1: The Buddhist Fallacy

INTRODUCING SPIRITUAL MUSINGS, VOLUME 4

THE MAGNIFICENCE OF SOUL

 

1

The Buddhist Fallacy

 

I had a United Church pastor friend who was discharged from his ministry for inappropriate conduct. He had an illicit affair with one of his parishioners whom he was counseling for marital problems. Their affair broke up his marriage, and hers.

They divorced their spouses and got married. After a few years my friend’s new wife left him for another man and they divorced. After several more unsuccessful relationships my friend got together with a much younger woman who was a registered nurse, a vegetarian, and practicing Buddhist. He became a vegetarian and Buddhist. They married and went to an ashram in India for a month to practice meditation, and a few years later he contracted a rare cancer that starved his body and he passed away.

My friend’s life intrigued me, so I explored it in my novel The Seeker, Quest for the Lost Soul of God. For reasons which can only be explained by a writer’s intuition, I saw his rare strain of cancer as the physical manifestation of the starvation of his spiritual self, which I intuitively attributed to the unconscious shadow side of his selfish personality.

Several years before he fell sick I took my friend out for lunch. He ordered a cheeseburger and fries. He ate meat whenever he could because he couldn’t help himself, but he never told his wife and always sucked on breath mints after eating meat. She suspected, but didn’t say anything.

My friend’s behavior intrigued me. “I’m curious, Adam,” I said over lunch that day; “how did you manage to reconcile your Christian beliefs with Buddhism?”

I was going to bring a book for him to read (The Monk and the Philosopher, by Jean-Francois Revel and his Tibetan Buddhist monk son Matthieu Ricard), but my friend had a habit of not returning books. I had loaned him three volumes by Idries Shah on the teaching stories of the incomparable Mullah Nasrudin, and another time I loaned him some books on running (we were both distance runners), but he never returned them; and I didn’t want to forfeit The Monk and the Philosopher because I needed it for reference. I had also loaned him some tools when he built his new house, and I had to keep reminding him to return them; but he never did. I had to retrieve them. And my books.

My friend was a soft-spoken likeable man who came across as very sincere and understanding; but he was inherently selfish and blindly insensitive. His first wife put him through divinity school (he was a civil engineer when he got the call to the ministry), and he abandoned her and their four children because he fell in love with the woman he was counseling two years after he got his first parish in a small community in northern Ontario; that’s why I wanted to explore his character in my novel.

My novel was autobiographical; but in the process of creatively exploring the quest for my lost soul—true to my aesthetic that literature is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what is—I also explored my friend’s life story by interweaving it with mine.

Adam took a big bite of his cheeseburger, chewed two or three times, and swallowed. “What do you mean?” he asked, and forked up a couple of gravy-soaked fries.

“It’s obvious. Christians believe that we have an immortal soul, and Buddhists don’t. I’d like to know how you reconciled these two beliefs.”

“We’re all one, O,” he glibly replied, addressing me by my nickname.

“So you don’t believe that we have an autonomous soul, then?”

“I think the Buddhists got it right. We’re all one Self,” he said, and took another big bite of his cheeseburger. One more bite and it would be all gone.

I wanted to open up a dialogue on the self of man; instead, I explored it in my novel after Adam died. And a few years after I wrote my novel I had seven past-life regressions that confirmed what I had arrived at creatively in my novel.

And that’s why I’m going to abandon to my creative process for today’s spiritual musing. The title that came to me was, “The Fallacy of Ego Detachment,” which was born of a discussion that Penny and I had over coffee the other morning. I had brought my third volume of spiritual musings Stupidity Is Not a Gift of God to closure, and as we talked I felt an idea approaching me from the far regions of my mind, not unlike the image of Laurence approaching on his camel from the distant horizon in the opening scene of Laurence of Arabia, until it came into full focus; but I shuddered at the audacity of its iconoclastic implications.  “I just saw the first musing of my next volume,” I said to Penny.  

“What?” she asked.

“The Fallacy of Ego Detachment” I said.

“What does that mean?” she asked; and after I explained the gist of my musing we explored titles for my new volume. But none seemed to work, until out of the clear blue the soul of my new book announced itself—The Magnificence of Soul.

However, as I looked for an entry point for my introductory musing I could not find one; so I sat and pondered. I knew what I wanted to write, but I didn’t know how to get there; and then my Muse boldly transformed “The Fallacy of Ego Detachment” into what would become my entry point—the Buddhist fallacy.

This is today’s spiritual musing, then; which, given my friendship with my shadow-affected former Christian pastor friend who died of a rare cancer that starved his body and my quest for my lost soul, had a very long gestation period…  

I studied my friend’s life. Writers study everyone’s life when they gravitate into their field of interest. We do it instinctively. We study their lives because we want to know the secret of their relationship with God, whether they believe in God or not. That’s their personal story, and my friend had a very complicated relationship with God.

