The Cave of the Saints (Chapter 4)

An Excerpt from a Spiritual Novel by Kenneth Rose

Chapter Four: Seeing with Both Eyes

I was awakened by the songs of birds of varying voices creating a harmonious symphony, which colored the air with a spray of happiness and peacefulness. I was in a tranquil mood, and when I looked within, the golden flame continuously whirled and spun on the inner screen of my mind like a dancer. I had attained a level of awakening that I thought would never change, yet I was mentally and physically drained. A knowing arose within me from an inner guidance system that had emerged in my conscious awareness in the last couple of days as it guided me to the Cave of the Saints. It suggested that my sense of fatigue was traceable to practicing the Tree of the Heart, which, as the mystical crossroads of the universe, unites every mind into one being bearing numberless faces and bodies in countless scenes and settings. To enter that mystical space is like standing in Times Square on an evening in summer along with tens of thousands of people but multiplied now by uncountable orders of magnitude. By praying for all of these living beings and by wishing them well, I was touched by their karma and by their individual dramas and destinies. If I felt tired after just one session of practicing the Tree of the Heart, how much weightier is the burden for the great gurus, the divine incarnations, and the interceding saints who take upon themselves the karma of the countless living beings distributed throughout numberless worlds.

I was absorbed in these thoughts when Dona’s arrival was announced by the dimming of the light in the cave as she approached the entrance. I stood to greet her with palms joined in front of my heart, for now I understood that she was not merely a local resident but a bodhisattva with a finely attuned intuitive awareness of the subtle realm that encircles the physical world. This inner world, which radiates out from the heart chakra of every living being, is populated by ancestors, angels, saviors, world-teachers, and the devas, who are the deities reverenced in the world’s religions. Living in both worlds allowed Dona to see with both eyes—the spiritual eye as well as the physical eye.

Dona unpacked supplies for the coming day from a rucksack, but I was less interested now in food and drink than in the spiritual nourishment on offer in the cave, which outshone physical nourishment as the sun outshines the moon during the day. I updated Dona on the events of the preceding night while we sat by the entrance of the cave overlooking the shining band of the river below, and I mentioned my sense of fatigue.

“Visions like the golden flame and the tree of the heart fade quickly,” she explained, “but you can rekindle them whenever you like just by calling them to mind. Visions carve permanent traces in our memory and link us to the subtle realms and the presence of the sacred ones. Through the exercise of your imagination—which includes the capacity of visualization—you can activate these traces of sacred visions and link up with the realities that they channel. The vision of the golden flame is a channel of the dynamic life of being itself as it continuously dances all of this into existence. Using visualization to activate the traces that it leaves in your memory reawakens your vision of that light.

“But, as with any advanced meditation, you should practice the Flame of Golden Light meditation sparingly while you gradually become accustomed to perceiving the world with both your ordinary eye and your enlightened eye. Never push yourself too far, and if you feel tired when doing this practice, stop for a while and wait patiently while you grow into a new level of spiritual maturity. You will eventually sense an inner summons to begin the practice again, and then you’ll be more confident when you practice.”

Dona rose and guided me to my meditation seat in the center of the cave, which was surrounded by the now-invisible niches of the saints and divine beings. “This morning,” she said, “I’ll show you how to see with both eyes while practicing the Flame of Golden Light meditation.”

As soon I sat down, the walls of the cave fell away, and I found myself walking up a staircase in a New York subway station. I knew the scene from growing up in Brooklyn—the white tiles lining the walls of the stairwell and the steel steps splattered with wads of black gum and crushed cigarette butts. I realized that this was Dona’s magic, one of her skills as an advanced yogini. Even more surprising was that I could still see my seat in the cave and Dona standing next to me.

“Is this seeing with both eyes?” I asked.

“Not quite. You are seeing two scenes—the subway is projected on the cave. This is a nice trick, a type of remote viewing, but it’s not yet spiritual seeing. Remember the Buddha’s instruction and see if you can access spiritual seeing with both eyes.”

I turned back to the doubled scene. I knew what to expect as I ascended the subway stairs into the square of light, which opened at the top of the stairwell, creating the illusion of rising into the clear sky. But as soon as my eyes reached street level, I saw a vast swarm of people moving rapidly in multiple directions. As I came to the top of the stairs, a group of people moved rapidly past me down the stairs into the subway, and when I turned around to see where I was, I found myself standing on 42nd Street and Broadway directly facing the old New York Times Tower with a view of the Great White Way stretching for blocks northward. It was a bright summer afternoon, heavy with thick humidity, and raw energy flashed through crowds of tourists gawking at the illumined marquees and snapping photos with their smartphones. This setting was far removed from the sanctity and tranquility of the Cave of the Saints.

