Albert Einstein On God: “Nothing More Than the Expression and Product of Human Weakness”

Einstein Gutkind Letter

With depend­able fre­quen­cy, the reli­gious views of Albert Ein­stein get revised and re-revised accord­ing to some re-dis­cov­ered or re-inter­pret­ed quo­ta­tion from his sci­en­tif­ic work or per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence. It’s not espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing that Ein­stein had a few things to say on the sub­ject. As the pre-emi­nent the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist of his age, he spent his days pon­der­ing the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse. As one of the most famous pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als in his­to­ry, and an immi­grant to a coun­try as high­ly reli­gious as the Unit­ed States, Ein­stein was often called on to voice his reli­gious opin­ions. Like any one of us over the course of a life­time, those state­ments do not har­mo­nize into a neat and tidy con­fes­sion of belief, or unbe­lief. Instead, at times, Ein­stein explic­it­ly aligns him­self with the pan­the­ism of Baruch Spin­oza; at oth­er times, he express­es a much more skep­ti­cal atti­tude. Often he seems to stand in awe of a vague deist notion of God; Often, he seems max­i­mal­ly agnos­tic.

Ein­stein reject­ed the athe­ist label, it’s true. At no point in his adult life, how­ev­er, did he express any­thing at all like a belief in tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. On the con­trary, he made a par­tic­u­lar point of dis­tanc­ing him­self from the the­olo­gies of Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty espe­cial­ly. Though he did admit to a brief peri­od of “deep reli­gious­ness” as a child, this phase, he wrote “reached an abrupt end at the age of twelve.” As he writes in his Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Notes, after a “fanat­ic orgy of free­think­ing,” brought on by his expo­sure to sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture, he devel­oped a “mis­trust of every kind of author­i­ty… a skep­ti­cal atti­tude toward the con­vic­tions that were alive in any spe­cif­ic social environment—an atti­tude that has nev­er left me, even though, lat­er on, it has been tem­pered by a bet­ter insight into the causal con­nec­tions.” In con­trast to the “reli­gious par­adise” of his youth, Ein­stein wrote that he had come to find anoth­er kind of faith—in the “huge world… out yon­der… which stands before us like a great rid­dle.”

Einstein’s rejec­tion of a per­son­al God was unde­ni­ably final, such that in 1954, a year before his death, he would write the let­ter above to philoso­pher Erik Gutkind after read­ing Gutkind’s book Choose Life: The Bib­li­cal Call to Revolt on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a mutu­al friend. The book, Ein­stein tells its author, is “writ­ten in a lan­guage inac­ces­si­ble to me.” He goes on to dis­par­age all reli­gion as “the most child­ish super­sti­tion”:

The word God is for me noth­ing more than the expres­sion and prod­uct of human weak­ness, the Bible a col­lec­tion of hon­or­able, but still pure­ly prim­i­tive, leg­ends which are nev­er­the­less pret­ty child­ish. No inter­pre­ta­tion, no mat­ter how sub­tle, can change this for me. For me the Jew­ish reli­gion like all oth­er reli­gions is an incar­na­tion of the most child­ish super­sti­tion. And the Jew­ish peo­ple to whom I glad­ly belong, and whose think­ing I have a deep affin­i­ty for, have no dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty for me than all oth­er peo­ple. As far as my expe­ri­ence goes, they are also no bet­ter than oth­er human groups, although they are pro­tect­ed from the worst can­cers by a lack of pow­er…

You can read a full tran­script at Let­ters of Note, who include the let­ter in their sec­ond vol­ume of fas­ci­nat­ing cor­re­spon­dence from famous fig­ures, More Let­ters of Note. The let­ter went up for auc­tion in May of 2008, and a much more dog­mat­i­cal­ly anti-reli­gious sci­en­tist had a keen inter­est in acquir­ing it: “Unsur­pris­ing­ly,” Let­ters of Note point out, “one of the unsuc­cess­ful bid­ders was Richard Dawkins.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Do Sci­en­tists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Ein­stein in 1936. Ein­stein Then Responds

Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

Ein­stein for the Mass­es: Yale Presents a Primer on the Great Physicist’s Think­ing

Albert Einstein​ & Sig­mund Freud​ Exchange Let­ters and Debate How to Make the World Free from War (1932)

