Dear Mr. Swartz,
I am new to Vedanta but have had a spiritual life since childhood. My father was a Methodist minister. I heard about you from a friend of a friend who was very inspiring and very dedicated to your teaching. We had several good conversations that helped me to get a wider view than the religious take on truth. A few days ago we talked on the internet and politics came up and this person up said that Donald Trump was the only solution to the problems facing America and the world. I was surprised, although I have been apolitical all my life, because Mr. Trump is obviously not a good poster child for the truth. I don’t want to repeat all the statements this person made but they were quite shocking and not factual. It seemed to me that there were two people inside him, one very kind, nice, helpful, dedicated and intelligent and the other one cynical and irrational. I’m a psychologist and I could see a lot of anger behind his pleasant personality. Don’t get me wrong. I liked him but I’m having doubts about Vedanta because morality is very important. On one hand he was saying that you needed to be objective and work on getting rid of your biases if you want to know the truth and on the other he seemed quite enamoured of Mr. Trump and didn’t condemn the racism, dishonesty, hatred of democracy, the press, liberals, his political adversaries and so forth. What really surprised me, however, was that a person who was talking about self awareness wasn’t aware of the contradiction. I know because I’m trained to spot it. So I wonder if there is any moral teaching in Vedanta. How can an obviously good person with so much love of God and truth be so unaware?
James: Denial is unconscious, as you undoubtedly know. Without the person’s participation, a part of the mind walls off impulses that contradict his or her good opinion of his or her self. Denial is a self protective mechanism. Self inquiry slowly exposes the hidden parts of one’s mind and an inquirer is meant to look at those parts that don’t coincide with the truth and discard them if he or she wants to grow spiritually. So in Vedanta we find some people for whom Vedanta is like religion in that it gives meaning to their lives but doesn’t actually transform the basic personality.
The nature of the teaching is such that it provisionally accepts duality which it later negates. But the denial mechanism may use this seeming duality to justify inherent contradictions, the most common of which is called the spiritual by-pass. The person says that the teaching says that the beliefs and opinions are not the Self and are therefore not real, so that their anger, hatred, and irrationality don’t exist. In this way they support ignorance while thinking that they have some special vision of the truth. To say something isn’t real doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. So this person who is teaching Vedanta hasn’t yet discovered the operation of this mechanism.
I don’t know who he is but he is obviously ignorant of the most important teaching of our source text, the Bhagavad Gita, which is the essence of the Upanishads, which presents two basic hand in glove topics: dharma (morality) and moksa (liberation i.e. knowledge of truth). Dharma means values and moksa means Self knowledge. It presents these two together to point out that a person who is seeking freedom needs to know the value of values with reference to freedom. And it says that a person who wants liberation needs to have two basic qualifications, discrimination and dispassion. Dispassion is looking at things objectively, scientifically. Vedanta is called brahma vidya, the science of consciousness.
Vedanta speaks of two orders of reality: pratibhasika satyam, subjective reality or the individual’s point of view and vyvaharika satyam, objective reality, God’s point of view. It points out that a person who doesn’t know the difference between the two, isn’t qualified for Vedanta, much less for teaching Vedanta. Why? Because if a person thinks that beliefs and opinions are real, there is no reality or better yet, there are as many realities as there are individuals, which doesn’t work in so far as humans are social animals with different temperaments and values who need to accommodate each other if they want to live peacefully, which everyone does.
The Self, the Truth, is that because of which objective and subjective reality are known. And truth is Reality which is called dharma, with a capital D, from which universal values spring: non-injury, truthfulness, compassion, empathy, fairness, etc. I grew up in Idaho, which is Trump country, and I know first-hand how many people there hate people who think differently from themselves. A self-aware person is definitely dispassionate, empathic and open-minded and tolerant. These values are evidence of, awareness of and appreciation of the moral dimension of reality.
