I cannot imagine that an especially large proportion of Britons my age will have failed to count themselves, at some point during their childhood, among regular viewers of Doctor Who. Rebooted in 2005 from its original twentieth-century form (spanning from 1963-1989), it has garnered immense popularity over the course of the nearly two decades, proving to this day still one of the most famous roles in modern series drama. For the heathens among you who are unfamiliar, the eponymous protagonist is an alien (‘Time Lord’) from a faraway planet (‘Gallifrey’) who thanks to an instance of rather adventitious thievery managed to come into possession of a vessel (‘TARDIS’) which has the capacity to take them to any place or time in the entire history of the universe. Aside from certain biological idiosyncrasies (such as having two hearts), they appear, speak, and (generally) act like your average human being. This is a mightily convenient thing, given our humble planet Earth seems to be a favourite of theirs for both holidaying and scouting companions for their more cosmically ambitious peregrinations. Also supremely useful is the fact that, upon suffering lethal harm, they have the capacity to regenerate their body into the form of a different, perhaps as yet publically undiscovered, thespian, and merrily continue life under the guise of a new series of television.
‘My Doctor’ (a common phrase among fans) was the 11th, Matt Smith. I caught the tail end of Tennant’s first run, and was profoundly affected by the grandeur and loftiness with which Russell T. Davies wrote his much-anticipated conclusion. But in the wake of Tennant’s tenure, especially this scene - which I am certain had a considerable impact on how I viewed morality, heroism, and self-sacrifice growing up - Smith’s buoyant, childlike beginning, strung to gorgeous tunes and new companions, ended up accompanying a particularly beautiful, now deeply nostalgic, period in my youth. So the poignance of his eventual departure, when it came to slightly older - but certainly still young - eyes, was so intensely etched on my childhood’s heart that I imagine I will have to draw up a separate article on that show alone. But for now I will mention it only as introductory segue.
During that scene (I will cry if I watch it again) the Doctor admittedly seems to be lacking a tad of subtlety as he at one juncture breaks the fourth wall and looks directly at the camera, and just before then blatantly explains the symbolic relevance of regeneration. Not that I mind at all, of course, because the former was the actor - to whom I and all other viewers of his era are inordinately attached - saying goodbye, not the character. But the latter is stated thus:
‘We all change, when you think about it; we’re all different people, all through our lives. And that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be’.
Again, a little on the nose, but undoubtedly beautiful. This is, aside from the narrative practicality, what we are supposed to make of regeneration; a diverse panoply of bodies, habits, and personalities drawn together under the continuous mantle of a singular name and character, persisting as a totality - and bearing a quite thorough memory of past selves - throughout the (I can’t say onward, can I?) march of time.
The reason, of course, that we find this profoundly moving rather than merely quaintly alien is because it is applicable, indeed wholly true, to our real lives. To be able to say goodbye to each passing epoch is a difficult thing, precisely because we care so deeply for the people we were at that cherished time. And it seems that with each turn of change, it becomes yet more arduous to depart from the familiar. At which point we encounter the relevance of the assertion of (most explicitly Eastern, but to my mind generally all) religion; that this misery arises as a result of a misplacement of attachment, and that if we wish to find peace, our longing for the unchanging should be directed toward precisely that: the immutable Ultimate Reality in which all this ceaseless mutability lives and moves and has its being, not anything - however intimate - with which we associate in worldly existence.
This is easy to say. But whatever we are inclined to call this - coming to be in the world but not of it, or detaching ourselves from the habits of Shirk-al-Asghar which prioritise the earthly over the Divine, or recognising the anatta and sunyata which pervades our being - it is a lifelong task, even whose commencement is neglected by the vast preponderance. When the Doctor displays sadness at the end of his run, it is because he has become acquainted with all things familiar, and with good reason. There is much joy in the familiar; for it is through this that we have come to love existence. But we must scrutinise the origin of our happiness keenly: does it arise from the mutable contingencies into which we happen to have been thrown, or something beyond - something far more universal?
