NO MAN'S LAND

Budhist Bodhisattva Vow: "The Buddha Way is unattainable; I vow to attain it."

All living people hold a satisfactory enough version of the world – that is we’re all here so we haven’t thought it better to kill ourselves yet – and therefore, those of us that are still here fall into three primary states: we either want to reaffirm belief in that satisfactory enough version of the world and say “I am fully who I want to be” and just look for people who reaffirm that (this is what I call the deluded non-alienated being). Or we want to improve ourselves in some way, admitting we live “between who we are and who we want to be” and we look for the world to tell us who to be and how to be it (this is what I call the alienated being with the delusion of future non-alienation). In both states our communities are what provide that non-alienated service to us, allowing us to live in the delusion of a now or future wholeness. Communities are always necessary, but these two states are always unfree, for those fully bought into their community are always a slave to that community’s non-alienated fantasy.

The third state is different, for it is counterintuitive, yet it’s where the possibility of freedom arises. It is when we live “between who we are and who we want to be” BUT without ever pedestalizing our desire for a non-alienated state, without ever caring if “who we want to be” is achieved. This is living in the embrace of alienation, in a perpetual no-man’s land, still part of communities, yet freed from the ideologies of those communities. This is not “giving up.” Giving up can only apply to the cessation of persistence towards a future non-alienated state. In this state we still hold ultimate concerns, concerns for which we would gladly die, yet we are not enslaved to some finite version of that concern. In actuality, in this third state, I know the ultimacy of my concern can never be achieved, and this acknowledgement is what allows me to live well in no man’s land. In fact, in this third category my alienated state of non-achievement becomes my heaven, and community can be exposed for its seductive tendencies towards empty promises.

In baseball, this no man’s land for the fielder is exactly the place where the baseball must drop for exciting action to occur on the field. This no man’s land for the runner is exactly the place where he must courageously run for the possibility of scoring. We must willingly enter no man’s land to attain the unattainable. It is only in this place that attaining changes its meaning from "getting an end state" to "getting the never ending act of attaining itself."