Self vs. Other: the Ultimate Paradox
Lokabandhu
This article was written as a talk for the 1995 Green Party conference. It has been put into its present form as a way of reaching a wider audience. The ideas in it are all drawn from the Buddhist tradition, although I have chosen not to use any Buddhist technical terms.
Many people involved in the environmental movement have three things in common: an awareness (often painful) of the problems facing the world and the pressing need to get out there and act; an awareness (to some degree) of the need to sort out their own 'stuff', their complexities and problems; and a general desire to have fun and enjoy life. These three can pull us in different, apparently quite incompatible directions; we can feel torn in ourselves and perpetually guilty. How can we reconcile them? Lokabandhu investigates.
The paradox of self and other
We are all, in different ways, skewered on the paradox of Self and Other. The problems of the world are enormous, to do justice to any of them is truly a lifetime's work and more; we ourselves can feel so complicated and confused it can seem a lifetime's work just to sort ourselves out - and a lifetime's work doesn't leave much room for fun!
It is a real paradox: there are no easy answers, no quick solutions. To ignore any of these dimensions is to fail to do justice to life in its wholeness; to focus only on one or another is to become partial and narrowed-down. We can recognise stereotypes: the arch-activist, living only for political campaigning, a fountain of energy yet who slowly succumbs to anger and burn-out, whose personal life and relationships are in tatters; the therapy addict who seems stuck in a mire of self-preoccupation, going ever-deeper into themselves yet never getting to the bottom of anything; and the party animal who eventually wakes up in the ashes of the night before with a sour taste in their mouth and a dreadful sense of emptiness. Like all paradoxes, there are no solutions to be found on the level of the problems themselves. We have to become different beings, beings who literally see the world through different eyes: we have to grow. To do this we need at least some vision of where we are headed and a path of practical steps we can follow. This path has to be able to include the whole of ourselves and indeed to be a path open to all living beings, whatever their particular lives and interests, it has to be a path based on universal values.
There are two crucial dimensions to this path, each of which help us in different ways to move beyond the paradox of self and other. The first is a growth in awareness, the second a growth in our capacity to love. Both are necessary, both are capable of infinite development and perfection, both have so many facets to them they are inexhaustible. I will explore each briefly.
Dimensions of awareness
It has been said that awareness is revolutionary. Awareness is the essence of consciousness, to be more aware is literally to be more alive. Awareness is not just an intellectual knowing, nor merely the play of sense-experience, it is a knowing and experiencing combined, living life in the moment while knowing that that is what we are doing. It is dancing through life with poise and skill. Awareness is a faculty that we can apply to our whole lives, and we may speak of different dimensions of awareness: awareness of ourselves, of others, of our environment, and of Reality itself.
To become aware of ourselves is to become self-conscious, to become fully human perhaps for the first time. We are so rich, so complex, so finely poised between ape and angel, so multi-dimensional but often, frankly, so divided against ourselves. We need to become aware of the whole of ourselves: our bodies, our feelings, our thoughts and visions and deeper values. To begin to become aware is to initiate a process of gradual integration of our many 'selves', to draw our energy together from our scattered fragments and deeper drives. Become aware also of our habits: we can say that to the extent that we are unaware, we are our habits, we are not individuals but simply statistics absorbed in the group. Awareness of ourselves allows to dwell in that tiny but crucial gap between provocation and habitual reaction: it gives us choice. Awareness allows our individual uniqueness to flower.
We need to become aware of our relationships in the world, of other people. We are not alone in the world, we are not separate from others. Everything we do or say affects others, and we ourselves are affected by others. Just like ourselves, other's hearts are "woven of human joys and cares, washed marvelously with sorrow, swift to mirth". We are not the centre of the universe. Through awareness of others we begin to realise that other's suffering may far outweigh our own, that we have much to learn, that we have duties as well as rights. We are surrounded by friends and lovers who we may take for granted, enemies who we can only see the bad side of, and strangers we treat as objects to serve or threaten us: awareness fills our world with living human beings, a net of jewels in which each reflects all.
And we are not only connected to other human beings, we live and are sustained by the world itself, nature, the environment. We depend for life itself on the Universe's delicate and ever-changing web of conditions: as the conditions change we change, and eventually, when the conditions no longer support our bodies, we die. We live and breathe in the world, we create through our actions the world in which we then live. Actions have consequences. Because of our technical prowess and sheer numbers, our actions are so much more weighty than ever before, and so our awareness of the environment and its laws has to be so much greater than ever before. There is so much beauty in the world, despite the damage we have caused, and every tiny thing may teach us: "An ancient pine tree preaches eternal wisdom, a wild bird cries out Truth". Awareness of others and the environment can be taken into every aspect of our everyday lives, and especially our livelihood and patterns of consumption: we can begin to make conscious choices based on our values, to make greater or smaller changes as opportunities arise. We can find ways of practicing awareness at all times, bringing ourselves back to the present so that life remains vivid and real.
