It’s an odd thing we go through as humans. We are bombarded with more information than we could ever assimilate. For those of us who like to pay attention to such things, it can be a bit of a blur. And yet, we, all of us, cope. We maintain. We manage to somehow stay on top of this mountain of information through a complex system of mental filtering. Our consciousness somehow manages to ride shotgun over this information, steering it, throttling it, dumbing it down into some sort of manageable torrent. In a way we are not too unlike that autistic child we see flailing at the world. And to the extent that we convince ourselves that we’re succeeding in that effort, we do our best to stoically stare past it all, resolute in our refusal to become swept away by it, to not become lost in the swirl that is this moment to moment reality.
It all reminds me of a description given by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor in a lecture on the functioning of the two hemispheres of the brain.
“Our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor…. Our right human hemisphere, is all about this present moment. It’s all about, right here, right now. Our right hemisphere thinks in pictures, and it learns kinesthetically, through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems, and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like, and tastes like, what it feels like, and what it sounds like. I am an energy being, connected to the energy all around me, through the consciousness of my right hemisphere.”
And about our logical, controlling side says:
“Our left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it’s all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment, and start picking out details, details and more details about those details, it then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we have ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It’s that little voice that says to me, ‘Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning.’ It’s that calculating intelligence that knows, that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it’s that little voice that says to me, ‘I am.’ ‘I, am.’ And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me ‘I am’, I become separate, I become a single, solid individual separate from the energy flow around me, and separate from you.”
And such ‘I am’ separation, despite all its romanticized, Cartesian logic and rationality, is not all goodness and light. It is after all separation. Any severance from the All is bound to have at least some degree of pain associated with it, no mater how much one wants to believe otherwise. And yet for some of us, it may not be that uncommon to experience moments of the hyper-intensive, All experiencing lucidity, those moments when the internal chatter has silenced, allowing the flow of the everything to begin to envelop us. Artists, musicians and craftsmen experience this, it happens for people on spiritual quests if they’re lucky, with people in love, writers stumbling across some particularly enticing concept that allows their mind to soar beyond the local confines of language and reason might even experience this. Poets struggle to grasp the ephemeral with clumsy hands, their words and ideas the tools of the rational mind, tools never intended to be used for anything so delicate, so elusive.
And at those moments, when the flow of energy about us is tasted, on occasion one detects, one thinks that they have just detected, a connection that transcends the rational small limits that mark the confines of the mind. Something like this is what happened as I worked on my little project last week, and again just the other night, this little thing I’m working on, this writing project that keeps calling me back when I find my self straying out to blog out some fragment of an idea, or escaping to romp the Twitterverse. I’ll send you a copy of it if you want. When I’m done. I promise.
So after years of agnosticism, atheism, I seemed to have developed this odd attraction to scripture, and I was working through one of these aphorisms that describes the moving of mountains. You know the one. I was seeing the play of it, its setting upon the common ground of existence, that ultimate, all expansive, indefinable field of possibilities where everything exists, and where everything, even the ideas attempting to contain them, are mere transitive perturbations upon that field. And these ancient texts rest in that place, and in that place, in that realm of existence, in that state of being, anything becomes possible because everything, all those ideas, all those distinctions, are all ever-changing, transient possibilities.
And as it became more and more real, can I say as it somehow began to make sense, I became filled with the impending sense of its possibility, with the overwhelming feeling of its imminent realization. The sense was so pressing that I felt compelled to get up, to get out of my chair, to go outside. You know how it goes. Sometimes an idea is just so expansive that you feel you simply can no longer contain it and you have to get up, get outside, perhaps walk around it a bit, whether it’s to get a better grasp of it or just to step away from it for awhile. Sometimes you’re not sure which it is; so you tell yourself that maybe you just need some fresh air. Perhaps just to look up at the night sky, at what’s up there, at what’s out there, at what’s next to you in that place, at what’s welling up inside you to embrace it. Maybe you can get a better look at what it is, right then, what it is that could move mountains. Could it be? The mind races at the possibilities.
