Anahata - Compassion and Mathematics

            Today we step out of the egotic 3^rd chakra, full of fire and will and drive, into the clear open air of the heart.  With this transition we move from a place of difference (I vs. everything else being the primordial instance of difference) into a place where boundaries dissolve and difference vanishes before sameness.  Here we learn humility in the face of the powerful realization of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of man.  We let go of our ego and open ourselves to the Other in an inclusive embrace. 

            Of all the chakras, the heart chakra is perhaps the most intuitive localization of an experience.  We intuitively connect the heart to love, and when we speak of someone being “open-hearted” the meaning is understood.  But the love of the heart chakra isn’t what we think.  It is not romantic love at all, but equanimity and compassion.  It is the love of the brotherhood of man, first and foremost.  The 4^th chakra is a bit aloof like that, all airy contemplation and high minded (one might say head-in the clouds or pie in the sky) ideals.  Compared to the down to earth 1^st chakra, the watery depths of infatuation in the 2^nd, and the fiery passions of the 3^rd, the Anahata chakra is in the cold, bright, open air of the stratosphere.

            Love is a convenient starting point for understanding this aloofness. Love exists in all 4 lower chakras in some way.  1^st chakra love is love for the family, tribe, of a parent for his child and the child for his parent.  It is conditional in that we love our own children first, and our own family more than other people’s families.  It’s easy to confuse this “selfless” love of the mother for the child with the general compassion of the 4^th (and I do think they’re related), as both put others ahead of the self, but they are very different.  If the mother loved everyone the same way they love their child, only then would it be 4^th chakra love.  We find romantic love in the 2^nd chakra, which is conditional in that the object of our affections must be lovable, which is a matter of personal preference (attractiveness, preferred gender, age, etc). We might easily forget to keep up other relationships when we’re captured by the jaws of the 2^nd chakra’s crocodile.  We are enchanted, and the moonlight of this chakra tends to hide all the faults of the person in question.  This is the love of the “honeymoon phase”, and in reality we find ourselves usually in love with the image of the person, only getting to know them on a deeper level when the initial burst of infatuation wears off.  3^rd Chakra love is love as status – trophy wives, gold-diggers, successful businessmen and politicians who might feel that they’re status is incomplete without a spouse and children.  Love as a vehicle for desire. All three types of love pretty much capture what we mean when we typically talk of love in a non-religious sense.  In that later sense, the Anahata reigns supreme.  4^th chakra love is impersonal, and without attachment to any particular object.  Here we find Christ’s injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself”, Buddhist compassion, Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga, and other “higher” forms of love. 

            I feel like I’ve been talking love to death this week because it is an easy example of what is really going on here in the Anahata chakra.  But the 4^th chakra goes well beyond love.  I think in its essence the Anahata chakra is about abstraction and a sensitivity to inner states.  What I mean by this is that we’ve now stepped out of the physical chakras (lower 3) and into a place where experience becomes independent of physical objects.  Love then, in the Anahata chakra, is not about the person.  Love is not in that person, but in us, and we extend it to others.  Realizing that love is within, rather than in the object of desire, is what allows for real interpersonal love.  When we live in the heart, we experience everyone as essentially equal in value and worth, and therefore equally deserving of our love.  This kind of love is an abstract kind, rather than concrete. 

            We don’t usually think of math in connection with this chakra, but it’s a good metaphor, especially as reason itself is connected to the anahata.  In math, we start by counting concrete objects, but this is not how it is necessarily used in science.  Science uses math to create an abstract representation of nature’s laws, representing relationships between forces and objects.  Such abstractions may require learning certain symbol sets, like numbers and math, to be learned “by heart”.  That last expression is a survival of an age-long association of the heart with the mind and memory. Science in particular is all about transcending the ego - a good scientist ideally removes himself, even his desires, from his experiment, trying to rise above the subjective, even above his attachment to the outcome of his experiment.

            Similarly, thought itself is crucial to understanding this chakra, and higher thought, specifically.  It is easy to describe the heart as “emotional power” as Mia Tuwari does in her books, but I think that this is incorrect.  It seems to me that emotion is largely a 2^nd chakra concern.  What we “feel” with our heart, that lump in the chest, the pitter patter, etc, is the feeling of obstruction, and pressure.  In yoga, we might say that this is attachment, and attachment is ultimately favoring one thing over another, for instance a person we love more than others.  When there is separation, or uncertainty about keeping hold of what we’re attached to (either in the early part of the romance, or at its end), we feel it in the heart as excitement or pain.  My experience is that the physical sensation is actually the same in either case, but the interpretation and emotional coloring is different.  In other words, the emotional difference is not in the heart chakra itself, just the attachment. 

