In the early stages of my father’s cancer, I found it very difficult to know how best to help. I lived a thousand miles away and would come for visits. It was hard seeing him going downhill, harder still feeling so clumsy, not sure what to do, not sure what to say.
Toward the end, I was called to come suddenly. He’d been slipping. I went straight from the airport to the hospital, then directly to the room he was listed in.
When I entered, I saw that I’d made a mistake. There was a very, very old man there, pale and hairless, thin, and breathing with great gasps, fast asleep, seemingly near death. So I turned to find my dad’s room. Then I froze. I suddenly realized, “My God, that’s him!” I hadn’t recognized my own father! It was the single most shocking moment of my life.
Thank God he was asleep. All I could do was sit next to him and try to get past this image before he woke up and saw my shock. I had to look through him and find something beside this astonishing appearance of a father I could barely recognize physically.
By the time he awoke, I’d gotten part of the way. But we were still quite uncomfortable with one another. There was still this sense of distance. We both could feel it. It was very painful. We both were self-conscious … infrequent eye contact.
Several days later, I came into his room and found him asleep again. Again such a hard sight. So I sat and looked some more. Suddenly this thought came to me, words of Mother Teresa, describing lepers she cared for as “Christ in all his distressing disguises.”
I never had any real relation to Christ at all, and I can’t say that I did at that moment. But what came through to me was a feeling for my father’s identity as … like a child of God. That was who he really was, behind the “distressing disguise.” And it was my real identity too, I felt. I felt a great bond with him which wasn’t anything like I’d felt as father and daughter.
At that point he woke up and looked at me and said, “Hi.” And I looked at him and said, “Hi.”
For the remaining months of his life we were totally at peace and comfortable together. No more self-consciousness. No unfinished business. I usually seemed to know just what was needed. I could feed him, shave him, bathe him, hold him up to fix the pillows—all these very intimate things that had been so hard for me earlier.
In a way, this was my father’s final gift to me: the chance to see him as something more than my father; the chance to see the common identity of spirit we both shared; the chance to see just how much that makes possible in the way of love and comfort. And I feel I can call on it now with anyone else.
~
The most familiar models of who we are—father and daughter, doctor and patient, “helper” and “helped”—often turn out to be major obstacles to the expression of our caring instincts; they limit the full measure of what we have to offer one another. But when we break through and meet in spirit behind our separateness, we experience profound moments of companionship. These, in turn, give us access to deeper and deeper levels of generosity and loving kindness. True compassion arises out of unity.
All the more painful, then, are the moments in which we feel cut off from one another, when we reach out to help or be helped and don’t quite meet. Despite the yearning of the heart, so often when we seek to care for one another we feel far apart. Albert Einstein speaks to this question and the challenge it poses to service:
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A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
It is to ourselves, then, that we must first look in our effort to see what limits the spontaneous expression of helping instincts. How does who we think we are affect what we have to give? How does this “delusion of consciousness” which “separates us from the rest,” narrow the range of our compassion? What different understanding of our being might nourish and deepen what we have to offer one another?
All of us seem to be born into the experience of separateness. In infancy, we come to distinguish between “self” and “other.” As we develop, we arrive at or devise a complex group of ideas about who we are, our ego. This includes our identity on a variety of planes in which we function simultaneously—as bodies, personalities, citizens, and souls. And we have many roles to play in the course of a single day, each of which is functional and tends to call attention to itself.
Working a busy afternoon at the mental health clinic, we are more conscious of our professional identity. When we get home and see the children, we’re most aware of ourselves as parents. Then the evening news comes on, and for a little while we are responding to life, say, as a liberal or as a conservative. The phone rings, and it’s our mother; now we’re someone’s child. But that model falls away quickly enough as we prepare for bed, notice that we’re aging, wonder about our sex life, and drift off to sleep perhaps anticipating tomorrow’s tasks at the clinic. Hundreds of times a day, we shift costumes to fit appropriate roles. This is the life of the separate self, moving through the world of “other.”
For the most part, this model “self” or “ego,” with its individual attributes and roles, serves us in good stead. It preserves our physical and, to a degree, our psychological integrity. It gives us a sense of continuity through time, directing and documenting personal growth. It catalogues past experiences, makes available our skills, helps keep track of capacities and limitations.
Frequently we relish or simply enjoy our individuality and sense of uniqueness. The freedom to define who we are is a challenge. As we acquire a certain degree of equanimity in self-image, we are that much more likely to feel empathy for those around us. We know what it’s like to be a “self” moving through the world of “others.” When someone feels particularly isolated or in pain, we don’t need a great deal of information in order to come to his or her aid. Our own experience of separateness guides us to appropriate understanding and support. Perhaps there are more specific parallels of experience. We too have gone through a divorce, lost a loved one, struggled with alcoholism, or experienced a debilitating illness. From this body of common experience, much caring is born. As separate selves, we spend much time reaching out to one another.
Yet it is only fair to say that the quality of our helping sometimes suffers from the hold our sense of separateness might have on us. As happily and healthily as we may function within it, the degree to which we believe ourselves to be individual, isolated entities has consequences for how we care for one another.
