Windows to Infinity

By Amin Hussain and Clive Hazell

Based on the assumption that a close relationship to that which is infinite is crucial for emotional and spiritual well-being, this book describes the many windows that are available to us and that afford us contact with the inexpressible and ineffable. It also highlights ideas, actions, emotions and attitudes that can block our view and thus impede our overall development. The text is liberally enlivened with stories, fables, myths and references to popular culture so that otherwise esoteric ideas are made enjoyable and accessible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665527873

Amin Hussain

By profession, Amin Hussain is an accountant; however, another passion of his is philosophy. He spent most of his life searching for the “water” of wisdom and insight. However, no matter how much he searched, he had to wait for the water to come to him. At the age of 17, he realized what that water meant and that was the beginning of his journey. He spent the next few decades consuming all the knowledge of the various philosophes and religions and the outcome of that search was this book. Clive Hazell is a counseling psychologist in Chicago. He has written several books and articles on family systems, the psychodynamics of groups and emotional development

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© 2021 Amin Hussain & Clive Hazell. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/02/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2786-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2787-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021911275

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Do you accept the Creator as is?

Theory of Emotional Development or The Theory of Positive Disintegration

Karma and Group Dynamics

DO YOU ACCEPT THE

CREATOR AS IS?

We put this question at the outset because it’s important to know one’s answer prior to beginning this journey of discovery. If we venture forth with preconceived ideas or even strong desires as to what we will find, our quest will not be as fruitful, for then we will block out any information we either do not like or that does not align with our preconceptions.

This clearing out or unearthing of one’s hopes, expectations, desires and anticipations is more easily said than done because it cannot be accomplished in one fell swoop. It takes time. Furthermore, giving up on one’s cherished ideas can be painful. Consider how carefully we inform children of the reality of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny.

Any trained psychologist is aware of Freud’s notion of the reality principle. It’s the mental function that helps keep us up to date and in touch with the consensual reality of the world around us—things like taxes, social customs, language, the laws of the land and so on. There’s also the pleasure principle, the mental function that wants reality to conform to our wishes. This is the part of us (usually seen in childhood) that wants instant gratification, to be loved all the time, and to have special powers. These two motivations compete with one another in the psychological realm and leave us more or less in touch with reality. Similar conflicting forces are at work in the realm of spiritual development. There is a side of us that wants enlightenment now and believes it can happen instantaneously, and there is a side of us that sadly acknowledges that this will take time and effort. Just as there is, within us all, the wish that the Creator conform to our initial image, there is also an aspect of our spiritual self that knows we might be in for a surprise as the truth is revealed.

A metaphor might help capture some of the subtlety and poignancy of this point. Imagine being separated from your parents at a very early age, so early that you have no conscious memory of them. Then, one fine day, you’re told that you will encounter these parents really soon. It’s likely that you will wonder as to the nature of these parents—what they look like, how clever they are, how they sound when they speak and so on. It’s not hard to imagine that, on the day of the actual encounter with the real flesh and blood parents, there will be some surprises that lead to some adjustments of your preconceived ideas and fantasies. Perhaps the real parents are quite unprepossessing—shabby and down at heel. Perhaps they are beautifully dressed and well groomed, possessing the finest of manners.

In this we are reminded of the many stories told of the prophet who shows up as a messenger of God but is not taken seriously because they‘re humble and not adorned with finery. How could such a person be the prophet? This is not at all what we expected! These stories enjoin us to be open-minded in our quest for the truth. Those who embark on a spiritual journey with an open mind and a questing attitude are more likely to follow the path of self-discovery and less likely to simply follow the rules.

An interesting study was done where two groups of people were identified. One group, the religious questers, saw their religious practice as one where they embarked on a journey of discovery, with as few preconceptions as possible. The other group, the formal group, pursued their religious development by following the rules and precepts of their religion—fasting, observing prayers, attending ceremonies punctiliously and so on. The intensity and frequency of experiences of emptiness of the two groups were compared. The study found that the questers were much more likely to experience emptiness than the rule followers. The experience of emptiness is challenging and often painful. However, the results of the study imply that as we develop spiritually, we are more likely than not to encounter feelings of meaninglessness, pointlessness and emptiness. Viewed from this framework, these feelings are not necessarily bad. They simply signify that the older frameworks of meaning have been rattled, or perhaps destroyed by the new learning that has taken place.

