Madness Can Resolve the Double Bind
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one of the things that I think we would benefit from understanding as deeply as possible is that of maya and the laws of karma. And the laws of karma operate in the realm of maya. They don’t operate beyond the realm of maya. And maya, of course, is illusion. But that illusion is very tenacious, as we know, and it’s not that difficult to fall into it if one’s consciousness gets projected into the phenomenal plane and mistakes it for reality.
And I wanted to point out that we’ve been talking in the retreat about the three types of reasoning that logicians recognize, right? Inductive, deductive, and abductive. But there’s a fourth type of reasoning that is the one that humans actually use. It’s none of those three. That’s what you use on philosophy exams or something. In real life, what I call the fourth type of logical reasoning is not inductive or abductive, but it’s mad-ductive. I would even call it “mad-duct-tape” reasoning, because we try to hold it together through a mad kind of hypothesis. Right? So there’s a kind of normal madness that people actually employ to make their decisions in life. They don’t do it based on reasoning. OK, so I think we all know that. But it might be important to actually study what mad-ductive reasoning is and how it functions and why—although it’s mad—it brings one to a sense of certainty that one is doing the Will of God. Right? Because one feels totally lost and not sure what to do, and it’s only this kind of mad-ductive superposition on the unfoldment of events that can bring it to a conclusion in which one feels like “I couldn’t have done anything else.” Right? And everyone wants to feel that way in order to be able to accept the unfoldment of their fate.
So I want to quote from a passage from an excellent book that I think is actually a storehouse of insights about the law of karma. It’s called Living by the Words of Bhagavan. It’s the story of Annamalai Swami, who is one of the chief disciples of Sri Ramana Maharshi, and he came at a very early point after the establishment of the Ashram in Tiruvannamalai, and he ended up being appointed by Ramana to be the builder of most of the buildings; he constructed them. And what’s interesting about Annamalai, to start with, is that when he was born in a village, maybe forty miles or so away from Tiruvannamalai, a traveling brahmin fortune teller told his parents that he was destined to be a sadhu, and his parents were horrified by this because they wanted him to have a job and make money—they didn’t want him to be wandering out there begging for dinner and all of that—so they did everything possible to dissuade him from being a sadhu and being spiritual. And the father wanted him to follow in his footsteps, and he was a builder, he was a constructionist and built houses. And the last thing Annamalai ever wanted to do was build houses. So, here, he becomes a sadhu, and he ends up having to build the buildings in the Ashram.
So you see how the law of karma doesn’t let you escape from your destiny, but at the same time there’s a kind of mad congruence between your destiny and your fate. Right? How they come together. And so in his acceptance of the fact that he was doing what he hated doing and yet doing what he loved doing simultaneously, he was unable to separate those two aspects of reality which are always bugging the ego, and finally coming to a resolution in which he could totally accept. But it took him a while.
So I want to read this passage that happened in the early days when he first came to the Ashram, and he was not happy there. So let me find this passage. OK, this was, if you have the book, on page 30. Not that you have the book here, but you might have it on your bookshelf and want to go back and check it. Some of you might have it! Synchronicities do happen!
“I was very happy to have found such a great guru as Bhagavan. As soon as I saw him, I felt I was looking at God himself. However, initially I was not very impressed either by the Ashram or by the devotees who had gathered around him. The management seemed to be very autocratic, and most of the devotees didn’t seem to have much interest in the spiritual life. So as far as I could see, they were primarily interested in gossiping.”
Now, you can’t relate to that here, can you? None of us gossip or have any unspiritual attitudes! But, hey, that was Ramana’s ashram! So Annamalai goes on, scandalously.
“These early impressions disturbed me. I thought to myself, ‘Bhagavan is very great, but if I live in the company of these people, I may lose the devotion that I already have.’”
This laughter disturbs me a little bit.
“I came to the conclusion that it would not be spiritually beneficial for me to associate with people who didn’t seem to have much devotion. I know now that this was a very arrogant attitude, but those were my true feelings at the time. These thoughts disturbed me so much that for three or four nights I was unable to sleep. I finally came to the conclusion that I would keep Bhagavan as my guru, but I would live somewhere else.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I will go and do meditation on the Self somewhere else, without having the distracting friendship of any human beings. I will go to an unknown place and meditate on God. I will go for bhiksha,’” which means begging for food, “‘and I’ll lead a solitary life.’”
Right? Live in a cave and be a real sadhu, right.
“I remember thinking, OK, so about three weeks after I first came to the ashram, I left to take up my new life.”
So he was only there three weeks and poof—gone, right?
“So I told no one, not even Bhagavan, about my decision. I left at 1:00 a.m. on a full moon night and started to walk toward town.”
“I went straight through the town past Easanya Math”, which is a monastic institution northeast of Tiruvannamalai, “and I started walking toward Polor. I had no particular destination in mind, I just wanted to get away from the Ashram. I spent the whole night walking and reached Polor, which is a village about 20 miles north of Tiruvannamalai, just after dawn. The walk had made me very hungry, so I decided to go for bhiksha in the town.”
“It was not a great success. I begged at about five hundred different houses, but no one gave me any food.”
That’s very unusual in India at that time.
“One man told me that I should go back to Tiruvannamalai, while another man, who was serving a meal when I approached him, shouted at me, telling me to go away. Eventually I gave up and walked to the outskirts of the town. I found a well in a field, and I spent about a half hour standing in it with the water up to my neck, hoping that the coldness of the water would take my hunger pains away. It didn’t work.”
