“He who seeth me in all things and all things in me looseneth not his hold on me and I forsake him not…… He who by the similitude found in himself seeth but one essence in all things, whether they be evil or good, is considered to be the most excellent devotee…”
Comment:
The “me” is the Self — which is consciousness, minus the subject-object dichotomy involved when we perceive…..and categorize. The passage is an exhortation, in the traditional manner of Eastern religion, to loosen the grip of the ego and see everything as different aspects of one.
This is a powerful passage, but psychologically, deeply problematic for me. Is equanimity the highest of all goals? Indifference to outcomes. Eastern religions tend to say so.
To what degree do the emotions cloud the mind? Do they always cloud it? To what degree do they enhance it? Different times and places have given us different answers.
And there is a paradox in the passage. Supposedly, the emotions arise from attachment to the ego. Attachment to the ego prevents you from experiencing the indivisibility of consciousness. But, at the same time, how do you detach from your emotions without experiencing some degree of that indivisibility in the first place.
The role of the emotions in moral judgment in the west and east might seem like a strange place to go for a blog on politics. But surely, the way we think about things has an influence on how we react to them and shape them by action. Our emotions allow us to be manipulated in specific ways.
Bush’s Manichean perception of the world as locked in a struggle between good and evil might seem to be an obvious example, at first. But I’m not certain if we are not just making easy generalizations there. There are probably plenty of people who do not see the world in such black and white terms, and yet have also been guilty of the same bellicosity. It seems to me it isn’t duality so much as conviction of rightness (despite all evidence to the contrary) that is dangerous.
But then again, if you peer into that idea a bit more, you realize that you can only be that convinced about the rightness of anything because you refuse to accept that every thing carries its opposite within it.
So, more than dualism, it’s a kind of absoluteness of perception, an overzealousness in action that seems to be the problem.
“The best lack all of conviction,
The worst are full of a passionate intensity.”