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How Your Own Viewpoints Cloud Truth and Reason
by
Justin Moreward HaigThe adoption of a judicious viewpoint is one of the most important things in life. Look around you and you'll see that the majority of people are the abject slaves of their viewpoints. Because of their viewpoints, even so-called good persons will commit the most uncharitable atrocities on themselves and on others; the religious fanatic will hold his arm in the air until it withers; another will make up his mind and not speak for a number of years; another will turn his daughter out of the house because she has had an illegitimate child; a fourth will disinherit his only son because he is married to a barmaid; a sixth will never wear a hat in the street because he thinks it's good for the hair--And so on it goes from the great to the small;--and all because of a point of view.
I once read that book The Garden of Allah by Robert Hichens. It is an instructive story because it shows how a good and loving-hearted woman will, under the tyranny of a viewpoint, behave in a hard and uncharitable way, thereby torturing the man she loves and herself in addition. You remember the story--the book is a popular one--how a woman who is a Roman Catholic meets a man in Egypt, falls deeply in love with him and he with her, how without any attempt to know one another's histories or characters they rush to the altar, so to speak, and immediately afterwards make a long journey into the desert where they live for a time in conjugal bliss, and as the phrase goes, are all in all to each other; so much so that the man, at any rate, would like to have his wife entirely to himself and resents the appearance of any strangers or acquaintances on the scene. Yet in spite of all their ecstatic love-making the woman has a feeling that her husband is not completely happy, and that something is preying on his mind, some secret he is afraid to reveal. And then finally matters come to a climax and she learns from his own lips that he is an escaped Trappist monk and has broken his vows after so long a period as twenty years. He had entered the order when he was too young to realize the fieryness of his own temperament, and although all went well for a time there came a day when through a combination of circumstances, together with an insufficiency of insight on the part of the head of the monastery, he was able to resist everything except temptation, and so on last had to run away.
And now, on hearing his confession, how does this woman behave? The first thing she does is to move into another tent. Not because she has ceased to love the man--oh, no--after an inward struggle within herself she comes to the conclusion that she loves him more than ever--all the same she moves into another tent because it strikes her as the proper thing to do. (In all matrimonial differences, the first thing is to move out of the bedroom!) That the wretched man is already suffering agonies of soul she knows perfectly well, but this doesn't deter her from adding to them by the course she adopts; not only does she refuse to share the same tent with him, but she will not even touch his hand. Not one comforting sisterly sign of affection will she show to that unfortunate, misery-stricken husband of hers. On the contrary, she is outwardly as adamant as a stone. And what is more having prayed to God, she imagines He is upholding her in her resolves.
How does the story end? She, with the supposed assistance of God, forces the man to go and confess to a certain austere priest, who she knows will prescribe but one course of action--that her husband should go back to the monastery for which he has escaped. This he does the very next day, and only as he is about to enter the door, does she imprint one little kiss on his forehead. She won't even comfort the man by letting him know that she's expecting a child to enliven her own loneliness--not one fraction of an inch will she give way. The final picture shows a garden on the edge of the desert in which, with her little son, she lives shut away from the world, and dreaming of the husband she will never see again.
Here then we have a story showing up with admirable consistency the tyranny of a viewpoint. Let us examine the matter closely and see what we can learn from it, and what in the nature of a warning we can extract. As the woman in question doesn't exist, we shall not be guilty of uncharitable gossiping if we say exactly what we think about her.
And firstly I should say it's a pity she didn't mix a little logic with her imagination. It is a beautiful thing to love God and she did, but it's a dangerous thing to have an illogical conception of God. The result may be anything from burning your neighbor so that his soul may be saved, to the morally cruel behavior of this otherwise well-meaning woman . . . yet in one sense can we blame her? As long as it is considered blasphemous or irreverent to reason about God, what can we expect? As a matter of fact, far from being blasphemous or irreverent, it's the best mental-spiritual exercise you can take. As soon as you are really interested in a being, whether God, angel or man, you're bound to reason about him; it would be unnatural not to do so. You may arrive at no definite conclusions perhaps, but at least you will heighten your conception of God and not endow him with the undesirable attributes this woman, in the Garden of Allah, endowed him with! But of course--and here comes the folly of it--she was quite unconscious of the unflattering aspersions she was casting on God. She all too painfully realized that her husband, in her own words, " had insulted God, " but she little thought that in an indirect way she herself was insulting Him too. For one thing, to think that a Being so great and all loving as God could be so small-minded and non-understanding as to be capable of feeling insulted, is already an insult in itself. In comparison with God, for instance, we Initiates are as near worms--but even we aren't susceptible to insults. If a man came into this room and said to me: " You're an impostor and a charlatan, " I shouldn't feel the least inclined to give him a black eye--I so thoroughly understand his viewpoint: to such a man I am an impostor and a charlatan!
