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Four
Meanings of Life
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Four
Meanings of Life by Forrest D.
Poston
I'll confess that calling these
"meanings" may
be cheating just a bit. Attitudes might catch the idea
more accurately,
but I'm beginning to suspect that, in this case at
least, attitude and
meaning are intertwined in critical ways. When you look
over the list,
you may notice that as attitudes they have a lot in
common.
* Yes. (Joseph Campbell)
* You don't answer the questions; you follow them. (Josh
Tarsky)
* We are the otters of the universe.(Richard Bach)
* Lets go exploring. (Bill Watterson in "Calvin and
Hobbes")
I'm not going to vivisect (good
ideas are
living things) each one of these, but I will start with
"Yes" anyway.
Actually, I'll start with "No." It's been many years
since my
undergraduate philosophy days, but I remember a few
things about a
group called the Jainists, and they are among the
extreme "no" folk.
The Buddhist idea that all life is sorrowful (or another
translation
would be that all life is in some way unsatisfactory) is
based on the
realization that all life feeds on life. To some degree,
we must
destroy to live. Whether we eat a cow or a carrot, we
are taking that
form of energy and altering it into something else
(ourselves). But the
cow and the carrot are doing the same thing with grass
and soil.
Creation and destruction are companions. (Even the
artist destroys the
blank canvas that was there in order to show color, and
the body you
had five minutes ago has shoved aside some more dead
skin in favor of
new cells.) The question becomes how to deal with
situation.
The Jainist response begins
with limiting the
type and amount of food. Then there's movement. Walking
can cause death
when you don't see that ant. Wait. Breathing means
inhaling whatever
may be in the air, so you have to wear some type of
mask. You eat less
and less, walk less and less. Eventually, of course, you
die, ending
your life, the life of whatever you fall upon, and the
life of the
various bacteria and such that depend on your living
body. That's the
ultimate no, and it's a failure because it breaks the
rule that gives
it existence. Other groups have decided that
sex/procreation are wrong
so the entire group becomes celibate. That also means
the group ceases
to exist after a relatively short time. Some people and
ideas can be
truly depressing. Well, I like absurd better, but let
them walk the
path they choose.
In the West, we're particularly
fond of
dichotomies, tidy pairs of ideas such as up and down,
good and bad,
right and left. One of those key pairs is body and soul
or material and
spirit. Several branches of tradition see the body as
bad and the
soul/spirit as good. The body and material physical
world are to be
resisted, while matters of the spirit are to be pursued.
This is the
"Maybe" in between yes and no. In this variation, parts
of
life/experience are to be accepted while others are
rejected. Yes to
this, but no to that. One thing becomes more real than
another. In this
split existence, the differences are usually considered
clear-cut,
which means individuals really have few choices or
decisions to make.
There's a certain attractive convenience to this path,
but the dangers
are there as well.
With such extreme and tidy
splits, there's a
tendency to deny aspects that are considered dark or
wrong. When the
mind wants something you don't think it should, you
might start saying
that's not me, I'm not that way. My stepmother is fond
of saying things
like, "I don't dislike him. I just dislike the things he
does." It gets
rather complicated, and if you try to pretend that the
"No" aspects
don't exist, you give them absolute power. You can't
control something
if you won't even look at it.
Yes. Yes to it all. The
universe and whatever
extensions there may be exists. Good, bad or
indifferent. That part of
me that wants to do serious harm to certain people is
just as real as
the part that wants to teach them to overcome their
current
shortcomings. The trick is that by saying yes to that
violent part is
the only thing that gives me choice. When I say that
it's there, I can
also say that I'm not going to go break any legs.
Considering my
temper, it's a good thing I learned to say yes and learn
control.