I canvass from door to door looking for voter registration volunteers, asking for just a few hours a week. Not a big job for someone, no great risk, and it can make a difference. That’s what we believe, anyway.
What I usually get is a list of reasons Why Not: “I’m busy elsewhere.” “I’d be embarrassed to ring someone’s doorbell.” “What’ll I do with the kids?” Things like that.
I’ll try to loosen it up a little. “Wouldn’t you like to meet some new friends?” “Wouldn’t it be nice to not be a mother for three hours a week?”
It generally doesn’t break through. And the reasons Why Not usually sound a little hollow as well. Something else is at work.
~
Operating from the model of the separate self, fear and caution may be the first responses we notice that block the spontaneous expression of our innate generosity. In infancy, when the foundation stones of ego are developed and the world seems very big, our survival mechanisms are called into play very quickly. We feel powerless and vulnerable, and because these ideas are learned emotionally, before reason and perspective are fully operating, they may be surprisingly resistant to change as we grow older. So perhaps we are a little wary of the world around us. However much we might wish to reach out, a habit of self-protectiveness buried within may still hold us back. “Keep the doors locked and we’ll be secure,” says the ego. Our heart responds, “But I’m not happy like that.” To which the ego replies, “Better safe than sorry.”
We may feel a little nervous and tentative, even defensive, about responding to the needs of others—particularly of those in considerable pain, who may make demands on us, whose reactions may be unpredictable, who may indeed remind us of our own vulnerability. One response of the separate self to the impulse to help out, then, may simply be a reluctance or inability to get involved.
We may also have to contend with inertia. An anxious, self-protective ego is most comfortable in a familiar role in which it knows exactly what’s expected of it. This attachment, in the face of changing conditions or new demands, leads the ego to hold on to one model of identity unless it has another equally comfortable one to slip into. It’s reluctant to grow, which means opening to the ambiguity of the unknown and learning new roles. This clinging can hold us back from even the simplest actions.
I’m just not the kind of person who signs petitions.
Inasmuch as we are caught up in any sense of personal inadequacy, we may wonder what we really can do for others, even in those moments when we’re not fearful or tentative. Because we often identify ourselves, consciously or not, with our shortcomings, we may feel that we don’t have enough, that we just aren’t enough, to help meet the needs of others. We give very little because we feel very small.
It’s not that I don’t care—I’m just sure you could find somebody better than me to do it.
Our caution and sense of inadequacy may also lead us to cling to a private agenda that limits the full freedom and generosity of those helpful acts we can initiate. Insofar as we feel lonely, angry, or powerless, for example, our caring efforts may be largely motivated by the need to gain intimacy, vent rage, or win power. Catering to our own needs and expectations, we may be less likely to hear what others feel they really need. We may be willing to give, but our self-image has its terms.
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Even now, after years of experience, I’m very reluctant to challenge a colleague on a tricky diagnosis. It’s a kind of dirty little secret in the medical profession. Everyone has a lot at stake. We all cling to our authority and persona. It becomes a sort of unwritten code among physicians, the license to do that. Very delicate stuff. And who pays, by the way?
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Frequently, in our efforts to remain secure and protect the integrity of the separate self, we give greater weight to one aspect of our identity over another. Though we may acknowledge, in the abstract, that we are simultaneously physical, emotional, moral, political, and spiritual beings, we seem to cling to one dimension of our identity at the expense of the others. We specialize. As a consequence, however, we often end up shortchanging what we have to offer one another.
“I’m just a surgeon. You really ought to discuss your reactions to this experience with someone else.” Why? What of the wellspring of compassion from having seen so many people go through similar experiences as patients? Thinking of ourself simply as a surgeon may cut off access to our empathy, potentially a source of great comfort and counsel.
Or perhaps we think of ourself primarily as a “seeker.” “Oh well, I’m basically a religious person. I don’t have much to do with politics.” Yet by simply opening to acknowledge a fuller sense of identity, we might see that the very inner tranquillity we may have cultivated in spiritual practice is precisely what is needed in social action.
So often we deny ourselves and others the full resources of our being simply because we’re in the habit of defining ourselves narrowly and defensively to begin with. Less flexible, less versatile, we inevitably end up being less helpful.
While some self-images are more likely to facilitate the expression of our compassion than others, it is also true that any model of the self, positive or negative, will limit our capacity to help. Each form we identify with, each role we attach to, is ultimately incomplete and transient. It can dissolve in a moment. A social worker gets fired—budget cuts, nothing open in the field: “Now I can’t even read the want ads.” A therapist starts losing patients, and fewer new ones come in: “What’s happening? Is it me?” A model mother can’t let go as her youngest child turns adolescent: “I’m so depressed. My kids don’t need me anymore.”
If any of these roles are who we think we are—social worker, therapist, mother—what’s left when they fall away? “Where’s the rest of me?”
Even if we may momentarily be secure in our chosen roles, they can still impede the quality of our service at the deepest level.
