This week I’m taking a break from my usual focus on the sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition and turning my attention to those of Hinduism. In reading the Text, I’ve come to a new and different understanding of what hedonism might mean for me in the context of this Satanic religion that I’m building for myself. Hedonism is traditionally thought of in terms of indulgence in sense-pleasures, but I think there may be a greater indulgence to be found.
Thinking of Hinduism as a single religion would be much like thinking of the Abrahamic religions as singular — an argument could be made that that is the case, but it would be a misrepresentation of the diversity of thought contained therein. But as the Jews, Christians, and Muslims have a reverence for certain texts in common, so do the Hindus. For them, the central and most sacred texts are the Vedas, written in ancient Sanskrit and believed to be of divine authorship. According to Dr. Grant Hardy (Sacred Texts, 2014), their actual content is less important than their ritual function. Even the priests who chant the words may not understand them, but the purpose is not to inform Hindus of metaphysical or ethical truths but rather, like the divine laws of the ancient Hebrews, to connect them with the harmonious order of the universe.
Another class of sacred Hindu texts is smriti, “that which is remembered” (in contrast to the Vedas, which are śruti, “that which is heard”), which are believed by Hindus to be of human authorship. These texts are less sacred then the Vedas, but simultaneously more important in terms of describing the general belief-structure of Hindu practitioners. Included among them are works of epic poetry, including what may be the grandest and most expansive of all epics from any tradition, the Mahabharata, which weighs in at approximately half the length of the entire Wheel of Time series. This work tells of a war of succession, and includes, in the sixth of its eighteen books, eighteen chapters so remarkable in beauty and significance that they are often taken from the greater text as an independent work, the Bhagavad Gita, “The Song of the Lord,” the first Sanskrit text to be translated into English. I’ll be using the 1985 translation by Eknath Easwaran, who believes that the Bhagavad Gita was actually composed separately and later inserted into the Mahabharata, and who describes the work as a “handbook for Self-realization and a guide to action,” making it of particular relevance to the Satanist.
In this story, I’ll be examining the first two chapters of the Text, and the second in particular, which is titled “Self-Realization”.
At the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita, a great war of succession is about to begin. Two armies are gathered before a great battle, and the warrior Arjuna is torn between his duty to prosecute the war and his desire not to kill those of his friends and relatives who are among the other host. He asks his charioteer, Krishna, an avatar of the god Vishnu, for advice on how to proceed.
This despair and weakness in a time of crisis are mean and unworthy of you, Arjuna. How have you fallen into a state so far from the path to liberation? It does not become you to yield to this weakness. Arise with a brave heart and destroy the enemy.
Bhagavad Gita 2:2-3
Krishna counsels that pain, death, and killing are all illusory; behind them all is an eternal Self which is “indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging” (2:21). This notion of the true Self, Brahman (also translatable as breath, cf. נשמה, neshama, the breath which God breathes into Adam to give him life), is central to Hinduism, and a major difference between those religions and Buddhism, which maintains that there is no true Self at all. Arjuna is a warrior, and it is his dharma — a complicated word, meaning (in Hinduism) approximately “duty” in a sense of cosmic ethical law — to prosecute the war against the usurpers.
But Arjuna continues:
How can I ever bring myself to fight against Bhishma and Drona, who are worthy of reverence? How can I, Krishna? Surely it would be better to spend my life begging than to kill these great and worthy souls! If I killed them, every pleasure I found would be tainted. I don’t even know which would be better, for us to conquer them or for them to conquer us. The sons of Dhritarashtra have confronted us; but why would we care to live if we killed them?
Bhagavad Gita 2:4-6
Bhishma and Drona are characters of remarkable literary legacy. Look up the Wikipedia page on either one, and compare it to a fandom page on, for example, Rand al’Thor from The Wheel of Time.
In Arjuna, I am reminded of Satan the Adversary in Paradise Lost, who, in his rebellion, took up arms against his fellow angels.
Continuing with his admonition to Arjuna, Krishna says:
When the senses contact sense objects, a person experiences cold or heat, pleasure or pain. These experiences are fleeting; they come and go. Bear them patiently, Arjuna. Those who are unaffected by these changes, who are the same in pleasure and pain, are truly wise and fit for immortality. Assert your strength and realize this!
The impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between the two have attained the end of all knowledge. Realize that which pervades the universe and is indestructible; no power can affect this unchanging, imperishable reality. The body is mortal, but that which dwells in the body is immortal and immeasurable. Therefore, Arjuna, fight in this battle.
Bhagavad Gita 2:14-18
Krishna continues with the discussion of sense-experience as transient, and then brings up something curious: the boundary between the temporal and the eternal, between the real and the unreal. I am reminded of Genesis 1:1, in which the earth exists in a nascent state between creation and uncreation, and of the dialectic of contradiction implied therein. I’ve found this to be a reoccurring theme across religions, and have written of this in several of my previous stories. To summarize, sacred texts often imply a certain tension in contradictions that seem to point to ineffable mystical understanding of religious mysteries that are understood inwardly but that cannot be revealed in language.
