Who are we really?
I’ve been thinking recently about how much I’ve changed in the last few years. I sometimes think once you decide to go down a certain road, ask certain questions, you can never go back. It’s like taking the red pill … you can be perfectly happy without knowing the ‘truth’, but once you do, there’s no way you can accept the illusion you’ve been living with. That way, you live a more intense life for sure, though it most definitely won’t be as stable or safe.
But what if you can go back? What if you can go back to looking for contentment and happiness and stability, as opposed to stimulation and intensity? Is it a choice you can make whenever you want, and are we scared to make it, just because it is a choice, and we hate all decisions?
If all you’re ultimately looking for is happiness (please, let’s not get into the suffering vs. happiness discussion - social conditioning or whatever, I do value happiness), does it matter at all how you get it? Is it possible to go back and be happy? In other words, if I chose to get married and live in the ‘burbs, is it possible that I would be happy?
Links:
Here’s my take on this situation, on an early saturday morning, after i have been wading through gigabytes of random data, and on a slight sleep deprivation high.
If one is not used to asking that question, it can have life changing consequences. A close friend asked herself that question two years ago and has yet to find the answer. She’d lost herself in her four years at a very competitive undergrad program, and when she was done with, she realised that she’d gone down a path she should not have gone down upon. For her, its only downhill from there (in my opinion). A search for a “normal” life has led to decisions that have made things only worse for her. You might know who I am talking about.
Society conditions us to a certain way of thinking about life. Life becomes a program, a series of steps one has to go through, and a set of roles that need to be played.
I am not convinced that is necessarily the way to happiness, but thats me. Happiness is highly person specific. Stability might bring you happiness, but it could also make you bored and unhappy. On the other hand uncertainty/intensity/stimulation can make you miserable from time to time, but make life much more worthwhile. Ultimately it all depends on how much risk one is willing to bear. There are some for whom stability is like death, because it prevents you from having new experiences. For someone like me, who believes that the sole utility of life is gathering experiences, stability can be quite challenging. This has a bearing on both professional, and personal decisions. On the other hand, there are people who are perfectly happy leading routine lives where little changes, and what works for them is good for them. In that sense I don’t understand why you put happiness on the stability side of the stability/uncertainty spectrum. Perhaps thats a personal opinion of yours.
Comment by He who shall not be flamed — August 20, 2005 @ 8:59 am
Wow … if I’m thinking of the right person … that’s scary. At least I did my experiment by staking all my savings, not by getting married and dragging another person into it.
My take on the happiness derived from stability vs. stimulation is that the choice changes the intensity of what you feel. I think the emotions you experience are equally distributed across a median (I would say like a sine curve, but that implies a stable frequency, and I think it’s more random than that). Anyway, if we think of it as a sine curve, it basically implies that we can only feel as much happiness as we can pain or sorrow. So if we choose to live a safe, stable life, we reduce the amplitude of the curve, and we’re essentially trading off intensity of joy that can be experienced against that of pain (that’s loss averse behavior, right?)
I’m pretty clear on the above, and on which side I choose to be on. What I’m wondering is, can I just as easily choose the other? After all, at some point I did choose stimulation over stability, and now I cannot imagine going back to stability. But is the choice really one-directional? Could I make the decision again that stability is what will make me happy? And if I decide that several years from now, would I have burned bridges and closed down options?
I think I do know the answer to these questions. All said and done, this is the way I’m choosing to live my life, and I’m reaffirming that choice through my actions. Even if I am burning bridges, I would much rather have certain happiness now than uncertain happiness at some unknown point in the future.
(Btw, I’m not putting happiness on any one side of the equation. I agree it’s completely individual, based on risk or loss aversion)
Comment by Administrator — August 20, 2005 @ 4:31 pm
Let’s start with the basics - there is no such thing as the absence of illusion - you couldn’t survive it. (Eliot says: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”). There is only the dance of the seven veils. What you call ‘the awakening’ is really just the act of swapping one illusion for another. Witness your preoccupation with happiness. There is no question, therefore of ‘discovering’ who you truly are - it’s only a question of deciding what fiction about your life you’d rather cling to now.
