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In the Cave of the Heart: Silence and Realization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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A paper presented at a symposium on East-West monasticism held in Kansas City in August 1983, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Abhishiktānanda (Henri Le Saux OSB).
Hidden in the depth of the heart and in the highest heaven Is that mystery of glory and immortality which only those can find Who have renounced all things and themselves.
This verse is freely translated from the Mahānārayana Upanishad and was apparently a favourite of Swami Abhishiktānanda’s, for he quotes it, in differing guises, several times. I think it fairly epitomizes his insight and his realization.
I have only recently made the acquaintance of Swami Abhishiktānanda and am not really entitled to speak of him. There are those who can, foremost among whom would be Dom Bede Griffiths. But I am so attracted to Swami Abhishiktānanda, so moved by his inspired writings on the life of renunciation and the non-dual experience, that I would like to offer the little I have to say to his memory.
Swami Abhishiktānanda was a French Benedictine monk, Dom Henri Le Saux, who, after thirteen years in a Benedictine monastery, received permission to go to India in 1948. There he and Fr. Jules Monchanin founded the ashram of Shantivanam (Forest of Peace) as “an attempt to integrate into Christianity the monastic tradition of India”.
In 1949 he met Śri Ramana, called the Maharishi or great seer, in the south of India, at the foot of the sacred mountain Arunāchala.
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- Copyright © 1984 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Mahānārayana Upanishad 12.14. This version is a compound of one found in Abhishiktānanda, The Secret of Arunāchala (Delhi: ISPCK 1979), p.14, and The Further Shore (Delhi: ISPCK, 1975). p.ix.
2 Subtitle of the book Ermites du Saccidānanda (Paris: Castermann, 1956, OP, no English trans.), written jointly by Abhishiktānanda and Monchanin about the ashram.
3 See The Secret of Arunāchala, chap. 1. The first darshan took place on Jan. 24 and 25, 1949, the second six months later.
4 In addition to those cited in note 1, books available from Osage Monastery (Rt. 1, Box 384C. Sand Springs, OK 74063) are: Prayer (Delhi: ISPCK, first published 1967, revised in 1972 and 1975, reprinted 1979); Hindu-Christian Meeting Point, first published in French by Ed. du Seuil in 1965, Eng. ed. 1969, revised 1976 according to a copy prepared by the author and published by ISPCK; Guru and Disciple (combines A Sage from the East, first published in French by Ed. Presence in 1970, and The Mountain of the Lord, first published in 1966 by the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society in Bangalore) London: SPCK, 1974; Saccidānanda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience (first published in French in 1965, revised and published in English in 1974 by ISPCK) is now out of print, but another printing may be expected.
5 Secret, pp. 8-9.
6 Ibid., p. 23.
7 Guru, pp. 29-30.
8 Ibid., p. 89.
9 Ibid., p.92; cf. p.93.
10 Ibid., p. 95.
11 Ibid., p.101.
12 From the root guh, to hide. cf. gupta, ‘the hidden one’, a name of Krishna, and the guhya ‘secret’, guhyatara ‘more secret’, guhyatama ‘most secret’, of the Bhagavad-Gitā. See Taittiriya Upan., 2.1: nihitam guhāyām, ‘the cave (or secret place) of the heart’. See also Further Shore, p. 107 n.89.
13 Guru, p. 91.
14 Hindu-Christian, p. 119.
15 Prayer, p. 23. See also the indicated footnote, which gives parallel passages from the Rig-Veda, Katha Upanishad, Hebrews, Revelations, Māndūkya Upanishad, and Kaivalya Upanishad. 16 B. Bruteau, “Prayer and Identity”, Contemplative Review, Spring, 1982.
17 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942). p. 943.
18 Bhagavad-Gitā II. 58.
19 This is one way of putting what the Hindus call the ‘sheaths’ of the self. cf. Hindu-Christian, p. 61.
20 St. Augustine. Confessions, IX. 10, freely rendered, based on translations by Edward B. Pusey (New York: Modern Library, 1949), p. 188, and Michael Nagler (The Little Lamp Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 1983), p. 60.
21 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 35.
22 Available in various versions. The one quoted is from The Medieval Mystics of England, ed. Eric Colledge (New York: Scribner’s, 1961), pp. 176, 167. In the William Johnston version, from Image Books (1973), the first passage is from chapter 9, p. 167, and the second from chapter 5, p. 158.
23 Cf. Matthew 6:22: RSV gives “sound”, but the Greek word is haplous, meaning ‘onefold, single, not compound or double, absolute’. See also Luke 9:62 for the “plough”.
