The Place of Nonabiding

 

One of the topics that Ajahn Chah most liked to emphasise was the principle of nonabiding. During the brief two years that I was with him in Thailand, he spoke about it many times. In various ways he tried to convey that nonabiding was the essence of the path, a basis of peace, and a doorway into the world of freedom.

The Limitations of the Conditioned Mind

During the summer of 1981, Ajahn Chah gave a very significant teaching to Ajahn Sumedho on the liberating quality of nonabiding. Ajahn Sumedho had been in England for a few years when a letter arrived from Thailand. Even though Ajahn Chah could read and write, he rarely did. In fact, he hardly wrote anything, and he never wrote letters. The message began with a note from a fellow Western monk. It said: “Well, Ajahn Sumedho, you are not going to believe this, but Luang Por decided he wanted to write you a letter, so he asked me to take his dictation.” The message from Ajahn Chah was very brief, and this is what it said: “Whenever you have feelings of love or hate for anything whatsoever, these will be your aides and partners in building pārami. The Buddha-Dharma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still. This, Sumedho, is your place of nonabiding.”

It still gives me goose bumps.

A few weeks later, Ajahn Chah had a stroke and became unable to speak, walk, or move. His verbal teaching career was over. This letter contained his final instructions. Ajahn Chah was well aware of all the tasks and difficulties involved in establishing a monastery, having done this many times himself. One would think that when he offered advice, it would be along the lines of “Do this, don’t do that, and always remember to . . .” But no, none of that; this was not Ajahn Chah’s way. He simply said, “The Buddha-Dharma is not to be found in moving forwards, nor in moving backwards, nor in standing still.”

At his monastery in Thailand, Ajahn Chah would sit on a wicker bench in the open area underneath his hut and receive visitors from ten o’clock in the morning until late at night. Every day. Sometimes until two or three in the morning.

Amongst the many ways in which he would convey the teachings, Ajahn Chah sometimes liked to test, to tease his visitors. He would put various conundrums out to them, queries or puzzles designed to frustrate and then break through the limitations of the conditioned mind. He would ask such questions as: “Is this stick long or short?” “Where did you come from and where are you going?” Or, as here, “If you can’t go forwards and you can’t go back and you can’t stand still, where do you go?” And when he’d put forth these questions, he’d have a look on his face like a cobra.

Some of the more courageous responders would try a reasonable answer:

 “Go to the side?”

 “Nope, can’t go to the side either.”

 “Up or down?”

He would keep pushing people as they struggled to come up with a “right” answer. The more creative or clever they got, the more he would make them squirm: “No, no! That’s not it.”

Ajahn Chah was trying to push his inquirers up against the limitations of the conditioned mind, in hopes of opening up a space for the unconditioned to shine through. The principle of nonabiding is exceedingly frustrating to the conceptual/thinking mind, because that mind has built up such an edifice out of “me” and “you,” out of “here” and “there,” out of “past” and “future,” and out of “this” and “that.”

As long as we conceive reality in terms of self and time, as a “me” who is someplace and can go some other place, then we are not realising that going forwards, going backwards, and standing still are all entirely dependent upon the relative truths of self, locality, and time. In terms of physical reality, there is a coming and going. But there’s also that place of transcendence where there is no coming or going. Think about it. Where can we truly go? Do we ever really go anywhere? Wherever we go we are always “here,” right? To resolve the question, “Where can you go?” we have to let go—let go of self, let go of time, let go of place. In that abandonment of self, time, and place, all questions are resolved.

Ancient Teachings on Nonabiding

This principle of nonabiding is also contained within the ancient Theravāda teachings. It wasn’t just Ajahn Chah’s personal insight or the legacy of some stray Nyingmapa lama who wandered over the mountains and fetched up in northeast Thailand 100 years ago. Right in the Pali Canon, the Buddha points directly to this. In the Udāna (the collection of “Inspired Utterances” of the Buddha), he says:

There is that sphere of being where there is no earth, no water, no fire, nor wind; no experience of infinity of space, of infinity of consciousness, of no-thingness, or even of neither-perception-nor-non-perception; here there is neither this world nor another world, neither moon nor sun; this sphere of being I call neither a coming nor a going nor a staying still, neither a dying nor a reappearance; it has no basis, no evolution, and no support: it is the end of dukkha. (UD. 8.1)

Rigpa, nondual awareness, is the direct knowing of this. It’s the quality of mind that knows, while abiding nowhere.

Another teaching from the same collection recounts the story of a wanderer named Bāhiya. He stopped the Buddha on the street in Sāvatthi and said, “Venerable Sir, you are the Samana Gotama. Your Dharma is famous throughout the land. Please teach me that I may understand the truth.”

The Buddha replied, “We’re on our almsround, Bāhiya. This is not the right time.”

“Life is uncertain, Venerable Sir. We never know when we are going to die; please teach me the Dharma.”

This dialogue repeats itself three times. Three times over, the Buddha says the same thing, and Bāhiya responds in the same way. Finally, the Buddha says, “When a Tathāgata is pressed three times, he has to answer. Listen carefully, Bāhiya, and attend to what I say:

In the seen, there is only the seen,

in the heard, there is only the heard,

in the sensed, there is only the sensed,

in the cognized, there is only the cognized.

Thus you should see that

indeed there is no thing here;

this, Bāhiya, is how you should train yourself.

Since, Bāhiya, there is for you

in the seen, only the seen,

in the heard, only the heard,

in the sensed, only the sensed,

in the cognized, only the cognized,

and you see that there is no thing here,

you will therefore see that

indeed there is no thing there.

As you see that there is no thing there,

you will see that

you are therefore located neither in the world of this,

nor in the world of that,

nor in any place

betwixt the two.This alone is the end of suffering.” (UD. 1.10)

Upon hearing these words, Bāhiya was immediately enlightened. Moments later he was killed by a runaway cow. So he was right: life is uncertain. Later Bāhiya was awarded the title of “The Disciple Who Understood the Teaching Most Quickly.”

“Where” Does Not Apply

What does it mean to say, “There is no thing there”? It is talking about the realm of the object; it implies that we recognise that “the seen is merely the seen.” That’s it. There are forms, shapes, colours, and so forth, but there is no thing there. There is no real substance, no solidity, and no self-existent reality. All there is, is the quality of experience itself. No more, no less. There is just seeing, hearing, feeling, sensing, cognizing. And the mind naming it all is also just another experience: “the space of the Dharma hall,” “Ajahn Amaro’s voice,” “here is the thought, ‘Am I understanding this?’ Now another thought, ‘Am I not understanding this?’”

There is what is seen, heard, tasted, and so on, but there is no thing-ness, no solid, independent entity that this experience refers to.

As this insight matures, not only do we realize that there is no thing “out there,” but we also realize there is no solid thing “in here,” no independent and fixed entity that is the experiencer. This is talking about the realm of the subject.

The practice of nonabiding is a process of emptying out the objective and subjective domains, truly seeing that both the object and subject are intrinsically empty. If we can see that both the subjective and objective are empty, if there’s no real “in here” or “out there,” where could the feeling of I-ness and meness and my-ness locate itself? As the Buddha said to Bāhiya, “You will not be able to find your self either in the world of this [subject] or in the world of that [object] or anywhere between the two.”

There is a similar and much lengthier exchange between the Buddha and Ānanda in the Shurangama Sutra, which is a text much referred to in the Ch’an school of the Chinese tradition. For pages and pages the Buddha asks Ānanda, in multifarious ways, if he can define exactly where his mind is. No matter how hard he tries, Ānanda cannot establish it precisely. Eventually he is forced to the conclusion that “I cannot find my mind anywhere.” But the Buddha says, “Your mind does exist, though, doesn’t it?”

Ānanda is finally drawn to the conclusion that “where” does not apply.

Aha!

This is the point that these teachings on nonabiding are trying to draw us to. The whole concept and construct of where-ness, the act of conceiving ourselves as this individual entity living at this spot in space and time, is a presumption. And it’s only by frustrating our habitual judgments in this way that we’re forced into loosening our grip.

This view of things pulls the plug, takes the props away, and, above all, shakes up our standard frames of reference. This is exactly what Ajahn Chah did with people when he asked, “If you can’t go forward and you can’t go back and you can’t stand still, where can you go?” He was pointing to the place of nonabiding: the timeless, selfless quality that is independent of location.

(...)

I first started to investigate this type of contemplation when I was on a long retreat in our monastery and doing a lot of solitary practice. It suddenly occurred to me that even though I might have let go of the feeling of self—the feeling of this and that and so on—whatever the experience of reality was, it was still “here.” There was still here-ness. For several weeks I contemplated the question, “Where is here?” Not using the question to get a verbal answer, more just to illuminate and aid the abandonment of the clinging that was present.

Recognising this kind of conditioning is half the job— recognising that, as soon as there is a here-ness, there is a subtle presence of a there-ness. Similarly, establishing a “this,” brings up a “that.” As soon as we define “inside,” up pops “outside.” It’s crucial to acknowledge such subtle feelings of grasping; it happens so fast and at so many different layers and levels.

This simple act of apprehending the experience is shining the light of wisdom onto what the heart is grasping. Once the defilements are in the spotlight, they get a little nervous and uncomfortable. Clinging operates best when we are not looking. When clinging is the focus of our awareness, it can’t function properly. In short, clinging can’t cling if there is too much wisdom around.

Still Flowing Water

Ajahn Chah would put the same “Where do you go?” question to people for a few months. As they got used to it, he would switch questions. Throughout his teaching career, he posed a number of different ones. The very last questions he came up with before his health deteriorated were in the form of a little series: “Have you ever seen still water?”

They would nod, “Yes, of course, we’ve seen still water before.” At the same time, they were probably saying inwardly, “Now that’s a pretty strange question.” But outwardly everyone was very respectful to Ajahn Chah, as he was one of Thailand’s great meditation masters.

Then he would ask, “Well then, have you ever seen flowing water?” And that also seemed a strange thing to ask. They’d respond, “Yes, we’ve seen flowing water.”

“So, did you ever see still, flowing water?” In Thai you would phrase that as nahm lai ning. “Have you ever seen nahm lai ning?”

“No. That we have never seen.”

He loved to get that bewilderment effect.

Ajahn Chah would then explain that the mind’s nature is still, yet it’s flowing. It’s flowing, yet it is still. He would use the word “citta” for the knowing mind, the mind of awareness. The citta itself is totally still. It has no movement; it is not related to all that arises and ceases. It is silent and spacious. Mind objects— sights, sounds, smell, taste, touch, thoughts, and emotions—flow through it. Problems arise because the clarity of the mind gets entangled with sense impressions. The untrained heart chases the delightful, runs away from the painful, and as a result, finds itself struggling, alienated, and miserable. By contemplating our own experience, we can make a clear distinction between the mind that knows (citta) and the sense impressions that flow through it. By refusing to get entangled with any sense impressions, we find refuge in that quality of stillness, silence, and spaciousness, which is the mind’s own nature. This policy of noninterference allows everything and is disturbed by nothing.

The natural ability to separate mind (or mind-essence, to use Dzogchen terminology) and mind objects is clearly reflected in the Pali language. There are actually two different verbs meaning “to be,” and they correspond to the conventional or conditioned, and to the unconditioned. The verb “hoti” refers to that which is conditioned and passes through time. These are the common activities and the labels of various sense impressions that we use regularly, and, for the most part, unconsciously. Everyone agrees, for example, that water is wet, the body is heavy, there are seven days in the week, and I am a man.

The second verb, “atthi,” refers to the transcendental qualities of being-ness. Being-ness, in this case, does not imply a becoming, the world of time or identity. It reflects the unconditioned, the unmanifest nature of mind. So, for example, in the passages from the Udāna about the unborn and “that sphere of being where . . . there is neither a coming nor a going nor a staying still,” the verb “atthi” is always used. It indicates a supramundane, timeless is-ness. The fact that the distinctions between the mind (citta) and mind objects are embedded in the language itself offers both a reflection on and a reminder of this basic truth.

