Last week I heard a Taoist scholar/practitioner say, "Feel small, and your problems will be small."
Makes sense. A similar intuition has been taking root in me since embracing the non-faith of churchlessness six or so years ago.
Most religions teach that bigger is better. We're supposed to expand our consciousness, rise up to heaven, grow in spiritual understanding, enlarge our connection with God.
I used to enjoy the feeling that my devotional practices enjoined by a religious organization -- meditation, volunteering, vegetarianism, tee-totaling, and such -- were helping me to become more.
More detached from this lower world of materiality. More attached to a godly power that was omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. More virtuous and ethical. More in touch with my soul, which would endure for eternity after my physical body/mind died.
Like virtually all religious believers, I was out to solve life's problems (including death) by becoming larger, stronger, and indestructible. Not in a material sense, of course. Spiritually.
Eventually I came to feel that this was a misguided way to go. There's no demonstrable evidence that any person ever has been able to overcome human limitations by becoming larger than life.
However, both logically and experientially I'm attracted to a less is more alternative.
Since we Homo sapiens are so puny, weak, and clueless in comparison to the vast, wild, mysterious cosmos, why not humbly acknowledge our littleness? And perhaps cultivate some shrinking to become even less than we already are.
This isn't any sort of original idea.
Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism/Vedanta, and other "eastern" faiths promote various varieties of no-self or ego-loss. So do the more mystical sides of the world's monotheistic religions.
Striving to become nothing seems contradictory to me, though. When I pull the plug on our bathtub drain, the water doesn't go through any effort to disappear. It just swirls away. Until...it's gone.
Similarly, I suspect that simply observing the nature of what we are -- basically, natural -- is all that needs to be done, or not done, to get one's psyche pleasantly small. (Again, not at all an original idea.)
Modern neuroscience doesn't find any enduring self or soul reflected in human consciousness.
I haven't found one either. It sure seems like there's no difference between me and the rest of the natural world, aside from the fact that, being a self-aware human, I can imagine/ manufacture/ produce/ create a seeming difference.
Isn't it true that what is bothersome are differences? Such as: The difference between what I want to have happen and what does happen. The difference between an enduring universe and a time-limited me.
The smaller I feel, the less these differences matter to me. That may sound paradoxical, but it isn't.
If I consider that I can play golf fairly well, then comparing myself to Tiger Woods makes me feel lowly on the links. But if I see myself as utterly incompetent at playing the game, I've got no pride to defend, so the difference between me and a top pro isn't bothersome.
Here's a thought experiment that I enjoy playing around with:
What if I learned that, ala the Matrix, I wasn't the "me" that I've always considered myself to be, but a computer simulation? (Some scientists take seriously the notion that the universe is simulated reality.)
This knowledge wouldn't change how I experience life directly. But it sure would affect how I experience my experiencing of life.
How? I can't say, because I'm only imagining that I've learned I'm part of a computer simulation. But is this so different from the "real" thing? After all, how could I know for sure that the unveiling of the Matrix wasn't another aspect of an illusion?
As I said on this post recently, in the end imagination is what we're left with when we approach the limits of thing-ness (when we pass from considering discrete things to the seeming unity that things exist in, or as).
So I can imagine that once I've realized that I'm not really the separate "me" I thought I was, but rather part of a simulated whole that includes a representation of the self I seem to be, dying wouldn't bother me nearly as much as it does now.
My substantiality would have been recognized as a mirage. My simulated consciousness would have come to understand that it was a simulation, part and parcel of a wholeness that was out of my control and would continue (or not) with or without me.
Increasingly, it seems to me that what people call "enlightenment" is nothing more than what I've just described: recognizing that the separate enduring self each of us appears to be is just that, an appearance.
Which makes me feel really, really small. Yet also really, really relaxed. Like Janis Joplin said:
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
I am reminded of a 1957 B movie called The Incredible Shrinking Man. As I recall, in the end he shrank (is that a word?) to nothingness. Your post makes me want to watch the movie again. Here's the link to IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050539/
... and I found this on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7iqJo2-6M8
Posted by: Smaysdotcom | April 19, 2010 at 06:18 PM
I often wonder if each grain of sand on a beach realizes it is but one grain or simply considers itself part of a whole with no thought of individual identity.
(To those readers who might suggest this is a silly thing to ponder because sand has no consciousness, I ask: How do you know? Grains of sand may think AND say the same thing about humans.)
Posted by: The Rambling Taoist | April 19, 2010 at 11:29 PM
I like the last bit of the entry, enlightenment in a nutshell. Even though it's an appearance, it's sure fun!
Posted by: Suzanne | April 20, 2010 at 12:46 AM
Brian - you, and all of your blog readers, have heard this before, multiple times and even to the point of boredom:
When neuroscientists probe into the brain, the reason they cannot find anything is because there isn't anything there to find. There can be little doubt that human awareness is generally felt to be approximately centered in between, and in back of, the eyes. What is starkly obvious, when you open up a skull, is that there is a lot of convoluted, folded up, specialized matter that comprises a discrete mass which is identified as a brain.
What knows this? Another brain looking at the opened up skull? Perhaps, but since there is nothing inside any skull except the brain, there remains the question of how any brain knows anything, and what is it that it knows?
My own brain has settled (so to speak) for the notion that there is nothing to realize. I have capitulated to what is obvious and undeniable. There is no separate entity that stands apart from what is called awareness.
It's just plain old Reality.
Posted by: Willie R. | April 20, 2010 at 05:31 AM
The Iceland volcano is something to put us into perspective. Lately the earth has had a lot of those reminders of how little control we have and how small we are in comparison to earth's power.
Posted by: Rain | April 20, 2010 at 07:50 AM
Willie, nicely said. All we are is reality. Reality R Us. We just happen to be a bit of reality that can imagine it is something other than everything else. Douglas Hofstadter calls us a "strange loop." That's for sure:
http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2007/04/youre_a_strange.html
Rain, so true. In the Earth's history there have been numerous mass extinctions caused by tremendous natural changes. We happen to live in a quiet time, geologically and climatologically. But that won't last -- in part, likely, because we humans are now able to produce our own changes, altering Earth's usual feedback systems.
More strange loopiness.
Posted by: Brian Hines | April 20, 2010 at 09:58 AM
",..............which would endure for eternity after my physical body/mind died."
it is this persistent hope that fuels all the major religions, and even many of the more refined metaphysical dalliances.
We have a gun to our head. Nobody know when it will go off. It is impossible to imagine ourselves NOT existing.
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Interesting too, this thing called memory.
If one has a spiritual experience, via meditation...how is one to know it happened unless one remembers it? One must review it to talk about it. One is held to time because memory is obligated to it. Without memory we are helpless. And happened where? I saw inside. The assumption is that it happened somewhere, in some context -- that is the assumption of space.
In the physical world when we do something we have the verification that comes through others....we build a wagon --others use it and see it. We have a spiritual experience, but it is real only in so much as we remember it, like a dream. Where is memory located? Is memory located, stored, in some astral realm or in the neurons which wink out when the body dies? Absolutely everything here in this blog depends on memory, otherwise the body is detained in a nursing home, the *me* a mass of tissue that no longer functions properly. And it can't remember all the totally cool shit it use to think about.
Posted by: Jon Weiss | April 20, 2010 at 10:23 AM
Getting smaller : for a long period of time I was a comma, now without the tail I am a full(?) stop.
Posted by: elizabeth w | April 20, 2010 at 04:08 PM
But when you're with a friend, you're a colon:
If he or she has more selfness than you, make that a semicolon;
Posted by: Brian Hines | April 20, 2010 at 07:46 PM