From Solipsism to Buddhism:
The Spiritual Psychology of a Loser

By Zach Tabor

“This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.”  ~ G.K. Chesterton[i]

Introduction

The first order of this essay is to rescue my apparently autobiographical, self-loathing title from misinterpretation.  To do so, I must define the special senses in which I intend to use three important words.  First of all, by “loser” it is not meant a single loser, and not even the single loser who wrote this paper.  Rather, it means any loser, or the quintessential loser, or, even more importantly, a specific type of contemplative quintessential loser who, in his early years, enjoys contemplating the stupidity of the masses more than participating in their stupid games.  The word “loser” is a loaded term—but it would be best if the reader dropped that load as best he can, because the word is not here meant as any kind of derogatory term, nor is it meant to imply a standard of value.  “Loser” is chosen merely as a categorical term, one that fits best the type of person I hope to exemplify, but not one that proclaims that this type of person is better or worse than any other.  A demonstration of the loser’s categorical placement should help clarify what I mean.  As anyone who has ever attended school understands, in all the pre-college years there is a competitive, cutthroat setting in which you are either “in” or “out”.  It is clearly a race:  there are winners and there are losers.  This is all that is meant by the term “loser”; it is not to say that the term is (or isn’t) an adequate description of a person’s character or value.    

But there is an even more important term to define, and the reason it is so important is that it too will be used in an unconventional way, and this unconventional usage shall be perhaps the largest pillar of the thesis—this word is, of course, solipsism.[ii]  By “solipsism,” I do not mean the metaphysical conviction that an individual’s self is all that exists (even though that is what it means).  By solipsism, I hope to give a sense of the psychological ramifications of this metaphysical[iii] assumption, that is, solipsism as how a solipsist feels about his world.  This psychological relation to the world is, of course, a result of metaphysical solipsism traditionally defined.  However, the great majority of people do not work from metaphysical foundations to psychological convictions.  Instead, they work with merely psychological convictions, rarely thinking of the metaphysical foundations for them.  This psychological conviction is what I mean when I use the term solipsism—that is, that the loser feels that he is the only thing that exists, because his sense of existential[iv] importance is centered on him and his immediate consciousness, by default.  It will be explained more clearly (I hope) later in the paper why the loser feels solipsistic, and why it is by default.  But I am forced to at least hint at it by explaining the third important word in the title.

In explaining even the growth of a child into a loser (instead of a “winner”) it is of great importance to give a sense of why I chose the term “spiritual psychology”, rather than merely “psychology”.  It will be the true crux and purpose of this essay to explain that the belief or disbelief in God is of great importance in determining the fate of an adolescent—the sequence of ideas, and the sequence of chapters in this archetypal person’s story, will be a sequence of cause and effect, stemming from agnosticism at its base.  That is, an agnostic[v] child, much more easily than a theist[vi] child, develops smoothly into a loser, who develops smoothly into a solipsist, who develops smoothly into a Buddhist.  It is not meant to imply that all agnostics become losers, or that all losers become solipsists, or that all solipsists become Buddhists, but that there is a very reasonable and human train of thought that easily occurs in this type of person, and which has occurred to me.  I’ve said that I am not the figure to be discussed, and this is true, but I do in fact fit into this category of people.  That will hopefully give a bit of credence to the otherwise fantastic claims to the psychological understanding of a rather large group of people.  With that said, my tone will now change as we drift into the story mode of diction.  This will primarily be a story, though a philosophical story, starting from childhood and leading into early adulthood; but it may also be seen as a story of my personal conversion, and as a testimony to the Spirit of God responsible for the inspiration to write it.

The Playground

Before we begin our story, the nature of this paper requires that we divide children into two types.  The first type is the child who believes in God, and the other is the child who does not.  Now early on, the belief in God, or its absence, is usually in the background, subtly affecting behavior here and there, but rarely making an entrance.  However, once middle school comes around, the child begins to be truly affected by his metaphysical assumptions, and this is precisely when we see children not only forming in-groups and out-groups, but forming them permanently.  The race can almost be said to be over at that point, though it may be over much later or even earlier, depending on the atmosphere of the specific school.

