You Must Revise Your Life

Post Date:October 25, 2009

    In an earlier entry (“The Year of the Ox”), I used the line from Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo”—“You must revise your life”—to discuss how the process of meditation and T’ai Chi requires and results in a complete “revision” or realignment of the self.
    Let me return here to the most important word in Rilke’s last line—“revise”—for a point of clarification about this process.   On the surface, to “revise ones life” suggests a refashioning or remaking along the lines of New Years Resolutions:  I will be more organized; I will eat healthier; I will exercise more.  This remaking begins with what one has (an ego and a body) in order to reshape it into a new self that is more in keeping with the image of one’s ideal self. 
    Another way of reading the word “revision,” though,  should not be overlooked since it is more in keeping with the gist of meditation and T’ai Chi.  RE-vision.  To see anew.  To see freshly.  To see again.  Such a concept of re-seeing shares much with the essence of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist meditation and T’ai Chi as meditation-in-motion.
    The Buddhist conception of the self is not that it is inherently flawed; rather each person has Buddha nature.  More, each person is already fully-enlightened.  We simply must realize our inherent Buddhahood and enlightened nature.  The self need not be “remade” but rather the self needs to be recognized—re-known—and contemplative, introspective practices such as T’ai Chi and meditation provide the tools to begin to “re-vise” oneself.
    To re-see within this paradigm is to recognize that within oneself is a fully awakened, fully-enlightened person—not an other to be constructed and remodeled—but a perfect one, a Tathagata, already intact.  [Tathagata, by the way, means, a person of “Suchness.”]
   We often view the act of “perfecting” oneself as an act of becoming the “ideal” person through incremental acts of revision (i.e., eat less, exercise more, be angry less, be more organized).  Yet if such a concept of becoming is abandoned, what remains is not the image of self but Being.
   To revise, though, requires fearlessness, as if looking into a mirror to truly see oneself—not to identify the flaws that require correction but to recognize how one has created an image of that self.  Our fearlessness requires that we recognize that the self we construct is merely that—a construct, an amalgam of ideas and images of the self.  We are not what we think we are.  Nevertheless, we cling to that idea of the self and its labels:  “I am ___ years old;  I work as a ____; I am in a relationship with _____;  I vote _______;  The list can go on ad infinitum and yet we never arrive at am. 
    Revision is an act of fearlessness.  To wake up is a manifestation of courage.  Otherwise, we are merely falling into the trap of remaking a self that is always already complete.  To let go of all of these labels is to embrace life.  And as Rilke writes, “for here there is no place / that does not see you.  You must change your life.” 

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