“Life is the wind. Life is the water. As long as life appears as phenomena there will be the stirrings of delusion. Delusion is in fact the movement, the stirring, of awakening.”
– Norman Fischer
In this 2019 essay featured in his new book, When You Greet Me, I Bow, Zen teacher and poet, Norman Fischer addresses the perplexing topic of mind, and the Buddhist insight into the interplay of the relative and the absolute. Within our human condition, we can have some sense of this relationship, which Fischer pictures as the kinship of waves to the ocean: the surface of the sea, like the state of our everyday minds, is subject to upheaval and turbulence, but the immense and profound body of water that underlies it remains undisturbed.Click here for The Dewdrop’s interview with Norman Fischer.
The teachings about mind are perhaps the most precious, profound, and foundational in Buddhism. Without some understanding of the expansive concept of mind described in these teachings, it’s hard to appreciate the full context of Buddhist meditation practice and the enlightenment promised as its ultimate goal.
The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, an important text in East Asian Buddhism, begins by saying that mind—not only mind in the abstract but the actual minds of sentient beings—“includes within itself all states of being of the phenomenal world and the transcendent world.”
In other words, mind isn’t just mental. It isn’t, as we understand it in the West, exclusively intellectual and psychological. Mind includes all the material world. It also includes the “transcendent world,” which sounds odd. Isn’t it commonplace to think of Buddhism as having, refreshingly, no idea of the transcendent, which sounds like God? We are told that Buddhism is practical and down-to-earth, a human teaching for human beings. It’s about calming and understanding the mind in order to put an end to suffering.
This is certainly true, and is a prominent theme of early Buddhism. But in contemplating what mind is, later Mahayana Buddhist pundits teased out huge and astounding implications embedded in the early teachings.
They began by distinguishing two aspects of mind—an absolute aspect and a relative, phenomenal aspect. These, they said, are both identical and not identical. So mind (not only in the abstract, but also my mind, your mind, the mind of all sentient beings) is at the same time both transcendent and not.
Mind can be both absolute and phenomenal because it is empty of any hard-and-fast characteristics that could distinguish one thing from another. It is fluid. It neither exists nor doesn’t exist. So, strictly speaking, it isn’t impermanent. It is eternal.
This means that the transcendence isn’t a place or state of being elsewhere or otherwise: it is here and now. Mind and matter, space and time, animate and inanimate, imaginative and real—all are mind. Mind can be both absolute and phenomenal because it is empty of any hard-and-fast characteristics that could distinguish one thing from another. It is fluid. It neither exists nor doesn’t exist. So, strictly speaking, it isn’t impermanent. It is eternal.
In effect, mind equals reality equals impermanence equals eternity. All of which is contained in the workings of my own mind and that of all sentient beings. So this little human life of mine, with all its petty dramas, as well as this seemingly limited and painful world, is in reality the playing-out of something ineffably larger and grander. As Vasubandhu, the Indian Yogachara (Mind Only) sage, writes in his famous Thirty Verses, reality is simply the transformations of mind.
This is staggering, baffling, and heady. What does it have to do with the inescapable fact that I definitely feel as if I am suffering? My mind may be empty, eternal, transcendent, and vast, but I still experience my life unhappily. What to do?
We could pose the question like this: If my mind is mind, and mind is reality, what is the relationship of my unenlightened mind, the cause of my suffering, to the enlightened mind that puts suffering to an end?
The teachings on mind assert that enlightenment and unenlightenment are in actuality not different. They are fundamentally suchness.
From a psychological and logical point of view, enlightenment and unenlightenment are opposites. I am either enlightened and not suffering or unenlightened and suffering, and these certainly feel to me like vastly different states. But the teachings on mind assert that enlightenment and unenlightenment are in actuality not different. They are fundamentally suchness (and the word fundamentally—meaning “at bottom, at their core”—is important here). Suchness is a word coined in the Mahayana to connote the mind’s perfect appearance as phenomena. When we receive phenomena as suchness, we don’t experience what we call suffering—even if we suffer!
What we call suffering, and experience as suffering, isn’t actually suffering. It is confusion, illusion, misperception, like seeing a snake that turns out to be merely a crooked stick. Suchness is the only thing we ever really experience. But since we mistake it for something painful and dangerous, we stand apart from it. We see ourselves as its victim, and so are pushed around by it, although in truth there is nothing that pushes, nothing that can be pushed, and no reason in the first place to feel pushed. Reality is not, as we imagine it to be, difficult and painful. It is always only just as it is: suchness.
But lest we project suchness to be something we can reach for or depend on, something other than what we are and see all the time in front of us, we are reminded that suchness isn’t anything. It is a mere word, and the limit, so to speak, of verbalization. It is a word proposed for the purpose of putting an end to words and concepts whose mesmerizing effect on us is the real source of our initial mistaken perception. Since all things are equally and fundamentally suchness, there is literally nothing to be said. Even calling it suchness is too much!
Suchness isn’t anything. It is a mere word, and the limit, so to speak, of verbalization. It is a word proposed for the purpose of putting an end to words and concepts whose mesmerizing effect on us is the real source of our initial mistaken perception.
So my suffering, as real as it seems to me, is delusional. But it’s a powerful delusion! Its very structure is built into mind, and therefore my personal consciousness. Since its shape and location (these words are metaphorical: mind has no shape or location) is the same as that of enlightenment, to which it is identical, and since both are empty of any grounding reality, my delusion can’t be gotten rid of. How can you get rid of something that doesn’t exist? Trying to get rid of it will only make matters worse. Besides, to get rid of my delusion is to get rid of my enlightenment, which is my only hope!
In a famous metaphor, Mahayana teachings liken the relationship of delusion and enlightenment to that of a wave and the ocean. The wave is delusion, full of motion and drama. It rises up, crests, breaks, dissipates, and gathers strength to drive again. With my eyes on the wave, I see it as real.
But the wave isn’t anything. There is no such entity as “wave.” There is only water, in motion or not. Wind acts on water to make what we call a wave. If the wind stops, the movement ceases and the water remains quiet. Whether there are waves or no waves, water remains always water, salty and wet. Without wind, the water is quiet and deep. But even when wind activity is strong on the surface, deep below water remains quiet.
Mind is like this. It is deep, pure, and silent. But when the winds of delusion blow, its surface stirs and what we call suffering results. But the waves of my suffering are nothing more or less than mind. And even as I rage, the depths below remain quiet. Life is the wind. Life is the water. As long as life appears as phenomena there will be the stirrings of delusion. Delusion is in fact the movement, the stirring, of awakening. My ocean mind is inherently pure and serene, always. When I know this, I can navigate the waves with grace.
Most of us live in social worlds that are profoundly unequal, where small elites have vastly more power and wealth than everyone else. Very few of the have-nots find this congenial. As experimental economists have shown, we tend to enter social situations prepared to take a chance and cooperate in collective activities. But if others take more than their share, we resent being played for a sucker. We live in unequal worlds, and few of us are unaware of, or indifferent to, that fact.
Since the elites are massively outnumbered, the origins and stability of unequal divisions of the cake are puzzling, especially once we realise that this is a very recent aspect of our social existence. Our particular species of humans has been around for about 300,000 years and, best as we can tell, for about 290,000 of those years we lived materially poorer but much more equal lives. For most of our life as a species, most communities lived as mobile foragers, shifting camps when local resources became scarce, but probably sticking to a regular pattern over a defined territory.
