purusartha: Indian self psychology

Interpretation in art and life

2011-10-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

For my class at Pacifica

Years ago, Susan Sontag wrote a famous essay titled “Against Interpretation” that many of you would agree with. Sontag argues, as some of you have done, that we should attend to the unmediated power of the work of art and set aside the irritable tendency to overthink it critically. I agree with her, and would ask, in fact, how anyone could disagree?

On the other hand, we also mostly agree that in “our times” (meaning in all times experienced in their “profane” every-dayness) the sacred is mostly absent and to locate it takes strenuous and faithful work, the sort of thing the Buddha did before his enlightenment and that Joseph Campbell (following Jung) terms the “Hero’s Journey.”

It follows that we need to be open to the immediacy of art but at the same time must complete a quest to achieve it. A paradox, is it not? Yes, but we have made progress, as it is now clear that immediacy is not immediate! It requires somehow attuning the human organism (body-mind) to the transcendent. Now we are on more familiar territory, that of the symbol and transcendent function, and developmentally of the individuation process.

Let’s look at the symbol in particular. From the beginning of his psychological development Jung understood symbols as engines to transform psychic energy (libido) to a higher, more spiritual (numinous) level. I want to suggest that this transformation itself can be understood as a kind of interpretation of both the archetypal forms that underlie the symbols and of the human psychophysiology that receives them. Symbols are like a key carved from the living body of the unconscious that fits into the lock of our body-minds and opens them to the light and power of the archetypes. Art, on this view, is never unmediated, and in fact works precisely as a mediator between sacred and profane, the unconscious and the conscious mind. On the other hand, when it is successful (the definition of greatness in art is success) art does plunge us into the unmediated. It is just like a fairy tale where the hero rides his little pony into the dark forest where he comes upon an enchanted princess. The vision of the princess is unmediated, but without the pony (the symbol) he could never get to her.

In the terms of my simple theory of culture, art lives in World Three but, when it succeeds, it drops us—hair on end, and chills down our spine—into the midst of World Two. Unsuccessful interpretation of art descends from World Three to World One, and becomes part of the mundane realm that the art work sought initially to escape. This triumph of the banal, which occurs all too frequently in secondary work about art (as Sontag said), is tragic but not essential. In my opinion, our response to art, as the ecstasy of World Two dissolves into the “orgasmic” afterglow that follows the esthetic experience, should and can become itself a new part of World Three, a particle of culture performed in and by our lives. In other words, art should “change our lives,” as Kafka said, a change that constitutes what Eliade calls turning chaos into cosmos and Jung terms (in the personal sphere) individuation.

Capitalism and the demiurge

2011-08-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

The parallel between the Gnostic demiurge (essentially a selfish, egotistic senex god) and the late capitalist cultural complex (where a similar god reigns) is on my mind. Capitalism as embodying a cultural complex is the more important idea here, I think. Following Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) individualism is a large part of the capitalist vision. The elect, chosen, saved comprise a subset of individuals (a relatively small number, and growing smaller as wealth concentrates). But unlike Weber, late capitalism seems to have given up on the possibility of transcendence, and in revenge against an absent god has chosen to take his place, to wall in Eden and indulge in intense pleasure in order to distract itself from the "horror" outside the gates. This image is almost exactly the same as the Gnostic demiurge hidden in cloud by his mother Sophia after she recognized the barrenness of her parthenogenic offspring. There sits the false god, unable to see beyond his estate though all powerful within it.

