Sunday Sermon
Scientists: People Are Turning Inward For Answers
But are they asking the right questions?
It’s a tough time. America is about to get dragged into a THIRD armed conflict. People all over the globe are electing far right governments as people seem to be rebelling against liberal democracy, with its chaos and ill discipline.
We want answers, but we don’t have the right questions.
I know it seems counter intuitive to blame the war and the violence and the fascism on something inside every one of us. After all, we did NOTHING to start the war in Ukraine or Palestine or the next one in Paraguay. We’ve been minding out own business. It’s not our fault!!!
But what if it is our fault?
Well, then that would be good news, because we could correct it, whatever it is we were doing wrong. And we would become part of the solution, not the problem.
You CAN be part of the solution.
How?
By interrogating this very notion of self that we all seem to share, and which has given us exactly the world that we have — a very selfish, ignorant and hateful world.
What is the self?
That is the right question to ask. And if you answer it, as I say, you can be sure that you are moving in the corrective course toward finding a solution to the problems of mankind.
Many people are happy with a kind of approximation. “My self is just the name I give to the set that explains all these activities which I personally engage in — waking up, brushing teeth, thinking, having these feelings, and so on.”
It’s a useful term, no? No need to overthink it, say most people. The status quo definition of the self is enough — most of the time.
But sometimes it’s not.
What if you were to really take an interest in the exact definition of the self? Where does it begin and end? What is it good for? Where is it going? And Why?
You would be Siddhartha, in Herman Hesse’s novel.
Herman Hesse published Siddhartha 1922 after World War One had revealed the savage madness of the human race. He had before the war spent a great deal of time in India, and this novel was his exploration of spirituality as it appeared to him in the East.
But it tells us more about the spirituality of the West than it does of the East. I studied literature at Columbia University where there was a professor named Edward Said, who was famous for his theory of “Orientalism.” The theory states that the Western literary view of the “Orient” tells us more about the West than it does about the “Orient.”
What does Herman Hesse’s view of the self as espoused in Siddhartha tell us about the way we viewed the self in 1922? And how is that different than the way we view it today? Why in 1922, and then again in the 1960s when Siddhartha was discovered by the hippies, was it suddenly worth discussing, this notion of the “ultimate self?”
And most importantly (to me!), why when my mother gave me this book to read when I was in 9th grade did it affect me so deeply?
Is Interrogating The True Nature Of The Self An Adolescent Pursuit?
I had only recently reached puberty, after all. I was living in a very snowy Minnesota in the 1970s. There wasn’t much on TV. Just I Love Lucy reruns when we got home from school. So yeah, people read books.
This book of all the books I read had the most impact on my young, troubled mind. I was anxious and ill at ease and insecure — in other words, I was an adolescent.
It was a different world in the 70s. I wasn’t about to talk to anybody about these feelings. There was no possibility of getting “psychological help” — only weak people did that. So I was just kind of “toughing it out.” I was on the Freshman football team, so I knew about toughing things out. You take a hit. You get back up, etc. You don’t cry.
(I guess this is now called toxic masculinity).
But when I read this book by Hesse, for the first time I thought that there might be another “way out.” This way out was called enlightenment, nirvana, or maybe self-actualization.
And it wasn’t just me! The whole of popular culture in 1970s America was saturated with the notion of there being a “higher consciousness” that was attainable.
Obviously, if you make it to a higher consciousness, you’ve found a “way out” of the lower consciousness.
An escape.
My Reading Of Siddhartha Was Escapist
Following on the Edward Said “Orientalism” theory, that our experience of the East in art and literature tells us more about ourselves than it does about the East, I was demonstrating the “quiet desperation” of the capitalist self. If I wasn’t quietly desperate, why would I want to escape?
People who are content in themselves actually don’t have much need or time to bother with the question of the nature of the self.
But people who are vaguely dissatisfied or otherwise discontented might find the notion of escaping to a higher self very attractive — especially if they are young.
As You Get Older You Realize One Thing — You Cannot Escape Yourself
So in a way, questioning the nature of the self is quite adolescent — if it is done in the context of the fantasy of escape.
