The World is My Mirror (3 page)

It is a curious thing: when the world shows up, I show up. Or the other way round: when I show up, so does the world. That has always been the case, but largely ignored, unnoticed. This intimate relationship is what has been described as ‘nothing appearing as everything’, Neither ‘everything’ nor ‘nothing’ is deemed to be more important or special‌—‌they are one and the same. This is how things actually are. Objects do not turn up without you, how could they? The very first sensation experienced as a baby‌—‌and there’s a ‘you’. Experience is appearing as hunger, as agitation, as wanting to be held. By not expecting things to be a certain way or searching for a special state, you become bullet proof, because whatever turns up is nothing other than experiencing appearing as ‘that’.

At first it is destabilising. You are questioning objective existence and doubting assumptions about reality; you are questioning assumptions which have been spoon-fed to you all your life. This destabilising is unavoidable. Some people experience more, some experience less of this destabilisation, but it will be felt; it comes with the territory. For years you have probably accepted that people, places and general everyday objects exist in the way you assumed they did. This is the dream you awaken from, but it is also the one you awaken to. Nothing changes, the sun still rises and the clouds still empty their watery cargo when you have planned your barbecue. The difference is you know you are not separate from the rising sun or the sausages smoking away on the half lit charcoal.

Events and their contents are like a mirror. The images in that mirror, although highly varied, have a strange, unchanging character‌—‌they only reflect Wholeness, a kind of full emptiness.

It is one thing to read or be told how human life begins: one solitary sperm fusing with one solitary ovum and starting a series of actions and reactions that never stop even when the body changes function at death. It is quite another to actually witness a baby making an appearance. What you see is the full force and awesome power of nature in one relatively tiny, helpless organism we have dubbed ‘baby’. There, staring you in the face, is the miraculous. Yet it so quickly gets taken for granted once all the activities are set in motion to ensure the survival of ‘baby’ in a world that can produce the miraculous and also destroy it at whim.

Babies are just one example. Take a look at anything and ask yourself, ‘If I remove the label from this object and do not replace it, what do I find? What can I say about it?’ Try this and if you can let go or see beyond preconceptions, you might see that objects are not objects; they are the appearance of no-thing, appearing as whatever is appearing. Gone is the idea of the inherent existence of objects, and in its place a mystery unfolds. A mystery that has always been here, dancing in front of us, showing us its wares as well as fooling around with notions of permanence and solidity.

Nothing can be taken away from its environment and still continue intact and unchanged. Stick a human being in outer space without any artificial environment, such as a space suit, and you will quickly find that the normal functioning has been arrested to the point of failure. Oxygen which abounds on earth is absent in outer space. The body, interacting with these conditions, will very quickly be no more.

So in describing any particular aspect of the world you are also describing the universe as it exists today. We have become so narrowly focused on objects as things in themselves and defined by words, that to consider interconnectedness and Wholeness seems fanciful and a pursuit for those with their head in the clouds; sane, responsible people knuckle down and get on with things.

It is just this sanity, this ‘normality’, that becomes problematic and stifling. It is the constant feeling of being just a cog in a machine playing our little role that starts to fatigue us to the point of desperation or depression and anxiety.

Then, the very system that confuses us also supplies the means to fix us and help us play the game differently, by offering the wisdom of professionals well versed in the trials and tribulations of life in the form of therapeutic intervention. This system is born out of ignorance but it attempts to help the poor soul afflicted by doubt and fear to see the world differently, more accurately, with more clarity.

What is not seen by the client‌/‌patient is that the veil is still tightly attached; it has just been decorated with nicer designs and a few more holes inserted to enhance breathing and ensure a better exchange with the conditions of the preformatted world of reality. It seldom occurs to either the helper or the helped that the world we know and love is constructed rather than interacted with. And so the game goes on, perhaps a little easier and with more accuracy, but the root cause remains to emerge again in another guise with new obstacles to overcome in the future. Even those therapies that operate within the paradigm of phenomenology cannot shake off an independently existing world with a unique interpretation by its interlocutor, negotiating using a pseudo-exchange of ideas to arrive at closure.

Just because our English teacher taught that nouns refer to objects that are responsible for the doer of actions does not mean we can actually find correlates in the environment that support this socially constructed belief born from modern day grammar. Simply put: a snooker ball exists as a pattern of light, touch, sound, smell and taste. It emerges from current conditions. Conventionally we can say the rolling and point of contact caused the object ball to change location, but this simply describes activity, a happening, rather than one object striking another. We therefore confuse current activity with independently existing entities.

Friends create enemies and enemies create friends. You can never know only one pole of anything. In fact to know is to be aware of this dualism, but neither of them exists independently. Waves consist of crests and troughs; mountains need their valleys. To omit either is to destroy them both. So duality is a celebration of Wholeness and not something to be avoided or dismissed by an appeal to nihilism. This is what a person can never see, even though it continually stares him or her in the face and taps them on the shoulder at every opportunity. To be a person is to be contracted, a real sense of me in here and you out there‌—‌but not just a ‘you’ out there. Every single thing from a sandwich to a sand-fly seems to have its own independent reality, totally divorced from ‘me as a person’ and my private existence that must be kept under wraps at all costs.

This mental trickery the brain performs seems to be the only game in town, and coupled with everyone playing the same game, it is no wonder we feel lost and adrift on a wide and vast ocean not of our making. To be a person is to strive to fit in and be accepted by the community that feeds and educates and expects returns in equal measure or, more often than not, in even greater measure.

