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?