BEYOND THOUGHT by John van Praag
Smitten By Faith Issue # 00053 17th December 2022
‘Smitten By Faith’ was launched on 6th August 2021 as a digital newsletter to share joyous spiritual paths . Unabashed expressions of faith. Little did I know then how many thousands of hearts it would touch and how many of my friends from so many corners of the world - articulate, sincere, thoughtful and accomplished – would be writing in ‘Smitten By Faith’.
One such good friend is Dr. John van Praag. You can read his previous erudite and moving article, ‘The Return’ or ‘Nostos’, published in Issue # 11 on October 16th 2021. John van Praag is Dutch, not only with the multi-linguistic skills of his countrymen but he is also the very rare combination of classical scholar, author, poet, businessman, entrepreneur and philanthropist.
John’s scholarship and humanity is evident in his long essay below with the captivating title, ‘BEYOND THOUGHT’. Needless to say, my readers and I are thrilled and delighted to welcome John back to ‘Smitten By Faith’.
The sub-titles say it all. John honours the ancient religions of the world and he recognises here dimensions of our cosmos; our natural world that is beyond thought – “beyond religion, beyond miracles, beyond idols, beyond words, the one reality, ground of being and eternal.”
So, let’s dive straight into the magic of words from John van Praag as he shares with us his profound view of the Universe.
For those readers who wish to discuss the subject further with John van Praag, you can contact him directly at the email address at the end of his article.
[ An editorial comment : Life is not lived in a rush. The wide spacings in the article below are the Author’s deliberate spacings - for the reader to decipher and meditate upon.]
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BEYOND THOUGHT
JOHN VAN PRAAG
BEYOND THOUGHT
BEYOND RELIGION
BEYOND MIRACLES
BEYOND IDOLS
BEYOND WORDS
THE ONE REALITY
GROUND OF BEING
ETERNAL
I wish to share some of the insights and realisations - those of others as well as my own - that have helped me on my spiritual path. Road signs found along the way. The pages that follow rely on quotations from scriptures by others as well as presenting some from my own writings. Words that have guided me, written and read and studied over the last 60 years or so and that have pointed me in the direction of the Reality that lies beyond thought.
TIME TO RETURN
I come from a land so peaceful
Desire made way for love.
The sun is setting on the sea
From far away
My soul is calling me.
John van Praag, “Empty Sea”, 2006
How do you express in words, how do you share in any manner, the experience beyond thought? Many mystics, poets and others have tried, including also musicians and painters. Genuine spiritual masters who have travelled beyond the daily consciousness may point the way. The way to that place from where our souls are calling us.
The following pages reflect just some of their expressions, the ones I have found most useful in my life; I have found that they are capable of carrying us along, at least part of the way, on our travels into this realm beyond thought. I have included a few expressions of my own, rare but blessed moments beyond thought. Those expressions, I find, unfortunately, fall well short of the power of the actual experiences; at least in my own case I can compare my actual experience and its reflection in my words.
One other, great problem is that the experience of the reality beyond thought is so fragile: it is easy for our daily lives to overwhelm us so completely that we may miss or even forget it altogether. Then, with the great 20th century, Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, we might ask
Is my soul asleep?
…
His answer is:
No my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its clear eyes open,
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
Antonio Machado (translation by Robert Bly)
Today, I believe, our souls are asleep most of the time, most of our living days, distracted as they are by the “water wheel of thought”, as Machado puts it elsewhere, as much as by our non-thought occupations.
Our society with its incredibly powerful distractions and constant demands for our attention will make sure of that. We are today even deemed to live in an “attention economy”, where human attention is treated as a – scarce – commodity! Even though he had his share of concerns in his time, Mozart was still able to compose some of his heavenly music even during his long coach travels between the capitals of Europe; today, he might well have been on the screen of his smartphone instead!
