In Pursuit of Wisdom #2: You Are The World
Why do we take joy in others’ joy? Why do we suffer seeing others needlessly suffer? Why does our heart well with lasting happiness when truly helping others? What is the origin of our collective sense of empathy?
The answer to these questions lies in realizing the illusion of self. Looking deeply, it is inevitable to realize that the concept of “individual,” at the level of reality, is irrational. You are the world, and the world is you, along with everything in it. To help others, and to take joy in it, is to know that in reality you are helping yourself.
Nonself is a central tenet of Buddhism, explored in-depth within much of Buddhist Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s 2014 treatise, The Art of Living. This was the last book Hanh wrote before suffering a debilitating stroke at the age of 88.
If you haven’t heard of him, Thich Nhat Hanh became a monk at the age of 16 and has since published countless books, disseminating Buddhist ideas of mindfulness, compassion, and love to a global audience. According to the book itself:
Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist Zen master, poet, scholar, and peace activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr..
Yes, that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr..
Speaking of Hanh, Dr. King was nothing short of reverent. He stated that:
Thich Nhat Hanh is a holy man, for he is humble and devout. He is a scholar of immense intellectual capacity. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.
…Seems like we should be taking the words of this Zen Master seriously.
In every school of Buddhism, suffering is acknowledged as a fact of life. Every human being will experience some form of suffering at some point over the course of their lifetime.
No argument there.
However, Buddhism offers solutions to the inevitable human quandary of suffering in the form of “The Three Doors of Liberation”: emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness. The illusion of self is derived from the concentration on emptiness (perhaps I will discuss the remaining two concentrations at a later date).
According to Thich Nhat Hanh,
Emptiness means to be full of everything but empty of a separate existence.
Essentially, because nothing is truly separate from anything else, that means every single thing is at the same time “full of” everything else. In order to be filled, something must first be empty. We are all empty of a tangible self — hence the illusion of self.
For example, I ate a tuna sandwich for lunch yesterday. The tuna sandwich did not manifest into existence with the snap of two fingers.
Starting with the bread, sunlight needed to pour down from the sky onto wheat to help it grow. The wheat was harvested by laborers using tools made of metal which was itself mined from distant mountains. It’s sent to a factory, most likely in automobiles burning gasoline which is derived partially from the death of prehistoric plants. In the factory, it is made into bread with machines, using electricity that is generated by any number of means including but not limited to the wind, the sun, water, or nuclear reactions. That’s just the bread.
You may be thinking: Avery, isn’t that quite obvious?
Everything is subject to cause and effect.
Consider, that if even one non-bread element of what I have just described as leading to a loaf of bread was removed from the calculus, the bread on my tuna sandwich would not exist. It could not exist.
Without me, my particular tuna sandwich could never exist. I had to buy it and put effort into its preparation. In order to do that, my parents had to conceive me, I had to be born, I had to have been said yes to being hired by my boss so that I could have a paycheck to purchase the tuna and the bread. In order to hire me, my boss had to be conceived, birthed, raised, etc..
Anything only ever exists in relation to what it is not, so much so that what something is cannot be separated from what it is not. “The other” is the only way we could ever exist.
We contain space and consciousness. We contain our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, education, food, and culture. The whole cosmos has come together to create the wonderful manifestation that we are. If we remove any of these “non-us” elements, we will find there is no “us” left.
Many are very attached to being a unique “self,” to an illusion of separation. So, why do I write about this? What can we do with nonself, with realizing that we are the world, and the world is us? What do we gain from tossing aside the ego?
The implications of emptiness are the subject of countless books, but for this article, I will offer that gaining this insight automatically increases our compassion for other beings.
Empathy has always come naturally to me as I strive to see the good in people, but until nonself, there were those that challenged my capacity for believing in second chances. Who among us deserves to be understood? Does a thief deserve to tell his story? A murderer? Or worse?
Following an introduction to emptiness and nonself, Thich Nhat Hanh recounts a memory from his activism in 1970s war-torn Vietnam, of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the country by boat. They don’t get far as they get captured by Thai pirates.
