Andrea Fitzpatrick lost her job last August and foundered for a while, as she struggled with her sense of self-worth. She had identified herself with her career, whatever it had happened to be. Corporate advance, money, and social status were the things that defined her. Unsurprisingly, they were not the things that made her happy, something she only truly discovered after being fired.

It’s an interesting story. On the one hand, it was heartening that someone had discovered happiness to come from something other than the superficial banalities of one’s life. On the other hand, it was sad that there are many people, perhaps most, who must actually learn this lesson.

A belief in fulfillment

And so I am not shocked that, like me, god believers are saddened by the hollowness of so many lives lived in emptiness, fulfilled by nothing and driven by the most amoral of motivations. I am not surprised at the satisfaction believers have in their lives, filled as they are with a pursuit that, no matter what unrecognizable form it may ultimately take, at the very least seeks meaning for themselves and everyone. I am not surprised by the confidence of their beliefs, by the resistance their faith has to that which disputes it.

Of course, I know they are terribly misguided for that faith, and the details of their belief are their ultimate undoing, and no reconciliation is possible between dogmatic positions and a truly happy existence. But I say that out of a need to clarify. It doesn’t really matter, this time.

It indicates that a life of true fulfillment comes from everything that seems not to define the majority of us. In the West, most have forgotten so simple a truth utterly. It may be cliché to bring up the fact that material pursuits have replaced our sense of satisfaction with ourselves and each other, but often truth is to be discovered anew in aphorisms like that.

It’s one reason for the divide and the ultimate conflict between those with faith and the secular world they inhabit. On a larger scale, it hints at more troubling issues: the conflict between Islam and the West, as an example, and the failure of either to find areas of common values and goals.

A flow of lives

But I must recede once again to the microcosm of a single life. Unlike James Randi, who is nearing the end of his journey, I can’t look back at a remarkable life to reminisce on scores of remarkable experiences. I’m far too ordinary.

There are issues to deal with, and things that seem like setbacks, but its very simplicity makes my life deeply fulfilling. Alex and I have a circadian beat to our lives that offers happiness I could scarcely imagine when I was in my twenties, clambouring for money and sex and superficial relationships and fun, and other trivialities. There is the expanse of Bronte Creek Park near my home, small though it might seem to some, that holds a portion of my consciousness in its fields and woods and paths. There are the hundreds of books in my library, holding hundreds of thousands of pages, that fill up the corners of my barely satiable curiosity. And there is the incidental interaction with people, acquaintances and strangers, offering the opportunity to imagine the details of another life, and, if I can, if only in the smallest of ways to make that other path slightly more navigable.

I like my work and I’m considered fairly successful, but it’s simply a lucky tool that allows me to live a life away from it. There are so many better things, more important things. The breathtaking breadth of human history in front of me at this very moment, for example, or living inside the cream-coloured pages of my library. I’m staggered when I think about the billions of lives that have shaped what humanity is right now; or the trillions upon trillions of beings that have directed the course of life on the planet.

Something in me goes very quiet when the sun sets beneath the purple clouds over the peaks of houses behind us. I feel as though I’m sharing the lives of the finches that wake me up each morning as they build a nest beneath the trough under my bedroom window, which they and their ancestors have done for as long as I’ve lived here. We’ve been here many years, but we’re still apart from virtually all the neighbours. Sometimes when we come home in the car, one of their kids waves at us, though we are silent strangers to them and their parents, and it makes me smile. Alex has a swimming friend that he picks up every Sunday morning. She usually bakes him cake on Saturday night, and he comes home full. Despite our shyness, and what must seem like stand-offishness, the neighbours directly beside us invite us for an hour or two of drink and conversation every Christmas and every summer, and have always been immeasurably kind to us.

There’s so much loveliness, so much fulfillment in life that I’m surprised when I hear stories of lessons learned, like Ms. Fitzpatrick’s. What deep pleasure there is to be found in the world’s accessible corners. What meaning there is in the most straightforward of relationships. How gorgeous things are. How important we all, each of us, are, to one another, to the flow of lives beginning in the incomprehensibly distant past and that builds our story for the sake of our existence alone. How completely beautiful, unknowable, and livable it all is.

