I remember a long time ago, I had read a collection of short stories by
the science ficion writer Edward Bryant, called Among the Dead and Other Events Leading Up to the Apocalypse. This collection was interesting and
noteworthy because it introduced me to another great author, Joan Didion (one
of whose quotes were used to begin the collection). Aside from that, there was
one story in that collection that I remember vividly. The gist of the story is,
it’s about this group of people who are trying desperately to climb a hill of
this deserted place, in the hopes that they will somehow arrive at an oasis or
a different world when they leave that hill. In the end, they finally reach the
summit of the hill, after a lot of mental anguish among themselves, only to
find that they skip into a dimension and arrive at the bottom of yet another
hill. The story is not meant to be a hard core science fiction, but seems more
of an allegory for how the idea of progress contains the seed of its own
failure.
I wonder how to explain this idea, but I think that there have been
different ways of approaching why progress leads to a special kind of failure.
I think the easiest reason is to say that there is no such thing as progress,
and this is just a figment of the imagination. Another reason is that people
suffer from attachment to their ideals, and this suffering makes the goal not so
‘worth it’. All of these sound like stock answers, but they overlook what makes
the notion of progress and ‘getting better’ so tempting or compelling. If I go
back to the psycho-geography of Bryant’s story, one aspect is that getting over
a hill often entails that we are going into another place, and leaving the past
behind. The view from the ‘other side’ of the hill always entails an exclusion
of the past. In common parlance, we often say ‘I got over it’, or him or her, to describe how we transcend a certain
kind of suffering. In my mind, that always conjures up the notion of climbing a
hill and then using the hill to cover up what happened before.
The other notion of psychic hills that interests me is that they seem to
compartmentalize or ‘dimensional-ize’ certain areas of space, dividing
otherwise flat space into different parts. But does one ever get to that point?
Sometimes, the more lucid one is, the fewer compartments there really are. It
is not that I got out of one space and into a better one, but that I somehow
see through all the artificial boundaries I create between spaces. That is when left often becomes right, bad
becomes good, and I am no longer protected by my hard boundaries. In The Surgangama Sutra, the Buddha
compares mind to a set of boxes with space inside of them. He remarks to
Ananda:
“Suppose one were to try to fit
some space into a variety of containers. Because containers differ in shape, we
could say the spaces within them also differ in shape. If you take away the containers
and look at the space that was within them, you will say that the space has
become one again. But how could space become unified or separated because of
what you have done? Indeed, how could the space be said to be either one or not
one?” (p.180)
When I read this passage from the Sutra, I am reminded of a time when I
went to one of those Magic Mazes when I was a kid. Here you have a very simple
space with lots of distorted mirrors (and even more distorted kinds of music). And
I am in that room getting scared of my own image because it looks like some
alien creature. But all the frightening images are just forms of ‘me’! And
which of those is the ‘real me’? No matter where I turn, I am afraid of the phantom
presence, but it is all illusion, and it is all me at the same time. If only I
can see that, then I make the connection that nobody is chasing ‘me’.
The parallel in practice is that I think there is often a desire to get
somewhere or to be something special after meditating. More often than not, the
opposite might also be the case. With more clarity of mind, one can start to
see what is down there in the waters, and how uncontrollable it really is. But
if one doesn’t have that clarity, how can any problems be resolved? If one doesn’t accept the gravity of one’s
own karmic energies (be it anger or sadness, or joy, or attachment, or
clinging), it would be impossible to change this or cover this up by simply
generating a new kind of thought. The paradox is that it is only total
acceptance that can allow real changes to happen. That acceptance is almost a
realization of how caught up I am in thinking I am ‘this’ or ‘that’, and how
powerful that delusion of a separate self is. It is like trying to take a lever
the size of a switch and using it to move the earth. When I truly accept how
futile that is, how impossible that thought is that this concept of “I” can
change anything, can I yield to that which is constantly changing yet stays the
same
References
The Surangama Sutra: With Excerpts from the Commentary by the Venerable
Master Hssuan Hua. A New Translation
(2009) Buddhist Text Translation Society.
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