*Subtitle quotation from Krishnamurti’s 1929 speech in which he dissolved the Theosophical Society’s proto-religious ‘Order of the Star in the East’, castigated the society that had pinned their spiritual hopes on him and denounced everyone who believes in and/or creates ‘religious/spiritual’ organisations that intend to somehow ‘spiritually save’ anyone by showing them some kind of ‘true’ path. The truth is that ’truth is a pathless land’. (Click here for complete speech.)
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Introduction
In my previous two essays ‘Blinded by Our Truth, Pts 1& 2’ I explored delusion, how easily and completely we are blinded by some aspect of our ‘truth’ about what is. I suggested that that delusion is strangely and perhaps intimately complicated by our shadowy relationship with the unconscious. The unconsciouses, one small part personal and one big part collective. The exploration that follows is a tentative beginning step, starting with John 1.
Just Reason Is This. What Is Reason?
In The Bible John describes the beginning of this puzzling thing called ‘life’ in a very odd way: he by-passes actual Life and rests ‘all’ creation in the lógos (usually translated into English as ‘Word’ with capital ‘W’).
1. In the beginning was the lógos, and the lógoswas with God, and the lógoswas God.
2. The same was in the beginning with God.
3. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1.1-3 my emphasis).
I’ve substituted the word ‘lógos’ for the word ‘Word’ because the word ‘lógos’ has a much broader range of meanings than the English word ‘Word’. lógos deepens the nuance of John’s statement in a way that isn’t present with simply using ‘Word’. Here is the etymology of lógos: Ancient Greek λόγος (lógos) is rooted to “speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, reason” (Wiktionary).
In other words ‘God’, by John’s own words, can be easily and more accurately defined as disembodied ‘reason’ or ‘story’ — I’ve grabbed those nouns from the long etymological list, all of which are ungrounded nouns of language or math. By yogic-Buddhist arguments both of these nouns (and the others too) are the means by which we remain in delusion to a degree beyond what just’ Word’ — which also supports or even promotes delusion — with or without a capital letter, connotes.
It is interesting that in the story time of covid ‘reason’ was shown to have become very close to this era’s version of a living god, the god of reason and its well reasoned abuse of language to guide our entrance into the great reset.
‘Reason’ itself has been castigated by many people throughout history, although Martin Luther did it perhaps the most colourfully:
Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom (p142 Works, Erlangen Edition v. 16 ).
(For a bizarre synchronicity with Luther’s vitriol and yet another contemporary abuse of language and assault on ‘reason’, watch Peggy Hall deconstruct the mainstream news’s very recent fear mongering ‘promotion’ of leprosy.)
We saw this god of reason in action recently with a flu called covid as reason enough to abuse language and truth to justify tyranny and for that tyranny to be accepted by the majority as reasonable. (For those upset that I state that the time of covid was tyrannous, here is the definition of tyranny: “government by a ruler or small group of people who have unlimited power over the people in their country or state and use it unfairly and cruelly” (Cambridge Dictionary).) In Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West John Ralston Saul presciently described the reasonable societal mechanisms that enabled the time of covid to have easily become a reasonable prison of space, words and thought. For example, the so-called ‘reasonable’ have argued/ranted, as if it was the height of reason, to trust the science because they are the science. That unreasonableness wasn’t questioned by the mainstream media who toadied that line and screamed it liked snake venom sellers without any ostensible awareness of how unreasonable and hypocritical that so-called ‘medical’ cant was.
Just Story IS It. What IS Story? Per John, Story Co-Created God, Not the Other Way Around
‘Story’ is a kind of ego-trap, one of the main tools that Mara uses to keep our minds in the delusion and suffering of Maya. (My definition of ‘Mara’ is that it’s the energy that deludes each of us to remain in ‘Maya’, and that Maya is being convinced that the permanence of joy and/or suffering is to be found in the temporal sensual world. For standard definitions see ‘Mara’ and ‘Maya’.) I suspect that that was what Luther was (ineffectively) articulating in his cautionary rant: reason is a delusion-trap disguised as the creator of truth using the language of being reasonable. And delusion knows no bounds and is always the other person’s problem, much to Mara’s delight.