Depth psychology and the contemporary craft of simulation

2010-09-03T23:19:00.000-07:00

Written for the students entering the Depth Psychology program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Fall 2010

I want to compare and contrast two things, as a way to introduce our topic of depth psychology. Following the British psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott, I will call them “dreaming” and “daydreaming,” or images with and without soul. We live today in an ocean of images: no other moment in the history of civilization has approached our facility in inventing, crafting, refining, and polishing pictures of things, what postmodernism calls “simulacra.” Think, for example, of what films have become in the past century, with the primitive “special effects” of the early days of motion pictures giving way to 3-D, animation, and especially to computerized digital manipulation of the images of virtually any and all creatures, times, places, worlds; even dreams, memories, and visions; and beyond the duplication of all these actualities extrapolation to what has not been and perhaps never will be. Yet, in spite of the enormous outpouring in the present day of images of our worlds and how they might develop, there seems to be less and less place for what Jung called symbols and archetypes, and Winnicott “dreams” and “imagination”; those emotionally-charged images and stories that intimate and sometimes make real a world beyond our own but also most deeply our own, a sacred realm where life can be lived creatively. Why is this?

I suggest that the plethora of images in our world is directly related to the general decline of imagination, and specifically to the devaluation of that psychology of imagination that we call depth psychology. You are entering one of the very few institutions in the world that value depth psychology. It is true that there are Jungian institutes, other schools of psychoanalysis, and a few academic programs that recognize the value of soul; but they are infinitely outweighed by the linear, literalistic, and soulless surfaces of much of what passes for culture in the contemporary world. Daydreaming fantasy, as Winnicott shows, is a dissociative and defensive activity that aims at hiding reality; it adds nothing to life, drains our energy rather than renewing it. Not that this is not recognized from time to time in our art, especially films—which after 100 years remain the premiere canvas on which psyche projects her insights. As an example, I would like to reflect on the recent film “Inception,” whose premise is that a near future technology would allow its possessor to enter and control the dreams of others. Of course these are no longer dreams, in Winnicott’s sense, but rather daydreams or fantasies without soul or depth, instruments of power and control motivated by the spirit of capitalism and self aggrandizement. “Inception” images for us the possibility of levels of dreams, dreams within dreams, and of a distortion of time such that a minute at one level equals hours in a deeper dream. The outward “spectacle” of dreams (to use Aristotle’s term) is brilliantly portrayed, but there is no sense of the mystery and depth of natural dreams. Instead, we are plunged into the tedium of being trapped in a (day)dream world where nothing new can ever happen. The protagonist of Inception, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is tempted to give in, as his wife had done, to the subtle blandishments of the spectacular—but finally banal—daydreams they had constructed in what felt to them like 50 years trapped in a third level dream. On returning to the real world she jumped to her death, thinking reality a dream. He rejected the daydream simulacrum of his wife pleading for him, too, to jump, and chose ordinary reality; paradoxically, because it was more real, deeper, than daydream. As he said to his wife’s image, recognizing that he had (re)created it, “You’re not good enough.” Real memories and authentic mourning are superior to mechanized fantasy.

This is the real issue facing depth psychology today. We are tempted by all the powers of our critical faculty to reject the imagination because we confuse it with the cheap daydreams of advertising and politics. The challenge is to show that there is something more in the imaginal world than the funhouse of the postmodern imaginary, where a bloated daydream world is dissected in irony but never transcended. Inception demonstrates again (as Jung and Hillman had shown long ago) that what passes for fantasy in much of our culture nowadays is only the old heroic ego warmed over, galvanized into a simulacrum of life like the vampires and zombies that inhabit today’s films. The good sense that rejects these phantoms of the surface—for instance in television like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report—is itself also a lingering contrail of the hero, though a much superior version of him. Cold, hard moral reason, like that shown by DiCaprio’s character in rejecting the will-o-the-wisp that pretends to be his wife is absolutely needed today, and so—in spite of a certain personal aversion to their style—I have to honor the spirit of Colbert and Stewart who aim at a purified comic intelligence capable of dueling with the bathos and chilly posturing of what Jung had already, in 1913, identified as “the spirit of these times.”

What, then, of Jung’s other force, the “spirit of the depths”? Where is it to be found in a culture where a film on dreaming never touches on Jung, or even Freud, and describes the deepest levels of the psyche as “limbo”? I hope that over the course of this quarter the answer may become a little clearer.

What is World Two?