In order to understand the story of the agnostic child, we must very briefly sketch the worldview of the theist child, and note that there is one extremely important difference between the two.  We have noted that somewhere in middle school, children start really forming their ideas of who is a loser, and who is a winner.  There is logic behind this, even if there is little reason.  It is commonly said that the children who are good at sports are more popular, and, while this is true, I think it is more true that the children who enjoy sports are more popular.  But sports are only one example of this difference.  The children who enjoy taking part in the smaller games within social groups, the little make-believes of curious imaginations, are always more popular than the children who shun them.  And these little games, and the bigger games, are always based on the assumption that the smaller details of life are important.  It is not, however, as though the child has pondered the nature of the universe and come to this conclusion; it is instead a natural instinct, and one that practically all children follow blindly until around middle school.  It is then that a few children begin to think, “Why is it so important that I get a touchdown in Ultimate Frisbee?  Why do I really care if Michael bet me that he could do more pull-ups than me in gym?  What difference could it possibly make whether or not Johnny likes April, and whether or not he got cooties from her?”  Not all the little games and dramas of children are so innocent, but the important thing is the conclusion such a contemplative child will form from these questions, based on metaphysics.  If the child is under the assumption that a personal God has created the universe, and that this God has a heart very close to the human heart, then it is quite natural for the child to assume that He smiles upon the treasuring of special moments, or silly games, or plain old fun.  The mystical, seemingly pointless joy of playing your buddies in basketball seems quite natural in a benevolent universe, since there is a mysterious blanket around existence, keeping it warm, and since the weight of the universe is held by its loving parent, resting effortlessly in His arms.  The theist child will rarely see these little games and trivialities as pointless, unless he becomes bitter by always losing.  But bitterness is a poison much more easily cured, especially if there is One who can cure anything.

However, this growing awareness of the reasons why people do things, or the lack of them, has a profoundly different effect on the agnostic child.  Once he becomes aware that there are reasons people do things, he will look at the games of children and see a striking lack of reasons to do them.  He will feel distant from them, if it be above them, or below them, or just off to the side.  He will begin sitting out during games, ignoring his gossipy friends, and losing all interest in innocent challenges of pull-up ability.  Here we begin to see the development of the loser, thus defined:  He will be more likely to be found sulking, or staring into space, or doing anything that doesn’t require much effort or interaction with others, because he has begun to realize that the weight of the universe is sinking down onto his shoulders.

This weight is increased by an even more poisonous effect of agnosticism on the adolescent life; this “poison” concerns the rest of the world, inasmuch as he can ascertain what the rest of the world is, and it will scar his sense of what people are for the rest of his life.  If the games of children are pointless, and most children play them anyway, then there must be something wrong with most children.  They must be stupid, or, what is worse but inevitable, they must be brainwashed.  The contemplative agnostic child, at this point, can’t imagine that some people have never thought about why they play basketball, or that some people have but do not have such trouble with it.  It is much more natural for him to assume that they have, but that, for some reason, they don’t admit the real truth:  that there is no reason to do it at all.  Here, though it may develop for other reasons as well, is the seed of the anti-conformist, the child who hates the popular kids, the child who likes to burn things, and who imagines that he’s burning football players or schools.  Much could be said about this type of person, but it might be best to produce only one gross overgeneralization per essay.

It is here that we break off from comparing the agnostic and the theist child and continue on with the development of the former.  It is important to keep in mind, however, that we have only considered the curious, intelligent child, the one who begins to look at games as something more than games.  We have not considered the type of person who does little to question the foundations of things, that is, the person who is much more interested in following instinctual feelings.  It is maintained that this momentary awareness within intelligent children will result in little more than idle curiosity for the theist child.  But for the agnostic child, the world and its inhabitants will grow piercingly dark and sinister from this logical step in thinking.  The “mass of morons” will begin to look like an enslaved race, a race of people who are too scared, or too stupid, or too stubborn to break free of their brittle chains.  The world may even look like a prison, with prisoners occupying themselves with all manner of self-delusion and superficiality, in order to avoid the underlying reality of their meaningless world.

The Only Thing That Matters

Now we come to a much more ambiguous stage in our hero’s life, one that will require a subtle and strange explanation.  We must use great imagination, and put ourselves in his shoes, in order to really understand what his realization results in.  He has taken one step towards understanding the world, and the world has taken a step towards hell.  He had no reservations, no value judgments, no overriding emotions about the world, until he came upon his meditations on monotony.  His first intellectual development resulted in a discovery of desperate self-imprisonment, and this has deeply colored his primary perceptions of the world in which he lives.  It wasn’t that he discovered something dark about the world; it was that he discovered that the world itself is hopelessly dark.

We’ve already seen that our hero now perceives the details of life as pointless prison-games meant to sustain a schizophrenic self-delusion.  But with his soot-colored glasses, he will now continue his intellectual development and peer into what other horrors this prison possesses.  There is, of course, no God outside of him, and the incessant chanting of such a creed seems nothing more than a comforting bromide.  But there is another, more expansive conclusion he must draw from his initial discovery:  He must deduce that, if all the games and hobbies and persuasions of children are pointless, then the adult equivalents must be also, for an adult is merely a deluded child who has more successfully killed his curious spirit.  In fact, all the dreams, all the beliefs, all the quests and conquests, all the particular soul-searches of the myriad creatures of creation—all of these must be pointless, because they are particular.  If the common man could only see that the house he spent half his life building would crumble under the feet of towering highway overpass posts in another fifty years, he would realize that everything particular fades away, and thus, that everything particular is pointless.  This is, I believe, the first hint of Buddhist instinct[vii] in the agnostic loser, but it isn’t nearly as powerful as his first solipsistic instinct.

To give a good sense of why solipsism develops from this worldview, it must be assumed that there begins to develop in every growing human being an indefinable, unexplainable feeling of existential importance, and that this importance naturally centers around what it most easily finds, like water falling through the easiest pathways.  This is the gut feeling that life means something (whatever that means) and the inevitable sister feeling that one must do something about it.  To see its results, one only need observe the skyline of New York City, or the thousands of students cluttered in college campuses.  It makes men paint, and sing, and write, and read—all these interests and dreams are the result of this sense of making something of human life, like making something of paint and canvas.  And they are all particular because different aspects of life are imbued with this sense of importance in different people.  Some believe that it is profoundly important that we sustain and defend our democratic union with prudence and dedication; others would much rather write a poem than even subscribe to the newspaper.  But this elucidation is not meant as a theory about the depths of human nature.  It is meant merely as an expedient cornerstone of our understanding of how our loser develops into a solipsist.  He develops into a solipsist, as was said before, by default, because there is really nothing in the world that has any importance at all, or at least nothing worthy of his existential attention.  The sense of importance, finding no home in the world, pours itself into the only thing that feels as though it isn’t fake—the very sense of being alive.  Though this is almost mystical, it has not yet reached that level; it is merely a seed for it. 

A good example of how this sense of existential solipsism applies itself is the profound paranoia such a person feels about the superficiality of normal people.  We’ve all met people who complain that everyone is fake, that people are just drones, or that no one knows anything about himself.  This paranoia filled the dynamic era of cultural revolt starting with the Beats of the early century and culminating in the hippies of the 60’s.  It is the hatred of normality that I speak of here—the partly justified, mostly unjustified claim to omnipotent knowledge concerning the self-honesty of the masses (that they are not self-honest).  And from this exaggerated paranoia about self-honesty comes an exaggerated interest in being self-honest.  Not only does this type of person think that people are lying to themselves, he is also extremely afraid that he might lie to himself.  Therefore, he undertakes every effort to avoid these subtle poisons, and doubts every assumption he can possibly think of.  But the paranoia lingers, because the existential spirit has settled on his solipsistic self-awareness alone, and he will spend his life attempting to produce the most deep and genuine self-awareness that he possibly can. 