I clicked TweetDeck for a quick look at the goings on there, opened up a window to tap out a hasty tweet:
Sometimes when the writing (or other project) gets real intense…do you feel the need to get up and go outside…or take a brief twitter break? 9:57 PM Sep 10th
It was then that I saw what bridgebldr had Tweeted just moments before:
Just came in from sitting barefoot in the grass, absolutely beautiful evening in Oregon, angelic wisps of clouds in the sky. 9:50 PM Sep 10
adding:
You are only one thought away from heaven on Earth. It’s your choice. 9:51 PM Sep 10th
The quickest way for faith to move a mountain is to stop making mountains out of molehills 9:55 PM Sep 10th
Every mountain is a molehill. So how hard is that to move? 9:56 PM Sep 10th
I was stunned. In those few short lines bridgebldr had just expressed the exact same moment that I was having, the same impressions, citing the same scripture. And it was all staring right back at me from the screen. Amazed, I went outside to contemplate what had just opened across this field of possibilities. A communication had occurred, not to anyone and not from anyone, just a thought, a transitive ripple across the field of possibilities, but this time, in this instance, it had, perhaps for the benefit of my cynic, become an undeniable matter of record right in front of me, across the internet, settled in the memory of the Twitter database. It was a very cool, dazzling experience, the night shimmering, dancing with possibility.
Oddly though, the next week was a struggle. My mind settled into this place where the very idea of getting back to writing, to getting back to this bliss, seemed daunting and uphill, the idea of it actually oppressive, as though it just was not meant to be. It started the next morning.
It’s not that that next morning wasn’t gloriously beautiful, it was. Perhaps it was just in the way I approached it, the dreading of it, the dark apprehension of the idea of it, the way in which I was determined not to let it bring me down. It was Thursday the eleventh. I was determined to not let the inertia of that day take me over. My first decision was my line of defense, to not to turn on the TV.
Yeah, it was that day. There is so much associated with that day, September 11th; it’s not a patriotic day, not a day of celebration, it’s a day infused with a profound sense of betrayal, a day infused with sorrow, a day like that place in Yellow Submarine where the blue meanies run rampant across the world stealing all the rainbows, all the colors from the flowers, all the joy. And of course I didn’t actually think of any of this at the time, this is all in retrospect, looking back at it that I see it for what it was. Unless one wanted to relive the events of eight years before, one did not turn on the TV or even pick up a news paper that day. The eleventh was a day to focus on work, and that’s what I did for the most part. I kept my head down and worked right through lunch, on through the afternoon keeping my mind occupied with any number of bleak repetitive tasks.
At some point as the afternoon moved into evening an old folk song began running through my head.
Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passing. Where have all the flower gone? Long time ago.
I hadn’t thought of that song in decades, so why was it going through my head now? Where did it come from? Why was it there? It made no sense.
How did it go? I Googled the lyrics. It turned out that the lyrics were composed in the tradition of ubi sunt, a literary term taken from the Latin, “Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?”, meaning “Where are those who were before us?” or “Ubi nunc…?”, “where now?” and were reflected in such medieval works as Beowulf, the Exeter Book, and others, The Wanderer having been composed sometime around 960 to 990 AD:
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels in the hall?
Separation from better times lost, I knew this but still thought it exceptionally peculiar that I should become obsessed by those particular folk lyrics I hadn’t thought about in decades. And never in the past eight years had ever thought of or associated this lyric with 9/11, so why now?
It was much, much later that I learned Mary Travers had been admitted to the hospital, finally passing away several days later from her illness. I made no connection, I was too immersed in my own trivial concerns to give it any thought. What would I think? There was no connection. My rational mind assured me I was separate, disconnected from the All. The existential ground was simply a playful abstraction. I had no time for play. Mary Travers passed away on the sixteenth.
So the entire week stalled like this. I would not get back to writing. Well I told myself the weekend was coming and I could clear my head and get back to it then, but when the weekend arrived I still had this kind of energy void. And the more I thought about writing, the more I wanted to escape. So I went back to watching TV, and everything I watched seemed to remind me of everything I had left unfinished, so I would go to bed to sleep. Anything to keep from writing. And I knew…
I knew that something was up. How could I possibly, sanely not want to do something that always, always brought me such joy? Well, I was suppressing, I told myself. All the indicators were there. The overwhelming feelings of boredom, the sleepiness. Clearly, some part of me was terrified of where this writing was heading.
For years I’d allowed myself to fall into this same pattern, repeatedly doing the same thing, allowing those intermittent weeks of idleness, these long weeks of distractions to have their way. Weeks and months obsessing over world events and national politics, was some part of me determined to never finish? I meditated. It was Monday night. I got back to work.
