CHAPTER 13
Living with the Self: Divorce, Forgiveness and Remarriage
We were descending through darkness now: the trail following the endless wooded hillside down from the high mountains into the life-giving air below ten thousand feet. We had begun walking before dawn that morning but were still hours away from the flat, open valley bottom where we would pitch our tents at last. By now, many in our party were exhausted, tripping and falling frequently down the hellish, forest trail of liquid mud churned up by innumerable passing yaks. The rain had not stopped for the last week, and everyone was tired and by now, completely wet through. As leader of the group, however, I could not afford to be tired, though I had no choice about being wet. We had been walking for twelve hours now and along the way we had lost track of one of our number: a woman in our group who had disappeared during this long forest descent; every corner or rest spot on the trail offered me the possibility of seeing her, as I hoped, above all hope, she had merely gone ahead of us and found her way down.
But my suspicions that she had taken another route were growing by the hour. Our Bhutanese guide was a difficult character at the best of times, and even though his English was perfect, it was employed mostly in elaborate self-justifications, in telling us stories about how marvelous he was in every capacity and how any mistakes that had been made were someone else’s. He had spoken to the group in the predawn darkness and told us all that there was only one trail down and that we could straggle out as much as we wanted because we could not get lost. My instincts had been to countermand the offer to straggle, but I had already been involved in a number of power struggles with this fellow, and in my hesitation the group was already off and away trying to gain as much distance as possible on what was to be at least a twelve-hour walk, the last walk of our ten-day trek through Bhutan.
By the time twelve hours had passed, we were still many hours from the valley floor, the constant rain of that day and the previous week having turned the paths into quagmires; we had also passed at least three places where the path bifurcated and where anyone straggling out in front could have taken a different path from the main body of the group, who by now were rightly staying close to the guide. When I looked the guide in the eyes as we sat beneath a large tree in the mud and told him that we could easily have lost a number of our group on the alternatives presented so far, he took it almost as a personal insult. It was a final confirmation, but too late now, that his priorities had nothing to do with the safety of the people in his care and everything to do with whether he was in the right.
I had only myself to blame. The clues had been there from the beginning. This fellow had puzzled me right from the very start. He did not strike me as being like any other Bhutanese I had met, nor was he like any Buddhists I had met in other Himalayan regions I had visited. On first arriving in Bhutan, I had spent an evening with him alone in the bars of Thimphu as an easy way of getting to know him and found myself, despite his wearing a traditional Bhutanese tunic, in the company of a coarse frat boy with reservoirs of resentment and a rampant sexual animus for any passing woman that completely floored me.
Late that night I heard his story and began to understand. When he was a child, Catholic missionaries had come to his family and offered to take him for schooling in northern India, free and clear, and all paid for. Under pressure from his family, he had gone, at six or seven years old, out of this high, poor but clear, inherited world and down into the foothills of India, where he had been thrown into a world where Catholicism met Hinduism and then met colonialism and it all combined in a Catholic, Hindu, colonial, repressed sexuality. It was a crossroads for which he did not seem to have received any proper guidance. No wonder he found it difficult guiding others. The move managed to uproot his Buddhist foundation without properly replacing it with a good Catholic one. What he had was the Catholic’s appreciation of sin without the accompanying fear of its consequences and without a Buddhist’s ability to watch those desires rise and fall away. More important, there was an almost physical sense of a split in this man’s psyche, an irredeemable heartache and wound at having been rent from his family that was completely unconscious and driven out in pure resentment for a world that had exiled him. He was a man divorced from his inheritance, from himself and from those he was supposed to be guiding.
Ten days before this final muddy night, our first day’s walk had ended in a debacle worthy of a Dublin Saturday night. We had come to a beautiful grassy shelf overlooking a river that our guide had told us would be our destination. But when we arrived at the place, we found it already occupied by another trekking group following the same river valley up into the mountains. What began as a robust argument, with our guide asking the other group’s guide to move on, degenerated into a deadly face-off when our man drew the knife traditionally kept in the bosom of his very traditional tunic and threatened the other guide. Blood would have been spilled if we had not pulled our guide off and set up camp far enough up the river for the conflict not to be resumed. Looking back, I see that I should have turned us around, marched back to Thimphu and replaced our guide. I prevaricated. We carried on.
