What does it mean to be human? I guess the answer to this is question could be anything really. I can think of several broad and specific strokes to paint a very subjective picture of what it means. I’ll leave those brush strokes for whatever artist stumbles upon this writing to fill in. But I think if I was to strip it down, the concept of being human, to what I would consider the core of the matter, I think I’d say it is honoring the part of us that feels and experiences. Just think, without feeling, without emotion and void of sensation, what would this being human thing be all about?
Sans all feeling and sensation, we simply become a vessel for observation, which has it’s own benefits I suppose. Yet let me ask this: Does standing outside of the tiger’s exhibit at the zoo allow us to truly know the tiger? Surely from our safe, untouchable space outside we can observe the tiger’s behaviors, “know” it in an intellectual sense; what it acts like when it’s hungry, how it rests and plays. This is simply data collection. Even if we stood outside that tiger’s den for centuries, astutely cataloguing every nuance, each movement and habit of the magnificent creature, could we honestly say we have total knowledge of the tiger?
The answer is no. How can we truly know the tiger if we’ve never felt the bristle of it’s whiskers, the coarseness of her coat, the immense power of his sculpted physique? How can we truly know the tiger if we’ve never sat with him in a moment of tenderness or shuddered at the sight of her fierce and angry eyes glaring at us with no protective glass to separate us? In it. Living it. Touching it. Tasting it. Smelling it. Absorbing the energy that IS, not from behind the impenetrable safety barricade, but right now in the moment. Vulnerable. Exposed. Living, under the very real threat of dying in any moment, THIS is knowledge of the tiger.
Observation + Experience = True Knowledge. The marrying of the intellectual and the emotional, the part that thinks and the part that feels, that is wholeness. Perhaps that is what a deeper part of me was pointing me towards as I sat here and asked whether or not we can truly “know” something. Really I am asking, can we have wholeness? Can we wholly understand the tiger without both observation and the flesh and blood experience? Can we wholly understand ourselves, this world or another person in their simplest, truest nature, without observation? No. Can we wholly understand ourselves, this world or another person in their simplest, truest nature, without experience? No. Only through the reconciliation of the powers of observation, the objective, and the transformative power of experience, the subjective, do we have true knowledge, whole understanding of what life is.
Being human then, is at it’s core, the balancing act between stepping back far enough to observe, yet never barricading ourselves with protective glass. For without being vulnerable, without being fully exposed, without the very real and imminent threat of death at any given moment, we cannot be whole. This not only makes death a very necessary process, but also necessitates the potential pain and hurt we may experience by letting our guard down, as well as the joys that come with it. And perhaps some religions and spiritualists have been failing us for leading us believe being human has been constructed as a device meant to be escaped, an existence meant to be transcended. Perhaps our greatest spiritual achievement lies not in transcending the human experience, but coming to wholly understand, honor and love it for exactly what it is, a 360 degree look at life from the inside out and the outside in. Perhaps. Perhaps…
-JB
