The Case for God (6 page)

The Upanishadic sages were among the first to articulate another of the universal principles of religion—one that had already been touched upon in the Purusha myth. The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed, and self-preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably, are ingrained in our thoughts and behavior but are also the source of so much of our pain. The Greeks would call this process
kenosis
, “emptying.” Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, draw attention to your unique and special qualities, and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an immense peace. The first Upanishads were written at a time when the Aryan communities were in the early stages of urbanization;
logos
had enabled them to master their environment. But the sages reminded them that there were some things—old age, sickness, and death— that they could not control; some things—such as their essential self—that lay beyond their intellectual grasp. When, as a result of carefully crafted spiritual exercises, people learned not only to accept but to embrace this unknowing, they found that they experienced a sense of release.

The sages began to explore the complexities of the human psyche with remarkable sophistication; they had discovered the unconscious long before Freud. But the atman, the deepest core of their personality,
eluded them. Precisely
because
it was identical with the Brahman, it was indefinable. The atman had nothing to do with our normal psycho-mental states and bore no resemblance to anything in our ordinary experience, so you could speak of it only in negative terms. As the seventh-century sage Yajnavalkya explained: “About this Self
[atman]
one can only say ‘not … not’
[neti…
neti].”
⁵³

Like the Brahmodya, any discussion of the atman in the Upanishads always ended in silence, the numinous acknowledgment that the ultimate reality was beyond the competence of language.

Authentic religious discourse could not lead to clear, distinct, and empirically verified truth. Like the Brahman, the atman was “ungraspable.” You could define something only when you saw it as separate from yourself. But “when the Whole
[Brahman]
has become a person’s very self, then who is there for him to see and by what means? Who is there for me to think of and by what means?”
⁵⁵
But if you learned to “realize” the truth that your most authentic “Self” was identical with Brahman, you understood that it too was “beyond hunger and thirst, sorrow and delusion, old age and death.”
⁵⁶
You could not achieve this insight by rational logic. You had to acquire the knack of thinking outside the ordinary “lowercase” self, and like any craft or skill, this required long, hard, dedicated practice.

One of the principal technologies that enabled people to achieve this self-forgetfulness was yoga.
⁵⁷
Unlike the yoga practiced in Western gyms today, it was not an aerobic exercise but a systematic breakdown of instinctive behavior and normal thought patterns. It was mentally demanding and, initially, physically painful. The yogin had to do the opposite of what came naturally. He sat so still that he seemed more like a plant or a statue than a human being; he controlled his respiration, one of the most automatic and essential of our physical functions, until he acquired the ability to exist for long periods without breathing at all. He learned to silence the thoughts that coursed through his mind and concentrate “on one point” for hours at
a time. If he persevered, he found that he achieved a dissolution of ordinary consciousness that extracted the “I” from his thinking.

To this day, yogins find that these disciplines, which have measurable physical and neurological effects, evoke a sense of calm, harmony, and equanimity that is comparable to the effect of music. There is a feeling of expansiveness and bliss, which yogins regard as entirely natural, possible for anybody who has the talent and application. As the “I” disappears, the most humdrum objects reveal wholly unexpected qualities, since they are no longer viewed through the distorting filter of one’s own egotistic needs and desires. When she meditated on the teachings of her guru, a yogin did not simply accept them notionally but experienced them so vividly that her knowledge was, as the texts say, “direct;” bypassing the logical processes like any practically acquired skill, it had become part of her inner world.
⁵⁸

But yoga also had an ethical dimension. A beginner was not allowed to perform a single yogic exercise until he had completed an intensive moral program. Top of the list of its requirements was
ahimsa
, “nonviolence.” A yogin must not swat a mosquito, make an irritable gesture, or speak unkindly to others but should maintain constant affability to all, even the most annoying monk in the community. Until his guru was satisfied that this had become second nature, a yogin could not even sit in the yogic position. A great deal of the aggression, frustration, hostility, and rage that mars our peace of mind is the result of thwarted egotism, but when the aspiring yogin became proficient in this selfless equanimity, the texts tell us that he would experience “indescribable joy.”
⁵⁹

Their experience of yoga led the sages to devise a new creation myth. In the beginning, there was only a single Person, who looked around him and discovered that he was alone. In this way, he became aware of himself and cried: “Here I am!” Thus the “I,” the ego principle, was born. Immediately the Person became afraid, because we instinctively feel that we must protect the fragile ego from anything that threatens it, but when the Person remembered that because he was alone, there was no such threat, his fear left him. But he was lonely, so he split his body in two to create a man and a woman, who together gave birth to every single being in the cosmos “down to the very ants.” And the Person realized that even though he was no longer alone, there was still nothing to fear. Was he not identical with
Brahman, the All? He was one with all the things that he had made; indeed, he was himself his own creation.
⁶⁰
He had even created the gods, who were essentially a part of himself.
⁶¹

This insight, Yajnavalkya explained, brought with it a joy comparable to that of sexual intercourse, when one loses all sense of duality and is “oblivious to everything within or without.”
⁶³
But you would not have this experience unless you had performed the yogic exercises.

