I think about death a lot. At my age it kind of goes with the territory. I fail to see how a thinking person can pass the middle of life and start treading on the statistical thin ice of your end and not have a few such thoughts. You’ve successfully worked through the Erikson Stage (Remember Psych 101?—Erik Erikson’s stages of development) of "Generativity vs. Stagnation", solved your mid-life crisis, only to come smack up against the fact that it didn’t really matter anyway, you aren’t going to be around all that much longer and you’d better start worrying about something besides yourself. Erikson’s last stage is Old Age—End of Life “Integrity vs. Despair”. That’s when you either just give up on yourself and your life and go stark raving bonkers, drown your soul in a deepening sea of booze and material goods, or decide that the mythical “one act of kindness” would be a good thing to leave behind and start behaving accordingly. People that negotiate this stage successfully have discovered that, for instance, they might rather be remembered as a nice guy than someone who stuck up for his principles and acted like an asshole about it. They might come to discover that no matter what amazing thoughts they have had in their life, what artistic creations have come from their hearts and heads, what scientific revelations have come through their brains and their mouths, the person who was them will sooner or later be nothing but dust, beyond memory. There were wise sages and glorious kings in Mohenjo-Daro, there were kind, loving families sitting happily around fires in front of caves in the Dordogne when we all had more prominent brow ridges. They are all gone, we dig up their bones and put them in museums, they have no names, they are no longer they, the bones are things, not people.
Erikson’s “integrity” at the end of life does not necessarily mean just honesty, it means wholeness, an ability to see one’s life as a complete fact with a beginning and an end. It means not being stuck on leaving ANYTHING behind, and accepting that fact too—that even though your kids (and maybe even your grandkids if you’re lucky) will remember what a kind gentle soul you were, or how good the cookies you made were, or how well you could fix their bicycles and help them build treehouses, that kind of remembrance lasts only a generation or so. After that, what? Do you care what happens after that? Can you deal with the idea that your constituent atoms, so firmly under your sway now, will be free to sift down into the soil, be blown over the land as dust, migrate to the stars? Do you think instead that you will be in some place in the clouds or in some purgatorial limbo where you can look down and feel forgotten or neglected or wronged if your precious reputation should suffer some dissing after your neurons have stopped firing? Can you get used to the idea of there being no You?
Christianity was invented in cultures which placed a large value on the ego—Western civilization is mostly about Being Me, getting what I Need. It is very much not about humans (whatever “human” is or was) being just animals, merely another cog in the amazingly complex machine we call the Universe. The simplest way to get a person who is fixated on his ego to relax is to tell him stories about Heaven and Hell and promise him that he will remain an intact being, upstairs or down, no matter what. And the only way to make the story hang together logically is to include a rule that only humans need apply; if all forms of life could go to this Heaven, if it included everyone from amoebae on down, it would obviously get pretty crowded in short order (unless maybe you believe the Earth is only 4000 years old.) And the Heaven Story’s first assumption is that humans are an elite, a privileged animal which gets to exist outside the normal universe after his/her biology stops functioning. So we have a story that a) only ego-centric people are attracted to, b) denies any sense of the vastness and wonder of life evolving through eons to its present complexity, and c) assumes that only humans get to participate in the extra-curricular activity called life after death. Life after Death? All life follows death, all life requires death. The food you eat grows in the soil made from the dust of your distant forebears; someday you too will be part of a carrot. The best thing you can do is learn to be happy with that fact, even amused by it. That will be your legacy, that is how you will be of some use to the future of life. Don’t get any pompous notions about leaving any ideas or creations behind. Nobody will care when your name can no longer be pronounced by whatever form humans evolve into.
