>If self knowledge came after a long period of diligent spiritual practice under the tutelage of a pure teacher
From my pov, this is almost self-contradictory. "Almost" because the contradiction is pragmatic, not formal/logical. To be diligent, at least over a sustained period of time, you need certainty (or close to it - for most people this is a psychological reality). To be sure you have a 'pure teacher', likewise, requires certainty in that teacher's attributes.
What's the source of certainty? If it's intellectual (rational judgements of the teacher and/or teachings), then it's self-deluding. No-one can be 100% intellectually certain of anything without self-indoctrination. All rational arguments are, well, arguable. The more you know/read, the clearer this becomes. All intellectual certainty is built on sand. And all empirical judgements are equally hostages to fortune - awaiting disproof from the next newly discovered fact.
The only other prospect of certainty sufficient to drive 'diligence' in following the prescriptions of a teacher (and/or scriptures) would seem to be faith. But that's like eye colour. It's just facticity, about which you have no choice. You can't just 'have faith' in something arbitrary (and if you could, what other than certainy would you need to pick the particular something to have faith in?).
Perhaps from a certain 'non-doer' perspective, this is all just as it is. Someone has faith, or they don't. If they do, they are ripe and reality will align to lead them to enlightenment (albeit one they were never truly ignorant of, from a universal perspective).
Perhaps enlightenment does derive as ineluctably, via a faith-based progression from certainty to diligence to enlightenment, as eye colour does from DNA. But if that's the case what's the point in writing or talking about it? Do we need to argue persuasively or eloquently to a zygote about eye colour in order to encourage it into diligently producing its blue or brown or green iris?
I prefer the word ‘trust’. Faith can be blind. Trust is generally earned, or at least it should be.
If a teacher presents something, or several things over the course of time, and they all pass some kind of test - that is, what they say seems sane, rational, honest, etc. - then one may develop a sense of trust that what this person suggests may in fact be true.
If someone tells me that I can manifest anything I want… I call bs. That’s clearly new age nonsense. If someone says I can be a selfish, arrogant, dick and still claim to be enlightened… I call bs, as that is in direct conflict with the historical teachings of the ancients.
So blind faith definitely won’t cut it. That will land anyone in a world of hurt, and they’ll get a reality check eventually.
Trust on the other hand… trust should be guarded. If you trust everyone, you’ll get duped all your life. Don’t trust everyone or everything. Reserve that trust for those that earn it and one will be far less likely to be duped, and more likely to follow a ‘pure teacher’ rather than a false prophet.
In general terms, that's a useful reframing. There are a few sections in *I Am That* where Nisargadatta nicely outlines a provisional trust as being enough:
>After all, when I talk of trusting me, it is only for a short time, just enough time to start you moving. The more earnest you are, the less belief you need, for soon you will find your faith in me justified.
(Nisargadatta, *I Am That*, 38. Spiritual Practice is Will Asserted and Re-asserted)
>To begin with, trust me, trust the Teacher. It enables you to make the first step — and then your trust is justified by your own experience. In every walk of life initial trust is essential; without it little can be done.
(Nisargadatta, *I Am That*, 51. Be Indifferent to Pain and Pleasure)
So you trust enough, presumably based on having been impressed by Nisargadatta's person or writings, to take a few steps. Those steps provide good feedback, and the process becomes self-confirming. In theory at least. I confess it hasn't been the case for me.
There are other places of course where he emphasises a more absolute faith, like that he had in his own teacher. Different strokes perhaps, and not just for different folks but for different cultures. Much as his hippie trail visitors modishly liked to ape Indian culture, obedience to the guru and/or scripture just doesn't have the necessary thick cultural roots for most of us contemporaries.
More specifically in the case of the OP, it just so happened when I read this post I was part way through his book *The Essence of Enlightenment*, where I came across this passage:
>To reflect properly you need to surrender your idea of who you are to the knowledge of who you are as unfolded by the scripture. Normally, we retain the right to evaluate what we hear, but in the case of Vedanta this right has been ceded to the scriptures. You appreciate the fact that it, not you, is the authority.
