First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany
”Idealism as Mental Opium”
Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore, October 19, 2003

"Intelligence is the ability to ascertain the essential." Jiddu Krishnamurti

Readings for Reflection

From “Call For a New Buddhism” by Christopher Calder (and inspiration for the sermon title):

What we call Buddhism today is an amalgamation of the true teachings of Siddhartha combined with invented myths and large amounts of culture derived from the country in which the Buddhism is practiced.Tibetan Buddhism, for example, is as much Tibetanism as it is Buddhism.Buddha's words were handed down for several centuries through oral tradition before a committee was formed to commit the communal heritage, not memory, of Buddha's teaching to written scripture.No human being who actually met the Buddha wrote any of the famous Buddhist scriptures that present day followers take so literally and seriously…

Some, but not all Buddhist circles have a politically correct insistence on absolute nonviolence.Tibet had no effective army to fight off the Chinese invasion of 1950.The less politically correct and more pragmatic Nepalese fought off the Chinese with ease.The Nepalese Gurkha fighters have a reputation for being among the bravest soldiers in the world.Tibet is enslaved and Nepal is free because Tibetan Buddhism went too far in the direction of extreme philosophical purity.Idealism is a form of mental opium.It may feel good for a short while but the long term effects can be disastrous. I do not call for war mongering or aggressive behavior toward one's neighbors.I do call for a strong sense that self-defense is normal, natural, and a basic necessity of life.Every animal on this planet has some form of defense mechanism and human beings should have many layers of defense to protect ourselves, our families, and our society.Having an army is not evil, it is just good common sense…

(Note: Opinions expressed on this page must be viewed as the ideas of an ordinary student of meditation. While I truly believe everything I say, you should not believe anything unless you see it, feel it, and know it for yourself.I make no claims of infallibility.In fact I absolutely claim fallibility)

From a leading American medical textbook circa 1868:

"...[opiates] cause a feeling of delicious ease and comfort, with an elevation of the whole moral and intellectual nature...There is not the same uncontrollable excitement as from alcohol, but an exaltation of our better mental qualities, a warmer glow of benevolence, a disposition to do great things, but nobly and beneficently, a higher devotional spirit, and with a stronger self-reliance, and consciousness of power. Nor is this consciousness altogether mistaken. For the intellectual and imaginative faculties are raised to the highest point compatible with individual capacity...Opium seems to make the individual, for a time, a better and greater man...."

Sermon

Opium is one of the oldest entheogenic substances.People, looking for spiritual experience, have been ingesting the opaque, white sap of the poppy seed pod for over 5000 years that we know of and likely thousands of years before that.Although most of the opium cultivated today comes from Myanmar and Afghanistan, it was first cultivated in lower Mesopotamia.The Sumerians referred to it as the Hul Gil, the joy plant.The Assyrians learned the value of cultivating the poppy from the Sumerians and passed it to the Babylonians who then passed it to the Egyptians.The opium trade flourished during the reign of Thut-mose IV, Ak-hen-a-ton and King Tut-ank-ha-men. Their trade routes included the Phoenicians and Min-o-ans who moved the profitable item across the Mediterranean Sea into Greece, Carthage, and Europe. (from PBS Frontline)As trade routes expanded, opium followed them too.And those who resisted the power of the poppy were crushed.The nineteenth century opium wars with China were vicious actions by the British to protect and enforce the cultivation and sale of opium.In short, opium use and civilization are intimately intertwined.

Why do people love the poppy pod?As late as 1972 we didn’t know the chemistry of the opiates interaction with the brain.In 1972, researchers from Johns Hopkins University discovered the opiates mimic naturally occurring chemicals in the brain called endorphins.Endorphins are those wonderful neurotransmitters that our bodies release when they experience pain or stress.Our brain’s neurons have special receptors for endorphins to which the opiates can also bond, inhibiting neural firing, creating an analgesic effect, easing the sensation of pain.These are also the pleasant chemicals that can stimulate the great feeling one has after vigorous exercise or facing fear riding a roller coaster.

The opiates are more powerful than endorphins because the body isn’t able to regulate them.The effect is dramatic.Aldous Huxley, a user of opium, spoke of the effects this way:

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution--then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."

