Barriers on the spiritual path - part 1:

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
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jupiviv
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Barriers on the spiritual path - part 1:

Post by jupiviv »

I’ll try to describe here some of the problems I’ve faced during the 3-4 years I’ve seriously engaged in philosophy, and also the problems I imagine may come up for someone doing the same.

Ultimately there is just one problem for anyone who wishes to lead a thoughtful life, and that is the lack of thought. Such a lack appears in many forms. Some of them are relevant to what I’m about to discuss, and I’m going to divide these broadly into two types: A> Incomplete thought. B> Inconsistent thought.

The difference between these two (which I shall henceforth call ‘A’ and ‘B’) is that A involves an inability to reason something to its conclusion, while B involves an inability to do so consistently. A is much more common than B, and B is essentially just a rarer variant of A. For example, a student may not be able to understand a mathematical formula – that is A. Another student may understand it, but may not be able to apply it to any problems, or be too lazy to even try out the problems – that is B. But clearly, they would both fail the mathematics exam. Student B won’t be passed by the board because he understands the formula. Similarly both of these two types of thoughtlessness basically amount to the inability to think.

However, the reason I chose to distinguish B from A is that B is found much more frequently in people who are unusually interested in and capable of intellectual pursuits (not just philosophical ones). The reasons for this are many, but among the main ones is the fact that people want to be happy, and too much rationality is destructive to happiness. In all human societies I know of, reason and thought are enthusiastically encouraged up to a certain point, tolerated or ignored up to a point beyond the previous one, and vehemently stomped on and scorned if it goes beyond that. So being consistently rational is not a goal that is likely to be accompanied with, let alone lead to, happiness.

Still, people who do have the goal of becoming more rational always, consciously or unconsciously, expect happiness as their primary reward. They obviously don’t expect to be happy due to the exact same things that make other people happy, but the happiness they seek is nevertheless identical, in essence, with that which other people seek.

I personally wanted a happiness that was so supreme that nothing could ever interrupt or destroy it. I saw nothing even remotely similar to it around me. The paths of happiness that people usually tread, I concluded, are not worth the effort they seem to put into acquiring it. It is extremely temporary and fleeting. It can be (and is, eventually) destroyed in countless ways. I didn’t see the point in seeking a happiness that would have to end at some time. I’m extremely lazy, and tend not to do things unless I think there are very good reasons why I should do them.

Anyways, I assume that other people who become interested in spiritual matters have roughly the same motivations I did when I started out, whether they are aware of them or not. But motivations rarely tend to last very long, which brings me to the first problem:

I. Disappointment: In the beginning, reasoning itself pleases a person who starts valuing it, for that is precisely why they value it. It provides them with weapons and defenses against the irrationalities of human life and society, which they despise. It gives them certitude and meaning in the face of the chaos and meaninglessness of ordinary human life that troubles them. In a lot of cases such a person has been scorned by society, or he has been unsuccessful at ventures which it considers worthy of praise and respect, or he has just had a generally unhappy life. Reason can ease his pain by putting his pain in relation to other things around him, or within him; in the context of the bigger picture (or the smaller one as the case may be.)

However, all weapons become obsolete, because they are tools, and all tools are expendable and replaceable. When reason is nothing but a tool for a person’s desire to relieve themselves of unpleasant emotions, there are also plenty of opportunities for it to lose its usefulness to this end.

There is a point after which reason cannot provide us with confidence and power anymore. Pointing out and analysing irrationality can make us feel triumphant over it in a sense, but it doesn’t make it go away. Refuting an argument made by someone else with superior reasoning can elevate us above them in our own minds, but we may not be able to change their minds by our reasoning, and be either powerless or unwilling (due to prudence or conscience) to do so by other means.

Thus, inevitably, reason ceases to satisfy and instead starts to disappoint us after a time if we primarily expect emotional gratification from its use. It’s even worse when, in becoming so dependent upon our reasoning mind, we lose control of it. It turns upon us and, horror of horrors, exposes all of our own irrationality to ourselves! What does it expose?

