I think I am as far away from understanding what it means to be human as I have ever been even though I have read and thought so much lately. My primary instinct – that I would come to understand, not through reading but through experience, is being borne out. I am reading the chapter in Nishitani on ‘the personal and the impersonal’. In true Zen fashion much of it just does not make sense, apparent paradoxical nonsense, like so much of Buddhist thought. Most of what he had written previously I understood because of what I experience in meditation. But anatman is another matter. I understand the concept and the logic, but it is not my experience of what it means to be a person. When it becomes my experience, if it ever does, only then will I really understand.
So, what does it mean to be a person? I have asked this often enough but all my attempts at an answer have been conceptual and speculative. Being a person is primarily being me. There is a sense of identity which extends back as far as memory. In my very early memories there is a sense of gift and a sense of recognition. ‘Gift’ in the sense that I did not make myself me, no more than I made my body. ‘Recognition’ in the sense that this gift of this ‘body/me’ was entirely mine. My uniqueness, quirks, talents, efforts and achievements were sometimes praised and appreciated; sometimes criticised and not appreciated; but always as coming from me, always mine and not derived from, or owned by another. There were no limitations on me being me, though the limitations on my behaviour were another matter. I was not allowed to be me with other people in a way that hurt or upset them. I became, gradually as I grew up, two persons. One, the private, inner, incommunicable me. Incommunicable because this ‘me’ was not one that I could communicate, or that I felt others were always willing to accept. This ‘me’ was constantly exploring experience, experimenting, testing the limits of what was acceptable and desirable, both on a personal and on a social level. They wanted a polite and dutiful boy and this boy became the other, public persona.
This split between public and private personae has never really healed. In every situation I felt a gap, sometimes a chasm, between the ‘me’ I was inwardly and the ‘me’ that was publicly acceptable. Hence a feeling of alienation that goes very deep. This experience is not unique. It is probably universal. It gave rise to much of the speculation in existentialist philosophy. Certainly it gives rise to serious doubt. Who is the real me? This is not a question of choosing between the social and the private me, between the I and the me, as Mead would put it. The doubt arises from the fact that such a gap should ever exist. It exists because the depths, Buddhists would say ‘nothingness’, from which the ‘I’ emerges are unplumbed. I do not know the roots of my being. Therefore I do not know what being me is. I am not aware even that there are roots. I emerged from nothing into self-consciousness. I will eventually dissolve into nothing. I hope that somehow my self-consciousness will survive this dissolution, but I do not know that this will happen and I cannot imagine, given the unity of body, mind, feelings and emotions, how it might. Hence the feeling of alienation, this sense of being separated from the roots of my being. It seems inconceivable that I should not have roots; that I sprang fully fledged from nothingness into being. This nothingness is very mysterious.
One is thrown into a situation where one is alienated, split, separated. There is a drive to heal that split, to be unified, to fill the emptiness within and bridge the chasm without. One is a separate consciousness drifting in a vast ocean – no idea of from when; no idea of to where. One has emerged and will submerge again. What is this vast ocean? Am I part of it, or simply on it?