As we have seen, the transition from the sensitivities of the ‘known self’ to those of the felt self represents a quantum jump in consciousness, one that enables the felt whole of the self to come into relationship with the felt whole of the present. The ‘known self’ is primarily preoccupied with the task of managing the various warring factions within the self and between self and world—a task that involves analysis, duplicates, judgment, willfulness, plans and agendas. The forces that bind the awareness of the ‘known self’ to that task are the anxieties that embed division and neglect within the body, confounding its consciousness and deadening it to the consciousness of the world.
The transition to the felt self begins with a dissolution of the inner barriers and baffles that separate the male pole of consciousness from the female; and the transition is fulfilled once the self opens to its full axial consciousness and finds its complement in the world. When that happens, the felt self becomes primarily conscious of consciousness itself—the defining trait of mutual awareness: the mind discovers all the world to be a corational corridor; it finds it can enter all things, and join them and learn from them, as it increasingly recognizes the One Mind that brings them all into relationship. Whereas the ‘known self’ experiences matter objectively from a mind materially confined to the head, the felt self experiences mind subjectively through the consciousness-infused matter of the world.
Okakura, remember, observed, “We boast that we have conquered matter, and forget that it is matter that has enslaved us.” The felt self represents the triumph of a sensitivity attuned to mind over one that is bound by the constraints of mere obdurate matter: mind over matter, we might say. The emergence of the felt self undoes our boast and our enslavement. It is a phase shift of such liberating power that its effect on self and world is multidimensional, and shows up in a wide range of perspectives. Among other effects that can be seen, the transition carries us
• from self-consciousness to mutual awareness. We could well consider this to be the primary shift in consciousness, the one from which all the others issue, and which helps to explain them.
• from doing to being. When doing comes first, being vanishes. When being comes first, it empowers our doing.
• from self-achieved independence to self-achieved submission. Myth personifies these two latent tendencies of the male element as tyrant and hero—roles determined by their relationship to Being. The tyrant, withdrawing into himself, rejects being and becomes unipolar; the hero, by submitting, opens the inner corridor first to his own being, and ultimately to the mutual awareness that sustains the felt unknown all around him.
• from enclosure to receptivity. This perspective epitomizes the shift from ‘fenced-in’ hetabrain to the resonant crux of our consciousness, through which self and world transform together.
• from knowing to feeling. The enclosure we have built is made of unintegrated bits of knowledge that stand against sensation—and so against the present itself. When that knowledge is surrendered to the pelvic intelligence of being, we begin to feel perspectives as sensation, and “the thing” as a whole.
• from self-conflict to grace. The effects of the phase shift can be seen in our actions; before the shift, our actions reveal the conflicts of Jerzy Grotowski’s divided performer; after it, they reveal being in a grace of expression that is limitlessly informed.
• from Idea to Energy. The purpose of stand-alone ideas is to split up the energy of the world and freeze it in discrete, fixed shards that diminish the reality of relationship and abstract the exchange of gifts.
• from bits to waves. When our thinking is shielded from Being, our ‘spectatorship’ reveals a world of isolated particulars, just as an observation of a wave of light reveals it to be a particle. When we see the world in bits, we naturally want to order it and rule it. When the self shifts out of spectatorship into the wide axes of its embodied, corational consciousness, we experience a vibratory intelligence that belongs to “a great wave phenomenon”—every ripple of which carries complete evidence of the whole from which it arises.
• from cybernetics to responsiveness. As the mindful sensitivities of the body awaken, we begin to experience it not as stubborn matter, but as a field of intelligence that has no need of a helmsman. Instead, the body enters a partnership with the corational present.
• from coarseness to subtlety. As self and world come into fluid, mindful relationship, the coarseness of our ideated thinking melts into the sensational subtlety of the present.
• from four dimensions to five. The rigid demarcations of time and space lose their verdict of absolute separation, as all things are found to reflect all things, and consciousness is found to be not a stand-alone phenomenon that defies the Universal Law, but a dimension of our reality in which all things interfuse.
• from generalization to specificity. As the hetabrain’s patterned divisions of class and category dissipate, the dull generality of the world around us falls away to reveal a ravishing specificity in which every tree, every stalk of grass, every cup of tea is its own unique and voluble manifestation of Being.
Of course, the above is only a partial list. In particular, there are five other dramatic changes by which our sensitivities become conscious of consciousness: they show up in our relationships to the ordinary, to spaciousness, to play, to gentleness, and to the harmonizing of the world. The rest of this chapter is devoted to a consideration of them, one at a time.
We are so in thrall to the male element that we see its power as the agent of success even when it isn’t. It wasn’t Wayne Gretzky’s power as a hockey player that made his career so outstanding—it was his sensitivity. It wasn’t Einstein’s powers of deductive reasoning that cracked open the riddle of relativity—it was his sensitivity to the interplay among mass, length, time, the speed of light and, by his own account, “the mind of God.” It wasn’t Barack Obama’s power as an orator that carried him into the White House—it was his sensitivity to his own truth, to the issues facing America, and to the hearts of the people. Of course, Gretzky was a powerful player, as Einstein was a powerful thinker and Obama a powerful speaker; but their power was in service to their sensitivity, not the other way around.
Misinterpreting the success of others, we tend to resort to willfulness in overcoming our own problems, which obliterates the sensitivity that could guide us through them and find guidance in them. And just as power is the quality that is formalized in any hierarchy—so that the transcendent king or CEO at the top wields more power than those lower down—power is seen by the male element as a means of transcending what is inconvenient or ordinary or simply standing in the way. We take transcendence as our polestar and are guided by the urge towards it in everything we do. This notion assigns supremacy to the male element—and that proves ruinous to the female element of Being every time and on every order of human organization: from individual to familial to communal to national to global. But why shouldn’t we transcend? Who wants to be ordinary? Our phrase “ordinary as dirt” reveals our associations with that word; and it’s telling that the name we use for our planet—the ultimate embodiment of female being—is Earth, which is synonymous with dirt and soil, words that also mean “filth.”
Our need to transcend Being is taken as natural, just as our fear of the female is taken as a prudent entitlement; and so it is that we seek for ourselves the tyrant’s acquisitions and his splendid bubble of privilege. Our pursuit of them has been radically successful: we take up residence in the head, and look down upon the body as a sort of fashion accessory to be whipped into shape by a personal trainer. Most of us in the West live as powerful tyrants of old could only have dreamed of doing: we can have whatever food we want, whenever we want it, in season or out; we can listen to whatever music we crave, wherever we are, with thousands of choices at our fingertips; we can travel half the globe in a matter of hours; and when we come home, we enter a private space and lock the door behind us. Inside, our hands are kept as far as possible from demeaning contact with the ordinary: they push buttons on the dishwasher, and on a proliferation of remote controls, and push ‘send’ and ‘command’ and ‘talk’ buttons on an array of devices that enable us to communicate with almost anyone at any distance. In our urban centers we surround ourselves with forms of architecture that not only proclaim our superiority to nature: they actually announce its irrelevance—except as accent or decoration—to what really matters in our vision of human progress.
Our tyranny over every facet of the natural world is relentless, and everywhere that tyranny exerts itself, it reinforces our culture’s fantasy of what it is to be human: to rise above the mundane—literally, “what is of the earth.” And so we transcend earth and meadow with the help of concrete and asphalt and homogenized lawns; we transcend time with facelifts and jet travel and instant meals; we transcend ordinary death by buying our meat prepackaged at the grocery store, and making up our corpses to look like they are sleeping, and watching death every day on the news as if it belonged to another, somehow smaller and more remote reality. We transcend everyday weather with air conditioners and heated cars, and with malls and underground concourses where you can buy anything and never see the light of day. And when we buy, we are not attracted to the ordinary, but to the best: the best pen, the best stereo, the best watch; not because, for example, the $8,000 watch tells time better than the $80 watch, but because it distinguishes us, sets us apart, shows that we are not ordinary. The farther we remove ourselves from what is ordinary, of course, the more we disconnect from Being. In fact, we show such callous disregard towards the life over which we have been “given dominion” that one might be forgiven for thinking that our gaze is fixed on the fantasy of some promised afterlife—the tyrant’s ultimate dream of transcendence: everlasting abundance liberated from all responsibility.
Alden Nowlan, in his searching humanity, wrote a poem that stands against that trend and sides resolutely with the ordinary. It recalls an event he shared with his wife and son and is called “Great Things Have Happened”:
We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, “Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.” But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had
been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.
