Psychologists, mystics and science fiction writers have all
talked about how much our lives seem to be re-enactments of stories –
especially, stories we learned in childhood, which we seemed to forget, but
somehow dominated our lives anyway. But
we can change that, by going back to the original stories and re-evaluating
them based on more complete, adult knowledge (if we have it!).
This past week, I returned to my childhood memories of
reading the Upanishads, which some people call “the New Testament of the
Hindus.” I had to update a lot of my memories and impressions. But before I get
into that... first... a bit of an older story, about a time when my life seemed
to be dominated by James Bond movies.
In the 1960’s, I really enjoyed those movies. Beautiful
places by the water, neautiful women, high technology, lots of excitement. When
I went to my “first real job,” at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, in the
summer of 1968, I was happy to see how much it looked like those movies... really
nice beachfront area, lots of high technology inside, so close to the beach
that we could actually go to the beach over lunch breaks, almost every day. And there was a beautiful intelligent woman in
the small library inside for classified documents in my section.
But then, it started to become TOO much like the movie.
Honest to God, the beautiful woman turned out to be part of a Communist Party
cell, working to get out the Pentagon Papers. (Google on Pentagon papers and
Ellsberg and you will see I am not making this up. But I am not saying
everything either.) The usual mechanisms for taking care of this gently did not
work either.
And then in 1969, there were two attempts to kill me. In the
first one, I was supposed to be asleep in a new apartment. (I have the address
in my files.) But I felt very strange as I prepared to sleep. I was 50-50 about
whether I believed in psychic stuff or not at that time (because of a VERY
compelling experience in March 1968 which I was only just then coming to fully
accept). I certainly knew I was not anything like Spiderman... but the tingling
sensation was really overwhelming, unlike anything I ever felt before. But I
was skeptical still, and I had nowhere else to sleep; it was dark, in a place
totally new to me.
So I put stuff back in my suitcase, and walked in the dark
to a pay phone, where I called my mother – who, like her family, had a lot more
natural psychic sensitivity than I ever had. She was pretty clear – “If that’s
what you feel, don’t just ignore it. You can find a place to sleep somewhere.”
I didn’t have money or a map that I can remember, but I trudged across a big
grassy field towards a residential looking tower. I was ever so happy to find
it was a student dorm, largely unoccupied in summer, more than willing to accept a new resident (assigned to a two bedroom suite with
a roommate) even at such a late hour. The next morning, it was in the
newspapers how someone had broken into the room where I was supposed to be,
found no one, broke into the only other room on the floor, and murdered the
person they found by stabbing them through the covers.
That was quite a wakeup call. And the next day or two, there
was another one. I will resist giving more details – except two. At some point,
I went to proper authorities, and reported an hour or two of detailed evidence
which they recorded. I also had a chance to speak to the guy who ordered this,
and asked why in the world... he said simply: “Because you knew too much.”
But before that... I realized I needed to fully tell myself
NOT to get too much into James Bond movies. I resolved: “I will never give up
my attraction for high technology, beautiful places, and beautiful Russian
women. But I never want to get close to people killing people ever again. The
guns are not for me, either sending or receiving, absolutely and emphatically,
ever.” That was the right resolution for me, and I am happy that my track in
life changed quite firmly. I did not ask for universal instant disarmament for
everyone... only for me and my life.
It was many years after that that I met and married
Ludmilla. For her, “From Russia with love” was always primarily a love story.
It was amusing for a few years that we would hear “From Russia with love” on
speakers in some places, and look at each other and smile. So eventually, we
relived the childhood memory by playing the DVD of that movie at home – and it
instantly changed the color and power of our remaining memories. The characters
were so insipid and so hard to empathize with – and that was the end of that.
It is a lot easier to associate Luda with Natasha in the Avenger movies than with...
but let me end that train here. Reliving memories can change them, and that is
what happened to me last week with the Upanishads.
The Upanishads were also a powerful part of my childhood, more powerful than any movies. From age 12 to
age 16, when I forcibly rejected any psychic or spiritual concepts of reality,
I was still deeply interested in the question of the meaning of life – of the
meaning of MY life, and of ethical philosophy in general. My starting point was
mathematical logic, and “metamathematics” in particular. I lived in the shadow
of John Von Neumann, especially. I came up with some abstract logical way to
try to answer the question “What should my utility function be?” – what should
be the goal, the telos, the purpose of my life? I started it with the question “who are you?” When
I was 16, in my senior year of prep school, a bright new kid in school looked
at what I was saying and said,” You really should read the Upanishads.”
