Deep Thoughts: on America and spirituality (my own observation: the US has too much religion, too little spirituality)

The Disappearance of the Outside
An interview with Andrei Codrescu
by Simeon Alev

introduction

I first heard of Andrei Codrescu when someone asked me if I had seen Road Scholar , his 1992 documentary, in which the Romanian-born American poet and National Public Radio commentator drives across America in a red Cadillac convertible, stopping at unpredictable destinations to take the spiritual pulse, like a sincere but bemused country doctor, of his adopted homeland. No, I hadn't seen Road Scholar —in fact I had never heard of it—but as a member of a radical spiritual community, the odds were good that when I did, it would be in a communal setting at least superficially similar to some of those Codrescu had visited and filmed. And so it was that one evening last winter, in a makeshift screening room filled to capacity with many of my closest friends, I first made the acquaintance of Andrei Codrescu.

Road Scholar proved delightful and captivating. Codrescu's unique vantage point—expatriate of totalitarian post—Stalinist Romania and astute critic of the totalistic superficiality of modern America—gives the narration its delicious irony. His is a complex sensibility in which cynicism and idealism vie for supremacy and neither (at least in the film) ever conclusively wins. This tension creates a transparency through which those he interacts with are able to reveal themselves completely. Yet at the same time Codrescu is thoroughly and unapologetically opinionated, and his voice-over pronouncements are deadpan but deadly. At one point he says, "I felt that somehow I knew all these folks. They were the friends I lost to gurus in the sixties and seventies, grown a bit older. . . . They made me uneasy. Is there something wrong with the rest of us? . . . Probably—speaking for myself. On the other hand, the oddness of a theocratic hierarchy right in the middle of a representative democracy isn't calculated to make me feel any better." When the show was over and the lights came on, I looked around the room and asked myself, "What would Andrei Codrescu make of us?"

As this issue of What Is Enlightenment? began to take shape, my question acquired intriguing new dimensions. The commercial triumph of popular spirituality in the West was a phenomenon we wanted to examine in the most rigorous context possible, taking as our standard the arduous challenges and awesome potential that characterize the highest spiritual teachings. We hoped to create a forum in which it would be possible to discriminate clearly among the incredible variety of paths and approaches being propagated today in the name of transformative spirituality or enlightenment. And we felt certain that the unique insights of a social critic such as Andrei Codrescu could help us to understand some of the cultural factors which contribute to the epidemic blurring of what we feel are crucially important distinctions. But I wondered . . . did we speak the same language?

"That's right up my alley," Codrescu told me on the phone from his office in the English Department at Louisiana State University, after I had sent him my proposal for an interview. "I wrote a book about this which you might want to read. It's called The Disappearance of the Outside."

The Disappearance of the Outside (subtitled "A Manifesto for Escape") is unlike any of the numerous kaleidoscopic volumes of poetry, memoirs and often hilarious social commentary that Codrescu has also published. It is a profound and intricately reasoned indictment of contemporary Western society, in which the cultural economy of the capitalist West is shown to be as oppressively destructive to the human spirit as were the Orwellian regimes of the Soviet-dominated Eastern Bloc under which he grew up. The promise that Western-style democracy appears to hold for Eastern European countries newly open to its influence is deceptive and dangerous, Codrescu asserts, not only to their own citizens but to humanity as a whole. Why? Because the collective consciousness of the West, which threatens now more than ever before to become the dominant consciousness of the world, is unnaturally suffused with images, images designed to disconnect human beings from the uncontainable mystery of what Codrescu calls "the Outside."

"The difficulty of distinguishing between the illusions of commodity culture and reality haunt the art of our time," he writes. "Memory, never very reliable, is easily fooled. The copy cannot be told from the original. When the memory of the 'real' goes, the image may not even bear much resemblance to the original. . . . We will live in an abstract world (if we don't already). The real will have become strictly mythical. We won't notice the disappearance of the Outside, or our lack of desire for it."

