While sitting on my customized cushion of sphagnum peat moss observing the sun edge its way clear of clouds to warm the cells of my skin that stretch in waking response, and the distinctive crow of our band-major rooster, and new okra blossoms giving way to the fruit I am creating new recipes for, and birds gracefully darting across the clearing in this river front forest, and a muscle twitch in my right calf, and Hettie doing her morning squirmy back scratching routine on her way to check for cats, and the flavor of the coffee, and the deafening air coaches on their way to screech on tarmac four miles away, and the fragrant levity of my pipe, and a newly graduated tadpole hopping after bugs barely smaller in the shade of a pepper plant, and the gurgle of my gut as valves deal with my nutrition autonomously, and a glorious black and iridescent blue butterfly nurses the orange and red cones of orchid flowers on the pride of Barbados bush, and the puny progress of late summer black eyed pea sprouts planted where the tomatoes rotted in July, and the prick of a mosquito unseen on my back … I realized once in a magical again… I am not observing from my body.
I am observing my body tell me what it observes on both sides of its skin. But me, I’m simultaneously no entity and at the center of all, no more my body’s self than the trees or the toad or the sun. But my body insists I have exclusive access to interface with its genetic memories, experiential cornerstones and sensations in the eternal present, and what’s more, I enjoy it, like an old soft pair of jeans. I suppose that’s the reason I call it mine and all too often identify with it with equal exclusivity.
I have had mutually consensual access to several other bodies in my body’s lifetime as completely as both of us could bear. Of those, several had occasion to reach the mutual realization that we were but one and the same observer, simultaneously as they so happened. The twoness of the pair of bodies, the very infinity of variety in the universe all seem to be the observer’s way of getting honest, autonomous answers from these bodily instruments of sensation just as I do from the cells of the body that claims the part of the observer that enjoys its sensations.
I am aware of the difficulty in sorting out the pronouns above due to language evolved to describe the myth of our civilization that believes and speaks it and can only say that the personal pronouns refer to the observer who’s sensory input the physical world is. All others refer to the individual sensual entities that are the physical world: the perceivers, the perceptions and the perceived — all observed in process. I figured it would be better to use the impersonality of pronouns for the observer, despite the confusion, considering the feathers that get ruffled when names like soul, god, creator, master, or supreme anything get bandied about. Our gestalt cannot be considered superior to the answers upon which we depend for satisfaction of our curiosity, nor is belief required when the questions are asked of autonomous entities thinking the questions came from within their separate, independent self.
Awakening to the observer obviates the separateness required of belief systems. Maybe.
6 comments:
Language being a human construct cannot begin to capture real "reality" or truth. Do we even have the words - or the mind - to describe our interconnectivity with every living thing - not only our selves...
welcome, abva(&at),
Of course we have the words and the art and freedom to wield them as well as other creative forms which still can only mean what they mean to each entity perceiving such artifacts no matter what the intent of the creator.
At best they are honest descriptions of the creator's perception of truth that resonate the deepest recognition in the perceiver, not so much of the pointer as of that pointed at … from another another view point.
At worst they are dishonest descriptions by the spin doctor's ability to sell lies to the gullible for the deepest benefit for the perpetrator protected.
Communication predates man's relatively recent discovery of the ability to articulately more purposefully, gain advantage more duplicitously through the ever proliferated fog of language. Granite and oils and musical notes express truer out-of-the-cultural-box perceptions of truth than all but the most sublime of poets.
And as those who seek to retain power utilise language as a tool of control (to belittle and/or bamboozle) so too can we use (or misuse) language to puncture the constructed reality we are fed.
Too true Pisces, the problem with the language of the sort that set Gurdjieff on his quest for the sleeping man. As I remember it, he noticed that, as a Caucasian who spoke Georgian, that the speechifying Russians had no word for conversation. In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, along with many other broadening concepts, would come to the crest of three known concepts he has blown together he gives the resulting peak a totally new name that rings out the feeling without wringing out the meaning without a reference to a past explanation.
In my earlier life as a potter, I used to drift, often into that place where self is abandoned, the body works without any interface of language, seeming to hover timelessly.
The mind is out, away, flying free.
How cruel it seemed when someone tapped on the glass in front of me, or a coffe was brought, suddenly reeling my mind back, returning my body to consciousness.
In the period I was away, I often turned out my best work.
I think now, when I write, the conscious mind is too prone to interfering, editing, telling me what to say, telling me where not to go.
I think of it as a Zen state. Maybe it is not, but that is the label I give it. Time halts. Tiny things are observed. Not judged. Bigger puzzles fall into place.
Rare these days for me to reach it.
Every decoding is an encoding: All translation is a distortion.
No words mean exactly the same thing to any two people.
Your description brings a picture to mind, but if I could paint it, it would not be the scene you describe.
I wonder if this detachment is what Timothy Leary so earnestly sought?
Welcome Sobriquet,
Oh, Leary found it alright. He just never found the way without a ticket to ride, maybe.
The American Book of the Dead testifies to his visits, but he had no address, like his compatriot, Richard Alpert, now Baba Ram Dass, has. Realizing the state is accessible through a way of thinking makes taking psychedelics now only enhance the beauty and number of prolific iterations of the way in extremely varied and brilliant display, but I've got it in with the bouncer who lets me in without a ticket anytime I say I'm ready, and I don't have to sleep two days to recover.
Post a Comment