The nice paradox of personhood is that the sum is less complicated than its elements. We transfer by the world as a totality, fragmentary however indivisible, clothed in a fancy dress of persona beneath which roil elements perpetually combating for energy, perpetually craving for concord. The particular person making the alternatives, the particular person bearing their penalties, and the particular person taking accountability for them are hardly ever the identical particular person. There isn’t a ache just like the ache of watching oneself overtaken by the weakest, ugliest elements — the chaotic, the compulsive, the ungenerous and needy, ruled by worry and lack, splattering confusion and damage over anybody who comes close to.
To dwell with consciousness is to personal all of the elements however not be owned by any of them, to decide on with readability and composure which of them to behave from. To like absolutely — oneself, or one other — is to simply accept all of the elements and cherish the totality.
D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) captures this with poetic precision in his private credo, composed in response to the 13 qualities Benjamin Franklin recognized because the wisest elements of personhood — temperance, silence, order, decision, frugality, business, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
“The soul has many motions, many gods come and go,” Franklin had noticed in recognition of our composite nature. “Know that you’re accountable to the gods inside you and to the lads in whom the gods are manifest.” Lawrence writes in response:
Right here’s my creed, towards Benjamin’s. That is what I consider:
“That I’m I.”
“That my soul is a darkish forest.”
“That my identified self won’t ever be greater than somewhat clearing within the forest.”
“That gods, unusual gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my identified self, after which return.”
“That I will need to have the braveness to allow them to come and go.”
“That I’ll by no means let mankind put something over me, however that I’ll strive at all times to acknowledge and undergo the gods in me and the gods in different women and men.”There’s my creed.
It’s not straightforward residing with these fixed visitations from conflicting gods, every with a unique dictate, impelling you towards a unique path. What makes all of it bearable is seeing this constellation of elements as part of one thing higher nonetheless — an unlimited and coherent universe ruled by immutable legal guidelines and immense forces that vanquish the grandiose smallness of the self and its warring fragments, that render life too nice and whole a miracle to be met with something however a convincing “yes yes — please.”
Lawrence channels this perspectival comfort in his 1930 e-book Apocalypse (public library) — a mirrored image on The Guide of Revelation, composed as he lay dying from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, not but halfway by his forties.
Observing that what we most lengthy for is our “residing unison,” he writes:
The huge marvel is to be alive… The supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most completely alive. Regardless of the unborn and the lifeless could know, they can not know the wonder, the marvel of being alive within the flesh. The lifeless could take care of the afterwards. However the magnificent right here and now of life within the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours just for a time. We ought to bounce with rapture that we ought to be alive and within the flesh, and a part of the residing, incarnate cosmos. I’m a part of the solar as my eye is a part of me. That I’m a part of the earth my toes know completely, and my blood is a part of the ocean. My soul is aware of that I’m a part of the human race, my soul is an natural a part of the nice human soul… There’s nothing of me that’s alone and absolute besides my thoughts, and we will discover that the thoughts has no existence by itself, it is just the glitter of the solar on the floor of the waters.
Complement with pioneering psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the conciliation of our inner conflicts and Scottish thinker John Macmurray on the key to wholeness, then revisit Lawrence on the strength of sensitivity and the key to fully living.
