The Friction of Life

In a certain, very real sense, life is a product of tension. Think of it like this. Two sticks rubbed together in the correct manner have the possibility of causing sparks, even fire. This fire can be very useful and constructive. We can use it to cook and keep warm. We can even use the fire to illuminate the night. But for this fire to be possible there must be certain pre-established conditions already in place. To even be able to light the fire one must have some skill. First one must collect the proper kindling (emotional maturity) in the area where the fire is to be lit. Put in another, more practical way, when two people really get to know each other, and by this I mean two people really getting under each other’s skin, they bear witness to and participate in one another fears, weaknesses, hopes, joys, sorrows, and expectation. In other words, they confront their own and each other’s human vulnerability.

We are so used to hiding the vulnerable parts of ourselves not only from others, but also from ourselves. Like the two sticks in our example, when two people’s vulnerable spots start to rub against each other, and I don’t mean sexually, although sex cannot be left out of the equation, it inevitably causes tension, heat, friction, and suffering. But if the individuals involved have a modicum of emotional maturity then they can rub, they can feel the heat and friction, and instead of simply breaking down in fear or rage, the two people have the possibility of creating the sparks that can lead to a fire.

If the two people can create a flame between themselves this is a really monumental event. There is no telling what the flame will do, but certainly a great growth process has been initiated for the two people as individuals and as a couple. In its most exalted state the flame could be called The Living flame of Love, but remember that there is nothing naively romantic about this notion. The Living Flame of Love is much more then just romantic love; it is a deeply passionate and compassionate love for life. We could call it religious love or spiritual love, i.e. love for the divinity that is life and is more then life itself.

When two people come together we talk about a third thing that is born. Let us call this third thing the flame we have spoken of, but as we have discussed, it will only become a flame under certain circumstances. If we as human beings want to go beyond fear and tension then we have to be able to stay with the friction of two beings rubbing up against each other for an extended period of time. There is no telling what will happen due to this friction, but we can say you will be the better off for experiencing the fire of life, the flame of love, rather than passively being trapped in fears and insecurities as life passes you by.

This process just spoken of also happens internally in each human being. It is how a soul is created. Remember that Gurdjieff used to say that humans are not born with souls. We each have the seed of a soul and under certain conditions that seed can grow into a soul, but there is no guarantee that this will happen. In fact, many people walk around living there lives mechanically with only the unrecognized potential for a soul buried somewhere deep in their hearts.

We each have a yearning. We each have a desire to live a soul filled life, but most of us do not know how as of yet. This same fire, this religious love that we spoke of earlier, is what is necessary for us to begin to really live as free and independent human beings. Only in this sense, we must focus on how this fire is lit in each one of us individually and not just between two people. The fire lit between two people who are willing to make the plunge into love is a reflection of the fire that is being lit in each individual’s heart. There are some saints whose love is so powerful that they never need to marry anyone because an inner marriage happens. The love that happens between two people is very important and by saying what I am now saying I in no way mean to devalue love between two people. I am just saying that there are two processes going on at once.

This living flame of love that happens between two people is a reflection of the radical opening of the heart that is going on in each individual. In fact, a deep love between two people would not be possible without this deep opening that is happening in each individual. Again we come to the friction. Sometimes an individual is just conscious enough in their own life that the two poles within them begin to rub against each other. These two poles are the objective-subjective, personal-collective, and/or microcosmic-macrocosmic aspects of our being. Normally these two sides of ourselves are split off from one another and we live a very confused life.
We think one thing and act in exactly the opposite way. We are bombarded by the cacophony of voices and opinions within ourselves and it is virtually impossible to do anything with confidence. The first step is becoming comfortable with ambiguity.

As the sparks slowly start to fly from the friction of the two poles within ourselves a little space is opened up in or psyches. With this space we can witness the war or eternal argument that is going on within our hearts and minds all of the time without getting totally attached to the messages being thrown back and forth by the various parties involved. Sure we will falter. Sometimes we will circum to the confusion, but we will have a little space, just enough to see that who and what we are is more then just this constant battle cry that is being raised within ourselves.

As the sparks continue to gather they will eventually ignite the kindling, the seed of soul potential, in the individual. This is a true “Ah-ha!” moment. Now there is the possibility of real growth and the activation of the deeper spiritual awareness within our being…this is as much as I know.

