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                     The Siddhartha Virus

Introduction

This is the true story of an idea that produces insanity.  It's based
on personal experience and the first hand observation of another
person who had the same illness produced by the same cause.

The idea is an old one and it appears in many writings but it╒s
presented in an especially clear and seductive way in a book written
by the German writer Hermann Hesse.

In 1922, after himself spending time in a sanitarium,  Hesse wrote
'Siddhartha', the story of a young man╒s search for a philosophy to
guide his life.   The novel is set in India around 600 B.C. at the
birth of Buddhism and the main character is named ╘Siddhartha╒.

We are concerned here more with the central idea that Hesse presents
in his novel and less with the story line.  As Hesse tells the story
of Siddhartha he conveys his own personal philosophy in bits and pieces.

I╒ve sifted out those ideas from the story of Siddhartha and
reorganized them in a shorter way so that we can look just at the
philosophy.  Let╒s spend an imaginary afternoon with Hesse╒s fictional
creation, Siddhartha, to take a close look at his ideas.

Siddhartha is an exceptional young man from ancient India of about
600 B.C.  Through the power of fiction we╒ll bring this character to
life to talk with us.


An Afternoon With Siddhartha

It╒s early afternoon on a warm summer day.  You and Sid are playing
Frisbee on a lush green lawn next to a gently flowing river.

You throw the Frisbee to Sid; he throws it back.  The white disk
hovers and floats against the blue sky.  You notice the grace and
precision of Sid╒s throws, remarkable for a first-timer.  After a
time you decide to take a break.

Sitting by the river, Siddhartha begins the following conversation:

╥This,╙ he says, handling it, ╥is a stone, and within a certain
length of time it will perhaps be soil and from the soil it will
become plant, animal or man.

╥This stone is stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha.  I do not
respect and love it because it was one thing and will become
something else, but because it has already long been everything
and always is everything.╙

You say, ╥Sid, that╒s an amazing statement.  I want to make sure
I understand you correctly.╙ You pick up a rock of your own and
hold it up.  ╥Take a look at your rock then look at mine.  When
you say your rock is everything, are you saying that your particular
rock is one and the same rock as my rock?  Not that they are the
same type of rock, but that the thing in your hand is the exact
thing that is also in my hand?╙

Siddhartha looks you straight in the eye and says,╙Yes, it is.╙

╥But obviously it isn╒t.╙, you say. ╙I can see that it isn╒t.
Why do you say that it is?╙

With a knowing half-smile, not condescending or unkind, Sid
points to the river off to his right.  ╥Look at the river.  It
flows and flows and yet it is still here.  Every moment it is the
same and yet every moment it is new and different.  It is likewise
with this stone.  Everything flows.╙

You have to think about this for a while.  Finally, you ask ╥Are
you saying that the river is the same and not the same at the same
time and in the same respect?╙

Siddhartha is about to answer but he stops.  He looks uncomfortable
and says, ╥Words don╒t express thoughts very well.  They always
become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little
distorted, a little foolish.╙

You say, ╥Look, all I╒m looking for is a ╘yes╒ or ╘no╒.  Did you
mean that the river is the same and not the same at the same time
and in the same respect?╙

Siddhartha distractedly tosses his stone into the water. ╥I can╒t
answer you because I don╒t think in those terms.  For one thing,
it doesn╒t make any sense to say ╘at the same time╒ because there
is no time.  Time is an illusion.

╥The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at
the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the
ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and the present only exists
for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.

╥Secondly, it doesn╒t make any sense to say ╘in the same respect╒
since everything flows into everything else, and is in fact
everything else. It makes no difference in what you choose to
focus on.  Forms are transitory.╙

You ponder this for a moment and say, ╥If it can╒t make a
difference what we focus on, it would seem to follow that our
senses don╒t connect us to reality but only to a world of illusions.╙


╥This does not trouble me much╙, says Siddhartha.  ╥If the world
is an illusion, then I also am illusion, and so the world is
always of the same nature as myself.  There is no difference
between mind and matter.╙

Let╒s leave this conversation and examine what Hesse has told us.

Hesse╒s World View

There you have it: Hesse╒s world view.  Everything flows, time
is an illusion, forms are transitory, our senses are forever
cut off from reality and words distort ideas.

In essence, nothing is what it is; nothing has an identity.

According to Hesse, everything that exists is what it is AND
isn╒t what it is, continuously.