Perhaps it shows us that we started trusting our own judgment of ourselves more than that of others only because we didn’t like the fact that theirs was sometimes on the mark. And also, in order to vengefully judge them back as openly and harshly as we liked without feeling the tug of conscience or guilt, since, according to us, judging others is always justified as long as we judge ourselves as well. It doesn’t matter, according to us, whether our judgment of ourselves or others is *correct*. What matters is that it is *frankly* stated (or thought), or at least appears to be so.

Maybe we realise that we started pursuing the goal of enlightenment only because we didn’t expect to succeed in any other even if we tried, or tried again as the case may be. Or maybe we were too lazy to try to succeed in anything else, and this particular usage of our brains not only fostered for our corrupt consciences some truly brilliant excuses for not doing anything else, but also left us plenty of free time to be lazy in general.

We may also become privy to the fact (most disturbing to lazy people like myself) that, regardless of how much we have reasoned about things, there is more reasoning to be done.

Very, very rarely does a person reach this point, when they have to reason even if they don’t want to. Their situation is like those scenes from action movies where the hero runs/jumps towards/into something from within/atop something about to explode/collapse, even if, ceteris paribus, the former would pose more of a risk to their lives than the latter.

Here we need to introduce another distinction. When people get bored/frustrated with the Truth, they either 1) keep going 2) stay where they are, or, 3) go back where they came from. Types 2 and 3 suffer from a roughly even mixture of type-A and type-B thoughtlessness, whereas type 1 suffers mostly from type-B.

Let’s look at types 2 and 3:

Type 2 are dishonest about their delusions. They don’t want to admit that they are afraid to take their wisdom any further, so they build up mental mechanisms (the efficacy of which depends not only upon their intellects but “worldly” factors as well, like money and not being assraped) to prevent troubling thoughts from arising. Meanwhile, their half-baked wisdom becomes the fuel their egos use to plunge into ever greater forms of self-deceit and depravity, affirming the truth of the saying that no knowledge is better than half-knowledge. The best way to describe this state is “spiritual hedonism.” The philosophy that embodies it most accurately, and honestly, is Epicureanism, which Kierkegaard described very eloquently with the dual themes in his book “Either/Or.”

A person belonging to this type is distinguished by the fact that he constantly seeks or exists in a state of what he calls “spiritual bliss” which he equates, at least partially, with enlightenment. Funnily enough, there is nothing remotely spiritual about it, because it involves hiding things one doesn’t like from the purview of one’s consciousness with the aid of mental blocks. All human beings have mental blocks, but what separates this class of people from others is that they are far more conscious of their mental blocks and can therefore control and manipulate them to some extent. They know that a mental block, while potentially a very good armour against suffering, can backfire as well. A post-modernist might be able to avoid a truth by saying there is no truth at all, but there are times when he might want to affirm a truth, but his philosophy would bid him refrain. A fundamentalist Christian might get rid of his burning need for sex by believing that carnality is sin, but it won’t make the rampant sexuality all around him go away, which might drive him mad.

The type 2 individual works around this problem by making his delusions more flexible. If he doesn’t like someone’s opinion of him, he reasons that a self doesn’t exist and therefore anyone (a self) who has an opinion about anyone else (other selves) is (himself) deluded, so their (self’s) opinion has no merit. If he faces an argument he cannot refute, he simply makes it go away (from his mind) by broadening the issue till it becomes meaningless. If he has a desire for something, like sex or a video game, he reasons that there is no difference between his desiring and not desiring it, since things are inherently not anything else apart from themselves. If he desires it then he desires it, and if not then not. As it happens, he does desire it, so it logically follows that it must be attained. However, the same reasoning cannot be applied to his insecurities and fears, because fear needs to be done away with if one is to become enlightened. If one fears something then one fears it. If not, then not. As it happens, one cannot fear anything because they are ultimately one’s own self, and it’s not possible to fear oneself for to do that one would have to go outside of oneself, which is logically impossible. Or, as is most commonly the case, he reasons that both happiness and suffering are impedances to enlightenment, defines enlightenment to mean a particular kind of happiness that involves some mental reasoning and concentration, and then trains his mind to develop a deep attraction to it (and also, in many cases, a repulsion to the more “sensual” or “worldly” forms of happiness). If, by chance, you are now thinking of a drug addict, you’ve hit the nail on the head.

