The World is My Mirror (8 page)

This section is strongly influenced by Douglas Harding and Richard Lang from
The Headless Way
website. Douglas was a philosopher and I suppose a bit of a mystic. He was well spoken, very English and incredibly engaging and gentle. His experiments are a practical way to discover absence. But the thing that stopped me in my tracks is the idea of ‘Face to No Face’.

The next time you find yourself engaged in conversation in close proximity with someone, imagine what they might see. The answer I hope you come up with is the face
you
see when you are looking in the mirror. Conversely, from your perspective, you see the face
he
sees when looking in a mirror; you are wearing each other’s face. His face is appearing in your consciousness. Consciousness is appearing as his face. You have every wrinkle, every blemish and every grey hair. You have the colour of his eyes and the colour of his skin. He is so close to you it is impossible to shake him off. You have taken on his appearance.

I am going to stick my neck out here and bet you do not feel like what you look like. I would say from your perspective you feel different to what your friend has got as his experience of you. Which do you prefer? Douglas would say you are capacity for the other person. Your emptiness allows for total fullness. Try as you might, you will not stop anything colouring your blank canvas. This is a good description of unconditional love: everything is allowed to be just what it is without restriction or regulation. It is all accepted.

This, if you rest with it, is jaw-dropping stuff. No longer are you just this small monkey-like creature walking around on two legs on a planet in a galaxy, in a universe. No, whatever shows up is in you and as you. Not the person ‘you’. I am using
you
as another way of saying experiencing or knowing.

This has always been the case, nothing new has happened. If you are not an object but capacity only, then you are not locatable in space or time. If you were findable you would have a boundary, an edge somewhere. There would be somewhere where you were not. Try and find this edge. If you could find an edge, then what has found this edge? May I suggest‌—‌
edgelessness
? Can you see how futile it is looking for yourself? Whatever you find is only another apparent object. This is precisely where the mind cannot go. It will try for you, I promise. But armed with what I have just written, give it a day off, will ya? Let it help with the new patio or the decorating. It is good at that; it will enjoy planning the colour scheme and working out how many rolls of paper you need. You will be surprised how sharp it is when not burdened with past and future and maintaining a spook’s lifestyle.

In one of my favourite pieces, Douglas describes how, when we are young, we are told we are the image in the mirror and before too long we take this idea on board as our identity. He describes how this image locked behind glass escapes its enclosure, enters the body and turns around to look out on the world. This is the image we carry with us. This is what we imagine others see and if we are told our appearance is not up to much, we can carry around a very unlovable person for the rest of our lives.

I want to add something of my own here as well. The image we think others see is also an image of unworthiness and faults, an image that is coloured with all our past failings and thoughts about who we think we are. It is not just a physical image. There is a feeling and belief of being transparent to others and an unverified notion of the other person having access to this inner world of dread and fear. Walking around with this beast attached to you all the time, anxiety and depression are never far away. There is a sense you can never really relax in another’s company. There is a fear they will rumble what you are really like, and that is what we guard with the utmost vigilance. You never get a day off. This is exhausting and debilitating. Life becomes hell and there is the wish for no more tomorrows or the next day.

Not a great picture, hey! Not everyone feels like this I guess, but it was pretty much my experience for about 40 years. Now you can appreciate what it felt like to not be what I thought I was. It’s like the idea of wearing tight shoes all the time and after a while not realising they are hurting your feet. You just get used to it and put up with them. When you get the chance to take them off, the relief is immediately apparent. You can wiggle your toes again and let them out of their enclosure at last. It is just like that: feeling oneself to be in the body with the world outside. The release is like letting the air out of a balloon that has been expanding for 40 years inside your stomach. When that air goes, the relaxation is almost worthy of the contraction. The lengths Wholeness goes to notice itself. However, there is no-one to feel bitter and twisted at the last 40 years or so. There is just resting in not knowing and full-on aliveness. Everything is how it should be; nothing could have been any different. You cannot have someone else’s dream; it will not work.

You may find tasks that you may have had to get a man in to do before you now tackle yourself with a new ease and confidence. I repaired my van when the immobiliser shut down the fuel pump. This saved me a packet and I can confirm it is still running today in 2012. Of course Wholeness breaks vans and also repairs them. There is no van really, but I still need it to ferry me around when I sort people’s locks out.

This false sense of self that is created to negotiate with the outside world can have some very high standards for itself. Because it is false it bears very little relation to what you really are. But because it imagines other people more competent than you, better looking than you and more intelligent, it seems to create an idealised image based on a fantasy of what you should be like to feel ok in the world. That idealised image will not let you win because it will always move the goal posts. No matter what you achieve, someone else will always be better at things than you are. It does not matter how much praise you receive, you do not feel that good about your achievements. It can even get to the stage you will feel embarrassed if your shoe laces come undone. It is not a case of simply stopping and retying them. You get frustrated first and only stop when the coast is clear. You have strayed from the path of perfection you laid down for yourself. This will always confirm your unworthiness to this imposter of an image. Thank goodness you are not that one. That one is a sad and doomed fellow, only suitable for the trash can.

I am probably being a bit extreme with the shoe laces, but the perfection trap can stop us from trying new things and prevent us from enjoying the company of others, because not only do we want to know everything, we want to be the best conversationalist as well. Any silences in our performance can activate the ‘I am a bore’ routine and then avoid any situation where you know performance may be below standard. You can never have a day off, ever.

