Where Next on This Journey?

When Refuge Is Denied, What Shall We Do?

In my own lifetime I can think of no turn of events or circumstance of history, politics, and society where so much still is at stake and yet feel so little in control of a shared destiny.

We are not powerless but we must garner our resources. Those about to take power from us know the power of fear and have the will to make vengeance their right.  They have poisoned a well already tainted by the toxins of a past that we as a nation have never taken seriously enough.  We must not underestimate their determination to undo any and all of the progress of the last 80 years meager as it may in truth be. Their aim is to bring into being a world unrecognizable to our hopes and dreams, in violation of our deepest held values. How do we contend with that?

We will protest when the time comes, fund the litigations that may alter the direct course of events, but for ourselves, as souls engaged, we must try to make a life more meaningful than mere survival, worth the living when our worth is being denied or dismissed. 

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There are currently only five students among the 4000 undergraduates at the University enrolled in my class The Meaning of Life: Happiness and Liberation in Theory and Practice.  I admit this offering emerged as much from my own desire to engage the assignments as it was meant to introduce a younger audience to the likes of Rilke, Voltaire, Goethe, and Hesse.

There is only so much time in a semester---we will visit Dickenson, Didion and Sontag, Shakespeare and Ryokan before we are finished---but the syllabus cannot but make a near mockery of the task before us.  I assigned two works of Hermann Hesse, and a student rightly asked me why two from one author when there is so much we might consider.

I replied that only one work of Hesse would not be enough to gather up his genius.  His storytelling lends itself to looking within without disavowing a troubled world; it is a prescription for soulfulness rather than an answer to our problems.  I also knew from the outset of this semester that we would face an election that might well turn us inside out, bring us to levels of anxiety and consternation the likes of which we have not witnessed in recent history.  These college kids, you have to remember, weren’t yet born when the 9/11 attacks struck, much less had they heard Nixon tell us that “when the President does it, it’s not against the law.”

I also told this student that I wish we could read the entire canon of Hesse’s work because there is in his deceptively simple prose a path that goes straight to the heart.  Hesse changed my life because he showed me how to go forward when it seemed there was more doubt than world worth the trouble.

Hermann Hesse published Siddhartha in 1922 some eleven years after he’d visited India.  You can hear the voices of ancient India throughout the book but it is no facile commendation of culture or religion.  In truth it is as much a critical inquiry that spares no character the task of meaning. 

Siddhartha had followed the success of his remarkable “childhood” story Damian where he where he asked us, almost as prelude to Siddhartha, what it means to live in a world of illusions or Scheinwelt.

Life is suffused with the sublime in more ways than we could have ever imagined but as much demands to be drawn into harsher focus when we are reminded of what humans are capable of doing what we should never do, becoming what should never be.  This gift of life, this true blessing, this invitation to celebration that is simply living and breathing must also admit to truths we wish were not.

In Damian the Scheinwelt paradox is made of two realms---Māyā where experience confounds us, like Chuang-tzu dreaming himself the butterfly, and the light and dark of the Platonic cave where the truths of the world grant not refuge but reality.

Hesse wonders at the good and admits to evil made solely of human device, introduces into Damian’s conversations the complex gnostic deity called Abraxas who does not solve or answer but raises further the questions that must be asked.  He then suggests through Jungian analysis the possibility of a deeper human awakening but that too we might reconsider, especially as we move forward to Siddhartha and continue the soul’s journey.

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My own journey through the whole of Hesse’s oeuvre was life shaping.  Since my teenage years I’ve made it a point to revisit the core novels, sometimes in sequence, sometimes when I just need to arrest the cacophony, the noise of despair, the anxieties of love and grief that jostle the heart and mind.

If we do not attend to such shadow castings, the dark nights of soul will become darker still.  That we must not allow to overcome us.  We need what only artistry and exemplary human achievement can provide, the invitation to meaning that will not conflate what matters most with the pursuit of happiness.

Perhaps that pursuit of happiness, promised for all but sadly granted only to some in the immortal Declaration words was itself only permission to take the further step, to make the pilgrimage for meaning, leaving each of us to decide what that might be.  Perhaps happiness is meant to secure the right to a measure of human justice to pursue whatever we seek.  But as for meaning, that strikes me as another road, the further destination not unrecognized as we journey but remaining always unfinished.

