What might the ring in Tolkien’s great mythical saga signify? It confers great power on its wearer but also corrupts and ultimately destroys. It is referred to as “the ring of power”. So does it just symbolize power? It was forged by the Dark Lord, Sauron. So does it symbolize specifically demonic power?

Jonathan Pageau has an excellent analysis on the symbolism of the ring in The Lord of the Rings on his YouTube channel, The Symbolic World. He talks about other famous rings in Western mythology, from the ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic, to the ring of the Niebelung in Wagner’s opera. He talks about the elements of binding, of invisibility, of what he calls “supplements”, technology and ornamentation. It’s a nice exploration, definitely worth watching.

Certain points stood out for me. The obvious association with power, the issue of dependency, which paradoxically leads to weakness as well as strength, and the issue of control. Adding the promise of salvation on the one hand and destruction on the other, I realized that here was a perfect description of the Tibetan Wheel of Life.

In the Lord of the Rings, everyone wants the ring, but often for slightly different reasons. The main reason is power. Who wants power in the Wheel of Life? Muppets (or Titans in the original Tibetan version). Muppets are fundamentally power hungry. They want power at all costs, either to extend and defend the power they already have, or to counter the power of their enemies. Whether top dogs or underdogs, all muppets really want is power.

Muggles are a bit different. They don’t want power as such, because they don’t want to stand out too much or put their heads above the parapet. Power is dangerous, after all. They want control. They want to establish a perfectly regulated and safe world with “no alarms and no surprises”. Control here is about control of the immediate environment and the social milieu, including the way other people perceive you. Hence, the central role of the ring as ornament. For muggles, it’s all about control and social status.

Addicts are dependent on the ring. They can’t live without it, because of the feelings of pleasure, expansion and well-being it provides. Golem is the sorry face of a serious ring addict. He is clearly closely related to those strange subterranean creatures of Buddhist mythology, the hungry ghosts.

The ring both gives power and takes it away. Dependence enfeebles the wearer in the long run, until you end up both a weakling and a victim, closer to a domestic animal than a human being.

These are four ways that “the ring of power” exerts its influence on the corruptible human soul. But there are two others, represented by the diva and the demon. Let’s follow the progression from one state to another, the irresistible road to perdition.

The pure soul desires only the good for itself and the world. It finds the ring. When it sees the extraordinary magical power contained within it, it instantly sees the potential for universal salvation. Used in the right way, the ring could solve all the problems that beset mankind. It must be used with great care, but the pure soul will see that only the purest motives employ its boundless power. Things seem to go well when the divas have the ring.

But either the ring is lost or the diva is corrupted. Now the ring is used in the Human World to keep peace and keep control. When the muggles have the ring, the world still seems to run pretty well. Train run on time. Everyone plays their part and sticks to the script. But there is an underlying oppressive feel to life in Muggle Land, which foments some dissatisfaction and rebellion in certain quarters.

The ring is lost again, or perhaps the muggles in charge are corrupted. Or there is a peasant revolt, or some other uprising from the lower echelons of the muggle hierarchy and the ring is lost in the chaos.

Whichever way it goes, the ring finds itself in possession of the muppets. Now we have tyranny and war. The muppets become drunk on power and blood lust and soon become utterly dependent on the ring to maintain their position and their sanity. But the ring is lost again and … is found by a simple hobbit.

The hobbit gets seriously addicted to the ring’s power, which he uses for his own selfish ends. He lives an unnaturally long time, but becomes deformed and monstrous. The ring’s dark magic begins to eat him up from the inside and he become weaker and weaker, until he becomes a helpless victim, an outcast from society, and then, in the final turn of the screw, a demon.

That’s obviously not exactly how the story of The Lord of the Rings goes. I just wanted to show how the symbolic “ring of power” can cause even the purest soul to degenerate, through several stages, until it finally becomes the soul of pure evil.

Frodo’s job was to destroy the ring once and for all in the fires of Mount Doom in the heart of Mordor. There is no other way. The ring always finds its way to its Lord and Maker, and turns everything bad. And he does it (I’m pretty confident that’s not a spoiler). With the ring gone, the world returns to its natural state, peace returns to the land, and Frodo can finally go home to his hobbit hole in Hobbiton.

Jonathan Pageau connects the ring to science and technology. He talks about our dependence on smart phones and social media and alludes to the ongoing development of AI (artificial intelligence). He ends on the slightly tongue in cheek comment that many of us may already be “ring wraiths” without realizing it.

