Weekly Features Post
Issue XXX
The title of this Weekly Features Post is sure to attract some shady types: XXX. Boy, will the porners be disappointed.
Stoic's Porch
"Rehearse death." Seneca
More Anonymous Existentialist Ramblings
Although Jack Kerouac never completely deserted his native Roman Catholicism, he was infatuated with Buddhism, especially Zen. He saturated many of his books, like The Dharma Bums, with Buddhist themes. He practiced dhyana, Buddhist meditation. He at times took vows to lead a Buddhist life. In one vow, he promised to limit his sexual activity to masturbation (apparently his idea of austerity), another time he vowed to eat only one meal per day and to write about nothing but Buddhism. He at times exclaimed, “I am Buddha,” and once asked the modern Zen master D.T. Suzuki if he could spend the rest of his life with him.
I think Kerouac's infatuation is the best place to point to the problem with Zen. Although I admire Zen, it has an error lodged at the root of it, and as a result suffers serious short fallings.
Zen's view of creation and God is known as monistic ontology. All things are one because all things are Brahman. If anything is viewed as distinct from another thing, the viewer is caught in an illusion (maya). This emptiness doctrine can just as easily be applied to morality. And when it is, the results are often shocking.
If all things are one, then there is no measure for right and wrong. We need to pause here and think about this, but it makes sense. When we praise something as “right” or condemn something as “wrong,” we base the criticism on some standard that stands outside of the thing praised or criticized.
If there is no other standard–and in monistic ontology there is nothing else to serve as the standard–then there is no basis of distinguishing right from wrong. All is one: Vice is virtue; virtue is vice. The ultimate result is antinomianism, which is absolutist immorality: Nothing good; nothing bad; just do what you want. Unsurprisingly, this antinomianism has surfaced in Buddhism's history in a perversity known as Tantric Buddhism. Tantric Buddhism is notorious for its orgiastic rituals (in some quarters the term is almost synonymous with sexual excess and violence). Its sexual and magical excesses spring from the metaphysical error of monistic ontology and its correlative that all distinctions, including distinctions between good and bad, are illusion. If all is one, there is no reason not to have orgiastic sex. In the words of philosopher Jacques Maritain: “Buddhism is, therefore, a proof that gentleness and pity, when they are not regulated by reason and dictated by love, can deform human nature as much as violence, . .”.
One of my favorite lines from small children is “because I want it.” When one of my children does something wrong or insists on receiving something that is clearly out of line, I ask him or her, “Why did you do that?” or “Why should you get that?” The frequent response is, “Because I wanted to,” or “Because I want it.” Every parent goes through this and laughs inside because the child's concept of “right” and “wrong” is so wrapped in his or her own self that they are making that the benchmark, the standard, of whether they should do or get something. It's laughable, but it's not far removed from a monistic-based approach to ethics. If there is no standard outside oneself, then “because I wanted to” becomes a legitimate, indeed Gospel-like, response.
I don't think it's any coincidence that the 1960s featured a Tantric-like degenerative twisting of the virtues of peace and love–peace becoming wrapped with cowardice and love becoming synonymous with free sex. Kerouac, after all, was one of the key heralds of the 1960s new age, and, as a part-time Buddhist, he was aware of the metaphysics of emptiness and the license it allows. It's also no coincidence that the 1960s featured child-like temper tantrums by a segment of our population that couldn't tolerate a society that didn't bow immediately to its demands. If we could look into the soul of a 1960s activist, at bottom of all his objections I think we'd find the simple words: “This is what we want, so give it to us.”
But even with their fearsome metaphysical error and the societal disruptions they helped spawn, the Beatniks' pursuit was laudable. Mental gnomes, yes, but striving to get past vulgarity, the banalities, the conventionalities. In their state of oblivion, all things were cast aside and they could just be. Just take it in. This was the Beat effort. The goal wasn't to be disgusting antinomians, though they often were. The goal was just to be, to embrace, and not worry if something wasn't acceptable. “If it feels good, do it.” That was their contemptible creed. But it didn't come from shallow lust. It came from a belief that anything less was a surrender to the mass society that America was becoming and the tightening load of essences that went with it. And therefore I applaud it, though, like my applause for Zen, I try to keep a sure eye on its core errors.
Strays
"The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State." Bertrand de Jouvenel
"The slave has but one master; the ambitious man has as many as can help in making his fortune." Jean de La Bruyere
There is a "pleasing sensation or order and accomplishment which attaches to a day one has opened by Mass." Hilaire Belloc.
"To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child." Cicero
The Last Word
Omophagy: The eating of raw food, especially raw meat. "Dress it up however you want; sushi cuisine is nothing more than omophagy."