“Is that all?” I hear somebody ask.
Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in
Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.250
Because the polestar of male doing is transcendence, it chafes to sever ties with the earth altogether, to rise above its verdant, ordinary filth and achieve something that really stands out, like landing on the moon; something that might proclaim the extraordinariness of the ‘doer’ for all to witness. By contrast, the Zen archer who makes a perfect, nigh-impossible shot bows deeply to honor the unknown “It,” for the shot is understood to manifest not the archer’s self-achieved excellence, but his self-achieved submission to the whole that informs and guides him. He remains an ordinary part of that whole, and knows that his art depends on it.
If you look through Alden Nowlan’s poems, you will find most of them warmed and heightened by the ordinary details of our world, which often carry a poem’s significance out like a ripple to meet the horizon. Those details are rooted in a specificity of moment and occasion and sensibility. Similarly, the Japanese poet Bashō surrendered his remarkable talents to the commonplace particulars of his world—and through those particulars Bashō allows the world to speak. The sense of particular and unbounded presence in such poems is conveyed by what is most ordinary in them. But how?
The roots of ordinary lead back to a Latin word meaning “to begin a web, lay the warp,” and back farther to a Greek cousin with the same meaning. Ernest Klein suggests that its earliest traceable origins lead to the same base that lies at the root of art and harmony: the Indo-European base ar-, “to join.” What is ordinary belongs to and reveals the web that is joined to all else—it embodies and reveals relationship. When you hold an ordinary object in your hand you are touched by its particular history, which is woven from the fabric of the whole universe. The material that constitutes a simple twig, for instance, was born in stars, eventually to be drawn through the soil and the air and stitched together by sunlight, which also sustains us. Its shape tells us about the winters and rains and bright days that have marked its growth; and before that its story weaves continuously back through the succession of its ancestors that breathed oxygen into the world and helped sustain your ancestors. Similarly, Arthur Miller noted that
the shadow of a cornstalk on the ground is lovely, but it is no denial of its loveliness to see as one looks on it that it is telling the time of day, the position of the earth and the sun, the size of our planet and its shape, and perhaps even the length of its life and ours among the stars.251
An old teapot acquires a patina from all the hands that have held it and used it with care. It was fashioned from clay that lay in the earth for thousands of years until someone’s spade uncovered it and dug it out. Its shape was felt only in someone’s imagination before her slippery hands drew it forth from the clay; the touch and imprint of those hands can still be seen, having been fired into fastness. An old teapot may have served tea to people who were children once and now are old. Held in the hands, it connects us to all that and more.
An ordinary object, like an ordinary person, doesn’t stand out but fits seamlessly into the world around it—the very fate we fear will befall us, which is why we imagine perseity and create artificial seams, wounding both self and world. But whatever is essentially ordinary—a child’s wooden toy, a roadside flower, the sound of rain on a tin roof—shares the same qualities as the teapot. In fact, wherever we find ordinariness, we find kinship; and finding kinship in the world cracks the door open to our partnership with it. That kinship is metaphoric in that an ordinary object has a history and a life we can identify with; but it is also literal. As Father Thomas Berry has pointed out, the trees and grasses are our kin, our relations, our genetic cousins; the rocks of the earth are born of the same star matter that made us. How apt, then, that Thich Nhat Hahn should write of washing a teapot “with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath.”252 Even an old teapot is a window on the harmony of the world; and that makes it a window on the dialogue of Being. The ordinary is our access into the living web of mutual awareness: “if you love it enough, anything will talk to you.”
The ordinary and the extraordinary are commonly thought of as two distinct and contrasting classes of things. And yet Bashō’s poems are extraordinary, as are Nowlan’s—though both are steeped in the ordinary. And classical Japanese Noh theater, which is resolutely ordinary, is also breathtakingly extraordinary. When I reflect on the extraordinary moments in my own life, I think, for example, of the first present my elder daughter gave me, when she was barely two: it was a little grey pebble she found on the ground as we walked home together. I still remember her tiny fingers placing it in my hand—a moment that illuminated my whole life and brought it into sudden focus.
It seems to me that the ordinary and the extraordinary are different sides of the same coin. People tend to turn their backs on the ordinary in order to seek an experience of the extraordinary; but in fact it is through our connection with the ordinary that the truly extraordinary unfolds before us: the ordinary, resplendent with the weave of the world, awakens us to it. The word extraordinary literally means “outside of the ordinary”—and what lies outside of any ordinary event is the extraordinary web of time and process that births that event from the universe. Only the ordinary can manifestly reveal that web, as the teapot reveals and connects us to Being. Similarly, it is when an ordinary artwork resonates with the world around it that we can experience the extraordinary through it. The ineffable harmonies of the Taj Mahal are unforgettable for just that reason, in spite of the number of tea towels and trinkets that bear its image. Or the Venus de Milo. And if you consider the Venus de Milo, you will find that it is not just the sculpted contours that captivate us—it is also the marble, in itself both ordinary and extraordinary, forged in the earth’s mantle, hauled into the light, and chiseled and shaped by hand. Imagine exactly the same contours cast in plastic or stainless steel, and the potency of the kinship afforded by the earth-forged marble becomes apparent.
The connection to Being provided by ordinariness is also behind the advice given in Hagakure, a samurai book written in the 1700s: “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”253 When we treat light matters seriously, even so light a matter as the gift of a grey pebble, it grounds us in the present, which contains all the mystery of the world; when we treat serious matters lightly, it helps us locate them in the ordinary and keeps them from becoming abstract. The martial arts technique heijoshin—the ability to retain ordinary or everyday mind in the face of danger—addresses the same issue. As long as the world remains ordinary, you are brought into relationship with it, seeing and hearing it clearly; when you abstract the world—something that fear always does—you mask its specificity and occlude the source of your natural responsiveness.
If we want to understand the ordinary better by naming its opposite, we could do worse than look to abstraction. Whereas the root of ordinary tells us about “beginning a web,” the root of abstract, you may remember, literally means “to pull away from.” The forgetfulness of abstraction is usually the tool of choice when we are looking for a solution—which, as we saw, comes from a root meaning “to cut off.” When the ‘known self’ cuts away from the ordinary world, it asserts its own rarity, which is the opposite of fitting seamlessly into the world even down to its etymology: rare comes from the Indo-European base eri-, “to loose; to split, separate, be rare.”
The meanings associated with abstract—pulling away from, cutting off, separating—suggest a severing of relationship; and indeed, the more we abstract our world, the less grounded we are in Being and the more we isolate ourselves from it; and isolation, remember, is hallucinogenic. The billionaire Howard Hughes, once a daring aviation inventor, pilot and movie producer, is not the only rare celebrity to have so cut himself off from the ordinary that he descended into paranoid madness. We can take only so much abstraction in our lives before all reality leaks out of them.
Actors learn that lesson, and for the purposes of their craft they adjust what they do depending on the relative ordinariness or abstraction of the medium in which they are working—whether theater, cinema or television. Those related media occupy so many of our waking hours—television especially—that it is worth taking stock of their different degrees of abstraction. Of the three, the process of making theater is the most ordinary. An audience assembles to witness ordinary people moving around and speaking in their own, usually unamplified, voices on an ordinary stage. Everything about theater at its best is patently ordinary. And an actor learns that as long as he remains grounded in the ordinary—resisting all urges towards self-achieved, rare accomplishment—then he can submit to whatever energies run through the world of the play so that they run through him too, heightening his physical responsiveness and awareness; and should he be ravished by a sensitivity to the felt unknown that is present here and now, the audience will be touched by it too. I love films, I love working on them and watching them; but no film has carried me into a direct experience of the blossoming mysteries and wonders and reality of life in the way that theater has. In my lifetime a small handful of performances have shaken me to the core, leaving me so opened that a breeze could meander through me. I believe it is the very ordinariness of the theatrical experience that enables it to fulfill its most exalted function—which is to render the invisible visible.
