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LIBERATION FROM OR OF THE SELF
This chapter expands on the ideas presented in
Consciousness in
the East and the West. I recommend reading that chapter
first for better context.
There are many forms of freedom. In spiritual matters, two
radically different types of freedom are at play: the freedom of
the body and the unique individuality operating within it, or
freedom from that 'I' or ego.
Embedded in the historical DNA of spiritual traditions in both
the East and West is the belief that the body and physical life
are obstacles to true freedom. As a result, these traditions,
particularly in Eastern spirituality, have predominantly sought
liberation from the self, understood as an identification with
the body.
However, in Western Christian traditions, the duality between
'spirit' and 'flesh' offers a more nuanced perspective.
Influenced by the Greek ideal of a beautiful soul in a beautiful
body, the relationship between body and soul was less
adversarial. There was even the possibility of friendship and
mutual coexistence, where body and soul could harmoniously
support one another.
Let us start with an exploration of the Indian liberation
project.
Chapter I - Liberation from the Self
In India, I once read many years ago in a local new, paper that a
baby conceived in a hospital in New York had screamed:
"Oh no!... not again!"
The Eastern idea that human life is fundamentally suffering
creates a longing to escape it. The goal is to escape the
strenuous life of the body. This can be done by meditating
oneself out of earthly existence. Through a spiritual
purification process, where the body's thirst for life is
neutralized, the vicious cycle of rebirths is transcended. The
spirit is now free from bodily existence.
Therefore, the highest human ideal is to be free from desires.
The desireless person can even triumph over gods. In the
Puranas, it says: There is nothing the gods fear more than a
person who desires nothing.
The paradox is that the spirit can only become free from the
body after it has disciplined the body to no longer follow its
natural instincts.
Untimely Fractures
Both in the East and the West, since ancient times, there have
been conflicts between our biological "animal" nature and our
spiritual ambitions. These conflicts, from my historical
perspective, seem to follow a certain pattern. We become
"civilized" in waves. The transition from a hunter-gatherer
existence to an agricultural life required a radical
intensification of self-control. The transformation from
agrarian life to imperial life in larger cities again required a
retraining of our behavior. This pattern can be chronologically
continued with historical examples.
Especially at the fractures between old and new social orders,
the operating systems within us have been untimely out of sync.
The older the biological operating systems are, the more
difficult they are to adapt in times of change. Older systems
are more unconscious, and without consciousness, change is
difficult. Furthermore, the archaic parts of us were gradually
created with aeonic brushstrokes, free from the accelerating
cultural changes of the last 50,000 years.
In these transitional phases, the willing and visionary spirit
and the instinct-ridden, lustful, fearful, and aggressive body
have stood against each other like dog and cat. Only with the
application of large doses of both carrot and stick have the
archaic instinct-programmed systems within us "understood" and
sluggishly learned the new behavioral demands dictated by
societal consciousness. After a few generations, it seems that
the new cultural behavior becomes habitually embedded as a norm,
resulting in a temporary truce between spirit and body.
I see such a truce in the sexual liberation of the 60s. Modern
industrial civilization had finally completed its education of
the body. It had successfully raised a well-functioning
industrial body, and it was now time to relax a bit and give the
body a bone to gnaw on.
The youth rebellion and the hippie movement brought this moment
to full release, but at the same time, birthed a hippie who
would throw the same culture from its sensual hedonism into a
sensorial anticlimax. In my view, it is no coincidence that
Steve Jobs was both an LSD-hippie and a control freak. Only such
an anachronism was able to create the abyss we all gaze into
today: the smartphone.
The Illusively Virtual Wave of Civilization
We are currently facing a civilizing wave of such extensive
character that perhaps nothing like it has ever been seen
before. This time, it is about the transition from an industrial
society to an accelerating, high-tech, artificially intelligent
global society.
In this virtualized flux society, there is no longer a need for
men and masculine values. Especially, the redneck man is out of
the picture.
Again, the paradox is that the spirit seemingly can only be free
from the body once it has disciplined the body not to follow its
natural instincts—now with the addition that woman cannot be
free from man until he no longer follows his instincts.
Spirit's Virtual Reality
The Internet, the digital world, and technology, in general,
unfold an omnipresent, non-corporeal realm of consciousness.
Today, I have many close friends all over the globe. Our bodies
never or rarely meet. We live in a virtual spiritual community,
with more emotional charge and attraction than the meeting of
bodies that happen to live nearby. I love having long, deep
WhatsApp conversations with my friend Sanatan from New Delhi. My
friend Justin from Los Angeles is battling prostate cancer. I
see his sad face in real-time on my smartphone, and our
conversations make both of us happy. My girlfriend lives in
Prague. It would not have been possible to have a girlfriend in
Prague and live in Copenhagen 15 years ago. Today, it is faster
and cheaper for me to fly there than to take the train from
Copenhagen to Kolding.
Time and space implode into the wormholes of miraculous
technology.
In this context, it is interesting that several influential
people, including Elon Musk, with scientific evidence behind
them, are convinced that the reality we live in is a simulation.
It is, in fact, not real.
The overarching thought that ties this chapter together is that
the digital world we are increasingly drawn into is
body-negating. Essentially, like in The Matrix, we do not need a
body to be digitally connected.
Thus, the mental-digital world of the spirit, in its
anti-corporeality, repeats an old Indian understanding of
reality: The world is an illusion.
The Eastern 'Liberation' Project
When, as a young person shaped by the freedom dreams of the 60s
over 40 years ago, I read about the inner struggles between soul
and body in the Middle Ages and antiquity, it seemed strangely
foreign. For us young people, bodily liberation was the same as
spiritual liberation and vice versa. Paradoxically, from this
standpoint, I see how history is repeating itself today. Once
again, the body and the spirit are on a collision course.
