Hamlet: What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of
Fortune, that she sends you to prison thither?
Guildenstern:
Prison, my lord?
Hamlet:
Denmark's a prison.
Rosencrantz:
Then is the world one.
Hamlet:
A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons,
Demark being one o' th' worst.
Rosencrantz:
We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet:
Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or
Bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
-- Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii
This thing that we call 'I' is nothing but a construct, a figment of our imaginative brains. This is the conclusion of much of the profoundest knowledge we have, yet it is practically unimaginable to our everyday minds. We interact on a personal basis, we experience things that register as good or bad for our very personal well-being, we live our lives each as unique and special creatures, and we revel in and cherish that uniqueness against all challengers, including the wisdom of the ages. We are all, like Hamlet, enclosed within the private prisons of our selves, and we like it that way, myself included. I am unique.
Things have become even more complicated since Shakespeare's time. We live in a mechanized, semi-sterile world too often disconnected from nature and the earth, and it's easy to lose our way. Our thinking has created many developments in the world, but we're out of balance with the simplicity of just being in the world. I have been faithfully continuing my meditations although mostly it's been just that, blind faith. Most of the time I've had no idea what I was doing, and was probably just making things worse. Maybe I'll look back on what I'm writing today and conclude that I'm still just making things worse, but I'm hoping not. I've gained some appreciation for the Zen predilection for paradox. If I can fully appreciate the sound of one hand clapping, I think I will have regained a level of comfort with that ever-elusive true self, and the simple pleasure of just taking in each moment one at a time without having to think about everything. There is so much we all share that is beyond words, before words, and outside of the limitations of intellection that give rise to paradox, good and bad, one and many, self and other. Life is more than these words. We have to stop and breathe it in.
Einstein proved that time and space are relative, but we persist in conceptualizing that they are not. The closer we look at these assumptions that define our everyday lives, the less solid they all appear. If it's more useful for us to persist in these assumptions, it's no less useful to also try and keep things in perspective and remain open to all the possibilities instead of clinging to fixed ideas. We need to stay flexible. As long as we keep trying to retain this image or that, we blur our picture of the world and reveal it only peeking through a maze of preconceptions and predispositions. Sometimes we don't even see it at all.
I don't think there's anything overly esoteric about what I'm trying to do. Quite the contrary, in fact. I'm just trying to follow the psalm that contained my grandmother's favorite verse. She quoted it so many times: "God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble." It's from Psalm 46, reprinted below:
1: God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
2: Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
3: Though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. Selah.
4: There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.
5: God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.
6: Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
7: The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah.
8: Come and see the works of the Lord, the desolation he has brought on the earth.
9: He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire.
10: Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.
11: The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah.
-- Psalm 46
I'm just trying to be still. It hasn't been easy. I keep learning more about what "being still" is. It's an acquired taste. I'm feeling my way as I go, and no one can help me. I can only do this myself. We really are unique -- whatever that means.
Survival is the second law of humanity.
The first is that we are all one.
-- Joseph Campbell
