The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.If you can get out of the mental habits of separation, it alters your ethical stance:
When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships.Instead of seeking your scapegoat, you search for hard-to-express (actually impossible to express in words) harmonies.
This ties a few ideas together I have been thinking about for a while. First, enemies are legible to the centralized systems of modernity. Second, if you don't tamp down your desires, real compassion is impossible -- because you will always fall for the trick of a scapegoat narrative [1 -- READ THIS NOTE]. And how do you tamp down desires? Words don't do the process justice ("Dao called dao is not the eternal dao"), but it involves breaking down separation and living in a world of wonder.
Another way to look at it is the question of dosage. Once you go past a minimum effective dose you risk other parts of system, including the most important ones: Gaia and Soul. Everything in too much extreme can become its opposite. This is also something Eisenstein realizes:
. . . we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?
BE SURE TO READ THE FOOTNOTE! IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR SOUL.
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[1] This point is embedded several places in the Daodejing. For me, however, the full flower of understanding came later, when I read the following passage from the Mundaka Upanishad, translated by Eknath Easwaran:
Beyond the reach of words and works is he [the deepest, best Self], but not beyond the reach of a pure heart freed from the sway of the senses. (pg 193).The era of social media provides ample demonstration that one of these strongest senses is that of social proof. Only in spaces where your heart is freed of that, and other greeds and lusts, can you get to real compassion. Study deeply the careers of your fellow humans and you will see that words and works alone cannot get you there. It is a process inside of you, working on the spiritual equivalent of muscle memory. And when you don't work on it, you will fall back to lines of separation. And when you fall back to separation, your compassion will leave and you will find scapegoats. You will demand sacrifices.
The real test of a person's compassion is if they can want good things for those whom they see as living an unattractive life.