One day I asked Adam what he got out of meditation. I asked because I had practiced Transcendental Meditation for a few years just to see what it was all about; but I moved on from that practice because I found meditation too passive.

 “I love meditation,” he replied.

“Why?” I asked.

 “It stills my mind,” he said.

“What else does it do for you?” I asked.

“It detaches me from my ego. That’s what I love most about meditation. When I get into that space I don’t have a worry in the world. I just am. Jan and I meditate for an hour every morning before we go to work. You should try it, O.”

“I have,” I said; but meditation wasn’t my path, so I didn’t pursue it.

However, I read books by Buddhists who practiced meditation, such as Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn who wrote: “There is no absolute separate ‘self’ in the first place, just a process of continual self-construction of ‘selfing’…Meditation is not about trying to become a nobody, or a contemplative zombie, incapable of living in the real world and facing real problems. It’s about seeing things as they are, without the distortions of our own thought processes. Part of that is perceiving that everything is interconnected and while our conventional sense of ‘having’ a self is helpful in many ways, it is not absolutely real or solid or permanent” (pp. 238-9).

I could not buy into this perspective, and over the years I began to see meditation less as a way to still the mind to detach oneself from ego, and more as a hiatus from life; an escape which for some odd reason felt wrong to me. I could never put my finger on why it felt wrong, but my disgraced pastor friend helped me to see why. Through him I saw this kind of meditation as a deceptive form of self-betrayal, a feel-good abnegation of the natural impulse to individuate the self that we are meant to be; and out of these feelings sprang the concept of  the Buddhist fallacy, which I’m exploring in today’s musing… 

Once again, synchronicity played its part in opening the door for my musing, because while I was reading The Waking Dream, Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Life by Ray Grasse over coffee this morning, I was nudged to go back to The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Richard Wilhelm with a commentary by C. G. Jung.

I immediately went to Jung’s commentary, which I read again in its entirety; but it wasn’t until I connected my feelings on meditation with what I had just read that I heard the bell in my mind ring loud and clear—the secret of the Golden Flower is all about the secret way of life that individuates the ego self of man!

There it was—the Buddhist fallacy! The synchronistic juxtaposition of what I felt about meditation and the secret way of life combusted and the Buddhist fallacy stood out like a full moon in a dark sky, because the ego that one detaches oneself from while meditating is never going to go away until it is transformed by the alchemical process of self-realization consciousness—meaning, the secret way of life.

The ego disappears into the unconscious while one is meditating; but it always comes back. This is the fallacy of ego detachment that my shadow-affected friend had alerted me to, because I knew that the ego, as illusory and unreal as Buddhists believe it to be, is not going to disappear simply because one believes that it has no reality independent of their own mind; one can detach oneself from one’s ego until the cows come home, I knew in the depths of my soul that it would not go away until it was miraculously transformed by the conscious efforts of the individuation process—and even then, it doesn’t disappear.

This is what the ancient alchemists meant when they said that we have to complete what Mother Nature left unfinished, and why the Sufis say that we have to “die” before “dying,” and why Jesus said, “Ye must be born again.” Which is why Carl Jung was so excited when Wilhelm introduced him to The Secret of the Golden Flower, because Jung had awakened to the secret way of life through his “confrontation with the unconscious” when he went on his quest for his own lost soul that he recorded in The Red Book.

Jung was excited when he discovered the Way of Tao in The Secret of the Golden Flower, because it confirmed his own discovery of “the secret way.” As he wrote in his commentary, “…when I began my life-work in the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy, I was completely ignorant of Chinese philosophy, and only later did my professional experience show me that in my technique I had been unconsciously led along the secret way which has been the preoccupation of the best minds of the East for centuries” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 86; italics mine). But, as he told Miguel Serrano in Seranno’s book C.G. Jung and Herman Hesse, A Record of Two Friendships, “The path is very difficult.” That’s why Jesus said, “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

I discovered the secret way of life as I “worked” on myself with Gurdjieff’s teaching, which awakened me to the Way that I began to see everywhere, beginning with the sayings of Jesus; and the more I lived the Way, the more I transformed the consciousness of my ego personality until one day I gave birth to my spiritual self in my mother’s kitchen while she was kneading bread dough on the kitchen table.

That’s why I was never attracted to Buddhism, because I sensed that Buddhism was wrong to believe that we don’t have an autonomous self; but I had to ‘gather and collect myself into myself,’ as Socrates would say, and transcend my ego self before I could part the veil and see the Buddhist fallacy. From the moment I gave birth to my spiritual self I knew that I had completed what Nature had left unfinished, and  I could say: I am what I am not, and I am not what I am; I am both, but neither: I am Soul.

I had found my true self that I set out to find when I sold my pool hall business and went to France in my early twenties; but little did I expect that to find my true self I would have to become my true self. And that’s the secret of the Golden Flower!