Unfortunately, these experiences of emptiness, which can be regarded as glimpses of the infinite for which one is searching, can be very off-putting to many people. As a result, one may resort to self-destructive behaviors to quell the disquiet. That is, instead of responding creatively to the emptiness (take drawing on a blank piece of paper for example), people respond by hastily filling the void with something, sometimes anything, to stop the feeling of emptiness. They might turn to drugs, alcohol or sex They could resort to picking fights, becoming obsessional, carrying out rites and rituals, acting out, going on spending sprees, doing lots of busy work, becoming hyper or becoming a recluse. On and on the ersatz solutions go—for sometimes the challenge of responding creatively to the emptiness is overwhelming. Additionally, the individual’s personal history, family, life space, education and culture might not afford the individual the resources to do anything other than quickly fill the void in a non-developmental way.

Language, essential as it is, can also become part of this acting out. We can fill the void (at least in fantasy) with talk, sometimes with chatter, sometimes with educated perorations. As Lao Tse informs us, He who speaks does not know. He who knows, does not speak.

In addition, language, symbolic as it is, can sometimes have the effect of appearing to render material that is metaphysical or spiritual. An idea, for example, is often made to seem as if it is an actual thing when expressed by a given word. For example, angels are seen as physical objects—with characteristics known to all in a given culture. They are white, winged, tall, slim and peaceful-looking. Santa Claus is a jolly, rotund, bearded fellow. By pictorializing Santa in this way we obscure the deeper meaning. For what is Santa? What are the ideas he symbolizes? They are deep and complex, involving at least: happiness, generosity, gratitude, love, goodwill and even disappointment and punishment (symbolized by the lump of coal left for the naughty child---which itself is a concretization of an idea).

We arrive thus at an interesting proposition, namely, that the presupposition of what Santa is like might prevent us from recognizing the real Santa when he (or she!) shows up. The indoctrination regarding the nature of Santa creates a specific blindness to the metaphysical (and perhaps real) Santa. Of course, if we take away the jolly bearded Santa in the department stores and movies, we are left with a temporary emptiness that places us back in the challenging situation of questing through the experience of emptiness and generating ways of creatively responding to the void.

The story of Santa Claus is a story, and in this analysis, we encounter the dual function of stories—to put to sleep and to awaken. The Santa story, in its usual cultural deployment, is oriented towards narcosis. It is aimed at creating sleep. When we look behind the story and examine its underlying ideas we are perhaps awakened to other possibilities. Our horizons expand and the light on our path brightens.

In this book we examine many stories from the perspective of the theory of karma, as well as from other philosophical perspectives. We will not spend a lot of time or space explaining the theory of karma as we believe this has been fairly well covered in our first book, Karma: Cause and Effect. We recommend you look this book over before embarking on reading this tome if you are unsure as to how karma might work as a system of explanation. The karmic world and its assumptions will be a continuous reference point throughout this book.

For indeed, the karmic world and its omnipresent causal chains are inescapable. As the story goes, if we tried to escape the laws of karma by secreting ourselves in a single small lentil and then diving down to the deepest chasm in the deepest ocean, we might escape taxes, our friends, enemies and families, but we still would not escape the cause-and-effect chain of karma. It is indeed ineluctable and inescapable. As a consequence, we might as well face up to it and work with it, attempting, at all turns to reduce our karmic accounts to zero by, among other things, paying off our debts and forgiving our debtors.

For many of us, especially those raised in the narrowly scientistic, dogmatically empiricist, materialist cultures of the relatively recent western world, the approach of explaining phenomena by recourse to karma is a difficult one because we are used to seeing things through our usual senses—sight, sound, touch and so on—and we are blind to the non-material or metaphysical. In the terms of our first book, we have a sort of soul blindness. Fortunately, this soul vision, this capacity to appreciate things in the non-material realm (some might call this capacity intuition), can be developed, especially if we set aside time to develop this atrophied form of perception through the act of meditation. This meditation can take many different forms. It opens the mind to new inputs. These inputs, perhaps, would open the person to the realm of karma, a different way of explaining the phenomena we experience in the world.

