Karma part 2

Is there a way to inhabit peacefully the world?

What is karma telling us about this? How can one live within the world without entertaining and feeding what cuts us from the wonder of being alive? Isn't that the whole point of life?

Sorry for the vague generality of these questions. Let me start by this often quoted sentence attributed to Rumi, saying that you shouldn't be looking for love, but rather becoming aware of everything that cuts you from experiencing it. I guess that's how I would understand the whole idea of karma.

This type of questioning might seem vain, sorry, especially since most of those who know me know how little I set an example for anything. But I'm regularly caught in questions about the consequence of one's actions - and doubts as to whether or not I should be doing this or that. To be actually more honest, it often comes back to the idea of complete equivalence of several alternatives: which one should prevail? How to filter what is really important and what isn't? How not to succumb to the emotional movements that suddenly make me think that I should give everything up and either kill myself or give all my wealth to X or Y? 
I don't know about you, but most of the time, very few things make me go one or the other way. I usually consider my existence as some sort of random deviation - especially when I am pursuing a goal in time. But every day, and at every second, I know that none of the things that I'm building have to become true. Anything can happen, and I'm likely to change, maybe my mind, because of other glimpses of awareness, or because something suddenly unlocks and a whole new path opens. It's a bit uncomfortable because it gives me a very hard time explaining what I do (nothing) to people who seem more grounded. Also, it makes me go a great length for very little movement - a rich inner life, and a thiner body bank account. 
And more often than not, we meet someone, have an experience, walk close to the sea, and we think "that's it". The turmoil stops for a heartbeat and things become limpid. The heart beats clearly, the quality of the moment is palatable. The air is dense, suffused with fragility. No one wants to break it. There's a release, and an understanding that comes from it. It's actually something that I've tried to make possible in massages (but right now I no longer think I'm able to do this). How beautiful it is, and how easily it can be broken, read a book by Daniel Mendelsohn (sorry I just liked the title and also I like to drop some sort of reference for intellectual credibility). Even a selfie seems inappropriate. Those moments leave no trace. Hearts open, and we feel some sort of blurring of the usual barriers. You and I are still there, but it's not as clear anymore. Or it's the I-the world thing that doesn't quite hold. Actually, there's less blabla. The sea has withdrawn for a while, and you are left to contemplate. 

These moments inform us about some sort of hidden continent that everyday life renders impalpable - submerges. These moments are perfect - wholesome. You need nothing else. There's no need for an explanation, for any form of clinging, possessivity, justification. It's neither mine nor yours, nor ours. It knows no boundary. It is there, always. And it helps you recalibrate your judgement.

So yeah. Anyone can relate to this (this is step 2 of how to talk like a guru, step one being don't assert, whischpeeer and use sea metaphors). When these moments are extreme, attention gets even less divided. A teacher I had, Daniel Milo, talked about miracles, dark or pink. Negative or positive. Trauma, and rapture. Experiences of life where there is no protective membrane to isolate you from it - whether because your whole system is under threat and you can not escape - or because, on the opposite, there is no fear, a complete relaxation into being. Miracles disrupt life as we know it, the apparent continuous stream of things. As a survival tool, the split between observer and experience can either be complete (dissociation) or absent. After that, it's the trope: "things will never be the same again". 

It all goes back to basic questions of life. What some religions insisted upon, things like the 10 commandments, are basic instructions in how you function. This is something that drove me crazy when I was going to public courts and thinking about whether or not I should become a lawyer. I was deeply infused by Dostoïevski on justice, and not only was it clear to me that crime, as for Raskolnikov, was in itself a punishment for the one who committed the deed, but also, I felt very close to one of Staretz Zossima's aides, who says that the day a judge will ask the criminal for forgiveness, humanity will become mature (more or less). The fact that, on top of having people who violated the possibilities for them to live peacefully in society, we also punish them seemed backward-looking. Of course, did I think at the time, it shouldn't be a surprise if the statistics prove that prison doesn't uproot criminal behaviors or tendencies. I don't really see how an institution can actually harvest the conditions for individuals to learn how to deal with their hurt psyches, but I guess some of the ideas presented here might be explored. 

The main thing was, and still is, that whatever happens to you, whatever choices you make, you have to deal with how your actions are undertaken. Of course this has some very upsetting consequences, and can be very deterministic. But I think this applies during every day life. At any given moment, as David Forster Wallace put it, we choose what we worship.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water." 

And so these default settings, these unconscious ways of understanding and creating our self-image are that which make us go this or that way. For instance, I've always thought of myself as average-ly intelligent (even though I had to admit that it just meant that I was fit for school and I liked it), and so I regularly have some sort of panic attack because I should write a PhD thesis instead of blogging for my Mum and Léa. Or I think that I'm worth this or that, and it cuts me from the rest of experience. I feel superior to the common guy who has a footballer's haircut, or anything, really, and any of the filters that I apply cut me from parts of the experience. It cuts me from the continuous recognition and joy that there is to live in peace, recognizing one of the most fundamental things: that nothing is bad, that no one is an other, that there is just what there is, and no need to qualify it. If I succumb to the thin spears of whatever has been inherited, or reproduced over the years, unexamined, and suddenly start interpreting the world from the point of view of me, of the self, with full power given to the interpretation, the act in itself divides me. It might be anger, or preoccupation, and I follow it, and I won't talk with the man in front of me who looks in disarray because that douche blocks my way - bloody tourists. It's very basic, almost too simple, but this is how it builds up and creates your life, encapsulates you or frees you from the ego shell.

