by Rocco Lo Bosco
Part 1: The Wheel of Bondage and The Secret Problem of Karma
This world is a manifestation of the unmanifest. There is vibration, activity, creation, sound, form and color. . . . In the looking, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching there is action. Because we enjoy these sensations we create possibilities wherein and whereby we produce more of the same, and in bountiful proportions. Men, women and children are always reaching out of the bondage of obscurity. . . . The need to be free is to escape from not being known—to being known. . . . We build societies, structures and super-structures, which express our need to be free. Yet in the building and the need to be free, there is fear of destruction. We cannot bear the thought of this. Therefore, we go on through pain and pleasure, laboring through many trying circumstances because we must transcend what is, in order to become what we are yet to be. In this there is pleasure, in this, pain (Gurani Anjali p. 29).
This simple passage outlines both the root and the problem of human action. As self-conscious beings we are aware of our actions. My living is at the same time an awareness of living, a self-conscious activity in a cultural milieu. To live means to make meaning, to be, to will. This will creates, sustains, and destroys. It shapes perspectives, puts thought and imagination into action, and frees us from the “bondage of obscurity.” Action is the movement from the unmanifest to the manifest, from the interior where we can conceive, reflect, and decide to the exterior where we present, represent, and accomplish. And yet the very act of conception carries with it the inevitability of death. As Heidegger tells us, we are “thrown towards death.” What is created will inevitably be destroyed. This last part—destruction—is what we dread, and this dread pervades human life. It is the secret problem at the heart of human action, the worm at the very core.
In his pioneering and still relevant masterpiece, The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker argues that the fear of death is the compulsive force behind human life and action. He would have agreed that “we cannot bear the thought” of destruction. He says the thought is so unbearable that the healthy person must deny it, and this denial forms the very mortar of human character:
The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. . . . But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man’s anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. . . . This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die (Becker p. 87).
For Becker all human activity is characterized by the madness born of an existential dualism; man is a finite being who suffers to live, who sweats and bleeds and defecates, and yet who hungers for immortal life. He is a creature who can imagine towering heights, and yet he is destined to the obscurity of the decaying corpse:
He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, disguised as dignified madness, but madness all the same (Becker p, 27).
This viewpoint sees death and destruction as the great spoiler, the overwhelming monster with which our “pretense of sanity” feebly or mightily struggles. Death pervades the whole of our life, is the very ground upon which the individual and the culture is built. This destruction literally surrounds us on all sides, within and without. It (and not money) is the root of all evil:
If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil men have wreaked upon themselves and upon their world since the beginnings of time right up until tomorrow, it would not be in terms of man’s animal heredity, his instincts and his evolution: it would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes, as he tries to deny his true condition (Becker p, 30).
This reductive viewpoint throws the problem of action into sharp relief and sheds light on “the fix” we find ourselves in when we awake at 3 a.m. with nameless anxiety. It explains the panic in “panic attacks,” the compulsion in “compulsive disorders,” and the pathology in a host of other illnesses of the psyche. It puts the urgency of our ambitions into perspective, by revealing the compulsion of denial at the heart of action. It claims that our very character is a “lie,” a form of insanity that allows us to be culturally sane. Culture is thus built on a lie, on an insane but necessary denial of our mortal condition. “The body and the self can never be reconciled seamlessly” (Becker 29), and so the human being is split between being a mere creature and being a self who hungers for life with all its possibilities; split between being a locus of control and being helplessly sacrificed to age, loss, and death, “a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it” (Becker 60). Life is overwhelming and death is dreadful. Thus the self-conscious being is tragic in his “sanity,” which poorly hides his bloodthirsty compulsion to secure specialness, first-ness, and immortality. He imagines omnipotence but encounters impotence. He is at war with himself, and so he must necessarily be at war with others. His actions are always haunted by the threat of annihilation—a threat to his personal existence and a threat to the meaning of his life. This situation makes him mad.
Thus the person suffers anxiety and dread and, therefore, repression. One’s striving is built on repression. But striving fails to secure what one really wants—real permanence, a worth that cannot change, immortality. This view is difficult to refute. Born from the strivings of our parents and our culture, we find ourselves beyond the age of six or seven striving, an emergent individual, learning better ways to strive, planning to strive, “to make our mark” and “be somebody,” to “secure the situation,” enjoying the victories and suffering the defeats of striving, retiring to strive into the “golden years,” still alone, still one, and drawing nearer to the end. Yet, amid our constant striving we long for unity, respite, peace. Becker cites the conflict between the twin ontological motives of agape and eros, the former a need born of the “horror of isolation” “to merge and lose oneself in something larger,” to be at “peace and oneness” (Becker 152), while the latter is an “urge for more life, for exciting experiences, for the development of the self-powers, . . . “the impulsion to stick out of nature and shine” (Becker 153). This is the inherent tragedy of a self-conscious being. Haunted by our mortality, we are caught between the irrepressible need to expand and the deep desire to merge. Thus the human being is always off-balance, troubled, uneasy. We might echo Sartre’s formula. Man is not what he is and is what he is not—an “absurd passion.”