On an impulse, I imagined the golden dancing energy in my vision the night before, and without hesitation, a flame of light blazed up in my heart. I felt a surge of delight and gratitude, and I blessed the scene unfolding ahead of me. Where there had been groups of animated but dawdling tourists and bemused city dwellers outpacing and outmaneuvering them, there now were troupes of radiant beings with shining faces who were delighting in viewing enormous, jewel-bedecked golden thrones embossed with iridescent inscriptions in dozens of sacred languages. As they read the messages on the seats, their faces brightened and their bodies became transparent, emitted rainbow light, and drifted upwards, rising above the circle of thrones into higher worlds. On the thrones, sat divine beings of countless known and unknown religions and mystical philosophies. Their eyes were closed in meditation, and tranquil smiles gently curved their lips. I was seeing people’s better selves, their higher selves, although when I shifted my eyes, I saw them as before—ordinary-looking people jostling each other on the streets of Manhattan. When I shifted my eyes again, the enhanced scene reemerged. I kept shifting my eyes in this way until I could see people simultaneously as their everyday selves and as their sainted selves.

“Now you’re seeing spiritually with both eyes, like a Buddha!” exclaimed Dona.

“Yes, yes—but how can people be both mundane and divine at the same time?”

“It’s like when you have a dream in which you fall from a cliff or are chased by a tiger—your dreaming self is just as much you as the person lying asleep in bed. We are beings living simultaneously on many levels or multiple channels. The person who cheats other people knows somewhere in a rarely visited room of their soul that they could be a better person than they are—that’s why they blame others or excuse themselves as weak or confused or without alternatives instead of praising themselves when they engage in unwholesome activities. That’s their innermost Self reminding them of who they really are. It’s a reminder to see themselves and others with their spiritual eye and not merely the physical one.”

This was an overly generous view of people, I thought. It didn’t seem to account for people caught up in the glamor of being bad such as well-dressed drug kingpins delighting in the awe and admiration of bystanders when they emerge as heroes from expensive cars.

“But that reveling in themselves as glamourous rogues witnesses in a twisted way to their awareness of their higher selves as virtuous heroes and saints widely admired by other people.” Again, Dona had read my thoughts. “Still, there is a karmic price to pay for negative actions, especially violence to others. When we take a cosmic perspective on time, we see that the rogue will not go free nor will the good person go unrewarded. The law of karma is universal in scope and no violence or theft will escape detection and repayment,” Dona continued. “For people who have turned to unwholesome paths, the road ahead always forks between suffering the returns on bad deeds or turning toward the good. Life in this world is a school, and a key lesson is learning to choose the good, the true, and the beautiful over their opposites.”

“The teaching that our life as it appears right now is an indicator of our karma is a hard teaching,” I complained. “It says that all of the negatives and positives of a person’s life are the results of their previous actions, choices, and thoughts. I wouldn’t be comfortable telling people living with negative circumstances beyond their control or choice in this life that they are the results of their actions in their previous lives. Isn’t telling someone that their situation in this life is due to their karma a way of blaming the victim? That seems to me to be a harsher teaching than appealing to the mysteries of the will of God to account for difficult situations in our lives. At least then the blame is on God and not on some version of ourselves in a previous life of which we are now unaware.”

“I see why you took up the study of religion, since this is perhaps the most difficult of all of life’s big questions, and religions and religious philosophies have long attempted to answer it. And I think that we—the School of the Inclusive Way and I—can point toward a solution to this difficult issue.”

“Really? How does that work?”

“It blends the doctrine of karma and the doctrine of God’s will to give an answer to the question of why bad things happen to people—which, by the way, also raises the question of why good things happen to people. Each one of us is an eternal being with a long karmic history composed of good, bad, and neutral karma. When we offer ourselves to God, or, to use a Sanskrit name, Ishvara, our better karma takes precedence over our negative karma. This act of self-offering to the divine wisdom that evolves and infuses the universe is the most powerful karmic deed that we will ever undertake. Through this action of self-surrender, we break free of the circle of self-absorption, and our mixed bag of karma gets used in ways that are beneficial to the whole of life. Then we begin to have experiences that are better than what we would have had if we hadn’t offered ourselves to the divine—although these experiences are still sourced in our good karma.

“But if we stay focused only on our own wants, our own egos, and our own demands, our karma unfolds against the good of the whole. This means that our current actions must be curbed and rechanneled by the higher guiding forces, with the result that the outplaying of our karma will be bumpier.

