Living In Truth

Adapted from the chapter Living in Truth from the book The Vital Spark
Written in 1990

The writer recently visited Gothenburg in Sweden and the large amusement park which is a feature of the town. Such places are really temples of illusion, which exert an attraction to children of all ages, but there can have been few better illustrations of the deceiving power of the world of Maya than the particular attraction which we were taken to sample.

On approach it appeared to be a very large wooden house with windows and doors of a quite traditional kind, except that they and the whole front of the house were set at a crazy angle pointing up in the air to the right, so that the right hand end was perhaps twenty feet higher than the left and, as a consequence, the whole giddily-tilted house appeared to be balanced precariously on its left hand end. But this was only the outer sheath!

Climbing up the steps to the front door, we entered a dim corridor which led one through a horizontal rotating tunnel the whole inner surface of which was covered with a highly-coloured pattern of brightly-coloured blobs on a neutral background rotating anti-clockwise to one’s left. Almost at once one lost all sense of what was vertical and what was horizontal and, with it, all clear idea of what was and was not upright. As a consequence, one found oneself leaning dizzily to the right. After many more such illusions the tour of the house ended in what appeared to be an enormously long descent in a lift. Through two windows in the wall, one could see the side of the shaft hurtling upwards during the bumpy descent, which ended with a resounding crash, after which the doors opened to allow us to emerge, only to find ourselves on the same level at which we had started!

The makers of the crazy house had used great ingenuity, not only in destroying one’s confident and familiar sense of the vertical, but also in using false but powerful clues to suggest to one what the vertical was in the other parts of the house. But they were only able to do so because they knew that each of us is all the time using things like the angles of doors and windows and walls to infer this information and to jump to what is usually the right conclusion. Since this process is largely unconscious and is second nature to us in ordinary life, we are totally unaware of how much we depend on these clues to orient ourselves.

These challenges as to how we see things in everyday life are valuable, because they remind us that we live in a world of appearances. Those appearances are often deceptive and they are not always worthy of the confidence which we put in them. The mind is an unreliable guide. If it is to arrive at truth, we have to subject what it tells us to a critical enquiry and not simply accept first appearances at their face value.

There is a verse in the short non-dual classic called Atma Bodha, Knowledge of Self, which says:

‘The knowledge that arises from the realization of one’s own true nature, directly destroys the illusion of I and mine, which resembles the sort of confusion about the directions which is experienced by a man who is disoriented.’

He does not know which is north and south, or even whether he is standing upright, like the visitor to the crazy house.

To know where one is it is necessary to get one’s bearings. In order to know whether one is standing on one’s head or on one’s feet it is necessary to have a sense of the vertical and of terra firma, which the astronaut lacks. When there is a discrepancy or conflict between the evidence of one’s senses, when one seems to see one thing and to feel another, then one becomes confused and disoriented. It is a powerful reminder of the fact that knowing where we are and where we stand is not quite so straightforward or easy as we commonly suppose.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries practically everyone believed that the earth was the centre of all things, and that all the heavenly bodies moved in cycles and epicycles around it. But at this time there was a renewed interest in what the ancient Greeks taught and it was discovered that there were other views in the ancient world. A Polish German mathematician called Nicolaus Koppernigk went to Italy to study as a pupil of Novarra in Bologna for six years and he found mention in Plutarch and Cicero of the thinker Aristarchus who held that the earth moved round the sun. Nicolaus Koppernigk’s Latin name was Copernicus and he was attracted to the idea of Aristarchus, because it made the movement of the heavenly bodies easier to understand.

The authorities did not worry too much about Copernicus’ ideas, until, in the seventeenth century, Galileo, using his newly invented telescope, observed the satellites of Jupiter, which were a clear example of a solar system in miniature. By 1616 the Catholic authorities had become alarmed and the theory was condemned as ‘false and altogether opposed to holy scripture’.

In spite of this, the Copernican revolution triumphed because it was based on a re-discovery of an ancient truth. It, once and for all, humbled man’s overweening pride in regarding the earth on which his body happened to live as the centre of the universe. But it still did not answer the question of what he was, or of why what Shakespeare calls such a poor forked animal as man should have these innate feelings of his own value. What the yogis stress is that we do not really know who we are, and that, like Galileo, we need to undertake the necessary enquiry and to examine the evidence so that we can discover and realize the truth about our nature, and thus decide which of the many theories and hypotheses current in the world is the true one.