But if it is done maturely, questioning the nature of the self is vital. Here’s why:
If you don’t question and interrogate and unpack the various assumptions we make about the self, then you are inevitably going to end up an egoist.
That is, a person whose ego in one way or another is running amok.
By ego I mean that deluded person we sometimes believe that we are when we are in a state of cognitive distortion.
That little imaginary character inside our head who sometimes gets too big for his britches — yeah that guy.
The one who:
— always wants to be right
— is afraid that he/she is inadequate
— hides his/her true feelings inside itself and is ashamed of sharing them
— compares his/her talents to others and often despairs at the result of such side by side taste tests
— is quite certain that he/she is the most well-meaning individual who ever lived
— knows that he/she is incapable of intentionally inflicting harm on another
— feels that he/she deserves to be treated better than he/she is usually treated
— unaccountably, seems to believe that he/she is going to live forever — even though it knows all beings must one day perish
— is dreadfully afraid of perishing, even though he/she believes they will somehow never perish
— serves its own interests and only pretends to serve the interests of others if it is convenient and makes them look good
— thinks looking good to others is the most important thing in the world
— is primarily categorized by stubbornness.
The Ego Is The Most Stubborn Structure In The Universe
Obstinacy of the ego is traced by Freud and others to the “anal stage” of development. In other words, toilet training. Stubbornness is the only way out of this rather hellish experience for an infant — this supreme conflict between his biological desire and need to poop anywhere and whenever he feels like it, and society’s need to manage that excretion process.
The child becomes either:
— retentive. He stubbornly commits himself to holding in that poop as much as he can, and becomes what we call an “anal type” of person. You’ve met these guys. They line their underpants. You know.
or:
— expulsive. He stubbornly commits to resisting society’s (mommy’s) edict that he hold in that poop. And he becomes slovenly or perhaps rebellious and out of control.
But either way, we emerge from this stage stubbornly committed to either holding in our poop or letting it fly.
Nobody believes in Freud dogmatically any more, but it is obvious that in order to function in society one must very early on develop a kind of inner resiliency or stubbornness to manage our urges, or our id, as Freud termed it.
Social evolution has favored those human beings who were able to transition from this chaotic, urge-driven state to the more controlled human “rational” or “civilized” way of being. Those without this stubbornness were selected out. We survivors of human evolution share this trait of “self” control.
When we say “self” we mean poop.
Self Control Is Poop Control?
According to post-ego, the self is an unfortunate bi-product of excretion, this thing in our heads that is convinced it is our “self.”
Our self is that system of defenses and stubbornnesses that allows us to function socially, underpinning a kind of mannequin character that we wear as a mask, that we came up with through the process of psychological “identification” with our parents.
So somebody like me comes along and says to the human ego, you are not real. You are as real as a unicorn. But not nearly as real as you think you are. Plus, you are kind of a bummer and are making the person whose psyche you inhabit rather miserable. So cut it out.
Guess what happens?
Stubbornness, resistance, anger, violence, derision.
The first reaction on reading the ideas of post-ego should necessarily be one of FEAR. Because the stubborn, defensive thing called your ego feels attacked by this idea, and suddenly worried that he might poop his pants if he for half a second lets go of this thing called “control”, which is really the contraction of the sphincter.
Don’t worry, people. You won’t poop your pants. Read on.
It’s Really Sad To Base Your Whole Life On Your Anal Sphincter
But that might be what you’ve been doing, sorry to say. For most people, they get to the end of their lives and they experience a kind of shock — number one, where did all the time go? And number two, why did I just waste all that time doing what I did?
Because it’s not a great epitaph, is it? “He held in his poo.”
But that could be the epitaph of most humans, if they never make it through this stubborn, sphincter contracting, control-freak ego identity.
The toilet training created a strong-willed self. A self that could be trusted, right?
However, that stubborn willfulness has the characteristic of inflexibility and paranoia. It’s always on guard, on the lookout, to make sure you don’t shit yourself.
A lot of people have nightmares about going to the bathroom inappropriately. About toilets overflowing, and about touching feces. Real horror shows!
