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he Path Of Yoga (Raja-Yoga) The Yoga of Meditation
"Raja-Yoga is the raja (the king) of Yogas, and as a sign of royalty it is often spoken of as YOGA without any further qualification or designation. Although Raja-Yoga is self-sufficient in its own sphere, it also plays the part of a preparatory school to the supreme Yoga of Knowledge" -Romain RollandA brief introduction to the Path of YogaTHE PATH OF YOGAFrom The Mahabharata Santi Parva, Sections CCXXXIX and CCXL Translated by sri Kisari Mohan Ganguli
[Note: What is the path of Yoga? Sage Vyasa provides the definition of the word 'YOGA' as follows:]
The uniting together of Intellect and Mind, and all the Senses, and the all pervading Soul is said to be Knowledge of the foremost kind.
[Vyasa further explains the path of Yoga:]That Knowledge should be acquired (through the preceptor's aid) by one that is of a tranquil disposition, that has mastered his senses, that is capable (by meditation) of turning his gaze on the Soul, that takes a pleasure in such meditation, that is endued with intelligence and pure in acts. One should seek to acquire this Knowledge by abandoning those five impediments of Yoga which are known to the wise, viz., desire, wrath, cupidity, fear and sleep.
[Note: The following texts from The Mahabharata cover the subject matters that appear in The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 5 called ‘The Yoga of Renunciation of Action’ and Chapter 6 called ‘The Yoga of Meditation’. Some of these Shlokas (verses) from the Gita are reproduced below after the text from The Mahabharata].
THE PATH OF YOGA ( The text from The Mahabharata in detail ):
Suka, (the son of Vyasa) said: By what means does one possessed of wisdom, conversant with the Vedas, observant of sacrifices, endued with wisdom, and free from malice, succeed in attaining to Brahman (The Supreme Reality) which is incapable of being apprehended by either direct evidence or inference, and unsusceptible of being indicated by the Vedas? Asked by me, tell me by what means is Brahman to be apprehended?Is it by penance, by Brahmacharya (celibacy), by renunciation of everything, by intelligence, by the aid of the Sankhya philosophy, or by Yoga? By what means and what kind of singleness of purpose be attained by men, with respect to both, viz., the mind and the senses?
The doctrine of knowledge as expounded in the Sankhya system
Vyasa said: No man ever attains to success by means other than the acquisition of knowledge, the practice of penance, the subjugation of the senses, and renunciation of everything. [Note: The commentator points out that by these four words the four modes of life are indicated].
The great entities (elements), five in number, represent the first or initial creation of the Self-born. They have been very largely placed in embodied creatures included in the world of life. The bodies of all embodied creatures are derived from earth. The humours are from water. Their eyes are said to be derived from light. Prana, Apana and the three other vital breaths have the air for their refuge. And lastly, all unoccupied apertures within them (such as the nostrils, the cavities of the ears, etc.) are of space. In the feet of all living creatures is Vishnu. In their arms is Indra. Within the stomach is Agni (digestive fire) desirous of eating. In the ears are the points of the horizon (or the compass) representing the sense of hearing. In the tongue is speech which is Saraswati (goddess of speech).
The ears, skin, eyes, tongue and nose forming the fifth, are said to be the sense of knowledge. These exist for the purposes of apprehension of their respective objects. Sound, touch, form, taste and scent forming the fifth, are the objects of the five senses. These should always be regarded as separate from (or independent of) the senses.
Like the charioteer setting his well-broken steeds along the paths he pleases, the mind sets the senses (along directions it pleases). The mind, in its turn, is employed by the knowledge sitting in the heart. The mind is the lord of all these senses in respect of employing them in their functions and guiding or restraining them. Similarly, the knowledge is the lord of the mind (in employing, and guiding or restraining it). The senses, the objects of the senses, the attributes of those objects represented by the word nature, knowledge, mind, the vital breaths, and Jiva (the embodied soul) dwell in the bodies of all embodied creatures.
Primordial Nature is the refuge of the knowledge Which exists only in the form of a sound.
The Soul also is not the refuge of the knowledge. It is Desire that creates the knowledge.
The body, within which the knowledge dwells, has no real existence. The body therefore, is not the refuge of the knowledge.Primordial Nature (Prakriti) having the three attributes of Goodness, Passion and Darkness (Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas), is the refuge of the knowledge which exists only in the form of a sound. [Pranavah or AUM or OM]. The Soul also is not the refuge of the knowledge. It is Desire that creates the knowledge. Desire, however, never creates the attributes. The man of wisdom, capable of subduing his senses, beholds the seventeenth, viz., the Soul, as surrounded by six and ten attributes, in his own knowledge by the aid of the mind. The Soul cannot be beheld with the aid of the eye or with that of all the senses. Transcending all, the Soul becomes visible by only the light of the mind’s lamp. Divested of the properties of sound and touch and form, without taste and scent, indestructible and without a body (either gross or subtile) and without senses, it is nevertheless beheld within the body.
Unmanifest and supreme, it dwells in all mortal bodies.Following the lead of the preceptor and the Vedas, he who beholds it hereafter becomes Brahman’s self. They that are possessed of wisdom look with an equal eye upon a brahmana (Priest) possessed of knowledge and disciples, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a chandala. Transcending all things, the Soul dwells in all creatures mobile and immobile. Indeed, all things are pervaded by it. When a living creature beholds his own Soul in all things, and all things in his own Soul, he is said to attain to Brahman (The Supreme Being). One occupies that much of the Supreme Soul as is commensurate with what is occupied in one’s own soul by Vedic sound. He that can always realise the identity of all things with his own self certainly attains to immortality. The very gods are stupefied in the track of that trackless man who constitutes himself the soul of all creatures, who is engaged in the good of all beings, and who desire to attain to Brahman (the Supreme Being) which is the final refuge of all things. ___________________________________TOP
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The Yoga doctrine.The Mahabharata Santi Parva, Section CCXLTranslated by Sri Kisari Mohan Ganguli
Vyasa said: O excellent son, asked by thee, I have told thee truly what the answer to thy question should be according to the doctrine of knowledge as expounded in the Sankhya system. Listen now to me as I expound to thee all that should be done (for the same end) according to the Yoga doctrine.
The uniting together of Intellect and Mind, and all the Senses, and the all pervading Soul is said to be knowledge of the foremost kind. That knowledge should be acquired (through the preceptor’s aid) by one that is of a tranquil disposition, that has mastered his senses, that is capable (by meditation) of turning his gaze on the Soul, that takes a pleasure in such meditation, that is endued with intelligence and pure in acts. One should seek to acquire this Knowledge by abandoning those five impediments of Yoga which are known to the wise, viz., desire, wrath, cupidity, fear and sleep.
Wrath is conquered with tranquillity of disposition. Desire is conquered by giving up all purposes. By reflecting with the aid of the understanding upon topics worthy of reflection, one endued with patience succeeds in abandoning sleep. By steady endurance one should restrain one’s organs of generation and the stomach (from unworthy or sinful indulgence). One should protect one’s hands and feet by using one’s eyes. One should protect one’s eyes and ears by the aid of one’s mind, one’s mind and speech by one’s acts. One should avoid fear by heedfulness, and pride by waiting upon the wise. Subduing procrastination, one should, by these means, subdue these impediments of Yoga.
One should pay one’s adorations to fire and the brahmanas (priests), and one should bow one’s head to the deities. One should avoid all kinds of inauspicious discourse, and speech that is fraught with malice, and words that are painful to other minds. …
Meditation, study, gift, truth, modesty, simplicity, forgiveness, purity of body, purity of conduct, subjugation of the senses, these enhance one’s energy, which when enhanced destroys one’s sins. By behaving equally towards all creatures and by living in contentment upon what is acquired easily and without effort, one attains to the fruition of all one’s objects and succeeds in obtaining knowledge.
Cleansed of all sins, endued with energy, abstemious in diet, with senses under complete control, one should, after having subdued both desire and wrath, seek to attain to Brahman. Firmly uniting the senses and the mind (having drawn them away from all external objects) with gaze fixed inwards, one should, in the still hours of evening, or in those before dawn, place one’s mind upon the knowledge. If even one of the five senses of a human being be kept unrestrained, all his wisdom may be seen to escape through it like water through an unstopped hole at the bottom of a leather bag. The mind in the first instance should be sought to be restrained by the Yogi after the manner of a fisherman seeking at the outset to render that one among the fish powerless from which there is the greatest danger to his nets.
Having first subdued the mind, the Yogi should then proceed to subdue his ears, then his eyes, then his tongue, and then his nose. Having restrained them, he should fix them on the mind. Then withdrawing the mind from all purposes, he should fix it on the knowledge.Indeed, having restrained the five senses, the Yogi should fix them on the mind. When these with the mind for the sixth become concentrated in the knowledge, and thus concentrated remain steady and untroubled, then Brahman becomes perceptible like a smokeless fire of blazing flames or the Sun of effulgent radiance. Indeed, one then beholds in oneself one’s soul like lightning fire in the skies.Everything then appears in it and it appears in everything in consequence of its infinitude. Those high-souled Brahmanas that are possessed of wisdom, that are endued with fortitude, that are possessed of high knowledge, and that are engaged in the good of all creatures, succeed in beholding it.
Engaged in the observance of austere vows, the Yogi who conducts himself thus for six months, seated by himself on an isolated spot, succeeds in attaining to an equality with the Indestructible. Annihilation, extension, power to present varied aspects in the same person or body, celestial scents, and sounds, and sights, the most agreeable sensations of taste and touch, pleasurable sensations of coolness and warmth, equality with the wind [Foot-note by the commentator and translator: Equality with the wind means speed of motion, power to disappear at will, and capacity to move through the skies. (Super natural powers known as ‘Siddhis’)]. Capability of understanding (by inward light) the meaning of scriptures and every work of genius, companionship of celestial damsels; acquiring all these by Yoga the Yogi should disregard them and merge them all in the knowledge.
[Note: By the practice of Yoga all these are capable of being acquired or attained. But then the Yogi who suffers himself to be led away by those valuable possessions is said to fall in hell, for the enjoyment of this kind is nothing but hell compared to the high object for which Yogis should strive].
Restraining speech and the senses one should practise Yoga during the hours after dusk, the hours before dawn, and at dawn of day, seated on a mountain summit, or at the foot of a goodly tree, or with a tree before him.
[Note: Chaitya trees or Peepul trees are sacred and large trees which stand firm on their roots and about which all round of each tree a platform of earth is raised. " In front of a tree" probably implying ‘under the shade of its spreading branches’].
Restraining all the senses within the heart, one should with faculties concentrated think of the Eternal and Indestructible like a man of the world thinking of wealth and other valuable possessions. One should never, while practising Yoga, withdraw one’s mind from it. One should with devotion betake oneself to those means by which one may succeed in restraining the mind that is very restless. One should never permit oneself to fall away from it. With the senses and the mind withdrawn from everything else, the Yogi (for practice) should betake himself to empty caves of mountains, to temples consecrated to the deities, and to empty houses or apartments, for living there. One should not associate with another in either speech, act or thought. Disregarding all things, and eating very abstemiously, the Yogi should look with an equal eye upon objects acquired or lost. One should behave after the same manner towards one that praises and one that censures him. He should not seek the good or the evil of one or the other. He should not rejoice at an acquisition or suffer anxiety when he meets with failure or loss. Of uniform behaviour towards all beings, he should imitate the wind
[Note: "Imitate the wind" by becoming unattached to all things].
Unto one whose mind is thus turned to itself, who leads a life of purity, and who casts an equal eye upon all things,- indeed, unto one who is ever engaged in Yoga thus for even six months,- Brahman as represented by sound appears very vividly. [Note: Refer to pages "Gayatri" and "Krishna’s flute" See the column on the left].
[Also refer to The Bhagavad Gita, Ch.6, Verse 8: The Yogi who is satisfied with the knowledge and wisdom (of the Self), who has conquered the senses, and to whom a clod of earth, a piece of stone and gold are the same, is said to be harmonised (i.e., is said to have attained Nirvikalpa Samadhi).]
Beholding all men afflicted with anxiety (on account of earning wealth and comfort), the Yogi should view a clod of earth, a piece of stone, and a lump of gold with an equal eye. Indeed, he should withdraw himself from this path (of earning wealth), cherishing an aversion for it, and never suffer himself to be stupefied. Even if a person happens to belong to the inferior order, even if one happens to be a woman, both of them, by following in the track indicated above, will surely attain to the highest end.
[Note by the scholar and translator: The inferior order here referred to is, of course, the Sudra order. The Commentator points out that whereas only the three superior orders (Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya) are regarded to be eligible for the study of Sankhya and for inculcation of such Srutis as Tattwamasi (That Thou Art), here sage Vyasa lays down that as regards the Yoga path, all are eligible to betake themselves to it]. [ Refer also to Bhagavad Gita, Ch.9, Verse 32: "For taking refuge in Me, they also, O Arjuna, who may be of a sinful birth, women, vaisyas as well as sudras- attain the Supreme goal"].
He that has subdued his mind beholds in his own self, by the aid of his own knowledge the Uncreate, the Eternal Brahman,- That, viz., which cannot be attained except by fixed senses,- That which is subtiler than the most subtile, and grosser than the most gross, and which is Emancipation’s self.
[Note: ‘ Fixed senses ‘ i.e., when the senses are fixed on the mind and the mind on the understanding. Ajaram (a word in the original Sanskrit text) is immutable or unchanging or that in which there is no change for the worse or for the better. By subtility is indicated the incapacity of being apprehended, and by ‘Mahattaram’(Sanskrit) is meant infinity].
