ON the Freedom
to be Yourself in a World of Difference
TO honor the day
of American independence, a few words on freedom, religion, and what we can and likely can’t do in this age of global connectivity and terrifying isolation. To write about one’s self is vanity but to
reject vanity is merely to refuse the value of our prerogatives to feel and to
think as we please. Vanity need not be
vice however circumspect we must be to think it any virtue. So here goes.
I go on Hindu
pilgrimages with Hindus. I’ve just
returned from one that I have dreamt of doing for nearly 40 years. I’d explain it all to you, if you’d like to
listen, and I’d try not to explain away the things about it that are far from
easy to pardon or approve. We will all
come to terms with our choices not because we all necessarily mature into a
greater self-awareness but rather because we know that “the bell tolls for
thee.” Whatever your religion or
spirituality or absence thereof tells you, this being mortal has terms we
share: its finite, its likely painful, and whatever you might think of death, life
promises neither fairness or exculpation.
I can’t think of anything worth doing that I could recommend for
everyone and I’m hoping that others won’t insist that I do what they select
either. Tolerance isn’t merely about
accepting another’s choices, it’s about reconciling choices we accept and reject. It’s not always the case that one person’s
freedom implicates another’s oppression but there’s burden in every life
because we all take, not only give. As one Hindu text puts it, “we are all food
and eaters of food.” That’s a religious claim
I can fathom.
I read and study
sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and other Indian languages, most of which come from
a hoary past and are filled with admonition, advice, and genuine religious
invitations. I feel no compulsion to
believe any of what I read and when asked why I participate in rituals or tell
these stories, it’s because I’ve decided there is something in it that I can’t
resist. What is unresistable to me may
be of no interest to you. I’m not the
least bit interested in compelling your interests or persuading you of
anything. “Zealous convert” is an
oxymoron and I’ve got nothing to preach.
We all, however, have something to learn and for that we will need
teachers. I’ve spent my life studying
religions not because they are true or somehow teach truths common to all
humanity but because people need what religions do.
WHETHER it’s to
procure our life passages ---hatch, match, dispatch--- or create the solitaries
of tribe, culture, or to meet some other social or creative expression, humans
have offered the best and the worst of themselves through our religious
cultures. We don't all meet at some
cosmic place of reconciliation unless that is your chosen worldview, but we do
have shared human needs. Just as we’ve
never met people without language, I think we’ll never meet people who have no
need for religion, and by that I mean what religions do for us. Even if that’s just
lighting a candle at a memorial and involves shifting our language to the most
secular registers in our pursuit of commonalities, we do not become moral beings
because we need religions, we are human beings with impassioned, sometimes
urgent needs.
MYTH defies
credulity and thwarts the powers of reason if all we admit are the resources of
waking awareness and yet it is only in waking awareness that we can interpret
what more mythology, ritual, pilgrimage, and study might mean. My Hindu teacher taught me how to think, not what to think and that means he taught me that every question that
is worth asking does more than inform us, it challenges our
self-representations and invites self-subversion. There are 330 million gods (at the very
least) because this is how many questions we can ask, how many conversations we
can have. And to have a conversation it’s
often helpful to have it with someone,
especially the gods, the demons, and all of the denizens of one’s
experience. For me, to be “Hindu” is to
be every character in the story and then some because I am more than any
definition of Hindu that I’ve ever read or contrived. Being “every character” means I must be more
than Hindu, but that’s part of the definition.
BESIDES, I grew
up in New Jersey, born an American, and that means there is little that makes
me like my fellow Americans than our shared proposition. We claim “all men” [sic] are “created equal,”
so we begin by stating as fact what we know is a far more complex, even murky
demand that we’ve spent the past 240 or so years grappling with, and denying as
the right of our fellow Americans. That’s
not “another story,” that’s the story. None of us are less than the sum of ourselves
or our histories and that can never be zero-summed anymore than we can claim to
know the all of ourselves. We are
limited beings, somatic creatures, part of nature that we’ve only very recently
in our history as a species have come to understand with any modicum of
reality. We are historical beings,
privileged and deprived, made and in the process of making with only the tools
we have as humans.
MY American
identity troubles me not because we have failed to meet the lofty claims of our
shared proposition but rather because we reserve the right to fail, to reject
that claim as part of our independence.
I’m troubled not by our freedom but by what we believe it permits us to
be: beings apart, beings free to feel and think in ways that refuse other human
beings our shared humanity. As for my “religious”
identity as a Hindu, that is more chaotic than it is disorganized, a source for
both personal elasticity and self-organization.
As a “religion” being my-own-version-of-Hindu has everything to do with a contention that the
methods of modern science provide our best, albeit provisional and incomplete
understandings of this world. Left only
with science we will forsake the poetic, the indirect, the power of the
humanistic to tap the grace and goodness that we can create. No religion I know of has more options to
consider the elasticity and viscosity of human possibilities than the
Hindus. There’s not a belief that doesn’t
seem to appear somewhere and there’s
not one that I know of to which you must adhere.
WHILE religion
too often demands we forsake our powers of reason for a claim to higher force,
mine contends that we are that higher
force and that our prospects for success, even greatness, requires we use the
all of ourselves. We’re going to need
all of the gods and demons, all of the words we know and don’t; we going to
need every bit of reason and our feeling to learn how to love life and embrace
each other. That latter task is no small
matter because we can be equally assured that we human beings will disagree
about fundamentals, not just peripherals--- that we will vociferously object to
others’ values and behaviors; that we will discover conflict to be as real,
often far more real, than any possibility of harmony. So what are we prepared to do about it?
