How the Whole Mess Began
Otherwise Known as ‘Childhood’
The essential difficulty with the human situation is that we have lost touch with our ‘true nature’ – that is, we are immersed in the idea that there is an ‘I’ who ‘lives’. This basic illusion creates all the problems of being human. We begin to think of the world as ‘happening to us’. From this illusion arise all the great questions – “Why are we here?” “What is the meaning of life?” “Why is there evil in the world?” And from it arise all the ‘terrors’ of being human. The fear of getting sick or dying. The longing to achieve a better life with more money, more friends, or more security. Stress, depression, and feelings of meaninglessness – all arise from this illusion of self. In fact, all of us are ‘dissatisfied’ with life, in that we feel that we have problems, and that our life would be better if only we could fix them.
If you don’t think this is true for you, just ask yourself if there is anything in your life you wish you could change, right now.
To understand how all this starts, let’s begin at early childhood. A child is basically set on ‘absorption mode’. He or she simply perceives, and takes in all the shapes and colors and motions of the world. Imagine the world to the very young senses – nothing yet has a name – all things appear just as they are. There are not yet any lines between the ‘different objects’ of the world – the wall is not divided from the floor, the sun is not divided from the sky. Indeed, if one can conceive of it, even the senses of a very young child are not yet divided – they have not yet learned that they have ‘five distinct senses’, and there is no reason to suppose that they conceive of a sound as distinct from a sight. Everything simply comes into their sensing organs, appearing just as it is.
Take a moment to imagine such a world!
The Training Begins
Now, the parents of the child are eager to communicate with her, and want her to be an intelligent, functional member of society. They want her to ‘do something with her life’, and to ‘make something of herself’. And so, of course, they begin at the beginning, and teach her language.
Language is a wonderful thing. It allows us to pass thoughts, ideas, and observations from one person to another. And indeed, we often label people as ‘intelligent’ or ‘dumb’ based on their mastery of language. Think of someone who stumbles over basic words as opposed to someone who uses large and obscure words with ease and fluency.
In fact, there would be nothing wrong with language at all, if only we were taught that it is a tool – arbitrarily created and lacking any reality outside of ‘convention’.
We should stop for a moment and explain what we mean by ‘convention’. ‘Convention’ is an important word to understand when speaking about dualistic thought, and we’ll use it to signify that something has reality only because we mutually agree upon it. For instance, that the sun will burn your eyes if you stare at it is not a matter of convention, because anyone who does it will have their eyes burned out, whether we all believe in it or not. But the idea that it is actually 1:46 p.m. right now is a matter of convention. It is simple to see that someone invented our concept of clocks and the 24-hour day, and that if everyone mutually agreed to switch over to, say, a system where we had ten ‘miras’ that marked a single revolution of the earth, and each of those was divided into ten ‘allins’, and so on, then it would no longer be 1:46 p.m.. 1:46 p.m. exists only by mutual agreement. By convention. By noting what (in our conception of the world around us) is conventional and what is not, we can begin to distinguish reality from imagination.
Now, back to language. The child is seeing the world ‘just as it is’, and then the parents point to something and say “tree”. The message that they are delivering is not “that thing over there, which is really boundless but appears to have a distinct self, could be called anything, but around this part of the globe most people agree to call it ‘tree’.” That would be pretty difficult to explain to a child. So instead we say ‘tree’, and are implying something more like – “that object is a tree.”
This teaching is constantly reinforced from a very early age, and the names of countless objects are added to the list. Slowly, the world around the child begins to resolve into differing objects that have names. He or she looks about, seeing most of the world ‘just as it is’, and then out pops a ‘tree’, or a ‘car’ or ‘mommy’.
The Result
We keep learning names for things until, as adults, we can sit in a room and name everything we see. Look around you right now and realize how amazing it is – how many names you have for all the vast quantities of things you’re surrounded with. I challenge you to find even one thing that you can’t, in some way, name. Even things which we know almost nothing about, such as the unidentified tiny bits of something scattered over my desk, fit into categorical names. For instance, I call those unidentified bits ‘dust’.
While we were children most of the world was ‘just as it is’, with only an occasional ‘object’ popping out, but now the entire world is made up of ‘popped out’ objects, and the world of reality, of seeing things with clear perception, is buried under a layer of symbol-images.
It is only in rare instances when something completely new and strange enters our senses that we stand, for a moment, amazed. Amazed because we are seeing something for which we have no name.
Whatever it is, we momentarily have a glimpse into our childhood self, when everything was nameless and wondrous and mysterious.
But when we see this odd thing, we are also vividly shown our addiction to language, because what is the first thing we ask? We ask – “What is this thing?” And then we will be given a name, and perhaps a function or origin. And though we still know almost nothing about it, we now ‘understand’ it, because we know its name. And invariably, its wondrous nature will soon fade, and the object will enter the immense realm of everything else we ‘know’.