Free Online Physics Cours­es

50 Famous Aca­d­e­mics & Sci­en­tists Talk About God

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Free Speech Bites: Nigel Warburton, Host of Philosophy Bites, Creates a Spin Off Podcast Dedicated to Freedom of Expression

free speech bites

In osten­si­bly lib­er­al democ­ra­cies in the West, atti­tudes towards free speech vary wide­ly giv­en dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal con­texts, and can shift dra­mat­i­cal­ly over time. We’re liv­ing in the midst of a gen­er­a­tional shift on the issue in the U.S.; a recent Pew sur­vey found that 40 per­cent of millennials—18–34 year olds—favor gov­ern­ment bans on offen­sive speech. The usu­al caveats apply when read­ing this data; New York magazine’s Sci­ence of Us blog breaks down the demo­graph­ics and points out prob­lems with def­i­n­i­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly with that of the word “offen­sive.” They write, “plen­ty of folks freak out about anti-cop sen­ti­ments but are fine with racial­ly loaded language—or insert your own exam­ples.” As com­men­ta­tors note almost dai­ly, var­i­ous free speech advo­cates show all man­ner of par­tial­i­ty when it comes to whose speech they choose to defend and whose they, unwit­ting­ly per­haps, sup­press.

Euro­pean coun­tries, of course, already have all sorts of laws that curb offen­sive speech and impose harsh penal­ties, from large fines to jail time. Those laws are extend­ing to the inter­net as well, a speech domain long cen­sored by Chi­nese author­i­ties.

Whether Euro­pean mea­sures against racist and xeno­pho­bic speech actu­al­ly lessen racism and xeno­pho­bia is an open ques­tion, as is the prob­lem of excep­tions to the laws that seem to allow cer­tain kinds of prej­u­dices as they strong­ly cen­sor oth­ers. Much more extreme exam­ples of the sup­pres­sion of free speech have recent­ly come to light under auto­crat­ic regimes in the Mid­dle East. In Syr­ia, soft­ware devel­op­er and free speech advo­cate Bas­sel Kharta­bil has been held in prison since 2012 for his activism. In Sau­di Ara­bia, artist, poet, and Pales­tin­ian refugee Ashraf Fayadh has been sen­tenced to death for “renounc­ing Islam.”

We could add to all of these exam­ples hun­dreds of oth­ers, from all over the world, but in addi­tion to the sta­tis­tics and the dis­turb­ing indi­vid­ual cas­es, it is worth ask­ing broad­er, more philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions about free speech as we draw our own con­clu­sions about the issues. What exact­ly do we mean by “free speech”? Should all speech be pro­tect­ed, even that meant to libel indi­vid­u­als or whole groups or to delib­er­ate­ly incite vio­lence? Should we tol­er­ate a pub­lic dis­course made up of lies, mis­in­for­ma­tion, prej­u­di­cial invec­tive, and per­son­al attacks? Should cit­i­zens and the press have the right to ques­tion offi­cial gov­ern­ment nar­ra­tives and to demand trans­paren­cy?

To help us think through these polit­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly fraught dis­cus­sions, we could lis­ten to Free Speech Bites, a pod­cast spon­sored by the Index on Cen­sor­ship and host­ed by free­lance philoso­pher Nigel War­bur­ton, who also hosts the pop­u­lar pod­cast Phi­los­o­phy Bites. The for­mat is iden­ti­cal to that long-stand­ing show, but instead of short con­ver­sa­tions with philoso­phers, War­bur­ton has brief, live­ly dis­cus­sions with free speech advo­cates, includ­ing authors, artists, politi­cians, jour­nal­ists, come­di­ans, car­toon­ists, and aca­d­e­mics. In the episode above, War­bur­ton talks with DJ Tay­lor, biog­ra­ph­er of the man con­sid­ered almost a saint of free speech, George Orwell.

Of his sub­ject, Tay­lor remarks, “I think it’s true to say that most of Orwell’s pro­fes­sion­al life, large amounts of the things that he wrote, are to do with the sup­pres­sion of the indi­vid­ual voice.” At the same time, he points out that Orwell’s “view of free speech is by no means clear cut.” The “whole free speech issue became much more del­i­cate­ly shad­ed than it would oth­er­wise have been” dur­ing the extra­or­di­nary times of the Span­ish Civ­il War and World War II. Tay­lor refers to the “clas­sic lib­er­al dilem­ma: how far do we tol­er­ate some­thing that, if tol­er­at­ed, will cease to tol­er­ate us…. If you are liv­ing in a democ­ra­cy and somebody’s putting out fas­cist pam­phlets encour­ag­ing the end of that democ­ra­cy, how much rope do you give them?”

