After World War II totalitarianism and technology combined to make a brave new world but one not quite the way Aldous Huxley envisioned it to be. Still drugs and sexual perversity prevail which erases any sense that one is being enslaved. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the population is already enslaved. This follows Goethe insight in 1809 that: ”None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
As we might expect, Buddhism has a more subtle definition or idea of what enslavement means. In a nutshell, it means to be ignorant of the true knowledge that we are not these temporal bodies of suffering; that by our desire for them we have enslaved ourselves to them. This enslavement means being no more than an instrument for observing and experiencing the world of samsara which is always suffering (duḥkha). This idea is contained in Buddhism's Four Noble Truths (catvāri āryasatyāni).
Adding to this, we never escape rebirth (death is never final) and with rebirth comes the probability that we will be reborn into the world of samsara. In the face of this, we try to counter it with optimism but the optimism is short-lived when disease and old age come over us and our once youthful bodies are no more.
The more foolish and immature among us ignore all the signs that life, if it were a play, means that everybody dies in the final act. Human life is all samsara as when Shakespeare’s Macbeth reflected, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The only hope we have is to transcend this enslavement by recognizing its cause then by eliminating it (nirodha) through direct intuition of the absolute which transcends samsara.
Our own postmodern brave new world is both bewitching and insidious. By a dark genius it grows more and more with each passing day. Is this hyperbole? Tragically, no. Our present day world gives us the illusion that universal happiness is possible but samsara prevails in the end. If we do not cultivate the religious mind of transcendence there is no alternative to the dismal prophecy that our lives will never escape suffering.
Humans always commit immoral acts when seeking their creator. What they fail to understand, by direct gnosis, is that their true nature is their creator.
It is something spiritual of profound luminosity yet incomprihencible darkness, having a very deep dream of becomingness in a myriad forms ever performing a temporal dance of birth and death, soaked in the bittersweet consciousness of good and evil.
Posted by: Jung | January 24, 2021 at 11:10 AM