2010-04-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

I began this work with the conviction (based on experience) that there are great moments in life, epiphanies or recognitions of an absolute character in which there is no sense of lack or incompletion. After the fact, as the epiphany fades into memory, we draw a line between these exceptional moments (which I am calling World Two) and ordinary reality (World One). Where does this line fall? How do we decide what counts as a great, self validated moment? With the Buddhists and Hindus I would acknowledge that even apparently worldly moments of satisfaction (Freudian “drive reductions” like eating and sex) are outside the realm of suffering, and so are not part of World One. But they also do not seem to fall within cultural, which I have termed “World Three” moments, because they do not seek, point to, celebrate or even reach satisfaction, but already are that. But perhaps we are missing something here. World Three is not just culture (the movement from World One to World Two) but can also include the descent of god into the world, i.e., the “avatara” (Sanskrit ava = “down” + tr = “cross”) event, where the movement is reversed, going from World Two to World One. Spontaneous eruptions of World Two in orgasm, mystical experience, big dreams, even the explosion of chocolate on the tongue, can be understood this way, as visitations from the divine to the earthly level. It is as if World Two, though complete in itself, contains “arrows” that point either to or from it to World One, with the arrows themselves being World Three.

I reading the books of David Lawrence, I have been wondering where rationality lies. It seems clear that reason cannot belong to World Two, the realm of bliss and fulfillment, because there is a movement in it, a tension or need for completion. If it needs completion, even if it tends in its inmost essence toward completion, reason cannot be complete. On the other hand, David Lawrence (and the Indian tantric philosopher Abhinavagupta whom Lawrence studies) have shown that reason does lead to World Two. This what Lawrence means by “transcendental argument.” My previous inquiry into Samkhya and Yoga has found that the higher (sattvika) buddhi, “insight” that distinguishes the subtlest aspects of prakrti (“nature”) from purusa (“consciousness”), lies in a paradoxical realm, the region I have called World Three, where World One suffering reaches an asymptote or limit in which it realizes its otherness from World Two and for that very reason becomes more and more like World Two, without limit. It would appear that rationality must be essentially the same thing as buddhi. So understood, rationality is an arrow from World One to World Two.

But buddhi has also been understood as the spontaneous appearance in this world of the divine. This is what happens when the guru appears to the disciple, as in the Bhagavad Gita when Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna, or when Bodhidharma travels from India to China bringing Buddhism. Buddhi thus conceived would be a gift from World Two as much as it is the highest achievement of World One. It lives on the border, as I have discussed before, but the movement is from above to below as well as from below to above. The otherness experienced in highest buddhi (in the direction World One to World Two) is also experienced in the avatara phenomenon, but now in the feeling of “visitation,” the sense that this experience of satisfaction somehow is different from other moments, that it is a time out of time, a holiday from ordinary reality. The World Two-ness of World Two, what makes it a second reality, might therefore be the sense that it has descended into this mundane reality from above, or below, in some way from outside.

This suggests that the secondness of World Two might lie in its being this other aspect of World Three, i.e., in its having a special sort of relatedness to World One, a relationship of fulfillment and completion. Going in one direction, we feel fulfillment arising in our ordinary life. Moving in the other direction, we feel fullness overcoming ordinary life from outside, as if from the future. The first case could be called “works,” the second “grace.” Now reason appears to reside primarily in the first sort of World Three process, the buddhi that more and more clearly glimpses consciousness in the course of diligent meditation and careful discrimination. Could it be that there is a second sort of “reason,” a flash of insight from World Two? An example might be the “thought” that came to me in 1965 that “Everything is empty.” Seconds later, this thought ignited, exploded, and annihilated my world. That is, it produced a World Two moment. But before the World Two there was a World Three moment of something like reason. And that “reason” seemed to come from the future, from the enlightenment that followed, more than it came from any rational process in my past life.

This line of thought suggests that I should be asking whether this sort of divine as guru process is present in Abhinava, or in Yoga.

