The Final Escape
The Final Escape
I have told this story elsewhere, but it is worth repeating. I met a young woman who was poised, successful, and worked in a very public profession. Years before, she had fallen in love with a young man, but her parents denied her permission to marry him because he came from a lower caste. After much soul-searching, they eloped and moved to a different city where no one would know their castes. Both were disowned by their families.
A year or two went by, and by virtue of her job, she was transferred to another city and was able to go back to her husband only for visits. Gradually the visits home became fewer and fewer, and he feared that he was losing her. He traveled to the city she was working in and found out that she had developed a relationship with another man. Heartbroken, he pleaded with her to come home. He expressed how deeply he loved her and said that he wanted to make this marriage work. But regardless of what he said, she insisted that she had made the decision to leave him.
Finally, he stepped into the restroom for a few minutes, returned to her, and made one last request before leaving her. He said, “You know, I gave up everything for you because I love you. Will you do me one last favor? I promise not to lay a hand on you; I simply ask that you let me put my head on your lap and let me lie there for half an hour. Just that half hour to rest on your lap is all I ask, and I promise I will be out of your life forever.” She felt sorry for him so she agreed. In only a matter of minutes, he started to convulse in her lap. Terrified, she called for help, but within moments he was dead. He had taken poison while in the restroom.
This completely shook her. Guilt, trauma, sleepless nights, everything that you can imagine one would feel in such a situation. Finally, she visited a guru to help her sort this all out. After some time with her, studying her astrological chart and other signs that he used to look into her past, he arrived at a conclusion: In a previous life, he said, this man had raped her when she was a little girl. It was her karma that she had become the means for him to repay his karmic debt for the wrong he had previously done her, so she need feel no guilt.
This young, successful professional now boasted that she had been completely released from all previous guilt on the matter. The guru had done his job. Absolution had taken place. Her mind was rid of any negative thoughts. Karma had exonerated her because it was payback time for him. In effect, the man betrayed in love had poisoned himself in a triumph of good over evil, and the woman who had betrayed him was merely an instrument to set the balances straight.
King David says in Psalm 115:2–8:
Why do the nations say,
“Where is their God?”…
Their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see;
they have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell;
they have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk;
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them. (NIV)
The tragedy of a worldview that is based on a blend of metaphysics, physics, spirituality, and medicine is that in the end, it violates those very disciplines to justify self-deification, which is the bottom line.
This is becoming the Absolute rather than communing with the Absolute. When you read Chopra and others of his stripe, you are told that God has a great plan for you. But the more you read Chopra, you realize that God is not visible in anything he has written. Chopra’s conclusion is that you are he… the divine is in you. Ah! But here’s the catch. To convince you of that, he has had to mutilate every other theory that holds to the contrary. How does he do that without seeming disrespectful of others? The bigger trick lies here. First, he takes their texts and strips them of their contexts. Next, he heavily quotes their own “authorities,” as long as they don’t actually believe their own texts. And finally, he dedicates his theory to all who lay claim to a different belief. This magical formula makes him look irenic and congenial, and then he can grace the talk shows as the ultimate glue that brings all religions together. He has provided spirituality without any absolutes and debunked any contrary claims at the same time. Anyone else may follow his lead and quote other texts out of context, but they dare not quote him out of context, unless they wish to meet him in a court of law.
This is truly the picture of the proverbial elephant being felt by four blind people; each one describes what he feels and gives his own perspective, to the exclusion of the other perspectives. If you shine the light on one chapter of the New Spirituality, it can almost look like Christianity. But when you shine the light on another chapter, you’re sure it’s Buddhism, then Hinduism, then Taoism. This is brilliance at work in a culture of spiritual hungers and an aversion for dogma.
If, when I am restless, I am wishing there were a God, why not trade that for a belief that tells me that when I am meditating, I am God, and that the momentary excursions into humanity are nothing more than illusion? It is quite ironic that many of the founders of these spiritual paths have found the West to be the ideal place for such frank and open discussion. One would risk his career, if not his life, in the hotbeds of some of those other worldviews these founders play with, were the same liberties taken there. Just as the charge of hypocrisy is the unintended compliment that vice pays to virtue, so is this a subtle compliment being paid to the worldview that allows them the privilege to attack the very foundations of belief that have made the freedom to believe and promote contradictory worldviews possible. Such is the glory of Christianity. Trying to redefine truth our way always results in redefining everything. The first temptation in the Garden of Eden was to play God with a different vocabulary, rather than taking God at his word. That is what the New Spirituality does best. But still hanging over our heads is the fact that relativism must eventually pay its dues in the currency of reality.
There is an old story about a man who proposed a bet with his friend. “First, I’ll ask myself a question, and if I can answer it, you buy me a coke.”
“What sort of bet is that?” countered his friend.
“But that’s not all there is to it. After I have asked myself a question and answered it, you ask yourself a question, and if you can answer it, I’ll buy you a coke. We will keep going till one of us asks a question we can’t answer.”
“Strange bet,” said the friend, “but let’s proceed.”
So the man asked himself the first question. “How can a rabbit burrow a hole into the ground, without throwing mud out onto the outside? My answer is, it should start digging the hole from the inside.”
“How can it do that?” came the immediate rejoinder.
“I don’t know,” said the man. “That’s your question.”
Between the koans and the subtleties, the obfuscations and the obscurities, there is a smile on the Buddha’s face. It may not be the smile of enlightenment. It may well be that the questioner is trapped into believing that the questions are the answers.