Uprooting illusions

In the flow of life that is Facebook, a quotation recently caught my eye.  It might have been this one: 

‘Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.’ – Mark Twain

Or it may have been someone else saying something similar.  It doesn’t really matter.  What Mark Twain says is said in many other ways and is embedded in the fabric of our upbringing.  The conversation underneath the quote was in strong agreement with its sentiments; expressing a belief that somehow illusions are a good thing, they make us human, they give us hope. 

Certainly illusions are often a source of energy, drive, ambition and creativity.  An illusion, sometimes accompanied with the hope of realisation other times not, is what fires us to be active.  Or a disbelief in the possibility of realising our illusions can create an intensity of longing, disappointment or despair that leads to a creative act.

Illusions ensnare us, they have a subtle power that we might recognise intellectually so creating an air of detachment from them, but at a far deeper emotional and psychological level we remain tied up in their web.

Mark Twain says we can exist without illusions but not live.  Embodied in this statement is that romantic belief about living, feeling passionately, being carried away, towards something, just out of reach. Just another illusion about illusions.

Can we live without illusions?  Yes, in a much freer way.  But maybe that is scary because our identities are so bound up in our illusions.  In fact, if it is not a step too far for many readers, maybe our identities are themselves illusions and the idea of an identity is itself an illusion.

In my brief search for the quotation I stumbled across on Facebook, I found hundreds of quotations about illusions.  This one challenges Mark Twain and is much more aligned with what I’m saying here:

‘Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.’

Language gets in the way often, and I stumble a little over what Simone Weil means by ’reality’ here.  However, I do agree that attachment is both the fabricator of illusions and the consequence of illusions. 

We become attached to our illusions.  They are part of us – part of what makes me ‘me’.  If I give up illusions, who am I?

I would like to substitute ‘freedom’ for ‘reality’.  We become free by separating ourselves from our illusions. The deepest-rooted ones are still there and like any plant, they can start to grow again.  But if we can walk by them rather than getting drawn in by their seductive fragrance, there is freedom – maybe just for a moment.

These thoughts are not original or new.  But when you are in the grip of a particularly strong illusion – like bindweed – which smothers and entraps, it’s interesting to observe the pattern and effects.

Even when your observing mind is pointing out the defects and flaws of your illusion, even when your discerning intelligence and intuition is continuously punctuating your experience with challenges, ‘aha!’ moments and discernment, still the bindweed illusion persistently hangs on and holds you there, as if entranced.

Stepping back in the moment of such experience is hard.  The persistent ‘me’ does not want to step back from your illusion.  You want to hold on to it – for dear life.  You do not want merely to exist, Mr Twain tells you.

So even over the peace of distance from your illusion, you choose – repeatedly – the pain of disappointment.  Even with each piece of accumulating evidence that your meticulous mind collects, polishes and connects with the other pieces, you turn your back on your inner wisdom.

Why is that?  Is it because you have been trained as a child to believe in the beauty of illusion over the simple state of how things are?  It is just a deeply engrained habit and one that can be substituted or replaced, even if its seeds are always there to be scattered by a gusty spring wind.

 

The tip of the iceberg, the roots of the tree….

Listening to some incredible tales the other day – so incredible they could have been material for a seventh novel in Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series about the Church of England in the 20th century – I was reminded of that saying, ‘The tip of the iceberg’. ‘The earliest, most obvious, or most superficial manifestation of some phenomenon’ (Webster’s Dictionary).

We only see a little piece of what others present to us, their persona, and can but surmise about the greater depths beneath the presenting surface.  The stories we tell ourselves and the world are at the tip of our iceberg, their deeper roots and truths concealed.

In our ignorance, like a ship at sea, we may crash into the hidden berg beneath the surface, and both or one of the two colliding beings may be hurt and damaged. 

How easy it is for us to become wrapped up in our own stories and those we hear from others….to the point where it becomes difficult to know what to believe and what to question.  Sitting there listening to these stories really drove that point home to me, always easier to see with someone else.

