The Arrow vs. the Circle - The Shape of the World

 One of the most enduring ideas I learned in college is that not everyone thinks like I do. 

It's true. And in all likelihood, they don't think like you do, either. This goes way past contemporary journalistic and talk show fodder about a divided country or prevailing politics. It goes all the way down to the how we think the world is made and the way it works beyond physics and biochemistry. It's about the nature of living things and, adjunctly, what we can expect or not expect in the process of living. Overall, there are two basic ideologies that not only dictate how we live, but they also dictate how we think.

The Arrow

The first way of looking at the world is as a straight line. Having a specific beginning and a specific ending, this view is most common in Western cultures (eg: ours) and most often coupled with a world governed by duality. That is, this world knows two opposing forces, each one working against the other to cause tension in our everyday lives. Right and wrong, good and evil, constantly at war with each other to the point that  determining one from the other and choosing rightly so as to live as decent a life as we can muster occupies a great deal of our time. 

In this scheme, whatever we consider bad is to be avoided at almost all costs. Poverty, illness, danger. We assume that it's possible to live a life with less bad and more good, not only through what we do ourselves, but overall  - as a group or society - and part of our job as humans is to tip the balance toward the good whenever we have a chance. Whether or not we think that goodness will alter a fate that extends beyond our physical life or not, this trend toward goodness is something to be desired and if our beliefs tend in the direction of a heaven, well then, there is an opportunity for all goodness to be realized.

The Circle 

Known as yin-yang, this is an Eastern or Asian view of the world in which all things in the universe consist of complementary, opposing forces in constant flux. These forces are unavoidable and interdependent, that is, one cannot exist without the other so that good and evil operate together necessarily and are not usually associated with  the same intensity of value judgement as they do in the Arrow model. 

This model also does not have any definite beginning or end. There is no Garden of Eden here, no Second Coming. The cycle, samsara, simply repeats until the individual gradually navigates their way into perfect communion with an awareness free from all suffering. That communion, that place of liberation, is called Nirvana and is reached in much the same way as is heaven: ethical living, mindfulness, and the wisdom gained by them. What this view does avoid is the struggle to right wrongs since what we might often call wrongs are a necessary and functional part of living that we have to learn to navigate to get where we want to go. 

Not the Same, But Not Completely Different

We're pretty much born into one of these worldviews. It's pretty hard for someone born in the U.S., like me, to think about things the way a Buddhist or a Taoist would. Most of us grew up balancing the voices between the bickering angel on our right shoulder and the nasty little devil on our left. The idea that those two rascals don't exist, that my ideas of good and evil are pretty much irrelevant, that there is no heaven or hell, well, that's a reach. But it also makes sense in a way because we know from experience that suffering can hone us to sharpness and difficulty can breed a kind of wisdom that ease never does. That they should need each other to make us the best we can be may not be so crazy after all. 

As for me, I like the idea of working to make this world a better place but at the same time the thought of floating off into an egoless Nirvana where good and evil don't matter anymore sounds pretty appealing, too. Maybe like you, I don't exactly know what will happen when I shrug off my physical body, but until then, Donkey has some good advice:

Images: ergo blog, jade dragon school

No Clocks in Eden

 

Sommarøy, a small Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway, decided in 2019 to get rid of all of its clocks. Anyone traveling there will find a land whose summer sun shines all day long and whose 300+ inhabitants are free to swim Caribbean blue waters or laze on sand beaches in the middle of the night because, well, nobody there cares what time it is. 

Just Imagine

Look around. Right now. How many devices do you use to tell you the time? I have two in the room I'm in and another in the room next door. I look at them constantly, even when the time doesn't matter. Like now. It's a kind of reflex, a way of grounding myself. If I know the time, I've got a handle on the world. 

But that's not true.

Of all of the constructs of man, time is one of the most insidious. We're either early or behind. We're constantly being measured by it. We worry about how much time something takes, or whether we have time to do this or that. We hurry through nearly everything to make sure we can fit it all in. If we didn't care about time, we would never have to be busy in the same way. We wouldn't constantly be rushing past people or things of ordinary beauty. We might finally be able to stop and SEE.

Time and the Spirit

It's not just the clock that's the problem. The clock is just a natural extension of the idea of time in the macro. It's looking at life in terms of what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. It's the concepts of past and future. That's time, too. 

We often talk about the importance of living in the NOW, being present for life's events as they occur as if that's all we have because, well, it IS all we have. The concept of time, the idea that we can in some way hold on to or influence what has already happened or what has not yet happened hogties our life. It is the origin of both regret and fear. Without time, we wouldn't give yesterday or tomorrow a second thought and they don't deserve it.

