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GEORG FEUERSTEIN ON THE BIG QUESTIONS
Interview by Brenda Feuerstein
Brenda Feuerstein explores her husband’s ideas, especially his take on the Big Questions of life,
endeavoring to put all in proper context in terms of his own development.
BRENDA: In many ways, you are very much a man of our time. Perhaps in equally many ways—I hope you don’t mind my saying so—you seem to belong to a different culture and a much earlier time. . .
GEORG: . . . May I take this as a compliment?
BRENDA: You may, but I wasn’t finished.
GEORG: Oops. Sorry.
BRENDA: I was going to say that on the one hand, you are pretty familiar with the computer, publishing technology and marketing; you have an interest in ecology, history, and politics; you are handy with power tools, enjoy woodworking, and are always curious about gadgets. On the other hand, you write poetry, dislike almost all modern music and art, and shun conventional socializing and sports; you are like a fish out of water in cities, which you say are “too fast and too noisy.” You prefer studying an old Sanskrit text over reading a contemporary novel. How do you see yourself?
GEORG: I’m amphibious! [Laughter] The right side of my brain is in the waters of the past, millennia ago. The left side works reasonably well on land in the present. Of course, we can’t really divide ourselves up in such a fashion. In my youth, I thought of myself as an Indian soul who inadvertently had donned a Western body. Well, maybe sometimes I still think along these lines, though now I would definitely jettison the qualifying adverb “inadvertently.” At a certain point in my life, I concluded that I had been put in this part of the world for a reason, which is when I started to accept my embodiment in the West. Before then, at least when I had begun to ask the Big Questions in my early teens, I felt somehow out of sync with my social and cultural environment. I felt like Robert Heinlein’s “stranger in a strange world” or Colin Wilson’s “outsider.” At a deeper level, things didn’t quite add up. I compensated for this experience with a great deal of thinking. You could say I retreated into my head. Now I feel very much more part of the present, and I would say I’m making the most of it. But, as you know better than anyone else, I’m definitely having some issues with our present-day society and culture. Real issues.
BRENDA: And those issues are quite big, I know. For the moment, can you say something more about the Big Questions that occupied you in your early teens?
GEORG: Oh yes. They were really the same questions with which I am still preoccupied, though nowadays somewhat differently from my youth. By “Big Questions” I simply mean: Who am I? Whence did I come? Whither do I go? What must I do? These are, if you like, universal constants of philosophical inquiry—not the kind of philosophy found in academic institutions but deep existential philosophy, which always has practical implications: philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom. Unless we have discovered “our” answers to them, or unless we are at least endeavoring to find answers, we inevitably live subreflectively, semiconsciously, in a state of consensus trance. . .
BRENDA: How are you approaching the Big Questions differently now?
GEORG: I am discovering answers. In my youth, I was still very busy with asking and at the same time somehow presuming that I knew.
BRENDA: So that readers will be clear, what do you mean by “consensus trance”?
GEORG: I believe, this term was first used by the American psychologist Arthur Deikman or perhaps by Charles Tart. It suggests the sort of state of diminished awareness that the majority of people seems to inhabit. I think, Arthur Koestler used “sleepwalking” to express the same idea. I have availed myself of both these concepts, because they are pretty convenient short-hand descriptions of what happens when people fail to ask the Big Questions and listen for the answers as they arise within. As Socrates said, “the uninspected life is not worth living.” Self-reflection and deep questioning appear to be a unique human capacity. If we do not exercise it, our humanness itself is called in question.
Philosophy in the traditional sense consists exactly in pondering the Big Questions and other related questions. It creates an opening for wisdom to manifest. If it is true that an answer is as good as the question prompting it, then the Big Questions are really excellent questions. They should, in due course, yield equally excellent answers. But the kind of philosophy that has self-inspection at its core is hard work. Few people are willing to engage this process or make time for it in their overly busy lives. It is challenging and can be frustrating, especially in the beginning when one wants definite, final answers urgently, immediately. But the philosophical mind matures over time. Like a muscle, it is in need of repetition. Like a muscle, it also is in need of proper nutrients, particularly oxygen. The “oxygen” of philosophical self-inquiry consists of the world of great ideas, the universe of wisdom, discovered and articulated by the philosophical geniuses of the past and present. . .
