A Blessing for a Sick World - The Visionary Contemplations of Crazy Horse

"I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become a circle again."

⁠— Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse, a Lakota chief and medicine man also known as Tȟašúŋke Witkó, played a pivotal role in the indigenous resistance against encroaching colonialist settlers during the nineteenth century. His efforts were intended to preserve the traditional way of life of the Lakota people of the Midwest.

While perhaps best known for his participation in battles across the Great Plains, the visions associated with Crazy Horse are also noteworthy, especially for their relevance to the present.

Among Crazy Horse's visions is one directly concerned with unity. This is the prophecy we contemplate here. It is said that Crazy Horse shared this vision with his fellow Lakota leader Sitting Bull during a pipe ceremony, a sacred ritual connecting physical and spiritual worlds.

A Blessing for a Sick World

Introduced as a blessing for a sick world, Crazy Horse envisions a future of misfortune. While such a description could be applied to any period of history, it is especially characteristic of our present circumstances under the synergistic tensions of climate change, pandemic, and racial injustice.

"Upon suffering beyond suffering, the Red Nation shall rise again and it shall be a blessing for a sick world."
In the context of a world in peril, plagued by disease, the need for blessings becomes ever more dire. With the prediction that the Red Nation shall rise again, Crazy Horse suggests that indigenous wisdom may offer an alternative to the distress that infects humanity. His contextualization further mentions a world longing for light.



"A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations. A world longing for light again."
These features characterize our present circumstances with exceptional precision. The ways of life inherited by us from whatever powers that be have not yielded the fruits promised to us. Our lives are largely dictated by stratification on various levels ranging from economic to ethnic, with each class and category set apart from the others. We live in the darkness of ignorance and yearn for illumination that will allow us to see clearly.

"I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole Earth will become a circle again."
Here Crazy Horse details his vision in images central to his indigenous identity. These references emphasize the interconnected nature of existence, with Seven Generations hearkening both backwards and forwards to the lineage from which one has emerged and for which one leaves one's trace through present deeds. The Sacred Tree of Life depicts diverse branches springing from the same trunk, with roots firmly planted in the Earth. Each of these references lends further depth to his vision.

"In that day there will be those among the Lakota who will carry knowledge and understanding of the unity among all living things, and the young white ones will come to those of my people and ask for this wisdom."

We find in this section of the prophecy an allusion to the healing power of well-intended intercultural exchange. The unimpeded transmission of wisdom between cultures offers exactly the psychological and spiritual medicine needed by the world, despite opposition by an especially vocal few. These inward remedies are necessary ingredients for paving the way toward resolving material illness in the world at large.

"I salute the light within your eyes where the whole universe dwells. For when you are at that center within you and I am at that place within me, we shall be as one."
Concluding his vision, Crazy Horse points directly to what appears to function as the inner source of unity between all. Only by first returning to the nature that resides within us are we then capable of genuinely connecting with others in the world beyond ourselves. To do so, we are asked to recognize the common strand that runs through us all, despite our superficial differences.

Visionary Contemplations

Given the divided nature of contemporary race relations, politics, class hierarchies, and other sources of social tension, Crazy Horse's vision of the future may appear to be a mere "pipe dream" without tangible correlates on the ground. However, its hopeful understanding of unity and interconnection may not be so far out of reach. The solution to our situation of separation is simple, but by no means easy.


Crazy Horse was killed through a fatal stab wound to his back, but more than a hundred years later, his vision for the future has not died. Much remains to be done and undone in the world in order for us to approach anything near his vision of unity. Yet as we can discern from his words, such unity may be found right within plurality itself. To be continued.

New Seeds of Contemplation - Thomas Merton on Communion, Solitude, and Contemplative Practice

New Seeds of Contemplation

“The more we are alone with God the more we are with one another, in darkness, yet a multitude.”
— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
In these times of isolation, while so many appear gripped by the panic of pandemic, the world may seem to grow dim. As an increasing number of people fall ill, more of us choose to quarantine, hoping to help slow the creeping spread of viral outbreak.