By ascertaining from the mouths of preceptors and by themselves reflecting with their minds
Upon these words of the great and high-souled Rishis spoken so properly, persons possessed of wisdom attain to that equality (about which the scriptures say) with Brahman himself, till, indeed, the time when the universal dissolution comes that swallows up all existent beings._____________________________________________________TOPI
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From The Bhagavad GitaExplanations based on the writings of Swami ShivanandaThe Divine Life Society, Rishikesh
Selected verses from The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 5 called "The Yoga of Renunciation of Action"
The Blessed Lord said :
Verse 3 : He should be known as a perpetual sanyasi (renunciate) who neither hates nor desires, O mighty-armed Arjuna, he is easily set free from bondage.
Verse 6: But renunciation is hard to attain without Yoga; the Yoga-harmonised sage quickly goes to Brahman (The Supreme Being).
Verse 13: Mentally renouncing all actions and self-controlled, the embodied one rests happily in the nine-gated city, neither acting nor causing others (body and senses) to act.
Verse 15: The Lord takes neither the demerit nor even the merit of any; knowledge is enveloped by ignorance, thereby beings are deluded.
[Note: Man is bound when he identifies himself with Nature (Prakriti or Maya) and its effects –body, mind, prana or the life breaths and senses. He attains freedom or moksha (liberation) when he identifies himself with the immortal, "actionless" Self that dwells within his heart.]
Verse 17: Their intellect absorbed in That (Supreme Being), their self being That, established in That, with That for their supreme goal, they go whence there is no return, their sins dispelled by knowledge.
Verse 18: Sages look with an equal eye on a Brahmin endowed with learning and humility, on a cow, on an elephant, and even on a dog and an outcaste.
[Note: The brahmana (brahmin or priest) is Sattwic. The cow is Rajasic. The elephant, the dog and the outcaste are Tamasic. The sage sees in all of them the one homogeneous immortal Self Who is not affected by the three gunas (Sattwa, Rajas & Tamas) and their tendencies.]
Verse 20: Resting in Brahman (The Supreme Being), with steady intellect and undeluded, the knower of Brahman neither rejoices on obtaining what is pleasant nor grieves on obtaining what is unpleasant.
Verse 21: With the self unattached to external contacts he finds happiness in the Self; with the self engaged in the meditation of Brahman he attains to the endless happiness.
[Note: If you want to enjoy the imperishable happiness of the Self within, you will have to withdraw the senses from their respective objects and plunge yourself in deep meditation on the Self within.]
Verse 24: He who is happy within, who rejoices within, and who is illumined within, that Yogi attains absolute freedom or moksha, himself becoming Brahman.
Verse 25; The sages obtain absolute freedom or moksha- they whose sins have been destroyed, whose dualities (perception of dualities or experience of the pairs of opposites e.g. happiness-unhappiness) are torn asunder, who are self-controlled, and intent on the welfare of all beings.
Verse 26: Absolute freedom (or Brahmic bliss) exists on all sides for those self-controlled ascetics who are free from desire and anger, who have controlled their thoughts, and who have realised the self.
Verse 27 : Shutting out all external contacts and fixing the gaze between the eyebrows, equalising the outgoing and incoming breaths moving within the nostrils.
[Note: Bhrumadya drsti or gazing between the two eyebrows where the psychic centre known as the Ajna Chakra is situated. The mind becomes steady when the breath becomes rhythmical.]
Verse 28 : With the senses, the mind and the intellect (ever) controlled, having liberation as his supreme goal, free from desire, fear and anger – the sage is verily liberated for ever. ___________________________________TOP
Index Alphabetical [Index to Pages] Selected verses from The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 6 called The Yoga of Meditation"
The Blessed Lord said :
Verse 2: Do thou, O Arjuna, know Yoga to be that which they call renunciation; no one verily becomes a Yogi who has not renounced thoughts.
[Note: The Lord eulogises Karma Yoga (Yoga of Action) here because it is the means or an external aid to Dhyana Yoga (Yoga of Meditation). It leads to the Yoga of Meditation in due course. No devotee of action who has not renounced the thought of the fruit of his actions can become a Yogi of steady mind. The thought of the fruits will certainly make the mind unsteady. In order to encourage the practice of Karma Yoga (Yoga of Action), it is stated here that Karma Yoga is sanyasa.]
Verse 3: For a sage who wishes to attain to Yoga, action is said to be the means; for the same sage who has attained to Yoga, inaction (quiescence) is said to be the means.
[Note: For a man who cannot practise meditation for a long time and who is not able to keep his mind steady in meditation, action is a means to get himself enthroned in Yoga. Action purifies his mind and makes the mind fit for the practice of steady meditation. Action leads to steady concentration and meditation. For the sage who is enthroned in Yoga, renunciation of actions is said to be the means. The more perfectly he abstains from actions the more steady his mind is, and the more peaceful he is, the more easily and thoroughly does his mind get fixed in the Self.]
Verse 4: When a man is not attached to the sense-objects or to actions, having renounced all thoughts, then he is said to have attained to Yoga.
[Note: Renunciation of thoughts implies that all desires and all actions should be renounced, because all desires are born of thoughts. "Whatever a man desires, that he wills; And whatever he wills, that he does."- From The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.4.5.]
Verse 5: Let a man lift himself by his own Self alone, let him not lower himself ; for this self alone is the friend of oneself and this self alone is the enemy of oneself.
[Note: The lower mind or the impure mind (asuddha manas) is your real enemy because it binds you to the samsara (making you worldly-minded), and the higher mind or the Sattwic mind, the pure mind (suddha manas) is your real friend, because it helps you in the attainment of moksha.]
Verse 6: The self is the friend of the self for him who has conquered himself by the self, but to the unconquered self, this self stands in the position of the enemy like the (external) foe.
[Note: Conquer the lower mind through the higher mind. The lower mind is your enemy. The higher mind is your friend. The lower mind is filled with Rajas and Tamas (passion and darkness). The higher mind is filled with Sattwa or purity.]
Verse 7: The Supreme Self of him who is self-controlled and peaceful is balanced in cold and heat, pleasure and pain, as also in honour and dishonour.
[Note: The self-controlled Yogi is not affected by the pairs of opposites : cold and heat implying comforts and discomforts at the physical level, pleasure and pain refer to emotions at the level of the mind, and honour and dishonour implying the faculty of understanding at the intellectual level.]
Verse 9 : He who is of the same mind to the good-hearted, friends, enemies, the indifferent, the neutral, the hateful, the relatives, the righteous and the unrighteous, excels.
[Note: Such equal minded Yogi has equal vision.]
Verse 10 : Let the Yogi try constantly to keep the mind steady, remaining in solitude, alone, with the mind and the body controlled, and free from hope and greed.
[Note: If you are well established in the practice of pratyahara, sama and dama (withdrawal of the senses, control of mind and the body respectively), if you have the senses under your full control, you can find perfect solitude and peace even in the most crowded and noisy place of a big city. If the senses are turbulent, if you have not got the power to withdraw them, you will have no peace of mind even in a solitary cave of the Himalayas.]
Verse 11 & 12 : In a clean spot, having established a firm seat of his own, neither too high nor too low, made of a cloth, a skin (tiger skin or deer skin) and kusha-grass, one over the other, there, having made the mind one-pointed, with the actions of the mind and the senses controlled, let him, seated on the seat, practise Yoga for the purification of the self.
Verse 13 : Let him firmly hold his body, head and neck erect and still, gazing at the tip of his nose, without looking around.
[Note : Though the gaze is directed towards the tip of the nose when the eyes are half closed and the eyeballs are steady, the mind should be fixed only on the Self. Gazing at the tip of the nose will soon bring about concentration of the mind.]
Verse 14 : Serene minded, fearless, firm in the vow of a brahmachari (celibate), having controlled the mind, thinking of Me, and balanced in mind, let him sit, having Me as his supreme goal.
Verse 15 : Thus always keeping the mind balanced, the Yogi, with the mind controlled, attains to the peace abiding in Me, which culminates in liberation.
Verse 16 : Verily Yoga is not possible for him who eats too much, nor for him who does not eat at all, nor for him who sleeps too much nor for him who is (always) awake, O Arjuna.
Verse 17 : Yoga becomes the destroyer of pain for him who is moderate in eating and recreation (such as walking etc.), who is moderate in exertion in action, who is moderate in sleep and wakefulness.
Verse 19 : As a lamp placed in a windless spot does not flicker- to such is compared the Yogi of controlled mind, practising Yoga in the Self (or absorbed in the Yoga of the Self).
Verse 29 : With the mind harmonised by Yoga he sees the Self abiding in all beings and all beings in the Self; he sees the same everywhere.
Verse 31: He who, being established in unity, worships Me, who dwells in all beings, that Yogi abides in Me, whatever may be his mode of living.
[Note: Scriptures tell of a person named Sadana who lived in God though he was a butcher, because his mind was ever fixed at the lotus feet of the Lord.]
Arjuna said :
Verse 33 & 34 : This Yoga of equanimity taught by Thee, O Lord, I do not see its steady continuance, because of the restlessness of the mind.
The mind verily is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding, O Krishna : I deem it as difficult to control it as to control the wind.
The Blessed Lord said :Verse 35 & 36 : Undoubtedly, O mighty armed Arjuna, the mind is difficult to control and restless; but by practice and by dispassion it may be restrained.
I think Yoga is hard to be attained by one of uncontrolled self, but the self-controlled and striving one can attain to it by the proper means.
Arjuna said :
Verse 37 : He who is unable to control himself though he has the faith, and whose mind wanders away from Yoga, what end does he, having failed to attain perfection in Yoga meet, O Krishna?
[Note: He has faith in the efficacy of Yoga but he is not able to control the senses and the mind. He has no concentration of mind. Having failed to achieve perfection in Yoga, i.e., Self-realisation or the knowledge of the Self, what path will he tread, and what end will such a man meet?]
The Blessed Lord said : Verses 40, 41,42, 43 & 44 :
O Arjuna, neither in this world, nor in the next world is there destruction for him; none, verily, who does good ever comes to grief.
Having attained to the worlds of the righteous and having dwelt there for everlasting years, he who fell from Yoga is reborn in a house of the pure and wealthy.
Or he is born in a family of even the wise Yogis; verily a birth like this is very difficult to obtain in this world.
There he comes in touch with the knowledge acquired in his former body and strives more than before for perfection.
By that very former practice he is borne on in spite of himself. Even he who merely wishes to know Yoga goes beyond the Brahmic world.
Verse 45 : But the Yogi who strives with assiduity, purified of sins and perfected gradually through many births, reaches the highest goal.___________________________________Book titled "How to know God": The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. A rational and psychological explanation of yoga. It will especially appeal to those who want religion to make sense.___________________________________
From The Teachings of Sri Ramana MaharshiThe following text is reproduced from our Page 'Self-enquiry'Question: In turning the mind inwards, are we not still employing the mind?
Sri Ramana Maharshi: Of course we are employing the mind. It is well known and admitted that only with the help of the mind can the mind be killed. But instead of setting about saying there is a mind, and I want to kill it, begin to seek the source of the mind, and you find the mind does not exist at all. The mind, turned outwards, results in thoughts and objects. Turned inwards, it becomes itself the Self.
Question: Even so, I do not understand. ‘I’, you say, is the wrong ‘I’ now. How to eliminate the wrong ‘I’?
Sri Ramana Maharshi: You need not eliminate the wrong ‘I’. How can ‘I’ eliminate itself? All that you need to do is to find out its origin and abide there. Your efforts can extend only thus far. Then the beyond will take care of itself. You are helpless there. No effort can reach it. Sri Ramana Maharshi: The yogi tries to drive his mind to the goal, as a cowherd drives a bull with a stick, but on this path the seeker coaxes the bull by holding out a handful of grass.
Question: How is that done?
Sri Ramana Maharshi: You have to ask yourself the question ‘Who am I?’ This investigation will lead in the end to the discovery of something within you, which is behind the mind. Solve that great problem and you will solve all other problems.Again people often ask how the mind is controlled. I say to them, ‘Show me the mind and then you will know what to do.’ The fact is that the mind is only a bundle of thoughts. How can you extinguish it by the thought of doing so or by a desire? Your thoughts and desires are part and parcel of the mind. The mind is simply fattened by new thoughts rising up. Therefore it is foolish to attempt to kill the mind by means of the mind. The only way of doing it is to find its source and hold on to it. The mind will then fade away of its own accord. Yoga teaches Chitta Vritti Nirodha (control of the activities of the mind). But I say Atma Vichara (self-investigation). This is the practical way. Chitta Vritti Nirodha is brought about in sleep, swoon, or by starvation. As soon as the cause is withdrawn there is a recrudescence of thoughts. Of what use is it then? In the state of stupor there is peace and no misery. But misery recurs when the stupor is removed. So nirodha (control) is useless and cannot be of lasting benefit.
How then can the benefit be made lasting? It is by finding the cause of misery. Misery is due to the perception of objects. If they are not there, there will no contingent thoughts and so misery is wiped off. ‘How will objects cease to be?’ is the next question. The srutis (scriptures) and the sages say that the objects are only mental creations. They have no substantive being. Investigate the matter and ascertain the truth of the statement. The result will be the conclusion that the objective world is in the subjective consciousness. The Self is thus the only reality, which permeates and also envelops the world. Since there is no duality, no thoughts will arise to disturb your peace. This is realisation of the Self. The Self is eternal and so also is realisation.