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I’ve been chronically ill for twelve years. Stroke. Paralysis. That’s what I’m dealing with now. I’ve gone to rehab program after rehab program. I may be one of the most rehabilitated people on the face of the earth. I should be President.
I’ve worked with a lot of people, and I’ve seen many types and attitudes. People try very hard to help me do my best on my own. They understand the importance of that self-sufficiency, and so do I. They’re positive and optimistic. I admire them for their perseverance. My body is broken, but they still work very hard with it. They’re very dedicated. I have nothing but respect for them.
But I must say this: I have never, ever, met someone who sees me as whole.…
Can you understand this? Can you? No one sees me and helps me see myself as being complete, as is. No one really sees how that’s true, at the deepest level. Everything else is Band-Aids, you know.
Now I understand that this is what I’ve got to see for myself, my own wholeness. But when you’re talking about what really hurts, and about what I’m really not getting from those who’re trying to help me … that’s it: that feeling of not being seen as whole.
~
Implicit in any model of who we think we are is a message to everyone about who they are. It’s not as if there are any real secrets. If we’re only seeing one part of the picture about ourselves, positive or negative, that’s all we’ll be able to make real to anybody else. Caught in the models of the separate self, then, we end up diminishing one another. The more you think of yourself as a “therapist,” the more pressure there is on someone to be a “patient.” The more you identify as a “philanthropist,” the more compelled someone feels to be a “supplicant.” The more you see yourself as a “helper,” the more need for people to play the passive “helped.” You’re buying into, even juicing up, precisely what people who are suffering want to be rid of: limitation, dependency, helplessness, separateness. And that’s happening largely as a result of self-image.
To identify with the separate self, however functional it may often be, is to make this model of reality more real for everyone else. How much is this helping, and how much is it hindering?
Perhaps we recognize the predicament; we see the problem of always having to be “somebody.” So we decide to let it all go, become the model of humility, and aspire to the ideal of selflessness.
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One day a rabbi, in a frenzy of religious passion, rushed in before the ark, fell to his knees, and started beating his breast, crying, “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!”
The cantor of the synagogue, impressed by this example of spiritual humility, joined the rabbi on his knees. “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!”
The “shamus” (custodian), watching from the corner, couldn’t restrain himself, either. He joined the other two on his knees, calling out, “I’m nobody! I’m nobody!”
At which point the rabbi, nudging the cantor with his elbow, pointed at the custodian and said, “Look who thinks he’s nobody!”
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What’s to be done? When there’s too much “somebody,” it’s trouble. But we can’t make believe we’re nobody, either. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and quit!
Time for humor and perspective. The least we can do is acknowledge or remind ourselves that this is part of the predicament of being human. We all must deal with conditioning. The sense of ourselves as separate is what we are contending with virtually all of the time. It’s our curriculum, and everybody’s enrolled.
So how do we get on with our course of study?
~
As an intern, part of my work was to travel around in teams, examining patients. I would notice their look as we entered. Intimidated, apprehensive, feeling like case studies of various illnesses. I hated that. But I was an intern.
I remember one guy distinctly, however, who was altogether different. I think this guy changed my life. He was a black man in his sixties—very cute, very mischievous, and very sick.
What brought us repeatedly to him was the utter complexity of his illness, condition on top of condition, and the mystery of why he was still alive. It was so strange. We were visiting not to fìnd out what was wrong with him, but why he was still here at all.
I had the feeling he could see right through us. He’d say, “Hey, boys!” when we’d come in—the way you might when a gang of ten-year-olds come barging into a house for a snack in the middle of an intense game outside. He was so pleased, and so amused. It made some people nervous. I was intrigued. But for some weeks, I never had a chance to be alone with him.
Now and then he’d get into very serious trouble, and he’d be moved into intensive care. Then he’d rally, to everyone’s amazement, and we’d move him back. And we’d visit him again, and he’d say, “You boys here again?”—pretending to be surprised that we were still around.
One night there was an emergency, and I took the initiative and went to see him alone. He looked pretty bad. But he came alert a few seconds after I entered. He gave me a grin and said, “Well …,” sort of like he’d expected me. Like he’d known how much I’d come to love him. That happens in hospitals.
I imagine I looked a little surprised at the “Well …,” but we just laughed a minute, and I stood there just so taken by who he was. And then he hit me with a single remark, half a question and half a … something else.
“Who you?” he said, sort of smiling. Just that. “Who you?”
I started to say, “Well, I’m Doctor.…” And then I just stopped cold. It’s hard to describe. I just sort of went out. What happened was that all kinds of answers to his question started to go through my head. They all seemed true, but they all seemed less than true. “Yeah, I’m this or I’m that … and also … but not just … and that’s not the whole picture, the whole picture is.…” The thought process went something like that. Nothing remotely like that had ever happened to me. But I remember feeling very elated.
It must have shown, because he gave me this big grin and said, “Nice to meet you.” His timing killed me.
