DOGEN ~ Binding One's Self Without A Rope ~ No 5

Part Five - The Marks of the Self

At this point let us return to take another look at those marks of conditioned existence -  impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and the lack of an unchanging self or nature. These make clear on what basis there is a problem with the Self – it acts as if the opposite is true; that permanence, satisfaction and a stable fixed self can all be found within conditioned existence.  We would rightly call this perverse behaviour, in Buddhism it’s referred to as a viparyasa - an upside down, Topsy-Turvy viewpoint. There are four such perverse views, three of them directly related to the marks of conditioned existence ;-

 

1. The belief that the impermanent is permanent.
2. The belief that the unsatisfactory is satisfactory.
3. The belief that the insubstantial self is substantial.  
4. The belief that what is ugly is beautiful.  

This last viparyasa  is not saying everything in conditioned existence is truly ugly, despite an outward semblance of beauty, because this is simply not true.  It’s real meaning is, that in comparison to the True Beauty experienced by an Enlightened person, the beauty of the conditioned world can only be seen as inferior, or ugly.   True Beauty is disguised, if not disfigured by conditioned reality.  We cling to conditioned beauty, because, however transitory it may be, it keeps us afloat and positive, unable to see or believe a more substantial True Beauty could exist in an unconditioned realm.

This mental perversity is barely conscious, our raw perceptions being instantly filtered through the distorting lens of the Self.  Our vision is said to be obscured specifically by ten viewpoints, or fetters, all of which are delusory and thus deemed incorrect. These bind us to seeing only a conditioned version of reality. These Ten Fetters, must all be broken free from before anyone can fully awaken to a Pure Consciousness. The Self having a fixed permanent nature – is traditionally the first fetter that needs to be shattered.  So, looked at from the perspective of the three marks of conditioned existence, the three forms of craving, the four mental perversities, and the First Fetter, the evidence is beginning to build up and make it clearer to understand - Why Buddhism considers the Self such a problem.  It’s not just one impediment among many, but the primary impediment preventing us from seeing ‘the knowledge and vision of things as they really are’ and thus progressing to attain that elusive state of Enlightenment.

Even to mention the word ‘fetter’ conjures up for me images of manacles, balls and ropes. Fetters do indeed hold back our spirit and aspiration for release. At some level buried in our unconscious, we do want to escape the terminal condition we find ourselves in.  Most of us act like rather  amateur escapologists, hanging helplessly over an abyss, suspended from a crane, bound by chains, handcuffs and a straight jacket, wondering what happens next. Slowly, as we are lowered into a large tank filled with water, it dawns on us that once we are born into the water, we’ll have only a short time in which to escape.  It will only be a matter of minutes. The strategy to escape a conclusive death needs rigorous, systematic execution. We cannot just hold our breath and hope to survive. Unfocused and lacking in resources, the desire for self preservation will be overcome by panic, as the clock continues ticking. If we don’t release ourselves soon the air will run out. At some point we cease to struggle, and give ourselves up to our mortal end.

Faced with the need to escape the impermanent, unsatisfactory nature of our own transitory Self, it seems quite natural, instinctual even, to want to convert our condition to its opposite. The Buddha, two and a half thousand years ago, warned that you cannot permanently escape conditioned existence through any form of craving or aversion.  Life is like a cart wheel running uncontrollably down a hill, crossing rough or smooth ground, rolling and bouncing over stones and bushes. Obviously a life’s progress would be more comfortable if we could dictate the nature of the terrain we cross, but mostly we cannot. Our only hope is to find either a way to stop the wheel rolling, or a way to permanently get off it.

First, before we devise an escape plan, we must get a fuller picture of what our predicament is.  The Buddhist symbol - The Wheel of Life, represents in iconic form, the evolving pattern of conditioned existence. Around its outer rim, in a succession of images, is drawn a Self perpetuating cycle, a chain of mutually conditioning events, one flowing out of another, known as the Nidana Chain. The sequence traditionally runs as follows ;- Ignorance - Karma Formations - Consciousness – Mind & Body – The Six Sense Bases – Sense Contact – Feeling – Craving –Grasping –Becoming – Birth – Old Age & Death.  These twelve links form a binding chain that holds us to the round of conditioned existence, to that wheel spinning wildly out of control down a hill.  They also demonstrate something fundamental to understanding the impetus for Buddhist methods and practices – pratitya samutpada,  It’s  often translated as Dependant Arising, because in dependence on one state, or states, being present, others will arise as a consequence from them.  The first part of pratitya samutpada goes as follows ;-

This being – That becomes

From the arising of this – That arises

This describes a simple karmic principle, a chain of causation that produces conditioned existence.  This can also be seen as a process that spans not just one life, but many lives. Initially we could look at this span from the perspective of genetics. We come into this current life with a genetic inheritance, dispositions mental and physical, not just from our immediate parents, but from the cumulative evolution of all human and earthly life. We pass on that inheritance, plus our own unique genetic variant to our children.  Genetics, unsurprisingly, also demonstrates the three characteristics of conditioned existence.  Our genes are in flux, the genetic message they transmit alters from life to life. They are often imperfect and flawed in that transmission, but basically our genes continue to produce human beings that ultimately will die. A specific gene combination deteriorates and dies, devoid of any permanent sense of a self, other than a chain of impulses, a core sense of a genetic message that needs to survive.

The Nidana Chain documents a similar process of inheritance, its practical consequences are, however, more interlaced with spiritual ramifications. The first two stages – Ignorance & Karma Formations – are said to be our inheritance from our previous lives.  From - Consciousness right through to Becoming - the effects of that inheritance run through this present life, further added to by the things we do in our current life. From – Becoming through to Birth, Old Age & Death – is what we bequeath to the future being that is re–born.  This model is used to demonstrate how conditionality is said to operate. It is only a model, and should not be taken as a scientifically verifiable description, weaving as it does  biology and psychology with metaphysics  For our purposes, I think it would  be useful to closely examine the middle part of the chain, from – Consciousness through to Becoming – viewing it from our perspective of The Self and its evolution.

Consciousness has arisen, but it’s not a Pure Consciousness, because its already tainted, spiritually ignorant, and self conscious in a crude instinctive way. This stage is usually represented  by the image of a monkey in a tree.  A primate, alone, isolated and perched high up in a tree, looks down on the world from its lonely perspective. It has already discovered that, in terms of survival, it’s got a much better chance of escaping it’s predators high up in the tree canopy. This is one of our genetic relatives, still an animal really, but with a rudimentary, but developing, sense of it’s Self which is separated by necessity from the rest of reality.

Already, almost the very instant consciousness arises, the sense of a Self emerges to take possession of a distinct Mind & Body because here is the monkey, and there is the tree that its sitting in.  The image representing this next stage is of four men in a boat. These are said to represent – the five skandhas– of Form, Feeling, Perception, Volition and Discriminating Consciousness, this latter is said to be steering. The boat and the four men are our body, complete with its emotional and mental limbs, that is now self-consciously moved and manipulated.  Damasio’s - 'Core Self' has developed into 'The Extended Self.'  Once upon a time the boat just floated idly, pulled this way and that by the rocks and eddies, in a stream of instinctual responses.  Now the boat is controlled, has a definite sense of direction and purpose, and discriminates accordingly. The Self  knows where it wants to go and how it wants to get there.

