Wisdom for उलझन · Confusion

मा अनुस्सवेन, मा परम्पराय, मा इतिकिराय, मा पिटकसम्पदानेन, मा तक्कहेतु, मा नयहेतु, मा आकारपरिवितक्केन, मा दिट्ठिनिज्झानक्खन्तिया, मा भब्बरूपताय, मा समणो नो गरूति । … यदा तुम्हे कालामा अत्तनाव जानेय्याथ … — "Not by what you have heard, not by lineage, not by hearsay, not by scripture, not by logic, not by inference, not by a reasoned train of thought, not because a view appeals to you after pondering it, not because the speaker seems competent, and not because 'the ascetic is our teacher'… But when you know for yourselves…"

Count the room. The twenty-four-year-old between the offer letter and the parents' plan has every one of these ten present — lineage, what everyone says, the elder's standing, the argument that sounds right. The Buddha does not say ignore them. He says not one of them is the deciding thing. Attanā'va jāneyyātha — when you yourselves know. He does not say when that will be.

एत्थाहं भो गोतम अञ्ञाणमापादिं, एत्थ सम्मोहमापादिं । … अलञ्हि ते वच्छ अञ्ञाणाय, अलं सम्मोहाय । गम्भीरो हायं वच्छ धम्मो दुद्दसो दुरनुबोधो सन्तो पणीतो अतक्कावचरो निपुणो पण्डितवेदनीयो ॥ — Vacchagotta: "Here I have fallen into not-knowing; here I have fallen into confusion." The Buddha: "No wonder you do not know, Vaccha; no wonder you are confused. This is deep, hard to see, hard to understand — peaceful, subtle, beyond the reach of reasoning."

The second time in the canon he tells a confused person that their confusion is the right response. Vaccha has asked ten metaphysical questions and received no yes and no no, and says so, honestly: I am confused. The Buddha does not fix it. He locates it — the thing you are trying to think about is deep; of course you cannot think your way to the bottom of it tonight. Being confused by a deep thing is not a mistake. It is accuracy.

सस्सतो लोकोति वा मालुक्यपुत्त दिट्ठिया सति, असस्सतो लोकोति वा दिट्ठिया सति, अत्थेव जाति अत्थि जरा अत्थि मरणं … येसाहं दिट्ठेव धम्मे निघातं पञ्ञपेमि ॥ — "Suppose a man was struck by an arrow thickly smeared with poison, and said: I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know whether the man who shot me was a noble, a brahmin, a merchant or a worker… Whether the view is that the world is eternal or that it is not, there is still birth, there is old age, there is death, there is sorrow — and it is the ending of these, here and now, that I teach."

Māluṅkyaputta wanted the ten great questions answered before he would practise another day. The reply is the one place in this literature where someone is told that their confusion is real and also not the first thing. Some knots are allowed to stay knotted while the arrow comes out. If you cannot settle who you are or what you believe tonight, the Buddha's own suggestion is that you may not need to before you sleep, eat, and are kind to the person next to you.

"Scire debet quid petat ille qui sagittam vult mittere, et tunc derigere ac moderari manu telum: errant consilia nostra, quia non habent quo dirigantur; ignoranti quem portum petat nullus suus ventus est." — "The one who means to shoot an arrow must know what he is aiming at, and only then draw and steady the shaft. Our plans go astray because they have nothing to aim at. If you do not know which harbour you are making for, no wind is the right wind."

The letter opens with Lucilius writing in for advice about particular decisions, and Seneca refusing to give it: we all deliberate about the parts of life; nobody deliberates about the whole. For the person who no longer knows what they want, this is not a scolding. It is a diagnosis. The two lists come out the same length because the harbour has not been named — and naming a harbour is a different kind of work from choosing a door. Slower, and done sitting down.

"ἴδ᾽ ἀρχὴ φιλοσοφίας: αἴσθησις μάχης τῆς πρὸς ἀλλήλους τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ ζήτησις τοῦ παρ᾽ ὃ γίνεται ἡ μάχη." — "Look — here is the beginning of philosophy: a perception of the conflict of people with one another, and an inquiry into where the conflict comes from."

Everyone around you disagrees about your life — the parents, the friend who says leave, the friend who says stay, the one who left. Epictetus says that noticing this disagreement, and asking why reasonable people land in different places, is where thinking begins. Not where it has broken down. The person in the middle of six opinions is not the one who has failed to think. They are the only one in the room who has started.

"Τοῦτο τί ἐστιν αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ τῇ ἰδίᾳ κατασκευῇ;" — "This thing — what is it, in itself, in its own make-up? What is its substance, its material? What is its cause? What is it doing in the world? And how long does it last?"