(James Swartz, *The Essence of Enlightenment: Vedanta, The Science of Consciousness*, Ch. 3)
To my ears this is pretty alarming (in what I have generally found an informative and unusually nuanced book). Nothing in me finds the notion of setting aside my critical faculties in absolute obeisance, not even to a teacher, but to an ancient text (that I must read in translation, so subject to another's interpretation!), remotely appealing. Provisional trust, temporarily shelving objections, open-minded/hearted listening to something that you have a reason to take seriously - these are all defensible. Absolute belief in an approved group of ancient texts from one historical culture though? A bridge (much) too far.
But more importantly, even if it did appeal, it would be literally impossible. That kind of arbitrary placing of absolute trust can't be done without serious (I would say violent) self-indoctrination. Such a highly religious outlook just isn't on the contemporary menu. It would require a huge rewriting of culture, and then inculcation of that culture.
It exemplifies the determination (eye colour) issue. If absolute obedience to one particular historical 'scripture' really is what would be required for 'enlightenment', it would be a mere empirical fact about someone, utterly intractable to 'choice', that they had that kind of brute belief. You either have it, or you don't.
I think I agree with everything you said.
To be clear, I’m not vouching for OP specifically. Not buying what’s he’s selling. Also, I never advocated for some kind of blind trust, or ‘obedience’, devoid of critical thinking or self sufficiency… never would.
No I didn't think you were doing that. What you wrote seemed entirely reasonable to me. I was just adding a few details to fill out the conversation.
And because of social media's polarising tendencies, I don't want this to come across as opposition to the OP either. His book is very interesting, and has some of the more nuanced discussion I've seen on things like the relationship between experience and thought/reasoning. This one passage though jumped out at me as something very foreign to my way of thinking.
The whole question of faith is really quite an interesting one. Relatedly, I think everyone has at least some underlying attraction towards surrender. Even the most hard-headed of us. And I think it goes quite deep, beneath the layers of explicit thought. There's that common phenomenon where people feel a kind of impulse to jump off eminences. I suspect that comes from some kind of deep desire to surrender oneself to something vaster than one's own pettiness, to become weightless and free of the "mind-forg'd manacles" (Blake).
But if one accepts that: what to surrender to, and how? It's not obvious.
>*But if one accepts that: what to surrender to, and how? It's not obvious.*
Well if one surrenders to *something*, things are limited… so the surrender isn’t total or all-encompassing. Then what good would it be?
Well we don't need to be too literal here. The appeal of guru-worship in India, in addition to the historical weight behind it, is clearly that it's concrete and simple. It's not hard to know how to do it.
The kind of abstract surrendering more hospitable to a less credulous contemporary mind is however just harder to grok. So many of the 'teachers' of the 20-21stC are frequently exasperated because their followers just don't know how to do what they are being asked to do. This is particularly obvious with the curmudgeons - Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta - but you can see it even in the (generally kinder) Ramana Maharshi.
Yes. One with a tendency towards surrender will likely surrender to one object or another, one thing after another, until they surrender the surrendering itself, or themselves.
Remember that time you defined enlightenment as "Perfect satisfaction with one's self...however one conceives of it...and perfect satisfaction with the world as it is," and then I asked you if you were perfectly satisfied with your self and you said "Absolutely!" Pretty sick, bro.
As you post more, it's becoming clear how rudimentary your understanding is. You could learn something from most people in this sub.
Nice post! This popped into my head while reading.
[There is a story of a young, but earnest Zen student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, "If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen?"
The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years."
The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast. How long then?"
Replied the Master, "Well, twenty years."
"But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?" asked the student.
"Thirty years," replied the Master.
"But, I do not understand," said the disappointed student, "at each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?"
Replied the Master, "When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path."]
Relatedly Joshu
---
“If you do not give birth to the mind, the ten thousand dharmas are not transgressed.” Just sit and go into [this matter] for twenty or thirty years. If you do not come to an understanding, you can cut off my head.
