Freedom is at the beginning,
It is not something to be gained at the end.
-J. Krishnamurti
Everything is fiction, that is to say a fable… Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say scripture, literature, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures of the world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures.
-Julio Cortazar
In recent times I have undertaken the project of trying to produce scholarship that has resonance and relevance beyond the academic, into the personal and the lived. One reason for this is my belief in the pragmatic philosophy that a theory, like any belief or idea, holds no distinction unless it changes one’s practice. Expounding on the ideas of the originator of pragmatism in American philosophy, Charles Pierce, his contemporary William James writes in Pragmatism, “Our beliefs are really rules for action… to develop [sic] a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance” (28-9). My academic project is to think about what type of conduct I would like to see produced, and what thoughts and ways of thinking might bring about this conduct. If, as James asserts, “all realities influence our practice, and that influence is their meaning for us” (29), I am interested in how realities are constructed and given meaning in light of a given practice.
From the religious communities of the Amish and the Shakers, to the counter-culture movements of the Beats and Hippies, to controversial religious cults like the Branch Davidians and People’s Temple (responsible for the Jonestown “self-extermination” of 912 members) and the Unification Church’s “Moonies,” to political groups like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Montgomery Improvement Association and the Black Panthers, the practice of community has often been seen as discordant and deviant in relationship with American society at large, and as threatening the ideals and freedom that comprise so much of America’s self-identity. The quest for a self-defined spiritual path, social structure, morality and form of “self”-expression- elevated and canonized by American society in the case of the solitary Henry David Thoreau- has been and continues to be received very differently when the seeker becomes pluralized.
The tenuous relationship between community and the individual explodes the confounding incongruity of some of the founding metanarratives of this country. Community, while embraced in abstract or conceptual terms, rubs uncomfortably against the idea of America as an enormous utopic community filled with individuals, as a melting pot in which the many become one. Questions of individualism, conformity, and liberty on both sides of the communal fence draw to a head a confounding larger ambiguity of the notion of the “self”- what are the parameters of the self- legally, spiritually, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally? This question of the self in relationship underscores my research in order to help orient and frame my own questions, research, experience, and writing.
I examine the language of the self and the ways in which the self is constructed by creating a non-dichotomous distinction between “image” and the “self.” A quotation by J. Krishnamurti from his book On Right Livelihood illuminates the idea of image:
Do you know what an image is? It is something carved by the hand, out of stone, out of marble, and this stone carved by hand is put in a temple and worshipped. But it is still handmade, an image made by man. You also have an image about yourself, not made by hand, but made by the mind, by thought, by experience, by knowledge, by your struggle, by all the conflicts and miseries of your life. As you grow older that image becomes stronger, larger, all-demanding and insistent. The more you listen, act, have your existence in that image, the less you see beauty, feel joy at something beyond the little promptings of that image (81).
Using this as a framework for the concept of image, it becomes obvious that “image” in my usage is perhaps closest to what we normally define as self, the image with which we identify. “Self,” then, becomes something else- all the desires and projections that one has constituted as self. Self becomes the stuff that makes up the image, and self-awareness thus means awareness or knowledge of how one has constructed one’s image, or how that image functions in various environments and interactions, in the effort to transcend it. Krishnamurti elucidates this concept as well:
Ignorance is lack of knowledge of the ways of the self, and this ignorance cannot be dissipated by superficial activities and reforms; it can be dissipated only by one’s constant awareness of the movements and responses of the self in all its relationships.
What we must realize is that we are not only conditioned by environment, but that we are the environment- we are not something apart from it. Our thoughts and responses are conditioned by values which society, of which we are a part, has imposed on us.
We never see that we are the total environment because there are several entities in us, all revolving around the “me,” the self. The self is made up of these entities, which are merely desires in various forms. From this conglomeration of desires arises the central figure, the thinker, the will of the “me” and the “mine”; and a division is thus established between the self and the not-self, between the “me” and the environment of our society. This separation is the beginning of conflict, inward and outward.
Awareness of this whole process, both the conscious and the hidden… is necessary if one is to be free of the influences and values that give shelter to the self; and in this freedom alone is there creation, truth, God, or what you will (Education and the Significance of Life , 56-7).
My work then engages questions of language and rhetoric. How does language affect community and the self, internally and externally? What role does language play in the definition of community/self, in maintaining community/self? What does the style of communication within and from within a community indicate about the community itself? Can any parallels be drawn between linguistic and rhetorical style and communal practices? If language is the lens through which experience is synthesized and rhetoric helps provide the logical framework that enables the interpretation of the experience, and experience has an educative function, then these linguistic and rhetorical issues will be of significant importance in examining community, self, other, and even larger ideas such as nation.
