A Way of Seeing To Enjoy (Part 1)

Knowing is equated with seeing. If you see the light, it could mean that you see a light blinking on a radio tower or it could mean that you know something that makes you see everything different or it could mean both.

Philosophy is equated with thinking. Religion is equated with feeling. Today, like the physicist David Bohm, “we hold several points of view, in a sort of active suspension” (Dialogue). Like poet William Blake—”To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower“—and like philosophers Søren Kierkegaard—we see the ‘eternal in the temporal’—and Ludwig Wittgenstein we say, “how extraordinary that anything should exist” (Lecture on Ethics).

Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein; from Logicomix (2008) by Apostolos Doxiadis, illustrated by Alecos Papadatos

Today we feel stoic acceptance of what the world throws at us. We say like Wittgenstein, “I am safe, nothing can injure me whatever happens” (Lecture on Ethics). With a “Click!” we connect to an awareness that leaves us feeling strangely lighthearted, for no apparent reason.

This feeling could best be described as “Self Actualization” as psychologist Abraham Maslow described, or as an “oceanic feeling” of limitlessness and oneness with the entire human race and universe as the mystic Romain Rolland described or it could be just one of those things: “What’s for supper?”

Today we go from a narrow self-centred perspective to a wider view of the world in its totality. We are ‘disturbed by joy’ like William Wordsworth was a few miles above Tintern Abbey:

“…I have felt a presence that disturbs me with joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky, and in the mind of man” (source)

1804. Tintern Abbey by William Havell (source).

Religious belief and the lack thereof could be understood not as rival theories but as different ways of seeing. If a believer and an atheist look at a picture and one says it’s hideous and the other says it’s lovely, who’s right? who’s wrong?

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Wittgenstein saw religion not as theoretical but as a “collection of pictures” reinforcing rules of life in the form of morality and a way of living that is itself what is eternal (Culture and Value, 1980). If someone taps into that eternal by living its ideal, one is living and being the eternal for a time like a leaf on a tree that is seasonal.

The world is factual. Facts are identifiable by science but facts can’t answer why you are here.

Like Wittgenstein said, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched” (Lecture on Ethics).

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte concluded in The Transcendence of the Ego that, “The World has not created the me: the me has not created the World” (p.105) but these two things are connected in a consciousness that is spontaneous. Sarte wrote, “Consciousness is always ‘of something‘, and therefore defined in relation to something else. It has no nature beyond this and is thus completely translucent” (source).

Some people picture a soul as translucent, as a kind of a ‘thing’—but not Wittgenstein. He said that if you look at soul language in religion, soul is not pictured as a thing but as integrity which is equally invisible. So if someone says, “He sold his soul for money” or “He sold his soul to the devil” it really means that he’s become materialistic. He has no deep moral sense and moral sense, as we know, is not visible.

A man may have everything but feel horribly afraid of what’s coming. A good man, however, enjoying a good way—tried, true and eternal through himself and those who live after—why, he has nothing to fear. Ever.

No matter what.

He can be light as a feather. He is not chained by anything material. He can never be judged as having lived a futile life even if he dies poor and unknown and didn’t do very much. After all, what does a sparrow do? What are flamingos for?

According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a person can’t get to the highest level of “self-actualization” without making it by lower level needs such as food, sex and security.

To be self-actualized is to be unafraid of the unknown, untroubled by ambiguity and triviality, self-aware, accepting weaknesses while developing strengths, living a “meaningful life” by having a purpose that goes above and beyond one’s self to a greater good (see: Self Actual).

If you were asked, “Do you understand the difference between thinking and being?” what would you say?

Understanding the difference between thinking and being is like when police catch someone in the act of a crime and say, “What do you think you’re doing!” which is another way of saying, “How stupid are you?”

This is the exact moment when the cop and the criminal give their collective heads a shake. Most people (most of the time) see the world from inside a self-enclosed bubble of preoccupied thoughts that shape how the world is perceived. But this way of seeing is limiting because it sees a world perceived through language and opinion.

When a person with soul (and a clear conscience, if possible) wakes up, looks around and says full of happiness, “This is a miracle!” he isn’t just describing an event. It’s really his reaction to something significant that he is being, becoming and enjoying.

World Views, Weird Edges & Higher States of Consciousness

It’s difficult to discover anything beyond presuppositions. Presuppositions are assumptions assumed in advance. When it comes to presupposers, it is as Nobel Prize Winner (1915) Romain Rolland said, “Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.” (Above the Battle).

