This has been written about so much that I wonder can I really add anything, but I used to read all this stuff and while I could grasp it I never made the actual move needed to "become it."
For example in his fragments Heraclitus says, "You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on." It is deceptively simple. This simple observation contains the secret of complete freedom from Death and suffering! It seems almost impossible, isn't that just a simple thing he says?
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
People used to travel to visit to see this ship. Now what did they think they were seeing as the planks were gradually replaced. At some point it would become indistinguishable from a copy of the original. This puzzle leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth, there is something deeply unsatisfying about it.
But we better get used to sitting with this problem because it lies at the centre of the Problem of Life. Because of this problem all things are actually "illusion" and the truth is something quite different.
Just like the Ship of Theseus they say that the human body replaces every atom every 7 years. It doesn't matter what the exact numbers are, it is sufficient to observe that we are physically changing all the time. Like a wave in fact travelling through the ocean. Waves do not take water with them, they simply move the local water in a circle. That is why a piece of wood just bobs up and down and does not move. When it moves it is the wind or tides, but not the waves. The substance of waves is always changing, at any moment there is a wave of water but move forward a few seconds and it is a made of completely different water. One wave causing the next wave, but nothing to actually moving.
Another example is Newton's Cradle. We might we tricked into thinking that some phantom ball moves through the middle balls carrying the "movement" from one side to the other, but clearly there is nothing more there than 5 balls. The system clicks along, each state causing the next, and the movement of balls at the end is just a side effect.
In Buddhism an often used image is a line of candles being used to light each other. Each candle causes the next to light, but nothing is transferred. The result looks like this.
So there are lots of examples of this uncomfortable truth about the world that it seems there is no substantial "thing" there, but rather the substance changes within the "thing" we are interested in.
And at least for me I kind of left it there. So things are like containers and the water in them changes all the time. The river is always flowing so is never the same. But the banks of the river, or the container, are roughly the same so "big deal". But I didn't make the transition that this implies.
If the substance in "things" is always changing, and it is just the container that stays the same, what is the container made from? When we say that a river is flowing, what is the river made from if not the water? How can a river be anything other than the water? What is this container? A phantom of a "river" without any water?
Likewise, an ancient Greek would say "I'm off to see the Ship of Theseus." His friend says, "but you know half the wood has been replaced?" He says doesn't matter its still "The Ship of Theseus." But if all the wood is changed what is this "Ship of Theseus" that is somehow a ship separate from the wood in it? Perhaps the "shape" is what makes the ship, as though it is the container. But then surely anything with that shape is The Ship of Theseus. When we say something "is" something, we want to mean there is some particular fixed material thing there, something that is unique and unlike anything else. But a shape or container is never unique and the substance is always changing. It seems we want for a phantom, something impossible.
Its a very dissatisfying problem. In a Sartrean way it gives us some nausea. Something is very wrong. We probably push the problem away, or pretend we understand it. But instead, now, just sit with it. This problem is the doorway to enlightenment.
Before pushing for a solution, why do I say this is so important. The reason is that when we think about ourselves we have the exact same problem. And what could be more serious than a fundamental problem with ourselves. We are like the Ship of Theseus. We have a name, we have an identity. People travel to see us sometimes just like the ship. And yet we are always changing. I've already said that materially we change every 7 years or so. If the substance of my body is always changing then am I not a different person every 7 years. Or perhaps there is a container called "me" that this stuff moves through. We've already questioned what the meaning of an empty container is. In reality containers are made of stuff like glass or pottery. But this doesn't help cos that stuff in the container is changing too, although more slowly. So there is then a container for the container (whatever shape the container walls have) and it starts to get stupid. Take a jog. Somewhere there is an injection mould for the glass jug, and presumably a mould for the injection mould but it must stop somewhere. To stop an infinite regress we should haul that up here and force these containers to be the same stuff as it is supposed to hold: a river is not its banks, it is the water flowing in those banks. A river is always made of water. Containers do not really help with this problem.
So the very idea of "me" which is the centre of "my life" is a problem if we think about it. Wow, perhaps I don't get life at all! And what are the key things we know about life? We are reminded of one every year, twice! Once on our Birthday and once today on Christmas when we remember the extraordinary birth of Jesus. Now what is all this virgin birth stuff? That will become apparent. The other thing is death. We are reminded of that at Easter at least with Jesus' extraordinary death. What is all this resurrection stuff? That will become apparent too. But we also have our own death to worry about, and that of the people we love. But perhaps if we don't understand what we are, perhaps we have this wrong and Jesus has this right? Possibly a more significant figure here is Buddha who spoke at great length about all this.
"Where there is nothing; where naught is grasped, there is the Isle of No-Beyond. Nirvāṇa do I call it—the utter extinction of aging and dying."