And that’s five or six decades after their toilet training ended and they supposedly graduated with honors.
Why are we still tormented by the notions of pooping ourselves, half a century after we were toilet trained?
It is because of fear.
We are so inflexible because we are afraid that if we let down our guard for even a second, we will have a poop accident.
And that’s horrifying and devastating. I mean, it’s bad enough to poop your pants when you are three, but when you are fifty-three? Come on man!
Read Siddhartha Through The Lens Of Toilet Training
Now that I am older, I reread this story, and I saw it not as a possible escape from the “troubled” mind of my adolescence. I saw it as a desire to escape from inflexibility.
Siddhartha as a young man sees that everyone around him is exactly as tormented by fear of poop accident as he is. Even the high priests. Even his own father. All of them live in a state of inflexible, stubborn, holding-it-in-ness. There is no peace in this state. There is only tension.
But he intuits that there is a possible state where this tension of holding it in is relieved. He thinks of it as enlightenment.
To even think of this as a possibility is very brave, because to even consider it, well, it risks making you poop yourself.
In order to move beyond the ego, you take a very, very scary risk of loosening the tight stubbornness. A sphincter might fly open. All hell might break loose.
But if you are willing to take that chance, well, a whole new possibility of being might open up to you.
If you are willing to take that chance, reader, read on.
The Stubborn Human Ego Was Existentially Threatened By Darwin
In the late 19th century, a threat was presented to this human ego who had been squeezing his sphincter too tightly for all these years — the theory of evolution. It proposed that we were nothing more than animals, which of course went right against our toilet training. The reason we don’t poop our pants is precisely because we are NOT animals, after all. That was the point.
Very slowly, under this nefarious influence of Darwin and modern science, the human imagination began to express skepticism about the “civilized” self within the beast.
By the time Hesse wrote, the influence of Darwin, Freud, Henry James etc. had begun to form a Modernist view of the chaotic self. Before, in the 19th-century the protagonist of realism was a discrete, integral and coherent whole. Think of Tess of the Dubervilles, for instance, or David Copperfield — these were coherent and discreet persons of the 19th Century imagination.
Then came Joyce and Wolf who translated that involuntary nature of personhood into the “stream of consciousness.” Now all over literature there began to appear voices of the disembodied, incoherent, but intensely felt “personhood.” TS Eliot, Joyce, and Wolf were the primary exponents of this new sense of personhood as a kind of intensely personal, irrational and angst-inducing strangeness.
But surely the self is more than just a stream of involuntary paroxysms of the mind? That’s the water that Hesse was swimming in. And that is how we should read him, rather than trying to understand the book as a meditation on the history of Eastern Religion.
Hesse Is Trying To Find A Way Out
He’s not trying to get back to the self of the 19th century, which was solid and indisputable. There it is — David Copperfield’s “self”. David Copperfield’s “self” walks all the way from London to Canterbury with no shoes. It hurts. He’s lost and alone in the world. But he’s still David Copperfield. They can’t take that away from him.
Hesse knows he can’t go back to that. Instead, he intuits that the way forward is to find the self “essence” that persists even as our notions of identity, psyche, consciousness and personhood become more and more dubious as the century progresses. Beyond all our illusions about our self, what are we really? Siddartha sets out looking for “Nirvana” because of course, when one reaches Nirvana one has gained wisdom and finally gotten in touch with the true self, beyond our delusions, and the true nature of reality.
If You’re Searching For Enlightenment — Turn On The Lights
Hesse wrote his books. If they enlightened the human race, you’d never know it. World War Two came and went. The human race seemed more deranged than ever.
But after 1945, the idea of finding “enlightenment” reappeared in the US, first through the Beatniks, who again presented personhood as an involuntary, intense paroxysm of the mind. This view was perhaps best evinced by a speed-addled Jack Kerouac taping the pieces of typing paper together in a long roll so he wouldn’t have to lose the flow as he typed out without punctuation what would become the roman au clef On The Road. Enlightenment came only in moments of intensity — through poetry, art, sex, drugs. But certainly not from any cultural or spiritual institution. The self was the authority.
