The Corporeal Fantasy

by Martin Butler

  Let's talk about the people who are relatively affluent and go searching for some meaning. There's some character who runs a website called ‘The Fuck It Way,’ which is reasonably popular. And he points out that 99% of our DNA is the same as that of bananas. We are meaning-seeking bananas from a genetic point of view anyway. The main route that people take to get some gratification is through stuff. They'll buy stuff, the new 52-inch plasma TV, new car, new house, new gadget, new dress, new shirts, whatever, new stuff, something that basically distracts them and pleases them for a short space of time, and they will then go and sell their labor for the rest of the week to buy all that stuff. The most insidious one is pointed out in the book ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Noah Harari, which is a brilliant book, and he points out that now it isn't just stuff, it’s what he calls romantic materialism - traveling to someplace that not many people may go to, traditionally anyway. Somewhere in Africa, somewhere in Southeast Asia, somewhere in South America, white water rafting holidays in Peru, Safaris in Africa and so on. These people believe that these things will gratify them and maybe they do for a period, but it isn't permanent because the following year they want to go and do the whole thing all over again somewhere else, the new promise of paradise and nirvana, some experience in some place that is new and unusual. Romantic materialism is the belief that experiences can fill this void that most people, particularly people with time on their hands, experience.

  Then we get the good old spiritual search in one shape or another. First of all, I'm going to talk about the thing that is really most popular right now, it's the importing of Buddhism to the West, or some of the ideas anyway, and central here are notions like being in the present, self-remembering, mindfulness, all these things that somehow are supposed to bring us some gratification. We wouldn't do it otherwise. Why would someone want to make an effort to be mindful while they're preparing their vegetables, which is the typical sort of thing? Why would they bother to do that if they weren't looking for some gratification? And so, our poor little egos, the egos of people who have too much money and too much time on their hands, their little egos dimly aware of the fact that one day the party's going to stop, are looking for some validation. Some validation that they're not some temporary phenomenon that will disappear off the face of the planet, and not just the face of the earth but disappear from the universe at some point in time. They're driven to seek meaning in this whole Buddhist thing, and I don't doubt that right back when Buddha did his thing, there was real meaning and power in all of that, real, not just gratification. But nowadays the market for this is relatively well healed middle-class people who have got everything; the will-to-life is satisfied, they're still not happy, so they need to find something that gives them some fulfillment. Now Plato said that focusing on the present was a total waste of time. Why? Because there is no present. We are continual becoming. We are not a thing; we are becoming. The minute you try and focus on the present its gone. Same with mindfulness. There was an interesting thing that would often take place in various groups and schools with which I've been involved. People would try to practice some mindfulness, self-remembering, or whatever and it was a common observation that the more they did this, the less they were present. The answer to that riddle is that by practicing something like self-remembering, or mindfulness or being present, you are trying to satisfy a desire. Desires are the essence of the whole issue, the entire problem, but more on that in a moment. We've got the import from the East, Buddhism, which is all nice and neat and orderly, all the kinds of things that the ego likes. And then we've got the Christian religion that has degenerated into praying to God and Jesus for stuff, the ‘Church of Abundance.’ And then we've got the spiritual New-Age type stuff. Chakras and astral bodies. As someone once said to me, even if all this stuff was true, even if we had an astral body, even if we could play with our Chakras in some way, how long do you think that would satisfy people? Well, it wouldn't. They'd get fed up with it; they'd be looking for something new. Flying around the universe in your astral body would gratify you for, well, maybe a few months. Once you've been to a few galaxies and seen that they're pretty much, all the same, you'd grow tired of it, and you'd be looking for the next thing, whatever the next thing might be. All these attempts to gratify, to get some kick-back from efforts are miss-guided. The reason they're miss-guided, hopefully, you will see in one minute. I'm going to quote here from the Tao Te Ching which is a wonderful work. I don't think people read it if they did it would upset them a great deal. In the very first verse it says: Empty of desire, perceive mystery - filled with desire, perceive manifestations. In other words, the only true way, if you can call it that, is no way, because there would be no desire associated with it. If you want to deal with desires, then you have to open your eyes and look at the world and decide whether the goodies that are on offer are worth the effort. And you have to look at the state that most creatures, including human beings, live in. Is this a place where you really ought to be trying to find some gratification? Because I can assure you there is no gratification in stuff. It doesn't matter whether its climbing Everest or whether it is buying the latest gadget, there is no permanent gratification to be had there. All gratification is the outcome of pursuing a desire. The gratifications are always temporary, and once you've satisfied one desire, then there will be a thousand in its place. They breed like rabbits. Desires are the things you need to deal with. That's terrible news for people who are searching because the search itself comes from a desire. As the Buddha said, seeking to diminish desires would only result in more suffering because that too is a desire. The only thing that will extinguish desire is looking at reality, seeing it for what it is and deciding that there is nothing worth desiring. How many people are going to do that? Almost none.

