A Word to the Wise: Samsara

Samsara

Oh! I watch this wonderful game in a lonely park.
A millionaire strikes a small ball with his iron club
And it flies to infinity, 
He goes behind that happily.
The poor sinner caddy too crawls towards him
with a heavy bag that [is] full of debts on his oblique shoulder[s].

--Nimal Dunuhinga

We will discuss the implications of this poem and the following in our fifth class on May 6th, at Shiva Mandir. If you would like to take part and receive the class materials, as well as access to our class forum,  please let us know by registering for this class at the following link: http://www.vedicstudies.org/a-word-to-the-wise.html — at Shiva Mandir Center for Vedic Studies.

Excerpt from The Turning Seasons of Hell: 

I was an actor on Shakespeare’s stage, and there composed the best of his lines

I was a poet in France and walked across the Alps

I was a singer in Milan, where my reputation was ruined

I was a painter on my back daubing plaster and bright scenes on chapel ceilings day and night

I was a sculptor in stone and clay, making hands and feet for the master

I signed the documents to set this country free

I fought alongside Sitting Bull and killed Custer’s men,

I slept under a tree, and out in the open field,
I contemplated, I practiced,
I slept sitting up, I slept in cemetaries,
I laid down and stayed wherever I happened to be,
I starved my body and my mind and lived on mud and insects,
I ate everything at once, I stopped eating at 5:00 every day
I mastered the sciences of language, logic and philosophy, of medicine and of arts

I was a soldier in a war of the most horrific demise,

a sailor who drowned before the sharks circled in,

a seer who touched the face of the sun,

a prophet, a scoundrel, a rebel and a rat.

A bubble, a lightning flash, a grand revelation, a disco ball, a star and a starship sailing through galaxies, the moon in the water, a pure purple, red, then white, then black, then white, then red, nothing.

a reflection, a reflection, an emanation, an emanation.

-By Caroline Kroll

Let's Get Started

Science endeavors to be objective, but poets have recognized the universality of consciousness through their own subjective awareness. Below follows one example from the poem "Tintern Abbey" which was written by the poet William Wordsworth:

“… and I have felt 

a presence that disturbs me with the joy

of elevated thought; a sense sublime

of something far more deeply interfused,

whose dwelling is in the light of setting sun,

and around oceans and the living air,

and the blue sky, and the mind of man:

a motion and a spirit, that impels

all thinking things, all objects of all thought,

and rolls through all things.”

A Dip into Consciousness

picture resource: http://maharishi-programmes.globalgoodnews.com/vedic-astrology/research.html (accessed July 1, 2012)

Modern science has not as of yet declared consciousness as the basis of creation, but reflect on these words by renowned British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington:

“All through physical worlds runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness. Here is a hint of aspects deep within the world of physics, and yet unattainable by the methods of physics.


And, moreover, we have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has regained from nature that which the mind put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have succeeded in reconstructing that creature that made the footprints. And lo! It is our own.”


– Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington