Thursday 27 September 2018

Nothing to Attain, Nothing to Accomplish

I had an interesting exchange with an unknown commenter under one of Bruce Charlton's posts on Albion Awakening yesterday. The post is here. He took the line that "The world has no purpose, is not going anywhere, it is already perfect and thrumming with meaning. Striving and seeking are harmful and pointless - they merely obscure the vision."  So for him spirituality is to do with becoming aware of what is right here right now, and in doing this your consciousness becomes attuned to the whole. This approach has a long and honourable history, particularly in the East, but I think that, for all its virtues, it is an incomplete path. I replied as follows:

"The problem with the ‘nothing to attain, nothing to accomplish’ path is that it has no answer to evil. If "the world has no purpose and is not going anywhere as it is already perfect” that means there is no good and no evil, that creation is without point and fundamentally nothing is better than anything else. This is actually a very limited and one-sided view of reality which rejects the relative for full focus on the absolute.

Now the absolute is the absolute, of course, but reality is not just the absolute or the uncreated. It is the absolute and the relative, spirit and matter, together, and a more inclusive view sees that time does indeed have a place in the context of eternity. It is not rendered null and void by eternity but contributes to a deeper view of life than eternity alone. This is why God creates, to make something more than pure undifferentiated oneness.

So the path that seeks growth is greater than the path that seeks being alone (as in only being). What is more, it is able to counter evil which very definitely does exist in a fallen world. The world is not yet perfect but it will eventually be made so by those who join the struggle. Those who simply seek to be ..... have rejected or not picked up on the fact that the fullness of life is found in the integration of being and becoming and the journey to ever greater heights of glory."

Unknown replied setting forth his position more fully (which you can read under Bruce's post linked to above) and making several points among which were this  "Christian mystics like Eckhardt and others say to call God good is to limit him - he is beyond such limiting conceptions",

and this "(time and evil) exist in a relative sense, like an illusion", 

and then this "These are all nice theories, and not reality. The question must be - if you strive and seek, if you fight evil and try and improve the world and yourself, if you approach the world through concepts and understanding and thus control- does the world then reveal its magic and wonder to you, do you then feel existential fulfillment, does seeking and grasping of the ego lessen, does your existential anxiety and anomie diminish? Or are you just expecting these things in a future that never arrives?"

I responded:

"I respect your position .... but it doesn’t cover the whole picture. We won’t agree which is fine but to me your view basically downgrades the individual who is little more than a blot on the face of pure awareness. But there is a big difference between the self-seeking ego which strives, tries to grasp etc and the fact of the individual which brings quality to consciousness (a good, in fact, an inevitable, thing) and allows for relationship which I now see as the principal purpose for creation. Your scenario removes the need for any kind of creation.

Ultimate truth is beyond good and evil but please don’t compare relative things to an illusion. What God creates is real even if not self-subsistent. It’s a mistake to think that the world of creation exists apart from God but it does exist in God and he saw that it was good. It’s not an illusion or a dream. He loves it.

By the way, I see what Eckhardt means but I think he’s wrong. God is good. That doesn’t limit him because goodness cannot be limited. The goodness of God is not part of the pairs of opposites. Evil has no intrinsic reality but it does have limited reality as the perversion of goodness. God is only beyond good and evil to the extent that he is beyond opposites. But he is goodness not nothing.

Perhaps you don’t accept God or see him as something subsidiary to ultimate truth? I don’t see how this can stand up. If the absolute does not include the personal then the personal could never arise. There must be some kind of differentiation even in the absolute, strange as that may seem to our logical minds. I suppose the trinity in Christianity is a clue as to how this might work. 

These are not theories to me. They are not thoughts though that is how they form themselves mentally. But they are more perceptions than concepts.

With regard to seeking and striving, I would draw a distinction between the striving of the ego or separate self who is after a reward, and striving driven by the pure aspiration of the humble soul. There is no saint or mystic who has not struggled even if the struggle is to let go of struggling. We seek effortless being certainly, but that does not mean that we don’t have to work towards it.

It’s not a question of fighting evil or trying to improve the world but the saying that all that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing is very pertinent. Even if that doing is no more than proclaiming the truth (sounds pompous, I know!), that is necessary in a fallen world which this is. But we must always act from love of God not desire to make our own paltry mark on the world. That is the difficulty which those who do seek to improve the world often don’t face and then they fall into the trap you rightly draw attention to."

I could have also mentioned that it is wrong to put time and evil in the same category as Unknown did. One is a God created reality, the other is a distortion of reality so they cannot be compared at all. I could have also said that he was quite mistaken in thinking that the Christian (for we are really talking about the difference between a Buddhist and a Christian path here) is trying to improve the world or himself or seeking and striving on an ego level. He is simply trying to put himself right with God, to walk in the light of Christ. That is a wholly different thing.

Unknown's reply referred to the Indian idea that creation is play when he says "You are quite correct that this removes any need for creation - rather, creation is mere Play, the Divine Game. Need means God isn't perfect, which Bruce quite honestly acknowledges and accepts.

The notion of the universe as a game, and play as superior to work, and magical spontaneity as better than necessity, is I admit very foreign to us today - but it is an ancient notion, and I wonder how much of the gloom, anxiety, and seriousness of the modern world cones from the loss of this notion.

Well, logically something that doesn't exist as an independent entity but is part of an energy field isn't real to the extent that it appears to us as an independent entity - that's all that's meant by illusion, and I don't think that's so terrifying.

An illusion is in fact real - it is not nothing - but it distorts what it represents
."

I must admit I find this kind of talk very unpersuasive. I've heard it many times before and it really just avoids facing up to the reality in creation or God by conditionally admitting these with one hand while dismissing them with the other. Funnily enough, given the mystical tone of the commenter's beliefs, it seems to be a mentally inspired approach, coming up with ways of expression to justify an opinion one already has   Of course, creation is not real in the way that God is real. No one has ever said it is, but it is still fully real. It is not in any way an illusion or dream, neither of which have any true reality at all. I would also object to the term energy field which reduces divine realities to abstractions and therefore presupposes unreality to demonstrate unreality. We are not energy fields any more than a star is, in CS Lewis's words, just a ball of fire and gas.

The debate boils down to this. How real is creation? How real are you? This is a matter for intuition but a clue is given in the book of Genesis when it is written that God looked at his creation and saw it was good. The view that creation is just play is attractive but play of who or what? The impersonal absolute? That makes no sense. Play means a player who wishes to derive pleasure from playing. It must be a who which means God.

I would agree there is an element of play in creation but that does not discount purpose. God can surely kill two birds with one stone! The purpose is twofold. One, self-expression in love and two, the desire to become more. I don't agree with the idea that God is not perfect. If he is the all, which he is, then he must be. There is nothing outside him or limiting him in any way. But perfection exists in absolute terms. In terms of a relative world of becoming, God can always become more than he is even though he is perfect. This is his reason for creation, to grow. Obviously he cannot grow as the uncreated absolute but in terms of creation he certainly can, and we can with him. 

So we can if we wish return to the absolute. But is it not better to do as God himself does which is retain and harmonise the two aspects of our being, the created and uncreated? I agree that we have to seek our deepest reality in spirit but that is not the whole of what we are and to restrict ourselves to that is to limit ourselves even if we are limited to the unlimited, paradoxical as that may sound. But then if we do that we are ruling out relationship which means love. 

If you say that the Absolute alone is real then you are also saying there is no better or worse in creation. It's all one. People try to get round this by saying that creation is real on its own level but the fact is that, once truth is realised, none of that can matter. Everything is part of the all regardless so why care? That is the fundamental truth however you spin it. This problem is resolved by looking at the world like this. Yes, God is in everything but he is not in everything equally. The purpose of spiritual evolution is to manifest more of God in creation starting with ourselves. Even the Buddha had somewhere to go. He could grow and no doubt has for I dare say his spiritual consciousness now is greater than it was then. There is something to attain. It is to be more than you are. There is always more of God to be realised which there would not be if there was nothing to be attained or achieved and the goal was just to be. That is part of it but spiritual growth can be endless if you allow it to be and don't cut yourself of from the fullness of the divine through excessive focus on one aspect, albeit the deepest, of it. God is a Trinity. He is not just the Father. This is where the Christian revelation goes further than anything else. We are not just spirit but spirit and soul and the goal is not to abandon one for the other as in the non-dualistic approach but to combine the two to make something new, something that was not there before. 

God is being. However he creates to be something and that should be our goal too.








26 comments:

edwin said...

Vedanta says that the creation, including the human individual, is "anirvachaniya" - which means beyond words and logic. It's something that cannot be talked about for it makes no sense in a nondual reality. You are right that, despite distinctions such as satya and mithya - independent and dependent reality - the world of our experience must then be seen as illusory and, therefore, without ultimate meaning. Good and evil are then passing thoughts in a being whose supposed existence is a temporary misunderstanding. "Unknown" writes in a tone that has the flavor of benign indifference that one can find in some committed to nonduality. It is not love, for it is a denial of relationship. It fosters detachment, which seems peaceful, but is really dead to all deep feeling, even the love of truth, which must rest on something other than a dismissal of all experience as illusory. But I have hope for "Unknown," for I have been in his place. It was when I became dissatisfied with "anirvadhaniya" - the no-eplanatioon explanation - and realized that life must have a source and a purpose that I rediscovered Christ. Because truth cannot be circumscribed by words or logic does not mean it is unreal; it means that another approach is necessary. The truth is not a proposition, but a person. It is not something to which we give intellectual assent, but something that must be lived in order to be known.

William Wildblood said...

Inspiring words, edwin. You put your finger on the problem, The position taken by Unknown is very appealing and seems metaphysically cogent in that it is the metaphysics to end all metaphysics. Until, that is, you start to match it up to the totality of what life is and then it is seen to leave out elements of human experience that actually define what it is to be human, love, beauty, goodness, courage , virtue etc. It tries to incorporate these because it knows it must but can only do so by an intellectual sleight of hand, the neither real nor unreal evasion.

When you write that the truth is not a proposition but a person you get to the heart of the matter. Us moderns think that abstractions represent higher realities than particulars but the truth turns out to be the opposite, and I do think that when you appreciate that there is a sense of coming home. When all is said and done the non dual position is bleak. Which is not a reason not to go along with it if it were true but does indicate that it cannot fully answer the question of what we really are. It cannot fulfil our heart.

Astraea said...

I have for some time read with fascination your discussions on this blog regarding the differences between Advaitic and Christian metaphysics. Despite all this reading I don’t think I would be able to communicate verbally to Buddhist or non-dualist friends why their ‘take’ is less complete than Christianity. I just know it is. Also, I probably don’t know enough about non-dualism to enter into a truly informed discussion about it. Having said that, I’m putting in my tuppence.

