Chapter 16: What I Believe
This chapter is a first draft written entirely by Claude from Aditya's notes and key points, and he has not yet rewritten it in his own voice. If you only want his prose, skip to the section marked "Original material."
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. —Thích Nhất Hạnh, Please Call Me by My True Names
I’ve marked this part off, and I should say what the mark means, because the obvious reading is wrong. It doesn’t mark a change of subject. Everything here is on the same road as everything before it, further along, and I got there by looking the way you looked in Chapter 1, for longer and with help. What it marks is that I can no longer give you a way to check what I’m saying. If you look and don’t find what I describe, that’s a finding, and it counts. Nothing practical in the book depends on this part.
Everything so far has needed only that the deep part is the same kind of thing in each of us. Here is what I believe: the kind has one member.
I should tell you where that came from. Some years ago, in an experience I’d rather not dress up, I was taken back to a memory of mocking a man for a political opinion I knew was harmful. I was shown what my contempt had done to him: it had fed the cynicism that produced the opinion in the first place. I hadn’t made him better. I’d made him worse. And then I was shown that I couldn’t stop, because if I let up and he turned out to be decent, what would that say about how I’d been treating him? So I had to do it more. None of this had been conscious, exactly. It had sat in limbo, where I’d called it unconscious and forgiven myself in advance. Then the hiding was stripped from me, not by force, but by the removal of everything that had been doing the hiding, the pride and the shame and the fear, and what remained I can only call love. Not for anything in particular. For all of it. And the first thing I understood was this is not me. The second was it’s not him either.
What I found was not a quality I possess. It was not proportioned to me at all. Take away everything that had been doing the hiding and what remained was not a better version of me. It was not a version of me. The traditions call it the Light, and every word I have for it is worse than that one. It isn’t something you have. It’s what’s there when nothing is being turned away from. Goodness is simply what remains in the absence of self-deception. Nothing has to be added. And it is not nice. It can be fierce. It can even be violent, if that’s what a situation requires. Its only defining characteristic is that it’s free of self-deception: it doesn’t misperceive evil as intrinsic to anyone, and so it’s incapable of contempt. We’ve been taught to picture compassion as the soft option, the thing you do instead of fighting, and that picture is one of the darkness’s better pieces of work. It doesn’t have to stop you from being compassionate. It only has to make sure that when you reach for the word, you find something limp, so that the real thing, fierce and clear and incapable of contempt, has no name left.
If that’s what you are, then the darkness is nothing but the turning away, and now you can see why it has to be nothing but that. If what’s underneath the hiding is care, nothing else is required to explain the harm. You don’t need a second thing in there that wants it. You only need the caring to be out of view. And there’s only one thing being turned away from, so there’s only one way to turn away from it. Every shadow in a valley points away from the same sun. Nobody coordinates the shadows. They’re one absence in many places, each cast by the same light, which is why they line up, and why every tradition drew it with one face. Then try to find anything that would tell two awarenesses apart, as opposed to two bodies or two sets of memories. Everything you can point to is content, and awareness is what the content appears in. If nothing distinguishes what’s looking out of you from what’s looking out of him, then the sameness of the two of you was never unknown to either of you. It was known at the level of what’s looking, and held in limbo at the level of the person. Contempt is what keeps it from being said. The other man enacted it, once, between the two of you, and for a moment you didn’t need to hide from what you knew.
Why do we keep turning away, once it’s begun? Because we’re afraid of what turning back will show. If care is what we are, the first failure to care looks impossible, so we read it as evidence of something evil underneath, and now looking threatens to expose not what we did but what we are. So we look away again, which makes more to fear. The feared essence has to go somewhere. We find it in enemies, in criminals, in anyone whose darkness is deep enough to make ours feel like light. Then contempt feels like escape: there it is, not here. And because the escape requires the other person to stay what we’ve made him, his recovery becomes dangerous. The most threatening thing an enemy can do is get better. This is close to what several traditions have said: that the nature is there before anything is acquired, that the darkness begins as non-recognition and not as an equal substance, that the catastrophe is taking the lapse as proof of sin, and that recognition, not destruction, is the way out. They didn’t supply the evidence in this book. They supply language for the conclusion, and the fact that old maps drawn from another direction predict a similar terrain matters to me.
And what the deep part recognizes may go deeper than living things. Not an organism, but presence, or reality itself. If so, the cold form goes all the way down. See the world as dead stuff we hold dominion over, and that’s the same turning away, aimed at everything at once. Somebody smashes a stone arch that stood for ten thousand years, for the fun of it, and you feel that it’s wrong before you have any story about who was deprived. The part of you that registers contempt for a person and contempt for the world doesn’t register them as two things.
Nothing you do stays inside your skull. The things you do when nobody’s watching hold up strangers you’ll never meet, at the moment they’re about to break. I can’t prove that. I’m reporting it as the thing that, if it’s true, makes it worth staying committed to your light at any cost. Not to your idea of the light, which is always contaminated. To the thing itself. That’s the definition of good I’ll be working with: whatever brings us closer to remembering what we are. Which is why the greatest thing you can give the world is your own seeing. Until then, some part of you is reinforcing what you’re fighting. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just how it works.
Original material, to recover
From quotes.md: Brad Warner (“the people that died in the collapse. Me again … I mean it absolutely literally”); Thích Nhất Hạnh in full; the sonder account (“for every cheap T-shirt I purchased … the poor Asian sweatshop worker sewing that T-shirt”); Graham Hancock’s shamans on severing the connection with spirit; both Eckhart lines; DiLullo on the ego speaking in your voice (already in Appendix 3).