Bobby Beausoleil Reference Archive

Reflections on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot through the lens of humanity’s responsibility to light up the divine within. 

THE EGO, it is said, is phenomenal and finite. Being of the body, it is entirely oriented in the spacial and temporal, and dies when the body dies. Yet while the undefinable quality or awareness that may be called the Soul animates and inhabits the body, the ego serves as an essential interface between a vastly more subtle and amorphous Consciousness and the physical reality with which It has chosen to be engaged through the instrument of the body. In this grossly oversimplified definition, the ego is what grounds us in and binds us to the “natural” world we know while embodied as human beings.

What happens, then, when a man is born with a physical affliction that greatly diminishes the influence of the ego, and how may this bear upon his relationship with all of humanity? And, on the flip side, what happens when the incessant chatter of a man’s ego is so dense that it effectively walls him off from knowing any real sense of community, leaving him as if stranded on an isolated island?

In his book The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky explores these core questions in a story that is set against the backdrop of 19th century Russian society during a period in which the Russian monarchy and aristocracy were in a state of terminal decay. Dostoevsky does not provide clear answers to these questions, however. Rather, he treats them like multifaceted gemstones, turning them this way and that, exposing them to the light from various angles. He leaves it to the intelligence of the reader to make sense of them and, to the extent possible, produce answers to them.

THE IDIOT begins with Prince Lev Myshkin and Parfyon Rogozhin facing one another in a passenger compartment on a train, where they have just met. As the story unfolds, a most remarkable relationship between these two men emerges—a relationship that proves to be the hinge pin of the story, and the undoing of both men.

The prince and Rogozhin are each afflicted with an illness. Prince Myshkin has epilepsy and is disposed to an occasional fit. This illness is congenital and has undoubtedly resulted in his peculiar orientation as a perennial innocent, or—in the term of the Russian culture of the period in which the story takes place—”idiot”. Over most of the story, Rogozhin’s ailment is referenced only as some unspecified illness that is evident in his sickly pallor and in odd facial ticks, suggestive of some malignancy squirming around inside of him. The reader is not told the nature of this illness until the very end of the book, when a doctor diagnoses it as “brain fever”.

At times these two men seem to be polar aspects of the same man—as if a man were divided into two individuals, with differing distribution of qualities. But these men are notseparate in any absolute fashion; they permeate one another in complex ways. Dostoevsky, himself an epileptic, seems to have drawn these characters out of his own inner gallery as a method for examining and exploring their respective modalities.

In contention between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin is Nastasya Filippovna, a woman who suffers intensely because her mind is ensnared in a kind of fugue of reliving the abuses inflicted on her from the time she was an adolescent girl through young adulthood. Her past has tarnished her with shame in the view of Russian society, and in her own view as well. Nastasya is the object of Rogozhin’s passion, and he wants nothing more in the world than to possess her for her demonic beauty, and imprison her in his world. Prince Myshkin wants only to give Nastasya sanctuary from such possession and imprisonment, and to care for her until she is restored to integrity. The entire story of The Idiot and all of the other characters in the story are suspended within the tension between these three individuals and their unfolding drama.

ROGOZHIN’S SO-CALLED BRAIN FEVER is nothing more or less than the relentless oscillations of his infernal mental machine—or “the monkey mind”, as Buddhists call it. The brutish Rogozhin is a man whose self-identification is entirely oriented in his physicality. As one who is egocentrically body-bound, Rogozhin’s internal duologue clouds his awareness of any state of being that is not directly associated with the external temporal universe he knows with his five physical senses. When the chatter of the ego becomes this dense nothing else can get in. Rogozhin represents a human being isolated within his own skin.

The extent to which an individual is dominated by the ego is determined to a considerable degree by exposure to cultural context. Rogozhin is firmly entrenched in the world of an Old Russia that, during the period in which the story takes place, has become an anachronism, a society nearly devoid of vitality but for a kind of lingering inertia with the past. There are rumors and rumblings of the coming social cataclysm that will brutally crush the last vestiges of monarchy rule, but Rogozhin is a man of little imagination. His attention is far more narrowly focused. He is preoccupied with getting what he wants, and he will stop at nothing to get it.

