So, I am saying that abstraction and storytelling are essentially the same thing. Calling a ‘cup’ a cup is no problem. It can form part of our narrative when we tell someone about our favourite one or how we dropped Grandma’s antique one when a child and being slapped for our carelessness. Storytelling is entertaining; there is a kind of magic to it.
But storytelling is a ‘happening’, a current activity. The ideas for our stories appear presently and colour consciousness this way and that. The same editing goes on when we describe the vicissitudes of our love life to our best friend or the way people we know appear to us over time. It is as if the moment we start to talk and think we are adding a chapter to the epic we call ‘me and my life’.
This is why as soon as we start to talk about non-duality it becomes fantasy. We know it’s fantasy because ‘reality’ cannot be talked about directly: there is nothing to talk about. All the words you may hear at a satsang or meeting point to something that cannot be grasped and cannot be pinned down. If you have been to a few meetings or watched YouTube videos of people asking questions, you will notice and feel the frustration of the ‘spiritual’ seeker trying to fit what is being suggested into a familiar framework that underpins our day-to-day stories. Time, purpose and logic appear over and over again. You will not get this; you cannot take it home with you and display it on your mantelpiece.
This is excellent news, however. If you understood It, you would be someone understanding something. You are back to square one. Not knowing is another way of pointing to seamless Wholeness. Not knowing is what’s left when stories are seen as stories. Not knowing is peace. Not knowing is constant wonderment. Not knowing can’t be known. Not knowing is.
Unlike abstraction and stories, experiencing or being need absolutely nothing. You cannot embellish being to make it look more attractive and more exciting; you’ve got diddlysquat to work with. It is already complete as this timelessness right here, right now. Can you see why ‘unconditional love’ is a term that is used frequently? Being asks for nothing and gives everything. You can never leave yourself; yourself can never leave you. There are no parts and no pieces. Prior to appearances—you are, and with appearances—you are. If that’s not pointing to completeness and oneness for you, then you are very hard to please. When Wholeness ‘sees’ itself it realises it ‘cannot’ see itself; it is itself. Silence and stillness in the form of calamity and farce continue to dance around. The court jester we call our life continues to entertain and amuse. We can still cry, we can still smile, and we can still get angry. Aliveness will not be tamed by stories. Aliveness appears as stories. There is no story that will be the end of all stories. Stories are the beginning, the middle and the end of everything.
Nothing needs to be any different to what already is. It is when fantasy seduces us that life can become serious business. Believing that there really are people outside of us, encircling us, placing us in the middle and taunting us, is the stuff of nightmares and dreams. Row after row of other faces, other bodies and other voices gnaw at us constantly. Some throw abuse; others throw sticks and stones. Their eyes seem to pierce our soul. They can see our filthy core. We will never live up to the standard they demand because they will shift the goalposts and reserve their praise for tomorrow or the next day. We try to please and bargain for some respite. We may be granted the odd concession and life may look a little rosier. But remember, roses have their thorns as well. Do not be fooled by the sweet smell of victory: thorns and brambles are never far away to tangle and trip us.
The point I am making is that abstraction and storytelling can take hold to such an extent they can drown us and suck the lifeblood out of us, leaving just the shrivelled skin and empty husk. Timeless being trumps all stories, all fantasy.
The good news is that we can still edit by adding and deleting and make up all sorts of stories. We can believe we were born, we can believe that we will die. We can shake hands with someone, hug, kiss and love them with all our heart. Nothing needs to be any different.
To kiss another person’s lips is to kiss our own. To shake another’s hand is to shake our own. We are only ever experiencing ourselves through everything life throws at us. We can stop pretending; stop believing we’re someone or something. We have played our game and made our point. Suffering and confusion can wake us up in the same way falling from a great height in a dream can. We will never hit the ground in a dream and we will never reach the base of a bottomless pit. Once we see there is only dream, the impact of a ‘me’ having a life becomes as ridiculous as the impact from the bottomless pit. We can pull ourselves together—there’s no need to pull ourselves apart!
Reading what has been written about abstraction and concepts and socially constructed meanings can be mighty difficult to grasp if we only know and accept what we have been taught about life, the universe and everything. The so-called solid world is perhaps too solid and real to be questioned. The hypnotic spell is taking a long while to wear off. A click of the fingers to be ‘back in the room’ does not seem to work for us. I am going to look at hypnotism in the next chapter, simply because it deserves a good seeing to. I want to end this one, though, with how I see the process of abstraction and the formulation of concepts.
Have you seen the television programme How It’s Made? They take everyday objects, such as a drink can or a musical instrument, and show you from start to finish the various processes that go into producing it from raw materials at one end to a recognisable, fully functioning thing at the other. Imagine you are in a trumpet factory producing high quality instruments for professional musicians. You are watching the production line where various people perform different tasks and assemble separate pieces, ready to send it on to the next guy down the line. You watch as the brass gets rolled and shaped by the metal worker, hammering and soldering the seams to an invisible airtight seal. Tubes get bent and valves sit nicely into holes. Heating and polishing ensure durability and attractiveness, and the guy has a blow and a press to test-drive the birth of a new addition to the family. Finally, it gets wrapped and boxed and labelled as ‘trumpet’.
