CHAPTER 12

Reading Siddhartha to Freya at Forest Lake

Then one is no longer disturbed by the play of opposites.

—Patajali

 

 

It was the summer before our daughter, Freya, began high school, and my wife and I had rented a cabin at Forest Lake. Freya brought Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha along. She was obliged to read the book before her first week of classes but was finding it hard going. The prose was tautologous and inelegant, the philosophy obtuse, and it was only a matter of time before she asked if I could read it to her and explain what it was about. And so we sat on the porch together in the evening, as a ruby-throated hummingbird flickered at the nectar-filled bird feeder and a fisherman in an aluminum dinghy drifted slowly around the edge of the lake, casting his fly upon the water. I tried to explain the Eastern view of enlightenment: how one seeks to distance oneself from the distractions of this world-the craving for wealth or fame, possessions, home comforts, luxury goods-in order to be more attuned to the mysteries of existence. But to Freya, at fourteen, it was inexplicable that one should deny oneself the pleasures of life and go wandering in a forest, neglecting one's appearance, depriving oneself of basic comforts, and exposing oneself to the elements.

“But there are elemental pleasures,” I said, “that are different from the pleasures of everyday life. When you go swimming in the lake, and go out far, don't you sometimes feel as if your body and the water flowed together, that the swimming was so natural and effortless that it just happens, and you are in your element, like a fish?”

Freya understood.

“That is close to what Siddhartha sought,” I said. “That oneness with the world.”

“But I like clothes,” Freya said. “I like looking good. I like good food. Is that wrong?”

“No,” I said. “But we can bring a lot of unhappiness upon ourselves by thinking that we absolutely must have these things if we are to have a life. One doesn't have to live without these things, but it may be useful to know that the greatest fulfillment in life does not come from them. That is why people sometimes give things up, at least for a while, depriving themselves of sleep, food, shelter, speech, and sex. It helps them get their lives into perspective, to see what is real and what is illusory.”

“Then why did Siddhartha have an affair with Kamala, and become a merchant, and live the life of the world? Why didn't he stay in the forest, or go with the Buddha?”

“Because the road of excess can also lead to the palace of wisdom. Because overindulging in the things of this world can have the same effect as depriving yourself of them. These are all experiments with yourself, as you search for the right balance between being a part of the world and remaining apart from it. Sometimes we need to take a break from the world, like coming here to Forest Lake. But if we lived here all year round, we might get bored with it. Same with books. They can help us understand the world, but sometimes it is good to get away from books and simply experience things as they are, like this lake and the pines around it. That was why Siddhartha could not follow the Buddha, as Govinda did. The teachings of the Buddha would have got in the way of Siddhartha understanding the meaning of those teachings in his own way, in his time.”

“I know that,” Freya said. “Sometimes I don't listen to my teachers or my books, but if I am interested in a subject I read about it in my own way and learn about it for myself.

 

I sit on the jetty as the sun goes down, inhaling the dry odor of pines, the scent of resin. A late breeze disturbs the surface of the lake. I also feel it on my face. On the yonder shore—a splash of sunlight on a mown lawn, a red barn. Nearer at hand—trampled pine cones, fallen branches, moss-covered stones, saplings, and a bough lifted and badgered by a sudden gust of wind. Below me, the shallows are amber in the sunlight. A shoal of small fish passes through them as through a glass of ale. Th e wind flips the page of my notebook against the back of my hand, and I stop writing.

In my amateurish attempts to explain Buddhism to my daughter, I had become aware of the foolishness of trying to characterize any human life in terms of a worldview, religious or secular.¹ To explain the life of an individual Buddhist in terms of Buddhist scripture would be as absurd as looking for the Sermon on the Mount in the life of a Christian. “The whole is the false,”² Adorno wrote, turning Hegel on his head. What one discovers in any biography is never an entire culture or ethos, but only fragments. A life is an improvisation in which those fragments represent our fitful, opportunistic inventions of a language that speaks to our changing circumstances.

I began to think of my own life, then, and of its many metamorphoses, its unceasing movement between solitude and sociality.

The role of outsider came easily to me; it enabled me to make a virtue out of my social ineptitude. Roaming the hills around my hometown, walking alone in the bush, or tracing the course of a local stream, I was at peace. Among my peers, I felt lost. Yet I was determined to redress this imbalance, to overcome my shyness, to write my way into the world.