I imagine that the most frightening part of it all for the average mind is the notion that one will have to really leave everything behind (cf. Luke 14:26). But I contend that this fear also arises from a misconception of our own freedom and authentic being. After all, we are not venturing into some remote, isolated pocket of reality by which we may be foreclosing all manner of joys at the end of those many paths left unexplored: we are undertaking theosis, progressing toward the God who is no thing amongst things but who dwells within all things, and so whose pursuit can only ensure the repletion of all true desires if he is genuinely sought. We must pay close attention to the nature of our desires and the (often timorous) impulses which ignite our common rebellions. God’s omnipresence is such that any movement of desire in any direction, even toward the most reprehensible sin, is still in some way, no matter how bereft of proper orientation, ‘toward’ God to the extent that it is motivated by the absolutely primordial longing for Transcendence, one which is not a ‘longing amongst longings’ (do please notice the pattern here) but the structure of desire itself. Desire may move to certain objects, entities, feelings, people, scenarios, or conditions - all of which, again, may be entirely sinful - but in each case it is only moving by merit of an original and perpetual self-gesturing toward the Divine.
It is through this frame of reference that we should approach (and certainly not mollify or ‘explain away’) the starker and more disquieting logia amidst the pages of the Gospels. I mentioned Luke 14:26 earlier: beyond this, Christ speaks on multiple occasions about the bounty awaiting the one gallant enough to undertake self-immolation, and die to the world, with a particularly forceful emphasis on the necessity of the (perhaps ‘violent’) death in question. To take a smattering:
‘Jesus answered [Nicodemus] and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.’ (John 3:3-7).
‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it’ (Matt. 10:34-39).
‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (Matt. 16:24-26, see also Luke 17:33).
‘The young man saith unto him, All these things [the commandments] I have kept from my youth up: what shall I lack yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’ (Matt. 19:20-24).
What is actually being said here, with respect to ‘dying’ to the world and being ‘born again’ in Christ? The last of these passages, along with the discourse on mammon (Matt. 6:19-24), has often been rather blunderingly interpreted by post-Christian communists on the one hand and prosperity gospel charlatans on the other. Is Christ literally exhorting all believers to become mendicants? Well, no. But, as in the case of the Buddha, it is not a coincidence that a renunciation of earthly privilege is favoured by the enlightened: that which so controls the desire of the world - wealth, power, hedonistic pleasure - simply do not appear as objects of interest for an enlightened consciousness. So the monastic life has proven, for many, to be the most appropriate manner of habitual existence simply because it is an arrangement and condition of being that they deem most plainly conducive to spiritual progression.
But by no means is it a requisite to knowledge of God; all that is ultimately of importance is the occlusion of all earthly fixations, even to the radical point where one becomes entirely indifferent to their presence or absence, to have or have-not: hence the ostensible difficulty of rich men, who almost certainly have devoted most of their lives to the acquisition of material wealth, to enter the Kingdom. It is not necessarily problematic or desirable that they are affluent (affirmation) or indigent (negation), but that they are yoked and incarcerated by an inordinate attachment to either. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that one may be attached to the latter to the effect of an equal spiritual destitution as the rapacious hoarder, deriving a sense of sanctimonious pride from having renounced the world whilst ‘weaker souls’ still seek daily to earn capital. The Buddha, of course, only achieved enlightenment in the Middle Way after departing the extreme self-mortification of certain Indian Brahmin communities; Maximus the Confessor (a personal favourite of mine, as the faithful reader will note) on many occasions reproves monks who wallow in self-esteem and ascribe their spiritual advances to themselves rather than God;1 and Suhrawardi would famously alternate his apparel with such an extremity that he would enter Aleppo on one day donning the most resplendent regalia, and the very next in threadbare, dirtied rags, making him indistinguishable from urban beggars. John Walbridge tells the following story indicating his utter irreverence for all things worldly:
‘It is said that he entered the city in clothes so shabby that he was mistaken for a donkey driver. He took up residence in a madrasa, where the director quickly realised that he was a man of learning and tactfully sent his young son with a gift of decent clothes. Suhrawardi brought out a large gem and told the boy to go to the market and have it priced. The boy came back and reported that the prince-governor, a teenaged son of Saladin, had bid 30,000 dirhams for it. Suhrawardi then smashed the gem with a rock, telling the boy that he could have had better clothes had he wished’.2
