A falling drop.
"... one must accept the thoughts that go within oneself of their own accord as part of one's reality." (1)
There was a time when there was no time
To experience it you must loose your identity
And having lost your identity no one is left to describe it.
When your identity returns
There you are not anymore;
That time comes back to time
Existence defeats description.
The experience of it
That is our lot.
And that comes at the end
Of our allotted time.
As for those who get a glimpse of it,
That is a glimpse of a timeless time
And no one was there to witness it.
These may seem
Just reveries of the mind,
But how does the mind get to it
If it is not there?
There was a time when there
was no time ....
.
‘Me’ was never born, while ‘I’ is a different story, a natural planetary happenstance close to eighty years old; I cannot recall how it happened nor have I have ever fallen in the hands of a depth psychologist to find out, somewhat like a guinea pig in a deep hypnotic trance, to learn the truth. I presume that my link with the safe and warm uterine world was severed, I was extracted, slapped on wet and tender butts and surely I did make a hell of it and my prenatal ‘me’ went into oblivion while ‘I’, willy nilly, had to get a start; it does not really needs hypnotic regression to find out how it happened. Time went by before I was told, and had to accept, that I was born but that is not unusual, you too might have been told a similar story and had to accept it but the similarity may, for environmental and familiar events, end here. Like every son/daughter with reasonably good parents, I was not considered completely normal and that is fine, normality pertains to robots and not to human beings; abnormal robots are somehow recycled while abnormal humans are not easily disposed off and, in most cases, more tenderly cared of. My great luck, even if I lived within a Catholic Christian community, is that, even if I never understood to what extent my parents were religious, they were not in the least bigots although all those nonsensical Christian sacraments demanded by tradition and the social milieu were my lot. Useless to say, this saved me a lot of brainwashing and nonsense (2) and, to my parents, I have but to be deeply grateful for this. My first great Christian experience was in a Catholic kinder garden where an old nun, possibly somewhat 'Alzheimer-ed', used to repeat incessantly "time goes by and death approaches" and did not brainwash those little souls in her care with the Ten Commandments. But thus she pushed me in a more rational view of life than towards monasticism ... should I not, now beyond average age-span when the angel of death is just beyond the corner, thank her? Time went by ... in my school, that was Asmara’s Comboni College, there were Catholic and Coptic Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Protestants and more and surely that contributed to an open mind, freed from racial and religious prejudices. A rare blessing the contact with indigenous Eritrean students in this pot that contained Indians, Arabs, Italians, Greeks, Armenians and more; there were not whites, blacks of yellows among us. A garden with no stinging plants! The teachers were Christian Missionaries of the order of Daniele Comboni (3) but, due to the ethnic diversity and related religious background of the students, religious teaching was not compulsory and this, as well, avoided noxious widespread brainwashing; education reinforces the habit of seeing the world through a certain lens.
As luck would have it and with a rebellious temperament during adolescence I realized that not a few veils were obscuring my mind’s sight so that I started, in one way or another, to try rid myself of this darkness and never did I desert this task which, day by day brought into my life many books and more bits of knowledge, not less so a deeper obscurity into which a mysterious, very hard to catch, small ray of light shone on the difficult path of infinity. There, in the nowhere, my ‘me’ had patiently been waiting to be discovered and what did I find? That, that ‘me’ is an insubstantial non-entity which does not, in the least, carry the label ‘private property’ since ‘me’ it is a universal pillar sustaining each ‘I’ anywhere in the universe wherever a sentient being is capable of attaching an ego to himself. And, as such, it cannot but be unborn and is not contained within the fringes of time and space, less so in a multitude of erect-walking bags of flesh and bones, although it takes pleasure to hide himself in the nowhere as soon as we fall in the somewhere.
'Me’ is the essence of ‘I’; it develops, grows and matures feeding of the subjective experience of ‘I’. It is the psyche’s play field and as well, it receives feedback from the psyche.
Everyone has his own belief, his own interpretation and his own say, to what extent am I off track? That is a difficult question, perhaps for all of us since the mind is a stormy wave never at rest.
I do not believe in pure coincidence, there is an exact, even if often hidden or inexplicable meaning-connection in whatever seems coincidental or pure chance; (4) to me not a rare happenstance. In a moment of relaxation from this insane "I-me" I went to some old magazines bound together and opening at random through its pages, the following passage, which I interpolate in this writing, showed up begging to be reproduced in between these lines before I resume digging into ‘my’ mind:
Can
the Obvious be seen?.
The
notion of a conceptual ‘ego’ confuses the issue. The word ‘ego’ means
‘I’-and no such thing (object) could possibly be conceived, for ‘an
I’ is merely a contradiction-in-terms.
What is conceptual is the notion represented by the pronoun ‘me’.