So--evolution. This is the dawning of the Age of Evolution, in the sense that 150 some years ago a stage curtain was drawn aside and we were able to finally get a view of ourselves as part of a much bigger Whole than we had ever imagined. As thinking beings, the concept of evolution has made a huge difference in how we conceive of all of our sciences, especially those that concern us. It is now in the 21st century unimaginably quaint to think of humans as never having been anything but this, and never changing into anything different. However, if you look at the evolution of life, it is difficult, though not impossible, to take it in without putting an upwards slope on the whole thing. Starting from blue green algae, we eventually get humans. Is that an improvement? Progress? Is it all going Somewhere? It would certainly make our lives seem to have more purpose if we could think that by in some small way, some miniscule mutation, some tiny behavioral modification, we were contributing to the glorious progression of Life, helping out the cause as it were. But looking at the theory of evolution that way is to use rainbow glasses. The simple selection of traits through survival of organisms better adapted to their environment does not necessarily imply an “upward” trend. It could just as easily imply that life on this Earth will someday again consist of blue green algae. There are other theoretical biologies that posit things about life’s necessarily increasing levels of complexity, but in this chaotic day and age some of us might have a few notions to the contrary about the need or desirability of increasing complexity. In other words, anything beyond simple survival of the fittest is not science, it is religion. And most of us do need that—it is very difficult to accept your life and all lives before you as not “going somewhere” as meaningless, in whatever sense we humans mean “meaning”. So, let’s assume we are evolving toward something better. As the weirdos of living beings, organisms with a consciousness, we are able to visualize a better person, a Year 7575 model Human Being, who might have evolved to be kinder, gentler, less impactive of the planet’s resources, maybe smarter? Where do these ideas come from? Why can we conceive of this Better Human? Does simply being able to imagine it mean that we are trying on some level to evolve into such a being? I am sorry to have to say I cannot answer that—I hope so, I dream so, but my evolving is done, I have reproduced my DNA already, I will soon be the dust such evolved persons may breathe in 10,000 years and hopefully they will have conquered hay fever and silicosis by then. Otherwise, all I can say is I tried, thank you very much, and I hope the carrots that grow from my bones taste good. (Try baking them with a little butter in a covered dish—wonderful!)
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Karma and horn-blowing
One frustration in having discussions with otherwise smart, feeling people is that many of us misuse the word karma. And not just once in awhile, but often—in its mistaken meaning of “fate” it has become a major excuse among the new age set for putting off action, for a fatalism that ill-becomes their otherwise proactive, forward-looking attitudes. I am always hearing things like “My karma made me do it.” or “ I just have to accept being the way I am, it’s my karma.” or “It was my karma that I had to sleep with the milkman—a past-life thing.” If you really want to be that way, to live in a world of predetermination (perhaps ruled by a big all-controlling bearded God-father on a throne who spends his time watching for fallen sparrows) then you really should drop the pretense of being up-to-date and with-it and simply use the word “fate” or “fortune” instead. If you really believe you are the way you are because of fate, you belong in the middle ages—that’s what kept the serfs toiling away and the lords and ladies partying guiltlessly. O Fortuna, velut luna . . .sors immanis et inanis “Oh Fortune, variable as the moon… you are monstrous and empty” (First lines of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana—read the rest here: Carmina Burana)
The classical tradition that generated the word karma is Hindu-Buddhist culture. As you may know, Buddhism in its less mystical forms is not really a religion it is a psychology, a science of the mind. Classical conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs) was first described in the West in the late 1800’s, but the same human processes were known to Buddhist thinkers several thousand years ago and these were called karma. Karma is not Fate, it is the sum total of all the conditioned learning you have experienced since birth, and more, it is the total of all conditioned learning the human race has experienced, even since the human race was a single celled free-floater in a warm ancient sea. All evolution is karma, all pain-avoidance, all pleasure seeking, all learning. It is everything you have taught yourself to do to recover from the anxiety of having been spoken sharply to by your mother, to try to feel better after your dad spanked you, all the chocolates you have eaten because the sweetness makes the anxiety go away because it is sweet like mother’s milk which caused your infant’s hunger-anxiety to diminish. You can build chains of conditioning from the smallest actions, from infancy through old age. Using the concepts of evolutionary biology, you can even build them from amoebas to humans. Early Hindu thinkers knew this and from this comes the connection of karma to “past lives”. No mainstream Buddhist thinker believes in a reincarnation that would be similar to pulling the hard drive out of a dying computer and plugging it into a new, freshly born one. They do not believe that you and your soul-mate ruled together over a central Asian kingdom 5000 years ago and are so much in love now because you have re-discovered each other. It's nothing that storybook-simple. What they mean with “karma of past lives” is the total of all the learning that has taken place, the fact that we know how to feed ourselves, reproduce, compose symphonies. They are not judgmental like we are in the West, so there is no bad or good in karma—it is just a fact.
