Avidya

Fake it till you make it, fake it till you make it, fake it till you make it.

Find Your Way, Rising Appalachia

I’m writing this Reflection as the initial shock of the COVID-19 social isolation in the spring of 2020 has worn off. 2020 has been a long strange trip so far, a year which has put into perspective every previous year of my life.

There is a funny saying from the first season of the phenomenal television show, True Detective. One of the main characters, a hard-boiled detective who drinks cigarettes by the case and smokes beers by the carton, tells the story of a very bizarre investigation into some kind of Lovecraftian death cult, a kind of Deliverance meets the Dunwich Horror. Though there is nothing supernatural from a literal perspective, there is some heavy philosophizing by this guy, Rust Cohle, who was played by Matthew McConaughey. As the narrative unfolds, we soon discover that he was undercover at one point in his career, living with drug dealers. As it turns out, the man took a mind-meltingly enormous dose of LSD at one point, or methamphetamine and LSD, or something.

Here was not a character whom you might normally think of as ‘enlightened.’ He had an enormous number of demons haunting him, including the ghost of his daughter who was killed in a car accident (whose name, incidentally, was ‘Sophia’ – the Greek word for wisdom). It was clear that he was not a happy man. Still, though, he was sympathetic, and we were show glimpses of his own lot in dribs and drabs throughout the series.

One of the more interesting lines that he had was this: ‘time is a flat circle.’ Some kind reference to Friedrich Nietzche’s discussion of the Eternal Recurrence? That is, that everything we do happens again and again and again into infinity? Perhaps. But that is of little use to us mortals, aside from a tidy little philosophical rabbit hole we can plunge into, unsure of its end. I prefer to think of something a little more… primal. Something pagan… heathenistic, even. I’m talking about the Wheel of the Year.

The Wheel of the Year is a conceptualization of the seasons as, you guessed it, a flat circle. Starting with… well, starting nowhere, really. If we want to think of our own calendar, the start of the year in January is somewhere between the Yule festival around the winter solstice and Imbolc, otherwise known as Candlemas after the Christians ‘got hold to it,’ to use an expression passed down from my father. Unlike a conceptualization from our traditional calendar, the imagery used in the Wheel of the Year is just that – circular. There is no beginning, there is no end, there is only the wheel.

It is easy – very easy – to get caught up in mental images of time as something which progresses in a linear fashion. Past behind, future ahead. Now, before I get accused of airy-fairy mumbo jumbo, I’m talking about perspective. Time exists without a care for how we represent it in our heads. Or does it? I’m sure most of it think about it in the same way: we open up our Outlook calendars at work, see the week laid out with different things scheduled on different days, all the while following a linear path. Days become weeks become months become years – straight on down the line.

There’s a song by Mary Gauthier (though I’m familiar with it due to Jimmy Buffett’s cover) called Wheel Inside The Wheel. The song is set in New Orleans, overtly about a parade of souls, including such figures as Marie Laveau, Louis Armstrong, and Oscar Wilde, among others. But what gets me about the song is the chorus. I have reproduced it for you below:

Souls ain't born, souls don't die
Soul ain't made of earth, ain't made of water, ain't made of sky
So, ride the flaming circle, wind the golden reel
And roll on, brother, in the wheel inside the wheel

I’ll get back to that. The title of this Reflection is ‘Avidya,’ a Sanskrit word which means ignorance. I was reading the collection of Ramana Maharshi’s sayings recently called Be As You Are. I have been kind of aware of this guy for a while but recently something twigged within (perhaps with the aid of Amazon’s algorithms while I was delving into some yoga research for an upcoming project). Then I picked up a copy of the e-book and devoured a significant portion of it. I frigging love the guy – he brought the heresy medicine big time.

