JD Salinger - the contradictions of his Westernized Hindu spirituality

In Zooey by JD Salinger, which is one of my favourite stories - reinforced by the preceding and following stories of Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, and Seymour: an introduction - the young adult protagonists (Franny and Zooey Glass) are acutely motivated by a hatred of egotism: in themselves, as well as in others. 

This hatred of "ego" - of The Self and its aggrandisement - is so powerful as to become the prime motivation - the most important thing for them both. 

This leads to a double-negative spirituality; with the usual problem of double-negations, which is incoherence. 

Incoherence because we can (and most people do) incoherently oppose and reject multiple things; but lacking a positive motivation there is nothing (not even in principle) that can or should harmonize such rejections. 

In Zooey and the other stories (as, apparently, in Salinger's own life) this loathing of ego led to oneness spirituality, which in Salinger's case was an inevitably-Western form of Vedanta Hinduism. 

 

In Zooey; we therefore get two opposite attempts to negate ego, and attain oneness. 

The first is to reject every-thing, so as to regard this mortal life as unimportant. Unimportant because an illusion (maya). 

We should thus strive to live by asceticism, without any attachment to the people and things of this world. 

The other, substantially opposite, response is to cease discernment among the things of this world (because they are all, ultimately, one); and then to conclude from this that everything is valuable, and equally valuable. 

In other words; we should embrace every-thing: every person, every thing, every event or non-event - all just the same. 

The idea is that the whole world is (equally-) Holy, and that (as F & Z's elder brother Seymour supposedly said: "all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next."  

So which is it to be? 

Do we reject the ego by rejecting the world, and ceasing to care about anything? Or do we reject ego by trying to recognize and experience that everything in the world is holy and equally holy?

It seems that F & N oscillate between the two.   

Also in practice; Franny and Zooey, and their brothers Buddy and the late Seymour, are very keen on practising a kind of micro-discernment; that discovers ultimate meaning in tiny, unnoticed, neglected yet wonderful epiphanic moments of life. 

The result is an inconsistency of belief and practice which is (apparently) intensely frustrating, and indeed despair-inducing (to the point of suicide in the most rigorous among the Glass siblings: Seymour). 

Yet this inconsistency is baked-into oneness spirituality, from its very foundations. 

And this incoherence works as a kind of proof that the double-negation of "rejection of ego" cannot, and should not, be the highest value. 

We should instead seek a positive value as our highest and deepest motivator.