            Difference, an “I” mentality, attachment, these things cause the heart to protect itself, to clench down, as it is a sensitive thing.  As we open the heart more and more in our practice, non-attachment becomes essential.  Non-attachment is a way of insulating ourselves from inevitable pain, a way of keeping equinamity, an even, steady keel in the waters of life.  Without this, an open heart would be in constant pain, as empathy without some distance turns into sympathy pains.  Most yogic practices aim at this distance (we may also say ‘renunciation’), and the yamas in particular are all calculated towards this end.  I’d go one step further and say that most spiritual systems concern themselves foremost with the heart. 

            Most modern religions tend to emphasize the ideas summed up by the anahata chakra, although these ideas may be filtered through the lower chakras in actual practice.  When we read the Gospels, for instance, we find Christ ministering to all people, almost seeming to prefer the prostitutes, poor, and tax collectors over the rich (who, after all, are as likely to get into heaven as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle).  He is criticized for this and willingly pays the ultimate price, crucified with common thieves.  This is a far cry from the triumphant King Christ who makes a later appearance, ruling, judging, and casting down to hell.  The latter is clearly a 3^rd chakra image, one which has been tenaciously keeping its grasp on the Christian imagination.  I think the reason for this is that it is only recently that the 4^th chakra has become anything close to being dominant in our culture.  The symbols have been there for 2000 years, but only with the Enlightenment, with its universal rights of man, scientific method, and penchant for democracy, has it really flowered.  The irony is not lost on me. 

            I think for the most part, the world needs more, not less, “heart”.  Humanity as a whole still displays a despicable barbarism, and much of the non-Western world is still firmly entrenched in the lower chakras.  But as the heart chakra becomes more and more pervasive in culture (and I’d say most of us reading this are extremely familiar with it), its flaws begin to creep into view.  One look at the gridlock in Congress and we can see the problems with democracy.  When everyone has an equal voice, the bigots, fanatics, and just plain stupid have an opportunity to shout down progress and spread hate.  I’m not advocating a retreat from freedom of speech, nor suggesting that we should have a strongman or 3^rd chakra king.  Far from it.  But there is something that happens when everything and everybody is equal – the world becomes flat, and ultimately the same.  We learn that we need some of those boundaries, even if we begin to suspect that they are illusory.

            The 4^th chakra in public policy simultaneously celebrates and annihilates difference.  It demands a level playing field, social justice, fairness, equality, and freedom from physical intimidation. It also seeks to uplift the downtrodden, the oppressed, and may appear to be more concerned with the Other than the Self, and this is both its strength and weakness.  When we educate ourselves into the 4^th chakra we recognize ourselves in all others.  Education is an important part of this development, as that is how we begin to place our own ego, our tribe, our concrete ways of viewing a non-concrete reality, in a greater context.  Learning another language helps us to realize just how limiting all language must be.  Learning history places us in context, and we stop seeing Armageddon hiding around every corner.  Comparing religious beliefs makes those exclusionary beliefs seem ridiculous and shallow.  But at the same time, these realizations may leave us hanging “in mid-air.”  We may learn to respect other cultures, humbly recognizing that our own judgments are constructed from our own cultural experience, and not “true” in any objective sense.  We become careful to avoid forcing our views onto other cultures, now sensitized to the bigger picture.  We see the world as a beautiful plurality of points of view, but at the same time removing the value judgments that help us to orient ourselves in the extreme multiplicity of points of view.  We see more options, more possibilities, and more choice.  We may even reject the ego itself. 

            Where does this lead us?  It can lead us to justice and fairness and essential equality.  It definitely brings greater freedom.  But it can also make choice impossible, because choice ultimately is favoritism, a discrimination (a word reviled by the 4^th chakra), and emphasizes difference.  The chaste 4^th chakra yogi cannot allow himself to be in a sexual relationship because it disturbs the equanimity of the heart – when we love one person more than another, we cannot love all equally.  Democracies become deadlocked, or worse, subject to the mob.  When the latter happens, it means that 4^th chakra equality is hijacked by those ruled by the lower chakras, leading to a degrading of culture to that level. This is the battle we’re fighting right now against the Tea Party, and the anti-intellectual and anti-secular factions.  In foreign policy, when we are trained to look at all cultures as equally valuable, it becomes harder to criticize barbaric practices such as genital mutilation and other human rights violations.  Essentially, when we’re unbalanced towards this chakra, life becomes ‘rule by committee’.  We may even, in the process of concern for others, lose sight of ourselves, and our own needs.  We may give too much, devalue ourselves too much, and in nourishing others, fail to nourish ourselves.

