i recall once, stating my most fundamental frustrations to shodo-san, the rinzai buddhist priest. i told him, in my broken and halting japanese, how i always wanted to be good, but never could quite arrive. and so, i had always always always been haunted by this fundamental non-acceptance, or even hatred, of myself. that was the feeling that was most "sincere" within me: the hate.
and i recall shodo asking me: "where is good? where is bad?" he was trying to point out the absurdity of my conceptual constructs. normally, we ask of such concepts, "what are they?" as in: what are the defining elements of the concept, what are examples. but by asking it as a "where" question, shodo posited it as more of a thing/place that i was in relationship with (because that, essentially, is what the concept was). and, as a "place," "good" doesn't exist.
we assume (even viscerally assume) that "good" and "perfect" exist outside of ourselves. but aside from us, the ones who yoke ourselves beneath their fictitious weight, these concepts do not exist. why, then, do we continually persecute ourselves when we don't measure up to these (ill-defined) concepts?
...
i don't recall much from my college religion classes, and i definitely can't articulate with precision the statements and arguments of the many philosophers/writers we encountered. but one recurring theme, it seems, was that of an "original sin." this is, of course, a largely christian concept, but in many of our religion classes, we attempted to find resonance with this idea in philosophical texts.
i recall that we explored this topic through language. in a way, the subject who is "born into" a world of language is necessarily "indebted" to language. he initially hasn't the means to speak properly, and engage within the linguistic economy. there is thus a fundamental guilt in the subject. he must gradually (l)earn his words, so that he can participate in the exchange, and define himself (actually make himself from scratch) in the process...
there have been many other ways to express this notion of a fundamental guilt. freud once posited (in beyond the pleasure principle) that the original organism (a single cell) required part of itself to be "overwhelmed" by excesses of energy in the outside world, to, in essence, die, in order that the living and vulnerable processes within remain undisturbed. in a sense, then, at the CELLULAR level, there is this continual and necessary relationship to DEATH contained within LIFE, a death instinct, that is, an instinct towards self-disintegration and destruction. freud utilized this image to explain the compulsion to repeat found in post traumatic stress disorder...
on the skin of reality, we assume that everything should run hunkey-dorey smooth, so long as all our major concerns are addressed. but somehow, we in the modern age, who have every convenience at our disposal, we still feel uneasy. why? those who feel disturbed are often made to feel weak or otherwise defective: "what's wrong with you? why can't you love and appreciate yourself, your position in life?"
i think that there IS something wrong with me. but that wrongness is a necessary consequence and condition of existence. the people who believe in the "once upon a time" and "happily ever after" of existence, who are able to posit a peaceful baseline to existence, they are able to drown out the disturbance fundamental to existence through the continual retelling of fairy tales. but what if things were NEVER supposed to be "alright?" what if everything were always in play? death/life, and this fundamental guilt, what if they were always already supposed to have been there?
what if, instead of starting from those innocuous words, "once upon a time," our life were always starting from "scratch," from a mistake, a revisioning...
as i mentioned in previous postings: there are two ways to form a crystalline wave. you start with a supersaturated solution, pregnant with significance, in both instances. in one, the "gradual" approach, you slowly (or quickly) evaporate the solvent, such that the crystal solute precipitates out, through a kind of natural "stacking" process. in the other, the "sudden" approach, you "scratch" the surface of the container, creating an edge for crystals to swiftly and instantaneously adhere to.
does guilt come from this slow, pre-ordained stacking process? or is it from some fundamental but necessary error in processing?
is the origin of the universe yin or yang, even or odd?
No comments:
Post a Comment