The Nirvanic Quest
The Nirvanic Quest
In one of his books, E. Stanley Jones writes about the challenge of facing hard questions. To every spiritual claim, he said, there are three challenges: (1) Is it new? (2) Is it true? (3) Is it you?
The struggles of the one versus the many, of permanence and change, of the I and the you is not new. Greek philosophers also struggled with these ideas and tried to solve them in purely secular terms. The long journey into autonomous spirituality is not really new either. On the question of God, there are only a handful of possibilities. Pantheism, which is the philosophical term that defines the divinity of everything, has tugged at the human heart for centuries. There have been shades of difference, sometimes greater than what appears at the surface and sometimes less. From the various varieties of pantheism—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—the main idea that the divine permeates all of life, along with its concomitant doctrines of karma and reincarnation, is part of a huge philosophical landscape, which is why it is not easy to put them all under one category. Ideas like yoga and iso-meditation are rooted in the same metaphysic. I call it iso-meditation because the idea of meditation is not unique to pantheism, but the idea that the isolated self is all there is, as both the object and the subject of meditation, is pantheistic. Let’s go back a few centuries and see that it has all been tried and tested before.
A few years ago I was in Athens, Greece, and as my wife and I walked in front of the famed Mars Hill where the apostle Paul delivered his historic message, I remember stopping to look at that historic spot from the main road down below. It is not possible to be in those environs and not take some time to allow your mind to take it all in… the ancient, broken columns of the Parthenon, the winding path that leads to the top of the hill, and the bronze plaque fixed to a large rock, on which is engraved the text of Paul’s brilliant address to the Athenians—skeptics, philosophers, pantheists, polytheists, atheists—all gathered to hear him.
This was Athens at its greatest preoccupation… always debating ideas of ultimate significance. Paul himself had been a devout Jew. His dramatic conversion on the Damascus road changed the history of the world. From being a religious fanatic bent on destroying Christianity, he became its greatest exponent, willing to pay with his life to take the gospel to Europe.
The fascinating thing is the initial response his message received in Athens. It was mixed at best, and sparse in impact. As I stared at the hill and we continued our walk down the street to cross at a traffic light, I noticed the name of the road we were walking on: The sign read in Greek, “Dionysius the Areopagite.” I immediately stopped and drew my wife’s attention to the name. Two thousand years ago, Dionysius the Areopagite was one of two people who responded to Paul’s message that are mentioned in the book of Acts, the other being a woman named Damaris. So here we were, almost two thousand years later, standing on a major street in Athens named after a man who had responded to the message of Saint Paul. It is said that Dionysius went on to later become the Bishop of Athens.
Greece was the birthplace of esoteric and soul-defining thinking. A little excursion into that world will help us see that the present-day spirituality is not new but has already been tried, tested, and rejected. It is not even exclusively Eastern. Plato taught that the soul was preexistent and eternal. It was he who gave us the metaphor of the cave: In a cave we can see only the shadow of reality. The essence or the noumenal is known as if through a shadow, not the reality itself. In this state we are restricted to the phenomena and restricted from the “noumena.” Somehow, the soul in this cave called time must make its way back to pure essence and ultimately reach that state of divine bliss in order to know its transcendent and original state.
Plotinus, who came after Plato and whose thinking is termed Neoplatonism, climbed the ladder of abstraction even more. God was beyond any definition or description, the “One.” This One defies reduction to language—is formless and beyond time, place, intellect, and, yes, the soul. This One is the source of “mind and consciousness,” from which emerges the individualized psyche that gives us the hint and link from this transient material world to ultimate thought and mind. By turning inward we, “the ones,” can discover the process through which the ultimate One impersonal conscious reality can be attained. This One is the One mind within itself. Pursuing this One through purification, detachment, reflection, and contemplation will ultimately bring liberation and absorption. This is how he worded it:
The soul is anxious to be free, so that we may attach ourselves to [the One] by the whole of our being; no part of it not touching God. Then it will be possible for the soul to see both God and herself divinely, and she will see herself illumined, full of intelligible light; or rather she will be light itself—pure, unfettered, agile, become a God or rather being a God, and wholly aflame.2
When you add to this the manifold debates about the nature of time, the soul, goodness, politics, and matters of permanence and impermanence in traditional Western philosophy, you have all the ingredients needed for a sophisticated spirituality.
