Second Hand Person

I've often asked myself if I am living out my own life, or the life I was told to live by society, by country, by politics, by media, by religion, by teachers, by preachers, by mentors.

When I boil it down, the question is, where is the source of my authority; out there somewhere, or within me?

“Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

“If I were foolish enough to give you a system and if you were foolish enough to follow it, you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming, accepting, and when you do that you have set up in yourself the authority of another and hence there is conflict between you and that authority. You feel you must do such and such a thing because you have been told to do it and yet you are incapable of doing it. You have your own particular inclinations, tendencies and pressures which conflict with the system you think you ought to follow and therefore there is a contradiction. So you will lead a double life between the ideology of the system and the actuality of your daily existence. In trying to conform to the ideology, you suppress yourself - whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are. If you try to study yourself according to another you will always remain a secondhand human being.” (Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known)

Concepts Versus Reality

Knowing these things for so many years, I was still

determined to hang on to my worldview, my precious beliefs, and my concept of God, especially when I was in trouble and needed a savior to cry out to. It finally started to crumble when I turned 50, or should I say I started to crumble and that I finally began to see that there was nothing left to hang on to. It was all dust in the wind, ashes in my hand, sand in my mouth and under my feet. But even then, I clung to mysticism as a way of holding on to my faith without compromising my integrity and my intellectual understandings of the human problem of language and words, stories and myths. I was creating new stories, new fictions, that would allow me to be the religious person that I still longed to be. Even though I was learning to let go of certainty, and other ways of thinking, it was my deeply ingrained longings and desires that I could not deny or let go of. I felt like that was my identity because it had been for so long. But what is identity besides language and words, stories and myths? I began to see that I was not losing myself, I was losing my concepts of myself, my concepts of the world, my concepts of god, my concepts period. Shifting or switching my story is very different than losing myself. I can redefine my myths and stories without losing my identity and purpose, my values and beliefs. The more I can anchor these things in concrete realities, and less in abstractions, the more I can be true to me. For example, see My Mythic Guideposts.

I needed to lose myself in order to be true to myself

I would have been fine, just believing what I had been told if I did not have this growing cognitive dissonance that I could no longer ignore. The fact that I had been coming apart at the seams did not help! The more I cried out, the more I wrote my questions, the more dissonance. Then when life broadsided me with full force, everything unraveled, uprooted, overturned, total devastation. And I found that no matter how hard I tried, I could no longer put the pieces back together. Life had completely shattered every "concept" of everything I ever believed in and stood for. I was at ground zero. And if I were to survive, I had to wake up, get up, and stand up on my own two feet rather than on the shoulders of others. And yet, what freedom like nothing I had ever imagined. 

“But in the same measure the myth gives us security and identity, it also creates selective blindness, narrowness, and rigidity because it is intrinsically conservative. It encourages us to follow the Faith of our Fathers, to hold to the time-honored truth, to imitate the way of the heros, to repeat the formulas and rituals in exactly the same way that they were done in the good old days. As long as no radical change is necessary for survival, the status quo remains sacred, the myth and ritual are unquestioned, and the patterns of life, like the seasons of the year, repeat themselves. But when crisis comes -- a natural catastrophe, the military defeat, the introduction of a new technology -- the (conservative) mythic mind is at a loss to deal with novelty (and change). As Marshall McLuhan said, it tries to ‘walk into the future looking through a rear view mirror.’” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiii)

I realized that I no longer wanted to be a second hand person. I wanted to be my own person, an original person, a radical person rather than a cut-out or knock-off, a generic or homogenized person.

"I have created mirrors in which I consider all the wonders of my originality which will never cease." 
(Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179)

Original comes from the root word meaning origin or source.

Original: directly from Latin originalis, from originem (nominative origo) "beginning, source, birth," from oriri "to rise" 

Radical: The Latin word radix means "root." This meaning was kept when the word radicalis came into English as radical. I.E. Returning to its Roots.