Codrescu's analysis helped to explain our frequent bewilderment when confronted with so many popular and presumably convincing approaches to spiritual life that begin to seem dubious the moment they are examined in the context of that rarest but most authentic of attainments, that "pearl of great price," the literal human embodiment of perfect goodness, of that which is truly sacred. His revealing description of America as "an uninterrupted anthology of fads chasing each other faster and faster across shorter and shorter time spans" is recognizably the condition of much of the modern spiritual world, and there is certainly more than enough evidence to suggest that things in general are every bit as bad as Codrescu says they are.

In the course of our conversation, Codrescu readily admitted that growing up in the shadow of a communist dictatorship has left him with the indelible conviction that perfect goodness is neither attainable nor desirable, and that the very aspiration to realize it can only be motivated by a desire to impose on oneself and others a standard of morality and conduct that is suspiciously absolute and almost inevitably oppressive. But at the same time, he derives and transmits a palpable joy from peering with relentless clarity beneath the rampant superficiality of American culture, and his unusual willingness to face reality directly reflects an inspiring commitment both to the discovery of truth and to the preservation of mystery.

interview

WIE: Road Scholar was our point of entry into your world, and one of the things that struck us as we watched it was that it had quite a strong spiritual emphasis. Was it your intention from the beginning to interview so many spiritual practitioners of one kind or another, or did it just happen that way as the project unfolded?

Andrei Codrescu: No, we certainly planned it that way. There were two things that interested me when I started elaborating the idea of the film. One was, what is the state of communal experiments after the fall of the big communal experiment in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Some of the early American utopian communities were used by Marx and Engels to elaborate their theory of communism, and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union took that as far as they did by transforming these utopias, in the process, into something that didn't resemble the original versions at all. But some of these communities are still here, and I wanted to know why. And the other thought I had was that I wanted to revisit some of my past. In the past—the late sixties to mid-seventies—I knew quite a few people who were interested in spiritual life and I was close enough to them to witness and occasionally to participate.

WIE: How do you see the state of spiritual life in America today?

AC: I feel that the sixties were the fountainhead of everything bad and good in America today, but as far as the proliferation of various kinds of techniques for attaining enlightenment, I think that that has been largely a function of the market. The great discovery of the early seventies was that the great new markets are interior—they're inward, they're spiritual—and that that was the direction that we were going to go in because we had pretty much exhausted physical space in America. And entrepreneurs of the spirit, if you like, took the cue from there.

WIE: Santa Fe comes across in the film as the quintessential New Age Mecca.

AC: Yes, Santa Fe is clearly the film's locus of what's being marketed, and if you've read the book you know that I met many more people there than were shown in the movie. I found most of them to be charming frauds. Just about everybody seemed to be operating on the surface level of suggestion and gimmickry—crystals, aura healing, etcetera. And then there were the out-and-out psychotics. . . .

WIE: Why do you think that this country has been unable to sustain the kind of radical self-inquiry that was embraced in the sixties? In the nineties, spiritual interest seems to be no less widespread but it doesn't seem to be propelled by the same degree of selfless passion and willingness to risk everything. You were nineteen when you came here in 1966. What is your former nineteen-year-old émigré's perspective on what happened in the sixties and what's happened since?

AC: The sixties was one of those epochs like the twenties—the twenties into the thirties—that suddenly compelled everyone to an urgency that was quite miraculous. These sorts of evolutionary periods occur, but I can't claim to understand why they happen. All I know is that there are tremendous energies loose in the collective body that are competing, and in the twenties and thirties, most of the important thinking in philosophy, in psychology, in ethnography, in history, in geology, was being done. You had, in France, the surrealist writers, Jacques Lacan in psychology . . . quite a few people working in various areas. And what they were competing with at that time was fascism, which was an extremely strong and simplified recipe for suicide. So you could say that this tremendous explosion of creative activity was a rush to find out what human beings were before they were going to be killed. I think that in the sixties we had the same feeling. It was another end of history—there have been several ends of history that have occurred since Nietszche proclaimed the death of God—and we experienced the same kind of urgency. We wanted to put human life on a new basis. We wanted to find out whether it was possible to live without war, to live in a different way. And that impulse translated itself into an emergency, a psychic emergency. But a very strong wave of oppression soon followed the optimistic explosion of the sixties, and what happened as a result was the translation of the spiritual quest into the realm of politics. Because while of course the FBI and the other oppressive institutions of the government couldn't understand the spiritual quest, they did understand politics, and once things were translated into politics it became easier for them to suppress it.