These times of isolation, while stressful or boredom-inducing, are also an opportunity to deepen our contemplative undertakings. We are not necessarily asked to shut others out, but perhaps to welcome them in ways that transcend physical presence. As Thomas Merton reflects in New Seeds of Contemplation, “I must look for my identity, somehow, not only in God but in other men. I will never be able to find myself if I isolate myself from the rest of mankind as if I were a different kind of being.” Perhaps in some sense, physical distance may open new routes of connection with each other.

Contemplative paths intersect in ways unknown to the mere meeting of bodies in space and time. Despite physical isolation for the sake of disease control, these contemplative paths remain open and connected, perhaps even leading onto previously unknown terrain.

Here, we briefly explore some of these byways through Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

The False Self

While ostensibly a Trappist monk and Catholic mystic, Thomas Merton's contemplative career was surprisingly varied, dipping into the realms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Sufism. Merton's primary source of intrigue seems to have been not what differentiated these contemplative approaches in a technical sense, but what each offered to the human experience in its depths and totality. It was this fascination with the human experience, largely its mystic varieties, that shaped Thomas Merton's contemplative path.

“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls.”

Indeed, for Merton, the art of transcending the boundaries of our otherwise myopic reality, limited by a sense of separated individuality fabricated from conditioning, functions as the key to unlocking previously unknown dimensions of intersection on the contemplative path. To free oneself from the prison of one's false self, one must dismantle the walls of metaphysical fixity, demolishing the assumption that reality must be a certain way on the basis of the dogma of a particular creed alone, that it can never be otherwise. For Merton, engaging in the mystical practices of other contemplative paths did just this, giving rise to an enduring experience of spiritual union.

Communion, Solitude, and Contemplative Practice

Merton's reflections on communion, solitude, and contemplative practice are particularly relevant to our present circumstances. Given the exponential outbreak of the coronavirus, "social distancing" appears to be the most viable means for flattening the curve. Even so, it poses a unique set of challenges of its own, ranging from loss of income, childcare and food insecurity due to school closures, and so forth. Quarantine itself, for the majority, ushers in an acute sense of boredom, loneliness, and a heightened craving to be in the company of others.



While we are indeed largely social creatures, thriving on interactions and human connection, a great many of us have long neglected the practice of looking within ourselves. Others may associate such introspection with trauma, and so we become averse to engaging with contemplative practice. In light of the conditions we presently face, however, such practices may be among our more viable routes to remaining connected and probing the foundations of the crisis.

On related concerns pertaining to solitude versus communion with others, Merton writes:

“Very few men are sanctified in isolation. Very few become perfect in absolute solitude. Living with other people and learning to lose ourselves in the understanding of their weakness and deficiencies can help us to become true contemplatives. For there is no better means of getting rid of the rigidity and harshness and coarseness of our ingrained egoism, which is the one insuperable obstacle to the infused light and action of the Spirit of God.”

Perhaps we may extrapolate from these reflections to our present situation.

While Merton appears to be referring to the spiritual insights that can arise in the company of others, even those we may consider challenging people, we can extend these reflections into the domain of physical quarantine and its implications for contemplative practice. Even in times of physical isolation, we remain spiritually connected.

Looking out upon the world at this moment seems to reveal a series of mistakes and mis-steps that have contributed to worsening public health conditions. Yet if we consider Merton's contemplations here, the flaws of others help unveil our own flaws, and as excruciating as it may be to stare both in the face, they are they ultimate test of our patience and endurance.



Merton characterizes the individual ego as rigid, harsh, and coarse. These jarring descriptions reveal that the culprit behind our disintegrating situation, a culprit which perceives itself to be invincible, neglects to comprehend its potential role as a vector of transmission, and fails to acknowledge the intricately woven web in which we're all embedded, lurks within.

When we face these unpleasant realities, whether they pertain to the world around us or to deeply habituated patterns of egoism within ourselves, we may experience a humbling reorientation of perspective. No longer blissfully ignorant, we find ourselves grounded in reality yet simultaneously groundless given the rapidly fluctuating situation both within and around us.

Socially Integrated Introspection

Thomas Merton—who himself walked the line between social activism and hermit living, dipping into each, often simultaneously—consistently urges a socially integrated introspection, a solitude that integrates with communion. While so much more could be said of Merton's work, especially given how ripe with wisdom his reflections are in New Seeds of Contemplation and other writings, we pause here for the time being. Again prompting us toward introspection in times that superficially suggest separation, Merton reflects:

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”



Source:

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. Trappist: Abbey of Gethsemani, 1961.

