That may not sound like an affirmation, but it is.
Sometimes No is the shortest route to Yes.
A colleague, for example, recently included this quote from a “success expert” in his newsletter:
“Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon … must inevitably come to pass!”That sounds like a lot of heavy lifting for a mere mortal. We hear this kind of advice a lot from seminar leaders, inspirational speakers, and fire-walking gurus as we channel-surf infomercials, shopping networks, and religious TV.
I think life works the other way around, inversely in proportion to the effort of the ego. So I reversed it, giving that fortune-cookie message a Taoist twist, flavored with wu wei or “not doing.”
“Whatever you can not imagine, do not desire, in which you do not believe, and do not act upon … inevitably comes to pass.”
The first saying focuses on the figure in the ground; it speaks to the little ego-tipped pyramid-of-self that we think we are. The second focuses more on the ground, the four fifths of the iceberg under the surface.
That’s the problem with oracular truth: the opposite is nearly always just as true. Oracular truth is more like a mobius strip than a yes/no binary system. When we look inside its bent reflections for the “inner truth,” we confront our own fun-house image sliding along the twisting strips. It’s all all true and it’s all all false.
Untruth lies in things not mentioned, said John Steinbeck, but maybe truth does too. Context creates content, but once the context is visible, it too becomes content in an unseen context. Russian dolls, Chinese boxes, fractal landscapes. Distinctions are a matter of convenience. The “ultimate truth” is just another approximation.
I listen in my car to audio tapes of college lectures on all sorts of topics. Keeps the brain engaged inside that sensory deprivation tank.
Focusing on the words of a complex presentation is like staying with the flow of your own mind during a period of meditation. When you catch yourself watching a leaf on the surface of the river as it moves downstream, you detach yourself and come back to the still flow in the center of your mind. In the car, you think you’re listening but suddenly notice that you slipped into “rain man space,” driving automatically for minutes or miles while your mind went somewhere else. While it was elsewhere, the part of you that Always Pays Attention paid attention to the road.
Maybe that’s what always drives, even when we think the steering wheel is in our hands.
Anyway, the lecture series was about relativity and quantum physics. The professor had arrived at the necessity for connecting the very small and the very large, particle physics and cosmology. His vivid word-pictures of the universe at various stages of development were like a movie-in-reverse as it rewound toward the Big Bang. The cooler universe became hotter, complexity and distinctions between things became simpler and simpler … and suddenly everything erupts from the non-point of the Big Bang, boundaries identities and distinctions exploding from behind the false face of the first trillionth of a second when everything was just one unified still-mysterious Thing.
Our intellectual journey in search of “ultimate reality” parallels that moving picture. Electricity and magnetism became electromagnetism. Then electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force became the electroweak force. Soon the electroweak force will include the color force, and one day when that grand unified force includes gravity too we will describe in a few equations the unity of all things.
But try to do that now and the universe retorts: no no no.
Not this. Not that.
No. No. No.
When I experience such moments, it’s better to pull over and think about things. Safer, too.
The older I get, the more I find that reflection and contemplation become the locus of my spirituality rather than the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world that characterized my earlier years. Love consists more of understanding or waiting patiently or saying nothing at all. These days, the late summer flowers, the first fall of a few leaves, the earlier sunsets, remind me that autumn is delicious, a crisp memory of summer gone that tastes like a tart apple straight from the tree.
The great lake along the trees and ravines near my home has been tranquil. It almost looks like the ocean if one doesn’t think too much about it. Tall cumulus clouds obscure the vanishing point just behind the sky and the horizon as I kill the engine and turn off the words.
The complexity and distinctiveness of everything is of course a function of my brain and its favorite interface, my eyes, as they have been taught to discern and design the sensory input of my life. Language teaches us how to see, our hive teaches us how to dance, how to tell one another where to find the honey.
What enters a black hole in our current conceptual model becomes infinitely dense, which we know is crazy. We know it goes somewhere, but we don’t know where. Our minds stop at the vanishing point. Our distinctions collapse into a few forces defined by mathematics and then, one trillionth of a second before the beginning at the end of our trek, the vanishing point skips a beat and disappears over the horizon.
Behind its mask, Medusa waits. If we tear off her mask, before we can say what we see, we turn to stone.
It’s not because we don’t know how to say it. Oh, we do. We know. We know that it must be like knowing how to drive when our mind is elsewhere, then suddenly noticing. We went away and returned, but that to which we returned was not the little ego-topped self that thought it left.
It’s something else. It’s …
No. Not that.
No. No. No.
Absolutely not.
