Mahāsīhanāda Sutta - The Greater Discourse on the Lion’s Roar

 Attached to The Buddha on himself ...

MN12 

1. THUS HAVE I HEARD. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Vesālī in the grove outside the city to the west.

2. Now on that occasion Sunakkhatta, son of the Licchavis, had recently left this Dhamma and Discipline. He was making this statement before the Vesālī assembly: “The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him, and when he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.” 

3.Then, when it was morning, the venerable Sāriputta dressed, and taking his bowl and outer robe, went into Vesālī for alms. Then he heard Sunakkhatta, son of the Licchavis, making this statement before the Vesālī assembly. When he had wandered for alms in Vesālī and had returned from his almsround, after his meal he went to the Blessed One, and after paying homage to him, he sat down at one side and told the Blessed One what Sunakkhatta was saying.

4. [The Blessed One said:] “Sāriputta, the misguided man Sunakkhatta is angry and his words are spoken out of anger. Thinking to discredit the Tathāgata, he actually praises him; [69] for it is praise of the Tathāgata to say of him: ‘When he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.’

5. “Sāriputta, this misguided man Sunakkhatta will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One is accomplished, fully enlightened, perfect in true knowledge and conduct, sublime, knower of worlds, incomparable leader of persons to be tamed, teacher of gods and humans, enlightened, blessed.’ 

6. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One enjoys the various kinds of supernormal power: having been one, he becomes many; having been many, he becomes one; he appears and vanishes; he goes unhindered through a wall, through an enclosure, through a mountain, as though through space; he dives in and out of the earth as though it were water; he walks on water without sinking as though it were earth; seated cross-legged, he travels in space like a bird; with his hand he touches and strokes the moon and sun so powerful and mighty; he wields bodily mastery even as far as the Brahma-world.’

7. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘With the divine ear element, which is purified and surpasses the human, that Blessed One hears both kinds of sounds, the heavenly and the human, those that are far as well as near.’

8. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One encompasses with his own mind the minds of other beings, other persons. He understands a mind affected by lust as affected by lust and a mind unaffected by lust as unaffected by lust; he understands a mind affected by hate as affected by hate and a mind unaffected by hate as unaffected by hate; he understands a mind affected by delusion as affected by delusion and a mind unaffected by delusion as unaffected by delusion; he understands a contracted mind as contracted and a distracted mind as distracted; he understands an exalted mind as exalted and an unexalted mind as unexalted; he understands a surpassed mind as surpassed and an unsurpassed mind as unsurpassed; he understands a concentrated mind as concentrated and an unconcentrated mind as unconcentrated; he understands a liberated mind as liberated and an unliberated mind as unliberated.’

 (TEN POWERS OF A TATHĀGATA)

9. “Sāriputta, the Tathāgata has these ten Tathāgata’s powers, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.181 What are the ten?

10. (1) “Here, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the possible as possible and the impossible as impossible. And that is a Tathāgata’s power that the Tathāgata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

11. (2) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the results of actions undertaken, past, future, and present, by way of possibilities and causes. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...18312. 

12. (3) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the ways leading to all destinations. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...18413.

13. (4) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the world with its many and different elements. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...

14. (5) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is how beings have different inclinations. That too is a Tathāgata’s power.... 

15. (6) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the disposition of the faculties of other beings, other persons. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...

16. (7) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the defilement, the cleansing, and the emergence in regard to the jhānas, liberations, concentrations, and attainments. That too is a Tathāgata’s power... 

17. (8) “Again, the Tathāgata recollects his manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births...(as Sutta 4, §27)...Thus with their aspects and particulars he recollects his manifold past lives. That too is a Tathāgata’s power…

18. (9) “Again, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, the Tathāgata sees beings passing away and reappearing, inferior and superior, fair and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate...(as Sutta 4, §29) …and he understands how beings pass on according to their actions. That too is a Tathāgata’s power…

19. (10) “Again, by realising for himself with direct knowledge, the Tathāgata here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints. That too is a Tathāgata’s power that the Tathāgata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

20. “The Tathāgata has these ten Tathāgata’s powers, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

21. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. Just as a bhikkhu possessed of virtue, concentration, and wisdom would here and now enjoy final knowledge, so it will happen in this case, I say, that unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. 

(FOUR KINDS OF INTREPIDITY)

22. “Sāriputta, the Tathāgata has these four kinds of intrepidity, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā. What are the four?

23. “Here, I see no ground on which any recluse or brahmin or god or Māra or Brahmā or anyone else at all in the world could, in accordance with the Dhamma, accuse me thus: ‘While you claim to be fully enlightened, you are not fully enlightened about these things.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

24. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘While you claim to be one who has destroyed the taints, you have not destroyed these taints.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

25. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘Those things called obstructions by you are not able to obstruct one who engages in them.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

26. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘When you teach the Dhamma to someone, it does not lead him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

27. “A Tathāgata has these four kinds of intrepidity, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

28. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell. 

(THE EIGHT ASSEMBLIES)

29. “Sāriputta, there are these eight assemblies. What are the eight? An assembly of nobles, an assembly of brahmins, an assembly of householders, an assembly of recluses, an assembly of gods of the heaven of the Four Great Kings, an assembly of gods of the heaven of the Thirty-three, an assembly of Māra’s retinue, an assembly of Brahmās. Possessing these four kinds of intrepidity, the Tathāgata approaches and enters these eight assemblies.

30. “I recall having approached many hundred assemblies of nobles…many hundred assemblies of brahmins…many hundred assemblies of householders…many hundred assemblies of recluses…many hundred assemblies of gods of the heaven of the Four Great Kings…many hundred assemblies of gods of the heaven of the Thirty-three…many hundred assemblies of Māra’s retinue…many hundred assemblies of Brahmās. And formerly I had sat with them there and talked with them and held conversations with them, yet I see no ground for thinking that fear or timidity might come upon me there. And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity. [73]31. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell.

 (FOUR KINDS OF GENERATION)

32. “Sāriputta, there are these four kinds of generation. What are the four? Egg-born generation, womb-born generation, moisture-born generation, and spontaneous generation.

33. “What is egg-born generation? There are these beings born by breaking out of the shell of an egg; this is called egg-born generation. What is womb-born generation? There are these beings born by breaking out from the caul; this is called womb-born generation. What is moisture-born generation? There are these beings born in a rotten fish, in a rotten corpse, in rotten porridge, in a cesspit, or in a sewer; this is called moisture-born generation. What is spontaneous generation? There are gods and denizens of hell and certain human beings and some beings in the lower worlds; this is called spontaneous generation. These are the four kinds of generation.

34. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell. 

(THE FIVE DESTINATIONS AND NIBBĀNA)

35. “Sāriputta, there are these five destinations. What are the five? Hell, the animal realm, the realm of ghosts, human beings, and gods.

 (1) “I understand hell, and the path and way leading to hell. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell.

(2) “I understand the animal realm, and the path and way leading to the animal realm. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in the animal realm.

(3) “I understand the realm of ghosts, and the path and way leading to the realm of ghosts. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in the realm of ghosts.

(4) “I understand human beings, and the path and way leading to the human world. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear among human beings.

(5) “I understand the gods, and the path and way leading to the world of the gods. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in a happy destination, in the heavenly world.

(6) “I understand Nibbāna, and the path and way leading to Nibbāna.  And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, by realising for himself with direct knowledge, here and now enter upon and abide in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.

37. (1) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell.’ And then later on, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I see that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he has reappeared in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell, and is experiencing exclusively painful, racking, piercing feelings. Suppose there were a charcoal pit deeper than a man’s height full of glowing coals without flame or smoke; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same charcoal pit. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path, that he will come to this same charcoal pit’; and then later on he sees that he has fallen into that charcoal pit and is experiencing exclusively painful, racking, piercing feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…piercing feelings.

38. (2) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in the animal realm.’ And then later on, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I see that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he has reappeared in the animal realm and is experiencing painful, racking, piercing feelings. Suppose there were a cesspit deeper than a man’s height full of filth; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same cesspit. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same cesspit’; and then later on he sees that he has fallen into that cesspit and is experiencing painful, racking, piercing feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…piercing feelings.