Louis About me, Believers Believers, Bronte Creek Park, Happiness, Selfishness, Strangers, Vocation

When I was twelve, I slipped on a hill of ice and broke my wrist. A few seconds of confusion led to a rapid slide into shock, and I was soon overwhelmed by deep nausea. I panicked and sought out a friend, who led me into the school building with his arm around my shoulder. And then I was looking at the scene as though from above, impassively: my friend with his arm around me, the two of us at the point of an arrowhead of curious children streaming into the school building, the hallway with its yellow light leading to the principal’s office.

One night at age twenty-two, a car not using its turn signal drove directly into the side of my bicycle, crushing my leg between the car’s grill and the bike’s frame before sending me over the hood, against the windshield, and onto the pavement. It was summer, and with my arms and legs outstretched while facing down, the first layer of my uncovered skin peeled away as my body rotated against the road in a full circle before stopping. Immediately and uncontrollably, a primeval howl of pain came up from the pit of my stomach. With near-total objectivity, I was then observing things as though from a distance. The pain in my leg and on the surface of my skin was total, certainly the most pain I’d felt before or since. But, intensely curious, I took note of the way my body writhed on the pavement. The night air was cool on my forehead, budding with sweat; there was a musical clatter of running shoes on the road as some kids from a nearby park ran to help me. The old woman who’d been driving the car stooped over me, breathing heavily. Somebody from one of the houses attempted to talk to me over my screaming, to ask for a phone number they should call. At once the impassive observer stepped forward, quieted the screams, and spoke the number evenly and calmly before allowing the pain, the writhing, and the vocalization to overwhelm me again.

Some years ago while meditating, I suddenly had the unbidden sensation of being watched. The observer was clearly myself. This was no schizophrenic episode, but a very intense sensation of “I” being cooly, impassively observed by “me”. “I” was lying outstretched on the bed, breathing deeply, hyper-aware of my surroundings but in a state of complete meditative relaxation. “Me” was a depthless reservoir of my consciousness, ever curious but universally impartial, an objective, dispassionate observer.

I, defined

After eviscerating religious faith and stripping it of its claim to moral authority of any kind, Sam Harris closes The End of Faith with a chapter on the nature of consciousness and the self. He argues deftly for a non-dualistic conception of consciousness that ultimately does not require “I” to be an important element to consciousness at all. He disposes with the notion that the self is either merely the body, with its self-regulating systems teeming with all manner of life, or the generic components that make up the mind, considering that, in the end, only genetics and social environments account for the myriad expressions of behaviour in human beings, and that one’s “self” is nowhere to be found in them. In fact, without wondering at the evolutionary path that may have led to such a state, he suggests that the concept of the individuated self is nothing more than a biological function of the brain, transmitting impressions collected from the environment to the receiving entity it has created for the purpose, called “I”. This “I”, this self, is not necessary for consciousness to exist; it is merely handy, and the apparent duality of our relationship to the universe, of a subject that perceives and an object that is perceived, is, on close inspection, wholly without substance.¹

Harris accepts nothing without evidence, so how are we to prove this for ourselves? Introspection through meditation, as evidenced by what he considers the empirically selected practices of Eastern mysticism, exposes the merely utilitarian nature of the concept of self. The act of investigating the self, of looking for “I” in the sea of one’s consciousness while meditating, reveals it to be illusory.

There is a further paradox: the best expression of selflessness, the best route to ethical behaviour and concern for others, occurs when one is sufficiently introspective in order to recognize that “I” might not exist.