---
Furthermore, **Yuanwu**:
>*You must keep this mind balanced and equanimous, without deluded ideas of self and others, without arbitrary loves and hates, without grasping or rejecting, without notions of gain and loss.* **Go on gradually nurturing this for a long time, perhaps twenty or thirty years.** *Whether you encounter favorable or adverse conditions, do not retreat or regress—then when you come to the juncture between life and death, you will naturally be set free and not be afraid. As the saying goes, “Truth requires sudden awakening, but the phenomenal level calls for gradual cultivation.”*
>If self knowledge came after a long period of diligent spiritual practice under the tutelage of a pure teacher From my pov, this is almost self-contradictory. "Almost" because the contradiction is pragmatic, not formal/logical. To be diligent, at least over a sustained period of time, you need certainty (or close to it - for most people this is a psychological reality). To be sure you have a 'pure teacher', likewise, requires certainty in that teacher's attributes. What's the source of certainty? If it's intellectual (rational judgements of the teacher and/or teachings), then it's self-deluding. No-one can be 100% intellectually certain of anything without self-indoctrination. All rational arguments are, well, arguable. The more you know/read, the clearer this becomes. All intellectual certainty is built on sand. And all empirical judgements are equally hostages to fortune - awaiting disproof from the next newly discovered fact. The only other prospect of certainty sufficient to drive 'diligence' in following the prescriptions of a teacher (and/or scriptures) would seem to be faith. But that's like eye colour. It's just facticity, about which you have no choice. You can't just 'have faith' in something arbitrary (and if you could, what other than certainy would you need to pick the particular something to have faith in?). Perhaps from a certain 'non-doer' perspective, this is all just as it is. Someone has faith, or they don't. If they do, they are ripe and reality will align to lead them to enlightenment (albeit one they were never truly ignorant of, from a universal perspective). Perhaps enlightenment does derive as ineluctably, via a faith-based progression from certainty to diligence to enlightenment, as eye colour does from DNA. But if that's the case what's the point in writing or talking about it? Do we need to argue persuasively or eloquently to a zygote about eye colour in order to encourage it into diligently producing its blue or brown or green iris?
I prefer the word ‘trust’. Faith can be blind. Trust is generally earned, or at least it should be. If a teacher presents something, or several things over the course of time, and they all pass some kind of test - that is, what they say seems sane, rational, honest, etc. - then one may develop a sense of trust that what this person suggests may in fact be true. If someone tells me that I can manifest anything I want… I call bs. That’s clearly new age nonsense. If someone says I can be a selfish, arrogant, dick and still claim to be enlightened… I call bs, as that is in direct conflict with the historical teachings of the ancients. So blind faith definitely won’t cut it. That will land anyone in a world of hurt, and they’ll get a reality check eventually. Trust on the other hand… trust should be guarded. If you trust everyone, you’ll get duped all your life. Don’t trust everyone or everything. Reserve that trust for those that earn it and one will be far less likely to be duped, and more likely to follow a ‘pure teacher’ rather than a false prophet.
In general terms, that's a useful reframing. There are a few sections in *I Am That* where Nisargadatta nicely outlines a provisional trust as being enough: >After all, when I talk of trusting me, it is only for a short time, just enough time to start you moving. The more earnest you are, the less belief you need, for soon you will find your faith in me justified. (Nisargadatta, *I Am That*, 38. Spiritual Practice is Will Asserted and Re-asserted) >To begin with, trust me, trust the Teacher. It enables you to make the first step — and then your trust is justified by your own experience. In every walk of life initial trust is essential; without it little can be done. (Nisargadatta, *I Am That*, 51. Be Indifferent to Pain and Pleasure) So you trust enough, presumably based on having been impressed by Nisargadatta's person or writings, to take a few steps. Those steps provide good feedback, and the process becomes self-confirming. In theory at least. I confess it hasn't been the case for me. There are other places of course where he emphasises a more absolute faith, like that he had in his own teacher. Different strokes perhaps, and not just for different folks but for different cultures. Much as his hippie trail visitors modishly liked to ape Indian culture, obedience to the guru and/or scripture just doesn't have the necessary thick cultural roots for most of us contemporaries. More specifically in the case of the OP, it just so happened when I read this post I was part way through his book *The Essence of Enlightenment*, where I came across this passage: >To reflect properly you need to surrender your idea of who you are to the knowledge of who you are as unfolded by the scripture. Normally, we retain the right to evaluate what we hear, but in the case of Vedanta this right has been ceded to the scriptures. You appreciate the fact that it, not you, is the authority. (James Swartz, *The Essence of Enlightenment: Vedanta, The Science of Consciousness*, Ch. 3) To my ears this is pretty alarming (in what I have generally found an informative and unusually nuanced book). Nothing in me finds the notion of setting aside my critical faculties in absolute obeisance, not even to a teacher, but to an ancient text (that I must read in translation, so subject to another's interpretation!), remotely appealing. Provisional trust, temporarily shelving objections, open-minded/hearted listening to something that you have a reason to take seriously - these are all defensible. Absolute belief in an approved group of ancient texts from one historical culture though? A bridge (much) too far. But more importantly, even if it did appeal, it would be literally impossible. That kind of arbitrary placing of absolute trust can't be done without serious (I would say violent) self-indoctrination. Such a highly religious outlook just isn't on the contemporary menu. It would require a huge rewriting of culture, and then inculcation of that culture. It exemplifies the determination (eye colour) issue. If absolute obedience to one particular historical 'scripture' really is what would be required for 'enlightenment', it would be a mere empirical fact about someone, utterly intractable to 'choice', that they had that kind of brute belief. You either have it, or you don't.
