What If the Self Isn’t Something to Find?

It’s an honor to be here. Thank you so much for all you’re doing.

Part of what is so exciting about these Chinese philosophers is they are all about asking: why is it that we fall into patterns that can define our entire existence — define what we see and don’t see in the world, the relationships we form — and how can we change those? How can we improve the relationships? How can we learn to see more of the world? How can we learn to interact in the world more effectively? And they’re incredibly practical. It’s an incredible vision of how, through training and cultivation, we can develop much more extraordinary possibilities than we tend, sadly, to do in our usual daily existence.

Absolutely. I was always this voracious reader growing up, mainly novels and poetry, which I still absolutely love. But at a certain point I realized, being a native English speaker, I was reading things in English — which was wonderful, but I wanted to learn about the rest of the world. So I decided to start going to the local library and literally going from section to section — it was arranged by geographical area — learning the world. And it was extraordinary. Truly life-changing. I fell in love with all of the literatures, philosophies, ideas, religions from around the world, decided to start learning other languages, and I’ve ended up continuing to fall in love with these ideas — and have ultimately become a teacher to try to give my students a sense of just the extraordinary richness of these philosophies.

I think you’re exactly right. When you read the great Western thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — thinkers who largely define how many people in America and Europe now commonsensically think about the world — it is horrifying, despite their brilliance, to see the ways they read other cultures. And I think it’s helpful to go back and read them, because when we casually make statements about so-called non-Western societies, we often don’t realize those statements came out of horrible stereotypes that arose largely in nineteenth-century Europe, at the height of imperialism. It’s very helpful for students to see that, hopefully be horrified by it, and then ask: what if we actually studied these religions and philosophies themselves? What if we devoted ourselves to trying to learn from other cultures, as opposed to imposing our values upon them?

I think you’re absolutely right that the goal is to understand other cultures on their own terms. I don’t think it’s ever going to be purely possible to do so. But instead of doing what we tend to do — simply imposing our values on other cultures — imagine if we trained ourselves to honestly learn from other cultures, in which case we’re thinking of it more as a dialogue. When you see different ideas, different values — or sometimes surprisingly common ideas, worked out in very different ways and practices — how can we learn from that? Now, that may sound absurdly utopian. At the same time, I’ve found in the classroom it actually is possible. In classrooms in America, virtually everything assigned is based on Western frameworks, largely from the nineteenth-century imperial period. Yet if you actually assign works — even granted, in translation — students become incredibly excited by these new ideas. They start bringing them into their daily practices, and within two to three months of a semester you can see the excitement. If that’s true in two to three months, imagine what it can mean over the course of a lifetime. So: will we ever totally understand a given culture purely on its terms? No. But can we do the dialogic work of learning across cultures? Absolutely yes.

I think it can be an incredibly dangerous endeavor. Now, let me immediately say there can be good sides to it. The good sides are the obvious ones: if I look within and find my true self, that’s a basis for questioning social conventions. Sure — there’s a liberatory side to that. But I also think that way of thinking, which is the common way in America, is incredibly dangerous. Because oftentimes what we’re really doing when we say “I should look within, find myself, love and embrace what I am — my good sides, my bad sides, because it’s just me” — what we’re really saying is: I will love what I currently claim to be. And what if, going back to Chinese philosophy, a lot of what I am is just based on patterns — oftentimes very negative and reductive patterns I’ve fallen into? Then I’m telling myself I should love and embrace a bunch of patterns I fell into from bad habits at a very young age. Which of course would be absurd. If I have bad habits — and assuredly I do — surely I should try to break them, train myself, grow, and become something greater than I currently am. That’s part of what I love about Chinese philosophy: the focus is on training ourselves to be something incomparably greater than we currently are. And the key is, it’s not focused on me. It’s focused on how, through building extraordinary relationships, I can — with others — build worlds where we all can flourish.

Exactly. And these habits can become so naturalized that we don’t even see them anymore. They become invisible.

Yes. One of the things the Chinese philosophers strongly emphasize is ritual. In America, you mention the word ritual and people immediately think: that’s terrible, ritual tells me what to do, and I want to be following my true self. The reason Chinese philosophers emphasize ritual is precisely because they say: if we are capable of becoming something far greater than a bunch of bad habits we’ve fallen into, it’s in ritual where we do the training work. You need to be developing daily rituals where you are constantly breaking your perspective, training yourself, opening your eyes, breaking the habitual ways we operate in the world. It’s through that training that you begin to see these horrible habits, begin to develop extraordinary relationships, and begin to really see the world.

I do. Weber’s reading is profoundly onto something. We often think the danger of a modern capitalist world is that we’re endlessly trying to gain wealth. Part of the power of Weber is that he noticed our anxieties go way beyond any actual possible acquisition of wealth. His argument is that the world of anxieties we live in comes from these early Calvinist ideas: we’re predestined for heaven or hell, there is nothing we can do, it’s already determined. And it creates this anxiety where, if I just endlessly work all the time, presumably that must mean I’m one of the chosen. So you’re working way beyond any practical reason to be working. He was absolutely right about that. It creates, as he said, this iron cage of modernity — a total rat race, a world unto itself, even when there are no practical benefits gained from it.