This view exploded in the sixties, when suddenly the nature of personhood as explored by Herman Hesse was profoundly compelling again. This of course had something to do with the challenge to “personhood” that came from LSD and other psychedelic drugs, and the idea of “higher consciousness” emerging as a popular trope, in music, art, literature, film, everything.
Thousands of kids found “enlightenment” on acid but then were horrified to learn that when they came down from their trip they had to engage in tedious tasks like taking the garbage out and earning money for rent and so on.
Hesse Places Our True Self Beyond Language
In this sense the book Siddhartha is more Neitzchean than it is Buddhist.
“There is no thing which would be Nirvana; there is just the word Nirvana,” Siddhartha tells his friend Govinda at the end of the book.
Words are the enemy, Hesse realizes. Because, well, what is the primary weapon of the toilet trainer — language. “Don’t poop your pants, kid,” says the parent. And the kid develops a hideous, self-controlling self that lives in a language-generated prison for the rest of his days, and never really even experiences reality or life IN THE WORLD.
The wisdom Siddhartha has discovered is something present “in the world”, rather than in a book or in language. It is a radical acceptance of the world itself. He gained this point of view from the teachings of the river where he toiled as a ferry boat driver for years. He learned this from nature itself.
“But I’m only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect,” Siddhartha explains.
Remember, as a German in 1922, Hesse cannot help but fall under the intellectual sway of Nietzsche. Is this self that Siddhartha attains perhaps his own version of the Ubermensch, the Superman?
It hardly seems a Buddhist ideal — Superman the caped crusader. But it does seem that Hesse is longing for something indestructible. Maybe not “able to leap tall buildings at a single bound.” But definitely able to withstand the attacks of Freud, War, and Modernity.
Despising the world, despising one’s “self”, these are tendencies that Nietzsche claimed were holdovers of the slavery mentality of Christian religion. The ubermensch gets beyond all that.
Hesse too no longer perceives a “fallen world” or one poisoned by original sin. He sees the world free from the dark lens of the Bible.
He sees the world as it “is”, not as it is judged to be by the opinions and delusions of our toilet trainers.
Free from our own sphincter-tightening paranoia. Siddhartha is able to relax his butthole at last, and finally at the end of his life, he’s able to enjoy the natural state of nature and true, universal selfhood.
Beyond Identification
Identification refers to the successful transformation that Freud says must take place during the phallic phase of child development, where the son identifies with the father, and thus is no longer afraid of castration. Or the daughter identifies herself with her mother and no longer has her own “phallic issues.” I hesitate to say “penis envy” because I don’t want any rocks thrown at me.
Whether Freud’s ideas hold up in 2022, it is clear that we emerge somewhere around age five with a fully coherent self, after we identify so strongly with our parents that we become another character in the human drama, and take our place in the stage of life.
In Siddhartha, this “identification” process seems to take place with Siddhartha’s meeting with the Buddha. Also with his time with the Ferryman on the River. Finally, he offers his friend Govinda the chance to “identify” with himself, and be freed from his own tormented ego.
There are statues all over Asia of the buddha, often in gold, depicting the Buddha in a state of contemplation. The idea of these statues is that they help the followers “identify” with an ego model that is free from the pettiness of our world. An ego with a relaxed sphincter.
All Human Behavior Is Mimicry
René Girard in Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World talks about how when human beings seem to be acting irrationally — today for instance, with Putin’s irrational invasion of Ukraine — there is usually an explanation to be found in imitation. Putin is imitating someone. Stalin maybe. But it’s someone. And all the soldiers are imitating one another in their bravery. And all the world leaders are attempting to imitate one another in their diplomatic brilliance and so on.
Why? Why do we imitate one another like this?
It’s because of this primal psychological process called identification where we imitated our parents and it brought us success.
Nowadays, whom does everyone want to imitate? The billionaires?
It might be good to have other models for our mimicry. Our post-ego movement hopes to present other more Buddha-like models for our primitive little brains to mimic. It would work out a lot better for us if we imitated the Buddha more and Bill Gates less.
