CHAPTER THREE
IS ”I” ANY LESS EPHEMERAL THAN ITS SUSTAINING THOUGHTS?
This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A life time is like a flash of lightning in the sky, Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.
— the Buddha
However obvious impermanence may seem to be, at least intellectually, we usually tend to keep the bare reality of it at a “safe” distance, steadying ourselves by creating and maintaining reassuring illusions of permanence for ourselves, rarely taking time to investigate the actual nature of the supposed self for whom all this is being done. Leaves may be falling, grey hairs appearing, friends moving, parents dying, but surely it’s not all changing, is it? It is, even including our assumed identity, that personalized, self-enclosed, often uneasily governed coalition of habits that so readily insists on referring to itself as “I.”
The very thoughts that reinforce such a sense of self are (as ten or fifteen minutes of giving our undivided attention to the actual presence and content of our mental activities will likely show) not being generated by a discrete thinker somewhere inside our head, but rather are mostly arising unbidden, far from being under any sort of conscious control. So who — or what — is doing all this thinking? Not “I.” (The notion of “thoughts without a thinker”
is spiritually old-hat, dating back at least to the Buddha, but it also has arisen in psychoanalytic considerations.6)
Is “I” any less ephemeral than its sustaining thoughts? Is not what “I” — and its multitude of interiorized voices, roles, and perspectives — purports to represent actually always in flux, regardless of the apparent solidity of its self-presentation? To see our mind’s “I” is not an act of “I,” but rather of awareness.
To thus see — or recognize — “I” is to dethrone our conventional subjectivity, perhaps even to recognize the bare “is-ness” that precedes and transcends (and paradoxically is) “I.”
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 35 ~
Ramana Maharshi states that not only is the mind no more than thoughts, including the “I”-thought, but that “there is no such thing as mind.”7 No such thing, no self-existing thing-unto-itself. And does anything have a verifiable or truly independent existence apart from everything else? But before we stand toe-to-toe with the Primordial Is-ness of the Big Picture — which transcends all framing — we’d do well neither to believe nor disbelieve Ramana’s statement, but rather to check it out in the laboratory of our own experience. The inherent insubstantiality, inseparability, and contingent nature of all that exists must be experimentally verified through our own direct experience — this is firsthand science, the hard-nosed science of spirituality.
The “emptiness”that is found — and that we learn to make room for — is not a vacuity, an absence, a mere void, but is simply the Matrix and Cradle of Being, its translinguistic Truth too essential to have meaning. The Is of is.
Call it Nondual Being, call it the Effulgent Void, call it Spirit, call it the Absolute, call it God, recognizing that It alone is, forever and ever appearing as all, all of this, while simultaneously ever remaining Itself — but I stray too far ahead of my topic, feeling the epiphanous birthstirrings of a poetry that only lives to celebrate the Unspeakable. Such song, however inarticulate or intoxicated, does not make “I” wrong, nor does it seek to obliterate “I” — recognizing that only spiritually ambitious egoity wants to get rid of ego — but rather permits “I” its cloud-dance, developmental dramatics, and evolutionary antics in the Infinite Playground of Being.
Look for me
where storms come uncaged Look for me
where the sea carries shattered sky Look for me
where cloudsilk weaves through your sigh Look, look for me
where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane
To penetratingly study “I” and its anatomical peculiarities, to uncover its birthing-place, to feel and intuit our way toward the source of “I,” transports us into a Life-enhancing appreciation of change and interconnectedness that renders Death less alien, less threatening, less other.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 36 ~
The degree to which we’re present as Being is the degree to which we don’t fear Death. When there’s awareness of “I,” then who — or what — are we?
Furthermore, when awareness becomes aware of itself, what then happens to “I”? When attention no longer goes primarily to objects (whether external or internal), and therefore is no longer significantly invested in sustaining the drama of subject and object, is what then still remains in the “position” of awareness us?
We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a Reality. We are that reality. When we understand this, we will see that we are nothing. And being nothing, we are everything. That is all.
— Kalu Rinpoche
To openly face the transience of everything can be terrifying or maddening, but to avoid doing so is to sentence oneself to a less than full life. Without a deeply felt, ongoing awareness of impermanence, Death tends to remain distant, mirage-like, of no real concern. Someone famous dies — not passes away, but dies — and we, with more than a little help from the media, give an abundance of attention to that particular death, all but forgetting that we too are going to die, and that on the day of the death of that famous someone, over a quarter of a million of us also died.