My limited understanding of your points (William) include:

"God creates, to make something more than pure undifferentiated oneness".
"The path that seeks growth is greater than the path that seeks ‘being’ alone."
"If the absolute does not include the personal, then the personal could never arise."
"There is always more of God to be realised which there would not be if there was nothing to be attained or achieved and the goal was just to be."
We are not just spirit but spirit and soul and the goal is not to abandon one for the other as in the non-dualistic approach but to combine the two to make something new, something that was not there before."

And of course, the most important point of all is that God is love and growth in God means a loving relationship which you can’t have when ‘it’s all one man’.

What struck me most though was Unknown’s emphasis on the idea of Divine Play or Lila:

Unknown says:
"You are quite correct that this removes any need for creation - rather, creation is mere Play, the Divine Game…….The notion of the universe as a game, and play as superior to work…….You are also correct William that in this system nothing is fundamentally better than anything - the world is a system whose parts are interdependent…..To be honest, I do not see how this is a one-sided view - it seems rather to avoid clinging to any extreme, and embrace the whole……does seeking and clinging and grasping, the Sources of anxiety and sorrow, lessen, and do you find the world a mysterious but magical home for the first time?"

So according to Unknown, play leads to magical spontaneity which is better than the gloom, anxiety and seriousness that attaches itself to Christianity. The world is a system who’s parts are interdependent, There is no single thing is worth clinging to because only the entire field exists – there is only Indras net etc.

Forgive me if I’m wrong but the number one truth of Buddhism as I understand it is that all life is suffering, suffering arises from attachment to desires and suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. If you anesthetize yourself enough by non-attachment then yeah, I can see that would result, as your previous commentator Edwin noted,

(in) "a tone that has the flavor of benign indifference that one can find in some committed to nonduality. It is not love, for it is a denial of relationship. It fosters detachment, which seems peaceful, but is really dead to all deep feeling, even the love of truth, which must rest on something other than a dismissal of all experience as illusory."

Then it seems to me ‘to play’ in this manner means a detachment which manifests as endless entanglement in the mysterious but magical universe. It goes everywhere but it goes nowhere.

If you contrast that with being 'in a play' – that is fully taking on a role - taking it all on as Jesus did – whilst remaining connected to God the Father even in extremis, you are not just playing – you are participating in a creative act – which may involve suffering.

And if reincarnation is true, (or not it doesn’t matter) and it’s true that God doesn’t like to dine alone, sincerely acting out your part in the play probably make you a better dining companion at the end of the day.

Unknown said...

Well, actually it is the realization that the world IS love, is relationship at its very essence.

Take any pair of opposites, evil and good say. The concept of good only make sense opposed to evil. Good must be defined against evil. They are interdependent.

So to strive for a world of only good - a Utopia - and the notion that our task is to progress to a place of only good, makes no sense.

Once you realize good and evil cannot exist by themselves but are interdependent, you realize they are not absolutely real. Only what truly exists on its own is really real.

Nonduality is often misunderstood as monism, but there is a reason it is called nonduality - a negative, not an affirmation. Interdependence is more what is meant than monism.

Now once you see good and evil as part of the whole and as interdependent and thus not fully real in themselves (they depend on their opposites for existence), you see them as in polarity not conflict. Polarity are opposites that are not in conflict but in love - they depend on each other for existence.

At that point, you see the world as perfect just as it is, right now. The attitude commonly used to describe this is detachment - but it is not the stoic cold lack of emotion of indifference, but a kind of joyous, serene, acceptance of everything. It is s kind of fulfillment and satisfaction, of being home in the world. The end of alienation. Not cold indifference but peaceful fulfillment that does not seek anymore. You no longer fight against anything or wish to change anything.

Buddha and Christ are portrayed as serenely smiling in complete fulfillment and lack of struggle, not the grim indifference of a stoic who find a life unbearable. The Hindus called this stare ananda - bliss.

So much so, in fact, that you don't even fight against the desire to fight - you recognize that too as part of the dance. You watch things come and go, and it is all magic - what the Buddhists call "tathata" - thusness, the world just as it is, and the Taoists called Tao.

How does one view the world from this state? As a game, as a dance, as a kind of illusion. Ultimately everything depends on everything else and there is no real conflict only magic. Only love at the deepest level. The underlying Oneness that one now perceives is beyond all worlds, concepts, and categories. After all, our concept forming minds are mostly tools for control, and artificially cut up the world into small pieces to this end. But when we are one with everything, there is nothing to control (as his control oneself?) - this experience cannot be described in terms of concepts which cut up into small pieces the oneness.

This doesn't mean you suppress anything - you allow everything to come and go as it please, the wu wei and tsu-jan (coming of itself), of the Taoists. Because you realize it's all you and grasping is meaningless.

In any event that's the idea - but one cannot really persuade another through ideas. One offers - and then one listens for an echo.

If you are happy with the striving path and faith concepts, then more glory unto you. From my perspective it us all part of the glorious dance.

It is useful only to clearly describe each path or vision - and I feel there are many misunderstandings about the path I am describing, so I try and clear them up.





Unknown said...

I just wanted to add that for any one reared in the Western intellectual tradition that began 500 years ago, whether Westerner or Easterner, has a hard time understanding Eastern ideas or mysticism.