The Self begins using the body's sensory capacities, The Six Sense Bases, for its own ends. These bring it form and substance, building something solid for it to live in.  The image on the Nidana Chain represents it as an empty house with five windows and a door. When you see an unfinished new house, never before inhabited, its very emptiness can be exciting. You rush around from room to room, look out of each window to see the different perspective they give, and stand in its open doorway to  get a sense of ownership. An empty house has a potential in that first proprietorial encounter, that it never quite lives up to.  As far as The Self goes, it’s a permanent structure, something  that  protects and will survive, which is all that is required.  Yet, this house is permanently empty, imagine it, without real doors or windows, just vacant spaces that the rain can blow through.  It’s a house, but not as we know it, its incomplete, unfinished, and a dissatisfied breeze inhabits its rooms.

The relationship between the Self and the Six Sense Bases is like a form of lust, obsessive and driven by a libidinous urge. So, when we come to the image for  Sense Contact  it really isn’t surprising to find its of two lovers embracing.  You know what lust can be like, you’re horny for someone, even though you haven’t actually talked to them. You’re already visualising how it will be when you first experience sex with them. Even before your first date, you’re completely besotted with imagining their body. When the time for actually making love to them arrives you are oblivious to any world outside of them. For a while you just can’t get enough of one another.  When the Self is in a sensual relationship with the body and its emotions, it is likewise all consuming, indifferent to anything other than its own lust for assertion and fulfillment.

Feelings arise from this act of narcissism. Though love is blind, so they say, and the image for – Feeling - is of a man with an arrow in his eye.  So, not only does the Self  blind you to anything other than its own needs, it also requires putting up with a perpetual source of suffering.  The ‘Loved One’, the one that we lusted after for so long, may not live up to our fantasies. Relationships are full of minor and major disappointments, as well as the satisfactions and emotional highs. No one person can ever fulfill us in quite the way we imagine they can, we are left still feel lacking in something. Our lover might decide to leave us, they may become broken physically or ill mentally, and worse still even die on us.  Desire in all its forms dwindles and dies. The man with the arrow in his eye, suffers pain from this, but he’s not about to take the arrow out of his perception. He is, quite rightly, afraid he’ll die of shock if he removes it, he might simply expire of a broken heart.

With such feelings arises a craving for it to be otherwise. No one in their right minds wants to suffer pain, self-inflicted or not. So, the Self, searches for a palliative, a soothing balm to ease or numb our mental wounds. Craving is pictured as a man drinking and being served by a woman.  Intoxication with pleasure, be it via drink, sex or shopping, temporarily blots out our existential predicament. It might even be possible to live one’s whole life, constantly distracting your attention, with one craving being immediately followed by another.  The cravings of the Self, are like any drug, they become addictive through repeated application. After a while it becomes almost impossible to take a hold and put a stop to them. Such addictions are a self- perpetuating cycle, and increasingly desperate as we age and become mortified at the proximity of death.

This is why arising out of Craving comes Grasping, the Self and its voracious desires reach desperation point.  We aren’t just casually reaching for things, we are grabbing them, rapaciously. The image for grasping is of someone gathering fruit from a tree, perhaps from a whole orchard of fruit trees. We are trying to pick, and stuff into our faces, all the fruit possible before they drop and rot on to the ground, or we do.  Time is running out to find that permanently satisfying fruit, that person or thing that will be an eternal self-sustaining elixir.

If we go to our deaths still grasping, Buddhist tradition says the outcome will be a further conception, birth, old age and death.  The image for Becoming is either a pregnant woman or a couple engaged in sex.  Grasping sows the seeds for a further becoming, a further consciousness, a further Self, a further rolling of the wheel down the hill, another turn around the cycle of conditioned existence. The Nidana Chain demonstrates a flow of conditioning factors, the manner in which we continue our ride on the merry-go-round of existence.  Most of the time we are just passively riding, being pulled around, up and down. It’s all a blur, as the fairground organ grinds on and on, and the ride goes round and round. It only takes a little thought, a moment of reflection, for an alternative to seem possible – perhaps it need not be like this.

We exist in a conceptual world of dualities; male and female, black and white, left and right, right and wrong, always there is a balancing symmetry. A conditioned existence implies, at least, the possibility of an opposite  unconditioned existence.  It would seem safe to presume that this would bear marks the mirror opposite to those in the conditioned - well almost. Whilst the unconditioned is said to be permanent and satisfying, what is considered opposite to ‘a self devoid of substance’ is not ‘a completely durable and permanent version of our existing self’, or ‘no self at all’,  but what is termed ‘a greater self’, a self composed and formed from a greater wiser substance. To adapt a phrase from the Christian Liturgy of Committal – our ‘frail’ self is  replaced by a ‘glorious’ self in the unconditioned state.  

We cannot ever know from our conditioned perspective what is really meant by that, though Buddhist doctrine informs us that for Enlightenment to arise seven positive factors must be present. The most important of these is said to be upeksa, translated as equanimity. Equanimity may perhaps indicate what makes a ‘greater’ more ‘glorious’ sense of self.  Whoever possesses equanimity is secure, unshakable and completely unperturbed by the workings of The Eight Worldly Winds we discussed earlier. They will have experienced Insight into their conditional nature. Possessing this wisdom, they’d feel strong compassion for the suffering of any living thing.  The frail and insubstantial nature of the sense of one’s Self within conditioned existence could be characterised as disconnected, dependent on, yet also separate from other peoples lives and experience.  The ‘greater’ sense of self seems to be characterised by feeling interconnected, interdependent and inseparable from the lives, feelings and thoughts of ,not just us, but the whole of sentient existence.

DOGEN ~ Binding One's Self Without A Rope ~ No 4

Part Four - Who’s in the driving seat?

Dogen would normally addressing  a remark such as ‘Binding one’s Self without a rope’ to monks, ones with experience of his personality and teaching style. They would, no doubt, find it easier to comprehend the  intent  behind Dogen’s statement than we do now. Now, after extensively ruminating over the nature of the Self we find ourselves teetering at the threshold of the next questions to arise from ‘Binding  one’s Self without a rope’ - How would you approach binding the Self, if indeed this can be done? - What practice or action will take us beyond its bounds and limitations?  Though, before we rush on to fully engage with these question of how and what,  I feel the need to be sure we know why we are doing this.  Aren’t we just creating an existential difficulty where there isn’t one?  Why does Buddhism consider the Self such a problem?  