Heresy, simply put, means a belief or opinion that is contrary to orthodox religious views. In the West, we’ve got plenty of stories of heretics. Witches, Spanish Inquistion, Martin Luther, oh my. The hegemonic Christian faith in the West has slaughtered its share of dissidents, as have many Abrahamic religions whose adherents broke rank with the orthodox opinion about whatever literal interpretation of scripture they have cooked up over the years. These interpretations of God, which Joseph Campbell chalks up to a tribal version of deity that grew up in harsh deserts where these things were necessary, imply the ‘other’ by their very nature. You aren’t going to find same gods for natural systems in different pantheons, like Aphrodite and Brighid and Freya, goddesses of beauty all. In these religions, only the chosen people are the god’s children. According to literal interpretations of many of these scriptures, God is some assholish dude on a cloudy throne with a bee in his bonnet about masturbation or some such (can you tell I grew up an irreverent heathen?).

The East, though, many of these religions talk about God as the great within, the egoless void whence all of existence sprung. In my personal experience of God, this is much closer to the money. However, there is also a system of coming to know God in this cosmology – that of the guru. In these systems, there is a bowing of heads to tradition and someone else as master. Wait, doesn’t that sound a little familiar to my Western mind?

In my experience, this master and servant idea is a great metaphor for seeking the experience of God, at least insofar as the battle of a separated will from an alien reality is concerned. Even the concept of free will implies a bound will (i.e. fate) and that there is a twoness to choice (check me first book, The Yoga of Strength, if you want a little more on that subject). The ‘aha!’ or enlightenment or whatever is suddenly becoming aware of the complete lack of separation, the total oneness of all. But, as we humans are wont to do, we have a tendency to take it literally and get bound up in an ignorance of our own making. We think that people are above us, more spiritually enlightened, levels upon levels, the jivanmukta, the liberated and the bound. Much of scripture in the East plays into these shell games (taken literally of course, which was never the point).

Sitting from where I am now, having sought and found (a way of living – looking for something beyond that is a recipe for tears), I find myself laughing all the time at the way that it’s all set up. Shell game is a great way to think about the search for God. We grow up in a world that seems so strange and alien, the vagaries of life pulling a few fast ones on us, hand as sleight as all fuck. We dream up this myth of separation from existence, decrying the world as one massive ‘fuck you’ to the little guy, the powerless little bit of meat that is subject to the world.

‘Subject’… that is the key to the elimination of ignorance, I think. All of us think in terms of subjectivity – we can and do say ‘I am’ with much gusto. Now, what we follow up with it depends on a whole lot of things, denoted as ‘objective truths’ all. I could say shit like, ‘I am a man, mid-thirties, crotch obsession, lawyer by day, mystic by night’ – all these fine trappings of identity that are as dust in the wind. Enough of those yearly cycles and all of that ego clothing is getting flushed down the great big shitter in the sky at the end of the line. But that ‘I am’ quality remains – it is constant. It never goes anywhere.

Think of it this way – if I say ‘I am a boy,’ you might respond, ‘shut your mouth, you’re a grown ass man!’ And yet, I was a boy. At one point, that was true. But it’s not true now. Still, ‘I am’ remains. I am young, I am old, I am man, I am woman.  I am, I am, I am…

There is a Sanskrit phrase from the Vedas which describes ultimate reality – ‘Sat-Chit-Ananda’ – being, consciousness, bliss. This Holy Trinity ultimately means the same thing (now, where have I heard that before?). Beingness is consciousness which is itself bliss. It’s why Joseph Campbell admonishes us to follow that bliss, because it will ultimately lead us out of delusion and to our true identity.

When people would come up to Ramana Maharshi, some dude whose ‘guru’ was a mountain called Arunachala, they would praise him and separate him from themselves by putting him up on a pedestal. In response, he would constantly tell them, ‘give that up, you’re no different than me.’ They would bring him literal interpretations of this scripture or that one, of this guru’s teachings or that one’s, and he would simply say, ‘tut tut tut, you’re not coming here to learn, you’re coming here to unlearn.’