As the opening quotation indicates, in all our striving we cannot bear the thought of annihilation. Our actions are always problematic because they carry within them the problem of being a person, of facing death and being caught between agape and eros, limitation and expansion, ignorance and knowledge, self and other, past and future, and all the opposites erased by death. Death is the state that is unknowable; it has no opposite or other. It sends back no messages. Each of us is prey to a beast whose face is never seen. And whatever we believe about existence after death—heaven, hell, reincarnation, and so forth—we know nothing. Whatever “structures and super-structures” we build for refuge, we cannot secure refuge. Whatever visions assure us, they only take place among the living. Whatever pronouncements are made by the wise, the scientific, the ill informed, or the foolish, they are made by human beings and heard and practiced by other human beings. The activity of life only refers back to itself. And so life and its meaning live under constant fear of doom.
So what then is the fate of our action? How will our projects fare? What can we do? Becker’s offers this: “The most any of us can seem to do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering, so to speak, to the life force” (Becker p, 285).
To fashion an object and drop it into the confusion, “the nightmare of creation,” is the best we can hope to do. For him this is the outer limits of our actions. His conclusion is an honest one that naturally follows the assumptions that preceded it. Each thing suffers and dies. Each thing is alone, bound by its own hide. The human creature is in an impossible situation, a self-consciousness that imagines immortality but suffers death. The human need to make life meaningful is forever haunted by death, by the shadow of meaninglessness. The alpha and omega of human action is the denial of death. Any discussion of a reality beyond the one in which creatures suffer and die is disallowed by scientific integrity. Yet, Becker glimpses beyond (his own) thinking just before the book’s close, saying: “There is a driving force behind a mystery we cannot understand, and it includes more than reason alone. The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism” (Becker 284). And this brings us to the main concern of this article: is there a kind of action that saves us, a cosmic heroism that’s truly heroic?
Any discussion that includes “a mystery we cannot understand,” or requires the inclusion of something “more than reason alone,” falls into the abyss between the rational and the mystic-spiritual, a chasm that opened in the seventeenth century: In that great and terrible age, Galileo destroyed geocentric theory forever, elevating science over revealed knowledge and quite literally turning the cosmos inside out. He required nothing beyond observation and reason to revise the universe, except a refusal to blindly accept 1,400 years of dogma. Descartes, that good but dangerous Catholic, in his relentless search for objective knowledge, founded a method rooted in the central concept that all physical phenomena must ultimately obey and therefore be described by mathematical laws, a stunning revelation that became central to the scientific paradigm. Though his reasoning saved God (and his own hide), within it was smuggled the unrelenting rationality that would eventually jettison God from the post-modern scene. Again reason clearly prevailed over any truth we might imagine existing beyond it. Then Hume condemned meaning in anything outside the domain of “quantity or number,” (analytical truths), even the law of cause and effect. Mystical discussions were forever divided from rational ones.
Mystery has always been the challenge of science, its codependent enemy. Science has sharpened Occam’s razor, emptying mystery into theory and transforming theory into technology. And however elegant the proofs of scientific theory, its technology is the proof that never fails, for we live this world-transforming proof; it becomes our very flesh. To map mystery with mathematics, to theorize and verify and especially to technologize, is to bracket metaphysics and put the human focus exclusively on the power of rational thinking. And this thinking cannot admit anything like the divine, the mystical, or the inner life that still seem so necessary to humanity.
Yes, despite all we have learned, the need for transcendence, for redemptive knowledge, persists in human beings like a ruined love that will not die. The search for transcendence is more a part of a human being than even an arm or a leg. And this ruined love is a fugitive in the West, condemned to live in shallow and rotting places, in the extremes of materialistic excesses, in the religious dogma that began dying in the 14th century, in the fundamentalist madness that willfully and ignorantly denies the last 500 years of scientific progress, in the new-age regurgitation of astrology, crystals, and buffet-style metaphysics.
This impasse created by the seeming contradiction between physical immanence and spiritual transcendence is where we find ourselves at the end of Denial of Death, and this impasse is deeply embedded in our culture and thought. Few books mark the dilemma so well. On one side stands immortality—sat, chit, ananda (existence, knowledge, and bliss)—the call of the fool and the mystic, neither of whom brings acceptable evidence to the court of rationality. On the other side stand the great architects of the last five centuries in the West—Galileo, Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Newton, Freud, Einstein, and so many more. These men thought into existence a revolutionary philosophical and scientific vision, an irresistible method of knowing that offered both objective certainty and a plethora of human invention, a new magic, a cultural eros never dreamed of in ancient days. But this revolution necessarily excluded the soteriological issue burning in the depths of the human heart: how shall I save my life? How shall I save my will? How shall I make life count? How shall I rescue life’s meaning? The gasping spiritual deformities being spawned at the dawn of the 21st century only emphasize the crisis, the wedge driven into the longing heart of humanity.
When Nietzsche, that passionate and brilliant voice in the wilderness, described the ascetic ideal as designed to repudiate the “meaninglessness of suffering,” an ideal that “offered man meaning,” he captured the modern bind. Though he found asceticism repulsive, he concluded that “any meaning is better than none at all.” Through this ideal, man interpreted his suffering and saved his will. And “man would rather will nothingness than not will.” But if man wills nothingness, then nothingness becomes meaningful. This is how great the need for meaning is. And as starvation is the greatest enemy of the body, the loss of meaning, of reality, is the greatest enemy of the human self.
