...All the ways of liberation offered release from the endless cycle of reincarnation- Vedanta and Yoga through the awakening of the true Self, and Buddhism through the realization that the process of life is not happening to any subject, so that there no longer remains anyone to be reincarnated. They agree, in other words, that the individual soul with its continued reincarnation from life to life and even moment to moment is maya, a playful illusion. Yet all popular accounts of these doctrines, both Western and Asian, state that so long as the individual remains unliberated he will in fact continue to be reincarnated. Despite the Buddhist anatman doctrine of the unreality of the substantial ego, the Milindapanha records Nagasenas complex efforts to convince the Greek king Menander that reincarnation can occur, without any actual soul, until at last nirvana is attained. The vast majority of Asian Hindus and Buddhists continue to believe that reincarnation is a fact, and most Westerners adopting Vedanta or Buddhism adopt belief in reincarnation at the same time. Western Buddhists even find this belief consoling, in flat contradiction to the avowed objective of attaining release from rebirth. It is, however, logical to retain the belief in reincarnation as a fact if one also believes that maya is the physical world as distinct from ideas about the physical world. That is to say, one will continue to believe in this Indian cosmology until one realizes that it is a social institution. I wish, therefore, to commend what to many students of these doctrines may seem to be a startling thesis: Buddhists and Vedantists who understand their own doctrines profoundly, who are in fact liberated, do not believe in reincarnation in any literal sense. Their liberation involved, among other things, the realization that the Hindu cosmology was a myth and not a fact. It was, and remains, a liberation from being taken in by social institutions; it is not liberation from being alive. It is consistent with this view that, in India, liberation went hand in hand with renunciation of caste; the individual ceased to identify himself with his socially defined identity, his role. He underlined this ritually by abandoning family responsibilities when his sons were able to assume them, by discarding clothes, or, as in the case of Buddhists, by donning the ocher robes which marked the criminal outcaste, and by retiring to the forests and mountains. Mahayana Buddhism later introduced the final and logical refinement-the Bodhisattva who returns to society and adopts its conventions without attachment, who in other words plays the social game instead of taking it seriously. If this thesis is true, why was it not stated openly, and why have the majority of Buddhists and Vedantists been allowed to go on thinking of the reincarnation cosmology as a fact? There are two reasons. First, liberation is not revolution. It is not going out of ones way to disturb the social order by casting doubt upon the conventional ideas by which people hold together. Furthermore, society is always insecure and thus hostile to anyone who challenges its conventions directly. To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the victim of other peoples anxiety requires considerable tact. Second, the whole technique of liberation requires that the individual shall find out the truth for himself. Simply to tell it is not convincing. Instead, he must be asked to experiment, to act consistently upon assumptions which he holds to be true until he finds out otherwise. The guru or teacher of liberation must therefore use all his skill[s] to persuade the student to act upon his own delusions, for the latter will always resist any undermining of the props of his security. He teaches, not by explanation, but by pointing out new ways of acting upon the students false assumptions until the student convinces himself that they are false. [Teachers dig holes into which students fall. In climbing out of the hole, the student learns.] Herein, I feel, is the proper explanation of the esotericism of the ways of liberation. The initiate is one who knows that certain social institutions are self-contradictory or in actual conflict with the form of nature. But he knows also that these institutions have the strongest emotions invested in them. They are the rules of communication whereby people understand one another, and they have been beaten into the behavior patterns of impressionable children with the full force of social anxiety. At the same time, those who are taken in by such institutions are suffering from them-suffering from the very ideas which they believe to be vital to sanity and survival. There is therefore no way of disabusing the sufferer directly, by telling him that his cherished disease is a disease. If he is to be helped at all, he must be tricked into insight. If I am to help someone else to see that a false problem is false, I must pretend that I am taking his problem seriously. What I am actually taking seriously is his suffering, but he must be led to believe that it is what he considers as his problem... Let us suppose then that someone who is suffering from a social institution imagines that he is suffering because of an actual conflict in life, in the very structure of the physical world-that nature threatens his presumably physical ego. The healer then must appear to be a magician, a master of the physical world. He must do whatever is necessary to convince the sufferer that he can solve what seems to the latter to be a physical problem, for there is no other way of convincing him to do what is necessary for acting consistently upon his false assumption. He must above all convince the sufferer that he, the guru, has mastered the imaginary problem, that his ego is not disturbed by pain or death or worldly passions. Moreover, because the disease was engendered by social authority, the guru must appear to have equal or superior social authority to the parents, relatives, and instructors of the patient. In all this, the Eastern ways of liberation have been astonishingly ingenious; their masters, whom society would have felt to be utterly subversive, have convinced society that they are its very pillars. It is thus that the guru who has a bad temper, or who likes to smoke or drink sake, gives the impression that he indulges in these little vices deliberately-in order to remain in his bodily manifestation, for if he were consistently unattached to the physical world he would cease to appear in it. Of course the guru is human like everyone else. [Of course they are NOT humans anymore than anyone else is human.] His advantage, his liberation, lies in the fact that he is not in conflict with himself for being so; he is not in the double bind of pretending that he is an independent agent without knowing that he is pretending, of imagining that he is an ego or subject which can somehow manage to be permanently one up on its correlative object-the changing panorama of experiences, sensations, feelings, emotions and thoughts. The guru accepts himself; more exactly, he does not think of himself as something other than his behavior patterns, as something which performs them. On the one hand, social conditioning as we know it depends entirely on persuading people not to accept themselves, and necessary as this stratagem, this as if, may be for training the young, it is a fiction of limited use. The more it succeeds, the more it fails. Civilization attained at the price of inculcating this fiction permanently is necessarily self-destructive. ~Alan Watts
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 14:33:54 +0000
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