Later, during my stays in India in the 1990s, I gained insight
into an old polarity between body and spirit that, in the Indian
time machine, had survived in small isolated pockets up until
today. Here, far from the tourist routes, I encountered remnants
of a spiritual culture that was likely thousands of years old.
In India, I had the opportunity to meet people whose lives were
radically different from anything we see on television or the
internet. In a way, it was like meeting aliens from outer space.
Retrieving completely unknown software from these people for my
own construction of reality and consciousness became a passion
for several years.
Although India today is predominantly Hindu, one cannot describe
its spiritual DNA without including Buddhism. For centuries,
India was predominantly dominated by Buddhism, which in many
ways is vastly different from Hinduism.
The State-Buddhist Middle Way
Buddhism took over but reconstructed the illusion concept in the
notion of samsara. Buddhism, as it unfolded in India under
Ashoka, was one of the world’s first attempts to construct a
mass-civilizational self-control. It emerged on the fertile
Ganges plain, which from 700 BCE experienced a radical economic
boom that would last for centuries. This economic rise was the
result of the emergence of the world’s first trans-cultural
mega-civilization—the Silk Road civilization, which, with its
network of urban civilizations like pearls on a string,
connected 70% of the world’s population in the period between
Buddha’s and Christ’s birth.
The new wealth set Hinduism’s feudal caste culture on a
collision course with the disruptive melting pots of the new
mega-cities. The metabolism of the big city and long-distance
trade along vulnerable Silk Routes required that everyone,
regardless of caste, culture, nationality, or language, could
interact peacefully in freedom, equality, and brotherhood.
Buddhism’s rules of conduct can, in this context, be boiled down
to the following tweet:
Behave properly—even toward people who are not part of your
clan.
It is therefore no coincidence that Ashoka, the founder of
empire Buddhism, placed all his over 100,000 stupas along trade
routes and monasteries in all major cities. Additionally, the
famous Ashoka pillars, with almost modern moral inscriptions,
were erected like traffic lights at all caravan crossroads.
Ashoka established the world’s first monastic system. These
monks’ task was not like that of Hindu sadhus, who withdrew into
Himalayan caves to seek personal liberation. The monastic
institutions became an integral part of the long-range
infrastructural metabolism of the trade routes. Here, the monks’
public demonstration of bodies in negation of desire inspired
the Silk Road civilization to non-violent and modest behavior.
Buddha’s first four teachings make almost too much
socio-economic sense in this context: There is
suffering—suffering is caused by desire—the cessation of desire
is the cessation of suffering, and finally, the self-controlling
conclusion: The Middle Way is the path to Nirvana. Buddhism, in
that sense, laid a preventative mental-protective field of
spiritual self-control over the polis culture that, like pearls
on a string, connected East and West. Ashoka Buddhism’s
trade-imperial mission, at the intersection of pan-religious
education through monks as role models and animist folk beliefs
like "Big KInd Buddha is watching you," helped make people less
inclined to attack the vulnerable trade routes.
Today, Buddhism has disappeared from India. However, its
spiritual DNA lives on. In India’s poorest state, Uttar Pradesh,
there is still today a social system where holy men, sadhus, in
lifelong wandering, settle temporarily in a village temple. In
the temple, there is either a hermetically sealed room or a deep
hole dug in the ground, intended for the holy man’s often
month-long meditations. The village sees it as a great honor to
receive such a sadhu. They are now assured of rain for their
crops. In the event that karma has determined it will not rain,
the sadhu’s life offers another important lesson to the
villagers: We live in hunger and frugality, but look at the holy
man in the hole! He is happy, yet has even less than us.
For the poor farmer and his family, it is inspiring to see how
the pain of what one does not have can be transformed by how one
takes it. That is why it is primarily the poorest people who
give alms to India’s wandering monks, the sadhus. They remind
the poor of how dignified life can be, even without clothes on
their backs.
In fact, I must admit that my respect for India’s poor is
immense.
Nowhere else in the world have I encountered such a dignified
culture of poverty.
For when the human in us weeps over what it has lost, the spirit
laughs at what it has found.
I know this is a dangerous viewpoint I am expressing here.
India’s extremely poor underclass is, in a way, happier than the
often self-satisfied nouveau-riche Indian middle class, even
happier than us in the West. (This only applies to the rural
poor, not the urban poor.) Spiritually, they are, in a sense,
superior to us. They have looked inward in renunciation and
thereby overcome the animal instincts and emotions triggered by
hunger, misery, and the worst forms of social and caste
oppression.
Where Was Capt. Lal Chand?
Nowhere is the idea that life is an illusion more pronounced
than in the Indian spiritual traditions' relationship with the
body. Where we in secular Western society call the spirit an
illusion because it cannot be measured or weighed, India calls
the physical world an illusion. A widespread meditation
technique is to endlessly repeat: I am not the body.
In 1995, I lived for about a year in North India in an Ashram
far from the new-age spiritual highways. For the next six years,
I returned periodically to this place. Here, I had the
opportunity to spend extended periods with people who had each
uniquely dedicated their lives to meditation. One of them was
Captain Lal Chand, who had fought in World War II on the side of
the English while exclusively focusing in meditation on the
total liberation of consciousness.
In the conversations I
had with him, he claimed that during that period, his
consciousness had been so detached from his body that he had no
idea what it had been doing during the war. When, after a couple
of years, he allowed his consciousness to descend back into his
body and the world of the senses, he found himself awarded an
English medal for bravery for his war efforts. For nearly three
years, he had, like a sleepwalker, been in a state of pure,
sleeping awareness on autopilot, while his consciousness was
only aware of consciousness itself, like two mirrors reflecting
nothing but each other.