Time and Eternity

God, who made us, lives beyond time. Everything in His consciousness is happening right now, to everyone everywhere. Every person who lived, every person who will ever live, you and me, are equally present to Him every second. Time, the hours of it and the passage of it, are an entirely human concept and the more we tie ourselves to the idea that time is real (it isn't), the farther we put ourselves away from God. 

Do you really think God put clocks in Eden? Of course He didn't. Nobody needed them. Those walks He took with Adam in the cool of the day had no limit, no recorded beginning or end. Their union was without any kind of limit, time or otherwise. 

Hmmm...  I stopped setting my alarm clock about 40 years ago, but darn. Looks like I didn't go far enough. Those folks on Sommarøy might be on to something. 

Image: Islands

Suffering, Self, and What to Do With Them

 

Who was the Buddha?

The person we know as the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, summed up his teaching in a simple sentence: "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering". I doubt there is anyone to whom that doesn't sound good. No one wants to suffer and the Buddha maintained that there was a way out of it, a way out of Samsara, the unending cycle of suffering that humans endure. This is what he taught, and this only. 

The way to do that, he said, was to undo our humanity completely, to dismantle all the pieces that make us discrete human beings, to define all the parts of our actions, thoughts, and personality that comprise our Self and to jettison them into the aether, leaving spirit unencumbered and absorbed into the stream that is life itself. There are no desires, no evils, no joys, no sorrows. We are completely and perfectly free forever. Nirvana. 

He said this was possible for anyone and his followers say he achieved such a state, but returned to teach others how to do it. He became bodhisattva, an enlightened being who delays entering nirvana out of compassion and helps all willing sentient beings to achieve awakening as well. He became a teacher and is said to have passed down (verbally - Gautama never wrote anything down) the way to do what he did and many have followed him. 

Sounds Pretty Good to Me

I can't blame them. Who doesn't want to leave suffering by the wayside and live in perfect happiness? Pretty much everything we do in life is geared toward making either ourselves (primarily ourselves, if we're honest) or someone else happy. It rarely works the way we think it does, of course, because generally what we think will make us happy is more life, not less. More love, more money, more health, more ease...more, more, more...and what it usually gets us is more complications and often more trouble. 

It's possible that the Buddha was on to something by telling us we are better off with less of ourselves rather than more. Desire is thrilling and can make us feel ecstatic and alive but it is not always our friend, often leading to bad decisions, waste, and misery. I wonder, however, whether he took his idea of achieving happiness a few steps too far and for those who think their humanity is not a misshapen impediment, it might be worth looking at an alternative.

Die to Self

The Buddha wasn't the only one who thought we needed to rid ourselves of too much Self, but it's a matter of degree. Jesus did it, too. But Jesus' dying always carried with it a resurrection. In other words, Buddha undressed us and escorted us into a different kind of existence stripped of flesh, bone, blood, and intellect, but Jesus did something different. Jesus changed the clothes of humanity. He taught a way to remove the cloak of pride and selfishness and destructive desire and put on a new one, removing a forbidding, fortified heart of stone and replacing it with a vulnerable heart of flesh, open to hurt and death but somehow enlarged by them. 

In short, Jesus taught us how to remain human, suffer constructively, and still find happiness. 

How to Be Human and Happy

There are some Christian sects that treat our bodies like a red-headed stepchild, of course, who say that we are unavoidably and irredeemably corrupt by physical nature, and in that, they have philosophical agreement with the Buddha. But Jesus was a man. A man who never apologized for being a man or tried to undo his humanity. A man who lived fully and died fully, too. A man who knew that complete divorce from suffering was not the way we were meant to live and demonstrated it by suffering with intent right before our eyes. 

Rather than undoing his humanity, He detached his humanity and his suffering from their catastrophic nonessentials, the desires and decisions that augment our sense of self but lead to nothing but the loss of the love, peace, and happiness we think we're working toward. He did leave a couple of pretty plain roadmaps for how to do this: his own life and the Sermon on the Mount. The sermon gives practical examples of which desires we should keep and which we should work to abandon. It tells us what we will look like while this is being accomplished - we will look like Jesus. 

I admit I'm tempted to say Duh here because that is his aim all along - to make us like him. He said to "follow me" more than 20 recorded times and in that, please note, that He did not live any nirvana. He suffered and in that, I deduce that, even when we are following and doing as much of the right thing as we can muster, we will suffer too. It's part of the deal. It's part of life. It forms us. It confirms our humanity, and in case you haven't noticed, we are, at least for now, all human.

The Alternatives

It turns out that we can have our cake and eat it, too. Sort of. We have a Self and do not need to kick it to the curb to know joy and peace. With that Self and the desires that it brings, however, we will also suffer. That's the deal. It's either that or the way of the Buddha: immolation of the Self and absorption into a blessedly sense-free Nirvana. 

There is a kind of happiness in either path.

I came so that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.-John 10:10

image: owlcation