4,000 carts.

Content warning: discussion of suicide.

A cultural context where "rich man" doesn't mean "bad man"

In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha tells an allegory about a rich man, his sons, and their manor. 

"At that time a fire suddenly broke out on all sides, spreading through the rooms of the house. The sons of the rich man, ten, twenty, perhaps thirty, were inside the house. When the rich man saw the huge flames leaping up on every side, he was greatly alarmed and fearful and thought to himself, I can escape to safety through the flaming gate, but my sons are inside the burning house enjoying themselves and playing games, unaware, unknowing, without alarm or fear. The fire is closing in on them, suffering and pain threaten them, yet their minds have no sense of loathing or peril and they do not think of trying to escape!"

To convince his sons to leave through the small, flaming, gate he offered them a bribe. Knowing that the only thing his boys liked more than games and toys was going out for a drive, he offered each of his sons either a goat cart, a deer cart, or an ox cart if they were to leave the house. His kids got their shit together and ended up escaping to safety. The rich man, wanting to make good on his promise and also wanting to provide something dope af for his kids, decided to get each and every one of them an ox cart with the highest quality animals he could find, plenty of leg room inside the cart, and exteriors decorated with jewels (though a sick decal would be more appreciated in modern times). All of the sons are happy with their gift.

The Buddha explains that he is the rich man, humanity is his children, the house is the world, and the fire is the suffering and evils inherent to life. We live our lives doing our best to distract ourselves from the heat of the flames, but the Buddha knows that while it might be difficult to get out, it is possible to escape and receive the grandest possible ox cart (conceptualized in the text as each individual achieving Buddhahood).

However, some of his followers have some questions. Did the Buddha basically just lie to his kids? There were a whole bunch of them who were expecting deer carts but he ended up giving them something they didn't expect. Gautama defends himself in two main ways:

1) He loves his sons so much that he would do anything to make sure they escape the fire.

2) Each son got something even better than they were promised and none of them were upset by the change.

He calls this "expedient means." Basically, in order to get each boy out of the house he had to promise something specific that would appeal to them. Had he not offered some of his sons a goat cart they may have not left their play space. However, the rich man knowns his sons much better than they know themselves; while the fanciest possible ox cart might have not lured them out it definitely made them more satisfied in the end.

It is finally explained that the different initial carts are metaphors for different groups of people. "Leaving home" by being bribed by the goat cart is like being a Theravada Buddhist, the deer cart is one who manages to "leave home" with no prescribed methodology (people like Gautama Buddha himself, who ended up inventing his own school of thought), and the ox cart is Mahayana Buddhists who are being offered the thing closest to the rich man's actual reward (note that this sutra is a Mahayana text).

Meeting Jeanne D'Arc

Forget the Buddha for a second and think about me instead.

I was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; I was raised Mormon. The Book of Mormon contains this passage, speaking about itself:

"Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost."

My interpretation of this as a kid was: after you read the Book of Mormon you can pray about it with the correct attitude and you will have a transcendent spiritual experience confirming the truth of the book. I was so confident that this was going to happen to me that when I read the Book of Mormon for the first time as an eleven-year-old I was absolutely shocked that I didn't receive any form of revelation. I assumed that I was doing something wrong.

I assumed that I was doing something wrong for eight years. I read and I prayed over and over again over that time period and I never once felt anything outside of myself. It started to, over time, get harder and harder to read the book or engage in church because the pain and shame of not being able to connect to God was overwhelming me. I stopped sleeping and I started to have to deal with physical sickness originating from my emotions. My health got so bad that when I turned nineteen and applied to go on a mission for the church, something that I saw as my last chance to make the divine connection, I was turned down.

I realized that I was going to kill myself if I continued on this quest. The pain was just too intense. I sat in my room, made one last prayer to please receive a manifestation of truth, or even comfort. I received nothing and I made a choice: I would stop pursuing a connection to God in any literal sense. If God existed it was my only way to honor Him; I presumed he didn't want me to end my own life.

In a way, though, my prayer for comfort (and eventually manifestation of truth) was answered. I had discovered the works of psychologist C.G. Jung during this time. After classes at Utah Valley University I would go to their library and read the books they had on him. I purchased books for myself and I studied those, and what I couldn't afford I read summaries and analysis online. His ideas fascinated me, especially his taxonomy of the Self.

