The World is My Mirror (9 page)

The apparent creation of solid, separate objects will eventually turn out to be more than a person can bear, and so collapse is inevitable. It will be at ‘physical death’ like the little puddle, or when the puddle realises it is made out of water and cloud and rests in everything for eternity.

Do you remember your English lessons at school where you started to deconstruct language into verbs, adjectives and nouns, etc? Nouns, we were told, refer to things‌—‌objects. They form the subject of our sentences and tell us who did what to whom: ‘John threw the ball’ seems straightforward enough and we can, without much difficulty, identify the actor, the action and the receiver of the action.

However, our sentences can also contain nouns that do not refer to anything we can touch, smell, taste, see or hear. I am thinking about abstract nouns. Justice, love, hope, fear and time can fit into this classification nicely. We can talk about these things over dinner and engage with them through the themes of our favourite novels, but we cannot taste them the same way we can our food or drink. Food and drink, we are told, are tangible‌—‌they have a reality to them; time and love do not‌—‌they are intangible. A nice, neat division it would seem: some things are concrete; some things are ideas. Ideas are not present in the same way a body or planet Earth seem to be.

The reason I mention this is not to tell you something you already
think
you know; it is to challenge this division, this common sense notion that objects exist independently and ‘out there’ for all to see, but abstract ideas have to be brought to life through discussion and debate.

Objects have no more reality to them than time, love and justice do: they are all abstractions‌—‌none are present. Let me try to elaborate a bit. I am just about to press the plunger down on my coffee pot and pour the first one of the day into my favourite green mug. What could be more real and concrete than that? But none of these objects exist in the form I am giving them. I am simplifying and editing that which is infinite into a few labels that enable me to describe to you through these words an everyday activity that you may also find yourself doing from time to time. There is one scene‌—‌and I am being picky as to what I say is happening. There is no final version that can be reduced down to coffee making; coffee making is an abstraction. There is no coffee making separate from experiencing. Experiencing is appearing to be ‘that’. No separation. Coffee making is an interpretation. The mind is slapping labels again, placing Post-It notes on experience so that it can know and predict.

All that seems to be happening is that stories are appearing to make sense of the infinite that has no time, edge or location. I am spinning yarns to entertain myself and my audience. This is no different from making objects out of cloud formation or believing the Plough constellation to be a real farming implement turning over the clod made out of star dust when night-time comes. The mind, or thought, is doing exactly what it is meant to do: it is creating patterns and joining up the dots.

So, I am saying that abstraction and storytelling are essentially the same thing. Calling a ‘cup’ a cup is no problem. It can form part of our narrative when we tell someone about our favourite one or how we dropped Grandma’s antique one when a child and being slapped for our carelessness. Storytelling is entertaining; there is a kind of magic to it.

But storytelling is a ‘happening’, a current activity. The ideas for our stories appear presently and colour consciousness this way and that. The same editing goes on when we describe the vicissitudes of our love life to our best friend or the way people we know appear to us over time. It is as if the moment we start to talk and think we are adding a chapter to the epic we call ‘me and my life’.

This is why as soon as we start to talk about non-duality it becomes fantasy. We know it’s fantasy because ‘reality’ cannot be talked about directly: there is nothing to talk about. All the words you may hear at a satsang or meeting point to something that cannot be grasped and cannot be pinned down. If you have been to a few meetings or watched YouTube videos of people asking questions, you will notice and feel the frustration of the ‘spiritual’ seeker trying to fit what is being suggested into a familiar framework that underpins our day-to-day stories. Time, purpose and logic appear over and over again. You will not get this; you cannot take it home with you and display it on your mantelpiece.

This is excellent news, however. If you understood It, you would be someone understanding something. You are back to square one. Not knowing is another way of pointing to seamless Wholeness. Not knowing is what’s left when stories are seen as stories. Not knowing is peace. Not knowing is constant wonderment. Not knowing can’t be known. Not knowing
is
.

Unlike abstraction and stories, experiencing or being need absolutely nothing. You cannot embellish being to make it look more attractive and more exciting; you’ve got diddlysquat to work with. It is already complete as this timelessness right here, right now. Can you see why ‘unconditional love’ is a term that is used frequently? Being asks for nothing and gives everything. You can never leave yourself; yourself can never leave you. There are no parts and no pieces. Prior to appearances‌—‌you are, and with appearances‌—‌you are. If that’s not pointing to completeness and oneness for you, then you are very hard to please. When Wholeness ‘sees’ itself it realises it ‘cannot’ see itself; it
is
itself. Silence and stillness in the form of calamity and farce continue to dance around. The court jester we call our life continues to entertain and amuse. We can still cry, we can still smile, and we can still get angry. Aliveness will not be tamed by stories. Aliveness appears
as
stories. There is no story that will be the end of all stories. Stories are the beginning, the middle and the end of everything.

Nothing needs to be any different to what already is. It is when fantasy seduces us that life can become serious business. Believing that there really are people outside of us, encircling us, placing us in the middle and taunting us, is the stuff of nightmares and dreams. Row after row of other faces, other bodies and other voices gnaw at us constantly. Some throw abuse; others throw sticks and stones. Their eyes seem to pierce our soul. They can see our filthy core. We will never live up to the standard they demand because they will shift the goalposts and reserve their praise for tomorrow or the next day. We try to please and bargain for some respite. We may be granted the odd concession and life may look a little rosier. But remember, roses have their thorns as well. Do not be fooled by the sweet smell of victory: thorns and brambles are never far away to tangle and trip us.

