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The Price of Enlightenment
| Article
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19530 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1991 |
4,243 Words |
| Author
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Richard L. Rubenstein
Richard L. Rubenstein is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished
Professor of Religion at Florida State University and
president of the Washington Institute for Values in Public
Policy. He is the coauthor (with John K. Roth) of Approaches
to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy |
With great authority grounded in both his own spiritual experience and historical scholarship in the field of religion, George Feuerstein explores the meaning and motives of those spiritual adepts and gurus who deliberately employ utterly unconventional and, at times, amoral behavior to effect a radical transformation in the consciousness of their disciples. Feuerstein claims his is the first attempt at a fuller explanation of holy madness, or crazy wisdom as a religious category. Holy Madness is an important work, offering Western readers a relatively balanced account of a religious phenomenon that runs counter to their fundamental religious values and experience.
Feuerstein offers a qualified defense of the "crazy-wisdom" guru and religious adept. According to Feuerstein, by their behavior crazy-wise teachers seek to "deconstruct" the normal consensus reality of everyday life. Thus, every guru works toward exploding the disciple's universe of meaning in order to realize total, unmediated identity with God, or ultimate Reality, in which the subject/object dichotomy is wholly overcome. When this occurs, enlightenment has been attained. Enlightenment, or the transcendental identity of the adept with the undifferentiated totality of existence, is devoid of limit and structure. (Normally, limit and structure are present when the self as subject is experienced as separate from and over against both the Creator-God and the world of objects.) Enlightenment can be imparted neither by didactic instruction nor by intellectual training. The guru can prepare the disciple for enlightenment by breaking down the ego's defenses and demonstrating the relativity and impermanence of the social and religious world. Sometimes this process entails outrageous actions on the part of the teacher; at other times the teacher elicits the breaking of taboos by the disciple. These actions run counter to accepted social practice but are not regarded as undesirable because their purpose is to enable the disciple to transcend the ego and society, the ego's collective counterpart.
According to Feuerstein, the crazy-wisdom tradition of breaking taboos is very old. Feuerstein lists the trickster of archaic tribunal religion, the Sufi adept, and such Hindu adepts as the avadhutas as precursors of the crazy-wise guru. With his voracious union of carnality and spirituality, the trickster embodies those anticultural forces that lie beneath the surface in any community. The Sufi adept ecstatically identified with God and, in so doing, breaks with an absolutely fundamental aspect of Muslim belief, the radical nonidentity of God and man. The Hindu avadhuta is a religious leader who rejects conventional standards so completely that he often walks about
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