The world is illusory;
Brahman only is real;
Brahman is the world.
-Ramana Maharshi
Call me a perennial philosopher.
Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – I found myself on a mighty ocean voyage, much like Ishmael. Well, it wasn’t all that mighty, but it was the ocean. Well, it wasn’t exactly the ocean: it was the Puget Sound. Like the hero Ishmael, though hero I’m not, I was tired of life on the mainland. As the Fates would have it, my wife informed me that we needed to take the ferry to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands. I neglected to ask her why at the time, perhaps just because it was such a relief to get away from irksome people and wearisome things at home. Do I need to mention that an orca is a whale?
A few weeks before we sailed, my brother emailed me to say he was trying to read Moby-Dick, but was shipwrecked on The Lee Shore, so to speak. What was all this stuff about Bulkington’s apotheosis in Chapter 23, he wanted to know? Hell if I knew. I emailed back and asked, “What in the world is the matter with you? Why would you want to do something so goofy as to read Moby-Dick?” He claimed that when I was in college (never mind how long ago, precisely) I told him he should read Moby-Dick if he wanted to be an educated and civilized adult. Oops.
I hadn’t read Moby-Dick in ages, and I’m pretty sure I never even read as far as the chapter that chapped my quite chapfallen brother. I told him that I didn’t have the faintest idea what The Lee Shore was all about, much less Moby-Dick entire, and apologized for sacrificing his peace of mind for my own mean-spirited amusement. This is what older brothers do. They abuse their siblings. Still, I mused, I must have seen something in that sea beast of a book. So with mixed feelings of guilt and curiosity, I tracked down a copy and was reading it when we left for the islands.
Before sailing, I did a little light research trying to figure it out. I checked a few reviews and articles. They were interesting and, in their way, helpful. Still, something seemed to go missing in people’s response to the book. Many seemed full of awe and reverence, but it was never quite clear what it was they held in awe.
In the years prior to these events, I had been on something of a quest of the kind that is not uncommon in one’s middle years, and was re-reading The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. The perennial philosophy is a curious way of looking at things. It is radically skeptical. It questions all assumptions. I mean all assumptions. As a result, it concludes that there is no such a thing as philosophy. Without philosophy, how can there be any philosophizing, or even a philosopher? There can’t be. Nor can there be any place for a philosopher, did one exist, to philosophize on philosophy. Nor can there be any such thing as time out of which years can be carved in order for anything to be “perennial.” There is only the Void.
For additional clarity or confusion, here is a paraphrase of Ramana Maharshi’s expression of the perennial philosophy:
The universe is illusory;
The Void only is real;
The Void is the universe.
And here is a famous attempt to clarify the perennial philosophy in the Chandogya Upanishad:
Svetaketu’s father said to him, “Svetaketu, my dear child, you who are so full of your learning and so censorious, have you asked for that knowledge by which we hear the unhearable, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived and know what cannot be known ?”
“What is that knowledge, sir?” asked Svetaketu.
His father replied, “As by knowing one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, the difference being only in name, but the truth being that all is clay—so, my child, is that knowledge, knowing which we know all.”
“But surely these venerable teachers of mine are ignorant of this knowledge; for if they possessed it they would have imparted it to me. Do you, sir, therefore give me that knowledge.”
“So be it,” said the father…. And he said, “Bring me a fruit of the nyagrodha tree.”[1]
“Here is one, sir.”
“Break it.”
“It is broken, sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“Some seeds, sir, exceedingly small.”
“Break one of these.”
“It is broken, sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“Nothing at all.”
The father said, “My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there—in that very essence stands the being of the huge nyagrodha tree. In that which is the subtle essence all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.”
If you can get comfortable with that “nothing at all,” you’ll be OK, because that’s where you come from, that’s where you’re going, and that’s where you are, according to this philosophy-of-no-philosophy.
I stowed my copy of The Perennial Philosophy in my whaling bag in order to read it side-by-side with Moby-Dick, and headed for the ferry. Though a little distracted, I remembered my wife and went back to pick her up in time to catch the next sailing. While sitting at one of the tables on the Orcas ferry with a cup of coffee, I read alternately from the two books. It was quite pleasant. At some point – I remember this most clearly – a very strange sensation came over me. It suddenly struck me that Moby-Dick was a version of the perennial philosophy. It had to be. How else to explain such an odd book? With the perennial philosophy, everything about Moby-Dick made sense. Without it, almost nothing did.
At first I was dumbfounded. All this time I thought Moby-Dick was an adventure book about whaling, with a mad captain at the helm and a ton of random literary and philosophical allusions. But if it was really a version of the perennial philosophy, then it wasn’t about whaling at all. In fact, it was less about whaling than just about any other book I’ve ever read. It was about Truth, which is to say it was about “nothing at all!”
I realized I ought not to be too sheepish about my puny ferry ride in comparison with Ishmael’s near circumnavigation of the globe: Ishmael didn’t really go on a voyage. He didn’t really go anywhere! Where would he go? At most he went inside, only to find out there was no inside nor outside.
I jumped up and walked around the outer deck staring at the gulls and waves, not really seeing a thing. I tried to settle down enough to return to my reading, but I was too thunderstruck. Unable to concentrate, I finally gave up and just stood in the stern of the ferry, watching the wake recede.
