This is so difficult to write and to convey because it brings crashing down the cornerstone you call reality. Few of us question the legitimacy of objects and events; it’s just the way it is. We will still pay for the work when it’s finished or throw our builders off site when we get home and look for another to finish the job. What is being suggested is that the process of abstraction, storytelling and hypnotism creates this magical, wonderful life of appearances that entertain and allow no-thing to appear as all this incredible array of things and dramas. All events, whether it’s watching a birth, mending your bike or cooking the dinner, are all the same—Wholeness, being and inseparability.
You have always been here, you were not born at some time and some place. You will not die because you were not born. You have always been the timeless, dressed in purpose, meaning and journey. What a load is shrugged off when the dream is rumbled and seen for what it is. Fifty foot gorillas are reduced to children’s action figures. Children’s action figures are up there with angels and miracles.
Fantasy and reality, like everything else, define each other and do not exist apart. There is only this—forever and ever and ever. Nothing is moving and nothing is changing. Permanence, stability and reality can never be seen or experienced. They don’t need to be. Thinking that you are experiencing something familiar and everyday is the stuff of dreams. Wholeness likes to dream; it is good drama, good entertainment. Deep sleep must get boring after a while—not much going on. A good old dream wakes us up when we sleep and when we think we are separate and alone. Appearance is dream, every last bit of it. It appears as awareness and in awareness. Consciousness never comes and never goes. It is infinite, timeless and unfathomable.
Thank the lord!
Come Fly with Me
I have mentioned ‘space’ a few times in the course of these words you are reading and assume you know what it is I am talking about. Generally speaking, it is considered to be that in which our villages, towns and cities exist. It is reaching through something in order to grasp an object and bring it closer to examine or consume in some way. Objects seem to take up space and so there is a limit to how many tiny objects you could fit in a match box or how much refuse and rubble a skip or dumpster will hold when improving the house or garden.
Space is what we travel through to get somewhere. A trip to the United States or Africa appears to take time and follow a course that can be verified by a map that someone else has drawn based on similar journeys taken in the past. This is fine as far as it goes. I mean, a trip to the States for me will take many hours from Heathrow or Gatwick in the UK, and so I will be packing my iPod to entertain me and not be content with the safety instructions in the pouch in front of me on the plane.
But spend a bit of time and examine a little closer. Space is experience. There is a knowing and feeling associated with it. The office I am in at the moment is about 3 metres by 3 metres, in everyday language, and feels pretty compact and bijou. Las Vegas, on the other hand, was a mighty big place when I visited, with structures that dwarfed just about everything in my little corner of the globe. My office is small; Las Vegas is big.
This distinction is bogus. Let me explain. I am looking at my cream-painted wall in front of me as I am typing and, to be honest, it could do with a spot of touching up or redecoration here and there. I can see bits of paint missing from sticky tape and the odd Blu-Tack mark. There seems to be a pattern if I use my imagination: the missing paint patches are little towns in the distance and the ripple textures from the paint roller are rolling fields punctuated by a few sheep and cows grazing on the grass before me. There is a pattern of light and it’s seducing my imagination to make up stories of ‘out there’ and separate.
Whether I am being amazed at the bright lights of Vegas or the splodges and imperfections of my office wall, fantasy is weaving its magic to make something out of nothing. I cannot have space separate from ‘me’ because when ‘Vegas’ or my office appears, so do I. I am labelling experience to be something in particular. So I am convincing myself that one pattern of light is called Las Vegas and another pattern my scruffy office wall, or, ‘country scene’. They are both experience and I am not separate from that. Las Vegas is abstraction both when I am talking about my trip to a place in Nevada and also when I think I am actually located somewhere very bright and in your face on Planet Earth. Thought is constantly editing to create the illusion that we are in our bag of skin and something permanent and separate is outside of us, with an independent existence. We only need enough so-called people to play along with us and we have got a real good game going on.
If you are puzzled by this, think of a dream. Whilst dreaming, common-sense tells us we are lying down somewhere, usually in a bed, and a world is appearing full of people, places and objects. There appears to be space full of most things you would find on Earth. There seems to be depth in the dream, so the dream body seems to be able to traverse the world in much the same way you do on waking up. No matter what goes on in a dream, on waking it does not take long to realise it was all imagined. Thought was up to its old tricks again and you appeared lost for a while in ideas and memory. Forget, for a moment, the interpretation of dreams as trying to tell you something profound about the inner workings of your psyche. A dream is much more than that. A dream is screaming at you to wake up and see it for what it is. It seems we can do this fine in the cool light of day when the ‘normal’ returns, such as not being able to fly or realising that monsters belong in story books and film. We seem to be able to accept space and time as illusory in our dreams, but do not allow this formulation in the waking state.