Ghalib on Love - Challenges in Pursuit of the Beloved

Ghalib on Love ...

Third in our series of mystical poetry from across the Hindu, Sufi, and Muslim traditions is Ghalib, an Agra-born poet who began writing classical poetry at age 11, composing work in both Urdu and Persian. He lived from 1797 to 1869 during the decline of the Mughal Empire, only a few centuries removed from the present. Continuing our excursion into the love poems of Indic poets, much of Ghalib's poetry also revolves around the theme of mystic love.

Indeed, for Ghalib, what lies hidden and veiled is a primordial love without beginning nor end. Showing both Sufi tendencies as well as Islamic influence, Ghalib cultivated a refined understanding of God's innateness within himself. Similar to Sanai's belief in an infinite inner force, Ghalib also felt that God is a divine power not separate from us, but arises from within our own consciousness as a reflection of our inherent (though often untapped) wellspring of love and compassion.

Here we inquire along with Ghalib, whose poetry asks us: how do we manifest love despite the challenges it poses?

My Religion is Breaking Rules

I believe in one God only; and my religion is breaking rules: (48)

When all sects go to pieces, they’ll become one part of true religion. (48)

Much like Kabir and Sanai who were similarly influenced by Hindu and Muslim teachings yet consciously broke free from established religion, Ghalib was also an independent thinker unbound by the trappings of religious norms and rituals. Knowing religion can be a binding force, Ghalib drew inspiration from those in religious circles yet held himself free from the regimented rules that restricted and constrained much of society.

When one blindly follows traditional practices without understanding the universal principles behind them, this only confines the practitioner to dogmatic religious ideologies, including a rote, abstract concept of love divorced from direct experience. Ghalib frames his religion with the reflection "my religion is breaking rules," believing that such rules stood in the way between man and God, obstructing their union.

Rather than submit to such rules as a means toward union with God, Ghalib remained a skeptic. He felt that union with God could be found not through rote performance of ritual obeisance, but through the wholehearted expression of boundless love for the infinite that is God himself.

Challenges of Love

Such reflections inspired Ghalib to chart his own path of love while grounding himself in a purposeful lived experience. However, such an undertaking by no means unfurled in perfect ease and comfort. In fact, Ghalib’s poems often reflect the painstaking, heart-breaking challenges of love. In the pursuit of his beloved, Ghalib is often at a complete and utter loss. He nevertheless endures the challenges of love, believing that to live out his full potential, he must transform and transcend his self-centeredness. In one poem, he writes:

The blood of my heart has not completely exited through my eyes. O death, let me stay a whole, the work we have is abundant enough. (43)

Given his plea to be spared from death in order to complete and fulfill the expression of his heart's yearnings, Ghalib appears to have unfinished business. Perhaps the poet has not yet exhausted his blood and vital energy into his work. Implied here is the poet’s unencumbered striving to remain in union with his beloved. The path of love requires one to exhaust one’s life breath into the object of desire, which for Ghalib is Allah, God.

Pursuit of the Beloved

Despite his committed, unrelenting pursuit of the beloved, Ghalib consistently faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Indeed, he reflects that the path of love is a training ground of sorts for one’s determination, capacity for experimentation, and response to failures.

She has a habit of torture, but doesn’t mean to end the love.

Such oppression is only teasing; we don’t imagine it as a test. (33)

To truly engage and understand such torture and teasing, one must come to embrace that the path is full of obstacles and that such obstacles are no less the path than moments of ecstatic union with the infinite, divine principle. Yet if one pushes too hard against such obstacles or feels it necessary to subject oneself to pain, such pressure can keep one from the goal. For instance, Ghalib writes:

God, I want to know why my desires bring the opposite effect.
The more I try to attract the Great One, the farther away she moves. (37)

Clearly the poet’s love affair is not a case of utter bliss. The beloved or Allah, depicted in feminine form, does not show Ghalib what we typically perceive as loving compassion, but rather, an abrasive dynamic insofar as She retreats from the mind that seeks for something to attain. For Ghalib, Allah by definition is "nothingness," ungraspable and thus unattainable. Despite knowing this, Ghalib continues to pursue Her.



