Unity With Existence
Unity With Existence
On the thinning of the line between the one who looks and the world that is looked at
1. The Thin Place
Nobody argues their way into this. I have tried. One can sit with the thought that everything is connected, turn it over, admire its logic, and remain exactly as separate as before: a man in a chair holding a correct idea. The unity I mean arrives differently. It is felt first, and thought about later, if at all. When it passes it leaves no conclusion behind, only the memory of a line having gone thin.
Which line? The one you draw every morning without noticing, between skin and room, between the one who looks and the thing looked at. On most days it is thick and busy. Then something happens, and it is as if a pencil mark had been rubbed almost away. You are still here. The world is still there. The border has simply lost its authority.
It is hard to say when it first happened to me. Perhaps on a street, perhaps in a field. I remember only that the ordinary noise of being someone went quiet, and what was left was seeing, plain and wide, with nobody behind it taking notes.
Aphorism
The line between self and world is drawn anew each day. Sometimes it is rubbed thin, and no argument did the rubbing.
2. Stone, Air, Root
Near a summit, after the climb had used up the part of me that plans, I laid a hand on a stone the sun had warmed. Cold air went in and out of my chest. I could not have said where my breathing ended and the wind began. The slope fell away into haze below, and the sky, which I had always taken to be overhead, seemed to be all around me, and a little inside.
A root does not decide to belong to the ground. The tree never regards the soil as a stranger. Standing there I felt something of that lightness, the absence of a quiet negotiation I had been carrying for so long that I had mistaken it for myself.
I came down the mountain the same man, with the same name and the same unpaid debts. Yet for a while the valley looked less like a place I was entering than a place I had been part of all along. The light on the roofs seemed to come from my own eyes.
Aphorism
The mountain asks for nothing. Stand on it long enough and the one who stands begins to loosen.
3. The Hand That Forgets Itself
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Watch a carpenter at a long board. The plane travels, the shaving curls up, the grain answers. At some point nobody is doing the work. Only afterwards, when the word I comes back into the room, does he notice it had been gone. Painters know this, and so do cooks, and anyone who has lost an afternoon to a thing they loved.
Between people it happens more rarely, and more quietly. Sit with someone you have known for decades and say nothing. The silence belongs to neither of you. Her breathing is the room’s breathing; the lamp lights you both without distinction. Nobody remarks on it. To remark on it would end it.
What astonishes me is how little drama there is in all this. No trumpet announces the lapse of the self. The hours simply pass without anyone keeping count of them, and the world, for once, is not on the other side of a glass.
Aphorism
Absorption is a small death of the doer. What remains is the doing, and it is complete.
4. The Ordinary Door
Stillness asks for no technique and no creed. An evening will do: a kettle ticking as it cools, the window going grey, and then the emptiness of the room acquires a strange fullness. Time loosens. A child has this without effort, and so does a shepherd. Nothing needs to be earned.
And still it unsettles. For years you have moved through the world as a small bounded thing among other things. To feel that picture slacken is like reaching for a stair that is not there. Some people shut the door at once and busy themselves. Others stand in the doorway a while, afraid, and do not leave.
Nobody can be argued out of that flinch, and nobody should be. It belongs to the long habit of being one thing in a world of others, and habits of that age do not leave when asked. They leave, if they leave, when we stop watching them.
Aphorism
The experience is too ordinary to need a teacher, and too large to be met without a flinch.
5. Counterfeits, and a Long Road
There are counterfeits. Two people who cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, who dread disagreement and panic at distance, are living in enmeshment. It is a loss of footing, and it makes a life smaller. The unity I am describing leaves a person intact. He still pays his bills, keeps his word, and says no when no is true. What shifts is perception, and with it the sense of who is looking. He may even grow gentler, since he fears dissolving less.
Others have walked this road before. In India a whole tradition built its thought and practice around this very experience, calling the self Atman and the ground of all things Brahman, and asking whether the two were ever separate. We will meet it in Chapter 6. For now it is enough to feel the stone, breathe the air, and leave the question open.
I distrust any account of unity that cannot also admit the kitchen, the telephone, the quarrel with a neighbour. A vision that fails in the ordinary day is a mood. The real thing walks back down the mountain with you and carries the shopping.
Aphorism
Unity does not erase the person. It only shows that the edge was never as hard as it seemed.
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