And here the central problem of action is unveiled. My actions must mean something. (But they may not!) They must count. (They may fail to matter!) They must save my situation. (My situation might be lost!) They must participate in my transcendence project. (It may be that transcendence is the foolish dream of a frightened ego!) Furthermore, though it is I who acts and suffers the consequences, my action necessarily refers always to something beyond me, some cultural script that imbues my act with meaning. Thus the meaning of my actions is perpetually haunted by the threat of meaninglessness, for who am I and what is the script? Who or what makes it real? Yes, when I consider my life closely, my own reality seems in large part to be derived from that very script whose reality can be called into question at any time. Alas, it is a sad truism that we now know entire cultures routinely go stark raving mad. Even a week’s collection of newspapers tells us so.
Like us all meaning is mortal, always promising to be more than it is, but completely dependent on the cultural context it necessarily ignores. By holding meaning above us, however much it comes through us, do we not make of it our special weapon against mortality? Meaning bears us up against doom. Yet meaning is stalked on every side by the threat of ruin, by doom. So badly do we need our meanings that we might die to preserve them. We may discover that we need them more than we need our own lives, even though it is our lives that give them being. Perhaps we need them more than food? Indeed, we cannot bear the thought of destruction.
Upon entering into any discussion of salvation—and here I mean saving meaning, saving action, or as Jose Ortega y Gasset says, “saving our circumstance”—we are always faced with an act of will which is also an act of faith. We may decide that No, life is a terrible trick of some kind, and we may react with sorrow, rage, rebellion, or compulsive distraction. We then place our faith in the No and derive meaning from the negation of meaning and/or the fretful meanings born of distraction. Or we may remain undecided like Hamlet, that character who prefigures the post-modern age, born aloft between the No and the Yes, circling back and forth, steeped in bad faith and perpetual bewilderment. These two alternatives signal a crisis of meaning that lies at the heart of our age. When we reflect on political leadership, we are faced with a faithless erosion of values so profound that we must wonder if the running of nations has been left in the hands of clowns or madmen. The hero is the movie star or rock star or, as in the late, crumbling Roman Empire, the gladiator-athlete. The vital signs of culture—art, music, poetry—have grown feeble; there is no vision of which they speak, no future that might save us, and so they parrot the past in a mutilated patchwork of remakes and reconfigurations. For many of us this is an age of despair, an age of mockery, an era of meanness and smallness, where bloody and horrific squabbles pepper the globe and come to us live on CNN, an age of vicious humor, of sophisticated tedium, of noisy desperation, full of sound and fury but devoid of hope and passion.
Yet one may still decide that nothing short of cosmic heroism will do. One may still engage the drama of life in a vision quest that saves meaning and restores the cosmos. In the midst of one’s fear and trembling, one may still insist on immortality. One may still engage in a leap of faith, a faith that Antonio de Nicolas has said is “one step beyond any god.” In any case, one cannot avoid deciding.
Part 2: The Wheel’s Still Center—Action’s Hidden Possibility
At the core of Yes lies the great leap, the daring, naked act of faith, the conscious plunge into agape, the baptism of fire that either completely incinerates the hero or gives him the strength to act. Paralyzed with indecision, unable to muster courage by drawing on his own feeble energies, the hero dives into the abyss. The hero dies to himself, to his history, to his viewpoint, and even to all the meanings that have sustained him until this moment of crisis. This dive may destroy him, or it may teach him how to go on living, his eros now riding on the energies of the infinite. He must gamble with his life for the precious knowledge of the infinite. And this is as it should be, for once born we are already facing the mystery, and it always demands nothing less than our entire life.
Few books tell the hero’s story and answer Becker’s existential dilemma better than the Bhagavad Gita. It begins where Becker leaves off, at the edge of the abyss, the dark place of terror and trembling. To the question of how human beings could save their situation, The Denial of Death offers the only answer it can: drop an offering into the confusion. In this sense Becker’s book is an apt coda for much of Western thinking, which may leave us at the edge of the abyss but can offer no clues about plumbing its depths. But we can turn to the Gita for guidance.
Arjuna, a purusharsabha (a bull among men), is a warrior whose failure of courage at the onset of a civil war initiates the yoga instruction of his charioteer, Krishna, who is also his spiritual teacher (guru). The dialogue between these two make up the structure of the Bhagavad Gita, a quintessential text on yoga. As an esteemed member of the warrior class (kshatriya), Arjuna shares little in common with the sannyasin (ascetic), the avaduta,or those who withdraw from society and the conventional life of their culture to seek and express moksha (liberation). In the Bhagavad Gita the hero is in the midst of chaos—not hearing about it from a distance. He might crave the isolation of a quiet room (or a cave) removed from the maddening crowd, the freedom to wander about from village to village clad in a loin cloth, carrying only a begging bowl, but we find him entrenched in his culture at its most terrible time, at the opening of what will be a bloody and terrible war. If he is to realize moksha, his essential nature, he must do so amid the madness of the battlefield.
Arjuna must transcend his fear and answer a call of authenticity that bears him aloft from the ordinary rut. He must shine true, even if it means that, like Socrates, he chooses to drink the bitter hemlock to satisfy both the requirements of his culture and his soul. He cannot be discouraged by the disapproval of others nor cherish their praise. As a hero, he closely adheres to an inner standard, so powerful, so inundated with vision, that faced with death, he does not abandon it. In fact it is death itself that immortalizes this standard. Death is the very soil of the heroic act, the act that chooses even a moment of pure vision over the mere continuance of life. We are dazzled by the hero’s journey, a humanizing movement which appeals to our hearts’ deepest aspirations, because it illuminates the best of human existence by providing living examples of the loftiest possibilities. Without the heroic possibility, we are little more than banal creatures, craving affection, reward, decorations, and many other forms of emotional rescue—and always more time to live, more time. The hero transcends these needs, drawn inward and upward toward the vision that he or she is destined to realize.
