What are ‘near enemies to the truth’? Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.
Now, some people object to the use of the word ‘wrong’ in the previous sentence, subscribing as they do to the idea that the only necessary criterion for truth is it feels true to me. This view is as dangerous in spirituality as it is in politics, because it usually means I want it to be true, so I'm going to believe it, regardless of the facts. If you don't see how dangerous this is, or if you doubt whether there really are facts or universal truths, please read the first blog post in this series.
Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls. With that introduction, let’s turn to this month’s Near Enemy.
NEAR ENEMY #15: “All paths lead to the same goal”
There’s a form of seemingly benign wishful thinking expressed in the cliché common in alternative spiritual communities that ‘all paths lead to the same goal,’ an idea often strongly linked to the absurd yet popular notion that ‘all religions are fundamentally talking about the same thing’. One can only believe the latter statement through an extreme version of the logical fallacy called cherry-picking. What all religions have in common are three features that are unpopular, to say the least, in today’s dominant cultural mode of secular humanism: 1) they lay claim to a comprehensive domain, encompassing the totality of human life from the cradle to the grave; 2) they tell humans how to interact with superhuman beings (God or gods or spirits);[1] and 3) each religion claims to be both necessary and sufficient, meaning each one declares itself indispensable in some way and says that you need not (and should not) look to other religions, for everything you need to know is provided by that religion. Point 3) is often stated in even stronger terms, such as when a given religion explicitly claims to offer a salvation that surpasses that of all other religions. Speaking as a scholar of comparative religion, I would say that these three features are all that the religions of the world share in common. Needless to say, this is not really what people want to hear.[2]
We don’t find the idea that ‘all paths lead to the same goal’ in any premodern spiritual or religious tradition.[3] It’s very much a modern idea that gained ground in post-WWII pluralistic societies in which there was social pressure to cultivate tolerance for each other’s beliefs. Most pluralistic societies, which includes virtually all the nations of the modern West, have developed an implicit philosophy that scholars call ‘relativism’. This is more or less the idea that everyone’s point of view is equally valid: everyone has their own inviolate truth, so everyone is entitled to their opinion. It follows, on this view, that everyone’s spiritual path is equally valid. But this could only logically be the case if all paths ultimately lead to the same goal.
The problem is that relativism is totally incoherent as a philosophy. Though it sounds like a nice idea, it simply can’t be the case that incompatible points of view are equally valid. Though people are free to think what they like, we can’t say that everyone is equally entitled to their opinion in the public square of discourse, because there simply are better reasons to hold some opinions over others.
Of course, though it’s the case that many people profess a version of relativism, it’s often a form of lip service. Few people literally believe that everyone’s opinion or view is equally valid. For example, nobody reading this book thinks that the views of neo-nazis are just as valid politically, socially, or culturally as the views of others. That’s an extreme example to make a point, but even when views are more proximate to each other, when the chips are down people most people don’t really think that everyone’s point of view is equally valid, and those who profess otherwise are usually just conflict-avoidant.
We do need to foster tolerance, but not at the expense of truth. Some views have better evidence supporting them, are more carefully thought through and more defensible than others. When you examine it, the philosophy of relativism always falls apart, and it’s also a view that tends to cause harm in unexpected ways. Consider this: the only way all points of view can be equally valid is if they’re all wrong. And the only way that is possible is if there is no such thing as truth. In this way, relativism always masks a hidden nihilism. And this nihilism is corrupting: it rots the deepest part of our collective psyche until we finds ourselves in a bleak, mediocre misery of meaninglessness. As a society, we have lost faith that notions of meaning in human life could be anything but fabricated. Nietzsche thought that we could each make our own meaning and that would work for us, but the loss of mechanisms of collective meaning-making has been debilitating for us as a species, fragmenting us into ideological tribalism and contributing to depression and hopelessness on an unprecedented scale.
