QUESTIONING REALITY FINDING NOTHING

vada

by cheyanne

Out on the road yesterday it came to me that we humans are, individually, art forms. Animals are too, every life form. It is the spirit of life in our lives that art aspires to, reaches for. Each one of us is a work of art. Our lives are art forms, each making our own story as it goes along. I'm inclined to think we weave our life stories with our attitude toward life. I've spent my adult life with an eye to improve my own attitude toward life, make it less self-destructive and less regrettable to others, imbue it with a loving spirit in place of a suspicious spirit. I see in my friends incredible art forms, complete ongoing stories of everyday life moments, interweaving with the stories of others making a Persian carpet of the mind in motion, constantly changing, even more complex than flow patterns in turbulence. As I interact with friends periodically, we fill each other in on the progression of our stories, catching up since last time we spoke. My friends whose lives I know from occasional installments are ongoing stories composed by an individual attitude toward life. A novelist attempts to catch the spirit of life in the telling of a story, much like learning the lives of our friends from updates of "what's going on." Somebody who complains all the time has a fairly rotten attitude toward life, due to their own series of experiences, how they're interpreted. I want to reach a place where my interpretations of everyday life events have a more realistic perspective that includes the stories of the others concerned.

vada

by cheyanne

I said I'm looking for a more realistic perspective. But what does it mean? Realistic? I can't find any guidelines to define what's real. It really is in how we look at it, the eye of the beholder. The beholder interprets what the eye sees, ear hears, or mind thinks. The beholder's attitude toward life colors the interpretation of an observation. I recall when Patti Smith's first album was new. Someone I knew heard a song and said, "She sounds so angry." It rendered me somewhat senseless. I had never thought she sounded angry all the times I listened to her. It's like it came from out in left field, off the wall. I thought without saying, what a shallow hearing. Patti sounds to me to have compassion in her singing. Anger was so not what I heard, I still wonder how her vocals can be taken for anger. My feeling is that the other wasn't listening, didn't hear the music, missed it all. Superficial hearing. I don't mean false by superficial, but skimming the surface like a swallow taking a drink from a lake. It was in a time when I did not comprehend reality to be anything but my own point of view. Growing up baptist, I had to learn relativity after years of I'm-right-you're-wrong-no-two-ways-about-it indoctrination. I remember when I first took an interest in writing poetry, I wanted to write Truth in every line. It didn't work. Didn't work at all. Started seeing what I took for Truth wasn't always the case. In fact, seldom was the case. I learned eventually to give up thinking Truth was something special. Ultimately, it's nothing at all. Perhaps the only real truth is there is no truth. I learned to go with what works and forget about truth. I still have a hard time letting go of it as a concept, like there surely must be something to it, though I can't find it.

vada 

by cheyanne

William Carlos Williams' image of reality comes to mind, a red wheelbarrow and a white chicken. This image I have held most of my adult life for a definition of reality. It's hard to find words for. It's red and white in relation to each other. It's a sense that is wordless, felt, understood. Using the image for a reminder of reality, I see the sense of the scene, white and red, coca-cola truck, the Russian Revolution, associations. Chicken, a living being, and wheelbarrow, a manufactured object. We human beings live in a world of cities and towns, roads, houses, cars, creations of the human mind. As individuals, we are in relation to objects all the time. I'm typing on a keyboard made by humans. Even the robots involved in the manufacture were made by human mind. We individuals live in a world created by the human mind. Every time I have flown in a big jet, I look at the plane's outer shell, the wings, the rivets, and a quotation from Hamlet comes to mind, What a piece of work is man. I can't help but think it radically awesome something that big can fly, it made of metal, and so heavy I could probably not move one of their tires, it lying on the pavement. A passenger jet stands as a symbol for me of the wonder of the human mind. The chicken and the wheelbarrow have become my symbol for reality in like manner. It's not that it's a chicken, and it's not that it's a wheelbarrow, same as it's not that it's white and red either. It's an epiphany without words. It's you-get-it-or-you-don't, like the Tao te ching. It's hard to explain what I get from the chicken and wheelbarrow I call an image of reality.

