The End of Faith (39 page)

But there have been other sources of cynicism. Inevitably, spiritual practice must be
taught by those who are expert in it, and those who pro- fess to be expertsto be genuine
gurusare not always as selfless as they claim. As a consequence of their antics, many
educated people now believe that a guru is simply a man who, while professing his love for
all beings, secretly longs to rule an ashram populated exclusively by beauti- ful young
women. This stereotype is not without its exemplarsand while the occasional yogi of renown
may lick a leper's wounds with apparent enthusiasm, many display far more ordinary
longings.

I know a group of veteran spiritual seekers who, after searching for a teacher among the
caves and dells of the Himalayas for many months, finally discovered a Hindu yogi who
seemed qualified to lead them into the ethers. He was as thin as Jesus, as limber as an
orangutan, and wore his hair matted, down to his knees. They promptly brought this prodigy
to America to instruct them in the ways of spiritual devotion. After a

suitable period of acculturation, our aceticwho was, incidentally, also admired for his
physical beauty and for the manner in which he played the drumdecided that sex with the
prettiest of his patrons' wives would suit his pedagogical purposes admirably. These
relations were com- menced at once, and endured for some time by a man whose devotion to
wife and guru, it must be said, was now being sorely tested. His wife, if I am not
mistaken, was an enthusiastic participant in this “tantric” exer- cise, for her guru was
both “fully enlightened” and as dashing a swain as Lord Krishna. Gradually, this saintly
man further refined his spiritual requirements, as well as his appetites. The day soon
dawned when he would eat nothing for breakfast but a pint of HŠagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream
topped with cashews. We might well imagine that the meditations of a cuckold, wandering
the frozen-food aisles of a supermarket in search of an enlightened man's enlightened
repast, were anything but devo- tional. This guru was soon sent back to India with his
drum.

13 Padmasambhava, Self-liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness, trans. J. M. Reynolds (New York: Station Hill Press, 1989), 12.

14 Padmasambhava was an eighth-century mystic who is generally credited with having brought
the teachings of Buddhism (particularly those of Tanta and Dzogchen) from India to Tibet.

15 No doubt, many students of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish esoterica will claim that my
literal reading of their scriptures betrays my ignorance of their spiritual import. To be
sure, occult, alchemical, and conventionally mystical interpretations of various passages
in the Bible and the Koran are as old as the texts themselves, but the problem with such
hermeneu- tical effortswhether it be the highly dubious theory of gematria (the translation of the Hebrew letters of the Torah into their numerical equiv- alents so
that numerologists can work their interpretive magic upon the text) or the glib symbol
seeking of popular scholars like Joseph Camp- bellis that they are perfectly unconstrained
by the contents of the texts themselves. One can interpret every text in such a way as to
yield almost any mystical or occult instruction.

A case in point: I have selected another book at random, this time from the cookbook aisle
of a bookstore. The book is A Taste of Hawaii: New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific. Therein I have discov- ered an as yet uncelebrated mystical treatise. While it appears to
be a recipe for wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish, we need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence of an
unrivaled spiritual intelligence:

NOTE TO PAGE 217

snapper filet, cubed 3 teaspoons chopped scallions salt and freshly ground black pepper a
dash of cayenne pepper 2 teaspoons chopped fresh ginger 1 teaspoon minced garlic 8 shrimp,
peeled, deveined, and cubed 1Ú2 cup heavy cream; 2 eggs, lightly beaten 3 teaspoons rice
wine; 2 cups bread crumbs 3 tablespoons vegetable oil; 2 1Ú2 cups ogo tomato relish

The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himselfyou and I awash in the sea of existence. But here we
find it cubed, which is to say that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions
of body, mind, and spirit.

Three teaspoons of chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each
level of our being by way of antidote comes likewise in equal proportions. The import of
the passage is clear: the body, mind, and spirit need to be tended to with the same care.

