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by John Horgan
One of my fondest altered-state
memories dates back my late teens. I was sitting alone on the porch of my
parents' house on a warm summer night. My mother and father had gone to a
party, and my brother and three sisters were in a room just above me
watching television. There was a kind of urgency in the air; the trees
shimmered like dark flames against the starry sky, and the crickets and
cicadas seethed and pulsed toward a crescendo. So loud was this insect
symphony that I barely heard the inane laughter from a television sitcom
drifting down from the open window above me.
I was suddenly overcome with
astonishment that I exist, that the world exists, that anything exists. I
wanted to run upstairs, grab my siblings, and tell them to stop watching
that stupid TV show and pay attention to the miracle of being right there
in front of them. Fortunately, I restrained myself. But everything I have
learned and experienced since then has reinforced my sense of the
unutterable mysteriousness of things.
Contrary creatures that we are,
we want to believe that our innermost thoughts are unique to us, and yet
we desperately seek communion and confirmation, too. It can thus be both
unnerving and exhilarating to discover our private musings expressed in
someone else’s words—perhaps more clearly than we articulate them to
ourselves. I had this uncanny sensation in 1997 when I was flipping
through an issue of the journal What Is Enlightenment? and stumbled upon
the following passage:
"I was walking through a pine
forest, returning to my hut along a narrow path trodden into the steep
slope of the hillside. I struggled forward carrying a blue plastic bucket
filled with fresh water that I had just collected from a source at the
upper end of the valley. I was then suddenly brought to a halt by the
upsurge of the sheer mystery of everything. It was as though I were lifted
up onto the crest of a shivering wave which abruptly swelled from the
ocean that was life itself. How is it that people can be unaware of this
most obvious question? I asked myself. How can anyone pass their life
without responding to it?"
The passage was from a book
called The Faith to Doubt, written in 1990 by Stephen Batchelor, a British
Buddhist. His epiphany took place in 1980, when he was studying Tibetan
Buddhism in Dharamsala, India, the headquarters of the Dalai Lama. The
experience was not "an illumination in which some final, mystical truth
became momentarily very clear," Batchelor goes on to say. "For me it gave
no answers. It only revealed the massiveness of the question."
The setting aside, I felt that I
could have written this passage myself. It describes precisely the
sensation that first overcame me on that warm summer night when I was
still a teenager and that I have sought to recapture ever since.
Batchelor's epiphany became the
touchstone of his life. He ended up drifting away from Tibetan Buddhism,
which offered no help in understanding his experience, and toward Zen
Buddhism, which was much more compatible with his outlook. Zen masters are
fond of citing the adage: "Great doubt, great enlightenment. Little doubt,
little enlightenment. No doubt, no enlightenment."
Re-reading Buddha’s original
teachings, Batchelor realized that Buddha resolutely resisted speculations
on metaphysical questions, such as whether God exists, why the universe
was created, why evil exists and whether individual consciousness persists
after death. It was Buddha’s followers who transformed his simple
teachings into a religion, complete with theological dogma, moral
strictures and rituals. In Buddhism Without Beliefs, Batchelor advocates a
bare-bones Buddhism, one that "strips away, layer by layer, the views that
conceal the mystery of being here" and leaves us in a state of acute
existential awareness.
He emphasizes that this state is
not always pleasant. When we truly confront reality, we "tremble on that
fine line between exhilaration and dread." In fact, there is no better way
to confront the "enormity of having been born," he contends, than to
ponder our own mortality. Batchelor advocates sitting in silence while
dwelling upon the following question: "Since death alone is certain and
the time of death uncertain, what should I do?" Ideally, this meditation
upon death will "jolt us awake to the sensuality of existence."
Batchelor’s writings contain what
I read as subtle rebukes to other spiritual authorities. He seems to have
gurus like Andrew Cohen in mind when he warns how some mystics can succumb
to "the danger of messianic and narcissistic inflation" (which I call the
I’m-enlightened-and-you’re-not problem). "We find ourselves humbly
assuming the identity of one who has been singled out by destiny to heal
the sorrows of the world and show the way to reconciliation, peace, and
Enlightenment." Batchelor recommends "ironic self-regard" as a way to
avoid this self-infatuation.