There is definitely something going on here, but what is it? How do we make sense of all this?
SO lets begin by not throwing anything away. There is a "Ship of Theseus" and there is a "Self" or a "Me." But we need to see them as though they are photos in a photo album of the mind. Or we can use the containers idea, as long as we don't over do it. These things are like very thin transparent plastic bottles like the 2L ones that hold fizzy drinks. These snap shots or sample of the world, are just very rough holders for the world. We can capture bits of the world in a bottle, or take a photo of it, but no one would ever say that the photo "was" the world, or the stuff we have stuck in the bottle belongs there.
Perhaps a child collects some river water in the empty plastic drinks bottle and shouts out "I have captured the river!" In a way they have, but its just a small bit of the river and now it has been captured its no longer "river." It no longer swirls and ripples or flows. It is nothing like a river, all the life has gone from it. We do the same thing to ourselves whenever we say "me." We trap ourselves in a bottle and think we know what we are talking about. But the real "me" is a swirling and ever changing thing.
Now we deal with this by saying things like "I am happy" or "I am angry." We take the swirling self and we stick it in a bottle of "me." The bottle or "I" is fixed, and through the bottle goes things like happiness or anger. Through this self goes thoughts, emotions, feelings, smells, tastes all sorts of things but the bottle remains the same. But we have questioned the logic here already. What is a wave without water, what is a river without water. What is the bottle of self without feelings and emotions and thoughts?
The proper way to see this is not a bottle with swirling feelings and thoughts inside, but rather when we see these thoughts and feelings we use them to deduce a bottle. Watching waves on a lakes shore there is nothing but water, and we deduce the presence of waves from the movements in the water. The waves don't exist outside the water.
Likewise we deduce the presence of a self from the movements we see around us. When Descartes said:
"I think therefore I am"
He was using the presence of thoughts to see a self, but there is no self separate from thoughts any more than there is a wave separate from water.
This is not the say the waves and selves do not exist, but they only exist as long as the phenomena from which they are made. There is nothing substantial or fixed or permanent to a wave, it is simply something that water does.
So now we can ask does a wave get Born and Die? Did Jesus get Born and Die? Did Buddha get Born and Die? Do I get Born and Die?
The answer is Yes if we continue to think that a wave exists separate from the water. But then you have that silly situation when the wave hits the shore and we think that it somehow continues as a "ghost" or a "soul" somewhere in the shoreline. And likewise we think that somehow the wave "entered" the water like a soul enters a body somewhere across the lake and motivated the water to behave like this like a mole burrowing through the earth. There is no mole to a wave, there is just wave.
It is true the energy of the wave gets converted into other things like sound or heat or moves some sand on the shore. But the wave is gone! It has died. And so it appears that death does happen. But where did the wave go? It was converted into other things so in another sense it didn't die, it only changed. But we can no longer see a wave rippling on the water and so we stick with the idea it died.
Yet we already analysed this. The wave was something that the water was doing, not a bit of water but the whole water. The wave was "in" the water on one side of the lake, and it appeared to move across the lake like a "soul" to water on the near side of the lake. And yet we already said that a wave cannot exist without water. This process by which some water in a wave shape causes another bit of water next door to have a wave shape is what we need to get used to. The wave is born and dies in each bit of water in turn. That is how it appears to move. The movement of a wave across a lake is an illusion just like the illusion that is exploited to make films and animations that make us believe that a mouse is talking and moving across the screen. Its an illusion.
And in the same way that this is an illusion, the idea that it dies and is born is also an illusion. It does not exist like we want to think about it.
And the same is true of the self. When someone calls our name, its just a plastic bottle, or a photo that snap shots us for a split second but it doesn't capture us. We can't be captured, we are a flowing, ever changing thing, like a wave flowing through water. It is worse when we try to snapshot ourselves. We can do this obsessively and really mess our lives up as we try to force ourselves into a definable shape, "I AM" we say as though we are like a fixed wave. But the moment we do this, we then face death. Thinking the wrong way we get stuck with this bottle holding what we think is us, and then all we can see is death when this bottle becomes empty as the stuff inside changes and stop being what we thought it was.
People give us a name. This is probably the start of it. We start to form a bottle that has this name, and we start to see everything that happens as going on either inside or outside this bottle. And we get more and more used to this bottle so it becomes fixed. And then we start to wonder what becomes of this bottle when all the stuff inside stops and we die. This gives us that sense of the "void" or the "blackness" of Death. But it's a mistake. There is no fixed bottle going through life with us. There is no fixed self, inside which we live and our life gets played out. And there is no fixed outside either. When Pink Floyd sing about "the wall" its the walls of this bottle that they are referring to. And if the bottle gets too fixed our life becomes stifled and we feel cut off from the world around us. Its all a mistake.