Someone else’s fantasy becomes our drama or feeds our drama, and acquires a reality of its own, like a floating iceberg cut off from the greater mass to which it belongs.  We need to find our way back to land.

Generally when we think of ‘the tip of the iceberg’, there is a feeling that everything beneath the surface, what is invisible, has huge power and importance, and is often very difficult – maybe mostly because it is unseen.  There is a sense of foreboding.  When a ship meets the iceberg beneath the surface, the ship’s fate is usually not a happy one. Think of the Titanic.  Very few sailors contemplate meeting a hidden iceberg with joy and excitement – unless they have a death wish.  We tiptoe around other people’s hidden depths, feeling our way and expecting to encounter problems there rather than joy.  At best we are neutral.

And then, while mulling over these reflections, I saw this picture.

The roots of the tree turn the iceberg on its head.  The tree stripped of leaves, in an autumnal or wintry setting, has spring sprouting beneath its surface in full glory and just starting to wrap around its bare, exposed trunk, like a second skin. Instead of shedding its skin, this tree is growing one, even out to its furthest extremities, its fingertips.  All of this life is there waiting to burst forth when the time is right.  Just because we don’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  The surface doesn’t tell the whole story, but in this version what’s hidden is wonderful not full of foreboding. 

So often we feel a frustration with life.  Despite our best efforts nothing is happening.  There is a sense of time standing still, incubating.  We can trust in this process or not.

So when we see the wintry tree, do we imagine a a dark mass of knotted roots beneath the surface, something to hack away at; or do we think of this dynamic living force at work, invisible and glorious, waiting to arrive?  I guess it’s a little like the ‘glass half empty’/'glass half full’ choice.

What about just – a glass?

You can see the tendencies, inclinations and habits of a personality grown up over a lifetime as dark, hidden and formidable.  Or you can see something more positive, if sometimes tangled and confused, at the heart of a person’s tendencies, inclinations and habits. You can get caught up in, and be entranced by, the stories the personality tells itself and the world, the way it reacts, its pleasures and irritations.

So I can choose how I see….

The tip of the iceberg, the roots of the tree…

Sometimes I want to believe so strongly in those hidden flowers that I am shocked by the discovery of some ice there too. I have expectations. I can get traumatised by the iceberg beneath the surface which I sense, maybe graze against or even collide with from time to time. I can be waylaid luxuriating in the flowers in the underground garden.

Somehow I need to welcome both the frost and the flowers without hoping for one and hoping against the other – stepping away from expectations, towards something.

Who am I?

Opera of the Moon – Jacqueli – from Ocean of Compassion website

Last year on my birthday one of my oldest, long-lost friends sent me an e-mail out of the blue.  It was affirming to be back in contact and illuminating – if a little uncomfortable – to re-establish how and why we’d fallen out of touch, and put the past to bed. 

People often have different versions of what’s happened, differing stories. She thought I’d rejected her while I remembered we’d gradually grown apart.  My version was kinder to both of us, certainly kinder about me.  Who knows which was true – er?

Anyway, my friend had kept the stash of letters I’d sent her during our four- or five-year friendship, from the end of junior high school through to university. We arranged to meet, after all these years and the plan was to re-read the letters together, recapturing lost time.

I was looking forward to it, not with any conscious expectations really, certainly no excessive overlay, but with interest.  I didn’t know what I expected, and as so often is the case, it was only afterwards that I knew what I hadn’t expected and kind of had a sense of what I was looking for.

We decided to meet at Starbucks.  I was sitting there waiting with a cup of coffee when a couple of people came in, a man and woman. They had their life’s belongings with them and seemed unsure of themselves, especially the woman. They had clearly fallen on hard times. They chose a table right next to me and settled in for a chat. 

