“Don’t be so clever. I’ve never seen anyone think their way to heaven.”
–Deepak Chopra, from Chapter 14 of Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment.
This bit of dialogue, spoken to Gautama (the future Buddha) by one of his masters in Deepak Chopra’s imagined biography of the Buddha, slices right through the illusory web of human reasoning like a Zen master’s hand chop or kick, apparently unmasking philosophy as an empty human preoccupation. Yogananda similarly speaks of the limits of philosophy in Autobiography of a Yogi, and Eckhart Tolle devotes an entire chapter of The Power of Now to the assertion that “You are Not Your Mind,” with a sub-chapter called “Enlightenment: Rising Above Thought.” He goes further, saying that writing a book about spirituality is no substitute for becoming enlightened – it is the mind fooling itself. Rounding out the personality of Gautama’s early master, Chopra says, “The scriptures were his illusion. They led him to imagine that he was free just because he could describe freedom out of a book and think about it with his subtle mind.”
The message is that real Truth is above human thought. Thought is grounded in the “either-ors” and the “ands-or-buts” of our dualistic, illusory physical world. By contrast, Truth resides in the One-ness of God. Not surprisingly, Yogananda puts it best, saying in Chapter 49, “Truth is no theory, no speculative system of philosophy, no intellectual insight. Truth is exact correspondence with reality. For man, truth is unshakable knowledge of his real nature, his Self as soul. Jesus, by every act and word of his life proved that he knew the truth of his being—his source in God.”
So why am I bothering to write this blog? If the thoughts of these great masters, Chopra, Yogananda and Tolle, not to mention Jesus, can’t get to the Truth, then how can I? I don’t know. I do know that I am drawn to writing about spirituality like a moth to a flame. I am an unenlightened human being, but I am a spiritual seeker and writing helps me on my quest. Thought, reasoning and writing cannot arrive at the Truth but I believe they can help along the way. The great seventeenth-century French philosopher-scientist, Blaise Pascal, suddenly received a radical revelation of God and in today’s parlance, we would say that he was born again. But who read him after his conversion? His “Pensees,” the thoughts he wrote before his great encounter with God, are what we remember. Thoughts and great quotations can trigger a catharsis that elevates our minds to a higher place.
Even in the Hindu tradition, there are several paths to God: one is through devotion (Yogananda’s path) and another is through intellect. Devotion is most likely a direct reflection of Truth, whereas intellect is merely a means of perceiving it obliquely, as through a lens. Both are divine gifts of a very different nature. The paradox of writing about spirituality is that while it may never reveal Spirit directly, it may help prepare us to recognize it and receive it when we are ready.
Bird of Spirit 