JANUARY 20, THURSDAY

WHO AM I?

Joseph Goldstein‘s podcast on Dukkha got me to thinking. He said that under the Bo tree Buddha realized that everything is transient and that attachement to people and objects can only bring Dukkha, sometimes called suffering. He defines Dukkha in several ways. Dukkha is the inevitable physical pain of sickness and death. Dukkha is the inevitable psychological pain of losing the things we love. Dukkha is the inevitable impermanence of everything. But he also says that Dukkha is a bad fit, like an axle misplaced in a wheel of an ox cart. It is this version of Dukkha that I don’t understand and would like to wonder about. But before I wonder about what he means by being not a good fit, not fitting comfortably into everyday reality, I want to try to be clear to myself what my own passage is, my own reality is, otherwise I think I am going to get more and more confused.

So this is where I will start. What do I, intuitively, feel being me is. Remember, this is me, not you (assuming there are any yous out there even paying attention, I may be just talking to myself). You, if you are there, have to wrestle with your own passage.

It seems to me that I have within me, out of sight, all kinds of deep inner drives that have come to me through the long process of human animal evolution. In addition, I have my gender and my appearance that have a bearing on how other people respond to me and how I make my way through the world. All of this came through a sperm uniting with an egg and joining their combined DNA.

These inner drives, and my experience (nature/nurture), determine the way that I respond to the world around me, to people and other forms of life and inanimate objects like clouds and waterfalls. In a way, because of the archetypes within me I am touched by the presence of all kinds of things and the way that I respond, I am thinking, is determined by these inner, hidden visceral emotions. I actually become aware of these emotions not by looking within myself but by seeing how I respond through these emotions to people and other life around me. It is almost as if I am projecting my emotions out and see them most clearly in my response to other people. When a person touches me intensely by their presence I am seeing what is within me projected out onto that person, thereby coloring and giving meaning to whatever out there touches me about that person through this projection on them. So when I am looking out I am actually looking within. When I say you are funny, I am really revealing what strikes me as funny and you simply fit the pattern and evoke a laugh. When I say you are beautiful I am really revealing an archetype within me of what I think is beautiful which you fit into in some way. When I say I love you I am saying that in your presence something within me feels intense love and your presence provokes this. My way of looking within myself is to see how I respond to the world around me.

But to take this a step further. I am a very social animal and part of being a social animal is that I bond with other social animals who have these same inner visceral drives projected out. And so, in some way, when we live together we together create a culture of all of our shared inner visceral drives. We invent culture in a communal way. At the center of this culture is language,which lets us communicate, and all of the other ways of communicating such as clothing and food and family relationships and mythological beliefs. All of these things start with things that touch us individually but quickly become communal in a shared projection of these inner visceral drives.

The combination of these individual projected drives and shared communal projected drives give us a feeling of identity. They are the way that we express and share our individual and communal drives. This identity is very important. If is is threatened we feel the threat to what feels most real to us and we resist as strongly as we can. Examples are that people‘s sense of being an American, a true American, is central to many people‘s identity. So is being a born again Christian, or even being white.

But a problem arises when our individual drives don‘t fit with communal drives. Then the social construct begins to feel as if, instead of enhancing life, it seems rather to block life. The social conventions within which we are living which in this way constrain us begin to seem empty and artificial and even forms without life, dead forms. This often happens to children as they grow up and discover that they are constrained by their parents and begin to feel that what they are told to do is deadening rather than enlivening. They rebel, at least for a while.

This seems to lead to a tension between being supported and made alive by conventions and the opposite, being constrained and immobilized by conventions. The side of us that is given identity and made alive by our cultural conventions becomes more traditional with an insistence that one‘s cultural language, food, dress, work ethic, family values, and religion are all fundamental. They are who we are and we need to defend them.

On the other hand if cultural conventions seem to constrain and block our inner visceral drives then the conventions themselves seem to be artificial and unreal and simply a way to control people. The less conventions make us feel alive the more they reveal themselves to be invented and artificial. To the degree that cultural conventions seem alien, the more we feel like a misfit within our own culture, and the more we either look for other conventions that seem better to support us or reject conventions completely as being unreal and turn inward to find what within us feels most alive. We can do this through an inner focus through meditation or quiet concentration or prayer.

The problem for me at this point is that while these two poles of a tension seem to me to be true, I am caught somewhere in the middle. Some conventions support me such as language and some conventions seem to constraining to me such as religious fundamentalism. I have great trouble sorting out what is what. And for other people what is enlivening and what is constraining will be different so it hard to look to others for advice. I have to figure this out for myself.

I can give one example of my quandary. Christian fundamentalism finds that the Bible is the word of God and everything in the Bible is true, both actually, everything happened in the actual world in just the way that the Bible recounts it, and because the story makes born again Christians feel fully alive. Fundamentalist Christians believe that only Christ, not Mohammed or Buddha or Shiva, can enable us to be born again and to be fully alive.

My problem is that I don‘t believe the actual part and don‘t believe the only truth part, but do feel that the presence and teachings of Jesus make many people fully alive and that some form of being born again, spiritually, not actually, really can happen. From my perspective these stories are a way of embodying the inner visceral drives within us individually and as a community.

Or looked at a different way. The biblical stories which are a way of revealing what has made people feel most alive over time, are projections of the inner visceral in story form. The stories if treated as being actual events become conventionalized and and cliche and finally lose their energy and become constraining and empty. But if seen as ways of reaching and enhancing our inner visceral drives then they take on intensity and lead us to the life force within ourselves.

So dismissing the virgin birth because it couldn‘t have actually happened is to miss the point. To say there is no God or gods, the atheist position, just because no one has seen any of the gods with their own eyes, nor is there anywhere that heaven could be in the whole expansive universe that was once the size of the point of a pin, is to miss the point.

These stories enliven us, culture enlivens us, because we all have life swirling within us, life which also start in an infinitesimal form at our conception. And this life force we do know exists and for me it is this visceral life force which is the most real thing.

Ok, there it is. My own attempt to understand myself before I begin to wonder about how I fit with Joseph Goldstein and Buddhism, if I do. It very likely seems crackpot or narrow to others, but to me it is my starting point (or maybe my ending point).