Nirvana for the masses…

Published: Aug 26, 2009 by Joe Larabell

Ya know… when organized religion gets hold of a good idea, more often than not the idea becomes perturbed in such a way as to ensure the ultimate indispensability of the organization formed to promulgate the idea. Miguel de Molinos, for example, taught that all we really had to do was contemplate God and we could form a direct channel with the divine – but they imprisoned him and banned his book because the party line at the time, as now, was that you need a professional priesthood to act as go-betweens to carry the messages back-and-forth. Most religions have similar perturbations in their messages. For that matter, so do most branches of the medical profession.

I was just reading an article the other day that happened to mention, in passing, that the “goal” of Buddhism was, at one time, the attainment of Nirvana but later that was later “changed” to be the attainment of Nirvana for all living beings. I’ve heard it both ways. But this was the first time it really struck me that one of those goals could be viewed as self-serving from the point-of-view of the “organization” known as Buddhism. That is, if all you’re interested in is Nirvana for its own sake, you hardly need Buddhism (the organization) once you’ve mastered the basic concepts and meditations. You certainly don’t need the priesthood once you’ve achieved your goal. But… if you can be convinced to postpone your “departure”, as it were, until everyone made it out, the organization would always have a reliable cadre of followers.

Now… I don’t mean to sound crass or selfish. I’m all for enlightenment on a large scale and if I am presented with the opportunity to speed up the process for someone else along the way, all the better. But suppose this “enlightment for all beings” thing is really just another perturbation introduced into an otherwise effective system in order to preserve the organization itself and provide job security for the established priesthood? If that were so, would the “goal” of “enlightenment for all beings” seem all that altruistic any more?

This post was originally published as: https://larabell.org/wordpress/nirvana-for-the-masses/

It’s funny how, every once in a while, if you listen to the subtle messages unfolding around you on a constant basis, you pick up on a pattern of small bits of information that seem to build into something substantial. That happened to me recently on the general topic of effortlessness. Like many would-be adepts, I have a number of daily practices that I fit into various parts of the day. Sometimes they pay off with feelings of increased awareness or energy but, if I were being totally honest, most of the time they feel like drudge-work… a part of the day that occurs more out of habit than anything else… with the basic idea being one of consistency rather than joy.

I was listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast today and ran across an interesting take on something that should be familiar to most Western Ceremonial Magicians. Eric Weinstein was talking about finding meaning in license plate numbers as he drives around (don’t we all do that when we first start on the Path?) and the way he explained it was:

"...it's important to notice what it feels like to discern meaning where there is no meaning... it's important to get in touch with the "as if madness" experience in order to guard against madness; so I'm hoping to suspend my insistence on Truth for periods of time..."

I’m not sure about the connection with madness, per-se… and I’m wondering if that wasn’t just a ploy designed to wrap up the thought before getting interrupted. I realized when he said that that another good reason for discerning meaning where there is none is to prevent intellectual ossification (my term… it didn’t appear in the podcast, as far as I know). The belief that one particular way of looking at things must serve as the filter through which we see everything else from that point forward seems to be common in most philosophies and pretty much all religions. Adherence to a strict theology makes us less able to evaluate contrary ideas on their own merit. On the other hand, by constantly playing fast and loose with one’s synaptic network, so to speak, one might stand a chance of maintaining enough mental flexibility to recognize a true Epiphany when it finally does come.

It’s ironic that avoiding intellectual ossification was one of the main points that Sam was trying to convey just moments earlier… that there’s no logical reason to use one or more points-of-view which happen to have been elaborated thousands of years ago over new points-of-view developed by one’s own reason in the present time. Of course, that’s easier said than done and when most people start on any sort of Philosophical or Spiritual Path, they’re usually not capable of the kind of deep reasoning that would discern the “true meaning” of the Universe at first glance… so we may need to use ancient philosophy and religion as a crutch for a while… in order to bootstrap our thinking to the point where we can reason with some depth on the Universe and our purpose within it. But I expect that we all have to eventually drop the rhetoric and design our own systems based on First Principles.

I was listening to an interview with the authors of the new book The Distracted Mind on NPR this morning and they touched on a favorite pet peeve of mine that centers on a basic misunderstanding of the term multitasking. According to Wikipedia, the first published use of the term “multitask” appeared in an IBM paper describing the capabilities of the IBM System/360 in 1965. Is is only recently that the term has been used in the common vernacular to refer to the apparent ability of humans to “concentrate” on more than one task at a time.

Nirvana for the masses...