We talked for five minutes about this and that—nothing in particular; children, I think. At the end, I ventured to say, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He said, “No, I’m just fine. Thanks very much … Doctor …?” And he paused for the name, and I gave it to him this time, and he grinned at me again, really he did. And that was it.
He died a few days later. And I carry him around today. I think of him now and again in the midst of my rounds. A particular moment or particular patient brings him back. “Who you?” For years, I’d trained to be a physician, and I almost got lost in it. This man took away my degree, and then gave it back to me with “And also?… and also … and also?” scribbled across. I’ll never forget that.
~
How good it can feel to regain perspective. Our feeling of confinement as narrow, limited, isolated entities begins to dissolve as we take a few steps back and recognize that who we are is “this … and also … and also … and also.” Moving in and out of these various identities, each is “real” only at the moment we are invested in it. A moment later it may not be relevant at all. We see, in other words, the relative reality of these various identities, “real” only in relation to the situation which calls them forth.
But if all of our identities are only relatively real, coming and going as circumstance warrants, is there any part of us that remains steady and stable behind all our roles? If we observe our own minds at work, we see that behind all these identities is a state of awareness that incorporates them all and yet is still able to rest behind them. As we loosen the hold of each identity so that we don’t get completely lost in it, we are able to remain light and loose—able to play among these various aspects of being without identifying exclusively with any. We don’t have to be anybody in particular. We don’t have to be “this” or “that.” We are free simply to be.
To taste this freedom increases our flexibility immensely, and enables us to be fuller instruments of service to others. For example, as a skillful nurse, we’ll sense those moments with certain patients in which all the nurturing we’ve learned as a mother is needed. Or perhaps a situation arises, say with an imperious physician, when who we are is simply a strong woman—one who’s gained that resolve through the consciousness raising and insights of feminism. Or in the presence of one who is dying, we feel that part of ourself which is merely God’s child; humility, prayer, and faith are what we have to share now.
We often move among these various identities with much fluidity and skill. When we discover how exhilarating this is, what we’re getting is just a taste of real freedom, the liberation that comes from loosening our identification with self-image altogether. We experience the versatility of our being and the independence of our awareness. We’re opening up the windows of our little homes and letting in a little cross-ventilation.
Humor also serves to support this awakening perspective. What else, in the end, do we laugh at but our own vanity and puffy attachment to who we think we are? The Marx Brothers have no respect—no respect, that is, for anyone who’s busy taking himself seriously as “somebody.” Everybody’s fair game. Groucho’s cracks and Harpo’s horn shake us all up. We sit there watching, laughing, loving it, grateful. How often we recognize ourselves in portrayals of human foolishness. How much freer we feel when a friend kids us about some quality of self-importance, and we’re able to gulp, take it, and finally join in the general laughter. We come off self-image. We’re even able to direct this same irreverence toward our own behavior and attachments.
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I catch myself in self-importance ten times a day—check that, five—well, maybe once. It’s appalling anyway. A little flashbulb goes off and I’m exposed … like Jimmy Olsen caught Superman changing clothes in the phone booth.
Of course, whoever I’m with has probably been seeing all this self-importance in me for hours before I ever notice. And my colleagues … they’ve been shrugging or giving up for years. So there’s no sanctuary. And I’ve stopped trying to hide it. No, that’s a lie! Don’t trust this man! Don’t print this interview!
What I’ve done really is I’ve begun. I’ve just started to watch myself as I go through these little prances. I actually have this exercise I sometimes perform. What I do when I catch myself being Mr. Administrator of Social Services is I get up out of my chair, walk away a few steps, stand for a moment, and then turn around and walk back and sit down again. The one who is now seated is usually not the same one who was there before. I’m no longer that guy, Mr. Administrator. For a while, anyway.
I should add that this exercise frequently appears quite mad to other people in the room, particularly if they’re people who have come to me for some kind of assistance. (“This is the guy I’ve come to for help?”) Funny. So I perform these exercises at considerable cost to my aura of authority, you understand. But it’s definitely worth it. Freedom is priceless … worth whatever the cost.
~
With increasing perspective, we see that all of our ego identities, models, and self-images can be useful, but need not be entrapping. We may gain this perspective very slowly, but the direction is clear. As we lighten our attachment to self-image, we find a different vantage point from which to observe who we are.
It’s as if you lived in a little town, and you go up to a mountaintop and, looking down, you see how you move about in the course of an ordinary day. You see your route to work, how you go shopping, the main thoroughfares, your shortcuts, your daily routines—you’re seeing all that from up there. Then you return to the village. But now, when you’re moving around town thereafter, there’s a part of you that always recalls the perspective from above. As you go through a day, you’re still watching it all from up there.
Sometimes, however, the process of breaking through attachment to our separateness happens simply because we’ve reached the boundaries of all our roles and self-images: “I gave it everything I had.” “I tried everything I knew.” Nothing worked, couldn’t help. Perhaps we give up in resignation; the separate self, by definition, has its limits, after all. But maybe we find another way. We surrender into the unknown. With nothing left to do, we let our heart and intuitive wisdom reveal another way to be.