I love that phrasing, and yes — if we focus on improving ourselves rather than proving ourselves, I think it changes everything. Part of what’s intriguing in the Chinese tradition — and I think this is absolutely right in practice — is that once you start training yourself to really connect with others, as opposed to trying to prove yourself in terms of what others think of you, you immediately start developing incomparably stronger connections, in which we and those around us are truly growing. And it quickly begins to build on itself — this sense of creating a greater world.

I love the contrast you’re drawing, and just to underline it: yes, in America in particular we tend to think of vitality in exactly the way you mentioned — me as an individual grabbing more for myself, breaking from social conventions, and somehow that means I’m more alive, more vital. It’s all about me and my personal greatness. To even call that a low-level form of vitality might be overly polite — I think it actually destroys your energies. And like you, I’m very moved that so many other traditions in the world say, on the contrary: energy is all about the training and cultivation that allows us to energize, literally, the world around us. In the Chinese tradition they’ll say: think of spirits as purely refined energies, the highest being the most highly refined. What we are doing is training ourselves, cultivating ourselves, to become in a very literal sense more spiritual — our energies become more refined. And with that training, it’s all about connection. It’s not about “look at me, look how powerful I am.” It’s about training these energies and then truly connecting with others and with a larger world.

I agree completely. So often now we think of religion as identity: I am X as opposed to Y. And it has all the dangers you’ve mentioned. Here too there is a history. In much of the world, what we could correctly refer to as religious practices weren’t done in this form of “I am X as opposed to Y, I am right, you are wrong.” They were practices. And the more we can focus on the practices, the more we can truly open up the power of these traditions. Once you’re focusing on practices, it allows — this is going to strain English — the practice form of dialogue we were discussing before. A lot of these ritual practices work across cultures, and they’re getting at very comparable sets of issues. If you’re not thinking “this religion versus that religion” but thinking about practices through which we can grow, it changes absolutely everything.

Absolutely. It’s a very telling example of the way ritual is being thought of in early China. In the ritual, it’s a father and a son — although it can be done with any family member, any friend, with gods, with other humans, with animals. The key is: when they walk into the ritual space, they cannot blush, because they literally become a different person. The father becomes the son of his own son. The son becomes the father of his own father. Each is forced to relate to the other from the precise opposite subject position they would occupy outside the ritual. And the idea of being forced to do this role reversal on a regular basis means: instead of the usual patterns that can sadly set in across generations in a family, how do you break those dynamics? You literally become the other person. You literally see the world from the opposite perspective. You relate to the person with whom you often have a very tension-filled relationship — but from the exact opposite subject position. The argument is — and I think in practice this is absolutely right — if you’re doing this regularly, very quickly you see the degree to which the world outside the ritual is just a bunch of bad habits we’ve fallen into. And once you sense that, and sense the degree to which it is defining this relationship, that is the degree to which you finally begin changing it.

Precisely. And I love the way you phrase it. When we think of things like this — cognitively trying to understand the world from other perspectives — that’s obviously important, but we’re thinking about it purely as: me, Michael, trying to understand the world from the point of view of Houman. That’s good to a certain level. But this, as you said, goes far more. In a ritual context, I literally become — to stick with that example — Houman, in my embodied state. It’s not just me thinking this way, which probably means I’m not really taking his perspective whatsoever. I am embodied, relating to the person who was Houman outside the ritual, and I am truly gaining a sense of that perspective in a fully embodied sense. It’s so much more moving than simply the cognitive “I’ll see the world from his view.”

Like you, I try to do them constantly. It is striking — and I mean this literally — when I first started reading these classical Chinese philosophical texts, I realized the degree to which, when I would walk to the bus as a kid, or now when I walk to school to teach, it is amazing how little of the world we actually see. It is amazing, in our daily relationships, the degree to which we’re really not connecting to those around us whatsoever. Once you begin to sense that, and once you begin these rituals that are all about training you to really connect and really see the world, it changes everything. So I do this constantly. If I’m walking to school in the morning, I’m training myself to actively see the world. When I’m interacting with people, I’m training myself to actively do so. I think prayer is a wonderful example, where you’re developing, as you said, the disposition of gratitude — which is something we’d like to say we feel all the time, but we really don’t. You are actively cultivating it. And once you’re cultivating these dispositions through ritual, they slowly become part of your everyday existence. Over the course of the training you begin truly connecting, seeing the world, feeling gratitude — as opposed to simply walking around, as we mostly do, sort of unconscious.

That’s a beautiful way of putting it, and I love your image of reading as a ritual. We’re often trained, when we read — a classroom example — to flip through a text quickly, find my line on it, so I can say this author is wrong because of X, raise my hand, prove my authority, and my work is done. On the contrary, if we think of reading as a ritual — and poetry is a perfect example — to read poetry, we are training ourselves to focus on every word, because it’s written by a poet who did that. It takes reading and rereading. Every new reading, we see depths we didn’t see before. It forces one not to come in as the authority, but to be the figure who is listening and learning from the piece. Poetry really pushes that upon us — if you go in with the standard authoritative mode of reading, you literally cannot make sense of a poem.

But thank you for all that you are doing. Truly — going back to the classroom, you’ve clearly developed a practice wherein you sense the discussion going on and you sense perfectly how to raise a comment, how to raise a question that opens up the entire discussion. That’s a sign of someone who is actively putting this into practice. So thank you for what you’re doing in the classroom, thank you for these discussions you’re organizing, and thank you for all the pedagogical work you are doing for the world.

It is truly an honor. And the good news is, by starting with me, there’s no place to go but up.