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Too Far Outside The World
Jeremy has a really interesting item about the Buddha from earlier today:
There’s a tradition in Buddhism that the Buddha’s first sermon after his enlightenment was so profound that only his five ascetic friends could have understood it and become enlightened themselves just by that teaching. When he first appeared he was still too far out of the world, too close to the enlightened state, to proclaim great truths in ways that could be comprehended by average individuals.
In the comments over there, Ran turned this into a more modern analogy:
That bit about the Buddha is great! Kind of like how Peter Gabriel started out doing great stuff that only a few of us liked, and then his music seemed worse and worse to me while becoming accessible to ordinary people for whom it was a huge improvement over Madonna.
This is something that a lot of creative people grapple with in a big way. And I think those of us in the occult world, and the conspiracy theory crowd, and the alternative religions, and other counter-cultural stuff too confront this in important ways without often realizing it.
Those of us who venture outside the ordinary world - the mainstream view of reality - we come up with a lot of insights and observations which we then want to share with other people. In the majority of the cases, we end up expressing them to other people who are also outside the ordinary world, or who are on their way out already. Though none of us are really quite on the level of “Buddha” I would very much liken this to the part of the story where immediately after his enlightenment, he’s only able to communicate his findings to his five closest ascetic friends.
Occasionally, we’ll see movements such as described in the occult evangelization debate which seek to do more than that. They seek to take the insights garnered on the outside of the world, and bring them back to the ordinary folks on the inside. This of course raises the question of whether that’s a good thing (which we’ve already debated extensively). But I think more than that even the difficulty arises in terms of how do you go about communicating to the masses? There seem to be two main ways that I see. One is to “dumb down” or to sort of distill your message down into it’s most essential level so that it can be accepted by the lowest common denominator. People still on the outside (would-be Buddhas) tend to call this practice “selling out” but it’s not always necessarily a bad thing. (If anybody wants to try and articulte when and where it’s a good thing, I’d love to work on that as well) The approach I’ve always personally advocated I guess is more about trying to “raise people up” to the level of the message. You present what you’re doing in an accessible way, but you don’t pull any punches when it gets to the difficult material. This might mean some people don’t quite “get” all of it, but it often means that the efficacy of what you’re saying remains intact to a greater degree.
Anyway, I don’t so much have a conclusive argument about this (as usual). It’s more something that I thought was exceptionally well-illustrated with the imagery about the Buddha. And it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, since I’m working with a literary agent on putting together a book proposal. They of course have very different ideas and experience about how to reach people in a wider audience than I do. So that’s sort of the backdrop of my own understanding of this question for the time being.
- Sentient World Simulation
- Let the World Change You
- We Are All Aliens
- Third World America
- These Four People Rule The World
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July 23rd, 2005 at 5:04 am
All posts here at The Investigator about Buddhism interest me - usually because of my own interest in the ideas posited by the Buddhist system. But not today. Allow me to elaborate.
My whole life I have felt that I was born with “foreknowledge” - that is I knew things about the world before I learned them. It is one of things that led me to Buddhism. (Oddly, old Jewish and Christian texts dealt frequently with the idea of reincarnation and if they hadn’t edited them out maybe Id be in their fold now.)
Some of this knowledge was in the form of wisdom. And so, throughout my life I have tried to share some of it here and there. Which brings me to, in a long way, your other point, what approaches do you use for disseminating insights?
Before I answer let me also say this. I am heartend to find so many living people wrestling with the same question. As I became more aware of the world and the kinds of people living in it I began to wonder something quite alot, “Where are all the other people like me?” Well, this webring might be answering that question. But maybe not. Kinda of like an inverted Jeff Wells, I am cautiously optimistic.
To answer the question - of the many techniques and theories i have held on how to share insights I am currently at the stage where I believe there is no one correct way and for me personally I only tend to share insights with those who are dear to me and those that I believe are open enough to hear about them. I don’t push anything on anyone and only cast my pearls before those who seem interested. Don’t get me wrong either I NEVER try to be anyone’s guru either when I single someone out. That way leads to the darkside.
July 23rd, 2005 at 8:13 am
It’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave — that dude came back after seeing the outside and then royally pissed the hell out of the other people who were chained up when he tried to explain things to them.
July 23rd, 2005 at 12:55 pm
Gary, I’m not quite sure what you’re reacting to in that above post. You seem to be saying that you don’t like the subject matter, but maybe I’m misreading it. As evidenced by the ENORMOUS discussion we recently had on the topic of evangelism, I also don’t think trying to be somebody’s guru is a worthwhile goal. But that said, my job as a writer is to figure out how to communicate with other people. And that’s what I’m interested in. By far, the most success I’ve had in communicating with others has been to open a dialogue and allow everybody to bring in their own perspectives, and then push the conversation in new directions from there. That’s a little background from my end.
