“I”: let me discuss this word before continuting to my primary thought. I realize many of my introspective posts begin with I. This is my starting point. It is not that I am egoistic, so much as that I cannot see from anyone else’s eyes, or introspect from within any mind but my own. As William James percipiently (and with typical thoroughness of analysis) pointed out 100 years ago, the discipline of psychology can really only be pursued in three ways: introspection which we hope is generally applicable; empirical research involving our physical bodies, such as our neurological systems and statistical analysis (rats in mazes; psychological tests); and a combination of the two.
Quite obviously, I often use the first. I is an appropriate and descriptive word in that case. I will add that the word in Sanskrit for ego is “Ahamkara”, which literally means “I-Maker”. It describes not an immutable self, but a field within which the effect of an I is created. It can be neither said to exist–since it is in constant flux–nor not to exist, since it is plainly there.
Anyway, having circumnavigated the topic three times in conformity with Tibetan Buddhist tradition–but backwards, with a whiskey bottle (Very Old Barton) in my hand and singing George Jones, as per my tradition–I would like to move to what prompted this post, this story
I figured somebody else had typed out the story, and dang if I wasn’t right. Multiple people. More than one person had the same thought, didn’t they? Take a few minutes and read the story. It is a strange story, from Idries Shah’s “Wisdom of the Idiots”.
Read it? No? Well, either way, here is my mind game I would like to present to you: what if you knew that there were not just hundreds of perfect copies of you scattered around the universe, but that you were just a copy of some perfect you who is always already up in heaven?
The point of this story is that this singer of songs thought that he had a unique voice. He was singular. And by extension everyone who knew him was singular. There was no one else like them. They were special. Upon learning they were not in fact special, and in fact a bit inferior, they vanished. Their selves were identical to their vanities.
At a deep level, it seems to me that spiritual growth requires the capacity to imagine our own annihilation, the humility to imagine a happy universe without us; the ability to live in the world and at times so fully merge with experience that we disappear, and let go of our clinging.
The experience of learning there were more you’s would for some people amount to an annihilation of an undesirable sort, since they were fully stuck: they existed like butterflies pinned to a board, content to consider their selves to have been fully described by the label affixed at the base of the pin holding them there. When the label is torn off, they are unable to move, and thus disappear.
What if you met yourself? Me, I visualize myself telling myself I’m ugly, then going out and drinking some beer, chasing some women, then coming home and having a blog-off. What if we both type exactly the same thing? Well, then we are damn geniuses. And idiots.
There is this famous scene in E.M. Forrester’s book “Passage to India” in which a British women has what amounts to a panic attack in caves modelled on the caves of Barabar. As I visualize it, it seems to me the task of the ascetics who lived there would have been to be transparent to the echo, or have been pleasurably tickled by it. Given sufficient vanity, however, it would amount to an attack.
So much of “life” consists in the interaction of events with the qualitative gestalt we call our self. Not for nothing have many of the best minds of human history asked probing questions about the nature of the self; and not for nothing, in my view, have they located the answers not just here and now, but in a world which can be felt but not seen in our present condition.
These are for me just thoughts. They are thoughts arising from feelings, but still just thoughts. They seem to offer a pathway to liberation from worry, emotional strain, and curtailed happiness. This may seem counter-intuitive, but that is only because much of our Western tradition has taught us to view ourselves as machines.
Descartes famously pointed to an animatronic sculpture in a French garden as a model for our physical selves. To that was appended a soul, in his view. We have kept the sculpture, but for all too many, the soul–being introspective, and thus in some respects merely amenable to James first method–has disappeared.
And now I have gone and mucked up even that.
Oh, I forgot what I wanted to say. If you are unable to undergo what I decided to call a “primary” annihilation, if you lack the humility to “disappear” at times, then you must at some point seek a secondary annihilation, which is to say the imposition of your power on the world, which causes and diminuation of the selves of others. You either destroy your own self, or those of others. The first is the path of Goodness; the second of course that of evil.
All of this exists on a continuum of course. Agonistic careerism, for example, consists often in winning relative to others. Now, forcing others to work harder is not intrinsically bad for them, but it is bad for the person who focuses on winning rather than growth, who focuses on the relative diminuation of others rather than self perfection.
It is the NCAA season. Let me offer what I view as the best model for success: “Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” John Wooden.
This model will actually cause general growth, and is thus completely compatible both with material success and primary annihilation.
I saw one other quote there that made me laugh: “Adversity is the state in which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.”
Few thoughts for your Monday morning.