In the non-dual teachings, the world is called the realm of avidya or ignorance of the Truth and there are many influences leading us to get the wrong ideas about things. In many ways, for instance, the situation of going into the crazy house can be compared with what it has been like to live under the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe for the last few decades. As in the experience of disorientation in the crazy house, people may have a very strong feeling of confusion and conflict within themselves. They may know that things are not right and that the view of man which their environment is trying to impose on them is somehow totally wrong, but only those with a strong inner sense of independence and a strong desire to live in accordance with truth can remain properly oriented under the circumstances. Only those who were able to maintain (by listening to the voice of their conscience) a sense of the absolute standards, the true uprightness, could fully appreciate and resist what was happening to them, not in the sense that they did not suffer from the appearances, but in the sense that they knew that they were false and based on lies.

One individual who managed to do this, in spite of intense pressure by the secret police and persecution culminating in long periods in prison, was the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, now President of Czechoslovakia. He has written a testimony to the principles which enabled him to resist this treatment in a book which is appropriately called Living in Truth. It was this principle that enabled him to found the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia and to play a major part in bringing about the popular awakening which led to the overthrow of the Communist regime in his country. In 1979, after being for many years the object of harassment, detentions and close surveillance by the secret police, he was sentenced to four and a half years of hard labour together with the other members of the Committee which had been set up to defend the unjustly prosecuted. In prison he was allowed to write only one four-page letter home each week.

Havel’s letters to his wife, Olga, were published in samizdat form after his release, and it is interesting to discover in their pages frequent references to the practice of Yoga. One is reminded of the verse in the Bhagavad Gita which says: ‘Even a little practice of this Yoga saves one from great fear’. His first letter contains the following:

Dear Olga,
It appears the astrologers were right when they predicted prison for me again this year and when they said the summer would be a hot one. As a matter of fact, it’s stifling hot here, like being in a perpetual sauna. I feel sorry about the many complications my new stint in jail will probably cause you. I think you should stay in Hradecek and look after the place—tend the meadow, make improvements to the house, take the dogs for walks to the pond, etc. There are always family or friends who might want to spend their holidays there with you. There’s no reason to stay in Prague—you can’t be of any help to me here and what would you do all day? And anyway, we’ve sublet the flat. Of course, you should learn to drive so you can do the shopping and so on without having to rely on someone else all the time. In short, you should lead a completely normal life, as though I were off on a trip somewhere. This is how you can help me the most, if I know you’re well and taken care of. I don’t know, of course, how long this trip will last; I am not harbouring any illusions, and in fact I hardly think about it at all. I don’t think much about our ‘case’ either—since there’s nothing to think about. The matter is clear and it is also clear to me (after all we’ve been through) what I have to do and how… I am trying to do a little yoga, but quarters are cramped and every movement must be worked out to within a millimetre…’

A few months later he is writing:

I had a good day today: a good bath, a marvellous session of yoga.

Again he is full of positive advice:

BE CALM, SERENE, CHEERFUL, INDUSTRIOUS, SOCIABLE, KIND TO EVERYONE, OPTIMISTIC, TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, DRESS NICELY. SAY ONLY CLEVER THINGS. DON’T PUT OFF UNPLEASANT DUTIES, STUDY MY LETTERS CAREFULLY AND TRY AND CARRY OUT THE TASKS I SET YOU. BE BRAVE, YET PRUDENT. THINK WELL OF ME, FEEL SORRY FOR ME, BUT NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE YOURSELF SAD. DON’T LOSE HOPE AND LOVE ME!

What is remarkable about these letters is the indomitability of his spirit and the positive attitude which he went on advocating, no doubt as much for himself as for his wife, in contrast to the appalling circumstances in which he found himself. Of course, as a sensitive person, he was not altogether unaffected by his circumstances. One finds him writing, for instance, in December 1979:
When hopelessness comes over me, I do yoga and it helps. It’s the trivial details that depress me, never the general situation. I read a very interesting book by Byrd, the explorer, Alone, about how he lived for half a year by himself at the South Pole. Many of his observations about isolation are consistent with my own experience!

