I made a promise to myself. I’ll be the only who knows if i will keep it.
I’d cycle through photographs trying to find something to draw me in. As if I am simply a reaction, creating causes and conditons to will myself into existance. Into being. I was looking for something special, finally I think i found it.
I’ve got 8 minutes left. I’ve been staring in to this void imagining all that I see to be a reflection. I’m distracted and ungrounded, unbound by any responsibility. Drifting in a formless infinite imagination, all the while the body I inhibit slips further down the slope of possibility towards the certainty that awaits all of us.
I can never decide. I feel stuck at an endlessly fragmenting crossroads. A splintered mirror. It throws light out in to many different paths, like a mirage. There is only really one path to take, but it always seems to appear as many. Yet I am resisting, in a strange illusion of choice.
The illusion of choice, as it is so called, appears to be one of the ways when presented, the paradox of life reveals itself. We tend to process our environment and our experience. We divide it between what we want to keep and that we wish to pass. Choice seems like a strange inevitability, part of the strange search, as we internalise our experiences in an attempt to know ourselves.
In Buddhism, one of the examples as easily rubbished by dry scientists is the sky. It is both blue and clear. The important part being and not or. Life seemingly is and, not or. People are both good and evil. Weak and strong. We make an analytical separation, like sorting wheat from chaff, but creatively speaking, there is no real waste independent of our finite position. One persons wheat is another persons chaff.
It took a long time for me to grasp this end of the thread. Again, in Buddhism, (I think this is where the allegory of the endless knot comes from.) life, or our perception and understanding of it is like a knot. We try to untangle it, but as much progress as we make, the knot seems like it goes on forever, much in the same way as fractals. The faculties we use to interpret the world are in some way dependant. They rely on the same mechanism spoken off earlier. The dividing of things into known and unknown, being or unbeing. At their root always lays a supposition, a kind of metaphorical foundation stone that underpins the refuge of rational logic, that underpins our interpretation of reality.
In simple terms this is like the relativism of hot and cold, night and day and in some senses male and female. These distinctions help us quantify and rationalise our experience, but they are no more absolute than anything else. They are, at best true in their moments, but do not represent any kind of ultimate reality.
I usually think of a stool, that our single pointed view looks out onto the world, for which Buddhist logic moves around the stool, kicking out the legs, until only one remains. This is a precarious position at best. If we don’t move, we may stay still for a little while, but life as we know doesn’t stay still. In looking at this last remaining leg, or perhaps pillar, I find that there is an assumption, like “It is cold tonight” that is true relative perhaps to yesterday. However it is not cold, in comparison to perhaps the winter of 1986, etc.
The process of trying to quantify and analyse everything with this rudimentary mechanism, is satasifiying as it appears to give some kind of certainty and stability, for the want of a better word control. An illusion of control. Similarly, we imagine if we understand our existence, we can make rational choices, and be in some kind of control. Stave off the uncertainty. But really, we understand or perceive very little of the totality of life we are immersed in, fittingly described in Buddhism as the ocean of Samsaric existence.
We are at best, like a surfer riding the crest of a wave. Once day we will be submerged. If we are not surfing the waves, we are hanging on to whatever wood drifts though our experience, something to distract us from confronting the true nature of our existence. In part, it’s everything contained in this shadow of our awareness. A large shadow in that darkness is our own mortality and death. Our minds and consciousness no matter how crystalline, and set, enmeshed and immersed in our experience, is in its nature as infinite as the ultimate truth and reality from which our individuated selves emerged. Thankfully for which we will all one day return.
The problem seems to lie with what they call self grasping. But self-grasping, is what we grasp and hold on to as true; as existing from its own side, independent of our conditional and dependant relational cognising mind. The reality is, whist gravity, night day, hot cold, conventionally exists, it is interpreted by us, using a relative model. Everything we perceive, we perceive relatively rather than absolutely. Therein lies the problem, we try to use a relative construct of reality to seek absolute truths, in an attempt to press away our fears and the mysteries of our unconscious actions. Our illusion of choice.
Sure, try and untangle the knot. It is not a waste of time. It is as much fun as playing a video game. But we will never untagle it in the way we hope we will. This type of questioning only leads to more questioning. In that sense, careers are great, work is great, life is great, they are an endless stream of superstitious problems to try and interpret and navigate like the seafarers of yore. But if we want to unpick the inner workings that help project our unconscious bias on to the lens of our world, all the work to be done is inner.
Unfortunately, the way is in part is to strip way all the modifiers, all the things that colour our existence, and the middle way paradoxically, is not reduce our life to nothing, but use our life, all the commonly re-occurring universal aspects of it, to reflect upon the mechanisms of our thoughts and feelings, constructions and structures of our world and thinking, that cause us to interpret, perceive and feel our experiences as we do. To realise that our experience is a spectrum, like this light, from any side it can contain any colour of experience.
Up above, outside and in it, can be everything or nothing. It’s up to us, insofar as it’s up to a sailor or a surfer on a sea, how we experience and meet its challenges. The challenges that transform us as people. Every cloud has a silver lining. Like weather this too will pass.
Remember to at least observe the beauty you see. Its always there, sometimes harder to see, but try to hold these memories, to help guide you when its dark. Be the light sometimes you cannot see. Even better, be the light for others when their world appears to be dark.
And as for the best lesson I was ever given. Try not to worry.