Now, abstraction is the same kind of process as the one described above. Let us take something not man-made, say a flower, a rose, maybe. If you could observe one right now you might notice its stem and its leaves. You can feel the thorns and smell the aroma. Count the petals and notice those central projections we call stamens that produce pollen at the tip, and we are well on our way to describing the rose. If thought is our factory production line, then we have taken the raw materials, in this case the noticed parts, the visible parts, of the flower, and stuck them together through investigation and knowledge. The parts have been processed. We have selected some parts over others. But, just as with the trumpet, there is no flowerness or trumpetness there which is above and beyond the entire process of mental model building and labelling. Look at it this way: if the trumpet went out of fashion and orders were down, the factory could start making fancy brass funnels out of the end piece of the trumpet. Similar processes could take place to produce it, it would just be quicker and a new label would be printed saying ‘brass funnels’. The same brass is functioning differently. There is no trumpet or funnel that can be labelled once and for all. For those of you in a pedantic mood there is no brass either: brass is an alloy of zinc and copper.
Similarly, the thing we call ‘rose’ might simply be regarded as a natural device for making petals, whose only use is to scent water for special ceremonies and rituals on the fourth Sunday of every month in a leap year. Roses would therefore be non-existent: they have no function other than to make petals for a sacrament. Sending a single red rose to a loved one might be considered offensive, or even blasphemous.
So concepts are the result of mental abstraction and not the depiction of a solid, preformed, pre-existing and unchanging world out there, to be observed and recorded for all time. If you are brave enough, look at the body and the self in the same way. The mind may
resist this kind of exploration; just give it a slap and tell it to listen for once. I will leave you to explore this on your own without any of my ideas contaminating you. All I will say is this: if you come up with anything interesting, discard it and start again.
My take on things, as you will realise, is to look for yourself, feel for yourself and stop hanging on to a guru, master or celebrity spiritual teacher. They are all a load of pants, and rightly so. I am not being disparaging here; I am just alerting you to the fact that you are the sole authority on yourself and not the ideas from fictitious characters in a book or film. Paying more money to sit closer to a famous teacher is just unnecessary. Mind you, you won’t listen to me or my load of pants either. Your dream is your dream. Just because I didn’t go to meetings does not mean you shouldn’t. That bolt of lightning might strike you—who knows? In some ways writing down these words will always be my take on things and I won’t pretend it isn’t.
Look Into My Eyes
Don’t forget, we are still in the pub, you and me, and the red leather seats are warming up nicely. The snow is still falling and the ale is still flowing.
‘Another plate of strong cheese and fresh crusty bread, please, barman!’
‘I want you to simply relax and concentrate on my voice. Look into my eyes, and allow yourself to trust me completely, unquestionably and wholeheartedly… You’re under.’
‘Everything I say from now on you are to believe and not doubt a single word: you are a separate entity that was born in the past and will die in the future. You live on a planet we call ‘Earth’. You exist with other people similar to you. There is something called ‘time’ that will ensure your progress through life as you reach your goal and realise your purpose. The goal is... ’
‘3-2-1, you’re back in the room.’
We are all familiar with hypnosis, both as a form of therapy to rid us of phobias or to arrest our unhealthy eating habits, and as entertainment in a stage show that can highlight how suggestible and gullible we can be.
I remember, whilst on holiday with my brother, we witnessed a stage hypnotist convince a young woman there was a fairy only a few inches tall dancing and singing right in front of her. The woman had been convinced that this Tinkerbell was the most magical and kindest fairy that had ever lived. In fact Tinkerbell was the best friend she’d ever had. The joy and love in her eyes was amazing to see and there was no doubt some message had been implanted into her brain. The real test was when my brother walked on stage and squashed poor Tinkerbell dead. Of course, the hypnotist orchestrated this manoeuvre and so it was all part of the act. Watching this woman slap my brother so hard around the face, though, raised an almighty laugh from the audience and a sense of amazement from me that anyone can be convinced of something so supernatural.
Well, if you subscribe to the view about birth, death, planets and time, you are also under a spell. You are asleep. You are dreaming. You are totally immersed in the drama you call ‘me and my life’. Just like the woman watching her beloved Tinkerbell, you have taken on board a view of life that is bogus and fragmented. A life that you have been convinced that you have, that you own. Parents, teachers and peers, in fact the entire back catalogue of human history is weaving its magic and showing us how to see and what to see. There is a consensus reality of objects and perceivers that colour our every thought, our every action, and reaction. The world is out there and obvious. You are seeing it and interacting with it. It is full of peril. It is full of danger. You have got to make it work because you have a life and you better look after it. You had better play the game and play it well. Sit up straight, stop slouching. Eat your dinner and be grateful you are not poor and starving. Love your parents and respect your elders and those of higher status and class. Enjoy education; it is for your own good. Learn about the world and learn about your place in the cosmos and in the scheme of things. Play your role: you are a man, a woman; you are English or African; you are a Buddhist or a Christian. Save the whale but abuse your spouse. Be ‘good’ in this life and gloat in the next. Progress is good, we are going somewhere. Tomorrow things will be better.