Our dear and beloved William Wildblood persists in understanding the Nothing of the mystics as an actual nothing, as a kind of featureless void without any attributes. Who does sound quite unfulfilling indeed. Technical terms like the Absolute hardly sound better. Words like "thusness", while trying to do a better job, also muss the mark. Tao is my favourite - but theatre Tao can not be spoken of. Such are the perils of trying to speak about what can not be spoken of.

Yet the scriptures caution us against precisely this - this is called annihilationism, and is rejected along with eternalism.

If we affirm nothing then we are making an affirmation - and this is not to have gone beyond concepts or attributes. A featureless void is a place with attributes. Literal nothing is a place defined by concepts and duality and has the attribute of nothingness.

The scriptures tell us to regard everything as Nothing, but to also see Nothing as nothing - if we cling to nothing, the sages say, after having destroyed all other concepts, we are worse off than when we began and are mere nihilists (the Buddha explicitly rejected nihilism).

The problem is that 500 years ago in the West, some people decided that only concepts have value. This continues to function as an unspoken premise in all our thinking even if we are not aware of it.

That is why am effort to get you to go beyond concepts will be envisioned as just another concept :) The Nothing - which is a tool - becomes conceptually envisioned and affirmed as a literal void without attributes, which means it isn't Nothing anymore. It is now something conceived and given attributes.

William Wildblood said...

Thanks for your comment Astraea. Non-duality can seem to have a sort of relentless purity and logic to it which makes it very hard to see through. But ultimately it is a human-centric sort of spirituality that prizes God's gifts over God.

Unknown said...

"Then it seems to me ‘to play’ in this manner means a detachment which manifests as endless entanglement in the mysterious but magical universe. It goes everywhere but it goes nowhere."

It goes everywhere but it goes no where - this is a very good way of putting it. It reminds of Jesus saying the son of man has not where to lay his head. He is everywhere - but by that token he is nowhere. Because if you are everything, there is no where for you to go - you are already there.

"If you contrast that with being 'in a play' – that is fully taking on a role - taking it all on as Jesus did – whilst remaining connected to God the Father even in extremis, you are not just playing – you are participating in a creative act – which may involve suffering."

Yes, in this vision you become aware that you are already part of the creative act by being one with everything. You create everything even as the universe does - because you are the same thing, not separate.

And of course you may suffer - you don't deny suffering, you merely accept it as part of the whole. Because if you want joy you must want suffering - they are interdependent. You live a life of both joy and suffering - while taking neither too seriously and understanding there is an underlying unity. To dippers suffering would hardly be detachment.

However, this is not conscious control. Just as in a sense you grow your own hair without consciously knowing how. You do not become a God in the Christisn sense who can now consciously control - you realize you already are God.

The often curious affinities of Charltons thinking when the thinking on this blog depends on little tweaks. For instance, people here think we must develop into Gods and consciously participate in creating the universe.

The ancient idea is that we already are God and participate on creation by default - the tsu-jan of the Taoists, that which comes of itself.

What is wanted is a transformation of consciousness rather than s physical development of one unit in physical world - as the conceit of a single unit developing at the expense of the whole - self development - is seen as impossible and as an illusion.

"Forgive me if I’m wrong but the number one truth of Buddhism as I understand it is that all life is suffering, suffering arises from attachment to desires and suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. If you anesthetize yourself enough by non-attachment then yeah"

This is a widely held misunderstanding which I hope I have somewhat clarified in my previous comment.

First off all, the Buddha's injunction involves you in a double bind. How can you desire not to desire? That's desiring. So it's impossible.

By the time of the Mahayana, the real implications of Buddhist thought were coming to be fully fleshed out

Tilopa says -

"No thought, no reflection, no analysis, No cultivation, no intention; Let it settle itself. Without mind, without meditation, without analysis, without practice, without the will, let it all be so."

This is very Taoist, of course.

And I hope I have made clear that this does not lead to self anaesthetiism, a blank indifference - that would be a rather one sided state that one would have to strive for, as that isn't a natural state. So that's hardly lettings be just as they are! That would be cultivation! (And indeed, all the strenuous cultivation of the early Buddhists goes against the spirit of the Buddha, which was gradually realize. You cannot train yourself not to desire - that is desiring).

You let things be just as they are, all your passions and roiling emotions, but you realize it is just a game, not quite to be taken so seriously as society tells us to.

This is why so many holy men appear as fools - they see through convention, that it is all a great joke.

It is a change in consciousness - not on the physical world.

It is liberation.

William Wildblood said...

Unknown, I think you may be projecting your ideas about me onto me when you talk of being stuck in concepts and my belief that No-thing means nothing. I realise the difference and I am not conceptualising. I have known and understood the premise behind advaita and Buddhism for over 30 years. It's not hard to understand.

You are also mistaken in saying that good has no meaning except in terms of being an opposite to evil. Would you say that about truth or love or beauty? These are realities and their opposites are just shadows cast in a fallen world where the light is blocked out sometimes or even often.

If you think the world is perfect now would you not intervene to save a child that was being assaulted? If (as I assume) yes then you would be going back on that statement.

Christ and Buddha do not have the same expression. That of the Buddha is detachment, that of Christ (whose eyes are always open) full of love. He is not detached from the world. He loves it with a love that is wholly involved. And do you not think he struggled in the garden of Gethsemane?

I do not say that the attitude you describe is wrong but it is incomplete. It is the soul resting in itself rather than uniting with God and the latter is the more advanced spiritual state

edwin said...

