Meher Baba, Shakespeare, and the Play of Life A Consciousness Primer by Geoffrey Gunther 1 SHAKESPEARE is usually seen as a secular writer who foreshadows modern scepticism of claims to absolute truth values. I find on the contrary that his central message is that the limited self must be transcended through love, through wonder and often through suffering. His plays, especially comedies, tragedies and romances, inspire a transcendent outlook when we can open to their inner message. To put alongside the plays the words of Meher Baba illuminates the reality of the message and reminds us that Shakespeare stands in the tradition of the perennial truth which encompasses what it really means to be human. GEOFFREY GUNTHER taught literature for many years and had a book on Shakespeare published in 1994, Shakespeare as Traditional Artist. He is now retired and lives in Queensland, Australia, near Avatar’s Abode, Meher Baba’s home in the Southern Hemisphere. Geoff can be contacted at [email protected]. Copyright © 2016 by Geoffrey Gunther 2 Contents Preface 4 Prologue 6 1. The God-Story: Consciousness and Meher Baba 12 2. The Science-Story 45 3. Twelfth Night and Cosmic Truth 61 4. More on Consciousness 72 5. Hamlet’s Redemption 86 6. A Healing Cosmology 101 7. The Great Romance 120 8. The Winter’s Tale 139 9. Science, Religion and Love 147 10. Conclusion 163 3 Preface There are no new answers to the problem of consciousness even if there are countless embellishments. The Rig Veda declares, What thing I am I do not know. I wander alone, burdened by my mind. And it is also this ancient source which calls Love the “Firstborn of Truth”. Meher Baba has reaffirmed the solution in our own times: …both freedom and bindings are consumed in the Fire of Divine Love, which destroys the very basis of the illusion of duality and all its paraphernalia.1 For many of us the spiritual side of our inner life has become fraught with doubts and dissociated from our picture of the world. I feel that I can offer at least a pioneering effort to integrate Baba’s message with the ideals, doubts and illusions of our lives. What perhaps needs reformulating is how to relate the problem and the answer to the way in which we view the truths of religion and science in the contemporary world. This is done in the hope that it can be a small contribution to the convergence of different perspectives and a relinquishing of arrogant certitudes in the light shed by Baba on the tremendous mystery of what our consciousness or selfhood is. Many good things are being said at present on the relationship between religion and science, and even about the nature of consciousness, but this is an attempt to integrate them with the utterances of the “Silent Master”, Meher Baba. At this time (2010) Meher Baba has been thoroughly marginalized, left on a shelf labeled ‘Indian Guru, influential 1930’s–1960’s’, and the world remains ignorant of the treasure of his life and work. Hopefully you don’t have to be a ‘Baba-lover’ to enjoy my book, as he can be taken as just one archetypal enunciator of the spiritual message which confronts scientism today. 1 Bhau Kalchuri, Lord Meher, vol. 11, 3971 (on the Fiery Free Life). 4 I hope that I have enlivened the debate by giving an imaginative resonance to it, so that intuition can cast off its anxieties and claim its due by revolting against the wrong types of authority being imposed on it in our world. There is an old clerihew that goes Cecil B. de Mille Rather against his will Was persuaded to leave Moses Out of the War of the Roses A similar reluctance has afflicted me in writing on consciousness. There are so many interesting things that have been said or can be said. My hope is that the words which follow show that any answer will come through humility and love and realization rather than through a giant intellectual synthesis. 5 PROLOGUE Most people know what consciousness is. It is what we are when we are not asleep. This is true and in a sense profoundly true, in that consciousness is right here and now for us, inseparable and indubitable as our present locus. "We know what consciousness is," William James once wrote, "as long as no one asks us to define it.”2 Only relatively recently has consciousness been seen as worthy of serious empirical investigation and much of the emphasis is on the phenomena of the brain measured by neuroscience. Some scientists like Daniel Dennett tend to deny its centrality and even that it exists. It is strongly imputed that this very own personal possession and identity of ours is an illusion, that the very basis of our commonsense reality is no more than an “epiphenomenon”, a phantasm. The solidity of our experiential world has