Either one dresses well or one does not dress well. Either one possesses precious stones and earthly wealth, or one discards them. Such is the nature of the world. But those of finer spiritual ilk would happily throw away either riches or renunciation tomorrow, if only for God. Take what Krishna elicits in the Bhagavad Gita:
‘The one in whose presence
The world does not tremble,
And who does not tremble
In the presence of the world,
Who is free
From pleasure and impatience,
Fear and anxiety,
Is also dear to me.The one who is
Able, pure and impartial,
Who sits apart,
Whose anxiety is gone,
Who leaves off
All endeavours,
Who is devoted to me,
Is dear to me.The one who
Neither rejoices
Nor resents,
Neither sorrows nor lusts,
Letting go of states
Both happy and unhappy,
Filled with devotion,
Is dear to me.The one for whom
Enemy and friend,
Honour and infamy,
Cold and heat,
Pleasure and pain,
Are the same,
Who has moved away
From clinging,The one for whom
Curse and praise are equal,
Who keeps silent,
Content with whatsoever
Comes his way,
Without home, with steady mind,
Full of devotion,
That one is dear to me’ (XII.15-19).3
If all of this seems frightfully escapist, or deeply immoral (being ‘content’ with evil?), or simply rather lifeless, bear with me. I might first make digressional allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated ‘If’ - a poem which has often been quoted here in the West with a reverence befitting a sacred text - and suggest that the rhetoric there (‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings nor lose the common touch’, ‘If neither foe nor loving friend can hurt you’, etc.) is really identical to that of the Gita.4 What the author of the latter hopes to demonstrate is that Ultimate Reality encompasses all being, and consequently all decision, meaning any affirmation or negation of particular aspects of existence are only ever properly conducted not by way of approaching them ‘in-themselves’, as it were, but by first gravitating toward that which resides beyond, and thereby proceeding in whichsoever manner is most conducive to this true End.
So when Christ - in keen parallel to Suhrawardi - implores us to ‘Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on’ (Matt. 6:25) he is not encouraging us to starve by way of inaction, or to strip down and stroll about the city with all jewels on public display. Rather, he seeks to direct us such that we may situate ourselves beyond both, meaning our concern is not for the worldly choice itself but the God who transcends the two options - meaning the choice that we do inevitably make only proceeds naturally, as a kind of symptom, metaphor, or offshoot of our original devotional love or bhakti. Such is the nature of our lives reborn: the world comes to us as inherent gratuity. Failing to appreciate this - and consequently fixating all our energies on modifying this or that occurrence in accordance with our will - almost invariably results in injury.
Imagine, for example, a cricketer who finds herself wracked with regret over her disastrous golden duck in a crucial T20 final, the biggest game of her sporting career. The reason this event proves so emotionally compelling for her is obvious: she has a deep investment in the activity, and has devoted a significant proportion of her life’s time, money, and energy to cultivating the skillset and career necessary to play at the level she so desired. Subsequently, she cares deeply about how she is perceived in relation to her performance. And yet, because of the nature of these passionate attachments, and the occurrence of this notable misfortune, she is strangled by an emotion - regret - which can do nothing but bring misery and self-contempt, which bears no positive capacity to alter the unfolding of past events, and casts her formerly joyful view of the game in an obstinate shadow.
It would be laughable, of course, for someone to come along and tell her ‘just not to worry about it’. But the endearing, sympathetic, awkward pats-on-shoulders from friends with far less interest in the sport should alert this cricketer to the simple but profound fact that there are indeed plenty of personalities who are not as remotely concerned with being perceived as an exceptional or flawless athlete, personalities who, when stepping on the cricket pitch at the annual village fete and bowling their fifth no ball in a row, would all too happily laugh at themselves and their unskilled clumsiness. In acknowledging the existence of such an approach we see an alternative, one which undermines the apparently indisputable necessity bestowed upon the event by this bereaved, perfectionist sportswoman. She sees another way of living, one that does not consist of tensing up like a deer in headlights each time she picks up a bat, desperate at all costs to give an infallible performance to the crowd, feeling that she is incapable of positive self-definition should she fail to do so.
