Who Are You?
Rarely these days do I read a non-fiction book that blows me away.
I’m not sure whether that’s a product of reading so many self development and Life Coaching books, that I seldom find anything truly unique. Or that I’m just becoming more cynical as I age. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
David Rock’s brilliant book Your Brain At Work (AL) was a rare exception and probably the best self development book I have read in the last 2 or 3 years. And right up there with that is the new book by Buddhist teacher, Bodhipaksa, Living As A River. (AL)
I’m not going to review Living As A River today, I’ll save that for the December edition of my newsletter,* but don’t be fooled into thinking this is just another book on Buddhism. It’s way more than that, it’s a book on life….and death.
It’s brilliantly well written, painstakingly researched and is an accessible read for anybody wanting to know more about makes us weird human beings what we are.
I have interviewed Bodhipaksa twice in ‘The Meaning of Life Explained‘ and ‘A Buddhist Plain and Simple‘. You can also follow him on Twitter or read more about him at Wildmind.
The following is an excerpt from the book and if this doesn’t have you questioning who you really are, then I’m not sure anything ever will.
Before we get in to that though I just wanted to wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving! I really am very thankful that I have such open-minded, intelligent, fun and thoughtful readers. And no, for once, I’m not joking.
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Living As A River – The Vin Fizz
In 1911, a 32-year-old sportsman and daredevil called Calbraith Perry Rodgers, with a scant 60 hours of airtime in his logbook, set off to cross the United States from coast to coast in his specially modified Wright airplane—the first in private ownership.
His dream was to win the $50,000 that tycoon publisher William Randolph Hearst was offering to the first person to fly across the continent within 30 days, but Rodgers, as much a canny businessman as an adventurous pioneer, had a financial backup plan in case the trip took longer than the month allowed.
He’d persuaded J. Ogden Armour, a Chicago entrepreneur, to underwrite the costs of the mission in exchange for the words “Vin Fiz”—Armour’s brand of grape-flavored soda—being emblazoned on the tail-fin and wings of the craft. And so, The Vin Fiz Flyer became the name of Rodger’s airplane.
The Vin Fiz took to the air from a field in Sheepshead Bay, near New York City, late in the afternoon of September 17, its pilot swaddled in layers of sweaters and sheepskin to provide warmth in the unheated cockpit. Seven weeks and almost seventy landings later the craft touched down at a racetrack in Pasadena, California.
Sadly, Rodgers failed to win Hearst’s prize. For all his courage and persistence, his flight had taken far longer than the 30 days allowed, and as a further blow to Rodgers’ hopes, the year-long window for participating in the competition had expired before the Vin Fiz reached Pasadena.
But a week later, buoyed by the glory of having made aviation history with his epic voyage, Rodgers set off to cover the remaining 20 miles to Long Beach and the Pacific Ocean.
In retrospect that was not such a good idea. The last leg alone took almost a month, with two crashes, one of which was serious enough to result in a broken ankle. All for a distance could be comfortably cycled in two hours.
Although he didn’t win Hearst’s $50,000, for Rodgers to cross the country in such a primitive aircraft was an astonishing achievement. The Vin Fiz was a fragile thing made from a spruce frame covered with linen, its body looking more like a box kite than a modern plane.
It was powered by a tiny 35 horsepower engine: no more powerful than some modern lawnmowers. Rodgers had no navigational instruments, and he found his way across country by the simple expedient of following a train, which also pulled a boxcar packed with spare parts for the journey.
And Rodgers was to need a lot of spares. The doughty Vin Fiz malfunctioned, crashed, or was damaged in rough landings so many times during the 84-day crossing that by the end of the journey only one wing-strut and a rudder remained from the original machine that had left New York.
Without in any way undermining the magnificence of Rodgers’ achievement, when I first heard this tale many years ago, I found myself wondering in what sense The Vin Fiz had actually completed the journey.
Only two components survived the trip, and given a few more miles it’s possible that even those remaining parts of the original airplane would have been replaced from the dwindling supply of spares in the white railroad car, in which case nothing would have remained of the original craft.
In a sense, one plane took off from Sheepshead Bay and another landed in California. With each repair, the machine had become in some sense a new aircraft. The Vin Fiz struck me as being a perfect example of the Buddhist teaching of anatta, or the non-permanence and insubstantiality of the self.
