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Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life?
Three
questions, fourteen words, a mere forty-three characters, that despite their
brevity still manage to superbly frame the central enigma of human existence.
They have occurred to every one of us at one time or another - sometimes as a
brilliant bolt of lightning illuminating our inner sky, sometimes as a fearsome
tremor that shakes the very foundations of our once safe, secure, little world,
leaving behind only a gaping void. Three questions, each that sooner or later
demand an answer from each of us - but offer by way of compensation the prize of
a creative, revitalized, and, above all, meaningful life. Sadly, in the course
of the typical life, they go unanswered as often as not.
Why, you ask?
Spiritual insight is profoundly liberating, and sometimes profoundly
disorienting. In an instant it can dramatically reshape the landscape of a life,
and the landscapes of anyone intimately linked to it. And humanity is
essentially conservative. Throughout the millennia, the prospect of change has
largely been perceived as would an uninvited, unwanted visitor: Draw the
curtains, bar the door. Consider that the oft-quoted, traditional Chinese adage
"May you live in interesting times" was intended as a curse, and not an
exhortation to excitement and adventure! So make no mistake: If you answer the
three questions, your life, and the lives of everyone around you, will surely
change. Then why bother even asking the questions at all, you may ask. To
paraphrase one of my favorite movie characters, you might as well ask why we go
on breathing.
Who are "you?" Honestly now, putting aside for a moment the facade that each one of us hides
behind, can you say for certain? It's not an easy thing to know. In fact, we're
not supposed to know. From the day we're born we're molded to conform to our
society's idea of who we're suppose to become. Our parents, relatives, teachers,
and churches each take a hand in our "assimilation," just as the extended
communities of their youth did with them. They don't mean us any harm; they
doubtless want us to be "happy." Indeed, the goal of this process is to
guarantee that we fit neatly into a larger whole and becomes a useful member of
the group. By their lights, they have our best interests in mind. All in all,
seen from the perspective of a group's ongoing stability, it's an eminently
reasonable idea. Unfortunately, the fatal assumption being made is that these
communities are themselves healthy - and therefore even remotely qualified to
take on the awesome responsibility of reshaping a soul to fit an externally
appointed norm. History has not been kind to societies guilty of such
extraordinary hubris. Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, South Africa, the Soviet
Union, and even our own United States's checkered past offer salient examples of
the tragedy that results when an imperfect culture attempts social engineering.
When society itself is sick, otherwise good people can be carried along by a
tide of ignorance, fear and collective madness. But the man or woman who has
answered the questions, who truly knows who they are, can stand against this
tide, perhaps even stem it.
The conditioning process has its origins in very same dark corner of the
human psyche that gave birth to slavery. Rather than starting from the premise
that every soul choosing to be born has a specific purpose (one that might well
be fundamentally at odds with the prevailing power structure of the group, yet
crucial to its continuing evolution), the 'assimilating' society seeks to write
its own thoughts in the minds of each succeeding generation. This is a direct
legacy of the not-so-distant era (still intact in many parts of the developing
world) when children were largely produced to: a) work the farm; b) take care of
their parents in old age. Seen in this context, children are little more than
extensions of their parents, in a sense their "property," with many obligations
and few rights - and absolutely no spiritual claim to self-determination. They
are strongly discouraged from deviating far from the collective norm. Those few
people that do choose to rebel become outcasts within their communities;.the
price of their re-integration is their psycho-spiritual death. We need only look
to the plight of 20th century homosexuals in America to see that there are still
powerful, coercive forces at work within our society, who ask nothing less than
the amputation of one's authenticity as the price for their acceptance. Of
course, the religious right's insistence on this price is understandable, even
sensible. Were they not to, imagine the whirlwind - with its accompanying gust
of chaos/change/creativity - that would result as closet doors swung open
throughout their ranks. They do not choose to live in "interesting times," even
if those times were to make them far more interesting people.
Seen
through the lens of ideal productivity, the "assimilation" model is ultimately
inefficient. Problems inevitably arise when someone is asked to play a part that
they're less than ideally suited for. Even though painters and accountants both
work with ruling lines, would you really want a would-be Van Gogh preparing your
taxes? Certainly, some people bend better than others, managing to find
fulfillment in other areas - even if their lives never quite produce the gold
they were capable of. Others break and never quite recover, spending years mired
in addictions, self-destructive behavior and outright mental illness. And the
would-be Prometheuses among us go to their deaths opposing the collective
inertia --while we shiver the whole night long without the gift of their fire.
Anyway you look at it, it's not exactly a winning formula for human happiness.
If traditional cultural pressures weren't enough, we now have to cope
with an insidious modern addition to the conditioning process -- advertising.
Here we find commercial interests attempting to mold us, but in a singularly
manipulative and offensive fashion. Not content to simply differentiate their
product from its competitors, these skillful propagandists seek to convince us
that the key to our actual happiness lies in the purchase of the right
mouthwash, car or hair replacement system? Laughable, isn't it? But bombarded
night and day in this assault on our judgment, we can easily swallow their
propaganda hook, line and sinker -- and find ourselves responding like Pavlov's
dogs to the subliminal cues of puppet masters whose sole purpose is to increase
our receptivity to their product. They want us conditioned and predictable, not
free.
Ah, freedom. Americans worship freedom. But do we really understand
what it means to be free? Consider our democracy. In election after election,
politicians of both parties do their utmost to play upon our fears, demonize
their opponents, and ultimately rob the electorate of its right to freely choose
a government. How many of us can truthfully claim that, when our time came to
pull the lever, we voted the 'issues' rather than these carefully cultivated
fears. I doubt this is what the founders our democracy had in
mind.
Without conscious awareness of the influences shaping our actions,
and an ability to act creatively rather than reactively, can there be any such
thing as freedom, or even free will? In truth, what we typically experience
during moments of crisis is a conditioned, hypnotic state that masquerades as
free will, but ultimately undermines our ability to exercise choice, much less
reclaim our identity -- and thus know the kind of happiness that simply cannot
be purchased at any price.
Truly, we would all be lost if weren't for
pain - whose sting, undiluted by Valium and recreational drugs of all types,
still retains the ability to wake us up. In the grip of agony, we have a clear
choice: To ask the three questions and consider how the lack of an answer might
have brought us to this awful place. Or we can take another drink, find a more
compliant lover, or buy a more expensive car or house. Choose the former and, to
echo Joseph Campbell, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all the spiritual
heroes who have ever walked the earth. Choose the latter, and we slide ever more
deeply into our societially-induced coma, sentenced to face our ultimate moment
- at our final breath, when all the events of our life will pass before our eyes
- and have no other response but to sadly reflect: "I didn't know, I never
understood. What an opportunity, what a waste."