“When people orient themselves to goodness and truth, divine wisdom summons their best karma in accordance with the overall divine purpose, which seeks the perfection of every living being in the universe. But when people don’t offer themselves to the higher realities, the divine allows them to grope along unaided under the influence of their karma until the suffering that they bring on themselves moves them to seek out and to give themselves over to higher realities.”

“But,” I countered, “doesn’t that means that karma is a set of possible futures that we have earned instead of a law prescribing direct linkages between our past actions and our future experiences?”

“You shouldn’t think of karma in a rigid way,” responded Dona, “as if it were an iron law allowing of no exceptions. The so-called law of karma is a humanly constructed model that tries to explain the actual reality of how destiny plays out. But, just as scientific laws are revised and sometimes overthrown as knowledge expands, so should our theories about karma be revised. Our understanding of light has changed dramatically since the 1800s, so our theory of karma should also be updated in light of the broadening of knowledge in the natural sciences, comparative religion, positive psychology, transpersonal psychology, and neuroscience.

“We need to keep in mind that when it comes to karma, we’re dealing with living beings instead of physical forces. Karma is a subtler reality than gravity, just as thinking is a subtler process than digestion. Karma functions more like an emotion than a physical law. When we feel compassion for others or when we engage in ethically meritorious behavior, our mood brightens and our spirit becomes lighter. Like a lamp switched on in the dark, we brighten the scenes of our experience, with the result that waves of good karma radiate from us. This lightens everyone’s karma as well as our own. In the same way, when we harm others or do what is hurtful, we tarnish the scenes of our experience. This also affects everyone to one degree or another, including us. My karma can brighten or deepen your karma, just as yours can brighten or deepen mine.

“Another factor shaping our karma is the influence of the devas, who wish our best destiny for us, which is union with the highest peak of being. Just as the light of the initial moments of the Big Bang is a constant background radiation throughout the entire universe, so divine influence—or grace—is a background radiation in our lives.¹ It shapes, undercuts, guides, cancels, and amplifies our good and bad karma.

“And there is one other fact that you need to keep in mind when thinking about karma—and this is the most startling aspect of the law of karma.”

“I’m waiting to hear,” I said with anticipation.

“I’m sure that you’ve noticed that there is a kind of ‘dumb fortune’ that randomly happens. Dozens of people might write a book on a topic, but just one of these books—and not always the best one—becomes a bestseller. Or a plane flying a humanitarian mission collides with a mountain while a plane carrying leaders of a murderous regime lands safely at a plush resort.”

“Yes, that seems to be a troubling feature of life,” I allowed.

“These strokes of good or bad luck can be compared to a ball falling into a pocket on a roulette wheel. Something just clicks, and this event rather than that one occurs.”

“But that’s just randomness!” I protested.

“Yes, of course it is! Because the universe is an open and free system, there is an element of randomness in it. Otherwise the universe would seize up and the world would be locked into a rigid, exceptionless system. Imagine how tedious it would be if all of your days passed with the monotonous orderliness of a ticking clock or the cycles of a dishwasher. But the universe isn’t completely random. It possesses an implicit orderliness, which is displayed in the motion of the planets and in the behavior of atoms and molecules. So there is always a blend of order and chaos—that’s the condition that allows life to emerge without being completely preplanned and coded upfront.”

“But that seems to run counter to the idea that karma determines our future or that God or Ishvara is in control of the universe,” I protested.

“To get a better understanding of mysterious realities like destiny, it’s helpful to learn how to hold opposite viewpoints at the same time by blending them into a new viewpoint. Instead of assuming that questions like this can be solved by taking an either this or that approach, we will find better answers by taking a both this and that approach.”  

“But thinking that both sides of a question are true results in contradictions and paradoxes, which goes against logic,” I, the onetime philosophy major, objected.

“Well,” the philosophy professor replied, “that’s true when you accept only yes or no as an answer to a question like this, but the situation shifts radically when you see that yes and no can both be true at the same time.”

“I’m sure Aristotle would have disagreed with you,” I suggested.

“Yes, no doubt, but who knows what he would have thought if he had engaged Hegel in debate? Here, let’s take an example. Is it day or night now?”²

“It’s daytime now.”

“How much daytime is it now?”

“It’s a mix,” I quickly responded to her riddle.

“What do you mean?” she probed.

“Well, it’s daytime now, not night—as we can see by looking outside. But we’re closer to night right now than we were an hour ago, so we’re somewhere between day and night—and that somewhere, that mix, shifts every nanosecond.”

“Right, the Now is always Now, but if I say that it’s 09.27.08 now’’—Dona glanced at her smartwatch—“that statement is false before I finish saying the sentence. A yes-and-no logic recognizes that the Now eludes every attempt to nail it down as this or that Now. It captures the richness of reality better than yes-or-no logic, which misses the vast middles of things. That would be like insisting that the Now is 09.27.08 now and forever. But that’s absurd, and no one does that, so why should we do that when we think about destiny or the nature of the divine?

