Caezar: переводы

→Unfortunately, the link between self-transcendence and moral behavior is not a straightforward as we might like. It would seem that people can have genuine spiritual insights and a capacity to provoke those insights in others, while harboring serious moral flaws. It is no always accurate to call such people “frauds”: They aren’t necessarily pretending to hav spiritual insights or to be able to produce such experiences in others. But depending on th level of their practice their insights may be an insufficient antidote to the rest of thei personalities. The resulting problems can be accentuated by cultural differences. For instance what is the age of consent for sex? One wouldn’t necessarily get the same answers in Bomba and Boston. Certain schools of Buddhism focus on compassion, kindness, and nonharming to a unusual degree, and this offers some protection against abuses of power. But even here on occasionally finds a venerated master with the ethical intuitions of a pirate.

→You don’t know what you need to know, and the expert presumably does; that’s why you ar sitting in front of him in the first place. The implied hierarchy is unavoidable. Contemplativ expertise exists, and a contemplative expert is someone who can help you realize certain truth about the nature of your own mind.

→Somewhere there must be truths other than the disappointing ones we have; somewher there must be access to a world larger than this one. And if, to get there, we must pu aside all arrogance of will and the stubborn ego, why not? Why not admit what we do no know and cannot do and submit to someone who both knows and does, who will teach u if we merely put aside all judgment for the moment and obey with trust and goodwill? A relationship with a guru, or indeed with any expert, tends to run along authoritarian lines.

→breath for a collective sigh of relief. At last, to be set free, to lay down one’s burden, t be a child again—not in renewed innocence, but in restored dependence, in admitted undisguised dependence. To be told, again, what to do, and how to do it. . . . The yearnin in the audience was so palpable, their need so thick and obvious, that it was impossibl not to feel it, impossible not to empathize with it in some way. Why not, after all? Clearl there are truths and kinds of wisdom to which most persons will not come alone; clearl there are in the world authorities in matters of the spirit, seasoned travelers, guides.

→Many people renounce the world because they can’t find a satisfactory place in it, and almos any spiritual teaching can be used to justify a pathological lack of ambition. For someone wh has not yet succeeded at anything and who probably fears failure, a doctrine that criticizes th search for worldly success can be very appealing. And devotion to a guru—a combination o love, gratitude, awe, and obedience—can facilitate an unhealthy return to childhood. In fact, th very structure of this relationship can condemn a student to a kind of intellectual and emotiona slavery. The writer Peter Marin captured the mood perfectly Obedience to a “perfect master.” One could hear, inwardly in them, the gathering o

→It is usually easy to detect social and psychological problems in any community of spiritua seekers. This seems to be yet another liability inherent to the project of self-transcendence.

→But one must draw the line somewhere, and I think consent should be the governin principle. SEALs in training can drop out at any time, and they are continually encouraged to d so. The inner voice that says they might not have what it takes to be a SEAL is deliberatel amplified by their instructors—often by bullhorn—so that those who don’t have what it take will leave the program. That is what distinguishes SEAL training from actual torture. Cults, b contrast, often violate the principle of consent in many ways. I don’t deny that a trul enlightened man or woman—that is, one who has fully and permanently unraveled th conventional sense of self—might awaken his or her students by violating certain moral o cultural norms. But extreme examples of such unconventional behavior—often referred to in th literature as “crazy wisdom”—seem to produce the desired result only in the literature. Ever modern instance of these shenanigans has seemed far more crazy than wise, attesting to nothin so much as the insecurities and sensual desires of the guru in question. Ancient tales o liberating violence, as in the Zen parable above, or of enlightening sexual exploits seem lik literary teaching devices, not accurate accounts of how wisdom has been reliably transmitte from master to disciple.

→One of the first things one learns in practicing meditation is that nothing is intrinsicall boring—indeed, boredom is simply a lack of attention. Pay sufficient attention, and the mer experience of breathing can reward months and years of steady vigilance. Every guru know that drudgery can be a way of testing the strength of this insight. And, needless to say, this trut about the human mind can be exploited. The journalist Frances FitzGerald recounts meetin many well-educated disciples of Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)—doctors, lawyers engineers, professors—doing years of uncompensated menial labor at his Oregon commune. All appeared quite happy with the work, presumably viewing it as an exercise in selfovercoming. Indeed, abandoning one’s worldly ambitions to do menial labor—attentively an joyfully—can be an exercise in self-overcoming. Here, two truths apparently collide: A perso can be exploited and still learn something valuable in the process.

