Letter to the Editor
The following was received from Rwanda in response to our issue on Death
Death and the Tibetans
Mme Rose Marie Mukarutabana
I should like to share a few comments on the articles in the issue [on death], particularly regarding the use of the Bardo Todol to help dying people or just dead people.
Just before Christmas, a friend called me at ten pm: "A friend of mine has just lost his best friend. He is quite shattered. Please send me something to forward to him!" She meant something about death, some of the ideas I had been sharing with her. We Rwandans do talk about death a great deal, because of the genocide. Everyone has lost someone, and many have lost everyone that was ever close to them. I mean, everyone: family, friends, friend's friends, school friends, first boy friend, teenage sweet-heart. All gone. And, of course, not in the nice, tidy way Nancy's mother went... So that none of the usual things will work. Other words, other ways have to be found, and often nothing really works, at least not immediately. So that the death I'm talking about here is one of the more ordinary type.
My friend said she did not feel confident enough to tell what she knew, afraid that the other person would not believe her, and might even think she was just dishing out the old pious stories, which would definitely push him further into the dark pit he was in. So I put a few words on paper...
The following morning, the gentle-man was, in the words of my friend, a differ-ent person altogether. Unbelievably, he was full of energy, perhaps even joy, she said tentatively. He had "accompanied" his friend, and was now busy helping everyone else to see things his way, and give the dead an "environment friendly" vigil and burial, both being ecologists.
The words I had written in that email to my friend were very simple, a combination of the traditional Rwandan attitude to death - the idea of "gutaha", going home to the Ancestors - and thoughts adapted from the Bardo. The idea of using the Bardo came to me "of its own", two years ago, when faced with a similar situation. That was the first time I used what I had learnt from the Bardo, about helping people go on with their trip. I wasn't sure it would work, because the man I was talking to was a professional Catholic theologian, who had internalized the idea that our own traditional ways were "pagan", meaning diabolical, anti-God. Tibetan ways were also non-Christian, but they'd be more "respectable", or at least sufficiently exotic to open new vistas...
The effect was surprising. I knew from experience that people needed simple, straightforward words about death and life, and I knew they were all the more ready to accept them when faced with death. But I hadn't been sure about this particular case. Now I know that in matters of life and death, a theologian is as "simple-minded" as any other person...
When he got back to his home, his wife rang to tell me: "I don't know what you did, but the man I sent you is not the same one you sent me back".
Sincerely.
Rose Marie Mukarutabana
Rwanda
Prayer
Lisa M. Payne
Prayer is never for self-aggrandizement. It is endless and selfless. Endless in that it is continuous; every moment a prayerful act. Selfless in that it is flowing; every outpouring a purposeful plea. Freely and effortlessly given for all, not beleaguered by selfishness.
How many times does a group-rote prayer resound monotonously; bereft of feeling and meaning; asking for divine intercession. How many individual prayers are offered for the same reason? Caught in the miasma of competition and materialism, prayers are given that direction in the Western world. In the Eastern world, it takes on the direction of qualities or attributes, either way they are desirous in nature.
The nature of prayer should be beyond self in origin. It should be group soul based. The group good, the advancement of all should be the emphasis of everyone's prayerful existence. Prayerful purpose in the everyday is what one should strive to-ward. Wilfully weaving an interconnectedness of mind, body, soul with definition; a living, breathing prayer in and of itself.
One's life as an example of that prayer's manifestation. Actualization of the organic prayer is all around. It is found in song, healing, teaching, etc; a co-creative action rather than an invocation/evocation modality. Prayer is not a sedentary thing. Prayer is action emanating into the world.
Meditation is the blueprint for this action. Cloaked in mantra, the repetition gives discipline. Once understood, it is the impetus from inertia. The enlightenment provides the spiritual centeredness to focus on others. Prayer for self-aggrandizement dissipates, falling away, melting into everyday life and action for others.
Does the Hummingbird Pray?
Charlotte Schmid
Between heaven and earth and all the universes
a form is created from sounds of many voices,
whispered, shouted, implored, sometimes threateningly harsh.
Sounds that seek an answer.
A question, a demand at times, a voice sent forth in space
from where no echo can return.
Knees bent on stony floors,
bead-strands fingered, incense burnt and
bargains made on golden platters that have used up their shine.
Does the hummingbird pray and the butterfly
and the willow down at the river's edge giving shelter to little creatures?
How do they pray? And who prays to whom and aren't we all One?
And the clouds reflected in the water,
Is that the answer to the waters' question
or is it the unanswered cloud-prayer reflected back?
Is the candle lit in the snow high up in the Andes
giving enough light to carry prayers over the world?
How do the malas and rosaries pass the time when they're turned with murmurs
and is a pearl necklace on pale skin not the same?
Do we listen to our prayers, the inner voice, intently
such as the river must
down by the bend where water smoothed the prayer stones,
where sunsets and moon-rises, seagulls and otters watch and
where Cranes lift the prayers on their wings -- and
fly away?
Fron Prayer to Meditation
A Life Journey
Nancy M. Davison
On a frosty night in the 70's I was driving across country and happened to tune in to a talk show on a Texas radio station. A woman had called about a friend whose daughter was on a plane lost somewhere over Colorado. The distraught mother had asked her friend to meditate and see if she could "get" any information about the daughter. The caller was disturbed by this request, and the show's host, in a sarcastic voice, said, "Meditate? Well, I guess we know what she's up to! Folks, you have to be real careful out there, because you never know where these people will show up! What we have to do is pray for God's help in this matter." And then he led his radio "congregation" in praying that the lives of those on the missing plane be spared. His message was that it's okay to "pray", telling "god" that you are powerless, and rely only on "him" to give you what you want, but that since meditation flies in the face of that powerlessness, putting the responsibility for life situations and conditions squarely on the shoulders of the individual, it is not only wrong but probably "evil".
