Podcast

MAP OF A HUMAN BEING AUDIO PODCAST.
Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #10. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

I was pretty broke coming off the Central American trip, so the call of the wild: bars, clubs, party scenes, things like that, crept around in my thoughts but I didn’t act on the thought. This was also my thirtieth year of life. I had given up smoking at 25, sensing that habit mixed with alcohol was hurting me. And now booze was becoming less and less a part of my daily round.
My life experiences were filling me up and the need for alcohol was diminishing. It was as if the earlier me, which came out of childhood notions, was ebbing away and someone else, my own identity, was declaring itself. I had a sense of a more satisfied self. Not that my own design was anything great. I can see now that I had probably delayed becoming an adult by not getting married and taking on all the responsibilities that come with family and children. So drinking for me was just a part of socializing, having fun, and I always viewed it as that. But an American lady I met in Mexico mentioned that my drinking was excessive. Of course I denied it, but her comment went pretty deep at the time. When I thought about it, I had never actually stopped drinking since I began, 14 years before.
Bawa was taking large swipes at the imbibing of all intoxicants – he ran down the whole list. The hippy era was in full swing when he first arrived in America and some of the earlier students were imbibers of one substance or another. It transpired that he had cleaned up a lot of them, got them to finish their education, and start families. I heard stories of him prescribing things like parsley soup, to be drunk for thirty days to help people clean their blood of marijuana. He said intoxicants impaired our ability to develop our humanity. They only feed the mind, especially the dog of desire. I thought, what male drinker (or female for all I know) hasn’t gone into a bar and rejected a friend’s suggestion to flirt with a couple of females because he thought they were not attractive enough; only to find them sitting on his lap after a few drinks? I found this excerpt from Shakespeare’s Othello that speaks to Bawa’s sentiment on the subject:
“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, pleasure, revel and applause transform ourselves into beasts!”
It was nice to meet with some of Bawa’s committed students at their houses or the donut shop (there were no Starbucks back then) and casually talk about what the hell, or heaven, was going on around him. Most of these folks had lost all objectivity about Bawa, so to ask them if he was ethical or moral or whatever wouldn’t yield any useful insight. But here we were, pretty much an open house most of the day, an elderly wise man sitting on a bed awaiting our questions and prepared, it seemed, to helps folks with many different problems, smack in the middle of an American city suburb. How did this come to be?
In brief, what I gleaned was, there was a Sri Lankan student at the University of Pennsylvania who met some Americans interested in things mystical. Their appetite had not been satisfied from the religious/spiritual surroundings of their youth. He told them about his Guru in Sri Lanka who it turned out was Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. They sent letters to him in the early 1970s asking their questions. Although Bawa didn’t write himself, he would dictate answers. The letter writers soon realized they had tapped a source of divine knowledge beyond anything they had previously known. Later, a Doctor who was also a student of Bawa’s was coming to the U.S. to attend a medical conference and Bawa accompanied him. The letter writers met with him at one of their houses. He could stay awake, it seemed, for endless amounts of time answering their questions and offering his guidance. After some time, he returned to Sri Lanka, but his impact led to setting up a more permanent way to study what he had told them. Soon more people came on board and Bawa began sharing his time between America and Sri Lanka.

Tags: intoxicants ruin our humanity, bawa comes to America, meaning of life,

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #9. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

With the ideas from the monkey-mind and dog-of-desire song mixing with the other bits of Bawa’s philosophy, a ‘great sorting’ got triggered within me. This is a tendency I now see I have. I like to fix things or sort them out, including myself. (Although I haven’t completely fixed myself yet!) Sometimes this gets me in trouble. When someone tells me their troubles my internal gears start working on a solution. But often the person isn’t asking for help, they just want to verbalize how they feel or tell someone what is wrong with them. “Some people just need to throw up and have peace,” I heard Bawa say.
In broad terms, I heard Bawa saying there are two separate distinct entities operating within us: The mind and the heart/soul. But wait, isn’t the mind the brain; isn’t the brain the mind? No. After 30 years of contemplating this stuff, I see that the brain sits awaiting instructions from the mind or the other center, the heart/soul. I know the brain is hard-wired to run our physiology, but these two inputs can also modify how the brain reacts to stimuli. The brain is our interface with the world.
There are many neurological discoveries coming out as I write this. And I think they will contribute greatly to our understanding of the human condition. For those scientists, however, everything is physical. It all begins and ends in the brain or body, the brain is who you are – a chemical potpourri. But what I’ve come to know is that the mind is an ideational projection fueled by the elemental energies of earth, fire, water, air and ether, (more on these later) and muddied by the subjectivity of race, religion, caste, nationality, gender, class - in short karma - being born into a wealthy or poor family, etc., the list is endless. So these perceptions, which are the mind, are very unreliable and care little for morality or ethics, but only wish to indulge in the dance of the world. Bawa, for me, was saying there is another thinking center, which is not contingent on the material world. Science cannot measure this, as it is uncreated. It is the seat of the conscience, which we know can get muddied by the apparent omnipresence of the mind/desire forces. But this center, Bawa says, is also where God is known – not in the mind. In fact he said the distance between God and Man is the mind. The mind can’t know God. It only understands the world of form; it begins when we arrive here and it ends when we leave. The mind indulges in and records temporary things. To understand ourselves we must go beyond mind and desire and get at the truth, which is in the heart/soul center.
I had the thought back then that my traveling days were over. But it occurred to me that if this stuff kept peaking my interest, and on some level kept making sense, I might be off on another journey: Only this time starting from the surface of the eye and going inward.
Just a note that dog and monkey lovers shouldn’t be discouraged, Bawa didn’t hate the animals. In fact, he was a vegetarian and encouraged his students to be also. He agreed that it increased one’s compassion, but he had another point. He said our mental state could be influenced by the food we eat, and that everything in the universe is already inside a human being in a kind of shadow form, including the animals, but we don’t want the influence of their flesh running in our blood. Turns out of course that it is also a good health choice.
He spoke of a condition called God-Man, Man-God, where a human being merges with God while on Earth. He explained that the animals could not do this, although they are conscious of God in other ways. He also quipped that if a person could serve humanity even as much as one cow, it would be a miracle. His point was that when humans take on the negative qualities of animals we become less than our true potential. Also, he made extensive use of explaining the nature of flora and fauna to illustrate his wisdom points, so a lot of plants and animals populated his discourse. The discourses were loaded with mystical and religious references, concepts, precepts, tenets, foreign words – the latter of which even the translators had either become so familiar with or didn’t have time to fathom as they tried to keep up.