vada

by cheyanne

Once I got it that what we call reality is illusion, reality went away as a consideration. I used to argue with Poe's quotation about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. I think of the short stories of Gao Xingjiang, Buying A Fishing Rod For My Grandfather, where he questions reality by way of various points of view. Again, like patterns in turbulence, one event observed by several points of view will have as many realities as observers. Is there one reality more real than any of the others? I don't believe there is. Used to want there to be a truth in reality that would say this is how it was, and then a variety of observations for the different ways it can be seen. By now, I don't see any event separate from observation having any meaning. It's observation that projects interpretation and then it has meaning, then it becomes "real." I have a rock on my desk I think of as real. When I'm outside the house, not observing it, I believe it continues in its place to be just as real as when I see it. Though, unobserved, it is not even a rock. It has no name. Its existence is unconscious, or so I presume. The rock is not aware of itself. It doesn't know it is a rock. It doesn't know. Observed, I give it meaning. It's a beautiful gray rock a geologist could look at and give a string of other names. Half of it has one kind of flow lines and the other half has different flow lines. Rocks were once liquid, and before that, gas. I see the rock a chunk of ice, frozen in place when a river of molten earth cooled down and froze. Before it was liquid, it was gas that came out of nothingness. Or what we think of as nothing. In that vast nothing must reside the essence of everything, like in the darkness lies the seed of light, and in the light is the seed of darkness. In sorrow is the seed of joy. How can I put my finger on even a rock and call it real? To me, it's small. To a three-year-old, it's huge. To somebody in China it is as non-existent as to my next door neighbor. It exists to you, because you take my word for it. If somebody came along and convinced you I was lying, the reality would go away, a silent explosion of mind pixels fading into nothing.

cheyanne herself

by cheyanne

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SUBJECTIVE REALITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

The last couple of mornings have been so bitter cold at 0 degrees with wind, I feel for the donkeys unable to get out of the cold. I recall my own need for a long hot bath after enough days and nights of being cold. I realize the need for the sauna in Scandinavia. Cold all the time, it is refreshing to bathe in heat, soak the heat into the bones, warm them, relax the whole body from bracing against the cold. I like the sanity of the Scandinavian countries. I've seen that Sweden has closed down their last prison. Nobody wants in. In Norway, the prison amounts to an apartment complex without walls, without guards carrying guns. Going out in zero weather not just a few days, but for months could get real old real fast. I want to do something for the donkeys, the squirrels, the birds, but there is nothing I can do but feed them, keep them warm on the inside, help the chickadees and the snowbirds make it through the long nights. The temperature is predicted not to rise above 29 for the day. I'll spend as much of the day in bed as possible and tell myself to pretend I'm in Finland, accustomed to it, no problem, it's like this all the time. It actually does help a little bit. It relaxes the body from bracing so much against it. I feel warmer relaxing and receiving the cold than bracing against it. I tell myself it's another lovely day in Helsinki. Sometimes when I go outside to the mailbox and don't want to put on a coat, I relax into the cold on the way out there and back, return to the house feeling fine and my clothes are freezing cold everyplace they touch flesh.

I've noticed in a few Scandinavian films how casual the people are with the cold. In an Icelandic film, I saw a woman putting gas in her car wearing a tshirt and it snowing. I've seen them go into a house and leave the door open, it snowing outside, below freezing, my idea of cold, and nobody has an issue with it. In one of the three Swedish films of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I saw a man go into a small shed kind of building, it snowing outside, the door open, and build a fire in a little stove. He used no more wood for the fire than I would use for kindling. I thought that little bit of fire isn't going to heat anything but the draft in the stovepipe, and it very little. Outside the window, I see the calf standing still beside the gate, one side in full sunlight, chewing its cud. Ground must be too cold to lie down on. Donkeys, too, are standing still, soaking up the sun on one full side. It's the still time of day after morning grazing to soak up the sun and lie down for a rest. I saw Jenny yesterday lying down. The ground is frozen solid. If I were out there all the time, I'd acclimatize, too, to some extent. Back in the summer, I would sometimes sit on the ground talking to Jack while he grazed. Not long ago, one day when it was cold, I sat on the ground beside Jenny grazing and talked with her. The cold ground was not so bad to sit on. Didn't do it very long. I'd like to spoil the donkeys, keep them comfortable all the time. However, this is what it does in the world they live in. Same as I need a motorized vehicle to get around in because the world I live in is built around motorized transportation. I'd be arrested for going about in a buggy pulled by a donkey.