“Who” and “What” Do Not Apply

In order to discover the place of nonabiding, we have to find a way of letting go of the conditioned, the world of becoming. We need to recognise the strong identification we have with our bodies and personalities, with all of our credentials, and with how we take it all as inarguable truth: “I am Joe Schmoe; I was born in this place; this is my age; this is what I do for a living; this is who I am.”

It seems so reasonable to think like this, and on one level, it makes total sense. But when we identify with those concepts, there is no freedom. There’s no space for awareness. But then, when we recognise how seriously and absolutely we take this identity, we open ourselves to the possibility of freedom. We taste the sense of self and feel how gritty that is and how real it seems to be. In recognising the feeling of it, we are able to know, “This is just a feeling.” The feelings of I-ness and my-ness (ahamkara and mamamkara in Pali) are as transparent as any other feelings.

When the mind is calm and steady, I like to ask myself, “Who is watching?” or “Who is aware?” or “Who is knowing this?” I also like asking, “What is knowing?” “What is aware?” “What is practicing non-meditation?” The whole point of posing questions like these is not to find answers. In fact, if you get a verbal answer, it is the wrong one. The point of asking “who” or “what” questions is to puncture our standard presumptions. In the spaciousness of the mind, the words “who” and “what” start sounding ridiculous. There is no real “who” or “what.” There is only the quality of knowing. And, as we work with this in a more and more refined way, we see that feeling of personhood become more and more transparent; its solidity falls away, and the heart is able to open and settle back further and further.

Vipassanā and Dzogchen practices are trying to outline very clearly for us how we are constantly making solid that which is inherently not solid. These methods are trying to illuminate the subtler and subtler kinds of clinging that we create around the feelings of self, time, identity, and location.

By framing our world in these ways, we are unconsciously concretising it. Questions like “Who are you?” automatically imply the reality of personhood. Answering with one’s name is a reasonable answer on the relative level. But the trouble comes in when we blindly allow the relative to slide into the absolute. We believe this name is a real thing. “I am a real person; I am Amaro.” Similarly, when we ask, “What day is it?” that question automatically implies the reality of time. If we’re not mindful, we go from acknowledging a human convention—brought about by the passage of our planet around the sun, somewhere in the middle of this particular galaxy—to creating an absolute, universal truth.

The corollary to this noncreation of solidity in the realm of perceptions and conventions—just in case we’re afraid of losing all forms of reality—is that we don’t have to create or somehow obtain the Dharma to replace the familiar basis we are losing. When we stop creating the obscurations, the Dharma is always here.

As soon as we see where the subtle and coarse forms of clinging are happening, and that stranglehold loosens—when we remind ourselves, “There it is; there’s that grip, the contraction of identity”—there’s an openness and spaciousness. That freedom of heart comes from recognising how we habitually create things and then accept them as real. When that is truly seen and known, the clenching contractedness can’t sustain itself and the Dharma manifests instead.

“When” Does Not Apply

Time is another area in which we should notice subtle clinging. We may experience resting in awareness and have an attendant sense of clarity and spaciousness, but we may also have a firm sensation that this is happening now. When we do, without noticing it, we have turned that now-ness into a solid quality.

The process of letting go happens layer by layer. As one layer falls away, we can get all excited and think, “Oh, great. I’m free now. This open space is wonderful.” But then we start to realize, “Something isn’t quite right here. There is still some stickiness in the system.” We notice the solidification of time and the limitation we have created of the present.

There’s a verse about time by the Sixth Zen Patriarch that I love to quote. It says:

In this moment there is nothing which comes to be.

 In this moment there is nothing which ceases to be.

 Thus, in this moment, there is no birth and death to be brought to an end.

 Thus, the absolute peace is this present moment.

 Although it is just this moment, there is no limit to this moment,

And herein is eternal delight.

Birth and death depend on time. Something apparently born in the past, living now, will die in the future. Once we let go of time, and if we also let go of thing-ness, we see there can be no real “thing” coming into being or dying; there is just the suchness of the present. In this way, there is no birth or death to be brought to an end.

That’s how this moment is absolutely peaceful; it is outside of time, akāliko.

We use such phrases as “this moment,” but they are not quite accurate because they still can give us an impression of the present as a small fragment of time. For even though it is just a moment, the present is limitless. In letting go of the structures of the past and future, we realize that this present is an infinite ocean, and the result of this realisation is living in the eternal, the timeless. We needn’t solidify and conceive the present in contradistinction to a past or future—it is its own self-sustaining vastness.

We’re talking here about the abandonment of clinging at a very subtle level, a practice that takes a lot of quick and careful spiritual footwork. When we see our mind getting caught up with something, we can apply the classic vipassanā technique— just hit it with impermanence, not-self, and suffering, the old one, two, three. If we have a good sense of anattā, we chop it with a “not me, not mine” and down it goes. But it is important to remember that clinging is extraordinarily wiley. There we are gloating over our success, but we don’t realize that this is a tag match that’s going on. Another character is bearing down on us from behind while we look at our knockout on the floor. The partner is about to clobber us. We just barely let go of the attachment to time when attachment to opinions starts moving fullspeed ahead. We drop that, then here-ness takes over. Then it’s the body. . . . Clinging takes shape in many, many different ways and we need to notice them all.

Oil and Water

Up until the point when Ajahn Chah met his teacher Ajahn Mun, he said he never really understood that mind and its objects existed as separate qualities, and that, because of getting the two confused and tangled up, he could never find peace. But what he had got from Ajahn Mun—in the three short days he spent with him—was the clear sense that there is the knowing mind, the poo roo, the one who knows, and then there are the objects of knowing. These are like a mirror and the images that are reflected in it. The mirror is utterly unembellished and uncorrupted by either the beauty or the ugliness of the objects appearing in it. The mirror doesn’t even get bored. Even when there is nothing reflected in it, it is utterly equanimous, serene. This was a key insight for Ajahn Chah, and it became a major theme for his practice and teaching from that time onward.

He would compare the mind and its objects to oil and water contained in the same bottle. The knowing mind is like the oil, and the sense impressions are like the water. Primarily because our minds and lives are very busy and turbulent, the oil and water get shaken up together. It thus appears that the knowing mind and its objects are all one substance. But if we let the system calm down, then the oil and the water separate out; they are essentially immiscible.

There’s the awareness, the Buddha-mind, and the impressions of thought, the sensory world, and all other patterns of consciousness. The two naturally separate out from each other; we don’t have to do a thing to make it happen. Intrinsically, they are not mixed. They will separate themselves out if we let them.

At this point, we can truly see that the mind is one thing and the mind-objects are another. We can see the true nature of mind, mind-essence, which knows experience and in which all of life happens; and we can see that that transcendent quality is devoid of relationship to individuality, space, time, and movement. All of the objects of the world—its people, our routines and mind states—appear and disappear within that space.

Small Boat, Great Mountain

Theravādan Reflections on the Natural Great Perfection

Amaro Bhikkhu

"Mediumship and Survival A Century of Investigations" - Concluding Remarks

 

With regard to the evidence for survival, I have now said, probably several times over, nearly everything that I have to say. I cannot dismiss this evidence en bloc as bad evidence, as entirely the product of fraud, misrecording, malobservation, wishful thinking, or plain chance coincidence. I can find no other decisive reasons for rejecting it. I have separately argued in connection with the phenomena of mediumship, with apparitions, and with certain cases of ostensible reincarnation, that the super-ESP hypothesis will not suffice to explain the quantity of correct and appropriate information sometimes furnished. I have further pointed out that some cases present features suggestive not just of surviving memories (the sphere in which the alternative super-ESP explanation might seem to be at its strongest) but of more positive personality characteristics – distinctive purposes, skills, capacities, habits, turns of phrase, struggles to communicate, wishes, point of view. Readers must assess these aspects of the puzzle for themselves. For myself I can only say that it seems to me that there is in each of the main areas I have considered a sprinkling of cases which rather forcefully suggest some form of survival. At least – the supposition that a recognizable fragment of the personality of a deceased person may manifest again after his death without there being some underlying causal factor common to the original manifestations and the later, aberrant ones, seems impossibly magical. And it is hard to see in what terms we could conceive this underlying causal factor except those of an individual consciousness of some degree of coherence and complexity. The hypothesis of an insentient ‘psychic factor’ seems, as I pointed out at the beginning of Chapter Fourteen, to present numerous difficulties. But in this area, and in important related areas, what we know stands in proportion to what we do not know as a bucketful does to the ocean. Certainty is not to be had, nor even a strong conviction that the area of one’s uncertainty has been narrowed to a manageable compass.

Even if one accepts that in the present state of our knowledge some sort of survival theory gives the readiest account of the observed phenomena, many issues remain undecided. In the vast majority even of favourable cases the ‘surviving’ personality which claims continuity with a formerly living, or previously incarnated, personality, is only able to demonstrate such apparent continuity on a very limited number of fronts, and may, indeed, markedly fail to demonstrate it on others. This does not, of course, mean that behind the observed manifestations there does not lie the fullest possible continuity; but equally it means that the hypothesis of complete continuity is unproven, and all sorts of possibilities remain open. Is there partial or complete survival? Sentient survival, or (far worse than mere extinction) survival with just a lingering, dim consciousness? Is there long-term survival or survival during a brief period of progressive disintegration? Is there enjoyable survival, or survival such as one would wish to avoid? Survival with a physical substrate, or disembodied survival? Survival as individual, or survival with one’s individuality for the most part dissolved in something larger? Is survival the rule, or is it just a freak? To these and many other questions I can at the moment see no very clear answers.

Many people, indeed, do not require, or perhaps wish for, clear answers. They will take the mere rejection of the super-ESP hypothesis as justifying the view that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.

Oh, easy creed

 That our beloved ones are not lost indeed

 But, somewhere far and fainter, live secure,

 While yet they plead

 With voices heard in visions live and pure,

 With touch upon the hand, that they endure,

 Only withdrawn!

For my part I think that any further decisive progress will have to wait upon the results of a great deal of further difficult and time-consuming work on a number of different fronts. By the time this work has been even partly carried out, most of us will be dead, and will thus know the answers anyway, or not know them as the case may be. And the results of the work may be to point away from the survivalist theory once again. As to this, one can at best express a tentative view as to the likely future trend of the evidence. I have given my own view. Others will estimate the situation differently.

To those hot for certainty – whether it be certainty of survival or of extinction – this answer may seem dusty enough. However it will not seem dusty to everyone. For, as I have tried to show, it is possible from a properly informed consideration of the evidence to build up a rational case for belief in some form of survival, and also a rational case against it. And a rational case, of either tendency, built on evidence, however difficult to interpret, is to be preferred to any amount of blind belief or blind disbelief. Furthermore, to persons such as myself, with an overdeveloped bump of curiosity and a liking for mysteries, what may be called a Chinese box universe – a universe made up, so to speak, of a puzzle containing another puzzle deep within it, and so on indefinitely – has much appeal. And maybe at the heart of all truth and justice lie hidden, and brought to light, will prevail. Or maybe not. But in either case the puzzles are there, and their fascination is irresistible.

What, then, of the future? How might these puzzles be further studied? I do not think that there are any short cuts to a solution, or to a dismissal of the problem. The idea of a decisive ‘test of survival’ has commended itself to many, and some public-spirited individuals have left behind them sealed packages, the contents of which they hoped to communicate after death. In only a few instances has any degree of success been reported (e.g. 110a, II, pp. 182–185; 139c); and even had successes been more frequent they might have been attributed to clairvoyance by the medium.