I share his sentiments. The rapid advances in technology in the past few years have, I think created enormous psychological and social problems across the developed world. I agree with Iain McGilchrist that technology is accelerating the dominance of the left hemisphere over the right in the brain’s perception and construction of reality (read his brilliant book, The Master and his Emissary). The left hemisphere is more about control and focused attention, whereas the right is more open and flexible. So, from a purely neurological point of view, we are becoming increasingly muggle-like.

The endless ongoing slagging match that is the Culture War is one glaring example of how technology, and social media in particular, has produced a climate of increased hostility and intolerance and ever increasing polarization. Ordinary people, driven by algorithms, click bait and echo chambers, construct and maintain online personas that are more and more radical and extreme, spouting a bizarre concoction of inflammatory rhetoric and censorious tribal political correctness. Technology is turning us into muppets.

Both children and adults are spending many hours a day in front of a screen, whether it be a phone, TV or computer. Try banning your teen’s screen time. They would rather die than spend all their time offline. It would be social death anyway, because all their friends are constantly updating stuff that they just have to see. Even the parents are hooked. We are all addicts now.

I would argue that the whole victimology epidemic is the result of technology too. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff draw on a whole raft of evidence to show how the “i-gen”, who are now at university age, is exhibiting massive levels of anxiety, depression and increased rates of self-harm and suicide, as a result of a host of factors directly or indirectly related to information technology.

There has been a steady increase in emotional fragility in the last couple of decades, culminating in the bizarre excesses of university campus culture, where students demand “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” because they can’t cope with challenging or different views to their own.

So, whether or not you choose to throw your mobile phone into the flames, it’s at least worth considering to what degree your engagement with this extraordinarily powerful technology is feeding the diva, muggle, muppet, addict and victim in you. You’re probably nowhere near demon yet, but how will you even know when enough is enough?

 

I have been interested in philosophy and psychology ever since I didn’t study them at university. Recently, I’ve been delving more deeply into moral philosophy, which straddles both disciplines. I reread “After Virtue” by Alasdair Macintyre, a book which greatly impressed me when I first read it over twenty years ago, and was more convinced than ever that his diagnosis of the crisis in morality is right: we took a wrong turn in the Enlightenment when we tried to base morals on a purely rationalist foundation.

Before the Enlightenment, morality was all about virtue, and the key philosopher was Aristotle. But with the advent of Immanuel Kant with his Categorical Imperative and Jeremy Bentham with his Utilitarianism, morality became more a question of rational deliberation than about the development of good character.

The two main modern schools of moral thought are deontology (Kantian ethics of obligation) and consequentialism (utilitarian calculations of utility). Although they differ in their approaches and conclusions, they are both more interested in hypothetical moral problems than in moral qualities. They try to answer the question, “what should one do in such and such a situation?”, by applying a rule or a calculus of maximum benefit and minimum harm. The focus is on the action and its consequences, not on the agent.

Moral thinking has shifted from Aristotelian “character ethics” to “quandary ethics”. It doesn’t matter who is in the quandary. All that matters is that the right course of action is carried out. And the right course of action is ultimately the result of a rational process. So, on this basis, it is conceivable that in the future it would be perfectly possible to invent an app that could calculate the best course of action in any given situation.

I find the reduction of the classical virtues, regardless of the specific list, to a single rational principle a bit disturbing. What was this move in the service of? Efficiency? Logic? Science? I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that Bentham was probably on the autism spectrum and that Kant might have been as well.

That got me thinking about the logical positivists, who dominated philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and the behaviourists, who dominated psychology. Were they on the autism spectrum as well? They certainly had a ridiculously narrow and mechanistic view of humanity.

Coupled with the rise and rise of science and technology in the last two hundred years, and the meteoric rise of computer scientists in defining the culture (many of whom are definitely on the spectrum), I couldn’t help wondering if there was a worrying trend in our conception of ourselves and in the direction of our self actualisation as a species.

If we think of ourselves as rational machines, might we not become rational machines? A rational machine has a mind and a body, and an odd admixture of mind and body it calls “feelings”. And that’s basically it. Rational machines make decisions and moral choices according to rational considerations, though usually with a little tug-of-war between “head” and “heart”. But they soon starts to look uncannily like philosophical zombies or robots, once “head” and “heart” are reduced to clever algorithms.