BRENDA: . . . and you have very much looked to ancient philosophers for your “oxygen,” right?
GEORG: That’s right. But in my youth I started out with Western philosophers like Socrates, as we know him from Plato’s writings, then thinkers like Aristotle, Eckhart, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Ortega y Gasset, Karl Jaspers, and a few others. I gobbled up their writings and tried as best I could to wrap my mind around their often complex and convoluted ideas and writing styles. It was at the age of fourteen—on my fourteenth birthday to be precise—that I stumbled on the wondrous world of Indian Yoga with its distinct philosophical notions. That’s when my quest took on a whole new flavor.
BRENDA: What do you mean?
GEORG: My philosophical musings became more penetrating, and my thinking acquired a spiritual thrust. But I wanted to say a bit more about Western philosophers. Several years after stumbling onto Yoga and Indian philosophy, I discovered the one Western thinker who, at the time, I felt offered a bridge between Western philosophy and Eastern wisdom teachings. That was the Swiss culturologist Jean Gebser. His magnificent book The Ever-Present Origin held me spell bound for a number of years. . .
BRENDA: . . . you even wrote a book about his ideas.
GEORG: Yes, Structures of Consciousness. That book was meant to introduce his ”theory” of consciousness to the English-speaking world. Writing it also gave me the opportunity to explore Gebser’s thinking a bit further and even critique aspects of it. Over the years, I’ve become a bit more critical of his ideas, but I still see them as a useful starting point for attaining an overview of the big steps in the historical development of human consciousness. The problem I now have with his work is that it represents a form of system building, and, like any system, his model is replete with simplifications, perhaps even oversimplifications. In my youth, I resonated with Gebser more than any other Western thinker, because he fully acknowledged that there is a spiritual dimension to reality. He very kindly entered into correspondence with me and encouraged me in my own efforts as a young writer and thinker. Of course, I idealized him. So, I can point to him as one of the major influences in my intellectual development. But I also often poured over Eckhart’s sermons, which spoke to me as a spirituality that was not bogged down in Catholic dogmatism.
BRENDA: Is there any other thinker who has exercised a similar influence on you?
GEORG: Oh sure. The ideas of numerous thinkers have helped shape my own reflections on the Big Questions. As a thinker and writer, I stand on the shoulders of many others. This is a terrible cliché, but it happens to be true. I would be hard pressed to identify exactly what each one has contributed to my thinking. Sometimes it was a specific idea, sometimes the way they expressed an idea. An instance of the former would be Kant’s categorical imperative or Schopenhauer’s notion of the “world as will and idea,” or Freud’s concept of the unconscious. An example of the latter would be Nietzsche’s impressive German writing style.
I can think of only one individual who has had a truly profound influence on my life, and that is Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. By comparison, you could say that Gebser’s intellectual model, or in fact anyone else’s model, is small fry. Gebser’s notion of modalities of consciousness has a certain practical applicability in daily life, but the Buddha’s teachings are all eminently translatable into moral and spiritual practice. Witnessing the play of the various structures of consciousness in one’s daily life is entertaining and can even give us a degree of self-understanding and greater tolerance, but the Buddha has left posterity an approach that involves every conceivable aspect of human existence. As part of my ongoing dialogue with the Buddha’s teachings, I have also become increasingly affected by, and appreciative of, the formulations and reformulations of some of his successors—such as Nagarjuna, Shantideva, Atisha, Je Tsongkhapa, Shabkar, Chögyam Trungpa, and not least H.H. the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama, by the way, is not only a formidable intellectual but also someone who has undoubtedly high realization of the Buddhist dharma, though he himself tends to downplay this.
BRENDA: What about Hindu teachers? Have any of them been influential in your intellectual development?
GEORG: Oh yes, of course! For many years, I studied the philosophical teachings of Patanjali, the Samkhya system of Kapila, the Vedantic nondualism of Shankara (or rather of his teacher’s teacher Gaudapada). I have also benefitted from delving into Kashmiri Shaivism through the works of Vasudeva and Abhinavagupta. I also have to single out the semi-mythical Krishna, whose spiritual activism is articulated in the Bhagavad-Gita. I owe the sages of India an enormous debt. They clearly have had a most benign influence on my life. When I say “ India,” I include the Himalayan countries of Tibet, Kashmir, and Nepal. I have made an effort to repay that debt by writing about their teachings with as much integrity as I can muster.