On New Year’s Eve, 1979, he writes:

In his last letter Puzuk [a childhood nickname for his brother, Ivan Havel] asked me to write more about the play I’m working on. I’ve abandoned the original Faustian conception and left only the basic theme, which I have shifted to a different milieu—prison. Yet it is not going to be a play about prison but—in a manner of speaking—about life in general; the prison milieu should serve only as a metaphor of the general human condition (the state of ‘thrownness’ into the world; the existential significance of the past, of recollection, and of the future, the spinning of hopes; the theme of isolation and pseudo hope, the discovery of ‘naked values,’ etc). It will be a Beckettian comedy about life; all that remains of Faust is the theme of temptation (the swapping of one’s own identity for the ‘world of entities’).

Later in the same letter he remarks:

I’ve just had a good session of yoga (I’m delighted by the sun, thanks to which I now have light).

It is now ten years since he wrote that letter and Vaclav Havel is President of the new Czechoslovakia, but one has the sense of someone who will not be disoriented or made dizzy by the whirligig of time. Shakespeare somewhere has a character saying: ‘O world, but that thy strange mutations make us hate thee, youth would not yield to age’10. But someone like Havel showed an inner strength which was not affected by the vagaries of time and change, because he had at least some sense of the truth of Yoga—that man has an inner source of light, power and independence which he can tap even in the most adverse outer circumstances.

So long as we think of ourselves only as a physical body, we are limited and subject to the physical circumstances in which the body finds itself. But if we can contact the inner spirit, then our whole perspective changes and we have a new, reliable spiritual dimension against which to judge the deceptive appearances of outer events. Shri Shankara makes this point again and again in his great classic Direct Experience of Reality:

For the person who is travelling in a boat, everything appears to be in motion; so does one perceive the Self as the body by virtue of ignorance. (76)
Just as, when the eyes are dizzy, everything appears as wandering, so does one perceive the Self as the body by virtue of ignorance. (78)
Just as the directions seem to be changed for one who has been in a swoon and has lost his sense of direction, so does one perceive the Self as the body by virtue of ignorance. (85)
Thus is the Self mistaken for the body owing to ignorance. But when the true Self is realized, this mistake disappears in the spiritual reality, Brahman. (87)

What these verses make clear is that we are grievously wrong so long as we regard the centre of our universe and its interests as the physical body, and as long as we do so we shall be spiritually disoriented, lacking the right perspective by which to understand the world and our life in it aright.

What we need is a new revolution, not the outer Copernican one, which identified the sun as the centre of the universe instead of the earth, but the inner one to identify the true centre of our being, not as the limited individuality identified with the body and the mind, which we mistake for it, but as the real Self, Atman, the spirit within. It is a mistake to imagine the body to be immortal; but our real ‘I’, the spirit, is. We are doomed to ultimate disappointment if we seek complete freedom for the ego, because it can never escape the limitations of its empirical nature and circumstances, but our real ‘I’ is free by its very nature. In the same way it is no good seeking lasting happiness as if it resided in outer objects, when the real source of happiness lies hidden within our own hearts in the infinite Atman.

Yoga prepares us for the inner enquiry into truth, relying on the old spiritual promise: ‘Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you’. In some of the later letters Vaclav Havel describes how he arrived at a deeper understanding of himself through his sufferings in prison and his deep cogitation on what he regarded as his own moral failings in having compromised with the totalitarian regime. In a letter of July 25th 1982, he writes to his wife about the starting point of his own spiritual enquiry.

