The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age by Charles Upton

Author:Charles Upton [Upton, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Comparative Religion, Eschatology, General Fiction
ISBN: 9780900588389
Google: CwUo8zcsinoC
Publisher: Sophia Perennis
Published: 2005-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

6. The Law of Detachment

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty. . . . In the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe.

Once again, Dr Chopra tells us that ‘in order to acquire anything in the physical universe, you have to relinquish your attachment to it’ (p83). But to relinquish one’s attachment to something in order to acquire it is not to relinquish one’s attachment. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Jesus said ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness, and all these things [i.e., the basic necessities of life] shall be added unto you.’ He did not say, ‘If you want all these things, simply seek the Kingdom of Heaven and you’ll get them.’ The difference between Deepak Chopra and Jesus may be subtle, but it is immense. Like a friend of mine said, ‘God cannot be used as a means to an end, because He is the End.’ When Jesus promised that ‘all these things shall be added unto you,’ he was teaching us not to let our worry about how to maintain our lives distract us from putting God first; he was not giving us a way of operating what Dr Chopra likes to call ‘the cosmic computer’. As we have seen, Dr Chopra maintains that ‘this knowledge will give you the ability to create unlimited wealth . . . and to experience success in every endeavor.’ Lao Tzu, however, is much closer to the truth when he says ‘too much success is not an advantage’ and ‘he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.’

‘Anything you want can be acquired through detachment, because detachment is based on the unquestioning belief in your true Self’ (p84). Would it be unfair of me at this point to ask why Dr Chopra is apparently unwilling to end world hunger, war, and environmental destruction? Does he really not want these things? But more to the point: Deepak Chopra’s central error seems to be the belief that his true Self is a kind of infinite Deepak Chopra, though he’s decent enough to grant that in my case it will be a kind of infinite Charles Upton. The Vedic sages of India taught the doctrine of Tat twam asi, ‘That art thou’. But Tat twam asi does not mean ‘you’ (the ego) ‘are That’ (the Self); it means ‘That’ (the Self) ‘is the real you,’ as in Shankaracharya’s doctrine that our feeling of being ourselves is a sign of the Absolute and Transcendent Self within us. ‘That’ is not an extension of ‘me’; ‘I’ am an extension of ‘That’.

And, certainly, there is wisdom in uncertainty. Certainly, as Dr Chopra tells us, overcoming our attachment to security, which is really an attachment to the known past, will help us experience ‘excitement, adventure, mystery .

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