What we see and feel is not everything, that is behind or above.
A Zen monk spoke to a dervish:
»I am so free and detached that I never think of myself anymore, only of others.«
The dervish said: »And I am so objective that I can look at myself as if I were another person;
that’s why I can also afford to think of myself.[i]
You can laugh about this and wonder whether the two are still in their right mind or whether their enlightenment has removed them from everyday situations – or whether they are just trying to hide the limitations of their state of consciousness behind clever phrases. In any case, their words are a source of amusement.
But aren’t they both right? Both are telling the truth. The story appears in many variations with different actors in a range of cultural contexts. So, there must be something else, something deeper behind it. Whether it’s the fat, laughing Buddha saint who teaches the koans of Zen to the common people in the pubs of ancient China, or the Rabbi who serves as a projection figure for Jewish humour, or the Indian saint who, when asked why he only had two disciples – it really wouldn’t be worth the effort – replied calmly: “Someday, someday everyone will come.” – They all looked at the world from the perspective of the winking outsider, who is simultaneously in the world and not in the world; they all met the questions of their contemporaries with indulgence, joy – and even cheerfulness. And it is only natural that clever people have also found a name for the koan of the story described at the beginning. They call it the Tetralemma, in reference to the dilemma we find ourselves in when we don’t know what is actually right and which of two options we should choose.
The famous Indian saint Nagarjuna, who lived in the 2nd century as one of the pioneers of Mahayana Buddhism, also penetrated it. In his context, the phenomenon is called Catuskoti, it is a “decision square”. It says: 1) It is neither so, 2) nor is it otherwise, 3) nor is it both so and not so, and finally 4) it is neither so nor not so.
You can see this as splitting hairs or a mere play on words. But doesn’t the fact that such figures of thought appear in such different cultural environments hint at a truth in dealing with the world and ourselves that eludes our laborious everyday lives?
The essence seems to lie in the world view that what we see and feel is not everything, that there is something behind or above, or is simply a level that eludes our rationalistic approach to life – which, as we all know, is an illusion anyway.
There is something completely different in cheerful serenity than a resigned “so what…” or the cynicism of someone who can still make jokes about others (or himself) in even the worst situations. Serene cheerfulness always includes one’s own self and is benevolent. Such an attitude, for its part, presupposes a distance to one’s own self. After all, how could an ego think calmly about the world if it does not look beyond the edge of its own plate and its contents? Therein lies the situation-shattering power of cheerfulness, with its infectious and liberating effect. Goethe put it in a nutshell:
I love the cheerful man
most among my guests:
He who cannot have himself at his best
is certainly not among the best.[ii]
Cheerfulness cannot be learned, but neither is it innate. It is curdled life experience and is based on an aspect of our being that only becomes visible when we move our knowing self a little to the side – you could even associate this aspect with a spiritual dimension. So it is about more than simply not taking ourselves so seriously.
To put it more ambitiously: it’s about the big picture or, as a voice from the East puts it much more simply:
Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and everything you do, is for yourself, and there isn’ t one.[iii]
[i] Aldinger, Marco (1992): Bewusstseinserheiterung. Freiburg: Marco Aldinger publishing house. P. 76.
[ii] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1982): Sprüche – Hamburger Ausgabe Band 1. Munich: dtv. P. 318. English translation by the author. Rhymed in original: »Ich liebe mir den heitern Mann / am meisten unter meinen Gästen: / Wer sich nicht selbst zum besten haben kann, / der ist gewiss nicht von den Besten.
[iii] Wei, Wei Wu (2002): Ask the Awakened: The Negative Way. Boulder: Sentient Publications. P. 7. Wei Wu Wei was the pseudonym of Terence James Stannus Gray (1895-1986).
