5
I’m On Facebook, Therefore I Am
“This
is it, sweetheart; so make the most of it,” says the cynical materialist. But
I’ve never bought into this perspective. I’ve always believed that we are made
of body and spirit, and when our body dies our spirit lives on.
Given
this, I’ve always taken our physical needs for granted; and though we have to
have these needs to survive, despite how much time and energy we spend to
sustain our physical survival, I’ve always felt that we have a deeper need that
drives our life, a need that is so deep it goes to the very core of our being.
Our
being is who we are, both our
physical and spiritual nature; and the need that drives our life is the need to
be who we are meant to be. Just as an acorn seed is driven by its genetic code
to become an oak tree and not a donkey, so are we driven by our own code to
become who we are meant to be. This is why everyone asks the question: Who am I?
The
poet John Keats caught a glimpse of our greatest need in a letter that he wrote
to his brother, which he titled “The Vale of Soul Making.” Keats offers a
perspective on our greatest need with a glimpse into the very heart of our
essential being: “There may be
intelligences or sparks of divinity in millions, but they are not Souls till
they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are
atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure; in short, they
are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God
to have identity given them—so as even to possess a bliss peculiar to each one
by individual existence? How but by the medium of a world like this?”
We
are all sparks of divinity, but we are not individual souls until we acquire
our own identity through the medium of our physical body (which I happen to
believe takes more than one lifetime; hence my belief in reincarnation); and it
is this need to acquire our own identity that drives all of our other needs,
just as the need for the acorn seed to become an oak tree drives its needs for
water, nutrients, and life-giving solar energy.
It’s
complicated, of course; because as we evolve through life into the person we
are meant to be we have to satisfy our need for food, clothing, and shelter;
and we have a biological need for sex that can drive us to distraction,
emotional needs to love and be loved, intellectual needs for our diverse
interests, and spiritual needs for the longing in our soul—which led the Sufi
poet Rumi to say, “These leaves, our bodily personalities, seem identical, /but
the globe of soul-fruit /we make, /each is elaborately /unique.”
In
effect, Rumi is saying that we may appear to be the same in our “bodily
personalities,” but in the essential nature of our being, our “globe of
soul-fruit,” we are all “elaborately unique.” So when we come to that point in
life when we ask the dreaded question “Who
am I?” we will not get the same answer, because we are all unique
individual beings; and trying to satisfy our need to be the unique person that
we are meant to be drives all of our other needs—which makes the need to be ourselves our greatest need in life!
For
the longest time I was puzzled by the craze of social media—Facebook, Twitter,
and other venues of self-expression—and I could not understood the incessant
need to be heard and seen by so many people; but once I solved the riddle of
our greatest need, I realized why so many people crave to be seen and heard on
social media.
“I think, therefore I am,” said
Rene Descartes, the French philosopher responsible for the mind-body split in
our understanding of human nature; but if we are more than our mind and body,
which I’ve always believed ourselves to be, than thought alone cannot satisfy
our need to be ourselves. Why then this need to be seen and heard on social
media?
It’s
lovely, nice, and very gratifying to share our personal life with friends and
family and everyone’s third cousin on Facebook and Twitter; but it seems to me
that our greatest need to be ourselves drives our need to be heard and seen on
social media, because in its own sweetly satisfying way it validates who we are
and makes our little life relevant to the whole crazy grand scheme of things,
and I can’t help but feel that if Descartes were alive today he’d probably say, “I’m on Facebook, therefore I am.”
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