            Ultimately, balance in the heart chakra is what is important, as it is in all the others.  This chakra becomes a problem only when it becomes the only way we view the world.  The problem isn’t in what it represents on its own, but its lack of completeness.  Without a strong ego, our 4^th chakra will give until there is nothing left of us.  Without romance, life can feel lonely, no matter how many ‘spiritual brothers and sisters’ we may have.  Without the hard reality of the concrete earth, i.e. without application in the physical, science and religion both become mere airy phantasms.  But the solution isn’t just about looking back and down to the lower chakras (although that is also important).  The final solution to the problem of the 4^th chakra are found in the 5^th chakra, where out of the selfless service and humble recognition of the equality of all beings comes the Voice of salvation – our own Voice. 

Books, Bibliophiles and Sacred Scripture

Books and Western Civilization go hand-in-hand.  Ever since Julius Caesar (maybe) invented the codex, aka the book as we know it, we as a civilization have been in love.  This is not to say that books were not important elsewhere (that would just be silly), but I would argue that books have taken on an out-sized role in European culture that has shaped our thought in subtle ways.  I want to use India as my counter-example, as it’s the non-Western region I know the most about, and because of certain similarities of thought.  I would love to hear from anyone who knows something about the Arabic or East Asian traditions on this topic.

            You may be familiar with the idea of an oral tradition and its importance in transferring culture.  When I think of oral tradition in the West, I think of Homer, whose works were recited often only in part by traveling bards, creating varied stories that changed over time.  The philosophers of old, too, relied primarily on oral teachings, such as the lectures of the Athenian Academy, or of those numerous philosophers who didn’t do much writing, but did a lot of influential teaching.  Socrates is the clearest example of this.  Those works which were committed to the page often had an oral quality, from Plato’s dialogues, the speeches of Epictetus (written down by a loyal student who made a big deal about trying to preserve his rhetorical style) and numerous others.

            Thinking of Indian culture, we can see very similar documents.  The Bhagavad Gita is meant to be sung, the Upanishads are often in dialogue form, and the entire Sutra tradition (including Patanjali’s famous work) is structured for maximum ease of memorization.  Traditional Indian teaching relies heavily on memorization of texts, key points, and even grammatical rules, even to this day.  This is Swami’s style, and I struggle with it, and he knows that I have no intention of methodically memorizing texts.  It is however extremely impressive when he rattles off quote after quote in perfect Sanskrit. 

            While in India oral culture has been essentially unbroken, European oral culture essentially died out during the Dark Ages, as barbarians wrecked the Roman Empire, and learned men wilted from lack of patronage and cloistered themselves in monasteries.  Here the book became increasingly important, and as Europe slowly picked itself up and began to rediscover its heritage, the cultural transmission was entirely through the medium of the book.  The Greeks and Romans  were reintroduced to the West by trade with the Arabic world through Spain, as well by the flight of scholars from (and the pillage of) Constantinople, the last vestige of Rome.  These and other rediscovered books contained secrets and mysteries that it seemed no man knew, and they, rather than other men, became the symbol of knowledge.  This plays out in myths through the such icons as the cursed book, the Grimoire, Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and movies like the underrated “9^th Gate”.  These represent the power of the book to unleash strange and powerful ideas that have the potential to upset the preconceptions of the reader or even the very order of the world.  The stark division between the literate and illiterate in medieval Europe must have exacerbated this.  In largely illiterate societies, writing has often been associated with magic.  In ancient Egypt writing very nearly was magic, and the history of talismans shows the power that strange images and scribbles had upon the imagination.  Consulting books and gleaning strange knowledge by merely glancing at obscure and mysterious symbols must have seemed akin to divination at some level, and indeed, there is even a sub-field of divination – bibliomancy – based on this idea. 

            A natural result of this is the desire to write a great book one’s self.  We hear about the quest for the “Great American Novel” or more previously a single unified Metaphysics, such as was attempted by Spinoza, Descartes, and others.  An interesting effect of the myth of the book is that, with the printing press, this tradition flooded our culture with books, new and old.  I leave it to the historians of science to determine the impact of this on the European scientific revolution, but we can assume a major influence.  An increasingly literate culture, with ever-increasing access to information clearly paved the way for the modern age.  As an aside, consider the fact that more new books were printed last year than existed in the Great Library of Alexandria by its final year.