If such an individual practices this kind of spirituality for long enough, he will be able to attain a very high and consistent degree of mental bliss and peace. Indeed that is the ultimate goal of such a person, and what he believes enlightenment to be. The behavior of this type of person is almost identical to that of drug addicts, in that they always seek a mental state that is very similar to the one that is induced by psychotropic drugs. [1]

Let’s look at three quotes from three very different people, two of whom were philosophers:

1>This capacity or faculty is reason. Its pure, spontaneously active nature puts reason on a higher level even than understanding, and here is why. Understanding is like reason in this: it is spontaneously active, and does not - like the faculty of sense - merely contain representations that come from our being passively affected by things. But it is unlike reason in that the only concepts it can produce through its activity are ones whose only role is to bring the representations of sense under rules . . . The intellectual management of the data of the senses is the understanding’s only task. Without this use of sensibility the understanding wouldn’t have any thoughts at all. In contrast with this, reason shows in its ideas, as we call them (ideas relating to reason as concepts do to the understanding•), a spontaneity so pure that it goes far beyond anything that sensibility can come up with. The highest occupation of reason is to distinguish the sensible world from the intellectual world, thereby marking out limits for the understanding itself.

Because of this, a rational being must regard himself – in his role as an intelligence, setting aside his lower faculties - as belonging not to the sensible world but to the intelligible world. So he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself and recognize the laws for the use of his powers and hence for all his actions. (1) As belonging to the sensible world, he falls• under the laws of nature (heteronomy). (2) As belonging to the intelligible world, he is under the moral authority of laws that are independent of nature, and so are not empirical but based entirely on reason.


2>"There are three layers of the human individual: his physiology, the body; his psychology, the mind; and his being, his eternal self. Love can exist on all the three planes, but its qualities will be different. On the plane of physiology, body, it is simply sexuality. You can call it love, because the word love seems to be poetic, beautiful. But ninety-nine percent of people are calling their sex, love. Sex is biological, physiological. Your chemistry, your hormones – everything material is involved in it…

"Only one percent of people know a little bit deeper. Poets, painters, musicians, dancers, singers have a sensitivity that they can feel beyond the body. They can feel the beauties of the mind, the sensitivities of the heart, because they live on that plane themselves. But a musician, a painter, a poet, lives on a different plane. He does not think, he feels. And because he lives in his heart, he can feel the other person's heart. That is ordinarily called love. It is rare. I am saying only one percent perhaps, once in a while.

"Why are many people not moving to the second plane because it is tremendously beautiful? But there is a problem: anything very beautiful is also very delicate. It is not hardware, it is made of very fragile glass. And once a mirror has fallen and broken, then there is no way to put it together. People are afraid to get so much involved that they reach to the delicate layers of love, because at that stage love is tremendously beautiful but also tremendously changing. Sentiments are not stones, they are like rose flowers…"

"Poets are known, artists are known to fall in love almost every day. Their love is like a rose flower. While it is there it is so fragrant, so alive, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun, asserting its beauty. But by the evening it may be gone, and you cannot do anything to prevent it. The deeper love of the heart is just like a breeze that comes into your room, brings its freshness, coolness, and then it is gone. You cannot catch hold of the wind in your fist. Very few people are so courageous as to live with a moment-to-moment, changing life. Hence, they have decided to fall into a love on which they can depend.

"I don't know which kind of love you know – most probably the first kind, perhaps, the second kind. And you are afraid that if you reach your being, what will happen to your love? Certainly it will be gone – but you will not be a loser. A new kind of love will arise which arises only perhaps to one person in millions. That love can only be called lovingness."


