Happy New Year

By Michael Erlewine

[May this New Year be creative and settle out the chaos we have been through, bringing out the best in all of us. Speaking of this, I have some questions about how our personality forms depending on the choices we make.]

PERSONALITY REVEAL

As time and advancing age thrust us outward into public view, like a plant sprouting in the spring, or more like the old image of Atlantis rising out of the sea, whatever singularity we have acquired over time is increasingly obvious. It’s the nature of personality that choices we made years and decades ago count and in time reveal their results for us and all to see.

Where back then, as a young man, I lived with some fear and trembling, trying to find my way in this life I was living, what is an obvious interesting choice now was not so clear back then when it was made. We literally pick our way along in life, defining ourselves choice by choice.

Our personality is the sum of all those choices.

It was certainly not true then that my person and my personal choices created a personality that many cared about, especially the public. I was lonely a lot, avoided because I did not choose to go to college or graduate from high school, even though I was accepted as a student at the University of Michigan without a high school diploma, and went to the U-M for like three weeks. I quit (to the horror of my parents) because to me college was no better than high school and I was sick at heart of trying to be educated. I am not educatable.

I like to educate myself, and with a father I loved but who did not talk personally with his son, and no grandpa on either side, I had to be my own grandpa, as the song goes, whether I liked it or not. In that one sense, I grew up early, yet my insecurity was obvious, at least to me.

And with my former high school friends, who mostly went on to college, saying that they would see me working at the car wash in years to come, yes, I felt isolated, and of little worth to anyone.

Yet, I am a stubborn cuss and have a lifelong history of wending my own way through this life I’m living. I am hard to teach and hard to influence unless whatever you are doing and being makes sense to me.

Then I’m easy.

If there is one thing about me, I’m a closer, and by that, I mean I tend to follow things out to the finish. I am good at the end game.

And so, as the poet Robert Frost put it “I took the road less travelled by” and that has made whatever difference there is from what my parents may have had in mind for me.

I became a naturalist at a very young age because we lived out in the country in a house my parents had built and there were no other houses (or kids my age) around. And so, my one friend was Mother Nature, and I guess I learned about natural law very early on and it was quite clear to me how natural law differed from civil law or social conventions. I would rather take it straight from Mother Nature and I judged society more by natural law than civil law.

I never took to school from the first day onward, and almost totally ignored my teachers unless they happened to have some life wisdom that I could recognize, but that happened perhaps twice.

The rest of the time I was in my own world while at school, and very busy at that, figuring out what I would do after I got out of school for the day. And that went on until my senior year at high school where I just up and quite school entirely, walked out, and hitchhiked across the country to Santa Monica, California, where I lived in an abandoned wooden walk-in freezer at Venice West in the basement of the now legendary ‘Beat’ art gallery called the “Gas House,” right on the beach. I fancied myself as an artist and painted in oils until time drummed that dream out of me. That was in late 1960.

And it was only less than a year later I was hitchhiking and hanging out with a young Bob Dylan and playing the guitar. Changes at that age came fast and furious. Anything was possible.

I have to laugh. It never occurred to me back then that these choices I was making would add up to a personality, a personal history that would interest anyone. LOL.

They were choices I made because of my interests in whatever direction they indicated. It was not really a choice, as I saw it, but just what interested me. I have always followed the trail of breadcrumbs of my own interest. In fact, as I get older, I have to question the whole habit of losing ourselves in our interests at the exclusion of what? Well, I did not know ‘what’ and set about finding that out.

Enveloping ourselves in our own interest is also fraught with consequences, consequences we each have to monitor and work around. Our own interests are also a form of attachment, attachment that can obscure the actual nature of our mind. And so as directional and valuable our interests may be, they very much are dualistic and part of Samsara. What about that, I asked myself.

Learning to curb our interests and thus see around them for what exists despite them I feel is very important. It’s not that our interests are ‘bad’ for us because, as we know, an interest in dharma can lead us to the non-dual practices like Mahamudra or Dzogchen. Yet, let’s not kid ourselves, dualisms like interests (interests in what?) are central to Samsara in which we are mired.

The very fact that our interests occupy so much of our time, they too are distractions. Samsara and Nirvana are co-emergent, connate. Our interest in our interests still is dualistic even though it may be through interests that we discover the non-dual forms of meditation like Mahamudra, which technically is non-meditation – effortless.

So, our interests, however pure they may be, are never non-dual and they encase us in their non-duality so that, in that sense, we cannot see beyond them. And we must get beyond them into non-duality to be enlightened, however that can be achieved.

In other words, our interests are a double-edged sword. While they carry us forward, they must be abandoned if we want to get beyond them and at one with non-duality, which is the actual nature of the mind. While our interests are so very precious, like so many things in life, they too have a lifetime and must be abandoned.

When does that happen and how do we do that?

Well, it happens when we realize that our interests have become more of an obstruction than a help. We lose interest in our interests for obvious reasons, as we realize they are holding us back and obscuring the actual nature of the mind. In that sense, they too much be unpacked.

This is where the rushing river, which has turned into a regular water flow, and then suddenly our stream of consciousness opens out into a wide placid sea, preparatory to the dewdrop slipping into the shining sea, which is the non-duality of non-meditation like Mahamudra and Dzogchen.

That’s the idea as I understand it. Of course, how to realize that in the flesh involves journeying the path itself, ‘doing’ instead of talking about it.

The point of this post is that our interests, while invaluable in the beginning, in time become confining, like a tomb, unless we can unpack them as our awareness dictates.

Awareness is slow and steady, yet we need not fear it will desert us. It’s all we have to make the right choice at the right time, so what is so precious is to be aware that we are aware and stay that way.

In my own case, for decades I was proud of my interest and interests. It was only very slowly that I began to be aware that my own interests were clouding my mind and holding up any possible progress.

That, my friends, was a stunning realization, one that turned me around, upside down, and sat me down to think. What am I without my interests? That’s a good question.

Well, I felt like a stranger in a strange land, as that old book title puts it. It was a new world, with new rules, and an avalanche of unpacking to contend with. And like a slow-motion rotation, I tumbled forward through time, no longer searching out what interested me, but just the reverse, spending time with what bored me, what I had ignored and never before knew, what I avoided. And so, my world turned.

This is not to say that there is no more interest or interest is verboten; not at all. Instead, it is that ‘interest’ is no longer the focus and seen as a protector, but at best, a vehicle, and at worst an obstacle.

Awareness of this problem is required.

And the response to that is backpedaling and continued unpacking of the focus of our interests, no longer the prince of time, but rather something to contend with and even to downplay.

Of course, since I know talking about dharma is pretty much impossible, as my dear poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it:

“Such any sense from that who can.”

[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]

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As Bodhicitta is so precious,

May those without it now create it,

May those who have it not destroy it,

And may it ever grow and flourish.