Now for the ‘biggie’: No, this is not the beginning of a daily deluge – merely the fifth of a Mandala Offering by wesley to you all – of Namgyal Rinpoche’s Teachings. For all the Great Mothers & Fathers, especially Micah & Basira. October 11 – ‘Lest we forget…’
For all the Great Mothers & Fathers, especially Micah & Basira
“I find it interesting to note that in North America people are always talking, singing, advertising and displaying one constant theme. Applying the theory that whatever people talk about is what they don’t have enough of, one would have to conclude that there is one thing North Americans are lacking, and that one thing is love. Or perhaps there are two: love and sex. You might say, “Look, sex is everywhere in North America.” To which I would reply that certainly there are gropings going on. North Americans seem to be into everything, but I don’t really believe that they’re into sex. What they usually think of as sexuality is object relating to object. They have reduced sexuality to something mechanical, something everyone believes ought to be done, and something of which each being should gather many experiences. But I don’t believe that beings are really into it. Because there is so much talk about it I suspect that sexuality is an experience lacking in understanding.
Those of you who were young once might remember talking about it. When you hadn’t gotten it, that was when you spent the most time fantasizing about it with your peers. You’d tell each other the most incredible stories—you do remember this period, don’t you? When you were frustrated you talked and imagined all sorts of different scenes. A being who is fulfilled at that level doesn’t in general talk about it. Certainly such a being doesn’t talk in the locker room about intimate moments, or about an intimate relationship with another.
One of the great signs of deep sexual experience is silence. It is a wonder; it provokes questions rather than statements. But before we go on to discuss the great monster, the terror of every schoolboy and girl—sex—we should talk about love. What is love? If you or I could answer this question, we would be eternally famous among mankind. We cannot define it exactly. It is essentially beyond words. We have heard the sages muttering down through the ages things like “God”, “Transcendence”, “The Divine”, and “Love”, but always beyond words.
We will, however, try to give a pale shadow of it. For the human being, for all practical purposes, love is giving. It is giving from the parent, or the teacher, or from friends, of two things: one is physical sustenance, and the other is mental sustenance.
Rather than attempting to define the undefinable, perhaps we can talk about what love must do. You must feed the hungry if you love, you clothe the naked and you visit the fatherless in their affliction. That is considered to be the summation of charity. Unfortunately the word charity has rather a bad connotation, linked now with ideas of commodity and superiority. The origin of the word is caritas, which means simply love. It suggests that you do something. You don’t just meditate, you transmit it, move it into the karma level, the enlightenment mind at work.
Let us suppose that you want to be actively involved in love. The first step of this discipline—and it is possibly the greatest of all disciplines—is to begin at the physical level. All of you are mothers, one to the other, to some degree. If the mother loves the child, or if you love one another, there is giving of physical sustenance. This has become confused with the giving of commodities. To give physical sustenance you should hold one another. Not that you hold on to, but that there is some kind of contact, a physical warming. That is sustaining. It warms the cells of the body directly. It may transmute energy, it may even promote physical healing. You also give, especially to a child, physical food. You should share food. One of the great symbols of the early Christian teaching was the Agapé, the love feast. Beings greeted one another with a physical kiss which—and not merely symbolically—contributed to the flow of love. Then they ate together, shared wine together; they partook of the Lord’s Supper, which later became the Mass and the Eucharist. Now the church is trying to bring that back to what it was originally, eating together with the Lord. When you share together communally, at the physical level, you can be led into the experience of the Lord, of the shining, the higher. You are prepared for the development of love.
Greet each other sincerely, by physical contact. Shake hands, yes, but also greet each other with embrace. If you do that in a pure state of mind it will not lead into sexual distortion, because it won’t be that kind of action. It will just be warm human contact. And it won’t be just mental contact! Other things follow in their due order, like the giving of clothing and the sharing of goods to at least ensure that the level of physical love is entirely covered. Once a week beings should come together communally to share their involvements. Any of these suggestions can be accepted or abandoned as you wish; they are intended as directions for consideration, not as rules.
Suppose for the moment we call this physical level the mother level; that is to say, we should be mothers one to the other. But we should also be fathers for each other. Well, how does one do that? By encouraging each other in dharma exploration, in exploration of the universe. We can give mentally, inspire one another. When a child begins to make an exploration, how many false fathers in the world are there who come along and say, “No, that’s not right. Here, give it to me. I’ll show you how to do it properly.” Or, if they don’t stifle the initiative for exploration, they withdraw into silence, into a sort of contemptuous brood, because they don’t want to be involved. If there is an involvement (which is getting rarer and rarer these days), it is only to teach the child things the father knows, remaining safely within the realm of the known rather than sharing an unknown. They don’t say, “Let’s go and explore this together, share a discovery.” They say, “I’ll teach you baseball son,” or “I’ll take you to the football game,” “Here, boy, here’s a bottle of beer, some booze for you.” Or, as in The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, they teach how to go out and “get a piece of ass.” So, of course, that is what the child learns to do. What else could he do? Generally speaking, the level of fathership really has not been one of any great significance in North America. Very frequently it is negative. This creates for the child very serious problems.
