Who am I? Have I ever asked this question? What the hell am I doing here? Yeah, constantly
every day I'm asking this question. What the hell is going on? Why are you here? Why did
God create me? Why am I here? I didn't know who I was or what my purpose was on this planet
or even if I had one. And I've spent, you know, I think I've spent my entire life questioning.
The questions, who am I, why am I here, have definitely come up. Who are you and why are
you here? Who are you? Why are you here? I think everyone, in their own way, at their
own time, asks the question, Who am I? Why am I here? I'm Thomas Moore. In my books,
I ask those questions. And I find that the people who read my books and talk to me about
them raise those same questions, the same ones, over and over again.
Over the years, I've been fascinated by the way in which a person's questions deepen.
Suddenly one begins to ask things that you never asked before. You ask the questions,
Who am I and why am I here? And you may never have asked the question before in your life.
In this film, we're going to see a number of people who are asking themselves about
their own identity, about the world around them, about the direction they're going. They
ask the questions in many different ways, and they have very many different answers
to these questions. Another thing we're going to do is see a few of the traditional religions
and philosophies that provide us with not always the answers to the questions, but with
ways of asking the questions, with images and rituals and traditions.
When I was a college professor many years ago, I taught religion to a large number of
students. I must have taught maybe 5,000 students over those years. And during all that time,
I often showed the films of Elta Hartley to them. These were films about many of the world's
religious traditions. She could teach us herself just in the films that we can find our own
way deeper into the things that matter to us, sometimes in our work. It doesn't have
to just be going off on our own and meditating. Our work itself, in my case, writing books
is a way of doing it. In the case of Elta Hartley, she has made these films that themselves
are a path toward a deeper understanding. Once you start asking yourself those questions,
you're on the path, and you just keep your eyes open and make the kind of friends that
help to promote that, go to the kinds of meetings that help to promote that, read the kind of
books that help you. I did, in my teens, read the Bhagavad Gita and got hold of a book called
14 Lessons in Yogic Philosophy, which answered the question that I'd had ever since I was
in my early teens, why are we here? What's our purpose in life? And this book, 14 Lessons
in Yogic Philosophy by Ramacharaka, gave me the answers why we're here. And of course,
it's so obvious we're here to grow. Life is a school. And you have to keep coming back
until you learn those lessons. I think Christian mysticism is my favorite. And the reason is
because I had to do a lot of research to do that film. And I learned so much about the
Christian mystics and Christianity that if Christianity were taught by the Christian
mystics, I'd be definitely, mainly a Christian now, you know, instead of being partly Buddhist,
because their lives were so gorgeous. And that whole film was such a joy to make because
I learned so much. Over the years, I've been surprised to discover how many people are
very interested in Christianity as a religious tradition, but don't realize how rich its
traditions really are. Many people don't even know that there are mystics and a long mystical
tradition within Christianity. I have found in my own life too that being Christian can
have many different dimensions and facets to it. I began life being very close to Christianity
as a Catholic. And then there was a time in my life when I was quite distant from anything
having to do with Christianity and Christian thought. But now with the publication of my
books, I find myself in conversations with people rediscovering Christianity in my own
way in a way I probably couldn't describe to anybody else because it's so personal.
