Closing the Gap

My Zen teacher often said that meditation is about closing the gap between ourselves and ourselves. This teaching has always been resonant for me. Especially as a young man, I was painfully aware that while part of me was living my life, some other part was standing aside just watching and judging. James Joyce caught it exactly when he wrote in The Dubliners: ‘Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.’

This sense of separation—from ourselves, from each other, and from the world—is one of the great gifts and great challenges of being human. On the one hand, this separation is the source of the awareness that allows us to wonder and appreciate the immeasurable mystery of life. One image in the Sufi tradition is of the globe surrounded by throngs all-knowing souls who are eager to be born human. For only by being born human can they have the sense of separation that allows them to perceive, delight in and sing praises to the wonder of life.

No other life form we know paints paintings or sings songs of love and praise—or writes a daily reflections in their blog. Though other life forms certainly have awareness—even some of the simplest single-celled life forms have the capacity to move toward what they ‘want’ and away from what is harmful—the capacity for self-consciousness seems to be limited to humans. Other life-forms communicate (see the wonderful new research on the multi-modal communication of trees and other members of the plant kingdom), but we humans are the only ones with this added layer of awareness of our awareness.

But this awareness comes at a cost. Many of us feel separated, divided from ourselves. From our earliest records, humans have been troubled by loneliness and isolation. This sense of disconnection has direct and serious implications to our mental and physical well-being. These dangers of disconnection have all been exacerbated by the necessary physical distancing in this time of coronavirus pandemic. The number of individuals suffering with serious mental health issues is climbing, reaching and exceeding the limited mental health resources available. Forty states have reported a rise in already high rates of opioid-related deaths. And while some of worry about the danger of armed conflict that is rising with the record number of gun sales over the past three months, our past history shows that these guns are a greater danger to those who have access to them than to those around them. In 2017, 60% of gun deaths were suicides.

So there is some urgency in closing this gap between ourselves and ourselves. It’s not just a matter of spiritual or intellectual debate, but a matter of meaning and of life and death—for ourselves and for those around us.

And now, after the election, the internal gap many of us feel is mirrored in the outer world. The gap between huge swaths of our population feels larger than at any point in my memory. We are a country divided between red and blue—each side fearful and suspicious of the other—each side convinced of their own righteousness.

How do we cross over the divide to touch again our common interest as fellow human beings? How do we hold to our integrity and begin to have new conversations that, as Joe Biden says ‘lower the temperature’?

….to be continued