Retrospection on a Longing for a Found and Lost Path

Fifteen years ago, in 8/6/2001, I wrote:

“From every segment of time and age I have within myself something to borrow or I have to; otherwise how can I share my impulse to the mellow flow of experiences which are coming and going to die? I have to find that part in which every period is burning blue in life, because I am not satisfied anymore with this everydayness of adulthood, in its gray horrified indifference. I have something to borrow from an immature child, somewhere before puberty. Because I am a child in a hope and enthusiasm of life. I am a child just as a child can be at home with its growth and the image of authorities who are there, as I am here for my son, to ‘teach’ him how to live. Nobody teaches them to embrace the time through which they are evolving, in the threshold of light and feelings and thoughts. We have to subjugate them to ‘rules’, without letting them know that the grid is contingent, because we ‘know’ what is good everlastingly and universally for them. A little bit humility is required to learn from them. [I will comment on the underlined sentences at the end.]

My son and I were listening to Bob Dylan’s song “Things Have Changed”, somewhere in the middle of song, Bob Dylan sings that ‘I try to escape as far as possible from myself’. He asked me “what does it mean: to escape from oneself?’ I wondered how to explain it to him. “To escape from ourselves” seems and sounds so obvious. ‘You don’t really know what it means?’, I asked him. I looked at his face, in those bright shiny eyes and the freshness and beauty that have not yet been scared enough, by the chain of betrayals and distrusts, not to ask such an innocent question. What does it mean to escape from oneself? I tried different ways and I failed every time. At the end I drew a circle for him and put a cross at the top of the circle: ‘You are here’, I told him, ‘then you start lying to yourself and the other.’ Then, I drew a line clockwise along with the first one, putting crosses here and there on the line. Finally, I put another cross close to the beginning but from the other end. ‘Then you feel you are full of conflict and fear and you don’t like yourself anymore and you start escaping from yourself.’ He said, ‘oh, I understand now.’ And I was not sure whether he understood or not, and I wished he would never experience this. Because for living, we can imagine a different set of scars to bring us to ecstasy. I cannot imagine the ecstasy of being alive without suffering.

From every ‘age’ I should borrow something to create myself anew.

I need that unquestionable yielding to life from my son, his softness and kindness, that I always envy. From teenagers, I need that curiosity and non-tainted spirit which is not yet fully entangled and confused by social values, definitions, and class distinctions; I need the tickling that goes through the spinal column when you are in love and that purity of desire when you make love.

I try to revive the teenager in myself which, as Fred Uhlman in “Reunion” describes, is a combination of “a naïve innocence, a radiant purity of body and mind, with a passionate urge to absolute and selfless devotion. The phase usually only lasts a short time, but because of its intensity and uniqueness it remains one of life’s most precious experiences.”

I sing my songs and knee down and pray to get rid of kneeing down and to be dispersed like the light particles of a plant in the air. I wish to finish this story in dignity and love: Where is the limit of endurance and fear? Where is the limit of selling and buying? Where can I meet my ‘daimon’, the spiral of life which has been constructed like a river on its beds, or its beds constructed by the river, like the flowing of a stream from the top of a steep hill down to its evaporation in sands or rivers or seas. It is a mysterious fact that whoever met her or his daimon has come back to ‘the Other’ and has been denied by the Other. The daimon within us demands and sets the impulse of a will for change, a ‘social’ change. A daimon ultimately manifests itself in a social task. That the story must be told and the price must be paid.

Meeting my individual daimon and the social utopia have, now, been superimposed upon each other: the image seems blurry but there is no ‘choice’. In our time, ethical and political questions have gotten as close as possible to each other. Our beings in the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ level are collapsing into a monumental edifice in which the individual has no choice but to choose a political action, beyond the limits of disappointment and success, and sees itself in the Other.

The daimon may ask you, “what are your wishes?” and she might make your wishes come true.

This encounter remains as a possibility, as a wish, and I will not get tired of wishing it even if the marshes of capitalism are blowing and the drum-marches of marketing-oriented characters hachure our insights. I am here, alive as a human dream, reiterating itself ceaselessly for the possibility that, anyhow, has been imagined all the way in our historical time, and we cannot, at any price, exorcise her phantom.”

The above piece was written in 2001 and in 2005 something happened to me, I call it ‘the event’ and I felt the hand of God turned, twisted, and swirled me around an axis and I fell into an abyss of vertigo. Now, it seems to me that God responded to my wish. But I had to abandon all that I knew and in the shake of this vertigo and after that to review, choose, and pick pieces of a shattered mirror, like separating carefully the wheat from the chaff.

