WHAT HAPPENS IN OUR LIVES

When I was in high school, I was acquainted with many students in my high school. I had a few friends but most I just said “hello” to now and then. A good number of students had graduated with me from grade school, in fact probably most. But I had few that I was close to, much less “knew.” Part of that was because such was my nature. I could be funny and charming but I didn’t tend to “let people in,” as it were. I had little confidence in myself and conversed with a few friends but not many others. I actually preferred being along—at least up the point, maybe 16, when I was found and claimed by a beautiful girl and then fell in love, which changed everything as she became my friend, my lover, and we had our incredible adventures for the next couple of years. Prior to that, depending on the season, the boys in my neighborhood would either play baseball or football in my backyard, while I would be up in my room diligently working on my stamp collection, with them all yelling in the background. I had absolutely no inclination to join them.

          My own inclination is to “seek greater context” for my life and myself. This has been my lifelong quest. I was presented with Catholicism as that context and I did learn many important lessons, such as the importance and reality of “mystery,” of “not knowing,” but I ultimately “threw the baby out with the bathwater” and went on my own personal “search for understanding” rather than accepting what I had been trained to accept. I am philosophical by nature and also seek peace and solitude actively every day. I look at what happens in life and do what I can to incorporate it into my own reality which I have created from whatever I have learned of life and my own experience of learning it. “It” is always a work in process. I don’t claim it to be necessarily “right” but it is what I have to work with; I am what I have to work with. I have no choice but to be with myself even as I am. So the “philosophizing” part is much like perpetually adding pieces to the unending jigsaw puzzle that I am and that will never be finished, not even after I die.

          But there is another part: the memories of my life, the stories of my life. Sometimes these take great precedence over the philosophizing, over the putting it all together so that it might make some kind of sense. The memories, the stories have their place. They appear to be the life and color and sound and feeling in each of the myriad pieces of the endless jigsaw puzzle that comprises me and my life. And they often rise to the surface of my consciousness, probably embellished into much more than they actually were, but in retrospect, in memory, we add to the story for effect and for meaning, for our lives must have meaning to us. We are always to be forgiven for such expansion of soul and spirit and heart. And we can no longer tell the difference anyway between “the fact” in itself and how the event impacted us and registered itself in our consciousness. In terms of our memories, are there really even any “facts,” clean cut and certain? We remember what we saw, what we heard, what we felt emotionally or physically, what we thought? All of it was fed to us through our own senses, our own experience. No body cams then or there. Perhaps reports and point of view from others, but probably not. We have no choice but to have faith in our memories, even as we have no choice but to have faith in ourselves, flawed as we may be. No one else is going to tell our stories to ourselves. We must be able to do that for ourselves. We know ourselves best, which is to also say that some of us don’t know ourselves at all. To know yourself is the primary goal of being human if you subscribe to the classic humanism of Socrates or even if you are unaware of that. To me, that equates with “loving God.”

          To return to all these fellow students at my high school and before that, they are now a part of my being, my life, my story, myself. I never anticipated at the time that they would be so stored within my mind and available for instant recall—but they are. I can even hear their adolescent voices in my memory. Last night I dreamed that I was talking to some of the girls with whom I was only slightly acquainted. We are still physically of the time but are now speaking with a wisdom of age, and are thus able to convey a warmth and a touch that would have probably not been possible during our youth. People do not lose their beauty. It may seem to retreat or be covered over but it can rise to the surface to meet itself in others. We do carry each other within ourselves, almost as though they were ourselves. When they die, they do not leave us, but even become more a part of ourselves, perhaps since they can no longer carry themselves as they did. But it never a burden to us to contain others in this way, for they somehow enhance our being with themselves. Of course, the sweet ones are easier to include and the sour ones a bit difficult perhaps, but they all bring something to us that is needed in some way. Perhaps this is the all-encompassing circle and experience of love, or simply of being. Perhaps there is no difference between the two. 

WHO ARE WE? WHAT ARE WE? WHY ARE WE?