Jung's idea is as follows: we are multitudinous. We all have an Ego, the "I" that we embody in our consciousness in the day-to-day. We have a Shadow, the rejected and shameful aspects of ourselves; the Shadow acts autonomously and unconsciously. We have a Pneuma, a spirit which normally connects a man to his feminine side (Anima) or vice versa for women (Animus). We have a Persona, the toolset and masks we wear to interact with the world. We are all connected to the Collective Unconscious, a set of psychic structures all humans share due to our similar brain structures. We are also connected to the physical world around us, the universe itself. Finally, at the biggest level we have the Self. The Self is the unified whole of every aspect of ourselves. A holistic everything. This concept of the Self is connected to other spiritual concepts like Oneness, Logos, Cosmic Truth, and most importantly in this context, God.

Jung's ideas were a major healing point for me. My suicidal thoughts subsided and I started to feel like a real person who could pursue his own life in a way I never did before. I made a major life choice to take a break from school: I took a job working for Salt Lake City Public Services where I still work today. I made important friend and colleague connections, worked for the best youth center in the state, and met my fiancée. I began to study, take healthy risks, explore my psyche, and engage with life. It felt really good.

One of the first points of study was a renewed interest in reading, as started with reading Jung's books and essays. The toxicity around my relationship with the Book of Mormon had poisoned my relationship with other books as well (when I was younger I loved to read), but once I had made my choice to leave the church my love of books was rekindled. One of the first books I picked up was Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain.

Here's what you need to know about the book and its author:

1) Twain did painstaking research to tell the life story of Jeanne (Joan's real, French, name).

2) Jeanne was a French girl who helped her kingdom defeat the English in the Hundred Year's War. She claimed that an angel had given her revelation, managed to convince the power structures of France to support her, and her work, in many ways, turned the tides of the war.

3) The English ended up capturing her and killing her, she died a martyr. 

4) Twain tells this story 100% straight, he shows her talking to an angel as an actual being.

5) Twain is one of America's most famous atheists.

This set of facts confused me. Twain was consistently annoyed by Christians, he used Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to mock them in their stories. Why didn't he roll his eyes at the superstitious beliefs of these people who gave an army to a farm girl? The book had absolute respect for Jeanne, her beliefs, her mission, and her connection to the Divine. I pondered on the truths of these things:

I was struck.

I suddenly felt a feeling I had never had before. I knew in an instant that it was the connection to the Holy Spirit I had wanted to feel my whole life. I connected to Jeanne from out of time and I felt her devotion. I connected to Twain as he studied her life and came to respect her. I connected to every religious person who had experienced the divine in the past and I finally understood. I felt like my whole Self and an experience of truth came to me: every religion and every spiritual practice is a language designed to help us speak the words of and manage to get to this feeling. None of them are "true" because "truth" doesn't matter in this space, I was feeling something beyond and it was full of trust and love. This was, in many ways, the most important day of my life.

The experience ended.

Call to Adventure

"Expedient means" is a utilitarian argument coming directly from the Self. We, as Ego beings, are trapped in the consciousness of "I"; we do not have a holistic view of our purpose and mission nor the dangers of the Shadow and our other psychodynamics. The only way for the Self to convince us to escape is to offer us something that the Ego wants and can easily understand. I can easily imagine a deer cart, but a giant ox cart with the coolest and bestest oxen and air conditioning and super comfy seats and lots of shiny gems is honestly a little overwhelming.

Every human being is called to escape from a world of pain and lies by taking the path to the narrow gate. Waiting for us, through that gate, is something so wonderful and so perfect that we could never even conceptualize it with our limited Ego. True connection with the Self can be achieved by figuring out the cart that appeals to us and to follow it towards the divine (please read my essay on the synthesis of transcendence and immanence for a guidepost on the "right way" to follow the cart).

There are two modifications I would like to make to the Buddha's parable. 

1) How many carts?

There is a little bit of debate around whether or not the parable is describing three carts or four carts. In the three carts argument the Mahayanists would say that the ox cart they are being offered by the Buddha is the same cart everyone gets in the end of the story. From this perspective they are essentially saying, "Our religion is the true religion, but that's okay because everyone else will come to see the truth in the end and we'll all be happy." In the four carts argument some Mahayanists would say they were being offered the thing closest to the S-tier ox cart everyone gets in the end, but even their conceptualization of the divine reward isn't quite right.

