Just revision of stuff already blogged (and now no longer a quick note!)
There are 2 distinct types of experience:
(1) There is the named/thought world and there is
(2) the Present world.
Now this is the where the dispute occurs. The Named world is not real, while the Present world is real.
Nonsense people say. Mount Everest is the tallest mountain. Fact! (Lets ignore disputes around this and presume it actually is).
Well the first problem is that its actually called Sagarmatha to the South. There is no such thing as Mount Everest. And to the North its called Chomolungma. So we realise that there is something there which is separate from its many names. So when we say "Mount Everest is the tallest mountain" we really mean that the mass of rock between Nepal and Tibet is the tallest mass of rock in the world. There is no actually thing called "Mount Everest" there is just a huge pile of rocks. The pile of rocks is real; the names are arbitrary, and we don't even need them.
So the classic question: before anyone ever saw this pile of rocks did it exist? Well the Gobi desert starved of water and the Indian Monsoons dumping all that water both attest to a huge mountain range. There was evidence that it existed before been directly seen. And I will leave that issue there, as enough has already been said to point at the purpose of this blog.
The point is that the mind is looking to hammer a nail into the mountain, sew in a label, replace it with a simple name. And then once this short hand it established we can ignore the "real" mountain we just think "Mount Everest" and think we know what we are talking about. Somehow despite the vast size of the mountain the world of Names thinks it can hold it in its hand now.
But here is real Mount Everest, or at least part of it.
Did anyone recognise it? Perhaps a climber who really "knows" the mountain and has spent decades climbing it may know this bit but no one else. Yet we all use "Mount Everest" like we "know" the mountain.
This is the difference between the two types of experience. The Name world and the Present World.
This is more commonly described as the difference between the text book knowledge of a tiger that we all get as kids and this:
Which if we "really" met would give us quite a memorable present! And indeed people spend large amounts of money to have this "real" experience, which proves that the "named" experience is not the same or real.
Okay big deal.
But actually BIG DEAL.
At every moment in our life there is a Present. But there is not always the Named world. Meditation is very focused on showing us the un-named Present world. When we really get to know something the name falls away and seems not so useful. When a tiger walks in the room, or we climb Mount Everest there is a lot to deal with apart from the Name. True we may be alerted to the danger with a call of "Beware Tiger!" but rapidly this is replaced with the Present experience of This Tiger.
Now this reveals the key thing about The Present: it is The Source. It speaks for itself. Text books seem to speak for themselves but they run out, there is only as much in a text as is written by the author, a wiki page does not write itself. But when we engage in climbing Mount Everest or a Tiger we are faced with a creative thing from which a new experience comes all the time. The Present is constantly creating new experiences to those who are open: it is like a spring bubbling up new things continuously. It is quite overwhelming how infinitely rich it is in fact. Those who are bored of life have got stuck in the named world and no longer access what is really there. They "think" they know the world, but its just names. When Gaston Lachaille sings "It's a Bore" in the musical Gigi it is simply that he has slipped into the finite world of Names. For the coward and the Ego maniac it is attractive because we can appear to grasp the world simply in our hand, but it is an illusion. What we grasp is no more real than our thoughts of "Mount Everest" are rock.
Robert Pirsig in the famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) explores exactly this. At one point as a teacher he describes asking a child with writer's bock to write about a single brick in a wall. Apparently there is nothing to say: it is just a brick amongst thousands. But as Pirig demonstrates when you access the reality of a brick and connect with The Source it speaks for itself and fills many pages. A painter experiences this observing their subject. The more they look the more they see. A cleaner once described how the more you clean the more dirt you see, and it takes some skill to know when to stop.
In meditation we usually start in the realm of names. We have thoughts about all kinds of things that are NOT PRESENT. "Oh I must remember to pay that cheque in" or "I really need get online and buy that" or "mustn't forget this person's birthday" etc. Our mind is filled with names, short hand tags for things in the world. But in there The Source is bubbling away giving us a continuous Present.
A common method to notice the Present is to watch the breath. We never stop breathing until we are dead, so its like The Source: it is something bubbling away that we can always dip into watching.