            There is also a question of authority to consider.  It is the habit of every culture to mythologize and give sacred meaning to the past.  Anything that is old becomes hallowed eventually, whether as museum pieces or immutable and infallible authorities of traditional culture.  The Guru in India certainly fills this role.  The guru is the repository of (often memorized, and thereby monopolized) knowledge passed down from hallowed antiquity, and therefore he is worshiped nearly (or actually) as a god.  In Europe, it is often the book that is so exalted.  The literal adherence to the authority of the Bible, considered literally as "the word of God" even today, speaks to this, but it is not the only example, even if it is the most important.  For centuries, the works of Aristotle and Plato, not to mention the more esoteric Corpus Hermeticum, were considered almost infallible in the same way as the Indian guru.  The academic tradition (now on the decline, for better or worse) of education by the “Great Books” is another, if later, manifestation of the same instinct.

            Strangely, it was the Tea Party movement that inspired this post.  I was reading some ridiculous op-ed piece on Fox News (I like to keep tabs on ‘The Enemy’) and I was struck by the sheer fetishism demonstrated towards the U.S. Constitution.  The founders, because they’re long dead, are hallowed into Saints, and their main document is near worshiped by the modern conservative movement.  Despite the fact that it’s needed to be amended 27 times, it is considered almost infallible to the “strict constitutionalist” type. 

            You can probably guess my feelings on all this. While I myself am something of a bibliophile (I have a library that I’m proud of and a bookshelf of antique or rare books), I clearly don’t approve of traditions of infallibility regarding any text, ancient or modern.  But I’m not really trying to make an argument against such silliness here, which would likely just be me preaching to the choir.  Instead, I want to pose some questions.  Conservatism, narrow-mindedness, and literalist interpretations appear all over the world, in as many different forms as there are cultures (or people).  That said, how much of an influence has the European book tradition had on the particular manifestation of conservatism that we see in this country today?  Has our bibliophile cultural inheritance had a part to play in emphasizing the infallibility of texts such as the Bible of the U.S. Constitution? 

           

Religious Knowledge: Part II

Continued from Part I...

In classical philosophy the discipline of metaphysics was a very popular way to try to understand the universe and our place in it.  Literally meaning “after physics,” the word comes from the untitled section of Aristotle’s work that follows the section entitled “physics,” hence ‘metaphysics’.  Metaphysics, as the word is used in philosophy, refers to an attempt to formulate a comprehensive, all-inclusive theory of reality, defining and describing its nature.  Prior to the development of the scientific method, this included “natural philosophy” (the old name for science) as a sub-section.  The primary method for creating a ‘metaphysic’ is inductive reasoning – drawing general conclusions about the world from a finite amount of experiences.  Wikipedia gives us a great example of an inductive reasoning:  Every life form we know of depends on water to live (an observation.)  Therefore, every life form depends on water to live (an inductive conclusion).  Clearly the second is not necessarily true based on the observation, although based on what we know, we might assume that this will hold true, even on other planets.  But that’s an assumption, not a fact.  We can call induction, and thereby metaphysics itself, nothing more than an ‘educated guess’. 

            The problem with induction, and metaphysics as a whole, is that it relies on pure reason to take a stab in the dark about unobserved phenomena.  If we accept a particular metaphysic and its inductive reasoning, we tend to limit our thinking.  For instance, if we reason that, based on observed life (life on earth) needing water to live, all life, including that on other planets, needs water to live, then we think of potential life in a limited (although reasonable) way.  When looking for life on other planets, we look for water first.  That may or may not work out for us, but if life forms exist somewhere out there that do not require water, we are less likely to find them. 

            We use induction constantly.  We assume that because gravity has held true for all of known history, it will continue tomorrow, although there’s actually no certainty of that (no empirical observation).  We assume that, based on the fact that we are alive today, we will be alive tomorrow, although there’s clearly no guarantee.  Metaphysicians of the past have used induction to ‘prove’ the existence of God (Spinoza), a Platonic world of ideas, and the division of nature into mind and matter (Descartes), but thanks to the advent of empiricism and the scientific method, modern philosophy regards their conclusions as suspect.