Karma is neither good nor bad, but what the teachings from Eastern religions (psychologies, therapeutic methods) are trying to say is that to live fully, one must not be governed by all the negative things humans have learned and that the easiest way to do this and let go is to break the chains of conditioning. In the West we attempt to sort out bad conditioning from good and keep the good. In the East, they just teach that one must break the karmic connection, bad and good will sort themselves out. It would be impossible to unravel all the karma we have built up or sort through it, but it is unnecessary. What the Eastern psychologist-meditators are saying is that to heal yourself from the pain, it is unimportant to trace the karmic connections; the only thing that is necessary is that we break the chains—become unconditioned. The method here is usually considered to be meditation, but there are other ways. All they are saying is that you must think outside the box. Do not be what you have been taught to be. Make new decisions based on the feeling of the moment, not on what you “have always felt you were”. Every thought or feeling comes in three parts: first the thought, like “Oh, there’s an apple on the table.” then the connection, the learning that links your thought to your reaction. The third part, the reaction, in this case is, “Hmmm, I could eat that apple because I’m a little hungry.” The second part, the link is that you have learned that apples satisfy hunger. The goal in Zen and other meditations is to eliminate the second part so that you say, “Oh, there’s an apple. . .” and stop there. No reaction. Stay in the thought. Be immediate. Only by breaking these conditioned reactions can we be free of karma. Your past life as a Scythian princess has nothing to do with it.
This is getting wordy and that is never my intent. Too many words spoil the idea. In other business, please forgive me for a little horn-tooting—a poem of mine has been “published” in an on-line poetry journal, here:
Holocene Lament (It's at the bottom of the page)
Winter's coming--have you got your tomatoes in?
The classical tradition that generated the word karma is Hindu-Buddhist culture. As you may know, Buddhism in its less mystical forms is not really a religion it is a psychology, a science of the mind. Classical conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs) was first described in the West in the late 1800’s, but the same human processes were known to Buddhist thinkers several thousand years ago and these were called karma. Karma is not Fate, it is the sum total of all the conditioned learning you have experienced since birth, and more, it is the total of all conditioned learning the human race has experienced, even since the human race was a single celled free-floater in a warm ancient sea. All evolution is karma, all pain-avoidance, all pleasure seeking, all learning. It is everything you have taught yourself to do to recover from the anxiety of having been spoken sharply to by your mother, to try to feel better after your dad spanked you, all the chocolates you have eaten because the sweetness makes the anxiety go away because it is sweet like mother’s milk which caused your infant’s hunger-anxiety to diminish. You can build chains of conditioning from the smallest actions, from infancy through old age. Using the concepts of evolutionary biology, you can even build them from amoebas to humans. Early Hindu thinkers knew this and from this comes the connection of karma to “past lives”. No mainstream Buddhist thinker believes in a reincarnation that would be similar to pulling the hard drive out of a dying computer and plugging it into a new, freshly born one. They do not believe that you and your soul-mate ruled together over a central Asian kingdom 5000 years ago and are so much in love now because you have re-discovered each other. It's nothing that storybook-simple. What they mean with “karma of past lives” is the total of all the learning that has taken place, the fact that we know how to feed ourselves, reproduce, compose symphonies. They are not judgmental like we are in the West, so there is no bad or good in karma—it is just a fact.
Karma is neither good nor bad, but what the teachings from Eastern religions (psychologies, therapeutic methods) are trying to say is that to live fully, one must not be governed by all the negative things humans have learned and that the easiest way to do this and let go is to break the chains of conditioning. In the West we attempt to sort out bad conditioning from good and keep the good. In the East, they just teach that one must break the karmic connection, bad and good will sort themselves out. It would be impossible to unravel all the karma we have built up or sort through it, but it is unnecessary. What the Eastern psychologist-meditators are saying is that to heal yourself from the pain, it is unimportant to trace the karmic connections; the only thing that is necessary is that we break the chains—become unconditioned. The method here is usually considered to be meditation, but there are other ways. All they are saying is that you must think outside the box. Do not be what you have been taught to be. Make new decisions based on the feeling of the moment, not on what you “have always felt you were”. Every thought or feeling comes in three parts: first the thought, like “Oh, there’s an apple on the table.” then the connection, the learning that links your thought to your reaction. The third part, the reaction, in this case is, “Hmmm, I could eat that apple because I’m a little hungry.” The second part, the link is that you have learned that apples satisfy hunger. The goal in Zen and other meditations is to eliminate the second part so that you say, “Oh, there’s an apple. . .” and stop there. No reaction. Stay in the thought. Be immediate. Only by breaking these conditioned reactions can we be free of karma. Your past life as a Scythian princess has nothing to do with it.
This is getting wordy and that is never my intent. Too many words spoil the idea. In other business, please forgive me for a little horn-tooting—a poem of mine has been “published” in an on-line poetry journal, here:
Holocene Lament (It's at the bottom of the page)
Winter's coming--have you got your tomatoes in?
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