Ten for Ben

Thank you, for your interest in my work and wanting to hear more about it. Questions come very easily, but to answer them properly takes time and energy on my part; I will try to help as well as I can with my limited means.

These questions are good because they get right to the heart of the matter:

What am “I” truly; and, when “I” do realize this, will “I” be extinguished in the process, unable to tell one thing from another, or myself? Will there be anything left of “me”? Will there be a “me” of me left who will experience things, know things, have joys? Well the good news is yes! And, the bad news is yes!

If you think of the ecological system of say, a rainforest, you can use this as an analogy to begin to understand the self. In an ecological system each part plays a role in the system as a whole: the plants put out flowers which are pollinated by insects, then bear fruit which feed the small animals, who in their turn feed large animals, etc.

In a natural environment, every species is important to the workings of the system from the specialized bacteria to the types of plants and animals, from the soil content to the macroclimate. They all work together to form a whole living super-organism: a rainforest (for instance). Such systems are dynamic in that they allow for a certain amount of change: species populations might rise of fall; while others step in to fill the role those no longer play.

To begin to identify the self, you can recognize your likes and dislikes, your hopes and fears, your fallacies and achievements, your affiliations, heroes and demons. There is far more to you than the physical organism sitting on your meditation cushion. Your identity combines all of this myriad of details and many more into what you recognize as “myself”.

All of these many opinions, ideas, feelings, and longings work together in the identity of your personhood. Your particular combination is different from mine obviously, so you can’t confuse me as being the same as you. (In fact, taken as a whole, there is and could never be another combination of attributes the same as yours: you are unique!)

But, all of your attributes that I have mentioned do not exist in isolation from other things. You like green, and green is the color of leaves. Everything about you is connected in some way to everything else. And everything is connected together.

In fact because all of this is so connected, it is impossible to say exactly where you end and non-you begins. Perhaps we could say that you dislike purple; purple is definitely not you, it’s the opposite of the spectrum to you. But in reality while you love green, you also sort off like blue, and some blues are very purply in coloration; and they are ok with you too, so maybe you don’t dislike them as much as other purples. So, the line around your dislike of purple has slipped a little.

And, the system is dynamic: You like green and you like green leaves, but one day your treasured green leaves turn brown, and then you begin to like brown too. You have changed a little bit, and now have added an appreciation of brown to your identity. I hope you will forgive me for making this example so simple, but it helps to make this analogy more clear.

It is the path of the Buddha to know the true self, and in that knowing to live one’s life as best as one can. This is the path that you and I are on. In knowing this truth, there are understandings that the workings of the ignorant mind cannot comprehend. It is appropriate to leave these childhood understandings behind.

In the landscape of the Great Mind, previously held views and ideas take on new comprehensions. In this “new terrain”, the understandings that you are gifted with, will not always fit into the human realm of understandings very easily. Self is one of these concepts that both reveals and eludes. The problem is compounded by the propensity in this culture to view self as a thing, when really it is a knowing of the deepest dimensions, eminent and resiliently coalescent, of an individual self-revealing personality.

Able to realize its own eminent modality, gifts that realization with a kind of identity that is at once self sustaining and aware, and further organizing - in the conditions of absolute freedom and expression, and all knowing thusness.

In other words, within the greater and absolute ontology of its highest realizable, resplendently omniscient, ever self-actualizing and self-revealing, forever processional, supra-foundational whole truth.

It is in this knowing then, that our self is both revealed and reinitiated, remembered and awakened to its new reality of effervescent possibility and wondrously developing interest, prescient wisdom, joy and fecundity.