Flight of Imagination
Compressing time and space in the theater of the imagination, let’s visualize the cross-country flight of the Vin Fiz. Let’s see the frail craft at the mid-point of each of its hops across the country, suspended in mid air, the images strung together to form a brief movie.
Squeezing the entire journey into the space of a minute, notice that the craft is continually changing. In a sudden jump of perception a tattered wing becomes whole again. A rattling bolt falls to earth and at that same moment is replaced.
A propeller, a wing-strut, a stretch of linen, a wheel, an entire engine—each vanishes and is instantaneously regenerated. As we watch the Vin Fiz in this way, it is a plane that is forever in the process of becoming another plane.
And when at last we visualize the final touch-town, only that stubborn wing-strut and hardy rudder remain unchanged. And we can, if we wish, imagine one more frame of this imaginary movie and see even those components being replaced.
So what was it that flew across the United States? What was the Vin Fiz? The craft that arrived in Pasadena was not physically the same one that had departed New York. The form was the same, the name was the same, but almost everything constituting the aircraft had changed.
No one component was the Vin Fiz. No single component contained the essence of the aircraft: certainly not the wing-strut and rudder that happened to survive the journey, and which were merely accidental survivors.
The Vin Fiz was also not the entirety of its components, since they were forever changing. When we try to look for the Vin Fiz it becomes mirage-like, its “thingness” vanishing under scrutiny.
The Vin Fiz clearly existed. But it was a process rather than a thing, an ever-changing assemblage of parts functioning in a particular way, rather than a static object. It was a process that had continuity rather than identity. It had no essence, but consisted of a series of ever-changing components that were brought together in a manner that allowed an ever-changing form to cross a continent.
What arrived in Pasadena was not identical to what left Sheepshead Bay, but there was a continuous process connecting the various iterations of the craft as it evolved over the course of its journey.
The continuity of the Vin Fiz is also maintained in the mind. Had the Viz Fiz suffered only one devastating crash half-way from coast to coast, and had a new craft been assembled from the parts in the railroad car (including only one wing strut and a rudder from the original aircraft) and continued the journey, would the aircraft be credited with the first continental crossing by air?
Naturally not. We would not have believed that one airplane had made the crossing. It would seem like a stunt had been pulled. And yet an assemblage of replacement parts (including one wing strut and a rudder from the original aircraft) was precisely what did arrive on the West coast.
What held together the Vin Fiz, just as much as the rivets and bolts, was the sense of continuity that the mind sees, which allows us to say that a process had continually functioned as an aircraft, despite modifications. When we look for a “thing” called the Vin Fiz, it now seems mirage-like, and undefinable.
The same is true of the human body. As the body makes a journey across the continent of life, from the coast of conception to the far shore we call death, it too is continually changing, the physical and mental components forever being replaced.
What arrives at the final touchdown is a far cry from what originally departed at the beginning of life. The body you’re born with is not the one you’ll die with. Looking at the body in the same way as we looked at the Vin Fiz, we can see there is similarly no essence within it.
There is no locus within the body where a self can be found. Our physical selves seem mirage-like, held together not so much by chemical bonds but a physical process of continuity and by an idea of selfhood.
Our ideas of what constituted the boundaries of the Vin Fiz are also limited. At some point after its historic flight, the Vin Fiz was broken up, its parts dispersed to rot or burn.
We no longer have the sense that there is a thing or process that we can label “Vin Fiz,” and yet the continuity has simply taken a different form. Parts of the aircraft – the ash from burned wood and linen, metal parts that long ago turned to rust – have become soil, supporting manifold forms of life. The carbon dioxide from its burning has become plants, which have since been eaten and transformed into uncountable living things.
Just a few years before it crossed the continental Unites States, the Vin Fiz had not yet come into being; it was trees, flax, soil, and ores buried deep underground. We could look at these things and never dream that they would one day fly across a vast continent.
When we look in this way we can see that there was no beginning to the Vin Fiz. Nor was there an end of it. But the mind tries to impose boundaries on processes that in essence are boundless. We think of the Vin Fiz beginning and ending. We see the craft in the air as being the Vin Fiz, but the components on the train as not being the Vin Fiz. We impute to the Vin Fiz a false sense of separateness.