That willpower was so necessary to achieving this indicates how habituated I had become to solitude. And in times of great adversity, when my will failed me, I would yield to my older impulse and retreat from the world as a hurt animal might retreat to a mountain lair to lick its wounds. Alone I might be, but never lonely.

When I took up yoga, I found a new pretext for distancing myself from the world, just as Hesse may have found in Buddhist notions of nonattachment a rationale for abandoning his wife and children, for whom he felt deep ambivalence. So absorbed did I become in yogic practices for disciplining body, breath, and mind that I was scarcely aware of how remote and disinterested I now seemed to my friends. All balance between self-absorption and worldly involvement was lost. I could sit in a full lotus, or stand equally still, on my head or my feet, but I moved among my friends carelessly or indifferently. I achieved physical strength and poise, calmness and concentration of mind, but at the expense of my ability to respond fully and sympathetically to others. Indeed, it took me several years to realize that yoga, as the word itself implies, is a way of integrating or harmonizing self and world, and not a justification for world renunciation. This view was underscored by B. K. S. Iyengar, who established the tradition in which I trained.

There is a…balance to be achieved between the philosophical life and the practical life.³

Religious life is not to withdraw from the everyday world…I am within and I am without. That is known as balance. If we can live like that, it is religion.⁴

People sometimes ask me whether it is possible to practise yoga and lead a normal family life. Is my own example not enough to give you the answer? In my early days, many people tried to tempt me to become a sannyasin. I said, “No, I will marry. I will see the struggles and the upheavals of the world, and I will practise.” So I am an old soldier. I have six children and I still practise yoga. I have not abandoned my responsibilities towards other people. I can live in life as a witness without being part and parcel of the action. I may be here, I may speak, I may help other people, but I can become completely detached in a split second. That is what yoga has given me.⁵

 

It is impossible to speak of the practice of yoga without addressing the question of belief—of the worldview in which the practices are embedded. Although yoga has been understood very differently in different Indian traditions, and by different Indian practitioners and preceptors,⁶ there would appear to be greater discontinuities between Indian and Western conceptions of yoga than there are within India itself. Iyengar's autobiographical essays and yoga commentaries, for example, are so replete with allusions to Hindu religious and social values, prophetic dreams and visions, ayurvedic medical philosophy and Patajali's Yoga Sutras, that one could easily conclude that yoga was intrinsically Indian and only partially within the reach of Westerners.⁷ Two arguments can be made against this assumption. First, the ethical restraints (yama) and disciplines (nyama), named by Patajali as the first two branches of yoga, are not unique to yoga. It is only with the third and fourth branches—techniques of the body and breath—that yoga proper begins.⁸ As Iyengar notes, mastery and enlightenment can be attained through diligence in one or two of the branches and do not require mastery of them all. “Mahatma Gandhi did not practice all the aspects of yoga. He only followed two of its principles—non-violence and truth…. If a part of yama could make Mahatma Gandhi so great, so pure, so honest and so divine, should it not be possible to take another limb of yoga—asana—and through it reach the highest level of spiritual development?”⁹ Second, yoga is universal. Citing Patajali's description of yoga as sarvabhauma (bhauma = world; sarva = all), Iyengar asks: “Two thousand five hundred years ago Patajali did not divide East from West. Why should we do so today?”¹⁰ However, Iyengar's stronger argument for the universality of yoga derives not from Patajali, whose knowledge of the “West” was probably limited and indirect, but from his own experience as a well-travelled teacher and therapist who has seen that many of the physical ailments and existential quandaries that human beings come up against are similar throughout the world. “So do not get carried away by the words which are used in different countries,” he concludes. “The essence is the same. Look into the essence and do not be misled by the names.”¹¹

This was borne out by my own practice of Iyengar yoga over a period of thirty-seven years. The eight “limbs” of yoga, as enunciated by Patajali—yama (ethical constraints), niyama (purifying disciplines), asanas (techniques of the body), pranayama (techniques of the breath), pratyahara (inwardness), dharana (inward focus), dhyana (trained contemplation), samadhi (the peace that passeth all understanding)—are neither exotic nor uniquely Indian. Indeed, yoga practice does not, of itself, require or entail any particular ethos or worldview. One may become a vegetarian, as I did, but there is no necessary relationship between doing yoga and embracing an ethic of ahimsa (nonviolence), truthfulness (satya), or nonpossessiveness (aparigraha). Nor does it follow that assuming postures named after various animal and plant species implies a totemic or shamanistic disposition.¹² As for yogic training, this is a matter of practice, not precept. As Iyengar put it, “To a beginner, do not explain; just put him in the correct pose (to give him the feeling, the understanding). One can know all theory, yet in practice know nothing.”¹³

Not everyone would share this nondoctrinaire point of view. For many people, practice and credo are mutually entailed. To merely go through the motions of meditating or praying without experiencing the religious rationale for the practice is bad faith. Belief is seen as a script or blueprint that guides our actions, and our actions should, it is implied, bear out our belief.