And tomorrow it could be you or me. This is a possibility to which we usually grant no more attention than a random line in a newspaper. A crucial but far from popular question in this regard is: How well prepared are we for our own death? What might we want to complete, to let go of, to more deeply explore or open to, if we knew we had but a short time to live?8 Recognizing right to our core that Death can happen at any time — any time — to us deserves a far more prominent seat in our consciousness, if only to awaken us more fully to our real condition (“Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme,” said the Buddha9).
To truly prepare for our death is not an exercise in morbidity or despair, but rather a wholehearted entry into a fuller, more awakened and caring life, a life made more precious, vivid, and authentic by its ongoing intimacy with Death and dying. Such preparation is an excuse to at last go more fully into our life, an opportunity to journey into and through the very heart of suffering, until we emerge more whole, more alive, more and more intimate both with what dies and with what does not die.
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 37 ~ This pain you think of as yours
Wells up from something much deeper than yourself, It is Existence, not you, that is suffering,
You are a tune it is trying to play on a flawed harp — The pain is protest, is reprimand, almost — is warning That the instrument will not serve, that withdrawal threatens.
Then the tune that is you will cease, the universe Be there, without you. But Existence will go on, And the music it makes in endless others, The music will go on. What then, is lost?
Only the self, the loved, the fleeting tune.
— John Hall Wheelock
Avoiding Death deadens us. The less intimate with Death we are, the more shallow, stagnant, and unreal our life tends to be, and the more subservient we become to the dualistic conventions that separate Life from Death. The instability and vagaries of the physical world alone are difficult enough to cope with, we might protest, so why grant attention to Death? Is not Life already insecure and challenging enough without the added burden of such an investigation? The voices of fear.
The inherent insecurity of everyday life, however, ceases being such a problem when we bring to it the perspective of our own mortality. The journey into and through this insecurity leads to communion — and identification — with the essential core of Life. That is, the insecurity of “I” gets replaced by (or compassionately enfolded within) the security of Being. Not being this, not being that, but simply Be-ing.
This shift to Being asks that we bring a transconceptual (an ungainly yet fitting adjective) perspective to our cognition — after all, how can the rational mind conceive of what subsumes and transcends it, without reducing “that” to just more intellectual fodder?
Just thinking about a dilemma won’t really resolve it — except perhaps through demonstrating the folly of doing so — since thinking in of itself is inherently dilemmatic (every thought having its counter-thoughts, every argument its counter-arguments, and so on), unavoidably making only more of what it is attempting to resolve, generating more and more conceptual culs-de-sac for itself, trapping itself in a vortex of hermeneutic circles.
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 38 ~
Only when we go beyond thought can we truly see and make wise use of it.
Beyond thought we find what is already between thoughts, already prior to thoughts, already present during thought. What is it? Don’t know. But it’s there.
The more intimate with it that I am, the more deeply I recognize that I don’t have the foggiest idea what it actually is. To name it is not to know what it is.
The position of knower sooner or later yields to the position of lover, as explanation steps aside for revelation. James Hillman talks of “searching for a way to account for the unknown in the still more unknown... Rather than define, I would compound, rather than resolve, I would confirm the enigma.”10
And so, in the spirit and open-eyed innocence of “don’t know” mind — which is not an ignorant mind, but rather one that cultivates intimacy with the unfathomable Mystery out of Which it arises — let us now return to the story of my near-Death experience and its aftermath.
Look for me
where storms come uncaged Look for me
where the sea carries shattered sky Look for me
where cloudsilk weaves through your sigh Look, look for me
where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me
where dewdrops make cathedrals out of grass Look for me
where light fans through throbbing decay Look for me
where silent riverpools dissolve your day Look, look for me
where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me
where dragonlizards await their prey Look for me
where epic shields are gripped by laureled hand
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 39 ~ Look for me
where emerald valleys sway in orgasmic trance Look, look for me
where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me
where the land is wild with rhythmed Wonder Look for me
where jagged shores moan with white thunder Look for me
where the sea is ablaze with dawn Look, look for me
where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane Look for me
where the elements dance and die Look for me
where forehead is an infinity of sky Look for me
inside your looking Look, look for me
where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain, where we can only once again love ourselves sane
NOTES
1. Ram Dass, 1992. Ram Dass has since the 1970s done much to bring Death out of the closet in Western culture. His talks (most of which are available on tape) frequently include considerations of aging, dying, and death, all conveyed in his uniquely confessional, humorous, and insightful manner. See also his recent book
“Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying” (2000).
