Daily Excerpt: Introductory Lectures on Religious Philosophy (Sabzevary) - What is meant by "religion" and by "philosophy"
excerpt from Introductory Lectures on Religious Philosophy by Dr. Amir Sabzevary
From Chapter 1. Introduction to Religious Philosophy
[Lester: So this is a course on religion. What do you mean exactly by “religion,”
or by “philosophy”?]
There is this wonderful animal called a salmon fish, which of course
begins life as a tiny egg. By the sheer force of the water, this egg soon finds
itself at the bottom of a river and after a few weeks, the shell opens and
out comes a fish. At the bottom of the river, this fish makes lots of friends,
buys a house, has children, and has everything that could possibly make
it happy. In other words, life is really good for this salmon. Without any
warning though, she gets attacked by her own psychology. Don’t ask me
how it happens, but one morning the fish says to herself, “I don’t belong
here. This is not my home. I have a house, but it’s no longer livable. I have
a relationship, in which I feel profoundly alone. I have children, but they’re
all like strangers. This is not my home.”
Now you would say, “What is wrong with this animal?” She has everything
and yet she’s unhappy. Maybe she needs therapy or drugs! But the
truth is, she doesn’t need any of that stuff. She’s transitioning from one
life to another. The fish just wakes up and says, “I don’t know why I am so
unhappy. All I know is that this not where I belong.” All of a sudden, all the
business-minded, socially acceptable things that this fish used to do mean
nothing. Her entire faculty shuts down because reason is no longer powerful
enough to guide this fish. The fish has sex, but is not happy. Has money,
but is not happy. For those of you that have read Dante’s Divine Comedy, it
opens, “In the middle of my years, I found myself in the dark wood.” This
is the 12th century when people are religious, there’s no pornography, no
Internet, and yet there is this man, a beautiful poet, who says, “All people
come to this crossroads.” You don’t have to be forty like Dante. At any time
you could wake up and say, “This is not my life. I am more than flesh, more
than body, more than my relationship, more than a house, more than my
life.”
All these awful things happen to this poor fish at the worst time of the
year, which is springtime. The bears are out from hibernation and they’re
sitting at the river, so the fish must do something that it was not designed
to do. It must not only go against the current of the river, but it must also
begin to fly. This fish begins to be guided by something that you and I have
lost, called intuition. Look at the life of Malcolm X. This is a guy who has
a wife, a guy who’s got kids, a family and so much going for him. But he
said, “I want my soul to be nourished, not my intellect.” My intellect says,
“Protect your life, protect your kids, protect your wife,” but my intuition,
or my soul says, “Live through your passion. Live for justice and fairness.”
You know what it means to be human, right? We do whatever we possibly
can to protect and preserve our bodies, our minds, our wealth, our fame,
and our reputation. Rational people are concerned about these things, but
for some strange reason, Malcolm X becomes irrational. He says, “I don’t
need my wife or my children, in fact I don’t even need my power. I will live
through my intuition. My intuition says, ‘The white man, the black man,
the yellow man, the brown man, they’re all my brothers. Deep down inside
them lives this thing called intuition, soul.’”
The fish’s feelings become so urgent that it starts to swim upwards.
Many of the salmon find themselves in the mouth of the bears, and only
a couple are able to get through this wall of hungry predators. Intuitively,
somehow they get back to the very top of the river and for some strange
reason they know it’s time for them to lay their own eggs. And once they
do, they die. The next generation is ready to float down, live in forgetfulness
for twenty or thirty years, and eventually be condemned by their own
psychology and try to journey back home, only to find death, which becomes
their salvation.
So for those of you that at times feel grief and you have no idea why
you’ve been condemned, your life is no different than the salmon fish. You
don’t need to drink or smoke. All these traditions are telling us is that we
are wired so that at some point, something about you will turn against itself
and you will be forced to make a transformation. It will be profoundly difficult,
and you may not be successful. But once this dam cracks and breaks
open, there is no turning back.
It seems that all of us are after one, simple thing: a life in which you and
I can find no wrinkles or blemishes, or a life that is beautiful. One of the
reasons why we desire to fall in love, read good books or watch inspiring
movies is because these things remove us from our limited life. All of us
in this class are pursuing this thing called Beauty. You don’t go to church,
or pray, or become a Buddhist because you care about any of these people.
You do so because on the inside, believing in the Buddha beautifies the
way you feel, think and live. You love the way love makes you feel about
yourself.
When, for example, my niece was two days old my sister brought her
to my place. She was asleep and I was standing over her, just to see how
she looks. And all of a sudden she would smile up at me, or sometimes she
would tear up and I would ask myself, “I wonder where she came from, and
what she saw there?” I loved these moments, because children have the
power to make us believe in worlds unseen and untouched by the rest of us.
Ideas are like my niece – they’re magic. But though they have the power
to transform, there is a price to be paid for this transformation. For
those of you that may assume that ideas have no power, that they’re just
dead things floating in the air, let me give you a couple of examples of how
ideas transform and the price people pay for this transformation.