Dear Unknown, Can you not see that to call life "a great joke" is supreme condescension? One might say it is blasphemy. It takes what is holy and throws it to the dogs. And a joke can only be such to one who understands it and appreciates the humor. To whom is the joke directed, and from whom does it come? Who, in the end, is liberated? One consideration that jolted me out of the "great joke" mindset was the nature of individuality. You cannot think yourself away, or laugh yourself away. And to change your consciousness presupposes a conscious individual who subsists through the change and to whom the change must matter. Liberation - moksha - is contradictory concept, for when the individual sees himself as undifferentiated from the indivisible being/consciousness, he is presumable no longer present to be liberated. So who enjoys moksha? The fact is we are not already God. It requires a great deal of intellectual parsing to make sense of the statement in light of our constant experience of limitation and individuation. Ultimately, I don't think anyone can become convinced of it. The fact is we are here, with one another, as created beings. The Creator has placed love in our hearts as the key to our understanding his being and purpose. But it is only by loving others, serving others, living as Christ lived, that we come to know the Father and, through knowing Him, realize that we are His children. This is not a joke we are living through, but a mysterious passage through a life in which we have an opportunity to become more, to share in eternal life. We can, of course, reject this opportunity. We can say no to individuality and try to immerse our minds in the absolute, where we no longer have to care about the person next to us who may need our help. And it may be we who need help, but don't know how to ask for it, for we are trying to maintain the notion that we are already God and life is a great joke. I wish you well. Think carefully, as I have done and continue to do, about the consequences of nonduality.

William Wildblood said...

Unknown, the flaw in your approach is that you think we are all God now. No, we're not. We have the seed of God in us but that seed needs to grow. Oh, to be sure we can experience non-dual consciousness but that is merely returning to where we were before we were born. The question that any non-dualist needs to answer and can't is why the physical world? Why are we born? Why do we not just remain in spiritual bliss? (That's just one question really!)The reply that's it's just play isn't good enough. To be blunt, it's dodging the question. God isn't a child with no purpose. He is the Creator and he has will and purpose.

These things can't be proved by argument so there's no point in debating the matter. But I will say that your approach only works if you deny the reality of yourself (and therefore that of others, of course.)For those who want to do that, it's fine. But the higher path is to accept the self and give it to God who will return it filled with himself.

Unknown said...

William, thanks for replying.

I would say it about truth and beauty as well, of course - we could not perceive beauty without contrasting it with ugliness, therefore neither are quite real as independently existing.

There is an underlying unity of opposites - which is polarity, the world as relationship or love. A world consisting of relationship as its essence is nondual - and nonreal as we usually understand the term. Hence illusion - which does not mean not existing. It's pure wonder and magic.

Of course I would save the child.

Liberation does not mean that you become callous or indifferent, as I've tried to show. That would be suppressing what naturally arises. Striving to reach a state of indifference is also self contradictory, and hardly seeing through the illusion.

But I would not take it seriously in the sense that now I am this great and good person, better than others, on the Path, or that a world in which children drown occasionally is worthless, etc. That the world needs to evolve towards a place where children never drown.

It's not about suppressing action or emotion - that's not liberation, but a different kind of caring. It's about doing what comes naturally without taking it so seriously and spinning all these grand conceptual schemes around it.

I have seen through the illusion - I do what comes naturally in the moment without making a fuss about it. I save the child because that seems natural in the moment.

But I also don't take it quite so seriously or make it the basis of ultimate truths.

The face of the Buddha is serene and smiling - it is the kind of detachment that says, everything is all right if you only knew, because everything is part of everything else and this separateness is an illusion, no need to get so worked up or take things so seriously. Don't be fooled by the game. It is complete confidence and final fulfilment.

The face of Christ that I have seen in some paintings conveys a very similar quality of complete smiling resignation, not in a pessimistic sense but as a state of complete confidence and fulfilment - that everything is OK in the end. It does not convey struggle or forced action. At least to me. It conveys the attitude of the Sermon on the Mount.

As for the soul resting in itself and not God. What if you are already God? Then what you see at the end of a process is already there, and cannot be lost.

It's not so much that we want different things as that we understand reality differently.

All programs of increase and improvement come from a feeling of lack and deficiency, and anxiety. By seeing ourselves as fragments cut off from the whole we naturally feel this lack. We then work hard to become something whole and complete. Gods.

It's perfectly natural and understandable.

But what if this perception that we are cut off fragments is wrong....then the whole program of self improvement would be based on a false premise, and the more we try to get sonewhere, the more we are losing the sense that we are already part of the whole.

As always, I merely aim to clarify - the choice is based on intuition and our sense of life, and cannot be forced.

I enjoyed the exchange, William, once again.

Unknown said...

Edwin -

I do not mean life is s great joke, what I meant was that our ordinary perceptions of things has having seperatee reality, and thus being really important and worth grasping after in themselves, is false.

So what is a joke is not life, but the social conventions that make life into something that it is not - something solemn and serious when it is already fully complete, and cosmic joy.

Life is "serious" if you think you are separate being that can actually die and need to struggle to survive.

That's the basis of our sense that life is serious. We want not just to survive, but eternal life. I am not condemning this, I am merely pointing out the basis of all ethics of seriousness. Survival. More broadly, eternal life.

But if we can't really die because we are really everything, and we don't need to seek eternal life because we have it, then life is no longer about survival, and it's gloomy seriousness is gone.