Don't Try To Understand Your Life

Do Not Try to Understand Your Life!

I have heard it said that human beings are meaning making machines. I agree with this. As long as we attempt to make meaning in our lives we are machines. Either a person has meaning in their life or they don’t. If one has to force a meaning and/or context onto their lives then it would seem that what they need to address is the bigger issue of inner poverty that they are experiencing. As long as our inner lives are impoverished it does not matter how many books, relations, or degrees one has. One can live amongst the greatest wealth, but if they are poor inside then their lives meaning nothing. That is just the catch though, for life is inherently meaningful.

What I am trying to say here is do not attempt to understand your life. Don’t attempt to force meaning onto your life. No matter how profound you think you are, no matter how well you know Plato or Jung or Shankara, you always exist within a paradigm. This paradigm necessarily limits your vision of reality because a given paradigm can only let so much information in. Not only thins, but a paradigm also interprets the information we are given in a certain way which conditions how we see life, existence, and reality. This is fine. There is nothing wrong with thoughts and the conditioning which produces them. The problem is when we begin to believe in the paradigm. We get into trouble when we think that the particular thoughts, or methods of investigating and interpreting reality, that are so appealing to us are in fact “the truth.”

I know the old maxim of the Delphi oracle, “Know they Self,” but I say don’t believe it. The second we say we know ourselves is the second we get into a lot of trouble. As soon as we think we know ourselves we put a box around reality. We convince ourselves that this is who I am, this is who I should be, this is how I should act, and/or this is what I should become. All of a sudden we drastically reduce our ability to perceive the wonderful movement that is life.

Let me give you an example. The Buddha said not to believe anything he taught unless you experience it for yourself. This is a favorite saying that so called free-thinking spiritual seekers like to quote. I say that this idea can get us in a lot of trouble. More then anything the Buddha’s idea seems to be a tool to perpetuate the Buddhist religion. What is being said is, “Think for your self, experience for your self, but only within the realm of what the Buddha and his students taught and experienced.” This is not free thinking at all. The Buddha says not to believe anything he says unless you experience but then he takes your experience away from you by saying follow these ideas, rules, and practices and then see what you come up with.

Maybe, just maybe, if you are a really good Buddhist meditator you will experience these things that the Buddha and subsequent Buddhists experienced. This is a self fulfilling prophecy. Of course you will experience what the Buddha said he experienced, to one degree or another, if you are following his regimen with his ideas in mind. If you think about impermanence and interconnectedness long enough within the Buddhist context, then of course that is what you will perceive of as reality

Really, to be free you must break all such boundaries. You have your experience and your life. You have the book of your life! Why are you so interested in reading the book of Jesus’ life or Krishna’s life and hearing what they have to say about life, truth, and reality when you have your own life? Sign posts along the way? You have your life and your experience. You have your mind and your relations. Why not just look at these things deeply always realizing that lurking on the horizon is something you don’t know? There will always be some thought you haven’t had before or some perspective you haven’t thought about your current situation within and these are good to have. Momentary perspective is wonderful. It can help us see things in a different light. It can help us heal old wounds, but remember that the perspective you “had” is now gone and life has moved on.

Most of us want assuredness so badly. We want to know the truth. We want things to make sense. We want things to remain the same, unchanged. Good luck! You are in for a great disappointment. What about radical openness to the unpredictability of reality? I am not saying that we should not make choices, which one might infer when I say not to cling to any particular thought as a representation of reality. Of course we have to make decisions, but isn’t it interesting how often the actions we take, which end up being best for us and others in the end, are not the actions we “want” to take.

The hard decisions, the decisions in which we really grow, are the ones the go against the known. For us to mature as individuals necessarily means to push through stagnant patterns of thinking and behaving. Each time we do this it is equivalent to taking a leap into the unknown. And when do we most commonly do this? We do this when a situation becomes so intolerable that we realize the ways in which our current way of thinking and being is inadequate to meet the larger reality of the situation. Reality will drag us kicking and screaming, against our will, into the unknown. The more resistance we put up the more damage we will cause to ourselves and others on our way out.

As a friend of mine once said, “How far down the rabbit-hole are you willing to go?”

