Vedanta as Universal Religion
During the Russian war in Afghanistan, Communists and Muslims both carried the AK-47 (or Kalashnikov rifle). Despite disagreements with the Soviets about God, costume, morality, and culture, despite religious mores from an era of edged weapons, Islamic fighters carried Soviet-style rifles, not swords and lances (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/10/kalashnikov-truth.html). A Kalashnikov truth, such as the direction of gravity, is one recognized--at least within particular circumstances--by virtually everyone regardless of ideology. It is fact.
On the surface, religion is a Kalashnikov-free zone. One atheist meme claims that all religions share a common belief: that they’re right and all the others are wrong. This is true of many institutionalized religions. Institutions guard their turfs. Joseph Campbell, in Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, sees this mutual denial as a failure to see religious teachings as metaphor, as onstage words gesturing offstage toward real but nonverbal experiences. As a result of this error, self-described believers claim that their tropes are Kalashnikov truths, verifiable as logical statements, while self-described atheists point out the obvious, that this is false. Atheists miss implied meanings in a rush to affirm the obvious, and many believers miss them too. Of course, it is common enough to look at plain facts and still still see undercurrents of figurative meaning in them, but literal-minded believers run the risk of worshipping pictures, words, and stories as dead facts, missing the living gist behind them.
Literalists run risk climbing the signpost. Authentic religious belief implies personal experience—transformation—and the genuine scriptures of all religions are putative messages left by the transformed, words pointing toward experiences transcending words. Compare a scripture to a signpost reading “Jerusalem” and pointing east toward the holy hill. A literalist may object that the sign is false because it is not, in fact, Jerusalem. It’s just a board with letters on it. It signifies what it isn't. Moreover, the signpost clearly disagrees with other Jerusalem signposts, such as one far to the east that points west. Directions are relative to where you stand, and the only sure way to verify accuracy of the signpost is to take the trip. Simply reading a road sign, however fervently, gets you nowhere. Those who only recite a creed and memorize scripture—revering a guidebook of symbolic representations—imagine they can visit Jerusalem by climbing a post toward the holy name on top. They will never see the sacred hill—miles out of sight to the east—that the post was erected to reveal.
The signpost or scripture is a material object, a graven image. If worshipped as sacred, it becomes an idol, even a misdirection. Somebody could have erected it mistakenly, and linguistic subsoils shift with time. You may want to look into that risk if you’re contemplating a pilgrimage—maybe talk to travelers who claim to have recently made the journey—but, unless you embark yourself, you can’t know for sure if the sign is accurate. In any case, it's a means, not an end. If it is indeed accurate, once you check into your Jerusalem hotel, the sign is irrelevant to you. You may spread the news, writing friends back home to confirm the sign's accuracy, but, in the shadow of Zion, the eastward-facing sign miles in the west is useless.
Brother Lawrence describes formal devotions as “only a means to attain the end; so when by this exercise of the presence of God we are with Him who is our end, it is then useless to return to the means” (6th Letter). Scriptures and creeds are as useless to the enlightened as a well in a flood says the Bhagavad Gita (2:46). And even in a desert, visible wells are only holes filled with the same air that’s around them. Water glistens dimly below. Wells are useless unless you drop a bucket into the darkness.
Like signposts to places over the horizon, creeds and scriptures need not agree in substance. Consider an east-pointing arrow carved into a Himalayan rock face alongside the Tibetan glyphs "Holy Hill;" or a wooden post in Sudan supporting a north-pointing cedar plank painted "Jerusalem" in Arabic, or perhaps a large aluminum sign on a southbound expressway outside Moscow printed in Russian. These are different in every detail, including the directions they point and the roads they indicate, but are nevertheless true guides to a single hill. In my analogy, the signs may be equivalent to, say, Buddhist sutras, the Upanishads, the Qu'ran, or the synoptic gospels. Indeed, there may be uncountably many signposts scattered around the globe of spiritual practice. But how can we surmise that they point to one “place.” The answer is to look away from the signs’ metaphorical surfaces—in I. A. Richard’s terms, the vehicles that carry sense but aren’t that sense—and toward the tenors, the gists the vehicles exist to imply. To revisit the metaphor of the well, we may drop buckets and compare the water, undistracted by the architectures of well houses--ignoring cultural artifacts that are, after all, merely visible means to invisible ends.
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| Aldous Huxley |
The first and most obvious communality is that “there is a Godhead, Ground, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations.” This wording conflates religions of a “personal” God with those such as Taoism with an impersonal ground of Being, but the distinction—beyond surface traits such as naming and associated myths—is largely artificial. The Father in orthodox Christian theology is Being itself, personal only in the sense that He is given a personal pronoun and identified analogically with human mind and virtues. As an entirely unitary, timeless being beyond Being, without change or limits or division, the God of the theologians is much closer to the Tao than to the irascible Mosaic deity that wrestled Jacob.
