Being II: Beyond Dualism

I was just sitting here thinking about being. What am I being? Who am I being? Was I the same person that I was yesterday? Am I that person that others see me as? Am I that person that I see myself as? These really are mind-numbing questions but they are worth asking - in fact, they have to be asked. For while we may chose to ingnore ourselves and our own nature, our nature will find ways to assert itself independent of our will and if we do not make a friend of ourselves then we are an enemy to be feared.

What makes us us? Well I could tell you specifics. I could tell you of my tastes in music and literature, my favorite colour, my academic career . . . But what would I really be telling you? Fragments, that's all, just fragments - nothing that really says anything about who I am.

Perhaps It's best to start on the macro level. A good starting point is to ask: what makes us human? Who are we as humans? The famous inscription at the Oracle at Delphi said simply "Know Thyself". This may seem like an easy directive to follow, yet there seems to be so many layers to peel back. One thing that seems to universally human is fear - fear of others and fear of ourselves. This fear seems to be at the root of many of our negative feelings and our destructive actions. Where does this fear come from? What can be done about it?

In the Bible we hear of the story of Adam and Eve who lived in a blissfully ignorant state of nature until they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and, dicovering their nakedness, became fearful, covering themselves up before being expelled from the garden to live a life of pain and toil that is the human condition. Here we see that fear is the inevitable product of knowledge of ousselves, of our "nakedness".

A deeper reading of this story raises the idea that this fear is result of the tendency of the mind to percieve the world in terms of binary opposition. This dualistic thinking separates everything into good/bad, friend/foe, and us/not us dichotomies. When we see the world thus, there is always something to fear: In the dualistic world "evil" and "enemies" are constantly lurking, trying to destroy us because, of course, we are "good" and "our people" are the "good guys". In this worldview the enemy is externalized, projected if you will, onto others. Life then becomes an ongoing battle to conquer and destroy external threats while we, anxious, separated, alienated, and alone, shiver behind our massive stone walls, stalking the ramparts, waiting for the inevitable onslaught of the forces of evil. It is no wonder then, that fear becomes central to who we are.

I am holding out hope that fear does not have to be an inevitable feature of our mental landscape. It may be that fear is only a product of binary thinking, that if we can find a way to relenquish our insistence on dualism in our thoughts and in our world, we may be able to create a new garden of eden for ourselves. That of course would take a quantum leap in human consciousness but, in a way, this has already been done. 2500 years ago an Indian prince turned ascetic sat down under a tree and "woke up", becoming the Buddha or "elightened one". He was one of many mystics and seerers who sought the way to paridise and found it. Much to think about, and much more to be said.

-Chris

"Beyond the land of ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I will meet you there." (Rumi 1275)