Abhyasa (spiritual practice) consists in withdrawal within the Self every time you are disturbed by thought. It is not concentration or destruction of the mind but withdrawal into the Self.===================================Related articles: Sankhya versus YogaRaja Yoga GitaMeditationDirect PathSelf-enquiryGodSelf- Atma
The Nature of RealityConsciousness - the three statesSelf-realisationEmancipationFreedom and BondageGita for Children
YogaMindKarma YogaTOP
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"Raja-Yoga is the raja (the king) of Yogas, and as a sign of royalty it is often spoken of as YOGA without any further qualification or designation. Although Raja-Yoga is self-sufficient in its own sphere, it also plays the part of a preparatory school to the supreme Yoga of Knowledge" -Romain RollandA brief introduction to the Path of YogaTHE PATH OF YOGAFrom The Mahabharata Santi Parva, Sections CCXXXIX and CCXL Translated by sri Kisari Mohan Ganguli
[Note: What is the path of Yoga? Sage Vyasa provides the definition of the word 'YOGA' as follows:]
The uniting together of Intellect and Mind, and all the Senses, and the all pervading Soul is said to be Knowledge of the foremost kind.
[Vyasa further explains the path of Yoga:]That Knowledge should be acquired (through the preceptor's aid) by one that is of a tranquil disposition, that has mastered his senses, that is capable (by meditation) of turning his gaze on the Soul, that takes a pleasure in such meditation, that is endued with intelligence and pure in acts. One should seek to acquire this Knowledge by abandoning those five impediments of Yoga which are known to the wise, viz., desire, wrath, cupidity, fear and sleep.
[Note: The following texts from The Mahabharata cover the subject matters that appear in The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 5 called ‘The Yoga of Renunciation of Action’ and Chapter 6 called ‘The Yoga of Meditation’. Some of these Shlokas (verses) from the Gita are reproduced below after the text from The Mahabharata].
THE PATH OF YOGA ( The text from The Mahabharata in detail ):
Suka, (the son of Vyasa) said: By what means does one possessed of wisdom, conversant with the Vedas, observant of sacrifices, endued with wisdom, and free from malice, succeed in attaining to Brahman (The Supreme Reality) which is incapable of being apprehended by either direct evidence or inference, and unsusceptible of being indicated by the Vedas? Asked by me, tell me by what means is Brahman to be apprehended?Is it by penance, by Brahmacharya (celibacy), by renunciation of everything, by intelligence, by the aid of the Sankhya philosophy, or by Yoga? By what means and what kind of singleness of purpose be attained by men, with respect to both, viz., the mind and the senses?
The doctrine of knowledge as expounded in the Sankhya system
Vyasa said: No man ever attains to success by means other than the acquisition of knowledge, the practice of penance, the subjugation of the senses, and renunciation of everything. [Note: The commentator points out that by these four words the four modes of life are indicated].
The great entities (elements), five in number, represent the first or initial creation of the Self-born. They have been very largely placed in embodied creatures included in the world of life. The bodies of all embodied creatures are derived from earth. The humours are from water. Their eyes are said to be derived from light. Prana, Apana and the three other vital breaths have the air for their refuge. And lastly, all unoccupied apertures within them (such as the nostrils, the cavities of the ears, etc.) are of space. In the feet of all living creatures is Vishnu. In their arms is Indra. Within the stomach is Agni (digestive fire) desirous of eating. In the ears are the points of the horizon (or the compass) representing the sense of hearing. In the tongue is speech which is Saraswati (goddess of speech).
The ears, skin, eyes, tongue and nose forming the fifth, are said to be the sense of knowledge. These exist for the purposes of apprehension of their respective objects. Sound, touch, form, taste and scent forming the fifth, are the objects of the five senses. These should always be regarded as separate from (or independent of) the senses.
Like the charioteer setting his well-broken steeds along the paths he pleases, the mind sets the senses (along directions it pleases). The mind, in its turn, is employed by the knowledge sitting in the heart. The mind is the lord of all these senses in respect of employing them in their functions and guiding or restraining them. Similarly, the knowledge is the lord of the mind (in employing, and guiding or restraining it). The senses, the objects of the senses, the attributes of those objects represented by the word nature, knowledge, mind, the vital breaths, and Jiva (the embodied soul) dwell in the bodies of all embodied creatures.
Primordial Nature is the refuge of the knowledge Which exists only in the form of a sound.
The Soul also is not the refuge of the knowledge. It is Desire that creates the knowledge.
The body, within which the knowledge dwells, has no real existence. The body therefore, is not the refuge of the knowledge.Primordial Nature (Prakriti) having the three attributes of Goodness, Passion and Darkness (Sattwa, Rajas and Tamas), is the refuge of the knowledge which exists only in the form of a sound. [Pranavah or AUM or OM]. The Soul also is not the refuge of the knowledge. It is Desire that creates the knowledge. Desire, however, never creates the attributes. The man of wisdom, capable of subduing his senses, beholds the seventeenth, viz., the Soul, as surrounded by six and ten attributes, in his own knowledge by the aid of the mind. The Soul cannot be beheld with the aid of the eye or with that of all the senses. Transcending all, the Soul becomes visible by only the light of the mind’s lamp. Divested of the properties of sound and touch and form, without taste and scent, indestructible and without a body (either gross or subtile) and without senses, it is nevertheless beheld within the body.
Unmanifest and supreme, it dwells in all mortal bodies.Following the lead of the preceptor and the Vedas, he who beholds it hereafter becomes Brahman’s self. They that are possessed of wisdom look with an equal eye upon a brahmana (Priest) possessed of knowledge and disciples, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a chandala. Transcending all things, the Soul dwells in all creatures mobile and immobile. Indeed, all things are pervaded by it. When a living creature beholds his own Soul in all things, and all things in his own Soul, he is said to attain to Brahman (The Supreme Being). One occupies that much of the Supreme Soul as is commensurate with what is occupied in one’s own soul by Vedic sound. He that can always realise the identity of all things with his own self certainly attains to immortality. The very gods are stupefied in the track of that trackless man who constitutes himself the soul of all creatures, who is engaged in the good of all beings, and who desire to attain to Brahman (the Supreme Being) which is the final refuge of all things. ___________________________________TOP
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The Yoga doctrine.The Mahabharata Santi Parva, Section CCXLTranslated by Sri Kisari Mohan Ganguli
Vyasa said: O excellent son, asked by thee, I have told thee truly what the answer to thy question should be according to the doctrine of knowledge as expounded in the Sankhya system. Listen now to me as I expound to thee all that should be done (for the same end) according to the Yoga doctrine.
The uniting together of Intellect and Mind, and all the Senses, and the all pervading Soul is said to be knowledge of the foremost kind. That knowledge should be acquired (through the preceptor’s aid) by one that is of a tranquil disposition, that has mastered his senses, that is capable (by meditation) of turning his gaze on the Soul, that takes a pleasure in such meditation, that is endued with intelligence and pure in acts. One should seek to acquire this Knowledge by abandoning those five impediments of Yoga which are known to the wise, viz., desire, wrath, cupidity, fear and sleep.
Wrath is conquered with tranquillity of disposition. Desire is conquered by giving up all purposes. By reflecting with the aid of the understanding upon topics worthy of reflection, one endued with patience succeeds in abandoning sleep. By steady endurance one should restrain one’s organs of generation and the stomach (from unworthy or sinful indulgence). One should protect one’s hands and feet by using one’s eyes. One should protect one’s eyes and ears by the aid of one’s mind, one’s mind and speech by one’s acts. One should avoid fear by heedfulness, and pride by waiting upon the wise. Subduing procrastination, one should, by these means, subdue these impediments of Yoga.
One should pay one’s adorations to fire and the brahmanas (priests), and one should bow one’s head to the deities. One should avoid all kinds of inauspicious discourse, and speech that is fraught with malice, and words that are painful to other minds. …
Meditation, study, gift, truth, modesty, simplicity, forgiveness, purity of body, purity of conduct, subjugation of the senses, these enhance one’s energy, which when enhanced destroys one’s sins. By behaving equally towards all creatures and by living in contentment upon what is acquired easily and without effort, one attains to the fruition of all one’s objects and succeeds in obtaining knowledge.
Cleansed of all sins, endued with energy, abstemious in diet, with senses under complete control, one should, after having subdued both desire and wrath, seek to attain to Brahman. Firmly uniting the senses and the mind (having drawn them away from all external objects) with gaze fixed inwards, one should, in the still hours of evening, or in those before dawn, place one’s mind upon the knowledge. If even one of the five senses of a human being be kept unrestrained, all his wisdom may be seen to escape through it like water through an unstopped hole at the bottom of a leather bag. The mind in the first instance should be sought to be restrained by the Yogi after the manner of a fisherman seeking at the outset to render that one among the fish powerless from which there is the greatest danger to his nets.
Having first subdued the mind, the Yogi should then proceed to subdue his ears, then his eyes, then his tongue, and then his nose. Having restrained them, he should fix them on the mind. Then withdrawing the mind from all purposes, he should fix it on the knowledge.Indeed, having restrained the five senses, the Yogi should fix them on the mind. When these with the mind for the sixth become concentrated in the knowledge, and thus concentrated remain steady and untroubled, then Brahman becomes perceptible like a smokeless fire of blazing flames or the Sun of effulgent radiance. Indeed, one then beholds in oneself one’s soul like lightning fire in the skies.Everything then appears in it and it appears in everything in consequence of its infinitude. Those high-souled Brahmanas that are possessed of wisdom, that are endued with fortitude, that are possessed of high knowledge, and that are engaged in the good of all creatures, succeed in beholding it.
Engaged in the observance of austere vows, the Yogi who conducts himself thus for six months, seated by himself on an isolated spot, succeeds in attaining to an equality with the Indestructible. Annihilation, extension, power to present varied aspects in the same person or body, celestial scents, and sounds, and sights, the most agreeable sensations of taste and touch, pleasurable sensations of coolness and warmth, equality with the wind [Foot-note by the commentator and translator: Equality with the wind means speed of motion, power to disappear at will, and capacity to move through the skies. (Super natural powers known as ‘Siddhis’)]. Capability of understanding (by inward light) the meaning of scriptures and every work of genius, companionship of celestial damsels; acquiring all these by Yoga the Yogi should disregard them and merge them all in the knowledge.
[Note: By the practice of Yoga all these are capable of being acquired or attained. But then the Yogi who suffers himself to be led away by those valuable possessions is said to fall in hell, for the enjoyment of this kind is nothing but hell compared to the high object for which Yogis should strive].
Restraining speech and the senses one should practise Yoga during the hours after dusk, the hours before dawn, and at dawn of day, seated on a mountain summit, or at the foot of a goodly tree, or with a tree before him.
[Note: Chaitya trees or Peepul trees are sacred and large trees which stand firm on their roots and about which all round of each tree a platform of earth is raised. " In front of a tree" probably implying ‘under the shade of its spreading branches’].
Restraining all the senses within the heart, one should with faculties concentrated think of the Eternal and Indestructible like a man of the world thinking of wealth and other valuable possessions. One should never, while practising Yoga, withdraw one’s mind from it. One should with devotion betake oneself to those means by which one may succeed in restraining the mind that is very restless. One should never permit oneself to fall away from it. With the senses and the mind withdrawn from everything else, the Yogi (for practice) should betake himself to empty caves of mountains, to temples consecrated to the deities, and to empty houses or apartments, for living there. One should not associate with another in either speech, act or thought. Disregarding all things, and eating very abstemiously, the Yogi should look with an equal eye upon objects acquired or lost. One should behave after the same manner towards one that praises and one that censures him. He should not seek the good or the evil of one or the other. He should not rejoice at an acquisition or suffer anxiety when he meets with failure or loss. Of uniform behaviour towards all beings, he should imitate the wind
[Note: "Imitate the wind" by becoming unattached to all things].
Unto one whose mind is thus turned to itself, who leads a life of purity, and who casts an equal eye upon all things,- indeed, unto one who is ever engaged in Yoga thus for even six months,- Brahman as represented by sound appears very vividly. [Note: Refer to pages "Gayatri" and "Krishna’s flute" See the column on the left].
[Also refer to The Bhagavad Gita, Ch.6, Verse 8: The Yogi who is satisfied with the knowledge and wisdom (of the Self), who has conquered the senses, and to whom a clod of earth, a piece of stone and gold are the same, is said to be harmonised (i.e., is said to have attained Nirvikalpa Samadhi).]
Beholding all men afflicted with anxiety (on account of earning wealth and comfort), the Yogi should view a clod of earth, a piece of stone, and a lump of gold with an equal eye. Indeed, he should withdraw himself from this path (of earning wealth), cherishing an aversion for it, and never suffer himself to be stupefied. Even if a person happens to belong to the inferior order, even if one happens to be a woman, both of them, by following in the track indicated above, will surely attain to the highest end.
[Note by the scholar and translator: The inferior order here referred to is, of course, the Sudra order. The Commentator points out that whereas only the three superior orders (Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya) are regarded to be eligible for the study of Sankhya and for inculcation of such Srutis as Tattwamasi (That Thou Art), here sage Vyasa lays down that as regards the Yoga path, all are eligible to betake themselves to it]. [ Refer also to Bhagavad Gita, Ch.9, Verse 32: "For taking refuge in Me, they also, O Arjuna, who may be of a sinful birth, women, vaisyas as well as sudras- attain the Supreme goal"].
He that has subdued his mind beholds in his own self, by the aid of his own knowledge the Uncreate, the Eternal Brahman,- That, viz., which cannot be attained except by fixed senses,- That which is subtiler than the most subtile, and grosser than the most gross, and which is Emancipation’s self.
[Note: ‘ Fixed senses ‘ i.e., when the senses are fixed on the mind and the mind on the understanding. Ajaram (a word in the original Sanskrit text) is immutable or unchanging or that in which there is no change for the worse or for the better. By subtility is indicated the incapacity of being apprehended, and by ‘Mahattaram’(Sanskrit) is meant infinity].