Now breathing is boring we think. Like Mount Everest is actually boring: its the highest mountain and that is it. After we have got used to this fact its boring. Like Pirsig's brick in the wall it is boring cos it is just a name.
But then we go and see it and connect with the Present it is suddenly anything but boring. The mountain is vast and offers countless new experiences. The brick may turn out to be made of clay with different coloured parts when looked at closely and so our unique relationship with the brick starts.
But actually so does the breath.
Sometimes people say every breath is unique. Buddha says in the
Mahasatipattana
Breathing in a long breath, he knows, "I breathe in a long breath"; breathing out a long breath, he knows, "I breathe out a long breath"; breathing in a short breath, he knows, "I breathe in a short breath"; breathing out a short breath, he knows, "I breathe out a short breath"
That is two types of breath to start with. But we will fail if we try to find something "unique" about every breath. There are not enough names like "long" or "short" to start with. What "unique" means is that each breath is its own individual. It is different from the last breath and the next breath: it is "this" breath. It is a similar thought we apply to people. People are boring in many ways, people are mostly the same. But each person is never-the-less unique and spend time in the Presence of anyone and they become a source which their name or description is not.
I was recently alerted to a state of mind called "dissociated". A person can become dissociated from themselves. This it seems is simply people like Gaston Lachaille lose touch with The Source and drift off into the finite world of names. They lose creativity and ironically become a Bore themselves.
If we watch something in the Present and observe it ever more closely we are moving towards the source from which it comes.
This I believe is what people who believe in God are talking about. Prayer and meditation for the Theists brings you into the Presence of the Lord, in the Presence of the Creator of the World who is the Source, who is Now.
So these ultimately profound experiences all lie in accessing the Present as deeply as we can. Quickly we see the world of Names as a shadowy crude patchwork laid over The Source.
As Suzanne Vega puts it in the song Language (1987):
If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be
These words are too solid
They don't move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
That flies by and is gone
Gone
Gone
Gone
And how odd for Platonists that this liquid world from which the world bubbles up and gives us infinite experience and which shows the world of language up as solid and clumsy, that is the shadow for Plato and the light comes from the world of Forms which are the statue archetypes that make things what they are.
If you could give a diagnosis of the Disease which infects the West and Modernity it is this, the belief that there are Statues of Truth.
Here is the Cryptic Wood White before 2001 thought to be Wood White. Now when DNA studies revealed it was a separate species did the Platonic world of Forms need to chisel out a new statue for it, or was it there all along in the Forms waiting for researchers to find it?
The Source and Time
One possibly puzzling notion is that Present in its usual usage today means the instant of time. We have Newton and Einstein primarily to thank for enshrining this mistake in the public consciousness. In order to create a model of movement physicists take the distance and time components and plot them on a graph as equals. It means that we can look at time unfolding as a journey along the time axis, just as distance unfolding is a journey along the distance axis. This is useful for recording where we were at each point in a journey and from this we can get the gradient to get the speed. But its a mistake isn't it because time is being mapped onto distance along the x-axis. You can't actually record real time. Graphs are all about just distance.
And so in Space-Time we have the mistake of thinking of experience as slices through a 4D loaf of space-time with each slice an instant in time.
It's all a complete mistake. There is only ever One Present from the start of the universe to the end. The Real Universe exists IN the Present. You can't go back in time to the "instant" before NOW because you live in the NOW. Any such movement is in the world of Names and is done by thinking of time like it was a distance. But REAL movement as we know needs distance AND time... not 2 orthogonal distances. So all of physics is built upon a crude mapping of time to a 4th distance axis. Time is not REALLY like this. In our thoughts it may be, but not REALLY.
The Source and Space
And this segues subtly into one of the commonest mistakes the Named world makes. We live a lot of our life in the limited finite Named world and so we get a inaccurate picture of the world. When we connect to The Source we see things quite differently e.g. Present above. But also we get Space wrong too.
So we are looking at an oak tree at the top of a field. Simple.
But we know that if we close our eyes that vision disappears and we can no longer see the tree or anything.