Think about it – your ‘I am’ quality is no different than mine, or his, or theirs, or whoever’s. What is different is the rest of it, the junk that we call real and yet cannot stand the test of time. Whether we grow up or die, shit that we think that makes us up is not going to stick around. The ultimate ground of reality is consciousness itself. It is unchanging. Can you see the connection with the spiritual admonition to ‘be here now?’ If you’re here now, you are living in the ultimate ground of reality, because being does not depend on any thought process about past or future. It simply is.

That’s why I think that perhaps time is the greatest teacher there is. I look at my little girl Iris, two-and-a-half. She is the sweetest creature I have encountered – named for the rainbow messenger of the gods, she certainly is that for me in the story of my life. Clarity and understanding arrived with that little beauty’s arrival into the world. And yet, she is in the muck like the rest of us – she freaks out, gets angry at the drop of a hat, gets happy, gets persuasive with her Dad – all of the beautiful qualities of a human being. But the shit that makes her angry would not make me angry in a million years any more. I have let go of many of the attachments that she has already built to the world. When I don’t get the Go-Go Squeez from Dad I either go without or buy one myself, I don’t cry and cry and cry until Dad picks me up and comforts me.

And yet, I know that she will drop that attachment – as sure as night follows day, in thirty years she will not be bother by such trifles. That ‘I am’ quality will still be there, though… So what’s changed then? The mind has changed. The mind is the thing that creates the attachments, the suffering. What is the mind? It’s part of our bodies, same as a finger or a leg or a whatever. But it changes, it ages. It usually does not change in intelligence, but it does come to know wisdom.

Wisdom, if I had to describe it, is the unfolding of self. It’s like a body itself, it changes with time – you live your life and it matures and thickens. Wisdom comes from the passage of time and time is indeed a motherfucker. Given enough of itself, it will take everything from us. Even our wisdom – this body will surely die and all of our wisdom with it. Everything goes. Everything except, perhaps, that ‘I am’ quality. Does that ‘I am’ quality come from the mind itself? Does consciousness spring from the correct number of atoms and electrons and whatnot? Where does it begin? Where does it stop? In science, this question of where it starts and ends is known as the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’

But does it do either, though? Is consciousness born? Does it die? I have my own answer, but I can’t answer that question for you. I can tell you ‘how it is’ according to my accumulated wisdom, tell you to make self-inquiry, do whatever a guru does. That ain’t really my style though – I’m not your guru. Your guru is within, just as it’s within each of us. Gurus who have self-realized are doing just that… but doing implies a separation. What gurus ‘do’ is just be and stuff happens which we attribute to them when we still think that there is a doer involved. Which is what we all ‘do,’ but we convince ourselves that we are the doers, that there is a subject (I) and a thing being done. That mentally cooked up separation - that is the ignorance implied by avidya. Within and without are just two sides of the same coin, when you see the true oneness of reality. Guru just means ‘that which removes darkness.’ But I’m not sure if I love that definition anymore. I think that the word can be translated to ‘that which removes ignorance.’ And, hell, time certainly does do that.

As far as I see it, the problem with the notion of the spiritual seeker is that we think they are seeking something. I know – I was there. I was seeking. I sought and sought and sought and wound up exactly where I was. The illusion perished in those moments, but the show went on. I still feel the full spectrum of colour of experience, the ups and downs of life. I am in touch with consciousness throughout, which is another word for bliss. Even in the depths of sadness and pain, which are still hanging around because it is my path to experience them and mine wisdom from them, I am in touch with bliss. The perfection of all of it, even what we would consider traditionally fucked up parts, is clear to me. There’s nothing wrong even when I am sad because I know I am not the sadness, I am just experiencing it as a transient thing that is happening. Same thing with happiness and boredom - everything has its place.

But I’m not special. Just like Maharshi wasn’t special, nor Jesus, nor Alan Watts, nor Wade down the way who’s got a fuck load of ATVs and likes to blast ducks with a shotgun and drink beer while ice fishing. It’s all apparent appendages on the same grand body of reality. Same same, but different.