Tags: wisdom memoir, meaning of life, why was I born?

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #8. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

Because the community was well established, Bawa was addressing long-time students and the interested newcomers. This approach was quite a task to accomplish within the same session, as opposed to college classes that are exclusively designed for specific student levels.
Well, don’t we all want to be wise? And I don’t mean a wise ass! And how do we get this wisdom? From life’s slings and arrows? Usually, it seems, we really have to suffer before we get wise to something! A childhood friend and I once deduced that what we called an asshole personality was someone who was incapable of seeing their own garbage and correcting it. If this goes on for years, well, you know them! This was something we always wanted to avoid. But isn’t it a wonder how we can always see other people’s crap and not our own? I found a great exchange in Twelfth Night by Shakespeare that speaks to this:
Duke: I know thee well. How dost thou, my good fellow?
Fool: Truly, sir, the better for my foes, and the worse for my friends.
Duke: Just the contrary: the better for thy friends.
Fool: No, sir, the worse.
Duke: How can that be?
Fool: Sir, my friends praise me and make an ass of me. Now my foes tell me plainly that I am an ass; so that by my foes, sir, I profit in knowledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused; why then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes.
Duke: Why, this is excellent.
I didn’t do a room survey, but knowing we are not perfect, while having empathy for one another, I think, is something many people in Bawa’s room had already learnt. In my world, almost everything was a fair target for verbal criticism or sarcasm, which assumes that one is observing from a place of perfection!
During a lull in the questions Bawa spontaneously broke into song. This shocked me, I felt self-conscious. There was no sign of this among the others though, so I figured this was probably one of his habits. I’m not talking about a song in the Western sense – a chorus and verse, a bridge here and there, another chorus and out in three minutes. It wasn’t like that; however, it was melodic and contained a certain vibration in its devotional aspect. Not that I’m the vibration type, but it touched a certain emotional core in me. The song was an appeal to God concerning the confused state of humankind. Bawa didn’t exclude himself from the appeal. It was also explanatory. The first half addressed the terrible state of Man and the second suggested a cure for the maladies. And wouldn’t you know it, the crux of the problem was the behavior of this ‘monkey mind’ and ‘dog of desire.’ Once the song was over, I didn’t feel any need to ask about those two culprits. For now, it satisfied.
In a nut-shell he identified three major areas in the mind. The monkey mind is that tendency to copy everything it sees. He said if you throw something at a monkey it throws it back. (I’ve personally experienced this!) It will even mimic you. Like this, we copy what others do and are only restrained by our moral code and sometimes even override that. We learn many kinds of undesirable behaviors like this. Subconsciously we hope all this will make us happier. The dog of desire is that part of us that searches for everything from evil, bestial and material things that obsess the monkey mind. Like the dog it pulls us sniffing along the road, sniffing and eating everything it sees, even though it might be harmful. This tendency makes us chew and chew on illusion and bark at the world. The baby mind compounds all this. It walks through the world pulling things off the shelves, and then just seconds later, discards the thing and yearns for something else never satisfied. If we want something from the world, he said, we still have this baby mind.
I was thinking, boy, you’re right. When those three get together, they really do weave a wicked web.