I do think it's awfully important to be able to appreciate and respect these variations
on anyone's experience of religion from one person to another or from one period of one
person's life to another. We're about to hear from two people who have found important
answers to their own questions in Christianity, but they're different. One was raised a Christian
and the other recently discovered it. In both cases, we find the intensity with which people
approach a tradition like this that has so much to offer and yet to offer it in many
different ways. I didn't believe in anything for a long time. And it's like I didn't believe
in myself. So there's no way I could possibly believe in anything else. I was lost. I was
thrashing around my bed screaming for help and there was no one to help me. This battle
was just going on in my head. The night that I realized that I would dedicate my life to
Jesus Christ, a lot of my questions have been answered in one form or another. I felt like
this was right. Like this is exactly what I needed for a long time. We all want to find
our calling, you know. Whether it be career-wise, vocation-wise, with your family, with your
spiritual life, there's always that dialogue, you know, why am I here? I think that there
is a deeper truth to our existence. It's a little more complex, you know, and God can
account for that complexity. But being a Christian in an intellectual setting, I felt was to
some degree looked down upon. But Christ is one of the most profound philosophers that
ever lived. We can't ignore what he said. We should bring him into that intellectual
discussion. The idea that the mass for a Catholic is not only a service, it is Christ himself
in the Eucharist living with us, nurturing us. So in some sense, yes, Christ lived 2,000
years ago, but he's alive and well on Sunday morning. You know, you can feed your soul
with the Eucharist. You can go to confession. You can get true forgiveness. You can know
that you've been forgiven by God for something you did that you feel awful about. You know,
you're here to love and to serve God. And who is God? God is love. One of the strong
images we just saw was of a head crammed with activity. I think this is a pretty good indication
of where we are in the 20th century. We all have heads full of activity, thoughts, plans,
interpretations, explanations. In fact, I think in this century we tend to think of
the interior life as a mental life. But it wasn't always so. When you go back in time
and not too far back, you find that people talked about the interior life as a life to
be lived, not just an understanding of the external world. And people entered monastic
life in the past. I know they still do, but they entered in the past in great numbers.
When I was a young man, I also entered monastic life when I was very young and found that
this world was one of very vivid, interesting, active, fascinating interiority going inward.
And it was not mental. It was a going inward. I think one of the problems we have today
is that we separate these things. And so we feel the interior life as this set of problems,
mental problems, and we look for experts to tell us how to deal with them. We experiment
with various ways of trying to understand them and then get them under control. Whereas
maybe the thing to do is to positively develop the interior life and to meditate in our own
ways and maybe even create our own monastic experiences in our simple ways in our homes
and our day-to-day existence. We're now going to look at an excerpt from Elder Hartley's
film Christ Your Mysticism. And I'd recommend that you look at the images in this excerpt.
The sounds, the music, the costume, the dress, and the postures and attitudes that people
have as they show us what it's like to nurture the contemplative life.
We live in a world apart, detached from the desires of worldly men. Their one desire,
to find God, to feel, to experience His presence. Daily routines are focused on this experience.
A time for manual labor, a time for spiritual reading, another for prayer and meditation,
and a period of communal worship. We are made in God's image, in the sense that we are
created for pure love. But we have fallen from the divine likeness by centering all our love
upon ourselves. Monastic life was designed to re-educate and reform man's capacity to
love, liberating him from fixation upon himself, teaching him to love the divine image in his
fellow man, and finally leading him to love perfectly in spirit and in truth by returning
to the source of love, God Himself.
That God was now present, revealing Himself in persons who were spiritual. God was not
far off in the sky. He was here with us. Heaven itself and hell too were states of consciousness
within each of us. The monk spent much of the day in silence, for the man who is to
have a state of mind receptive to God's presence must learn to find the solitude within, wherever
he may be.
Sometimes when people feel a call to enter a contemplative life, they withdraw from the
world. They go to a monastery, they go on a retreat, go on a pilgrimage, just get away
for a while. But there's another movement that's very old and traditional, and that
is to enter more fully into life, and at the same time develop your contemplative experiences.
The example we're going to see now is of a man who decided to do both, to live a contemplative
spiritual life and be very much involved in the world, and he found his way to do this
in Zen Buddhism.
Born and raised Roman Catholic, I love Jesus. I love the whole idea of a compassionate spiritual
person. I love the message that he gave. It's just there was something about it that I didn't
care for. You know, it's nice to put two dollars in a basket that goes around on a Sunday morning,
but it's hands-on. I've got to be hands-on. For me, spirituality is hands-on. If I'm not
having hands-on experience, it's worthless.
I was hurting. Yeah, I was lonely. I was incredibly lonely, feeling disassociated with all of society.
Well, for the past five years, five and a half years, I've been practicing Zen Buddhist.
I'm actually a postulate Rinzai Zen Buddhist, American monk. A lot of what I do is meditate
on Ponder Cohen's, those silly little questions that can't really be answered with logical
thought.