  INNER PEACE - TOO EXPENSIVE FOR MOST

  How much are you willing to pay for inner peace? I guarantee that by the end of this section you will be of the opinion that the price is too high. The spiritual self-help market is a multi-billion-dollar market. It's enormous because many people are not all that happy. The reasons for unhappiness vary, and it seems there are plenty of people saying exactly what's wrong. They're producing diagnoses of man's condition, but how many people out there have got a solution for it? Well, almost none. I want to talk about one of the more naive approaches before I get on to the real meat. This more naive approach is meditation, and again here is a huge multi-billion dollar industry. There are people selling meditation techniques, courses, books and a large market of people who are ready to consume them because again, they're not happy. Well, what are they looking for when they take on board a meditation practice? In the main what people are looking for is some inner peace, some rest from the turmoil that is going on inside their mind and their emotions. Will meditation give you that? Well, here's the rub - if you sit in meditation for half an hour or more, and you've been doing it for a while, then certainly the inner chaos will calm down, and you'll experience some degree of peace. It's relative, not complete peace. People think they can stop their thoughts, but actually, you can't stop your thoughts. You can calm them down but not stop them. People liken the meditation process to some mixture of water and mud. When you let the bottle or container that's got this mixture in it stand it for a while, then the mud will sink to the bottom, and you'll get clearer water at the top. That's an excellent analogy, but the dirt is still there, it may be at the bottom, but it's is still there. Meditation will give you this, maybe, you will get to the point where you get some physiological effects, the release of serotonin is one of those, and endorphins another. It’s just like eating chocolate; it makes you feel good for a while. The problem is that within 10 minutes of coming out of your meditation, you'll be feeling harassed, on edge and anxious again, or whatever emotions were bothering you before you went into meditation. Meditation is not a solution for most people - in fact, for virtually all people if they are looking for inner peace. Of course, we see all the glossy advertising with people sat
in the lotus position looking as though they are in Nirvana. Are they there? No, they're irritated by the guy who's taking a photograph, wishing that he'd do the shot that he's happy with or whatever. If you decide that you want to meditate all the time, if you've got the luxury of sitting there half the day, you'll find in the end, that meditating too much is like lying in your excrement. It’s difficult to express, but it gets messy, which is the only word I can use. How do we get inner peace, some inner silence? Well, the reason you don't have peace, peace of mind and inner calm is that you have desires. And there's an excellent book by a character called Valentin Tomberg, who wrote ‘Meditations on The Tarot.’ Now, this isn't the usual use of tarot, for fortune telling, saying what is going to happen to someone in the future or anything like that, this book is a profound book. In the very first chapter in the book, he states that all the saints and all the great mystics agreed on one thing. Meditation is of no use until the desires have been calmed. Then we say, ‘well how do we calm the desires?’ Let's clarify what desires are. You know you have desires that arise from your body - thirst, hunger, sex, sleep, and you have desires that are stimulated by your imagination, excessive money, the next holiday is going to be the best one you've ever had, material things, a nice big car. Desires pretty well all stem from the will-to-life, the need to survive. I'm not going to go into that here; I've covered it in other areas. But, all these desires, while they're active, are going to drive you and they will not leave you with any peace of mind. Desires are like a tyrant, they'll keep pushing you, and they will keep you engaged in life and chasing things because every desire implies lack. If you're thirsty you lack water, so you go and get water. If you want a nice big new car, then it implies that you are not satisfied with the vehicle you have at the moment. Desire means a lack of satisfaction, so cravings are always in a sense painful because they come from a sense of lack.