It follows that stability or instability has nothing to do with illusion or the absence of it. Or rather - there is, a priori, no reason to believe that the search for stability is any more illusory than the search for stimulation. What the ‘red pill’ can show you is how insignificant you are, and how difficult security can be to come by. But it doesn’t need to change what you crave.
Look at it this way - we live in a world where nothing has meaning. In your opinion, at least, the only way to cope with this is to find some absolute that you can hold on to. That absolute could be either stability or stimulation - there’s no real reason to pick one over the other. If the final belief must be in a fiction - then we’re free to choose whatever fiction we like - the fiction of contentment is no less seductive than the fiction of excitement - both are ultimately unlivable except through a triumph of the imagination. All happiness is the suspension of disbelief anyway. The only thing the red pill has done is that it’s made you conscious of the deception, made it voluntary. Where once you simply accepted the normal life as a given good, you now have to recognise that there are many different ways to live your life, but you could still choose the house in the suburbs and with the same imagination it takes to make your life in the city fulfilling and meaningful and a source of happiness to you now, you could feel the same amount of happiness in your life in the burbs. Essentially happiness / satisfaction can never come from external things, it can only come from within, through an act of will.
The question of whether you, having seen the problem and chosen for a while to believe in the fiction of excitement and simulation can now go back to living a more settled life is a more difficult one - but my point is that it’s idiosyncratic to you. Other people could see the futility of living and choose to believe in the family life instead. As far as the question goes for you - I don’t think you can do it with the beliefs you currently have. But it would be easy enough to see through those beliefs as well (since nothing has meaning and everything is fiction). It’s not hard to make the case that art and theatre and books are all empty and bogus. And that the settled life is somehow a greater source of happiness - it’s just a question of using your imagination a little. The only question is - why would you want to. It’s like starting to write a book and then abandoning it half way to write a different book which is just as bad / good.
One last thing - it’s unfair that you refuse to debate the happiness vs suffering point, since it’s central to this argument in the first place. The only reason the questions you’re asking are even worth considering is if one believes in happiness - otherwise there’s no earthly reason why you would want to go back to your old illusions, even if that meant that you would only suffer in your brave new world (the classic ‘awakening’ speech, btw, just take down your copy of the Tempest and read it)
Comment by Myrmidon — August 20, 2005 @ 4:32 pm
A quick follow up - since I just saw your comment - to use your amplitude analogy - there’s nothing inherent in stability or stimulation that causes one to have greater amplitude than the other. You are choosing to make the stimulation curve have greater amplitude than the stability curve, someone else could easily go the other way. As I said in my earlier comment - it’s all in your head.
Comment by Myrmidon — August 20, 2005 @ 4:35 pm
note - everything i am saying is my opinion only, and so dont take it personally. “who are you really?” cannot be answered with language and words. it has to be felt, experienced first, and the only way to feel it is to silence your ego-mind first. also, i would like to point that “collecting experiences” cannot bring happinness, cannot be the meaning of life. its just a kind of addiction. i think the primary cause of suffering is our attachment to our pasts (and in turn, our clouded limited judgement about our futures). to break this attachment, one has to “lose” experiences, not gain even more. when asked what he had gained from enlightenment, the buddha said “i have gained nothing, but i have lost everything.” indeed, life is a game of losing.
Comment by untutored — August 20, 2005 @ 8:23 pm
untutored: agree. Precisely why i was very careful to use the word ‘utility’ and not ‘meaning’. there is not deeper ‘meaning’ to any of this than there is any ‘meaning’ to a piece of rock in the desert. so while ‘collecting experiences’ , or building up past baggage is not the ‘meaning or the purpose’ of life, it is certainly a good way (in my opinion) of using up the time we have as sentient beings.