So for a while America had been nineteen years old just like I was, but now it began to age very quickly. This was partly because the war had disappeared, so there was a different status quo, and partly because we were suddenly introduced to several alternative realities, really that started with Ronald Reagan, who was an absolutely brilliant hologram, a projection of several authoritarian desires in the body politic. What he presented us with was a renewed sense of nationalism, the promise of a shining economy in which everybody could participate so that they could have whatever they wanted, not by trying to change the way they lived but simply by buying it. That was really the beginning of the triumph of consumer society in a very, very big way. And as people got older, pretty soon they began to worry about making a living and then the urgency left. A more radical way to think of it is that the last train for God left America in about 1974. There was a great rush to get on board and many people did—they either died or were marginalized to some place where they still exist. But the rest of us stayed behind and tried to organize life as best we could.

WIE: Georg Feuerstein, elsewhere in this issue, distinguishes between authentic liberation teachings and "watered-down versions of powerful original teachings made palatable to Western consumers." What aspects of our culture would predispose spiritual seekers to accept these diluted teachings? And what is it that has to be removed from genuine teachings in order to make them attractive to Americans?

AC: Our consumer culture is both material and spiritual, and the success of consumerism and spectacle has to do with packaging. You could say that more than two-thirds of the things that make us happy do so because of the package they come in, the box. There's nothing inside. Our attention span has been severely reduced over the past two or three decades. Some people blame television, and it's probably true. But Attention Deficit Disorder is not an entirely negative condition. We also have ADD, or a reduced attention span, because we want to absorb and incorporate more and more information and more and more products in order to make sense of our world. It is only an ascetic minority that tries to do without things, without technologies, without consumption, but even they are inextricably linked to these things. Even those people who consciously refuse to participate are still connected to the global culture, so in a sense there is no choice but to be within it and to think it. So our short attention span comes from an effort to defend our humanity and also our sense of self from a culture that splits it all the time, that divides it, divides it, divides it. Because capitalism is schizophrenia; it is a multiple-personality-producing force. In order to defend yourself against that you have to absorb very fast more and more, and so you don't pay enough attention.

But there is another aspect to your question about making a spiritual package that is pleasing or saleable. Historically, as we all know, true shamans and spiritual people have been shunned by most communities. They have been ostracized. The shamans had to live in a tree and they were dirty and frightful people, and when they came to the edge of the village, it was only the fact that they had spiritual and healing powers that kept the people from beating them with sticks and destroying them. And it seems to me that the shaman's perspective is the one from which to question the genuineness of any spiritual package that doesn't transform you into a complete freak who has to eat worms and live in the desert, that allows you to still live in your community and not be an outcast. Because a palatable spiritual package, to me, runs the danger of not having enough energy or of not being spiritual enough—an effect of being pretty much just a dilettante's dabbling in superstition. I really think that the genuinely spiritual person is dangerous, and charged with a kind of frightful energy and antisocial power. And when they appear, they will be shunned.

WIE: How do you feel, then, about people who are trying to make spiritual teachings popular by "defanging," to use your words, or "denaturing" them by removing the offensive or subversive elements you've touched on so that people will become interested in them?

AC: Those people are dangerous, actually. They're dangerous because they present a virtual reality in lieu of reality. Anybody who gives you a wax apple and tells you it's a real one, you know, you'll figure it out when you take your first bite. But for a while there, after you've bothered keeping it and you're not really eating it, they think you won't know the difference. And a lot of people don't.

The greatest enemy of the real is the seemingly real. And that is something we've gotten very good at doing—faking reality, faking the objects of our interest, presenting substitutes. This is a culture of simulation. It is possible for a poor person to think they are living as well as a rich person because what they buy looks the same, but theirs is made out of cheap s— while the rich people buy the stuff that's made out of genuine material.

WIE: It also seems possible that you might not figure it out. You could actually give yourself the illusion of eating, and even digesting, the wax apple.