There is a strange and unspoken wisdom to the existence of people who simply don’t care about the same things that you do: they elucidate, with intimate, human viscerality, the sheer arbitrariness of one’s own attachments to certain corners and domains of being. This is, incidentally, another argument contra religious exclusivism; Life (that which Christians, for one, firmly believe is God and Christ) is comprised of a consistent disruption of our ideological lassitudes, a subjection of our comfortable familiarity to the fires of stark alterity, thus ideally - when properly received - loosening our ontotheological fixation on this or that system of thought, and reminding us that God resides wheresoever there is being, and that creation in itself, even in its religious quarters, bears not a sliver of ontological Necessity but is rather wholly conditioned. And, above all, it is liberated from sin once it comes not to disdain this fact and (inadequately) replace it with idols of immanent worship, but appreciates it as the very content of God’s gratuitous self-emanation, his gracious, generous, and infinitely personal gift of self-donation to you. But the crucial issue remains: who is the ‘you’ in question? If we are to understand the notion of dying and rising again in new, Godly life, we cannot stop when we reach our skin. We must be rather more intimate than that.
If, let us say, any given personality at any given moment is like the pianist’s playing of a chord - certain notes being pressed in unison, or with an arpeggio disparity - then the fullness of a human life will be more akin to a complete concerto. Different notes and chords will be struck at different times according to the exigencies of the universe’s given unfolding (the sheet music, let us say), but none of which - no matter how spontaneous - ever prove entirely discontinuous from the last bar of music; the sound must flow melodiously and coherently, and so we maintain a sense of constancy throughout the piece. In the case of Bach, for example, the tune draws itself into distant and ostensibly irretrievable precincts of thematic variation, only to, in astounding grace and beauty, return itself to the original motif by an opposite traversal of the ascending or descending scales, before then adventurously embarking again.5 Our psychologies likewise assume different forms at different instances by way of momentary acculturation to this or that mode of being; we copy a certain slang, listen to a certain genre of music, eat a certain pudding after dinner, all enfolded in a sense of unified (but realistically cultivated) selfhood. We walk these pathways until they have eroded sufficiently to call them home; we can softly fit our boots into their worn tracks, sliding in as effortlessly as Cinderella’s shoe by memory of our enduring acquaintance from days of yore, before we could even really reflect on it all, but from which we recollect the warmest of feelings. But - most crucially of all - we begin to distinguish our path from the rest of the earthen trail, deciding that ours, by way of its indubitable kindness and familiarity, must be the superior; that those untrod paths are uncomfortable, rough, and jagged underfoot, and make for turbulent walking. ‘Good pedestrians’, we tell ourselves, ‘would do better to steer clear, and hike in this smoothened range’. Perhaps life sends a gale which throws us off course, and we are forced against our will to step on the foreign turf. We dislike it, both from our preconceptions and its strangeness to our step, its disconcerting novelty and awkward difference. So at the first chance we flee back home, to the old hearth, our love of it doubled by our having been away, and our relief at the return of the feelings which we feared may well have been lost.
Of course, the great error which I am hoping to elucidate is simply the conflation of any one chord or note with the constitution of the entire piece; the assumption that your path alone - the one at this particular juncture in your life - is the straight and narrow, and all else is anathema. But I am not speaking only of epistemic ideology or belief: it is really a matter of assessing all that we have lived. Once ingratiated with the familiar, we are not wont to let it go: when we are speaking of those things with which we have always unquestionably associated (our bodies being the prime example), it becomes all the more difficult to parse our truly eternal subsistence (Jivatman) from the earthly ephemera (generally speaking, the five skandhas or ‘aggregates’).
Many at this point are spurred to take offence at the suggestion that they may not actually be their body; this is perfectly normal, and entirely understandable: it is after all that through which we have always known consciousness, that with which we have navigated and sensed the world, the vessel whose faculties and limitations have more or less determined the entirety of our existence. But while our offence at first may seem righteous indignation, in due course life will do what it does to all people: it will show you change. The athlete who prizes their fitness will be injured and weakened, the sex symbol who flaunts their looks will wrinkle and age, the very sensory organs by which we have taken the world for granted all these days - those permitting our sight and our hearing in particular, the two often most cherished - will dim and fail, perhaps into utter disuse. And this is not even mentioning illness and disease. We will look back on photographs of our youthful vigour, and find someone whose memories we vaguely recall but whose handsome face and body now cannot be called our own. We will try to vicariously relive some semblance of their freedom by telling tall tales to the eager grandchildren. But we cannot alter the fact that we have extensively and irrevocably changed. Remember our earlier binaries: we are attractive, or we are not attractive, we are young, or we are not young… If all our lives are dedicated to simply shifting such spectra to the higher pole, to making and keeping ourselves beautiful, rich, and adored, we have already committed our future to misery.
