True Pride

Friedrich Nietzsche, aged 18

In my last I meant to say that God whether existent or not can provide a focus for the spiritual life. I mentioned atheist Sam Harris approvingly for demonstrating that the separate “I” is an illusion: there is only the One. In his own words, “Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.”

Which might lead to the conclusion that the problem is “ego”, and that spiritual life is about effacing the self. In a recent post, “The Trip”, I noted that you cannot safely cross the road without a vivid sense of “I”. The pronoun refers to body and mind together as a single unit. Too often we carelessly think the “I” refers merely to consciousness, particularly self-consciousness. In its Latin form “ego” is too often a shorthand for “egotism”, which in turn is intended as “arrogant selfishness”. Thus it is easy to get confused when we want to look into it seriously.

So I want to leave that contentious pronoun, whether in Latin or English, and talk about a different word. Pride, I say, is an essential spur to proper human behaviour, more important than any set of rules, any commandments instilled upon the impressionable child. More reliance is placed on pride, for good or ill, as a guide to action than reason, laws or even the preservation of one’s own life. This is particularly true of the male psyche. When pride is shattered, it’s like having no backbone, becoming a jellyfish. The growing child seeks a role model for what to be proud about. This is where everything can go well or badly. “WoodsyBit Moss”, in a comment on my last, mentioned “false-pride, ego and love for my country”. It seemed like a meaningful coincidence, for I’d already been brooding about notions of “good pride” and “bad pride”. I found them to have too many Christian associations.

So I shall speak in praise of true pride, proposing it as a human birthright. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t mention pride, but is focused instead on my “rights”, defined in terms of how others must treat me. It says nothing about how I should treat myself. So here goes.

As a singular instance of Everyman, I was born black, white, able-bodied or otherwise, into a good or bad family; or perhaps was left to my fate as a foundling, floating among the bulrushes—or abandoned in a dumpster. That is to say, the dice were loaded from the start, I didn’t arrive by choice. What then can I do? Cringe and find a hole to hide in? No, here I am, there’s a space in this world for me, body and soul. Only I can claim it. I am to fill my space completely. This is true, that is to say healthy pride which leads me on to my fate; perhaps to enter Europe from Africa or Syria and get drowned in an overloaded boat.

False pride is to see myself as superior, to encroach, to exceed my space and stifle others with my overweening. Or else it is to adopt a false humility. Worst of all is to be neutered, a nothing. It might be genuinely helpful to be told that God loves me, but only if the teller feels this love personally in his or her heart. Such a person would show it by loving me for being whatever I am. And I suppose what people hate about religion is the scarcity of such a person. Many are those who will quote Jesus while leading you blindly into the very ditch he warned them against.

This pride I speak of is “the true beginning of spiritual life” because we need to know it is possible to be profoundly self-sufficient. Possible and necessary too, for no one person can show me the way. On this basis every religion falls. I almost feel that this point is the foundation of Nietzsche’s philosophy; perhaps not so much in his major works but the project he spoke of in his last book Ecce Homo as The Revaluation of All Values. He lost his sanity before he could write it.

As a young man Fernando Pessoa was much impressed by Nietzsche. Here is an entry describing a disorienting loss of ego, from The Book of Disquiet—fragment 262 in Zenith’s translation:

Fernando Pessoa as a young man

Today I was struck by an absurd but valid sensation. I realized, in an inner flash, that I’m no one. Absolutely no one. In that flash, what I’d supposed was a city proved to be a barren plain, and the sinister light that showed me myself revealed no sky above. Before the world existed, I was deprived of the power to be. If I was reincarnated, it was without myself, without my I.

I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without ever having been, among the dreams of someone who didn’t know how to complete me.

I always think, I always feel, but there’s no logic in my thought, no emotions in my emotion. I’m falling from the trapdoor on high through all of infinite space in an aimless, infinitudinous, empty descent. My soul is a black whirlpool, a vast vertigo circling a void, the racing of an infinite ocean around a hole in nothing. And in these waters which are more a churning than actual waters float the images of all I’ve seen and heard in the world—houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and syllables of voices all moving in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

And amid all this confusion, I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

It’s not demons (who at least have a human face) but hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it’s the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a god who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

If only I knew how to think! If only I knew how to feel!

My mother died too soon for me to ever know her . . .

The piece is dated 1st December 1931. As his translator says, “No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper.”