Recently, more sophisticated forms of test have been suggested. Thouless (159b) has proposed that persons who wish to leave a ‘test’ behind them should encipher and deposit with a reputable organization some prose passage of appropriate content. All they would need to communicate would be the keyword. A control against the possibility that mediums could crack the code by super-ESP would be obtained by having them attempt to obtain the keyword while the subject is still alive. If they fail to obtain it we must assume that it is beyond the reach of ESP. Perhaps such a project will work – a supposed Richard Hodgson communicated through Mrs Piper a ‘password’ which turned out to be the name of her own daughter enciphered in a complex manner almost certainly known to Hodgson in life (109, pp. 204n-205n). Stevenson (153a) has initiated a similar project using combination locks instead of ciphers. A positive result in such a test would obviously be of great interest and importance; but to constitute strong evidence for survival it would, I think, still need to be combined with evidence for the survival of purposes, personality characteristics, other sorts of memories, etc.

Such ‘tests of survival’ apart, it seems to me that work on the question of survival will have to proceed, piece by piece, on two broad fronts. The first would involve the slow and patient sifting and accumulation of ostensible ‘evidence for survival’ such as I have presented and discussed in this book. The second (much harder to define) would involve the sort of inquiries, factual and conceptual, which might result in our being able to build up a general framework of thought within which survival and the various categories of evidence for survival will cohere and made sense, and will cohere also with the findings of other branches of science. (On the other hand we might decisively fail to achieve such a framework of thought, and that too would be a matter of great significance.) We have (as I have tried to show) already acquired a good deal of material on the former front; but we have acquired very little on the latter. If the evidence for survival were a great deal more copious and more startling than it actually is (and it is fairly copious and sometimes quite startling) we could perhaps get by with little accumulation of material on the latter front. I can certainly imagine a state of affairs in which, as a matter of fact, no one, or no one except philosophers when actually philosophizing, would express doubts about survival. Suppose, for example, that persons ‘out of the body’ were regularly able to act as living communicators, conveyed fluent and appropriate information, etc., and could give on their ‘return’ full accounts of what had transpired, and after their own deaths continued to communicate in much the same way right up to the moment of their reincarnation as one of Stevenson’s child subjects. But such a state of affairs does not obtain. Hence, it seems to me, it has become as important to attempt to progress on the second front as on the first. We already have quite a lot of ostensible evidence for survival; we do not have a conceptual framework into which we can satisfactorily fit it.

I shall accordingly not pursue the question of what further ostensible ‘evidence for survival’ we might obtain, but shall instead move immediately to the second of the two ‘broad fronts’ on which (I argued) work on the problem of survival needs to proceed. What steps might be taken to enlarge our relevant ‘background’ knowledge in such a way that the evidence for survival comes to ‘make sense’ in an overall context which includes the findings of other sciences as well as those of parapsychology? I should expect progress on this front, if progress there is, to be slow and painful, a gradual fitting together of laboriously acquired pieces, rather than a sudden insight into their true relations. And one can set no limit beforehand upon the number of ‘pieces’ which might in the end prove relevant. In previous chapters I have suggested various kinds of parapsychological work which, it seems to me, might have relevance to this endeavour. For example:

1. Experiments directed towards obtaining mediumistic communications from living persons. Living communicators might turn out to face much the same difficulties and to get into much the same muddles, as discarnate ones; and then we might perhaps obtain some clues as to the mechanism of communication, and the tenability of what I called the theory of ‘overshadowing’, and so forth. The work might or might not cohere or combine with work on OBEs. Equally, the upshot might be to suggest that the Gordon Davis and John Ferguson cases were not freaks or frauds, and hence to strengthen the background to the super-ESP hypothesis.

2. Likewise capable of supporting the super-ESP hypothesis would be experiments with sensitives (if such could be found) resembling those studied by Osty (see Chapter Ten above). I do not think that the status of the super-ESP hypothesis can be adequately established until such experiments have been carried out utilizing modern methods of experimental design and statistical assessment, features conspicuously absent from Osty’s pioneering work.

3. Full and extensive studies of the abilities of such gifted subjects as ‘Ruth’ (see previous chapter) to generate hallucinations in themselves and sometimes, apparently in other people, might, as I pointed out, throw light on the tenability or otherwise of the theory of veridicial apparitions which I discussed in Chapter Sixteen.

4. The most urgently needed investigation in the area of spontaneous cases is, it seems to me, a detailed investigation by competent and properly equipped persons into the physical aspects of a really marked ‘haunting’. For in such cases we have, very often, localized physical disturbances that are prima facie not susceptible of an ordinary explanation; and we have also (at least sometimes) apparitions; and the problem of the relation between these two is absolutely central to all questions concerning the nature and genesis of apparitions, and ramifies into other questions. Furthermore, in some hauntings, there are certain signs of an intelligence (whose origins and nature remain to be elucidated). One might try bringing different mediums and sensitives to the spot independently of each other to see if there was any agreement in their ‘diagnoses’, and thus obtain both ‘mentar and ‘physical’ avenues of approach to the same case (cf. 97; 106; 143). From a number of such investigations, one might (with an immense and unlikely amount of luck) begin to glimpse an overall pattern within which several different kinds of ostensible survival evidence might fall into place.

However, as I remarked a moment ago, relevant discoveries are likely to come – I think will have to come – from outside parapsychology altogether. From what I said in Chapter Thirteen, it should be clear that the physiology of memory processes will constitute an area of central concern. Wider aspects of biology may come to have relevance (144). There are also many signs – which I cannot detail here – that progress in the frontier regions of physics and mathematical physics may open up new ideas for parapsychology. Recently published work on the ‘metal-bending’ phenomenon constitutes an empirai focus for these speculative ideas, but the ramification of these ideas could extend much more widely than that.

The problem that confronts survival research is not shortage of things to do, but shortage of funds, with which necessarily goes shortage of personnel. When the SPR was first founded, it had a number of very able members with private means and ample leisure. It was these persons who were primarily responsible for the immense amount of work and the significant progress that marked the first three or four decades of the Society’s existence. The situation today has radically changed. There are fewer wealthy and leisured persons, and some of the investigations that are now desirable would require sophisticated and expensive scientific equipment. Governments and grant-giving agencies have not enough funds for tackling problems in this world, and will certainly not subsidize the study of problems relating to the next. It is only if a sufficient number of interested individuals band together and contribute their money and their time that we may hope for any concerted rather than piece-meal progress to be made. There continues to be a vital role for the SPR, the ASPR, and kindred societies. The recent work of Stevenson and Osis, as well as the original labours of the SPR’s founders, have shown how much can be accomplished even by a small number of dedicated persons with moderate funds and facilities at their disposal.

Substantial parts of this book have been taken up with an attempt to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable; to reconcile, in other words, the data of modern psychology and modern neuroscience, with certain odd empirical facts that apparently suggest that human personality may at least sometimes survive bodily death. I do not for a moment pretend that I have satisfactorily harmonized these bodies of data. Each time I tie up, with fumbling fingers, a couple of loose ends, a third one slips free again. Most of the protagonists will continue to reject the opposite camp’s data without any adequate scrutiny and purely on faith – faith, that is, that because their own findings and interpretations are unshakable, or at least shakable only in inessentials, the other fellow’s findings and interpretations cannot merit serious study. It is not just, say, neuroscientists who have this attitude to the ostensible evidence for survival. Some parapsychologists (from the experimental camp) tend to take this view of the data gathered by other parapsychologists (those interested in the topics of this book). Some Spiritualists would accord a like negligent dismissal to the findings of neuroscience. I do not like this rejection of data on faith – it is at best a not very honest way of protecting oneself from the labour of having to adjust one’s opinions. A far bigger act of faith – one to which I must confess I cannot at all times rise – is to accept both sets of data, and to assume that since the universe is not in the last resort disorderly, some way of reconciling them will in the end be found.

Alan Gauld

The Buddha Is Awareness

 

Ajahn Chah’s teachings also parallel Dzogchen in regard to the nature of the Buddha. When you come right down to it, awareness is not a thing. Nevertheless, it is an attribute of the fundamental nature of mind. Ajahn Chah would refer to that awareness, that knowing nature of mind, as Buddha: “This is the true Buddha, the one who knows (poo roo).” The customary way of talking about awareness for both Ajahn Chah and other masters of the forest tradition was to use the term “Buddha” in this way—the fully aware, awake quality of our own mind. This is the Buddha.

He would say things like, “The Buddha who passed into parinibbāna 2,500 years ago is not the Buddha who is a refuge.” He liked to shock people sometimes, when he felt he needed to bring their attention to the teachings. When he said something like this, they would think they had a heretic in front of them. “How can that Buddha be a refuge? He is gone. Gone, really gone. That’s no refuge. A refuge is a safe place. So how can this great being who lived 2,500 years ago provide safety? Thinking about him can make us feel good, but that feeling is also unstable. It’s an inspiring feeling, but it is easily disturbed.”

When there is resting in the knowing, then nothing can touch the heart. It’s this resting in the knowing that makes that Buddha a refuge. That knowing nature is invulnerable, inviolable. What happens to the body, emotions, and perceptions is secondary, because that knowing is beyond the phenomenal world. So that is the true refuge. Whether we experience pleasure or pain, success or failure, praise or criticism, that knowing nature of the mind is utterly serene. It is undisturbed and incorruptible. Just as a mirror is unembellished and untainted by the images it reflects, the knowing cannot be touched by any sense perception, any thought, any emotion, any mood, any feeling. It’s of a transcendent order. The Dzogchen teachings say this too: “There is not one hair’s tip of involvement of the mind-objects in awareness, in the nature of mind itself.” That is why awareness is a refuge; awareness is the very heart of our nature.

Has Anybody Seen My Eyes?

Another parallel between Dzogchen and Ajahn Chah’s teachings comes in the form of a warning: do not look for the unconditioned, or rigpa, with the conditioned mind. In the verses of the Third Zen Patriarch it says, “To seek Mind with the discriminating mind is the greatest of all mistakes.” Ajahn Chah expressed the futility and absurdity of this tendency by giving the example of riding a horse and looking for it at the same time. We are riding along, asking, “Has anyone seen my horse? Anyone see my horse?” Everyone looks at us like we are crazy. So we ride over to the next village and ask the same thing: “Anyone seen my horse?”
Ajahn Sumedho offers a similar example. Instead of looking for a horse, he uses the image of looking for our eyes. The very organ with which we see is doing the seeing, yet we go out searching: “Has anyone seen my eyes? I can’t see my eyes anywhere. They must be around here somewhere but I can’t find them.”

We can’t see our eyes, but we can see. This means that awareness cannot be an object. But there can be awareness. Ajahn Chah and other forest masters would use the expression “being the knowing.” It is like being rigpa. In that state, there is the mind knowing its own nature, Dharma knowing its own nature. That’s all. As soon as we try to make an object of that, then a dualistic structure has been created, a subject here looking at an object there. There is resolution only when we let go of that duality and relinquish that “looking for.” Then the heart just abides in the knowing. But the habit is to think, “I’m not looking hard enough. I haven’t found them yet. My eyes must be here somewhere. After all, I can see. I need to try harder to find them.” (...)
**
Realising Cessation

Another very important aspect of the view is its resonance with the experience of cessation, nirodha. The experience of rigpa is synonymous with the experience of dukkha-nirodha, the cessation of suffering.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? We practice to end suffering, yet we get so attached to working with things in the mind that when the dukkha stops and the heart becomes spacious and empty, we can find ourselves feeling lost. We don’t know how to leave that experience alone: “Oh!—whoom—everything is open, clear, spacious . . . so now what do I do?” Our conditioning says, “I am supposed to be doing something. This isn’t what it means to be progressing on the path.” We don’t know how to be awake and yet to leave that spaciousness alone.