Relativism entails the notion that all spiritual paths ultimately lead to the same goal. This is again an attempt at tolerance. It suggests we shouldn’t judge religions comparatively, that they’re all fundamentally equal and they’re all after the same thing. When you zoom way out, there certainly seems to be a lot of commonality amongst the goals articulated by the various religions and spiritual traditions. But this is an illusion created by the tendency of different religions to use similar terminology, when in fact these central terms of discourse are used in distinctly different ways by each tradition. As soon as you zoom in and get into the details, it becomes apparent that religions and spiritual paths are articulating different goals, since the goal of each is intimately interrelated with its distinct worldview. For most people, this then begs the question “is one more right, more correct, more real than the other?” I do think that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, “What do I want out of the spiritual path? Where do I want to end up?” Try to articulate that as clearly as you can and then see if the path you’re on describes a goal that matches your aspiration. <SNIP>
TO READ THE REST OF THIS BLOG POST, PLEASE BUY THE SOON-TO-BE-RELEASED BOOK Near Enemies of the Truth, in which it appears in a much-improved form.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I have in mind here anthropologist Melford Spiro’s famous definition of religion, which has never yet been surpassed in terms of its ability to cover nearly all the behaviors people call ‘religious’: “A religion is an institution consisting of culturally patterned interactions with culturally postulated superhuman being(s).” (Spiro, 1966)
[2] What people want to hear is that all religions teach us to be kind to each other. Certainly it’s the case that in every scripturally-based religion (which does not cover all religions), we can find injunctions to be kind, but it’s not the case that those injunctions are equally important in all religions, and kindness is thought to be necessary for salvation or liberation in surprisingly few of them. (It’s a debatable point, but perhaps only one religion, Jainism, thinks kindness is actually necessary for achieving the primary goal of the religion.)
[3] Many adherents of Hinduism think otherwise; but in fact there are many Sanskrit texts whose whole purpose is to distinguish the various goals that different Hindu philosophies and sects advocate for: such as, for example, the 8th-century Para-mokṣa-nirāsa-kārikā, which presents (and argues against) twenty different conceptions of the liberated state (mokṣa).
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS (transcript of a live teaching session)
Student: What are the goals of nondual Śaiva Tantra?
Hareesh: Three or two depending on how you're looking at it! The subordinate goal of nondual Shiva tantra is bhoga, meaning the ability to truly enjoy life. That's actually relatively rare and it's not just a function of privilege because plenty of people, with lots of wealth and privilege, are desperately unhappy. Bhoga doesn't have anything to do, directly, with the ability to make money or attract lovers. Bhoga means a true, deep, embodied enjoyment of life that comes from freeing yourself from your own pettiness and your own confused mental states, so it's an effective spiritual practice for some. So bhoga is related to liberation because you cannot have bhoga if you don't aim at liberation. It's even possible to pursue a tantric practice, for example, with the only goal of enjoying life more but it's going to turn out that if you really want to enjoy life more, in a deep way, that you're going to have to do some work on yourself. You're going to have to release your delusion and release your pettiness to some extent. So the goal in that sense is similar to that articulated by other yogic traditions as well except that they don't include bhoga. Classical yoga, for example, doesn’t include the enjoyment of life as a legitimate goal whereas tantra does.
The subordinate goal supervening that goal is Moksha, liberation defined as the end of all self-limitation, the end of the separate self, the death of separate self, the end of all mind-created suffering, concomitant with awakening to your true nature.
Student: What is the difference between liberation and awakening?
Hareesh: That's an important question for virtually all the authorities in the non-dual tantric tradition. Liberation and awakening are two sides of one coin, they're two aspects of one goal: being fully awake to your true nature liberates you from suffering, liberates you from the separate self, from the ego identity. In the process before you reach the culmination where there's no more awakeness there's a nice positive feedback loop phenomenon between the two aspects of awakening and liberation. The more you wake up to your true nature, the easier it is to shed self-images, become free of forms of mind-created suffering, and see through your stories. The more you shed your stories and self-images, the easier it is to wake up to your true nature.
There is value in making an argument about a subtle distinction between the two. One could say that liberation is not complete until you have integrated your awakening into every aspect of your life. As humans, we're pretty good at compartmentalizing and siloing. You could be very awake and partially liberated but when it comes to certain types of relationships, like romantic relationships or your relationship with your spouse, you might look significantly less than liberated to those observing your behaviour. It doesn't mean that you're not awake, it just might be evidence of the fact that the awakening is not integrated into that aspect of your life yet.
I'm one of those people that wants to argue for this subtle distinction that liberation is not complete unless awakening is integrated into all aspects of your life. It might seem like liberation is complete when you're no longer suffering but are you still causing other beings to suffer inadvertently. Then we would say your liberation is not complete. Certainly, some ancient authorities would not agree with that notion.
