Freedom Ain’t Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose

Andrew Sullivan resurects this 2003 Slate article by John Horgan dissecting Horgan’s experience with and eventual break from Buddhism.

Says Horgan,

But what troubles me most about Buddhism is its implication that detachment from ordinary life is the surest route to salvation. Buddha’s first step toward enlightenment was his abandonment of his wife and child, and Buddhism (like Catholicism) still exalts male monasticism as the epitome of spirituality. It seems legitimate to ask whether a path that turns away from aspects of life as essential as sexuality and parenthood is truly spiritual. From this perspective, the very concept of enlightenment begins to look anti-spiritual: It suggests that life is a problem that can be solved, a cul-de-sac that can be, and should be, escaped.

There are plenty of other challenges that Horgan presents in the article, but I agree with him that this element presents, I think, one of the most challenging aspects of wrapping one’s head around a contemporary practice of Buddhism.

Now, as in politics, I am loathe to place any kind of spiritual or religious label on myself. I grew up going to a united church, which translates into Christianity-lite I’m told, and indeed my childhood was not littered with a heavy ontology of Christian symbology — religion was always something that had a easiness to it in my family household. Around the age of 19 I officially broke with my religion over your garden variety factors of dissatisfaction: intolerance towards homosexuality, problems around accepting a plurality of beliefs, the tendency to moralize in an overly black and white fashion, etc., etc. For a time I considered myself atheist and then eventually fell into a quasi-Buddhist/Taoist/ mystical frame of mind that has stuck with me to this day despite going through some not insubstantial evolution over the proceeding years.

At one point I attended a 10-day silent meditation retreat that was based on the original practice of mediation as articulated by the Buddha and for a time lived in an intentional community that placed a great deal of importance on spiritual exploration and meditation. I don’t meditate regularly now, though I should, but I do practice yoga both regularly and frequently as both a method of physical exercise and an avenue towards a more meditative and equanimous state of mind. I feel like I get a lot of benefit from that practice and often remark that going to a Sunday yoga class is my equivalent of going to church.

All of which is to say that I don’t pretend to be an expert on these matters, but I’ve wrestled with what Horgan notes and believe that I have something of value to contribute to those negotiations.

What I take to be the fundamental insight of most Eastern religions is the realization that the world in which exist and work and play is transitory, it is momentary and nothing of any true permanence takes up residence in it. Things arise, stick around for a while, and then they cease to be. At the same time, there is a ground of being or existence upon which all of that gyration is taking place, there is something that those things — humans, animals, ideas, rocks, ice cream cones — arise out of and cease to be into and the point of meditation towards the aim of enlightenment is to anchor our presence in that which is eternal. And so what the Buddha suggested when it comes to life is that all of human suffering can be explained as a misunderstanding of those transitory things as the stuff of eternity and that when we experience pain, we convince ourselves that it will be forever instead of realizing that it will come to pass at some point, when we experience joy, we clasp onto it with such fervor because we believe we can possess it forever. The idea of non-attachment is to realize that that which is transitory should be approached as such, the relationship one has to it should be with an ease and lightness because it is, after all, only a momentary thing.

But here’s the rub, non-attachment isn’t the same thing as detachment. And in fact, what one starts to realize when one really sits with the idea of non-attachment is that rather than withdrawing from the world altogether, one is actually freed to engage with and experience the world more vividly because one isn’t busy mistaking the transitory for the eternal. One anchors one’s ultimate presence in the eternal, the recognition that ultimately one is not different from the ground of being (God), but that one is also a manifestation and expression of that ground that exists and operates in the world of form (samsara). As such, one is freed to articulate the most profound and beautiful expression of that ground one can muster without mistaking the expression for the ground itself (kind of like not mistaking the world as dictated by ideology for the world itself, to use a politically focused metaphor) and so one can avoid becoming weighed down too heavily by the objects of that world and ultimately navigate the terrain of that world in a more skillful and compassionate manner.

It’s not so much that the world isn’t real or doesn’t matter, it is and it does, and it isn’t so much that one seeks to terminate one’s relationship with that world, rather one must come to accept the world for what it is, appreciate that world for what it is, and try to do the best in that world that one can — always with one’s heart tied to the pulsing exuberance of existence itself (existence tends to be ecstatic in its manifestation because it is intrinsically good to be). Most of that take on Buddhist thought and existential realization comes out of the work of Nargajuna and specifically his role in illuminating the doctrine of the two truths. Thankfully for me, the spiritual circles in which I have tended to run have been steeped in that revolution in Buddhist thought, so at that point at which I came face-to-face with the idea of detachment from the world that lead to Horgan’s departure, I had a body of thought to help me work through the challenges.

So while I don’t strictly speaking call myself Buddhist, when asked where i lay my spiritual head at night I will usually describe my bed as pretty Buddhist-esque. And in so doing I do not correspondingly hide away from and denounce this world, despite all the time I spend banging away at a keyboard. In fact, the truth of it is that I am more in love with this world than I ever have been.

Update: subtle but important change in the wording of the detachment vs. non-attachment paragraph around one’s relationship with the ground — ah the challenge of writing about the Tao that cannot be named…

Random Posts...

• doubt, believings, and post-postmodernism
• reductio ad absurdum
• From Kazakhstan With Love: A Lesson in Multipolarity