The dust on my desk is a great example. I call it ‘dust’, wipe it away day after day, and am certainly not amazed by it. And yet, if I am given a large enough microscope, I am suddenly astounded. There is sand from far-off deserts. There are small chunks of armor and limbs from dead insects. There are strangely shaped grains of pollen, and even small wriggling living beings. All that in simple dust?
Language, then, can draw us out of the world. The more language we know and the more masterful we are at utilizing it, the more the world resolves into separate things, most of which become unworthy of our attention. Thus it takes more and more spectacular sensory input – like music and sunsets and movies and TV and mountains – to hold us rapt. If you watch your own behavior, you’ll see this tendency everywhere – you’ll note how you ‘get used’ to certain sensory input, and favor, for instance, the vision of an eagle over the vision of a crow or chickadee. It is not that the flight of a crow is in any way less amazing than the flight of an eagle, but you’ve labeled the crow’s flight ‘common’, and stopped bothering to see it.
This creates a terrible circle, where people become more and more bored by the world around them, and turn to drugs or television or drama or dubious spiritual paths or constant music in order to keep the world interesting.
Few adults have kept the wonder. Interestingly enough, if you go to a facility that houses ‘developmentally disabled’ adults, adults who weren’t able to absorb our conventions and language, you’ll see people who are eager to show you a picture, or a toy, or an empty glass. They find such things endlessly amazing. Of course, we think they’re simply ‘dumb’, but maybe they’re on to something . . .
What Else We Learn As Children
Now, it’s not just the convention of language that we are taught. We are taught ‘divisions’ as well. Divisions are lines that are drawn around certain things of the world. All the things of the world, in fact. We draw them around the outlines of objects when we pick one up and tell the name of the thing to a child. ‘This is an apple’, we say, holding it up. And we imply that it is bound by its skin. ‘That is daddy, and this is mommy’. Separate. ‘That is a mosquito (squish!)’
As the child grows more masterful at language, we can deliver more complicated fictions to them. “This is my action, and this is the consequence.” (i.e. If you sass off, you’ll get in trouble.) This is very useful for conditioning behavior, but it also begins to teach children that actions are divided, that there is ‘cause and effect’. Of course, there are no lines between a ‘cause’ and an ‘effect’, because the entire concept is purely conventional.
We create more divisions by teaching children the different continents and nations and states, by teaching them the different nationalities, by teaching them about different languages and religions, and the concept of ‘good and bad’ and ‘right and wrong’.
Our Lines are Arbitrary
What we fail to show children is that divisions are all conventional, and that they only hold up as illusions if we don’t look too carefully. If we stand ten miles away and look at the peaks of two mountains, we can easily say ‘That’s Mount Holly and that’s Mount Pine.’ If we never look any deeper, we can go our whole lives thinking of them as quite distinct. But if we land ten people by helicopter on the top of Mount Holly and ask them to walk down the slope and mark the place where Mount Holly ends and Mount Pine begins, they’ll all troop down into the foothills and valleys and mark ten different places where they feel the two mountains are divided. That’s because the line is a matter of convention, and none of them would feel sure they had the ‘real’ place until a person they considered ‘of authority’ drew an imaginary line for them. Then they’d all agree.
All objects, all concepts, are like those mountains, if you look closely enough. No lines exist in nature except those that we draw by convention.
And Then, Value
Finally, we are taught value. We place sanctity on some objects and not on others, all based on the system of morals we are taught as we progress in learning our conventional knowledge.
At last the world is no longer ‘just as it is’. It is fully divided into categories, fully dissected into symbol-code, and broken into a thousand bits. Among the things we’ve learned to see as separate entities are other people. And it follows that we see ourselves as individual entities, as well. Which leaves us feeling separate from the world, divided from our peers, and struggling against the assaults which are constantly coming in from ‘outside’, such as aging, temptation, death and disease, accidents, financial problems . . .
These things are no longer a part of us, as they would be in a ‘child mind’, but are outside forces with which we must do constant battle. We’re left with the feeling that if we just sat down and did nothing, our life would slowly fall apart around us – so we must stress ourselves out trying to constantly upkeep our life as it is.
And to make things even worse, we have to keep trying to make our lives ‘better’ by having more money, better relationships, and a nicer house. We can never rest, because otherwise our lives would fall apart. And this is all we have to look forward to until we die. Of course, maybe, just maybe, if we work really hard, things will be better next year and we can finally relax. Since the problem isn’t really the outside world, though, but rather our concept of self, we’ll inevitably find that next year is just as busy and just as stressful as this one!
The answer? Simply to change our model of reality. This one obviously isn’t working, so it’s probably worth it to try something else.
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