I have asked these kinds of questions, really, for most of my life? I know at least that some others do, though many do not. Is it a luxury to ask such questions, only for those who are not burdened by the responsibilities of life? The philosophes? I personally believe that some naturally harbor such questions, regardless of class or burdens of life. In fact it may be those most burdened by the responsibilities of life that are most driven to the point of having to ask such questions. I initially wondered why I phrase it collectively, that is, as “we.” Why not “I”? Because it is “we” who are all in this human situation of living and not just “me.” “We” each have “our” life and are responsible for ourselves, yes, but we are each faced with pretty much the same or at least very similar dilemmas of existence. Though we are certainly not the same and are unique to ourselves, we share what it is to be human, though even that varies according to culture and custom.

As we get older and find ourselves unable to find answers within ourselves, many “turn to God.” I tried this when I was much younger when my daughter with autism was born. I realized the powerlessness of praying to a powerless god bolstered by tradition and corporate religion of fear and guilt, and this tradition also taught the presence of “divine love.” But I saw that such divine love is already the state of existence in itself. It is that situation of all “being in the same boat,” of all of us being human together and realizing that we are here to love each other. This is a most necessary requirement and reality of existence though it is certainly not realized and is equally not dependent upon any divine entity. My own philosophic leaning is Stoic, which can translate into Zen Buddhism that holds that each of us is possessed of a “true nature” or “suchness of being” which is seen as our “ground of being” in which everything “is as it is.” Pretty inscrutable, yes, but, to me, better than pretending that life is different than it is by using “God” as a metaphorical crutch and the Devil as a “fall guy.” This is what it has come to, though it may not have begun as such before the corporate and doctrinal religion took over. I have also studied and participated in Daoist thought and practices, especially the Yijing (or I Ching) for many years, some of them as an I Ching “consultant,” in which I counseled people through the use of the oracular advice of the ancient Yijing, which precedes the Bible by perhaps 1500 years, and presents a literal system of dealing with the challenges of living in the world. I haven’t particularly put it to use for a few years due to its complexity, however, I have recently attained a book that delves further into the details and essences of Daoist thought and practice. The Daoists see the essence of existence as energy emanating from various greater sources of energy. I will not explain these three types of energy but suffice it to say that this approach ties in with Hindu and Theosophical thought and, I have to admit, explains the energetic basis of existence and all forms that I literally saw with my own eyes when I often ingested LSD over forty years ago. I suppose I just lost all credibility with you but I trust my experience and I remember exactly what I saw. 

So now the question of who we are or what we are opens immensely. It gets so big that we can no longer “wrap our minds around it.” For instance, the Daoists also teach that the stars in our universe that have exploded over the eons were reduced to dust floating through space in the universe, came into the earth’s atmosphere, fell to earth, and became part of the soil of the earth, of which our bodies are composed. Consequently, we are literally “made of star dust,” which I’ve heard before but never quite understood.

These various topics upon which I write are brought to the fore and are often opened up enough that they are not “completed” and remain open-ended. This is probably as it should be and most certainly as it is.

