Reflections on Continuation, Concrescence and my Uncle Mark

Yesterday was my birthday.  Every time I think of the miracle of coming into this world, I am reminded of words of Kierkegaard from This Sickness Unto Death – that we all have two separate consciousnesses with regard to our being: that of being and that of having come to be.  It is this latter aspect that continually marvels me.  We all have some sense of existing, in some manner, and at some point in our lives this stark fact intrudes upon our consciousness.  We are.  And that is miracle enough.  But there is another aspect to it: that we have arrived here... as if planted... through no action of our own whatsoever.  I did not conceive myself, nor did I ensure my survival through the first many years of childhood.  My existence is the result of innumerable factors, all of which were completely beyond “my” control or awareness.  I have, as it were, simply “come to be.”  And here I am.  For awhile I thought how cruel it might actually be to bring children into the world.  Because these beautiful innocent creatures inevitably mature to bear the pain and difficulties of adulthood.  Because it is difficult to be.  Even more, perhaps, it is difficult to become.  I think of the words of Andrea Gibson: “I asked the Sun, ‘Tell me about the Big Bang.’ It said, ‘It hurts to become.’”  And it does.  It hurts to become.  But somewhere through the journey of becoming, I have found a self that is composed, as my teacher continually reminds me, of “non-self” elements.  This year I asked my father for only one thing for my birthday: a picture of my uncle, Mark, who died in Vietnam over a decade before I entered the world.  Why?  Because my spiritual practice has awakened me to the fact that I am a continuation of those who have come before me.  My Uncle Mark influenced my father to the very depths of his being – influenced the kind of man he sought to be in the world, and the kind of integrity he sought and continually seeks to embody.  And his death began in my father a journey of questioning the sense – or lack thereof – that exists or does not exist in the world… a world where people die for no real reason (at least in the sense we are normally conditioned to seek for reasons), where painful things happen, where difficulty is inherent.  Where it hurts to become.  And my father became.  And continues to become.  And my mother, who brought me into this world through the vehicle of her body, she also continues to become.  And it is in their becoming that I found doorways to my own.  My journey out of the trenches of myopic manifestations of my childhood faith began when my mother opened that door for herself.  Her choice of freedom over fear – her light – gave me permission to choose freedom as well, gave me permission to open to that same light in me.  Shining in the darkness. 

And sometimes it is enough to know that we are a continuation of those who have come before us.  Sometimes it is not.  Because the people who proceed us do not always continue to become. Sometimes they become stuck, and we feel as though we are pushing forward through sludge and resistance, seeking to break ties that bind us to people and heritages that we no longer wish to embody.  To things that we did not ask for, because we did not ask to be born.  We did not ask for this “having come to be.”  And yet we are here.  And that, I think, is when it helps to remember that those who continue after us are continuations of us.  My uncle did not know when he died in Vietnam over 45 years ago that his life would continue in me, or in my brother who inherited his name.  But it has.  He has.  And just as surely others will be the continuation of my life and being in the world.  The little boy who was my child for those sacred months in 2013 is a continuation of me, whether he knows it or not.  Whether he ever knows it.  The friends who share this path with me.  The people whose lives I touch simply by being.  By becoming.  And yes, sometimes it hurts to become.  

In my Buddhist tradition we speak of the birthday as a “continuation day,” and I believe I have just touched a bit upon why.  We do not have a single moment when we become a person and then, from that moment on, we just are, solidly, unchangingly.  We are always becoming, and our life begins before we are conceived.  We live as seeds in our mothers and fathers, even in the most specific and biological ways.  Cellularly and physiologically you can trace that back even further, of course, to the ways in which an egg cell forms in the ovaries, or the strange mechanisms by which sperm is produced in the male body (I know, no one wants to think of these things with regard to parents, but these are the miracles that create and continue us as living beings).  The water, the nutrients, the sunlight, the oxygen, the miraculous becoming of a human being from non-human elements.  And then there is the passing on of psychology and sociology – culture and conditioning, education, awareness, language.  We are beings who inherit.  Beings who come to be.  Beings who become.  And at some point in our lives we realize that we are.  That we possess some faculty of self-determination and awareness.  We come to understand that the choices that we make create conditions that give rise to the ways in which we will continue in the world.  Not only in ourselves, but also in the “selves” of others around us, the Earth, the living and non-living systems that comprise it, and on and on and on.  Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) once said that we have as much free will as we have mindfulness.  In my own life I have found that mindfulness creates a space between my experience of life circumstances and my responses to those circumstances.  As I cultivate mindfulness through meditation, insight, love, stillness and breath, I come to see that my choices are not simply mindless continuations of the factors that have brought me here.  I come to see that I am a synthesizing, integrating entity in the world.  A locus of what the philosopher Whitehead called “Creative Concrescence.”  I am a being in which the universe takes its history and makes radical novelty in any given moment – the universe gives birth to new manifestations of itself, through me, in every moment.  But I only truly get to be this instrument of concrescence when I am awake.  I am reminded of the line in the movie Peaceful Warrior:

