THE TRANSFORMATION OF LIFE
THE WHITE MAN FANCIES HIMSELF AS A PRACTICAL person who wants to “get results.” He is impatient with theory, and with any discussion which does not immediately get down to concrete applications. This is why the behavior of Western civilization might be described, in general, as “Much Ado About Nothing.” The proper meaning of “theory” is not idle speculation but vision, and it was rightly said that “where there is no vision the people perish.
But vision in this sense does not mean dreams and ideals for the future. It means understanding of life as it is, of what we are, and what we are doing. Without such understanding it is simply ridiculous to talk of being practical and getting results. It is like walking busily in a fog: you just go round and round. You do not know where you are going, nor what results you really want.
To minds that think in this way, what we have discussed so far may seem too theoretical. These ideas are all very well, but do they work? Yet I must ask, “What do you mean by work?” The usual “working test” of a philosophy is whether it makes people better and happier, whether it results in peace, cooperation, and prosperity. Yet this is a meaningless criterion without much “theoretical” understanding. What do you mean by happiness? What are “better” people better for? About what will you co-operate? What will you do with peace and prosperity?
The answer to these questions depends entirely on what we are and what we actually want now. If, for example, we want at the same time both peace and isolation, brotherhood and security for “I,” happiness and permanence, our wants are contradictory. Their results, however practical we may be about getting them, will be further contradictions. It is the old story of wanting to have your cake and eat it—to which the only possible conclusion is that you put it in your stomach and keep it there until you have violent indigestion.
If we must be nationalists and have a sovereign state, we cannot also expect to have world peace. If we want to get everything at the lowest possible cost, we cannot expect to get the best possible quality, the balance between the two being mediocrity. If we make it an ideal to be morally superior, we cannot at the same time avoid self-righteousness. If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.
When we have made up our minds as to what we do want, there remain indeed many practical and technical problems. But there is no point at all in discussing these until we have made up our minds. There is, in turn, no possibility of making up our minds so long as they are split in two, so long as “I” am one thing and “experience” another. If the mind is the directive force behind action, the mind and its vision of life must be healed before action can be anything but conflict.
Something must therefore be said about the healed vision of life which comes with full awareness, for it involves a deep transformation of our view of the world. As well as words can describe it, this transformation consists in knowing and feeling that the world is an organic unity.
In the ordinary way, we “know” this as a matter of information but do not feel it to be true. Certainly most people feel separate from everything that surrounds them. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone. I can feel what is going on inside my own body, but I can only guess what is going on in others. My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.
Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.
For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a house across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my foot or an idea in my brain. In another sense, I am also what I do not know. I am not aware of my own brain as a brain. In just the same way, I am not aware of the house across the street as a thing apart from my sensation of it. I know my brain as thoughts and feelings, and I know the house as sensations. In the same way and sense that I do not know my own brain, or the house as a thing-initself, I do not know the private thoughts in your brain.
But my brain, which is also I, your brain and the thoughts within it, as well as the house across the street, are all forms of an inextricably interwoven process called the real world. Conscious or unconscious of it as I may be, it is all I in the sense that the sun, the air, and human society are just as vital to me as my brain or my lungs. If, then, this brain is my brain—unaware of it as I am—the sun is my sun, the air my air, and society my society.
Certainly I cannot command the sun to be egg-shaped, nor force your brain to think differently. I cannot see the inside of the sun, nor can I share your private feelings. Yet neither can I change the shape or structure of my own brain, nor have a sensation of it as a contraption like a cauliflower. But if my brain is nonetheless I, the sun is I, the air is I, and society, of which you are a member, is also I—for all these things are just as essential to my existence as my brain.
That there is a sun apart from my sensation of it is an inference. The fact that I have a brain, though I cannot see it, is likewise an inference. We know about these things only in theory, and not by immediate experience. But this “external” world of theoretical objects is, apparently, just as much a unity as the “internal” world of experience. From experience I infer that it exists. And because experience is a unity—I am my sensations—I must likewise infer that this theoretical universe is a unity, that my body and the world form a single process.
Now there have been many theories about the unity of the universe. But they have not delivered human beings from the isolation of egotism, from conflict, and from the fear of life, because there is a world of difference between an inference and a feeling. You can reason that the universe is a unity without feeling it to be so. You can establish the theory that your body is a movement in an unbroken process which includes all suns and stars, and yet continue to feel separate and lonely. For the feeling will not correspond to the theory until you have also discovered the unity of inner experience. Despite all theories, you will feel that you are isolated from life so long as you are divided within.
But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no “you” apart from what you sense, feel, and know. This is why the mystics and many of the poets give frequent utterance to the feeling that they are “one with the All,” or “united with God,” or, as Sir Edwin Arnold expressed it—
Foregoing self, the universe grows I.
Sometimes, indeed, this feeling is purely sentimental, the poet being “one with Nature” just so long as she is on her best behavior.
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a ɻeshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the soul can ɻee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
This rural rapture from Byron is quite beside the point. He has only come to terms with nature to the extent that he has befriended his own human nature. The fly likes the sweetness of the honey, but not its stickiness, which makes him
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Classed among creatures.
The sentimentalist does not look into the depths of nature and see
Sluggish existences grazing there, suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom:…
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes—sight in those ocean depths— breathing that thick breathing air.
Man has to discover that everything which he beholds in nature— the clammy foreign-feeling world of the ocean’s depths, the wastes of ice, the reptiles of the swamp, the spiders and scorpions, the deserts of lifeless planets—has its counterpart within himself. He is not, then, at one with himself until he realizes that this “under side” of nature and the feelings of horror which it gives him are also “I.