I'm remembering a sentence I saw that my friend Susan McCachren posted on facebook, the image a Tibetan lama, the words, "We are prisoners of our own egocentrism." It is about the most obvious thing to see. I know it, see it in a wide variety of ways, but don't think to house it in so obvious a straight-forward sentence, nor think of it so succinctly. In a way, it's what I'm addressing in these daily writings, approaching them subjectively, owning up to my own egocentrism, seeing it in relation to the world around me that I interact with. We all do everything in first person. Objective depends on controlled laboratory conditions. Out here in the world, it seems to me the closest we can get to reality is the subjective. Reality is a difficult word to give a realistic definition to, so I'll jump in and see how close I can get. When I start with only God is real, this means only love is real. If that is so, then reality is found in the love feeling in every living being. It has little to do with mind. In human society, we value mind above all else. We've come to believe that a head full of information is knowledge, which it is, though it is not the end in itself. After working the farm with old man Tom Pruitt for several years, he introduced me to an old boy of his generation, Lef Wagoner, saying to Lef, "I taught him everything he knows." It told me he was proud that I'm a learner. But the first thing that popped into my mind was he did not teach me about the poetry of WB Yeats or the films of Bernardo Bertolucci. I knew, however, that he meant in their way of knowledge, how to do things, how to fix what's broken, how to work with cows, how to cut down a tree so it falls exactly where you want it to, even when it's not leaning in the direction you want it to fall. It's a very clever trick that is easy as a thought and it works every time. He taught me how to make a rail fence out of locust trunks. He taught me how to put a fence post in the ground so it will never wiggle, and to stretch barbed wire so it will stay taut for many a year. He was thinking one kind of education and I was thinking another.

Tom's way of teaching was by doing. Fresh out of a culture that thinks teaching amounts to telling information, in class lectures, assigning reading, explaining and testing, there came a time I was frustrated with Tom because he wasn't "teaching" me. We'd spend the fall months cutting firewood for four houses, two of which burned it like it was trash. He would now and then tell me something like cut the tree level with the ground instead of leaving a stump. I don't use wood anymore, but I see my friends cut wood and everybody leaves a stump. It runs all over me and I want to say something, but it's not my place. I see a stump as eight more sticks of firewood left to rot. Tom, with no more than a seventh grade education, had more wisdom than about anybody else I knew. The most important word in the language for Tom was "experience." He taught by experience. I helped him do the work at first, watching him, following his lead, and paying attention whenever he told me something. Eventually, I learned wisdom comes from experience, first hand knowing, whereas knowledge comes from second, third and fourth hand information, which may or may not be true per detail. Experiential knowledge, learning by doing, affirms the old saying that experience is the best teacher. There I was, Mr college educated intelligent, in a world where my knowledge from another world, another belief system, had no meaning whatsoever. I came into Tom's world an over-educated ignoramus. I didn't know anything, the same as I say now of the college educated middle class moving to the mountains, who know how to work the remote for the television, and that not very well. By now, I have education by gathering information and by experience. I feel like it is a balance I live well with. I like having both book learning knowledge and common sense, which I think of as experiential knowledge. I see the knowledge of accumulated information is something on the order of objective, while the knowledge of experience is subjective. Experience teaches the heart. Information teaches the mind. I need both for a balanced life.