It is important to make a distinction here, too.  One might think that if this kid believes his self to be the only thing that exists, then he should perhaps spend his life bettering himself.  There is a good reason why I, at this stage, chose not to take that route, and why I write the story of this kid so that he doesn’t either:  It is because what is usually meant by “bettering oneself” is actually the gaining of compliments or recognition from others, which cannot matter to the solipsistic loser, whose first defining moment spawned the observation that gaining recognition from others is a part of those purposeless games, as well as a common quality of their players.  The only thing left that could possibly matter seems to be an interest in attaining a superior state of mind, or a more truthful, self-honest state of mind, or a transcendent state of mind. 

It is this conclusion that leads him into psychological or existential solipsism.  With a distrust of pointless games, a distrust of the genuineness of people, and no belief in an external God, one quite inevitably falls upon a solipsistic state of mind, as our hero has.  He now turns away from the entire outside world, and begins to contemplate the importance of consciousness itself.  He is attacking his problem at the root—the very root of his own awareness.

The Hope Beyond Hope

Now we have traced the opinion our hero has of normal people, and of what they do in general, but we’ve said nothing of how he might feel specifically about hope.  Hope is probably the single most important emotion in the pursuit of meaning and truth, because it spurs the search onward with conviction, fills in the gaps where it seems to be fruitless, and gives the seeker a sense that the search is headed in the right direction instead of the wrong one.  But the attitude our embittered agnostic solipsist will probably have towards hope is not a very hopeful one, because not only is the enemy (the normal person) hopeful, but also our hero’s initial perception of the world was not one in which people should have hope.  It is a perception in which hope can only hinder us with dead dreams.  At this point, it may be said that our hero has lost all hope—that is, all hope in the world.

Nevertheless, a different sort of hope lies at the foundation of his bitter and cynical philosophy.  It may seem like a shunning of the world, but what lies at its foundation is not a shun—it is a hope that there is something better than what he shuns.  We’ve already said that the seed of the soul (the existential importance) has been placed within his immediate self-awareness, but it may be quite unclear as to what the phrase “immediate self-awareness” means, and why I chose to use it.  It is not meant to suggest that he thinks of the fact that he is alive as the most important thing in the world—this, in fact, would be the sweet, sublime poetry of a much healthier person.  Rather, he probably thinks of his very being as a mystery and a riddle, but the only riddle which has an answer.  He perceives his existence as a basic, simple assumption on the outside, but with incalculable mysteries “within.”  This is when he truly starts to become mystical, though he has not become particularly Buddhist yet. 

I must digress for a moment and note that the most trite and common habit among pantheistic[viii] mystics is the loaded usage of the word “within.”  It is really felt (and rightly so in our hero’s shoes at least) that the secret of life lies within the depths of consciousness, that there is a door lying beneath layers and layers of curtains, and that, if we try hard enough, someday we will open it, and the world will reveal itself to us with light and truth, giving color to the grasses and joy to the eyes.  This hope for a transcendental truth seems an inevitable result of the train of thought going strong thus far, combined with the growth of the search for meaning.  It is the shifting to a higher gear, the point at which solipsistic soul-seekers find their first hint of what they believe to be the secret of the universe.

It should be relatively easy to imagine what such a person might feel if he were to be confronted with a scene of meditating Buddhists—calm, introspective, dedicated to the disillusioning of their illusions, and completely indifferent to the particular concerns of man, they would be a ray of hope for the grim child, but it would be no ordinary ray of hope.  The hope offered to the solipsistic loser by Buddhist mysticism is not the hope that his development from loser-ism to solipsism was in vain.  It is not the hope that there is meaning or design to the world, or that his old gut instincts about enjoying particulars really had a foundation, or that there is something out there that will one day make everything okay.  It would be exactly what he is looking for—the hope that the world is meaningless, that it is an illusion, and that it is even a prison of self-deluded prisoners.  His hatred of the world would be vindicated, and his cynicism about people’s self-dishonesty would take on a spiritual significance when seen from Buddhist eyes, because Buddhism proclaims that all men are deluded about the meaning of the world. 