Now my research that evening led me to a fable attributed to Aesop. Apparently no one really knows exactly when or where these fables originated, some have suggested Indian traditions. This one fable in particular seemed particularly apropos to my writer’s block, the fable of The Dog in the Manger. One translation goes:
A Dog lay in a manger, and by his growling and snapping prevented the oxen from eating the hay which had been placed for them. “What a selfish Dog!” said one of them to his companions; “he cannot eat or sleep in the hay himself, and yet refuses to allow those to eat who can.” (The moral, people often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves).
Now it’s an error, a simple trick of the mind, to reduce these types of fables down into the shallow confines of the mundane and obvious, and ironically, in a way, this becomes the precise point of the fable, for were the mind offers the simple, poorly thought out answer, buffered by the wrongful notion that there is little more to be gained, it has the effect of producing precisely the same result as that dog in the manger. The dog, the mind, can block the way to the experience of bliss because it, an artificial creation meant to corral the All into manageable confines, is itself, by its very nature, completely unequipped to ever grasp the immensity of what it has been trained to guard. You get the idea. From the standpoint of the fable, the dog’s placement in the stable was completely inappropriate, it had no business being there, but then on the other hand it did what was in its nature to do, that much at least was appropriate, it just didn’t belong in that place.
The real benefit of these stories is found in their relationship to the All, their meaning experienced in immersion in the All. If that makes no sense, don’t worry about it. If it does, well then you know what I’m talking about. And from the unitary perspective, from the perspective of the All as experienced through the right hemisphere as Taylor might put it, there is a great depth of meaning and bliss to be found in any of these stories, but then such is the nature of the unitary. Bliss.
After hours of writing I was as energized as I’d been before, delighting in this wonder lifted from the dust of centuries, at the absolute perfection of it all. And I was amused at my reticence, at my silly writer’s block and the way it had stood in the way, knowing, even when I was not there in that place, that it was due to this yapping internal dialog, growling its dark uncertain fears. I tweeted:
This work is such an amazing thing… it occurs 2 me what part procrastination must play that would cause me to stay away. 10:31 PM Sep 21st
And once again I found myself getting up to head out into the nighttime, but this time it was different. This time I wasn’t driven by some ill defined compulsion to step away from the keyboard energized by what I had written, pushed to step out into that shimmering nighttime of possibilities. This time it was different.
Our Shih Tzu was beside himself at the back door. He was clearly agitated. There was something out there in the darkness.
Whatever was out there did not belong, and this wasn’t my imagination. Rama was running back and forth barking. Torn between wanting out, and wanting to hide, Shih Tzu’s are like this, they’re remarkably just there, one moment curious, the next filled with anxiety, vibrating full body in the face of the unknown. Something was out there. Something unafraid to stand right beyond the door, unafraid to make its presence known, capable of doing harm perhaps, if provoked.
I opened the door to step out and caught a glimpse of dogs but I could not make them out in the darkness. This explained the boldness at least, there were two of them. I reached for a flashlight but it was dead. How could that be? Had I forgotten to turn it off? I flipped on the backyard flood lights, and there they were, a pit and a mix, holding their own in the glare, sizing me up, growling, yet confused, as if they knew they were out of place. Perhaps the flood lights caught them off guard. They looked now like children caught out past their bedtime, knowing they should have been asleep in their snug little doggy beds, and yet they still seemed stuck in a mindset that it was I who was intruding on their space.
Now in ten years I have had a stray in our back perhaps only one other time, and that was running through. But now everything was closed. There was no where for them to get in or out and I was baffled at how they had even gotten there. Seeing them standing there was just simply bizarre.
In it’s own way it was a kind of an awkward moment, they didn’t belong there, but there they were, so it seemed appropriate to say something, to talk to them, you know, the way you would with dogs with whom you hadn’t been properly introduced, you try to be firm, but respectful. It was as though they were waiting for me to make the next move, so I politely, firmly, suggested they go back to where ever it was they came from, to stop making nuisances of themselves with all their non-nocturnal neighbors. They offered a couple of unconvincing growls before skulking back into the darkness.
It wasn’t until later the next day that it hit me that once again the universe had offered up it’s own little serendipitous bit of synchronicity… its own uncanny take on the evening’s studies. Dogs? What the heck was going on? Was I on to something?
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