I Am Not What I Do...

A question from a psychologist explores the author's answer through a simple philosophical thought process.

 

 

I Am Not What I Do...

 

I don't know. The jury is still out on this one, in most people's minds -- even in this advanced stage of human existence...

A psychologist friend of mine said recently, "I am not a psychologist. I practice psychology for a living, but it is not who I am. I am not a surfer. I surf just as much as possible, because it gives me great joy and peace, but it is not who I am." Then he proceeded to drive the point home, and it hit, hard: I Am Not What I Do...

Neti neti, the Hindus say. This is a sort of mantra that basically translates as "not this, not this." Or, "not exactly this, but also, not exactly that, either." So, are we Divine, then, are we God or Gods? Well -- not exactly this and not exactly that. Part of the discussion of neti neti surrounds our misbegotten attempts to grab onto, describe, identify with, and then turn into personal plaster our essence; or if we're really erudite, the nature of "God." The Hindus' belief is that we cannot describe this essence. In fact, other religious/spiritual traditions make this same last statement in their own words.

Ever heard of mercury? When the thermometer breaks and the mercury falls all over the floor, you try to pick it up, right? And how successful are you? It eludes you. It moves before you can catch it. You cannot even touch it. So is our essence the same as that of mercury in a sense?

I'm sorry, I don't know. But it rather sounds like it.

Bob Dylan lets it all loose in "Gotta Serve Somebody." Poetically, of course, but the point, to me, is clear. You can call me whatever the hell you want, but I didn't say that's who I am. Because we normally define ourselves a priori by our given name, one particular, long-winded, stanza of this Dylan classic -- that will drive you insane if you listen closely enough -- is the following:

               You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy

               You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy

               You may call me R.J., you may call me Ray

               You may call me anything...

I know for a fact that he could have gone on and on and on, but you know, a stanza's a stanza. A verse is a verse.

Who I Am may just be one of those verses. Today, I beeped at a car that was going too slowly and suddenly I felt like a real jerk. Normally, I back off and let people go their own speed. One other day, I was so pissed off, I actually gunned it around a car doing 15 in a 30 mph zone. I mean, really. And? So which one of these is "Me"? Am I the jerk? Am I the one who drives quietly and respectfully, allowing others to do whatever they do? Am I the redneck in the Ford F-250 with extra-large shocks, big tires and a bad attitude that guns down the quiet and respectful, even if spacey, driver who is doing whatever he or she does? You may call me Lorraine, you may call me Laverne, you may call me Nelly, you may call me Polly Purebred...

I'm not a Ph.D. like my psychologist friend. I'm not a successful (or even unsuccessful) screenplay writer. I'm not a political diplomat. I'm not a mother, and God knows, many women personally identify themselves by "I AM A MOTHER." With pride.

There are numerous forces that conspire to lock an individual into the idea that he or she Is whatever it is the individual does. It's what I'd call a real dialectic-in-motion. Let's look, shortly--because each item could be an essay in itself--at some of these forces, one by one and how they fit together.

Media. The media is simply a global horror show. By some cryptic power with which "the news" or even a television program can hypnotize, people are seduced into believing that they actually Are something. That something might be what the journalists tell the public they are, a simple example being that "I Am one of the 95%, and I will never Be one of the 5% or the 1%," or what have you. What follows is usually that these convicted individuals Do whatever corroborates and perpetuates this belief in the inevitability of their fate. It might be what Rush Limbaugh convinces us we Are as he makes his sure-footed comments on the conservative platform. In that way, then, these I Am a Conservative individuals now believe because this is what they Are that whatever Mr. Limbaugh says they must Do is just a part of that, and wah-lah, it all comes together nicely: "I Do X, therefore I Am Z." Or, of course, "I Am Z, therefore I Do X." I am not unfairly invoking Descartes here, it just sounds similar.