Those people who still read
Carl Jung's work
know it all as the Shadow, that place in ourselves where
we shove and
hide everything we think is wrong or think other people
wouldn't like
if they knew. Sadly, I know far too many people who are
being fully
manipulated by the aspects they dislike because denial
eliminates the
choice for control. Taking a look at your Shadow can be
a bit
disgusting and very disturbing, but there's also a great
deal of
liberation. First, you actually discover that a number
of things you
put there aren't bad at all. A simple one is death. (Not
often that
death gets called simple, is it?) Many of my students
end up writing
about death sometime during the term, and almost
everyone apologizes
for being morbid. They really think that it's wrong to
wonder, wrong to
be curious or furious, and they think no one else thinks
about it. All
subjects fall somewhere under one of two categories:
life or death.
Since you cannot have one of those without the other,
all subjects fall
under just one category, which has no name. So we wonder
about death,
our own, those close to us, those we're mad at, the
world. If we wonder
openly, we can share ideas and fears and hopes. It's
when we turn it
inward into the shadow that we lose control, and that's
all too often
when the violence explodes.
The second good thing about
accepting your
shadow (which doesn't mean going out and doing
everything in it), is
that you no longer have to expend energy denying its
existence, and you
can use that energy for more interesting pursuits. What
you gain is
self-awareness, which also means responsibility. Once
you become
self-aware, you can't run around blaming everyone else
for your
mistakes. Pain in the butt, isn't it? On the other hand,
if you aren't
wasting time and energy blaming someone else when you
fall on your
face, you have the energy to get up learn to do what
works. The path of
Yes means both responsibilty and fun even though many
people treat fun
and responsibility as mutually exclusive.
I'm not saying that mixing the
two well is
overwhelmingly easy, either, but a shift in attitude can
be
particularly useful, as Josh Tarsky discovered. (And if
you're out
there, Josh, get in touch.) Josh fell for the idea that
answers are the
answer, but answers are really no fun at all, even on
those rare
occasions that answers appear to come. Like many of my
students, Josh
got back on the old track from childhood. He started
asking "why?"
There's no end to why, and given the strength of mind
behind Josh's
asking he was really giving himself trouble. He was
reading a journal
entry about the problem when he looked up and said, "You
know, I think
you don't answer the questions; you follow them." There
it was, one of
the most brilliant bits of philosophy you'll ever come
across, simple
and clear.
Questions are the thrill ride,
not answers.
And when you realize that question leading toa answer
leading to
question is the ride, not the destination, life changes.
What was sour
frustration becomes play (which sometimes includes some
sweet or
bittersweet frustration). We're the otters of the
universe because we
love to play, and one of the biggest truths children
know and adults
forget is that learning is the biggest game of all.
That's why you
don't go out looking for set answers, you go exploring
(which comes
from the last Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in the "It's a
Magical World"
collection).
There are forms of play that
are destructive,
sure, but play itself is essential to being human. Take
a walk through
philosophy, religion, and art, and you'll keep finding
people saying
that we must learn to be like children. They don't mean
giving up what
we've learned. They mean taking the attitude of wonder,
adventure, and
exploration. Life dumps crap on us, and it hurts. A
child looks at the
fire and goes, "wow," and then sticks a hand in the fire
and gets
burned. Pain isn't much fun, but there sure is a
wonderful pleasure in
knowing not to stick your hand in that fire again. Ah,
but we do manage
to find other fires, don't we. The trick is simply never
forgetting
"Wow."
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Other Essays and Poetry
Something
Somewhat
Vaguely
Like a Resume
Being
Like
Children
The
Blessing and the Blues
The
Cat With a Bucket List
David
and the Revelation
The
Dawn, the Dark, and the Horse I Didn't Ride In On (an
odd, meandering, semi-romantic story)
Ghost
Dancer
in the Twilight Zone
The
Hair Connection and the Nature of Choices
The Mug,
the Magic, and the Mistake
Trumpet
Player,
USDA Approved
Videos
Poetry
Selected
Poems
The
Poetry
Process
Writing by Current or Former Students
Ms.
Write Meets Her Match in Jr. Ms. Write Now
by Heide Perry
I'll
Just
Have Cats
by Cara Hummel
Toys
to
Toys
by Allyson Bowlds
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