Mobile foragers live in small bands (tens, not hundreds), but with connections of kith and kin to neighbouring bands, in social worlds of a few hundred to a few thousand. In many respects, these forager cultures are varied. They have differing cultural traditions and face different environments. The Australian Western Desert and the High Arctic could hardly be less alike, and both differ sharply from the rainforests of the Congo basin. Even so, in crucial ways, their social lives are remarkably similar. They sometimes have elders or initiates, but they have no chiefs. No-one has command authority over other adult males. Relations between the sexes vary but, in many forager cultures, women are indispensable, skilled, autonomous and essential props of the foraging economy. They gather plant foods and small game, and make much of the equipment of everyday life. They often have a good deal of social and sexual choice.
In contrast with subsistence farmers, foragers are indulgent towards their children, who roam self-educating in mixed-age groups, learning by exploring and experimenting. While the US cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins exaggerated the ease of forager life in his book chapter ‘The Original Affluent Society’ (1972), he was right that they met their subsistence needs efficiently, and often quite quickly, in part through a profound commitment to sharing. These communities didn’t just happen to be fairly equal, but actively sought equality. The Canadian archaeologist Brian Hayden has long insisted that every community contains aggressive, ambitious individuals who’d like to be leaders. Foragers keep these upstarts on a short leash.
Somehow, after 290,000 years of living without anyone having the power to tell us what to do, and with every member of a community having about as much as everyone else, most of us are now subject to command, and with immensely less than a favoured few. Why? Of course, in the state societies we live in, there’s no mystery about the many accepting their subordination to elites. While elites are vastly outnumbered, they control the army, the police, the state apparatus. An attempt to seize elite wealth would be met by overwhelming coercive power, and even successful revolutions have a dismal record of largely replacing one elite with another, usually at the expense of many lives, mostly of the poor. So, for those outside the elite world, their least-worst option is to accept subordination, perhaps with individual or collective attempts at amelioration, depending on the specifics of the political environment.
No social world ever went from an egalitarian community to an elite-dominated, state-structured society in one fell swoop. It’s a gradual movement towards inequality. The pathway to inequality leads through unequal, but still small-scale and stateless, communities, in which incipient elites lived with and among their neighbours, and without control of coercive state institutions. As such, they were vulnerable, and as Christopher Boehm notes in Hierarchy in the Forest (1999), and Stephen Pinker too, in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), the denizens of pre-state communities aren’t shy about the judicious application of violence. So how did inequality establish and grow without the cloak of law and the shield of organised state power?
Once hereditary leadership backed by military power establishes, subordination and inequality are explained by entrenched differences in access to force. So the critical problem is to explain inequality in village societies where it doesn’t yet have the protection of institutionalised power. These ‘transegalitarian communities’ are dominated by ‘Big Men’ (as they’re called in New Guinea and Melanesia), that is, individuals with wealth and status. But they don’t rule as a right, and their sons don’t automatically inherit their standing. It’s in communities of this kind that inequality establishes. Once these cultures exist, we’ve had a shift from social worlds that were equal to worlds in which inequality was a routine and accepted fact of life – so much so that it often seemed natural.
There are two developments in mobile forager cultures that tend to set the stage for the establishment of inequality. One such scaffold to inequality was the emergence of clan structure. Clans have a strong corporate identity, built around real or mythical genealogical connection, reinforced by demanding initiation rites and intense collective activities. They become central to an individual’s social identity. Individuals see themselves, and are seen by others, primarily through their clan identity. They expect and get social support mostly within their clan, as the anthropologist Raymond C Kelly writes in Warless Societies and the Origin of War (2000). Once storage and farming emerged, incipient elites used clan membership to mobilise social and material support.
The second development was the emergence of a quasi-elite based on the control of information, which created a hierarchy of prestige and esteem, rather than wealth and power. This was originally based on subsistence skills. Forager life depends on very high levels of expertise in navigation, tracking, plant identification, animal behaviour, and artisan skills. The genuinely expert attract deference and respect in return for generously sharing their knowledge, as the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues in The Secret of Our Success (2015). As the social anthropologist Jerome Lewis has shown, this economy of information can include story and music, and the same can be true of its ritual and normative life. Indeed, there might be a fusion of ritual with subsistence information, if ritual narratives are used as a vehicle for encoding important but rarely used spatial and navigational information. There’s some suggestion of this fusion in Australian Aboriginal songlines, and the idea is expanded from Australia and defended in detail by the orality scholar Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies (2015). So there can be expertise and deference not just in subsistence skills, but also with regards to religion and ritual.
Farming and storage make inequality possible, even likely, because they tend to undermine sharing norms
While the original exchange of deference for access to expertise was probably adaptive for both parties, oblique social transmission (from a favoured few in generation N to all of N+1) puts manipulation on the agenda. When social information flows just from parents to children, maladaptive instructions have an automatic tendency to fade away. But the centralised transmission of the norms, rituals and ideology of a community can easily favour one group at the expense of others. The explorer E Lucas Bridges, in his classic Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948), details with amusement how the entirely cynical Yaghan initiates (a people indigenous to the Southern Cone in South America) terrify women and adolescents by dressing as ghosts. He had no doubt that any signs of female scepticism would have been dealt with by murder. We probably see this as well in some Australian forager communities that privilege a gerontocracy. Charles Hart and Arnold Pilling’s The Tiwi of North Australia (1960) is renowned for its description of one such gerontocracy, with the power of older men residing in their control of esoteric knowledge. It also made possible an alliance between incipient priests and elites in communities transitioning to inequality.
So, two scaffolds of inequality developed in the still fairly equal forager world. These scaffolds became potent as communities gave up movement in favour of a settled life – storage and farming – beginning about 10,000 years ago. Some foragers developed a lifestyle around storage (sometimes called ‘collectors’ rather than ‘foragers’). Hunters and fishers of the Pacific Northwest built an economy around salmon runs and marine resources. It’s possible that, in glacial Europe, sedentary foragers intercepted migrating herds, and built their economy around stored or smoked game. But giving up a life on the move and depending instead on stored foods is mostly connected to the origins of farming, and the new climatic regime of the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago.
The viability of farming depends not just on access to the few wild species that can be shaped into crops and flocks, but on predictable weather patterns. The Holocene is not just warmer and wetter than the Pleistocene glacial that preceded it. It’s much more stable. Grain agriculture never developed in Aboriginal Australia in part because of the marked annual variation in many Australian climates. Without industrial storage and transport, dependence on crops would have been suicidal. Whatever the causes of this revolutionary change, its consequences were immense. Farming and storage make inequality possible, perhaps even likely, because they tend to undermine sharing norms, establish property rights and the coercion of labour, amplify intercommunal violence, and lead to increases in social scale.
First, let’s consider storage, sharing and property. For mobile foragers, sharing is insurance. Hunting especially is very chancy, requiring both luck and skill, so it’s adaptive to share if you succeed today, on condition that others share with you when you fail. Targeting plants and small animals is more of a sure bet, though in some forager communities even these are shared, as the social rewards of generosity are important, and the social costs of refusing are high since the intimacy of forager camps makes success hard to conceal.
Storage, however, tends to erode sharing. Storing, like sharing, is a way of managing risk, and farmers are more likely to store than to share. Variation in supply within the community is likely to flow from variation in commitment and effort, not differences in luck. Local bad luck – unfavourable weather, a plague of pests – will probably affect everyone in a community, which makes sharing a poor form of insurance. It’s to my advantage to share with you, if my good years are your bad ones, and vice versa (so long, of course, as you return the favour). Not so if we’re both having it tough at the same time, as we have no surplus to share; and not so if we both have good years together, as then we don’t need one another.