39. (3) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in the realm of ghosts.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared in the realm of ghosts and is experiencing much painful feeling. Suppose there were a tree growing on uneven ground with scanty foliage casting a dappled shadow; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same tree. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves… that he will come to this same tree’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in the shade of that tree experiencing much painful feeling. So too, by encompassing mind with mind …much painful feeling.

40. (4) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear among human beings.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared among human beings and is experiencing much pleasant feeling. Suppose there were a tree growing on even ground with thick foliage casting a deep shade; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same tree. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same tree’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in the shade of that tree experiencing much pleasant feeling. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…much pleasant feeling. 

41. (5) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in a happy destination, in the heavenly world.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared in a happy destination, in the heavenly world, and is experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. Suppose there were a mansion, and it had an upper chamber plastered within and without, shut off, secured by bars, with shuttered windows, and in it there was a couch spread with rugs, blankets, and sheets, with a deer-skin coverlet, with a canopy as well as crimson pillows for both [head and feet]; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same mansion. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same mansion’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in that upper chamber in that mansion experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…exclusively pleasant feelings.

42. (6) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that by realising for himself with direct knowledge, he here and now will enter upon and abide in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.’ And then later on I see that by realising for himself with direct knowledge, he here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints, and is experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. Suppose there were a pond with clean, agreeable, cool water, transparent, with smooth banks, delightful, and nearby a dense wood; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only towards that same pond. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same pond’; and then later on he sees that he has plunged into the pond, bathed, drunk, and relieved all his distress, fatigue, and fever and has come out again and is sitting or lying in the wood [77] experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…exclusively pleasant feelings. These are the five destinations.

43. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. Just as a bhikkhu possessed of virtue, concentration, and wisdom would here and now enjoy final knowledge, so it will happen in this case, I say, that unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. 

(THE BODHISATTA’S AUSTERITIES)

44. “Sāriputta, I recall having lived a holy life possessing four factors. I have been an ascetic—a supreme ascetic; I have been coarse—supremely coarse; I have been scrupulous—supremely scrupulous; I have been secluded—supremely secluded.

45. “Such was my asceticism, Sāriputta, that I went naked, rejecting conventions, licking my hands, not coming when asked, not stopping when asked; I did not accept food brought or food specially made or an invitation to a meal; I received nothing from a pot, from a bowl, across a threshold, across a stick, across a pestle, from two eating together, from a pregnant woman, from a woman giving suck, from a woman in the midst of men, from where food was advertised to be distributed, from where a dog was waiting, from where flies were buzzing; I accepted no fish or meat, I drank no liquor, wine, or fermented brew. I kept to one house, to one morsel; I kept to two houses, to two morsels;…I kept to seven houses, to seven morsels. I lived on one saucerful a day, on two saucerfuls a day…on seven saucerfuls a day; I took food once a day, once every two days…once every seven days; thus even up to once every fortnight, I dwelt pursuing the practice of taking food at stated intervals. I was an eater of greens or millet or wild rice or hide-parings or moss or ricebran or rice-scum or sesamum flour or grass or cowdung. I lived on forest roots and fruits; I fed on fallen fruits. I clothed myself in hemp, in hemp-mixed cloth, in shrouds, in refuse rags, in tree bark, in antelope hide, in strips of antelope hide, in kusagrass fabric, in bark fabric, in wood-shavings fabric, in head-hair wool, in animal wool, in owls’ wings. I was one who pulled out hair and beard, pursuing the practice of pulling out hair and beard. I was one who stood continuously, rejecting seats. I was one who squatted continuously, devoted to maintaining the squatting position. I was one who used a mattress of spikes; I made a mattress of spikes my bed. I dwelt pursuing the practice of bathing in water three times daily including the evening. Thus in such a variety of ways I dwelt pursuing the practice of tormenting and mortifying the body. Such was my asceticism.

46. “Such was my coarseness, Sāriputta, that just as the bole of a tindukā tree, accumulating over the years, cakes and flakes off, so too, dust and dirt, accumulating over the years, caked off my body and flaked off. It never occurred to me: ‘Oh, let me rub this dust and dirt off with my hand, or let another rub this dust and dirt off with his hand’—it never occurred to me thus. Such was my coarseness.47. “Such was my scrupulousness, Sāriputta, that I was always mindful in stepping forwards and stepping backwards. I was full of pity even in regard to a drop of water thus: ‘Let me not hurt the tiny creatures in the crevices of the ground.’ Such was my scrupulousness.

48. “Such was my seclusion, Sāriputta, that I would plunge into some forest and dwell there. And when I saw a cowherd or a shepherd or someone gathering grass or sticks, or a woodsman, I would flee from grove to grove, from thicket to thicket, from hollow to hollow, from hillock to hillock. Why was that? So that they should not see me or I see them. Just as a forest-bred deer, on seeing human beings, flees from grove to grove, from thicket to thicket, from hollow to hollow, from hillock to hillock, so too, when I saw a cowherd or a shepherd…Such was my seclusion.

49. “I would go on all fours to the cow-pens when the cattle had gone out and the cowherd had left them, and I would feed on the dung of the young suckling calves. As long as my own excrement and urine lasted, I fed on my own excrement and urine. Such was my great practice of feeding on filth.

50. “I would plunge into some awe-inspiring grove and dwell there—a grove so awe-inspiring that it would make most of a man’s hairs stand up if he were not freed from lust. When those cold wintry nights came during the ‘eight-days period of snowfall, ’ I would dwell by night in the open and by day in the grove.194 In the last month of the hot season I would dwell by day in the open and by night in the grove. And there came to me spontaneously this stanza never heard before:

‘Chilled by night and scorched by day, 

Alone in awe-inspiring groves, 

Naked, no fire to sit beside, 

The sage yet pursues his quest.’ 

51. “I would make my bed in a charnel ground with the bones of the dead for a pillow. And cowherd boys came up and spat on me, urinated on me, threw dirt at me, and poked sticks into my ears. Yet I do not recall that I ever aroused an evil mind [of hate] against them. Such was my abiding in equanimity. 

52. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through food.’ They say: ‘Let us live on kola-fruits,’ and they eat kola-fruits, they eat kola-fruit powder, they drink kola-fruit water, and they make many kinds of kola-fruit concoctions. Now I recall having eaten a single kola-fruit a day. Sāriputta, you may think that the kola-fruit was bigger at that time, yet you should not regard it so: the kola-fruit was then at most the same size as now. Through feeding on a single kola-fruit a day, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little my limbs became like the jointed segments of vine stems or bamboo stems. Because of eating so little my backside became like a camel’s hoof. Because of eating so little the projections on my spine stood forth like corded beads. Because of eating so little my ribs jutted out as gaunt as the crazy rafters of an old roof-less barn. Because of eating so little the gleam of my eyes sank far down in their sockets, looking like a gleam of water that has sunk far down in a deep well. Because of eating so little my scalp shrivelled and withered as a green bitter gourd shrivels and withers in the wind and sun. Because of eating so little my belly skin adhered to my backbone; thus if I wanted to touch my belly skin I encountered my backbone, and if I wanted to touch my backbone I encountered my belly skin. Because of eating so little, if I wanted to defecate or urinate, I fell over on my face right there. Because of eating so little, if I tried to ease my body by rubbing my limbs with my hands, the hair, rotted at its roots, fell from my body as I rubbed.

53–55. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through food.’ They say: ‘Let us live on beans,’…‘Let us live on sesamum,’…‘Let us live on rice,’ and they eat rice, they eat rice powder, [81] they drink rice water, and they make many kinds of rice concoctions. Now I recall having eaten a single rice grain a day. Sāriputta, you may think that the rice grain was bigger at that time, yet you should not regard it so: the rice grain was then at most the same size as now. Through feeding on a single rice grain a day, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little…the hair, rotted at its roots, fell from my body as I rubbed.

56. “Yet, Sāriputta, by such conduct, by such practice, by such performance of austerities, I did not attain any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. Why was that? Because I did not attain that noble wisdom which when attained is noble and emancipating and leads the one who practises in accordance with it to the complete destruction of suffering.

57. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through the round of rebirths.’ But it is not easy to find a realm in the round that I have not already [82] passed through in this long journey, except for the gods of the Pure Abodes; and had I passed through the round as a god in the Pure Abodes, I would never have returned to this world.

58. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through [some particular kind of] rebirth.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of rebirth that I have not been reborn in already in this long journey, except for the gods of the Pure Abodes…

59. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through [some particular] abode.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of abode that I have not already dwelt in…except for the gods of the Pure Abodes…

60. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through sacrifice.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of sacrifice that has not already been offered up by me in this long journey, when I was either a head-anointed noble king or a well-to-do brahmin.

61. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes through fire-worship.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of fire that has not already been worshipped by me in this long journey, when I was either a head-anointed noble king or a well-to-do brahmin.

62. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘As long as this good man is still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessing of youth, in the prime of life, so long is he perfect in his lucid wisdom. But when this good man is old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, and come to the last stage, being eighty, ninety, or a hundred years old, then the lucidity of his wisdom is lost.’ But it should not be regarded so. I am now old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, and come to the last stage: my years have turned eighty. Now suppose that I had four disciples with a hundred years’ lifespan, perfect in mindfulness, retentiveness, memory, and lucidity of wisdom.197 Just as a skilled archer, trained, practised, and tested, could easily shoot a light arrow across the shadow of a palm tree, suppose that they were even to that extent perfect in mindfulness, retentiveness, [83] memory, and lucidity of wisdom. Suppose that they continuously asked me about the four foundations of mindfulness and that I answered them when asked and that they remembered each answer of mine and never asked a subsidiary question or paused except to eat, drink, consume food, taste, urinate, defecate, and rest in order to remove sleepiness and tiredness. Still the Tathāgata’s exposition of the Dhamma, his explanations of factors of the Dhamma, and his replies to questions would not yet come to an end, but meanwhile those four disciples of mine with their hundred years’ lifespan would have died at the end of those hundred years. Sāriputta, even if you have to carry me about on a bed, still there will be no change in the lucidity of the Tathāgata’s wisdom.

63. “Rightly speaking, were it to be said of anyone: ‘A being not subject to delusion has appeared in the world for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of gods and humans,’ it is of me indeed that rightly speaking this should be said.”64. Now on that occasion the venerable Nāgasamāla was standing behind the Blessed One fanning him.198 Then he said to the Blessed One: “It is wonderful, venerable sir, it is marvellous! As I listened to this discourse on the Dhamma, the hairs of my body stood up. Venerable sir, what is the name of this discourse on the Dhamma?”“As to that, Nāgasamāla, you may remember this discourse on the Dhamma as ‘The Hair-Raising Discourse.’”

That is what the Blessed One said. The venerable Nāgasamāla was satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One’s words.

On intelligence & fools

 

Nothing tends to be more difficult than not pretending to understand.

If we do not analyze, we will not understand.
But let us not presume that we have understood just because we have analyzed.

Classifying is the first step toward understanding; persisting in classifying is the first step toward confusion.

The line between intelligence and stupidity is a shifting line.

To understand is finally to make fact after fact coincide with our own mystery.

In a fiery intelligence the materials are not fused in a new alloy; they are integrated into a new element.

To think against is more difficult than to act against.

Everything is trivial if the universe is not committed to a metaphysical adventure.

There are a thousand truths; error is one.

Refusing to admire is the mark of the beast.

Those who lament the narrowness of the environment in which they live long for events, neighbors, landscapes to give them the sensibility and intelligence which nature denied them.

Ideas tyrannize the man who has but few.

Someone who lacks vocabulary to analyze his ideas christens them intuitions.

The invention is invented once for all times.
The idea must be reinvented each time.

Men change ideas less than ideas change disguise.
Through the course of the centuries the same voices are in dialogue.

Imbecility changes the subject in each age so that it is not recognized.

Among ideas only the stupid ones are immortal.

Foolish ideas are immortal.
Each new generation invents them anew.

History inexorably punishes stupidity, but it does not necessarily reward intelligence.

The curve of man’s knowledge of himself ascends until the 17th century, declines gradually afterwards, in this century it finally plummets.

Stupidities spread at the speed of light.

The key event of this century is the demographic explosion of idiotic ideas.

An abrupt demographic expansion rejuvenates society and makes its stupidities recrudesce.

Demographic pressure makes people brutish.

A limited population produces fewer ordinary intelligences than a numerous population, but it can produce an equal or greater number of talents.
Great demographic densities are the breeding grounds of mediocrity.

Posterity is not the whole of future generations.
It is a small group of men with taste, a proper upbringing, and erudition, in each generation.

An intelligent touch can make the austerity imposed by poverty culminate in the perfection of taste.

Intelligence is the only art that can survive in any historical climate.

In spiritually arid centuries, the only man to realize that the century is dying from thirst is the man who still harnesses an underground spring.

Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.
The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.

Genius is the capacity to make on our stiff, frozen imagination the impact that any book makes on a child’s imagination.

To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang.

The ability to consume pornography is the distinctive characteristic of the imbecile.

Depravity always arouses the secret admiration of the imbecile.

When we say that words transfigure, the fool mistakenly thinks that they adulterate.

The philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but an angel imprisoned in time.

To be right is just one more reason not to achieve any success.

An intelligent idea produces sensual pleasure.

The organ of pleasure is the intelligence.

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.

Each new truth we learn teaches us to read a different way.

Fools worry about nothing but spelling and forget syntax.

The imbecile is betrayed less by what he says than by his diction.

The “common reader” is as rare as common sense.

A book does not educate someone who reads it to become educated.

The pleasant book does not attract the fool unless a pedantic interpretation vouches for it.

Contemporaries respect tedious books when they are pretentious and pedantic.
Posterity laughs at those crumbling idols, in order to venerate, of course, the analogous sham saints of their time.

Nobody scorns yesterday’s foolishness as much as today’s fool does.

Serious books do not instruct, but rather demand explanations.

Books are not tools of perfection but barricades against boredom.

To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discreet life among intelligent books, loving a few beings.

For moving situations only clichés will do.
A stupid song expresses great pain better than a noble verse.
Intelligence is an activity of impassible beings.

The two wings of intelligence are erudition and love.

Wisdom consists in being moderate not out of horror of excess, but out of love for the limit.

Truth is the happiness of intelligence.

To demand that the intelligence abstain from judging mutilates its faculty of understanding.
It is in the value judgment that understanding culminates.

Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent.

An “explanation” consists in the end in assimilating a strange mystery to a familiar mystery.

Explanation implies, comprehension unfolds.
Explanation impoverishes, by identifying terms; comprehension enriches, by diversifying them.

Contemplated in light of our sorrow or our happiness, of our enthusiasm or our disdain, the world displays a texture so subtle, an essence so fine, that every intellectual vision, compared to that vision of the sentiments, barely seems like clever vulgarity.

Authentic intelligence spontaneously sees even the most humble fact of daily life in the light of the most general idea.

Our meditation should not consist of a theme proposed to our intelligence, but of an intellectual murmur accompanying our life.

Neither improvisation by itself, nor meditation by itself, achieves anything important.
In reality, the only thing of value is the spontaneous fruit of forgotten meditations.

The intelligent generalization should bear the decipherable imprint of the particular fact that gives rise to it.

Whoever does not simultaneously play upon the board of maximum generality and the board of maximum particularity knows nothing of the game of ideas.

To change thoughts repeatedly is not to evolve. To evolve is to develop the infinitude of the same thought.

Only he lives his life who observes it, thinks it, and says it; the rest let life live them.

“Life” (in emphatic quotation marks) is the consolation of those who do not know how to think.

“Escapism” is the imbecile’s favorite accusation to make.

A fool is someone who has opinions about the clichés of the day.

The experience of a man who “has lived a long life” can usually be reduced to a few trivial anecdotes with which he decorates an incurable stupidity.

Whoever takes pride in “having lived through a lot” should keep quiet so as not to prove to us that he has understood nothing.

Human stupidity is so monotonous that not even a long experience adds to our collection of stupidities.

The only certain patrimony after a few years is the load of stupidities that chance prevented us from committing.

The years do not deplume us of illusions but of stupidities.

Without economic concerns the fool dies from boredom.

No one is important for a long time without becoming a fool.

Life is an instrument of intelligence.

It is by means of intelligence that grace saves us from the worst disgraces.

When we understand what those who seemed to understand [really] understood, we are dumbfounded.

When we sail in oceans of stupidity, intelligence requires the aid of good taste.

Without an alert imagination intelligence runs aground.

