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Message |
| Posted By: |
Uncle Tantra |
| Date: |
24-Apr-2004-14:57:13 |
| Subject: |
Unc's Supermodel Theory of Spirituality |
It's a fine Spring day in Paris, the kind they write songs about. I'm taking advantage of it by sitting at an outdoor table in one of my favorite cafés, sipping a fine St. Émilion, writing a story instead.
There's a lot to write about. The café itself overlooks the Seine, and down on the Rive Gauche below me there is a fashion shoot for French Vogue going on. I can tell it's for Vogue because of the quality of the models. We're talking supermodels here, faces and bodies I know from every magazine I pick up, half the billboards I see in the Métro, and even a few movies. And they're modeling swimsuits. For a lover of female beauty such as myself, this strikes me as the ultimate karmic reward for enduring a gray, dreary Paris winter. It also strikes me as the perfect opportunity to write about one of my pet theories about where religions and spiritual beliefs come from. Go figure.
Here in the café, the women have doffed their coats and sweaters and are luxuriating in the sun in short skirts and halter tops and sheer silk blouses and looking good! Really good. Down at the fashion shoot, the models are strutting around in thongs and bikinis (often without the upper half of the bikini) and looking...uh...better. This is not a value judgment, per se. It's their job to look better, to look ideal. They're supermodels.
Here in the café, the women are happy French products of the Gene Pool Of The Gods, almost universally slim and well-formed. Down at the fashion shoot, the supermodels haven't got an ounce of body fat among the lot of them, and make the beautiful women sitting next to me look like fatties.
So why does this whole scene remind me of religion and spiritual beliefs, and where I think that many if not all of these belief systems come from? I mean, beside the fact that it's Uncle Tantra writing this story, and he's more than a little weird?
It's the models.
Spiritual beliefs are built on models.
The supermodels of the fashion world model an ideal for us. They get paid the big Euros because they model that ideal well. They wear something outrageous in a fashion shoot or to the latest trendy disco photo-op or to a film festival, and within a few weeks the fashion industry has created hundreds of knock-off variations of the new ideal and within a few months the "upper echelon" of women who read Vogue and Elle and Marie Claire are wearing the same things, modeling their look and their behavior on the look and behavior of the supermodels. Within a year, even cheaper knock-offs of the same ideal start to appear in the stores that cater to those with more realistic clothing budgets, and the whole world starts to look like the ideal that was modeled for them.
In my opinion, all of the founders of religions and traditions of spiritual belief on this planet have modeled their assumptions about creation and How It All Works for us, and formulated a belief system based on those assumptions.
Let's examine a few examples, to see whether Unc is onto something with this latest theory, or whether (as has admittedly happened once or twice in the past), he's just full of shit.
Take Christianity. (And you can, as far as I'm concerned...I have a great deal of respect for the individual known to us as Christ, but not nearly as much for the expressions of his teachings that have followed him.) It's based, in my opinion, upon a particular model of consciousness and How It All Works. That is, that one particular sentient being can have sufficient personal power or grace or love or whatever you choose to call it to, by means of His own sacrifice, atone for the "sins" or failings of billions of other sentient beings. This is the often-unchallenged assumption that underlies most Christian belief systems. "He died for us." "He sacrificed himself that we might be saved." "His sacrifice has expiated my sins, such that I don't have to take personal responsibility for them any more. As long as I believe in Him and His sacrifice, when the merde hits the fan I am cool because He took care of all my karma for me."
Millions of people believe this. I'm not knocking their beliefs per se. They have, in my opinion, just as much validity as anyone else's beliefs. They might even be true.
But it's an entire religion modeled on a pretty interesting assumption. Can you imagine even the concept of salvation through a teacher's personal sacrifice even occurring to someone raised in a household in which the notion of karma and individual responsibility for one's individual actions were the prevalent assumptions? How can the notion of "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" (the scientific counterpart of karma) coexist with the concept of grace, of someone other than oneself being able to make the consequences of one's self's actions just go away, never to bother them again?
Take Hinduism. Joseph Campbell once characterized it with a term that, being a wordsmith, I just fell in love with. He called it "polypantheism -- the belief that there are many gods, all of whom are the boss." When you look at spiritual belief systems that were created by humans whose early upbringing was in a Hindu household, you find many of the assumptions that underlie Hinduism itself. That is, that there exists a strong, ever-changing hierarchy of "higher beings," who have powers denied to us mere humans, and whose position within the overall hierarchy of gods and goddesses is equally fluid. There is really no way to say which of them is "more powerful" or "less powerful" in a given situation than another, because it really all depends on context. In other words, although each of the Hindu deities is cool, their relative importance in the overall scheme of things depends on how cool they are at the moment. Just like supermodels.
What doesn't depend on context is that all of these god-models and goddess-models are subordinate, one way or another, to one particular supermodel, who is always the coolest. That's Brahman. He/She?it is by far the coolest. Everything that has physical existence is seen as a manifestation of Brahman, and an expression of His/Her/Its "higher purpose."