Crop farming is also arduous and time-consuming. The returns are low, per hour worked, and no one has ever thought subsistence farmers made affluent societies. Land must be cleared, weeded, protected, improved, sometimes watered. These efforts must be maintained for years, not just months. It would simply be a bad idea for people to commit to these efforts without something like property rights. Likewise, it would be maladaptive for children to remain with their parents working their land unless these rights included a right of transfer. So storage, especially storage based on crops, will tend to produce a community of independent family economies. With inheritance, that will in itself tend to produce wealth inequalities, if only because family size variation will force some families to divide their pie more finely than others. Once wealth inequalities develop, they tend to increase. If a son inherits only a quarter of his parents’ land, his children are apt to have still less, and living on the edge of just enough, they’re more vulnerable to minor bad luck, and to the accumulation of debts and obligations they can never repay.
Storage opens the door to coerced labour. Sedentary collectors sometimes keep slaves, but mobile foragers don’t. Foraging, even when it’s not large-game hunting, depends on high levels of autonomy and skill. Foragers spend their time alone, or in groups of three or four, half a day’s walk from camp. Autonomous, small-party searching is essential to the efficient use of territory. As a consequence, the economic challenge of coercive supervision of mobile foraging is insurmountable since you’d need as many guards as slaves. Labour on farms is spatially focused and often much less skilled. It can be supervised and controlled. Moreover, it’s tempting to do so, as much farm work is intrinsically unappealing: unlike archery, hoeing will never be an Olympic sport. In many subsistence agricultural communities, when slaves aren’t to be had, much of the work is offloaded to women and children. Storage, and especially storage based on crops, often leads to subsistence economies with less autonomy and more coercion.
The social mechanisms that keep alphas in check in forager communities depend on intimacy and trust
Storage also makes intercommunity violence more likely. There is among scholars immense controversy about the extent of intercommunal violence among mobile foragers. On one view, the threat of intercommunal violence was the overriding feature of the world of mobile foragers of the mid- to late-Pleistocene; see the economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s bookA Cooperative Species (2011). I am very sceptical. There’s no archaeological evidence of such violence till very late in the Pleistocene. Moreover, forager camps are difficult and unrewarding targets. Outsiders will rarely know their exact locations because, if violence is such a threat, there would be little or no friendly travel between tribes, and so neighbouring groups won’t know much of one another’s territories. Foragers have few material possessions, are armed by default, and are expert at tracking and reading their country, making them hard to surprise in their camp sites. Finally, foragers’ emphasis on autonomy and consensus in decision-making is hardly an ideological signature of a militarised world.
There’s no doubt, however, that intercommunal violence has often been a major threat to collectors and subsistence farmers. The neighbours’ stores are a tempting target, as are their flocks, improved lands and the people themselves, as slaves and second wives. But they’re more than just tempting targets – they’re potential threats, as your possessions are equally a temptation to them. Sedentary folk can also accumulate goods worth stealing in a way that foragers never could. Unusual material possessions came to be a sign of wealth and influence. Pottery, obsidian and metal began as prestige goods in these early sedentary communities. This permanent threat of intercommunity violence offers incipient elites an opportunity to present themselves as able to negotiate peace, barter and build alliances on the community’s behalf, so long as this leading role is backed by the community as a whole.
Moreover, farming tends to lead to population growth. Interbirth intervals shrink as mothers no longer have to carry toddlers between camps, while farming provides a reliable source of weaning foods. Crop-growing is arduous, but it intervenes lower in the food web, and thus secures a greater proportion of local biological productivity for human use. That’s especially true if yields are improved by weeding, fertilising or irrigating. A farmer’s food supply isn’t as balanced and healthy as forager foods. But there’s certainly more food. An increase in community size matters, for many of the social mechanisms that keep alphas in check in forager communities are scale-dependent. They depend on intimacy and trust.
Finally, storage will often lead to a surplus, as it’s prudent for each family (or economic unit) to store more than they expect to need. It’s wise to allow for contingencies. But when a family does end up with stores in excess of their subsistence needs, that surplus is available as a tool in local politics. By lending it to those whose stocks have run short, it can create obligations; a favour that can be called in. Alternatively, a surplus can be used to build prestige by transmuting it into high-status goods or services. Crops can be turned into beer, pigs or displays (by being used to support non-subsistence activities). Competition for status, influence and power is fuelled by surplus. Yet there’s no surplus without storage, and only a limited surplus without farming.
These downstream effects of storage and farming set up an engine of inequality, with transegalitarian societies emerging as a dynamic consequence of storage in conflicted environments. Recognition of property rights and inheritance allows wealth inequalities to establish and even grow. These can provide a surplus used for internal politics, and an ambitious, persuasive individual can add to their own stores through calling in debts and mobilising support from his clan. These accumulated stores can then be spent in prestige-enhancing displays such as feasts or other expensive rituals, and sometimes by sponsoring the building of ritual structures. These displays are partly to impress their own community, but also, and very importantly, they’re targeted at their opposite numbers in other communities, others who equally combine ambition with access to wealth.
In regional environments in which intercommunity violence is a threat but not inevitable, a display of wealth and community organisation sends other communities a message that you’d be a dangerous enemy but a valuable partner in both trade and predatory alliances against third parties. This gives most members of the community some self-interested reason to support these ambitious displays. But the successful sponsors of such displays reap the main benefits, establishing themselves in the eyes of other communities as the go-to person, becoming the conduit through which social and material exchange with other communities flows. It’s a high-risk strategy, especially early in the shift to a transegalitarian world. But if the incipient Big Man pulls it off, an initial disparity of wealth is parlayed into prestige and political influence, which in turn builds further wealth through a pivotal role as fixer and facilitator, and the cycle iterates. Polly Wiessner’s ‘The Vines of Complexity’ (2002) is a wonderful case study from Papua New Guinea of this dynamic in action, and of how the dynamic escalates. Early in this process of biding for prestige, and a pivotal factor in mediating between communities, an ambitious would-be mover-and-shaker might accumulate and give away 10 pigs at a feast. A few generations later, it was both possible and necessary (for the same political effect) to accumulate and give away 250.
Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’ (whatever that is)
So bids for power work by transmuting wealth into political influence, which returns more wealth. Those bids are much more likely to succeed because of the decay of levelling coalitions that enforced (approximate) equality in forager worlds, because collective action to restrain ambition became increasingly difficult. The change in scale mattered: foragers live in small (and to Western eyes) astonishingly intimate social worlds (their shelters, for example, are typically small, closely packed and without walls). The social worlds of farmers are larger and less intimate, and this makes collective consensus-formation more difficult. Additionally, the interests of those outside elite circles are only partially aligned. In transegalitarian worlds, wealth differences aren’t yet extreme, and those in the middle have a stake in the recognition of property rights, with some being allies or supporters of the local Big Man, expecting some return for their support. While they might want ambition to be kept within bounds, their interests aren’t served by equalisation, and conflict within the community increases the risk of predatory interventions from outside, a risk important to all but the poorest. Finally, the egalitarian ethos of forager communities – an ethos that motivates and mobilises restraint of ambition – erodes in an economy based on storage rather than sharing.
Such erosion is likely to be much accelerated by alliances between ritual leaders and incipient elites, alliances documented in Hayden’s The Power of Ritual in Prehistory (2018), since the normative life of these communities is articulated and taught through its communal ritual life. It’s no coincidence that we tend to see (for example) shifts in marriage norms, so that would-be husbands have to pay a bride price in pigs or other prestige resources. For poorer men, marriage will thus bind them in obligations of debt to their wealthier sponsors. Elite-favouring ritual beliefs can be more dramatic still. In their work on transegalitarian communities in Melanesia, the anthropological archaeologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus give a vivid example from the Solomon Islands: a mover-and-shaker established his local reputation in part by sponsoring the construction of a ritual house (itself a sign of wealth and a source of prestige), but also through his reputed alliance with, and protection by, a pigs-blood drinking demon. It helps to have the priests on side.