Tags: meaning of life, wisdom stories, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Tony Buck

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #7. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

Back in Bawa’s room, this session produced an endless string of personal questions. Keeping my distance from the surroundings, I still viewed it as a kind of public lecture. It took me a while to come to terms with the intimacy of it. I wasn’t used to people revealing their deepest personal secrets. My instinct was to flee the room and leave them to their privacy. Live theater has a greater immediacy than say watching a film. In fact, I have a friend who can’t take live theater and only goes to movies. This gathering had the effect of being even more immediate, because I was beginning to wonder if I was still an audience member, or becoming one of the cast!
At times, I found myself feeling superior to some of the people, thinking, I don’t have that problem. I can see now that this was a form of self-defense. Clearly, the only way these people could reveal their inner secrets and conflicts was because they felt safe. It began to dawn on me that the ‘something’ I’d been subconsciously registering on people’s faces and in their body language was empathy. I was the odd one out in this crowd. Once this sank in, the compassion became quite palpable. Not that I lacked compassion, I was just more used to worldly environments like bars, beaches, cafes and the work place.
And then, within the discussion of a marriage problem, which was quite removed from my life, I had to admit, I heard a past girlfriend’s voice – maybe I had one of the husband’s personality traits that Bawa was gently exposing, as in this case it was straining the relationship. However, I rationalized that since I was single, my traits didn’t bother anyone. Bawa listened to both sides and asked questions in such a way that hinted at the solution. I saw him do this a few times, and if it didn’t get through, he simply gave advice.
It began to seep into me that I could use some of this too. I was reluctantly moving from ‘that’s their problem,’ to, ‘well, if I were honest, I’m not perfect in that department either.’ As I let that thought in, suddenly an avalanche in my head informed me that everything said applied to me in some degree. But how could that be?
“You mean I’m not perfect?” I didn’t sign up for this. I saw myself turning to run.
“What you can’t face yourself? What is your idea of self? Surely I am perfect? Have I ever really asked this question?” Fortunately, I still had just enough humility to know that my knowledge of ‘self’ could increase many fold under this method.
“So why haven’t you used it before?” Don’t we all subconsciously consider ourselves to be the gold standard of human example? And don’t most of us parry away incursions into our private stuff, and resent being corrected, even if there is some element of truth in what’s being exposed? Maybe this is the value of having an observable community. We see other’s stuff and can then decide whether to keep that in ourselves or eradicate it. That’s if we’ve realized the need for eradication. Of course, it helps if the community members don’t crush each other or come up with convoluted methods of shutting down growth opportunities like guilt tripping or defensiveness – this happens a lot in families, doesn’t it?
For me, admitting imperfection is painful. And if we have low self-esteem, which even some accomplished people do, it’s even more difficult. We are not exactly trained for this are we? If we get even a glimpse that something’s out of balance, we’re more likely to head for the diversion – food binging, get high or drunk or do something rash. I kept hearing Bawa suggest little steps on the path of wisdom, which was one of his main themes: We need wisdom (defined as wise judgment in most dictionaries) to live the best life. He said this wisdom should be applied to every aspect of life, increasing our self-knowledge about our habits, passion and karma, (karma: the ethical, moral and physical consequences of thought and action. That’s the general definition anyway). When he used the word karma, it usually meant negative influences. Wisdom should also be applied toward thinking, relationships, and material acquisitions. In fact, this wisdom seemed to be the establishing of a heightened state of consciousness about every action we make; including those relating to the spiritual realm. In a way, it sounded arduous, but Bawa suggested the troubles from not doing this are just as great. Of course, I didn’t yet know what his guiding principles were for this wisdom, but I knew if I stuck around, I would probably find out.

Tags: wisdom memoir, meaning of life, why was I born?

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #6. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