Last year, for the first time in my life, I bought a car. Second hand, low mileage and in relatively good nick for a nine year old automobile. I’d passed my Driving Test a long time ago, when I was twenty. For the thirty years since then, matters of finance, lifestyle, concern for the environment, and most of all loss of confidence, meant I didn’t feel I needed a car.  Once I got the job working at the Crematorium, which was far out on the other side of town, I knew I’d need to buy a car.  My driving skills were very rusty, so it took some time to regain them, and my confidence.  There are still times, as I step out to drive my car, when a feeling of dread comes over me, sometimes even a mildly nervous bubble of panic - I don’t really want to do this. Once I’m in the car and driving, a sense of capability gradually reasserts itself.  In the background though, there’s still an anxious oracle, a sense of unspecified foreboding.  Inside the protective metal skin of my  car I feel vulnerable and exposed, only a thin membrane of tempered steel protects me. This petrol driven pram could easily be dented, punctured or mangled, with me ending up a jam-coloured splodge sandwiched in the middle.  Being a careful driver reduces the odds of my being involved in an accident, but it's no insurance against an encounter with the unexpected fool.  Driving has increased my mobility, but also my awareness of just how conditional my security  and  grasp on life is, as so much of it is out of my control. The Self might also appear substantial and protective but we instinctively know, even as we proceed  self confidently driving through life, that it affords no defense against our ultimate collision with untimely death.  

A motor car is an engineered extension of our body; its capabilities and boundaries. It even bares some anthropomorphic similarities in form and design. From the moment of its invention, it was inevitable that the car would be brought under the patronage of 'The Autobiographical Self.' It has its ‘practical’ functions; protective armouring, a sense of purpose, through speed, steering, movement and destination. It also has its ‘decorative’ functions; the sensual smoothness of its shiny skin, its style, colour and acceleration. All have associations with virility, ambition and success, that advertisers never fail to drive home all the time.

Now what if I was to say - Why is the Motor Car considered such a problem?   It is easier with a car than with the Self, we can stand back and examine it in a more disassociated fashion, as if you’re buying it from a second-hand car dealer.  The first thing to say, is that the pleasures of car ownership seem largely to be associated with how you engage with it imaginatively, and how it makes you feel when you drive it. The unpleasant aspects of car ownership, are mostly associated with the practicalities of maintaining and running it, the unexpected expense, the atmospheric pollution, traffic jams, accidents, mechanical failure, and its limited life span.  Though, in contrast to our own perishable self and body, when a car finally dies, you do have the pleasure of going out and buying a new one.

What is pleasurable or unpleasant about owning a Self is not dissimilar.  It is  rich with a range of positive feelings and imaginative pleasures. These are only upset when our desire for pleasure encounters an obstacle. Such unpleasant intrusions of earthy practicality into our dreamy life, drags our imagination down from the clouds.  There is no design or malevolence to this, its merely the working motion of an intransigent reality.  Similar to a cheap car, the Self will bear you from birth to death. It’s fueled by desire and driven by The Worldly Winds, or lokadharmas. These contrary pairings of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, fame and infamy, praise and blame - define the  possible outcomes of the gamble desire plays with reality.  

The Self when it gets what it desires, feels the positive gain from delight and pleasure. Through being praised, it gains a sense of immortal fame. All in all, it seems such a life-enhancing experience, we feel emotionally and imaginatively complete. Reality is our best friend and servant. On such a day you’ve got the soft top down in your car, wind freely blowing through your hair, the throbbing soundtrack of Deep Purple declares “I’m a Highway Star,”as you cruise at ever faster speeds down the motorway of life.

The Self, when it doesn’t get what it desires, feels an irrevocable sense of loss as a well of negativity and pain arises. It blames itself for the apparent descent into eternal infamy. Life is torn asunder, we are left robbed of purpose and meaning. Reality is our enemy and torturer. On such a day you’re dressed in grubby overalls, hands and face covered in smears of dirty oil and grease. You’re staring bewildered at a car engine that refuses to start, the garage radio blares out Madonna, mercilessly teasing you “I’m living in a material world, and I’m a material girl.” Life can be such a bitch.

Desires are insatiable, it's hand reaches out further and further for an even more elusive, unattainable flower. Though we know  the satisfaction of each desire dissolves once we’ve touched it.  Desire can be an unreliable master, sometimes a beautiful angel, sometimes a three headed beast.  As a beautiful angel, it acts as a handmaiden, in the early stages of the spiritual life it can, for example, allure, direct and lead our spiritual attention, hold and support our fledgling aspirations till they can fly unaided.  In the opposite enclosure is the beast, the three-headed gorgon, that is fed by craving. Craving, as a word, has a coarser, impulsive, more animalistic urge to it than desire has. It denotes an almighty hunger, a thirsty unquenchable libido. It’s endless ravenous hunger, if not checked, can become unprincipled in how it grasps. It wants what it wants no matter what the cost maybe to itself or others. Craving behaves like Charles 1, the autocratic, English monarch who believed the he had a divinely inspired right to rule, attempting to bring everyone under his royal control and command. He was, as a result, the only English king ever to be publicly executed, to have his head chopped off from his body. Untrammeled craving can similarly make you lose your head, and thus all perspective. Unsurprisingly, craving has three aspects which we are already very familiar with.  

First, there is a craving for sensual delight, for a pleasure-filled balm to preserve the meaning and  vitality of the senses. Second, there is craving for a continuity of purpose to existence, for an element of consciousness to survive and go beyond death itself.  Third, there is craving for an end to it all, for life with all its trivial fripperies and trappings to be consigned to oblivion.  We may, however, be less familiar with the third form, perhaps only experiencing it briefly during times of personal crises. If not, we may be aware of individuals who have literally drowned in their own sensual intoxication; knowingly drinking, eating or drugging themselves to the point of death. Nothing is worth the effort, because we’re all going to hell in a hand-cart, so lets blot it all out of our minds in the meantime.

One problem with the Self does reside in the beastly nature of these cravings.  Cravings distract our attention, evading face to face contact with disillusion, dissatisfaction and death.  Death can become more consciousness  through the  archetypal power of dreams.  At the time when I began working full-time at the Crematorium, I had a series of disturbing nightmares. They usually consist of some form of chase, in which my arms and legs would literally flail and hit out violently at my imagined pursuers, trying to shake them off my trail. The reasons for this escaped my memory the moment I awoke, but the sense of panic and alarm could persist all night.  The last time this happened, I do remember what was chasing me, it was a dog.  The dog, jet black and longhaired, was pelting after me, saliva dribbling out of each corner of its mouth.  This was no friendly mutt, but a harbinger of death, ferociously in pursuit of me, its foam covered teeth nipping at my trouser turn-ups. One bite closer, it would succeed in delivering its rabid infection directly into my bloodstream.  No wonder I was running as if my life depended on it. Endlessly running, over and over, round and round the same ground, never ever fully escaping the death-delivering dog, forever snapping at my heels.

I cannot escape that dog, one day it will catch up with me, no matter how much I run from it, or crave for it to cease its pursuit. For what happens after death is an eternal conundrum for humankind, as life cannot provide us with an empirical answer. Such an answer, were it to exist, would help us handle our  deaths with better grace and dignity. Most religions, in trying to provide answers to our craving for certainty, formulate a future place for the sense of one's Self to exist in beyond death. Creating a continuity for life that salves our existential anxiety. Whether that future is heaven or hellish, is dependent upon the content and style of life just completed. We might stay in eternal bliss or in perpetual damnation, or return at some designated point in the future to live again in the human realm. Either way, something recognisable is said to survive death. The Buddha described this view as eternalistic. All theistic religions fall under its hope-filled auspices.

