The Illusion Of Self & The True Interconnectedness Of Life

A beautiful and humbling piece by Daisy Hildyard:

The ordinary life of my body stayed in its own world: that of a person who reads manuscripts, eats treacle tart, talks to pregnant doctors, and frequently drops her laptop – a person whose genes are all her own and who exists at a distance of some six thousand miles to the red earth passageways of the mines in south-eastern DRC. There is a significant if not ominous quiet in human narratives, which struggle to accommodate a real, breathing individual together with the story of her other lives, lived out on different scales, in the same story, in the same words. More-than-human scales are explained in reports, libraries, laboratories, theories – in places that have little room or concern for the daily experiences of real individuals. Meanwhile, stories about humans continue to go about their familiar business on the scale of the human body, a scale on which an individual character might talk or eat or eavesdrop.

When you draw these different kinds of story together, they disturb one another. The miner’s skin and the typing fingertip, indirectly, make physical contact over thousands of miles. The parasitic microbe has descendants in every human cell. These are small, local, real examples of how these conflicting stories get inside one another’s skin – they are mutual irritants – they bedevil one another.

Thinking about the Caesarian screen which is erected to protect a mother from the sight of her own internal organs, I had understood that this effort to separate the self from a new, extended understanding of life, is a form of self-protection. Your internal organs are you, just as your face is you – but that’s a headfuck you don’t need while you are busy giving birth. The screen is put in place. You are only trying to keep the sense of individuality undamaged, but the work of doing so becomes a growing strain the more you know about your body’s global reach, its microscopic symbionts, its evolutionary history, even the internal organs you think of as your own. If you want to witness your body in these wider contexts, you need to depart from the traditional unit of the person, which is the individual human body.

I had believed that it was dangerous to open up the individual in this way. To tear open the human self, I reasoned, would jeopardize those rights of self-possession, and this, in turn, would put the most vulnerable individuals at risk. In fact it is the other way round. A belief in self-containment is what corrodes human skin. Sealing the human body by removing or simply ignoring anything that complicates it, connects it, contaminates it: this is what exposes and contaminates human bodies in a simple and factual sense. And so it appears as a kind of contradiction: in order to protect yourself, you need to allow yourself to be broken open. This violation of the self is not an act of self-destruction – not an experience of death but an amplification of life.

Buddha was right about the illusion of self and the famous dictum of ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Buddha and many of his past and current disciples (without the Buddhist religious dogma, there are hordes of those creatures) were "somehow" aware of this interconnectedness of multitudes of other non-human lives with human life and the illusion of self. The delusion of human exceptionalism and anthropocentric views never even come under their radar.

I always wondered, how did they know this "microscopic fact?". It's still an open question.

I do have a hypothesis. I will talk about that another day but the clue is "Attentiveness" and Montaigne mantra of "Observe, Observe and Observe".

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses writes about why we miss what is right in front of our nose:

We poor myopic humans, with neither the raptor’s gift of long-distance acuity, nor the talents of a housefly for panoramic vision. However, with our big brains, we are at least aware of the limits of our vision. With a degree of humility rare in our species, we acknowledge there is much we can’t see, and so contrive remarkable ways to observe the world. Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubble space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We think we’re seeing when we’ve only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.