Five years ago something happened to me that in many regards had a key significance in my subsequent life. It began rather inconspicuously: I was in detention for the first time and one evening, after interrogation, I wrote out a request to the Public Prosecutor for my release. Prisoners in detention are always writing such requests, and I too treated it as something routine and unimportant, more in the nature of mental hygiene: I knew, of course, that my eventual release or non-release would be decided by factors having nothing to do with whether I wrote the appropriate request or not. Still, the interrogations weren’t going anywhere and it seemed proper to use the opportunity and let myself be heard. I wrote my request in a way that at the time seemed extremely tactical and cunning: while saying nothing I did not believe or that wasn’t true, I simply ‘overlooked’ the fact that truth lies not only in what is said, but also in who says it, and to whom, why, how and under what circumstances it is expressed. Thanks to this minor ‘oversight’ (more precisely, this minor self-deception) what I said came dangerously close—by chance, as it were—to what the authorities wanted to hear. What was particularly absurd was the fact that my motive—at least my conscious and admitted motive—was not the hope that it would produce results, but merely a kind of professionally intellectualistic and somewhat perverse delight in my own—or so I thought—‘honourable cleverness’. (I should add, to complete the picture, that when I read it some years later, the honour in that cleverness made my hair stand on end.) I sent the request off the following day and because no one responded to it and my detention was prolonged again, I assumed it had ended up where such requests usually end up, and I more or less forgot about it. And then one day lightning struck: I was given to know that I would probably be released, and that in the process, ‘political use’ would be made of my request. Of course I knew right away what that meant: (1) that with appropriate ‘recasting’, ‘additions’ and widespread publicity, the impression would be created that I had not held out, that I had given in to pressure and backed down from my positions, opinions and all my previous work; in short, that I had betrayed my cause, all for a trivial reason—to get myself out of jail; (2) no denial or correction on my part could alter that impression because I had undeniably written something that ‘met them halfway’ and anything I could add would, quite rightly, seem like an attempt to worm my way out of it; (3) that the approaching catastrophe was unavoidable; (4) that the blot it would leave on me and everything I had taken part in would haunt me for years to come, that it would cause me measureless inner suffering, and that I would probably try to erase it with several years in prison (which in fact happened), but that not even that would rid me entirely of the stigma; (5) that I had no one but myself to blame: I was neither forced to do it, nor offered a bribe; I was not, in fact, in a dilemma and it was only because I’d unforgivably let down my moral guard that I’d given the other side—voluntarily and quite pointlessly—a weapon that amounted to a heaven-sent gift.

Havel said that this incomprehensible lapse thrust him

‘into a drastic but, for that very reason, crucial confrontation with myself; it shook, as it were, my entire “I”, “shook out of it” a deeper insight into itself, a more serious acceptance and understanding of my situation, of my thrownnesses and my horizons, and led me, ultimately, to a new and more coherent consideration of the problem of human responsibility… ’

The central question I came back to again and again was this: how could it have happened? How could I have done something so transparently dubious? …Was it a major error in thinking, an expression of subconscious physiological fear, or was it simply a wrong assessment, a kind anyone could have made (usually without such far-reaching consequences)? In this and other ways, then, I interrogated myself, but regardless of how I responded, I still felt I had left the essence untouched, that I was getting no closer to an explanation and that this way would never bring me even relative peace of mind. I’ve known for some time now why this was, but only now have I learned, perhaps, how to articulate it: the mistake lay not in answering the questions wrongly,… but rather in the very way I posed the questions, which originated in an unconscious effort to localize the essential cause of my failure somewhere ‘outside’, beyond the borders of my real ‘I’ (the ‘I’ of my ‘I’), in ‘circumstances’, ‘conditions’, external factors or influences, into some alienating ‘psychological process’—that typically modern way of excluding the self from the ‘category of blame’. Yes, my questioning was essentially only a desperate attempt to hide from myself the hard fact that the failure was mine—exclusively, essentially and fully mine….Today, the hidden motives behind this attempt are clear to me: accepting full responsibility for one’s own failure is extraordinarily difficult, from the point of view of the ‘interests of our existence-in-the-world’, and frequently it is virtually unbearable and impossible, and if one wants to live even slightly ‘normally’—i.e., exist in the world (guided by the so-called instinct for self-preservation)—one is irresistibly driven to ease the situation by dividing the self, turning the matter into an unfortunate ‘misunderstanding’: those entirely warranted reproaches cannot possibly be addressed to me, but to the other, who has been mistakenly identified with me. Obviously if one stuck complacently to this approach, it would lead to the disintegration of one’s own identity.

This insight led Havel to realize that his questioning was only a desperate attempt to hide from himself the fact that the failure was his.