Another response to death is to say absolutely nothing happens, when your body dies, you die completely, nothing survives of the Self into another world. In the absence of facts to prove otherwise, this world is all there is. What you achieve or succeed in, and whatever good you do in the life between birth and death, is all left behind. This turns life an interesting eventful journey heading towards an concluding terminus. Enjoy it while it lasts – shop till you drop. The Buddha called this view nihilistic.  Various forms of humanism, atheism, materialism (scientific or otherwise) and secularism are driven by this view. Eternalism or nihilism, our cravings and desires will frequently switch between one or other of these two beliefs, though one may be more prevalent.

The Self is a common factor to both these views, in either it has some form of concrete existence. Whether it is for one life in this world, or for further lives in this or other realms, is an argument about duration. Though one of these views will no doubt inform our modus operandi within life, it is, none-the-less, an unresolvable issue. I don’t believe Dogen was much concerned about ‘How long the Self exists’ but with the core issue of 'Whether, and in what sense, the Self exists.’

Buddhism gives only a temporary and grudging credence to the Self and is suspicious of any eternalist or nihilist viewpoint.  Though it does appear superficially to incorporate elements of both views, but gives both of them an evasive twist; the body dies, you die, but something survives that is linked karmically to who you were, but will  not be in any way shape or form, identifiable as you in any future re-birth.  For Dogen felt it was not really important, and might even be a waste of intellectual effort, to try to prove either eternalism or nihilism to be right or wrong. If either view is used to buttress the sense of one’s Self as a fixed unchanging entity, this is the primary wrong view he thought we should be most concerned about.  Its not about correct or incorrect views either, but also how we hold it mentally, the rigidity with which we endorse it. This would make it doubly incorrect.

From a Buddhist point of view the Self’s consistency is seen as a concoction, without substance. What we present as a stationary, stable Self traveling immutably through time, is really a shifting unstable Self stretched thinly across the gaps between successive moments.  The sense of one’s Self could be seen as a giant mutant monster emerging out of a frothy pool of processed singular experiences.  Though consciousness would seem, in its origins at least, to be pure, it being one of the six elements; Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space and Consciousness. Only when Consciousness becomes embodied within a human form, with feelings, perceptions and desires, does it become discriminating.  This discriminating consciousness distorts how we feel and respond to reality. Once consciousness is confined to a body, it's no longer pure, it becomes tainted and biased by the incestuous relationship it has with the Self. This why within the Buddhist context of seeking clearer, purer awareness, The Self is seen as such a problem- because it  thoroughly muddies the water of consciousness. This might indeed be what Enlightenment is, a simple re-awakening to Pure Consciousness.

DOGEN ~ Binding One's Self Without A Rope ~ No 3

Part Three - Hand Crafted

Sometimes, I imagine the sense of one’s Self as being formed a bit like knitting.  Bright woolly threads are carefully fingered and looped together over needles, until finally they form a finished garment.  It’s handmade, and only our first attempt, so it rarely fits exactly.  It’s worn, out of fondness, we know it’s not perfect.  Over the years the wool ages, becoming dull and matted. Moths make holes that are difficult to repair.  By then, the garment and us are inseparable, we’d feel reluctant to throw it away and start again.  We are the knitter who has become what we were knitting.

This act of knitting, wearing and repairing this garment that we call the Self, creates for us a comfortable and familiar straight-jacket.  All the more inescapable because everyone knows the sense of one’s Self is a fact.  It can be backed up by empirical evidence; historical documents, photographs, even monuments, that support a life story vividly recollected. A life story is a bit like an old style movie, held on huge reels and kept in our memory canisters. Given electricity, light and a projector, our past experiences come back to life. If you stop a movie and examine it, you can plainly see it is just individual moments,a second of experience forever frozen on film. A film's sense of movement and continuity is easily seen through, its just a trick we pull on the eye and brain. seeing The sense of one's Self, and its life story, as composed of separate, fragments of experience with no continuous story attached, is not so easily seen through. Our experience of Self, is similar to individual loose links made of silver, that are welded together into a chain by the connections our memory makes.  In the dying away of our body heat at death those welded together links melt. The embodiment of experience becomes a powdery ash, dispersed across a lawn by in the sudden gusts of a forgetful breeze.

It is the Self that demands something should survive from our lives, otherwise what was it all in aid of? What are we here for if not to be remembered?  Both the experience and its interpreter will disappear, so it’s vital some sort of entente cordiale, is arrived at concerning this question.  It provides us with a cogent reason for the existence, if not need, for history, why a sense of it remains so important to mankind.  History books document individual events and the lives embroiled in them, mainly those that are considered significant to the struggles and progress of human civilisation.  Each era interprets the facts of these stories differently. Tales of heroic adventurers,daring deeds and pioneering enterprise in the creation of a vast regal empire, that are valued by one generation, become regretful tales of moral cowardice, covert racism, and exploitation of economic power to another.  Aside from the differing values used to select and interpret the facts, history paints an expansive panoramic picture, designing a frame of consistency within which to frame our human endeavours. Though the scale may be smaller, our individual histories have a similar volition behind them - the desire for significance, purpose and of course, continuity.  The personal histories we tell ourselves, are likewise open to differing interpretation and emphasis. The meaning we bring to them is changeable and in no way as fixed as we'd like to believe.

I lived in London for nine years, the last few of them  unsettled and dominated by internal conflicts.  My job, the creativity of my performance work, my social life, all appeared to be on or at the point of stagnating. My entire memory of those years became coloured by recollections of painful persistent moods.  During this period I floundered in the backwash from my own melancholy.  I can see from my current perspective, that this was largely of my own making. Ten years later, with a few years of Buddhist practice under my belt, I returned to London.  I had a plan to revisit all the  places where I had lived and worked, before I flew off to Spain for a four month long Ordination Course. I had thought the visit would revive distressing incidents long buried by my psyche.  Instead, looking at the sites of my old bed-sits, I was struck by how uninhabited the places were by recollections.  The houses and streets where I’d spent my London years felt somehow neutral.  I’d wanted to bury some demons, but failed to find any.  Only then did I realise how I'd made the existence of demons an incontrovertible fact. Those concluding years were distorted by veins of darkly mordant emotion that poisoned my ability to recollect in a fair, balanced way.  Yes, not all of my years there were happy, but I’d been incredibly fortunate in the opportunities and the people I’d met and worked with.  In spite of the redundancies and periods of recession, I’d managed to keep in work. I’d experienced and done huge amounts culturally and creatively.  I could now see it was a period equally as blessed with angels, as it was with demons.  From the perspective of ten years later, it didn’t seem that bad at all.  

Personal memories seem then to be dependent on the conditions that formed them; the particular tendencies and thought patterns present at the time.  Memories are only as reliable as the feelings that shaped and coloured them. All historical facts require interpretation, regardless of whether it documents the sweep of human evolution, or the passing of a single life from birth to death. Perceptions are evaluated on the basis of our memories, and we respond  according to the stories we’ve embroidered around them.  The sense of one’s Self, is experience welded together by memories.  If the memories are unreliable, then it’s likely that  the sense of one’s Self will be too.  