Our challenge is to find the way home, to experience, or maybe re-experience, the silence of the unknown, of the unmanifest, and yet participate meaningfully in the life for which we came; to be able amidst the din of the twenty-first century to remain awake and “listen at the shores of the great silence”. For it is in this Great Silence that we find our road signs.
As has been expressed by various writers in only slightly varying forms: we are not humans on a spiritual mission, but spirits on a human mission. Yet, the challenge seems to be to fulfil this human mission while achieving and maintaining full awareness of our spiritual nature, without which the mission is bound to fail, or will seem to have been useless when looking back on it.
From far away my soul is calling me…
Yes, indeed, it is from far away, and easy to miss. An illustration may be “The Last Words of Steve Jobs”- which may or may not actually be his - as quoted by Richard Branson:
I have come to the pinnacle of success in business.
In the eyes of others, my life has been the symbol of success.
However, apart from work, I have little joy. Finally, my wealth is simply a fact to which I am accustomed.
At this time, lying on the hospital bed and remembering all my life, I realize that all the accolades and riches, of which I was once so proud, have become insignificant with my imminent death.
In the dark, when I look at green lights of the equipment for artificial respiration and feel the buzz of their mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of my approaching death looming over me.
Only now do I understand that once you accumulate enough money for the rest of your life, you have to pursue objectives that are not related to wealth.
It should be something more important:
For example, stories of love, art, dreams of my childhood.
No, stop pursuing wealth, it can only make a person into a twisted being, just like me.
This must be our challenge, finding the path that Steve Jobs concluded he missed; and this very challenge is also the opportunity that life offers us. After most of a century of living on this earth, I have come to the conclusion that this life, while it is to be enjoyed, is also meant to be realised as the great opportunity that it is.
So, faced with this challenge, even now I hesitate to share the few insights, some from others and some my own, that I find helpful in a world that does indeed seem ever more overwhelming, frantic and loud. I guess I can do so only in the spirit of giving an offering as a fellow pilgrim on the path, which, in the end, we all are.
Aldous Huxley, in 1945, summarised what he called the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ - a term he derived from Leibnitz – and with it he presented the core findings of the great mystics of all ages and all cultures. Eknath Easwaran in his introduction to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita (Vintage Spiritual Classics, 2000) quotes it as follows:
· There is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change.
· This same reality lies at the core of every human personality.
· The purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially: that is to realise God while here on earth.
It looks like it is important for us to achieve this purpose while here on earth; for what the great religions, many mystics, and the vast literature on near-death experiences suggest is that we take with us into death the kind and the level of consciousness, including desires, that we have achieved by the end of, our lives. Heaven and hell are of our own making here on earth, and fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may be, that probably is what we take with us: the essence, the distillation of our being at the time of our death. This would explain why those who have come back from death report experiences that reflect their own state of mind at the end of their lives, set against the background of their own culture. The encounters with divine beings, dead relatives, the experience of beautiful landscapes in heaven always seem to be in accord with the person’s cultural, religious, and life environment, from which the subject seems to create the after- (or near-) death experience.
Thus, forgiveness and being accepted into the loving arms of the divine may well have to be achieved in this life if it is to be encountered after death. This may well be why spirits who manifest to us on earth are often those of people who have died unexpectedly and prematurely, or under very negative circumstances. They were not ready to leave, and apparently are, as a result, not ready to move on.
It may be much harder after death to ascend to a better or higher state than during our lifetimes. Buddhism stresses that a human life is an incredibly precious opportunity, and apparently hard to come by. It is to be realised and treasured.
So, the next phase may well be determined by this, current one. We must know by the end of our present life what it is that we really want. That , to me, suggests that making a true success of our life cannot be that complicated; at least if it were, that would seem a bit unfair and ‘undemocratic’. Yet, in life, we are all given challenges, and having been blessed or cursed with the gift of reason, we do complicate matters. Picasso had to first develop incredible skills before he could, later in life, paint and draw ‘like a child’. In the same way, if life were uncomplicated simplicity from the beginning to the end, we would, no doubt, miss its opportunity. We do have to experience what life offers us to the full extent of our capability and through that experience find the wide-open door to heaven that is offered to us.