And so I did. I was taking mathematics courses at Princeton
at the time. The bus came earlier to Princeton than my class, so I had time to
eat lunch in that town, and visit the undergraduate library. I remember a long,
long shelf full of Upanishads in English translation. I was even allowed to
check out one of those volumes, in hard red binding, and take it back to my
dorm house to read. I became very excited; my friend was right, the original upanishads
talked about a Greater Self and lesser self very much like my abstract
(nonmystical) theory of ethics... and I was hooked. I did notice some hairier
less theoretical stuff, along the lines of yoga and psychism, in later sections,
but I attributed that to he general decline of the top culture and paid less
attention to it. I was excited; I felt someone else had similar ideas; I
returned the book to the library. Later that year, my theory came crashing
down, and I came to agree with a letter I received that year from Betrand
Russell. (See www.werbos.com/Mind_in_time.pdf
for that story, and my current views.) No more Upanishads. By the way, that
year I also met Robert Oppenheimer as part of a group; friends of his and mine
told me about how he learned Sanskrit ever so quickly, in order to read the
Upanishads in the original.
But later, as I learned more about all the cultures of the
world actively exploring first person experience, I remembered about the yoga
parts. Again, that is a long story, but last week I decided to go back and see
what I could learn in the Upanishads themselves, beyond that simple part I
learned so many years ago.
My first step was a google search. Wikipedia seemed to
confirm my basic memory, that the Upanishads say a lot about “Atman,” a kind of
Greater Self – which I now identify more with the noosphere than with any
formal abstraction. (Again, see www,werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf for more
explanation of that.) It was amusing to read about one or two hundred “minor
Upanishads,” mostly specific to narrow sects of Hinduism, all written much
later, as if a local preacher in Alabama were to write his own version of the
Bible tuned to push his own specific views. But next, I asked how to FIND the 13 principal
Upanishads (in English translation). The reviews at Amazon were heavily biased
by devotees of one group or another, even for translations of the principal
Upanishads, Thus I ended up buying the classic original translation by Hume
(not THAT Hume), with a long introduction. (A kindle version is available free
on the web from Liberty books; it can be found in google but not google
scholar!)
Reading Hume’s translation was very informative but very
sobering... in a way like watching “From Russia with Love” as an adult. Hume
was ever so positive about the Upanishads; he even gave prominent speeches in
India to the Independence Movement. But as he gave the details... well, not
quite so simple and helpful as I had hoped.
There is a tendency for mystics to struggle to find The
Original Source, past all the contaminations of people like the Emperor
Constantine, whose version of the Bible is infamous among true Christian
mystics with deep knowledge of history. But it is not as if people in 1000 BC
were all-knowing. Long traditions can be helpful exactly when they grow in the
right way, building knowledge more and more over time. It was clear that the
early stages of Upanishads reflected very humdrum polyglot paganism, and
self-serving priest kings, just like what one may find in many parts of the
world, without much special. But the Upanishads are a mosaic of very different
things, as Hume notes. There are few passages worth extracting, like the
section on the inner Self Hearing and Speaking... which reminded me of a book
by Pete Sanders... adding a few “extra chapters” implicitly. The power of
poetry linked to experience in those passages has some special value. And there
are a few good, juicy quotes about folks
who get too hung up on worshipping stuff like the Golden Calf. And yes, the more
enlightened passages about seeing and hearing through the Greater Self do point
a better path than those versions of Buddhism which ask people to “be here now”
to the exclusion of very important other disciplines of the mind.
The Great Debate about Monism versus Dualism sounded
interesting, but I saw nothing beyond what was in wikipedia for useful content.
Having a clear scientific picture of what these words mean gets rid of a lot of
nonproductive groping with froth.
On the whole... I see no reason to go back over any of these
13 upanishads in real depth (except again one or two passages)... too much blatant
mythologizing and fantasy. I get indications that some later work in the yoga
tradition (or perhaps even things cited in Hume’s long introduction) would be
more interesting at this point. Yes, I have already looked at Patanjali and
Ramakirishnan, but there is more there...
Best of luck...
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