When I was a child, I remember praying, "please give me a horse, and lots of books for Christmas" - to a "god" I visualized as having two faces on one head, each head looking in the opposite direction. At some point I realized that praying didn't really do much good (I never did get the horse), so I stopped doing it. My goal in life became the acquisition of knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom, and I came to disdain prayer as an emotional cul-de-sac, vowing never to ask some nebulous and probably non-existent "being" for something "he" wouldn't be able to provide, anyway. During those growing up years I also learned to concentrate the prelude to meditation an ability that set me questing for the key to "something" that was missing. I knew that supplicative prayer wasn't going to reveal that key.
During those pre-teen years I would often stay overnight with a friend who lived in town. About half a block down the hill from her house was what we called a "holy roller" church. On Summer nights we would open the window of her upstairs room, slapping mosquitoes as we listened to the people in the church shrieking and singing and making all kinds of noise. It sounded as if they were having a lot of fun, so one night we couldn't stand it anymore, and snuck out of the house. Oozing around to the back of the church, we stood on tiptoe, looking through the window at an amazing scene. The people were liter-ally rolling on the floor, making loud, in- comprehensible noises, speaking in words we couldn't understand. If this was prayer, it was unlike anything we had ever been taught in our staid Christian religion, which was pretty much the "god bless me and Mommy and Daddy, and please let me have a horse" variety. This exuberant flailing and wailing didn't fit that category at all, and was completely beyond our ability to process at the time. It was impressive to a young girl, and added to my store of know-ledge, but shed no real light on my dilemma.
As a teen, I slogged my way through several "Christian" churches, an-noyed and bored at their unremitting insistence on "giving everything to Jesus" in prayer no help there, while the Buddhist Temple at the edge of town was definitely out of bounds for a young Caucasian girl in the 1940's. Nevertheless, the detours and cul-de-sacs along the journey have all been learning experiences, so it is just as well I came to an understanding of the profound beauty of the Buddha later in life.
When I was nineteen I joined the Catholic Church, and began to ob-serve the rituals and devotions of the Rosary and the Mass, another kind of prayer, through which I learned that it was possible to get myself out of the center of the picture, and concentrate instead on community and group good, an excellent lesson for a Leo personality. The Catholic regimen did not so much demand passive acceptance as participation in a process. Though I never developed any real devotion to Jesus or Mary or any of the other saints on the calendar devotion being entirely too non-mental for me the Church offered a dimension in prayer which I explored for nearly two decades.
At some point during those years I dimly began to realize there was only so far this little personality could go on its own. I decided I had already put out sufficient effort and demanded the key I had been seeking for so long. Demand and supply! I quickly "discovered" astrology, reincarnation and Alice A. Bailey, in that order. In 1979, Letters on Occult Meditation "fell" into my hand off a dusty shelf in a second-hand bookstore, beginning the next phase of the inner/outer life.
Study and application of the Bailey teachings revealed that occult meditation was what I had been searching for. The five stages in the process of contact and fusion between personality and soul are Concentration, Meditation, Contemplation, Illumination and Inspiration. Completion of these stages give the individual control of the evolution of consciousness, and through this process we grow to understand that it is intention to serve, and not personal need, that must fuel and guide the life. Prayer, as a concept of giving control of the lesser life to some nebulous "other" does not fit into any of these stages, and can leave the prayer who asks to be served in a limbo of unfulfilled expectations and frustration. In President Kennedy's inaugural speech he defined brilliantly the difference between prayer and meditation, when he said "ask not what your country can do for you, but ask, rather, what you can do for your country." Our country is the entire world, and supplicative prayer does not do much of any-thing to solve that world's ills or fulfill its needs. For some prayer is not only supplication but also the mark of a true believer, and an offering of worship or adoration to divinity. I have never been able to accept the idea that "god" in any form would desire or demand such worship. Let me close with the words of a very wise Buddhist monk who understood the basic and vital difference between supplicative prayer and pro-active meditation. He wrote:
I do not believe, I understand
I do not worship, I practice what I understand.
In prayer, we acknowledge our bewilderment and our inabilities, while in meditation we identify with the source of all power and confidence, and become forces for good in the world, as we practice what we understand.
St. Francis of Assissi
Ford Boyer
In the Agni Yoga book, Leaves of Morya's Garden, II (pg. 146) we find that "Prayer, or spiritual communion, is the highest manifestation . . ." but we need also "mental refinement and spiritual strength."
Prayer that is based on emotion only rarely succeeds; there must be a heart/mind quality added to those words we attempt to send to a higher realm of consciousness.
In the Agni Yoga book, Heart, (#932) we are told that it is "much wiser to pray for the world, in which you yourself will also find a drop of Bliss."
This bliss is inherent in the words of the Prayer of St. Francis of Assissi:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where the is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light; and
Where there is sadness, joy.
Oh, Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born
to eternal life.
Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if all humanity followed this prayer? We know that we do not live in a utopian world, but if the possible thousands would repeat this prayer each day we may be able to create a paradigm shift to better human relations.