Subject: The Royal Path
From: Baader, Cecilia (cbaader@casecorp.com)
Date: Sun Jan 30 2000 - 23:56:24 EST
Greetings, everyone.
Last week, we began to discuss Buddy v. Seymour as the actual hero of our
Glass family canon. Because weighing in on this subject required consulting
and yes, lifting, many of the ideas espoused in the Alsen book, I have left
off answering until now. Because I know that the listmembers come from all
walks of life, I'm going to include a bit of explanation in this post that
will be totally unnecessary for some and a little beyond others. Bear with
me, because I think that what Alsen has to say is extraordinary, and opens
another level of understanding of the Glass stories.
The first thing to understand is that in the Hindu faith, there are four
different paths toward enlightenment: bhakti yoga, the path of devotion to
god, jnana yoga, the path of study and knowledge, karma yoga, the path of
work and service, and raja yoga, the path of study and meditation. Seymour
takes the royal path, raja yoga, in an effort to get beyond what he was able
to accomplish in earlier incarnations and move quickly towards illumination:
"Raja yoga, the 'royal' or most difficult path of spiritual advancement...
aim[s] to speed up spiritual progress and to lead God-seekers to moments of
illumination by making them concentrate all their physical, mental, and
physical powers... When the basic conditions of yama and ni-yama are met;
when the proper upright posture is maintained; when the breathing exercises
are executed perfectly; and when the mind is steady in the repetition of the
mantra, then one can reach the highest stage of raja yoga, the trance-like
state of samadhi. And it is during samadhi the raja yogin achieves
temporary illumination and oneness with God" (153-155).
Unfortunately, the path of raja yoga requires a person to reject everything
else and seek only the path of enlightenment. Seymour, we see from Buddy,
has managed to get quite far in his meditations: he is able to determine
that he, Buddy and Zooey have been brothers through at least three
incarnations, he is able to see the flashes of light that come along with
great flashes of insight, and he is able to see some of the future, though
his vision is not altogether clear. However, at some point he comes to a
standstill, and Seymour, determined to reach nirvana after this incarnation,
decides to move forward and change his path.
He abandons the path of raja yoga and marries Muriel in an attempt to move
into the next stage, or arasma of life. Vivekanada explains: "The Hindu
begins his life as a student [brahmacharya]; then he marries and becomes a
householder [garhasthya]; in old age he retires [vanaprasthya]; and lastly
he gives up the world and becomes a sannyasin [sannyasa, monk and teacher].
"Raja yoga is therefore a path that is unsuitable for most people and should
only be pursued by sannyasins who have given up the world. Average
individuals who expect to lead normal lives had better pursue one of the
other three paths, bhakti, karma, or jnana yoga. For if these paths are
followed earnestly, the individual will eventually reach the same goal as
the raja yogin. Vivekananda illustrates this point with a story from the
_Mahabharata_, India's great epic:
A young sannyasin went to the forest. There he meditated,
worshipped, and practiced yoga for a long time. After much hard work and
practice, he was one day sitting under a tree, when some dry leaves fell
upon his head. He looked up and saw a crow and a crane fighting on the top
of the tree, which made him very angry. He said: "What! How dare you throw
thee dry leaves upon my head?" As with these words he angrily looked at
them, a flash of fire went out-such was the yogi's power- and burnt the
birds to ashes. He was very glad, almost overjoyed, at this development of
power: he could burn the crow and the crane by a look! After a time he had
to go to the town to beg his bread. He stood at a door and called out
"Mother, give me food." A voice came from inside the house: "Wait a little,
my son." The young man thought: "You wretched woman, how dare you make me
wait? You do not yet know my power." While he was thinking this, the voice
said again: "Boy, don't be thinking too much of yourself. Here is neither
crow nor crane." He was astonished. Still he had to wait. At last the
woman came, and he humbly said to her, "Mother, how did you know that?" She
said: "My boy, I do not know your yoga or your other practices. I am a
simple, ordinary woman. I made you wait because my husband is ill and I was
nursing him. All my life I have struggles to do my duty. When I was
unmarried, I did my duty to my parents; now that I am married, I do my duty
to my husband. That is all the yoga I practice. But by doing my duty I
have become illuminated; thus I could read your thoughts and know what you
had done in the forest" (156-157).
I love that story, by the way. (And yes, Sonny, I agree with your
description of Alsen's book as a sort of a "handbook" to the Glass stories.
It's wonderful.) So now Vivekananda has established that we can take more
than one path and still reach the same result. If raja yoga is not the
right path for you, perhaps karma yoga or one of the other paths is the
right one. Seymour has determined that he needs to force the issue and take
another path, karma yoga.
Seymour had hoped to spend his life as a sannyasin, but gives up that path
to attempt to become a householder, hoping that marriage and service to
simple Muriel will help him to advance. This is why, in RHTRC, Buddy is
reassured when he reads in Seymour's diary: "I feel as though I'm about to
be born, Sacred, sacred day... I've been reading a miscellany of Vedanta
all day. Marriage partners are to serve each other. Elevate, help, teach,
strengthen each other, but above all, _serve_" (90-91). He understands that
Seymour has decided upon a new path, that he is using his marriage to get
him beyond what study and meditation did not.
Now Seymour, in his "memo" to Buddy, he tells him that he thinks that
Buddy's path is the path of karma yoga, work and service. For through his
work, he constantly evolves towards a oneness with God. Read it again: "Do
you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by
_profession_. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism that I'd ever
heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but
your religion" (160). He then goes on to say that Buddy won't be asked if
what he was writing something wonderful and moving when he dies. He will be
asked only two questions: "Were most of your stars out? Were you busy
writing your heart out?" It's the same idea that Buddy later espouses to
Zooey, with his admonition to "Act, Zachary Martin Glass." Seymour tried
the raja yoga path and it failed him. Buddy has decided to reach oneness
with God by taking this more accessible path of making his work his
religion. And he advises Zooey to do the same.
Alsen completes the book with an explanation that "Hapworth 16, 1924" is
where Buddy makes it, where he is finally able to let his stars come out.
He's thrown out all trappings of "rattling good stories" and has written the
beautiful piece that allows him to come to terms with Seymour's death, to
understand where Seymour went wrong with his quest, and to go beyond it,
still loving his brother but no longer canonizing him. For in Hapworth, we
see the real Seymour, the one who threatens counselors and camp directors,
the one with a tiny little nasty streak. The same streak that would allow
him to do the kind of horrible thing like throw a rock at poor Charlotte or
shoot himself with his wife sleeping in the next bed.
So by writing about S. and coming to terms with the reality of his brother's
life, Buddy comes to a deeper understanding, an illumination. And now he is
free to go even deeper, to become all that is possible for him to be. Don't
get me wrong: he hasn't achieved enlightenment, but he has gotten further
in this incarnation. Buddy still has problems to overcome, but he is a
little further than he had been. Seymour, however, has ended this
incarnation with the same problems that he had before. He still has to
figure out how to get around this problem that he has with anger and with
lust. Added to that, he has this little problem of the bad karma resulting
from his suicide. Seymour, however much idealized by his family, has taken
a step backward. And Buddy's progression towards that understanding,
towards the acceptance of his _real_ brother, is the real action of all the
Glass stories.
So have I convinced you?
Regards,
Cecilia.
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