Living With Yourself
Rebecca and I could probably safely be categorized as co-dependent. After all, we’re literally together 24/7. We eat together, work together, wake up and go to sleep together. Heck, maybe we could even get one of those double-seater toilets so we could poop together!
The point is, most people we’ve known, at one point or another, have popped the question – “How can you two do it? How can you stand each other? I mean, I could never be with anyone constantly!”
We usually launch into a little speech about how much we enjoy each other’s company, how all that time together has brought us to a point where we don’t ever argue or play those little one-upmanship games that couples play.
But maybe, instead, we should answer the question with a question in return.
“How, pray tell, can you stand yourself?”
That might be taken wrong, but if you talk to any good Zen monk, they’ll tell you that with a little shifting around of things, you can come to a place where you have no Self. That’s right. Enroll in a nice Zen monastery, and pretty soon you’ll take your Self, rip it out of your body, toss it on the ground, and squish it between your little pink toes. Later on, you can sip from the resulting fermented goop, and this makes life pretty interesting.
But if you’re not a pristine, perfectly enlightened Zen monk (if you’re not sure, try to levitate – if you can’t, you’re a Zen monk), then you’re just a regular person, and that means you have a Self.
Now, you might think that the Zen monk has the difficult job – trying to eradicate the Self.
But that’s all wrong. In fact, you have the difficult part, because a Self isn’t something you naturally have. It’s something you have to make up, and then you have to spend the majority of your life energies trying to convince yourself that you’re still there!
We might think that we’re going to work to earn money so we can keep our house and our spouse, but who are we kidding? We might think we are interested in Zen because we want to become enlightened, but who are we kidding? The truth is that everything we do, every day, is directed toward one singular goal. And that’s upkeeping the Self.
Any good Zen monk, with the juicy remains of her Self oozing between her toes, knows how difficult it was to upkeep that Self. It involved endless toil, lots of self-recrimination, failing to meet one’s own expectations, and a host of other pointless activities. How nice to be done with all that silliness!
But here we are, upkeeping this imaginary person who most of us don’t even really like that much, and we spend every waking and sleeping hour with that person! Not only is that person with us all day, but sometimes they keep us up at night, going over their endless problems and worries and making us think about those Lunesta commercials we saw earlier in the day.
Is it any wonder we have so much drug abuse, drone-like television watching, and depression? We’re all wiped out from living with this imaginary person we call Me!
Maybe, next time we feel like we have to get drunk and escape for a while, we should sit down and chant a few mantras. After all, getting drunk is actually a heck of a lot more work than getting rid of your Self.
And the left-over fermented juice really is pretty yummy . . .
Explore posts in the same categories: Quick Thoughts
June 23rd, 2007 at 7:06 pm
I agree that many of us use outside sources to avoid really understanding ourselves. I’ve noticed that as I continue to develop my self-awareness that I am less prone to need a drink because I want to dive into the feelings. They are so much more entertaining than any high alcohol could provide.
June 26th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Hello Karl,
I’ve appreciated your thoughtful comments throughout the site. Again, you touch on an important point — that our feelings (and every other aspect of our reality) is simply amazing. Just sitting, we can be in awe of this very moment of experience. But once we have laid our symbols over everything (and symbols are much less entertaining than the real deal), life can indeed seem boring — it’s as if we glance around us, and instead of seeing ever-changing trees, shifting patterns of sunlight, and the infinite amazement we call ‘people’, we instead see only our words — a tree, a patch of sunlight, and Bob.
Living in a world of symbols is not only confusing, but stale and rather frightening. In our longing to once again have magic in our lives, it’s all too easy to try to find it in any number of methods. You mentioned alcohol, which has a certain stigma attached to it, but there are many other methods which our society sanctions — video games, television, and zen-inspired blogs being just a few =)
And yet, it’s not enough for us just to avoid these things (or use them in moderation). Because the real problem isn’t the escape — it’s that we need to escape in the first place. And this comes from an even more profound sanctioned method — our method of dividing the world up into broken pieces in the first place! Most of us spend our lives trying to fix the symptoms, when the disease is left to create more and more problems. Just why is it that we are longing for ‘more’? Why do we feel frustration, loneliness, or anger? Why is it that life doesn’t always feel ‘right’?
These and similar questions can lead us to discovering what’s at the foundation of all our suffering.
And that’s when we can encounter the disease itself, and see it for what it is. Unmasked, it loses all its scariness and all we’re left with is this impossibly beautiful thing we call Now or life (or whatever word we’d like to lay over it).
Sweetwater,
Kenton