July 24th, 2005 at 4:28 am
If we want to reach people on a large scale then I think we have no choice but to dumb down the message in order that it will connect with most of the people who are hearing it. The other thing we need to do is make the message very unradical so that, again we’re not frightening off most of the listeners/viewers. It’s the reality of communicating to large groups of people - and one of the reasons politicians during election time usually have pretty meaningless things to say.
Even if we manage to get a message out to a large audience, because of it’s watered down and superficial nature it will not be able to affect them deeply and will need to be repeated constantly over and over again. Again, this is the technique of the establishment. Their message is often nonsense but they have the means to repeat it so often that people begin to think that they thought of it themselves.
The biggest problem with this approach is that the only way to get access to mass media on a consistent basis is to become part of the establishment and that would require a change in our beliefs and values. It’s been done often enough and it is known as selling out. It happens on different scales too, not just on the large scale - so that selling out can happen in a number of little steps. Changing our message is not necessarily selling out but changing ourselves or our beliefs to get access to a more powerful communication method is. Of course once we have changed ourselves we may find that the message will change anyway.
At the other end of the scale is the one on one approach and like you say, most people probably wouldn’t be in the right headspace to latch on to what we have to say. In this case though, changing the message is less about dumbing it down than it is about meeting people at their level and if you can do it then you have the chance to affect someone much more deeply that is possible through things like mass media or mass anything else.
The grassroots approach may mean we have to listen to the other party first to find out where they are at before we can begin but surely that is the sign of an elightened mind. It’s a kind of power thing. If you have lots of power you can bludgeon people into submission via the media but if you lack that kind of power you are forced to approach the other party on their own level. It’s a more ‘enlightened’ approach and it changes you and you become a different kind of ‘powerful’ person because of it.
July 24th, 2005 at 12:38 pm
Maybe men and women simply weren’t meant to live “en masse”, and can’t truly be reached when they are. Maybe they were meant to live in smaller, tribal-type groupings organized around geographical realities or common beliefs and interests. In such an environment, the distillation of new takes on old subjects could happen quickly, face-to-face, in a supportive and receptive atmosphere. Islands of variety and difference in living and thinking wouldn’t get lost in the great chaotic muddle that is mass society, instead they could function as a primary organizing principle. If you herd everyone into large disorderly orderings, perhaps it is inevitable that the lowest common denominator will be the only effective attractor, strange though it might be.
Could enclaves of enlightenment, now seemingly banished to the hinterlands, actually emerge from their caves to become the bellwethers of a new ‘island civilization’ after the Collapse (assuming one comes)? This is the thesis of Morris Berman in his book The Twilight of American Culture. Maybe, when all is said and done, this is all you can really do - if you’re gonna be on the fringes, try to be the best fringe person you can be, and hope that maybe someday the seeds you’ve sown will help to produce something that ends up mattering to a lot more people.
July 24th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
I guess this reminds me of a supposedly true story my teacher once told me. i think he got it from one of those retarded chicken soup for selling your soul books of something like that, but i still like it.
anyway, it’s about this teacher in elementary school. she walks into her class blind, and the principal only tells her that these kids are ‘hard to reach’ or something. everytime she asks about it, they sort of talk in circles and just say how special they are and how hard you have to work to get through to them.
the first thing she notices is that all the kids have big numbers on their desks: 170’s to 210’s or so. she assumes that these are the IQ’s of the children!
she figures that the ‘difficulty’ is that these kids are gfted and not being challenged sufficently. so she proceeds to gently encourage them and prompt them to live up to their potential.
after a short time, all these kids are getting riduculously high marks, and they all love their schooling. the principal comes down to find out what the hell the teacher has been doing.
she’s suprised. isn’t that what i was supposed to do? these are gifted children after all. they can probably do even better. look at these IQ numbers!
the principal says: what? these are their #’s for the cubby’s where they put their shoes. these kids are the ’slow learners’….
hehehe
July 24th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
enlightenment is a choice, we choose when we go looking for it. it`s not inscrutable like some people like to think it is. we are all born with the memories of hundreds of generations of experiences in our dna. it`s our birthright. it`s a matter of sitting quietly and listening. shutting the fuck up……… the rest comes automatically.
July 24th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
there are those who hope that what they`re studying/practicing is outside of the world so that once they gain mastery/control then they`ll be some sort of god. the truth is that we are already……………………………………………. ego be damned.