The mystical technocrat Ken
Wilber comes to mind when Batchelor cautions against taking on the mystery
of existence with the "calculative attitude." As the success of science
demonstrates, we can solve many problems through calculation—that is,
careful analysis, deduction and induction, trial and error. But existence
is not a problem but a mystery, Batchelor says, which not even the most
potent calculation can solve. Batchelor also warns against viewing
meditation as a technique or procedure that when diligently carried out
yields various benefits. "Meditation and mystery are inseparable. Just as
the mysterious cannot be unraveled through calculation, nor can a
meditative attitude be acquired as though it were a technical skill."
Batchelor describes himself as an
"agnostic Buddhist." The term agnostic was coined in 1869 by the British
scientist T.H. Huxley, best-known as "Darwin’s bulldog." Huxley summarized
the "agnostic faith" in two principles: 1: Follow your reason as far as it
will take you. 2: Do not pretend that conclusions are certain when they
are not demonstrated or demonstrable. Agnosticism is often denigrated as a
passive worldview, the philosophical equivalent of a shrug. But true
agnosticism, Batchelor contended, consists of the active cultivation of
doubt and uncertainty in the face of the mystery of existence. An agnostic
stance "is not based on disinterest. It is founded on a passionate
recognition that I do not know." Agnosticism consists of "an intense
perplexity that vibrates through the body and leaves the mind that seeks
certainty nowhere to rest."
Reading Batchelor, I kept finding
passages that echoed my own thoughts, sometimes eerily so. One morning, I
confessed to my journal that in spite of my professed interest in
cultivating mystical wonder, I am actually quite content to remain in my
ordinary dull-witted state. Deep down, I fear confrontation with reality.
I keep it at arm’s length by turning it into an intellectual puzzle. I
then put down my journal and picked up Faith to Doubt, which I had started
reading only a day or two earlier, and came across a passage in which
Batchelor questioned his own commitment to awakening:
"Because--despite all the lofty
talk about ‘transformation’ and ‘awakening’--do I seriously want to
change? Do I not just want an appendage of enlightenment to stick on to
what I already am? I understood that so many of my visions for the future
were just extensions of my mediocre self covered with the veneer of
misconstrued notions of sagacity."
I felt that in Batchelor I had
found a kind of alter ego, even a soul-mate. I arranged to meet him on a
winter afternoon in the Greenwich Village apartment of Helen Tworkov,
editor of the Buddhist journal Tricycle and an admirer of Batchelor’s
work. He was a soft-spoken man of medium height and build. He had grey
hair, thinning on top and brushed back, and he wore glasses with greenish
rims. He was born in 1953, the same year as I. We sat at a table on which
stood a vase containing three branches studded with cherry blossoms.
As we spoke, Batchelor’s gaze
occasionally drifted over to the window beside us, which looked out on the
dark brownstones of the West Village. His demeanor was both diffident and
firm. When I asked him about his history, he warned that he suspected his
own reconstruction of his youthful states of mind. But he could give me
some facts. He was born in Scotland. His parents separated when he was
quite young, and he grew up with his mother in a town north of London. In
his teens, he took LSD, marijuana, and other drugs and read
counter-culture classics such as Be Here Now. Batchelor thought Ram Dass's
book "showed, in what may seem now like very simplistic and naive
language, a passageway from the psychedelic experience into a kind of
Eastern spirituality and mysticism. And that I think served as a very
important bridge at that time."
In 1972, bored by his education
and by England, he traveled east. Eventually he arrived in Dharamsala,
India, where the Dalai Lama was living in exile from his native Tibet. The
Tibetans entranced the young Englishman. "This was a people who were
dispossessed," Batchelor explained, "and yet in the midst of that they
retained this warmth, and almost luminous kind of intelligence."
He started learning Tibetan and
undergoing training as a monk. Gradually, in spite of his admiration for
his Tibetan teachers, he became disaffected by their form of Buddhism.
"What they taught was so defined by Tibetan history and culture that I
increasingly found the practices and so forth didn’t mesh with my
yearnings, my longings, my needs as a westerner."
His frustration was brought to a
head by his 1980 epiphany, in which he felt the mystery of existence so
acutely. None of his psychedelic or meditative experiences had prepared
him for this sensation. "It was one of those experiences that came
completely out of the blue and utterly shocked me." The experience
"probably didn’t last for more than a few minutes in its intensity, but
it’s never left me either," Batchelor said. "And the work I have done
since has been an attempt to somehow articulate that."
