The True World
Philosophers—those teachers of life wisdom—in the day of Siddhattha Gotama, the Buddha (4th century B.C.E.), were expected to offer up a theory of The Absolute. (Come to think of it, they still are expected to do so; so let’s speak in the present tense here. I’ll return to Gotama in a moment.) An absolute is some Something from which all things ultimately emanate and to which all things ultimately return. Unlike the non-absolute actual world, The Absolute does not partake in the annoying and corrosive whims of change, difference, and indeterminacy. No, The Absolute is whole, complete, indivisible, and incorruptible. It is also invariably transcendent and/or pervasively immanent, indescribable, and ineffable (all claims that should raise one’s suspicions, I would think). In short, The Absolute reigns supreme as the Great And Irrefutable Explainer of The All. (You may have noticed: Absolutes tend toward Germanic capitals and Winnie-the-Poohian Monumentalityness.)
Now, you may be thinking: such a thing, an Absolute, is much too much for me; I do not deal in such grand things. But is that true? Are you sure? Following are just a few names that have been bestowed on The Absolute. Perhaps you will recognize a dear acquaintance here.
Logos; Dharma; Brahmin; Dao; The One; Intelligent Design; Universal Law; Cosmos; Fate; Destiny; Being; The It’s-All-Good; The Meant-to-Be; The Mathematical Absolute Infinite. These are names that say to you the universe in which you live is lovingly ordered, founded on reason, and inherently meaningful. These are names that proclaim: Rejoice! Contrary to all appearance, there is a True World!
God; Godhead; Brahma; Allah; Shiva; Rama; Atman; The Great Mother; The Goddess; etc., etc., etc. These are the “thousand and one” names (far too few by thousands) of the Great Deity, the Creator and Controller of All. Most believers in such an absolute seem to understand their deities in anthropomorphic terms. These names say: You are loved. You are protected. You shall escape from destinies of woe unscathed. But only if you believe in My Name! Or else . . .
There is also the lower case variety of absolutes. They are less promising than their upper case variety, but also less threatening.
water; fire; air; matter; quantum particles; bosons; superstrings. These words name underlying essences, fundamental building blocks, the basic stuff of the All. In an old Upanishad, a father imparts this idea to his son. He says, “look at all of these clay objects here, son. There are statuettes, utensils, cups, bowls, and much more besides. See how each is of a different shape, form, weight, and function?” “Indeed, it is so, father,” says the son. “And yet, as variegated as each is, all have clay as essence. Just so, son, are you perfectly identical with the essence of Brahmin. You, in fact, are that.” In short:The Universe “R” Us.
right; wrong; true; false; race; gender; democracy; justice; good; bad; me; you. Finally, every day the newspapers are filled with implicitly posited absolutes such as these.
What is the problem with this business of the Absolute? A look at the very word’s etymology will be instructive.
Absolute (adj.).
Late 14 century, from Middle French absolut (14c., Old French asolu, Modern French absolu), from Latin absolutus, past participle of absolvere “to set free, make separate” (see absolve). Most of the current senses were in Latin. Sense evolution is from “detached, disengaged,” thus “perfect, pure.” Meaning “despotic” (1610s) is from notion of “absolute in position;” hence absolutism. Absolute monarchy is recorded from 1735 (absolute king is recorded from 1610s). (Excerpted from the Online Etymological Dictionary. See link to the right.)
In my reading of this definition, the first problem with an absolute is that it “makes separate.” In fact, that is its very job. The Absolute is absolute precisely because it is trans-sentient, transcendent, beyond. The whole purpose of invoking an absolute is to allow for something unchanging in a world of change. “God is my rock.” More prosaically (and hence insidiously) Madison Avenue proclaims: “In a changing world one thing remains the same: The Prudential.” In the logic of the Absolute, it is just this “detachment, disengagement” that renders it “perfect, pure.” Why? Because your Absolute is utterly unruffled by the complex contingencies of the actual, and heart-breakingly messy, world–its uncertainty, multiplicity, serendipity, happenstance, playfulness, whim, vagary, caprice.
When we observe the world, is there really any wonder why we grasp at absolutes? I am not surprised in the least. I, too, of course, feel the “metaphysical need” (in Schopenhauer’s terms) for cosmic security. What feeling person does not yearn to escape from life somehow intact? Who does not fervently desire for his loved ones eternal safety? Who, in short, does not ache for absolution—for final, blissful, separation from the fire of consciousness?
Yet, our definition tells us that there is a dear, dear price to be paid for our absolution. That price is thedespotism of The Absolute. The despotism involves a doubling down of “making separate.” When I look to an absolute—for security, sureness, an answer and an explanation, in short, for help—am I not at the same time separating myself from myself, my life from my life?
