My friend Mark Whitwell, the yoga teacher from New Zealand, has absorbed the teachings of several Indian yoga masters, primarily T. Krishnamacharya and his son and student T.K.V. Desikachar. These teachers did not imbue in Mark the usual puritanical claptrap about self-discipline and the need to keep searching for God. "If you are looking for God," Mark says in his Fiji twang, "it means you don't have God. Even getting close to God means you don't have God. Looking for God is like looking for your glasses that are on top of your head." He might almost be quoting that lovely line from the Quran in which Allah says, speaking in the royal plural as is his wont at times, "We created man and surely know what misdoubts arise in their hearts; for We are closer to him than his jugular vein" (50: 15b, trans. Ahmed Ali).
Not long ago I went Mark one better. After a visit to the ophthalmologist, I was already on my way down in the elevator when I became convinced that I'd left my glasses in his examining room.
Not long ago I went Mark one better. After a visit to the ophthalmologist, I was already on my way down in the elevator when I became convinced that I'd left my glasses in his examining room.
I wandered back up and found my way unescorted to the room, only to
discover they weren't there. Looking around in confusion, I saw Dr.
Cheema and informed him that I was looking for my glasses. "Oh," he
said in his unfailingly polite, slightly Pakistani accent, "I think you are
wearing them!"He had, of course, dilated my pupils during the exam, so that even with my glasses on everything looked hazy to me. Although I'm nearsighted, I couldn't see my cell phone well enough to call my stepson to pick me up. Because I had already forgotten the reason for my blurred vision, I had become a walking metaphor for the state of so much of humanity. Even wearing our corrective lenses, we think we need glasses to see properly. It reminds me of the famous image of the illusion of the material world used by Shankara, the ninth-century Indian sage. He likened our response to the manifest universe to that of a traveler walking along a pathway in the jungle; he sees a piece of wood on the ground but mistakenly thinks it's a snake, and so becomes afraid.
Forgetting that we are already perfect Buddhas, or, as the Kabbalists might put it, that we have one of the countless shards of divine Light already within us, we assume that we need some interpretive lens through which to see things as they really are. And yet, we're already equipped with such a lens, and it's closer to us than our jugular vein.
Dizzying, isn't it?
"The ancient wisdom of yoga teaches that Life is already given to you, you are completely loved, you are here now," says Mark Whitwell, pictured above. "It teaches that we are not separate, cannot be separate from nature, which sustains us in a vast interdependence with everything. The universe comes perfectly, and is awesome in its integration and infinite existence." So, that means we don't have to waste time looking for anything outside of us. It's all here, as plain as the glasses on our face, as warm as the blood streaming through our jugular vein.
"For the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world." -- Joseph Campbell from his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
I love your story about the glasses. Such a perfect metaphor for the distorted vision each of us carry, when clarity is there within us all the time.
Mark is a wonderful teacher.
We are closer to him than his jugular vein, how it can be?
I give you a very simple situation brother, a lamp can't be illuminated without electricity, on otherway, electricity can't have light without lamp, which one more important? They need each other. We are can't be alive without God, God can't be real without us. Without God, we won't be exist, without us, who knows if there is God? Keep looking brother, good luck.