For all the qualities which we admire or loathe in the world around us are reflections from within—though from a within that is also a beyond, unconscious, vast, unknown. Our feelings about the crawling world of the wasps’ nest and the snake pit are feelings about hidden aspects of our own bodies and brains, and of all their potentialities for unfamiliar creeps and shivers, for unsightly diseases, and unimaginable pains.
I do not know whether it is true, but it is said that some of the great sages and “holy men” have an apparently supernatural power over beasts and reptiles which are always dangerous to ordinary mortals. If this is true, it is certainly because they are able to live at peace with the “beasts and reptiles” in themselves. They need not call the wild elephant Behemoth or the sea-monster Leviathan; they address them familiarly as “Long-Nose” and “Slimy.”
The sense of unity with The "All" is not that clear, a nebulous state of mind, a sort of trance, In which all form and distinction is abolished, As if man and the universe merged into a luminous mist of pale mauve. Just as the process and form, energy and matter, Myself and experience, are names for, and ways of looking at, the same thing - so one and things, unity and multiplicity is, Identity and difference, are not mutually exclusive opposites: They are each other, much as the body is its various organs, To discover that the things are the one, And that the one is the, is to realize that both are words and noises representing what is at once obvious to sense and feeling, And the an enigma to logic and description.
A young man in search of spiritual wisdom put himself under the instruction of a celebrated holy man. The sage made him his personal attendant, and after some months the young man complained that thus far he had received no instruction. “What do you mean!” exclaimed the holy man. “When you brought me my rice, didn’t I eat it? When you brought me my tea, didn’t I drink it? When you made salutations to me, didn’t I return them? When have I ever neglected to give you instruction?” “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said the young man, totally mystified. “When you want to see into it,” answered the sage, “see into it directly. When you begin to think about it, it is altogether missed.”
Plucking chrysanthemums along the East fence; Gazing in silence at the southern hills; The birds flying home in pairs
Through the soft mountain air of dusk— In these things there is a deep meaning, But when we are about to express it, We suddenly forget the words.
The meaning is not the contemplative, twilight, and, perhaps, superficially idyllic atmosphere beloved of Chinese poets. This is already expressed, and the poet does not gild the lily. He will not, like so many Western poets, turn philosopher and say that he is “one with” the flowers, the fence, the hills, and the birds. This, too, is gilding the lily, or, in his own Oriental idiom, “putting legs on a snake.” For when you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, “I am all this.” There is simply “all this.”
The feeling that we stand face-to-face with the world, cut off and set apart, has the greatest influence on thought and action. Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so ad inɹnitum. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart. To “know” reality you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it, and feel it.
Speculative philosophy, as we know it in the West, is almost entirely a symptom of the divided mind, of man trying to stand outside himself and his experience in order to verbalize and deɹne it. It is a vicious circle, like everything else which the divided mind attempts.
On the other hand, the realization that the mind is actually undivided must have a corresponding and equally far-reaching influence on thought and action. As the philosopher tries to stand outside himself and his thought, so, as we have seen, the ordinary man tries to stand outside himself and his emotions and sensations, his feelings and desires. The result is a fantastic confusion and misdirection of conduct which discovery of the mind’s unity must bring to an end.
So long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom. The more the fly struggles to get out of the honey, the faster he is stuck. Under the pressure of so much strain and futility, it is no wonder at all that men seek release in violence and sensationalism, and in the reckless exploitation of their bodies, their appetites, the material world, and their fellow men. What this must add to the necessary and unavoidable pains of existence is incalculable.
But the undivided mind is free from this tension of trying always to stand outside oneself and to be elsewhere than here and now. Each moment is lived completely, and there is thus a sense of fulfillment and completeness. The divided mind comes to the dinner table and pecks at one dish after another, rushing on without digesting anything to find one better than the last. It finds nothing good, because there is nothing which it really tastes.
When, on the other hand, you realize that you live in, that indeed you are this moment now, and no other, that apart from this there is no past and no future, you must relax and taste to the full, whether it be pleasure or pain. At once it becomes obvious why this universe exists, why conscious beings have been produced, why sensitive organs, why space, time, and change. The whole problem of justifying nature, of trying to make life mean something in terms of its future, disappears utterly. Obviously, it all exists for this moment. It is a dance, and when you are dancing you are not intent on getting somewhere. You go round and round, but not under the illusion that you are pursuing something, or fleeing from the jaws of hell.
How long have the planets been circling the sun? Are they getting anywhere, and do they go faster and faster in order to arrive? How often has the spring returned to the earth? Does it come faster and fancier every year, to be sure to be better than last spring, and to hurry on its way to the spring that shall out-spring all springs?
The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music, also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales. It might, however, be observed in passing that the music specially characteristic of our culture is progressive in some respects, and does at times seem to be decidedly on its way to a future climax. But when it gets there, it does not know what to do with itself. Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner were particularly guilty of working up to colossal climaxes and conclusions, and then blasting away at the same chord over and over again, ruining the moment by being reluctant to leave it.
When each moment becomes an expectation life is deprived of fulfillment, and death is dreaded for it seems that here expectation must come to an end. While there is life there is hope—and if one lives on hope, death is indeed the end. But to the undivided mind, death is another moment, complete like every moment, and cannot yield its secret unless lived to the full—
And I laid me down with a will.
Death is the epitome of the truth that in each moment we are thrust into the unknown. Here all clinging to security is compelled to cease, and wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned, life is renewed. Death is the unknown in which all of us lived before birth.
Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that “I” cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting it go he finds it.
As long as you do not know how to die and come to life
again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.
