Alone With Others
Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism
by Stephen Batchelor
Grove Press, New York City, NY ©1983 (Interdisciplinary) 134 pp.
In his first chapter, “Having and Being,” Stephen Batchelor suggests
a correlation between “having” and “the craving to acquire more and more.” He refers to this as the expanding horizontal
dimension of life with which people today are preoccupied, and contrasts it
with the vertical depths of “being,” in which life is felt as awesome and
mysterious. He suggests that the “mindset of having” necessarily presupposes a
sharp dualism between subject and object. This discussion prompted me to look
at how this plays out in my own life: when I’m in an acquiring mode – whether
it’s collecting groceries for dinner or books for a learning project – I’m less
aware of the awesome, “being” dimension of my life, and more caught up with
objects “out there.”
Toward the end of the book, he says that once we have
experienced
the essential reality that we
are being with others -
inescapably with them in the world - then self-concern gets dislodged from its
primary position in our lives as the center of motivation. This existential
awareness of ourselves as being with others transforms or reveals our
self-concern as a concern for others. Yet “the spontaneity of authentic concern
for others is constantly threatened with obstruction and distortion by
self-concern.” Thus, we need to make a real effort to cultivate concern for
others and reduce our self-concern.
the essential reality that we
are being with others -
inescapably with them in the world - then self-concern gets dislodged from its
primary position in our lives as the center of motivation. This existential
awareness of ourselves as being with others transforms or reveals our
self-concern as a concern for others. Yet “the spontaneity of authentic concern
for others is constantly threatened with obstruction and distortion by
self-concern.” Thus, we need to make a real effort to cultivate concern for
others and reduce our self-concern.
All of this seems abstract and a tad moralistic until he
notes that concern for others is activated in response to their pain and
suffering. As this concern for them
flows from us naturally, our self-concern naturally diminishes, and over time
develops into loving kindness and compassion. This brings Batchelor back to his original
thesis, that the meaning of one’s life is measured not by what one has, but by what one is. Some astute reader then summed
it up by writing in the book, “Enlightenment,
while achieved in the solitude of inwardness, cannot be fully actualized except
in being with others.”