And it appears to me that the odd uncommented on tautology or conflation of story with God by John is a huge factor in the ability and eagerness by the many to accept the delusion of story. Would society, in general, be quite as open to being actively deluded by an authority figure in a white lab coat or in a TV screen if, for the last two thousand years, consciously or unconsciously, the collective hadn’t been energised and energising stories like the God-delusion story described by John 1?
Our Christian history is rife with horrific examples of being imprisoned by the story god, a projection of the stories of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ that we use to keep ourselves free from spiritual/existential confusion, inside a his-story of truth-based blood-drenched prisons of stone and thought.
The Word Is The Chain That Binds Us To ‘Truth’
David Byrne has a fascinating discussion about this.
The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralised land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.
One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity — but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names — who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More importantly, how much do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilising" function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and non-administrative words, the words of epic oral poets, sort of went along for the ride, according to this version.
What's amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalised by us as a mark of being civilised. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control — to be able to read and write — makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognise its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of enlightenment. We've come to love the chains that bind us, that control us, for we believe that they are us (pp161-2 Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne).
Byrnes’ claim that language was primarily the tool of administration and control is confirmed by my exploration of accounting at university where I learned that most recovered verbal records in clay or papyrus are administrative and accountancy. And that is supported by much of the content of the language on the Rosetta Stone. Epics like Gilgamesh and finds like the Gnostic Gospels are relatively rare.
Rosetta Stone
The text of the Rosetta Stone actually deals with a fairly banal piece of administrative business. It is a copy of a decree passed in 196 BCE by a council of Egyptian priests celebrating the anniversary of the coronation of Ptolemy V Epiphanes as king of Egypt. … The text begins by cataloging some of the king’s noble deeds and accomplishments, such as the giving of gifts to the temple, the granting of a variety of tax reductions, and the restoration of peace to Egypt after a rebellion that had begun during the reign of his predecessor, Ptolemy IV Philopator (Britannica).
Body Freedom Becomes Joyful Defiance Of The Truth Of The Word
My many years of psychological study has now been expanded by ten years of livingbydoing with my body the yogic ideas and practices recommended by Patañjali in his guide to clear-seeing, The Yoga Sutras. And that somatic practice has been expanded by Gautama Buddha’s teachings that to be mindful of the body is the means to defeat the energy of Mara and to see truly what is. It turns out that some, or even many, of Gautama Buddha’s teachings are in important ways distinct from the story-teachings of the religions of Buddhism that evolved after Gautama’s death.
With all my fifty-plus years of reading and ten years of a daily physical meditation, yoga and using a Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process (akin to Gautama Buddha’s ‘mindfulness of the body), am I claiming to be able, now, to see the truth?
Ah, only if that was so, Grasshopper. No. Although what has happened is that I now see that the stories of ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’ are flaccid, insubstantial, ephemeral, and imprisoning. My stories, those that I created and those that I used to re-affirm and confirm my being, were the means by which I created and maintained my prison and became its warden.
What has happened with my physical practice much more so than from my reading habits is that fear has fallen from me and remarkable as that is even more remarkable has been that my curiosity and openness to the absolute mystery of what is has expanded. And with that expansion the fear-based need to know the truth has fallen away. This IS It has become enough because what it is is joyful curiosity about what this is.
What Is This Joyful Defiance Against?
At its core the joyful defiance is against the story-structure stories of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’, epitomised by John’s cosmology. It is this path of truth that Krishnamurti and Gautama Buddha cautioned against, those predefined certainties that things like religious creation stories use to control thinking and feeling and which are the foundations of rigidity in belief that created the killing machinations of history, of which we are alive in one that is the most extensively and cleverly done.
A recent example of manufactured collective delusion in action, of being in a directed self-perpetuated prison story, is the story of 9/11:
The official [9/11] story required either that one descended into total intellectual senility in order to still believe it – perhaps deliberately made ridiculous for that very purpose – or else that one keep one's intellect alive but destroy almost everything that one had previously believed about how society works. – Occam's Razor On Terror Events: ‘A Theory’ by 9/11 researcher, Gerard Holmgren
And:
“The purpose of propaganda [covertly directed malevolent ‘stories’] is not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponds to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. – Theodore Dalrymple, aka Anthony Daniels, British psychiatrist, slightly edited.