In realizing the heroic quest—and here is the secret gift of heroism—the hero is bedecked in immortality. The gesture to transcend at all costs the morass of one’s time, the utter bondage, anxiety, and dread of one’s situation, is simultaneously an expression of something mysterious, indestructible, and timeless. It is as if the hero expresses within the changeable human drama the unchanging cosmic origin, a thunderous and indestructible voice, a consciousness beyond fear and longing, an abundance that cannot be depleted. And here we arrive at an important distinction between Arjuna and the Western hero. This cosmic origin is far more than a hint in the heroic journey of Arjuna; it is a direct experience, an incarnate transformation that enables Arjuna to do what he must. He is destined to enter the core of the highest mystery, to transcend even the act of heroism in an experience of absorption that forever escapes the categories of thought.
But first there is always the crisis, the crushing decision that must be overcome, the obstacles that appear insurmountable. In the field of battle, whatever form that battle takes, the hero seems to face impossible choices. Arjuna is overwhelmed with that moment. Requesting Krishna to pull the chariot between the two opposing armies, he sees “. . . fathers and grandfathers/teachers, uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, companions/fathers-in-law and friends, belonging to both armies” (Bhagavad Gita 1.26-27). He looks “closely at all these relations standing there” and becomes “filled with the utmost sadness” (Bhagavad Gita 1.28). His tells Krishna: “I foresee no good that could come from having slain my own kin in war (Bhagavad Gita 1.31). For having slain our own kin, How will we be happy . . .” (Bhagavad Gita 1.37) .
Dharma (law, duty, context, field) demands that Arjuna enter the battle and fight; everything in Arjuna’s life has led to this moment. He must fight, but that will mean killing kinsmen. If he refuses he will disgrace himself and his army. This dilemma is literally paralyzing him by the end of the first chapter of the Gita. Not only is Arjuna facing the possibility of death as a warrior, but far worse he is facing the possibility that his life will mean nothing. He is facing a death worse than death.
In order to fight, he must overcome his confusion, which is to say he must overcome his uncertainty about action and especially about the meaning of his action. But the problem with this challenge is that he is his own confusion. In his paralysis he has taken his “I” literally and made of himself a frozen idol that cannot endure the battle. In order to act, he must first slay himself, meaning he must transcend his attachment to outcome, either bitter victory or crushing defeat. He must lose the weight of narcissism that grows with every moment of considering the outcome and its implications for a self (himself) that exists as a dread-filled mental reflection in the midst of the battlefield. Once this weight is removed, he will remember again what he must do; the meaning of his act will be restored (Bhagavad Gita 18.37) and his “flaw of pity” and confusion about dharma will be resolved.
And so he turns to Krishna for help, and though the God-man necessarily appears as a second figure in the drama, Arjuna’s charioteer and teacher, he exists within Arjuna as the deepest voice of human consciousness, guiding the chariot of the warrior’s body, tutoring the depths of his soul. At the highest level of truth there is no difference between them, and this unity is the basis for understanding Krishna’s radical teaching:
Never was there a time when I was not,
Nor you nor these rulers of men;
And never hereafter will there be a time when any of us
will not be (Bhagavad Gita 2.12).Of what-is-not there is no coming to be;
Of what-is there is no ceasing to be.
The final truth of these is known to those who see the truth
(Bhagavad Gita 2.16).These bodies, it is said, come to an end
(But they belong) to an embodied one who is
eternal, indestructible, immeasurable.
Therefore, fight, O Bharata!
Both he who considers this to be the slayer
And he who considers this to be slain,
Fail to understand: this neither slays nor is slain.
Nor is it ever born, nor dies,
Nor having come to be will it not be once again.
Unborn, eternal, everlasting
This primeval one is not slain when the body is slain
(Bhagavad Gita 2.18-20).
If Arjuna knew in his body what Krishna meant by these words, his crisis would be over. But he must be made to recollect, to resurrect in his flesh the vision by which all diversity is seen to be carried by one consciousness, one eternal life. Krishna is not offering Arjuna a belief that might bolster the warrior in his dire time of need, or a perspective by which he can rationalize his actions. Krishna is inviting Arjuna to forget himself so completely that he might remember who he is before time, face, and name. Krishna’s words launch the project of transforming Arjuna’s consciousness from one immersed in agency, “doership,” and particularity to one that has shed all dimension of thought and grasping and thereby rests in its original form (Yoga Sutra, parts 2 and 3). (Such an act is not possible for Becker’s hero who may think of the abyss and tremble before it, but is not willing to plunge into its infinite depth.)
Arjuna’s spiritual destiny comes to a climax in the eleventh chapter of the Gita, which takes place in a place without place, without borders or words, in an infinitely radiant vision in which the entire cosmos of the “moving and unmoving” stands in unity in the form of pure consciousness. Though necessarily narrative and dual in structure (Arjuna sees the entire world held in the body of the God of all gods), Arjuna’s vision is unitary and unspeakable. He describe it as:
If in the heavens
There would be the light of a thousand suns rising together
It would be like the light of that great self (Bhagavad Gita 11.12).
