The problem with the traditional forms of such religions as Buddhism
and Christianity is that the spirituality is seen as divorced from
physicality, which leads to similar separation in social reality. The
people with spiritual inclinations go into monasteries or into
ministry; the women have to share their lives with people who men
believe that women are evil and that their duty is to control their
every action and every thought. The world, being seen as one of
illusion or one of Satan, becomes that way more convincingly by being
shorn of the attention of those who have it within themselves to want
to improve things. And the concept behind these convictions becomes
self-fulfilling and then becomes reality for the people living under
such beliefs.
This is not accidental; this is an inevitable, logical result of the
beliefs themselves. To conceive spirit as being forever divorced from
flesh, or of human nature as sin, or of desire as root of all
suffering, is to rob the real world of the spiritual riches and to
damn it to ever-perpetuating, ever-consuming darkness. In all such
cases, the injury done to mankind is monumental. And in both cases
this does not have to be.
Christ and Buddha had to adopt the attitude that they did toward the
world, because of where they were in the world, what the world wanted
from them, and what the world at the time was like. Jesus had to
decide that the world "of flesh" was evil, because his flesh and his
world was owned by an alien militaristic empire that ruled with
crosses and whips. He had to reject the world and damn it as being a
world of sin, because the world belonged to his enemy. He had to
reject - women, money, politics, power, even his physical body -
because all this was in the hands of the Roman Empire, which could do
anything with all this anything that it wanted. So he had to actually
transcend the flesh and then resurrect, in order to prove that his
true self was not owned, that the power of the Roman Empire was not
absolute, and that there was a light at the end of the darkness - the
light of heaven, over which the Emperor and his thugs had no power.
There were many people who could very well believe at the time that
the world was the world of sin. The Roman Empire was a brutal
militaristic organization where one quarter of people had life and
the
other three quarters were slaves and endured constant brutality and
humiliation. It was not an ethical enterprise, and many people made
the mistake of conflating the slavery and the brutality in the Roman
Empire with its religious diversity. The truth is, the two had
nothing
to do with one another at all, and while Christianity offered a
promise of eternal life to people living in slavery or under the
Roman
yoke, it offered less than nothing for people's earthly experience.
With Buddha, the cir***stance was not the same, but analogous at a
mental level. He was the son of a king, and at his birth his parents
were given a prophecy that he would be either a great king or a
founder of a major religion. His parents wanted him to become an
emperor and kept him from fulfilling the prophecy of his becoming a
founder of a major religion by lying to him, keeping him from knowing
anything, and removing all sights of suffering out of his eyes. So
first he saw real world outside the royal compound - people sick,
dying, in torment - and found out that his education was a lie; then
as he left the city to meditate under the tree, the king kept luring
him by his desires - dancing girls, tasty fruit, friends, wife, power
- back to the kingdom hall that had deceived him. So what would it be
logical for the meditating mind to decide but that the world is one
of
deception (maya) and that desire is the root of all that is wrong
with
the world? He had to reject both his education and his education-
shaped mind along with any desire that he may have had, in order to
find any kind of truth. That was because his education was a lie, and
his desires were being tempted to go back to the powers that had lied
to him.
Buddhism preaches non-attachment; there is a good reason for that.
All
attachment - emotional, physical, intellectual, personal - was being
used to tempt Buddha away from his pursuit of the truth and into the
maw of the people who wanted him to serve their will for him - the
will that he had found out to be a deception. He had to break all
desire for everything that the kingdom had to offer - from nice food
to dancing girls to his sweetheart to adoring friends to political
power - as well as his family bonds and his personal friend****ps and
loyalties and romantic attractions, and destroy everything in the
self
that was vulnerable to these things or that wanted or required these
things, because all were used to control him and lure him back into
deeception. Buddha is offering a path that he himself had to go in
order to achieve freedom.
