I mentioned in my previous blog the "oneness" with all other people that I sometimes experience and believe to be our true nature. I did not mention that there is a consequence, a result, of this, or how this awareness may have come about in my life. I'll speak of the latter first. Up until 1982, I had pretty much been able to compartmentalize my life, keeping it more or less quite separate from those of others, pursuing my own challenges and goals, though also being able to maintain a marriage relationship. I had been able to "live in my own little world" and also in society well enough. Then my daughter was born with profound autism which manifested a few weeks after her seemingly "normal" birth. This had the effect of breaking down the walls I had constructed around myself over time to keep me "safe from the world" by holding it at "arm's length" away from myself. To use another term, when I realized that my daughter would never be able to "have her own life" (as I saw it then) and would always be "trapped" within herself (as I believed then), my "heart broke." I believe that this is what happens with all parents whose children have "profound disabilities," whether or not they acknowledge it. However, something else happened: the psychic "walls" that had protected me from the painful invasiveness of the world, of reality, came crumbling down. I found that I "felt" other people on a very deep level within myself, as if they were, in fact, me. I "become one" with everyone else; I was no longer able to compartmentalize myself as I had. I had compassion and understanding actively developing within myself.
But such compassion and understanding, such a sense of oneness with others, also has its natural consequences. Schopenaur, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, coined the word weltschmerz, meaning "sorrow or pain of the world," which he said he could feel in his own cells, which came with his own sense of "oneness with others." If one has this sense and experience of merging with the other, you have no choice but of knowing what they are feeling, and also of feeling it within yourself. I believe that this pain and sorrow is the human condition itself, that is, that it arises simply from being born in a physical body. Even as a young child I felt that it was not "natural" for me to be in this body and that I belonged in and came from a place not physical at all. Being in a body has always seemed awkward and inappropriate on some deep level. As I got older and read various "stories" or myths or cosmologies, I understood more on why I felt as I did: I was a non-physical "spirit" who had been "born" into a body, into the material world. I was not as I "should" be; I was a "stranger in a strange land." I was very slowly making my way back, through being born into physical bodies in life after life, to my "original, pure nature." And this is true of everyone, regardless of their beliefs about it. I saw its correspondences in the natural world; everything is regenerated and evolving. Thus, it is "natural" for human beings to feel that "something is missing" or that they are not as they are meant to be; they do not feel "whole" because they are not in their "true form," but rather in a material body that is destined to deteriorate and die. And they must learn to dis-identify with their material, worldly existence and to identify with their non-material, transcendent being. Interestingly, this was an essential teaching of Roman Catholicism, though, when I was a child, it also taught that "the flesh" was a "temptation" in its pleasures, including the Gnostic notion that it was "evil" to "give in to carnal desires." What I see now is that the "Roman" part of Catholicism actually loves the body and sees it as "good", as God's good creation, as it were (which is more or less reflected in Aquinas), whereas the Gnostic part of Catholicism (as reflected in Augustine, Paul, and later, in Calvinism) in which the body and all creation is seen as "false" and "illusory" (much like the "maya" of Hinduism). It's not that sex is "evil," rather, it's that to identify with the body is simply false, for the body, by its very nature, dies, and if we are identified with it upon death, rather than with the non-physical "spiritual" aspect of ourselves, in which we find ourselves upon death, we have what amounts to a rather hellish problem that demands that we purge ourselves of our false identity with the transitory physical existence. Practically-speaking, if one is planning to climb a mountain, one prepares in so many ways, from packing oxygen to wearing warm clothing. When leaving the body at death, one prepares for the non-physical existence. I am being overly simplistic here in order to clearly convey the basic idea.
Sometimes I "go off in tangents" as they present themselves to me, and perhaps never return to the "original point." Such is life. When I walk in the redwood forest, I have sometimes found myself following deer trails far off the main path. Must I have a "deer mind" to be able to do this? No. However, it just may be that at a certain moment I am "possessed" by a "deer mind" and consequently compelled to follow the deer trail. It is also perhaps the curiosity of the hunter (though I've never hunted and have no desire to kill animals) that leads me. When I was much younger I purposely followed deer trails, almost as a tracker, and surprised many a grazing deer herd, some of which fled and some of which, apparently not seeing me as a threat, kept grazing as if I were not there. A good part of my reason for being in nature is to "not be there" in that way. It relates also to "not leaving a carbon footprint." Such "invisibility" amounts to the Hindu virtue of ahimsa ("harmlessness").
But such compassion and understanding, such a sense of oneness with others, also has its natural consequences. Schopenaur, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, coined the word weltschmerz, meaning "sorrow or pain of the world," which he said he could feel in his own cells, which came with his own sense of "oneness with others." If one has this sense and experience of merging with the other, you have no choice but of knowing what they are feeling, and also of feeling it within yourself. I believe that this pain and sorrow is the human condition itself, that is, that it arises simply from being born in a physical body. Even as a young child I felt that it was not "natural" for me to be in this body and that I belonged in and came from a place not physical at all. Being in a body has always seemed awkward and inappropriate on some deep level. As I got older and read various "stories" or myths or cosmologies, I understood more on why I felt as I did: I was a non-physical "spirit" who had been "born" into a body, into the material world. I was not as I "should" be; I was a "stranger in a strange land." I was very slowly making my way back, through being born into physical bodies in life after life, to my "original, pure nature." And this is true of everyone, regardless of their beliefs about it. I saw its correspondences in the natural world; everything is regenerated and evolving. Thus, it is "natural" for human beings to feel that "something is missing" or that they are not as they are meant to be; they do not feel "whole" because they are not in their "true form," but rather in a material body that is destined to deteriorate and die. And they must learn to dis-identify with their material, worldly existence and to identify with their non-material, transcendent being. Interestingly, this was an essential teaching of Roman Catholicism, though, when I was a child, it also taught that "the flesh" was a "temptation" in its pleasures, including the Gnostic notion that it was "evil" to "give in to carnal desires." What I see now is that the "Roman" part of Catholicism actually loves the body and sees it as "good", as God's good creation, as it were (which is more or less reflected in Aquinas), whereas the Gnostic part of Catholicism (as reflected in Augustine, Paul, and later, in Calvinism) in which the body and all creation is seen as "false" and "illusory" (much like the "maya" of Hinduism). It's not that sex is "evil," rather, it's that to identify with the body is simply false, for the body, by its very nature, dies, and if we are identified with it upon death, rather than with the non-physical "spiritual" aspect of ourselves, in which we find ourselves upon death, we have what amounts to a rather hellish problem that demands that we purge ourselves of our false identity with the transitory physical existence. Practically-speaking, if one is planning to climb a mountain, one prepares in so many ways, from packing oxygen to wearing warm clothing. When leaving the body at death, one prepares for the non-physical existence. I am being overly simplistic here in order to clearly convey the basic idea.
Sometimes I "go off in tangents" as they present themselves to me, and perhaps never return to the "original point." Such is life. When I walk in the redwood forest, I have sometimes found myself following deer trails far off the main path. Must I have a "deer mind" to be able to do this? No. However, it just may be that at a certain moment I am "possessed" by a "deer mind" and consequently compelled to follow the deer trail. It is also perhaps the curiosity of the hunter (though I've never hunted and have no desire to kill animals) that leads me. When I was much younger I purposely followed deer trails, almost as a tracker, and surprised many a grazing deer herd, some of which fled and some of which, apparently not seeing me as a threat, kept grazing as if I were not there. A good part of my reason for being in nature is to "not be there" in that way. It relates also to "not leaving a carbon footprint." Such "invisibility" amounts to the Hindu virtue of ahimsa ("harmlessness").
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