In anoth­er episode, Irshad Manji—feminist, self-described “Mus­lim refusenik,” and author of The Trou­ble with Islam Today—talks free speech and reli­gion, and offers a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than what we’re used to hear­ing report­ed from Islam­ic thinkers. When War­bur­ton says that Islam and free expres­sion sound “like two incom­pat­i­ble things,” Man­ji coun­ters that as a “per­son of faith” she believes “free expres­sion is as much a reli­gious oblig­a­tion as it is a human right.” In her esti­ma­tion, “no human being can legit­i­mate­ly behave as if he or she owns a monop­oly on truth.” Any­thing less than a soci­ety that tol­er­ates civ­il dis­agree­ment, she says, means that “we’re play­ing God with one anoth­er.” In her reli­gious per­spec­tive, “devot­ing your­self to one god means that you must defend human lib­er­ty.” Man­ji sounds much more like Enlight­en­ment Chris­t­ian reform­ers like John Locke than she does many inter­preters of Islam, and she is well aware of the unpop­u­lar­i­ty of her point of view in much of the Islam­ic world.

Address­ing the ques­tion of why free speech mat­ters, broad­cast­er and writer Jonathan Dimbleby—former chair of the Index on Censorship—inaugurated the pod­cast in 2012 with a more clas­si­cal­ly philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion of John Stu­art Mill’s On Lib­er­ty and the lib­er­al argu­ment against cen­sor­ship Mill and oth­ers artic­u­lat­ed. For Dim­ble­by, “free­dom of expres­sion [is] not only a right but a defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of what it means to be a civ­i­lized indi­vid­ual.” It’s a view he holds “very strong­ly,” but he admits that the valid excep­tions to the rule are “where the dif­fi­cult ter­ri­to­ry starts.” Dim­ble­by points to “very obvi­ous cir­cum­stances when you don’t have free­dom of expres­sion and should not have free­dom of expres­sion.” One of the excep­tions involves “laws that say that if you express your­self freely, you are direct­ly putting some­one else’s life at risk.” This is not as clear-cut as it seems. The “dan­ger­ous ter­ri­to­ry,” he argues, begins with cir­cum­scrib­ing lan­guage that incites anger or offense in oth­ers. We are back to the ques­tion of offense, and it is not a uncom­pli­cat­ed one. Although activists very often need to be unciv­il to be heard at all, there’s also a nec­es­sary place for pub­lic dis­cus­sions that are as thought­ful and care­ful as we can man­age. And for that rea­son, I’m grate­ful for the inter­ven­tion of Free Speech Bites and the inter­na­tion­al vari­ety of views it rep­re­sents.

For more of those views, see the Index on Censorship’s web­site to stream or down­load sev­en more Free Speech Bites pod­casts.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You!

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Great Writ­ers on Free Speech and the Envi­ron­ment

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

Hear All of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia Novels as Free Audio Books

NarniaMap-e1324285473899

I have not seen the sec­ond two of a promised sev­en films based on the nov­els in C.S. Lewis’ The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia series. But I tend to agree with sev­er­al crit­ics of the first filmed adap­ta­tion, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “The PG-rat­ed movie feels safe and con­strict­ed,” Peter Tra­vers observed, “in a way the sto­ry nev­er does on the page.” Although Lewis “did noth­ing to hide his devout Chris­tian­i­ty” in his alle­gor­i­cal Nar­nia books for young adults, nor in his grown-up sci-fi fan­ta­sy series, The Space Tril­o­gy, Lewis on the page comes across as a rig­or­ous writer first and a Chris­t­ian apol­o­gist sec­ond. Except, I’d argue, for his work of explic­it­ly pop­ulist, and rather facile, apolo­get­ics, Mere Chris­tian­i­ty (orig­i­nal­ly a series of radio lec­tures), his fic­tion and pop­u­lar non-fic­tion alike present readers—whatever their beliefs—with chal­leng­ing, inven­tive, wit­ty, and mov­ing ways to think about the human con­di­tion.