If this picture of the road to inequality is right, it leads to four expectations. First, inequality depends on a prior establishment of an economy of storage and an expansion in social scale. Second, transegalitarian communities emerge from forager communities with clan-based organisation. Third, transegalitarian communities emerge from forager communities where the normative and ritual life is in the hands of a small group of initiates. And finally, such communities emerge in regional contexts with intermediate levels of intercommunity violence, contexts in which violence is a risk, but one that can be managed.
Bottom line: egalitarian, cooperative human communities are possible. Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’ (whatever that is). Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies. But such societies are not inherently stable. These social practices depend on active defence. That active defence failed, given the social technologies available, as societies increased in scale and economic complexity. There’s no going back to Pleistocene equality, and I for one wouldn’t embrace the social intimacy and material simplicity of such lives. But we do have new social technologies. China (especially) is showing how those can be used to enhance elite surveillance. Let’s hope they can be reconfigured to support more bottom-up social action, to mitigate some of the effects of imbalances of wealth and power.
How can a brain tumor diagnosis be a gift? And how can a book about this experience be full of joy … and have the potential to change your life? After a decade exploring the nature of reality and researching and experimenting with human potential Will Pye experienced an initiation at the age of thirty-one via a Grand Mal seizure and the subsequent diagnosis of a golf-ball-sized brain tumor. Will shares how he was able to experience the development with no stress or suffering, how the diagnosis became an opportunity for profound growth and how we too can access the gifts of such a wake-up call. Will reveals scientifically proven tools and perspectives to transform our lives by changing our minds and opening our hearts. Learn how accessing these untapped powers and potentials causes positive changes in those around us and throughout the world. Catalyze your own transformation, contribute to the global shift in consciousness and discover life purpose everywhere you look with this extraordinary book. Will Pye is a social entrepreneur, consultant, coach, speaker and workshop leader working with individuals and groups globally facilitating transformation at the most fundamental level. He divides his time between Melbourne, Australia and Cambridge, England. www.willpye.com
In Your Mind In your mind One foot on Jacob’s ladder and one foot in the fire And it all goes down in your mind Livin’ at the bottom of the stairs of life Never a smile knockin’ on your door The air is blue and so are you Prehistoric monsters on the floor Last verse of your last song And God don’t hear dead men The end of the line is in your mind Then you’ll be stayin’ in In your mind In your mind Bone for bone and skin for skin Eye for eye and tooth for tooth Heart for heart and soul for soul Somebody said “What is truth”? Lock it up and close it down The sound of mournin’ like a dove High beyond the rattlin’ roar Lookin’ to the face of love [Chorus:] In your mind In your mind It all goes down in your mind One foot on Jacob’s ladder and one foot in the fire And it all goes down in your mind In your mind In your mind Sunday words are back again And you eat your fundamentalist pie But just a piece you understand You get the rest up in the sky Praise and glory, wounded angels Shufflin’ ’round the room Eternity is down the hall And you sit there bendin’ spoons In your mind In your mind Father, Son, and Holy Ghost Sacrificial drops of pain On a silver plated cross Sanctification on a chain Thay say redemption draweth nigh The storms of silence from above Stop your ears and close your eyes And try to find the face of love [Repeat Chorus twice]
The bestselling book on childhood trauma and the enduring effects of repressed anger and pain
Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer–and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.
Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents’ expectations and win their “love.” Alice Miller writes, “When I used the word ‘gifted’ in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb…. Without this ‘gift’ offered us by nature, we would not have survived.” But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.
Shunryu Suzuki (鈴木 俊隆 Suzuki Shunryū, dharma name Shōgaku Shunryū 祥岳俊隆, often called Suzuki Roshi; May 18, 1904 – December 4, 1971) was a Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States, and is renowned for founding the first Zen Buddhist monastery outside Asia (Tassajara Zen Mountain Center). Suzuki founded San Francisco Zen Center which, along with its affiliate temples, comprises one of the most influential Zen organizations in the United States. A book of his teachings, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, is one of the most popular books on Zen and Buddhism in the West.[1][2][3]
Biography
Childhood
Shunryu Suzuki was born May 18, 1904, in Kanagawa Prefecture southwest of Tokyo, Japan.[4] His father, Butsumon Sogaku Suzuki, was the abbot of the village Soto Zen temple.[4] His mother, Yone, was the daughter of a priest and had been divorced from her first husband for being too independent. Shunryu grew up with an older half-brother from his mother’s first marriage and two younger sisters. As an adult he was about 4 feet 11 inches (1.5 m) tall.[5]
His father’s temple, Shōgan-ji, was located near Hiratsuka, a city on Sagami Bay about fifty miles southwest of Tokyo. The temple income was small and the family had to be very thrifty.[4]
When Suzuki entered school he became aware that his family was very poor. Suzuki was sensitive and kind but prone to quick bursts of anger. The other boys ridiculed him for his shaved head and for being the son of a priest. He preferred staying in the classroom to playing in the schoolyard, and was always at the top of his class. His teacher told him that he should grow up to be a great man, and to do this he needed to leave Kanagawa Prefecture and study hard.
Apprenticeship
In 1916, 12-year-old Suzuki decided to train with a disciple of his father, Gyokujun So-on Suzuki.[4] So-on was Sogaku’s adopted son and abbot of Sogaku’s former temple Zoun-in. His parents initially thought he was too young to live far from home but eventually allowed it.
Zoun-in is in a small village called Mori, Shizuoka in Japan. Suzuki arrived during a 100-day practice period at the temple and was the youngest student there. Zoun-in was a larger temple than Shōgan-ji.
At 4:00 each morning he arose for zazen. Next he would chant sutras and begin cleaning the temple with the others. They would work throughout the day and then, in the evenings, they all would resume zazen. Suzuki idolized his teacher, who was a strong disciplinarian. So-on often was rough on Suzuki but gave him some latitude for being so young.
When Suzuki turned 13, on May 18, 1917, So-on ordained him as a novice monk (unsui).[4] He was given the Buddhist name Shogaku Shunryu,[4] yet So-on nicknamed him Crooked Cucumber for his forgetful and unpredictable nature.
Shunryu began again attending upper-elementary school in Mori, but So-on did not supply proper clothes for him. He was the subject of ridicule. In spite of his misfortune he didn’t complain. Instead he doubled his efforts back at the temple.
When Shunryu had first come to Zoun-in, eight other boys were studying there. By 1918, he was the only one who stayed. This made his life a bit tougher with So-on, who had more time to scrutinize him. During this period Suzuki wanted to leave Zoun-in but equally didn’t want to give up.
In 1918 So-on was made head of a second temple, on the rim of Yaizu, called Rinso-in. Shunryu followed him there and helped whip the place back in order. Soon, families began sending their sons there and the temple began to come to life. Suzuki had failed an admissions test at the nearby school, so So-on began teaching the boys how to read and write Chinese.
So-on soon sent his students to train with a Rinzai master for a while. Here Shunryu studied a very different kind of Zen, one that promoted the attainment of satori through the concentration on koans through zazen. Suzuki had problems sitting with his koan. Meanwhile, all the other boys passed theirs, and he felt isolated. Just before the ceremony marking their departure Suzuki went to the Rinzai teacher and blurted out his answer. The master passed Suzuki; later Shunryu believed he had done it simply to be kind.
In 1919, at age 15, Suzuki was brought back home by his parents, who suspected mistreatment by So-on. Shunryu helped out with the temple while there and entered middle school. Yet, when summer vacation came, he was back at Rinso-in and Zoun-in with So-on to train and help out. He didn’t want to stop training.
In school Suzuki took English and did quite well. A local doctor, Dr. Yoshikawa, hired him to tutor his two sons in English. Yoshikawa treated Suzuki well, giving him a wage and occasional advice.