The point I am making is that abstraction and storytelling can take hold to such an extent they can drown us and suck the lifeblood out of us, leaving just the shrivelled skin and empty husk. Timeless being trumps all stories, all fantasy.

The good news is that we can still edit by adding and deleting and make up all sorts of stories. We can believe we were born, we can believe that we will die. We can shake hands with someone, hug, kiss and love them with all our heart. Nothing needs to be any different.

To kiss another person’s lips is to kiss our own. To shake another’s hand is to shake our own. We are only ever experiencing ourselves through everything life throws at us. We can stop pretending; stop believing we’re someone or something. We have played our game and made our point. Suffering and confusion can wake us up in the same way falling from a great height in a dream can. We will never hit the ground in a dream and we will never reach the base of a bottomless pit. Once we see there is only dream, the impact of a ‘me’ having a life becomes as ridiculous as the impact from the bottomless pit. We can pull ourselves together‌—‌there’s no need to pull ourselves apart!

Reading what has been written about abstraction and concepts and socially constructed meanings can be mighty difficult to grasp if we only know and accept what we have been taught about life, the universe and everything. The so-called solid world is perhaps too solid and real to be questioned. The hypnotic spell is taking a long while to wear off. A click of the fingers to be ‘back in the room’ does not seem to work for us. I am going to look at hypnotism in the next chapter, simply because it deserves a good seeing to. I want to end this one, though, with how I see the process of abstraction and the formulation of concepts.

Have you seen the television programme
How It’s Made
? They take everyday objects, such as a drink can or a musical instrument, and show you from start to finish the various processes that go into producing it from raw materials at one end to a recognisable, fully functioning thing at the other. Imagine you are in a trumpet factory producing high quality instruments for professional musicians. You are watching the production line where various people perform different tasks and assemble separate pieces, ready to send it on to the next guy down the line. You watch as the brass gets rolled and shaped by the metal worker, hammering and soldering the seams to an invisible airtight seal. Tubes get bent and valves sit nicely into holes. Heating and polishing ensure durability and attractiveness, and the guy has a blow and a press to test-drive the birth of a new addition to the family. Finally, it gets wrapped and boxed and labelled as ‘trumpet’.

Now, abstraction is the same kind of process as the one described above. Let us take something not man-made, say a flower, a rose, maybe. If you could observe one right now you might notice its stem and its leaves. You can feel the thorns and smell the aroma. Count the petals and notice those central projections we call stamens that produce pollen at the tip, and we are well on our way to describing the rose. If thought is our factory production line, then we have taken the raw materials, in this case the noticed parts, the visible parts, of the flower, and stuck them together through investigation and knowledge. The parts have been processed. We have selected some parts over others. But, just as with the trumpet, there is no flowerness or trumpetness there which is above and beyond the entire process of mental model building and labelling. Look at it this way: if the trumpet went out of fashion and orders were down, the factory could start making fancy brass funnels out of the end piece of the trumpet. Similar processes could take place to produce it, it would just be quicker and a new label would be printed saying ‘brass funnels’. The same brass is functioning differently. There is no trumpet or funnel that can be labelled once and for all. For those of you in a pedantic mood there is no brass either: brass is an alloy of zinc and copper.

Similarly, the thing we call ‘rose’ might simply be regarded as a natural device for making petals, whose only use is to scent water for special ceremonies and rituals on the fourth Sunday of every month in a leap year. Roses would therefore be non-existent: they have no function other than to make petals for a sacrament. Sending a single red rose to a loved one might be considered offensive, or even blasphemous.

So concepts are the result of mental abstraction and not the depiction of a solid, preformed, pre-existing and unchanging world out there, to be observed and recorded for all time. If you are brave enough, look at the body and the self in the same way. The mind may resist this kind of exploration; just give it a slap and tell it to listen for once. I will leave you to explore this on your own without any of my ideas contaminating you. All I will say is this: if you come up with anything interesting, discard it and start again.

My take on things, as you will realise, is to look for yourself, feel for yourself and stop hanging on to a guru, master or celebrity spiritual teacher. They are all a load of pants, and rightly so. I am not being disparaging here; I am just alerting you to the fact that you are the sole authority on yourself and not the ideas from fictitious characters in a book or film. Paying more money to sit closer to a famous teacher is just unnecessary. Mind you, you won’t listen to me or my load of pants either. Your dream is your dream. Just because I didn’t go to meetings does not mean you shouldn’t. That bolt of lightning might strike you‌—‌who knows? In some ways writing down these words will always be my take on things and I won’t pretend it isn’t.

Don’t forget, we are still in the pub, you and me, and the red leather seats are warming up nicely. The snow is still falling and the ale is still flowing.

‘Another plate of strong cheese and fresh crusty bread, please, barman!’

‘I want you to simply relax and concentrate on my voice. Look into my eyes, and allow yourself to trust me completely, unquestionably and wholeheartedly… You’re under.’

‘Everything I say from now on you are to believe and not doubt a single word: you are a separate entity that was born in the past and will die in the future. You live on a planet we call ‘Earth’. You exist with other people similar to you. There is something called ‘time’ that will ensure your progress through life as you reach your goal and realise your purpose. The goal is... ’

‘3-2-1, you’re back in the room.’