You see, a little mad-ductive reasoning already starting to take over, right.
“Then I made my way to the Samadhi”, which is a shrine where the corpse or the cremated remains of a saint are. “I went to the Samadhi of Vithoba, who was a saint who had died recently in that town, and sat there for a while. I finally got something to eat when an old lady came to do puja. She looked at me and she said, ‘It seems as if you are very hungry. Your eyes are starting to sink into your face. I don’t have much myself, but I can give you some ragi.’”
That’s millet gruel. It’s not very good, believe me. You’d have to be starving to want to eat it.
“As she was saying that, she gave me about one and a half tumblers of this ragi gruel to drink. It didn’t do much for my hunger pangs, but I was still happy to receive it. The long walk and the lack of food had made me very tired.”
“As I sat there, I began to question the wisdom of leaving Bhagavan. It was clear that things had not turned out in the way that I had expected. This indicated to me that the decision might not have been correct. I formulated a plan which I thought would test whether my decision had been correct or not. I took a large handful of flowers, placed them on the Samadhi of Vithoba, and started to remove them two at a time. I had decided in advance that if there were an odd number of flowers, I would return to Bhagavan, if there were an even number I would carry on with my original plan.”
“When the result indicated that I should go back to Bhagavan, I immediately accepted the decision and started walking toward Tiruvannamalai.”
How many of you have ever made a decision on the basis of something like that? There’s a few honest mad-ductive yogis here. So his karma did seem to indicate that he would be better off going back and that he was going to have a very hard time doing that, living out of the Ashram as he desired. But did he make that decision based on a rational understanding of reality, or was it a non-rational giving into superstition? Well, he goes on.
“Once I had accepted that my prarabdha, my destiny, was to stay with Bhagavan, my luck began to change. As I was walking into town, a hotel owner invited me into his hotel and gave me a free meal and even gave me some money.”
OK!
“He even prostrated to me. He bowed to me as if I was an enlightened saint. So I had decided to return to Tiruvannamalai by train because I wanted to get back as soon as possible, but before I could reach the station, some more people invited me into their house and asked me to eat. I ate a little food there and then excused myself on the grounds that I had just already eaten a big meal. I had decided to try to travel without a ticket because I wrongly assumed that the money I had been given wouldn’t be enough for the journey. My good luck continued on the train—halfway to Tiruvannamalai, a ticket inspector came to inspect all the tickets, I seemed to be invisible to him, for I was the only person in the carriage who was not asked to produce a ticket. A similar thing happened at the end of the journey when I paused in front of the ticket collector on the station platform. He said, ‘You’ve already given your ticket, go. You’re holding up the other people in the line.’ So then, by Bhagavan’s grace, I escaped on both occasions without having to pay.”
Right?
“So I walked the remaining distance to the Ashram. On my arrival, I went straight to Bhagavan, prostrated before him, and told him everything that happened. Bhagavan confirmed it was my destiny to stay at Ramanashram. He said, ‘You have work to do here. If you try to leave without doing the jobs you’re destined for you, where can you go?’”
OK, so that’s how karma works, OK? Now, he was pretty certain by the way he was treated on the way back as if he was already an enlightened being and given all kinds of miraculous help that he had made the right decision. So he had no doubts, right?
So karma will work that way, but does it work that way because of external forces? Or was it his own projections, and his own attitude, and his own subconscious conflict with the act of leaving the Ashram that had produced the difficulties leaving, and all of the great events of support that he got on coming back? Right?
So a psychoanalyst would obviously analyze this event differently than would a mystic or a yogi, but nonetheless, this is the kind of event that determines the course of our lives, rather than any kind of a logical process of deciding the pros and cons of some program.
This Post Has 3 Comments
Howard Leah
11 May 2022Excellent – thank you that really helped me
DeeDee B. Wood
13 May 2022I first married by a method that Shunya would call ‘mad-ductive’ reasoning . My story goes like this:
Two men wanted me to marry them, simultaneously, and I loved them both, although they were not at all alike. I wanted to marry, but couldn’t decide which man to marry.
So, I decided, before leaving my home one morning for work, to assign the name of each of my suitors to a particular foot and that whichever foot landed on the threshhold of my office entrance would be the name of the man that I would marry! Also, that I would give no thought to my steps until that very moment of my step onto my threshhold had arrived. When I’d arrived the threshhold, I abruptly realized that my right foot was on it. and that I’d put the name of my suitor Charles on that foot, so HE was to be my husband. And, it came to pass a few months later that Charles and I married.
After our marriage, my other suitor, Dennis, came to have dinner with us at our invitation. After the dinner, as he was leaving, he handed me a letter he’d earlier written to me, in which he wrote, among other things, that he considered me the most honest woman he’d ever known. Somehow, though, I didn’t feel quite worthy of his many kind words in that letter, and I never told him how my decision was made to marry his competitor!
That marriage lasted ten years, until I realized that Charles was a hopeless alcoholic who didn’t have the dreams that I had–which were to further my education and then become a mother.
So after 4 more years, I remarried, but not so much by ‘mad-ductive’ reasoning this time! I furthered my education, and became a mother, which I sincerely believe was my true destiny.
Vajra Sat Yoga
23 May 2022What a story! Thanks for sharing DeeDee!It is good to know you found the teaching to be of value!
Namaste