Searching for paradise here on earth has been an ongoing project for as many or more years as the cultivation of the poppy.For all the searching, no one has yet found a way to constitute a heaven realm on earth.There have been some fairly good societies but all have had flaws that eventually undermined them.For all these failures, you’d think people would give up trying-–but they can’t.If we are going to be social beings, and we must be if we want to procreate and survive as a species, we need to understand how to create a good society.In a democracy, the problem of creating and maintaining a good, just society is our responsibility.

One solution for building a good society I’d like to wrestle with this morning emerged along with the advent of scientific empiricism during the Enlightenment period.The path to knowing how to build a good society transitioned from implementing divine law on earth through the Catholic church toward Greek inspired thinking of building the good society on the basis of ideals, a transition from theology to epistemology, from the Godly to the human.

Rejecting revelation as the fount of Truth, Enlightenment thinkers returned to pure ideal Platonic forms that transcend the real world as the ultimate source of truth.Examples of truth could be observed in the world but they were shadows, shadows of the abstract truth intellectual inquiry could uncover, by separating the object, the limited example, from the ideal form found in the subjective observer.No revelation was required, just observation and intellectual inquiry.In fact, even the object wasn’t critical, only intellectual inquiry into the world of ideas.This may work well to describe Newtonian falling objects using the formula Force equals Mass times Acceleration (F=mA), but in the realm of human beings, the separation of subject and object creates distortion.

The use of opiates powerfully illustrates this distortion.Once one is under the spell of the opiate, one’s perception is altered.A noticeable distance begins separating the perceiver from the perceived.Homer vividly conveys opium’s effects in The Odyssey.In one episode, Tel-e-mac-hus is depressed after failing to find his father Odysseus. But then Helen...

"...had a happy thought. Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who swallowed this dissolved in their wine could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother or father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done..."

Unfortunately, this distortion of reality by our minds isn’t easy to recognize in normal waking consciousness.The ordinary person sees no difficulty using his mind to perceive reality accurately.He sees his garage door opening as he turns into the driveway and drives under it.She listens to geese migrating south and smells the musty odor of fall leaves.He pets his dog and enjoys a crisp apple.Our daily experience of living gives us great confidence we’re in touch with the truth about reality.So where is the problem?

The epistemologist locates the problem precisely in these facts.Yes we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch, but what do we perceive in these psychical acts and how do we shape them in our minds as mental objects?Think of an auto accident with many witnesses each having their own perception of what happened and who was at fault.Each witness constructs the accident in their own minds.Only a portion of that construction may or may not have any relation to the facts.

The difficulty we’re wrestling with here lies in the dissimilarity which exists between mind and matter.The mind is representational or psychical while the objects are physical.How can the mind assimilate physical objects and translate them into the psychical accurately?Here is what the idealistic philosopher does with this problem:

Since the mind is psychical, it seems perfectly obvious and logical, that nothing but what is psychical can affect the mind and nothing can proceed from the mind but what is psychical. All knowledge, then, since it proceeds from the mind and takes place in the mind, must be purely mental. Physical objects are, therefore, absolutely excluded from knowledge: the objects of knowledge are mental objects, ideas. Consequently, even when we apparently perceive external and extended objects, what we really perceive are "mental objects," "ideas," "conscious states," "representations," but not physical, extra-mental things themselves. (see this link for more…)

We Unitarian Universalists have much in common with this idealistic approach to philosophy.We believe everyone has their own approach to and experience of truth.There may indeed be Absolute Truth, but each person’s interior representation of it will be unique. The individual, therefore, is the final authority.We encourage people “to build their own theology” and practice it within our community.Valuable as we find this approach to religion, it has its dangers as well.In our Principles and Purposes we acknowledge this danger in our source, “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against the idolatries of the mind and spirit.”The dangers become clear as we look at the philosophy of idealism more closely.

The retreat from the physical into the psychical parallels the process of using mind-altering chemicals.Opium distorts reality draining away the unpleasant sensations and harmonizing the dissonances.Irresolvable tensions dissolve in a sense of satisfaction as though all one’s needs are fulfilled.The opium creates a distance and sense of disconnection from the “real world.”