I could never fathom how some scholars can day after day, year after year, busy themselves with those wisdom teachings and not be inspired by any of them. Some academics even speak disparagingly of them. The early Indologists, who were having ulterior political or religious motives, were especially guilty of this unenviable ingratitude.
BRENDA: What about scholars in your field? Have any of them influenced or inspired you?
GEORG: As you would expect, many have contributed to my knowledge base. The first to come to mind is the German Yoga scholar Johann Hauer, whose book Der Yoga was for many years my bible. It contained a translation of Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra and, to my absolute delight, also the transliterated Sanskrit of this fundamental Yoga text, because I could not yet read the deva-nagari script in which most Yoga texts are written. Hauer's was the best thing around. In those days, I also greatly benefited from the writings of other German scholars, especially Richard Garbe, Helmuth von Glasenapp, and Paul Deussen, but also the famous Rumanian-American historian of religion Mircea Eliade whose book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom had been translated into German . Later, the publications of numerous other researchers helped me deepen my knowledge of Hinduism and also Buddhism—way too many to mention here.
When I think back there was really only one scholar whose writings I could say not only informed but also inspired me, and that was Max Müller. I discovered him during my early days in England. Like me, he had been a German expatriate. Like me, he was not only interested in scholarship but also in making India’s culture and philosophy available to his Western contemporaries. For instance, he wrote a nice biography of Sri Ramakrishna. His last book, Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, which was released in 1899, one year before his death, became one of my favorites. Despite of this book being in many parts outdated, I’m still rather fond of it, as I am of Müller himself.
Müller started out as one of the pioneers of Vedic studies, but he had a very agile mind and was involved in many other scholarly disciplines. Today he is mainly remembered as the editor of the Rig-Veda and one of the founding fathers of comparative mythology. I like to think of him as someone who sincerely dialogued with India’s philosopher-sages and endeavored to bring back from his intellectual peregrinations essential wisdom for his contemporaries. In India he is fondly remembered as Moksha Mula—moksha being the Sanskrit word for “liberation” and mula standing for “root.” The renowned nineteenth-century Swami Vivekananda, who met Müller at his home in Oxford, thought of him as the reincarnation of Sayana, a Vedic scholar-sage.
Lately, unfortunately, some people have sought to cast Müller in a less favorable light, because of some unflattering statements he had made about Hinduism. We must, however, bear in mind Müller’s particular socio-cultural milieu, which was pronouncedly Christian, and also the fact that the discipline of Indian studies, or Indology, was still in its infancy. More importantly, before criticizing him, we ought to acknowledge the clear evolution of his thinking in the course of his life. Toward the end of his life, he was rather more decidedly cosmopolitan than earlier on.
My great regard for Max Müller can be seen from an essay I wrote back in the early 70s, which was published by Rider & Co. in England but was never marketed by them. There is a mildly amusing anecdote attached to this. I had become friendly with the then editor of Rider & Co., Daniel Brostoff. I expressed to him how much I’d like to publish a booklet on Müller, and he told me that he thought that was a great idea. He offered to print the booklet through his company. I was thrilled and hammered out the essay. A month or so later, I received a box of several hundred booklets with an invoice for the printing costs. Of course, I had not expected to be charged, and also was quite unable to pay the amount asked. Alarmed, I called Daniel up to explain that there had been a terrible misunderstanding and to express my predicament. He generously had his company settle the bill and let me keep the booklets free of charge. I can’t imagine this sort of thing happening nowadays. Publishing, for the most part, has become a cut-throat business.
BRENDA: Going back to our earlier discussion, would you mind saying something about the four Big Questions themselves?