Religion. Here's another seductive fly trap. The practitioner may be a Fundamentalist Christian, a kosher Jew, a pious Muslim, FLDS, a New Age spiritualist, or anything else a person might identify with. The catch here is not the practicing of an organized, or even unorganized, religion or spiritual tradition. It is identifying with that tradition--or saying, I Am a (whatever); this unavoidably leads to Doing particular activities or practices that keep the individual believing that he or she deserves the great title of "spiritual leader" (think of Jerry Falwell) or "more pious than the next guy"--that is, More Real. This smells like arrogance to me. It also begs the question of what is real: What if one stops Doing whatever practices are required to be considered a Fundamentalist, yet he wants to continue to be identified as this Fundamentalist character? He Is but he does not Do? That's completely empty--he's now a self-proclaimed figurehead. A lot of religious zealots, as well as politicians, financiers, and on and on, can be described as such. Why do people do either one of these scenarios: Identify with a particular religion or take on a vacuous name that falsely identifies them as something in particular? Is it safety perhaps? This leads rather easily into the third force I want to mention, of the many.

Fear. Fear is a slippery one. It's a killer. Literally. It's also ubiquitous. Media is also ubiquitous and so, in fact, is religion. I see a pattern here.... The ugliest part of this global infection of fear is that it is highly contagious. Fear of one's environment: fear of the external control mechanisms in the form of certain human beings--dictators, for example; fear of the natural, unstable, unpredictable forces of the planet itself; fear of one's own fears (remember Franklin D. Roosevelt?), those of death, injury, the pain caused by jealousy of one's own neighbor that must be swallowed to maintain some sense of coveted personal pride; and perhaps most of all, the fear of not Being anyone special among these billions of people on the planet--of not having a name, nothing to be immortalized by; these and so many, many more are the fears that drive human beings to find something, anything--and it may be considered good or it may be considered pretty darned bad--to confirm that they are alive. What individuals Do merely buttresses what they have decided they want to, or should, Be. I should say "we," as I am in this sinking boat along with everyone else.

Thus:

I Am Jealous. I Am an underachiever. I Am pride. I Am a mother. I Am Joe Blow. Am I now? Are you? According to the title of this piece, I Am None of these things. And, sorry, neither are you. You might say, "Of course not, I never said I was, idiot...excuse me, but I Am [instead] X, I Am Y, I Am Z." Oh, Are you that instead? Are you?? If not, then what the hell Are you, or who.

I submit: You're not what you Do, you Are Not how you feel at any moment, you're not what you think you Are, you are nothing. I am nothing. Then whence existence in the first place?? Is everything going to go black now? Am I dead? Will I have to let go of all of my relationships, my loves, my hates, my desires, my preferences, my livelihood, my cherished opinions, the very god damned ground I stand on?? Do I now have to go away like the monk who, after relinquishing his worldly affairs and existence, went to a faraway place and sat upon a high dung pile--for years, in meditation? It seems that, as the story goes, this was his way of affirming that no matter where one is, enlightenment is being unattached to the effects of the "world" of Doing and Being. This is apparently what he Did in his life, but it doesn't sound like he identified with the dung pile while he was doing it.

I don't want to sit on a dung pile in India somewhere. I do not want to be alone like that, it just doesn't feel right. Now, this is quite different from saying that, for instance, I Am an enlightened being, and therefore I must Do this or that. First of all, neti neti really hits when I try to affirm something silly like I am an enlightened being. Second, whether or not I am or decide that I am, it is disingenuous to say that, therefore, I must "Do" x, y, or z in order to prove it. I cannot say What or Who I am, so how is it possible to decide what it is I must Do to back it up? It's like a vicious circle. A big, eternal lie.

The challenge: Find out Who You Really Are. I'll be doing the same. Then, what you are to Do will most likely just begin to occur: "You" have no say. And what you Do will most likely change now and again. Maybe not. Maybe you'll spend your life on a dung pile, alone. You might instead be rich and famous--and then someday lose it all and be alone again. Or not.

But let me go out on a limb here: IF you make a plaster cast of yourself as any one of these things, you're stuck. Then you Are dead. In fact, chances are you were never even real, just an idea that someone told you was cool and correct.

