A couple of days ago I happened to run across this quote from Jack London's book, The Mutiny of the Elsinore. I have no idea if it was actually said by Benjamin De Casseres; there is a good chance that it may have. But that is beside the point. Here is the quote that I found of interest:
I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."
What struck me about De Casseres' remark (and I agree with much of it except his interpretation of the “Real”) is that in waging war against the truth, or what I believe, ultimate reality, man must first greatly fear truth. Such a fear, I presume, is almost instinctual. Even more curious, man doesn’t even know the truth, in the sense of ultimate reality, yet he fears it greatly.
Perhaps man fears truth because he knows it can, in some unpredictable way, threaten the fictional world he has constructed which, surrounding him, causes him to feel a sense of security. Living in such a world, in the meantime, he can dedicate his life to destroying every vestige of truth; giving sustenance to truth-destroying religions instead of truth-giving ones.
For the man who wars unconsciously against the true; who also viscerally senses its signs, it must create such a level of anxiety that his brain, in order to escape such anxiety, feels the need to turn to paranoia for relief. In grasping this, we must keep in mind that the classic form of paranoia is not the same as clinical paranoia.
“In the classic form [of paranoia], the delusions develop insidiously and become knit together into a rational and coherent set of beliefs that is internally consistent and, once the initial set of assumptions is accepted, compelling and vigorously defensible. In paranoia, intellectual functioning is unimpaired and the paranoid is quite capable of coherent behaviour within the delusional system” (The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology, p. 508).
If we look at the main idea behind a truth-destroying religion from the perspective of classic paranoia, a religion that will help us to escape from truth and its consequences, perhaps Freud is not far from shining a light on this subject. For this view I turn to a journal article by Ralph W. Hood, Mysticism, Reality, Illusion, and the Freudian Critique of Religion (The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 2[3], 145).
“This, then, is the crux of Freud’s ontogenetic view about religious motivation. A religion that serves only to alleviate infantile fears is one that infantilizes humankind and is fated to be overcome with development. Religion must be more than wish fulfillment lest the omnipotence of thought ignore the demands of reality altogether.”
The above, I think, helps us to somewhat sum up the paranoiac derived, truth-destroying religion. Indeed, with the help of the paranoiac mind, which can certainly create a totalizing system, it is possible to create a truth-destroying religion that, amongst other things, holds out wish fulfillment which also concerns drowning our fears, which arise from an undeveloped mind (which we refuse to develop). I need to add, that such a religion can also include science and technology which when blended together add up to scientism (this began in the Victorian age with culture’s tendency to make science the authority thus extending scientific terms into the social matrix).
I need now to briefly touch on truth-revealing religion. This passage from the Catusparisat Sûtra, I think, will help to orient us in the general direction of a truth-revealing religion, above all, that it runs contrary to the ways of the mundane world that is always at war with truth.
“The way which goes against the stream is a profound one, very difficult to see. Those who are afflicted with passion will not see it; they are enveloped by a heavy darkness.”
If, in considering the above, it passes through the reader’s mind that Gnosticism, the film, The Matrix, are examples of going against the stream, they would be on the scent of the Buddha’s idea of true religion, i.e., saddharma, which pursues truth (satya) in its own right.
It is only when we are enthusiastically drawn to the possibility of awakening to the undying spirit which animates this body of flesh, and its bones, that we can speak of a religion as being truth-revealing. In the same breath, a truth-revealing religion has found the flesh to be a terrible master which as we cling to it, causes us to forget our undying nature and also, to lose our sense of compassion.
At the same time, every truth-revealing religion must more or less defend itself against those who have a great fear of truth. Historically, we see this played out in the West where paganism and Gnosticism and other like religions were forcibly repressed by the Church of Rome. But in Asia, this fear was much less evident with the spread of Buddhism. So there was much less repression.
To this day, the West does not see that its religious values and perspectives are really antagonistic to a truth-revealing religion like Buddhism. In this kind of culture, immaterial spirit counts for nothing. Yet, chief amongst the incongruities of the West, all that the West holds dear has come from paganism which celebrated the so-called Mysteries!
History, I believe, has shown us that the congregations of truth-destroying religions, by their fear of truth, have only succeeded in constructing greater fictions which serve to obfuscate the truth—not to reveal it. These congregations are made up of the Icchantikas about which the Buddha speaks in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra.
“What is an Icchantika? An Iicchantika cuts off [within himself] all the roots of good deeds and his mind does not call forth any association with good. Not even a bit of a thought of good arises. Nothing such as this ever occurs in true emancipation. As there is nothing of this kind, we say true emancipation. True emancipation is the Tathagata.”
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