The relationship between Abhinava’s esthetics and politics, as seen through his philosophical theology

2009-06-01T18:59:00.000-07:00

Abhinavan esthetics finds in art a momentary and isolated interval of freedom from ordinary life where we can experience the deeper truth and meaning of our emotions. True experience of art by one whose heart is in it (the sahrdaya) involves supra-worldly wonder (alaukika-camatkara, Anandabharati). Love, separation, the comedic, heroism, etc. can be “relished” (rasaniya, carvana, asvadana, etc.) in art because in it they do not touch the concerns of the ego (which would make them painful and incomplete), and can be seen sub specie eternitatis—in effect, can be seen to be experienced by purusa or Siva and not the ego. (It is emotional, affective essences that are relished in art, realized to belong to purusa (Siva), not just any perceptions or mental contents.) As in Samkhya and Yoga where the two interrelated purposes of prakrti are 1. to give pleasure to purusa and 2. to release purusa (achieve moksa), in esthetics there is a necessary connection between the relishing of rasa (higher pleasure or bhoga that art gives) and the isolation of the rasa experience from ego (ahamkara). Relishing is possible only in the absence of ego, and the ego can be transcended in art only because of the relish it gives.

How then to understand politics and art together as two parts of a unified culture? Is not art inherently political? Rilke said that art teaches us, “You must change your life.” Is this not felt on the level of social life, and so in politics as well? And yet, it would seem that politics is worldly (laukika) whereas art is alaukika, cut off from the world. I have tried in my Slumdog paper (posted earlier) to show that both the films discussed (Slumdog Millionaire and Salaam Bombay!) see their own esthetic function to include a political or quasi-political aim: to make us want to do something for the slum dwelling children of Bombay and to make Mumbai a more human city. I think it is necessary to reinterpret Abhinava’s view that art is unworldly (alaukika) in order to make it relevant to the contemporary world and contemporary art). I propose to do this by viewing Abhinavan esthetics from the viewpoint of Abhinava’s theology, which I will try to illuminate with psychoanalysis.

David Lawrence and I have independently found that some versions of psychoanalytic self theory are quite compatible (after necessary modifications) with Abhinava’s theology. (My paper was in Mankind Quarterly in 1992, Lawrence’s was presented at DANAM last year.) We both discuss Heinz Kohut in this regard, and I also find similar ideas in D. W. Winnicott. The basic idea in both authors is that we humans experience the outer world in terms of our selfhood, and that the social and cultural world in particular is a “transitional” realm that feels relevant to our sense of self, adequately mirroring and supporting it or failing to do so. There is a circular interplay between self and self-relevant world that can be viewed as parallel to the emission and re-absorption of Siva’s world in the unmesa/nimesa process described by Abhinavagupta. In the transitional experience in psychoanalysis the concerns of the self are not walled off (as they may seem to be in the alaukika theory of art) from what we might call an esthetic preserve or “national park,” and instead involve expansion of the self out into the world where it interpenetrates the environment, and a complementary movement back into the interior self.

But the esthetic theory and the theology are not that far apart. An analogous transformation of the self happens in the two cases, a shift of self reference from “ahamkara” towards “purusa” selfhood. In esthetic experience, as in spiritual development, there is a move from ego to consciousness as the true spectator or owner (svamin) of the experience. Similarly, in the transitional experience when it develops into culture there is a move away from ego and toward a more “cosmic” or universal sense of selfhood that begins with renunciation. In Abhinavan esthetic culture an egoless moment is walled off so that it can shine in purusa “space,” while in transitional culture the moment becomes more egoless through the transformation from crude claiming that something in the world must be “mine” to self denial in the present moment coupled with a faith that what I really need is inherently mine and will come to me (in some sense of “me”) in some way, in time. The sense of what “I” am shifts from a drive to assert itself or claim ownership to a standpoint that has eternal value and certainty. At the same time, its location shifts from inside the walls of the body and mind outward into the realm of culture, and even the cosmos. (This can be understood partly in terms of the vasanas or “latent impressions” from one’s past lives which move the self far beyond the skin of the present personality, if still far from the recognition that “I am Siva.” Recall Duhsanta’s past life intimations in Sakuntala V.)