I have been trying to digest the insight and message of ‘the event’ and put myself together again and I couldn’t gather myself easily because the trace of the past, the mistakes and habits, had been created furrows in my soul. And I couldn’t make sense of myself and transform the revolutionized furrows now in one night. Years of work was and is ahead of me to put the shattered pieces of a puzzle together to come up with an exit, a sense of freedom and salvation.

I was reading the above note, which was written before ‘the event’ and I found some pearls and some cheap misguiding beads in it. The sense of awakening (while always growing), is seeing how some opposites are complementary (such as female and male, light and dark, the contingent and the necessary), while good and evil are distinct. It is striking to me now that how I am or we are inclined to come to a definitive conclusion based on certain half-truths.

Well, in the above story, the pearl is my conversation with my son about Bob Dylan’s song (I try to escape as far as possible from myself). I am talking about the shame and guilt of lying to oneself, while one knows what is the right course of action. However, I couldn’t understand the implications of this understanding. I couldn’t see that the “conscience” behind this experience of conflict and cognitive dissonance is a sense of divine self, which is not “contingent” (accidental) but “essential”. So in another part I say: “We have to subjugate them [children] to ‘rules’, without letting them know that the grid is contingent, because we ‘know’ what is good everlastingly and universally for them. A little bit humility is required to learn from them.” What is wrong and what is right with this passage? It is true that we need to learn from children and to be humble in front of them, not to act and feel as an all-knowing authoritative figure. But it is false to think that there is only a historical grid of intelligibility (Foucault’s historical ontology) and the grid is contingent through and through-- that is taking a nihilistic attitude about all the rules and patterns of life and making them contingent only upon their historical context. I made a horrible mistake about this in relation to my first son and both of us paid the price.

The divine soul or conscience (the divine grid and law) is essential to us: a sense that one knows what is right and what is wrong, after the deconstruction of idols (contingent grids). Here, two seemingly opposites are superimposed: one is the contingent and accidental definitions of who we are, our nationality, our cultural imposition and bias, our confirmation bias, our surrendering to the idols of a normative society; and the second one is: the essential conscience and the self which urges us to deconstruct the idols of false selves, and as Bob Dylan longs, to come back to our genuine self rather than escaping from oneself. So difficult to understand and do it. I oscillated from the fact that some of our self-idols are contingent and historically constructed to the fallacious idea that there is no essential self in us. So I fell.  After ‘the event’ in 2005, still I couldn’t understand the message fully. And I made exactly the same mistake in my comments on Tibetan Book of Dead below couple of years ago. The Tibetan Book of Dead says:

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in the hospital after an automobile accident to find that she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: She has the same face and form, her senses and her mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is.

In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch with all the desperation of someone falling continuously into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.” —Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, chapter 8

Now I understand what a wisdom is in this passage, but then I went on my “naturalistic” and “historical contingent” identities and read and distorted the whole thing in a wrong direction. It is good to learn from our mistakes and learning never ends, we have to be constantly vigilant. So, fallaciously I wrote:

“What if the "true" self, after "ego", and along with "ego", is a relational self, in constant awareness of the fact that vulnerability is the condition of existence and understanding and joy, it is the condition of experiencing love, where one is aware of one's integration in the social, along with and coextensive with awareness of one's integration in the biosphere, and an empty zone of universe, the enigma, perceivable by mind. I call it a holistic self which is already present and we always have immediate access to it in order to come out of the state of complete amnesia.”

Here, I reduce human being to its “vulnerability”, while this is true, a half-truth, it doesn’t distinguish between what is unique in human beings and other living beings. The fact that we have a divine self is not in contradiction with the principle of vulnerability, having a relational self. Our genuine awakened self is deluded or covered up by false identities and idols, and we try to remember it (the point in the Tibetan Book of Dead).

I continued with an attempt to confront “Cartesian Nucleus Self” with Marxian/Foucauldean/Feminist “Relational Self” in the favor of the latter:

“Descartes thinks that logically it is possible to doubt everything (including existential/physical vulnerability), but not the fact of "thinking" as a substance. When I say the true self is a relational self, first I mean it is not nucleus, or self-same identical substances of thinking or body/extension; second, it is essentially open and changing as a vulnerable life integrated in love, people, and biosphere, food, water, light, etc. So the idea of self-same "mind" or "self" is flawed. Thinking is possible because of this integrated vulnerability, not the reverse, and the assumption of "power" and "identity" comes from a reaction and fear of vulnerability, survival, and a need for integration and love.”