Examples of this separation between body and spirit are numerous
in India.
It is only in consciousness that we are awake. In the older and
more animalistic operating systems of awareness, we are either
asleep or half-asleep. However, in these reflective sleepwalking
states of awareness, we are capable of performing most everyday
tasks, including, apparently, winning an English bravery medal.
Captain Lal Chand was likely not able to think new creative or
unusual thoughts during this period, nor to learn new behaviors.
Lal Chand's extreme life serves to illustrate just how far
consciousness can indeed distance itself from the body. However,
Lal Chand, here in Punjab, far from the beaten path, was not an
isolated case.
One remarkable thing was that these spiritual elders I met here
in Hoshiarpur in 1995—despite the fact that they had, to varying
degrees, pulled their consciousness 'up' and out of their
bodies—looked astonishingly happy and healthy, just like Lal
Chand. Their reflexes were as sharp as those of young people.
They were surprising, witty, and full of fluid intelligence.
I have truly never seen anything like it anywhere else in the
world.
The Stinking Station Master
Just as I had come to the conclusion that all these ancient sages were kind,
I met the Station Master.
After a visit with "The Station Master," as he was called, I embraced him as a
spontaneous thank you for the spiritually inspiring but unsettling visit. The
wise man reacted to my embrace with the following sarcasm:
"Why does this man embrace this body?
My wife says it stinks!"
My attempt to hug the sage prompted him to launch into further invective against
me. I was the stereotypical Westerner, overly inclined to give in to the
nonsense of my, in reality, non-existent body!
The Station Master
In fact, he preferred that I didn’t visit him again.
It would be a waste of time for both me and him. He turned to Bhaharadwaj,
who had brought me there, irritated: “Why do you bring all these unserious
people to me? And why do you keep coming here yourself? Don’t you know that
God is also in the street outside?”
The Station Master sat in the pre-monsoon heat in a small, airtight,
claustrophobic room without turning on the Casablanca fan. When I asked if
we could get the fan going, he mocked me again for being a slave to the
body's pursuit of comfort.
He sat cross-legged on his spartan bed in his small, suffocatingly hot, and
dark room. He had been sitting there for the past twelve years, hardly
moving. The Station Master asked me to come right up to his bed. He grabbed
my arm and pulled me with surprising strength right in front of him, so our
faces were almost touching. I inhaled the sweet, almost rotten smell of
sweat from his body.
“Do you have a question? If not, it’s better that you leave now!”
Without waiting for any potential question, he continued:
“You must choose. There is no middle ground. It is either this world or
GOD!”
He now pulled out a knife and waved it in front of my face. Then he
straightened his back and placed the blade against his Adam’s apple.
“I sat in the lotus position with this knife at my throat for ten years! I
said: Oh bodymind! If you try to tempt me with your illusory web of thoughts
and desires, I’ll use the knife!”
The Station Master is one of the most intense people I have ever met in my
life. His body was so thin and wrinkled with age that it appeared more dead
than alive, while his nearly blind eyes burned like spotlights. I took some
pictures of him, but he noticed the flash with his half-blind eyes and
threatened me with misfortune if I ever published the photos.
I staggered back out into the light, half-cursed and half-floating in a
bubble of consciousness and clarity. I never visited him again, but I
remember him as one of the people who shook and inspired me the most.
The Station Master had indeed denied the body to such an extent that he saw
himself as beyond any duality.
Although he didn’t see himself as part of any existing tradition, his
statements reminded me of the Indian Advaita Vedanta philosophy, which
claims that only THAT, meaning the spiritual self, exists. Here, dualism
becomes so extreme that it turns into monism. I thought of Advaita's perhaps
most distinguished representative, Ramana Maharshi, who called the world a
disease and the life of the body a disease within the disease. The body is
seen as an illusion within the illusion, a double illusion. The Station
Master was certainly on the same wavelength as this viewpoint.
Ramana sat for years in the meditative trance that Indians call
God-intoxication.
Later, he said of that period:
“Sometimes when I opened my eyes, the sun would rise. Other times, it would
set.”
In the Indian perspective, the body with all its desires and cravings must
be negated for the soul to become free. We find traces of the same thought
in the West, particularly in the worldview of the Church Father Augustine of
Hippo. But the Indians have always been far more radical when it comes to
denying the life of the body.
Diogenes in the Cowshed
In India, the illusory reality is symbolically represented by the
goddess Maya. She spins her web of dreams over humanity.
In Hoshiarpur, I also visited a hermit who had swapped his Himalayan cave
for a concrete cowshed in the middle of the city of Hoshiarpur. Here, the
hermit now sat with a blissful smile, his eyes closed in the unhealthy air
of fresh concrete and cow dung in a stall on some straw alongside cows and
buffaloes. These were conditions that no self-respecting Danish farm cow
would have accepted.
I thought of Alexander’s meeting with Diogenes in the barrel—not in the
sense that my life is otherwise comparable to Alexander's, but because of
the dignity the hermit radiated sitting in his stall.
“Move aside!” Diogenes said to Alexander... “For I have forsaken more than
you have conquered.”
I asked the hermit why he had traded the beautiful open Himalayan nature for
the company of cows in this small dark room. His answer was that it didn’t
matter since the world was an illusion anyway.
“What you see is Maya,” the wise man said to me from his stall. “Do not mix
reality with what you see here.
Consciousness alone exists!”
All over India, from Kanyakumari in the South to the Ganges River in the
Himalayas, one finds folk tales, poems, and philosophical writings, all with
the theme of life’s impermanence and transience. The moral is: Do not attach
yourself to your wife, your children, your house, or your life, because
before you know it, it’s all over. Let go of life before it lets go of you.
