Oh what tangled webs we weave, not only when we practice to deceive, but when we try to understand human behavior encumbered by centuries of tangled thinking. Chip Brown gets into a real bramble thicket when he tries to unravel the involvement of a long-time Zen practitioner and his psychoanalyst (in this New York Times article,) and unfortunately doesn’t have the cutting edge of science to hack his way out of it.
Zen Buddhism, according to Chip’s sources, proclaims that the self is “the arch delusion… a malignant growth which is to be surgically removed,” and I would agree, given a particularly narrow definition of “self.”
But Zen comes in a variety of flavors, and the self is not always so limited or regarded with such disdain. Dogen, a famous Japanese Zen guy, famously said, “To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things of the universe.”
The self as an independent initiator of action is an illusion, and studying our own experiences will reveal that. With that illusion out of the way, we can see the self as the accumulated history of a particular human being—all the memories of its interaction with the universe. The universe is the author of who I am, and who everyone else is, and no one is in charge of any of it; no one is to blame. Actions still exist, and they still have consequences, as the Buddha said, but they arise from previous actions going back to the big bang, rather than from some out-of-the-blue act of a freely willing self.
The former Zen monk that Chip writes about was abused and abandoned as a child, and his pursuit of Zen was an unsuccessful attempt to deal with that abuse and its consequences. His narrow experience of Zen had brought him to a feeling of love for an abstract idea of “universal life,” but had given him no positive feeling for the particularity of individual lives, including his own.
By the end of the piece, his experience with his Zen-sympathizing psychoanalyst had brought him to the realization that what he wanted was to love the life he had been given.
“What he felt was joy. Not the unbordered joy of enlightenment, but the vernal joy that comes after the wintry work of mourning: the joy of a man with a life of his own.”
I’m glad the guy has found some joy, but what has he been mourning? And what does it mean to have “a life of his own”? It sounds like he’s still entangled in the vines of psychoanalysis.
On occasion I have mourned the life I’ve had: if only my parents had been rich and educated; if only I had been born in the urban North instead of the rural South; if only I had never smoked pot; if only I hadn’t sold that cottage in San Francisco, etc., etc. If any of those things had happened, “I” wouldn’t be here: I would be someone else, and given the peculiarities of life, I might be miserable or dead instead of happy and alive. It is impossible to imagine who I might have been, even if only one tiny circumstance had been different—it’s called chaos theory. Mourning the past is the same as wanting to be an unpredictably different person now—like playing Russian roulette with your personality.
So “mourning” results from a lack of understanding of the realities of existence: physics, chemistry, evolution, etc. If our personal history has given us any reverence for truth, then once the ignorance underlying mourning is dispelled, it tends to dissipate from the weight of its own non-sense.
As for having a life of one’s own, how could you have the life of someone else? Your practical life is what you remember of the things you’ve been exposed to. (It’s also possible to have an experience in the “present” without any connection to memory, but while that can be fun and interesting, it isn’t practical and won’t pay the bills.)
My life simply is what it is, and any unpleasant emotional reaction to that is the result of ignorance of what is possible. I might as well be sad about gravity as sad about my life.
Emotions are the brain’s reaction to reality as it has learned to perceive it. There are some inherited reflexes, but most emotions are the result of acquired ideas of what is desirable and what is threatening. When those ideas are based on falsehoods or limited perspective, knowledge of the truth can alter them. The brain’s perception of reality changes with every new understanding and experience, and emotions will tag along, sooner or later.
So don’t mourn the past; it’s what got you here. What you do now will become your recent past, and will take you to a different and possibly happier present.
Where I Live
