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The Pleromatics Project
4. Eastern Spirituality
I
am the true Self in the heart of every creature, Arjuna,
and the beginning, middle, and end of their existence.
Bhagavad Gita
The attempt at a unification of physics and psyche involves us deeply in the technical language of the twentieth century. However, religion of the Whole based on knowledge of a unifying creating eternal reality is by no means new. The world's oldest scriptures, the Rig Veda of Hinduism (1500-1200 BCE), set forth essentially that same concept. In the words of Vedic translator and anthologist Raimundo Panikkar, it is the concept of "the mysterious `One,' eka, which underlies and makes possible all multiplicity":
I ask the wise who know, myself
not knowing:
who may he be, the One in the form of the Unborn,
who props in their place the six universal regions?
The One is lord over all things,
fixed or moving,
walking or flying -- this whole multiform creation.
Hinduism, with its many "gods", its diversity of ritual, and its Sanskrit terminology sounds quite exotic to Western ears, and its concepts remote from traditional Western consciousness. In classifying attitudes toward divine mystery, Hinduism is commonly described as a pantheistic religion, and in respect to its many manifestations of divinity, sometimes as polytheistic, unreconcilable with western monotheism.
The word religion usually specifies a particular set of beliefs about the Sacred, and the rituals and institutions which bind a worshipping community together. However, the quest for an understanding of the religion of the Whole goes beyond the conventional concept of organized and systematized religion, and defies conventional categories.
First, religion of the whole leaves behind fundamentalists in both religion and science. Religious fundamentalists deny truth beyond a standardized interpretation of scripture; the "fundamentalism" of scientific positivism denies any reality beyond matter itself. The narrow viewpoint of each of those is a barrier to the evolution of awareness and understanding which we seek here.
Beyond that barrier, however, the next great obstruction is that great divide which was just mentioned: the divide between theism and pantheism. Samuel Alexander, the British philosopher of religion quoted earlier, held that the two would be irreconcilable if theism is interpreted strictly to refer to a transcendent God, and pantheism to an only immanent one.
In traditional classifications, a strictly transcendent God is the god of deism. Alexander says, "Deism ... is opposed not so much to theism as to revelation." The God of the Hebrews was not a deistic god, so strictly transcendent as to be out of touch with mankind. Yahweh appears to Moses in the burning bush, contends with Job, speaks to the prophets, sings through the psalmist, and covenants with the people.
Alexander continues, "Theism in the strict sense of that term believes in a transcendent God, who is also the creator of the world, who enters into intimate relations with man and natural events." By contrast, immanence means "that God is a principle which pervades the whole of nature and has no existence outside. ... This notion is the essence of pantheism."
The thesis which I desire to commend, then, is that transcendence and immanence are not reconcilable, that God cannot be ... at once the immanent and the transcendent ground of the world. If God is coextensive with the world, he does not transcend it. If he transcends it, he is not immanent in it.
Such a polarization (an example of OR logic) leads us away from religion of the whole rather than toward unification. A reconciliation of eastern spirituality with that of the west must then occur on some other axis and by some other logic, as in fact Alexander accomplished with his concept of evolving deity. [Part III: Religion of the Whole] Unification is not so much a logical problem as a pattern-recognition problem, the most common of mental processes, such as that by which we recognize a face in the crowd to be that of a friend.
The beliefs and customs of the major religious traditions arising from Asia are quite varied, and I do not want to slight any one of them. However, Brahmanism is the most ancient of the recorded traditions. Brahman is not only the basis of religious belief, but is the philosophy of reality which characterizes all Indian thought. Since its view of reality historically undergirds the many forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, that is the appropriate place to begin.
In the article on nonlocal reality (Part II), we discussed the cosmos in terms of a "cosmogram" of three concentric circles: (1) cosmos, represented by the outer "shell" of the material world, is the term we use for the full scope of material reality as we conventionally know it; (2) psyche, its "inner" nonlocal aspect; and (3) a central circle or center point representing an ordering principle. Let us now examine another cosmogram, and search out correlations between eastern concepts and Jung's model of the psyche.
In the cosmogram of the total psyche, the realm which senses the material cosmos is labeled ego. The term psyche conventionally refers to the usually unconscious "nonlocal" realm beyond ordinary consciousness. Jung used the term self for the total psyche, as well as its central ordering principle, or "Meaning".
We can find these concepts in eastern philosophy, too. Of course a schema such as this must be highly simplified. Scholars and adherents of those religions might want to cite many exceptions, even objections. However, the simplicity makes it easier to correlate ancient traditions with modern knowledge; it is a quest which derives from full respect for those traditions, and from a desire to learn from them.