Enlightenment Took A Back Seat To Money
Post the 60s, we dispensed with “exploring the very notion of personhood.” That would have been considered “up your own bum-ness” in the decades that followed, decades of scarcity in the 70s, greed in the 80s, globalization in the 90s, and then our era of profound inequity and the advent of postcolonial theory. How one is oppressed, that is an interesting question for this era — not “what is one to begin with?”
So why then, is it an appropriate time to revisit this notion of personhood itself?
With the advent of social media, where one could craft one’s own identity through images and posts, personhood once again starts to seem less coherent and more open to the kind of challenges that Herman Hesse poses with this paragraph from 1922 that I will place below.
Throw in a worldwide pandemic. Make everybody stay home for two years, then follow that with the biggest land invasion by an army in Europe since the Second World War, and personhood is back in full bore crisis mode once again.
We Don’t Know Who We Are Any More.
Our ultimate personhood, our self, our individual discreet ego and how it relates to the infinite, is once again in crisis.
Truth itself has become interrogated once again. What are facts for one side of the political divide are made up items of fake news to the other.
Alternate facts? Alternate selves.
Maybe there are as many alternates of self and personhood as there are people!
And the very idea of exploring the question of self is naive and old-fashioned.
But I don’t think so.
The turbulence of these times has sent us looking inward once again, and we are more confused than ever as to who we are, where we came from and where we are going.
But mostly, about who we are.
Who is our self? What is our ultimate, core being?
Here is a meditation on the search for transcendence of the ego. Maybe put it on and chant along with the chorus:
Oh Ego
Ego let me go
Ego let me go
Ego don’t say no
Oh Ego
Ego let me know
That there’s more to life than the ego.
This is the paragraph from Siddhartha I speak of in this article:
“Where was Atman to be found, where did He reside, where did his eternal heart beat, where else but in one’s own self, in its innermost part, in its indestructible part, which everyone had in himself? But where, where was this self, this innermost part, this ultimate part? It was not flesh and bone, it was neither thought nor consciousness, thus the wisest ones taught. So, where, where was it? To reach this place, the self, myself, the Atman, there was another way, which was worthwhile looking for? Alas, and nobody showed this way, nobody knew it, not the father, and not the teachers and wise men, not the holy sacrificial songs! They knew everything, the Brahmans and their holy books, they knew everything, they had taken care of everything and of more than everything, the creation of the world, the origin of speech, of food, of inhaling, of exhaling, the arrangement of the senses, the acts of the gods, they knew infinitely much — but was it valuable to know all of this, not knowing that one and only thing, the most important thing, the solely important thing? Surely, many verses of the holy books, particularly in the Upanishades of Samaveda, spoke of this innermost and ultimate thing, wonderful verses. “Your soul is the whole world”, was written there, and it was written that man in his sleep, in his deep sleep, would meet with his innermost part and would reside in the Atman. Marvelous wisdom was in these verses, all knowledge of the wisest ones had been collected here in magic words, pure as honey collected by bees. No, not to be looked down upon was the tremendous amount of enlightenment which lay here collected and preserved by innumerable generations of wise Brahmans. — But where were the Brahmans, where the priests, where the wise men or penitents, who had succeeded in not just knowing this deepest of all knowledge but also to live it? Where was the knowledgeable one who wove his spell to bring his familiarity with the Atman out of the sleep into the state of being awake, into the life, into every step of the way, into word and deed? Siddhartha knew many venerable Brahmans, chiefly his father, the pure one, the scholar, the most venerable one. His father was to be admired, quiet and noble were his manners, pure his life, wise his words, delicate and noble thoughts lived behind its brow — but even he, who knew so much, did he live in blissfulness, did he have peace, was he not also just a searching man, a thirsty man? Did he not, again and again, have to drink from holy sources, as a thirsty man, from the offerings, from the books, from the disputes of the Brahmans? Why did he, the irreproachable one, have to wash off sins every day, strive for a cleansing every day, over and over every day? Was not Atman in him, did not the pristine source spring from his heart? It had to be found, the pristine source in one’s own self, it had to be possessed! Everything else was searching, was a detour…”
Read the Scientists series so far:
