Letting go: the third one is the good one

3 july

And what if the things that we come across, those things that we decide to let go into our life without much ado, are just anchors? 

If books would be made in marble, like those old staircases, the words in my Siddharta would be shiny and a bit curve, from the many times that I have walked across them. I figure that book as a winding staircase, actually, with turns to stop walking and look around. One is the conversation between Gautama and Siddartha. Gautama exposes his views, ultimately the doctrine that we need to let go to avoid endlessly winding the karmic wheel. Siddartha asks him if his exposing of this view isn’t, in itself, an act of not letting go; an act that will keep him tied to the endless consequences of his preaching, never letting him go. 

Now, please, just stop and take a little moment. This is one those brilliant moments in which cultures cross, in which a westerner like Hesse has spotted a fundamental logic contradiction in buddhists teachings. If all what it is is to let go, what sense does it mean to help others, to love others? 

The solution of Hesse, who wasn’t just another westerner, is to make Gautama smile at the wise and sharp analysis of Siddharta. You have heard me well, he tells Siddartha. And you are intelligent to have spot this point. But, my young and intelligent man, beware of the excess of intelligence. And so Gautama smiles again, and disappears from the pages of the book.

For quite some years I could not make much sense of this passage. I did use it to illustrate my own contradictions and conflicts, being buddhist and left wing activist/politician. How can the acting for a social cause merge with the letting go that buddhism preaches? I did not know. Eventually my own buddhism drifted to the zen versions of it, and their use of koans, those totally beautiful, sharp and absurd situations, that apparently need to be solved by the practicioner. Eventually I got that they needed no solution as we understand solutions, instead the contemplation of the tensions described might bring us somewhere else. There is nothing too exotic or esoteric in the whole zen thing. It is just another way to change perspectives, to challenge your current perception. Perhaps that was Hesse’s attempt in describing that contradiction between letting go and acting compassionately. 

And so my friends Mari and Toto challenge me and my previous article, and point to the limitations of that letting go in which we all seem to agree, at least to some extent. As Mari tells, should we also let go a Tesla, if it comes our way? Or should we let ourselves go, and not be so strict with out letting go of material things? And then of course I would love to do the Gautama thing, and ask them to portrait me looking interesting with a long white beard (because the long hair is indeed long gone) and penetrating eyes and a kind smile and perhaps even some white robes hanging from my -alas- not anymore thin frame… just about to pronounce some deep, oriental and eventually opaque piece of wisdom. But let’s not. Let’s not keep on doing the orientalist thing, adding layers upon layers of exoticism. Let’s for once be relaxed, and let go of all that. Is that Tesla, of whatever you are about to buy, or whatever you are going to do to somebody else going to make you freer? Or will it be just another anchor fixing you to what you do not want to be?

 

What I like the most of this question is that there is no true answer. It is what you make of it. You are free.