11/7/17
Bhakti Darsana verse 4
Atma
alone is Brahma.
The knower of the Self contemplates the
atma, not any other.
This thus meditating the Self
is named as bhakti.
Nataraja Guru’s translation:
It
is the Self alone that contemplates the Absolute;
The knower of the Self
meditates on the Self and not on any other.
That
which is meditation on the Self
Is
known to be contemplation.
Ah!
Another bhakti meditation. What a perfect way to spend an evening, gathered
with a dozen loving souls to celebrate life at its most joyful. Nitya’s
commentary reads like a guided meditation in its own right, and we interspersed
several others gleaned from the treasure trove of human sharing.
Nitya
immediately invites us in to a cosmic inner vision:
If ignorance is like an ocean of darkness,
knowledge is like an island of light where rises the resplendent sun of pure
consciousness. Although darkness is negative, it does have the capacity to
conceal truth and obstruct vision. When light comes it does not push away
darkness. The very presence of light is the absence of darkness. Light not only
causes its own existence but it also automatically reveals its presence. It not
only presents itself but also illuminates whatever is within its ambit.
We are
reminded in no uncertain terms to treat light as a metaphor for consciousness:
The light that is spoken of here is not
physical light but the illuminating and self-revealing qualities of
consciousness. The self-revealing consciousness is the atma. The revelation is not to any agent other than the Self
because nothing else exists except the negativity of non-knowledge.
The most
precious light of all: awareness. Consciousness. While there are degrees of
consciousness, you either have it or you don’t. If you switch off that light,
it is utterly dark. Not like in your bedroom, where there’s always some light
seeping in no matter what you do.
Possibly
even more fundamental than conscious awareness is something we call love: the
initial impulse that brings a universe into existence, laying the groundwork
for consciousness to evolve. I read out a brief section of Aldous Huxley’s
insight when his doors of perception were opened by LSD: “What came
through the closed door was the realization… the direct total awareness, from
inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.” It’s a
realization I can vouch for from my own personal experience, too. You can read
more of the context in Part II.
Deb
shared something else from Huxley, and that section is also found in Part II.
Huxley is especially helpful in that he understood his transcendental
experience in Vedantic terms, and as a writer was unusually capable of
expressing it. His terminology dovetails perfectly with our study.
Nitya
uses a water analogy to show us how atma and brahma, the Self and the Absolute, are
the same and yet distinct:
As the Self is boundless and not tainted
with
any relativistic adjunct, it can as well be recognized as Brahma, the Absolute.
The ocean can be called water because water is the only content of the ocean.
Brahma and atma are related in the
same sense.
This
implies that the Self is the only content of the Absolute. At the same time,
the distinction made here is essential to a complete understanding, mainly so
we avoid the pitfall of equating our ego with the Totality and getting a
swelled head. As Bill put it, we are given both an inspiration and a warning.
The inspiration is to look at the knowledge of the Self that is not constrained
by individuated consciousness, while the warning is that the absolute sense of
knowledge can easily be mitigated if it is enclosed in ego boundaries. It is
our default setting to become attached to one aspect of the light and reject
others, but a devotee who is absorbed sees only the purity of an unbounded
awareness. Here’s how Nitya expresses the downside of limitations:
The term Brahma
as a self-signifying word is necessitated because the knowledge of the Self can
sometimes be circumlimited with ego boundaries, and thus can manifest as
conditional states. When a pot or jar is immersed in the ocean, no substantial
change takes place either to the ocean or to its content, the water. But if the
vessel is lifted out of the ocean full of water, even though nothing has
happened to the basic formula of the composition of the water as H2O,
nobody would call it ocean. Now it is only a potful of water. It is this kind
of crippling effect that comes to the conditional Self when it is identified as
a conscious operation of awareness that is of a sensory, cognitive, or
volitional import.
