80 overcoming the worldpushed in contradictory directions by the view of ultimate reality that
informs it. Th is view affi rms the deep unity of suff ering humanity and
indeed of all living creatures. In contesting the fi rm boundaries of the
self, it provides a basis for benevolent action in universal selfh ood. How-
ever, in denying or diminishing the signifi cance of what goes on in both
the historical time of societies and the biographical time of individuals, it
undermines the reasons, and obscures the guideposts, for transformative
action. It takes humanity to the threshold of struggle with the world and
leaves men and women there, with an emotion but without a program.Criticism: the school of experience
Having addressed the overcoming of the world by the light of the
shared goals of the religious revolutions that resulted in the major ori-
entations to existence discussed here, consider now this approach to
existence by the standard of its psychological reality and stability: its
connection with our most deep- seated dispositions. Viewed from this
perspective, its fl aw is its war against life, life as it really is, manifest in
the living individual and the mortal organism.
Th e denial of the reality of the individual self is a denial of death. It
is also an anticipation of death, as if we could rob death of its terrors by
foreshadowing right now the dissolution of the self into universal mind.
Death is denied by a series of connected, self- fulfi lling prophecies that
are to free us from the cares and distractions of mortality and to put us
in communion with a reality that the decay of our mortal bodies can-
not corrupt.
Life, however, fi ghts back. We cannot protect ourselves in this way
against death without diminishing or devaluing our dealings with the
world and with the people around us, which is to say, without suppress-
ing life. It is as if the way to redress the irremediable fl aws in our exis-
tence were to have less existence. We transport ourselves out of the
coils of our alienated existence into a universal experience, without the
dangerous boundaries, of embodiment and time, in which we seem to
fi nd ourselves encased.
In the realm of practical action, the consequence at the limit is a
progressive disengagement. If our struggle to be free of the subjugating