I wasn’t really paying attention but all of a sudden I heard two names I recognised, two high school teachers from days gone by, right back to the time of the letters I was waiting to read.  My ears pricked up and the woman talked at length about one of them, the one I remembered better, saying he had helped her pass English and get into college.  I was wondering why after all these years she was talking to this man so animatedly about a high school teacher. I couldn’t really follow what she was saying, and the man also seemed a little perplexed.  It seemed strange – here they were at this much later stage in their lives, pretty much the same age as me, and she seemed so preoccupied with this high school teacher I hadn’t thought of for decades.  I was struck by the different courses of our lives, I heard her say something about almost getting thrown out of home during high school, and I thought how true it is that our early life can shape us and set us on a path.  I felt grateful for my start in life, as I looked at them, the man with a huge lump in or on his forehead – had he been punched or was it some deformity that had always been there or had grown up in the course of life?

I was tempted to join in and say, ‘I knew that teacher too, he taught me.’  But something held me back.  And when my friend came, I told her as we walked to her car, and she like me hovered at the prospect of going back in and telling them, ‘we went to that school too, we knew those teachers.’  Something held us back.  Was it self-protection or fear?  We told ourselves it was a practical decision, it would have eaten up our precious time. These were people we might have known, maybe we did know them, they were unrecognisable as their lives had made them physically alien to us.  Maybe we were unrecognisable too. Maybe we’d had lunch together on the playground.  They could have been us, and we could have been them.  I felt connected to them, and curious – but something in me held back. In rejecting them, was I rejecting a part of myself, or was I just being myself?

And remember, we had a job to do. 

So we went to read my letters.  And lo and behold, one of the key figures in all those early letters was that same teacher I remembered but hadn’t thought about for decades!  Endless references to him of the most inane sort.  I could hardly remember the man, but there he was on every page.  I had mocked him, unkindly, we both had with adolescent insensitivity and no malicious intent.

And I saw in these early letters a person I didn’t recognise but a person I knew, a person I had never seen so clearly before – as I stood back from my earlier self.  I looked at the reams of stream-of-consciousness….  Boys, gossip, food, clothes, pop stars, petty jealousies and insecurities, stuff….  None of it was wholly at odds with my memories, but the words on paper in familiar handwriting had the effect of bursting the bubble of my sense of past self.   It was a surprise, moderated slightly by the glimmers of someone I knew better emerging in the later more reflective letters from university, these still swamped by an adolescent neo-Romantic drama queenish melancholia.  I was a little disappointed – letting go the illusion – and it made me think.

The experience of reading these letters was oddly empty and insubstantial – like eating a Starbucks pastry that looks so tasty and leaves you feeling a little light-headed because of the high sugar content.

And then a couple days later coming back to England, getting off the plane and hearing the high-pitched shrieks and gigles of it must have been towards 1,000 adolescent schoolgirls all with their crushes on The Janoskians: ‘Just a group of hopeless kids with no future taking on the streets of Melbourne.’ ‘The Janoskians (Just Another Name Of Silly Kids In Another Nation) are a YouTube comedy group, pranksters, singers, entertainers, and stunt performers, based in Melbourne, Australia.’ (Wikipedia) The Janoskians were arriving on the same flight, in fact they’d been in the row behind, and all these girls were hanging on desperate to see them.  Police were holding them back.  It was surreal to walk through the entry doors at Heathrow Airport and be greeted by this huge crowd of barely controlled emotion.

And only afterwards did I reflect these were the schoolgirls inside of me let loose – this was the excess of emotion run riot in those letters, magnified and ramped way up the scale.  I could not reject that girl who was me just as I could not deny the connection with the street people, my old classmates, at the table nearby.  Walk by, turn away, that’s what we did as we walked down through Duty Free with no goods to declare into the airport, along the demarcated space with those pulsating schoolgirls pressing in on us – no, life would not let me off the hook.

I can see clearly now

Let me tell you a secret – artist unknown

Sometimes you need to go far away to see clearly, and sometimes you need to come way up close and be overwhelmed by what it is you’re looking at before you can actually see it as it is – without colouring.  