Five questions, written by the most powerful man alive to himself, and not one of them is what should I do about it. He asks what the thing is before he asks what to do with it. A great deal of confusion is a decision being demanded of a thing that has not yet been looked at — the job, the marriage, the belief, still a blur of other people's descriptions. Marcus's habit was to look first. The decision, in his notebook, is never the first entry.

"The elephant was in a dark house: some Hindus had brought it for exhibition… As seeing it with the eye was impossible, each one was feeling it in the dark with the palm of his hand. The hand of one fell on its trunk: 'This creature is like a water-pipe.' Another touched its ear: to him it appeared to be like a fan. Another handled its leg: 'I found the elephant's shape to be like a pillar.' Another laid his hand on its back: 'Truly, this elephant was like a throne'… If there had been a candle in each one's hand, the difference would have gone out of their words."

Read it as the relationship you cannot judge. You have a hand on one part of it; they have a hand on another; your mother, who has heard about it, has a hand on a third. Each report is true of the part touched. The fight between you is a fight between two partial truths, and Rumi's quiet point is that nobody in the room is lying. Is it them or is it me is the wrong shape of question for an animal this size. The answer is a candle, not a verdict.

"Hidden things, then, are manifested by means of their opposite; since God hath no opposite, He is hidden. For the sight fell first on the light, then on the colour: opposite is made manifest by opposite… Therefore thou knewest light by its opposite: opposite reveals opposite in coming forth."

For the person holding two true things: in Rumi's cosmology, this is simply how knowing works. Nothing is seen except against its opposite. You know what you want partly by the thing you also want; you know what you believe partly by the belief you were handed and can no longer hold. The tension between them is not a malfunction of the mind. It is the mind doing the only thing it can do — seeing one thing by the light of another.

"The eye of sense-perception is only like the palm of the hand: the palm hath not power to reach the whole of him. The eye of the Sea is one thing, and the foam another: leave the foam and look with the eye of the Sea."

The two lines after the elephant, where he says what the story was for. The pros-and-cons list is palm work — one hand, one part at a time — and it will never touch the whole animal, however many rows you add. He does not say the palm is wrong. He says there is another organ. He does not say how to open it. He says only that the foam on the surface of the question is not the sea, and most of our deciding happens in the foam.

ऐका वचन हें संत । मी तों आगळा पतित । काय काजें प्रीत । करीतसां आदरें ॥१॥ माझें चित्त मज ग्वाही । सत्य तरलों मी नाहीं । एकांचिये वांहीं । एक देखीं मानिती ॥ध्रु.॥ — "Hear this, saints: I am a sinner beyond the rest — why do you love me with such respect? My own mind is my witness: truly, I have not crossed over. One person believes a thing because they saw another believe it."

The witness again — and this time it testifies against him. The saints have decided he is holy; his inner witness says not yet, and he trusts it over their praise exactly as he trusted it over the village's contempt. That is the point of the device. He is not claiming to be sure. He is claiming an inside witness that will not lie in either direction, including about himself. For the person who cannot tell whether it is them or the relationship: a witness that can say I don't know yet is worth more than a crowd that is certain — and the last line names the crowd's method exactly. They believe what they see each other believe.

बरें जालें देवा निघालें दिवाळें । बरी या दुष्काळें पीडा केली ॥१॥ अनुतापें तुझें राहिलें चिंतन । जाला हा वमन संवसार ॥ध्रु.॥ बरें जालें जगीं पावलों अपमान । बरें गेलें धन ढोरें गुरें ॥ — "It was good, God, that I went bankrupt. Good that this famine hurt me. In the burning of it, my mind stayed on you; the whole household business came up like vomit. Good that I was shamed in the world. Good that the money went, and the cattle."

Two abhangas later, the same facts and the opposite verdict. In the life-story they were shame; here each one is bareṁ jāleṁ — it was good. Nothing in the events changed. This is not offered as a promise that your confusion will turn into gratitude; it is a record that the judgment a person passes on their own life can reverse completely while the facts stay exactly where they were. Which means the verdict you are passing tonight is not the last one available.

निषेधाचा कांहीं पडिला आघात । तेणें मध्यें चित्त दुखविलें ॥१५॥ … आतां आहे तैसा दिसतो विचार । पुढील प्रकार देव जाणे ॥१८॥ — "Then a blow of prohibition fell, and in the middle of it the mind was wounded… Now the way of it looks as it looks. What comes next, God knows."

