My Muse and the Path

Well it has taken a very long time to resolve the old issues in the blog regarding My Muse.

So there are two levels to this: (1) spiritual: resolved (2) worldly: unsure

(2) So the worldly one is just whether I played it as well as I could and whether I just made bad choices. Debate that forever.

(1) Spiritual one more interesting. So there is all the psychic/karmic stuff about rebirths, destinies and energies which again debate forever. But a friend advised me recently the most important thing was to "let go." So I did.

After so long that was easy. It was just a choice to close the door and put it down. After decades you are holding just because you forgot to put it down, or you believe some loyalty means you should keep holding it. Or you've been holding it for so long, you'd be letting yourself or her down to drop it like some endurance challenge. Well these are all choice you make now, and have nothing to do with the Past which is gone.

So key point of this blog is what I hoped to get from My Muse. I have two quotes from her writing which at the time were evidence that I was in the right place:

(1) A description of having fallen asleep in summer with the window above her bed open, and the experience of waking into the mist and light rain that was coming through the window. She described that experience you have on waking of there being no beginning so it seems a boundless experience, and she described the being absorbed into the experience. Bingo that is what I was looking for.

(2) A poem in which she described the lawn as an expanse of green outside her window with the individual blades of grass reaching up to be part of that expanse. Again bingo she was looking holistically at the wider experience and then analysing it into parts. We usually think of a lawn as being made of grass leaves, but actually painters realise we see the expanse of green and only afterwards analyse the components. Leibniz argues this with the sea. As one approaches the sea while we are still too far off the hear an individual wave, somehow they all combine to create a sound that we can hear. That sound cannot then be just be many inaudible waves side by side, they must add together to become something bigger than any of the parts. When you hear the sea at a distance you cannot actually pin that experience down to any inaudible individual wave! So its quite reasonable for My Muse to describe the lawn as an expanse of green, while atomistically, reductionistically or materially we might say this was wrong.

Now I knew deep down that everything I brought to My Muse really lay inside of me. It is true I needed her as a catalyst to get what happened going: it takes two to Tango but the results of that are only conditional and impermanent. The real awaking is unconditional. In Love we are always looking for the unconditional. We say crazy things like I will love you forever but this is what it feels like. And in material terms childbirth is a weak form of eternity in that obviously we survive death through our children. But there is a more profound level of eternity here.

What I was grasping for in My Muse is the experience of Jhana or Dhyana or Samadhi that I began to read about in Buddhism afterwards. At the time from the Greeks "ekstatis" to be outside oneself, to be beyond oneself, which crudely translates into Buddhism as Non-Self that all phenomena are not-self. And remarkably remember some time later that I had in fact already experienced this before as a child. But like AI running into language problems talking about itself, so we run into language problems when faced with things like Jhana as English does not have a language for this, and so it is hard to articulate, make sense of or even remember. This is why I thought Indian speakers like My Muse might be more familiar with these gateways into mind as their language developed within a culture that recognises these things.

Anyway I realise now that you do not need to know an Indian speaker to access the Mind. There are enough translations and expert teachers, and even with sensitivity we can find it for our self if we are prepared to reexperience the seeming familiar world, and see it with fresh eyes, because the truth is: we do not really know what things are like as we are usually taught to only superficially access the world. It is sufficient just to know the name of things normally to constitute knowing. What is the highest mountain etc? Schooling, quizzing and demonstrations of learning are easily satisfied simply by knowing names. Although AI should be rapidly replacing people with just knowledge. To really experience something however is something you cannot prepare for, it must be done through openness in the moment of experience - quite a different process and one that I was hoping My Muse could teach me. Well it turns out this is not the only, or even best way!

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One problem with using worldly doorways to the spiritual is that if any conditional factors generate dislike it closes the door. I have met people pursing religions who through failed worldly relationships have left the religion. This is the worst thing that can happen! We swap out the eternal for the mortal and don't even realise. How much more lost can we get! My Muse in fact was exactly this, but how easy to confuse the mortal with the eternal when you are confused!