The Ascendancy of Psychotic Knowledge (cont.)
By Shunyamurti
Similar
regimes of orthodoxy ruled other religious traditions as well.
Historically, only in India was freedom of thought allowed, and that
only among a single class of people: the yogis. The teachers and
practitioners of yoga remained outside the system of vedic doctrine
and the control of the Brahmin caste. The great liberated yogis did
not fear the brahminical system, and the system recognized its need
of yogic sages to maintain its own legitimacy, and so a pax yogica
was established. The yogis could teach their own kind of knowledge,
could establish their own social forms that allowed dropping of
gender and caste discrimination, and could propagate their own
lineages of teachings, so long as they remained in their forest
retreats and ashrams, and did not try to undermine the social system.
Eventually, the yogis became incorporated into the system as its own
safety valve. By allowing dissidents to egress from the system of
social control through yogic renunciation, the society remained
remarkably stable throughout the stormy vicissitudes of history. In
this way, the discipline of yoga remained free of mind control by the
clerical elites.
In other
regions, however, including China, the Middle East, and Russia, as
well as Western Europe and the colonized Americas, the effect of
suppressing independent thinking led eventually to the blowback of
religious schism and turmoil that eventually resulted in the
overthrow of the dynasties that had reigned since the ancient times.
In Europe, the Protestant Reformation led to the French Revolution
and the bourgeois overthrow of the feudal system. Capitalism had its
own golden age of free thought. But that was soon controlled by the
new priesthood of scientism, applying what Lacan referred to as
“university discourse” on behalf of the class of robber
barons that had gained control of the levers of society. The older
discourse of religion now also bowed to the same masters.
The
religious establishments gradually lost their credibility and their
membership dwindled. Newer religious movements attracted the
alienated adherents of the older ones. But each new movement became
co-opted by the same hegemonic forces and lost their steam.
Eventually, it became impossible to launch a successful challenge to
the dominant regime. Even such originally revolutionary approaches to
human understanding as psychoanalysis, which Freud proudly labeled “a
plague,” and later, the more transcendentally oriented Jungian
analysis, have been tamed and blunted as instruments of change, in
fact have been largely converted into instruments of oppression, by
the power of the hegemonic masters, through strict licensing laws and
the peer pressures and homogenizing edicts of professional societies.
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