Higher education
In 1924 Shunryu enrolled in a Soto preparatory school in Tokyo[4] not far from Shogan-ji, where he lived on the school grounds in the dorm. From 1925 to 1926 Suzuki did Zen training with Dojun Kato in Shizuoka at Kenko-in. He continued his schooling during this period. Here Shunryu became head monk for a 100-day retreat, after which he was no longer merely considered a novice. He had completed his training as a head monk.
In 1925 Shunryu graduated from preparatory school and entered Komazawa University, the Soto Zen university in Tokyo.[4] During this period he continued his connections with So-on in Zoun-in, going back and forth whenever possible.
Some of his teachers here were discussing how Soto Zen might reach a bigger audience with students and, while Shunryu couldn’t comprehend how Western cultures could ever understand Zen, he was intrigued.
On August 26, 1926, So-on gave Dharma transmission to Suzuki.[4] He was 22.[4] Shunryu’s father also retired as abbot at Shogan-ji this same year, and moved the family onto the grounds of Zoun-in where he served as inkyo (retired abbot).
Later that year Suzuki spent a short time in the hospital with tuberculosis, but soon recovered. In 1927 an important chapter in Suzuki’s life was turned. He went to visit a teacher of English he had at Komazawa named Miss Nona Ransom, a woman who had taught English to such people as the last emperor of China, Pu-yi, and more so his wife, the last empress of China, Jigoro Kano (the Founder of Judo), the children of Chinese president Li Yuanhong, and some members of the Japanese royal family. She hired him that day to be a translator and to help with errands. Through this period he realized she was very ignorant of Japanese culture and the religion of Buddhism. She respected it very little and saw it as idol worship. But one day, when there were no chores to be done, the two had a conversation on Buddhism that changed her mind. She even let Suzuki teach her zazen meditation. This experience is significant in that Suzuki realized that Western ignorance of Buddhism could be transformed.
On January 22, 1929, So-on retired as abbot of Zoun-in and installed Shunryu as its 28th abbot. Sogaku would run the temple for Shunryu. In January 1930 a ten’e ceremony was held at Zoun-in for Shunryu. This ceremony acknowledged So-on’s Dharma transmission to Shunryu, and served as a formal way for the Soto heads to grant Shunryu permission to teach as a priest. On April 10, 1930, at age 25, Suzuki graduated from Komazawa Daigakurin with a major in Zen and Buddhist philosophy, and a minor in English.
Suzuki mentioned to So-on during this period that he might be interested in going to America to teach Zen Buddhism. So-on was adamantly opposed to the idea. Suzuki realized that his teacher felt very close to him and that he would take such a departure as an insult. He did not mention it to him again.
Eihei-ji and Sōji-ji
Upon graduation from Komazawa, So-on wanted Shunryu to continue his training at the well known Soto Zen temple Eihei-ji in Fukui Prefecture. In September 1930 Suzuki entered the training temple and underwent the Zen initiation known as tangaryo. His mother and father stayed on at Zoun-in to care for his temple in his absence.
Eihei-ji is one of the largest Zen training facilities in Japan, and the abbot at this time was Gempo Kitano-roshi. Prior to coming to Japan, Kitano was head of Soto Zen in Korea. He also was one of the founders of Zenshuji, a Soto Zen temple located in Los Angeles, California. Suzuki’s father and Kitano had a tense history between them.[6] Sogaku had trained with Kitano in his early Zen training and felt that he was such a high priest due to familial status and connections. Shunryu did not see this in Kitano, however. He saw a humble man who gave clear instruction, and Shunryu realized that his father was very wrong in his assessment.
Often monks were assigned duties at the monastery to serve certain masters. Shunryu was assigned to Ian Kishizawa-roshi, a well known teacher at the time who had previously studied under two great Japanese teachers: Sōtan Oka and Bokusan Nishiari. He was a renowned scholar on Dōgen’sShōbōgenzō, and was also an acquaintance of his father from childhood.
Kishizawa was strict but not abusive, treating Suzuki well. Suzuki learned much from him, and Kishizawa saw a lot of potential in him. Through him Suzuki came to appreciate the importance of bowing in Zen practice through example. In December Suzuki sat his first true sesshin for 7 days, an ordeal that was challenging initially but proved rewarding toward the end. This concluded his first practice period at Eihei-ji.
In September 1931, after one more practice period and sesshin at Eihei-ji, So-on arranged for Suzuki to train in Yokohama at Sōji-ji. Sōji-ji was the other main Soto temple of Japan, and again Suzuki underwent the harsh tangaryo initiation. Sojiji was founded by the great Zen master Keizan and had a more relaxed atmosphere than Eihei-ji. At Sōji-ji Suzuki travelled back to Zoun-in frequently to attend to his temple.
In 1932 So-on came to Sōji-ji to visit with Shunryu and, after hearing of Suzuki’s contentment at the temple, advised him to leave it. In April of that year Suzuki left Sōji-ji with some regret and moved back into Zoun-in, living with his family there. In May he visited with Ian Kishizawa from Eiheiji and, with So-on’s blessing, asked to continue studies under him. He went to Gyokuden-in for his instruction, where Kishizawa trained him hard in zazen and conducted personal interviews with him.
Sometime during this period Suzuki married a woman who contracted tuberculosis. The date and name of the woman is unknown, but the marriage was soon annulled. She went back to live with her family while he focused on his duties at Zoun-in.
Suzuki reportedly was involved with some anti-war activities during World War II, but according to David Chadwick, the record is confusing and, at most, his actions were low-key.[7] However, considering the wholesale enthusiastic support for the war expressed by the entire religious establishment in Japan at the time, this fact is significant in showing something of the character of the man.
San Francisco Zen Center
On May 23, 1959, Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco to attend to Soko-ji, at that time the sole Soto Zen temple in San Francisco. He was 55.[4] Suzuki took over for the interim priest, Wako Kazumitsu Kato. Suzuki was taken aback by the Americanized and watered-down Buddhism practiced at the temple, mostly by older immigrant Japanese. He found American culture interesting and not too difficult to adjust to, even commenting once that “if I knew it would be like this, I would have come here sooner!” He was surprised to see that Sokoji was previously a Jewishsynagogue (at 1881 Bush Street, now a historic landmark). His sleeping quarters were located upstairs, a windowless room with an adjoining office.
At the time of Suzuki’s arrival, Zen had become a hot topic amongst some groups in the United States, especially beatniks. Particularly influential were several books on Zen and Buddhism by Alan Watts. Word began to spread about Suzuki among the beatniks through places like the San Francisco Art Institute and the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Alan Watts was once director. Kato had done some presentations at the Academy and asked Suzuki to come join a class he was giving there on Buddhism. This sparked Suzuki’s long-held desire to teach Zen to Westerners.
The class was filled with people wanting to learn more about Buddhism, and the presence of a Zen master was inspiring for them. Suzuki had the class do zazen for 20 minutes, sitting on the floor without a zafu and staring forward at the white wall. In closing, Suzuki invited everyone to stop in at Sokoji for morning zazen. Little by little, more people showed up each week to sit zazen for 40 minutes with Suzuki on mornings. The students were improvising, using cushions borrowed from wherever they could find them.
The group that sat with Suzuki eventually formed the San Francisco Zen Center with Suzuki. The Zen Center flourished so that in 1966, at the behest and guidance of Suzuki, Zentatsu Richard Baker helped seal the purchase of Tassajara Hot Springs in Los Padres National Forest, which they called Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. In the fall of 1969, they bought a building at 300 Page Street near San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood and turned it into a Zen temple. Suzuki left his post at Sokoji to become the first abbot of one of the first Buddhist training monasteries outside Asia. Suzuki’s departure from Sokoji was thought to be inspired by his dissatisfaction with the superficial Buddhist practice of the Japanese immigrant community and his preference for the American students who were more seriously interested in Zen meditation, but it was more at the insistence of the Sokoji board, which asked him to choose one or the other (he had tried to keep both roles). Although Suzuki thought there was much to learn from the study of Zen in Japan, he said that it had grown moss on its branches, and he saw his American students as a means to reform Zen and return it to its pure zazen- (meditation) and practice-centered roots.