AC: Yes, and that's apparently what's happening. There are quite a few people nowadays who are content with consuming substitutes and thinking they're having a genuine experience. And this is a process that's been going on for quite some time. I mean, there are people who know television families better than they know their own. The people sitting next to them on the couch are islands of mystery, while the people on television—the Huxtables, for example— everything is known about them. But the terms by which people relate to the mysteries sitting right next to them are those that are given by the fake, by the simulation, because the simulation provides a language, a way out of the difficulty of the real relationship. It's not so much that people mistake the simulation for the real, as that the simulation provides them with a way out of the difficulty of facing the real. It provides them with an escape.

WIE: The subtitle of your book The Disappearance of the Outside is "A Manifesto for Escape," but this is obviously not the kind of escape you mean. What do you see as a viable way out of the perils of life in a culture of ever accelerating simulation?

AC: I personally feel that there is an imperative to create, to make the world, which forces one to original expression and to the rejection of received ideas in any form, especially received language. But we have a great language problem these days because large areas of language have been laid waste by the media, by repetition of clichés, things that used to be meaningful but that mean absolutely nothing now because they've been said so many times, just like kids repeating words over and over until they don't mean anything any more. Some of those words once referred to important things, but now we have instead the continual creation of meaningless buzzwords in the New Age scene, giving us the mind numbing clichés by which most people live their lives today because they no longer know how to articulate their own experience. So under the circumstances it is better, I think, to use two or three notions or expressions that have been deeply examined and are lucid and candid than just to repeat after someone else. And this brings us to the question of ritual.

The fact is that all communities, in order to bond, need certain myths and rituals. By performing a ritual, you are in fact linked to the original act of creation of the community, you're linked to the original myth. So perhaps the important thing, especially today, is not to have a new form or new forms of expression, but to have rituals that are imbued with real meaning, myths that do indeed connect you to an original experience. And I think that would be the job of any truly spiritual community—to continually refresh through ritual the energy, the creative energy of the beginning, and then to continue from there. But things like running around with wolves in the woods or beating drums with Robert Bly don't seem to me to be genuine rituals in that way. They are just more entertainment's of the bored and affluent, who buy themselves a weekend of so-called spirituality and think they've done something. This kind of thing is really humorous. It's what the Czech novelist Milan Kinder defines as "kitsch." Kitsch is the awe that somebody feels about their own amazing good taste and ability to appreciate something. In other words, they're not truly living the experience or appreciating it; they're amazed at how amazing they themselves are for being able to do it.

WIE: In The Disappearance of the Outside you write, "If we face a new situation today, it is the speed with which everything is copied, co-opted and turned against itself. The original of anything, whether it be a poem or an assassination, still preserves something of the freshness of the intent. No such freshness will be found in the copy, and the copy of the copy will have long since turned its energy against the very freshness that spawned its ancestor." Does it seem likely to you that contemporary American versions of ancient spiritual teachings have fallen prey to the same process?

AC: They probably have.

WIE: Why do you think it is that spiritually inclined individuals often don't seem to take the time to deeply examine a prospective path in order to discover how authentic or transformative it really is?

AC: I think the reason why someone who is spiritually inclined may not look closely enough is probably a cultural problem: there are so many alternatives. It's like being in a supermarket. Do you really have time, in a spiritual supermarket, to look at every single thing and read the package and then follow someone? Or do you take for granted the written words and the testimonies of various people?

But I also think that in the sixties we were more adventurous and we really wanted to be "Outside." We threw ourselves Outside and there we encountered the wilderness and in that wilderness we discovered many, many things. We thought that the established churches and institutions at that time were part of the status quo and we wanted to have nothing to do with them. So we experimented, but I think that these experiments have been brought "inside" now. What I refer to as "the Outside" is a place that is now very rarely accessible.

WIE: Our capitalist culture is also a democracy, and one of the central and seemingly democratic injunctions in contemporary American spirituality is "Thou shalt not judge." Many people seem to feel that having a strong opinion in and of itself can cut you off from the experience of a deeper, more intuitive truth. Or alternatively, that all human experience is subjective anyway and there really isn't any deeper truth to speak of.

