Finding My Ass

From Menletter May 2010

By Tim Baehr

Some days I can't find my own ass with both hands. If this has never happened to you (with your own ass, not mine), you're probably not living a very full life. I have a bit of the same problem with my car: every once in a while I lose track of its back end and smack into the house next door as I turn around in the driveway. Little harm done except to the old ego - a bit of house paint on the bumper that comes off with turpentine, and a couple of scrapes in the clear-coat to remind me to pay more attention.

I love my little car. I put so few miles on it that it might outlast me (if I'm more careful) on this planet. Which brings up some interesting points.

The Buddha, and several other philosophers, have pointed out that nothing in this universe is permanent. Every entity - animal, vegetable, mineral, natural, or manufactured - and every relationship contains within itself the seeds (metaphorically speaking) of its own destruction. Even mountains are eventually reduced to dirt and sand, carried away by wind and water. The planet, our sun, our galaxy, our universe are all destined one day to disappear, at least in their present form.

My little car was assembled from stuff once spread over the Earth in the form of iron ore, bauxite, latex, petroleum, and a bunch of other things. All these elements contained within themselves the potential for transformation into an '07 Civic Si. And that Civic Si contains within its very existence its own transformation into recycled parts or a block of squashed car dangling from a huge electromagnet and destined to be melted down to make steel that will perhaps end up in another car. The process has, actually, already started with the bumps and nicks on the rear bumper, some wear on the seat fabric, and a few parts of the gearbox and suspension that have been replaced under warranty. My car is a temporary transformation of a lot of stuff, and someday it will no longer be a car.

The philosophers point out the impermanence of things in our lives as they try to get us humans to realize that the thing we call our self, precious as it is to us, is also impermanent.

On an intellectual level, we all know this. Everybody dies. We cannot draw a first breath and escape the last breath. And vice-versa: we cannot draw a last breath without having drawn a first breath. Death is a necessary condition of life, and life is a necessary condition of death.

On a gut level, our self-identity feels like a permanent thing. But like my car, it is really a collection of parts: A meat-based life form whose every cell, on average, replaces itself every three years. An agglomeration of neural connections that constitute learning and memory, most of it not directly accessible to our conscious mind (What was for dinner last Wednesday? Where the hell are my car keys?). Our ability to think in language has given us the illusion that there is an unchanging entity, a self, that accompanies us through our lives and maybe even beyond. But if we start disassembling the pieces that make up our "self," we end up with nothing, or at least nothing our conscious mind could recognize.

Consider what Shakespeare's character Jaques has to say in As You Like It:

JAQUES:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

We lead a life of transformations, our self-image - and self - constantly changing. And even for those who believe in an immortal soul, the end of our temporal life leaves us "sans everything," including eyes to see with and a mind to think with and a voice to communicate with. Whatever the afterlife may be, if there is one, it is without everything we know or have ever known. When my ass disappears from this planet, along with the rest of me, including my "self," that's it.

This doesn't mean that the self doesn't exist or that we delude ourselves into imagining that we have one. Or that we need to kill or eliminate the self through spiritual exercises or asceticism. The self is a damned useful way for us to survive in the universe. We may have flashes of insight that we are at one with the universe and not separate from any aspect of the universe. And those flashes are, maybe, joyous tastes of an existence that includes absolutely everything, including the self. But if I'm in this blissful state all the time, and feeling complete unity with all the cars as I cross against the light, I'll end up as somebody's hood ornament. Not exactly what the philosophers had in mind.

Sometimes it can be useful to sit down with our self and say to it, "Hey look - you may think you're special, unique, and separate from all existence. That's fine. That's useful, most of the time. But that kind of separation is also lonely. So don't take it all - including your self - too seriously. Now just sit still for a while. Come back from time to time and sit some more, experiencing the stillness, and you may get that momentary flash of oneness. If you do, you'll know a joy that you hadn't thought was possible. And your self-separated world will be richer because some of that joy will leak back into it."