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(3) LINES WRITTEN WHILE SITTING IN A LITTLE WOOD
Reality-as-a-dream can only be realized when the egoless "I"
has been achieved. No small feat, but not an impossible one
either. The first prerequisite to its achievement is this:
the ceasing of dependence upon a belief in a transcendent self.
In this way only can the reality which consists of both "I"
and "not-I" be experienced.
How does one bring this condition into being? That which would
seem at first to be a rarefied state turns out, in actuality, to be
grounded in the body, motivated by the body's own sensorial
self-awareness. I must, in effect, learn how to be my
body. I begin by silencing my mind and drawing my attention to
one narrow point of focus. The state of experiential
consciousness thus attained has at first a quite foreign feeling, its
foreignness having the effect of causing me to "see as if
through a second pair of eyes." That is to say,
when the analytical mind is suppressed, and as sensorial awareness is
moved to the forefront of my attention, my state of consciousness
grows more "animalistic," feral, wild; and yet, because the
self-reflective part of my consciousness is still in operation, I
find myself constantly shifting from my "animalistic" point
of view to one that is observational. As the effort needed to
concentrate on a single point of focus gradually lessens (which is to
say, as the animal within me attains a state of relaxation with
regard the experiential consciousness peculiar to it), I find myself
becoming defined more and more completely by a self-awareness that is
sensorially rendered: my sole form of
self-acknowledgment is that which is delineated by the activities of
my bodily senses. Language regains, as its primary function,
the primitive power of a more purely emotive utterance as opposed to
being a matter of the ego seeking a fixed, symbolic formulation by
which to express its hermetic existence within the mental
sphere. Vocalization becomes as much a matter of how one
intones shaped sound as it does of how one conveys abstract
information via the definitions of words. For, as the egoistic
self fades, self-awareness comes to be held in suspension; what
remains is "self" defined as a "point of
particularity" arising from the "flow of experience"
that constitutes the "ground-of-all-being" – a mode of
existence which perceives reality not from any artificially
conceived, fixed and static point of view, but from a state of
fluidity. Ultimately, with sufficient practice and patience,
this fluidity may yield to an experiential perceptivity that is
devoid of all egoism, and lead to the realization of an all-engulfing state
of "oneness." At any rate, this is what I assume its
experiential condition would be in its most fully developed state .
. .
I base this assumption on the premise that "self" implies a
state of being that is always in the act of becoming:
"I" is the existent state achieved via the act of nothing
(the "not-I") yielding to the state of something
(the "I"). One might feel compelled at this point to
ask who or what it is that gives rise to this act; but the question
is, in reality, nonsensical: "I" and "not-I"
are but two halves of a greater whole; the causality of each lies in
the existence of the other. "I" becomes via
the sensorial perception of the outer and inner environments, at the
center of which exists Emptiness – the "not-I."
"I," gaining its existence through the act of becoming
thereby transcends the "not-I," yet still does not affirm
the existence of a transcendent self because "I"
never exists wholly outside of time. Being is timeless; becoming
is not. Properly realized, this understanding yields a view of
the self that is neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective, but
rather, is wholly both. Self already exists in a state
of oneness, and needs only to learn to let go of its anxiety in the face
of this truth in order to comprehend it experientially. One
must begin, it would seem, by ceasing to view the body as an
abstracted symbolic representation of the self and instead view it as
a metaphor for being as becoming.
Language – the most commonly used method of communicating with
ourselves and with each other – exists as a form of equivalency for
the subject of language. Language "stands in" for the
subject of language; it is the symbolic representation of the subject
of language. But the symbolic aspect of language is
fundamentally unimportant; it's only the content of language
that gives its symbolic representation any value. If, for
instance, I open a book written in a language I do not understand,
all I see are meaningless marks on a page: those marks
have, for me, no comprehensible content. The content of
language on the other hand is born out of sensory perceptions:
any word – noun or verb, adjective or adverb – is a symbolic
representation of a concept abstracted from sensorial awareness.
Language is the form our human song – or squawking, chattering,
grunting – takes. It's only when language is used in a
self-referential way with regard to its originator that it is used mistakenly:
that is to say, it's only when the abstracted concept of self,
as embodied by language, is believed to show the existence of a transcendent
self that language is used mistakenly. By the same token, when
the ability for abstract thought is taken to show the existence of a
transcendent self, abstract thought is used mistakenly.
Language allows for greater complexity of communication by serving as
the embodiment of conceptual abstraction, but both language and
abstract thought are ultimately grounded in sensory perception.
We are not transcendent figures in this world – or if we are, the
proof of it lies not in this direction.
I no longer believe that the ability of humans to think conceptually
need necessarily be treated as some sort of evolutionary
"mistake," however. Among other things, it allows us
to organize into highly complex social groupings and facilitates the
communication of complex, abstract thought. Unfortunately, we
tend to allow it to define us according to a single perceptual
perspective as well – to wit, that of the status quo. In
consequence, we are confined to, and by, that perspective. It
is frequently the case that an uncomfortable existential gap opens up
when we communicate via conceptual thinking: we find
ourselves trapped in our own egos, lonely, partial, incomplete,
unresolved. This is not, however, the fault of our capacity to
think conceptually. Rather, it is a problem that arises from
mistaking the symbolic aspect of language, and of the body, with the
metaphoric content that constitutes their true reality. It
arises when we mistake ourselves for being alone, and forget
that we are also, and always, becoming as well.
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