Friday, November 13, 2009

Subtlety

Great things are subtle. Not obvious. Multi-layered. Capable of being savored. Think about good food, fine wine, great music, poetry, or a beautiful painting. Consider the beauty of the world we live in. The great scientific insights in every field.

Intellectual people (like me) sometimes think that the apparent simplicity of Maharaji’s message makes it unsubtle and therefore unworthy of their attention. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Maharaji’s message points to something that is extremely subtle, and even the way he presents his message is, well, not obvious, multi-layered, capable of being savored. Let me give you just one, tiny, current example of multi-layered subtlety in Maharaji’s talks.

One of his current themes is the distinction between believing and knowing. Yesterday I watched a near-live video presentation of a recent talk he gave in India centered around this theme. While listening, I recognized a rich subtlety in one of his metaphors that I had almost completely missed in previous hearings of very similar content.

This was during his famous “imaginary cow” example. In many of his recent addresses, Maharaji has invited his listeners to believe that there is a cow on stage with him. As he describes the imaginary cow, one can indeed almost see it, and almost taste the sweetness of its milk. His point, of course, is that you can’t actually drink the milk of an imaginary cow. Believing vs. knowing.

In making this point, he uses analogies within the cow analogy. For example, he says that if you are drinking a real cup of tea, and you want to add some cream to remove the bitterness of the tea, you can’t use the cream from the imaginary cow. The tea will still be bitter.

I’ve heard this whole story a dozen times or so, both on video and in person, but this time I heard something in a new and delightfully subtle way. I realized that the tea analogy does much more than drive home the basic point. It is beautifully chosen to convey in itself the depth and subtlety of the message.

At one level, he evokes the sense of taste to convey the immediate reality of his subject, implying that the Knowing he refers to is something you can actually "taste," and not just in your imagination. At an even deeper level, the “bitter tea” can remind us of the bitter taste of life without love. The cream, of course, represents the love we all seek. When love is mixed into the tea of life, it permeates it, removing the bitterness and giving us something much more pleasant to experience. And that, to me, is a wonderful analogy for the experience of Knowing that Maharaji offers.

I’m talking here about one little phrase, one little moment, in one hour-long talk. What I’m trying to suggest is that his expressions are permeated with such multi-layered subtle points, waiting for us to discover them, to our delight and our edification.

I can only hope that Maharaji would not be annoyed by what I have expressed here. He doesn’t like to be interpreted, and indeed I am not trying to interpret him, but to appreciate him, and to share that appreciation. For he’s the cream in my, uh, tea.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Learning from a Challenge

The America's Giving Challenge ended yesterday, with the cause TPRF: Food for People coming in second place out of almost 8,000 Causes entered, and raising about $250,000 from thousands of small contributions in less than 15 days. I had the opportunity to be a part of organizing this remarkable effort. After this experience, I have never appreciated Maharaji more. On its own small scale, the process helped me to recognize another of his qualities worthy of passionate admiration.

The Challenge did not follow the usual fundraising campaign template. It was about the number of donations, not the amount, and the rules allowed one daily donation from each contributor. Most of us, including TPRF supporters, have received many fundraising requests. The familiar pattern is an appeal for one contribution that should be as large as possible, or perhaps a commitment to regular monthly support. This Challenge presented something completely different and very unfamiliar.

People tend to see what they expect to see. Breaking through a familiar pattern to convey a new idea takes time, patience, and persistence, even with one person. We wanted to reach thousands. At first, there were moments when I wanted to shout at people, to shake them and say, "Don't you get it?!" But shouting and shaking is not effective. It's about that patient, persistent effort, and about hundreds and thousands of individual realizations, each happening in its own time, in its own way.

Through every channel we had, we kept up a continuous stream of messages that conveyed the same information in different ways, always trying to be positive and encouraging, and often with a light touch. As the campaign went on, the lights went on, one by one, for more and more people, and the daily support built steadily, to the point where we had well over 2,000 individual contributions on the last day, and a remarkable overall achievement of second place.

When I thought about this, I remembered that Maharaji has said something very similar about efforts to convey his message -- that he tells us the same thing, again and again, but keeps finding different ways to say it, so that we can, individually and in our own time, begin to really get the message.

I know how difficult it was for me to overcome my own impatience, and to keep channeling the passion I felt about the potential of this Challenge into patient, positive effort. How challenging must it be for Maharaji, who must also want to shake us sometimes, to channel his passion for the human potential that he sees into the patient, persistent effort he has been making for so many years? Somehow he does it, never losing the passion, the kindness, and the hope that people will understand more and more of what he has to say.

No one sees more clearly than he does, that the only thing that really matters is the understanding of individual human beings, which comes about one by one. No one understands better than he does how one drop after another can become a mighty river. I got a glimpse of this in the achievement of the Challenge that has helped me see just a little more of the vision behind what he is doing. That little bit I've seen makes me proud to count myself as one of his passionate admirers. We had so much fun, we did so much good, with the united effort of a few thousand people over a few days to make one little contribution every day. How much fun, and how much good, does he envision for our human potential? It's something I can learn more about every day, and I hope I live long enough to learn a lot more.