Comment by He who shall not be flamed — August 20, 2005 @ 9:55 pm
well, i would argue that there is a purpose to life, and the purpose is to find out who you are, where you came from, and where you will go after your body disintegrates. will collecting experiences help you figure out the answers to these questions? perhaps. but then you need to choose those experiences carefully (looking for a teacher, a guru, someone who HAS seen, is one set of experiences - iterative, i grant you that - for instance). not become an experience junkie, is all i am saying.
Comment by untutored — August 20, 2005 @ 10:50 pm
Myrmidon: I see what you’re saying about leaving a book half-read. The initial pattern of living a conventional life happens by default, and isn’t really a choice. Once you take the red pill, you consciously make a choice and pick between stability and stimulation. And the choice you make is irrelevant, so why bother changing it.
Re absolutes, you know what I feel about that. The more absolutes you have, the less complicated your life is. The fewer you have, the more you have to think through and decide for yourself (I digress, but do you remember the quote on the plaque at the Lincoln Center library - something about people who don’t believe in moral absolutes having the most strongly held values?) Anyway, once you reach the realization that there is no larger meaning or purpose to life, you cannot make the case to make the effort to go on living, unless you pick the fact of existence as an absolute. Once you’re there, then you decide to make the most of it by gathering experiences.
Untutored: First of all, I most definitely welcome argument, so nothing will be taken personally … and welcome (also btw, do I know you/do you have a blog … just curious)
I agree, like HWSNBF, that collecting experiences is a good way to pass the time we’re here. Another point though, is that if you get utility from gathering as many experiences as possible, aren’t you really detached? You can experience something with great intensity, and keep moving on to other things. You could argue that you are attached to the idea of gathering experiences, but I think that’s as good or as bad as being attached to the idea of being detached (I’ve had this discussion with someone else - about the futility of ’seeking’ detachment). Also, I think baggage comes from expectations from a future, a feeling that our life has to culminate in something, meet a grand purpose.
I agree less with your second comment - if you think the purpose of life is to figure out what the purpose of life is, isn’t that most definitely an addiction? Also, since you will probably come up with the answer that there is no purpose to life, you will probably decide not to procreate, so natural selection will work to eliminate the instinct to question - hence the purpose of life cannot possibly be to figure out what the purpose of life is.
Comment by Administrator — August 21, 2005 @ 2:41 am
“You can experience something with great intensity, and keep moving on to other things.”
true. but collecting experiences why? just to experience the world intensely? how do you know that your experience is as intense as it could possibly be? how do you know that your experience is not limited by the baggage of past experiences? by experience do you mean sense pleasures - if so, can a lasting sense of happiness come from sense pleasures? and if not, what do you mean by experience? etc etc (as in, many more questions follow)
“You could argue that you are attached to the idea of gathering experiences, but I think that’s as good or as bad as being attached to the idea of being detached”
absolutely agree with you. the idea of spiritual fulfillment can become bondage. witness how the over-eager seeker tries to play karma police to the rest of humankind. but here is the thing. i think its a necessary attachment, something which you have to submit yourself to, if you are serious about figuring out this puzzle, this mystery that is life. but keep in mind that there is a subtle distinction here between what the goal is and how to get to it. if the goal is liberation, then true liberation can only happen when the mind lets go of the drive towards liberation itself, but that, i think, is the final step. to get to that point, where one liberates oneself from the need to be liberated, one has to attach oneself to the sattwic ideal of liberation, of a right law of living. ultimately, all attachment is bondage. attachment to the idea of liberation, however, is merely a necessary, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT, condition for true liberation. there is a beautiful passage from sri aurobindo’s “essays on the gita” which says all this perfectly. let me quote him
“For, as the Gita points out, the sattwa binds as much as the other gunas, and binds just in the same way, by desire, by ego; a nobler desire, a purer ego, - but as long as in any form these two hold the being, there is no freedom. The man of virtue, of knowledge, has his ego of the virtuous man, his ego of knowledge, and it is that sattwic ego which he seeks to satisfy; for his own sake he seeks virtue and knowledge. Only when we cease to satisfy the ego, to think and to will from the ego, the limited “I” in us, then is there a real freedom…….For that we must rise high above the three gunas, become trigunatita; for that Self is beyond the sattwic principle. We have to climb to it through the sattwa, but we attain to it only when we get beyond sattwa; we reach out to it from the ego, but only reach it by leaving the ego. We are drawn towards it by the highest, most passionate, most stupendous and ecstatic of all desires; but we can securely live in it only when all desire drops away from us. We have at a certain stage to liberate ourselves even from the desire of our liberation.”
