There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to
meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
"Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a
bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes,
"What the hell is water?"
If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here
as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish,
please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the
fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are
often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an
English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the
fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal
platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like
hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete...
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically
certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one
example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically
sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep
belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most
vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort
of natural, basic self centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive,
but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our
default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it:
There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute
center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of
you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your
monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be
communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent,
real-you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to
preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called
"virtues." This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing
to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural,
hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally
self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of
self.
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