Become What You Are
Always have a large pinch of salt handy when you meet the fellow who talks about trying to renounce himself, to overcome his ego. (2)
#ego
We are really stuck with ourselves, and our attempts to reject or to accept are equally fruitless, for they fail to reach that inaccessible center of our selfhood which his trying to do the accepting or rejecting. (4)
“I have always found that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process. They think of themselves as lazy and lucky. If they did anything at all, it was so simple that anyone else could do the same–for all that they have done is to recognize a universal fact of life, something as true of the weak and foolish as of the wise and strong.”
#ego
The fragility and frailty of our human bodies within the merciless and marvelous torrent of life evokes every emotion of this agonizingly sensitive organism–love, anger, sadness, terror, and the fear of terror. And our attempts to stand above these emotions and control them are the emotions themselves at play, since love is also to be in love with love, and sadness to be sorry that one is sad. Our unwillingness to feel is the very measure of our ability to feel, for the more sensitive the instrument, the greater its capacity for pain, and so for reluctance to be hurt.(6)
#emotion
…there is an almost uncanny wisdom in the spontaneous and natural reactions of our organism to the course of events. The extraordinary capacity to feel an event inwardly, as distinct from bursting into precipitate action to avoid the tension of feeling—this capacity is in fact a wonderful power of adaptation to life, not unlike the instant responses of flowing water to the contours of the ground over which it flows… The point is that our feelings are not really a kind of resistance, a kind of fight with the course of events. They are a harmonious and intelligent response. A person who did not feel frightened at the threat of danger would be like a tall building with no “give” to the wind. A mind which will not melt—with sorrow or love—is a mind which will all too easily break. (7)
#emotion #tension #nature
But ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we do not let them complete their work; we try to suppress them or discharge them in premature action, not realizing that they are a process of creation which, like birth, begins as a pain and turns into a child. (8)
#emotions #creation
It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in the words of Chuang-tzu: “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.” Detachment means to have neither regrets for the pat nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment.” (10)
#enlightenment #mirror
You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now—otherwise you would not be here. Hence the infinite Tao is something which you can neither escape by flight nor catch by pursuit; there is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it. So become what you are. (11)
#harmony #eternalnow
And it is so easy to get stuck—on the raft, on religion, on psychotherapy, on philosophy. To use another Buddhist simile: The doctrine is like a finger pointing at the moon, and one must take care not to mistake the finger for the moon. Too many of us, I fear, such the pointing finger of religion for comfort, instead of looking where it points.” (13)
#stuckness
Passage on concentration – 16
Self-consciousness is a stoppage because it is like interrupting a song after every note so as to listen to the echo, and then feeling irritated because of the loss of rhythm. (17)
#selfconsciousness
Therefore, the important thing is simply to begin—anywhere, wherever you are. If you happen to be sitting, just sit. If you are smoking a pipe, just smoke it. If you are thinking out a problem, just think. But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily, compulsively, from sheer force of nervous habit. In Zen, they call this having a leaky mind—like an old barrel with open seams which cannot contain itself. (18)
While modern astronomy tells us of our insignificance beneath the stars, it also tells us that if we lift so much as a finger, we affect them. It is true that we are transient, that we have no abiding self, but the fabric of life is such that one broken thread may work immeasurable ruin. The magnitude of the world with whose destiny we are bound up increases rather than diminishes our importance. Nature may seem to have little regard for individuals; it may let them die in millions as if it mattered nothing. But value is in quality, not quantity. A pea may be as round as the world, but as far as roundness is concerned, neither is better than the other. And man is in himself a little universe; the ordering of his mind and body is as complex as the ordering of the stars. Can we say, then, that the governing of a man’s universe is less important because it is different in size? (20)
The essence of Lao-Tzu’s philosophy is the difficult art of getting out of one’s own way—of learning how to act without forcing conclusions, of living in skillful harmony with the processes of nature instead of trying to push them around. For Lao-Tzu’s Taoism is the philosophical equivalent of jujitsu, or judo, which means the way of gentleness. (21)
#laotzu #jujitsu #harmony #nature
But in the Chinese language the word which we render as “nature” has a special meaning not found in its English equivalent. Translated literally, it means “self-so.” For to the Chinese, nature is what works and moves by itself without having to be shoved about, wound up, or controlled by conscious effort. Your heart beats “self-so,” and, if you would give it half a change, your mind can function “self-so”—though most of us are much too afraid of ourselves to try the experiment. (21)
#nature #control
