REFLECTIONS ON KING SOLOMON AND THE BUDDHA

Reflections On King Solomon And The Buddha - Section 1

Bias

by Ira Rosenberg

WESTERN BIASES

The Western world has a bias against inwardness, reflectiveness, quietude. It favors the interpersonal over the solitary life. This lack of appreciation for solitude devalues the creative power of inwardness, especially the deep turnings made in solitude, the teshuvahs, the changes in direction, the reversals that are our schooling in wisdom.

Our education, the schooling of youth, gives no emphasis to inwardness. Interior learning, experiencing inner states, holding a steady gaze inward, meditative skills, are almost totally ignored. All knowledge is equated with outer knowing, with a decreasing proportion of even the outer knowing dependent on direct sensory discrimination, and more on authority, or on abstract intellectual and technical understandings best left to experts. The power of the outer over the inner has led to the eclipse of genuine spiritual experience communally experienced, except in extremely local gatherings. In the larger secular world outwardness has had an even more corrosive effect. It has kept us from validating our own internal experiences with those of other voyagers, other seekers. It has encouraged us to think of ourselves as statistical reference points rather than unique sentient beings whose self-ness is puzzling and important, shifting, changing, inconstant.

Creativity and spirituality are not denied, but what we admire in the inner process is really the triumphal Return rather than the courageous Withdrawal. And return is a triumph, in our view, only if it is known by others. It has to be appreciated and rewarded by the culture in a timely manner. A few bumps on the road of return are okay, but they have to lead to quick vindication in this lifetime. The private person whose wisdom is shared within the orbit of his personal life has almost no status in our society.

We tend to correlate success with Return and failure with Withdrawal. Withdrawal is contemptuous, cowardly, a shunning of responsibilities, particularly our duty to earn and spend. Creative withdrawal is often pathologized as depression; we even see ourselves that way. But withdrawal and return are mutually entailing. You can't have one without the other.

Many of us live in terror at going on the quest for meaning, because we fear we're not strong enough and we'll lose ourselves along the way, as well we might. And this fear keeps us from developing our full range of capacities. Instead we cling together, clinging to character in mutual narcissistic indulgence as in the all too cute Seinfeld reality, clinging to character not because we're huddling together for shelter in a natural world full of challenges, but because we are morally lost in a disharmonious, cacophonous, trivial uproar of our own devising where the constant emphasis on the minutiae of personality, combined with the diminished value of personal action in love and wisdom keeps us from appreciating ourselves or recognizing each other for the excellence of our deeds.

Given our preference for the social over the inner world, you would think we would be experiencing a Golden Age of intimacy. But a depressing situation has emerged instead: we spend increasingly large portions of our lives in isolation, approaching and separating from TV sets, computer monitors and movie screens as if our favorite programs were significant others. Even sex becomes increasingly virtual, data intensive, risk free and empty.

With the power of human artistry to create engaging dramatizations, with gripping special effects, and our willingness to suspend disbelief, we have let media generated fantasy lovers, heroes, enemies and role models invade our psyches. We take movie stars into our hearts, we know their expressions, the look of their bodies, their little tricks and habits. We know them, but they don't know us. There is no reciprocity.

We are passive until we shut off the set. Then the experience abruptly ends. These media "relationships" arouse us, but we can't move through progressively intimate sensory distances to meaningful turning points, so there is no fulfillment. When the news anchor says "see you tomorrow," he can't see us and the pixilated made-up image we see is certainly not him. This lack of real contact we make up for with a particularly potent substitute gratification: the thrill of eating. Regressing to an infantile approach and separation processes we fill our hearts by snacking in front of the TV.

These cultural biases deprive us of our turning points both in love and in wisdom. Our turning points still stir in privacy, and some suggest that love and wisdom have unprecedented opportunities to grow strong in the private world, but our private world becomes increasingly trivial as the hold of the political and economic world over us increases. The capacity for meaningful action languishes; we become vestigial to ourselves.

Even in private life love and wisdom are suppressed. Absent of real community, we miss the consensual validation we need from the outside world for our inward processing. When solitude is not supported it comes back to haunt us and make us doubt our convictions, or even have convictions. We're secretly convinced of our impotence, our irrelevance. We fear love too, for it can expose us. We don't want to be reminded of our power, because we are afraid we are delusional when we think we have power, so we are left with our careers, our bank accounts, our fashions, and with emptiness, denial, foolish primping and manic consumerism.

We can now summarize the ways our culture impacts on our possibilities for happiness. What we say applies equally to the haves and have-nots, the winners and losers, the successes and failures, the achievers and the nebbishes. These ways fall under three headings found in all cultures and classes, but a taking particular historical form in each culture.

Naturally we'll focus on our own situation:

SELECTIVE STIMULATION -- The cultural surround attaches or obscures us from contact with the signalling sources in nature. Times and seasons, day and night, heat and cold, the natural signals for grouping together or moving apart, are overridden by culture. Technological alteration of the perceived environment, in our period, tends to make our evolved physiological capacities increasingly irrelevant and even dysfunctional, not only our muscles, but brains and senses too need to be tamed and tuned, increasingly with psychoactive medications and recreational drugs. This if course has deep consequences for our sense of belonging, purpose and value in the human family -- and important consequences for our mental and physical health, through stress, pollution, electromagnetic radiation, over stimulation, etc., all of which impinge on our happiness.
INTERNAL SELF DIVISION -- That part of nature which is human nature: our drives, emotions, hormone flows, our mind, awareness, consciousness, hopes and fears are also shaped by culture. Our personalities are divided into worthy and shameful parts. We favor some, suppress others, dividing us from ourselves. How we love and how we grow wise is shaped by what is rewarded, and what is punished and what is shunned and what is ignored. The culture largely trains us up to be who we think we are.
So the permissions and prohibitions we receive from our culture through the agency of our families, upbringing, education and institutions, weighs down on our natural tendencies. Our biosocial rhythms are suppressed and distorted, particularly our two principal meaning-giving rhythms, love and wisdom. Every cultural milieu favors some parts of love and wisdom while forestalling others. One leg strengthens while the other weakens. Given the polar movements in love and wisdom, this skewing of the legs makes some things easy, but others difficult or impossible, throwing us on the resources of one part of our personality or another, whether or not it is our strong suit.
SKEWING OF LOVE AND WISDOM. Though love and wisdom are biologically rooted, and inevitably expressed in some form or other, they can certainly be promoted or repressed by culture, particularly through the pressure of property dominance and territoriality, our main reward and punishment system. Successomania, addiction, juvenilization and consumerism are our current cultural biases, our reward and punishment system. They are sustained by the deep inward cauterization of the stages of love from each other and the stages of wisdom too, of approach from separation, and withdrawal from return, and from a depletion of their turning points. On a fundamental level this involves a breaking apart, so to speak, of the "corpus callosum" between love and wisdom as a whole, the linkage that stabilizes passion and softens conceptualization. In consequence, our freedom of action is impaired, including actions that would improve social, economic and environmental conditions in as yet undiscovered ways. We are restrained not only by what is allowed or prohibited, but by what it is even possible to conceive, or to find the heart to act upon.

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Last Updated 07/31/99 (rge)