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THE SORROW OF LONELINESS

In Christian ideology, it is said to be humankind's desire for, and subsequent consumption of, the "fruit of knowledge" which caused it to fall from a state of grace.  In consequence, Man, as personified by Adam, was punished by being given a foreknowledge of the certainty of his death, and by being forced to secure his food from that day forward through toil and sweat.  Woman, as personified by Eve, was punished by having her pain in childbirth intensified.  Adam and Eve both became aware of their bodily nakedness, and were denied access to the Tree of Life, the fruit of which would have given them immortality.  While Christianity is generally seen as espousing a hierarchical view with regard to humans and other animals, the underlying premise of certain of these alterations in the conditions of human existence would appear to indicate that, before the fall, humans were thought to have been in some ways similar to animals:  the growing self-awareness over such matters as bodily nakedness, mortality, and death, as well as the subsequent feelings of shame, fear, and loss which accompanied this growth in self-awareness, all point to an a priori existence which was seemingly not unlike that of nonhuman animals.  On the other hand, humans were also viewed as having been to some degree other than animal – the difficulty in procuring food and the pain associated with childbirth causing them to become more like animals, and thus by implication acknowledging them to have been, in their previous condition, less like animals.  Human beings are thus shown, in mythological terms, to have been in their original state both like and unlike nonhuman animals.

It's a complicated picture being presented here.  I believe the early inventors of Christian mythology to have been grappling with the understanding that human beings are born of nature, and yet have something within them which feels to be "greater than," or "other than," that which nature generally allows.  The semblance of knowledge humanity had in its original state becomes by such terms as difficult to imagine as does the Buddhist concept of the emptiness of Original Mind – this (or something similar to this) being what the Garden of Eden and humanity's existence therein was, I suspect, intended to symbolize.

It is the appetite for intellectual knowledge which is seen in both Christian mythology and by the precepts of Buddhism as being responsible for humanity's having lost touch with its original state of grace, or original "emptiness" of mind.  This hunger is not dissimilar in its operation to that of a physical hunger for food or sex:  it drives our mental faculties in the same way that physical need drives the body – or, for that matter, in the same way that the hunger for emotional sensation drives the emotional self.  Closer examination of intellectual hunger reveals it to be a facet of the mind which does, in fact, move animalistically, like a quarry after prey – the quarry being in this case some specific piece of information or some aspect of abstract knowledge which the mind feels compelled to "pursue," "consume," and "digest."  If this pursuit by the mind for knowledge is examined with detachment, it can be seen to demonstrate in its mode of actuation the same sort of narrowed focus and concentration that an animal uses against its selected prey.  A sort of "tunnel vision" is adopted by the mind, and I would suggest that it is the movement of the mind through this "tunnel" as it seeks to capture and engulf some new facet of knowledge which first gave rise to the symbol of the tubularly shaped serpent as the harbinger of humanity's downfall.

The difficulty I have, however, with the story of Adam and Eve is the same difficulty I have with the Buddhist concept of Original Mind:  both seem to indicate that the intellectual hunger of human beings constitutes some sort of mistake.  I too have sometimes speculated along similar lines, and yet I have always come back to the same nagging question:  If such hunger is a mistake, then why did our brains evolve in such a way as to manifest it?  Of course, though we are human we are also animal, and hence it is only natural that we should develop an animalistic hunger for ideas.  One might suggest that such intellectual hunger constitutes nothing more than a kind of "evolutionary awkwardness" in the history of our species – albeit one so extreme in its consequences as to conceivably result in our complete damnation.  Christian ideology holds this to be a relevant possibility; and yet, doesn't this suggestion contain within it the implication that all of life is a mistake – all of life being, by definition, ruled by appetite?

But I have come to believe that the real mistake lies in the idea that the acquisition of intellectual knowledge is an end in itself.  It is not.  Humanity's higher intellect has evolved not as something we need to negate in order to return to the Garden of Eden or to the status of Original Mind; rather, it is something we have evolved in order to allow us to discover it.  Or at least, its discovery may be said to be an outcome of this evolution, whether evolution has occurred to serve this specific purpose or not:  without the presence of a higher intellect, this process of discovery could not take place.  The psychological pain sometimes associated with the human capacity for self-awareness springs from the fact that the presence of intellectual appetite reduces the intellect to the same endless cycle of pleasure and suffering that is experienced in the presence of all the appetites.  Thus the animalistic aspect of the intellect must, finally, be discarded as the ultimate valuation of our mental capacities.  When it is, the presence of the emptiness of Original Mind may be discovered – and, once discovered, recognized to have been in existence all along.

It's this recognition of the presence of the emptiness of Original Mind which, finally, allows for the exercise of the enlightened (i.e. the experiential) self and the development of the Warrior.  For the greater the awareness one has with regard the emptiness of Original Mind, the more likely one is to attain a state of realization with regard one's experiential existence and to develop detachment with regard to the appetites; hence the more likely one is to find release from the bondage of egoism and thus achieve a greater measure of flexibility, of maneuverability, and so, of freedom.

How then should the Warrior conduct him or herself in this world?  The emptiness of Original Mind reveals our perception of reality to be illusory insofar as it is ruled by the appetites, for the appetites are caught up in the illusory belief that their needs and desires can be satiated.  They cannot.  And yet the realm in which the appetites manifest does exist:  reality is real.  If the pursuit of pleasure, and the suffering this engenders, is seen as only illusory, it seems to me that another kind of egoism has been indulged, for the validity of the experiential realm shaped and ruled by appetite has now been reasoned away.  Thus the most appropriate response to pleasure and suffering – as experienced both by the world, and by the individual – must be one of compassion.  If certain aspects of the fundamental creative force are recognized as being "trapped" by the pursuit of pleasure and the suffering that is its inevitable consequence, then compassion stands as a basic prerequisite for any action undertaken in a reality that manifests such pursuit in both illusory and actual ways.  Such a reality might be said, I suppose, to be ruled by "karma" – which is to say, the world I experience might be defined as the permutations of my karma (karma itself being here defined as the individual, idiosyncratic manifestations of my personal energy) which result from its interaction with the karmically energized manifestations of all that exists around me.  My ability to interpret the experiences of this interaction depends, I would suppose, both on the nature of my personal karma and on the degree of detachment with which I am able to observe its varying manifestations.  The emptiness of Original Mind, however – as with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – exists beyond the laws of karma, because it exists beyond the realms of appetite.