2. Friedman, 1964, p. 391.
3. I found nothing in psychological research literature concerning the effect that bringing awareness to one’s own death might have on one’s sense of identity. This may have something to do with the lack of attention psychotherapy tends to gives
Darkness Shining Wild
~ 40 ~
to Death. Obviously, for the dialogue of psychotherapy to include Death, therapists need to be receptive to the death concerns, however subtle, of their clients. My becoming more focused on the topic of Death has had a very positive impact on those who work with me, helping them to to more openly and fully share their thoughts and feelings regarding Death. In so doing, other core issues inevitably emerge, the most central of which is usually that concerning identity. There is nothing like the openly felt consideration of Death to bring a nearly-immediate depth and fitting intensity to the question of “Who am I?”
There have been a large number of studies done on death anxiety, which one researcher aptly criticizes as being “assembly line studies” (Kastenbaum, 1987).
Meat for graduate students’ doctoral appetites. Most of these studies merely correlate death anxiety (as “measured” via self-reports with Templar’s Death Anxiety Scale) with various demographic and psychometric variables.
In one of the more intriguing studies, the researcher hypothesized that ego development (as measured by Jane Loevinger’s Sentence Completion Test) would correlate negatively with death anxiety (again, as quantified through Templar’s scale). Contrary to his hypothesis, he found a positive correlation between ego development and death anxiety, which gives a bit more bite to the old saw that ignorance is bliss— those who “know” less have less to be anxious about, or so it seems. However, this apparently significant finding suffers from at least one major flaw: Like almost all death anxiety studies, it only measures “conscious” death anxiety. Unconscious (or repressed) death anxiety must also be taken into account.
As Yalom (1980, p. 54) warns, “Very low death anxiety may reflect strong unconscious death anxiety.”
4. Kierkegaard, 1957, p. 55. It’s also important to consider the kind of fear that has as its object the absence of something. At its extreme, such fear may show up when the experience of no-self arises. Then, though the fear isn’t experienced as happening to a separative self, it nonetheless is still happening, as a biochemical reality. The sustaining thoughts of such transpersonal fear, though they are but thoughts, can be very seductive, especially when their corresponding sensations are those of full-blown terror or panic (see Segal, 1996). As distressing and disorienting as this can be, it has the benefit of deromanticizing the passage into no-self — most spiritual literature tends to overemphasize the bliss of self-transcendence, and to downplay its darker or less “spiritual” dimensions, especially with regard to fear.
5. “Ego” as a concept has negative connotations for many spiritual seekers, for whom it is simply an impediment, an obstacle in need of eradication. On the other hand, many psychologically oriented self-theorists view ego more neutrally, conceptualizing it as a process of knowing, thinking, and adapting (McAdams, 1994, p. 540). For example, Jane Loevinger (1969, p. 85) claims that “the striving to master, to integrate, to make sense of experience is not one ego function among many but the essence of the ego.”
ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS
~ 41 ~
As I define it, ego is not actually conscious of itself, regardless of its possible romanticizing of the idea of transcending itself (such spiritual ambition being but part of its self-concept). Ego could be said to be a cult of one (or a self-enclosed coalition of survival-oriented habits that automatically refers to itself as “I”). This does not mean that it is evil or in need of annihilation, but rather that it’s centered and unquestioningly governed by its own ideology (Masters, 1990, pp. 10-18).
What is needed is not the elimination, but rather the illumination, of ego. As Epstein points out (1995, p. 98), what needs to be transcended in spiritual practice is not the whole ego, but rather its representational component, the essential groundlessness or insubstantiality of which simply needs to be recognized, through the skillful application of wakeful attention. Perhaps what matters most here is developing the capacity to become aware of what one is currently identifying with (including one’s self-concept) — and this capacity is not a function of ego.
6. Epstein, 1995, p. 41.
7. Godman, 1985, p. 50. “You must look for truth beyond the mind,” Nisargadatta says (1982, p. 365), and (p. 362) “The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.”
Great stuff—and it’s just the tip of the Nisargadattan iceberg—but it’s not all that useful until we’ve taken a long deep look at our mind...
We can list its contents—plans, comparisons, daydreams, images, memories, internal conversations, lists, judgments, and so on—but is there more to the mind than what occupies it? Does the mind differ from its contents, and if so, how?
Does the absence of thoughts mean the absence of mind? Thoughts and the process of thinking can be observed, but can the mind be observed when it is without content, and if so, what then is observed? How does the content-free mind differ from pure space? Or from consciousness?
If you are thinking about these questions, how do your thoughts about them differ from the thought or thoughts under examination?
When you are dreaming, how do you experience your mind? The body you have in your dreams is a dream-body, but is the mind you have in your dreams a dream-mind or is it the same as your waking-state mind?
And so on...
8. For a rich and savvy exploration of this, check out Stephen Levine’s A Year To Live:
How to Live This Year as if It Were Your Last (1997).
9. Blackman, 1997, p. 21.
10. Hillman, 1975, p. 152.