The most honest ending anyone has given to their own life story. Asked to account for himself, he reaches the present — it looks the way it looks — and declines to say what happens next. Not because he is modest. Because he does not know, and the witness he appointed in line twelve does not permit him to pretend. If you have been asked, by the family, by a form, by yourself, how this is all going to turn out, this is a saint declining to answer that question in his own Gāthā.

"It is just like this: you live in a dark room. Cobwebs are there, rats run here and there, in the corners dirt goes on multiplying. And suddenly I come in your room with a lamp. You tell me, 'Put off your lamp, because you are making my room dirty. It was never so; everything was so beautiful in darkness.' How can I make you confused? … If your room has to be cleaned, then the first step is to see the room as it is; otherwise how will you clean it?"

The same dark room Dnyaneshwar gave Arjuna, with the light moving the other way. For Dnyaneshwar the dark is the confusion; for Osho the confusion is the lamp. Both are right, on different nights. If the belief you were raised in has started to look like a room you had never actually seen — the dust, the corners — this is the voice that says the lamp did not make the dust.

"Just watch it: who is saying that you are confused? A confused mind cannot even say, 'I am confused.' You must have become a little watcher by the side — you see the confusion around you like smoke. But who is this who has become aware that there is confusion? All hope lies in this phenomenon: that a part of you — a very small part of course, but that too is too much in the beginning — a part of you can watch and look at the whole confusion."

The most useful sentence in the discourse, and the quietest. Whatever is reading this page and recognising itself as confused is, by that act, not entirely confused. There is a part standing to one side, watching the smoke. He does not ask you to make that part decide. He asks you to notice it exists — and not to drown it again by rushing to a verdict so that you can feel safe.

"Only a person who does not know much, only a person who is not aware, can remain without confusion. A really aware person will feel, hesitate — every step he will take and he will hesitate — because all certainties are lost. Says Lao Tzu, 'The wise man walks so cautiously, as if he is afraid of death on every step.'"

He is reaching for the fifteenth chapter quoted earlier on this page — hesitant, like one crossing a river in winter — and translating it for a twentieth-century audience. Hesitation as the gait of the wise. For the person who has been told they are indecisive by people who have never doubted anything: two voices, two and a half thousand years apart, say that the hesitation is what being awake walks like.

यदि मन्यसे सुवेदेति दभ्रमेवापि नूनं त्वं वेत्थ ब्रह्मणो रूपम् … ॥ नाहं मन्ये सुवेदेति नो न वेदेति वेद च । यो नस्तद्वेद तद्वेद नो न वेदेति वेद च ॥ — Teacher: "If you think 'I know it well', then you know only a very little of it…" Student: "I do not think I know it well. Nor do I not know it. I know — and I do not know. Whoever among us understands that — 'not that I do not know, and not that I know' — knows it."

The student's sentence is the exact grammar of a dilemma: I know, and I do not know. It is what the twenty-four-year-old would say about the job if he were being completely honest — I know it is right, and I know it is not. The Upanishad does not correct him. It records his sentence, and the next verse makes it the definition of knowing. Three thousand years ago, I know and I don't was entered into scripture as the right answer. (Variant: दभ्रम् / दहरम्, both "a little".)

न तत्र चक्षुर्गच्छति न वाग्गच्छति नो मनः । न विद्मो न विजानीमो यथैतदनुशिष्यात् ॥ — "There the eye does not go, nor speech, nor the mind. We do not know; we do not understand how one could teach it."

Na vidmo na vijānīmo — we do not know, we do not understand — said by the teachers, in the first person plural, in the third verse of the text. Not as a confession of failure: as the first true thing that can be said about the subject. A tradition that opens its instruction with we don't know how to teach this is not a tradition that will scold you for not knowing how to live it.

अन्धं तमः प्रविशन्ति येऽविद्यामुपासते । ततो भूय इव ते तमो य उ विद्यायां रताः ॥ … विद्यां चाविद्यां च यस्तद्वेदोभयं सह । अविद्यया मृत्युं तीर्त्वा विद्ययामृतमश्नुते ॥ — "Into blind darkness go those who worship not-knowing; into darkness greater still, those who delight in knowing… But the one who knows both together — knowing and not-knowing — crosses death by the one, and by the other reaches the deathless."

Ubhayaṁ saha — both, together. This is the Upanishad's explicit instruction for two truths, and it is not pick one. It is hold both — and it adds, in verse 9, that choosing either alone leads into the dark, with the confident chooser going in deeper. Jung's waterfall between above and below is this verse in twentieth-century prose. The oldest text has it as the method, stated once, in six words.