The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (10 page)

Buddha was purportedly incurious about how or why the universe and its inhabitants came to be. What possible difference could such information make to someone who had consecrated himself to a single end: to become liberated from the illusions that held his head to the grindstone of existence? In a very real sense, Buddhism was the prototype for the field of neuroscience, which may yet deliver a blow from which the self-image of humankind will not soon recover. What remains to be seen is this: will neuroscientists substantively modify our concepts about who we are and where we stand or merely cause our heads to make some pettifogging modifications. The reception of the research of a Canadian scientist name Michael Persinger may be a predictor of humanity’s genius for keeping its head locked into the old ways. In the 1980s, Persinger modified a motorcycle helmet to affect the magnetic fields of the brain of its wearer, inducing a variety of strange sensations. These included experiences in which subjects temporarily felt themselves proximate to supernatural phenomena that included ghosts and gods.

Atheists have used Persinger’s studies to nail close their argument for the subjectivity of anyone’s sense of the supernatural, while believers have written books contending that the magnetic-field-emitting motorcycle helmet proves the existence of a god who has

“hard-wired” itself into our brain. A field of study called neurotheology grew up around this and other laboratory experiments. Even if you can substantiate a scientific find with a cudgel of data that should render the holy opposition unconscious, they will be at the ready to discredit you—imprisonment, torture, and public execution having gone the way of chastity belts. The bonus of this deadlock for writers of supernatural horror is that it ensures the larger part of humanity will remain in a state of fear, because no one can ever be certain of either his own ontological status or that of gods, demons, alien invaders, and sundry other bugbears. A Buddhist would advise that we forget about whether or not the bogeymen we have invented or divined are real. The big question is this: are we real? This query may yet be taken out of the hands of enlightenment 46

religions such as Buddhism and turned over to neuroscience and its satellite disciplines.

But none should hold their breath for a verdict in this case, which will be in deliberation until the day that human beings cease to walk the earth, although not because they listened to the Last Messiah.

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FACING HORROR

ENLIGHTENMENT

Like any system of thought that goes against the grain of regurgitated wisdom, Buddhism has enticed legions of the world’s choicest heads, or at least those in the cognitive vanguard. Aside from its lack of a god-figure, it sits atop two courageous and cogent observations, numbers one and two of the Four Noble Truths. The first is the equation between life and suffering. The second is that a craving for life is the provenance of suffering, which is useless and without value. (Pace C. S. Lewis [The Problem of Pain, 1940], whose apologetics are applauded by Christians for giving them ammo against logicians who cannot square an all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God with the demonic sadism of His world. Theodicy notwithstanding, what more could a believer ask for than a chance to clean up in the afterlife by wagering their pains in this one?) These Two Noble Truths lead off a philosophy of hopelessness that might have amounted to something if prescriptions for salvation had not followed, as they did with the Third Noble Truth: that there is a way out of suffering. Now everything was up for grabs. How tragic that Buddha, or the committee that wrote under his pseudonym, did not stop with the first two of the Four Noble Truths but wandered into preaching a way that individuals—and ultimately all of humanity—may be released from the shackles of suffering. That way is through the Noble Eightfold Path that leads to enlightenment and Nirvana. (Please note that the foregoing sentence does not apply to all sects of Buddhism.