During his pursuit of the beloved, Ghalib reflects that love’s full emergence and consummation requires immense patience:

Love requires waiting, but desire doesn’t want to wait.
The heart has no patience; it would rather bleed to death. (15)

Such patience is a theme he gives ample time and space for reflection.

The spiritual seekers are tired, two or three at each stage of the path.
The rest—who have given up—never knew your address at all. (35)

Only those who have patience will emerge out of their repeated failures and struggles and unravel the secrets of unity, reflects Ghalib.

Macrocosmic and Microcosmic

Ultimately, Ghalib reminds us that we are not separate from everything else, but intimately part of a dynamic process, deeply interrelated with the entire cosmos. Separation or duality is a consequence of ignorance:

If you can’t see the Ganges in a drop and the planet in a grain of sand,
Then your eyes are not adult but the eyes of infants. (31)

The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.
A pain when beyond human range becomes something else. (45)

In these two couplets, we find images of the macrocosmic and microcosmic seamlessly intermingling. In a single drop can be seen the entire Ganges, while in but one grain of sand the planet spins. By becoming indistinguishable from the river, the droplet is fulfilled, consummated, restored to the innate wholeness it never, in actuality, lacked.



Such reflections imply that perhaps the solitary, separate, selfish ego that perceives itself always in contrast is the ultimate enemy to be vanquished in order for divine love to be sustained. To manifest love, Ghalib demands that the heart must be broken wide-open. Only then may the infinite pour in.

If your heart is still in one piece, cut your chest with a dagger.
If eyelashes are not soaked with blood, put a knife in your heart. (33)

While such imagery is certainly intense, it conveys the painstaking efforts Ghalib invested into reunion with his beloved. As we open our hearts, we gradually empty out the egoic self responsible for erecting prison-like boundaries, thereby limiting our freedom. Similar to Kabir who probed the tendency toward self-centeredness, Ghalib also highlights that our individual, mundane existence symbolically manifests its limitations in the form of playthings with little control over their destinies, guided instead by forces unbeknownst to it.

The world I see looks to me like a game of children.
Strange performances and plays go on night and day. (22)

Unable to see the futility of our grasping immaturity, we become part of a performance or play, enacting every petty thought that arises, not realizing them to be figments of our mind, games of our own creation. Our energy becomes scattered as we follow habituations unquestioningly rather than carefully observing the mind's activity. Thus is our conditioning:

The horse of life is galloping; we’ll never know the stopping place.

Our hands are not touching the reins, nor our feet the stirrups. (19)

In this sense, we lose the goal and life grows meaningless. However, taking back the reins, we have full control of the direction of our mind, thus opening the space for love to manifest. Therefore, resembling the approach of Kabir and Sanai, Ghalib emphasizes that the finite, limited self must die in order to become aware of its undifferentiated essence. He states that death is the cure to the terrible danger of existence:

Oh Ghalib, the sorrows of existence, what can cure them but death? (15)

Death inclines the lover towards everlasting union with the beloved. God is the only purpose that gives him a way out of his deadened, woeful state.

When I see God, color comes into my cheeks. (14)

Reconnection with the loved one (Allah) brings one back to life, which constitutes the very essence of humanity.

Coming Full Circle

Coming full circle, the whole journey towards God brings Ghalib back to the loving, nurturing womb-like vessel of God, from which we emerge and to which we return by following the footsteps of love. Thus, love is not a place to go but a process of continuous unfolding of one’s heart, the embodiment of devotion. The capacity to transform our habit energies based on the embodiment of love lies within the potential for witnessing something greater and bigger.

For the Sufi poets, union with God is the transcendent destination, but most importantly, the dynamic process of love is what kept them deeply interconnected, embodied, and committed to witnessing the unwavering love that lies hidden. Without subject or object, there is no existence and no separate identity, only pure love.

Thus the bond of love is the creative power, the womb of life that binds and holds the wholeness of creation together. In other words, it is the primordial glue that allows for the cohesion of the cosmos, the dynamic dance of unity.



The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib. Ecco Press, 1999.

Sanai on Love - Embodiment and Purification

Sanai on Love ...