The only thing that can die is the ego - the ego is the fictitious concept we have of ourselves, built up in interaction with society. It doesn't actually exist, but if you believe it dies, you will fear death.

So if you already have the thing you most want and you cannot lose it, what do you do? You play - that is, you engage in intrinsically satisfying activity. Serious activity is always for the sake of - it is work.

"Whom is liberated? Who sees the joke?"

Exactly :)

There is no one to be liberated. That is actually a Zen Koan btw,a famous one :)

There is nothing but liberation - there is no seperate "I" to be liberated. It is all one process.

Liberation consists on realizing you don't need it :) There is no you to be liberated.

If liberation was "real" - something actually changed in the world - it would be an actual attainment, it could be lost or gained. It would be the striving path. It would be like fearing not to desire.

Liberation is seeing through the illusion of such ideas.

There is a famous Zen story where a man comes to a Zen master and says please help me pacify my mind, the master says show me your mind and I will pacify it for you, the guy replied, I can't find my mind. The master says there, I've pacified it for you!

Liberation is not an attainment that happens to an "I", it is seeing through the concept of an I - it seeing through the need for liberation :)





Unknown said...

William,

"Unknown, the flaw in your approach is that you think we are all God now."

You are of course correct. This is the main difference between us.

How one sees this will decide his position on this.

In a way it is "cosmic narcissism" :)

One may struggle to kill ones ego, only to realize that the very struggle simply strengthens the ego. You find yourself in a double bind, an impossible situation.

All action of whatever kind simply builds your sense of self, your pride, your arrogance.

The solution proposed by the Eastern traditions and the mystics is to expand your sense of self to include everything. Which also means you are nothing :)

So complete narcissism folds back upon itself and become a complete egolessness, as there is no "other" against which to define yourself.

But as you say, debate can only clarify our respective positions, and decision is individual.

Thanks, William.

William Wildblood said...

I’m sorry Unknown but I have to say I find your long comments full of non-sequiturs and contradictions. For instance, you say you would save the child, as I’m sure you would, but that very fact denies the perfection of the world. Why intervene if perfection is expressing itself? If the non-dualistic position is true to itself it would not but then it never is true to itself when it comes to the crunch. It always has an escape clause that allows it to wriggle out of the consequences of its extremist position when these become apparent. To me that shows it up as an ideology even if that ideology is based on the vision of oneness. But that vison has to be tempered by the truth of the reality of creation to be complete. Otherwise it is one-sided and ultimately just, to use the dreaded phrase, a belief system

Nowhere do you seriously address the points raised against non-duality but just repeat your unsubstantiated assertions. But then that’s what all non-dualists do!

You are not already God. God is in you which is a wholly different thing. Edwin is right that this attitude is fundamentally blasphemous though I appreciate that blasphemy makes no sense according to your worldview. But you are reducing reality to one aspect of it just like the materialists do. Indeed, non-dualistic spirituality and materialism are close cousins in that they are both reductive, just in opposite ways.

By the way, I don’t take Zen koans very seriously. They were suitable for a very conventional mentality such as medieval Japanese people possessed but are little more than game playing really. No one has ever been enlightened through a koan. A moment of clarity, no doubt, but that’s not enlightenment or anywhere near it.

You say the struggle to kill the ego comes from the ego and you are right that many people approach spirituality with the idea of getting something or being something. But this is not real spirituality which is driven by love of God not desire for heaven. It’s a preliminary stage which should soon be left behind as one purifies motive so that desire becomes love.

The great flaw in non-duality is that it thinks it can do without God. Of course, it will admit God provisionally but only to dismiss him effectively. It’s the intellectual sleight of hand again. But the love you talk about as a part of Oneness is not real love which requires the full acknowledgment of God and of yourself. Non-dualistic love is just a kind of side effect of bliss. It does not know sacrifice and suffering as real love does and this was demonstrated by Jesus.

Anyway, that’s enough. I’m not trying to convert you! But I think many people have been led astray by the seeming power of the non-dualistic argument and I am putting these thoughts down for the benefit of anyone who might be trying to find a way out of the illusions in the mind it can create.

Unknown said...

William,

That would be like saying why eat if perfection is expressing itself.

The world is a system with processes, not inert.One of them is eating.This does not mean I must now transform myself into the sort of creature that never has to eat or the world is evolving to be a place where no one has to eat any more.

In other words, "what is" is perfect. If needing to eat is "what is", it's perfect. If saving the child is a spontaneous reaction of my nature "what is", it's perfect.

In fact, even your desire to develop and evolve is part of "what is", and thus part of the larger perfection :)

You can't "tell" someone to be spontaneous. The attempt to not be spontaneous is itself part of the spontaneous process of life.

That's the implication of it all bring One.

The transformation being sought is in the consciousness, not the real world. Once you realize even your attempt to strive is really an expression of the spontaneous life force and not opposed to spontaneity, you begin to develop a sense of humor, and not take yourself or the world very seriously at all :)

You just watch yourself with amused detachment and realize it's just a game. If your striving falls away then of its own accord, that's fine.

This is liberation. No longer being taken in by the game.

I would not call nondualism reductive because it does not say the world is "nothing but" - rather, it says the world is both one and many. The many that we see is United by an underlying unity. Nirvana is the same as samsara, as the famous saying goes. Things exist but are interdependent, so not quite real the way we ordinarily see reality.

