flowperson said:
Who is this Bob and why do all of his/her fellow humans disrespect, hate, and disregard his/her essential human nature to such a great extent... do you think? Or is he/she a stranger in a strange land...to reference a favorite Heinlein book of mine ?
What do you all think...believe ?
flow...
I'm glad you asked, flowperson...
Of course, my post should be taken with a grain a salt...and I'm sure Merton would've said the same about his own writings on this topic. The argument that is made is very abstract, you know...it is revealing, but it's just information.
The inevitable question that might arise directly in response to the post I made is: what can somebody possibly do, then? They either remain as selfish as before, or act on that selfishness and simply displace it into more deceptively acceptable forms. This is a dismal outlook. I would say, in accordance with
InLove, that we are all like Bob in a certain way. But I don't think Bob is necessarily a doomed person...condemned to perpetually embodying selfishness.
The problem Bob has is that he misunderstood it from the very beginning. He thought the thing was to rid himself of selfishness...to purify his self. But, that's impossible. The self that seeks desperately to purify itself because it believes it is impure is helpless, really. It is like trying to bail water out of a sinking boat, but dumping the bucketloads of water right back into the boat, or trying to wash off dirt with more dirt. You know, he wants to cast away his selfishness, but in setting out so fervently to do so, he just gets more and more hung up on it, more and more involved with it...and he ends up fueling the fire, rather than extinguishing it.
The problem Bob has is that he unwittingly started with the assumption that, at his core, at the very heart of whatever it is that he is, there really was nothing but intrinsic, irreducible selfishness...and, perhaps unintentionally, he let that most fundamental self-delusion become his 'reason' for action. That is to say, he did the most injustice to himself in that he reduced himself to a bare, scraggly concept
about himself. Paradoxically, he completely denied himself as being nothing but selfish, and thus he simultaneously cut himself off from his faculty for being genuinely selfless. He bought into ideas about who he was, hook-line-and-sinker, and that was what lead him astray.
Thus,
flowperson's question: "Why do all of Bob's fellow humans disrespect, hate, and disregard their essential human nature to such a great extent?" What you come to is the often misunderstood ior distrusted idea, for instance, that: "One must first accept this world entirely and genuinely, or else they can never make it better."
Of course, we might say that if we simply trust our selfishness, that nothing will happen...we just remain terribly selfish. But, Alan Watts delved into this in an illuminating lecture (to paraphrase for reduced length):
"It is a gamble to trust yourself to come through with love. But there is really no alternative. Now to trust oneself to be capable of love or to bring up love...is to take a risk, a gamble. You may not come through with it. In the same way, when you fall into love with somebody else and you trust them, they may, as a matter of fact, not fulfill your expectations. But that risk has to be taken. The alternative to taking that risk is much worse than trusting and being deceived. People who can't trust themselves to love have to take all sorts of artificial and surgical measures to produce the effect of love for saving face. They become progressively more incapable of loving at all, and they create turmoil and misunderstanding in themselves and others in society. In other words, to live, and to love, you have to take risks. There will be disappointments, and failures, and disasters as a result of taking these risks. But in the long run it will work out. My point is that if you don't take these risks the results will be much worse than any imaginable kind of anarchy."
In terms of our friend Bob, his mistake was his decision that his selfishness or self-love, in the world of all worlds and the heart of all hearts, was the most terrible of things...that it was truly worth nothing but hatred. Here's Watts again: "The essential point is to consider love as a spectrum. There is not, as it were, just nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. When you find only one of these forms existing"...perhaps that dreaded self-love..."if at least you water it, the rest will blossom as well. But the effectual prerequisite from the beginning is to let it have its own way."
In other words, Bob's mistake was that, strangely, he got in his own way. He tried to create a new self that would be unselfish, and in doing so he departed from the point at which anything could actually be done.
Of course, this too, should be taken with a grain of salt. It's all just information, as I'm sure you know...subject to the same effects, if taken incorrectly, that Bob got himself into in the first place. We could go back and forth forever with ideas as to why this outlook, too, is flawed, you know? Eventually you get around to seeing that you've been going in circles the whole time. What you really needed, you actually always had...much like our buddy, Bob. What happens then is beyond words, really. But I think that it is precisely what Bob was looking for...