Lewis’ immer­sion in Euro­pean Medieval and Renais­sance lit­er­a­ture in his day-job role as an Oxford don—and his ecu­meni­cal, almost Jun­gian, approach to lit­er­a­ture generally—gives his fic­tion a seri­ous arche­typ­al depth that most mod­ern reli­gious nov­el­ists lack, mak­ing him, along with fel­low “Inkling” J.R.R. Tolkien, some­thing of a lit­er­ary saint in mod­ern Chris­tian­i­ty. Though it may offend the ortho­dox to say so, Lewis’ nov­els cap­ture a “deep mag­ic” at the heart of all mytho­log­i­cal and lit­er­ary tra­di­tions. And they do so in a way that makes explor­ing heavy, grown-up themes excit­ing for both chil­dren and adults. Though I’ve per­son­al­ly left behind the beliefs that ani­mat­ed my first read­ings of his books, I can still return to The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia and find in them deep mag­ic and mys­tery.

There’s no deny­ing the enor­mous influ­ence these books have had on children’s fan­ta­sy lit­er­a­ture, from Har­ry Pot­ter to Lewis’ athe­ist antag­o­nist Philip Pull­man. I look for­ward to shar­ing his books with my daugh­ter, what­ev­er she ends up mak­ing of their reli­gios­i­ty. I’ve still got my tat­tered paper­back copies, and I’ll glad­ly read them to her before she can tack­le them her­self, but I’m also grate­ful for the com­plete audio record­ings of The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, avail­able free online and read by Eng­lish child psy­chol­o­gist and author Chris­si Hart. In install­ments of two chap­ters at a time, Hart reads all sev­en of the Nar­nia books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspi­an, The Voy­age of the Dawn Tread­er, The Sil­ver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Last Bat­tle.

You can hear the first two chap­ters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe above, and stream or down­load the remain­ing chap­ters, and the remain­ing six books, at Ancientfaith.com. Although Hart and the Ancient Faith site who host her read­ings clear­ly approach the nov­els from an explic­it­ly Ortho­dox per­spec­tive, I don’t think read­ers need to share their beliefs, or Lewis’, to enjoy and appre­ci­ate the sto­ry­telling mag­ic of The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia.

And it should be not­ed that CS Lewis Pte. Ltd. grant­ed per­mis­sion to put these record­ings online, accord­ing to the Ancient Faith web site. The record­ings are there­fore list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. Enjoy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

C.S. Lewis’ Pre­scient 1937 Review of The Hob­bit by J.R.R. Tolkien: It “May Well Prove a Clas­sic”

Watch Hand-Drawn Ani­ma­tions of 7 Sto­ries & Essays by C.S. LewisWatch Hand-Drawn Ani­ma­tions of 7 Sto­ries & Essays by C.S. LewisWatch Hand-Drawn Ani­ma­tions of 7 Sto­ries & Essays by C.S. Lewis

The Only Known Record­ings of C.S. Lewis (1944–1948)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Pope Francis Set to Release a Rock/Pop Album: Listen to the First Single

pope francis album

That’s right, I said it. In Novem­ber, the Pope will offi­cial­ly release a rock/pop album called Pope Fran­cis: Wake Up! (which you can already pre-order on iTunes). And below, you can hear the first sin­gle, “Wake Up! Go! Go! For­ward!” It’s one of 11 tracks.

Accord­ing to Rolling Stone, “The Vat­i­can-approved LP … fea­tures the Pon­tiff deliv­er­ing sacred hymns and excerpts of his most mov­ing speech­es in mul­ti­ple lan­guages paired with uplift­ing musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment rang­ing from pop-rock to Gre­go­ri­an chant.” The Pope’s songs will focus on themes that Amer­i­cans are get­ting famil­iar with this week: “peace, dig­ni­ty, envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns and help­ing those most in need.“Pope Fran­cis: Wake Up! will offi­cial­ly go on sale on Novem­ber 27th. Yup, Black Fri­day.

via Rolling Stone

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Tolstoy and Gandhi Exchange Letters: Two Thinkers’ Quest for Gentleness, Humility & Love (1909)

Gandhi.Tolstoy

Some of the most rig­or­ous moral thinkers of the past cen­tu­ry have spent time on the wrong side of ques­tions they deemed of vital impor­tance. Mohan­das Gand­hi, for exam­ple, at first remained loy­al to the British, man­i­fest­ing many of the vicious prej­u­dices of the Empire against Black South Africans and lob­by­ing for Indi­ans to serve in the war against the Zulu. Maya Jasanoff in New Repub­lic describes Gand­hi dur­ing this peri­od of his life as a “crank.” At the same time, he devel­oped his phi­los­o­phy of non-vio­lent resis­tance, or satya­gra­ha, in South Africa as an Indi­an suf­fer­ing the injus­tices inflict­ed upon his coun­try­men by both the Boers and the British.

