and be at one with some imaginary centre, we resist our health – our variety, our flexibility, our ability to change. We seek changeless-ness in a constantly changing world, when the glory of life lies in change.
What if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? – or, like the mastodon’s huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being someone represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails and turtles
– from THE DICE MAN
The normal personality consists of an accumulation of habits, attitudes and aspirations that lay claim to the title of character. We form these consistencies because our society rewards us for most of them and gets upset when we deviate from them too far or too often. By the age of thirty we’ve all become reasonably dependable machines, efficient for some operations, inefficient for others, but very limited in the tasks we can perform. It is a happy machine if it works in harmony with the other machines, but to do this the machine personality must not change. A mobile, eccentric or random machine would throw the super-machine called society out of whack. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds but is quite basic to the development of selves and society.
Personal identification – name, beliefs, religion, family, possessions, and personal history – all are anchors thrown into the sea of life to try to control the flow. They are symptoms of fear. They represent grasping for certainty in an uncertain world; consistency in an inconsistent flow; stability within unstable societies; meaning in a meaningless universe.
Seers and mystics have often urged us to be detached, grasp nothing, be free of ego. Some imply an actual withdrawal from activity, but the best mean that we should enter into each activity with all our might, to exert our last ounce of energy to win the race, but wander away when the laurel wreath is awarded.
A beautiful statue Of the hardest granite looms With great dignity in the middle Of the garden. Ah … How the butterflies dance Around the unseeing eyes.
We can be statues and impress people or be butterflies and dance. But we can’t be both. If we choose to impress people then we are turning part of ourselves into stone – the part that we think impresses. Statues are rather weak at dancing, and anyone not capable of chance and change will no longer be able to dance.
WHIM COMMENTS: Hey, how about becoming the statue of a butterfly!? Not too cool, I guess.
Place something on a pedestal and you turn it into stone.
The tendency of every living creature is homeostatic – it wants to stabilize its relation to its environment at the simplest level possible. The creation of the self is part of this tendency.
The tendency of chance, on the other hand, is to create instability and complexity.
Living forms evolve through chance, through mutations – scientific terminology for the play of chance. Mutations are sudden, ‘unexplained’ altered forms of any given species. They are accidents. All living creatures – it is hardly a surprise to us – evolve through accident. It is the purpose of dicing to let chance into our lives so that we, like the species, may evolve.
With dicing we try to let go of our attachments to attitudes and beliefs and behaviour patterns. We do this not to get at some central core of identity but rather to make room for new ones. Humans can only exist with a variety of contradictory aspirations and ideas. The error most men and most religions make is to try to force the individual into a singleness – to create One from the many. Our goal is different – to create more from the many.
Mystics who claim unity with the ALLness are in effect announcing their embrace of multiplicity, for if you are at one with everything then you are multiple. However, those who claim to have experienced a single true Self or Reality or God separate from other false entities are creating a struggle and a seriousness which is central to the human sickness. If there are authentic selves and false selves then it is clearly a valuable goal to seek the true self and kill off the false; and life is a serious business. But if all selves are illusions then we can relax: we’ll never have any truer self than we have at any given moment.
I, OBOKO
In this infinity of energy I,
A single ion, slip from pole to pole
Unregistered. In this unending space I,
A speck, resume unseen my solitary way.
In this eternal toll of hours I,
A millisecond, tick my finite single tick
And disappear. In the great gasp of God I
Am swallowed up, an only atom of air
Thrust through the mighty mouth and
Rushed into the cavernous lungs and
Sucked into the hot, roaring flood
Of God’s great blood, ripped
Through the arteries and hurled
Through narrow streams
To feed at last a single cell
Of bone in the great I AM.
God grins.
The healthy human being aims not for unity but for multiplicity, aims not for a stable self marching consistently through a hostile world, but an ever-expanding variety of selves wandering playfully through a world of our own creation. Although most humans are frightened at the idea of multiplicity, some of us, having opened ourselves to variety and inconsistency, eventually find ourselves emerging into a joyful fulfilment we’d rarely experienced traipsing the endless road of self and order.
The self is a dead skin which keeps new beings from being born. Shed it.
We are not ourselves; actually there is nothing we can call a ‘self’ anymore; we are many-fold, we have as many selves as there are groups to which we belong. The neurotic has overtly a disease from which everybody is suffering.
– J. H. DAN DEN BERG
In internally consistent societies the narrow personality has value; men can fulfil themselves with only one self. But today we are bombarded every moment with conflicting messages about who we should be and how we should act. Most religious traditions urge restraint or abstinence in sexual matters, but our mass media, TV sitcoms, soaps, popular fiction, popular music, MTV, the internet are urging us unendingly to be sexually attractive, and not, presumably, so we will look better in church.
Society both urges us to save money and to spend. It urges us to work hard but to vacation. It urges us to buy bigger and better and to live within our means. Our religions condemn vanity and our whole culture encourages vanity. Our religions condemn greed and our whole culture is based on the duty of every man to fight hard to climb the economic ladder and accumulate and preserve things. Our religions condemn lust and our whole culture stimulates lust.
As a result, each of us has hundreds of aspirations and potential selves which never let us forget that no matter how mightily we step along the narrow single path of our personality, our deepest desire is to be multiple: to explore many aspirations and play many roles. We are all husbands, wives, saints, adulterers, artists, actors, businessmen, heroes, good-for-nothings … In a multivalent society, the multiple personality is the only one which can fulfil. The normal person fights multiplicity; the wise man embraces it.