Rogozhin’s inner world is not unlike his house—a huge joyless mausoleum, with few windows, all of them grimy and shrouded; a rambling warren of dark rooms and even darker hallways; a house harboring shadows and gloom. Little light shines into Rogozhin’s world. He is as one cursed to live under a dark cloud. Looking at his copy of Hans Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ, he sees the betrayal of Christianity’s promise of salvation and everlasting life (for if humankind’s Saviour was himself not resurrected as claimed, how can any mere sinner hope to be resurrected?). Rogozhin is desolate, believing his entire existence to be limited to the span of a single earthly lifetime—an erroneous belief continually reinforced by the incessant jabbering of the voice in his head, building ever thicker and denser walls around his heart. He has become fixed in a condition of believing himself fated to live alone and loveless in the world until the disease of life runs its course and ejects him, finally and forevermore, from consciousness.

Caught in the delusion of being earthbound and imprisoned in his skin, Rogozhin becomes convinced that only by doggedly pursuing that which he desires most can he ever hope to know anything of delight in the days allotted to him. He suffers continually the torment of fearing he may never attain full possession of the object of his desire, a thing of living beauty to love for himself alone. He will pay any price and will even kill to secure the prize he has fixed his attention upon.

PRINCE MYSHKIN’S EPILEPTIC CONDITION has endowed him, in some manner we can only surmise, with a rare empathic capacity. His affliction has tranquilized his ego in some unfathomable way, diminishing its influence on his mind. He retains enough of an ego that he is able to navigate in the human world reasonably well, but just barely. He is as though scarcely contained in his skin. Unlike most people, he is not walled in by the compulsive chatter of his own repetitious thoughts.

The prince does not own a house, though he can easily afford one, and seems to be at home wherever he may find himself. He, like the house he does not possess, is open to the light and inclined to welcome any visitor. He is apt to find the greatest joy where he is surrounded by beauty or in the company of happy people.

The prince’s natural state is one of compassion, empathy and receptiveness, such that the joys and sufferings of others frequently bring him to laughter or tears, or both. Near the end of Part 2, in the expanded moments of profound clarity he experiences at the onset of an epileptic fit, Prince Myshkin thinks to himself, “Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.” Notably, this remark seems to be an echo of a comment attributed to the revered sage, Saint Augustine, who is also said to have struggled with affliction: Love and do what you will shall be the whole of the law.. A wordly truth does not get much more succinct than that.

Though not stupid by any means, the prince tends to naivety, and is almost childlike in his guilelessness. He doesn’t even seem to mind when the people in his life are exasperated by his strange tendencies, and are having difficulty deciding whether to love him or despise him—he doesn’t mind because his strangeness is such that he empathizes with their exasperation with him, and good-naturedly agrees with them that he is ridiculous. He makes no distinction as to whether the attitudes of others in relation to him are flattering to him or not. Late in the story, during the so-called engagement party, Prince Myshkin comments on the value of being ridiculous:

You know, in my opinion it’s sometimes good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can’t understand everything at once, we can’t start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who already understand … and not understand … so much.

The prince’s empathy is not merely an understanding of the emotions of others; he is able to feel what others feel as if-no, not as if, but as truly that—the feelings of others are his own. Such is his emptiness that he is like an open hungry maw that devours the advent of communion with another. His “I” is so diminished as a result of his affliction that the other pours into him unbidden, without his being able to select his experiences on the basis of a distinction between pleasantness and unpleasantness in his encounters with others.

 At times this is excruciatingly painful to him: witnessing the execution of a man by guillotine, he is at the mercy of experiencing the thoughts and emotions that the condemned man experiences. Even so, he does not resist the experience; he does not judge such encounters as welcome or unwelcome. Rather, he simply accepts them as a condition of his condition. He may have some limited choice as to how he responds in any given encounter, but his affliction will not allow him a choice that would permit him to escape his response-ability to the deepest need of another person with whom he may be brought into engagement.

Occasionally the prince’s compassion is repaid with resentment, even bitter resentment. Such compassion, such vacantness of any judgment on the prince’s part, tends to expose the failings, shames and weakness of the people he engages with, and sometimes they resent him for it. He regrets this, and is at times feels guilty because of it, but the emptiness that is the foundation of his capacity for empathy and compassion is a feature of his nature that he is helpless to do anything about. It is simply the way he is wired.

Overall, however, the prince has an uplifting effect on the world around him.

