2B1

I’ve written a lot in this blog about my belief in the fundamental connectedness of people, of living beings in general, of things in general. And I suspect it has been a waste of time. There are only two likely reactions anyone might have to this notion at this point in history: “Duh, who didn’t know that?” or “Are you insane?”

If you look at the world around us right now, it certainly doesn’t look like what one might call “an organic whole.” The level of social fragmentation and conflict appears to be historically high and increasing, as does the level of conflict between human beings and Nature. No one seems to be able to agree about anything, especially in reference to how we might solve any of these problems –we can’t even agree what the problems are – but everyone seems to be ready to fight to the death to push the solution they like. It’s a situation I’ve taken to summing up like this: Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t.

Philosophically, theologically, ecologically, there’s widespread acknowledgment that everyone and everything is interconnected; that, indeed, all is one. But there’s also widespread antipathy toward that idea, widespread efforts to divide and conquer, to impose some form of absolutism or exclusivism, which means the conversion or eradication of everyone who believes in anything else: My way or the highway.

Even among people who say they believe in the kinship of all humans, the unity of existence, you don’t find many who behave accordingly. On the contrary, mostly they’re just promoting another absolutist/exclusivist ideology and contributing to the general fragmentation.

Now, if I suggest that the real solution to this problem involves each person looking inward and disengaging from mass culture and mass thinking, it might seem as if I’m promoting an even more intense degree of disintegration. After all, everyone else seems to think the answer is for everyone to unite, to join up, to enlist in some movement or other. But that’s just an invitation to choose sides in the war of exclusivisms.

Real unity begins at home, so to speak. People who are fragmented inwardly cannot bring about any kind of world except one that is likewise fragmented. Conversely (contrapositively, actually), a unified world can be brought about only by people who are personally unified.

This is, of course, the overall message of Plato’s Republic (see esp. 443d-444a), and it is a theme that has remained constant in the Western tradition from that time to the present. Plotinus, for example, reiterates:

“Know Thyself” is said to those who, because of their selves’ multiplicity, have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves. (Enneads VI.7.41. Trans. A.H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press.)

The message remains fundamental right through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, as evidenced by a statement of the alchemist Gerhard Dorn (quoted several times by Jung): “Thou wilt never make from others the One that thou seekest, except there first be made one thing of thyself.”

And of course it’s a basic principle in the synthesis offered in the 20th century by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: “First of all, what man must know is that he is not one; he is many. He has not one permanent and unchangeable ‘I’ or Ego. He is always different.” (P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, First Lecture.)

The tradition is, of course, full of advice and techniques for the individual to attain self-unification, but the overall idea is presented beautifully in my favorite passage from Plato’s Phaedo:

Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?

Certainly.

But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom. (Plato, Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/.)

In today’s world, in which we are barraged 24 hours a day by stimuli from our immediate environment and even more from our expansive electronic environment; in which we imagine ourselves constantly “connected” with our friends, family and business associates by our wireless devices and other kinds of electrical umbilical cords; in which we turn our attention incessantly from one outrage to another, from the latest missing child report to the latest natural disaster to the latest celebrity scandal to the latest political uproar to the latest phony “reality” show development to the most recent “friend” update on our favorite social networking site – each one of our “interests” is just one more fragment of our soul torn off and sucked into the diffuse cloud that constitutes what we imagine to be our identity.

Strange as it may sound, the cure for this condition – and it is truly a sickness, of the soul – is to care less, to care about fewer things, to stop wasting our attention and our life-energy on things that don’t matter and which we can do nothing to change, and to focus on the one thing that is truly within our power to alter for the good: our own minds.

Roots

I'm sitting here with a rather obvious reminder of how rash it can be to forget that things that appear on the surface to be totally disconnected - for example, a nondescript, seemingly dead piece of vine on one side of the yard and a sprig of poison ivy on the other - often turn out to share a single root.

This image is a fairly obvious metaphor for the kind of connectedness I wrote about a few posts back in terms of family trees and "one life," but it's also a way to start attempting to reconcile what might appear to be a glaring inconsistency in my recent rambling divigations.

On the one hand, I spewed quite a bit of verbiage scorning contemporary atomistic-individualistic models of the person as "illusory" and "a betrayal of our true nature as humans." But in my last two posts, I endorsed the idea that the only real foundation for ethics "is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge." In other words, a truly ethical society exists only when each individual in that society lives ethically.

So it certainly could appear as if I'm condemning social atomism with one breath and promoting it with the next. Obviously, that's not my intention. By way of explanation, I want to reiterate the distinction I made previously between "individualism" and "individuality."

I defined individualism as "the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays." I've ranted more than once, in fact, about our seeming acceptance of this externalized model of identity formation.

But I haven't offered a definition yet of what I would allow as "real" individuality or how it's cultivated, mostly because it's harder to define. In fact, I believe the ultimate basis of individuality or "personhood" is a kind of inner core that is the part of us that connects us with the whole stream of life. Ultimately, it's a mysterium, irreducible to a verbal formulation: It's to be lived, not discussed.

So it's easier to talk about the "how" than the "what." And the "how" is of course quite well known, and has been known for millennia. I'll let Plato explain one way of looking at it, and leave it at that for now:

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?”
“Certainly.”
“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Online at the Perseus Digital Library.

Identity Theft

I'm finding it more and more difficult to persuade myself that I have anything to say here that's sufficiently different from what a gazillion other blogs are saying to make it worth anyone's time to read this one. We like to think of ourselves as unique individuals and to believe our thoughts, feelings and experiences in general are very different from everyone else's, but when you live in a nation of 300-plus million people, even if only 1/10th of 1 percent of your fellow citizens have the same thought, that's still 300,000 of you with the same idea.

Moreover, how many choices do we really have? Religion, for example: There's a sort of menu of options ranging from highly traditional, fundamentalist sectarianism to outright materialistic atheism. The same sort of thing is true with politics. Sports: Pick a game, then choose a team to support. So identity-formation becomes like a meal in a Chinese restaurant: Pick one item from column A, one from column B, etc. And one person is a Baptist Republican Redskins fan who drives a Ford and likes Toby Keith, another is a Unitarian Democrat Yankees fan who drives a Toyota and listens to Tori Amos. I don't know how many such combinations are possible, but the number probably isn't very large, and some of the differences are pretty insignificant.

Worse still, we live in a world in which not just physical products are mass-produced, so are ideas, attitudes, styles, dreams. The products are marketed as a way of expressing who we are, and we buy them, and we also buy the premise that what we own, what we wear, what we drive expresses who we are. And maybe it does, and maybe it's not completely absurd to go to the mall to buy some individuality, but it certainly seems likely that we're limiting our possibilities that way.

If you've ever watched an older relative in the twilight of life, you've seen them seemingly fade away as they lose their grip on the attitudes, opinions, obsessions, addictions, preferences and finally the memories by which they defined themselves. What's left then, if that kind of self-definition is all they have? But who or what is it that made those choices in the first place?

Oh sure, I know, no two of us have the same fingerprints, except monozygotic twins. So yes, we're all unique in that sense - which means we're all the same, doesn't it?