Now, ten days later, after much damage control and containment of this man, we had lost someone right at the end of the trek; again because of my hesitations in confronting my nemesis. When we finally reached the valley floor and the end of the enclosing forest, the loss of the woman was confirmed. She was not there. There followed a very fierce argument about whether to alert the authorities in Thimphu so that they could send a search-and-rescue party, which I eventually won by simply going to the official who had greeted us at the end of the trail and telling him what had happened. I was beyond caring about this man’s professional pride anymore.
Although I was told that the rescue party would be there by morning, I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility for the woman and decided to set off back up the trail with a head torch and extra batteries to try to find her down one of the side branches where I had been told there was a woodcutter’s hut. It was at least five hours back up to this branch of the trail through rain and mud. One of the yak herders who accompanied our group was chosen out to go with me, as I made it clear I did not want our egotistical guide along. Amusingly, this yak herder went by the nickname of “Superman” because of his distinctive blue-and-red-dyed robes. He certainly did not look the part of the superhero; he was very slender, with not an ounce of muscle on him, and he had obviously drawn the short straw amongst his fellow herders. I had no idea that Superman comics had even made it to these mountain regions of Bhutan, but Superman and I duly set off up into the dark, rain-soaked forest, where I soon found that despite his title he was terrified of the dark and very, very tired after his long day.
The job of yak herders is to run, and I mean run, behind the yaks as they carry their enormous burdens down the mountain trails, throwing sticks and stones and singing innumerable yak-herding songs to chivvy them along. With their throwing and running yak herkers cover probably twice the distance of any trekker on the same trail. Yaks are by no means domesticated, but are wild and aggressive creatures that are barely tamed and that take an enormous amount of energy to keep them headed in the right direction. Each yak follows a strict hierarchy in the procession, with the leader carrying innumerable ribbons and bells hanging from its long and very dangerous horns.
The yaks would always set off late, with the camp on their backs, after the main group had left, and then around ten o’clock charge through our group of panicked trekkers, who at that time would be on eggshells listening for the daily cry: “The yaks are coming.” Climbing a tree or a rock, or running at right angles at great speed into the bush was undignified but highly recommended. The sight of the herders themselves, singing, shouting and throwing sticks and stones after the hurtling, burdened beasts, was always a sign that peace would reign again until the whole process was repeated again the following day.
Now Superman seemed tired and bereft without the yaks as a focus for his efforts. We walked at a fast pace through the night, hour after hour, and all the while I ignored his obvious distress. As we walked, he sang an unending jabbering song, interspersed with blowing into the whistle around his neck. I finally stopped him and asked him what all the noise and hullabaloo was about. He stared into my face with a look of sheer terror and said that there were bears in every part of this forest and he must scare them away from us. I let him know that I was about to become more terrifying than the bears if he carried on with the racket. After this he settled down.
We carried on walking for about four hours, through the mud and the rain and the bear-filled woods. I thought of the woman with the bears and I thought of the fairy-tale nature of her being in the woodcutter’s hut, if that was where she was. We carried on walking. Finally we got to the crux of the walk, a liquid, mud path that negotiated a series of small cliffs up through the wooded slope. Superman looked up and slid to the ground with a moan. He lay spread-eagled in a puddle, almost sobbing. I knew he wasn’t pretending. I sat down against a rock beneath a tree. The first rule of rescue is not to endanger the rescuers, something I had been pushing to the back of my mind for the last while. My Indiana Jones- style hat was pulled down over my forehead, and I watched the steady rain dripping off the rim as I gazed down at the sodden blue-and-red superhero.
In that moment in the pouring rain, sitting in the mud and wet as wet could be and realizing we had to turn back, I had a profound feeling of absolute, utter and complete tranquillity. It was, perhaps, the one time in my life when I could physically understand the sentence “The peace that passes all understanding.” It came out of having absolutely no choice, but it wasn’t just that we had done our best and there was no other decision but to turn back; it wasn’t that I was thoroughly soaked and thus couldn’t get any wetter. It was as if suddenly, everything in the world was in its right place. Every part of the earth and every part of the surrounding darkness of space was part of this concentrated experience happening here and now; as if a whole cosmos was radiating out from our little mud-spattered redoubt in the dripping woods: as if all events and characters in this play had conspired to this moment and there could be no other outcome. Adding to my sense of peace was a sudden, illogical but absolutely certain feeling that the woman for whom we searched was safe and that we would find her tomorrow walking into our camp.
