Celery, yes… the name wasn’t coming to me. Ram Das.
Rhea,
Most of my aliveness is not so spectacular, not worth recounting to others, yet somehow more important. It just happens somehow while I'm doing ordinary things. Everything dissolves, becomes brighter, smells become like food that permeates me, the outside pours into me in a soft flooding sort of way…
…well said! You also say, I know I'm not describing it well. Actually, the precipitous drop in my excitement with your disclaimer, it highlighted how well you did say it Rhea. Your light flooding into you, and with it mine into me, present in reading.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Do you think we would welcome the change if suddenly we could have as our own the time-and-place experiences of someone else, their actual experiences? If intuition grew so able that we could virtually be each other, perhaps even, inconceivably, actually. If I grew able to experience the whole cloth of, say, you Rhea when you see someone’s skin dimple with the tip of an acupuncture needle you’re next pulse will push through. Or if you could experience the how of what it is when this being who answers to Ted sees, hears, smells and feels a sharp chisel lift a microscope ready thin slice of wood, the living thing beneath on its way to being an artifact of human endeavor, the joy of that little movement with the wrists and fingers?
With such a fundamental change in human capability the joy we have in bridging the gulfs between us would evaporate. My spirit wouldn’t have raised an airy notch when I tried to convey the experience of carving wood.
These words we use, our languages get their magic; it seems, through their ability to approximate. Not a part of Rhea’s experience, something can rise from proximity to it across space and time to reach proximity to Ted’s place of time. Not actual experiences, these approximations we call language have value for us because they are inherently less. Language based, we suffer because without the suffering of separation there would be no love or closing of distance.
Do we gain, the question becomes, because we, in fact, are incapable of communicating experience directly and truly?
Art would lose its purpose.
What function does pointing to have? Certainly, pointing to is a vital part of ourselves. No matter how many gifts I give to you, you won’t feel the love for you that my gifts mean unless I point to it with some kind of artful expression that means the same thing.
That meanings don’t exist manifestly, that they come in the act of pointing out--the deficiency seems to be our biggest treasure.
What weight would “be here now” carry without our clumsiness at life?
Your words indeed gave me a sense of the how of you. Separated by a continent we are unified because we are separated by even more, much, much more. We aren’t always, and never, I guess completely, alive, none of us. Each and every one of us has this yearning to be real that is somehow more urgent than the experiences we NEED to communicate. And that is why we speak.
But speaking is never enough. Speaking bridges. But bridges need a void to cross. The pain we have at not being able to live, our emotional selves must honor, even love it—the more so, the more poignant our needles and chisels.