Thus, our hero sees a dark, morbid world of death and decay, and he reads the First Noble Truth.[ix]  He suspects that most people don’t think that the world is deadly and decaying, and he reads the Second.[x]  He may even feel that he is especially suited for the Buddhist path, since he has already realized the first two truths of its most important doctrine.  The Third Noble Truth is that you may end existential suffering by ending attachment to the world of suffering, and this will give him a powerful sense that there really is some truth to what he has been feeling.  The Fourth and final Truth is that Buddhism, especially Buddhist meditation, is the proper way to end attachment to the world of suffering.  Buddhist meditation, which aims at bringing about a spiritual “awakening” from the world, will embody the young solipsist’s desires more than he had ever imagined.  It will grab hold of his subtle sense that there is some secret in his consciousness and lift it to a throne in the sky.  It will sit on common ground with his most important conviction—the one piece of life in which his soul resides—and it will embrace this piece, shouting for joy that the soul chose such a forthright and wise inhabitant. 

The hope offered by Buddhism is not that something in the world will save you, or that everything will be okay, but that everything is by its very nature not okay, and that it is only by realizing this and searching inward for something almost unreal that you may find peace.  Not only is this hope coincident with our hero’s most deeply felt convictions, it is also mystical, sprouting into the mysterious depths of unfathomability.  It stirs the deepest longings in his soul, and points at the world with narrowing eyes and hateful disdain as it encourages these longings to search elsewhere.  Beyond the meager and monotonous concerns of the masses lies a new world, a new reality, a new way of perception,[xi] and it is truly new because it denies all that could ever become old.  It cannot hope that someone or something will save you—in fact, a Buddhist might hope that things will let you down.  Instead, it is a hope truly different from normal hope, in the sense that it hopes for something entirely unknowable and unknown, and it does not hope for the vindication of anything known.  It is a sincere disgust with the very nature of reality.  For the man who hates the world, and everything in it, this is the greatest hope that can be offered—the hope beyond even hope itself.

The Leap Beyond Leaps

Now we come to the most curious and pivotal point in this cosmic vindication of manic depression, for once the solipsist truly becomes a Buddhist, he can no longer be a solipsist, because he cannot exist.  There is a paradox within Buddhist doctrine that takes on the character of an existential black hole, and at the same time manages to proclaim that any resistance to this difficult doctrine is the result of resistance to the truth.  If anyone claims that Buddhism avoids the ad hoc[xii] nature of “sophomoric” religious arguments, he has not considered the Buddhist doctrine of the annihilation of self.  It may be true that in all other respects, Buddhism is as calm as a cow and as magnanimous as a martyr, but in the conviction that the self is the source of suffering, it is truly dogmatic in the most negative, absurd sense.  It is obvious that Buddhism proclaims the attachment to particulars to be a source of suffering.  What might not be so obvious, especially to those who have not looked seriously into Zen[xiii] Buddhism, is that it also proclaims that one of these particulars is the individual self.  But Zen Buddhists, by being the most absurd and mystical, are at the same time the most logical of the Buddhists, because they are the first to carry this train of thought to its logical conclusion.  For the self is always getting into trouble:  It wants all sorts of things, it’s never satisfied, and it’s always particular—all the qualities that a Buddhist detests.  If it be assumed that what mankind needs is a way to place its own particular life within a larger, comforting context, then the Buddhists have attained this in the most curious and direct way—by actually becoming that context.  Not only is the oversoul of Buddhism the savior of humanity, it is also the only real humanity—the truth at the bottom of things.  And what is at the top of things?  The illusion of individuality. 