AS if you haven’t
noticed, I write long pieces with words---spelling bee words, occasional f-bombs,
and punctuation. If you’re looking for
spiritual Capital Letters ---The Absolute, Consciousness, the Divine---or for
memes that work on Twitter, there are plenty of other people who are happy to
accommodate you. If you’re spirituality
isn’t focused on humanistic concerns, which includes politics, then you’ll also
need someone else to think with. I
realize that life’s messy, irresolvable issues drive people to seek answers in places
that satisfy our hopes and dreams, in fantasies of consolation or ultimate
freedom. But if your worldview requires
theologies or theories that take you from this world and into another, then you’re
asking for religion. This is means you’ve
essentially given up on reality and I can understand that but I don’t empathize. I don’t feel your dissociation anymore than I
share your affinity for an alternative spiritual reality. I’m stuck in this one, the one that involves being
involved in the whole world, in the conversations that involve opinions and contrariety
that aspire to make accommodation for differences and include the admission
that we’re all compromised.
WE THE PEOPLE all
make concessions to our ideals and principles but I’ll take that a step
further: concession is the path we must
tread to incremental progress when there is no real prospect for consensus. This has never been more true than in America
this July 4th, 2016. I’m here
now and mean to work for a future dramatically different, the sort that
replaces the tired conflicts of the past with something more inclusive and
progressive. But I think that bending
that moral arc is serious, hard work and that it’s nothing like a certainty: we
humans are just as likely to regress, degenerate, or allow ourselves yet
another impenetrable form of self-satisfying ignorance to lead the way. I’m not sanguine we Americans really are up
to it since changing things for the better is no simple matter and we’re good
at making it more difficult. Our
government is designed to be cumbersome, slow working, and to demand from us
the recognition of our deep disagreements.
This design was, in part, a method to prevent even more revolution and
violence but it has its downsides: we
complain “nothing gets done” knowing implicitly that can’t and won’t agree on what to do. Progress is not inevitable, those are social
and political realities that demand our attentions. And as for spirituality, whatever one
proposes that to be, no one’s gonna get a free pass because their meditation practice
or their world view, their god or their enlightened master confers dematerialization
into your own personal dome of silence. (There’s a Get Smart joke in this somewhere.) Don’t mistake me, I’m all for vacations and
peace of mind but do come back. Those of
us still here will take care of things till then. I hope you’ll do the same for me when I occasionally
check out. Carry on, and if handstands
make you feel good too, how could one seriously object? I’m done debating the “real” meaning of “yoga”
because it never actually ever had one real
meaning. There’s not one of anything but
the utterly useless idea of uniqueness.
Revel in your individuality but never in your aloneness ---the best of
being alone is also made possible by other people.
CAN we admit
there is an invincible ignorance in the world? (N.B., again a claim with which some Hindus,
nay, all sorts of others would adamantly disagree, which tells us nothing more about
ignorance but rather a great deal about differences.) Yes, it is invincible and no amount of
education or wisdom is going to change that anytime soon (or more precisely,
anytime). Don't take me for the glum
cynic here, it’s just that it’s far easier to fuel emotions than it is to
change minds, and there’s always someone we can blame for what we can’t
control. Our job isn't to cure this
ignorance but to offer alternatives. If your religion conspires to bring the
rest of compassion or even an indifferent tolerance, then you’ll hear no
objection from me. Go on, believe what
you like but know that there are costs. When
those costs cost the rest of us, be prepared to hear about it. This is all made the more difficult because
you'll never penetrate the impenetrable, never will evidence or reason actually
determine the story. Instead you might
reach into more willing hearts that can change because you are the example of an
alternative to the one with all the answers.
We’re not always so exemplary and we’ve all got our shadows and pasts,
but receiving the world for what it creates requires more than the recognition
that power is the story. There’s more
than power over in a world of power:
there is power to and power for.
This may require something more like what Frodo and Sam did, or what you
see when a firefighter runs into the fire
rather than away from it.
TEACHERS
will be examples of that required misdirection because they’re not just
performers or entertainers or star athletes proffering up their genius. Teachers struggle in public with what it
means to be learning. Learning involves
opinion, experimentation, which implies failure, and a process devoted to a
tedious, not always rewarding project that guarantees neither applause nor
self-satisfaction. If you’re looking for
contentment, it comes only when you decide not to refuse the other alternatives. Happiness is built on paradoxes and
covenants, you can trade-off without entirely selling out but that too comes
with costs. So if you are a teacher, off
the example of the alternative to ignorance.
Knowledge as far as we can know is provisional, never absolute in the
sense of being immune to reexamination, but that’s not to say all opinions are
equal. Opinions respect the facts, which
is why both can change. Wisdom isn't an
action but it appears in actions: like courage, it is no virtue but rather the
requisite for virtue. And as for the
stupidity in the world, well, since there's no fix, just drive on past those
billboards that make your blood boil, baffle you with unbelief, and then say to
yourself, "I'm not alone, I'm not alone..." And write to me when you
can. Or join in a seminar or some other
conversation. I'll be 'round. Keep to the ardor. It's our only calling.
