True Self (again)

When you are yourself you don't know yourself.

That is the personal version of the SRH. (It doesn't mean that when you don't know yourself you are yourself.)

Being involved with other people from the start we grow up, and develop a consciousness, out of this interaction with society. Only at some stage do we start to consider ourselves a person based upon teh evidence that everyone treats us as one. For example we will learn our name when very young, and wonder implicity as we learn the rules of language what that name refers to. We will be held responsible for things we have done, punished and told off, and we will gain an inward looking reflection on ourselves that watches what we do as other watch what we do. All this leads almost inevitably to trying to fill that "hole" created by the gaze of everyone upon "me", that hole that even has a unique name! To make things even more inevitable at another young age we will recognise the intricate correspondence between the "dead" mirror reflection and our real "feeling" body that seemingly inhabits the space that everyone talks to and refers to as me. Thinking my body is me is the first prison gate. It is that time when sometimes as we make up a football team we forget to count ourselves and select 11 people which ironically leaves us out of the team.. stirrings of the SRH warning us! but we never take heed.

But it does not end there. We realise that there are things that we are which teh body isn't. We begin to see ourselves then as a hidden spirit within the body. This persists for many years. There are things the mirror cannot see, and other people and society cannot see. We live within a world of secrets. There is justice in this world of secrets because a hidden god and hidden heavens are there alongside us. This is the second prison gate. This is the stage where I still am. Buddha says that this is the worst state because it is so hard to escape from. Science is trying to unlock this second level of the prison cell, while firmly remaining trapped behind the first prison gate. We are all in prison those who walk down this road of "knowing" themselves.

It's hard to explain. Better to explain what being oneself is. I've noted before in this blog the Zen story I didn't understand for years. Standard set up of an ambitious student seeking enlightenment from a master. After 10 years of cleaning the temple he is annoyed with the master for not teaching him his "true self". The master lets him go, and as he walks away the master calls his name. He turns around and the master says "that is your true self." Referring of course to the instant that is passing when the student responded to his name being called. It is in those instants of responding to the outside world that we are ourselves. It is pure irony.

I'm now repeating previous blogs but resaying things is good revision for me. Public speaking is the art of entertaining the audience, it is not about oneself. Good public speakers think about teh audience. Bad ones worry about how they are doing and how they are feeling! It is enormous irony that we get concerned over ourself in the belief it will help the audience. A nervous wreck we do not peform as well as if we gave it to the audience and left ourselves out. It is a hard lesson to learn but once we start to speak we often get absorbed into the moment and forget about ourselves and then things go very much better. Ajahn Chah (Thai master) once made a student who was nervous about public speaking give 3 unprepared 1 hour talks one after the other. After that he never worried about public speaking again, and is now a very good public speaker and spreader of the Dhamma.

Absorbtion into the moment is what I admired "my muse" most for, but irony upon irony when she went that actually left me seeking myself more in an inauthentic way and I became completely not myself. This blog here is spawned from the sense that I am getting over that rejection (or miscommunication, or mess up whatever it was) and without care for public opinion, my boss, my temple, my friends, family, girlfriend or anyone have a space where I can simply "be". It is odd that this was much easier when I was a child, but now almost 40 it really takes a lot to let go of all this social expectation and pressure to "be" something more than the aging flesh and relatively soon to be corpse that I really am.

My mother is the worst (but then 30 years older than me it seems that is to be expected). Facing the grave herself, presumably before me, she worries far more that me about what people think of her. She worries about the future, and money, and almost everything. Surely as we get older we will learn to care less about what will soon be completely ripped from us by death. Apparently irony is ironic. Children are carefree, teenagers reckless, adults responsible, and the elderly it seems positively concerned about all these irrelevant things.

"Society" has taken a bit of a hammering from this blog. I think it was divided previously into true Society, which is factual and all inclusive, and fake society which is the various levels of "societies" that people feel they belong to and have to conform to (those memberships that construct their identity in other words). There is a link here between "being oneself" and social membership which is the root of the ills of fake society. We feel we know ourself by listing the societies that we belong to. A muslim student was set the task by his cousin of writing out his understanding of such things as culture, tradition etc. It struck me as a particularly ethnic-minority thing to do (as discussed in previous blogs), but more tragically such thinking is seeting him up with a false consciousness that he actually is from this culture or tradition. We are all children of Africa if you accept the anthropology and genetic studies but we don't like that membership because it doesn't make it exclusive and so there is no sense of "my" membership and so it is fake!

There is a term from psychology "Sociopath". It suggests that the sufferer has an illness of their relationship and integration with society. Yet society itself is an illness! Indeed many actual psycho/sociopaths do very well in society because they have an illness. The various psychopaths in the military/political complex of America are it seems (it is only opinion) quite ill in their thinking. The use of "bombing" to solve almost every problem is an illness. Wonderful quote from a top American politician of the 1970s (I forget his name but he is extremely hawkish). When recalling a clearly sensitive political situation, he said the U.S. response was to commence a "program of massive bombing". Enormously entertaining and amusing (I still joke with a frined about it) but it seems this is no joke within the American mindset. Another sociopath it seems is Zuckerberg (I've not seen the film but a friend has). Out of envy for the social elites at Harvard he created Facebook. Rather than be in the field of social interaction himself, he engineers the channels through which people interact: a metasocial being so to speak. He makes a lot of money. Within the machine of economics and society he is not a "path" at all. But any real measure of human interaction would say that he is not the exemplary example of someone who is easy going, fun and caring - i.e. a model non-sociopathic. Nor am I; this is not a criticism but an examination of the nature of society. It is the qualities that fake society looks for - those which enable social climbing, wealth and status - these are the things that have come under attack in this blog. True society is warm and caring and does not construct social status or exclusive membership. There is no sense of wealth either since this concept is derived from the concept of social status. And I suppose there can be no emphasis on economics either. These are the people and the society without illness. Where people are treated as what they are: people. This realism (rather than the fantasy of imaginery status hierachies) also fosters a true approach to self because these people don't belong anywhere and don't know who they are. They are spontaneous, live in the moment and are free. This returns us to the opening discussion.