The Faculty of True Discernment

[This is an editorial re-write of a Blog entry from about 10 years ago. I'm not really a better writer now, but I'm certainly a better editor.  I also did a YouTube video of reading this Blog entry]

When I first started with Kundalini Yoga, decades ago, my old Guru had told us that the Kundalini, particular at the Ajna Chakra, would make us ‘smarter’.  I often wondered at that promise, since so many of the Initiates that had been with the Swami for years didn’t seem so extremely bright.  I figured at the time that it must all be somehow relative, and that before they started with Kundalini Yoga that they must have been REALLY stupid.  

Well, one would ask whether I eventually became any “smarter”?  Hmmmm.  Well, you know,  I suppose we must wonder what my old Guru could have meant by choosing the word “smart”.   I had always been able to get A’s in school but was never at the very top of my classes, and that never changed.   But what did happen in my case was that I found I could recognize the Truth and have a sense of certainty about It whenever I would hear It or see It.  Maybe I was incrementally better at ‘thinking up’ the truth of things, but being an original or a particularly inspired thinker was only a small part of it.   It was not so much a case of thinking fast or of thinking new but of thinking ‘sure’, of being certain of the Truth of things.

I was lucky to be able to identify a certain point in time , a moment when the transition came about, when that brand of ‘smartness’ kicked in.  This moment had been punctuated by a Dream, the Dream of True Discernment.     

 The Dream Scene was a well sun lit grassy field with large rocks and fallen trees that offered a natural gathering place for hikers and nature lovers to sit down, rest and take in the ambient beauty. Well, in this particular Dream Scene, there was this woman who was playing a guitar and one would have to describe her as being ugly.  But her guitar playing was the most beautiful I had ever heard. Then came along these men, who might have been nice enough taken singly, but together they dropped on the Evolutionary Scale to being Primitive, that is, they acted like a pack of jerks.  As they approached they started in with ridiculing her for her looks… yes, they were speaking among themselves, but they knew she could hear them.  I was concerned that this would annoy her enough so that she would stop playing, and besides, it was difficult to hear her through all their noise, and so I yelled out to them, "Hey, guys! Everything else aside, can't you hear that playing. We are in the presence of some real talent here, right?  So why don’t we all just shut up and listen?" Then the lady, who had seemed oblivious to all of us up to that point, suddenly looked up, and looking me square in the eye said, "The faculty most worthy of cultivation is the faculty of True Discernment".

In an instant I was transported into a second dream in a moon-lit arbor. It was a young growth forest with as many bushes on the forest floor as the trees around them,   The air was cool, and this felt like a nice place to be.  In this dream I was a disembodied presence floating up above the scene by about a dozen feet, simply watching.  What I witnessed down below was a beautiful Greek Goddess… I would guess, Diana, Goddess of the Hunt.  She was clad in a pearl-white translucent toga, made of not much more than a few yards of material, and belted at the waist.  She was barefoot and she also had a bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder.  It was breathtaking, and I knew this must have been some kind of special vision.  But the tranquility of it all was shattered when along came this strong virile heroic looking man – too old to be called young, but not old enough to be supposed very wise. He was delighted to happen upon such a pretty young woman and of course wanted to make her acquaintance. He said in a boastful tone which may have had a degree or two of double entendre, "I am on the hunt tonight and I feel sorry for the poor creatures that will happen my way, because I am such a good shot that they won’t stand a CHANCE".

Diana remained silent and seemed in no hurry to reply, but rather pulled a strangely unique arrow from her quiver. She held it out a moment so that the hunter, and maybe even myself, could see that it was probably the most crocked arrow that could still be straight enough to be shot from a bow. She loaded it onto the string and pulled back in preparation of shooting... then turned her head off to the side so it could be seen that she obviously had no intention of aiming, and she released the shot.   SHHHWOOOOPP!  The arrow whistled off and lodged inside a bush   She walked over and took hold of the arrow’s shaft and withdrew it from the shrub, and, amazingly, there impaled on the arrow’s tip was a limp dead game bird. Then she spoke, not to the Hunter, but directly to me, "Chance? Nothing happens by Chance".'  Then I awoke.

Anyway, what do those two juxtaposed dreams mean?  Well, not many dreams come with captions, but these dreams did, and I just had to remember the quotes. But these dreams were arranged in sequence, and so we can infer that the messages are inter-related.   So apparently in order to understand that ‘nothing happens by chance’ one has to have some skills in regards to ‘true discernment’.  And, likewise, in order to attain that mindset where one is ever ready to Discern Truth in what most people would consider random day to day nonsense, well, one would need to understand that Everything must have Meaning.  Our assumption going in must be that if we don’t see Meaning, then we aren’t paying sufficient attention.    Also, the idea of ‘cultivation’ is important.  Even with the Kundalini, apparently there has to be some intent and practice in order to ramp up one’s abilities in regards to True Discernment.  You know, I have found that the best practice is to just talk to people, and not just talk to friends but to everybody: store clerks, cashiers, people in elevators, pedestrians on the street where you’re waiting for the same crossing light.  Just talk and often they will say something that will just LIGHT UP as TRUE.  But you have to listen.  Most people who are ‘in conversations’ are using up their brain power in thinking of what to say next.  Well, don’t think about what to say.  You’ll surely think of something.  Also, if you are fully engaged in listening, then what you will probably think to say when it comes your turn to speak will be related to what the other person was just speaking about, that is, you will be appropriately responsive.  People like that. And so they keep talking, and eventually you get the Truth out of them.  And when you hear it, and Know it, well, it is like finding a Treasure.  “Wow” will become one of your favorite words.      

Oh, I should mention that another dream came along which would affect my view of the World and helped me in my Pathway towards True Discernment.  In this Dream I was walking across a deep chasm on a board that had been laid between the two sides, and suddenly the board was pulled away and I found myself falling, but I only experienced it as a sense of floating weightlessness.  As they say, it’s not the falling that hurts… it’s the hitting the ground that’s the problem”.   Well, before I even came close to hitting the Ground a Dream Guru appeared, pulling me out of the Dream to tell me “Perfection consists in Randominity, so Be Not One Thing, and Be Not the Other”.  So, yeah, apparently one has to be able to see Patterns in the Complexity but at the same time refrain from over-generalizing about them.  Think about it like when you take a Rorschach Test, that you need to just see smears of ink that look like “smears of ink”. Seeing stuff that really isn’t there is sort of the opposite of True Discernment, don’t you think?   So you shouldn’t be predisposed to any particular belief system, which would induce a kind of a Tunnel Vision.  There is the Truth and then there is the Party Line. Now, yes, I have often been a Joiner and have been a part of many groups many times in my Life, but I have been lucky that rarely has any Organization ‘vetted’ me for ‘True Believer’ Status (even Most Cults are laid back and never ask for an explicit pledge but assume that one is an Ass Kisser just like everyone else).  Now, of course, you may ask why I would join anything that I do not 100% believe in.  Well, in Nature, Absolutes do not exist, and you’ll never find 100% of anything.  So, where Clubs, Political Organizations, and even Religions are concerned, how can one ever expect a perfect fit?  So one joins because a Club is More Good than it is Bad.  And then, yes, One should see some Good in Everything, but, then again, if you find nothing to complain about, well, you’re not paying attention, are you?  The Truth is always good to know, but its not always good news.