Skip to main content

A genuine fake

I was in a market in Malaysia once, looking at a display of 'Rolex' watches. The salesman asked me, 'You want to buy Rolex? Genuine fake'! 'What is the difference between a genuine fake and a fake Rolex I asked'? 'The genuine fake will work', he replied!

The religious scholar, Huston Smith, once engineered a meeting between the novelist, Aldous Huxley, and the spiritual writer, Alan Watts, both Englishman abroad in America. After Watts was gone, Huxley and Smith returned to their seats, where Smith reports he could virtually see Huxley sorting his mind. "Then his verdict: 'What a curious man! Half monk, half race track operator." When I (Smith) later reported this assessment to Alan, he loved it and acknowledged its accuracy."

It was Watts (in a essay) who coined the notion of being a genuine fake (and it was the title for Monica Furlong's biography of Watts). How you find yourself both the bearer of understanding something, able (in Watts' case) to convey it beautifully to others in wit laced, illuminating writings (and talks) and yet to carry this in a time bound, fractured mind-body, flawed through and through. Your admirers see the truths and pass over the flaws but you know you are 'faking it' and are haunted by the possible moment of exposure.

It points to the reality of any 'religious life' that it is lived always with a measure of two faced doubt - towards the reality of the quest and to the reality of myself faced by the immeasurable  challenge of the quest (if true).

Last week, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, admitted to doubt. The secular (and mostly religiously illiterate, when not simply hostile) press assumed that this meant that even the 'high representative' did not believe in the truth of the religion he so obviously thus pedals. He was committing the last remaining sin of the post-modern age - that of hypocrisy.

However, hypocrisy is, at least, a diminished sign that a person believes he or she ought to appear to believe something (or aspire after a different state).

What Welby was eloquently (if unguardedly) admitting to was that he too was a 'genuine fake' - that in any genuinely spiritual journey, we become aware of the distance between what is hoped for and who we are and that gap can as easily turn to doubting it might ever be closed (or indeed be real) as to spurring us on to greater efforts to dispose ourselves to its luring reality.

Indeed the two are deeply related for doubt keeps us honest about the difference between the truth and any one person's capacity to embody it and show it forth. We know we are one part monk, one part race track operator and are immunized against any pretense of fundamentalism and the trails of woe they bear in their wake (with which history is only, sadly, all too familiar)!

So, let us be as genuine as we can be in our fakery, being the real thing is not in our gift.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more