relief from this rift within us. They propose to show how we can see and live in such a way that the charms of the world may prevail over the flaws in existence. The quest for invulnerability to change and suffering, as well as for benevolence given from on high, provides a practical route by which to achieve this goal.
It is thus a mistaken prejudice to associate the overcoming of the world with a philosophical pessimism, as it is associated in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the sole thoroughgoing development of this point of view that we have had in the West. Like the other two major orientations in the history of world religion, the overcoming of the world connects insight with hope and salvation. The question to ask next is whether it looks for salvation and hope in the right place.
Serenity and benevolence
These ideas and incitements inspire a vision of how to live. In that vision, the two central commitments are to serenity and benevolence. They are closely linked.
We achieve serenity by conquering the will, which, seated in the embodied self, seeks the attractions and prizes of a realm of shadows. We cultivate an inner reserve from the commotions of this shadowy domain, a reserve founded upon our acknowledgment of the truth—of the One being or of the archetypes of reality—lying behind the veil of time, distinction, and individual selfhood. We discount the significance of the ups and downs of worldly fortune. We become, to that extent, invulnerable; invulnerability and serenity represent two aspects of this same ideal of existence. We experience, right now, our share in the hidden reality of the One or in the hidden realities of the models of being.
The right understanding of the world may be a necessary condition of our detachment. However, it is generally recognized by the votaries and philosophers of the overcoming of the world to be an insufficient condition. Right understanding must be supplemented by disciplines that, under the light of this understanding, turn the will against itself. One such discipline is that of intense concentration, filtering out all extraneous elements in consciousness, and turning consciousness on itself, until it comes to experience itself as a piece or as an expression of universal mind. Another discipline is the cultivation, through art and speculative thought, of a contemplative view of reality, uncontaminated and undistracted by the interests of the embodied and individual will. Yet a third discipline is sacrificial action, which not only acknowledges our universal kinship with all other beings but also practices renunciation of our self-regarding and partial interests.
The intended effect of these disciplines is not to prevent us from acting. It is to allow us to act as the conscious citizens of a higher order of reality. The serenity that it seeks is therefore compatible with courageous and even heroic intervention in society. The risks and costs of such intervention, rather than placing the ideal of serenity in jeopardy, reveal its nature. Serenity results from self-possession. The self that is thus possessed, however, is not the one that awakens to find itself tied to a dying organism. It is the one that recognizes its participation in an order of reality and of value lying beyond the parade of phenomenal difference and change. We can more readily confront or renounce the epiphenomenal because we have come to view our experience in the light of the real, which is also the timeless.
A disinterested and universal benevolence forms, alongside this ideal of serenity and self-possession, the second part of the existential imperative that results from the overcoming of the world and of the will. It is the specific form taken, in this approach to life, by the inclusive fellow feeling that all the higher and historical religions sought to put in the place of an ethic of proud self-assertion.
Its distinctive tone is sacrificial attentiveness to the needs of others, marked by distance and detachment. Such benevolence is highest and purest when uncompromised by any erotic interest or by any proximity of blood, community, or common interest. It is best experienced and offered by a person who has already triumphed over the illusions of the will. Although it may be attended by great costs and risks, including death, it brings no inner trouble. It cannot be troubled by being rebuffed. On the contrary, it is marked by a joy signaling our discovery that we are not simply the individuated selves, the partial minds, and the dying organisms that we appear to be. It is both enabled by serenity and productive of serenity.
A benevolence of this nature presupposes no equality between the lover (if we can call disinterested benevolence love) and the beloved. For one thing, different human beings achieve different degrees of advance in the overcoming of the world and of the will. Only those who advance furthest toward this goal are capable of the greatest generosity. For another thing, the lover needs nothing from the beloved, not even disinterested love in return. The less his benevolence is requited, the more perfect it is.
The metaphysical basis of this ideal of benevolence is the same as the metaphysical foundation of the ideal of serenity. It is the acknowledgement of the falsehood or shallowness of all the divisions within the cosmos as well as within mankind. The overcoming of the world infers the denial or devaluation of the barriers within humanity—a shared theme of the religions of transcendence—from its most general thesis about the ultimately real. The practical consequence for the ideal of benevolence is that our sacrificial good will should reach out not just to other human beings and to non-human sentient creatures but even, as well, to all beings, caught in the toils of illusory distinction and change.
From the combination of the radical or qualified metaphysic of the overcoming of the world with the twofold imperative of serenity and benevolence, there results a response to death, groundlessness, insatiability, and belittlement.
The overcomers of the world and of the will deny death by affirming that the life of the individual self was, to begin with, an illusory or derivative phenomenon. In the radical versions of the metaphysic of overcoming, the dissolution of the body breaks down the barrier that sustained the illusion of our estrangement from one and timeless being. In the qualified versions, with their hierarchy of degrees of being and reality, death represents an incident in an itinerary (for example, of the transmigration of the soul, to be embodied in other individual organisms) that has our reunion with one and timeless being as its goal.
The overcomers deny groundlessness by moving toward what they regard to be the ground of existence, concealed from us by the phantasms of our mendacious experience of time, distinction, and individual selfhood. Communion with that ground is the ultimate source of both insight and happiness. It is the sole trustworthy guarantee of the serenity that we should seek and of the benevolence that we should practice.
The overcomers deny insatiability by professing to teach us the only way in which we can free ourselves from insatiable desire: to turn aside from the source of desire in the unquiet and embodied self. By negating both the seat and the target of desire and by dismissing or devaluing the impermanent, we escape the ordeal of insatiability. Our escape begins in the right understanding of the world and in the pursuit, on the basis of such understanding, of the ideals of serenity and of benevolence.
The overcomers deny the inescapability of belittlement by affirming our connection to the source of all reality and value: one and timeless being, concealed under the disguise of transient and misleading phenomena. The phenomena separating us from the real and the valuable can also, if we understand them correctly and act according to this insight, become the bridge to the hidden truth of our being. By crossing this bridge, we can experience divinity now.
Criticism: betrayal of the past
My criticism of the overcoming of the world moves from a point of view internal to this way of thinking and acting to a perspective external to it. I first ask whether this direction in the religious consciousness of humanity has enabled its adepts to do justice to the concerns shared by the religious revolutions of the past. Next, I discuss the psychological stability of this set of enacted beliefs: its chances of success in adapting its program to what we are like and can turn ourselves into. Finally, I take up the aspirations to which this form of consciousness is almost entirely blind, and pass judgment on it from the anticipated standpoint of the