In the two movies I discussed, the selves of the characters Krisna and Jamal are esthetic for the viewer (we see them from the outside, individuated across childhood, the flashbacks in Slumdog constituting a kind of time-lapse photography revealing a single personality) but transitional (possessing hope of deep fulfillment within their worlds) for the characters themselves. By putting these two facets of the films together in this way it is possible to suggest a way to transcend Abhinava’s assertion that rasa cannot refer to the world. As discussed, both films call on us to change our political lives, to care for the homeless children of Bombay and build a better Mumbai. The sahrdaya is also a citizen because art implies a way of life in the world. In spite of the sharp division Abhinava draws between life and art, it is clear in the famous image we have of him as a living man that the two were in fact one. The verses, and painting, of Abhinava sitting with his two yoginis and his disciples, playing the lute while sipping wine in the fragrant Kashmiri garden unmistakably constitute both a work of art and an idealized vision of a social order that may never have existed fully but was conceived as ultimately desirable by Abhinava and his followers. What if life in Mumbai were like that?

yoga , vedanta, and the identicality of purusas

2008-11-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

One striking difference between the darsanas of yoga (/samkhya) and vedanta is the unity of the consciousness principle in vedanta (i.e., brahman) and its diversity in yoga (the purusas). Why this is so has long been debated, and I have myself thought much about the question. An idea I found in Peter Pesic's book Seeing Double has helped the matter get clearer for me. In trying to make ordinary language sense of quantum physics he invented the term "identicality" for the fact that elementary particles such as electrons are exactly like one another in all ways. As Pesic says, their "species is their individuality," meaning that electron-ness is all that an electron is. The analogy in yoga is to see that purusa-ness is the whole being of any particular purusa, for example "mine." (Of course even to say this is to reveal a profound misunderstanding, as I belong to the purusa and not the reverse. As the texts tell us, purusa is the svamin or "lord.") The consciousness in me is not different in any way from the consciousness in you. But if this is so, why do we say that there are as many purusas as there are persons (linga-sariras)?

The answer has to lie in the fact that spiritual liberation is an individual matter, even though the ultimate reality is in no way individual. For yoga (and samkhya) the path to liberation lies through discriminative awareness of the radical difference between consciousness and its contents. This awareness of difference, paradoxically, brings with it a state of deepening unity (samadhi) within the personality as the grasping and misunderstanding of the ego resolve themselves into a state of apophasis, a via negativa that lives in recognition that "I am not, I have nothing, there is no 'I' in me" (naham na me nasmi, Samkhya Karika 64). Becoming more and more like to the purusa that witnesses its dissolving, this transformed ego is all that defines the purusa as "this" purusa, and (again paradoxically) the more it becomes itself the more it recognizes that this consciousness is and has always been itself.

Yoga is on the surface at least more of a path of sadhana, spiritual work. While there is an implicit guru in yoga (I am referring to the "Lord of Yoga" or yogesvara who is probably understood implicitly as Siva), this is not emphasized. Vedanta, as a form of mimamsa or Veda-based path to enlightenment, teaches that we achieve enlightenment when our inner buddhi (the same faculty as in yoga) is brought to the level of brahman by the guru, or--which is the same thing--by hearing the "great statements" (mahavakyas) at the moment when that buddhi is ripe. My teacher's teacher used to tell a story about a meeting between a highly accomplished yogi and one of his disciples. The yogi said, "the difference between our paths is that we are given a bag of unhulled rice, a bucket of water, and sticks of firewood. We have to hull the rice, light the fire, and cook the rice for ourselves. Your guru puts a cooked ball of rice into your mouth." This expresses the difference between yoga and vedanta succinctly, but it also shows how they are the same. It is the same mouthful of rice, the same nectar of consciousness, that in the end satisfies both disciples.