If the story seems far-fetched, it proved to be doubly so when the woman did walk into our camp the very next day, having been found by another descending yak train negotiating the muddy trail. She had spent the night exactly where we thought she might be found, in that mythical woodcutter’s hut. She had heard the bears shuffling about outside and been initially frightened, especially as she was menstruating and had heard the old stories about bears being drawn to the odor. But her agitation had also subsided in the night, as ours had, into a profound peace, and she had a dream of seeing the baby she was about to adopt in Cambodia immediately after our visit to Bhutan.
After the trip, when the woman did reach Cambodia to go through the legal process of adoption, she found that the very night she had spent alone in the hut was the selfsame night the baby she was to adopt had been born and brought to the orphanage.
All very far-fetched, all absolutely true. It is remarkable to think that from the perspective of the birth that night and her own impending motherhood, we were not meant to find that woman. She was to go through a form of childbirth herself up there alone in the woods with the bears. All the flawed decisions, the selfish egomaniac guide, my hesitations and lack of asserting myself as leader, the pouring rain; Superman’s exhaustion, were all forgiven by the larger context into which we had all walked.
Until I heard that story, I had been prepared to teach our guide a lesson and put in a detailed report to the Bhutanese officials who ran the guiding program, asking them to fire him for a big catalogue of reasons. After I heard it and after my experience in the rain and after I saw the baby back in the United States, I let it go. I couldn’t be so self-righteous, though I must admit to a certain sense of relief when I heard that he had got himself sacked anyhow and couldn’t endanger any other group.
What is also remarkable is how much the drama of that night was constituted by individuals who did not know themselves very well or the larger story in which they were participating. The unreliable Catholic Buddhist guide, my lack of confidence and follow-through in confronting him were all forgiven by the bigger story. It seems to be that bigger story that the self must find and commit to in order to find happiness in the third marriage with the self.
Back from the Himalaya, home from the fairy-tale woodcutter’s hut and away from babies being brought in the dead of night to Cambodian orphanages, back in our car or our workplace or our office cubicle, the marriage with the self can seem very difficult, very stubborn; the experience of profound peace like a magical falling in love that we now have to sustain in a serious disciplined follow-up, like a marriage following a courtship, but this time, a marriage with the self.
Spending any time at all in the day with that elusive entity called the self can be very, very difficult, let alone entering into anything we might describe as a real marriage. There is a sense of being put on trial in each of the marriages but particularly in this internal marriage. Silence of one kind or another is necessary to come to terms with that self, and at least a little of that peace that passes all understanding that I felt in the forest and yet silence seems to be the very thing that initially brings us out in an allergic reaction.
It is remarkable how deathly afraid we are of any real quiet that might start to open up a spacious noncoercive relationship with the self or the world. Much easier to turn on the iPod, the laptop, the BlackBerry. In unmediated silence we intuit all our flaws being made abundantly clear to us and all our previous actions being revealed in their true light. We would much rather stay on the surface, where our self-protections can be put into a virtual context, or laughed off, or seen as being a natural part of our character. What we do not understand is the self-forgiveness and the self-compassion that come along with all the inner and outer seeing.
With the larger picture, seen in silence, untouched by our particular anxieties, comes a possibility for freedom. We are creatures afraid of ourselves and afraid of what we will find at the center of our many outward manifestations of selfishness, big and small. It might be a comfort, then, to understand how much our happiness in the other two marriages of relationship and work depends on our having a settled marriage with the self. It might also be a consolation to follow those who have gone this way before us, who bore the same fears and allergic reactions to silence, to self-revelation and see what they might have found in building a steady relationship with the world that opens up in that silence.