Now the reaction of our hero will take a turn here towards Buddhism, but away from my own reaction, for since I am still writing, I must still be a self.  I do not know what would happen to our hero if he decided to continue on his Buddhist quest, for I did not continue on mine.  But I can at least draw a good sketch of why he might have continued.  The doctrine of self-destruction, for the solipsist considering Buddhism, rings true in some ways, and in others does not.  It rings true in the sense that selfhood is the ultimate self-lie.  It is the greatest of deceptions, to be able to convince yourself that you do in fact exist.  It reveals the very nature of reality to be a sham, and thus breeds a hope that the new reality will be greater, even in its primary assumptions.  It also satisfies the need for a metaphysical context, or a way of explaining why things are going to turn out okay, because, according to the Buddhist, things were always okay.  It was selves who thought otherwise.  In fact, the reason we think of “okay-ness” and “not-okay-ness” is because we are in the dualistic world of individuality.[xiv]  The human desire for meaning, for the Buddhist, is the result of his very existence as an individual self, or, rather, his illusion of such. It is truly a practice of cutting the problem off at its root.  It is the ultimate sense of coming home, because to the Buddhist not only are you away from home, you don’t even have a conception of home.  Therefore, home must be even greater than you can conceive.  There is much you could do with this idea, but it all comes quite literally to nothing.

The ways in which self-destruction does not ring true, the reasons that this nonexistent seeker might think twice about taking a leap off of a nonexistent cliff, are all based on the convictions of the individual self.  If the self is what needs meaning, then getting rid of the self is no more a solution to the problem than getting rid of the stomach is the solution to hunger.  This would seem to be the logical conclusion, but this is the conviction of the little self, and the little self is deluded.  To believe this cosmic ad hoc argument may accurately be called madness, but the flippant, or even the honest Buddhist might turn around and say that it is madness to believe what the small self says.  The train of hope is going strong, and if it isn’t stopped, it will hurl itself into this tear in existence, and will cross over to the other side.

It should be greatly emphasized that this is not the whole of Buddhist doctrine, nor is it even contained in the Four Noble Truths—at least not explicitly, though it is contained by extension.  It is strongly present in the Zen school, as well as in the Theravada[xv]—many others may omit it entirely, or emphasize it weakly.  I am convinced that in the schools in which it is absent, the courage to take Buddhism to its logical conclusion is also absent.  But we may assume for the conclusion of this essay that our hero has this courage, and that he has become convinced.  He truly believes that he is something that he is not, and, like the Oriental serpent, he is willing to eat his own tail into paradoxical paradise, leaving behind all the rubbish of the separation of subject and object, the separation of self and other, and the separation of soul from meaning.  He is ready for ultimate unity.

The Unity of the Cosmos

Very little can be said of our hero once he has taken this leap, because he is, generously considered, the whole universe, and, critically considered, dead.  But there are a few things one may say about the state he might be in, and his relationship to the universe.  It is here that the tone of this essay will change decidedly from objective to personal, from an informative sketch of what could happen to a description about what has happened—and about what else could happen.

There is a certain solipsistic quality about Buddhism which has been my primary motivation to write this essay.  It seems that the step from solipsism to Buddhism was really merely the reduction of one detail—the self.  It really seems to me as though the Buddhist instinct is indeed the solipsistic instinct—the instinct that nothing in the world really matters, and the instinct of detesting the fantasies of people who think otherwise.  Buddhism is solipsism minus the self.  Solipsism taken seriously must concede that the world of sense experience exists, in one way or another; it must imagine that it is a dream, or an illusion, or something of minimal importance.  But if the self is all that exists, then the sense world, however delusionary, must be a part of it.  That is, this whole universe of vast spacious expanse must indeed be a part of my mind.  Other people must be a part of my mind.  It begins to look like the dream theory.  Yet the waking world, if it can even be called a world, is nothing at all like this dream.  But then one must admit that to say, “everything is my mind” is a bit absurd, if not arrogant.  For to assume that everything is my mind is to assume that my mind has spiritual significance (it’s got “the goods”) whereas no one else’s does.  The only evidence one could possibly have for the conviction that the world is equivalent to his own mind, rather than Mary’s, or Michael’s, would be the sense that if I’m the one thinking, then I must be the important one.  This can only be seen as arrogant and childish, and is in fact given the name “egocentricism” by psychologists who promote the notion that people normally grow out of it somewhere before early adulthood.  But the Buddhist achieves the exact opposite of arrogance.  About the Buddhist there is an aura of humility and peace of mind, and of a sense of knowing his place in the world.  The only way to achieve this is to usurp the source of arrogance—the self.  Now I am most definitely not saying that the Buddhists deny the self in order not to appear arrogant—for there is another, far better reason to deny the self.