“Let’s go back to the question of what shapes our destinies. We might avoid contradiction by stressing order at the expense of randomness and argue that all events occur in obedience to the divine will. But that makes the divine a mysterious and frightening dispenser of good and bad destinies bearing no relationship to our choices and desires. That would be an unjust system in which, like marionettes, we are jerked about by a power beyond our understanding and control.

“Or we might avoid contradiction by claiming that because the law of karma is exact, everyone is fully responsible for whatever they experience, good or bad. But if people’s lives are difficult or pleasurable in proportion to their karma, then we will be forced to blame a child born into poverty for that difficult circumstance by claiming that it’s due to its bad karma and that when an oppressor enjoys a comfortable upbringing and lives in a villa that’s also due to good karma.

“Contradicting and muddying these neat pictures of karma and the divine will is the reality that a lot of what happens in life seems random, like the play of particles. In fact, reality—like the Now—is richer than our theories about it, which are occasionally right—just like it is 09.27.08 every day.”

“So, by holding both stances at the same time—seeing reality as both random and determined—we come closer to what’s really true?” I asked.

“Yes, the random appearance of good or bad circumstances in our lives gives us opportunities to outsmart, if you will, or outmaneuver randomness with the power of our good karma and reliance on the divine. To look at the question of destiny like this is seeing with two eyes, and when we do that, the devas aid us invisibly as we negotiate randomness with the equipment provided for us by our stock of good karma. If we manage randomness well, we will rise at death to higher levels in the subtle realms.”

“So,” I suggested, “the element of randomness in the physical world makes it into a school, a place where we can test our reliance on the devas and karmically-cultivated goodness against whatever occurs.”

“Yes, exactly!”

“That’s a far more satisfying theory of karma than any other that I have heard,” I exclaimed with surprise. “But how do you know this?”

“It’s intuitive knowledge, which comes to us through deep listening to the vast mind of the universe, which constantly speaks to us in the deepest depths of our minds.”

“But who hears that?” I questioned.

“We all do. In every moment, our deepest self, which is the divine ground of life, urges us on to perfection and to union with itself. Until we take up deep spiritual listening to being, to the divine, we generally are unaware of the voice of the vast mind of the universe, although it breaks through in hunches, inspired guesses, and spontaneous decisions.

“This inner voice is subtle, so it’s easily obscured by the louder voices of family, friends, society, and education, but it can never be silenced because it’s more basic than any other voice. It’s also muffled when we act from hatred and greed. And if we give too much space in our minds to what spiritually indifferent people think, then we can lose confidence in its existence and its promptings. This voice will be almost inaudible to people who take their cues from physical reality alone, which is like expecting artificial intelligence to have a spiritual or aesthetic experience. Only technologists who reject spiritual immortality and hope to extend their lives by downloading their digitized selves into durable machine bodies think like that. But that’s an immortality dependent on paying their electric and internet bills.”

After this intriguing discussion, I turned my eyes sideways, and Times Square and its crowded streets reappeared before me, although it instantly transformed itself into a forest clearing blending the soft greens and browns of the earth with the gentle blues and yellows of a springtime sky. All around the songs of birds colored the air. The faces of the visitors to this timeless forest of the divine were bright and uncreased with cares, and their earthly bodies had been changed into elegant forms made of light and air.

“Armin, it’s time for me to go.”

Dona’s voice brought me back to the Cave of the Saints. “We’re all friends together there,” she said, “in the forest of the divine, but we forget—which is why spirituality comes ever and again into our lives to call us back to our true selves.”

I was going to ask a question—actually lots of questions about why we don’t experience our true selves all the time and whether the forest of the divine is the supreme standpoint of reality, but Dona merely smiled. I knew that today’s session was over.

“The answers to all of these question will emerge as long as you keep practicing,” Dona replied to my thoughts as she nodded and stepped out of the cave.

(To be continued.)

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Image: Kapaleeshwarar Temple, Mylapore, Chennai, India, January 6,2007 (Kenneth Rose)

1. Sri Ramana Maharshi taught, according to K. R. K. Murthi, that we receive grace in accordance with our “merit” and the resulting capacity to receive it. See Face to Face with Sri Ramana Maharshi: Enchanting and Uplifting Reminiscences of 202 Persons, edited by Laxmi Narain (Hyderabad: Sri Ramana Kendram, 2009), 324–325.

2. See G. W. F. Hegel’s discussion of the notion of the “Now” (das Itzt) in Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit), §95-97.