But as long as one is subject to compulsive reactivity, one avoids such fears by fleeing to consoling thoughts and images that spin out of control into irresistible fantasies of oneself as a character in a trite drama that compels repetition. Each retelling provides an entranced respite from fear and anxiety, and allows you to extract ever keener frissons of pleasure from the story’s detail. These fantasies are isolated episodes of a larger story that cannot be told. Whether it be a tale of sex or revenge, it culminates at a point of intense satisfaction—then starts again. You do not go on to imagine how the following day you will face the person you have just seduced or humiliated.
The fantasy is a solipsistic act without consequence. It is both an anxious flight from contingency and a fixation on something that promises permanent satisfaction and security. Flight and fixation are two aspects of a single process. They reflect the simultaneous turbulence and frigidity of the demonic. Fixation is a compulsion that is driven and sustained by flight from the intolerable contingency of things. By holding on tight to an idea, object, or person, I feel momentarily safe and unafraid. But in the very act of grasping something, fixation distorts it. Tightening attention around what is desired severs it from the matrix of relationships whence it springs, making it appear necessary rather than contingent. And thus do I find myself viscerally trapped in Mara’s most insidious snare.
7
The Devil’s Circle
A MAN LOST in a desert can trudge for hours through the sands until he sees ahead of him an unmistakable line of footprints leading to the horizon. But his joy on finding a trail turns to despair when he realizes the tracks are his own. Since one limb was a few millimeters longer than the other, or habit or injury inclined him to step fractionally further with one leg, he consistently veered to the right or left. Without a path or landmark to guide him, he traced a vast circle while convinced he was walking in a straight line.
“Samsara” is a Pali/Sanskrit term that describes life’s tendency to repeat itself. In Tibetan, it is translated as ‘khor ba, which means “circling.” This circling is an endless round of compulsive flight and fixation. In German, “vicious circle” is Teufelskreis, a “devil’s circle.” Like someone lost in a desert, I feel compelled to struggle ahead, unaware that a devil’s circle will only bring me back to where I began. Through the years, I return again and again to the same stock obsessions. I flick through the tome of my achievements in the blink of an eye only to feel that nothing has really happened. I am still the anxious and puzzled child who set out on the journey.
A disciple once found the Sufi sage Mullah Nasruddin eating a pile of chili peppers. The mullah was sweating profusely, his face flushed with pain. When asked what he was doing, he replied, “If only I continue a little longer, I am sure I’ll find a sweet one.” No matter what experience has taught us, we insist on making the same mistakes again and again. “Live like a milk-sucking baby,” urges Mara. Tug at the teat of experience long enough, he seems to be saying, and it will deliver more than mere milk.
A devil’s circle is addictive. It raises you to dizzy heights of rapture only to bring you crashing down into troughs of despair. Yet I do not hesitate to start the diabolic cycle again. I find it hard to resist the urge to go through the familiar and comforting motions of a habit, even when I know that the end result will be the anxious craving to repeat the experience again. Whether the obsession is food, power, sex, religion, or a drug, the pattern is the same.
The devilish circling of samsara provides an anesthetic against contingency. By keeping to established patterns of thought and behavior, I seem to keep life’s disconcerting impermanence and unpredictability at bay. Regarding myself as a self-sufficient unit of habits and routines provides a shield against contingency’s disturbing excess. A devil’s circle blinds us to those cracks in the world through which we could step out of its orbit onto a path.
The natural world itself inclines toward stable and predictable patterns: the circling of planets round the sun, the recurrence of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of oceans, the unfurling of a bud into flower, the organization of a colony of bees, the migrations of birds, the beat of the heart, the divisions of a cell, the replication of sequences of DNA. Samsara is not just a psychological process. Its machinations are at work in our chemistry and biology as much as in the repetitive obsessions of our psyche.
“Samsara” is shorthand for the unconscious and conscious strategies employed to cope with the convulsions of contingency. As an inherited survival strategy, the brain creates the impression of being a fixed self in a relatively stable world that can be manipulated to achieve happiness. By means of concepts and language, this seemingly constant self is able to learn from the past and plan for a future in which it will reap the rewards of what it does now. Having guessed how others are likely to behave, it adopts maneuvers to outwit or exploit them. This innate sense of being a self, as well as the cravings involved in getting what it desires and avoiding what it fears, are built into the organism.
“Everything,” wrote Spinoza, “endeavors to persevere in its own being.” The human organism compulsively clings to the illusion of its own necessity as tenaciously as the roots of a tree cling to the soil in which they are embedded. Gotama understood how human freedom is opposed by impersonal forces that mindlessly assert themselves. By appearing to him as a farmer, Mara assumes the form of one whose life is locked into the patterns of repetitive seasonal change. In this guise, the devil is not merely a demonic distortion of consciousness but the capacity of the natural world to confine, disturb, and confuse us.