GOOD FORTUNE

I manage the walk down the stairs rather well on this day and sit down in my once comfortable chair in my office, which I suppose could be called my library since one wall is mostly covered by three bookshelves that just about reach the ceiling, and the other wall has two bookshelves that extend its whole length three feet high. This “library” continues into other rooms: one bookcase right outside my office, one double one in the living room, one in the dining room, one in the bedroom, six in the garage, as well as some piles of books on the desk outside my office. I am here in the morning to check my stocks and to see if they might be up enough to sell and also to check if there are stocks low enough to buy, while also considering their dividends and their inherent financial strength as other integral elements. Once I dreaded this but now I enjoy it. I try to read the market as best I can, though I have often majorly misread it by buying stocks too soon in a big correction. Now I follow my wife’s good conservative advice of taking small gains rather than waiting for larger ones. Statistically, stocks will rise four or five percent far more often than eight or nine percent. Now I takes gains and then reinvest if the stock is still rising. The stocks that are more stodgy or have fallen, I hold and take dividends from them, some for years, for they were bought badly and stupidly when I once followed the advice of so-called “expert investor” reports, like Kiplinger’s, though they did give me good “tips” regarding “intermediate” bond funds. Now I hold those I cannot sell and otherwise “swing trade” with the rest. In a rising or steady market, it can work if you are able to pick the right “bottom feeders,” as they are called (though they all too often can feed on us). And like I said, I enjoy the detail work now. I went from reading “spiritual” and philosophical books to actively trading stocks and reading history, including historical novels, and good novels in general. I enjoy the trading as I once enjoyed the details of stamp-collecting, or, let me say it, philately, as a child. And I read at least two books at a time: one upstairs with my “upstairs” glasses which I read next to my wife as she reads and one downstairs with my “downstairs” glasses which I read in the bathroom, otherwise called “the reading room.” Right now, Roman history downstairs and Goya and Daoist meditation techniques upstairs.

From my chair here in the office, a designer office chair that my ex-wife had discarded probably twenty years ago, I look out at what is now a forest I have grown in our tiny back yard. My view of the suburban neighbors’ houses is totally blocked by trees of all kinds: three Italian pine Christmas trees I planted, a large apple tree (now producing some incredible Granny Smith/Pippen apples), a tall red bushy New Zealand tree, a lilac-like tree, a magnolia tree, a tall birch, five or six live oak trees, and an assortment of other trees, including two tan oaks. The night-blooming jasmine that I planted now wends its way among the outside of two live oaks. In the 6x6 sunny section, there are grapes and tomatoes growing now. When I say “I have grown” this, I mean that I have planted some and tended to the growth of the others through pruning, tying, and wedging 4x4s against them to help straighten them out. I remove the lower branches of the trees within the perimeter of the yard (which includes two pines, two live oaks, and one tan oak) so one can walk around beneath the canopy or sit out there in the shade on a hot day. The hot tub (spa) is on my deck in the shade of the live oaks, though I use it sparingly since the heat inflames my nerves. At my previous home on thirty acres that I bought from Dick Smothers of the Smothers Brothers in 1987 and sold in 2001, I nursed and protected what grew into a veritable forest composed primarily of live oaks and pine trees on a multi-acred hillside that was once a vineyard, which are now quite visible when I drive by the place. I love forests. To have “husbanded” one makes me happy. Even my little backyard forest gives me the visual sense of being in a forest right here in the ‘burbs.

My wife, in her high level of chronic pain from fibromyalgia, now sleeps and actually sleeps a lot due to the pain. Pain actually causes the body to shut down in this way. This gives me time, in addition to attend to stock trading, to writing and reading. Yesterday was our seventeenth anniversary of our commitment to each other (and the formal marriage came later). She changed my life completely and has been as a blessing to me in my life. Her life has become extremely painful for her to live from day to day, but she smiles through it, grateful to share it with me. When the pain started getting unbearable nine years ago, she wanted me to help her end her life, but I had too much faith at the time that she would “get better.” She never got better but only worse, to higher levels of pain, but she has in some way become able and willing to bear it. And so it is. And so we are always loving each other deeply and immensely, which, to me, is beyond my wildest dreams. I am most fortunate indeed to have Amy in my life.

I speak of myself and "my good fortune" but my life revolves around taking good care of Amy as well as my daughter, Sarah, who is now grown, and my step-son, Vic, also grown. Both kids are disabled: Sarah with autism, Vic with CP. While I am proud of my forests, I am more proud of Amy, Sarah, and Vic. "Others" figure strongly into my being; they and others like them are central to it. I am most fortunate because I have been favored enough by the gods, as I see it, to embrace that which has been given to me in my life. To find oneself responsible for others who cannot care for themselves--and to accept and appreciate the exigencies of such a situation--is one key to great happiness in life. Such is my good fortune, my profound blessings. Good fortune, in its totality, is not easy to bear, by any means. There is always irony and paradox to be recognized, and to quote myself: Too much irony makes one overwrought. But life is good regardless. We learn to be here now with the greatest of joy and sadness in our hearts. Kahlil Gibran, wrote in The Prophet:

When love beckons to you follow him, 

Though his ways are hard and steep. 

