Chief Wiggum, you honor us with your presence.
Baloney! I won't rest until one of us is behind bars--you. You know anything about a cigarette truck that got hijacked on Route 401?
What's a truck?
Don't play dumb with me.
One of my favourite Simpson scenes, Fat Tony the gangster boss playing dumb and rather than saying he doesn’t know anything about a robbery, he claims to not even know what a truck is. But, is Fat Tony on to something? What is a truck? If I said I was going to give you a truck if you could describe it to me, what would you say?
You might might respond that it’s got wheels, its got a windshield, its got a chassis and lots of other things. So then I dump all of the components of a truck in a big pile in your driveway and say happy birthday, here’s your truck. And of course you’d say, “well this isn’t a truck, you have to put all these pieces together.” “Ahh,” I say, “leave it with me!” and I get to work for a few days putting it together. When you’ve come back I’ve randomly connected each bit, the steering wheel to the accelerator, the windshield to the brakes and you say, “this isn’t a truck either!”
So to bring it back to Fat Tony’s question, what is a truck? A truck is an idea, a concept that we apply to a specific configuration of elements that have existed in different forms for millennia. It exists in this form for a while, then the truck gets scrapped and they transform into something else, existing again for millennia. So a truck, rather than being a discrete entity that appears one day and disappears another day, is a coming together of the elements, knowledge and labour.
You’ve probably already guessed where this is going but we are no different. We don’t just blink in and out, we are the continuance of exploding stars, millennia of culture and knowledge, our ancestors and many other elements, constantly changing. After we’re gone, everything that we are continues, transformed but still there. Why does this matter?
It matters because human beings are caught between two competing ways of being. One is the non-self way of being: being present with our experience, being aware of the suffering of others and wanting to act to reduce that suffering, non judgemental, patient and accepting. The other is the survival-focused way of being: worried and lost, lacking compassion, impatient and judgemental. Now this isn’t to judge the survival focused way of being - the reason we have it is to keep ourselves alive and sometimes, on rare occasions, we need to apply it. But most of the time our lives aren’t in danger. As a side note - you might define a hero as someone who is in a life threatening situation but still applies the non-self way of being, being present of mind and helping others before herself.
To develop our peace, to develop our practice, we have to let go of the idea of a permanent, separate self. We have to cultivate the idea of ourselves as a continuance of everything that has happened before, a drawing together of elements that will continue after we’re gone. We have to let go of our desperate clinging to survival that drives our anxiety, smile to it, see it as a friend, thank it for looking after us. We can release that friend and instead embrace the universe in ourselves. Embrace other people in ourselves. See ourselves in others. See the infinite in ourselves. See ourselves in the infinite. Its not easy, it takes practice but by simply making the effort we can start to release ourselves from attachments that drive a lot of our suffering.
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