It is not hard to stand behind one’s successes. But to accept responsibility for one’s failures… is devilishly hard! But only thence does the road lead—as my experience, I hope, has persuaded me—to a renewal of sovereignty over my own affairs, to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of my existence as an uncertain enterprise, and to its transcendental meaning. And only this kind of inner understanding can ultimately lead to what might be called true ‘peace of mind’, to that highest delight, to genuine meaningfulness, to that endless ‘joy of Being’. If one manages to achieve that, then all one’s worldly privations cease to be privations, and become what Christians call grace.

He goes on to speak of the inner voice which caused him to agonize over his moral failure, speaking of it as

the mysterious ‘voice of Being’ that reaches my ‘I’ ‘from outside’ more clearly (so clearly that it is usually described as coming ‘from above’) than anything else, but which, at the same time—paradoxically—penetrates to a deeper level than anything else, because it comes through the ‘I’ itself: not only because I hear it in myself, but above all because it is the voice of my own being, torn away from the integrity of Being and thus intrinsically bound to it…

He speaks of the fact that good has emerged from what seemed bad:

I have my failure to thank for the fact that for the first time in my life I stood—if I may be allowed such a comparison—directly in the study of the Lord God himself: never before had I looked into his face or heard his reproachful voice from such proximity, never had I stood before him in such profound embarrassment, so humiliated and confused, never before had I been so deeply ashamed and felt so powerfully how unseemly anything I could say in my own defence would be. And the most interesting thing about that confrontation… was this: if my request had ended up in the chief prosecutor’s waste basket and I had come out of prison a hero, I might never have experienced it at all! In other words: it was shame… that, to my astonishment, put me in the sharpest confrontation I have ever experienced with the ‘absolute horizon’ of my relating, i.e. with the Being of the world and my own being, with that ‘personal face’ which Being, in moments like this, turns towards me. Thus it is not so at all that there are two separate and remote worlds, the earthly world of erring people who are of small account, and the heavenly world of God, the only one who counts. Quite the contrary: Being is one, it is everywhere and behind everything; it is the Being of everything and the only way to it is the one that leads through this world of mine and through this ‘I’ of mine. The ‘voice of Being’ does not come ‘from elsewhere’ (i.e., from some transcendental heaven) … it is the ‘unuttered in the language of the world’ that Heidegger writes about…

Havel goes on to say that the shock of this experience meant that ‘Everything I was, for myself and for others, suddenly found itself open to question… I had to ask… who I really was’. To this question he arrived at an existential answer:

I understood that my identity is what I seek, do, choose and define, today and every day; that it is not a path I once chose and now merely proceed along, but one which I must redefine at every step, wherein each misstep or wrong turn, though caused only by neglecting one’s bearings in the terrain, remains an irradicable part of it, one that requires vast and complex effort to set right. The maturing of the ‘I’ into itself is not, therefore, merely an accumulation of bits of knowledge and action that cover one’s original state of nakedness and vulnerability with layers of clothing and armour, but a constant confrontation with one’s own source,… demanding each instant to return in full seriousness to the ‘core of things’, to pose the primordial questions again and again, and from the beginning, constantly, to examine the direction one is going in.

Havel speaks of the self as related both to the concrete horizon of the finite world in which it lives and also to what he calls the absolute horizon.

My family, friends, acquaintances, fellow prisoners, the unknown weatherwoman, my fellow passengers in the streetcar, the transport commission, those who go to see my plays, the public, my homeland and the state power-structure; countless relationships, tensions, loves, dependencies, confrontations, atmospheres, milieus, experiences, acts, predilections, aims and things with which I am loosely or closely connected—all that forms the ‘concrete horizon’ of my relating, because all of it is my world, the world as my home, the world in which I am rooted in a complex way… It is the world of my existing, such as it presents and opens itself to me, as I make myself at home in it, as it constitutes itself for me through my experiences and as I—in one way or another—make it meaningful. Thus my ‘I’ creates this world and this world creates my ‘I’.