A MANUAL FOR MARRIAGE WITH THE SELF
We might remember again the Buddha’s to-do list for finding the self. He spent years deepening the state that I had just had a small glimpse of in the dark, rain-filled forest. His experience is that of the consummate practitioner who took my little fling, my lightning raid on peace and tranquillity, and made it into a settled relationship. It is worth looking at the jottings on that invisible yellow sticky pad that he passed on to others who came after him. It could equally be instructions for keeping a relationship alive. They are indeed the instructions Deirdre Blomfield-Brown took heed of and followed faithfully in her marriage to the self as the newly dedicated Pema Chödrön.
As Pema Chödrön, a dedicated Tibetan Buddhist, Deirdre found herself not only responsible for her newly disciplined life, but also, in recognition of her dedication, appointed head of a monastery built on the wild shores of Nova Scotia, Canada. In taking vows in the Buddhist tradition, she would have made an undertaking to follow the Buddha’s to-do list, better known as the Four Noble Truths.
Other people’s disciplines and rules always have a little of the insufferable about them, so we should read them, even if they are the Buddha’s, with a great degree of skepticism. Here they are, including the ones we have encountered already.
ITEM ONE. Of great help to those wandering wet, muddy forest paths in the pitch dark.
Understanding that there is no life without suffering. It is impossible not to be visited cyclically by that quality; we should not waste our energy trying to keep the changes that discomfit us at bay. We should consider ourselves just as much alive and just as much our self in every part of the cycle, lost or found, whether the tide is in or out, whether the grand old duke of York is at the top of the hill, at the bottom or only halfway up or down. We should stay in the conversation whether we are happy or disconsolate. In other words, with regard to suffering, we might as well complain about the weather for all the good it will do.
ITEM TWO . Of great comfort to those who have not achieved a specific outcome.
Our suffering comes from the fact that we are attached to the outer form that something assumes in a given instant rather than the movable conversation that stands behind it. Just as we find it hard to keep up with children’s growing and to address them in a way appropriate to the age they have actually reached, so we find it hard to keep up with the curve of transformation in almost every aspect of human life, including our own. Keeping up with what is occurring rather than lagging and getting caught in things that no longer exist, is one of the great disciplines of life. We can also become attached to ideas and concepts, like my finding the woman and rescuing her even though she was, in the end, better left alone. Which does not mean to say we stay at home and do not look for the lost; we must do what we think is right but detach from the specific outcome. Sometimes the outcome of our search-and-rescue effort is a deep exhaustion out of which we are provided with the revelation we were looking for. Perhaps I myself, sitting in peaceful clarity in the dark and the rain, was involved in a kind of vigil with her, we can never know. We can be imprisoned by even our best hopes, just as we can be imprisoned by believing these Four Noble Truths.
ITEM THREE. Of great comfort to those who like contradictions.
It is possible to attain a state where we are free from suffering. We free ourselves from suffering by being fully in the conversation rather than something static having a conversation and trying to defend that something at every turn. Again, we can stop complaining about the weather, the guide and the lack of overnight accommodation in central Bhutan. As an individual, I must learn to identify my self with the bigger picture, a picture that includes the weather, the history of Himalayan Buddhist culture and its lack of emphasis on roadside accommodation. I must learn to live at a kind of frontier between what I think is me and what I think is not me, so that my identity is more of a meeting place; an edge between past and present rather than an island around which the events of life swirl and move on. Even the pouring rain is part of my identity, though if I have the choice, I may move out of it. Even grief and loss, if felt in a timeless way, can be free from disconnection or suffering. In summary: It is possible to be happy while cold, wet and exhausted.
ITEM FOUR. Of great comfort to those who want to improve themselves and make the world a better place.
There is a disciplined way to sustain this experience of being free from suffering. It is possible to live without a constant sense of anxiety that something is not right and something is not complete. There is a way of living in which we can feel instinctual joy while letting time work its way toward our eventual disappearance; there is a way of being utterly in the present while holding responsibilities, finding people who are lost and getting things done. There is a way of not choosing, of being a crossroads where all the many qualities we try to hold together so willfully meet naturally. There is a peace that passes all understanding and it is attainable, though it will not give us any special privileges.