Batchelor initially assumed that
his Tibetan teachers would be familiar with his experience and help him
understand it, but they were baffled. He realized that the Tibetan
language did not really have the words and terms that he needed to convey
the gist of his revelation. For example, he could not translate the
seemingly simple sentence, "The world appeared to me as a question," into
Tibetan. "I can say it, but it’s meaningless, it’s gobbledygook." As a
result, he became "acutely conscious of the limits of Tibetan Buddhist
culture."
Batchelor squirmed a bit when I
asked if his experience could be described as mystical. He disliked the
term, or at least was ambivalent about it. It suggests "some visional
insight into the nature of reality that somehow cuts through the veil of
appearances into something transcendent, beyond, that’s wholly other." To
Batchelor, spirituality is about seeing this reality right here and now,
in front of us. "I suppose if I were a theologian, I would be a theologian
of immanence rather than transcendence."
Batchelor started reading
voraciously, searching for insights into his experience. He found echoes
of his revelation in the works of such disparate thinkers as the Catholic
theologian Paul Tillich, the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, the German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, and the French existentialists Jean Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus. But the tradition that resonated most with his
experience was Zen Buddhism.
I asked Batchelor why he called
himself an agnostic Buddhist rather than just an agnostic. He admitted
that he sometimes asked himself the same question. "Especially when I run
up against the rather more rigid, dogmatic forms of Buddhism, I think,
‘Why am I still bothering with this stuff?’" But he still felt at home in
Buddhism. "That doesn’t mean that I’m comfortable with it. Perhaps that
means I’m like Catholics who spend their whole time berating the Vatican."
He smiled. "I sometimes compare Buddhism to the tinder on matchbooks. If I
didn’t have it there, I wouldn’t be able to get any spark."
Batchelor rejects Buddhist
doctrines such as reincarnation. The idea that individual human souls
persist in some disembodied form even after the body dies is "very
difficult to square with the world as we know it through the sciences." He
did not rule out the possibility of life after death. He simply believed
that we cannot know one way or the other. "I don’t find those questions
terribly interesting, to be honest. I certainly don’t feel they have much
to do with what I consider to be the heart of my Buddhist or spiritual
practice. I’m indifferent. I could live with it either way."
Belief in reincarnation or an
afterlife, while perhaps consoling, diverts us from an honest
confrontation with death. "To hold death as a question, again, to me is
central. I guess it goes back to that experience again. I’m not saying
that’s easy or comfortable, but it’s true to what I can understand." He
accepted the notion of karma, if it is defined simply as the fact that our
actions in this world have consequences in this world, and not in some
ethereal afterlife.
Batchelor shares with his friend
and fellow Zen Buddhist Susan Blackmore a distaste for occult,
supernatural beliefs. An obsession with the supernatural "turns us away
from experiencing the wondrousness of what is right before our eyes and
ears, all the time," Batchelor said. The world revealed by science is much
more fantastical and counter-intuitive and wondrous than the world as it
is portrayed by Tibetan Buddhism or Christianity or New Age
pseudo-prophets. "The scientific descriptions of the world generate to me
a much deeper sense of awe and wonder than these Buddhist and religious
sorts of fantasies."
Batchelor is unimpressed by most
attempts to fuse Eastern mysticism and science. "The classic statement of
this is The Tao of Physics, which nowadays looks terribly dated," he said.
"It basically just trawls through quantum physics and relativity and
trawls through Buddhism, Hinduism, and the lot and pulls out any kind of
ostensible parallel, confirming a thesis that they are talking about the
same thing. It is a very flimsy way of doing things."
Batchelor still believes in
enlightenment, or "awakening." As he understands it, enlightenment is not
a state of permanent bliss and beatitude. It begins as a transitory
experience that fades but leaves you permanently altered. "You somehow
have a glimpse of the world from another perspective. But the actual path
begins there. It doesn’t end there."
The questions posed by life and
death demand "a response," Batchelor said, "both intellectually,
ethically, socially, politically. But that response is always provisional
and partial and incomplete. And in a sense it stimulates an ever-greater
appreciation of, almost, the infinity of the question. So I see the path
very much as a trajectory--an ongoing, open-ended trajectory into the
future--rather than something that can be finalized by a belief system, or
some scientific discovery, or by the claim of some guru, or whatever."
Batchelor and his wife, a
French-born former Buddhist nun, teach meditation and lead meditation
retreats, but Batchelor no longer meditates every day. "I am a meditation
teacher who doesn’t meditate any more," he said, smiling sheepishly.