The troops under Mara’s control tend to straddle the awkward divide between body and mind: sensual desire, discontent, hunger and thirst, craving, lethargy, fear, and restlessness cannot be neatly classified as mental or physical states. Lust is as much a warm rush of blood to the genitals as an emotional yearning or erotic fantasy; hunger as much a pang in the stomach as a craving for steak; fear as much a constriction in the throat as the desperate longing not to be hurt. Buddha refused to be drawn on the question as to whether soul and body were the same or different. He regarded such speculation as not conducive to awakening. By paying unprejudiced attention to the totality of experience, one discovers an unbroken continuum between what one thinks of as “body” and what one thinks of as “soul.” You cannot specify where the pang in the stomach ends and the yearning for steak begins.
The conviction of being an abiding, conscious self, disassociated from the body out of which it peers onto the world, is an illusion generated by biology and reinforced by psychological and spiritual longings for a fixed identity. The sense of things remaining the same under changing conditions may simply be how the world appears to an organism that requires perceptual constancy in order to function optimally. Yet a person’s apparent permanence is seized as an objective truth in our futile quest for something that will forever console us. If illusions and deceptions will improve an organism’s chances of surviving to pass on its genes, then selection pressures will favor them. The forces of nature are indifferent to the ensuing confusion caused to featherless bipeds in search of truth and meaning.
When the suspicion dawns that I am going round in circles, I realize what it means to have lost my way. I may have set off on a path with the hope of breaking out of a cycle of habits only for it to have imperceptibly slipped into another familiar and comfortable routine. As life’s insidious drift toward repetitive patterns, a devil’s circle is incompatible with a path that liberates. To embark on a path is to break free from samsara’s cyclical orbit. A path leads into unknown territory, whereas a circle goes over the same ground again and again. The enticing avenues that a devil’s circle offers are not paths at all.
8
A Devil in the Way
WHEN A DEVIL’S CIRCLE is replaced by a path, a way is opened up in the fabric of existence that may at first seem like a rupture, a fissure, even a collapse or breakdown. What is
familiar and secure is abandoned in favor of a seductive but disturbing unknown. For when you proceed along the open space of a path, you encounter the turbulent rush of contingency. Things are not as stable or predictable as they once appeared. The present moment is nothing but the point at which the future vanishes. The not-yet-come hurtles toward you like an endlessly breaking wall of water into which you have no choice but to step.
The devil is what makes you hesitate in taking that step. He gets in your way. He blocks your path. In making you veer aside to retrace the protective curve of a circle, he severs you from that matrix out of which life springs. Existential conflict is rooted in this primary opposition between the devil and a path. The devil hinders us from proceeding along a path that would liberate us from the dilemmas, desires, and fears that entrap us. The path opens up the possibility of a freedom the devil cannot tolerate.
Ashvaghosa recounts how Kamadeva, the Indian god of desire, is styled “Mara—the enemy of freedom.” Asked about the nature of devils, the Tibetan yogini Machik said, “A devil is anything that obstructs the achievement of freedom. . . . There is no greater devil than fixation to a self. Until this is cut off, all devils wait with open mouths.” Gotama claimed to have awakened to a middle way that “can be known here and now, as a result of which a mindful person releases his hold on the world.” Contrasting his way to that of Mara, he said, “The safe and good path that leads to happiness has been reopened by me, the wrong path closed off, the decoy removed, the dummy destroyed.”
Not only does the devil block the way to freedom, he tricks one into following paths that appear promising but lead only to frustration and disillusion. This is what happened to Balaam, as told in the Old Testament’s Book of Numbers. Summoned by his king but acting against God’s will, Balaam “saddled his ass and went with the princes of Moab.” To prevent him from following this course, God dispatched a satan who “stood in the way” against Balaam. As with Job, the satan functions as an “angel of the Lord” rather than an embodiment of evil. His role is nonetheless defined by his blocking the path that Balaam is intent on pursuing.
The root satan in Hebrew means “to oppose, to plot against.” Satan is spoken of as the “adversary.” The meaning of the Greek diabolos (translated into English as “devil”) is “one who throws something across one’s path.” Job complains that his diabolic God “hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and he hath set darkness in my paths.” The Acts of the Apostles depicts the early followers of Jesus as practicing not Christianity but what they called “the way,” an echo of Jesus’ claim to be “the way, the truth and the life.” Such a way leads to salvation through removing whatever hinders progress along it. The Koran presents a similar opposition. Having refused to bow before man, Satan tells God how he will find revenge: “I will waylay Your servants as they walk on Your straight path, then spring upon them from the front and from the rear, from their right and from their left.”
In the Buddhist and Abrahamic traditions, the path serves as a metaphor of freedom while the devil stands for whatever inhibits that freedom. The Chinese also gave primary importance to the concept of the way (tao) but without developing an explicit counterconcept of the devil. They were nonetheless aware of the diabolic possibilities of nature and human society that cause one to lose one’s path. “Heaven and earth are ruthless,” writes Lao-tzu. “To them the ten thousand things are but as straw dogs.” Imposing famine, pestilence, lightning, and earthquakes, the “Lord of Slaughter” (as Lao-tzu calls Heaven) is indifferent to the longings and fears of mortals. Since the sage understands this to be the way (tao) of things, he is not unduly disturbed. “If I think well of my life,” comments Chuang-tzu, “for the same reason I must think well of my death.”