When that space in the mind appears, it can bewilder us or we can easily overlook it. It is as if each of us were a thief who breaks into a house, looks around, and decides, “Well, there is not much to take here so I’ll just keep going, find some other place.” We miss the realisation that when we let go, dukkha ceases. Instead, we ignore that still, open, clear quality and go looking for the next thing, and then the next and the next. We don’t, as the expression goes, “taste the nectar,” the juice of rigpa. We just zoom straight through the juice bar. It looks like there is nothing here. Everything looks kind of boring: no lust or fear or other issues to deal with. So we busy ourselves with attitudes like: “I am being irresponsible; I should have an object to concentrate on; or I should at least be contemplating impermanence; I’m not dealing with my issues. Quick, let me go and find something challenging to work with.” Out of the best of intentions, we fail to taste the juice that’s right here.

When grasping ceases, the ultimate truth appears. It’s that simple. (...)

Fear of Freedom

The Buddha said that the letting go of the sense of “I” is the supreme happiness (e.g., in UD. 2.1, and 4.1). But over the years we have become very fond of this character, haven’t we? As Ajahn Chah once said, “It is like having a dear friend whom you’ve known your whole life. You’ve been inseparable. Then the Buddha comes along and says that you and your friend have got to split up.” It’s heartbreaking. The ego is bereft. There is the feeling of diminution and loss. Then comes the sinking feeling of desperation.

To the sense of self, being is always defined in terms of being some thing. But the practice and teachings clearly emphasise undefined being, an awareness: edgeless, colourless, infinite, omnipresent—you name it. When being is undefined in this way, it seems like death to the ego. And death is the worst thing. The ego-based habits kick in with a vengeance and search for something to fill up the space. Anything will do: “Quick, give me a problem, a meditation practice (that’s legal!). Or how about some kind of memory, a hope, a responsibility I haven’t fulfilled, something to anguish over or feel guilty about, anything!”

I have experienced this many times. In that spaciousness, it is as if there’s a hungry dog at the door desperately trying to get in: “C’mon, lemme in, lemme in.” The hungry dog wants to know: “When is that guy going to pay attention to me? He’s been sitting there for hours like some goddamn Buddha. Doesn’t he know I’m hungry out here? Doesn’t he know it’s cold and wet? Doesn’t he care about me?”

“All saṅkhāras as are impermanent. All dharmas are such and empty. There is no other. . . .” [makes forlorn hungry-dog noises]. These experiences have provided some of the most revealing moments in my own spiritual practice and exploration. They contain such a rabid hungering to be. Anything will do, anything, in order just to be something: a failure, a success, a messiah, a blight upon the world, a mass murderer. “Just let me be something, please, God, Buddha, anybody.”

To which Buddha wisdom responds, “No.”

It takes incredible internal resources and strength to be able to say “no” in this way. The pathetic pleading of the ego becomes phenomenally intense, visceral. The body may shake and our legs start twitching to run. “Get me out of this place!” Perhaps our feet even begin moving to get to the door because that urge is so strong.

At this point, we are shining the light of wisdom right at the root of separate existence. That root is a tough one. It takes a lot of work to get to that root and to cut through it. So we should expect a great deal of friction and difficulty in engaging in this kind of work.

Intense anxiety does arise. Don’t be intimidated by it. Leave the urge alone. It’s normal to experience grief and strong feelings of bereavement. There’s a little being that just died here. The heart feels a wave of loss. Stay with that and let it pass through. The feeling that “something is going to be lost if I don’t follow this urge” is the deceptive message of desire. Whether it’s a subtle little flicker of restlessness or a grand declaration—“I am going to die of heartbreak if I don’t follow this!”—know them all as desire’s deceptive allure.

There is a wonderful line in a poem by Rumi where he says, “When were you ever made any the less by dying?” Let that surge of the ego be born, and let it die. Then, lo and behold, not only is the heart not diminished, it is actually more radiant, vast, and joyful than ever before. There’s spaciousness, contentment, and an infinite ease that cannot be attained through grasping or identifying with any attribute of life whatsoever. No matter how genuine the problems, the responsibilities, the passions, the experiences seem to be, we don’t have to be that. There is no identity that we have to be. Nothing whatsoever should be grasped at.

Small Boat,
Great Mountain

Theravādan Reflections on the Natural Great Perfection

Amaro Bhikkhu

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - Introduction

 

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a complex interweaving of tales narrated by a young army officer called Alphonse van Worden, who kept a diary of his experiences in the Sierra Morena in 1739, recording both the events which he witnessed and the stories he was told by the company in which he found himself. In 1769 or thereabouts, his diary was sealed by him (so the story goes) in a casket; forty years later, it was found by a French officer while out looting after the fall of the city of Saragossa. He didn’t know much Spanish, but he realized that what he had come upon was a story about brigands, ghosts, cabbalists, smugglers, gypsies, haunted gallows and no doubt much else besides. It was an intriguing mystery: intriguing enough to persuade him to keep the book in his possession, to attempt to hang on to it when he was captured and, later, to inveigle his captor into translating it for him. The same intriguing mystery awaits the reader of this translation: or rather the same complicated web of mysteries. The French officer of the foreword was careful not to spoil the story by revealing too much about it in his preface, and in this introduction I shall be just as discreet; but without giving away too much, I can suggest where the mysteries of the book are to be found.

There are in fact three enigmatic aspects to the book: its author, its composition and its contents. Its author, Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815), was a member of a very great Polish family who lived at a time of considerable literary and political turbulence throughout Europe. His life was spent in travelling, writing, political intrigue and scholarly research. He received a solid education in Geneva and Lausanne, had two spells in the army as an officer in the engineers, and spent some time on a galley as a novice Knight of Malta. He was among the first to make an ascent in a balloon (in 1790), which brought him much public acclaim; he was a tireless political activist, consorting with patriots in Poland, Jacobins in France and the court of Alexander I of Russia. He appears to have been a freemason. All this activity cannot easily be ascribed to a single set of beliefs: at certain times he applauded, at others condemned the French Revolution; he fought against the Russians yet served the Tsar, and accepted a commission to fight alongside the Austrians while declaring himself their political enemy. His travels at different periods of his life took in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, France, Holland, England, Germany, Russia, even Mongolia; he wrote lively accounts of most of these journeys, and while on them engaged in historical, linguistic and ethnographical researches. His published writings helped found the discipline of ethnology. He compounded his scholarly activity with an interest in publishing, establishing an independent press in Warsaw in 1788 and a free reading room there four years later. As well as writing and publishing scholarly works and pamphlets, he wrote a play, a set of sketches (‘parades’), and, of course, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. He married twice, and had five children; he was divorced from his second wife in 1808. There were rumours of incest. By 1812, politically disillusioned and in poor health, he had retired to his castle at Uladówka in Podolia. On 2 December or 11 December 1815 (depending on the source), he committed suicide, although whether out of political despair, mental depression or a desire to be released from a highly painful chronic condition is not clear. Many stories are told about his death. He is said to have fashioned a silver bullet himself out of the knob of his teapot (or the handle of a sugar-bowl bequeathed to him by his mother); he had it blessed by the chaplain of the castle, and then used it to blow out his brains in his library (or his bedroom), having written his own epitaph (or, according to other sources, drawn a caricature of himself). The macabre stories about his end, his equivocal political career and personal life, his polymathy and his restless wanderings all contribute to the composite picture of an Enlightenment thinker and a romantic figure par excellence, commensurate with his one great literary work.

The controversies surrounding the composition of his novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa are scarcely less dramatic than those surrounding his life. For a long time its authorship was disputed; indeed, the editor of a very recent partial translation still maintains (against conclusive evidence) that Potocki may not have written it. Its publishing history is highly complex. A set of proofs of the first ten or so days appeared in St Petersburg in 1805; this was followed by the story of Avadoro, the gypsy chief, extracted from the framework of the novel, which appeared almost certainly with Potocki’s permission in Paris in 1813; the following year saw a republication of the first ten days, linked to the story of the gypsy chief. If one looks closely at these Paris publications, it is clear that Potocki had still not completely decided in which form to publish his novel, nor whether it would please the public; his death in 1815 put an end to further flotations on the book market of the French capital. But that did not prevent his published work from being plagiarized three times in the next quarter-century, and even becoming the subject of a lawsuit.

It is not clear when Potocki conceived of his novel or when he finished it; the best informed opinion seems to suggest that he began it in the 1790s and completed it in the last year of his life. If one looks, however, at the details included in the first day, one sees that the outcome of the novel is already carefully prepared, which suggests that by 1805 Potocki knew more or less where he wanted to go. The whole text was composed in French; but in spite of assiduous researches in Polish family archives, not all of it appears to have survived in this form. About a fifth of the text is only available in a Polish translation from a lost French manuscript of the whole book, made by Edmund Chojecki in 1847. For a long time, it was hoped that a complete original version would be discovered; but in 1989 René Radrizzani cut the Gordian knot of speculations as to what and where this might be by publishing the complete story in French for the first time, having supplied a French translation of the missing parts from Chojecki’s Polish version. Radrizzani’s French edition includes all the variants relating to the different surviving manuscripts and printed versions; there are, however, only one or two (very minor) points where they are necessary for the understanding of the text, and these have been recorded in footnotes. Critical controversy still rages in France, and it is possible that a new edition by a much respected Potocki scholar may appear in the near future; but, even if it does, it is unlikely to modify much of Radrizzani’s text, although it might bring new manuscripts to bear on Chojecki’s Polish version and make different editorial choices with respect to the existing material. Like the author’s life, the text of his masterpiece leaves many questions unanswered, or unanswerable.

What is the novel about? At a simple level, it is a novel of frames; the preface, supposedly written in 1809, encapsulates the narrative of Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer about to join the Spanish army, who for two months in 1739 is diverted from his journey to Madrid, and obliged to spend this time in the company of the Muslims, cabbalists, Spanish noblemen, thieves and gypsies whose stories are recorded by him as they are told to him. These story-tellers adopt the first person not only to tell their own tales, but also to relate stories they have heard from others: at one point even, the gypsy chief Avadoro (or Pandesowna, as he is also known) tells a story within a story within a story within a story, much to the annoyance of one of the more literal-minded members of his audience. These stories are loosely linked to events in European history between about 1700 and 1740, although it is not necessary to know about the historical background to understand them. An epilogue, also written by Alphonse van Worden in about 1769, closes the novel and ties up the loose ends. All this self-conscious and often highly sophisticated story-telling may suggest that the book is demanding, even difficult to read, in the way that modern experimental fiction can be: but this is not the case. It cannot be denied that by the middle of the novel there are several different stories being related at the same time, and that their enmeshment is such that the characters in the novel themselves are made to complain about its complexity. But, this fact apart, Potocki’s novel has much in common with other epics of entertaining story-telling such as Boccaccio’s Decameron or The Thousand and One Nights, with which its first readers compared it. Like those works, each story is complete in itself, even though there is an overall design which enhances the pleasure of reading by the many coincidences, patterns and recurrent figures which help bind the whole text together.

Potocki seems at one time to have thought of his work in terms of the Gothic novel (‘à la Radcliffe’, as he said in a letter to a friend), and indeed there is no shortage of macabre, sinister, ghastly and horrific events; but it also has affinities with many other literary modes: the picaresque, in the story of Avadoro-Pandesowna’s semi-criminal youth; the adventure story, in its evocation of inexhaustible gold-mines and grand international conspiracies; the pastoral, in its disabused portrayal of court life and its celebration of the beauties of nature; the libertine novel, in its imaginative exploration of the erotic; the conte philosophique, in the dry satirical tone of much of the text and its moral, political, religious and scientific discussions; the fantastic, in its intermingling of the supernatural and the ordinary (although how much remains supernatural at the end is for the reader to decide); the Bildungsroman, in the process by which the naïve Alphonse van Worden is brought to maturity. These affinities have led critics to compare it to Don Quixote, Gil Blas, even Nathan der Weise; but as well as all of this, it is a novel of portraits, a veritable gallery of eccentrics, boors, wits, fools, pedants, philosophers, tricksters, boon companions, cowards and brave men, coquettes and (more rarely) virtuous women. Some of these portraits are just vignettes, others are extensive and profound; some add their colourful voices to the rich texture of the novel, others are no more than the objects of picturesque description.