The realm of the material cosmos and of our ordinary conscious lives is the realm of karma. Karma is the "network" of spacetime actions, the field in which they occur, and from which spiritual enlightenment releases us. The terminology governing spacetime actions is quite rich and somewhat varied. Descriptions of karma often invoke physical terms, such as energy and flux, even "vibrations". In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is generally expressed as an abstract reality of the connectedness of actions in spacetime. It is the realm of causation and effect. (In Jainism, karma is perceived as a more material concept, as a "dust" which interacts with soul.)
The karmic realm is also the realm of samsara, the world of flux and entropy, the cycle of birth, death, decay, and rebirth. It is the realm of prakriti, the energy of nature by which mental and physical worlds take shape.
Beneath spacetime's local phenomena lies the dharma, the realm of the deep reality (`law') by which all is governed. Dharma is a word with many levels of meaning, and in various contexts can mean system, cosmic order, duty, justice, moral quality, and ideal, as well as law. In Buddhism Dharma (usually capitalized) is the Buddha's law or teaching, the body of precepts to which the aspirant adheres. However, that Dharma was received by the Buddha from his enlightenment to the deep reality (dharma). Though the historical context and connotations of the terms are entirely different, there is a parallel here with the relationship of Jew to Torah: Observing the Law brings one into accord with the law (order) enacted in creation.
We may take the term psyche to refer to the unifying and ordered deep "spiritual" reality of the cosmos as a whole, to the entire holomovement (to use Bohm's word), rather than to an individual's own psychological unconscious. We shall develop that correlation in more depth later. Here, too, dharma, like psyche, refers to the cosmic reality of the One as All. In eastern philosophy, this One which encompasses All is not itself personified, but is known in many forms. In later Hindu scriptures, the One takes the name Brahman:
Still higher is Brahman, the
supreme, the great,
hidden in the bodies of all these beings,
the One, encompassing the All, the Lord ...
The cosmic waters glow. I am
Light!
The light glows. I am Brahman!
Brahman is All.
In later Hindu scriptures, the reality is personified as many divine beings (devas), having many names. These are avatars, that is, manifestations of divine reality, such as Shiva and Vishnu who are worshipped as direct expressions of divinity to the people. It is these by which, according to Eknath Easwaran, divine consciousness is born in the human heart. The highest expression in Hindu scripture of such a personalized understanding of divinity occurs in the great "Song of the Lord", the Bhagavad Gita.
The devas are representations to mankind of the manifold aspects of both dharma and Atman. The Atman is Cosmic Self, the essence, the central ordering principle which indwells all creation and all creatures, and which thus gives meaning and coherence to all existence. Often the concept of Brahman merges with Atman, and one may be represented as an expression of the other, as in the first quotation above, from the Gita's chapter on "Divine Splendor". It concludes:
Just remember that I am, and that I support the entire cosmos with only a fragment of my being.
The significance of "That I am" is easy for western minds to overlook. In Hindu texts it carries great meaning, for it is the essence of Brahman to be invariant being which contains all becoming. As Yahweh was revealed in the burning bush to Moses as "I am that I am", so is Brahman in splendor, speaking as Lord Krishna, revealed as the deepest reality of being, whose existence nurtures all existence in a seamless whole.
In Buddhism, the deep reality of dharma is often expressed as nirvana. Enlightenment to nirvana represents, not a paradise or heaven in which we (westerners) seek reward, but an awareness of that reality which underlies all existence. The relationship applies individually and cosmically. Lama Anagarika Govinda (1896-1985), founder of a Western Tibetan Buddhist order, writes of "the knowledge of the relativity of samsara and nirvana as the two aspects of the same reality". He says that thinking and all actions of the transformed life, toward which the spiritual path leads:
become increasingly an expression of the fundamental unity of samsara and nirvana, that is, of the interrelationship of physical and psychical qualities, of the sensual and the transcendental, of the individual and the universal.
In Hinayana Buddhism, the Buddha is respected as teacher, not worshipped divine. Gautauma Buddha himself did not present a doctrinal system which encompassed questions of existence and of life after death. In one of the ancient scriptures, he tells a questioner that he has not done so because:
this profits not, nor has to do with the fundamentals of religion, or ... knowledge, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana; therefore I have not elucidated it. A bear always in mind what it is that I have not elucidated, and what it is that I have elucidated.
Nevertheless, another of the early scriptures records a discussion between Ananda and the Buddha on the doctrine of "dependent origination", which is a governing reality. In the subsequent development of Buddhism, the Mahayana school developed a more transcendental approach, which gives more emphasis to an idealistic and monist view of reality. That was developed still further in Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism. Lama Govinda wrote A Living Buddhism for the West, late in life. In that, he develops the Buddha's doctrine of dependent causation in a way which correlates well with the cosmogram.