Although he does not succeed in producing much in the way of positive social benefits in a conventional or practical sense, he has a way of inspiring a kind of higher nobility in everyone he engages with, often in spite of themselves.

It is evident that Prince Myshkin’s ego is greatly diminished in comparison to other people by his level of presentness in his communications with others. The ego’s range of influence and response is necessarily limited by nature to the temporal sphere, and therefore can operate only in relation to what has happened in the past or in anticipation of what may happen in the future. When the awareness is focused in the present moment the ego is inactive. Empathy and compassion are natural expressions of a state of presentness, and Prince Myshkin represents one for whom such as state is the only way of being. He has difficulty understanding why everyone does not experience life the way he does.

While speaking to the gathering at the party he went on to say:

You know, I don’t know how it’s possible to pass by a tree and not be happy to see it. To talk with a man and not be happy that you love him! Oh, I only don’t know how to say it … but there are so many things at every step that are so beautiful. Look at a child, look at God’s sunrise, look at the grass growing, look into the eyes that are looking at you and love you …

And just at that moment, as Dostoevsky described it, there came from the prince the shout of the “spirit that convulsed and dashed down” [Luke 9: 17 – 26] as he was overcome by the paroxysms of an epileptic seizure.

NASTASYA FILIPPOVNA IS THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB in Dostoevsky’s literary passion play. For a character who plays such a large role in the story, she is given relatively little time on stage. Nastasya’s primary role in the story is to serve as the focal point in the relationship between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin, who are both obsessed with her, for different reasons. To the prince, Nastasya is a call to duty; to Rogozhin, she is the spoils. Thus she delineates who they are, and their relationship with each other.

Nastasya is an open wound of emotional suffering. Orphaned as a young girl of twelve by a tragic fire that burned down her horne and killed all of the other members of her family, she was shortly thereafter adopted by Afanasy Totsky, a wealthy businessman. Safety, comfort and education came to Nastasya at a great price. Totsky, who had taken a concupiscent interest in the beautiful young orphan, built a gilded cage around her, and kept her there like a doll in a doll house to satisfy his “sensual” appetites. Totsky forced his attentions on Nastasya for months at a time, as vacation amusement, until, as a young adult, she rebelled against him.

Throughout the story, Nastasya is desperately trying to break free of the physical and emotional cage she has been placed in by being cast in life as an object of obsessive fascination and desire. Men are captivated by her, and most of them would in turn make a captive of her. She is mistrustful of most of the ways out that are offered to her, and for good reason-all of them come from men. Only the prince offers her what might be a bona fide path to release from her suffering.

Prince Myshkin sees past the prideful, haughty persona Nastasya presents to the world. With the eyes of his innate empathy and compassion he looks beyond her beautiful face and sees the frightened child inside of her who struggles constantly with her confusion and the shames she is unable to reconcile. The prince suffers for her. He would make any personal sacrifice to give her sanctuary and solace. At her birthday party, when she is about to accept Rogozhin’s offer and leave with him, the prince says to her:

I am nothing, but you have suffered and have emerged pure from hell, and that is a lot. Why do you feel ashamed and want to go with Rogozhin?

You’re proud, Nastasya Filippovna, but you may be so unhappy that you actually consider yourself guilty. You need much good care, Nastasya Filippovna. I will take care of you.

Rogozhin loves the beautiful Nastasya with an obsessive passion, and is completely fixated on her as the object of his desire. He would buy her, give her all of his wealth, and possess her utterly in a suffocating embrace. During the birthday party, when Nastasya decides to leave with Rogozhin, he is overjoyed. He shouts out to everyone at the party:

Keep away! … She’s mine! It’s all mine! A queen! The end!

But his joy is short lived, as Nastasya does not stay with him. All through the story she alternately rejects and acquiesces to his marriage overtures. Midway in the story Rogozhin admits that the thought of “putting her to the knife” to end his torment has crossed his mind more than once.

Nastasya recognizes the deep empathy in Prince Myshkin, and she instinctively trusts him, but she fears losing herself in those depths. She rationalizes that she is so soiled as to be unworthy of him. At times in the story she is on the verge of committing herself to the prince, only to run away at the last moment. Nastasya knows that with the prince she would necessarily be brought into confrontation with her shame, her doubts, her confusion. In the prince’s love the only self-identity she has ever known would become unraveled, and she fears annihilation. Rogozhin observes, ” … your pity is maybe worse than my love!”