Wait. Not done yet. Speaking in dialectics, we have a thesis (I Am Not What I Do), an antithesis (the forces that conspire to convince us we are indeed what we do), and a, well, kind of synthesis ("Find out Who You Really Are.... Thereafter, what you are to Do will most likely just begin to occur.").  But, the writer (that would be "me," hahaha) has a question to ask: What about all of those inner forces that seem to precede us and our identifications? Through these, is it possible, or even inevitable, to live an actual life "out in the world," without disappearing and contemplating on a dung pile in India?--just based on inherent traits you possess as an individual cog (or fractal) in the universal machine. This is a valid, salient question. Let me back up this query:

Lajos Egri, in his 1946 The Art of Dramatic Writing, is discussing dialogue, in line with the theme of his book. He asks, "Would you say that one individual embodies within himself (italics mine) good and bad, noble and depraved thoughts? Is it in every character to be a martyr or a betrayer?" He answers himself: "Yes. A man not only represents himself and his race, but mankind. His physical development is, on a small scale the same as that of mankind as a whole (italics mine also)...he goes through all of the metamorphoses man underwent from the time he started his long journey from the protoplasm...one man is the replica of all." He goes on. What the man is saying, which has been said many, many times in endless ways, is that we are all the whole and its components at the same time.

And about the word "fractal," or self-similarity. A fractal is an occurrence in nature where the micro level imitates the macro level. Imagine a leaf that reflects the pattern on a branch, which in turn imitates the growth pattern of the branches of the entire tree.

We are the universal whole and we are individual pieces of this whole at the same time. We are replicas of "all." Thus, as individuals, and as (in my case) the daughter of an engineer, it is reasonable to conclude that each cog has its individual contributory functions as a member part of the complete engine.

So, what are these "preceding" forces:

Globally? The senses. I am tempted to say love, beauty, also--but these are loaded words and I think it's best to stick as closely to the untouchable forces as possible. Not the "unknown," now. That could just be something that we are identifying with sub- or unconsciously. So, the first definition, in Webster's Collegiate, of the word "sense" is "sensation, feeling, mechanism of perception, meaning; to perceive, feel." These senses are prior to our identification with them.

More relatably? Let's say I am drawn to listen over and over and over to Bob Dylan's "Mystic Garden" or "Senor." Or I fall over and cry uncontrollably when I hear Adam Lambert's "Underneath," "Nirvana," or "Mad World." Other individuals say, "Oh please, Paulick, get over it, lighten up," and so forth. For me, this that I am drawn to is all poetry and music that "resonates" with something deep inside of me, not a choice. It just is. For these others, something else clearly resonates with them. But, by the way, they are identifying with that; and this is why what I, on the other side, feel is "wrong" or "unacceptable."

Agreed, for me there may be some identification with, say, particular lyrics or the minor key because I believe I Am a negative, morbid person. Agreed. Does this bring us now somewhere back near where we started? NO. The action of dialectics is always to move forward: The synthesis drives another, new, thesis, which invites a new antithesis, and on and on. So, again, I submit: The statement, or thesis, that I Am Not What I Do stands. The new thesis is this: Who You Are and What You Do have no a priori connection to your inner nature, your naked existence.

A new antithesis is called for. That's someone else's job--I'm only one part of this.

 

 

There's a nice little Buddhist story to end this diatribe:

               One day a young Buddhist on his way home came to the banks of a wide river. Staring                hopelessly at the great obstacle in front of him, he pondered for hours on just how to                cross such a wide barrier. Just as he was about to give up his pursuit to continue his                journey, he saw a great teacher on the other side of the river. The young Buddhist yelled                over to the teacher, "Oh wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this                river?" The teacher pondered for a moment, looked up and down the river and yelled                back, "My son, you are on the other side."

 

Author's Note

review at will, but I will disagree with everything you say! hahha
It appears that only about 1/2 of this was published--it's only 2500+ words, though, so maybe I'm missing something. Enjoy what you've got, I guess!