By ascertaining from the mouths of preceptors and by themselves reflecting with their minds
Upon these words of the great and high-souled Rishis spoken so properly, persons possessed of wisdom attain to that equality (about which the scriptures say) with Brahman himself, till, indeed, the time when the universal dissolution comes that swallows up all existent beings._____________________________________________________TOP
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From The Bhagavad GitaExplanations based on the writings of Swami ShivanandaThe Divine Life Society, Rishikesh
Selected verses from The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 5 called "The Yoga of Renunciation of Action"
The Blessed Lord said :
Verse 3 : He should be known as a perpetual sanyasi (renunciate) who neither hates nor desires, O mighty-armed Arjuna, he is easily set free from bondage.
Verse 6: But renunciation is hard to attain without Yoga; the Yoga-harmonised sage quickly goes to Brahman (The Supreme Being).
Verse 13: Mentally renouncing all actions and self-controlled, the embodied one rests happily in the nine-gated city, neither acting nor causing others (body and senses) to act.
Verse 15: The Lord takes neither the demerit nor even the merit of any; knowledge is enveloped by ignorance, thereby beings are deluded.
[Note: Man is bound when he identifies himself with Nature (Prakriti or Maya) and its effects –body, mind, prana or the life breaths and senses. He attains freedom or moksha (liberation) when he identifies himself with the immortal, "actionless" Self that dwells within his heart.]
Verse 17: Their intellect absorbed in That (Supreme Being), their self being That, established in That, with That for their supreme goal, they go whence there is no return, their sins dispelled by knowledge.
Verse 18: Sages look with an equal eye on a Brahmin endowed with learning and humility, on a cow, on an elephant, and even on a dog and an outcaste.
[Note: The brahmana (brahmin or priest) is Sattwic. The cow is Rajasic. The elephant, the dog and the outcaste are Tamasic. The sage sees in all of them the one homogeneous immortal Self Who is not affected by the three gunas (Sattwa, Rajas & Tamas) and their tendencies.]
Verse 20: Resting in Brahman (The Supreme Being), with steady intellect and undeluded, the knower of Brahman neither rejoices on obtaining what is pleasant nor grieves on obtaining what is unpleasant.
Verse 21: With the self unattached to external contacts he finds happiness in the Self; with the self engaged in the meditation of Brahman he attains to the endless happiness.
[Note: If you want to enjoy the imperishable happiness of the Self within, you will have to withdraw the senses from their respective objects and plunge yourself in deep meditation on the Self within.]
Verse 24: He who is happy within, who rejoices within, and who is illumined within, that Yogi attains absolute freedom or moksha, himself becoming Brahman.
Verse 25; The sages obtain absolute freedom or moksha- they whose sins have been destroyed, whose dualities (perception of dualities or experience of the pairs of opposites e.g. happiness-unhappiness) are torn asunder, who are self-controlled, and intent on the welfare of all beings.
Verse 26: Absolute freedom (or Brahmic bliss) exists on all sides for those self-controlled ascetics who are free from desire and anger, who have controlled their thoughts, and who have realised the self.
Verse 27 : Shutting out all external contacts and fixing the gaze between the eyebrows, equalising the outgoing and incoming breaths moving within the nostrils.
[Note: Bhrumadya drsti or gazing between the two eyebrows where the psychic centre known as the Ajna Chakra is situated. The mind becomes steady when the breath becomes rhythmical.]
Verse 28 : With the senses, the mind and the intellect (ever) controlled, having liberation as his supreme goal, free from desire, fear and anger – the sage is verily liberated for ever. ___________________________________TOP
Index Alphabetical [Index to Pages] Selected verses from The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 6 called The Yoga of Meditation"
The Blessed Lord said :
Verse 2: Do thou, O Arjuna, know Yoga to be that which they call renunciation; no one verily becomes a Yogi who has not renounced thoughts.
[Note: The Lord eulogises Karma Yoga (Yoga of Action) here because it is the means or an external aid to Dhyana Yoga (Yoga of Meditation). It leads to the Yoga of Meditation in due course. No devotee of action who has not renounced the thought of the fruit of his actions can become a Yogi of steady mind. The thought of the fruits will certainly make the mind unsteady. In order to encourage the practice of Karma Yoga (Yoga of Action), it is stated here that Karma Yoga is sanyasa.]
Verse 3: For a sage who wishes to attain to Yoga, action is said to be the means; for the same sage who has attained to Yoga, inaction (quiescence) is said to be the means.
[Note: For a man who cannot practise meditation for a long time and who is not able to keep his mind steady in meditation, action is a means to get himself enthroned in Yoga. Action purifies his mind and makes the mind fit for the practice of steady meditation. Action leads to steady concentration and meditation. For the sage who is enthroned in Yoga, renunciation of actions is said to be the means. The more perfectly he abstains from actions the more steady his mind is, and the more peaceful he is, the more easily and thoroughly does his mind get fixed in the Self.]
Verse 4: When a man is not attached to the sense-objects or to actions, having renounced all thoughts, then he is said to have attained to Yoga.
[Note: Renunciation of thoughts implies that all desires and all actions should be renounced, because all desires are born of thoughts. "Whatever a man desires, that he wills; And whatever he wills, that he does."- From The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4.4.5.]
Verse 5: Let a man lift himself by his own Self alone, let him not lower himself ; for this self alone is the friend of oneself and this self alone is the enemy of oneself.
[Note: The lower mind or the impure mind (asuddha manas) is your real enemy because it binds you to the samsara (making you worldly-minded), and the higher mind or the Sattwic mind, the pure mind (suddha manas) is your real friend, because it helps you in the attainment of moksha.]
Verse 6: The self is the friend of the self for him who has conquered himself by the self, but to the unconquered self, this self stands in the position of the enemy like the (external) foe.
[Note: Conquer the lower mind through the higher mind. The lower mind is your enemy. The higher mind is your friend. The lower mind is filled with Rajas and Tamas (passion and darkness). The higher mind is filled with Sattwa or purity.]
Verse 7: The Supreme Self of him who is self-controlled and peaceful is balanced in cold and heat, pleasure and pain, as also in honour and dishonour.
[Note: The self-controlled Yogi is not affected by the pairs of opposites : cold and heat implying comforts and discomforts at the physical level, pleasure and pain refer to emotions at the level of the mind, and honour and dishonour implying the faculty of understanding at the intellectual level.]
Verse 9 : He who is of the same mind to the good-hearted, friends, enemies, the indifferent, the neutral, the hateful, the relatives, the righteous and the unrighteous, excels.
[Note: Such equal minded Yogi has equal vision.]
Verse 10 : Let the Yogi try constantly to keep the mind steady, remaining in solitude, alone, with the mind and the body controlled, and free from hope and greed.
[Note: If you are well established in the practice of pratyahara, sama and dama (withdrawal of the senses, control of mind and the body respectively), if you have the senses under your full control, you can find perfect solitude and peace even in the most crowded and noisy place of a big city. If the senses are turbulent, if you have not got the power to withdraw them, you will have no peace of mind even in a solitary cave of the Himalayas.]
Verse 11 & 12 : In a clean spot, having established a firm seat of his own, neither too high nor too low, made of a cloth, a skin (tiger skin or deer skin) and kusha-grass, one over the other, there, having made the mind one-pointed, with the actions of the mind and the senses controlled, let him, seated on the seat, practise Yoga for the purification of the self.
Verse 13 : Let him firmly hold his body, head and neck erect and still, gazing at the tip of his nose, without looking around.
[Note : Though the gaze is directed towards the tip of the nose when the eyes are half closed and the eyeballs are steady, the mind should be fixed only on the Self. Gazing at the tip of the nose will soon bring about concentration of the mind.]
Verse 14 : Serene minded, fearless, firm in the vow of a brahmachari (celibate), having controlled the mind, thinking of Me, and balanced in mind, let him sit, having Me as his supreme goal.
Verse 15 : Thus always keeping the mind balanced, the Yogi, with the mind controlled, attains to the peace abiding in Me, which culminates in liberation.
Verse 16 : Verily Yoga is not possible for him who eats too much, nor for him who does not eat at all, nor for him who sleeps too much nor for him who is (always) awake, O Arjuna.
Verse 17 : Yoga becomes the destroyer of pain for him who is moderate in eating and recreation (such as walking etc.), who is moderate in exertion in action, who is moderate in sleep and wakefulness.
Verse 19 : As a lamp placed in a windless spot does not flicker- to such is compared the Yogi of controlled mind, practising Yoga in the Self (or absorbed in the Yoga of the Self).
Verse 29 : With the mind harmonised by Yoga he sees the Self abiding in all beings and all beings in the Self; he sees the same everywhere.
Verse 31: He who, being established in unity, worships Me, who dwells in all beings, that Yogi abides in Me, whatever may be his mode of living.
[Note: Scriptures tell of a person named Sadana who lived in God though he was a butcher, because his mind was ever fixed at the lotus feet of the Lord.]
Arjuna said :
Verse 33 & 34 : This Yoga of equanimity taught by Thee, O Lord, I do not see its steady continuance, because of the restlessness of the mind.
The mind verily is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding, O Krishna : I deem it as difficult to control it as to control the wind.
The Blessed Lord said :Verse 35 & 36 : Undoubtedly, O mighty armed Arjuna, the mind is difficult to control and restless; but by practice and by dispassion it may be restrained.
I think Yoga is hard to be attained by one of uncontrolled self, but the self-controlled and striving one can attain to it by the proper means.
Arjuna said :
Verse 37 : He who is unable to control himself though he has the faith, and whose mind wanders away from Yoga, what end does he, having failed to attain perfection in Yoga meet, O Krishna?
[Note: He has faith in the efficacy of Yoga but he is not able to control the senses and the mind. He has no concentration of mind. Having failed to achieve perfection in Yoga, i.e., Self-realisation or the knowledge of the Self, what path will he tread, and what end will such a man meet?]
The Blessed Lord said : Verses 40, 41,42, 43 & 44 :
O Arjuna, neither in this world, nor in the next world is there destruction for him; none, verily, who does good ever comes to grief.
Having attained to the worlds of the righteous and having dwelt there for everlasting years, he who fell from Yoga is reborn in a house of the pure and wealthy.
Or he is born in a family of even the wise Yogis; verily a birth like this is very difficult to obtain in this world.
There he comes in touch with the knowledge acquired in his former body and strives more than before for perfection.
By that very former practice he is borne on in spite of himself. Even he who merely wishes to know Yoga goes beyond the Brahmic world.
Verse 45 : But the Yogi who strives with assiduity, purified of sins and perfected gradually through many births, reaches the highest goal.___________________________________Book titled "How to know God": The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. A rational and psychological explanation of yoga. It will especially appeal to those who want religion to make sense.___________________________________
From The Teachings of Sri Ramana MaharshiThe following text is reproduced from our Page 'Self-enquiry'Question: In turning the mind inwards, are we not still employing the mind?
Sri Ramana Maharshi: Of course we are employing the mind. It is well known and admitted that only with the help of the mind can the mind be killed. But instead of setting about saying there is a mind, and I want to kill it, begin to seek the source of the mind, and you find the mind does not exist at all. The mind, turned outwards, results in thoughts and objects. Turned inwards, it becomes itself the Self.
Question: Even so, I do not understand. ‘I’, you say, is the wrong ‘I’ now. How to eliminate the wrong ‘I’?
Sri Ramana Maharshi: You need not eliminate the wrong ‘I’. How can ‘I’ eliminate itself? All that you need to do is to find out its origin and abide there. Your efforts can extend only thus far. Then the beyond will take care of itself. You are helpless there. No effort can reach it. Sri Ramana Maharshi: The yogi tries to drive his mind to the goal, as a cowherd drives a bull with a stick, but on this path the seeker coaxes the bull by holding out a handful of grass.
Question: How is that done?
Sri Ramana Maharshi: You have to ask yourself the question ‘Who am I?’ This investigation will lead in the end to the discovery of something within you, which is behind the mind. Solve that great problem and you will solve all other problems.Again people often ask how the mind is controlled. I say to them, ‘Show me the mind and then you will know what to do.’ The fact is that the mind is only a bundle of thoughts. How can you extinguish it by the thought of doing so or by a desire? Your thoughts and desires are part and parcel of the mind. The mind is simply fattened by new thoughts rising up. Therefore it is foolish to attempt to kill the mind by means of the mind. The only way of doing it is to find its source and hold on to it. The mind will then fade away of its own accord. Yoga teaches Chitta Vritti Nirodha (control of the activities of the mind). But I say Atma Vichara (self-investigation). This is the practical way. Chitta Vritti Nirodha is brought about in sleep, swoon, or by starvation. As soon as the cause is withdrawn there is a recrudescence of thoughts. Of what use is it then? In the state of stupor there is peace and no misery. But misery recurs when the stupor is removed. So nirodha (control) is useless and cannot be of lasting benefit.
How then can the benefit be made lasting? It is by finding the cause of misery. Misery is due to the perception of objects. If they are not there, there will no contingent thoughts and so misery is wiped off. ‘How will objects cease to be?’ is the next question. The srutis (scriptures) and the sages say that the objects are only mental creations. They have no substantive being. Investigate the matter and ascertain the truth of the statement. The result will be the conclusion that the objective world is in the subjective consciousness. The Self is thus the only reality, which permeates and also envelops the world. Since there is no duality, no thoughts will arise to disturb your peace. This is realisation of the Self. The Self is eternal and so also is realisation.
Abhyasa (spiritual practice) consists in withdrawal within the Self every time you are disturbed by thought. It is not concentration or destruction of the mind but withdrawal into the Self.===================================Related articles: Sankhya versus YogaRaja Yoga GitaMeditationDirect PathSelf-enquiryGodSelf- Atma
The Nature of RealityConsciousness - the three statesSelf-realisationEmancipationFreedom and BondageGita for Children
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yoga
http://www.hinduism.co.za/yoga.htm
Vyasa said: O excellent son, asked by thee, I have told thee truly what the answer to thy question should be according to the doctrine of knowledge as expounded in the Sankhya system. Listen now to me as I expound to thee all that should be done (for the same end) according to the Yoga doctrine.
