Color

I'm painting the inside of the front entrance to the house now.

Life and Death

Journey to Mythaca being gone, today I pulled out my other piece of work, the Baba book. Here's the excerpt I worked on. It's from Search of Self, his autobiography. The text is unchanged from the carbon copy of the typewritten mansuscript I have. I've included my own notes in brackets between the lines.

Life and Death

Shiva is the controller of the principle of ‘death’, therefore, it is said that ‘Death’ has to come to a grain before ‘Life’ can spring forth. Death stands for Shiva, the positive. Lord Jesus said, ‘Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it cannot bring forth fruit.’

[Read "seed" for grain. I think he used the word grain to parallel the quote from the Bible. Shiva is the considered positive principle in all Tantra and is associated with death.]

‘Life’ is the fruit of the combination of that supreme polarity in nature, symbolized by the combination of Shiva and Shakti,
(-ve, power) in Hindu theology.

[Baba consistently uses "-ve" for negative and "+ve" for positive. He is saying that life is the product of the ultimate polarities, nature (Shakti/power) and spirit (Shiva/death)]

Thus Shiva has to merge in Shakti, positive merge with the negative; male in female in consummation of that crucial ‘death’ from which ‘life’ springs. Shiva is the ‘field’, Shakti is the ‘flux’.

[As above, so below. The positive merges with the negative in heaven as it does on earth.]

The transmutation of the Absolute (Shiva) into Power (Shakti) is manifest as the process, the flow, of Life. The course of a life is a continuum of ceaseless death; ceaseless merger of polarity. Ceaseless death leading to ceaseless creation. ‘Except one be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” John 3:3.

[Whew. He's explaining all of creation in these few sentences.]

One cannot conceive of this continuous, ceaseless process of creation to continue without the ability to do so.

[I still find this line confusing. It seems like something may have been left out by the previous typist, or perhaps he or she couldn't read Baba's elegant Victorian script. Or maybe it means what it seems to say, that we can only understand the ceaseless process of creation because we ourselves have the power to create.]

Similarly, one cannot conceive of ‘ability’ without an enabling ‘power’.

[Baba studied physics in Calcutta during a very exciting period of growth in the field. He kept up with the field until he died in 1987.]

Nature is that Power, the opposite Polarity of the Absolute. Nature, after all, is a polarity, the opposite polarity of the ‘Absolute Polarity’. Reality is at the Absolute end, therefore unreality, or maya, is bound to be at the ‘Nature’ end.

[He drew a diagram to explain this. At its center it had a vertical continuum with the words "consciousness " at the top and "matter" at the bottom. Sometimes he labeled the poles spirit and nature, other times Shiva and Shakti, or brahman and atman. What is real is at the top, what is mayic (illusion) is at the bottom. Most frequently he just drew the symbol for OM at the top and the symbol for an atom at the bottom, or wrote -ve at the bottom and +ve at the top.]

Nature, or power, is mayic. Indeed, power is deluding and absolute power is deluding absolutely; sometimes self-deluding.

[Astute connection, yes?

Then he goes back to teaching yoga:]

Thought is, also, a ‘power’ of the mind. And ‘power’ or ‘nature’ is a negative character, as already proved. Thought is a negative aspect of mind. The positive mind is without mayic or phenomenal thoughts, called objectivisation.

[The positive mind doesn't separate subject and object.]

Thought is the logic of our ‘mind’ (-ve) reduced to a system. No wonder I consider system-mongering as negative. It involves the ‘power’ to follow the rules of the system or throw them away.

[Ganesh Baba generally separated himself from any group or person who promoted a fixed system of how things work or the way to do things. His own ideas continually evolved. He never wanted followers and did his best to scare most of us away.]

It is in throwing them (thoughts) away, that the mind acts positively. Intuition is a positive aspect of mind and in intuitive meditation, or in transcendental trance (samadhi) mind assumes its positive aspect by becoming devoid of negative aspects, i.e., thought.

[This is the yoga teaching.]

Nature is negative, the capacity to control nature, that is the positive aspect of man.

[He doesn't assign a value to the words positive and negative.]

But ‘thought’ is no mechanical product of the cerebral mechanism. It is the ‘power’ of mind. A machine can be built to play chess; but it cannot chuckle over an opponent’s mistake, or regret its own. What would our lives be like without emotion? An emotion is an intensely moving ‘thought’— ‘emotion’ is an intense motion in ‘mind’.

[This is interesting, isn't it? He sees mind as a field.]

The polarity of sex will not be started without emotion. And how long would the race survive without sex? It is the power of mind that sustains the polarity of sex and thus, perpetuates the process of progenation in the race.

[I read this over and over, and say, wow, aren't these wonderful connections he makes?]

Love is a product of that polarity. It is the effect of the intense emotional attraction of opposite poles of ‘sex’ (male and female) and is a biological necessity.

[Makes sense to me.]

God, indeed, is a higher form of ‘distilled’ and refined ‘devotion,’ a psychobiological necessity; which is the holy and pure expression of ideal ‘love’, i.e. single-pointed devotion to an ‘ideal, in the shape of ‘God’. (Self 94)

[Baba almost always brings these short pieces back to God in the end.]

Jai Ganesh.

It's gone!

Look closely and you'll see the creatures of Mythaca.

It took a long, hard push at the end, but I sent my manuscript off to WingSpan Press this week. Kate, who's been doing the editing, and Josephine, the illustrator, and I worked several days straight to meet my self-imposed deadline. It was fun doing the project together.

Josephine's illustration are spectacular. I hope the book is worthy of them! It should come out sometime in the fall, though I'm not sure when.