Toward the within

Much of this is anathema to atheists, who connect the kind of mysticism that Harris is talking about with dogmatic positions of faith, or acceptance of propositions without evidence. But meditation is available to everyone, and the results of studied introspection will speak for themselves. There is nothing here that need be accepted on faith. It is merely the West’s allergic reaction to the potential abandonment of identity that stands in the way of honest inquiry into the nature of personal consciousness. Even for atheists, there should be an exciting terrain within reach, if only one would close one’s eyes and quiet the chattering observations of consciousness offered by the self, to investigate the nature of consciousness itself.

1. Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 210 ff. [↩]

Louis Meditation, Morality, Mysticism Consciousness, Introspection, Meditation, Mysticism, Sam Harris, Selfishness, Selflessness

How many times have I been insulted in life? How many times has that been in the bodiless environment of the Internet?

Exactly. And so I wonder why one small insult out of countless others has me bothered.

I’ve had a lot of success on Craigslist. I recently posted an ad for an iPod Touch I no longer need, and got a bite almost immediately, but the individual wanted 20% off my listed price. I’ve always gotten exactly what I’ve asked for on Craigslist, so I replied in two curt words that I’d only be taking my asking price. “No, $300,” was how I put it.

An hour later, I got back a reply saying, “Get over yourself,” followed by a large ASCII Star of David. My name is Steiner, a classic German name that confuses some people, who take it to be Jewish. It seems this symbol was supposed to stand in for something, to intimidate me. A shaming device of some kind. A yellow badge, I think.

I immediately deleted the e-mail, then revived it a few minutes later. I looked at it for a while. I’m not the most charitable of men, nor the most even-tempered. Several replies came to mind as I wondered at what I should do. “Wow, I’m convinced, it’s yours — free!” was one. “Steiner is a German name, Genius,” was another. Various other flavours of sarcasm seemed apt. Later, it seemed to me that I could also take the route of pointing out how his message was received: with some alarm, and some sadness at its implications.

The young man was from Toronto. He’d used his full name in the “From” header of his e-mail, and, it being very unique, I looked him up and found a Flickr web page and a few other things. In addition to his likes, dislikes, the town in Romania where he grew up, friends, and hobbies, there were many pictures of him. Here he was with a few friends, also twenty-something, lounging in a nondescript apartment. Here’s a girl with him. He’s carrying an infant in this one, and here’s a picture he’s taken of himself, holding a point-and-shoot at arm’s length.

What path has led this ordinary person to the place where it seems acceptable to him to offer a stranger a deflating insult, and a veiled threat? And what’s the appropriate response?

The second question is easier for me to answer. In a case like this, the appropriate response is no response at all. For one thing, we are, unfortunately, forced to consider that an individual capable of a menacing text reaction like this is also capable of much more. Further, what could be gained by reacting negatively? Or even with sadness and alarm, my most sincere response? I couldn’t imagine this person responding well.

No, I quietly ignored his response.

About the first question, about how it came to be that he, or me, or anyone else, would think that such a response could be legitimate. There’s no real answer. The usual observations about faceless communication and the ease with which one can abandon civility while engaged in it come to mind. But it seems there has to be some larger issue, some explanation that would account for the willful injury people cause on a daily basis. It’s not that online communication engenders acting badly; it seems to me there’s a callousness inherent in many people that is exposed by online communication. Perceived consequences being minute, many feel free to act in whatever way is expedient to vent their ever-shifting negative emotions. Even a second’s worth of thought for how the other is made to feel seems too long.

Generally I love people, but it’s an on-again, off-again affair. They so disappoint. I am enthralled one moment, overjoyed at their complexities, torn to wonderful shreds by the fickleness of their delights and passions and pursuits, in awe of the heights of intellectualism they can climb to; and then I’m dashed again, brought down by their pettiness, by their dogmatic and inward-looking steadfastness to unreason, to selfishness, to emotional, intellectual dwarfism. I wish I knew what brings people to the very boundaries of supreme selflessness, only to be snapped back into their own self-concerned little world with the bright silent violence of a meteor crashing into the atmosphere.

I’m a victim of it and a perpetrator at the same time.

Louis General Communication, Morality, Selfishness, Strangers