When We Stop Playing A Shell Game, The World Is Most Intimately Ourselves
Of course, the bear that crushed our bird feeder one early morning and knocked on our front door was a little scary and we had to chase it away. And one night at about 3:00 am one of our cats stood up on our bed, hissed loudly, and woke us up to a racoon coming in the cat door. The racoon got stuck and I had to push him out with an oak cane.
In the spring morning, the gold and purple finches, cardinals, and red winged black birds added color and songs to the air, and later, the peepers such comfort. And taking walks with such companions as oak trees leaning against each other to speak, and ravens coughing as they flew overhead added wonders to my day.
But hearing about the climate emergency and the extinction crisis we face⎼ I felt so bereft. I felt such grief over the increasing instability of nature itself, weather disasters, and the loss of species ⎼ for example, frogs, peepers, and salamanders, about one-third of amphibians ⎼ 12% of bird species, all threatened with extinction, as well as ash trees which used to fill the forests near my home. We must all take this emergency very seriously.
These species are not just companions. They are intimate mirrors of our lives and mental state and we can see them everywhere. The deep red of the Japanese maple in the garden, which is more of a bush than a tree⎼ what amazing feeling is right there. A crow flies overhead and its harsh call echoes in our body.
We often think of ourselves as located behind these two eyes, a mind isolated in this shell of a body, a shell within a shell within a shell. And only within this shell can we locate what is most intimately ourselves. Or we think of the red color and harsh call as coming from “outside” us.
Yet, is not that Japanese maple and the crow also, in some way, intimately ourselves?
Don’t we carry those colors and sounds in us? We don’t just hear and see and feel them. We give them life. The red of the cardinal is how our mind gifts color to the electromagnetic or light waves bouncing off the bird’s breast. Color is the way we perceive a wavelength of light to which our eyes are sensitive.
The harshness of the crow’s voice is how our mind translates the sound wave frequencies emitted by the bird. That red, that song is intimately us. No us, no song, just wavelengths.
Because conscious perception is awareness aware of itself it simultaneously looks within as it looks out. It is a deeply felt mystery that we live. When we stop playing the shell game, the world is most intimately ourselves.
The French philosopher, Rene Descartes, in his classic book, Meditations, asked himself what it was he couldn’t doubt or of which he could be most certain. And he decided he could not doubt his own existence; because he thinks, he must be. “I am, I exist, is necessarily true every time I pronounce or conceive it in my mind.” I think, therefore I am. Even Satan, he said, could not make him nothing if he thought he was something.
And much of the Western world adopted his perspective. I am here thinking, so I must be here living. From inside me to the rest of everything. But what is it that is aware of the thinking, the thoughts, memories, feelings? Is it the act of him or me thinking that we can be most certain of? Or is it that thinking is happening, here, now?
Descartes’ perspective leads us to possibly feel aloof or separate from everything else. Alone. But is this way of seeing the world accurate, or merely a perception wrapped in and distorted by an idea? Maybe the reality is the other way around ⎼ maybe what we think of as my perception is all of reality coming together at once?
In his book, Nothing Is Hidden: The Psychology of Zen Koans, psychologist and Buddhist teacher Barry Magid described how the myth of an isolated mind alienates us from our natural embeddedness in the universe in three different ways. By:
- separating us from nature.
- obscuring the fact of constant social relationship with the people who surround us, who live in our memories, and the words we use, the books or social media, the entertainment.
- turning the sense of our own mental contents from a stream in which we swim to the furniture in a room we view through a window at a distance.
Barry Magid points out that a whole school of relational psychology says a baby develops its sense of self largely through interacting with its mother or parental figure. We are born relatively unformed, ready to absorb in our own ways and capacities the universe that surrounds, enters, and becomes us. We learn who we are in the context of others and are always embedded in a body, a language, a culture, a history, and a physical world. No physical world, no us. No culture and language, no words to speak.
We are never not the universe. As Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said, we always “inter-are” with all beings and everything.
50 plus years ago, in a meditation session with Zen teacher Philip Kapleau, I first heard a quote that has lived in me for decades as a wish, an archetype, a promise, sometimes as an experience almost too perfect to believe; and maybe, hopefully, a seed. The quote also appears in his book, The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, Enlightenment in a section recounting different people’s enlightenment experiences.
The quote is, “I came to realize that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun, and the moon, and the stars.” It is by Dogen Zenji, a 13th century Japanese Zen master. Kapleau’s book recounts how a Japanese businessman and Zen student had read the quote, and it impressed itself upon his mind so vividly. After seven or eight years of meditation, he finally perceived the essence of what the line reveals.
One night, the student repeated the line over and over to himself; he couldn’t let it go. And suddenly, his old universe shattered. He himself realized that mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars. And instantaneously, “like surging waves, a tremendous delight welled up in me, a veritable hurricane of delight, as I laughed loudly and wildly….”
And since reading that passage, every time I’ve let go and laughed, I’ve felt that promise in my heart and mind. It goads me to be thankful, to embrace the great wide earth and everything on it, as honestly and as deeply as I can, and to let go as fully and deeply as I can. And ⎼
Oh, to laugh like that!
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