My own view is very different. That one may experience, through yoga practice, an exhilarating consonance of body and mind, and even, at times, experience an undistracted, euphoric state of being in which the boundaries between oneself and the world disappear cannot be taken as evidence that one has attained a superior state, let alone a divine one, or that one is now warranted to capitalize on one's experience as a guru or sage. Experience, in itself, proves nothing. It gives no good grounds for making epistemological or eschatological claims. It is to Kant that we owe this argument against what he termed “the parlogisms of pure reason,” in particular, the mistake of moving from a necessary feature of our representations of the world to a conclusion about the world's actual nature. We may have a strong sense of being substantial selves that remain consistent over time, or we may have had an overwhelming experience of satori (disappearance of the ego, union with the One), but in neither case can we draw ontological conclusions about the nature of the experiencing subject or the objective nature of the cosmos. Accordingly, to momentarily enjoy a sense of union between body and mind does not mean that Descartes's separation of body (res extensa) from mind (res cogitans) is untenable, any more than the ability to still one's discursive consciousness is a sign of enlightenment. As Agehananda Bharati puts it, “If there is some ulterior Truth somehow linked to [mystical] experience, we cannot know it.”¹⁴ Moreover, the zero-experiences that Christians call grace and Hindus call samadhi may never come to those whose entire lives have been devoted to attaining these states, yet come unbidden to many who have never gone in quest of them.¹⁵

Our tendency to ontologize and exoticize experience is understandable. Without a strong personal experience of God's presence and power, it would be difficult to sustain a belief in His existence. But enlightenment may also be understood as not finding God, of being able to resist jumping to the conclusion that certain experiences confirm the existence of one of the extrahuman or extrasensory entities with which every social imaginary is replete, of seeing these entities as props or means of coping with and finding satisfaction in a world that defies our best attempts to know and control it. Divinities—like subtle bodies, biofields, astral forces, and auras—are heuristic, not ontological, categories. To place them in brackets, suspending the question as to whether they really exist, does not necessarily lead us to dismiss them as illusions, for they are necessary illusions that can have real consequences for our well-being.

Agehananda Bharati has labored these same points in his own attempts to demystify religious experience. “Mystical experience does not confer the status of objective existence on what has been experienced,” he writes. Nor does the existence or nonexistence of the Godhead make “the slightest difference to my meditation or my ritual.”¹⁶ In short, Bharati's embrace of Indian mythology, theology, and ritualism bypasses belief. Moreover, it entails the view that the bonds of belief are inimical to emancipation.¹⁷ Iyengar's approach to yoga is remarkably similar. Yoga practice is not grounded in belief, he observes, but faith. “When I was suffering from tuberculosis and got healthy through yoga, I did not believe that yoga was going to cure me. It cured me. That gave me faith. Faith is not belief. It is more than belief. You may believe something and not act on it, but faith is something you experience. You cannot ignore it. If you ignore it, it is not faith. Belief is objective—you may take it or leave it. But faith is subjective—you cannot throw it out.”¹⁸

There are echoes here of Karl Jaspers's view that faith is neither a possession nor a form of knowledge.¹⁹ Rather, it belongs to the perennially uncertain space between all that lies within our grasp and all that eludes it.

The impulse to retreat from the world may thus be understood as a strategy for recovering a sense of security and stability in the face of circumstances that overwhelm us, a way of standing still or reorienting ourselves when worldly involvements bewilder or break us. Faith is a recognition that it is possible to come to terms with such experience, to periodically die to this world and reenter it anew.