In a way, this new vision—soul vision—might be helped by dimming our awareness of the hypnotic tug of the material senses. These senses, by the way, are not bad. They are of course very helpful in finding our way around the material world. Intuition, however, can help us chart our way in the karmic realm. In this way, we might say we are becoming like a football player who can kick accurately and strongly with both feet—a distinct advantage. We were given this gift of soul vision by the creator. So much of the time we let it fall into disuse, only seeing half of the world, if that, through the material senses. Animals are not blessed with this capacity for intuiting the non-material world. It is a distinct and uniquely human gift—a gift that requires a certain amount of attention and cultivation. All too often, however, our mind is flooded with programming from family, culture, and education that causes us to develop a one-sided intelligence and ignore this other side that is essential to our humanity. This book aims to render some ideas that might be of assistance in activating this often-ignored side of our existence.

In the world we find cycles of causality, webs of interconnectedness. One we may conceive of as the cycle between the eye, the brain, the heart and action. This is shown in Diagram X, below.

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To explain this we may describe a simple sequence, a very early and basic sequence. A mother looks at her baby (eye) and wants to kiss the baby, because she feels love (brain and heart) and then the mother picks up the baby and kisses it on the cheek (action). We can see that any action may be comprised to a greater or lesser extent by each of these four elements. We can act without thinking, that is, we might not use our brains. We can do something but not have our hearts in it. We can act blindly, without seeing. We can see and think and feel but not act. For an action to be a full action, it has to include each of the four components. We also see that the eye and action are material while the brain and the heart, although material objects that carry out metaphysical functions, are non-material. We thus see an inner balancing act between the material, intellectual and spiritual, the last being contained in the heart.

To put it another way, we may say that the eye sees or apprehends. The brain thinks about it. The heart literally takes it to heart and the fourth step leads to an encounter with reality—an encounter informed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the eye, brain and heart. We may apply this relatively simple checklist or flow chart to our actions and the actions of those around us. We also recall that the very flow between these four subsystems is itself influenced by karma.

A story:

The Spider Who was Born in India and Traveled to the U.S.A.

Once upon a time there was a little spider who was born in Bombay. One day, by accident, he finds himself in a suitcase. Suddenly the case is packed tight and slammed shut. He sleeps inside the case for hour after hour until he finds himself rotating around baggage claim. Finally, he is whisked away and the suitcase is opened. He exits into a New York hotel room. He crawls across the floor, climbs up to the window sill and squeezes outside. At that moment, a hungry bird spies the spider and gobbles him up.

This simple story illustrates the workings of karma. The spider had a karmic debt to pay to the bird from a previous life. Since they were both born far apart, a long journey was necessary and the spider, unbeknownst to himself, travels from Bombay to New York to pay off his karmic debt inherited from a previous lifetime.

Similar logic can be used to explain the bear who patiently waits mid-stream for a passing salmon to eat. Hour after hour hundreds of salmon pass by until finally the bear catches one and eats it. Chance? Or karma? The theory of karma would hold that the bear and the salmon have a relationship from a previous life. That specific salmon owes the bear a meal. Now the debt is paid. The animal kingdom is replete with such examples. Modern science might explain that the lion catches the slowest wildebeest. Karma would hold that the two had a previous relationship, and a debt was being called to account from a previous lifetime.

With humans, the situation becomes infinitely more complex. We might, for example, witness a scene where an employer is treating an employee unfairly. Western ethical theory, based on such things as the golden rule, Kant’s categorical imperative or Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation might lead us to intervene and attempt to radically change the situation. While karmic theory does not reject these ethical notions, it does add some complicating factors, factors that the change agent ought to consider before intervening. One should consider, for example, the pre-existing karmas between the participants. Does one person owe the other something from a previous life? If this is the case, no amount of intervention will alter the situation until the debts between the participants are either paid off or forgiven. Will an intervention create new karmas? Often times an intervention aimed at social change creates pain and suffering in others. This pain and suffering will