Myth As Fact?
God has created the world in play.
– Sri Ramakrishna
A simple, childlike story in India’s ancient scriptures tells how multiplicity emerged from unity. The Lord, the One without a second, felt very lonesome one morning. After all, he was the only thing that existed in the entire universe, so when he looked around him, he could see no one but himself. This did not satisfy him at all. He wanted to play.
So he made playmates. Out of himself he created the myriads of creatures, the two-footed and the four-footed. He started playing with them, playing hide-and-seek, which is what life is all about. We are all playing this game with the Lord. We are all seeking him, and he is hiding playfully from us.
It is easy to talk about this, sing about this, paint this, but it is an entirely different matter to experience it. Yet in deepest meditation, the veil separating you and me can drop. Then, beneath the varied costumes, we will be able to perceive the same supreme Reality whom we call God, who is playing his game in the world.
I like Easwaran's wonderfully clear and simple telling of this ancient Hindu story better than I do almost any other version I've come across. But the thing is, Hindus and Wilberians alike seem to take this story as fact. They may call it "myth" and explain that it "points at" rather than embodies Reality, but it seems to me that, when all is said and done, they take the story quite literally. The "Ultimate Reality" is consciousness that has intentionally "involuted" Itself into the world that subsequently struggles and evolves to regain its original unity.
But every time I hear and consider this, I wonder why the perfection of Ultimate Unity would EVER consciously--i.e., intentionally--become a messy and chaotic multiplicity wracked by suffering. Yes, I know that the Hindu and Wilberian mystics joyfully proclaim that this multiplicity and suffering is still, ultimately, a perfect Unity. But their perception and mine on this seem so far apart that I wonder if one of us isn't terribly deluded and whether I am necessarily the one so afflicted. This world seems anything BUT unified and perfect, and just because mystics and integral philosophers tell me it is doesn't mean I buy what they tell me.
Ken Wilber suggests that if I undergo the right "injunction" or spiritual discipline, I will discover for myself that the mystics are right and that my old way of seeing things was wrong. But I wonder if this is isn't all-too-analogous to saying that everyone who takes psilocybin will, at some point, see strange things happen to the objects in front of their eyes; therefore, those things are ACTUALLY happening. The floor is REALLY undulating like the ocean, and those plants in the vase before you are REALLY growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking before your very eyes.
1 comments:
"...I wonder why the perfection of Ultimate Unity would EVER consciously--i.e., intentionally--become a messy and chaotic multiplicity wracked by suffering."
This is very similar to the question Zizek has about Buddhism and origins. In "Why Hegel is a Lacanian," the afterword to his Interrogating the Real, Zizek takes up the similarities (and ultimately, as he argues, differences) between Nietzschean, Lacanian and Buddhist ethics. Of Buddhism he says:
"In what, then, does the gap that forever separates psychoanalysis from Buddhism consist? In order to answer this question, we should confront the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blindspot: how did the fall into samsara, the Wheel of Life, occur? This question is, of course, the exact opposite of the standard Buddhist concern: how can we break out of the Wheel of Life and attain nirvana? (This shift is homologous to Hegel's reversal of the classical metaphysical question, how can we penetrate through false appearances to their underlying essential reality? For Hegel, thequestion is, on the contrary, how has appearance emerged out of reality?) The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire, its deception, emerged from the Void, is the great unknown at the heart of the Buddhist edifice: it points towards an act that 'breaks the symmetry' within nirvana itself and thus makes something appear out of nothing (another analogy to quantum physics, with its notion of break the symmetry). The Freudian answer is drive: what Freud calls Trieb is not, as it may appear, the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the craving that enslaves us to the world of illusions. Drive, on the contrary, goes on even when the subject has 'traversed the fantasy' and broken out of the illusory craving for the (lost) object of desire" (336).
I used to take exception with his assessment about drive and tanha. That was before I had a better grasp of Jacques Lacan's distinction between demand, need and desire. I now think more along the lines of Robert Morrison when he describes bhava-tanha as a kind of primal force in the Buddhist universe (here analogous to the Will of Schopenhauer and later Nietzsche's writing, and perhaps Emerson's "Genius" too). To that end, I see a connection to be made between the Freudian drive and this primal force. From there, a better explanation is possible for how things seem to have gone out of whack, but I'm not in a position to spell it out here.
Initially, and I guess still somewhat, I see Zizek's problem as kind of a non-problem. The issue of how samsara started seems implicated in understanding its ending, per a Right Understanding concerning co-dependent arising.
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