My bumping into this Fellowship scene was purely serendipitous, so I was very detached from it; it verged on entertainment for me. In fact it took a couple of these Bawa Q & A sessions for me to realize how important these answers were to people. This wasn’t just theory, some people were there for the first time like me, but I started to realize many were long-time students, they weren’t just getting a perspective on life, they intended to take action depending on his answers. This, I felt, gave much more gravity to what seemed to me like informal exchanges. Such answers would have to be very well considered if someone could come back a year later and say, “I did what you advised, and …it was perfect, or, you ruined my life!”
Another visitor, more experienced than me in this kind of environment, pointed out that she’d never seen such an open-door policy in a situation like this. Evidently other teachers rarely appeared from private quarters, and to meet him or her so casually and publicly with total access was rare.
I was uninterested in other people’s back pain, but talking about things spiritual and beyond, piqued my curiosity. There were a couple of unexplained things that kept coming up during his answers. The ‘monkey mind’ and the ‘dog of desire.’ He said the mind had monkey tendencies and that it also contained this ‘dog of desire,’ not very exalted concepts for this great human mind. I thought of a TV quiz show that was very highly regarded in England at that time called, “The Brain of Britain.” Contestants would sit in the hallowed chair and consistently answer questions that were beyond the reach of most of us. Or a billboard I’d seen in America, which said “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste.” Well, Bawa seemed to be saying that the mind was a terrible thing, period. Nor was he using the word monkey or dog in an endearing way. He didn’t dwell on these concepts. They were like buzz-words. I mentioned this to the people my friend and I were hanging around with. “What do you know of this ‘monkey mind’ and ‘dog of desire,” I asked.
I was met with laughter, “Keep listening,” they urged me.
“Does it have anything to do with evolution?” Laughter again.
One of the guys was about to launch into a detailed explanation, but my friend restrained him. “It’s a question he should ask Bawa, let him answer it.” The guy immediately agreed.
I said, “Well, when is one of those sessions likely to occur again? I don’t know if I’m going to be around too long.”
They said the room could open again in a moment, if something gets going; or tomorrow. “Don’t worry, this kind of thing happens here daily, sometimes twice, three times a day.”
I said, “Well I heard somewhere that gurus can suddenly declare a vow of silence that lasts for years.” They laughed assuring me that Bawa wasn’t about to do that, he was way passed all those phases.
Back in the second floor kitchen cutting veggies for the ladies, I mentioned that I was quite impressed with the quality of Bawa’s answers. There was no real response, signaling to me that for them it was a foregone conclusion. There was very much a family atmosphere. In fact Bawa referred to the hundreds of people who regularly visited through the week as the Funny Family. Being a bachelor and not drawn to family environments, I preferred the idea of friends, finding family too claustrophobic – or perhaps committed.
I should say that I had no prior knowledge of the classic guru, master/disciple, student relationship. But over the years I’ve become aware of the different types in different traditions. Looking back I really enjoyed the story-telling experience and the Q and A sessions, not questioning the form of it, it seemed so natural. However, I dreaded that at some point someone would take me aside saying it was time for some kind of weird initiation ceremony, or a financial charge. I certainly wasn’t going to inquire about it and speed it on. But I’m glad to say it never happened in any form or way and no one ever asked me for money.
Another person, who’d just shown up like me, told me they had visited many such ashrams and although there were usually a few people from the teacher’s ethnic background, most of the communities consisted mainly of white, college educated, middle class Americans. They were surprised to see a fairly large number of committed black students and a smattering of many other diverse ethnic groups. I hadn’t really noticed this, but it was a veritable United Nations. Someone later asked about this during a Q and A session and Bawa said, “It is because there is equality here.”
Once again, while cutting vegetables, my friend alerted me that Bawa was about to speak, and this time I knew he had not left the kitchen. I was beginning to think he had established a psychic connection to the guru. But just as I put down my cutting knife, someone spoke from a loudspeaker situated out of sight above a wall cabinet. Then I realized, a moment before, I’d heard the click of an electric sound. It was scientific not psychic this time.

Tags: dog of desire monkey mind

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #5. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

I know a lot of people today don’t even believe in the existence of a God. I went through a short atheist period when I was about 19. Of course it is the religions, in my opinion, that have trashed the idea of God with their vacuous and bigoted points of view – not to mention a few wars, jihads, inquisitions, reformations, etc. And what does it mean: the religions? The officials of the religions, the people who draw their salaries from religious positions, most of them, from my observation, are simply politicians in a religious setting. And how dare some of them say that we must go through them to connect to God.
I know at one time I really believed in the existence of a Jesus just the way they described him. I think when we are young there is a real hope that an authentic Jesus existed. Unfortunately the young adult girls and boys who taught us at the Methodist Sunday school I went to had very little spiritual knowledge, and were simply parroting their parents most of the time. They tried to impress us with miracle stories about Jesus. Well at that time, on special occasions, magicians came to school and performed their magic tricks. As we grew older we learned sleight of hand and slowly figured out how these were done. Even if we couldn’t figure them out, once we knew they were tricks, they were fathomable. And with the science education we were getting, explaining the mysteries of life, well, for me, Jesus got lumped in with the magicians and I lost respect for miracles. So with the lure of friends playing in the park on Sunday mornings and nothing to hold me at Sunday school, it was a one way current, and I sadly remember running down the street arguing back at my mother that I was no longer going to church. Church was her refuge. My dad never attended. World War Two closed the book on any faith in a deity that he might have had.
From those I have talked too, it seems an atheist period is almost essential before one can renew faith. Well, I think it has something to do with the death of the false god that, religions, parents and society feed us as children. I was definitely raised on a version of the sky god. The large bearded mean man who sits up in the clouds waiting for us to screw up so that he can hit us with his massive bat! By the way, I believe that the bad reputation of the monotheistic God has been fashioned in part by 1500 years teaching the Greek classics in Western culture. All the bad behavior of those deities have been superimposed onto Yahweh, God, Allah; which especially suited the brutal mentality of the oppressed male psyche and the oppressors, until some modicum of freedom was attained through the twentieth century. I know there is some wisdom in the Greek classics, but there is also this other influence.
One of the clinchers for me was everything is forgiven because Jesus died on the cross for our sins. Then what is the point of carrying on in this world of suffering and pain if it is all taken care of? I might as well leave now and go straight to the glorious afterlife. Something about that didn’t ring true for me as a 19 year old. Maybe that is because I had only read two and a half books by the time I was twenty. The half was a science fiction story called, The Day of The Trifids, which was for examinations at the end of my school days. The first complete book was a Time Life volume on Matter. This book showed me how everything I could see was made of atomic particles: atoms, electrons, protons, nuclei, etc. Everything ‘solid’ was in fact an electromagnetic fiction because these particles were just pockets of electrical energy. Despite this, we can’t walk through matter because these little particles are dashing about at the speed of light, so there are always masses of these little electric shocks in the way. And another thing, if you could stop this whole thing and put all the atoms side by side, most of what we call ‘solid’ is in fact space! You could fit all the so-called ‘solid’ of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London, or the Washington monument into a little finger! I spent weeks jumping up and down on floors wondering why I didn’t go through them!
At that time I rarely went to a library I regret to say. My interest had been piqued by the idea of psychology, which had such a low profile back then. To the working class English of that day, you had to be certifiably nuts to be associated with it. I tried to read one psychological book, the cover attracted me, but it just seemed like gobbeldy-gook to me. I wasn’t very discerning back then. Then I read my second book, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. I can’t remember how it came into my hands, maybe a jumble sale at my Mum’s church. I thought it was another book on psychology, but it was a kind of Christian book. Oddly enough, when I had finished it, I knew I believed in God. What kind of God, I don’t know? Just that I felt a connection inside to something mysterious and powerful in the universe, and that actually it was always with me and I now called it God. However, what I felt had nothing to do with religion, saints, prophets or any other supports. So unlike some, I’m glad to say, I didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I didn’t tell anyone about this, it was my secret. And it wasn’t a big part of my life, just something that was ‘there.’ I find it odd now that I didn’t act on this new awareness, I guess I didn’t know where to turn. I mean, if you really say to yourself, I believe in the existence of a God, doesn’t that have huge consequences for the way you view life? Like, perhaps I should find out a little more about It? (I now think there should be a warning on all religious buildings like the ones on cigarette packs: The opinions, words and behavior expressed in this establishment and by its members, may not be those of the deity they claim to represent or worship!)