The Self is a versatile and very accomplished storyteller – it remembers the adventure stories, the fairy stories, the horror stories, the love stories, the myths and legends composed around your experience and those from  your own family’s history. Sometimes these tales are literally learnt at one’s mother’s knee.  As a child I remember we had an old biscuit tin, it was kept in the heavy wooden sideboard in our front room. Though rather battered, the tin still had Christmas snow scenes discernible on its sides.  Inside it were family photos in a wide range of sizes and styles. I often rifled through it. My parents, grandparents,  sister and myself, featured strongly, in a variety of filial combinations.  My Mother would sometimes bring out the box, and look through the photographs with me. For her, each one contained a family story, tales she was eager to repeat and inculcate.  

Some of the stories embarrassingly were about me. There was a photograph taken when I was four, refusing to smile for a wedding photographer, even though he’d bribed me with money and ,what was worse, given me a boiled  sweet. This was followed by the statement “You always were such a stubborn child, you’d never cooperate or do what you didn’t want to !” Others told me about the mild eccentricities of some of my relatives. There was my Grandma and Granddad Tunnicliffe, captured walking along the promenades and putting greens of Lytham St Annes. They went there on holiday every year for literally decades, because “It was the only place your Grandad liked to go too,” he’d say “We like it, don’t we love? It suits us, so why go anywhere else?”

Apart from my immediate family, there were photos  of relatives I’d never met, mostly because they were dead. Such as Granddad Lumb, very much the patriarch, had sired eight children and expired his last breath, aged fifty six, due to blood pressure problems, many years before I was born. “These days he’d never have died so young, or so suddenly” my Mum would say in tones of regret.  George Tunnicliffe, the elder brother of my maternal grandfather, who, so my mother thought, “was the spitting image of me”.  There was my Father’s Aunt Florence, who had quite an individual fashion style out of kilter with post war conventions and rationing. She'd make all her own cloths. This would cause some consternation at family weddings, “is Auntie Florence coming?” they’d whisper, dreading to think what outlandish thing she’d turn up in. Whatever it was, was usually extravagant, and involved a quirky use of colour.   I rather liked the sound of her, I sensed an exuberant  kindred spirit.  

There were others I later identified with, for very different reasons. Cousin Lawrence for instance, part of the hill-farming wing of my father’s family. He was single, euphemistically referred to as ‘a confirmed bachelor’, clever, educated, but fussy and womanish in his manner. Considered an oddity, and a family figure of perplexed amusement. He’d lived most of his adult life alone, so far as we knew, up there on the edge of the pennine moors.  With the dawning of my own sexual orientation, I sensed Cousin Lawrence might have felt doubly isolated. How he may have dealt with his experience in a less permissive era, is an unspoken story, that will sadly never be recounted now. I soaked up all these tales, it seemed important for me to remember them, because they gave me the sense of how my Self fitted into the continuity of my families history.

There were some people in those black and white photographs, in the background or just to one side and often out of focus, that my mother seemed not to recognise. She’d say “Your Auntie Margaret might know who that is” and move on quickly to a photograph of someone she could talk more effusively about. Auntie Margaret is the unofficial archivist of the family lineage, and knows  how some distant relatives fit into our family tree.  If she didn’t remember them, how would I find out who they were?  Where does a personality and a life story go to? It seems a sad and quite obvious thing to state, that with every generation that passes away, personal memories pass away too. The sense of someone and their place in a families history diminishes, then is lost, never to be regained.

Someone in the future might find a photograph of me, with ‘Vidyavajra, 2007, Cambridge’ written on the back.  They’d have a face, a strange unfamiliar name   (quite misleading in terms of a family), a year, and a place. Who I was, how I was as a person, as someone to spend time with, what I was doing in Cambridge, would be matters for deduction, or guesswork.  In trying to find answers to these questions, they’d do no better than an archaeologist does; trying to deduce a personality from shards of pottery and scraps of textile.  It’s as if the sense of one’s Self is not only fragile, but, overtime, is also biodegradable.

Most people, so far as history is concerned, have unremarkable and therefore undocumented lives. Over millennia, billions and billions of lives have passed in this manner. Whilst we are alive, perhaps we still hold out a hope to find our own small place in History. Most of us will not. Our culture’s current obsession with gaining celebrity at any cost, would appear to be fueled  by the desire to ensure a small footnote in history. A desperate lunge towards eternal validation. In the creation of a history for the sense of one’s Self, we are crying out to an indifferent world, for our experience to matter, for our lives to be of some significance.  Every day we live and breath, we rail against the dying of our distinctive and clearly distinguishable Self.

When I worked at the Cambridge City Crematorium, I heard bereaved families and friends eulogizing on the virtues of their recently deceased relatives.  Though these would often list their achievements in life, what they did  seemed less important in comparison to how they were as people. What was most treasured and worthy of note was the emotional character and presence of the deceased.  Kindness, an ability to love and be loved,a sense of fun, good humour and playfulness of character, cannot be captured in a snapshot or on film, drawn on paper or carved in stone.  This sense of a Self is clasped fondly to the hearts and minds of those who knew them, and when they too die, so do these memories. Whatever we see as notable or significant about someone, will eventually crumble and turn to dust on a shelf.  

So far, what I've described, is how the sense of one’s Self pretends to ignore it's own impermanence. Turning our gaze away from the characteristic marks of conditioned existence, distorts how it is to be human within it. We are bound by our human nature - to Nature, and cannot exempt ourselves from its stipulations. This thing called the sense of one’s Self  might wrestle with our conditional nature, but it's a Pyrrhic struggle. At every onset of sickness, from a cold to a coronary, the encroaching frailties of old age, are read as oracles of our own mortality. Fear arises as the truth of this situation is made abundantly clear. Consequently,there’s an urgent impulse propelling our desire for self-fulfillment and self-realisation - to insure a small grain of immortality before our time runs out.

The Self, as we are seeing time and time again, is primarily conditioned by circumstances, choices and consequences.  The Self has also formed a lifetime's bond, a marriage of convenience with the mind and the senses.  This relationship is a complicated mix of functional and fictional strands, an entangled, knotted and frayed ball of memories, desires and self-justifications. Though it has been revealing to explore the Self, I wouldn’t really know where to start if someone asked me to disentangle these threads. Perhaps this is its final, and best, means of defense; presenting such a perplexing mess of motivations, no one in their right mind would tackle them head on. In essence the Self is a fabrication, though a fabrication with foundations dug deeply into the earth, fed by the nutrient rich streams of experience and consciousness.  It would be a very difficult plant to uproot.

It's behaviour is similar to bindweed. Gardeners have struggled for centuries with bindweed. Left to its own devices it runs rampant through a garden, creating a tough resilient mat of growth, weaving itself over, round and through any plant it encounters. It is tenacious and persistent, if you rip it up, the tiniest strand of root left in the soil will re-locate itself, and grow rapidly with renewed vigour.  The only thing that kills it, is to remove all existing growth, then cover the entire ground affected with the thickest of plastic sheeting, impervious to light. Some gardeners suggest leaving this cover on for several months, even a year. This cuts out all sunlight and basically starves to death any remaining roots or strands. By the way, this doesn’t always work.