As we begin to become more aware of our connectedness to others and the world, we begin to become aware of what we may call Reality itself: this is nothing mystical, simply "the way things really are". Everything changes. Everything arises in dependence upon conditions, and changes when those conditions change. Nothing is permanent, we ourselves will die. We have no fixed, eternal self, separate to the flow of the rest of the Universe. If we take responsibility for our lives, we can create the conditions within which anything we choose may happen: our potential is unlimited. If we don't take responsibility for our lives, we will blindly become the product of our conditioning, living and dying with the same old habits and biases we inherited with our mothers milk: "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad, they may not mean to but they do. They give you all the faults they had, and add some others, just for you..." Our actions will still have consequences, but we will be blind to the patterns of cause and effect, stumbling ignorantly through life, suffering. The only way out is to become aware and to take responsibility, to re-create the conditions that shape our lives. Of course we 'know' that everything changes, everything is impermanent: a moment's thought will convince us. But we are not aware of it really, we do not live our lives based on its' truth. In fact we often go to great lengths to remain unaware of death: we simply can't cope with it.
Awareness is terrible. It challenges us to find meaning in the details of our lives, to cultivate our garden with a light heart while remaining aware of the suffering in Tibet and our own eventual death. And once we have begun to become aware, very often, a snowballing process has begun which it is difficult to stop, and it is even more difficult to go back to our old state of unawareness. Because awareness is growth, to become unaware again is to die , to kill some part of ourselves. To live with this perspective is a true challenge. It is to be forced to choose just how we will spend the time and energy remaining to us, to become fully aware of our interconnectedness, to begin to find meaning in every tiny ordinary activity of life, since all are fully lived. It is therefore it is to begin to move beyond our paradox. But to become aware is to become challenged by immensity. To remain buoyant and happy in the face of true awareness, awareness especially of impermanence and death, requires great emotional positivity: we also need to cultivate our capacity to love.
The Art of Love
Awareness is not simply an intellectual awareness: our feelings, our whole emotional body, must be included too. Without an strong, emotionally positive response to life our awareness, however clear, can become dry, alienated, even uncaring, and we will simply be unable to cope with a real awareness of impermanence. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, as the poet said - but we can choose to set up conditions whereby we will become stronger, healthier, more able to bear the weight of insight, and this is the second limb of the path beyond the paradox of self and other. The truth of impermanence guarantees us the freedom to change. We are creatures of habit, and we need to change our habits. Generally, we are in the habit of grasping and craving what we desire because we think it will make us really happy, also of hating what we fear because it threatens us. This is in such contrast to the way things really are, the reality of interconnectedness and no separate, fixed selfhood.
We have to learn to affirm life, to feel compassion for suffering whether borne by ourselves or others, to feel joy at strength and good fortune, to passionately wish the best for ourselves and for all the world: to love. To nurture, challenge, instruct, enchant, befriend ourselves and others that we may become happier and begin to grow in awareness and love. There is nothing sexual or romantic here, no question of projection or idealization - simply a whole-hearted human response of affirmation to life, the total antithesis of violence and negation. Love for ourselves is based on a natural self-cherishing, a healthy appreciation of our qualities and potential, and desire for happiness; love for others on an imaginative identification with them. As Shelly so finely says, "The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."
As we become stronger and healthier emotionally, more loving towards ourselves, we become able to go beyond ourselves, to really care for others, to give to others equally with ourselves and even to put others before ourselves without martyrdom. We become able to meet suffering with compassion, wherever that suffering is found, and we begin to act more and more, in whatever we do, from a perspective of love for all the world. We begin to be able to give ourselves to our particular tasks, great or small, heroic or mundane, knowing that our motives are the highest, that we desire nothing more than the welfare of all beings: our conscience clears and we are able to devote ourselves wholly to the task in hand. Our sphere of concern will embrace the world; our sphere of action remains finite and yet we act within it from the perspective of the world. We move further and further towards the transcendence of self and other, breaking down the boundaries.
Yes but how?
We may be convinced of the value of developing awareness and learning more deeply to love, but that merely begs the question, how? The answer, in a way, is very simple. Although ultimately we aspire to become free and spontaneous and eternally creative, when we begin we are very largely creatures of habit: our work is to transform bad habits into good habits. Bad habits close us down, and down, and downwards unto death, good habits lead us gradually to the dance of life, to the transcendence of all habits and reactivity. We need to practice good habits until they become natural in the way that a dancer practices her movements until they too become natural. Often we speak of meditation practice simply as 'practice' and of the 'practice of ethics'. We behave as if we were Enlightened and we are led towards Enlightenment. So we can work in every area of life, practicing awareness, generosity, patience, kindly speech, and all good qualities, adding if we wish times for special, more intensive practices such as meditation, and gradually we will develop the habits of awareness, generosity, patience and the rest. This may not sound glamorous but it works. We may hunger for the most exotic, highest teachings, but this may be simple laziness on our parts. "Learn to do good; cease to do evil; and purify the heart" said the sage Bodhidharma to the Emperor of China, to his dismay. "Is that your highest teaching - a child of three could understand that!", he cried. "Yes - but an old man of eighty cannot practice it", came the reply. There are no higher teachings, only deeper understandings. Once we have mastered awareness and the art of love, then we may move on, using our awareness to reflect on our experience so deeply that we penetrate the fabric of Reality itself.
Work as play
As we grow in awareness and love, as we are able to see more and more clearly that we ourselves are ever-changing, along with the rest of the world, the burden of our sense of self begins to lift and our whole habit of distinction between 'self' and 'other' begins to dissolve. We no longer care so passionately who gets what, because all is ours, we no longer distinguish so rigidly between work and play, since all our activity is meaningful and satisfying and freely chosen. We cannot be overwhelmed by problems, since who is there to overwhelm? Our energy is integrated and free, we are able to give, knowing that there is in reality no giver, no gift, and noone to give to. The paradox of Self and Other, the ultimate paradox, has been transcended, and we are free at last.