All experiencing is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with a debased mind and dukkha follows,
as the wheel of a cart follows the hoof of the ox.
All experiencing is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.
Speak or act with a purified mind, and well-being follows
like a shadow which never departs.
– Dhammapada, verse 1-2. Translated Christopher J. Ash
The point about death and love. So, a child’s attitude to love is naturally narcissistic, and mummy’s or daddy’s death is about themselves, and not about mummy’s or daddy’s – or, the family dog’s – experience. To care about the other’s experience wholly, would require a level of empathy and compassion that has yet emerge. This is all developmentally beautiful, and not a fault in nature. It’s an unfolding.
Our growth, then, if we are to absorb the lessons of death, needs two wings: wisdom and love. In respect of love, we need the development of warmth toward others; particularly, of kindness, empathy, and compassion. Kindness brings appreciation for otherness, empathy brings understanding of the other’s experience, and compassion brings an embrace of their dukkha. (That is, to take the dukkha of another to heart.) Narcissism is the refusal to do this.
Since I mention Narcissus so often, I thought it would be a good idea to visit the myth. During my psychotherapy training, I absorbed the implications of the ancient myth, recorded and expanded by the Roman Ovid, in his Metamorphoses. The myth shed light, for me, on the precarious condition of civilised humanity. The story of Echo and Narcissus is a story that points toward the purification of love.
Ω
Narcissus was the son of a river god and a water nymph. When Narcissus was born, Tiresias the blind seer was asked whether the child would live a long life. Tiresias replied: “He will live to old age, if he never knows himself.”
As a youth, Narcissus was very, very beautiful, and his beauty was comparable to the gods, naturally. However, he was conceited. Too proud, too haughty, to return the love of others and callous and indifferent to the suffering of those who fell in love with him, he mocks them. When an Oread (a mountain nymph) named Echo falls in love with him, he rejects her heartlessly. When she prays to the goddess of love, Aphrodite protects echo from the pain, by making her fade away from the woods and mountains. out of grief, leaving only her voice, which is heard by all.
However, another of the mocked and spurned lovers, a youth in this case murdered by Narcissus, prays to Heaven: “May Narcissus himself love, and not gain the thing he loves.” The goddess Nemesis, she whom none can escape, the goddess of divine justice, answers the prayer. She guides him to a pool – a still forest pool, one that had never been disturbed by human or animal – where he meets his fate. As he bends to drink from the pool, he sees his own image there, and, thinking it is some beautiful water-nymph living there in the pool, he longs to possess it, to have its marble-like beauty for himself.
Not being able to attain the thing he loves, he grieves, and he dies there by the pool. When nymphs come to bury his body, they find that a flower – the species we call the Narcissus – has sprouted in the place where he has died.
Ω