Consciousness: The Universe, Part I – The Universe As a Teaching

By Jacob Needleman

Several years ago when I first started to write about the Eastern religions, which are now taking root in America, I could not understand why it was that every word I put down on paper seemed false, why every beginning ended in a lie. To write about our young people and their search, their experiences and struggles, that was more or less within my grasp. But when I turned to the towering spiritual systems of the Sufis or the Tibetans, for example, I very easily lost my way. Standing before these ancient teachings, which far surpass my understanding, I would often fall back on praising or comparing them

Gradually, I began to see that great teachings enter the world according to an order and sequence that we are bound to find incomprehensible. But men are impatient to have a handle of what they do not understand. And so we fasten on one or another aspect of a system--an idea here, a method there--which satisfies our impatience. The result is that all we have before us is, so to say, a "cross-section" of the entire system. But obviously no number of static cross-sections can add up to the flowing structure of a living teaching.

Now I wish to write about the universe; and I wonder if the difficulties will be greater or less. Is the order of the universe any less organic than the order in the teaching of the Buddha or Jesus?

It may sound strange to compare the universe to a teaching, but we should realize that this is an absolutely fundamental question for us if we are to move toward a deeper understanding of our place in the cosmic order. It is not merely one authors personal brand of metaphor; quite the contrary. The order by which a teaching is introduced to mankind may be the most essential thing about it, more so even than the conceptual content of the teaching itself. For the apparent content varies, depending on interpretations, circumstances and on individuals; but the sequence of experiences which a great teaching brings to humanity at large is fixed and invariable. A teaching is true to the extent that this sequence is a particular incarnation of fundamental cosmic laws.

Let us, therefore, entertain the possibility that we understand very little about what a teaching or a universe really is.

Every great spiritual teaching speaks of itself in its own way as a mirror of cosmic reality. In the traditions of China the Tao is both the way to truth and the way things are. In Christianity the Word is both the teaching of Jesus Christ and the fundamental manifestation of God. In the Hindu tradition (including Buddhism) Dharma means both duty and the sustaining order of the universe. And in the Hebrew tradition Torah includes not only law in the sense of the teaching, but also law in the sense of the foundations of God's creation. A well-known passage in the book of Proverbs expresses this idea without ambiguity. Wisdom is speaking:

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.

I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.

When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water...

When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth... when he gave the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment; when he appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by him...

Now therefore harken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that keep my ways.

Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not.

(Proverbs 8:22-33)

Wisdom thus speaks not only as the teaching (the instruction) but as the divine pattern of the cosmos.

How to think about this equation of the universe and a great teaching? It is tempting, for example, to see a teacher such as Mohammed or Bodhidharma, who brought Buddhism to China in the sixth century A. D., as the bearer of an extraordinary energy which is distributed to the world in the form of ideas, actions, events, schools, factions and the organized efforts of the community of followers. To compare this sort of pattern to a universe would require that we think of reality not in terms of things but as a ladder of processes, a great movement and exchange of energies. A teaching would then be a copy of this cosmic process on the scale of human time on earth. To receive such a teaching in ourselves, one's own life would have to become yet another copy of this process.

Thus, taking Christianity for a model, one must ask: What was the teaching of Jesus? Was it only what he said? Or does it not also include what he did and suffered? But does the teaching stop even there? A critic may claim that Jesus failed because Christian life has become what it has become. But is not the distortion, the crucifixion of the teaching, also, in a larger sense, part of the teaching itself? And if a man is to become a Christian, perhaps it is absolutely necessary that he witness the same process of distortion within himself. How else will he understand that it is in one's own thought and emotion that the "crucifixion," the distortion of the truth, really takes place?

Yet another line of speculation--again purely by way of opening this issue: Spiritual teaching is often spoken of as indirect. What is meant by this, I think, is that such a teaching does not act by persuasion, which is a form of compulsion and seduction, but rather by providing certain kinds of experiences. For a man who is searching for truth, these experiences are such that they cannot be assimilated only by a part of himself, the isolated intellect, for example. They require that a person receive them with the whole of himself.

Writing in the nineteenth century in a massive onslaught against the theologians and philosophers who wanted to make the Christian teachings accessible solely to the intellect, Sören Kierkegaard put the point as follows:

The communication of results is an unnatural form of intercourse between man and man, in so far as every man is a spiritual being, for whom the truth consists in nothing else than the self-activity of personal appropriation, which the communication of a result tends to prevent.

And then, comparing God to a teacher, he writes:

For no anonymous author can more cunningly conceal himself, no practitioner of the maieutic art [the art of the midwife] can more carefully withdraw himself from direct relationship than God. He is in the creation, and present everywhere in it, but directly He is not there; and only when the individual turns to his inner self, and hence only in the inwardness of self activity, does he have his attention aroused, and is enabled to see God.

The prophets and spiritual innovators who have written of the universe as bearing the "signature of God" must surely have included something like the above in their thinking. Certainly, reality is as "silent" as any Zen master. And perhaps the only way for us to understand reality is through a more complete assimilation of the experiences which it presents us, both joyful and painful. Yet the universe is so vast, our planet so small and our lives on it so inconsequential that a teaching is necessary in order for men to be exposed to the full range of events which take place in a cosmos.