Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Exteriority vs. Interiority


Exteriority is either forced on us (usually through fear of not dealing with the tangible pressures of daily life) or we choose it (by radically embracing the tangible pressures through inspiration, vision, compassion…making the decision to thrive instead of just survive. The problem with exteriority is that we don't have many real forums to express our frustrations in today's society.

At one time, if you were trying to accomplish something and were consistently thwarted by someone, there was either no recourse at all (because of class structure) or there were ways to physically deal with them (sword fight, clan feud, battle ax). Although we live in an age of dialogue, the real problems, I think, aren't with other people, but institutions. We can dialogue all we want with each other, but inevitably our movements are very constricted. We have no real recourse to address or even tangibly engage power unless we create it ourselves. In the past, institutions were just as stodgy as they are now, but people could hack each other up. Now, we're not allowed to fight each other and we certainly aren't allowed to fight the institutions.

When I say "aren't allowed," what I mean is we are bound by our faux civility and the cultural disdain toward personal violence and anger. What we end up with is these muted but pervasive dramas: road rage, apathy, and suicide: the kind of alienation so perfectly exemplified by Kafka.

I would surmise that external frustration + time to reflect = interiority.

My well-traveled friend, Nick, told me the other day that there are very few windows into other cultures while visiting another country, which can be both freeing and frustrating. It seems to me, therefore, that being in another culture acts as a dramatization of the institution: sets the stage for both intense exteriority and intense interiority, and, as I say this, I am remembering back to my time in South Africa how these two poles vacillated painfully. One day I would be wandering a township, thrilled and afraid, and the next day I would lock myself in my room, depressed and in completely turned inward.

I would conjecture that if our exteriority is full of mostly painful experiences, we will create a space inside to retreat to, and vice versa. The psychological complications come when we interpret our exterior frustrations as somehow being "about us" and then turn our interior life into a painful place as well. I think that's how most people live in the modern world: without any safe place to go to. We reflect on situations that aren't working out for us, to attempt to use the mind to fix what we see as the problems of our lives. We make a problem of our interiority and then become obsessed with it. If what all the Zen and Insight teachers say is true, most people are almost never really present for their lives…always living in the past or the future.

So, to sum it up, absorption in b.s. requires exteriority, but it has been my experience that too much absorption in bs hits a critical mass and then turns back on itself as an alienated interiority. If daily life is full of exteriorities that are pleasant, then retreating from the external world would almost never be necessary.

But we make a problem of exterior life, which then engenders interiority, and then we make a problem of interiority. So, yes, it would make sense a la Deleuze and the Buddha, to stop making a problem of exterior life in the first place. Yet, my problem is with the word "bs" because it implies frustration to me. If it can become just life, without a value judgment, then there would be no problem, and no need to retreat to interiority. Right?

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