Science fiction and the culture of naham

2007-11-05T23:38:00.000-08:00

I will be giving a talk at DANAM (Dharma Association of North America) in November 2007 on "rasa as culture theory." Understanding culture in its essence as the attempt to go beyond the "culture" we apparently inhabit to another transcendent realm of bliss, I discuss one film, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, as an example of the theme of (almost?) all science fiction of the past 50 years at least: the trope of the extra-terrestrial as stand-in for the material, bodily human that we inevitably oppose to a self that owns and is loved by that body. Ironically, the robots, ETs, and vibrating monoliths of Battlestar Gallactica, 2001, Solaris, Forbidden Planet, and the Replicants of my chosen film all aim, in the end, only to show what it is to be human. To be human is to be a body, and body is seen most clearly when it shows itself as other than human. And yet bodies are concerned in their innermost stories and essence with that other thing that makes us human. That is (as my old teacher Raja Rao told us) the abhuman. The search for the abhuman is the story of all (almost all?) science fiction just as it is the theme of all fiction in general. It seems so beautiful to me that at the instant we love a woman, or yearn for God, or even feel profound disgust at the horror of it all, we tell tales of archetypal love and strife and striving; we put it all on the line to tell a story to the King (as Shakespeare said). Culture is that story, refined in the quiet moments that follow passion. Part of contemporary culture is science fiction, and it deserves more respect and more consciousness than it has been granted by the gatekeepers and censors who pass on what counts in the media maelstrom of the 21st century. I do not have time, energy, or expertise to prove the point, but I do claim truth for the intuition: what all the Others of science fiction seek is not other than what I, and the dancing girl of Samkhya, and the demon at the feet of Visnu seek in what we do. A retrospective of AI, Minority Report, Gattaca, The Matrix, and even potboilers like Independence Day, would show the thing clearly. We celebrate the Self in seeking it, and the more we recognize just how far from humanity we are the clearer we see what it means to be human, and how we can live that only by losing it in the act of making--or being made--art.

Mathematics and culture

2007-07-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

William Byers' How Mathematicians Think (Princeton, 2007) states that the deepest motivation for mathematical practice rests on the fact that "There exists that which cannot be expressed yet we must express it." (p. 120; italics in original.) He amplifies this as "putting the ineffable into words, describing the indescribable, or expressing the inexpressible." Exploring the example of the "infinite," he finds that historically two clusters of characerizations are found: on the one hand the infinite is boundless, endless, immeasurable; and on the other hand it is complete, whole, perfect, and absolute. The first cluster belongs more to the context of expression, the second to the intuition of the wholeness that lies beyond expression. In my terms, the indescribable infinite belongs to World Two, and the attempt to say the infinite in terms such as "immeasurable" to World Three, the realm of culture and specifically mathematical culture. Godel's incompleteness theorem is a paradigmatic example of mathematical culture because it shows that "within the context of logical thought one can deduce limitations on that very thought." (Byers, p. 282). This is quite similar to the argument in the Samkhya Karika that leads the highest embodied intelligence (sattvic buddhi) to see that "I am not, I have nothing, there is no self in me" (naham na me nasmi, SK 64).

The self referentiality of the Samkhya text closely parallels that of Godel. This seems to be a general feature of (genuine) culture. There is always self-reflection in the service of self-transcendence. We are bound into the world of duhkha but that suffering life contains within it the possibility--indeed the necessity--of a beyond. Great ideas in mathematics parallel the great realizations of figures like the Buddha and Patanjali (of the Yoga Sutra) that show the limitations and thereby the potentialities for release in our World One of constriction and pain.