“if you think the purpose of life is to figure out what the purpose of life is, isn’t that most definitely an addiction?”
let me amplify a little. when i said the purpose of life is to find out who you are, i meant that all of us are searching for that ONE truth, that ONE right law of living, implicitly or explicitly, (human life is really a futile attempt to express the inexpressible) and we turn to books, movies, music, the arts for it. but traction on this search is only possible once we have understood who we are, inside, who is acting, who is thinking, who is feeling, who is experiencing the negative emotions etc. in other words, this is not merely a psychological exercise, but also a physiological awakening. understanding our body, its needs (really the right word is “demands”), etc etc. in fact this is why many meditation techniques emphasize taking your attention to this or that part of the body (when i first tried these techniques, i was simply astonished at the inability of my mind to even contemplate the body parts, let alone take my attention to them - as in, am i supposed to “feel” that part? am i supposed to “visualize” it as if from outside or as if from inside? etc etc). the body-mind complex is one, and to gain traction on who we are, we have to first understand what this thing called the body is, etc etc. second of all, as for the addiction bit, refer to my comment and sri aurobindo’s quote above.
finally, about your question as to my identity, no i dont think you know me, and neither do i know who you are. i think there is a strong case for anonymity in the blogosphere, because unlike the real world, the blog world allows us to exchange views without having to be calibrated by where we came from, what schooling we had, how we spend our spare time, etc., but only by what we have to say and how we say it. this freedom should be valued. of course the freedom is subject to abuse, when anonymous commentators indulge their lower natures without restraint, but that is a necessary evil that the blog world must put up with, i think. no, i dont have a blog yet, but planning to open one soon, if i am able to overcome my trepidation about putting my thoughts out there for everyone to see (although i am doing that anyway, right?:):) )
cheers.
Comment by untutored — August 21, 2005 @ 3:44 am
All: Just to reiterate - I’m not convinced that it is possible to ‘collect’ experiences - I think it is only possible to imagine them. In a world without purpose or meaning (I clearly don’t buy all this malarkey about the ‘one truth’ - caps lock and incoherent ramblings from faux sages notwithstanding) the only experiences you have are the ones you imagine - so with sufficient imagination you could find incredible sentient stimulation in total silence as well - all this other stuff (art, religion, blogging) is just a crutch for those of us (read: all of us) who don’t have that kind of imagination.
Of course, precisely because life has no purpose / meaning the fact that we’re using a crutch doesn’t really matter - whatever works for you, works.
MR: I agree about the absolutes point - the whole point about the ‘red pill’ or the awakening is that it destroys the absolutes you once held sacred. I don’t think that increases complexity - it just makes the problem undefined. Like trying to do a linear maximisation problem with no constraints. Whether that’s something you want or not is entirely up to you. Oh, and for the record, I do think there is one absolute - and that’s existence. Everything else is imagination.
Comment by Myrmidon — August 21, 2005 @ 12:44 pm
myrmidon - “I do think there is one absolute - and that’s existence.” well said. could this be the one truth i was referring to? actually, i was trying, ineffectively it turns out, to say that we are all searching for the path to happiness (of course some of us may be consciously searching for pain, but i have yet to meet such a person). dont necessarily agree with everything else you have said, but i am not looking to convert anyone here.