For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is—a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism. But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of itself, such as happiness, the mechanism is all clutched-up. It is trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. It is working purposefully, as it must, but to no purpose. It is looking for results in terms of itself. It wants to get results from the process of looking for results. This is a hopelessly and wildly fouled-up feedback mechanism. There is, however, just this one possibility. It can realize the whole round circuit of the trap in which it lies. It can see the entire futility and self-contradiction of its position. And it can see that it can do nothing whatsoever to get itself out of it… At this moment, there is a sudden shift in the center of gravity of one’s whole personality. You simply find yourself outside the trap, outside the result-seeking mechanism, which now appears as a sort of object which has purposes all to no purpose. You see yourself as a purpose-seeking creature, but realize there is no purpose for the existence of such a creature. In relation to everything except your own preservation, you are marvelously futile. (25)
#ego #purpose #thetrap
We find ourselves in these circles because of ignorance, because of unconsciousness of the nature of our minds, of our thought-processes, of ourselves. And the antidote to ignorance is not action but knowledge—not what to do, but what we know. Yet here again, the necessary knowledge does not seem, on the surface, to be anything very promising or hopeful. For the only knowledge in this sphere which can be talked about is negative knowledge—knowledge of the trap, of our helpless imprisonment in useless seeking. Positive knowledge—of the Tao, of God, of the eternal Reality, is a matter of immediate, momentary experience. It can never be put into words, and any attempt to do so converts it into just another aspect of the trap. I realize that we do not like to be told that we are in a trap, and that there is nothing we can do to get out; still less do we like to realize it as a vivid experience. But there is no other way of release. A proverb says that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity. We cannot find release until we have known the real extremity of our situation, and see that all striving for spiritual ideals is completely futile—since the very seeking thrusts them away. (27)
#thetrap #ineffablility
The message of Eastern wisdom is that the forms of life are maya and therefore profoundly lacking in seriousness from the viewpoint of reality… He is enlightened who joins in this play knowing it as play, for man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
#play #maya
No authentic wisdom can be imitated. Each man must find it for himself, because there is really now way of putting it into words, of reaching it by any specific methods or directions.
#imitation
Without exception, everything that we attain or create, even the memorials that survive our death, must perish without trace, and that our quest for permanence is pure futility. Because, furthermore, happiness exists only in relation to misery, pleasure in relation to pain, the perceptive man does not try to separate them. The relation is so inseparable that, in some sense, happiness is misery, and pleasure is—because it implies—pain. Realizing this, he learns to abandon all desire for any happiness separate from misery, or pleasure apart from pain.
#dichotomy #impermanence
The point which emerges is that what we are counting or measuring in physics, and that what we are experiencing in everyday life as sense data, is at root unknown and probably unknowable.
At this point, modern philosophy dismisses the problem and turns its attention to something else on the assumption that the unknowable need not and cannot concern us further. It asserts that questions which have neither the physical nor the logical possibility of an answer are not real questions. But this assertion does not get rid of the common human feeling that such unknowns or unknowables as electrons, energy, existence, consciousness, or “Reality” are in some way queer. The very fact of not being able to know them makes them all the stranger. Only a rather dry kind of mind turns away from them—a mind interested in nothing but logical structures. The more complete kind of mind, which can feel as well as think, remains to “indulge” the odd sense of mystery which comes from contemplating the fact that everything is at base something which cannot be known. Every statement which you make about this “something” turns out to be nonsense. And what is specially strange is that this unknowable something is also the basis of that which otherwise I know so intimately—myself. (45)
#physics #logicalpositivism #reality
But for the man who is something more than a calculator, the baffling is also the wonderful. In the face of the unknowable he feels with Goethe that:
the highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.
In the type of metaphysical or mystical experience which we are discussing, this feeling of wonder—which has all kinds of depths and subtleties—is one of two major components. The other is a feeling of liberation which attends the realization that an immense amount of human activity is directed to the solution of unreal and purely fantastic problems–to the attainment of goals which we do not actually desire. (47)
#wonder #metaphysics
This uprooted feeling is doubtless responsible for the psychological insecurity of Western man, and his passion for imposing the values of order and logic upon the whole of his experience. Yet while it is obviously absurd to say that consciousness is a function of consciousness, there seems to be no means of knowing that of which consciousness is a function. That which knows—and which psychologists call somewhat paradoxically the unconscious—is never the object of its own knowledge.
#unconscious #insecurity
We must never forget that the processes which form this brain are unconscious, and that beneath all the perceptible orders of the macroscopic world lies the indeterminate nonsense of the microscopic, the “gyring” and “gimbling” of a “tove” called energy—about which we know nothing.
#unconscious #energy