Although we may have to yield to the torrent of collective stupidities dragging us along in its current, let us not allow ourselves to be dissolved in its mud.

A man is wise if he has no ambition for anything but lives as if he had an ambition for everything.

When the race of egoists absorbed in perfecting themselves dies out, nobody will be left to remind us that we have the duty to save our intelligence, even after we have lost all hope of saving our skin.

An intelligent man is one who maintains his intelligence at a temperature independent of his environment’s temperature.

To induce us to adopt them, stupid ideas adduce the immense public that shares them.

The distances between nations, social classes, cultures, and races, are a little thing.
The fault line runs between the plebeian mind and the patrician mind.

The crowd calls no actions intelligent except actions of the intellect in the service of instinct.

Man at times despairs with dignity, but it is rare for him to hope with intelligence.

The fool loses his hopes, never his illusions.

Man’s moment of greatest lucidity is when he doubts his doubt.

Our maturity must re-conquer its lucidity daily.

Layers of imbecility deposit themselves in the soul like sediment over the years.

The soul grows full of weeds unless the intelligence inspects it daily like a diligent gardener.

Let us try, as we grow older, to assume attitudes which our adolescence would have approved and to have ideas which it would not have understood.

Few ideas do not turn pale before a fixed glare.

Thought tends to be a response to an outrage rather than to a question.

Fools become indignant only with consequences.

Even the least foolish usually do not know the conditions of what they wish for and the consequences of what they admit.

To punish an idea, the gods condemn it to inspiring enthusiasm in the fool.

Let us not give stupid opinions the pleasure of scandalizing us.

The ironist mistrusts what he says without believing that the opposite is true.

A man is wise not so much because he says the truth but because he who knows the exact scope of what he says.
Because he does not believe he is saying anything more than what he is saying.

Wisdom consists in resigning oneself to the only thing possible without proclaiming it the only thing necessary.

Sometimes only humiliations leave ajar for humanity the gates of wisdom.

Resignation to error is the beginning of wisdom.

Life is a daily struggle against one’s own stupidity.

The first step of wisdom is to admit, with good humor, that our ideas have no reason to interest anybody.

When we accept our mediocrity with good humor, the disinterestedness with which we take joy in another’s intelligence almost makes us intelligent.

The quality of an intelligence depends less on what it understands than on what makes it smile.

Authentic intellectual seriousness does not frown, but rather smiles.

The serious man is just as idiotic as intelligence that is not serious.

To think that only important things matter is the menace of barbarism.

The arguments with which we justify our conduct are often dumber than our actual conduct.
It is more tolerable to watch men live than to hear them spout their opinions.

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give their opinions.

The majority of men have no right to give their opinion, but only to listen.

After the intelligent opinions have been excluded from the opinions of an age, what is left over is “public opinion.

To speak of a people’s “political maturity” is characteristic of immature intelligences.

As long as he is not so imprudent as to write, many a political man passes for intelligent.

Political activity ceases to tempt the intelligent writer, when he finally understands that there is no intelligent text that will succeed in ousting even a small-town mayor.

Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but on them, in the end, depends against which reefs one is shipwrecked.
If interests move us, stupidities guide us.

Modern man will never admit that a stupid idea shared by many is not respectable but merely dreadful.

The public is not convinced except by the conclusions of syllogisms of whose premises they are ignorant.

Anybody has the right to be stupid, but not to demand that we revere his stupidity.

There is no fool’s opinion that is not worth hearing, but also none that is worth respecting.

In the modern world the number of theories is increasing that are not worth the trouble to refute except with a shrug of the shoulders.

So that one does not live depressed among so many foolish opinions, it behooves one to remember at every moment that things obviously are what they are, no matter what the world’s opinion is.

There are no ideas that expand the intelligence, but there are ideas that shrink it.

The practical man wrinkles a perplexed brow when he hears intelligent ideas, trying to figure out whether he is hearing nonsense or insolence.

To maintain that “all ideas are respectable” is nothing but pompous nonsense.
Nevertheless, there is no opinion that the support of a sufficient number of imbeciles does not oblige one to put up with.
Let us not disguise our impotence as tolerance.

Cynicism is not a measure of astuteness but of impotence.

The great man’s errors are so painful for us because they give a fool the chance to correct them.

Stupidity is the angel that expels man from his momentary paradises.

An age is civilized if it does not reserve intelligence for professional work.

Modern education delivers intact minds to propaganda.

Formal instruction does not cure foolishness; it arms it.

Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything.

So long as we do not come across educated fools, education seems important.

There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.

To educate man is to impede the “free expression of his personality.”

The idea of “the free development of personality” seems admirable as long as one does not meet an individual whose personality has developed freely.

My truth is the sum of what I am, not a simple summary of what I think.

From the slums of life one returns not wiser, but dirtier.

To think like our contemporaries is the prescription for prosperity and for stupidity.

The fool does not concede superiority except to one who exhibits idiotic refinements.

Whoever is curious about how to measure his stupidity should count the number of things that seem obvious to him.

What disconcerts us momentarily cures our stupidity.

The fool is disturbed not when they tell him that his ideas are false, but when they suggest that they have gone out of style.

The fool does not renounce an error unless it goes out of fashion.

The public does not begin to welcome an idea except when intelligent contemporaries begin to abandon it.
No light reaches the masses but that of dead stars.

Great stupidities do not come from the people.
First, they have seduced intelligent men.

We need people to contradict us in order to refine our ideas.

Nobody knows exactly what he wants as long as his adversary does not explain it to him.

In order to understand another’s idea it is necessary to think it as one’s own.

Intelligence consists not in handling intelligent ideas, but in handling any idea intelligently.

From the sum of all points of view does not emerge the object in relief, but confusion.

A confused idea attracts a fool like a flame attracts an insect.

Only the imbecile never feels like he is fighting on his enemies’ side.

Even the greatest fool experiences nights during which his defenses against the truth waver.

Making us feel intelligent is how nature notifies us that we are saying something stupid.

Wisdom comes down to not showing God how things should be done.

Wisdom comes down to never forgetting either the nothingness that man is, or the beauty that is at times born in his hands.

Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas.

The prejudices of other ages are incomprehensible to us when our own blind us.

Understanding tends to consist of falsifying what is apparently understood, by reducing it to terms that are supposedly intelligible because they agree with our prejudices at the moment.

The fool calls conclusions he does not understand “prejudices.”

The only intelligence without prejudices is one that knows which it has.

A man does not become stultified by his prejudices unless he believes they are conclusions.

Nothing is more unforgivable than voluntarily imprisoning ourselves in another’s convictions, when we should be trying to break through even the bars in the dungeon of our own intelligence.

To be young is to fear being thought stupid; to mature is to fear being stupid.

“Reconciling man to himself”—the most accurate definition of stupidity.

The distance between interlocutors of different generations is proportional to the stupidity of each interlocutor.

He who understands least is he who he stubbornly insists on understanding more than can be understood.

Thinking does not prepare one to live, nor does living prepare one to think.

Refusing to consider what disgusts us is the most serious limitation threatening us.

The idea of another only interests the fool when it touches on his own personal tribulations.

Great intellectual tasks are not accomplished by one who deliberately undertakes them, but by one who modestly seeks to resolve personal problems.

We usually share with our predecessors more opinions than ways of reaching them.

It is in the spontaneity of what I feel where I search for the coherence of what I think.

A truthful, upright intellectual life grabs out of our hands arts, letters, sciences, in order to prepare us to confront fate alone.

Upon each person depends whether his soul, deprived of its many pretensions by the years, is revealed as bitter spite or as humble resignation.

Happiness is the prickly flower of intelligent resignation.

Every intelligence reaches a point where it believes it is walking without advancing a step.

Nothing is more dangerous than to solve ephemeral problems with permanent solutions.

The “solutions” that puff contemporaries up with pride seem within a few years inconceivably stupid.

Man unleashes catastrophes when he insists on making coherent the contradictory evidences among which he lives.

“Solutions” are the ideologies of stupidity.

As a new problem is born out of a problem solved, wisdom consists not in solving problems but in taming them.

Intelligence consists not in finding solutions, but in not losing sight of the problems.

Intelligence hastens to solve problems which life has not even raised yet.
Wisdom is the art of stopping it.

Philosophy is the art of lucidly formulating problems.
Inventing solutions is not an occupation of serious intellects.