There is a common denominator to the dream state and the waking state, and that is knowing or experiencing. There is no such thing as space without experiencing. If you have ever experienced so called ‘space’ and been absent, I would like you to write a book about it and convince me. My imagination is pretty good, but that one is surely a mindbender to end all mindbenders. Mathematicians and physicists may be able to establish the reality of space using formulas and equations. Not bad. But equations in the head or written down for public scrutiny are just more experiencing. Give up. You cannot win.
Places, people, buildings and mountains are made from thought and not matter. Matter is another word for experiencing and not separate from it. How fantastic this all is, how breath-taking! Armed with this, you would not believe the sigh of relief from Wholeness. It is the same sigh of relief when you realise you have not lost your holiday money in a dream game of cards, nor has your arm been amputated in a dream car crash. Nothing that appears is real. What is real does not appear, ever. You will never find it. If you think you have, then write a book about that as well. I wouldn’t mind taking a peek at the manuscript first, though: I am always looking for something to get the barbecue going. If you are smart and full of charm and charisma, I am sure you will accumulate a following of some sort after you have put pen to paper. Count me out though. The only thing I follow is my nose to a good bar for a fine pint of ale or a good Indian restaurant for a good curry.
Sorry.
Children: No Better Guru
I just have to put finger to keyboard: I am sitting in my office looking out the window in the wake of a stormy night. I can see a little girl, no more than three-years-old, standing on the kerb in bright pink wellies gazing into the puddle below. Her mum seems to be goading her to have a splash. Without any further encouragement, in she goes. Back on the kerb and the bravery increases: ‘One, two, five—jump’ I imagine she is saying. Not one penny was needed to simply enjoy one of nature’s treasures. Not only that, her mum’s face was beaming as well, enjoying the entertainment from the safety of dry land.
I am mesmerised momentarily and stop in my tracks. For that small sample of time, the girl was not just simply playing in the water; she was the water. I bet there was no worrying about getting her trousers wet or considering mum having to wash them. No thinking, I had better be sensibl
e because mum has got enough to do with the dinner to cook and the mountain of ironing to scale. She was simply being.
This is what never really leaves us: the joy of just being. It might get covered or buried to a great depth, but when Wholeness stops pretending to be a thing that can be described, it greets itself like the prodigal son returning to the embrace of the father. It was a journey that had to be made because the joy of the return cannot be felt without some time in the wilderness. There is no mistake. It is what it is.
Children can teach us so much more than any book or master can do. They represent unconditional love in a tangible non-abstract way. Just watch any two or three-year-old playing: it sends shivers up your spine if you look without seeing and understand without thinking. They have not chosen to play: playing happens. They have not chosen to cry; they are simply crying. Conditioning and adult sensibilities, although inevitable and part of the play of being human, play a major part in hiding what is plain to see and withholding what you can easily grasp. I am not being negative here; in fact I celebrate conditioning now. How else can you see through bullshit without creating a piece to sample?
If you are spellbound by the drama of living and want to feel you are a responsible parent, you will want your child to be similar to other children and eventually similar to, or possibly more successful than, yourself. Gradually, we are taught how to see and how to think. Education slims us down so we can fit into any niche available. This simplifies things, and so homogeneity seems easier to document and deliver than heterogeneity. We can write our ten-yearly Census for the ones that take our place.
I mentioned the socially constructed self and how some theorists do not talk about Freudian structures that reside within; rather they emphasise emergent selves through activity and discourse. Looked at in this way, we find eighteenth, nineteenth or twenty-first century personalities. There are no immortal souls that will find their way to heaven aboard the ‘good person’ express. Ideas about who we are and what life means change with our sentences and our sciences.
There is little attempt within this paradigm to impose natural structure on the social world. The self is always seen as an historical artefact that has an ad hoc nature to it. Ideas and beliefs shape, and are shaped by, human sensibilities. It seems then that the isolated individual thinking his thoughts and having a secluded inner life with purpose and intention is a cultural and changeable phenomenon. The old hypnotise the young through language and an appeal to historical progress. That is what is on offer; that is what you have to work with.
This is why splashing in a puddle or playing in a sand-pit are transcendental. There is no sense of end-gaining from these activities or getting it right. You cannot make mistakes playing, or become confused about the details in a rule book about puddle splashing or sandcastle making.
There is no better grasping of what we mean by timelessness than being with children and letting them show us how to let go and just be. There seems to be very little of that censoring and self-consciousness for the child that can easily plague an adult who feels the stage lights and critical audience when new activities—and old, for that matter—are embarked upon. The gradual building up of an identity through our early adventures and misadventures and throughout life provides predictability and a knowledge base that sets a pattern for all future behaviour. Spontaneity has grown guidelines—what a contradiction in terms!
If you have a feeling for what I am trying to describe—you might have smiled at the description of the little girl puddle splashing earlier on—then you have already been where the girl is now. I do not need to go into any further detail to get my point across. You know. It has never gone away. Timelessness has dressed itself up. It has been in drag. You have become lost in the imagination of growing-up and growing old. You thought you had a purpose, a job, a spouse and a duty to perform. You are dreaming about the non-existent, the past, the future and the now. The unceasing sparkles of life have become like daggers, poking and piercing, prodding and provoking.
Liberation is letting go of the seriousness of the story—not the story itself. The world is staggering. Just look around and feel it. Ask yourself what is going on and reject with the utmost conviction any answer that pops into your head. Life has no answer. It just is. Children know this but cannot say; animals know this but do not care. Adults think they know this and that is the problem.
When you are immersed in the drama of life it is impossible to accept that there is nothing wrong with anything. You will provide data from wars, famine and homeless people. You will look at the disabled and the poor and bang your fists down, demanding a reason for all this mess. You will hope that Hitler has gone to hell and Mother Teresa to heaven. But engineering a peace process and feeding the starving is an activity that simply occurs or not. You don’t do it. It happens. Likewise, pulling over whilst driving to help a stranded motorist is a kind thing to do: the steering wheel goes left rather than straight on, and two wheels mount the pavement to enquire about assistance. Just like playing is for the child, life does it all. You are off the hook.
Hatch, Match and Dispatch
Open up your local newspaper and you will probably find a page with births, marriages and deaths. Laid before you is all of life, wrapped up in print like a portion of fish and chips. Familiar names may grab your attention and thoughts like, Ooh, they’ve had a baby, or, Wow, they finally got hitched. That won’t last! Or finally, Arrh, shame… he used to be a bloody good darts player as well.
We are experiencing emotions in the same manner as if we are turning the pages of our favourite novel. Both are embellished; both are fictitious. We can cry with our novels and cry when we experience loss, joy and anger. We do not manufacture these emotions—they simply arise. Have you ever tried to stop yourself crying to avoid embarrassment when you are with others, or had the giggles when you are supposed to be serious? It is a battle, isn’t it? Emotions are so overwhelming; you cannot separate yourself from them. In that moment your identity is the emotion; you are not a person experiencing them.
This is more about death than relationships and birth. Death is a real conundrum, more so than birth or marriage. Where will we go? What will it be like? Will we be punished? Who else will be there? Will we find out the secret?
We could go on and on with this list and I am sure you can provide your own ideas and fears. More than anything else, non-being and nothingness cannot be sorted out using logic and reasoning. No one has come back from the dead and told us what to expect. Sure there is documentation for near-death experiences. But near-death is not death. Whatever it is, someone comes back and tell us what they experienced—light, tunnels and peace. These are experiences; they are known. Death is surely absence of the one that knows. If it’s known… you are not dead, are you?
Deep sleep is surely a kind of death. There is an absence here as well, but any notion of absence is a concept like anything else. We talk about it whilst thought is operating and not in conversation between two dead people. So, this is what makes death a no brainer. You would think logic of this nature would quieten the mind. In actuality it appears to stimulate it. It can go off on one and start religions and faiths to account for supernatural activity. The mind does not let logic get in the way of a good scary story. It will conjure up and pull no end of rabbits out the hat. It is its job, you see. It cannot help it. It has to know something. Knowing nothing is not an option. That is fine and dandy. Leave it alone. You will only make it worse if you seem interested.
Perhaps death is all there is. Apparent life is death at room temperature. A little cooler is dream stuff and fantasy. Look at it as you will. Death will always be clothed in fantasy like everything else experienced. This does not mean we laugh and joke when a loved one goes still and stiff and stops talking. Powerful emotions arise and show themselves, and memories occupy our thoughts more than listening to the words of condolence our friends and relatives offer. We grieve.
/> My dad died in 2002 from mesothelioma, a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos on building sites in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. I remember touching his cold, hard body and thinking he felt like a shop dummy. We could not talk not even to argue. There he was, no more than 70 pounds of skin and bone occupying only half of a single bed. What got to me was watching the funeral directors carrying him downstairs in a black body bag. It reminded me of a butcher with a pig slung over his shoulder. Both had ceased to be; only we whisk our corpses away from the gaze of the living. It’s hushed up, this dying lark.
Surprisingly, this first experience of death of someone close had more than one emotion or thought attached. Yes, there was sadness and a sense of loss, but there was also a knowing at some level that there is only life. Death is not the end of anything. If it is the end, then what was it that began? My dad never manufactured his birth or death. The processes that form the body are the same ones that eventually clear it away. Everything is taken care of.
The World is My Mirror Page 11