But you'll say: " What about this monk's broken vows? What are your views with regard to them? " Well, frankly I don't believe in those sort of vows. In my opinion the taking of vows springs from a feeling of uncertainty. It is like tying your own feet together when you scent danger, in case you may be tempted to run away. He has completely renounced, never needs to take vows, because nobody requires to bind himself to refrain from doing what he never wishes to do. Somebody has written: " Renunciation is only true and complete when there is no sense of Renunciation ": And that is correct.
Does the adult have to renounce the pleasures of childhood? Certainly not; he renounces them inwardly because he has outgrown them. It's the same with adults in Wisdom--they need not take oaths that they'll give up resentment, jealousy, envy, hatred, and the like--they never have the temptation to feel such emotions; they can't even feel them--they've forgotten how! Or take yourselves and your attitude to Yoga philosophy. To you it is the background of everything. Each one of you now know was that whatever happens you will still be true to your philosophy. And why? Because it's the highest interest you have in your lives. Do you need to make vows on the subject? Surely there would be quite superfluous. But supposing on the other hand you do take a vow--say to perform a certain kind of work, and then you lose interest in that work but continue as simply because of your vows, what sort of work will you produce as the result? Probably bad work--for what's not done with love is, with few exceptions, badly done.
And now to return to this monk. He entered the monastery when he was seventeen, knowing nothing whatever of life, yet he vowed to renounce life. But can any body renounce a thing they have never known? It's a contradiction in terms. Therefore whatever vows that monk may have taken, they were not those of renunciation, except in mere words. If he'd been a nun, I suppose one would say he had wedded himself to God, but as God is usually considered to be of the male sex, one would need to express it differently. In any case one thing is certain: wedded or not, those broken vowels would hardly break God's heart. He is not quite dependent for his happiness on the fidelity of one rather insignificant man. Just think of the unconscious conceit of that man! For that is one of the drawbacks in dualism. Here is God who created this vast universe--probably according to that monk's conception, out of nothing--yet he's going to worry himself and feel insulted and pained because one little insignificant creature living on one of his countless earths has ceased to pray all the day long. It may be very flattering to us to think that we are necessary to God, but it's bad for our heads; it tends to make them more swollen than they are already.
The doctrine that with every trifling sin we commit we are paining God, is perhaps a useful one for the education of imaginative children who can realize the conceit it implies, but apart from that it's a dangerous doctrine. There's a moment in the book under discussion when the wife of this vow-breaking monk says: " I feel that God has been more intent on you than on any one I have ever known. " This sentence remained in my memory on account of the boundless conceit it implies. We laugh at the savage's conception of God as the angry thunderer who needs propitiating, but the savage is at least modest; he thinks his God a Mighty God, and himself a worm--for remember you will only entertain the propitiation idea if you regard someone as mightier than yourself.
That woman in the Garden of Allah thought she believed in a Mighty and a Loving God, but even so she seems to have taken it as a matter of course when He apparently prompted her to behave in a very un-loving manner. It's as if he had said: " My business is love--yes--but you--you are different, your business is to show yourself hard and cruel, in that way you carry out My plans and decrees. By your behavior you must force this erring monk to return to me. I need him more than you do. It's true you have only the few pleasures and joys of your little world and I've the whole infinite universe for my playground, still--I must have that man. I'm sorry to take him away from you, of course, but then you shouldn't have been so foolish as to become attached to a man like that. The mischief's done now, so you'll just have to bear it. In any case you've already got my Love to console you, and after all it's much better than any man's. And now I'm afraid that's the best I can do for you. . . "
These sentiments sound very elevated from the lips of the All-loving! If that women were here and I told her what I have just told you, she'd think me a blasphemer. But it is not I who am putting those words into God mouth, it is so to say she herself. It's her own viewpoint which is responsible, not my viewpoint. I'm not blaspheming, because I don't believe such a God exists. We can't be irreverent toward a myth.