Practicing Zen Buddhism, it's incredibly engaged. Realizing the no separation between my life
as a monk in a temple as compared to my life as, you know, Joe American on the street.
I can attain liberation from my pain. I can attain enlightenment realizing that I don't
have to be afraid that I'm lacking anything, that I'm not going to die because, oh, I don't
have the right job, I'm not making enough money, or she don't like me, oh my God, I'm
going to be alone the rest of my life. I'm a full, complete human being. Graced by God,
there's a spirit in me that is universal.
Donald is not your usual image of the monk. Centuries ago, another young man left home,
knew he had to find something else in his life, and went out on his own search and asked
his questions, the same ones we're exploring.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, in the foothills of the Himalayas, a baby boy was born to the
Gotama family. They called him Siddhartha Gotama, who came to be known as the Buddha,
the enlightened one.
What kind of man was this? What brought about his search for enlightenment? He was born
into a life of luxury, protected from the ugliness, the tragedy, the desperation of
the world. Legend has it he journeyed into the village. There he saw for the first time
the spectacle of human suffering. He saw that pain and suffering, disease and death were
not incidental to the life of man. They were identical with the life process itself. He
felt the sorrow so intensely that he determined to find a remedy. He left his wife and young
son, abandoned all material possessions, and went into the forest to join the many wandering
holy men.
He became aware of the need for a new kind of effort, mental concentration rather than
physical austerity, and stressed over and over again the possibility of discovering
reality without divine aid. Your fate is not in the hands of God. It is in your own, he
said. You yourself must make the effort. Buddhas only point the way.
Buddhists believe that the purpose of life is to attain complete enlightenment, and Buddha
said that this was possible for everyone, no matter what caste or what sex, that all
that was necessary was to follow the eightfold path. This eightfold path is the basic formula
that will eliminate suffering by correcting false values and giving true knowledge of
life's meaning. We must learn to think and speak with care and truthfulness, abide by
basic moral laws, earn our living in ways that are not hurtful to others, and maintain
a consistent pursuit of the goal by thinking about it incessantly and by learning to contemplate
with a deep mind.
Buddhists believe that enlightenment comes from a sudden flash of intuition, which occurs
after time spent in disciplined meditation. There is no centralized authority, no pope,
no elaborate ceremonies of conversion. One can become a Buddhist by simply practicing
the principles of the eightfold path, not a set of rules, but a technique of action by
which the individual can overcome his self-centeredness.
Sometimes, the answers to our deepest questions are not at all rational. You can't put them
in words. And religions for centuries have understood this, and they have taught people
how to meditate. Meditation doesn't always or doesn't usually end in any kind of understanding
that can be expressed in language, but it leads to another place of understanding, a
deep place. There are many forms of meditation. Many schools have thought about how to meditate.
We're going to see one, as presented by Alan Watts. Alan Watts was a figure who was important
in the 1960s. He was very important in my life. He introduced me to Eastern religions,
and especially to the beauty of religion itself.
Meditation, it's best to sit on the floor or the ground on a cushion, either cross-legged
or in the lotus posture, if you can manage it, or as I'm sitting, which is kneeling
and sitting back on my heels, which I find the most convenient. This position is slightly
uncomfortable. There is a certain amount of strain on the legs, but the advantage of this
is that it keeps you awake. You should have your spine comfortably erect, not tight, not
slumping, but just evenly erect, and your hands resting on your lap, palms upwards one
upon the other. And then you settle into this position, so that you, in the same way as
we learned to let the breath settle itself out when you breathe out, so you learn to
relax into this position and settle down comfortably on the ground, and you will discover that
if you take it easy, time will disappear, and that you will be able, as judged by the
clock, to sit in this way comfortably for, say, forty minutes to an hour.
The religions offer a very interesting paradoxical answer to our question by saying that we can
find out who we are, we can find out why we're here, when we discover divinity, God, an absolute
sense of God. Of course, no religion has presented this more clearly than Judaism, the sense
of an absolute God, the sense of a God who is involved in every aspect of life, in the
family, in the home, in politics, in community, and in isolation and solitude. You can't find
a religion that has more of an emphasis on the absolute God.