Vyasa said: O excellent son, asked by thee, I have told thee truly what the answer to thy question should be according to the doctrine of knowledge as expounded in the Sankhya system. Listen now to me as I expound to thee all that should be done (for the same end) according to the Yoga doctrine.
Yoga
Meditation
Quotations
If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. (trans. George Long)
A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?" (trans. George Long)
Let opinion be taken away, and no man will think himself wronged. If no man shall think himself wronged, then is there no more any such thing as wrong. (trans. Meric Casaubon)
(...) As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad , and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes has no value for him. (trans. Maxwell Staniforth)
Quotations
If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. (trans. George Long)
A cucumber is bitter. Throw it away. There are briars in the road. Turn aside from them. This is enough. Do not add, "And why were such things made in the world?" (trans. George Long)
Let opinion be taken away, and no man will think himself wronged. If no man shall think himself wronged, then is there no more any such thing as wrong. (trans. Meric Casaubon)
(...) As for others whose lives are not so ordered, he reminds himself constantly of the characters they exhibit daily and nightly at home and abroad , and of the sort of society they frequent; and the approval of such men, who do not even stand well in their own eyes has no value for him. (trans. Maxwell Staniforth)
Friday, March 10, 2006
Glossary
A Glossary Of Terms
Below is a list of terms commonly found in philosophy texts and other scholarly works. Some are esoteric and rarely seen ('adscititious,' 'deipnosophist'); others are more frequently employed and contextually significant.
absolute -- 1. that which can exist on its own without depending on other things. 2. in ethics, the view that moral truth exists independently of cultural context and time and place ("moral absolute"); cf. moral relativism.
absolutism -- in political philosophy, the view that absolute rule is the most desirable, or the least inadequate.
adscititious -- not inherent or essential, derivative.
a posteriori -- reasoning from particular facts to general principles or conclusions; inductive, empirical. [ Latin, "from the posterior".]
a priori -- 1. reasoning from general propositions to particular conclusions; deductive. 2. an assertion made before examination or substantiation. [Latin, "from beforehand".] A priori knowledge exists independently of direct experience; e.g., one needn't draw a hundred parallel lines to know that they never intersect one another.
agathism -- the doctrine that all things tend towards ultimate good, as distinguished from optimism, which holds that all things are now for the best. adj., agathistic. [From the Greek agathos, good.]
agnosticism -- the belief that one cannot know whether God exists or does not exist. An agnostic may or may not believe in God, but in any case feels that there is insufficient proof to hold fast to either view. Cf. atheism.
animism -- the belief that objects are inhabited by spirits, and that natural events or processes are caused by spirits.
anthropomorphism -- the ascription of human characteristics or motives to inanimate objects, natural phenomena, or supernatural things. Many major religious systems -- among them Judaism and Christianity -- share anthropomorphic qualities. An example is the belief that human beings are "made in God's image," or that God is a personal deity sensitive and responsive to human need and pain, or more commonly, that God is an elderly man with a long gray beard sitting somewhere in the sky on his celestial throne.
anthropopathism -- the attribution of human feelings and emotions to anything not human; e.g., inanimate objects and animals.
anthroposophy -- a theory advanced by Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) contending that the spiritual realm can be understood through the exercise of human intellectual faculties. Knowledge of "higher worlds" is possible according to this view.
apocalyptic -- of or pertaining to religious revelation or to momentous spiritual occasions. From the Greek, meaning "uncovering".
apodictic -- incontrovertibly true; demonstrably so, certain.
apollonian -- having the classical beauty and strength of Apollo as opposed to the emotionally volatile and romantic attributes of Dionysus. The Apollonian/Dionysian -- or classicist/romanticist -- distinction is one of which many philosophers have made use since Hellenistic times. It was drawn upon by Nietzsche, for instance, in The Birth of Tragedy; the Apollonian was depicted as critical, rational, logical; the Dionysian as intuitive, creative, artistic.
archetypes -- 1. an original model or prototype. 2. the quintessence or ideality of something. 3. in Jungian psychology (Carl Jung, 1875-1961), symbolic representations of established ways of responding to certain types of experience, contained in the collective unconscious.
Arianism -- a heretical doctrine associated with the teachings of Arius, an Alexandrian priest of the fourth century who taught that God created from nothing (ex nihilo) and begot a Son before He created all other things. The Son of God, according to Arius, was divine but not equal to God. This doctrine was condemned as heresy at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.). The official Church teaching at Nicaea was that Jesus and God are consubstantial, of one and the same substance.
Aristotelianism -- of or pertaining to the philosophy of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), among the greatest philosophers who ever lived. Aristotle made prodigious contributions to the understanding of biology, epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics, and politics.
associationism -- a theory of knowledge propounded by thinkers such as Condillac in France and James Mill in England which holds that nearly all thought processes are governed by association (e.g., cause and effect, resemblance and difference, contiguity). Associationism has influenced the modern theory of conditioning and learning; it is opposed by those who believe the mind can freely create arbitrary images.
ataraxia -- a tranquil and calm state of mind.
atheism -- the belief that God does not exist.
Atman -- in Hindu religion, the individual soul, in contrast to Brahman.
atomism -- the theory, as set forth by philosophers such as Democritus, that physical objects consist of minute, indivisible particles moving in a void.
attribute -- in Spinozistic philosophy (Benedict Spinoza, 1632-1677), one of the infinite aspects of Reality, such as matter or thought.
Averroism -- the philosophical system of Averroes, an important medieval philosopher and contemporary of Thomas Aquinas (see Thomism). Averroes denied the immortality of the soul but thought reason to be eternal and transcultural.
axiology -- the study of values and the nature of value judgments.
axiom -- a statement that is true by definition or so obviously true that it needn't be proved. In logic, an assumption used as an unquestioned basis for a theory.
behaviorism -- a psychological theory that stresses the importance of studying overt behavior and denies the legitimacy of introspective reports of consciousness. Behaviorists see mental activities (emotions, dreams, pains) as having no scientific value.
Brahman -- in Hindu religion, the power that sustains the cosmos and the soul (atman).
Buddhism -- a religion of various sects (e.g., Zen, Mahayana) founded sometime in the 6th century B.C. by Siddhartha Gautama (the Enlightened One) which teaches that suffering is part of existence and that the extinction of separate consciousness is prerequisite to enlightenment. (Useful commentaries on Buddhism can be found in the highly regarded works of Christmas Humphreys, D.T. Suzuki, and Alan Watts.)
Calvinism -- a religious offshoot of Protestantism known for its doctrine of predestination (the idea that every individual is predestined to either damnation or salvation).
categorical imperative -- in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a moral law or command not dependent on any conditions; a rule enjoining us to act so that we could will our act as a universal maxim.
Catholic -- the official title of the Western Church after the rift between the Eastern and Western Christian Churches. [from the Greek, meaning "universal"].
Catholicism -- the religion of Western Christianity up to the Reformation; the religion also of the Church of Rome.
causality -- the theory that every event has a rational cause. Aristotle identified four causes to everything: material, formal, efficient, and final.
coherence theory of truth -- the theory that a statement is true if and only if it coheres with a given system of statements or beliefs.
collective unconscious -- in Jungian psychology (Carl Jung, 1875-1961), the part of the unconscious that contains symbolic representations, or archetypes, of ancient ways of thought inherited from humanity's past experience.
contingent -- a proposition whose truth depends on facts about the world, not on the rules of logic. In modal logic, all true propositions that are not necessary are contingent.
contradiction, law of -- first put forth by Aristotle, the axiom that nothing can both have and not have a given property or characteristic.
cosmology -- the study of the origin and structure of the universe.
cynicism -- 1. a Greek school of philosophy originally based on the doctrine that nothing can be known. In the Roman era cynicism became an ethical doctrine emphasizing the need to live an austere, abstemious life. 2. more recently, the view that people act in ways to further their own ends and self-centered ambitions.
deipnosophist -- one who speaks learnedly at the dinner table; from a work by Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai, written in 228 A.D.
deism -- the belief that there is a God whose existence can be apprehended without revelation. Cf. agnosticism, atheism, and theism.
determinism -- the theory that all events (including mental ones) are caused, so that whatever happens cannot happen otherwise. Determinism is opposed to the theory of free will, which holds that human choice is active and unconstrained.
dialectic -- 1. the art of testing whether assertions are valid or not. 2. In Hegelian philosophy, a kind of logic that proceeds from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. [from the Greek, "pertaining to debate".]
dialectical materialism -- in Hegelian and Marxist theory, the view that the world is a material process undergoing stages of unending change.
dogmatism -- a theory or belief system unsusceptible to critical questioning and doubt; a dogmatist is one who holds unflinchingly to an idea in the belief that such an idea is infallible.
dualism -- 1. a theory opposite to monism, holding that reality consists of two substances (e.g., mind and matter, body and soul). 2. in Platonic metaphysics, the belief that human being consists of soul and body, the latter being a prison in which the formerly all-knowing soul resides. 3. a theory running contrary to monotheism, holding that supernatural reality is of two forms, the one good and the other bad; Manichaenism is one such dualistic religious view.
ecumenism -- a movement providing worldwide unity among religions through cooperative understanding. [ecumenical, from the Greek, "of the inhabited world."]
elements -- basic components or constituents of things; Aristotle recognized four: fire, water, earth, air.
empirical -- based on observation and experiment rather than pure reason; inductive.
empiricism -- the epistemological view that all knowledge is grounded in experience and direct observation, and not what's in our mind a priori. Eminent empiricists include Locke, Berkeley (pronounced Barkley), Hume, J.S. Mill and Bertrand Russell.
entelechy -- the inner nature of something which is responsible for its ultimate development and fulfillment. In Aristotelian philosophy, entelechy is seen as form, as distinguished from matter.
Epicureanism -- school of Greek philosophy (Epicurus: 341-270 B.C.) based on the belief that there are no divine laws and that wisdom consists in the pursuit of rational pleasures; the forerunner of modern utilitarian moral philosophy.
ethics -- the theory of good and evil, of conduct which is right and wrong; the branch of philosophy dealing with moral principles and their methods of justification.
fatalism -- the doctrine that each person's destiny lies beyond any individual effort to change it.
first cause -- the beginning of an elaborate series of causes, often identified with God.
free will -- the freedom of conscious choice of moral agents, irrespective of the significant influence of genetic endowment, environment, and cultural circumstance.
hedonism -- in moral philosophy, the doctrine that 'good' is that which contributes to pleasure or diminishes pain. The most influential of classical hedonistic philosophers was Epicurus; more recent hedonistic philosophies include those of the utilitarians (Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill among them).
idealism -- in metaphysics, the view that ideas or thoughts are the chief, organizing reality, as against the views of materialism, which holds that matter is the primary reality of the universe. The most popular and enduring idealistic philosophy is Platonism.
intuitionism -- in ethics, the view that people have an innate sense of right and wrong.
logic -- the study of proper reasoning, of valid and invalid arguments, of fallacies and syllogisms. Usually broken down into formal logic and informal logic.
maieutic -- see the Socratic Method.
materialism -- the doctrine that matter is the only, or primary, reality, as opposed to idealism, which contends that ideas and thoughts of things are the only reality.
metaphysics -- the study of being in its largest sense; an inquiry into the ultimate reality. [Literally, "beyond physics".]
monism -- 1. In Greek philosophy, the theory that everything is made out of the same basic stuff (e.g., the atomistic philosophy of the Ionians); the theory that there is literally only one thing (the Eleatic monism of Parmenides and his disciples). 2. The rejection of dichotomies, such as those of 'mind' and 'matter'. Examples of monist theories are materialism and idealism.
moral relativism -- The view that values differ across cultures and societies and are not universally "true" in all places and for all time. The opposite of moral absolutism
naturalism -- the doctrine that reality is governed by certain laws, including those of cause and effect.
nihilism -- 1. the view that nothing can be known, that knowledge is illusory, meaningless, or irrelevant; the denial of any objective ground of truth. 2. the view that moral values and perspectives are groundless and cannot be justified, either by appeal to God and tradition or by appeal to the human conscience, intuition, or the laws of a state. 3. the belief (e.g., of Nietzsche) that the universe has no ultimate aim or purpose, that human life is insignificant. [From the Latin nihil, "nothing".]
nirvana -- in Buddhist religion, a state of mystical wisdom achieved after all fleshy desires have been surmounted. In Hindu religion, the renunciation of all material attachments and achievement of ultimate happiness.
noumenon: in Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself which cannot be perceived in experience.
objective -- independent of individual apperception or feeling; cf. subjective.
Ockham's Razor (or Occam's Razor) -- a principle developed by William of Ockham (1285-1349) which holds that the simplest of two or more competing theories is preferable, and that entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ("entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity"). The principle is often referred to as the law of parsimony.
ontology -- the study of being, of the ultimate nature of things.
ousia -- a Greek term meaning essence, the essential nature of a thing.
panentheism -- the view that God is both "in" all things and outside of all things at the same time; the idea that God is both immanent and transcendent.
panpsychism -- the theory that all objects in the universe -- "inanimate" as well as "animate" -- have an inner being or psychological nature.
pantheism -- the doctrine that God is inherent in all things, that every particular thing in the universe is a manifestation of God's essence. The doctrine was most influentially and cogently advanced by Spinoza.