And here we come to another factor in the argument--the supposition is that if a person is capable of love, he must inevitably be capable of suffering, and as this is the case with ordinary humans, it must hence be the case with God. Our monk and his pious wife imagined that God loved them so deeply that he suffered through the former's infidelity. But does this argument hold water? The one sun shines in the sky but is reflected in millions of little dewdrops; if the dewdrop is big, the reflection is big, if small, the reflection is small, if tarnished with dust, the reflection is punished--yet the real sun shines pure and unaffected in all its glory. Now if you imagine that Sun is the unconditional feeling of Love and Bliss in itself which it pours out over everything and everybody, can the behavior of the individuals it shines upon alter its love and bliss? Certainly not; but only the more evolved can realize this, the less evolved are unable to conceive that even God--to put it crudely--can do anything for nothing.
These latter can't imagine the sensation of absolute Love in itself. Their idea is that in order to love, you must have some particular person or persons for whom to direct that love. It's the same with joy--there must be something about which to feel joyous; remove that something and the joy disappears. What was this monk really thinking in his heart? Why, that God was partly depended on him for happiness, and that as soon as he misbehaved himself, God was distressed about it--so much so that he must endeavor to retrieve him at whatever cost. It's like an unevolved husband feels towards his wife; as long as she behaves herself, he takes her as a matter of course, but this soon as she starts to flirt with another man, she suddenly begins to loom very important in his eyes--and in a painful way. As I told you, that woman in the story said: " I feel that God has been more intent on you than on any one I have ever known. " And there it in this sentence speaks the very human conception of the Almighty. " Now that you cease to love God, his vanity is hurt, and hence he wants you all the more, just as the husband wants his unfaithful wife. " Yet does all this coincide with logic and experience; is there not an unconditional Love, an unconditional Bliss, or not? We Gurus know there is, because we've experienced that Love and Bliss in ourselves. We were taught how to experience it, and now will try to teach others to do likewise.
But first we must make war against the many false conceptions of God, and all they involve. If people think of God as a jealous God they'll imagine they have a right to be jealous. If they think of him as a sad God they themselves will think they can give way to sorrow; that is where the tyranny of their viewpoint will come in. It was because this woman in the Garden of Allah thought her God capable of sadness that she resigned herself to sadness and treated her husband so harshly and inhumanly in the process. Unconsciously she thought herself stronger and more heroic than GOD. Nobody would go and wreck her own life for a being she knew to be incapable of feeling sorrow. The strong don't need to sacrifice themselves for the equally strong or more strong, they sacrifice themselves for the weak. That is why I say this woman subconsciously imagined herself stronger than God. And the result was a tragedy. Ah--Epictetus was very wise when he said: " It's not things, but our opinions about things that matter. "
Sum up the net results of the opinions of these two characters in the book. Because of his opinions, this man became a monk; because of his opinions he took vows which, with his temperament, he never should have taken; because of his opinions he was plunged into misery when he broke these vows; because of his opinions he married a certain woman--people don't marry unless they believe in marriage; because of his opinions he leaves her to loneliness and sorrow, and incidentally to the bringing up of a fatherless son--for after all a father who shut up for life in a monastery is as good as dead.
And what of hers? Because of her opinions she marries a man of whom she knows practically nothing. Because of her opinions she is all but driven to despair when she hears he has broken his vows; because of her opinions she immediately moves into another tent. Because of her opinions she behaves in a hard and inhuman way. Because of her own opinions she forces him to leave her and go back whence he came. Because of her opinions she refuses to tell him that she is pregnant. Because of her own opinions she can never marry again, since even to seek for an annulment of marriage would go contrary to her opinions. And now after all this I hope you realize the tyranny of viewpoints and how dangerous they can be
If only people would learn to think before they evolve their point of view, or having evolved one, would at least weigh every pro and con to see whether there are not follies and inconsistencies which need altering and readjusting! But unfortunately most people never think about a point of view for themselves, they just adopt any one that happens to be floating around. If they admire some person in particular they'll adopt his viewpoint, quite irrespective of its suitability to their own temperament or mentality.
It is on account of this diversity of human temperaments that the great Sages who gave to the world the Yoga Philosophy divided it into several Paths--so that each student should follow that one most suited to him. Are you here in this circle all treading exactly the same path? No, of course you're not; how were that possible when exactly the same phase of Yoga does not appeal to all of you are like?
But that is somewhat by the way. The lesson I want to impress upon you tonight is this: if one species of viewpoint can produce unhappiness and cruelty, another species can produce the opposite. Therefore what you, who are . . . learning a little wisdom must do, is to teach people to form love-and-happiness-producing viewpoints, not the reverse, as did this woman in the Garden of Allah.