Recent musings from my notebooks: H. H. Art Kleps, Buddhism and Christianity, Unamuno, C.S. Lewis


A dream about His Highness Art Kleps

A dream I had last night has convinced me to take up the thorny subject of His Highness Art Kleps again. Immediately after the dream I was of the opposite opinion. I was glad I woke up, and thought, “I should forget about writing any more about him.”

In the dream a small van with silver and black paneling pulled up to deliver party supplies. The driver also handed over a receipt for $2000 which had been charged to the church account. With a sinking heart I remembered that I had placed the order, and at the same moment I realized that Art had just arrived. “Who ordered that?” he demanded to know, and then he instructed me to tell the guy to take it back and not to pay the bill. I put off telling him that it had already been paid. He was already accusing the man who delivered it of fraud, and I knew that it wasn’t fraud and that Art was going to want me to back up the claim that it was. Then he asked me, “Why did you order it?” I replied that I had had a feeling that something important was going to happen so that there would be a celebration. I was being dishonest, and trying to flatter him that his arrival was the important event. In fact I had had no such premonition and was just hoping Art would be pleased with me or at least not mad at me. At the same time I was disgusted with myself for letting myself be controlled by Art in this way.

As I began to realize it was a dream and to wake up, I was dismayed that this ghost from my past still had this power over me in my dream. I thought about the fact that I have been thinking for some time about writing about my relationship with Art, and at that moment, I resolved not to do it. I just wanted to be done with him. But now I’m thinking that I don’t need to be done with him. I just need to change the relationship by making it clear to myself that it was good and right for me to be a loyal disciple of his for a while and then to quit, and that it is not clinging to the past to want to think about what he was right about and what he was wrong about. Yes, he is dead, but also he is still alive, and that is consistent with what he taught and with what I now believe and tell anyone who is interested.:

Art Kleps says (in “The Excommunication of Timothy Leary”, DTS, okneoac.org):

“The understanding which the peak psychedelic experience brings to everyone is always and everywhere identical (but is repressed in a million different ways): Life is a dream, and it is your dream. This message, which we may call ‘solipsism’ or ‘nihilism’ or ‘yogacara’ or ‘madhayamaka’ or ‘Zen’ Buddhism is the message of every great mystical philosopher in human history—the message, within the dream, that tells you it is a dream.

“Everything else is repression.

“Three dimensional space is an illusion. The flow of time is an illusion.

“History is an illusion. Timothy Leary is an illusion. I am an illusion.

“Within your illusion, the great religious traditions (repressed, no later than they begin, in a million different ways) always stand for the assertion that one does not ‘attain immortality’, but rather realizes, upon one’s enlightenment, that there is no ‘death’ any more than there is any ‘life’, other than as fake dramas to maintain the illusion of externality, multiplicity, and space-time. One’s mind does not exist in the world, the world exists in one’s mind. What is the nature of that mind—that is the question. The ‘conscious’ wish system, obviously, is only a part of it. The ego may steer, but it does not rule. There is more to it than that.”

But I say (Dreams and Resurrection, pp. 24-5):

“. . . [I]f I am dreaming right now, then there must be a waking reality relative to which this is a dream. Even though I am not consciously aware of anything in that reality, I may be in some way dimly aware of it or it may be affecting what I am dreaming. So, the relativistic conception of dreaming and waking does not have the consequence that there is no reality and all is merely a dream. We would be equally justified in saying that there are no mere dreams and all is reality. We are more justified, though, in thinking that sometimes we sleep and dream, and other times we are awake; that these alternate on a fairly regular basis; that, although it is possible that in the future we will sleep and never dream again, or sleep and only dream, and not wake up again, or that we will wake up once and for all and never sleep or dream again, we have no basis in experience that would justify us in expecting any of those possibilities.”

The medieval sense of “comedy”

The medieval sense of “comedy” is that of a narrative that ends happily. It is in that sense that, for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy is a comedy. The central revelation of a peak LSD trip and of Christianity is that life is a comedy in this sense, not in the sense of a performance intended to provoke laughter (which is consistent with the fact that life does include times of laughter).

Buddhism teaches that nothing is permanent, that the cause of suffering is wanting some things to be permanent, and that there is a solution to the problem of suffering, which is the realization that nothing is permanent. Christianity teaches that we are permanent (“we” includes all subjects of experience), and that suffering is bearable because in the long run joy is so much greater. So, I suppose both Buddhism and Christianity teach that life is a comedy in the medieval sense, and the whole issue depends on whether it’s true that nothing is permanent.

For Unamuno, who wrote The Tragic Sense of Life, the life that is tragic is a life with no afterlife. For him, the life that includes the afterlife is a comedy, in the medieval sense, and not a tragedy. And this is because he hoped for the apokatastasis, the restoration of all things.

C. S. Lewis would say that he, too, hopes everyone will be saved, but he doesn’t realize, as Unamuno does, that if even one person is not saved, then life is a tragedy, after all, for all of us. The evidence that he doesn’t realize this is that he is happy to defend what he calls “mere Christianity,” which teaches that some, maybe even most, people will be damned forever. The ethics of this misunderstanding of Christianity is no better than the utilitarianism of nonbelievers. One should repent of one’s sins, ask for and accept God’s forgiveness, and teach others to do the same; and do this in the hope of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” while allowing that many will not attain happiness at all, because if they haven’t repented and accepted forgiveness before their death or Judgment Day, whichever comes first, it is too late for them forever.

Jesus didn’t say, “Maximize utility,” or “Do the best you can do.” He said, “Be perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”

Art Kleps says (Millbrook , Bench Press edition, p.93):

“It all comes back to Dick Alpert’s question to me when I was explaining what I had realized back at Millbrook: ‘I do have a life of my own, don’t I?’ That’s his business. All I know about him is what I know about him, and, if he ‘thickens the plot’ I’m glad he is there to serve as a character in my story. I am content to have him think of me in the same way.”

But I say:

When Art says, “I am content to have him think of me in the same way,” he shows that he does think Dick Alpert has a life of his own. Even when he says, with emphasis, “That’s his business,” he implies that Alpert does have a life of his own. But when he says, “All I know about him is what I know about him, and, if he ‘thickens the plot’ I’m glad he is there to serve as a character in my story,” he says something consistent with the solipsistic reasoning that since he can’t know Alpert’s experience in the same direct way that he knows his own—that is, as the subject of that experience—then he can only know Alpert as an object of experience and that, as far as he knows, he himself is the only subject of experience that exists. And that reasoning is flawed. It is true that my experiencing of something is not the same as your experiencing of that same thing (or event or process). But to believe that is to believe that I am not the only subject of experience. It’s not just your business whether or not you have a mind of your own. It’s my business, too, because it makes a difference in how I should treat you.