From Soul, to Self, to Annihilation of Self.6

(Cont'd)

Fromm has written a great deal about the differences between the "having" and "being" mode of how certain people are living and of relating to the world and to other people. To me, the important question is "why"? Although he does not tell us explicitly, one gets an idea from three quotations he puts at the fly leaf of his book:
1. The Way to do is to be .  --Lao-Tse
2. People should not consider so much what they are to do, as what they are.     --Meister Eckhart
3. The less you are  and the less you express your life--the more you have and the greater is your alienated life.     --Karl Marx
I think he is pointing to us the direction we should go if we want to achieve what we say we've always wanted: happiness and how. This is how he is related to Matthieu Ricard's little book Happiness and this is also where both of them are related to what we normally refer to as our "soul" or our "self".

As far as "happiness" is concerned, Fromm makes an important distinction between what he calls "joy" and what he calls "pleasure" because he thinks that most people in the modern world are living in a world of "joyless pleasures".  In popular thought, "pleasures" are related to the satisfaction of a desire that does not require much action or activity which is truly "alive" or "living"  although they may be of high intensity eg. the pleasures of social success, earning more money, winning a lottery, conventional sexual pleasure; eating to one's heart's content, winning a race, the state of elation brought about  by drinking, trance or drugs, the unusual  pleasure of satisfying one's sadism or one's passion to kill or dismember what is alive etc. Of course, to achieve some of these may require quite a lot of activity (e.g. to become rich and famous ) but one is "active" only in the sense of what Fromm calls "busyness". and when one has achieved that, one may feel for a few brief moments a certain "thrill", or "an intense satisfaction" or one may feel that one has reached a "peak" of excitement, of satisfaction, of a trance-like or orgiastic elation.  But one may be driven there by a "pathological passion" because they do not lead to an "intrinsically adequate solution of the human condition." in the sense that they do not lead to human growth and humans strength but on the contrary to their crippling. Fromm says: "The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satisfaction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary society produce different degrees of excitements. But they are not conducive to joy." On the contrary, "the lack of joy makes it necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures.". This is what Moses meant when he told the people of Israel about one of the worst of their "sins": "You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things." (Deuteronomy 28: 47) To Fromm, "joy is the concomitant of productive activity. It is not a 'peak experience' which culminates and ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that accompanies the productive expression of one's essential human faculties." He puts it very well in another imagery: "Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment. Joy is the glow that accompanies being.".  Why? He explains: "Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown.One's inner powers have no increased." He quotes the Latin saying "post coitum animal triste est" (after intercourse, the animal is sad) because it is a "loveless sex", a "peak experience" of intense excitation, hence thrilling and pleasureful but it is necessarily followed by the disappointment of its ending. To Fromm, "joy in sex is experienced only when physical intimacy is at the same time the intimacy of loving."

Fromm says that all the great world religions proclaim, the attainment not of pleasure but of joy because joy is the core achievement of all our spiritual exercises and practices which enhance and promote Life.Thus Buddhism conceives of the state of nirvana as a state of joy and in the Jewish tradition, the Sabbath is a day of joy and in the Messianic Time, joy will also be the prevailing mood and the prophetic literature abounds in the expression of such joy: "Then there will the virgins rejoice in the dance, both young men and old together: for I will turn their mourning into joy" (Jeremiah 31: 13) and "With joy you will draw water'." (Isaiah 12: 3) and God calls Jerusalem "the city of my joy" (Jeremiah 49:25) and we find the same in the Talmud: "The joy of a mitzvah [fulfilment of a religious duty] is the only way to get the holy spirit.(Berakoth 31, a) And in the Christian tradition, gospels mean "glad tidings" and in the New Testament, joy is the fruit of giving up "having" or "possessions" whilst sadness is the mood of those who refuse to relinquish them (Matthew 14: 44 and 19:22) and before he dies, he told his disciples: "These things I have spoken to you, that my joy be in you and that your joy may be full." (John 15:11), The great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart has a beautiful passage where he talks about the creative power of laughter and joy: "When God laughs at the soul and the sou laughs back at God, the person of the Trinity are begotten. To speak in hyperbole, when the Father laughs to the son and the son laughs back to the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love and love gives the persons of the Trinity of which the Holy Spirit is one (Raymond B Blakney Meister Eckhart 245). Fromm thinks like Spinoza according to whom "Joy is man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection" whilst "Sorrow is man's passage from a greater to a lesser perfection (Ethics 3 definitions 2 & 3). To Spinoza, the purpose of our life is to strive to get nearer and nearer to "the model of human nature" by which he means the human potential to be optimally active, free, rational and good. ( "everything which we are certain is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model of human nature we have set before us") and evil is "everything which we are certain hinders us from reaching that model" (Ethics 4 Preface). To him, joy is virtue and good and sadness/sorrow (tristitia) is sin and evil. We experience joy only when we are growing nearer towards "becoming" and "realizing" the good that is inherent within ourselves.