  

 

 

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BABY VADA SAYS HELLO

       hello

       mama's in the bathroom


As one who takes everything for subjective, I see objective being a condition created by the human mind to help understand the subjective, taking it apart, naming the parts, dividing the seamless infinite, the continuum of Now into millenia, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, tenths of a second, hundredths of a second, thousandths of a second, the nanosecond (a billionth of a second). Terms that everyone can agree on, the definition of reality, essentially meaningless. Is reality, thus, meaningless? I think so. Yesterday I saw Vada, 1 yr, standing by the edge of the coffee table, using the edge with her right hand for balance. She saw Justin's Marlboro gold pack box. She picked it up with her left hand like a cell phone, held it to her ear and said, "Hello," leaving out the l's, something like Heh-ho.


I held her up to see the mounted deer head on the wall; she'd pointed to it while we were going around looking at pictures on the walls. She looked at the deer face-to-face and said, "kit-kit," her word for cat, kitty. I got it that she saw its face covered with hair, a different kind of face from ours with ears that stick up, and big round eyes, like kit-kit. She's differentiating "reality" out of the seamless continuum, one image, one word at a time. I'm seeing her learn this "reality" by every experience in the course of a day. She feels sleepy, she wants to hold her blanket. It was the first time I'd noticed her make associations, the cigarette pack for a cell phone. Same shape, same size. I believe she knows it was not a cell phone, but saw the association and played with it, a toy. She saw the deer head with hair on its face and associated kit-kit. It seems like she's walking, one step at a time, out of the seamless void where there is no depth of field, something like seeing the forest, not the trees. They would be there only like in a dream that sees everything inside the eye's frame, as "unreal" as a movie, light on a screen. Each thing she pulls out of the seamless vision is differentiated into its form, given a name and understood as real. This table that helps you stand up is real. It has a name. It is solid and heavy; you cannot walk through it. It must be walked around.


She has to learn in this new body that sharp corners on tables hurt, that you can't walk through a table. She's learning to separate objects from the continuum one at a time by name as she learns them, and I see going on in her eyes immense curiosity about everything she sees. I blew bubbles for her outside on the deck. She said, "Buh-buh." She imitates sounds so well, no matter whether it is a sound like clicking the inside of one's cheek or a word, I can't help but see her as a translator at the UN so fast she can translate simultaneously with the original. Sounds are so interesting to her, she reminds me of a musician finding new notes, new chords, new runs. She's connecting sound and object. Learning the names to things, she is also learning which sounds have no meaning beyond the sound itself. We, the adults, are teaching her to differentiate "reality" from the seamless continuum as we were taught it, one thing, one word at a time, as we collectively believe it in agreement with everyone else. I think it's called enculturation, a Margaret Mead word. Then, in another language everything has a different sound. Like gato and kit-kit.


Yesterday I had several hours with Vada, watching her, seeing her have a new experience every second, delighted discovering reality at so fast a pace. It's like the world she's new in is opening, revealing depth of field to her, separation of what she sees into particular shapes that have names. She sees a bird fly over. Mama says, "Bird," and points. Vada looks up and bird is gone. She does see them, though, and knows mama means those things that flicker in a straight line across that big expanse of sky. It fascinates me to watch her about like it would sitting in a class with Noam Chomsky the professor, which I've never done, but imagine it would blow my mind every class. Baby the professor teaches me by experience, blows my mind every time I'm around her. I see her watch the bubbles hop on the breeze and drift down to the table, pop-pop-pop. She would watch until the last one went out. It took me back to my own disappointment seeing bubbles pop when I wanted them to last on and on, delicate crystal balls floating like dandelion parachutes surfing the breeze.