And lest we think that this vision could be properly rendered by any form of narration, or that it is not known except through the plunge into the abyss, Krishna tells Arjuna:
Time am I, the world-destroyer, grown mature,
Engaged here in fetching back the worlds. (Bhagavad Gita 11.32).
This plunge will echo Arjuna’s heroic transcendence, a journey beyond the beyond from which there is no return. Arjuna will never be the same. He will tremble in terror before the majesty of this vision. But it is naïve to think that visionary absorption will make anything easier for him. His vision will not lessen the importance or the validity of the phenomenal world of particularization, the world of time, space, self, and story. It will not remove his responsibility to act, to live his story. He will still be “on the spot” for every moment of the rest of his life. He will not lose his dread and anxiety once he becomes “self-realized,” or live the rest of his life in bliss. Rather, his realization will strengthen his faith in the leap. He will draw on the abyss in order to face it. He retains all his burdens and takes on an additional one: the burden of knowing that God and the abyss are one.
But before this destiny is fully realized, Arjuna encounters various Yogas, various perspectives that will enable him to make the leap. These perspectives outlined in the chapters leading up to Chapter 11 are ways, paths, dharmas, contexts for action that liberate the individual from “the great fear” (Bhagavad Gita 2.40). From the viewpoint of dharma the human drama and the cosmic reality are reciprocal and interdependent. The former is the intense and overwhelming multidimensional reality in which we participate, while the latter is the one life or consciousness that lives in all of us, subsuming all dimensions. The drama reveals and exists for the One, and the One reveals and exists for the drama. Thus the individual’s action is of critical importance within the tradition of the Gita and yoga in general, because it either works to reveal or conceal the One. Compulsive action attached to doership and fruit of action conceals; action detached from doership and fruit of action reveals. Between the individual and immortality lies the path, the dharma, or way that provides a matrix for responsible action that aims to reveal the sacred dimension of life and hold the worlds together.
The term dharma derives from the root dhri, which means to support. Dharma supports existence; to act in accordance with dharma is to act to hold the world together, even if such an act is war. Within the human drama dharma is the best course of action, the way, never easy, but always best. Without attention to the call of dharma, life disintegrates into a narcissistic and fearful trek through a meaningless landscape. Within the framework of Arjuna’s society it is right for him to do battle. Krishna tells him:
. . . Having regard to your own dharma, you must not falter.
There is no higher good for a kshatriya
Then to fight accordant with dharma (Bhagavad Gita 2.31).
But dharma is never dogma. Though Arjuna must fight in accordance with his duty as a kshatriya, his complete identification with his role as a warrior and his family relationships with men facing him on the other side obscure a much greater truth. And the realization of that truth requires a higher level of dharma whose understanding is “resolute and unitary.” Krishna speaks of a way to immortality, the razor’s edge mediating between the eternal vision of moksha (liberation) and the existential bondage of any human self in a situation:
. . . But listen to the following wisdom of Yoga, O son of Pritha;
When disciplined with it, son of Pritha, you will leave
behind the bondage of karma.
In this path, there is no unsuccessful effort, No reversal is known;
Even a little of this dharma rescues one from the great fear
(Bhagavad Gita 2.39-40).
Though Krishna never tells us exactly what he means by the term “the great fear,” we well know what it means. It is a perfect term for chaos, the unmanifest, disorder. It means death and all the implications of loss. It is the thought we cannot bear, the thought of destruction, the unthinkable thought of annihilation that drives us to labor through “many trying circumstances,” attempting to escape the “bondage of obscurity,” and to build “structures and super-structures” (Anjali 29). It is at the very core of our pain and pleasure, the maker and spoiler of all fruit. It is the faceless beast that we both flee and battle. And so,
Your interest is in action (karman) alone, never in its fruits;
Let not the fruit of action (karman) be what impels you,
But do not let yourself be attached to inaction (akarman) either.
Taking your stand in yoga, be active, O Winner of Wealth,
Having relinquished attachment and having gained
equilibrium amidst success and failure.
Serenity of mind is called yoga (Bhagavad Gita 2.48-49).Having relinquished the fruit of action (karman),
Having disciplined their understanding,
The wise are free from the bondage of birth,
And arrive at a state which is beyond delusion (Bhagavad Gita 2.51).
Thus yoga is introduced as the practice of a dharma whose activity frees action from bondage and makes known immortality. Its practice is perfected through profound meditation (Chapter 6) and the relinquishment of the fruit of action, a pivotal yoga practice that is seen both as the means to access immortality and the result of such access. But we must immediately ask two questions: what does it mean to renounce the fruit of action and how does such renunciation lead to liberation?
Let’s begin with the first question. What does it mean to “relinquish projects,” to practice the “yoga of renunciation” (samyasayoga), to attain a “state of desirelessness”? How can desire be relinquished? Isn’t desire our natural state? Isn’t a state of desirelessness best seen in the catatonic state, the pathological trance reducing a human being to a blob of hibernating flesh? Without desire even the fork cannot be lifted. How can I possibly be without wanting, for am I not wanting itself, perhaps an absurd passion, but nevertheless always a passion. Is not wanting the very circuit of a self? And isn’t it true that wanting not to want is still wanting?
