The End of Childhood is the End of Certainty
I won’t get into how, but I found myself explaining to Carrie what I know of the imago, or our image of what attracts us in a mate, and the operation of transference, rationalization, the unconscious, and denial.
The moment we realize that our parents, teachers, or other mentors are flawed – that they are human – is the end of innocence. The god-like are seen in all their messy humanity. To come to see the limitations of those we look up to and depend upon is a necessary, if painful, rite of passage. But not everyone makes this passage. Not everyone is ready, in this sense, to grow up.
The fundamentalist, the narcissist, the dependent and the victim for example, will simply double-down, insisting on their belief in certainty, such as in someone’s infallibility (in the case of the narcissist, his own), or the inerrancy and clarity of a text. The fundamentalist purports to see absolute clarity in texts that are not only not clear, but were never claimed to be clear by anyone at anytime before Darwin. The entirety of modern-day American-style fundamentalism is not “fundamental” to the Bible at all, but a relatively recent invention of the mid-1800s. Rapture theology, for example, did not occur to anyone before it occurred to the Englishman John Darby in the 1830s. How clear could it be?
But in the black-and-white, in easy answers, there is comfort and certainty, and comfort and certainty were never needed so much as when Darwin’s natural selection and geologist George Lyell’s dating of rocks, in the mid-1800s, both showed the earth to be far older than a literal reading of the Biblical myths would suggest. Indeed, before the advent of science and reason in the Enlightenment, which was terrifying to some of the pious (and which Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann recently, and revealingly, identified as the root of all of America’s problems), no religion ever insisted upon the historicity of their sacred texts. They did not take it literally. They saw the tales as mythos, the stuff of finding meaning and of understanding the sacred, and not as logos, the province of fact, rationality, history – or science.
Once you confuse mythos with logos, it becomes difficult to think clearly. Once you start building museum dioramas, as one can now find in Kentucky, in which humans frolic with dinosaurs, purportedly only a few thousand years ago, you will have so successfully rejected science that you are now at liberty to dispute without either evidence or science-based rebuttal the nearly universal conclusion of scientists worldwide that the earth is warming dangerously. The same science that sends people into space, powers GPS, runs your cell phone, and heals the sick is dismissed when it runs into conflict with our beliefs, tribal mores, or other indices of identity.
If we are meaning-seeking creatures, then it is great comfort for meaning to come easily, and for answers to be readily at hand. Humans fear few things so much as uncertainty. The unknown has always been terrifying to our species. And so we may seek to remain in, or return to, the comforts, the lack of uncertainty, of childhood.
On the Cushion
Yesterday morning I found myself once again thinking, Now, why am I doing this again….this Camino? Is it fun? If it is, will it remain fun? Is fun even the right question? I have slowed down a great deal, but apparently not so much that I have stopped craving more stimulation than is available. Rural trails, small towns largely emptied of the young (or the middle-aged), few cafes, no night life. I don’t even have books. I suppose I could download more onto my MacBook’s Kindle app, but lights go out at ten.
Here is what is different. I am not doing much on online dating sites. I don’t check my phone for emails or texts – there are none there. I’m not doing any coaching, and sending and receiving few emails about it. Some of the Tourette’s tics (but only Type I – I don’t get to shout or curse, damnit) are largely in remission. Because Tourette’s is exacerbated by stress, I take this as the clearest, most objective evidence of change. One tic that had become quite prominent over the summer arose from an urge to pop my left knee as you might crack your knuckles. I haven’t seen it in about a week.
Yes, this is embarrassing. I’m out now.
And I’m still not giving much thought to where to live. The house in Bend already seems a memory. By the time I return, it will be completely out of mind – just as my things will be out of the house and in storage. I may never see it again, and that’s all right. The letting go really sped up in the end, surprising my expectations.
Nevertheless, I am reminded of meditation retreats, where people may at times find themselves wanting to run away, screaming. But that is exactly the point of watching the mind. You will eventually see things that you aren’t keen to see. Resentment, cravings, attachments, irritability, annoyance, jealousy, rage, desire, rejection, discomfort. Meditation doesn’t make the unpleasantness of the outside world go away – it brings our relationship with the outside world into sharp focus. The path to any kind of enlightenment isn’t filled with peak moments.
You could even say the path doesn’t go anywhere in particular. The goal may simply be to stay on the path, the middle path, in which we neither cling to, indulge in, or identify with, nor push away, reject, repress, or condemn. We may choose either erroneous path out of a craving for certainty, whether the need to have an identity or an explanation we can cling to, or the need to reject what is going on in order to hold on to the storylines we have, or to avoid painful feelings. The middle path is the one where we observe our experience without judgment (pushing away) and without attaching ourselves to it (clinging). Only then can we see clearly, and make decisions rooted in what we know to be best for us.
To Los Arcos
Monday morning. Woke up many times in the night, and knew I was sick. I can feel it in my chest. Further dreams of seeing clearly, and of letting go. I decided to take the bus to Los Arcos (“The Bows,” named for the decisive role archers played in winning a great battle) rather than suffer through a 20k walk. Mom and Carrie sent their bags ahead and the group of four left me at the bus station. At the bus station I ran into three young Israeli women whom I’d seen prior albergues, and two Lebanese women I met last night. I helped them find the right bus and introduced them all to one another. The countryside we passed through was gorgeous, all greens and browns and yellows, everywhere rolling hills and citadels and iglesias, and granite cliffs in the distance.
Once in Los Arcos, I walked around for a bit, finding the stores (drinkable yogurt,potato chips, muesli bars), the public hostel (albergue municipal, always the cheapest), and a Café-Bar called Abascal, where I had a green-and-red-pepper omelette bocadillo and tea. I leafed through a Spanish magazine and got caught up on which American celebrities are sleeping with which other American celebrities. I still don’t understand who Kim Kardashian is, or why she is. I especially can’t understand what would justify the Spanish caring.
In the tiny plaza outside Abascal I sit abreast of my new amigos, or the local retired community of hombres. A seventy-something man walks back and forth over the 35 yards as if counting steps, as if trying to catch the distance in the act of being different on just one of his passes, and thus reveal even una plaza to be subject to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one big cosmic joke.