The
Ferryman’s End
The icon for burnout
This ferryman’s craft (i.e. his skill)
lies dead in the water. In simple Irish terms, this ferryman has ‘lost the
plot’ and feels awful. His craft (i.e. his primary function) is his active
pursuit of a (indeed any) meaningful, that is to say, fulfilling goal/plot
(i.e. the ‘other shore’). When he reaches his goal, i.e. touches the ‘other
shore’, he (and his passengers) comes alive (i.e. is/are reborn). However, when that goal, ‘the other
shore’, fades, disappears or dies, the ferryman (to wit, his craft) comes to
a halt and he sinks (meaning that he burns out, as during the mid-life
crisis), and his life, meaning his survival drive/skill, (becomes depressed)
and extinguishes. Unable (or unwilling*) to move, for he/she has no goal that
drives him/her, he/she can no longer reach and touch the ‘other’ shore. Fundamentally, the ‘other shore’ is (a
metaphor for) difference, namely ‘difference that makes a difference.’ It is
becoming different that gives life (a new lease). ‘This shore’ is (a metaphor
for) sameness. Sameness decays life, i.e. brings death. Unable to touch, i.e. to make contact with
difference the ferryman cannot become real, identified and fully energized
(hence elated), meaning fully alive. Unmoving, that is to say, adrift in
sameness, he sinks and dies together with his passengers. The ferryman’s craft, i.e. his most
basic (survival) skill, is creating (i.e. receiving) and transmitting
difference, thereby making himself and those to whom he transmits his
difference (actually his passengers) real and meaningful, and happy too. The icon (rather than sculpture) of the
Ferryman’s End represents the individual who, mired in sameness, that is to
say, in wholly meaningless activity, is losing touch with the real world,
personal or general, and is, consequently, experiencing burnout and feeling
like he or she is dying. The sense of realness (i.e. of ‘I am’ness’, Sanskrit: soham), the release of energy
(read: enlightenment) and the manifestation of personal identity (i.e. of
unique difference) all emerge as after-effects of contact by ‘this’ (i.e.
dying ‘me’) with ‘that’ (i.e. ‘not me’ that brings new life). Loss of contact
(i.e. of connectivity, for instance, when your smartphone doesn’t work and
you can’t socialize and so begin to feel lost, or when you’ve lost interest
in your job or hobby because it appears as meaningless activity) results in increased
feelings of un-realness and loss of energy (experienced as depression),
which in turn result in the fading of identity (and self-meaning) and an
increase in unhappiness (the latter telling the individual that his or her relative
survival capacity is decreasing, i.e. that he or she is failing/dying). For
dynamic hence predatory bio-systems such as the human, disconnection, losing
touch (and fading ≈ dying), because not being able to feed on
difference, is inevitable. Firstly because contact is momentary (i.e.
quantized, i.e. step/contact by step/contact). And, secondly, because only
new (i.e. differential-to-random) contacts (i.e. food) can actually happen
and thereby restore (or rebirth) to life. In other words, ‘only difference
makes a difference’, meaning that repetition, i.e. sameness (is compressed
out because it) can’t make contact. In short, for an individual to stay
alive, i.e. to be fully real, conscious and joyful (i.e. self-realized),
he/she must continuously touch or be touched, each time differently (and
which the dying ferryman cannot do, or will not do because of an act of
self-sacrifice*). The
individual who tries to be still, to avoid new contact and remain the same,
i.e. to live in the ‘here & now’ (i.e. on ‘this shore’), stops, decays
and dies. The
ferryman’s craft/skill is his (or her) capacity to create (meaning: become) a
bit or bite of difference by means of which he or she makes contact and
thereby survives. Anyone who creates and transmits difference and so
generates realness and alternate identities (i.e. new worlds), thereby giving
life, is a true ferryman. *… The saint (for instance, the Buddhist
Bodhisattva) voluntarily
stays put on the river, as it were between the two shores of sameness (to
wit, death) and difference (to wit, life), hence beyond sameness/death and
difference/life (called nirvana), in order to ferry all (or allow all to step over him)
from death to life. In this regard see my book:
‘Autobiography of an Awakened Creature’ © 1991 © 2021 by Victor Langheld |