The "doctrine of dependent and simultaneous origination" is known as the doctrine of pratitya-samutpada. The root meanings of the words conote wholeness and union in the arising or appearing of nature. Govinda writes that it was often interpreted as a "causal formula", but that is only its superficial "scientific" meaning; the doctrine may also be interpreted to refer to origination "beyond all relations of time and place":
causality and synchronicity are not necessarily mutually exclusive -- a point to which the Buddha himself returned when he declared that pratitya-samutpada was to be understood in a much deeper sense and not merely as a simple chain of causality in space and time, namely as the internal dependence of every phenomenal form on every other. When Ananda declared that the formula of dependent origination was easy to understand and intellectually satisfying, thus interpreting it in a purely temporal-causal sense, the Buddha rebuked him and referred to its profound and difficult-to-comprehend sense.
Govinda also gives a psychological interpretation to cosmos, which can be correlated with Alexander's western concept of evolving deity. Individual qualities, Govinda says:
are transformed by the event of enlightenment into qualities corresponding to the nature of a Buddha. These qualities have no ego reference and are thus no longer limited by the concept of an ego, but are all-embracing, that is, in the truest sense universal. Thus the entire universe becomes the "body" of the Enlightened One ...
Another ancient tradition is that of the Tao te Ching associated with Lao Tzu. In Taoism, the deepest reality is the tao or "Way", a concept which is correlated with the western logos or "Word" in the Chinese translation of Saint John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the tao". In the Chinese tradition, the "named" local reality (cosmos) stands on or within the "unnamed" deeper nonlocal reality:
The tao which can be
spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name which can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of
heaven and earth.
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Many thinkers, spiritual and scientific, have been embarked now for some time on the search for correlations between eastern concepts and modern physics. Physics writers Gary Zukav (The Dancing Wu Li Masters) and Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics) are perhaps the most well-known of these. Eknath Easwaran, introducing his modern translation of the Bhagavad Gita, writes:
This analysis of the phenomenal world tallies well enough with contemporary physics. A physicist would remind us that the things we see "out there" are not ultimately separate from each other and from us; we perceive them as separate because of the limitations of our senses. If our eyes were sensitive to a much finer spectrum, we might see the world as a continuous field of matter and energy. Nothing in this picture resembles a solid object in our usual sense of the word. "The world of physics," wrote Sir Arthur Eddington, "has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we remove the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions." Like the physicists, these ancient sages were seeking an invariant. They found it in the Brahman.
Perhaps the vindication that we seek in our search for correlations between physics and psyche is best expressed in a quotation from the Fourteenth (and current) Dalai Lama. After speaking of the four traditional elements of eastern philosophies, earth, water, fire, and air, he adds space as a fifth element, then continues:
As regards the element space or "ether", according to certain Buddhist texts, such as the Kalachakra Tantra, space is not just a total voidness, devoid of anything at all, but is referred to in terms of "empty particles". This empty particle therefore serves as the basis for the evolution and dissolution of the four other elements. They are generated from it and finally are absorbed back into it. A The Big Bang model of the beginning of the universe has perhaps something in common with this empty particle. Also, the most subtle, fine particle described in modern physics seems to be similar to the empty particle. Such parallels do present something that I feel it would be worthwhile to reflect upon.
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Notes: Eastern Spirituality
"I am the true self" -- Baghavad Gita (10:20), translated by Eknath Esawaran. Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1985. p 143.
"I ask the wise who know" -- Rig Veda I, 164. The Vedic Experience: Mantramanjari, An Anthology of the Vedas for Modern Man and Contemporary Celebration. Edited and translated by Raimundo Panikkar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. p 660.
"The One is Lord over all things" -- Rig Veda III,54. Panikkar page 660.
"Theism in the strict sense" -- Alexander, S. op. cit. (1969) page 321.
"The thesis which I desire to commend" -- ibid, p. 324.
In Jainism, karma is perceived -- Padmanabh S. Jaini. The Jaina Path of Purification. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. p 111 ff.
"Still higher is Brahman" -- Svetasvatara Upanishad III, 7-21. Panikkar p 733.
"The cosmic waters glow" -- Mahanarayana Up. 1-2; 152-156. Panikkar p 335.
"Brahman is All" -- Baghavad Gita 4:24. Panikkar p 429.
"Just remember that I am" -- Baghavad Gita 10:42, Easwaran
"the knowledge of the relativity of samsara" -- Anagarika Govinda. A Living Buddhism for the West. Boston: Shambhala, 1990. p 49.
"this profits not" -- Portable World Bible, op. cit. [1:8] p. 119
"causality and synchronicity are not necessarily" -- ibid, p 49.
"are transformed by the event of enlightenment" -- ibid, p 16.
"For as long as the Buddha is still" -- Anagarika Govinda. The Way of the White Clouds. Boston: Shambhala, 1988. p 35.
"The tao which can be spoken of" -- Tao Te Ching 1:1, translated by D. C. Lau. New York: Viking/Penguin, 1963. p 57.
"This analysis of the phenomenal world" -- Eknath Easawaran, op. cit. p 10.
"As regards the element space" -- Tenzin Gyatso (Dalai Lama XIV). Ocean of Wisdom: Guidelines for Living. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990. pp 44-45.
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