Comments on Forever Becoming: Positive Space

Any true spiritual path must include two essential...

2009-12-12T20:21:39.238Z

Any true spiritual path must include two essential components - the means with which to perfect oneself, and the means with which to contribute something to others.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.254

The disabled body brings home our dependency to us...

2009-12-12T16:00:35.891Z

The disabled body brings home our dependency to us. In needing help, they both force and allow a crossing of boundaries.

Because their needs are more obvious - or more socially coded - they become easier to attend to. So whilst we all may, in some way, be in need, we are more able attend to the needs of the disabled person because they have been delineated and are known. They are also, in most instances, manageable.

Perhaps we can distance ourselves from the disabled person because we know the ways in which they are different from us; we can chart the course from us to them. In this way we can help them without being too troubled by the fear of becoming them (or already being like them). Contrast this with the everyday neurotic, or even the schizophrenic.

The disabled person allows contact. They remind us that we are interdependent, that we all need each other. They present a challenge to ideas about individuality and independence.

'It is a fundamentally insane notion,' obs...

2009-12-12T15:46:38.541Z

'It is a fundamentally insane notion,' observes a character in W.G. Sebald's novel Vertigo, 'that one is able to influence the course of events by a turn of the helm, by will power alone, whereas in fact all is determined by the most complex interdependencies.'

The cult of the will disowns the truth of our dependency, which springs from our fleshly existence. To have a body is to live dependently. Human bodies are not self-sufficient: there is a gaping hole in their make-up known as desire, which makes them eccentric to themselves.

We are able to become self-determining, but only on the basis of a deeper dependency. This dependency is the condition of our freedom, not the infringement of it. Only those who feel supported can be secure enough to be free. Our identity and well-being are always in the keeping of the Other.

To exist independently is to be a kind of cypher. The self-willed have the emptiness of a tautology. They make the mistake of imagining that to act according to laws outside the self is to be something less than the author of one's own being.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory, p.188-9