Salt and freshly ground black pepper: here we have the perennial invocation of oppositesthe white and the black aspects of our
nature. Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe for spiritual
life. Nothing, after all, can be excluded from the human experi- ence (this seems to be a
Tantric text). What is more, salt and pepper come to us in the form of grains, which is to
say that our good and bad quali- ties are born of the tiniest actions. Thus, we are not
good or evil in gen- eral, but only by virtue of innumerable moments, which color the
stream of our being by force of repetition.

A dash of cayenne pepper: clearly, being of such robust color and flavor, this signifies the spiritual influence of
an enlightened adept. What shall we make of the ambiguity of its measurement? How large is
a dash? Here we must rely upon the wisdom of the universe at large. The teacher himself
will know precisely what we need by way of instruction. And it is at just this point in
the text that the ingredients that bespeak the heat of spiritual endeavor are added to the
listfor after a dash of cayenne pepper, we find two teaspoons of chopped fresh ginger and one teaspoon of minced garlic. These form an isosceles trinity of sorts, signifying the two sides of our spir- itual
nature (male and female) united with the object meditation.

Next comes eight shrimppeeled, deveined, and cubed. The eight shrimp, of course, represent the eight worldly
concerns that every spiri- tual aspirant must decry: fame and shame; loss and gain;
pleasure and pain; praise and blame. Each needs to be deveined, peeled, and cubed that is,
purged of its power to entrance us and incorporated on the path of practice.

That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any textand that they are
therefore meaninglessshould be obvious. Here we have scripture as Rorschach blot: wherein
the occultist can find his magical principles perfectly reflected; the conventional mystic
can find his recipe for transcendence; and the totalitarian dogmatist can hear God telling
him to suppress the intelligence and creativity of others. This is not to say that no
author has ever couched spiritual or mystical infor- mation in allegory or ever produced a
text that requires a strenuous hermeneutical effort to be made sense of. If you pick up a
copy of Finnegans Wake, for instance, and imagine that you have found therein allusions to various cosmogonic
myths and alchemical schemes, chances are that you have, because Joyce put them there. But
to dredge scripture in this manner and discover the occasional pearl is little more than a
lit- erary game.

16 For a recent scholarly treatment of the phenomenology of Buddhist meditation that is
compatible with my usage here, see B. A. Wallace, “Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan
Buddhism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5-7 (2001): 209-30. For extensive discussion of meditation by neuroscientists, see
J. H. Austin, Zen and the Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), and C. deCharms, Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma and Brain Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Snow Lion Publications, 1998).

17 I believe this metaphor comes from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, but I have forgotten where in
his many discourses I read it.

18 It is often said that a person cannot learn these things from reading a book. In the
general case, this is undoubtedly true. 1 would add that one is by no means guaranteed to
recognize the intrinsic nonduality of con- sciousness simply by having an eminent
meditation master point it out. The conditions have to be just right: the teacher has to
be really deliver- ing the goods, leaving no conceptual doubt as to what is to be
recognized; and the student has to be endowed with sufficient concentration of mind to
follow his instructions and notice what there is to notice. In this sense, meditation is
undoubtedly an acquired skill.

19 The recognition of the nonduality of consciousness is not susceptible to

NOTES TO PAGE 220 299

a linguistically oriented analysis. While it is perfectly natural that men who knew only
their thoughts would attempt to reduce everything to language, the efforts of Wittgenstein
and his imitators in philosophy do not cut deeply enough to shed any light upon this
terrain. Perhaps an intuition of these things could be read into Wittgenstein's celebrated
statement “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” But the true mystery,
whereof we cannot speak, can nevertheless be rec- ognized.