As with other belief systems, Buddhism is a compilation of do-it-yourself projects, and some of them are unlike the faith herein encapsulated. This principle has its parallel in every philosophy, ideology, and bag of myths that has ever been presented to the world: because no two heads are contoured the same, no one system or collocation of systems will ever be an immaculate fit. If truth about yourself is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude. The Buddhists have made a stand on this point by attacking the thought process itself. But this kind of headwork is grueling and about as viable as Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulators, leaving followers of Buddhism with the same basket of empty promises as its cohorts in salvation.) With its dual objectives of enlightenment and cutting oneself loose from rebirth, Buddhism early on joined all other religions in pitching a brighter future for believers and their deliverance from the woes of this world. These wares may be had during an individual’s lifetime or could be delayed for a reincarnated shot at the bull’s-eye of karma, a hit-or-miss doctrine that Buddhists bummed from Hinduism. Leaving aside reincarnation and the mental gymnastics this hypothesis foists upon the believer—ask Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs (1998)—the state or non-state of Nirvana, which dangles in the future like a numinous carrot in the darkness of life’s suffering, has nothing on Christianity’s heaven or the Vikings’ Valhalla. It seems to be a superior conception—or non-conception, if you prefer—to the ethereal theme parks of other religions on this basis: one is not asked to believe that something is true because a dogmatic authority says it is true; instead, one is invited to see the truth for oneself once maximum enlightenment kicks in, an invitation we are forewarned is extended only to those who do not doubt the truth in advance of lolling restfully in it. G. K. Chesterton would have condoned Buddhism on this point.

In the marketplace of salvation, enlightenment is categorically the best buy ever offered (so say its ad-men). Rather than floundering in a world that seems to be nothing but smoke and mirrors, you may sign up to attain a conclusive vision of what’s what and what’s not. Roughly speaking, enlightenment is the correction of our consciousness and the establishment of a state of being in which muddy illusion is washed away and a diamond of understanding shines through. This is the supreme payoff . . . if it may be had, if it has any reality outside the pat or cryptic locutions that allude to it. Millions of people have spent their lives, and some have even lost their minds, trying to win it without ever comprehending, as they sucked their last breath, what it was they had gambled to get. Had they indeed attained enlightenment without being aware of having done so? Were there stages of enlightenment and, if so, how far had they gotten? But enlightenment seems to be a well-defended redoubt whose location cannot be triangulated by speech, the only rule being that if you have to ask yourself if you have arrived, then it is certain you have not.

Nevertheless, it does seem that a charmed circle of individuals have reached a state that corresponds to that of enlightenment as delineated—vaguely or rapturously—in scads of scriptures, diaries, copyrighted publications, and public depositions. And they appear to have come to it unwarned, sometimes as a result of physical trauma or a Near-Death Experience. Perhaps the capital instance of enlightenment by accident is that of U. G.

Krishnamurti, who claims to have experienced clinical death and then returned to life as the kind of being glorified in the literature of enlightenment, although it should be added that U. G. never gave the least credence to any doctrine of awakening and blasted all religions as well as spirituality itself. (Contrary to the popular holy man Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, who at the age of sixteen reported his death and enlightenment, then spent the rest of his life as a chain-smoking guru. U. G. once met with Ramana Maharshi and was not impressed.) Through his clinical death, which he called a “calamity” due to the pain and confusion he felt during this process, U. G. became a puppet of nature. To his good fortune, he had no problem with his new way of functioning. He did not need to accept it since by his account he had lost all sense of having an ego that needed to accept or reject anything. How could someone who had ceased to partake in the commerce of selves, who had discarded his personhood, believe or not believe in anything so outlandish as enlightenment . . . or any other vendibles of the seeker’s scene, none of which are hugely evident and all of which are as outmoded as the gods of antiquity or tribal deities with names that sound comical to believers in “real” religions?1

Some would interpret U. G’s disrespect for spiritual beliefs to be in happy accord with the nature of enlightenment, which they have been taught cannot be pinned down by particulars of any kind. Others would deny this assertion, perhaps because they have been indoctrinated to believe that both irreverence and deference are off the mark once one has

“awakened.” Neither side of this controversy would have tempted U. G. What he repeatedly exclaimed in interviews is the impossibility of human beings, except perhaps one in a billion, to keep their heads from overlaying teachings of any kind on their lives as animals who are born only to survive and reproduce, not to build either cultures or castles in the air. Mental activity beyond the basic programs of our animalism leads only 50

to suffering, confusion, and self-deception. U. G never spoke of a solution for what our heads have made of our lives. We are captured by our illusions and there is no way out.