Peripatetic -- a follower or disciple of Aristotle. The word comes from the Greek verb "to walk about"; while holding discussions with students, Aristotle would frequently walk around.
pluralism -- the doctrine that the world is composed of many things, the source of contrary processes. Cf. monism.
positivism -- a philosophical view which recognizes only those things that can be empirically verified, or known directly by observation.
pragmatism -- the notion that truth is the practical application of an idea; a theory which emphasizes the instrumental nature of the intellect and which sees the consummation of truth in direct, successful action. The earliest pragmatist philosophers were Americans: C.S. Peirce and William James among them.
prolegomenon (plural: prolegomena): a critical introduction to a thesis or work; prefatory remarks.
realism -- 1. The doctrine in epistemology that the external world exists independently of perception. 2. The view that universal ideas correspond to objective realities.
relativism -- See moral relativism.
scholasticism -- a philosophical movement of medieval times characterized chiefly by speculative thought, the merging of theological conceptions with metaphysical ones (as, say, in the work of Aquinas).
Socratic Method -- An approach to teaching and philosophizing pioneered by Socrates (470-399 B.C.) which consists of asking a succession of questions. The aim is to expose some weakness or inadequacy in the thinking of the interrogated. The questions serve as an impetus for further study and reflection.
specious -- an argument that seems plausible but is in fact fallacious.
subjective -- existing in thought as opposed to the "external" world.
theism -- 1. belief in a God or Gods. 2. the view that God transcends the universe but is also, in some way, immanent in it.
transcendental -- that which is beyond the reach of the senses, of ordinary experience. [literally, "to climb over".]
transcendentalism -- 1. The philosophical disposition to look for truth within oneself, as against the conventions of culture or society. 2. A form of realist metaphysical thought, esp. in Plato, which sees Truth beyond the phenomenal, material world. 3. A part of Kantian philosophy in which real knowledge is achievable when one can transcend mere empiricism and ascertain the a priori. 4. A New England movement, associated most often with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that sought to express spiritual reality and the ideal, relying exclusively on intuition.
utilitarianism -- the moral philosphy of Epicurus, and much later, of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, according to which actions are considered moral which contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. "Good" is tantamount to "pleasure," "bad" with "pain". Contrast this view with deontological ethics.
voluntarism -- the doctrine that the will is the supreme force or factor in human conduct and in the universe; this perspective received its most influential articulation in Schopenhauer's philsophy.
Weltanschauung -- German word meaning "worldview," a way of looking at and understanding the external world.
yang -- in Chinese philosophy, a universal principle which manifests itself as a male force, as spirit and heaven.
yin -- in Chinese philosophy, a universal principle which manifests itself as a female force, as body and earth.
Zen -- a system of Buddhist meditation intended to transcend the normal categories and strictures of human rationality, whose ultimate goal is the achievement of satori, or deep revelation and insight.
- Return Home -
Below is a list of terms commonly found in philosophy texts and other scholarly works. Some are esoteric and rarely seen ('adscititious,' 'deipnosophist'); others are more frequently employed and contextually significant.
absolute -- 1. that which can exist on its own without depending on other things. 2. in ethics, the view that moral truth exists independently of cultural context and time and place ("moral absolute"); cf. moral relativism.
absolutism -- in political philosophy, the view that absolute rule is the most desirable, or the least inadequate.
adscititious -- not inherent or essential, derivative.
a posteriori -- reasoning from particular facts to general principles or conclusions; inductive, empirical. [ Latin, "from the posterior".]
a priori -- 1. reasoning from general propositions to particular conclusions; deductive. 2. an assertion made before examination or substantiation. [Latin, "from beforehand".] A priori knowledge exists independently of direct experience; e.g., one needn't draw a hundred parallel lines to know that they never intersect one another.
agathism -- the doctrine that all things tend towards ultimate good, as distinguished from optimism, which holds that all things are now for the best. adj., agathistic. [From the Greek agathos, good.]
agnosticism -- the belief that one cannot know whether God exists or does not exist. An agnostic may or may not believe in God, but in any case feels that there is insufficient proof to hold fast to either view. Cf. atheism.
animism -- the belief that objects are inhabited by spirits, and that natural events or processes are caused by spirits.
anthropomorphism -- the ascription of human characteristics or motives to inanimate objects, natural phenomena, or supernatural things. Many major religious systems -- among them Judaism and Christianity -- share anthropomorphic qualities. An example is the belief that human beings are "made in God's image," or that God is a personal deity sensitive and responsive to human need and pain, or more commonly, that God is an elderly man with a long gray beard sitting somewhere in the sky on his celestial throne.
anthropopathism -- the attribution of human feelings and emotions to anything not human; e.g., inanimate objects and animals.
anthroposophy -- a theory advanced by Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) contending that the spiritual realm can be understood through the exercise of human intellectual faculties. Knowledge of "higher worlds" is possible according to this view.
apocalyptic -- of or pertaining to religious revelation or to momentous spiritual occasions. From the Greek, meaning "uncovering".
apodictic -- incontrovertibly true; demonstrably so, certain.
apollonian -- having the classical beauty and strength of Apollo as opposed to the emotionally volatile and romantic attributes of Dionysus. The Apollonian/Dionysian -- or classicist/romanticist -- distinction is one of which many philosophers have made use since Hellenistic times. It was drawn upon by Nietzsche, for instance, in The Birth of Tragedy; the Apollonian was depicted as critical, rational, logical; the Dionysian as intuitive, creative, artistic.
archetypes -- 1. an original model or prototype. 2. the quintessence or ideality of something. 3. in Jungian psychology (Carl Jung, 1875-1961), symbolic representations of established ways of responding to certain types of experience, contained in the collective unconscious.
Arianism -- a heretical doctrine associated with the teachings of Arius, an Alexandrian priest of the fourth century who taught that God created from nothing (ex nihilo) and begot a Son before He created all other things. The Son of God, according to Arius, was divine but not equal to God. This doctrine was condemned as heresy at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.). The official Church teaching at Nicaea was that Jesus and God are consubstantial, of one and the same substance.
Aristotelianism -- of or pertaining to the philosophy of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), among the greatest philosophers who ever lived. Aristotle made prodigious contributions to the understanding of biology, epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics, and politics.
associationism -- a theory of knowledge propounded by thinkers such as Condillac in France and James Mill in England which holds that nearly all thought processes are governed by association (e.g., cause and effect, resemblance and difference, contiguity). Associationism has influenced the modern theory of conditioning and learning; it is opposed by those who believe the mind can freely create arbitrary images.
ataraxia -- a tranquil and calm state of mind.
atheism -- the belief that God does not exist.
Atman -- in Hindu religion, the individual soul, in contrast to Brahman.
atomism -- the theory, as set forth by philosophers such as Democritus, that physical objects consist of minute, indivisible particles moving in a void.
attribute -- in Spinozistic philosophy (Benedict Spinoza, 1632-1677), one of the infinite aspects of Reality, such as matter or thought.
Averroism -- the philosophical system of Averroes, an important medieval philosopher and contemporary of Thomas Aquinas (see Thomism). Averroes denied the immortality of the soul but thought reason to be eternal and transcultural.
axiology -- the study of values and the nature of value judgments.
axiom -- a statement that is true by definition or so obviously true that it needn't be proved. In logic, an assumption used as an unquestioned basis for a theory.
behaviorism -- a psychological theory that stresses the importance of studying overt behavior and denies the legitimacy of introspective reports of consciousness. Behaviorists see mental activities (emotions, dreams, pains) as having no scientific value.
Brahman -- in Hindu religion, the power that sustains the cosmos and the soul (atman).
Buddhism -- a religion of various sects (e.g., Zen, Mahayana) founded sometime in the 6th century B.C. by Siddhartha Gautama (the Enlightened One) which teaches that suffering is part of existence and that the extinction of separate consciousness is prerequisite to enlightenment. (Useful commentaries on Buddhism can be found in the highly regarded works of Christmas Humphreys, D.T. Suzuki, and Alan Watts.)
Calvinism -- a religious offshoot of Protestantism known for its doctrine of predestination (the idea that every individual is predestined to either damnation or salvation).
categorical imperative -- in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a moral law or command not dependent on any conditions; a rule enjoining us to act so that we could will our act as a universal maxim.
Catholic -- the official title of the Western Church after the rift between the Eastern and Western Christian Churches. [from the Greek, meaning "universal"].
Catholicism -- the religion of Western Christianity up to the Reformation; the religion also of the Church of Rome.
causality -- the theory that every event has a rational cause. Aristotle identified four causes to everything: material, formal, efficient, and final.
coherence theory of truth -- the theory that a statement is true if and only if it coheres with a given system of statements or beliefs.
collective unconscious -- in Jungian psychology (Carl Jung, 1875-1961), the part of the unconscious that contains symbolic representations, or archetypes, of ancient ways of thought inherited from humanity's past experience.
contingent -- a proposition whose truth depends on facts about the world, not on the rules of logic. In modal logic, all true propositions that are not necessary are contingent.
contradiction, law of -- first put forth by Aristotle, the axiom that nothing can both have and not have a given property or characteristic.
cosmology -- the study of the origin and structure of the universe.
cynicism -- 1. a Greek school of philosophy originally based on the doctrine that nothing can be known. In the Roman era cynicism became an ethical doctrine emphasizing the need to live an austere, abstemious life. 2. more recently, the view that people act in ways to further their own ends and self-centered ambitions.
deipnosophist -- one who speaks learnedly at the dinner table; from a work by Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai, written in 228 A.D.
deism -- the belief that there is a God whose existence can be apprehended without revelation. Cf. agnosticism, atheism, and theism.
determinism -- the theory that all events (including mental ones) are caused, so that whatever happens cannot happen otherwise. Determinism is opposed to the theory of free will, which holds that human choice is active and unconstrained.
dialectic -- 1. the art of testing whether assertions are valid or not. 2. In Hegelian philosophy, a kind of logic that proceeds from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. [from the Greek, "pertaining to debate".]
dialectical materialism -- in Hegelian and Marxist theory, the view that the world is a material process undergoing stages of unending change.
dogmatism -- a theory or belief system unsusceptible to critical questioning and doubt; a dogmatist is one who holds unflinchingly to an idea in the belief that such an idea is infallible.
dualism -- 1. a theory opposite to monism, holding that reality consists of two substances (e.g., mind and matter, body and soul). 2. in Platonic metaphysics, the belief that human being consists of soul and body, the latter being a prison in which the formerly all-knowing soul resides. 3. a theory running contrary to monotheism, holding that supernatural reality is of two forms, the one good and the other bad; Manichaenism is one such dualistic religious view.
ecumenism -- a movement providing worldwide unity among religions through cooperative understanding. [ecumenical, from the Greek, "of the inhabited world."]
elements -- basic components or constituents of things; Aristotle recognized four: fire, water, earth, air.
empirical -- based on observation and experiment rather than pure reason; inductive.
empiricism -- the epistemological view that all knowledge is grounded in experience and direct observation, and not what's in our mind a priori. Eminent empiricists include Locke, Berkeley (pronounced Barkley), Hume, J.S. Mill and Bertrand Russell.
entelechy -- the inner nature of something which is responsible for its ultimate development and fulfillment. In Aristotelian philosophy, entelechy is seen as form, as distinguished from matter.
Epicureanism -- school of Greek philosophy (Epicurus: 341-270 B.C.) based on the belief that there are no divine laws and that wisdom consists in the pursuit of rational pleasures; the forerunner of modern utilitarian moral philosophy.
ethics -- the theory of good and evil, of conduct which is right and wrong; the branch of philosophy dealing with moral principles and their methods of justification.
fatalism -- the doctrine that each person's destiny lies beyond any individual effort to change it.
first cause -- the beginning of an elaborate series of causes, often identified with God.
free will -- the freedom of conscious choice of moral agents, irrespective of the significant influence of genetic endowment, environment, and cultural circumstance.
hedonism -- in moral philosophy, the doctrine that 'good' is that which contributes to pleasure or diminishes pain. The most influential of classical hedonistic philosophers was Epicurus; more recent hedonistic philosophies include those of the utilitarians (Jeremy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill among them).
idealism -- in metaphysics, the view that ideas or thoughts are the chief, organizing reality, as against the views of materialism, which holds that matter is the primary reality of the universe. The most popular and enduring idealistic philosophy is Platonism.
intuitionism -- in ethics, the view that people have an innate sense of right and wrong.
logic -- the study of proper reasoning, of valid and invalid arguments, of fallacies and syllogisms. Usually broken down into formal logic and informal logic.
maieutic -- see the Socratic Method.
materialism -- the doctrine that matter is the only, or primary, reality, as opposed to idealism, which contends that ideas and thoughts of things are the only reality.
metaphysics -- the study of being in its largest sense; an inquiry into the ultimate reality. [Literally, "beyond physics".]
monism -- 1. In Greek philosophy, the theory that everything is made out of the same basic stuff (e.g., the atomistic philosophy of the Ionians); the theory that there is literally only one thing (the Eleatic monism of Parmenides and his disciples). 2. The rejection of dichotomies, such as those of 'mind' and 'matter'. Examples of monist theories are materialism and idealism.
moral relativism -- The view that values differ across cultures and societies and are not universally "true" in all places and for all time. The opposite of moral absolutism
naturalism -- the doctrine that reality is governed by certain laws, including those of cause and effect.
nihilism -- 1. the view that nothing can be known, that knowledge is illusory, meaningless, or irrelevant; the denial of any objective ground of truth. 2. the view that moral values and perspectives are groundless and cannot be justified, either by appeal to God and tradition or by appeal to the human conscience, intuition, or the laws of a state. 3. the belief (e.g., of Nietzsche) that the universe has no ultimate aim or purpose, that human life is insignificant. [From the Latin nihil, "nothing".]
nirvana -- in Buddhist religion, a state of mystical wisdom achieved after all fleshy desires have been surmounted. In Hindu religion, the renunciation of all material attachments and achievement of ultimate happiness.
noumenon: in Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself which cannot be perceived in experience.
objective -- independent of individual apperception or feeling; cf. subjective.