A deeply resonating view from a friend in India:

Obsessed with Borrowed Identity
"Hindus are becoming more Hindu, Muslims are becoming more Muslim, Indians are becoming more Indian, Americans are becoming more American. Everywhere it's like humanity is becoming more obsessed with self definition, clinging to any and every kind of borrowed identity, terrified of standing alone in their own personal beliefs or thoughts.
"This is a full blown fear psychosis created by power hungry politicians who unite a people not through shared culture or shared ideology, but through shared fear.
We have to resist this with all our heart and stubbornly refuse to give in to these constant lies that divide rather than unite us." (Rajiv Pande)

Mass Conformity and Dogma Rob Us of Identity and Authentic Conversations
Far too often the asset of longing for community becomes our greatest liability. One of my favorite verses from the Bible is Romans 12:2. “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind;” for we are a “peculiar people”. And yet most religion goes about the business of mass conformity without any transformation or freedom. One of our greatest blindspots is that the “principalities and powers” that lie just out of sight are powerful influences using every channel of communication in society to force mass conformity; quietly, unknowingly, undetectably stealing from us our individuality, our uniqueness, our peculiarity, our wisdom, our insight, our authenticity; leaving us stripped of creativity, power, and voice… our birthright gifts.

I especially resonate with this statement from below: “My loneliness arises not from a lack of social opportunity, but because wherever I look, whoever I meet, has already been ‘taken’ or has become ‘occupied’ territory as it were, in that he or she is no longer an individual up for grabs, but has sworn loyalty to some other community, faith, ideology or other form of mass-conformity.” I long for true community where we can be perfectly ourselves; bands of misfits and outliers, gypsies and nomads, free to live out extremely different and unique lives of meaning and purpose… a people that have not been overloaded and bogged down with downloads; conditioned conformity driven by the principalities and powers of our age.

Unfortunately, we prefer to climb into our little boxes of conformity where it is warm and sleepy, slogging and slumbering through life as we worship our gods of comfort, security, and certainty.

“I believe there can be no moral growth without the exercise of our own free will. It is indeed paradoxical that to grow morally, we need to move away from the comfort of conformity and actually become the devil for a while, even if inwardly tormented by our own self-doubt and loneliness.

“I think the denial of free will has a lot to do with the demonization of free will – the misplaced fear that disobedience is necessarily evil.

“And yet the greatest evil has always emerged from zombie like obedience and especially when this obedience acquires massive proportions and entire communities or nations are consumed by it.

“My loneliness arises not from a lack of social opportunity, but because wherever I look, whoever I meet, has already been ‘taken’ or has become ‘occupied’ territory as it were, in that he or she is no longer an individual up for grabs, but has sworn loyalty to some other community, faith, ideology or other form of mass-conformity. Even the neo-spirituals, light-worshipers, oneness zombies etc. have some form of internal discipline and group norms – so these so-called ‘non-conformists’ are actually behaving exactly as they thought they were rebelling against.

“Something weird happens when groups of people come together under a common banner. The anguish of being a moral lone wolf (and therefore a free will believer) is overcome through mutual forgiveness. However, in the process of this mutual forgiveness, moral conscience becomes dulled. The wolf is tamed. The soul is no longer restlessly seeking its own redemption.

“Religions offer this sweet surrender, this abundant forgiveness from an infinitely benevolent moral authority, but always at the cost of individual freedom. But strangely enough, it is not God that is to be found at the heart of any religion, but community. The forgiveness emerges not necessarily from some esoteric and metaphysical origin, but for the greater part from the very earthly and very palpable sense of belonging offered by the ordinary folk populating that religious community.

“Somehow belongingness, while in all respects appears to be a legitimate human need, also carries with it the innate risk of moral complacence. The ‘Greater Good’ has an identical twin co-existing with it as the ‘Greater Evil’. As long as you are within the community all is well. Otherwise ‘hell hath no fury like a community scorned’ (within itself and by its own).”

What determined, diligent discernment is required 

to stand radically alone without being consumed by society!

What profound paradoxes underlie being fully human, fully alive!