There are no edges, no boundaries, nothing is finite.  There
is no difference between ╥this╒s╙ and ╥that╒s╙.  There are no
objects, just a unified soup of everything boiling together,
always becoming something but never actually being anything.
In this world there is nothing to grip, no thing to use as a
point of reference.

What It╒s Like To View The World This Way

If we try to view the world that Hesse describes, this is what
we might see:

Rocks becoming trees becoming rivers becoming men becoming
shoelaces becoming battleships becoming fleas becoming words
becoming thoughts becoming memories becoming imagination becoming
observations becoming symbols becoming sounds becoming illusions
becoming meaningless becoming atwete becoming mufkwi becoming
46634g becoming .@!(#(! becoming 3240 becoming HVEni0-**
becoming....

...an endless sentence  because there are no ╥real╙
distinctions in reality.

Nothing is True or False

Since there are no actual differences in reality, there can
be no contradictions between statements about reality: all
statements become neither true nor false, but arbitrary.

For example, the statement ╥The sun is visible.╙ corresponds
to reality in exactly the same way as the opposite statement
╥The sun is not visible.╙ since all things are and are not
continuously.

The Trip To Insanity

A mind must go insane if it adopts the policy of
systematically erasing the distinctions that  it observes.

For example, one day you see a black cat and you say to
yourself, ╥The cat is black.  And also it is white. But wait,
it isn╒t really a cat at all because it╒s becoming a frog.
Certainly, if I wait long enough some of the atoms of the cat
will end up in a frog.╙

You turn to cross a busy street.  You see cars speeding down
the road.  But of course you know that is just what you SEE
the cars doing.  You know that the cars are in fact not moving
at all, and also that they are moving at the same time.  You
know that the cars are decomposing, becoming something-other-
than-cars, melting into the pavement.  You might try to walk
across the street, but you might sink up to your neck in the
cement that is cement-but-really-becoming-water.

You could just stay where you are, because there really is
no difference between your side of the street and the other
side any way.  You could stand there all day, all year, all
millennium because there really is no difference between one
and the other since there is no time either.  You lean back
and stand still looking into the blue, blue sky....╙My God!
Isn╒t it beautiful!╙, you say.

But, since reality really does have definite edges, you start
to have problems.  You experience pain when you bump into
things that somehow don╒t fit your current way of imagining
them.  You don╒t understand why things hurt you or where they
come from.

You have no way of predicting how things will act since the
actions of things are no longer tied to their specific nature
in your mind.  Literally anything can happen.

You get paranoid because you are out of phase with reality.
You experience the world as out to get you.  What you never
suspect is that it╒s really you that╒s out to get you.

You go from feelings of total bliss to total terror.   You╒re
ready for the mental hospital.

Driving Yourself Insane Takes Work

Fortunately, the mental habit of erasing the identity of
things is not easily learned because it goes against an entire
lifetime of identifying similarities and differences.

Zen Buddhists spend years striving to achieve the state of
mind that Hesse describes.  They have meditation exercises
designed to reprogram their minds to erase distinctions.  For
example, they contemplate a contradictory phrase like ╥What is
the sound of one hand clapping?╙  Over and over and over,
they ask themselves the question until ultimately their mind
gives up and they achieve  ╥Enlightenment╙.

We might call that experience ╥having a nervous breakdown╙
or ╥going insane╙ but Buddhists call it ╥Enlightenment╙.
Funny isn╒t it?

I╒ve Been ╥Enlightened╙

Having had this experience, I can report that one really does
experience the most tremendous sense of inner light, of being
able to see forever, an intense feeling of KNOWING EVERYTHING.

At the same time, sensory impressions become so intense that
it╒s extremely pleasurable just to perceive things.  Your mind
becomes so flooded with sensations that there is no future or
past; you can╒t imagine anything other than what you╒re
perceiving NOW.  You don╒t have any extra mental capacity left
for memories or imagination about the future.  You╒re reduced
to the mind of an animal.  There╒s no arguing that it╒s
blissful -- it is.  But that isn╒t the whole story.

While all this is going on your mind is working below the
surface to destroy every idea you ever formed, erasing even
distinctions that have become second nature like being able to
recognize numbers.

I can remember vividly spending an entire night trying to
figure out the pattern behind the changes in the lighted
segments of my digital clock.  I sat there in the darkness in
the red glow of the clock desperately trying to grasp what was
going on.   There seemed to be a pattern behind the changes in
the lights, but I couldn╒t grasp it.  I didn╒t recognize the
individual segments of a digit as being part of a digit. I had
totally lost the knowledge of numbers and counting.