And when his wings enfold you yield to him, 

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. 

And when he speaks to you believe in him, 

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. 

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. 

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, 

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth. 

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself. 

He threshes you to make you naked. 

He sifts you to free you from your husks. 

He grinds you to whiteness. 

He kneads you until you are pliant; 

And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast. 

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart. 

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, 

Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, 

Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears. 

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. 

Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; 

For love is sufficient unto love. 

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, I am in the heart of God." 

And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. 

Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself. 

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: 

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. 

To know the pain of too much tenderness. 

To be wounded by your own understanding of love; 

And to bleed willingly and joyfully. 

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving; 

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy; 

To return home at eventide with gratitude; 

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips. 

PHYSICAL PAIN: ITS DIRECTIONS

I awaken to excruciating pain—mostly in my back, but also sometimes my neck and the occipital nerves towards the top of my head. My back feels as if it has been bashed with 2x4s. So I rise from bed early out of necessity and then go downstairs, one stair at a time due to the painful stiffness through my body. All this pain diminishes as I move around, but not entirely; it still lurks in my body, surprising me with its sharpness now and then. Approaching bedtime, I take a pain pill and a sleeping pill. These enable me to sleep and rest for a while until my sharp pain awakens me as if I had fallen asleep on a medieval torture machine, the rack. My doctor says this is the result of spinal bone spurs, which is a spreading crystalization of calcium over the backbone, with protrusions of “bone” into spinal nerves. The pain radiates out following any old slight bone fractures of which I have a few in my lower ribs on the right side, due, not just in my estimation, to a belt that struck me there when my bones were still forming. The pain has come home to roost or so it would seem. However, since it does diminish as I get on with my day, I consider myself lucky indeed, even blessed. My wife, in the nerve pain of her severe and chronic fibromyalgia is always in pain, and can barely move around at all. I told her yesterday, “We get up, have our coffee, do our errands and doctor visits during the day, have dinner, watch a movie, go to bed, and then we’re dead—if all goes well.” She laughed. Pain makes life literally tortuous. Every day one is tortured simple because one has a body that is subject to such. Such is the nature of bodily existence. This by no means makes the body “bad.” I surely enjoyed its pleasures well enough when I was young and younger and still do what I can to counterbalance the pain.

But the pain of existence—the inherent life of the pain of the world, the suffering of the world, called weltschmerz by Schopenhauer—has always been there for me and is inherent within every human being, be they conscious of it or sensitive to it or not. For all its pleasures and wonders and great joy and beauty, life is painful and life is suffering. This does not make it bad at all; it is just that to the extent that we identify ourselves with our physical bodies and the physical world without getting beyond this level of identity is the source of our loss—for the body and all that it holds dies and all is lost in that regard. Buddhism offers no remedy to physical pain, saying that it is inherent to life and the body and must therefore be borne by us. We do have the ability, though, to not suffer over our suffering, i.e., to not make our pain cause us more psychological pain—which is what we tend to do. Rather than accepting and being with the pain and ourselves in pain, we pray to God to take it away—which is all in vain as well as a vanity, an unreality, a falsity. My own pain I tend to take with a grain of salt; it hurts but it is as it is and I adapt and accept. My wife’s pain is something that is more difficult to accept, for it includes an acceptance of losing her, of having her with me no longer. This kind of acceptance is most painful and most difficult, though the fact that one who is in chronic and severe pain may be relieved of such pain does make its acceptance more possible. One of life’s most difficult dilemmas is to allow oneself to love another, for this is to love another as oneself. Even when that love is deepened beyond one’s very being, since it is still personal, i.e., of the person, of the body, when they leave their body, a part of the one who loves them is taken away. The hole in one’s heart, in one’s being, is not only metaphorical. How many mates whose spouses die, follow them very quickly. This is called “heart-breaking,” and that goes to the very core of one’s being, of one’s life. On the other hand, such a death of one who suffers and is then released from at least its physical aspect, is a blessing and an opening to whatever is to happen next. I assume that something does, but that’s another story. That story pertains to our need to let go of the suffering and pain in our mind and heart to every possible extent, before we finally leave the body.