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You might say I’m the gatekeeper here, the first person people meet when they come in for help. My friends at work, they’ll call up and say, “St. Peter?” I say, “He’s not here right now, can I take a message?”
Anyhow, Family Services is the name of our department. People come in, I direct them to the appropriate office: food, shelter, child protection, welfare, legal services, your basics. My job is to get a sense of who someone is and then find the right place for them. Not simple.
For a long time I found this an uncomfortable assignment. I don’t like sizing up someone according to their problem. It may help them get to the right office, but it also reduces them somehow. Reduces me too. I’ll find myself resisting this way of going about things. But I had an experience which changed my way of thinking about it.
There was this woman who was living on the street, one I used to pass on my way to the bus. She was homeless, alcoholic; later it developed she had had a cancer diagnosis. For some reason I decided to take up with her. I liked her smile. Enough of sending everyone elsewhere. I knew the whole maze of social services; I’d take her around myself—clinics, shelters, Medicare, whatever. I guess I wanted to know you could help one person yourself. She was very uncomplaining. Viola. She was willing, even funny about it. “Well, Marie,” she’d say, “what are you going to do for me today?”
Oh, the scenes we went through! They called me once from the Women’s Shelter. Somehow she’d brought in three pints of Seagram’s Seven that night, and a group had gotten drunk. That was against the rules, and I had to take her out. “You told me you’d be good,” I said. “You were warm there.” She said, “Well, we got warmer.”
Or I set her up once with a counselor. After a while he called. “Look, she shows up irregularly, and she always wants to argue with me when she does. What’s she here for?” And I’d tell Viola, and she’d say, “Sure, I love to argue with these people. He wants to talk about my childhood all the time. But he doesn’t even remember what childhood was like himself. Trust me, Marie.”
And I did. I’d have to laugh. She was so insightful and honest. Oh, I really did love her, that one—I really did. But the problems went on for months. Nothing seemed to work out. She kept going back on the street, drinking, getting sicker, all the rest. The more helpless I felt, the more I just loved her; what else could I do? And I’d try again. “Look, Viola,” I’d say. “Look where, Marie?” she’d reply. It became a kind of joke between us: “Look.” “Look where?”
She moved to a park near my house, and there she started to really go downhill. One evening I went to see her and she was sitting under a tree. She looked awful. I had this powerful feeling that she was getting very close to death. So I went through everything with her one more time: her drinking, her health, her eating, her shelter. She could come live with me. I’d reached that point of willingness.
She just listened, and finally she said, “You know, dear, there’s nothing you can do for me anymore.” And I saw she was right, I just saw that. And I heaved this big sigh, just let go. About then, it started raining lightly. I finally said, “Well, it’s getting late and wet. Shall we go get some coffee?”
She said, “You go, Marie. I’ll be all right here.”
I said, “Yeah … well … I’ll see you later then.” But somehow it felt to both of us like I wouldn’t.
I went to the bus, and I was crying on the bus. I felt just brokenhearted. I felt there was something else, I didn’t know what. Then this thought came to me that she was out there alone in the rain. Just that. So I got off and took the other bus back and went into the park with a newspaper on my head. I must have looked pretty funny.
She was under the tree. She looked up at me. I sat down. She said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Nothing, really. I just felt like being with you a little more.” She said, “Okay.”
So we sat in the rain. There we were. It was relatively dry, because this was a big sycamore tree. I told her about how my father taught me to identify trees by their bark and how I loved trees and nature and felt happiest there. She told me about the desert. She used to live in Arizona. Her favorite place was the desert; it was so peaceful there.
We watched the rain. We watched how the squirrels ran around and the last few people scurrying out. We watched how the park looked with no one in it: some birds, a stray dog.… some mist beginning to appear. And I felt finally at peace, and we were both at peace, and we stayed silent a long time. I felt such love.
She walked me to the bus. She said, “Thanks.” I said, “For what?” She said, “For nothing.” We laughed. “You’ve been very good to me,” she added. We were teary. We hugged. Then I got on the bus, and we waved good-bye. I never saw her again. I’ll always love her.
~
When our models of who we are fall away, we are free simply to meet and be together. And when this sense of being encompasses all—one another, the park, the rain, everything—separateness dissolves and we are united in compassion.
Helpful Being, then, is the goal. What we have to offer others will come from our sense of unity. So we look for and cherish those experiences in which we feel ourselves connected to all things in the universe.
Out under the stars, stretching to encompass notions of distance and galaxies, “light years,” until the mind just boggles and goes “tilt”—and suddenly your sense of specialness or separateness is replaced by a feeling of identity with the all-inclusive immensity of the universe.
Listening to a Bach chorale and feeling transported into a sense of order and harmony far beyond the music itself.
Harvesting the garden, smiling as you remember the spring planting, and appreciating the lawfulness of fruition in nature, the same life energy in you.
Making love, when you suddenly merge with someone very dear; two become one, and you somehow feel more truly yourself than you ever had before.
