Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Atemporality of Privileged Moments
While we intuit that a concrete universe exists, all we know is what we actually sense. This creates a problem with language, because our differing sensory experiences require that we all understand different things by the language we hear, as we associate that language with shaping events that are unique to us. This opens up many questions about meaning, but it opens up another issue as well: is it possible to escape meaning?The Buddha instructed that the problem with life is dhukka, the suffering that comes from attachment. If you free yourself from attachment to earthly things, he argued, you will not suffer. When the Buddha practiced detachment, though, he appeared so happy that others wanted to follow in his footsteps. And so he taught them. Which seems like a strange thing for somebody who has truly found his own happiness to want to do. Aristotle said that the good is that at which all things aim. What was the Buddha aiming for?
Contemplating dhukka, what I find is that I don't want to be detached from all earthly suffering. I have people that I love, pets that I adore, places that give me pleasure. And the thought of their or my passing is not taken sanguinely: I want the experience of them to remain a part of what I do. And yet the grieving process has taught me that I can let go of these attachments over time. People I wept over ten years ago I now think of with absolute joy for what I learned from them. They have slipped out of my physical existence and into my mental existence. What causes the angst, I think, is not the suffering of attachments - though their breaking is unpleasant - but the lack of control. As Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
I think the Buddha was, thankfully, in a different place than Woody Allen. But it bears noting what that place was: a choice between the sublime bliss that he had found and the thought that others would miss out if he didn't teach them. There's a generosity in this, but also a desire for control. Not, mind you, over the people he taught. But over the world. To teach is to assume that what you have to teach will improve the lot of others and that they ought to learn it. There is an inherent assumption you know something they need and you will make your impact on the world in providing it. The Buddha, seeking Nirvana, couldn't find it if the secret was to die with him. Which set the stage for his teaching - controlling the destiny of his ideas - but also for others to do wacky things with them like arguing over who's a proper Buddhist, which school of Buddhism is right and all sorts of other nonsense that would have made him laugh, weep or both if he had truly found the Enlightenment he claimed to have found. All of which is to say that part of human happiness is human suffering because, by our actions, we demonstrate that we prefer the suffering of existence to the relief of oblivion. We like our oblivion is controlled doses.
Now we've got another Buddha wandering around called Echkart Tolle. He tells us of the Power of Now. What he talks about, however, is the primordial sense of Pain whose closest analogous emotion is fear, or the desire to avoid impending pain. His answer is to separate oneself from the mind, ceasing to confuse our thoughts and emotions with a deeper sense of who we are as part of the world at large, and inseparably so. The idea, it seems, is to begin with shorter hops into Nirvana that are then extended. I appreciate this idea in the way that I appreciate the idea of Christianity building heaven on earth, one soul at a time, as opposed to getting lose in the idea that all is nought till kingdom come, which seemingly abjures Jesus' own injunction to pray that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, something we shouldn't need to wait on.
Tolle says that positive emotions, such as love, are associated with our connection to Being, as in the old bit about us being human beings, not human doings. He tells us:
Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered "speechless," sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.I think these moments come with breaks in thought because they coincide with necessary breaks in contemplation of what we can and cannot control, allowing us to fall into flow.
In literature, we think of the "privileged moment" as time out of time, a short space where two characters can share something that transcends the ordinary unfolding of the plot. And while a privileged moment may be tacked on to many stories - "and they lived happily ever after" - the true completion of such stories is inevitably the resolution of events in a familiarly temporal world. Which is why Tolle gave up sitting on park benches smiling at people and wrote his book. Why the Buddha took up teaching. And so on. Longfellow tells us, "Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal..." In the same way, successful quests for Nirvana do not end with the sage disappearing into eternity in contemplating his navel, but with that self-same sage giving those around him a chance to hear the whisperings of eternity within the framework of mortal life. Privileged moments will come, often in literature, and more often than we acknowledge in our real lives, but even as an eternal universe pulses. to our senses time marches on. The Power of Now and the proper handling of dhukka does not come in severing ourselves from the reality of how we are constructed, but in finding a way to let the immortal soul sometimes reveal itself from within the mortal body so that our lives may give expression to something larger. To return to where we started, if our sensory lives give meaning, the highest state is not the escape from meaning, but to transcend, momentarily grasping the idea of that old hymn - "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end" - and knowing that we're a part of it, not apart from it.
posted by gbarto at 1:35 PM