Hermeneutics of the Lotus
The Fusion of Theories of Consciousness and Deity Conceptions
in
Indian Thought
A Brief Commentary
on Opening Lines of the
Yogini Hrdaya, The Heart of the Yogini
Within an Autobiographical and Philosophical Context
Illustrated
Part 1
The glowing centre of the lotus is as the fire of consciousness animating the human form, its petals akin to the myriad layers of the mind. The fire at the heart of cosmos and the flame of awareness that is the self merge in the lotus. O wonder of wonders, eternity in an instant of time, infinity in a grain of sand.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
An account of my contemplative explorations, under the inspiration of Indian and Indian inspired thought, complemented by other ideas, of my own consciousness as reflecting human consciousness in general, and of the Hindu text the Yogini Hrdaya, The Heart of the Yogini, as exemplifying the correlation of theories of consciousness and deity conceptions in Indian thought and bodies of thought it has influenced. The symbolism of the lotus is the unifying motif of the two parts of the essay.
My Encounter with Indian and Indian Inspired Philosophies and Spiritualities trhrough the Story of the Buddha
I was sixteen. I had just completed secondary school, the stage before tertiary education in my country, Nigeria. I was like soft and fertile earth, awaiting planting and tending by the right hands, but I did not know then that I was about to enter a transformative gateway to the rest of my life, a transition in which the universe as I knew it was going to be be reconfigured in terms of seismic reworkings within myself.
In that tender and ignorant state, I stumbled on Charles Connell's World Famous Rebels and World Famous Exiles in my family's library. I was deeply moved by the story, in World Famous Rebels, of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha.
Connell's simple but engaging narrative brought alive for me the story of the Indian prince who, shocked by the transience of human life represented by illness, old age and death, and dissatisfied with existing explanations represented by the religious and philosophical wealth of his country, abandoned family and society, withdrawing into the forest to seek the ultimate meaning of existence.
By exploring relationships between the human mind and the cosmos through meditation, a technique of studying the mind by using the mind in exploring itself and the universe, he sought answers that made adequate sense to him, knowledge intimate to himself rather than views from external sources.
He thereby sought his own understanding through a technique likely already ancient in India in his time, an approach bypassing reliance on any source outside one's own mind for understanding the meaning and ultimate source of existence, a radically independent stance underlying much of Indian philosophy and spirituality and is one of India's greatest contributions to the world.
It is represented in its most fundamental and most pervasive form by Yoga, a philosophy and spirituality centred in the discipline of mind and body, leading ultimately to union between the individual mind and the mind at the heart of cosmos, one meaning of ''Yoga'' beung ''union'', between individual mind and cosmic mind.
The most foundational Yoga text describing this aspiration and its basic methods might be Patanjali's The Yoga Sutras, presenting methods of penetrating to the ultimate source of existence through the control of the mind, a vision and method hugely influential in various forms across the world .
Inspired by the story of the Buddha, I resolved to emulate him. I would explore my own mind, relying on no one else, on no sources outside the penetrating insight of which the mind is capable.
After years of effort, without arriving at his goal, the Buddha, his body worn out by desperate asceticism, chose to keep himself alive by eating moderately. He then sat under a bodhi tree, resolved that he would not rise from that location until he had reached enlightenment on the answers he sought. The image of the Buddha seated in meditation under a tree has long become globally iconic.
Seated at the open space at the back of our house in Tamandu Barracks, Apapa, Lagos, my legs crossed in the lotus posture of Yoga globally famous as as a means of focusing the body and thereby influencing the mind, a posture named after the lotus, a central Indian symbol of the unfolding of the mind and the universe to their essence, their ultimate meaning, I resolved that I would not rise till, like the Buddha, I had reached enlightenment of the ultimate meaning of existence.
''On the third watch of that night'', as an account of the Buddha's story goes, he at last arrived at his destination. Travelling through the corridors of the mind, he entered at last into the awareness of the ultimate logic of existence and of how to live, a knowledge that may be shared, but can only be adequately understood through personal experience of that state of understanding into which the Buddhas had entered.