The fool exclaims that we are denying the problem when we show the falsity of his favorite solution.

In every age a minority lives today’s problems and a majority yesterday’s.

What was true yesterday is not always error today, as fools believe.
But what is true today can be error tomorrow, as fools forget.

A certain intellectual courtesy makes us prefer the ambiguous word. The univocal term subjects the universe to its arbitrary rigidity.

The authentic problem demands not that we solve it but that we try to live it.

Those who are partially wrong irritate us; those who are totally wrong amuse us.

Because he does not understand the objection that refutes him, the fool believes he has been proved right.

One usually does not reach conclusions except by ignoring objections.

Between intelligent adversaries there exists a secret sympathy, since we all owe our intelligence and our virtues to the virtues and intelligence of our enemy.

The most presumptuous wisdom stands ashamed before the soul drunk with love or hatred.

Triviality is the price of communication.

Wisdom, in this century, consists above all in knowing how to put up with vulgarity without becoming upset.

Intelligence, in certain ages, must dedicate itself merely to restoring definitions.

Intellectual combat is won not by throwing up barricades, but by courteously leaving the field open, so that the adversary’s stupidities only break each other's noses.

Intellectual boorishness is the defect that we least know how to avoid in this century.

Antipathy and sympathy are the primordial attitudes of intelligence.

Intelligence is guided not so much by ratiocination as by sympathies and aversions.

I trust less in the arguments of reason than in the antipathies of intelligence.

Even when it cannot be an act of reason, an option should be an act of the intelligence.
There are no compellingly demonstrable options, but there are stupid options.

What arouses our antipathy is always a lack of something.

To disagree is to assume a risk no one should assume but the mature and cautious conscience.
Sincerity protects against neither error nor foolishness.

Sincerity soon becomes an excuse for saying stupid things.

Once I believe I have mastered a truth, the argument which interests me is not the one which confirms it but the one which refutes it.

Intelligence should battle without respite against the sclerosis of its findings.

The senile sclerosis of intelligence does not consist in the inability to change ideas, but in the inability to change the level at which we have them.

Men disagree less because they think differently than because they do not think.

Nothing obliges the man who only meditates to debate every fool who argues.

Whoever insists on refuting idiotic arguments ends up doing so with stupid reasons.

Intelligent discussion should be limited to clarifying differences.

The intelligent man tends to fail because he does not dare to believe in the true extent of human stupidity.

The fool is scandalized and laughs when he notices that philosophers contradict each other.
It is difficult to make the fool understand that philosophy is precisely that: the art of contradicting each other without canceling each other out.

Compassion agrees, at times, to solutions which a certain intellectual sense of honor obliges it to reject.

There is something unforgivably vile in sacrificing even the most foolish of principles to the most noble of passions.

The professorial tone is not characteristic of one who knows, but of one who doubts.

We do not know anything perfectly except what we do not feel capable of teaching.

In finding out what an intelligent man said, it is customary only to listen to the fool who mimics him.

No thesis is expounded with clarity except when it manages to be expounded by an intelligent man who does not share it.

A valiant and daring thought is one that does not avoid the commonplace.

Tired of sliding down the comfortable slope of daring opinions, intelligence finally settles in the rocky terrain of commonplaces.

Nothing happens more frequently than that we feel we possess several ideas, because we only seize upon inadequate expressions of the same one.

When a commonplace impresses us, we believe we have an idea of our own.

Intelligence is strengthened by the eternal commonplaces. And it is weakened by those of its time and place.

One must appreciate commonplaces and despise fashionable places.

Once the intoxication of youth is over, only commonplaces appear to us to deserve careful examination.

Solitude is the laboratory where commonplaces are verified.

It is in reiterating the old commonplaces that the work of civilization, strictly speaking, consists.

The commonplaces of the Western tradition are the guidelines that do not deceive in the social sciences.

The traditional commonplace scandalizes modern man.
The most subversive book in our time would be a compendium of old proverbs.

I have no pretensions to originality: the commonplace, if it is old, will do for me.

In silent solitude only the soul capable of conquering in the most public disputes bears fruit.
The weakling begs for commotion.

Intelligence isolates; stupidity brings together.

An outlandish idea becomes ridiculous when several people share it.
Either one walks with everybody, or one walks alone.
One should never walk in a group.

Not intelligence but vanity reproaches “intellectual isolation.”

Dialogue does not consist of intelligences discussing with each other but of vanities confronting each other.

Dialogue with the imbecile poses difficulties: we never know where we harm him, when we scandalize him, [or] how we please him.

With somebody for whom certain terms must be defined one must speak of some other topic.

Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men, because intelligence is a conviction they share.

Prejudices defend against stupid ideas.

The prejudice of not having prejudices is the most common one of all.

The modern world obliges us to refute foolish ideas, instead of silencing the fools.

Our denouncing the imbecile does not mean that we wish to get rid of him. We want diversity at any price.
But the charm of variety should not prevent us from judging correctly.

The silent presence of a fool is the catalyst that precipitates in a conversation all the stupidities of which the most intelligent speakers are capable.

The inferior man is always right in an argument, because the superior man has condescended to argue.

The calculations of intelligent men tend to fail because they forget the fool, those of fools because they forget the intelligent man.

I envy those who do not feel that they own only their stupidities.

The imbecile’s egoism is his neighbors’ safeguard.

Authentic superiority is intolerable for the fool.
Its simulacra, on the other hand, fascinate him.

The price intelligence charges its chosen ones is resignation to daily banality.

The ritualism of daily conversations mercifully hides from us just how basic the furnishings of the minds among which we live are.
To avoid any shocks, let us prevent our interlocutors from “elevating the debate.”

Truth is what the most intelligent man says.
(But nobody knows who the most intelligent man is.)

Nobody thinks seriously as long as originality matters to him.

Whoever believes he is original is just ignorant.

We reactionaries provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers.

The most persuasive reason to renounce daring progressive opinions is the inevitability with which sooner or later the fool finally adopts them.

For the fool, obsolete opinion and erroneous opinion are synonymous expressions.

Intelligence is enabled to discover new truths by rediscovering old truths.

When respect for tradition dies out, society, in its incessant desire to renew itself, consumes itself in a frenzy.

Our spiritual inheritance is so opulent that today an astute fool has only to exploit it in order to seem more intelligent to a slow-witted fool than an intelligent man from yesterday.

Castaways more readily forgive the imprudent pilot who sinks the “ship” than the intelligent passenger who predicts its drift towards the reef.

The effectiveness of an intelligent action is so uncertain today that it is not worth the trouble to discipline our wildest fantasies.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle.

In history it is wise to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

Because his carefully calculated expectations failed, the fool believes that the madness of our hopes has been mocked.

Reason, Progress, and Justice are the three theological virtues of the fool.

In every historical situation there always arises somebody to defend in the name of liberty, humanity, or justice, the stupid opinion.

“Historical necessity” is usually just a name for human stupidity.

“To have faith in man” does not reach the level of blasphemy; it is just one more bit of stupidity.

The cost of progress is calculated in fools.

In the end, what does modern man call “Progress”?
Whatever seems convenient to the fool.

Modern stupidities are more irritating than ancient stupidities because their proselytes seek to justify them in the name of reason.

Indoctrinating experts is notoriously easy.
The expert, in effect, attributes to every emphatic dictum the same authority as he attributes to the procedures he follows.

With the categories admitted by the modern mind we do not succeed in understanding anything but trifles.

Stupidity is the fuel of revolutions.

The future tense is the imbecile’s favorite tense.

Fools believe that humanity only now knows certain important things, when there is nothing important which humanity has not known since the beginning.

It is easier to make a man accept a new truth than to make him abandon the errors it refutes.

Knowing which reforms the world needs is the only unequivocal symptom of stupidity.

The caprices of his passions perhaps save man from the catastrophe toward which he is launched by the automatisms of his intelligence.

There is no worse foolishness than the truth in the mouth of a fool.

The South American intellectual, in order to feed himself, imports junk from the European market.

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

To discover the fool there is no better reagent than the word “medieval.”
He immediately sees red.

Marxism and psychoanalysis have been the two traps of the modern intelligence.

The subconscious fascinates the modern mentality.
Because there it can establish its favorite stupidities as irrefutable hypotheses.

