FUNDAMENTALLY LIKE YOU AND OUT OF TIME I am fascinated with time. Time rules me. Time is indifferent to me. Time destroys me. And yet, time isn’t even real. Time tells me that all phenomena, everything, is impermanent, and yet nothing is impermanent. There is only one thing trickier than time: language. Without language, there is no time. For example, as David Loy tells us, “Without nouns, there are no referents for verbs (past, present, and future tenses). When there are no things that have an existence in time, then it makes no sense to describe someone as being young or old.” What would it mean if you and I didn’t exist in time? For one thing, we would realize that phenomena, things, are time, fundamentally because they have no existence outside of time. The individual self, as a thing, is time, again, because it has no existence outside of time. And so, if the self is time, it means it is process, a flowing of consciousness, at times appearing as thinglike (particle) and, at other times, as thoughtlike (wave). Like time, self flows through life containing everything in it and thus never separate from anything it contains. And so, what’s the point of this little nondual formulation? If I am, as an individual subject, as Jessica Benjamin suggests, “fundamentally like you but unfathomably different and outside your control,” how do I reconcile this inherent tension of difference, caused by the shadow of you, with the nondual proposition of inseparability? This is typically where readers get thrown off. As the Zen master Dogen says, “To study the Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” The irreconcilable relationship between self (or things, time, etc.) and no-self is only an apparent one if we engage in the process of understanding self. This is why I find the therapeutic process so valuable. The very focus on and privileging of self, as it unpacks its very thought process, invariably leads to its (dissolution). Which doesn’t mean the self disappears; it merely means it transforms and expands as a reality and thus includes more perspectives from which to dislodge any tendency to grasp at only one perspective. This slow, unfolding process is quite exquisite as some of you may know. Just turning language over on its head alone opens up what was before a claustrophobic world. And then the self starts opening in ways it never opened before. And opening means fundamentally changing self-perception. And when you change, as the saying goes, the world changes with you.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:42:03 +0000
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