Gandhi’s some­time con­tra­dic­to­ry stances may be in part under­stood by his rather aris­to­crat­ic her­itage and by the warm wel­come he first received in Lon­don when he left his fam­i­ly, his caste, and his wife and child in India to attend law school in 1888. And yet it is in Lon­don that he first began to change his views, becom­ing a staunch veg­e­tar­i­an and encoun­ter­ing theos­o­phy, Chris­tian­i­ty, and many of the con­tem­po­rary writ­ers who would shift his per­spec­tive over time. Gand­hi received a very dif­fer­ent recep­tion in Eng­land when he returned in 1931, the de fac­to leader of a bur­geon­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment in India whose exam­ple was so impor­tant to both the South African and U.S. civ­il rights move­ments of suc­ceed­ing decades.

One of the writ­ers who most deeply guid­ed Gandhi’s polit­i­cal, spir­i­tu­al, and philo­soph­i­cal evo­lu­tion, Leo Tol­stoy, expe­ri­enced his own dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion, from land­ed aris­to­crat to social rad­i­cal, and also renounced prop­er­ty and posi­tion to advo­cate stren­u­ous­ly for social equal­i­ty. Gand­hi eager­ly read Tolstoy’s The King­dom of God is With­in You, the novelist’s state­ment of Chris­t­ian anar­chism. The book, Gand­hi wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “left an abid­ing impres­sion on me.” After fur­ther study of Tolstoy’s reli­gious writ­ing, he “began to real­ize more and more the infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties of uni­ver­sal love.”

It was in Eng­land, not India, where Gand­hi first read “A Let­ter to a Hin­du,” Tolstoy’s 1908 reply to a note from Indi­an rev­o­lu­tion­ary Tarak­nath Das on the ques­tion of Indi­an inde­pen­dence. Tol­stoy divides his lengthy, thought­ful “Let­ter” into short chap­ters, each of which begins with a quo­ta­tion from the Vedas. “Indeed,” writes Maria Popo­va, the mis­sive “puts in glar­ing per­spec­tive the nuance­less and hasty op-eds of our time.” It so affect­ed Gand­hi that, in 1909, he wrote to Tol­stoy, thus begin­ning a cor­re­spon­dence between the two that last­ed through the fol­low­ing year. “I take the lib­er­ty of invit­ing your atten­tion to what has been going on in the Trans­vaal for near­ly three years,” begins Gandhi’s first let­ter, some­what abrupt­ly, “There is in that Colony a British Indi­an pop­u­la­tion of near­ly 13,000. These Indi­ans have, for sev­er­al years, labored under var­i­ous legal dis­abil­i­ties.”

The prej­u­dice against col­or and in some respects against Asians is intense in that Colony….The cli­max was reached three years ago, with a law that many oth­ers and I con­sid­ered to be degrad­ing and cal­cu­lat­ed to unman those to whom it was applic­a­ble. I felt that sub­mis­sion to a law of this nature was incon­sis­tent with the spir­it of true reli­gion. Some of my friends and I were and still are firm believ­ers in the doc­trine of non­re­sis­tance to evil. I had the priv­i­lege of study­ing your writ­ings also, which left a deep impres­sion on my mind.

Gand­hi refers to a law forc­ing the Indi­an pop­u­la­tion in South Africa to reg­is­ter with the author­i­ties. He goes on to inquire about the authen­tic­i­ty of the “Let­ter” and asks per­mis­sion to trans­late it, with pay­ment, and to omit a neg­a­tive ref­er­ence to rein­car­na­tion that offend­ed him. Tol­stoy respond­ed a few months lat­er, in 1910, allow­ing the trans­la­tion free of charge, and allow­ing the omis­sion, with the qual­i­fi­ca­tion that he believed “faith in re-birth will nev­er restrain mankind as much as faith in the immor­tal­i­ty of the soul and in divine truth in love.” Over­all, how­ev­er, he express­es sol­i­dar­i­ty, greet­ing Gand­hi “fra­ter­nal­ly” and writ­ing,

God help our dear broth­ers and co-work­ers in the Trans­vaal! Among us, too, this fight between gen­tle­ness and bru­tal­i­ty, between humil­i­ty and love and pride and vio­lence, makes itself ever more strong­ly felt, espe­cial­ly in a sharp col­li­sion between reli­gious duty and the State laws, expressed by refusals to per­form mil­i­tary ser­vice.