Suzuki died on December 4, 1971, presumably from cancer.[8]
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A Prosperos SundayMeeting
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For this free, one-hour event beginning at 11: 00 a.m. Pacific time- Sunday, June 27, 2021, on Zoom.
William Fennie, H.W., M. 11:00 am Pacific/Noon Mountain/1:00 Central/2:00 Eastern https://us02web.zoom.us/j/332275676 This Sunday William Fennie, H.W., M., examines the underlying Reality Self, ever-present for each of us, that offers guidance and the key to meaningful engagement.
These talks are presented by contribution. Everyone from fundamentalists to atheists are welcome!
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George Berkeley is known for his doctrine of immaterialism: the counterintuitive view that there’s no material substance underlying the ideas perceived by the senses. We tend to think of a horse-drawn coach as a thing, but Berkeley tells us it’s really a set of ideas – the sound of the coach in the street, the sight of it through a window, the feel of it as we get in. We regularly perceive these ideas going along with each other, but there’s no material thing, beyond the ideas, that supports or holds them together – the ideas are all there is. It’s a hard view for a present-day reader to stomach. It was hard on the stomachs of readers even in Berkeley’s day in the early 1700s. He acknowledged that ‘it sounds very harsh to say we eat and drink ideas’ but insists that nourishment is nothing more than various ideas of the senses.
Berkeley also says that pain, real pain, is an idea. This assertion seems to have antagonised and amused his contemporaries. John Arbuthnot, physician to Queen Anne, engages in some light-hearted teasing when writing to his and Berkeley’s friend Jonathan Swift in 1714 that the ‘Poor philosopher Berkley [sic]; has now the Idea of health which was very hard to produce in him, for he had an Idea of a strange feaver upon him so strong that it was very hard to destroy it, by introducing a contrary one.’ It was and is hard to think of all phenomena as ideas and nothing more; even harder to think of our own perceiving, feeling, digesting bodies as ideas and nothing more.
Nevertheless, Berkeley is clear on this: such things as coaches don’t exist independently of being perceived, because they consist of ideas and perceptions. Without there being a perceiver, they simply can’t exist. Do things exist when not perceived by any human mind? Here Berkeley gives a positive answer in the notebooks he kept while he was developing this new doctrine, as he called it: the horses are in the stable, the books are in the study despite no one being there to see, smell, hear or touch them. That is, even when I’m not there to perceive these things, they exist. How so? After all, things exist only when perceived by a mind.
Here, God comes in: because God wills things into existence when she (Berkeley would have said ‘he’) perceives them, then anything that God creates has an existence in her mind. Because God knows and perceives all, those things that are at any given time unperceived or unconsidered by any finite mind have an existence through the infinite mind. God comes into this picture as a saviour, preventing Berkeley from having to say that objects enter and leave existence continually as they’re perceived and then not perceived and then perceived again by particular finite minds.
But God’s role in Berkeley’s thought is not only or most importantly as a backstop for his immaterialism. It is as the giver of laws that other minds must try to follow. These God-given laws structure the moral, social and political world, just as others structure the phenomenal world. I would like to reorient the understanding of Berkeley by bringing the social and political consequences of his religious beliefs to the centre and seeing his immaterialism in relation to them. This aspect of his philosophy is often neglected by those who want to introduce Berkeley as a specimen in the history of philosophy, someone who took empiricism to its limits. A fuller appreciation of the role of God in Berkeley’s philosophy explains why he adopted immaterialism, and why he thought his immaterialist philosophy would serve a social purpose, something that isn’t immediately obvious from the narrow view of Berkeley’s approach that we find in histories of philosophy.
At an early stage in his intellectual development, Berkeley realised that the created universe depends on God, a universe that is known to humans through the relatively dependable series of ideas they experience. God is, then, central to Berkeley’s thought, providing the context in which the human world elaborates itself: he described the biblical creation as God progressively revealing to other minds some of the eternal contents of her own mind. It’s only because God determines that human acts of will have certain consequences in visual, tactile and other sensory ideas that we have any ideas of our bodies, and that human agency has consequences in the world at all, let alone dependable consequences. It is for these reasons that Berkeley said that the visual world was a universal language ‘whereby we are instructed how to regulate our actions’, that the phenomenal world was designed by God to demonstrate his grandeur and show us how to behave. Berkeley’s purpose in writing was to convince his readers that we have a ‘most absolute and immediate dependence’ on God.
The precise conception Berkeley has of dependence on God and its consequences for human obligation – to God, to other humans, and to the rest of the creation – isn’t an aspect of his thinking that can be bracketed and ignored (as it has been so often by philosophers). The relationship of dependence on God is one of subordination to laws that humans, as responsible agents, are obliged to try to follow. These two things, the existence of a God and the moral responsibility of humans, would have made up the second part of Berkeley’s most famous book, A Treatise Concerning thePrinciples of Human Knowledge (1710), had the manuscript not been lost while he was touring Europe. Berkeley’s universe is best understood as a body of law that human agents and other finite minds attempt to read and then follow through their actions.
This is where I think we should start, with a legible world dictated by God, when interpreting Berkeley today. Such a reading will give us a philosopher who is not just or even foremost an immaterialist, but rather a social and religious philosopher who is constantly emphasising the need for subordination, the following of rules and laws, and the necessity of obedience. His immaterialism, indeed, somewhat surprisingly, serves that end. That is why Berkeley conceived of his immaterialism as part of his lifelong struggle against what he variously called atheism, scepticism or free-thinking – the challenge to religious authority over the social world.
We’re under an obligation to conform to natural and moral laws because a superior agent wills them
Immaterialism is not (just) a counterintuitive doctrine that surprised Berkeley’s contemporaries and still surprises his readers, nor is his God just the saviour of that doctrine. Rather, Berkeley expressed, through a wide range of writing including his great immaterialist texts, the necessity of social, political, moral and religious dependence on higher beings. He was a thoroughly religious philosopher, and his religion implied a politics. That politics was of a conservative cast, and included (disappointingly) the defence of slavery, as well as some more progressive or emancipatory forms of conservatism such as the promotion of education and economic development. Appreciating the role of God-given laws in his outlook unlocks a fuller understanding of his immaterialism. Without this, it’s very hard to appreciate why immaterialism is so relevant to some of his other somewhat eclectic concerns, including economic development, the swearing of oaths, and slavery.
In a text built up from three discourses delivered in the Chapel at Trinity College Dublin as part of his duties as a fellow, and published in 1712 under the controversial title Passive Obedience, Berkeley asked ‘what relation is there more extensive and universal than that of subject and law?’ He was talking about humans living under human laws, but just a few paragraphs earlier he’d made a case for the comparability of natural and moral laws. The laws of nature are ‘nothing else but a series of free actions produced by the best and wisest Agent’. The natural and moral worlds are to be conceived of as the free actions of God, and binding as laws for all other spirits. We should recognise both the kinds of law that govern events beyond our wills, such as those of gravity, and also those that require us to exercise our wills, such as the absolute negative moral law against rebellion that Berkeley elaborated in this short book. This conception of the human relationship to God as conforming to the will of a superior should remain central to our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophical project. We’re under an obligation to conform to natural and moral laws because a superior agent wills them, and wills that we conform to them.