24 See Saccidānanda, p.40: “How realize the self? Whose self? Mine. Who am I? Look for it yourself. I don’t know how to set about it. Who is this I that says: I don’t know? Something or somebody in me. Who is he who says that? However hard I try, I cannot succeed in catching this I. Who cannot catch whom? Are there two ‘1’s’ in you chasing each other? (after Maharishi’s Gospel, 2, 1)”.
‘“I know not who I am’, ‘I know who I am’; only fools can speak in such a way.
To know oneself, must one make oneself two?
Self-knowledge is the non-reflexive I, resplendent in its own uniqueness.
(after Ulladu Nārpadu.)” Also p. 38: “Sensory and psychic experience flow on in a steady Stream ... but as for me, I am. What am I? Who am I? There is no answer except the pure awareness that I am , transcending all thought. … there is no need for me to strive in order to find this ‘I am’. I am not an ‘I’ searching for itself. The Maharishi pointed this out very astutely when certain disciples sought by means of thought and reasoning to realize ‘who they were’, and thus engaged themselves in an endless mental pursuit of this elusive self. The search is endless because the self which is thought poses the problem of the self which thinks, and so on ad infinitum. AH that a man has to do is simply allow himself to be grasped by this light which springs up from within, but itself cannot be grasped”. Cf. Guru, pp. 101-2: the self see the self by the self.
25 Hindu-Christian, p. 97. Cf. p. 100, “God and the world are not two”, and the following argument; also p. 98 “ ... dualistic presupposition which assumes that God and man can be added together. But Advaita means precisely this: neither God alone, nor the creature alone, nor God plus the creature, but an indefinable non-duality which transcends at once all separation and all confusion”.
26 cf. Galatians 2:20.
27 John 10:14-15. Cf The Teaching of the Catholic Church, ed. G.D. Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1949), Vol. 11, p. 1253-54: “God will not remain outside us. He will be within our mind itself, and there we shall see him. The nearest approximation to such knowledge on earth is our knowledge of ourselves. We know ourselves because we are ourselves; we are present to ourselves in our innermost being. Hence Holy Scripture uses this knowledge as a means of comparison: ‘Then I shall know even as I am known’. We must not, therefore, imagine God in the Beatific Vision as some outside Object to look at, but as dwelling within the very essence of our soul, and thus being perceived from within by direct contact”. Cf. also St. Thomas Aquinas: “Visio illa, qua Deum per essentiam videbimus, est eadem cum visione qua Deus se videt”. “That vision, by which we will see God through (his) essence, is the same as the vision by which God sees himself’. Summa Theologiae, Supp. q. 92, a. 1, ad 2.
28 “The experience of Jesus includes the advaitic experience, but ... compels us to admit the existence in man of something even deeper still”. Saccidānanda, pp. 82-83. Also p. 108: “The Spirit has led him from the advaita of Being into the inner communion of the Trinity, has brought him to the secret place of the Source, the very bosom of the Father; and there, at the heart of Being, he has finally discovered his own divine sonship”.
29 “Insight and Manifestation”, Contemplative Review, Fall 1983. section Complex or Trinitarian Non-Dualism. Also “Humanity in the Image of the Trinitarian God”, Prabuddha Bharata, March 1979, reprinted in Neo-Feminism and Communion Consciousness (Chambersburg, PA: Anima).
30 “For the Greek the primary datum is not nature but person, throbbing with life, communicable life. Each Divine Person is irristibly drawn, by the very constitution of His being, to the other two. Branded in the very depths of each one of them is a necessary outward impulse, a centrifugal force, urging Him to give Himself fully to the other two, to pour Himself out into the divine receptacle of the other two. It is a ‘reciprocal irruption’, or unceasing circulation of life. Thus, each Person being necessarily in the other two, unity is achieved not so much on account of the unicity of a single passive nature but rather because of this irristible impulse in each Person, which mightily draws them to one another”. Article on “Circumincession”, by A.M. Bermejo, in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). The expression ‘reciprocal irruption’ is from Cyril of Alexandria.
Cf. Abhishiktānanda: “As long as he looks upon God as ‘another’ in the sense in which his neighbour is other to him, as long as for him Jesus too is ‘another’, and he sees the divine Persons also as ‘other’ both to him and among themselves, he has not begun to understand anything either of himself or of God”. Hindu-Christian, p. 93.