This goes so far, in some religious or spiritual sects founded by those who grew up imprinted by the model of Hinduism, to a belief that is remarkably similar to Christian determinism. That is, that no sentient being in the universe is really acting on his or her or its own. They're just acting out the will of Brahman. They have no choice as to what they do or don't do in any given situation. There is no such thing as free will. Every action that every sentient being has ever undertaken in its entire life has been determined by the Grand Plan of Brahman. Any belief to the contrary is extinguished the moment one becomes enlightened, and realizes that nothing one has ever done in one's entire life has had any effect whatsoever on creation or even one's own evolution; it was all preordained, determined, the will of someone/something greater than our selves.
Again, can you imagine this concept even occurring to someone brought up in a household that believes strongly in individual free will and its counterpart, individual karma?
Imagine the approach to spiritual practice and the pursuit of the ever-present but unrealized state of enlightenment that the Hindu-influenced founder of a spiritual belief system brings to the table, based on his or her assumptions about creation and How It All Works, the model they have in their minds for How Minds All Work.
Is it likely that a person who has completely bought into such a model for creation, in which individual effort and individual free will is dismissed out of hand, would ever create a belief system that emphasized individual effort in the pursuit of enlightenment? If you believe, to the core of your being, that there is no such thing as "individual effort," that all actions are preordained or determined by the "will of Brahman," is it likely that you're going to found a religion or a spiritual discipline that puts a great deal of value on individual effort, or actually doing things that can enhance your evolution, and influence the eventual realization of the ever-present, natural state of enlightenment?
Now, take Buddhism.
Not that it it's any different than any of the other religions or spiritual disciplines I've mentioned, just that I feel a personal resonance with its assumptions and models of the universe and How It All Works that I don't feel for some of the others. These assumptions and models could be just as off-base in Buddhism as I think they are in some other belief systems. They could be complete hooey. I am more than willing to admit this.
It's really not that the supermodels that Prince Siddhartha founded his belief system on seem "better" than those that other systems founded their belief systems on. Really. I fully admit that the original Buddha might have been as full of shit as I occasionally am. It's just that I identify with the models he built his belief system on in ways that I don't identify with the models that others built their belief systems on. It's all in the details.
Buddha had a fundamental assumption that, whatever the force that underlies creation may be, it isn't sentient. That is, it neither is aware of nor gives a shit what goes down in day-to-day Maya. There is no Grand Plan. It's pretty much up to the collective consciousness of those who dwell in Maya to determine how Maya dresses from day to day. Every individual has exactly the same influence on the collective mind of Maya. It really doesn't matter if you're slim and blonde and beautiful and were born the product of an amazing Teutonic Gene Pool like the German supermodel currently strutting for the cameras in a thong down on the quai. You have exactly the same influence on the collective consciousness of the planet as the equally-interesting but dark-haired and kilos-heavier woman looking over my shoulder from the next table, wondering what I'm writing that has me paying attention to it and not to her, despite the fact that she is dressed to kill in the latest supermodel-inspired attire.
Buddha had a tendency to believe in free will. He had a tendency to believe that -- even if it later turns out not to be true and that your whole life was predestined -- there is simply no advantage in believing that, on a day-to-day basis as a spiritual seeker. Because if you do, where does the impetus come from to do more, to try harder, to try at all, to do anything to further one's own liberation?
The supermodels down on the quai have free will. And free breasts, as well. There is now a line of gawkers lining the ramparts, looking down on their trend-setting activities. For all intents and purposes the gawkers look like mere humans admiring the escapades of the Hindu gods and goddesses in Brahmaloka. And the goddesses are modeling well. That's they're job. The swimsuits they are modeling will undoubtedly be de rigeur on French beaches this summer, and on foreign beaches the summer after that.
But will the women wearing them have had a great deal of free will in their decision about which swimsuit to wear? Or will they just follow the trends that were modeled for them by our modern-day gods and goddesses, and do their best to look just like them?
Is there a point to all of this, other than to pass a pleasant afternoon in a Paris café?
Does Unc have anything to suggest or...gawd help me...model for those reading this?
Only one thing.
We all have assumptions that underlie our day-to-day beliefs and actions. Each and every one of these assumptions has been taught to us, by someone we saw or heard about or read about who seemed to model a state of consciousness or a state of realization that we longed for but as yet had not been able to realize. And we bought into these assumptions, big-time. We modeled our own beliefs, and our own lives, on the beliefs and the lives of those we chose as our favorite supermodels.
And that's cool. That's just how Maya works.
But if you've chosen a path in life that has the abstract purpose of going beyond Maya, of going beyond models, of attaining some sort of self-sufficiency or self-realization, it might not be a bad idea, from time to time, to examine the basic assumptions that underlie your chosen path, and see if they're still really your assumptions. If they are, cool. If they aren't, also cool, but if you're a seeker of enlightenment, sooner or later you're probably going to have to do something about it.
That's all. Nothing heavy. Nothing too philosophical. Just some scribbles to pass the time while watching bare-breasted supermodels cavort down on the quai. Just another day in Paris.
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