Life is as fleeting as a dewdrop in the morning.
The argument in these teachings about the illusory nature of the world is
that everything that changes is not real. Only that which is unchanging is
real. From this perspective, it is clear that no phenomena in time and space
can be real.
The all-pervasive perspective of the self, of consciousness, is presented
here in its timelessness and unchangeability as the only reality.
Indians call this timeless, unchanging state Brahman, or the Self. Only
Brahman is real for the Brahmins. Brahman is defined as consciousness in
itself.
Not being spiritually dependent on bodily comfort has developed in India to
such an extent that the very demonstration of control over the body becomes
a means of showing one’s strength, superiority—even in relation to God. Body
control here crosses over into body contempt. The sadhu, the wandering holy
man whose hand we see in the picture below, belongs to a sect that continues
to hold up an arm, day and night, until the arm’s blood supply stops, and it
withers and falls off.
Ung mand med løftet arm i Rishikesh, Nordindien - 2006
Illusion as a Survival Response to
Catastrophes
Cultures are shaped by their encounters with catastrophe. How do a country's
inhabitants deal with poverty, hunger, disease, and war?
No country, perhaps except for Russia, has been subjected to as many
regularly recurring catastrophes as Indian society. In Europe, we had the
plague in the 14th century and the Thirty Years' War. In India, the monsoon
has failed approximately every ten years for the past two thousand years,
creating disasters on a scale that we in the West have not known.
There are geneticists who believe that, due to historically recurring
famines, Indians have developed a special survival gene that allows them to
live longer without food than any other race. On the flip side, they cannot
cope with the new well-nourished middle-class lifestyle. Every third case of
diabetes in the world is an Indian. Indians hold the world record for heart
disease, especially among very young people. The famine gene hinders them
from fully enjoying India's modern consumer feast of good food.
Remarkably, India is the only 'civilized' country where, during significant
periods of history, organized cannibalism has been practiced as a survival
strategy. Parents have eaten their children and vice versa to survive. When
I present this historical evidence to Indians, they naturally deny it.
During the great famine of 1631—paradoxically the year before Shah Jahan
began constructing the obscenely lavish Taj Mahal, in stark contrast to his
millions of subjects who had no clothes on their backs—several European
travelers reported that organized sales of human flesh occurred in the
larger cities.
The connection between suffering and hunger can be seen as far back as the
more than 2,000-year-old Buddhist Jataka tales, which repeatedly juxtapose
the empty stomach against the morally right action. In the tale Ingratitude
Punished, we even witness a Bodhisattva helping to eat his brothers' wives
in order to survive.
The last remnants of this cannibalistic culture can be found among the
Aghoris, who can still be found in cities like Varanasi, where they live in
graveyards and ritually consume the flesh of the dead to demonstrate that
the world is an illusion.
An Aghori-like explanation for the construction of Indian illusion theology
is readily apparent. In a catastrophic culture, it does not pay to invest
life energy in a bodily 'earthly' life. Indian culture has, as a survival
response, instead specialized in freeing consciousness from the body. Spirit
alone exists—because the body will be gone before the morning dew has
evaporated from the fragile reeds of life.
The Fragmentation of the Caste System
Catastrophes alone, however, do not explain the whole picture. Another
important factor is the Indian caste system. India was (and still is) one of
the most fragmented cultures in the world due to its caste system. Even the
four main castes are divided into hundreds of sub-castes.
When the Afghan-Turkish Muslim Muhammad Gori stood before the gates of
Lahore at sunset in 1192, observing the enemy army, he had to ask his
military advisors in wonder:
"Why are there so many small fires?"
His advisors replied: "They are kitchen fires because food is being prepared
now."
"But why in the world are there so many small fires instead of a few large
ones like we have?"
"Because the Hindus are divided into castes. These castes cannot and will
not eat together."
Muhammad Gori smiled and said: "Then I have won the war!"
For if people cannot eat together, they cannot fight together either. A
warrior culture must necessarily be monotheistic in order to effectively
expand its business empire through 'churches' and cannons.
In India, the caste system adds an additional layer of fragmentation to an
already highly divided class society. The original word for caste is varna,
which means color. The caste system is a form of advanced apartheid that has
hindered dynamic social change to an extent unknown in Europe. India became
a buffet for invaders. Due to social hyper-fragmentation, Indians could not
keep their powder dry.
The extreme over-division of the population by the caste system made it
impossible to mobilize a collective survival response against both war and
volatile weather.
Catastrophes can only be tackled with solidarity and unity.
When a people have been hit by famine and/or invading armies from outside to
such an extent and are unable to mobilize an adequate survival response, it
makes sense to view the world as a place of suffering, where being reborn is
not a blessing but a curse to escape.
The Indian survival response is still evident today. It is: me first! You
can observe this in any Indian queue, even in international airports, where,
if I’m standing in the same queue, I must be cautious not to be snuck past,
even by respectable Indian ladies of my own age.
Even in modern India, one can see this illusive survival strategy reflected
in the phlegmatic Hindu face you encounter again and again on your journey
through the masses. This face seems wordlessly to say: when the next
unexpected slap hits, it doesn’t matter much... I’m not really present
anyway, because why would I be here in this illusory world?
What remains is a world that you don’t really need to clean up—why would you
bother?
Chewing Gum and Absence
On the way to India in 1992, only with Air India can you experience a toilet
door hanging from a single hinge. Back in my seat, my nervous gaze slid out
to the jet engine on the wing. Both engine and wing were, fortunately, where
they should be. Had Air India's mechanics borrowed a bolt from the toilet
door to hold the engine in place? India is full of on-the-spot solutions. I
call them chewing-gum solutions, named after an experience where I
discovered that the electrical wires under my TV stand in the hotel were
'fixed' with a large lump of chewing gum. With this lump of gum in my
fingers and my bare feet on the marble floor, I lit up like a bulb—one of my
greatest spiritual experiences.