AC: Well, I think "Thou shalt not judge" is one of those wimpy, fearful, courage-free ideas. The potential of a human being is in commenting, translating, judging the world. Not only should you not shy away from judging, you should do so as much as possible—as long, of course, as you're not harming someone else by doing that. You see, it is not necessarily important to walk a mile in another person's shoes to know that that person is out to lunch or that their shoes don't fit. It's possible to know those things without actually having to do that. So I think that an unwillingness to judge only reflects a lack of courage and it's the disease of a politically correct culture that is afraid to offend. I think you should critique as much as you are able to observe, and not shy away from it. In a true democracy, you'll get equally strong opinions coming back at you, and you have to survive the clash. It's your prerogative as a free person to spout off and even make an ass of yourself if you like, but you'll get your corrective if somebody equally free is also speaking. And it's not that we should be intentionally offensive to one another; we should be candid. The genuineness of democratic discourse is in candor. It's not in avoiding offense.

WIE: How do you think candor fares against the equally popular notion that there is no such thing as objective truth to begin with? If this is true, what is it that makes it possible to discriminate in a way that isn't merely context-bound or subjective?

AC: It's possible to discriminate if you bring to it everything you know. Of course you may not know enough. You may be wrong. But you are duty-bound to be candid. And as I said before, in a true democracy, you will get your comeuppance if indeed you are wrong.

WIE: New Age spokesman Dr. Deepak Chopra delivered an address last May to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., before an assembled multitude of print and broadcast journalists, which was simultaneously broadcast live via national radio and television to an audience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. His popularity suggests to some people the possibility of reaching a critical mass of spiritual interest that could propel us toward an exciting new chapter in humanity's collective evolution. What do you think about this?

AC: I may be wrong because I don't know much about him, but I sort of associate Deepak Chopra with a whole slew of somewhat spiritual inspirational speakers that all the corporations in America are now very interested in because they single-handedly inspire bored workers and management to renewed energy which, of course, they will then put into the company. I'm not sure what that's all about, but I am sure that a large corporation doesn't hire a spiritual person in order to sabotage or create anarchy among its operations. They just sort of take a refresher course in, you know, getting in touch with what makes them happier so that they can be better workers. I've heard a couple of these guys but I had to walk out—I just couldn't take it. I think there's a degree of subversion, as we were saying before, to the true spiritual business and it's probably not one that would sit well with corporate management. I know people who teach Zen and juggling to workers and to corporate CEO types who have everything. They have Jaguars and swimming pools. The only thing they don't have—that they're now buying—is the spiritual dimension, if you like, to make themselves more effective.

WIE: Speaking of Jaguars and swimming pools, near the end of Road Scholar you say that "paradoxically, America is the most materialistic country on earth, and it's also the most spiritual." Of course there are many spiritual creeds these days that hold that spirituality and materialism need not be mutually exclusive, and some are even based on that idea. With that in mind, why do you feel this is a paradox? If it is, what is the effect of American materialism on American spirituality? And also, under ideal circumstances, what would be the effect of American spirituality on American materialism?

AC: That's a very good question. I think it is a paradox because the material world that we live in has its own imperatives and its own directions, and for the most part we are flotsam in the constant movement of production and consumption and we really don't have that much to say about it. Now, I think you can look at a lot of spiritual work as a work of resistance to our material culture, and that's where the paradox is. The fact that this country is rich in spiritual movements and ideas testifies, I think, to a certain resistance to being helpless flotsam in the production/consumption cycle. What influence material culture has on this spiritual work we've already discussed: it creates the necessity to package spiritual work, and really to package it in a way that resembles material products, because it's more palatable, it's easier to sell and it's more attractive. But what influence the spiritual work has on material culture is a more complicated question because, clearly, as we've been saying about inspirational speakers and people who introduce spiritual terms into corporate culture, there is some kind of influence, but I don't think it goes to fundamentally changing the nature of the production machine. Genuine spiritual work, I think, would tend to gum up the works. In that sense I don't think there is a great deal of visible influence by true spirituality on our material culture.