In order for the parable to really work I think the fancy smancy ox cart concept needs some altering. Right now the narrative is a bit self serving to Mahayanists and doesn't quite capture . The "expedient means" argument only works for me if the real cart is so big and so grand that it would be blow our minds at how cool it was, but we couldn't believe it until we saw it. Right now, with the Mahayanists being offered an ox cart and the Buddha giving us a better ox cart doesn't capture that and it implies that Mahayana Buddhism is the "best" cart in some way.

a) I don't want to dismiss the idea that some religious practices or languages can be better at helping us "escape" over others. Mahayana Buddhism is awesome, I have practiced its subschool of Zen Buddhism and I have benefitted greatly. However there are a lot of assholes who think their religion is the best religion and I don't trust anyone who makes claims such as these. My position is there are "best religions for a particular individual to practice" as a cart-bribe over others.

b) To take away the Mahayana bias and to complete the metaphor I think the final cart has to be something beyond the imagination and/or something that the rich man's sons couldn't believe was waiting for them. The True Cart cart should be pulled by griffins, should be Ra's sun barge, should be non-Euclidean, should be connected to 7G internet, etc.

2) I want to expand the concept a little bit:

Each cart is representative of a religion or spiritual practice. The Buddha explains that there are three, but I would like to argue that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even one specific cart for every individual who has ever lived. My divine connections have shown me that the religious experiences of mankind are all different carts; I would reckon that most who would even engage in such a metaphor (read: religious people who don't decree that their religion to be the "only true" religion) would want to consider their divine language to be a cart.

Divine language acts as a cart in that it acts as a Call to Adventure. I, a kid growing up in Utah, was told that there is a God and a dude named Joseph Smith who told us the Right Things to know about God. This goaded me to "leave my games" and try to get out of the house, it caused my first steps towards the gate. Whether we conceptualize this cart as "Mormonism" as a whole or "Scott's personal experience with Mormonism" it doesn't really matter; I will always be grateful for it causing those first steps.

Over those seven years, however, the cart stopped appealing to me. I started to only see the problems, with the cart and with myself, and my progress halted. If the rich man had only given us one option, the Mormon Cart (the animal is probably a curelom) I'd never have a chance of escaping. Thank God, and I mean that literally, there are other carts. Twain and Jung helped show me the cart of spiritually minded agnosticism and of mystic psychology (animals: cat cart and snake cart). Discovering these two helped me find other carts like Hinduism, Stoicism, and once I realized that I didn't have to have "one true" cart I finally found an appealing version of the Christian cart (monkey cart, lion cart, donkey cart, respectively).

This conceptualization of spirituality is one that can help us all escape the fires more effectively. You've got the cart you want, I have the cart I want, there are amazing things about your cart you can tell me about and there are amazing things about my cart I can tell you about. This dynamic makes "escaping" even more appealing and gives us more tools to make it. We have not escaped the flames yet, but I can and will support you as we venture. I know that the carts I'm rushing towards aren't the ones I'm going to get, but I cannot wait to see what I have waiting for me.

We are always living the life we want to live.

I cannot tell you what dharma is and I cannot tell you my dharma. Dharma is a complex topic which scholars have struggled to fully translate. Dharma is dharma. Similarly, my personal dharma is incommunicable. My dharma lives somewhere between my complex neural connections and the simple truth of what is. However, I can do my best to express what I know about dharma.

Dharma is a concept which has, in its various uses, described the following: an individual’s spiritual purpose, the universal moral code which we all must follow, the laws of physics, the justification for the Indian caste system, and a methodology to deal with one’s karma (Widgery, 1930). The idea is used in several religions and each tradition uses it in a slightly different way. Were this a research paper I would try and synthesize the different concepts or perhaps find areas where the concepts are incompatible, or maybe I would write about dharma, the caste system, and how many Americans hold certain stereotypes around how India is structured. Instead I will say that dharma captures bits and pieces of all those things and point to one common theme across several of those uses: dharma is a set of spiritually associated principles which are meant to guide the actions of conscious beings. Understanding these principles and acting with that knowledge is a common theme in the daily lives of many practitioners of Hinduism.

I learned of the concept six years ago when I first read the Bhagavad Gita. I had been exploring the religions of the world through a Jungian lens. C.G. Jung was a psychologist active in the early to mid-twentieth century. While he is often associated with Sigmund Freud, who is dismissed by the modern psychological establishment, though Jung’s spiritual edge keeps him relevant today. The Jungian idea I was exploring at the time, and have been exploring since, was the concept that connection with the Self (Jung’s analogous concept for God, Truth, Ultimate Reality, etc.) can be built by living a life a meaning. Jung believed that modern man’s search for a soul was the primary arc which guided us through life. I approached the Gita from this lens: how do I live a life with purpose? Dharma seemed key to the answer.