I loved my mother very much and was close to her though I lived three thousand miles away and also had a disabled child which made it pretty much impossible to visit her and my father. They were in ill health but did their best to come to see us. She died young. But I found that when she left her body, she was closer to me—as if she literally entered into my being and became a part of it. I missed her even less because she was always present. Perhaps this is how it is for those whom we love deeply; they somehow enter into us when they depart their bodies. Perhaps it’s purely psychological, though I actually don’t think it’s only that. I think somehow it’s literally physical. I know an Indian medicine man, leader of a local ancient tribal people. He’s very big, probably 350 pounds and well over six feet tall. He told me that he has “seven grandfathers” that live in his body, that they are always hungry and he obediently feeds them. At the time I thought, “What a feeble excuse,” but now I have more of a sense of the truth of his statement. If we take other people into ourselves, into our very cells, when they are alive, which I believe to be absolutely true, why cannot this happen just as much or even more so once they leave their bodies?

“Pain” has the capacity to lead us many places within ourselves. Esoterically or spiritually, pain is the great purifier as well as the “punishment for sins.” Perhaps any of this is true. Perhaps pain is “karmic.” And/or perhaps it is simply part and parcel of existing in a body and as a body, not just as an individual but as a part of a great whole of humanity with whom we share the same heart, the same feelings in many respects; even the same mind and soul, if you will, on a certain level. Is it “my” pain? Is it “our” pain? Am I suffering for others or just for myself? One must be able to hold these questions properly and in a balanced way so as to avoid megalomania and narcissism, but just where between each of us are the boundaries? I don’t know if our own “taking on” of the pain of others actually reduces their pain, but if it’s not diminished, our own willingness to take it upon ourselves, to put another’s being before our own, reframes us, reforms us, purifies us of our own “sins,” our own actions committed in ignorance. As I’ve said before, I never know where these “conversations with myself” will lead—but they generally go where they want to go.

There's a line from No Country for Old Men in which the Sheriff visits an older sheriff who is now in a wheelchair. The Sheriff asks "How are ya?" and the man says "Yer lookin' at it."

ON BEING DEFINED

Recently I was talking with my sister and she noted that I have always sought to be with a woman, though she framed it as “companionship.” This caused me to reflect upon my nature and upon human nature in general. I always tended to think that I am “self-defined,” i.e. not needing others to be able to see myself and how I am. I even prided myself on my independence and sometimes isolated existence. I could go into the woods and stay there by myself for days or be at my little house off Zayante Rd. in the Santa Cruz Mountains and write my dissertation and my book for weeks at a time in solitude. In retrospect I now see just how painfully lonely I was and that my sister is quite right. Such a realization causes me to redefine myself as one who has been defined not by myself. It would seem that most people are not defined at all—to themselves or anyone else. Most people, it seems, define themselves by their roles in life, their careers, their family, their nationality, ethnicity, or nation. Or they may define themselves by their religious beliefs or otherwise spiritual beliefs, or their philosophical bent and state of mind. I see that these are all valid and credible self-definitions, if you will. I cared for my daughter for twenty years and my life revolved around her and her care, yet I would not say that I was defined by her, though I would say that I was defined by my love for her. That’s a rather strange thing to say, at least for me to say. I have now been with the woman who is my wife for seventeen years and have no doubt that she has defined me. To actually find someone whom one deeply loves and who deeply loves back is probably the most profound occurrence possible to humans. One does come to share heart, soul, mind, and body with another. Such matches are, in my estimation, beyond “natural.” One finds oneself defined by the other.

