Damn that Serenity Prayer
Here’s something I’d never thought of until recently: Do you have your own permission to be who you are?
Yes, that may sound stupid, but it’s not as tautological or wishy-washy as it first seems, I think.
It comes from this: You didn’t ask to be here. You never consented, that you know of, to being you. And maybe–no, probably–you got dealt some shit that, had you had a say in the matter, would have been a lot different.
It’s not to say that you aren’t grateful to be alive (hopefully) and thankful (hopefully) for all the good things you’ve got. It’s that, good or not, like it or not, you didn’t have a vote in it. Anyone with a healthy distrust of authority would occasionally have an issue with that.
Here, and ourselves, against our will: that’s true of everyone. And it’s also true of everyone that everyone wants to be happy, to feel at peace.
You see where I’m going. How at peace can you be if you never backed up and got your own permission to be who you are? You have to be you, so you’re either okay with it or you’re not. If you’re not…if on some level, you resent being you…then I would go so far as to say that being “at peace” is definitionally impossible.
So. How does one go about “getting one’s own permission to be oneself”? Do we stand in front of mirrors and say, “Hey, look, is it okay that I’m going to have really bad eyesight and no social skills? …Well, you know, hey, everybody’s got to take some knocks. Sure, sure, that’s okay. …Great! But what about the family? Our brother’s problems hurt, man. …Oh, well, you know, a litle pain builds character, so that’s okay too.” …and so on? (I really hope not; that sounds humiliating.)
I honestly have no idea. Maybe I’ll figure it out. But it does seem compellingly likely that it’s important to find some psychological way to give ourselves permission, to accept the unchangeable parts of our personal circumstances without resentment, resistance or negativity. To do that would be to stitch up a nasty ragged edge on the Human Condition.
This isn’t news, of course; smarter folk than I have come up with it before, I’m sure. But this time I came up with it, which means that either the human animal is getting smarter over time, or the truth is getting more obvious.
;)
4 comments
I read this three times and still it doesn’t make much sense without tons of bizarre (for me anyway) assumptions. First, let’s get some things straight:
“It comes from this: You didn’t ask to be here.”
Nope, for many religions you did ask to be here. For example spiritism preaches that you choose your life before becoming flesh, karmic religions say that your current actions will affect your next life so it’s just a matter of doing what is “right” to control your next life (hey you can even born as a god), for people who don’t believe in souls that phrase doesn’t even make sense (how could I ask to be here if there wasn’t a I), people who don’t believe in free will (I’ve met some) would say that we don’t ask anything anyway.
Ok, so assuming that there was a “I” before “here” and we had no influence in saying how things would become after we born, we could say that. The next question is: why do I need permission?
Permission is a funny thing, because the moment you ask for it you’re also saying “Hey man your authority is valid and I endorse it”. What if you don’t think their authority is valid? Why would you need permission then? Did the old americans asked for the original owners of their land for permission? Why would you respect someone’s authority if this being doesn’t even talk with you before going old testament on us?
“You have to be you, so you’re either okay with it or you’re not.”
It’s a false dichotomy. Sometimes you’re ok, sometimes you’re not. It’s not a binary thing either, a better representation would be a scale from “totally okay” to “really not okay”, or a multi-dimensional thingy saying “I’m partially ok with my body but my family totally rocks and my personality is not so bad either, otoh my love life is hell and so is my job”. Acceptance is not about being ok with things, it’s about realizing that life is what life is, not matter how much you dislike it, and there’s nothing you can do to change what is (we can only change what will, if even that much).
After reading many of your philosophy posts, I think you need a healthy dose of non abrahmic religion study in your diet, together with a couple of doses of non-european philosophers.
Mr. Yokomizo,
Which non-european philosophers would you recommend?
Yes, by all means, we love recommendations. Actually most of my formal philosophy study is European — concentration in Greek and 18th-Century White Guy — but the vast majority of my informal (i.e. because I like it) philosophical study is Eastern, mostly Chinese with a little Japan and India to break the non-monotony (because China is hardly monotonous). As for religion, it’s funny that you think my views are too Abrahamic. It’s so funny, as a matter of fact, that I’m going to call some people and tell them you said that, so they can have a good laugh. It’s true that the “default view” I’m usually responding to is modern and American (-slash-Western), and that’s primarily informed by a strange version of Christianity, but it wouldn’t make much sense for me to respond to a view that’s not espoused by most people I deal with. For myself, if I had to identify with a religion, it’d be Taoism. I consult the I Ching regularly and study Tai Chi as well as the Taoist texts and whatnot, plus Taoism as a spiritual philosophy doesn’t require religious involvement, so they’d probably say I was a Taoist even if I didn’t.