The processes that make cinema are less ordinary. The audience watches not people, but images of them projected onto a screen. The earliest screen actors quickly found that a heightened responsiveness to the world looked ridiculous on the screen—in fact, the screen will only fall in love with an everyday approach to acting. It was originally speculated that this was due to the large scale of the cinema screen, that acting just had to be smaller to compensate; but even on a tiny screen so-called ‘theatrical acting’ looks melodramatic and weak. It seems rather that the medium, lacking ordinariness, has to adhere to it in other ways. So even though the circumstances of a movie may be extraordinary—Bruce Willis battered and bruised and standing alone against world terrorists, for example—the actor’s responses need the kinship of the ordinary (“Oh well, here we go again”) for the audience to relate to them. We accept that the issue is one of realistic depiction, but of course it’s not. The underscored ordinariness is an artifice that actors, screenwriters and directors have had to master, a way of compensating for the abstraction of the medium. The earliest heroes of cinema may not have understood that conceptually, but they certainly knew how to appear endearingly ordinary: Charlie Chaplin, for example, or Clark Gable, who described himself as “a lucky slob from Ohio.”
The processes that bring television into our living rooms make it the most abstract of the three media. A signal is sent over a wire or through the air (but how that happens remains vague for most of us) from somewhere (most of us have never passed by the television stations and probably don’t know where they are) and enters a box that translates it (how does that happen?) into images in a screen (not even on the screen, in it—and what is inside a television screen anyway? All we really know is that a tube screen will explode if it’s broken. Would a plasma screen leak plasma?). Then there is its content: an ordinary story is continually sliced and diced by random messages that urge us to go shopping for life-enhancing products. One is tempted to speculate that the medium is so divorced from the ordinary that it can only compensate by becoming banal. And it is banal, even down to the etymology of the word. Banal originally meant “compulsory,” and is related to the Old High German word bannan, “to command or forbid under threat of punishment”: a demand for compliance if ever there was one. And sure enough, television is beamed into our living rooms with laugh tracks that cue us to be amused, and to what extent; scripts that tell us what to think; music that instructs us in what to feel when; and acting that directs the audience in their every response. The medium is so abstract that the viewer usually has to be taken by the hand and walked through what a show means every step of the way. Ambiguity banished, perplexity nowhere to be seen, the world flattened into what can be signified. In exchange for its familiar tyranny, television entertains us—that is its one task and it does it well. Of course, the word entertain literally means “to hold between,” and that, usually, is the effect of television: to temporarily suspend us between realities, so that we are in neither the revelations of the present nor the remembrance of an artwork. The abstraction induced by television is a form of forgetfulness—similar to that induced by nepenthe, the mythological drug of forgetfulness. The effect of that forgetfulness not only renders the visible ordinariness of things invisible—it induces in us a neglect of the body, and of our capacity to be present with ‘what is’.
Considering the abstractions of the medium, it is instructive to look at the ways in which television mirrors and complements the privately screened world of the ‘known self’. We might recognize, first of all, that we often turn on the television not because watching it feels good, but because by watching it we feel less—we withdraw from sensation. Television is a peculiar form of companionship that offers little but the antephialtic of distraction, and asks even less of the viewer in return. It is called escapism for a reason; but its appeal dims a little when you realize that what you are escaping is the intelligence of your own Being. Television holds us in its sway in part because, totemically, it actually represents our head-centered mode of existence. Encased in its skull-like enclosure, it stares out at us through its bright windowpane, chattering away endlessly in scatterbrain fashion, offering a continual drip feed of commercials and flashy inducements not to channel-hop. It can never rest because it can never escape its own abstractions; and so it anxiously frets its way through a rapid-fire succession of images, each one infused with predigested meaning—while the disconnected body on the couch moves into a deep sleep of lethargy in which the tyrant’s values are reinforced at every turn. And even when television displays images of our larger, shared body losing its life—images of widespread extinctions, dying lakes and rivers, air turning brown with filth—we note them, as we might note our leg has fallen asleep on the couch, but we don’t really feel them. Just as we know, but don’t really feel, that they represent the very processes that give us life.
The phase shift from the ‘known self’ into the sensitivities of the felt self, then, carries us from the nagging need to transcend, and grounds us in the ordinary; but it also carries us from enclosure into spaciousness. The assimilating intelligence of the logosmind depends on a sense of spaciousness: only when there is spaciousness enough in our sensitivities to accommodate the whole can we feel the whole.
Spaciousness is so fundamentally a part of the natural condition of things anyway, one wonders how we could ever lose our sense of it. All the matter of the universe was just a mere speck in the moment before the Big Bang; that mere speck is now dispersed across the unfathomable stretches of the universe—all the rest is empty space. Sir James Jeans pointed out that if you “put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.”254 A physicist looking into your body on a subatomic scale would see something pretty similar: a vast emptiness, occasionally punctuated by pinpoints of energy.
And yet we live in bodies that feel dense and tense, in a world that feels squeezed for time, and in a mental environment that is often strained with congestion. It is not in the nature of the world or the body to so constrain us, but in the nature of the ‘known self’. Sogyal Rinpoche helped us understand that when he wrote, “All effort and struggle come from not being spacious.”255 When I first read that statement, I was pulled up short. A daily torrent of half-digested verbiage has lulled us into glossing over words, forgetful of their ability to point with care and felicity to the world’s relationships. I knew of the precision that informed the writing of Sogyal Rinpoche—but could he really mean that all effort and struggle come from a lack of spaciousness? I lived with the statement for weeks before I was ready to accept that not only did he mean exactly that, but I couldn’t find an exception to it.
Sogyal Rinpoche’s statement pertains directly to the choice we face between inhabiting the tension and inhabiting the world. To inhabit the tension is specifically to inhabit the patterns of willfulness (or “effort”) and self-conflict (or “struggle”) that resist the world’s energies. To inhabit the world is something quite different. You cannot inhabit the world without inhabiting its spaciousness; to turn away from its spaciousness is to fortify yourself against the world, a word that shares the same root as effort. We create spaciousness inside us as we dismantle the baffles that confound the corridor within. It is into the spaciousness of the corational corridor we call ‘the world’ that the heart’s gate opens us, dilating the spheres of our sensitivity. Your very existence is so intimately bound to and supported by that spaciousness that we might say that only by inhabiting the spaciousness of the world can you inhabit the unpatterned source of your true self. That unpatterned source, of course, is antithetical to the status quo—and inhabiting it is the mythic task to which the hero is called.
Given how central spaciousness is to reality itself, it is odd to note that although we have the word proprioception to describe “our sense of the body in space,” we have no word to describe “our sense of the space in the body.” That oversight is natural enough in our male-inflected culture: our sense of ‘the body in space’ enables us to act on the world and ‘do’ things even as it underscores our apartness from the world; by contrast, our sense of ‘the space in the body’ enables us to ‘be’ in the world, even as it draws us into relationship with it. But natural though it is to us, that oversight is also dangerous: language is what delivers our awareness into consciousness. As the young Helen Keller was delivered into a world of clarity once she learned to ‘sign’, we need to discern and bring our awareness to the spaciousness within the body and the patterns that compromise it if we are to be delivered into our own wholeness: for the body’s spaciousness activates the corridor, and the heart’s spaciousness opens us to the Call, delivering us into mutual awareness. Once the crux of our consciousness finds its complement in the spacious, mindful Energy of the present, it becomes the unpatterned source of our truest responses and our fullest life.
We might name the sensitivity that reveals how much spaciousness we are allowing ourselves in the body our spatioceptive sense. Once you become aware of your spatioceptive sense, you can subtly scan your body at any time and discover which parts of it feel spacious and which feel dense or congested; you can feel where the flow of energy through the corridor is baffled and impeded. What compromises our spaciousness is always our own divisions: they are the source of the effort and struggle that bind our subtle energies in neglect and self-conflict. They represent our choice not to integrate our experience. As you detect those consolidations and consciously ease them into relationship with the core of your being, you reclaim the spaciousness within, so that every part of the body becomes responsive to every other part, and it moves as a mind-suffused unity: every breath is then a whole-body breath; every tilt of the head ripples up through the spine; every lift of an arm is supported by the floating, responsive hips.
There is a direct relationship between our spatioceptive sense and our mind’s sensitivity. An activated spatioceptive sense is our surest defense against the fixities of the ‘known self’: willful doing relies on the baffles within. When we surrender our inner corridor to spaciousness, we liberate the body’s cellular intelligence to do its work. When the mind’s sensitivity offers the spaciousness within to the spaciousness of the world, so that each lives within the other, then it dilates into the fullness of its partnership with the present.