The traditional human being has more psychological options than the modern one. It can think and it can feel, but it can do other things too. It can “believe”, not in an intellectual sense, which is just an act of reason, but as a completely distinct psychological category. “Belief” in this sense is not an act of reason but a leap of faith (or a “leap into faith” as Kierkegaard put it). It is no accident, therefore, that the advent of high modernity was accompanied by the “death of God” and the psychological atrophying and neglect of our capacity for belief.

The same is true of “awareness” or “mindfulness” (which has fortunately been revived in recent decades through its importation from the East), and our capacity for “will-power” and “flow”, which is the ability to enter a state of absorption or trance.

The modern human being has sacrificed these capacities and abilities on the altar of science and technology and has been fooled by modern philosophers and psychologists into thinking that they don’t really exist and that human beings should forget about them and aspire instead to be as close to rational machines as possible.

We have sold our souls and our wills, as well as our minds and hearts. We have forgotten the light of the soul, the strength of the will, and the powers of the mind and heart. We have forgotten the virtues: the virtues of the soul, personified in the king archetype, the virtues of the will, embodied in the warrior archetype, the virtues of the mind exemplified by the philosopher archetype and the virtues of the heart, represented by the monk archetype. We have exchanged virtue ethics for rational ethics, and Virtue itself for Reason.

Nor is there room for the mystic archetype or the shaman archetype in the modern conception of the rational human being. “Belief” and “trance” (or “flow”) are anachronistic and archaic qualities that have no place in a world of rational machines. There is no room for God or Spirit in this world.

So it seems that we have come to a fork in the road of history. We can accept our fate and be absorbed into the monistic rational information system of Dataism, and sacrifice the rest of our humanity to the gods of science and technology. Or we can rediscover and reaffirm our waning humanity and meditate against the machine.

 

“The effectance motive” is “the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment.” It is a basic human drive, which can be observed in other species as well, most visibly in apes and monkeys. It is what drives us to solve problems, learn and make progress.

Without a sense of progress, human beings lose motivation and meaning. What’s the point of going round and round the merry-go-round if you’re not actually getting anywhere?

We need a purpose and we need an aim, and we need to feel that we are moving in the right direction. This is “the progress principle”, which is the fact that “we get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them.” This principle has actually been demonstrated neurologically: we get a dopamine hit every time we move closer to our goal.

So how does this play out in our lives? Well, it depends on the goal, obviously. Let’s have a look at the goals of the four central archetypes in the Wheel of Samsara and see where that takes us.

The muggle’s goal is success, in other words, fame and fortune. I feel good if I am moving up a status hierarchy, if I get a promotion or a raise, or if I get recognition from my superiors or peers. I feel good if I manage to acquire status symbols (big house, big car, exotic holidays and attractive partner). And I feel good when I do a good job and further my career.

All this hard work and growing competence makes me happy. It may be that all the material rewards are secondary and that my true satisfaction comes from a sense of progress and effectance. Recognition and renumeration are merely confirmation of my success, which is the primary thing. But either way, the source of my happiness is based on progress in a narrowly defined sphere of activity (“work”).

The muppet’s goal is victory. This is because muppets (who live in the “Titan Realm”) are perpetually at war. Who or what they are at war with doesn’t much matter. They may be at war with their spouse, or sibling, or with a giant abstract entity, such as “the Rich” or “the West” or “Islam” or “Postmodern Neo-Marxism”.

Football hooligans are muppets. Political activists (of all stripes) are muppets. Even if I am fighting a just cause, I am still a muppet, which doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m wrong. I might be completely right in my position and completely justified in my activism. It just means that I am deriving satisfaction (and dopamine) from a sense of victory, or rather, progress towards victory.

I experience every small victory against injustice or oppression or godlessness is ultimately a victory against evil. I feel that I am making progress in an eternal Manichean war between good and evil. And if I am a particularly heroic muppet, I’m not just making the world a better place, I’m actually saving it.

We also get our dopamine hit vicariously. If our children do well, for example, and make good progress relative to their peers, we feel good. If our team does well, or if our opponents suffer a humiliating defeat, we feel positively rosy, even when we had nothing to do with it personally. Sometimes we get a double dose, such as when a friend or family member vanquishes our enemies and is lifted up the status hierarchy of our tribe as a result.