Leitmotifs run through the work, adding to its pleasure. There are erotic encounters involving sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes four participants, some told naively, some urbanely, some with a tortured conscience; authoritarian fathers (van Worden, Velásquez, Soarez) repeatedly appear to imprint on their sons their own strange philosophies of life; characters are metamorphosed or transform themselves from Christians into Muslims or Jews, from men into women, from beautiful girls into hideous corpses. Dreadful scourges in the shape of implacable persecutors (the principino, Sedekias, Busqueros) haunt the lives of the protagonists. There is a great deal of impersonation and acting, of illusion and delusion, throughout the novel: much of this has to do with strange, convoluted, even barbaric and cruel rites of initiation, which the major characters – Alphonse van Worden, Juan Avadoro-Pandesowna, the Great Sheikh of the Gomelez – all undergo. Other, more mysterious, patterns can be traced, not only in the succession and balance of the stories, but also in the recurrent tableaux, which, as some scholars have pointed out, seem to have affinities with the tarot pack. These motifs are there to be enjoyed, whatever significance may be attached to them by critics.

Does the book have a message? Certain commentators have seen in it an answer to Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme, a sort of Enlightenment celebration of reason and toleration. Others have opted for the rationalism implicit in the younger Velásquez’s mathem-atization of the human being; yet others for the materialism to which the elder Hervas turns in despair at the end of his life. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa could be seen as a novel of social and political conservatism, or a savage indictment of the social order and of all political activity, or a plea for pragmatism and liberalism. In a certain sense, all of these apparently contradictory views are true, for different parts of the text can be used to support different theories about it. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the contrast between the heartfelt confession of Enrique de Velásquez, the proponent of selflessness, and the measured Mephistophelian speeches of Don Belial, who propounds a philosophy based on egoism. A recurrent moral theme is that of honour: various versions are explored, and all are subtly and mercilessly satirized. There is the lunatic delicacy of the Walloon officer Juan van Worden, who will fight any number of duels to satisfy a nightmare punctiliousness about aristocratic honour which is almost never shared by his reluctant adversaries; we encounter the bandit Zoto, whose scrupulous and much-praised observance of the niceties of brigandry and murder perplexes Juan’s naïve son; Pedro de Velásquez’s obsession with science and mathematics spills over into his bizarre courtship of the person known as Rebecca de Uzeda; the sanguinary fanaticism of the Gomelez family contrasts with the Uzedas’ readiness to submit to any requirements of outward observance, in a spirit akin to that of the Vicar of Bray; yet more relaxed ethical postures can be detected in such figures as the Knight of Toledo and Señora Uscariz. Do all these value systems have a single root, in the same way that the novel suggests (at certain points) that all religions spring indifferently from one source? Do they constitute the bundle of contradictions – integrity and duplicity, flesh and spirit, rigidity and suppleness, youth and maturity, indulgence and asceticism, prolixity and silence, folly and wisdom – which go to make up the human being? Could this be the hidden message of the book?

Every reader will no doubt find certain passages or aspects more significant than others. There are moments when a reader may detect a lyrical or passionate note breaking through Potocki’s characteristically witty, detached, satirical prose, which is dominated by the humane, worldly-wise, ironic voice of Avadoro-Pandesowna. On two occasions, it seems to me, his tone changes: once, towards the end of his life story, when he speaks of the loves of a young man, in which the individual figures of his mistresses merge into a composite evocation of the tenderness, excitement, adventure and pleasures of love; the other occasion, and to my mind the more telling, when he describes a specifically Spanish mode of social intercourse. The French had at this time, as is well known, the reputation for brilliant, flirtatious, urbane conversation between social equals of different sexes in the context of the salon (Carlos de Velásquez practises it in this novel); at the same time, the Spaniards were known for their taciturnity. Avadoro’s father, the implausible progenitor of the articulate figure whose narrative voice dominates the novel, scarcely utters a single word in the whole of his adult life; his granddaughter, the mysterious elfin Ondina, is almost as uncommunicative. But between these zones of silence, the gypsy chief himself revels in speech, both his own and that of others, which he relays to his motley band of listeners. This celebration of polyphony, of unfettered human intercourse, has been linked to the enlightened, tolerant exchanges of freemasonry, but Avadoro-Pandesowna offers it as a specifically Spanish experience, arising from the institution of the highway inn, which makes no distinction of class, is not bound by the stiff etiquette of Spanish polite society, brings together all sexes and ages, is unpredictable, jolly, communal; if Potocki’s novel has a message, this seems to me to be it. It is to this that Avadoro-Pandesowna gives expression in his nostalgic description of the Spanish hostelry on the twelfth day:

The beasts were at the rack in the stables and the travellers were at the other end in the kitchen, separated from the stable by two stone steps. At that time, this was the normal arrangement in nearly all Spanish inns. The whole building was but one long room of which the greater part was occupied by the mules and the lesser by the humans. But it was all the merrier for that. As the zagal (muleteer) saw to the pack animals, he kept up a steady stream of repartee with the innkeeper’s wife, who replied with all the liveliness of her sex and station until the more serious-minded innkeeper came between them and interrupted the exchanges. They soon started up again, however. The inn rang to the sound of the castanets played by the maids, who danced to the raucous singing of a goatherd. Travellers made each other’s acquaintance and invited each other to supper. Everyone gathered round the stove, said who they were, where they were going and sometimes told stories. Those were the good old days; now our inns are more comfortable, but the boisterous social life which the travellers of those days led had a charm I cannot describe to you.

Not just here, but for much of the novel, we are vicariously transported into the atmosphere of an early-eighteenth-century Spanish hostelry (or, if we abandon the fictional framework, an inn in 1780, when Potocki visited Spain), listening to the stories of men and women, some rich, some poor, some law-abiding, some criminal, some naïve, some worldly-wise; how can such a cornucopia of narratives be brought to an end? Some critics have said that the resolution of this particular novel is disappointing, but it may be that no novel of this sort can resolve the problem of an ending which must be indefinitely deferred if the entertainment is to continue: for when the voices are stilled and the party breaks up, silence, solitude, absence, even a sort of death supervenes. But for as long as the book remains open, inviting the reader into the imaginary hostelry of its pages, it can prove itself to be the most lively and entertaining of companions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

JAN POTOCKI was born in Poland in 1761 into a very great aristocratic family, which owned vast estates. He was educated in Geneva and Lausanne, served twice in the army and spent some time as a novice Knight of Malta. During his lifetime he was an indefatigable traveller and travel-writer, an Egyptologist and pioneering ethnologist, an occultist and an historian of the pre-Slavic peoples. He was a political activist and probably a freemason, although he seems to have espoused a bafflingly wide range of political causes, some of them patriotic. Among his other exploits were an ascent in a balloon over Warsaw with the aeronaut Blanchard and the provision of the first free press in that city.

Potocki was proficient in many different languages, and his extensive travels led him through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Caucasus and China. He married twice (the first marriage ending in divorce) and had five children: scandalous rumours surrounded both of his marriages. In 1812 he retired to his estates in Poland, suffering from chronic ill health, melancholia and disillusionment. He committed suicide in 1815. Although the exact details of his end are uncertain, the most credible story is that he blew his brains out with a silver bullet, which was modelled from the knob of his sugar-bowl and first blessed by the castle chaplain.

IAN MACLEAN is Reader in French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Queen’s College.

Experience and ownership

We explore the nature of mind – its fabric and its field of experience – by looking inwards and thus develop the quality of insight. As we reflect upon the nature of experience and how it works, anattā (not-self) slowly becomes a bit more understandable and meaningful. 

With perceptions – the sound of a bird chirping or the sight of a cloud floating by overhead – it is easy not to have a sense of ownership. We don’t feel that we own the song of a bird or that a certain cloud is ‘ours’. With feeling it’s usually trickier. When there’s a physical sensation in the body, like an ache or a pain, we usually experience it as ‘mine’: an ache in ‘my’ back or a pain in ‘my’ knee. Yet when that is explored, insight deepens. There can be moments of revelation, a clear knowing that the sense of ‘my-ness’ (mamaṃkara) has been added onto the bare sensation of pain arising, abiding and passing away. We see that very feeling of ownership as merely another mental impression, like a sound or a sight or a taste. 

Mental formations (thoughts and emotions), in a similar way to feeling, may seem even more personal at first: ‘my’ story, ‘my’ memories, ‘my’ ideas, ‘my’ fears, ‘my’ excitement, ‘my’ love, ‘my’ hate. As insight deepens, this is explored as well. The selfless nature of thoughts and emotions can also be revealed and experienced. Remembering our story is simply ‘remembering’; it is a mental image from the past. It too arises and passes away. Emotions then are another layer to be examined. Eventually their empty nature becomes clear as well: ‘This regret, excitement, jealousy... is just a pattern of perception, a pattern of consciousness. It arises, abides for a while, and passes away.’ It is as if we are digging down, deeper and deeper – from sensations to perceptions to thoughts, then emotions – through layer upon layer of experiences that seem more and more personal, more totally ‘who and what I am’. And when the nature of sensations, perceptions, thoughts and emotions are recognized as empty of self, awareness continues beyond into the exploration of decision-making and choosing.

Yet even if these other experiences are seen as not-self, somebody seems to be making a choice. Someone seems to be saying, ‘Go this way, don’t go that way.’ It feels like a person. It feels like an ‘I’ who decides. After all, isn’t there a ‘me’ creating karma? But we can dig deeper into that, too. What happens when a decision is being made? Is it really an ‘I’ who is doing the deciding, the choosing, the intending and the acting? What is the stuff that choosing is made of? These are questions we can ask ourselves as we explore this mind.

THE ANATOMY OF DECISION 

Let’s take a look at the process of making a decision, for example, when we’re driving to reach a destination. First, the mind is aware of arriving at a crossroads. 

Then there is a perception of possibilities – left, right or straight ahead. Next there is the memory of a plan (‘need to go south’). The memory (‘need to go south’) maps on to the perception (‘this is a crossroads’), and intelligence is engaged. The idea arises: ‘turn right to go south.’ With that thought, the hands and arms move, turning the steering wheel to the right. 

As we watch this process unfold, we can ask ourselves, ‘Who is deciding?’ We reflect, ‘Perception is not-self. Memory is not-self. Thinking is not-self. Physical action is not-self.’ So there we are, turning right at the crossroads. Someone seems to have made that decision. It certainly looks like ‘I’ am the one who chose to go right. But when the process is separated out into its constituent parts, that ‘I decided’ is only an apparent reality. Each of its elements is not-self – no ‘I’, no ‘me’, no ‘mine’ – can be found. Thus even decision-making is not-self. Right at its very core, there is no person; there is just mind, awake to the present. 

When there is a strong influence from avijjā (delusion, not seeing clearly), choices are guided by desire, craving, compulsion, fear, aversion, unconscious habits. Those apparent choices are guided by ‘me’ chasing after what ‘I’ like, or ‘me’ running away from what ‘I’ am afraid of, or ‘me’ opposing and attacking what ‘I’ don’t like, or me opinionating about the world. Such actions are reactive, acquisitive, conflicted, afflicted and lead easily to dukkha. 

With avijjā, when it is not recognized that the mind is what matters, then the world is the locus of all our hopes and is blamed for all our suffering. As Jean Paul Sartre famously wrote, through the voice of one of his characters, ‘Hell is other people,’ although I’m not sure if he meant that ironically or literally. 

The crucial relevance of this mind, and how its attitude can be changed for the better, is not recognized and the only way that any happiness can be found is taken to be by rearranging the world: by getting what we like and getting rid of what we don’t like. This is a sorry prison; no exit indeed.