The transition of our consciousness into the felt self also carries us from the compliance and tyranny of the ‘known self’ into a spirit of welcoming playfulness. The nature of Being is elusive: contained within a perplexity, it is hidden, and it is hidden, and it is hidden, as Rumi said. Elusive contains a vestige of the Latin word ludere from which it comes, and which means “to play.” If the elusiveness of Being is inherently playful, we might also note that the playfulness of Being is the quality in which we can most readily and seamlessly join it. For instance, as an artist tracks a shimmering perplexity, which he recognizes by pure feeling, it plays among all the ins and outs of the world it inhabits, slipping and sliding, showing and hiding; and as he chases it through its world with brushstroke or phrasing, the work of art remains behind as the evidence or the record of that play. The prototypical artist, Orpheus, brought the world around him into harmony by playing his music. Any activity, it seems to me, acquires more life and immediacy and effectiveness when buoyed by the spirit of play. Muhammad Ali brought that spirit into the boxing ring; Shakespeare brought it to the theater; Socrates brought it to philosophy. The remarkable neurosurgeon Charlie Wilson brought it to the operating table: as a colleague commented, “He was like a cat playing with a mouse.”256 I remember interviews with teammates of Wayne Gretzky when they were preparing for a big hockey game. Most of them spoke in terms of “psyching up to take on the other team,” and “gearing up for the challenge,” or their determination to “get out there and win.” Gretzky’s attitude was of an altogether different character: “I don’t go out there for the challenge, as a challenge—I go out there to have fun. I go out there saying, ‘I want that puck—and you can get your own.’ ” He wasn’t just playing hockey—he was playing. As coach for the Canadian team at the 2006 Winter Olympics, he told them—after they had just been shut out two games in a row—that if they couldn’t go out there and have fun, they were missing the whole point of being there.
The central importance of playing in human health and development was perhaps the foremost message of psychologist Donald Winnicott. He believed that in playing, and only in playing, are you able to use your whole personality; that playing is the basic expression of the creative impulse, which is active in all healthy individuals; and that playing is the basis of all spontaneous living. It is the basis of vital conversation, of good cooking, of a pleasant walk in the woods. The spirit of playfulness is best embodied by children: unless they are fearful, they play at everything; they are agents of chaos. The world calls aloud to them to come and play, to just try things out and see what happens.
Playing is fun, creative and enriching; it can also be dangerous. The eminent scholar Ernest Klein traces our word play to the old English word pleon, “to expose to danger, risk.” That applies precisely. Playing is not about reverting to fixed solutions; it is about chasing the resonance of a perplexity into the unknown. When we undertake those chases, we are most alive, most free, most open to experience—and most open to risk: the word experience, remember, is a cousin to peril. When Winnicott points out that “playing is inherently exciting and precarious,”257 he also notes that “this is the precariousness of magic itself.”258 Magic, of course, is about transformation; the unknown is always an agent of transformation. That’s why we are so uncomfortable with the unknown, because to the enclosed self it smells of death, not rebirth. In fact, it is redolent of both. The unknown into which Orpheus stepped literally was death: Hades itself. To step into the unknown is to expose yourself to transformation, and transformation demands that what is must pass away, or die, to be replaced by something newborn. When we play, we step into the unknown and risk encountering ourselves in a perplexing light—one that might ask us, like the snake, to shed an old skin. That risk also carries a reward, for it opens the door to self-revelation; and to discover the self anew is to discover the world anew.
We have already noted that the tyrant is identified with the spirit of acquisitiveness, and at this point we can see why: when someone cuts away from the perplexing whole to which he belongs, he turns instead to the things that belong to him. By contrast, insofar as the hero heads into the perplexing unknown, he is identified with the spirit of inquisitiveness, the desire to find something out, to achieve a new and transforming perspective. Inquisitiveness is a form of play that leaves what is known and pursues a perplexity as a moth tracks light—without needing to stop at answers, solutions or meaning. We are warned that “curiosity killed the cat,” and without doubt it has claimed a few of them over the years; but a lack of curiosity will kill a kitten ten times out of ten: what there is of the kitten dies off, leaving behind a cat, prematurely old. If curiosity is a feature of youthfulness at any age, it might also be recognized that perplexity nourishes the soul—calls to it directly and challenges it to grow. Inquisitiveness leads to an evolution of consciousness that brings us more deeply into relationship with the world; by contrast, the possessions of acquisitiveness stand as a bulwark against any such evolution.
Donald Winnicott wrote extensively about playing, but he also wrote about what he considered to be the dark counterpart to playing: compliance. Compliance, we might note, is the sine qua non of self-tyranny; but compliance also sounds the death knell of play. In comparing them, Winnicott contended that “living creatively is a healthy state … compliance is a sick basis for life.”259 Any act of compliance tacitly empowers the authority it obeys, whether the authority justifies its demand on the basis of its claim to knowledge or by its ability to inflict reprisals. When the self is divided into a part that orders and a part that obeys, it complies with and thereby sanctions rule by Idea; the more authority we give to an idea, the greater its power of endarkenment, and the deeper the compliance that binds us.
Of course, the very idea of authority is a fantasy we construct; the Energy of Being, the one reality, answers not to authority, but to harmony. The differences between a compliance to authority and the companionship of play are telling: compliance ‘looks back’, play faces forward; compliance conforms to expectation, play defies expectation; compliance subjugates curiosity, play is fueled by it; compliance abstracts the present, play is awake to it; compliance is guided by the ‘known self’, play is guided by the mystery of ‘what is’; compliance stultifies the exchange of energies with the world, play exults in it; and finally, compliance is characterized by a sense of seriousness or heaviness (each delicate foot of my younger daughter used to weigh at least ten pounds the moment she was asked to do something she didn’t want to do), and play is characterized by a sense of welcome or lightness. If the spirit of isolation thwarts play—and so too any real possibility of transformation—the spirit of play, by contrast, is rooted in companionship; and real companionship, it turns out, expresses a willingness to be changed.
Another aspect of the shift that moves us from ‘known self’ to felt self is that it carries us from a siege mentality to one that finds repose in harmony. The hetabrain feels under siege and encloses itself in response. In the Indo-European family of languages there is a host of words related to enclosure, and together they tell a story: their meanings include hook, club, knotty stick, peg, nail, bolt, lock, to bar, to be caught on, and to shut up. Images of aggression, defensiveness and fixity. It is an appropriate set of responses to a hostile world—and that raises an essential question, a question to which the spiritual path provides one answer, and classical science another: is the world alive to you, and a source of guidance and nourishment, or is it a place of hostility and indifference? Is it a place in which to be at home, or is it an environment in which you won’t survive unless you build and fortify your own private bunker? Is it a random outcome of strictly material, four-dimensional interactions, or is it an all-aware miracle in five dimensions? The stance this book takes is clear enough, but it is a question that each of us can only answer in our own hearts. In what follows I offer my own thoughts on it, with the hope that they might provide you with a source of reflection.
As we have noted, science has chosen to describe a four-dimensional world in which consciousness is but an insignificant by-product—a world described originally by the rules of mechanics and, more recently, by those of statistical probability. At best, such a world is indifferent to man—an opinion our culture generally considers to be realistic. Darwin left us a somewhat darker legacy: “survival of the fittest,” an idea inspired by his work, paints a picture of scarcity in which the individual has to compete against the world to earn the right to continue living. This is a culturally biased outlook that both suits and feeds the consciousness of tyranny with which the West has identified. It is also so circuitous an idea as to be almost worthless. When we say “survival of the fittest” we might ask—“the fittest for what”? The answer would have to be “the fittest for survival”—which establishes a standard that is self-defining only after the fact, conveniently adapting the idea of fitness to accord with whatever happens to have survived.
Nevertheless, we embrace this message of popular Darwinism as if it were lucid gospel, and retreat to our fortified enclosures, sensing hostility all around. Competition in its ancient Latin roots used to mean “to strive together”—and indeed, when you race with someone, each of you is helping the other to do his or her best. Nowadays we compete against—often for financial gain, which is our culture’s most trusted determinant of status: if I own more than you, I am ipso facto more fit for survival, and therefore a superior specimen. Money breeds entitlement. The almighty quantity we accumulate in our lives becomes our substitute for quality in our lives, which always beckons to us from somewhere in the future, just over the horizon, something we have to work towards—and that’s ironic, of course, because real quality can only be found where you are right now.