In the end, inevitably, Rogozhin is unable to bear his anguish any longer. He murders Nastasya, and then enshrines her body in his room in a scene that seems almost religious.

HOLBEIN’S PAINTING THE DEAD CHRIST IN THE TOMB plays a very significant role in The Idiot. Rogozhin gazed at the painting and lost his faith in a Christian salvation. Prince Myshkin looked at the image of the corpse, with its terrible wounds, and fell into empathy with the suffering the Galilean had experienced with the tortures that had been inflicted on his body. But it was through the character Ippolit that Dostoevsky most freely expressed how deeply disturbed he was by this painting, as in this excerpt from Ippolit’s “Explanation”:

Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous implacable, and dumb beast which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this one being alone!

Yes, it is made clear by this painting that Nature gives no special dispensation to the God-struck. In the end Nature reclaims what belongs to Nature, to whom no body is sacred­, not even the body of the Son of Man, who had realized perfection in life. In the end, the body is just a corpse. Dead meat.               

Does this mean that the resurrection of the Christ did not occur? It is easy to understand how one could arrive at this conclusion. Holbein’s painting would be extremely unsettling to a man like Dostoevsky, who was probably taught from boyhood that the resurrection of the Christ was to be understood as a literal truth, as in the sense of a miraculous embodied resurrection, rather than as metaphor for spiritual awakening. But there is another interpretation that may be arrived at when looking at the painting, one that Dostoevsky did not explore in his novel—one that affirms the resurrection.

To see Holbein’s painting in the light of a different understanding requires suspending belief in a supernatural embodied resurrection and examine the crucifixion of Jesus in a more down-to-earth manner, one that is in a fundamental way different from the interpretation promulgated by traditional Christian teachings.

We have been told that Jesus suffered and died on the cross for the sins of all humanity. This begs the question: What is sin, exactly? Is it, as we’ve been taught, “bad deeds” that we commit in disobedience to the commandments inscribed on the tablets of Moses? Actually, no, that’s not what the word means at all. As we’ve learned, religious imperialists have a tendency to skew interpretations of scripture to advance their agendas­ and Prince Myshkin roundly knocks them for this in his impassioned commentary in the novel, so we don’t need to dwell there. The important thing now is to know that the word sin has its origins in the Greek language, the original language of the New Testament, and that it means to miss the mark. Being in a state of sin, in this context, refers to missing the point of human existence and to being in a state of ignorance of one’s intrinsic spiritual nature—unenlightened, in other words.

All of Christ’s teachings were intended to point humanity away from the state of ignorance, unskillfulness, and missing the mark (sin), toward a spiritual awakening. He died to preserve these teachings … and therefore he died for the sins of all humankind.

To the authorities in Rome, the Galilean was considered a subversive influence on the population, and a nuisance. When he was put on trial for blasphemy he was offered an opportunity to escape torture and crucifixion in exchange for renouncing the very core of his teachings. Jesus knew full well that by refusing to deny that he was the embodiment of divinity-as he knew himself (and everyone else) to be—he was committing himself to great physical suffering and the end of his corporeal existence. But giving in to the pressures and copping a plea was not an option for him. Jesus, being a teacher of the highest order, refused to make a lie of all his teachings. As a bodhisattva, he knew it his responsibility to take humanity with him on the path to God. He had to preserve his teachings regardless of the personal sacrifice he would be making by refusing to renounce them, so that the teachings would remain to serve as a path to spiritual enlightenment for all mankind.

Christ said, speaking in the voice of the Father, or Ultimate Cause (that he taught resides in each of us): “I am the resurrection and the way.” The key to understanding the resurrection is to be found in the words of Jesus himself, particularly those he spoke during the Sermon on the Mount. He said: “The kingdom of God is within.” Stripped of mythology, there is no hocus-pocus here, no superstitious nonsense, nothing supernatural. Resurrection, for Jesus of Nazareth, for all of us, is inward. There is nothing “out there” to be resurrected to. As said by Major Tom in the song by David Bowie, it’s cold out there in space.

Holbein’s painting of the dead Christ in the tomb has the power, when looked at in a certain way, to restore Jesus to humanity and make his teachings accessible to us once again. It tells us the simple truth about an illuminated teacher who told us the simple Truth: the path to our liberation, to our salvation, to the direct knowledge of Divine Will, is within.