Tags: religion losing faith sky god

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #4. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

We left the kitchen and entered Bawa’s room, where he said something in his bird-like high pitched voice and the translator echoed that, “If anyone has something on their heart, they should get it off.” I took that to mean, if you have a question, please ask. For the next two hours, people asked questions from, “How do I cure my back pain” to “who is God?”
The questions were translated into Tamil for Bawa and in those moments I thought about how I would answer the questions – after all we all have our load of worldly and professional experience and knowledge that we can bring to the table. Well, when I heard Bawa’s answers, I felt eclipsed, you might say. Later, Bawa gave an example for something else that I think speaks to how I felt after that session. Imagine spending your whole life illuminated only by the light of the full moon. Then, one day, unexpectedly, something stirs on the far horizon. You look, something’s emerging there, then the sun rises. That’s sort of how I experienced the depth and perspective of this man’s knowledge. Ah, I thought, but a man can know a lot of stuff and still not be true to it himself. Even so, I had to admit that there were some real gems of ideas in those answers.
One man asked, “How should God and politics come together in the public arena?”
Bawa answered, “In the name of God, the most merciful, most compassionate. God is a power. It pervades everything, everywhere. It is mingled within our bodies and souls. Is there anything like the Father and Mother who is God, anything like Him on this earth? The One mingled within the love within us since the eternal beginning. The One who is the food of love, the happiness of Grace. As friend and relative of love, this God who is within us, and rules from the center of our hearts, where can we find an equal to Him? Where can we find something similar to God who is the Mother of our souls? He is the lucidity of Wisdom?”
At this point the questioner, believing that Bawa had misunderstood the question, tried to jump in, but Bawa lifted his hand gently and continued. “This flower that radiates the Grace of divine wisdom has no form and is uncreated and yet exists everywhere. Is there any such thing as this on this earth? He who performs His duty knowing the mind of all the creations, the great effulgence that existed before, now and forever. He who is the form of kindness and generosity within Grace, he who is the form beyond form of patience and tolerance within forbearance, is there any such One in the universe? He is compassion, perfection, happiness, the open space. He is beyond all imagination and spectacle. He is the fruit of the heart and contained within as truth within truth, as the soul within the soul, as wisdom within wisdom. He resplends as the grace within grace, as the grace shining everywhere, as the radiant flame which becomes the Noor ( the resplendent divine light). And that formless ‘Thing’ which becomes God is the thing that is God. That which exists as love within love - that is my Father. That is God. And everything else, my brother, is politics.”
The actual description went on for about fifteen minutes, the man raising his hand from time to time in an attempt to get Bawa back to the question. I’ll have to edit some of his answers so as not to create a work the size of the phone book.
A woman asked about her relationship with her husband. It was a bit of a muddled ranting and I’m not sure what she really wanted, but Bawa advised her against advising her husband immediately on his arrival home. He told her when he arrives home tie him up with love. Make him tea and give him his favorite magazine, or whatever. Later, he said, in bed, when he’s exhausted from his monkey behavior, you can advise him. He called it the pillow mantra.
Someone said that his whole life seemed out of control, getting spun around by the world. Bawa answered, “There are twelve openings in the body. Nine openings are: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, one mouth, and the two below the waist. There are three closed: the navel, the eye of wisdom in the middle of the forehead and the throne of God on the top of the head. The nine open ones spin us around in the world. They are the nine planets that influence our life. Have you studied them?” The person shook his head, unsure. Bawa continued, “Each one must be studied. Understand how they influence your mind and desire, how they lead you into trouble, the mischief that enters through the ears. This tongue saying the most awful things never feeling the pain of the words. The looks you send out and the illusions that come into the eyes. Each opening must be understood and you must know how it impacts you. When they have been understood and controlled, the eye of wisdom will open. Then your life will be lived through wisdom. Then you will attain peace.”
“How can I do this?”
“You must study with one who knows for twelve years, one year for each opening.”
There were also very personal questions like, “should we have another child?” Or, “I’m thinking of buying a house.” I wondered if Bawa has any advice for me? I thought he’d say to this person, don’t be foolish, think for yourself, but instead he went so far as to tell the person in which area he should look for the house. Another person, asked about a health problem. Bawa asked, whether this individual had seen a doctor and followed the advice? It turned out that she had seen a doctor but hadn’t followed the advice. Bawa advised her to follow it and informed her that her problem was in the stomach area.
He was also very unflattering about religion, even quoting Carl Marx’s statement that religion was the opiate of the masses. That was a surprise. As far as I could understand, he was of the opinion that religion actually hindered spiritual experience; now that I could go with. And yet he was clearly a religious man. His brief outline about God was not the way god was presented to me growing up. That god was more of a vengeful thing, waiting in hiding behind a cloud ready to hit you with a cricket bat if you did anything wrong! This, of course, was completely opposite to the way I understood Jesus, but it fit in perfectly with the way some of our school teachers beat or hit us. I used to wonder, if Jesus said love your enemies, how come the teachers hit the children, were we worse than enemies?
Bawa began his answers with various versions of, “In the name of God, the most merciful, beneficent and compassionate.” And also addressed his students as, “Precious jeweled lights of my eyes.” His Sri Lankan students had been with him for over twenty years.