Of course this would be a pretty drastic strategy to apply to the sense of one’s Self’. So, if extermination is out of the question, when Dogen said ‘Binding one’s Self without a rope.’, what was he meaning us to do?   What is the best way to approach the tangled issue of the Self?  When faced with its intractable character, how you approach ‘Binding  the Self’ becomes a very genuine koan. Dogen’s early monastic training was based strongly around reflection on koans. Those baffling statements with little in the way of logical premises or outcomes, problems whose solution will not be found within their own terms of reference.  Though the Soto tradition, which Dogen co-founded, is primarily focused on meditation, koans remain a significant practice for monks with a degree of spiritual maturity.  Dogen’s discourses, particularly in ‘The Shobogenzo’, can  be read as poetical explorations of the koan form. Another way you could approach the Self, and indeed Dogen’s phrase ‘binding one’s Self without a rope’, is to ponder and reflect on it as you would a koan.    

DOGEN ~ Binding One's Self Without A Rope ~ No 2

Part Two - Discovering Yourself

'Binding’ is always done in relation to something or someone, and Dogen seems interested in how this is applied to one’s Self. When I look at the first three words of our phrase; ‘binding one’s Self’, it is that seemingly insignificant possessive word one’s which draws my curiosity and attention.  It’s an odd, slightly formal English term, often used disingenuously to give an impression of objectivity, aloof and impartial, whilst the speaker is really being subjective and  partial in the opinions they’re expressing.  There is this, our sense of this, and  how one believes one should see this.

It seems important to create some distance imaginatively from our own Self. It is a bit like owning a coat, we know what its like to wear it from the inside out, but we need to see it from the outside in. To look in a mirror to see if it suits us, or gives the desired impression, or we take the coat off completely, hang it up on a coat hook, and take a good long look at it. Our subjective experience needs objective, and external ratification.  If one were to receive that, then one would have sufficient proof that one’s Self had a distinct concrete existence. For this to occur the sense of one’s Self, has to be in a formal, fixed and factually absolute context, otherwise this evaluation cannot be done. This is only a ruse, one we willingly partake in, whilst the actual conditions forming our relationship with the Self, remain, as ever, informal, fluid and factually relative.  In our heart of hearts, deep in the murkier levels of our sub-conscious, we know the latter is true. The infirm nature of the sense of one’s Self lies at the root of most human insecurity, neuroses and paranoia.

‘Binding one’s Self’, describes the Self as though it could be purchased, like one’s house or one’s car might be. This betrays a possessive theme that seems intrinsic to its nature;  even though we describe it as though it is inseparable from us, it remains something extra, in addition to - like a handbag.  Like a handbag, its functions are both ‘practical’ and ‘decorative’.  We carry it around with us, wear it as an accessory, and highlight this embellishment as integral to our identity.  The world of the Self, so constant and  familiar we feel it can be owned, remains essentially fleeting, as insubstantial and difficult to keep up with, as are current fashion trends.

The neurologist Antonio Damasio, in his book, The Feeling of What Happens describes consciousness of the Self as possessing three levels. At the foundation level is 'The Core Self', defined by the exterior form of the human body. The limits of skin, flesh and bone give a tangible boundary to what needs protecting. This desire for preservation is an instinctive reflex barely self-conscious, but nevertheless fulfills the core responsibility - to survive.  

The next level is 'The Extended Self', this adds onto 'The Core  Self'  the feeling that someone is responsible for the desires for food, shelter, warmth, and hence to find solutions for them. Self preservation becomes self conscious in an elementary way  –  I am hungry, I need to find food, I need to hunt etc.  'The Core Self' has developed into someone with needs, who instigates actions to meet them.  The Self is extended because the remit of self preservation has been stretched from ‘survive’ to ‘I will survive’.

Finally, at the third level, what Damasio calls 'The Autobiographical Self'; extends the imaginative boundaries of self-consciousness further still.  The sense of one’s Self now has a memory, it has ongoing stories it repeats about itself, tales  with a sense of lineage and an experiential history.  This Self has an ongoing internal dialogue, it says :- ‘I’ve not felt this hungry for weeks, though I’m so lazy, I really can’t be bothered to spend hours hunting. Last Spring, I  hunted young deer drinking water down by the river, I picked them off easily, feasting on venison for days after, which was sheer bliss. Maybe I’ll make my way there now.’ Self preservation has formed an even tougher carapace for itself.  Expressed simply it has evolved from ‘survive’, to ‘I will survive’ to ‘I know how I will survive’

The 'Core', 'Extended' or 'Autobiographical' sense of Self all have this cardinal impulse at their root; to enable survival.  A continuous loop of feedback joins our present Self up with the past – the present experience reminds us of a past experience – that is then used to reinterpret the present experience – and we adjust our reaction accordingly This narrows down the range of responses, improving our prospects of survival.  Maintaining a continuity to our experience within the known boundaries of a body, does help to defend it better. Its something humanity has developed a pre-eminent skill  in. This practical benefit to owning a Self should  not be overlooked, or undervalued, as we proceed to further dissect and deconstruct its nature.

In The Sutra of Golden Light, a simple, compelling simile is used to capture how our sense faculties and the sense of one’s Self interact. The senses are described as thieves, and a thief always steal something that is not theirs, they have no right to possess what they take :-

“And this body is like an empty village. The senses are like six village thieves: they all dwell in the one village but do not perceive one another. The eye-sense runs after forms, the ear-sense after the consideration of sounds, the nose sense takes up various smells, the tongue sense runs after tastes continually, the body-sense runs after the sensations of touch, the mind-sense after consideration of things….The mind is flighty like magic and the six senses consider their objects just as a man runs about in an empty village and is dependent on the six village thieves….And in the case of all six senses the mind, flighty like a bird, enters the senses and whatever sense it bases itself upon, it gives that sense its peculiar knowledge.”3

The sense of one’s Self would seem then to be a stolen commodity, one   assembled from bodily sensations. Sensations passing through the mind’s myopic lens, which experiences them, interprets them and consigns them to memory, so they can be recollected when required. It is during this process of reflection and evaluation that the mind gives back to them ‘its peculiar knowledge’; the story of a continuous and ongoing Self.  This self-knowledge becomes as indicative as fingerprints, in representing what is unique about us.  The mind through this perpetual dialogue, and Self appraisal, draws out useful boundary lines, it says  – I go this far and no further – beyond this, are all the others who are similar to me, but not me.  A sense of Self defined as separate from Other, does have strategic benefits defensively.  It might be envisaged as like a stockade circling a medieval village, built to withstand heavy and barbarous attack. However, such seemingly impregnable defenses, could, under prolonged siege, be forced into submission simply by hunger.  The sense of one’s Self,  might protect and survive, but it can also be susceptible to alienation or xenophobia. Self defense may become imprisoning and starve us of simple human contact and intimacy.

