Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  As it turned out Ocean Park was no disappointment because I had already prepared for the worst. It was however pleasant swimming etc. but the place is simply run down with superannuated Baptists whose chief subject of conversation is last night’s sermon. I am always much more pleased with my family after being away with mental degenerates for a while.

  But no sooner did I put down that word “degenerates” than I pulled back in instant remorse, conceding that the campgoers were “clean, honest, and kindly in general.” Who was I to judge? And who was really more dogmatic and closed-minded—the Baptists or my parents? In a matter of seconds, my arrogance collapsed into shamefaced humility:

  Whenever I am like this, too critical of the ideas of others and too sure of my own I must remind myself there are only two things that I really know—one: that I exist. I could say I live and am a human being but those things are also matters of definition so I can’t be sure. Two: That I know nothing except these two things. One might say that this is being silly and extreme but I think it is best to start out with as few as possible things which you hold to be unquestionably true and start from there.

  So there they were—the irrefutable facts from which the rest of the inquiry would have to proceed: I exist. And I know nothing.

  It would have helped if I’d known something about philosophy beyond its existence and the names of a few notable practitioners, if I’d had any idea that a long line of grown-ups—generally male and wealthy or at least well financed by monarchs—had wrestled with the exact same questions that tormented me. Descartes, for example. I knew of his triumphant foundational statement—“I think, therefore I am”—but I dismissed it as a useless tautology. After all, “I think” means pretty much the same as “I am.” You can’t think without existing, and you can’t express the condition of existing without doing at least a tiny bit of thinking, if only as to which word goes where. What I didn’t know at the time was that Descartes had started from the same condition of radical doubt as I had, refusing to accept even sensory data among his “givens,” and, equally impressively, refusing to rule out the possibility that the whole thing—the entire universe—is a trick or an optical illusion. Somehow, despite all the peculiarities of my gender, age, class, and family background, I had tapped into the centuries-old mainstream of Western philosophical inquiry, of old men asking over and over, one way or another, what’s really going on here?

  It would have been especially comforting to have all those dead white men by my side when the whole logical enterprise began to come apart, as I suppose it’s bound to when you confront the world with only “I” as a given. There’s simply no way to get from “I” to “not I” once you’ve boxed yourself into what I later learned is called Western dualism, with its perpetual divide between mind and matter. Several months into the journal, I began to complain about what I called “circular thoughts,” which are just the hall-of-mirrors effect you get when you try to reach the outside world from within the limits of “I.” One entry begins without explanation in something like despair:

  If I was confused last time I wrote something I am lost now. I decided to stay calm and not get excited, think objectively etc. That was calming while it lasted, but then it was just another circular thought. I guess the thing to do is to get outside of myself and look in or look around. Of course that is impossible. So I am at an impasse again.

  I tried to escape the straitjacket of “I” with a more impersonal formulation: There is Something, and there is Nothing, where Something included both the perceiver (the old “I”) and the perceived:

  Any thing which either perceives or is perceived exists and qualifies as Something. Just how much the perceived thing exists is very important to know but I don’t see how I ever can. Therefore Nothing has to be just the opposite of Something.…Nothing is that which neither perceives nor is perceived.

  But then the maddening challenge is to perceive, or comprehend, Nothing—at which point, of course, it gets absorbed into Something, and where are you then?

  Even the desire to understand had to be questioned, because desire, when closely examined, makes no sense:

  It seems to me that the principal psychological factor in living things is desire. Reason is purely intellectual (natch) but desire is so basic that it is never explained in any book about psychology I have read. The problem is: is the purpose, essence, of desire no desire (as it certainly seems to be) or is the purpose in the incompleted [unfulfilled?] desire? Is the purpose of life death—or is it in living? Desire seems to be an unsatisfied longing for its own absence, in fact it is.

  Page after claustrophobic page of the journal is filled with these paradoxes, with the “real world” as my parents styled it, making an appearance largely as a background annoyance: “If Someone or Something set out to make a universe and I am given an instant in eternity to live in it why is there dirty snow in the gutters, or dishes to do, or homework or clothes or movies or any of this?” Maybe the whole logical enterprise was flawed, and you couldn’t really say “this or that,” “true or false,” “one thing or another.” In the absence of Hegelian dialectics, which I had not yet encountered, I experimented briefly with a kind of indeterminacy: “Nothing Is Absolutely True or Untrue.” But of course that didn’t work either, because: “If that is true then it must apply to itself also which means that something is true and its antithesis untrue. Which is right back where I think I started from.”

  So this great project of thinking—where exactly had it gotten me to? The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses. I was a failure at the one unique task I had been given. I existed all right, but I existed only as a condition of constant desiring and yearning, because I knew nothing.

