Ignorant Bliss or Blessed Relief? — Self, No Self and Their Mutual Inclusion in All Living Form
Some say that to be without self
Is the only way to be
Without suffering
.
To which, I can only agree
For to be without self
Is to be without qi
A motionless zero
A void
Indistinguishable
From infinite void
Space everywhere
.
But to be this way
Is to be without life
Motionless, emotionless
In ignorant bliss
With no care in the world,
Passionless,
Compassionless
A serenity born
From anaesthetized sleep
With no cause for concern
Arrested in peace
.
For the truth is
No body can exist
In no time
Only void can
And void exists everywhere
Within, without and throughout our temporary form
Forever calling
Receptively
For dynamic embodiment
By responsive current
As the love in our hearts
And the life in our skins
Bringing blessed relief
To all living form
The calm in our storm
.
In our increasingly distressed, zealously competitive modern human culture, many of us are seeking ways out of the depression and anxiety that come with feelings and fears of loss, uncertainty and failure. In the process, increasing attention has become focussed on the fundamental nature of self and selflessness, life and lifelessness, consciousness and unconsciousness, motion and stillness, material and immaterial, substance and energy, space and time. Alongside familiar ‘me-first’ or ‘us-first’ ideologies have come increasing calls for collaboration, suppression of ‘ego’, mindfulness, living in the now, oneness, wholeness and connecting to nature.
Recently, I came across this translated quote from Lao Tzu, author of the ‘Tao te Ching’:-
“If you are depressed you are living in the past; if you are anxious you are living in the future; if you are at peace you are living in the present.”
For all that I hold Taoism in high regard, it sent a shock wave through my body, causing me to wonder if something or somewhere had got lost in the translation. Can you imagine why?
It caused me to respond:- “If your current is excised from past and future, you don’t exist. RIP.”
And, at the back of my mind was this very different quote, from Winston Churchill:-
“If you are going through Hell, keep going”
Then, later, I wrote this:-
— — — — — — — — — — — — -
Postscript
A current excised from past and future
Cannot exist
Yet the Whole of Abstract Thought & Theory
Is framed in this State of ignorant bliss
Stuck in paradox
Obstructing and obscuring
All that flows in vibrant life
— — — — — — — — — — — —
I have long been troubled by notions of ‘no self’ and ‘living in the now’. And I suddenly saw more fully why, and how they relate to self-abandonment when all regard for past and future is suspended and ‘nothing really matters’. It equates to a state of pure passivity, an exclusion of ‘self’ from bodily experience into ‘boundlessness’. Actually it corresponds with pure 1st-person perception in which, paradoxically, any individuated discernment of self-identity is lost. It is just as much a subjective abstraction of immaterial self from body as its counterpart, the objective abstraction of material self from void space.
On the other hand, I have for many years now recognised self-identity to be a dynamic natural inclusion and expression of receptive void space in responsive living form and responsive living form in receptive void space (See http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion). No material body can exist instantaneously, because it is formed via the circulation of energetic current around a receptive ‘zero-point’ centre of void space somewhere within infinite space everywhere. All currents naturally flow from source to sink. Hence it takes time to become some body as a dynamic inclusion somewhere within space everywhere. A self excised from past and future can literally have and be no body.
With this understanding we can reconcile and move on from purely objective or subjective perceptions of self-identity as an isolated or non-existent entity, to an appreciation of all living forms as mutual inclusions of spatial stillness and energetic current, pooled together within the continuum of space everywhere. This is what it means to be alive as passionate, compassionate, receptive-responsive beings-and-becomings, forming relationships with one another and our surroundings.
This is how I would rather understand the message of Taoism — not as an instruction to cut our present adrift from past and future (or vice versa, to isolate our selves in past or future) — but as an appreciation of the current — the flow of life-giving ‘Qi’ that sustains us between ‘there’ and ‘then’ within the ever-present stillness of space everywhere (‘Tao’). We need not lock ourselves in to past regret or future uncertainty, but can take these in our stride as we accept the joys and griefs, the pleasures and cares of life as it is, not how we might abstractly idealize it to be in ignorant bliss.
What a difference it makes, what a blessed relief it is, is it not, to understand our selves in this way? To recognise and find peace meditatively in the calm eye of our storms as responsive centres of receptive awareness. To know ourselves as needful ‘holes’ requiring energetic sustenance to be able to thrive — not ‘selfish wholes’ abstracted from one another and the spatial and energetic context that brings us lovingly to life? There is no problem with ‘ego’, if ‘self’ is understood in these terms. The only problem comes when we are misled by abstraction to think, as Einstein put it:-
“the environment is everything that isn’t me”
Abandoning Self
On this clear, bright
Slightly misted, slightly frosted morning
The pain of being me
In a world that doesn’t agree
Has become too much to bear
.
I can’t keep going this way
At a total loss
To know what’s real
As memories flood in of worlds gone by
In lost experiences
Rendered pointless at best
Disastrous at worst
.
Nor can I know
What future, if any remains
Beyond this idle moment passed
Beyond caring
.
I can only take in
The sights and sounds of a present
Beyond comprehension
And leave myself out of it
‘
Forget me
For I am no longer here
