Certainly we are always in relationship to everything in our experience of a world. Yet, the primacy of all self-defining is through others first, everything else is a sloppy second.
Who "you" are is contingent on others, because they have defined "you" and "you" have defined them (although "you" like to take all the credit).
The German philosopher Heidegger emphasized that there is no experience as "man" or "human being" as a separate isolated experience or 'story.' Of course, man and human being are separate ideas or concepts that can be strung together in numerous narratives. But the experience is only in relationship, or "Being-in-the -World," as unified
You experience your greatest joy and your most intense suffering through and with others. But "you" believe this is not to be trusted and so rely primarily, and often exclusively, on your 'self.'
Make no mistake, sitting on your cushion meditating is not free of others, since who "you" are, or the concept you identify with as you "meditating," is an interdependent construction extracted from a world of others. Your 'world' provides you with everything you need and even your belief in transcending the world was given to you from your world. But if the world is "you," and there is no division, you give to yourself.
Your "story" is not about you, but about you in relationship to other stories that relate to other stories, which relate to other stories, on and on, ad infinitum (such are the tangled webs we weave). Yet, your desperate attempts to identify and isolate an individual 'story' against and in contrast to other individual stories is the root of your suffering.
Even in the relationships you claim as your most intimate, you barely touch the depths of intimacy even though you sense that all experience is unified. Unity frightens the poop out of the sociopathic ego, which revels in its separate individualism, but wouldn't know itself from spit if it were not for the shared experience which defined it. So it adopts complicated and austere 'spiritual' practices, which only reinforces its desire to revel in itself, denying that it would not even exist without 'others' to give it meaning.
Nothing wrong with meditation though, especially when used by ego to come out from its protective shell and engage with its experience of others. Only then will it know itself as engaged with a world in which its greatest joy is from shared consciousness.
Certainly engaging with a 'world' is crucial to the 'self' since without the experience of a world there could be no experience of 'self.' Nevertheless, all experiences are intensified when combined. This idea is so counter to the usual mode of your egoic relating that it's hard to grok and you become acclimated to separating your relationships from your spiritual practices in the belief that once your "spirituality" has sufficiently intensified (whatever that means), the trickle down theory will then insure that your relationships benefit accordingly.
Yet, this is counter to the fact that relationships are your spiritual practice and your only purpose.
I meditate fairly regularly (actually, I just call it 'sitting still for a spell') but for me this is nothing but prep for engaging in a world of others. It's the old parable, "seeking the face of Christ in another" is "awakening," since it's through others that such a maximal experience is attained. Intense solitary experiences are grand, but I contend this is multiplied exponentially when engaged in sharing with and through another. This is how we learn who we are in truth. Yet, it's also how we create a shared experience of reality that may not be true if our purpose is denied.
Great photograph.
ReplyDeleteI thought about the above post this evening while reading excerpts from Rene Daumal's "Letters on the Search for Awakening: 1934-1944" in the Fall edition of Parabola.
Excerpt from a letter to Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, November 1941:
"Another way of putting it would be (without knowing Chinese) to propose this new translation of the first line of the TAO TE CHING: "A way that is entirely laid out, no, it is not the way." I told you that I have encountered in my life a true teaching. One of the signs of its truth, for me, is that it never proposes an entirely prescribed path. No, at every step the entire dilemma is revisited. For me, nothing is resolved once and for all. And what I have always loved in you is your refusal of a prearranged path, and that's important to me because alone one can't sustain such a position. We must be a number of people to help each other, to awaken one another."
Well, I had an essay prepared, hence deleted, as Daumal quite took the wind out of my sails; however, I do wonder where it may all lead, given that we misjudge, misinterpret, fail to listen deeply, desire validation and struggle within control dramas all of the time. Yet, if unity is not some Utopian mythology, it has its' seeds and possibility elsewhere. Something in the collective unconscious longs for it ideally, but in reality, borrowing some profound social upheaval, such a notion inevitably fails. Cynical, I admit.
Blessings~