New Age Imperialism

[Ian Livingston]

Pynchon certainly plays with the Western attempts at coopting Eastern
thought and religion. And, boy, do I ever get the joke. As a caretaker
at a Buddhist retreat facility, I am astounded at the self-centric
self-deception that passes as "for the benefit of all sentient
beings." If I didn't get the joke, I would be furious with these old
children. There is a piece of wisdom I picked up somewhere in relation
to the transcendentalism of the '70s, that you can't transcend what
you haven't integrated. Westerners typically have very dis-integrated
egos and whenever they sit on their cushions, it seems, they project
their own unconscious egoic constructs into theistic cutouts they then
pay devout homage to. Mahayana Buddhism, which is very polytheistic,
is a fruitful playground for those who honor themselves in this way.
There may be a few westerners who escape this trap, but I think they
are an obscure minority.

One of my Buddhist cares here is very emphatic about the omnipresence
of post-traumatic shock in Western civilization. We are a collection
of warrior cultures, he says, that incline to treat children as future
warriors--whether on the battlefield or in the marketplace. Children
are denied childhood and compelled into training in campos of
intellectual violence. Therefore, we grow up experiencing the world as
a non-reality more nearly associated with dream-projection than with
the interdependent manifestations of emptiness as form the mystics are
on about. This subtle difference is lost on the Tibetans, who are
clueless about child psychology and trauma theory. Buddhist psychology
kicks in with the advent of a healthy (or relatively intact) ego,
somewhere about puberty. Of course, my friend's theory ignores the
fact that Eastern cultures are equally hard on their children, and
that they, too, are a collection of warrior clans.

In fact, it is difficult to find a "Western religion" outside paganism
and New World tribal contexts. Remember that Judaism evolved in the
Eastern deserts and is the mother of both Christianity and Islam.

I think, Robin, that much of Pynchon's mystical female surely relates
more directly to Jungian alchemy, as it was Jung who did the most to
translate that thread for westerners. Remember it was the Taoist
classic, The Secret of the Golden Flower, that set him on the track of
researching alchemy in the 1920's. And Pynchon clearly read Jung in
the '50s or '60s. I think Eliade best approaches the likely sources of
alchemy in The Forge and the Crucible, and Joseph Campbell certainly
did his part in popularizing the masculine / feminine union that
Pynchon so poetically depicts in Reef-Yashmeen-Cyprian triangle. If
alchemy, as Eliade postulates, arose from the conjunction of metal
smithing with the rise of agrarian cultures, then the thread of
alchemy from Wicca to Zen makes a great deal of sense.

>And I do remember someone writing that the Buddha could not have been the Buddha
>anywhere else....

Hell, James Brown couldn't have been James Brown anywhere else, or in
any other time. And to be more specific in the Buddha case especially,
"the Buddha" manifests at the turning of the great wheel of the Dharma
every few thousand years, so Gautama Buddha will reincarnate as
Maitreya Buddha, according to the Mahayana lore, at some crucial time
in the future. For any old Arthur C. Clarke readers out there, he may
have leathery wings and a barbed tail, or be the collective psyche of
the last generation....


On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 6:25 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> In all his books, from V to Inherent Vice, Pynchon is making fun of us
> Westerners trying to learn
> from the wisdom of the East. There is not only something helpless about it,
> it's also politically
> problematic. Just some minutes ago I read a passage from David Cooper's "The
> Death of the Family"
> [1971] that sheds some light on this. Since I read it in German I give you a
> short summary of his
> basic argument and just (back)translate Cooper's final sentence. What he
> says is that - although
> the cultural imperialism the West is forcing the East into is bad enough -
> the true crime is the
> expropriation of the Eastern traditions by our Western cultures. Cooper says
> we're "parasites"
> sucking out older civilizations. This he calls "reactionary mystification".
> His example is the selective
> transplanting of elements of Mahajana Buddhism from Bhutan to San Francisco
> without taking into
> consideration the different social contexts. The outcome of this is a
> political "quietism" which,
> according to Cooper, goes along only too well with the global exploitation.
> David Cooper finishes
> the passage with the sentence: "True Mystics were always very conscious of
> the nature of society
> they lived in and, thus, really political human beings."
>
> Is Vineland's Sister Rochelle a "true mystic" in this specific sense?
>
> Kai
>
>
> "Es gibt heute in der Ersten Welt eine weitverbreitete Sehnsucht nach großen
> Lehrern und geistigen
> Meistern, die, wenn sie auch nicht alle Probleme lösen können, doch
> zumindest den richtigen Weg zum
> richtigen Ziel zeigen können. Eines der ausgeprägtesten Merkmale des
> kulturellen Imperialismus sind
> nicht die kulturellen Modelle, welche die Erste Welt der Dritten aufzwingt,
> was an sich schon brutal
> genug ist, sondern ist die Weisheit, welche die Erste Welt jeder älteren
> Zivilisation wie ein Parasit aussaugt. So entsteht eine reaktionäre
> Mystifikation, die von Mystik keine Ahnung hat. Wenn zum Beispiel einige
> Elemente des Mahajana-Buddhismus nach dem Westen verpflanzt werden ohne
> Rücksicht auf die unterschiedliche soziale Realität in Bhutan und San
> Francisco, dann ist das Ergebnis ein Quietismus, der insgeheim völlig mit
> dem ausbeuterischen System übereinstimmt. Echte Mystiker waren sich der
> Natur der Gesellschaft, in der sie lebten, immer äußerst bewusst, und in
> diesem Sinne waren sie wirklich politische Menschen."
>
> (David Cooper: Der Tod der Familie. Reinbek bei Hamburg 1972: Rowohlt, p.
> 61)
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."