In the cathartic scene of “Good Will Hunting,” our hero is at last forced to accept that the abuse he endured as a child was not his fault. After a lifetime of marching to an invisible drummer, Will is at last so beaten down that the facade cracks and this truth is allowed in. It is a powerful scene that helped secure the film an Oscar nod for its script and acting.
It’s also true of us all. It’s not your fault or mine or anyone else’s.
In the same way that a spontaneous itch prompts my fingers to spring into gear to scratch it, so too do our thoughts spontaneously arise based on a lifetime of habitual thought. It’s not really deniable. Anyone can sit quietly for a moment and watch the thoughts come and go. Which means that none of this thing you and I call ‘my life’ is, in fact, ‘mine.’
This is the Big Secret behind nonduality and the other great spiritual and religious movements. When Jesus said “I am that I am,” all of the minds conceptualized it into, “This MAN is GOD and we must put all our faith in HIM.” Same with Mohammad and Buddha and the rest. But the gnostic and nondual translations of “I Am” are quite different: I Am is true for the whole shebang, no separation, no this and that, just I Am. One.
The mind isn’t keen on this. It likes to blame itself (or others) and to gobble up (or eschew) credit. The mind celebrates itself and beats the shit out of itself. And it does it to others. But look past the mind and it’s pretty clear that it’s all playing out of its own accord. Or as many mystics point out, we aren’t living our lives, we are being lived and the ‘we’ is a figment of its own imagination. We’re akin to Dr. Frankenstein gradually bringing ourselves to life through conceptual thought and language. And we’re just as much a fiction.
Like our equally fictitious Mr. Hunting, it’s when the misery of this mind-made self becomes too great that perhaps a little light is let in (or out?). In a poem I recently stumbled across, the author beautifully summarizes the ‘weight’ of depression:
You said it, how despair
Became so full it pushed you out
Squeezed you out, leaving no room,
no time, no you to relate to it, own it.
Leaving no you.
Otherwise the mind maintains its grasp and an imagined me marches onward to tear down and build up, to criticize and to celebrate, to crucify and deify. On and on and on it goes, endless lifetimes and empires and crusades all hellbent on creating and sustaining and destroying and rebuilding and to what end?
The mind interprets this as cause for depression – after all, there MUST be a point to all of it, right? But the mind only can speak and think from a place of memory, so what can it possibly know of now? What, then, can it possible know of love, compassion, humility except what it has been taught, what has been inherited by other equally fictitious minds?
In those rare instances when the awakened speak of ‘enlightenment’ – the dissolution of the self – they speak not of meaninglessness nor do they urge a path of nihilism. Instead they speak of “liberation.” They have been ‘enlightened’ of life’s great weight, that which ‘depresses’ us. Gone is that imaginary self and its endless litany of wants and needs and hopes and fears. And what is left, I suppose (because I am still trapped deep within this imaginary Doug) is the simple magnificence of Being. What else could there be?