Tags: wisdom memoir, meaning of life, why was I born?

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #3. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

The next morning we went to the Fellowship house.
There were two kitchens. The first floor kitchen, which was the public or communal kitchen sat just off a large meeting room, and there was the second floor kitchen. This was a little more private, although very little in this house appeared private. It was set aside primarily for the Sri Lankans that traveled with Bawa or visited, and other permanent house residents.
Judging from my friend’s relationship with those in the kitchen that morning, he was well known to them already. They all knew his life story and I had the feeling mine was about to go public also.
“Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“One older sister and a twin sister.” Having a twin sister always seems to excite people, I’ll never know why.
“Are the sisters with me? Do they live in the States? And your parents?” Which means: are they alive? Yes, both were alive at that time. Yes, and they’re well.
“How do they feel about you being 29 years old and not yet married? You’re not married are you?” Phew!
Needless to say, most of the people in the second floor kitchen that morning were older Sri Lankan women all dressed in Saris. They had various characters: a rotund, kind of the-heart-and-soul-of-the-earth type. A delicate quiet person, who continued cooking without involving herself in the discussion; although I knew she had her antenna up and didn’t really need to get any further information. From her corner of the kitchen came the hiss and crackle of a sizzling frying pan as she dropped in finely chopped onions and seed spices, sending pungent jabs of cumin and pepper into our nostrils. Another lady busied herself, occasionally interjecting questions to retrieve a missed detail. My friend served as a buffer to all this, knowing I enjoyed it, being familiar with the idiosyncrasies of Asians, having grown up in England. They also had me cutting vegetables just the way they wanted them. Seems they were quite attached to their own recipes, which they prepared for the midday meal. Rice was shared, but there were many other dishes. An okra curry here, some dahl over there, and in this pot? “Just some vegetables,” curried of course. The ladies weren’t very good at explaining the curry cooking process. Or were they trying to keep trade secrets? Unknown to me at that time, I would hang around with them later and learn to cook some of their dishes and incorporate them into my diet. A five-year apprenticeship at a Rolls Royce company learning to use all the tools and machines, had taught me how to watch a skilled person work and see the subtleties of actions needed to complete a process.
They’d all been to London and some had relatives or children living there. Within half an hour, I was being introduced as London Tony. That name would stick for years to come even though they probably visited London more than me. Having hailed from the rural West Country of England I even had a little distaste for large cities at that time.
Occasionally one of the husbands came into the kitchen, they were both physicians. Both men translated for Bawa and were also his dedicated students. Everyone offered food and drink as soon as they had been introduced, seemed like a cultural habit. I accepted tea and drank it without milk or sugar. This was seen by the Sri Lankans as equivalent to betraying the Queen! They shared the standard English way with milk and sugar, doubling up on the sugar.
All of a sudden my friend announced that Bawa was about to speak and we should go to his room. I wasn’t sure if he had left the room and come back, but somehow he knew and used the excuse to leave the cutting of vegetables motioning me to follow him.
On the landing people filed into Bawa’s room. He sat lotus position on his bed with a blanket over his legs. A microphone was positioned in front of him, and one of the doctors settled down beside the bed in front of another mic. The room filled up quickly and like the good student that I was (I left school legally at 15 ½ years old) I settled in as far to the back as I could. There was some rivalry for the space near the bed.
I watched Bawa like a hawk, looking for any sign of a chink in the armor. Rumors abounded in those days about gurus not following their own wise words. Bawa looked at no one in particular, appearing to be in a contemplative mood as if listening to some far-off sound. The room filled with cross-legged people. When I thought no one else could possibly get in, people would step carefully between the seated and lower themselves, settling like birds in a nest. It was clear these people were very professional at this; I wouldn’t have had the nerve.
Bawa said something in his bird-like high pitched voice and the translator echoed that, “If anyone has something on their heart, they should get it off.” I took that to mean, if you have a question, please ask. For the next two hours, people asked questions from, “How do I cure my back pain” to “who is God?”