A combination of peering in the distance and blinking at proximity, gives a clear view.   You need the opposites to achieve clarity. This can require travelling – mind travel, body travel – some combination of the two.  To get in touch with your inner intelligence is not always easy.

Where does that confidence arise from, if and when it does arise?  I don’t know.  Perhaps it is going through a cycle a few times, and then seeing how you feel.  Being drawn to, pushing away, feeling confused, being caught up in illusion, being disappointed but still in illusion….Stepping outside that cycle, taking a step well back, almost falling over the edge a few times, being enmeshed in the mire of confusion and unsettlement, not knowing what to think and feel. 

And then, one day, you do just know.  You almost don’t trust the feeling of knowing.  But it persists and you feel – free….free for the moment, anyway.  The cycle is deep and persistent, it can always start again.

It doesn’t make you any less feeling, any less compassionate.  Perhaps it even makes you more so.  Measurement is futile. 

You do not need to tell the truth to anyone other than yourself.  In fact, the need to speak, to tell – anything – diminishes – almost to the point of nothingness.  It is at this point that you may begin to wonder about the relationship of insight – at what feels to be this very deep level – and creativity.  It is at this point that you may begin to reflect on the self-indulgence of art.

And yet, it is art which can help us get to this brink.  But it is not art which takes us past this point.  It is practice.

For awhile now, I have been reflecting on how writing (read ‘art’/'creativity’) has come to feel like a pure self-indulgence, and a diversion away from self-knowing or self-realisaion.  This has been a troubling and confusing thought pattern for me, so I have suppressed it at times and gone away from it, other times letting it bubble and resurface.  It has made it hard to write, and I guess it still is – hard-er to write than it was. 

But now I realise that writing enables the process, but is not enough in itself.  Writing this has been easy.

 

One that stays, one that goes

“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep!”
– Rumi

I wake with a clear image in my mind – the seated shape in red, the rising figure to walk away in blue.  The blue rises out of the red, making purple, and is fixed there – as if going but not able to go, staying, fixed in motion.

It is an enduring image, I see it clearly as I write this.  The colours are all of equal weight. The rising one is not a figment of the seated one’s mind, they are both there, both equally real, together.  This for me captures in a peaceful way the feeling of going and staying, without any wanting or desire mixed in to the recipe.  Once it becomes ‘wanting to stay’ and ‘wanting to go’, the tension is there, the conflict arises.

The Space Between the Hare and the Fox: The Space Between the Fox and the Hare – Jackie Morris – The House of Golden Dreams

I’m reminded of being in a car park just starting to drive away.  I see someone and in that moment my car is driving away and I am being carried.  The red one is unable to move even as I go, but the other, the moving blue one, is feeling an overpowering impulse to stay, to get out of the car and go…  Who is driving who? The car is driving me.  Is any one driving?   I can’t change course, the vehicle takes control.  So I go.  But I’m still here.

Another morning I wake up with another clear thought: ‘I want to fill the space.’  It is so obvious – and so disappointing!  All this time, even on this blog, I keep saying, ‘I want space’, ‘I want to find, make space’.  This is not true.  The lie is a comfortable fiction, it makes me feel good, but in that clear space in the morning before the mind gets filled, I see past the lie.

The staying and the going, the filling and the not filling.  The filling of space of time, with busy-ness, is a form of staying.  It’s an activity, a going – that is going nowhere.

Dear World,

Dear World,

Just a few words from me.  I’ve been busy and I haven’t felt like writing.  I’ve got a name for it – ‘noble tiredness’*** – though I stubbornly refused to acknowledge it.  No apology or explanation, but I’d like to restore our connection.

Beginning to write a blog is like coming into the world.  It is being born.  It’s exciting and immediate, and, caught up in the experience, you don’t really think about the World that you’re giving to, the World that’s receiving you.  You are so caught up in yourself.

Dear World, you received me so graciously when I started.  I didn’t know who you were, or who I was writing to.  You came into the picture gradually, or maybe I mean suddenly; and it was quite unnerving.  I did not want all of you to read me at first.  I wanted the rest of you, yes, but not You.