3>Observation is totally free of analysis. Is it possible just to observe without any conclusion, any direction, any motive - just pure, clear looking? Obviously, it is possible when you look at these lovely trees; it is very simple. But to look at the operation of the whole movement of existence, to observe it without any distortion, is entirely different from analysis. In that observation the whole process of analysis has no place. You go beyond it. That is, I can look at that tree without any distortion because I am looking optically. Now, can I look at, is there any observation of the whole activity of fear without trying to find the cause, or asking how to end it, or trying to suppress it, or running away from it? Is it possible just to look and stay with it, stay with the whole movement of fear? I mean by staying with it, to observe without any movement of thought entering into my observation. Then I say, with that observation comes attention. That observation is total attention. It is not concentration; it is attention. It is like focusing a bright light on an object, and in the focusing of that energy which is light on that movement, fear ends. Analysis will never end fear; you can test it out.

What is common between these three quotes? They all refer to mental states characterized by a high degree of clarity and bliss (which may be euphoric/euthymic). The quotes are by Kant, Osho, and J. Krishnamurti (in that order). Clarity and concentration of mind are indispensable tools in the quest to know the truth and make it known to others, but they are just that – tools. All too often, these tools become the province and paradise of truth for even the most honest and determined seeker. As such, they are used for irrational ends. The only thing that a type 2 individual is concerned with is the elongation and commixtion of his moments of bliss to the point where they’re ubiquitous in his daily life – which by the way, given human psychology, is nigh impossible. They may reach a point where even a thought or an isolated sensation can send them off on a spiritual joyride. Invariably, they believe this to be a sign that they have progressed in their enlightenment, but what they have done is short-circuited and ended in a cul de sac (albeit a very comfortable one!)

Their reasoning is limited to a very narrow cross-section of their lives, and they can afford (for various possible reasons not relevant to us at this point) to be even more unaware of the rest than the average deluded chap on the street. While they can reason that good and bad are in the mind, they can’t go further and understand that good and bad are outside it as well. While they understand the fact that all things are illusory, they fail to grasp the fact that all things are concrete and real. They say things are empty, and yet spend hours obsessing over their thoughts and feelings. This is because they have erected impregnable thought-walls (impregnable by their own minds) around things that they do not want to think about. They view any thought or opinion that can be connected with their own experiences/views before the point of time which they consider to be the beginning of their spiritual quest, or with those of people whom they consider to be not spiritual enough (the masses, academics etc.), as inherently deluded. This suspicion of the mainstream is not, per se, bad. It is when this suspicion becomes a foil for one’s own delusions that one’s reasoning mind is in peril. Sometimes trees are trees, sometimes they are empty voids, and some other times they are illusions. The experience of trees as trees, empty voids or illusions could be wise or deluded depending on the person who experiences them, depending on how he reasons about it and relates it to his other experiences. The All is never deficient, but he who doesn’t see its bounty thinks that it is, or what is far worse, regards his own portion to be more than enough.

Let’s return to the quotes for a moment. The first one, from Kant’s “Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals” is clearly an expression of that drug addict-like obsession with mental clarity and peace. While he is right to distinguish the realm of the senses from the realm of abstract thought in a certain context, he goes even further and says that the latter can operate without the former, which is clearly false. He also says that it is “spontaneously active”, which basically means “uncaused” and is therefore false as well. He also says, without providing any real reason, that it should be primarily concerned with distinguishing between itself and the sensory realm. Why can’t it be primarily concerned with distinguishing between things within the sensory realm itself, and with itself included within the sensory realm? Kant was an academic who liked nothing more than to obsess over useless philosophical categorizing, but he certainly had some insight. He would belong to the type 2 individual, who doesn’t push his reasoning to its infinite conclusions but rather only uses it to the degree it makes him feel good.