In answering this charge, which, incidentally is often the Western accusation of nihilism and absurdity leveled against Indian philosophy, we might turn to one of the oldest Upanishads for guidance. In speaking of the origin of life the spiritually poetic Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad describes the One alone in the beginning, self-aware and somewhat shocked by “his” solitude:
In the beginning this (world) was only the self, in the shape of a person. Looking around he saw nothing else than the self. He first said, “I am.” Therefore arose the name “I” (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.1).
Pure consciousness generates reflection and thought, thus becoming an “I.” This “I” is completely alone, One without a second. Realizing its solitude it is afraid.
He was afraid. Therefore one who is alone is afraid. This one then thought to himself, “since there is nothing else than myself, of what am I afraid?” Thereupon, his fear, verily, passed away, for, of what should he have been afraid? Assuredly it is from a second that fear arises (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.2).
The second is anticipated. Fear is known at the very instant solitude thinks the possibility of a second. A solitude without this recognition would not be a solitude but rather the original condition prior to the primal thought “I am. . . alone. ” Solitude carries with it the anticipation of another, a second who brings the possibility of action, the possibility of life:
He, verily, had no delight. Therefore he who is alone has no delight. He desired a second. He became as large as a woman and man in close embrace. He caused that self to fall into two parts. From that arose husband and wife. . . . He became united with her. From that human beings were produced (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.3).
She thought, “How can he unite with me after having produced me from himself?” Well, let me hide myself. She became a cow, the other became a bull and was united with her and from that cows were born. The one became a mare, the other a stallion. The one became a she-ass, the other a he-ass. . . . The one became a she-goat, the other a he-goat, the one became a ewe, the other became a ram. . . . Thus, indeed, he produced everything whatever exists in pairs, down to the ants (Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.4).
Desire permeates manifestation and comprises all the relationships therein. Desire gives rise to life and expresses the flight from primordial solitude. Yet this solitude “hides” itself in the variegated cosmos, which always remains a unity to (its) pure consciousness. Therefore, the cosmos is a kind of retreat from unity, a flight of the consciousness that obscures its totality. Thought obscures pure consciousness, the many hide the one; yet, this retreat must also become a return, a recovery of human origin, not in some distant future, but in the very now which eludes the individual until he or she stops time by stopping thought. The Yoga Sutra expresses it in this way:
Yogas citta-vritti-nirodha
Yoga is the restraint of the fluctuations of the mind (Yoga Sutra 1:1).Tada drasthu sva rupe-vathanam
Then there is abiding in the seer’s own form (Yoga Sutra 1:2).
Life moves in two directions: the way out as thought, multiplicity, becoming; and the way in, as withdrawal, meditation, and renunciation of fruit. Because we both desire and relinquish, the practice of renunciation is possible. In a sense, totality—the end of desire as absorption in pure consciousness (samadhi)—is as much of what we are as is our constant craving. So the practice of yoga is not only possible; in fact, it mimics an innate secret of our existence. We want to stop as much as we want to go. We want eros and we want agape, but when the desire for true agape is realized, desire reaches its end. One recovers the root of renunciation. One experiences the movement between the poles of agape and eros as a play of pure consciousness. One “knows” the freedom at the heart of life.
This is why yogis restrict “thought-modifications,” why they train the mind to silence itself through meditation, why they practice “the return to the origin” (pratiprasava), whereby consciousness is withdrawn from the manifest. And they repeat these activities to create the embodied memory, the trace or samskara. Thus they journey back, again and again, to the One. They become divers into the abyss. Herein lies the possibility that the tradition so strongly recommends, the return to the condition prior to reflection, a condition of neither birth nor death. It is only after returning to the “still point” of consciousness whose light gives life to all possibilities, that the individual may be reborn with eyes to see the cosmic origin within the depths of desire and to consciously unite the cosmos with the human drama. This is the journey of the spiritual hero—to God, beyond “God,” then back again. And the fabric of this journey is action: action to know and action that follows knowing; action that is grounded in sacrifice, action that sees, restores, recovers, unites, and liberates.
And this is precisely the journey of the Gita’s hero. Krishna’s teachings form a prescription for action that liberates; in fact while the Yoga Sutra defines yoga as citta vritti nirodha (cessation of thought modifications), the Gita defines it as “skill in action.” Through skill in action the highest human possibility is achieved:
. . . Perform the action that has to be done,
Continually free from attachment,
For by performing action without attachment,
A man reaches the supreme (Bhagavad Gita 3.19).He who neither hates nor desires
Is to be known as one who constantly renounces.
For free from dualities, O Strong-Armed
He is easily released from bondage (Bhagavad Gita 5.3).The disciplined one, having relinquished the fruit of action,
Attains perfect peace.
The undisciplined man, impelled by desire,
Is attached to the fruit and is bound (Bhagavad Gita 5.12).
Renunciation of fruit is grounded in the knowledge that all action is already a sacrifice, that the fruit of all action is already relinquished:
The action of the unattached man is free,
Whose understanding is firmly rooted in knowledge,
And who acts as a sacrifice, is wholly dissolved (Bhagavad Gita 4.23).
In seeing one’s action as a sacrifice, one is seeing oneself both as the sacrifice and the one for/to whom the sacrifice takes place. Action as a sacrifice poignantly reflects one’s mortality and one’s immortal root. To truly sacrifice one must be grounded in that unspeakable sense of abundance that throbs in the fearless heart. One must know,
. . . I am the self at the heart of every being;
I am the beginning and middle of beings.