Anyway, the point is that we derive a sense of meaning and happiness from the “effectance motive” and the “progress principle” when we are effective in and make progress in two different but complementary arenas: “the Rat Race” and “the Culture War”.

What about the addict? What’s the addict’s goal? More dope obviously. My goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But it’s not just the pleasure inherent in the pleasure itself that gives me a sense of continued satisfaction. It’s the success in obtaining it. The “progress principle” is at work here too. When I am making progress in my pleasure seeking behaviour, I feel good, and when I’m not, I feel bad. The absolute level of pleasure is less important than the relative.

And the victim? The goal of the victim is simply to prove how awful the world is. The victim feeds on bad news. When I’m in victim mode, I secretly delight in wars, humanitarian crises and natural disasters. I relish every sign of the imminent collapse of civilization or the relentless destruction of the environment and the looming threat of global climactic meltdown, because it confirms my belief in the essential badness of humankind.

On a personal, psychological level, I feel that I am making progress every time I unearth another trauma or discover another physical, emotional or mental problem. My “effectance motive” is basically to find more and more signs of corruption, decay, abuse, neglect, and evil in myself and in the world. My “progress principle” depends on finding ever new pieces of evidence for my negative view of reality.

The addict and the victim derive their sense of meaning and purpose from the “Hedonic Treadmill” and the “Impending Doom”. There is a built-in sense of progress, just as there is in the “Rat Race” and the “Culture War”, although it is easier, with a little distance, to see that it is progress, but on an endless loop.

There is no end to the “Rat Race”. There is no end to the “Culture War”. There is no end to the “Hedonic Treadmill”. There is no end to “Impending Doom”. We feel that we are making progress on all four fronts: we’re winning the race, we’re winning the war, we’re getting high, and we’re getting ever closer to our inevitable annihilation. But we’ll never actually win the race, win the war, stay high or spontaneously combust, even if we spend a lifetime trying.

Is this an unrealistically bleak view? Let’s be optimistic then. Maybe the personal and/or global apocalypse will actually come in my lifetime and my victim will be vindicated. Maybe I will reach the top of the heap and become President of the United States or CEO of Google and my muggle will be vindicated. Maybe my side of the Culture War will destroy the other side once and for all and my muppet will be vindicated. Maybe I will find the secret to endless bliss without any comedowns and my addict will be vindicated.

Or maybe that’s not the point. (Obviously that’s not the point). After all, it’s about the journey, not the getting there, isn’t it? As long as I feel that I am making progress, I’m happy enough and life is worth living. So who cares if I never actually “make it”?

That’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion, but it’s not very satisfying. Surely there’s more to life that accepting the illusion of progress just to get through the day? As far as I can see, there are three options available to us.

The first is to actually believe in one or more of these areas of “effectance” and throw yourself into it wholeheartedly. Believe in the Rat Race! Believe in the Culture War! Believe in the Hedonic Treadmill! Believe in Impending Doom! I can call you as many names as I want: “Muggle! Muppet! Addict! Victim!” But these are just empty insults, because you know what you’re doing, and I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about.

The second option is to accept that all this time and effort is ultimately futile, but that it doesn’t really matter. That’s just life. Everyone else is doing it. It’s normal. Take the rough with the smooth. Nobody’s perfect. And other rationalisations. Also, it passes the time of day. As long as we have “the effectance motive” and “the progress principle”, it’s all good. Imagine if you weren’t chasing these goals all the time. What on earth would you do all day?

Which brings us to the third option. Stop. Just stop. Stop the war, get off the treadmill, drop out of the race and cancel your subscription to the end of the world. Direct your “effectance motive” and “progress principle” to something real and lasting. Forget all that nonsense. Try the spiritual path instead. Then you might actually get somewhere.

 

 

The Good Place is an American comedy series about the after life. The basic plot is that an administrative error has sent Eleanor, a selfish “dirt bag” to the wrong place. She ends up in “the good place” instead of “the bad place”, with predictably hilarious results. She knows that she doesn’t belong there, but must do everything in her power to stay, if she wants to avoid an eternity of excruciating physical torture.

I can’t say too much about this series, which I highly recommend (it’s on Netflix), because anything I say will be a spoiler. However, I will introduce the other three main protagonists in the drama, who you get to meet in the first episode: Chidi, Tahani and Janu. On Earth, before they died, Chidi was an ethics philosophy professor, Tahani was a celebrity charity fund-raiser and Janu was a Buddhist monk who took a vow of silence when he was eight.

