Dismembering Identity: A Pseudo-Buddhist Contemplation.

No,no…. I am not taking a chainsaw to Dr Id! My apologies if you tuned in today hoping for blood. Did you really think that even a Pseudo-Buddhist would go in for such gratuitous gore? Tsk Tsk!

(By the way… if you want to skip my ramblings, and get on with the contemplation, you can do that here. Otherwise, you’re stuck with me for a dozen or so extra paragraphs.)

Now that you’ve been denied your horror-fest… I’m sure you’re wondering exactly what, pray tell, a Pseudo-Buddhist Contemplation might be?

Funny you should ask. I was just about to tell you.

Ahem.

I greatly admire Buddhist doctrine and practices. The stress on tolerance, loving kindness, relieving suffering, and centeredness seems a Very Good Thing. I am not a suitable Buddhist, however — I’m fond of my own cultural orientation, devoted to my own spiritual path, and …. well.. a whole lot too lazy to make a good Buddhist.

But I’ve picked up a few Buddhist influences here and there, mostly meditations (actual, real-live dyed-in-the-mantra-type Buddhists don’t mind if non-Buddhists learn their practices, so it’s guilt free appropriation).

By the time these practices and ideas have been run through my non-Buddhist filters, they’re a bit mangled, and I can no longer properly call them Buddhist meditations. Still, I have to call them something …. thus, pseudo-Buddhist.

Not only is the practice I’m writing about today not exactly Buddhist anymore… but it isn’t properly a meditation, either. In my ancient tradition of pseudo-Buddhism, the term “meditation” is reserved for a disciplined, focused practice of attention. This isn’t that.

It’s more.. well… contemplative. A quiet, casual, non-stressing, non-focused, non-attentive sort of mulling-over-things, in the psuedo-Buddhist tradition.

The *thing* we’re going to be contemplating (pseudo-Buddhistically speaking) is the nature of your inner core, or more precisely, the trappings that obscure and confuse and distort your view of that inner-core: those parts of your identity that seem to be You, but aren’t really You.

But when do we get to the dismemberment, you ask?

Patience, Grasshopper. We’re almost there.

Dr. Id taught us that our identity is who we are in the world. When the world shifts around us, our identities shift in relation - and unpredictable shifts in the world mean unpredictable shifts in our identity. Being identity-destabilized is disorienting at best; at its worst, it leads to a sense of worthlessness and deep depression.

Buddhist teachings stress a connection between suffering, and our attachment to ego/self/identity, so it seemed natural to turn to my pseudo-Buddhist practices to look for tools in dealing with the modern challenges to identity.

Which brings us to the dismemberment. Finally!

But you’ll have to click through to part 2 for that.

Go on. Read it. There’s another cute girl there, with a power tool.

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MindTWEAK: Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away. - Aitken Roshi

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