In a BBC interview with Wole Soyinka, the seventy-two-year-old Nigerian writer is sitting on a stone wall. Behind him is a dirt road and some mango trees. The man who spent two years and four months in prison during the Nigerian civil war—a year and ten months of it in solitary confinement—speaks of the difference between involuntary and voluntary withdrawal from the world. Incarceration and solitary confinement are forms of torture, he says. Ways of “breaking the mind.” “But to retreat to my childhood home and spend my days in seclusion here, I cannot get enough of it. I am a glutton for tranquility. My selfish search is always for a place like this.” Elsewhere, he observes, “I cannot wait to repossess the bush, or maybe it is the other way around, let the bush repossess me. The bush and its furtive breath. Refuge and solace.”²⁰ Yet despite the dangers of political engagement, Soyinka suggests that the writer who needs peace and quiet in order to work also needs the turmoil of the world if he is to have something to write about. This paradox is embodied in the combative-creative figure of Ogun that Soyinka has made his tutelary deity. “He could be such a peaceful person, yet he could go to war at a pinch.” In the same vein, Soyinka speaks of activism and art as Siamese twins that cannot be operated upon without one or both of them dying.²¹

Imperturbability can be a virtue. To “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,”²² to remain calm in the midst of chaos, is a kind of transcendence. But it is not a transcendent state that is achieved, but an acceptance of the “incompleteness of the world, the imperfectability of man [and] the impossibility of a permanently valid world order.”²³ In short, the stone is always situated within the stream, buffeted and abraded by it.

By contrast, there are those who seek stone as a symbol of solidity and constancy—a place outside the turbulence of life's seas and streams.

In the fall of 2009 I travelled to Denmark for a conference of anthropologists and philosophers, all of whom were doing research on questions of ontological trust and uncertainty.

During my flight from Boston to Rejkyavik, I left my seat to stretch my legs and fell into conversation with a man around my age who, with his wife, was on his way to join a cruise that would take them on a circumnavigation of the North Atlantic. He was wearing a baseball cap with the insignia of a parachute regiment, and a fisherman's shirt whose pockets were crammed with pens, reading glasses, and gadgets. No sooner had Paul Herrick introduced himself and told me his destination than he asked whether there was anything I had wanted to do in my life but hadn't, whether there was anything I now regretted having not done or left unexplored. It occurred to me that he had been watching the Rob Reiner movie The Bucket List, about two terminally ill men who escape a cancer ward and head offon a road trip with a wish list of things to do before they die—driving a Formula One car, sky-diving, climbing the pyramids, going on a lion safari in Africa, and so on.

“No, I don't think there is,” I said.

“Then you're a fortunate man,” Paul said.

“What about you?” I asked.

Paul, it turned out, was one of those people who ask all the questions. So he responded to my question with another of his own.

“What's the difference between man and the animals?”

I hazarded a few guesses, already trying to figure out how to extricate myself politely from this situation. “Language? Intra-specific violence? Conceptual thought?”

“Man seeks perfection,” Paul announced, answering his own question and ignoring my own. And he explained how this and other profound insights into the human condition were contained in The Urantia Book.

First published in Chicago by the Urantia Foundation in 1955, The Urantia Book claims to have been given by celestial beings as a revelation to our planet, Urantia. Paul first read it when he came out of the army in 1962. It took him a year and a half to get through its more than two thousand pages. “I was fascinated,” Paul said, but I thought it was bullshit. Then I read it again. Halfway through, I realized it was the truth. It all made perfect sense. Let me tell you, that moment was the biggest thrill of my life. I was a young daredevil. I'd scuba dived in the Arctic, skydived, done stunt flying. I was one of the guys who formed The Golden Knights.²⁴ Been a thrill seeker all my life,²⁵ but, like I say, The Urantia Book, when I realized what it was, that was the biggest thrill I'd ever experienced.”

Our conversation ended with sudden turbulence; the “fasten seatbelts” sign came on, and Paul and I were asked to return to our seats. Half an hour later, when we had regained stable air, Paul sought me out again. I left my seat and we worked our way back to the toilet area where there was space to stand. Paul was apologetic at first for boring me with his talk of Urantia. “You probably think I'm crazy. You probably want to hide somewhere so you don't have to hear me go on about Urantia.”

I assured him that this was not the case. His story intrigued me. I was particularly interested in something he had said about faith: “You must pursue and keep faith with what is real for you, even if it has little reality for anyone else. Like me wanting to hold the world record for the most aircraft types jumped from. So far I've jumped from one hundred and sixteen different types of aircraft, and I'm looking for more.”

Paul paused. “I think I know what you're driving at. You want to know what brought me to The Urantia Book.”