We not only
have yanked ourselves out of the ocean of love (is that why we in the US are
called Yanks?), but we yank each item of awareness out as well. To keep us
company? A yank for a Yank, I guess it is. The meditation on the Absolute is
about restoring separate items to the overall context of unity. This takes
place naturally once we begin to look at the wholeness in which life plays its
games. I suggested a movie screen analogy. When we watch a movie we are fixated
on individual parts of the screen, and that is what makes the story and its
effect work, but we tend to forget that what we’re experiencing is all part of
a single projected image, and those parts aren’t actually distinct. They are
all projected together. And as with our purnamidah
chant, you can take something away or add something to it, yet it always
remains what it is: in this case a movie. Its wholeness doesn’t go away when
you change an aspect. Only our awareness changes. As Nitya says:
And although there can be a relativistic
increase or decrease in physical light or in the cognitive clarity of
apprehending and discerning objects of perceptual or conceptual import, there
exist no such degrees of comparison in consciousness that is pure, simple, and
homogeneous. This is not a state that is manifesting, but it is what truly is
and what is veiled by the phenomenon of relativism, which is comparable to the
kaleidoscopic variegation of patterns and designs in an organically functioning
tapestry of mental images.
This leads us to a practical aspect of bhakti. Our brains
are always selecting one aspect out of the total to focus on. It’s a perfectly
reasonable survival mechanism, but it’s very limiting. The effort we have to
make is to contextualize what we encounter within the totality of our
awareness. At the very least this requires letting go of our learned reactivity. We have been trained our
whole life to rate everything on a variety of scales and then select the best
option. Not surprisingly, our choices are all 10s in our estimation, while
those around us range lower, often much lower. Remember high school? Rating
everything was a fulltime occupation, and our choices determined our peer
groups and our behavior to a significant extent. No too much wrong with that, other
than it excludes awareness of the Absolute, the neutral attitude of balance
that is blissful in the extreme and the underpinning of fairness. Ratings are
what we erect our ego boundaries based on. Those items of interest affect us
mightily when we invite them to, and pretty soon we are stressed and miserable,
unable to readily escape because we have so wisely chosen our ever-so-elegant
bondage.
Bill
concluded that our job is to find our true nature, and the Guru is giving us
the keys. Our practice then (Bill loves the idea of Practice) is to try to
discover our true nature despite the way we pursue the world. Jan suggested a
more fluid way of looking at it: we can open our hearts to the ocean of love
that is all around us. It means turning back to yourself, and this includes
taking steps to forgive not only others, but yourself as well. Forgiveness
helps you to be at peace with others. It’s one way to get over our obsession
with rating everything. This inspired Paul to add that it was essential to not
take our doubts and apprehensions too seriously. He has found that simply
waiting can give the flow of life time to iron itself out. It is certainly true
that we can do damage by pushing our agenda, yet we can also miss the boat by
not upholding our valid agendas.
Nitya
speaks of the resplendence of lighting a match in an utterly dark place. That
means bringing our conscious intelligence to bear. Understanding naturally
engenders forgiveness. The class had a lively discussion of how to bring light
to life. Paul has often said we don’t go into a cave and try to push all the
darkness out so there will be light—we just bring a torch with us and the
darkness disappears. So we have to work on ourselves to get the match lighted,
and not worry so much about banishing the dark. That happens naturally as a
corollary to being lit up.
Paul
semi-humorously admitted to finding himself trying to subdue and strangle all
kinds of loathsome apparitions. Bill thought his time might be better spent
learning to be free. Easier said than done! Dispelling apparitions can become a
fulltime job, and there are always plenty more waiting in the wings, if we do
manage to thwart one. The problem is we think that’s how to go about fixing
things, even when we know better.
With
all our ratings and so on we are profoundly addicted to pushing away what we
see as darkness, in hopes that behind it somewhere lurks the light. We can’t
admit that the ones and twos have light also, not just us tens. Look at the
public sphere: it’s all about chasing evil away, walling it out, blasting it to
smithereens, consigning it to hell. We modern humans have all had a lot of
practice at this self-deluding attitude. Real change requires a paradigm shift,
and it is only going to happen in individuals, at least for now. Don’t look for
criminal politicians to lead us. There’s no Movement afoot. Self-correction
will never be a popular or lucrative endeavor. Bringing light in a modest way
doesn’t make headlines, and it may well go unnoticed in the moiling and madding
of the crowds. Union with the Absolute is so quiet and unobtrusive it hardly
seems like the optimal contribution we can make to the world we live in. Yet it
is, it is! The opening salvo of Atmopadesa Satakam puts this beautifully,
including in Verse 5:
People
of this world sleep, wake and think many thoughts;
ever
wakefully witnessing all this shines an unlit lamp,
precious
beyond words, that never fades;
ever seeing this, one should go
forward.
