We are living in a time of sudden reversals. We are told that the speculative bubble in the world financial markets has finally burst, and the period of economic expansion that has been going on for several decades now is coming to an end. Where economists and politicians once feared inflation, the rapid growth in the cost of things, we are now told that we are in danger of entering a deflationary spiral, in which the value of financial assets decreases.
It’s easy to point fingers at those who have inflated the value of real estate, stock prices, luxury consumer items, Picasso paintings and the like. But isn’t there a much broader sense of things being overvalued? An inflation in the value of personalities (the cult of the celebrity, from rock star to professor to yoga instructor), in the value of ideals (the inflation of complex and meaningful words such as democracy or freedom by various governments to justify their actions), in the value of information (the saturation level of media that provides us with instant access to everything, but which leaves us still somehow powerless to change things).
This overvaluation has squeezed out any activities that cannot or will not package themselves as part of the marketplace. And it’s been accompanied by the collapse of various cultural markets—for musical recordings, magazines and books. What if, rather than the familiar cycles of fashion in which the old is replaced by the new, we are experiencing an overall collapse of the values that have held modern societies together, with nothing there to substitute for things that have been devalued?
Can we also speak of something like spiritual inflation? I struggle with this. If I vow to attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings, and am currently unable to achieve this goal, is my vow itself a kind of inflation? To the degree with which I walk around with a sense of moral superiority based on the fact that I have taken this vow, it may be so. And although I am delighted by Obama’s success in the US elections, his reliance on endlessly repeated words such as “hope” and “change” also strike me as a shrewd use of the language of inflation, a last and desperate attempt to flatter his American audience and their need to have something, anything to hold onto. And if all of this is so, could we talk about something called “spiritual deflation”? What would that mean? A return to skepticism, cynicism, to the bare bones materialism which most of us who explore a spiritual path have rejected?
The finest moment of spiritual deflation I can think of happens in Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa’s book Crazy Wisdom. A student asks what you can gain from having a spiritual practice, and Trungpa’s reply is “nothing.” Someone in the audience asks if we need to hope for some kind of benefit, and Trungpa again responds that the situation is hopeless. The audience is clearly shocked and again and again they try to get Trungpa to offer something that they can hold onto but he refuses. They list the various potential benefits of spiritual practice but again he says sorry, it’s hopeless.
I remember when I first read this book I too was scandalized and I thought that surely Trungpa had made a mistake and was being nihilistic … or maybe he’d misunderstood what the English word “nothing” means. But now I see that it was I who didn’t want to understand—Trungpa is deflating the various goals, ideals, beliefs that his students have about their practice so that they cling to nothing, so that they have no illusions about themselves, so that they do not use their practice to feed their egos, or for any of the other cunning ruses that Trungpa calls “spiritual materialism.”
But what are we left with if everything is deflated? Recently when asked what I thought union meant, I replied, almost by reflex, “the liberation of all sentient beings.” Fine. But how is that going to happen? After all the traumatic attempts to enforce unity—political and religious—that constitute world history, many people rightly distrust pitches for union. Could there be a union, though, that doesn’t inflate the value of an idea or a belief and then force people to conform to it? If all ideological forms were rigorously deflated, if we could truly bear the deflation of all of the props that we need to establish our own identities and roles, what kind of fantastic union beyond all concepts opens up? It would require enormous amounts of trust, of self-confidence, of generosity, to let go of things in that way … to believe that we can be, and be with each other, humans and non-humans, without inflating any part of it.
I have been reading the great French philosopher, mystic and political activist Simone Weil recently. In the years before World War II, in a Europe torn apart by the rise of fascism, workers’ struggles for rights and the surrealist revolt against all authority, Weil wrote of something she called “decreation.” Although Weil was mostly ignored in her lifetime, her writing has the power today to help us think outside of all the predictable words and categories that seem to define our situation—including “deflation.” She defines decreation as follows: “Decreation: To make something created pass into the uncreated.” And she contrasts decreation with destruction, which she defines as: “To make something created pass into nothingness. A blameworthy substitute for decreation.”
What is the difference between the “uncreated” and “nothingness”? The uncreated is that which exists whether we want it to or not, beyond our ideas, plans and egos; it is not created by us, yet the fact that we can create anything at all is entirely reliant on it. Nothingness, on the other hand, is an idea, a forced absence or closure, a word we use to try to control the way things, including ourselves, come and go in the realm of the created and uncreated. It is the illusion of an end, and an end that we think we can control through naming. For Weil, decreation is not just an idea; it is a spiritual practice. At the end of the essay she says:
To uproot oneself socially and vegetatively.
To exile oneself from every earthly country.
To do all that to others, from the outside is a substitute
for decreation. It results in unreality.
But by uprooting oneself one seeks greater reality.
Uproot the illusion, live in the “poverty,” to use one of Weil’s favourite words, of the absence of a grasping self. Yet, evidently there also exists a risk of confusing decreation and destruction, and of succumbing to the fascination of nothingness. It is even possible that Weil herself, who is said to have starved to death during the Second World War, in solidarity with the sufferings of the occupied French people, may have mistaken nothingness for that which exists free of all concepts, uncreated.
But then Weil makes the remarkable statement: “We have to die in order to liberate a tied up energy, in order to possess an energy which is free and capable of understanding the true relationship of things.” That is the statement of a yogi, and calls up many of the great yogic traditions, from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which begin with the line, “yoga is the cessation of mental fluctuations,” to the Tibetan Buddhist practices of Chöd or tonglen—where the giving up of the self is practised to deflate the ego and open up compassion, to the mystical Christianity of Teresa of Avila.
Although Weil is thought of as a Christian, in the late 1930s she began studying Sanskrit, the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita. Perhaps her understanding of the yoga of decreation was just beginning, and she was unable to separate the austerities of the yogi, which aim at liberation, from the martyrdom and sacrifice of the Christian saints, in which the gesture of death has an unequaled value. Perhaps I have simply not understood Simone Weil yet. As poet Anne Carson says in her essay on Weil and decreation, “Saintliness is an eruption of the absolute into ordinary history and we resent that.”
For so committed an activist as Weil, decreation was not only a matter of personal salvation. It was aimed at a liberation that must be at once individual and collective, social and political. Decreation, the deflating of the self of all that is illusory or false, leads to union with God. But it also makes possible the union of divided individuals with other individuals, with nature and with the cosmos. It is a gesture of generosity, of “absolute daring” in Carson’s words, of love, of assent.
Perhaps today we can undergo a time of deflation in a discerning way. And perhaps the yoga of decreation will open up to us, in our own ways, from within whatever tradition we find ourselves, as a path to a union still unimaginable, waiting for us to receive it through our individual and collective struggles out of the impossible. In the words of the I Ching hexagram of huan, for dispersion or dissolution:
Dispersion. Success.
The king approaches his temple.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Perseverance furthers.