I think of God, firstly, as a creator of the universe, and as the one who set things in
motion. And I think of God as not only having created the world and then stepping back,
but still having an active role in the world, that God is constantly here and there and
aware of the actions of the earth and what's going on. And I look at God as a source of
comfort in terms of prayer and everything, and as a sort of, I guess, motivation to do
good things, in other words, to serve God, to want to do things for that reason.
I'm seventeen years old. I'm here now working as a counselor in Camp Ramah. I was studying
in Orthodox Day School, but I wasn't really practicing everything that I was learning.
I was learning the Orthodox studies, and then on the weekends I'd be partying and doing
my thing. But as I got older, I left the Yeshiva and started going to public school, and I
guess at that point I realized something was missing in terms of religion, so I got involved
with a youth group.
I'm the International Vice President of United Synagogue Youth, and my position is mainly
to fifteen thousand member organization in America, Canada, Hungary, and Israel. And
my main position is to coordinate the Israel programming for the organization in terms
of awareness and political action and those sorts of things. And I don't think that things
are as bad as they seem. I think there's definitely hope for the future.
There are views that are more stringent and views that are more lenient, and I would say
mine is pretty moderate. It's a good balance of tradition and modernity, you know. It's
a little bit of everything.
It's important also just in general if you're going to identify yourself as a Jew and, you
know, walk around and say that you are, to really, to make it something that you're proud
of and that people will look at you and say, that's a Jew. You know, it's a good thing
to be.
As far as my parents and my family goes, we would say we were culturally Jewish, but religiously,
no. I mean, I guess around Christmas and Hanukkah time, we would light candles and I would get
presents. And then once a year I was dragged for the Passover Seder, which I hated, just
because it was boring. And they made me, you know, even as a little kid, they'd want to
go through the rituals of reading the books and asking the questions why on this night
do we eat sitting instead of reclining instead of standing. And I was always uncomfortable
doing that because it didn't mean anything to me. I didn't necessarily believe in God
even as a little kid. And I didn't like saying these words because it just felt phony. It
didn't feel like a part of me.
I label myself an agnostic. And then I always say, well, at least I think so. Which is basically
what an agnostic is, is someone who's not sure. And maybe other people say, oh, okay,
you know, make up your mind one way or another. Well, how am I supposed to make up my mind?
I don't know if I believe in God. I want to believe in God because I don't want there
to be, because I'm happy with this life and I don't want it to end. I don't want there
to be nothing after. I don't think it matters. I mean, I could spend my life believing in
God and from day one to the day I die, I will believe in God. But really, if there is a
God or if there isn't a God, it doesn't really matter. I think I'm apathetic and cynical,
but doesn't mean you can't be happy and intelligent and keep working to change things.
Americans these days seem to be rather uneasy about the notion of being dependent. I often
think that we have a declaration of independence in this country and that idea of independence
has seeped deep into our bones and our psychology is full of it. People try very hard to become
independent. You don't hear much about people trying to be dependent. And yet, dependence
has a very important place in life. And I think that part of the answer to our question,
who am I, is to discover that I can only define myself or understand myself in relationship
to somebody else. And that relationship implies mutuality, relying on someone else, being
in community, depending on someone for my very survival and even for my self-understanding.
So I think this notion of dependence can be deepened. If dependence is a problem, a psychological
problem, I would say, this is a therapist in me talking, I would say that the solution
to that would be to discover a very deep, solid sense of dependence. And of course,
this can be then expressed in religion in the sense that we can be dependent on God,
we can be dependent on divinity, on the world itself, the world in which we live, on an
absolute sense of the divine. And it is this kind of absolute divinity that we find in
the religion of Islam.
I'm grateful every day when I wake up that I'm Muslim and they have Allah with me every
day. Allah is outside and inside. Whenever you think of Allah, Allah is with you. And
He stated this, that whenever you think of Me, I'm there. It's like 24-hour service,
in a matter of speaking.