Other traditions would also find that these fundamental principles were indispensable: Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Daoism, as well as the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each had its own unique genius and distinctive vision, each its peculiar flaws. But on these central principles they would all agree. Religion was not a notional matter. The Buddha, for example, had little time for theological speculation. One of his monks was a philosopher manqué and, instead of getting on with his yoga, constantly pestered the Buddha about metaphysical questions: Was there a god? Had the world been created in time or had it always existed? The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had been shot with a poisoned arrow and refused medical treatment until he had discovered the name of his assailant and what village he came from. He would die before he got this perfectly useless information. What difference would it make to discover that a god had created the world? Pain, hatred, grief, and sorrow would still exist. These issues were fascinating, but the Buddha refused to discuss them because they were irrelevant: “My disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana.”
⁶⁴

The Buddha always refused to define Nirvana, because it could not be understood notionally and would be inexplicable to anybody who did not undertake his practical regimen of meditation and compassion. But anybody who did commit him-or herself to the Buddhist way of life could attain Nirvana, which was an entirely natural
state.
⁶⁵
Sometimes, however, Buddhists would speak of Nirvana using the same kind of imagery as monotheists use of God: it was the “Truth,” the “Other Shore,” “Peace,” the “Everlasting,” and “the Beyond.” Nirvana was a still center that gave meaning to life, an oasis of calm, and a source of strength that you discovered in the depths of your own being. In purely mundane terms, it was “nothing,” because it corresponded to no reality that we could recognize in our ego-dominated existence. But those who had managed to find this sacred peace discovered that they lived an immeasurably richer life
⁶⁶
. There was no question of “believing” in the existence of Nirvana or taking it “on faith.” The Buddha had no time for abstract doctrinal formulations divorced from action. Indeed, to accept a dogma on somebody else’s authority was what he called “unskillful” or “unhelpful”
(akusala)
. It could not lead to enlightenment because it amounted to an abdication of personal responsibility. Faith meant trust that Nirvana existed and a determination to realize it by every practical means in one’s power.

Nirvana was the natural result of a life lived according to the Buddha’s doctrine of
anatta
(“no self”), which was not simply a metaphysical principle but, like all his teachings, a program of action.
Anatta
required Buddhists to
behave
day by day, hour by hour, as though the self did not exist. Thoughts of “self” not only led to “unhelpful”
(akusala
) preoccupation with “me” and “mine,” but also to envy, hatred of rivals, conceit, pride, cruelty, and—when the self felt under threat—violence. As a monk became expert in cultivating this dispassion, he no longer interjected his ego into passing mental states but learned to regard his fears and desires as transient and remote phenomena. He was then ripe for enlightenment: “His greed fades away, and once his cravings disappear, he experiences the release of the mind.”
⁶⁷
The texts indicate that when the Buddha’s first disciples heard about
anatta
, their hearts were filled with joy and they immediately experienced Nirvana. To live beyond the reach of hatred, greed, and anxieties about our status proved to be a profound relief.

By far the best way of achieving
anatta
was compassion, the ability to
feel with
the other, which required that one dethrone the self from the center of one’s world and put another there. Compassion would become the central practice of the religious quest. One of the first people to make it crystal clear that holiness was inseparable from altruism
was the Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE). He preferred not to speak about the divine, because it lay beyond the competence of language, and theological chatter was a distraction from the real business of religion.
⁶⁸
He used to say: “My Way has one thread that runs right through it.” There were no abstruse metaphysics; everything always came back to the importance of treating others with absolute respect.
⁶⁹
It was epitomized in the Golden Rule, which, he said, his disciples should practice “all day and every day”:
⁷⁰
“Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”
⁷¹
They should look into their own hearts, discover what gave them pain, and then refuse under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else.

Religion was a matter of doing rather than thinking. The traditional rituals of China enabled an individual to burnish and refine his humanity so that he became a
junzi
, a “mature person.” A
junzi
was not born but crafted; he had to work on himself as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty. “How can I achieve this?” asked Yan Hui, Confucius’s most talented disciple. It was simple, Confucius replied: “Curb your ego and surrender to ritual (
li
).”
⁷²
A
junzi
must submit every detail of his life to the ancient rites of consideration and respect for others. This was the answer to China’s political problems: “If a ruler could curb his ego and submit to
li
for a single day, everyone under Heaven would respond to his goodness.”
⁷³

The practice of the Golden Rule “all day and every day” would bring human beings into the state that Confucius called
ren
, a word that would later be described as “benevolence” but that Confucius himself refused to define because it could be understood only by somebody who had acquired it. He preferred to remain silent about what lay at the end of the religious journey. The practice of
ren
was an end in itself; it was itself the transcendence you sought. Yan Hui expressed this beautifully when he spoke of the endless struggle to achieve
ren
“with a deep sigh.”