Or in service itself—comforting a crying child, reassuring a frightened patient, bringing a glass of water to a bedridden elder—when you feel yourself to be a vehicle of kindness, an instrument of love. There’s more to the deed than the doer and what’s been done. You yourself feel transformed and connected to a deeper sense of identity.
~
When I was working in New York with elderly, poor orthodox Jews, I’d come upon a number of old synagogues—dirty, filthy, vandalized. I’d always had ambivalent feelings about synagogues—a kind of no-man’s-land for me. If anything, they made me less sure of what it meant to be a Jew.
But one day I came upon one that somehow caught me. That night I went to the service—very few people there, all down and out. And suddenly the thought came to me that I would clean the synagogue. Just that. And I did it.
That’s how it began. We’d bring in young people to clean these synagogues and in so doing get a sense of what they really meant—not a social club but a place where the entire life cycle of a people and their continuing relationship with God was to be celebrated.
Myself, I found it hard to pray there. That was the stage I was at. But I helped bring a sense of order and beauty. You see, I had had an immense respect for that generation of Jews which had come to Palestine in the twenties and thirties, who went back to the land not simply to rebuild the land but to be rebuilt by the land, by the work itself.
That’s what this became for me. This was a mitzvah, an act of service, but it was also an act by which I myself was being rebuilt—rebuilt into a deeper relationship with my tradition and my people and that living faith.
~
Finally, profound moments of spiritual and religious experience take us beyond identification with our isolated egos. The sense of separateness falls away as we come into some deeper understanding of “It All.” While these experiences do not always easily lend themselves to words, the message of all the teachings that support them have much in common. Don’t get lost in what’s apparent. Go beyond the evidence of the senses and the rational mind. Acknowledge that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. Whatever else we may seem to be, we’re also reflections or expressions of … and then we get names for the nameless: “Awareness,” “Being,” “God,” “Life,” “the Formless,” “the Way.” Whatever it is, whatever it’s called, there’s only One of it. It’s present in all creation. We ourselves are rooted in it. It is our essence.
Who we are, from this perspective, begins with the One. Unity, not separateness, is our starting point. And while our ego doesn’t disappear, its importance is certainly put in perspective as a result of having experienced a higher Self.
Whether these experiences—through nature, art, love, service, spirit—are frequent or rare, we see that when we are not caught up in self-conscious separateness, not defined by self-image, we still survive. Indeed, we thrive and function happily, freely, and efficiently. We feel exalted. Despite all our ego’s concerns and warnings of the dire consequences of not being “somebody special,” we are capable of simply resting in our being. We simply are.
The geese have no intention to cast their reflections.
The lake has no mind to receive their image.
Fortune Cookie
From this perspective, the whole question of identity can look very different. We can enter into the world of the separate self with a certain amount of freedom, even irony and whimsy. As long as we’re here, we might as well play.
~
In a Seattle newspaper there was a picture of a man behind bars. The caption explained that he had been caught with a dispatch case full of papers and cards claiming various and different identities. The police had thus far ascertained that he was none of these. The problem was that they couldn’t find out who he really was.
The man said, “They’re the ones who arrested me. It’s their problem to find out who I am. I know who I am.” The police sergeant said, “This man has boggled our system.”
~
Tastes of self-transcendence draw us to further exploration. We recognize that these insights need to be cultivated. We may easily fall back into old habits and patterns of thought. But having come into contact with the higher Self, we’re motivated to find ways to strengthen our acquaintance. There are many paths, and each in its own way can help us to move beyond identification with the separate isolated ego.
To study the Way is to study the Self.
To study the Self is to forget the Self
To forget the Self is to he enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between Self and Other.
DOGEN ZENJI
We may choose to explore those forms of therapy that encourage us to understand just how our models of self have arisen through past experience. Earlier forms of psychotherapy seemed to deify the ego and, by focusing on its genesis, invest it with more and more solid reality. Recent approaches of transpersonal, humanistic, and Gestalt therapies, and those derived from Jung, encourage the liberation of the self and the exploration of a more expansive sense of identity.
As we shall see in a subsequent chapter, the practice of meditation can help us to develop our ability to penetrate the process whereby the mind is constantly creating and reinforcing attributes of the separate self, ideas of “me.” We can systematically observe these ideas as they pass by, seeking to draw us into identification: “I’m this, I’m that.” But we can learn to remain mindful behind these thoughts, lessening our attachment to them as we watch them rise and pass away.
Other traditions, in effect, use the mind to beat the mind. In Rinzai Zen Buddhism, a teacher gives a student a particular koan to solve—for example, “What was your original face before you were born?” Of course, no rational answer is possible. But the student makes regular appearances to offer a response. Usually he comes armed with some artifice designed to make him appear wise and insightful. But these answers are quickly discerned as creations of ego and brusquely dismissed, and the student is rejected. This continues until the moment the student gives up the effort to look impressive and a spontaneous answer just comes out. The teacher honors it. The student has “forgotten the self.”