My dissertation research entails examining communities in their construction of the concepts of “education,” “culture,” and “work,” and how these concepts mediate understanding of both ascribed qualities (those with which the individual is born, such as family, race, gender) and achieved facets (those that the individual acquires or develops in the course of a lifetime, such as special talents, education, knowledge and experience) of an individual’s identity.
Intentional communities are traditionally formed in resistance or rejection, if not opposition, to the existing lifestyle that is dictated by norms in “mainstream” society, or dominant culture. Three major mitigating factors in determining lifestyle and beliefs/values both with a community and in greater society are the definition, practice and philosophy of education, culture and work. My work focuses specifically on race, gender, and the body, and the ways in which both ascribed and achieved qualities determine one’s relationship to these three categories, and vice versa. My objective is to glean a greater understanding of the ways in which different relationships to education, culture and work enable or disable a new configuration of practices of the racial, gendered, and sexual “self.”
Calling upon feminist and contemporary anthropological methodology, and furthering the work of critical utopian studies, my research uses observation, participation, interviews, photographs, and close readings as my primary sources. These are coupled with and juxtaposed against critical theory that examines race, gender and sexuality and texts on the self that I use not as theory per se, but as points of reference. My work makes an attempt to abandon theory, to move beyond it, and to see what scholarship might look like “post-theory.” These ideas will be explored in depth later in this paper. Instead of theory, personal narrative is included to orient my reader to my specific subjectivity as existing at a particular intersection of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, education, beliefs, etc.
I have been repeatedly struck by how limiting theories of race, gender and sexuality can so often be, how self-defeating in that they often privilege the very opinions that they wish to debunk, thereby giving them more power, how stuck in “normative” scholarly performances these theories seem to be. Even Women’s Studies cannot escape that- by name alone- it draws and maintains a boundary that will never bring us face to face with the erasure of gender as marking difference. As a result, I turned to Eastern philosophies and models of the “self”, particularly J. Krishnamurti’s and those of the Zen Buddhists. As David Buchdahl says in his essay “Religious Orientation of the Communal Counter-Culture:”
The East is important… not because it has something so different to offer, but because it has developed so richly those ideas that often only existed on the margins of Western thought. The East has focused on areas that remained, at best, minor themes in the West; at worst, they were often denounced as heretical, rarely taken seriously, or conceived as something dangerous and alien- a counter culture.
These Eastern theories of “self”- as a construction based on attachments-made sense to me, perfect sense in fact, but seemed unable to address the ways in which race, gender and sexual orientation in the US (and, of course, elsewhere) can form the basis for lived oppression, violence, privilege, discrimination, etc. These things do not seem to me to be dismissable as projections of the individual that he or she must transcend. My work engages these theories, using them as primary theoretical sources, but also questioning them, rubbing uncomfortably against them, disagreeing with them and, at times, abandoning them altogether.
My overarching academic goal is to produce scholarly narrative that explores many of these interesting questions of community, identity and liberty. Rather than mere theory, I am interested in lived practices that challenge the construction of race, gender and sexuality in dominant or mainstream cultures. Drawing from my own experiences at Sirius Community, an eco-village and intentional community in Western Massachusetts, I explore the friction between the ideal of community, which is frequently upheld as an essential and admirable tenet of traditional American life, and the practice of community in America.
My inspiration and instruction for this study have come from many different places, ones that do not frequently show up on reading lists for comparative literature scholars, but which offer knowledge that I find valuable to progressing my goal of integrated, experiential, educative development. This is the path to which my intellectual interests have been leading me, trying to figure out how I fit in and where ideas like mine are more common. Books on mindfulness and yoga are intellectual texts for me because my desire is to be educated on integration of the individual. The books I read proffered different value systems, different educative (especially self-educative) processes, and fictional, autobiographical, and semi-autobiographical chronicles of self-fulfillment. When reading these books I tried not to look for anything specific, but just to be open to the experience of reading it. Afterward, I reflected on the beliefs and living principles that underscored the text. I was interested in pinpointing what values I might see as lacking in American culture and what alternatives, supplements, or "inoculations" (as Sandra Lipsitz Bem calls them in her book An Unconventional Family) I would suggest.