And the end as well (Bhagavad Gita 10.20).
When practicing relinquishment of outcome, one is relinquishing the self presupposed to be the agent and benefactor of action. Claiming the fruit of action creates and reinforces agency—that self that is not-self (Yoga Sutra 2:6). The agent is taken to be a substantial entity, a self apart from the world, bound by its cloak of flesh. Such a self dwells in pleasure and pain, clings to life, and assumes itself to be its own foundation (Yoga Sutra 2: 3-9). It is a necessarily frustrated and dissatisfied self, very much the self described by Earnest Becker—one riddled with anxiety, guilt, and dread. This agent does not see that it co-arises with the world, that it exists only in its vital situation, that it is derivative. It does not have its own being (sva-bhava) and yet behaves as if it does:
“I am wealthy and well-born.
Who else is like me?
I will sacrifice, I will give, I will rejoice.”
Thus speak those deluded by ignorance (Bhagavad Gita 16.15).Taking their “I” literally, full of might, insolence, desire, anger:
These malicious men show hatred against me
In their own bodies and those of others (Bhagavad Gita 16.18).
Thus the ignorant self exists as a lie always on the verge of being exposed. In ignorance (avidya) this sense of self (asmita) is the pre-reflective appropriation of consciousness. I-am-ness mistakes changeless consciousness for itself. Taking itself to be its own foundation, the fate of this self is crisis. As an owner, as an agent, it is a thief (Bhagavad Gita 3.12), riddled with grasping and fear (kleshas). The fate of this “I-substance” is suffering. In fact all creatures are “borne away by this stream of pain from time-without-beginning” (Vyasa on Yoga Sutra 2:15). The “remedy” for this affliction of self (person) that does not know the Self (pure consciousness, Ishvara, purusha, the supreme self, etc.) is meditation and renunciation:
With your mind on the supreme self,
Surrendering all action to me,
And being free from desire and selfishness,
Your (mental) fever vanished, fight.
Men who constantly follow out this teaching of mine,
Uncomplaining and full of faith,
They too are released from the bondage of their actions(Bhagavad Gita 3.30-31).
No wonder renunciation of the fruit of action is seen as the very pinnacle of spiritual practice in the Bhagavad Gita. In the twelfth chapter, “The Yoga of Devotion” (bhaktiyoga), a kind of hierarchy is outlined for the one who finds it difficult to fix the mind on the universal vision, or even offer action to that vision:
Knowledge is better than practice,
meditation is superior to knowledge;
Relinquishment of the fruit of action is better than meditation;
From such relinquishment, peace immediately comes (Bhagavad Gita 12.12).
Relinquishment incorporates meditation, knowledge, and practice, because relinquishment is the perfect imitation of the vision as lived in the everyday world of difference. Renunciation of fruit of action reflects the “activity” of consciousness. Relinquishment is not an ideal, an impossible concept. Rather it is already the primordial condition. As Krishna tells Arjuna, “the supreme self, imperishable, without beginning or qualities, neither acts nor is tainted” (Bhagavad Gita 13.31), and as the “uppermost purusha” (consciousness) . . . Enters the three worlds and sustains them” (Bhagavad Gita 15.17). Renunciation directly expresses the highest vision, because one’s perspective is freed from attachment and aligned with consciousness, upholding action as a witness while remaining untainted by its residue.
The Yoga Sutra calls this vision, this primordial consciousness, “Ishvara, distinct, untouched by klesha (affliction), actions, fruition, or their residue, unlimited by time, teacher of the prior ones, [its] seed of omniscience unsurpassed” (Yoga Sutra, 1: 24-26). It cannot be contained or exhausted in any form of knowing and all forms of knowing and being are exhausted in it. “Though all beings are fixed in me, I am not fixed in them” (Bhagavad Gita 9.4). The realities of Being find their source in the reality of consciousness, which is ubiquitous in space and time, and in/as the vision is seen to be eternal and indestructible.
Without the beyond-ness of our experience—that is, consciousness as its all-pervasive ground—we could not know the innumerable possibilities of temporal and spatial configurations. We could not enjoy the possibilities of variegated perspectives. We could not consider the night sky filled with stars, or the tiny mote of dust floating on a beam of sunlight with an equal eye. The subatomic particle and the red giant star, most radically, have their origin in (our) awareness, itself neither large nor small, neither this nor that. Consciousness is free, and its freedom is expressed in our movement. As much as we suffer and must suffer, we feel a sense of the limitlessness in our lives. We may think of anything in an indefinite number of ways, and there seems to be no end to what we might do or how we might do it. And this freedom is what underlies all limits, what makes all limits a problem for human beings. We suffer against our limits to make known the limitless. This is the essential motivation of the spiritual hero who ascends the twin peaks of eros and agape.
Lighting “the way,” consciousness brings manifold experience into existence; its “action” makes creatures possible. Yet it is not involved or affected by what it generates. In our action it is inactive. We move, and yet (as it) we do not move. We as time, form, and space rest upon its omniscient, limitless eternality. Yet even in our inaction, experience is ever moving; it is “active” as witness. Consciousness is both active and inactive. Thus so are we. For we are both consciousness and being, divine and human, known and unknown, moving and unmoved, here and now, and forever beyond the beyond.