For the fool, only those behaviors which conform to the latest fashionable theory in psychology are authentic.
The fool, upon observing himself, always views himself as corroborating experimentally whatever stupidity he presumes to be scientific.

Because he heard it said that religious propositions are metaphors, the fool thinks they are fictions.

To call himself cultivated, it is not enough for an individual to adorn his specialty with bits and pieces of other specialties.
Culture is not a group of special objects but a subject’s specific attitude.

It is fine to demand that the imbecile respect arts, letters, philosophy, the sciences, but let him respect them in silence.

When today we hear someone exclaim: “very civilized!” “very humane!”, there can be no doubt: we are dealing with abject stupidity.

The cultured man does not turn culture into a profession.

When a society’s intelligence becomes plebeian, literary criticism appears more lucid, albeit cruder.

Contemporary literature, in any period, is the worst enemy of culture.
The reader’s limited time is wasted by reading a thousand mediocre books that blunt his critical sense and impair his literary sensibility.

There are certain types of ignorance that enrich the mind and certain types of knowledge that impoverish it.

In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but what he does not know.

The newspaper allots the modern citizen his morning stultification, the radio his afternoon stultification, the television his evening stultification. 

The abuse of the printing press is due to the scientific method and the expressionist aesthetic.
To the former because it allows any mediocre person to write a correct and useless monograph, and to the latter because it legitimizes the effusions of any fool.

An extensive card catalog, an imposing library, a serious university, produce today those avalanches of books that contain not one error nor one insight.

One could object to science that it easily falls into the hands of imbeciles, if religion’s case were not just as serious.

Where he is easy to refute, as in the natural sciences, the imbecile can be useful without being dangerous.
Where he is difficult to refute, as in the humanities, the imbecile is dangerous without being useful.

It does not appear that the humanities, in contrast to the natural sciences, reach a state of maturity where anything idiotic is automatically obvious.

Mechanization is stultifying because it makes man believe that he lives in an intelligible universe.

Stupidity appropriates what science invents with diabolical facility.

What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly.

Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence.

It is from a mistaken accentuation that the majority of the errors in our interpretation of the world proceed.

Authentic history is the transfiguration of the raw event by intelligence and imagination.

When the intellectual climate where something occurs is lacking in originality, the occurrence only has interest for those whom it concerns physically.

Nicolas Gomez Davila 

“Treatments” that Cause the Disease?

 

Rabies is a rare disease, so rare that the vast majority of doctors will never see a single case of the condition in their lifetimes. From 2000 through to 2020, there were only 52 human cases in the United States, making it one of the rarest diseases known to mankind.199 Despite this fact, the specter of rabies haunts the human imagination and a large proportion of the population believes that a single bite from an animal comes with a high risk of “catching” the disease. Probably as a result of this fear, rabies is frequently cited as both evidence for infectious disease (caused by a “virus”) and the need for vaccines.

Louis Pasteur is credited with the development of the rabies vaccine in the late 19th century after his public declaration that it had been successfully trialled in dogs preceding the then, first human trial. Wikipedia states that Pasteur, along with compatriot, Émile Roux,

developed the first rabies vaccination in 1885. Nine-year-old Joseph Meister (1876–1940), who had been mauled by a rabid dog, was the first human to receive this vaccine. The treatment started with a subcutaneous injection on 6 July 1885, at 8:00pm, which was followed with 12 additional doses administered over the following 10 days.200

The subsequent recovery of the young peasant Joseph was put down to Pasteur's alleged “treatment” which was a convenient explanation for what actually took place. The first issue is that rabies is a condition and whoever makes the diagnosis makes their decision based on a subjective selection from a collection of symptoms and signs. There is no objective test that can be performed and independently verified. Joseph had received at least a dozen bites from the dog but there was no way to know that he had or was going to develop rabies. Instead, as was reported, “upon examining the boy's wounds, Drs Vulpian and Grancher concluded that he almost surely faced death from rabies.”201 Therefore, despite Joseph being without symptoms, it had already been decided that any intervention that was administered at this point could be declared as life-saving.

The second issue is the nature of what was injected into the boy. Pasteur’s “transmission” experiments in animals were typically carried out by injecting tissue from a diseased animal into another animal with the claim that the diseased tissue contained an “infectious” agent. His experiments were not scientifically controlled and this type of exposure route does not require the existence of a germ to damage or kill the recipient animal. Pasteur’s vaccine was simply a variation of these experiments: he took spinal cord material from a dead rabbit, then “attenuated” the imagined germ by drying the tissue for around a week, and injected this into Joseph. The theory was that the claimed germ was weakened by this process which would allow the boy to become “immune” to the disease.

This dubious practice of inoculation with disease products to supposedly prevent disease in others persists until this day. Whether people believe it to be a valid health measure or not, it can be shown that the widely claimed success stories for Pasteur’s rabies vaccine were fallacious. After his long-hidden journals were finally disclosed in the mid-1970s, it was apparent that his public announcements about the successful treatment of rabies in dogs were fraudulent. In the 1995 book, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, author Gerald Geison revealed that, “the survival rates for the two sets of dogs fall into the following ranges for the dogs treated by Pasteur, 50 to 78 percent, for the untreated control dogs, 57 to 71 percent.”202 In other words, there was no evidence that his rabies shot was of any use at all.

In fact, it was probably even worse. As Dr Montague Leverson reported in 1909, the widespread use of Pasteur’s rabies vaccines in France corresponded with a dramatic increase in the number of cases of the condition that it was supposedly preventing:

During twenty-three years preceding the use of the anti-rabic serum there were 685 deaths from rabies in all France, or an average of 30 per annum. But since the use of the anti-rabic inoculations the average has risen to 100 per annum, in place of 30, with a continually increasing number each year, so that according to the official returns the number of deaths from rabies in France for the year ending in June, 1907, was just about 300. In truth, as Professor Peter said, in his address to the Academy of Medicine, Paris, on the 11th of January, 1887, “M. Pasteur does not cure rabies he imparts it!”203

Geison had already written an article in 1978 outlining the overblown claims about the risk of humans developing rabies and the role of the rabies vaccine in treating victims of animal bites:

In any case, most victims of rabid animal bites could forego treatment without experiencing any untoward consequences in the future…In vaccinating the victim of an animal bite against rabies…one can never be sure that the subject of treatment has in fact contracted the disease. And one can therefore never be sure whether the treatment is even potentially beneficial to him or to anyone else.204

However, the enduring rabies mythology means that many people are convinced of the need for a vaccine if they have been bitten by an animal. As a consequence, if they do develop symptoms of rabies following such an injection, it can of course be blamed on the rabies “virus” rather than the purported treatment. Once again, it cannot be emphasized enough that there are much better actions to take to improve health instead of worrying about things that will almost certainly never affect us The illogical beliefs about rabies and the oft-repeated claim that the condition must be caused by a “virus” prompted us to publish the video, What About Rabies? in 2022.205

199 Ma, X., et al., Rabies surveillance in the United States during 2019,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 1 Jun 2021: https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.258.11.1205

200 “Rabies vaccine,” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies_vaccine (accessed 25 Sep 2022)

201 Geison, G., The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, Princeton University Press, 1995

202 Ibid.

203 Leverson, M., “English city of Leicester as example of benefits of abolition of vaccination,” Bridgeport Evening Farmer, 21 Aug 1909.

204 Geison, G., “Pasteur’s Work on Rabies: Reexamining the Ethical Issues,” The Hastings Center Report, Apr 1978: https://doi.org/10.2307/3560403

205 Bailey, S., “What About Rabies?,” drsambailey.com, 5 Aug 2022: https://drsambailey.com/resources/videos/viruses-unplugged/what-about-rabies/

by Mark Bailey & Samantha Bailey

www.drsambailey.com

The Final Pandemic: An Antidote To Medical Tyranny

The Dilemma of Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist who took seriously the idea that his field, as a social science, should be able to offer a comprehensive theory of human culture, providing broad and verifiable explanations of individual behavior and social life. He understood that human culture is a consequence of the human search for meaning, and that basic functions of culture include defining what our human situation in reality is and what meaningful and dignified living consists of—what we are, and what the right way of doing things is. But in The Denial of Death and subsequent works, he offered a startling new approach to understanding how culture actually fulfills these functions, and what society requires of individuals if they would contribute to cultural meaning and stability. And in providing this new approach to cultural anthropology, he explicitly relied—in an act of philosophical scholarship both rare and courageous in his social scientific tradition—on Kierkegaard’s anthropology of human existence as “a union of opposites,” as a synthesis of the fiinite and the infinite.