Some of the characteristics that I find negative and problematic in American culture are: the materialism and the narrow view of success that it inspires; the unmediated and often excessive consumption; the misconception and misrepresentation of love; the narcissistic individualism; the unhealthy relationship to the body; the dichotomous, linear, univocal thinking. Jean Beaudrillard's America offers a poignant, if romantic, outsider's perception that shows many of the negative aspects of American culture (I call them "negative" and "problematic" in American culture because I find them negative and problematic in myself when they arise, as they sometimes do). I often find it ironic that many minority scholars struggle to insert themselves into a structure, an institution, or a dialogue that is predicated on exclusion, on patriarchy, and on the predominant hegemony; or that they create equally problematic oppositional responses. If one truly believes in equality, how does it make sense to create a binary between "them" and "us"? Doesn't that perpetuate dichotomous thinking, which, clinical studies show, may perpetuate hierarchy? Doesn't seeing oneself as disenfranchised and white males as empowered create that reality, at least to a certain degree? But, then again, I think it might be easier to fight for insertion or fight against the "hegemonic white patriarchal male" and his system than trying to create something completely different, or at least it may seem easier.
I see the self-help and new age phenomenon as indicating that a re-education of sorts has been taking place. Dissatisfied with the meaninglessness, lovelessness and hopelessness that Cornel West relates to Nihilism in his book Race Matters, many Americans have sought a restructuring of their beliefs, values, and practices and have used the Self-Help/New Age genre to foster this re-education. Self-help/New Age books have frequently become best-sellers, indicating that there is a spiritual market out there of people thirsty for a new understanding of themselves, the world, and God.
Of course, I can't set a moral agenda for the nation, but I can suggest that communities help determine what, how, when and why their children are taught, so as to reinforce it at home, and I can begin to outline what beliefs I hold and would hope to have at the foundation of the instruction of my own children. I am not advocating the enforcement of those values, merely an awareness of one's own values and mindful attention to whether or not they are instilled, reinforced, and even questioned through education, literature, songs, movies, and television, games, discussions, and practices. I think that anyone who teaches must acknowledge that their own beliefs, interpretation, values and understanding, as well as those of the institution which they assume they must uphold, are ingrained in their teaching in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And yet most parents seem more concerned with the credentials of a teacher than with the beliefs which he or she will thread through the instruction.
I do not see myself as endorsing swapping one fiction for another fiction. Rather, I believe that certain beliefs, manifested in action/ practice, help lead to what one might call self-realization or fulfillment. I have included some of them in the appendix to this paper. They are not religious, per se, but they are also not secular. They do not promote any one conceptualization of God, but also do not deny God's existence. They exemplify the mestizaje that Maria Lugones articulates in "Purity, Impurity and Separation" by being neither one, nor the other, but kind of both, and at the same time neither. God is present and also not present in, for example, the Dalai Lama's assertion of the Buddhist belief that the fundamental nature of human beings is compassionate, generous, honest and peaceful.
I see religions as offering a variety of possible paths to self-realization through God, but I am also mistrustful of it in general. I think that the fear of religious leaders past and present has caused them to assert that there is only one way, only one path to God (and that God is only their God) because they doubted the ability of the people to follow faithfully and believe truly if made aware that there are infinite paths leading to God. Sure, some may seem swifter, some longer, some surer, but they are as infinite as the galaxy, as infinite as God Itself. One thing I learned from re-reading The Autobiography of Malcom X and then viewing Spike Lee's film "X" was that there were many Muslims in the Nation of Islam, but only one, Malcom X, was a man of God. Many see religion as an end in of itself and do little to push themselves toward self realization; they hold on to their projections and desires and, what's more, they do it in the name of God. Malcom X was a true servant of God and an example of what happens when religion does work. Gandhi was another. I see them as being servants of the same God, but on different religious paths, as we all must be.
One thing I did find remarkable in my reading was that I did not encounter an example of successful self-realization that did not have some concept of spirituality and/or an understanding of God at its center. In revisiting Jamaica Kincaid, Marguerite Duras, and Willa Cather, I notice the marked absence of an intimation of spirituality, and I wondered if the repetitive narrativization of loneliness and emptiness that I found present in all three authors couldn't be at least partially linked to it. Their voices ring so false to me, come across as performances of assumed identities, offer little to me as a reader, though I have read them repeatedly and with great interest.
Reading quite a few autobiographies heightened my awareness of the importance of sharing the evolution of one's perspective, of striving to integrate the plural voices that one so often has not into something smooth, linear and flawless, but into something choppy, jagged and incomplete. More often than not, I've learned, my growth and development come from the jags, from exposing them to and exploring them with others. The personal narrative that is included is based on the idea that showing where I have come from will elucidate where I am at the present moment and help clarify the possibilities that the future holds.