Twelfth century Persian poet Hakim Sanai is credited with writing the first Persian mystical epic of Sufism, The Enclosed Garden of Truth (حدیقه الحقیقه و شریعه الطریقه). He was a major influence upon Rumi. Here we take a brief tour of the garden in search of Sanai's vision of love.

While Kabir’s path of love deepens our understanding of selflessness and invites us to remember God’s infinite consciousness devoid of “me” and “mine,” Sanai’s path of love advocates a gradual inner purification of the heart through which sedimented views are cleansed and removed. These impurities are obstacles that hinder mystical union.

For Sanai, only through the removal of all dust (i.e., pride, lust, greed, and other sensual passions) lying hidden within our hearts can one expand the limited mind to limitless awareness.

Embodiment

“The highroad by which thy spirit and prayers can travel towards God lies in the polishing of the mirror of the heart” (15) writes Sanai. Here the trope of the highroad stands for an ascent to God, a higher plane of embodiment that is accessible to us to the extent we cultivate to remove the dust of defilements.

Just as a mirror when stained by dust obscures the reflected image, so the limitless self (Allah, for Sanai) is obscured by its sensual contaminants. For Sanai, when the heart is wholly purged of sensual passions, then the brightness of God can be reflected and embodied.

You can better see thy image
In the mirror of thy heart than in thy clay.

Break loose from the chain you have fettered thyself with,
for you will be free when you have got clear from thy clay.

Since clay is dark and heart is bright,
Thy clay is a dustbin and thy heart a rose-garden (17).

In this image, we see the heart likened to a rose-garden and clay a dustbin. Clay stands for any of the heart's contaminants, those impurities that harden around us and weigh us down. Meanwhile, the dynamic of turning away one’s attention from the world to the inner awareness of God signifies that as we slowly empty ourselves of rubbish, sunlight begins to shine through our inner landscape of extravagant gardens, in whose lushness we become alive.

The brightness of God refers to the deeper dynamic dimension of love, our inner being. Clearing the muck and mud of our egocentric habits is a direct way to reclaim embodiment and connection to our inner awareness, for Sanai.

Purification

In the context of Sanai's poetry, purification is undertaken in order transcend our limitations, shifting the practitioner from a narrow framework in which they pursue the immediate gratification of sense pleasures to a panoramic perspective. In peering through a myopic lens, we limit ourselves to the realm of the finite. Our lives in this mode are characterized by duality and filled with dissatisfaction, always seeking something to fill the void. Yet when the seeker recognizes creator (Allah) and creation are one, her perspective widens immensely:

Then when the soul sets forth from the gate,
The old heart becomes new from there on.

His form escapes from the bonds of nature,
The heart gives back its charge to the spirit. (24)

This recognition of unity dissolves body boundaries between self and others. When there is no separation, awakening stirs within us, like the final moments of a dream as it dissolves in the early morning. With our limitations transcended, we are returned to an embodied, non-dual, panoramic awareness that was with us since time immemorial, only obscured by choices of our own making.

Fabrication of Duality

Like Kabir's protest against dualism, feeling that the individual self must be shattered in order to transcend dualistic notions, Sanai similarly asserts that duality is an obstacle on the path of love.

In the face of his belief in the Unity, There exists for him no old or new; All is naught, naught; He alone is. (86)

Sanai thus reflects that God, Allah himself, is beyond dual concepts and notions. Non-dual awareness entails the vulnerability of living with an open heart and risk of having our precious cherished ego bubble burst. To burst the bubble, all notions of self and others and all relativity must be transcended until there is no existence except God, who is undifferentiated and whole.

Cutting through duality, Sanai further urges that we need to cast our conditioned existence into the unconditioned.

O seeker of the shell of the pearl of 'unless',
lay down clothing and life on the shore of 'Not.' (30)

Here, the imagery of clothing conveys our use of garments to hide our limitless self (Allah). In fact, these garments are fabrications, in more ways than one. They are fabrics that are measured, cut, and stitched together to create a finished product in the form of a garment. Just like the fabrics, the faculty of mind, the intellect, stitches together separate names and forms to conceive the world in terms of fixed measurements. The mind has a tendency to fabricate constructs, which in turn cover over our limitless self.



