Where Do You Belong?


Where In The World
Do You Belong?

.


.

I'll start by asking about your identity and wind up talking about God's.

Who are you? Why are you different than other people... and how are you the same?
. . I think that the drive in human growth... and in psychotherapy... is basically a question of identity. We have a drive to know things. We have a fear of knowing things. The fear, I think, is that we may not find that we belong, and organized religions have taken advantage of us there.
. . We need to find out how we relate to the larger picture. We are lesser creatures if we do not know, because we will --in many small ways-- fail to fit in. A failure to fit results in a feeling of anomie. Anomie is usually thot of as simply a feeling of being lost, but more exactly, --from the Latin-- it's being nameless. "Lost" works too.
. . Finding yourself is not easy. I takes a lot of forgetting!
. . People come to therapy to decide what to do next. (The only decision in life, really.) If it's a question of how to relate to another person, you need to know how you fit in with that person. If it's a question of how to relate to the world, you need to know how you fit in with the Gaian system -- the epic of evolution, why the wind blows, and how bumblebees fly. Find out, and know that you belong, and how you belong, and what your part is.
. . I think this is why therapists, ecologists, and scientists in general... tend toward Zen.


I'll tell you with a story. Don't expect a funny punch line. Instead, hope for self-understanding.

Long ago in Japan, a noviate went to sit at the feet of a great teacher of Zen. He would stay and learn the mystery of life if it took him the rest of his life. He arrived after dusk, and the teacher silently took him to his room for the night. It had simple shoji-screen walls and a smooth wood floor, and nothing else.

The Master said, "Find your place here, and I will see you in the morning."

The student watched the door slide closed, and wondered what the master meant --find your place. Was it his first test? He looked around. Wy, no place in the room seemed any different than any other. He could hardly tell where the door was. He lost his sense of direction, wandered around, then laid down, wondering if he was doing it wrong. Was this "his place"? He tried another. Soon he had tried all corners, the middle, and many places between. None felt any more his place than another. He moved and moved till he finally fell asleep where he was at that moment. In the morning, he woke when the Master opened the door.

The Master said, "Ahh; I see you found your place."

The student smiled, stood, and went home.

============

You see? Y' don't worry about it. Where you are is where you are. What there is is what there is. There's no "supposed to". Now, if you "get it", you see the totality of Zen, and of reality. Reality is just as it is. You see it when you stop looking for the mystery of it.

I apologize for telling you the secret immediately. We have a mental capability that can work out the most difficult enigmas in nature. Most people want the secret formula to take decades to figure out, and involve intense rituals, fasting, and other deprivations. A secret so precious should be difficult to obtain. Sorry. It's a feather; you won't need that bulldozer.

However, if it makes you feel better, it usually does take decades for someone to actually believe and understand that it's so simple. To get there, there is one deprivation: deprive yourself of all the preconceived ideas and mythology about what reality is. All the metaphors, all the cultural personifications-into-gods that feelings and concepts are subject to. (gods of anger, gods of the sea, gods of poetry, etc, etc.)

During your discovery process, learn of every species, every life's place within the structure of existence. Learn that your place is no more remarkable, except in certain particulars. That will help you find your place as a species and as an individual. (Hint: no life is truly individual.)

Ideally, at any time, you can step out of your"self" and see that the material around you --aside from all the history of how it got there-- is just a conglomeration of molecules, just sitting there with no purpose of its own. And --surprise-- all the molecules that make up your body are no different. The molecules that make up your brain are no different. They react with other chemicals in itself, and new chemicals that we call emotions (some pleasurable, some painful) that are caused by external factors, and all those reactions, back and forth, may cause motions in bodily molecules that we call... well, life.

And life reacts back. Enjoy.


.

HOME PAGE

Previous essay: Where Are You?
Your relationship to the big picture.

Next Essay: Who Are You?