I will stop there because you are probably running out of breath. I have told it like this to give the sense of absolute frenetic activity and railroad expectations. Unceasing and unrelenting doing and becoming appear to be so commonplace. For most it appears there is no problem with ‘normality’. We accept we were born and had a beginning, and we accept, probably with degrees of fear and imagination, our eventual demise. Some of us think that we will leave this world behind to continue somewhere else, a ‘better place’, with the secret laid at our feet and the satisfaction we have done well.
Many people, it seems, have accepted life as it is presented to them from a very young age by those who genuinely want us to function well and play the same game everyone is playing and not appear out of place, or, even worse, mad, bad or a total misfit. We become socialised and hypnotised. In short, we are conditioned.
Conditioning reminds me of Pavlov’s dogs. If you are not familiar with this, I will explain. Pavlov was a Russian physiologist working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was interested in the digestive system and performed experiments on animals. He wired them up and studied their digestive chemicals, how they are produced and how they function. Whilst studying dogs and the salivation associated with feeding times, he noticed that even before the food was presented, the dog salivated at the seeing of the white coat of the experimenter. The dog had made a connection between ‘white coat’ and ‘dinner time’. The dog was behaving based on future predictions. In a way, a kind of mental world that paired an everyday neutral event with a reward was operating at some level for the animal.
Are we much different? As babies our rudimentary gurgles and babblings are greatly shaped by reinforcement in the wake of intonation and praise from an adult who tries to get baby to say ‘car’. At first, a just noticeable ‘C’ might be all that is needed for a smile and hug from Mum or Dad. You can see that over time a pattern of light that resembles the object we regularly receive a hug for, might result in a pointy finger and a clear reciting of ‘car’. Hand claps and praise, ‘clever little boy’, stand in for a plate of butcher’s tripe and a Bonio biscuit.
This, to me, is the beginning of hypnosis. The stage hypnotist does his warm-up routine in half an hour to select a suitable victim; education in ‘humans’ takes a little longer. Once achieved, though, it is a devil to extinguish. If only we could be reassured by a life hypnotist for being a wonderful participant and that we will remember nothing of the evening. We could walk into reality like walking back to our seat. A round of applause and a ribbing from our witnesses might be all that is needed for us to stop pretending. I am saying this, but if it is seen for what it is, then nothing needs to change and nothing needs to alter. You are already one hell of a miracle. Believing you are a farmyard chicken clucking your head off is nothing to what there is on a day-to-day basis. Taking a look at your own hands now and again and saying to yourself, “What on earth are these?” is enough to break the spell. You never made them; they just appear, like the morning sunshine and the evening moonlight.
Creating the Drama
If you have experienced the relief of waking from a bad dream, you will know how it feels not to have actually lost a loved one or perhaps not to have actually murdered someone and not actually have the police hot on your trail. On waking, you can rest assured that what you thought was real was only fantasy and imagination. Phew!
This chapter will explore the possibility of that ‘phew’ happening right here, right now in the so-called waking state. Just as in the dream, the apparent everyday life of relationships, jobs, birth and death is a creation, a fantasy—a fabrication. It belongs just as much to the thoughts and ideas of those that precede you as it does to you, the person reading this now. It is all made-up. None of it is happening. It is all dream appearance. ‘You’ do not ‘have’ a mother, father, brother
or sister. There is no outside world full of animals, mountains and weather systems.
No. Thinking is concocting the whole shebang. Nothing, but nothing, exists outside of thought. Concepts are handed down to us to reduce the fear of the unknown, both for the benefactor and the recipient. You are being handed a baton by those already on the move. Grasp it and run! Round and round you go chasing, chasing and chasing. You can pass it on if you like—it might just ease the burden—or drop it and exit the race. What you think of as an external world is ‘thinking’ doing what it does best: creating stories, or—more colloquially—bullshitting!
I want to take a look at this bullshitting to see how it starts; its function; why it can create fear of a world; and—more importantly—why it can lead to anxiety and the fear of other people.
To assist us, I am going to create an analogy using a cinema screen and the curtains. The curtains seem to obscure the screen and so control how much light is on view. The screen is representing timeless being and the curtains can be thought of as internal mental structures built from very early experiences. Some lives seem to exist with the curtains tightly shut and others have them drawn back to differing degrees, creating various openings and life experiences. The curtains, or mental structures, only appear to block out light. Whatever you think is happening, and no matter whether you have a love story, horror movie or comedy, the light is always burning as brightly as ever behind the scenes; you only have to turn around and see. The drama itself seems hypnotising and serious, but it is the light that illuminates all scripts, all acts and all scenes. It not only illuminates; it appears in and as every picture.
The World is My Mirror Page 7