The Opium of the People

Sam Harris

This is what Karl Marx actually said:

The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Everyone knows Marx was a theorist whose ideas have not come to pass in real life. I like to see myself as a nontheorist—open to what I see before me, rejecting all belief, driven by inner impulse to the point where I cast my fate to the winds. All the same, I can bear witness to some of what he said above. I have known religious suffering, real suffering, and the protest against suffering. As for the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heartless world and soulless conditions, I know them too but mainly as a spectator. I’ve known religion as illusory happiness. When I broke free from religion (a bhakti-meditation cult), it was as if the sky cleared and I could let in real happiness.

Today, in liberal affluent Western society, we have atheists who don’t understand that in this heartless world the poor and oppressed cannot afford man-made care but are forced to rely upon God’s care. If they stop believing in God they won’t have anything at all.

These highly-educated and well-off atheists think of religions as dealers—pushers, in fact—in some form of spiritual “opium”. They may be right, but it doesn’t mean that their customers are stupid or otherwise contemptible. So I address myself to Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, and I say to them: “If you ridicule their God, you are callous to their pain, you take away their only pain-killer.” And I say to them further, and to the late Karl Marx, “Who are you to say their happiness is illusory? You are in no position to say that another person’s pain or happiness is illusory. You take away, but what do you have to offer? Only that which the oppressed creature cannot afford; or, if you lean to the Left, only the promise of fairness and equality—a better future, like Heaven.”

Then Sam Harris, who I’ve never bothered to read till now, astonishes me with his book Waking Up: Searching for spirituality without religion. It doesn’t entirely exonerate him from my accusations, but I find he has been on his own spiritual quest from the age of sixteen. He has done meditation, studied under Gurus, been profoundly impressed by the doctrine of non-duality as embodied in the Indian saint Ramana Maharshi.

With his background in neuroscience, he ponders the “Mystery of Consciousness” and the “Riddle of the Self”, devoting a closely-argued chapter to each. I end up thinking it is not really my kind of book, he has addressed it to a different audience. Yet there was one thing that kept me turning the pages: eager anticipation of his delivering a bridge between science and spirituality, something the world has been waiting for. No, that’s not right. I cannot speak for the world, too many are trying to do that. It is I who have been waiting for something like this, someone with a properly-trained, coherent and structured mind who knows enough to bridge this absurd gulf. Sam Harris does have such a mind. It encompasses a lot of things that don’t mean a great deal to me. I'm happy to set those aside, so as to clear the stage for one big thing, one big accomplishment. He sets the age-old wisdom, the ultimate truth, in a new context, to a new audience, with his own modern kind of proofs that don’t rely on ancient sutras and and mythical Masters. The separate “I” is an illusion, there is only the One. And in his words,

Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

And this might be a good place to end, but there is more to say. Harris prefers Buddhism and Non-Dual Vedanta to Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions, which in varying degrees he actively dislikes, especially Islam. Fair enough. But he doesn’t acknowledge that if the people’s opium is actually God, they don’t need a dealer in the form of pastors and suchlike. Indeed, it’s not Christianity’s but America’s fault that most things there, including religion, follow a business model where customer retention matters more than the product itself. It’s not Allah’s fault but history’s and human nature’s, that Allah’s name,

whatever it signifies, has been associated with appalling behaviours. Religions can be magnets for every kind of evil intent. But love of God in the heart is true love to those who can find no true earthly love, and a stepping-stone to the One. Surrendering to the Unknowable is one of the ways, like having a guide-dog for the blind, letting go the illusion of “I”, trusting in new eyes. Whether one believes or not doesn’t matter, but the simple trust does.

Harris’s title is significant: “Waking Up”. His drug of choice is not opium, a pain-killer that gives you dreams, but MDMA, known as Ecstasy, which he seems to approve, along with sensible caveats. As a neuroscientist who has used the drug on himself, he says it released chemicals in his brain which made him love everyone. I don’t endorse his book wholeheartedly, but find much to admire; especially that he talks from his own experience and knowledge. Who can do more than that?

Unconscious motives

Yesterday the young man who shot 12 people in a cinema was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of release, though some had expected the death penalty. No one has any idea why he did it—the court said it wasn’t relevant. I wasn’t interested in the verdict or his motives. It was just a news item, which on its own rang no bells in my head; until a blogging friend in America said he’d hardly met any Southern poor white trash. It was in the context of Elvis Presley, of whom he’s never been a fan—nor have I, for what it’s worth.