If the entire physical universe, with all its inhabitants, is indeed my very mind, then there is a devastating logical consequence.  The fact is that my mind, if it is the universe, is not really any specific thing, because there is nothing outside of it—that is, there is nothing to compare it to.  It is not as though the universe is My Mind, as opposed to yours or anyone else’s.  The very notion of a self is one who inhabits the cosmos—the notion of being separated from others, as well as from your surroundings.  If the universe is my mind, then my mind is everything, and to say that my mind is the universe is merely to say that the universe is the universe.  And it would indeed be much more apt to call this unity of the cosmos Everything, or the Universe, instead of My Mind—it is really much more like a universe than a mind.  Buddhism answers this riddle by saying that the whole of existence is not My Mind—but simply Mind.  Shunryu Suzuki-roshi of the Soto sect of Zen says, “The true understanding of the mind is that it includes everything; when you think that something comes from outside it means only that something appears in your mind.”[xvi]

But even this, in a certain sense, is still solipsistic—in that special sense which I have hopefully maintained in this essay.  Suzuki-roshi calls nirvana “Big Mind,”[xvii] but I’m more inclined to call it Small Universe, since it is really just the same old universe, minus the spiritual significance and individual minds of everyone else—indeed, minus everything but me.  Now the Buddhists would not say that nirvana is the world minus everything but me, or the world minus everything but my mind, but they would say that it is the world minus everything but Mind. 

The Light of the World

To conclude, we might briefly consider that rival philosophy that was in combat with solipsism for the fate of our hero at the very outset—I mean, of course, theism.  It is no secret that the true purpose of this paper is not merely to tell the story of an agnostic child, but to imply that this particular type of agnostic child has stumbled upon a universal philosophical truth.  When considered as an alternative to Big Mind, or Small Universe, we might think of theism as Small Mind, Big Universe, for in a theistic universe the individual mind clearly inhabits a universe of myriad minds.  But what’s more, the whole of reality is even larger than the universe, because there is a holy addition.  The God of the universe adds infinitely to the sum of space and time, expanding reality infinitely away from the solipsistic conviction.  The belief in God, while seen by many as either a mere comfort or a crutch, is actually the real crux of existence.  Without belief in a personal God, it is an inevitable series of logical steps that nothing in the world has any significance, nor does it have any reason to be there.  The disbelief in God leads logically to the mystical denial of everything that exists—even the self.  But the belief in God does the very opposite:  It affirms all that exists, and then adds to it.  We might say that atheism is an infinite subtraction process, whereas theism is an infinite addition.  It seems no accident that the final words of Siddhartha (the Buddha) before his death were, “Be a lamp unto yourself,” because a few miles west and a few years later, a Man who died and came back to life proclaimed, “I am the light of the world.”[xviii]  It is quite pointedly ironic that the cause of our hero’s denial of the significance of reality was a thirst for its very significance, and that the real reason he rejected the world in favor of the inner light was because he really wanted an outer light, but never knew it was there.

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Notes

[i] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 138.

 

[ii] Solipsism is a philosophical theory that proposes that only the self—that is, “me”, or the solipsist in question—exists, or can be proven to exist.