At the five-star Clarks Hotel in Varanasi, the hot water tap fell off as I
frantically tried to adjust it while standing under the shower. At another
five-star hotel, scalding hot water came out of both taps in the bathtub.
It’s not the first time that door handles, electrical outlets, and faucets
have fallen off when I touched them in this wonderfully adventurous country
full of dreams and illusions.
Once, on a motorcycle trip in South India, a tailor sewed some buttons onto
my new Indian shirt, which, after only a month of use, was ready for
retirement. The tailor sang songs to honor his God while threading the
needle through the eye of heaven. When I got the shirt back, I discovered
that the new buttons were sewn on the wrong side of the shirt!
A tailor!!! Now the party's over.
All these wonderful craftsmanship achievements are made by the same illusive
Indian who doesn’t really see any point in being present in this world,
partly because the world is an illusion and partly because he is despised
precisely for doing manual labor. Naturally, then, he can’t really take
responsibility for the quality of his work either.
If you see the world as Maya, it becomes Maya.
In all its absence of presence, in the form of freshly painted house
facades, well-paved roads, and electricity without outages, India has
actually found a charming solution. It’s called peace—stoic peace and
acceptance of any situation. It has sprung from the idea of illusion,
combined with the belief in fate that makes the individual 'karmically'
responsible for every detail and event in life. The following picture I took
while stuck in a traffic jam in New Delhi. Notice the dignified peace the
seemingly random composition of people in the picture radiates.
Nowhere does timelessness show itself more clearly than in a traffic jam in
New Delhi. Here, a group of cycle rickshaws rests in the eye of the storm.
Vishnu – the Maintainer of the Universe's Balance
In 1989, I witnessed an astonishing Vishnu ritual in South India. A
ton-heavy statue of the god Vishnu was carried around on two long, arm-thick
poles. Two smaller statues accompanied him on the cart, representing
Vishnu's wives.
Ten sweating and groaning men struggled to keep their footing under the
weight of the stone deity. Vishnu, Lakshmi, and Mahadevi were splendidly
dressed dolls, with masks made of several kilos of pure gold. On their
heads, they wore large, heavy gold crowns. Leading the procession was a
police officer in full uniform, baton drawn, his serious face beneath the
raised baton guarding the valuable gods amid the ecstatic crowd.
The ten bearers and their divine burden swayed around the ritual and the
universe’s center—a large stone pillar, a representation of the god Shiva’s
generative phallus.
From the ceiling, numerous colorful lamp wires dangled down. As the
procession passed under these electric wires, the crowns on the gods were
nearly knocked off, and each time, the ten bearers had to crouch deeply with
great effort to avoid them. Sometimes, the gods were close to toppling over.
The music dramatically accompanied each near-miss with the wires. It almost
seemed as though the Indians found it amusing.
It’s also a bit funny to think that it’s Vishnu's very task to maintain the
balance of the universe, and here he was, swaying dangerously around his own
temple.
The low-hanging wires were accepted by the devotees as divine obstacles,
like the sacred Indian cows in the streets.
No one, except me, seemed to think it would be easy to raise the wires just
a little.
Power Lines in Main Bazaar, New Delhi
My Western-trained mind completely forgets the beauty of the ritual, lost in
irritation and amazement that no one seems to have had the same thought as
me: For heaven’s sake, just pull those wires up into place!! It would only
take a stool and two minutes of work.
When I lived in Lucknow in '94, some Indians felled a tree, which landed on
the road outside the house I rented. It lay there for months, without anyone
making an attempt to remove it, even though it caused traffic jams during
rush hour and a number of minor accidents, especially after dark. Why
doesn’t anyone drag the tree off to the side?
Why didn’t I remove the tree myself? It would have taken just 10 minutes of
work. But I had already become part of that phlegmatic calm that flows with
or around whatever exists without trying to change it.
I didn’t take a photo of the felled tree outside my house in Indira Nagar,
Lucknow in '94. However, I did take this picture a few years later.
To be fair, it should be mentioned that the Indian middle class, which has
emerged over the last 30 years, no longer views their own world as an
illusion. They are just as present in the so-called materialistic ‘reality’
as the rest of the world's McDonald-shaped quarter-pounder people. In a way,
the Indian middle class is dissolving the caste system, but at the same
time, creating a new caste—the money caste—which sees itself as real, yet
still maintains an illusory relationship to the world, especially in terms
of ignoring the massive poverty that still exists just beyond their walls.
Cultural habits (or lack thereof) do not die but are reborn in new forms.
Chapter II – Liberation of the Self
"God enjoys himself in all things."
– Meister Eckhart
"Real knowledge, even in this body,
is intrinsically so delightful
that the sum total of created things
is nothing to the joys of pure perception."
– Meister Eckhart
"God delights so in this likeness that
he pours out his whole nature,
his whole substance into it, in his own self.
The joy and satisfaction of it are ineffable.
It is like a horse turned loose
in a lush meadow, giving vent to his
horse-nature by galloping full-tilt about the field:
he enjoys it, and it is his nature."
– Meister Eckhart
"Oh Friend! Understand
The body is like the ocean
Rich with hidden treasures.
Open its innermost chamber
and light its lamp."
– Mirabai
The Journey of Consciousness into the Body’s Darkness
First, a brief recap. The previous chapter dealt with the ancient Eastern
journey of liberation from the self and the body. Over two thousand years
ago, Buddha’s finger pointed at the moon, not the earth. The world was seen
as an illusory and suffering place. The ancient people of the Silk Road
longed to be free from themselves and their suffering. The spirit had to
free itself from the world's swampy body in order to realize itself. The
same tendency can be seen in Christian traditions, but nowhere have spirit
and body stood in such sharp opposition as in India.