But when there is vijjā (awakened awareness), choices are guided by mindfulness and wisdom (sati-paññā), attunement to the time, place and situation. There is no ‘self’ involved. If an action is taken and it works well, there is no ‘self’ to get drunk on it. And if an action doesn’t work, there is clear comprehension: ‘This road is closed. Let’s take a detour.’ There is no sting of failure. The experience is that of freedom and ease in all circumstances, ‘wide open, free as air,’ as the Buddha put it. When the mind learns to consider, choose and act based on mindfulness and wisdom rather than on self-view and blind habit, the heart is freed. It is no longer imprisoned by the traumas of longing for success, fear of failure, desperation for approval, fear of criticism. Rather, we do what we do, based on mindfulness and wisdom, and let the world make of it what it will. 

When there is success and things go well, we can enjoy it but not take it as a personal achievement, carrying it around like a big prize. There is just the sweet taste of things going well. And when things go badly and fall apart, we often learn deeply significant lessons from the experience. We can remind ourselves, there is just the bitter taste of things going badly – it’s just a taste, empty and ownerless. We don’t have to take it personally. Besides, something that might seem like a ‘success’ may lead to all kinds of trouble, while a so-called ‘failure’ may provide unique, precious and wonderful opportunities. 

In the final analysis then the nature of the subject – the feelings of ‘I’ the experiencer, ‘I’ who remembers, ‘I’ who thinks, ‘I’ who plans, ‘I’ who decides, and ‘I’ who acts – is revealed as completely empty, like a lump of foam or a water bubble or a mirage, like the layers of the onion or a conjuring trick – there is a shape but it is empty, void of substance.

Mind Is What Matters 

Ajahn Amaro 

Do Jews Think Differently?”: Aspects of Jewish Self-Glorification

“What hollow, offensive self-glorification! Here it is ‘proved’ that the nation of Kant was really educated to humanity by the Jews only, that the language of Lessing and Goethe became sensitive to beauty, spirit, and wit only through Boerne and Heine!”                 
                     
Heinrich von Treitschke, A Word About Our Jewry, 1879.

As indicated by the above quote from the nineteenth-century German historian and politician Heinrich von Treitschke, self-glorification has long been a noted feature of Jewish ethnocentrism and has frequently contributed to anti-Jewish feeling in host populations. It is almost entirely absent, however, from existing studies of anti-Semitism. Primarily, this absence can be explained by way of the fact anti-Semitism is, in the received wisdom, something that Jews are subjected to by hostile host populations for irrational reasons, rather than something that Jews have a role in causing or provoking. Jewish behavior, especially the kind of behavior involving traits that are negative or antagonistic to outgroups, is therefore remarkably neglected in Jewish historiography and social science studies concerning Jews. A secondary explanation for the neglect of Jewish self-glorification in the development of anti-Semitism, or even simply as an aspect of the Jewish identity or personality, is the scarcity of serious studies of Jewish ethnocentrism. The following essay attempts to address this gap by exploring aspects and examples of Jewish self-glorification, and puts forward the hypothesis that Jewish self-glorification should be regarded as an example of both positive and negative ethnocentrism — that it reinforces in-group loyalties and self-esteem while weakening the loyalties and self-esteem of outgroups.

Jews have a joke among themselves that goes something like this: A class of schoolchildren is asked to produce an essay about giraffes; little Tom Smith hands in a piece on the neck; little John Baker writes about its diet; others write about the tail, the environment, and so on. Then little Benny Cohen hands in his paper, and it is titled “The Giraffe and the Jews.”

The joke, little-known among non-Jews, conveys an important truism — that, for Jews, everything, no matter how distant or abstract, often comes back to the idea and feeling of being Jewish. In other words, it is a joke about Jewish ethnocentrism. That non-Jews aren’t very familiar with the joke speaks to the fact that Jewish ethnocentrism is something that is very frequently discussed and celebrated by Jews, but also something that is frequently downplayed, obscured, or even denied when queried by outgroups.  As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that there is very little objective scholarly literature that explicitly deals with the way in which Jews see and regard one another, and how they regard themselves as Jews. More generally, it has been noted that Jews are averse to being objectively studied at all, and are notoriously unresponsive to census questions, resulting in a persistent inability to accurately determine their population size in almost every Diaspora country.[1] This aversion to censuses has been explained as a cultural relic of reactive past responses to persecution, although there is a case to be made that it developed over time for more proactive, deliberate and strategic reasons, such as assisting in the avoidance of military service in the Russian Empire, and the evasion of quantitative population restrictions in Jewish residence charters issued in early modern Europe.[2]

Jewish Ethnocentrism

In addition to census avoidance, it is notable that there is a general air of hostility towards other forms of gathering data about Jews and their behavior. It is especially interesting that, while studies of Jewish ethnocentrism carried out in the last fifty years are rare, objective studies of Jews have frequently been regarded as controversial or even as examples of prejudice. The quintessential case in this regard is of course that of Kevin MacDonald, but as Sander Gilman has demonstrated in Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Jewish Superior Intelligence (1996), there have also been very negative responses to work carried out on Jewish intelligence and behaviors by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, Henry Harpending, Charles Murrary, and Richard Lynn. One could speculate that Jews are averse to objective studies of their aptitudes and behaviors because they are aware that at least some of these findings would reflect negatively on their group and provide some cause for revising the prevailing understanding of anti-Semitism and contemporary Jewish politics. Jews, it could be argued, are averse to studies of Jewish ethnocentrism because they are probably aware that such studies would reveal them to be highly ethnocentric, a fact that could prove extremely problematic if it became widespread cultural knowledge in a host population.

The small number of studies that have explicitly and directly examined Jewish ethnocentrism have unanimously concluded that Jews are a highly ethnocentric group that scores very highly in both positive (ingroup self-esteem) and negative (hostility to outgroups) ethnocentrism. Jewish children identify themselves as Jews as early as five years of age.[3] Smooha’s 1987 study of Jewish ethnocentrism in Israel, published in the Routledge journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, found it to “contain an excessive or unjustified element of superiority,” and “an unwarranted expectation of Jews to be treated preferentially.” Smooha’s findings “clearly expose ethnocentric excesses among the Jews,” and indicated that by certain metrics “virtually all Israeli Jews are racist.” It was found that while Arab ethnocentrism in Israel was “mainly reactive and transformable,” “Jewish ethnocentrism looks both genuine and intractable.”[4] In a more recent study (2003), Brown et al. examined ingroup romantic preferences among American Jewish and non-Jewish White undergraduates and found that Jews had a “significantly greater” preference for their own group, and that the stronger a respondent identified as a Jew, the stronger was the respondent’s preference for a Jewish romantic partner.[5] These respondents were also more likely to more favorably evaluate the Jewish people as a whole “on every target rating.” In short, Jewish identity is very strongly linked to positive ethnocentrism and endogamy (marrying within one’s group).

A particularly interesting aspect of the study by Brown et al. is the response to increasing rates of intermarriage among American Jews. Jewish intermarriage has been raised as evidence by some scholars objecting to analyses of Jewish ethnocentrism, most notably and recently by Nathan Cofnas.[6] However, as Brown et al. note, given more than a century of intense assimilation and acceptance by the host population and a population size of only around 3%, “an endogamy rate [among Jews] of 50% is surprisingly high.” They add that intermarriage rates are highest in those areas where the number of eligible in-group partners is very low, and point out that their study of college students indicates that ethnocentric preferences remain very strong in Jews, even the young. Cofnas has also posited that intermarriage and subsequent gene dilution should be regarded as evidence against Kevin MacDonald’s theory that Jews have acted to facilitate the continued genetic distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool in the United States. Here it is worth considering the Judaic scholar Simon Rawidowicz who coined the term “the ever-dying people” to describe the Jews. In every generation, he noted, there are concerns (real or imagined) about Jewish survival. Yet this very concern about survivability was what helped to ensure that the community would continue to live, and even thrive. In plain terms, Jews, still enjoying a “surprisingly high” rate of endogamy, can afford the collateral damage of moderate levels of intermarriage, and in some respects the panic it causes can even be beneficial in facilitating the continued genetic distinctiveness of the Jewish gene pool among the strongly-identified and highly ethnocentric core of the population.

Jewish Self-Glorification

As a highly ethnocentric population, Jews would be expected to exhibit high levels of self-esteem at group level. Individual self-esteem has been linked to both sense of ethnic identity, and to ethnic self-esteem,[7] and although direct studies of the extent and nature of Jewish self-esteem are almost non-existent one study of Jewish adolescents has indicated a strong correlation between feeling Jewish and feeling good about oneself and one’s group.[8] In fact, one 1968 study found that Jewish individuals with low personal self-esteem could boost their overall self-esteem by adopting a stronger group identity and, in a sense, drawing on the self-esteem of simply being Jewish.[9] Similarly, a 1981 study found that Jews, as a group, had higher self-esteem than both Protestants and Catholics, who were roughly equal in self-esteem.[10] A more anecdotal indicator of Jewish self-esteem at the group level is the very strong group reaction towards those Jews who are even slightly critical of Jewish identity and “being Jewish,” most obviously in the form of the obviously excessive “self-hating Jew” accusation that is often made against Jewish defectors from the self-esteem norm. It is especially interesting that scholars who oppose work on Jewish ethnocentrism are also prominent in making Jewish “self-hatred” accusations, and Sander Gilman is again notable in this regard with his Jewish Self-Hatred (1986). This policing of positive perspectives of Jews among the in-group and outgroup is an excellent example of the dual function of Jewish self-glorification, which is arguably the most flamboyant and contentious aspect of Jewish positive ethnocentrism and high Jewish self-esteem.

Self-glorification is commonly defined as the exaltation of oneself and one’s abilities, though one could add that it entails excessive or unjustified elements of superiority. Individually, high levels of self-glorification are correlated strongly with psychopathy.[11] A small number of studies have found that groups demonstrating feelings of exaggerated self-love and superiority were more prone to desires or attempts to dominate other groups.[12] It is interesting in this respect that Patai (1996) quotes Menahem Nahum, an eighteenth century rabbi as follows: “All nations, with the exception of Israel, lack understanding [intelligence], and because they lack understanding no country can forgo Jewish leadership.”[13] Jews have exhibited excessive or unjustified elements of superiority for many centuries, most evidently in the foundational texts of their religion which posit Jews as favored by a sole universal deity, destined to dominate other groups, and establish moral hierarchies in which outgroups can be treated badly. Even in the New Testament of Christians, one finds the statement that “Salvation is from the Jews (John 4:22), and Jesus is mentioned as comparing a non-Jew to a dog (Matthew 15:26).

Later, in their interactions with Western culture, Jews frequently had recourse to the exaltation of themselves and their real or imagined abilities. Patai argues that by the twentieth century such forthright confessions of supremacist thinking had evolved into a more guarded “environmentalist explanation of Jewish superiority.” These explanations follow a formulation that asserts Jewish superiority from a less aggressive stance, often accompanied by claims that Jews simply don’t have the cultural baggage of their hosts. As an example, Patai cites French Jews of the nineteenth century who claimed superiority over Frenchmen because they didn’t have the religious and cultural baggage of a Catholic upbringing. This compares remarkably well with a writer in the Times of Israel who, commenting on the activities of the Jewish politician Alan Shatter in promoting divorce and contraception in Ireland, has argued that Shatter’s Jewishness “appeared to put him at an advantage, freeing him from the baggage that weighed on his Catholic counterparts.” Similarly, David Dresser and Lester Friedman, Jewish scholars of the media, maintain the position that Jewish filmmakers have a unique, untainted objectivity because of their Jewishness. They write that “Jewish artists’ marginality allows them a vantage point denied other, more culturally absorbed, creative thinkers.”[14]

Environmentalist explanations of Jewish superiority, and therefore examples of Jewish self-glorification, are certainly alive and well in the present. On October 5th, Norman Lebrecht, the Jewish British commentator on music and cultural affairs, published a piece at The Spectator titled “Do Jews Think Differently?,” in which he argues that Jews possess “a common ancestral way of thinking” that has allowed them to “change the world as we know it.” He insists that there exists “a way of thinking that has allowed Jews to see the world from an oblique angle,” and continues “Do Jews think differently? The moment I asked that question, there could be only one answer. … Some dissenting Jew, somewhere, right now, is about to change the way the world revolves.” Lebrecht refers at length to his recently published Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947 (Simon & Schuster, 2019), in the course of which he profiles 36 Jews who he claims are responsible (in a positive sense) for modernity. Lebrecht is a strongly identified Jew who clearly has a high level of self-esteem at the group level. He also has a history of producing texts that have advanced Jewish self-glorification. For example, in a 2011 Occidental Observer review essay (of Lebrecht’s Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World), Brenton Sanderson argues that

The focus here is on alerting us to fact of Mahler’s towering genius, and how this genius was inextricably bound up with his identity as a Jew. Overlaying this, as ever, is the lachrymose vision of Mahler the saintly Jewish victim of gentile injustice. Lebrecht’s new book is another reminder of how Jewish intellectuals have used their privileged status as self-appointed gatekeepers of Western culture to advance their group interests through the way they conceptualize the respective artistic achievements of Jews and Europeans. … This betokens an acknowledgement of the importance of ethnic role models in the promotion of ethnic pride and group cohesion, and how ethnocentric Jews, like Lebrecht, have hyped the former to promote the latter. This form of Jewish intellectual activity is clearly directed at influencing ‘social categorization processes in a manner that benefits Jews.’

