All posts in Buddhism & Philosophy

‘The times they are a-changing.’ 

I’m getting on a bit, 75 next month. When do I find this ‘I’? Is there something to be found, a soul perhaps?

I’m no more certain now than at any time. There are narratives of course and they change too, theories, fictions.

The conceptual mind is a sliding filter, within the body, itself a filter; always changing. Consciousness escapes identification as an object. What seems fixed and permanent is an illusion. As the waves roll in over the sands of time, ‘impermanence is the footprint of the absolute in the relative.’

In the stillness, you look at a leaf , sitting in a bush with its neighbors. Are they friends or merely indifferent? Coming from the same source they must surely be relatives. A gust of wind comes, ruffling the leaves. Where does the wind come from, where does it go? It cannot be seen but is known by its effect on the leaves and the perceiving eye that is…

And the question is

And the question is:

Am I just adding to the confusion of perceptions
Or helping to liberate them, as they arise?

The desire to solidify experience is reflected here;
a grasping at a fleeting moment as mine, a process of self identification
that fails again and again as time subverts it.

Embrace the failure as perception shifts…

And So

And so

Watch the watching, as I am a construct

About this time, I came across the Mahayana Buddhist view of ’emptiness’. Living in London, with a bunch of apprentice hippy friends. Some of them had seen Chogyam Trungpa teach. I thought it was all a bit wacky.

‘Emptiness’ surely equates with nothingness, nihilism? But no, it’s a potentiality. There is no box which fits. Ah, there is an echo here. The mind which enfolds within itself to emerge anew in a dreamlike sequence.

Jung came to the rescue. I never went to a therapist but read voraciously. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious rang bells. I had long since abandoned formal Christianity. Authority, religious or otherwise, was a complete turn off but here was a sense of the spiritual that transcended cultural barriers.

From the geometry of imagination to the observable world, was accomplished by Benoit Mandelbrot who introduced the concept of ‘self-similarity, in his paper How Long is the Coast of Britain? Science, May 1967.

Abstract.

Geographical curves are so involved in their detail that their lengths are often infinite or, rather, indefinable. However, many are statistically “self-similar,” meaning that each portion can be considered a reduced-scale image of the whole. In that case, the degree of complication can be described by a quantity D that has many properties of a “dimension,” though it is fractional; that is, if exceeds the value unity associated with the ordinarily, rectifiable, curves.

From there, the visual development of fractals was radically enhanced by computer modelling and digital technology.
The phrase ‘often infinite or, rather, indefinable’ is a key to my own perspective and, on occasion, perception.

Not being a mathematician, I came to this many years later. However, I think it was 1970, thereabouts anyway, my cousin and I were staying with a friend on Dartmoor. We all took a dose of LSD. We climbed the hill to Belstone Tor and sat amongst the rocks. The sky was filled with streams of light, the earth was shimmering with fractal patterns. Some time later we had returned to the house. There was a watercolour on the wall. The scene was of a rocky coastline. The waves were breaking on the shore. The gulls were crying. Their calls were quite distinct.

At some point, our friend’s father appeared. He lived nearby. Someone in the village had phoned him to say that his son, who had wandered off, was behaving erratically. They were concerned.

The father wanted to know what the hell was going on. My cousin and I were unable to explain, other than that we were all tripping. I wanted to get back into the painting. The father was perplexed. I could see that he had come to a decision to look elsewhere. “Look he’s disappearing” I observed. He was dissolving into a potential existence to my perception. “Alright I’ll go” he huffed.