Our name, our identity, what people think of us, what we think of ourselves, what we have done, what we like, what we don't like, when we were born, when we think we will die, what other people think we have done, what we believe, what we think, what we think we are, who we think we are, what our parents think of us, who our parents think we are, our philosophy, our religion, : every single one of these, and many more are all just bottles or snapshots that try to contain an ever changing being. It cannot be contained. As Buddha says it cannot be defined.
"Like a flame that has been blown out by a strong wind goes to rest and cannot be defined, just so the sage who is freed from name and body goes to rest and cannot be defined." Buddha: Sutta Nipāta
Being undefined is the secret at the heart of life that we don't like to face. We grasp for definition, not realising that the grasp itself cannot be defined. This grasping comes from nowhere, if we could watch the nature of the grasping rather than what we reach for we would see our own indefinable nature. Its initially unsettling, and can cause a feeling of "groundlessness." But there is no gravity here, we will not fall, there is nowhere to fall. We just are where we always have been, quite safe, at peace.
Sunyata is another name for this, and while this is often translated as "emptiness", it is equally "fullness". The state of undefined is also a state of pure potential. Because we are nothing, we can be anything and everything. It is pure freedom, without any grasping for form. The wave passes through the water without ever being anything. A photo can make it look like it was at a particular point on the lake at a time, but we know this is an illusion: "it" was never there, nothing was passing through.
A physicist may say well there was something there: the potential energy stored in the wave that was dissipated as the wave collapsed, and the kinetic energy that was driving the next wave. But this is the weird thing about energy, while it has an exact numerical magnitude, you cannot ever get a jar of energy. It is always in some form like a wave, or the sound of waves as they hit the shore.
The world is not completely chaotic and random, freedom does not mean we explode in a state of chaos and randomness, it just means that the energy right Now can take any form. The problem we have is that we think in terms of the forms, not the energy. We want to be "rich", we think we are "useless", we think we will "die": these are just the containers or the forms and we struggle to fill those containers. But its the wrong way around. WE ARE UNDEFINED, and even if we find ourselves in a bottle of "rich" or "dead" we are still UNDEFINED. But usually we struggle with these containers and we either think we are in the wrong one, or don't want to leave one. Not understanding that we are undefinable we get stuck and controlled by containers. When someone hates you, it has nothing to do with you, you are undefined, but that container of hate might become a hazard if we get stuck in it. Just let the wave move on.
This is not to say that we can just breeze through life without a care for anyone or anything and just avoid containers. Waves do ripple water, our self takes on forms, it is just that we are not those forms and change is certain. We cannot really get stuck, although we try to. That is suffering.
With a correct understanding we start to make the right choices. We don't behave as though we are stuck in a bottle, or trying to get into another, we realise we are undefinable and being outside the bottles is the right place to be, its the original place. Richard Rohr says this well with his "bubbles." In fact historically it was probably reading him recently that started this new path for me.
When we are happy outside the bottles, then we are more than "The Ship of Theseus" and the wood can be many thing other than just a ship that carried Theseus, then we know freedom. Indeed the multiple possibilities of that wood are its freedom. It doesn't have the remain in the bottle of the "Ship of Theseus" indeed it can't.
A Buddhist story tells of a pilgrimage to see a Buddha set high on a mountain. The weather changed and the group of pilgrims are plunged into driving sleet and freezing weather. Too far to turn back the monk leading them pushes on to the statue. When they arrive the monk breaks off the huge arms of the wooden statue and starts to make a fire. The pilgrims are disgusted that he is defacing a Buddha. He simply replies that it is not a Buddha it is a fire. So it is with containers. Stuck with the containers we don't see the infinite possibility that the undefined offers us every moment.
I believe right now that this is what Jesus was teaching us. On the Cross he beat death by refusing to defend "himself", and refusing to hold vengeance for his oppressors. He forgave, and he died as a no body. He did not try to be someone. Since his death he has become "Someone" very big, but this is the opposite of the point of a random person born in a stable. The wave that has since become the legend of Jesus at the time moved on effortlessly. Likewise the wave started effortlessly. Altho the moment it became visible was his baptism by John the Baptist when the Holy Ghost entered his body. But this is only metaphorical in this interpretation. Jesus began his journey like a wave: nothing entered and nothing left; yet there was a wave. So in fact the virgin birth story of Cbristmas is a story that attempts to say that no seed was planted in Mary by man. Jesus had no seed, he had no mortal origins, and that lack of a seed accompanies him through to his death where no seed was lost. Without seed, no one was born and no one died. This is how it is for us all, but without following his example we believe in ourselves not God and we believe there is a seed, a soul, a self within us, planted by the Devil to make us rebel against God who says we are free and not bound to this world. God says we are free; we have no seed; we abide always in Heaven from before we are born until after we die.
Merry Xmas.
