(3)

A muggy day today.  A typical summer's day, bright and noisy and glossy with heat.  Fortunately, I live far enough north, and it's still early enough in the season so that, by the time evening arrives, it's cooled off beautifully.

I decide to go to the cemetery and walk.

I'm thinking as I walk about an insight that came to me a few days ago concerning the nature of experiential consciousness and its relation to reality.  The insight consisted of the fact that everything within us, and everything external to us, is all of one piece, existing as a single, unbounded whole.

Unfortunately, I can't really remember what I meant by this.

I have said before that the external world is both subjective (projected from within me) and objective (having an existence separate from me).  But what of my internal world?  That world is created partly from biochemical processes.  It's created partly from emotional responses to the external environment, past and present, and to expectations I hold of the future.  It's created from images derived from the external environment, sometimes altered by emotion or fantasy.  It has, at times, a curiously synesthetic quality:  during my most relaxed periods of meditation, for instance (it occurs as well just before I fall asleep), I may experience a thought or emotion as an expanding bloom of color, or as the metamorphosing of a geometric shape.  It would seem, therefore, that the internal world could also be described as being both subjective (derived from the interiority of self) and objective (derived from that which exists external to self).  Still, our perceptions of the external and internal worlds differ in one crucial way:  the external world is perceived via our physical senses.  However, it's equally true that a separate set of senses exists for the experiencing of the realm within.  This is never more noticeable than during an "out-of-body" experience, when the external world has been shut off from our physical senses only to have an internal one appear in its place, replete with sights and sounds that are available to us only via the use of our inner eyes and ears.  This is a fact that anyone who has had an out-of-body experience can affirm, though the out-of-body experience is only one of several leading us to the same conclusion:  what else, for example, is the common nighttime dream but the experience of an inner world perceived via a set of inner senses?

None of this, however, addresses the more fundamental question of what, exactly, the "self" consists of.  For self is amorphous.  Self seemingly exists nowhere, and yet, potentially at least, exists anywhere and everywhere.  Self is not a transcendent figure.  Self is consciousness, and consciousness is experiential.  Consciousness is a focal point, a sort of prism of awareness, through which flows an individual's experience of the external and internal worlds.  Each individual's internal world – the world of their intellectual, emotional, and imaginative selves – is so singular and unique, and its uniqueness so apparent even from the moment of birth, that it seems impossible for the science of psychology to give a truly comprehensive account of its complexity:  I myself cannot see any other explanation for it other than the concept of karma.  Although it's true that a belief in karma might seem on the face of it to presuppose the existence of a transcendent self, capable of surviving many deaths and rebirths, this self is not ideational.  Rather, it is the movement of a particular point of consciousness through the various stages and realms of existence, not excluding that of physical death.  It is consciousness shaped by, and grounded in, the experience of its movement through these stages and realms of existence.  And consciousness itself is not ideational because consciousness does not depend on the verbalization of the act of self-reflection to give it existence.  Rather, consciousness is experiential (and so includes, but is not limited to, the act of self-reflection).

I was walking the lip of the gully that runs alongside the cemetery, looking about me with my usual pleasure at the various gravestones, the variously shaped trees and bushes, the colors of the grasses and mosses, the zig-zagging flight of the flies and gnats; and feeling the cooling breeze of the evening air; and smelling the freshness – and the musty odorousness – of the earth; when I happened to notice a dead branch lying on the grass.  The branch was about three feet long, and extending from its stem were a number of smaller branches and twigs, arranged in a more or less circular pattern so that, at its highest point, the branch stood about two feet off the ground.  It was the color of the branch's bark that struck me most forcibly, however.  It was, simply put, grey – but such a bright, vibrant grey that it seemed almost to be glowing in the evening light.  Of course, since I've learned to quiet my inner dialogue somewhat I'm constantly noticing the world in a more sensual fashion – its shapes, colors, and textures taking on a rich luxuriousness such as I've never known before.  Sometimes the very freshness of the experience is what captures my attention but, when I get beyond the excitement and delight of that, I notice myself becoming entranced ever more profoundly by the act of pure experiencing.  For example, I did not today gaze upon the branch I saw and think:  "How vibrant the greyness of it is!  How beautiful it looks!" etc.  Rather, I became absorbed in the experience of its greyness.  Not of greyness in any abstract sense, but of this particular greyness, as it was being expressed by this particular branch.