What makes it disappear? Its well established that the eyes work like a room with a window and curtains. Close the curtains and the room goes dark and there is nothing to see. Light no longer travels into the room and we can long see the tree outside.
And so quite simply we say that the tree is outside the room and we are inside. Close the curtain and we can no longer see the tree. Simple.
It is no mystery and well understood the eye works like this:
But there is a problem. If light must get INSIDE the room BEFORE we see the tree, then how can we see the TREE that is OUTSIDE the room?
Surely when we see the tree then light must ALREADY be INSIDE the room. The tree that we think is OVER THERE has already been seen!
Think about it. When we see something it appears in our consciousness. When we close our eyes it vanishes from our consciousness. It is still OVER THERE but we no longer see it OVER HERE. That means that when we do see it, what we see must be OVER HERE and not OVER THERE. You can't see something before you have seen it! That is ridiculous. So we can't see what is OVER THERE until light gets OVER HERE. The whole point of vision is that we don't have to go OVER THERE to see stuff, light brings it here. You look at a star does not mean you must visit the star, the light brings the star to you. And so in fact everything is OVER HERE. So we see the difference between the Present and the Named here. In the Present everything is HERE, it is the experience of vision itself. When you see something it is HERE and NOW. Yet when we analyse our vision we start to name things as near and far and inside and outside like we can in a painting. This OVER HERE and OVER THERE is an illusion in the world of names. Heideggar (dare I criticise him) may actually have this wrong. The "there" of Dasein is actually an illusion. The reality is that Being is just HERE and NOW. You see it or you don't!
This means that either the Tree is OVER HERE or We are OVER THERE! Which ever way you think about it the point is that everything we see has already BEEN SEEN.
So there can never be a Thing OVER THERE and a ME who is OVERHERE, and then light links us up. The point is that SEEING has ALREADY happened for everything we see whether it is here or there.
Now this is another difference between the Present world and the Named world. In the Named world things are laid out in space. Some things are near, some are far, and in the middle of the scene is Me. And we think that Me is looking at all these things in the scene. We close the curtains and the far things can no longer be seen because the curtain gets in the way of our line of sight. This is how we THINK it.
But in "reality" everything has already been seen. It doesn't matter whether it is near or far these are just names we add. The experience of seeing has already happened for us to see anything. This Present is completely flat. Things are just seen or not seen. There is no near or far or even any space, there is just vision.
And this vision is bubbling up from the Source. You can't look around in the scene to see where it comes from. It not like hearing a plane coming and looking in the sky waiting for it to turn up. The Source is the source of vision itself. Everything that is being seen is present right here. There is nothing else.
If we are waiting for a plane to turn up, then that is actually in the realm of names. We are thinking and expecting it based upon what we imagine is going to happen. BUT it hasn't happened yet, and it is not REAL yet. As we know all to well in life things almost never turn out how we expect. we may never see the plane because the clouds are low, or perhaps its going a different way to what we thought, or perhaps it was landing and will never fly overhead. After all the actual experience we had was the sound bubbling from The Source of the sound. Everything else we added. We gave that sound a name: the sound of a plane. And then with this label of "plane" we added all the expected behaviour of plane and filled our mind with imagined expectations. None of it real. We the real eventually bubbles from The Source we may be roughly correct, but only very roughly. The actual experience is new. The Names are always a crude overlay over the Present.
Now at the heart of all this is that very odd Name which seems to be everywhere "Me." But like everything above the reality of self is quite unlike the Name.
There are 8 billion people on the planet and one of them is "me" we think. We imagine ourselves in a room, or in a line or queue and we are just one person along side 8 billion. And perhaps we see ourselves as tall or short, or smart or dim, or pretty or ugly, or good or bad, or boring or interesting, or lucky or unlucky, or happy or sad, or lovable or unlovable, or wise or foolish, or deserving or undeserving etc etc. And then we think about what other people think of me and it gets more complicated. But then we stop and catch a glimpse of our breath in the Present and we leave the world of Names and occupy the world being bubbled up by The Source. The world as it really is, and the imaginary thoughts about what we are drift away and we are faced with reality... and it is nothing like what we were thinking before. Literally nothing like it and we drop the names and we drop this false self.