All World
Gayatri Pariwar

[Abstracted from Catherine Ingram’s universally acclaimed book- ‘Passionate Presence’. Published with glad consent of the author. – Editor]

In awakened awareness, seeing beauty results from one's perception and not necessarily from the thing perceived. What we often describe as beautiful is merely a conditioned interpretation that is trained to see one thing as beautiful and another as revolting.  Awakened awareness, however, overrides this conditioning and is able to see beauty in the most unlikely of places because it sees the universal essence of things.

Some years ago I was in India to visit my teacher- Poonjaji, when a dramatic shift in my perception occurred. I had become, over many trips during the previous twenty years, more and more allergic to India. By that I mean I had developed such revulsion for the sights, smells, and sounds that accost one's senses every day that I went around with a slight feeling of nausea. Nevertheless, India continued to draw me because of its rich spiritual heritage and the great teachers who lived there. I also enjoyed being occasionally unplugged from the hectic pace of Western life. But I had long ago lost all romantic notions about much of India and instead noticed its disease, pollution, poverty, and superstition. It seemed after a while that my eye fell upon ugliness at nearly every turn. Being with Poonjaji changed all that. I began to sense the presence of the life force in myself and, soon, in everything around me. While I was showering one day, the bath tiles came alive as I imagined, could almost feel, their subatomic particles swirling within. When walking, I no longer experienced myself as a separate body but as a movement in and through an all-encompassing landscape. This perception in turn produced feelings of warmth and appreciation for every strange, wonderful, or ordinary thing I chanced upon. Now, wherever my eye landed, my heart was lit up by the indwelling presence it recognized there. The wart hogs eating garbage on the side of the road became beautiful to me because I could feel my own essence in them. They and I, embodying different forms, were just part of the unbounded panorama of existence.

In Zen they say, "When you wake up, the whole' world wakes up". One's awakened awareness recognizes its own nature in everything, seeing its source as the source of all. One then perceives in love and wholeness, experiencing beauty not merely in certain objects, people or places, but as awakened heart intelligence at one with the world.

So often our definition and appreciation of beauty comes from limited awareness. Sure, we can see beauty in the creamy pink cheeks and shining eyes of a child, in the purple and red glow of sunrise over a snowy field, or in the languid grace of a gorgeous woman. Identifying these as beautiful requires no special intelligence. Our genes and cultural conditioning do that work for us. We easily respond to typical triggers of instinct and what we have been taught to define as beauty.

But in awakened awareness the experience of beauty is not about how a person, place or thing looks; it is about how the one who is looking feels. We are able to see beauty even in what our instincts or cultural conditioning define as horrid. The horrid is also seen and noted in awakened awareness but is accepted as part of the whole. As a human animal we may move away from all unpleasant smell, but we need not experience the smell as an alien force, separate from totality. Rumi said, "Imagine the delight of walking on a noisy street and being the noise". In awakened awareness we are not mentally carving up the world into what should be included or not. We sense the world as a vast extension of ourselves. We belong to it and it belongs to us. Imagine the delight.

The beauty that we experience in outward manifestation is a direct reflection of the beauty of our internal reality. Have you ever noticed how someone you love or one who has simply been kind to you may suddenly look beautiful even though you might have once considered that same face to be plain? What was it that changed? In awakened awareness we are not solely dependent on visual stimulation to experience beauty because we recognize that the greatest conduit for the experience of beauty is love. When we love, we see beauty; we walk in beauty. In love, we are beauty itself.

There is a story told by Japan's potter Hiroshi Eguchi of a visit to his pottery store in Nagasaki by Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan in 1948. Blind and deaf since birth, Keller had by that time spent more than sixty years in a relentless love of learning and discovering beauty. The potter Eguchi had seen his city devastated by the atomic bomb just three years before and felt embittered towards Americans. Nevertheless he consented to show the two women around his store and was intrigued when Keller picked up a special old Imari pot. As she examined it with her hands, she exclaimed "Oh, how lovely." Eguchi indignantly thought to himself, “How can this old blind American lady understand the beauty and value of this pot?'"

Seven years later, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan made a second trip to Nagasaki and again visited the pottery store. Imagine Eguchi's surprise when Keller asked him to show her the Imari pot she had "seen" years before. On hearing this Eguchi realized he had previously misjudged Helen Keller's capacity for appreciation. He would later write of this episode. “It is not by our eyes that we appreciate pottery. It is our hearts that feel the beauty of pottery"

If only prayer you say in your whole life is 'thank you' that would suffice.

Gratitude is a precursor to delight. To be truly happy is to live in gratitude. In awakened awareness, we feel grateful simply for life itself. That we exist at all, witnessing the wonders of life for the span of our existence, is an immeasurable gift and reason enough to live entirely in gratitude for all kind of things, great and small, happy and sad, within that existence.

In Dharma dialogues, people often ask me about the meaning of grace. I reply that grace is gratitude. Living in grace means accepting whatever comes one's way with thankfulness. Grace is not, as is commonly misunderstood, a situation whereby everything goes your way. People will mistakenly think that they were in some sort of grace because they were bumped into first class or chanced to meet the right person at the right time or any other such lucky occurrence. But true grace is an attitude of acceptance and appreciation for whatever comes our way, the hardships as well as the joys. Grace is openheartedness that whispers "Okay" while everything is falling apart.