There was a very unhappy white man around the 19th century named
Henry David Thoreau, who was in love with his teacher’s wife. Thoreau
hated school for what it was doing to people, so he opened a school with
his brother, only to watch his brother die soon after. He closed the school,
walked away from everything and lived in the woods. In the woods he read
a tiny Indian book called the Bhagavad Gita, or “music of the gods.” The
ideas went inside him, which is noteworthy. You can read the best books
and be around the best people but if your environment on the inside is not
right, those people will not be able to go inside you. If you’re single and
looking for the perfect guy or perfect gal but you don’t have your act together,
the perfect person will walk into your life, and then walk out. Ideas
are no different in that they are like guests. Like any guest you can exploit
them, or receive them well. If you exploit ideas, you speak about them, but
you don’t feel them or understand them properly. You use them the way
you would use a person for money, or for a good time. But receive them
well, and they go inside you like a mustard seed and become gigantic trees.
After reading the Bhagavad Gita, Henry David Thoreau understood
that every single human has an obligation, in the sense that when we are
born, the gods created our birth for a purpose. Our task is to figure out this
purpose. We are like a puzzle. You are not here to write essays for your
instructors, you’re here to write essays that spell out all the puzzles that
live inside you, which have lots of missing pieces. And Thoreau got all of
this by reading a tiny book that has less than twenty chapters. He writes On
Walden, in which he says, “Do not be deceived by modernity. Don’t watch
TV or play video games, and don’t have useless friends. Go into the woods
and let the winds be your friend. Let the leaves dance for you. Let the animals
be your theatre. Go back to nature because that’s what you and I are.”
A brown man named Mahatma Gandhi reads On Walden a few years
later, and you have to understand how ridiculous Gandhi was at the beginning
of his life. Though he was brown he wanted to be English, both inside
and out. He was, in fact, educated in England, then went to South Africa
to sell his knowledge, only to realize that it doesn’t matter how powerful
or eloquent you may be as an Indian, if your skin is brown, the white man
will never accept you. And he realized that it doesn’t matter what you try
to become on the outside, if you’re impoverished on the inside, meaning
that if you have no self-knowledge and you don’t know what you’re doing
with your life, then the false images that you erect to satisfy other people
will shatter. Gandhi was so moved by On Walden that he almost singlehandedly
drove out the entire British empire from India.
A few years later, a black man named Martin Luther King Jr. reads the
life story of Mahatma Gandhi, and his life is transformed. He is able to inspire
millions with his ideas on justice, and ultimately sacrifices his life for
these ideas. Do not underestimate ideas, especially if you receive them at
the right place and the right time. They will paralyze most of who and what
you are. It’s devastating, and it’s also inspiring. It is far safer for you to be
closed to any idea that could potentially change something about you, and
it is far easier for you to remain cheap. It is safer, more familiar, and more
comfortable. Because if you want to make some changes in your life, let me
put it to you like this.
Imagine that I have been addicted to alcohol for twenty years. Sure, I
can blame my father and mother for being drunks, and I could blame the
entire country for what it has done to me. But ultimately one day I realize
that I’m getting old and my life has been lived in bars and bottles so I say,
“I’ve lost my wife because of alcohol and my kids don’t respect me because
of alcohol, so I need to make some changes.” For many years people have
been telling me that I’m a drunk and I’m no good, but I keep telling them,
“I’m a social drinker! I get buzzed once in a while and I get drunk once in a
while, but what’s wrong with that?” My friends keep telling me, “Look you
don’t just drink once a week, you drink every day.” I’m not quite sure, but at
some point someone comes to me and says, “Look, you’ve been a drunk for
a long time, and these are the reasons.” For whatever reason it’s the right
time and the right place and I look myself in the mirror, psychologically
speaking, and I say, “He’s right. I’m a drunk.” Now I have to summon the
courage to sober up. Do you know how difficult it is to remove the habit
of going to the bar? What am I going to do with my time now that I want
to get rid of this addiction of going to the bar? What am I going to do with
all my friends that I’ve known for decades? What am I going to do with the
familiar conversation, where we get drunk and talk and laugh, and then I
go home and collapse, only to wake up and repeat the same story? This is
part of who and what I am, and all of a sudden I want to create a brand-new
life for myself and it’s not going to happen.
First you physically distance yourself from the bar and the bottle. But
what do you do with the friends with whom you’ve created emotional
bonds? Even if you were to physically remove yourself from friends, what
do you do psychologically when you sit home, all alone? What do you think
about? How do you protect yourself from the emotional chaos? Something
inside you realizes that in order to get over your addiction, you can’t do it
alone. You pick up your phone and say, “I need the closest AA.” You call
and once you go in, twenty people are sitting in a circle, and one person is
the head. All of you have the following in common: It doesn’t matter what
your parents did to you or what you’ve done to other people, the truth is,
all of you are drunks that are trying to sober up. The common denominator
is the same, in that alcohol has been used to escape the tyranny of life.