  Now, one of the best people to comment on this is Arthur Schopenhauer. Near to the very end of his great work, ‘The World as Will and Representation’, there is a chapter called ‘On the Doctrine of the Denial of the Will-to-life.’ Sounds fairly dramatic, doesn't it? Well it is dramatic, because what he's saying is that until the driver within you, that drives you to get more money, get a better car, go on a better holiday, eat better food, or whatever it is that is floating your boat - until the thing that is within you that is pushing all of that turns around and looks at itself and says ‘this is all futile’ - until we understand the desires you will never have any peace. Now obviously this is a big thing, and I did say at the beginning of this that the price for real peace is very, very high and it's so high that most people will not be willing to pay it, they would sooner suffer. What is implied in all of this, is that we move to a straightforward form of life, because Schopenhauer's chapter on the ‘Denial of the Will-to-life’ isn't about suicide, he considers suicide to be useless, and it is useless. What he's talking about is realizing that all the things that you go chasing after, social prestige, fame, money, pleasures, those kinds of things, are ultimately futile, they bring you nothing. How many people can realize that? Well very, very few. What will happen is that the people who've become reasonably affluent will think that they can buy peace of mind. That is just one of the funniest things, and it is tragic as well. But it's so funny that people treat peace of mind like just another thing they can purchase - they can pay a couple of thousand dollars somewhere for a meditation course and go and buy peace of mind. That thing that is driving them to do that is the very same thing that is causing their problems, their lack of peace of mind. Inner silence cannot come about until something within a person has looked at life and decided that the usual pursuits are utterly and entirely futile.

  This is where the great Spinoza says in the first few sentences of one of his works called ‘The Improvement of the Understanding,’

  "... experience has taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile.”

  These are fairly strong words, aren't they? Vain and futile. He describes how for a while he tried to have his cake and eat it, to keep engaged in ordinary life and usual social stuff, the ordinary ambitions, and he found that actually, it wasn't possible to maintain the conventional type of life driven by desires for luxury, for fame, for whatever. He says in this particular work of his that, in the end, he had to devote himself wholly to the work that he'd set himself. There's a price you have to pay. This is a substantial existential challenge for an individual, and it isn't some pretty thing that happens in a nice wooden-floored meditation hall full of middle-class people who have paid their $2000 for a meditation course. It doesn't happen like that; it's a very personal thing. Unless a man is utterly disappointed with his life, he cannot do the kind of work that we are talking about. If you want inner peace and silence, then you have to seriously start reflecting on the nature of life and your life with total honesty, and it's not pretty. Eventually, you will reach that state of disillusionment, and this is a dangerous place to be of course, because there's nothing at that point that is going to replace that disillusionment. The thing that replaces it is something you have to wait for. In the Christian religion, they call it grace. Spinoza isn't one really to talk about his own experiences very much, but he does give a little bit away in the Improvement of the Understanding. He said that life had taught him that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile - you can imagine the disappointment he must have felt to arrive at that. He'd had a go at that and found it all reasonably useless. The irony is that once this process has taken place, once someone has seen through life so to speak, they don't need to meditate unless it's for a specific purpose. There are reasons why people meditate other than to try and achieve some state of calm - for particular aims. But, you know the general idea of meditation that you sit, and you calm things down, and yes things do sometimes calm down, but as I've said before, the mud is still at the bottom of the jar. If you sit for 20 minutes then dirt settles down to the bottom, yet as soon as you come out of your meditation the whole thing gets shaken up again, and you're back to square one. The price of inner peace, silence, and contentment is way too high for most people to pay, they would sooner have their misery. And that is the way it has always been, and that is the way it will remain.

  ACTIVE OR PASSIVE

  At the very heart of Spinoza’s philosophy is the notion of active and passive states. The word “act” and its derivatives (action, acting, activity) are crucial to Spinoza since it indicates a state where a person is operating from their initiative instead of being a passive responder to events. Ultimately it is a question of whether we allow events and things to have power over us, or whether we have control over them.

  As I’ve mentioned many times the fundamental driver of all sentient beings is the desire to persist in existence – or the survival drive. When our survival is more assured we are happy – it’s as simple as that. When it is under threat in even the most indirect way, we feel unhappy. And power is another critical element in Spinoza’s philosophy, so much so that he equates it with virtue. The more power a person has to persist in their existence, the more virtue they have. However please do not confuse “persist in existence” simply with the act of staying alive. More than this he means to be what we are.