Relocating to Nirvana

Thomas Hobbes expresses the modern bourgeois mentality well when he says, “The felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis uitimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum.” We moderns are always restlessly producing and consuming. We are never satisfied. In fact we don't even have the faintest idea of what would satisfy us. The only thing we know for certain is that it would be preceded by the word "more."

In the fifties, Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert began experimenting with the hallucinogens psilocybin and LSD. He concluded that the state of mind to which the drugs took him was most certainly the summum bonum. He then sought more reliable ways to reach this state of mind. Alpert’s quest eventually led him to India, where he studied Yoga and Buddhism. Alpert concluded that the “Nirvana” referred to in Indian texts is essentially the same as the “high” produced by LSD and psilocybin, just reached by different means. The Indian method of achieving Nirvana was, he decided, superior. Drugs presented the inevitable problem of “coming down.”

In addition to this practical problem, however, there is a deeper theoretical one. Perhaps the tripper experiences the same Nirvana as the Eastern mystic, but he doesn’t really understand how or why. An appropriate analogy is the jet airplane. The jet takes us from one place to another quickly. But it doesn’t give us an understanding of the world in which the two places are situated, or the vastness of the distance separating them. The tripper is a tourist in Nirvana. The guru has relocated.

In Protestant theology, there was once a debate between salvation by faith and salvation by works. Salvation by works won. And this victory has become deeply entrenched in our nominally secular culture. We now unquestioningly privilege material works over psychological satisfaction. Insofar as our society makes use of psychology at all, it is primarily to return nonproductive people to the workforce. The idea that a nonproductive life, a life of contemplation and reverence, might be the higher form of life, has lost its plausibility in the Western world.