‘Survival of the fittest’ is the tyrant’s ultimate self-justification. According to its flimsy logic, to control or dominate someone is to demonstrate that you are fit to control or dominate her. You are entitled to. That can happen at any scale: in the hetabrain’s tyranny of the self; in a boss bullying an employee; in a corporate tyranny within the competitive marketplace; or in a society’s tyranny over other cultures. The arrogance it breeds is not merely obscene: it is capable of blinding us. The idea, for instance, that we in the developed world—who foul our own nests with such toxicity that we threaten the very life of the earth that mothers us—are more ‘fit for survival’ than, say, traditional Australian aborigines is downright preposterous. And yet, it persists as a self-evident truth for many. In the dog-eat-dog scheme that ‘survival of the fittest’ extols, we have amply demonstrated our superiority, after all.
But is it really a dog-eat-dog world? Paleobiologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh has found that fossil records of prehistoric dogs in North America tell an interesting story. About thirty million years ago twenty-five canine species roamed the west and south of what is now the United States. Typically those species show an evolutionary trend towards getting bigger and stronger—in fact, some were the size of grizzly bears. So ‘survival of the fittest’, as our culture understands it, seems to be a rule of thumb. At a certain size, though—somewhere between 20 and 25 kilograms of weight—‘bigger and stronger’ becomes a liability. It takes too much effort to survive on smaller prey, so the diets of such carnivores become more specialized: they are forced to kill prey as large as or larger than they are. Higher energy needs lead to lower population densities, and that makes the species vulnerable to food shortages. Fossils reveal a clear pattern: extinction comes fastest to the canine species that are ‘fittest’—that is, biggest and strongest, as we typically think of fitness. Some would counter, though, that if one canine species survives while a larger one dies off, it is self-evident that the surviving species was more fit. Whatever fitness means.
Perhaps the dizziness induced by such arguments is what keeps us from reflecting soberly on our notion of the dog-eat-dog world and stating the obvious: for any species in the natural world, its survival is a product of how well it can harmonize with that world. There is more to this issue than semantics—the principles of ‘fitness’ and ‘harmony’ are radically different. Fitness appeals to the hetabrain because, although it won’t lend itself to a meaningful principle, we can isolate the quality of ‘fitness’ from the world and satisfy ourselves by measuring what we believe to be its various aspects: speed, strength, reproductive rate, size, weight, et cetera. We could even compile those measurements in a weighted formula and come up with a number that represented the specimen’s Fitness Quotient—much as we currently measure someone’s faculties of abstract reasoning and call that number his Intelligence Quotient. Harmony, on the other hand, cannot be measured, because it cannot be isolated. Furthermore, unlike fitness, it does lend itself to a meaningful principle—a principle of dynamic balance in its give and take with the world. To survive, a species needs to be in harmony with its food supply and its predators, and also with the fluctuating seasons of its world, and ultimately with the entire intricate web of the ecosystem to which it belongs and which it helps to sustain. Without such a sensitive balance, the species will perish through overpopulation, dwindling food supply or an inability to adapt within an increasingly imbalanced environment. What natural selection actually favors is the ability to harmonize with the world.
Habit might lead us to imagine that ‘survival of the most harmonious’ is the same as ‘survival of the most adaptable’; but mere adaptation is a reactionary and passive idea, a throwback to the isolationism of perseity. Harmonizing with the environment is an exchange of gifts, a reciprocal relationship. Examples of such relationships abound wherever a species is studied within its environment, but I know of none that more clearly illustrates the point than a story about the prairie dog cited in the New York Times.260 In the 1950s, government officials were concerned about the damage done to sparse desert grasses on the Navajo reservation near Chilchinbito, Arizona, and recommended an extermination of the extensive prairie dog population. Navajo elders objected, saying, “If you kill off the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for rain.” Amused by this superstition, and knowing full well that prairie dogs had nothing to do with rainfall, scientists went ahead with their plan. Today, that area is a virtual wasteland. It turns out that the millions of burrows acted much as the alveoli of our lungs do. As the moon moved the water in aquifers up and down, it pumped moisture-laden, ion-charged air out of the earth and into the atmosphere, which helped create the moisture on which the grasses depended, which the prairie dogs then ate. Their burrowing also kept the soil loose, allowing the rainfall to penetrate and nourish the grass roots. The prairie dogs had not just adapted to their environment—they were an inseparable component of its living harmony.
Our potential for harmonizing with the natural world is obscured by our instinct to dominate it. In fact, the five-dimensional reality of that potential is so far beyond anything our female-fearing culture prepares us to contemplate that we can gain some inkling into it only by looking to examples from hunter-gatherer cultures, which have been shaped by it. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, daughter of two anthropologists, grew up on Africa’s Kalahari Desert among the Ju/wa Bushmen. In her book The Tribe of Tiger, Thomas writes of the relationship between the Ju/wasi and the lions: though they hunted the same prey, the tribes and the prides had established a sort of understanding. Her brother once joined a group of four Ju/wasi as they trailed a wildebeest they’d wounded with a poisoned arrow. When they came upon the animal after several days, it was very ill and was surrounded by a large pride of lions, perhaps thirty in all. The Ju/wasi spoke “firmly but respectfully” to the lions, threw some clumps of earth at them, entered their circle, killed and butchered the wildebeest, and left with it. The whole time the lions rumbled and paced among the surrounding bushes, but kept their distance. As Thomas observed, “the people-lion relationship wouldn’t have worked unless both sides had participated.”261 By the time Thomas returned to the Kalahari thirty years later the Ju/wasi had disappeared—driven off by white ranchers—and the harmony of the truce was long forgotten.
Another example: in Searching for the Lost Arrow, Richard Nelson describes his stay at an Inupiaq whaling camp off the Alaskan coast. Winds had closed the open channels in the ice that whales use for migration, except for one large lead, at which the Inupiaq placed their camp. No whales had been seen for a couple of days, so everyone was staying warm inside the tent. Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by Igruk, an elder in his seventies who had been lying on a soft bed of caribou skins with his eyes closed: “I think a whale is coming, and perhaps it will surface very close.” Igruk was respected as a great whaler, and at his words, everyone hurried outside. Sure enough, seconds after Richard had stepped outside to join them, “a broad, shining back cleaved up through still water near the opposite side of the opening, accompanied by the burst of a whale’s blow.”262
To begin to grasp how examples of such harmony are possible we need to appreciate that they are enfolded in the dimension of consciousness, which suffuses and sustains all reality. As Hugh Brody has noted,
Hunter-gatherers believe in the spiritual link between the creatures they hunt, the places they travel and themselves.… And shamanic knowledge to some extent depends on the possibility of communication between humans and animals. It accepts without difficulty analogous communication between animal species. Shamans embrace mystery not as a temporary failure of explanation, but as an integral way of apprehending the world around them.263
Shamanism is a vital element in the culture of such societies. Our attempts to dismiss it as ignorant superstition betray the evidence: shamanism has survived because such societies rely for their survival on the ability to read the truth of the world around them; and shamanism—along with detailed observation, a living attunement to place, and a culture of respect—provides that. At its best, shamanism is a way of listening to the subtle energy of the world in order to harmonize with it; and to the best of our knowledge no hunter-gatherer society has survived without it.
To the hetabrain, of course, ‘survival of the most harmonious’ doesn’t sound anywhere near as convincing as ‘survival of the fittest’. For starters, the hetabrain is incapable of recognizing harmony, as we have seen. When it looks to the world, it seeks and detects order, which promises to facilitate control. What a difference it would make to your soul’s journey and to your kinship with the world if you sought to harmonize with it—if you took that to be the cardinal necessity. It would change how you step out of your front door and onto the street. It would change how you wake up in the morning—opening your eyes to mutual awareness and seeking to listen to and harmonize with the world’s five-dimensional aliveness, rather than waking up already trapped within the machinery of your agendas as they grind away at you and the world to get things done.
I think ‘survival of the fittest’ was obliquely introduced to us in the sixth century B.C. by Zoroaster, who saw the world as the battleground in which the good God was perpetually in conflict with the evil God. All of nature, including human nature, was implicated in that struggle for domination. Joseph Campbell’s observation on the effect of that worldview shows how deeply it still runs within us: One is not to put oneself in accord with such a world, but to correct it. And in your efforts to correct it, nothing can impart a sense of entitlement more thoroughly than the knowledge that your actions are sanctified by the good God, and are made on his behalf, and that what you oppose is impure and not deserving to survive. Zoroastrianism, though still practiced, is dying out, condemned by its own standards of purity: membership is restricted to those whose parents both belong to the faith. Its hostile interpretation of the world thrives, however, in many of the world’s great religions, as well as in the dualistic ‘isms’ that haunt our thinking: every ‘ism’ that represents an adherence to doctrine—racism, sexism, despotism, communism, fundamentalism, capitalism, authoritarianism, whatever—is in its essence a division of the world into an entitled elite and an undeserving other.