GEORG: Sure. The first question, which may well be the king-pin of philosophical inquiry, is Who am I? Sooner or later, a sufficiently awake person will want to consciously address this question. By “awake” I mean not being submerged in the consensus trance. Who am I beyond the appearance of my body, beyond the self-presentation of my mind, beyond the diverse roles I have assumed in life? For a good many people participating in the collective dreaming of our consumer culture, which avoids philosophy, the “I” is the apparent body, the apparent mind, the apparent roles. “I” is a young, good-looking, healthy, and fit individual or an aging person whose health is compromised, a factory worker or a wealthy industrialist, or a good-for-nothing politician; a clever student or someone with learning disabilities, and so forth. Collective dreamers caught up in the consensus trance won’t question these descriptive labels. They are afraid to penetrate to a deeper level. Perhaps they sense that with deeper questioning come answers that require a much greater degree of self-awareness and also a much greater level of responsibility.
BRENDA: Can you explain what you mean by responsibility? I understand but readers may not.
GEORG: No problem. As our perspective on ourselves and the world changes and we are given a more privileged view of things, we also inherit a greater degree of responsibility for what we are now seeing. To give an example, if you see a drunk stumbling in the streets, you are likely to inwardly condemn and outwardly avoid him. When you know that this individual got drunk only to find the courage to hurl himself in front of the next truck coming by, your greater knowledge of the situation also increases your moral responsibility as a fellow human. Instead of condemning the man, you ought to help him. As long as we are hypnotized by the consensus trance, we obviously have diminished responsibility—or think we do—for our own actions and those of others. Some people perceive inklings of the philosophical life but are afraid to raise their head all the way out of the fog that is the consensus trance. They will likely keep bobbing up and down until they can find sufficient inner strength to choose a fully conscious life.
BRENDA: And a fully conscious life, of course, is what the Buddha and other sages have advocated throughout history. . .
GEORG: Quite! They are the enemies of the consensus trance, though “enemies” without any harmful intent. It would probably be better to regard them as physicians who offer genuine healing for those afflicted with semi-consciousness, or various degrees of unconsciousness. As you know, the Buddha compared himself to a physician and his teachings to pure medicine. Healing occurs when the person awakens from the consensus trance. That’s the sublime moment of enlightenment. A wonderful metaphor.
BRENDA: What about the second question, Whence do I come?
GEORG: Clearly, all four questions are interrelated. When we have discovered our answer to the first question, we are likely to also have found a plausible answer to the second, third, and fourth one. The answers may be very generic or possibly quite specific. As long as we are under the influence of the consensus trance, “Whence do I come?” can mean only one thing: a physical location. I came from such-and-such a country or town. I came out of my mother’s womb. I came out of a test tube containing my unknown mother’s egg fertilized by my unknown father’s sperm—a sad situation. As we probe deeper with our philosophical mind, the “I” that we are apt to discover is not identical with the limited body-mind. It is something more intangible, perhaps even something more nebulous or flimsy. Consequently, we must also expect that the starting-point of our journey—the “whence” of the question—is similarly intangible. The question is really calling for a spiritually based answer. At the very least, it is questing for a deeper psychological answer.
BRENDA: Onward to Big Question number three. . .
GEORG: Whither do I go? Again, the entranced individual will settle for an answer referring to a locus in space-time: I go to church or to a football game or a party. If the person is somewhat more aware, momentarily coming up for air so to speak, he or she will perhaps say: I am destined to die. I go back to dust and ashes. Period. However, the real inquiry begins right there, at the point at which the nonphilosophical inquirer stops abruptly. For the average person, death is an unpleasant eventuality, a threat. It is inevitable, but it is better not to dwell on it. If the inquirer is religiously inclined, he or she will invoke the inherited beliefs in God and heaven and bring the conversation to an abrupt halt.
BRENDA: Isn’t that a bit cynical?
GEORG: I am generalizing here. But when a belief is uninspected and merely inherited from one’s parents or one’s larger socio-cultural environment, we are dealing with an intellectual door stopper. It effectively blocks genuine inquiry and prevents genuine answers, as they might arise within oneself if given the inner space to do so.
By the way, I'm sure you know that when you use the word “cynical,” you are invoking a time-honored philosophical tradition. The Greek Cynics were philosophers, who, as the word kynikos suggests, lived like dogs. That is, they lived simply, sustainably and were mostly despised by the general population. In turn, they frowned upon people’s hedonism and would have been absolutely horrified at modern consumerism. Like the Indian yogis, hey were great believers in renunciation and self-discipline. So, I prefer to regard cynicism as a positive attitude. Not emotion-charged sneering but rational disapproval of things or ideas that are fanciful and unviable.