In retrospection, I can’t stop smiling at my naïve certitude: “thinking is only possible because of this integrated vulnerability, not the reverse”! This is the reductionism that I have been criticizing all along. Thinking is possible because we have a sense of self in addition to be integrated in love, people, and biosphere. I call it enigmatically a divine self, that is, it is a subclass of life, eternal life, not dead particles entangled just in food, water, light. My false interpretation couldn’t differentiate between us and other species that don’t have a sense of self—awakened to our being in the world, to our finitude, and to our divine source.

However, I continue to problematize having a sense of self and adamantly try to show how we are “nothing but” a biological and naturalistic being:

“Pantheism and theism exaggerate on homogeneity, universality, and self-sameness. In another word, [I believed] all living beings are connected because of their genuine biological vulnerability and integration in biosphere, but uniquely different and other in their perception of the world (pay attention I don't talk about living beings or souls outside biosphere). I assume theism and pantheism are inclined to project human unique capacity for conceptualization and holistic perception to universe, so to reduce the universe to our consciousness. Co-extensively, we prioritize human consciousness to the perception of a fish or bat. After all, in self inflation, we apply our conception of "oneness" (universal thinking) to universe or God, not seeing that this blissful mystical experience might be a representation of a thirst for expansion, will to power, and desire for immortality, in utter ignorance of the fact that we exist because of mortality.”

Now I wonder, how I could be so misguided and insist on my one-dimensional naturalistic view. I see a difference between species but don’t want to admit the fact that we have a sense of Self which has to be unshrouded from fictitious identities (the point of Tibetan Book of Dead). Or more accurately, it is the point of Religions of the Book, that we have to save our divine self (the divine seed) from the burden of beastly desires (Nafs, pleasure) and not reducing it to naturalistic needs only. I was lost even after 2005 --‘the event’ in my life. Why? Because I wanted to find the elixir of transformation of consciousness and freedom without the grace of God, the same mistake as all naturalistic and secularistic views.

So I continued my fallacious arguments:

“Our cells and flesh and blood and brain and consciousness exist because they receive food, light, air, water from biosphere/the world and need people and love to survive. As we are impressed by our seemingly self-same universal concepts (unchanging), while the individual instantiations of the universal concepts, this pen, that chair, this human being, that tree or animal (Aristotle hacceity: thisness, particularity) come and go (die, expire), we separate our vulnerability, sensation, and body from the "unchangeable" world of "mind" or "consciousness" or "soul". So, accordingly, we have this accidental and erroneous body/sensation/impermanent/vulnerable/dying body against our nucleus eternal mind, consciousness, and soul. Transformation of consciousness is not really the death of awareness and thinking but to see that consciousness escapes from the vulnerable body while vulnerable body is a condition of its possibility. Transformation of self-consciousness is to overcome its desire for self-same extension to eternity, overcoming prioritizing itself to the status of God or Universe, and overcoming its destructive will to power: what Foucault calls the sovereign subject as the ground of "humanism" (as a hegemonic force exerting its cruel destructive force over its own, all other species, and the whole planet.)”

Life is a tough journey, to know how one has been going through dead ends and misguided paths. When I read this piece again, I wonder how I could be so blind. Similar to all naturalistic traditions and physicalism/materialism, I reduce consciousness to our body. And our body is contingent and passing and dying, therefore there is no essential eternal soul in us. I can see now how I was reductionist and insisting—like a blind man—that only what is seeable, visible, and tangible is real! This is the reductionism of our modern physics. Max Plank says: only what is measurable (quantifiable) is real! What is painful to me is that even the potentially awakening moment of ‘the event’ of 2005 couldn’t put me on the right path. The Foucauldean exaggerated mistaken notions had permeated into my soul. I needed ups and downs and back and forth until I can gather two seemingly opposites together: the relational (social)-self, and the nucleus-self work together; the body and the soul complement each other; both the finite and infinite reside in us; vulnerability and consciousness depend on each other, not that the latter is caused by the former.

If I lose my flexibility in thinking, I can’t correct my mistakes and those who insist on their mistakes and sins are doomed to annihilation and suffering. ‘The event’ of 2005 in my life, taught me one precious lesson, among others: I have to see the direction of my soul from finite to infinite, from the beast to the divine, and always always include the grace of God, not falling in the delusion of Gnosticism: as if we have and can have ultimate control upon our knowledge or the world. With best intentions, this will end up in libido dominandi, an assumption of a false naturalistic god within, which can know everything, without the grace of God.

04/29/16