Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, Pessoa, and Ninguem

Nirmala and I recently returned from Lisbon. Our visit to the Portuguese capital was very brief; in addition, we were on a group tour, and had only a few hours to ourselves. I reveal myself here as an unabashed admirer of Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest writers of the past century: we asked directions to A Brasileira, the café Pessoa frequented during his lifetime. I read about a brass statue of Pessoa in front of the café, and wasted little time to walk the mile or so to this destination. Here are some pictures of us at the café:

A recent article of mine, Ramana Maharshi, Pessoa, and Niguem, available on my blog and on the internet, contained a discussion of the inscription at the base of the statue, a quote of Pessoa’s from his most famous work, The Book of Disquiet. “To read is to dream, guided by another.”

I began my discussion as follows:

An interesting quote! It is, however, only the opening phrase of a passage of remarkable insight. This will be discussed at length in a subsequent essay.

This is that subsequent essay; we shall now begin our detailed analysis of the full passage.

2.

We present the passage from the book in the original Portuguese and in the excellent translation of Richard Zenith:

Ler é sonhar pela mão de outrem. Ler mal e por alto é libertarmo-nos de mão que nos conduz. A superficialídade na erudição é único modo de ler bem e ser profundo.

Que coisa tão reles e baíxa que é a vida! Repara que para ser baíxa e reles basta nâo a quereres, ser-te dada, nada depende da tuo vontade, nem mesmo da tuo ilusão da tuo vontade.

Morrer é sernos outros totalmente. Por isso o suicidio é a cobardia; é entregarmo-nos totalmente a vida.

                                               
                                                 --Livro de Desassosego, 229

To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.

How shoddy and contemptible life is! Note that, for it to be shoddy and contemptible, all it takes is you not wanting it, it being given to you anyway, and nothing about it depending on your will or even your illusion of your will.

To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.

                                                    
                                           --The Book of Disquiet, 229

First Paragraph

The opening sentence, which is inscribed on the statue’s base, is quite appropriate for inclusion there. It encourages one not only to read, but to become absorbed by what one is reading; to allow what’s being read to read the reader, as it were. We certainly can use all the encouragement we can get to read more in this age of cable. computer streaming, and cell phone. But the quote has a certain Hallmark-card quality; a bit too pat when it stands alone. The next sentence goes a little deeper:.a good book demands and deserves one’s undivided attention. The image of letting go the hand that is guiding one is quite effective, as one would expect from the hand of a major poet. The last sentence shocks us and comes as a complete surprise. “To be only superficially learned is the best way to read and be profound.” That’s hardly what's taught at schools and  implied at universities! It seems to contradict common sense. Pessoa is not the kind of writer to shock for shock’s sake, however. What does he mean? The rest of the passage will make what he is saying clearer, as we shall see; this sentence is in perfect agreement with what follows. Pessoa is informing us here that we must leave our egos behind and forget all the cleverness that makes us smile before the mirror, when we read. We are not to overwhelm the text we are reading with an inner dialogue of commentary, we are to let the text overwhelm us. We must not interpret Hamlet as we read the play; that will come later. First we must let Hamlet interpret us. We must become the stage, as it were, on which the play occurs, not some Euro-trash director commenting behind the scenes. I interpret “being profound” here as leaving one’s ego completely behind, thus, as it were, becoming the world. Concentration and ego are veritable oxymorons. One of the many ways good music and good literature delight is by giving us a profound relief from ourselves.

Second Paragraph

How shoddy and contemptible life is! Note that, for it to be shoddy and contemptible, all it takes is you not wanting it, it being given to you anyway, and nothing about it depending on your will or even your illusion of your will.

I remember reading somewhere that Buddhists teach that unhappy persons are closer to the truth than happy persons are. This statement must be qualified. Certainly Buddha’s First Noble Truth teaches us that life is dukkha, suffering, or perhaps better translated as 'insufficient', that is, what you think will satisfy you completely ultimately won’t. (It often takes a long time to realize this.)  So, according to Buddha, those who seem happy while denying the Four Noble Truths are living a life of illusion—what I would call a double illusion, since the primary illusion is that we are each a separate self. Persons who seem happy while living lives full of greed, hate, and delusion often do great harm to others as well as ultimately to themselves.

This doesn't mean, however, that life in itself is shoddy and contemptible. Far from it! My favorite Yiddish proverb is ibergekummene tsuris iz gut zu dahrstellen, (“it is good to depict overcome sorrow"). Buddha’s entire teaching is a call to joy, a guide to lead us bey dukkha. As profound as Pessoa is, we must concede that Buddhism in its essence goes even deeper.