Buddhist and Hindu postmodernism

2007-06-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

I have long thought that much of modern and postmodern thinking can be categorized as "Hindu" or "Buddhist," depending on whether or not it allows the possibility of transcendence. Of course taken historically or philosophically that is not an easy question, and I think it is quite clear that many forms of Buddhism do allow for transcendance. I think the location of the Buddha's enlightenment at the moment of seeing the morning star figures this "going beyond." So when I use the rubrics "Hindu" and "Buddhist" I do not intend the terms literally. Rather, I mean that modernism and after divides fairly well into tough-minded cultures of suspicion, avid to dissolve or deconstruct all experiences of a beyond into sexual, political, economic, or gender interests, and tender-minded cultures of mysticism and ecstasy that believe in the reality of those moments of flight into joy surpassing our worldly understanding. Psychoanalytic and Marxist culture criticism fall into the former category, most of the counterculture and New Age (e.g., Jeff Kripal's Esalen, the sixties, etc.) into the second.

Where does postmodernism lie? I think that "officially" postmodernism is "Buddhist;" it wishes to eliminate anything essential and allow only the webs of difference (and consequent deferral) that most of its cannonical texts describe. In my usage, postmodernism tries to dissolve World 3 culture, i.e., culture that points toward experiences of enlightenment, into World 1, the realm of suffering (duhkha). But (in my view inevitably) postmodernist thought finds itself confronting moments reached ostensibly through its own deconstructive methods where the beyond breaks through, or at least beckons. Several of these occur in the thought of Jacques Lacan, which I think is why Derrida attacked him so severely. The structure of postmodern or poststructural thinking rests on a grid of oppositions that fail to capture any essential "self" in our material or intellectual worlds. In (real) Buddhist terms, there is a "failure to find" (anupalabh-) any permanent or self-subsiding entity there. Lacan's concepts of "the real" and "jouissance" raise the posibility of a transcendence that cannot be named or found. Transgressive within the patriarchal repression that has arisen within postmodernism Lacan's ideas suggest to me the relationship between prakrti and purusa in the Samkhya Karika. The nay-saying of self reached by prakrti (nasmi na me naham) points with overwhelming force at the seeing and I-ness that prakrti knows with all her being she is not. Lacan's "real" seems to me to be like this, something we can never know, and that we know more and more fully that we cannot know as we become wiser. On the other hand, the more sharp becomes our knowledge the greater becomes the bliss that rises from this understanding. Thus the real and jouissance are inextricably connected.

Cultural embers

2007-03-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

The purpose of culture is to remember and create pathways from World 1 (the realm of suffering, duhkha) to World 2 (fulfillment, joy, enlightenment). As such culture is a "world of its own" that I call World 3. Tantra makes it very clear that this culture (including its version of "culture of the self") must be recreated at every moment, and that otherwise it tends downhill towards decay and ossification. A movie I saw last night pictures old culture at a moment not exactly of decay but of dying down, like a wood fire fading to coals. The Hermitage Dwellers is a recent Dutch film in Russian about three old and one young employees of the great St. Petersburg museum who find there a world apart from the continuing darkness and deprivation of the city (still "Leningrad" to the old people who lived through the German siege in the 1940s). The art gives off an afterglow of its original esthetic power and exposure to it--standing close by as if next to a dying fire--is enough to warm the souls of the museum "dwellers," but only if they take regular and sustained doses. Standing next to Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son" the young man, a former soldier with a guilty conscience, irradiates himself with the blissful moment of forgiveness that the art work shows, and the painting seems to translate him into a state of redemtion that is deep and genuine if also partial and fleeting. This, the film seems to say, is the most that old culture can do, give a modicum of comfort and distant intimation of transcendence to men who did not experience the original World 2 moment on which the work rests and lack World 2 moments of their own that these old beauties might find ways to touch more vitally. One thinks of the women in T.S. Eliot's museum "talking of Michaelangelo" or evening-clothed bourgeoisie at the Vienna opera immersed in the "Magic Flute."