In his roles as fellow of a college, chaplain, dean and bishop, Berkeley preached, and a significant part of his preaching addressed the question of how people should manifest in their behaviour the duty they owe to God. Religion, he said, ‘is nothing else but the conforming our faith and practice to the will of god’. ‘What else is the design and aim of vertue or religion,’ he asked in the same sermon, ‘but the making our several distinct wills coincident with, and subordinate to, the one Supreme will of God?’ We honour and show love for superiors ‘by performing their will, & endeavouring that others perform it’. This subordination isn’t of all finite spirits equally to the one infinite spirit: there are degrees of conformity to God’s will. Berkeley says there is ‘Some sort of union with the Godhead’ in all people ‘but with men, Xtians, inspired persons, Xt in different degrees.’ Different degrees of conformity are different degrees of unity with God.
Conformity brings spiritual rewards. It also brings temporal privileges. As Berkeley said in an early sermon on zeal: ‘As we are Christians we are members of a Society which entitles us to certain rights and privileges above the rest of mankind.’ In his ‘Address on Confirmation’, Berkeley said that, while the whole world might be understood as the kingdom of Christ, the phrase also had a more restrictive sense and applied to ‘a Society of persons, not only subject to his power, but also conforming themselves to his will, living according to his precepts, and thereby entitled to the promises of his gospel.’ That is, when Berkeley talked about the phenomenal world of ideas forming an instructive discourse directed to us by God, the God he had in mind requires conformity to his will. Greater or lesser degrees of conformity result in privileges expressed in the social and religious hierarchy of this world.
The God who produces the immaterial world, then, requires specific behaviours of different kinds of people, and grants them specific privileges. The distinction is not just between Christians and non-Christians, but between various types and classes of person in Christian societies. Here Berkeley is quite in line with his times and the large number of books dedicated to differentiating and specifying the duties of types and classes of people – children, parents, spouses, magistrates and so on. Berkeley’s sense of stratification and distinction by social status or rank is most obvious in his economic writings of the mid-1730s, chiefly the three volumes of rhetorical questions called The Querist, which put forward a programme for Irish economic renewal. The (‘native’, Catholic) peasantry are to give up their alleged sloth and dirtiness for habits of cleanliness and industry. The (absentee, Protestant) gentry are to give up imported wines and textiles for Irish cider and linen. Both classes will find they have higher desires – the peasants for beef and better clothes; the gentry for local productions of the fine and useful arts. A national bank will support the increased rate of circulation in the economy, or its momentum, as Berkeley calls it. And a class of philosophical educators such as Berkeley himself will manage the necessary transformation of opinions, desires and practices, chiefly by educating the gentry. Different classes of people – the higher, the lower, the educators – have different roles in practising and producing conformity to God’s will.
All classes of people have responsibilities to God that are in part expressed through their behaviour towards their own and other classes of people. ‘Charity’ is the term that, for Berkeley, captures the fulfilment of these responsibilities. He preached on charity at the English merchant colony in Livorno in Italy in 1714, saying – perhaps with an eye to the background of his audience – that the mutual satisfaction of wants through commerce was a form of charitable action within the reach of all. Duty to God and charity to his neighbour will make the true Christian attempt the conversion of heathens and infidels, Berkeley said in the sermon he preached to the Society for Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts on his return from his failed expedition to found a university in Bermuda. That project was itself geared towards the conversion of Native Americans, as well as the religious reform of white colonists.
Berkeley wrote Alciphron (1732) while in Rhode Island awaiting the funds for the university he hoped to found, which never arrived. One of the characters who voices views closest to those Berkeley expressed elsewhere says that it’s an obligation to dispense ‘Medicine for the Soul of Man’. In 1734, Berkeley became Bishop of Cloyne in southern Ireland. He described the poor of Cloyne, a small town in Cork, as ‘objects of charity’, and the employment of around 100 men in agriculture led by his wife Anne as ‘a charity which pays it self’. Berkeley’s last major work, Siris (1744), is an idiosyncratic text that begins with instructions on how to mix water with pine resin to create a medicinal drink for treating the epidemic of dysentery that swept Ireland in 1740-41, and continues to argue for the compatibility of ancient and Christian accounts of the soul and the Trinity. He said there that he was ‘indispensably obliged by the duty every man owes to mankind’, and that ‘charity obligeth me to say what I know’.
‘Obedience to all civil power is rooted in the religious fear of God’
Charity is, if you like, the positive side of an obligation to other people, and to God. In contrast, Berkeley frequently expressed a negative or restrictive obligation that’s broadly concerned with implicitly or explicitly giving one’s word. It’s one of the assumptions of Passive Obedience that any social order is better than none, and that accepting the benefits of social order (simply those of not ‘anarchy’) is to accept the legitimacy of the sovereign who governs that order and the absolute obligation not to rebel against that sovereign. When Berkeley wrote to persuade Tories not to break their oaths of allegiance to George I as the Jacobite uprising of 1715 unfolded, he noted that:
Common mutual faith is the great support of society; and an oath, as it is the highest obligation to keep our faith inviolate, becomes the great instrument of justice and intercourse between men. Whatever, therefore, lessens the sacredness or authority of an oath must be acknowledged at the same time to be highly detrimental both to the Church and the Commonwealth.
Berkeley presented similar views in 1738 when he thought the social fabric was under threat from the atheistical blasphemies of a rogueish Dublin society called the Blasters. ‘Obedience to all civil power is rooted in the religious fear of God,’ and only reverence for God ‘can beget and preserve a true respect for subordinate majesty in all the degrees of power, the first link of authority being fixed at the throne of God.’ Misusing oaths is to threaten the very source of civil life, submission to the authority of God.
More specific oaths also concerned Berkeley. He took a strong view of the obligations of the marriage vow. When one of his brothers was condemned to death for bigamy, but saved by the interventions of Berkeley’s friends, Berkeley wrote to reimburse them for the expense. He noted, however, he ‘would not have disbursed half the sum to have saved that villain from the gallows’. When Berkeley excerpted a discussion of the marital vow of obedience from a book on The Relative Duties of Parents and Children, Husbands and Wives, Masters and Servants (1705) for his anthology The Ladies Library (1714), he inserted some thoughts of his own: that it is ‘a Command, the Breach of which is a Sin, and the Punishment of all Sin, Death eternal’. If we have any interest in order at all, if we have an interest in the world appearing to us as a regular, dependable, interpretable chain of events, an interest in our own wills producing predictable and stable outcomes, then we must obey the source of this order, the supreme authority of God.
Obedience can be presented more positively as charity, but it remains an attempt to conform to a higher will, in the expectation of gaining privileges and responsibilities in this world and the next. Humans depend on God for an orderly sequence of ideas and experiences as they interact with the physical world; they also depend on God for social and moral order. To maintain social and moral order, humans must feel religious awe towards God, and acknowledge the legitimacy of subordination of people into different classes and ranks, with different privileges and responsibilities. God doesn’t exist to repair the problem of occasionally existing objects in Berkeley’s immaterialism. Berkeley’s immaterialism exists to give his readers a sense of their entire dependence – social, moral and political as well as experiential – upon God. Dependence upon God models forms of human dependence and relation that Berkeley described in a wide range of writings.
As we have just seen, Berkeley’s God is the source of all authority, subordination and order. Finite spirits aren’t obliged to obey only God, but also to obey their superiors in the social order. Servants are obliged to obey their masters. In a way that distinguishes him from immediate predecessors such as John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf, Berkeley blurred the line between servitude and slavery, between contractual and forced, temporary and permanent servitude. In TheQuerist, Berkeley asked: whether ‘other nations have not found great benefit from the use of slaves’ for public infrastructure projects? ‘Whether temporary servitude would not be the best cure for idleness and beggary …?’ ‘Whether all sturdy beggars should not be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years?’