And yet: my existence in this world and the way I relate to my ‘concrete horizon’ cannot be explained, as it may seem at first, by some one-sided and unqualified clinging to them as such, by surrendering to their actually existing, isolated, relative, self-exhausting, phenomenal and superficial manifestations. It depends, rather, on something else: on the extent to which I direct my existence-in-the-world toward… its own Being, to the very Being of this world. This can only mean that through my life, through the experiences and trials I undergo, I gradually penetrate beyond the different horizons of my ‘concrete horizon’, I attempt to widen them, to step past them, to see beyond them, to get to what is on the other side of them—until ultimately I aspire towards a place beyond its ultimate, conceivable limit, the ‘horizon of all my horizons’, to what I call ‘the absolute horizon’ of my relating.

First of all, then: my only true certain and indisputable experience is the experience of Being in the simplest sense of the word, that is, the experience that something is. At the very least, there is I, the one having the experience, there is the experience as such, and there is, and must be, intrinsically, something that I experience;… If I try, in all honesty, to examine this trivial experience of Being more closely and describe it, if possible, in words, then it seems more appropriate to divide it.. .essentially into two basic layers. The first layer—apparently more definite, more tangible, but in fact rather problematic because it is relative—includes all my direct experience of the world and myself as they manifest themselves to me on various levels of perception. The second layer—far less direct and vivid, yet incomparably more profound and essential—is the experience of ‘Being’ in the sense that I am using it here. The first of those layers is related, obviously, to my state of separation, my thrownness into the world. The second, on the contrary, grows out of my thrownness into the source in Being, my recollections of it and my longing for it. But what does the second experience—evidently the more primordial and firmer, however deeply concealed it may be and drowned out by the incessant clamour of everyday life—what in fact does it mean or say? Essentially, it is… a conviction… that everything I experience on the first level is not, somehow, exhausted by itself, is not ‘just that’ with ‘nothing more to it’, but rather is a situational, partial, superficial assembly (limited by my perspective and locked into it) of fleeting, confusing, isolated—or once again, merely superficially and accidentally linked—expressions of something infinitely more consistent, absolute and absolutely self-defining. There is here an undeniable intimation not only that ‘there is something behind it all’, but also that somewhere in the fathomless depths (i.e., fathomless to me) of everything that exists there is something beyond which there are no more ‘beyonds’ and beyond which there is, therefore, nothing to be, because it is the ‘last of everything’, of every entity… it is the essence of the existence of everything that exists; it is what joins everything that exists together,..

He goes on to say that this is not just a philosophical thesis but a matter of experience, manifest as

an intrinsic longing to arouse, through the conduct of one’s existence in the world, one’s own hidden, slumbering, forgotten and betrayed being and through this being—which is anchored in the integrity of ‘absolute Being’ and separated from the ‘I’ that is constituted from it and to which that ‘I’ is intrinsically oriented—to touch once again that fullness and integrity of Being,… In other words: the experience of Being is not merely an idea or an opinion: it is a state of the spirit and of the heart, the key to life and one’s orientation in life, to one’s way of existence; it is not merely one experience among many: it is the experience of all experiences, their veiled starting point and their veiled end. It is a genuinely human journey, arduous and beautiful for what it entails—all the way from the injunction to pay attention to the incorruptible voice that is everywhere calling us to responsibility (which exists even where we are out of sight of the world of our existence) to that highest delight, as we experience it fully and completely in those fleeting moments when the meaning of Being is brought home to us, when we find ourselves on the very ‘edge of finitude’—face to face with the miracle of the world and the miracle of our own ‘I’.

The revolution that Vaclav Havel has led in Czechoslovakia has certainly inaugurated a new freedom for the peoples of that country, but the revolution he speaks of here is a much more profound one, akin to that Copernican revolution of the spirit which we so badly need to usher in a real age of enlightenment. It is the recognition that man’s life should not revolve round the body and its individual interests, but those of the spirit, and that the real freedom and immortality which he desires for himself is to be found, not in the finite ego or the fallible mind, but in seeking and finding the inner light of the spirit, Atman, of which the yogis speak.

Just as when the eyes are dizzy, everything appears as wandering, so does one perceive the Self as the body by virtue of ignorance…

Thus is the body mistaken for the Self owing to ignorance. But when the Self is realized, this mistake disappears in the absolute Being, Brahman.