Although he once found meditation "extraordinarily valuable," over time it
came to seem like "a kind of evasion, really. It was a cutting off from
experience, rather than a full-blooded engagement with all of its
ambiguities and messiness." He tries to cultivate his existential
awareness through writing now more than through meditation. "I write and
think and struggle with questions. That’s my practice."
Batchelor realized that his
anti-belief outlook could ossify into still another belief. "Any statement
you make, however skeptical it might appear, could serve as the basis for
yet another kind of fixed view. ‘Doubt everything’ could become a dogma."
He tried to apply his doubt toward his own opinions as well as those of
others. He sought to keep his outlook fresh in his writing by deliberately
introducing discontinuities into his narrative. He hoped thereby to
"reflect something of the Zen idea of the suddenness, abruptness of
insight and understanding, something that breaks into life."
It was late afternoon now. The
sun had vanished behind a sooty water tower across the street. Gazing out
the window Batchelor murmured, more to himself than to me, "That’s
beautiful." And it was. The grimy, cluttered cityscape was redeemed by the
sky above it—pale violet and cloudless, with the transparency that only
winter skies have.
Batchelor grimaced when I asked
if he believed that life is fundamentally good. "Good is such an
anthropocentric, anthropomorphic idea. To characterize reality as good is
like characterizing reality as having purpose," he answered. "It’s another
consolatory device." He paused. "I mean I’m glad it’s all here," he
continued, "but then to label it as good is..."
Frowning, Batchelor looked out
the window again. Life’s goodness, he continued, is inseparable from its
dark aspects, from pain and cruelty and injustice. Good and evil "have to
go together. They are polarities that are meaningless independent of one
another."
As I put my notebook and tape
recorder away and my coat on, Batchelor kept mulling over his awkward
relationship to Buddhism. Maybe at some point he would break away from it,
he told me. Especially in its American version, Buddhism can be awfully
stuffy, conservative, and dogmatic. He worried that it might seem gimicky
for him to announce that he was no longer a Buddhist. Also, he might
appear ungrateful and hypocritical, after all that Buddhism had done for
him. But still, at some point...
Batchelor stood in the middle of
the twilit room, seemingly lost in thought. We shook hands and said
goodbye.
A subway got me to Grand Central
Station just in time to catch my train home. Hurtling north through the
night along the Hudson River, I took my notebook out and scribbled down a
few random thoughts about Batchelor. What impressed me most about him was
that he really did seem to be in a state of doubt and uncertainty; it was
not just rhetoric. There was a restless, unsettled quality to him. But was
that cultivated or congenital? Like the rest of us, perhaps Batchelor
advocates a spirituality that suits—and justifies--his temperament. And
the reason it appeals to me so much is that my temperament resembles his.
And that’s what worried me.
Batchelor reminded me of the anthropologist Stuart Guthrie, the atheist
who desperately hoped for a mystical experience that would help him
transcend his pessimistic worldview. Like Guthrie, Batchelor seemed
trapped within his own skepticism. His anti-belief philosophy did not even
permit him the consolation of saying that life is good. Did I have the
courage to sustain such a perspective? Did I have any choice?
I like to think of my
skepticism—my faithlessness—as a position that I arrived at freely. But
maybe it is hard-wired into me, like myopia, or color-blindness, or
tone-deafness. Maybe Susan Blackmore is right: Free will is just an
illusion; our destiny is a matter of genes and memes, not of the choices
we think we make. The best we can do is grin and bear it as our fate
unfolds.
Mulling all this over on the
train, I realized that I had forgotten to tell Batchelor my mantra joke. I
had thought of the perfect mantra for cultivating awe before the
impenetrable mystery of existence. Instead of "Om" or "Sat nam" or any of
the other familiar mantras, you repeat the phrase "Duhhhh...." Probably
just as well that I hadn’t told the joke. The mood hadn’t been quite
right.
The man sitting to my left was
snoring softly, his mouth agape. His head and neck were tucked into a
yoke-shaped inflatable pillow. I put my notebook away and stared into
space, listening to the rhythmic rumble of the train. Occasionally
something luminous sliding past the train window caught my eye: the seamed
canvas domes of indoor tennis courts, a junkyard crammed with dead cars,
the lights of a harbor on the Hudson River’s far bank, the turreted walls
of Sing Sing Prison.
Duhhhh...
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