Like the great Buddha and now Eckhart Tolle ( The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, 1999; Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from The Power of Now, 2001; Stillness Speaks: Whispers of Now, 2003, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose 2005;     Milton's Secret: An Adventure of Discovery through Then, When, and The Power of Now 2008, Oneness With All Life: Inspirational Selections from A New Earth 2008 and Guardians of Being, 2009 ), Fromm emphasizes the need to live to in the present if we want to adopt a "being" mode of life. He says: "The mode of being exists in the here and now (hic et nunc). The mode of having exists only in time: past, present and future because "we are bound to what we have amassed in the past: money, land, fame, social status, knowledge, children, memories. We think about the past, and we feel by remembering feelings (or what appear to be feelings) of the past. (This is the essence of sentimentality) we are the past; we can say: "I am what I was...The future is the anticipation of what will become the past. It is experienced in the mode of having as is the past and is expressed when one says: "This person has a future' indicating that the individual will have many things even thought he or she does not now have them." Therefore, whether we deal with the past or the future, the fundamental experience of "having" is the same! To Fromm, the present is the point where past and future join, a frontier station in time, but not different in quality from the two realms it connects. He says: "Being is not necessarily outside of time, but time is not the dimension that governs being.". He explains with an examples; "The painter has to wrestle with color, canvas and brushes, the sculptor with stone and chisel. Yet the creative act, their 'vision' of what they are going to create, transcends time. It occurs in a flash or in many flashes but time is not experienced in the vision. The same holds true for thinkers. Writing down their ideas occurs in time, but conceiving them is a creative event outside of time. It is the  same for every manifestation of being. The experience of loving, of joy, of grasping truth does not occur in time, but in the here and now. The here and now is eternity i.e. timelessness. But eternity is not, as popularly misunderstood, indefinitely prolonged time."  Eternity is in a sense a mode of existence "outside" of time, where to the person, time does not matter any more. In that sense, eternity is subjective, not objective, as commonly thought!

How to deal with our past? To Fromm, in the mode of "having" the past , e.g. by remembering, thinking, ruminating about the past, the past is dead. But we may bring it back to life. We can re-create the past or metaphorically resurrect the dead: we can bring intensity into the process of "experiencing" the past with the same "freshness" as if it occurred in the here and now and "to the extent that one does so, the past ceases to be the past; it is the here and now."  Likewise, one can "experience" the future as if it were the here and now "when a future state is so fully anticipated in one's own experience that it is only the future 'objectively' i.e. in external fact, but not in the subjective experience. To Fromm, "this is the nature of genuine utopian thinking (in contrast to utopian daydreaming)" and it is the basis of "genuine faith" which does not need external realization "in the future" in order to make the experience of it real."  However, Fromm is realistic. He does not ignore the existential fact that our bodily existence or our life, has a limited duration and that we cannot live eternally nor can we ignore or escape from the action of time. He says: "The rhythm of night and day, of sleep and wakefulness, of growing and aging, the need to sustain ourselves by work and to defend ourselves, all these factors force us to respect time if we want to live and our bodies make us want to live." But although we respect time, we do not have to submit to it! Like Camus' Sisyphus, we need not submit to our "fate".  When do we submit to time? Respect for time becomes submission when the "having" mode predominates:
" In this mode, not only things are things, but all that is alive becomes a thing. In the mode of "having", time becomes our ruler. In the being mode, time is dethroned; it is no longer the idol that rules our life." The "having" mode predominates in our contemporary society because in a capitalist society, time means money and everything, every person is made its slave because of the overriding and paramount need to make the greatest amount of profit in the shortest time possible in the relevant supply, production, distribution and sales and consumption of the relevant products, commodities and services cycles. The speed of the relevant production, transport or business "machines" and now the speed of the internet forces its own rhythm upon the worker and the managers alike . Time has become king. Only in our "free hours" do we have the semblance of a choice. Yet owing to the force of habit, "we organize our leisure as we organize our work." Or we rebel against the tyrant time by being absolutely lazy: "By not doing anything except disobeying time's demands, we have the illusion that we are free, when we are, in fact, only paroled from our time-prison.". Sounds familiar? Doesn't it?

(To be cont'd)