This was precisely Gotama’s conclusion. For this reason, when asked to come clean on his notion of The Absolute, he did so, but in an extraordinarily ironic manner. His words have come down to us in a dialogue known as the Sabba Sutta: The Discourse on the All. I have written on this issue on this blog and elsewhere, so I will be brief. Gotama uses the language expected of him: he names an “All.” But what he identifies as this All is nothing more or less than the common human sensorium: eye and the seen; ear and the heard; nose and the smelled; tongue and the tasted; body and the felt; mind and the thought. He does not look beyond this sensorium, to, for instance, a deity or cosmic force; and he does not look within it, to, for instance, some minute element, such as water or fire or Atman or soul, concomitant with other entities and with the universe as a whole. Gotama says the “true world,” the totality, the whole, the absolute, is right on the surface of things. Look no further than your eyes and ears. In doing so, the observer (really, the meditator) will see, of course, that there is no absolute, there is just…well, look, listen, smell! Or, he will see that “The Absolute,” like “God” or “Its-All-Good,” areindeed within the sensorium—as thoughts only! (And don’t forget the fecund offspring of “thought:’ ideas, beliefs, hopes, wishes, fantasies, and much, much more.)
Yet, good Gotama knew his fellow humans all-too-well. He said that the available world will not be enough for us, so we will persist in clinging to our absolutes and, in so doing, cause endless trouble to ourselves and to others. Is that true? No? Well, have you read the newspaper today?
E. M. Cioran sums up some of these points in his usual pugnacious yet fun language.
The Buddha does not allude to an identifiable Being. Scorning the artifices of faith, he invites us to meditation. To engage our minds, he establishes its limit…He had a different notion of man [from St. Paul]…How meditate if everything must be referred to a supreme individual? What can we seek with psalms and prayers? What can we find? It is out of sloth that we personify our divinity and then appeal to Him. The Greeks awakened to philosophy the moment their gods were no longer adequate. Ideas begin where Olympus leaves off. To think [[[Gotama]] would add: and to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, too] is to stop venerating, to rebel against an enigma [and, let's add, a despot] and proclaim its bankruptcy. (From the essay “Rages and Resignations,” in The Temptation to Exist. I edited without changing the meaning.)
For those readers who would like to consider further this idea of Absolute-free living, I offer two useful text excerpts, below. The first is from William James’s essay “What is Pragmatism?” The second piece is from Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. Happy trails.
I. What Pragmatism Means
Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. “God,” “Matter,” “Reason,” “the Absolute,” “Energy,” are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.
Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work. Being nothing essentially new, it harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions and metaphysical abstractions.
II. How “The True World” Finally Became a Fable. The History of an Error.
The true world, attainable to the sage, the pious man and the man of virtue—he lives in it, he is it. (The most ancient form of the idea was relatively clever, simple, convincing. It was a paraphrase of the proposition “I, Plato, am the truth.”)
The true world which is unattainable for the moment, is promised to the sage, to the pious man and to the man of virtue (”to the sinner who repents”). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, more insidious, more evasive—it becomes a woman [my apologies here; I wholly disagree with Nietzsche's view of women. GW], it becomes Christian.)
The true world is unattainable, it cannot be proved, it cannot promise anything; but even as a thought, alone, it is a comfort, an obligation, a command. (At bottom this is still the old sun; but seen through mist and skepticism: the idea has become sublime, pale, northern, Königsbergian [i.e. Immanuel Kant. GW].
The true world—is it unattainable? At all events it is unattained. And as unattained it is also unknown. Consequently it no longer comforts, nor saves, nor constrains: what could something unknown constrain us to? (The grey of dawn. Reason stretches itself and yawns for the first time. The cock-crow of positivism.)
The ”true world” —an idea that no longer serves any purpose, that no longer constrains one to anything—a useless idea that has become quite superfluous, consequently an exploded idea: let us abolish it! (Bright daylight; breakfast; the return of common sense and of cheerfulness; Plato blushes for shame and all free-spirits kick up a shindy.)
The Sail of Ulysses
Wallace Stevens
Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea, read his own mind.
He said, “As I know, I am and have
The right to be.” Guiding his boat
Under the middle stars, he said:
If knowledge and the thing known are one
So that to know a man is to be
That man, to know a place is to be
That place, and it seems to come to that;
And if to know one man is to know all
And if one’s sense of a single spot
Is what one knows of the universe,
Then knowledge is the only life,
The only sun of the only day,
The only access to true ease,
The deep comfort of the world and fate.
There is a human loneliness;
A part of space and solitude,
In which knowledge cannot be denied,
In which nothing of knowledge fails,
The luminous companion, the hand,
The fortifying arm, the profound
Response, the completely answering voice,
That which is more than anything else
The right within us and about us,
Joined, the triumphant vigor, felt,
The inner direction on which we depend,
That which keeps us the little that we are,
The aid of greatness to be and the force.
…
There is no map of paradise.
The great omnium descends on us.
