The titular idea is a big-ticket item on my "list" of insights that I hope to fully crystallize by the time I get my receipt in the Spring. Recently and to my suprise (I had expected that spending a month on an oncology service would bring me much closer to tackling the suffering piece) I've felt some clarity on being's requirement of limitation; its meaning emerged as I grasped the primacy of limitation in our experience, and it seemed fitting to be expedient in cementing some thoughts on the issue (part 1).
I am me and not you. There is a boundary around each of us that allows our being to maintain its “shape”. I suppose like shrink wrap that envelopes the budding consciousness, Sartre be damned, it forever and always becomes that perfectly reflective material that our exploration of things in the world is curtailed by as each attempt to “understand” inevitably bounces off their and our own shrink wrap and, over time, cements the self as the frame of reference that we cannot(?) break free from. Think of the act of wrapping that pink, soppy moist consciousness less in terms of concealment and more in terms of “limitation” and delineation. In this sense, being, by not allowing for the “touching” of consciousnesses imposes an initial and draconic limitation on the existent: we are born into a shared environment --a far cry from self-sufficient or sustaining. Yet, as limiting as the cling wrap is, the grammar of our reality demands both origin and destination for every transaction. Food from fridge to face, offensive text from sender copied and pasted to text with a friend, hugs offered to a willing recipient and you get the idea. We grow up and negotiate the intangibles of each interaction with varying degrees of success; sprinkled in are occasional reminders that the delineation of “self” creates breakdowns in our objective appraisal of the world (Does he mean I look great compared to last week when I was on IR consults? Is my mentor commenting on my garbage situation based on their personal experience from 43 years ago?) that we can usually ignore when things are good. We also become aware of the concealment function that being serves and will make use of it, with varying frequency, on the broadest of continua from selfless and benign to selfish and manipulative. There are also moments when we encounter another existent whose being presents sufficiently chaotic, their reasoning sufficiently malignant or flawed that we are consciously relieved to be able to relegate both the experiences they volunteered as well as our own assumptions about what may lurk below the surface of their observable reality to that discrete individual where they will continue to exist separately from our own “self”. In short: an arrangement that seldomly registers with us during day to day operations and has perks and pitfalls.
Leaning ambitiously into what I hope isn’t just a pseudointellectualism, I want to tackle my thoughts on suffering. So let’s go way way back to the big bang when all things became. It’s been said that time and its inevitable progression are a consequence of entropy: natural processes are irreversible and time’s arrow. In the realm of physiology of normal aging, this is painfully cemented for the radiologist who reads age-appropriate cerebral volume loss, degenerative changes of the spine, mild fatty changes of the liver etc. which have no clinical consequence. How does a spine tell time? I suppose it lets its owner know the difference in its state at age 34 from that of age 19 by punishing you with an uncomfortable sensation in the morning after a night slept on a couch or when you decide to join a yoga class in Plano because there was a groupon and you were bored. Time’s arrow has moved water and collagen out of your discs, and spoiler alert, neither time nor water will flow backwards. Equivalent processes can be identified everywhere in the body. One could even say that pain or the gradual decrease of original function are built into us, unapologetically, on every level. Yet, most of us lead enjoyable lives beyond both the clinically insignificant and significant changes and disruptions of aging and disease. So why do most if not all humans find and experience joy among the lower back pain, gallstones and enlarging prostate? One pretty good guess is that it’s joy out of spite directed against the effects of time’s arrow on the only body we will call our own. When said out loud, this has a flavor of immaturity that doesn’t really do justice to the significant and even selfless things humans do; playing such a rigged game as beautifully as we indeed do if spite was the only motor might work for a brief period on the scale of the individual but certainly not the macro scale of an enduring civilization. And this view falls short of our ability to cope with assaults on our psyche—the most intolerable among them being injustice. There are things we are capable of doing to one-another, things sufficiently malevolent and vile, that can easily thwart whatever buy-in we previously had regarding our existence. When the pain of from a vertebral compression fracture or the betrayal of the father of your children is searing, many things are instantly clarified: the bliss that exists in the absence of pain; the comfort lent by a loving spouse; the state of mind predating the side-chick to whom he swore he never wanted that second baby with you. A visceral reaction to the unthinkable occurring, the essence of what suffering is, instantaneously expands our knowledge of the world and ourselves. Inertial forces precede any conscious effort to put up a fight, and in an attempt to resist the rapid distortion of our being, we feel the boundaries of the self that we previously had at best a vague awareness of. Through suffering we commit to memory where we, and by extension our principles, preferences begin and where our tolerance for infractions against the former end.
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