Eleanor, as I already mentioned, was a selfish dirt bag. However, she does seem to have some redeeming qualities. She is feisty and funny (and hot), and never gives up. She’s a fighter. So, as the story progresses, through a series of clever twists and turns, we find ourselves watching a drama of four archetypes: the warrior (Eleanor), the monk (Janu), the philosopher Chidi) and the queen (Tahani).

What is “the good place”? When do we feel that we are in a good place? Perhaps when we feel like a king or queen, a philosopher, a monk or a warrior. In other words, when we think we are in control. As soon as we realize we have no idea what’s going on, this illusion of mastery shatters and we wake up to the awful realization: we aren’t in “the good place” at all.

What if we pool resources? What if the warrior, monk, philosopher and queen band together like The Avengers or The A-Team? Together they are stronger. They complement each other. The strengths of one make up for the weaknesses of the others. And what if these archetypes represent the qualities of one person not four separate people? Then it’s not really about individuals teaming up, but about “subpersonalities” integrating in the psyche.

Either way, whether it’s about outer community or inner communion, what if that doesn’t work either? What if, periodically, all four of you realize that you are in “the bad place”? Why? What have you done wrong? What’s missing?

In the last chapter, I suggested that everywhere is a bad place when there is no genuine spiritual community, because you will inevitably fall back into a default community, of which I claimed there are only four kinds: a muggle community, a muppet community, an addict community and a victim community. In “the good place” you find warriors, monks (and nuns), philosophers and kings (and queens). In “the bad place” you find victims, addicts, muppets and muggles. They are the negatives or shadows of the positive archetypes.

So what distinguishes a spiritual community from these other communities? And why do the four positive archetypes keep ending up in “the bad place”? Why do they keep being exposed as their negative opposites? The queen a muggle, the philosopher a muppet, the monk an addict and the warrior a victim?

We find one possible answer in Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus”, in the revealing answer Mephistopheles gives to Dr Faustus’ questioning about how it can be possible that a devil has escaped hell:

“Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?”

It should be obvious really, but in the modern world, it is such a forgotten truth, that it is almost a taboo. “The good place” is where God is and “the bad place” is where God isn’t. It’s as simple as that. Wherever you go, whatever you do, however clever and kind and good you think you are, you will always end up waking up to the fact that you are really in “the bad place” all along.

Unless you don’t wake up. You could live your life truly believing that you are in “the good place”. Maybe you are okay with being a victim, addict, muggle or muppet, or a bit of each, with a bit of warrior, monk, philosopher and king thrown in. Maybe “the bad place” isn’t so bad.

But if you do wake up, maybe once, maybe twice, maybe countless times, the truth will eventually dawn on you: there is no God but the true God, and there is no place like the real Good Place. Believe and you are there. Doubt and you are not. It really is as simple as that.

 

ANATTA, ANICCA, ABHAYA

ANATTA means “no-self”. When you say the word, bring the meaning to mind. Do not treat it as a negation or attack on your ego. Take it to refer to the conscious part of you that is not identified with anything. See if you can connect with a neutral space of pure awareness within you. We start with ANATTA, because if we do not consciously find a neutral space within, and disidentify from the forms of our ego, the rest of the meditation may be hijacked by one subpersonality or other and will lose its effectiveness.

ANICCA means “impermanence”. All things change. Nothing stays the same. Impermanence is a law of nature. We too are here for just a brief time, no longer than a “brief candle”. We must let go of the illusion of permanence, which is the central illusion of the ego. The ego is just a temporary psychological configuration, but it maintains itself in being through the illusion of permanence. It is a self-fulfilling belief. Because we believe our ego (which is just another word for “personality”) is permanent, we behave as if it were permanent and solid. When we remind ourselves of ANICCA, impermanence, we relax our hold and become more fluid and flexible. This is also a very important attitude at the start of a meditation, because it means we are open and sensitive to change, and not rigid, resistant or defensive.

ABHAYA means “fearlessness”. We must put on the fearlessness of a spiritual warrior as we enter into meditation. This is important to combat the fear that is at the heart of the ego. The ego is afraid for itself. It is afraid of death. Both ANATTA and ANICCA mean death for the ego. If we cannot overcome this fear, we will once again fall back in thrall to the ego. It welcomes us back with obsequiousness and cold comfort: “You did the right thing to give up. Well done. Stay here with me. You’re safe with me. We’ll look after each other. Don’t go out there again. It’s dangerous.” To break through the shell of the ego, we must be fearless even in the face of death.

