Looking at Our Own Reality

How does our own personal sense of reality arise? The answer seems obvious, but a little reflection proves that to be too simple. The obvious answer is that we feel our own bodily sensations—and also that we, ourselves, know this, this “Here I am.” There is a distinct duality present in this simple state of self-awareness. One polarity is a sense of continuity, of persistence. I was awfully worn out yesterday, but now I’m pretty chipper. The knowledge that I was and now I am—and simultaneously aware of both—is that sense of continuity. I remember being tired; my body is now energetic. The knowledge belongs to me; it is still there. And the mere fact of forgetting doesn’t change that. Thus for instance I haven’t the vaguest of how I felt at 9:20 a.m. on July 11, 2009. Indeed 2009, which is just the other day, is a pretty fuzzy memory unless I start consulting calendars to bring some of it back. Nevertheless I feel innately certain that I was present back in that vague past. So here we have it: continuity, persistence, now tired, now chipper, but while these states cycle, something remains unchanged. That something is the consciousness of my persistence.

The other pole of this duality, of course, is change itself. There is me—and the other, the over against. The most obvious “over against” is my body. The other, greater over against has changed over time, in itself and also in relation to me. Once it was Minnesota, then Virginia, then Kansas, then Missouri, then Germany, then Hungary. My body has also changed. Once it was small and young, now it is big and old. It is still the over against because it has changed—but “Here I am” has not.

So much for the obvious. But is that sufficient to make us feel real? One way to test that is to imagine ourselves in a situation where nothing else is present but Here I am and Stuff out there, the body close and intimate, all else a step removed—pleasing when it’s edible or drinkable, dangerous when it is hard and cold. A world like that would very quickly make us feel deep anguish. The closest to a documented case like that is the life of Helen Keller—close but not quite perfect. Keller was 19 months of age when an illness deprived her of sight and hearing. As I’ve noted in this blog earlier, she was beginning to learn to speak, was imitating phrases that she’d heard. She had also learned the word for water and remembered it (as “wah-wah”) throughout her painful period of mental darkness. Until she reached age seven and finally got help, she lived in a state of powerful frustration, longing to communicate somehow by using signs and gestures. It’s not a perfect case because she had, at an early age, already discovered—not the other but the others. Her fabulous story is of the greatest value in vividly showing how vitally important for a personal sense of reality is the presence of, and communication with, other Here I am’s.

Long ago and far away I came across a great truth. I think it was in Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Pathways Through to Space. It is that the two great paths exist for human development, one based on heightened consciousness (Enlightenment) and the other through relationship (Love). Merrell-Wolff’s path was the first; indeed it seems to rank very high among the mystics. But I’d assert that Love is prior and higher—indeed that in its absolute absence, in a world of mental darkness such as Keller experienced in childhood—the very tools for higher awareness are denied us. Language, the tool we need for the first-mentioned path, comes about because we use it to relate to other living beings just like us. It begins with that wah-wah in earliest childhood. Our personal reality depends intrinsically on relationship—as does genuine transcendence. All else is secondary.

The Buddha ranks highest in the category of Enlightenment—achieved by a great act of denial, as it were. What were the roots of that effort? Seeing human misery when Siddhartha Gautama was young: compassion. And when the Buddha achieved his aim, what did he do? Did he pass on into Nirvana? If he had done so, some farmers would have found a desiccated body under that now famous bodhi tree. But no. The Buddha returned to the world to—to communicate, to relate. And one of the great religions sprouted from that seed. No. There are no genuine solitaries high or low. Enlightenment needs its justifying polarity too. Ultimately transcendence falls apart unless there is another person out there to give this person his or her reality.