Where is new culture today? Do others feel as I do that the last upwelling of nutrients from a lasting World 2 happened in the 1960s? The last great classical composers worked fifty years ago or more, and in popular music where are the equals of the Beatles, Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan (aside from Mr. Dylan himself, who does not decay musically though he's now post sixty-four). Literature may be an exception here, though surely not in the English novel. And painting, while subject to the same drifiting lack of center (predicted by the great Yeats) does have moments of fierce originality of vision in the work of men who are physically old but still young in art (Cy Twombley and Brice Marden are two). Overall, though, there seems little but afterglow at which to warm our spirits. The only hope I can see, the same hope that was always there, lies in breakthrough to new Worlds 2. At any rate the old culture tells us, admonishes us, that breaktrough is possible and refuses our drift to the couch and the grave.

Siddhis and World Two

2006-12-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

The "psychic powers" (siddhis) of yoga have been problematic, or even embarassing to some. What is the point of these apparently ego-focused abilities when the person is on the brink of release from ego? Chandogya Upanisad chapter 8 makes clear that the ability to obtain all desires lies in the atman-brahman identity, even as it equally shows that fulfilled desires below the level of that atman-brahman are temporary and ultimately undesirable. What is clear here is that only at the creative source are desires (kama-s) fulfilled, and that being at that creative source (recognizing that one is that source, that atman = brahman) is bliss. There is a push back toward beginnings in the Upanisads as in the Yoga Sutra, and those beginnings are realms of bliss. This is what I call "World Two," the state of fulfillment which is not only an "experience" but a stance. [Parenthetically, this is what Heidegger is about, always shifting from the purely mental and interior (experience, concepts) to an orientation, a stance or comportment towards Being.] Standing in ananda there is a sort of explosion of joy, akin to the moment of kensho in Zen Buddhism, which is expressed in exclamations of achievement of desired things--whatever happens to be desired. "Shivoham!" in the Sankara song is similar.

The state of bliss (brahmaloka = anandaloka) is a world, as van Buitenen suggests in his article "Ananda or all desires fulfilled." It is a positive reality in its own right, not just a relief from suffering. Siddhis and the various desired things spoken of in Chandogya 8 are alike in representing the spontaneous outpouring of World Two into this world ("World One"). In this way they are moments of culture, which I call "World Three." The joys of life are real only when they flow from World Two, from a stand in World Two. Pleasures confined to World One (Chandogya 8 shows that this comprises the waking, dream, and deep sleep states) are temporary and not really "enjoyable" (bhogya). "Magic," then, becomes an essential part of culture, which opens up a perspective on much of popular tantra.

How many purusas? As many as moments?

2006-12-25T23:06:00.000-08:00

An important question in early samkhya is how many purusas there are. Upanisadic atman = brahman thinking might well suggest only one. Nevertheless, in order to account for the fact that we don't all share the same karmic burden or own the same psychophysical personality, samkhya concluded that there are as many purusas as there are sentient beings ("from Brahma to a blade of grass"). These purusas own different endowments but in their essential nature all amount to nothing more than consciousness. In the terms of Peter Pesic (in his book Seeing Double, MIT Press) the purusas are similar to elementary particles like electrons that are the same in all essential respects, and share "identicality." Some Buddhist thinkers (see Matthew Kapstein, Reason's Traces, Wisdom publishers) claim that there is a givenness of self-reference moment by moment that amounts to nothing but the momentary event of consciousness. In a sense there is something like purusa in each moment but a purusa that does not carry over to subsequent moments. Nevertheless there appears to be an "identicality" of consciousness in these moments that is very similar to one that applies between purusas in samkhya. An identity of "nature" between the consciousnesses within different moments seems implied in Buddhist concepts such as the Zen talk of "seeing eye to eye with the Buddha and patriarchs." The essence of liberation in samkhya is to see that the consciousness in all moments of experience is this completely selfless essence, and not an ahamkara (hence the recognition of "I am not" (naham) at Samkhya Karika 64). This is similar to Buddhist realization which also sublates the ahamkara (ego). The apparent difference is that samkhya ends with a permanent purusa and Buddhism with an endlessly repeated experience of momentary consciousness. That repetition is what I call culture, and I have argued that samkhya, rightly interpreted, implies the same thing (paper at AAR/DANAM, 2006).