But sometimes, instead of an old lesson needing to be re-learned, we’re noticing a new perspective on an old situation, or seeing a new dimension in something we thought we should’ve known all along.
For example, we have an expectation, fear, or regret, a project and we get lost in it; we ruminate on a detail and forget why we started the project to begin with. We lose ourselves in thought and don’t recognize that we’re living being lost in thought; we’re living an idea and no longer feel our life. We do something and feel we did it incorrectly and think we’re now and forever a mistake. And then we live angry at ourselves. Or we get angry at someone; and somewhere inside us we imagine this anger at another will save us from our own shortcomings⎼ but there’s no such escape. We’re just living scapegoating, living resentment.
Oh, and here’s one that’s common: we’re exercising and thinking mostly of getting it done. Or, similarly, we’re in a car driving to meet friends in order to relax together. But we drive fast; we get all tense trying to get to a future where we can let ourselves relax, instead of driving at a more leisurely pace where we’re at ease right now. How many times do we have to learn such lessons?
These insights are inspired by the 13th century Japanese Zen Master Dogen Zenji’s Being-Time, not that I have more than a basic understanding of his teachings. We often try to withdraw from or escape a situation, emotion, or expected future. We certainly can “time travel;” it’s one of humans’ greatest gifts. It allows us to plan ahead, empathically feel what another person feels, imagine a work of art or what the consequences of an action might be. It makes critical thinking possible. But when we lose perspective, time-travel can become a great peril we inflict on ourselves.
We can never step outside our lives, outside the universe, outside time. The imagined mental travel is itself a moment of life. A thought is time. A cry is time. A book is time. The first flower after winter, the first snowdrop, is the time that is spring. We are being time.
We too easily forget everything around us, everything we’ve experienced, every being around us is our life now. This, right here, right now. There’s no exit from it, not until we die, if then.
The French philosopher, J. P. Sartre, who was a member of the French resistance during WWII, gives us an interesting angle on these insights. Sartre wrote a play during the WWII occupation of France by the Nazis. The play was called No Exit. From one perspective, the play can be seen as an exposition of the hell created by a hellish war and the way the Fascist occupiers treated their fellow human beings. The Nazis deceived themselves, lied about their aims and the reality of others, refusing responsibility, refusing to feel the enormity of pain and destruction they inflicted. The play was first performed in 1944, during the occupation with Nazis in the audience ignorant of this layer of meaning in the play.
The three main characters in No Exit share a room together in hell for eternity. There are no torturers other than themselves, no flames other than the fire of lies and deceptions they lit in themselves. Near the end, one of the characters states “hell is other people.” But this is itself deceptive. Each of the three characters is in hell due to the dishonest, inauthentic ways they think of themselves and others. Each illustrates a different type of self-deception or bad faith towards one’s own truth, a different way to twist their own consciousness into unconsciousness, twist freedom into imprisonment.
How do they lie to themselves? One character acts cowardly, deserts from the army, and justifies this by telling people he refused to fight due to his being a conscientious objector. But he did nothing that showed such commitment. One character pretends their actions weren’t their choice and were forced to do what they did. They repress from conscious awareness the meaning their actions had for others. Another character holds onto one moment of time as if it was inescapable, a label for oneself for eternity. They refuse to acknowledge the nature of time as constant change; or to use Sartre’s terms, as a flight outside of present being, from what one was to what one will be.
We might do something similar. Maybe we don’t help someone who needs it, and we think we’re just powerless to act. We disrespect someone and when called on it, we say “that’s just your perception on it.” Or in reverse, we overemphasize the meaning our actions might have for others by using a label someone else might place on us. We call ourselves a hero or coward, a this or that, and tell ourselves we can’t help it; we were born this way. We don’t recognize we’ve chosen the label. We treat ourselves almost as if we were a robot pre-programmed by who knows whom or what. In this way we deny responsibility and ignore the ways we can change.
Dogen and Sartre represent enormously different approaches. One is a way of Zen practice; the other, a philosophical analysis. Both include an understanding of conscious awareness that can help us see and learn from what we’re looking at. They enlighten the reality of here and now and explore the actuality of time. They both reveal deceptions we might inflict on ourselves, deceptions which arise when we limit our awareness and responsibility, and thus our freedom.
Right now, we’re being called upon, like Sartre was during WWII, to join the resistance to fascism and inhumanity. We’re being called upon to live a deeper life that’s true to ourselves so we’re better able to respond to what this moment in history is asking of us.
How will we respond to the call?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