On Empathy as a Conditional form of Self-Transcendence

On Empathy

What is empathy? This may seem like a basic question, but it is a question which I believe to be of the utmost importance for us to explore. Empathy is the closest that the majority of us wary travelers will ever know of self-transcendence. A genuine conception and experience of what self-transcendence actually is and really means is of the utmost importance for the lasting happiness of individual people, and even more importantly, for the survival of humanity. The reason I say this is because without a genuine experience and understanding of self-transcendence we are forever trapped with in the self-centered world of our isolated-individual egos. In this world our cares are only for our selves. There is no consideration of the other. Furthermore, our egoistic concerns are very sort sided. We want to attain what we desire here and now regardless of what the outcome of gaining this desire may cost us or others in the long run.

The individual ego has no perspective when it comes to imagining life seven generations down the road. Being selfish, the ego is easily persuaded to adopt whatever morality and worldview, or lack there of, that is prevalent at the moment, regardless of the fruits of this worldview. On the other hand, empathy is the ability to feel-with and/or feel-into another person’s pain, anxieties, happiness, sorrows, and joys. It is not sympathy, which is to feel-for another person as they experience a difficult time in their lives, and it is certainly not pity, which is akin to looking down upon those poor unfortunate souls experiencing some sort of significant suffering in their lives. No body in their right mind would want anyone to pity them!

Both sympathy and pity imply a strict dualism as concerns the relationship between the one not experiencing the pain and suffering (the observer) and the one experiencing trials and tribulations (the observed). On the other hand, empathy implies an existential identification with, a feeling with or into, the suffering of the other. Of course, when I say the words, “identification with the other,” I am not saying that in an absolute moment of self transcendence in which two individualities merge and “I” know what it is like to be the “other.” This conception of empathy is ridiculous because if I were to fully transcend my individuality and be identified with the being of the other, then both of our individualities would have to completely disappear. This is idea brings us into the realm of mysticism and not empathy, although it is my idea that empathy is a certain preliminary for taste of the state beyond all states that the mystics have described differently as Divine Union, annihilation of the ego, the experience of the unconditional, etc.

To understand empathy we have to look at the concept of imagination. In a state of empathy the observer, in a certain sense, imagines the pain of the other and can viscerally feel the pain as his or her own. The pain of the other does not become the observers pain exactly, for there is a level, when we are living on the conditional plane, on which no matter how close we are to someone we can never really know what the experience of their thinking and feeling is like. Each of us has an unapproachable sense and experience of self that is intimately tied up with out personal histories which in their existential reality is entirely off limits to the direct experience of any other human. As I see it, when we feel empathy with-for someone we are engaging in a hermeneutic of experience in which we are recognizing that “I” as an individual experience mental, emotional, and psychical pain and suffering. This suffering is not pleasant and it causes great hardships in my life. If I could avoid this suffering of course I would, but I cannot, for as a human being, if I wish to grow emotionally, intellectually, morally, and spiritually I must suffer. There is no way around this for in our suffering lies the potential to see our wounds and our places of immaturity and vulnerability which we have to learn to face with patience, fortitude, and courage if we wish to live our lives with grace and love.

At once I understand that not only do I suffer but others suffer as well. I also realize that while my suffering is personal to me, it is of no greater or lesser importance and gravity than the suffering of anyone else. Of course, I will have the tendency to bemoan my own suffering because it is an unpleasantness that I am experiencing, but in the end, other then due to an extreme sort of self-centeredness, why should I think that my suffering if any worse then anyone else’s suffering? To review, four realizations prepare one to be able to empathize with another person: (1) the recognition of the unpleasantness of my own suffering; (2) the recognition of the necessity of my suffering for the holistic development of the human person; (3) the realization that others suffer; and (4) that the suffering of another is equal in its importance to the my own suffering. With these four ideas in mind we can be with a person who is suffering and have an idea of the experience this person is going through. Not only will we have an idea, in the sense of an abstract notion, of what this person might be feeling, but we feel with them because we know in our own way how difficult this experience must be for them.

It must be pointed out that there are different types of suffering and from a certain point of view, not all types of suffering are necessarily “necessary” for one to go through. There are growing pains at each stage of our lives that are inevitable. There are physical ailments, our first broken heart, a divorce, and other such experiences that try as we may, at least some of these, we can just not avoid. Although, suffering caused by torture, unjust political regimes, sexual, physical, and extreme emotional abuse are not necessary in the same sense and the suffering that results from them needs to be dealt with differently (i.e. more actively, in the sense of opposing and doing what we can to end these types of extraordinary suffering). Empathy is not by any means incompatible with these extreme situations, but before, or while, we are experiencing empathy with the other, a more active resistance to the causes of suffering must be carried out.