That U. G. came upon a way out, as he told his countless interrogators, was nothing but luck, nothing that he knew anything about or could pass on to others. Why bother, then, to tell people that there is no such thing as wisdom and that they are doomed to live and die helpless among the slagheap of their illusions. Why? Because these people came to him and asked for his help. To their pleas he immediately replied that he could not help them, nor could they help themselves. No help could be had from any sector in which they searched. They could seek all their lives and still make it to their deathbeds with nothing but the same useless questions and useless answers with which they began. U. G.

had his, but they would never get theirs. So why should they go on living? Naturally, no one explicitly posed this question to U. G. But they had his answer: there is no “you” that lives, only a body going about its only order of business—that of being alive and obeying biology. Whatever else people did with themselves was no concern of his, as he tirelessly reiterated to those who engaged him in conversation. He did not see his place to be a savior of humanity. That was something for the mountebanks of salvation who infested the world with this or that sect, each with its teeth bared to defend its trademarked trumpery. While he saw our race as hopelessly at loggerheads with itself, U. G. would not have backed Zapffe’s conclusion that we must put an end to ourselves. He was just not caught up in human life as a tragedy. That way of thinking was for those poor apes impossibly aspiring to be something other than what they are. The protocol that Zapffe advocated is no less hopeless than U. G.’s insouciant acceptance of things as they are.

But it has the bonus that it would write finis to the great paradox that has bedeviled our species rather than shrugging it off as irrelevant. It would also quiet every one of those interest groups born of consciousness—with religions at the top of the list—that U. G. so disdained. Even a rational exchange of views is only a façade hiding irrational passions immune to all pretensions to “agree to disagree,” which is what people say when their attempt to crush you has failed, something they hope to set right at a later date.

Leaving aside such an extraordinary specimen as U. G. Krishnamurti, humanity suffers from the conflicted state that consciousness has brought upon it and that is only intensified with each new eructation from philosophy, science, religion, or city hall.

There is no reason to believe that the future will diverge from the past in this regard, although neither is there any reason to believe that it will not. The future is strategic ground for feuds both well-mannered and lavishly sanguinary. Disputes great and small are often protracted well past the lifetimes of those who inaugurate them, leaving subsequent generations to carry on the good fight. As U. G. repeated to his interlocutors,

“I am not interested in changing the world.” And if you are not a combatant, you must resign yourself to being no one.

Of a sort with U. G. is the Australian physicist John Wren-Lewis, a nonreligious scientist who nearly died of poisoning and woke up in a hospital in a state of enlightenment he never requested or pained himself to earn. Both U. G. and Wren-Lewis have publicly emphasized the fortuitous nature of their unsought illumination.2 Both also warn against gurus with recipes for enlightenment. In talks with interviewers, U. G., who did not write books (nor are the published interviews with him copyrighted), lambasted as frauds every 51

spiritual figure known to humanity, including Buddha and Christ. Wren-Lewis has been more consumed by the connection between enlightenment phenomena and Near-Death Experience (NDE). His hypothesis, for what it might be worth, parallels Zapffe’s in that it explains ordinary consciousness as a “basic malfunction” that “is some kind of inflation or hyperactivity of the psychological survival-system.”3 He derives hope that this malfunction may be repaired from the fact that some NDE-ers are relieved of their anxiety for survival by having their egoistic consciousness commuted into an

“impersonal consciousness” of an enlightened sort.

Because they have not gone off the deep end of religiosity, U. G. and Wren-Lewis are rarities among those who have known ego-death, a state that has nothing but anecdotal evidence to support it, which puts this phenomenon in a class with mystical experiences and revealed religions. As one might imagine, ego-death is laden with about as much mass appeal as physical death. It has been eyed as an ideal only by a small fraction of our species. To everyone else, death is death. In a normal head, impersonal survival does not sit well. It would negate all that we are, for what are we but beings anxious to survive?