Upside-Down and Backwards

From Menletter October 2003

By Tim Baehr

We're all looking at life in a fun-house mirror, except for the fun part. There's so much that we've got backwards.

Take consciousness. We all think that we're "conscious" during our waking hours of ordinary life. But what is conscious about the largely automatic things we do and think? We get up, drink coffee, go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch a little TV, go to bed. We may be dimly monitoring the process, but does it rate as consciousness? It takes a flash of true consciousness - in deep meditation, in the presence of great beauty, in the moments after a brush with death - to show us that we're asleep most of the time.

Success is good, failure is bad. Right. Nobody I can think of has ever achieved any psychological or spiritual growth through success. Jesus was a minor Jewish rabble-rouser who was murdered for his efforts. Siddhartha was a rich prince who became an ascetic monk and teacher but couldn't "find" enlightenment until he gave up and sat under a tree for a week doing nothing - and is known today as the Buddha.

Even secular success is built on a foundation of failure. Most of Thomas Edison's experiments failed. The Wright brothers damn near killed themselves learning to fly. You want to be successful like, say, Ken Lay? George Bush (either one)? Please.

Everything is understood as distinctions - opposites or contrasts. There's success and failure, as above, but also good and evil, truth and falsehood, life and death, with maybe shades of distinction in between. Here's where even upside-down and backwards are upside-down and backwards.

Take the Fall of Man. The serpent offered Adam and Eve fruit - not from the tree of evil, or from the tree of good and evil, but from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve could stayed forever in paradise - perfect union with The One - had they not discovered a way to make a distinction, to divide and fracture The One.

Maybe Adam and Eve are the mythological source of the misery of distinction: mine versus yours, us versus them, love versus hate, rich versus poor, white versus black, young versus old, male versus female, and on and on.

All of these differences - and more - are real. But what if some magic, some divinity, some Reality, could erase the distinctions - could change "versus" everywhere to "and"? A few humans among us who've managed this erasure are called enlightened. A few are called saints. But that's just another distinction. The enlightened ones, I think, are simply failures who ultimately surrendered to a reality in which the difference are real but the distinctions simply don't matter. We may be different from those people. But the distinction between us and them may be only because we haven't failed yet.