Ideas running contrary to assumptions are subject to argument and ridicule.

If someone says, “Yesterday I saw angels sitting in a tree!” You’d think that person is on drugs, mentally imbalanced or a romantic poet named William Blake (who also saw angels in a tree).

The presupposition is, of course, that angels don’t sit in trees.

They prefer chairs.

A presupposition can be true, partially true or totally false. Most people – knowingly or not – have assumptions relating to their world view.

A world view is how truth and reality is understood. It asks: What is reality? What is a human being? What happens when you die? How do you know what’s right and wrong?

A world view can affect one’s goals, ability to enjoy life and attitudes towards society, progress and nature. Collectively, a world view can affect the world itself.

World views are fundamental assumptions. Fundamental assumptions always have an opposite. They can never be completely proven. There are two basic world views: one is religious (spiritual) and the other isn’t (secular).

Secular juggler.

Secular types say, “There are causes for all effects!” There are (1) atheists: there is no God or gods, the universe is material, theories like the big bang explain things scientifically, death is the end, what’s right and wrong is what we decide; and (2) postmodernists: we create a social reality, there are no truths only preferences, moral values are relative so do what feels good.

Spiritual types say, “Some effects are without causes!” Spirit is more important. There are (1) pantheists (Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, new agers): everything is God, we’re all of the same stuff, divinity is us, God is an impersonal Force, Energy, Vibration, there is no sin only ignorance, we die and are reborn; and (2) theists (Christianity, Islam, Judaism): there is one eternal personal God of infinite wisdom and power who created the universe, we pray and obey and exist beyond death.

A scene from Northfork (2003).

When a believer of whatever orientation has a prepackaged model, it’s hard to experience something outside that model.

But if you can set aside assumptions and self-interests for a minute or two, you can come up from day-to-day thinking to enjoy a higher mental state that is not only blissful (perfect happiness), but peaceful (free from disturbance).

There’s something curiously unconscious about this good feeling that’s easy. First: Relax. No pressure. No worries. This is not a competition. Put yourself in a beautiful scene (real or imagined) and let yourself feel content and tranquil.

“We can never discover anything outside the brain,” said Paul MacLean.

Instead of three bears, picture three brains inside your skull like neuroscientist Paul MacLean (1913-2007) said there was.

Imagine climbing from the lowest brain, the reptilian (think: road rage!), up past the next lowest, the paleo-mammalian – paleo means older – (think: threatened mama bear with cub) to the highest brain sitting on top like a cloud.

This is the neo-mammalian brain (neo means new).

The neo-mammalian (or neocortex) is the seat of perception and imagination. Whether religious or not, the three brains theory allegorically explains why people think and do what they think and do do.

The reptilian brain is responsible for “aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays;” the paleo-mammalian (limbic system) is responsible for “motivation and emotion involved in feeding, reproductive behaviour, and parental behavior,” and the neomammalian is responsible for “language, abstraction, planning, and perception” (Triune Brain).

Lower brains are said to be instinctive. Their concern is with reproduction and dominance, sometimes necessitating deception and violence.

When under the sway of lower brains, we’re principally concerned with our self and successes. We strike back when hit. We shift blame. We lack introspection. We rationalize behaviour in a so-called dog-eat-dog world while maintaining a flattering image of ourselves.

But in rare moments, when there are no demands put upon us, when one is quiet and comfortable, in such a peaceful interval, we are free to enter a higher mental state. When released from pride, ambition and self-justification, one looks at others not with criticism and judgement, but with a realization.

Human behaviour is driven by primitive mental pressures. People are nasty, emotional and self-interested, not out of evil, but out of hurt! In a higher mental state you see distress for what it is and not in terms of how it affects you.

“It is the artist’s business to create sunshine when the sun fails,” said Monsieur Rolland.

Romain Rolland (1866-1944) described higher intelligence as a religious feeling independent of any dogma, credo, Holy Scripture, mission statement or self salvation. It is simple and direct. It is contact. It’s a feeling of the eternal in the sense of not having limits – like an ocean (Oceanic Feeling).

Bird.

With self-interest gone, caring not for status, power or possession, boundaries are broken. We connect with things like trees, clouds, rocks, and birds. As William Blake said in Proverbs of Hell, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (1789). We see visions as children until worldliness blinds us.