The unique aspect of Jewish self-glorification is not just the production of books like Lebrecht’s, but the scale and uniformity of such production, and the resulting broader cultural impact. Other groups have at times produced self-glorifying texts, for example, Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), and Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001), but these are extreme rarities, these authors have also written about unrelated subjects, and these texts do not appear to be accompanied by particularly high levels of ethnic self-esteem or associated factors of ethnocentrism in their respective ethnic groups. By contrast, Lebrecht’s book is simply part of a steady production of texts in which Jews celebrate themselves, often with extremely tendentious claims and outlandish and misplaced self-congratulation. Lebrecht’s latest text, for example, is almost a reprint of Jacques Picard’s Makers of Jewish Modernity: Thinkers, Artists, Leaders, and the World They Made (Princeton, 1998), and this in turn is part of a tradition that includes Heinrich Graetz’s 11-volume Geschichte der Juden (1853-1870), Cecil Roth’s The Jewish Contribution to Civilization (1938), Fredric Bedoire’s The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture (2004), and Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006) ( see here for an examination of how Spinoza has been a particular focus for Jewish self-glorification).

A fundamental problem with many of these texts, and a contributing factor to anti-Semitism, is that they very frequently involve Jews taking exclusive credit for accomplishments in which their role has been disputed, minor, or even entirely absent. Heinrich von Treitschke’s 1879 complaint at the opening of this essay concerned the efforts of the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz to promote the idea that Jews were due credit for the work of Kant and the literature of Lessing and Goethe. It is noteworthy that the effort to claim credit for the work of Goethe is ongoing among Jews today, most prominently in two works, Klaus Berghahn’s Goethe in German-Jewish Culture (2001) and Karin Schutjer’s Goethe and Judaism (2015). Efforts have also been made, on the flimsiest of evidence, to suggest that Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (1605), was Jewish, and as Sanderson has noted, there have been claims that Shakespeare’s works were actually written by a Jewish woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier. Jews have also attempted to demonstrate the Plato’s “dependence on Moses” (see, for a modern example, Carlos Fraenkel’s Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza).

Richard Popkin (1923–2005), a Manhattan-born Jewish academic working in the history of philosophy, was particularly notable for his efforts in Jewish self-glorification. While working on raising the profile of Spinoza via dubious methodologies, Popkin employed equally questionable methods and arguments to raise the profile of another Enlightenment-era Jew, Isaac La Peyrere. Popkin wrote: “I have tried for over a decade to make him one of the central figures in modern thought, but have not yet succeeded in completely rescuing him from obscurity.”[15] Even though La Peyrere’s accomplishments are regarded as marginal by almost every non-Jewish academic in the field, Popkin was at the forefront of efforts in the 1970s to displace Thomas Hobbes with La Peyrere as the most influential and significant critic of the idea of Mosaic authorship of the Old Testament, an attempt which ultimately failed because of a resolute scholarly consensus on the “archetypal originality” of Hobbes’ critique of religion. Popkin later turned his attention to linking La Peyrere to Spinoza, even though he admitted “no document attesting to this has been found,” and that in relation to Spinoza’s supposed use of La Peyrere’s works “one can only speculate.” Elsewhere, Popkin devoted himself to “proving” the “Jewish inheritance” of Isaac Newton, whom he wished to present as a “follower of Maimonides.”[16]

The Zionist thinker Walter Goldstein wrote in 1942, in relation to figures like Goethe, Mozart, Bach, Schiller, Lessing and Kant, that the meaning of the Diaspora was to “absorb the alien and learn from it — but to learn from it for us, for our own purpose”[17] [emphasis in original]. Trends in modern Jewish academia and culture suggest that a quite literal absorption is taking place, whereby almost every major figure of Western culture is being reinterpreted by Jews as owing much of their accomplishment to Jewish sources. Other major European figures and events that have been subjected to revisionist interpretations for Jewish self-glorification include John Milton (Jeffrey Shoulson’s 2012 Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity), Leonardo Da Vinci (Leonardo Da Vinci’s Musical Gifts and Jewish Connections, 2010), and the scientific revolution (André Neher’s 1986 Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century). Dante Alighieri is now said to have been influenced by Kabbalah (Mark Mirsky’s 2003 Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah), while Louis Pasteur’s revolutionary research on immunization is now said to have been based on the Talmud. Other figures claimed as Jews, or to have been heavily influenced by Jews and Judaism, include Pythagoras (Louis Feldman’s 1996 Jewish and Gentile in the Ancient World), Christopher Columbus, Rembrandt (Steven Nadler’s 2003 Rembrandt’s Jews), and John Locke (Yechiel Leiter’s 2018 John Locke’s Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible).

Another aspect of Jewish self-glorification is implicit in claims that certain aspects of modern society would not exist without Jews, and even that outgroups need Jews in order to survive. A good example in this regard is the blurb for Norman Lebrecht’s latest book, Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, in which it is argued: “Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy. Without Siegfried Marcus no motor car. Without Rosalind Franklin genetic science would look very different. Without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth.” These incredibly hyperbolic claims are demonstrably false from a factual point of view. The case of Siegfried Marcus is worth discussing. The earliest form of the automobile was pioneered by François de Rivaz around 1808, and the four-stroke petrol internal combustion engine that still constitutes the most prevalent form of modern automotive propulsion was in fact patented by Nikolaus Otto in the 1860s. While some have claimed that Siegfried Marcus had developed a fully functioning motor car by the 1870s, there is remarkably little evidence for this. By contrast, in 1885, Karl Benz developed a petrol or gasoline powered automobile, and this is also considered to be the first “production” vehicle as Benz made several other identical copies. In either event, it is clear that Benz was operating independently of anything Marcus was building, and that Marcus himself was dependent on technological innovations developed by non-Jews in order to pursue his project. In short, without Siegfried Marcus we would indeed have the motor car, and since the chain of modern production goes back through the Benz technological genealogy, it can be confidently asserted that we did in fact have the motor car without Siegfried Marcus.

The same pattern can be ascertained in every example given in the blurb for Lebrecht’s book, and it is particularly ironic that Lebrecht should include Landsteiner who was an excellent example of a defector from the Jewish norm of high ethnic self-esteem. Landsteiner, a convert to Catholicism, took legal action in 1937 against an American publisher who had included him in the book Who’s Who in American Jewry and was highly ambivalent about his Jewish origins. One assumes that, had he been alive today, he would have taken legal action against Lebrecht also. The inclusion of Landsteiner in Lebrecht’s book is, however, indicative of another aspect of Jewish self-glorification — a tendency to exaggerate the Jewishness of the subject so that his ‘world-changing’ achievement is held to be the natural expression of his Jewish origins and identity.

This pattern is observed even in circumstances where there is ample evidence that the subject distanced themselves from Jews and Judaism, and even held hostile attitudes towards them. The best example in this regard is Spinoza, who was exiled from the Amsterdam Jewish community and later survived an assassination attempt arranged by the same Jews. Spinoza also wrote very disparagingly of Judaism and Jews in his 1670 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in which he expressed his thoughts on Judaism. According to Spinoza, Judaism “commands the hatred of the enemy,” and is “carnal and particularistic.”[18] Spinoza argued that Mosaic Law was “merely national,” and was “a particularistic and tribal law that serves no other end than the earthly or political felicity of the Jewish nation.” Claims that Judaism was a universal religion were seen as nonsense by Spinoza, who saw in the God of Israel only “a tribal God who is not the God of all mankind.” He stated that, in relation to the Jews “it is the hatred of the Nations that above all keeps them in existence as a people.”[19] Such statements and contexts haven’t prevented Spinoza from being adopted by an extraordinary Jewish academic cottage industry as the quintessential Jewish genius who saved outgroups and ushered in modernity with his putative Jewish brilliance.[20]

A further aspect of Jewish self-glorification is the promotion or exaggeration of Jewish figures whose accomplishments would ordinarily (without Jewish self-glorification efforts) be regarded as moderate to mediocre. Lebrecht’s book is again a useful example because he cites figures like Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust as world-changing. While these authors produced works that are unquestionably unique and, if nothing else, interesting, their status as world-changing is hyperbolic by any objective standards. The works of both authors, which equally orbit the same themes of neuroticism and paranoia, did not resonate in the mass cultural consciousness in the same way that some of their non-Jewish literary contemporaries did (Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Eliot, and Yeats to name just a few). And, in any event, there are questions as to why novelists (especially those of long-winded niche texts like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) should be considered world-changing at all, especially in a century that saw multiple major wars, massive innovations against disease, and the development of the television and aircraft. Lebrecht’s focus on Jews is instead highly revealing of a certain type of Jewish perspective prominent in strongly identified Jews exhibiting high levels of ethnocentrism and ethnic self-esteem. From the perspective of these extraordinarily ethnocentric individuals, only Jews matter — regardless of the meaning or meaninglessness of their work or achievement. Perhaps the quintessential example in this regard is the reception by Jews of the Jewish Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. Sanderson (2011) comments:

For critics like [Klaus] Ottmann, Rothko’s genius is indisputable and he possessed an “extraordinary talent” that enabled him to transfer his metaphysical “impulses to the canvas with a power and magnetism that stuns viewers of his work. … In fact Rothko’s skill in achieving this result — whether intentional or not — perhaps explains why he was once called “the melancholic rabbi.” For prominent Jewish art historian Simon Schama, Rothko’s “big vertical canvasses of contrasting bars of colour, panels of colour stacked up on top of each other” qualify Rothko as “a maker of paintings as powerful and complicated as anything by his two gods — Rembrandt and Turner.” For the ethnocentric Schama “these [Rothko’s] paintings are equivalent of these old masters … Can art ever be more complete, more powerful? I don’t think so.”

In trying to explain these aspects of Jewish self-glorification, one can’t escape the possibility that the most ethnocentric strata of Jews have indeed retained the same perspective of Menahem Nahum, the eighteenth-century rabbi who insisted that all nations, with the exception of Jews, lack “understanding” and that no country can forgo Jewish leadership. It is likely that the level of ethnic self-esteem in such individuals is so high that they, in some sense, simply find it inconceivable that outgroups could succeed, let alone outperform Jews. Such a perspective would certainly go some way to explaining what appears to be an obsessive search for the often-imagined Jewish origins of leading Western figures and their accomplishments, and an equally obsessive search for Jewish figures who can be successfully boosted in the popular consciousness of outgroups, and positioned as lightning rods for Jewish ethnic pride.