The two con­tin­ued to write to each oth­er, Gand­hi send­ing Tol­stoy a copy of his Indi­an Home Rule and the trans­lat­ed “Let­ter,” and Tol­stoy expound­ing at length on the errors—and what he saw as the supe­ri­or characteristics—of Chris­t­ian doc­trine. You can read their full cor­re­spon­dence here, along with Tolstoy’s “Let­ter to a Hin­du” and Gandhi’s intro­duc­tion to his edi­tion. Despite their reli­gious dif­fer­ences, the exchange fur­ther gal­va­nized Gand­hi’s pas­sive resis­tance move­ment, and in 1910, he found­ed a com­mu­ni­ty called “Tol­stoy Farm” near Johan­nes­burg.

Gand­hi’s views on African inde­pen­dence would change, and Nel­son Man­dela lat­er adopt­ed Gand­hi and the Indi­an inde­pen­dence move­ment as a stan­dard for the anti-apartheid move­ment. We’re well aware, of course, of Gand­hi’s influ­ence on Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. For his part, Gand­hi wrote glow­ing­ly of Tol­stoy, and the mod­el the nov­el­ist pro­vid­ed for his own anti-colo­nial cam­paign. In a speech 18 years lat­er, he said, “When I went to Eng­land, I was a votary of vio­lence, I had faith in it and none in non­vi­o­lence.” After read­ing Tol­stoy, “that lack of faith in non­vi­o­lence vanished…Tolstoy was the very embod­i­ment of truth in this age. He strove uncom­pro­mis­ing­ly to fol­low truth as he saw it, mak­ing no attempt to con­ceal or dilute what he believed to be the truth. He stat­ed what he felt to be the truth with­out car­ing whether it would hurt or please the peo­ple or whether it would be wel­come to the mighty emper­or. Tol­stoy was a great advo­cate of non­vi­o­lence in his age.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gandhi’s Famous Speech on the Exis­tence of God (1931)

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Leo Tolstoy’s Masochis­tic Diary: I Am Guilty of “Sloth,” “Cow­ardice” & “Sissi­ness” (1851)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A Day in the Life of Zen Monk Leonard Cohen: A 1996 Documentary

I don’t think any­body real­ly knows why they’re doing any­thing. If you stop some­one on the sub­way and say, “Where are you going — in the deep­est sense of the word?” you can’t real­ly expect an answer. I real­ly don’t know why I’m here. It’s a mat­ter of “What else would I be doing?” Do I want to be Frank Sina­tra, who’s real­ly great, and do I want to have great ret­ro­spec­tives of my work? I’m not real­ly inter­est­ed in being the old­est folksinger around. 

- Leonard Cohen, speak­ing to author Pico Iyer in April 1998

 

One need not have lived a rock n’ roll lifestyle to be famil­iar with its plea­sures and pit­falls. That heady mix of drugs, sex, and pub­lic adu­la­tion isn’t sus­tain­able. Some can’t sur­vive it. Some retire to a more staid domes­tic scene while oth­ers are left chas­ing a spot­light that’s unlike­ly to favor them twice. But rarely do you find one who choos­es to give it all up to become a Bud­dhist monk.

Well, not all.

As direc­tor Armelle Brusq’s 1996 doc­u­men­tary, above, shows, singer-songwriter—and yes—Zen monk Leonard Cohen’s rou­tine at the Mount Baldy Zen Cen­ter out­side Los Ange­les extend­ed beyond the usu­al mind­ful­ness prac­tice. His sim­ple quar­ters were out­fit­ted with a com­put­er, print­er, radio, and a Tech­nics KN 3000 syn­the­siz­er. He some­times doffed his robes to enter the record­ing stu­dio or enjoy a bowl of soup at Canter’s Deli. Com­par­a­tive­ly, his world­ly attach­ments were few, divvied between the pro­fes­sion­al­ly nec­es­sary and the fond. Still, call­ing his daugh­ter, Lor­ca, to pass along a veterinarian’s update, Cohen sounds every inch the dot­ing Jew­ish dad.