Could I do the same thing with my emotions, I wondered?  Would it be possible to view my own emotions with detachment?  To what degree might my emotions, or any aspect of my inner environment, be described as the outgrowths or attributes of some more central or essential experience, and thereby be separated from it?  To what degree does karma, which I might describe as being the sum total of the attributes of experience, gathered through many incarnations in many different realms of existence, shape this internal environment?  To what degree might it shape my external environment – and how do these two environments influence each other?  For all my theorizing, I still cannot claim to know.  For knowing can only be found through experiencing.  Or rather, knowing can only be found through the conscious awareness of an experiential existence.

I continued to walk until I had reached the tree I like to stop and lean against, and for a long time stood looking into the woods as the evening sunlight slanted down, tinted green from its passage through the leaves.  I looked up through the branches of the trees into the intricate pattern of lacework they made against the dimming blue sky.  I stood there a long time, looking and wondering about . . . well, about all the things I do wonder about.

Hearing a rustling sound behind me, I turned round to see a man walking his dog along the edge of a nearby road.  The man had his gaze fixed upon me and he wore a serious expression, his brows furrowed as if the sight of me troubled him or aroused his suspicion in some way.  He looked vaguely familiar to me:  I think he may have been one of my old customers from the convenience store.  The dog, a white malamute, made a charge in my direction, and the man called him back sharply.  I turned my face away, not speaking.  I'm not very good with people; I never know what to say to them.  But the look the man had given me made me feel ill at ease and, after he had passed, I decided that it was time for me to head back home.

I was making my way back along the lip of the gully, lost in thought and musing on how my face too must look, when I'm lost in thought, like the face of the man I'd just seen – brows furrowed, eyes full of seriousness – when my feet became suddenly entangled in the same branch I'd noticed earlier, causing me to stumble slightly.  This stumbling put me in mind of how my cats, wanting to play, will sometimes jump out and attack my feet as I pass by.  I paused then, and turned round to take another look at the branch.  It was only my fancy, of course, to think that it had, like my cats, "attacked" me; yet now my attention had been caught, and I wondered why.  Was it really just my imagination, or had that branch somehow "wanted" me to focus my attention on it?  I leaned against a nearby tree and studied it awhile.  Some emotion was being stirred up in me by the sight of it – what was it?  Something in the vividness of the grey – something too in the shape of the branch as it arced upward and forward through the air . . .  It seemed to be filled with energy, self-contained and self-sustained; to be filled with life, as delineated by the movement of the branch through space and time.  That branch embodied a presence, I felt sure; and this presence, being formulated partly by its own existence and partly by the act of my witnessing its existence, spoke to me.  It spoke to me of the nature of "self" and "other," of the utter and complete separateness of "self" and "other," and of how the relationship between the two, a relationship of experience, could never be severed.  It spoke to me of solitude, and of how even solitude must have its witness – though that witness may be no more than the self-reflective "other" that exists within.  Is this what "loneliness" really is – the act of one's self witnessing its own solitude?  Though I have learned to narrow the gap between the self that acts and the self that witnesses those acts, I have not yet learned how to close the gap between them completely.  Or perhaps I should say, I have not yet learned, even now, how to fully experience that gap, that gulf of emptiness, that void, which constitutes the unseverable relationship between "self" and "other."

Or maybe I have.  As I've said before, that emptiness, that void – which is, simply, a state of nonbeingness – must also act as a porthole to the state of beingness.  Thus the two states coexist, and are both being enacted all the time – though I have not yet learned how to be conscious of them both at the same time.  What, I wonder, must that experience be like?  It seems to me it must mean to exist in a state of consciousness that knows itself to be a part of everything, all at once, while at the same time knowing itself to be nothing, absolutely nothing, at all.  How strange that must be!  I cannot even imagine it.

Oddly – sentimentally – I no longer wanted to go away and just leave the branch where it lay.  I did not want it to become just another unseen, unwitnessed artifact, ignored, stepped on even, by another.  I picked it up and, looking around me with some embarrassment lest anyone should see, threw it – rather unceremoniously – over the edge of the ravine.  As I did so, a tiny piece of it broke off in my hand.  Just a twig, with four or five smaller twigs spiraling out from it, it was like a miniature version of the larger branch from which it had sprung.  I lay this twig against my palm, tracing its outline with my fingers . . .

It was as if I'd been given a sort of flower to hold.