Stated with stark brevity, Becker’s central and most original thesis as presented in The Denial of Death is as follows. As animals to whom self-consciousness has been given, we humans are aware that we will die, and this awareness produces in us a basic anxiety, indeed a fundamental terror, about our vulnerability, the violent ways of nature, and the inevitability of death.Therefore, we devise all sorts of strategies for suppressing awareness of our mortality. This denial of death, says Becker, is one of the basic functions of culture. How does culture manage this? First, by explaining human existence to be part of an enduringly meaningful universe, thus giving each of us a sense that our individual lives are signif i cant and valuable; and second, crucially, by controlling our basic anxiety through the devising of “death-denying hero systems,” or “immortality projects,” that enable us to believe and feel that, through our participation in them, our lives transcend mortal perishing. In the summarizing words of Sam Keen, from his foreword to the 1997 edition of The Denial of Death: “We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrifficing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market.” Through participating in “culturally standardized hero systems” that assure us that our selves or our tasks are of imperishable value, we feel immortal, and render our terror of death unconscious.31

Unfortunately, Becker explains, our projects of immortalizing heroism tend to inflate one specific worldview, or group, or institution—this religion, this nation, this type of government—into the only vehicle of human connection with imperishable meaning. Thus, when human beings encounter alternate belief systems or worldviews, they are experienced as threats—first because each argues for an ultimate truth at least somewhat different from one’s own, and second because the very fact of a plurality of belief systems or worldviews indirectly reveals that one’s own “project” is merely a local and arbitrary construct, a “vital lie” of culture and character, built for protection against the terrifying realities of mortality.32 Because of this we are led, according to Becker, to try to defuse the threat that “otherness” poses to our own immortalizing hero systems, and we pursue this in various ways. We may attempt to convert others to our own beliefs. We may seek to accommodate other points of view, by looking for and finding aspects of them that seem compatible with our own. A cruder, but common, strategy is to denigrate others who do not share our belief systems, belittling and dehumanizing the “others.” Then, as a most thorough solution, we can wage war, attempting to vanquish or even annihilate those whose differences threaten to expose the artificial character of our own “system” for transcending death. Through humiliating, damaging, and defeating the enemy; through mass deportations; through ethnic cleansing and genocide, we can at once eliminate threats to our heroic self-esteem and prove that it is we who are living and fighting in the service of everlasting truth. This, Becker argues, must be understood as the principal source of human violence and war: the inability to tolerate people significantly different from ourselves because to do so would betray the arbitrariness and falsehood of our own death-denying immortality systems, take away our psychological protection against our basic terror, and force us to face our true situation as self-conscious creatures who know that we have to die.33

In The Denial of Death, Becker developed this thesis and its implications for psychoanalysis, addressing ideas of Freud and other humanistic psychologists, especially the (in his view) underappreciated Otto Rank. The critical power and sweep of its central arguments were quickly and widely acknowledged; the book became a best-seller and won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Becker had obviously uncovered one of the hidden main-springs of psychological and cultural life, and shaped a powerful new tool both for ideological critique and for analyzing and redefining psychological “health.”

Where does Kierkegaard fits into this analysis? In chapter 5, titled “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker enthusiastically presents elements of Kierkegaard’s “psychological expositions” in order to deepen and clarify his own arguments, asserting an essential congruence between Kierkegaard’s understanding of human nature and that offered in The Denial of Death. Throughout the chapter he pays tribute to Kierkegaard’s genius, calling him a “master analyst of the human situation,” a psychologist of “uncanny brilliance” engaged in an “unbelievably subtle” existential analysis that has given us “some of the best empirical analyses of the human condition ever fashioned by man’s mind.” Present-day psychiatry, he claims, “lags far behind” Kierkegaard in its theories of human existence. One reason for this is that Kierkegaard’s analysis exploits to the utmost “the basic insight of psychology for all times”: that a human being is a “union of opposites, of self-consciousness and of physical body”; that this conjoining of self-consciousness with a body subject to death and decay constitutes a paradox; and that “this paradox is the really constant thing about man in all periods of history and society.” Kierkegaard understands, says Becker, that being a “spiritual,” that is, self-conscious, animal— a godlike being, who nevertheless decays and dies—produces in us a fundamental anxiety, or dread, induced by our powerlessness to overcome the ambiguity of our ontological situation. Most impressively, Becker says, in Kierkegaard’s two great works of psychological exposition, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, he has analyzed in “a broad and incredibly rich portrait of types of human failure” variants of the two elementary ways that we flee from the truth about our situation and its attendant anxiety. These are: (1) our denial of the responsibilities of self-conscious freedom, through immersion in bodily experience or in the givens of society, and (2) our denial of our “animal limitations,” through soaring into fantasies of unlimited possibility, including the fantasy of preservation from death and destruction.34 Kierkegaard’s analysis of the many variants of these two basic types of flight from ontological anxiety, Becker states, enables us to understand how widespread is human denial of the human condition. Kierkegaard shows us how the fatalist, the determinist, the social conformist, the happy consumer, the hedonist, the dreamer or fantasist, the worshiper of technology—even the schizophrenic and the clinical depressive—can all be understood as living “vital lies” of denial with regard to human existence in its given structure as an uneasy conjunction of body and spirit (or, as Kierkegaard puts it, “of  finitude and infinitude”). Each of these types tries to escape the anxiety of the human ontological situation by fleeing either creatureliness (body) or self-conscious freedom (spirit). The dreamer and the technology worshiper defy their creaturely dependence on accidents, evil, and decay. The conformist and the happy consumer dissolve their freedoms into the “social hero-systems” into which they were born. The determinist and the fatalist deny, respectively, the fact and the meaning of freedom. The hedonist, through living for the immediacy of sensations, simultaneously flees spiritual responsibility and tries to take control over the meaning of existence.35 Each can be seen to be trying to escape the anxiety of being that union of opposites, a “spiritual animal”— either by blotting out self-conscious freedom or by denying creatureliness.

Kierkegaard has thus provided the anthropological basis, explains Becker, for recognizing how central to the human psyche are both experiences of basic anxiety and psychological defenses against it, and therefore for an appreciation by cultural anthropology of both the origin and ubiquity of death-denying hero systems. In providing this, he continues, Kierkegaard has given us something even more valuable, the “golden fruit of all his tortuous labors”: he has shown what authentic existence—existence without cultural heroism and the vital lies of character—would look like.36Becker approvingly describes, at the end of his chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” this true “health,” this au-thentic existence that would face into its basic anxiety, accept the paradox of its being, and accept the knowledge of death.

The authentic person, Becker states, is the one who opens up to and em-braces his or her true human situation—which means, most important, breaking away from the “programmed cultural heroics” designed to protect against awareness of mortality, and fully acknowledging creatureliness and the fragility of existence. Authenticity, writes Becker, requires letting aware-ness of mortality penetrate consciousness to the point where one’s habit-ual sense of self, as constituted and sustained by all the fragility-and-death-denying emotional character armor built up since childhood, is “destroyed, brought down to nothing.” In this psychological process, a person honestly and courageously accepts the nothingness implicit in all f i nite being, aban-dons all dependence on personal, cultural, and worldly assurances of en-during meaning, assurances equally empty. And in this extremity of honesty and courage, a transformation occurs. By dying to all “f i nite being,” the self begins to be able “to see beyond it,” and learns “to relate itself to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, to the Ultimate Power of Creation which made f i nite creatures.” The self discovers in the dark night of its abandonment of reliance on f i nitude that there is, after all, a legitimate focus of its search for enduring meaning: one can, in hope and courage, aff i rm that “one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator,” to a transcendent ground that guarantees one’s personal signif i cance within “an eternal and inf i nite scheme of things.” But this aff i rmation is faith. Faith is that opening and reaching out to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, whereby one links one’s “secret inner self” to “the very ground of creation.” This, states Becker, is the culmi-nation of Kierkegaard’s anthropological analysis and his ultimate message, with which Becker here concurs: human authenticity, with its full emotional acceptance of mortality, is based upon and impossible without that religious faith through which “the invisible mystery” at the heart of a creature “attains cosmic signif i cance by aff i rming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation.”37

In his approval of Kierkegaard’s account of genuine religious faith and its role in authentic human living, Becker appears here to have fully embraced Kierkegaard’s anthropology, which affirms precisely that human existence is a union of the finite and the infinite, of time and eternity. If a human being is capable of affirming the connection between his or her own “invisible mystery” and “the invisible mystery at the heart of creation,” then human consciousness is necessarily both immanent and transcendent.