Because you all share the same story, after two weeks there is so much trust
that you stand up and say, “I am Amir. All these things happened to me. I
drank and I’m trying to sober up. I need help.” And for the first time you
understand that if you really want to understand life, or live life, you cannot
do it on your own. You need a community. In the ancient world, this used
to be a cult. In the Middle Ages, these were the halls of education. This is
the relationship between a student and a teacher, but in modernity, none
of these exist.
So my recommendation is this. If ideas inspire you but you don’t have a
support system, don’t pursue them. You will just become more of a drunk.
My parents sent me to India to become educated and to make my parents
happy I said, “Okay.” I went through twenty years of school, thinking
that when I finish my degrees I’ll finally be free and happy. But despite
having all these degrees my mom looks at me and says, “You’re twenty
five. You need to get married.” Apparently, a PhD isn’t enough. So I got
married, and then after being married for about eight months, my wife
looked at me and says, “Children.” First I thought school would be the
end of it. Then they said it’s marriage. Then they convinced me that it’s
children. Then my father says, “What are you going to do with all these
degrees?” So I went into teaching. And for the first few years I enjoyed talking
very much, I enjoyed reading books very much, and I enjoyed playing
with philosophical and religious ideas. I believed that at last I had achieved
a modicum of comfort, happiness and stability. But now I look back and I
realize that I’m really not happy. For the past fifty-seven years of my life, I
have obeyed, respected and done everything that my society and parents
have asked, and I have even followed my own nature to some extent. But
once in a while I wake up at two or three in the morning and ask, “Has my
life been reduced to coming to classes and talking this nonsense and then
going home and looking at my wife and looking at my kids, eating, sleeping
then talking? If this is it, it is profoundly dissatisfying!” And the truth is, I’ve
committed no crimes, and this is not something that I deserve. Someone
who has worked so hard really deserves much better.
You may think that this is my story but the truth is, it’s not. Every
single one of you in this class, whether you get an “A” in this class or an
“F,” whether you get a job that pays you six figures, whether you get married
or you’re lonely, it doesn’t really matter what you do. Because it seems
that human beings have forever been condemned to be discontent. And we
have tried to silence the unhappiness that we feel at times, yet it refuses to
go away. As a black man you will go out with a white woman and consider
her a trophy, and you will think that your misery has come to an end because
now you have power over the white man. But alas, you sit and look
yourself in the mirror and realize you’re black and ask, “What exactly does
that mean?”
This psychological condemnation has been around for at least seventy
thousand years, when Neanderthals buried their people in the fetal position,
decorated with ornaments, so that when they came back to a world,
maybe not the physical world, they would be happier and more content.
The simple fact that humans think is an expression of our tremendous
capacity for sadness, unhappiness and discontentment. For the first few
weeks that you’re in a relationship, you never think. You just feel like this
is the person that you’re going to marry and have lots of children with. All
of your reflective abilities have been put on pause because emotionally, you
have been consumed by this thing called love. A tremendous amount of
passion lives inside you and thinking shuts down, which is why you and I
have the ability to take so much nonsense from our companions. But once
this emotion called love dissipates a little, the conversations that used to
come about so casually now take effort. Boredom has set it. You need to
understand that when we tackle ideas, whether they are from Gilgamesh
or the Buddha, they are rooted in human unhappiness. There is no escape
from it.
It is only in the last two hundred years or so that you and I have been
promised happiness down here in the physical world. They tell us that we
can, in fact, find our soulmate, get married, have children, get a job, make
lots of money and happiness will forever remain our companion. We now
seek happiness for the first time in human history, because for the longest
time the only thing that was promised to us was this: “You may find moments
of joy, but for the most part, your life will be a struggle.” You need to
appreciate the cultures that tell you that life is not about happiness because
if you know that life is not about happiness, you will never enter into any
relationship, romantic or otherwise, imagining that this other person or
thing will make you happy. Because at our very core, we are lonely, isolated
human beings who have to figure out what it is that makes us come to life.
And once alive, no one can accompany us.
Let me remind you of one of the last scenes in the Gospel of Mark.
Keep in mind that Jesus Christ is supposed to be a man of wisdom, whose
body is like a church in that every time he opened his mouth a sermon
came out. He is a man who is at peace. But even Jesus, while he’s hanging
on the cross, finds something missing inside himself and says, “Eloi eloi
lama sabachthani?” or “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Even Jesus on the cross feels alone. Before that in the Garden he says, “Let
this cup pass by me. It is tremendously difficult to live as a professional human
being. It’s too much of a burden, so please let me be like other people.”
Of all the philosophies created in the past sixty thousand years or so,
religion comes forth and says, “Money doesn’t give you happiness. Fame
and fortune don’t bring you happiness. There is some mysterious entity
that lives inside the human being, but it is covered in an avalanche of garbage.
Once you get rid of all this garbage on the top, then you’ll get to this
thing.” For those of you in this class who’ve ever been to therapy, make
no mistake why you’re there. You’re there because you want to bring out
the innocence that has been lost. You want to figure out why for the past
twenty years you have been abused, in all sorts of ways, and you want to
get rid of all these awful emotions that have been imposed upon you from
the outside world. Deep down, it’s no different than what these traditions
are arguing.
For more posts about Dr. Sabzevary and his books, click HERE.
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