To Burn Or Not To Burn

The other day I made an interesting realization: many of the starkest memories in my life are of dreams, not actual incidents. Moreover, the few vivid memories I have of actual experience are from early childhood—before I became civilized and learned to conceptualize the world and before dream and reality became clearly distinct. As an adult, the sensual poignancy of my waking life seems to diminish more every year, but the impact and drama of my dreams remain as strong as ever—stronger, sometimes, than pivotal events like my marriage, my first sexual experience, my first time teaching a class, or visits to famous landmarks or museums. This indicates, in my case at any rate, that dreams are significant. They aren’t just random neurons firing at will. Or, actually, maybe they are--but so what? Is real life any less random? And does randomness prohibit meaning? I don't think so; meaning is created, not predestined. And like our waking experiences, dreams, whether random or not, have something to teach us, provided we're willing to learn (and maybe we do ascribe their meaning after the fact, as we re-envision them, but that doesn’t reduce their impact or relevance).

One dream I remember as being especially noteworthy was about my father. He was imprisoned at the top of a large wooden tower that had been set on fire. I was watching him from the ground below. As the flames grew higher, he stood at the tower’s edge and prepared to leap off. I yelled at him not to, pleading for him to bear the flames just a little while longer, but to no avail. He plunged to his death, and I woke up.

I had this dream when I was in my early twenties and just about to graduate college. In other words, I was about to enter the so-called real world, to leave the carefree life of my youth behind, and become a part of the adult workforce. In that context, the two participants in the dream are more likely representatives of two sides of my self—the young self, staring up at the menacing structure I would soon have to enter; and my future, elder self, which was being burned alive inside the same structure.

As I think about the dream now, I see a prophecy fulfilled—at least in part. If the dream were to reoccur, I imagine I’d see it from the reverse perspective: looking down at my symbolic son while I suffered the fire’s wrath, then leaping headlong into the void to abolish my pain, my son's disappointed eyes being the last image I see before smashing into the earth's surface. Burning is what adult life often feels like to me—like a blaze that imprisons and consumes. And the temptation to “leap”—to give up the fight and ease my hardship—is a temptation I fight almost every day, both in the literal sense of contemplating the bourne of no return and also, and more typically, in the figurative sense of dulling my troubles in TV or alcohol or daydreaming or sugar (or religion, when I was younger)—but not just dulling my troubles, dulling, and annihilating, my whole self along with them. What I mean is that I constantly fight the temptation to diminish the power and impact of my life by decreasing my awareness of and my participation in the actual living world. And I’m not alone in that.

Since most Americans hate their jobs, they start to envision happiness as a state of inactivity—kind of like being dead. As a result, they use the fruit of their labor to purchase things like computer games, TVs and DVD players, MP3s, Romance novels, and so on … in other words, things that encourage passivity—things that don’t require active agency as much as compliant admiration and fantasy building. While some commodities such as computer games might give the illusion of agency, real activity—the kind that truly affects the world we live in—is forbidden. The result is that we live our lives between two equally dismal conditions—the fire and the abyss.

The activity we're allowed comes in two forms: activity we do for another—i.e. activity that doesn’t really belong to us but is done to earn money for purchases and, in the Third World, for survival; and activity that we do in our spare time and which we purchase with the activity we sell to another, or, put another way, activity designed to escape the former activity—“escapist” activity (or art-ificial activity). In either case, we’re not acting to realize ourselves—we’re acting to serve the system. We’re acting to erase the legitimacy and effect of our lives—to join the ranks of the living dead via domestication (see Fredy Perlman at insurgent desire for more on this). The choice we’re presented with is to either merge entirely with the system—to die by fire, or to escape into darkness and isolation—and die by plummeting. It’s the story of Icarus all over again, but without the heroic connotations and without any hope of survival.

But maybe, with enough diligence, we can find another option. As my dream suggests, the flames of life might not be as punishing as we imagine them. In Buddhist practice, the main objective is to achieve Nirvana, which translates, literally, as the extinguishing of the fire. Only the fire of Buddhist imagery isn’t extinguishable. According to the ancient Brahmans, when a fire was extinguished it went into a detached or latent state. Rather than ceasing to exist, it simply freed itself from any particular fuel source—it became “unbounded”. Fire also features prominently in Buddhist art and mythology as a force for transformation. In the Tibetan Mandelas, for example, fire is drawn at the outer edge of the image to represent the transformation that has to take place before entering the sacred territories within. In the Western World, too, fire is often used as a symbol of transformation (the Phoenix, to name just one), and it seems likely that this might have something to do with the fire depicted in my dream, as well.