Some of us may experience the call to congregation and find ourselves drawn deeply to collective devotion and ritual. Whether in worship, formal ceremony, song, dance, or services, we experience the coming together of our many hearts. As joy and exaltation grow, our sense of separateness falls away. This becomes our path for strengthening our sense of unity.
Or perhaps the experience comes through solitary, interior prayer and contemplation. We lift up our hearts, minds, and souls. We reach out to God. Through our surrender, love, and faith, we feel a sense of profound communion in which our individuality merges into His Being. In these moments we are One. And though they may not last or retain their intensity, we’re not likely to forget these moments when they happen. We seek them more often.
All these methods, and many others, strengthen our ability to recognize and dwell in our higher Self, beyond separateness. In pursuing these practices, however, it’s important to remember that the object is not to destroy the ego. We’re not declaring war on our separate self. It helps assure our survival and effectiveness. It has a role to play at an appropriate level of our lives. What we’re doing instead is working to establish a new balance between the ego and the higher Self and allowing our higher Self to expand, explore, and root itself more fully in a consciousness of unity.
Ramakrishna, the great Indian saint, likened the situation to a coach in which the driver (the ego) sits atop in command of the horses. The owner (the higher Self) sits quietly within. Because the coachman has never seen the owner, he begins to think himself totally in charge. But when the owner makes himself known, quietly but firmly, the coachman, perhaps begrudgingly but ultimately in his best interests, relinquishes his fantasy and becomes content in the role of … of what? Of servant, it turns out. For then it responds more and more to the call “Not my but Thy Will, O Lord.” The ego finds joy and relief in attuning to the greater Way of All Things, to the larger harmonies of the universe in which it can find its proper place and need no longer be driven by the insatiable need to control. In surrender to its proper station, the ego finds peace. The higher Self is now freer to guide the work of loving kindness and compassion. The character of service also begins to change.
~
Now there are two theories about crime and how to deal with it. Anticrime guys say, “You have to think like a criminal.” And some police learn that so well they get a kind of criminal mentality themselves.
How I’m working with it is really pretty different. I see that man is essentially pure and innocent and of one good nature. That’s who he is by birthright. And that’s what I’m affirming in the course of a day on the job. In fact, that is my job. The “cop” part of it … well, they call us “cops”; to me, my job is I’m a peace officer.
Now it’s interesting how this works. For example, when you are holding in thought a vision of our unity in good, you frequently spot a criminal motive arising or evident in someone. It’s a kind of spiritual radar. Crimes can be prevented that way—I’ve seen that. And not only that. At the same time, I’m holding to the view that such a person is complete already, and doesn’t need to steal, and will be provided for from universal abundance. So I work not only to prevent the crime but to eliminate its causes—its causes in fear and greed, not just the social causes everyone talks about.
Even when it gets to conflict. I had arrested a very angry black man who singled me out for real animosity. When I had to take him to a paddy wagon, he spit in my face—that was something—and he went after me with a chair. We handcuffed him and put him in the truck. Well, on the way, I just had to get past this picture of things, and again I affirmed to myself, “This guy and I are brothers in love.” When I got to the station, I was moved spontaneously to say, “Look, if I’ve done anything to offend you, I apologize.” The paddy wagon driver looked at me as if I was totally nuts.
The next day I had to take him from where he’d been housed overnight to criminal court. When I picked him up, I thought, “Well, if you trust this vision, you’re not going to have to handcuff him.” And I didn’t. We got to a spot in the middle of the corridor which was the place where he’d have jumped me if he had that intention. And he stopped suddenly. So did I. Then he said, “You know, I thought about what you said yesterday, and I want to apologize.” I just felt this deep appreciation.
Turned out on his rap sheet he’d done a lot of time in Michigan and had trouble with guards in jail. I symbolized something. And I saw that turn around, saw a kind of healing, I believe.
So what really happens if you’re going to explore whether or not this vision of our nature really has power? Maybe people will say you’re taking chances. But you’re taking chances without any vision; your vision is your protection. Maybe they’ll say you’re sentimentalizing people. But it’s not about people. It’s about principle and truth. It’s about how the universe is. Maybe they’ll think it’s idealistic; things could never be this way. Well, for me, things are this way already; it’s just up to us to know that more clearly.
I see that my work is to hold to an image of who we all truly are, and to be guided by that. And I have been guided by that. To greater strength and security … within myself and on the street.
~
What follows in the quality of our helping when we begin to know ourselves beyond separateness?
Perhaps, at the very least, we can be a little less fearful, a little more trusting. When we break through the boundaries of self, we often find that we don’t have to be as defensive as we might have thought or as might have been our habit. Things aren’t inevitably pitted against us. If they appear to be, the possibility of harmony and reconciliation is a little more real. When we’ve had a taste of unity, we’re that much more ready to bring it quickly into any situation, at any given moment, with anybody.