Susan
wondered if we weren’t supposed to put an end to all mental modifications, a la
Patanajali, meaning that any effort, no matter how well intentioned, is
paradoxically contrary to proper practice. This is indeed a common belief, yet
it is a fallacy. Several regulars missed the class two weeks back where I read
out Nataraja Guru’s clarification of citta
vritti nirodha. It’s posted in Part II of the Bhakti verse 2 notes.
Basically, Patanjali’s instruction means to restrain our outgoing or horizontal
tendencies, so as to free up our vertical efforts to be at our best. Please do
read it, but here again is the gist:
The verticalized activities of
the mind should not be obstructed but instead must be allowed free scope, with vitarka (criticism) and vichara
(inquiry) as functions. It is
the outgoing tendencies or horizontal activities of the mind that produce
dissipation of interest. It is only on the horizontal level that control is
necessary.
Vitarka and vichara may sound daunting, but they
are what we naturally do all the time to enable our learning and spiritual
growth. We could be better at this if we aren’t always coping with the demands
of trivial interruptions, which life seems to delight in pestering us with. If
nothing else, we have to make an effort to carve out some free time from the
ceaseless demands of maintaining the life of the complex organism we happen to
be. Nitya supplies us with another measuring rod to remind us we haven’t
finished the job quite yet:
Although effort is required for us to
free
ourselves of the ten thousand and one colorations and conditionings that come
to our mind, once we are free of the tyranny of inhibitory or obsessive
compulsions consciousness effortlessly shines forth without any need to dismiss
the unreal.
It’s quite
simple: when we are untroubled by whatever happens to us, able to treat it
dispassionately as nothing more than “fringes and folds in the time-space
continuum,” we can stop making efforts to liberate our consciousness. Until
then, working to free ourselves of our assumed obstructions and impediments offers
terrific benefits.
Nitya
sums it all up with a renewed definition of bhakti:
In the conditioned state, innumerable
are the
objects for the mind to meditate on, but in the unconditioned state the Self
alone is, and it has not a second to be with. Hence we can say that it has
become the all-filling Brahma which is never again tampered with by the advent
of anything conditional, eventual, or consequential. This pure state is bhakti.
In
keeping with the verse itself, the class was luxuriously meditative, and we
closed with a lovely session, attuned to a version from the latest Scientific
American magazine (Nov. 2017) of an idea familiar to us all. Anyone could
easily make up something similar for their own personal meditation. This one is
adapted from The Zoomable Universe: An
Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing, by
Caleb Scharf, (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2017). I read it out slowly so we
could visualize its expansive ideas invoking eternity:
Do
you want to hear the most epic story ever?
A
long time ago the atoms in your body were spread across trillions of kilometers
of otherwise empty space. Billions of years in the past there was no hint that
they would eventually come to be configured as your eyes, your skin, your hair,
your bones, or the 86 billion neurons of your brain. Many of these atoms came
from deep within a star—perhaps several stars, themselves separated by many
more trillions of kilometers. As these stars exploded, they hurled parts of
themselves outward in a flood of scorching gas that filled a small part of one
galaxy out of hundreds of billions of other galaxies, arrayed throughout a
gaping span of space and time almost a trillion trillion kilometers across.
Some
of these atoms have been in the shell of a trilobite, perhaps thousands of
trilobites. Since then, they’ve been in tentacles, roots, feet, wings, blood,
and trillions, quadrillions of bacteria in between. Some have floated in the
eyes of creatures that once looked out across landscapes of 100 million years
ago. Yet others have nestled in the yolks of dinosaur eggs or hung in the
exhaled breath of a panting creature in the depths of an ice age. For others,
this is their first time settling into a living organism, having drifted
through eons of oceans and clouds, part of a trillion raindrops or a billion
snowflakes. Now, at this instant, they are all here, making you.
Tat tvam asi, baby!