Ockham's Razor (or Occam's Razor) -- a principle developed by William of Ockham (1285-1349) which holds that the simplest of two or more competing theories is preferable, and that entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem ("entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity"). The principle is often referred to as the law of parsimony.
ontology -- the study of being, of the ultimate nature of things.
ousia -- a Greek term meaning essence, the essential nature of a thing.
panentheism -- the view that God is both "in" all things and outside of all things at the same time; the idea that God is both immanent and transcendent.
panpsychism -- the theory that all objects in the universe -- "inanimate" as well as "animate" -- have an inner being or psychological nature.
pantheism -- the doctrine that God is inherent in all things, that every particular thing in the universe is a manifestation of God's essence. The doctrine was most influentially and cogently advanced by Spinoza.
Peripatetic -- a follower or disciple of Aristotle. The word comes from the Greek verb "to walk about"; while holding discussions with students, Aristotle would frequently walk around.
pluralism -- the doctrine that the world is composed of many things, the source of contrary processes. Cf. monism.
positivism -- a philosophical view which recognizes only those things that can be empirically verified, or known directly by observation.
pragmatism -- the notion that truth is the practical application of an idea; a theory which emphasizes the instrumental nature of the intellect and which sees the consummation of truth in direct, successful action. The earliest pragmatist philosophers were Americans: C.S. Peirce and William James among them.
prolegomenon (plural: prolegomena): a critical introduction to a thesis or work; prefatory remarks.
realism -- 1. The doctrine in epistemology that the external world exists independently of perception. 2. The view that universal ideas correspond to objective realities.
relativism -- See moral relativism.
scholasticism -- a philosophical movement of medieval times characterized chiefly by speculative thought, the merging of theological conceptions with metaphysical ones (as, say, in the work of Aquinas).
Socratic Method -- An approach to teaching and philosophizing pioneered by Socrates (470-399 B.C.) which consists of asking a succession of questions. The aim is to expose some weakness or inadequacy in the thinking of the interrogated. The questions serve as an impetus for further study and reflection.
specious -- an argument that seems plausible but is in fact fallacious.
subjective -- existing in thought as opposed to the "external" world.
theism -- 1. belief in a God or Gods. 2. the view that God transcends the universe but is also, in some way, immanent in it.
transcendental -- that which is beyond the reach of the senses, of ordinary experience. [literally, "to climb over".]
transcendentalism -- 1. The philosophical disposition to look for truth within oneself, as against the conventions of culture or society. 2. A form of realist metaphysical thought, esp. in Plato, which sees Truth beyond the phenomenal, material world. 3. A part of Kantian philosophy in which real knowledge is achievable when one can transcend mere empiricism and ascertain the a priori. 4. A New England movement, associated most often with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that sought to express spiritual reality and the ideal, relying exclusively on intuition.
utilitarianism -- the moral philosphy of Epicurus, and much later, of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill, according to which actions are considered moral which contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. "Good" is tantamount to "pleasure," "bad" with "pain". Contrast this view with deontological ethics.
voluntarism -- the doctrine that the will is the supreme force or factor in human conduct and in the universe; this perspective received its most influential articulation in Schopenhauer's philsophy.
Weltanschauung -- German word meaning "worldview," a way of looking at and understanding the external world.
yang -- in Chinese philosophy, a universal principle which manifests itself as a male force, as spirit and heaven.
yin -- in Chinese philosophy, a universal principle which manifests itself as a female force, as body and earth.
Zen -- a system of Buddhist meditation intended to transcend the normal categories and strictures of human rationality, whose ultimate goal is the achievement of satori, or deep revelation and insight.
- Return Home -
Monday, March 06, 2006
invention
V. INVENTIONS & ACHIEVEMENTS
c. 510 B.C. -- First known map, invented by Hecataeus in Greece.
c. 250 B.C. -- Principles of the lever and other simple machines developed by Archimedes.
c. 140 B.C. -- Invention of trigonometry by Hipparchus.
1260 A.D. -- Konstantin Anklitzen invented the gun/cannon.
1608 -- Hans Lippershey invented the first telescope.
1654 -- Basic laws of probability propounded by Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat.
1666 -- Isaac Newton laid down the principles of integral calculus.
1752 -- Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning conductor.
1793 -- Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
1830 -- Andre Ure invented the first thermostat, and Edwin Beard Budding created the first lawn mower.
1846 -- Elias Howe created the sewing machine.
1867 -- Christopher Latham Sholes invented the typewriter.
1879 -- James Ritty invented the cash register.
1888 -- George Easton created roll film camera.
c. 510 B.C. -- First known map, invented by Hecataeus in Greece.
c. 250 B.C. -- Principles of the lever and other simple machines developed by Archimedes.
c. 140 B.C. -- Invention of trigonometry by Hipparchus.
1260 A.D. -- Konstantin Anklitzen invented the gun/cannon.
1608 -- Hans Lippershey invented the first telescope.
1654 -- Basic laws of probability propounded by Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat.
1666 -- Isaac Newton laid down the principles of integral calculus.
1752 -- Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning conductor.
1793 -- Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
1830 -- Andre Ure invented the first thermostat, and Edwin Beard Budding created the first lawn mower.
1846 -- Elias Howe created the sewing machine.
1867 -- Christopher Latham Sholes invented the typewriter.
1879 -- James Ritty invented the cash register.
1888 -- George Easton created roll film camera.
simulacra
Modules on Baudrillard II on simulation
ACCORDING TO BAUDRILLARD, what has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map. Reality itself has begun merely to imitate the model, which now precedes and determines the real world: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory" ("The Precession of Simulacra" 1). According to Baudrillard, when it comes to postmodern simulation and simulacra, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” ("The Precession of Simulacra" 2). Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that postmodern culture is artificial, because the concept of artificiality still requires some sense of reality against which to recognize the artifice. His point, rather, is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice. To clarify his point, he argues that there are three "orders of simulacra": 1) in the first order of simulacra, which he associates with the pre-modern period, the image is a clear counterfeit of the real; the image is recognized as just an illusion, a place marker for the real; 2) in the second order of simulacra, which Baudrillard associates with the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies. Such production misrepresents and masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening to replace it (e.g. in photography or ideology); however, there is still a belief that, through critique or effective political action, one can still access the hidden fact of the real; 3) in the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.
Baudrillard points to a number of phenomena to explain this loss of distinctions between "reality" and the simulacrum:
1) Media culture. Contemporary media (television, film, magazines, billboards, the Internet) are concerned not just with relaying information or stories but with interpreting our most private selves for us, making us approach each other and the world through the lens of these media images. We therefore no longer acquire goods because of real needs but because of desires that are increasingly defined by commercials and commercialized images, which keep us at one step removed from the reality of our bodies or of the world around us.
2) Exchange-Value. According to Karl Marx, the entrance into capitalist culture meant that we ceased to think of purchased goods in terms of use-value, in terms of the real uses to which an item will be put. Instead, everything began to be translated into how much it is worth, into what it can be exchanged for (its exchange-value). Once money became a “universal equivalent,” against which everything in our lives is measured, things lost their material reality (real-world uses, the sweat and tears of the laborer). We began even to think of our own lives in terms of money rather than in terms of the real things we hold in our hands: how much is my time worth? How does my conspicuous consumption define me as a person? According to Baudrillard, in the postmodern age, we have lost all sense of use-value: "It is all capital" (For a Critique 82).
3) Multinational capitalism. As the things we use are increasingly the product of complex industrial processes, we lose touch with the underlying reality of the goods we consume. Not even national identity functions in a world of multinational corporations. According to Baudrillard, it is capital that now defines our identities. We thus continue to lose touch with the material fact of the laborer, who is increasingly invisible to a consumer oriented towards retail outlets or the even more impersonal Internet. A common example of this is the fact that most consumers do not know how the products they consume are related to real-life things. How many people could identify the actual plant from which is derived the coffee bean? Starbucks, by contrast, increasingly defines our urban realities. (On multinational capitalism, see Marxism: Modules: Jameson: Late Capitalism.)
4) Urbanization. As we continue to develop available geographical locations, we lose touch with any sense of the natural world. Even natural spaces are now understood as “protected,” which is to say that they are defined in contradistinction to an urban “reality,” often with signs to point out just how “real” they are. Increasingly, we expect the sign (behold nature!) to precede access to nature.
5) Language and Ideology. Baudrillard illustrates how in such subtle ways language keeps us from accessing “reality.” The earlier understanding of ideology was that it hid the truth, that it represented a “false consciousness,” as Marxists phrase it, keeping us from seeing the real workings of the state, of economic forces, or of the dominant groups in power. (This understanding of ideology corresponds to Baudrillard's second order of simulacra.) Postmodernism, on the other hand, understands ideology as the support for our very perception of reality. There is no outside of ideology, according to this view, at least no outside that can be articulated in language. Because we are so reliant on language to structure our perceptions, any representation of reality is always already ideological, always already constructed by simulacra.
ACCORDING TO BAUDRILLARD, what has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map. Reality itself has begun merely to imitate the model, which now precedes and determines the real world: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory" ("The Precession of Simulacra" 1). According to Baudrillard, when it comes to postmodern simulation and simulacra, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” ("The Precession of Simulacra" 2). Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that postmodern culture is artificial, because the concept of artificiality still requires some sense of reality against which to recognize the artifice. His point, rather, is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice. To clarify his point, he argues that there are three "orders of simulacra": 1) in the first order of simulacra, which he associates with the pre-modern period, the image is a clear counterfeit of the real; the image is recognized as just an illusion, a place marker for the real; 2) in the second order of simulacra, which Baudrillard associates with the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies. Such production misrepresents and masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening to replace it (e.g. in photography or ideology); however, there is still a belief that, through critique or effective political action, one can still access the hidden fact of the real; 3) in the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.
Baudrillard points to a number of phenomena to explain this loss of distinctions between "reality" and the simulacrum:
1) Media culture. Contemporary media (television, film, magazines, billboards, the Internet) are concerned not just with relaying information or stories but with interpreting our most private selves for us, making us approach each other and the world through the lens of these media images. We therefore no longer acquire goods because of real needs but because of desires that are increasingly defined by commercials and commercialized images, which keep us at one step removed from the reality of our bodies or of the world around us.
2) Exchange-Value. According to Karl Marx, the entrance into capitalist culture meant that we ceased to think of purchased goods in terms of use-value, in terms of the real uses to which an item will be put. Instead, everything began to be translated into how much it is worth, into what it can be exchanged for (its exchange-value). Once money became a “universal equivalent,” against which everything in our lives is measured, things lost their material reality (real-world uses, the sweat and tears of the laborer). We began even to think of our own lives in terms of money rather than in terms of the real things we hold in our hands: how much is my time worth? How does my conspicuous consumption define me as a person? According to Baudrillard, in the postmodern age, we have lost all sense of use-value: "It is all capital" (For a Critique 82).
3) Multinational capitalism. As the things we use are increasingly the product of complex industrial processes, we lose touch with the underlying reality of the goods we consume. Not even national identity functions in a world of multinational corporations. According to Baudrillard, it is capital that now defines our identities. We thus continue to lose touch with the material fact of the laborer, who is increasingly invisible to a consumer oriented towards retail outlets or the even more impersonal Internet. A common example of this is the fact that most consumers do not know how the products they consume are related to real-life things. How many people could identify the actual plant from which is derived the coffee bean? Starbucks, by contrast, increasingly defines our urban realities. (On multinational capitalism, see Marxism: Modules: Jameson: Late Capitalism.)
4) Urbanization. As we continue to develop available geographical locations, we lose touch with any sense of the natural world. Even natural spaces are now understood as “protected,” which is to say that they are defined in contradistinction to an urban “reality,” often with signs to point out just how “real” they are. Increasingly, we expect the sign (behold nature!) to precede access to nature.
5) Language and Ideology. Baudrillard illustrates how in such subtle ways language keeps us from accessing “reality.” The earlier understanding of ideology was that it hid the truth, that it represented a “false consciousness,” as Marxists phrase it, keeping us from seeing the real workings of the state, of economic forces, or of the dominant groups in power. (This understanding of ideology corresponds to Baudrillard's second order of simulacra.) Postmodernism, on the other hand, understands ideology as the support for our very perception of reality. There is no outside of ideology, according to this view, at least no outside that can be articulated in language. Because we are so reliant on language to structure our perceptions, any representation of reality is always already ideological, always already constructed by simulacra.
simulation
Jean Baudrillard
Simulacra and Simulations
from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.
In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.
The divine irreference of images
To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any other symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.
The alienist, of course, claims that "for each form of the mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost the truth principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective caues have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of simulation that can never be unmasked, since it isn't false either?2
What can the army do with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of identification, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as though he were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or lunatic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" symptom and the authentic symptom. "If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of subversion. Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which again outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.
Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.
It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
This was the approach of the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences - the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics.
Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meamng and that something could guarantee this exchangeGod, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted circuit without reference or circumference
So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the successive phases of the image:
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.
Hyperreal and imaginary
Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.
Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.
Political incantation
Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.
The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public mocality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.
But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and revivihg moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.
All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.
Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality - these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc." - as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and furfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).
Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral and economic rationality, but - challenge to take up according to symbolic law.
Moebius: spiralling negativity
Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get rid of Nixon - and why not? All hypotheses are possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact- the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle.
The communists attack the socialist party as though they wanted to shatter the union of the Left. They sanction the idea that their reticence stems from a more radical political exigency. In fact, it is because they don't want power. But do they not want it at this conjuncture because it is unfavorable for the Left in general, or because it is unfavorable for them within the union of the Left - or do they not want it by definition? When Berlinguer declares, "We mustn't be frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy," this means simultaneously:
1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.
2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.
3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over.
4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy - which might appear evident, but not so evident, since:
5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).
All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it.
Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As for the Moebius strip, if it is split in two, it results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of resolving its surfaces (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 - where even those condemned at Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western democracy, which finds m them the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in return Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign intervention? Where is the truth in all that, when such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?
The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the "vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution.
All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.
It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.
Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an art)ficial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.
To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.
Strategy of the real
Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.
For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.
But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.
Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you). In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.
In this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand m terms of some reality, because it can function nowhere else. The simulation of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly (because it has no "consequences") or be punished as an offence to public office (for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for nothing") - but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. The established order can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order simulacrum, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions upon which function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at order.
This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this assumption (thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.
Thus all hold ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all. But this does not make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.5), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only dominate referentials, a determinate power which can only dominate a determined world, but which can do nothing about that indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real - power itself eventually breaking apart in this space and becomnig a simulation of power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power effects and mass simulation).
The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also - why not? - the discourse of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world even the confusian of the reality principle with the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One remains among principles, and there power is always right.
Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc.; and if it was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value, of every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened even more against it. And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the play of simulation.
As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it. But it is too late.
Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle epoque of political economy, no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself.
Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power - a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of power - a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it on others) and grieving its loss. Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning.
But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an art)ficial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it. Undoubtedly this will even end up in socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge - as it is through the death of God that religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none. A simulation which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike "true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake - this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death. Completely expunged from the political dimension, it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved.
Likewise with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer exists. Everybody still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the same sense), the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which it is equivalent in the general run of life's options. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of stake in the work process.6 The same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared. And for that matter so has the strike-real too, which is no longer a stoppage of work, but its alternative pole in the ritual scansion of the social calendar. It is as if everyone has "occupied" their work place or work post, after declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is the custom in a "self-managed" job, in exactly the same terms as before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent strike.
This isn't a science-fiction dream: everywhere it is a question of a doubling of the work process. And of a double or locum for the strike process - strikes which are incorporated like obsolescence in objects, like crises in production. Then there are no longer any strikes or work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else entirely: a wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil, a scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the empty stage of the social.
It is no longer a question of the ideology of work - of the traditional ethic that obscures the "real" labour process and the "objective" process of exploitation- but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.
This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology, for these are all discourses of truth - always good, even and especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of simulation.
Notes
1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like a witch's trick - and more generally before any technical apparatus, which is always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin to the uneasiness before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will (cf. The Student of Prague, where the devil detaches the image of the student from the mirror and harrasses him to death by the intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind of black magic, from the fact of being seduced by one's own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic mirage of technique, McLuhan) and that returns to him, cancelled and distorted -endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us: simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette, image of photo) always had as objective an operation of black image.
2 There is furthermore in Monod's book a flagrant contradiction, which reflects the ambiguity of all current science. His discourse concerns the code, that is the third-order simulacra, but it does so still according to "scientific" schemes of the second-order - objectiveness, "scientific" ethic of knowledge, science's principle of truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with the indeterminable models of the third-order.
3 "It's the feeble 'definition' of TV which condemns its spectator to rearranging the few points retained into a kind of abstract work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a reality that was only just presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not supposed to represent anything." TV as perpetual Rorshach test. And furthermore: "The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile."
4 "The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan of the political economy of the sign, when it enters into the third-order simulation - the distinction between the medium and the message characterizes instead signification of the second-order.
5 The entire current "psychological" situation is characterized by this shortcircuit.
Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, once the initial phase of revolt is passed and once there has been established the principle of the right to emancipation, seem like the real emancipation of parents. And the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always more insistent demand (though still as paradoxical) for the presence and advice of parents or of teachers. Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly have absconded with their true liberty. Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be." They're going to hassle them, not with any emotional or material spontaneous demand, but with an exigency that has been premeditated and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledge. Hyperdependence (much greater than before) distored by irony and refusal, parody of libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without content, without referent, unjust)fied, but for all that all the more severe - naked demand with no possible answer. The contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, the pedagogical or familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there remains only a demand linked to the empty form of the institution- perverse demand, and for that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable" desire (that is to say non-referential, un-referential), desire that has been fed by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated," desire captured in its own vertiginous image, desire of desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Deprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back upon itself, draws its energy from its own reflection and its disappointment with itself. This is literally today the "demand," and it is obvious that unlike the "classical" objective or transferable relations this one here is insoluble and interminable.
Simulated Oedipus.
Francois Richard: "Students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they are aware of this and they play the game, ironically. 'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word, speak, you are there for that.' Contestation certainly, but not only: the more authority is contested, vilified, the greater the need for authority as such. They play at Oedipus also, to deny it all the more vehemently. The 'teach', he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play at incest, malaise, the untouchable, at being a tease - in order to de-sexualize finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back again, who tells the "oedipal" stories, who has the "analytical" dreams to satisfy the supposed request of the analyst, or to resist him? In the same way the student goes through his oedipal number, his seduction number, gets chummy, close, approaches, dominates- but this isn't desire, it's simulation. Oedipal psychodrama of simulation (neither less real nor less dramatic for all that). Very different from the real libidinal stakes of knowledge and power or even of a real mourning for the absence of same (as could have happened after 1968 in the universities). Now we've reached the phase of desperate reproduction, and where the stakes are nil, the simulacrum is maximal - exacerbated and parodied simulation at one and the same time- as interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same reasons.
The interminable psychoanalysis.
There is a whole chapter to add to the history of transference and countertransference: that of their liquidation by simulation, of the impossible psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, that produces and reproduces the unconscious as its institutional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the exchange of the signs of the unconscious. Just as revolution dies of the exchange of the critical signs of political economy. This short-circuit was well known to Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic dream, or with the "uninformed" patients, in the form of the gift of their analytic knowledge. But this was still interpreted as resistance, as detour, and did not put fundamentally into question either the process of analysis or the principle of transference. It is another thing entirely when the unconscious itself, the discourse of the unconscious becomes unfindable - according to the same scenario of simulative anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the third order. The analysis then can no longer end, it becomes logically and historically interminable, since it stabilizes on a puppetsubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed on demand - an impossible-to-break-through point around which the whole analysis is rearranged. The messages of the unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.
6 Athenian democracy, much more advanced than our own, had reached the point where the vote was considered as payment for a service, after all other repressive solutions had been tried and found wanting in order to insure a quorum.
Simulacra and Simulations
from Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.l
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.
In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their art)ficial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.
The divine irreference of images
To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any other symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.
The alienist, of course, claims that "for each form of the mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost the truth principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective caues have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of simulation that can never be unmasked, since it isn't false either?2
What can the army do with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of identification, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as though he were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or lunatic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" symptom and the authentic symptom. "If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of subversion. Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which again outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.
Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.
It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
This was the approach of the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences - the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics.
Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meamng and that something could guarantee this exchangeGod, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted circuit without reference or circumference
So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.
These would be the successive phases of the image:
1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.
The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.
Hyperreal and imaginary
Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.
Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.
Political incantation
Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.
The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public mocality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.
But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and revivihg moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.
All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.
Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality - these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc." - as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and furfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).
Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral and economic rationality, but - challenge to take up according to symbolic law.
Moebius: spiralling negativity
Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get rid of Nixon - and why not? All hypotheses are possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact- the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle.
The communists attack the socialist party as though they wanted to shatter the union of the Left. They sanction the idea that their reticence stems from a more radical political exigency. In fact, it is because they don't want power. But do they not want it at this conjuncture because it is unfavorable for the Left in general, or because it is unfavorable for them within the union of the Left - or do they not want it by definition? When Berlinguer declares, "We mustn't be frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy," this means simultaneously:
1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.
2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.
3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over.
4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy - which might appear evident, but not so evident, since:
5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).
All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it.
Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As for the Moebius strip, if it is split in two, it results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of resolving its surfaces (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 - where even those condemned at Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western democracy, which finds m them the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in return Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign intervention? Where is the truth in all that, when such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?
The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the "vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution.
All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.
It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.
Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an art)ficial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.
To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.
Strategy of the real
Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.
For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.
But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.
Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you). In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.
In this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand m terms of some reality, because it can function nowhere else. The simulation of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly (because it has no "consequences") or be punished as an offence to public office (for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for nothing") - but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. The established order can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order simulacrum, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions upon which function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at order.
This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this assumption (thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.
Thus all hold ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all. But this does not make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.5), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only dominate referentials, a determinate power which can only dominate a determined world, but which can do nothing about that indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real - power itself eventually breaking apart in this space and becomnig a simulation of power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power effects and mass simulation).
The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also - why not? - the discourse of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world even the confusian of the reality principle with the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One remains among principles, and there power is always right.
Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc.; and if it was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value, of every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened even more against it. And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the play of simulation.
As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it. But it is too late.
Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle epoque of political economy, no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself.
Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power - a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of power - a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it on others) and grieving its loss. Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning.
But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an art)ficial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it. Undoubtedly this will even end up in socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge - as it is through the death of God that religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none. A simulation which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike "true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake - this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death. Completely expunged from the political dimension, it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved.
Likewise with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer exists. Everybody still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the same sense), the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which it is equivalent in the general run of life's options. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of stake in the work process.6 The same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared. And for that matter so has the strike-real too, which is no longer a stoppage of work, but its alternative pole in the ritual scansion of the social calendar. It is as if everyone has "occupied" their work place or work post, after declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is the custom in a "self-managed" job, in exactly the same terms as before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent strike.
This isn't a science-fiction dream: everywhere it is a question of a doubling of the work process. And of a double or locum for the strike process - strikes which are incorporated like obsolescence in objects, like crises in production. Then there are no longer any strikes or work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else entirely: a wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil, a scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the empty stage of the social.
It is no longer a question of the ideology of work - of the traditional ethic that obscures the "real" labour process and the "objective" process of exploitation- but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.
This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology, for these are all discourses of truth - always good, even and especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of simulation.
Notes
1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like a witch's trick - and more generally before any technical apparatus, which is always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin to the uneasiness before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will (cf. The Student of Prague, where the devil detaches the image of the student from the mirror and harrasses him to death by the intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind of black magic, from the fact of being seduced by one's own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic mirage of technique, McLuhan) and that returns to him, cancelled and distorted -endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us: simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette, image of photo) always had as objective an operation of black image.
2 There is furthermore in Monod's book a flagrant contradiction, which reflects the ambiguity of all current science. His discourse concerns the code, that is the third-order simulacra, but it does so still according to "scientific" schemes of the second-order - objectiveness, "scientific" ethic of knowledge, science's principle of truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with the indeterminable models of the third-order.
3 "It's the feeble 'definition' of TV which condemns its spectator to rearranging the few points retained into a kind of abstract work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a reality that was only just presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not supposed to represent anything." TV as perpetual Rorshach test. And furthermore: "The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile."
4 "The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan of the political economy of the sign, when it enters into the third-order simulation - the distinction between the medium and the message characterizes instead signification of the second-order.
5 The entire current "psychological" situation is characterized by this shortcircuit.
Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, once the initial phase of revolt is passed and once there has been established the principle of the right to emancipation, seem like the real emancipation of parents. And the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always more insistent demand (though still as paradoxical) for the presence and advice of parents or of teachers. Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly have absconded with their true liberty. Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be." They're going to hassle them, not with any emotional or material spontaneous demand, but with an exigency that has been premeditated and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledge. Hyperdependence (much greater than before) distored by irony and refusal, parody of libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without content, without referent, unjust)fied, but for all that all the more severe - naked demand with no possible answer. The contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, the pedagogical or familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there remains only a demand linked to the empty form of the institution- perverse demand, and for that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable" desire (that is to say non-referential, un-referential), desire that has been fed by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated," desire captured in its own vertiginous image, desire of desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Deprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back upon itself, draws its energy from its own reflection and its disappointment with itself. This is literally today the "demand," and it is obvious that unlike the "classical" objective or transferable relations this one here is insoluble and interminable.
Simulated Oedipus.
Francois Richard: "Students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they are aware of this and they play the game, ironically. 'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word, speak, you are there for that.' Contestation certainly, but not only: the more authority is contested, vilified, the greater the need for authority as such. They play at Oedipus also, to deny it all the more vehemently. The 'teach', he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play at incest, malaise, the untouchable, at being a tease - in order to de-sexualize finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back again, who tells the "oedipal" stories, who has the "analytical" dreams to satisfy the supposed request of the analyst, or to resist him? In the same way the student goes through his oedipal number, his seduction number, gets chummy, close, approaches, dominates- but this isn't desire, it's simulation. Oedipal psychodrama of simulation (neither less real nor less dramatic for all that). Very different from the real libidinal stakes of knowledge and power or even of a real mourning for the absence of same (as could have happened after 1968 in the universities). Now we've reached the phase of desperate reproduction, and where the stakes are nil, the simulacrum is maximal - exacerbated and parodied simulation at one and the same time- as interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same reasons.
The interminable psychoanalysis.
There is a whole chapter to add to the history of transference and countertransference: that of their liquidation by simulation, of the impossible psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, that produces and reproduces the unconscious as its institutional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the exchange of the signs of the unconscious. Just as revolution dies of the exchange of the critical signs of political economy. This short-circuit was well known to Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic dream, or with the "uninformed" patients, in the form of the gift of their analytic knowledge. But this was still interpreted as resistance, as detour, and did not put fundamentally into question either the process of analysis or the principle of transference. It is another thing entirely when the unconscious itself, the discourse of the unconscious becomes unfindable - according to the same scenario of simulative anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the third order. The analysis then can no longer end, it becomes logically and historically interminable, since it stabilizes on a puppetsubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed on demand - an impossible-to-break-through point around which the whole analysis is rearranged. The messages of the unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.
6 Athenian democracy, much more advanced than our own, had reached the point where the vote was considered as payment for a service, after all other repressive solutions had been tried and found wanting in order to insure a quorum.
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