The mind brings to the Self a restless capricious nature – described in the sutra as flighty, magical or birdlike, because its constantly changing its viewpoint. Hopping around like a bird in the branches of a tree, at first it desires to be here, then here, then here. Always it’s a new branch, a new view, a new perch for the Self. The life blood that feeds and sustains the Self, the thing that keeps its pulse racing, its heart alive and fluttering, is desire. There is the Self that is desired, and the Self that is desiring - these two impulses, aren’t always compatible even when acting together.  The Self that is desired is ‘practical’, primarily seeking security in the present through asserting ‘who I am’. The Self that is desiring, primarily seeks fulfillment in the future through fantasy and dreams of ‘who I would like to be.’  I’m calling the latter a ‘decorative’ function; because what it does is not essential for survival. This type of self- consciousness is defined by its preferences, things it likes and dislikes, how it wishes to be, how it would like to be perceived. It is not practical in its focus and seeks a liberated imagination; the freedom to be or to do anything it wants – to extend the parameters of 'who I am.'  At its most extreme, the ‘decorative Self’ creates idiosyncratic behaviour, affectation and narcissistic forms of individualism. It has a youthful aspiration and spirit, which easily becomes the creed a surgically enhanced celebrity lives by, and the pool an overdosed rock’n’roll legend will be found floating in. Fame is, it seems, a double edged sword, as Oprah Winfrey once reflected:-

“ If you come to fame not understanding who you are,

it will define who you are”4

Celebrity, is one very special circumstance that a few people find themselves in. They often obtain it, but come completely unprepared for the way an imaginary and false sense of one's Self, will be bound to them, no matter how ill fitting, uncomfortable or inappropriate this maybe. This may explain why the sad consequence of such immeasurable fame and wealth, appears often to be unbridled indulgence and obesity, one that becomes self-hating and self-destructive. The 'decorative' function,- who I'd like to be has become separated, if not divorced, from its 'practical' partner - who I am.  For most of us,who lead more ordinary lives, who I'd like to be, has some very practical restrictions, usually lack of time, talent, money or opportunity. What Oprah Winfrey said I think applies more broadly; if we don't understand who we are, any circumstance we find ourselves in, will end up defining who we are.

It is unsurprising then, that, irrespective of circumstances, these ‘practical’ and ‘decorative’ functions do require  arbitration. The ‘practical Self’ desires a secure room with a view. The ‘decorative Self’ desires to change the paint work, wallpaper, furniture or curtains, to move everything around within the room, or transport it to the Mediterranean coastline, all to change how the room feels and improve its prospect. The ‘decorative’ aesthetic chafes constantly against the ‘practical’ functionalism of self imposed walls and a static unchanging viewpoint. Fear can prevent any step being taken beyond those walls, because the default position for the Self, falls first and foremost, to safety and security. The ‘decorative Self’ adjusts, reluctantly, to living within specified boundaries, whilst complaining incessantly about the iron bars in the window restricting the view of the garden.  Here, the Self is the one who binds, its containing influence acts as an implacable jailer.

The ‘practical Self’ does have to accommodate the impulses of the ‘decorative Self’ in some way. No-one can sustain for long a divided sense of Self. We’ve all known, or have at least seen, people who live completely different private and public lives.  Bank Managers, who go to Salsa classes on Wednesday evenings.  Plumbers, who love Country & Western music and dressing up as a cowboy. Teachers, who love the feel of a leather jacket and a Harley Davidson rumbling between their legs. Computer Programmers, who take part in medieval battle re-enactments on Bank Holiday weekends. These quite innocent pastimes, maintain an ongoing truce, between the desire to be secure and the desire to be what you dream of.  If dreams are not embodied in some way, if they are starved or heavily suppressed, can destabilise the sense of one's Self. Psychologically, the centre sometimes cannot hold, because contained creative energy is unable to be released.  A refreshing, newly revived perspective needs  to be brought to the Self.

Whilst we nominally grant the sense of one’s Self a fixed continuity, this doesn’t mean we can wash our hands of responsibility for how we are, or who we have become.  We cannot shrug our shoulders and say that ‘this is just how things are, this is how I am and everyone else will just have to adapt and get used to it – because I can't change it.’  If the Self is not a permanent fixed entity, it cannot be used to  predefine our future destiny, its not excuse or an alibi. The Self is only an instrument of our fate of we let it be.  Frederick Nietzsche, challenges our tendency to become passive towards ourselves and life, bemoaning our lot, as if it were somehow predestined  :-

“ We bear loyally what we have been given…and when we sweat we are told  ‘Yes, life is hard to bear !’   But only man is hard to bear !

This is because he bears too many foreign things upon his shoulders

Like the camel, he kneels down, and lets himself be well laden.”5

Assuming responsibility for what happens to us in life is discomforting, we’d rather not do it really.  After all, we may end up not liking our Self and who we have become, and that could indeed be hard to bear.  However difficult life might be, change is never impossible, The personal preferences and biases that usually inform our priorities can be adjusted.  Whether we feel able to take it up these choices is really the most pertinent point here. Its another  example of how we may be restricted and bound by the sense of one’s Self.

Consequences roll inexorably after our choices, as though they’re subject to gravity and develop their own momentum - like a stone tumbling down a hill.  The effects of consequences are similar to the weather - unpredictable, persistent, sometimes beneficial, sometimes harsh, and will certainly ignore the depth of our desire for it to be otherwise. The storms that are brought forth may be ameliorated, but they cannot be changed substantially or stopped in their tracks.  This is what we will  frequently find hardest to bear in our life.

If we drop a pebble into a lake, once it has been dropped, there is no way to forecast how far, or for how long, the ripples will radiate out. Though the ripples disturb the reflective lake surface in countless waves crossing and cross cutting each other, the ruckus to light and water cannot be forcefully stilled. In its own time this motion eventually dissipates. There is no set period for when the stream of consequences flowing from a decision will run out of impetus. The ripples and rivulets emanating from the past, continue to affect us well into the present, even to the end of our lives, and according to some Buddhist doctrines even beyond that.  All of which could appear to be a rather depressingly fatalistic viewpoint. Though this would be mistaken, and really isn’t the case. Though its easy to see how this conclusion could be arrived at. Fate and consequence cross very similar terrain, but behave and respond in markedly different ways.  You could envisage life as a  river. The concept of fate would direct its energy and forcefully re-channel, control and dam its progress. Making it unable to  move, or be moved by free will, from a fixed and predefined course. Consequences, cooperate with the free flowing of a mountain river. The flow can be intense, furious and turbulent at times, depending on the territory its crossing. As the river progresses consequences adapt with it, whether its to the roar of the rapids or the leisurely meandering of an estuary. Every mountain river eventually becomes a languid estuary or delta, one that vanishes into the all encompassing vastness of an ocean. Consequences may be out of our control, but they are more opportunistic than vindictive, though never be predestined or eternal. Fortunately, consequences are a conditioned thing too, and are thus impermanent.

This doesn't stop life from feeling heavy sometimes. So, if we are like a camel that lets itself be well laden, then wouldn’t it be great if we could just off-load and be set free of everything that weighs us down?  We all have decisions we’ve taken, things we’ve said or done, things we’ve neglected to say or do, things we no doubt regret.  We’d love to be able to wipe the board clean and start again.  We appear to feel free only at the very moment of a decision. Thereafter, the consequential process adds more weight to camel and dampens our briefly liberated  spirit.  Though we may desire to have freedom of choice, the evidence appears to indicate that self-determination is, to a degree, circumscribed.  Who we are now,  who we will be in the future, can only flow out of who we have been in the past. A river is propelled by where its been, as much as by where it currently is going. The sense of one’s Self, is very much the result of the conditioning influences of circumstance, choice and consequence, in the past, as well as the present.   

