Material Girl, Immaterial World

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator, there is no poverty and no indifferent place.

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Caught in materialist fetters, including sense objects, sense enjoyments, sense pleasures and displeasures, sense desires, remembering, forgetting, thinking, planning, and so on, we are haunted by doubts, subject to delusion, finitude, dualities, and more. So long as you are aware only of the material world through your body’s sense organs, you will naturally develop attachments for objects in the world, and from such attachments, fear, lust, and greed (among others) develop, and from these anger arises. From anger, delusion comes, and from complete delusion, confusion of memory, bewilderment, and loss of sense and sensation. When memory is bedeviled, intelligence is lost. When intelligence is lost, one loses wisdom completely and “falls down to the depths of the material ocean.”

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

…

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses.

– William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

For the sake of going beyond sensational speculation, let us yet imagine there are Two paths before you, one of Light, Peace, Love, otherworldly pleasures, and still higher planes; and on the other path, Darkness, difficulty, anger, confusion, ignorance, and so on. Then let us imagine, like two rivers converging into the sea, that these paths are flawlessly and ceaselessly interwoven, as if layered perfectly throughout one another — and upon the dawn of certain conditions, an event-horizon, if you will, an individual (we) might transcend the boundaries of both paths, creating a third junction (a line of flight) uniting Two into One. Actually, not quite Two and not quite One, but a secret, sensational third thing, at the same time inexpressible and imperceptible. 

My current theosophical and ethical aim, I think, is to realize this third path for all it is worth, beyond mere speculation and beyond belief or bare sentiments. There are both gradual and sudden processes at play. Both subtle and intense forces in a wild array. 

As a product of insight, duality is known in actuality to be a false duality, that is, matter is illusory (but not unreal). An intelligent person can clearly tell light from darkness, but without wisdom they do not really understand that there is a false duality (that there is an event-horizon, an illusory process whereby darkness becomes light and light becomes darkness). A Zen notion captures this in the thought: “Spring does not become Summer. Summer does not become Fall. First it is Spring, then it is Summer. First it is Summer, then it is Fall.” In other words, so long as one believes in the event of light, there is also belief in an event of darkness, too. If we seek liberation from both speculation and delusion, we must learn to walk on the water of the material sea. That is the alchemist’s splendor. 

To convey a pith instruction: be melting snow. Parallel to the alchemical process, the tantric way (i.e., path of expansion) is to transform every obstacle into an opportunity. To weave the threads of contradiction into harmony with the whole. It is about seeing clearly the profane in the pure, the purity in the profane. This path suggests liberation is within and without the body, not beyond it. It is the other side of the aforementioned Third path that recognizes no contradiction, no true distinction. Even these dualities, between sameness and difference, the Oneness and Twoness, melt into the earth. 

So what that we lust and greed after what we desire? So what that we take pleasure and pains to achieve our aims? So what that we are attached to this body and believe ourselves to suffer death at its dissolution? These are all fine and natural ways to live out a human existence. They are not the only way. There are many worlds beyond the material plane. Simply put, to live only in the material sense is not enough to satisfy the spirit of life (or life of spirit). That is why I take up the mad scientist’s banner and experiment ad nauseum, continuously embarking on strange adventures, perpetually returning to the same essential difference, exploring pattern after pattern. 

We shall not cease from exploration,

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Ram, Allah, Keshev, Karim, Hari, Hazrat—

So many names. 

So many ornaments, all one gold,

It has no double nature.

– Kabir, “Brother, Where Did Your Two Gods Come From?”