(3)

Each of us, I suppose, develops his or her own unique philosophy for dealing with the vicissitudes of living, arrived at via some mysterious process by which received wisdom and individual psychology are fused.  I once knew, for instance, a man whose temperament was such that he refused to let anything bother him, no matter what that might be.  Whenever something unpleasant or irritating occurred, if ever somebody disagreeable crossed his path, he didn't get upset.  He shrugged off worry, grinned at bad luck; did his best to make things better but then, having once tried, simply forgot all about it.  His unceasing good humor was a source of amazement to me, and I asked him one day how he managed to achieve it.  What he told me was this:  "It's simple, really.  I just realized at a certain point that everything's fucked up.  I mean, I'm fucked up, you're fucked up, the whole world's fucked up – so there's really not much point in worrying about it,  I used to try to figure things out.  And then, somewhere along the way, I realized I couldn't, and probably never would.  So I stopped trying.  I don't think that's a good thing or a bad thing.  It's just that I know that everything's fucked up, and there's nothing I can do about it.  Except maybe laugh."  And laugh he did.  He laughed all the time.

Another man I knew told me once that he went through life feeling always as though he were trying to "wake up."  He said that he felt as if this existence was a kind of charade, a deception of the mind, a trick, a trap.  What he wanted, he told me, was to shake free from all illusion, to awaken from the dream of this world into some greater state of awareness, an awareness which, he felt, would be equivalent to a state of bliss.  All of his life he'd been wondering just how to do this, and struggling to embody its accomplishment.

I've also read stories of certain Buddhist monks who drank and indulged in violent emotions or sexual excess.  Other monks, of course, led very ascetic lives.  The most important point seemed to be to learn how best to comprehend the true nature of existence:  asceticism and indulgence were considered to be equally valid paths, so long as the guiding principle was one of coming to understand the impermanence of being.

In the end, I'm not sure which of these ideas to believe.  It seems to me that to say we are simply "fucked up" and leave it at that is not enough.  It is not, so to speak, a "righteous" enough path.  The fucked-up parts of ourselves seem to me to be like knots in our psyches which we must work to untie.  They represent those aspects within us that are least childlike and most childish.  Left unattended, they lead us into a careless sort of self-indulgence that brooks no insight into the nature of being (unless that indulgence ends by making us feel so "lost" to ourselves that no choice remains but to fight our way back to self-discovery again).  In my experience they are the parts of ourselves most likely to breed laziness, invite self-deception, and end in a kind of self-contempt.  Resolving problem areas within oneself may not solve the greater mystery, but at least it helps loosen the blindfold that keeps us from apprehending that mystery clearly.

And yet, to say that life is ultimately no more than a deception, a charade, an illusion that traps, also does not seem to me to be quite right.  It avoids answering that old, old question, from which so many other questions spring:  Why be born into this world, why have this vast universe, why hear and taste and smell this reality, why be graced with this life, if it is only something which, in the end, we must learn to give up?  Of course, in the end we are forced to give it up anyway; but to say that it was fundamentally pointless all along seems to me contrary to common sense, as well as an inexplicable and indefensible waste of creative energy.

On the other hand, I am inspired to be neither overly indulgent nor unduly abstemious when it comes to my human appetites.  The self-ordaining laws that have made me, via the workings of my personal idiosyncrasies, who and what I am, lead me to believe myself neither saint nor sinner.  I am a common man, with common needs and common desires.  Some of these abet my goal of self-discovery, some lead me astray.  I fend for myself as best I can.

And yet still I ask:  Why is it that I, who have already unraveled so many psychological knots and done away with so much self-destructive behavior, should continue to feel like a man blindly groping his way along some barely discernible path?  Is it that I have come to that impasse whereby a man must learn to "lose his life in order to gain his soul"?  Meaning by "life" all those conceptions of the self that are bound up one way and another with egotism and pride, and by "soul" that which is gained as we learn to see reality for what it really is – whatever that may in the end turn out to be?  As mysterious as all this sounds, it's the nearest I can come to the truth – although the truth need not, I believe, remain forever a mystery . . .

There is a tremendous storm blowing through town tonight.  The wind shrieks round the house; the windows rattle; the very roof shakes as if it were going to be torn off.  The lights go out and then blink back on again; somewhere in the distance I hear a siren wail.  The wind will sweep the trees clean of leaves tonight; tomorrow they will stand naked, blackened barbs against a whitening sky . . .

DISSATISFACTION