Adaptive Qualities of Contemporary Jewish Self-Glorification

There are a number of features of Jewish self-glorification that could be regarded as highly adaptive in the contemporary social and cultural environment. Most obviously, by creating and sustaining an environment in which the in-group is seen as uniquely gifted and tasked with a world-historical mission, Jews promote high levels of ethnic cohesion and discourage defection. The most remarkable example of this dynamic at play can be found during the Middle Ages when some Jews opted for suicide over conversion to Christianity. The argument could be made that, for those choosing suicide, it was psychologically easier to die as a member of a gifted chosen people than to defect to a status that, in elements of Jewish theology, was less than human.

High self-esteem is also very strongly correlated with the General Factor of Personality (GFP), which in turn is associated with high degrees of social success and effectiveness.[21] In essence, by promoting high levels of in-group self-esteem, Jews make themselves more effective as individuals in acquiring, and helping to expand, positions of social, economic, and political influence for the broader group. In short, high self-esteem produces better and more effective activists. The generally higher level of self-esteem found among Jews, when compared to Catholics and Protestants[22], would indeed suggest an elevated GFP and social effectiveness in general. It could also be reasonably posited that feelings of high ethnic self-esteem would provide encouragement and justification for psychological aggression and various forms of activism against outgroups, assumed to be intellectually or morally wrong in issues of inter-ethnic dispute, and this aggression could extend to attempts at cultural and political domination. An interesting case study in this respect is the Jewish New Left of the 1960s and their self-concept as engaging in “heroic action” against outgroup norms. Both Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin quite literally used superhero allegories to describe themselves and their activities, with Rubin comparing himself to the Lone Ranger and Hoffman claiming “I’m just the guy who flies around in a cape and has the hots for Lois Lane.”[23] In such cases, highly narcissistic Jews act aggressively in the cultures of outgroups at least partly, or ostensibly, in the belief that Jewish heroic “assistance” is required for the outgroup’s own good — with the outgroup patronizingly seen as incapable or unready to even understand what that “good” is. Some degree of self-deception among Jews would be required in such cases, and this is discussed further by the present writer elsewhere.

A further adaptive quality of contemporary Jewish self-glorification is that there is always a possibility that outgroups, in whole or in part, might be convinced by the cultural atmosphere of Jewish self-glorification, accept it as truth, and willingly submit themselves to Jewish leadership. This can occur on an individual level, in which outgroup members are so accustomed to believing that Jews are uniquely talented or gifted that they are more prone to following certain Jewish ‘guru’ figures, or it can occur on a more broad ethnic basis in which Jews in general are regarded as a special people by outgroups. In the former case, there are certainly no shortage of examples of Jews of moderate significance gaining very widespread followings and acclaim from outgroup members, with all the allusions to “Jewish genius” one might expect from such a scenario. In the latter case, Jews have long held a privileged status as victims and gurus on the Left (though this is now waning), and Jews and Israel continue to hold Christian Zionists and aspects of the European Right in thrall, and are indeed regarded by many as “the apple of God’s eye.” Examples of non-religious ethnic Europeans producing texts glorifying Jews include Paul Johnson’s 1987 A History of the Jews and Thomas Cahill’s 1998 panegyric The Gifts of the Jews.

Yet another adaptive quality of Jewish self-glorification, and related to the one above, is that it can act to simultaneously reduce ethnic pride among outgroups and elevate Jewish prestige. If highly ethnocentric Jews can successfully disseminate the falsehood that the outgroup’s accomplishments are in fact Jewish accomplishments, then there will be a clear diminishment in the level of ethnic self-esteem in the outgroup. A similar effect can be accomplished by culturally “spamming” the outgroup with discussions of Jewish genius and exceptionalism, and these can be exacerbated further by combining such efforts with cultural “spamming” depicting Jews as the blameless victims of irrational violence perpetrated by the same outgroup. In this case, the Jews become intellectual and moral heroes, boosting in-group self-esteem, while the outgroup is paralyzed by a twin sense of inferiority and guilt.

The converse, of course, is that Jews have been prominent in promoting White guilt—in effect glorifying their own past while vilifying the people and culture of the West. Mainstream media messages promoting White guilt are ubiquitous, and Jewish involvement with the media and projects such as “Whiteness Studies” is notorious.

Maladaptive Qualities of Jewish Self-Glorification

The most obvious maladaptive quality of Jewish self-glorification is its potential to provoke anti-Semitism, as seen in the quote opening this essay. It is especially interesting that the rise of modern forms of anti-Semitism coincided with the rise of European nationalisms, which could in some sense be regarded as a form of political activity designed to raise ethnic self-esteem. Jewish attempts to assert cultural superiority over the highly-accomplished and pride-filled Germans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appear to have been an especially volatile source of ethnic friction.

Jewish self-glorification is also something that needs to be carefully expressed, and even highly ethnocentric Jews appear to be aware of safe limits to the expression of their ethnic pride. For example, Cecil Roth in his The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation wrote:

The Jew is distinguished, perhaps, by a slightly greater degree of intellectualisation, possibly by a freshness of outlook, natural in one whose approach tends to be external; and, in consequence, by a faculty for synthesis and for introducing new ideas. He is apt to show, in fact, certain characteristics inevitable in persons who belong, through the circumstances of their history, to a single sociological group. To say more is hazardous. [emphasis added]

Not only is Roth’s comment an excellent example of an environmentalist explanation of Jewish superiority, but his caution is also extremely noteworthy. Jewish self-glorification can be hazardous because the very point of contending for credit for a particular invention/accomplishment is a potential point of ethnic conflict. Additionally, Jewish self-glorification takes the risk of publicly posturing Jews as a group, a position that is normally avoided and downplayed by Jews in almost every other cultural scenario. Jews must also exercise caution in what exactly the claim credit for. Claiming Karl Marx, for example, despite his baptism and some anti-Semitic remarks, is an endeavor not without risk, and the same can be said for texts like Neal Gabler’s 1998 An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Jewish claims of responsibility for creating “modernity” and the “modern world” also assume a level of cultural consensus that these are in fact good things worth taking the credit for. One imagines that if a cultural consensus was reached that “modernity” was bad, or negative for Europeans, texts like Norman Lebrecht’s latest book would quietly disappear.

Most catastrophically, Jewish self-glorification efforts can potentially be identified for what they truly are, with these efforts failing and then in fact coming to reflect badly on Jews. Writing in the 1970s, Dutch Spinoza expert, Hubertus G. Hubbeling, expressed awareness of the fundamental and longstanding difference between Jews and non-Jews in interpretations of Spinoza’s importance. Hubbeling, with barely concealed irritation at the specifically Jewish character of the effort to exaggerate Spinoza’s significance, wrote towards the end of his Spinoza’s Methodology that:

there are some Jewish writers who emphasize very strongly the importance of Spinoza’s contribution to the development of democratic ideas. Joseph Dunner, for example, places him above Locke in this respect. L. Feuer makes of Spinoza the first democratic political philosopher: ‘The political philosophy of Spinoza is the first statement in history of the standpoint of democratic liberalism’ … According to the opinion of the present writer Spinoza’s importance is exaggerated here.[24] [emphasis added]

If the full implications and impact of Jewish self-glorification became common knowledge, fuelling anti-Semitism, it would clearly have a deleterious effect on the Jewish position in Western culture and society.

Conclusion

Although Jewish self-glorification is almost entirely absent from existing studies of anti-Semitism, it has played an important role in generating inter-ethnic friction over historical time. Jewish self-glorification, which continues to thrive both in Israel and the Diaspora, should be regarded as an extreme example of both positive and negative ethnocentrism — that it reinforces Jewish in-group loyalties and self-esteem while weakening the loyalties and self-esteem of outgroups. At time of this writing, Jewish self-glorification is highly adaptive for Jews who occupy a position of cultural prestige in almost all sections of Western culture and society, and who use self-glorification to secure this prestige and expand it further. Jewish self-glorification has been highly successful in boosting Jewish activism against outgroups, and together with victimhood narratives, which are themselves a form of historical glorification, have succeeded in paralyzing European outgroups with a twin sense of inferiority and guilt. Attempts to further lower European ethnic pride, through accusations of putative historical evils or by co-opting, relativizing, or universalizing their ethnic achievements will continue to be a key point of inter-ethnic conflict between Europeans and Jews. A crucial task for those interested in improving the prospects of the European peoples will therefore rest to some extent in finding ways to elevate group pride and creating a cultural consensus to diminish that of the Jews.

[1] Saxe, L. et al. “Measuring the Size and Characteristics of American Jewry: A New Paradigm to Understand an Ancient People,” in Rehbun, U (ed) The Social Scientific Study of Jewry. Sources, Approaches, Debates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 37-8.

[2] See, for example, the Charter Decreed for the Jews of Prussia (April 17, 1750) by Frederick II, which outlined the number of Jews, by occupation, permitted to reside in Berlin.

[3] Hartley, E. L., Rosenbaum, M., & Schwartz, S. (1948). Children’s Perceptions of Ethnic Group Membership. The Journal of Psychology, 26(2), 387—397.

[4] Smooha, S. (1987). Jewish and Arab ethnocentrism in Israel. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 10(1), 1—26.

[5] Brown, L. M., McNatt, P. S., & Cooper, G. D. (2003). Ingroup romantic preferences among Jewish and non-Jewish White undergraduates. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 27(3), 335—354.

[6] Cofnas, N. (2018). Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy. Human Nature, 29(2), 134—156, (153).

[7] Rosenberg, M. (1989) Society and the adolescent self-image (Rev. ed), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[8] Markstrom, C. A., Berman, R. C., & Brusch, G. (1998). An Exploratory Examination of Identity Formation among Jewish Adolescents According to Context. Journal of Adolescent Research, 13(2), 202—222.

[9] Rutchik, A. (1968). Self‐Esteem and Jewish Identification. Jewish Education, 38(2), 40—46.

[10] Rovner, R. A. (1981). Ethno-Cultural Identity and Self-Esteem: A Reapplication of Self-Attitude Formation Theories. Human Relations, 34(5), 427—434.

[11] Hofer, P. (1989). The Role of Manipulation in the Antisocial Personality. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 33(2), 91—101.

[12] De Keersmaecker, J., Onraet, E., Lepouttre, N., & Roets, A. (2017). The opposite effects of actual and self-perceived intelligence on racial prejudice. Personality and Individual Differences, 112, 136—138.

[13] Patai, R. (1996) The Jewish Mind Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 324.

[14] Dresser, D and Friedman, L. (2004) American Jewish Filmmakers University of Illinois, 7.

[15] Popkin, R.H. (1978) ‘Spinoza and La Peyrere’ in R. Shahan and J. Biro, Spinoza: New Perspectives Norman, Oklahoma.

[16] Popkin, R.H. (1990) Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton’s Theology Boston: Kluwer.

[17] Quoted in Biemann, A (2012) Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme Stanford, California.

[18] Strauss, L. (1965) Spinoza’s Critique of Religion New York, 18.

[19] Donagan, A. (1988) Spinoza New York, 9.

[20] See, for example, Harry Wolfson’s two-volume The Philosophy of Spinoza, Joseph Dunner’s Baruch Spinoza and Western Democracy, Lewis Feuer’s Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, Leon Roth’s Spinoza, Descartes, and Maimonides, the many works of Richard Popkin, Margaret Jacob’s The Radical Enlightenment, Marjorie Glicksman Grene’s Spinoza and the Sciences, Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life and his Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind, Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650—1750, Michael Mack’s Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud, Steven Nadler’s A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age, and Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

[21] Erdle, S., Irwing, P., Rushton, J. P., & Park, J. (2010). The General Factor of Personality and its relation to Self-Esteem in 628,640 Internet respondents. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(3), 343—346.

[22] Rovner, R. A. (1981). Ethno-Cultural Identity and Self-Esteem: A Reapplication of Self-Attitude Formation Theories. Human Relations, 34(5), 427—434

[23] Jezer, M. (1993) Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel Rutgers University Press.

[24] Hubbeling, H.G. (1964) Spinoza’s Methodology Royal Van Gorcum, Netherlands.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/