To Be A Human Being

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This raised the interesting question of the extent to which relationships based on the

first two of Aristotle's levels of friendship are actually a kind of ego project.

In which the other person sort of becomes an extension of us.

So maybe when we're attracted to someone, this is what's going on.

The other person affirms our sense of ourselves in some way.

This can be very marked and very striking when you fall in love with someone.

They become little more than a screening upon which you can protect your desires and fantasies.

So this led me to question the extent to which we can then be truly present with that person at all.

If they are somehow subsumed into our ego project, they vanish as individuals.

They are absent in themselves and we are absent to them.

So I'm aware this is all a little bit exaggerated.

I'm just trying to make a point using a rather blunt instrument.

So here's the first paradox, although we may be very present indeed in terms of our

scandars meeting other scandars, the tendency to self-interest and self-preoccupation

can cause us to be absent at the same time.

The person we are with vanishes under the weight of our own feelings, perceptions and

volitions with regard to them.

But what of the Buddha?

Well, that's a question which is way above my pay grade.

But I'll share my reflections anyway.

So the Buddha also has scandars, at least while he was alive.

He had a body which aged and which started to cause him pain, which can't have been

nice even for someone who is awakened.

In other words, he had pleasant, unpleasant and neutral veil in her, neutral feelings.

I'm always intrigued and moved by the idea that the Buddha still had preferences.

He liked to be with particular people and to hang out in particular places.

And even sometimes wanted to be on his own when people were proving particularly ignorant

and intractable and resistant to his teachings.

He had volitions and sense-consciousness.

But the crucial difference must have been that the Buddha's scandars were not subject

to clinging.

In other words, he wasn't in the business of identifying with them as being his.

They were just phenomena that arose and passed away within the field of his awakened awareness.

I say that glibly, but of course I've absolutely no idea really what that would have been like.

But what comes to mind for me are unlimited spaciousness and the sense of an open system.

If you reflect, refer back to the idea of closed systems that we are.

Unlike us, the Buddha didn't have an ego agenda.

He didn't need people to affirm him or to make him feel good.

Although he did appreciate people like Ananda, for instance.

And would praise people and would give expression to his appreciation of people around him.

What must it have been like to meet him this ultimate open system?

It only imagined that a person meeting the Buddha would have been fully perhaps even terrifyingly

seen for who and what they were, rather than as some kind of projection of his own stuff.

And having the Buddha's elephant gaze trained on you as he gave you his full attention.

This brings me to the third dimension in Aristotle's theory of friendship,

which is friendship based on mutual virtue, so mutual appreciation of virtue of qualities.

So to quote the AI I looked up and I like looking up AI, this involves a deep understanding

and admiration of each other's character and desire for the others will be.

In other words, we go beyond her own self-interest and our own ego project

and are drawn out of our closed system into an open and a mutually penetrative relationship

in which we truly see the other person.

And we do this in a sense by being absent, by getting our sense of self out of the wake.

This is another paradox.

By being absent, we can be truly present to the other person's true qualities and virtues.

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