GAIA’S FINAL MAGIC WORDS
The problem with words (even ‘Magic’ ones)
The protagonist, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) escapes from Shawshank prison. He withdraws the money he made through corrupt schemes he ran on behalf of Norton, the prison governor. He sends evidence of the corruption and murders at the prison to a local newspaper. The police go to apprehend Norton, who shoots himself to avoid arrest. Red, Andy’s friend, gains parole, after serving 40 years inside, but violates it by crossing the border into Mexico. On the beach of Zihuatanejo, the two friends are reunited. Happy ending.
I was doing a one-to-one session, where the person was exploring the energy of openness.
As we stepped outside, she looked around. On the left, in the distance, there was lots of smoke coming from a farm on the hills. After a while the woman said to me that she had seen the smoke. But she was just curious, like a child, about the smoke. As if she had no word for fire, she made no ‘assumptions’ or connections in her head about there being a fire. She was just looking at the smoke.
You see, even having a vocabulary stops the experiences. It is as if we know too much all the time, so we can’t really experience what’s happening. Because of our knowledge, immediate connections are made and everything is boxed into a known realm pretty quickly.
This invites us to think about the fact that everything we refer to in everyday speech is an agreement of meaning and form between people. My friends Michael and Petra, who are shamans, were talking to me about this: that the moment we give a name to something it becomes a supposed known thing, and it loses its magic. But the name is not the thing.
The woman in my session then looked at the grass and the daisies, and she said she felt the same curiosity; it was like looking at them for the first time, with inquiry, rather than with ‘knowledge.’ She was just exploring, as if there was a whole world there in that grass (why do you think a kid can spend an hour looking at an ant?).
So in a culture where we want to know it all, the real fun is perhaps in knowing less.
In that way, we could see the world immediately next to us (a chair, a paving stone, smoke) and notice that it is very beautiful indeed.
Gaia’s Magic Weeks, held in Italy, are part of the F**k It Retreats program. Find out more at www.thefuckitlife.com