Of course, everyone makes assumptions in their writing, and much of the time I take shortcuts to avoid writing huuuuuuge technical posts full of definitional material: I have to do that for class; so I don’t worry about it here. I think most of your issues with this have to do with those assumptions/definitions. For instance:
1. No, you didn’t have a choice, that you know of, which is what I said. You can believe what you like, but it’s all guesses; none of us remembers making the choice, and none of us knows that what and who we are had any input from us at all.
2. By default we all grant validity to our own opinions. Barring lots of education and work to the contrary, we all assume that our own permission counts for something. If we never made any choices to end up us, here, then we never got a chance to weigh in and give the situation our stamp of approval. For many–I’d say most–people, this results in a lot of hidden resentment over non-obvious things, like family, physical self, historical time, psychological traits, etc. In fact, I don’t like how close I’m riding to accepted modern psychology here; many psychologists (more of the Jungian than Freudian tradition, but some of both that I know) believe that addressing hidden resentment is an important tool in “getting over” hangups related to feeling out-of-control of one’s own life.
3. I don’t think the dichotomy is false at all. Yes, there are many steps to being nonresentful of one’s life-situation as a whole; you could say that you have to separately come to acceptance of body, mind, family, time, etc etc etc.; but still, on balance, you’re either comfortable with the package deal or you’re not. If you’re comfortable with who you are, then even little things that might bother you are easily assimilated and accepted; and if you’re *not* comfortable, not okay with, who you got stuck being, then the unease you feel about it tends to permeate everything, and even the “parts of you” that you’re okay with you tend to view in contrast to the parts you don’t.
Thanks for some good comments! Though you’ll have to tell me which of the hopeful nuns I know paid you to make that Abrahamic comment… ;)
-pd
For recomendations I can’t find my books right now (everything is out of place around here) so I can’t name names, but as non-western philosophers are mostly religious we can go naming religions instead. I would start with hinduism (Rigveda and Mahabharata are two of the best books), go to taoism and confucianism, move to both suffism and zoroastrism and take a long and good dive on buddhism, from the Dhammapada to The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind. That without leaving Asia. The most important thing is to read those without any skepticism, trying to believe in what those guys are saying: if they don’t believe in a monotheistic god, forget everything about it; if they say the world is non-causal, ignore causality.
I said your views were too abrahmic mostly because they imply a traditional monotheistic, single incarnation, causal, worldview. No offense implied but most people that grow up in a christian environment (hell, I went to catholic school for eight years) find too difficult to even see how deep these ideas get into them without going through some catharsis. Also no matter how much one reads about different religions/philosophies they are still foreign until one starts practicing them.
Now let’s come to the counterpoints:
1. Likewise you believe you didn’t have a choice. If I kiss you in a bar and don’t remember in the day after, did it happen or not? If dozens of people say I did it and offer me evidence (e.g. photos, your handprint in my face after you slapped me) does it matter if I still don’t believe in it? What if I start to believe in them, even if I still don’t remember it? What if I believe so much that I start to “remember” what happened? Being able to remember something doesn’t make it more or less real, memories can be created and belief is one of the most powerful forces in our mind.
I do know people that “remember” their past lives (even the Dalai Lama remember his, IIRC) and talked to the spirits about their purpose in life. Some said “such and such happened because I planned for it before coming to this world, because those would teach me to be a better ” and truly believed that they knew what they talked about.
2. I don’t think we disagree on what you’re saying. Resentment is bad mm-kay, but it’s not entirely related from having permission to do/be something/someone. What I said was, what if I don’t need/care for permission? Why should I need it in the first place? A buddhist monk once said “I don’t want to either be alive or dead, but I’m alive so let’s keep as it is”, in this context I would say “My permission to be myself is the fact that I’m myself”. Putting in other words “I do what I can, if I can’t I don’t” or even permission = being able to do/be. Also not all resentment is bad, “negative” emotions are damned today but they’re part of ourselves.
3. We can see everything in a binary partition of A and not-A (assuming a non-dialetheistic world) but most of the time it just reduces the discussion to noise. Saying “so you’re either okay with it or you’re not” is tautological taken at face value. Your point is subtler though, but then it’s also a false dichotomy, because as I said there are different dimensions to evaluate one’s life and we can’t reduce them to a single dimension without losing information. In math we can’t project a complex number to a real one without losing information, because we need at least two real numbers to describe a complex. Sure we can say that if there are N dimensions in life and all of them are below some sort of ok level we can say that we are unhappy. But what if 70% of them are above ok level and 30% are below it: how can we determine if there’s a way to add the ups with the downs? Also human are very limitated beings most of the time we focus on a couple of issues, so we can be content on some days and discontent on other days. As our mood swings and our personality changes so do our acceptance of ourselves. Even if we could register down the days and see if we have more bad days than good ones, how can we say that there’s a one to one equivalence?
This obsession with trying to reduce everything to an orderable quantity puzzles me, I wasn’t born/raised with that and I find bizarre that people can’t see past it.
P.S.: There should be a way to keep track if there’s comments in posts we commented on. I keep forgetting to check if you replied on something I said.
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