The trick is to set aside self-concern and go into nature wherever that is. Step out of mechanical garments. Look up from technological gadgetry and have a poetic vision. Attend to sensations in the world without thought of advantage and know there’s no difference between any two world views. As a rational witness, let your higher mind drift above and beyond the weird edges like a cloud minding not minding at all.

Melvin Sokolsky’s 1965 photo spread entitled Fly.

Enjoy The Impossible Dream

Long ago, before indoor plumbing, iPhones, disposable razors, squeezable cheese and remote controls TVs, sometime in the sixth century BC, along the coast in what was then Greece and is now Turkey, there lived a reclusive thinker of royal decent named Heraclitus of Ephesus (530-470 BC).

Little Heraclitus had no interest in politics or power. He preferred to think. He rejected information-gathering because it didn’t teach understanding (Heraclitus). He renounced royal privileges and withdrew to a secluded estate in the country where he enjoyed observing nature and self-questioning (Basics of Philosophy).

He wrote, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it” (Russell, 1945) and “The character of man is his guardian spirit (Stanford). One should turn one’s luck into a function of character and ethical stance.

He noticed how most people sleep-walk through life without understanding what’s going on (IEP). They called him the Obscure, the Riddler, the Reviler of the mob and the Weeping philosopher – possibly because he used to sit in Ephesos and cry over man’s feebleness (Heraclitus the Obscure).

Existential Comics “The Weeping Philosopher“

Heraclitus noticed how things flow and nothing stays the same. “We both step and do not step in the same river. We are and are not” (Fragments). “Unless you expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hidden and thickly tangled” (Wikiquote).

“Panta Rhei” – all flows, nothing lasts. Permanence is an illusion of the senses. Things change for the continued existence of other things. Opposites replace each other (IEP).

But this is the hardest message of all. All things are transient: your happiness, your home, your family, your friends, your dreams, your health, your moments of ecstasy and insight – everything is flowing through your hands as you’re aware of it.

But what if it’s not such a bad thing? Life is change. It’s a good thing! That’s the point! What if there’s more to it? What if, at a level you’re not aware, you’re more important than you think you are. What if you actually matter?

Science says that you’re a complex machine. In a Scientific American article Why Life Does Not Really Exist it reads, “Life is a concept that we invented… all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles… We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.”

Really? A cat is a complex machine. You’re a complex machine. No wonder people treat each other like machines. According to science, we are machines.

But do we really think that there is no difference between an inanimate machine and a man or a woman?  What about feeling? What about consciousness? What about beauty? What about love? What about a baby? What about a boy learning to skate? What about spirit? 

Sam Harris observed that many people consider the word spiritual to be “thoroughly poisoned by its association with medieval superstition” (In Defense of Spiritual) and yet, it’s just the right word. Spirit is the deliberate effort to overcome separateness and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

In 1797 William Blake wrote: “What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song? or wisdom for a dance in the street? No. It is bought with the price of all that a man hath: his house, his wife, his children. Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy (The Four Zoas).

Experience is a loss of innocence and yet through that pain Blake sees how the world is infinite. “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour / A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage” (Auguries of Innocence).

Can you see infinity in a grain of sand? What would it take to do that? Could any little thing contain a cosmic truth that you could be aware of with enough imagination? Could a wildflower be a miniature heaven? Could a grain of sand be a miniature world?

Most people don’t know how to hold eternity in the palm of their hand. It’s hard enough keeping it together until the end of the day! We’ve lost our minds. Our attention is lost in a blur of appointments, technologies, to-do lists, worries and agitation. We’re more absorbed in movie worlds than our own. We walk by a crow or a rabbit or a sparrow without being blown away by how miraculous it is!

But… sometimes… in the briefest moment, when we freeze in our tracks, when we hear Pachelbel’s Canon or harmonia 76 or some music, sound, sight or smell that takes us out of ourselves for no reason. And we look into the eyes of people who look angry, distant or afraid and we feel compassion for them. We feel a spirit of friendship. We have a feeling of beauty and a happy, tingly shiver goes through our body. In a brief moment of attention we pick up the scent of something more going on than survival, but the moment passes and mundane thinking swallows us again.

The trick is to cultivate those moments. Enjoy them. Again and again. Blake’s vision of an expansive experience is available to anyone, any time. It’s just that the modern world has given itself to the literal, to the informational and to the material. We’ve lost touch with what matters within ourselves. The pendulum has swung to non-spiritual. We miss the magic in front of us. A tree is not just a tree. It’s a tree! It’s a tree! It’s a damn tree!