Bible, Bible, Everywhere Each With a True Path to Trek
In my not extensive studies of other big world religions there are hints of a similar religious requirement for a belief in god-centric cosmologies and with it some kind of associated reward-punishment duality as the (singular) path to salvation in some definitive storied way. For example, in my essay ‘Blinded by Our Truth (Pt 1): Delusion Knows No Bounds and Is Always the Other Person’s Problem’ I shared how Tibetan Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor created, by story, a lie in order to support the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology story that is their path to the ‘truth’.
Chafing at the restrictive story-path of the truth in Tibetan Buddhism, Batchelor looked for another predefined path under the direction of Korean Zen monk Kusan Sunim.
Again, and not surprisingly, Batchelor bumps against predefined, hence rigid, stories of the pathof truth:
The [reasonable] logic of Kusan Sunim's argument failed to convince me. It rested on the assumption that there was "something" (i.e., Mind) that rules the body, which was beyond the reach of concepts and language. At the same time, this "something" was also my true original nature, my face before I was born, which somehow animated me. This sounded suspiciously like the Atman (Self/God) of Indian tradition that the Buddha had rejected. I could not reconcile the Zen Buddhist love of snow on bamboo, cypress trees in the courtyard, or the plop! of a frog jumping into a pond with the mystical experience of a transcendent Mind revealed once the universe of bamboo, cypresses, and frogs was "shattered." …
Despite the constant emphasis on questioning and doubt, I was again being primed to arrive at an insight that would confirm the foregone conclusions of an orthodoxy. Ironically, the orthodox views of Korean Zen traced themselves back to the idealist Mind Only school of Indian Buddhism, which my Tibetan teachers had been at pains to refute with their Middle Way doctrine of emptiness. I now found myself in the curious position of practicing meditation in a school whose philosophy I rejected, while adhering to the philosophy of a school whose meditation practices I had rejected (p68-9 Confessions of a Buddhist Atheistmy emphasis).
Is Something It?
From the above, Batchelor wrote “It rested on the assumption that there was "something" (i.e., Mind) that rules the body, which was beyond the reach of concepts and language”.I find this intriguing because this clearly has a strong echo with John 1, namely that mind (lógos/God) predates/overrules the body. John infers that something (mind?) co-exists with lógos because God and lógos arise concomitantly to derive/birth life. Kusan Sunim’s Korean Buddhism affirms ‘something’ before/beyond language and that from language the story of existence is made reasonable, also independent or outside of a body.
As Batchelor has noted the official Buddhist practices mentioned here, Tibetan and Korean Zen, contradict Gautama’s actual teaching that regarded cosmologies and god as distractions from the practices that will ameliorate the sufferings associated with physical life. Gautama’s direction to find peace and compassion and even joy rests firmly in our physical expression by aligning our actions with our thoughts and intentions, ie, by developing integrity in the physical expression of our bodily existence. Really, Gautama provided a user’s integrity guide to action the body in a way to calm the mind, which fractal like, will help calm the body. Calming the body is the first course of ‘action’, not the other the other way around despite what is generally taught and thought about mindfulness and meditative practices.
Why?
The challenge that I faced with this approach, as does anyone who practices this with sincerity, is that it doesn’t answer the question of why life is. Is ‘this is it’ all there is? For most of us this initially leads to a confused and seriously uncomfortable feeling because without that story of why life appears to have no actual meaning, no path towards or away from the story maker who is creating the diaphanous ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. This is the ‘truth is a pathless land’s’ real meaning, confusion and the opportunity to explore from that confusion that landscape with fearless open curiosity and without Mara guiding the ego to demand that there is a singular answer.
And yet without meaning, as many including Jung and Jordan Peterson argue, life appears to be hard, dreary and short. And this is perhaps, the real crux of Gautama’s first fold, first noble truth, which I adapt as follows: searching for meaning in sensual life is suffering.