Striving a world of "nothing but" good reductionist :)

As for Koans, the point is they have no answer - they are supposed to make you realize the question you are asking - how to achieve salvation - is a nonsense question, you are already saved. Its meant to get you out of concepts.

You aren't supposed to achieve liberation through the koan - but yo realize you never needed it.

I do agree that the mystical mumbo jumbo surrounding it today obscures its true purpose, but it is actually quite simple and even humorous.

You are correct that in this system there is no true suffering and seriousness, but we are not Protestants so we don't value those things :)

You are right also that in this system we do not value ourselves and God as fully independent entities - we are interdependent, and thus have an underlying unity.

But your striving for unity with God merely seeks what we think is already the case. So the difference us one of method.

Anyways, thanks for your thoughts William, and I agree the only worthwhile thing is to lay things out as clearly as possible, and make a choice.

Unknown said...

I also want to add that while arguing these concepts - or rather clarifying our positions, since this isn't a contest - is fun and can be useful, in my view what is really needed is to stop trying to capture ultimate truth in a net of dry concepts. It is alive.

I find non duality and elements of advaita useful as tools, but ultimately they are just concepts - I am more in sympathy with Zen, which says the more you think about and discuss it, the further you get from it.

What we need is an experience, I believe. All concepts are just symbols - not reality itself.

If non duality doesn't work for you, stay away from it.

And with that being said, I support you on your path, William, and think it well. Good luck.

Adil said...

I support the tantra buddhists in this matter, who are persecuted by both mainstream buddhists and hindus. Essentially they see creation as the effective force of shakti, the divine feminine energy, and therefore real and worth fighting for. They worship warrior goddess Kali, since destruction is necessary for creation. This overcomes the duality of matter and self as illusion, and only Brahman as real, and unites them while embracing both the lower and the higher. It also elevates the feminine principle. I like this because it grants integrity to both creation and the created, instead of brahman just playing with himself through us. I certainly wont grant my soul away for some cosmic principle. Too much is at stake in these end times/the kali yuga. For me the personal is higher than the impersonal, and things matter because we have the capacity of choice and will. I prefer to work toward an ideal in terms of God, rather than giving myself away to floating consciousness. One must be both self-grounded and open minded at the same time. Its important to revitalize once conceps by unwinding and rewinding, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Unknown said...

Eric -

Understanding eastern traditions as impersonal is also a western misunderstanding. Anyone steeped in the Western tradition that began 500 years ago - which makes concepts central - will have a block in understanding traditions which seek to go beyond concepts. It's not a question of intelligence but of implicit assumptions creating a mental block.

As I indicated in my other comment, the point is not to eliminate the self or get absorbed into this vast impersonal energy field.

It is for the self to identify with the whole, to realize that it is the whole. That it is the energy field.

This is cosmic narcissism. All is Self. Only that way can one transcend the ego. Everything else is refined competitive ego.

Buddhism is supposed to deny any kind of self, but again this is false. I defy you to show me one single sentence in Buddhist scripture where it is said self for a not exist.

What is said is that nothing we can imagine or perceive is (alone) the self - it is beyond all perception or conception, because the eye cannot see itself.

The Buddha even explicitly refused to say the self does not exist when questioned.

Buddhism is really identical to Hinduism except without the surrounding culture and it also recognizes that the Hindu conception of the Atman may become a conception and something one is attached to, despite the way this is warned against in the Upanishads.

Adil said...

Unknown

Well I come at this from a tantric perspective and have pragmatic concerns. Tantra is a dharma onto itself, hence the persecution by many orthodox followers. Tantric insights are seen as "adharmic" and unethical. If you just identify with purusha (cosmic self), it's at the expense of the phenomenal world which is seen as maya in buddhism. I believe in the argument that prakrti (the material) is shakti or the power of brahman, who by its absolute nature has no power to act in the material world of changing phenomenon. Shakti - the feminine energy - is the brigde. If the world is an expression of brahman, why should it be seen as secondary or illusion? It is the creative force of shakti. In this way tantric metaphysics collapses the distincion between the material and spiritual spheres.

It deconstructs the distinction between samsara and nirvana and all the metaphysical spheres collapses into one pure reality. According to mainstream buddhism ego is samsara and total annihilation is to be pursued following buddha, but the tantric buddhists have the view that samsara is not distinct from nirvana and the goal is not to attain freedom from this world - but the goal is to reincarnate as a bodhisattva who acts in duty for this world and for the benefit of as many as possible. Sometimes the bodhisattva has to be antidarmic and forceful to be the protector of dharma. This is a heroic rather than ascetic ideal, more proper for these End Times. The point with tantric practice is to identify with shakti - the creative force of cosmos and therefore becoming superhuman. 

Buddha was ready to be a sage at the right time. People do not just emerge like sponges in the soil, but are reincarnated reflections of their lineage. Now we are in the Kali Yuga, for which I believe Tantrism provides the most effective outlook. There is no need to hold onto the scheme of a decaying world when the insight that prakrti is not illusion is made and this world is a world of power. As christianity makes clear, we need a futuristic and progressive idea of evolution of mankind and the expansion of consciousness. The tantric ideal is the overman, mahapurusa, in contrast to buddha the idea is the fundamental transformation not renouncing the human condition, such as Jesus also teaches. 

Unknown said...

Thanks Eric,

Well, Tantra is generally disparaged in the West but since the West has a hard time understanding Eastern traditions (or its own mystical tradition), I suspect there is good in it, although I haven't seriously studied it my self.