Amidst the confusion and complications of life there have been some “inputs”, thoughts and experiences that have particularly helped me to travel forward on the spiritual path. And, in this writing I am attempting to share some of what can be shared of that. What cannot be shared is what is the most important ground from which sprouts all that can be; that is the ground beneath the love and friendship that a life on earth bestows on us. In fact, that, too, we bestow upon ourselves; that, too, is ours to achieve.
And it is beyond thought.
I lit candles in the sunlight,
Searched and struggled in the night,
And rushed to find
I was already here.
John van Praag, ibid.
It may seem a bit too easy to say that it cannot be so complicated, that we are “already here”. For it seems we all go through a “dark night of the soul” before we emerge. Like music that leads through reversals to its harmonic resolution. The emergence into the light cannot take place without the preceding darkness.
However,
If you realise that everything, including all the problems you will encounter along the way in your lives, that everything, without exception, is there not to make you happy, but to make you conscious, then you will be happy.
John van Praag, “Can You Be Happy in the 21st Century?”, Utrecht 2006
It is this matter of being conscious on which we need to stay focused. When Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita says to Arjuna
I am the goal, the root, the witness…
Bhagavad Gita, transl. Easwaran
he, as our own High Self, urges us to be aware that we need to climb to a level above the action of our lives and observe. That’s consciousness! A split occurs as we see things from above; we see ourselves on the stage of life, and this puts our struggles in perspective. The word conscious comes from the Latin root for knowing, scire; but this knowing is intensified by the prefix con- so as to express knowing very well. And this knowing-very-well becomes possible by taking distance. We can either identify with the observer, yes, become the observer, the watcher, or remain stuck in the action.
This witness, this observer is none other than our High Self, the Atman, Lord Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita, Christ-consciousness or the Holy Spirit in us. Total, one-pointed attention may well be the door to oneness with this High Self. The door to a consciousness beyond thought.
Of course, the great spiritual writings of the past millennia give us a wealth of clues and guidance. Thus, the dialogue in the Bhagavad Gita between Lord Krishna, who is an emanation of the God Vishnu, and the human hero, Arjuna, is really a dialogue between our own High Self and our daily self.
There are some precious insights in the writings of Max Freedom Long about the Huna tradition, a tradition that may well antedate all other spiritual traditions we are familiar with (Max Freedom Long: “The Huna Code in Religions”). The “kahunas” of that tradition already recognised a “High Self”, and believed that life’s goal is to perceive and follow the inspiration of this High Self. In fact, Huna posits that humans have three selves: a “lower” self which is closely linked to the body and emotions, a middle self, which is the thinking “machinery”, and a High Self that it locates as floating above a person’s head, (The Egyptian horizontal figure 8, which we find in ancient Egyptian representations above the heads of certain figures, may well represent, or have been derived from, this same concept of the High Self). Also in the Huna tradition, the goal of life is consciousness of, yes, identification with, this high self.
Coming to a juncture that is usually the end of a human lifetime, and at least the temporary conclusion of what we are likely to experience and learn while here on earth, I know that for me it is the words of Arjuna spoken to Krishna - whether he be God or our own High Self - that best reflect what I now know and believe and experience as my ultimate reality. I can fully identify with Arjuna, while, for me, this ultimate Divine reality that he addresses as Krishna still has many names. Arjuna expresses it thusly:
Changeless you are what is and what is not,
And beyond the duality of existence and non-existence.
……
You are the resting place of all beings.
You are the knower and what is known.
You are the final home.
(Bhagavad Gita, XI-38 sqq)
Thus, to me both our present nature and our destination become clear.
I am the stillness of the sound,
I am the heat of the fire,
I am the light filled with form,
I am the water of the wave,
I am the mirror,
No trace is left on me.
John van Praag
H. John van Praag
Hong Kong, 2022
Email : hjvanpraag@gmail.com
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