Wednesday, February 8th 2012
“In teaching, the Buddha never spoke of humans as persons existing in some fixed or static way. Instead, he described us as a collection of five changing processes: the processes of the physical body, of feelings, of perceptions, of responses, & of the flow of consciousness that experiences them all. Our sense of self arises whenever we grasp at or identify these patterns. The process of identification, of selecting patterns to call 'I,' 'me,' 'myself,' is subtle & usually hidden from our awareness. We can identify with our body, feelings, or thoughts; we can identify with images, patterns, roles, & archetypes. Thus, in our culture, we might fix & identify with the role of being a woman or a man, a parent or a child. We might take our family history, our genetics, & our heredity to be who we are. Sometimes we identify with our desires: sexual, aesthetic, or spiritual. In the same way we can focus on our intellect or take our astrological sign as an identity. We can choose the archetype of hero, lover, mother, ne'er-do-well, adventurer, clown, or thief as our identity & live a year or a whole lifetime based on that. To the extent that we grasp these false identities, we continually have to protect & defend ourselves, strive to fulfill what is limited or deficient in them, to fear their loss. Yet, these are not our true identity.”
This is one of my most profound & ongoing challenges in Peace Corps, defining myself. Living without sitemates during my first year of service, & not having as decent a grasp on the Mongolian language as I now have, I found myself defining myself not by others, but by my own solitude. In other areas of my life here in Mongolia, I realize that I have only known my friends here (particularly other volunteers) since June 3rd 2010 when we all first met. I believe that as social creatures, human beings define themselves by other people. What implications does this hold for my own concept of self? For the majority of my service, I have juggled whether or not to ingest the labels & conceptions that others here had put upon me. Perhaps it is most pertinent to mention that fellow volunteers do not truly know me, not in the sense that time & familiarity would breed. With the majority of our service spent at separate sites, face-to-face contact limited to once or twice per year, how could I claim that anyone here knows me? Now, nearing June & my return to America, I have begun to step back into myself.
The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh expresses the oneness of everything with the example of a piece of paper. Holding it up, he said “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water the trees cannot grow; & without trees, you cannot make paper. So the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent on the existence of a cloud. Paper & cloud are so close. Let us think of other things, like sunshine. Sunshine is very important because the forest cannot grow without sunshine, & we as humans cannot grow without sunshine. So the logger needs sunshine in order to cut the tree, & the tree needs sunshine in order to be a tree. Therefore, you can see sunshine in this sheet of paper. & if you look more deeply, with the eyes of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of those who are awake, you see not only the cloud & sunshine in it, but that everything is here, the wheat that became the bread for the logger to eat, the logger's father–everything is in this sheet of paper.”
Jack Kornfield further illustrates this concept by recounting the following story. “The emperor of China asked a renowned Buddhist master if it would be possible to illustrate the nature of self in a visible way. In response, the master had a sixteen-sided room appointed with floor-to-ceiling mirrors that faced one another exactly. In the center he hung a candle aflame. When the emperor entered he could see the individual candle flame in thousands of forms, each of the mirrors extending it far into the distance. Then the master replaced the candle with a small crystal. The emperor could see the small crustal reflected again in every direction. When the master pointed closely at the crystal, the emperor could see the whole room of thousands of crystals reflected in each tiny facet of the crystal in the center. The master showed how the smallest particle contains the whole universe.”
At some point nearing the one year mark of my service, something in me shifted. I started to feel like a part of my community. At the time, I described it to myself that “I stopped seeing Mongolians around me & started seeing people.” Now, I am beginning to realize that my self concept comes from within more than without, that I am not simply a product of my possessions or experiences. Who I am is a constant state of transition & change, a never-ending striving for betterment, a continual drive to move forward, an insistent seeking of inspiration & improvement.
“When we are silent & attentive, we can sense directly how nothing in the world can be truly possessed by us. Clearly we do not possess outer things; we are in some relationship with our cars, our home, our family, our jobs, but whatever that relationship is, it is 'ours' only for a short time. In the end, things, people, or tasks die or change or we lose them. Nothing is exempt.”
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