  God saved Descartes from falling into a similar morass, or, more precisely, Descartes invoked God—in this case, a literal deus ex machina—to save himself. Confronted with the possibility that the universe might make no sense at all, that it might turn out to be a massive deception perpetrated by a demonic deceiver-God, Descartes said, in effect: Whoa, God is perfect, by definition, meaning also perfectly good, so he cannot be a “deceiver.” In his benevolence, Descartes’s God must have kindly arranged for our perception of things to correspond to their true inner nature, leaving us free to reason our way to the ultimate truth. I couldn’t understand the God part of this, but I had some sympathy for what Descartes wanted, and what he wanted was for everything, underneath all the chaos and contradictions, to just be okay.

  For a period of four to six months when I was fourteen and fifteen, I too was soothed by religion, though not of the God-ridden variety. I had always been fascinated by religion—meaning the ambient Christianity—as a kind of prefab metaphysics requiring no intellectual effort on the part of the user, and I returned to the subject many times in my journal. Good daughter of atheists that I was, I rejected the part about the universe being administered by some distant parental figure, but I was drawn to the drama of Christianity, with its primal substrate of violence and sacrifice. In practice, however, Christianity was another matter. Whenever I entered its physical precincts, such as the Congregational church I had joined in order to play on its girls’ basketball team, I found the same crushingly bland aesthetic that prevailed at school, only with pictures of Jesus instead of flags. “Modern Protestantism,” I wrote, “is a social organization, providing basketball, badminton, bowling, dancing and a Sunday fashion show. The most incongruous thing I ever saw in ‘our’ church was a girl praying. I was startled, really.”

  Catholicism, with its special effects, i
ts stained glass windows and incense, was a little more intriguing. I understood that it aimed to transport its adherents to some alternative dimension above the dull brick surface of Lowell, but in aiming for the transcendent, it managed, for me at least, to achieve only the weird. I was trying to blend in at one of those sweaty CYO Friday night dances I occasionally went to with a girlfriend, where my goal was neither to dance—because I didn’t know how to—nor to be seen not dancing, when it occurred to me that this was a religion whose central ritual was an enactment of cannibalism. I formally renounced Christianity, in writing, on New Year’s Eve 1956:

  Now I am sure about religion. Positive. Before I used to think that maybe there was something important in Christianity for me. Once I was impressed by a sign on a car which said “The Answer Is God.” Then I realized I had a choice between a life of faith, trusting always in a paternal guardian and submitting to a sort of parental supervision—or being alone. The latter is superficially more difficult, involving the knowledge that when one dies, one is dead, and that it is possible that life is purposeless. My decision, accompanied by much mental fanfare, was easy.…

  How I came across Hinduism is not recorded. Certainly I had no Hindu friends, nor had the subject ever been mentioned in school, where the boundaries of the known world pretty much coincided with those of the Roman Empire at its height, with the addition of the United States. India, with its swarming beggars and bustling pantheon, its great nonviolent struggle for independence, its caste system and so forth, was not in the syllabus, and the word “curry” had arisen only as a verb. But somehow I acquired a paperback edition of the Upanishads, and within a few months after the above formal rejection of Christianity announced my “conversion” to Hinduism, at least in its most abstract philosophical form, minus all the lurid gods. If all this had happened ten or twenty years later, in the sixties or seventies, it probably would have been Buddhism that I found first. But Hinduism seemed to be my ticket out of Descartes’s nightmare of dualism, and fortunately it demanded not the slightest pretense of belief.

  Hinduism offered me no epiphanies, only a temporary reassurance. First, it seemed to ratify and even honor my ignorance. “It says in the Upanishads,” I noted, “that truly blessed is he who understands the spirit of the words: ‘I am not even sure that I know nothing.’” Nor could I expect to know anything, at least not if “knowing” was conceived as an act of conquest in which some sort of mind-creature leaped on its prey. There was no “I” to stalk the “not I” with, only one infinite substance, the Brahman, from whom we were temporarily separated by the thinnest veil of illusion. I was sitting on the little closed-in porch between the kitchen and the back door, reading and half listening to my mother and sister working on dinner, when I laughed out loud—but softly, to myself—in relief. There was no more need to go after the truth like a madman attacking a cliff face with a knife: Everything was already here, complete, and I was coterminous with all of it. All I had to do was give up everything—ambition, desire, curiosity, even, if I were strong enough, dinner.

  Naturally I told no one of this sudden “conversion.” Maybe I underestimate them, but I’m not sure that my parents’ acquaintance with Hinduism extended beyond Kipling, or at best Gandhi. What would I say to them anyway—“Oh, I’ve gone over to the side of religion, but don’t worry, there’s no God involved, or at least no single grand monotheistic god”? Since the Upanishads come with no list of instructions—no pujas, for example, to perform—I could practice my newfound religion in perfect secrecy, silently repeating “Om,” struggling to squelch the desiring self and lift myself beyond the limits of “I.”