We’ll also be more likely to take initiative and to reach out less self-consciously to those in need. Someone may be a little shy asking for help, and we ourselves may be a little tentative offering it. But we can overcome these boundaries more quickly because we’ve already been working to see that they’re not inevitably so solid. How many times, after all, do we initially hold back with one another, only to laugh when we finally break through the caution and meet openly and freely? How long it takes for this to happen depends entirely upon how much we’re coming into these situations feeling separate. What’s to prevent us from meeting in compassion instantaneously?
The more we’re able to take such initiative trustingly, the greater sense of range and possibility we’re likely to have in our efforts to help out. We might feel more patience—we’ll work longer and harder with a retarded child or someone in physical therapy—when we have more confidence that there are sources of support beyond ourselves. Something may happen, someone may come along, a moment of insight, a flash of inspiration, a new source of energy. We’re more trusting of the universe because we have experienced nourishment in those moments when we’ve felt at One with it.
Being less cautious, we’ll be more likely to take risks in the expression of our helping instincts. Perhaps in the midst of a grim situation near a family sickbed, heads shaking, brows all furrowed, we’ll take a chance and say, “This is quite a soap opera we’re all stuck in here.” Now maybe they’ll throw us right out of the room; that’s how much of a soap opera it is. But maybe it’ll be just what’s needed to break the tension. Maybe a few people will be able to come up for a moment’s air, see the horizon beyond the next wave, remember the big picture, then take a deep breath before plunging back in the midst of it all. We’ve succeeded in interrupting the soap opera for a brief public service message. Worth a try anyhow. At the very least, we’re seeing that we can stretch ourselves, go beyond what’s familiar, trust our instincts a little more. All this is possible because we’re not so firmly wed to models of ourselves and how we’re supposed to behave when we’re seeking to help one another. Less afraid that reaching out threatens our own well-being, we’re freer and more venturesome in expressing our caring instincts.
As we approach other people in this spirit, we’ll also be more likely to communicate what we have in common rather than what divides us. Knocking on someone’s door with a petition protesting utility rates, we won’t have to meet as “righteous activist” and “reluctant housewife.” Maybe we’ll get engrossed in the smell of the soup inside as the door opens. We’ll begin talking recipes, talking grandparents’ recipes, talking grandparents … and then, almost as an afterthought, “Oh, by the way, I had this petition. I don’t know about your utility rates, but ours …” “Oh, yes. Ours too. I don’t usually get involved in this stuff, but sure, right—where do I sign?”
As we become less identified with any single aspect of the separate self against another, we’re freer to know which among them all is most appropriate for a given situation. It’s as if we can be anyone to anyone. Resting behind all roles, we can also be, as it were, no one to no one—that is, we can create a space where whoever we’re with has the best chance to come out from behind their self-image. No costumes, no disguises; come as you are.
The awareness that allows us to rest behind ego, moreover, also gives us a far greater ability to listen to others, to hear what’s really needed. Our intuition can guide our actions. The universe is filled with information. Answers are inherent in questions. The less our mind is busy feeding the ego, the more we can allow our “spiritual radar” to come into play, the more we can tune into One Mind.
Our work to move beyond separateness may also strengthen our sense of abundance. We feel like we need less because we’re coming to see just how much we’ll always have access to. We don’t have to ration our helping acts quite so carefully. We needn’t constantly measure just how much we’ll be able to offer before we get depleted. We don’t have to feel as if we are sacrificing by giving. Beyond separateness, service replenishes. “To forget the Self is to be enlightened by all things.”
In turn, our helping actions will be less directed by the ego’s personal agenda and need for constant reassurance. We won’t be entering into service so much to gain intimacy, purpose, a sense of usefulness, and so on. We don’t need to go anywhere special to attain these. They’re in us already and available all around, simply as we understand our interrelatedness with all things. Our service, then, is less a function of personal motive and more an expression of spontaneous, appropriate caring.
We’re not so much helping out, then, because it’s “me” needing to tend to “you.” We’re helping out because it’s “Us.” The more we understand and dwell in that truth, the more we serve simply in the way of things. If one of “Us” needs help, if one of Our arms gets caught in a door, naturally we use the other of Our arms to set it free. Helping happens not because it’s been weighed and considered; it happens because the barriers to its lawful and automatic expression have fallen away.
And, finally, what of those moments when we question whether we’ve anything useful for others? What do we really have to offer, what do we really have to give? Everything, it turns out. Everything. If within each of us is that essence of Being which is in all things—call it God, Life, Energy, Consciousness—as open to all that as we are in ourselves, so we have it to share with one another.
What could that mean practically, as more than a lofty abstraction? It could mean that when we’re holding a frightened, battered child … or hearing the grief of a total stranger … or bandaging the wound of an enemy soldier … or sitting with a dying friend … they can feel in who we are the reassurance that they are not simply isolated entities, separate selves, lonely beings, cut off from everything and everyone else. They can feel us in there with them. They can feel the comfort that we are all of us in this together. They have the chance to know, in moments of great pain, that nevertheless we are Not Separate.
When all else fails, when we’ve done what we can, we still have this essential reassurance to offer one another. It comes as each of us moves beyond attachment to separateness into a greater sense of Unity. “To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barrier between Self and Other.”