This disconnected, self-satisfied state well describes the ideologue, in love with his own theories.The ideologue chooses to bend reality to fit nicely into his philosophical categories.He filters out and rejects any facts that do not fit his thinking.If only everyone would embrace my thinking, he muses, all the world’s tensions would dissolve and a sense of peace and satisfaction would pervade the world!

Sadly, all ideologues distort human nature because they disconnect from it.Any attempt to reduce humanity to an ideal form will always result in error.Think, for example, about modeling human behavior in economics.Humans do not behave like an economic man always seeking the best price, buying and selling in predictable ways.Even small idiosyncratic variations in behavior can sink the most elaborate economic modeling.

To help better understand this process of mental distortion, I’d like to mention this morning, two twentieth century philosophers who have wrestled with idealism.Owen Barfield, lifelong friend of C.S. Lewis, rejected subjective idealism.Barfield noted the process of “the brain perceiving” gets dropped out of the subject-object duality.He followed Rudolph Steiner’s idea that the brain perceiving nature, the “Thinking on which our experience of nature depends, really is in--objectively in—nature.”Reality does exist outside our perception of it, even if we cannot objectively perceive it.Objective reality does have its own Truth and we can approach it with our minds.

The second thinker I’d like to mention is the Frenchman Raymond Aron.

Aron, who died in 1983 in his late seventies, is a half-forgotten colossus of twentieth-century intellectual life. Part philosopher, part sociologist, part journalist, he was above all a spokesman for that rarest form of idealism, the idealism of common sense. (link)

Aron is notable for Unitarian Universalists because of his “discriminating devotion to the [humanist] ideals of the Enlightenment.” He believed, as many of us do, in the power and limits of reason, resisting superstition.Yet he was able to retain what many ideological thinkers despise: a relationship with traditional values and society.Aron was a man comfortable with the word paradox.

He wrote a book that created a stir in 1957 titled, The Opium of the Intellectuals.Aron was critical of anyone who offered a vision of human perfection or proclaimed access to any Absolute Truth.The leitmotif of Aron’s career was pragmatic responsibility:

the exercise of that prosaic, but indispensable, virtue: prudence. Aron understood that political wisdom rests in the ability to choose the better course of action even when the best course is unavailable—which is always. (link)

Resisting dualistic thinking, Aron acknowledged that genuine progress was always contingent, piecemeal and imperfect.Reality is prosaic and human nature is poetic.He said, “I do in fact think that the organization of social life on this earth turns out, in the end, to be rather prosaic.”Aron is particularly critical of the extravagant ideals that, in the end, turn bad, promising everything and delivering misery and impoverishment.

While Aron’s major enemy was fanaticism he was no friend of its opposite: apathy and indifference.The unwillingness to engage life is as destructive as the fanatic’s crusade.His guide was the practical wisdom of prudence.Prudence is a great word.It expresses caution and care when dealing with risk, sagacity in the management of affairs, skill and good judgment in the use of resources, all united by the ability to govern and discipline oneself through the use of reason.The path to prudence, he said, was skepticism, another cherished word within our midst.

Skepticism is an integral component of the Unitarian Universalist approach to religion.We do not embrace any ideology of faith but hold all of them lightly.We do not blind ourselves with dogmatic belief nor drug ourselves with emotional fervor as the evangelicals do.Unitarian Universalism could be called a prudent approach to the religious.We skeptically approach all truth claims and endeavor to find out as much as we can for ourselves.But skepticism, Aron felt, is not an end in itself.

Skepticism, Aron wrote,

is perhaps for the addict [to ideology] an indispensable phase of withdrawal; it is not, however, the cure. The addict is cured only on the day when he is capable of faith without illusion.

Experience is a far better grounding of our faith.Mind-altering substances and idealism offer the illusion of a world that cannot be.Wonderful as the sensations of the moment can be, opium’s effects fade requiring ever higher and higher doses to achieve the same effect.Idealisms like Marxism and Capitalism too must distort reality more and more as reality resists their theories.The result in both cases is death.

So let us expose the false truths of the poppy and the ivory tower through a skeptical approach to idealism.Let us hold our ideals tentatively, knowing they matter a great deal while also recognizing their limitations.Let our experience of them be their prudent measure.As Jesus wisely said, by their fruits you will know them.

And finally, let us realize that a good life is led prudently seeking a reasoned faith without illusions.