If your immediate response to such reading is to look yourself in the mirror and whisper, through plaintive and nostalgic voice, ‘sic transit gloria mundi’, you have done quite well - but it is not exactly what is desired. Any sadness which arises from the realisation of our ineluctable aging is from a purely pragmatic standpoint entirely unhelpful, even if it is tinged with that sweet, all-too-familiar melange of melancholia and yearning (a feeling which, note well, is beautiful only insofar as it hints toward a joy beyond the limitations of upset). It sounds harsh to uninitiated ears, but yes, we must seek, in the fullness of time, to arrive at a point where we are so awash with the plenitude of Life that the prospect of death can evoke no sadness in us.
This is why the doctrine of anatta intimately relates, as any good Buddhist will tell you, to our mortality.6 Cultures the world over have attempted to orient themselves to death’s frightening ineluctability, and indeed it seems most vogue for contemporary atheists to chalk up all religion to this very effort. As I hinted at the beginning of my very first article I am not actually overly opposed to this definition of religion; although it is often delivered through supercilious, upturned noses which are clearly entirely ignorant of the feeling of death’s proximity, it works as a kind of negative, almost apophatic reading of humanity’s relation to worldliness, of which death is the principal and ultimate symptom. There is a caution to be exercised, especially from the vantage of Christian theology, which prevents us from slipping into a Heideggerian negativity that defines authenticity (eigenlichkeit) according to Dasein’s anxious proclivity toward das Nichts (the Nothing, i.e. death). This will not do for any religion which claims self-definition in the God who is himself Life. Our lives do not or at least are not obliged to become meaningful because they will end in-themselves - a thesis that only arises in an Existentialist key trying to reckon with the decline of Western belief in the hereafter. Quite the opposite: in the keen knowledge that all earthly things die and pass away, we loosen ourselves from their influence, and set ourselves free in the discovery of our own - as it were - ‘nonexistence’ as a subsistent self.
In this vein, certain tracts of Augustine’s Confessions have always seemed to me some of the most fantastic exercises in Buddhist meditation. Augustine plumbs the depths of memory; interrogating youthful folly, death of loved ones, existential crises, and so on. The further he descends in the process of self-examination, the more lucidly he comes to realise the undeniable absence of some immutable epicentre in-himself; in short, he discovers that the only stable, ever-abiding ground, the only true constant in all the tectonic shifting of desire, memory, language, body, sentiment, location, philosophy, and relationship is none other than God himself.7 This God is ‘interior intimo meo’ to Augustine: more intimately interior to him than he is to himself, precisely because he is nothing with which Augustine priorly associated himself: down even to his flesh and bones, down even to his most cherished memories and experiences. This is not easily realised - but it is possible. Once the smoke clears, and through strained discipline we have long meditated upon the evanescence of all entities, it may slowly begin to dawn on us that our habitual identification with this loose bundle of things we tend to call ‘me’ - this frail body, these discordant memories, these protean feelings, these fallible thoughts, this determined death - is simply no longer desirable. It is then that we are opened onto a wholly new, borderless vista of wider, more encompassing, more loving reality, and know that it is good; in short, that is, we may gradually commence our return to the Being that we have been all along.
See The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2, comp. St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, trans. & eds. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1981),
John Walbridge, ‘Suhrawardi & Illuminationism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, eds. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 202. See also Let’s Talk Religion’s video on Suhrawardi - indeed, if possible, scour everything on their YouTube channel. They are an exceptional resource, especially on Sufi history.
The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Laurie L. Patton (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 143-4.
And, among many other texts, the Tao Te Ching. See XXI, for an example stated in the plainest possible terms; or the striking XXIX, which to the uninformed would seem an almost undeniable endorsement of quietism.
See DBH’s remarkably original glossing of Bach’s ‘theological’ craftsmanship in The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 282-5.
See In The Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon ed. Bhikku Bodhi (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, Inc., 2005), 206. Originally AN 7:70; IV 136-39.
For further reading, see this compelling book from an unfailingly fantastic author: Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).