As a free race, we know it one
By one in the right of all. Each man
Is an approach to the vigilance
In which the litter of truths becomes
A whole, the day on which the last star
Has been counted, the genealogy
Of gods and men destroyed, the right
To know established as the right to be.
Let’s view Stevens’ Ulysses as a symbol of the meditator. (Identical, perhaps, to a symbol of the seeker.) What can we learn?
As a meditator, you sit in stillness, silence, and simple awareness. The place and time of your sitting are right under the contours of your breath, under the shape of your sail. Your breath animates your body, your being. Like the boat’s sail in relation to the wind and the sea, your breath both symbolizes and constitutes your passage through life.
To sit like this is to cross the giant sea of your existence by night. For, what will be your guiding light? Normally, the interplay of cognition and language is. But sitting in stillness, silence, and simple awareness necessarily corrodes the primacy of language as your means of knowing. Haven’t you come to distrust your language—your naming, valuing, judging, categorizing, hierarchizing, thising, and thating? As a meditator, you have learned to view the internal flow of discursiveness in the same light as the whoosh of a passing car or the twitter of a bird. In what light is that? Without language, by what signs will you be guided?
Ulysses looks for light in his own mind, reads it. The middle stars are not beyond the sphere of heaven. Their light is visible from earth. The meditator, like Ulysses, sees, and thus, knows the totality before him. He observes, that is, this light of the omnium, the plenum, this fullness that is an abyss of impermanance, this resplendence of the all that appears to him. As grandiose as this may sound, it speaks of nothing other than the simple sway of phenomena that rise and fall in, through, with, alongside (does any preposition fit?) your mind, your conscious awareness. The meditator recognizes that only as he knows just this, he is, and has the right to be. Being is not reasoning about being. It certainly is not weaving metaphysical embroidery about what may lie beyond the middle stars. Such knowing is not the result of new information about the world processed through language-cognition. Ulysses’s/the meditator’s knowing is not analogous to an “optical” apprehension. It is not the case that there is a subject who sees an object, all three of which (the seeing included) remain unaffected by the relation. What, then?
Knowledge and the thing known are one. Gotama, the great meditator, said something similar:
In the seeing (and in the hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking; in,that is, our continually unfolding sensorial knowing) let there be just the seeing, etc. When for you, this is the case, then you will not identify with the seen, the heard, the smelled, the tasted, the felt, the thought. And if you do not so identify, then you will not be located in them. If you are not located in them, then there will be no here, no there, no in-between. And this will be the end of unease. (Udāna 1.10,Bahiya Sutta)
This end of unease is a big claim, isn’t it? Ulysses, though, claims, too, that such knowing is The only access to true ease/The deep comfort of the world and fate—our fate to be human beings and all that that being entails. What kind of knowing is this that marks the beginning of true ease? It is a knowing that is intimately attentive to the continuous transition we name “life.” It is neither a static inventory of the being of settled, nameable things nor a mythologized account of some teleological becoming. No, the knowing is this full-bodied sense of a single spot (the universe is always “here,” always “now”). This knowledge is the only life there is. For what other could there be? (Do you wish to separate your life from your life?)
Every meditator knows well the human loneliness that sitting entails. Yes, it may turn out that you come to know—to experience intimately—the inseparable interconnectedness of self and environment. But you will come to this awareness through the loneliness of sitting in silence, alone (even when with others), facing a wall, in near darkness. What the meditator comes to realize in sitting like this, though, is the real source of loneliness: there is no map of paradise. The meditator begins to see—sometimes to her horror—that her secret chart to the buried treasure has yellowed beyond recognition. She is then left with nothing but the light of her immediate awareness to guide her. Eventually, the meditator begins to value this loneliness as A part of space and solitude/In which knowledge cannot be denied. How could any of the knowledge as articulated above be denied or fail? For the vivifying, invigorating, life-giving knowledge the meditator seeks is precisely of the luminous companions coursing through experience, appearing, however fleetingly, before the reading mind. From here, from passing through this lonely space, the meditator develops the inner direction that determines her next step.
You can find no substitute on this journey. No one can stand in for you and no other journey will do. Ulysses proclaims that in engaging this work, in undertaking the (meditative) journey, you are taking your place as a member of the free race (free, as opposed to bound?—and by what?). Doing so, the all, the whole of experience as it unfolds—the great omnium—will settle before you. And you, through the vigilance of practice, will become the very instrument through which fragmented, atomized, fractured reality—the litter of truths—will coalesce into a whole existence. It will mean that you have counted the last star, have finished with your incessant valuation of reality’s inventory. The cost is dear, though: the genealogy/Of gods and men destroyed. What entails this destruction is the meditator’s inability to maintain his subscription to the program, to persist in agreement with the group, to adhere to society’s forms of meaning-making myth. Only once we perform this genealogical undoing have we earned the right/To know established as the right to be.
Only then can the meditator genuinely say, along with Ulysses: As I know, I am and have/The right to be.