DOSTOEVSKY’S MYSHKIN-ROGOZHIN DICHOTOMY dramatically illustrates the dilemma at the center of human yearning: How to find our way out of ignorance of our higher nature, to bust out of the small-self orientation dominated by egoic processing, and realize that separateness is a delusion and in fact an impossibility.                                                                                                                                

The ego is the I-sense responsible for the selfs perception that it is an independent, separate entity. It gives me to know where my skin ends and where yours begins, and where I exist spatially in relation to you. It gives me the discrimination that enables me to think of the words to say to you, and to understand the words you say to me. These are clearly valuable distinctions. The problem arises when habitual attention is given to the ego—when it talks too much, and I become convinced that its voice is me. This can lead to the belief that my physical reality is the only true thing, disposing me to seek happiness in what I perceive as external to me. Investing my sense of self in a thing “out there” diminishes me, and has a blinding effect. Then I may forget that you are me too, and consequently cause suffering to you and to me.                                                                                                                                

The term spiritual enlightenment essentially refers to the state of awakenness and presentness that occurs when the mind stops arguing with itself. There is nothing particularly magical about enlightenment. Humans are prewired for it. It is not even necessary or desirable to completely annihilate the I-sense, as Dostoevsky asserts. All we need to do is turn down its volume enough that it is unable to take over—to cultivate stillness, to create spaces between the thoughts. One can then strengthen awareness of the present moment, which has the effect of bringing the light of a higher consciousness to the world.

The formula is the same as it was when spiritualwisdom was first introduced to the world by the ancient Rshis, and passed along to us by all of the avatars, bodhisattva, and great spiritual teachers of the world. The techniques may vary from one spiritual tradition to another, but purifying the mind has always been the essential formula, always the starting point where one begins. When the ego is quieted presentness is simply here, and empathy and compassion occur effortlessly.

This is easier said than done, of course. The ego’s hold is tenacious, backed up by millions of years of biological evolution where it is rooted in animal survival instincts. Some kind of breakthrough must occur to trick the ego into releasing its hold. Emmanuel Levinas made this intriguing observation:

How to get outside the circle that encloses Don Quixote in the certainty of his enchantment? How shall we find a nonspatial exteriority? Only in a movement that goes toward the other man, and that is from the outset responsibility … [T]he empirical world of man’s animal nature must be conceived as a bursting of the epic of being, a bursting in which a break, a fissure, or a way out is opened, in the direction of the beyond where a God that is other than the visible

gods would abide.                    [God, Death, and Time]

A breakthrough may occur in a movement that goes toward the other man in response to the other man’s need or affliction. Or, it is possible for a breakthrough to occur as the result of an affliction, as Dostoevsky suggests in the story of the fictional Prince Myshkin. In describing how the prince experienced the moments immediately prior to the onset of an epileptic seizure he wrote:

… [S]uddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self­awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.

Here is a sad irony. If the prince (assuming he had been a real person rather than a fictional character in a story) had gone to Asia instead of back to Russia he would have likely been met with encouragement and nurturing support for his unusual spiritual orientation. He may even have been revered as a saint, instead of winding up in a sanatorium. In India he might have been introduced to Gadai, who as a boy and throughout much of his adulthood was subject to “raptures” characterized by a scream if ecstasy followed by violent trembling and unconsciousness which significantly contributed to his spiritual awakening. Gadai, who lived contemporaneously to Dostoevsky, became known as Sri Ramakrishna, and is widely believed to be the most recent known avatar.

Indeed, the prophet Mohammad is said to have been disposed to epileptic fits that informed his religious visions. Saint Augustine and Francis of Assisi also had illnesses that contributed to their spiritual illumination. Doubtless this can be said of many others besides.

So, is Godliness an affliction? The short answer is: No … or … not necessarily.

Godliness, or spiritual awakenness, is the cure. An affliction of some sort, in medical terms, or some traumatic experience such as a sudden brush with death may help to create a breakthrough to spiritual enlightenment. For most of us, however, the path to enlightenment may only come through disciplines such as meditation, prayer, personal charity, chanting mantras, and other yogas or spiritual practices intended to invite quietude into the heart so that awakenness may occur.

A Zen aphorism puts it this way:

Enlightenment is an accident. The most we can hope from spiritual practice is that it makes us accident prone.

Amen, brother.