And that reminds us that to see the world as a testing ground for fitness is to empower the inner tyrant, who is ever ready, as Campbell observed, “to battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment.” The gravest effect of that outlook is anticipated by our theme “as it is with the world, so also with the body.” To be at home in the body is to be at home in the world; but to experience the world as a place of hostility—as an environment from which to maintain your distance and over which to seek control—is to experience the body in the same way. One is not to put oneself in accord with such a body, but to correct it. The tyrant, afraid of the female, is afraid of being in the body. And so we alienate ourselves from the body by withdrawing into the head, and we assert control over the body, and stifle its breathing, and drug it into submission when we need to, and make it get fit enough to assuage our vanity, and accept as natural and inevitable the schisms and conflicts and scarcities that rage through it. Or we so dissociate from it that when we feel the body nagging at us for attention—needing to experience its own consciousness—what we give it instead is food, and more food.
So much for the outlook that is promoted by pure science. The spiritual path is the path of the ordinary hero, and it sees the world very differently. The entire spiritual journey is one in which the individual learns by degrees to see and read the world as an all-nurturing miracle of guidance in which we have a role as cocreators. It is a path that teaches us—deeply, deeply teaches us—that the state of no effort is our greatest strength, for it is also the seamlessly integrated state of Being that enables us to harmonize with the strength of the world. Eventually that teaching leads us to the understanding that the world itself is enlightened; to join the world is to die to the endarkened ego and give yourself to the supreme light of intelligence all around you. Enlightenment is not something any individual can possess, any more than someone could possess the Logos or Buddha consciousness. Spiritual enlightenment in an individual is nurtured by a profound dissolution of the anxiety that separates us from the world, so that we can at last join it, seeing and understanding “the real as the play and work of love,” as Andrew Harvey put it.264 To join the enlightened world is to awaken to a place of ceaseless renewal and revelation; a place of companionship in which you are fully known in everything you do, even as you sensationally discover and serve the world in everything you do; a place in which alienation and existential isolation are seen to be creaky illusions, because in fact you know yourself to be an indivisible part of all Being, intimately and companionably sustained by it; a place in which endless gifts arise from the deep mystery that suffuses everything ordinary.
When you come to that place, you become like the tree or the prairie dog, which move to and express the harmonies of the world—but which, more than that, also deepen and support those harmonies. That too is the story Orpheus shows us: the harmony of the world calls forth music from the artist—but equally, the artist can call forth harmony from the world. I have been fortunate to have experienced this in performances: John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson performing in Home in London; Monica Mason dancing The Song of the Earth at Covent Garden; Claudia Bruce performing Cross Way Cross in New York; Iben Nagel Rasmussen performing Itsi Bitsi in Holstebro, Denmark; Hosho Hideo performing the Noh play Sotoba Komachi in Tokyo. It has been said that “Noh has been a purification of the Japanese soul for 400 years”; Noh has also been called ‘healing without medicine’. It is hard to explain exactly how or why that happens, but the same is true of all of the above performances: each one of them called forth from the world a new harmony that could not be resisted, and which unleashed life-giving energies. All great art does that—it sensitizes us and makes it possible for us to relate to the world anew: newly harmonized, and harmonizing in turn.
It is tempting for us, of course, to explain away such phenomena as matters of psychological affect. That temptation is supported by a feature of our culture that is not without irony: we devote ourselves to controlling and fighting ‘what is’ without ever really attending to ‘what is’—and then we proclaim ourselves the most reliable arbiters of ‘what is’. Evidence abounds, though, that there is the potential for an exchange of gifts within the corational corridor around us in ways that our idea of ‘what is’ just doesn’t prepare us for. I’ll cite two small examples. Jay Gluck, who wrote Zen Combat in 1962, arranged to bring five United States military police and a high-speed camera to meet with Morehei Uyeshiba, the founder of aikido, who at the time was eighty-five. In a demonstration, Uyeshiba took on the military police, who were supported by a further six Japanese martial artists armed with oak swords. As Gluck explains, the film shows this tiny old man—he stood four foot ten—moving amongst his charging assailants with a contented smile on his face. No one even touched him until he let several of them grasp him in any way they wanted, whereupon he floored them all simultaneously. Gluck wrote that the film “showed nothing but a smiling old man moving unconcernedly amidst intense, charging GIs [who were] seemingly unaware that he existed.”265 The modern mind wants to explain this phenomenon in terms that are entirely inconsistent with Uyeshiba’s writings and training and teachings; but only so much can be explained away as trickery or coincidence before those explanations begin to sound overly defensive.
The second small example (and there are literally thousands we could look at) took place in South America in the spring of 1998. The story was followed closely by the media there, and was also picked up in Europe and North America. The account that appeared in the London Daily Telegraph on April 4 is so enjoyable that I present it to you in its entirety.
Tribesmen Call in Divine Power
to Halt Forest Fire
John Clemens, London Daily Telegraph
RIO DE JANEIRO - Kukrit and Mati-i are the new heroes of the rain forest. It took the illiterate Kaiapo tribesmen from the Mato Grosso half an hour of mysterious ritual on a river bank this week to break a five-month drought in the northern Amazon region of Roraima, which had been turned into an inferno.
Their ancestral powers ended what was rapidly turning into one of the world’s largest ecological disasters.
Within hours, torrential tropical downpours had put out over 90 per cent of the huge jungle fires that had run out of control and destroyed thousands of acres of savannah and rain forest in an area the size of Wales over the past two weeks.
Kukrit and Mati-i—they are unsure about their age as tribal forest Indians count only up to two, all the rest is “very much”—were flown from their tribal village 2,400 kilometres away by the government’s Indian Foundation. It was a desperate act which defied all the latest technology and white man’s science. The official forecasts were gloomy. Data sent by channel 2 of the NOAA-14 weather satellite and interpreted by the high-tech computers at the Brazilian space center in Jose dos Campos, thousands of kilometres away in the far south of the country, indicated rain in the region was still “at least two to three weeks away.”
Hundreds of firefighters were engaged in a hopeless battle against the advancing flames, United Nations emergency aid was offered and considered, army helicopters were dropping “waterbombs”—all to no avail. Enormous tracts of virgin rain forest were being devoured and no one could stop it.
Kukrit and Mati-i were unperturbed by their first flight. After they had crossed hundreds of kilometres of jungle they settled in a three-star hotel in Boa Vista, capital of Roraima state in the extreme north of Brazil, took a shower and had a leisurely dinner. Then they went out to the banks of the nearby Curupira River, carrying cipo leaves and taquara branches from their homeland. They were worried that their tribal brothers of the local Yanomami nation would be “eaten” by the flames. “We will make water fall,” they promised as they asked to be left alone to perform their ceremony in the dark.
Satisfied, they returned to their hotel 30 minutes later and went to bed, a novelty to them as they are used to hammocks. “It will rain,” was all they said before sleeping.
Less than two hours later, the first reports came through on the radio at the army fire task emergency center in Boa Vista. “It started raining here,” an almost incredulous voice said from the jungle town of Cacarai.
An hour later, similar reports came in from Apiau, in the region between the Surunu and Majari rivers in the north. When dawn broke, Boa Vista was hit by one of the heaviest downpours in living memory. People danced in the rain in the streets before breakfast and the airport, closed several times in the past few weeks because of smoke from the forest fires, was shut again—this time because of poor visibility caused by the impenetrable rain curtain.
By the end of the day, 25 millimetres had fallen. The fires petered out and humidity rose back to its “normal” 97-per-cent level.
Satisfied, Kukrit and Mati-i returned to the Mato Grosso. They did not give an explanation. All they said was that they had talked to Becororoti, a famous ancestor gifted with divine power, who, when he died, went to heaven and was turned into rain.
Orpheus flies out of the jungle and, in an exchange of gifts by the Curupira River, calls the world into harmony. Unfortunately, the harmony that is so natural to Kukrit and Mati-i is not only unsupported by the dominant cultural paradigms of the West—it is directly undermined by them. Our culture is devoted to the myth of individuality; it sees unipolar thinking as the rightful ruler of the individual; it reveres dissociated perspectives as ‘pure’ truth; it believes the world is strictly four-dimensional; it considers an individual’s accumulated wealth or status to be emblematic of his success; and it considers the ideal lifestyle, accessible only to those with a deluding amount of wealth, to consist largely of being shielded from any contact with the ordinary, and from any responsibility but to one’s own security.