One question that the Trump phenomenon raises is how people with otherwise good personal moral lives support a person whose primary value is his own self interest. It turns out that gun sales are skyrocketing. In fact the gun stores are sold out. They can’t meet the demand. And the bulk of the sales are not to conservative Trump supporters who are afraid of losing their guns and suffering under the rule of the godless liberal elites. The liberals are now stocking up. Let’s think ahead to the point where 50% of an armed citizenry is squared off against 40% of the citizenry, with 10% of the citizenry apolitical. What’s the next step? There is a good argument why it isn’t civil war, but that’s not the point.
My point is that the more one values one’s self-interest above the interests of society the more psychologically unhealthy the person becomes and the more unhealthy the civic environment becomes. Donald Trump is an obviously unhealthy person. A society that prizes the destruction of values perceived to be antithetical to one’s own is not conducive to happiness and spiritual growth. The whole karma yoga teaching is about supporting universal, not personal, values first. The list of these values are well documented in the Gita. By every yardstick Trump is the essence of a demonic character, one dominated solely by passion and stupidity. The person you are talking about is obviously not aware that the six concluding chapters of the Gita are all about the importance of a strong moral character before, during and after liberation. He obviously doesn’t know that the law of karma is a moral law.
The only lasting solution to the problem of inner and outer conflict is a moral solution. Vedanta points out that the sign of a free person is someone whose values align with universal values. So it’s pretty clear that this person has his own alterative facts and values. A person who adores and supports an obviously morally corrupt role model and shows a lack of dispassion with reference to evidence-based facts has obviously not assimilated the essence of the teaching. His subconscious mind has carefully chosen only the part of the teaching that doesn’t upset long-held prejudices.
I had an discussion two years ago with a Trump supporter who said I was his teacher and came to one of my talks. After a few minutes I could see that he actually thought I was a liberal fool and was intentionally baiting me. I was surprised at his cynicism. I argued as I looked for an opportunity to bring the discussion to a spiritual level but he couldn’t see that I was making valid arguments and dismissed them out of hand because they would have forced him to look at his own unhealthy beliefs and opinions. I broke off the argument when I saw that there was no way for me to move the conversation to the real issue.
Arguments are never about what they are about; there is always an unknown factor motivating them. I realized that the ostensible purpose of engaging me in a political argument was not political, but to give me insight into a part of that his mind that he wasn’t aware of and that there was no way he was going to become objective. I realized that he thought he knew everything already and wasn’t about to listen to me, even though he professed great devotion to me and to Vedanta. It’s a common problem.
I wanted to ask him how, in light of the teachings of Vedanta he justified his adoration of Trump which he proudly called “a wrecking ball,” and who is the personification of the destructive power of nearly every value that is inimical to truth and decency. They say, however, that he loves his children.
Obviously, if you understand Vedanta, there is only one way to answer this question, “I can’t justify it.” He was a clever person, quite familiar with the teachings and he tried the non-dual bypass, which I mentioned above. I said leave the Self out of it, that the conversation was James speaking to Joe and that if he couldn’t understand that there was no way to justify his worship of Trump then I would have to resign as his spiritual teacher. He said that I was projecting, which is the other half of denial, as I’m sure you know, which only proves my point because people can’t accept something about themselves that they can’t see.
That’s the point of the teacher in Vedanta. He or she is meant to bring hidden things to light. Generally the rule in our tradition is that the teacher is not required during the assimilation phase, the idea being that his role ends with successful completion of the inquirer’s reflection phase which culminates with the conviction “I’m the Self.” But it is often the case that a person thinks they are Self realized and are in the assimilation phase when in fact they haven’t completed the basic phase. They have listened selectively, owing to the power of the unconscious mind, but are unaware of that fact. This person hasn’t properly assimilated the teachings on dharma. This is not to say that you can’t learn certain valuable things from them but you will not be getting the complete teaching, which is dangerous.
It is dangerous because non-duality means no differences. Each of Vedanta’s many teachings are equally important and all are necessary to reveal the non-dual nature of reality. So if a teacher ignores one aspect of the teaching, in this case the dharma or values asspect, he is not doing you a favor because dharma is built into the human mind. Sometimes it is called conscience. If you go against what is universally right, your mind will be disturbed and a disturbed mind is not dispassionate or discriminating. Without that kind of mind, you won’t grow spiritually.
Best regards,
James