It's a beautiful religion. I know most people have stereotypes that Muslims are terrorists,
and that we're a bunch of fanatics, and that we don't know what we're doing. But it's
not like that at all. Islam is probably the, it is the most beautiful thing I have ever
known.
What is the meaning, or the true meaning of being here? Is it to make money? Is it to
be powerful? No. It's to be happy. It's to help your fellow brother, your sister.
I did feel different because there are certain practices which I must do because I'm a Muslim,
which my Christian and Jewish and other non-Muslim friends did not have to do. For example, during
Ramadan, there's a month during the year which Muslims are required to fast from sunrise
to sunset daily. No eating, no drinking, no smoking. If you're married, no relations.
Total abstinence. And that's to teach you patience, to teach you to be generous when
you give charity.
So during the lunch time, I'd go to the cafeteria and not eat, and my friends would offer me
something. I said, no, I'm fasting. And they'd be, what, you're fasting? What's that? So
I'd get a chance to explain what it is. And some of them would look at you funny, and
some would say, oh, that's really interesting.
Through the daily prayer that a Muslim must practice, there is an interaction between
one's self and God. You're always asking for mercy, for forgiveness, for guidance.
So in that way, yeah, I have talked to God. Why am I here? I'm here to worship. Worship
who? Worship the Creator. I'm here to worship, to please, and to serve Him.
Now we're going to see a short excerpt from a film by Ilta Hartley on Islam. This too
is a film that I used to show students many years ago. And the images in this particular
film have stayed with me all my life. The image of the whirling dervishes, the washing
of hands, the prayers, and all the rituals that we see, the architecture, the colors,
the designs. It shows us that in the purest religion, you find that the spirit that is
felt in an interior way just shows itself, pours out into creating a beautiful world
around, all around the people who are practicing the religion.
Youngest of the great religions, it reverenced Christ and the prophets of Israel. But to
Israel's monotheism and Christ's love thy neighbor, it added how to love Him. Trust
in God and His messenger, Muhammad. Pray five times each day. Give to the poor. Fast during
the month of Ramadan, and if possible, once in one's lifetime, make a pilgrimage to Mecca.
This was and is Islam for the majority. But for others, there was more. We call these
other Sufis. They wanted to purify and spiritualize Islam from within. Give it a deeper mystical
tone. Infuse into it a spirit of liberty and love. For most Muslims, God is on the periphery.
The Sufis wanted Him to stay center. They wanted to shift Him from background to foreground,
to meet Him face to face. Religiously, they were an elite, aspiring higher and willing
to assume the heavier disciplines their extravagant goal required. The Sufi tries to pray without
ceasing, to make of his entire life a prayer. Every faithful Muslim will enjoy God's presence
eventually. The Sufi wants Him now, here, in this very life. Islam is a circle. God
is its center. Its circumference is His law. Each Muslim observing that law stands as a
point on the circumference. Sufism is the radius, the path that leads from the circumference
to the center. For every outside, there is an inside. For every body, a soul. The soul
of Islam is Sufism. One of the feelings I get as we explore religions, various religious
traditions, in answer to our question of who am I, why am I here, is a sense of deep pleasure
and vitality. There is a deep, deep source of happiness, of joy, of pleasure that is
connected to our quest for meaning, so that meaning and pleasure go together, or meaning
and the most concrete pleasures of life. They can also go together. We see this especially
in Hinduism, where the celebrations and festivals, the food, the music, the images, the shrines,
all profess that God is everywhere, that everything is divine. That gives the entirety of life,
then, a sense of vitality and pleasure. Religion then becomes an art of memory, a way of remembering
that all things are not just flat, reasonable, practical, but they have a soul, they have
a heart. Religion shows us that.
What's being done here are various rituals to the gods. Each particular ritual does have
a significance. The significance is very involved and very complex, and the priests are very
well-versed in the rituals and prayers that need to be said for each particular god. Usually
this is the site where homams are done, where basically things are offered to the gods,
such as ghee, which is basically melted butter. Those things are offered to the gods at this
site. And it can't be any place. It has to be a certain... and there's a certain method,
a certain way that it has to be offered.