Celebri­ty devo­tion to Kab­bal­ah or var­i­ous East­ern spir­i­tu­al prac­tices often stinks of the super­fi­cial, a pass­ing fan­cy that won’t last more than a year or two. Cohen’s rela­tion to Zen Bud­dhism is endur­ing, a gift from his long­time friend and teacher, Mount Baldy’s Roshi, Kyozan Joshu Sasa­ki, who died last year at the age of 107.

One of Cohen’s respon­si­bil­i­ties was help­ing Roshi with the myr­i­ad small details the elder­ly abbot would have had dif­fi­cul­ty nav­i­gat­ing on his own. Cohen seems entire­ly at peace in the road­ie role, keep­ing track of lug­gage while on tour, and fetch­ing cones for the entire par­ty from a near­by ice cream truck.

The poem Cohen penned in hon­or of Roshi’s 89th birth­day is of a piece with his most endur­ing work. Think Suzanne’s oranges were the only fruit? Not so:

His stomach’s very hap­py

The prunes are work­ing well

There’s no one left in heav­en

And there’s no one going to hell

Film­mak­er Brusq is chiefly con­cerned with doc­u­ment­ing Cohen’s spir­i­tu­al real­i­ty, but she toss­es in a few treats for those hun­gry for pop iconog­ra­phy, par­tic­u­lar­ly the impromp­tu show-and-tell at the 25-minute mark, when the crew peeks into the leg­end’s mem­o­ra­bil­ia-filled LA office.

The sound­track, too, is music to a Cohen fan’s ears, and lyri­cal­ly inspired giv­en the sub­ject:

Wait­ing for The Mir­a­cle

Teach­ers

A Thou­sand Kiss­es Deep 

Democ­ra­cy

The Future

Suzanne

Dance Me to the End of Love

Clos­ing Time

Nev­er Any Good

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Bud­dhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlight­ened Life

Leonard Cohen Nar­rates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fea­tur­ing the Dalai Lama (1994)

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musi­cian Fea­tured in a 1965 Doc­u­men­tary

200 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Hap­py 18th birth­day to her favorite for­mer­ly-17-year-old play­wright! Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened Life

There is a cer­tain kind of think­ing that the Bud­dha called “mon­key mind,” a state in which our ner­vous habits become com­pul­sions, haul­ing us around this way and that, forc­ing us to jump and shriek at every sound. It was exact­ly this neu­rot­ic state of mind that Leonard Cohen sought to quell when in 1994 he joined Mt. Baldy Zen Cen­ter in Los Ange­les and became a monk: “I was inter­est­ed in sur­ren­der­ing to that kind of rou­tine,” Cohen told The Guardian in 2001, “If you sur­ren­der to the sched­ule, and get used to its demands, it is a great lux­u­ry not to have to think about what you are doing next.”

There at Mt. Baldy the jour­nal­ist and cos­mopoli­tan racon­teur Pico Iyer met Cohen, unaware at first that it was even him. In his short Bac­calau­re­ate speech above to the 2015 grad­u­at­ing class of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Iyer describes the meet­ing: After show­ing him fond hos­pi­tal­i­ty and set­tling him into the com­mu­ni­ty, Iyer says, Cohen told him that “just sit­ting still, being unplugged, look­ing after his friends was… the real deep enter­tain­ment that the world had to offer.”

At the time, Iyer was dis­ap­point­ed. He had admired Cohen for exact­ly the oppo­site qualities—for trav­el­ing the world, being plugged into the cul­ture, and liv­ing a rock star life of self-indul­gence. It was this out­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion of Cohen that Iyer found allur­ing, but the poet and song­writer’s inward life, what Iyer calls the “invis­i­ble ledger on which we tab­u­late our lives,” was giv­en to some­thing else, some­thing that even­tu­al­ly brought Cohen out of a life­long depres­sion. Iyer’s the­sis, drawn from his encounter with Leonard Cohen, Zen monk, is that “it is real­ly on the mind that our hap­pi­ness depends.”

