Reflections: Flickering
Reflections: Flickering
I had prepared a bath, one of the indulgences I allow myself from time to time. As I lay down and let the warmth spread to every part of my body, my thoughts gradually calmed down and surrendered to just observing the flickering candle I'd lit at the far end of the bathroom. In the absence of easy access to a good sauna, this is one of the easiest ways I have for disengaging the mechanics of thought endlessly churning over imagined pasts and futures.
Something Tony had said about shedding skins and letting go of our old habits arose in the beginnings of stillness:
“In this transitional time it is hard to let go of our old skins. They must fall away of their own accord. Until they do, we carry baggage of our old ways of thinking. Shreds remain attached. We are like a snake shedding it’s skin. I feel this across many parts of myself. Thresholds have been crossed. I have shed some things. Then, I realise I haven’t left them all behind. I am, we all are, caught in obsolete language.”
Looking back across the path I have walked these last months and years, the landscape is littered with moulted skins. These inside-out discarded skins are artefacts of my past selves' relation to the universe. And I see that I will probably never finish this continual process of shedding skins, there are always more skins to shed. The directions of growth are endless. Slowly the landscape beyond binaries that I've sense for some time is beginning to take shape.
I was stretching out in the tub holding my index finger and my thumb closely in front of my eye gazing through them at the flickering candle at the opposite end of the bathroom. I dipped my fingers in the water. A droplet was held suspended from the tip of my index finger, it glittered in the flickering light. It seemed to have reached an equilibrium. It wasn't quite falling. I asked myself: what if I could make the water drop from my finger? And the water seemed to grow and it felt like it might drop. Then I instantly hesitated, I seemed to have perplexed myself with my question and it felt like the droplet stopped in its gravitational pull. Then the question vanished from my mind and the droplet fell.
And then I asked myself: what would it have felt like if I had made that water drop? And I instantly realised that it wouldn't feel any different. It would be different (from what I thought). There is a subtle but big difference there.
We keep asking ourselves similar types of questions which bring us to a standstill, fixing the flow of movement into a still picture which we can then deliberate endlessly. What would it feel like if it was like this? What would it feel like if that person loved me? If I was able to do that thing I want to do? If I had that job, that recognition, that insight? The point is that our feelings are not really relevant, the universe wouldn't be any different because of them. Only our imagination makes us believe it can be different. This may seem a trivial point if it wasn't because it is this very difference which stunts our growth as we remove ourselves from the flow of the moment. Our feelings are not relevant. If they make us project a different state of affairs unto the present, they are in the way.
I was recently told the story of Tai Chi Master Yang-Chian who was able to transfix a bird to his palm by yielding slightly when it tried to take off. In this way he captured the bird's energy and it was stuck in his hand until he let it go. What would it feel like if this story is true? It is not relevant! As soon as I asked that question, what would it feel like if I made the water drop? I stepped back from experiencing into a reflexive mode of existence. I step back from direct experience of the presence into thought and language, and I thus separate myself from that drop. I am not separate. This is the backdoor that illusion always uses to sneak its way in.
I could ask myself, what would the world be like if I all these things were true? If I could fixate a bird on my palm. If I could make a water droplet fall with my body-mind power. Well, it would just be. And I could verify that it would be so empirically. We shouldn't mix up our imaginings and projections with what is. What would it be like if that story was true? It wouldn't be different in the slightest. I can always verify these things empirically, there is no mystery here. Mystery arises at the end of our ability to grasp reality. People might ask: is this really true, what is the trick? I might ask, is this really true, what is the trick? But asking and answering questions is no substitute for first hand observation, for doing.
The candle in the bathroom was flickering fast, say at four flicks per second. And I held my foot in front of it so that I could now not see the candle but only the shadow on the wall. Although I couldn't directly observe the candle it was clear that it was there because of the shadow pulsating across the wall. And it was equally clear that the flickering was not the candle itself. The flickering was the shadow cast on the wall. The candle is alight all the time. It is not flickering. And then I noticed that the candle was reflected in the water, in the bathtub I was sitting in. And in the water there was no flickering. The moving surface of the water did make the light appear slightly wobbly but there was no flickering. The light is there all the time, the sun is always shining. The universe is always growing. That it feels different is a matter of feeling. But that doesn't make it less true that it is so.
I had had a question in my mind when I was cycling home the same afternoon: what is the innovation of Dark Mountain? I knew that at the heart of the 'innovation' is that simple fact that Dark Mountain has created a rhizome where people can explore what it means to narrate their lives and realities non-linearly. For some time I have been thinking about this as processing the debris of a broken culture in post-modern society. What happens as people re-narrate their lives is that the world changes as they change their story. In the course of the exploration, the world they inhabit becomes non-linear. And as I was lying in the bath I realised that this research process is also my own exploration of stepping into a non-linear narrative of my lifeworld.
Here language is important because 'stepping into' could prop up the illusion that 're-narrating' requires something other than simply doing: 'stepping into' implies some other domain. Stepping is a process. The 'other domain' exists in thought only and as soon as I imagine it as something different from what is, I have stepped out of the process. I have to let the process unfold without getting in the way. I can say this now because I am far enough down the line to see the moulted skins. I started out with questions and looking for something, searching. The questions came together and changed, gradually they took on their own life. And I've come to see that what I do has to be processual to be real and not just a thought experiment.
I realised that I am getting to the bottom of my own psychological narrative and one of the first stories I was told when I was a child. I was lying on my side in the tub with one eye under the water and one eye above the water and I thought of Adam and Eve. I thought of two fundamentally different, but mutual, modes of engaging in the world. Reflective and non-reflective. In words, outside words. Left brain, right brain. And I thought of my eye under water as the pure, timeless unfolding that I am. The part of the self that could be said to exist in Paradise before the Fall. I thought of the other eye as the part that came into existence after Eve gave Adam a certain apple. The reflective, self-aware self, and the part of my psychology which makes time appear linear, which gives the world a beginning and an end.
As the story goes, we cannot access Paradise after the Fall. But it will come back but in the future. Unfortunately, in this linear narrative the return to Paradise happens beyond the Rapture. It makes my psychology look forward in time for Salvation on the other side of some cataclysm. I asked myself, how can I dissolve this dualism at the root of my psychology? Is it possible to step into the world, into a way of being that fuses the two, like Iain McGilchrist talks about in The Master and the Emissary. Is there a way?
Of course there is! But it isn't a 'way' that leads anywhere. It isn't something I can achieve by making an effort. Transcending the dualism is possible but only by manifesting it. Or doing, or being. And that goes back to the problem of posing paralysing questions. If I ask: how can I hold these insights, how can I hold this wisdom? I am asking a question which fragments myself into the very dualism I intend to transcend. Because in the question there is an 'I' and there is a 'Something' that is being held. The only way to fuse the two is simply to manifest, is simply to be.
This can be explained in language, and it can be communicated to myself and others in words. But when it comes to being and what is really possible, the only thing that counts is manifesting the light beyond the flickering shadows.
06/12/2012