Once settled in on the island I was able to resume my reading, alternating between the two books as before but now with a fixed idea. Every line I read, even every word, confirmed my first suspicion. Moby-Dick was a tour de force version of the perennial philosophy. Somehow, Melville didn’t lose sight of his object for a single word.
Ahab’s apophatic definition of the perennial philosophy is “Truth hath no confines.” Please leave aside the politically incorrect temptation to read this line with a lisp, which Melville’s keen ear no doubt noticed and which he may have used to emphasize the notion that Truth, while true, is not serious. What does Ahab mean? Perhaps it will help to put Ahab’s “Truth” in Ramana Maharshi’s formulation:
The universe is illusory;
Truth only is real;
Truth is the universe.
The perennial philosophy is a philosophy that contains the seeds of its own destruction: no space, no time, and no perennial philosophy! It eats itself, along witht the rest of an illusory universe, like the sharks in Moby-Dick:
They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.
What happens when a shark eats its entrails, or the perennial philosophy destroys itself? Here’s Yeats’ translation from the Katha Upanishad, which might help:
This is perfect. That is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect. Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect. May peace, and peace, and peace be everywhere.
What is this perfection? It’s the void; it’s Ahab’s “Truth;” and “thou art that.”
What are we afraid of? Truth. The Void. The Abyss. No-Mind. No-Self. In the East, it’s called sunyata, emptiness. What are we attracted to? Sunyata. As Ishmael says:
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
What does Narcissus see in the fountain, and why is he attracted to it? It’s the Abyss, both compelling and terrifying. The thing that most appalls is also the only thing that ultimately satisfies our deepest longing. It’s not Narcissus looking into a fountain, since there is no Narcissus and no fountain. It is the Abyss looking into itself. There is no Nietzsche.
We explored Orcas Island, including the town of Eastsound. My wife and I are a bit odd, or at least she is, and wherever we go we usually check out the local library. We wandered into the Eastsound branch of the San Juan County library system and I headed for my usual section, the 291’s, comparative religion. There, I found a book titled Spiritual Enlightenment, the Damnedest Thing, by Jed McKenna. It was the damnedest thing. I read 2 or 3 pages and had the same thunderstruck experience I had on the ferry. Here was someone who wrote perfectly, one line after another, a version of the perennial philosophy. What the heck was going on?
It gets weirder. When we returned to the mainland, I obtained a copy of Damnedest along with two subsequent books in what turned out to be a trilogy written by McKenna. In the second book of the three, almost as an afterthought, he explained the true meaning of Moby-Dick. Why was he able to do what so many have not? It’s because he came from a very strange direction, and that direction was the perennial philosophy.
I eventually found out why we went to Orcas Island – or at least I found out the ostensible reason. My wife was scouting it out as a possible site for her mother’s 90th birthday celebration. The gathering happened the following summer, and was largely successful. The only mild difficulty happened when my mother-in-law found out I was reading Moby-Dick. She insisted we all take turns reading Father Mapple’s sermon out loud. This didn’t go over well and I ended up in the doghouse. The rest of my in-laws eventually went on a whale-watching tour while I stayed home and read my books. They didn’t see any whales.
So, to sum up: we went to an island named after whales, I was reading a book about whales, I found a book in the island library written by an author who wrote a book about the book about whales that I was reading, we read a chapter from the book about whales, my in-laws went to look for whales, and I landed on the persona-non-grata list. Perfect! But don’t you think the universe was telling me something? “Surely, this is full of meaning, taken in context.” Like, don’t irritate your in-laws?
As a bonus: the perennial philosophy is about things that don’t exist, and Jed McKenna doesn’t exist. Jed McKenna is a nom-de-clavier. How about that? He is a perfect example of how something that doesn’t exist can get under your ever-lovin’, non-existent skin, and drive you mad. He beat me to the press! No matter. I love his books, whoever he is. Additional bonus: the Dewey Decimal category 291, comparative religions, no longer exists either. Might want to check your surroundings to see if you’re still there, the way things are disappearing.
Earlier I wrote that the reason for our island adventure was to scout out a place for a family celebration, but that is not the whole truth. The real reason for our trip was so that I could write this essay. Surely this too is “full of meaning taken in context.” I’m just starting to see that.
Note
[1] From Wikipedia: “Ficus benghalensis produces propagating roots which grow downwards as aerial roots. This tree is considered sacred in India, and often shelters a little or larger temple underneath, but is offered worship on its own generally too. Even apart from the worship, it is one of the most sheltering trees in the heat of the land, with a large and deep shade, and is thus extremely useful for travelers of the old sort – on foot, bicycles or oxcarts, or horse riders – travelling for hours or days; traditionally it was found almost ubiquitously on roads and in village centers, the latter very useful for any formal or informal gathering to be conducted in a cool place or even for any poor person or a traveler to sleep under. The respect for this and other trees of this nature is thus linked both to the use and the worship as sacred. Also known as Indian Banyan, Ficus bengalensis is also the National tree of India.” (“Nyagrodha” is the Sanskrit name.)
In Mardi, Babbalanja retells the ancient story of the nine blind men and the banyan tree who argue about which of the many trunks is the true one. As the many roots and branches of the huge banyan tree confuse the blind men, so do the many “aerial roots” in Moby-Dick confuse and distract the reader, obscuring Ahab’s “Truth” that there really are no trunks. I love that: “aerial roots.” Don’t you?