Racing to the Top

Every fibre in me revolts each time I try to be a Person. I have been primed to succeed, primed to get to the top, primed to be an individual. And yet each cell in my body recognises that there is more to life than the compulsions that drive me; that caring and being cared for are more desirable than the ‘dog eat dog ’ attitude that has come to plague our civilisation. The Individual cannot care; only the Person can.

There is this story I came across when I was in college many years ago. A young ant, trying to figure out what life was all about, noticed a commotion in the distance. He hurried to the scene to see more clearly. He saw a small mound of ants in front of him, with more ants trying to clamber to the top. Amidst all the pushing and shoving was a constant refrain: “Got to get to the top!” The young ant joined in the frenzy with the others and started pushing and shoving in the race to the top. It went on for several hours, during which time several ants were crushed and wounded. Finally one ant, swept by the momentum, was hurtled to the top. He was amazed at what he saw. “There’s nothing at the top!” he exclaimed. “There’s absolutely nothing up here.”

The significance of the story needs to be explained further. An intellectual stream of great import, known as The Enlightenment, took place in Europe in the 18th century, which changed the notion of the human being profoundly and forever. Up to then the church, the feudal lords and the restrictive guilds held a stranglehold on human advancement. The liberal and intellectual currents of The Enlightenment, with their emphasis on reason and intellectual progress, took the human being out of the shadow of the church, the feudal structure, the family and the clan. The natural child of The Enlightenment was the philosophy of Individualism which declared that the individual is an end in himself and is of supreme value. All individuals were in some sense morally equal and no one would ever be treated solely as a means to the well-being of another person. Individualism also justified a certain degree of selfishness in the individual.

Individualism, which at one point of history was a progressive current, finds itself today in crisis because of its identification with the fiercely competitive attitudes of the market - like ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘ win-lose’. It is an axiom of post-modern society that some people will win and others lose, that some will rise to wealth and fame and others will be trampled upon materially and emotionally. Today the individual is geared to compete right from primary school through university and professional life. He is geared to reach the top. The vision of human existence is vertical, to climb over each other to get to the top. Only one set of human drives are nourished: those of power and selfish competition. Other drives, the horizontal ones, concerned with being a Person, drives related to love, fellowship and interconnectedness are neglected and slowly atrophy. The crisis is even more accentuated when we discover, like the ant, that there is nothing there at the top, that the top is an illusion.

2

Nothing is permanent, and the cause of all suffering is to hold on to the illusion that there is Permanence. The consumer goodies I buy are not permanent, the giddy heights I aspire to are not permanent. Each cell in my body is racing to extinction. If I were to grasp this central truth of the Buddha, the truth of impermanence, I would be a happier and more fulfilled man. But the notion of impermanence is usually so frightening that I prefer not to think about it. I am regularly drawn to the make believe world of consumer advertisements, of the daring shown by the world of female fashion, the excitement of the new cars in the market. My outer spaces are expanding, while my inner ones are shrinking. And yet the truth of the impermanence of all things strikes me every once in a while, drawing me to myself, reminding me that I am missing the poetry of existence and the joys of equanimity. The inner journeys do not negate the world, nor take away from its beauty and awe. Rather they help free us from life-negating delusions.

Freedom from the illusion of permanence, metaphysical or material, is what I have imperfectly strived for, with some success and many failures. But then. I am not a great believer in the full Nirvana, the complete one. It is my karma to experience small joys and Little Nirvanas. Only a Person can experience the wonder and the transcendence of the Little Nirvanas. The Individual, a product of our material wasteland, was pronounced spiritually dead some time ago.