Re-Uniting Self With Other - How the Hole in Our Hearts Can Heal
A Hole has appeared in downtown Manhattan. Enormous symbols of economic hubris have been fearfully punctured by sharp transgressions, collapsing in moments. We feel a hole in our hearts, filled with the pain of the crushings and burnings and exuded spirits of those moments. We cast around for explanations, a way forward out of the darkness, in which good can somehow prevail. For many, the way is to fall back on old ways – to cast blame elsewhere and seek to root out the evil. But it may be as well to look in the mirror.
We all, needs must, harbour anger, an inner thorniness that in its place protects and empowers, but out of place abuses and wounds. Tyranny’s anger is roused by terror, a real or imagined thorn in its side that wounds and threatens its freedom to suppress. Terrorism’s anger is roused by tyranny, a real or imagined domination that deprives and denies its freedom of expression. Neither can win, both can lose in a never-ending war of attrition. Both seek to exclude the other, to cast out its evil so God can prevail. But God, they say, moves in mysterious ways, both inside and outside our bodily selves.
So, maybe the way forward is to feel the hole in our hearts for what it is: the empty inner space, the Ground Zero, of a Love that includes Other as Self in common passion, in spite of and because of the hurts it inflicts. We can do so in the spirit of an immersive philosophy that regards all things, our Selves included, as dynamic inclusions of our common living space. We are no more separable from this space and one another than are whirlpools in a water flow. No thing, no being, is isolated or independent from any other, but rather exists in a mutually transforming relationship of one with the other. Any thing we do to Other, we ultimately do to our Selves.
This ‘inclusional’ philosophy is not new, of course. It has always been present in our hearts, and at the heart of those cultures and religions that so sadly, so often, find themselves in conflict. But it is easy to lose sight of, particularly because it requires us to see something invisible that we can only imagine: the implicit space, the material absence, that, far from coming between us, actually unites (‘intra-connects’) our insides through our outsides. We breathe each other’s air. And when we do lose sight of it, choosing to focus only on explicit material things through our rationalistic desire to gain social, political, economic, psychological, scientific or technological control, we separate the inseparable. And then, with all possibility of relationship denied, the scene is set for abuse.
So, when the abuse comes, and we feel the hole in our hearts, perhaps we should not view this as a call to arms for further abuse, but rather as an alarm call telling us to look in the mirror and wake up to the reality of our common existence. Then, maybe, the hole can begin to heal.
Postscript (10 September 2002)
This was originally written on or around 14 September 2001, when I woke up in the morning with the whole piece (hole peace?) reverberating around my mind, waiting for me to set it down. I hesitated to share it with more than a small circle of trusted friends, for fear of giving offence and inducing, in my own small way, even more hurt in a community filled with raw emotions. And I wasn’t sure of my own motivation, knowing just how desperately I personally long for a different way of seeing to subsume the dominance of western rationalism. At the time of writing, I had no knowledge of the use of ‘Ground Zero’ to describe the scene of devastation and two or three weeks previously, coincidentally or otherwise, I had dreamt of being on a plane that was flown into fiery oblivion against some vertical edifice. In the dream I had felt an overwhelming burning sensation on my skin, but had no choice but to let myself go and be consumed.
Now, a year later, I feel distressed that so little of what I had dared to hope might emerge from the ashes, by way of self-reappraisal and a new way of seeing, has actually come to pass. The predominant language remains focused on the need for rather than the need to resolve conflict, the need to eradicate rather than embrace and transform the source of fear that translates into anger. And so it goes on. A poor epitaph for those who have suffered. A poor portent for those who will suffer.