Iyer refers not to that per­pet­u­al­ly wheel­ing mon­key mind but what Zen teacher Suzu­ki Roshi called “begin­ner’s mind” or “big mind.” In such a med­i­ta­tive­ly absorbed state, we for­get our­selves, “which to me,” Iyer says, “is almost the def­i­n­i­tion of hap­pi­ness.” Cohen said as much of his own per­son­al enlight­en­ment: “When you stop think­ing about your­self all the time, a cer­tain sense of repose over­takes you.” After his time at Mt. Baldy, he says, “there was just a cer­tain sweet­ness to dai­ly life that began assert­ing itself.” Iyer’s short speech, filled with exam­ple after exam­ple, gives us and his new­ly grad­u­at­ing audi­ence sev­er­al ways to think about how we might find that sense of repose—in the midst of busy, demand­ing lives—through lit­tle more than “just sit­ting still, being unplugged” and look­ing after each oth­er.

Note: You can watch a Euro­pean doc­u­men­tary on Cohen’s stint as a bud­dhist monk here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musi­cian Fea­tured in a 1965 Doc­u­men­tary

Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poet­ry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musi­cian Began)

Leonard Cohen Nar­rates Film on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fea­tur­ing the Dalai Lama (1994)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adventure and Creative Act

Many of us in the West live in some of the most frag­ment­ed reli­gious land­scapes in the world, but in the midst of deep­en­ing lev­els of con­flict over poli­cies of birth and death, these two issues that divide us also join us togeth­er. More than at any time in his­to­ry, peo­ple live in expec­ta­tion of sim­i­lar spans of life; we all lament the loss of loved ones who die at any age; and most of us live with some fear of death, or at least vio­lent, untime­ly death like the kind Alan Watts describes above.

Watts, Eng­lish Zen guru of sorts (though he would not like the label) lec­tured more on death than per­haps any oth­er philo­soph­i­cal or reli­gious teacher since the Bud­dha, but he did so in a way that illu­mi­nates our ideas about the inevitable end, even if it should come upon us all of the sud­den.

You heard a bomb com­ing at you, you could hear it whis­tle and you knew it was right above you and head­ing straight at you, and that you were fin­ished. 

This is no abstract thought exper­i­ment, of course, but the his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence of mil­lions of peo­ple, from Dres­den to Iraq. But despite the ter­ri­fy­ing exam­ple, Watts describes achiev­ing in that moment absolute clar­i­ty and uni­ver­sal­i­ty. The dread­ed bomb whis­tles toward you, “and you accept­ed it,” he says.

How exact­ly does one achieve that accep­tance? With­out dog­ma­tiz­ing or mys­ti­cism, Watts offers some wis­dom in anoth­er excerpt from a lec­ture above. This video’s use of melo­dra­mat­ic film clips and cin­e­mat­ic music may be a lit­tle schmaltzy, but his mat­ter of fact talk isn’t less­ened by it. Though not every­one pass­es on their genes to a next gen­er­a­tion, an exam­ple he dis­cuss­es in both excerpts, we do all leave the plan­et to make room for new peo­ple, wher­ev­er they come from, and this, he says, “is an hon­or­able thing…. It’s a far more amus­ing arrange­ment for nature to con­tin­ue the process of life through dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als than it is through the same indi­vid­ual.”

Watts was not at all doc­tri­naire about death, par­tic­u­lar­ly in his lat­er years. In a con­ver­sa­tion with Aldous Huxley’s wife Lau­ra in 1968, he called dying “an art,” though not quite like Sylvia Plath did: “It is also,” he said, “an adven­ture.” He con­sid­ered Aldous Hux­ley’s unortho­dox death—on an LSD trip while Lau­ra read to him from the Tibetan Bar­do Thodol—a “high­ly intel­li­gent form of dying.” Nonethe­less, Watts, an Epis­co­pal priest become an explain­er of Zen Bud­dhism in Amer­i­ca, also had a great deal to say about more for­mal reli­gious ideas of death.

In the lec­ture above, from a 1959 Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion pro­gram, Watts explains a par­tic­u­lar Bud­dhist con­cept of rein­car­na­tion and rebirth through var­i­ous realms. It’s a pic­ture as fan­tas­tic and pic­turesque as Dante’s, and like his cre­ative act, one that can be read with some lit­er­al and much pro­found­ly philo­soph­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. These con­cep­tions help demon­strate that far from fear­ful, our puz­zling over the inevitabil­i­ty and mys­tery of death can be, as it was for Watts, “one of the most cre­ative thoughts I ever thought in my life.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Dis­cov­ers the Secrets of Aldous Hux­ley and His Art of Dying

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

The Zen Teach­ings of Alan Watts: A Free Audio Archive of His Enlight­en­ing Lec­tures

 Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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