Kierkegaard himself is eloquently detailed on the matter. “A human being,” he explains,

is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that [in self-consciousness] relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. . . . [From this may be derived] the formula for faith: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power [God] that established it.38

A self can, Kierkegaard states, through willing to be itself, “rest transparently in God” because human consciousness is the site where eternal being enters time. Each “moment” of conscious experience, of self-presence, is “that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other”; human temporality is that flow of conscious presence “whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.” Therefore, human beings experience anxiety (angst): anxiety proclaims our concern over the possible uses of our freedom in the task of bringing our fragile, sexed, mortal lives into attunement with the eternal ground of our being.39 This is an anthropology that serves as a sharp rebuke, and a therapeutic antidote, to modern immanentist anthropologies, and through his analysis and embrace of Kierkegaard Becker appears to be in a position to usefully exploit it in his own social science. He seems ready to recover a conception of human nature that accounts for our native orientation to transcendent meaning by affirming—along with Jaspers, Scheler, Marcel, Levinas, Lonergan, and Voegelin—that human existence is life in the In-Between of immanence and transcendence.

In fact, though, we find neither the articulation nor the development of such an anthropology either in subsequent chapters of The Denial of Death or in its successor and companion volume, Escape from Evil, Becker’s final work. Kierkegaard’s ontology of human existence is nowhere to be found in their often brilliant discussions of psychology, religion, culture, and the human sources of violence and evil, which instead consistently portray human beings, in typical modernist fashion, as purely immanent animals who just happen to have the productive and ennobling, but also tragic and self-torturing, appurtenance of self-consciousness.

This divergence from Kierkegaard may be seen even in the chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” where some of Becker’s conclusions about the import of Kierkegaard’s analysis clearly deviate from those drawn by the philosopher himself. For instance, at one point Becker states that, in Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety, “the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s own death.” In another place, he indicates that, for Kierkegaard, the “prison” of inauthentic character is “built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror.”40 Neither of these assertions accurately portrays Kierkegaard’s own understanding.

For Kierkegaard, the basic anxiety of consciousness is not over the fact that one is finite and mortal. It is a response to the fact that one is finite and transcends finitude—that one participates in time as a fragile, sexed, and mortal creature and participates in the eternal, nonfinite being that transcends mortality. Human inauthenticity, the “sickness unto death” with which we are all infected, is not simply the result of shrinking from mortality, but of our despair over the task of accepting and reconciling both dimensions of our nature, the temporal and the eternal. The basic anxiety that belongs to the “sickness unto death” is not simply the terror of annihilation and its indignity, but anxiety that wells up from the recognition that we are responsible both for facing up to our creatureliness and to the claims of the eternal upon us, claims that transcend the transitory domain of physical death.41Becker misconstrues Kierkegaard by overstressing one side of his account of the origins of anxiety: the threat of meaninglessness posed by death. Kierkegaard himself emphasizes that an equal, if not greater, source of anxiety and despair is the threat of mismanaged participation in eternal being.

For Kierkegaard, then, a human being is truly a “union of opposites,” a uniting of animal being with the “immortalizing presence” that makes of that very being a paradox. For Becker, on the contrary, a human being is not really a synthesis of temporal and eternal, finite and infinite, but merely a creature that happens to be “self-conscious”—a creature burdened with a secondary or ancillary capacity to have ideas or thoughts, including thoughts of mortality and timelessness. Despite his justified admiration for and use of Kierkegaard’s analyses of existential failure, which offer profound support for Becker’s insight into the extent to which the denial of death—as one pervasive form of the denial of the human condition—shapes human life and culture, Becker does not really take advantage of Kierkegaard’s anthropological exposition. To do so would require a radical break with the immanentist subject of modern social science, for whom transcendent being can be only a mental invention or projection—and this break Becker is not able or willing to engage in.42 Thus, his embrace of Kierkegaard in The Denial of Death involves Becker in a sort of philosophical confusion, or dilemma, that he is unable to resolve. He recognizes Kierkegaard’s genius as a “master analyst of the human situation” whose insights both reveal the origins and extent of death denial and explain what it means to live a life without such denial. He cannot, however, incorporate either Kierkegaard’s actual anthropology or his explication of the authentic life of faith into his own psychological and cultural critique, because immanentist assumptions about human nature and human knowing prevent the Kierkegaardian insights from taking hold.43

Becker’s dilemma is perfectly represented in his approach to the notion of immortality. He shares with Kierkegaard a passionate, derisive criticism of those who are certain of their personal immortality, as if eternal being were their possession, and who often bolster that sense of certitude and possession through the denigration and victimization of others. The idea of immortality is seen by both thinkers as a perennial source of self-delusion, smug egotism, false heroics, and injustice. For all this, though, the symbol immortality clearly has, for Kierkegaard, an authentic and justifable meaning and function. It is one of the symbols we use to make sense of our experiences of eternal and nonfinite being, to stand for the questions and hopes and images that arise from our mysterious participation in transcendence.44 However, in Becker’s Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, notions of immortality are always linked to inauthentic and self-deluded human yearnings to escape mortality. While Becker acknowledges that human beings subscribe to what he calls “immortality ideologies” because of a love of and longing for fuller life, for him any thoughts of imperishable meaning are always in part a “reflex of the death-anxiety,” so that the notion of immortality is always, for him, both a promise and a lie.45 To be true to his own insights into authentic existence in “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker would have to acknowledge legitimate and salutary—as well as self-delusory and destructive—functions of the symbol immortality. Correspondingly, he would have to incorporate into his work a careful distinction between, on the one hand, the false heroics of inauthentic religious faith, which seeks primarily self-righteous certitude and self-inflation, and, on the other hand, the genuine heroics of authentic faith, which accepts the human condition as it is and stands open to the risks and mysteries of participation in transcendent meaning—the faith exemplifled by Zen masters, Socrates, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr [???]. But these distinctions are not developed, and Becker’s cultural anthropology—with its bold embrace of ideas that challenges the narrow conventions of contemporary social science—leaves human beings still only groping for transcendence, rather than struggling with the mystery of its presence.46

Becker’s dilemma is that of a scientist who knows that the data he has isolated are of profound importance, but who can only interpret them in terms of a familiar but faulty theoretical paradigm. The data pertain to the desire to invest human life with imperishable meaning. Relying as he does on the faulty theoretical model of the modern, immanentist subject—who does not participate in eternal reality but merely has ideas about it—Becker interprets this concern as signifying primarily a denial of mortality. However, what our concern with imperishable meaning signifies primarily is awareness of existing in-between finite being and transcendent divine presence. Becker is not wrong to insist that the human fascination with transcending death is an important key to establishing a new and profound cultural anthropology. But it does not unlock for him the anthropological theory our age needs: one that breaks completely with the immanentist model of consciousness and history, and reestablishes at the core of psychological and social science the fundamental insight that human existence participates in the understanding, freedom, and creativity of divine transcendent being. Becker had amassed many of the clues—especially in Kierkegaard’s psychological expositions— that would have allowed him to make this breakthrough. Why were they not sufficient? What would have enabled him to do so?

Our account of differentiating consciousness indicates at least part of the answer. The history and significance of human grappling with transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning is a given presence in consciousness—that our longing for transcendence is not an act of desperation, as Becker proclaims, but rather the natural longing to clarify what we already experience.

A psychology or cultural anthropology (or any other science, or philosophy) that truly addresses the needs of our times requires above all a critical appreciation of the differentiating process, without which science cannot understand what it itself is: the uncovering of one of the realms of meaning—the realm of systematic explanations of things, of their intrinsic properties and uniform interactions—by a human consciousness whose questioning is created and drawn by the ground of being, the divine partner whose presence both permeates the finite world and illuminates that very consciousness with the revelation of divine transcendence.

from the book Transcendence and History The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity by Glenn Hughes