Likewise, Sanai uses clothing symbolically to represent a particular form that we often wear and with which we identify. Such robes disguise our true self. Indeed, we mistakenly hold onto our garments as a false refuge in which to hide. By laying down the clothing and life on the “shore of ‘Not,’” we begin the process of undressing that which lies hidden and disguised.

Our Original Home

We find in Sanai's poetry a liberating narrative, one that depicts the process of inward purification and outward embodiment of the divine, re-inhabiting the abode of God, our original home.

Sanai implores us to turn inward, understand our innate union with God, and lay ourselves bare. As with Kabir's use of the term "God," Sanai can be similarly read as imploring a reconnection with our innate purity, free of the contaminants and clothing in which we dress and thereby disguise it. In mystic fashion, "God" for Sanai is the infinite, not some being separate from us, commanding us from above. Rather, this force implores us from within.

We're curious what you may find worthwhile about Sanai's poetry, either from what we've shared or any other works of his you've encountered. Please feel free to join the conversation in the comments below. Best wishes.



Hakim Sanai’s The Enclosed Garden of Truth. Trans. M.J. Stephenson. Hastings, East Sussex, 2016.

Kabir on Love - Harnessing the Runaway Mind

Kabir on Love ...

An Indian mystic-poet influenced by Muslim and Hindu teachings yet critical of both, Kabir (who is believed to have lived sometime between 1398 and 1518 of the common era) was a powerful contributor to the Bhakti or devotional movement in India. Many supernatural stories surround his early life. At the crux of Kabir's philosophy is union with God through self-discipline.

Here we embark on the first installation of a three part series (also see part two on Sanai and part three on Ghalib) on the mystic love poems of Persian and Indic sages, spanning syncretic and ecclectic Sufi, Muslim, and Hindu visions of union with the divine.

In particular, Kabir's vision of love is informed by a deep appreciation for the divine within each person. Many of his poems urge the reader to turn inward and to regard all human beings as manifestation of God. Perhaps it was this humanizing of the divine, and vice versa, that inspired his poems regarding cosmic union.

The Middle Way

You may recall a previous post of ours detailing the Madhyamaka school's version of the Middle Way, a Buddhist undertaking that, while expounded by the Indian sage Nāgārjuna, in fact traces itself to the earliest of teachings purportedly spoken by the historical Buddha himself from the Pāli Canon.

Why do we mention that here? It appears that Kabir, while not Buddhist and in fact critical of Buddhism, devised his own understanding of the Middle Way. His understanding was framed not in terms of a countermeasure to still the tides of metaphysical speculation, but in terms of navigating the extremes of sensory indulgence and sensory deprivation, a variation on the Middle Way also found in Buddhism.

Before launching into Kabir's poetry, we first briefly examine Kabir's version of the Middle Way, veering neither to the extreme of pleasure hoarding nor ascetic renunciation, given that both may be mistreated as objects of identification. Such an understanding deeply informed his understanding of love and mystic union.



Throughout his poetry, Kabir consistently stresses that the world is bound by objects of desire that function as sense enjoyments. Encumbered by these objects, around which we create false identifications and personalities, we often forget our spiritual goals. At the other extreme, haziness enshrouds those who renounce the householder life and live a life of poverty as ascetics. For Kabir, this is equally problematic as a potential source of identification, in this case with the life of a renunciant. While Kabir leaned toward the renunciant lifestyle, he found it equally unworthy as an object of identification relative to a life of luxury.

According to Kabir, the ideal embodiment of true renunciation concerns herself neither with “me” nor “mine.” The moment we cling to a personal ego, the mind becomes limited by self-centeredness. With a mind free from egoism, we realize pure consciousness in the form of union with Rama or Allah. So long as we allow egoism to take up our mind, the further we are from God.

Kabir’s poetry invites us to surrender the finite ego and to cultivate love for the infinite consciousness of God. This was Kabir's Middle Way.

The Runaway Mind

Sounds simple enough, but not actually so. Several obstacles stand in the way of our actualization of union. For Kabir, our chief obstacle in life is the “runaway mind,” the mind that regresses into the infinitely receding past and unfurls into the yet to unfold future, seeking a sense of safety and security in that which seems to promise but can never provide such comfort.

Kabir describes this runaway mind as a crafty huckster caught in the trap of the ego (wife) and the five senses (children). While such comparisons, wife standing for ego and children standing for the five senses, are problematic from a text critical perspective, they illustrate Kabir's renunciant tendencies.