What is the goal of education in today's society? Is the goal of education to establish a universal base of knowledge or logic? What are the values and beliefs behind our educational system? What type of thinking and lifestyle does it promote? What doors does it open and what doors does it close? I am not sure if I need to know the answers to those questions. If I am interested in using education to establish a knowledge of self, of the cultural, political, and religious assumptions inherent in an individual, thereby rendering them choices rather than assumptions, then I might want to understand and accept what is before even imagining what can be. Or, I might assert that what can be is, in me, and worrying about what is for others is not a productive game-plan.
One of the goals I see as important is instilling meaning. In a song by The Last Poets, they implore, "Put more meaning into everything you do. More meaning into loving, eating and living and there will be more meaning in you, which means everything!" When we have no connection to the food we eat and the clothing we wear except that we purchased it with our cash or credit, it is very hard to instill it with meaning. I see mindfulness as being instrumental in the process of creating meaning. By "meaning" I mean non-monetary worth and connection. One of the most powerful experiences that I had with meaning occurred during my trip to Guinea Bissau, West Africa, where I had what one might call a Zen experience of food preparation and consumption. I found that knowing the origin and original form of the foods I prepared heightened my awareness of what I was eating. The process of preparing, of adding spices, of considering nutritional value all added meaning to the food itself, which was all the more delicious because it required such an involved process to prepare it. Eating became a more mindful experience, instead of merely being blithe consumption. I have since started sewing my own clothes as well, when time permits, a process which deepens and strengthens my appreciation of them, which moves them from the realm of apparel into the realm of accomplishments, however small. I seek more ways to apply mindfulness to my daily practices in this quest for meaning, for non-monetary worth and connection.
Another practice I find beneficial in understanding myself was examining and questioning the notion of success as it is commonly defined in our culture. In her book Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit, Donna Farhi examines success by comparing the notion of success in American culture with that which is the basis of the practice of yoga and is strengthened and confirmed through the practice of yoga. "We are taught from an early age that what we do and what we own are the sole components for measuring whether we are 'successful.' We measure our success and that of others through this limited vantage point, judging and dismissing anything that falls outside these narrow parameters. What yoga teaches us is that who we are and how we are constitute the ultimate proof of a life lived in freedom" (Farhi, 7). Examining one's notion of success often helps elucidate the desires, attachments, and projections that help uphold one's image of one's self. Farhi explains, "We build self-images and construct concepts and paradigms that feed our sense of certainty, and then we defend this edifice by bending every situation to reinforce our certainty" (Farhi, 12).
My own examination of my idea of success has evolved slowly. It still upholds some of the qualities I dislike in myself (like vanity, or the desire to feel loved and accepted, for example), but also has forced me to begin examining those qualities, applying mindfulness to them and, in my case, prayer and meditation. It is my hope that these practices will bring about an ability to perceive the invisible signs that Farhi speaks of:
One of our greatest challenges as Westerners practicing yoga is to learn to perceive progress through "invisible" signs, signs that are quite often unacknowledged by the culture at large. Are we moving toward greater kindness, patience, or tolerance toward others? Are we able to remain calm and centered even when others around us become agitated and angry? How we speak, how we treat others, and how we live are more subjective qualities and attributes we need to learn to recognize in ourselves as a testament to our own progress and as gauges of authenticity in our potential teachers. When we remain committed to our most deeply held values we can begin to discern the difference between the appearance of achievement and the true experience of transformation, and thereby free ourselves to pursue those things of real value.(Farhi, 8)
My goal and my recommendation is gentle, non-violent movement toward peace, and movement toward others who share similar beliefs and practices. My choice to discuss at length the self was in no way an effort to downplay the importance of community. Community plays a very large role in nurturing successful practices, one which I explore further in thus work.
I have read in more than one book that things had never been worse than they were then, when the author wrote it. And yet they do get worse, in spite of all the scholarship trying to change things. They get worse, but they also get better and, most importantly, they are what they are. Acceptance of what is without comparison, projection or expectation is the only way that change is enacted organically. In “The Desiderata of Happiness,” Max Ehrmann writes that "whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be." I believe that the only way that one can change oneself, a situation, or the world is to first accept it as it is, embrace it, and have no intentions toward it. As Ehrmann reminds us in his poem, "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."