Part II
Swami
Vidyananda’s commentary:
It is because a wise man is a knower of the Self that he
meditates on the Self. Not only does he meditate on the Self, but he meditates
on nothing other than the Absolute consisting of existence, subsistence and
value (i.e. Bliss). He does not meditate on the inert and unreal non-Self which
is the cause of suffering. He does not (even) meditate on the world. Because of
meditating on the Self, it is called bhakti
or contemplation. So, the man who meditates on the Self is the real
contemplative. The Self is the Absolute, and the knower of the Self is the same
as the knower of the Absolute. This is the same as saying he is a true
contemplative. The characteristics of such a knower of the Absolute will be
further described in the final chapter.
* *
*
From
Nitya’s Brihadaranyaka Upanishad commentary:
Reading a book and enjoying it is good, but reading yourself
is more important. The language used to write a book has a grammar and a logic
which govern how the words should be arranged to make meaningful sentences.
Similarly, when you look at life to discover its grammar and logic, then alone
are you participating in the remaking of your being. (Vol. II. 47-8)
* *
*
In
Storming Heaven, Aldous Huxley is
looking for ways to open the Closed Door to the Other World he has discovered
through mescaline, and meets The Captain, Al Hubbard, a genius inventor and an
expert at using LSD to precipitate a breakthrough:
Huxley initially had been
skeptical of the reports coming out of Vancouver that had Al evoking the
Beatific Vision in dentists and lawyers. But in October 1955… he decided to
give the Hubbard techniques a try. As he later wrote… “What came through the
closed door was the realization… the direct total awareness, from inside, so to
say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. The words, of course,
have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle.
But the fact remains….” (56)
Jay Stevens, Storming
Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press,
1987)
* *
*
Speaking
of Huxley, Deb read out a section of his famed Doors of Perception. I’ll reproduce a slightly expanded version
here. The book remains one of the most cogent explanations of the psychedelic
and/or spiritual experience, partly because he was a genius and a writer and
partly because he was mentally well prepared—he knew a lot about religious and
philosophical interpretations of the Great Experience. Here’s the beginning of
his first mescaline trip, a couple of years before the one mentioned above (you
may catch the connection with Nitya’s be-ness):
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was
sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained
only three flowers—a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint
at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and
cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the
bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little
nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning
I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no
longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was
seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by
moment, of naked existence.
“Is
it agreeable?” somebody asked. (During this part of the experiment, all
conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible
for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)
“Neither
agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “it just is.”
Istigkeit–wasn’t
that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic
philosophy– except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque
mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the
mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a
bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under
the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have
perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was
nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were–a transience that was yet
eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a
bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet
self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.
I
continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect
the qualitative equivalent of breathing–but of a breathing without returns to a
starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to
heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like “grace” and
“transfiguration” came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other
things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and
from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst
which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood,
not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely
and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I
remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki’s essays. “What is the
Dharma-Body of the Buddha?” (‘”the Dharma-Body of the Buddha” is another way of
saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen
monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance
of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, “The hedge at the bottom of
the garden.” “And the man who realizes this truth,” the novice dubiously
inquires, ‘”what, may I ask, is he?” Groucho gives him a whack over the
shoulders with his staff and answers, “A golden-haired lion.”
It
had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was
all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the
Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less
obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I–or rather the blessed
Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace–cared to look at. The
books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers,
they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder
significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade;
books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color
was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the
point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my
attention.
* *
*
Michael
B. sent a link, which he correctly estimated would be right up my line. I
include it to expand on this section of the commentary:
The shimmering self-evidence of a person
sitting in the dark and saying “I am” is a case of Self-knowledge, but in a
badly limited and grossly conditioned state. The complexity of its relativity
only increases when that consciousness is fed with the sense data of perception
and the limitless conjectures of a mind that is capable of proliferating
compositions of mental images. In this way, a person can have so many
informational tags put into their bio-computer as to make them a bursting
reservoir of information. This of course is not a case of the knower of the
Self, and this knowledge is certainly not Self-knowledge.
By the way, you can see here a hint of Narayana Guru’s
thought experiment from Atmo:
Verse 10
“Who is sitting in the dark?
Speak, you!”
In this manner one speaks; having
heard this, you also
to know, ask him, “And who are
you?”
To this as well, the response is
one.
Verse 11
“I,I,” thus, all that are spoken
of,
when carefully considered,
inwardly are not many; that is one;
as the receding I-identities are
countless
in their totality, the substance
of I-consciousness continues.