Tags: wisdom memoir, meaning of life, why was I born?

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #2. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.
In the last entry I just met Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and he served me some food.
We moved with others to an outside second floor porch. I was about to tuck into my soup when my friend told me to wait. We left the food and went into Bawa’s room, where he was about to speak. There was no furniture in the room so everyone sat cross-legged on the carpet. I was not good at this, being more used to a barstool. I could see that some were real pros, going for what’s called the full lotus position where you put the top of your foot on top of the opposite thigh. The room was only about 15 x 20 feet, but held a lot of people sitting this way. Not a square foot of carpet was exposed after a few minutes. The crowd spilled out onto the landing and down the stairs into a large meeting room.
Bawa sat lotus position on a small bed with no back support. Someone set up a microphone near him and he coughed into action. From the acoustic I could tell there were loudspeakers placed about the building. His voice was a little shrill at first. He sounded bird-like to me, speaking in his Asian tongue that at times changed tempo sounding like a tabla (Indian hand drum). Nearby I saw a senior Asian male and a thirtyish American female having some light-hearted banter, the man finally sitting on the floor by the bed and quite naturally, I thought, began an instantaneous translation into English. Sometimes he paused to hear the complete thought, sometimes giving us the English, word for word. What followed appeared to be a benediction lasting about 15 minutes. Bawa called on God to help us in many different ways. I must admit I tuned out after a few minutes because there were just too many God hurdles for me. What God did he worship? Who or what does he mean anyway? Will this become clear? Do I care?
I’m used to accents, but I thought this could be a strain for some. The bird-like voice with an incredible strength of its own, charging ahead as the translator followed close behind with a fairly thick Asian-English accent. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish ‘fate’ from ‘faith’ and the ‘whales’ of illusion, which I figured meant ‘veils.’ Although Bawa said a lot in 15 minutes, repetitions of the same thought were thrown around in two or three different ways, indicative of an oral tradition. So it was clear what was being said even if the odd word didn’t fit. He spoke about food and how we should feel the hunger of those less fortunate than ourselves and thereby feed them. I noticed there was no sign that he was about to partake of the meal he had served.
Out on the porch we ate our food. My friend introduced me to those he knew. Some, who had only arrived four or five weeks earlier, seemed very acclimatized to the surroundings. They were the Californians who were apparently familiar with the ashram scene. They were polite and I sensed tolerated my need to talk about how I’d just come up from Central America. Most of them were fairly traveled, but that was not the reason for their disinterest. The Guru and what was happening at the ashram was the real thing on everyone’s mind. It seemed all encompassing, with Bawa being the center of everyone’s attention. My ego was very aware of not receiving much curiosity. This was not new to me, when I returned from my first six-month hitchhike around Europe in 1972, I was amazed how disinterested my friends were in even little bits of the adventure. Over the years I’ve found those most interested in travel stories are other travelers!
Bawa’s presence and aspects of the philosophy he’d talked about earlier that day overshadowed all other topics of conversation. I only paid minor attention to this, not fully grasping what was being discussed. There were a lot of foreign buzz-words being thrown about. I figured I’d be gone soon, so I just enjoyed the friendly ambience, spiced with a charge of anticipation.
Many used a greeting in a foreign language that I didn’t understand. Whenever someone laid it on me, I would rather mischievously invent a gobbledygook response of my own. There was a specific reply the initiated used, but I couldn’t catch the pronunciation. Occasionally someone would make eye contact with me and putting their hand on their heart, which I had seen Bawa do, they addressed me, I thought, as Andrew. I replied, “Actually no, I’m Tony.” It was quite a while before I realized they were saying, ‘Anbu,’ which means ‘love to you’ in Tamil.
The place seemed harmless enough. I thought my friend wouldn’t get into too much trouble there. I’d noticed a bevy of good-looking ladies. A small percentage of the Western ‘enthusiasts’ were dressed in a mishmash of Eastern clothing, but there didn’t seem to be any extreme cultural trips going on.
Many strange pictures of various sizes adorned the walls, evidently, painted by Bawa. Some contained simply drawn animals, but absent of people. Some had lines of Eastern letters and words. They were all over-the-top when it came to color, and yet somehow they worked. It turned out they were some kind of teaching illustrations, representing some of Bawa’s philosophy. One was called ‘The Rocky Mountain of the Heart.’ Another: ‘Four Steps to Pure Faith.’ One was a kind of family tree of prophets and saints. I thought they all had a kind humor to them, not really heavy at all. And thank God, no Jesus figures on a cross with blood dripping from hands and feet. I was still suffering idol and icon lag from the heavy religious artifacts south of the border in Mexico and Guatemala.
My friend’s morning routine was to help the Sri Lankan ladies, who traveled with Bawa, prepare food for the midday meal, and it was likely that Bawa would give a talk or answer questions. So the next day I thought I’d join him.