The summation of his understanding, his development and presentation of techniques to reach one's own experiential grasp of those ideas, and the building of a community of seekers out of those attracted to his vision, is the beginning of Buddhism.
Through the inspiration of a single man who might have written nothing, owned almost nothing, had no fixed home, lived as an itinerant mendicant, relying on alms for sustenance, wearing only the most basic of clothing, was born one of the most influential movements and body of ideas in history, shaping entire Asian civilizations across the centuries, penetrating beyond Asia to become iconic in large parts of the world till the present day.
A movement represented by diverse spiritualities and philosophies, by a universe of myriad cultural forms in visual and verbal art, educational institutions, publishing houses, in seas of scholarship, martial arts, sport, oceans of writing and more, all from the inspiration of one quintessential example of the culture of the hermit and the monk exemplifying what English historian Arnold Toynbee describes as the recurrent need to "withdraw from the business and pleasure of the moment in order to measure human potential against the human condition''.
I could not emulate the Buddha's resolve not to rise from his meditation until he had reached enlightenment. I did not even adequately understand the implications of such a resolution, as demonstrated by my rising from my meditation to enter the house later in the evening when my mother called me in for supper. But an unkillable seed had been planted, fed by other books in my family's library, particularly the first of the three volumes of In the Light of Truth by the German founder of the Grail Message, Abdrushin, a book that, through persistent invocation of the idea of a divine centre of awareness in the human being, compelled me to seek that centre by looking into myself with the eyes of my mind, developing my own approach to this ancient idea, evident from ancient India and other ancient cultures to the present.
Encounter with the Interior Inferno
In this fervent quest, I stumbled upon a powerful and mysterious force within myself, a force that consumed me with a hunger for ultimate knowledge of the kind sought by the Buddha and other seekers of ultimate understanding through experiential knowledge.
This force is a consuming flame threatening to absorb all other aspects of my existence into itself the way an inferno absorbs all elements into its dynamic nature, leaving the unassimilable as ashes, a ravenous beast that has no interest in anything, biological, social or material, no interest in the basic structures of human existence, except the fulfillment of its own hunger.
This fulfillment is a process often quietly ecstatic as the cognitive flows are ongoing. It may be trance like as new ideas emerge. It opens one into unanticipated idea constellations as one goes about the daily business of living, the self active in the daily, everyday universe, while the conscious and subconscious minds seamlessly dialogue in working out new idea constellations at times so precise it seems as if an affiliate consciousness is dictating them to one's mind.
Feeding this hunger has led me to suspension from sensitivity to the passing of time, even for years-of what meaning are the rising and setting of the sun, the accumulation of planetary motion around the solar centre as the body ages and things come and go, in the face of the infinity of the knowable? Why should the fish seek to rise from the ocean depths while the worlds upon worlds in those depths constantly unfold before him?
I became almost unrecognizable to people around me. An average youth without any particular interest in learning beyond reading comics, becoming a dedicated, even fanatical bibliophile, yet insisting he did not want to continue with schooling, absconding from the university in the various times he had been persuaded to start an academic program, orientations leading to dismay for my family and confusion for others.
As a middle class youth, a son of university graduates, an accountant and a school teacher, schooling was seen as imperative for sociation. Yet, the imperious power of the force that gripped me flung me outside such considerations.
I had resolved, under the influence of the philosophies reshaping my inner world and the spiritual practices structuring my understanding of reality, that the globally dominant educational system was divorced from the need to understand the ultimate meaning of existence. I came to understand human life as a journey from an unknown origin to an unknown destination. Education as conventionally pursued in that context was more a manner of coming to terms with the immediacies of the journey than about understanding the rationale of that journey.
