DREAMS IN A BACKWATER

PART THREE:

In The World, Not Of It

I

(1)

DREAMS IN A BACKWATER:  fragment

The more truly I come to see myself as being, not only human, but a human-animal, the more truly I come to understand the manner in which I inhabit my world.  The "animal" part of me is largely defined by the immediacy of its relationship to the surrounding environment, that environment consisting solely of that which I can sensorially perceive:  presently, the two rooms of my apartment, its contents, and whatever I'm able to see when I look out through the windows at either end of my apartment.  Out one window I see a parking lot, the back of a church, the back of the public library, several of the neighbors' houses and yards and, a little ways in the distance, part of an old school building where I attended classes as a boy.  Out the other window I can see the alley that lies below me, a flower shop located on the other side of the alley, a bank, a fast-food restaurant, and several more houses.  These buildings, plus the cars passing by or parked along the street, some telephone poles, a few bushes and trees, and a glimpse of the sky, constitute the whole of my immediate surroundings.  Because I am an animal, these items mark, in a very literal way, the limits of my world:  they are all that I am sensorially aware of.  Because I am an animal, this world is knowably real to me because I perceive it with my senses; this sensorial apprehension assures me of its reality.  But the human part of me is also concerned with certain aspects of my environment which, while being derived from the knowledge of my senses, are abstract, or metaphysical, in character.  For instance, because I am a human-animal, this world, however immediate, however knowably real, has about it a sense of unreality.  Because I am a human-animal, I have the feeling that, lurking behind the surface of the things I see, and behind even those things that I can touch, with which I am in actual physical contact, there exists a void.  This void is not something I can see, nor touch, nor know in any usual way through my physical senses.  And yet I believe in it.  Almost I might say that it is the only thing I believe in.  I believe in it because I know that wherever something is, there must also be something which is not.  This is an inference I make based on the knowledge of my senses.  Thus the reality in which I as a human-animal exist can be understood to be made both of the information I receive via my senses, and by the knowledge I derive from what is implied by that information.

The reality in which I live is made of opposing forces:  subjectivity and objectivity, chaos and order, meaning and meaninglessness, etc.  Everything has a relative importance in accordance with the position of its opposing force; these opposing forces are, in turn, part of a spectrum, the sum total of which creates a unity, as sunlight is made of a unity of colors, or the individual spokes of a wheel when joined together make the whole.  Ultimately, being itself must have its opposing force in nonbeing:  being and nonbeing are relative states which are themselves part of a greater unity.  Thus I assume that nonbeing – the void – must exist everywhere.  Though I cannot perceive nonbeing directly, I witness the process of its manifestation everywhere about me through the transitioning of life to death.  Animals have (presumably) no concept of death – or not of their own deaths, at any rate.  As a human-animal, however, I am endowed with the foreknowledge of my death:  I know that I must someday face it.  However, if being assumes nonbeing, then the reverse must also be true.  And so I must conclude that death does not bring about a state of nonexistence, but acts merely as a sort of porthole into another, different state of being.  As life brings death, so death must bring life.

Because I live in a society which does not properly understand or address the animal aspect of my nature, society itself becomes something that I fear more, in a way, than I fear the death of my physical body.  The society in which I live, in its antagonism towards the animality of humans, betrays a desire to suppress the wholesome functioning of my animal nature for the sake of the needs of the social system and its governing powers.  To live in agreement with such a suppression is to live but half a life.  Or, to speak more poetically, I might say that it constitutes a sort of living death.  To battle this suppression I must take on the stance of a "Warrior" towards society.  I become a Warrior not in order to enact any violence towards it – a useless endeavor from every perspective – but to proclaim my desire to survive those societal strictures under which I am forced to live.  To do this, I need to learn first how to recover my animal self.

I have no real guide as to how to do this.  I can only slowly feel my way along.  But it seems to me that in order to recover my animal self I need first to recover my experiential self – which is to say, I need to apprehend myself directly, unguardedly, and without prejudice.  At present I am doing this through the practice of a simple form of meditation:  I sit on my bed with eyes shut and allow strings of thoughts and emotions and memories to arise in me at will, and without interference.  I observe their passage; then I let them go.  This is not as easy a task as it might sound, and requires a certain amount of discipline.  There is for instance always the urge to get up and do something.  This urge I think is a natural and healthy one, and so I sometimes indulge it:  it is, after all, a basic need of the human-animal to look after itself, to procure food, to keep its shelter in order, create art, indulge in play, etc.  Were I to feel myself as having a sense of belonging to some larger community, it would also involve attending to that community's needs.  But, in the world in which I live, how often is this urge – the urge to action – merely a symptom of how my animal nature has been perverted?  How often is it simply a mask I put on the face of boredom – a boredom which ultimately springs from the fact that the fulfillment of my urge to attend to my animal needs has been separated from a true understanding and healthy acceptance of what my animal nature is?  It is in order to gain such acceptance that I meditate, and so I try as often as possible to stay seated upon my bed, allowing whatever thoughts and feelings to come to me as will.  Often as I sit there, I am overcome with humiliation or shame over some memory that arises out of the far-flung past; sometimes I even groan out loud from sheer embarrassment of it!  Sometimes I judge myself harshly:  but I refuse to indulge in that sort of thinking for very long.  Sometimes I get sleepy – and so I sleep.  Sometimes I get lost in daydreams, or I get restless because my thoughts seem to be leading me nowhere.  But I know that this is only a sign of resistance to the discovery of my true self.  And so I keep at it.  I keep looking within, trying to discover what my experience of self really consists of.  Eventually there comes a moment of illumination, and I say, "Ah!  So this is who I really am!"  It is never, of course, in any ultimate or final sense, who I "really" am; there is always another self to be discovered beneath the one that is known.  But as time goes on, I find that I have access to parts of myself I never knew before to exist.  It's a fascinating and exciting voyage to make.

In this way, then, I take my first step on the path of the Warrior.  In taking this step, I am attempting to recover and restore the true relationship between that part of me which is "human" and that which is "animal."  Only in this way, I feel, can I comprehend the true nature of my being and, in so doing, survive successfully – which is to say, with integrity – in this world.