Ancient people had every reason to flee from the body. Freedom from the
self, from bodily existence, made perfect sense, for only a few lived beyond
the age of 40, and no one could be sure what tomorrow would bring in terms
of war, catastrophe, hunger, or disease. The risk of a violent death was
extremely high. Viewing the world as an illusion was, therefore, an
appropriate survival strategy, especially in India, which, due to frequent
monsoon failures and an overly caste-divided society, could never figure out
how to face challenges collectively. Indians thus developed meditation as an
anti-body survival solution in an inherently over-fragmented, dysfunctional
society. The logic of "What is lost externally must be gained internally"
drove this Indian meditation practice, leading to a form of spiritual
liberation through alienation from the life of the body.
The Illusory Illusion
It’s not uncommon to hear people who meditate claim that the world is an
illusion. “Nothing truly exists” is a typical statement often heard in New
Age circles, especially those inspired by Vedantic philosophy. Here, the
philosophy of illusion is no longer just a cultural critique of our
superficial contemporary world of couch potatoes and reality stars. Here,
the illusion encompasses all moving parts of time and space!
In this view, life itself is seen as an illusion.
I too have said and 'believed' that the world is illusory. My question now
is:
Why have I actually said that?
In my 40 years of meditating, I’ve observed how especially the invisible
parts of the ideology that came with the set and setting of meditation have
subtly shaped my perception of reality overall. All the small, almost
invisible things we repeat for years contribute to creating the map that
both guides us in life and shows us where we belong. Everything from the
micro to the macro scale is information.
Even the slightest discrepancies between this map and our 'core personality'
will sooner or later create obstacles on our spiritual path. If there is no
information synchrony between the smallest and the largest in us, over time,
we will experience a slow stagnation.
What life on the New Age scene has taught me is that far too often, I have
built my life on 'truths' from the outside, which slipped into my system
without first being thoroughly examined. In my blind and naive reverence for
authority, I uncritically adopted religious or so-called 'scientific'
fundamental beliefs from external sources, only realizing much later that I
was full of undigested words that were not really my own.
My goal here is to bring these external ideas into the light for closer
inspection, like using tweezers. My meditation must undergo dissection down
to its smallest details. Only those culturally foreign pieces of information
that pass the critical test of the marvelous intellect will be allowed to
pass through the brain barrier and become part of the new spiritual DNA.
So I repeat the question:
What does it really mean to say that the world is an illusion?
Is it even appropriate to view what’s right in front of our noses as
illusory?
Based on my own inner experiences, I can confirm that there is a galactic
perspective where 'one' is, so to speak, led out of the protective walls of
the ego and the body, rising above roofs, cities, countries, and further
out, so far that the planet we call Earth, then the solar system, and
finally the galaxies seem no larger than a molecule in a speck of dust.
From out there, our little, ever-changing lives seem utterly insignificant
and, in that sense, an illusion.
But less will also suffice. Many will surely recognize moments in
meditation, so still and deep, where many desires, tasks, or problems that
once seemed significant now seem non-existent.
However, it should be clear by now that I am no longer certain about the
absolute truth of seeing the world as an illusion.
Have we really been given a body and a world just to abandon them in favor
of a depersonalized spiritual perspective?
As far as I can see, a self-reinforcing loop of conclusions forms in the
relationship between illusion and detachment: We leave the world because it
is an illusion. When we leave the world, it becomes an illusion.
The spiritual eagerness to label our bodily life as an illusion, therefore,
makes me suspicious. What is the motive behind this devaluation of body-time
in space?
The philosophical argument is that everything that changes is illusory.
Today you are healthy. Tomorrow you are seriously ill. Today your wife loves
you. Tomorrow she has left you.
Don’t attach yourself to life, for it is samsara, ever-changing, and change
creates suffering. Therefore, attach yourself to the unchanging in the form
of eternity, God, the Self, Spirit, Nirvana, the Ground of Being, or
Consciousness. For only the unchanging can be considered real.
Now my question is: Does the Indian conclusion hold, that 'something' does
not exist because 'it' changes?
Could this argument actually be hiding an unwillingness to face life’s
hardships?
Why is suffering considered so terrible? Why not see it instead as an
integral part of a changing but wonderful life of sunshine and storms?
I, therefore, allow myself to view the illusionary perspective as a
potential expression of escapism.
Why have we been given a body if the whole point of the game is simply to
leave it?
Seeing the world as an illusion makes it easier to escape existential
responsibility for what is… here and now… right in front of us. Calling
something illusory is the same as downgrading its value.
Suffering is easier to 'survive' when it’s just an illusion anyway.
I call it liberation through alienation.
Depersonalization as a Survival Strategy
The very idea that the world is an illusion, in the sense that it is not
always what it appears to be, is in itself a wonderful philosophical and
cognitive discovery.
The new scientifically grounded thoughts that the world is actually a
simulation are groundbreaking. I don’t see it as a coincidence that the
elite of the Western world are now rediscovering the concept of illusion in
the form of simulation theory. For, as mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter, the body and the spirit are once again at odds.
The philosophy of illusion can, as long as it merely poses critical,
skeptical questions about the beer-drinking existence we automatically take
for granted, have the potential to develop into a theology of freedom.
The problem only arises when this philosophy becomes a norm, a dogma, an
unchallenged and unexamined foundational assumption upon which the rest of
the narrative of existence is constructed—a narrative that often practices
what Buddha would call a thirst for life.