In 1960, two years before he read The Urantia Book, Paul had made a routine parachute jump. His main chute failed to open. It was a streamer. He tried to deploy the reserve chute. Nothing happened. He realized he was going to die. In a desperate effort to deploy the reserve chute, he grabbed it (“They had no ‘pilots’ in those days”) and hurled it toward the horizon. “It almost tore me in two, the force of it. But I survived.” Paul went on to say that he had been raised in the Methodist Church. “But something about it was implausible. I couldn't accept it, and I didn't like organized religion. I had to come to the answers in my own way. My son is an aeronautical engineer, like me. A brilliant one. I talk to him, he listens, but he doesn't see what I see. My sisters are the same, except they won't even listen. They're fundamentalists. One burned a Urantia Book, page by page. The work of the devil, she called it. You can talk to a person until you're blue in the face. It's not going to happen. For some, it comes gradually; for others, it comes as a shock. Like a sledgehammer. It knocks you sideways. It opens you up to what's really going on out there. You can't prove a thing, you can't touch it or see it, but when you know it's there you know it more surely than you know I'm standing here talking to you.”

I told Paul I was an anthropologist. I wanted to tell him that I had also been frustrated getting my message across—trying through my writing to reach a broad audience and disabuse people of their mistaken notions of non-Western peoples. But Paul presumed I dug up bones and ancient civilizations, and was keen to know what I would make of the chronology revealed in The Urantia Book and the “four epochal events.”

“You know much more about anthropology than I do,” Paul said, “but I'll bet you'll have many aha moments when you read The Urantia Book. It will tie together and fill in the gaps in your knowledge of anthropology. You will suddenly know what to look for, and where to look, that your colleagues don't. You will be able to explain the heretofore unexplainable.”

I set little store by revealed knowledge, so I could not follow Paul to where he wanted to take me. And when, in due course, Paul sent me excerpts from The Urantia Book that advocated eugenic solutions to the “problem” of racially or intellectually “degenerate” and “socially unfit” forms of humanity, I called an end to our correspondence.

Nevertheless, for months thereafter, I wondered how someone who sought risks in life should be attracted to a book of bogus revelations, a work of the fascist imagination in which devotion to a single absolute authority figure goes hand in hand with obedience to some absolute law.

We all have to find answers that work for us, and we arrive at them in our own way. But what attitude does an intellectual adopt in the face of the multifarious worldviews to which people become attached, and the universal claims that are made for them? Can we achieve Jaspers's “philosophical faith” that accepts the finite limits of what we may know, and not fall into nihilism, relativism, or despair?²⁶

About the time I wrote these lines and posed this question, I happened to read Kendra Goodson's final essay for my 2009 course “The Shock of the New.” In her essay, Kendra describes one of her first nights on call as a hospital chaplain, when a seventeen-year-old man was brought to the emergency room with a gunshot wound to the head. The wound was self-inflicted, and the young man died soon after admission. “As a chaplain,” Kendra writes, “I was supposed to be offering words of hope and comfort,” and so she led the grieving family in prayer. But as the father began to weep into his hands, Kendra said something “that I regretted as soon as it had slipped out—‘It doesn't make sense.’” She then placed her hand on the father's back. Soon after, his sobbing began to subside, and “as he wiped tears from his face, he looked at me and said, ‘You're right, it doesn't make sense.’ I was astonished,” Kendra writes, “to see relief in his eyes as he said these words,” as if facing up to the arbitrariness and precariousness of existence were not paralyzing but healing.

Reviewing the conversations, encounters, and stories that I have juxtaposed in this book, I see far less evidence of union, reconciliation, or balance than of struggle and of aporias, suggesting an inescapable sense that no one life ever encompasses or comprehends Life itself, that no one is identical to the class to which he or she ostensibly belongs, and that we are just as bound to project our own self-understandings onto the world at large as we are fated to be shaped by events and influences that remain beyond our practical and conceptual grasp. In Nietzsche's exhortations that philosophy be more experimental, in the radical empiricism of William James, with its emphasis on the intransitive as well as the transitive aspects of our experience, in Karl Jaspers's notions of the encompassing and the limit, in Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics and Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism, one glimpses a lineage of ideas that disavow the possibility of closing the gap between the way we represent the world to ourselves and the way the world is actually constituted. Rather than seek, through science or rational analysis, new ways of creating certain knowledge, these thinkers urge us to describe all that gets excluded in such quests for certainty. By opening our minds to the unsettling strangeness that lies on the margins of what we think we know and can name, our world maps may lose their value but we enter other worlds thereby, not with dread but exhilaration, realizing the truth of Sextus Empiricus's argument²⁷ that skepticism may be embraced as a way of life (agoge) or disposition (dunamis) as well as an aporetic method of thought, and that the suspension of judgment (epoché) may help us achieve inner tranquility and peace of mind (ataraxia).