31 John 15:15.
32 Thomas Merton says: “Since our inmost ‘I’ is the perfect image of God, then when this ‘I’ awakens, he finds within himself the Presence of Him Whose image he is. And, by a paradox beyond all human expression, God and the soul seem to have but one single ‘I’. They are (by divine grace) as though one single person. They breathe and live and act as one. ‘Neither’ of the ‘two’ is seen as object”. “The Inner experience: Notes on Contemplation (1). Cistercian Studies XVIII (1983) 15. Cf. Abhishiktānanda, Prayer, p. 84: “My own I...is a participation (and not an outward projection) of the I of God”. See also The Teaching of the Catholic Church, p. 1254: “We shall know him, and therefore, says the Scripture, ‘we shall be like unto him’. Our life will be in conscious contact with his, and his life will, as it were, overflow into ours and pervade us through and through, and thus we shall know him”.
33 Cf. John 3:6: “What is born of the Spirit is spirit”. Cf. Romans 8:16 and I Corinthians 2:10.
34 Cf. I John 4:l0: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us”. Cf. 4:19: “We love, because he first loved us”.
35 Cf. John 14:l0 and 20: “In that day you will know that 1 am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you”. Abhishiktānanda says: “His I can no longer be in opposition to any other I ‘No one is different from or other than myself’ (Nāradaparivrajakopanishad 4.38) His awakened I, piercing like a laser beam, now lights up to its very depths the ‘I’ that is uttered by any conscious being”. Further Shore, p. 19.
36 Cf. Matthew 25:40.
37 Saccidānanda, p.63.
38 Prayer, p. 33.
39 Abhishiktānanda: “The (self-realized person) will do whatever his companions and colleagues do only he will do it perfectly. Freed from the limitations of human selfishness and anxiety, in all that he does he will be in a pre-eminent way the instrument of the spirit. He will have a marvellous detachment from everything, because, if the Absolute is present in everything that happens, equally it is not limited to any one thing. If his vocation leads him to the service of his brothers, for example, the poor, the lepers, or the underprivileged, he will give himself completely to each one of them, totally forgetful of himself; for in each of these needy and unfortunate people he discerns the whole mystery of the Presence”. Hindu-Christian, p. 64.
40 Cf. Colossians 1:16-17: “...in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible ... all were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together”.
41 I Corinthians 15:28. hi Ramakrishna distinguished between those who attain the non-dual experience and stop there, and those who, after attaining the highest unitive experience, come back to the phenomenal world, seeing it in an entirely new light, permeated through and through with the supreme Spirit: “The Jnāni gives up his identification with worldly things, discriminating ‘Not this, not this’. Only then can he realise Brahman. It is like reaching the roof of a house by leaving the steps behind, one by one. But the Vijnāni, who is more intimately acquainted with Brahman, realizes something more. He realizes that the steps are made of the same materials as the roof: bricks, lime and brick-dust. That which is realized intuitively as Brahman, through the eliminating process of ‘not this, not this’, is then found to have become the universe and all its living beings. The Vijnāni sees that the Reality which is Nirguna, without attributes, is also Saguna, with attributes”. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 30.
42 Abhishiktānanda, following Ramana, calls this the sahaja state, that which is the ‘inborn’ natural state of the human being. (Cf. the Taoist term tzu-jan, ‘nature’, meaning the spontaneous, that which is so of itself i.e. a harmony which arises in the mutual interaction of all beings if not interfered with by arbitrary external and artificial means. Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way, New York: Pantheon, 1975, pp. 42-44). It is, he says, “to be contrasted not only with the life of division, ... and self-delusion when a man lives ... at the surface of himself, but also with the so-called ecstatic state when the (spiritual aspirant) is totally absorbed within and has not yet recovered the ‘world’ in the light of the atman”. Saccidananda, p. 39; cf. p. 37.
43 Guru, p. 96.
44 Cf. the Tao Te Ching, 7 and 22. In Abhishiktānanda’s words, “Now that he has discovered the true center of himself in that very principle from which the world itself originates, his ‘personal’ interests henceforth coincide wholly with the divine plan, according to the Lord’s will for the world and everything in it”. Hindu-Christian, p. 63.
45 Ibid.
46 Further Shore, p. 39.
47 Chuang-tzu says: “The baby looks at things all day without squinting and staring; this is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. he merges himself with the surroundings and goes along with them”. Chuang-tzu, 23.
48 Julian of Norwich. Showings, The Thirteenth Revelation, the twenty-seventh chapter. In the Paulist Press version (Classics of Western Spirituality), p. 225.
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