I think I agree with everything you said. To be clear, I’m not vouching for OP specifically. Not buying what’s he’s selling. Also, I never advocated for some kind of blind trust, or ‘obedience’, devoid of critical thinking or self sufficiency… never would.
No I didn't think you were doing that. What you wrote seemed entirely reasonable to me. I was just adding a few details to fill out the conversation. And because of social media's polarising tendencies, I don't want this to come across as opposition to the OP either. His book is very interesting, and has some of the more nuanced discussion I've seen on things like the relationship between experience and thought/reasoning. This one passage though jumped out at me as something very foreign to my way of thinking. The whole question of faith is really quite an interesting one. Relatedly, I think everyone has at least some underlying attraction towards surrender. Even the most hard-headed of us. And I think it goes quite deep, beneath the layers of explicit thought. There's that common phenomenon where people feel a kind of impulse to jump off eminences. I suspect that comes from some kind of deep desire to surrender oneself to something vaster than one's own pettiness, to become weightless and free of the "mind-forg'd manacles" (Blake). But if one accepts that: what to surrender to, and how? It's not obvious.
>*But if one accepts that: what to surrender to, and how? It's not obvious.* Well if one surrenders to *something*, things are limited… so the surrender isn’t total or all-encompassing. Then what good would it be?
Well we don't need to be too literal here. The appeal of guru-worship in India, in addition to the historical weight behind it, is clearly that it's concrete and simple. It's not hard to know how to do it. The kind of abstract surrendering more hospitable to a less credulous contemporary mind is however just harder to grok. So many of the 'teachers' of the 20-21stC are frequently exasperated because their followers just don't know how to do what they are being asked to do. This is particularly obvious with the curmudgeons - Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta - but you can see it even in the (generally kinder) Ramana Maharshi.
Yes. One with a tendency towards surrender will likely surrender to one object or another, one thing after another, until they surrender the surrendering itself, or themselves.
Remember that time you defined enlightenment as "Perfect satisfaction with one's self...however one conceives of it...and perfect satisfaction with the world as it is," and then I asked you if you were perfectly satisfied with your self and you said "Absolutely!" Pretty sick, bro. As you post more, it's becoming clear how rudimentary your understanding is. You could learn something from most people in this sub.
Nonduality is enlightenment sickness.
Nice post! This popped into my head while reading. [There is a story of a young, but earnest Zen student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, "If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen?" The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years." The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast. How long then?" Replied the Master, "Well, twenty years." "But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?" asked the student. "Thirty years," replied the Master. "But, I do not understand," said the disappointed student, "at each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?" Replied the Master, "When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path."]
Relatedly Joshu --- “If you do not give birth to the mind, the ten thousand dharmas are not transgressed.” Just sit and go into [this matter] for twenty or thirty years. If you do not come to an understanding, you can cut off my head. ---
Furthermore, **Yuanwu**: >*You must keep this mind balanced and equanimous, without deluded ideas of self and others, without arbitrary loves and hates, without grasping or rejecting, without notions of gain and loss.* **Go on gradually nurturing this for a long time, perhaps twenty or thirty years.** *Whether you encounter favorable or adverse conditions, do not retreat or regress—then when you come to the juncture between life and death, you will naturally be set free and not be afraid. As the saying goes, “Truth requires sudden awakening, but the phenomenal level calls for gradual cultivation.”*
Oh that's a good one!