This is just how things are, and not necessarily a bad thing, though it can become so if we resent feeling restricted by our Self and its history.  Quentin Crisp, said something  uncomfortably prescient about this :-

“It’s no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years,

whilst saying really I was meant to be a ballet dancer,

by that time pigs will be your style”6

We may wish to turn back the clock and take a different path, redesign ourselves in the light of experience, to somehow escape the feeling of constriction that the sense of one’s Self can sometimes create. However, a bound man, in struggling to free himself, often makes his bonds grow even tighter. You taste a different type of freedom once you are willing to acknowledge your bound conditioned nature.

In my youth, I definitely thought I could willfully determine the path my chosen career would take. Once I knew what career that would be of course. In reality it proved to be a decidedly more haphazard, intuitive route, like picking up an erratically strewn paper trail.  From childhood through to my early teenage years, my all consuming passion had been for History - ancient or modern it mattered not. I loved reading about it, and visited every church, stately home, castle and abbey ruin possible.  My early creative imagination was alive to a sense of place, period and how people may have lived.

At sixteen I chose to go to Sixth Form College, envisaging a future career  in someway related to History. I was down to study two subjects for ‘A’ Level; History and Geography. I went with my parents to see the College Principal, Mr Charlesworth, who was a lanky man in old fashioned tweeds and half moon spectacles.  The latter, bifocal and hinged, he nervously flicked up and down as he spoke. I can see him now peering down at me from over those blessed spectacles, saying  “We like all our students to study three subjects, your third needn’t be that important, though it might as well be something you enjoy doing”  I’d always enjoyed Art, so I chose to do that.  

Miss Bamforth, the Art Tutor, was an enthusiastic middle aged woman, with a no nonsense approach. Her encouragement, revived my faith in my own creative potential. History, suddenly seemed dull and boring in comparison. I changed my future plan, and chose instead to apply to Hull College of Art. I was accepted on a Arts Foundation Course, which lasted only a year. By the end of it another choice loomed.  Did I want to pursue Fine Art, or a Design discipline?  In retrospect, perhaps it would have been better if I’d chosen Fine Art, but at the time, overly influenced by my parents concern about a career, I chose Graphic Design. Design appeared to have job prospects at the end of it. This I knew my parents would understand, just being an artist didn't seem a positive a career option.  To my parents, artists were lazy, anarchic, spongers on society, sexually licentious, perpetually intoxicated and off their trolleys on illegal drugs. All of which I discovered did happen, though you didn’t specifically have to be an artist to be any of those things.  All the same, I’d never have dared to do it myself.

I left Art College with a BA Degree in Graphic Design, already in possession of a disillusioned view of my future career. Ten months later, I started my first job in the Art Department of a London book publisher.  Eight months after that, the company changed ownership and  I was made redundant.  One morning, not able to bear the thought of hawking my portfolio around Design Studios, yet again, I took a momentous decision; I decided I’d go for any job, no matter how humble - bricklayer, window cleaner, road sweeper, who cared?  I can remember now the sense of elation as I walked home from East Finchley Tube Station, joyfully turning my back on a chosen career. That sense of a spirit freed by reckless abandon, soon vanished once faced with the hard facts of what my job prospects were.

There was a consequence to having a background in the Arts - I easily got a job working in an Art Shop, one I found I was more than just good at. Over the next ten years, I progressed from being a Shop Assistant, to a Manager, to finally owning and running my own Art Shop. Though retailing  successfully dealt with the ‘practical’ issue of financial security, my desire for creativity, the ‘decorative’ need for self expression, went through a variety of artistic disciplines. The search for a lifelong vocation outside work, meant I took up at different times in my life - acting, performance art, painting, poetry, interior decoration, and even morris dancing.

A small decision, taken spontaneously without much thought, to do Art as a third subject, ended up defining the direction of most of my adult life.  Its consequences continue to colour possibilities right up to the present moment.  Even though I’m still an enthusiast for History, fifty years on, too much artistic water has rippled under my bridge, for a career in that field to fully blossom. Following the trail  of Art, meant I turned my back on ever becoming a Historian. Art and Retailing have inevitable ended up shaping and defining me to some extent. The sense of my Self, even thirty years later, still fidgets slightly within this limitation, as though unable to find a permanent place to settle these aggravating facts.

Whether choices like mine were made spontaneously or not, they are usually made for a reason. There are things we hold paramount; security, affection, love, to belong, to be free etc.  At that time, I knew I wasn't emotionally robust enough, to manage the insecurities inherent to a full time artistic career. My Self had, and still has, a strong desire for security, financial or otherwise. This motivation, similar to the glue that binds a book, holds the sense of my Self together, and limited the choices I felt were available. A binding is also attached to the ragged edge of a cloth to prevent it unraveling. Likewise, we bind ourselves out of fear that frustrated desires might one day cause us to unravel and fall apart.  Perhaps this was what most of us fear.  At root we’re all  anxious not to lose the sense of one’s Self, however frayed or threadbare it may have become.   

Life and circumstance do on occasions lead us to unravel. This can be what initially sparks the quest for a spiritual solution. The restless discomfort and suffering of my dissatisfied spirit brought me, as a consequence, to Buddhism. In the aftermath of any period of instability, we want to find a better more durable way of binding, of holding the sense of one’s Self together.  When I came along to Buddhism for the first time, I‘d been desperately wishing for certain outcomes  most of my adult life. Usually, these were in the form of monetary success, a fulfilling career and a handsome, kind-looking sexual companion to share the proceeds with. I fell painfully and repeatedly on the sword of these ordinary, but distinctly unreliable expectations. When I first heard the arya satya – the noble truth - that suffering arose out of craving - it was as if I’d finally stumbled across a key to a whole new wing of a house.  As it opened, a fresh way of seeing myself and the world emerged from behind it.  This didn’t produce an immediate change of perspective, but more a gradual revelation, as though I was gentle unfolding a completed piece of origami, to find out how it was made.  I started examining my reactions and motives in closer detail than I’d ever done before. This slowly began slackening some of the bonds that I’d tied myself up in. The Buddha used similes of release from bondage, or from carrying a great weight, to convey how the insights from 'awakening' transform the sense of one’s Self. Until we are relieved of this duty, we don’t know what a burden it has been. Little realising how, maintaining the sense of one’s Self, restrains us more effectively than any rope.

Part Two - References
3 – Taken from – The Sutra of Golden light – Translated by R.E. Emmerick.
Published by The Pali Text Society 1992.
4-  Taken from the website – chicago.about.com – Top 10 Oprah Winfrey Quotes.
5 - Taken from - A Nietzsche Reader - Selected & translated by R.J.Hollingdale.
Published by Penguin Books 1997.
6 – Taken from – Resident Alien – by Tim Fountain / Quentin Crisp.Published by Nick Hern Books 1999