That path meant moving away from all that desired - because the
desires were used to tempt him to that which had deceived him. It
also
meant going away from ego - because all ego's wants and longings and
attachments were used to entrap him in the kingdom that had deceived
him and that had absolute power over everything - money, fame, power,
status, admiration, respect, validation - that an ego might want. It
meant spending many years silencing, deconstructing and transcending
the mind - because the mind was falsely educated and falsely
conditioned and made to think things that were not true. It meant
what
he had to go through to free himself from false things; but it does
not mean that all suffering is based in desire, or that ego is a
piece
of dirt, or that mind is evil, or that life is an illusion, or that
spirituality is forever divorced from these things.
To damn the world, or to claim world as necessarily one of suffering,
or to remove from the world desire, is in no way a way for making a
better world. Instead it is the way to remove light from the world
and
plunge it into self-feeding and self-perpetuating darkness. So while
many people in monasteries have successfully and effectively followed
Christ's or Buddha's paths to freedom and wisdom and spiritual power,
their social advice has been absolute disaster for the societies that
followed their guidance in matters of life. In both cases,
relation****ps, science, education, business, politics, - everything -
has been damned and have been therefore carried out in the most
destructive possible manner. And that does not make anyone or
anything
holy. It makes life on earth an unnecessarily and self-fulfillingly
toxic hell.
Christ's advice on the best way to have a relation****p is not to have
a relation****p. That flesh is sinful and that therefore there cannot
be at the same time a ***ual and a spiritual love. That *** is a
dirty
thing and that anyone who elicits ***ual desire or *****c passion
deserves physical, personal and spiritual violence. Few things have
levels of misery, abuse and ugliness than these horrendous beliefs.
With both Buddhism and Christianity, there is contempt for
intelligence; for fact; for nature; for reality. So it is no surprise
that application of both theosophies have eradicated learning,
prosperity and accomplishment from the world in which they were
applied. Roman Empire had great inventors, great philosophers, great
scientists, great doctors, great engineers. They had a steam engine
1,700 years before the Industrial Revolution. And while religious
people claim that Roman Empire was undone by its "decadence" (reality
check: It was conquered 200 years after it Christianized) the true
reason that it was undone is that it listened to Roman-day
Republicans
who thought with their pocketbooks instead of their brains and
believed that the cheapness and abundance of slave labor made the
steam engine uneconomical. If they thought ahead, they would have
realized the promise of that invention and not only created real
prosperity that they would have never dreamt of, but have also been
able to invent war machines that would have va****ized any invading
army - as well as being able to end the horrible institution of
slavery that was the true moral outrage of Roman Empire and the real
source of hatred and resentment against it.
In choosing whether to embrace high-technology, high-intelligence,
job-
creating clean energy, or to go on with the ruinous policies of Texas
Oil, the present-day world faces a similar choice.
But that is a different matter, no matter how crucial in
significance.
The Romans had great science and engineering and could have had a
world we have now, two millenia before it came about, if they had
been
smarter about their economic and political policies. Nothing of that
sort existed in the Christian world until it was shaken to its core
by
European Enlightenment and American Revolution.
So it is no surprise that, in order to find intellectual, political,
social, personal, ***ual, physical freedom, many people have made the
same choice that Christ and Buddha have made, in reverse. Like Christ
and Buddha rejected the physical world, they have rejected the world
of the spirit, because the world of the spirit was under control of
mentalities that were hostile to intellect, nature, prosperity,
science, human rights, ***uality, beauty, and all else that affirms
life on earth. The European Enlightenment grew out of that, as well
as
a profusion of secular mindsets - rationalism, pragmatism,
capitalism,
realism, scientific materialism, economics, psychology, atheism,
agnosticism, skepticism, and many others.
