The Third Question

 

3. What is the true origin and the meaning of individual differences?

This is the Oh My God question. 

As I explained in my examination of the second question, all true origins are hidden behind a veil of mystery.

This may sound like a copout, but it isn’t. It is perhaps the most important observation we can make in this lifetime, because everything about our attitude, our limitations, our understanding, and our abilities is defined by the extent to which we absorb this fact and allow it to act on us. It is, in essence, the essence of questioning itself.

All true origin is concealed in the unknown. The one fact that we do know is that an origin has taken place. It is already a true origin, because we are in it. It bears a direct comparison to the “true nature” of things in the Buddhist conception, that is, the Dharma. An all-encompassing truth that already exists and is indelible unto itself.

Although we don’t seek the origin of all things here. All we are asking about is the “true origin” of individual differences. In order to really understand this, we would need to turn the clock back to the Big Bang and understand what motive force created the instability in the energetic singularity, causing it to collapse into a material universe of differences. 

Individual differences between human beings are by this directly tied to individuals between solar systems and even between galaxies; and all of that put together, the entire universe, consists of an individual difference between everything compressed into an infinitely tiny and infinitely perfect point, and an expanding universe in which everything continues to become more and more different through the action of time.

While the scales here are too big to imagine or reasonably contemplate, we can turn the dial back in to the level of a personal life” something that Henri Tracol said: “I was born of my wish to be.”

This statement, of course, follows on the already-completely-expressed Dharma of “I am.” Said Dharma engenders the wish to be: “I am” is not enough by itself. It seeks relationship. Being can only be defined through relationship; “I am” can only know itself to the extent that it knows that which is not itself. 

It cannot know what is not itself if there is nothing outside itself. 

This means that human consciousness, and perhaps all consciousness, can only arise through an essential and initial apophatic action: I can only know myself by knowing everything which I am not. The more that I, through my awareness, dismiss everything I encounter by questioning and rejecting it, saying, “not me,” the more clearly the boundaries between “I am” and the outer world are defined. The action becomes most interesting when I begin to understand that the action has to be applied not outwardly, to things that obviously aren’t me (a tree, a bird, my uncle) but inwardly, to things that I generally assume to be me but in fact aren’t me at all.

In this sense a large portion of the psyche turns out to be a parasite that has grown within me and feeds on my Being. Meister Eckhart’s sermons two and three touch deeply on the question of needing to reject not just the premises and suppositions of the outer world as “I am,” but also the suppositions and premises of the inner one. 

One is reminded of the signs posted in stores which are closing: “everything must go.”

The wish to be involves an examination of this kind; and its meaning is contained within the search itself. I will confess that I don’t think I have yet brought the question of meaning, which I examined at great length in my Treatise on Metaphysical Humanism, up against this question of difference in sufficient measure.

Although the phrases “I am” and “I wish to be” are uttered sequentially — because they must be, there is no alternative — I am not so sure they’re different. These are just two manifestations in time and definition of two aspects of a single thing. I’m not sure that we can divorce “I am” from “I wish to be” and be left with anything real. Being contains the wish to be with in it already. In fact, intoning the two statements sequentially already begins to give us the mistaken impression that they are two different things, one a state at rest, and another a state in action. I just don’t think it’s that way. I think that the two forces are reciprocal and exist in a unified state beyond the veil of our limited awareness.

The meaning of individual differences is buried in this wish to know oneself. This is in essence an unfulfillable wish, because the self only comes to exist in the context of not – self, and the perceptions that arise because of relationship between the two. 

This relationship is in eternal movement and evolution, and never the same from one moment to the next, so the wish to know oneself ultimately becomes the action of a wish to live in the present moment and see it clearly. There is a meaning to be discerned here; and yet its nature cannot be written down, because it is molecular, not verbal, and consists of feelings, and an intelligence of insight born of care, which the word wish already expresses.

Meaning is, in other words, organic; and this is the means by which it must be explored. We must go deeper; the surface of the ocean reflects light: it creates beautiful effects, but is in fact a kind of rejection. 

The light that is received by the ocean, on the other hand — the light that passes through its surface, penetrates into its depths and feeds its creatures— gives rise to great wonders and mystery.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.