Far be it from me to deny anyone their happiness.  But it will take more than the enchantments of nature and the joys of family and fellowship to reach the depths of the soul, to come face to face with all that love entails, and, yes, hate too. We will engage our human frailties and must tap a wellspring of fortitude to dive deeper into the truths of this mortal condition.

Where love meets grief culminates in Siddhartha is at Hesse’s riverside, where his Ferryman plies his raft so that the one and the other may meet, exchange places, and offer something like safer passage, there and back again, because safe cannot be guaranteed and it is the journey that is worth making.

Meaning will not soothe us, nor can it make us “safe” unless we decide to abdicate our power, giving it instead to a god, to a Buddha or Siddha or even to a tyrant for the promise of having it made for us.  Wouldn’t that be grand?  That someone or something could make this life meaningful for us?

We might instead consider how to ply the river that tests our courage to cross from light to shadow and back again.  The Ferryman is not at the riverside to rescue us from ourselves but to give us a chance to make our own journey to meaning: what do we know about the value of life when the world decides to thwart our dreams, deny us even the means to question and seek?

In Hesse there is no denial of the human shadow or its purport.  Shadow may contain regret, forgotten dreams, and lost chances but it is as much the resource of connection to what is hidden within.  To have the courage to go to such places is to answer another kind of call, listening for the siren song reminding us that this very human life, for all its travail, is a gift to prize and respect.

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What we value cannot be taken from us even by those who would violate or steal our freedoms, not if we dare to look into the mirrors of soul where we can learn again and again how to make our stand.  We must turn to those resources, listen and engage in that conversation.

It is “on the field,” as Krsna puts it in the Gita, where we find the strength to sustain our values, speak from the place of the heart----and where no trespass can enter, no tyrant can occupy. 

I’ve started again on this Hesse journey because such artistry provides that mirror to the soul and a chance, another chance to enter the conversation of meaning---Demian, Siddhartha, Der Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, Journey to the East, and his culmination in Das Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Bead Game.

This may not be your cup of chai but some or another work of art will take you to your riverside.  There, perhaps for a moment’s respite, you can begin to recoup and reclaim what has been taken from us and has also been revealed: there are those whose judgment and choice confounds our sense of decency and leaves us wondering what we must do next.

To remain free, we’ll need the grace of good company and a conversation that takes seriously the judgments yet to be made.  We need not to abandon the powers of judgment but to refine them, to create a conversation that may not persuade but must live on.

Hesse’s protagonist Siddhartha shares the name of the prince who becomes Shakyamuni Buddha.  They are, of course, light and shadow to each other and so to us.  Hesse also spares us the soporific beatitudes of Enlightenment for a better conversation about love and freedom, about choices we make and those we do not but are instead made without consent.

In the course of the story Siddhartha’s dearest friend Govinda leaves to follow the Blessed One on the path to Enlightenment.  Theirs is a choice to separate, so that each might find his own way, providing our first lesson of true friendship. They part ways to honor the other’s choices, and by affirming each other’s freedom they may come to the end of their relationship---will they meet again? 

Siddhartha and Govinda are individuals but as much fractals and fragments of the soul we all share. They do indeed meet again, many years later, and there is much to consider about their respective choices.

Govinda remains following the Buddha’s path but has not arrived at the Buddha’s Enlightenment.  Is it because he has failed or that this final awakening is not for this birth?  In Siddhartha’s conversation with the Buddha we hear within his respect and deference for the Blessed One’s exemplary life of virtue and contemplation also the criticism that what has so served Shakyamuni may not have well-served his friend Govinda.  How can we find ourselves if we are not looking for ourselves, instead seeking another’s experience?

As Siddhartha becomes the Ferryman, he too may claim a certain kind of fulfillment but it is not, at least as I read it, a matter of resolving the pain of samsara.  Siddhartha’s many teachers----his father, his merchant mentor, his lover, his son, his guide the ferryman Vasudeva---each has their own story, their own pursuit, and not all have been able to journey back to the river.

There we learn that meaning, like the river itself, is neither stillness nor resolution.  Rather it is made by plying the dangerous course on a raft where we engage again the conversations of the journey.  We go there and back again from light and shadow, repeated as many times as we inhale to exhale, if only we have temerity to accept the true peril: that the journey is ours to choose. 

What lies before us is yet unknown and too well understood, but it can be engaged.  We may create purpose when clarity is not on offer, when we know that candor will not persuade.  It is up to us to make a soulful life that speaks for itself, present amidst the clamor that awaits us.