Ramana Maharshi, the greatest Hindu sage of the past century, taught that our true nature is bliss, not sorrow. Sorrow denotes an ego in the web of anguished self-centered desires. Suffering is always associated with the ego. Important here is to remember what Ramana said as he was dying from cancer in an age when the availability of analgesics was severely limited. “There is pain, but there is no suffering.” He had transcended ego, he had transcended suffering.Transcending the pain that the body is heir to, however, was not a goal of either the Buddha or Ramana Maharshi.

Pessoa was not a happy man. He lived a very isolated life. He stated in The Book of Disquiet that if his heart knew what his brain knew, it would stop beating. This is not the highest stage of wisdom.

What Thomas Mann said about Nietzsche is noteworthy. He said that Nietzsche is undoubtedly very profound; his life of extreme isolation, however, is not an example to follow.

The Hindu expression,  satcitananda, is much closer to the truth. Sat is wisdom, cit is consciousness, and ananda denotes bliss.

It is also noteworthy to state that a fake gurus’s incessant quoting of this compound word doesn’t make him a true guru—Just about all gurus, at least in my opinion, are fake. Ramana Maharshi, however, certainly wasn’t.

Pessoa’s profundity cannot be denied. That it has its limitations, however, is also apparent.

Third Paragraph

Before we interpret the third paragraph, I would like to write a few words about the ending of the second, namely that life is given to us and it doesn’t depend upon our will. The question of free will has exercised philosophers for centuries. I am convinced that free will is indeed an illusion, an assertion for which I cold cite much scientific evidence, for which space is lacking here. The individual, separate from the environment, is not an objective reality, but belief in it has greatly improved our chances of survival. This “Darwinian illusion” of an objective self is, however, very strong. I am convinced that free will does not exist, yet I schedule events and meetings on my Iphone neverthless. This is not a contradiction; that a dreamer dreams is to be expected.

I have a “higher I” inside myself, as it were; my everyday I functions as if it weren’t there.  If I completely realized my identification with my “higher I,’ I would be a sat guru. I am not.

Pessoa reveals here that he realizes that free will is an illusion. His problem is that he is suffering spiritually and knows no exit. It’s as if a hammer in an unknown hand were pounding on his hand, which is unable to move. Not a good situation to be in; I am convinced that there is an exit from despair, other than suicide, but it is not easy.

Now let us proceed to an analysis of the final paragraph, the most important of all: To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice; it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.

To die is to leave despair behind; suicide, however, is cowardice, since it’s an escape—a very strange escape at that, stopping suffering by a deliberate destruction of the sufferer. Pessoa is not a coward; he accepts his fate and will not leave its terrible exigencies voluntarily. The important thing to do is to surrender ourselves completely to life.

Note the paradox here: if we surrender ourselves completely to life, we transcend ourselves. Once one viscerally realizes that the illusion of the self is not a necessary burden to carry, we may not be able to disard the burden completely, but, if we work on it, we can certainly lighten the load. To surrender ourselves completely, however, is a kind of death, since our poor little suffering, sickly phenomenal ego must die to achieve it.

This is why Jesus taught that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Once the cross is thoroughly borne, it disappears—there is no one left carrying it anymore.

If Pessoa had ever been able to completely surrender to life, his despair would have ceased and would have been replaced by an ineffable condition, which we hint at with the words 'joy' or 'bliss'.

Now let’s turn a moment to the Portuguese text. The equivalent of the English, “it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” The Portuguese begins this phrase with “é”. This translates as “is”—One must recall, however, that verbs in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian can stand alone, the pronoun, as in Latin, is contained in the verb. Thus, in English this “é” must be translated as “it's” or “it is.” But a subtlety is lost here. “é” in the text  occurs after a semicolon; it thus can be interpreted as applying to “ler”, “to read” in paragraph one; it also can refer to “to die” in the last paragraph. In other words, becoming absorbed in a book is a kind of death, because our ego is no longer there. Similarly, surrendering ourselves completely to life is a kind of death as well. Once one is absorbed by life as by a good book; once one realizes the illusory nature of the ego, the imaginary egotist inside the brain, the Wizard of I pulling the levers behind the curtain, as it were; this central mirage which gives you so much anguish, disappears like a cube of sugar in a hot cup of tea.

The death which Pessoa refers to in the third paragraph is Life, a state of being which Buddha referred to as Nirvana and Ramana Marshi referred to as Moksha.

This excerpt from Pessoa’s masterpiece is a good illustration of the Buddhist teaching that unhappy people can be closer to the truth than happy ones. Without being a Buddhist or a Hindu, Pessoa, on his own, leavened this passage with the truth of Buddhism and advaita Hinduism. It is an extraordinary passage, worthy of contemplation, internalization, and realization. It contains the difficult, wonderful answer to anguished questions concerning the human condition.