What I get out of practicing Hinduism is the fact that it gives you an inner strength.
I find that it gives me a strength that also tends to guide you.
The goal is, one, the path's to be varied. That's the whole basis of that. That's why
I think Hinduism is probably the most allowing religions of the other ones that I've gone
through to look at. It allows for you to take any path. At the same time as being a polytheistic
religion, it's monotheistic. You can take God from any angle and you'll reach him. Whether
you want to call him Christ, whether you want to call him Allah, whether you want to call
him Ganesh, it's your choice.
God is always there. You don't have to go to temple every day, but God, no matter where
you are, God is always there. You can wake up in the morning and everybody, they pray
in the morning and they pray before they go to bed, but you don't have to pray every single
day as long as you know that God is there and God will always be with you.
We have usually meditation and yoga. I don't practice it, but I think when I was younger,
I used to go to a Hindu camp. We had, every morning, we used to have... morning, as you
say, stretching exercises and breathing exercises, relaxation. That's what's involved in our
religion.
I'll meditate, but it's more like prayer. Meditation is more like it's a discipline
and you'll do it every morning. People wake up at four or five a.m., practice yoga or
meditation.
I used to it one time. I can't say I do it as much now. I'll do it on and off. It depends
on the time. Sometimes I'm going to be tired or something, I just won't be able to do it.
I just give myself time to myself.
You're going to go through every day deciding whether you have a mission or not, and that
stresses out people. People go every day in the morning, God, why am I in this job? Why
am I doing this? Am I enjoying this? Am I not enjoying this? I don't think it's even
worth it to think about those things. You find out what you like to do, you do it, and
you just try to hope that everything else around you is working with it, and you pray
to God to help you with it. Whether you're happy, sad, that's what the place is.
Wherever you are right now is good. The next day will be better.
The message that I would give to the people is that I think religion is important, but
I think if it's difficult for a person to suddenly join a religion when they haven't
been exposed to it or brought up in it from a young age, but I wouldn't say it's impossible.
I think religion is important because it definitely guides you. I found that it tends to prevent
you from being lost, which is very easy to have.
Hindus believe that existence is a process of finding God within, and that man's life
on earth has only one purpose, to identify himself with his eternal self, and so come
to intuitive knowledge of Brahman, the Divine. Meditation is a primary discipline by which
one reaches perfection. First, one prepares himself morally. Then comes control of the
breath or pranayama, and correct posture or asana for control of the body. Meditation
helps control the senses and still the mind. Every ritual, symbols painted on the ground,
or worship of the spirit in the tree, is directed toward this intuitive experience of the God
within. Religious practices performed at home are the only ones that are relatively obligatory.
Every home has a small shrine where individual members worship daily. At the highest levels
of religious thought, God is abstract, but most need to picture their gods in human form.
In addition to worship at home, worship called puja is frequently held at the temple, and
offering, simple, flowers usually, is customary. When yoga is mentioned, most Westerners think
of the
Hatha yoga, the physical discipline that teaches control of the body. But there are many yogas,
for yoga means yok, or union, union with God. A yogi is someone who practices yoga. Most
forms of yoga involve meditation. Control of the body is taught so that one can sit
in meditation for a considerable period of time without having body sensations intrude.
Songs in praise of God, called bhajans, are a way of celebrating God's love.
So, when assiduously practiced, and when a person centers his heart in the true self,
and is exempt from attachment to all desires, he is said to have attained to yoga.
Every week I try to read something from one of the great books of Daoism. Daoism, at least
as I understand it, has been a very strong influence in my life and work. One of the
things I like about Daoism, is the way it unfolds on itself. The image of the strong
and the weak folding in on itself all the time, the happy and the sad, and so on. I
also notice that Daoism, at least for me, makes me realize that our deepest questions
ultimately have a certain lightness about them. There is a heaviness and lightness of
the yin and yang of our very questions. So we say, who am I? Why am I here? Those questions
can be heard in very heavy tones. They seem so serious. And the answers are not so serious
in a certain sense. The answers are, your questions aren't very good. Find better questions.