The “abundance” of consciousness, its “divine generosity,” is without affect or expectation. Its reality is our existence, whereby its reality is not changed by anything that changes. Our identities represent it; thus we feel ourselves to be already beyond what we have not transcended. Our identities then are a cosmic play, a sacred faux pas brought about by the ignorance of totality. Krishna gives Arjuna an important hint when he says:
“I am doing nothing at all.”
So the disciplined one who knows the truth thinks:
Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting,
Walking, sleeping, breathing,
Talking, grasping and letting go,
Opening and closing his eyes,
He keeps present that in these, only the senses are active among sense-objects (Bhagavad Gita 4.9-10).
Consciousness is God without concern, God without “God.” To project upon it any quality, even the quality of being God with all the presupposition the term implies, is to toss more verbal coinage into an abyss that cannot be mapped. Rather it is silence that moves us closer to its knowledge. Action, done through the perspective of renunciation, brings about the silence necessary for release, for the mind cannot get behind consciousness and behold it. Release is not to be had through reflection, analysis, formula, or logic, though those expressions may point the way. One must enter through the doorway of utter silence. One must renounce what is already and has always been renounced. Then the unspeakable speaks, and the seeker may respond:
Having seen your great form . . .
The worlds tremble and so do I (Bhagavad Gita 11.23).
Thus the initiate is encouraged to imitate Ishvara’s supreme condition of relinquishment by renouncing the fruit of action. Ultimately both the Yogas of meditation and renunciation are necessary. One practices relinquishment of fruit so one may see that there is no fruit to claim. This insight erodes the compulsive aspect of action. So renunciation is both a practice and a realization. As a practice it aims at the realization that both desire and renunciation are eternally true, or to put it another way, that the “action” of consciousness is untainted by the action of beings. As a realization it works to make action free of taint, free of attachment. The attachment to fruit, the anticipation that threads through every act, the excitement promised by an act, is challenged by this realization. The result is not that one acts robotically or heartlessly. Rather, one acts wholeheartedly as a gesture to the infinite. A subtle progression of insight takes place, and there comes a time when one sees even the slightest anticipation of loss or gain, pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, victory or defeat, as already a divine play, a sacred illusion, a holy drama that one must suffer and yet (as pure consciousness) can never suffer.
Part 3: There Is No Wheel. The Preceding Argument Must Be Relinquished
The arguments presented here rest upon an irrational premise. How can one speak of an “origin beyond location” or “what cannot be said”? How can one speak of a foundation that is utterly without substance? How can one speak of a groundless ground? We might argue most rationally that the chasm between transcendence and immanence (which was created after the Renaissance and which widened concomitantly with the evolution of Western thought) has infused us with a sense of meaninglessness and anxiety. It is argued today that life is only that chasm, and any notion of a divine origin is an illusion spun from the profound desperation of a self-conscious creature. The destiny of thinking people, thinking as they should, thinking as history has taught them to think, is anxiety that can be eased only by medication. For it is true: the origin will not reveal itself to thought and disappears when one thinks carefully to find it. It is true that the origin does not exist to mind.
These writings indicate no-thing. Rationality soon turns to angst because the vision does not yield to capture of any kind. It cannot be thought. It fullness cannot be expressed by words, and those who “see” must be declared fools, madmen, and cowards by those who only “think.” All of what has been said here, from the viewpoint of hard-headed (and hard-hearted rationality), is either an error or a lie. For there is nothing, nor should there be anything, that persuades one to seek and release the source of his or her life other than the curious mystery of their solitary suffering and the inevitability of their death. There is no rebuttal to the sophisticated arguments that dismiss the sacred in the wink of an eye. The only appropriate response is silence. And if one argues that that silence is still a speaking, a living chasm, who can argue? And who is it that argues? One can only say, “Sit in it for a while. See what happens.”
There is little doubt in my mind that without a foundation human beings are driven and mad creatures compelled to perpetrate both petty and profound atrocities upon themselves and each other. Why? Because as Earnest Becker so eloquently told us, their actions mask their profound fear and dread, their desperate grasping at validation and power, their intense and lonely suffering that nothing can cure, except perhaps with a coma or a lobotomy. But let us not suppose the yogi is free of suffering. He or she has merely realized that there is a “part” of them that cannot suffer, and to it they dedicate their actions. Through practice of meditation and relinquishment they come to realize all of what exists is for consciousness (Yoga Sutra 2:21). Though they suffer, they have become conscious of consciousness, and are fit to realize compassion, which is the only sane response to human life. Still, the rationalist/realist may argue, they may be deluded.
Again there is no rebuttal. One cannot overturn the argument that the sacred is an invention of a desperate creature. One cannot argue, ever, successfully for the One. The yogi need not argue. He or she knows that the play of thought and action is inevitably an invitation to silence. For the one who has entered the silence fully, thought is a prelude to meditation, and action the vehicle through which one expresses before another the One within all and the One wanted by all.
But few are willing to dive head first into the depths of their solitude. It seems far easier to serve the vision of appropriation over the vision of relinquishment. And for most of us argument is far more comfortable than silence.
References
Anjali, Gurani. Ways of Yoga. New York: Vajra Printing and Publishing, 1993.
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973.
de Nicolas, Antonio T. The Bhagavad Gita. York Beach, Maine: Nicolas-Hays, l994.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals” and “Ecce Homo,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Modern Library, 1968.
Woods, James Haughton. The Yoga System of Patanjali (Yoga Sutra with Vyasa’s commentary).Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977).