This post marks the end of the project of this blog from 2007 to 2026. It was a closed-hand* search motivated by a desire to grasp something, extract something, and reveal something tangible and discrete from the world. Eventually this hand has seen the futility of trying to grasp a definite final thing. The hand is always free top open, and close, to let go and to grasp. And not recognising that the hand is always free to let go is what in fact leads us to a struggle unnecessarily.
*By hand is meant not just a physical or brain activity but also more importantly a "heart" activity. "Heart" is not very scientific, but it refers to the psychological experience of feeling our way through the world. Intellect looks at the world through a glass window. Heart exists in the world and feels its way. Closing the hand on things feels like solidity and certainty, but this becomes stress and anger when what we grasp becomes challenged and we risk losing our grip. Without knowing about opening the hand, we often feel like the only option is the grip tighter to stop is slipping. What we need to learn is that we are not what we grasp, and letting go does not change us at all. I blog has talked of a "self doll" before. We manufacture this appealing image of ourself and grasp it for comfort. We are secure in this. But when that doll is challenged and we feel it slip from our grasp we instinctively hold tighter. This is foolish: who is the doll important? We can't be the doll if it is important to us! We cling for no reason, and there is no consequence to keeping our hold or letting go! Stress for no reason at all!
From this starts a new blog: https://riswey.over-blog.com/
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Four related things in this post. This describes essentially a Scrooge experience of opening the closed palm or fist to receive the world afresh. Once we develop a fixed goal or definition we are closed to new things. This is experienced as stress and death. Scrooge goes from "bah humbug!" and having a dead closed view of Christmas to a stress caused by resisting certain truths that the ghosts reveal. The last ghost of things to come in particular show the consequences of a closed palm. Once his fist is forced open he is free to receive the new Christmas day as a new day.
What I go on to discuss below in various forms is the danger of this blog and indeed any attempts to narrate the world.
If words ever become a pleasure for us then we are drawn away from the world that they are talking about which is like us cutting a flower off its root to take home. It dies. A flower and root need be connected and words only make sense in conjunction with what they are talking about.
If words ever take over this is the exact same as our ego trying to stand independent of our parents and the world that birthed it. It is the same as us closing our palm and gripping the world to claim some part of it for ourself. We shut out any part of the world and other people to define ourself and we begin the path of withering. It is stressful and we die.
The worst thing about a closed palm is that it will not listen. I has grasped, it is now full and there is no rom for anything else. A closed palm is very hard to open again. A closed heart shuts out the words of wisdom and the love of others that it needs to learn to open again. In this state it withers and suffers the pain of death.
So we must be very cautious about the joy we get from anything closed, definite and grasped because cutting off from the rest of the world and other people is self destruction.
So what is the point of this blog then? Well that is the danger. If this ever sort a definition, a conclusion, a point of completion where the palm has fully closed and cut it off from the world then it ceases to be meaningful as it is divorced from it is talking about.
That applies to reader and writer alike. Any sense that this will end is futile. The world and the heart is open, and so there never was an end.
(2) The non-dual lies before the separation of subject and object. [note to author: setting sun through trees]
Here is a photo of a scene. While looking at this is not looking at a butterfly on a flower, it is a reproduction of similar light. Even if it was AI that AI has been trained on real photos and so is a more convolution reproduction. Let us forget what the object is whether real or reproduction. What we need for this is the visual experience of a butterfly on a flower.
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| (c) Satria Bagaskara on pexels |
Now until a few moments ago you were definitely not looking at a butterfly feeding at a flower. And then you were. Go back to looking at it and experiencing that definite experience that I am calling the butterfly at the flower. It is a definite experience. Know that it is distinct and definite. I should have another picture here really so that via the difference we can see that each experience is its own definite thing. Look at it again to be sure that that visual experience is real and definite before continuing in the text.
Now it is not immediately obvious but that experience is a single thing. It just happens.
For many people that is enough. Or unfortunately for very few it is enough because things happen after we have the experience.
One of the key things that happens is we claim and grasp the experience for ourself. "I saw a butterfly" or "that experience was for me" or similar.
What is happening here is not what it seems. We are not digging deeper into the experience to uncover its truth. Instead we are laying a narrative over the top like the narrator on a wildlife TV program. Such a narrator may go "here is a butterfly feeding on a flower and it is being seen by you." The narrator is doing something very distinct here: they are dividing the singular experience we had before (which was just the experience of the butterfly) into the object (the butterfly) and the viewer or subject (you).
Usually we see this act of the narrator as telling us something about the picture which helps us see it more clearly. But actually what is the narrator is doing is taking the experience and then remixing it into a new experience which is the thinking part. When we see "butterfly" and "me" as separate parts this is something new that is being created that was not there before!
I said "unfortunately" seeing the butterfly is not enough. That is slightly unfair as there is nothing wrong with the narration. The "unfortunately" comes from us being unable to turn this narration off. There is no menu cog with the option to turn off the spoken narration in our minds. As a result we get hounded out of just seeing the butterfly on the flower as a singular experience with no division and complexity.