Beginnings are easy.  There’s the euphoria of starting something new, all the ideas that crowd in and fight for pre-eminence, the excitement of seeing letters cross the page, form words, sentences, and pretty pictures in between.

People read and comment.  Looking forward to their responses…it’s fun; even more, it’s delightful.  It’s hard to imagine anything changing.

But it does. 

For one thing, you turned up.  It got harder. Self-consciousness, an old pattern, reactivated.  Thanks for showing me that one all over again.  Extremely deep-set and so hard to eradicate.

What starts out without a history, just becoming in the present and making the future, gets weighed down by accumulated experience.  Becoming a crustacean – both hampered by and protected by that weight, that experience.  

And so then I found I was writing to you, and I told you what was in me.  I thought you understood, but did you?  We had a bit of a wobble.  I couldn’t say a word.  Silence is easier sometimes, and then becomes a new habit.

Writing to you here is a little like tiptoing across water.  Walking lightly so as not to sink.  And the whole screen is like an old-fashioned television full of pixels blurring into infinity.  Or is that just my screen-saver?

There is so much I still have to say to you.  Sitting here in the room with you, I realise it. But I hardly know you as you hardly know me, and is this the way to acquaint ourselves?  It’s been hard work to come to this point, and yet I feel the hard work is just beginning.

You hold a mirror and you ask me few questions, offering the occasional comment.  I am grateful.

God’s World

 

O World, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists,  that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

 

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart – Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, — let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

 

- Edna St Vincent Millay

 

 

**

“Dear Vasco,What is worth doing and what is worth having?
I would like to say simply this. It is worth doing nothing and having a rest; in spite of all the difficulty it may cause you must rest Vasco –otherwise you will become restless!I believe the world is sick with exhaustion and dying of restlessness. While it is true that periods of weariness help the spirit to grow, the prolonged ongoing state of fatigue to which our world seems to be rapidly adopting is ultimately soul destroying as well as earth destroying. The ecology of evil flourishes and love cannot take root in this sad situation. Tiredness is one of our strongest, most noble and instructive feelings. It is an important aspect of our conscience and must be heeded or else we will not survive. When you are tired you must act upon it sensibly – you must rest like the trees and animals do.Yet tiredness has become a matter of shame! This is a dangerous development. Tiredness has become the most suppressed feeling in the world. Everywhere we see people overcoming their exhaustion and pushing on with intensity—cultivating the great mass mania which all around is making life so hard and ugly—so cruel and meaningless—so utterly graceless—and being congratulated for overcoming it and pushing it deep down inside themselves as if it were a virtue to do this. And of course Vasco, you know what happens when such strong and natural feelings are denied—they turn into the most powerful and bitter poisons with dreadful consequences. We live in a world of these consequences and then wonder why we are so unhappy.So I gently urge you Vasco, do as we do in Curly Flat—learn to curl up and rest—feel your noble tiredness—learn about it and make a generous place for it in your life and enjoyment will surely follow. I repeat it’s worth doing nothing and having a rest.Yours Sleepily, Mr. Curly XXXLetter from Mr. Curly to Vasco Pyjama in “The Curly Pajama Letters” by Michael Leunig

Virtual adolescent on summer break

– For Fran who is as fascinated as I am by this subject, and anyone else who sees a reflection here.  Perhaps surprisingly to myself anyway, I wrote most of this several weeks ago, and the messages/learning keep coming.

About a year ago I wrote a post called ‘Virtual adolescent’.  I reflected on how internet life and interactions are new to us still and evolving. We are all adolescents online at best, and it often feels like we are children.   If anything, I’ve got a little younger online since then.  Sometimes I find the vulnerability of life on the internet breathtaking.  I think we develop coping strategies in 3D life and may be disarmed virtually.  Uncomfortable maybe, but on balance a good thing. 