It means specifically that karma is not some extraterritorial power from afar that retributed you for all your deeds, or at least it requires no mediation, no stretch into time. Or, let's say, not necessarily. It seems much more simple than this. What it means is actually that anything that we entertain, actions, as well as thoughts, desires, conclusions, opinions, shapes our view of the world, and creates our lives. The ocean comparison is famous. There is a turmoil of ideas, sensations, opinions, knowledge, data about the world and when you are born, you are drowned in it. Depending on your localisation and the cumulated whereabouts of your life, you become this or that person. To a certain extend, that you is a habit. If I don't pay attention to my behaviour, the habits reinforce themselves. And then someday I realize that I treat this or that person in a bad way, for this or that reason. I recognise that this is no longer valid. Because I pay attention to it. So the habit dissolves. And so it goes, through our lives. What remains unchecked dances as the natural me, unfettered. And the slow, imperceptible evolutions, changes of circumstances, maturations make way, and generate the regular crises under which we try to assess if the ground on which we based our decisions, our sense of self, still holds truth. 

There are two things in there. One is that the unchecked part of life is actually what filters reality for us, the hidden question being if there is a way to be with reality without interpretation. The other one is that reincarnation is the logical consequence of this lack of attention. Beware, it will get again exaggeratingly meticulous. 

So coming to the first thing. We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are, said Anais Nin - and so many others. This is obvious, so I won't detail it. But just as a reminder, this means, also, that whatever counts as a valid representation of reality - whether a political discourse, a symbolic representation, a map - only is valid as long as its validity is not massively abandoned. It's true, as long as we haven't agreed on another version. This gives us an impression of coherence and stability to the world. Our current doubts with reality would make us question this latest assumption - anti-intellectualism and fake information seeming as valuable as what used to be the grounds on which we discussed. It seems that we are now struggling to even talk about something in common. But anyway, the only thing that I really wanted to say is that democratic debates are only enjoyable if we know that we are discussing representations - it is good to do so. But our discussions and stronger representations might make us unaware of the fact that that which we are discussing is but a representation. If I don't read the newspaper for a while (which I did), coming back, I wonder what people are talking about and realising that it looks like one of these soap operas where nothing really changes so much). The constructed consensus appears more easily to the untrained mind. Does that mean that there is no way to talk about the world and that we should drop out of facts, politics, etc., as seems to be the case now? Not quite, because this too is an interpretation - a negative one, the one you use when you flee from the world. And also, that there is no other way, the interpretation of the world is a given for the human condition. 

 

Let me quote Alexandra David-Néel on this. In The secrets of tibetan buddhism, she talks about what happens when one of our senses is stimulated. In this example, it is sight, and there is a horse running a bit further away. English translation by me, sorry. 

Est-ce à dire qu’en vérité absolue nos sens sont entrés en contact avec un cheval réel […] ? Rien ne le prouve, toute preuve que l’on pourrait apporter reposerait encore sur le témoignage des sens, témoignage qui ne ferait que repéter les inexactitudes précédemment enregistrées. Il ne nous est rien permis de s’imposer au-delà de l’existence d’un stimulus qui a provoqué la sensation que nous avons éprouvée, sensation que nous avons interprétée à notre façon en y ajoutant des images de notre invention.
Faut-il croire que nous avons été dupes d’un pur mirage ? Pas absolument. Vraisemblablement, le stimulus correspond à quelque chose, mais ce quelque chose […] nous demeure inconnu.

Would it mean that in the absolute truth our senses have been in contact with a real horse (...)? Nothing proves it, any proof thereof would again be relying on the testimony of our senses, testimony that could not but repeat the inaccuracies previously recorded. There is nothing that we can allow ourselves to impose beyond the existence of a stimulus that provoked the sensation we felt, sensation that we interpreted our way, adding to it images of our own making. 

Should we believe that we have been deceived by a mirage? Not absolutely. In all likelihood, the stimulus corresponds with something, but this something (...) remains unknown to us. 

So the main point is that the world, reality, remain unknowable by the senses. The mental is a sense too. This has deep implications. But for now, what we can say is that we can not see, or sense, or feel, or qualify reality with complete accuracy. The unconscious link between what is felt and what is interpreted, the underlying certainty that we can grasp the world, is being put out and deprived of its automaticity. No matter how good we get, it will remain unknown. This has been explored many times, by Virginia Woolf, notably. And since the mind is also a sense, its production - knowledge, information, opinions, feeling, and everything that creates the I - will always be limited by this, can only be an illusion. Not so cool right? Not so cool, especially given the passion with which we pursue some ambitions - to map the world, map the brain, get to know everything, an ambition that will probably lead to the making of an extraordinarily powerful machine. See this article on AI for instance, and my upcoming contribution on the subject (link missing).

The second thing comes from the fact that the mind is a sense. It is the sense of the ego, that which creates me as a me, as separated from the rest. Interestingly, its expression is mediated via language, and the classical sentence in French, at least, reflects this dissociation by creating the subject and the object, dissociated and reunited by a verb. My knowledge of grammar is extremely poor so please feel free to not take this too seriously. 

Anyway, the next post will be on Reincarnation, which I guess is a continuation of this one. Sorry, few jokes there! My bad.