'tis the season

You are here. Image Credit:  NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

The end of one revolution around the sun is pretty much done and we are on our way on another. The days will lengthen until the summer solstice and then begin their reduction, yet all remains in balance. The planet will continue to spin for a few billion years more, by which point, one assumes, we – humanity, that is – will be long gone.

I spend and have spent, a lot of time looking at long temporal eras. I’ve been immersed in a number of cosmologies – principally Buddhist, Daoist, and Hindu – and have an amateur’s grasp of geologic and cosmic time from physics and astronomy. Existence, felt human existence as I’ve experienced it, seems to take place on multiple planes of time.

The brain gets quiet in the face of dizzying time scales. I can somewhat grasp what a hundred years feels like. I’m closer to that number than I have ever been and a century no longer seems so long. I remember the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and even being in my crib. All of that doesn’t seem so distant.

When I look at the events that have transpired on this planet since I can remember becoming sentient here, it seems like a lot. But the themes continue to be minimalist; there is strife and reconciliation and more strife. There are great leaps in technology and improved standards of living and these are entwined with environmental devastation and, yes, more strife. Exploitation seems to be a large part of our experience here. The transactional seems to be the main guide to human relationships, so much so, that when we meet with unconditional acceptance, we are automatically suspicious.

We question: what does that person really want from me? What is my obligation going to be? There is rarely a simple smile, an open embrace, a non-bargained-for desire to aid or receive aid. But such does exist. It may start at the family/clan level, but I’ve encountered it around the world. One could say that these non-transactional interactions are outside the norm, outside the scope of the themes mentioned. Our thematic lives do seem small in range, but I’d argue that within each of those themes – from strife to reconciliation, with all the drama they entail – there is a textural richness that we are but dimly aware of. Consequently, when a reconciliation arises that is unforced, when – of a sudden – that non-transactional acceptance manifests, there is healing and realization of something outside of time.

“It just came out of nowhere! My [adversary] just did [surprising action to resolve whatever the conflict was]!” The cynic will say that this is all well and good, but there’s nothing to stop the present progress from being retarded or falling back into worse shit. However, I’ve found that in many cases rifts that heal surprisingly, seemingly out of nowhere, tend to stay heal. The scars eventually fade because the parties have let go of the old perspectives. They have ceased to identify with the conflict as an everlasting or permanent reality.

There is plenty of daunting, challenging news that we listen to, cling to, and reify. Humans love drama. We love the upset, the anger. We do. Aristotle spoke or the "tragic pleasure of pity and fear." We don’t love the work it takes to resolve strife, for the most part. It’s easier to emote and blame, to get upset and pray our way out of our emotional morass, never really understanding how we got there in the first place; that would mean accepting that the burden of our emotions falls only on our shoulders.

We turn to one another for wisdom or guidance, but even when it’s clear that we don’t listen to sound advice or heed only bad advice, we don’t accept the responsibility for having done so. “Why did I listen to [him, her, or you]?” seems to be how many absolve themselves of bad decision-making.

Of course, this is superficial. We are beset with our superficial understanding ourselves, so much so that we don’t know what a self is. We suspect that we have or are, selves, but rarely realize the “we” that we think we are is at best, a phantom; the self is a fugazi of a lifetime of stimuli, confused with or uncritically accepted as “personality.” To come face to face with the understanding that one is not what one thinks nor that one is “one”, at all, but rather a multitude of conflicting emotional responses, can be shattering. However, it can – and very often is – liberating. In direct proportion to recognizing the multitudinous make-up of what one calls “oneself”, one recognizes that what is, is not so lasting. From there, one can begin to make more informed decisions about what it means to be, to love, to give, to receive.

At this time of the year, on this spinning planet around its star across relatively vast distances, but those same distances paling to nothingness in relation to vaster distances across galaxy, across universe, we humans celebrate the end of a cycle of that revolution with a plethora of symbolic acts of continued light in the world, an opening of a path to realms unseen. The world – well, the northern hemisphere – grows quieter and increasingly into darkness as the solstice comes and then, once past, grows lighter. The light grows. But it grows because of planetary spin and procession in relation to the star at the center of the solar system.

Out of this, has arisen agriculture and sun worship. Myths that held until science codified the reason for the reliable sequence of season and climate. Myth becomes science and we become assured that science is the way to resolve all of our problems, overlooking the possibility that there is much that we don’t understand behind the reliably repetition of experiment. Why is there anything, at all?