Go back and look again and try and forget anyone is seeing it and there is anything being looked it. It is definitely impossible now because even this blog is part of the narration!
But all that was to illustrate that at the beginning of experience there is an undifferentiated singular experience with nothing being seen and no-one seeing it!
So a Buddhist might complain at this point. Hold it! Doesn't Buddha expressly tell us that for the experience to be caused there needs to be object and a subject? Nothing exists by itself, it always exists between some causes and conditions. In this case an object (the butterfly) and an eye (me). True but this narration is only an antidote to the other narration that things exist permanently, unchanging and out of themself. Someone may think a "butterfly" is a butterfly because inside it there is some butterfly-ness. Somehow the butterfly is different from the world around it in some absolute way. But this is all narrative. Above we were discussing the world before the narrator kicked in at all. The singular distinct event of the experience that starts the whole thing. Narrators always start talking after the camera has captured some experience of the animal, but before the narrator kicks in we have just the experience.
Now the relevance of this to this post is that with all the narration in this blog it is easy to "know" the truth and forget all about what this truth was talking about. We can know that the "self" and "ego" are just narration on top of the world but we can forget to turn off the narration sometimes and just see the world as it is.
And that relates to the ego and the heart. When we forget to turn off the sound and the narrator, or take them too seriously, we drown out the experience. And this occurs because we desire to have the definite knowledge of the world rather than the world. If we think about taking a walk in the park instead of watching a nature program about it we will notice that walking in nature without the narrator is possibly boring. We have no idea what we are looking at, and we can quite easily miss it all. We come home with nothing to say, no narration and we don't feel the buzz and excitement of definite knowledge (think this is dopamine in brain chemical terms). And why do we want to buzz? Well this is starting to become about ourselves and our own definition and then we see it is ego. People interested in Natural History tend to start to learn how to make their own narration. I remember spending an afternoon with an experienced bird watcher and the time went from a lazy bland day to a rollercoaster of soap opera as the birder decoded all the bird songs we were hearing to tell me what was going on in the bush, they noticed birds of prey coming in and disturbing the flocks of other birds, they brought a dense story to what was unfolding drawing the attention to so many things and giving a depth to what before had just been a flat boring scene. And yet the scene was the same! The video was the same! But with the narration the self could take part and I can still tell the story of that afternoon now. Yet there is nothing to stop someone without the knowledge experiencing that scene and starting to generate their own narratives. As with the butterfly above, any child can see that and take fascination in it, you do not need to be a trained lepidopterist to be stirred by the wonder of butterflies. Indeed as we grow older and the narratives become engrained it is in fact that ego side that blocks us to the wonder of nature and requires other narratives to awaken us. If we can get used to turning off the sound we can go back to the wonder of experience as it is. And when we do that we can calm the ego, and lessen the need to close our palm and grip on to the world.
(3) The ego manifests in the hardened heart. Grasping to one way or the other closes the hand and the heart and leads to stress.
The traps that this blog leads into is the illusion of correctness. Once we think we know the truth, or have some formulation of the truth, then it is irresistible to grasp it. And why do we grasp it? Indeed why do we search for it? It is so that we can validate our self. How ironic if that truth is that the self is so unformulatable that we dare not to even think of self. To get a fixed handle on even this truth is to formulate a self.
Instead of who? We can also ask what is our motivation. Buddhism highlights this. Our motivation must always be for others at the very least because if we are motivated by ourself we will only ever propagate that self into everything we do and so block all attempts to transcend it.
As Pema Chondron says we make a vow to help all beings and then never let our heart harden over. That is to say we never close our palm again to grasp at anything. It is always open, unresolved and receptive of everything and everyone.
This blog ultimately still seeks a resolution, a formulation, a universal truth that can be etched in stone and sold to everyone. That is just the activity of an ego seeking definition and eternity.
My criticism of Jews lies in this. But it is a criticism of every person and every people seeking to become something definitive. That is a process of closing oneself off from what is awkward and ill defined and trying to perimeter a neat known entity and essence.
Any such project is doomed in death. A fish removed from water, while now visible for all to see, then dies. We close our palm and we die. If the ego ever did succeed in standing before the camera of the mind it would kill the person trying to photograph it. While this is exactly SRH, SRH now becomes a toxic entity because it encourages us to grasp at formulation and that is exactly the mistake it highlights. What is the point of a formulation that is no formulation. Why would anyone have use of this?
(4) Transcending self is a battle. It is not an heroic battle, it is a humiliating battle where our constant reorganisation and rebuilding of self is again and again uncovered and exposed and our pathetic attempts are laid bare in their full hypocrisy. At every move we try and re-establish a private realm in which we are correct, authorised, justified and righteous; a realm that cuts itself off from that which is false, illegitimate, and despised and in that very move we become inauthentic and reified.
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