“What would you say if I told you I keep seeing those shoes in a dream?”

“I’d say maybe you’re still sleeping.  People can go their whole lives without ever really waking up.”

And I think that is what life is really about.  Waking up.  I think that is what the protests in Baltimore have been about.  Hurting people asking a world to wake up.  Asking for insight, love and attention, the way our bodies ask for the same when they begin to break down because we have treated them wrongly.  And, as I continue into my 34^th year, that is what I want to say.  That we do not have to be mere continuations of our predecessors.  We do not simply need to perpetuate the status quo that we have inherited from generations before us.  We, together, can be those instruments of concrescence in the world – the beings in whom the universe conspires to become, to integrate its history into moments of radical freedom that birth something new.  And then I think that this, too, is continuation.  The caterpillar becomes a butterfly, but only when it acknowledges that the means that have led it to where it is now have reached their rightful end.  That the time to cocoon has come.  The time to decompose, to end.  Because in our endings are also our beginnings.  Maybe this is what the tradition speaks of when we say “no birth; no death.” 

I suppose that when I leave this life, I simply want to be able to say that: I became.  And I never stopped becoming, so that you too, could become.  So that we could become.  Continuations of one another.  Continuations of life.  Radical beings of freedom and concrescence in the world.  Seeking integration, life and beauty.

And I want to honor all of the ancestors, living and dead, who came before me so that I might “come to be.”  I want to honor the work that they did to become, the pain that they endured, the choices they made to bring me my freedom, my mindfulness, my “self” made of non-self elements, my becoming.  I want to thank my mother, my father, my brother with whom I grew up and my brother who came into my life much later (11 years ago!).  My cousins and friends and teachers and colleagues.  I want to thank the guy in high school I hated like he was the devil incarnate in high school, because he, too, became a mirror, reflecting me back to myself in the places where I was guarded, hurting and angry.  I want to thank all of those who have helped me reach this place and become the person I am, this person who is already fading into the person I will become.  The friends and spouse and romantic partners who have journeyed with me on this path – who have been so integral to my continuation.  To the continuation of my parents.  To the continuation of my Uncle Mark.  To the movement of this impermanent, empty self, rich with meaning and wonder and awe and breathtaking beauty and gratitude, through the world.  I want to thank my parents (again).  Truly.  And my Uncle Mark.  Because I am only just beginning to wake up, this strange person who has, somehow, “come to be.”

May my continuation be their continuation, and may my choices make the continuation of others easier, not more difficult.  May they contribute to our collective awakening, to the healing and preservation of the Earth, whose life we are draining through consumption and overuse.  And lastly, I offer this: if you were not able to give me a birthday present this year, either because of time or money or because we are not good friends or because we are good friends and you know that I really want and need nothing right now, here is what you can give me:  Wake Up.  Just a little bit.  Breathe.  Take a moment to look at the trees outside, or the sky, or the ground.  Touch something.  I mean REALLY touch it, like there is nothing else in the world except that one thing that you are touching.  Think about where it came from, how it came to be.  See if you can see the entire cosmos supporting its existence.  Was it created in just or unjust ways?  Ways that can be sustained into the future or ways that drive our planet toward ill-health and pollution, where we are lost in production, consumption and despair?  What is this thing that you are touching?  Can you see that it is also you?  Can you breathe with that, and then maybe, just maybe, become a little bit more awake?  A little bit more aware.  Can you touch life deeply, and be a moment or an agent of concrescence – of creating newness – of becoming more alive in this moment?  Of helping us ALL wake up, together.

So here is my wish for THIS birthday: that it would be a bell of mindfulness for every person I touch, with the energy of the bell gatha that we recite at practice centers around the world:

Mind, body and speech joined in perfect oneness,
I send my heart along with the sound of this bell.
May its hearers awaken from forgetfulness
and transcend all anxiety and sorrow.