The point, of course, is that piling up information does not
bring Self-realization; in fact it often buries it under masses of distraction.
This is very different from a computer, which gets more efficient as its
information banks increase.
Nitya
was musing on bio-computers back in the heyday of the idea, but the idea is
increasingly inapt. The article from Michael raises a lot of doubt on the
analogy, though it falls far short of a damning refutation. What is left out of
Epstein’s account (not surprisingly) is the transcendental factor, since it
remains unknowable and unprovable. It is, however, essential to a complete
picture of what’s going on. I highly recommend you take the time to read this article,
as it does what we are instructed to do in our meditations: intelligently
exorcise ourselves from the thrall of mediocre thinking. Enjoy, you
non-computers, you!
The Empty Brain
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge
or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer:
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
by Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the
American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He is
the author of 15 books, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.
* *
*
Nitya
makes a logical point in his commentary that inevitably reminds me of the
beginning of the Mat Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland:
This is why, in formal logic, the converse
of a
universal proposition is said to be not tenable. We can confidently say, “All
oceans are water,” but its converse, “all instances of water are oceans,”
cannot be accepted. The present verse recognizes knowledge as Self-knowledge
only when it is free of any limiting conditioning.
I didn’t explain the example I took from this very well in
class, and promised to include the bulk of it in these notes. The following is
part of my response in Nancy Y’s Brihadaranyaka Upanishad online study group,
from July 2016. It includes some of the riddle answers as a bonus, which
constitute a fascinating bit of literary trivia, though not related to the
class except that we are meant to laugh and have fun while we’re learning:
The
present material is right up my line! First a serious call to nontriviality and
then a humorous dip into Alice in Wonderland. That they overlap is made clear
by the following. First, Alice:
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but
all he said was, ‘Why is a raven like a
writing-desk?’
‘Come, we shall have some fun now!’ thought Alice.
‘I’m glad they’ve
begun asking riddles—I believe I can guess that,’ she added aloud.
‘Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer
to it?’ said
the March Hare.
‘Exactly so,’ said Alice.
‘Then you should say what you mean,’ the March
Hare went on.
‘I do,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least—at
least I mean what I
say—that’s the same thing, you know.’
‘Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter.
‘You might just as well
say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’
‘You might just as well say,’ added the March
Hare, ‘that “I like what
I get” is the same thing as “I get what I like”!’
‘You might just as well say,’ added the Dormouse,
who seemed to be
talking in his sleep, ‘that “I breathe when I sleep” is the same thing as “I
sleep when I breathe”!’
‘It is the same thing with
you,’ said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat
silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about
ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.
We’ll get to the
riddle later, but dig this from The Psychology
of Darsanamala, Bhakti Darsana verse 4:
The term Brahma as a self-signifying
word is
necessitated because the knowledge of the Self can sometimes be circumlimited
with ego boundaries, and thus can manifest as conditional states. When a pot or
jar is immersed in the ocean, no substantial change takes place either to the
ocean or to its content, the water. But if the vessel is lifted out of the
ocean full of water, even though nothing has happened to the basic formula of
the composition of the water as H2O, nobody would call it ocean. Now
it is only a potful of water. It is this kind of crippling effect that comes to
the conditional Self when it is identified as a conscious operation of
awareness that is of a sensory, cognitive, or volitional import. This is why,
in formal logic, the converse of a universal proposition is said to be not
tenable. We can confidently say, “All oceans are water,” but its converse, “all
instances of water are oceans,” cannot be accepted. The present verse
recognizes knowledge as Self-knowledge only when it is free of any limiting
conditioning.
So cool that these
examples resurfaced in my life at the same time, one more in a long line of
mysterious “coincidences.”
As
to the riddle “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”, it was originally intended
by author Lewis Carroll to be absolute nonsense, but over the years some
fabulous answers have been derived. In my magnificent copy of The Annotated Alice, featuring
background material compiled by Martin Gardner (brief bio below) some of the
best answers are brought to light. (He also notes the British dormouse is a
tree-living rodent more like a small squirrel than a mouse. Named from the
Latin dormire, to sleep. Nocturnal,
so it sleeps in the day.)