In speaking about the relationships between father and son I don’t want to suggest that we perpetuate the idea that mother is always mother and father is always father, with no interplay between these two. For the moment I will use the expression ‘fathering’ to promote the idea of a type of fathership that we can use to manifest love, one to the other. The Buddha said that beings should have Kalyāṇa-mitta, suitable friends, to help them awaken. That is the fathership principle. It need not be as closely embracing as the mother principle which gives foundation to the child. If a child is well-founded in physical warmth, he can then be taught the law of mental coldness, the abstract or objective principle. In a healthy relationship these two never become distorted. If there is just the moisture of the mother the mind will not develop sharpness. The being may be unable to penetrate the laws of the universe, let alone bring them together in an orderly way. Mankind needs clear seeing. In our relationships one with the other, we should listen respectfully and then try to increase the flow of question. To raise and promote question, to be supportive to learning, is a cross-feeding.
These two things, to me, are the only manifestations of love. If you were to come upon someone who was very badly injured, and while trying to manifest love you wept over them, saying “Oh my, oh dear,” that really is not enough to help them. You need to get on with the active development of love. In addition to the warmth you need knowledge; you need the clear knowing of how to help, how to be involved, to manifest love. You must consider the capability of the other person. It is true that there are beings who don’t know how to accept love, beings who may take a love manifestation and distort it. They may take an interchange of kindness into the own peculiar neurotic tunnels and pervert the teaching of love. This is due, presumably, to their childhood conditioning. It is as if a great banquet has been prepared and beings are standing at the window, dressed in rags and muttering amongst themselves. They don’t realize that they are welcome to come in to the feast. So they stand outside raising conspiracies, throwing stones. They would like to join in but they’re afraid to take off their dirty garments and have a good bath in love. The only way that love can come to such beings is in the motif of, “If I give you this, then you will give me that.” As children when they asked for bread they were given stones, not moving, rolling stones, just stones that sat like a vast heaviness in their being”.
? Isn’t it true that in today’s society with the man working in the business world, involved in getting, the woman in many instances has had to play the parts of both father and mother?
“I don’t exactly agree with that. The real story is not being brought out. The father has always gone out. But once his business was to hunt and fish. To say that now his business doesn’t allow him time to be a father is an unacceptable excuse. Why can’t he share what he is doing today? In countries like Ceylon fathers take their sons out into the fields or up into the high palm trees to bring down coconuts. In some cases they take their daughters. We could do that. Why isn’t the child, male or female, taken at an early age with father and mother to the place of work, shown the mechanics of work? Is it because we are so involved with redundant labour that we don’t want to share our negative feelings? Certainly the modern father doesn’t share his business with the child, doesn’t give the child opportunity for direct insight into working. In Europe the small tradesmen do take their children into the shops at an early age, and it is possible that this has led to some abuses. One danger is the parent might want the child to be exactly like him or herself. I sometimes suspect that this is always in the air with parents.
Let us go back to the two basic things for which a human being must feel a need: total security or fulfilment on an emotional level, and the resolution of the great dissatisfaction that resides in his being. The human being wants to be complete emotionally. You could call that love if you wish. But the greatest need that has to be fulfilled is the need to know, to explore what the universe is about. Man wants to know. Most beings are, I think, not terribly in touch with the feeling of this latter need. To me it is reaching out in all the cells of the body; the cells themselves want to go somewhere, do something and come to know. The entirety of your being, both physically and mentally, is reaching out. There is a type of grasping going on to take you further and further. It is as if the mother and father principles were receding, and you are like a child taking first steps, trying to get to them. The more you try to reach them, the further they recede. But the more you try the more you know. It’s very satisfying to make that effort.
The mother principle is the inner understanding, down into the cells of the body. The father is the outer exploration of the universe. These two needs should be hyphenated: being-knowing, one great need in everyone. It must be catered to. “Man cannot live by bread alone.”
‘Bread’ is the very important foundation, part of the emotional security. Every so often survival on earth necessitates the turning of the cumulative mind of man towards the solution of grave material problems. There will never be a time when we are really completely free of such concerns. We exist within a very narrow framework, and we are constantly being challenged at the physical level. But we need something with which to occupy ourselves in addition to that. We have to be inspired. If physical sustenance were all that there is to life, mankind would have ceased to exist long ago. He would have just given up. But we have an inner drive to examine, explore, build and shape, even if our knowledge is at the mud-pie level. We want to intervene, we want to build. And in order to build we have to know. So as we go out into the universe, either satisfied or dissatisfied with our material conditions, we want to know all the vibrations, everything that’s happening. We want to know every work that proceeds out of the mouth—or womb—of God. The knowing gives us the ability to put up with the material struggle.
If we didn’t have a vision of something further, of the expansion of mankind’s collective consciousness, I don’t think we would make the effort to exist, to go from day to day. In the back of our minds there is an ongoing hope of something more, something further. There is in every human being something of the idea that “this world is not my home.” We have other homes, other places to visit. We must leave our usual surroundings, leave the things with which we are physically comfortable and go out to new worlds. One might think that the many people who left Europe did so only for that reason. Many of them quite simply felt that they weren’t existing as well as they might, and so they sought new worlds.
There is always in mankind the feeling that wherever we are there is a new world further on, something more exciting or involving. I dare say that in the future beings will planet-hop much like we travel from city to city today. Beings will travel to various planets, and undoubtedly be dissatisfied with many of them, always looking for a better planet a little further on down the line. It will be particularly satisfying to find a planet which no one else has been to, a possession solely for oneself. Imagine having a whole planet which you alone could explore—if you could somehow maintain your existence in the leisure of time and space. What a marvelous thing that would be, to discover a new world, a Shangri-La! Within everyone there is always a hope of finding a Shangri-La. That’s what keeps man going. That (not to mention all the hard, day-to-day work done by factory workers and housewives) brings forth inventions and discoveries. There is always going to be another day when, somehow, everything will be mysteriously resolved and bettered”.