CONFLICTED IN MY NATURE

Culturally I am somewhat aberrant. I live in Michigan but I don’t feel like I am at home here. My basic nature is too mean, too jaded. Like many Michiganders I grew up in a farm town, just not a Michigan farm town with its elevator and grain reports from the Andersons of Maumee. Every piece of media I got, television, newspaper, radio, etc., was from a big city, more particularly Philadelphia. Having now lived in the Midwest for 30 years I can see there is a harder edge to East Coast life. Resultant of my upbringing sarcasm is just another of the many services I provide.

However like every person that has grown up anywhere my path of growth differed from those around me, and from those being raised elsewhere. As a young man I worked in the fields, and I was not happy about it mind you. I also worked in produce houses, was not happy about that either. Despite character building-soul strengthening hard work, I did not gain some mystical connection with the earth and its cycles of sowing and reaping. Nope I didn’t wipe the sweat off my brow look up into the sky and say this is my place. No epiphany told me I was one of God’s own creatures working at the plan, pulling a thread in the tapestry. All I got was the cynicism that exposure to big city media can offer.

As I grow older I realize that the mindsets both rural and urban experiences evoke are valid. Letting one take some level of dominance at different times is not a bad thing. The changing from cynical to earthy, from mystical to empirical and making the shift sometimes quite quickly is not problematic.

One theory of communication psychology hypothesizes that we are not unified whole beings, but rather that we present as distinctly different persons in dissimilar social contexts. While it sounds like an acknowledgment that we are all schizophrenic, it isn't. It just means that different personality aspects that we possess have dominance in different contexts. The theory posits that such differences are appropriate both for the sake of suitable social interaction and for survival. I am okay with our personalities being comprised of different facets used in changed situations.

If you are a person how must dwell on the true nature of who and what we are, I urge a reread of Hesse. It is that moment in Siddhartha where Govinda kisses the ferryman's forehead and sees the total unity of disparate being and non-being. For your reading pleasure here is that section again,

"He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead

he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing

river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all

came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there

simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed

themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha.

He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely

painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with

fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red

and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the

face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into

the body of another person—he saw, in the same second,

this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head

being chopped off by the executioner with one blow

of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women,

naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw

corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void—he saw

the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants,

of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna,

saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a

thousand relationships with one another, each one helping

the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving

re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately

painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none

of them died, each one only transformed, was always

re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time

having passed between the one and the other face—

and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated

themselves, floated along and merged with each

other, and they were all constantly covered by something

thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing,

like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin,

a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was

smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face,

which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched

with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile

of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing

forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand

births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely

the same, was precisely of the same kind as the

quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps

mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama,

the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect

a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected

ones are smiling.

Not knowing any more whether time existed, whether

the vision had lasted a second or a hundred years, not

knowing any more whether there existed a Siddhartha,

a Gotama, a me and a you, feeling in his innermost self

as if he had been wounded by a divine arrow, the injury

of which tasted sweet, being enchanted and dissolved

in his innermost self, Govinda still stood for a

little while bent over Siddhartha's quiet face, which he

had just kissed, which had just been the scene of all

manifestations, all transformations, all existence. The

face was unchanged, after under its surface the depth

of the thousandfoldness had closed up again, he smiled

silently, smiled quietly and softly, perhaps very benevolently,

perhaps very mockingly, precisely as he used to

smile, the exalted one."

So don't sweat the currently dominant part of your being. It’s all one.