Just as damaging, our culture believes that our thoughts don’t matter to the world, and sees the problems around us as strictly mechanical problems that require mechanical solutions—whether they are problems of socioeconomic malaise, personal illness or the health of our planet. But consider this: Kukrit and Mati-i brought harmony to rampant natural destruction with prayers, leaves, branches and a sensibility attuned to the universe. Is it not possible, then, that the discord and conflict in human consciousness worldwide might be contributing to the discord and conflict we see around us in the natural world? As Roger Nelson commented, “We may be connected together far more intimately than we realize.”
For myself, I believe that the main challenge of our age is to usher our corationality into consciousness—so that we live within the subtle dialogue of reality rather than inside our self-absorbed monologue. When you consider all the problems our society faces—in the environment, in the economy, in our shattered sense of community—it’s clear that they are problems of systemic imbalance. It is not by mere accident that those problems exactly mirror the imbalances we perpetuate within the thinking of the self by dissociating the male element from the female. Until we evolve beyond the fetters of our own mistaken identity—until we can evolve from a consciousness of tyranny to a consciousness of consciousness—the idea of restoring balance to the world will remain no more than a half-baked fantasy.
The Apocrypha is a selection of books that were included as an appendix to the King James Version of the Old Testament. The word apocrypha comes from the Greek for “hidden things,” and in one of its books, Ecclesiasticus, is written,
Many are in high place, and of renown; but mysteries are revealed unto the meek.266
It is a familiar sentiment, expressed in a wide diversity of spiritual writings and practices. But according to one of the central themes of this book—the world we create around us replicates the one we experience within—we would expect to find the prototype for that truth at work in the individual. The hetabrain, of course, is seated on high, and houses a self that is of renown, a word that literally means “named”; the ‘named self’ is the ‘known self’. The passage contrasts those “in high place and of renown” with the meek, to whom “mysteries are revealed.” The word meek as it is used in the Bible has none of the modern connotations of “weak,” “shy” or “spineless.” In fact, those connotations are provided by the hetabrain, just as it misunderstands corationality to be irrationality, or self-enclosure to be mastery, or harmony to mean order. The tyrant views meekness as a timid, retreating demeanor that betrays a lack of strength, or a tentative sense of presence. Such forms of meekness exist, and are ways of minimizing certain relationships with the world; in fact, they result from their own kind of self-conscious enclosure and tyranny.
The Biblical meekness is something altogether different: a form of grounded presence that enables you to stand in the world’s stillness in innocence. Such meekness doesn’t cringe defensively in the world but stands tall in it, precisely because meekness is not weighed down with the burdens of self-absorption. In fact, because such meekness fully surrenders to the present, the heart’s gate will fully open to the present: standing tall in humility before the spacious present, you leave room for it to come to rest within the pelvic bowl. Meekness in the Biblical sense is a vulnerability born of strength, a state of mind that is free from anxiety—a striking contrast with arrogance, which cloaks anxiety beneath the smug assurance of knowledge. Meekness surrenders the blinkers of ‘knowledge’ before the limitless presence of ‘what is’, and accompanies it into the felt unknown; meekness is literally made possible by heroic courage. Christ, who preached meekness, exemplified such courage: he did not submit to any man, nor to any law of man, because he found the strength to submit meekly to the truth of his own life and to the Logos—the mind of God—that all the world expresses.
The word meek comes to us from the Old Norse mjuk-r, “soft, pliant, gentle”. One meaning that the OED lists for meek is “patient and unresentful under injury and reproach”; and that is the real test, in a way. It is one thing to cultivate a sense of spaciousness—a full acceptance of the world as it is, untainted by resistance or anxiety—while sitting by the seaside or walking through a meadow. It is another thing to remain in the world, gently in the world, when under duress.
When Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,”267 he is merely stating a fact: only the meek can inherit the earth; others can’t, for the simple reason that they are enclosed from it; with the world kept at a distance, they can inherit only the specters of their personal, self-achieved fantasies. A grounded gentleness of heart—or meekness, as the Bible says—ushers us into a relationship with the present that is fully sensitized to it. To inherit the world is to live in it as it lives in you, “feeling the thing as a whole.”
Gentleness of heart—or meekness—attunes you to the blessed subtlety of ‘what is’ and begins weaning you away from the habit of abstracting ‘what is’. In its quiet attentiveness, gentleness receives the mysteries—the pulse of the present and the touch of its invisible guidance. When an athlete finds himself “in the zone,” he has found in the utmost extremity of his sport an inner gentleness that lets him hear, as in the calm eye of a storm, the subsonic whisperings of the world around him: the delicate currency of Being that informs his every move. And who among us can guess with what subtlety Kukrit and Mati-i tuned in to the web of life, or how gently they turned its course with their cipo leaves and taquara branches?
Standing in the river, in the world, knowing it and being known, is the only true blessing we have—and the only one that is always right here. As Christ’s words and those of Ecclesiasticus point out, only a gentle surrender can attune to those subtle currents. Your capacity for relationship—the true measure of your ability to ‘be’ in the river—cannot outgrow your sensitivity; and it is in the medium of grounded gentleness that your sensitivity is truly nurtured. And to be quite clear, what we are talking about here has nothing to do with the appearance of gentleness; it is not something to be achieved by cultivating certain mannerisms of speech or demeanor or deportment. The focus is not on gentleness per se, but on what its subtle yielding opens you to and the vivid companionship it illuminates. It is a means, a doorway—not a destination: the submission of the hero is specifically a self-achieved gentleness that allows what is here, now, to speak to your core. In the midst of your exchange with the world you might even appear ferocious or wild or uncouth or aggressive. During one martial arts sparring match, Aoki was monitored by an electroencephalograph. Of the results of the EEG, which were published at the time, he said in an interview,
When they analyzed the wave patterns, they found that I entered into deep meditation even while in the midst of violent movement, using a technique, in the manner of the Zen adage, “motion in calmness, calmness in motion.”268
The more completely you are at peace with the present, the more sensationally you will be informed by its subtle currents—and the more sensitively you will respond to what it calls from you. Furthermore, the more extreme the circumstances in which you find yourself—the more fully you are called upon to do—the more gently you will need to abide in the wild calmness of Being itself. Aoki has spoken of entering a state of such calm clarity that any opponent who even thought of attacking him would fall down. When he was asked by the interviewer whether he really did nothing at such a time, he responded, “No! If I do anything, it’s no good. It’s a state in which I myself do nothing.”269 In such a state there are no cybernetics, there is no white noise, there is no willful doing; the pure signal of Being resonates through the pipeline in a seamless, unfettered exchange of information and creativity with the world. By contrast, we typically have difficulty walking down Fifth Avenue—or holding a banana peel—in a state of peace.
The whole idea of gentleness runs contrary to the impulses of a culture that believes doing requires effort and misapprehends the world as a place of hostility—so it is worth a closer look. The word gentle comes from the Latin gentilis, which means “belonging to the same family.” That brings to mind Thomas Berry’s observation that the trees and grasses are our genetic cousins, our kin; and that the earth itself is born of the same star matter from which we are made. When we pick up a teapot gently, we embrace the kinship of the ordinary world. To see that subtle kinship around you, to see family, is to open your heart to your life; to be gentle with the world is to feel the kinship of it. In gentleness, the ordinary heart meets the ordinary world and they are found to beat as one.
Gentleness has limited value as a mere idea—gentleness is a yielding love for ‘what is’ that involves your whole being: emotional, spiritual, intellectual and physical. To engage with the world that way, gently and wholly, is to return to the sort of unenclosed sensitivity that Henri and H. A. Frankfort described in our ancient forebears, who experienced the world “as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship”270—a precise description of the dialogue of Being. But that gentle wakefulness to the world, insofar as it involves reciprocity, also reminds us of the essential nature of gentleness: gentleness is not static by nature, nor is it found in any action per se; the quality of gentleness is only revealed in interaction—it is fundamentally a quality of relating, or relationship, in the same way that grace is. Because gentleness is grounded in the stillness of the present, it is a quality of relating that arises from wholeness and answers to wholeness. In its essence, gentleness is not a state—it is a subtle, two-way conversation, and does not exist independent of that conversation. If you gently move a baby’s arm, that gentleness shows up in the sensitivity and care and patience and mindfulness of your interaction with the baby. A gentle gesture is a highly informed gesture: it begins in attentive unknowing and is guided by Being; like Being, it is in flux, adapting to and revealing the world’s subtle currents. Whatever is gentle bespeaks a capacity for relationship. As such, it carries us out of the isolating wound of our self-consciousness and reunites our thinking with our Being.