dissolved and this applies to all systems of thought and rules of behaviour including the spiritual traditions. The very foundations of rational certainty and moral choice have crumbled; we know that we ourselves and the universe itself are both obscure, and that truth no longer coincides with how we make sense of life. There are no ‘naked data’ that we can be sure of except empirical facts and even these dissolve in an epistemological scepticism. Yet we still carry the inescapable burdens of self-awareness, conscience, curiosity and of an imagination which creates ideals of great beauty; to be both masters and servants of the real and to validate our experience as selves remains the great need for the thoughtful and the sensitive. We must all face this challenge. In the past our conviction of the solid reality of our self and its perceived world was guaranteed by the assurance of a Supreme Being whom we could trust since we were in His image, and by the apparent solidity of the material universe. This innocence is no longer possible or even permissible. The data available to our minds must make us ask the following: do we really know what being awake or being conscious is? Science calls us to wake up from our fatuous common sense view of things. The great spiritual traditions of the East now impinging on us all issue a similar challenge. Consciousness examined largely through intro- 2 In his book Psychology: The Science of Mental Life (1962, 40), George Miller sums it up thus: “Consciousness is a word worn smooth by a million tongues. Depending on the figure of speech chosen it is a state of being, a substance, a process, a place, an epiphenomenon, an emergent aspect of matter, or the only true reality”. 6 spection undermines convictions of ourselves as separate observing entities and sees all experience as illusory. This crucial instability is a window of great opportunity, disintegration making us look to the inmost feeling of presence, perhaps making us open to help, relaxing the iron grip that holds us apart as separate entities. A real and unsatisfied need for meaning is our treasure. If we do not wish to lead a life of unexamined belief or unexamined scepticism, we are all, not just the professionals, forced to think about this utterly personal thing that is our consciousness, which our dear grandmamas took totally for granted as they bounced us in their soft laps. This is a good thing . maybe. I say maybe because as soon as we do begin to think about it we are plunged into some very formidable contradictions.3 Mind, being what it is, works with opposites and lots of opposites are available to it on this very topic which is so personal, so imperative, so demanding, that we will feel that we have moved from that grandmotherly lap to two very hard bony knees. What is happening? Well, we all need stories to begin to approach the big truths of ourselves and the universe. As Gurdjieff 4 put it, “Story is breath, life. Without story man have no self.” 5 Stories structure our minds and linger in them. They structure our subconscious minds more pervasively than facts or principles or assertions. In our own day two stories stand central to our reflection on meaning: the Science-Story and the God-Story. Perhaps making these two stories explicit will enable us to remember much we usually forget. We are all faced with what Gustav Fechner asserts: “Among all existing miracles the greatest is that anything should exist at all.” Another way to put it is that we need central myths which will in some way fulfill our ultimate concerns. Yet the old stories, of a literally true explanation of Everything in revelation or of the evident and solid and lawful Newtonian universe, just cannot cope with the evidence. But what is happening now is that we are all being told two new stories, 3 The ancient poet Charles d’Orleans puts it in lively terms Now blind, I find all roads betray. So that I go not quite astray I tap my staff; but ways are crossed. Alas, that I must chant this lay— A Wanderer, I, whose path is lost. 4 Gurdjieff was probably the greatest psychologist of the twentieth century, but as the time has idolized Freud and Jung, Gurdjieff has remained marginalized. This saying can typically be read in two ways. It may be implied that to escape false self we have to escape from all stories. 5 Paul Beekman Taylor, Shadows of Heaven, 183. 7 two very different and very strange stories, stories that don’t add up, a fact so uncomfortable that we may even hide from this awareness, may not even want to know this news, and decide to go back to the daily rag which the media baron has kindly provided for us with its bogus news and its self-flattering astrology column.