Second, “the Ground is at once immanent and transcendent.” The Godhead is not only the source of nature, so that the devout can see creation as revelation, but the same source is latent within us. Teachers both east and west advise emptying ourselves of the distractions of ego to find pure being within. The immanent God, the holy presence in the human heart, is more central to personal devotion than the transcendent Creator or Ground of Being, even if the two are one and the same. Meister Eckhart says that nothing is “as present or as close as the mind of God” (Talks of Instruction 21), and, in The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence on his deathbed writes directly to the point: “He is within; seek him not elsewhere” (15th Letter). Albert the Great, Aquinas’s teacher and a doctor of the medieval church, wrote, “To ascend to God means to enter into oneself (On Cleaving to God, 7). Eastern religions go without saying.
Third, “it is possible for human beings to love, know, and from virtuality, to become actually identical with the divine Ground.” This explicit in Eastern religions, from the joke about the Buddhist monk who asks the hotdog vendor to make him “one with everything” to Krishna’s teaching in the Gita that the human soul (Atman) is of the same substance as the world-soul (Brahman) and that sages realize this fact. The concept is less explicit in Christianity, where knowledge of God is taught, but identity may be heretical; however, this distinction is a fine one, blurred in application and balanced on a razor’s edge. Brother Lawrence describes his soul as “firmly fixed in God, as in its centre and place of rest,” where God renders “me entirely like Himself” (2nd Letter), a state called theosis or deification in the theology of the Eastern church. Meister Eckhart describes the saint as disappearing into God like a drop of water in a vat of wine (p. 35). This sort of teaching led to Papal condemnation, but Eckhart’s orthodox defender Henry Suso writes that those who clearly see their “real essence” penetrate the “unfathomable abyss of the unknown Godhead, wherein they are immersed, overflowed, and blended up” (pp. 48-49). Mainstream theologians from Augustine to Aquinas describe less radically the beatific vision, an ecstatic face-to-face encounter with God promised after death, as the ultimate goal of faith.
The fourth part of the Minimum Working Hypothesis is that “to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.” Huxley’s term “final end” is a quotation from Thomas Aquinas concerning the Beatific Vision in his Summa Theologica. The orthodox Western tradition defines the vision so strictly that it is a postmortem reward for saints in Heaven—the “pure of heart” who will “see God” as promised in the Beatitudes—but Aquinas himself had ecstatic visions and quit writing his Summa, calling it “like straw” compared to what he had witnessed, suggesting that he may have achieved life’s “final end” while alive. As I have seen from evangelical hymns of the early 20th century, Protestant tradition often assumes the vision of God’s shining face (replacing the sun in John of Patmos’ New Jerusalem) to be a universal gift to all the saved after death—again eternal happiness and the aim of all life (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/06/death-wish-in-dixie-afterlife-in-shape_15.html). The Platonic concept that nobody can “see God” (much less become unified with Him) while in the flesh is implicitly relaxed in the Eastern church, where the gift of seeing God’s uncreated energy—part of his real being—is available by meditating on icons.
I will combine Huxley’s fifth and sixth hypotheses (he reduces them to four in his introduction to the Bhagavad Gita): that in enlightenment, “the more there is of self, the less there is of the Godhead” so it is “a way of humility and love.” The desirability of unselfishness and love seems almost Kalashnikov, a Hallmark sentiment not only across a spectrum of religions but in secular humanism and Marxism, imbedded in the negative connotations of greed and egotism. Huxley’s Way goes far beyond ordinary altruism, which may be framed as enlightened self-interest, and aims for interior selflessness, actively loving one’s neighbor as oneself—extinguishing, as the Gita says, all I or mine so that action flows from the Godhead.
This is described in many ways: as acting without desire or fear, as knowing that you do nothing, but only God within you, or as doing ordinary acts as prayers. “No barrel can hold two drinks,” Eckhart wrote. “If it is to contain wine, then the water must be poured out of it so that the barrel is quite empty. Therefore, if you wish to be filled with God and divine joy, you must first pour the creatures out of yourself” (68-69). The Mundaka Upanishad (3.2.8-9) makes the same point: “As the flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and their form, thus a wise man is freed from name and form, goes to the divine Person, who is greater than the great.”
Sources
Albert the Great. On Cleaving to God. catholicfirsts.com. Accessed February 20, 2019.
Bhagavad Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War. Translated by Barbara Stoler Miller. Bantam, 2004.
Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God. Epworth Press. c. 1940.
Campbell, Joseph. Thou Art That: Transforming a Religious Metaphor. New World Library, 2001.
Huxley, Aldous. “The Minimum Working Hypothesis.” Isherwood, pp. 33-35.
—-. Introduction. Song of God: Bhagavad Gita, pp. 11-22.
Isherwood, Christopher, editor. Vedanta for the Western World. George Allen & Unwin, 1948.
—-. “Hypothesis and Belief.” Isherwood, pp. 36-40.
Mundaka Upanishad. The Upanishads, Part II. Translated by Max Muller. sacred-texts.com. Accessed Februmary 20, 2019.
Meister Eckhart. Selected Writings. Translated by Oliver Davies. Penguin, 1994.
Richards, I. A. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford UP, 1936.
Song of God: Bhagavad Gita. Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. New American Library, 1954.
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