A burning tower is as good a metaphor for my current life as I can think of. The world I live in IS on fire; it’s consuming itself, and me and its other inhabitants, out of existence. At the same time, escape, while tempting, is not an option. The flames are inextinguishable. That leaves only one alternative—to live within the twilight of the two world's--to practice, and to recognize, what Buddhists refer to as the Middle Way. To me, that means much the same thing that it means in the Tantric traditions; it means that I have to be fully alive and open to life’s natural forces but that I can’t cling to or wish to possess those forces. It means—get ready now, this might sound sappy—that I act lovingly instead of on principle or duty or for hope of reward. It means that I act without selfishness or ego. What it doesn’t mean, though, leastwise not to me, is that I act non-violently.

I know. I know. The first precept of Buddhist ethics is to abstain from harming living things. But I don’t care. For one thing, I’m only a half-assed Buddhist, anyway, and for another, I don’t think pacifism is the correct tag for that precept. If you shoot someone while he’s in the process of massacring your family, you’re not harming life—you’re protecting it. And if your country’s government is hell bent on the destruction of all living things to serve its elitist interests, then you ought to do anything within your means to stop it—including acts of violence. You can do as much "harm" to other living things through pacifism as you can through blood-letting, and, in some cases, the latter option serves the greater good. That's obvious. Defensive violence is not the same as an act of aggression. Sometimes the bully really won't leave you alone until you fight back.

During the Vietnamese War, Buddhist monks were known to set themselves on fire as an act of protest (click here for a picture:flaming buddhist). Onlookers marveled at how serenely they bore the flames, never grimacing, never breaking their postures, never screaming out in pain. Now, I’m not necessarily endorsing their methods—there are other ways to be heard--but torching yourself for a cause does say something about commitment and sacrifice—and about lack of ego. Nevertheless, it’s also a violent act—a violent act AND a loving act. In the words of their fellow Buddhists “…they [monks and nuns] had been driven to take the stand they had by their profound compassion for their suffering people, and by the fact that there was literally no one else who could speak for the war-weary people and their longing for peace.” So this very clear act of harming another living thing—the actor’s self,in this instance—was not seen as a violation of the First Precept. As Thich Nhat Hanh explained, "the compassionate intent of self-immolation overshadows the argument that it’s harmful". In sum, acting lovingly trumps acting violently—it trumps the ideological precept.

With that in mind, we can’t, if we’re serious about struggling with and for the oppressed, rule out violence as a means to further our resistance. Acting violently doesn’t mean “you’ll become just like them.” You’ll become just like them when you act out of the same egoistic mindset that they do—when you act selfishly instead of lovingly, or, when you act in obedience to a principle or precept, instead of from the heart. That’s it. No need for a bunch of philosophizing here. And I’m not saying that you MUST act violently. Maybe that’s not your path. I’m simply saying that we can’t rule it out.

Okay, now back to my dream. I don’t think it was telling me to pick up my gun and head for the jungles in Chiapas. The reason I bring up the issue of violence is to show how easy it is to retreat into passive, escapist, death-loving pseudo action—to take the leap from the tower instead of to bear life in its entirety. Unquestioned and unwavering obedience to any principle or law, even a principle or law of non-violence, is an act of submission and escape—not love. As I’ve stated in other entries (Action and Art, On Instinct and Intelligence), when you follow principle you inevitably make actions secondary to concepts. (To reiterate what I said in Action and Art: Instead of being in the act of loving someone, you "fall in love" or "find love". The principle--of love, in this case--becomes the subject of the action.) That's what principles do—they exalt themselves and objectify their followers. If you have a principle, you don't need to be responsible for your behavior, because you're just following a code. And codes also take emotion out of your decision making; they suggest that you can reach a moral decision by adhering to an abstract rule, excluding all other factors. You don't have to feel anything—or think anything, for that matter—and you don't have to take any risks; you get to maintain your unearthly purity. Principles also imply that words are richer than experience, an idea that Buddhism does a good job of debunking.

In a nutshell, what I think my dream was telling me is that there is no refuge from love. But maybe love isn’t the best word choice in this case. Maybe a better choice—one less imbued with sentimentalism—is responsibility. Existentialism 101—you and only you—not God, not a precept, not an institution, not an ideology, not your Mommy and Daddy—are responsible for your actions, and you alone have to bear and recognize that responsibility. You have to bear it when it costs you friendships or romantic interludes, when you lose sleep or when the anxiety becomes so intense that you contemplate suicide. And the only way to bear the full weight of life's responsibility—to be fully aware and fully committed—is to not be bounded by the inferno that surrounds us—to live within the flames but not be imprisoned by them. And the only way to accomplish that (gonna get sappy again) is through loving others. That means accepting our mutual dependence and realizing that you can’t, by yourself, escape suffering. It means that you can't ever find solitude. Bodhisattva like, you have to live within the inferno for the sake of the living world. You can’t escape your responsibility—not even in your dreams.

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"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Italo Calvino Invisible Cities




tags:
anarchist
buddhism