Otherness
I
Understanding ourselves as people-cells of Yasha requires the willingness to lie in bed with otherness, to acknowledge we are part of one wholism with those we most disagree with. So we must grow skillful in our handling of otherness, begin to recognize its effects on us: the shift in atmosphere, the coolness, the slight drawing back, the entrance of aggression or quiet departure. Let us note the specific anatomy of relational disintegration and the common thread of shadowland fear that causes our hearts to quiver, our minds to recoil, and our hair-trigger emotionalism to be kindled. Our fear of otherness is the powerful and catalytic dread so often lying at the root of division. A visceral anxiety that dwells on the border of blind caterwauling, and teeth-tearing, it is a panderer that cunningly plays on our revulsion from the unknown. It is an untaught fear that robs us of reason, scares us into lashing out and goads us into poor decision-making.
What lives outside our circle of known thinking, of codified behaviors, scares us. We revile viewpoints alien to our own, despise what is foreign another: the unfamiliar behavior discordant and jolting to our outlook. Otherness encompasses the strangeness of another person’s perceptions and imaginings. Otherness is the aloof element, the inherent solitude that refuses possession. It is whatever hints to us of the world vast and entire, existing just beyond the boundaries of another person’s life. Poet Ranier Maria Rilke writes, “A merging of two people is an impossibility,” for as we travel toward another, the foreign ideas within them seem to edge farther away. The closer we draw in, the farther off their center seems to be. It is otherness that lays down this ultimatum: I cannot conform myself to you. You cannot conform yourself to me.
Otherness brings the forbidding awareness of something outside of our ken and beyond our control. To our conscious minds it has the feel of limiting blinders, of not knowing fully and not being fully known, becoming aware of each person’s boundless and inscrutable terrain. However minutely we have memorized the outline of another person, Otherness reveals that we know only their outermost borders. We experience behaviors, catch glimpses here and there of their thoughts through speech’s clumsy medium, but can hardly begin to penetrate the complexity of another mind. No matter how detailed our familiarity with their silhouette, their inner self remains impenetrable to our understanding, both penumbral and deeper shadowlands.
Otherness forces acknowledgment of our vulnerability because it asks us to accept the instability of being human. Otherness confronts us with the truth that what you depend on in another person may evaporate at any time. Otherness can arrive as a predator in the night to seize our relational holdings, dragging away what is familiar that we cling to. By reminding us of the inherent mutability in relationship, otherness touches on our intrinsic solitude, Two othernesses cannot entirely pulse the same rhythm, but bookend a distance that fundamentally resists eradication. A brush with otherness evokes the animal awareness of our isolation—of the part of you and the part of me that dwell separate, apart, and trembling in the dark.
Despite all this, otherness mesmerizes us. It holds sway over our emotions, because we crave its animating presence. We long for a counterpart, our restive spirit reaching out for an answering call. We open the door to otherness because we want its help to process our identity and form our story. We crave input from a separate well of understanding: gestures, and facial responses from others to gain self-definition. Jungian analyst Polly Young-Eisendrath writes:
The self is what we rehearse of what others say about us; what we react to in what others do to and with us; and what we see in how others mirror us back to ourselves.
Time and again we reach out to otherness to define us, long for it to gather and heal us. We ever hold out the question, “Who am I?” to those around us, and the answers we receive inform the way we build the airy thinness of our selfhood.
And yet, in all this, we seek a specific type of feedback. We crave a confirming and comforting response, restricting our interaction to those who will hold up the same mirror image of ourselves we know. Resident within the human heart is this desperate and abiding wish: to catch a glimpse of our own familiar image in the mirror of another and for our self-same thoughts and feelings to be echoed back in dulcet tones.
But when otherness covers its honest response, we often draw back, affronted. In push-me, pull-you fashion, we reel and flee until we find we cannot do without otherness and return thirsty for more. We develop a love-hate relationship, continually reaching out our hand toward otherness and then snatching it back. For otherness is not a genie in a bottle, is uncommitted to confirming the image of ourselves we cling to. Instead, like a warped fun-house looking glass, otherness returns our familiar visage with buckling distortions, stretching our portrait with unpredictable irregularities. Though we ask otherness for self-definition, we often refuse to believe what it tells us, turning our backs to protect our fragile egos from its stinging astringency.
II Key in the Lock
If we can travel beyond our fear, we will begin to understand that otherness has a pure and redemptive quality, a golden strand, piercing and direct. Otherness is the persistent reminder of the divine, the main source in the world of the vital and fluid. Organic in movement, liquid, protean and mutable, otherness unfurls like plant growth, like root-spread and branch-reach. Wild and untamable, the hallmark of otherness is stamped with complexity, with intricate fractal geometries of increase and Fibonacci-like escalation of design. Unlike humanly engineered, sequential, growth patterns, it eschews insular methodologies and provincialism.