However, there is a big difference between thinking, “I need to live a life of meaning,” and, “I should live by my dharma,” and actually living a spiritually fulfilled life. First of all, there are Hindus who would look at that first sentence and ask, “What do you even mean by ‘should?’” Second of all, what even is my dharma? The answers given in Hinduism are either strict moral codes, some of which have been used to uphold a destructive class system, and high level spiritual truths which I struggled to grasp. I made sub-optimal choices left and right as I tried to figure out the idea. Sometimes I would get too theoretical, diving deep into texts and theories without making any changes in my life. Sometimes I would experiment with myself to see who I “really was,” such as trying to become a business student, and realize I had gone down the wrong path. Sometimes I would act in cruel and thoughtless ways and not even think of, or worse even feel justified by, my “dharma.” I found that Hinduism wasn’t working for me as a spiritual practice and I left it behind for other attempts at finding “my path.”

This all culminated thirteen months ago when I made two major decisions: I left a job that I deeply cared about for a job that offered more money and I bitterly ended a relationship with someone I really loved. Just like I cannot fully express dharma I cannot fully express the despair and stupidity which drove me towards those choices; I thought I was doing what was “right,” but I fell into a deep depression and long introspection in the months afterward. I felt a deeper need than ever to know something about how to make choices in life.

I returned to the Gita and to the concept of dharma. I was sure that I had something more to learn from them. Three things happened:

1) I woke up at three in the morning from a dreamless sleep. I, without thinking, grabbed my color pencils and wrote, “We Are Always Living the Life We Want to Live,” on the wall on the bedroom. I had a vague sense of its meaning: every choice we make, even the ones that we are responding to negatively, are an expression of something in our minds or souls. Our choices hold meaning, and the choices we don’t make also hold meaning.

“The wise see that there is action in the midst of inaction and inaction in the midst of action. Their consciousness is unified, and every act is done with complete awareness (Easwaran, 2009, 118).”

2) I personally felt like the specific moral codes and social roles which were pitched by the Gita and other Hindu texts were seeped in cultural norms that didn’t resonate with me. My instincts told me, though, the dharmic conceptualization of Self would help me in my growth from the Jungian framework. I wanted to come up with a technique to develop my own dharmic values. I sat down one day, wrote down scores of what my values were as a kid (“Connecting to God,” “Taking care of my family”) in my current life (“Making enough money for school,” “Keeping myself emotionally safe”), and what my absolute ideals are (“Helping people work through their cognitive dissonance,” “Building a family legacy”). I synthesized the entire list by looking for commonalities across my three selves and then expressed them poetically into a sacred set of lyrical heuristics for how to live my life. I make choices based on them on a consistent basis.

“The word dharma means many things, but its underlying sense is “that which supports,” from the root dhri, to support, hold up, or bear. Generally, dharma implies support from within: the essence of a thing, its virtue, that which makes it what it is (Easwaran, 2009, 266).”

3) The bitter end to the relationship was resolved. When she came to my apartment, she saw the words on the wall and they resonated deeply with her. I showed her my dharmic values technique and it helped her work through some of the darkness that was impacting her. We rekindled our romance, we are now engaged to be married, and every day we work to support each other in our dharmas and to follow a dharmic code we developed for our relationship specifically.

“The Gita begins with the way of selfless action, passes into the way of Self-knowledge, and ends with the way of love (Easwaran, 2009, 49).”

Overintellectualizing dharma when I first encountered it six years ago made it impossible to fully engage with. Ironically, it wasn’t until I took the idea on in a spiritual, artistic, and abstract manner that I was able to turn my studies into something real and lived. While I am not a Hindu I will always be grateful to the Hindu thinkers who developed the practice and to the Hindus who first exposed me to the Gita in the first place.

Dharma is a concept which can describe the following: which ice cream flavor I chose to eat when I first went to a Baskin-Robbins, the color of literally everyone’s shirt, the sound my refrigerator makes when it is sitting open, the cool lightning storm that happened last night, and every expense report my boss has ever written. I cannot tell you what dharma is and I cannot tell you my personal dharma. However, I can point to the universe and I can point to myself and I can show you exactly what it is.

Citations

Easwaran Ed., Eknath. (2009). The Bhagavad Gita (Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality) (p. 118). Nilgiri Press. Kindle Edition.

Widgery, A. (1930). The Principles of Hindu Ethics. International Journal of Ethics, 40(2), 232-245. Retrieved September 15, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2377977