            Turning back to religion, we find that their founders had certain religious experiences that we can equate with observation in science.  A certain uncommon thing (something different than average day-to-day experience) was experienced by a person, and this person tried to make sense of it.  In other words, the religious founder had an uncommon experience which impacted his current understanding of the world in one way or another, and in order to create a new worldview incorporating the new information, created a sort of metaphysical theory by inductive reasoning.  I know, I’m being extremely vague and general, but only because I want to include all major religions.  Each founder reacted differently, may have experienced differently, and certainly induced different conclusions.  Lets use the Rishis as an example:  Consciously searching after truth beyond the appearance of the world (based on what they heard from others), they used various methods (yoga, hallucinogens, etc) to bring about certain experiences.  They described these experiences as Indra, Brahman, Shiva, etc.  From this basis, they induced a metaphysical corpus which includes everything from moral law, social law, physical theories, even medical theories.  As each of these seers described things in different ways, their accounts were later organized by others into 4 Vedas, which were then connected to later commentaries and inductive speculation (the Upanishads), integrated with fictional epics (Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita), and refined by a commentarial tradition into Vedanta (meaning literally “The end, or conclusions, of the Vedas”).  Over thousands of years we come to a rich body of religious and cultural information we call Hinduism. 

            While we may look at this rich tradition and admire its complexity and beauty, we cannot ignore the problems.  The inductive reasoning that postulated that different types of people should follow laws appropriate to their role in society (dharma) became crystallized into the unfortunate caste system of the India.  Further, the deep cultural respect for tradition discouraged any attempt to look beyond what is in the scriptures (like only looking for life on water-rich planets), creating a setting in which thousands of years of guess-work based on limited spiritual experience defines one’s world view.  Intellectual life for a long time in India included logical debates which were less about reality or truth than about the clever ability to manipulate the massive scriptural corpus to prove one’s point.  My guess is based upon your guess, like a castle on a cloud. 

            The same certainly holds true for Christianity.  After the initial spate of religious experience among Christ and the Disciples, quite a few Gospels turned up around the ancient world.  Eventually the four we know became canon, around the time of St. Augustine (4^th century).  Many Gospels were rejected to make room for those four, most because they were either suspect in authenticity, or they conflicted with the metaphysics of those with the most influence.  The “Church Doctors” then put together their metaphysics based on the canon (and really, the New Testament doesn’t give us a lot of actual information about the world), and this became the Christian tradition.  The dogmas of a church are really just metaphysics, but regarded as infallible by tradition. Heresy is really just when one person’s inductive reasoning conflicts with the standard metaphysic.

            For this reason, empiricists tend to regard metaphysics and religion both as a waste of time, even calling religious or metaphysical statements “meaningless”.  David Hume wrote of classical metaphysics:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles [Hume’s empirical principals], what havoc must we make?  If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?  No.  Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?  No.  Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing by sophistry and illusion.” – Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 

When we also consider the difficulties of knowledge and perception, we become even more skeptical that such grandiose conclusions, such as offered by metaphysicians and theologians, can ever attain to real knowledge.  Consider further the fact that if the speculations of metaphysically inclined ‘natural philosophers’ could be so wrong in their conclusions about the physical world that everyone can touch and see without any special effort, then what is the likelihood of any metaphysic being accurate in describing the nature of what is not seen by all?  I’d say it’s not bloody likely. 

            While most empiricists call for rejecting religion as a whole on these grounds, this seems to me a bit hasty.  As top-heavy as religious doctrine becomes, it is still based on human experience.  People have spiritual experiences all the time, to varying degrees of intensity, and I myself have had quite a few.  As skeptical as I am about most theology, I cannot doubt what I have experienced, just as you don’t doubt that the earth exists under your feet.  We also cannot doubt that unlike a perception of political rights, the scientific method, or written language, religion is a truly universal cultural phenomena.  Religious experience, in its primary sense, is universal to humanity, in the same way as spoken language, an upright walk, and music exist wherever there is man.  For a modern atheist to proclaim that there is no God is bad inductive reasoning.  He makes a negative observation: “I have never experienced God” and by inductive reasoning concludes “there is no God.”  By that same logic we might go from “I have never seen Transformers 2” and therefore “Transformers 2 doesn’t exist.”  As much as I wish that were the case, just because I lack experience of it, does not make it not exist.  Mr. Atheist might then say “but Dave, you can read reviews of Transformers 2, hear about it from others, and even go rent it yourself and watch it.  You can verify its existence, but you can’t do that with God.”  To which I must respond that there are no shortage of churches out there who profess God’s existence, you can hear about him from people who’ll even come knock on your door to chat, and according to the mystics (like the yogis), you can even train yourself to eventually experience God.  While that might take years, it also takes quite a bit of training to personally verify most scientific claims.  Most atheists, secure in their own inductive reasoning, are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to even attempt having a religious experience.  We might liken this to the fact that, despite the efforts of those who might insist on its existence, I’m unwilling to sacrifice my time, intelligence or sanity to verify the existence of Transformers 2 by actually watching it.  

Cont. in Part III