Otherness glories in a rich variety of cultures, tongues, preferences, and diverse customs of sundry beauty. Cultural custom, contrasting tribal traditions, idiosyncratic familial behaviors form its adornments; peculiarities of individual habits, quirks, preferences are its cufflinks. It is otherness that casts for us a vision of self-actualization, of what each person’s individuality was created to gift the world with. Like sunlight on seawater, otherness draws the dazzle from the sea depths. It is our true individualism, our primary source of vigor, and fundamental wellspring of growth.
Otherness is a chief gift to man, a piece of the heavenly come to earth. Not what is earthy ––the common way of understanding. Not what is bound and unenlightened, but what is heavenly, other. Among what is unjust and base, otherness conveys the elemental trace of creativity from God. All have been given a shard of separateness that spills over with divinity. Otherness reminds us of this deep truth: the multi-faceted nature of God is pieced out to each one of us. Each of us has our own otherness that when gathered together reveals the streaming glory of the divine personality; we are each a diamond point of originality revealing the face of God, who is the ultimate other.
Otherness remains the key mainspring, the genius in the concept of the larger body of humanity. How the people-cells fit together is locked away in the treasure house of otherness; that we are other is our hope. Sameness lacks the vitality and power to meaningfully cohere us. Though we mistakenly undervalue it now, at the end of time otherness will be revealed as the lodestone that drew coherence to our aggregate humanity and lay adamantine at the base of our unity.
Hidden out of our sight as we pursue a relentless monoculture, join ranks whenever we can with the like–minded, take up the rallying cry of sameness. Rather than perceiving otherness as against us, we must grow to understand that we are together caught in a gigantic sham of pretense in which our differences appear like something to be conquered and overcome. Otherness waits in the hallways of our lives, broods on how to gather and heal us into the interlocking body of humanity. Occupying the interstices, dwelling in the crossroads, otherness calls: come to the borders of your own personality, reach across, and don’t be afraid.
When we become willing to embrace otherness we draw near to the strip on no man’s land at the border of our selfhood. Here in the in-between, a table of equal power is laid. At this table that eschews hierarchy, neither party has the upper hand nor dominion of thought; neither retains the right to dictate, oppress or subsume. The table of otherness is a place of absolute equality where the status, wealth, and authority of all parties are nullified. There, a freedom exists, as a child gives without guile or pretense and receives without shame or humiliation.
To be willing to come into contact with someone’s otherness is the most courageous and defining act of our lives: to do so we must relinquish ourselves to the unknown. To be face-to-face with otherness is a place of searing nakedness, where the possibility arises of unfeigned knowing and being known. Here our innermost vulnerability is laid bare, deep and entire, that we might come bereft of pretension, and the best of us can be gathered and given back to us.
The table of otherness has this protocol: to unflinchingly protect individuality, to stand guard over the solitude of another2 and protect it from any other being, even ourselves. Working toward resilient unity, then, requires this recognition: it is not otherness that is the enemy, but the deep fear that rises up to thwart our desire for relationships. In our Neanderthal emotionalism we have mistakenly thought of what kindles our inward trembling as the adversary, but it is the fear itself that we must learn to oppose.
Our response when afraid is a hinge-point, a defining moment in which we opt to cohere or withdraw, to embrace unity or to collude with its demise. Our choices at these moments aggregate to an overall tenor of our individual relationships on the micro-level and determine our ability to coordinate on the macro-level. And so what we elect when we are confronted by otherness shapes our future relational capacity. When we catch a glimpse of its hallmark clothing, we must learn to set a welcome mat at the doorstep of our hearts and cultivate an intentional reverence. Our growth in resilient relationships relies on it.
Thus a central component of our individual and collective relational health is learning a rubric of otherness, developing wisdom to navigate its rocky shoreline. Otherwise our longings for lasting community can be easily short-circuited by the fear-based emotionalism we experience when confronted by otherness. In our partisan mindset, we will feed what little unity and common understanding we have to the gaping maw of our own terror. Then fear will stand at the bedside of our relationships and act as doula to the birth of dissolution, ushering in disintegration and welcoming division to come squalling into the world.
When we come here, we realized that our fears have lied to us. Otherness is not something to run from, but is this true beauty: otherness gathers us and heals us…
Our moments of encounter at its table are the truly defining moments of our selfhood, where the best of us is gathered by another and given back to us. And there is the freedom of a child to give without guile or pretense, to receive without shame or humiliation. To be laid bare in the open humanity of giving and receiving . not having to assert or declare who we are but the noble and the ugly gathering, swirl and pool around ankles and we simply own in quietness every facet of our being. And reach hands across the table to embrace all of the other person’s humanity as well—in the glory of who they are: good and bad enmeshed, in full acceptance of their humanity, of their not-godness. Part of being not god. Without control or beating submission, asking them to change or conform to our preferences. The table of otherness has this protocol: to unflinchingly protect the individuality of the other person as sacred, to stand guard over the other person’s solitude from impingement by anyone, especially ourselves.