Tags: meaning of life, wisdom stories, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Tony Buck,, remarkable man,

Podcast

Welcome to the Map of a Human Being Blog & Podcast #1. Covering the first six months of my encounter with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.
I arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1980 at the age of 29. I was returning home to England following an overland trip to Cape Horn that ended prematurely in Honduras after 5 months on the road. The trip was cut short by the regional military conflicts of that time, and by my having under-estimated my travel costs.
I stayed with a friend who moved to Philly a few months earlier from a Gurdjieff (Greco-Armenian philosopher) inspired spiritual community. I couldn’t imagine what had brought him here, as he was very committed to that place. He told me he had met a Remarkable Man, a Gurdjieff phrase meaning someone with exceptional wisdom. So I decided to check him out and thought I would probably book an airplane ride back to England about a week later.
My friend’s apartment was on a street of terraced houses, called row-homes in Philly. Within a few blocks the architecture and landscape changed to mansion-style houses, featuring gardens and driveways, leading to old carriage houses many of which were converted to modern garages. Many of the homes were in need of repair. Some were used as religious institutions like the Fellowship, as it was known, where people visited and lived with the Remarkable Man. An historical sign boasted that the area was developed in 1895 to attract merchants out of the center of Philly. But those were the glory days, now many of the houses were split into apartments, and like most of the houses I’d seen since Washington DC, they needed a paint job.
At the house, we removed our shoes and proceeded up a narrow staircase to a second floor, where we passed through a small kitchen, and joined a slow, chatty line in the hallway. Instead of air, the house was filled with curry odor. When the line moved around a corner, I got my first glimpse of what looked like an Indian Guru, or Bawa as everyone referred to him. Bawa meant father in Tamil, which was the southern Indian language he spoke. He turned out to be from Sri Lanka. (Formerly the island of Ceylon off the south coast of India, also called the island of Serendip for years before that.)
Sitting cross-legged in an armchair, on the landing, Bawa poured soup that he scooped from a large five gallon stainless steel pot into people’s ceramic bowls using a wooden handled ladle connected to half a coconut shell. He was a small man with a white beard cut like a crescent moon around his chin from ear to ear, whiskers shaved away from his mouth and upper lip. I, on the other hand, sported a full bushy beard, preferring not to bother shaving, especially when traveling.
His face was young, very clear, brown skinned, not wrinkled or blemished in any way. However, I understood at that time that he was at least sixty years old. He wore a light Indian style loose cotton shirt and the traditional sarong or tube of cloth wrapped around his waist and legs.
Over a railing I could see a grand staircase with a dusty chandelier hanging above it. People sat and stood about. We’d snuck up some back stairs. As we approached Bawa, I noticed he constantly motioned or asked people to put their bowls where he could fill them. When it came to my turn, I took a bowl from the stack near him, putting it where he told the other’s to put it. I thought, ‘give yourself a break, pal, put in the curried soup, and I for one won’t give you a hard time, and you can finish off serving the two hundred or so people.’ He had little wiry arms with not much muscle on them. In fact his flesh was pulled tightly over all parts of his body that were visible, there was no spare flesh. And as he leaned forward I could see white chest hairs under his shirt. That surprised me because I thought he was younger!
As soon as my bowl was in place, without looking up, he began stirring the pot a little more than I thought it needed. Then he put a ladle of the soup mixture into my bowl. Not wishing to delay him I straightened my back to go, but again without looking up, he motioned with the ladle for me to put my bowl back where it had been with an audible negative, “Uh, uh!” So I did.
He stirred the pot again, putting a third of a ladle into my bowl. Once again I began straightening up but that same, “Uh, uh! Hold it.” So this time I kept my bowl there. I was wondering where this was going because my bowl was now completely full. Then, he tipped the ladle allowing only one drop to fall. This time I waited. Then he looked up for the first time sporting a grin from ear to ear. I smiled back saying, “You’re all right pal, you’re all right.” He kept grinning and nodded as I moved away. I was tickled. At least he appeared to have a sense of humor. I mentioned the interaction to my friend and he said it had significance, ‘because nothing a person like Bawa does is done casually.’ I didn’t much care about it either way. I just had in my mind to check this guy out in case he was misleading my friend.

Tags: meaning of life, wisdom stories, Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Tony Buck