There is an interesting parallel between the Buddhist understanding of personal unhappiness and the suffering individuals may go through in divorce. Pema Chödrön’s initial glimpse into the self came through her outer experience of divorce and separation. What is difficult and painful in a divorce is not so much losing the other person (by the time of the actual divorce, our feelings at being apart may be of relief) but losing the dreams we shared and built together as a couple. There is an intuition that no matter who we find ourselves with in the future, no matter how much happiness we find with an other, those shared intuitions of a possible future will not occur again, including the way we parent our children. Our approach will be different, and our children will be different because of it. When I let go of another, I let go of a different future, a future I did not credit with informing my present so fully. When I change my relationship with reality, I also have a different future, but if I cannot let go of the old dreams, I will be full of nostalgia and grief for my old future. Even if this previous relationship was not good for me and brought me deep unhappiness, it was one that I knew and had helped to build myself.
Many of us live in a constant state of separation, as if in a permanent process of divorce with the reality that confronts us. As in a real divorce, we draw battle lines, make endless self-justifications and retell all the stories to put us in the right. We may even excise certain people from our memories as we might erase them technically from photographs. Vulnerability can be the hardest place to go, to understand that there is no person who is all right and no person who is all wrong. My exasperated and easy judgments of the guide could be brought to bear on my own life. How much of my own inherited foundations are muddled and unresolved and create a certain amount of ongoing chaos around me? My Irish and Yorkshire sides work well together for the most part, but there is a definite, painful confusion when an Irish rugby team plays England. I don’t know whom to cheer on. I solve this by not watching such an intimate, painful encounter between the two sides of myself. Which is exactly the dynamic that occurred when I refused to confront the guide. Living with such different streams of history inside my psyche has always made me give a person the benefit of the doubt and asked me to see both sides, to look, and too often for too long, for understanding. The guide’s confusion was but a magnified, less subtle version of my own.
So, having compassion for the guide does not mean that I do not confront him when he endangers my group of mountain walkers. It does mean, however, that if I can inhabit the bigger context that the noble truths have invited me into, I am able to confront him with some understanding and compassion for the inner struggles that led to him making such bad decisions. There is a possibility, only a possibility, around the evening campfire, for an opening. Pushed to the limit, of course, and asked to choose between his personal safety and that of my group, I would push him compassionately off the side of the mountain, but almost always we are not given these stark choices. No real conversation can occur without some vulnerability. We often close the conversation by forcing ourselves to make a premature and sometimes absurd choice between our self-preservation and having a proper conversation, even when there is no real threat to our person. We exaggerate and even create a sense of threat so that we are saved the necessity of a real dialogue. Calling someone a “little Hitler” may feel satisfying at the time, but it is a very efficient way of closing down any possibilities of redemption, either for the little Hitler I am judging or the little Hitler inside me that called him a little Hitler in the first place.
My greatest enemy is my greatest teacher has a very long history in Buddhism and in almost every other spiritual tradition. The statement is not an excuse to pardon bad behavior, or to roll over and die when persecuted. We use the sense of threat and competition as a way of looking at the parts of us that feel attacked whether there is a real enemy present or not. Especially in the marriage with the self, we are more likely to find there is indeed no other enemy than the false self we continually present to the world as the real one.
Why should it be so difficult for the Bhutanese guide to feel at home with himself? Why should it be so difficult to live with that very thing that shares our own skin and with which we are most familiar: our own self? How can it at times be so uncontrollable and so destructive, when we have grown with it, walked around with it and suffered along with it? We know its biography and its complaints, what it needs to feel happier about the world and what it doesn’t need: those things that anger it and make it feel hard-done by. We can tell exactly what it is going to say in most situations. We have listened to its endless and repeated requests for versions of the same thing all our life, and yet, we seem just as powerless to make this self truly happy as we do with any other self outside us. What is really strange is that this self constantly seems to be doing things that we later regret or want to hide or forget.
We seem to spend half the time coercing it to do things that we want it to do and half the time being coerced by it into things we don’t want or like. It is indeed like a stranger and like a partner all at the same time.
A strange and seemingly eternal dynamic that seems to keep us both apart and firmly cemented together in any marriage is our refusal to give our partners the very thing they most want in the relationship. There seems to be something almost instinctual about our targeted withholding of specific forms of requested love. We withhold these intimacies not only because we sometimes cannot find the wherewithal to offer them, but many times because some interior whispered voice tells us that what is being requested is the very thing partners must grant themselves. That we, in effect, cannot supply what is being demanded, even if we tried. Some wiser part of us refuses to buckle under the coercion and though it may not be able to articulate why, withholds the desperately needed commodity in an unconscious effort to educate the other person into their own inherited sense of lack.
