Café Philos: an internet café

Some thoughts from the Bhagavad Gita:


Foolish men talk of religion
in cheap, sentimental words,
leaning on the scriptures: "God
speaks here, and speaks here alone."

...

As unnecessary as a well is
to a village on the banks of a river,
so unnecessary are all scriptures
to someone who has seen the truth.

...

When your understanding has passed
beyond the thicket of delusions,
there is nothing you need to learn
from even the most sacred scripture.


- Mitchell, tans. From Chapter Two.



Mystics the world over have always challenged us to see for ourselves, pointing out again and again there is no substitute for experience.

Because mystics think experience is primary, they often find themselves at odds with folks who think holy scripture is primary. And sometimes, the folks who think holy scripture is primary end the dispute by burning the mystic. (That tendency to burn people at the stake is not reciprocated -- So far as I know, there is not even a single case of a mystic murdering a non-mystic to suppress what the non-mystic has to say. ) It is no longer fashionable to actually burn mystics, at least not in the West, though it is still fashionable to dismiss their claims as hallucinations or delusions.

Indeed, perhaps they are hallucinations or delusions. To paraphrase the Taoist mystic Chung Tzu, "Last night I dreamt I was a butterfly. Awaking from my dream, I now wonder if I am a human dreaming of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a human." How are we to know which is the "dream" and which is the reality?

Perhaps psychology, neuroscience, or some other discipline can someday answer that question, but as of now, I know of no body of experimental evidence which strongly supports the notion mystics are hallucinating when they describe experiencing a sudden end to subject/object perception and all that follows from that. Besides, even if mystics are hallucinating at that moment, their hallucinations seem to bestow real benefits on them in the aftermath. For instance, they tend to become much less susceptible than most folks to being manipulated by language and symbols. The mystic challenge to "see for ourselves" might be worth taking up simply to improve our quality of life, without reference to whether mystical awareness is truer than non-mystical awareness.

Sometimes you find much the same idea occurs to people in both the West and the East. Consider first Heaney's poem, "Lovers On Aran":


The Timeless waves, bright shifting, broken glass,
Came dazling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To possess Aran. Or did Aran rush
To throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves collision,
Sea broke on land to full identity.


(- Seamus Heaney, Poems 1965-1975)


Now, compare Heaney to Lao-Tzu:


Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.


(Tao Te Ching, from Chapter 2, Stephen Mitchell trans.)


In Heaney's poem, we find much the same idea that contrasting things define each other as we do in Lao-Tzu.

Yet, perhaps there is this remarkable difference between Lao-Tzu and Heaney, between East and West: While Lao-Tzu implies that contrasting things are ultimately aspects of a single, undiferentiated, and ultimate reality, the Tao -- Heaney implies that it is love, rather than the Tao, which unites things.

After all, don't we in the West in many ways prefer to think of love as ultimate reality, rather than the impersonal Way?