This year I had the first summer break since I was a student.  Not planned, just the way things worked out.  When I was a student, summer break meant working in a department store, restaurant, or office.  I liked these short-term arrangements, they were so different from how life was the rest of the time, and they gave a window into other ways of living.  I met new people, got things done, made money, socialised, read the books I wanted to read, and had fun.  Somehow life seemed simpler if also more superficial.   The superficiality was ok because I knew it was for a self-contained time.

I felt free to connect with people and experiences in these summer breaks, knowing the connections would be short-lived, so consequences were unlikely to matter much or at all.  These assumptions were largely unconscious and not necessarily correct.  Occasionally they backfired.  Things sometimes went wrong, but not in a big way, and they were almost immediately overcome and apparently forgotten when so-called ‘real life’ resumed in the autumn.

Interacting in the virtual world can be like being on summer break.  In the virtual world we can behave in ways that we might choose not to, or think better of, in our embodied lives.  In our lives off-screen, we make different choices perhaps because the protocols are different and we’ve learned how to behave, to respect others and ourselves, or maybe because we know we have to deal with consequences.  To some extent at least, I like to think we’re grown ups. 

In the virtual world, people make quick connections and equally there may be quick unconnections.  We come and go as we like, we delete our own and others’ comments, we can react quite suddenly, both warmly and fiercely.   You can get a rapid high in a virtual interaction, and almost immediately a sudden plunging low.  It’s a little like a roller coaster.  You can feel you know someone quite well, and then realise you hardly know them at all.

All of these phenomena have their counterparts in embodied life, but online the rich fabric of human interactions is reduced to a kind of virtual starkness.  We are all strangers in a strange land with our sometimes few, often many, virtual ’friends’.

Those of us who inhabit a virtual world are making our own choices about how we navigate connections and separations, what we consider care and courtesy, what we find acceptable.  We’re making up the rules as we go along.  We might be happy about our own intepretations, but others might have a different view. 

My various online experiences this summer and autumn have led me to reflect on what I wrote about Virtual Adolescence last year:

‘Do I trust those who might come across me online to behave with respect and care? Do I have real relationships with the people I know online only and with some of whom I discuss issues of the deepest importance to me? I think I do, but these are relationships that can be discarded at the flick of a switch without any real consequences or repercussions in daily life. People you think you are connected with can disappear or just suddenly not respond, and you are left hanging/wondering. You could say this is a lesson in learning how not to be attached – but at the other extreme it might become an experience of carelessness towards others and even perhaps oneself. The ambiguous and uncertain status of these connections must have some effect on the psyche and on how we relate to others and ourselves. I don’t quite know what that effect is.’

Now I think I know better the effect – it can cut to the quick, and it does leave me (you too?) feeling vulnerable.  Some people would say, as if to an angst-ridden adolescent, ‘get a grip!  What is all the fuss about?  It’s only a trivial online exchange, it isn’t real life.’  But I think there’s more to it than that.  Online exchanges are as real as we let them be, and the phrase ‘real life’ is pretty meaningless.  Everything in life is as real as anything else, isn’t it?

And experiences of trusting and feeling let down are as real online as they are face-to-face, it’s just that you can pretend to yourself they are less important because you don’t have to look them in the eye.

Trust is not something you turn on and off like a tap or faucet. It is there until it isn’t, or not there until it is.

In the virtual world you have none of the texture of embodied interactions to reassure and help you.  You have the intonation of a Facebook comment to give you an insight into who you are with.  You can pin a lot on a word or a ‘like’, and you can feel total rejection through a deletion or a blanking of your comment.  All the quirks of who you are, your past experience and innate tendencies, can be activated.  It’s a great opportunity to observe these and try and separate your Self from them, and it can be uncomfortable.

For me, it has become an interesting exploration into the relationship of freedom and connection.

I don’t mind feeling like an adolescent again, maybe even being one.  It certainly makes me more awake deep inside; and it reminds me of questions that I have apparently grown out of.  Those questions are still and always there.