In the same way, if I spend any time in silence, any time at all watching the way my mind works, I will find, as Pema Chödrön did in the years of discipline that lay ahead of her, that there is a parallel way in which we withhold the very thing from ourselves that might provide us with the possibility of happiness. As Pema Chödrön says, “The first noble truth . . . is that people experience Dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong . . . only in the West is this articulated as ‘something is wrong with me.’ ”
What we withhold from ourselves is the willingness to understand our own imperfection. The strategic, intellectual self, looking in from the outside, cannot have the experience of sheer physical vulnerability that the deeper internal self must gain to walk through the door of self-compassion. Just as we must leave our partner with certain struggles that are entirely their own, so we must leave our deeper self alone to suffer through the confrontation with its own flaws and imperfections. By letting ourselves alone in this radical way, we actually demonstrate a freeing form of love for that emerging inner person.
MY OWN FLAWS AND MY OWN FEARS ARE MY GREATEST TEACHER
If I am afraid of something and especially if there is no logical reason I should emphasize that particular fear beyond all the other fears that human beings feel, then I have the possibility of coming to terms with and questioning the premises on which my sense of self pivots. My flaws are my doorway to self-understanding and my way of understanding the flaws and fears of others.
The strange irony is that we take these very personal problems too personally. We think that if we investigate the self we will find out that there is something wrong at the core, and we want to defend against that revelation at all costs. The surface personality feels as if it is going to die and becomes deathly afraid of the conversation. The task is to shift the identity more toward the movable conversation that stands behind us, a deep undercurrent we can tap into that carries on unconcerned with the surface tribulations. In this depth we try to create a real silence in which to keep our long-standing, well-established, self-protective stories away, to let ourselves alone so we can experience the physical vulnerability of the question and be transformed by it. We give these smaller protective stories away so that we can see how they come back to us once we have established a larger way of being in the world.
We call this unremitting wish to create a silence in which to see to the truth meditation. The outer form looks like silence as we see a practitioner sitting quietly, but meditation can take many forms, beginning usually with simply following the breath, getting to the very foundations of the way we physically give and take. It can be quite revealing to find out how much willpower we put into that autonomic bodily function; we find that we are controlling a process that can be left well alone and doesn’t need so much outside intervention. Meditation can also take conceptual forms in which we dig down deep in one area, asking a question about why we are so afraid of a certain thing, or by which we attempt to come close to a physical sense of hurt we carry.
We could see meditation as the equivalent of the kitchen or a bedroom in a marriage. It’s the place where most of the significant transformative conversations happen; significant conversations that may be silent but that can shift the relationship with the self to a new level. The act of physical transformation can at times be an almost ecstatic, sexual experience. It can also be a fierce, unrelenting and prolonged daily confrontation. One of the disciplined forms of conversation with the self that Pema Chödrön learned from her Tibetan Buddhist tradition was a practice called Tonglen. It was a practice I was unwittingly performing with my difficult friend and enemy the Bhutanese guide.
Tonglen is the willingness to get not only to the center of particular forms of suffering that affect us deeply but also to the vulnerability and physical heartache that come with the experience. I might choose the suffering I witness in Darfur, or the unhappiness of an abused child I am powerless to help, or in my own experience, an unresolved hurt I felt from my father. In Tonglen, I will attempt to breathe that hurt in and give it back with each out-breath as something more spacious and generous. The object is not to solve my unresolved hurt or the endless griefs of the world, but to feel the heartache and vulnerability itself and to try to deepen that sense of hurt. The sense of vulnerability itself becomes a doorway into a bigger understanding of it and a way to hold it at the same time. It’s not a way of abstracting the suffering of the world and then doing nothing about it, but a practice for making ourselves able to bear it and work with it despite the many reflected fears it brings up inside us.
