Momentary Bliss

Last night I dreamt of a shaman. He was a character I was playing in a game, but I also became him. He seemed to be completely mad, but only because he was so far from sane. He/I hunched down in the dirt, barefoot and with wild unkempt hair, and called out a need to the forest. Something big was coming, a war to be won, and He/I needed all the assistance that Gaia could offer. So up from the dirt crawled a worm and We lifted it to Our ear where it bit down and dangled off the lobe. Up from the soil crawled a little lizard and We lifted it to Our ear where it bit down and dangled next to the worm. Down from the sky came a raven came and We lifted it to Our other ear where it bit down and dangled from the lobe. Creatures of old and deep magic, singing the songs without words, songs of the power that flows behind the veil of matter. With the old secrets pouring into Our ears We stood to face the challenge of a modern world of machines and electronic wizardry. A crooked grin spread across Our face and Our eyes gleamed with the raw intensity of a man who never forgot the old ways. They would think Us mad, but their sanity would be the one thing keeping them from stopping Us.

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My mind has been speaking to me in my dreams about the old ways. Somewhere deep inside there is a bell that tolls long and low. It speaks from a place that is behind the symbols we use to express our world. You may point to a tree and say "that is a tree", but that is a vastly inadequate description. Where is the tree and where are the leaves? Where are the roots and where is the dirt? Where does one end and the other begin?

There is power in the symbols, they can bind experience into defined shapes. We feel we create order when labeling and classifying our world. Language helps us to create commonly agreed upon containers for what we see and feel every day. How would we carry on a conversation without such a system?

Yet underneath and behind and outside these symbols there is something much more powerful, a power beyond conception or description, but not beyond experience. The full weight of the moment-to-moment experience is simply beyond measure. If you look at the tree and allow yourself to really see it, then you realize that there is no tree at all. There are no leaves, there are no roots. These are just words, just membranes we use to separate our world into manageable chunks.

We think this separation makes our experience easier to deal with, but it ends up making everything so much more difficult. Once the world has been filed away and reduced down to measurable bits, we then try to juggle all these bits in our mind and keep them all in the air at once. So many little pebbles bouncing around and colliding with each other. It is a source of great strife.

The other option is to acknowledge that all these little bits are not real, not in the true sense of the word. Surely we all know that the tree is real. We can go up to it and feel the rough grooves of its bark and hear the wind running its fingers through the leaves. We know that it most definitely exists. Yet it is nothing, as in it is no thing. It is not some separate object that exists despite the air around it and the dirt beneath it. It exists because of these containing and intertwining elements. It is convenient for our mind to view the tree as digging its roots into the soil and reaching its branches into the sky, to think of it as its own entity among other distinctly separate elements, but this is just a mental exercise. The tree is only separate in our mind, in our conception of it. If you truly look at the tree you will see that the soil could not exist without the tree and all the trees that had come before it. The wind could not exist without the tree either, without its breathing in and out, cycling the atmosphere through itself. Where does the soil end and the tree begin? Where does the tree end and the sky begin?

This may seem like a pointless statement, a philosophical platitude, and it absolutely is. That's because it's used to describe something that is beyond description, to point to a direct experience that cannot be defined or measured or categorized. If you observe the tree for long enough, you will begin to realize that the tree is the sky is the soil is the earth is you is me is the dog down the street is the ship resting on the bottom of the ocean is the winking star at the far end of the universe whose light is only just now reaching us even though it died in a glorious explosion millions of years ago.

To confuse our world and the direct experience with the symbols we use to describe those experiences is to invite mental death. If we walk down the street every day and think "That's just a building" and "That's just a car" and "That's just a cloud in the sky" then we are lying to ourselves. A great big fat lie. A lie so large that you can't even tell it's there because it entirely obscures your vision. It's as if we've painted a little picture of what we think of the world and then held it up in front of our eyes for so long that we forget that it's just a quaint little painting and there's a whole world going on behind it.

The direct experience is ineffable. It is so heartbreakingly beautiful that it completely defies all means of expressing it. To stand under the obscured moon and breathe deep of the moist night air after a spring rain is just as excruciatingly wonderful as waiting in line at the bank, it's just that one is easier to see than the other. Why is that? Because of that little painting we hold up in front of our eyes.

Every moment is the moment.