One thing I love about many of my good friends is that they’re honest with me and willing to find and kindly tell me about holes in what I’ve said or argued, and to hear what I didn’t speak.
A great friend and college roommate found a point in a recent blog of mine that I had left unexplained and that had filled him with questions.
The lines were: Black holes the shape of trees, buildings, and hillsides stood silhouetted against a gray sky, a massive gray cloud filled by moonlight, yet with no moon visible. And the darkness appeared to begin in close to myself and lessen as it spread out into the distance. And he asked: “How did the darkness appear closer to yourself?” Or “why did it appear darker the closer you came to yourself?” Did you realize the implications of what you said?
Perceptually, the world was darker closer to myself because the only physical illumination was far off, from the lights of a nearby city, or from the moon itself. But I rebelled against my own first understanding of the psychological or metaphorical meaning of the line. I heard “dark” as meaning sinister, something negative or evil. But I didn’t mean sinister or evil.
I later realized other meanings of dark, as in unknown or unknowable. As in beyond words. As in unrealized possibility. As in the unknown before from which everything after emerges. Before we speak there is an emptiness, a silence. Buddhists, Taoists, mystics speak of this.
Lao Tzu spoke about the emptiness out of which the universe, or fullness of life, emerged:
“In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words,
Words came out of the womb of matter…”
Of course, since we don’t know what will happen or what will emerge from the womb of time and matter, we can feel frightened. We don’t know if what emerges will be helpful or hurtful. We don’t know if we’ll have the ability to face the unknown or do something with it we can be proud of.
We often think we know so much about ourselves, maybe too much. We might think we are so clear, obvious, unchanging. In fact, we can never fully know or fully capture ourselves or be contained in any number of words, thoughts, judgments.
Each word, each thought is an abstraction, a recording, or occasionally, as philosopher J. L. Austin argued, a performance or action. Think about an officiant saying. “I now pronounce you man and wife.” Or when we are overcome with beauty and all we say is “wow.” Words facilitate remembering and can help us evaluate, analyze, think about something. They can be so beautiful⎼ or painful to see or hear. They can lead to rumination or take us out of it. There’s so much that just can’t be spoken. Yet here we are talking.
In every moment, we have this choice. Do we get absorbed in the universe of words and lose the universe of physical being? Do we use words to memorialize the present into the past? Or do we mistake a word for what it points to? In Buddhism, it’s said: don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.
When I was a student in secondary school and college, like so many others I became very good at taking notes. This was so helpful on exams and writing papers. But I also missed feeling the presence of the others in the room with me, missed the subtle facial expressions of the teachers as they spoke, and missed being aware of my feelings as I wrote.
Every word, by itself, is only a random sound or set of markings until it’s tied to a culture, history, our past; tied to the place where we are hearing or speaking it, the people who are speaking or writing it, even the weather around us when we are experiencing it.
As the Zen Buddhist teacher, activist, author Thich Nhat Hanh said of a piece of paper, it has the clouds and rain in it. It has the trees in it, the sun that energizes the tree, the people who cut the trees, the truck that transports the logs, the workers in the paper mills. It needs us to see it. In fact, where does it stop? It has the whole universe in it.
Not only each individual thing we perceive has everything in it, but every word, thought, and sensation. Not only because of the interconnections, but because they appear now, can bring us here, now. They are a means of communication and a point of contact where we can touch and be touched by whomever or whatever we are with. They are no less part of the universe than stones or raindrops.
So, if we mindfully shift our attention not just to the word and its meanings but be present with the situation in which the word appears, including our own thoughts and feelings, we can hear life itself speaking, the universe speaking.
We might get to a point where, in a way, we are not; our plans, engagements, memories, worries are not. All that we are is now.
In meditating, or creating, the more we clear our mind from distracting itself, the more likely something beautiful will emerge. The quieter we get, the more we can sit calmly in whatever situation we are in.
In poet and translator David Hinton’s book, Hunger Mountain, he re-interprets or translates the famous collection of Zen Koans, those records of transformative and inexplicable interactions between student and teacher, called the Wu-Men Kuan or No Gate Gateway, as the “Absence-Gate Gateway,” or “Absence as the Gateway.”
Reading Hinton’s book clarified my own feelings and thoughts about this dark self. He said, “The deeper I look into myself (the seen), the more perfectly this creature I am eludes me.” The more I become dark to my own looking. The closer we get to ourselves, the more inexplicable we are and the more we disappear. We can dissolve into the very act of looking.
It benefits all of us, when we can do so, to allow ourselves moments to sit quietly with our friends, and this darkness, this disappearance.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock