The End of Faith (38 page)

6 Nevertheless, these are exactly the sorts of equivalences that scientists and philosophers
working on “the self” are apt to draw. A conference was recently held at the New York
Academy of Sciences entitled “The Self: From Soul to Brain,” and while much of interest
was said about the brain, not a single presenter defined the self in such a way as to
distinguish it from truly global concepts like “the human mind” or “personhood.” The
feeling that we call “\” was left entirely untouched.

7 Certain philosophers, while they clearly have not transcended the sub- ject/object divide
as a matter of stable experience, conceptually repudiate it in their thinking. Sartre, for instance, saw that the subject could be
nothing more than another object in the field of consciousness and, as such, was
“contemporaneous with the World”:

The World has not created me; the me has not created the World. These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness,
and it is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This abso- lute
consciousness, when it is purified of the J, no longer has any- thing of the subject. . . . It is quite simply a first condition and absolute source of existence. And the
relation of interdependence established by this absolute consciousness between me and the World is sufficient for the me to appear as “endangered” before the World, for the me (indirectly and through the intermediary states) to draw the whole of its content from the
World. No more is needed in the way of a philosophical foundation for an ethics and a
politics which are absolutely positive.

J. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill and Wang, 1937), 105-6.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes a similar point, even while confining himself to
subject/object language: "The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject
which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the
world, but from a world which the

NOTES TO PAGES 213-215 291

subject itself projects." Cited in F. Varela at al., The Embodied Mind: Cog-

nitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 4. 8 This is not to say that infants are mystics. Nevertheless, a process of increasing
individuation clearly occurs from birth onward. See K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), for a criticism of the false equation between what he calls the pre-rational and the trans- rational. As Wilber points out, there is no reason to romanticize child- hood in spiritual terms.
Indeed, if our children appear to inhabit the kingdom of heaven, why stop with them? We
might as well direct our envy at our primate cousins, for theywhen they are not too
overcome by the pleasures of cannibalism, gang rape, and infanticide to seem so

are the most gleeful children of all. 9 Thus, a man like Heidegger, who was an abject admirer of Hitler, can nev-

ertheless be commended to our attention, with scarcely a hint of shame, as one of the
giants of European thought. Schopenhauer, who was undoubtedly a clever fellow, hurled a
seamstress down a flight of stairs, injuring her permanently (he was, we are told, annoyed
by the sound of her voice). Other eminent thinkers could also be singled outWittgen- stein
was a manifestly tortured soul and an enthusiastic practitioner of corporal punishment
when in the company of unruly little girlsbut, and this is the astonishing fact, not a
single Western thinker can be named who rivals the great philosopher-mystics of the East.
There are those who feel no embarrassment at reaching as far back as Plotinus for an
example of a mystic reared in an Eastern corner of the West. But Plot- inus, by his own
admission, enjoyed only an occasional glimpse of the plenum that he so eloquently
described. In the context of one of the East- ern schools of contemplative practice, he
would have been acknowledged for nothing more than having set out toward the goal in
earnest.

The situation appears to have been somewhat different in the ancient world. Greek
philosophers spoke frequently of the state of eudaimonia the objective state of happiness that was thought to attend the good life but their
efforts to reach it were not very sophisticated. The closest thing to an Eastern mysticism
to be found among the ancient Greeks was skep- ticism, in the tradition of Pyrrho of Elis
(ca. 365-270 BC)but Pyrrho's teachings amounted to disavowal of philosophy altogether.
Happiness has since been relegated to the ontological backwater of moral philosophy, and
the ideal of the philosopher as sage is not even a distant memory.

The teachings of Pyrrho, which have survived in the writings of the second-century
physician Sextus Empiricus, enunciate what is clearly a

spiritual discipline, not at all unlike the dialectic of Madhyamika in Mahayana Buddhism.
The Skeptic (with a capital S) is not merely a philosopher who failed in his officehaving
sought to gather true beliefs about the world and found his basket empty at the end of the
dayhe is the person who has found the peace (Greek ataraxia) to which such a failure can lead.

Skepticism, in Pyrrho's sense, is not the dogmatic assertion that noth- ing at all can be
known. It is the acknowledgment that whatever we know at present is simply the way things seem, and the Skeptic refuses to take another step into the twilight of metaphysical views. He
knows that he does not know anything other than appearancesand the fact that this seems to
be a truth about the nature of experience is, likewise, nothing more than the way things
appear to him at present. As Sextus says, “the Skeptic continues to search,” studiously
withholding judgment (Greek epochŽ). He does not even judge that this is a position that should be maintainedrather, every
belief on offer seems to invite its own contra- diction, and the Skeptic has merely taken
note of the unsatisfactoriness of the situation thus far. The man is befuddled, and he is
happy to stay that way.

This position has rarely been accorded the respect that it deserves in the West, for it
has been widely doubted whether it can be honestly maintained by any means short of
administering repeated blows to one's head. It is also generally conflated (as in B.
Russell, A History of West- ern Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945]) with the more dogmatic mistrust of knowledge evinced
by Arcesilaus, Carneades, and the other regents of Plato's Academy during its
two-hundred-year flirta- tion with the refusal of all dogmashaving decided, in opposition
to obvious contradictions in its tradition, to take its inspiration from Socrates in only
his skeptical moods. Academic skepticism appears to have been a more strident critique of
the knowledge of othersand therefore a declaration of the “truth” that no one knows
anything at allthough it is true that in conversation, Pyrrho's suspension of belief would
have amounted to much the same thing. Consequently, most philosophers have not recognized
Pyrrho's innovation to be the empiri- cal turn toward profundity that it genuinely was. It
is said that Pyrrho acquired his discipline from a naked ascetic (Greek gymnosophist) he met while on Alexander's campaign to the borders of India. He is also reported to have
been quite a saintly figure, presumably as a consequence of the peace he acquired in the
absence of opinions. It should be noted,

NOTES TO PAGE 215 293

however, that the ataraxia which Sextus describes in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism was not “enlightenment” in the Eastern senserather, it seems to have amounted to little
more than a condition of not suffering as much as ordinary men. Nevertheless, ataraxia was
a realizable spiritual goal supported by sound reasoning and, as such, represents an
empirical advance over the aims of mere philosophy.

10 There is more to Diamond's thesis than this, but it essentially boils down to the unequal
geographical distribution of animals and foodstuffs that can be readily domesticated.

11 At least on paper. Nevertheless, what is so remarkably barren about the Western
philosophical tradition is that while the occasional lucky man in his most muscular
moments of inquiry may have won a brief, experien- tial insight into the nondual nature of
consciousnesssomeone like Schelling, for instance, or Rousseau while he was lolling in a
boat on Lake Genevaphilosophers in the East have spent millennia articulating and
integrating such insights into distinct methods of contemplative practice: rendering them
both reproducible and verifiable by consensus.

12 My debt to a variety of contemplative traditions that have their origin in India will be
obvious to many readers. The esoteric teachings of Bud- dhism (e.g., the Dzogchen
teachings of the Vajrayana) and Hinduism (e.g., the teachings of Advaita Vedanta), as well
as many years spent prac- ticing various techniques of meditation, have done much to
determine my view of our spiritual possibilities. While these traditions do not offer a
unified perspective on the nature of the mind or the principles of spir- itual life, they
undoubtedly represent the most committed effort human beings have made to understand these
things through introspection. Buddhism, in particular, has grown remarkably sophisticated.
No other tradition has developed so many methods by which the human mind can be fashioned
into a tool capable of transforming itself. Attentive readers will have noticed that I
have been very hard on religions of faith Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even
Hinduismand have not said much that is derogatory of Buddhism. This is not an accident.
While Bud- dhism has also been a source of ignorance and occasional violence, it is not a
religion of faith, or a religion at all, in the Western sense. There are millions of
Buddhists who do not seem to know this, and they can be found in temples throughout
Southeast Asia, and even the West, praying to Buddha as though he were a numinous
incarnation of Santa Claus. This distortion of the tradition notwithstanding, it remains
true that the esoteric teachings of Buddhism offer the most complete methodology we

have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencum- bered by any dogma.
It is no exaggeration to say that meetings between the Dalai Lama and Christian
ecclesiastics to mutually honor their reli- gious traditions are like meetings between
physicists from Cambridge and the Bushmen of the Kalahari to mutually honor their
respective understandings of the physical universe. This is not to say that Tibetan
Buddhists are not saddled with certain dogmas (so are physicists) or that the Bushmen
could not have formed some conception of the atom. Any person familiar with both
literatures will know that the Bible does not contain a discernible fraction of the
precise spiritual instructions that can be found in the Buddhist canon. Though there is
much in Buddhism that I do not pretend to understandas well as much that seems deeply
implausibleit would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge its preeminence as a
system of spiritual instruction.

As for the many distinguished contemplatives who have graced the sordid history of
ChristianityMeister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint
Seraphim of Sarov, the venerable Desert Fathers, et al.these were certainly extraordinary
men and women: but their mystical insights, for the most part, remained shackled to the
dual- ism of church doctrine, and accordingly failed to fly. Where they do take to the
air, with a boost from Neoplatonism and other heterodox views, it is in defiance of the
very tradition they might have epitomized (had it been wise enough to transcend its own
literary conceits), and therefore they serve as hallowed exceptions that prove the
rulemystical Chris- tianity was dead the day Saul set out for Damascus.

Contemplatives within the other Semitic traditions have had their mystical impulses
similarly constrained. Sufism (itself influenced by Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism,
and Christian monasticism) has generally been considered a form of heresy in the Muslim
worldas the terrible deaths of Al-Hallaj (854-922) and other distinguished Sufis attest.
Where its doctrine has remained mindful of the Koran, Sufism is wedded to an indissoluble
dualism; similarly, Jewish Kabbalists (whose teachings bear the influence of Christian
Gnosticism, Sufism, and Neo- platonism) do not seem to have considered a truly nondual
mysticism a possibility. See G. Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorsette Press, 1974).

There is no denying the mystical talents of many Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
contemplatives. Every religious tradition, no matter how wayward its beliefs, is likely to
have produced a handful of men and women who profoundly realized the inherent freedom of
consciousness.

NOTE TO PAGE 215 295

As consciousness already is free of subject and object duality, the emer- gence of an
Eckhart or a Rumi is no surprise at all. The existence of such spiritual luminaries,
however, suggests nothing about the adequacy of the Bible and the Koran as contemplative
manuals. I trust that some lucky man has been enlightened while being run over by a train
or flung from the bow of a pirate ship. Does this mean that such mishaps consti- tute
adequate spiritual instruction? While I do not deny that every tradi- tion, East and West,
is likely to have produced a few mystics whose insights breached the gilded prison of
their faith, the failures of faith- based religion are so conspicuous, its historical
degradation so great, its intolerance so of this world, that I think it is time we stopped
making excuses for it.

The New Age has offered little progress in this regard, because it has made spiritual life
seem generally synonymous with the forfeiture of brain cells. Most of the beliefs and
practices that have been designated as “spiritual,” in this New Age or in any other, have
arisen and thrive in a perfect vacuum of critical intelligence. Indeed, many New Age ideas
are so ridiculous as to produce terror in otherwise dispassionate men. In response to the
absurdities that are arrayed, each year, at events like the Whole Life Expo, scientists
and other rational people have found new reason to criticize and discard all spiritual
claims and their evidence. And so it is that every man who concerns himself with the
disposition of the planets before the disposition of his ideas simply heaps more fuel upon
the dark fires of cynicism.