Contentment is perhaps the most underrated aspect of happiness in our culture. Mostly we are conditioned by advertising and society to equate contentment with boredom. From an early age we are inducted in the message that happiness means wanting and getting things. About a week after the destruction of World Trade Center and the loss of nearly three thousand lives, our government and media called upon its citizenry for their help. What they suggested was not to count our blessings, or to realize life's uncertainty and be more kind to one another, or to diminish our dependence on foreign resources. No, according to the government and advertising media, the most important and patriotic act for us in the face of national tragedy was to purchase products. Spend money. Get back to consuming. We are expected to go along in a nearly robotic buying trance upon which even a large-scale catastrophe should barely impinge.

I don't see an evil conspiracy on the part of government and corporations. These organizations are comprised simply of people, just folks. But there are number of fallacies under which many of the people in those institutions operate. They assume that wanting more and always being hungry for the next thing is the desirable condition. They are engaged in this assumption, not to pull one over on an unsuspecting public, but because they, too, want more things and are trying to get them. They just happen to be in positions of power that allow them to readily do so by convincing masses of people likewise. It is a pyramid scheme on a large scale. Unfortunately, the players are slow to notice that this is not leading to happiness and that runaway train of consumption is killing much of life on earth. If we were all more content, we would consume less. Contentment therefore becomes one of the most revolutionary acts a person in western culture can experience. But feeling content goes against all cultural norms and conditioning, and that is why it is so rare.

Perhaps the greatest example of contentment that I know of is the life of Ramana Maharshi. One of the most revered of contemporary Indian sages, Ramana had an extraordinary awakening in 1896 when he was just sixteen years old. After school one day, young Ramana was overcome by thought of death. How could it be that everything was destined to die? More to the point, how could it be that he was going to die? Stricken with fear, he lay down and allowed his awareness to examine what exactly it was that would die and what could possibly remain. In a span of twenty minutes, he realized what he called the Self, the substratum of existence, which infuses everything. Because he recognized his fundamental nature as that substratum. the fear of death left him and never returned. Moreover, he was filled with love, an appreciation of Self in all its forms. So absorbed was he in this newfound delight that he could no longer bear the mundane activities of life as a schoolboy. Ordinary studies seemed to be a distraction from his immersion in Self. Six weeks after his realization, he left home and went directly to the mountain Arunachala, a sacred pilgrimage spot that had always held a mysterious lure for him.

There, on and around the mountain, Ramana spent the rest or his life. So great was his contentment that until his death in 1950 he never left Arunachala, even for a day. For many of his initial years there he lived in complete silence, dwelling in caves, clad only in loincloth. After sometime, devotees began to collect around him, drawn by the silent love that emanated from him. Eventually an ashram formed to accommodate the devotees and visitors. Scholars, writers, heads of state, spiritual teachers, and seekers from around the world also came to sit in his presence. Over the years, Ramana would occasionally answer questions but mostly he remained silent, helping out with ashram chores, tending to animals, or resting on his dais. Having never sought the world, the world came to him. I was a young woman- when I first saw a photo of Ramana Maharshi taken in his later years. I remember looking at the picture and having the thought "That is what I would like to look like at that age." His face radiated contentment; his eyes gazed into forever. It was perhaps the most beautiful face I had ever seen. I attempted to read few of his teachings, but they were too simple and direct for my complicated spiritual needs and beliefs at the time. It was a long journey to come home to them. Who could have known that in meeting my teacher nearly twenty years later I would find myself with a teacher whose own living teacher had been Ramana Maharshi?

The deepest contentment comes from recognizing the pervading life force in everything. It is the experience of witnessing an infinitely creative intelligence endlessly manifesting itself. We call its comings and goings life and death. But from another perspective, all is consciousness, endlessly rearranging itself into form and formlessness. There is no need to demand that its creatures of form should continue past death in some manner when the underlying reality from which they spring is infinite. Knowing this, we are witness to eternity, if only for a short while.

Two jewel merchants arrived at a caravanserai in the desert at about the same time one night. Each was quite conscious of the other’s presence, and while unloading his camel, one of them could not resist the temptation to let a large pearl fall to the ground as if by accident. It rolled in the direction of the other who, with affected graciousness, picked it up and returned it to its owner saying, “That is a fine pearl you have there, sir. As large and lustrous as they come.”

“How gracious of you to say so, “said the other. “As a matter of fact, that is one of the smaller gems in my collection.”

A bedouin who was sitting by the fire and had observed this drama, rose and invited the two of them to eat with him. When they began their meal, this is the story he told them:

“I, too, my friends, was, once upon a time, a jeweler like you. One day I was overtaken by a great storm in the desert. It buffeted my caravan and me this way and that till I was separated from my entourage and lost my way completely. Days passed and I was panic-stricken to realize that I was really wandering about in circles with no sense of where I was or which direction to walk in. Then, almost dead with starvation, I unloaded every bag on my camel’s back, anxiously searching through them of the hundredth time. 

Imagine my excitement when I came upon a pouch that had escaped my notice before. With trembling fingers I ripped it open hoping to find something to eat. Imagine my disillusionment when I found that all it contained was pearls!”