[iii] Metaphysics is the study of “first principles”, or the basic foundations that give rise to particular ideas.  An example of a metaphysical assumption might be, “The mind is separate from the body,” or, in this case, “I am all that truly exists.”

[iv] The word means, “pertaining to existence,” but is sometimes used to mean, “pertaining to the meaning of existence.”  A better way to convey the way the word is used here is to say that it refers to the meaning of life.

[v] A common but misunderstood term that should be cleared up just in case there is confusion.  Agnosticism does not mean atheism, or the belief that God does not exist—it means a lack of conviction on either side of the issue, that is, the lack of both belief and disbelief in God.  Two forms of agnosticism exist:  hard and soft.  The “hard” agnostic believes that it cannot be known whether or not God exists; the “soft” agnostic is merely in doubt as to which is true.  The latter is the sense I intend to use here.  The whole paper might work for an atheist child as well; personal experience is the only reason why I chose an agnostic.

[vi] One who believes in God.

[vii] Buddhism proclaims in its Four Noble Truths that the world is composed of suffering, and that the only way to eradicate this suffering is to eradicate attachment and desire in general, with no distinction between desire for good things and desire for bad things.  The Buddhist “instinct”, of particulars being unimportant, might best be exemplified by Tibetan mandalas, which are gigantic, gorgeous creations of colored sand that are painstakingly arranged to produce an intricate picture, and then swept away in a matter of less than a minute.  It takes up to several days to finish a mandala: and its destruction is meant as a symbolic and meditative practice designed to wipe away attachment to finite things.

[viii] Pantheism is the belief that the material universe and man are only manifestations of a transcendent God—that everything is, in essence, God. 

[ix] The First Noble Truth:  Life is dukkha, which means “suffering,” or an existence that can never satisfy.

[x] The Second Noble Truth:  The cause of our suffering is our desire for and attachment to the world of dukkha, sometimes referred to as a wheel of recurring birth and death, if applied to reincarnation.  This attachment is usually described as a sleep or stupor that most people are not aware of, since they’re asleep.

[xi] The belief in a mystical, transcendent reality is a very important Buddhist doctrine that deserves repetition and clarification.  To end desire and attachment is to attain “nirvana,” which is a holistically transcendental state of mind, often described as waking up from a dream, or in terms of loss of individual self and merging with the whole universe.  The notion is holistically transcendental in the sense that the new reality will be like going from living in two dimensions to living in three.

[xii] Latin: “for this”.  Ad hoc refers to that which only applies to one who already agrees, such as a principle of Nazism meant only to convince Nazis.  An ad hoc argument, in philosophy, is one in which the arguer assumes that his conclusion is true, and then attempts to prove his supporting arguments merely with that assumption alone.  An example of an ad hoc “sophomoric” religious argument would be one in which a scientist attempted to argue that Christianity is false because we have fossil records older than the supposed creation of the world; and in which the Christian responded that God merely placed the fossils there in order to test our faith.  (I am not saying that this is typical of Christian apologetics.)

[xiii] A sect of the Mahayana school that greatly stresses the importance of the practice of meditation over doctrinal study. 

[xiv] Buddhism, especially Zen, often emphasizes “non-duality.”  It is hard to explain this concept because explanation automatically assumes duality.  Perhaps a quote from Shunryu Suzuki-roshi will clarify it: “When everything exists within your big mind (nirvana), all dualistic relationships drop away.  There is no distinction between heaven and earth, man and woman, teacher and disciple” (Suzuki, 44).

[xv] Another major division of Buddhism that is typically seen as a contrast to Mahayana.  Theravada Buddhism is usually thought of as the traditional, orthodox school, which tries to adhere as strictly as possible to the original teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, the founder.  Shakyamuni was not a deity, however, and there have been other Buddhas (“Buddha” merely means “an awakened one”) which have contributed to the various sects of Mahayana Buddhism, such as Bodhidharma of the Zen sect.

[xvi] Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1999), 34-35.

[xvii] Suzuki, 35.

[xviii] John 8:12