A Common Way to Think

It's worth taking into consideration that your most basic assumption about life is that it is a commodity. That is, it is like a valuable material out of which you construct your specific life. As far as you are concerned, it exists in a limited quantity for a finite duration. You don't want to waste any of it. If someone wastes your time, you get angry: they've stolen from you. You only have a few tools for extracting life from your time in the world, the senses. Your root motivations are sensual. Everything beyond the senses is an abstraction designed to justify your sensual yearnings to your moral consciousness. Morality is necessary to assist in socialization. But life is not abstract, it is like a physical substance. You seize it and make something out of it. You want to get the most of it. You drink it in, you suck it back greedily. You crave experience. Everybody craves good experiences, though good is variable. You're constantly looking for tricks to make your life yield better experiences, or you're relying on your old compulsions and addictions.

Your life belongs to you. Everybody gets some, yours is yours and it's all you've got. You can do what you want with it. You are not your life. You are what you get out of life (your history and identity), how you get it (your personality and activities), and what you want to get out of it (your desires and plans). If you are an idealist, you think you can get what you want out life without taking it from anybody else. If you are a realist, you know that it is a competition. You know that you have rights: the customer is always right. You accept your obligations: to pay your karmic rent with contributions (you can hope for a new lease). You have needs: upkeep of the experience machine and the satisfaction of its demands. You have to be balanced to hold it all together. If you lose your grip, it can get away from you.

It's all through the language, you turn and turn and it's always there: there's you and there's your life. Since there is no distinction between experience and the experiencing animal, your life is to you both a substance and some strange beast, and you are both the master and the connoisseur. You see your life as a thing opposite to you, a quantity of energy to be expended, bright and organic, dark and diffuse, mysterious and unmanageable. And you are the miner, the farmer, the teacher, the executive, the owner, or perhaps more often, the refugee, the derelict, the slave, the saboteur, the enemy. In fact, you are completely inconsistent, you don't know who you are, and when you look at your life, it fills you with tenderness and disgust. You end up developing very complicated co-dependant relationships with your life, belonging to the various personalities you use to elicit pleasurable experiences from the different situations you encounter.

There are numerous problems with thinking this way. It creates a natural opposition, because we fight with our lives to get what we want from them in the same way that we fight with the world to get what we want from it. It inclines us to be selfish, not only because we are absorbed with our internal struggle but also because we end up thinking we should get whatever we want. It fills us with anxiety, because the stakes are so high and the odds of success are so low. I think this way of thinking is implicit in the human mind, but it is intensified in our culture. I think that the reductionist/materialistic/positivistic-type outlook that is everywhere taken for granted serves to intellectually enshrine and protect the Consumer Self by scoffing at other self-understandings. I fear that the most natural pathways of our minds are really designs laid down over centuries to serve the owners of society. I don't think this machine we've built is working very well.