Tantra is s branch of the Mahayana -

"In this way tantric metaphysics collapses the distincion between the material and spiritual spheres.

It deconstructs the distinction between samsara and nirvana and all the metaphysical"

This is already the general position of the Mahayana, that samsara and nirvana is the same thing.

Samsara is the world seem as split up I to little bits by our minds, nirvana is awakening.

"If the world is an expression of brahman, why should it be seen as secondary or illusion"

It isn't really. That would be dualism. Things seen as seperate is what is the illusion.

Once you understand things are empty - have no seperate existence - and thus interdependent you realize the world is nirvana.

It's a path of awakening or liberation not transformation of the world - you awaken from your illusions about the world, you are liberated from them. But the world is perfect.

If the world changed, that would be a striving path, and there would be no end to it, and you could never be secure.

Anyways your remarks remind me again that Tantra is a branch of the Mahayana and perhaps I should look into it.

I agree your criticisms apply more to Theravada Buddhism, however.

Adil said...

Unknown,

So it seems we are more or less on the same page, except that I chose to have an active relationship with God. I was like you before, but for me it was just spiritual status-quo and I seeked something more. But as they say there are many ways to the Divine and good luck with your path. What matters are results and the quality of ones spiritual state, not the outer form. Clearly, the organic nature of eastern traditions have escaped the mental prisons of the modern mind (and mainstream abrahamism).

Unknown said...

Cool, mostly agree. We all have to choose our path.

Ultimately all words are just symbols for an unknowable reality - we shouldn't get too entangled in them.

By that token, I respect the Abrahamic faiths even though I find them seriously limited in their non mystical aspects - God the Father is a symbol for an unknowable reality, and if it works for some people great.

Lots of people simply cannot properly understand non duality, and its useless to try and foist it on them. They keep on reverting to conceptualizing it as an undifferentiated monism.

Whatever makes one less grasping and more loving, and more alive to the magic of life, and less striving and more more capable of appreciating the present, is good.

William Wildblood said...

I wasn't going to say any more in this thread because it's not going to get anywhere, but I have to take you up on the point about not understanding non-duality. Non-duality is actually easy to understand, it really is. And it's because I do understand it that I see its shortcomings.

You might consider the possibility that it is non-dualists who don't understand the Christian revelation even though they have appropriated bits of it to make up for the deficiencies in their belief system. For example, love which cannot really exist if advaita is to be self-consistent. It would just be a pointer to reality to be rendered meaningless at realisation. For if individual souls are not real then love, real love not warm fuzzy feelings, is also unreal. In advaita diversity is basically extinguished in unity instead of being simply subordinated to it. That is its mistake.

I see the non-dualist as unable to resolve the apparently paradoxical nature of existence in which the one and the many coexist eternally, and he therefore goes through all sorts of intellectual contortions to justify his position. More significantly, he also fails to see that the essence of reality is personal. This is the glorious truth he misses though he will deny that. But that's because of the trick, and it is a trick or what I've called an intellectual sleight of hand, he uses is to accept something on one level only to deny it on another. I've got to say there is a touch of intellectual dishonesty in this. The human mind is a funny thing. It can even use the idea of non-duality to subtly strengthen the ego not that I am saying that about you. I think your spiritual instincts are true but you express them through a philosophy (which it is) that doesn’t hold up to close examination and which, unfortunately, can lead people astray if taken seriously. To reduce God to spiritual insignificance, and non-duality does precisely that much as it may protest, is spiritually dangerous. The devil could be a non-dualist.

Adil said...

WW

Agree. The bhagavadgita says the supreme godhead personality is higher than the impersonal brahman, and must precede and include it. Personhood is not a concept, it just is because god is. It is your body. It is the experiencer and the experienced. The fabric of reality is a non reducible person. Which means humans are semi-gods who can attain exclusive knowledge within the boundaries of subjective concepts - although God can never be captured in a net. In this sense, it is not even about diminishing the ego and transcending the self in favor of some cosmic narcissism but rather taming and integrating in to become an actualized person. I find many "hippie" types have low self-esteem because they are trying to negate their egos instead of elevating their souls. So they become "cosmic narcissists" with lack of godgiven self-worth.

Unknown said...

William -

"In advaita diversity is basically extinguished in unity"

I would say separate existence is expanded to interdependence.

The "dependent arising" of the Buddhists is often another term for non duality.

You are right that any philosophy whatsoever can be used to expand ego, which is why I am more and more attracted to the early Zennists - the original ones, not the ones who came later and made it into this elaborate institutional system.

Thanks for your remarks William.

Unknown said...

Eric -

A cosmic narcissism would be someone who has lost the distinction between his self and other - which actually means complete egolessness.

Taming the ego, however noble and refined our efforts, unfortunately ends up merely building our pride and sense of self.

I think an ethic which believes in egolessness ultimately has to transcend effort and develop some kind of Taoist or Mahayanist philosophy of wu wei when the full implications are perceived.

Bruce Charlton is in a sense more consistent when he admits the effort is to become a divine demiurge oneself - this us frankly egotistical - i.e involves developing our separate, atomistic self into something greater and better than others - although in his case it may be benevolent to an extent.

But that is why there is never talk of egolessness on his blog. Because striving always builds ego, and striving to become a demi God is a frankly egotistical project - although he may well be a benevolent deity. He is honest about this.