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THE TEST OF ISOLATION
Birth is a process of isolation. What was universal being becomes a particular entity, with a space of its own, with a time of its own — a particular kind of tuning in to the harmony of the universe. Every newborn punches the clock of nature at a particular time; this time begins the life-long contest between the individual and nature. Nature, in him, starts to unwind; this is nature's essential character. The moment a man is born, nature in him begins to die; it flows downward along the path of universal entropy — first, at a slow pace, then with a progressively greater rate of acceleration.
Man, however, is not born all at once. He is born first as a particular body. He is born further as a particular ego, with individualizing reactions to his surroundings — physical, social, and cultural. Some of these reactions we call feelings, others thoughts. Insofar as these make him different from other human beings, we see in him an individual. As he integrates these individualizing traits into a consistent all-around pattern of behavior, of feeling and thinking we invest him with the name, personality.
Man is born as a particular body from the womb of his mother and of mankind. He is born as an individual person through a process of individual differentiation and self-consolidation out of the matrix of society and civilization. In both cases, birth means isolation.
The trend toward isolation, through differentiation and individualization, meets at every step nature's trend toward uniformity and the leveling off of energy. Every human experience is a contest between the two trends, indeed between further birthing and further dying. Man always seeks to be more completely what he is. Nature forever flows downgrade under the law of deterioration of energy. If man, for the many years of his youth appears to gain in organic strength, it is because the momentum of his impulse toward isolation normally keeps on the increase until mid-life. He succeeds in steeling himself more effectively against the pressure of social traditions. He meets the challenge of earth-experience with great enthusiasm. If various conditions destroy this enthusiasm, neurosis sets in. If a sense of inferiority or fear confuses his will to to individual self-assertion through all social or family experiences, he follows the path toward uniformity inherent in natural energies; he takes refuge in social anonymity or in subjective escapes. He dreams expressionistic or sur-realistic, while the dynamic potential of his organism gradually deteriorates and his emotional responses become blurred into the indifference and weariness of psych-asthenia.
Every experience is a potential birth. Every experience can increase the individual's isolation from the collective average. And it should - if the individual is strong in personhood. Every experience can be so met that the experiencer realizes more deeply that which they are as an individual. There is such a realization if the experience is lived through and through; if the man emerges from it integral and whole with the added plus-value of consciousness; if, through the experience, he maintains his integrity even where he is most closely interwoven with the fabric of natural impulses and energies.
Every experience can be an experience of oneself experiencing. This leads to an increase in the intensity or sharpness of one's own characteristics - thus of one's isolation and one's singleness. It makes the personality more consistent and more significant, more distinct, even in its pliability and its seeming giving way to the impact of nature's energies. There is a 'giving way' which is born of weakness; another, as in Judo and in the Taoist's way of life, which derives from intelligence - the power to adjust to experience while retaining one's integrity, one's isolation.
Isolation has been given emotional connotations of loneliness by men weak in selfhood. Every man who is a self, an individual person, is necessarily isolated - yet not alone. He needs not be lonely in isolation. Loneliness is an admission of defeat in the face of experience. It is born of fear. Lonely men are men who fear they might not emerge, whole and integral, from the contests with nature — weary men, who lack enthusiasm to keep on forever being born. There are always new births ahead. Isolation can always become more total as selfhood becomes more encompassing. But the isolation of which we speak is not to be considered in relation to space and distance from other objects or entities. To be isolated is to acquire well-defined characteristics, a unique character. It is to be what one is in spite of, nay through, all the possible impacts of nature and life. It is to be a self, and to be more thoroughly, fully, consciously this self through every experience, however intense its whirling suction, however tenacious its hold upon the body and the psyche, however insistent the challenge of earth-existence.
The negative way to meet the test of isolation and of birth is to insist on being and remaining different from other human beings. The positive way is to insist on being ever more distinct. The integrity of the self is based on distinctness; the separativeness of the individualist, on an emphasis of differences. Distinction emphasizes form and character. Differences give rise to feelings of distance, of solitude, of fear, of incompatibility.
The test of isolation forces us to choose between becoming ever more distinct or more different, more single or more solitary. It creates the outstanding person, or the individual who feels left out. It is the test of birth. Either the experiencer keeps being born, or he crystallizes into what he was before the experience, or he gives up "name and form" and slides wearily into the anonymous and
formless — which is spiritual death. Every experience constitutes such a test, because every experience is a challenge to self-awareness. It produces a new horizon, a new sunrise-point — unless one refuses to be born again through the experience; to rise, with the sun, to his zenith; to shed the light of consciousness upon a new "day"; unless one seeks refuge in the collectiveness of the earth, and lies down on the couch of inertia to accept the embrace of fate. Fate is the refusal to be born again. Every person creates fate by refusing to become more distinctly a self.Distinctiveness implies formulation; social distinction, a sense of form and cultural excellence. To be a self is to have a permanent form. The opposite is formlessness "sloppiness". The "sloppy" individual refuses to meet his everyday experiences with distinction. He does not distinguish himself in the contest against nature. He lets nature take its course, and that course always means entropy — the progressive erasing of distinctive features. In contrast to this, personality is revealed — or displayed! — by the man who meets every experience with distinctive response, whose reactions to life are stamped with the character of selfhood. His living is a series of 'signatures'. Every experience adds strength, recognizability, uniqueness, and impressiveness to the signature. He makes his mark upon time and place. Wherever he goes, he is an origin. He is perpetual victory over uniformity and death. All he touches acquires character — his own.
To this, there is a shadow. The individual who seeks forever to be different, craves to appear "original". He dilly-dallies through a life of surrealistic gestures which increase only the emptiness around him. He isolates himself, not by achieving distinction, but by creating distance. The distance produces solitude; the originality, a vacuum which nothing will ever fill with living substance. The original individual lives in self-contaminated air, in the formalism which crystallizes living forms into mummies, in the artificiality of showcases crowded with mannequins forever gesticulating under public gaze.
To seek originality is to seek the embalming of differences. Everything vital is taken away save surfaces and make-up. To be an origin is to fecundate society with the consciousness drawn from experience. Consciousness, however, is a vase. What fecundates is the liquor vitae, the gift of the spirit that ever comes to fill the vase in answer to the need of the Empty. Every new dawn creates an emptiness for the spirit to fill. Every creator is a cup of consciousness overflowing with a downpour of spirit. The rising sun ascends from an ever new horizon; yet the Light is always the same. The containers are distinct; the contents are identical. Spirit is the eternal content. To be an origin is to release spirit. To seek originality is to close one's door to the gifts of God, the eternal source of spirit.
Every challenge of earth-existence to man can produce three types of results. Man may refuse the challenge and fall, entangled in the shreds of the experience, toward the dead level of absolute indifference. And if, passing through the experience, he retains his integrity, he may do so either in openness to ever new horizons, or with the rigidity of automatic response — as a rising sun, or as a mannequin freezing a sum-total of particular responses into a fictitious sense of permanence.
Permanence of this sort is not immortality. Immortality is not the overcoming of one experience of death — and a repeat performance ad infinitum. Immortality is the overcoming of every possible kind of dying. It is the capacity to remain what one is while being forever born again. It is dynamic distinctiveness; not static difference.
Originality is a glorification of one's complexes, of that which separates while differentiating. Creativeness is the quality of victorious emptiness that knows itself forever to be filled with spirit. It is the absolute certitude of ever-renascent fulfillment. It is the marriage with God. It is isolation, with the One and All filling one's self full. To know such a resplendent isolation is to be forever a rising sun.