The Spiritual Bypass
A Japanese Zen monk once gave a lecture on meditation on the top floor of a
skyscraper in Tokyo. Suddenly, a small earthquake caused the building to
sway dangerously. People panicked and rushed out of the building. Only the
Zen master remained seated. When the earthquake was over, the audience
returned to the lecture hall, where the Zen master sat, unmoving, in serene
calm, eyes closed. When people asked why he didn’t flee, he replied:
“While you fled out, I fled in.”
In meditation, you let the world be the world and adapt yourself instead.
The colossal freedom potential in this 'flight' is dizzying and
awe-inspiring.
Liberation Through Alienation
However, everything is a matter of balance. For many years of my younger
life, I fled inward every time I faced problems in my outer life. When I had
trouble with a girlfriend, I fled into the "I am not the body" meditation.
Was it a good idea? Hardly... The problems didn’t disappear because I
practiced ostrich meditation. On the contrary, many precious years passed,
during which I could have learned to navigate life’s tricky whirlpools as a
human being. Instead, I chose, during difficult periods, to depersonalize
myself into pure spirit.
Throughout my life, I’ve seen this survival strategy used countless times by
modern, Western-conditioned people. For people with mental anguish and
struggles in daily life, it is all too tempting to reuse or perhaps misuse
ancient Eastern spiritual DNA to liberate themselves through alienation.
New Age – Illusion or Ferrari?
New Age organizations today continue to grow, drawing on the religious DNA
of the East in the sense that most modern meditation traditions still carry
within them Buddhism’s or Hinduism’s ancient longing to escape the
troublesome existence of being human. At the same time, the dreams of bodily
happiness are marketed in such a way that it’s hard to tell whether the
project is about wellness or the negation of earthly life. A variety of
reinterpretations are trying to find their way in a landscape where, at one
moment, you are supposed to rise above the illusory body and not take the
ego seriously, and in the next, you are doing everything possible to make
the body feel extra comfortable with therapy, massage, personal development,
tantra, mindfulness, and fine dining. Add to that the American dream, which
promotes the idea that mindfulness and positive thinking are the way to the
Ferrari you’ve always dreamed of.
An arsenal of pop-smart livelihood gurus preach and talk, but it makes
little difference. The foundation, which is rarely questioned, is old and
shaky, especially if it is meant to support a dream of material success. Let
me emphasize that there’s nothing inherently wrong with desiring a Ferrari.
The issue is the inconsistency in the cultural software of meditation.
Why?
My gadget-guru Steve Jobs kept asking people who worked in different
business organizations: Why do you do what you do? No one could really
answer. The only response was: We do what we’ve always done, what we’ve been
told to do. Steve Jobs had enough awareness to see through the routine
sleepiness in these answers, and with this insight, he was able to change
work procedures so they became meaningful.
We are hopelessly stuck in habits and sleep. It doesn’t matter whether we’re
talking about a business empire, an academic institution, or a religious
organization. For that reason alone, all tradition-based meditation
organizations should subject themselves to a thorough revision.
The dilemma in meditative circles—whether the body is worth investing in or
whether it is an illusion to be transcended—is a very real one. The
liberation of the self can often be uncomfortable. The pain, which is a
fundamental condition of living in a body and interacting with other bodies
and the world, is still there, even if you flee from it into the world of
the spirit. It makes sense for sensitive people in a modern big-data world
to reuse the old Indian depersonalization techniques, where one liberates
oneself from oneself. It’s almost too easy to use meditation as a spiritual
bypass of the body and everyday life. A depersonalized life without integral
bodily existence, however, offers no spiritual fullness or depth. I would go
so far as to call it a waste of life.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Liberation from the Self, the body and
spirit, after a long period from the 60s to the turn of the millennium, are
once again on a collision course. The only thing I am critically concerned
with here is the lack of meta-awareness in this conflict. The sleepy
meditative environments need more restless Steve Jobs archetypes to ask
questions about everything between heaven and earth.
I Am Not the Body – I Am a Cyborg
In a time like ours, with dizzying speeds of change in our self-perception
and the interfaces through which our metamorphosing identities navigate, the
body is left behind like a fossilized turtle while the hare’s soul in us
hurries to put on new virtual bodies.
This separation already happens on a micro level the second you forget that
your body feels sad because you got a like on a photo of a dessert on
Facebook.
In this context, it is no coincidence that Steve Jobs took a meditative
pilgrimage to India in his youth and remained friends with the book
Autobiography of a Yogi for the rest of his life. Silicon Valley is, if
anything, a postmodern Buddhist/Hindu melting pot, spiced with microdoses of
LSD. Nor is it a coincidence that Indians are so good at programming. They
are used to handling "nothing."
The organic-chemical cultural mutations between digital technological
expansion and the spiritual traditions of the East are already countless and
unpredictable.
In this sea of possibilities, I choose—with respect for all the possible and
impossible hybrids that the liberation from the body can take in a world
where spirit will likely shed its old shell and inhabit cybernetic
organisms—a different path.
I call it the liberation of the body.
Individuation in Super-Awareness
It makes sense to view humans as a tree. The tree’s root system is our
unconscious biology, which carries millions of years of accumulated
biological operating systems. In the treetop exists what grows in the light
of consciousness.
Most of the body’s inner biological life is hidden, not because it is
repressed, but because it is wordless, and therefore unknown and
incomprehensible. No historical figure, to my knowledge, has pointed more
clearly to the human roots’ diverse depth and importance than the
psychologist C.G. Jung:
"Man's task is to become conscious of the
contents that press upward from the unconscious."
– C.G. Jung
Jung called the process of becoming conscious of oneself "individuation."