As ‘I’ I am forever inconceivable: as ‘me’ I am a conceptual image extended
in space-time, manipulated psychically, and assuming an illusory autonomy.
My space-time ‘life’ as ‘me’ consists of a series of spatial and temporal
incidents experienced by an objectivised ‘entity’ whose sole virtuality
is that it is I.
As such I cannot experience at all- since only what is objective can
suffer experience (which is any sensation whatever).
In preaching the abolition of ‘suffering’ the Buddha sought to make
this evident. We are still trying to do this. Could it be too obvious
to be seen?
Wei Wu Wei (5)
Back, to my possibly insane cerebration, I turn now
to another subject concerning my apparent subjectivity. The question
'what am I?' has never insistently intrigued me, so much so also the
'who am I?' although it might have received more personal attention;
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded
on our thoughts”. (6)
That which really intrigues me is the 'why am I?' Surely, I did not
gain existence on this beautiful planet just to feed the so many cats
who filled my life to the brim. Then, on the assumption that there is
purpose in the universe, 'why?'
Why am I writing these lines, why are you reading them, why are we,
unknown to each other and separated by a given period of time and an
indefinite distance involved in this intellectual task? This can easily
be surmised: that we may understand and be reciprocally discursive,
even in disagreement, points to a mysteriously shared substratum, an
intangible wide-expanse intellectual chessboard where our lives are
played otherwise this could not happen, everyone would be a lonely stranger
helplessly stranded on the planet. The conundrum is 'why are we?'
I am an heretic, an iconoclast:
no religion, godless, no divine or other celestial guides. Nor are dogs,
hirudineans and rotters allowed in my compounds; this does not mean
that I despise or hate the aforementioned, the words despise and hate
do not belong to my dictionary; I simply try to avoid foolishness and
ignorance: mine are enough and far from being overcome, if
ever. My teachers in life have been mostly printed pages from remarkable
individuals, most of them belonging to the planet’s eastern hemisphere;
a long time have I spent fishing out the best fishes from the rivers
of their thoughts and, not less so, from the ocean of the world’s religions;
"... whoever does not want to die of thirst among men must learn
to drink from all cups." (7)
All the same the 'why am I?' baffles me while ‘me’ won’t
disclose this paramount secret and here I am out of a limb!
Perhaps ... since a plausible idea wriggles the shrunk convolutions inside the bony shrine above my neck, it has been there for quite a long time and still begs for a resolute answer to the 'why am I?' and I am forced to travel in a circle. But…
|
. "Before enlightenment you chop wood and carry
water … |
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| Apparently nothing happens except that, freed from the cage, consciousness thrives on a different mental level where it can use the power added to it either in a positive or a negative way, or plunge itself, as well, in the field of insanity. "There are things in the psyche which we do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life." (8) The drop which dissolves in the wide expanse of the ocean can restitute an inadequate, indeed poor, idea of what 'Life' builds upon and how it enriches its own experience on this speck of cosmic dust which is our planet; we cannot span the cosmic infinity where 'Life' thrives. What is sure is that the drop cannot return as the very same drop, it has dissolved in the ocean; still, perhaps some of its atoms and molecules may appear in other drops within other clouds with, encoded within, the experience gained within a former cloud. This discounts the theory of reincarnation. Yet some lingering memories may reach other drops which will attach themselves to some receptive psyche, memories which a receptive psyche will attach to a "my" past life. Might it not be that some of these dispersed atoms and molecules carry with themselves or, rather, are the seeds of an evolutionary process since nothing whatsoever gets lost in the cosmic experience? This is a crude, indeed poor, explanation of what my intellect can grasp up to this point; there is another wall to smash: what is the purpose of life? 'Me' is once more struck dumb nor will it ever smash this other wall; speculation and wild theories abound, none of them reasonable; we are looking at the problem from an infinitesimal "inside" constricted within the illusion of space and time. 'Life' itself may not be aware of its purpose, it may be just a great cosmic machine yet, behind this there ought to be something inconceivable, an intelligence with those two qualities which are most manifest in planetary life: purpose and will. That is why 'me' was never born and 'I' am pounding my computer's keyboard. We have something in common with that mysterious beyond, purpose and will. "There is no such thing as chance, and what we regard as blind circumstance actually stems from the deepest source of all." (9). From end to end, with
labor keen; Page There are several ways to become an enlightened being in this wonderful planet, a fully realized homo somewhat sapiens. You may try with a complicated Tibetan mandala
of your choice. It is advisable to be shut in a dark and deep
cave up in the Himalayas clad in a light cotton robe and in
a given number of years you will emerge, a Milarepa reborn.