The pirates proceed to steal their valuables and sexually assault an eleven-year-old girl on board. The father was thrown overboard, and after the attack, the young girl threw herself into the sea after him.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s response to this senseless, horrific act of violence proves the depth of his compassion for all living beings:
I visualized myself as a little boy born into a poor family in Thailand, my father an illiterate fisherman. From one generation to the next, my ancestors had lived in poverty, without education, without help. I too grew up without an education, and perhaps with violence. Then one day, someone asks me to go out to sea and make a fortune as a pirate and I foolishly agree, desperate to finally break out of this terrible cycle of poverty. And then, under pressure from my fellow pirates, and with no coastal patrol to stop me, I force myself on a beautiful girl.
My whole life I have never been taught how to love or understand. I never received an education. Nobody showed me a future. If you had been there on the boat with a gun, you could have shot me. You could have killed me. But you wouldn’t have been able to help me.
Meditating that night in Paris, I saw that hundreds of babies continue to be born under similar circumstances and that they will grow up to be pirates, unless I do something now to help them.
We are the world.
Those pirates did not manifest into existence with the snap of two fingers. We created them. Someone did. We are all products (or victims, depending on how you look at it) of all the experiences we have ever had.
I myself recently had an experience in which I was in the physical presence of someone I knew was likely guilty of a horrible crime, a crime which, even aside from privacy laws, I would not want to repeat. As I watched them, I wanted to scream. My skin flickered with anxiety and rage that I couldn’t hold back. I wanted to dart across the room, snap my fingers in their face, and wish them out of existence.
But just as this would never be possible, it was never possible for evil to appear without the existence of that to make it evil and that which is not evil.
I pity the evil, the wicked. This is because I see that if I experienced everything that they experienced in exactly the way that I did, I don’t know if I would turn out differently. I want to believe that there’s a soul, that there’s something inherent to me that could never, ever be capable of terrible acts…but how much ownership can I have even of that? My experiences, my DNA, the experiences of my parents, all contributed to my own perception of who I am.
I pity the evil, for they were not sufficiently taught to be good. We are the world and everything in it. Everything flows into everything else, in a constant state of change as it does.
Now, when that person comes to mind, I feel calm. In this present moment, they undoubtedly deserve to be held accountable for their actions and to be punished in the name of justice for the sake of the victims.
But, when these practices are inflected with the insight of emptiness, we don’t miss the whole for focusing on a mere part (the perpetrator themselves). If we wish to “solve” the problem of evil, we need to most look at the whole, the whole that exists within each part. With emptiness, useless and blind retribution can be replaced with the clarity needed to create a better world.
If we accept that we are the world, and the world is us, then every decision and the way we make it becomes very important. “The world” is not a separate entity to analyze, to complain about, to be in awe of. We directly contribute to its ills, its beauty, and its vastness — because we are it. Similar to the butterfly effect, the slightest change in action or thought literally changes the world.
I feel as though there is a recent narrative of insignificance in popular culture. Claims that we are only ever one of more than seven billion people on earth. We are one vote out of millions to elect the president. War is inevitable and a part of human nature. Peace is a foolish idea.
Why do anything? Are you not powerless compared to the whole, compared to the power of history?
When we realize we are inseparable from the whole, and we hold this belief close to our hearts, we suddenly don’t feel so powerless.
I haven’t.
For me, feelings of depression, insecurity, and loneliness in my life have been cut down through this realization alone.
Suddenly, the questions of who you are and what you want from life, and what you want to do next, become among the most important questions you could ever answer.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. They are the ground upon which I stand.
-from the Buddha’s Five Rememberances.
We can actually take the responsibility for our own role in those hundreds of babies being born to be pirates — and change it.
Thich Nhat Hanh calls on us through emptiness and the other doors of liberation to realize that:
If there is a spiritual crisis in the twenty-first century, it is that we have not put God in the right place, namely within ourselves and in the world around us. Can you take God out of the cosmos? Can you take the cosmos out of God?