Returning to the Text:
Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to seek me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.
There are ignorant people who speak flowery words and take delight in the letter of the law, saying that there is nothing else. Their hearts are full of selfish desires, Arjuna. Their idea of heaven is their own enjoyment, and the aim of all their activities is pleasure and power. The fruit of their actions is continual rebirth. Those whose minds are swept away by the pursuit of pleasure and power are incapable of following the supreme goal and will not attain samadhi. The scriptures describe the three gunas. But you should be free from the action of the gunas, established in eternal truth, self-controlled, without any sense of duality or the desire to acquire and hoard.
Bhagavad Gita 2:41-45
Samadhi means both the flow-state of perfect conscious awareness, and a mystical state of unification with the divine, and the gunas are the three qualities of the phenomenal world, very roughly balance, energy, and imbalance
LaVeyan Satanism is hedonistic and materialistic (as can be seen in statements throughout The Satanic Bible, published by Anton Szandor LaVey in 1969), in opposition to religious prohibitions against such attitudes for moral reasons. In my view, the concern is not that hedonism and materialism are morally wrong. Assuming there is no conflict with common sense ethics, there is no moral reason not to do as we please. Rather, these are consolation prizes, and paltry ones at that, relative to that of what Krishna speaks. As Krishna points out, the materialist hedonist and the pious Christian ascetic differ only in their choice of indulgence; for both, “the aim of all their activities is pleasure and power,” in this life for the former and in the next for the latter. And neither is samadhi a promise of a post-mortem world in reward for nihilistically denying this one. Very much to the contrary, nothing could be more in and of this world. It is, in a sense, a greater hedonism than the hedonism of the material: the utmost fulfillment of vitality in existence, the pure indulgence of conscious experience.
Krishna continues:
You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself—-without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is perfect evenness of mind.
Bhagavad Gita 2:47
Yoga, here, means any discipline which leads one to truth or realization
Krishna is not speaking specifically of economic labor, saying rather that the consequences of our actions do not truly belong to us as our actions themselves do. This is sensible, for there is for no consequence a single cause, just as there is for no sign a single, objective referent. Both are structured, existing in contexts of difference lacking absolute foundations.
Even as a tortoise draws in its limbs, the wise can draw in their senses at will. Aspirants abstain from sense pleasure, but they still crave for them. These cravings all disappear when they see the highest goal. Even of those who tread the path, the stormy senses can sweep off the mind. They live in wisdom who subdue their senses and keep their minds ever absorbed in me.
Bhagavad Gita 2:58-61
The weak-minded are easily distracted, the slave of their urges. When they experience unpleasant emotion, they cannot withstand it, fleeing into petty distractions when that pain is at the core of our very vital existence, when it is that which drives us to better ourselves and our lives (cf. Nietzsche: “To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure,” The Gay Science, 1887, translation Kaufmann). It was the torment of Satan the Adversary in Hell, combined with his loss of the happiness of Heaven, that first inspired him to continue his work after the initial failure of his rebellion (Paradise Lost 1:50-56). And Moloch, advising Satan, spoke of “turning our tortures into horrid arms against the Torturer” (2:63-64), of making use of one’s suffering to support one’s greater objectives. Without suffering, the Buddha would have had no cause to ask the great question of birth and death, and without greater suffering still, he would have left the question unanswered. So it seems as well that hedonism might be an indulgence, of a sort, in our own suffering, delving into it rather than fleeing from it, seeking to understand its source and its nature, and using it for our own betterment.
Atheists and agnostics of all sorts will likely scoff at that final clause in the Text, but one should bear in mind what Krishna represents for the Hindus, and especially for the Vaishnavas: Krishna is the avatar, the immanent incarnation, of Vishnu, who is identical to Brahman, the true Self to which all souls (Ātman) are consubstantial. Keeping one’s mind absorbed in Krishna means exactly absorption in one’s own conscious experience, about which I have written above. To such a degree as Satanism is a religion of the Self, awareness of one’s true nature is paramount. To say that I am a independent and isolated self in the Cartesian sense, in and for myself alone, is an attractive fiction that flies in the face of all that science and philosophy have learned about the nature of identity. Thus, when Krishna concludes the chapter with words that would seem antithetical to the Satanist:
They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the ego-cage of “I,” “me,” and “mine” to be united with the Lord. This is the supreme state. Attain to this, and pass from death to immortality.
Bhagavad Gita 2:71-72
…I suggest that there is wisdom there for those who would seek to know their true Selves. When there is no distinguishing the part from the whole, what is there to die?