The mind’s a shortchanging
Huckster with a crafty
Wife and five
Scoundrel children.
It won’t change its ways.

The mind’s a knot, says Kabir.
Not easy to untie. (13).

Here Kabir speaks in the third-person, informing us that the habit energy of the five senses and ego fuels the mind's tendency to run amok, a tendency which inevitably ties us up as if into a knot, thereby constraining freedom of movement.

Perhaps the crafty huckster is caught in the trap of “I,” “me,” and “mine” more than any symbolic manifestations or objects of possession. Wife and children are not to blame. Rather, the issue lies in clinging. For Kabir, wife and children are objects over which one tends to lay claim, which further tightens the knots of suffering. Anything we think we own, we also stand to lose.

Harnessing Habit Energy

Kabir further reminds us that these knots can be undone by transforming our maladaptive habit energies into behaviors conducive toward liberation. Powerful habit energy accumulated since time immemorial triggers our disembodiment, conditioning us to view the world through the notion of separateness. Thus we find ourselves constricted and bound by our conditioning. Once we take back control of the mind and cease being pushed around by our habit energy, an unbinding occurs. To quote Kabir:

Listen carefully,
Neither the Vedas
Nor the Qu’ran
Will teach you this:
Put the bit in its mouth,
The saddle on its back,
Your foot in the stirrup,
And ride your wild runaway mind
All the way to heaven. (14)

Reflecting his free-thinking tendencies, Kabir here reminds us that our own mind is what both shackles and unbinds us. By giving our mind over to external sources of presumed authority, we become enslaved. By indulging its habit energy, which orients us toward pursuit of sensual pleasures and material objects, we are shackled. By taking charge and rising above habit energy, we become fully alive, present, relaxed, connected, and re-embodied.

Shifting the direction of our habit energies, we come to witness the unity of God. For Kabir, love is all that makes sense. He thus dismantled his loom and sacrificed weaving, his career, for God’s love. One may wonder what triggered his radical departure from a conventional form of livelihood. Perhaps he felt an absence, an incompleteness or lack of wholeness, which led him to seek union with God. Perhaps he awakened to the realization that his sense of a separate self was nothing more than a false appearance, a dream manifested by egoic habit energy.



Love may serve as a cure of sorts for the mind that is enmeshed in habit energies and reluctant to surrender its egoic tendencies. When the idea of individual self shatters, we come to transcend any dualistic notions such as “me” and “not-me.” All separateness vanishes into the unitive nature of phenomena.

Open the inward eye, says Kabir.
It’ll make the well disappear;
The water carriers too. (41)

In the Indian subcontinent, ritual bathing in holy water, such as the River Ganges, has long been practiced. Perhaps the well and water carriers stand for a similar sort of ritual ablution. Reflecting the dissolving of impurities and the embrace of unity with God, when one gazes inward, the well (physical body) and the water carriers (five senses) are “emptied” insofar as they are realized to be an illusion and thus unworthy of identification. Consequently, when the water of life runs dry, the unity of God can move and flow into us. Likewise, once the outflow of the mind and conditioned body via the five senses cease, one experiences an inflow of unconditional love, pouring inward via mystical union with the divine.

A Dynamic Process

As usual, we return here to the relevance of such reflections to us today. With so much of the world's population preoccupied with profit and prestige, why should one even consider looking into the poetry of a fifteenth century Indian mystic?

For Kabir, awakening to God's presence is a dynamic process that requires constant awareness and continual remembrance. God is the home of our infinite consciousness, a home where we may always return despite long forgetting its unconditional embrace. Kabir emphasizes that continual remembrance of the name of God (Rama) is necessary to fuel and nourish the recognition of God.

No matter what one's religious background, or lack thereof, Kabir's use of the term "God" can be understood to stand for connection, much like "religion," from the Latin religare, to re-bind. When we remain forgetful, we grow disconnected from ourselves and our surroundings. Through remembrance (mindfulness or smṛti in Sanskrit, from smara स्मर, to re-mind or remember) we become reconnected. Through this reconnecting, remembering, re-minding, re-binding, we are in actuality un-bound, free.

Songs of Kabir. Trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. New York Review Books, 2011.