I definitely think it’s a mistake for those who think it is. I like getting surreal and absurd in that special Pirandelloesque frame of mind.
The reason I said Hinduism (and thereby Buddhism—Buddhist meditation being essentially Dhyana Yoga, which word was bastardised by the Chinese into Chan, and by the Japanese, in turn, into Zen) is ‘mistaken’ can be understood by comparing the following two quotes:
[size=95]Be a warrior and kill desire [kâma), the powerful enemy of the soul.
[The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Mascaró, 3:43 (note that chapter 6 is about Dhyana Yoga).]
All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity–and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they ‘spiritualize’ themselves. Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion, war was declared on passion itself, its destruction was plotted; all the old moral monsters are agreed on this: “il faut tuer les passions” [“one should kill the passions”]. […] Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity—today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who pluck out teeth so that they will not hurt any more… […] The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its ‘cure’, is castratism. It never asks: “How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?”—It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule [Herrschsucht, translated above as “passion for power”], of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, ‘Morality as Antinature’, 1.][/size]
Krishna-bhakti, which the Bhagavad Gita advocates, is itself the spiritualisation of a craving:
[size=95]The spiritualization of sensuality is called love[.]
[Nietzsche, ibid., 3.][/size]
The same goes, of course, for Jesus-bhakti.
The state of losing your self consciousness is not in your interest. You are only interested in continuity. You want to continue, probably on a different level, and to function in a different dimension, but you want to continue somehow. You wouldn’t touch that other thing with a barge pole. That would liquidate what you call “you,” all of you – higher self, lower self, soul, essence, conscious, subconscious – all of that. You come to a point, and then you say “I need time.” So inquiry and spiritual endeavor comes into the picture, and you say to yourself “Tomorrow I will understand.” This structure is born of time and functions in time, but does not come to an end through time. If you don’t understand now, you are not going to understand tomorrow.
What is there to understand from an outside source? Why do you want to understand that? And you can’t understand what happened to someone else. It is an exercise in futility on your part to try to relate the description of how another functions to the way you are functioning. That‘s a thing that cannot be communicated. Nor is any communication necessary. No dialogue is possible. Every individual is a unique creation of nature, so each one will experience his own enlightenment in his own way. Enlightenment is not something that can be turned out on an assembly line.
When the ‘you’ is not there, when the question is not there, what is is understanding. You are finished. You’ll walk out. You will never listen to anybody describing his state or ask any questions about understanding at all.
What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from the natural state of your self-- it is a movement away from yourself. To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you, nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is an expression of nature.
"The sacrifice of the ego to the higher self is the renunciation of acting on passions as they drive one to fulfillment of carnal pleasures, (food, sex, the first two chakras) and dominion of others (ego, third chakra), which causes these energies to ‘sublimate’, to become less wild, crude, and more compressed, sharper, in which case they will direct themselves at other aims.
When they are at the density where the fourth chakra resonates with them, they express in love, the drive to give indiscriminately to others. When this is also renounced, rising to the fifth, where giving is a conscious process, manifesting in art in the broad sense. At the sixth level, when even art is renounced, the energy is taken up by the frontal lobes and produces insight, understanding the way the subject as a microcosmos ‘fits into’ the macrocosmos, thereby opening up thew gates to invention, and genius. At the seventh chakra, when the world is entirely renounced, the energy resonates only with itself, and is experienced as ‘pure spirit.’ This is experienced as boundless existence, but it is actually still bound, to itself, the energy is bound to it’s quantity, which si a limit it cannot itself perceive. For that, the other chakras are again necessary.
That is why the greatest saints have returned from their proverbial mountaintop and descended to share their energy through the first three chakra’s - now not bound to it, but patiently working it like land. (This is the conscousness of Binah, the heavenly mother, with Malkuth, the Earthly daughter, through the Son, Tipharet, which is the downward will of the illuminated seat of Kether.
There is never a consciousness of all existence, it only seems that way, when all that is experienced is known.
Nietzsche’s take on the reason for conquering the passions comes from his own eccentric, typical counter-reaction to the Christian perspective that derives from the Augustinian and Manichean view of the flesh as negative or sinful. But the eastern view is quite different from that. It is not that the passions are themselves evil, stupid, or sinful, but obstructions and distractions that lead away from enlightenment, true reality, and bliss; and it’s not a war waged on passions that is advocated since you can’t kill a passion by means of another passion, just as you can’t wage peace through warfare. The way of the Buddha is not found through war but through the journey of self-realization and spiritual transformation.
But in all humor, and I do like to enjoy a good laugh, I can’t resist a look back on a great conversation I had once with some friends. My good friend’s little sister, a great precocious artist who was 16 at the time, was working on a painting she was doing for me, on the rough back of a formica table top. It was her rendering of a Byzantine lion with wings, and I still have it. It is a lion frought with Celtic and Byzantine symbols, even with some Chinese geometric (as once were done in bronze articles – like pre-dynastic Chinese symbols on an incense burner). Byzantine art was influenced by the East, especially Persia and Iran (Sasanian) and sometimes as far east as India.
This is real genius. On a side note, according to my young artist friend, Christianity in those days was approached through the Saints. Conclusion – we are getting audacious talking to and representing Jesus as a person. In fact, since there is no historical evidence that Jesus ever existed, and that the saints did, I strongly incline to that view myself. Anyway . . .
The young artist laughed and said: Oh how artists must suffer – renouncing renunciation like Kumar and Govinda’s wife in the Ramayana. A little inverted logic (rationalization) never hurt anyone. This of course would make a great Bollywood film, complete with song and dance.
So when Kumar advises Govinda to renounce renunciation and make his wife happy, I couldn’t help but think of that old takeoff on the Greek idea of moderation: all things in moderation, even moderation.
Bollywood’s Kumar and Govinda’s wife:
Best Bollywood takeoff song and dance ever, from Hustle: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZJgUW9atnk[/youtube]
How do I eat sweet, sweet delicious chocolate, with none of the fat, none of the calories, and none of the sugar? Oh wait, I can’t.
Because you think you have to eat the chocolate – because you are looking for happiness by using something – you put yourself in a position where you can experience dissonance or even distress. That confines you. The fact is, you don’t have to eat it, you don’t have to look for happiness. It’s only an unhappy person that is looking for it. The confining feeling is created by looking for something beyond what you are (when you stop looking). Stop looking for roses and there will be no thorns. You are trying to get out of the problem you created by yourself. Actually there was no problem there. You created it.
Is this simply an idea that bothers you or are you really attracted to sitting around nothing. If the former, it seems like some religion or other has managed to shame you for being yourself.
Is the ego bad?
If you have no interest in getting involved in worldly affairs, there isn’t much point.
Perhaps it is not the getting involved that is the problem, but the state of things now in the world. I do not see people judging their desires to have improved things very much. I also think it is strange to not be onesself.
Why not do what you want? When you want to bliss out, do so. When you want to ‘meddle’, why not meddle?
The judgment of selfishness is no help. It’s just another layer on top of who you are. A negative marker.
Amor Fati wrote:
Here are some further questions: Is there really a higher will? How is that will characterized? Is it “God”? Is it my own “higher power”? Is it a communal expression of all sentient will?
Further into the same idea: When we are “in the moment,” must we not abandon the narratives we usually use to recognize and organize our lives and our personalities? When the narrative is gone, what is left? Chaos (meaning disorder)? Quantum flux (“quantum” used metaphorically)? Pure emotion? (I’m just guessing, because I don’t have a good answer.)
Your thoughts most appreciated!