Ending Suffering, Part 4: Ending Me

Some years ago I had a remarkable dream. In it I was a raindrop tumbling from a great, gray cloud and I felt ecstatically free the way one can in flying dreams. Then, suddenly, the clouds parted and below me stretched a vast and endless blue ocean and to my horror I realized I was about to be swallowed up in it, that upon splashdown “I” would forever disappear in that great expanse of water. Terror gripped me and I wanted desperately for something to latch on to; to stop or at least forestall my impending doom. But when I hit the water something wonderful happened: I instantly became the ocean itself. Far from being snuffed out, my consciousness simply expanded to become everything.

This series of posts was written because I wanted to try and put into words my own journey of suffering and redemption and in so doing perhaps help others who might also feel a bit like Gene Sprague staring down into the cold waters of San Francisco Bay. I have no idea whether the path I have been pursuing is “right” for anyone else nor do I even know whether it promises me a happy ending (whatever that is).

In point of fact, I don’t really know that I know anything at all, and maybe that is where the journey for us all must begin: in acknowledging that we really know nothing about anything, including ourselves. Rod Serling used to touch on this theme from time to time in The Twilight Zone, when some poor schmo would suddenly wake up to realize that all of creation was a great fabrication built around his lonely little life; or gaze up to realize he was a doll living in a child’s play world; and each of these programs would disturb us because they were reminders that we can never truly know anything about the world around us. You may take comfort (or umbrage) with these words, but do you really know me? Can you ever really know me, or anyone for that matter?

And yet…. Watching yourself or your fellow humans you’d think we were all a bunch of demigods, what with all of our lecturing of others, the demands to “be more like us,” the pontificating from political, religious, and scientific types about this or that “truth.” We wag a finger in the face of another with nary a clue as to how that finger was constructed nor, for that matter, how our central nervous system manages the process of shaking that finger in the first place. Oh, but we “know” things, boy do we humans know things.

I think this absence of knowing gets to the heart of human suffering. We feel as if we are strangers in a strange universe. There is me and there is the universe and because I can never really know that universe I feel terribly lonely and afraid. Metaphorically speaking we ate of the tree of knowledge and that knowledge was sufficient to set us all on edge about ourselves and our place in the world. Scary stuff to the mind.

So if I can’t ever really know anything about the universe out there, all that is left is … me. Can I “know myself” and in that knowing find the “truth” that will “set me free”? The last (or perhaps I should say, most recent) step in my own journey has been in this attempt to get to know the real me. Who am I? Or, more specifically, what am I? In each of my Vision Quests I spent considerable time exploring that question, tracing back my roots, examining the myriad forces that helped to shape me. As it turned out, the search for “me” was far more difficult than I imagined. But it also has become the most important – and rewarding – exercise of my life.

Think about your own life for a moment. “You” arrive on the scene in the form of a wriggling, wet mass of organic potential, nothing more. Your birth in many ways is akin to opening up that shiny new computer, complete with a basic operating system, hard drive, latent memory, and some software to tie it all together. But that’s it.

In the case of the computer, an outside user fires it up, maybe logs onto the Internet or starts creating some files in its memory banks, and thus begins the “life” of that computer. In the case of you, the newborn, the outside world sets upon you with a vengeance and your body’s five senses immediately begin reporting their findings to the brain’s hard drive. For example, in the modern developed world, within seconds of delivery you are suctioned and slapped, inoculated and swabbed, weighed and swaddled and after some handling from mom, dad and anyone else wanting a photograph with Baby X, you are rolled into a nursery surrounded by a variety of other screaming, writhing, snoozing newborns. The newborn’s operating system is now online and its brain is gobbling up stimuli at a breathtaking pace. Notice there is no mention of “you” yet because, other than the name your parents penned onto the birth certificate there is no you. Just a clean slate known as a baby.

Over the ensuing weeks the baby is constantly under siege from (hopefully) well-intentioned stimuli. Again, the baby’s brain at this stage has no concept of human beings, spatial relationships, language, dimensions, colors, sizes, shapes, etc. It is a blank slate upon which its immediate world is furiously scribbling an endless array of lesson plans.  The baby is a body enjoying or rejecting things – it likes warm and soft and dry, for example, and it rejects (through the only way it knows how, crying) cold, hard, wet. Its brain very quickly learns to associate the smell and taste of a breast (not “mom’s” breast, mind you, because human concepts like mom and dad don’t yet exist – just the breast) with putting an end to what it later will come to know as a hunger cramp.

