in his time as they are now. In order to understand a mystic, one has to become one. One has to surrender to him completely, and absorb him like a sponge, in his totality. Since this is a very demanding directive, except for one who has a burning desire to become enlightened, people interpret mystics according to their own limited visions. I cite two examples from the Bible :

Christ is made to utter: Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Now the word repent does not fit into the vocabulary of an enlightened being. Commenting on this use , Osho explicates : repent simply means return; it doesn't mean repentance at all. Turn in, it means; return to the source, it means; it means return to your own being.

Another glaring example is his supposed utterance at the cross : My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?Reacting on it Baba Muktanand exhorted : For such a great being as Christ, the cross is absolutely meaningless. All that Jesus would say in this situation is : God, bestow thy grace on these sinners also.

When a realized soul like Christ talks, he doesn't talk of objects; he talks of the essence, the quintessential. He doesn't talk about the ephemeral, he talks about the perennial. The Jews asked Jesus if he had seen Abraham and he said : Before Abraham was, I am. Only somebody who can see beyond form, beyond the exterior can understand such a profound statement. For all others it is as baffling an assertion as the one made by Lord Krishna to Arjun : I proclaimed this imperishable yoga to Vivasvan. Vivasvan happened aeons ago !

A realized soul can not be measured by a peripheral yardstick, because he remains established in the centre. For him there is no past or future. He is always present in the present. Christ's life may not make big history, but it does make a big presence. Waiting for Messiah, or waiting for the Second coming is like waiting for Godot*. Instead, it will profit us immensely if we learn to immerse ourselves in his ever present presence. We happen to be either in the past or the future, that is, on the periphery, but never in the centre. Each one of us has got to find his centre, his fulcrum, a place which makes us free in our totality. When Gurdjieff was around, he told people bluntly to wake up.

weltanschauung# =A comprehensive view of the world around and one's relationship with it.

Waiting for Godot*= A play by Samuel Beckett, in which Godot never shows up.

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi

REAL PROSPERITY FOLLOWS THE NATURAL COURSE

Sengai, a nineteenth century Zen Master and head of Shufuku-ji, the first Zen temple of Japan, was forthright in his teachings. Once a rich man asked him to write a couple of benedictory words, to be treasured from generation to generation, for the continued prosperity of his family. Sengai obtained a sheet of paper and wrote on it: father dies, son dies, grandson dies. The rich man was exasperated and sought an explanation from the saint for shocking him thus.

It was not unusual for Zen Masters to deliver their message in sutras as sutras are easy to remember and poignant in their pithiness. Elaborating upon his death sutra, he assuaged the ruffled feelings of the peeved Dives* thus: "If your son should die, before you, this would grieve you greatly. If your grandson should pass away before your son, both of you would become broken-hearted. If your family, generation after generation, passes away in the order I have mentioned, it will be the natural course of life. And if somebody has earned enough merit to ensure a natural course of life, I call this real prosperity".

Sengai seems to underscore the point that untimely deaths, say from disease or hunger, are detrimental to the natural flow of life. This concept has found favour these days with Swami Ramdev who is intent upon building a prosperous India by eradicating disease and hunger. On a broader canvas, Sengai is reflecting upon a natural course of life for wholesome living. While Swami Ramdev advocates the practice of pranayam to root out these aberrations, Sengai offers the practice of Zen for achieving real prosperity.

Zen may appear exotic to us but it is not. It is our homegrown concept coming back to us after a long time, showcased in a Japanese basket. Zen is the Indian dhyan by way of China and Japan. Bodhidharma, a Pallav prince turned Buddhist monk, and twenty eighth in line from Buddha, took dhyan to China in the sixth century C.E. where it flourished as ch'an. Eisai, a twelfth century Japanese priest, made Japan home to ch'an in the form of Zen. Zen stripped of its frills is essentially dhyan, albeit informal.

Broadly speaking dhyan is of two types: formal and informal. In formal dhyan we sit in silence, in a comfortable pose, and practice mindfulness. Though meditation has come to be used globally as an equivalent of dhyan, it doesn't fill the bill. Mindfulness is the right word. Meditation means contemplation, reflection, rumination,even concentration while mindfulness is consciousness, awareness, alertness, wakefulness. Meditation needs an object to meditate upon but mindfulness is just the state of wakefulness, the state of being. In informal dhyan, we can work in the market place in a state of mindfulness, that is, alertness. Kabir calls it sahaj dhyan.

Both dhyan and pranayam happen to be part of Ashtang Yoga and they exist in a state of equilibrium with each other. If you practice pranayam with awareness, you pass into dhyan spontaneously. Conversely, if you happen to be practising dhyan, you may find yourself performing pranayam as well. But the big question is how dhyan contributes to bringing about a naturalness to our lives. Let me try to explain.

Psychologists tell us that our mind is nine parts unconscious and only one part conscious. This points to a very disturbing feature of our lives--we work with only 1/10th of our full potential of conciousness. All our decisions are taken with only a fraction of our whole potential. May be one big reason why we have brought our beautiful earth to the brink of extinction is that we work largely in a state of unconsciousness. Our unconscious is so stupendous, it overwhelms the tiny conscious. We have become so much used to backseat driving by the unconscious that we never suspect we are being remotely controlled by it.

The tiny conscious in us works only as a trigger to start a process and then the unconscious takes over. It is like a nuclear fission. Once started no power can stop it. We have no control over the tail-end. We use the word addiction for being overpowered by the unconscious. Be it alcohol, drugs, junk food, junk thoughts, we remain blissfully unaware that the unconscious is in charge of us. The irony is that we always think that we are the masters but the conscious in us is too niggardly to help us remain conscious for a long period of time. We just don't have the knowhow to remain conscious without a break.

Dhyan aims at upgrading our consciousness by enlarging the volume of our consciousness. Yes, it is possible to be fully conscious and annihilate our unconscious completely. Transforming the unconscious into the conscious is the real alchemy. When the dross in us is changed into burnished gold, we come to realise that awareness functions faster than a fast-track court as it dispenses cases on the spot. Decisions are taken on moment-to-moment basis so that there is no backlog left to be shovelled into the unconscious. Dhyan is the only way of distancing the watchman in us from our mind.

An enormous chunk of energy kept hostage as our unconscious gets released. A huge burden is lifted. We are freed of a constant drag on our energy. The released energy burns the desires that burn us. As a result love, compassion, harmony, steadfastness spring up. With the dissolution of the unconscious, the past is obliterated and so are the projections into the future. Only the present remains. In the present we can't help being our real Self as the present has no space or time for being unnatural. And if we remain pure like nature, nothing unnatural happens in our life. That is real prosperity a la Sengai.

Dives*= 1. A Biblical rich man. 2. Any rich man. (pronounced Daiveez).

Om Shantih
Ajit Sambodhi