Giving and Forgiving - An art of moral self-interest
 
"…The old avatar looked up, slowly waving his hand in front of my face. He gazed into me, deeper than anyone had ever been allowed. Not a word passed between us in those brief moments he read my soul as he read his own and knew a stranger as he knew himself. The unanimity this man felt with all life on earth mystified me."

by Youngbear Roth R.Y.T., I.A.Y.T.

 In 1972, the late sun streamed through large, bulletproof, street-side windows in a California military surplus store. I sold guns and ammunition by day and participated in a weapons smuggling ring by night. At that time, we called ourselves "revolutionaries" flying armaments from California through Honduras to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua who were attempting to overthrow a CIA backed Contra government. Both the Sandinistas and the Contras committed human rights violations aplenty; my job, as I saw it, was staying alive, and I took my cue from the CIA - my decision being coldly capitalistic and sadly apathetic towards humanity. I returned at the age of nineteen penniless from Israel - where I'd been running from the police on narcotics charges - to the United States, via New York's Kennedy Airport - where I was clubbed twice in one night by a guard for the crime of not having a place to sleep. In my home state of California, the first job I found threw me in with a less than sterling group.

I tell this youth's story because although, as a senior citizen, I am a long-time mystic and yogic priest, I do not wish to be sanitized by those who lend weight to my robes. The social satirist and activist, Dick Gregory, once offered, "I am a home grown boy, not dropped here from the moon." I was born to walk the path, but not born a yogi. I wallowed in the same mud as the other barnyard animals. Staying alive is a baseball bat to the knees; it is a humbling experience.

Like all humanity, I am simultaneously a student and a teacher. I have seen something of this world and have somewhat to teach, yet, I have much more to learn. During those adolescent years, I met an aging yogic avatar and poet (composer of the world famous song Nature Boy), Eden Ahbez. He stepped lightly into our military storefront in search of campsite goods for his digs in Desert Hot Springs, and we undertook the first of almost two decades of life altering conversations, helping me survive youth and gather myself along the journey as a man. At that first meeting he, with his waist length white hair and long beard, blew his bamboo flute and recited his famous lyrics to me, and when he spoke the final stanza, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return…" I stood in the middle of the store sobbing. I really did not know what else to do; I felt no love – only emptiness, regret, depression, and anger.

"You have such a well of peace in your eyes," I said.

The old avatar looked up, slowly waving his hand in front of my face. He gazed into me, deeper than anyone had ever been allowed. Not a word passed between us in those brief moments he read my soul as he read his own and knew a stranger as he knew himself. The unanimity this man felt with all life on earth mystified me.

"My friend, I would give anything to experience the harmony I see in your eyes. All I feel is rage." I appeared much as any other young man, however, inside I felt ancient and exhausted.

"Then do this for me," he said. "Give. Give the best of yourself to the world, and your world will change, and you will change. It won't happen overnight. These things take time." And, as an afterthought, "You'll be okay," he said; for all I could see, the old man appeared to have traveled a lifetime pure and unscathed by the universe. At that instant, I was thinking what an uncertain and frightening world this is. I was thinking an hour passed since my last drink. It is only in retrospect I realize no one arrives at their present position in the cycle of samsara, life and death, untouched. We ride the crest of an unending learning curve where we must be given the time and space to err and grow, and be forgiven our human trespasses. First query: when one commits the crime of living at the expense of other's lives, seeking forgiveness from others becomes yet another crime. So, where does one turn? The weapons that moved through my able hands had taken lives, and this I found abominable. "I am a monster," I thought.

***

` One of my favorite stories from the Upanishads concerns a woman on a long journey who decides to take a nap. One afternoon she falls asleep with her careworn feet pointing towards the local temple. The monk in charge views this as an insult and anxiously chastises the woman for pointing her bare feet toward Brahman. The woman calmly awakens to the monk's indignation, considers her trespass and replies, "Show me where Brahman does not exist, and there I will point my feet."

The Judeo-Christian interpretation of Western (originally Eastern) spiritual doctrines traditionally teaches that we are separate from, yet, created by and in the image of God. A handful of Christian and Jewish mystics espouse that we are a manifest quality of God.

However, in the Eastern philosophical and spiritual tradition of Vedanta – Hinduism's tomb of revelatory doctrine that includes early descriptions of yoga and the hoary literature of the Upanishads - humanity takes the profound plunge that our finite energy and God’s infinite energy are one and the same energy; that atman, the finite self, and Brahman, the infinite self are one and the same – the universe, humanity included, is God – God is the universe and more. Like Eden Ahbez, one may know all of life as one knows one's self. It is written in the Tao Te Ching that the wise sage need never leave his abode to know the world.

Whichever train of belief one intuits, East or West, the life-broadening message stands clear and universal: we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, rather, we are "divine spiritual being" experiencing the human condition. Our second inquiry then becomes obvious, "Why are we here; why as humanity?"

When I consider the above query, my mind reels back to a time before I committed to the path: I was seventeen and found myself in a foreign country unable to speak or read the language. I was homeless, living out of an airport restroom, sleeping in public lobbies, and at the mercy of those who might offer me a handout. For a self-centered, Levi clad, Calvin Klein shirt wearing, middle-class American, this radical shift in lifestyle was a rude initiation into the human condition. By the time my cycle of initiation brought me relative stability – a few years of ups and downs – I became a bitter and unforgiving drunk, a young man who viewed the human race through a gripping, illusive anger.

The art and science of yoga believes we are born out of a dynamic universe to evolve on the corporeal plane through challenges this life affords us; to master interior harmony through practicing life within exterior homeostasis. We are born into humanity because a human being is the only sentient being capable of using its own mistaken perceptions and resulting crises about its illusive condition to transcend that condition. Humanity is here to transcendentally evolve an awareness of its divine self by using Maya, its created crises and illusions. Eastern philosophers, religious practitioners, and spiritual metaphysicians are fond of saying, "Nirvana, final liberation, is found in the midst of samsara." Living is a transcendental practice, and one of our greatest hurtles to transcend is the challenge we face in holding tight to our illusions while riding the flowing tsunami of a dynamic universe. If the yogic plunge that finite and infinite energy are one is true, how can an individual grow in awareness of the divine self – a finite aspect manifest of the infinite flowing universe – when one becomes staid in opinion and unforgiving in thought, deed, and action? Struggling with Maya, we are challenged to perceive dharma, the truth of our yogic path.

We approach life like a battle demanding we develop a white-knuckle grasp on our survival weapon - the ego - which must be "correct." Ironically, this ego cannot be correct until it learns to renounce its worldly position and allows us to flow in awareness of our divine self. One of the original definitions of yoga is "the art of renunciation"; that renunciation being to master living in the world while not being of the world. Certainly, we live in a world of relative right and wrong. Though, in practicing the rest of yoga's definition - to yoke, unite, return, or flow back to the divine self - one must renounce one's position of attachment to being right or wrong, else impede the current of union. Forgiveness is paramount to mastering yoga's deepest truth and goal: to realize the divine self and live in awareness of the divine creative infinity that illuminates itself and infuses its energy throughout the universe, beating inside every human cell.

The Vedas also tell us that which we know only too well; walking the road of life is like walking along a razor's edge.