Student: is tantra interested in getting out of samsara?
Hareesh: Yes, but they redefined samsara as the cycle of suffering. There wasn't much stress on the idea of escaping the cycle of birth and death.
Student: I started to realize that I'm spending a lot of time studying tantra, and that self-realization is powerful, but how far can I go sitting in alone in my house?
Hareesh: All the way! You're not limited by your location, or your time in history, or your family situation, or your stories about yourself. None of those are actual limitations, just in your mind that they are. If you believe those thoughts they become limitations but they're not.
Student: If you have a goal, wouldn't that be ego driven and not the pure motive?
Hareesh: No, but this is a really important point! Having a goal can be a pure motive and pure aspiration. The goal of longing to awaken can be totally free of ego. An escapist longing is not considered pure aspiration in the tradition but if it's longing to free yourself from your shackles, so that you may set others free, that's an example of a of a pure aspiration for liberation.
Student: We spoke a lot today about having goals and we used a lot of words: liberation and awakening, but as far as I understand, when you speak about Shakti there's nothing to escape from! Correct me, because you know better, but there's nothing that we escape from.
Hareesh: Exactly, that's why there is this shift in the meaning of the word samsara. Before it meant the cycle of birth and death, and then later, in tantra, it comes to mean the cycle of suffering. We are seeking to escape the cycle of suffering caused by wanting things to be different from how they are, the suffering caused by wrongly understanding the nature of the self, and the suffering caused by passing on karmas and traumas to others that we have experienced. So, we seek to stop suffering and to stop making others suffer, that is the samsara we wish to escape from in this path. There's no need to escape from existence or non-existence, those are just different manifestations of the goddess. All energy is the goddess, and all matter is energy, so all matter is the goddess too, even trauma. Energy likes to flow but stagnant, stuck energy tends to cause suffering. Suffering, ultimately, is not inherently bad or wrong but in this particular game, we're seeking to become free of it so we can benefit and uplift others. So the problem is not with the trauma, or the pain itself, the problem is when we identify with it, get stuck in it, or it gets stuck in us. Stuck energy tends to stagnate and create suffering (it doesn't have to but it tends to) and so, even though it's all energy, there's still something to do. It's all Shakti but there's still something that life calls us to which is helping to get that stuck energy to flow again for the benefit of all beings.
Student: Is there any way one could know if they, or someone else, is fully liberated such that they're not causing suffering to others?
Hareesh: Only some lineages and traditions talk about the cessation of causing any form of harm as intrinsic to the goal of liberation. The fact remains that you can never tell whether somebody else is fully awake or fully liberated. There's no way to tell that for sure and indeed it seems to me that the whole game was set up that way on purpose (not that it was set up by somebody, I used the phrase metaphorically) but it seems very significant to me that it's not an accident. You can't ever tell for sure about someone else but the tradition declares you can tell for sure about yourself. You can reach a point where you have no doubt whatsoever that what there was to do, is now done, what there was to shed or dissolve is now dissolved, that you are awake and aware and free. It's not that there's not more to see, it's that you have realized what you are, in a very fundamental way and permanent way. You haven't just glimpsed it (because if you glimpse something you can lose that glimpse again) but any real seeing of what is, cannot be unseen. So if you actually realize your true nature, as opposed to just glimpse it, you can't lose that again.
Please take some practical tips from this webinar, clarify your aspiration, get specific and clear about your goal with all the spiritual seeking, spiritual practice, spiritual contemplation. Clear, not vague, not ambiguous. Clear, precise, specific. Clarify your aspiration. Make sure you have an alignment of view, practice, and fruit. If the goal to which you aspire is specifically described by a specific spiritual tradition, and you're doing the practices of that tradition, and you love the philosophy of that tradition, you already have alignment. That's the reason to follow a tradition because it has a prefab alignment already set up for you. It doesn't work though if you don't resonate with the view and the articulation of the goal in that tradition. The whole reason for there being tradition is because they provide alignment of view, practice, and fruit. If you're doing this on your own, and you can do it on your own, it's just really really really really really really really hard, but if you're doing it on your own, you've got to create the alignment of view, practice, and fruit.
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