Scientific enquiry has shaped the world we find ourselves in today. For instance, the sophisticated communication devices that we use every day are a far cry from drums or burning beacons on hill tops.

Science describes the universe from information retrieved from painstaking experiments and deduction in association with instruments that display predictable qualities regardless of the operator: a telescope magnifies consistently, whoever it is looking through the lens.

I remember chemistry lessons at high school that described the atom and its bonding characteristics which form all the amazing bits and pieces that surround us. I would be still trying to get my head around subatomic particles and the teacher had moved on, leaving me unable to fully grasp any further information. There was a sense, somewhere, I think, that this information was more than its surface structure and had the potential to tell us something else. I wouldn’t have described it in these terms then, I would just have considered myself stupid for not understanding the detailed description of why some atoms are more active than others.

The scientific account of nature renders the notion of a separate ‘you’ looking at the world as fantasy rather than fact. If everything in the universe can be reduced to atoms, subatomic particles and‌—‌ultimately‌—‌energy, then this account rules out actual chemistry teachers, schools and pupils. If we are being scientific, the world is therefore one homogenous blob that shapes itself into a colossal amount of variation over time, but retains the building blocks that make it up. One only has to consider the water cycle taught at junior school to appreciate that nothing dies, it just changes form over and over again. So is the sun the puddle’s tormenter and eventual killer or is it its transport to join other puddles in one hell of a cloud party? If we get attached to the puddle, splash in it every day and give it a name, we’ll recoil in horror on a hot day when the sunny grim reaper comes to call and takes away the best friend we’d ever had.

So it could be said that all science is based on attempts to gain more accuracy and detachment from human hopes, wishes and myths about how things are. But it is not that straightforward. Let us take the brain for example. Research has established it as one of the most complex structures the universe has pulled out of the bag. We only have to look at the billions of neurons and the neural connectivity to appreciate the permutations and patterns possible. When I studied psychology we looked at how a neuron becomes active and sends a signal to another one. Along with other neurons firing at different rates, whole areas of the brain were alive with activity. The details are complex and beyond the scope of this section: simply, the characteristics of raw materials found in nature, such as calcium, sodium and potassium, are being used to underpin the activity of the brain.

Where is the brain without this activity? Can we sensibly consider the brain on one side of the equation and the activity somewhere else? It does not make sense when looked at in this way, and yet we make the brain into an object, giving power to the noun over and above what is actually occurring; language is creating non-existent separate entities. It is so easy to get convinced and taken in by this trick because language has great power when we make the assumption that it describes a real world out there.

I suggest that it is more the case that Wholeness can do braining in the same way it can do rivering and mountaining. And here’s the even more curious thing: braining is not separate from what it creates. You do not get rivers and mountains without the electrical activity of the brain. And yet, this assumption that the object is real, independent and ‘out there’, and the brain is representing the world ‘in here’ for a ‘you’ or a ‘me’ to see it and interact with it somehow, is clearly false. If we pause for a moment we see that is just not possible. Everything is too
alive
to be pigeonholed in this way. Current activity is all there is, even if memories are appearing that appeal to times and places other than the one right here.

If this is grasped, language that talks about me and you and past and future has been exposed. It is nothing other than current activity: a timeless, unceasing energy that has no beginning and no end. The mind we talk about in our everyday conversations is no longer housed within the skull of a separately existing thing we call human. No, it is demoted or promoted, whichever way you want to understand it, to an expression of life itself. Gone is the notion of birth and death, and in come drying puddles, cloud formations and rainy days filling those little hollows once again.

Apparent personal lives appear like clouds: they form, hang around for a moment with a short display and then appear invisible. The cloud has not gone anywhere because it never existed; life appeared cloudy for a while and now it is appearing as blue sky. This is Wholeness at work appearing different and maintaining itself at the same time. The consensus view of reality will not allow this formulation to take root, simply because one cannot maintain personal identity and Wholeness at the same time. Like the lucid dream described earlier on, once the dream is seen for what it is, it simply fades away.

There is no need to place science on trial for conspiracy, though. Science is an activity like everything else. I quite like computer technology, motor cars and anaesthetic while my leg is being removed; it feels good. Science has removed many diseases that would have claimed lives years ago. We have running water and electric light. But comfort is not your comfort or my comfort; it is just comfort for no one. Wholeness seems to prefer comfort over discomfort, but creates both to form a contrast.

We feel that everything that is happening is happening to a ‘me’. There is not just depression; there is my depression. There is not just money; there is my money, and so on. Trying to own something and make it ‘mine’ is a product of seeming individuality. It cannot be avoided. It is what happens along the way and causes joy and grief as a result. However, at some level there is a feeling of disquiet and loss. Worldly activities become a symptom of something else. Like Freud’s formulation of unconscious forces which shape observable behaviour without consent, this constant longing for something else is a longing to come home. It is not a negation of the world and a desire to reside in a cave on top of a mountain; it is the feeling of belonging we want. Wholeness wants to recognise itself in everything, not in quiet contemplation on a cushion somewhere. It wants to look at creation and see novelty without separation. It wants to see difference without isolation.