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GOD AND DOG

sun in the pines

It's Sunday afternoon, perfect weather, sun out, mild breeze, just enough to ring the wind chimes lightly, several doves at the bird feeder. I like having doves around. I love their voices, who-o-o. I like watching them take off straight up like helicopters, whistling the chirp they make rising from the ground. When I was baptized here in Brush Creek, Glade Valley, in a little baptizin' hole by the side of the road in the meadow with cows around, I think it was 1978, one of the women in the church said she saw three doves fly over, which everybody took for a sign the spirit was there. For me, it just meant three doves flew over. though it did have an interesting ring of mysticism in it. I didn't know, still don't know. Hooray if it was the presence of the Holy Spirit, whatever that is. All I can figure where Holy Spirit is concerned is it might be the aspect of God that communicates with us in signs and intuitions. Please spare me the argument about brain chemistry.



Since one day last week when I wrote comparing getting God's attention to a dog's attention, it has stayed in my mind, because it resonated in a way I'd never seen before, like an insight into God's nature I'd not seen until the moment those sentences were written. I go into a friend's house with a dog. First time, the dog sniffs me, looks at me, appeals to me with eyes to acknowledge presence of consciousness. If I ignore the dog like it's not even there, not seeing the dog, the dog will go lie down on it's place and pay me no more mind. If I walk in the house, see the dog, make eye-contact, speak to the dog by name, touch and pet it, I have a friend I didn't even know a minute before. The dog will watch every move I make waiting for an opening to have some attention from new friend. It rang and rang in my head and continues to ring like windchimes as I see in God's nature something I'd never noticed before.

When somebody doesn't believe the spirit is present, the spirit doesn't care. So I had to believe first, to get God's attention. When I was as confirmed in my atheist phase along the way, totally convinced, as I ever was, some discourses of Meher Baba fell into my hands. Two days of reading randomly in his discourses and I became convinced that God indeed is. Once that was known, or maybe it is more accurate to say believed, I could not live as before, when I didn't see it. Meher Baba recommended that I practice, really practice, the religion of my culture. Baptist? Baptist. That was a Tall order, since I'd spent my time post emancipation rejecting everything Baptist. All of a sudden a consciousness that knew me better than I knew myself was with me wherever I was, guided me to the mountains in the course of a year. All I knew of the mountains were Walker Evans photographs and Doris Ullman photographs of Appalachian poverty. That's all I thought there was in the mountains, poverty and illiteracy. I was going to my little cabin home in the wilderness of toothless illiteracy, Wrong Turn North Carolina. Leaving "the world," I was given a dog for a companion and teacher.



What a joke it was to find the world was here too. Of course it was. What kind of thinking led me to think it might not be? Not thinking. This is where I learned "the world" is the human mental construct we collectively agree upon, calling it reality. There came a time that when something happened seemingly from outside that reality, and someone said, "That was weird," I'd think without saying, Not necessarily. I wouldn't say anything, because if queried, I couldn't give an answer, certainly not an objective answer to pass a test by. I feel like now I live in a zone between the reality of this world, the mind, and the reality of the spirit as revealed in the Tao te ching. The way of the spirit and the way of the world in the same sentence make a paradox. Two lines from verse 71: Not-knowing is true knowledge. / Presuming to know is a disease. To the mind that adheres to the commonly agreed upon mental construct reality, it's nonsense. Seen by the flow of the non-aggressive spirit, it doesn't even need thinking about. It's clear as the moon on a still pond.



An email this morning from my friend Sarah who grew up in Myrtle Beach saying she'll be playing fiddle for a square dance with a youth group at Meher Baba's center between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach on 500 acres of virgin forest and beach with cabins and communal kitchens. That's where he knocked my socks off and set me to going barefoot. Her email brought back those 2 days and nights of mind racing as fast as it's ever gone, receiving new understandings, one after the other almost unto Tilt. I suppose that someone who calls himself a scientist would say I did, indeed, go tilt. Maybe I did. Hooray if I did. As a result, I don't believe that objective is possible. I take science for a good thing, like I take auto mechanics for a good thing. In the world of the agreed upon mental construct, science is a God-send. Maybe someday as a result of advanced science the people of "the world" will lay off hating and killing each other. God hasn't been able to convince us there is a better way to live in the world over 5,000 years of avatars and scriptures. Maybe science can help.



Found a good quotation from Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian ethologist, I believe I  found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.

Bingo.

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