Berkeley’s language here minimises the difference between slavery and servitude. Likewise, in notes for a sermon preached in Rhode Island, he said that in the New Testament ‘servants’ signified ‘slaves’. I’m not suggesting that Berkeley believed slavery was a positive good. Rather, he believed that what he understood to be dissolute, dirty, cynical, slothful, asocial forms of life were a great ill, and that being forced to participate in projects promoting the public good was better than being left at liberty to dehumanise. Such a view, of course, legitimises slavery.
Berkeley supported obedience to forms of temporal subordination now recognised as morally repugnant
Berkeley presents slavery within an orderly Christian society as preferable to forms of liberty that, he believes, limit the development of important human capacities. When Berkeley was in Rhode Island waiting for his college funding, there’s evidence of him buying two and baptising three enslaved people. The historian Travis Glasson has convincingly argued that the Yorke-Talbot legal opinion, issued in 1729, that baptism and slavery were compatible was the result of the activism of Berkeley or his circle, trying to facilitate the baptism of enslaved people in America. Berkeley had argued in his Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches (1725) for the college that would take Native American and Black students, as well as the sons of white planters, that ‘Slaves would only become better Slaves by being Christian’. Berkeley supported obedience to forms of temporal subordination that are now recognised as morally repugnant, and argued that some forms of forced labour, perhaps temporary, perhaps not, were a social good – a greater good than the ills of servitude or slavery.
There’s much about this picture of Berkeley’s God, and the human and divine relationships it implies, that Berkeley shares with other Christian writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It’s not surprising to see Christianity connected to subordination and obedience, both in political and social life, and encompassing slavery, for instance. It’s more unusual, perhaps, in the precise obligations it entails for someone like Berkeley, a philosophical educator. This person has to conform to God’s will by following laws, by accepting privileges and responsibilities to shape and govern other people through discourse and through the founding and maintenance of social institutions, from colleges to farms, in order to produce the same great good for them – conformity to the highest will. In doing these things, the philosophical educator is imitating God. God discourses continually to humans through the phenomenal world, through its regularities and dependable phenomena; but also through its less predictable events, such as illness, earthquakes and extreme weather. The philosopher should also learn to read these phenomena.
The immaterialist doctrine exists to promote this understanding of and conformity to God, rather than God being a convenient backstop for immaterialism. In both its typical and its more idiosyncratic respects, therefore, Berkeley’s sense of the religious foundation and lived texture of social life isn’t something that can be set aside without the risk of mischaracterising his immaterialism and his philosophical ambitions in general.
The central realisation Berkeley wanted his readers to undergo is that of absolute and continual dependence upon the will of a superior for everything in their world – their sensory experiences, the laws of nature, the capacity of their wills to bring about consequences, the complex coordination and subordination of wills involved in producing a social world. This realisation issues in the striking doctrine of immaterialism. But it also issues in the particular form of conservative political and social life that Berkeley lived and promoted in his varied activities as a churchman, economist, husband, brother, slave-owner and so on. Understanding Berkeley’s immaterialism, and the role of God in his immaterialism, requires an acknowledgement of his religious view of political and social life. Some of that view is closely shared with other Christian writers of his time, some of it more idiosyncratic and characteristic of the visionary immaterialist that he was.
World work is a spiritual practice that Joel Goldsmith invited his students to follow. He believed that individual spiritual illumination was not solely for the purpose of advancing our own spiritual consciousness, but that its greater importance and purpose was to lift world consciousness.
Joel realized that the world is living in a sense of separation from God, and that this sense of separation is the root of all world problems. Yet he also recognized that the illumined consciousness of individuals—the developed Christ-consciousness—can dissolve that material sense. So Joel constantly encouraged students to refrain from fighting, bemoaning, or trying to solve the problems of the world in human ways, but rather to work to elevate our own consciousness by going within to the silence, realizing the omnipresence of God and communing with the Christ of being. Joel said,
“Our goal is not stopping wars. Our goal is not emptying hospitals of sick people. Our goal is not making all poor people have abundance. Our goal is the destruction of material sense, so that the new creature, Christ, may be revealed as individual being.”[1]
Joel believed that those who have gone one step ahead in spiritual understanding had to accept responsibility not only for their own family, community, and nation, but for world conditions. He said that our concern should embrace the whole world, so that the spiritual kingdom would be manifest on earth.
The Practice: Three Daily Meditations
Joel’s world work practice consists of dedicating three meditation periods each day to uplifting the consciousness of the world and dissolving the material sense that keeps it in bondage. We go into these meditations with no personal desires or intentions, and without criticism, judgment, or condemnation of others. We do not seek to change the conditions of “this world,” recognizing that “My kingdom is not of this world,”[2] and that the realization of the Presence will reveal divine law, order, and harmony. As we go into these meditations, we simply have the intention to experience the Presence, to realize the Christ within, and by so doing, release the influence of the Christ into the world. As Joel said,
“It has been given to me that if a band of realized Christ-consciousness is formed around the world, it will touch and awaken individual consciousness and bring lasting freedom to the world.”[3]
These are Joel’s simple directions for the three meditation periods:
“Let your first meditation period be only for the purpose of feeling a consciousness of God’s presence. When that has been achieved, that is the end of that period of meditation for the world.
In your second meditation, again achieve a conscious awareness of God’s presence and realize that this realization of the Christ is dispelling material sense in human consciousness.
Begin your third meditation once again with a realization of the Christ, and then recognize that that realization of the Christ is dispelling material sense and opening human consciousness to a receptivity to Truth.”[4]
Doing these world work meditations is our gift to the world and our contribution to world freedom. It is a part of our tithing, or giving back to God of our first fruits.
The Effect
Joel said that we cannot measure the degree of power that may flow through an individual who is realizing the omnipresence of God. We have no idea who might be touched by the Christ as a result of our world work and be in a position to take some beneficial and effective action.[5] The person who is in the right place at the right time with some degree of receptivity will be the one through whom the Christ will seem to come. But we do not need to know who it is, or when it happens, or where. Our function in world work is just to be instruments through which the presence of God can touch and awaken humanity. Joel believed that through our spiritual realization, we can help to settle the affairs of the world, not by might and not by power, but by the Spirit of God.
Further Reading on World Work
Joel spoke often of World Work, but never more eloquently than in “Spiritual Freedom,” the Infinite Way Letter of July 1959, now found in the book The Heart of Mysticism.
[1] Recording #155, Side A, 1956 Barbizon Private Class for “25”, “Three Daily Meditations—Realized Consciousness”
[3]The Heart of Mysticism, pp. 1157 (1959 July Letter: “Spiritual Freedom” )
[4]The Heart of Mysticism, pp. 1156-1157 (1959 July Letter: “Spiritual Freedom” )
[5] In her book, The Spiritual Journey of Joel S. Goldsmith, Lorraine Sinkler tells a story that illustrates this point. In 1937, the Congress under President Roosevelt proposed legislation to “pack” the Supreme Court in order to make it more amenable to the New Deal. When Joel heard about this, he saw the risk. The night before the bill was to come up for a vote, the “Voice” told him to stay up and pray that night, meditating and reading, not praying for defeat of the bill, but simply waiting for something to come through. At four o’clock a.m. the answer came that the work had been done. The bill did not pass, and years later, the editor of a chain of newspapers told that he had been awakened at four o’clock in the morning on that particular day by a voice in his ear saying that the bill must be stopped. He sent out word to all his newspapers to enlist public opinion against the bill, with the result that the nation was so aroused that the bill was defeated.
Iwihub Collection of talks that comprise the book “The Mystical I” London Special Class 1964 tape 562 B “World Work 1964 We may not pass by on the other side” Transcript: https://theinfiniteway.files.wordpres…
Joel Solomon Goldsmith (March 10, 1892 – June 17, 1964) was an American spiritual author, teacher, spiritual healer, and modern-day mystic. He founded The Infinite Way movement. Wikipedia
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