The second quote, by Osho, is even more depraved than the first one. He virtually admits that all he cares about is happiness, and paints a big red target on thin air that I’m sure a lot of people who’ve read whatever book it’s from (I found it in an online compendium of his writings) have aimed at with their money and sanity.

The third quote, by J. Krishnamurti, is very much like the first one, except that while Kant urged the importance of “reason” (what J.K called “analysis”), J.K is urging the importance “attention” (what Kant called “understanding”.)

Without realising the nature of reality as intimately and clearly as he does the act of eating or sleeping, a man will never achieve anything of importance, regardless of how high and noble his thoughts, how devoid of fear or hatred his heart, or how deep his love for selfless beingness is. What these three men have described in those quotes are not the Goal, but, at best, a part of the path which one must traverse to attain the Goal. They are not the finished software ready to be released in the market after months of hard work, but an early alpha intended to provide some reassurance that those 40 hours of writing code were not in vain.

The type 2 individual has made his delusions more flexible by adapting his reasoning to different emotions, perspectives and situations, but his reasoning itself is incomplete (A type). It can be considered consistent in the sense that it occurs more frequently, but not in the sense of its application to various matters (B type). It is applied to a given subject only to the extent that it stimulates the aforementioned spiritual bliss. If it causes boredom, anxiety or frustration, it’s time to move on as far as the type 2 individual is concerned.

Now I would like to discuss the type 3 individual. These are people who are either more honest with themselves, or just not as capable (for whatever reason) as type 2s for living in a way that even remotely approaches or resembles spirituality. They prefer to go back to ordinary life, but rarely abandon reason altogether. They may become a Bill Hicks/Alex Jones/George Carlin type or join the local rationalist-humanist-atheist club/society, or even a progressive Christian church.

In a way, type 3 people have more potential for becoming wiser. They are more “human”, to use the Buddhist parlance. They don’t get carried away by visions of the infinite, and are more aware of their limitations and place in the grand scheme of things. They reason that enlightenment is too daunting a task for them, and rush to preserve whatever worldly attachments they still have. However, in time, those attachments may seem paltry and hopeless to them, and, unable to delve into greater ignorance on account of their reasoning minds, they might start seeking truth in earnest and become a great Bodhisattva.

Sometimes it is non-duality that nourishes the soul with pride and contentment, and duality that starves it. To see everything as oneself can become the worst kind of demagogy – that raises itself above all else in the name of being the same as all else! Diluting distinctions between the myriad things can be nothing more than an attempt to wish away our helplessness and confusion in a universe that is indifferent to whether we think it is indifferent, angry or concerned about us.

Reductionism puts things into perspective in these cases. Be honest with yourself, and analyse the movements of your mind with the ruthless skepticism of a detective investigating a multiple homicide case. Don’t just stop at the reasoning behind a thought or idea if it seems valid. Why does the reasoning seem valid to *you*? Are you sure you don’t have an ulterior motive for calling it valid? Is a different, but equally valid position possible? If so, then why, and how does it affect the validity of this position vis-à-vis the absolute? You must expose the motive behind everything you think and do. Are you sure you don’t value truth simply because you aren’t able to lose yourself in dreams? Are you seeking the harmony of wisdom only to run away from the chaos of ignorance? Cui bono?

Then you can go back to talking about oneness and selflessness. In the Shrimad Bhagavad Geeta, Krishna appears to Arjun in many avatars during the battle, one of which is an infinite-armed avatar. In the end however he resumes his ordinary, two-armed form. This is a message that ultimately there is duality.

Anyways, type 3 people haven’t been able to make their delusions flexible like type 2. They are unable to adapt or extend their incomplete reasoning to the many aspects of their lives, and they can’t (or won’t!) develop the mental tricks and feints of type 2, so they fall back into the realm of attachment and emotions without a proper safety net to break their fall, since their hearths have been neglected while they were out hunting the truth. The irrationalities of human society do serve coherent functions and purposes, at least in some cases. Often they are time-tested methods of coping with loss, amusing boredom, avoiding confrontation, gaining the approval of others, soothing anger and impatience and the feelings of injustice and unfairness, generating confidence and hope, etc. When a man rejects these things, he runs a great risk of going berserk if the new version of the OS doesn’t work out as expected and he has to revert to the previous one without a backup of the erstwhile drivers and software.