Just This Is It
By emphasising doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine (p71 Confessionsby Stephen Batchelor).
And an old Zen Story (abridged):
When Dongshan was ready to leave his teacher Yunyan, Dongshan asked, “Later on, if someone asks me if I can depict your reality, or your teaching, how shall I reply?”
Yunyan paused, and then said, “Just this is it.” (For full Koan see Pacific Zen Centre.)
Shunryu Suzuki’s unpublished comment/poem on ‘This Is It’:
Do not try to see objective world
You which is given as an object to see
Is quite different from you yourself.
I am going my own way
And I meet my self
Which includes everything I meet
I am not something which I can see as an object.
When you understand self, which includes everything,
You have your own true way.
— Michael Stone ‘Just this is It’ July 15, 2015
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Or click on the coffee to buy me a coffee:
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Could it really be the end, Number Ten,
will you dance with me?
Could it really be the end, Number Ten,
we'll just wait and see,
and if it really is the end,
I guess I'll throw a big party,
and, all the boys and all the girls can come out,
and play with me.
A friendly game of hide-and-seek,
that could, easily last for weeks, and just,
when you think it's peaked, you'll forget to pour yourself
another drink.
Great read Guy ... though my attention span is weeny-sized of late. That Martin Luther quote was a hoot, though maybe a disservice to those whores with a heart of gold. 😂
I sometimes attempt at using language and logic to point to the limits of language and logic, but usually end up collapsing into a black hole of contradiction and tautology.
I came upon a funny alternative in the form of a translated quote by Nietzsche ... "For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
But after that 2nd mug, I can't even see the damn keyboard.
Ah the old linguistic conflict existing between the dogma of analytical intellect and the natural fluidity of intuitive knowing. This is a beautiful topic.
Words of power can only encircle truth. They cannot ever apprehend it. For truth is unattainable to the mind, it is native to the undefined condition of Being. The closest thing we can do as humans to relate truth is through symbolism. That's why the earliest languages were written in symbolic form.
The mind is well suited for breaking things down into small pieces and cataloging them. The mind is like a knife, it cuts. If development of clear sight of truth can be considered as a cloth, can we weave it with a knife?
The mind is very good at controlling the pieces and cataloging them; when it is used to do that with truth, it falls flat footed. This is because the true nature of reality is not dualistic, it is One.
Though it can be experienced in the context of the human existence, it must be observed in perfect stillness, with a silent mind.
The physical world is in a state of Maya, not because of it being illusory, but because it is in a movement of "becoming," this movement towards Being is the purpose of Time.
Everything is One, when we look inward, we find it.
Great read Guy ... though my attention span is weeny-sized of late. That Martin Luther quote was a hoot, though maybe a disservice to those whores with a heart of gold. 😂
I sometimes attempt at using language and logic to point to the limits of language and logic, but usually end up collapsing into a black hole of contradiction and tautology.
I came upon a funny alternative in the form of a translated quote by Nietzsche ... "For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
But after that 2nd mug, I can't even see the damn keyboard.
Cheers Guy!
Ah the old linguistic conflict existing between the dogma of analytical intellect and the natural fluidity of intuitive knowing. This is a beautiful topic.
Words of power can only encircle truth. They cannot ever apprehend it. For truth is unattainable to the mind, it is native to the undefined condition of Being. The closest thing we can do as humans to relate truth is through symbolism. That's why the earliest languages were written in symbolic form.
The mind is well suited for breaking things down into small pieces and cataloging them. The mind is like a knife, it cuts. If development of clear sight of truth can be considered as a cloth, can we weave it with a knife?
The mind is very good at controlling the pieces and cataloging them; when it is used to do that with truth, it falls flat footed. This is because the true nature of reality is not dualistic, it is One.
Though it can be experienced in the context of the human existence, it must be observed in perfect stillness, with a silent mind.
The physical world is in a state of Maya, not because of it being illusory, but because it is in a movement of "becoming," this movement towards Being is the purpose of Time.
Everything is One, when we look inward, we find it.