I know, I know, I’ve read it all, too. I’ve devoured the Ram Dass and took a bunch of Eastern mysticism literally for a while. I thought I escaped Western dogma and jumped headfirst into the Eastern stuff. I thought that life was a very serious thing with huge consequences for failure to do ‘x.’ Karma and rebirth and what have you. Seems strange to speak of taking it all lightly, sitting here now in the COVID-19 outbreak. I am ‘doing’ my part – social distancing, hand washing. But I’m also aware that the doing is more of a process, like the revolutions on a wheel or a procession of seasons. I don’t think I have answers – or anything really. I gave it all up at one point - including the questioning. All my delusions of separation came to an end and I saw that they were just as much a part of the process as anything else.

Delusion of separation – that is a pretty good explanation of identifying with our thoughts. We in the West worship our rational minds, we speak of cause and effect, we divvy and chop up reality into little bits and delude ourselves in a myriad of ways. If you understand the metaphor of Satan as the Lord of Lies being the exact same concept as maya, which means illusion in Sanskrit, or even the same as avidya or ignorance itself, you start to grasp that the unreal is just the convincing part of the whole game. And it is a game – why else would we fool ourselves? How many times does my daughter ask me to play hide and seek in a day (it’s a lot)? Whether we are hidden or we are found, we remain.

We don’t say we are our fingers, do we? We know that they are a part of us, but I never say that I am my finger. Or my toe. Or my arm or my head or my nose. Yet our thoughts, our little bundle of identity bits, our subject / divide, our world in here and out there – that is who we say that we are. Certainly – it must be! I mean, it’s served me so well in the past, this story I have told myself about who and what I am.

One of my favourite parts of Maharshi’s philosophy is that he refers to the ignorant as those who think that they are the doers in the world. To use my previous metaphor, do we think that our toes do the doing? What about our arms? Our legs? What makes our hearts beat? If you think it stops at your head, maybe keep asking the question: who is doing it? Where does the separation start? (Fail to) Find that point and the whole house of cards come crashing down, and you will laugh yourself silly.

I just do as I do and don’t really question it any more. I’m chopping wood and carrying water and things are just flowing as they do, around and around the circle of time. In the winter time, parts of me die and I get depressed. In the spring time, I rejuvenate and learn things. In the summer time, I expand. In the fall, I begin to contract. Creative shit comes out of me and I marvel at it – do I believe it? Hell, I don’t really know nor care – my mind will do what it does but I know who I am. I make connections and say things and change my mind and act like a (hopefully) good Dad, dutiful son, loving partner. I know I’m not the doer - I just am and that’s enough.

But how is that any different from anyone else? Even when we are all knotted up in the ‘doing’ game, we’re still all one. How are these ‘spiritual leaders’ any different from anyone else if it’s truly the case? Remember the wisdom of the shell game. Take your dogma and swallow it whole and you will apply a circular logic to it, a certain ‘they is good because they is’ kind of tautology. That works for many people and I am not knocking it – we all have to find our own paths. But go for long enough you come to find out that you are indeed ‘same same but different’ as any of them.

Or you can take the heretic’s path – find the guru inside, or in a mountain, or in the trees, or in the eyes of your lover or child. See that mirror reflecting brightly and dissolving the web of thoughts and fears and worries that you think make up the substance of your being. Those ideas that come after ‘I am.’ To paraphrase Maharshi, unlearn that shit. See that you are, and that is enough.

And don’t forget that the end is always a new beginning, even the seeker’s path. For when you are found, you begin anew. Like the Wheel of the Year, there is no end, no beginning. You get to truly enjoy the merry-go-round ride in the wheel inside the wheel.

When you rise and move your feet
Find the pulse and find your beat
Rock the walk and don't retreat
We will rise as one complete

Find Your Way, Rising Appalachia