In the of the type 3 individual, reasoning is inconsistent (B type) in the sense of not occurring frequently enough because it is incomplete (A type). They have not reasoned about things to the bitter end, even though they may honestly apply whatever reasoning they have done to various matters, and try to live in accord with it. If they had carried their reasoning farther, while also developing their ability to concentrate and still their minds, they might have been propelled into higher realms.

[1]An addendum on the similarity between the psychology of the type 2 individual and that of drug addicts. As someone who has been friends with Puff the Magic Dragon a few times (I’m not talking about weed or all of the yuppie psychedelic stuff either), for reasons including but not limited to research (I LRFH’d when I read some of Hunter Thompson’s work recently – hey bro!), I know quite a bit about the altered experiences that drug usage induces. The “ideal” feeling that is aimed for is either a childlike sense of innocence and security where everything is new and mysterious (in a good way) and nothing poses any risk or danger to oneself, or an experience that bears unmistakable similarities with orgasm, but which may not be directly related to anything sexual. The feelings of thrill, excitement etc. as post-pubescent humans experience them are almost always directly analogous to coitus – the sense of trying to overcome something through an intense struggle, as opposed to the sense of coiling back in mortal fear of it. There is a reason why all the horror/slash fiction/movies feature so much sexual content. Humans can’t enjoy sex if there isn’t some fear involved in it.

Veteran drug users often have a “buffer” (some would call it a “happy place”) meant to control, to some extent, their behavior during extreme “highs” and “lows”. It could be sit-ups, or a piece of music, but when they do/hear/watch it during their crazier moments of intoxication, they can be calmed and brought back to their senses somewhat. Listening to the letter duet from “Le nozze di Figaro” when you’re weighing the pros and cons of poking your eyes with a ball pen can be surprisingly effective in making you feel just happy to be alive, although perhaps not in the way Mozart intended.

Anyways, this behavior seems to manifest in the type 2 individual as a single or collection of “all-purpose” spiritual sounding ideas and thoughts, like, for example, exhibited by our very own Dennis. Whenever they are in danger of feeling Bad emotions, perhaps on account of an unexpected realisation of the pettiness of their intellectual conduct, or an aggressive man in a deserted street, or a persistently critical forum member, they activate the intellectual “buffer”, which removes all fear/uncertainty/doubt from their mind by emotionally neutralising the object of the Bad emotion (“it is what it is”, “it doesn’t really exist”), stripping it of all reality and meaning. Conversely, the “buffer” turns the situation into an exciting game where they get to destroy the Bad emotion and/or its source using all of their favourite mental tricks and spiritual quotes. Whatever the case may be, they can deal with the situation calmly and on their own terms, i.e, in the castles of delusion they have crafted in their brains, devoid of any conscious, honest relation to the world around them. And it goes without saying, it’s also a cue for them to have another vision of everything as empty voids or piñatas stuffed with non-dual love-bonbons.

In the immortal words of Dennis – “Bliss!” But it is easy to see that this paradise can easily turn into a nightmare. And even if it doesn’t in a direct, literal sense, its effects are hellish. These kinds of people do very little to dispel the misery that afflicts the human race. They may outwit millions of people and escape their wrath for wasting their time on this earth by enjoying themselves in this immoral way, but not so with Nature. Their deeds shall reverberate throughout the universe for all eternity.

This is a good place to end this overlong diatribe. I’ll continue this topic in a later post.
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Kelly Jones
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Re: Barriers on the spiritual path - part 1:

Post by Kelly Jones »

Sorry to interrupt, but it'd be good to leave this thread for Jupta's essay, and place discussion in another thread.
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