It’s
the riddle where the book’s annotations reach their highest level. Pure gold.
First, Carroll’s own clever solution was given in the Preface to the 1896
edition, 31 years after the first edition. After noting that originally there
was no answer, he offers, “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat, and it is never put with
the
wrong end in front!” It is impossible to write on a sloping writing desk if it
slopes away from you. Still, how does this apply to a raven??? We shall see.
The
American puzzle genius Sam Loyd offered several riddle answers of his own;
first: because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being
musical notes. He went on to add: because Poe wrote on both; bills and tales
are among their characteristics; and because they both stand on their legs,
conceal their steels (steals), and ought to be made to shut up.
Aldous
Huxley supplied two nonsense answers in 1925: because there’s a b in both, and because there’s an n
in neither. Another fellow offered a
similar answer: because there’s an e
in each. Another: because both have quills dipped in ink.
Gardner
presents a number of others, but you’ll have to check out the book yourself. I
will just add a couple more of them: Because one has flapping fits and the
other fitting flaps; and because a writing-desk is a rest for pens and a raven
is a pest for wrens. I’m sorry—I find these infinitely amusing, and can only delight
in the cleverness humans exhibit when not being shot at or otherwise
persecuted.
It
wasn’t until 1976 that the mystery around Carroll’s own curious answer was
discovered. In the very first printing of the 1896 edition his answer was
spelled one letter differently: “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they
are very flat, and it is nevar put
with the wrong end in front!” Carroll had spelled raven backwards as nevar, but
an overeager editor had “fixed” it to never
in all later printings, so his very clever wordplay was annulled. Carroll died
soon after that new edition came out, so it’s unknown if he ever knew about it.
While
we’re on the subject of riddles, this from Wikipedia about the compiler of The Annotated Alice:
Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010) was
an American
popular mathematics and popular science writer, with interests also
encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and
literature—especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K.
Chesterton. He was considered a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated
the text of Carroll’s two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold
over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and was
regarded as one of the most important magicians of the twentieth century. He
was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Gardner was best known for creating and sustaining interest
in
recreational mathematics–and by extension, mathematics in general–throughout
the latter half of the 20th century, principally through his “Mathematical
Games” columns which appeared for twenty-five years in Scientific American and
his subsequent books collecting them.
Gardner was one of the foremost anti-pseudoscience polemicists
of the
20th century. His book Fads and Fallacies
in the Name of Science published in 1957 became a classic and seminal work
of the skeptical movement. In 1976 he joined with fellow skeptics to found
CSICOP, (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal), an organization devoted to debunking pseudoscience.
Our
exercise to “Contemplate and celebrate the emancipation of truth from
traditional dogma and social roles in any place or era,” certainly resonates
with “debunking pseudoscience.” All too often skeptics (the current one at
Scientific American, Michael Shermer, is a prime example) evince hostility to
religious ideas whether or not they have merit. Many of those ideas are easy
targets. Often, though, some very powerful and wise concepts are thrown out
with the bathwater, usually because the skeptic doesn’t bother to try to understand
them.
Still,
skepticism is essential to any truly spiritual quest. We are approaching one of
Nitya’s all time best quotes in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “Science
is to help us avoid the folly of putting our trust in nonsense.” (435) We also
have similar advice in this lesson: “The true claim for wisdom comes from absolute
certitude and not from inane beliefs or speculations.” (393) I also love
two of his from Living the Science of
Harmonious Union:
The yogi makes every effort not
to be a howler telling untruth or a simpleton believing in something because
somebody said it or it is written somewhere. (243)
It is not difficult to cultivate
an awareness that is both critical and sympathetic. (371)
This last is where
scientific fundamentalists (among others) fall down. We all have our faults and
blind spots, so we should be charitable about them in others. Try kindness
first, and only if hardheadedness prevails should we consider sterner
measures…. Shermer started life as a fundamentalist Christian, which may go far
in explaining his pugnaciousness: it’s the reformed whore syndrome. I make it a
policy to forgive people substantially for the faults I once had but have
renounced, because I know how hard they may grip us hapless mortals. Luckily,
fuzzy thinking isn’t invariably fatal or even particularly detrimental to
others. It does have a tendency to ignite anger, though, so it is best to bring
it into focus.