  Part of me desperately wanted to succeed in this project of self-obliteration, in a very direct and physical way. I would be walking back up the hill after school, cherishing the backdrop of bricks and pavement and tiny, ill-tended lawns, which in the absence of woods and fields was my entire exposure to the natural world for the day, when something would come over me—was it a mutant form of the famous “sex drive”?—and make me want to throw myself onto the ground, rub my face into the grass, and be absorbed back into the earth. Wasn’t I made of the same stuff myself, although a little heavier on the carbon than the silicon? Didn’t I have some kind of “right of return,” as the Upanishads seemed to promise? Abolish this flaw in the universe, this membrane separating me from the All, and restore the world to perfect One-ness!

  But I never did have to be peeled off somebody’s lawn or shaken out of a meditative trance state, and the principal reason was hunger. I might promise myself to skip dinner as an exercise in desirelessness, and the encyclopedia entry on Hinduism had warned me of the travesty of beef. But the prospect of a good hamburger—a little pink in the middle, buns toasted in pan grease—was usually enough to banish all foreign religion. Then there was the other kind of hunger, seemingly issuing from a small shrewlike animal that had made its home inside my head and could never get enough books, ideas, or information to feed on. On the blessed day when Galaxy or Astounding Science Fiction arrived in the mail, how could I be expected to sit cross-legged on my bed muttering “Om”? And was I really willing to stop asking why, which as far as I could see would be indistinguishable from personal death?

  There’s no point in the journal where I renounce Hinduism; mentions of it just fade away sometime in 1957. I had glimpsed the vast, glassy-calm, blood-warm sea of Brahman and refused to submerge myself in it. Yes, I knew I was “a part” of this universe, this Something, but also that I was “apart” from it. Beyond dualism and monism there was the inescapable dialectic of “a part” and “apart,” which I could not or would not extricate myself from. Besides, I didn’t fully trust the Brahman any more than I did Descartes’s “perfect God.” If consciousness was some sort of defect in an otherwise perfect One-ness, then I wanted that defect to go on a little longer, because without any effort on my part, and apparently independently of my conscious quest, things were beginning to get interesting in a way that nothing I found in the Lowell Public Library had prepared me for.

  Chapter 3

  The Trees Step Out of the Forest

  Most of what I actually wrote in my journal is probably accurate; the problem lies in what I left out, especially in that first year of entries. Something unspeakable was happening at irregular intervals beyond my control—unspeakable simply because it came with no words attached. People talk about “leading a life,” as if it were an ox being tugged on a rope through its nose ring, but in my experience most of what we do is just try to dodge whatever’s coming our way—the blindingly bright, completely unexpected explosions that disrupt even the most orderly plan. No doubt a responsible narrator would draw a connection between these shocking intrusions and my desperate attempts to arrive at “the truth”: If you beat your head against a wall for long enough, either the wall or your head will crack.

  The first eight months of journal entries, set in Lowell, contain just a few indirect references to these uncanny events, allusions decipherable only by me. I flattered myself that I had made a conscious decision not to write about them out of respect for the absolutely singularity of what I had experienced. Good schoolgirl that I was, I reserved the journal for mini-essays on topics like “chance and determinism,” the appeal of religion, “the nature of desire,” and whether the passage of time is an illusion. But the truth is I didn’t know how to broach the subject and at least understood that any attempt to express the incommunicable risks ending in a sputter of mush.

  I can remember perfectly well the first time it happened, about a year before the first journal entry. My mother had determined that we should do something “as a family” on Sunday afternoons, another domestic management strategy that she had gleaned from the women’s magazines. No one was exempt from these outings, either by reason of homework or illness, unless they exhibited flamboyant symptoms like fever or vomiting. Mostly, in those days before highways or the perpetual traffic jam of towns, we just squeezed into the car and d
rove—kids in the back, grown-ups in the front smoking and picking at old sores like the self-answering question of why my father didn’t seem to want to spend more time with us. Sometimes there would be a touristic destination or at least a roadside tavern as a turnaround point, where the grown-ups would have a few beers while we kids waited out front. If I had known that drunk driving carried the risk of maiming and death, these Sunday afternoon enterprises might have been more successful at holding my interest. As it was, in the face of stone-cold boredom, there was nothing to do but escape into my personal imaginings.

  On this particular Sunday, our destination was a horse show in the town of Hamilton, and I could not tell you even today what was supposed to happen there to warrant the word “show,” since neither the animals nor the humans in attendance offered the slightest promise of entertainment. No one in the family had any interest in horses, either as aesthetic objects or as a means of transportation, unless you want to count a near-disastrous attempt on my part to ride the gentle-looking spotted mare that spent her days in a field near our house. I had leaped onto her back from a stone wall—bareback of course because where would I get a saddle from?—a move that prompted the mare’s foal to try to kick me off its mother’s back, while she in turn launched into a gallop. I managed to leap back off before I was thrown, and scampered away, abashed by my arrogance: What made humans think horses were eager to carry us around with our crotches bouncing against their backs?