Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking into the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
(4) The following experiment was performed on a group of ten subjects. See how you would answer the questions.
Think of five acquaintances, not close friends, not lovers, not family members.
Describe each by three adjectives (in the experiment, a “personality characteristic chart” was provided on which one could score an acquaintance on a scale of “good” and “bad” qualities, e.g., more or less trustworthy, attractive, boring, intelligent, selfish, flighty, outgoing, introspective, and so on). Thus, you might describe an acquaintance named Gary McPherson as fairly good company, moderately trustworthy, funny but a little malicious, and so on. Or Linda Ellison: fairly good-looking (a 7 or 7½), more intelligent than she lets on, a good listener. And so on.
Note that most if not all of your adjectives could be placed on a finite scale, say from a plus ten to a minus ten.
Now, having described five acquaintances, do the following. Read these two sentences carefully:
(a) You are extraordinarily generous, ecstatically loving of the right person, supremely knowledgeable about what is wrong with the country, about people, capable of moments of insight unsurpassed by any scientist or artist or writer in the country. You possess an infinite potentiality.
(b) You are of all people in the world probably the most selfish, hateful, envious (e.g., you take pleasure in reading death notices in the newspaper and in hearing of an acquaintance’s heart attack), the most treacherous, the most frightened, and above all the phoniest.
Now answer this question as honestly as you can: Which of these two sentences more nearly describes you? CHECK (a), (b), (neither), (both).
If you checked (both)—60 percent of respondents did — how can that be?
(5) Do you understand sexuality?
That is to say, are you happy with either of the two standard versions of sexuality:
One, the biological — that the sex drive is one among several needs and drives evolved through natural selection as a means of sustaining the life of the organism and ensuring the survival of the species. Thus, sexual desire is one item on a list which includes other such items as hunger, thirst, needs of shelter, nest-building, migration, and so on.
The other, the religious-humanistic — sex is an expression, perhaps the ultimate expression, of love and communication between a man and a woman, and is best exemplified in marriage, raising children, the sharing of a life, family, home, and fireside.
Or do you see sexuality as a unique trait of the present-day self (which is the only self we know), occupying an absolutely central locus in the consciousness particularly as it relates to other sexual beings, of an order and magnitude of power incommensurate with other “drives” and also specified by the very structure of the present-day self as its very core and as its prime avenue of intercourse with others?
If the sexual drive is but one of several biological needs, why are we living in the most eroticized society in history? Why don’t TV, films, billboards, magazines feature culinary delights, e.g., huge chocolate cakes, hams, roasts, strawberries, instead of women’s bodies?
Or are you more confused about sexuality than any other phenomenon in the Cosmos?
Do you know why it is that men and women exhibit sexual behavior undreamed of among the other several million species, with every conceivable sexual relation between persons, or with only one person, or between a male and female, or between two male persons, or two female persons, or two males and one female, or two females and one male; relationships moreover which can implicate every orifice and appendage of the human body and which bear no relation to the reproduction and survival of the species?
Is the following statement true or false:
Pornography is not an aberration of a few sexually frustrated middle-aged men in gray raincoats; it is rather a salient and prime property of modern consciousness, of three hundred years of technology and the industrial revolution, and is symptomatic of a radical disorder in the relation of the self to other selves which generally manifests itself in the abstracted state of one self (male) and the degradation of another self (female) to an abstract object of satisfaction.
(6) Consider the following short descriptions of different kinds of consciousness of self. Which of the selves, if any, do you identify with?
(a) The cosmological self. The self is either unconscious of itself or only conscious of itself insofar as it is identified with a cosmological myth or classificatory system, e.g., totemism. Ask a Bororo tribesman: Who are you? He may reply: I am parakeet. (Ask an L.S.U. fan at a football game: Who are you? He may reply: I am a tiger.)
(b) The Brahmin-Buddhist self. Who are you? What is your self? My self in this life is impaled on the wheel of non-being, obscured by the veil of unreality. But it can realize itself by penetrating the veil of maya and plumbing the depths of self until it achieves nirvana, nothingness, or the Brahman, God. The atman (self) is the Brahman (God).
(c) The Christian self (and, to a degree, the Judaic and Islamic self). The self sees itself as a creature, created by God, estranged from God by an aboriginal catastrophe, and now reconciled with him. Before the reconciliation, the self is, as Paul told the Ephesians, a stranger to every covenant, with no promise to hope for, with the world about you and no God. But now the self becomes a son of God, a member of a family of selves, and is conscious of itself as a creature of God embarked upon a pilgrimage in this life and destined for happiness and reunion with God in a later life.
(d) The role-taking self. One sociological view of the self is that the self achieves its identity by taking roles and modeling its own role from the roles of others, e.g., one’s mother, father, housewife, breadwinner, macho-boy-man, feminine-doll-girl, etc. — and also, as George Mead said, upon how one perceives others’ perceptions of oneself.
(e) The standard American-Jeffersonian high-school-commencement Republican-and-Democratic-platform self. The self is an individual entity created by God and endowed with certain inalienable rights and the freedom to pursue happiness and fulfill its potential. It achieves itself through work, participation in society, family, the marketplace, the political process, cultural activities, sports, the sciences, and the arts. It follows that in a free and affluent society the self should succeed more often than not in fulfilling itself. Happiness can be pursued and to a degree caught.
(f) The diverted self. In a free and affluent society, the self is free to divert itself endlessly from itself. It works in order to enjoy the diversions that the fruit of one’s labor can purchase. The pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of diversion, and in this society the possibilities of diversion are endless and as readily available as eight hours of television a day: TV, sports, travel, drugs, games, newspapers, magazines, Vegas.
(g) The lost self. With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance — so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.