KARUNA, KARUNA, KARUNA

KARUNA means “compassion”. Confronting the fear of the ego and fear of death, we encounter suffering. The spiritual journey is beset by hardship and struggle. We cannot avoid great suffering if we are to change and die to ourselves. We need the soothing balm of compassion. Compassion is not pity. It literally means “suffering with”: com passio. It is the willingness to share the suffering of another, and so help carry the load. We can arouse compassion for our own suffering as much as the suffering of another. We can also receive the compassion of an archetypal “divine being” such as Avalokitesvara, Isis or the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the most powerful visual depiction of compassion is that of the pieta, Mary weeping over the broken body of her son. Bringing this scene to mind cannot fail to arouse deep feelings of compassion in us, which we can then direct to our own sufferings “in Christ”.

DOSA NIRODHA, KARUNA

DOSA means “hate” or “aversion”. It is a negative psychological attitude of dislike, disgust, anger, rejection. NIRODHA means “cessation”. So when we say the words “DOSA NIRODHA”, we become aware of any unacknowledged negativity or resentment we might be carrying, and gently let it go. If it does not dissipate completely, we are content with lessening its energetic charge and so reducing its hold on us. We bring compassion to the suffering caused by DOSA, and the suffering that caused it. We bring compassion also to our inability to free ourselves of it completely. DOSA, if it does not arise in the heat of the moment, as when provoked by an adversary, is generally connected with past slights and resentments. It is the negative energy of our “unfinished business”.

TANHA NIRODHA, KARUNA

TANHA means “thirst” or “desire”. It is the opposite instinctual drive from DOSA, a pulling towards, rather than a pushing away. It encompasses all forms of craving, clinging, neediness, lust and desire. It includes spiritual desire as much as sexual desire or desire for fame and fortune. TANHA can be as distracting and destructive as DOSA. Psychological issues associated with DOSA are those around phobias and traumas, and anger management issues. Those associated with TANHA are addiction issues, substance abuse and obsessive compulsive disorders. By bringing the energetic charge of TANHA to awareness and consciously letting it go with compassion, we can begin to reduce its subliminal hold on our lives.

DUKKHA NIRODHA, KARUNA

DUKKHA means “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness”. It was the recognition of the problem of DUKKHA as the tragic and inescapable fact of life that impelled Shakyamuni Buddha to strike out on his spiritual quest to find a solution to human suffering. The first of his Four Noble Truths is the self-evident existential truth, “there is dukkha”. DUKKHA is broader than physical pain or even psychological pain. It includes “having what you don’t want” (DOSA) as well as “not having what you want” (TANHA), but also, more subtly, “not having what you have” and “not wanting what you want”. In other words, being generally dissatisfied. Life just doesn’t seem to live up to the billing. Free even from the push and pull of DOSA and TANHA, things just don’t feel right. There is a subtle background malaise. The psychological issue here is depression. Where DOSA indicates an inability to let go of the negativity of the past, and TANHA indicates an inability to deal with the seductive lure of the future, DUKKHA indicates our inability to enjoy the present.

UPEKKHA, UPEKKHA, UPEKKHA

UPEKKHA means “equanimity”. Equanimity is a dispassionate philosophical attitude. Whatever comes our way is treated equally, without preference or deference. We resist the temptation to react negatively with DOSA or greedily with TANHA. We refuse to react with the dissatisfied indifference of DUKKHA. UPEKKHA is a state of poised equilibrium. It is a condition of spiritual fortitude in the face of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (Shakespeare), the capacity to “meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two imposters the same,” (Kipling). By arousing the quality of UPEKKHA, we complete and consolidate our withdrawal from hate, greed and suffering and turn to face any eventuality with strength and courage.

KARUNA, MUDITA, METTA

KARUNA means “compassion”. This is the golden thread that runs through the whole meditation. We bring the healing power of compassion to bear on all our psychological struggles and difficulties. The difference here is that we are now in a position of spiritual strength from which we can bring compassion to others. We bring to mind the suffering of sentient beings and send out healing compassion to all.