We impute the same false sense of separateness to ourselves as well, and the purpose of reflecting on the elements is to dispel the mistaken assumption that the self is a thing—static, separate, and enduring.
The purpose of reflecting on the elements is to see the truth of flow, of impermanence, of insubstantiality, and of interconnectedness. And on the way to seeing this truth we have to let go of the idea that the body is a thing – that it is separate and that it has some kind of permanent essence.
When we do that, we start to realize that we can’t “own” the body. The body is not ours in any real sense, nor is the body “us” in any real sense. The self cannot be found within it. This, as we’ll see, isn’t to diminish ourselves. Rather, it’s to free ourselves from a limited way of seeing the self so that we can appreciate that we’re much, much more than we habitually assume.
*Decembers Newsletter – Free Stuff
I’m just mulling over a competition for Decembers newsletter. I’m not exactly sure what it will entail at this stage, but I do know I’ll be running an exclusive Life Coaching offer and giving some free stuff away, so get signed up in the box right below!
Yes this is a great book!
You can find another point of view and great review here:
http://nondualityamerica.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/bodhipaksa-living-as-a-river/
*Sounds True liked it so well they used it as their main book description on Amazon…
Take care and keep up the great work with the site.
Matthew King
Much as I admit my ignorance, I believe that the manifestation of the flesh has prevented us from seeing our infinite nature. Whence the mind is controlled by the flesh, awareness will set us free. :-)
It fascinates me how my nephew’s tiny fingernails are made from weetabix.
And weetabix was only sunlight and soil not long before that.
Lovely and deeply insightful post, thanks Tim.
And that every part of you was once part of the big bang! Mind-blowing.
Our mistake is to usually assume that there is a thing called “I”. The step Bodhipaksa doesn’t do is this: Not only our body is not really ours and not really one-and-the-same, equally our self is not really “our”, or “self”, only the seeming consistency of seemingly continuing memories keeps us in the illusion of being “one person”…
Bear in mind this is a short extract from a book. I wanted to reproduce this because I thought and still think, it is a brilliant metaphor.
Tim, this is a beautiful concept and piece of writing. I’ve never heard of the Vin Fiz, but now am fascinated.
This is profound stuff: “The same is true of the human body. As the body makes a journey across the continent of life, from the coast of conception to the far shore we call death, it too is continually changing, the physical and mental components forever being replaced.” This will also make it easier to look in the mirror this morning.
LOL! Yeh I know what you mean.
This is the best description of emptiness I’ve ever read. I’m been trying to wrap my mind around it for some time, and reading this brought me a step closer.
Alisa
Blogger, relationships editor, ghost writer, wife and mom
If you like it Alisa you’ll love the book.
I read at one point that our bodies on a molecular level regenerate every 7 years. Therefore you are no longer your physical self on a molecular level from one 7 year point to the next. Somewhere “you” began and ended but yet still exist.
After this regeneration, it’s fascinating to imagine how what we put into our bodies and how we live within ourselves emotionally has an impact on us on a molecular level. (Hence why someone looks so young at 38 when someone else looks so old)
The “who” we are still remains even after the “what” we think we are is long gone.
I love how he deepens this point so beautifully and much more articulately than I had imagined.
Elegant piece. I’ll be digging into his work for sure.
Thanks for sharing Tim.
It varies massively depending on the part of the body how often it regenerates and Bodhipaksa talks at some length about this.
The lining of the stomach is only 5 days whereas bones can take years.
That Vin Fiz thing went way over my head…
WOW! I shall go get my hands on that book.
The thing that intrigues me about and makes me wary of books “like this” is I tend to get lost for a while…sometimes a long while after reading them.
That place of balance between living life and my thoughts/understanding of life is a fine line that is hard for me to find at times. I need to feel grounded enough to go do the laundry but not so grounded that doing the laundry is so important.
I hope that makes sense :)
It does indeed make sense and I know exactly what you mean because I can be like that.
OTOH, that’s why it’s quite a scary book (to me) because it makes me think so deeply.
Thanks for sharing this, Tim.
I fully understand the Vin Fiz Principle. I just have a tendency to forget I understand it.
I know how you feel. Conscious awareness isn’t always that easy.
Score. Beautiful, astute, relevant, perfect.
I AM the vin fiz flyer.
So are you. But do you realise it?
I sure do and it’s kinda scary.
Beautiful too, no?