BRENDA: Hmmm. So, one more Big Question remains to be discussed.
GEORG: What must I do? When we know who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going, philosophically or spiritually speaking, then we most likely also have a sense of what we must do to get to our perceived destination or express our highest ideals. This is the main question that troubled Prince Arjuna, as we know from the Bhagavad-Gita. He was about to lead his army into what he had been told by Krishna would be a devastating battle. When he saw family, friends, and teachers in the enemy lines, he started to doubt the lawfulness of the looming war. He put down his bow and arrows and was ready to leave the battlefield and retire to the forest. His charioteer, friend, and teacher Krishna would have none of it. He imparted to him, right there on the battlefield, the sublime teaching of Karma-Yoga, the path of self-transcending action, or what I have come to call “spiritual activism.”
Unless we inspect our actions and the motives behind them, we flounder around in moral uncertainty and spiritual confusion. Life is short, and we must make our actions count. So, Arjuna wanted to have answers to the following questions: What is action? What is inaction? What is wrong action? Krishna patiently provided him with answers, and then, like a true teacher, left it up to Arjuna to decide whether to fight or not. We know from the Mahabharata, in which the Gita is embedded, that the prince chose to do his duty as a warrior and protector of the social good and did so with extreme, even terrifying, efficiency.
BRENDA: I know you dislike war. You even left Germany when you were in your late teens, partly to avoid being drafted into the army. Your readers might like to know why you find merit in Krishna’s teachings, which were obviously meant to encourage Arjuna to fight.
GEORG: Fair enough. Yes. In Germany, military service is compulsory. To put it mildly, I didn’t feel called to be trained as a soldier. I couldn’t conceive of fighting for a nation, especially one that had caused two world wars. I am a pacifist and don’t think that any war nowadays is worse fighting for. If someone were to attack me or someone close to me, I would do the necessary, whatever that might be. Hopefully, I would just seek to disable the attacker before he could do me harm. But going to war on the basis of abstract concepts like “fatherland,” “democracy,” or “autonomy” just isn’t convincing to me. In any case, Germany wasn’t at war when I was called up for my medical fitness exam. I would just have had to spend two years taking apart guns and learning how to kill someone at a distance. I left the country instead and never looked back.
Anyway, let’s look at the Gita and Arjuna’s war. Here we must bear in mind the context, as with everything else. Arjuna and his siblings had been literally cheated out of their kingdom. They had met the unreasonable demands of their cousins, the Kauravas, by spending twelve years in solitude in a forest and a thirteenth year incognito at the court of a neighboring kingdom. The Kauravas were truly bad apples, and their rule threatened to collapse the moral order in their country altogether. Arjuna and his siblings, the Pandavas, were eager to uphold the law, righteousness, or dharma. So, as I see it, the Bharata war was presented as a just war, if ever it occurred in historical reality.
Now, just wars are exceedingly rare, I think. Maybe they exist only in theory. For sure, President George Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq definitely don’t belong to this category, though he has been telling the American public and the rest of the world otherwise. It seems only American citizens believe him, while everyone else is highly suspicious of his explanations. I think we should explore this later. What I want to say here is that war, even just war, is horrible. It always causes untold pain and suffering to people, mostly the people who, if asked, would simply like to live in peace. So, a peaceful solution to situations of conflict must be found. H. H. the Dalai Lama is right, even though some of the younger generation of Tibetan expatriates think otherwise.
Perhaps wars should be limited to the military leaders themselves. Lock them up in a confined area and have them fight it out. Can you see Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, or Kissinger for that matter want to engage in personal combat? Usually war mongers are cowardly. For them war is a head trip, which they would like to enact from the safety of a bunker.
BRENDA: You feel quite passionate about this. . .
GEORG: I do. The lack of peace in the world is a big problem. It has been a big problem throughout the known history of so-called civilization. I grew up in post-war Germany during the era of the Cold War and in the shadow of nuclear extinction. War is a betrayal of the human spirit. It is a failure of humanness. But let’s break off here, before I launch into another tirade. I need to simmer down. [Chuckles] Thanks for quizzing me.
© 2007, 2008 by Georg and Brenda Feuerstein.
All rights reserved.