That╒s ╥Enlightenment╙ and I reached it by contemplating a
contradictory statement until I snapped.  That wasn╒t my goal
but that╒s what happened: I was trying to understand some bogus
mathematics, the symbolic equivalent to "What is the sound of
one hand clapping?".

For me ╥Enlightenment╙ also meant being beaten senseless by six
police officers who thought I was high on PCP.  It meant being
strapped to a bed with tight leather straps and left overnight
in the corridor of a hospital.  It meant spending two weeks
in a mental ward drugged like a zombie on powerful anti-psychotic
drugs.

In spite of my mental health care, I recovered.  Not everyone does.

The Antidote For The Siddhartha Virus

The Siddhartha Virus destroys your ability to grasp reality by
attacking your most basic ideas of what reality is and how you
come to know it.

If you have a firm grip on reality nothing can harm you.  If
you don╒t know where you stand, if some of the things
Siddhartha said sound good to you, then you╒re vulnerable.

Let╒s take a few minutes to immunize ourselves against the
Siddhartha Virus.

From your earliest memories you knew some things about reality,
things that you never questioned and never put into words: but
you knew them more certainly than anything else.

As a baby, even before you could talk or understand words, when
you looked around and picked up a rock or a ball or a flower, you
knew that whatever it was it existed.  You learned that if you
wanted the ball in your hand you had to move your hand to grip it.
And when you gripped the ball you knew you held it.

Back then, before you learned to think in terms of concepts, your
senses were your only way to grasp reality.  A conceptual grasp
of the world came sometime later as you learned to use words.

You could look down and see the red rubber ball in your hand,
you could feel it, you knew the ball was there with such
certainty that it never, ever would have occurred to you to
doubt it.

If you examine what you knew then and put it into explicit
conceptual terms you might come up with the following:

1. Things exist. I saw them and touched them.

2. I know things exist.  It wasn╒t until much later, when I
became aware of my mind, that I grasped this fact explicitly
--  but I knew it then implicitly because I acted on what
I knew.

3. The only way to know things is through my senses.  Before
I learned to use concepts, physical objects were always grasped
in some sensory form, as an image, a touch, a taste or smell.
Internal states were also always grasped as sensations of
hunger, fear, excitement etc.  Even today, as an adult, all
of my conceptual knowledge that ╥makes sense╙ ultimately reduces
to sensory knowledge of some kind.  My senses are the basis of
all of my knowledge.

4. Things exist independently of my knowing them.  I know this
because I continue to feel the ball in my hand even as I close
my eyes.  So the existence of things doesn╒t depend on my
knowing them.  Things are what they are independent of my
awareness.

These ideas are the most certain of ideas and it is here, at
this vital point, that the Siddhartha Virus strikes.

According to Hesse:

1. Things don╒t exist as separate things but as part of a
   flowing river of forms.

2. Since there are no things, you don╒t have any knowledge of
   things.

3. Your senses don╒t connect you to things, because there
   aren╒t any.

4. Nothing has an identity independent of some mind or another.

Who is right?  Which position is true?  How do you know?

On the one hand you have knowledge based on your own
observation, confirmed by a lifetime of experience and on the
other hand there are the statements of another person, Hesse.

Further, the type of knowledge you have about things is
literally self-evident, that is, each thing you see is proof
that things exist.

Hesse╒s ideas go against your most certain knowledge and he
presented no evidence for his position.  He just claimed them
to be true without substantiation.

Hesse also committed the fallacy of the stolen concept: he
depended on the existence of things and the validity of your
senses even as he denied them.

In order to get across his ideas, he represented them as
written words, marks on paper which he counted on holding
their separate identity until your senses were able to pick
them up.  By presenting his ideas in definite, sensible form
he contradicted the content of his argument which is that
nothing is definite and capable of being sensed.

Conclusion

It comes down to this: if you choose to accept Hesse╒s world
view as true you must first evade the arbitrary and self-
refuting nature of his argument and second, you must deny
what your own eyes, ears and hands tell you.

Can you honestly do that?

Should you take the arbitrary word of someone else over
the immense weight of a lifetime of your own first hand
experience?

Your sanity depends on your choice.

                      ~~~~~~~~~