Because gentleness brings you into relationship with the world, it maximizes the world’s reality for you. And the more reality the world has for you, the more it will activate you and engage you. Gentleness is not weakheartedness. It is about entering the full reality of mutual awareness. To move into gentleness is to step into a serene wakefulness that moves on and out, like ripples in a pond. Its patience is like a shot of oxygen to the loving logosmind, and it quickens your whole Being to the specificity of the present. Its fluid, welcoming spirit carries you forward, hand-in-hand with the world, fully activated. And that, more than anything, is what places gentleness on the side of life: because gentleness yields, it allows us to move forward in partnership with ‘what is’. Whenever we lose gentleness, we put on the brakes and arrest our own life. Reality is sensational. Fantasy is sensationalistic.
Zeami, in his advice to actors, expressed something that carries profound implications for our culture: it is a mistake to understand a lack of tenderness as strength.271 True strength is something you discover as you open to the subtle currents of Being; and you can truly connect with Being, with ‘what is’, only through gentleness. Anything else is a form of resistance. The moment we lose gentleness we topple into fantasy and preoccupy ourselves with embellishments on its dark logic. Gentleness of heart will deliver you from the shadowed cell of the ego, and carry you into the bosom of Being, in which the mystery that slides through each moment sings its love. True gentleness enables you to rest in the pelvic bowl, and it lightens the heart’s gate that it may open with ease to the world’s currents. It rescues you from the driven highway of doing and allows you to sail the river of being.
Understanding grounded gentleness as the medium in which the mind’s sensitivity flourishes, we might further recognize it as the medium of love that enables anything to talk to us. There are many ways in which gentleness can quicken our analog intelligence to the dialogue of Being, and all of them are important. First, and perhaps most challenging, is to forego willfulness and be gentle with yourself: with your breath, your seeing and hearing, your moving, your self-doubts and self-accusations and missteps. Similarly, you can be gentle with your emotions: with your own excitement, your own disappointment, even with your own grief and joy and rage. Gentleness is not a means of subduing the emotions or homogenizing them. It is just the opposite. Emotions are energy on the move, and they have the potential to bring the vividness of the world into focus. It is more often the case, though, that our emotions preoccupy us and separate us from the world. They bury us in ourselves. Sometimes the emotions that ambush us and hang on are an expression of the shadow self: a part of us that we are unwilling to acknowledge and bring into relation with the whole—often a part of us that has been hurt or fearful from a young age, and remains defensively reactionary. John Sarno, a medical doctor and pioneer in the practice of mindbody disorders, has done remarkable work in demonstrating how such emotions, rage in particular, will manifest in the body as painful symptoms. A calm, gentle acknowledgment of such dark passions is sometimes all that is needed to bring them into relationship with the whole and eliminate the pain. As well, the liberated energy of those emotions will bring the present newly into focus, and leave the intimacy of the world in its wake.
By contrast, when you apply the brakes to an emotion, you wrench yourself out of the world and terminate the two-way conversation. The emotional energy then has only the barricaded fantasy of your ‘known self’ to move through, and around and around it goes until it settles into the body and hardens. In general we always lose gentleness when there is something we would rather not feel, often simply because we perceive that feeling it is not going to help us achieve our goals. And so we decide that we don’t really require the participation of our pelvic intelligence. With that decision we align with the tyrant’s unipolar choice to “know the thing in part.”
The gentler you are with yourself, the more fully you will be present. When you can be gentle with your whole life, your whole life will be present. Of course, gentleness is soft, but its effects are not. It opens the door on the flux of the world, the only reality, which moves with the power of a whirlpool. Not everyone chooses to give over to its pull. If you do make that choice, your grounded gentleness will carry you into an ocean of truth.
In being gentle with yourself you prepare the way to be gentle with all the particulars of the living space around you—and that loving attention will reveal the ‘mutual awareness’ on which your true consciousness depends. When you behold the world beholding you, it welcomes you into the reality of ‘what is’. As that mutual awareness gently grows, you respond with increasing ease and genuineness to what is around you. In so responding you discover responsibility—for the link between gentleness and responsibility is immutable. Your ‘ability to respond’ depends on the yielding spirit of gentleness, and whenever gentleness is offered, your ‘responsibility’ will be activated.
The link between gentleness and responsibility takes on a larger significance when applied to the discovery of your personal path. Nothing will throw you from that path more quickly than the spirit of resentment or blame or victimhood by which we hold others responsible for how we feel or what we do. Gentleness, on the other hand, which has no brakes, returns you to the source of your life and accommodates whatever integration is necessary to carry you forward: to bring the spirit of gentleness to your own living is ultimately to take responsibility for your own life. Sometimes, as our gentleness carries us into a profound realization of kinship with the world, the responsibility we feel will have such reality, such Quality, that it will appear to be sacred. The remarkable theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who argued on behalf of a “religionless Christianity,”272 rejected the rigid moral standards of the Bible, and argued that right and wrong are determined purely by the “loving obligations of the moment.”273 It is reported that when he was hanged by the Nazis, there were tears in the eyes of his guards.
There are other ways of being gentle as well. Sogyal Rinpoche tells us, “The most essential thing in life is to establish an unafraid, heartfelt communication with others.”274 What most consistently interferes with such communication is the part of us that can’t resist being judgmental. In that regard, offering gentleness to someone is the opposite of offering her your judgment. When you gently open to another’s Being, the shimmering reality of your exchange with her overwhelms any mere fantasy you might wish to construct.
To be gentle with the present moment is to open yourself to its wild eternity: to be gentle with the present is to be present. And you may find that it is possible to be in the moment so gently that you merge with it. When that happens, you enter a state of bottomless grace: the bliss that occurs when your thinking merges with your Being and finds peace and nourishment within the harmony of ‘what is’.
In this chapter we have looked at some of the changes that occur as the two axes of our consciousness—the inner and the analog—bring us more and more fully into relationship with the reality in which we live. But if we are to truly overthrow the entrenched habits and tenacious hallucinations of our self-tyranny, it would help to know how it all began. How did we come to live in our heads? How did the male element dissociate from the female within us? And why? How did we turn away from the guidance of the world to such an extent that we can no longer detect it? How did we move so deeply into self-absorption that, ironically, we lost our ability to feel the self? Whatever forces guided the evolution of our consciousness into the enclosure of dissociated doing, they are the forces with which we must now contend. The next section of the book, then, takes a look at the historical journey that carried the center of our consciousness into the cranium and bottled it up there.
Our self-tyranny, under whose influence we all live, seeks to make of the body a house of death: it becomes an organized inadequacy, a stranger to its own energy. How, then, to call that tendency to account? The breath is our most tangible and immediate experience of the body’s energy. The question then becomes how to submit to the breath and receive its sensational information, rather than anticipate and control its journey. Most people have heard of the importance of breathing deeply, but I have found that when I encourage students to breathe deeply, they often try to accomplish that by pushing the breath down into their bodies, as if filling the lungs from the top down. Such breathing is the work of willful manipulation rather than receptivity. As such, it tends to reinforce the baffles that divide up the corridor, rather than opening it to your being. You will never see a baby pushing its breath down into its body.
To foster a different experience I use the image of milk being poured into a jug: it drops freely into the jug until it hits the bottom, and as the pouring continues the milk fills the pitcher from the bottom up. Similarly, try that with the breath: stand in a relaxed position and let the breath drop straight down through the spacious corridor of the body until it hits the pelvic floor, and then fills the body from the bottom up, and finally releases out again. If you find that difficult, try to be aware of where you may be holding tension and allow it to relax, submitting to where the experience may take you. As you bring ease to the jaw, tongue, chest, and especially the muscles deep in the abdomen you will become aware of the pelvic bowl receiving the breath, bringing all the sensations of the body into relationship with your core. Once that begins to happen, the inflow and outflow of the breath will begin to liberate the entire energy of the body as a whole. Just let the breath drop in and release out and carry you into newness.