20 Meditation has, in fact, been the subject of scientific study for many years. See J.
Andresen, “Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine: The Story of Experimental Research on
Meditation,” journal of Conscious- ness Studies 7, nos. 11-12 (2000): 17-73, for an exhaustive review. Much of this research has employed
EEG and physiological measures and, in so doing, has not attempted to localize changes in
brain function. Most stud- ies that have utilized modern techniques of neuroimaging have
not stud- ied meditation relative to the self-sense per se. See A. B. Newberg et al., “The
Measurement of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow during the Com- plex Cognitive Task of
Meditation: A Preliminary SPECT Study,” Psy- chiatry Research: Neuroimaging Section 106 (2000 and 2001): 113-22, for the results of a SPECT study. To my knowledge, only one
group has begun working with meditators who are producing the specific, subjec- tive
effect of losing their sense of self; a preliminary report on these stud- ies can be found
in D. Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (New York: Bantam, 2003).

21 F. Varela, “Neurophenomenology,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 330-49, makes this point with regard to the scientific valid- ity of
“subjective” data: “The line of separationbetween rigor and lack of itis not to be drawn
between first and third person accounts, but determined rather by whether there is a clear
methodological ground leading to a communal validation and shared knowledge.”

22 I would like to briefly address the concern that the experience of non- duality brought on
by meditation is entirely private, and therefore not amenable to independent verification.
Are we obliged merely to take a meditator's word for it? And if so, is this a problem?

Those who would demand an independent measure of mental events should first consider two
things: (1) many features of human experience are irretrievably private and, as a
consequence, self-report remains our only guide to their existence: depression, anger,
joy, visual and auditory hallucinations, dreams, and even pain are among the innumerable
"first-

person“ facts that can be finally verified only by self-report; (2) in those cases where
independent measures of internal states do exist, they exist only by virtue of their reliable correlation with self-report. Even
fear, which is now dependably linked to a variety of physiological and behav- ioral
measuresincreased startle response, rising Cortisol, increased skin conductance,
etc.cannot be taken off the gold standard of self-report. Imagine what would happen if
subjective ratings of fear ever broke free of such ”independent" measures: if, say, 50
percent of subjects claimed to feel no fear when their Cortisol levels rose and to feel
terror when they fell. These measures would cease to be of any use at all in the study of
fear. It is important that we not lose sight of the cash value that physio- logical and
behavioral variables have in the study of mental events: they are only as good as the subjects say they are. (I do not mean to suggest that people are subjectively incorrigible, or that every mental
event is best studied by recourse to self-report. When the topic under considera- tion is
how things seem to the subject, however, self-report will be our only compass.)

23 Indeed, the future looks rather like the past in this respect. We may live to see the
technological perfection of all the visionary strands of tradi- tional mysticism:
shamanism (Siberian or South American), Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical
Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism), and all the other byzantine paths whereby man has sought
the Other in every guise of its conception. But all these approaches to spirituality are
born of a longing for esoteric knowledge and a desire to excavate the visionary strata of
the mindin dreams, or trance, or psychedelic swoonin search of the sacred. While I have no
doubt that remarkable experiences are lying in wait for the initiate down each of these
byways, the fact that consciousness is always the prior context and condition of every
visionary experience is a great clarifying truthand one which brands all such excursions
as fundamentally unnecessary. That con- sciousness is not improvednot made emptier of
self, or more mysteri- ous, transcendental, etc.by the pyrotechnics of esotericism is a
fact, which contemplatives of every persuasion could confirm in their own experience.

The modern version of the visionary impulse, perhaps best exempli- fied in the exquisite
ravings of Terence McKenna, is the equation of spir- itual transcendence with information of a transcendental kind. Thus, any experience (most effectively invoked with the aid of
psychedelic drugs) in which the mind is flooded by paradoxical disclosuresvisions of other

realms, ethereal beings, the grammatology of alien intelligences, etc.is considered to be
an improvement upon ordinary consciousness. What such a romance of the subtle overlooks,
however, is the sublimity of con- sciousness itself, prior to subject/object perception.
That subtle disclo- sures are captivating to the intellect (whether or not they are
“true”), there can be no doubt. But their impermanenceany vision, having arisen, is
destined to pass awayproves that such phenomena are not the basis for permanent
transformation.