To be defined in this way is neither submission nor surrender. I suppose it could be called “love” or “connection” or “oneself as another” (to use Ricoeur’s book title). It may be that in order to “be defined by another,” one is already necessarily oneself first. But I think it’s an ongoing, deepening process. I have noted that we live on many “levels” of being simultaneously. We may focus on the more superficial levels initially but the focus and experience deepens to more subtle levels as time progresses. Hot and frequent sex becomes something different—and more sublime and lasting—as we get older, or, for instance, if one’s physical condition catalyzes such changes in the process. It may be that in the process of caring for my daughter, I learned to make her needs primary to many of my own needs. Doing this on a daily basis for twenty years perhaps had the effect of literally reforming my own psyche, my own thinking and feeling process, bringing what is called soul more to the fore. In other words, there was a kind of self-redefinition that occurred. And then the woman who is now my wife came into my life and I, with her help, was able to recognize that she was to be trusted at a very deep level. Such currents run deep in spite of the storms upon the surface. We have to be able to “go deep” and become a bit amphibious. Such is the redefining of ourselves.

Now the discussion arrives at a few questions: Where do I end and she begins? What is the nature of the boundaries between us on the deeper levels? Do people become “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone”? Do we feel each other’s pain, even physical? One is reminded of Schopenhauer’s notion of weltschmerz or “world sorrow or pain” which, according to him, could be felt in the very cells of one’s own body. Do we naturally “take on” the suffering and pain of others, even into our bodies? Obviously so, in my estimation. Obviously too, I always tend to answer my own questions. I talk about weltschmerz somewhat at length in my book, Depression’s Seven Steps to Self-Understanding: A Guide to Comprehending and Navigating Your Inner Journey, published in 2010.

I find that once I start to write these thoughts down as essays, they lead to someplace quite different that I may have initially anticipated. To me, this is the purpose behind any creative thought: to see where it goes. Life is fascinating in this respect, no matter what.

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

One may, of course, attempt or even succeed in evading the responsibilities and reality of the present moment by reverting to “past lives” or “the other side” or what have you. I am aware that I readily speak of such things rather frequently here, perhaps because they are more interesting and more dramatic in their own way than the “here and now.” But I am quite aware of the fact that I live here and now here and now. One may “go places” in their minds, in their thoughts, and be quite aware of being in different layers of existence. I am aware that there is a “greater context” in which I live and move and have my being, as the Biblical phrasing goes, though when “taken away by the moment,” it seems that I forget about it. However, even though I may judge myself as losing my sense of the greater context since I may "lose my temper," as it were, and demonstrate signs of impatience, ignorance, and stupidity, this too is what occurs within the greater context, which is inclusive of it all, of the sacred and the profane, the holy and the unholy. There is no particular way of being that must be demonstrated. We cover the spectrum of being from lower animal to higher spirit, from the most dense to the most sublime—all at the same time and moment.

So, how is life supposed to be? What are we supposed to be doing? It seems there is so much that is wrong and so little that is right. People have false or wrong priorities and such has been their indoctrination to social and cultural life. I have certainly been of that mind and action most of my life, how can I expect others to be beyond it? If life as it is lived is false, how can it be lived truly? Can there even be such a simplisitc dichotomy? That which is false leads away from that which is true, but it is not necessarily evil in its intention. Being born in the flesh in itself leads us away from the real as we come to identify with the body and seek to survive above all else.

But humans are different over time and place, i.e. culture and society, even thinking and feeling differently, while always “tending” to be human. Such is my understated sense of humor. Though we are at “home” as we will ever be in these bodies, we do not “feel at home.” One cannot call the body home for long; no matter how much we try to convince ourselves, our days in the flesh are limited.

I have been fortunate in my life. The gods have been forgiving of my many wrongs done to others, not maliciously but certainly ignorantly and obliviously. I am sure I remain quite narcissistic but have learned some restraint. In some respects, my life has been quite heavenly and, in others, hellish. It just may be that heaven entertains, if not contains, hell. Such an eternal heaven can seem like an eternal hell, depending on how we look at it, how great our understanding, context, and identity can be.