Or you need to deepen your questions. Or you are something outside of yourself. Or you
are bigger than yourself. Or you are God. Or you are gods. Or there is one God. There
are many gods. There is a certain humor in all of this. I don't think it is a cynical
kind of humor at all, but a kind of humor of self-recognition, of saying, yes, my questions
are limited. I am limited. And Daoism lets me know that. I would like to read to you
a passage from the Dada Jain. There was something formless and perfect before the universe was
born. It is serene, empty, solitary, unchanging, infinite, eternally present. It is the mother
of the universe. For lack of a better name, I call it the Dao. It flows through all things,
inside and outside, and returns to the origin of all things. The Dao is great. The universe
is great. Earth is great. Man is great. These are the four great powers. Man follows the
earth. Earth follows the universe. The universe follows the Dao. The Dao follows only itself.
Now we are going to see Susan Rabinowitz, who brings Daoism to life in her basement
school, a teacher of Tai Chi and Chi Kung, who practices the principles of the Dada
Jain, but practices them with her body and with her presence within her community. When
you encounter Daoists, they don't very often really talk a lot about the philosophy of
Daoism. They are more likely to just do something that is balancing and is unifying to their
mind and their body. Balance is important to the Daoists, and it is important in as
many different ways as you can think about it. What we see these people here doing is
balanced in their physical body, it is balanced in their mind, and it is balanced in their
energy. The first beginning practice is one where the people stand still and don't move
outwardly, but allow their mind to experience their bodies. By experiencing their bodies,
really the feelings of their bodies, not just the thoughts in their mind about their bodies,
they start to bring their mind and their body into balance. After a little while of this,
the natural energy of the human being starts to join this balance of mind and body and
becomes balanced as well. I think what is important to me is having a mind and a body
and a spirit that really are one thing, that in some way are connected to each other and
that in some way are connected to a larger picture. As a Daoist, I contemplate nature's
ways and learn to move as the fish that swims with the current or the knife that slips with
the grain. The brooks and birds, the mountains and forests fill me with constant delight,
but my joy has not ended when grief rushes in, because there is no dark without light,
no up without down, no bad without good. It's yin and yang, opposites coming together, creating
a whole. Like water, a Daoist deals with obstacles by circumventing them when possible, but just
as water erodes the hardest rock if no way round exists, so does he silently persist
in following the course set for him by nature.
The religions have so much wisdom to offer, and in the next segment we're going to see
Tom, Laura, and David, who are doctoral students of religion, talk about the impact of their
studies on their own personal lives and the way they think, and how their academic study
of religion have led them to take up the practice of Tibetan Buddhism.
Part of my interest in Buddhism came about because I was actually very interested in
physics, and I read the Dao of physics when I was in high school, and I felt as if somehow
well, if science is somehow proving Buddhism, well that's, you know, I was very impressed
by that. But in a sense, I finally came around to realizing that it was, like science doesn't
really have a heart in some ways. It didn't seem to me to be a path with a heart, and
here was, in a sense, a science that didn't just have a heart, it was a heart, you know,
it was the science of the heart.
Another way to put it is it's the perfection, the culmination of wisdom and compassion in
an integrated form, so completely wise compassion and completely compassionate wisdom. This
is held up as an ideal, and it's stated to be something that is attainable. Whether or
not any of us attain it, the perfection of these two qualities in this life may not be
as important as if we are at least moving in that direction towards that idea.
If you want to understand your past actions, look at your present condition. And if you
want to understand your future condition, look at your present actions.
Some of the things that concern me is this notion that when you're adopting a so-called
non-Western tradition, that it represents some kind of breakage away from your own self,
your own truth, your own culture. And I would suggest that for me, Buddhist practice and
values is simply a path in some ways to re-appropriate what it is that I feel is mine and where I
came from.
We're now going to see excerpts from Elder Hartley's film Requiem for a Faith about
Tibetan Buddhism. It was narrated by Houston Smith. I remember again seeing this film many
years ago and being so impressed by the gesture that showed the interrelationship between
method and wisdom. And the very description of this interrelationship was a form of technology,
the moving of the hands in a certain formal traditional way.