This is the marriage with the self that Pema Chödrön has publicly committed to and to which she has actually made vows. In the consummation of this marriage we find this personal self cannot be separated from all the other selves in the world. “To study the self is to forget the self,” said Dogen Zenji. The out-loud vow that Pema Chödrön made in her marriage is called in the Tibetan tradition the Bodhisattva vow: “Human beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” Our own vows to self-understanding; to taking this invisible, very personal marriage seriously may not have a name, and we may not get an official ceremony. It may be a moment on a mountaintop or at a table in a small café, or a second alone by a window in a high building in Manhattan. The essential thing is that we see its necessity and make that often unconscious relationship with the self as conscious and as generous to others in this world as a happy marriage can be.
Conclusion: On Letting One’s Self Alone
What is needed in a marriage with the self is what is needed in the marriage to another: a radical letting alone of our partner, the deeper self, to let it live its own life without our necessity for a constant, overarching control. We must stop trying to protect that deeper, more vulnerable self from the way it feels things keenly and at their essence. This self that we are attempting to “marry” can look after itself as much as our partner can. Its vulnerability is not a weakness but actually a faculty for understanding what is about to happen. It does not wish to survive its encounters with its previous reality intact and untouched; it actually wants to be transformed by what it meets. In a sense it wants to be the conversation itself.
Conclusion: On Letting the Self Meet Another
There is no self we can construct that will survive a real conversation. A real conversation always involves our moving the small context we inhabit to the next-larger context that will transform and enlighten us and that seems to have been waiting for us all along.
What we withhold from ourselves is the very thing we need to complete ourselves. This act of completion is often seen as a form of death and something to be fought against. We quite often do not want to know what we need. We will try to offer false gifts to the self in order to keep the real gift at bay.
Conclusion: On the Difficulties of Vulnerability
The real gift and the crux of our difficulty is our constant and entirely natural experience of vulnerability. Trying to live without feeling vulnerable means we do not understand the fierce nature of the reality we inhabit. In closing off our vulnerability, we close off the authentic exchanges that tell us we are actually having a real conversation. Vulnerability is the door through which we walk into self-understanding and compassion for others. Being enlightened does not mean we assume supernatural powers or find a perfection that exalts us above the daily losses other human beings are subject to; enlightenment means we have accepted thoroughly our transience, our vulnerability and our imperfections and live just as robustly with them as without them.
The relationship between the ego and the deeper enlightened self is much like the relationship between the rescuer on the muddy path and the person who does not “wish” to be rescued, who must gestate through the lonely night in the woodcutter’s hut. The ego is meant to look after us, to care for us and protect us, and perhaps come looking for us when we seem to be lost. But when we identify completely with that protective figure, we lose the more important story and halt the possible transformation occurring in the depth of the night. Sometimes the best thing to do is to hold a kind of silent vigil beside the part of us that is going through the depths of a difficult transformation. When the outer story that the ego tells, merges with the one the inner self has come to, this becomes “the marriage of true minds.” The ego seems to disappear, but actually it has simply assumed its rightful place in the hierarchy of priorities; it has become a good servant to the soul’s desires.
Conclusion: On the Nature of the Path
I wrote the following piece, recalling all those paths I had walked in various parts of the Himalaya and the invisible, personal transformations I experienced along the way. The poem includes in an unspoken way my friend and helper the Bhutanese guide. It begins with a quotation from Han Shan, a Chinese Taoist who spent a long time gestating on a mountainside and who established a faithful marriage with the elusive and ever-changing center we call a self.
NO PATH
There is no path that goes all the way.
Han Shan
Not that it stops us looking
for the full continuation .
The one line in the poem we can start and follow
straight to the end. The fixed belief we can hold, facing a stranger that saves us the trouble of a real conversation .
But one day you are not just imagining an empty chair
where your loved one sat. You are not just telling a story
where the bridge is down and there’s nowhere to cross.
You are not just trying to pray
to a God you imagined
would keep you safe.
No, you’ve come to the place where nothing you’ve done
will impress and nothing you can promise will avert
the silent confrontation, the place where
your body already seems to know the way having kept to the last its own secret reconnaissance.
But still, there is no path that goes all the way
one conversation leads to another
one breath to the next until
there’s no breath at all
just the inevitable final release of the burden .
And then
your life will
have to start
all over again
for you to know
even a little
of who you had been.
from D.W., River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007