So I thought to myself, I’ve never met any Southern poor white trash either, in any of my visits to the States. And yet an insistent bell started to ring, a memory wanting to be let in, not perhaps of “Southern poor white trash, but certainly “trailer trash”. Perhaps movies I’ve seen. Herzog’s “Stroszek” would be one, and another about Mississippi people who live in ruined shacks, or was it in the Everglades? There were others, I get muddled. But it wasn’t any of those. It came back to me: he lived in a trailer, committed an inexplicable murder, was put on Florida’s Death Row and remains there to this day. I know this, and know him, because we corresponded for several years.

As to why he did it, or indeed why we later shared a correspondence, one can think of motives; but I can’t quite believe in them, wondering instead whether there truly is a destiny that shapes our ends.

At the time I was laid up with chronic fatigue syndrome, more or less housebound, more or less unemployed. I felt drawn to do something useful, voluntary work from home. I found a website, HumanWrites, “a long established British organisation founded for the purpose of befriending prisoners on Death Row in the USA”. If I remember rightly, there was some kind of vetting procedure, and then they arranged an introduction to the prisoner I mentioned above. And so we got to know one another. I may have his letters somewhere, and mine to him. He would have preferred writing to a woman, or failing that, letters with pictures of women embedded in them. I used to embed images just as I do now in blog posts, but they were snapshots illustrating my simple stories of daily life.

We managed to find things to talk about, while carefully avoiding the subject of his crime, which in any case he denied committing. I cannot blame him for that, as he spent much of his time pursuing appeals through a succession of assigned lawyers, who as you may imagine were inexperienced and pleaded his cause half-heartedly to practise their craft, with no passion to free him. He would describe his daily life, vividly and amusingly. Sometimes he would lightly hint that he needed money to buy stamps, and if I could afford anything beyond that, there was a whole range of things he could order from the prison canteen, from fancy foods to a small colour TV. He was able to eavesdrop TV from the neighbouring cell, but to get picture as well as sound, he held a mirror through the bars to get a reflection of the screen. This wasn’t allowed, and one day he injured his arm pulling it in when a guard showed up.

The first time he wrote he said he was a Buddhist, after receiving books from the Prison Ashram Project, a part of the Human-Kindness Foundation founded by Bo Lozoff, who has since died in 2012. He said this resource had made a difference to him. He was a pleasant, attentive, tactful and considerate correspondent; not stupid but able to look after himself and make the best of situations. He had a low opinion of some of his fellow inmates, but I don’t remember him saying anything bad about the guards, though the rules were punitively strict and it was easy to get into trouble. I never thought he was telling me the whole truth. He might have lied consistently for all I know. I could see he was pretty good at turning things to his advantage. I discovered he had posted requests for pen-pals in many places, and probably had many correspondents including women whose epistles would have pleased him a lot more than mine. I imagine him to be devoid of the kind of moral conscience that you and take for granted.

Given all this, it made no sense that he should have done this violent murder. He was intelligent enough to see that he would promptly get caught, as indeed happened. What was his true motive? As I’ve said, I never went near discussing his crimes with John himself, but it was easy to get hold of his story online. I guess that's part of the punishment. You have no privacy, either in your cell or in the world at large, where everyone can see what you’ve done. Here, for instance; and also here.

My role was not to judge his guilt, or have an opinion on the suitability of his punishment. I’m not even a principled opponent of execution. My motive for the correspondence, as I thought, was to practise kindness. For all I know he wanted to practise kindness too. Why should he not seek any form of atonement available, and send kind letters to all comers from his (monastic) cell? I prefer to think well of every fellow-creature. Our correspondence ended ten years ago. Not long before that, he had a visit from his daughter. It wasn’t easy to arrange, especially because her mother had long ceased contact and I don’t think they had ever lived together as a family. He sent me the photo above.

To me, his crime had the unconscious motive of landing him in jail for his own good. Perhaps the same goes for the young man who killed 12 in the cinema. I seem to see some people, myself included, driven to do what we do as if in obedience to pre-ordained destiny. We are as bewildered as anyone by what we do, and struggle to rationalize our actions by deducing motives after the event. If this is true, it doesn’t exonerate us from the consequences, which are perhaps pre-ordained too.

It did occur to me that someone living in John’s chaotic circumstances outside jail would not be able to pursue any deep urge to a more spiritual life. Prison offers him a retreat from the world, and a chance to behave properly as a human being. I wish him well, whatever happens, over the years to come.