All learning activities, valid as they might be, needed to be complementary to this ultimate goal. Since the educational system prioritised activities of secondary value represented by the business of survival in the world, reinforcing an orientation of humans as lost people who chose to proceed blindly on a journey the rationale of which is unknown to them, I resolved I needed to develop a learning system through which I would pursue that ultimate goal in dialogue with other secondary cognitive necessities.
I read as widely as I could towards that end, marshalling and practising various mystical systems, approaches to the unity of self with or perception of the essence of existence. I did this in relation to study in other disciplines in our broad ranging family library and books I could acquire.
I eventually got a conventional, university education but have remained haunted by the split between my aspirations, my cognitive and creative individuality and efforts to belong within the globally dominant educational system as a cognitivist, a person dedicated to the quest for knowledge, ''cognitivist'' being a term I have coined as richer than ''intellectual'' in summing up the cognitive identity I aspire to, since I understand the intellect alone as unable to deliver the richest creativity, even in intellectual work, implying that a synergy of diverse ways of engaging the world, from the sensory, to the emotional, the intuitive to the intellectual, is vital for maximising human creativity, even in work where the intellect is ultimately dominant.
The Perennial Fascination of Indian and Indian Inspired Philosophies and Spiritualities
In this journey of understanding I am still on decades after its commencement, my aspirations continue to constellate around the world revealed through silence, sinking inward from the universe of diverse knowledges into that inward eloquence of self, the foundation, the ground of personal existence, the awareness of oneself as a mouth of knowledge that enables all other awareness,growing in understanding of self as it feeds on that which is different from the self.
Within this context, a quality I deeply admire about Indian thought, the cultural form which initiated my journey on this path, is its fusion of the abstraction represented by ideas of consciousness with images of deities.
The existence of consciousness is evident to the person possessing it and to other people who are also conscious. When consciousness is understood, not simply as the fact of being aware in a general sense, but of being aware of oneself, as a distinctive entity, different from the rest of existence, one is at the fundamental reality of human existence, since self awareness is at the root of all human social, cultural and technological development.
Exploring one's sense of self is richly rewarding, from the sense of "I'', that knot of awareness around which all other perceptions constellate, to the myriad ideas and orientations constituting how one sees oneself and the universe in relation to oneself.
Indian philosopher Ramana Maharshi urges students of the mind to focus on the sense of self, specifically on the core of awareness of oneself as a distinctive entity, stating that consistent concentration on that core of self consciousness opens out eventually into an appreciation of the larger, cosmic consciousness underlying the individual sense of self, an experience Paul Brunton describes himself as entering into in his account of his relationship with Maharshi in A Search in Secret India.
That focus on the sense of self is my favorite meditation although I'm yet to experience that expansion into cosmic consciousness described by Maharshi and Brunton.
I also admire deity images and have used and to some degree still use them in my spiritual practice but my central practice is the practice of mental relaxation as ideas come and go, of concentration on the sense of self awareness and of prayer within that contemplation, inspired by the idea of the sense of self awareness as an expression of an ultimate, cosmic identity I am united with even though I am not aware of that unity.
I am particularly inspired by the conjunction of conceptions of consciousness and deity images in relation to the Hindu Goddess Tripurasundari and the Hindu God Śiva on account of the imaginative dynamism and ideational scope of those images.
They integrate a broad range of human experience, presented in terms of visual and verbal pictures of the deities and their associated narratives. They conjoin all the senses-sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Their range of reference runs from the human body as a cosmic symbol to geometric forms as cosmological structures, to sounds, hand gestures, architecture, sculpture and other forms of visual art projecting the nature of the deities as individual entities as well as embodiments of the cosmos.
One of the more striking demonstrations of this synergy of possibilities in Hindu sacred arts and thought is the book the Yogini Hrdaya, translated as Heart of the Yogini, celebrating Śakti, a feminine identity believed to pervade the cosmos, enabling existence and dynamism, an identity of which all feminine divine figures and perhaps human women as well, are an expression. The rest of this essay after the picture immediately below and the lines that explain it, is a commentary on some of the opening lines of this exquisite text.
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