MUDITA means “sympathetic joy”. Here we share in the happiness and joy of others. It is the positive correlative of KARUNA. KARUNA and MUDITA can be seen as the psychological antidotes to DOSA and TANHA. When we encounter difficulty, pain and suffering, we don’t like it, so we instinctively react with aversion, DOSA. But we can bring compassion to alleviate the suffering. Thus compassion is the antidote to hate. When we encounter success, joy and happiness, we might react with envy, another form of DOSA, or with craving, TANHA. We like it and we want some of it. Or we can bring sympathetic joy to celebrate the success and happiness of the other without wanting a part of it. Thus MUDITA is the antidote to greed. It is like sharing in the achievement or pleasure of a young child. If they are enjoying a lollipop, it would be ridiculous to desire the lollipop, or we are no better that a young child ourselves. In KARUNA we “suffer with”; in MUDITA we “enjoy with”.

METTA means “love” or “loving kindness”. We send love and good will to all sentient beings, whether suffering, happy or indifferent. METTA is the antidote to hate, greed and suffering and blesses both the giver and receiver. Once we have made an inward clearing of our psychological ties to ego, permanence, fear, hate, greed, envy and suffering through self-compassion, we find that love arises and flows naturally and easily. Love is the crown of The Clearing Meditation.

One summer twenty years ago, by the river Isis in Oxford, I had a profound experience of “waking up” from my ordinary, habitual “me” consciousness into an extraordinary “non-dual” consciousness, where I felt completely at one with my surroundings and with the whole world. It felt as though I had stepped into a timeless realm, where one instant and ten thousand years were somehow the same and where one glance at a flower was more real and meaningful than my whole life up to that point. The experience only lasted for a few hours of clock time, but once back in the “ordinary” state, I knew that I would have no choice but to dedicate the rest of my life to finding my way back again. Thomas Traherne went there hundreds of years ago:

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and the stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world; the green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. … Eternity was manifest in the light of day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. 

Many others have been there too. For other first hand accounts of spiritual awakening, check out Richard Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, W.T. Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy or Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology by F.C. Happold. Here is an account taken from The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience by Masters and Houston:

The subject, S-1 (LSD), a housewife in her early thirties, was taken by the guide for a walk in the little forest that lay just beyond her house. The following is her account of this occasion:

I felt I was there with God on the day of the Creation. Everything was so fresh and new. Every plant and tree and fern and bush had its own particular holiness. As I walked along the ground the smells of nature rose to greet me – sweeter and more sacred than any incense. Around me bees hummed and birds sang and crickets chirped a ravishing hymn to Creation. Between the trees I could see the sun sending down rays of warming benediction upon this Eden, this forest paradise. I continued to wander through this wood in a state of puzzled rapture, wondering how it could have been that I lived only a few steps from this place, walked in it several times a week, and yet had never really seen it before. I remembered having read in college Frazer’s Golden Bough in which one read of the sacred forests of the ancients. Here, just outside my door, was such a forest and I swore I would never be blind to its enchantment again.

 

Whether or not we profess a particular faith, most of us, deep down, assume that matter is inanimate. If we are religious, we are probably dualists, which means that we believe that there is a spiritual as well as a material reality, a soul as well as a body. But even so, the material side of our dual nature is still just material. So actually dualists are still materialists (although they are not monists).

Imagine you have access to an electron microscope. You train it on the tip of your little finger. As you increase the magnification, you see the skin cells, the cell membrane, the mitochondria, the nucleus, the proteins and peptides, perhaps actual atoms. You zoom in through the realms of biology, chemistry and physics, apparently passing from the living to the dead.

Now imagine that next to the electron microscope is a telescope. You look through the aperture and zoom out past the few straggling clouds on this beautiful clear night into the immensity of space, past the moon, past Mars and the gas giants, to the Milky Way and beyond. Awesome though it is, what you are looking at is an immense wasteland of cold rocks and burning stars, all pointlessly spinning through the infinite void.

Between the microscope and the telescope, you find yourself precariously balanced between two infinities, a sliver of conscious life between two immensities of unconscious, inanimate, dead matter. As Prospero put it, “we are the stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded  by a sleep”. Bounded by inanimate matter on all sides, we are like a tiny bubble of life floating on an infinite sea of death.

But what if we look through a panpsychist lens? Then we see not endless graveyards of inanimate matter as far as the eye can see, but infinite consciousness. Then we are no longer an anomaly, a weird aberration, a strange exception to the rule of universal death. We are an integral part of a living universe. And our God is “the God of the living, not of the dead.”