So, for example, the body’s nutritional needs kick in, the brain interprets a hunger pang, and the body’s communication device (the mouth) cries out in the only way it knows how. Fairly quickly a now-familiar entity appears and something warm and soft is pressed to that same wailing mouth which quickly switches to the only feeding motion it understands, sucking. The discomfort disappears. This series of conditioned responses is repeated again and again until it is “learned” by the brain. Over time these same kinds of patterns are repeated in countless ways and the brain gradually learns how to manipulate the body’s hands and fingers, crawl, eat, stand, walk, and eventually talk.

Around the age of two, however, something profound begins to occur to the brain: it starts to recognize a pattern of separation, of an external existence “out there” and a “me” with which that world interacts. Quite suddenly, the brain-body connection morphs into a “me” and now it is no longer an issue of a physical discomfort – now it is an issue of “I am hungry. I am thirsty.” Not surprisingly, we know this period as “the terrible twos” and parents speak of their once-darling child now having “a mind of his own.” The metamorphosis is complete, “I” have arrived on the scene and from that point forward the story of I will only grow in familiarity and intensity.

If, for example, I consider each day as a chapter in my life story, by age 20 I will have told myself the same story of me more than 7,000 times, reinforcing all of the opinions, ideas, concepts, and thoughts that largely were handed to me by the world around me. By 40 I have told myself the same story nearly 15,000 times and by 70 we’re reaching 25,000 repetitions of the same script, helping us better understand the adage, “It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks” or our descriptions of the elderly as “being set in their ways.”

Depending on which script you were handed, that means “you” could have been acting out the same role of being “stupid, smart, funny, an idiot….” thousands of times and never once did it occur to you that the role you were playing actually had nothing to do with you.

All of these are just thoughts, of course, and over time the brain becomes home to an immense library of thoughts forever swirling about like mosquitoes in a swamp. The brain grabs hold of certain thoughts – usually the really juicy ones – and it is these thoughts that we confuse with “I.” So if you spent your formative years being told you were a dunderhead, chances are pretty good there are lots and lots of those thoughts buzzing about your head just waiting to be identified with you.

All of which leads back to the question, then, “What am I?” It’s pretty clear that I have nothing to do with the body since it has pretty much been doing its own thing since conception. It’s also evident that I’m not the thoughts rattling around in the brain since I can neither control which thoughts pop in and out of awareness nor can I predict what they’ll be. And besides, most of the stuff I think about was inherited by the folks that came before me. So if I am neither body nor mind, what is left?

Mystics call it the Self, One, God, Awareness, Presence, Source, the Silent Witness. It is that from which all perceptions of separateness originate. Our suffering, it is said, springs from the mistaken belief that we are separate and apart from each other, from the world around us, from God. So long as I continue to believe that I am a body and a mind I will suffer, because such a belief system requires that I – and everything I love or care about – also die, including the universe itself.

It is important at this juncture to note that these words are not written from the perspective of an awakened guru. Far from it. But what “I” can say is that the constant questioning of myself (“What am I?”) has helped me to stop taking the world and myself quite so seriously. It’s becoming more difficult to sustain any real emotion – particularly anger – toward anything since, again, who or what is experiencing that emotion? Taking “pride” of ownership in anything also is more complicated since, again, it’s not really “I” who is doing those things. It is easier to feel compassion for even the most annoying individuals since it’s pretty clear they’re just acting out the conditioned script they imagine to be them. And yet, stupid drivers can still drive “me” crazy. Go figure.

There are still a lot of questions, of course, but increasingly I see the task isn’t to answer those questions but to let them go, because the mind is just getting in the way of things. Instead of identifying with a thought it’s a lot more satisfying just to observe it passing by like, say, a red car on a highway. In those instances when I find myself “being taken for a ride” by one of those thoughts, I gently remind myself that it’s just a thought, let it go, return to the role of observer. Easier said than done, but usually it works.

The point to all of this I suppose is that as a human I can never overcome my suffering because suffering is inherent to the human condition. You cannot have one without the other. The key, I think, is to overcome one’s sense of humanity or, as Jesus put it, to “be in the world but not of it.” Instead of pronouncing “I think, therefore I am,” perhaps it would be better to realize that “I think, therefore I suffer.”

If you’ve gotten this far it’s maybe occurred to you that this blog is nothing more than a conversation with yourself. And I think that’s one of the great rewards with looking at one’s existence in this new light. We stop doing things for the recognition of ourselves or others and start to get a glimpse into this notion that there really is just the One manifesting Itself in infinite ways. That maybe all “we” are is imagined fragments of the great singularity that once upon a time experienced a Big Bang created this fantasy called the universe and that one day we all will at last return to that singularity, to the Oneness the mystics are always telling us about.

Then again, what do “I” know?