The other point which I believe must be addressed here is the necessity to reflect on what I would call intelligent empathy. Intelligent empathy applies to all the situations I have mentioned above, and more besides. There is a term in Buddhism called skillful means which I believe it is important to reflect upon in a general sense when discussing intelligent empathy. The doctrine of skillful means has specifically to do with the Bodhisattva’s ability to offer the type of help or assistance that is appropriate for a given person (taking into consideration all relevant factors, such as age, life experience, intellectual capacities, level of emotional development, etc.) in a given time and place. Likewise with empathy, we have to do our best to access each individual situation to discern to the best of our ability what kind of support we can be. Sometimes we can offer words of advice from our own experience. Other times we can offer information or connect people to resources that may be able to help them. In other circumstances we may have to leave a person alone, or let go of an attachment we have in order for the person, or both people, tp learn and grow from their experiences. In my opinion, what we do not want to do is get so caught up in what we think is right or the “truth” and then force our opinions, which may actually be totally inappropriate in some contexts, on others.

This last idea makes me think of the definition of compassion that I have heard from a Buddhist teacher who I cannot now recall. He said that compassion is wisdom in action. Compassion necessarily follows empathy because once we have deeply experienced our own suffering and hence have gained the ability to relate to the suffering of others we cannot but feel love and compassion for others, which includes the want to assist the suffering in any way we can. When we are empathetic people we do not like to see other in pain, even if in certain circumstances we realize in the long run that the pain they are going through now may be necessary for their personal growth. All the same we have to have the wisdom and discernment to be able to step outside of our own boxes and experiences for a moment and listen to the other in order to decide what we can do to best be a support for them. This could be a simple as being an open ear when one needs someone to listen to. The point is that when we are with a suffering other, to the best of our ability, the emphasis should be placed on them and not ourselves.

Finally, for just a moment I would like to explore the idea, which I alluded to in the beginning, of empathy as a form of self-transcendence and as a gateway to deeper levels of self-transcendence. From what has been said previously about empathy it is easy to see that, in my opinion, empathy equates to the ability to feel into the experience of another, to the extent possible, with wisdom and compassion. With this said, I think it worthwhile to keep in mind that as individuals we are fallible and prone to think that our experience is all encompassing. With an awareness of this we may perhaps be able to avoid some of the pitfalls of egocentrism that could come about if we assume that we always know what is best for others. Despite this unavoidable limitation, when we empathetically listen to and be with another we momentarily cross the line that separates one isolated ego from another. We try to deeply enter into the experience of the other, always recognizing our own subjectivity, from their point of view, based on the information they present to us. This act of imagining ourselves with the other is nothing but love.

Here a conditional form of self-transcendence arises because we at least make an attempt to see life from another point of view. Better yet, we attempt to take the others experience and point of view as being as important and real as our own. In doing so, we momentarily step outside our self-centeredness and witness the truth of another person’s life. It takes a significant amount of love, care, compassion, and dedication to the wellbeing of all of life to even imagine attempting such a feat of love. With this care and love we move beyond our isolated egos, ever so slightly, and feel the interdependence of self and other. For when we deeply feel that there is no true happiness when others suffer, we start to move beyond the realm of selfish ego-mind into that vast expanse of space where compassion arises in tandem with the realization that there cannot be an “I” without the “other.”

It is in this space where the strict sense of individual egos start to drop away and we can begin to imagine ourselves in a more universal aspect, as intimately connected beings interacting in a natural and psychic atmosphere where all our lives together weave one beautiful tapestry of which when any part is torn or damaged the whole tapestry looses some of its beauty. I think it is time we start taking better care of this great piece of art that we are. It has been no small task for life to assemble this tapestry. Maybe instead of doing our damndest to unravel ourselves, each other, and the world string by string we should consider the questions, “What does it mean to be part of this great tapestry? What is my part in it? How do I fulfill this part most lovingly and peacefully? In other words, how do I live in such a way as to preserve the vibrant beauty and integrity of this great tapestry which I am a part of?”