The depression, hopelessness and constant underlying anxiety that plague us day in day out have the power to be our saving grace. This unease, the feeling that something’s just not right here, can be the return home to a place we never left; the yellow brick road stops its winding course to reveal a hint of its circularity.

Separation never feels ok‌—‌ever. Do not listen to anyone who says separation’s fine because all there is is Wholeness. It will not wash! Separation is a longing to return, to come home, to re-establish the embrace that enveloped us from our ignorant beginning. This is never a discovery in a novel sense as, say, when a scientist discovers a new particle. No, this is a re-discovery. That is why this is already absolutely known and not the mystery we thought it was.

To come home is to notice what is here now, not what can be achieved through effort and practice. This is to look with the eyes of a child and the wisdom of an adult. Nothing new is presented to us, we just simply see nakedly without trying to get something, achieve something, and distort something. Watching the bee collect her nectar from the seducing, enticing flowerhead, leaves you dumbstruck, and the recognition that this activity has its counterpart in the cooperation of your heart with your brain shows you Wholeness without words, without satsang‌—‌without gurus. This is nature’s gift to itself. It is seeing itself and it is being itself. Nature laughs at itself with a guffaw that can shake the pillars of heaven. See yourself in the cry of a new-born, in the heat of the sun and the taste of a beer on a hot day on the patio. Nothing appears without you, and you cannot be seen unless you wear a disguise. No need to give special treatment to stillness, it is over here, in the movement of life!

I want to look at something which I hope you do not think so obvious as to require no explanation. I want to explore what we mean by ‘mind’. Ordinarily the word is used to describe some kind of private activity like working a maths problem out in our head or wondering where to go on the next holiday. We can have ‘a lot on our mind’ or even feel we are ‘losing our mind.’ So, I guess we could reserve the definition for some private activity that only the thinker has access to.

I want to extend this definition, though, simply because I do not think it is comprehensive enough. Look at an object, any object, and see what it is made of. I am going to take the tape measure lying on my desk as my example. I notice its shape as curved at one end and straight at the other. It is black in colour with splashes of yellow. It feels a reasonable weight, maybe getting on for 500 grammes. It smells a bit plastic-like and I’ll leave the taste for now: it is been in my pocket and everywhere! Extend the ruler and it sounds metal-like and a bit squeaky. The point is I have not described it without appealing to all the senses I have at my disposal. I have used thinking to gain some sort of description for you. Every one of these seem separate, don’t they, but separate from what? If these senses fell away, I would find it mighty hard to hang on to the object I call tape measure. What I am getting at is that mind activity also includes the appearance of objects in the world. The remarkable thing is that we assign an independent existence to these objects. In other words, we believe they exist when the senses aren’t at work. So, if I am concentrating on cooking the dinner, I assume the tape measure is sitting on the desk in the form I previously described. This is not my experience and never has been. The tape measure is empty of its own existence. It appears when I say it does and at no other time.

I know this does not sound overly exciting and not quite Rumi’s ecstatic poetry or Tao Te Ching stuff. Nevertheless, there can be no objects in reality. Objects exist in fantasy only. But fantasy is no other than reality appearing as fantasy. There is no such thing as unreality. If you have started to release smoke out of your ears, then take a breather. I am not suggesting anything new is occurring, all I am saying is that reality is not what we have assumed it is. The reality for the individual who thinks he lives on a planet in the universe is a story; it is a dream. This is what a person cannot let go of. Because if the consensus view of life goes, so does the person. You cannot get rid of this old notion and remain intact. It is like getting rid of black and keeping white. This is why a seeker can never find what he or she is looking for. It sounds a bit bleak, I suppose, and a bit hopeless as well. But never mind, let us have a go.

The mind is subject to some bad press in spiritual circles, rendering it an inadequate device for self-realisation. We hear things like, ‘The mind has not a clue,’ or, ‘You need to transcend the mind to reach nirvana.’ However, the mind, or thinking, is not going away. We need it to function responsibly and intelligently in this world. We need to know our enemies as well as our friends through the amazing cognitive capabilities that match current patterns with older established ones. It is useful to dodge a person in the supermarket who’s bored you to tears on a previous encounter and so enable your half hour lunch break to be as productive as possible. The mind is a marvel of nature. The emergence of thought is the emergence of ‘world’. Thinking creates novel situations and constant change that appear and disappear almost instantaneously. If we accept the evolutionist theory of life, then we can see physiological change and novelty are considered a gradual tinkering brought about by slow environmental pressures; thinking is not bound by the same time constraints.

The trick is to give it something to do. This way it will be like a sheepdog at your feet waiting for you to throw that tennis ball for the hundredth time. It hates standing still. It gets bored, restless and silly. Give it some homework and mark its results. Be strict, though, it can be very economical with the truth and it is a master of deception. You thought Derren Brown was good? Wait till you see what your own mind is capable of.

Probably the strongest, most ubiquitous belief the mind has is that you, whatever that is, is located inside the body as a person‌—‌whatever that is. This, the mind argues, is your ultimate residence, the location from which you view the world and plan your activities for the rest of your life. In here we can hold our secrets and fantasies. We can contemplate whom we would like misfortune to visit and imagine the triumph after defeating our enemies from the past and present in a mock battle that would leave the writers of Star Wars in a daze. Yes, in here no one can see our vulnerabilities; no one can really know we’re worthless and unlovable.