"Before enlightenment you chop wood and
carry water … The enlightened Zen monk chopping wood and carrying water would explain it in a single word, ‘satori’; a Dervish mystic would say ‘fana’, an Hindu ascetic would say ‘moksha’, a Buddhist would say ‘nirvana’, a Tibetan anchorite would say ‘tharpa’ . We translate these words as ‘enlightenment’, ‘illumination’ or ’spiritual realization’ and the mystic experience cannot be conveyed in words. But whatever the vision, the experience reflected by the aforementioned words is a subjective experience, even Lao Tzu’s “The Tao that can be told is not the is a mental concept. Can the human experience of reality, the unconditioned realization of our primordial nature, reflect that Reality which lies beyond the power of the human mind? Another method is to use your imagination as best it reflects your personal dispositions; a long time ago, since the Himalayas and the Ganges are beyond my reach, I conjured the visualization described below and it seemed fairly effectual, notwithstanding I am still in a dark cave with no rays of light. Clearly, you may devise your own visualizations as it best suits your disposition, but beware, psychical games may be dangerous. "Imagine that a large sphere is interposed somewhere between the sun and the floor – an eclipse of sphere! And, again in your imagery, you are the shadow cast on the ground, a flat bi-dimensional shadow in Flatland but, as luck would have it, endowed with a sense of sight, and some sort of intellectually active machinery. Hence, you will perceive a dark disk with a dim and fading aura of light around it somewhere above in the deep blue sky but all that will be perfectly flat simply because, being a shadow, you lack the perception of the third dimension, in your ill-fated case height; and, worst of all, lacking the sense of height that dark disk will be intolerably oppressive. It will be some kind of immaterial but indeed real weight on your shadow-body and no matter how you slide on the floor to evade it, it will follow you everywhere. A perennial daily nightmare with no way out; and there is no way you can comprehend that situation because you do not know what is causing it, you cannot visualize, still less, imagine the bright sun shedding light above the sphere. As it happens, due to some unexplainable portentous event and an extreme effort somehow your shadow leaps on the sphere. There cohering to the sphere, it experiences a strange sensation due to its curvature and the possibility of a different, strange and mysterious world is envisaged, verily a different dimension; hence it slides, not without a supreme effort, upwards; but as it crosses above the sphere’s middle section it is annihilated by the sunlight and no one but an inert sphere, a psyche without a brain, is left to tell the story. You are annihilated! Fused into the sunlight the shadow returns where it belongs to, that domain of eternal light which gave you a tangible, albeit flat ineffable existence." Such a situation is not difficult to imagine; nor does it require a dark cave or a bed of nails, just make yourself comfortable. "And only when he turns away from himself, will he jump over his shadow-and verily, into his sun." (7) When I devised this mental game I
did not realize its symbolical importance, only much later it
crossed my mind. The shadow is a projection, that is, what I
think that I am. The object in the way, hard to reach, is my
subconscious. The luminous source above the mysterious object
is that which dispels ignorance, a face of reality – not reality
in itself; self knowledge, within the limits available
in our mental tool box. Our reality is what our sense perceptions
posit us. Hence “Be your own guide and your torch.” (The
Buddha) Even so, there is an indeed simpler way which can be
summarized in only four words, an extreme shortcut: here forget
the grammarian's and the psychologist’s scholarly definitions
of ‘I’ and ‘me’. 'I' is your physical
person, exactly the reverse of your image as it appears in a
well-polished mirror while 'me' is the conceptual reality
of that cherished 'I' and then, relaxed and breathing
properly, close your eyes and meditate about "the Self
beyond myself"; only four words! That is the shortest path to
the effulgent insanity of the beyond. “What visage
did you possess before your father and mother were born?” (12)
Indeed, there are a plethora of methods to switch on your inner
light and in this blessed era only a click of the mouse away!
That is all it takes to join the beaming army of enlightened
beings in this gorgeous, albeit maltreated, planet. As for me,
a hoary one-eyed troglodyte, without an Internet connection,
(13)
I still have to totter in my dark psychic cave. "Religion is regarded by the common people
as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful".
(16)
Are you afraid of death? Senseless and irrational
unless you have a sure method to escape it, death!
But there is no way out, your inescapable fate is to feed the
worms, or wild creatures, or to be cremated. But this fear is
terrible, what hallucinations will cross your mind during the
last moments? It depends on your psychical propensities; perhaps
a bright smile will enlighten your visage, a happy trespassing. All in all, you are your own paradise or hell. Page As I wrote above, I discount the theory of
reincarnation; it is a religious or psychological hook to dismiss
man’s fear of death. That intolerable and frightful fear of
utter extinction does not make sense, it is simply irrational.
My drop dissolving in that cosmic reality symbolized by the
ocean looses its strict individuality; as such it will not experience
a past or a future, its constituents will be part of the ocean
for ever and ever! Notes. 1- C. G. Jung
in "Myths, Dreams and Mysteries"-p. 329-Collins, The Fontana
Libray-1974. |
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