There is a problem with these mindsets as well. They stake their
central claim on denying the world of spirit. So any spiritual
longing, or any appreciation for or expression of splendor,or
anything
loving and warm and tender in people, is by them brutally and
maliciously suppressed. Their supposed rationality becomes so
overbearing, so controlling, so abrasive and horrible and
destructive,
that people flee from them even if it means disastrous consequences
for themselves or living in poverty or losing their minds or their
rights or their comfort or dying early or get brutally raped,
tortured
and killed. Denying spirituality to people with the same violence
with
which the religious deny physicality, these mindsets become just as
cruel and just as horrendous as the ones that they seek to replace.
And then what is left for people, is choice between one semi-life or
another semi-life - the life of spirit without flesh, or the life of
flesh without spirit. Both of which, in this situation, become lives
of destruction and decay.
The process of evolution from rationalism - any rationalism - whether
it be Enlightenment, or Victorianism, or the 50s, or the 90s - is
quite similar. Genius struggles, laboriously, painstakingly,
passionately, through the maze of rationalistic obstruction, to
produce refutation and to bring into life some kind of splendor. Then
more follows; struggle ensues. The world of the rationalist becomes
less apparently certain, less apparently rational, less apparently
noble, the more abrasive and terrible and hysterical it becomes in
its
attacks on what threatens its orthodoxy. And then - light at the end
of the tunnel: A liberation. Which once again comes under attack from
all sides, but shows a way for as long as it lasts and remains
through
history in its art to inspire those in the future generations who
hunger for life to go as far as did they, and then further.
I know this from history, and I confidently give this prediction. A
rationalism - any rationalism - will always be followed by a
romanticism of one or another kind. Romantic period after European
Enlightenment, Bohemian period after Victorianism, the 60s after the
50s - these are not accidental; these are inevitable. In all cases,
we've seen the walls of false life-negating rationality refuted by
people who have seen something more, or who have dug deeper, or who
have used rationality itself to get to a more profound understanding
than what is preached by the theories and that refute its conceptions
and its implications for the world and for mankind, or who have
experienced and studied learning from other cultures, or who have
achieved powers of insight, or who have decided to feel instead of to
only cognate and were able to see what the rationalist does not see
himself or does not want people to see. An Einstein who as a
scientist
applies science to a place that transcends physical determinism that
dominated the 19th century conception of the universe and its
resulting structures and institutions - the 60s existentialist
psychologists who refute the behaviorist dogmas and arrive at a
concept of man as a human being rather than a machine - a Russeau,
Thoreau, Emerson, Byron, Wordsworth or Elizabeth Barrett Browning who
open people's minds to the world of beauty and passion that in the
Cartesian conception of universe could not exist - a Nash who in his
work on game theory arrives at refutation of orthodox economics and
gives place in the world for compassion and interest in the good of
one's fellow man - will always pop up through history to refute any
kind of rationalistic determinism. And this will go on, for as long
as
the rationalists of one or another kind try to construct a world out
of their dogmas and to trap the minds, spirits and lives of their
children and those after them in those entrapments.
With religious supremacism, we will see the same thing happen as
well.
A Luther who uses Biblical teachings to show the corruption of Roman
Catholic Church, or the Enlightenment scientists who used
intelligence
to show the falsehood of the Biblican cosmology, will exist for as
long as do both human intellect and the Bible. Intelligence will
always continue to come along and refute dogma that denies
intelligence. And if the theological dogmatists want to do away with
or to subvert intelligence, as Roman Catholics did, as Puritans did,
and as both the Muslims and the Bush administration appear intent to
do, then it will come at them and their societies from without.
There has to be a better way than either of the preceding. A positive
way is an integrative experience of life, in which both the physical
and the spiritual exist and work to each other's benefit. It is a way
in which both the physical world and the spirit world are affirmed
and
find ways to enhance one another and exist in synergy rather than
disintegration. And it is a way in which life as a human being - a
being who combines the spiritual and the material aspects - can be
affirmed in its entirety, allowing for lifestyles and covenants in
which the totality of humanity can exist - and achieve greatest human
experience, greatest human accomplishment, and most complete and
integrated manifestations of human beings themselves.
Copyright Ilya Shambat 2008, can be reproduced with attribution
|