Unlike the sage, ordinary men
become entangled with everything they meet. Day after day they use their minds in strife. Their little fears are mean and trembly; their great fears are stunned and overwhelming. They bound off like an arrow or a cross-bow pellet, certain that they are the arbiters of right and wrong. They drown in what they do—you cannot make them turn back.
In losing sight of the way things are, one loses sight of one’s path in life. One finds oneself “running one’s course like a galloping steed.” Only an intuitive understanding of the way can free one from this turmoil to live at ease, with the curiously effective detachment of a sage.
The “True Person” of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu lives fully in the world without being overwhelmed by its frenzy and muddle. He is impervious to the social pressures bearing down on him. “He can commit an error and not regret it, meet with success and not make a show.” At the same time, he “puts himself in the background; but is always to the fore.” Lao-tzu compares the way of the sage to water, which “benefits the ten thousand creatures; yet itself does not scramble, but is content with the places that all men disdain.” A path allows water to run freely along and gather within it. This flowing, nourishing, and transparent liquid is what Namuci, the drought-demon, refuses to release.
Mara is not so much opposed to Buddha as to the “ancient path traveled by the awakened ones of old” that Gotama discovered and made known to others. Mara knows that even after Gotama’s death, the path he taught will still be available to those who wish to follow it. It is the path—not Buddha—that enables one to escape from Mara’s snare.
9
An Empty Space
SO UBIQUITOUS IS the image of a way or path that its metaphoric richness is obscured. Imagine a footpath that cuts across a field, passes through a gate into a wood, winds between the undergrowth and trees, emerges onto a heath, climbs out of view toward a distant range of hills. To the mind’s eye it seems superimposed on the landscape: a brown line traced on a green background, a passage weaving darkly through a forest. To say it “cuts,” “passes,” “winds,” “emerges,” “climbs” is to think of it as something with agency that stands out in its own right. But if you kneel down on the ground and examine it, what do you find? Nothing. The path is just a gap between other things: the human-sized space between the grasses in the field and the trees in the woodland.
As long as a path serves our purpose, we do not notice it. When walking along a trail in the countryside, we attend not to it but to the landscape that opens up around us. Only when we lose our way do we become conscious that it is no longer there beneath our feet. One moment we are strolling along, only in the next to be gripped with anxiety on finding that the path we had taken for granted has vanished. To lose one’s way is to lose one’s bearings. We stumble about in a panic, retracing our steps, wondering whether we recognized a landmark, terrified that we are lost. When we find the path again, we are grateful not so much for the muddy trail that draws ahead but the assurance of its leading to a destination.
The path is a cipher of meaning and purpose. One’s “path in life” is a convenient way of saying what one’s existence is for. It sums up all that we value and aspire to. It lets us envision our remaining years as a trajectory stretching ahead on which to realize our hopes. It enables us to stay focused on priorities, whereas to have “lost one’s way” is to have lost a guiding vision. Just as the sense of following a path imbues life with meaning, so being lost is linked with aimlessness and despair.
To lose my way is not only to lose a sense of direction but also the freedom to move. A path allows me to walk or run at a steady, rhythmic pace. As soon as I lose it, I find myself struggling through undergrowth, climbing over fallen trees, circumventing heaps of rocks. The anxiety of having lost my bearings is compounded by the frustration of being obstructed. I expend a great deal of energy but make little headway. My relief on recovering a path is that of being able to move freely again. For a path is a space where nothing gets in the way.
One tends to think of space in terms of physical extension and location. A body “occupies” or “fills” a space. For there to be “no more space” means that nothing more can be fitted into a room or a vehic
le or a document. Outer space is that virtually infinite expanse speckled with galaxies and stars separated by inconceivable distances. “Inner space” suggests a formless expanse of mind in which thoughts, mental images, memories, and fantasies rise and pass away. Space seems to be the relatively permanent place where temporal events happen.
Buddhist philosophers see space differently. They define it as the “absence of resistance.” The space in a room is understood as the absence of anything that would prevent one moving around in it. To cross from one side of the room to the other is possible because nothing gets in your way. Rather than being the place where things happen, space is the absence of what prevents things from happening. The space in the room is nothing in itself; it is just the absence of chairs or tables, glass walls or hidden tripwires that would obstruct movement within it. In encountering no such resistance, we are able to move about freely.
This dynamic concept of space also applies to a path. A footpath is a space because it offers no resistance to placing one foot in front of the other. Its space allows one to move without hindrance. Space is thus a metaphor of freedom. Instead of seeing a path as a thing on which one walks, imagine it as the space between things that allows one the freedom to walk. If the English language did not condemn us to separate the path from the act of walking, we could speak of such free movement as “pathing” (as in French one can talk of une cheminement). But we don’t say “he paths”; we say “he walks on a path,” thereby giving the impression that a path is just a place where acts occur. By contrast, in Sanskrit the noun pratipad (path) comes from the same root as the verb pratipadyate, which means “he or she paths.”
Living with the Devil Page 5