I've no idea

Inside me there is no endless world, but an idea. I am an idea of a Self. MySelf. As surely as if I'd cast mySelf in a movie and played me. A singularly Self-absorbed character of seemingly fickle preferences. Curious, harmless, demonstrative.

Prophets and teachers hold forth on the phantasmagorical nature of Self, sometimes to an annoying extent. Like Rumi, for example. Talk about flagrant disregard for Strunk and White. Here's a guy who wrote a six-volume tome, 3,500 odes and 2,000 quatrains, the theme of which can be boiled down to “there is no Self.”

There were instances, however, when dervish dude got right to the point:

“The human shape is a ghost made of distraction and pain. Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel, trying wildly to open this image tightly held within itself.”

(To be fair, Rumi was also a party animal who often veered into sensual exaltations, but that doesn't serve our purpose here…)

What serves our purpose here is that 850 years ago, Rumi talked and wrote nonstop about the illusion of Self, apparently because just saying “there is no Self” and riding off on a water buffalo like Lao Tzu did was not sufficient to get the point across. All before iPods and roadsters and designer handbags and dog sweaters and Berlitz language courses and the endless barrage of other stuff by which we reinforce ourSelf.

We even have an entire industry built around Self. If we could only improve the Self, we'd no longer loathe the Self. Those cognizant enough to even recognize Self-loathing would be free to live the remainder of their lives like the TV asthmatic twirling through wildflowers because of the miracle of nasal spray.

My own Self, for example, has been so improved that I sometimes fear I cannot meet the rigorous standards of my own company. I call that “nap time.”

Recognizing that Self is an idea ("narrative," "story," "ego"… whatever the term du jour) isn't intellectual rocketry, which itSelf is rather basic compared to say, Beethoven in high dudgeon. One doesn't need Rumi, Lao Tzu, Buddha or Haile Salassie to figure out that Self is a constantly fluctuating postulation of the mind. When I have thought mySelf ugly, I have been. Beautiful? Same. Likewise industrious, lackadaisical, ambitious, lazy, brilliant, dull, complicated, simple, old, young, fiery, calm and 10,000 other adjectives. I can feel happy, sad, restless, content, angry and magnanimous, all in the time it takes to type the words. Logic dictates that these contrary states do not occur simultaneously, but in rapid succession; so rapidly they fly right by unless we're paying attention.

Which we're not.

We've enculturated distractions to the point of a pathology, which we've lovingly named “attention deficit disorder.” We can't even drive to the Safeway for Cheez-Its without talking on a cell phone. I know teen-agers who discuss their diagnosed disorders as like a collection of ceramic cats.

I had more examples, but I felt like eating a carrot, and on the way to the fridge, I realized it was dark and I should draw the blinds and that it was 6:30 and “The Simpsons” might be on but maybe not because it's on at 8 o'clock on Sunday unless the network cut a different syndie deal, then there might be old episodes at 6:30. Obviously, I had to go to the Fox Web site and check but when it loaded, I found a story that reminded me to wiki the top 40 International Drum Rudiments because one never knows when a distraction on the order of hitting something with sticks might be necessary....

Sunday, January 21, 2007

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