That there is existence is taken as a priori. How could it be otherwise? Has it always been so? Have there been other universes that just didn’t make it, where billions of eons of dust never coalesced into a planet? Or where it was only – what? Space? Could there be space without a temporal event? If the Big Bang didn’t happen, what would there be?

Our minds grow silent at the enormity of such a question. How could we not be? But could we not be? Our minds grow silent at the interstices of being and non-being.  Zhuangzi pretty much gets at this here:

 “There is beginning. There is a time before beginning. There
is a time before the time before beginning. There is being. There
is nonbeing. There is a stage before nonbeing. There is a stage
before the stage before nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and
nonbeing. Still, as for being and nonbeing, I do not know which
is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said
something, but I do not know whether what I have said is really
saying something or not.”

What is beyond the temporal? In Buddhist Madhyamika, the idea of eternalism is juxtaposed against the concept of annihilism (Buddhists often use the term “nihilism” but it’s not a universal philosophical usage). The former is passed over because there is posited no thing that can last eternally owing to the composite nature of any singular existent; all that exists is the result of causes and conditions that come together into the unique event and at their dispersal, the event or being, ceases. Likewise, the idea that at the end of a personal existence, there is nothing is refuted by invoking karma that follows in the wake of the individual’s temporal existence. Karma is seen to affect the individual in successive lives until enlightenment is reached. Karma is impersonal and is seen as a motive force for becoming successively until, well, the end of the universe, which is posited and accepted in later Buddhist cosmology. Of course, there are myriad ways to work one’s way to enlightenment; however, a discussion of Buddhist soteriology is not part of this. 

In the Abrahamic religions, particularly in the later Christian and Islamic descendants, the idea of an eternal place (heaven/hell/limbo) in post-mortem existence grows out of the sense of humankind being the center of creation and the result of moral retribution/reward by a creator God who judges individual humans according to how they lived their lives on this planet.

In both cases, the ontologies are reductive and the individual is more or less at the mercy of retribution or reward. Karma may be impersonal, but there still arises a person that is subject to it. As for a rather limited idea of God, one has to question the grounds for why a so-called perfect deity would create a work to grow dissatisfied with it enough to cast it off one by one, into a hell realm? A counter argument is that God loves all His children but in giving them free will, most of them turn their back on Him, so it’s their fault that they wind up in damnation. This has always boggled my mind. If I’m not fully on board with karma, I’m definitely not willing to accept this narrative of a singular deity whose time is spent on making creatures, imbuing them with the ability to suffer and then, after “giving them freewill”, is fine with sending them to a dimension – one assumes this is a physical dimension – to be tortured forever.

On the other hand, that concept of eternal damnation does seem to be a later development. I don’t know that it existed in the early church nor do I recall Jesus the Christ saying anything to the extent that anyone who sinned would be cast into Hell for all eternity. However, humans do seem addicted to the idea that there is a post-earthly existence of extreme suffering for having behaved badly.

It’s difficult to reconcile such a dismal view of the universe when you look at the sky as it meets the horizon and as the planet cools locally, clouds appear toward dusk, flecked with crimson as the sun is further obscured as the hemisphere you’re on turns its face away from the glowing orb some 92,955,807 miles (149,597,870 km) from where you are. Where is the moral center here? It is subsumed by wonder.

The brain grows quiet and heart fills. It fills with wonder and love, a love for the phenomenal world inhabited by other beings. And it might even fill with love for those beings.

Where is this love in the universe? Why should “love” exist when it’s not even certain that human beings are capable of recognizing themselves? But that’s just it. Love, as I intend it here, is something other than or even greater than, mere familial or fraternal love or acceptance. There’s still a sense of self and other in those types of love. That is to say, “these are the people to whom I am bound and all others are less than they”. In the love that I have in mind, there is no Other. We rarely recognize ourselves in the Other and it’s even rarer that we come to understand that we are the Other.

I suspect that when St. John said “God is love”, it is this unquestioning, unqualified love that he had in mind. Is it sustainable? From the people I’ve met who seem to embody it, yes.

Today is Christmas Eve, Hanukkah ended on 18 December, Kwanzaa starts the day after Christmas, and there are other festivals going on that celebrate this shared experience of existence on a globe traveling around a star in a galaxy with billions of other stars, among billions of other galaxies and with that sense that our lives here come and pass quickly. Even though that seems to be the case, we can sense being part of all this in wonder. And we add warmth to that wonder, however fleetingly given life’s woes and struggles and pains, with love.

At this time of year, at this point in human history, I sincerely wish that that wonder and love be shared by all.