The Tibetans are particularly good at this technology of spirituality. They use music,
costume, especially gesture, color, printing, tools. I have here a dagger that can be used
for dealing with dark and evil spirits. Very handy thing to have and I keep it on my desk
or nearby all the time. I think that we often, in our effort to answer our questions of who
am I, why am I here, become too vague. We need a technology. We need some firmness,
some focus in our questioning. And religion can offer this to us and it's one of the
really greatest gifts of religion.
The Tibetans assume that truth has many levels. The Tibetan wise knew and to the advance they
taught that it's all within ourselves. These gods that seem so solid, so objectively real,
actually represent our own psychic forces, the calm and fear, the kindness and malevolence
that is in each one of us. Those whose minds are simple will see good and evil as residing
outside themselves and possessing concrete forms. This ignorance is at root single. It
consists in the delusion that we are individuals. With insights so radically penetrating as
to be at first scary, we see that separate selfhood is a fiction. Our real identity is
with being as a whole. Once we see this, we begin to act with the whole. Easier said than
done we say, and the Tibetans agreed. So wisdom requires methods to reach it. For those who
like shortcuts, who can take life's medicine straight, method prescribes the royal road
of meditation. Go in beeline, straight for the prize, the saving insight into life's
oneness that brings eternal release. Truth hits us with greater force if we can see it,
not just think it. So the Tibetans painted the truth. In addition to seeing the truth,
we can feel it physically with our bodies. So the Tibetans enacted the truth through
gestures. Finally, truth can be heard. So the Tibetans chanted. They discovered ways
we still don't know how of shaping their vocal cavities to resonate overtones to the point
where these became audible as distinct tones in their own right. So each lama thus trained
could sing chords by himself. Sensed without being explicitly heard, they stand in exactly
the same relation to our hearing as the sacred stands to our ordinary mundane lives. For
the object of the spiritual quest is precisely this, to experience life as replete with overtones
that tell of a more that can be sensed but not seen, sensed but not said, heard but not
explicitly. I can ask myself the same questions. Who am I? Why am I here? The questions are
familiar to me because I've asked them of myself many times in the past. The second
one I think is the easier one. Why am I here right now? I'm here because I love what I'm
doing. The first question is a tough one. Who am I? I ask the question often and I've
never been able to answer it but that doesn't stop me from asking it again and again. And
I can recommend that you ask that question and ask it very concretely instead of in the
abstract. Ask the question, who am I as I watch this? Or even better, who is watching
this? Why am I here? Or even better, where am I coming from as I watch this? What is
happening to me? Who am I becoming as I sit here and watch all these images? But eventually
you know I came to realize that you know all identities and labels being relative as they
are you know there are certain ones that might be you know positive for me and Buddhism,
the label of a Buddhist I felt was overall a good one. Hopefully I will be you know an
obedient servant of Christ, a loving one you know and hopefully I can live my life in that
way. It's like the age old question, if we ever knew why we're here, what we're supposed
to be doing here, there would be no reason for existence. And I've spent you know I think
I've spent my entire life questioning. Being a seeker never ends. It's you know you're
always learning, it's a you know it's a never ending process. I think everybody goes through
that phase of you know who am I and why am I here and I feel that I am a Muslim and a
Muslim is somebody who surrenders himself and submits himself to Allah's will. I can
hardly remember a time in my life when I wasn't concerned with why I was on this earth or
who I was as a person. Why am I here? I'm here to worship. Worship who? Worship the
Creator. I'm here to worship, to please and to serve him. So while in high school I kind
of had my you know rebellious like well what am I doing here? I think as an adult the experience
of my father dying was a much more pivotal and significant one for me. Each day, each
moment, each breath is a different answer to those questions. I'm not a permanent thing.
You know right now I'm the guy being interviewed and an hour from now I'll be a guy eating
dinner and tonight I'll be the guy who's sleeping but who am I when I'm asleep if I'm not there
to know who I am. You know so it's who the hell am I? I don't know.