→calisthenics, hypothermia, and sleeplessness. But those left standing have had an experience o self-overcoming unknown to humanity outside ancient Sparta—and they can be sure tha everyone else with whom they will serve in combat has survived the same ordeal.

→It is well known, for instance, that some of the best recruits to the SEAL program are weede out owing to sheer bad luck. They simply suffer too many injuries to continue with the trainin or to survive “hell week”—a five-and-a-half-day purgatory of wet sand, dangerous boat drills

→I’m not saying that being forced to do hard and seemingly useless work cannot benefit person. Consider the Navy SEALs: To become a SEAL, every candidate must pass a qualifyin course so arduous that it would constitute torture if imposed on him against his will. This is selection process that allows the U.S. Navy to produce the most elite special operations forc found anywhere. But it is also a bad selection process that serves primarily as a rite of passage.

→I’m confident that if I were to teach a similarly insane doctrine, all the while demanding painfu and pointless sacrifices from my students, I wouldn’t have a friend left on earth by the end o the week.

→He used to make visitors to his chateau in Fontainebleau spend long days digging ditches in th sun—only to have them immediately fill them in and begin digging elsewhere. He must hav made quite an impression in person, given how long he was able to get away with this mischief.

→However, Gurdjieff taught his students that the moon was alive, that it controlled the thought and behaviors of unenlightened people, and that it devoured their souls at the moment of death.

→It is true, however, that the role of guru seems to attract more than its fair share of narcissist and confidence men. Again, this seems to be a natural consequence of the subject matter. On can’t fake being an expert gymnast, a rocket scientist, or even a competent cook—at least no for long—but one can fake being an enlightened adept. Those who succeed in doing this ar often quite charismatic, because a person can’t survive long in this mode unless he can bow people over. G. I. Gurdjieff set the standard here, and he may have been the first man to retur from his travels in the East and establish himself as a proper guru in the West. He was th classic example of a gifted charlatan. He managed to attract a wide following of smart successful devotees, including the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, the painter Georgi O’Keeffe, and the authors J. B. Priestley, René Daumal, and Katherine Mansfield. He reache other luminaries as well—including Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, and Gerald Heard—throug the efforts of his main disciple, P. D. Ouspensky. Frank Lloyd Wright once declared Gurdjief “the greatest man in the world.”2 Coming from a narcissist of Wright’s caliber, this says quite lot about what sort of impression the man could make.

→enlightened adept would behave this way? Well, what makes you think that your provincia assumptions about enlightenment are true Given the structure of this game, it is little wonder that many people have been harmed b their relationships to spiritual teachers—or that many teachers, given so much power over th lives of others, have abused it. This ethical terrain is all the more confusing because there is n cult leader so deranged or sadistic, or whose fall from grace was so hideous, that one can’t fin students who will insist that he or she is the Messiah. It is amazing to consider, but there ar people still walking this earth who believe that Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshal Applewhite were genuine saviors. It is also safe to say that no teacher has been so saintly an impeccable that someone hasn’t left his company convinced that he was a dangerous lunatic. I every guru were judged by the worst thing anyone has ever said about him, none would escap hanging.

→Whenever Gutei Oshō was asked about Zen, he simply raised his finger. Once a visito asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy too raised hi finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screamin with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gute raised his finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened. If cutting off a child’s finger can count as compassionate instruction, it seems impossible t predict just how fully a spiritual teacher might depart from conventional ethical norms. This i both a theoretical problem in the literature and a psychological one in many spiritua communities: A student’s moral intuitions and instincts for self-preservation can always b recast as symptoms of fear and attachment. Consequently, even the most extraordinarily cruel o degrading treatment at the hands of a guru can be interpreted as being for one’s own good: Th master wants to have sex with you or your spouse—why would you resist? Can’t you see tha your impulse to refuse such a generous overture rests on the very illusion of separatenes that you want to overcome? Oh, you don’t fancy tithing 20 percent of your income to th ashram? Why are you so attached to the fruits of your own labor? What is enlightenmen worth to you anyway? You don’t like scrubbing toilets and doing yard work for hours at stretch? Are you above performing such simple acts of service to the Divine? Don’t you se that this feeling of self-importance is precisely what must be surrendered before you ca recognize your true nature? You found it humiliating when the master had you strip nake and dance in front of your parents and the rest of the congregation? Can’t you see that thi was just a mirror held up to expose your own egocentricity? Oh, you don’t think a

→The End of Fait Letter to a Christian Natio The Moral Landscap Free Wil Lyin

→ALSO BY SAM HARRI

→SimonandSchuster.co authors.simonandschuster.com/Sam-Harri