The Jungle enveloped him and he suddenly felt claustrophobic. The floor was dense and always shifting slightly. The canopy was impossibly tall and daylight bespeckled between the leaves like the stars in the night sky. And there was no forward looking path. It was chaos and he couldn’t make sense of it.
Between the trees there was more growth or hanging vines. The grown was likewise a poorly manicured lawn with no uniformity at all. Everything shifted around like leaves on a pond. And to top it all off, it sounded like white snow on a television set.
He closed his eyes and covered his ears. It was quiet and black again and he was able to calm down. He kept his ears covered, but slowly opened his eyes. He looked directly down and saw his legs. Moving downards, he saw where his skin became his socks, and his socks became his shoes. Then, noticed how his shoes met the earth.
He drew his hands from his ears and took in the sounds while he watches his feet on the ground. The noises individualized and he was able to pick some out. Then, rather than seeming like a bad chorus, it was instead a coalition of individual instruments. Suddenly, he recognized one. It was running water. He looked around and saw only vegetation. But he looked down again and saw a gradual slope of the floor. He followed it down.
Slowly, but methodically, he descended farther and farther down until there seemed to be a clearing. It wasn’t, it was a stream. It was small and still. A closer look at the water allowed him to decide which way it flowed. A dead leaf gave this away.
The stream broadened and soon met with another. As he followed the creek, it later became a river. Before he knew it, he was at the coastline and was greeted by the ocean.
When we are young or thrust into unfamiliar settings, we seem overwhelmed with information. Everything seems as the jungle; there is no discernable order.
What we do, then, is through time and practice, make ourselves familiar with small bits of information at a time. We stay with this until that information becomes a part of our identity. We draw a box around it, and like we do with our bodies when we are young, we declare ownership.
Over time, the more we let into our boxes, the bigger the perimeter gets and the safer our selves become. Each new piece of information though is suspect. If it is outside the box, it is dangerous.
As younger people, our boundaries are far too close to give us comfort and spreading those barriers outwardly is necessary. As we age, though, and learn through experience or education, our walls start to dig in deeply and become firmly fixed. Some of those boundaries are more flexible than others, and some are less.
What we become comfortable with tends to be a direct result of what we accept as ourselves, and our actions and rationalizations for that behavior reflects this. Our circumstances, those pieces of our lives that we have no control over, are largely responsible for this.
A man can have done terrible things, and we can be afraid of him. But another person, as perfectly reasonable as us, may not be and may even excuse the man for his actions. Why? His relationship to the bad man. If he had accepted this man before he did these things, then he is unlikely to change his position.
We all have an aquaintance whom is unreliable, erratic, and disappointing. If we know this person, we may accept his flaws and even go so far as to proclaim that he is “a good guy” despite all evidence to the contrary. But when another is met with this same person, the reaction can be quite different.
The building of safe zones, where we can develop an understanding of order, is a proven method of pushing life onward and protecting the survival of the species. But it is not without its failings.
Beware of what you learn for it may become a part of you.
A significant portion of our upbringings is dedicated to the avoidance of information. It is justified precisely because of our understanding of the borders we draw around ourselves. It is difficult to breach the boundary, but once there, it is difficult to remove as well. Not only is this a part of us, but it is also separate from others.
Beware of what you don’t learn for it will become your enemy.
If you are the center of your polity, anything that resides outside your walls is the “other”. That is, it is quite literally the antithesis of your very self. It is your opposite, or your opponent. Whatever you don’t let in, you defend against.
This is not a radical idea, but like the system of identity borders, it is observable. The closer the borders are to the center of the self, the more recognizable the things outside of them are. It is only when borders are expansive are defenses more easily broken. It becomes increasingly difficult to discern the other from the self.
The only way something is not the other is when we accept it in our borders. With objects and inert matter, this can be easy. With other people, it is tricky. Because, not only do we require that they are a part of us, but we must also be a part of them.
If we can bring people within a common frame of reference, there is nothing to defend against, for they are us. But for this to be truly the case, our information of them must be perfect. And it can’t be. Because information, over time, changes. We have to know, understand, and accept these changes; we have to be a part of them.
The surest way to perfect information is perfect communication. Perfect communication requires not a fast messenger between kingdoms of the minds, but free exchange. When this happens, the barriers disappear and we are no longer separate, but the same.
But this is nearly impractical as we exist today. We are taught to draw borders in order to understand the world. Maybe it is a necessary function of the human brain that we learn this way. Perhaps it is the only way to survive. Evolution may have formed this mechanism because of the threats of the state of nature.
If we removed those threats, though, could we learn and grow and exist without borders or rules to govern action and thought? What would it mean if we did?
– T.H. White, from The Once and Future King
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