Do you remember the other three—Parmenides, Heracleitus, and Cratylus? According to Parmenides, all that is, is. Heracleitus went one better: All that is, is changing; you never step into the same river twice. And Cratylus bettered that: You don’t even step into the same river once; not only is the river flowing, but so are you. This means that the you who stepped into the river is in flux and is not the same you who steps out.
The irony of all this thinking is that the I and the you were sublimated in the mix of metaphysics, as the only way to justify flux and randomness was to find a justification for the mix. On the shoulders of other philosophers, people like Fritjof Capra came along centuries later and in The Tao of Physics tried to make all this metaphysics look scientific. Chopra, a latecomer then, appeared on the scene to leverage quantum. And the bigger the egos became as they exposited all this, the more they preached an egoless world.
Once again, take a step back—it is an amazing trail that began with a false lead and spelled a dead end. Dionysius the Areopagite came to know Jesus through the preaching of Paul. Years later, a fragment was found and credited to a man called Dionysius the Areopagite, whose theology sounds very similar to what the mystics were to develop in the years to come. “God talk,” he basically said, was more meaningful in negation than affirmation, although he did not completely rule out affirmation. But once the stage was set for this kind of thinking, you can see where it was all headed. He basically played with language and philosophy, and equivocation was the name of the game. One could not even say, “God is good,” because God’s definition of good would be different from ours. Finally, he opined that one had to go beyond Jesus to “the God, perfect and complete” in his transpersonal self: Jesus was only an imperfect revelation of a perfect being. This teaching of Dionysius’s was floating around and found ready listeners in the Athens of his day. The Greeks always had a leaning toward putting ultimate definitions in ideas rather than rooting them in the personal.
It is interesting that as research continued it was realized that this Dionysius of Greek philosophy was not Dionysius the Areopagite of Mars Hill; he had just borrowed the name in order that others would take notice of him and read what he was writing… a fitting find for a nonpersonal theology.
This constant free-floating self has been the object of study for the sciences, the mystics, and those who pursue an understanding of our essence. Hence, closer to our time and to the New Spirituality, all of them succeed in muddying the waters when it comes to the self and our essence. Marianne Williamson regales her audiences with lines out of science that she extrapolates into metaphysical pronouncements. She quotes Gary Zukav in describing how the quantum world provides us with the model of “transient forms sparkling in and out of existence.” She follows it up with her own quip, saying that though you don’t exactly flatter anyone by greeting them with, “Hello, transient form, floating in and out of existence,” that’s who we really are. The audience laughs. Entertaining speech, trying to make up for a greater vacuum than the quantum world.
I remember as a new Christian walking into a church in Canada and listening to a hymn I had never heard before, a hymn titled “Himself”:
Once it was the blessing, Now it is the Lord;
Once it was the feeling, Now it is His Word;
Once His gifts I wanted, Now the Giver own,
Once I sought for healing, Now Himself alone.3
That hymn was written by the well-known churchman and theologian Albert B. Simpson (1843–1919). The first time I heard it I thought to myself, How profound! How God-centered and how refreshing that the spiritual journey is to move one from focusing on the benefits of belief to the great romance and beauty of knowing the Author and Giver of life! Heaven, if it means anything, will mean being in the presence of the Ultimate Being, not being the ultimate.
Today’s spirituality actually would reverse the thoughts to:
Once it was the Lord, Now it is the blessing;
Once it was His Word, Now it is the feeling;
Once I knew the Giver, Now the gifts I own;
Once I sought Himself, Now it is the healing and my “self” alone.
Behind the popularizers like Chopra are the real metaphysicians of the soul. In the next chapter I shall deal briefly with these three who were the designers of Eastern spirituality gone west.