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Back to the Forum Archives In a recent Forum essay I discussed a book and it's author. The book is entitled, "Grist for the Mill. The author is, "Ram Dass," who is, or was, an Eastern religious practitioner and spokesman for the new age movement in America. I made the point that his philosophy , as far as I am able to discern, was a blend of the major Eastern philosophies. Those are Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen, liberally sprinkled with Confucianism. Although I see much of the American trend toward Eastern religious mysticism as unsupportable panicky religious nonsense, there are some interesting and useful facets to the practice and study. I think it will be useful to take a brief tour of the concepts of these Eastern philosophies and practices. I caution the reader to realize this is just my understanding of these ideas. My attempts to understand came out of my own confusion about religion. This, in turn, was caused by my early indoctrination which did not entirely take. For some reason I was left kind of wondering and reluctant to believe the stuff that had been laid on me. Since my youth I have been rather clumsily searching for understanding and going of in many directions. One such direction had me poking around these Eastern views of spirituality and religion. So this is my take. I may be missing the point entirely. Before you buy in, you may want to make your own independent study. I will just write this as though I really knew. The main ideas in all of these Eastern practices come out of a concept of the universe and reality that are completely contrary to our standard Western picture. In the West, we live pretty much in a Newtonian Euclidian world of solid real things that are measurable and definable. That view of the world as solid and dependable permeates all of our cultural thought process. That view has had the force of scientific law in our scientific community. It is the basis for all of our scientific achievement and the reason for our dominance of nature. Until recently it has been completely unchallenged. One of the mainstays of this view of nature are Newton's laws of gravity. Along with Newton we have Euclidian geometry with its five postulates which are sufficient to derive all of the propositions of Euclid's geometry. It goes back further than that, however, with the notion of the unchanging atom as the indivisible building block of matter. This idea was first proposed by the Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus. We need not lay these things out here. The student who is really interested can do his own research. As I said, until recently these concepts have been completely unchallenged in he West. Now, the Eastern religious philosophies come out of a view of the universe completely contradictory to our Western view. In Eastern philosophies, the universe we perceive is understood to be illusory. Everything we see and deal with every day are constructs of the mind caused by our own illusions. While we in the West view our universe as composed of separable parts which can be isolated and dealt with individually, the Eastern mystics view the universe as an indivisible whole. In fact, it takes on more of the character of a single process rather than a group of entities. A tricky idea in this understanding is that each facet or piece of reality contains the entire universe within it. Everything is contained in everything else. A common phrase we hear from these folks is, "It's all one." By that they mean nothing is separate from the flow, not even mankind. That is the essence of the Eastern philosophy. Their entire understanding and spiritual practice comes out of that perception of a single undifferentiated universe in process. The idea of separate entities is simply illusion caused by spiritual ignorance. There are various techniques and practices the individual can follow which will allow him to transcend this illusion and come to a oneness with the true nature of the universe. They have various names for this state of mind or transcendental state. One such is called nirvana. It is the ineffable ultimate in which the student has attained disinterested wisdom and compassion. We achieve emancipation from ignorance and the extinction of all attachment. The techniques we find for achieving this wisdom are various forms of meditation and disciplined practices. The purpose of these are to push the mind out of its normal modes of thought. Eventually, if we practice long enough, we may transcend the illusion and reach this divine state. What comes after that is a bit vague, at least for me. It sure is not like going to heaven and hobnobbing around with the various saints and stuff. All we know about nirvana is it is the ultimate and there is no more to want. In fact, letting go of desire seems to be key to achieving this state. These folks see desire as a negative concept coming out of our illusions about what is real and important. On of the interesting things about all of this Eastern philosophy is the idea of reincarnation. It seems to be a key part of all of them. From this concept, we do not live just a single life. We are born, we live, we practice, and eventually we pass out of human existence, but not out of being, nor do we go to heaven or hell. At some time later, we simply reincarnate into another round. So far as I understand it, we must keep doing this until we get it right. We finally achieve a condition wherein we have dealt with all of our karma. Karma is the total effect of our actions and conduct during the successive phases of our existence. Somehow, we must balance out all of the bad we do by living an enlightened life and coming to an understanding of the true nature of our existence. Then, and only then are we ready fo nirvana. We lose the illusion and come to recognize our connection to the infinite. The time frame here, as I understand it, is not just centuries, but millions or billions of centuries. A lot of that may sound like hogwash to most Western folks. However, there is one interesting caveat in this. Recently, some of us in the West have been confronted with the result of our scientific community's investigation into subnuclear physics. Profound as it may seem, we have been unable to discover that sought after ultimate building block of nature, the indivisible particle. What we have found instead is rather startling. More and more the inescapable conclusion is, there is no such indivisible particle. Instead of a particle we have found energy in one form or another. We have found energy bundles called quanta. We have found hadrons and quarks and all sorts of interesting phenomenon. We have found quantum fields and various kinds of processed that sometimes masquerade as particles, but we have found no particle. The dawning conclusion is, there are no particles. There are no real things. Oh my! Not to worry. This does not mean we have discover a universe of chaos. In fact it is a thing of symmetry and beauty, but different than what we expected. What we perceive as particles and real things are really energy fields of one form or another that sometimes manifest as particles and things. In fact, we have found an underlying quantum universe that seems to be very much like the Eastern concept of the universe as a single unified process or field. So, perhaps the Eastern mystics are not wrong, but have just discovered a different way of arriving at the same truths. From a spiritual standpoint, their view is entirely valid. The difference is, the Western scientific approach is very useful in dealing with the physical world in which we unenlightened find ourselves. The Eastern approach is not. In fact, we only need to look at the grief and suffering in the Eastern world to know that. So, don't throw out your scientific text books. At the level we live, all of the rules of Newton and Euclid still apply and are very useful. It is only in the subatomic world of nuclear physics where those rules break down. Of course, we have Einstein to blame for all of this. It all
began with his theories of relativity. If you would like to read
more about these ideas, try finding and reading "The Tao
of Physics" by Fritjof Capra.
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