For Jung, however, individuation was inseparably connected to the world of
words and understanding. For him, understanding was a central tool for the
spiritual locksmith’s work of unlocking the door to the unconscious.
I, however, see a new ruler, radically different from the king of words,
conquering the continent of the body!
This ruler is born at a balance point created by super-awareness.
The Incomprehensibly Wordless Super-Awareness
Once upon a time, deep in the heart of the Russian Empire, there lived three
monks on an isolated island in the middle of a large lake. They had almost
no contact with the civilized world. They knew very little about Christian
theology. Their only prayer was: "We are three. You are one. Lord, have
mercy on us."
A bishop heard about these three hermits and decided to visit them. He rowed
a long way out on the lake until he finally reached the small island. The
monks greeted him with great love and humility. However, the bishop was
deeply surprised by how little the three knew about Christian theology and
decided to stay on the island for a few days to give them a crash course in
Christianity. The hermits were deeply grateful for the bishop’s teachings
and thanked him many times as they bid him farewell. The bishop rowed back
toward the mainland. Halfway out, he heard the monks calling after him. He
turned and saw the three running across the water. "Lord," they said, "we
have forgotten your teachings. Can you repeat what you said?"
The holy simplicity of the three hermits renders theology, and in a broader
sense, the very phenomenon of ‘understanding’ unnecessary in a form of
incomprehensible super-conscious wisdom. To understand something is to grasp
it. Who wants to grasp it? It is the ego, which eternally desires to
transform things by grasping control. Therefore, the ego desires
understanding. Understanding brings power. In wisdom, however, we let go of
everything we have grasped.
The super-conscious highway is therefore also the flyover that bypasses the
ego’s futile attempts to spiritualize itself through self-development. This
is not to say that one can do without therapy or psychological insight,
which, to continue the highway metaphor, could be compared to the essential
on-ramps. The overwhelming mass of texts on Meditation.dk consists of
on-ramps to the super-conscious highway. This articulation knows its place
as a servant and makes room for what is most important—awareness, which,
when you inhale a perfume whose name you don’t know, makes you aware of the
scent.
The Super-Awareness Colonization of the Body’s Wilderness
Meditation.dk is an artistic life project that, step by step, brings
super-consciousness to the dark, attentive body micro-world without words.
In this sense, meditation is the psychic microscope of super-awareness. It
incarnates in the body as a wordless and understanding-less spatial realm of
abstract clarity. The colonization of the body by super-awareness is
radically different from the otherwise praiseworthy body-consciousness
behind the desire to exercise and eat healthily. It pales in comparison to
the consciousness that suddenly becomes aware of the deafening roar of our
cells’ living wave-rush. The body’s cosmic background radiation is
here—always. However, we only become aware of our foot the moment we sprain
it. When it functions, we ‘forget’ it. We only hear the fridge hum when it
stops. Through change, we become aware that the hum was there all along.
Meditation is about enabling consciousness to become aware of what always
is.
The Holy Grail is found in the body’s dark night.
The Attentive Sleepwalker
The part of our life tree that is hidden underground sleeps. We are
sleepwalkers dreaming that we are awake. A sleepwalker has forgotten himself
in perfectly ‘forgotten’ awareness. The attentive animal operating systems
usually function fine without the interference of consciousness. However, in
their fundamental wordlessness, they struggle to ‘understand’ or follow the
more complex directives of consciousness. The sleepwalker attentively speaks
to me like the cashier at Irma who asks if I want a receipt, and I remind
her every day that we have an agreement that she doesn’t need to ask, to
which she smiles and says: "Oh, right!"
The sleepwalker is not aware that he is not awake. The same applies to us in
our normal waking consciousness, especially if we compare the normal waking
state to the super-awareness that can be cultivated in meditation.
The most important insight in meditation is the realization of how little
consciousness we actually possess and how little our verbal-conscious
operating system has truly understood of the body’s inner life of attention.
I repeat this awareness's "Oh, right!" realization daily, in the same way as
my little Irma ritual.
That we are fundamentally sleepwalkers can be verified through your own
introspection. When you meditate attentively into the body, you will
discover a Cambrian-varied ocean life of totally unknown sensations that are
at once massively present, like the air around us, but strangely elusive. As
one of my friends said: "After so many years of meditating, I should know
the animals in my inner zoo by now, but I don’t!"
I have constant tinnitus due to my younger life as a rock guitarist, but I
rarely hear it. Attentive sensations are like the hum of a fridge. We are
always aware of the fridge’s sound, but we only become conscious of it when
the fridge stops humming. If you now let your consciousness look inward into
your body, you will immediately feel an unspecified sea of sensations. These
sensations were there, just like the fridge’s hum, even before you became
aware of them.
For the serious meditator, it is an eternally repeated, astonishing
discovery to realize how unaware we are of how much we truly sense. That’s
why I return again and again to this fact as my most precious mantra. For
every time we remind ourselves of how unconscious we are, a small part of us
wakes up. Gurdjieff called this meditation constant Self-remembering.
Meditation, when not used as an escape from the self but as the liberation
of the self, presents a project that will first require a whole lifetime and
then become life itself. It may sound overwhelming, but remember Edison’s
words:
"I never did a day of work in my life. It was all fun."
The project is to wake the body from its sleeping beauty slumber.
What must first awaken here is consciousness itself. It awakens in itself in
super-awareness. Without super-awareness, you can forget about liberating
your bodily life. Only super-awareness is capable of cultivating the
necessary intensity and strength that makes us aware of the sleeping
biological life forms that live in and give life to our bodies, like roots.
Super-awareness brings the body’s background into conscious foreground,
while our perhaps overly significant ‘self’ simultaneously steps down from
the throne a little but a necessary step, where it can instead rest in the
blissful darkness of the ground of being.
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