In the developed world, we are taught to make images to symbolize or represent almost everything — for remembering, recognizing, navigating, and so on, and we excel at it. This aptitude to bring to bear rich imaginations and broad vision in our daily lives is one of the things that differentiates us from animals and plants. But actually, this can become an abstract route to creating our exclusive and often narrow way of seeing the world because it forces us to identify and stamp ‘me’ and ‘mine’ on each mind moment. If we are not mindful — not fully aware — we are apt to become seriously attached to such images, fearing their loss, and eventually, we mistake them for reality. This can send us wildly out of balance.
This tendency (unconscious) or temptation (conscious) to ‘identify’ with the images we constantly create and curate is perhaps one of our primary tests as human beings. Familial and social conditioning combined with our particular DNA makes us etch a clear line between reality and the imaginary. We distinguish between the visible and the invisible and consign ourselves to experiencing life constantly from the sidelines via concepts and archives.
But many of us have never even heard of this test, meaning we have thoroughly and unconsciously turned our backs on our divine mission. Instead, we favour and over-cherish a synthetic ‘self’ invented by the dictatorial intellectual mind. This is pure ego and arrogance: some would say it is the dark side of human beings, our personal ‘Satan,’ our samsara (human suffering), our constant resistance to the gravitational field of love and goodness. These resisting consumers are the majority who populate our societies and communities in modern life. While those who live lives of surrender and desirelessness are rare.
Science informs us that human beings have physically evolved as much as they are going to; in other words, we are at our peak as a species, but our spiritual evolution is clearly severely retarded. As a result, most of us are not truly happy, and neither is the world at large. We are restless, insatiable, destructive and behave immaturely and primitively.
We cannot create harmony in our social groups for the most part and constantly crave artificial external stimulation. Mixed in with this short-sightedness in life, we conceal our terror of death and disappearance, and this endemic fear has caused us to lose the use of so many subtle tools available to the higher mind, the mind of ‘grace’ (Christian) or emptiness-sunyata (Buddhist) or moksha (Hindu), to invest all our energy in the intellect and acquisition.
We give over our precious human existence to shopping, possessing and questing for attention, making us major stakeholders in materialism and sensual satisfaction. It is logical then that we sit back in our high, comfortable chairs, flicking switches and frittering away our time viewing visual collections. Logic? Another resistance to what is natural.
We may even make images to represent our own minds: for example, the iceberg with its small tip showing above the water surface and its mass below, symbolizing the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, respectively. The onion, with its tender centre and layer upon layer of ever-hardening skins, is another. Although these images may help try to appreciate or recognize the difference between two contrasted aspects of our mind, it does, in fact, separate them from one another in an Aristotelian way. By attaching ourselves to such images, we unwittingly identify with them and coax our ‘self’ to acquire and possess them compulsively. In actuality, there is no ‘self’ to identify with anything material because we are beings of energy made flesh in order precisely to spiritually evolve.
It is preferable then to avoid making or encouraging these images even though they may seem to ease understanding as we conduct our daily business. Ironically, the word ‘understanding’ in its original sense is connected to ‘listening,’ ‘standing among,’ and ‘not looking.’ Rather than craving finite blocks of black and white as captured on screens and pages and bold framed linear scenarios, the reality is a boundless greyness which floats and fleets in whatever shape is needed to embody the essence of love, an unconditional listening, a flickering of our nature of light. The act of emptying onto the page using the abstract symbols of writing to be read by others allows images to come to us reflectively, with time to play and take control. Writing is a meditation for me; the surface sensations and images come from a deep, warm place. I am not remembering or recognizing, nor am I going anywhere. I am simply touching my True Nature in the emptiness and then trying to translate it for others or myself.
Suppose we cease to try to pin down our feelings, cementing them into our foreground, crying out for witnesses to come forward and acknowledge us, asserting our unique view to others. In that case, we can quickly realize that the field of awareness is infinite and has no boundaries, no images. Then, we can quietly coalesce in the field, needing no images or intermediaries at all. By closing the busy outer eyes so addicted to colour, shape and orientation, we can close the image albums and lock the archives, walking away to our natural home beyond all concepts created by the human mind. Then, we can clearly hear the sound of reality moving and merging, the concrete sound of infinity and eternity, of goodness and the divine. Proper understanding consists of universal, unconditional listening, during which nothing is pinned down, nothing is owned, and everything becomes one. We embody love with our true nature enabled only by breathing air we have borrowed from the universe. Everything else is simply arranged only to stimulate the intellectual mind.
We shall know each other by our deeds and being, and by our eyes and no other outward sign save the fraternal embrace.
The above is a verse from the Cathar Creed (1244), known also as The Church of Love. It indicates that the spirit of life is played out whilst silently respecting everything on the material plane, though not identifying with it, accepting everything but quietly supporting those who need support. Identifying and possessing destroy and engender greed and ignorance. Using images is, in a way, an attempt to possess aspects of the visible, to keep them for reference as a source of knowledge. The medieval mystic Cathars had nothing material, not even Bibles, which showy Christians had become slaves to. Indeed, all the great adepts dispensed with material supports. Instead, they embodied their spirit of compassion and humility.
I have deliberately positioned myself in a different culture (Japan) where I cannot easily read, write, or even understand the society around me. This is the most precious opportunity to desist from making images and concepts. I notice that I am not using my mind like I did when I lived in my native culture because it is often impossible to interpret my present environment.
As I wander down crowded streets decked out with loud kanji (pictograms), katakana and hiragana (phonemes) neon signs so characteristic of Japanese cities, whisked aside by bicycles mounted on the pavement and bustling people pushing through crowds, I can often only listen deeply and breathe. It is no use bringing out my image albums and brandishing metaphors and idioms because they are meaningless in a culture which reads the air instead of dissecting and deeply analyzing ideas and images. I cannot imagine what is going on in other minds around me because there is no pattern I can predict, no pictogram I can imagine, and no inherited template. I can only embody my love and float around, sealing away the intellect and letting visions occupy me, and my ancient senses help me to navigate.
Only being in the field of awareness exists in the Land of the Rising Sun. I am the terraced shaking paddy, standing in sluiced rice rows, paddled by ducks and frogs activated by tremors from the inflamed warts of the Earth’s crust below me, burned and bundled and finding its way inevitably into famished stomachs. I have dramatically learned how not to be separate from anyone or anything here in a Land created from the hair and kimono of the million gods. To interfere with this seamlessness for even a second to create an image, take a shot, and drum up an association would make me gasp for air!