Comment by untutored — August 21, 2005 @ 2:09 pm
Interesting thoughts, all. Where I come out on all of this is that if the utility or happiness we gain out of all experiences is ultimately all in our heads, we should go ahead and do what comes naturally without over-intellectualizing (ironic, I know). The only advantage is that going through this thought process is a liberating experience, and we realize that we don’t need to restrict ourselves to a certain set of experiences or way of life that we have been conditioned into thinking is the only way to live. What I don’t have patience with is the mind-set that then passes judgment saying that this ‘free and liberated’ life should then necessarily thumb its nose at convention and gathering hedonistic thrills should be the new objective of life. That, in essence, is trading one absolute for another, and I don’t see the point of doing that.
Comment by Administrator — August 22, 2005 @ 6:14 pm
indeed, this has been an interesting discussion. meditativerose, i’d like to share a few more thoughts, inspired by your comment that all our experiences are in our heads. to me, this sounds like fluff or at best a convenience, because the imprints of our experiences are not merely left in the mind, but also in the body. correspondingly, our ability to make what we do of our experiences is as much a physical process as it is a mental/intellectual/imaginative one. this amplifies my earlier comment about body-awareness. every emotion has a corresponding rhythm in the nervous system (and the most perceptible evidence of this is in our breath). if the mind is the glow of the candle, then the nervous system is the wick. indeed, contentment is at its core a nervous phenomenon, not a mental/intellectual one. it follows that i dont buy this black-box concept of the intelligent will as an omnipotent contentment-generator. a proper redressal of the emotional residues of our experiences, must be a physical, vital process. in fact, this is how i relate to all the talk of spirituality and enlightenment. think of dualities as contrapuntal nervous states, and liberation or enlightenment as that particular equilibrium where there is no nervous agitation brought on by sense perceptions. only one in a million gets to that state, but even they cannot get there by merely willing it to happen. physical discipline is absolutely essential for contentment. this is the key reason why i feel that contentment cannot be had from external experiences. it must be physiologically cultivated through a proper calming of the nervous system (and it is only to that extent that the notion of will power is at all relevant, since sitting with your eyes closed and observing your thoughts, or contorting your body in a yogic posture and facing the pain head on, is so hard). is it then any surprise that the slaying of desire (through a withdrawal of the senses into a space of silence) is so much an imperative in the oriental prescription for happiness? thanks for the space.
Comment by untutored — August 23, 2005 @ 2:00 pm
My 2-pence, for what it’s worth:
I took this call sometime ago. Am I happy about it? I don’t know… it’s frightening to wonder if I passed up something I might never have again. But does it make sense? You betcha. Trust the instinct. Everything else is bunk.
As to why we’re here… I think we’re here to pursue happiness. In whatever way each of us prefers… some might be genuinely happy being a couch potato, others might take pleasure in coffee and smokes on the waterfront, other still in writing or music, and some in a frenetic pace. You gotta do what you want to do. I think that’s what it comes down to. I’m not certain that stimulation-and-intensity and happiness are mutually exclusive, though. One might come through the other, yes?
Comment by Progga — August 28, 2005 @ 2:22 am
Progga - Agree. What was that quote … something about living the best of all possible lives … I might be quoting out of context, but since we can never really ‘test’ our possible lives and evaluate each of them, all we really have for better or worse, is the one we choose to live. Unbearable lightness of being and all that jazz … we ultimately make the choice to take our lives lightly or think of life’s lightness as unbearable.
About happiness, I most definitely agree with your view, and I find it hard to imagine happiness without stimulation and intensity, but have to accept that others may not see it that way, and might in fact find it difficult to understand why some of us are willing to take on the risk of being hurt by choosing stimulation over stability.
Comment by Administrator — August 29, 2005 @ 5:02 pm