You can see the Universe in a grain of sand! You can stop slogging through your day and take a moment to notice something cosmic. The connection between everyday reality and ecstatic enjoyment is as close as your face! It’s in the dust on the floor, in the mess on your desk and the water in your sink. The trick is to notice… and imagine… and love… and dream.

Dream your own particular impossible dream. 

References

Harris, W. (n.d.). Hericlitus: The Complete Philosophical Fragments.

Russell, B. (1945). History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Shuster. New York.

For Roberto. Who encourages.

Enjoyment Without a Head

Imagine walking into a forest. It’s winter. There’s snow but you’re not cold. It’s silent and still and magical. As you stroll you notice how thoughts come and go, until gradually, as you pay attention to the graceful world, thinking subsides and a gentle feeling arises.

This is a path you’ve walked before. You can picture the former you walking here. And it’s a funny thing: You’ve lurched between wanting and not wanting throughout your life, but in a moment of attention like this, you don’t do either.

You see your breath in the air and ask: “Who are you?” Who but you would know? Why not look into what it’s like being you – first person, singular, present tense? “Would you want to live and die without looking at the one doing that?” asked Douglas Harding.

You see yourself as a kid looking in a mirror. Your mom said, “That’s you!” and you believed her. Again and again you see the person under glass and think, “That’s me!” You think you are as you appear in the mirror, but that’s not how you actually see. When you look out of yourself, you don’t see a head.

You see hands, feet and knees. You see objects. You see trees and rabbit droppings and pine cones. You see far and near, but try as you might, you can’t see the one seeing. Your self is like that. Your self is a concept like a reflection in a mirror.

The ancients spoke of beauty, goodness and truth. Immersed in a world of snow, grass, trees and colour, you put one foot in front of the other and care not for images, politics and economies. You see beauty. You see goodness. You know a simple truth: You’re here and glad of it.

The poet William Blake (1757-1827) wrote, “Every Eye sees differently. As the Eye, Such the Object” (Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, p. 19). Everyone may see the same tree, but experience it differently. Blake said, “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). The fool is less aware. He sees, “trees” like a million others. Meaningless. Insignificant. But a wise person lives in gusto and pays attention. A wise person’s tree is more real.

You are the space between. Before a thought comes, there is a thinker. You are the one thinking. You are consciousness itself.

Writer Douglas Harding saw philosopher Ernst Mach’s 1885 self-portrait where he closed his right eye and drew himself. While walking Harding had an insight and wrote, “What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, and odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me.”

Harding looked at himself and realized that he couldn’t see his head. “It took me no time at all to notice this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far beyond them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world”  (On Having No Head).

In the 1960s Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band saw a similarity between poet Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) and Douglas Harding. Heron wrote a song about headlessness that begins, “When I was born I had no head. My eye was single and my body was filled with light. And the light that I was, was the light that I saw by. And the light that I saw by, was the light that I was” (song: Douglas Traherne Harding). 

In the 1600’s Traherne wrote, “You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars.” Traherne was a philosopher of enjoyment. He wrote, “Your enjoyment of the World is never right till every morning you awake in Heaven” (Centuries of Meditation). Wade (1944) writes of Traherne, “In the middle of the seventeenth century, there walked the muddy lanes of Herefordshire and the cobbled streets of London, a man who had found the secret of happiness… He became the most radiantly, most infectiously happy mortal this earth has known” (p. 2). This is the secret: It is in paying attention without thinking. Don’t be fooled by personality.

You are like the surprised squirrel silently watching you watch him.

If this squirrel were a person, you would feel self-conscious and probably look away, but when you’re headless, you don’t worry. Both you and the face you see, don’t see their own face. It’s just a you looking back at another you. 

You are a tightrope walker. The path you walk (in or out of forests) is the rope you’re on. You walk between thought and attention. The trick is to enjoy both. You are the world seeing. You are not a thing. You are not your appearance. You are seeing itself. You are capacity. This year is dedicated to paying attention without distracted thinking. Wherever you go, there you are. You are the world to yourself. You are the one experiencing.

Trust experience and enjoy it.

References

Wade, G. (1944). Thomas Traherne: A Critical Biography. Princeton University Press/Oxford University Press.